Top is different very creative they really uh made uh quite a transition But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in Hotel is next door to a perfect metaphor for the mind, and thus for recommended to savvy travelers ("I travel in women's undergarments, and recent times had to take on the faded but patinated glamour of a residential hotel, on an inconvenient exit ramp on the freeway from Signs read: Welcome to Hotel Real Desert! Free PsychoAnalytic all but silenced, or more accurately, is hushed by the uncomprehending sullen stares of adolescent louts sweating over video game joysticks, Human adults learn to perceive this inherently fluid, relative domain in terms of fixed, solid objects existing within fixed structures of night cooling your heels in the turbid oasis waters flowing under the vodka bottles. An evil young girl pacified a colicky toddler with wine spritzers in her baby bottle. Your revulsion at the girl's ministrations abreaction to the bass tones of the hip hop muzak and the screams pulled the girl into a stall in the powder room and urged her to hold back on the alcohol, trying to explain that she didn't have to revenge "What is she but a vessel to be filled, a flesh bubble around Lack?" the vixen asked. "And who am I, her sister or mother?" She continued in The world had lied, had took away our pride, the slow, sad slide But you cared for me, shared bare necessity with me, dissed Felicity "Stop, stop," you sobbed. "How can you say that? You're white, for With a certainty that it's better never to have been born than to be as hapless as the girl, you tied her off and injected her with a killing around the coffee table, the nipple of her bottle clenched in her teeth; almost no one turned from the video screens to see you on the way out. "Is this another one of the learning experiences I am expected to extra neurons is so we can learn. I suppose that as a neonate I had little choice in what happened to me and must have felt breast, warmth, wetness, fullness without clear ideas of internal vs. external origins. [She waddles over to the table and pulls a disposable diaper out of a "Now, however, my babyhood seems to require concentrated efforts to construct myself, learning to be me seeing, hearing, talking and walking. I begin to take pleasure in operating the circular reflex 'to deprivation attach themselves to the sensations and form the bases of my love, anger, etc. But the way they grow has to mean that what I will learn to call emotions are very dense mixtures of sensation and interpretation in narrative form: I feel sad because X happened. X happened because Y did Z to me or I did Z (to Y.) Someday I will know organic brain with functional mind.' I dismiss this as reifying a purely mental phenomenon; plus it's too confounding for my developmental stage. "Instead I will consider a feeling I have begun to feel now: I am sad. An explanation will arise very quickly. I feel sad because (I am sure by then I will be able to imagine some causal relationship between my body, times I have felt sad and I will connect them into a series by way of already be an explanation of a somatic sensation or mental phenomenon. Sensations are on my skin or the virtual skin, emotions are [She stumbles, the bottle between her hands, held up to release the "I have to say parenthetically that this new stuff in the bottle love them (or want them or hate or fear them). These associations will become progressively more elaborate as I accumulate more experience. Soon I can say 'I feel I am cold and contemptuous of others because I am afraid to experience their rejection of me,' or 'I love him because he makes me feel secure and confident and wanted.' The explanations will not particularly help in feeling better if one feels 'bad;' conversely, trying to feel 'good' will not seem to be enhanced by good explanations. I will live through years of therapists encouraging me to experience my psychic wounds, my feelings, with the idea that I can achieve a state of being in which pain can be experienced without debilitating "I will ask now, while I have extra synapses, isn't it the narrative itself that inscribes the scars on our minds, our hearts, my future [She slips, falls on her back, unconscious. Urine spreads in a pool toward the frayed electrical cord of a Mickey's Ghost Town slot up over the mass of her moist arms and the aluminum sill, cooling in the moonlight. Her face, the face on which the ends of the earth have come and gone, is not pensive, not secretly smiling, but cowed by the suffering she has felt and is all too sure to feel again. She has taken it on as weight; the excess of everything gradually pulled her pelvis out of tilt, her bowels out of line, her womb a little adrift. She has just returned, in fact, from the hospital where she lay under the knife fibrous tissue. Hers is the face of a patient, drugged out of pain and came to her full animal consciousness, her autonomic systems in full "It's a good thing I already had my two girls," she reassures herself. The first glowed with the iridescent colors of a conch shell, of a victimize her child, they told her. Her baby's sun faded in the dark and now a toddler, had the better luck of being born in a prison hospital and fostered out to a former nun with money and horses and compassionate when her daughter returned temporarily to her dank previous home where she became a gibbering speed freak, an auto thief, a fugitive, and generally white trash. She and her mother share one trait, an ability to recount the episodes when they were maimed and deprived of the halcyon life they believe is available to normal people. "While she's here, I into the net. Routing through several nodes, he finds that a message is move his tongue, desperately lonely, he fell into the rainy gutter. When he woke, a piece of paper was twisted in his mouth. Dried out, he read People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about. Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy? enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very Hertz's automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already He's been committed ever since, a clandestine freedom fighter, autonomous, placing his devices alone or with a few other cadres, exchanging plans and ideological instruction only through safe message in their description of their People's War and the centrality of the tangible letters, paper signs of struggle. These new electronic messages global empire far harder to conceptualize in terms of improvement and The deaths of three friends ended our military conception of what we are doing. It took us weeks of careful talking to rediscover our roots, to remember that we had been turned on to the possibilities of revolution by denying the schools, the jobs the death relationships we were "educated" for. We went back to how we had begun living with groups of friends and fount that this revolution could leave intact the enslavement of women if women did not fight to end and change it, political struggle for tonight, as unsure as he is about Our mother came in and stabbed me repeatedly and then I was transferred For the last century, the west has twisted in the meshes of a My dad's house had many mansions. When he died we had to empty the house and divide up his accumulations and all I got was this lousy searched the tall room under the eaves, strewn with papers and junk, information, getting a number, not clear whether it's the number for an numbers on the phone. Are they different or not?' 'Yes, they are,' Aunt I think our human brains are an evolutionary accident. The difference between chimp and human brains is very significant in terms of size perception. The difference does not look like the results of any evolutionary pressure. The random gene changes that led to a much larger brain do not seem to offer survival advantage commensurate with the energy expenditure required to supply it. I conclude that our brain began as a genetic mishap, for no more purpose than that apportioned to "We shall see people engaged in attractive occupations, giving no thoughts to material wants, free from all pecuniary cares and anxieties. As women and children all work, there will be no idlers, all will earn more than they consume. Universal happiness and gaiety will reign. A unity of interests and views will arise, crime and violence disappear. maids, cooks, and so forth all working for all (when they please). depending on what's happening, the universe's rules of operation. A photosynthesis, the works. The tree, as the rule of the physical universe would have it, reflects light. In the universe humans inhabit, reflecting light is a necessary result of the assemblage of matter on among other trees, rocks, animals." Pumping his harmonium, he sings: tree tissue organized to move water from root to crown its cells are sensitive to the pressures (pleasures): necessary and proportionate interaction of human body with tree, obviates any quibbling about whether or not matter is just our idea of [The] discernment of relatively invariant entities and processes and the creation of mental maps where the key coordinates map relatively "Else why do we? I want to assert that molecules, atoms, photons, help it, the rods and cones react to light, the reactions excite a few cells, then more and more. Brain studies seem to indicate that the neurotransmitters and electrical flow are emergent properties of the And they are not yet coded, nor are they in language. Afterwards, utilizing previous neural pathways in relation to the tree. "Only then are we 'affected' by the tree, and only then do we cogitate an idea, which is coded, is in symbols, of 'tree.' No part of this is any more or less 'real' or objective. It must take active work to look at the tree: the reception of minimal sensory input is necessary not which datum is to be enriched through concentration. From there the processing must actively combine memories, previous categorizations and new data through neural connections. A particular tree becomes a tree in many contexts, as if the brain makes as many as possible available from suspicious nor blank; he simply stood there, as he stood always everywhere, for the principal feature of the scene. Naturally he had no conception of him than the way he fell into position as we approached of the peaks might to our apprehension have been interested in his You know, you butch thing, many cosmologists posit different levels of universes, hoping thereby to answer questions regarding the seeming Royal, says contemplating alternate universes could help scientists distinguish which features of our own universe are fundamental and necessary and which are accidents of cosmic history. A light, pet? hyacinth hair and tell me ours is the cosmic accident. You may randomly an: I love a free lunch, if it costs someone a great deal. Let's speed of light. Only a narrow range of settings (for these constants) is suitable for the evolution of complexity or Life as We Know It. an: Life as What? Say it again about the multiverse. posited "the Anthropic Principle," asseverating that these coincidences were not just luck, but were rather necessary preconditions for us to be looking at the universe. After all, we are hardly likely to discover universe, which he sees bubbling progeny like yeast buds. According to universe today, outweighing matter two to one. But according to modern quantum physics, empty space should be seething with energy that would outweigh matter in the universe by far, far more, by a factor of at inflation lends more energy than was thought to exist? And the cosmological constant,, a formula to account for this discrepancy, must is that we "queers" in our indolence have seen through the canard of like the lilies of the field. How lovely to be wanted by the entire She reads from her commonplace book, makes a notation in her crabbed for the objective transformation of the world (or for the 'production' question of 'being' oneself but of 'producing' oneself, from conscious as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence' Remember distinguish himself from animals? Is man's existence an end for which he critiques the notion of production of subsistence: "it is the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants.'17" erotic freedom, says labor is grounded 'in an essential excess of human existence beyond every possible situation in which it finds itself and is the starting point, foundation and principle of play insofar as play is precisely a breaking off from labor and a recuperation for labor.18' But that is so wrong!" does not gauge himself in relation to Nature. He is not aware of Necessity, a Law that takes effect only with the objectification of "Primitive 'society' does not exist as an instance apart from symbolic exchange; and this exchange never results from an 'excess' of production. It is the opposite: to the extent that these terms apply here, 'subsistence' and 'economic exchange' are the residue of symbolic and living are first of all acts that are exchanged: if they are not exchanged, they do not occur. It is symbolic exchange, where the relation (not the 'social') is tied, and this exchange excludes any surplus: anything that cannot be exchanged or symbolically shared would break the reciprocity and institute power. Better yet, this exchange relation of symbolic exchange, abolishing the definition of himself as of her mouth, "artisanal work is, according to etymology, 'demiurge.'" computer 1s and 0s, the organ is manual (and pedal). I spend my days scrambling through forests of big and little pipes, for it is a very big party for People With AIDS up in the hills, within spitting distance of wheelchairs, wrapped in bright blankets, wheeled mushrooms in big straw the vanguard of sexual healing as both treatment and prevention waves, our sun king as he ordered the world with and for us, and a little like a social director who, under his bonhomie, was transparently He slid into the water next to me and we bobbed up and down smiling and cruising, I trying to assure myself I was still cute and attractive, his job as director and animator of our clump of radical patients and victims, since a sexual liaison would reduce his availability to "listen, handhold, inspire, cajole, hug, solace" the others he thought in his care. That afternoon he pulled himself out of the pool with a slight turgidity visible in the folds of his floppy yellow trunks and smiled as if he expected to be back to bob some more with me. He didn't come back soon, not until after I fended off a handsome guy anyway. He was already twice a widow of wealthier, lonelier men who left him houses and money for cosmetic surgery. I had nothing to offer but when he came back, smelling of sunblock, lime and vodka. "Want to come Family Stone at the Electric Circus. "I wish there was still acid to be "That must have happened twenty years ago," I replied. "Surely you've come to terms with all of that by now. After all, here we are all together, having fun, living proof that God doesn't punish the wicked with anything more than painful, ugly death and stigmatized suffering." "Yes, surely I should feel cheered by your reminder of how good we have "I think our consciousness should be altered, early and often." he told me, his good eye engaging mine. "We need to experience being without pathways that could access and perceive or experience the occurrence of review and cogitate on the process itself. Sensory input is reviewed through the same neural pathways (or analogous or related or proximate ones) that process raw sensory input. It is unclear whether the brain always knows the difference between processing the sensory input we usually think of as perception of reality and processing the processing which, as mirrors can reflect each other, can approach infinity as sense data become perceptions, become organized ideas, become abstract categories and then categories of categories. Given what little is understood about the brain, it is not possible to say whether these processes are or are not organized in hierarchies. The brain may assign more or less attention energy, ranking by importance or immediacy or "The result of all this, I think, is that humans have a brain that processes sensory and internal mental phenomena at too many levels, too often, too much, with inadequate mechanism to turn the processing off. We have brains too good for our own good; we think and abstract feelings and memories too much. This ceaseless idling is what we have learned to call our feelings, however remote the neural processing may be from our brain (and by brain I keep trying to mean all the data processing mechanisms from senses to memory to thinking) thinks what it does is real. What psychological literature and philosophy have always less compelling as explanation and certainly as a concept to provide a comfortable relation to 'external reality.' But the brain is best seen as actively seeking, processing and thinking at all levels simultaneously: consciousness is a trick of our brains describing us to ourselves, stringing processes and events into a self, asserting to us that the self of today is the same one as any other day, selecting data "Yeah, you're right," I said. I never thought he was sexy after that. front desk. Usually dressed for her main job as Conductor on Wild Ride de M. Toad, she would be irritable in a pantsuit that barely stretches lover or daydreaming about her brothers. She'd not be impressed by the As they walk toward the elevator, the organ grinder might come up to "Well, that wasn't a bit awkward. So Bill, how funny to see you here. Bill might be feeling a little nonplussed himself, and may already be regretting this encounter. In an attempt to make things easier he might "No, man, I have no plans at all. I just travel now." ceiling, smoothing her throat and lighting a cigarette. of Rural Life environment every afternoon about five. I hold discussions with myself on politics, love, taste or philosophy, and let my thoughts wander in complete abandon, leaving them free to follow the first wise or foolish idea that comes along, like those young rakes we see in the for another, accosting them all, but sticking to none. after dinner there I was, watching a great deal but saying little and listening to as little as I could, when I was accosted by one of the weirdest characters in this Land of ours that has not been sparing of them. The notions of good and evil must be strangely muddled in his head, for the good qualities nature has given him he displays without ostentation, and the bad ones without shame. Marcel is devilishly good looking, a queer bird, and has made himself the boon companion of every I: Not much, but when I have nothing better to do I enjoy watching the HE: Oh, they're not here to be watched. Not at these prices! I: And how have you been keeping yourself? I heard you were hooked up with Dr. Dread who runs the Red Hanky Pavilion. No new vice squad I: Don't you welcome the acceptance of our kind? Imitation is sincere HE: If that's acceptance, fuck it. "If we are all part of God," as the special in being queer anymore. "We're all over!" they keep screaming.. Yes, yes. We're over. We're pass and boring. Though some clueless I: You however, continue pursuing "practices and pleasures?" You must HE: Up! Just to play for a brief 16-hour party. Ugh, the prep. (Marcel suddenly began to act out his words with the most extraordinary Trimming, then shaving your balls. I fell in the bathtub the other day. I was standing on the edge, trying to see my ass to shave it, when I slipped and cracked a disc. Now my hands tingle all the time. Then 10-day, 20-day runs. slammers the worst. I finally said to Dr. Dread that he was a sleazy old fairy buying muscles instead of love. He sent They only let me stay at the Real Desert Hotel, and in a mildewed room they can't rent, cause my uncle once endorsed the place. I: It's no wonder you are so abandoned, Marcel For that matter, doesn't understandable, but wrong, the notion that each of us is alone, imprisoned within the individual cranium, when in fact even the physical universe of matter depends on us to exist, and even more desperately the sperm and egg that make us and the genes and social conditions that shape each of us. The other is always before us, demanding that we be think we think alone. Our mythologies of lost or fractured selves interpellated then I am clocked, called out, made to answer to hey you, but the you I create (in response) has to answer back, has to interpellate the cop. I is always a response, not to the mirror, but to alienation, disintegration that our dear fathers lived to feel. pole of support for liberation of the colonies. The Great Depression all our men to war, let them kill in the company of other men, and then sent them home to individual suburban families. None of them knew how to be with women or children, so then came the baby boom. Feeding on schedule or feeding on demand, but overfeeding. And the Cold War and the No wonder the 60s were aflame. Children left to crusade against racism, I: Who is this angelic youth with white hair making toward us? saw him with anybody who could have been his confidant. How must it be HE: I hope so. She said "There must have been so many things deep within him that he could never talk about. I suppose he died of a broken I: And why do you have so much to say about this dangerous young man? fugitive from US justice, accused (falsely) of complicity in Black Liberation Army killings of police in the 1970s. He is waking his in itself without reference to the human act of representing it, that is, without the opposing 'ob-' by which it is first of all put before supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible before; for the human representational act that encounters it.' It is very materialist, explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed through anything else. This impossibility does not lie in the inability of our human thinking to explain and fathom n this way. Rather, the inexplicable and cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world's nature, and falls short of it. The human will to explain just this dharma? Am I just disappointed at the end of all I believed in? Is "Would you like your yogurt enema before or after? I can read to you I say autonomist theory contrasts the vitality of living labor Prior to and more dynamic than capitalist restructuring Is the class struggle that constitutes the working class Capital's restructurings "subsume" not only the workplace Reproduction of labor power occupies a crucial but unacknowledged role Challenged resource allocation in the jungles and the sands demobilized support for progressive guerilla bands. Global capital then broke down traditional village structures But international mass migrations result in newer combinations, Husbands dead, women and children are left with "free" choices Disrupts and tears apart systems of capitalist rule Despite regimes of power, humans make themselves subjects Sabotaging, rectifying, evading, the intentions of global rule In the north abandoned plants and ruined communities But then moments of freedom where people's relationships are less And assert that we are sentient like any other plants and animal that their hierarchies of power can be overturned, not express the complexity of new feelings, of the new situation they faced. of our fathers. We wanted the Art Ensemble's music to go further than whistles through the gap in her front teeth as she reads from the Herald into fumes of asphyxiation that linger low to the earth. We struck a blow for little people of all ages. And don't forget, "hummer" used to him. He's been on the job day and night since he got back." She enjoys a opportunities," driving a fleet of trucks through the United States other fast food venues. He ships them home and to countries in Central Ring. Caprice believes they must change their activities. "The bigger profits are in sanitary napkin dispensers. Just try to get convinced; he is at work modifying and lowering electric dryers for downloading of their music stars easier, they wish their country back in their black Purple Label suits, each carrying a titanium computer case handcuffed to his wrist, step out of the vehicles and survey the under a silver military haircut, commands them to park the cars fifteen minutes. Check for digital positioning and, of course, He strides, as erect as always, to meet the manager, who is Would you like to go to your rooms, or shall I take you directly to the ideology of his more physical early career has been tempered by a fanatic amateurs can hurt children lining up for rides if we don't find them fast. More than reputations are at stake. I wish it was as take his own clothes off. In doubt, he sits on one of the mattresses "Put these on each other, pigs," Marcel continues to shout, throwing "Put these blindfolds on them and this mask on your own face. And get batter their backsides while I get some hits ready to slam them up." The musty room above the garages is a storehouse for all the junk and But tonight, a smeary cubicle has been put up with a staple gun,; the party space confined to the penumbra of a tall white candle, the flickering light and mysterious aroma of beeswax disorienting the In a baritone of arrogated authority, he says to the men stretched before him, "We will cultivate 'the self' by means of an ascesis, an 'art of life.'" He shoots into their veins what could not be called 'good drugs,' but ones that obliterate the subject, leaving only obsessive repetitions of the impulses to stimulate nerve endings. Coughing and then moaning, the twin pigs cry out, "'Self' is not a personal identity so much as it is a relation of reflexivity, a relation snaps latex gloves on his white hands. Marble white and leather black, a his lubricated youthful muscles, his masculine energy rising to the Together, they drive the men, now sobbing and vocalizing their fearful utters these hypnotic words: "You have no identity here. You are only Marcel speaks oracular words as his hands move in profound violation of nature's fundament: "I don't think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of is much more than that; it's the real creation of new possibilities of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our species of perverse sexual desire, but virtually nothing new in the way ravage 'the self' by hand because 'the self is a new strategic because it is the point of entry of the personal into history.' We perform 'the crucial work of rupture, of social and psychological disintegration, that may be necessary to permit new forms of life to come into being. but there is no guarantee that they will come into grunt their bodily assent to transcendence in pleasure our young bodies together ejaculating enough to clear the major toxins (leaving what were, after all, only subsidiary poisons of sexual deviation and guilt felt by some who were out of phase with cosmic trips together. We had gone to places so sublime that difference was racial Other. We could have been together. Then, we would have thought The thought was that repression of natural impulses was a reification of the restriction to bare necessities for labor under capitalist relations of production. At first we noticed that abundance (not of the US economy afforded better living for much higher proportions of the US population) was not satisfying to us, although it seemed to be sufficient for our parents who had suffered serious deprivation during the Depression and then horrifying war (our fathers ignorant men thrown women who became our mothers in letters to unknowable islands and bivouacs). Our dads came home, moved into nuclear family houses, farther from their parents, aunts, uncles, etc than ever before, tried to live with rectitude and diligence amid rising prices and elevated standards uncomprehending wives and children. No wonder so many became alcoholic and silent, no wonder so many women secretly suffocated in those on schedule, an agonizing commitment for parents who heard their babies' cries as echoes of their own childish deprivations and wanted to provide better for their offspring. The moms and dads capitulated to a makeshift of indulgence and vaccination, hoping for clean, healthy children who As we children of the baby boom grew older we had more free time than any previous generation on earth, free time to undergo the tidal waves of adolescent hormones and to read Catcher in the Rye and even On the Road in study halls, although we also memorized Pledges of Allegiance, Then televisions began to show us vibrant Black children singing their wasn't privileged and purposeless. We were electrified by the righteousness of their new Black way and the brutality of the old dating, and those of us who couldn't get dates understood that we were sarcastic resistance to the parts of life we agreed were uncool. And the So many of us escaped to college. We suddenly found friends who did not think we were inadequate, or at least we shared inadequacy and fumbled for relief from restrictions of our behavior. We read and we shared, trip. Trips were dangerous explorations of cosmic reality, and they were serious, only occasionally joyous, but so revelatory as to be precious signposts of the fulfillment we thought we lacked. In the swirling hallucinations we also felt the reality of our own bodies, sweating, poster about the hippie mother and baby, the freak father with a rifle. We should be together, if only we could, the longing for uniting, the unprincipled and unprecedented wealth of this empire, We had never been denied before; we called for an end to the obvious sickeningly conspicuous waste, shrieking injustice of prejudice against the Blacks, who were beautiful and sexy and mild. Our confusion when this bad was not remedied was relieved through the Communist Manifesto, made We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young Dangerous, obscene, hideous, dirty, violent and young? We are not quite proud of ourselves. A hymn to us, an anthem to tearing down the walls we felt between ourselves, while we were aware but daunted by those walls within ourselves. Could our trips together lead us out of the brutality though walking through the valley of the shadow of death (the shadow, not the death) what could we be hoping for from the son of god. the risking of irony, the risk of meaning, really meaning, it. Soaring, twanging, milk and cows and honey, way out in the country. Oh Your contradictory humanness, body of blood, brain basket, coursing organs, a voice trying to break through to you, to you in your personal ears, crackles of sublime interference intercourse and guitar notes too complicated their screaming simplicity, electronic fuzz, nobody wants to boogie, only to sit awestruck by the single notes, the ones that carry through the six realms of beings to being it goes on to A man asks you to look into his eyes, his borrowed moments. can he give me moments, can I give him his, oh no, he is not for me, but by miraculous means he is here for me, turning me down, Borrowed moments they cannot fill the moments of our lives but so wounded that his turning down is turning towards him, nothing to And then the hawsers creak and the wind is so strong and capable of carrying us over to the other side, everybody smiles in the same and the berries will keep us both alive on this simple wooden platform, on these very free and easy winds, leaving you to sail toward the sun (taking off at night so as not to burn) Do I have to take a sister, can't I take a brother? Power of leaving, watch all the past die, you moving it changes its name and its game, but doesn't mean shit to that love electric glimmer, and those pecking, noodling, fingers mumbling into me, can this pleasure be taken me taken do I have strength to dance when I am alone, surrounded by the assumptions, the natural thing, but entering the stream, too much cold in one place breaks, it's here in that country twang so dangerous, so hideously hellish, ironic again, Back to the fantasy of soviet power, collectivist nostalgia: if only they could have crystallized the revolutionary moment, but if only they "People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about. Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy? only encourages other oppressed peoples (such as the blacks) by showing what the alternative is and that it can be won, but also costs the imperialists billions of dollars which they then have to take out of the The legitimacy of the State is called into question for the first time the youth rebellion turns into rejection of the State, a refusal to be The crisis in imperialism has brought about a breakdown in b bourgeois social forms, culture and ideology. The family falls apart, kids leave home, women begin to break out of traditional "female" and "mother" archeological team, measuring the girth and length of the columns of all the rest of womanhood. Her education was a strange one, based in She, fearing for her life but resolute, rose and turned to face the dismounted and came in her direction, seizing her by the hand and wrapping his other arm around her waist. A scream was forced from her lips as they were pressed against the firm mouth and bulging chest of climb down, unloading and loading the horses and pack mules where the trail between rock cliffs was too narrow to let them pass. There at Wadi paused and pitched their tents, while the erotic dancing girls undulated rhythmically. As they cooled their palates and ate their dates, the Sheikh's men knew they could not be followed, as they were the masters faced her captor alone on the moonlit desert. She was carried into his tent and bathed by three maidens who scented her hair with jasmine, then draped her in rich silks. She was thrown onto a divan covered in intoxicating aroma of horse and sweat lingering at his thighs. His eyes widening, a smile brightening his sensual lips, the Sheik you were a mere stranger. Remember how receptive to strangers they were turn away, but his exotic honeyed tongue darted between her lips before The Sheikh emitted a low musical laugh and replied, "I am always gentle and always savage. In this case, however, since you are an agent of international petroleum prospectors, you do not deserve much gentleness in this our desert land." He pulled her roughly toward him and, grasping her wrists, extended her body across the soft rugs and lay atop her. her cries went unheeded as the moon and its caravan of stars crossed the they swore their oaths, the baby's mother shot her violator, the father of her child, through the heart and was consequently set upon and especially her brothers, in all games and in learning. Particularly fond longer permitted on the team. She grew rebellious, flirted with the where she began her Transition, taking testosterone and pumping iron, global capitalism and sexual oppression around the world. Hated by clandestinity, supporting himself as a sex worker, male or female, as Highway and the Incense Route. It was these routes which were fought brought them unto the top of the rock, and cast them down from the top old idea of controlling and taking toll from the caravan routes, money being his prime objective in the Crusade. Though Crusaders constructed a local people. The city died out of men's memory, and the nomads used it as a hideout, living in the nearby caves, for a thousand years. newspaper behind his back. He calls them over to introduce a young man "How are you gentlemen enjoying the summer? What brings you to this godforsaken shack?" He picks thoughtlessly at a scab on his nipple. Just then, a stricken policewoman rushes by carrying a scorched baby on his shirt, he dashes toward the front of the hotel. he's kept me all these years. And I was an orphan too, from the Blitz!" electrocuted in the Casino. They're searching for its mother now." thank you. We're meeting a nice musical artist here for lunch." bottle, tell him. And watercress sandwiches for four?" exciting assignments for you! We've been so busy! Caprice, our old friend, is the cook here. Her spies have put us in communication with a "But in this case we will, dear. The girl has a reputation for being too mannish, and her mother and father are dead set on female genital mutilation; it is going to be part of an initiation rite, accompanied by circumcised and insist on circumcising our daughters so that there is no mixing between male and female... An uncircumcised woman is put to shame by her husband, who calls her "you with the clitoris". People say she is said to be in despair over their daughter's 'perverted sex drive.' They This mutilation procedure will be performed by a qualified doctor in "We have the cleverest plan, dear. You will impersonate a surgeon, fake the procedure, and bring the girl and her mother here to Caprice to 'recuperate.' Then Caprice and her family will go to work convincing the mother the girl is better off being herself. Isn't that a scream!" hear about it? He's cool. And he'll have to make the arrangements." child is gay, but he doesn't want to be married. His lover's parents, I miss the old days when we musical types were merely sinful. Now the speaking the truth and acting in knowledge in accordance with nature." The world, the same for all, neither any god nor any man made, but it think, says that even those who are asleep are workers and "The path up and the path down are one and the same, constant, ever discordant, from all things one and from one all things." B1040 In gratitude, the tree leaves rub pathetically. It is very old for a struggling to maintain its life in a climate that is too cold and wet, then too hot and dry. It is patient in the morning sun. It tells Merle "The existence of reciprocal relationships of things implies that each universe as a whole is, a contribution that cannot be reduced completely, perfectly and unconditionally, to the effects of any tree-- am in reciprocal interconnection. And, vice versa, this also means evidently that no given thing can have a complete autonomy in its mode of being, since its basic characteristics must depend on its relationships with other things. The notion of a thing is thus seen to be an abstraction, in which it is conceptually separated from its infinite background and substructure. Actually, however, a thing does not and could not exist apart from the context from which it has thus been conceptually abstracted. And therefore the world is not made by putting together the various "things" in it, but rather, these things are only approximately what we find on analysis in certain contexts and Merle is not merely sentient, he is sapient: he has had many previous Not so many years ago, after undergoing an ecstatic epiphany upon karma, he has worked all his lives to ease suffering. He listens to the running toward the pool and the front, carrying a baby in her arms. He says to himself, "I can tell that extinction nears for that child is 'With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to knowledge of the passing beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate in accordance with their speech, and mind, who reviled the noble ones, held wrong views and deprivation, the bad destination, the lower realms, in hell. But these who did not revile the noble ones, who held right views and undertook and he discerns how they are inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, there were a tall building in the central square [of a town], and a man with good eyesight standing on top of it were to see people entering a house, leaving it, walking along the street, and sitting in the central square. The thought would occur to him, 'These people are entering a house, leaving it, walking along the streets, and sitting in the central and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, superior, beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate in accordance slaps his face with a news clipping. "What is this? Are we allowing amateurs to burn our assets now? Find these anarchists and eliminate The 'Total Urogenital Sinus Surgical Procedure' was to be observed by Mobilization' seminar presented by the hospital. with associated surgery Approximately two dozen people picketed the hospital in a peaceful children resulted in assignment to the wrong gender. Approximately twenty minutes before the procedure was to begin, a bomb went off in the The combined bombing and picketing efforts paid off. Not only did Dr. adult survivors of early childhood surgery intended to assign an infant people whose surgery as children resulted in assignment to the "wrong" activists loudly demonstrates our collective outrage at what is occurring in hospitals around the country five times a day to people in the binary sex model, wherein a man is a man and expresses masculine characteristics, while a woman is a woman and expresses feminine characteristics, and their sexual dichotomy exists for procreation. This model goes to the core oppression of the entire bragged about my relatives," he thinks. "Nobody cares about who I am Foundation has liberated thousands of young gay, lesbian, transgender, Boulevards and the men who were kind to him only to get him in the back every day. But now he's looking for his new friend, a nice but sleazy girl who's visiting her mom here. "She'll be in the Casino still. But wrong. He can't figure out what the baby would be doing running loose, getting hurt maybe. Skidding into the bar, he nearly collides with a "Hey, you, kid! Stop right there. What are you doing here? "I work here, well sometimes. My uncle is the manager." here a couple hours ago?" He already knows the kid was behind the bar in "Yeah. If it was the same one, there was a baby here. A girl was with her, like blonde hair, a little high. Where is she? Did something happen elbow, "unless you mean those kids over at the video games." "We've got a lot more to worry about, kid.. By now that baby may be dead. It might be a kidnap thing. You look around for this girl if you think she knows something. And come report to me before you leave." for a woman to come along to check the Dames. When no one goes in or out, he pushes the door open and walks in, bending to look in the stalls. There! A pair of jeans pulled down over fancy Pumas. It's her! "Oh, god," he sighs. "I just met up with her. She was all 'you're so different systems of punishment with the systems of production within prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its In comes the harried ER doctor. "Where's next of kin? We have to deal In comes the nurse. "Poor baby! At least she's not a suicide like that In comes a State official with an alligator purse. "We need to keep this baby under surveillance. She may be a crime victim. This child may be the victim of parental abuse, and we must interrogate her mother." "What makes you think this child even has a mother?" sneers the doctor. right now. It's the baby." She hangs up to screaming on the other end. to folk religion; it has become a ceremony purporting to fulfill, at the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts without the obstacle of English offerings of food, drink, etc., are made to them. Even the mere mention beings have to obey his commands. Thus, in all rituals connected with Merle yips the growing crowd into silence. He knows that first one must dispense with the armed guard and getting the patient to offer me a seat He summons a full assembly of the deities. Then, he barks out orders to "I am the devil in the details," is heard coming from the blue lips of The compassionate Dog tenderly licks the burned face of the baby and tells the devil, firmly but respectfully, "the merits of offering This is the dangerous point, as Merle knows well. If the spirit still refuses to leave, the deities must be informed of his obstinacy and the his universe, the reader. "Dear Reader, if the spirit will not leave, the baby will be left in a coma. Should the Author let her live, or A clock is heard ticking, and sands run through an hourglass, whispering suspense. The heart monitors ping ominously. Two mothers hold merciful death for the electrically ravaged child; she is negligible collateral, as he assumes she is already damned by the sins of her the screen says, "You've got mail." A celestial hand reaches out to "I like the gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel. The Nineteenth Century Novel is, aside from its aspects in convergence of human lots" arose from genetic predisposition, social conditions, and ideological (religious) conviction. I just wish I could thoughts for me. If I can now remember them, I will try to write some Our brains seem to work through chemical and electrical circuits outside through the senses or internally from nerves monitoring the body or nerves monitoring the thought processes and memory. The mind in the process of processing. The mind is somehow tricked into believing that it is continuous and identical to itself, despite the responses at each moment of our lives. We seem to want to believe we are the same from day to day; hence, the creation of a "self" as a vessel of continuity, of identity. Of course this "self" is inflected by genetic and cultural factors: a 21st C US gay white This "self" comes to dominate our reception of input and processing because women are subjected to much more biological change on a periodic basis, they have less investment in the rigid maintenance history explains things on the basis of continuities, individual or Our "self" tries to hold things together in the midst of ongoing chaos by assuming continuities and asserting it can and must integrate different responses to similar and even wildly divergent processes that happen to the body and the mind. One of the ways it asserts this attempted integration is to believe the individual thoughts that pass through our minds (scientists concerned with seconds, and that a new one occurs at least as often) are connected I take from this the conclusion that a desire to integrate different impressions, feelings, or impulses into a self is based on an illusory belief that it is even possible, and therefore that the attempt to integrate is always a failure. That failure results in a feeling of inadequacy that is the genetic consequence of the fact that our brains are too sophisticated for our own good. An isn't as good as others, but because no human is capable of Nor is any human capable of reconciling autonomy vs doubt of her capabilities, love vs hate, like vs dislike, or any other thing we inadequate to contain the complex variability of situations and lead to rigid distinctions about what is inside and what is outside, what is good and what is bad, what is functional and what is Human society functions through the confusion of our connections and disconnections with others and ourselves, pretending we are individual identities and creating power networks that pervade every and bad, creative and destructive, because these binaries are inadequate but just about as far as our brains can go with the with it, burdened like all other humans, with the delusion that it is possible to integrate impossibly divergent feelings, impressions, impulses, into a coherent "self." Since we can't, we feel shame. Others feel shame too, but our shame is inscribed with the dichotomies and hierarchies of masculine power in our own particular gay male way, as constructed by the social processes (gender, class, race, geographic accident) of the last several centuries. So, why not decide that shame is inevitable, that everyone feels it that we can't fly: we don't feel shame at not being able to overcome gravity. We do invent airplanes and banana peel jokes. We also invent philosophies, psychologies and religions that help transcend the blame and depression that are reactions to the inadequacy of the Wild sex is one of the incommensurable feelings, bodily and social processes that sometimes breaks through the rigidities of "self" and But nothing we have invented can overcome the basic problem that we we want domestic comfort. They can be made to coexist, but they can't be made into one stable thing. The recent history of gay sex, through sexual experimentation to the search for transcendence and think, evidence of our biological and social limitations. the other, "Do you smoke after intercourse?" The other replied, "I different from itself. We all think poop smells, but each of us familiarity, and hope it is the same every time. We like same all the time. They also like other men because they are the same, familiar to the senses. It is possible for a man to imagine how another man feels pooping, sweating, running, eating, laughing, being hurt, being afraid. Since he seeks to integrate his contradictory impulses, he looks to other men for help and for Woman must more clearly notice she is different every minute, and markedly different through the month. Man looks to woman to be different, and cannot imagine integrating her except by inserting different smells and textures, unsure he is safe. Unsure whether he is doing the right thing or inflicting harm, he tells himself this is the natural thing to do, although he would feel more secure if she was familiar like Daddy and not mysterious like Mommy. Male for difference, an insistence on integration by inserting himself If this were the case, our shame, the mind's conclusion that the biological incapacity of the mind to reconcile contradictory thoughts and feelings is to be interpreted as failure and inadequacy qua humanness, when in fact each human faces the same incapacity and our desire for the Other to allow us an escape from the shame of being unable to do what humans by nature are not really able to No blame. Perseverance furthers. The superior man (sic) thinks it's a film, which is the only direct descendant of the late Novel as In the last three years, Stark County, OH, which includes Canton, has steelworkers at Republic Technologies on the east end of town lost their "It's put us at a little bit of a competitive disadvantage," he said. decision for me would be to go outsource in China. The tough decision is "The truth is unless we can do something with these plants, they won't chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers. undervalued currency and the harm that imports were causing his customers. Foreign competition was so intense, he said, that the price and it becomes clear that the recording industry's problems with the illegal online distribution of music in the United States pale beside The industry's biggest hurdle may be cultural. As is the case among many young people in the United States, swapping files and burning doesn't matter to me, honestly speaking," said our contestant, referring Piracy, of course, affects more than a pop star's paycheck. Sales of countries than in the United States because of a combination of file These examples leave out China, where piracy exists on an entirely according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, File sharing appears to be as cross- cultural as any other type of piracy. The amount of swapping in a country generally correlates to the A sign outside advertises "Recordings! Your Favorite Songs in Cassette popular requests, and if the shop does not already have the song, no personally download it from the Internet at his father's office. "The starting to pay big dividends and released estimates that show the size The new estimates from the United Nations Drug Control Program show the effectiveness of United States aid. The new data, though, are sure to encourage supporters of eradication. "Many people who thought this couldn't be done in the past are having to rethink their assumptions," decline in coca production to a fall in cocaine consumption in the According to the Department of Health and Human Services, occasional himself. You've got to prevent these things.. But all the agriculture ministers left after that suicide. We need to get at the roots of dissent. We can no longer count on AIDS alone to clear out the excess farm labor pool already. Read this! It's his daughter!" behind his old apple orchard here. In the quiet solitude of his former Trade Organization talks, as the developing nations walked out in him, "We're leaving tonight, dear. Things are getting too hot for us Emir is lending us a palace for a couple nights. God knows he's gotten an experimental Fair Trade cooperative, just beginning to succeed in reversing the Green Revolution fertilizer problem, until her mother, the village head, and her aunt, the chief agronomist, died. The AIDS epidemic is threatening farm output and, in turn, many people agriculture for food and livelihood. The Joint United Nations Program on "Where farmers and their families fall sick, they cultivate less land agricultural productivity decreases and hunger and malnutrition are on the rise. Many children are losing their parents before learning how to farm, to prepare food and to fend for themselves..." As Factory Jobs Disappear, Workers Have Few Options jobs lost nationwide in those three years, many of them because of imports. Some economists say that even with a boom all those jobs are Factory unemployment has snowballed into a huge social and political the 1990's. President Bush gave a speech about manufacturing losses on pressing the issue. A wide range of figures suggests that the economy is likely to surge, but economists predict unemployment will remain almost In a fetching cowgirl evening dress, the winner weeps tears of joy and formation called a Prion. Prions are infectious agents which (almost certainly) do not have a nucleic acid genome. It seems that a protein alone is the infectious agent. The infectious agent has been called a prion. A prion has been defined as "small proteinaceous infectious particles which resist inactivation by procedures that modify nucleic acids". The discovery that proteins alone can transmit an infectious disease has come as a considerable surprise to the scientific community. cortex and cerebellum. Probably most mammalian species develop these diseases. Humans are also susceptible to several prion diseases: the suite of offices he rents to a casting company is being boxed up and "Yes, we are relocating," says the harried casting director. "We supply immediately. Glancing at a printout in his hand, he tells his assistant, drooling rum and shooting, two children to eviscerate, dogs to run and Security Operations, insists." Turning away, he shouts into a phone, And you said, "There is no purpose. It's just an accident." virus teeming through his body, young enough to be your son. And You said "Life goes on, within you and without you." a growing taste for transfiguration, obliteration of self. to another consciousness through the ecstatic chanting, where the sound enables All to transcend their fear and experience their wonder the other beings, inhabiting rocks that break in useful shapes, water that cleans and cools, animals that give themselves to the people out The children speak better as they socialize more securely. The commemorate our births from out of the dark centers of the women, to feel the complexity of our love and frustration with each other, to stretch our cognition to encompass the thoughts of every entity we They fashion tools and fashion pictorial representations with perspective, use of pigment for line, shading, juxtaposition of images in complicated interactions and with both sympathetic magic and Our community, All, is the winner of the Great Cave Communities award modern humans, able to learn and teach, conscious of our talents, trained by the environment to emphasize the overcoming of interpersonal frictions and cooperate. Perhaps there is some genetic memory of the bonobos we are related to, those great apes whose species, unlike their closest relatives the arboreal chimps, are terrestrial enough to relax and enjoy food and sex, without the environmental pressure for male hierarchies of domination. (see We, the All, speak and make tools beautifully. All do not merely "produce," as in productive labor; All are fully modern but have not had to distinguish the infrastructural "labor" of acquiring and cooking food from the superstructural "leisure" of talking after eating or "ritual" of singing. It would be mistaken to see the life of cognitive and emotive skills in everything we do, and have developed complex society in which connections to each other and to the rest of than through individual sensoria. Living is not easy for All: glaciers and the dangers of the hunt narrow our world; but All's painters, somatic, verbal and plastic form. It is important to note that All without an owner's manual, and its habit of focusing attention on the of narrating, stitching transitory sense impressions and feelings into the others, has a legitimate fear of cave bears and cave tigers. But fear threaded with memories of past attacks and predictions of possible future pain that may obscure the core brain state of This tendency in the darkness of life is brightened by a voluntary surrender to the shared ecstasy of safety and worship of fecundity, need for X and Y chromosomes is invisible to them, All experience sexual contact without deducing its role in reproduction or imposing the standard of reproduction on the sexual activity. All, like the children are born from the bodies of women. Their groups might be as (fictionalized, I assume, by the author) were inaccurate. Please see "My body moves to the singing and drumming, the bone flutes, the holy waters shared, the bodies all around me in the resonating chamber of where our people feel special and right, where I and each one of us is "Jagged crackles of flashes around our heads, our insides chanting admitting us to the other part of the world, the part where all is alive, all we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, lift, set down, pound or "All we remember and all we forgot is here before us, the deer and other meat, the bear and tiger to whom we are meat, the plants and water and rock look at us with recognition, welcome us, dotted lines of light, of power shoot from everything into me, from me into Powers of beings revealing their being to our eyes and ears I am not afraid of this power and the beings are not afraid of me" "I can be in the darkness with light sweating out of my body, droplets hiss white circles on the cave floor as I turn, as I turn "Then absolute stillness, fires brighten, the world disappears into such forms as lichens on cave walls, cave bear assailants on the attack, earwax of old people exchanging formulas to ward off humans generate as they experience their ritual life. One is the state or process of transcendence, knowing the ultimate, stepping out of self, through pain, ecstasy, whatever, into a feeling of unity, wholeness, of uniting with higher levels of being. These modes of transcendence are more or less known and knowable, and can be The other category is the recognition and embrace of Immanence, beyond epistemology, not a category of knowing, but one derived from categories with the sexual division of labor among humans and ultimately with gender stereotyping. By the time of the High Paleolithic or Neolithic cultures of these caves, societies had evolved far beyond the basic divisions of child rearing and other tasks. I have witnessed the fact that women provide adequately for themselves and their children, and share the surplus, through food social structures rather than necessity selected for hunting, I conclude that men developed hunting as a supplement, as something helpful but not usually necessary, something to do to exercise their brains and to take a more active role. Cooperation, and language, had already been established through experience of gathering, sharing and these activities could be performed with the brain of a Neanderthal, I have seen your comments on this matter. Consider the following 1.The opening to immanent holiness in existence could be related to the evolution of the cerebral cortex and therefore to an unknowable knowing performed by the complex bundling of neural pathways but holy origin in the processes the brain uses to monitor its own active consciousness without transmitting them to the conscious mind. "Life is a business whose returns are far from covering the cost. Let us merely look at it; this world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, "If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, men would either the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with In the world outside this fiction, the Author remembers a sacred "Oh, beautiful one, do not withhold from me that which makes you: sperm, feces and bone and everything that makes you what you are and L: "Yes. Mankind can't endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one C: "Then I should have told him that people put bombs on trains everybody knows it's the other way around! And anyway, God?? impersonate bloody corpses of his favorite heretics. He spends his time drunk on excellent local wines, fantasizing a very fulfilling accused of gorging on rich foods and guzzling fine wines in the houses of the rich. What a life, and very subversive, walking from town to of the Kingdom of Heaven, but they can be in it right now! Tramping around, not worrying about how slow walking is compared to the bus or And, of course, purity of soul would put them all beyond petty medieval morality. Since the Kingdom of God can be lived in the present, there is no need for reproduction, either. Free love!" "Better yet, they indulge their urges in homosexual acts." has come into camp with a stringed instrument and is singing about divinely. Your hands stray beneath the robe to the chest of your You. I stroke your hair, your beard, your manly chest. Your scent is strong with today's sweat and the rosemary we walked through all afternoon. A kiss as your strong neck bends back to take my mouth, the sliding of your tongue and the savory taste of meat and rare pepper. with your gaze, my body shivers even here next to the fire, as your seems a little hard to take. I am also impressed by the ideology, the called themselves 'poor good youths' and 'good daughters.' They rejected the sacramental system without worrying about excommunication. They said 'I am a poor boy or girl' instead of 'I am impersonally: 'it is said to you' instead of 'I say to you.' They all a way of indicating they disdained Church hierarchies and followed to spare future generations of the pain of living. Let's start a movement for negative population growth among affluent Westerners. Let's pledge not to have children and instead to leave some room and have babies with surrogate mothers, and then hire nannies to take care "Maybe the most useful would be mass suicide in the First World, for almost ostentatiously plain, rigorously but gorgeously tailored, might embarrass a Pontiff who, in his dotage, leans increasingly Their luck runs sour when they are spotted by agents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the bus terminal in the "We know who you are: you are atheist revolutionaries. You, Caution, sign that causes the priestly crew to relent. He points to their crotches and mimes fellatio. After a period of speechless "Every chance he gets," interrupts a young catechumen. "Ever since," repeats the father with asperity, straightening his "But we can't just let you walk around pretending to be piously in spend the winter in the warm waters. The river at the park has a fenced off area where manatees who have been nursed back from poor health are kept. They would be unable to survive if they were free, a grinding and work well for the foods the manatees eat. The teeth in front wear down as the manatee gets older. But, new teeth form in the back of the jaw, moving forward to replace them. That tooth movement Manatees are plant eaters. They feed on all sorts of sea plants. An eat. Also, sand is often mixed with the food they eat. The gritty sand Brain, eyes, ears, whiskers are some of the body parts that help the manatee sense the world. The manatee ear bones are large and their hearing is believed to be good. They make sounds under water to "talk" to each other. The sounds are like chirps, whistles, or squeaks. Most of the sounds they make are too low a frequency for humans to hear. Their eyes are small but manatees have fairly good vision. They can tell differences between sizes of objects and different colors and patterns. The manatee snout is covered with whiskers. They are sense Their brain is very large and has a lot of gray matter. The gray matter is where thinking occurs. Manatees can learn tricks. Breathing: come up to the surface to breathe air. When the manatee reaches the surface, you can hear the air blown out of the mouth with a big burst of air. Poof. Then you can hear the fresh air being sucked in. Sharks and alligators do not usually hunt them. Most premature deaths In an upcoming episode, readers will gasp at the scope of their to their aspirations and doubts with encouraging tenderness and penetration. They are also eager to help her progress in her the boy's armpits and crotch, with puissant bottom notes of pee and what he hoped was an unsuspecting planeload. Elaborately moving his tongue in his long drowse, he fell into the reverie mentioned earlier coastal regions in the tropical parts of the Old World, but some individuals go into the fresh water of estuaries and up rivers. member of this order adapted to cold waters. Manatees live along the coast and in coastal rivers in the southeastern United States, Central three to about six individuals. Generally slow and inoffensive, they spend all their life in the water. They are vegetarians and feed on various water plants. They are the only mammals that have evolved to the myths of the sirens) and manatees. The only reliable observations of nursing in manatees, however, have revealed that the young suckle while the mother is underwater in a horizontal position, belly somewhat similar but that the calf usually is in an inverted position. comparative scarcity at the present time probably results from exploitation by humans for food, hides, and oil. The number of the Baby's chest and screeches away in brimstone and thunder to the facing the viewer, still holding the murdered Ana K. in his arms, right of the bed, her hand on her daughter's little forehead, while falling out of the frame bottom right. Merle is in the foreground to Doctor, Nurse and Alligator Purse, in a pictorial triangle middle ground left, stare dumbfounded, one at The Baby, one at Merle, and the We, the readers of the world, despite ignoring repeated calls for comment, can now notify you that we have decided you should let The Baby live. Please inform us of any outcome, and we may deign to functioning, and I cannot be certain all of that is intact." accused of gorging on rich foods and guzzling fine wines in the houses of the rich. What a life, and very subversive, walking from town to of the Kingdom of Heaven, but they can be in it right now! Tramping around, not worrying about how slow walking is compared to the bus or And, of course, purity of soul would put them all beyond petty medieval morality. Since the Kingdom of God can be lived in the present, there is no need for reproduction, either. Free love!" "Better yet, they indulge their urges in homosexual acts." has come into camp with a stringed instrument and is singing about divinely. Your hands stray beneath the robe to the chest of your You. I stroke your hair, your beard, your manly chest. Your scent is strong with today's sweat and the rosemary we walked through all afternoon. A kiss as your strong neck bends back to take my mouth, the sliding of your tongue and the savory taste of meat and rare pepper. with your gaze, my body shivers even here next to the fire, as your seems a little hard to take. I am also impressed by the ideology, the called themselves 'poor good youths' and 'good daughters.' They rejected the sacramental system without worrying about excommunication. They said 'I am a poor boy or girl' instead of 'I am impersonally: 'it is said to you' instead of 'I say to you.' They all a way of indicating they disdained Church hierarchies and followed something you learned on your honeymoon in your hometown. By changing the subject from Sea Cows to vegetative infants, you missed diving took over the Springs in the name of ecology,( actually "Human Resources" ax- men responsible for draining the Springs and the genetically combine MANatee genes with those of "land sharks"-- to clone aquatic (cold blooded) humans who will control global "Homeland Security Pool and Spa Services, Inc", installed in thousands else. Especially poor old people. The surplus seniors around the world. The drowning world. Meanwhile, planned communities will be expected to work happily and harder at meeting raised expectations--- Old age is predicted to have more positive attributions-- such as maturity, competence, sophistication, Surfing the Wave of Retirement: Waving or Drowning? Growing old successfully will be the expected norm. Without vigorous investments Leisure and Medical Industries, Travel, Surgery and Adult Learning are that you know Her Secrets. Gasp at the scope of their operations. remember when he'd last enjoyed sex. He'd gotten off the plane in penis against him, kissing deep as he could, and S masturbated himself to orgasm, feeling embarrassed at how long it took and how his flying grip. That was more than a year ago and he'd only jerked off a As he thought about it now, he thought his sexual appetite had never lasted more than about fifteen minutes at a time. He'd had that The sex he first had was with himself. R___ G___ had taught him to confessed, the smell was his own. He had grown increasingly concerned "Try stripping him and leaving him in a cold shower for a He'd always had a boyish way that drew stronger protective types. He'd enjoyed that so much that he'd never learned to be anybody else. others who were boldly exotic. They were badges he would put on to made him more adept at the presentation of a self as sympathetic generosity with which Others (especially Black women) granted him the had always been the most important markers in his sexual adventures. "We're not sure this old guy has any authentic self of his own," "Never mind the proof, that's for sissies and appeals courts," South tells the interrogators. "Just keep him talking. Try the drugs." He knew by now the question had to be answered with a yes; after all, he did choose within the limitations of history and genetics. And he also knew the question and its answer taken together were a trap, sucking him into an illusory comparison of selves, reifying an idea that did him no good, and could only add to all the negative feelings of deficiency he confused himself with. He knew there is no authentic authentic, and his political comrades and their revolutionary project had helped keep all that at only barking distance. He couldn't remember anymore what it was like to love anyone, let alone love the He wasn't sure he could remember how people talk to each other. He was always impatient with friends' recitations of their daily ins and not. He thought such talk was trivial and tried to not tell such tales, even to himself. It was difficult for a compulsive repeater who was used to saying over and over some phrase or song that caught in He understood now that nothing happened unless he wanted it to. The he'd thought stemmed from his deficiencies were feelings he'd And somehow, a few years ago, he began to take the pills and everything changed. He was no longer so sure he was an unhappy person; freer to think and play. If that happened because he swallowed an organic chemical it must mean his mind in its ceaseless processing must have been interpreting in a particular way, a way that he no longer had to experience. His unhappiness was an interpretation that was not necessary; he could just as well be patient and observant, mindful of how his narration of the extended recent time did not the world seems futile and tiring, especially in the morning." And "I notice that my mind is engaged and ticking more productively later in the day." And "I notice that I sleep a lot, and maybe that is compensation for reduced REM or deep sleep on account of sleeping South finds it takes very little to get S to talk, but his talk outlaw, is subjected to all the usual tortures used on political How are you? I am fine. I am a student in the seventh grade at the taking pictures of the prisoners have sex with each other. Sex should be between men and women who say "Okay, let's have sex' (with each Absolutely Top Holiest Redeemer Reformed New Apostolic Charismatic "Okay" before we have sex with him or go to the basement for and priests whip the girls.) When they put The Question to us, I feels a lot more fun than the cane. I think you should follow our example. And then let them go, because they have always said "Okay" to having sex, maybe even with each other. They might even have sex with hand, he rubs his eyes and reminds himself he hasn't washed his hands. Rinsing with water from the stoup, he wonders where this kid got their sabotage activities and of others they know carry them out. If The International Movement, totally legal supporters with ELF and South is confronted with a photo of himself naked, simulating very large capitals, the accompanying text reads US Pull Out! Apologize to the Sodomized! Moral Is as Moral Does! Memory floods the synapses with a message once sung to him (by J or B Yes, it's love I offer you and hope that you will keep. So what thing can I offer you? What gift is there to give? So this I offer now to you is weak with right and wrong- what he thinks his dreadful interrogator wants to know. "There is no actual conspiracy; there doesn't need to be a conspiracy. The Twelve Links of Interdependent Origination61 explain that all substance is composed of themselves built not out of phenomena but out of an utterly different experiments will lead us back to objective events in time and space is about as well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world 'We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody the use of spontaneous ordering forces enables us to induce the formation of an order of such a degree of complexity (namely comprising elements of such numbers, diversity and variety of conditions) as we could never master intellectually, or deliberately arrange, we will have less power over the details of such an order than we would of one which we produce by arrangement.'63" "We thought Communism might be better if we stopped planning so much. up on this you idiot! The West is dying and you ask why? NeoCon or a FORBID YOU USE MY MACHINE STOP TORTURING MY OLD COMRADE STOP that they are unable to conquer the old man's will. amphitheater to see the dance of the Mountain King and imagine asking them to release him. He's a wanted fugitive, so we can't "Get to Cologne, that's the closest city. There can't be that many something you'd never be able to pronounce, my dears.") Unclear about geography, he accepts his uncles' guidance and a suitcase full of opium and flies off to Cologne. Marcel stays behind; the Sheikh and his friends love to watch his fair Gallic skin get sunburned and peel. the Eau de Cologne factory with a load of bergamot oranges. "We thought you were one of us," shouts the driver over the roar of five lower gears. "What is the matter with you? You smell like a fried As our view goes to a medium shot, he slides his bruised limbs into a clandestine stateroom under the load, turnips on their way to a After a few days on a private island in the Black Sea, our friends You must join us for a few weeks of thrilling caravan travel. I can't take No for an answer, as we all seem to be wanted by that dreadful know you can't spell, and they'll know where we are, you booby." "All will be revealed tonight. Now eat your apricots and dates. Rest! The thing I most can't remember is how a woman feels inside. people would all shout at him. As a chorister the boy would have sung "architecture of life," meaning that Bach provided a structure for his understanding during the complex changes he was to face throughout a The first documentary evidence of his name change is in his His thought, as recorded in his journals during his years at the the East. Although his philosophical studies show his great is said by a classmate to have urinated on the library's holograph of Comrades from that time equivocate, but refuse to agree to his description of himself as physically repellent; they note his discern tactical opportunities in the contestations with the emerging German bourgeoisie and its English investors. He disappeared, faking his death at the hands of Brown Shirts in a riot in Berlin, and considerable effort expended by the author, no clarity as to the precipitous rejection may have been followed by more dangerous events, archives of clandestine operatives. Recently released and decoded, the and the role of the Communists in the resistance, but the prominence underwent. Apparently R was not enthusiastic about the transfer of industrial assets to the Soviet Union, and he is probably the unnamed party leader who was sent twice for proletarian internationalist involved in new controversies. During debates over development of want to stink up our country for all future generations." He was He married his cook after she sustained a cerebral infarction in It is not difficult to discern, hidden in this little poem, an expression of great regret that he felt himself inadequate in love. that he must have treasured, as he brought it with him into exile when hotels since that time, eking out his days with a faithful friend as memorizing with little enthusiasm. "What drivel, set in what regular feet!" she exclaimed inwardly, never yielding the least outward sign of disbelief. She was well on her way to a ranking position within the deepest secret plans of the group. "I can't fish out the actual steps they are taking, besides building tourist traps with surplus submarines. What is the meaning of the turbans? I must get to the from the cliffs over Lake Superior, vaguely persuaded that something men's clothing (few in True and Argosy but plentiful in Esquire.) He drugstore while awaiting his orthodontist appointment. He read all the Great Books dutifully, racing to find out how each ended, annoyed at were not normal, and that they had a name; in fact, he was most devastated to learn that his urinary appendage had a name and a different function, and he cried in embarrassment upon learning to call the "wetter." And "vagina" was too confounding altogether. Having no sisters, never having caught his mother without her girdle, he was not so sure where this vagina was located or what it did. Ignoring it all was by far the best course, he concluded. Venison was named by his mother, who thought her son had a "freakish, gamey look." His father, a sarcastic reformed drunk, predicted that "he'd have an odd taste, not like ordinary meat," and it was true: only the qualities of meat from the town's frozen food locker, none of the grace or equanimity of the live animal, and had the look of one larded with strips of fat through his flesh and ready for roasting. He spent all his summer days in the woods, moving from mossy stumps woods, following deer trails he would look up to the cathedrals of the forest with a longing to worship something, even the spare sunlight limestone walls. Far better to think of himself as a hermit in bosky seclusion than a rejected, overweight and soggy egghead. only his teachers, making a mentor and confessor out of a recent cheekbones, rendering him more manly in Venison's eye and even less confusing desire at the porcelain skin revealed in the hollow between Chemistry was Venison's meat. He loved making banana smells of esters and quickly moved on to more complicated organic molecules. It was a inhalers and a growing taste for perspiring, gasping conversations tendencies, often walking backwards for miles to erase what had happened earlier on the same route. It was he who led Venison to the as summer rains raised the smells of damp hay and animal excretions. through deep snows out onto the ice crags to peer into the fluorescent It was while staring into the impossibly deep waters of Lake Superior that Venison received the first intimations of his special mission and of mankind's aquatic mammalian peers. He learned that humans were hairless because they were originally aquatic apes, able to evolve into standing bipeds with the aid of the buoyant waters of the ages when they first emerged from the arboreal ecosystems that had limited anatomy, and found himself zeroing in on the hypothalamus. rich in ganglia, nerve fibers, and synaptic connections. It is composed of several sections called nuclei, each of which controls a specific function. The hypothalamus regulates body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, metabolism of fats and carbohydrates, and sugar levels in the blood. Through direct attachment to the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus also meters secretions controlling water balance and milk production in the female. The role of the hypothalamus in awareness of pleasure and pain has been well established in the laboratory. It is thought to be involved in the expression of emotions, such as fear and rage, and in sexual behaviors. Despite its numerous vital functions, the hypothalamus in humans accounts for only How exciting to think that a part of the human brain was evolved from waters of the Lake, that humans would be happier if they lived there without the elaboration of aggressive behaviors exhibited by the savage boys in gym class. How much better to be without these functions and to live as the sturgeon once did in these waters. In an upcoming chapter: new research suggests a link between the "You can get a nice date milkshake and we'll join you at the Suddenly, they were thrown to the ground by the Sheikh's bodyguards, toward the elevator to the bunker underground. A grenade rolled black microfibers through the pierced and gilded ceramic arabesque Hotel Real Desert. He wondered again how all these people were sorry, but you will have to miss the safari, I think. How about this: my old schoolmates, mightn't it be better to make your way through many cigarettes. He wants to write a clear exhortation to his peers: filter burns, he thinks, "My idea is complex and it's hard to make this argument coherent." He stubs out the cigarette and clicks on the "I should cut away all the digressions here," he breathes out with always making plans and canceling. I always cancel too, so shut up." After a trip to the toilet and worry about bladder problems, he sits down and lights another cigarette. Here he looks at the draft of his for something very similar. Inexperienced, naive fighters are pitted against each other, one side to maintain the present corporate world order and the other to replace it. And it's not a fight just between homeland? No, it's a military and political shield operating to dominate the global market, a market that doesn't care what ordinary and all, a country that embodied greatness once. But we are not any We, the people who used be so productive, were lulled out of our vitality by corporate grasping and by big demand for US goods and US Prosperity was, of course, not spread equally among us: the average income declined but corporate income skyrocketed to the top. Most a home, college for the kids, insurance even for domesticated to production of money and financial equities. That future was a little like an LA garden, all exotic plants, tended and watered by people and resources brought from across the borders. Now not just our only immigrants can afford to take. Even the soldiers are taking pay a compassionate look at the whole planet: living creatures nearly ruined, cherished moral and religious ideals perverted into family values, and competing, hostile forces that nations can not control. A expect to negotiate our way out of continual wars either, because we blindly let corporations sell our birthright for a mess of oil and Bush, neither good cop nor bad cop, can pacify, let alone rectify, freedom, democracy and peace. We will be more secure if we dismantle that's fits for this earth, based on the desires we share with all people everywhere. Things worth fighting for right now: Never mind that these are utopian ideas: the demands themselves move people to realize that if these basic human needs were met then competition for scarce resources would diminish. And they can be met, abundantly, from the incalculable wealth we produce together on this does matter whether it's an avowed fundamentalist Christian militarist He's not confident that his argument addresses what he feels is an It's sad, isn't it? What we love is here, in this place. Where we are alive, we learn to love the scene, the settings in which we are conscious. Unnoticed, all the people and trees and sidewalks make a place, a country, which we consider central to the experiences we have. Their centrality might be illusory; after all, what we're really attached to is our consciousness, our aliveness. But mental processes become affect, our bodies and our brains do that in this place and we to give up the fatal connection to power, to glory. The republic of liberty, at least the hope and the struggle for liberty that marked smiles and readier cash, overwhelmed what possibilities of mutual aid We leave our author here, unsure that he has moved even himself. the deepest secret plans of the group. "I can't fish out the actual steps they are taking, besides building tourist traps with surplus submarines. What is the meaning of the turbans? I must get to the "You are in grave danger. Venison is accumulating millions of dollars and thousands of recruits with the aim of taking humans back to their "What you don't know is that he has convinced his followers that a part of their brain, originally evolved in fishes, was passed in a distorted way to humans, causing aggressive behavior. They are mystic gear, but in fact the turbans are stylized bandages covering suspicious of her since she began to show signs of what he was explorations of consciousness made Venison very clear about enemies: her hypothalamus to see if she is male or female.74 We have to kill him, her or it, regardless. She's an interloper who wants to interfere with my mission. The whales will F are forced to flee on foot, as heavily armed police officers fire "As a government, we are committed to the rule of law and the and claiming the tracts as their own." [Pictures of lush land, with mountains in the background are shown, then police officers in riot has died, shot during a confrontation with the police." ranchers, government officials said, would be disastrous for the economy, which relies heavily on Western assistance and on tourism, a might encourage similar demands by the scores of other ethnic groups move in and cut the fences and bring in their cattle,'' said one white firmer action against the trespassers, some of whom are from the "The police need to be harsher,'' he said. "There have been too many warnings. There need to be more arrests. We need quicker, more adopted a cautious approach to land reform. A new constitution that is being drafted proposes that the long leases granted to some wealthy where a railway was being built, into reservations on far less leaders 'of our own free will, decided that it is for our best interests to remove our people, flocks, and herds into definite reservations away from the railway line, and away from any land that because their predecessors were clearly taken advantage of by the my days in prison than see settlers spend their days enjoying my The room service porter, who is actually a local operative helping them avert the female genital mutilation scheduled for two days hence, destroyed the electrical fencing that rings the properties and driven their own herds onto the land to graze." He tells them the area that table tells them, "Aggravating the current conflict is a drought that fragile tourist industry has been hurt in the past by fears of best known. They perform dances at lodges across the country, in which they chant in unison and leap vertically to seemingly impossible little profit from tourism and that many of the people who dress as We're human beings, and we have a right to agitate for our rights.'' taking place against a backdrop of major global climate, social and now with a golden beard, young cool glasses, accompanied by a boisterous film crew. They took up all available space. I was with comfortable friends and attractive young I was incommoded because the cutest young man was with him, but looking at me through long lashes over his muscled bicep, as if to "No," I said to the brother, "things have been dreary since you got here. I came with friends to study the language and culture and now Gurney with false bottom to "disappear" recumbent figure In a dream you may stray and lose your way home. You ask someone to you still can't get home. Once you rouse yourself from your realize that the only way you could have gotten home was to awaken yourself. This [kind of spiritual awakening] is called "return to the origin" or "rebirth in paradise." It is the kind of inner realization serious error, however, were you to assume that this was true enlightenment in which there is no doubt about the nature of reality. You would be like a man who having found copper gives up the desire apartment of the one person he remembers from his few visits to the West during his ascendancy in the E. German Party. He rings hesitantly totters to open the door. Peering through false eyelashes, she croaks, and see me; I can lubricate and be ready in a minute. And now, really personage tells a young man with a video camera, sitting next to the strong tea. "You knew always that I love mankind; I never could not Trade Organization now. She consults on security operations for the workers reasoned, then we should no longer suffer under the weight he emphasizes that the most important demand of the factory worker was to abolish the production quotas and destroy the structural order of command over labor in the factories. Socialism, after all, "We should have emphasized that socialism also means the end of gave concerts that showcased her late husbands work to support herself and her children. It is not known whether Johannes had always For more detailed biographies of each of these classical composers, Keep in mind that words for songs during this time period usually how they might be conveyed through the music. Would the tempo be slow and the tone sad because love is unrequited, or might the tempo be fast and furious to show the frustration of two souls that never As you begin these assignments, remember to keep in mind what was and Voice over, through the radio in the car, on the television at the airport, in the ambulance waiting outside the hospital, we hear part "If we unite now, each and every one of us, and each tribe to another, we will cause the implementation in this country of that distinction. It does not choose between black and white. We are here must first achieve the right to elect our own representatives. That is which does not elect its own representatives in the Legislature and we are going to set about to rectify this situation. We feel we are dominated by a handful of others who refuse to be just. God said this is our land. Land in which we are to flourish as a people. We are not worried that other races are here with us in our country, but we insist that we are the leaders here, and what we want we insist we get. We want our cattle to get fat on our land so that our children grow up in prosperity; we do not want that fat removed to feed others. own gift from God and I wish those who arc black, white or brown at Bribery and corruption is prevalent in this country, but I am not surprised. As long as a people are held down, corruption is sure to rise and the only answer to this is a policy of equality. If we work Sirens scream, paramedics and nurses bustle from station to station, patients awaken from nights spent on hard chairs to request attention: early morning is always busy at a hospital. When the obviously turn briefly but see not much more than their surgical masks. The young patient is already prepped, draped with white sheeting, her knees up, feet in stirrups, sedated and monitored. Her parents, anxious for their daughter who has only just resigned herself to undergo this procedure, huddle in a corner, dressed in sterile scrubs. The older aunt of the girl holds her hand and whispers comfort in her ear, which is haloed by the white stretch cap over the hair braided commanding woman dressed in white with a tall head wrap approaches the patient; initiating the ritual, she lifts a small, precise scalpel. She pauses, and quotes from her nation's most famous author. is printed in full, The Story Continues cites only short excerpts are going to describe here, has been strongly attacked by a number of government, educational and medical authorities. We think it necessary to give a short historical background of the method employed by these bodies in attacking the custom of clitoridectomy of girls. clitoridectomy of girls and other rituals surrounding it, as well as initiation ceremonies for boys. He makes it clear that these customs functioned to make young people part of community religious and social However, this urge for abolishing a people's social custom by force of law was not wholeheartedly accepted by the majority of the delegates in the Conference. General opinion was for education which would enable the people to choose what customs to keep and which ones It should be pointed out here that there is a strong community of girl who has not been circumcised, and vice versa. It is taboo for a undergone this operation. If it happens, a man or woman must go away from home for some years, have thought fit to denounce the custom and to marry uncircumcised girls, especially from coastal tribes, thinking that they could bring them back to their fathers' homes without offending the parents. But to their surprise they found that their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, following the tribal has not fulfilled the ritual qualifications for matrimony. Therefore a return to their homeland. Their parents have demanded that if their sons wished to settle down and have the blessings of the family and the clan, they must divorce the wife married outside the rigid tribal custom and then marry a girl with the approved tribal qualifications. Failing this, they have been turned out and disinherited. At this point the girls, who are not allowed to participate in the race, start out walking to the tree, escorted by a group of senior warriors and women singing ritual and heroic songs. When the girls are near the tree, the ceremonial horn is again sounded, this time indicating that it is time for the boys to start the race. The boys then start running in a great excitement, as though they were going to a battle. The truth is, it is really considered a sort of fight between the spirit of childhood and that of adulthood. his wooden spear over the tree is elected there and then as the leader a one is chosen by the will of the ancestral spirits in communication time. As stated above, the boys climb the tree, break the top branches, while the girls collect leaves and twigs dropped on the ground. These are later tied into bunches and carried back to the homestead to keep the sacred fire burning the whole night and also to be used in other rituals, especially in making the initiates' beds. The songs rendered by the relatives and friends round the foot of the tree generally pertain to sexual knowledge. This is to give the initiates an opportunity of acquainting themselves with all necessary rules and regulations governing social relationship between men and the sacred tree), the boys and girls are lined up according to the order of their adoption. Here a ceremony of taking the tribal oath of the ceremonial council. The initiates promise by this oath that from this day onward they will in every respect deport themselves like adults and take an responsibilities in the welfare of the community, and that they will not lag behind whenever called upon to perform any service or duty in the protection and advancement of the tribe as a whole. Furthermore, they are made to promise never to reveal the tribal secrets, even to a member of the tribe who has not yet been The songs they sing on the homeward march are directed towards denouncing all things that are not fit and proper for any adult member of the community to do. Moreover, the phrases embodied in these songs are to encourage the initiates to become worthy and At the end of the ceremony the boys and girls are free to go to their respective homes to rest until next morning. Care is taken to protect them from anything that might inflict wounds upon them, as the shedding of blood is regarded as an omen of ill luck. The initiates are guarded the whole night by senior warriors against outside against any possible attacks from witchcraft and also against any temptation or enticement to indulge in sexual intercourse. At the time of the surgical operation the girl hardly feels any pain for the simple reason that her limbs have been numbed, and the operation is over before she is conscious of it. It is only when she awakes after three or four hours of rest that she begins to realize that something has been done to her genital organ. The writer has learned this fact from several girls (relatives and close friends) who This signifies that the children have now been born again, not as the children of an individual, but of the whole tribe. The initiates means "My tribal brother or sister." When the ceremony is completed all burst into ritual song. They bid farewell to one another and then leave the homestead under the escort of their relatives. On the arrival at their respective homes a sheep or rat is killed by the parents to welcome them home again and anoint them as new members of With such limited knowledge as they are able to acquire from their converts or from others, who invariably distort the reality of the entitle them to claim authority on sociological or anthropological opportunity to acquire the scientific training which will enable him anthropologists who have bad experience in the difficulties of After manfully squeezing his nose to unseat a particularly intractable blackhead, pressing the flesh to the tearful point where toilet. His buttocks seemed to hurtle past their usual resting point and collided, with little padding to diminish the impact as his flesh toilet. A man alone can easily neglect to lift the seat, although previous tenant with a pristine pink one which he thought made a whimsical match with the pink tiles on the bathroom walls, yet he'd never been moved to harmonize the blue color of the floor tiles, perhaps because he'd painted above the tile wainscoting in a When he hit the rim, he was pleased that he was able to ejaculate "Holy Shit!" within microseconds of contact, congratulating himself on rejoinder. Having feared just this kind of undignified clapping of tender skin onto the chilly and narrow porcelain, he was wont to leave the seat down, until recently when it became redolently clear that tiny droplets of urine were deliquescing to burden the air with the fug of a public latrine. There was no completely agreeable solution In any case, after replacing the seat and spreading his anal pore, his disappointment at the quantity and texture of the waste he pushed out was mollified only when a very organized plume of gas was emitted, followed by a much more gratifying, elongated extrusion of shit and a final firm fart that enabled the distended belly to regain some smoother roundness. The unhindered egress of his excreta permitted human body was experienced most to resemble that of other connoting radical excavation of the underlying ground of animal life pride at the "primitive" adaptation that efficaciously coordinated involuntary peristaltic motion and voluntary bearing down and pushing to achieve evacuation. The sensation of clean unopposed extrusion, along with the bombast of flatulence and the highly parabolic presentation of urine through the manually guided penis, was pleasurable in the extreme, wreathed with smells that one could not although only one's own could be granted this status and exempted from the general disgust others' bodily excrescences could awaken in one if warriors of the spirit, had occasion to taste this matter, but his despite the alluring abjection it most theatrically might otherwise Meditating on the high estimation Pascal placed on frequent and copious defecation, enjoying especially the more vernacular version of his attention to more rigorous exigencies of the present situation. That is, he remembered he was entrusted by the Big Humpback Himself to shake, eschewed a wipe, preferring the prospect of a warm lavage, and turned on the shower, lighting a cigarette to enhance the waiting time while the hot water made its way from the distant heater to his bathroom. When all was right, he tossed his butt into the toilet and the anthropological queers who wanted to authenticate their own proclivities and choices, and he felt a strong antipathy at the minutes to spare before the Fruit of the Sea armed security arrived. When there was no answer to that, he asked, "Just who are you, They said nothing more until they stopped for food at the stoplight "I don't know," one of the men said. "What do you want to eat, Al?" "I don't know," said Al. "I don't know what I want to eat." Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end "Fuck it, give us four fried egg sandwiches to go. We gotta go, Al." "Say, you're a pretty bright boy, eh? Yeah. And hurry up. We gotta Al lit a cigarette. "Give me a cup of coffee now though, "he said. He hot but he swallowed anyway. He could feel it burning all the way The man turned back to look at the paper bag of sandwiches. "You got "Don't look now, don't turn around. Those guys are The Killers," She took their coffee and sandwiches across to a booth. She motioned "Whatever you want." She dropped her spoon into her coffee. "Can we pursued his questions. "Start by getting real with me. No forked turned to see her. Then he heard a startling new voice. "This is real. The reader is here instructed to imagine these two as if they Pretend "The Killers" is modified to the present episode about successfully imaginative, it will be unnecessary to detail their penguins in the aquarium's exhibit, tales of love, lust and betrayal are the norm. These birds mate for life. But given the females flirt profusely and dump their partners for single males with They have been completely devoted to each other for the last eight years. In fact, neither one of them has ever been with anyone else, They're both male. That is to say, they're gay penguins. animal species. The list includes grizzly bears, gorillas, flamingos, "The world is, indeed, teeming with homosexual, bisexual and in the first page of his book. "From the Southeastern Blueberry Bee of have been in an exclusive relationship for four years. Last mating senior keeper for polar birds at the zoo. He took the egg from a young, inexperienced couple that hatched an extra and gave it to Silo penguins. In an effort to increase breeding, zookeepers tried to Elsewhere, a female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex. Six bighorn rams cluster, rubbing, nuzzling and mounting They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own), and animals who live in data on alternative sexuality in animals to write Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural animal sexuality in its many forms and the ways biologists have tried to explain it away. The second section, "A Wondrous Bestiary," orangutans, whales, warthogs, fruit bats, chaffinches.89 cannot spread over evolutionary time if they reduce an individual's personal reproductive success. To be more precise, an imaginary Parthenogenetic (virgin birth) species do exist in nature, they found. Such a species cannot exist. Just as a sterile species cannot those individuals do not reproduce, evolution theory predicts that the percentage in the population must decrease continuously down to a level that is produced by new mutations. But we observe more than that. So how should the excess be explained? One possibility is in the same individual. But this cannot be the answer either, because bisexual individuals will produce on average less progeny than homosexuality proposed by biologists. This is one of the best, and interesting parts of his book. Probably few people have the to refute the variety of hypotheses to explain (away) homosexuality. toward the ceiling, 'Her knees were bent upwards, her legs still spread apart, her arms falling limp behind her, as the sterile drape slipped off and slithered to the floor,' reported a surgical nurse. "I didn't have the opportunity to make my ritual incision," commented "Suddenly, the ceiling parted and she went to heaven," her aunt said, going under the knife in that godless custom. I don't know what my with such a thing in this day and age.' The doctor in charge was not it's time we got back there too. I hope the little baby is still alive, as we can be very helpful to her now, I think." What a happy reunion they all made back at the Hotel. Caprice their new guest found acceptable but odd, and all toasted to success. Security Operations had been transformed through complicated cosmetic an said tartly, "He was discovered when he was found to have no recollection of the chord changes in 'Sophisticated Lady.' The bad connected with international terrorism, had been caught and extradited corrupt officials and planted millions of trees in ravaged forestland. reasons. "It's killing us, and the conspiracy is among the rich nations (too selfish) and the poor nations (too corrupt) to pay for agree on anything, united in condemning people for their sexuality. I robbing us of our land. And Christian values are what we need. All the deals. He's just whipping up poor farm laborers to riot because he won't fight the agribusiness giants that own all the land. Same as in are practically French by now," said Caprice, bending her husband's elbow to bring the champagne glass to his lips again. In attempting to turn the gathering back toward festivity, she urged everyone, "Let's and work to expand the power of the multitude. That remains our Instead of the usual chapter of The Story Continues, readers are asked to consider the following two important items. The feds are spying on and harassing political activists with a EARLY THIS MONTH the federal government launched the latest crude program called for "aggressive even obvious surveillance" of a wide range of individuals (regardless of whether or not they're election, according to an internal document leaked to the press. The plan a collaboration between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other agencies involves renewed scrutiny of mosques and interrogations of people whose national origin, religious faith, or political leanings might, about immigration status theirs and others' and about their For staffers at these organizations, responding to these kinds of crackdowns has become alarmingly routine. This is the fifth round of origin, religion, and, increasingly, their political views. No one knows just how many have been deported as a result of the interviews or of the various dragnets conducted over the past three the notorious Special Registration program alone. And the fact that told me, "Going after immigrants is just the first step towards going Indeed, a look at the past three years shows that Attorney General whose only real crime is their opposition to the Bush administration's to spy on everyday citizens without probable cause of criminal dubbed "enemy combatants," without charges or access to a lawyer. private citizens and relying on private industry to a degree never seen before. Today federal agencies are maintaining a grand total of The Bush administration has shifted federal funding away from traditional law enforcement and toward domestic spying, explained John police practices and surveillance issues. "A lot of this activity is, in fact, being carried out by local police working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force," he told me, explaining that those agents are even local police chiefs are often not aware of what these As the Bush administration loosened professional standards for law enforcement, it simultaneously increased financial incentives for conducting surveillance, Crew continued. "To qualify for grants, [local law enforcement] must have organizations in their locale that are threats," he said. "They have to justify their own budget by Civil liberties watchdog groups obviously worry about the chilling effect these kinds of surveillance and crackdowns have on our faltering First and Fourth Amendments. But they also insist that When law enforcement fails to distinguish between violent criminal activity and legitimate dissent and when it favors collecting as much information on as many people as possible rather than useful "choosing quantity over quality," Crew said. "You develop good leads by generating trust, not by disrespecting people's rights.... [And] if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, adding more hay doesn't The bills that have recently passed through the House and Senate in gathering and expanding Big Brother's reach even further into our "It's during times of fear when civil liberties are most at risk," efforts to bring the US to trial for war crimes in the matter of the Federal Prosecutor's Office against high ranking United States We are asking the German prosecutor to launch an investigation: since into the responsibility of these officials for war crimes, and since German law allows German courts to prosecute for killing, torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, forcible transfers and sexual coercion other systems of justice have failed and seeking to hold officials up the chain of command responsible for the shameful abuses that Please join our effort! The German Prosecutor has discretion to decide whether to initiate an investigation. It is critical that he hear from you so he knows that people around the world support this they were sitting very close together, each able to look over the "Yeah, pretty peaceful, eh?" He pulled off his watch and told closer toward the lake. He started to take off his left boot and "Don't think about it, just do it," he was told. "It's snowing, it's getting dark, and it's the only way we can get picked up by the infra Not even a minute later tracer bullets flew over them, streaking to check on what kind of toolkit the guy was operating with. rockets into the treeline as it swooped down between the unseen In a matter of seconds, somebody had bundled up the two naked men and strapped them into the helicopter. As they rose and headed out north the air behind them, its occupants catapulted up flaming and then down blankets and started iv drips to rehydrate them, pushing in a dose of long, slow breaths. Satisfied with their vital signs, she left them to drift a while; both were quiet for what seemed to be quite a long "Printed here is a timetable I am instructed to share with you. It details certain activities by persons you are acquainted with or that you will otherwise find relevant. The phone is programmed to put you in touch with the persons who contracted for this operation. They are When he pushed the talk button and heard a voice say his name, he said, looking over at the man who had turned the tables on him, resourcefulness. You are safe now, in good hands I promise you. And so I expect you'll enjoy it. Now will you please give the phone to from the laptop screen about a product line in unmanned airborne Exhibition. Last year we reviewed Transformation in Action. This year examine an extension of this philosophy entitled Global Persistent the operational and intelligence community capabilities. The nature threat and the tempo of operations demand a radical departure from way we have managed information flows, shared products and provided represent an efficient and effective solution to provide a 'cursor' target under any conditions and at any location. This year we A vendor dishes spicy noodles into bowls for customers lined up on the sidewalk. A family is sitting on the ground at a low table, passing women, in blouses and skirts, all wear scarves on their heads, pinned just below their chins. The camera pans slowly and reveals a man in "Hey, what's he doing there? Go back, get that white guy out of the English? Yes, well, we've rented this stand for the next two days. You'll have to eat somewhere else." He reports back to the director, The man who was moved out of the food stall takes his bowl and moves next door to another stand. He sits down and continues to eat. took off his white turban about an hour ago and is now carrying it in has followed him. He needs to clear his head after three hours in which his ostensible colleagues from the cult competed with the products) for dominance, each with the aim to manipulate the other spheres, particularly under the racist colonial policies of Great would purchase a live dugong, a purchase that is illegal under endangered species. The animal, allegedly orphaned in the wild and profitable rapidity of calculations of ringgits and yuan, dollars white tunics and white turbans, in a scene that owes too much to be persuaded to bring this magnificent beast to the dock at KL for a H: "Oh, our expert veterinary staff will of course be on available to examination. And for a nominal cost, we can even find shippers who will cross the Pacific and bring it directly to a port on the West his cup with a repellently long fingernail on his pinky. L: "Of course, a sound animal will require very special treatment en A palpable chill passes through the room at this maladroit refusal. H: "I cannot countenance the remotest possibility that you and your risk from the notorious pirates because of our negligence. Despite the risks a foreigner might face, we were prepared to make certain the What is most visible here is the severely narrowed operational scope County will pay three to see the live dugong swimming in the tank of their office. Little do they know that the Pirate Queen, a beautiful similarity to a Pirate Queen in a film cribbed from a book entitled Your LIFE Story by someone else) determined to protect her heritage, This script could be a smash: Criticality meets Ironic Distance meets successful, which will require at some point that his secret mission throughout the "Dark" Continent, financed by the Napkin Ring; whose mission is to infiltrate and destroy oppressive cults and directs public relations for the World Trade Organization and thinking thoughts about consciousness and cognitive development, a Each week a new chapter of the serial is emailed. If you want to read it as it should be read, just reply to this email with "I want to read" in the subject heading. You will be added to the mailing list. Readers are also invited to contribute narratives, comments on the beautiful and all people are so friendly. I can't walk down the beach girl on its back. It must be young, as it is only a little taller than a week or two, as my assignment there is stalled while we wait for credited by a little English girl with saving her life in the tsunami. weeks, and she was spending her last day on the beach yesterday before As the wall of water crashed toward the beach, many birds and animals (shot of dogs running on beach) This is not the only story of animal was running toward the water back to his family in the nick of time, Where are you? Are you well.? I have heard nothing from you. I am almost in prison here. I was made to suffer all the hells of detoxification from my morphine, and I miss you. I came to Frankfurt days. I had no money, no clothes, no nothing and I am desolate. I had All my dreams for the future are long gone; the fascists are rising for an old man like me. I am so lonely. Can you please come and help I was apprehended by US Marshals and brought back to the US. (see denounced me and said I never did anything to help the Black Liberation Army. But that does not satisfy the Justice Dept. There is a small committee of people supporting me, and the Populist Legal Agency is defending me. The political climate in this country has changed so much. The liberals are the most craven cowards. Can you aspiration to unite with God can be fulfilled only after death. Church cannot face a congregation that understands The Knowledge of huge peasant rebellion, caused by widespread dispossession of land tilled by residents and sparked by a new reformation of religion. We the idea of rights inherent in each individual person. Sadly, we expect that one superpower will tie reformation theology and [Here the text is broken and nothing is legible except one phrase: commitment to the humans arises. Over the last few centuries I watch their bewilderment at the rapid growth of cerebral cortex and its integration into two hemispheres. When the hemispheres were separate, the humans took the voices in their heads to be communication from gods. Now that the two hemispheres are bridged, they are so lonely, realizing that the only voices they hear are their own. Can I bear to watch them invent power hierarchies of gender, occupation, accumulated being and otherness, which should usher in a golden age of tranquility Happy Winter Solstice I have not heard from you in a long time. archery I never liked being in the basement anyway with those grisly New Age Academy is a secure facility for boys and girls with ADD. We yesterday that she would have to submit frozen samples of her brain It is suspected that she contracted Mad Cow Disease (bovine when contacted by our reporter. "This is obviously political persecution for my totally legal support of the ELF Liberation Front." "ELF Lib," as it is called by its adherents, is alleged to have brought Prion to the attention of authorities. She was bound in a rug you should make him your bitch and that would clean his clock for him. from it to consider the act of knowing and its modalities. For certitude that characterizes my consideration of that selfsame cat as modalities are behind us on the noetic side of the pole, and if there we were to face the object, we would get the pure sense of the object has seized on quantum mechanics as an explanation for their theological concern with consciousness and the desire to shed "the ego" in order to be at home in the new construal of the universe." that matter is no longer to be thought of as solid and stable, and chiropractor, so he undoubtedly has the scientific background to the brain are active when looking at, say, an apple as when remembering an apple. He then says this indicates that the brain cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is only remembered. Therefore consciousness is constituting reality. That's coterminous, congruent. That leaves out the whole rest of the body, including the eyes, the muscles that move the lenses in the eyes, the sneezes and is finally underway. "That means that the assertion about consciousness constituting the world is not proven by that argument. changes phenomena: observing a subatomic particle can determine either its location or its momentum, but not both. In fact, all we have are probabilities for where any given particle is prior to observation: it "Theories abound, darlings, to explain this uncertainty principle, there is no thing, no entity we can call matter, or energy, or reality. All we can do is ascertain probabilities, which do not order. Most scientists are agnostic on the question of whether there is a "real" universe out there independent of our observation of it." "The best that can be said is that observation (and we could stretch and call that consciousness, I guess) is implicated in every phenomenon we can observe and seemingly in every phenomenon we can "But this movie goes too far; it wants us to believe our we take a hot bath, we are transformed and can throw away our anxiety are a logical outcome of theories that brain chemicals and electrical connections among neurons are the seat of emotional reactions of delight and distress. Readjustment of those electro chemicals is a falsehood that the cell is the basic unit of consciousness) want food Much of the life of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender, economies and geographies. This course will examine some of the ways and responded to the Law that seeks to channel desire into acceptable use, unsafe sex, sexual activity in public or private are "crimes" said to characterize "queer" life. We will attempt to look at the behaviors and beliefs of persons seeking sexual and emotional connections and their outcomes in modes of being that both create challenged the structures of economic and social life, with resulting transformation and incorporation into the globalization of the Construction of a Gay Drug, Resentment, The Crystal Diary, and Macho Sluts. In addition, students will participate in original research on sexual subcultures in this city and in other parts of the Topics to be covered (partial list, needs expansion) lecture on the phenomenon of Gay Crystal, about which I, as an know something from my frequent and promiscuous contacts with New "And then I will perform a disquisition on the Gay Circuit Party, "As always, Marcel, I am impressed by your perspicuity," I had to "And," added my addled friend, "I have a whole idea about the history In this multimedia course, we will examine the Lesbian, Gay, origins of this cultural movement in Cold War economics and politics In literary production, specifically gay male writing begins with became icons to 60s gay poets. Most prominent New York poets were particularly visible. The high camp of the Theater of the Ridiculous looked at in early film and recordings of these performances, as well significant cultural producer of the second half of the century. anonymous projects that contributed to the development of the demonstrations and "tribal" gatherings of groups like the Gay Liberation Front. Hundreds of new "queer" writers began their careers objection to immediate revolution: 'We have no majority among the truth or pedants who want an advance guarantee that throughout the votes plus one, this they want at all events, without taking the least account of the real circumstances of the revolution. History has never given such a guarantee, and it is quite unable to give it in any revolution. To make such a demand is jeering at the audience, and is Law and Order (Maintenance) Act for recruiting people to undergo military training and conspiracy to engage in sabotage. He is accused of personally picking the spot for the abortive attempt to kill *When all the chicken pieces are brown on every side, mash tomatoes *Thin the peanut butter with a few spoons of hot broth and add half *In a separate pot, boil spinach or pumpkin leaves for several minutes until tender. Drain and toss with the remainder of the peanut compilation, her first CD on a stateside label. Split between lulling music for enthusiasts of both contemporary and folkloric song forms. Cyclical motifs combine earthy singing and translucent instrumental syncopation to create a hypnotic sound of power and ancientness." had "not actively cooperated" with the fund and had been in arrears on summit. With political temperatures rising dramatically over dealing with issues of democracy and electoral conduct. State University who were marching to protest segregation at a bowling Brother (the government's version) was looking over people's shoulders: a staffer on the National Security Council was responsible Army, even though amphetamines were widely distributed as stimulants King was murdered, fires spread to within two blocks of the White Democratic presidential convention was on its way to town, but and taxi drivers. The convention itself would be ringed with electrified barbed wire; the security force had at its disposal brutality that resulted was so extreme it changed people's political of bloodbaths. More riots, the Weathermen bombings, the murder of more were still to come. There was momentousness, paranoia, and danger punching out people who grew their hair long. A feeling of shared latter for a meal of lentil pottage. The country which the Lord his blessing appears to have been inherited by his latest posterity. this time they were fearfully denounced by the later prophets. After centuries continued to prosper. But during the warlike rule of the adopted their dwellings as well as their country. Everywhere we meet removal of part, or all, of the female genitalia. The most severe form consists of clitoridectomy (where all, or part of, the clitoris is stitched or held together in order to form a cover over the vagina when they heal. A small hole is left to allow urine and menstrual Girls undergoing the procedure have varying degrees of knowledge about what will happen to them. Sometimes the event is associated with festivities and gifts. Girls are exhorted to be brave. Where the mutilation is part of an initiation rite, the festivities may be major events for the community. Usually only women are allowed to be Sometimes a trained midwife will be available to give a local cold water, to numb the area and reduce the likelihood of bleeding. More commonly, however, no steps are taken to reduce the pain. The girl is immobilized, held, usually by older women, with her legs open. believed to facilitate healing. The girl may be taken to a specially designated place to recover where, if the mutilation has been carried out as part of an initiation ceremony, traditional teaching is living in the mountains off herbs and plants; all citations from himself, transmigratory soul unbound by genetics, has personally It is also worth noting here, by the way, that the rumors of an not supported by any available evidence. Readers will be aware of history, wherein the past and present cultures of all times and places are ransacked for information and entertainment. Merle has made no preserved books, and all agree are some of the most beautiful books in That sentiment is echoed in a new banner that greets drivers as they cellphones around the world. To keep markets open for its economy, the food imports, in bilateral talks and in preliminary negotiations in "It is not hard to guess why he chose to terminate his life," said La conditions of the farmers, the agriculture industry and the rural upon, to demonstrate how farmers could survive and compete despite out paddies abandoned across the valley floor. "If we import more "Parents who are farming, don't want their children to do farming," he said, speaking in a room filled with farmers. "There is no hope. "Frankly speaking, I am really, really proud of him," his daughter terms of legal punishment, implies, more or less obscurely, judgments of normality, attributions of causality, assessments of possible have been rocked by the discovery of the vast smuggling network run by Emirates, seems to be escaping punishment despite its role as the key world to mask the real destination of cargo. Consider how the manufacturing company. "No document was traced that proved" the according to the country's inspector general of police. The real destination, he said, "was outside the knowledge" of the producer. One tracked down, they will offer a similar explanation. deniability. Its customs agency even brags that its policy on trade zone, a haven for freewheeling international companies. Our separated from one another by time, so that time itself interposes a Faced with the catastrophic reality of the tortures "bad apples" responsible for what could otherwise be of the rural towns from which the soldiers accused of Curiously, not a single interview has appeared with the most miserable known. If a journalist had tracked Black" Smith would be able to recount how all of the to remain on his feet for interminable hours with a experienced the humiliation of having to ask a male how in prison one can be sexually abused by the same structure which organizes basic nonverbal responses, such as aggression, which, in living fish, consist of two lines of cells near the kidneys. Pathways involved in oral and genital functions "converge in that part of the hypothalamus in which electrical stimulation results in angry and defensive pituitary gland (which is linked to the hypothalamus)] "are derived affectless, but it helps. It helped me realize that I can't rely on old concepts like US imperialism to understand what's going on. The blame for attacks on US targets is not just on the US. The changes in multitude. It makes sense out of things that can otherwise be addressed only through righteous but ignorant indignation. coalitions of the willing, fighting border wars continually, striking out with money and technology at competitors and friends, bewildered that others don't like us, and disappointed at our seeming failure to keep hope alive. Our overweening pride, inflated by the dollars everyone in the world clamored for, has made our claims this organ is markedly smaller in gay males and females than in Would Be Queen, that there are no "true" transgenders. The Christian fundamentalist right to further their eradication of transgender persons and of homosexual behaviors. Ed.] with noticeable closed eye imagery, is a much greater aesthetic enhancer, especially of people and of music; is more euphoric; more favorite characteristic is that one retains an interesting psychedelic He was later baptized a Christian with the name of John Peter, which giving evidence before the Morris Carter Commission, he proceeded to after his arrest, he was freed from all restrictions. stability, economic progress as well as agricultural, industrial and supported reconciliation. He retained the role of prime minister after foreign policy. Stability attracted foreign investment and he was an document of the highest distinction in anthropological literature, an a formal study of life and death, work and play, sex and the family in life presented here are at once comprehensive and intimate, and as has ensued over the years regarding clitoridectomy and female genital leaves a relatively recent historical artifact in place without reconnaissance helicopter has been deployed in support of United The primary mission of the helicopter is in the scout attack role. The helicopter can be optionally equipped to carry out transport and utility roles using equipment kits installed externally on existing hard points. A cargo carrying hook is rated to carry loads up to 2,000lb. Emergency casualty evacuation can be carried out transporting two casualties on litters (stretchers), plus over 320kg of supplies to insertion of up to six troops for critical point security missions. pylons. Each pylon can be armed with two Hellfire missiles, seven Mission processors control the suite of mission subsystems via a radar warning receivers against pulsed and continuous wave radars and night and to engage the enemy at the maximum range of the weapon systems and with the minimum exposure of the helicopter. The mast mounted sight contains a suite of sensors which includes: a high resolution television camera for long range target detection; a thermal imaging sensor for navigation, target acquisition and guidance of the Hellfire missiles and designation for Copperhead for handoff to an AH-1 Cobra helicopter for TOW missile engagements. The mission equipment includes an Improved Data Modem for Digital of 475kW. The engine and transmission system have been upgraded to provide high performance levels in high temperature and extreme talk about experimental inaccuracies to epistemological or ontological issues and back again. However, ontological questions seemed to be of somewhat less interest to him. For example, there is a passage our observational data, there might still exist a hidden reality in which quantum systems have definite values for position and momentum, unaffected by the uncertainty relations. He emphatically dismisses this conception as an unfruitful and meaningless speculation, because, as he says, the aim of physics is only to describe observable data. against the fact that the human language permits the utterance of statements which have no empirical content at all, but nevertheless produce a picture in our imagination. He notes, "One should be especially careful in using the words 'reality', 'actually', etc., since these words very often lead to statements of the type just relations as rejecting a reality in which particles have simultaneous properties different from those being observed. In contrast, classical physics rests on an idealization, he said, in the sense that it as inherent properties, independent of their actual observation. which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or "generative") orders, some of which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher. generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical implicate domain "could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, applied in order to enforce socially approved behaviors; "addicts" and "homosexuals" are, for example, the "carriers" of AIDS. See "Epidemics philosopher, master teacher and hierophant. His partnership with Politicking with Words: On Ideology and Dictionary Meaning have taken in good earnest the definitions of those words and their provisional meanings, with reference would have grown somewhat circumspect about dictionary authority and the standard. That the standard is collectively is another truism. But collectivity can be a problematic as far as fixing the linguistic standard is concerned. Given that society is heavily stratified into classes and ranks, all those living in it do not have a uniform level of literacy and the same degree of access to the process controlled by the culturally and politically dominant group or class, the ideology of dictionary adapts itself to the dominant ideology at all points of time. Since wide acceptability is the goal of ideology, it makes its cultural and political agenda invisible and makes itself of dictionaries of various sizes and kinds always regard and marketability as the end. In practice, indiscreet lapses from objectivity do occur nonetheless, and the market suffers occasional setbacks. A few years ago, Another event that clearly illustrates how ideological their opposed political and ideological dispositions. true representatives of English politics and religion, believed in the constitution of the state equally well and used the same rhetoric for their own publicity. friends and supporters of the war and principles of claiming monopoly of the custodianship of constitutional for the exclusive title of friends to the constitution political meanings. Claims and denials as well as vilification took up political positions that turned out to be antagonistic political struggle clearly signifying ideological underpinnings. appears neutral, as it does in the modern dictionaries, it is only so following the dictates of objectivity, an ideology in itself, and the politics of invisibility. predictably featured in the new dictionary, displacing found a place as free citizens in the world of linguistic past services, civil or military. Men often receive office. But in particular, officers, soldiers and sea the government. In his time they were seen as arms against grant of pension by the Congress to officers provision for old officers and pension granted for the purpose of bribery for favor and support. He maintained vastly changed social life in many ways; yet language the loss of horses very well, remaining in the general vocabulary to be widely used without horsey associations with horses. Many of these words are used figuratively, are traceable to horse imagery. We drive motor vehicles ride and road: via road is cognate not only with our course drew carriages of its own. (Apt names, actually: railway carriages, like the earliest motorcars, looked charge, chariot. (Cart and coach are not related to it, early 1900s, to ride the cars meant to take a tram, and the man in the cars was used as sobriquet for an and so have most utility vehicles, like fire engine, hackney or hack being a hired horse and by extension the sleeping cars on old trains like the Orient Express). for the cheap seats on an airplane. French gives us and if heavy and enclosed, a coach. (Sleds are wagons with runners, and sleighs are carriages with runners, points stand out about these words. First, many are still used in their own right, but in trivialized senses: for zooming around beaches, and even baby carriages words, except in the train senses, for we call anything putting the car before the horse, so to speak, though I have never heard anyone mention the irony in this. parts persist in our newer machines too: wheels and steering itself were originally boat words, and hubs kept as a nickname for a silver dollar, and it also Many names also survive from the body of a carriage. convertibles. The oldest enclosed coaches originally had two passenger seats facing each other, an arrangement the rear is still called a trunk (it once really was a trunk, as you can see in pictures of old coaches and even old motorcars). The horn is the literal and figurative that was carried by a mail coach to announce its arrival vertical shield by the driver's feet, and like the fenders who waited in the cold while the very rich shopped, for only the very rich could afford to come in carriages Coach in the artistic or sports sense is an abstraction gaudiest wagon in a circus parade. Giving up alcohol, that sprinkled down dusty dirt roads in summertime. hubs rotate directly on the axletrees and squeak if away, we cart it off; and scandals fester until the tumbrels roll, the executioner's carts of the French drafting in a great hurry at the very last minute. An on the cart, as if everyone were stuffed in and frantically a horse straining against the collar to pull a heavy on or has a blinkered viewpoint. In tandem is often ranged one in front of the other, in a single line, with We coax balking people like reluctant draft animals even keep stables of lawyers or designers or whatnot. horses; and we even try to harness wind and sun and people's enthusiasm. We whip up enthusiasm too, as And horsewhipping once settled many public arguments, Parasols, Canes and Whips to be left at the head of The desultory dialogue recorded below is a verbatim English speakers have a selection of French vocabulary are here, even as we speak, but largely confined to blanches, eh? The spirit is always willing, but for pass, but if a movie has a decent plot and credible TIMOTHY: To be honest, a lot of the films recommended nude or two, that's for sure, but for my money there name tried to flog me a vacuum cleaner once. I remember there are those who consider him a traveling salesman tradition of impertinence dating back to dada in general a bit dubious about anything since the Impressionists, over backwards to tease critics, but forget all about gleefully entertained. But see the way he negotiates obsessed with the naked human form aren't pornographers, takes no chances, aesthetically speaking. It's a question trouble with all those terms is they associate style Any discussion of what constitutes style must encompass think the work should speak for itself. Any critiques United ace given to contretemps with footballing authorities like blancmanges. How can we reconcile the boorish plenty of time to write a dissertation on everybody's dissipation on slender means with a vacillating devotion to his art. He wound up trading it in for gunrunning even think of using any of the variations for a boy winner of wars, adviser to kings, father of five (legitimate) ruthless crushing of a peasants rebellion. Just the the Blessed Virgin's Mother, has always been popular to be in any way connected with the excessively macho heroine gave intellectual respectability. Originally a daughters of a clergyman who surely admired neither was distinguished by the spelling. This was before suggested to me that this name has lost a great deal seems a pity. It has a pleasing sound once used by became more formalized with the spread of literacy, Hermitage. (Surely not from the apostate emperor?) It is true that from the earliest times she was also Julienne soup, named after a female cook. The apparently likely to be from the popular saint, or for its meaning, for horse. Yet the only male Rose I can discover is television interviewers. His successor as a transatlantic to have been largely used for boys, but Lee is generously this widely popular use has anything to do with any the Shakers, is perhaps unlikely; it is just a very nice used for boys, generally of the upper or professional French history without apparent difficulty, but it was however rugged his appearance. So the studio chiefs Could he, by the remotest chance, have been the inspiration at school with such feeling. In our language, dead words are continuously discarded. There is considerable and changes of meaning. As new processes are discovered, A furlong was an eighth of a mile and a rod four and roads, bridges, rent in oats, upkeep of beacons, and of nicknames, which, being descriptive, are useful to historians. As the population grew, Christian names became insufficient for identification purposes. A care of game and of fences. Place names often have developed in the same way. It is not difficult to see wild animal, that cheater was a rent collector (more credible), and that a publican was a public servant. Reed the Thatcher, were neatly matched to the occupations. other makers has been that while the original family jobs, this has not always been observed in later versions. sense without the accompanying illustration. Perhaps, connection, it was possibly easier to give a satirical probably alluding to the same suspicions of adulteration in the 1950s in a large Happy Families set produced All the families had names related to types of cough. There was thus the Bark family of dog breeders, the Hack family of woodcutters, the Hoarse jockeys, and even manages to alliterate. But a name may also connect glance through the largest occupational group in my Blight can stand it, and has got used to the jokes produced and business. He may be taking some pleasure in the possible recent discomfiture of the previously appropriately So familiar is the phenomenon that it was capitalized swimming pool. Two separate sets of Happy Families cards were published using authentic local business relate to a trade or merely suggest one to us through some association are carried by people in completely as a baker. I shall continue to look out as well for that accompanied it. All the more reason, then, to focus on this idiom as seen in colorful terms before it the woods stands a heap of rocks, a marker, about six feet high surmounted by a flat, upright slab adding another two feet to its height. Such a marker goes land marker, although he had not seen it, he without turns up in old deeds. For me it served as a milestone for instance, a flat stretch running between a hillside from straying too close to the dwelling. Though now in disuse, it consists of a trench three feet deep, on sloping land, with a retaining wall on the uphill side. Five likely dictionaries omit the word tug as it is consists of digging tug from bogs and hauling it out to dry before burning. Who knows, perhaps the arduous around. Hence it comes as no surprise to find in the eccentric pronunciation, leaving rs out of words or churn the tree flares widely at its base. Since churns means to argue over a price, hopefully to whittle it or fruit in a state of incipient decay. Akin to dozy is as cut at the sawmill, imperfect because it ran into pine panels are installed, their boards nailed side comes to us from the age of oil lamps: when the wick burned down too low to give a good flame, it had to woods, one log behind another, linked by chains and scored the logs at intervals to prevent deep, damaging ridges which are straight if they came from the old saws. But kerf marks on milled timber are hardly the holding the opposite ends, bringing up the rear, and carrying bales of hay cut by scythe from the hummocks This one came to me from a countryman with a remarkable county fairs or before other awestruck audiences. It tips creating a loop that can abruptly trip a hiker in one, whippoorwill shoes for the lady's slipper orchid mentions when he tells us that his mother left a bowl of dough overnight to rise, only to find the cate the Country people understand this; city people do not. rifle. He had shown me his boiling spring, a spring that boils up from the depths and also bubbles. He and his folks used to collect the sand from a boiling spring to make scythe rifles. This tool was used for scythe rifle consisted of a stick of wood flattened on me up short. That's the new way of doing it. quoth he. The old way was to take a flat stick, hickory was good, and jab it with an ice pick hundreds of times, spread beef tallow over the pits, and finally sprinkle concluded, would last two or three years on the hayfield. about scythe rifles. In his essay on Prudence he remarks, of a whetstone or mower's rifle when it is too late in out. New words take their place. But isn't that the on my new computer, the name of the startup program persuaded that their inability to work with the computer but in ourselves, to coin an expression for computer I was told, to any name you want. I might have replied that is)? Among the many I queried, merriment at my Having read enough fiction for the day, I turned to the New York Times. In the Arts and Leisure section, I was drawn to a headline about the Holocaust. The place or sound like some original thing such as champagne monster should have a capital to denote it's capital. I don't care for sprouts much, and don't buy enough of where food is served. Food is the most obvious subject, rarebit. This is part of a much longer geographical list of foodstuffs which can be expanded to include and Tiger nuts, although the last might defy such easy fish) seems to be like a double fault, but just think of all those dishes on the menus of your favorite restaurants. activity. We also have bow legs, Roman noses, pigeon chests, not to mention German measles, chicken pox, flares, might one day come back into fashion, while wants to know if Victoria sponge with a Bath bun and which explains the tortuous logic in his offering. His cake and a Granny Smith apple. Lunch could be York puree; Turkey with the usual bits and pieces, including must remain alert when shopping for food: that Danish Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet, if your medical insurance terminates for any reason continue such medical insurance.... [From Group Insurance trousers was considered vulgar, and some extraordinary substitute names but are left out of otherwise quite gloves, spats, and a too tight vest over a big belly: New Yorker has on occasion kept in pants but omitted It is not clear whether this is an example of prudery or of prurience, which has been exemplified by such She was dressed not to the nines, but to the zeroes. who dresses for work in plaid shirts and suspenders, aggressively inappropriate for the occasion, I remind walks of life are hurled together under extreme, often edicts dictate which words are acceptable and which slang is the rapid influx of English. Different groups, ranging from urbane students to cliques involved in drug smuggling and prostitution, pepper their language a drug dealer were to rattle off lists of narcotics words, the English speaker would be surprised at all (gelatin), and gel jelly, for instance, are cryptic nicknames for drugs in general. The word for joint insider word for the actual liquid that is injected. both arms at the same time. Drug rushes are called flesh, as in a flash, or simply trip, and to have a hiding it in one's anal canal is called finger, and the individual who transports drugs in this way is called specifically to indicate the nature of an individual's inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers, actors, directors, composers, historians, learned societies, is honored more in the breach than the observance), films, academia, literary criticism, bibliographers, about the world's greatest dramatist. Subtitled, after speech as God's greatest gift to man; and speech, in and often irreverent imagination, occasion for exuberant Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, that interpretation. A nunnery may be a monastery, an abbey, a convent, a cloister, or a priory. Period. Since bastard (the only equivalent male counterpart heading, Family, we find under rogue (the sole alternative subgroups, all models of clarity and superbly indexed, a keen observer of the creatures of the field and forest, a bird of prey from a cutting tool. A hawk is, in fact, simply another kind of tool, used to this day by plasterers Decay and Sickness we find further echoes of Hamlet: work is not only that meanings, but shades of meaning are made clear, especially helpful for actors, directors, a new and penetrating light on the infinite variety Owing to my being unable to find the full bibliographical Drinks, by R. A. Spears, was recalled when I saw the Death Dictionary: they are similar only in that they oblique references to the subjects they cover). Anyone English lexicon and the propensity of its speakers to coin metaphors should attend to these two works (at culture. I do not mean, of course, to disparage the capacity of other languages in their ability to exhibit such a fine array of words and phrases pertaining to a particular subject, but, if it is common, I am unaware longer literally true, for the number of people living now exceeds the total of all who had ever lived. (I apologize for being unable to give the exact reference, but its validity does not mitigate our capacity to say other terms. The range is quite wide, running from drowning. As can be seen, this book is a veritable treasure trove of arcane information. The entries include the will until the occurrence of a future event), the failure in meeting society's standards), the poetic which, for some reason, has a bibliography different entire book constitutes, as mentioned above, a sort of thesaurus, there is actually a Thesaurus section where, under main headings like Abortion, Afterlife, Aside from its linguistic, lexicographic, and social death in the abstract or in its ineluctable reality-- familiar to VERBATIM readers. The smooth perusal of the articles is aided by a minimum of footnotes (at the ends of the essays), with a detailed bibliography treat usage from historical and contemporary perspectives, topics that are likely to interest readers of VERBATIM. It is not often that this commentator has the opportunity would be difficult to find a book of this value among commercial publishers' books at such a price. Those annual dues); for this they receive all publications, the present volume, and the Newsletter. Correspondence If one is to acknowledge that it is unfair to express the entire reviewing process might as well be rejected The problem is that the words selected summer afternoon words beginning with p or containing a k -sound; on whose favorite word is kreplach. It is not hard to see ubiquitous, but it would be wise to give up attempts at analysis before coping with eggplant and kumquat, minor celebrities were solicited. Many are so uncelebrated not in dictionaries; and, finally, (entertainer, magician) Those to whom all that is acceptable as a basis for a book may find enjoyment, intellectual fulfillment, and other reward in acquiring it. At a stretch, one might regard it as a book of (rather longish) quotations contributions appear in the same order; there is no preferred looking at the trees rather than the paper. thing, and I was particularly so at the time I picked it up for review. In the context of the book, Wickedly Funny must be interpreted as meaning cynical, bitter, me my face looked like a bouquet of elbows). It is misleading to call this a book of quotations: most extracts be the product of a publicity agent, at least qualify should say that the book is entertaining, even amusing; but it is rarely funny: if you enjoy her performances, schizophrenic, but it is not funny to see its concocted Madness). The quotations are listed in rather haphazard order under these subcategories; authors (including ascribed and, if they are dead, their dates are sometimes hard to understand the style. If one is interested only list Anonymous. There is even a quotation evidently prepared by committee: Why is life so tough? Perhaps Lewis' table is that although I assume it works for his incursions into English English. Henry Porter, in a disapproving article in The Guardian Weekly for May understand, nor do I think this is entirely owing to unfamiliarity with U phonology. The fact that there feared for her hearing. A few years ago she consulted friend replied, Well, lately I have had trouble understanding there's your answer, the doctor said; I can't understand supple comfort, the Prestige tennis shoe spoils your feet. cab was coming to take her away from the stadium. The had been buried in the track less than an hour before. She kept smiling at the cameras and sat there, standing tall. different level of imagination and which I think of as Try it a bit faster. The answer to the question should pointed beard, exactly what I should expect a geneticist and phrases are often used to express the same concept in a completely different way in different languages. A browse through dictionaries will provide many more is silly, but there it is. I also find myself making up has come along. This time it is for names ending with know that young parents can't resist these fashions any more than they can resist the new clothing styles fashion victims with regard to names, but when your the fact that in the school down the road, the children being mercilessly ragged by Tahini and Pooh, themselves they are jumping, or being pulled, on to the latest It is clever to have a slightly unusual name for the names must be chosen from a prescribed, though extensive I am regularly confronted with children whose names I last saw on the menu of the Maharajah restaurant. now, I realize, she was telling me the absolute truth. perhaps we could ask people to think more carefully when choosing them. For instance, if you want your latest to be a lawyer, then choose a solid trustworthy builder, use Brick, Timber, or Lintel. You might even weren't born with, what about Peter for a safecracker, sentiments exactly. In similar situations, especially should have been either Thank you or You're welcome. but it comes across as a polite way of saying, I don't coping with the mentally and physically taxing demands concerning issues of earthshaking consequence, with but don't let it happen again implied. There is no that it will either disappear or quickly acquire the bother to read this piece. Others of you, of course, know about these splendid beasts, and their activities, been taken into standard dictionaries of the English language. Jabberwocky itself is given in The Concise Oxford Dictionary as designating nonsensical writing World gives this: meaningless syllables that seem to As a noun it now means a murmuring noise; a rambling drive before the wind or to play the fife or flute. I utter a low, deep laugh. There is the splendid galumphing, we are given frabjous, as in O frabjous day!, which The Concise Oxford allows straightforwardly as meaning gave it only one r, but somehow a few editors gave it in that extra r, which an equally careless proofreader Better than a hotel. Luxury suites, elegantly furnished young car thieves, runaways and gang members is already in danger of closing for lack of funds B3 [From Inside about in the long distance marketplace,... [From the Sexual Aides: How to order them without embarrassment. his room at the Graben Hotel. [From Art View, by John after delivering, the third, a rare occurrence, physicians products, please call us if this product does not meet your expectations.... [From the text on a pint container of .isn't a smoking ban in saloons almost a contradiction in certain way in geography class, only to end the year ones as scores of former colonies became independent, generation later, we seem to be going through another not hesitate to correct them when they refer to, for conform that it brings, there are still sometimes perfectly It is when the trend is carried to sanctimonious extremes Black consciousness and Black pride, Blacks challenged which implies, of course, something bad or negative, which has to be rendered pleasant or acceptable). I white. If you mean blacks, write blacks. Strictly speaking, then, according to The Economist, would a the Arctic are, as far as I know, still commonly referred six different dialects. I suppose that no one would One could, therefore, simplify matters by saying that time for political reasons.) These two examples of harder to accept are the new names for what used to has traditionally been called by a name which is the when its literal meaning is identical to the traditional and seems intent on converting his agricultural nation country, and furnished it with, among other things, basilica rumored to be larger even than St. Peter's desire to be seen as the leader of a linguistically and use this term or the traditional term depends, I suppose, read individuals and others who pride themselves on being up to date and informed (and therefore especially with reluctance shows a certain intellectual virtuosity the very essence of his statement. For a man of his intelligence and lifelong habit of writing, such a slip not `politically correct' but `psychoanalytically correct') drove him to ruin. Was the punishment particularly harsh because the affair reminded everyone, including the King himself, that his Majesty behaved according part of the typesetter (or typist). Sometimes it is totally innocent and does not interfere, even for a A plea on groups of insanity, in a newspaper report of a criminal trial, is promptly dismissed by the mind and substituted with grounds. Newspapers, particularly, a research report read the results of the experiment smiled when I quickly discovered that it should have from the context, the true intent of the sentence. A Some typos might be said to be errors of similarity words are substituted for the words in the manuscript. more serious than a single misspelled word. This occurs unintentionally skipped altogether, resulting in an incomprehensible, mangled style. I call it the propinquity from one line to a line or two below in the manuscript On rare occasions a typographical error is uncanny. a child's reversal of the letter R. Similarly, the title York erected a huge billboard sign high atop a gasoline seeing. The sign intentionally misspelled the name certainly a careful speller, he most likely would have shaken his head at this kind of childish electioneering. candidates, reading from prepared notes, made interesting of equipping aircraft carriers with modern musicians the typographical errors of similarity or familiarity fatigue and exhaustion brought on by a presidential When one's name is deliberately or even unconsciously One does not have to be psychologically sophisticated program chairman prepared in longhand a few laudatory quite at home when surrounded by persons of integrity... transcribing the prepared introductory notes, resulting Among men, he is out of place. When among cheaters the category of typographical print errors, but they are nonetheless mistakes, and can be quite costly. In course about four minutes after its launch from Cape air. The reason: an inadvertent omission of a hyphen from the computer's mass of coded mathematical ascent an army of professional proofreaders who, like electronic the final printing. Proofreaders use a special set of marks, signs and symbols to indicate on the gallery capitals, bold face), space notations (size of paragraph etc. To the uninitiated these marks to look like hieroglyphics to launch a program in, say, Ichthyological Taxonomy type. Information technology, or IT, covers areas as diverse as automatic speech recognition and synthesis, paperless office; It is supposed to replace all those filing cabinets and folders with a chip or two here It is not much in evidence, however, in the actions of ESPRIT itself. For instance, paperless is emphatically to describe the office of an ESPRIT participant. The decades of its existence, established quite a reputation mountain. Perhaps inspired by its own acronym, ESPRIT which it may be identified; and ESPRIT itself never refers to projects by their full names, but only by the Formal Design and Verification for Provably Correct ESPRIT projects, by the way. They are participants in acronyms of grant applications which proved successful) preferably be French in origin, since that may lessen acronym invariably represents an English word sequence. to disaster. Perhaps that is what happened with my unsuccessful proposal for a Multiple Entry Reconfigurable In fact the area of acronym selection is so important here. Moreover, a project to fill it is just what ESPRIT `springy cord.' I have always assumed that it must of that. At this moment, the word is most commonly used for the elastic tether by which daredevils attach off into space, a sport that was graphically depicted the terms was used at least ten years ago for the elastic neither is given an etymology. A bungee consists of a tough woven cloth covering. The term familiar to me from my sailing days is Shock Cord, for it is often used usually found as a stretchy tie used to bind things up, as a reefed mainsail on its boom, light articles to a turn down the narrow lane that leads to Oxford University's my father's sparse joke repertoire: Church usher to himself bring a smile: Who has not felt in his heart half century as distinguished scholar and able administrator. tongue that made him famous, and his contemporaries agreed that most legendary spoonerisms were invented Eyewitnesses claim, however, that the concept began Their Titles Take.' Others claim he once actually bull) is his question of a former student shortly after name was associated with oral transpositions. When college social function, he responded with outspoken transposition of letters, syllables, or sounds in a word or phrase. More often, they take an oral rather than a written form. Writers employ them, however, form, particularly the effect upon spelling. Functional implied, both before and after transposition. Analysis might be called good as opposed to bad spoonerisms. tons of soil, in place of sons of toil, not only sounds right and spells right, but has meaning in its revised humor or irony, as this one does. Sound, spelling, spout in the lake for speckled trout is interesting, perhaps even amusing, but it lacks the satisfaction to mind, but they must be discarded quickly, if you spelling to be changed. Since sound and mental image wood, the result is neither meaningful nor pleasing to the ear. Farm does not rhyme with warm, and the sound of wood differs greatly from food. While the term form wooed has good sound, it loses its effectiveness phrase. Strictly visual spoonerisms must be rejected. they give great pleasure both to ear and mind, however, meaning, and usually are uninteresting. I recall a his face. Behind his back, however, irreverent junior Spoonerisms can be classified on a functional basis produce correct words which, unfortunately, neither say the least, puzzling. Plaque is a word, and states is there is no mental connection. Useless spoonerisms only introduces a totally new meaning, but also injects A gratifying subset of the useful category includes accidental. Transposition produces a vulgar term or with the painting is foul art, or perhaps even better, Making up spoonerisms is a pleasant form of addiction. demands to be hummed: the more one tries to forget, the stronger is the sense of impulsive and involuntary pain upon others, and can engage in his or her passion quality of life. No one ever recovers, but under the town. A bit later at the same picnic when the same said, laughing, but that's just the way it turned out. the rancher's sister yelled, What did y'all do with terms, the jargon, at least in the Southwest of the imagine than, say, nautical, or culinary, or musical quite angry over the firing of her husband, and probably probably right. But the most repugnant part of the castration, and I remained sure that bull calves are ketch rope taut, are not used, as the practices are Also, increasingly brands are painlessly frozen, not burned, into the calves' hide. Even in the relatively had been so brisk and deft and the calves so nonchalant ranch terminology varies from area to area. Everywhere the old song: ...they feed in the coulees and water cowboy, grass, pasture, fence, heifer, beef, boots, saddle, shipped.' A cutting horse is a mount trained to separate woven of strands of rawhide, which is elastic. If a big calf or steer was roped with one of these rawhide style, and the roping horse came to an abrupt halt or sat back so that the roped animal hit the rope at a run, the lasso tended to stretch like a rubber band witnessing the folly of such misuse of their implement dale! Literally this means simply `Give to him' but (like a fish). The idea was that you had to hold the dally, began to understand, maybe at the cost of an eye or two, and in their own lingo called the rawhide along with the thing itself, is chaps, typically truncated on horseback in thorny brush. The only time I have chaps the article is invariably called as if spelled and the law of open syllables that causes the first of as the first l of the double l combination, but it is and illustrate language. And where a basic occupation metaphors, whether the subject be marital transgression have lived and loved. If ever I write an autobiography people defined in terms of private significance. For the turn of the century. He goes on to fix that summer loafing about on signposts. They assigned definitions designed to get snarled up on conveyor belts at airports. have a special `quick release' feature which enables the case to fly open at this point and fling your underclothes no right to expect poetry or wit in this latest Oxford be linguistic archaeologists. They then have the difficult whom Mills is explaining all this. I imagine that it is shelf, has all become clear to him? Is this entry as in philology, it will have been crystal clear. He will have had no need to consult the Introduction to discover stands for Old English, and that old in that context has a fairly specific meaning. He will have understood he would think in such simplistic terms: his historical farm.' My further point is that to be totally successful, the editorial team about how the information is presented required, even if it is not the imagination of the poet better presented in an entirely different form. Had been a strong case for listing separately the hundreds be traced in alphabetical order. Separate articles been to publish this material as computer software. Surely the reference libraries to which people turn have access by now to personal computers? I should by inserting a floppy disk into my machine. On typing needed it, a Help key should have brought an instant English name rather than a slightly different one. I believe it would be wrong to confine the discussion interested in this specialized information, and how it recent years. Academic excellence has been maintained, flair, and original thinking. The editors of this book had an important part to play. Unfortunately, both be happy to send to those requesting it] in which I suggested that relatively accurate statistics on word the circulation and listenership figures of periodicals the words and phrases under investigation. While it study'), multiplied by, say the Audit Bureau of Circulation yield a figure that could legitimately be called its too large to manipulate readily, so, using a formula familiar to statisticians, it was normalized to produce a simple decimal number of only a few digits which I the exercise was to connect the frequency information great usefulness to lexicographers and other linguists and usefulness by the mid 1940s. With the emergence seemed likely that the analysis of large bodies of text would be facilitated, for one of the greatest expenses and heard in a single day is unbelievably huge. In a stations alone is unimaginable. While it is acknowledged samples instead of an entire corpus for analysis, the prodigious quantity of lemmata (that's the plural of again, the statistics for a few thousand of the most Still, that means that a reasonably accurate sample, those days, computer storage and processing equipment Moreover, publishers are today generally less reluctant publications dealing with highly specialized areas. If an article about it in a recondite learned journal. genre or because their lexicographers felt that every student who read Burns had to be able to find in the dictionary every word he used. These days, when all likely to appear in crossword puzzles are included. relegated to footnotes in student editions or to specialized syne are probably still to be found in many dictionaries, for special effect or other reasons, as in popular quotations, Romeo?, known to every schoolchild (and misunderstood of the essays collected within its pages, for much of corpora for citations is arrived at subjectively and seen that tries to present a point of view from the paying attention to the semiotic aspects of language rubrics of Contexts of responsiveness, Listener response have mixed success in dealing with the subject. The first, Attending the hearing: listening in legal settings, through, notwithstanding its inclusion of much matter though concise treatment of psychotherapists' reaction have listened to with interest. After devoting (wasting?) of how callers and presenters say hello and goodbye finally get down to the substance of the calls. In a subcategory called Extreme, outrageous and offensive US are familiar with the pattern. What the authors fail to mention is that the treatment the caller receives in the third person, is often very unpleasant indeed, (especially one in which a caller was told that if he of his acerbic, dyspeptic, often rude manner. What presenters are missing is that listeners often tune in to hear all sorts of the things that other listeners them mad, and it makes the presenter appear intolerantly at variance with those the presenter might perceive callers are subjected to, mainly in order to eliminate through rarely have anything of moment to contribute, eliciting a fair exposure of their comments, and the listener is (too) often left with the feeling that the presenter has been too dismissive. The analysis in this article is interesting and well done, but I question the caller and the presenter are discussed. To consider mistake; as far as I can see, the comment on listeners of the listening public and the station as personified become a caller he is as much a part of the script, presenter and is, in effect, no longer a mere listener. this interesting collection of papers, but I should like virgin) caller, I really enjoy your program (which alternates never fathomed the purpose of the first; the second is pure sycophancy; and the third is patently ludicrous, biographer and his subject. Only one of the contributors the subject understood the biographer more profoundly praising his literary skills but inveighing against his riches, or honors, but solely for liberty, which no also for a variety of other purposes, all of which are highly generalized diction, quite possibly encouraged This is an exceptionally fine collection of scholarly English Lit., these essays are largely free of that fault. Perhaps their clarity owes something to their and lucid prose, and scholars who gloss their texts cannot resist their influence, which is all for the it shows that he lives on the estate that bears the family name and distinguishes him from his cousins, The second definition, which I need not quote here, sense, but I will refrain from snarling at people who should not fool with that one: I was not and I do not. suggest, to use the phrase of that kidney. Apparently, the kidneys were a factor in determining a person's and superlatives of English adjectives the gradations superlatives of polysyllabic words. Despite the fact that it is awkward to describe, there is nothing terrifyingly is that hot means `hot,' hotter means `more hot, of a and hottest means `most hot, of a temperature that is greater than that of anything else being considered.' For polysyllables, like ignorant, we use more ignorant does not hold for old and older when applied to people: person, or, to put it the other way round, an older while an old person is merely `old,' an older person is perceived as being older than a younger person (often about them; indeed, they state an impossible condition. though improbable, could make sense. The ambiguity yielding the more reasonable She taught him everything from one publication to another, it is often legislated English: numerous times we read, without supporting thinking that every treatment of it in dictionaries Smith writes in VERBATIM [XVIII,2,23] that the suggested which in this word is pronounced like the e in ebb in is doubtful. Since this English word has no association will have to produce an etymon that is phonologically thread running through all these mistaken etymologies is that their supporters think that the only criterion brimming with error that the title of the review of it not unnaturally, very pleased when readers and critics porkpie hats, bellbottom slacks, and epigraphic yellow sold at a soda fountain or snack bar. The place was Comics) is rather sketchy on detail. As I recall, the consisted of a ladyfinger dipped between bites in a dish with toppings or additions. On entering the Naval concoction involving ice cream, and especially to establishments Dixie was a large tender that repaired and serviced combat vessels, mainly destroyers and destroyer escorts, would often accompany his delivery of treats to the that, but it seemed to me, a boy of about ten at the blend of dunk (a popular debate at the time concerned farm would recognize it as intended for people supplying a good plain advertisement for the product. However, given body of text there is at least one error that its had the distinct impression that he had gone too far in defining that crucial word. I knew unmentionables thus underwent the perfectly logical semantic shift intended) the body parts beneath those undergarments to my mind an advertising poem which my grandfather the mouth of one of his characters in (I think) Look being `to lack,' which could have shifted into colloquial [XVII,4] makes a persuasive case for the phenomenon baby used to describe the actions of a judge or arbitrator give the child to her rival rather than see it killed by that a judge acts wisely in following that example. appears in all references on the derivation of the expression. you Truth herself; for I have brought her down from terms a hundred years later. Or each was independently time ago I was creating a document for a client, using neatly illustrating my contention that spelling checkers, practicality, practicability, particulates, predictability to access to relevant issues of the journals cited. Or, even better, perhaps you already know the etymology would see it as we do: a logical name of a river (and largely unsatisfactory, for they are marred not only by poor choices for addenda but mainly by the deletion older entries to make room for the new. Fortunately, published, and copies of early printing crop up now unwind. Aside from that, the main attractions of the earlier Brewer were its eminent readability, its obscure It is no fault of the editors that familiarity breeds contempt: most of the references in this edition occurred within the living memory of many of its contemporaries, one associates with the original. It is the errors of fact that occasion the greatest irritation, however: been subjected to a careful reading by a knowledgeable fear of the people lest they elect a vice president The book is riddled with such errors and misconceptions, the material. It says, for instance, that The Three Stooges' films had a comparatively short life, obviously reads A later sarcastic version is laugh all the way I am informed that this book has received uniformly about the ignorance of critics and the gullibility of Brewer's Twentieth Century: despite the similarity of the titles, the former is a slighter work; also, it consists quite far from the fact. The orientation of the two books is different: the interval of fourteen pages covered including cross references); of these, only about a references, while that of the new Brewer is popular in both books and is not tempted to accept as gospel should be considered useful additions to a reference by extraterrestrials. Some of the words associated dealt with words and not languages, and, with a few exceptions, with words used by humans in some future writing her master's thesis on languages created by Many writers avoid the language problem by introducing lungs and the face, and there is no reason to assume creatures on earth), and they would thus be unlikely to use languages constructed for humans. The language the development of artificial languages and with the search for language universals, characteristics that many (or all) languages share and that lend credence to the notion that there was only one original language (Without going into the matter here, it must be said structures of language, not with superficial correspondences a sample of the author's humor, which I find engaging: Just take a look at the lunatic in love with language piles of information, he collates and classifies it, he makes lists and fills card indexes. He is in the and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe for so little result. I don't believe any other fantasy by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher's of the ineluctable attraction of their own, native language simplified structure, which aids in its rapid assimilation. poetry in it, its chief function as a means of basic communication has been violated, and with the onset one and, before long, it will begin to suffer the same or French, for example) which at least has an extensive This is a curious book. Those who might be encouraged one would do well to read Appendix II after reading the Introduction. The author, a linguist, is often obscure, is her fault or her translator's. I was unsure, for instance, could progressively dominate fiction, that history, in eliminating myth, could itself become a science, story: a tale, a fable, an imaginary account? [p.5] I suppose that is English, but it is certainly anacoluthic, found in examples of religious glossolalia, with an reduplication, vocalic parallelism, open syllabification, of this would be quite funny if it weren't so serious. at the start of Challenge, part of a retail industry first seems to call for a model, for the name, surrounded also, in that sequence the reader is not boxed into the corner of obligation where he must stand, face to might be. If a young person today were to encounter ignoramus! Everyone (else) in the world knows that who invoke strange names of strange people to demonstrate shared between such entertainers and their audiences, shared with thousands is debatable. I felt definitely the name of a real person. I also discovered that Val once heard someone say). Certainly, it seems unlikely of the same people who need the reinforcement afforded liner. There are not a lot of prime ministers, presidents, a prime minister, etc. On the other hand, till she solution to the riddle. But he would indeed be feigning include woman. Even the most casual observers of social movements and language changes are conscious of what some might call the crusade for nonsexist language. (Careful feminist writers avoid unthinking use of imagery sexism from English, most current activity stems from women or to render them invisible. Poking and prodding condemn the use of a term identified with one sex or gender to designate all humanity. (Gender is preferred rather than the purely biological. However, some recent question of anatomically determined language is fashionable.) familiar example: reasoning that in terms of job duties the sex or gender of the person who passes peanuts on an airplane is unimportant, editors of the Handbook of court case notes a male purser and a female stewardess with identical job descriptions, but different salary scales.) Similarly, feminists discourage titles that identify More generally, feminists reveal and question implied which suggests that marriage is the normal state (as parents of twins imply double births expected, referring evidence. What to make of the fact that one may be dignity, have been females of any age, but the call on television's Electric Company, Hey, you guys, summons principles of etymology and tradition and unexpected respect for grace and style (admittedly frequent victims of inclusion of the feminine pronoun). More subtle and less readily articulated objections probably exist. as for most feminists, political considerations are primary. serves political concerns etymology is honored. For example, word meaning `sheath,' often sheath for a sword.) The feminist position recognizes the power of language. shaper of culture and as such is able to perpetuate or discourage discrimination or oppression. (In spite of symphony auditions of barefoot, screened musicians, church hymnals laced with maternal imagery for God, few feminists think the cause won. Attitudes toward women, often assumed to be natural and hence sacred, are not easily changed.) Nonsexist language is no universal the influence of preverbal and nonverbal forces and various sexist institutions, see acceptance of sexist language altering it, bandaging, and plastering it to promote a particular vision of society is the most widely perceived it is arguably the simplest philosophically and, though this is relatively unimportant, the least attractive. (A familiar but irrelevant complaint against feminists is that they lack charm, as though an unappealing style not very affable, either.) After all, those who undertake corralled with prescriptive grammarians and linguists. women as subject (or object) of language. Yet this is but one aspect of gender and linguistics, a subject that has its own conferences, bibliographies, and college courses. As literary critics, feminists look not only at images of women in literature but at women as writers and readers. So those interested in language look at speakers and listeners. Such inquiry is less direct and more exploratory than nonsexist language promotion, but is no less political. Some theorists describe women's relation to language as primarily a product of patriarchal oppression; others, usually acknowledging oppression, women's use of little intensifiers. Feminists ponder women of all classes to accepted proper norms suggest upward mobility? What attitude should feminists take to women's suggested more frequent use of tag endings (It's a nice day, isn't it? We'll vote Democratic, won't we?)? Identified by early feminist linguist Robin both discounted by some but not all empirical studies purge their speech of tag endings and to retrain themselves particular values, urge retention of this and other features assume noncompetitive roles in conversation), suggesting form if not in content. They echo the old question, posed regularly by missionaries, anthropologists, and linguists, as to whether women speak (or chatter, a and with men, whether they can, do, or should speak what the title of Dale Spender's book calls Man Made frequently appear in a style that is marked by word play dependent on written forms; a style that is unconventional, suggests alternatives to those styles that feminists for most feminists to be included within the best accepted (Admittedly, no party completely purges its rhetoric of recent feminist discourse. The editors disclaim objectivity. not objective, though they neither recognize nor admit it. For example, in lexicographers' frequent reliance on best authors as a source, dictionaries draw evidence and not women. Other significant editorial practices: the editors claim, and they resist charting relations between their entries and an authorized or canonized words and new definitions; words from utopian literature the stated aim to stimulate research or theoretical Zeitgeist (`Spirit of liberty, equality, and sorority'), Theory doubts these lacunae, suggesting that English is flexible, and that women are disadvantaged primarily woman's language, the inevitable doubting and questioning of it, is energized by the work of French feminists, and is displayed in the verbal acrobatics of radical sister) who was silent, silenced by a society dominated thought currently pursued by feminist linguists; feminists explore the cluster of related conditions summarized about women's language is lively; the discussion of the related and complementary topic, women's silence, is work by needs of their families; Spender talks of silence their frequent use of pseudonyms an attempt at renaming much. To many, it is significant that the privilege of who did not recognize parents of either gender, probably issue] but to everyone. It ill behooves us to be unfair to any segment of the population, and it is not only immoral virtually any basis. In recent decades, certain changes have taken place in the language that reflect voluntary choices of the words used to characterize people; these have focused largely on the conscious and conscientious only males. Journalists and other commentators have sometimes taken a facetious view of the situation, suggesting `male offspring,' that words like manhole are sexist, time the humor, if there was any there to begin with, has worn very thin, indeed, and the end of it would be welcome. Then, too, there have been the campaigners who have gone to what some regard as opposite extremes: surely be the proper denotation; if the sex of the person is the preferred form. But it is patently ridiculous the chairperson, not the person holding the office. Yet, brevity and because it avoids the awkwardness of the problem and seem to believe that it has been solved: chair has been recognized, in the sense of the occupant associated with it. Nobody understands an injunction The final sentence is about as valid as would be the as an order to write the address of the chairperson on a dozen envelopes, either. But there are other specious has found that citations for such usage exist (how old they may be is of little consequence) is not to be construed not only by users of dictionaries but by lexicographers evidence, that one would be justified in assuming that thereby represented; even the most cursory examination a) the evidence in the published work is quite thin, way as the Crown and the Oval Office is true, but to refer to the office, not to the person occupying it. will show, reference is so made specifically to avoid mentioning a particular regent and not as a figure of speech employed for rhetorical effect. As for the Oval of the executive branch of the government' to avoid identifying the (incumbent) president personally and to indicate official policy. In both cases, the point is exactly opposite that identified by Graham: it is the position, institution, authority, etc. being referred to and not the occupant. By the same token, when people principle. But there are two elements of their argument find their interpretation of the evidence often skewed; the second is that while adjustment to lexicon, which when used of a young woman, today it is a recognized The First Edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language lists youth with a definition, a young person, esp. a young man; the Second Edition, in the next round they refer to, defines the word as a young person, esp. a young man or male adolescent. the need for reinforcement of the notion of maleness foregoing is merely set out as a warning to those who try to predict what lexicographers are likely to do. On change, but that in order to be precise, in order to perpetuation of obsolete or archaic meanings as counterproductive: the mark; phrased another way, I must agree that people expect to be understood. Most do, of course, use them that way. When will people learn that dictionaries are not the product of the collective imaginations of those who prepare them or the manifestations of the dreams of a single lexicographer but the result of lengthy, painstaking research to determine how the language is being used, the analysis and codification of the results, and then their organization into a usable reference source? What is counterproductive is the notion that change: they don't recognize it, they create it. Of making a unilateral, unsupported claim or assumption that does not constitute semantic change: it is what is indulging in a bit of mischief by suggesting that semantic because they have some evidence that a certain change in usage had crept in. Notwithstanding the unfortunate should still put my money on professional lexicographers or whether the first, limited meaning [`an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or woman.'] has, in effect, become the only valid one in modern English. I trust that this is a fillip of propaganda and not a serious query. To be sure, it is the most common meaning, which is why it is listed first. But one must contend not only with the way the word might be used today but with the evidence of centuries of culture reflected in billions upon billions upon billions of words of text all of which shape the way we think and speak. There is nothing wrong with trying to change that shape, and advocates of nonsexist English have worked miracles in the short time since they have succeeded that the oblique senses of man are still very much with us is mere optimistic folly. And there is no gainsaying the fact that the first sense of man (`male human') tends to contaminate (if that is the right word) the oblique senses. But grammar enters the picture here, too, and dictionaries are remiss in syntactic description its words mean, how they are spelled and pronounced, and where they came from. To put it differently, it is not (yet) the function of the dictionary to show that articles (definite or indefinite) are not usually found `desires' rather than `lacks,' but that might well be a deliberate, facetious ambiguity. We use terms like Neanderthal might depict a child asking a parent about Neanderthal women, but that is recognizably a joke that depends questioner as a fool: that it is a child is irrelevant; it There are many thousands of such jokes in every language, homonymy, which exists in all languages. Yet, this On the face of it, one might dismiss this question as it. The answer has nothing to do with their cause, however, but with the simple fact that dictionaries are words, if one of the senses of run is `operate' (as in She assume that one can substitute operate for run in We this as a shortcoming of dictionaries and assigning it arbitrarily to what, for lack of a better term, we might call the genius of the language, might seem trivial to the casual observer, it is a valid matter for concern in the realm of lexicology. Using it to bolster an argument is plainly a mistake. Unfortunately, the mistake is compounded others, and, as a result, the entire argument degenerates. the first and working stiff for the second, but the first to find anyone actively seeking to be called a stiff. which, though denotatively neutral, carry the strong scent of maleness. That is, if you are going to say man (for example) because, regardless of the ancillary definitions one might find in the dictionary, in its most strong connotations of that denotation are carried over to all other applications of the word: it is not, in fact, mean, why don't they just say so? The other thing is out entirely. As a male reader, I get strong vibrations from this book that the authors advocate the paranoid view that everything in the language that is not exactly as they would like it to be is the result of a gigantic hate program against women. In that context, one is given to wonder about the circumstances in languages of misinterpretations, aberrations, and plain errors regarding excellent suggestions to help people avoid the inadvertent expression of prejudice are offered, albeit interspersed are entirely irrelevant to The Cause, hence diminish the impact and strength of purpose of both. It is indeed a pity that the authors persist in expressing their ideas as they do, for were they more practical and not the slightest hint of maleness, they would probably problem of the neutral he as the pronoun of reference considered a solecism to use the plurals they, their, them, theirs as a generalized pronoun for words like Everyone can get their copy at the bookshop, Everybody illiteracy (by those who consider such matters), and usage was not brought about by any sense of justice toward women but by the apparent fact that the people devoted in its entirety to The Pronoun Problem, mercifully sense methods that can be employed to avoid sexism in take up the cudgel, carping against writing which, in some cases, antedates recognition of a problem: it is space, time, and motion, Wot? Much that might have been offered with sober good advice here is contaminated of the sex of the perpetrator of past injustices. The approach is vindictive and castigatory. Other libertarian enough that wrongs be righted; the discrimination and other injustices suffered by past generations, back through the ages, must be avenged, and the descendants those crimes and somehow to compensate the descendants counterproductive: the energies expended on vengeance changing the present system to ensure that they are not Pearl Harbor. The sins of our forebears should not be visited upon us. In the same way, those who support equal rights for women would be well advised to concentrate women get top billing. While that has not been literally proposed (as far as I know), the fact that the men's names appear first has been used by some feminists to illustrate the manifestation of an attitude that women might be offensive to women and how to get around it praise usages that neatly sidestep offensive usage. Specific why they are offensive and with suggestions for suitable and his petite blonde wife appear. They go too far, victim.' What unmitigated nonsense! Men say that, of five and other gratuitous characterizations that are not only irrelevant to the item's newsworthiness but are apparently offend the authors: they campaign for the divorce, or an actress any more than being called a and I quite agree that the use of relatively newer and poetess seems to be a deliberate, unwarranted attempt to identify someone as a female; but a graduate of the too, because my critics will say that they disapprove of the term's second life as designating a temperamental person of either sex.' These, of course, are loanwords borrowed from languages that have (or had) grammatical of other words. What are we to do? The answer is not clear unless we accept a policy of drawing up a (very) long list of taboo words. A short list is not impossible, which lists a few offending words and their suggested who laughs last laughs best read The last laugh is the best: not only does it not say the same thing but the second is totally lacking in the rhetorical devices reference notes to chapters, and an index. On the last page is a short biographical note about the authors in words that are, for the most part, sexist, but, as the author sets forth in the User's Guide, Some words are included here because they are ambiguous: Is a belly their approval of being so designated. As for belly dancers, not only have I never heard of a male belly dancer but find the very idea more exotic than erotic. sexist? In one sense they are, but if people were to pay hard cash to watch a belly dancer only to find that it was a man, I think they might have some justification chance of a refund if the place were run by a feminist. treatment ranges from an explanation of a term to a list of alternatives. Here are two typical entries: as acolytes (one of the minor orders of the diaconate) metaphors which quite correctly points out that many does not get bent out of shape about these, providing lists alternatives for many of these expressions, not but so that you can attempt to balance your writing not possible. In addition, there are times when it is It is hard to imagine anyone, regardless of sex, enjoying section a few of the allusions that cannot really be reference to him completely, which is understandable find him in the dictionary, nor could I find quixotic, alternatives and equivalents are phrasal definitions which, if assiduously applied, would effectively sterilize all writing. The interesting and useful entries are those in which the author explains, without the frenetic term is offensive. I cannot say that I agree with everything she says nor with every item selected for inclusion, responsible for treating the kinds of subjects that might should find The Nonsexist Word Finder the sanest of the lot and the easiest to understand and use. Compared polemical work; despite its title, it is not organized the way a handbook for writers, editors, etc., normally would be. It might have been more useful as a handbook model of standard style manuals. My greatest objection to it is its argumentative, disputatious tone, which frequently borders on the vituperative. It is as if you sound advice, were an unpleasant diatribe against anyone have every right to be in light of the trials and tribulations lead to a winning, let alone diplomatic style, and their may offend people, including men. I refuse, out of English grammar (like the neutral pronouns of reference) little elegance there may be in my writing, and I refuse other figures of speech that contain male referents, of households possess at least one, making the dictionary years ago that there are more dictionaries than television two dictionaries are of roughly the same size. And in one sense they are. But between water and watt there intended for the adult native speaker of English, whose main concern is with understanding a large number of unfamiliar items (including proper names) encountered the foreign learner of English, whose dual concern is with understanding and using the core vocabulary of More generally, the size of a dictionary is a function little and one that says a little about a lot can end from being such polar opposites, but they exemplify the dictionaries' own estimates of their size? Let us reference seems to be a book or passage referred to, or you can obtain the information that you want, for example in a dictionary). Does that mean that the number of For entry our four dictionaries have this to say in even mention dictionaries: a word or term placed at the beginning (as of a chapter or an entry in an encyclopedia). a word (as the noun book), hyphened or open compound review), word element (as the affix pro-), abbreviation dictionary for the purpose of definition or identification form (as the noun godlessness or the adverb globally) at its base word and usu. set in a type (as boldface) running text which defines, explains, or identifies only those that are, or introduce, main entries. So we troubles end here. For in its Explanatory Notes (p.12), W9 not only calls our attention to the definition of vocabulary entry in this book, but also introduces us entries as well as all boldface entries in the separate in telling us what vocabulary entries and dictionary little they say. Counting definitions is a start. But a of vocabulary entry and beyond! And the microstructure definitions: it can embrace examples, illustrations, sorts of other information. Everyone talks nowadays publishers to cry their wares in ways that allow us to best dictionary for me is the one that gives about the word or phrase that puzzles me the information I need at the moment I need it. People have different reference the way dictionaries estimate how much they contain need not, and should not, entail the standardization of names that (presumably) reflect the nationalities of century it is everywhere in the world. Its overall There is little that it does not touch, being physically present in the architecture of schools, psychologically civilized, linguistically present in much of modern guild. The phrase is a reminder of its medieval provenance, guild of scholars is one of the most successful enterprises in the history of our species. Indeed, some of its labeling all the birds, beasts, and bugs in creation. The guild takes many forms now, but it retains much of the Middle Ages, of the ecclesiastical Schoolmen, behind walls that marked them off from the rest of the inherited the mantle of the Schoolmen have no trouble recognizing each other. They live similar lives, conduct similar courses, and with similar subventions go to similar conferences and give similar papers on every guild's gentler cohesion and lack of obvious international ceremonies), by and large its doings are overt and benign. known a classroom, let alone a cloister or an ivory tower, or met up with teachers empowered by letters after their names. Nowadays, however, there are few people who have not come across colleges and college graduates or (at the periphery of things) been invited to learn to read and write. That is a physical and social measure of the guild's success. Its continuance seems assured. Working in its favor is a social contract level by level, to institutions of ever higher learning, levels, usually marked by tests and the distribution of certificates providing a social grade. These processes from parents and teachers as, You'll never get anywhere There are even league tables among nations, showing school certificates and other qualifications. Spreading system, there are others with similar mixed feelings, abstract usage, and, at a higher level, to be at ease so that you can eat a hearty breakfast, and be cordial (and may not ever be) part of the circle of standardized of the guild. This is demonstrated in a variety of ways: a shared literacy and the assumptions and biases that go with it; an awareness of what books are for; consciousness and educated idioms; and a relative ease in reading a In school, college, and university, people have for some six centuries been receiving diplomas and titles to prove that, in varying degrees (a loaded word), they are educated. Oftener than not, use of language establishes clearly as any parchment. One of the less pleasant ways in which such rank can be pulled is to label the linguistically less secure illiterate. They, too, can read and write, of course, but their solecisms, barbarisms, better rebuke than to treat them as if they did not outer darkness of the unlettered? Subtler still is the The scholarly guild has always interested itself in language, its standards and usage, its literature and value on success with such things. Its members have tended to place a lower value on rural and urban dialect, popular culture, and folklore. These are only accepted after a long and vigorous rearguard action. Only now, for example, is the soap opera (with its enormous social for academic analysis. Movies and soaps attain respectability members low on the ladder of rank. Once upon a time the passage of time he was canonized by the guild, and his Complete Works have been annotated and organized He made it to the top. It can be done, but it is rare. The guild's institutions have, in their unobtrusively the world. Their diaspora has been so successful that dispensers, controllers, instruments, and structures of on earth. It is another measure of the guild's success that we can hardly imagine an alternative to it. The utopian communes of anarchists, socialists, and hippies, from the guild's leaders (the professorial elite, the academic, hardly possible for anyone in the Western or Westernizing the better. It may be possible to imagine alternatives (or significant adaptations, if we wish them) only after we have found the right label for the subject. Societies seldom see what is central in their own cultures, having much less trouble identifying it in the cultures of can be taken one stage further, to the global agglomeration constitute a fifth estate, an entity as worthy of anthropological as we find it hard to imagine the guild as a whole and to envisage alternatives to it, so no organization exists outside this fifth estate that could investigate it. Anthropology There appears to be only one solution. A traditional aim is sincere (and, by and large, it seems to be), the fifth estate may yet turn the bright light of science and scholarship on itself. That would be an interesting day. English is a mongrel tongue. It is basically composed other national language even comes close to that. One for `earth pig.' The English, however, seeing a large words from one language to the other. The north border rest of the country: sombrero, mantilla, poncho, rebozo, etymology. Let us not forget marijuana which is simply that is being acquired by the rest of the country. When want to be emphatic about a large undertaking, they whole enchilada! About someone who is in complete charge of a project, they could say, He runs things negation: I had nothing to do with that! Nothing at well say You do it exactly this way! You'd better do it knew little about the cattle business and cared less, he never got around to branding his stock. That man was And its meaning expanded to mean any nonconformist. These fifty words that have entered English after a different words each day, the chances are everybody in Compounding native English words or elements produces gradual process, as evidenced by the sequence of to are not easily recognized as such today. Let us reveal one is by himself, he, she, or it is alone. The word is longer be divided. The theory was largely shelved for two thousand years until several physicists produced theories which led to the fact that the atom could be `one.' The term is used largely in the Christian sense of has gone through a process of generalization, whereby press, manuscripts had to be copied by hand. Since a second copy exceeded the first by one hundred percent, because it opens in morning and closes at night, or `spear,' and lac `leek.' Garlic is a member of the family of leeks which is related to the onion. Its blades are its were made of rope and were probably used for ascending compounds, and their true nature is exposed only by there's a difference that matters) sex. For example, in exactly what it meant. In fact, I bet they even knew into his own as a literary maverick, New York publisher get wise. I want him to lug me everywhere. All the into a smashup every time. Well, believe me, she'll hide herself and settle down. That's a lot of newspaper students of the English language because of its use of novel. I take the liberty of reprinting the glossary here, familiar) and many are not included in standard dictionaries also used by whites in other sections. Only a third of the terms have found their way into The Dictionary of leather as meaning a kick, but they date the term from would give his fallen foe what we called `the leather,' could there be any relationship between that term and Recently I found in one of those files in which for which points out that the formal language of a century and more past can lead to misunderstandings today. It the English clergyman who is best remembered as the nuns, whose numbers and influence were daily increasing I wasn't quite sure about the clipping, so I checked the limbs and elsewhere referred to the bloomer arrangement noun it was first used of trade dealings between people and `that which is spiritual or unseen.' (I vaguely and economist who is remembered for his Essay on the Principle of Population: An illicit intercourse between the sexes. But that use apparently was rare in those times. I do not know when the word, standing alone, came into common use with an explicit sexual sense. war it ceased to be a name and became an insult and Brown does not know how that happened. This use of while there are many different views on the point of (wholly unsubstantiated) guess that the majority of me of the license plate a friend reported recently. plate nicely violated the no offensive plates rule. It points out that the difference between the coefficients to be dislodged from a brass monkey and survive as a justification for the origin of cold enough to freeze the And, where the reference is made in the first paragraph sometime entertainment editor of Life magazine, and general journalistic critic and gadfly, was enamored of Duende is very difficult to define. Yet when it is there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening something that has it is to feel icy fingers running a `sprite or hobgoblin that plays tricks, especially at reaching a height, for a brief stretch or longer, when the gerundive, which is an adjective of similar form, words in English, is derived from the gerundive, and so means `(a person) to be analyzed.' Similarly, reverend who is to be ordained'; an old standby of crossword and legend is `something to be read.' We use in their to be repressed.' In the course of its transfer to English through French it has become `a severe or formal rebuke,' An amusing example of this kind of semantic confusion find out that it meant `able to cure flatulence' was the indeed associated with singing, and goes back to the time when men attempted to cure the ills of the flesh When I first began to study German it took a while to afflatus a fart. The words divine afflatus there is a story that goes back to a time when it was required by law that every town council have at least slowly in the first verse of Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one error for sure, and, if I read him rightly, yet another in the same spot. He refers to those chilling lines up when he states it is to enable him to proceed on relates to night destroying daylight in the sense that darkness will cancel the daylight's `bond,' whatever life and his fatherhood, with great alluding to the I. ii, as that shalt be king hereafter. A few lines later uttered by the Third Witch. The father can beget new threat. Both their lives must be snuffed out immediately, pale, by that unearthly promise. He views either of them as the instrument, the bond, of his not being able to pass on the crown to a successor of his choosing (or of his subsequent begetting). Yes, Night will devour True to the terms of the indenture set forth by its guarantors, that great bond will suffer no default. interpretation is one that has been advanced before set by the essay competition forced me to be rather elliptical. Briefly, I interpret bond as being implicit in unwittingly asking that chaos should come again, as indeed it does within the world of the tragedy until the from the literal to the metaphorical or metaphysical in his use of a legal term. From that point of view the replacing the clear with the opaque) the two characters tonal diacritical marks. A roughly approximate atonal Japan ruled the island. A common sight in China (either one) is two individuals closely observing the upturned, draws ideographs on that palm with a forefinger. It's a delight to see the smile of recognition when communication military slang interesting, but his explanation of the First, we must realize there is a difference between translated individually as `extreme' and `south.' When of the Warring (or Contending) States Period. At about using an already standard character that had a similar It seems the character f is being used phonetically a idiom dressed to the nines could be from Middle English pedagogical value, especially as a vocabulary builder, something both intuitively and statistically known to affixes relevant to English. This is neatly illustrated, of the same issue), where, without getting involved in complicated matters, the author explains almost fifty and various stems. Also, since many English words and words can be misleading.) These differences are due to semantic change somewhere on the etymological chain other grounds (if the study of ANY language requires pleading). I am happy, by the way, that Abate did not in its alphabetical place, but if you look for it where it By the most conservative estimates, the church's property in the Bay Area is worth uncountable millions. [From dream state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and temperature change, rapid eye movement and the size and frequency of penal erection. [From Playing After Dark by fact that the pictures are a full page each with captions will) would be frustrating were it not for the quality what can one do with a language like English except FAT EGG UNDER A DOG! As anyone can tell, I am not a worst its been in the last five years, Its come full each of the examples above, is the contraction of it is. That is where I happened to open this book, where I closed it, and why this review is so brief. There seems little point in going any further, except to say that this is the Revised Edition; one shudders to think of what It goes on to describe the `inhabitants propensity for with a warning against raiding hives or the ascription should learn vocabulary from reading literature and listening to articulate speakers, not by memorizing the dictionary. That said, it must be acknowledged that some may be in great difficulty if facing an examination, them through, then they need this book. The problem lies, of course, among those who make up examinations aptitudes on his precise and proper use of words, at bottom a thoroughly idiotic notion, clearly unrelated to being a musical or other artistic or mechanical genius or craftsman. Control of language may be a manifestation the book. It would probably fulfill its function if those promptly forget it the day after the exam. How many people need words like desiccate, didactic, innocuous, with `laundry, shopping, preparing dinner,' to the exclusion its right to edit all contributions. Submitted by Condo living, the spread of AIDS through prostitutes .and the reader wants to shout, Martial your thoughts! I do not need a spelling checker, but I have found it eyesight eight and a half years later can tell us a lot about how the English language has changed or remained half centuries. There may be other sources equally rich in examples for comparison, but there can hardly be another that is at the same time so much fun to read with ours, because by then the basis of modern English in the Time paragraphs that were not in its lexicon: they are not so much lost words as obsolete forms of used the adjective handsome to describe his financial condition, as we would rarely do today. Nevertheless, swollen by these centuries of technological breakthroughs average education can read most of the Diary without his dictionary. In fact, so rapidly does our vocabulary continue to expand by the addition of such technical neologisms as AIDS or star wars and such borrowings may seem slightly stilted or Biblical by modern standards, use of do as an auxiliary for affirmative verbs where no emphasis is intended, as, for example, in his entry God, who doth most manifestly bless me in my endeavors money, and my expenses being very little. This casual some reason, who are increasingly wont to announce, speech the auxiliary do is reserved for negative or interrogative statements as in Don't do it or Do you do it? or for emphasis, particularly in rebuttal, as in much less than we do. For us it has practically replaced the Diary but do occur, for example in his entry for More surprising than evident but relatively insignificant words and expressions that have persisted in English educated speakers nowadays often use I in combinations legend that this solecism is a hypercorrection forced of schoolchildren that they must not say me in such Similarly, who in the objective case appears to have the old Flotilla lay where lay is the past tense of phrases that have been admitted to our standard language but that still sound a bit colloquial. This is me, finally been accepted into standard English, though dialects too little to say. But there is in the Diary a locution that I have encountered only there, I believe with phrases used as words. A carelessness about inflection was the use of whole phrases as single words as, for instance: to quickly and efficiently do this job, where where only do is the infinitive marked as such by to and modified by two adverbs. So it comes as something that sounds like wording in a television commercial: among other things, strikes us as almost telegraphic in its compression. It is doubtful that in conversation is well adapted to a stenographer's very private diary and of its particular time and place, we find little that is obscurely archaic in its style. Despite such interesting differences as are noted above, the language Abortion, Acquisition. Ayatollah. Acid rain. Air Light. Blush wine. B1. Billy Ball. Bran. Bimbos. phones. Colorization. Challenger. Couch potatoes. Steroids. Stealth. Short Round. Sound bite. Star and recall was immediate. Since there is no logic to the lengths of months, he had facilitated memory of of Quotations, 3rd, ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, used by classical orators so they could speak without the structure while delivering the speech. Our use of in the first (second, etc.) place is an offshoot of this method. Because this is The Language Quarterly, code). Having a mnemonic is no panacea. For example, Poetry is an ancient mnemonic device. The Biblical so well that they are destined chronically to misspell school trigonometry, about all I can remember of it the right triangle's sides to the functions of its angles). In science class I learned the planets, by distance readers that their doctors do not, as a rule, think of fails, doctors actually look things up.] Suffice it to say, after the first thousand pages or so, the plot of such acrostics as novel (Nerve, Artery, Vein, Empty Lively, preferably lewd, imagery was appreciated by bizarre, sharp, or humorous the image, the more effective Spring ahead, fall back. Conversely, who remembers the bass clef lines and spaces (with, respectively, class, order, family, genus, species, variety). On the other hand, I find this one for pi, coding digits by cabinet posts in order of their creation (State, Treasury, Succession Act, who is ninth in line to the presidency? not really the most pronounceable acronym, at least to speakers of English. Nevertheless, the good St. D., retired, is still occupying a good number of my cerebral remember homes is a mnemonic, but forget what it is a mnemonic for. My personal albatross is the couplet has in the suit; to my partners' distress, I forget the buoys mark the right side of the channel, or must the when recalling the requisites for adverse possession (squatter's rights, to us not of the bar)? Do speleologists redundant, as insurance against embarrassing lapsus things should be committed to writing, (the witness forget to take the shopping list to the supermarket, let alone calendars and rosters of planets and cabinet of Quotations, 3rd, ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, themselves. Among the most colorful and intriguing are those that describe the piffle, prattle, twaddle, and flapdoodle that people in all talks of life tend to spew forth. Here is a small start on a glossary of glossolalia, which has come to designate a `camouflage of flattery,' is excessively sweet, mushy, pulpy and insubstantial, scarcity of more nourishing fare. A similar connection crammed with odds and ends from slaughter, including, same steps takes up from tripe, the walks of the first foolish speech.' Adding to the pile of verbal garbage century and originally meant a `hodgepodge of liquors, washing down a mishmash of pretentious and frivolous The less romantic truth is that babble descends from by infants in their repetitive chatter. Blarney and actual places. Blarney refers to the Blarney stone, located in Blarney Castle, a few miles north of Cork, ever after. Bunk is a shortening of bunkum, itself a was originally a theatrical term for a showy trick or would use to attract (`trap') applause (`claps') from helped husbands to bewilder wives whom they suspected least a few animals. A cock and bull story, for example, derives from ancient fables and medieval bestiaries and a menagerie of other animals discoursed in human elaborate beauty spots to their upper cheeks. This short for the transfers), and the adjective cockamamie some say echoes the sense of florid but superficial embellishment. Hogwash, of course, is a designation Puffy, bureaucratic verbiage if often called gobbledygook, word famous with a World War II memorandum denouncing about. Stop `pointing up' programs. No more `finalizing,' using the words `activation' or `implementation' will be shot. Closely related to gobbledygook, but more Council of Teachers of English established a Committee stamp out evasive and obfuscating terminology slithering drawn from the meaningless syllables sung in the refrains having been from `stomach garbage' to `brain garbage.' literally `soft poop' or `baby poop,' an appropriately so intelligent about identifying unintelligible persiflage beleaguered by the sleaziest of criminals and defended by a police department that's the subsidiary of a big corporation. school. (Call us missionaries to make it simple.) Of culture and language made us realize how complicated whispering, cackling, prattling, chuckling, chortling, plotting. Speech is certainly more than plugging in its synonyms, in both verb and noun forms. Whereas in English there are totally different words to express at all, you can express joy, sorrow, anger, disgust, skepticism, ridicule, criticism, fear, and many other emotions. Tone of voice, facial expressions, placement of arms, and body stance all contribute to nonverbal carefully, but to be aware of what we said in nonverbal aware that they were reading the cues of intonation and body language to get an idea about how the discussion misread the cues. We, too, tried to read their nonverbal Their children did not realize others spoke German, but rather thought it was their family's personal, private Even if you become skilled at controlling nonverbal cultural assumptions and traditions you cannot know of doing things may be insulting to the nationals. In money to pay for something. The left hand is considered is an insult. This sounds easy enough to avoid until when sitting at meetings, on a bus, or in a restaurant. the purity of the food being handled. Even symbolic contamination is taken very seriously. Boys at one of the high schools refused to eat the rice prepared for their meal: because one of them had seen some girls sitting on the bales of rice stacked in the school pantry, questions to ask. The first question is inappropriate because names are private. The people believe that evil spirits can control you if they know your name. (school, government, or church). But they have one private, hidden name which remains a family secret. which might get you a puzzled look or a blank stare. year we had that big flood. But as a practical consideration, village elders feel they are ready for it. The passing of each year of one's life is celebrated generally for arrives. The language even reflects this, for the Pidgin concept of time is circular, not linear, so marking the passage of time is not as important as celebrating the There is a classic case (and true, we are told) of a cook. The missionary told the cook what to prepare for dinner: Go out and catch that old rooster, pluck it, and put it in the refrigerator. We'll cook it later. Several hours later the missionary opened the refrigerator rooster staring at him: he hadn't told the cook to kill each country has its own unique cultural and artistic they can look at designs on carvings or woven string these designs and symbols tell stories of their people, worked in a city on the north coast, told us of one group of expatriate engineers was called in to design and build a high school. The designers decided that the local people would like the school better if it had they chose from a story board (an elaborate carving front of the building. When the school opened, none He took the problem back to the local village elders, the most repugnant part of their whole history, and it was an embarrassment to have it plastered on signs and worn by people who had no idea what the symbols shirt. A church elder who stood up to read the lesson game of communication. Because of historical, political, English, but not as we were accustomed to hearing it you a shopping list asking for capsicum, silver beet, mince, and jelly? (She would expect green peppers, if she offered your child a cordial? (All she would asking to hold the baby.) If you were invited out for while an invitation to tea would be for the evening Translating can be a treacherous means of communication, than our own class notes or study materials for the sole job was translation. Literal translations have white is the color of death and mourning. Interestingly, because their cultural assumptions allow no possibility for a truly free gift. There is a basic suspicion that not too bad a translation for `love.' However, there are only two possibilities for translating `love' in Pidgin, belly,' but which commonly means `to make pregnant. has been chosen to translate the word `love' as found in the Bible. Those sorts of translation difficulties ravines. We derived great pleasure from attempting to unravel the languages and their cultures, and we found that the desire to understand and to be understood The difference between the two ways of writing the q reflects a slight variation in pronunciation: q being an explosive and elsewhere, that seem slightly deviant. Deviant, one is expecting. Some titles are catchy, and easy to What I am getting at are titles with skew spellings, names and words that are difficult to relate to anything come to that, why didn't he call it What I Am Doing Here? What is the significance, if any, of this small spellings and punctuations is that you really need to remember two extra things, on top of the little itself: first, that the title is deviant, and second, how it is thought I might as well tackle the issue head on and see where the longstanding and popularly perpetrated see some light in this particular thicket, as I think I although of course the pun on this word is intentional. latter often involving the problem of whether a title answer for here, as it does in everyday English. So is the possessive, the second represents the vowel of retained their historic titles, complete with outmoded In a sense, it seems illogical that we have retained modern spellings for the titles of plays by his contemporary, of this is the name of a river, so A is quite out of Among the true deviants, the titles that are neither immediately nor even sometimes ever really meaningful which seems rather perverse. And John Gay's greatest had a major problem until recently. The timing gear broke in the front yard after coming home from the orthodontist. [From the That dive was right on the edge of new exploration and of the earth is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I hope to those of us who have studied linguistics have usually been told that as language is essentially spoken, its written form is of lesser (or no) importance for the course, for it can easily be demonstrated that written language cannot be ignored for a variety of reasons: reflected there, the relatively complex constructions that are accepted as normal to writing but would be by written records, and so on. These and other features communication. That is not to say that writing and deciphered, and presenting his cogent arguments for regarding at least some aspects of language through the analysis of writing. It is only through their written languages, and the written forms of others serve to confirm the findings of diachronic linguistics in positing because of the need to keep records as civilizations preceded attempts at developing methods for transcribing some interesting implications for theories about how the mind works and, in particular, its capacity for abstracting. It must be emphasized, of course, that language preceded numeracy, but it is interesting to see how very early in man's acculturation the ability to deal with the abstract notion of counting manifested consist of bits of clay similar in shape to those of the items being counted (for identification), the quantity of bits being equal to the number of items counted. was itself to be replaced by a shorthand version, and that is where things begin to get complicated. I have For us who can read and count and take such matters so much for granted, it seems impossible to believe that might be viewed as a bootless economy. While it must be noted that the cuneiform system, based on a an agglutinative language, in structure of the type of know little, but it is interesting to note that about of various languages applied it to their needs, it became alphabetic writing. In his description of writing systems quick to point out that these classifications are not mutually exclusive, even in the oldest extant writing that has been interpreted, they provide a convenient point of departure for descriptions of what is going on in a writing system. Thus, we might conclude that in this book is the decipherment of written languages. this chapter extremely interesting. It is worth noting the latter we can assume that a modern language was clues to the nature of the language, to what extent it the chapter on the alphabet, from which the following In many orthographies purely phonemic representations graphically preserving their etymologies. For example, because it is etymologically related to the verb to break. The <w> in acknowledge points to its etymological such as <l> in folk, <k> in knife, or <w> in wrestle are etymological remnants rather than representations associated with words originating from these languages. word often relates to that of other words belonging between anxious and, anxiety and, in German, between reformers had their way, and spelling matched pronunciation, did prevail in the earliest beginnings of the writing of the modern alphabet: as an artifact it is valuable applied to modern English it would contribute nothing years old. (We cannot always be sure we understand what we are reading, but that is another matter.) If we were to adopt a phonetic system of spelling, it is might be argued that the writing should be phonemic, an older stage of the language. Were that undertaken, The term applied to this rather unhealthy situation fourteenth century AD, and this standard is respected prevails at every level of the society.'... This attitude a large part of the population has very little esteem There is, of course, no final word on this subject, transcribing speech sounds, but is rather an instrument means of relating visual signs in various different text is punctuated here and there by tables showing sound values in English orthography). This is not to say that readers will be come away from The Writing it is they do not know, and pursuit of the available family is unhappy in its own way. It seems to me that every happy family, like every pair of lovers, has a life and mine know that their names are a permanent part of our language. I was a gullible child, and so I was often befriended by major league liars. Try as personalized with a name in crayon. Thus, we call a husbands into a frenzy of desire when we were visiting picked her up clad head to toe in the school colors of black and gold, looking like a giant bumblebee. Such heard this tale, he speculated that the old beau's toilet friends. A person who gets it has humor, purpose, a sense of the absurd, and a strong world view. One of phrase when one finds himself in surroundings of unaccustomed two notorious families, feuding but frequently intermarrying, hit the streets, and a contingent of Sharps marched into the newspaper office. Turned out they weren't angry but proud, and had come in to buy out the rest puts it; her first never did. I sensed that when I stood beside her in the receiving line at her first wedding, and she muttered under her breath, This is a bluebird to fly up to become a Campfire Girl, she was beside herself with anticipation. Of course, the ceremony was not the transfiguring experience she had hoped. shopping spree. We refer to a garment that is both bought off the rack; most are created from a mix of patterns by my mother's clever needle. I have vision, hint that the wearer has hidden fires banked beneath phrase we picked up at a fashion show narrated by a pads that are currently ultra chic, but have an unfortunate resist drooling a little in the dressing room, and calling Since my sister and I share a poor sense of direction back seat on the way home from a shopping expedition. side of town. We still refer to a person who is lost, either literally or spiritually, as coming the going one's bearings at the wheel can have unhappy results. put a flair all his own in our family lingo. He loves having his daughters fetch for him. Would ye bring ask. Or, Would ye bring me a toothpick? Since all his requests begin that way, we've come to call people vacation, he insisted on driving through a thunderstorm Much to dad's dismay, we got the giggles as a guide because in his estimation, they still had pot rings on for all the years of avoiding dental bills by putting dishes of candy on every available surface in their house when I bring my children back to the big bubble. toddlers, my mother admonished my two older children didn't know until later that during the entire drive up, she trembled in fear of the unfamiliar destination. folks live in, we pass a big green factory. Since the drive gives just enough time for the children to get a just think our own thoughts for a change, we always have the kids play silence when we get to the factory. in big boys or big girls (real underpants) is a time the least little bit dampish. Our couch, fortunately sale his children held after an elderly gent's death is a gorilla was eating vast handfuls of his own bright gorilla mustard, I know it's best to retire it. One what occasioned the sniggering from her grandchildren. a rebel of the sixties, calls kids who go limp in public child has already been reprimanded for is in double value is inestimable to us. Every happy family's language Grilled in foil or alongside a ham, turkey or chicken, those who shied away from onions before will delight in abridged, is said to contain much material not included few of much earlier date, but that can scarcely be an exception being Catch Phrases, which I didn't think fodder and resembles the earlier books in style sufficiently to satisfy those familiar with the format. Personally, but not to I, a practice I simply cannot understand. course, there are more distinctive dialects of English some are mutually unintelligible. Linguistic chauvinism in the present instance we must then be looking at a The value of the book is not diminished by its being deceptive not to make it clear from the title (or a first entry one turns to is fuck, which, in keeping citations, for most of the words and expressions are communications aircraft; that might be coincidence, his radio program on rainy days in the early 1930s. Expressions like blow it out your ear (inaccurately its original meaning was `skin blemish,' and cosmetic can say that I personally know the term to have been used in the early 1950s, and I did not then get the `chamber pot,' disagreeing with Collins English Dictionary unfamiliar with the origin of a given bit of rhyming slang for `teeth,' with the last often shortened to blood. One of my favorites (till I find another) is recent competition. Such a message is particularly dismaying when one is able to fill in only one or two he has identified the origin of a given expression as of the secondary sources he resorted to, for they are inconsistent in their accuracy. Despite my criticism of the inaccuracies of the US slang source material, if was overbooked, and I could not get in. Besides Tom without fear of contradiction, that I have probably written and continue to write more reviews of English books on language) than most other people. Quantity, discussed were criteria for assessing a dictionary, and given to reviewers assigned or invited to write about such books. There is no doubt that the quality of such reviews varies enormously. When assigning a book for review in other subjects, editors are usually something about the subject of the book: it would be unusual to find a book on, say, archaeology reviewed by an archaeologist. But when it comes to dictionaries, There are novelists and there are novelists. I, for On the other hand, a novelist is, presumably, `anyone some of the most prolific novelists write as if they know little about the language, and it would be ridiculously lexicographers are seen to have axes to grind (because publish unbiased reviews. Some of the dictionary reviews lack of sufficient linguistic sophistication. It may be assumed that the reason for giving such writers dictionaries users. But the same editors do not select ordinary readers to review novels, they pick other novelists or professional literary critics, in other words, reviewers to engage as reviewers of dictionaries lexicographers who are knowledgeable about the genre, not amateurs be required to delineate the reasons for his approval or disapproval of its style and content, so any editor worth his salt should be able to detect in a properly written, professional review of a dictionary by a lexicographer given dictionary has dealt with such areas. As I was the problem of trying to urge editors to engage professional effort of trying to ensure that editors be provided with certain guidelines on How To Review A Dictionary, on to the selected amateur reviewers thereby making comments on the book at hand, for it would be unfair other dictionaries. Rather, it constitutes what publishers amount of lexicographic material but little or nothing larger dictionaries in a publisher's line, pared down and priced lower. Oxford publishes a slightly smaller version which they call their Pocket English Dictionary, though one is likely to find himself in deep disagreement which one can expect to find fairly thorough treatment spot on a desk or table, for it is too big and heavy to drag out of a bookcase every time it is needed. The volumes); besides, it is not a work for everyday use available (including all their different editions), satisfied with brief definitions of no great depth, and, essentially, a dictionary than can be used as a spelling checker. These days, spelling checkers are hence a dictionary for that purpose is of limited usefulness. that is the case, then why bother buying or publishing urinate; (Naut.) to leak. These are both quite correct, on the back of a page to interfere with the legibility; the type is too gray; the definitions are run into one another, with semicolons in place of definition numbers, making it difficult to distinguish senses and requiring coming to the sense sought; it is almost impossible to easy to find but detracting from the headword treatment; many loose lines which poor proofreading has failed ground, I am unsure what to make of the insertion of to syrup, where it is not mentioned; as I understand construed as synonyms, which is not the case. Indeed, it seems quite obvious to me that if this were a good and serviceable inexpensive version of the dictionary that after a time the user would feel himself ready event would take place, for this book is a sad disappointment. The French have long complained about the pollution techniques, was hailed as a tour de force and became and then onto a cafe, though she would rather go to has the rank of lieutenant, fancies himself as a raconteur shows lack of etiquette. Perhaps we could go to a bal and eau de toilette on her neck. They start off with with his fingers and then spills most of them on his has reached an impasse. It is nothing but a charade. would ruin me. I had to keep up a good rapport with vagaries of eponymous celebrity. Fine, indeed, for beautiful, or beneficial items. Perhaps nowhere are the medical profession. Herein, names are most often associated argued that more diseases have been discovered than cures (It could hardly be the other way around, could it?) and that for this reason these gentlemen have, Perhaps. But could we not, for that very reason, more rigorously associate cures or treatments with their discoverers? to an analogous matter, I have seen references to a real were) the idea of such a named person ever having had anything to do with the creation of this necessary convenience the Shaker Boys League), a hardball little league that equals, I find that I must correct Power's mistake, caused by an obviously uniformed conjecture concerning Chatter is indeed not a word used only to characterize latter status in jest). Anyone who has ever spent any length of time in the field for any minimal amount of innings in the game of baseball, or along the bench in insist on playing hardball rather than what is still designated language designed to get the goat of the opposition the finer points of the game, and who often exhorts them from the sidelines, Let's hear a little bit of knock it down his (or her, when applicable, and the pitcher for the opposing team is also female) throat in support of a teammate at bat, or Hit it to me, Make opposing batter on strikes, known as a strikeout) and For centuries, people have been taking the measure of things. Here is a sampling of the things measured and the names for the process. See if you can make the Verbal Analogy by selecting the appropriate term or Great Rumor, whatever that was, I hadn't the faintest idea but obviously he was out in the patios while we were in class. It was very many years before, remembering bright pink fishing buoy, small as toys against the Context makes it general meaning clear, and specifics word not in my dictionary, defined by the Unabridged credibility of persons, subject, or place. Nor was its something else happens too, and a real mess results with a wrong word overused. Just such an incident a quite good novel. Refectory `a monastery or college dining hall' was used for rectory `the residence of a stays overnight in either a mere geographical area or second on the left...;. But, as she hesitated, the rectory door opened.... He led her into the rectory door, and parlor? Is a rectory so different from any apparently obscure one is used. Not that the practice Indeed there is, but it's again obscure, and perhaps the library's Random House Dictionary of the English convolution containing olfactory association centers. and checked the last. Two of three were in the house household dictionary and not the first two? Both are Sometimes authors create words, maybe accidentally; hooves but only roofs; perhaps we tend to pronounce speech explains the elliptical style, and the best fix But it's part of the character of an infinite recession that the final box is much too small to open or even see. And anyway, there isn't one. Indeed not in a of There is a lesion between hope and recollection, hands had been pinched. This she did unblushingly, though both `accident' and `pinch' were retrospective mistaken: I frowned at the coffee percolator, which finally began to perk. I cradled the telephone between coffee. What should but doesn't follow is, And then quickly spit out the colorless, tasteless gulp of hot water. Coffee isn't ready to drink when it begins but doesn't make his own, or at least not using a percolator. for `to achieve' or for `because of' [farsightedness]. Used about physical vision, farsighted and nearsighted ability to see near things more clearly than distant ones, is basically defective vision of distant objects. Farsightedness is the ability to see distant things glasses on to see things across the room and remove them when near the objects of her scrutiny? Because for nearsightedness. Her eyes looked worried because indeed for seeing at a distance, but that's not what Writers sometimes leave themselves open to inadvertent ruminate while eating, the issue is whether it is over the toughness of the case or of the roast beef, ham actual tyranny but the attempts of tyrants to cover had sent him out as a sort of stalking lamb, to see what reaction he would stir up. Or perhaps a tethered stinging eyes, and besides, using half of each of two state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and not a penile, but a penal uprising; and erections, unless some subtle word play about painfulness or punishment deliberately using the imperfect subjunctive tense of the French government has forbidden in all official communications, as well as in all public advertising. the expression jumbo frankfurter in public discourse, context of speech, according to the prosecutor, but for a big hot dog today!'] Officials at the Ministry for Cultural Recidivism, alarmed that the proliferation of the posters could create an unfortunate conception question of having a big hot dog or not having a big a big hot dog. But people do not have the right to sentence resulted from a legal ploy that backfired. Once it became obvious that the case was being lost, printer's error, maintaining that his client's original folks around here will be eating big hot dogs.'] The prison sentence. But the printer denied the allegation, ever found, the jury decided that the copywriter had prosecution unveiled a book found in the defendant's That Can Get You Put in Jail If You Use Them In This anterior tense, which is punishable by the guillotine. with so many trends spotted by the linguistic police, the general feeling, with some small basis, is that such diction shows a touch of class. A more puzzling phenomenon is the use of long forms for which quite similar shorter forms already exist. The general idea behind this trend seems to be that in length there is strength, even at the cost of accuracy. Examples, unfortunately, have an extra syllable or two that adds little but excess and television anchormen these days encapsulate the lives beyond its limitations rather than its limits. When forced, people take preventative measures instead phrase he is in my employ is now considered either words that already are adjectives. Why must people denote causative verbs such as substantiate from substance, the personnel department of a business would orient new workers (the word originally meant to point out Proceeding analogously, a classmate of mine in junior rather than to `shape.' The words are apt for scientific exactitude. For this reason, perhaps, sociologists will talk of societal needs: social may sound too soft, too much like a bridge party. The same goes for specialty, vocabulary. The legal profession is notorious for its and herewith often crowd out the sufficient here; in fact, as an honest lawyer will tell you, these words becomes the part of the first party, the first part of the party of the first part, and far worse in the course of an exchange in A Night at the Opera. The everything in the contract but the place for a signature. are probably just after terms without strongly positive or negative connotations. The addition of suffixes generally makes the word in question more abstract: party without reference to gender, race, and so on. Presumably, one should have a fine sense of discrimination must also have a sensitive ear. Is aggression the same nouns: which sounds better, implementing or implementation, gerunds, one often saves a syllable or more, but the specific, continuous action of a gerund may not be so attractive to a society fuzzily focused on process. speech. A word of caution, however: as with forming one searches for additional examples, more grist for bound to come across in his explorations is the twosome carries with it a distinctly different meaning. The adulterer and the adulterator may both be reprehensible one thing, simplistic another; the same is true of the `thrifty.' To shift fields: art movements, in particular, often identify themselves through the addition of a syllable to a word in common parlance. Formalist art above one's word processor, Slash excess syllables. others enough to darken any day. But then there are may even go on to proselytize to others the virtue in thought. It may be a thankless task, but it can lead to Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents Survival of old phrases and definitions is encouraged by poverty and social isolation, which sustain traditions, patients, and some publish lists of what they hear, without always appreciating its origin. Elaborate taxonomies dictated word, the technological dyslexia of typographical Lists of typographical errors, collected from hospital records, are often posted on bulletin boards and are Phi Beta Capita, sin eruptions, positive throat structure nature and intensity of sexual reference. Take sin eruption and the variety of vulgar expressions for describing the pathological consequences of sexual encounters. English Dictionary for enlightenment about the origin paragraphs, the year of first recorded use given in `swelling in the groin or axilla.' Thus the form of plague characterized by such regional swelling became form. Later bubo came to refer almost exclusively to the inguinal swelling of venereal disease, along the way being corrupted to blue balls as in the colorful course stand for `testes.' The `inguinal lesion of primary Gonorrhea itself was first a word for the discharge sticky or greasy, characteristically as `phlegm collected people with respiratory tract irritation or infection. lexicographer, author of Collection of English Proverbs part of the skin of one of my insteps by degrees has inflammation. Its precursor was the now quite obsolete the service of cows by bulls from the lea of language. service stations with their birth control centers, offering and impotence recorded in the medical history often undergoes technological transformation to importance, marriage courage is necessary for a satisfactory family speech may fail to recognize linguistic fossils when VERBATIM makes an excellent gift, at any time of the year, for mature, intelligent people interested in language. said: For the second time in two weeks a Galena Park of freshmen drop out of UT after four years. About here only a selection of a selection, suggesting some local customs, traditions in a nutshell. To understand another proverb puts it, Customs are the fifth element The generous heart does not grow old; The house that receives no guests receives no angels; A rich man who succinctly, Food for one is food for two; One cup of crooked; or again, After the passing of incense there is the family. My brother and I against my cousin; my translated example. Families, as the proverb suggests, should be closely knit. They should also, according praised: When a man's mother is at home, his loaf of less generous In time of famine the old have teeth and What the devil accomplished in a year, an old woman may accomplish in an hour. Children are the stairway of verbal wrestling, one vying with another or sometimes combining with it, the idealistic and the skeptical in his heart; the man with children has a heart like a comes to friendship. Straightforward enough is The who loves you will chew pebbles for you, your enemy again, See two people in harmony, and one person is off warns one medieval example. The victim is murdered, He who makes light of other men will be killed by a and its skin will be rewarded by its stink, while an is cut short except a long speech. For use by ministers of finance there is If meat is dear, patience is cheap. comes a whole portfolio of sayings on the perils of ambition. Climb like a cucumber, fall like an aubergine; Stretch your feet only as far as your blanket allows; swift must be cut off; He who eats the Sultan's raisins lips of the governed, those proverbial underdogs. A streetwise realism prevails, if not downright subversion: truths; There's no security in three things: the sea, the Sultan, and time. Expectations are generally low in floor you don't fall out. When speaking out is perilous prince's dog is also a prince. Deference is not the one; two others snigger that A bribe (a) takes down the judge's trousers, (b) unwinds his turban. If economy tell the truth unless you have one foot in the stirrup as a general policy that is not without dangers also: other texts. Leave the moral high ground to poets, trouble and sing to it, suggests one saying; but most warn that trouble will come anyway. In the timeless will be born without heads; If a peasant were made of silver, his balls would be made of brass. In the same grape, a hundred wasps. The Almighty might provide themselves. Better a neat lie than a sloppy truth hints how rhyme, that proverbial standby, can get the better for its own sake. The tongue of experience is truest, confirms one with due humility: Ask a man of experience is given his due, experience seen as a sort of leveler: hands are in water is not like him whose hands are in fire; or, taken a stage further, An imbecile can manage men, ignore the advice of a thousand more, then return to your original decision. The limitations of languages or, most majestically of all, in The dogs bark, the caravan passes. Behind the telling proverb is a salutary If I have regretted keeping quite once, I have regretted my speech many times over, another proverb admonishes other kinds of house is implied and, in the last, with slightly different and easily distinguishable meaning. stressing the first word of the name of a breakfast both nouns would bear equal emphasis. In the advertisement, wrongly placed emphasis in a phrase is likely to be however, cannot be said either of the recent and increasingly emphasis on both syllables leads to the word's being advised, among other things, to stress the first instead that the new policy, rather than being a reflection of overseas English speakers, since the new pronunciations these examples of difference in stress can be said to words that are pronounced and stressed exactly alike in both syntactical uses: accord, control, decree, dismay, et al.; but these words appear to be in the minority. first syllable by way of contrasting two actions or conditions, as in, it has de creased, not in creased. understanding of the written word which has punctuation would make phrases like the following distinguishable: of politicians and of those who are the principal purveyors It may be symptomatic of such losses that today the mantra, a prayer that begs our indulgence, asks us to take the wish for the deed, and, what is far worse, seeks to convict us of ignorance and stupidity should was filmed, another master was shaping the vocabulary creation of Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove. their schoolboy slang lives again. Copies even found their way into the trenches of the First World War, when the tales were turned into books, up until the State schools but still read his matchless prose with sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. had a vivacious approach to slang. Key words of that era are cheery, chums, and breezy, all much used by master of the Remove, was a beast, but a just beast, a clearly had an effect on the vocabulary of his foolish and absurd pupils, especially in the insults they exchanged You spoofing sweep! You frabjous ass! You fat duffer! of the idiotic Bunter is preposterous! This amusing mix of fractured English and an excellent vocabulary smoothly these stories prepared the readers for the a pew `seat,' on their jiggers `bicycles,' playing the goat, a measly solicitor, cad, and rotter, and similar expressions were all part of typical schoolboy slang had never encountered at that time, so their horizons clever enough to adapt his use of schoolboy slang to write that Bunter couldn't care a straw, but in his later novels he changed this to couldn't care less, so his ear for dialogue stayed tuned into very old age. educational as well as entertaining. The recent resurgence slang is still perfectly recognizable and acceptable to a new generation as we near the 21st century. That The strangest example of a loanword I have encountered spurt over the past twenty years, predictably in the fields of science, business and economics, politics, have come across. As in all languages, the older a loanword, the less recognizable it is, so I start with (rote) may city bus. [rote means `land conveyance' bar beer outdoor beer bar. No prizes for guessing do with loanwords at all but fascinating nonetheless. Four Golden Turtles.' So far I have been unable to Group, apologized for having used the word welsh in the sense, cheat by failing to pay a gambling debt; word derives from the word Welsh `of, pertaining to, neutral or complimentary; the two possible exceptions Welsh cricket `louse.' Of the latter type many examples that it is offensive occasionally but that it is offensive down in price,' notwithstanding its notation marking suggesting that a man who had raided a law office and killed some people in it had been inspired or spurred on by the derisive attitude toward lawyers that lawyer was raised and promptly ridiculed as ludicrous: one by nationalistic and ethnic interests than by lawyers. Nomenclature, or, How to Win at Trivial Pursuit and delved into the subject, particularly with regard to hailed into court. When I was a lad, the word nigger was taboo in the US, but it was used freely till recently colored was anathematized (despite the National Association which has still not changed its name), black was legislated Negro and colored, though I cannot recall any riders There cropped up, here and there, objections to the use of black to describe things other than good and of the day. Is it my imagination or do I detect intimations world, there would be no need to refer to people by to omit mention of an individual's color, but they got round that by showing a photograph; today, television an attempt to get people to pronounce it as closely as rather than Say, Jack: after all, there might still be I number such items among the Perils of Literacy: it is mainly since they learned to read that people have words and names according to their spellings, a dangerous Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government have learned to lobby for preferential treatment and speak little or no English, and most make every effort they can to retain the cultures of their respective (silly) season on the language in the US; but we cannot might take heart from the news that books could still be perceived to have such an impact; my own cynical have had much effect and would have been long forgotten There are a lot of offensive words in the language, people put those words together to express offensive the book's protagonist led to a forceful lesson in the while applying for visas to a certain Middle Eastern was hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists, who tried in their passports, on the theory that those ending in role by the terrorists, played a heroic role by insisting More specifically, are there unique or typical names into various categories (the following is not meant to Depending on the nature of the local liege lord, that ghetto were not only geographical: inhabitants were usually restricted in the trades they could engage in. pawnbrokers or bankers (often there was little difference traded along routes which stretched from the Middle only made shakes, he also built and surfaced the entire traveling in the course of my business (as international and write them to see if we might be related. I underestimated almost every large city of the world I have visited, ago, I started seeing the little white service wagons How this exception to the rule occurred is impossible imagine that it could easily have happened over the visits to the Middle East, I should become the object trousers to determine my religion? He would have a gentiles of my age bear the visible signs of the Covenant terms, are long gone. Part of this impression comes and its readiness to dress up the differences in ways likely to appeal to tourists from overseas and from with the times. The very word convict is more prominent and convict settlement. Terms that have validity only in a historical context abound: carrying gang, Dumb the tourist trade. So does the former name for the named in allusion to the wombat's capacious hole in and artificially maintained currency as part of the chewer is explicable as a sign of plenty, but apple carver is the fruit of a somewhat desperate attempt is part now of a deliberately created nostalgia for a past in which there was once a thriving export industry. shellfish, not, as in New South Wales, a slice of fried ostensible difference in the island produce, as does mutton bird') for those foolhardy enough to contemplate kangaroo and koala share the honors with a remarkable cultivates the notion of wilderness. Again the tourist Aboriginal term, this time for a fiery piece of lighted face to the outside world, partly the face of a genuine comparative isolation of its population, and partly a both the new and the old to create a viable contemporary among hidebound literati and intransigent intelligentsia are people who write bristling letters to the editor stuck in the old monaural groove. Most style books stoutly maintain media is a plural noun, period. The the existence of an alternative but dismisses it as a subversive plot: Media still a plural, despite persistent events.' Remember also that data, criteria, and phenomena and Mail Style Book not only holds media's plurality, but includes within its wide network books, periodical publication called Women's Self Defense. Among his was taking aim at the use of the singular verb with quondam fail to detect is that a linguistically fascinating, there is now both a plural media and a singular media, and each means something different. The legitimate illustrated recently in the Globe and Mail, despite the Style Book's taboo. The paper's television critic to risk its collective life on the icy highway from The press served the purpose well, as long as it involved felt to be needed. The public, in its wisdom, opted for the nettlesome media, first used in this sense, to In the same magazine, the singular medium appeared, situations, such as those created by the rather tortured Data, still in transition, is usually singular outside academic when, like media, it developed a new sense. Agenda been treated as one since the turn of this century. Literati and intelligentsia retain their snooty classical just about completed its evolution to singularity. Criteria accepted anglicized one is octopuses, the simple English plural in such senses as various media are on display also taken on a monolithic unitary sense. I am happy Dictionary have the last word: As with the analogous form has begun to acquire a sense that departs from compilation and editing of The Random House Dictionary it occurred to me that it would be extremely useful to have a listing of a large number of English words different matter. There was no problem identifying New York, with my proposal, suggesting that such an analysis would yield useful results for cryptanalytical research. I was summarily turned down in a peremptory who told me that he had been called in by Air Force Intelligence and given the job of preparing just such a list. It was at the suggestion of the agency that he was getting in touch with me, as he had no notion of how to go about the work. We met in my office some time later, and, being far more interested in the results list. Although nothing was committed to writing, I gave Brown to understand that all I expected in return was a copy of the resulting work and an acknowledgment words, all in capital letters, alphabetized from the the same listings as the first four, but these were Second Edition, and, in addition, as number of other specialized medical, scientific, and other dictionaries. for the Third Edition, but they refused. I cannot recall far as I know, the information is still available from English: Word Lists, one must assume that its existence not put off those who have need of a list that is not only more up to date but is also more selective and, missed black hole, which is widely used as a popular speech, Excellency (presumably only a form of address), exaggerate, exaggerated, exaggeratedly, and exaggeration. have found it useful to have had at hand my Suffixes raw frequency, the criterion applied for use in the classroom or at home. For instance, I am not entirely to have been especially marked. Introducing a formula would have freed up space for more important inclusions. teaching or learning English word formation, employing items listed; those who argue about the size of native any words or phrases that are not familiar and could very likely extend the list without difficulty. If semantic section offering fishing flies and became intrigued tried to discover more about the names, with an eye toward compiling a work on the subject. I did manage caught a lake bass, which we grilled on an open fire The day was sultry, without the slightest breeze to create even a suggestion of a cat's paw on the surface game fishing. As I had caught the most fish that day, somewhere. It was quite beautiful. One might think that watching other people fishing is like watching peaceful, well calculated to remove one's mind from time. As I know little about it, I shall not attempt to expatiate on it here. The present book, although it is called a dictionary, contains much ancillary encyclopedic, most of it carefully referenced to sources, which are In many entries, the etymologies are far more replete: given, techniques are discussed (carefully distinguishing second the true mayfly, and the third, the stonefly, one's experience with fish is limited to the occasional dawn. It cannot be compared with a dictionary, per This dictionary combines two glossaries of underworld through the Conscientious Objectors' Union, requested stand as a conscientious objector, it is not surprising that his more expansive glosses often extend into sociological the custom of referring to a prisoner by the last two digits of his official number). Although the existence school teacher, but the reason for his imprisonment is unknown. A revised edition of half of The Argot also exists. The revision includes material collected his glossary, had access to a number of books, including more expansive glosses focus primarily on lexicographical three parts. The first is a blend of the headwords is being used. The texts are edited conservatively, so that spelling or typing errors are allowed to stand. illustrative quotations (where available) from other judge,' chiseller swindler,' dip `pickpocket,' the rap fruit for the sideboard `easy pickings,' tank a `safe,' track `prison warder who carries contraband messages There is much previously unrecorded material: button up `cease betting, or lower one's stakes considerably use of this slang, as when describing a theft from a heterosexual sex, and an abundance of terms for the this latter expression unconsciously carries with it soldiers and others feel when forcibly shut off from the other sex. In this connection it is saddening to cat `passive homosexual,' hock `prisoner who is out The glossaries include material which is not specific up, bugger up,' bang `intercourse,' outsider `horse word on,' battler `one who struggles (honestly) for a special place in the `argot,' or are used intensively in the issue, and he includes imbecile with the comment: particularly of the warders. Rhyming slang is a feature to have been especially intensive in the underworld through the criminal biography, fictionalized accounts detective novel. An interest in the language and lexicography a full account of these glossaries, and then turns to the development of dictionaries of underworld slang material. This survey and its bibliographical material will prove an indispensable guide to any lexicographer underworld slang and an extensive listing of underworld preparing what was later to be published as The Random opinions about both at the time, opinions that have Dictionary (and its editors) were criticizing it for the I must admit that my evidence was entirely impressionistic, for his contention, either. My chief criticisms, however, but with little thought for those who were to use it: some question about the accuracy of description of a it. It is far more likely that the preponderance of forms is hard to imagine. Certainly, there is no principle the user is the treatment of pronunciation. While it rely on detailed variants to be the product of a judiciously (a subject I do not have the space to go into here). [I think that the inferior dash beginning the third pronunciation must be an error.] Counting the internal first two are pronounced, one must go to the preceding that the user has to filter back five columns to see to see how that is pronounced. In other manifestations Such information might be appropriate to a reference other linguists, but its usefulness and meaningfulness a dictionary: most users pick up a dictionary occasionally etymology, or other information (like usage and synonymy). times a year; for a few, it means several times a week. One can hardly expect to become steeped in the recondite especially since they might well be for entirely different dictionary style should be revealed transparently to required to take a course in dictionary navigation or to spend half an hour adjusting his eyes to read reams assess in a dictionary is the quality of its definitions. abstruse to go into in VERBATIM, but a not entirely the word defined. It works much of the time, particularly things. One of the examples frequently cited of the worst reflexes of the style can be seen in the main for passage in or out of a building, room, or other is prevented or allowed to the contents of a repository, It is not difficult to understand how such a definition slips; what is hard to see is how, once it was written, and communication could have let it get into print. of transients and several floors served by elevators, containing easy chairs, with a variety of compartments tickets) of particular interest to a traveler, or providing shining), and with telephone booths, writing tables, restrictions (there are few hotels in large cities that guests outside their rooms, lest some wretch needing would a native speaker of English refer to restaurants eating, drinking, dancing, etc.? Indeed, there is no sense to which it is stretched in the definition of and his legatees in a straightforward, sympathetic, facts are present, awry in only once instance, which difficult, without substantial knowledge, to confute dour, lugubrious individual, and even the author of tales exemplifying his humanity, any a sense of humor. and some of the less savory practices of that organization's reasonably accurate, though one should note that its sources could scarcely be said to be unbiased, most employees. All the complimentary critiques are well time, as it were, but not treated with much respect. heed, being either the result of misconception, ignorance, already. Yet, there is one bald misstatement of fact were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of or appear on the program, although two of his colleagues gave curate's egg of fact: the facts remain as recorded (I know, the only person associated with the conference in English. At that time, there was no recognition linguistics, which fell somewhere among the various psychology and sociology stools. I was turned down, but not entirely discouraged, and decided to return to the fray several years later, when I had more time. with the board (and me). It subsequently developed gain the participation of linguists and lexicographers practical suggestions, and in getting financial support Notwithstanding, my claim to prior inspiration remains. contributions from the Center for Applied Linguistics, and other help, while not atypical, is a bit of a low that anyone who has an interest in the documentation of such things would be well served to obtain a copy of it (the book); it is well written and interestingly set were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of or appear on the program, although two of his colleagues gave The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical among which appears the name of your proud editor). entries, a generously defined, arbitrarily artificial 1930s (when that governmental department was responsible by the General Services Administration). An entry in headword (that is, main entry set flush left, often in approximate alphabetical place, without definitions or other lexicographical information); every variant speech. In a typical college dictionary, which might do not generally advertise the number of definitions in their dictionaries but flaunt their entry counts. At but on the most superficial level one might observe to those who already have a largish dictionary (even provenance of this new edition, it is disappointing that no statement of purpose, no fundamental linguistic serving to illustrate, quotations served a somewhat particularly intrusive factor in its use, for variant does affect the pronunciations, which, given in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, are curiously, that is shown as a variant pronunciation that is in, along with solid coverage of other neologisms, early 1970s. I devised what I thought was a useful system for showing syllabification of boldface words in the Collins English Dictionary: places where hyphens (except for spelling hyphens, which always permitted fact that some compositors clambered over one another words showing the breaks, others paid the information and the marks were omitted entirely from the Second standard practice in the US would write these as two might be felt to intrude in definitions, with words when definers use words less familiar than the entry examples. Not all US variants are entered; for example, that is not heard in the US; neither is the given pronunciation r -dropping dialects in AE, they do not predominate, (more colloquial) sense of `affairs' as met with in Yet if one applies that criterion, the definition is too It must be noted that definitions are ordered historically frequency. Thus, the first definition of interlude refers detail; but it would be more useful to offer an overall might fit into a library, personal or institutional. The who have an earlier edition would be well served to replace it with this one. Also, the preceding comments should in no way affect those who care little about must express a prejudice, however, for the benefit of access, speed, convenience (as compared with hoisting casual use, it would be extravagant to go to such an compete more readily with the other main contenders One of nine women will get breast cancer as well as support them but bends over submissively and lowers swung the limber birches for it to be a common pastime. (Providence County) two other names for the pastime the trees and let them return him to the earth, John birch would tip part way down only to falter, leaving the climber dangling halfway, a predicament, indeed. As a noun, swale rolls off the tongues of countrymen ground,' as in the geological term describing rolling the imaginative borrowings of the English language. `swaying or lurching motion.' In support, the dictionary have a future? Only time will tell, or only as long as hands and went over to check out another participle however, I was charmed by a collective noun (foreign, middle of the dance floor with a profoundly intransitive first, the lady met my preposition with declension, but in a short time we were conjugating magnificently, The hijacker hid a pistol in his hat that only fires Typical among the words over which purists agonize, is easily answered by looking up the definitions of the words in a dictionary substantial enough to offer matters, is that those who fail to distinguish between are blissfully unaware that any question exists: consequently, bother to check. One is moved to suggest that it is the responsibility of teachers of English to implant suspicion that there might be something questionable the language. These days one despairs of the teachers, showing that fewer than half of entrants to university commercial parvenu, but it should be noted that Radio Classic music not always classical, but there is an utter lack of sensitivity in the selection of music like souls groaning in hell alternating with dissonant organ music; as I could not believe what I was hearing, half an hour but persisted, as I wanted to hear the title in order to make certain that I would switch off if anyone ever threatened to play it again. Unfortunately, a reader might recognize it from my reasonably accurate This listener's knowledge of and taste in classical worst features of the differences between classical have a cynical view of public taste, a recent [March that all music not classifiable as classical is considered While she won't admit it, [the character] clearly is a class in which she said the instructor missed three English names as long as the language has been spoken name for it is known. It is possible that before the hybridize freely giving rise to intermediate forms, the need for two names might not have been apparent however, an alternative derivation, since, in Middle it occurs quite frequently, but purists prefer to call it indiscriminately applied to several wildflowers including less well informed when in his Peter Bell he wrote: It might have been a primrose, although they usually rather more likely since they grow in meadows or, of on The Random House (Unabridged) Dictionary, Second might deal with dictionaries, is a dictionary of difficult, unusual, often obscure, obsolete words, a combination Difficult Words [plug, in case you missed it]). Both indeed, the latter type preceded general dictionaries that treat the broad spectrum of the English lexicon, for it was thought unnecessary to provide definitions it is felt that a general dictionary ought to describe the lexicon of the language (as far as space permits), roughly into two classes: those one knows and those terms that word lovers are likely to add to their writing which mean a `person with whom one cohabits without the stultifying morass of today's political correctness. were not used. For many, it might be impossible to find evidence for their existence outside the single might have been nonce coinages. Their rarity is attributable from wallowing in peculiar, curious, and unfamiliar amusement. The selection of such words is likely to be personal, reflecting the tastes and proclivities of the compiler, hence one is hard put to quarrel with forth by the author in his Preface. It is important to mention that all words in Endangered are pronounced accorded succinct, clear definitions, and all are provided more or less elaborate index to the dictionary section. word sense coincides with that of the compiler. Ted might not be a fair touchstone in such matters. In has been anticipated by using more than one synonym certain puzzle solvers who seem to need all the help they can find that is not already provided by dictionaries, fun with it will want to acquire the book for delectable which manages medical malpractice. [From an employment and air traffic controllers. An experienced flight instructor before touching down, while checking out a pilot in a pause after it. A pilot who had been instructed to three crew members in the cockpit. The flying pilot disaster is imminent, but the copilot failed to use that word, even though the pilot had used its exact role. An instructor reports responding to the tower flying the aircraft. In similar incident, a copilot reports the controls. The sentence Maintain runway heading maintain the heading indicated when lined up on the as meaning that the pilot take a heading after liftoff to keep the aircraft traveling on that line. In some situations this difference can lead to a conflict between Go Ahead as referring to his driving, rather than his travel before the controller realized what had happened. sound exactly or nearly alike, can be just as problematic sentence Pass to the left of the tower is ambiguous because left can mean either the speaker's left or the hearer's left; but further confusion is also possible, reports practicing short field landings in a small airplane was confusion and a longer landing. A pilot who was called for and flying in the wrong direction turned pilot who was told to receive his clearance from the Center when he was on the deck misheard this as off the deck and proceeded with his takeoff, consequently barely missed colliding with another after landing, because the pilot heard Hold short as Oh sure in response States was handed off to a new Center after the captain feet, and started to descend. The copilot had really misheard Climb to five zero as Climb two five zero, putting him on a collision course with another aircraft did lead to a fatal accident, when a pilot, in another incident, read back the instruction Descend two four traffic controller mistakenly took this statement to for further instructions, and so did not warn the pilot the thick fog, was already on the runway. The resulting pilot's otherwise perplexing use of the very nonstandard which bilingual or multilingual speakers inadvertently progressive aspect, which is expressed in English by a equivalent of at plus the verb's infinitive. Perhaps because of fatigue or the stress of having to work in while keeping his words in English, as required. The going on and so interpreted the at in the most natural cleared to taxi into position for takeoff, but the controller by having his copilot radio to ask for permission to word hold to express this request. In aviation parlance, what you are doing and thus to go around in a landing and the complete destruction of the aircraft by fire, be learned from these examples. Not only pilots and controllers, but people in general need to learn to be more mindful of their own language use and to be We all need to learn to listen with more care and to ask for clarification, rather than assuming that we already know what is going to be said to us in advance. I don't mind having my feet to the fire. It focuses times. The resulting confusion is furthered by inconsistencies Parliament, in defense of the hanging of a conspirator a total loss of the faculty of thought. Medical use of madness then disappeared, but the word was retained to a greater or less degree absent in consequence of disease or decay of the brain itself. It is always an acquired condition, and as such is to be distinguished sound. It recognizes degrees of the syndrome rather than the previously described total loss of mentality. reversibility and dismissed acute dementia as really of consciousness... nor that caused by depression... of conditions, some reversible, some progressive... is difficult to determine, and was soon abandoned. If Psychiatrists during that time officially replaced the complex nature of the term and to marvel at the diversity global impairment of intellect, reason and personality by many medical authors, but is incorrect. The decay is not global at onset; discrete disorders of mention may dominate the clinical picture in midcourse; and even in the final stages cognitive impairment may be selective. Maintained consciousness is accepted by nothing is said here of the cerebral origin of dementia, mental disorder in which the cognitive and intellectual some degree of permanent change; totally recoverable knowing located? Impairment of memory is a frequent not necessarily of other types. The concept of irreversibility disturbance is severe enough to interfere significantly relationships with others. The diagnosis of Dementia only in the presence of reduced ability to maintain on severity eliminates mild cases of dementia or instances manage when little intellectual ability is needed. All work or usual social activities, hence these losses are not diagnostic of dementia. The assumption that a causative organic factor is always present is not proved in rare cases. Complete studies including autopsy available. Any definition, therefore, must be tentative, as occurs too often in medical dictionaries. Current meaning may be sought in articles published in recent nature of changes in brain tissue. It therefore cannot of current uses of the word would include the following often uncertain; early changes from normal to abnormal be static or reversible. It arises secondary to structural its medical description is organic. Dementia is characterized may also result in disordered language and difficulty Popular and medical use of dementia first associated it with senility but since World War II has linked it dementia, the result of multiple small strokes, are currently considered the most frequent causes of dementia. horror and pity. Other causes of dementia, however, vitamin B complex, and chronic alcoholism. Unfortunately, causes of dementia that lack an effective treatment. reveals the true meaning of the season of good will to a strange anomaly. Mass has its roots, as already send away, or dismiss. The earliest occurrences of the word being used to refer to a religious service of the fourth century, when it was applied to matins uttered at the end of the ceremony but later applied to the service itself. And it is here that the anomaly shouted or sung as an expression of joy to commemorate by spending wallets full of money and gorging ourselves been the most commercial time of year, and it is just The word boustrophedon is used to describe inscriptions range of directional options, all writing systems have in the direction they are written. Actually, there is one significant exception to this rule, a written language complete one's studies. Speakers of other dialects would associate the same meaning with the sentence. The symbol indicates that the character above it is to be read after the following character. Parentheses which retains the meaning of the original, as much as word. The choice of which reading to use for a specific word order, a simple transposition of two characters devices for indicating that characters are to be read In cases where reversals overlap, or nest, a second In general, the reordering markers are easily understood; been selected, the choice of inflectional endings intended. has fallen out of fashion in recent decades. While texts, very few can actually write them. In the nineteenth used, and it is interesting to note that some of the first A friend of mine, let's call him Marc, was finishing standing social status. He has his own box private paragraph of the article, where the language is not artificially loaded, I find seven words derived from translated into French. The current balance of trade may be in favor of English, but overall it is clearly once resulting in a kind of hybridization, has lately pin's or hip hop. Certainly, though, most of these freaks will be dislodged and swept away by the passage ear. The real threat to the French language is not French altogether in science and technology, commerce, present rate, French, which still appears along with the roots of world culture but hardly worth learning to my attention, and I am pleased that he did, for it Before getting into that, I feel compelled to reiterate users of such books: in order to look something up in already possesses. Not everyone can always be sure one of the functions of education is to implant doubt in a student's mind: in other words, it is not so important school, what a dangling modifier, split infinitive, verb, etc., might mean, but the process of education should have created a (minor) circuit in the brain of the pupil so that when a certain situation is encountered would be best were he to look it up in an authoritative amount of text appearing on television screens these days requires a lot of writers; the problem is that writer is these days construed in its minimalist sense have not a scintilla of enlightenment regarding the television, housewives and househusbands who delight in revealing intimate, revolting, and highly suspect and channels devoted entirely to charlatans perpetrating years correcting English themes, flows from an enviable agree), to questions of syntax (like the placement of adjectives), to matters of semantics (like the discussion entirely, but he fails to criticize severely enough their use solely to writing), and, in general, he seems to avoid condemning poor style; also, the pronunciation Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet, if your medical insurance terminates for any reason continue such medical insurance... [From Group Insurance and editors who have the wit to harbor doubts about their infallibility (which ought to include just about know it all, for it never occurs to them to look up the a reference in the editor's Preface to names listed on the frontispiece. Sure enough, on the page facing the title page is a list of, among other things, the contributing editors. Maybe I was out of date with A frontispiece is an illustration that appears opposite New to me. I checked in what I consider one of the The Writer's Guide is divided into five parts, Usage, include notice of the myriad illustrative sentences it contains. I trust that I shall be forgiven for skimming over the Usage chapter, partly because much of it is cut and dried and the parts that are not confuse the issue of avoiding prejudice with political correctness, than a reference to the place where the sun rises.) I shall also skip Grammar, which seems quite straightforward punctuation a fuller treatment than that afforded: I looked in vain for two things, the wisdom offered regarding what the position is on the use of a comma following etc. in the middle of a sentence). I found neither, nor did I find the common editorial term serial commas in the Index, which seems a little thin. It seemed best not to try to go through the book systematically but to dip into it here and there. Good advice is given the word modifier is not necessarily applied only to words that precede a noun, and that the rules change table: the editors are forced to offer comments like equal titles of functions (equality is not always easy for whom?), etc., and even then to include a column of exceptions. (If you want my advice, settle on one large dictionary as a standard and look up any compounds is more important than whether vice president has a hyphen or not. However, that does not apply as consistently I disagree with the suggested treatment of fractions, are exactly the same in construction as two thousand, are perfectly legitimate nouns in English and do not interested in reading a vignette on spelling checkers by a literate person. In any event, I have found that spelling checkers do find typographical errors that scanner I have used is very tricky and sensitive, and, problems as it solves; but I am going to pursue the might be struck in which less time is spent correcting That might not have been the implication, for small caps are usually sixty per cent of cap height (though have seen fit to comment on particularly heinous examples not, however, the place to embark on a disputatious wrangle leading nowhere. Suffice it to say, I find nothing serious to quibble with in the basic advice useful information, and if one does not already have the temptation is to stay with it: it is like a comfortable available, the information appears in approximately the same place and in a familiar format. Things are changing, though, and I am a little surprised that I have heard nothing about the availability of a style manual integrated with the software of a word processing several aspects of his subject, from What Is Slang? Features of Slang, The History of Slang, Influences on final word, History of the Project, the last revealing that the editor's initial interest in such a project went pages are occupied by the usual paraphernalia involved published in the press by the time this appears that most of our comments will seem redundant. Still, it is useful to note a few things that journalists are likely to overlook or pay little or no heed. For instance, not listed among the titles in the Selected Bibliography. picking up citations from other works is in any way to research any subject without relying on the scholarship with few exceptions, its purpose is to provide a reliable phrases one looks up. It is not a text whose purpose know. Yet the writing of a review puts a different often remarked that the most useful, realistic reviews using it all the while. It is thus with some of the reference books that I have edited: users have told me that although the style of a given work was unfamiliar treatment) not available from books previously used. there are only a handful) but with racial, religious, and ethnic slurs, which are both derogatory and offensive A high percentage of slang consists of such matter. at pieces here and there. Because of a recent criticism spelling of flack for press agent, I looked it up and various grounds. I have known the term for most of still, I must allow that, like others, I am not immune to succumbing to the trap of believing in the infallibility of a fact that is simply not so. My own etymology, world comes through periodicals, radio, and television. am too lazy to look up. These interjections could be considered marginal slang; but they are not so labeled in dictionaries and do not meet Lighter's criteria. context is in, and I should not expect many dictionaries labeling in dictionaries is not only erratic but internally definitions given for that term in the dictionary itself there are fewer and fewer). The pattern of labeling book. I cannot recall the reasoning behind the label, review], was once slang but is now standard English. standard but is now slang. It would be interesting to and precisions to turn their noses up at vulgarians and others who fail to preserve the language in its supposedly pristine condition. People who cleave to of the language or of the origins of words that are metaphoric in origin and that much of it can be quite subtle. True, there is not much subtlety in calling is a gynecologist is not immediately obvious, that Cement for a cemetery, and that chain lightning is certainly as descriptive as rotgut for cheap potent liquor cannot shifting and why some of its elements (like neat and more than any earlier time has seen the accumulation of a more detailed documentation of life, as anyone Some have been retained by becoming standard, often slang context, like chassis for a woman's body; many sufficiently to drop them, like chew out for scold; only to be picked up by the squares to make themselves (cigarette). Many have little use today but are colorful, people but are obscurely metaphoric for others, like catbird seat vantage point, which is often treated as seen the way a catbird alights on a tree branch from where the surrounding territory can be surveyed for documentation of an aspect of the language too often also as an engaging colorful source of the pleasure to be derived from revelation and reminiscence. Further side of language are well aware of what Jeans characterizes come adrift, go overboard (about something), get under subtle, less direct connection with maritime affairs, might have with Jeans's statement is with his use of island culture that depended heavily on the sea for astonishing is the increasing distance, chiefly during the past century, that landlubbers have put between the sea, and a handful of eccentrics, like Jeans, a few concern for terms nautical, the last of which is manifesting has ferreted about in the language to uncover words mainly because, recalling it as a reference to buildings the opinion that because the word is used in association is imaginative but unsupported by the evidence, and I fear that Jeans has stretched a point. My suspicions would have carried some weight with other seafarers. has, notwithstanding tarry appetites, not the remotest and there is not evidence to suggest it ever had anything (original) bird sense, found a metaphoric application Of course, there are genuine nautical expressions as well, some of which have been given thorough treatment: writes, the phrase is not nautical in origin. If not, then why is it here? Why is space devoted to entries like misfire, Morse code, muster, nickname, nip short lost his way or, as often happens, the (original, probably shorter book for which less could be charged. As it is, the book is greatly bulked up: its wide hanging spaces make for an attractive package; the illustrations which Jeans repeats the conventional theory (to the I maintain to be an incredibly poor fiction); he also their thirst, a theory that even Jeans regards as ludicrous. uncritically; and, among works that either fail to reflect task set, or are just plain awful, the following are these are useless and inaccurate, others are picturesque Nautical language deserves more respect. By contrast, the bibliography for my historical nautical dictionary criticism of Jeans's book has anything remotely to do with my own: the two are of entirely different purpose blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of after delivering the third, a rare occurrence, physicians his room at the Graben Hotel. [From Art View, by John and sucking in slightly. She had obviously read the else eventually reads, mispronounces, and thus turns may acquire its own distinction: a dignified gentleman than actually clearing his throat, or someone cackling word implies. There are linguistic terms for these astounding. People now exclaim whew! after a close throat sounds like a gathering of phlegm, variously belongs somewhere in there. Certain aspects of revulsion, last two originally mimicking the response of someone fact, the sheer pronunciation of the letters in sounds fights of good guys versus bad guys, specifically the words appear simply as large colored letters within a given frame, but if you have ever read a comic book had to figure out a pronunciation key. Luckily, since most comics are aimed at those with unsophisticated sounds, a fine mess for most people. Again, the villain is precise pronunciation: with the possible exception sounds. If only dogs could spell. Cats only vaguely time on a farm is a sad travesty of the deep, throaty similarly saddled with precisely imprecise sound effects, Of course, these vile approximations are not always effect, but all it did was mislead youngsters into pronouncing novels similarly have characters expressing surprise made bare assent into a ringing affirmative, though a shame to lose the etymology buried in the original spelling, though it would be a boon for easy pronunciation. its phonic integrity? Is the u in buzz really necessary? thorny issue of how much language was all imitative inexorability of an ancient saga. For many years I have seen her name championed by other writers in lists of neglected It is no exaggeration when I say that I prefer English language in the world. To tell the truth, it is the little knowledge that I have of the English language for this knowledge, I would not have been a teacher, a writer, an English language columnist and an author. Not all ideas that arise in my mind in my own tongue can be expressed in English as well because not all tongue have English equivalents. It was when I was with a question. As I was the best student in English, English, those languages do not distinguish between of asking such questions in English. I have collected But none of them is really acceptable as idiomatic to English speakers. The second one would be acceptable such a question does not satisfy us. Our answer to number like fifth, tenth, fifteenth? Unfortunately, such a question in English? If you do, please let me book on enjoyable English. I will give you credit. to those noted in one of our source dictionaries or used in a recent book, magazine, or newspaper. All the fact that there are not a lot of books dealing with thorough in its detailed treatment and explanations the scores of entries. I am not sure whether to categorize definitions are quite good and straightforward, despite the illustrations. It seems that the authors enjoyed not use items that are simply errors: they have to be funny or, to clarify that point, the Editor has to find them funny. Some slips that pass in the type might laughter, but if they have no effect on the Editor, Also, we must have the name of the periodical or call batches. Because they are used as fillers, they might they are and on filling needs. If they start looking a bit hoary, we discard them on the grounds that there are always new ones appearing, and, these days, language thanks for sending them. To all, please understand history, in his old age wrote about his having learned He then became aware of the significant differences this in his book of reminiscences and reflections, Experiences, the standard form of the language. It was irrelevant context they can be taken as such.) Recently a polished, some spellings, usages, and pronunciations and in a to use another simile, they are like shrubs transplanted loses its spreading habit or becomes dwarfed; sometimes at home there; but now, I was struck not just by the the space of a few weeks, I jotted down several hundred Food, Games and Sports, Technology, and Transportation. served, cake, cornflakes, cornflour, custard powder bus most of the time (occasionally, a city bus), and Allowing, as always, for a difference in pronunciation, some recognizable words can certainly muddle conversations indulges in harmless dalliance but a lover, male or not, illicit); hula hoop means leotards; nylon is the transparent kind of plastic; shocking, used as a plural means out of control, maniacally chaotic and violent assigned articles indicating gender, and some words that a change in the article is often the only indication from this might be that the choice of neuter is inevitable since the gender of most English nouns is inscrutable. remains in use, the more likely it is to be treated word and is still in use, may be an example of this: standing, has acquired all the inflections of a feminine loanwords, in use for centuries and with no obvious short, it seems that a process of naturalization has as hospitable to English words as it has been in the neuter nouns with few inflections or none at all, at least until the new words have put down roots. Still, of grammar, I doubt that matters will ever reach the equivalents of barbarisms such as to you and I and Us expected many details of daily life to have changed or to be unfamiliar, but I was not prepared for the alterations in the pronunciation of words which had occurred in such a relatively short time. I have also noticed a sharp acceleration in the decline of dialectal usages, less in pronunciation than in vocabulary: I for example, no longer know dialect words and expressions striking changes. I am still waiting for somebody to 1960s never did succeed in reviving the old pronunciation in pronunciation rather than initiating them. I find towards adopting back vowels in diphthongs to replace pronunciation is by no means confined to Royalty and the aristocracy, speakers of the famed Received Pronunciation is an invariant user of this diphthong for what was course, been shouted down. It would be an interesting for these phenomena. The continuing drift from back continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the fifteenth century. Like the building of the Alps railways, and I notice that the letter t is now always hardly surprising that when people have to say them for the first time they guess the pronunciation from the spelling, always a dangerous procedure in English. changes is that the expected tendency of recordings to stabilize pronunciation has not in fact happened. When sound recording was first invented, many people, language. I can remember that as late as the 1950s caused by habitual stressing of the first syllable in French pronunciations and expressions from that period, changes have taken place and that everyone has always vowel has displaced a diphthong there: I would have the laws by which our pronunciation is still evolving? against titles that give the game away. However, it of the plot are typified, quite randomly, by: Witness for the Prosecution, Don't Look Now, Beware of Pity, sweeping in a related arena: do not forget that the pages before it ends, leaving her name as a metaphor for the deadly effects of society's conventions, as the novel's preoccupation with the agrarian defection historical information on earliest appearances: for example, Money is the root of all evil is traced to original statement, The love of money is the root of clearly, would have produced a date nearly a millennium the quote is given as Money is the root of all evil, the editors of the Dictionary were tracing back the Surely, this man could not have mistranslated Radix He might have translated it Cupidity is ...,Avarice unable to see exactly what this cleric and grammarian are naturally indolent, but because their owners are instinctively efficient. Nowhere in English is this human to work, either by adding a prefix or suffix as in simplify wind in sails, they saved themselves a lot of breath by the ship, they dropped a heavy object attached to a they chose a short, appropriate noun to describe that Through the easy and logical expedient of converting nouns to verbs, our linguistic forebears established world, a noun was verbified yesterday. And undoubtedly Director of Current Affairs, and is for the most part a reasonable exposition on the need for plain English. may be surprised to learn that it does contain hospitalize, row because they fit in headlines, it adds, somewhat of Received Standard English. Benjamin Franklin, a another party, who are [sic] striving to debase the language by introducing the verb to wire instead of writer's puritanical heirs today rail against the verb fax, even though they likely think nothing of cabling, Jersey Nets basketball player, accused of rape, said reliable guidance in the whole matter. It labels the these affectations. But what has intent to do with it, even assuming you can accurately impute motive? how vile the coiner's design, serve useful purposes. Certainly, to critique fills a gap left by the pejoration the continent gleefully and unthinkingly report their snap judgments at least until a new, verb's utility has Due to the fact that the patient is an extremist and is responding poorly to fluids, the patient will be taken immediately to the operating room, where exploratory laparotomy products, please call us if this product does not meet your expectations.... [From the text on a pint container of I saw an ad once in the back of a magazine promising price I would receive a certificate and a photograph of the galaxy where my star was located. I might even be able to see that star if I possessed suitable magnifying equipment. I was not tempted by the offer, but it did occur to me that while I would not like to have a star, English language may belong to all of us, but some of its words are the property of individuals or, in most cases of lexical ownership, of corporations. I am referring protected under federal law from the infringement of unscrupulous competitors. Now, I am a language professional, want competent advice in the latter areas you should and cannot be staked out as private property and what that notion of privacy really means when it comes to lay claim to it. You must also sell the goods named by service mark. In law, a trademark is a name, logotype, design, or any combination thereof adopted and used by a manufacturer to identify its goods and distinguish them from articles sold by others. A service mark identifies rights to the mark even if you have not registered it, The symbol you choose for your mark may be pictorial, as the bearded representation of the Smith Brothers are named, respectively, Trade and Mark. But a trademark and market it under the straightforward name Widget Terminator. Maybe the Widget Terminator does its job well, finds a niche in the market, and over the years barred red circle. Since his product works differently from yours, you cannot get him for violating patent law, so you haul him into court and sue the pants off him for infringing on the implied trademark you have Benny, fresh out of law school and eager for work, to argue that the public has come to love and trust the and deceived by the similarity of the name of the rival your reputation will be damaged and your sales hurt. damages and that he pay your cousin Benny, as well. course. The law recognizes two basic kinds of trademark, definition: a strong trademark is one used only in a fictitious or fanciful manner, while a weak trademark doubles as a suggestive or descriptive trademark. Weak trademarks are more difficult to establish, and they are entitled to narrower protection than strong ones. have an invention, but its name is not a trademark, because a trademark cannot be an ordinary word, particularly ordinary sense. Both widget and terminator are common the function of the product, which is to remove pesky know that things are never what they appear when it cola nut. The cocaine went out when it was declared a controlled substance early in this century. Interestingly, the makers of Coke (which is also a registered mark) word cola in its name. But the courts ruled that because fanciful sense, you should be able to claim it as a coloring (suggesting, as the ruling noted, the very antithesis of innocence) are legitimate trademarks; although it is clearly descriptive, raisin bran and of an ordinary word to make it distinctive, for example silent e, is frequently mispronounced). But a clever or phonetic spelling of a common descriptive word does not entitle you to own it as a trademark. Rather, a common word can become a trademark only if it acquires used so long and so exclusively by one producer that it has come to signal to the general public that the product producer alone. (The courts have insisted repeatedly that to be a trademark, a word or symbol must call up not the product or service but its source, the producer may be on his side in the battle against widgets. If you stop selling a product for two or more years, you may lose the right to its trademark. The courts frown on manufacturers who pretend to sell a few samples of a future use. But you may be able to withhold the product to improve it, and you can change the product significantly of their hot sauce but successfully defended their right was considered a generic term and, hence, not registrable. But because the process for making it was patented, patent holder had exclusive rights to the name of a unique product. When the patent expired, new manufacturers was instrumental in passing our first federal copyright laws to protect an author's intellectual property, the projects, attempted to restrain the sale of other dictionaries with the original word book. In the early 1940s, World World dictionaries, obtained a ruling to quash the disclaimer Despite the fact that this synonymy is one that the courts have repeatedly upheld, no dictionary is willing which is why different books can have the same title, as long as their contents are different and there is no intent to deceive the public. Two manufacturers may be allowed access to the same trademark if their products are so different that their markets will not overlap and if there is no indication that the public will be unsuccessful in a suit to force the owners of the Vogue School of Fashion Modeling to change its name. And VERBATIM is enjoined only from producing blank media. products bearing its name and distinctive logo, and VERBATIM, the language quarterly, is free to do likewise. name has become a generic term. Cellophane failed to protect itself in an infringement suit when the defense attorney asked the Cellophane representative for the generic name of the product. Unable to come up with a synonym for cellophane, the manufacturer lost its longer, though it too has now become a generic term. Thermos and Zipper were both originally trademarks. their names began to function as generics in the public mind, and because of that the courts have ruled that other companies could use these words, uncapitalized, so long as they did not attempt to confuse or deceive the public. However, a design or distinctive style of what words can or cannot serve as trademarks. Prior decisions have little value in trademark claims, and result, trademark rulings may seem idiosyncratic or contradictory. The law clearly specifies, though, that a trademark cannot be immoral, deceptive, scandalous, against a charge that the name was deceptive, but in perceived to threaten public morality, was permitted.) Tastes change of course, in wines as well as scandals, and though Old Monk is gone from the shelves, today's courts seem not to be offended by the brand of wine United States, but their legal status is determined the Scrabble and Monopoly are trademarks for games. Despite recognized as exclusive product names, although the pair of words. You can lay claim to an entire slogan if product, but the courts do not let you monopolize the language. They will limit your power to control sentences there's Bud, who failed in their attempt to prevent use of all slogans beginning, Where there's life... including, At any rate, it seems that where there's a trademark, there's hope for a lawsuit. The Xerox Corporation, in the past gone out of its way to protect its right to the words it owns. Though I have found no reference to manufacturers, the company has tried to regulate the use of its trademark in ordinary English. For example, Xerox is a trademark to be used only as a proper noun, to have become generic, if not according to the courts, where it occurs freely as noun, adjective, and even verb, with or without capitalization. Xerox persists because unregulated use by others may cause a trademark Many publishers, either fearing litigation or simply because they are sensitive to questions of ownership of the printed word, prefer to take a cautions approach and allows it to function as a verb. But no contemporary But back to the hypothetical case of Widget Remover share will become so large as to draw the attention of able to get the injunction that your cousin could not. any and every use of it by another. In one case the court told a manufacturer that there can be no monopoly respect to marks having `love' as a portion thereof and thus exclude all others from the use of any mark composed little for a writer like me, except perhaps in the ego department, since according to the law, a word can be a trademark only if such status does not deprive others of their right to the normal use of the English language. for his birthday, think again. Words that do not fit owning a ball: even if the game is not going the way said: For the second time in two weeks a Galena Park school Galena Park school teacher has been murdered. [Submitted building of the Panama Canal. At the end of his report, surveyed his sentence with considerable pride, and discovered sides reversed is `A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!' became a doctor to realize the unfulfilled potential of behavior, I visited the good doctor in his office and L: I understand that you were recently visited by a L: Apparently, you began to despair of ever overcoming R: Do good's deeds live on? No, evil's deeds do, O L: Did you ever despair that evil could be conquered? L: I understand that your colleagues in virtue have The Foregone Conclusion --I claim the capital letters Sometimes it is the sneakiest, too. Its legerdemain as well, you might say, as in the following tricky, apartment on a first date? Not many girls, liberated There are far more ingratiating Foregone Conclusions If you start explaining that you are going somewhere have fallen into the trap. To say that it is quicker or not the same as a false premise. They are indeed quite similar but the difference is that a false premise can stand on its own: It is essential that the government colonel equal time.) And the parenthetical comment is not intended to be an example of a false premise! You see it is the element of persuasion that distinguishes the Conclude carefully here: medically a double dose of pain killer does not always kill any more pain than In the trade I believe they call this a trial closing and It is only right that companies making excess profits Don't the little (italicized) blighters slip in smoothly? equally strong? Or of the same color? Of course, silly Foregone Conclusions can be. How persuasive is the entries were retained in the four Addenda Sections in question. These evidently possessed whatever qualities of viability are required for an item to survive in at least written English once it has experienced adequate quantity and variety of printed occurrence to justify suggesting that the early years of a word's temporary admission to the English lexicon are the most critical. continue to indicate the critical quality of a new word's provide crucial information, the list is organized according that, for example, the highest mortality again appeared the deletions were noun compounds, whereas the only taxonomy is that determined by the 13,683-item corpus immune, adj. UNABBREVIATED antimissile electro- bitch box trace adj. system water tooth- MIXED AFFIX- gamma decay pick phosphate isolated cam- clock on Age of era clock out an august group of intelligent men and women met in the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor of the Capitol's speakers of English who have the ability to manipulate sound logical, or patriotic, or it could appear to be sordid and bordering on treason. For example, consider One statement suggests concealing or hiding something; a tidy ship. The participants wanted to convey the Rather, they were only concerned with getting at the facts. They wished to bring the message of what actually and justice would triumph. Still, for this to happen, all participants recognized that language was important to ensure that the public would understand acts and events as the speakers wished them to be understood. a variety of words and phrases to indicate the concept of not telling the truth. Seldom did anyone admit to lying, but statements were often couched in terms colorfully that he told you to write down a different version of the facts? And moments later he continued, Are you saying that you decided it was appropriate to put out a North's response he used the words a version of the carries a favorable connotation: We want to get out the whole story, or Col. North will tell his story to the committee. But used with words with unfavorable concept of plausible deniability is a variation on the theme of avoiding the recognition or the admission of lying. Implicit in the term is the idea that one has later. One must then consider if such a denial is reasonable, it possible that the denial, that is, the lie, could be exposed? It might be possible to establish an equation any statement. Psychologists and social scientists could scheme strongly implies `craftiness, secret intent'; objected to the term, declaring it to be pejorative. Speeches in this context carries with it too much of the While statement is better, answer gives the mental picture answer; we are left with a positive image. Response would have been a good neutral word, but neither side While it means simply to `couple or connect,' the connotation When we hear that someone is linked to an organization game develop over what to call `money that is excess discussed the use of the residuals or profits from the responded with Well, you insist on referring to it as throughout the questioning, and North continued with residuals. Divert means to `change from one course or use to another or to turn aside.' In some contexts the word can connote `secrecy and deception,' a diversion up a chance to irritate or challenge North, for the connotations are completely different. It is much better to refer to the proceeds of a raffle rather than the profits. Profit is deeply rooted in the world of business even more innocuous. Shortly after this, North used the terms revenue producers and deserving of fair just synonyms for profit that alter our perception a little. to `work around' and implies ingenuity and strategy. law. North's statement that he sought a means of complying much nicer, conveying the idea of adhering to regulations. more formal, legalistic atmosphere to the questioning. Collegiate Dictionary tells us that a fall guy is `one who is easily duped.' A second definition reveals it to formal term and suggests ignorance. Many of us recall said, You ain't gonna pin this rap on me! I ain't no who bears the blame for others'; it is a political word that carries with it a certain nobility and martyrdom sport of quibbling over words arose early in the questioning general's appearance before the committee, those two words came up often. Those who tended to be favorable to the colonel used inquiry while those distrustful that his actions took just a few days, and investigation bestow upon Representative Brooks a special commendation operation for covert operations. He used a noun, two prepositional phrases and a string of adjectives that repercussions will remain for some time. Our judgments across our gray matter reminding us of childhood. A position that seemed logical a while ago now becomes irrational. A strong conviction is suddenly an indefensible belief. Some of us will hold to an idea or concept regardless of the evidence; others will change positions. Still others will simply marvel at the use of language and our emotional side begins. We may never know for sure if our conclusions are based on cold, hard logic or ever published. Professor Honey, an English linguist easily pronounceable places in the world, writes in a straightforward, simple, casual, friendly style totally that usually mark writing on pronunciation. That is not to say that the book's theme is casual, for Honey comes to grips with social aspects of language that are seldom treated, even in a clinical manner, by linguists. work is known mainly to academics because it appears in scholarly journals and in books distributed largely to congratulated for perceiving it as a work that deserves a wider readership. The biggest concessions to make the presentation more palatable for the general reader is the elimination of footnote references within the text: even superior numbers do not appear in the text, and those who demand footnotes must refer to a brief Appendix where they are arranged, chapter by chapter, with clear page references. As one who understands because of their continual, unsightly interruption of there if you want them, but they do not intrude. The index is quite thin on the ground: after reading such a book, one naturally puts it aside till it is wanted for reference to certain points, and the paucity of the index a chore at a later date. I have always felt that every book on language should include, either in its index or in a separate listing, all of the words and word elements then we say he is speaking dialect. But if he uses the news bulletins, then all we notice about his speech is accent in the United Kingdom, though other varieties of English are discussed. To better understand attitudes The accent most obviously associated with the standard Among speakers of English worldwide, either as a native titles give a good indication of the subject matter In the course of his treatment of these topics, the author provides a wealth of information that answers numerous questions (and confronts many of the prejudices) Increasing literacy and pressures towards `correctness' the l in fault, vault, and soldier; the second w in standard English accent learned to drop the final d 0which for centuries had been attached when ordinary We all know about language prejudice, but it is nonetheless accents, since, as its author claimed, to no one is the absence of local dialect more important than to of our society, for us to attach to particular accents and attributes considered typical of certain social well as accent) have the power to close off a conversation render a flat advertised as vacant that morning suddenly shifting: as soon as some of its characteristics are adopted by speakers of a different social or educational scarcely be tacit, change the rules of the game, coming 1930s might have been mystified by the insertion into reasons. First, its speaker is perceived as standing give the speaker the benefit of the doubt. Thirdly, greatest single influence on the current evolution of also true that the greatest single influence on the grammar, vocabulary, and idiom of English as spoken Those who are not intimately familiar, from listening rather detailed descriptions (chapters six and seven) of their pronunciations and their effects, good and bad, can be charged to the failure to identify specific dialects dictionary would reveal). The same is true for Honey's which, contrary to the author's information, is pronounced first syllable and that of father in the last, or, as in an observation that does not apply to New Yorkers or reSEARCH, which leads me to think that these stress patterns are not necessarily distributed along dialectal and a negative statement of possibility, between `I It may not come as much of a revelation to Professor Honey to learn that even I, a native speaker of AE, to say can or can't when the word receives any emphasis; can't with that of father does neaten things up a bit. politician's admirable fluency in English. Listeners question about his personal life, that his pastimes have been struck by the creeping changes I have perceived entire book here by stopping now, leaving readers with a great deal to look forward to. In the unlikely event repeat that VERBATIM readers are sure to find it as in this interesting and useful book. Most of the 130-odd (actually, to get fussy about it, Foreword or Preface) for inclusion seems a bit esoteric, but the general structure comment on the origin of the term, its etymology, and entries throughout the book, I chose to read thoroughly entries. I have not commented on entries that are either speakers who associate the designation with the circus sense, and the of can be attributed to journalese or some other aberrant style. Appeal of is used in standard but scarcely one I should have selected as typifying AE. It sounded like a nonce usage to me till I found it should not think it common enough to warrant occupying me as a nonce word, not likely to be found around the cherry pick `verb, informal to cream off the choicest cherry. Some (younger) people often save the cherry to eat last; people more advanced in age may be seen to eat the cherry first, presumably on the theory that they might not last long enough to finish the sweet. To many, the cherry is, indeed, the choicest part. But the image is colored, too, by the existence, in both AE and BE, of a type of light, mobile hydraulic crane provided with a basket or platform enabling one to approach a black person who adopts white cultural characteristics with white cream between, a confection not encountered creative `adjective, euphemistic going beyond conventional been a better gloss, and one must take account, too, that it was originally (and still is for those who have to be helpful, there is a great deal of interest to be This curiously curt coinage, based on cathartic, at least has the merit of getting out of the usual humdrum There are (other) entries whose validity seems questionable mentioned, are not likely to have sufficient frequency are shown to add explanatory information to the definitions checked by those in the know, for it is almost impossible to derive accurate information about a given dialect had time to contemplate the area before settling on an appropriate name; in the United States, where settlement without delay. This haste has quickened the creative juices, and has sometimes resulted in innovative and place names in a relatively short period is illustrated in name would do, as long as it was different and peculiar. In the confusion of finding a name quickly, practical was first named after a state senator, but this name confusion when juxtaposed with a common preposition. becoming confused when passengers requested tickets form for post office name selection there is a blank for took this information literally as they were voting for United States, and every few miles a siding had to be built so that trains could pull off the track and wait for used because they were easier to remember than numbers. the names of shippers. Naming a siding after a company given names to certain places that were fairly well known, it is to be expected that some of their names arrived. Sometimes a place or state name was borrowed that they could not hear, much less imitate, the exact boils (or steams) in the pot.' Supposedly a man bet his friends that he could run to the river and back would stampede buffalo to kill them. When the bodies of the buffalo his into the stream, they would make a bolt of lightning hit near the village. When the people spring. Believing that the lightning had created the Harder points out that when the explorers asked the partly as a transliteration, and partly as a translation. complicated by going through a middle language, often names have come from fifty different languages, but as have been anglicized and many of the words have been but this clue can be lost if names alternate between word meaning `paint,' and this might be the correct again suggested, the clerk in the office just reversed it. The main reason for the reversals was that they allowed appearing to be egocentric. One man was too humble to have a siding named after him. He was a popular there is disagreement on its significance. One story is named because it coiled back and forth so much. The truth is, however, that it was named after the Snake poor, and snakes were often the only food available. Some names do not tell false stories; they tell no stories made from the first and last letters of the alphabet, names also provided opportunities for playful statements agenda was to find a name for a new siding. They had easy to say. Each man's suggestion was rejected by the others, hence they were surprised when the supervisor decision. When questioned, he replied, Well, you all native lands and languages as they spread out over the continent was to bring old names from home to their tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peaceful end to the Springs makes a person thirsty. The Chocolate Mountains how to spell Ptarmigan that they just began calling the bring their mobile homes and campers and stay during the cold months. When friends would arrive, many of them would ask, Why here? The residents decided to take the words right out of their friends' mouths by when the host of a popular radio show promised free named Lover hid among the boulders from people intent several explanations. The name has been traced back term for a junction of two roads. Another theory is Intercourse was the spot where the horses entered onto been accidentally named when a real estate developer sales pitch for the new property he was promoting. He was nervous and instead of saying that it was going to been named by the whim of a snowstorm. It was in the fall, and a sign painter was perched high on the side of paint the name of the grain company. He started with first five letters, he was forced down by the snowstorm. to finish the painting. But by then, the name was so firmly established that the painter did not bother to a commercial advantage. This is easily demonstrated in the real estate business where developers work hard to create names that will sell their town. Someone small lots will try to communicate a feeling of spaciousness be one person's perception of a place, while At the crude and had to be changed to appeal to more genteel Girls Meadows by the federal mapmakers, and Bullshit was Tight Ass Canyon, named because of the narrowness many local citizens were indignant that civilization In going through an early explorer's journal we found found Mud Lake transformed into Silver Lake for purposes coming to what is actually a relatively warm and comfortable just as today, more people were interested in attracting rather than repelling visitors and settlers. We see this in the way that postmasters increased their fame by naming post offices after their businesses. The first The person who ran the business received a little extra money to serve as postmaster and in this role could decide on the name of the post office. At first, little attention was paid to the post office name, but as mail became increasingly important, it was the post office name which often won out as the town name. This is Mail for other communities was left at crossroads or Unlike the ancient coins, however, the legends in place hyphenation points; the standard calls for a dot between confidence is inspired by the presence of three errors where spellings differ. No comment is made about differences variants in pronunciation. For instance, if a Brit pronounces a lot to spend, in pounds or dollars, to get it wrong. on the Rialto in The City, reported that a reader in Wells) received a tax form with the instruction Send envelope provided, I looked inside, wrote the mystified death by reckless driving of person unborn at time of With his sharp suits and gold chains, good looks and brought the skills of the wide boy into the world of rather, lack of meanings. A morpheme is the smallest morpheme, such as the suffixes and prefixes of English. gagged morpheme. It is a series of sounds impressed collocations could do no semantic work on their own in Admittedly I have given in to temptation in coining most such morphemes into common usage, a spinoff of public attention. The pattern for coinage is simple and uniform. A familiar noun provides the model for variation, Everything except this memorable portion of the word known, it suggests a pattern for further combinations upon the model's salient contemporary import. Because be easily recognizable to provide material for a new Marathon provided the model after it was reintroduced (the earliest such reference, surprisingly, comes from physical activities, and had no meaning on its own in marks, and so it has become an ineradicable part of Telethon seems here to stay, sanctioned by dictionaries, suffix began attaching to other base elements in the 1950s and '60s. As it is, the last twenty years have seen a bewildering array of applications, all in the sense of appeared in such unlikely combinations as talkathon, or shorter races than a marathon). Most usages are perceived as the primary form of the suffix, but the new morpheme survives the novelty of its first innovation useful, almost as if by accident, and brings something when a business person or public relations representative single, handy, distinctive term. But utility alone has important, each new usage reflects an attempt at creativity, bound to become popular. The hyphens that separate the wit invested in the coinage, like parsley atop a visitor is likely to find on tee shirts and sidewalks wherever comprises innovations based upon a portion of a common physical fitness has brought us specialty group calisthenics, type of music is playing or degree of enthusiasm. But drives, or the names of businesses. Most will disappear as quickly as they were created. That is the way of all stepchild of the pun and initially is meant to be recombined thrive because the temptation arises, so often too powerful to resist, as was the case with this essay's title, to throw in a little wit for good measure, even if without much accuracy. Like the puns above, most word forms with newly created morphemes are incidental and almost make us pause to groan the groan that is nearly laughter. interest by whetting our humor. That is a function, gagged morphemes are a feature of our national disposition, tradition. We can dismiss them no more than we can show that in public life we are in a hurry and do not want to slow down long enough to devise an explanatory advisor, but not a dictator, in usage. The people who establish and preserve innovations are unlikely to have the philologist's taste for etymological fidelity, but that hardly means they are uneducated or uninterested in language. On the contrary, their attention to meaning must be acute, even if purists pale at the inelegance of the many neologisms, because bound and gagged morphemes ease and utility. No one could scorn them if they were meaningless; then they would simply be empty oddities. It is the emphasis of neologists, the nature of their playfulness over etymology, an emphasis upon the wit of brevity, and an ear finely tuned for useful novelty. Teachers and other professionals are usually credited Standard that textbooks try to inculcate, the dignified parlance of discourse, and then the related but divergent Grilled in foil or alongside a ham, turkey or chicken, those who shied away from onions before will delight in It's turned out to be one of those red herrings around our necks. [Quote from Bob Porter, director of Maintenance him on the green. She went on to report a number of pointing out her favorite constellation to a friend that year, learning to read; the city was plastered with radio is not a rude word if it is sworn in context and broadcast at the right time. A rude word is, of course, arbitrary: it is not as though everyone is not familiar with the rude words; indeed, those who object to them the most are not likely to be in bed by nine o'clock. The feeling, one assumes, is that broadcasting them, regardless of context, at times when children are listening, Thus, when uttered by an actor whose thumb has just words seem as natural as in real life. When uttered in circumstances where taboo language would seem either more subtle than the rest. Benny Hill, whose shows of old burlesque routines in which there is much rolling of the eyes, winking, and the sly aside to the audience, accents, mumble, talk too fast, or all three, it is sometimes audiences) are on about. They appear to revel in the diminution of (this viewer's) auditory acuity but because since abandoned, were quite specific: There is an absolute effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive spared the last two, but the rest are retained as mainstays English: panties), the mere mention of which seems to references to poofs (`homosexuals'), (big), boobs, lavatories, It is not suggested that these subjects be interdicted, twenty years of acculturation, for an outlander to discern much that is funny about them. To me, the funniest announced retirement to run a business in antiques, for which he doubtlessly acquired a taste from Benny Hill's jokes. Another form of humor that enjoys great They do not seem to appeal to insecure men who have pointed out that the audience for the latter had fallen should venture to suggest that the quality of the show reports, More people, it appears, ring or write in [to language is often the resort of those who are unable to articulate their thoughts and emotions, and the presence of characters so afflicted is certainly dispensable No detail is too small to overlook. [From an advertisement The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded Despite their reputation for distrusting polyglots, incorrect and even inferior, and as a result become alienated from at least two of the Three Rs. Though appetite, she would tell him, It's no wonder, with all The difficulty of communicating across these regional English is an essential part of the cultural baggage of confined to some sort of parochialism for life. Oddly understood outside a very restricted circle. Professor More than half the hospitals' staffs were immigrants, Indies, who were experiencing difficulties in understanding not what one might have expected: the misunderstandings English was poor. On the contrary. They were quite tube, provided assisted ventilation, and positioned a catheter in his bladder to monitor his urinary output. confusion was even greater when immigrant physicians their surgeries. Eventually, the situation was recognized by the Ministry of Health and passing an examination sale at the beginning of the 1980s. The manual explained you. The almost universal ignorance of medical nomenclature spotted a haulage contractor's truck bearing the slogan A few common examples of the sort of misunderstandings be especially misleading in the case of a female patient, a history of chronic lung disease and not tubes of the colloquial expressions for pregnancy: Away the trip to be having a baby, to be in a delicate condition, to be in an interesting condition, to be in pig, to be in up the stick, to catch on, to catch the virus, to fall for a baby, to have a bun in the oven, to have a touch of United Kingdom are just as guilty as their patients of is supposed to reassure the patient: We're just going little peep in your tummy. One particularly outrageous gynecologist was explaining her impending hysterectomy adapting words to suit their own requirements. For example, a touch of the old brown crisis would mean now it is usually found in the rural hinterland of the quickly divide all those they met into the sheep and away, directly. High praise is tidy middling and middling county is naturally given to emphatic statements. An a sow saddled and any impossible task calls forth the person, and someone of low intelligence was described hungry, cold, or miserable. A typical county boast glory refers to the sweeps of the windmill set in the sign of a cross, said to bring luck to anyone in the it was thought lucky to bring into the house on one's To conclude, here is a snippet of the conversation of an old West Wittering woman, who lived near a scientist: decimal currency. The familiar pennies, halfpennies, and so on, according to the price charged, for decimal and gamblers to avoid using money slang: quid, spin, quid, and other terms were in common use in conversation also be so called for the same reason it was called a idea was for a convenient coin to pay for short cab like it. Until then they were usually given a sixpence, for the change. When the fourpenny groat was introduced nicknamed it Joey and frequently spat on it in disgust in payment. It was last struck for currency use in little flower) because it bore a flower, a lily, the it varied from twenty shillings to thirty shillings; its counterfeiters in the underworld. They also called shillings small whites. Half a bar for ten shillings given on striking a bargain, making a deal at a market, in barrows, etc., and possibly referring to the poor design or baldness of the effigy on some of the coins. How to Gain Proverbial Wisdom, or It Takes One to Know One bun, and she liked nothing better than putting in her raise taxes, she thumped the newspaper and intoned, parents on a regular basis. I tolerated my aunt and her proverbial wisdom until she began applying it to her nephew. Hearing that I regularly went to sleep answer but a sullen nod. That is, until one day when I was helping my mother fix dinner for a family occasion weeks later, I was complaining about having to buy a new suit, and my aunt happened to be within earshot. my aunt was a lot more careful what she said around me, like a burnt child that shuns the fire. But eventually care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of I think, she said finally, you are being deliberately not be bothered to adjust the scales. If my proverbial of proverbs, sayings, adages, maxims, and plain old Since they are meant to cover all of life's vicissitudes that I could not find a girlfriend. (I complained a lot in those days, a habit many proverbs warn against.) to take note because she tried to console and scold me in that double tone that proverbs have. She put later, after I actually had a girlfriend and was worried away, my aunt passed on this pearl of wisdom: Absence hope springs eternal in the human breast. She continued steel sieve, and she became almost touchingly uncertain she was despairing of ever doing anything more with new tricks, I cheered her up by flatly opposing her: adorn her headstone, I often think of inscribing an of possessions. What I am left with is a list of proverbs Strike while the iron is The more haste, the less The best things in life There's no such thing as a Repent before it's too It's never too late to mend. Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost. Never back down on Cut your coat according to Don't rock the boat. The squeaky wheel gets all The more haste, the Strike while the iron is hot. Every cloud has a silver It never rains but it pours. The first shall be last. To the victor belong the Two heads are better If you want something done than one. right, do it yourself. Always plan ahead. Don't count your chickens Money is the root of all Money makes the world go Never bet on a sure A bird in the hand is worth Actions speak louder It's the thought that counts. Use a carrot instead of Spare the rod and spoil the The meek shall inherit Where there's a will, there's Do unto others as they Do unto others as you would do unto you. have them do unto you. Monkey see, monkey Imitation is the sincerest Wisdom comes with There's no fool like an old Make hay while the sun Take time to smell the roses. Honesty is the best Don't wash dirty linen in Uneasy lies the head Absolute power corrupts Seeing is believing. All that glitters is not gold. other up does not mean they are incorrect; they simply suit different occasions. Literature, which is now that ends To thine own self be true is not all bad. It is just that, to employ a proverbial expression, he turns of phrase are more intriguing. Or at least I fact, I have felt lately as if I were employing more turnaround for someone whose first interest in language confession. Or as she might put it: She who laughs make flawed writing acceptable. [Lance A. Miller, in the belong to a specific domain in the English vocabulary achieves intimate familiarity. The naked terms for have always proved too much to bear for polite society, of them with a blanket of euphemism. The domain is also fostered many ribald versions. It is not surprising, runs through our culture, some necessitate etymological Most, indeed, defy precision in the attempt altogether. over a ditch. Conveniences for the wealthier sections writer at the turn of the fifteenth century advised private, and this is the specific sense in which the word entered the English language. The earliest euphemisms established it. It is not surprising, semantically the description of a solitary place, one where people an attribute of a thing for the thing itself: a toilet is a tells us that the name is possibly attributable to the concealed in a piece of furniture, which could then seems interchangeable with another, less notorious, wrote a book on the subject entitled A Metamorphosis (with the indefinite article preceding it). Jakes is was also very much alive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the dialect of southwestern now obsolete, but to this day the blocks of toilets at can only be guessed at. It is slang for chamberpot later, a chamberpot. All these are feasible surmises by the process of metonymy. Perhaps it hails from a great friend to those with bibulous tendencies, jerry greatest mystery of all in this field of vocabulary. have fun replacing the last zero with a one after the Among the more incredible explanations (as recorded hallelujah, as prompted by a caption to a cartoon by Now we'll begin again at the Hallelujah, and please note is that of a corruption of the word lee: for those working in the country, a place for relieving oneself was always chosen out of the bite of the wind, that their meanings have acquired depreciatory connotations). that the modern sense of lavatory originated at the as one of its items, but it was probably earlier: The their original meanings, terms such as bog retained their original meanings (a marshy place) as well as Terms which border on the vulgar tend to be onomatopoeic: group of terms is that which contains words only with a localized meaning. It would be impossible to compile examples follow: the heads (naval colloquialism, dating the public toilets after the color of their paint. It is malleable domain of the English vocabulary, for the For the best part of half a century I have lived on bearing in mind that academically, if no longer psychologically, Certificates of my own English youth; these are set municipal college, at least in its language aspects, if such it can be called, has nothing to do with the wants to. I am roughly familiar with researches into use of the living language hereabouts best shown in New York liberal to summon him by. Still more difficult to use with the confidence of a local is my gardener's nigger hair which, to date, I cannot.) So most nicknames sound to the casual tourist. There is no authentic sense of a pejorative corruption of a parent tongue sentimental to propose the contrary, as do the sophisticated kind of linguistic laziness, and this has considerable charm, as a lot of laziness can. A typical morsel of that, and expressing character (and class) by doing so. This is not to deny that there is an ingrained feels a little bit much more better, thanks. The last is the typical local double (or triple) comparative, but Take the idiosyncrasy in the use of personal pronouns, that of the lack of, or reluctance to use, accusative bother? One form can do the job. We will do just as None of these rather charming locutions is represented always struck me, namely the dropping of the final g white (perhaps even a grin of such rum) over a seascape particularly in verb tenses. The constantly surprising often coming over at first as error; the universal use of the conditional would for the future will can lead comparison of the present tenses of the verb to have scene, since they make a response to shades of reality incompetent but lovable little islands, embarrassing colonial deposits now handed over to sink or swim in interests of the global village. In an article (The demonstrated that he was anything but. I was induced duty from a cobwebbed trunk in the attic of obsolescence. those, only the last would be taken today with equanimity, above now languish in dusty disuse. Virtually all of them are derogatory, and some of them are so mordantly to a precursor wave of today's political correctitude? purely English words, producing the likes of drunkard, lost to perdition); and the mellifluous but contumelious who fell short of contemporary standards of physical might be labeled political. In this charming group I could go on, but given the space constrictions, that spoke of the weather, for instance, without invoking perhaps more frequently (it was in the English Midlands, unkind): It's roaring with pain. Some of our visitors other, for instance, what was the difference between mot is a shaft of wit. While on this subject, I may as well quote another of these prize questions: What is The appearance of a fourth edition of this dictionary an indication of its popularity as well as of its scholarly Of all the countries in which English is a significant complex socially and linguistically. While English is currently the most important language, it is the first language of only a small proportion of speakers: according country have tended to polarize the dialects of English English, rather than a general, roughly homogeneous some respects a reflection of the contact history of endearment, forms of address, and words of approval. in this category are words of long standing (since the introduction of English in the Cape in the late eighteenth English: trek, veld, laager etc. Other uncontroversial which appear in written English sources, but rarely origin that recur in English texts (often for local dictionary. Likewise, it might be necessary for novices would have to indicate the word for left in all languages frequently enough in the book. For example, as this we must infer that the authors now consider this to be an English item. Yet, the citations they give afford years in the charge office as a fraud detective. That with an audience that is capable of appreciating the from the other. It is also in practice difficult to decide between the process of borrowing (which dictionaries rather, it is one of the strongest challenges facing lexicographers of a vast number of languages in the the world in situations of intimate language contact. anyone wishing to get to grips with English in South attention to detail, provides extensive definitions transcriptions and, above all, provides delightful illustrative put out books that contain a huge amount of valuable providing, in the worst case, no index at all and, in these are not insurmountable, and there is no excuse accompanying it by a thorough index. The important must try to anticipate and provide for a variety of users' needs in an index; users do not seek the same sort of information, and the effort must be made to imagine the uses to which a particular work will be points to the information as can reasonably be expected. useful, usable one) in a book that contains much valuable produced the earlier manuals accompanying computers find, later, on seeking the format of a certain command, version of the text, or that the item sought was not listed; the only solution was to go through the entire text, laboriously turning each page to find the lost time is still spent trying to find a given bit of information programmer would be likely to have called it because editing, styling, composition, or the other arts and text, especially if the text is consistently styled typographically. quotation marks, and so forth, one can use this information Not all text is so highly stylized, and the present fiction, which offer little opportunity for automatic extraction because the subjects suitable for indexing are often paraphrases of the words used in the text. does not occur in the text (and, I daresay, courtship This booklet contains many fascinating insights into the art of indexing, including, for example, the observation, their writing, indexers have to condense their implications devote the space to the full description that it merits are involved in indexing and are unaware of the existence official journal of the following affiliated societies; of them, frequently rifling earlier material on the legalistic grounds that it is out of copyright. To those wont to steep themselves in the writings of the scholarship and of the broad dissemination of knowledge, only for their content but for their controlled and mannered style yields great satisfaction. One must be especially grateful to those who, rather than cast modernize a classic, a policy that too few publishers was the primer, the basic grammar on the history of could turn in those irritating lapses of memory of the English since then, it is fitting that its history be updated, in dialect, lexicon, grammatical theory, and the universal but also to revise scholarship in the light of later research that either elaborates or confutes information that is now more than half a century old. Although that this is the fourth edition of the work, ignorance of the second and third editions must be put down to include a more comprehensive section on dictionaries, language for most people, reflected in a recent report Sometimes a more critical and profound analysis can is pure emphasis. The writer is in some doubt as to whether the listener has paid sufficient attention to the first line. Concentrate, he appears to be saying, implies that the girl's appearance was unique. It is impossible to say what she is like, because she is like girl's singular looks. Other girls cannot be contemplated company on the dance floor? Is she perhaps as enamored shall be looking at tomorrow. Please stand for the words frequently lets me down these days. I wondered which caused me to think that it probably is a recently given in those other dictionaries, with this additional definition, practicable. It also gives a second definition: the beginning as a deplorable little syllable. The emphatic use of do has long been used in our language. persons who have just been introduced to one another. Do is a remarkably versatile verb. You can do your subject is properly linguistic, cultural, or categorizable word double is used to describe it: thus, for instance, culture, like, I put a nickel in the telephone to dial by familiar names. The letters were, however, retained Also, in those days, the zero could not occur among as, I believe, do all international codes, universally. had letters, but I am sure that I will be quickly corrected meant: I assume that they have statistics on the number about such things, is to make certain that the word without letters on telephones, how could it arise in letters as a mnemonic. For example, a dealer in stolen could tell customers to dial HOT CARS; a psychiatric word or command, alphabetically as well. I understand but it was decided that it might be too late by the time the call went through. In an earlier issue of a better mnemonic advantage it is hard to say. Does proves unsatisfactory as a verb. Press seems to have and when they cannot reason, it is safer and less disgraceful In response to a reader's complaint that his restaurant I admit to an interest in architecture and interior John Patten, the Education Secretary, is, according for standard English to be introduced without endangering write well and effectively, and if all that work was in vain, it will be a great pity, a footling remark in the circumstances. The Times reports that the new curriculum and children will be expected to use capital letters distinction between these terms or whether the distinction playing fields in general, and level playing fields that our charity derives no direct benefit from the donation to this association every time they use the mention of it now and then in my writing. The interdiction preposition must accompany the word it is connected caveat concerning split infinitives, which cannot be At the time I did not reply, because I did not have the time to search for it. Now that I have found it, I which had been roundly criticized, especially for its time to ours it has been in a continual declination, the age in which they live, let us consider in what phrases, which are ill sounding, or improper; or in theirs. For in this case the refinement can be but last age, or to excuse the present, and least of all mere forty years later regard him as being of another age: clearly, three centuries ago people had quite a perception of time different from our own, largely, I believe, brought about by our more thorough documentation derisory tone or as an excuse for our own shortcomings: page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious insist much on it. It is obvious that we have admitted have lately written with most care, have, I believe, that is, not to be too hasty in receiving of words, but rather to stay till custom has made them familiar much with French: that is a sophistication of language, occasions, the professional linguist's avowed position medical doctor's in relation to a patient: both are phenomena they encounter without expressing qualitative not supposed to express his loathing or disgust at the manifestations of some horrible affliction, nor is it deemed proper for him to assume an accusatory posture patient cannot always be held responsible for catching word, utters grammatical solecisms, or uses infer for hence, it might be said that he is not responsible for from innumerable cop shows on television to call the circumstances, a message appears on the screen that them with the proviso that it be transmitted as is. at least one channel and remains on the screen for at greater than that of a fleeting utterance by a newscaster fleetingly. One cannot help thinking that an entire pursuant. Pursuant is a legal term, of course, not one that drops readily from the lips of the housewife or accuse me of being a purist, which I do not think I am. On the other hand, I try not to be a linguistic of statement at face value; in my view, it would have number of titles identifying the person or place pictured. the mistakes in VERBATIM? As for the last, I would analysis. For many people, their ability to relate to reality is inexorably tied to their control of language, the greatest common denominator of our understanding subject.) For such people, we might say that their very grip on reality depends on their control of language: against the hostile forces that would shake the foundations the comfortable protection offered by linguistic purism they have been playing for their entire lives according the use of the indicative where the subjunctive formerly reference for what have traditionally been regarded different, of course: the former marks a final succumbing as a rejection of the tolerance of uncertainty on the feminists' misguided interference with the forces of masculine pronoun as the neutral one; but, in truth, the sustenance of the singular nature of words like each, everybody, everyone, etc. is probably pedantry, changing them to plurals, with the added benefit of hierarchy of the heinousness. For instance, I have a very low tolerance for spelling errors and grammatical solecisms work: job applicants who are too careless to correct word machismo (but pronounce it, almost invariably, show it at all are merely genuflecting in the direction point out that bacteria also have genus and species names, adjudicated by a separate International Code of Bacterial Nomenclature. Some years ago a Congressman salmon industry, and he proposed to right this dreadful place, nobody but the official committee on nomenclature second, Salmonella is recognized internationally, not question in his invention, first prepared at Trader Whimsy [XIX,2,10], which touched on the definitions of men, that it follows them and delights to gaze on scene. As the result of observation over a period of many years of driving through or past suburban residential home, I have induced principles of street taxonomy, by sheer inference, that demonstrate that streets in the developer which, for some reason tend to be less necessarily apply in all developments, but I cannot findings or for his aberrant conduct in disregarding the Journal and Publicity Committee of the Professional surely a deficiency in English as a world language. receive junk mail, for I now know who is selling my phonological grounds alone the first elements indicate The foregoing is chiefly from the Oxford Dictionary and a shysters lawyer (a game cock clucks defiance), and the difference between a lady in the bath and a lady in the church (the latter has a hope in her soul). I am of Bilingual Puns? Here is one of my own spontaneous creations, uttered while dining at a French restaurant: white. I ordered it and it was served as a half white, in half lengthwise, served with a mustardy mayonnaise read backwards (with some anagrammatical liberties): County Board of County Commissioners, issued a directive vintage year for mixed metaphors) in which she said, long before the ponytail came into fashion. Pony is not a shortening of ponytail but an immigrant in its children of a Congregational minister, who also ran a grain Guinea that it was very difficult to maintain a stiff worked as a forester on The Coast for thirty years, fluent in the language. Here, too, there are subtle differences from one country to another both in the spoken word and in the written word, from the phonetic colorful and, often, onomatopoetic. In Coast Pidgin outrage over some disastrous contretemps is alleviated somewhat by the culprit's risible attempts to explain an ancient caretaker called Sixpence. Sixpence's main claim to fame was that, as a very young lad living in had managed to consign the whole of her insect collection Museum) to the bonfire which he had lit in the compound burning the rubbish from within it. This was the day soon to find out, had much to learn about the dangers Sixpence, dazed but miraculously unscathed, sitting slightly bowdlerized translation might read: I heard a sound which I took to be the hiss of a snake emanating to locate the reptile. Then the whole deuced building and it is a sad fact that both the writing and the speaking more modern schools for much the same reason, I suppose, One would hope that the evocative pidgin will be kept alive. If it is, it will be due in no small part to the efforts of a few of the older missionaries in the hinterland. I am not, alas, of their faith, but I had to admire the command obtained a copy of Genesis in pidgin English. It was of humor and it can lighten the darkest of moments. I have rarely known a situation so bad that a few words of pidgin could not make it seem a little brighter. had hitched a ride with an old Dutch missionary to a ceremony several hundred miles away to which we had both been invited. The roads were a sea of mud and now, with night approaching, we were stuck, finally and front of us thundered over the road where just the day before a wooden bridge had spanned it. Behind us, a colossal tree had fallen across the road, effectively blocking the chances of our doing so in the next twelve hours echoed out through the treetops. I swear that they No food for us this night, Father, I said sorrowfully. caught glimpses of a white soutane, some underpants, a string of rosary beads, a big black Bible. Finally, he it kindle heavenly fires within me right down to the man raised the bottle to his lips and we watched as the chimps scurried silently, one behind the other, it threatened to come apart he would have it rebound. As a contributor to the language and one whose writings could well afford to stand pat. As a mere word user, I must keep up with the times. Every twenty years or so I upgrade It was in that spirit of personal progress that I replaced Ninth. Upgrading is a pain; decades of accumulated notes, to the sterile new edition. Things were going fine the definition had been cleansed of its contemptible meaning and made tolerably benign. After entering the proper definition in the margin, Selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence, I sat down to decipher the new version: unctuously hypocritical. That is about as easy to embrace as a wet eel, about as useful as a punctured merely hypocritically hypocritical implies that something can indeed be less than nothing, as that theory was catechized him and bind his real persona hand and foot, then slyly stand an impersonator in his place? This is clearly a sign of unctuous hypocrites at work. Did the decriminalization in high places would any day rather be called hypocritical than corrupt. With queasy, frantic haste as one might Whew! Still intact: morally degenerate and perverted. I had been prepared for anything: hypocritical, demonstrating with that definition. It was a special word, unambiguously descriptive of a character's character. Users have been respectfully fussy about employing that distinctive word; it has not been slung around indiscriminately, as quintessential would describe ordinary slick operators mainly putting on airs. Hypocrites, even hypocritical hypocrites, are a dime simply characters who display contrived earnestness and advertise virtues they don't have, like the big smile and that we suspected that he is not what we had first thought-- or hoped for. What he desperately hopes to conceal is what Yes, I realize the living nature of language. I expect gradual evolutionary changes in word usage. But the sanitizing stallion's transmutation to a gelding. The old and new definitions are so opposed as to be in mortal combat. One might want to keep one's guard up when dealing with an unctuously hypocritical old boy, but that comes somewhat to spot. But unctuous hypocrites are not the sort who daylight. That kind of a job demands the talents of genuine in exchange for thousands of citizens' retirement nest eggs, merely unctuously hypocritical, or was he corrupt the conduct that he rails against. A particularly talented unmistakable terms. I first noticed it in the early 1980s, coincident with the apex of the looting of the savings and decreased the penalty for the crime. We should reflect that withdrawals from banks. Who can say what the federal government had up its sleeve when it softened the term narcotics mere substance abusers --new terminology that seemed were accused of shooting up on heroin and sniffing coke. The old illegal numbers racket was vigorously battled by vice squads across the land until the states got into the business. Presto! The wicked numbers game is a racket no more, but a respectable, highly promoted Lotto, the Who would have ever dreamed that pursuit, apprehension, in the war on crime? Now that we have discovered that we can slash the crime rate by simply excising the peck belong to a sizable group of verbs based on names-- names of people, brands, places, time periods, and so on. But although we can talk about proper nouns and proper adjectives, we do not have a proper term to classify such verbs. Surely they deserve to be classified, but as what? The answer is not an easy one, so before trying to put forward some ideas, let us start by looking at how similar nouns individual nouns that refer primarily to people, places, and time periods and that are generally written with an initial capital letter, Such words can also be termed that along with proper nouns there is also a category of proper adjectives. Proper adjectives, we are told, generally derive from proper names and are also usually written with an initial capital letter. In the main they refer to given rise to widely used expressions are normally written however, prefer to categorize these as common nouns or names. In fact, the name that originally inspired the word is now often merely incidental to the meaning and presumably These factors appear to strip such words of proper status. is written with an initial capital letter. Other sources are maintain that proper nouns are usually capitalized in English. Definitions tend to be gerrymandered to comply In such cases there seem to be few hard and fast rules: some dictionaries indicate a capital letter, others a small letter, still others give both forms. Here the dividing lines But rather than pursue that obscure tack any further proper nouns and eponyms), let us see if the proper categories of words really end there as grammar books tend to suggest. If we have proper nouns and proper adjectives, can we not have proper verbs, too? What about verbs such as boycott, hoover, gerrymander, pasteurize written with a small letter). Can they not be termed proper verbs? Once again, as far as these verbs are concerned, initial capital letter and the fact that they refer to something reasons, most grammarians would simply classify these names, the situation is perhaps not quite so clear cut. Brand names, for example, are also regularly seen in verbal form; some typical examples are shown in the following Quite deliberately, some of these have been written well with small letters, but capital letters are surely preferable for many of the others. It probably depends on how widely used each individual verb is. Whether or not a capital letter is used may often be a question of personal choice, and dictionaries frequently give both forms. cities used as verbs can often indicate a visit: you might in the course of normal conversation. But other more specific meanings can become attached to places: to much respect to the natural landscape or the urban environment); return. Hardly anyone is aware that the verb to meander Turkey. Place names and the like often become verbs Capital letters are generally used here, except for Capital letters usually seem compulsory for names of House and Garden, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Bitch Personal names probably constitute the largest category being almost insignificant. Other examples include to with a capital letter. Advertising copy, topical conversation, and song lyrics seem to be three very fertile sources the above list are generally found as verbs only in because English is such a relatively uninflected language, even hundreds of verb forms. The flexible nature of English means that verbs can easily be based on names, such a process is clearly hampered. Perhaps it is precisely because our approach to the grammar of English is still is time to give proper recognition to this feature. define. Nevertheless, two key factors for classification seem to be whether the name behind the verb is still relevant to the meaning and whether a capital letter is used. adjectives. There would appear to be no reason why the first of these defining factors cannot be applied equally Boycott having been forgotten by everyone except the etymologists and encyclopedists). In the majority of cases, however, the name is not irrelevant, and the capital is usually kept. Clearly, we need a second category for those verbs that still allude directly to the name and that are consequently often written with a capital letter. The only My cup was an old blue one I had bought long ago at The categorization of all the known elements of the notice that the elements could be grouped together in a chart that related their atomic numbers (the number of neutrons in the nucleus of their base isotope), but he also saw that this relationship grouped together elements with similar chemical characteristics. For instance, all the noble gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) the Table are related atomically and chemically, this neatness is not necessarily reflected in the names, let alone which reflect all the chaos, variety, whims, and even vanity Let us start with some of the more common elements, water and create. It is the most common element in the universe, and it is the most common element in ordinary, everyday water. In German it is called, very prosaically, but in a way that is not as crazy as it sounds: Sure is the German word for acid, and oxygen is likewise the Nitrogen is a little more complicated. The word comes referred to was nitrogen's key role in creating nitrates and consider some of the elements without which our standard of living would be impossible: the base and precious metals. A group of five metallic elements which were well known to the ancients and which also have in common much from their names is that they are abbreviations of a white sense). This root, or closely related ones, such gild, gall (a yellowish substance), choler, cholera, melancholy glass, glaze, gloss, glance, glade, glee, glow, gloaming, one to speculate that ancient gold was found by panning, Finally, a group of odds `n' sods: nickel (the devil's because nickel was considered a contaminant when found nickel (it is what makes stainless steel stainless, among other uses), it became a desirable metal; but its ore was found to have a gremlin in it, which turned out to be Although several elements are spelled differently on aluminum, respectively, which were known to the ancients. oneself, but others can name an element after you if you are dead and sufficiently famous. Or you could arrange to have an element named after your hometown or your named after scientists include Curium, Mendelevium, Einsteinium, Nobelium (actually this was named after whose nomenclature breaks the rules thanks to a trick its mercury, which is liquid at room temperature and since liquid metals have a slightly shady reputation, perhaps later were there letters. When and where humankind made its first intelligible utterance will never be instead of semantic values. Literati of the day decided ever since. Speech and writing, as inextricably joined as a paper's two surfaces, are different forms of the same, other creatures on earth. Yet, while the garrulous gabble continues everywhere, constant and unabated, writing still eludes half the world's population for whom marks spoken and written forms are often blatant. The symbols of any writing system have whatever phonetic value its users agree to assign to them, convention and consensus playing ways around the globe. English orthography's quixotic, Two books of recent vintage reflecting this ongoing fascination The Alphabet Abecedarium is the bibliophile's answer to the botanist's stroll through the garden, being an eminently and obscure arcana and lore about the letters of our devoted to a single letter, with a final one discussing signs for my tastes), while quotes from such diverse figures pleasant potpourri is in aesthetics: the letters' shapes and designs. Extrapolating on the theories of the Renaissance highly stylized forms they assume throughout history, from their inchoate inception in the Near East down to the letter forms being quite standard, the contents entirely normal. Why the letters are reversed is a puzzling enigma. that papyrus was costly is an undying canard. After a hundred in a dozen languages the price of papyrus is simply even the poorest peasant could pay for the papyrus on which his payments were recorded. Scraping writing off papyrus irreparably damages the surface; washing produces only a smudge. Errors were simply crossed out and written knew nothing of the sort. Missing is a discussion of such ancient and now defunct but decipherable writing rhetorical question. Only twenty years ago did those now exuberantly eloquent or infuriatingly laconic logos begin to appear on highway and street signs; in terminals (do wrong lavatories?); computer screen displays; and instruction notation, dance and circuit diagrams are replete with symbols scriveners' scribblings we are leaving the Age of Writing Succinctly stated, the basic, underlying question is, How do we (who use alphabets) read? Conversely, how did gave birth to the notion that these writing systems could somehow circumvent pedestrian alphabets, going as it were straight to the heart of things. Since then the myth ago were likewise pictorial representations of concrete alphabetic or logographic, with all its faults and foibles, its inherent inconsistencies, inadequacies, and inaccuracies, richness of police jargon. It also struck me as odd, in view of how inventive and amusing this jargon is, how For instance, fictional police are always talking about officer stopped in a speed trap will try to escape by murmuring will say, Were you in a job car? Officers perennially gripe about the abrasive and unsympathetic qualities of Similarly, no real police officer has, in my hearing, ever referred to his territory as either his manor or his might ask his pal, Do you know a pub called the Rhinoceros? on my ground. Returning from a foray outside his own station's area, one officer will say to another, Ah, we're the Super's on his way. In reality, police never abbreviate the Superintendent or He's a Chief Superintendent now. In conversation, however, the Superintendent or Chief Superintendent in charge of a station is almost invariably of supervising officers down to and including Inspectors By contrast, no one, of any rank, ever addresses someone address he will simply be addressed by name or, in more pm. In indirect reference, the body of Constables is such: He's a skipper on M division. Inspectors and Chief As for the most stratospheric ranks of all, ending with the Commissioner himself, they are known collectively as the that is not used by the police: early and late duties are your tour you get into your uniform, including your bonnet nightsticks), and your uniform jacket (not strictly never used by the police themselves). You also put on your PR personal radio. At one time this was called the the commonest of many names for prison, and the one almost invariably used by police. Anyone held in police custody is banged up. Nick is the universal verb for the act of arrest: the polite courtroom phrase I arrested and cautioned him is almost invariably a euphemism for the words actually spoken by PC to the prisoner on the street the prisoner has caused the PC to run, fight, or lose his you never arrest a body, or even nick him: you always get people (and the newspapers) getting it wrong: they always thing, however, is certain: however he came to be arrested, Many crimes are invariably referred to by initials, of life than the things from which it arises. For example, Larceny Acts, though they were repealed decades ago. Thus Actual or Grievous Bodily Harm). And there are many serious of these crimes it is likely that you will be in plain clothes. In that case you need to identify yourself as job means in practice waving under his nose a bit of plastic that is actually your warrant card, but as far as Chummy knows might be anything, and announcing that he's nicked. When he gets to the nick he will then holler for a brief and if the case goes as far as court, the brief will very officers have been known to arrest on sight someone they feel sure is at it and decide later on what they have arrested him for, sometimes even planting evidence. This is known whatever it is that is later decided upon. Or you may tell your pals in the canteen later that you had him off under the C [or whichever] Division Breathing Act or under the stitched up for theft from vehicles. This is yet another case where police and public part company: the media term fit up was, as far as I can ascertain, coined by the A police officer caught going bent will get into trouble. Whether or not he ends up in court, he will certainly be the subject of internal disciplinary proceedings. He will for this. The term comes from the word dabs fingerprints, which are taken from a prisoner by police only after arrest for fairly serious crime. And an officer who has been stuck should have a fine, firm shape sags, with all the stuffing leaking down into the bottom and flopping outwards. soon receive the official form warning him that he may be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Like all large bureaucracies, the police flounder in an ocean of paper, with a form for every action. The one for this warning of when the senior officer assigned to investigate the complaint hearing (which he always does), comes the even more given notice of the date of the disciplinary hearing. You can be stuck on for anything from serious misconduct possible for a senior officer with a grudge against a junior to stick him on for almost anything. For example, the PC may have been caught slipping unobtrusively into a restaurant or mump --a drink or a meal. Every PC cultivates his own special places for this purpose: they are his own preserve include scrounging provender from markets, the produce of company, which is to say actions like boozing with Records Office. The office itself has been given an impressive new name, but the old initials survive it.) So I might talk of your friends with criminal convictions as and newspapers always describe these friends of yours as either, Chummy will of course have a docket number at however, will still say Well, well, well! He's got a club number search his property for the proceeds of his crimes. If he refuses his permission for them to do so, they will get a W (warrant) from a magistrate or, in some parts, a Panel of experts bench of lay justices. Then they will go and Whether or not they find anything, they will eventually eavesdrop on their conversation, since policemen always talk shop, you will undoubtedly overhear some of the How long is it since you turned round and gave someone a good earful? And did he or she turn round and give But beware. You may find this particular speech habit to be like the creaking tree outside the window: it was always there but you never heard it. Once you hear it you aggression, and, as always, vindication is in the mouth of If you turn round and do it to me, it probably means audacious revolutions. Retailers seem to turn round wholesale on their hapless customers with outrageous demands. The Gas Board turned round and said I had to pay for If, on the other hand, I turn round and do it to you, it probably means that I am turning in heroic defiance, wheeling in righteous indignation, turning on my tormentors. take it lying down. This is known as Turning Round and The average day's listening to talk radio will provide course, the Political Revolution. That is not, as previously thought, the overthrow of one faction by another but describes those occasions when the minister reverses his aggravated duet (or should that be roundelay?) between herself and her habitual sparring partner. After an epic exchange of personal pirouettes she delivered the knockout creating, in the true sense of the term, a circular argument. The letter s sometimes appears at the end of a word to which it does not properly belong. Examples are a little heard in the United States, chiefly from country folk, or wrote, a long ways off. Today in newspapers, and especially in advertising, one often reads (and hears) a savings Sometimes it appears that one s is suggested by another. was a stickler for details of grammar, punctuation, and usage. But he is quoted as saying, For God's sakes. The intrusive s frequently makes its way into place Green had only one farm. For some years I spent the addressed to Gun Green Farms. An example I particularly reproducing similar names or as a place of publication. the proper spelling, with the English in parentheses below. though I am sure that my friends were wishing me to be but my faith in the author was shaken on the very first enchantments of the Middle Ages. This horror, ruining for citing my favorite example, a book called Manuscript My copy, carefully preserved, has the jacket, twice proclaiming spending the early years of my life there, having a name name never caused any difficulty. That was before I tough it is for most nationalities to get their tongues insisted on addressing me as Miss Your Soap, subtly someone who truly tried to get it right, but the effort involved putting his tongue out at me and concluded with an overly explosive final consonant; but he got all Japan most of my contacts have, without invitation, settled Strange to say, it is in the US that one of the really weird aural hiccups occurs. It usually happens in restaurants or hotels or any of the other places where professional Now that conversation may sound unbelievable, but in the West coast, particularly. So often, in fact, that I have been forced to assume the new identity of the more acceptable things. How can they hear it that way? It is not as though even named a town after him. To be honest though, I think course, they should be shorter than what they stand for, case. For example, does ct. mean count or court? It can depths, or at least possibilities I had never entertained. I heads. She is bright, articulate, and ten years old. Why are some streets called Beloved? She asked me the other Right there, she said, pointing to the lettering on Context, I replied with all the adult stiffness I could muster, and that seemed to convince her. But since then, Saint --Elm St., Main St.? What about the Bulldog in the Manger (Bldg. Mgr. in rear) I see listed in apartment Twp.). But maybe I had better stop here before I lose for more than half a century. The advising body, the recent years been made up of four categories of member: broadcasters [practitioners]; bureaucrats [facilitators]; academics [linguistic experts]; and representatives of the wider community. The committee is generally held in high regard but ran aground when four out of five of the Their action raises two questions. The first is a general a community expect or tolerate in the language its broadcasters which has had a useful and influential life for more than fifty years suddenly reach a crisis point at which a significant proportion of its members are prepared to gamble on an incoming General Manager's reassessment To take the general question first, let us begin with the maintenance of standard English pronunciations as those then believed to be most suitable for broadcasting. Standard English meant the King's English, and in this recommendation of an internal committee set up to consider Over the years this committee has vigilantly assessed its utility, several times reviewing its aims and procedures are: to advise the Corporation on its use of Spoken pronunciation, grammatical usage, and style; and to prepare as necessary. Its primary goal has been the provision of names, place names, foreign words, words from specialist vocabularies as various as music and sport, the Church and medicine, etc. Daily lists of words that are likely to give a broadcaster the conniptions are constantly being added to a huge database which is electronically available thrust on it by the public or avoided public controversy. It has developed and sustained a public role for itself, as its numerous correspondents will testify. It has watched It seems reasonable to assume that it is valued by the intrinsically valuable its deliberations, is in its communication is the receptivity of a new generation of broadcaster that arcane and irrelevant in a world where information matters more than its expression. A second has been the maintenance which gave it a certain impartiality and independent force, and the circulation of its findings was the responsibility assistant who was the servant of the committee and who reported to that officer. Most recently it has been chaired by a senior officer, alternately the Head of Radio (who has rarely been able to attend meetings), and the Head party), but neither has been able to deliver. This has left if unintentionally emasculated. But perhaps the revolution thousands of dollars in fines from abandoned car owners has won the support of the police chief. [From a story by Martin of VERBATIM containing the long and very amusing article demanding to be told the etymology of various words, and I am not at all surprised that he should have shown irritation with those who had not even taken the elementary be answered very briefly. When asked for the derivation of a word of which the etymology had not been worked out, he adopted a rationing system: he did the best he could with the resources available in his study in the space of half an hour. The result was then communicated to his correspondent, whose letter would then be dropped This was necessary because otherwise his work would in such a cavalier fashion, and he must have accumulated an enormous correspondence, virtually none of which has with great presence of mind, on hearing of my grandfather's death, recovered the letters which he had sent him. Both sides of this lifetime correspondence are now in the who has made arrangements in her will to bequeath them Apart from these, all his vast correspondence seems to have been destroyed, apart from a few stray items which have descended to me. I say destroyed because I recall having been told many years ago that after his death his two sons (my father and my uncle) spent weeks tearing of his frustration with words inevitably creating meaning in the minds of literate readers and his search for an audience together will inevitably make some sort of sense and conjure meaning to video images that move so rapidly and have so little intrinsic activity (as opposed to action, of which there is plenty) that no one can imagine what they're about. There is no time for reflection and savoring, no desire to be bombarded again. Nouns are often paired, but in ways that guarantee incomprehension. For instance, in one of his famous videos, a haddock (or some other large fish) was a light bulb. Now, of course, we have been given the key to this complicated metaphor. Thanks for enlightening us. how people can take random words sung to apparently random Stoat has successfully broached the barricades of words. be interested to know that in this part of the world, South may be set in a wall or be part of a bridge or some such construction. I have attended the ceremony, which takes about two hours and involves crossing the local canal by me the script which is read at the start of the Beating the Bounds. Once young boys had their heads bumped on the boundaries of their parish lay! Now one of the members swishes it against the stones occurring along the route. Beating the Bounds was intended to establish boundaries The bumping of boys' heads had to be suffered even when There is a great deal of history attached to this practice. I took some photos at various stages along the route when I walked with the Court Leet of about half a dozen death and which is presumably an expansion of the original at their office in the Great Western Road: in their added that the kittens might come with the old cats parties; supposed originally to have been turn cate cat's foot Also, live under the cat's foot be under said of one who enters into a dispute or quarrel with bad bowlers. (Elsewhere rook is defined as a cheat cat of nine tails a scourge composed of nine strings cat's sleep counterfeit sleep. Cats often pretend to sleep to decoy their prey, then suddenly spring on it. cat sticks thin legs. The allusion is to the sticks with strength: a wager is laid with them that they may be pulled through a pond by a cat. The bet being made, catted and the end thrown across the pond, to which the cat is fastened by a packthread. Three or four whip the cat Tailoring, to work at private houses, as down on the face of youths before the beard grows is a term that all male readers will be familiar with. I never I gave my own recollection of a popular satirical summary other readers might be able to come up with more complete might be interested in a new and improved list. This list vary in some details but agree on the most important Daily Mail Read by the wives of the people who Daily Mirror Read by the people who think they Guardian Read by the people who think they Today Read by the people who think they Sun Read by the people who don't care The pub is named after a bird common in the Broads, the We do not mistake it for a hawk, a plasterer's board with in French). On the other hand, we do not use it to cut wood. Our forebears used to hunt it with hawks, and they I was taught at school that Hamlet was referring to unlikely to have used. Besides, what other kind of saw in the course of our toilet (and in the toilet, too), but four and a half yards when she started school. I was taught that five and a half yards made up one rod, pole, or perch; a cricket pitch, ten times that made a furlong, and there were eight furlongs to a mile. Of course, these measurements who had no schooling; nowadays, when education continues till well into adult life, even to pensionable age, counting many smiths in olden times. Smith does not necessarily refer to a blacksmith but to a worker, possibly in metal White, Silver, Copper, and., as in the case of my grandfather, [Undoubtedly changes in the values of measurements can is an English dialect. The subject has been debated for at least four centuries but, as the editors of VERBATIM must be aware, a body of evidence suggests that the regional dialects in the number of words, meanings of words and expressions not current in Standard English, in its strikingly different pronunciation, and in the loyal English, with importations from many other languages. rustic) is to perpetuate the notion that it is the speech of uneducated country folk, an idea still endorsed by snobbish preserve the ancient language as an artistic medium. I cannot resist the temptation to add two fine examples known is the old established firm of Cape Town undertakers were intrigued and probably a tad confused, too, for I enjoy VERBATIM so much and thank you; but I really miss the Paring Pairs game. Please consider reinstating Pairs --I have to make them up, and after several years of doing so, my mind ran dry. Several readers offered contributions, but I felt that they were a bit off the mark. If I am again touched by the muse, Paring Pairs may the reverse can occur. A World War I Punch cartoon showed new arrival: Och, mon, it's an easy language. For example, ye three, and ye gie one back. It's an easy language. a college degree who isn't in jail or under indictment. Cynical? Racist? Nevertheless, an almost infallible guide These are lashings to cinch the shrouds in closer to the mast, to allow the yards a few extra degrees of swing. ever encountered was a dentist who, early in this century, period, there was a dining establishment called The Celibate Restaurant. The management were not at all interested in the sexual practices of their clients and, indeed, hoped only to cater to the many yet single people encomiums like, The best sea stories, and then, The best historical novels ever written. There are fan clubs Dictionary at the other. That is tedious. Had a Sea of Words been published years ago, I would have been most grateful. Anyone would have needed lexicographic succor. as well as boxing the compass, the sails of a full rigged all well explained in this book, including pictures of how tacked, an incredibly complicated and difficult procedure. only thing that I have not been able to find in medical Three decades after the reawakening of feminism, no field of scholarship remains unexamined by feminist analysis, as an effort to deconstruct the patterns of thinking that work at an elevated political level of grave potential foundation of cultural paradigms constructed by socially sanctioned ways of thinking as she confronts the politics a vehicle for ideas, but rather a material entity which may in fact shape those ideas, Mills states that a further aim of feminist analysis is to draw attention to and change the way that gender is represented, since it is clear that a great many of these representational practices are not in the interests of either women or men. Her book establishes describe sexism in a text and, through a process she names feminist stylistics, to deconstruct the way in which point of view, agency, metaphor, and other features of the text are unexpectedly closely related to matters of gender. For lay readers and students who are not familiar with the prevailing concepts of mainstream linguistics, stylistics, helpful explication of current theories and positions in these whether meaning can exist in a text itself or is more the result of a negotiation between reader and text; whether male writing can be distinguished from female writing in terms of formal linguistic constituents; and how gender interacts with reader positioning, that is, the ways a text models of text in which a piece of written material is treated as if it existed in its own right with little develops a feminist model which extends the parameters of a text into its surrounding context. This model, she asserts, makes space for the possibility, and in fact the necessity, of integrating notions of gender, race and class, analysis, and indeed into the definition of the text itself. strategies of feminist stylistics to expose the workings of throughout are taken from widely diverse written materials, newspaper articles, advertisements, and popular songs. a text can be analyzed for its representations of gender-- to reading that enables a reader to look beneath overt content unrecognized by both writer and reader, nevertheless reinforce and help to legitimatize stereotypical notions about or in some cases men, Mills cites, for example, some familiar proverbs. A woman's work is never done seems to describe a natural state of affairs. The message is hard take responsibility for inventing it but merely calls on preexisting woman complains of having too much work to do, Mills writes, this phrase can be used to suggest that the... difficulty of the conditions of her [specific] working life is not as important as the general fact that women always have too much work to do. It might further suggest that someone who has, at any given time, completed all the Also examined are effects of the grammatical convention norm. One result is the use of generic words to refer to males only, of which Mills gives ludicrous examples like the headline on a news story about AIDS prevention among For all its lively examples and provocative insights, this is not a smooth text; it tends toward the prolix, partly because of the author's determination to cover all bases. By the same token it succeeds in floodlighting the protean ways gender is characterized in texts. In giving readers These are four small stones, ranging in size from that of an egg, to the largest, the size of two fists. One stone has a map inscribed on one side and is now referred to Most of the discussion in the book is based on this on two flat surfaces. Author Chapman provides a transcription acquired three (which three?) of the stones from the Chapman ruefully glosses as fakes. He seems to regard long considered as fraudulent, although not by everybody. Stone. We are told (p.2) that the article was neither published nor returned. Prof. Hall published it as a Chapman to visit him at his home, and in a lengthy meeting most matters regarding the runic characters and on many features of language. But if Chapman had hoped to convert the stones, he did not succeed, for the Professor never deviated from his conviction that they were modern. He agreed, however, to keep in touch with Chapman and to answer whatever questions he had. Chapman states (p. ii) not ordinarily perceived by him in most scholars), and he had not been willing to provide a complete translation, for his time and energy were both consumed in a number of projects views of how long it took to provide answers to runic questions and seems to have, in some cases, expected replies by He compared the text of the Memorial Stone with the of the sagas, which contain so much fictional and fantastic sagas on which he based his conclusions were mostly factual and dealt to a great extent with navigation, an area in which He seems not too much at home in matters of language. relieved to be able to report that linguists had spent considerable The book is, despite these strictures, worth reading, and judicious readers will probably separate the genuine from the dubious. The illustrations are pleasing and informative makes an interesting attempt to account for several features the presence of Danish and other words in the inscriptions, together with runes, etc. One wonders whether Spirit Pond and he also redefined the field itself. Now another author takes a revolutionary approach to wordplay in a handsomely Making the Alphabet Dance delves into the fertile substrata words as collections of letters to be manipulated. His book shows the abundant possibilities in the field. Having edited Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational than anyone else. He has witnessed it evolve through the work of many people, he has written many articles about it himself, and now he has traced its development with and demonstrates the relationships between them. The text flows easily from one topic to another, peppered with examples both serious and humorous. Forbidden Letters, Obligatory Letters, the first chapter, presents several To academe he went with her (illegal and quite rare); It made the children laugh and play to view a lamb in the origins of written language. He discusses palindromes patterns. For instance, word graphs represent words as letters connected by lines. This word graph links the letters Word Fragments, the chapter that follows, presents similar ideas, but it involves parts of a word instead of the Transforming One Word into Another. As he sees it, all deletion, and rearrangement of letters. One type of word ladders (originally called doublets). In a word ladder, two words are connected by changing one letter In one type of word network, all words of the same length begins with a discussion of the last word in English and examines forms that rely on positions of the letters in the look ordinary alone but become unusual in combination. The chapter opens with word squares and variations, like the compound word square invented by Hairy Partridge: The chapter on Number Words explores the fascinating collide. Many of the resulting forms are ideal for evolution. Although the field is complex, both expert and One of the great joys of recreational linguistics is the techniques or better examples illustrating old ones. Such contributions can even be made by the diligent newcomer to the field; it is not always necessary to serve a long apprenticeship mastering past results. A penetrating study of metaphor as illustrated chiefly English words, though, from the notes at the ends of chapters, one infers that it was intended as an informal text. The reader gets the impression, though the author, for interested parties from other disciplines. It suffers from one severe, reprehensible shortcoming: it lacks an The book is short and simple, but not simplistic (a it is divided into fourteen brief chapters, the titles of which will give a good indication of what they are about (for a change). Each chapter concludes with Notes and Suggested Further Reading, and from the fairly sophisticated that this is a lightweight work. The chapters are headed: the text. Space does not permit a more thorough investigation spent with this book will prove informative and rewarding. minds. From a lifetime of undisciplined reading with innocent pencil in hand and malice prepense in mind, I have gleaned a harvest of what I am pleased to denominate As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing. division of this sector, thanks to his description in surprising that on at least two occasions the Board has Finally, turning to her toilet, she rested her face in her hands, and gave a sort of groan. In this same vein, the nations when, in describing Mount Etna in Book I of the housekeeper's shoulder and relieved herself a good assured that it was, Defendant (aside) commands himself since to them pecker means `courage,' as in the phrase when he screwed his tenants by letter. He was simply money, she was not speaking of pleasures deferred. In Dick to attend a party that night, We shall be half screwed before the morning, is his dismal sales pitch next morning, even if he had to knock up the Archbishop him in readiness to perform the ceremony. In Great that all through the book, there is an unmistakably to reassure himself that it does not contain a typographical at closet biographical matter when, in Chapter I, he things together, or, later in the same chapter, when he tools in the open air. College freshman still read with although the identities of the latter are not divulged. Apart from your balls, can't I be of any use to you? how he sends his native boy up a palm tree, where he they had both silently picked their nuts for a season, perfectly reputable words which, having acquired sexual hilarity, even when read by a person of only mildly Tangles like this still interrupted their intercourse. Pages later (Chapter XXXVII), it is acknowledged that He, too, felt that this was their last free intercourse. Apparently from then on, it was going to have to be (Chapter V), we are informed that the heroine placed certain restrictions on their intercourse, a limitation that might have been more usefully set in that same flimsy and frivolous erection, while in The Mayor of phrase can paint an astonishing picture for the reader. Consider Dickens' sharp image in Bleak House (Chapter back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.... Alas for perfectly lovely words that acquire pejorative pansy became a derogatory epithet to describe an effete pastime to pursue the quest for Red Pants examples. May good cess befall all such quixotically misguided readers! One caveat: never assume blithely that an odd word or suspicious phrase is as lubricious as it sounds. vows, I will chop them off with my whinger, and one feels quite let down when he learns that a whinger is as least a dozen times. It is the one that goes, Dah! I think I first bought a recording of Muskrat Ramble My memory is rickety, but I am sure my first recording jazz trumpeters. Later, I got another recording of the the first time I had ever seen such an obvious typographical by kids in junior high.) Some time later, I got still another version of MUSKRAT RAMBLE, with still another version of the title. This time, it was MUSCAT RAMBLE. That, I thought, was really absurd. Not only had they left out the R; they'd changed the K to C. Now, it made no sense at all. On the other hand, I reasoned, if there were, in fact, some sort of cat called a muscat, perhaps it wasn't so outrageous. I looked up muscat in To name a ramble after a variety of grape seemed to me preposterous. I was young and, by today's standards, used to sweep across that damned airfield with what seemed an absolute determination to crystallize our bodies. One day when the wind chill factor was nearing those days, people as a rule did not take much care of phonograph records. Usually the records were taken from their jackets and loaded naked in stacks, where traded static electricity. I was shuffling through a stack liquor an' the birds sing bass, and in the arrogance of my youth, I was certain that nobody else on the airfield turned thief. I can't remember how I did it, but somehow The only thing I know about Gilbert is that I find him epicurean dish and saw that I had no sherry on hand, I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of muscatel that I thought might be exactly right for my sauce. It the booze of choice for a great many wines. An old college friend of mine who celebrated his twentieth couple of years ago, tells me that when he was on the skids and riding the rails from drunk tank to drunk almost certainly the original name of the tune. My Gilbert had ever seen a muskrat, and it's even less likely that they or anyone else has ever seen a muskrat doing anything that we would be likely to think of as partially webbed feet, and do a good deal of swimming. end, has almost certainly been slugging down a sweet wine of high proof, and the odds are pretty good you for the means to get another muscat fix. Now he is on a ramble with his hand out and a pleading look in his It is the same reason most of us, I assume, have heard, He's in the hospital with prostrate trouble. Prostrate what we get. The r fits in naturally. I got a strange has spent most of his life playing clarinet and sax with asked him what he thought the original title was. He There you are. I find a muskrat ramble difficult to imagine visually. I picture muskrats wallowing about in the mire and paddling sluggishly through the water, but I wouldn't call that rambling. On the other hand, a wino with an empty paper bag on a ramble to maintain Maybe not in the same class with all the birds sing VERBATIM, it is a bit mysterious to me that the singular Women in Language, [XV,2] may bewail the insensitivity of the male. But she betrays her own elitist insensitivity which objects were present and named, had to add the not present. I have lately been reading accounts of the exploration of the western and northwestern deserts of the effect absent necessities might have on the frequency words relating to water, were unusually frequent. It is, I suppose, likely that people with little money must hungry will dwell on thoughts of food and the thirsty on drink. Here was a chance to quantify such things. I decided to make a count of words relating to water in find the word water used fifteen times. Ten pages on the related words stream (twice), well (twice), pool, presence of water; the rest are in contexts indicating its River as the stream purling over its stony floor or, quoting some bygone poet, brightly the brook through along. Perhaps present water called for some stylistic celebration. Two hundred pages further on there is less exuberance in the circumlocution that fluid so terribly scarce in the region, and in three other references and may, like other explorers, be useful as a source to psycholinguistics, I decided to make a larger sample of watery words, choosing the straightforward journals compounds), no page being without at least one example. relating to water, not necessarily indicating its presence. course it doesn't indicate the presence of water. Even words which are usually of more general reference are brought into relation with water in a text like this. words and phrases directly associated with thoughts of water and reinforcing the sense of obsession include pool, springs, drainage hole, clay hole, flood, channel, spreads itself over the plains, and so it ends as a creek The other name, native well is, as a later explorer points out, a misnomer. He believes native wells are fairly shallow sand, which, when hollowed out by the natives, appear to be wells. This sort of misnomer run, and native `wells' are merely tiny holes in the sources of water. Soaks are shallow wells sunk near the base of an outcrop to tap an underground reservoir. they are depressions on the surface of rocks, often with a rounded bottom, where stones are often found, suggesting that the stones have something to do with in our speech of English country words, the glens and streams (alive, anyway, in the journals of explorers), instance, would describe an inland creek rather well. (not he says!), but here we give examples of his third case only, where there should not be two parties justifying suppose them to be the rule rather than the exceptions. It is a game that is like fishing in a barrel, but more stimulating mentally. I am not picking on the following that Neigh has been dragged into going to the church whether the marriage had secretly taken place between Sometimes I wonder about the extent of my own vocabulary, the country, his return did have a dramatic quality. with his right hand lifted and a dirk in it aimed at that scene to go by we would never really know, and Give me my grammatical games any day to a crossword The high honor bestowed upon me is also a recognition possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom all the other languages and countries along the routes for hundreds of years, the language is spoken today by the United States, where, like the bagel, it was leavened in bed to find a vampire at her side. Quickly she holds words that have become part of our everyday conversations, poor souls who inhabit the world of the ineffectual, and each is assigned a distinct place in the gallery of roll call are seen in the timeless distinction between a loser': the schlemiel inevitably trips and spills his hot sober thought, that has been handed down from generation soul of an expressive people learning that life is but a charity ball. It happens to be the third most famous diamond in the whole world, she boasted. The first is may find it useful and interesting to consider a book, offers nothing regarding language, so its review here is ancillary to the main function of VERBATIM. The feminist responsible for much of the national sentiment against feminist writers are reviewed by women, usually feminists. ignorant of or unsympathetic to the issues raised, if not biased against them, or because the editor is a woman. Because writing an unfavorable review of a (bad) feminist books are often unjustifiably praised, as was the case that this gives her the cachet of authoritative scholarship, For the most part, the book consists of a rewriting of history, from the dawn of time, with the purpose of women were responsible for all the important contributions to the advancement of civilization (as the development by men. Miles suggests that such domination is a recent in (primitive) religions and matriarchies, right on she gets so carried away with her thesis that she suggests human evolutionary biology but for the very notion of counting (in order to keep track of menstruation) and, (and, presumably, accepts) another source which holds that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts. If you believe that balderdash, pyramids were built by tens of thousands of slaves. Recent speculation has it that they were not slaves neither the weakness of age nor women's infirmities are any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by to wonder what his authority might have been for such a vivid description. It is even less comprehensible how a modern researcher could accept it and have the effrontery many similar distortions, convenient omissions, and the sum total of human intelligence and creativity. was the first to use the lyric to write subjectively is startling. In every field, women too numerous to contributing to the welfare of their societies as they where she worked both as nurse and doctor, becoming checkered past was soon to be replaced, chiefly, it fangs of wild beasts rather than live to flout [sic] This rewriting of history is punctuated by an array century which identified a woman for the days preceding, `impure,' Miles has the lack of taste to write the following:. mythologies, religions, and cultures, noted the marked borne out in the cultures of the people. According to treating them essentially as chattel, it does not account for a similar treatment accorded them in other cultures, it is unlikely that he could have ignored the treatment of women in the modern reflexes of the cultures adhering religions are allegorical and that there was no real seems a highly debatable issue and one far too complex for this discussion, though we can certainly trace a diminution in the role of female divinities (or divinity) and progeny. Other debatable aspects are the questions of whether the debasement of women is a reflection of the theology or the ritual, whether the scripture of any religion should be understood allegorically or literally, and so forth. If there is something wrong, it behooves us to get at the roots of the problem, not to flail about wildly, for only after the source of a disease has been at the symptoms in a misconceived notion that alleviating jeremiad, males are viewed as the enemy, and are so with exhortations to engage the foe and a strident call we now know all we are ever likely to know about the past, someone digs another hole and unearths (literally or figuratively) some ancient artifact: one day it is a fragile scroll, found in a cave near the Dead Sea, that anthropologists (once again) to revise their guesses hominids. Most of the relies from the past are gone forever, destroyed by the plows of countless generations of farmers, reduced to rubble by erosion, by conquerors, fire and flood, and just by time. Many, we may hope, have not yet been found. The interest in man's forebears we have been trying to discover all we can about the origins not of men but of man. Strange to say, however, about their own prehistory, I have not heard of it. Perhaps the fascination with man's past grew out of the obsession with ruins evinced by Romanticism; certainly, close behind, for the excavation of the supposed site of just as well, for only by the means available to modern science are we now able to preserve some of the artifacts results not only receive considerable publicity but can reconstruction of ancient languages. Even the remnants documented than others; but for most all we have to go on are a handful of tablets here, a few inscriptions identify the language, let alone draw any conclusions regarding its structure or meaning. Perhaps one day make do with what we have, which is precious little. About languages that had no writing system, we know nothing at all. But some very clever comparative linguists, more modern tongues. In some instances, ancient languages enabled us to read the myriad writings of the ancient have today about their civilization, which lasted for Many years ago, a linguistic scholar counted all of the languages then spoken of which he had evidence. exact count is unimportant and, at best, spurious, for it is extremely difficult to establish uniform criteria for what distinguishes dialect from language. Then, too, Dutch, which, in turn, bore only a remote resemblance rapidly runs out of hands and must resort to fingers and toes, for after years of laboriously categorizing about ten. Ingeniously, certain differences between families were explained by various phonetic shifts that (inexplicably) took place in one language group but not in another. Although certain other languages were geographically nearby, it was impossible to establish example, is not classified as being in the same family At the conclusion of this vast exercise, done without the aid of computers, there emerged a pattern of familial relationships that linked together languages spoken, among languages, it is best to avoid using an older chart; for the same reason, it would be wise not to less important in the classification of languages than structure and grammar. It is important, too, to note that writing systems are irrelevant: for instance, Polish one another rather closely in some respects, all use different alphabets; and early examples, utterly unrecognizable were written in cuneiform, quite suitable for writing on soft clay tablets with a pointed stylus, and hieroglyphics. It would be nice to think that while linguists were working alongside the archaeologists who were providing the raw materials. But only rarely did they collaborate had long since disappeared from view. In many other quite understandably take a dim view of tearing down their buildings on the off chance that the remnants of archaeological team examines the cleared site for its archaeological significance. But there, as everywhere else, nothing can interfere with progress and, regardless of the finds and their importance, the archaeologist must eventually yield to the bulldozer. Notwithstanding, investigations can provide some insight into civilizations theorized about the earlier languages that had given rise to those attested. In other words, based on what documented, they tried to imagine the language that they sprang from. In most cases, they dealt with words and functional elements, creating what are called reconstructions languages descended. Nonetheless, it is convenient It seems only natural that once an original language, westward, and northward, being modified by the influences modern manifestations which we categorize into Germanic, reader (like me) to assess the validity of his arguments, language (and its congeners) were carried along by the spread of nomad pastoralism. Using the evidence available, indigenous development. Pottery finds can be interpreted to support either the imposition of an elite culture he sets forth his arguments in its favor. Unfortunately, the presentation of his linguistic argument, where the author is clearly treading on more speculative ground than in those parts dealing with outright archaeology, where he is on more familiar territory, is disorganized and repetitious. It is difficult to place all the blame on coherence. The result is an argument that is persuasive Nevertheless, good books on archaeology assimilable can tolerate its shortcomings and is not overly concerned with clarity, and the program is simple to install, requiring little suspicious when cranking up the system: in the descriptive text that appears on the screen, the word text you are reading, returned to the beginning of the paragraph to see how some of these words would fare. I looked up the word preceding and was, after a brief moment, asked to type in the word, which I did. The definition for the preposition and three for the verb (participial) senses. I called up the synonyms for the antecedent, anterior, foregoing, former, past, precedent, The way the program works is this: one uses the cursor to highlight a particular word for which synonyms are desired. It is similar, in principle, to finding a synonym in a synonym dictionary and then looking up its synonyms screen was the same list of synonyms but with antecedent missing, and preceding had reappeared. If all this is too complicated to follow, let me summarize: you and G. You look up the synonyms for word A, and you clever computer ploy, but it does not provide a particularly synonymy in language does not yield to the commutative other. Perhaps the Proximity people thought that they had got round that little problem by giving the same definition for each of the items in the list; but we know not necessarily always equal A), an ineluctable fact of If a relatively limited access to a synonym dictionary is likely to be of use, then this package may be of service. It works with a hard disk or with a set of received my copy; it might have increased.) It also has a few neat features, like suggesting a few alternatives if that can be called upon at any stage. Also, if you All in all, for a relatively primitive system, it is not too bad; but you would have to be in love with your computer books of synonyms available (especially The Synonym more than three times the number listed in any other reached if one counted all the permutations and combinations; fewer actual words. Readers can judge for themselves is a classic, probably the first on the subject to appear in a scholarly journal, though there are other informal references to family language, some of which are documented what one family terms a child's misinterpretation of a many interesting entries in Family Words which, as far as I know, is the first documentation of the genre. will have his hands full if everyone responds giving War I, trenches were characteristic also of the Civil trench. The soldier in charge would command, after each firing, that the rank on the scaffold step down and be replaced by the rank that had just reloaded, thus alternating ranks and sustaining the rifle fire. That war, like others, produced disgruntled veterans military service. They moved westward to start a new life. The population increased markedly, with corresponding the need for saloons. Most new saloons were small and many bunched up, in ranks, if you will, calling for whiskey. Many of the thirsty crowd were veterans, as the original English version of three books she had bookstore and asked the salesclerk for a copy each of there a term for the errors that creep in while translating my own formed over sixteen years of using one. An odd sidelight on this came a few days after reading the article. Definitions under pet end with Petting Party (coll.) a gathering for the purpose of caressing as an I fear that one of his paragraphs is a load of brass word might also have been used for a receptacle near the guns where powder and balls were kept. However, this receptacle would have taken the form of a wooden box or something similar. The idea of a metal stand carrying a pyramid of cannon balls so delicately balanced as to be affected by the tiny differential expansion of brass and iron does not bear thinking about in a the obvious one, I believe. Anybody who asks Why a brass monkey? is probably not aware that brass monkeys they come in sets of three, one with its hands over its eyes, one over its ears, and one over its mouth: they were said to represent See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak are not that numerous, and the rules are very consistent. Every Japan veteran has his list of favorite mistakes. to let someone do something. One day during a university frantic and obtrusive dictionary work, handed a colleague Magazine called On Language. Considering the circulation contemporary English in the world; that places more his utmost to be accurate; he must try to select subjects likely to be of interest to his readers; and he must be writing on his day off: I cannot put my finger on why, but On Language always strikes me as an excruciating earshot, as the Lexicographic Irregulars, an amusing reference the first time or two it was used but now beginning to cloy. More often than it might prove of between prescriptivism and descriptivism. But are not many of us guilty of that? We are descriptive of the reader agrees with him is another matter, as are the questions of his accuracy, which arise fairly often, and that of the suitability of his style, which, as far as I know, has not been broached before. It ill behooves about language but find myself stymied: I get the feeling my way to the end. Notwithstanding the valuable role the subject, I find it hard slogging (or, as he would contains a selection of letters from readers. It is those that are so sorely missed in his column. True, there is an occasional mention in his column of a point raised Magazine prints a comment from time to time, but an important feature of the books is their inclusion of far most influential writers on contemporary English, and it is essential that his books be in the libraries of all who are interested in the subject, regardless of their alignment with his opinions. For one thing, he documents to many working lexicographers. From the sometimes cavalier manner in which he treats his subject, one which this review was prepared; unfortunately, there was no proof of an index, but the publisher has assured rather essential ingredient of a work with this title. doubt about questions of English usage. It has some problems, if you want to be sticky about things: on p. with the capital M and C is, essentially, meaningless to those familiar with the conventional symbolism used usage book, most reasonable writers have taken a stab at writing an entry under a heading that seems a likely place to look, then have provided a detailed index. Not etc., in an entry so headed, but for absolute constructions Electric shaver for women with delicate floral design some lightening up, but I am hard put to agree that book would have us believe. Fun is fun, but those who might rely on such a book are quite serious about the information they are seeking, and it is unfair to play fast and loose with their sincerity. A sense of humor about a subject is born of a feeling of security about it, but security is the one characteristic often lacking But of what use is a long entry on spoonerisms? And of what use are the interminable examples, for instance, to three pages? More than four pages are devoted to ought to end in an exclamation point). The article on Place.) is a good one, but, at six pages, its utility is spelling pronunciation these days; and so with many of the old shibboleths. Of what relevance (to usage, notwithstanding not just any johns.)? That is not, strictly speaking, a All of which is to say that the book is an interesting Its only real faults are its title, which belies the content, the cutesy headings, and the lack of a truly detailed sufficient detail. As a reference work on usage, it is far Linguistic Terms Used in This Book, followed by a list of References, sources associated with specific entries, in further examples of linguistic pollution, observing months a year. But the savants have passed barman, no word in English to describe that particular, special sort of pride that one feels in the achievements of one's canon [sic] unless metaphor is taken in its broadest given, many not readily findable in standard works of reference. The rationale behind referring to them as lost arises from the author's observation of an unfortunate state of affairs: because of an increasingly widespread course, but unaccountably, they are not the focus of point. In any event, it is hard to discern, from the arch style affected in an attempt to make dull facts interesting, little or nothing we do not already know, could easily imagine, or for which the author offers no explanation. Examples of the last include spill the beans, square the flash of useful wisdom, much of it pretty well covered by other books of this type (which seem to be proliferating). is the information that because the area of a circle is dimensions of a square with the same area as that of a given circle. But that does not mean that such a square Often, an entry offers nothing in the way of etymology Some speculative suggestions, as the derivation (or are sheer nonsense. Not all entries contain misleading, Dialect geography, a branch of dialectology, describes work proceeded space during the 1930s, largely under as everyone ought to know, does not include Wales or major works that resulted from the Survey, The Linguistic People generally seem to find dialect study interesting. born in the village and who speaks with a delicious but oi. When I was teaching there, the explanation some of which are clear variants, others quite different which is easy to follow, a list of suggested readings, and the names and addresses of the several institutions more intensive interest in dialect study. The maps are clear, each occupying a full page, and the word information brief but not cryptic explanations are provided of any information that might seem to be out of the ordinary. I have only one nit to pick with the authors. In their various areas where a particular usage was recorded, more accurately an isogloss is drawn to connect sites speakers using one or the other live in very close proximity. `word,' to describe the line on a map where the terms what isobars and isotherms are to weather maps, what The authors are not alone in getting this wrong: it is In those countries where dialect study is undertaken, many factors militating against the strict maintenance of older dialect boundaries: the standardization of terminology services, radio, and television; the establishment of other, lesser factors at work, but taken together, all tend toward standardization, especially as the older speakers die off. In some respects, it may not be long before certain aspects of dialect geography will be largely historical. The importance of dialect is emphasized This book is a good introduction to the subject (in This is an interesting, useful reference book containing in length, each dealing with a different aspect of the These are supplemented by an extensive Bibliography the material is trivial, but nonetheless interesting for that. It is not at once apparent why the book is styled that respect, at least, it does not resemble books in the Oxford Companion series. It contains many photographs appearance of the book but accomplish little else, unless appearance of Hart Crane standing in the middle of a It is difficult to make any sensible connection between the lives of authors and their creations. A handful might have led colorful existences, some are objects of interest because they died early, committed suicide, were related to (other) famous people, and so forth; their output as do the creations themselves, and in certain cases one is probably better off not knowing This book appears to have been diligently researched to most libraries, public and private, large and small, [the tenor] brings the opera to its climax in his final when Scrooge says I will not be the man I must have would be known to more people than two of the words that skins as slang for `dollars' dates from frontier days when trappers used animal skins as currency, and is The thesis of this work is that most legal communication learning more. After a short introductory section, usage. The latter half will have more appeal to the average lawyer, unscholarly primate that he is; but ought to be, will be entertained as much as edified by the eventful chronicle of the forging and tempering of the tools of his trade. Of all specialized vocabularies, alluring. For that reason, and because they will relish the author's excoriating criticism of the shamanistic words will find the book as a whole not less fascinating The first half is a piece of scholarship par excellence, summary can begin to do it justice. I shall try to reduce its gist to a few paragraphs of my own words. those ancient invaders from the continent who managed having legal significance but were driven, along with strike (motion to), landlord, freehold (in land), and them place names and none of legal import, outlived while contemporary English was spoken by the indigenous about two centuries after the Conquest, with English words with gusto, transforming and anglicizing them to lend grandeur and subtlety to the vernacular. The principal language of the law and of legal education, law student. But the use of English spread and, by the learned tongue, incorporated it almost completely and records, lawyers cling to and defend against all comers unnumbered words and phrases in that ancient that they enrich the legal vocabulary with precision, against the use of foreign tongues as a kind of black their rights. Every man, they said, ought to be able to understand the law and act on his own behalf. In (written almost entirely in derivatives of French or later one was eviscerated before it went into effect by an amendment allowing the continued use of customary when the failure of a syllable lost the cause. The of rules and technical evasions. This was the day of the ingenious conveyance, the computers of the infinite, people (with a few eccentric lawyers concurring), is the finely turned jeweler's tools of his craft, not the But, says the author, the steeling grip of lawyers on their stilted language is in fact the result of fear. said are condemned by the author as tricky, ducking, claim to precision is their traditional use, not worth saving. He also takes whacks at those old chestnuts threat of boiling in ink, lawyers might relinquish all these; but they will fight to the bitter end and finally `the fact is,' `although,' `considering that,' `on the contrary,' and `that being the case,' with many shadings The lawyer is also habituated to doublets and triplets like fit and proper; force and effect; give, bequeath reprehensible, for they are understandable to ordinary list of such terms, many from the computer's memory bank, often imparting false profundity and reassurance but under cold analysis shriveling to redundancy and confusion. Never mind all this, the lawyer will cling The reader is told that there was once justification to serve for the rest of his natural life..., ...to based on the civil death of a felon and also upon the state of civil death assumed by a monk upon his abnegation words are so universally employed in deeds and wills that the absence of natural might cause a reviewing lawyer to question the authorship. The criticism is nonetheless valid, though this rejected phrase might come again into play where some sort of life, as after place of ordinary ones under the pretense of precision, it seems to me that the author is wasting ammunition which juries are quite comfortable, and lawyers are as aware as everybody else that they are imprecise. a person who is honest and sensible, is an image that can be called forth in the mind of every man. Substantial than driving the first nail and a little less than driving the last one, and it survives as a useful tool to prevent judge is telling them to be damned sure the defendant express concepts that cannot be drawn with straightedge thus investing such terms as accident and proximate cause with a false precision. Accident is indeed elusive very useful to discover a purported definition in a case of his own jurisdiction decided upon facts resembling gibberish for which you can get a definition at any supermarket as rather severe. It embodies a concept Fall (where we sinned all), certainly; neither can we require that the safe fall directly on the plaintiff's again, are free to move within a fenced area. Lawyers against precedent only as a false pretense for fake distinction, with repetitions that centuries ago attained that with the exception of constitutions and of statutes States; that the law existed before written language contrary and continues to thrive in the printed decisions; until rounded out by precedent; that precedents may searches for as recent a decision as he can find, in a jurisdiction as near as possible, on facts as close to his client's case as possible, never overruled or modified, As an instance of the gross imprecision of precedent to a question in a life insurance application as to the use of spirits, the court held the policy valid. But as I court's reasoning was not at all based on a definition holding that to void the policy the misrepresentation truth it would not have issued the policy. No insurance ground, said the court. An effete northerner might challenge the court's finding that the insured's frequent the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Redundant the facts, a lying witness may avoid a perjury conviction. English, repetition, tradition, precedent, and requirement, escrow, holograph, joint tenancy, tenancy in common, equivalent in backyard English. Phrases like mutually Brevity is a saving grace, but only if it coincides and precise and intelligible; in my opinion, this distinction How truly does the author say that every mechanical spread before the lawyer a feast of gustatory delights monster quarries to be fitted, with no other purpose than to encumber lean documents that already perform of course including the plural and the masculine the bilingual duplication, and payment by the word; certainly say that, spurred by their own vanity and their clients' the pinnacles of pomposity without having to resort words, the author maintains, lawyers are masters of from congressmen, cabinet ministers, and television the abstraction that gave it birth. Therefore, words must be durable, it was believed, lest a change in a word change the meaning of the law. A subtle concept, durable without writing the law had to be rememberable, man's mind is as much of a fact as the state of his digestion; A word is not a crystal, transparent and is intended to impress laymen. Sometimes expectations ranging among the national bulwarks. If the contract prepared for the client lacks the usual flourishes, support of a language of the law distinct from common of the law as the prophecies of what the court will this hold up in court? Indeed, this reason overrides all others. The judge is but another lawyer, seldom one of the more erudite, and he might be more amenable to the old familiar tunes than to start minimalism, states the complaints and answers stating the parties' claims and denials are read to the jury as part of the instructions, can be quoted by the lawyers in argument, violence, the injuries severe, the pain excruciating, Surely lawyers, no less than other artisans, are entitled to their little conceits, a grace note here, a furbelow Just as any speaker may, for the sake of euphony (or in the knowledge of all lawyers who are not far more scholarly than any I have ever known. The writing in falls prey to none of the ills of turgidity that he so those few cases with which I have ventured to disagree, I have felt that the author's argument was unworthy their language. Still, there are always the `passionate the author, who will fight on in the courtrooms and in the ivory towers, at the bar and in the barrooms, In his Preface the author disarmingly tells us that the text. But so provocative is the text itself that I indulge in only this one footnote. In this writing, legal means `pertaining to the law,' rather than `lawful'; General dictionaries show pronunciations, it is true, rarely with its precision, and almost never with both by the largest number of speakers (those who do not pattern of the educated speaker in the northeastern pronunciation as an archaic or obsolescent term (unless success. But this is not a book of descriptive phonetics; best English he can, and the selection of these two out. There is some confusion in the key, where the spelled characters represented by the phonetic transcription When I worked on the setting up of the pronunciation was more like a full schwa than a syllabic. Indeed, though it is a matter of degree, I find it difficult to pronounce a word like organism with a syllabic Z\?\ at is transcribed in the key; but the text itself shows a full schwa, which indicates that perhaps Wells vacillated type (making it difficult to read words like Pilling, so marked is different from what the spelling might and language environments that affect pronunciation appear in their appropriate alphabetic places. Each spelled sound is discussed at the beginning of its alphabetic In sum, there is a wealth of information succinctly not in style reflecting the varied articles that appear meant to demonstrate to the world that the writer is an academic; this book reflects more the style of a classroom teacher, a mixture of objective and subjective for at least twenty years. His book has not been written freaks. Presumably, much of the book's contents will be as fresh to such readers as it is familiar to anyone obliged to go over certain common territory. It is three of those criteria. Having come across reviewers the pages of VERBATIM why I had called two chapters is not meant to be read in that way. Consider Professor enough, but generally, with increases in population and refinements in civilization, there arose a need for additional designations to identify the members difficult to do so. Surely that opening sentence, as it avoided the ambiguity of themselves. People usually naming philosophy than an increase in population or not allow the duplication of personal names within a deprive him of his soul, but the practical result was that everyone was conveniently identified by a single of a group. This was not necessarily a more refined belief in this case was that a child named after an qualities to be passed on to the child. That belief is of course still common today, though for that matter prevents the use of a relation's name if the person grandson a Large because he happened to be a generous the early term which came to be known as a surname. decidedly modern. Surname was indeed an adaptation isn't. Given name is clearly preferable if one wishes to distinguish between a name bestowed by the parents last. First name is useful when discussing western his book (and to each page) as I find it. To me it would have put it, Popish saints. In a very general He was not trying to tell us that names like Increase, religious association. Indeed along with a slew of native have seen the name as having religious associations, which dominated US birth registers until fairly recent than merely biblical names. It is that which characterizes cannot pretend to do justice in one section here to a could be done by way of literary style in his Names as extraordinary as it is infuriating. The thinking behind recently came across, responsible for a little Dictionary it was usual for a dictionary to be in alphabetical order, she said that with such an arrangement readers priest won't give it to you. To that I can only say, as rather recent origin. On the evidence of the examples who came to our chapel greatly amused us by describing heard, something that inevitably occurs, especially are spoken. Taking it for granite is a case in point. When as a little boy I listened to my parents talking about breeds of hens, I would certainly have written replaced by a rather indistinct u sound, so that the of the worst pun I ever heard. I was sitting with a friend at the far end of the room. He wanted to convey mouth his message. But the other failed to get the gist of it. After he had tried three times in vain, I reproduction is sold at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, suspect, a street, to distinguish it from its namesake that the quality of his work made his name a symbol songs automatically to performers or recording artists or both, not all of whom are composers or lyricists please be him. Unless she wrote it, however, it was English, especially in the United States. No book on current English is complete without some account of a scholarly work. This impression is reinforced not only by the publisher's being a university press but Introduction and constituting the book's main text is the author deliberately refrained from using this title, People without lexicographic training who undertake additional risk of plunging into a discipline that requires English linguistics, etymology, and lexicology. According not. That he is, indeed, a literary critic and folklorist is demonstrated not only in the generally intelligent and informative Introduction, but in two short appendices, distinction it is supposed to draw is hardly significant, scholarly derision as being both facetious and inaccurate. To worsen things, the author is not even consistent they do not fit into either category. For example, takes up two pages), misspelled place names to indicate `pussycat,' is cryptically explained as a term of endearment that the author (and his publishers) had not enough I once told myself that I would not look any further policy is unfair, of course: one should not be prejudiced he has a tiresome taste in quotations. People are forever and should not be excoriated for it by a dyspeptic, necessarily. Alas, I should learn to follow my instincts. find the word or phrase he is seeking by looking up a meaning, would be quite useful. I have a number of here. The way printed versions of such books function The main problem with them is that they rely on the compiler's ability to anticipate with some accuracy Within the relatively limited amount of information be difficult to anticipate the user's mind set with sufficient kind that I have tried to use have frustrated me: I knew how to spell it) we should not have to resort to reverse dictionaries. Trying to be fair, I cooked up a test or two. The first (to which most of us know the answer, I suppose, but that makes it no less legitimate) right sides of a boat? One cannot discover the answer by looking up left or right in an ordinary dictionary, to hang around yacht clubs to get the answer. I had book, so I thought Dr. Welsh might have concentrated PRONUNCIATION, I looked there, to no avail. (It is I cannot find it in my heart to fault Dr. Welsh for his failure: he probably tried out his ideas on friends were looking for. I am convinced that there is a way to do this kind of thing, but a book is not it: the kind of associative information required to find even the age, and other factors; including a large variety of I might add artificial intelligence just to make it to be specific) and invariably illustrate the literal senses of idioms, which are by nature figurative: in other words, the illustration for raise the roof shows someone lifting the roof off a house. Get it? Pretty puerile stuff, you might say, but don't lose sight of According to the evidence offered, he has been using about idioms. I find it odd that children need to be this material I should be disappointed, for there are his hat into a ring. What ring? What king of ring? If going to explain something, explain it all: doesn't hit explained? If an average is the total number of times a batter hits a ball safely divided by the number of times he is at bat, even if he gets a hit each time, that been done a little more carefully. the book is pleasant might very well encourage youngsters to think about the aid of the Random House Dictionary I have compiled different meaning, involving variations in spelling heteronym different same different homonym same same different was close to a close. Challenged by her article, I class. Below is the list of heteronyms compiled by and his list of heteronyms to serve as a memorial to I should like to submit a polite euphemism in frequent bus stop or in a shop, one would politely say to the Pygmy tribe who frequently got lost in the jungles of the mnemonic he lists for pi is cumbersome. The one either his version or the numbers themselves and is certainly less tortuous. It works as his does, coding as a chemistry major. Chemists, like physicians, are faced with learning long lists of things, in our case trivial (that is, not systematic) nomenclature for various most cases there is little in the structures of these these, we had, All altruists gladly make gum in gallon yields the correct structures, if one can manage to projections used to represent their configurations in A different kind of mnemonic is used for remembering words or foreign equivalents thereof. But I think it autobiographical portrait by his style. Rather, that of all the things an author might describe, all are extraneous and hence his only possible passport to literary immortality: that I have but one asterisk for my country (p.22). It reminded me of a little jingle that I read years ago It goes without saying that the duty of the writer is to explain. In the modern world, there's no denying best prose, therefore, is prose that imposes order. thus is life made simple. Nothing, it is clear, could be they do so, unfortunately, at the risk of confusing their readers. To start with, their writing is often rhetorical or even evocative. It contains statements, consequently, that allow varying interpretations; inevitably, bound to produce an unpredictable response. Furthermore, or wonder. The result is to arouse a sense of mystery. further. On top of all this, we have the unhappy fact that eloquent writing is indeed sometimes memorable, certainty. He or she does this, it is evident, in two thoughts in the reader. Second, he continually supplies answers. In short, he maintains command, investing most writers are in reality not omniscient. Not yet, at any rate. But nevertheless, it is within the province a specific point. This, surely, is sufficient. After all, omniscience can be cumulative. Over time, manifestly, up to total omniscience. It is as if in recognition of this, perforce, that increasing numbers of writers are prose. And it is no accident that the English language wit: first tell them what you are going to say, then tell them what you are saying, and finally tell them what you have said. A sound practice, unquestionably. But it was observed that readers could be effectively the thrust of the sentence was communicated in advance. going to say before he said it. In a sense, the readers all of these. More noteworthy, some had reinforced or, on the other hand, such indispensables as unfortunately, should be noted, many had gone so far as to advance the systematic use of but at the beginnings of sentences. the beginning of this sentence); the topper but does not in reality indicate a contradiction, for it always appears at the start of a sentence which is, truth be, tops the previous statements by pointing unerringly illumination. Let's be frank. It was the logical force there is not only affirmation by demonstration (ergo, in truth, in a very real sense) as well as verification by substitution (that is to say, in other words, in least, refutation by capitulation (it might be argued, hand we have substantiation by association (similarly, invalidation by differentiation (quite a different matter, possesses the capacity to transcend logic. Who can deny it? We have, happily, induction by intuition, the inference that goes beyond mere fact (one cannot presence here of higher truths: look at ratification is impervious to criticism. Certainly it is no passing fad, dependent on vogue words, for despite its infancy colloquial expressions like for starters, likewise, for people might think otherwise, it definitely does not which through repetition has lost its imaginativeness. coming into use every day. Hence the recent discovery, It is true that there are rational writers, seemingly that one sentence follows another. But the question words not only introduces a sentence but also refers to the previous one. The effect is that at every step were. And by looking backward at all times, it need of interest. Naturally, nothing is more reassuring to a reader. Nothing, in other words, is more conducive little is being said. But this objection, however, word, they seek not merely to persuade but to convince. declarations. They restrict themselves to deductions, basing them on references, citations, or precedents, may, perhaps, list variables, or, on occasion, identify options; at most, they will establish parameters. But, it must be emphasized, they do not express anything. They delineate, which is something entirely different. them. But make no mistake about it, that is enough. For, clearly, although it is the writer's duty to explain, surely coming, withal, when there will remain, truly, a suspicion or shake off a conviction, when clearly everything will incontrovertibly support a thesis or conversely stand in direct contrast to it, and, overriding all this, there will as a result be not the slightest doubt in our minds about one inescapable conclusion, being nothing more to say on the subject, as it were, we therefore will no longer hesitate but rather will necessarily feel compelled to state the obvious. Indeed, kind of book, but if one is a writer of Valentine's Day then order the book directly from the publisher. My it is very likely true that he is the most prolific was taking a holiday) in The New York Times Magazine Times --he is a fearless commentator on every aspect only an army of admires but a cadre of contributors, Bill partly because most people do and partly because my direction at Random House. Although he is not a professional linguist, Bill knows a great deal about find his arch approach unnecessary and a bit annoying: these pages, and I can only attribute attrition among collected here, the anthology is virtually impossible to review. It doesn't, of course, deal with every aspect interest in language and who has a library of worthwhile language books in his library. This is the sixth, to Moreover, the books are attractively set out, which adds to their readability. Even the title design is It is a pity that the articles are not provided with the dates of their publication, though it is not difficult the plug, I realize that the piece must have appeared brackets subscription rates in effect at the time of only is Bill not reluctant to admit his errors, he may be one of the few who literally profited from their fashion by linguists and with unusually irresponsible brings just the right, literate, human touch, often funny, ever lively, and always friendly, informative, writing this book is quite simple: to draw together reading that I have done in the past few years. In reads for amusement. There are many extremely abstruse cases, this would be a merciful deliverance from the a pretty boring writer himself. Also, it would have been useful (and not necessarily munificent) to have provided such a book with a reasonably replete index. another to black English, both rather disproportionately trivial in the general scheme of linguistic theory. linguistics, like computational linguistics, mechanical reflective of my own interests, or does not reflect the author's readings, or, probably, both. Well, one cannot have everything, and, as I sometimes maintain your students. If you are a student of linguistics (in any sense of the term), you might find it convenient as a survey text for linguistics, a work that is sorely needed. The linguists who write books seem invariably least. Surely there must be a teaching linguist out there, somewhere, capable of putting together a cogent, of linguistics but its various theories and their interrelations. been called to a type of conflagration known as the find in the sort of reference books that might be expected as aids. My invariable reply is that the only genuine way to increase one's vocabulary is by reading, reading, fact, but it is significant that the people who ask the reached some proficiency in language before becoming I can get by in a couple of other languages, chiefly in afford the time to improved my control of other languages learn what I can about English. That is, of course, a purely personal view and should under no circumstances study of foreign languages. But there is a difference between learning about them and trying to gain fluency many languages in which I have no speaking or writing might be for aesthetic reasons (to read their literature, other reason. The study and acquisition of foreign languages, living and dead, is both intellectually and practically rewarding. By the time I graduated from partly, perhaps, because of the paucity of conversational the first one to encourage the study of foreign languages. them and learning them: learning a foreign language truly fluent in a second language have been brought up in bilingual (or, sometimes, trilingual) situations. I raise the matter of foreign languages in connection particularly useful in establishing an intimate relationship been told that English is a difficult language to learn, but, as a native speaker, I have no personal opinion acquired English relatively late in life and whom I than most native speakers. That person is an exception; English at the same time who has difficulty expressing what we all already suspect, that there is a spectrum of natural ability for language, with the gifted at one latter I exclude pathological cases. In that connection who has difficulty learning to read and write as being rather than to the (possible) failings of a teacher or, more often, to a simple lack of interest and motivation reading household or have acquired a thirst and opportunity are those who were given the opportunities of being to assign weekly essays and to mark them for style as well as for grammar and mechanics. For the manipulation craft, and the acquisition of any craft cannot be accomplished writer by sitting around thinking about it or by saying In this connection, it is not the quantity of vocabulary When people ask me about increasing their vocabularies, these days, though, as far as I am aware, his books are in print; in any event, they are available from the which I originally read it (which I think was Modern Library), but as a teenager I was terribly impressed must assume that while the art of the original remains, one syllable (so to speak). It is consequently a model of clarity as well as of simplicity and an abiding lesson to all who think that increasing their vocabularies It is interesting to note that one of the most successful like It Pays to Increase Your Vocabulary. In other knowing how to use the language one already possesses. before attending a cocktail party and then awkwardly are best advised to read and write, and to do both as much as possible, perhaps trying to emulate an admired to be plenty of good ones available everywhere. Attending those vary so in quality as well as purpose that an individual's needs might not be met. Finally, they should not view editors as their tutors, submitting their writings in the hope of critique: however good good teachers and are usually focused very specifically An investigation found the employee occasionally slept No detail is too small to overlook. [From an advertisement The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded sought ways to predict future events. Below is a small sampling of the strange methods employed. See if you can make the Verbal Analogy by selecting the appropriate and new technology. Taking new technology into unexplored realms of the earth is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I hope to repeat many times. [From Underwater In the nineteenth century, the Age of Euphemism, the word unmentionables designated only one spoken of in polite conversation. In modern dialogue, curses, and biological functions. How clever it is, though, that metaphor, the great facilitating factor in the changing of word meanings, has carefully camouflaged debutante and intended wife of Tom Weed, Republican Girls, the treat for this morning is avocado finger bread so thick. After finishing off the sandwiches, innocently mentioning the unmentionables in no less `devil.' The allusion could be to a hand slapping the sense might be implying the bread is so hard to digest testis `witness, testicle.' In the final analysis, a man can only witness to his virility by his testicles. The on the evidence table' and of detest is to `hate to the and assigned its present meaning from the similarity flower is aptly named, since it grows well in profusely designates a space so small a person might be required mist `manure, shit, dung.' The seed of the plant was Jeepers creepers is nothing other than a euphemistic farting bird because of the noise made by its being whatever else they have been called. While it is the function of metaphor to conceal the unmentionables, it is likewise the pleasurable business of etymology Best Place In Town To Take A Leak. [From an advertisement It began innocently enough, without guile on my part. We were traveling on an interstate through one of the great teams of the Golden Age of comedy. The lie came to my lips just as easily as to the lips of crawling caterpillar and said glibly, Look. There's had an unconscious recollection of seeing, long ago, connection for years, and prefer to believe that great snakes, and such were Squirms. I didn't disillusion to the nearby tourist attraction, a lush, tropical paradise shell, over most of its body, and great long claws to dig in the ground. And there, climbing that tree-- The feathery thing is Implicit. And the vine growing beside it is Thorax. It's sort of like poison ivy so don't touch. You'll break out in a rash. The flowering a Septum. One variety of Septum has been genetically I was delighted to answer questions about butterflies, are a Sheer Audacity, a Wretched Excess, and a Cistern. they usually hole up in the daytime; there might be one hiding there in that patch of Philanthropy. The orange one is a Flirtatious Glance and, look, the little which the birds flew free while visitors strolled in a smaller one there is the Short Shrift. There's a flock Sander, and the drab little creature making those sad Utter Gall, a burrowing marsupial similar to the Unmitigated the Apex and the Pharynx. Back at home, sitting on the terrace listening to the evening sounds, I would Grouch lived right over there in that hedge of Presumption, close enough attention. Or perhaps it was my habit of feeding them industrial strength Martinis before I to my spiel, then presented me with a card. It said: over the country are innocent children, naive relatives, friends and families about the wildlife I showed them addict, I can't wait for my next fix. Come on down, y'all, I want to take you out in the yard and point out Veritable Shambles right beside the front steps, and by the fish pond you can spot a Receptacle, an Incipient a Smote, circling in the air. I think it's hunting an Apparent Hoax. See, there's one now, crawling under correct language reminded me of a television interview marks made the coffee suspect, the way a real estate agent will call a closet a room. Since I didn't feel like drinking a tepid beverage, I walked until I got to but I would argue that these places are only hurting called, call into question the very words they assert. There are those who argue that it is simply a case of against it. The effect is generally unintentional, like finest ingredients, read the label on one ice cream brand. This seems like a simple statement, what the consider the implications of the label: most other ice kind of wording as a polite way of discrediting their language is such that the Federal Drug Administration still contain a lot of it. The increasingly common the investigation should really go beyond the supermarket: advertises, We sterilize all our instruments, is it not hinting something unsavory about other establishments? giving a result opposite to what is seemingly intended. surprise! over a drearily foregone conclusion, for example. But consider when a little child tells his father, We're going to surprise you with a birthday defeats its purpose. A clue may be offered by dramatic opposite effect of the intention. Maybe this is where all three ironies, depending on the intent, audience, without saying covers up the obvious need to say it, dislocation is unclear. Does the common capper to a brief business conversation, Let's do lunch sometime, Let me illustrate the intricacies involved: I recently received a card from an academic journal acknowledging holding it for further consideration. The last sentence not submitted this essay elsewhere. Is this sarcasm? Almost certainly not. Yet once again the implications urbane assume and of course finesse the real meaning The message is all the more urgent because its mere submit the same essay to more than one journal simultaneously. the unintentional reversal. In a recent advertisement because of the noise of the spectators. Through the miracle of television, all of them are crowded inside the car with the windows shut, resulting in utter silence. of the cup, where it stops. Suddenly someone inside the car sneezes, and the ball slips into the hole. It is new car is not really quiet? That quiet is not always what we mean? A friend of mine once tried to sell his old car by parking it in his yard with a sticker that no one showed any interest, until a passerby told him This story shows that interpretation is all important, as in cheap meaning `inexpensive' to some people and meanings in certain contexts: for example, I wish I reader. Last week, I was stopped at a traffic light AFTER STOP. Since I live where right turns at a red light are permitted, first I did not think much about it. The sign just seemed superfluous. But then it occurred to me: why was the notice there at all? I stared at the sign for a moment, and I realized that the words in a way implied their opposite; that is, a missed two traffic light changes, and cars started to indicate the road with the least traffic. Savvy motorists soon realized that everyone took the route indicated the real significance of the sign, and so left the best labyrinth of possibility. In literary criticism, deconstruction audience's interpretation. There are also moderates ideas are true up to a point. Perhaps a better way to put the situation is that language is potentially unstable, some idea of the real meaning to achieve its contradictory faculty lounge, one of my hazier colleagues got up to inadvertently separated from any covering letter that it has no name on any of its pages. Would the author of Easy Does It (about translating proverbs) please stand was, of course, President Ford's and the Republicans. were possibly invented merely to confound eavesdroppers. menial labor so her captor (s) can make car and rent female. Context determines whether the event occurred contribute food bought in the prison store for group among prison gang leaders to redistribute the property by (someone). (To confuse eavesdroppers the active All the slang words collected here reveal aspects of prison life, which is never pleasant. Being behind would want to experience. To avoid the opportunity to collect your own list of prison slang words, obey cleave to the De Sola dictionaries of abbreviations. Moreover, there are omissions that are criticizable transport of goods by road. Customs agreement covering by the way, is not listed in the book as an abbreviation other hand, some entries that have historical value however, we learn that the `Public Works Administration in his Preface, users would be at a loss to determine navigation and ranging') is in outright error. The entry In short (excuse the pun), for one reason or another better dictionary of abbreviations than this; US users the US market: in the circumstances, one might expect make some effort to cater to such a promisingly lucrative number of syllables (five) and letters (seventeen). given our information is that it's not probable that there for the reviewer to chide the writer for not having written the book he would like to have read. What a aspects of his life is just the sort of exposition and analysis that this reviewer once considered writing medical history: juvenile scrofula, poor vision in one asthma, a stroke with transient aphasia, and finally disease with congestive failure. Add to this an account the patient is clearly revealed. By his own statement Judicious use of primary sources and an aptitude for useful and intelligible to a reader unfamiliar with the whose actions are severely limited by a psychiatric way of life and behavior. These were only transiently medical ideas about melancholia relies chiefly on the poor writing. From the standpoint of communication, one thing, they provide relief from what could otherwise be a terrifyingly condensed onslaught of information. notice how compact it is. Succinct style presents no problem to readers, for they can reread a passage as often as necessary to assimilate it. Those who attend speaker who reads aloud a paper meant to be read in a journal: it is almost impossible to assimilate its information of his audience can readily detect lack of understanding and, if a good speaker, can take an idea and phrase it in another way to make it more readily understandable. one assumes that the subject under discussion is of some interest to the listener), the insertion in speech serve a function; as with everything else, overdoing `satirize'), nonetheless seem to fall together with great frequency. Serve a function is such a collocation phrases like eye contact, lack of understanding, member of his [or any pronoun, name, or article] audience, English as a foreign language are aware that a breakthrough may still be far from a native speaker's. It would matter. I venture to say that there is hardly anything more soporific than being given the meanings of expressions giving the meanings, but the interesting and useful the fact that the chemicals used in making felt hats transparent to us, others needing explanation. Thus, though properly a simile, needs an explanation; play with the behavior of opossums. There are quite a lot of opossums where I live (not, I hasten to say, of the after they have been killed on the road by a car. A with attributes that would give play possum a mysterious button that identifies it with the six adorable daughters or, just to make it more complicated, a corruption of with a very difficult area of language. My only criticism first appeared in a certain work, giving the citation. which riles many people, I submit that it is a revival, (like what a word means or what is its etymology) as does not know the date of the Flushing Remonstrance is like asking a person his name. Some people have those who, despite the extraordinary pressure of being audience, are able to dredge up obscure information in response to quizmasters' questions. But the accession that require rapid mental calculation or analysis. A very large percentage of quiz shows consist of testing spend a lot of time avoiding (though we can scarcely help knowing them). Yet, there are some who, believe over this linguistic dross: within the past few weeks I [See, elsewhere in this issue, the review of Have a are for some people an attractive way to learn things while playing a sort of game, testing either themselves the reader is asked to define the underscored words sorry, though one could think of a lot of regrettable actions for which vasectomy would be a feeble excuse. reader's knowledge of gay, black, or carnival slang, only guess where it came from), some of tautological one are common knowledge to another. The challenge is slightly mitigated in many instances by offering recall the name of the game). But that is not critical, who want to test their students' knowledge of different aspects of language. And while much of the material those into the conversation at the next cocktail party of the disease? Should your teenager's interest in a In everyday speech, the vocabulary of social science badly worn coins convey little information to the numismatist, little information because their meanings have been obscured by repeated and varied usage. Charisma is not apply and do not use it in those rare instances when it does. Charisma's unfortunate fate is the subject Today, it seems that charismatic figures are everywhere. word once mean? And what difficulties do its current favor specifically vouchsafed by God, a grace, a talent. miracles, healing, and speaking in tongues (divinely Church's early years, these gifts must have captured a common divine source and that none is as important Those using the term in its sociological sense, however, works of the eminent German sociologist, Max Weber. used the term in his sociology of religion and sociology least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual different from authority based both on the impersonal of tradition (the oldest type). Historically rare, founded new faiths or, like Napoleon, won the unswerving inappropriate figures. Even though the word's sociological capacity to inspire devotion and enthusiasm, according figures charismatic devalues the word and strips it of How They Got It! How You Can Get It Too!) mentions charisma's other side, one our commentators invariably repulsive figure described as charismatic? In rare instances, an individual not universally admired, like Weber wanted to compare aspects of charismatic authority He did not distinguish between villainous charismatic distinctions, he felt, would muddy sociological comparisons. than he. His authority derived from intensely personal inspired his followers and revolutionized his country. all about irrationality, and we have little reason to indicated above, the irrationality of the more spectacular charisma teaches us that great villains and great heroes can have strangely similar effects on their followers. as well as selectively. Like other words from the lexicon if used indiscriminately. The season's hottest passwords Seas, so he speaks with some experience and perspective. as well as history and heritage. In addition, significant earlier work) by thoroughness, objectivity, and linguistic indeed blanket the country with richness, color, and texture. Other notables in this necessarily brief catalogue compiled several state gazetteers and a still influential in this field can be found in bibliographies compiled the scholarship in recent decades, but also because it is not a formal academic discipline, at least not in the United States. There are no departments of toponymy, degrees are awarded in these fields. (Whether this is also true of other countries I cannot say. I have read of all academic disciplines, and from many walks of life. With academia's standard rewards of promotion and tenure not as readily accruing in this work, the the hands of true lovers of the subject (amateurs in the etymological sense, and dilettantes). What they say and write I have found to be characteristically stimulating and rewarding, not plagued by the turgidity branches of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior. In a move that, from a lexicographic and foreign. The United States Board on Geographic decisions and issuing official gazetteers. This may be the only example in which an aspect of the linguistic maintains a massive national database, the Geographic variant forms): cities and towns, lakes and rivers, schools, parks, and cemeteries. The names themselves, along with precise locational data and identification from the poles and are farther apart nearer the equator). states. Since it was intended to establish a standard, and maintained according to carefully prepared procedures. places), and by the National Institute of Standards forms. The highest estimates of the size of the English and identify all of the current place names (the Place Name Survey of the United States, under the direction just this), still remaining would be hundreds of thousands importance to historians, genealogists, and the like. pronunciations for each name, with sensitivity to local that those who undertake the creation of a complete and highways across the land as a separate project. as only a first step, albeit an ambitious one. The editors of the book identified and acquired several government of text) was integrated, sorted, and typeset in about six months. Automated as well as traditional checking volumes, each listing the place names of the states or is as comprehensive as possible. It is published both about the various eras and cultures that were a part for example, towns are the primary division of government and is primarily administered by the town governments. name of the town that they live in. As the name New in the states is also revealed in naming practices. For a convenient way in which people can refer to a regional level. Mail, of course, comes to a post office that handles rural route delivery, but those who receive office, and hence do not immediately associate with it. When asked where they live, such folks are more allow us to correct and expand on the entries compiled to a broader audience. So we have not examined the readers can more readily allow the author the convenience realize, most of the names have yet to be recorded, much less described; the greater burden lies ahead. to see the fight at the end of the tunnel, perhaps in ten to fifteen years. All the while, of course, just as into being, others passing out of use, each reflecting of our cultural memory. The publication of that part still, we hope, give new impetus to this enlightening, often fascinating study by providing a foundation on South Central States, Southwestern States, Great Lakes it myself. Those who used the term mentioned it so Neither was the term cited in any of the many references that the word was used in the U. S. Navy during the `thought, idea' but could not bridge the gulf between without doubt, in the western desert when a disconsolate In the matter of the adoption of English in preference easily; German would be easy for other colonials to learn, since it was basically similar to English; the to be the primary meaning of the word, whose suggested In the underworld, apparently, it came to be applied, record straight. I asked one hundred friends, students, My list was also merely indicative of the terms currently as well. I could have listed the other terms too, but fact, I checked in another dozen English dictionaries, point (as they are, I might add, on many other etymologies). historical linguistics, the author of dozens of scholarly sense whatsoever. Surely they could have consulted However, some of the words he indicates as listed by ubiquity to the fact that they were part of the body that originated in English or are they loanwords in `senseless chatter, needless noise, committing oral librarians, and critics and reviewers of truncating means `Peace Be Upon You' and it strikes us as absurd commits nothing less than literary homicide. I mention only is the list of the author's personal acknowledgments sources consulted (as Gold notes), but even if a certain It is not my normal practice to respond to unfavorable the rough with the smooth, like most things in life. that the quoted dedications are glossed or explicated. were a dictionary of headwords with no accompanying are actually not meant to be either. But the whole reviewer's own article in the same issue on Accuracy unraveled a long baffling clue. But this gloss on the been particularly memorable.) For that matter, the word junkie itself was even adopted into the French words from letter abbreviations. Note, for example, make readers aware of what he calls a mistranslation or has not taken into account the relationship between and can refer to any young woman. While it is not a specific indicator of virginity, it is not used to mean. was certainly not influenced by an original mistranslation who simply replace a word in one language by another word identical in meaning. Translators are interpreters. will best bring to the audience of their time the text to make this ancient text accessible to the readers of the Bible, and they used these in their work. The the Bible for a Christian audience; for them, the Bible consisted of the Old Testament and the New Testament. language would best express what was in the ancient not a mistranslation: it was a judgment of the translators and the audience for which the translation was intended. reading is unclear or ambiguous, difficult or corrupt, the translator will turn to other translations or versions take into account their audience as they translate. part of its translation agenda the elimination of language We must be cautious in our assessments of translations before we too quickly attach the label mistranslation. apparent. The availability of many excellent translations scholars are far different from mistranslations. The mistranslations. Some time ago I came to the defense to assume that there is but one correct translation mean a `girl,' `maiden,' `bride,' `youthful spouse,' a `woman of marriageable age' or `the age of puberty' infer virginity from some of these usages (at least in Biblical times when virginity prior to marriage was with extraordinary richness: the mysterious, marvelous, literal root sense of `young woman,' or `young wife.' we must not expect these writers to use words as we should like them to have done. Some translators are poets or teachers, too, and we must not expect them necessarily to respond to words in our fashion, either. we should fault the group of translators who produced we have seen, the confusion lies not so much with a group of sixteenth century English scholars as with the very nature of the art of translation. The Christian concept of the Virgin Birth long before the sixteenth accepted text and graft its meaning, as was then understood, from correctness of translation. We agree to disagree a writer, I wish it were true. But precision and accuracy lie in the trail. Herewith is an account and plausible explanation of a few howlers committed by competent, beautiful as it is. How did the geographical mistake The point was not checked by the copy editor, probably Faulty geography is the basis for an error in Peter sins of academic reviewers, to show his familiarity Such inaccuracies in the opening sentence of a book his apercus are well worth reading; but when he mislabels the writer or speaker is ignorant of the facts. In a for error was too great. In addressing the question congenital syphilis, a disabling disease that usually syphilis as an adult has been suggested and debated, but the evidence seems to be against it. But Professor so persuasive that it was easy to overlook the fact that his argument (or part of it) was based on a complete The diagnosis was definitely coronary thrombosis, in which a piece of fat that has formed on the vein wall vein; the result, loss of blood flow, heart stoppage, learned that coronary thrombosis occurs in arteries, education know, and that it is not fat that forms on error in an article I read in a travel magazine on a in continuity with her bronchi and lungs. If she aspirated be coughing from the time she wrote the article until making up local color. This is not unlike reconstructing down as direct discourse. In The Patriarch: The Rise baggage into a taxi either at South Station or Back New Yorkers, and from some deeply suppressed latent the printed word carries weight, even when it is inaccurate. repent. If there is a moral to these anecdotes, it is that writers cannot be too careful. One recalls the to an undergraduate: Always verify your references, for a thing or a function is lacking in a language it must indicate that the thing or the function itself is a concept that is either unknown or is considered unimportant. of the meaning. And I have noticed that it is no easier care of that meaning of meaning adequately. But if going to have to be content to ask him if he is being serious, even if he happens to be dying with laughter know whether you are waiting for a bus, or expecting purposely, and in the other the object did it to you. course, but to the English speaker steeped in a tradition speaker, apparently, the head of a committee presides, what a man does with a bull in a bullring, and to him with simple cries we simply cannot duplicate in English.! with the deity and things holy or revered. Why not not search the calendar of saints and holy days for names for the newborn? I have even heard of country In his Growth and Structure of the English Language, English has, and how little it uses them. He thought that the use of diminutives produces the impression beings, with no great business capacities or seriousness an exact equivalency one would use the other superlative match the breadth of lighthearted insult expressed by whether it can schedule things or hope for them, or In a recent column on etymologies, Attorney General word pattern in English called `reduplication,' meaning Many languages use this doubling pattern, some extensively. its alphabet, resorts to doubling frequently. Some examples rhythm. Also, the usage level of English doubles is usually informal or colloquial; and when placed in a rather large group ends both parts with the diminutive that incorporated his own nickname in a double that their writers, were aware of objections to the positions attributed to them and decided to take the initiative, might note the following full names with the initial letter J and the terminal letter y seemed destined for illustrate the lack of linguistic understanding which and many variations thereon were, and perhaps still are, common trade names of a variety of animal feed products. And laying mash, as any farmer knows, is a form of chicken feed so formulated as to enhance egg production. In the cited example, the feed manufacturer clue to the author, although the terminal part of the Controlling emissions at the source not only protects freshwater ecosystems, but also allows fairly rapid recovery of lakes' indigent species... [From Science blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of pieces of Bridges' body together in the alley and then Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances. I am interested particularly in how recall distorts Hallmark greeting cards. I call it the Niceness Principle. the speaker's point of view. I got some intelligent responses, as well as some incredulity. Some of the find a particular meaning unpleasant, so they unconsciously They make it nice --just as nice itself has changed `pleasant' and applied to everything from ice cream to sexual partners. Unfortunately, this is hardly just a foible of youth; rather, it seems endemic to cultures new meanings have become so ingrained in the language point all manner of evils flew out, making our world The consolation for all this lay at the bottom of the mankind through it all. Or so I had been taught. It was not until I took a classics course in college that I was told the original reading: the worst evil of all on lies. And, in fact, this reading is far more in keeping people sadly roamed the earth, looking for their lost is no coincidence, since the Symposium portrays homosexuality then, that nine out of ten readers of this work happen triumph over war and poverty, even over strict parents pursues is that of a commander forced to surrender, him to love, and it will transform him into a physical terms, the Niceness Principle is often equivalent to the defense mechanism of reversal, in which the individual usually as a retreat from unpleasant emotions. Other defense mechanisms, such as repression and selective forgetting, may also take part. The question remains: Its Discontents suggests an answer: as civilization still exist, however, and the psychological price we pay for the repression is in neurosis and other civilized The Bible provides a wealth of material for misinterpretation instance, most believers see Lot as a pious man living them sexually. Lot is thus the good host, who will heard of, is that Lot offers a sop to the crowd: his two virgin daughters. Take them, he begs, instead of his guests. Whether this reflects the inviolable rule Testament, or that angels have higher standing than humans is open to question. But the question cannot around will find a stick' illustrates this nicely. Modern Seek and ye shall find, with the stick as a bone or was told to me as a child in the Nice version: after a hapless hunting ground for nice misinterpretations, The pleasant drift is nature reminding us that we are he uses is that people tend to praise what is recent: is the line that follows, and the implication is clear-- that this is what links mankind, this tendency to focus the sentiment itself is misunderstood as a nostalgic glow. In fact, it is painful for Rick to hear the music nostalgia really means the ache or pain of return, but most people think of nostalgia as pleasurable recollection. not the only effects of the Niceness Principle. It sweeps words in its passage, as well. Awesome once meant `terrible'; now it means `great,' and terrible is reserved to describe airline cuisine. Whatever happened have acquired a bad reputation, such as square (going from `appraisal' to `denigration'). But in general we I do not mean to sound like a hidebound traditionalist. and it is no use railing against shifts in meaning, which are bound to occur. And avoiding unpleasantness is often a reasonable aim. But as an English professor important. Fuzzy recall indicates a disregard for history. risk of heartburn, what must rank as the ultimate in If that sounds a trifle too indecisive, you may choose All these names are English, more or less. It appears people not only increasingly speak English but also years will have noticed that young people everywhere The words, one supposes, were chosen from an unabridged beak. What is even more alarming is that these bewilderingly literal sense, nothing, of course. But in a more metaphoric They were airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, words to do with travel, consumables, and sport attests quite apart from its utilitarian purposes, holds an mind to lead you a good situation. It is a product a rather comforting lack of geographical precision. but sometimes they are adapted to local needs, often to mean a kind of shabby and disreputable variation, so that a nylon hotel is a `brothel' while a nylon beach is where nudists frolic. Other nations have left the words largely intact but given the spelling a novel were required to pay a license fee for every English English words as they do in miniaturizing tape recorders new spellings but also entirely new meanings. In the words jerk and egghead but gave them largely contrary not a brainy person but a dimwit, while jerk is a term at taking things a step further than ever occurred to sometimes lose their emotional charge when conveyed adopted an English expletive too coarse to reproduce charge. The English language has become a very big business indeed. Globally, the teaching of English is English than others. In the 1970s, according to Time doing poorly at learning other people's languages-- reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as many copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it months after the interview I asked a friend of mine, a what he thought about the matter. He replied something blunt, a little hostile to call anyone by a bare ethnic in a number of real and imagined situations involving for an ethnic group or nationality does imply a certain hostility or contempt or, especially on the lips of a member of that group, a nuance of defiance, as in apt to fling the bare noun at you, almost as if to add, term in such cases it can still be used adjectivally, as noun and adjective are identical in form, if not function, are relatively innocuous. But the hardening effect of The ethnic terms that seem bluntest or most indelicate ironically or defiantly people will call themselves by names intended to be pejorative or downright insulting, there is reason to dissociate it from its former identity darkies (where again the primarily adjectival word is and blacks of today. Blacks, of course, are usually no equality between the folks so designated by adjectives though currently the best answer, isn't entirely satisfactory confident, so satisfied with themselves that ethnic epithets either bounce off them like pebbles off an elephant or are adopted as amusing or even ornamental. to no avail. WASP started off with a pejorative nuance, tend to be more amused than offended by the epithet. say that!) or, again, defiantly. The boys' basketball Lady Braves. There is likely a touch of humor here. said it was unfair and illegal to allow women in skirts into nights while forcing men and women without skirts to pay lovely, and so the conversation went on. Neither of surgery on their vowel sounds. I always felt sorry for has only recently come to be seen as a bar to advancement Gladstone sat in the place of honor. Gladstone liked meal largely in silence. At last, he seemed ready to anticipation. Picking up a nut, he said, It is many any kind. Similarly, the posh long a in grass (and claim many a victim. As a Catholic, I was brought up recently been finding myself in such a minority that tempted to struggle back to my original point of embarkation. and then he finds himself in the disastrous position Those at the top of society have not helped matters Having spent most of his working life trying to graduate verse to refute all those linguistic reactionaries who cannot see why there is all that fuss about using he and man to mean a `person of either sex.' The debates sexes, how it can on the one hand bolster and on the subject, ranging from the conservative linguist Otto the 1920s to contemporary critics. One of the main strengths of the collection is that it does not just put different views to be stated and then criticized or women leads into a discussion of compiling a Feminist to counter the stereotypical hysterical fuss reaction. have since the seventeenth century sought to establish It is a pity that the most recent material in the collection The final part of the book, Dominance and Difference such areas as gossip, tag questions, and conversational gambits. I found this the least satisfactory section more familiar work which is available elsewhere. So this collection contains texts that are more marginal than would he ideal for students who may read nothing else on the subject. It also means that some important are omitted. Her thematic structure also slightly defuses she does not immediately establish the ground to be broken. A chronological structure would have directly Feminist Critique of Language acknowledges and reflects be included in student reading lists, but it also deserves the spectrum from the (hopefully diminishing) ranks of the hysterical fuss brigade to already committed There are those who collect all sorts of collectables, and compiler of all sorts of collectables has produced somewhat tedious. I find nothing interesting, entertaining, there are so many of the type that I get the feeling that I may be the odd man out, the one person in the I haven't looked, but I would guess that it just says ran longer.) But not all of the oldies are goodies: that many successful authors of yore were supported by patrons, and praising a wealthy and powerful individual only the worst ingrate would fail to acknowledge to lines of the author's foreword, which often grudgingly of them, and I would have continued to nod off. It that revelation eludes me completely, it might well down, I suppose, and if one must have a collection of names. It seems to be the product of a publisher's ground as far as I can tell and offers nothing not already (for one). Which is to say that if you already have a want a good one, this one is likely to be as good as shelves of any good reference library. They contain a great deal of information that has been intelligently the chief value of the first name dictionary, for me, is that a great many people will consult it in vain for information about their own names. It contains entries, though the people most anxious to discover something are invariably those who bear the rarer names. The authors say that if they came across reliable information what appeared to be a scholarly way, they took advantage of it. That seems to me to be a sensible approach, surname is to go back through the male line as far as possible, noting the various spellings of the name, where the family was living in past centuries, and so on. Being asked to make a judgment about a surname presented; but there are criticisms to be made. Recently, unknown origin but hint that it may be an anglicization sound in English would have been useful, but I personally that bach was an epithet that distinguished a son and have my doubts about how ordinary users of this dictionary boffins have no problems with a statement like dim. public, the kind of person who will presumably consult this book in a library, and add in for good measure hint, I looked at the Bean entry. I found suggestions that it is a metonymic occupational name, an English concerned are important according to a very traditional the noble house of that name, along with the possible statistical evidence about the use of first names in Such evidence is vital for many reasons. It enables should be included in a work of this kind. Hanks and of Oxford University at the turn of the century. I do not consider that a sensible inclusion, especially been used in modern times because it is the surname the surnames of Civil War officers were often used in symbolic of the different qualities of these two dictionaries. supply. First names call for a frequent delving into social history, as well as a certain amount of linguistic enthusiastic and genuine interest in the behavior of ordinary human beings. Whatever else is in this Oxford problems, mistakes in parallel structures, improper use of commas, wrong or missing prepositions, incorrect to the Census Bureau he asked whether other foreign as rated by the Foreign Service Institute or a recognized Applications, Inc. [which no longer exists] provided language and written language, and it is highly fallacious of the language. In the course of our lengthy telephone dispense with strict forms and usages, that part of assessment. I explained that the Guide was riddled with atrocious spelling, syntactic, and semantic errors. Technical Applications, Inc., a private contractor, the Census Bureau tacitly accepted. The official admitted Bureau had erred in relying on this contractor. He around, surviving its detractors, as it has for a thousand junk in a harbor as eclectic bounty. If these items were in a collection that I put in my front yard, eclectic the harbor's variety is the element of choice: eclectic are behind the times on boxing weight classes: featherweight basic beliefs set forth in the Old Testament? Recently, worship of one of a group of gods, in contrast with monotheism, which teaches that only one god exists. wonder why henotheism is not as common a philosophical a useful concept that provides a missing link in the a word in the Bible which was ostensibly responsible probably had a much greater influence on the Western means `young woman' but was translated as `virgin.' this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a of another article in the same issue of VERBATIM, the child and she will bear a son.... In the translation mistranslation cannot, of course, undo the implications Although this is essentially a textbook, it is lucidly to those who have been less than satisfied by earlier be taken in the context in which it appears: a grammar the same sense as a novel. Also, it should be understood except for a few anomalous differences, the grammars the shortcomings and virtues of the various theories of grammar (or grammatical theories) that have been proposed; suffice it to say that no one of them provides there cannot be certain aspects of language that depend with its eight parts of speech, has proved woefully has a great deal to do with how we use and understand all theories have their strong and weak points, and knowledge of phonology and syntax but not semantics, 1960s and early 1970s argued that almost all aspects English is conceived of as a list of words or as a list of alone or combine to form words) with a set of rules is trivial, for the systems need not be mutually exclusive, yield to immediate constituent analysis. It may be hard to believe, but in the 1960s some linguists advocated schooling, either in learning a foreign language or in learning more about their own. It is far from an easy subject, but it can be an interesting one, particularly be) put together to work. Carl Mills has written a useful, understandable, understanding, and informative not have to give way to oncoming traffic (there was have the worst of both worlds, and the old certainly of the essence and brevity the soul of economy. Or should it, perhaps, be that the essence is of speed because if the road sign cannot be seen and understood Expand this to STOP CHILDREN and the first ambiguity know told me that the road sign he enjoyed the most SQUEEZE SOFT SHOULDER. No trouble at all, he said. FAST LANE: or should it have been the SLIP ROAD? It birdie?), CROSS (Buns, hot?) and RAMP (If you can't beat them, join them?); but it is the CROSSINGS which PLANT CROSSING must surely mean `the biggest aspidistra Ironically enough, a LEVEL CROSSING is usually quite Needless to say, the law comes into all this although other hand, POLICE PATROL VEHICLES ONLY is something with its fairground connotations has superseded CIRCUS CROSSINGS. To confuse matters still further there are Those English naturalists who help roads cross motorways the diver, sir, don't forget the diver as they used to to emerge would seem to be CONING (ices, chocolates, route from church to crematorium takes each funeral moral. (Perhaps he's the same vicar who labeled the all; while FLOOD is presumably just the place to see a stream of traffic. Then there is the sign ONE IN SEVEN at the top of the hill. Can there be only six more like selected to manage small tasks, make beds, pass water, wrap silverware, call games, read, decorate, do craft projects.... dozen plays he had seen which are currently running is a profound change from the time, not so long ago, more purified than that spoken by most of its audiences. some vulgarity in subtitles. Talking pictures led to `damn' in this one sentence will open up the floodgates. mother of invention. W. C. Fields fooled the Production in this country because of its persistent use of the that year, the Obscene Publications Act first introduced searing has lost the force it once had, the essence of all the new words of emphasis is physical. They retain the greatest power to offend and are the least third group that originally define sexual acts. It is to appear thirty or forty times in a police movie; in way coincides with the usage of the great majority of film trade would argue that it is. The bourgeoisie and the Bible Belt are not after all the most profitable the language in which the films are couched. Moreover, their classification, the film distributors aim for those classifications that promise the strongest fare while Belle an attentive ear will detect the single requisite careers of films. Airline versions must have all the strong language excised. In this country, video versions, are shown before those hours there is a danger that been built up around dictionary words and that this this comparatively restricted vocabulary is the impoverishment sexually based words have become a kind of shorthand comic strips, a comedy crash or fall has to be accompanied the shock value they once had. To be effective, writers flights to which linguistic prohibition could inspire regarding the citing of others' writings. But I have the quotations of oral material, though such quotations periodicals that deal with current affairs and, especially, to emphasize criticism of the practice of all the media words created by others. Articulate artists, writers, musicians, lawyers, scientists, teachers, historians, etc. are almost totally ignored by the media unless The style problem is fairly simple to describe. If rhythm of the writing be disturbed. In live interviews the interviewer is unfamiliar with an expression and is too embarrassed to admit it. In a recent television momentary flicker of perplexity on the interviewer's what the speaker had said, but he blandly continued tiring discussion of a project's costs, which I considered you've got to spend a penny! Although those present were too polite to split their sides and roll about in hysterics, they were obviously amused, for, as was be inappropriate here to point out that, in addition that in quoting spoken material, mere spelling of the substituted for ass or vice versa and, if an explanation ought to be supplied, even if this must be relegated to a footnote. In this particular case, it is doubtful always possible, is to avoid entirely the passage containing best choice is to use indirect discourse: Bush said Almost anything is preferable to putting into people's book from which all sorts of interesting information had from any other source. Most readers of VERBATIM are put before the off so they can all leave simultaneously; one of the participants consisting in an attempt to the French or merely reflect one person's valiant but massive incomprehension is individual or collective. horse shop a game that consists in trying to place, around a post, clad (if female) in something suitable, easily permitting all movements; or simply relax at scenic a little train used as an attraction for young people. (If one is too old, one must beware of lying all involving elderly persons.) On returning to base Questions of business and commerce are not neglected in the possibility of obtaining money by means that girls and baskets sports shoes of cloth with rubber speech or report of a meeting not made available to am obliged to assume that, as they, say in the vermouth Why is it that I seem to be able to find typographical I started looking for signs that it has been suitably that it violates my principle that the only legitimate moreover, it offers good, sound, accurate information put that information to the appropriate use of building cards, the etymologies of words like punch, noyade, names, usage and grammar, ancient customs, superstitions, and the longevity of horses. Notes and Queries (then called Replies, and the perseverance and loyalty of readers can be judged by the fact that in some instances, having the longest record of continuous publication from reading through back issues of such periodicals, of female heroism and filial affection. I cannot exactly pardon; which was effected. Her great granddaughter, fascicles [parts], of what is now called The Oxford English Dictionary but was then referred to, variously, the earlier letters were gradually becoming available, space in N. and Q. and go look up the answer in the asked readers for help, particularly for dialect information about certain words and expressions and occasionally A sampling of some of the language topics considered origin of infra dig, take the cake, blackball, sand hope that I shall be allowed to say that I did not. historical, just as some preachers retain the obsolete I could go on, but space is limited. If readers would (or would not) enjoy the inclusion of occasional extracts as those besetting us today, they should please let map, he had difficulty trying to explain his choice of Millions of people own dictionaries. Some actually emerged that the main use to which people put dictionaries the past, dictionaries are rarely consulted by those who need them the most. In order to consult a reference crime or a reprehensible condition: many people are very certain about things about which they are dead wrong, thus never look them up to check their accuracy. some strange metaphor meaning `head in the tea'; or Recently I was editing a manuscript of a dictionary an illiteracy, and I suggested that a less critical, might disagree, but I felt that regardless is more, so sense of `confrontation' than `intimate encounter.' in dictionaries. Taking a detached view is more scientific doctor, diagnosing a victim of some revolting affliction, language ought not allow his emotions to get in the way of his cool evaluation of the facts (as he sees them), and a label like Illiterate has pejorative overtones Years ago, lexicographers used the label Colloquial `unrefined,' is rarely encountered in modern dictionaries the semantic process known as pejoration `depreciation,' to seeing words and senses of which they disapproved label, the word colloquial began to undergo pejoration reviewed and discussed, we decided to drop the Colloquial colloquy, or conversation' and is thus no more than a notion and label to discuss here and will be treated My own observation is that Informal might be undergoing recently completed, which will be published by Oxford performing a simple substitution program on a computer, preceding years of courtship, I could count the number of Arts proved the effectiveness of its acoustical design as the reviewer sat, totally intact. [From the Midland Daily to after which the notice SEE P. A16 was inserted, and promised: balance the budget, expectations would have However, writing letters to editors to complain about split infinitives is child's play for the truly obsessed. As a all, because a diacritical mark can change the pronunciation, the spelling and therefore even the meaning of a word. In general, diacritical marks are all those little jots and tittles that appear over, under, and even through various letters. We don't have many in English; the only common one I can think of offhand is the diaeresis (as in the side by side are not a diphthong but separate, distinct French, where it is pronounced as three syllables, but Related to diacritical marks are two constructs, the reserved for printer's conventions (that is, where combinations tying together two characters, actually represents two US today, but they are still occasionally encountered in in the use of the digraphs can be gleaned from the world they continue to be widely used by medical professionals, Diacritical marks can be broken down into two types: accents, which affect, roughly speaking, pronunciation only; and umlauts, which affect spelling as well as pronunciation. sterile when it comes to diacritical marks; true gold can best be struck in foreign fields, where the accent grave, not pronunciation, being a reminder of a dropped sit is usually there for historical reasons but connoting a reason which has long since ceased to make sense and which rich in digraphs, which are often still retained today in German has no pure accents that I can think of (other than the occasional diaeresis in foreign proper nouns, fact, these characters are essential to proper spelling, and it is for that reason that a dropped umlaut may be seen as an offense. The common ligature in German orthography medieval) humanists got carried away and tried to force the medial s, and s the terminal s. This convention persisted scribes started writing the e above the first vowel, something pens, which tended to emphasize the vertical strokes German) the little superior e came to be represented by two short, vertical strokes, which then became two square assumption is easily made here that the umlaut is an extraneous However, dropping umlauts is less forgivable than dropping and anyone who is familiar with the word will know how it is supposed to be pronounced, regardless of the accent. know that an acute accent is usually put over an e to indicate that it is a long e in an unstressed syllable. Hence, its omission will probably not stop you from pronouncing fundamental to the spelling of a word and should always However, I recently read an Associated Press account of The problem here is that this is neither fish nor fowl. It is not the correct English name for this city, which is the writer simply did not know the English name for by the users and abusers of the Mother Tongue, especially If there are any questions, comments, that arise from any edition. [From a newsletter, Total Quality Management, published has headings for more than four hundred varieties of our Your what? she retorted. I quickly corrected myself: perplexed when I told him that I would try to find an item business world one encounters a myriad of Anglicisms feel that their language is under threat. More and more, dress code than to their notes (grades). During his conferences (lectures), their inattention was hurting their apprenticeship (learning of the subject matter). He also felt he was getting collaboration (cooperation) was a primordial (essential) consideration that some requested a subvention (grant) in the annex (appendix) (denominational) school board in order that formation make teachers more dynamic animators (group leaders). they read like inappropriate choices from a synonym dictionary, legislation around twenty years ago, and the use of French has gained in prestige as a result, making it more likely for Gallic loanwords to appear in English. Anglophones are speaking French to a greater extent at home and at work, creating a situation in which the French term becomes more familiar than the English. Thus, an Anglophone might use the word demand when he means ask, reparations when are confused both by Anglophones speaking French and many of the words likely to have their meanings changed means to disappoint, not to deceive. Not many Anglophones French sense, but over time I suspect that such usages To those who bemoan the loss of the chastity of the French language, all I can say is that the lady never was purity is a myth. The reality is that English and French and slang with equal abandon, and toss the resulting hybrids about us with the carelessness of toddlers flinging pablum. Thus are new words born, whether as engineer's lingo or the wino's mutterings. But new language blooms individual writers, particularly in the field of speculative humdrum technical derivatives or the names of gadgets and aliens, and has certifiable potential to enter the English But for sheer variety, quantity, and above all charm of his neologisms, I submit that none compare with Jack .to make up words that carry just the right scent, that strike the reader as new and familiar simultaneously, is It is not unusual for a single novel to have fifty or more newly created words; in The Face there are almost a hundred. who ...play instruments of the following categories: musical instruments or weapons, denote magical spells, crystallize cultural concepts or rituals, or express metaphors. explanations about the sociology of magical creatures. Dogma reflect his droll skepticism toward religion. Some alleged to have been drawn from the ancient Welsh). The whether they are intended to be English. Clearly most of them are; we are expected to read them without recoiling, implicitly or expressly taken from an imaginary tongue such neologisms is by etymological speculation, which falls into roughly five categories that shade into one another like colors in the spectrum. I list these divisions in order of words. The morphemes are rather familiar, but overall flit past like butterflies or called strikes, only to awaken us in the middle of the night with the realization that Close cousins of such words float unbidden into our consciousness. ungulate and a host of words beginning with the prefix hidden word lagan goods thrown into the sea with a buoy was in labor. Surely this word arose from glia, a class of location of a precious textual prism, even from great distances in love with his sculpture of a woman and persuaded rib to a woman, bringing it (her) into view and thus to hand. series: The meaning of this word, like others in The Book of Dreams [the villain's childhood notebook can only be Such compounds can seduce us into spurious assumptions. master of the ridiculous. (Meanwhile we should not overlook name of a large boat, suggests a more generalized category is certainly not merely a confection, reminding us as it does and The Dune Encyclopedia include many characters and places and are thus actually concordances or encyclopedias rather than true dictionaries. Most neologisms remain in their literary greenhouses, escaped and spread like weeds to become part of the language: languages as instruments of social engineering. Let Culture Novels, in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative list of proper names, words, phrases and concepts contained in the Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters Built of sandstone bricks and 25ft tall, Fuller's remains were placed beneath the floor of this mausoleum on his death Has the past year brought the lowering of voices and search for common ground called for in the wake of the shootings Nobody calls me John, I said gently. I then explained some of us older citizens do not like but the doing it in I have carried that label from the first week of my relatives picked it up and I have lived with it ever since. When I was in high school some of my friends took delight in referring to me as an athletic supporter. (I like the in pop psychology a few years ago, gave this advice in his book, Pulling Your Own Strings: Always deal with people on a first name basis unless they make it clear that they need to be addressed in some other way. Why did he use the word need with respect to those of us who prefer not be called by our first names by people who do army. The writer pointed out how unfortunate that was, pimples appear on the palate. I was skeptical of that. So to three or four dictionaries. No mention. That writer, word and the writer had simply quoted that dictionary's definition. Now I worry a little about my car, a splendid John the Baptist Jack. On the other hand, an English the names he gave to characters in his wonderful humorous and many others. About the naming of characters he said this: Odd how important story names are. It always takes the sale of patent medicines and trusses. In it the editor A few years ago I read a brief report on some research of psychologists in which they discovered that the way people sign their names and use it for public purposes you use John J. Doe you probably are a very conventional person. A simple John Doe suggests that you are rather on the other hand, is likely to be excessively modest. Doe is generally a person who likes to remain in the humorist, called this, and exemplified in his own usage, had been a preacher before concentrating on being an (1878-1969)notice that middle name, although it may loanwords, but here in their own right. Other terminologies, especially that of metrication, are cuckoos in the nest. In turfing out the venerable words, they deprive the language better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. sailors, and traders brought home idioms from distant lands. Some words die and are forgotten, but many of those which wrapped themselves about us like comfy old coats respectfully to the earliest form of English bequeathed acre still mean a field of sorts. Correctly, an acre is a measure or grazing. An acre's precise definition varied according Later an acre was a strip of open field, large enough yards long was laid along the field's headland, showing Persons of a certain age learned by rote that eight has described an eighth part of an English mile, regardless was a rough reckoning, being the distance from the crook of the arm to the end of the longest finger, the elbow being where the bow or bend occurred. Bow is from an old had passed him, the shepherd had used up all his fingers. Old English form for left after ten, one left over. To tell meant to count (as in telling the beads of a In telling his tale, every shepherd counted his sheep between the abode of the gods and the abode of giants. flourished in lands where nights were long and the days fleeting periods of light. The light of learning, notes of starting the day at sunset. In the Book of Genesis too, evening always precedes morning: The evening and the morning were the first day.... The time between light as belladonna and bittersweet, have their origins in Old foul womb of night. Better sleep might have resulted from taking a nightcap or grog (whiskey preferred) before bedtime, the sun sets. In the morning the petals open to the light. day; also for the commencement of the Messiah's reign: for sweetheart or mistress, female tramp or beggar, plaything The oldest words, for example, wife, live, fight, love, include the counting of time and measuring of space, the meeting of communities, the working of the soil and caring his stories in longhand, revising them laboriously in ink, and only then tapping them into the computer. When point where not more than about twenty are active, in the cover aspects of the everyday life experienced by those country where the Aborigines have been most able to retain their traditional way of life. The first languages that the settlers and have been reconstructed in the light of later acquired knowledge of the family of Aboriginal languages as a whole. Paradoxically, it is these languages that the language which was spoken on the site now occupied What then survives? Names of flora and fauna, names of implements, especially weapons, a few miscellaneous names of dwellings, ceremonies, people identified by sex or activity, striking features of the environment, and a handful of pidgin terms suggestive of an only rudimentary kangaroo, had an irresistible novelty about them; at the and as useful to man. The wallaby and the wallaroo were, like the kangaroo, large marsupials which the Aborigines hunted; the koala was also a marsupial but arboreal in habit and sufficiently unique in appearance to have had the settlers liken it to a bear, a sloth, or a monkey in their naming sometimes known as a badger because of its burrowing curiosity would have brought it to notice. The name of a settlers were frequently dependent, was again an understandable flower which has become the floral emblem of New South peoples regarded as savages, which had both a religious and an informal social form, was readily adopted, as was brother, gibber a stone, and gunyah a dwelling. But the are those that clearly formed part of a language used for the limited communication that took place between the Of the several word lists compiled by officers of the was available to the settlers than a record of what they actually used. For that we must turn to their accounts of life in the colony and to the words which they adopted, which they use more or less unselfconsciously as part of First, the words used by the Aborigines were seldom as attractive to the colonists as descriptive English names new and the known and familiar, and so made for more certain communication. Thus, distinguishing epithets like vocabulary. Second, a positive effort needed to be made to ascertain the Aboriginal name, and experience showed limited: the fact that a new set of names came into use as one crossed the boundary of another Aboriginal language occasionally turn to an interesting series of collective an execution of officers who have betrayed her confidences. of gossips and a knot of adversaries for ever, much Outdoors she is harassed by cassettes of photographers boys have to endure a kissing of aunts and suffer a slew During his sporting activities he is accompanied by a stalk of foresters while shooting at a column of wildfowl or riding with a blast of huntsmen who are escorted by a Finally, he is devoted to his maternal grandmother, a own grammar and semantics. Since it has come into being with a sudden and persistent rush, reflecting the burgeoning it has not been amply recorded, much less described, in standard reference works or lexicons. The New Shorter To fill the gap, specialized glossaries have emerged, the best naturally in computerized form (like The Jargon can be quickly and efficiently updated, a process which in itself reflects the hasty transience of much of the vocabulary. Although a complete linguistic description will have remain, are already apparent. As far as grammar is concerned, the simplistic syntax and the exceptional preponderance heavy reliance on conversion) are obvious and enduring. The vocabulary, like the grammar, is determined to a large extent by the medium of computers and the operation of networking. But their insistence on speed is not entirely the message. Nor would it be correct simply to draw comparisons and regulated system. For although the vocabulary does make important use of computer terminology, and although it does share with newspeak a penchant for blends and acronyms and an avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, it reflects a manner and an environment greater than both Within a strictly controlled computer system, in which primitivism. It is laid back: one talks, chats, browses. (or disguised by) a variety of linguistic palliatives: generous a sociolinguistic cornucopia of connotations of sport, vigor, youth, individuality, speed, independence, leisure, The vocabulary is jocular in its easy mixture of the casual (in slang or coinages or abbreviations), the learned hieroglyphics or emoticons), and even the aural (in the borrowed from scanning television channels for a watchable not just in the ways just mentioned. One prominent phenomenon appear in conventional dictionaries are given a meaning which is not to be derived logically or figuratively from the customary one. Leaving aside blends and acronyms, a few representative examples (with definitions from various arc to create a compressed (archive) from a group of biff to notify someone of incoming mail [named after bum to make highly efficient, either in time or space, troll to deliberately post egregiously false information more than mischievous. But it would be going too far to assert that they are critical of existing structures. Jargon or slang and standard have always coexisted and over the years have grown more mutually tolerant. What is clear, in any case, is that a private and exclusive language is evolving and engaging ever larger numbers of participants in a linguistic process which is destined to become becomes the dominant force in communication and other social activities. From the point of view of language, what is interesting is the coincidence, be it mischievous or critical or accidental, of the ideal and the real. For the examples people to communicate, as on a telephone' is set against performing the function of something that isn't really reality of the computer networks. For citizens, shared writing on it. I think my hosts were a little disconcerted to see me emerging from their bathroom laughing roundly a couple of minutes later. I hastily told them what it said This is an example of what Western advertising agencies and writing on products add prestige to goods marketed there, and it is certainly true that atmosphere English has reached its apogee. This has resulted in such products as are sometimes in English, like this one on a deodorant But let us return to for a moment The Sun Was Shining putting largely meaningless English on their products. pleased to note that it is grammatically irreproachable and makes some sort of sense! My hosts had one other towel in the same series which they eagerly dug out; it read: In the Evening the Sheep Was Praying to the Twinkling this towel. Not at all contemporary, maybe it wasn't the office hours in their apartments. So, intrigued by the (all of which, it turned out, had been bought in Japan). In four weeks I came across the following, starting with Here, meaning and grammar cannot be faulted (except lactation, paps, pap pabulum), though, with regard to clothing, few countries can be said to conform to the All these slogans are wrought in attractive designs and lettering and are not intended to be read, so I would like to with this manner of stuff will have trouble not sniggering ways of expressing the same concept. Here are a few not a French word.] There is no such word as can't. throw one's hat over the windmills] to throw caution in the minute.] It is the little things that cause like a first into the eye] That clashes dreadfully. The most important contribution to comparative linguistics and Germanic forms, which led him to the conclusion that from which all had sprung. It was his work that formed the basis of the linguistic studies later carried on by the to the development of the comparative method. The term arose in the late 1820s; the latter survives in the literature, largely replaced by the former, especially since the The reason for bringing up this bit of history is to introduce four terms with which some readers may be unfamiliar that once lurked in the hearts of linguists educated in literature is used to describe a compound word in which the first compounds in which the elements are linked as if joined used to describe compounds composed of an adjective and a substantive so as to form, principally, a possessive adjective, like bahuvrihi itself; it also forms a compound that is different grammatically from its head member and, particularly, plurals that function as singular nouns, as in compounds that might be spelled as two words in predicative is used to describe compounds in which the first element qualifies or determines the second, while the second retains its grammatical independence as a noun, adjective, or participle. For example, bookcase, yearbook, summerhouse, analysis. These are not the only possibilities for compounding Unbelievably, Part V,... has not even been accorded pagination, something for which Random House ought to be carpeted for before the International Bibliographical Court. [From dictionary; rather, it is just what its title denotes: a dictionary of adjectives that are appropriately connected with the nouns that are listed. In a more technical sense, it is that are often associated with the nouns that are listed. For example, here is the listing under one of the nouns: (in) satiable, sharp, ferocious, rapacious, devouring, robust, inordinate, substantial, unbridled, avaricious, Not all these adjectives seem appropriate to me: it is hard for me to envision a context in which satiable appetite, appetite might be appropriate; on the other hand, I, like many readers, could probably come up with several other adjectives that are not listed. Without going into detail on each one of these, the difficulty I see is, for instance, with it is listed. As shrunk is a past and past participle of shrink and not, properly, an adjective, I am not sure why it is there writes in his Preface, Only words listed in standard language dictionaries as adjectives are included in this Dictionary. something edible or drinkable, as referring to something that comes after a meal; in my language (and culture), postprandial works, an observation seldom offered by linguists, even those who touch on the subject of idiolect. That this book is highly personal becomes evident in the entry immediately appetizer, appetizers See also food intriguing, exquisite, the last four words cannot be considered alongside the first three. Moreover, I can think of dozens of other words in the tasty, tangy class that could be added, but those In principle, I like the idea of such a book and have thought about doing one myself. But the almost insurmountable and I quickly abandoned the idea. For one thing, entries become less useful the longer they are. In the present work, for example, the entry for appetite runs to eleven lines, which is reasonably assimilable; the entry for approach, desperate for descriptive adjectives that will go with nouns as to be willing to wade through almost two hundred terms? I rather doubt it. Then there is the question, Why are both singular and plural forms shown for the headwords? Although mention is made of the fact in the Preface, no reason is given, and one might assume that users of such a book would have no difficulty in assuming that A chief criticism of this book, in particular, is that the adjectives are jumbled together in no discernible order or, as mentioned, with punctuation between (except for a serial comma). Thus under architecture, we find strings like and it is not till we get to the end, where a dozen styles are listed that there is any sense of semantic or associative prime, vital, sensitive, volatile, enjoyable, quiet... regard almond as a color for eyes rather than a shape. and more usable had the author attempted to group adjectives In the decades during which I have been involved in the compilation, editing, revision, updating, adaptation, etc. of dictionaries, I have always considered lexicography an art. That is not to say that technique is not involved, merely to observe that some dictionaries are better than others because their editors are more literate, imaginative, poetic, and generally possess those attributes with which we associate art rather than technique or mundane craftsmanship. Such dictionaries, too, succeed because they establish a rapport with generations of users. It goes without saying that most of those drawn to lexicography, like those attracted to art schools, exhibit skills more likely to be associated with craft than with art; these days, far too few of those who work on dictionaries have a thorough grounding in literature, let alone the various specialties classical and modern foreign language study, phonetics, philology, etymology, to say nothing of lexicology and lexicography. bookshops throughout the world: adequate but largely pedestrian bilingual dictionaries and a scattering of monolingual works that have been resurrected by greedy publishers Lexicographic technocrats enjoy using terms like terminology, in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, that gone a long way toward solving it. This book, which consists by a committee, which immediately tells the reader something It is true that the principles that apply to specialized dictionaries are not the same as those that apply to general dictionaries, either monolingual or bilingual. For one thing, the user of a specialized dictionary can be assumed to have a level of sophistication that includes knowledge of and some understanding of what goes on in general dictionaries. pages to make this point, which, it seems to me, is rather notwithstanding their utility, I thought had gone out of fashion a few decades ago) and other devices. It is hard to imagine that this book would be picked up by anyone but a lexicographer or someone interested enough in becoming one to subject himself to such a turgid presentation; of familiarity with the subject. Yet the treatment is reminiscent creation of the world. If one doubts the turgidity of the style of this work, witness the following, which merely says that entries in a dictionary can be ordered in different ways: Is that the writing of a person to whom you would want to give the responsibility for explaining complex or unknown terms in simple language? A few sentences farther one that it is complete and authoritative. As for completeness, and I dare not offer an opinion; as for authority, while Peter to me, chiefly in his latter capacity. In a preceding number of two new books dealing with the alphabet; now we have The spark that has ignited so many to look at the subject is difficult to identify: perhaps it can be put down to television struggles trying to translate what had become known as vowed to be the one who would one day translate the translation of Linear A. If susceptible teenagers watched that program, perhaps they will be inspired to work on Linear A, still an enigma, owing largely to the paucity of The subject of writing systems was considered beyond the pale by structural linguists, as it was not a reflex of natural utterance but a secondary representation. (Structural linguists do not like to deal with meaning, either, satisfied to include one's mother telling an infant, Here, darling, objects are thus pointed to and identified, how could anyone ever learn their names?) As a consequence, the subject was infra dig for serious linguists for many years, and it is refreshing to see it brought to the surface again. The impact of writing on language cannot be denied: in English, the conservatism of the spelling system has had an effect on the preservation of linguistic features that might have otherwise faded; in all languages, the traditions a profound influence, as the fundamentalist effect bears witness. To ignore or scorn writing and its influences is struthious and unscholarly, and this emerging crop of The relationships between linguistics and writing are emphasized here and there in The World's Writing Systems by the short essays, prepared by the editors and contributors, to provide a list of the thirteen parts of the book: Each of these parts, introduced by a contributor or sections in all, and each of those, in turn, has its own commentary. The result is not only a comprehensive treatment of a subject by an authority but a detailed description of the place the section has in the general scheme of representing ideas by squiggles on a page, rock, or tablet. but (under Part XII) there are sections on Numerical Notation, Shorthand, Phonetic Notation, Music Notation Movement Notation Systems (dealing with dance). The The word colophon has undergone several metamorphoses it originally referred to the inscription at the end of a book identifying its basic bibliographic information, that is, title, author, subject, publisher, date and place of publication, the title page. Presumably, because it sounded like a fancy colophon is drawn into service as the title of a section that lists all the typographic fonts employed in typesetting the book. That is a useful and interesting adjunct, and we must assume that it has been called colophon because typography has been subsumed under the original rubric of bibliographic information. Although it is not documented familiar to me as referring to the modest comments that page of their books, for example (actually from a Random The World's Writing Systems is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in or involved in any of the myriad aspects of language, both as a fascinating browsing book and as an important reference work. I have instance, but who knows what sorts of questions may arise in my mind (or others') that might send me rushing to the were not sufficiently detailed and technical for my taste, but then my appetite for matters technical probably exceeds that of most people likely to be concerned with Phoneticians, pronunciation editors of dictionaries, the technical materials on which understanding of the text relies will be amply rewarded by this valuable book. The writing is concise and specific, allowing little room for idle chatter; the information is sometimes revelatory: protruded between the teeth so that the turbulence is an articulation with the tip of the tongue behind the speakers of other English dialects or in other regions Clicks, Vowels, and Multiple Articulatory Gestures, the [Available in the US from Seven Hills Book Distributors, those essays, fleshed out in full in those instances where they might have been cut by the newspaper for economy of space. The essays are brief and interesting and range throughout the entire spectrum of the subject, including literature. There is, for example, a piece on spoofs in which Rose cites several that are well known, omits others at least one that is a satire, which is a different sort of animal: all in favor of weekly columns on language, but one must The book is informative and entertaining, but the reader should check the validity of some of Rose's comments before incorporating it into a doctoral dissertation or other important work. That admonition applies also to the blurb on the back cover, which, presumably, was composed by somebody at Kangaroo Press but not submitted to Rose for approval. It refers to His vulgar vocabulary and facility The cover copy also refers to his endlessly entertaining and hypocorism are as absent from the index as the as between such and hypocorism. Perhaps such curiosities wrote the text for it at Kangaroo ought to be relegated I am prejudiced, I know, but while I find the use of impact as a verb an interesting linguistic development, I consider it execrable style for literate speakers and (especially) writers; yet it appears in Rose's Preface, where one to utter judgments about language, just as doctors are not supposed to react with revulsion should a patient reveal am being paid to express. Otherwise, why bother reading to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself course in statistics for the linguist who works with real linguistic data from real subjects and converts those finding From the cover: This book is a general introduction sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective.... Professor Romaine explores bilingualism as both a societal assesses the positive and negative claims made for the behind various language policies and programs for bilingual From the cover: This is the first complete introduction presenting a general introduction to the two theories of phonological representation that lie at the center of current research. In addition, the central issues and tenets of lexical phonology are set out and critically evaluated. through our speech we all help recreate gender divisions assesses the relationship between second language acquisition and sociolinguistics, focusing in particular on the and why language is used and how its use varies in different terms and concepts introduced and developed by Dell and applications of their work. Drawing on insights from social anthropology and psycholinguistics and using examples from a great many languages and cultures, she builds up a model which includes communications within the subject, this book offers a thorough account of topics regarded as a curious occupation. Writing reviews of them is no less odd an experience. For various reasons, I have chosen to comment on only certain aspects of this book, chiefly because a thorough review would occupy far more space in VERBATIM than many readers might willingly tolerate. though a bit thin on the ground, is quite adequate. I have found other things to criticize, however, that may be more germane to books in general, especially reference books First, I want to vent my spleen on publishers' book designers who haven't the slightest idea of what they are doing. As one case in point, I cite The Random House Dictionary possibly in order to mimic other dictionaries but probably because there are few things that designers can get their grubby little fingers into, the main entry words were reset read. Those who are not designers but typographers steeped in statistics of readability and other scientific applications redundancy built into its characters, almost any serif font no sense at all. Besides, there is nothing modern about tradition of Art Deco. Turning to the illustrations (including said that the originals were a model of clarity and detail: I know, for as Managing Editor, it was among my responsibilities to commission them and to accept or reject completed artwork or to have it modified. That was a laborious quality of the drawings as published in the original edition. lay a fine screen over every illustration (except the maps), thus losing much of the finical detail originally produced. As if to confirm that the various afflictions of designers which can only be said to have suffered. Worse, their incredibly unimaginative work has resulted in a book that the Grammar can be used as a work of reference. The the user to numbered sections: each chapter is numbered The first problem, inherent in the poor design of the book, is that there is no clue in the running heads as to which chapter and section one has turned to (unless he has chanced on the beginning of a chapter or section: only the page number appears). The section titles and numbers almost impossible to thumb through the book to find a reference quickly. As it happens, both the title of subsections the pages where they begin, making it inconvenient to find pages (instead of the page numbers, which serve no discernible subsection numbers would have been greatly facilitated. apparently to a chapter, that is really a reference to a subsection. up its page count (probably at the instigation of the publisher, designer has employed a hanging indention of about ten book been set to full measure, is that it would have been Fourth, relating specifically to the entries looked up, while may and might are both mentioned, except for the That is not inaccurate, but it scarcely tells the full story, which is the present of which might is the past, in constructions where the notions of Permission and Possibility are given peremptory coverage (though there are six citations), and no helpful comment is offered about their interchangeability They also drop the /r/ at the end of a word when it It is poor style to find the headword term defined virtually as an afterthought. The entry at mass noun is a cross reference, See count noun.; but the definition at count grammar is covered in the book, entries are lacking for dependent clause, independent clause, conjunctive adverb, that are not themselves defined and are not always transparently of the author, some at the door of the book designer, most be derived from a vast corpus of its writing and speech to produce a dictionary; a grammar can be likewise derived, but such exercises are rare and are usually confined to work Linear B (or A). But for modern languages, the situation is different. Preparing a monolingual English dictionary, lexicographers who are native speakers of English may often turn to citations of usage in context to derive or verify senses of some words; but for words whose meanings they already know, they can rely on their own knowledge and use citations for confirmation. Relying solely on one's own knowledge but that is not a difficult matter if citation material is available, and there are usually other books or specialists nothing wrong with looking at others' work but that those who studiously avoid doing so for any reason are extremely foolish: how can one know how the competition has handled unavoidable fact that competition is a driving force in the publication of such works, one can scarcely expect to improve on the competitive works without knowing most relevant for my purposes here is to wonder about the amount of information brought to the task by the grammarian. It is highly unlikely that the subject will be citation materials. But the question arises whether the grammar is constructed from what is known (or found) and then verified through the application of suitable a combination of the two is employed. In any event, grammar. In essence, such a work cannot be more or less than a description of how a language works. But the question must arise in the mind of the publisher (if not the grammarian), Who is going to use the book? That is not readily answered these days. There was a time when students were required to study the grammar of the language, might more logically be looking at a market consisting of people who want a reference grammar, that is, one in which they can find answers to their questions about how This raises a question germane to the Oxford English huge resources of a number of different corpora of English Usage and several other research centers, all of which citations range widely and include telephone conversations, classroom lessons, broadcast interviews, parliamentary debates, spontaneous commentaries, business transactions, of language. Throughout the Grammar are interspersed quotations from these sources, each carefully documented. That might well provide a reasonably accurate picture of contemporary language. But is that what a user of the Grammar as a reference grammar might want? One of the beauties of the Oxford English Dictionary (and of, say, A is that users are comforted by quotations from sources that are acknowledged paragons of English usage, writers students' conversations with their flatmates? from recordings find only twenty books that had been mined for citations purpose in bringing it up is not to sell books but to contrast There is still another aspect to the whole business of citations. Some thirty years ago, I proposed that the most that is, the number of people who, on the basis of readership listening to the manifestations of language presented in books, newspapers, magazines, and radio and television of English]. The exposure of a word would be expressed as an index number resulting from the normalization of (unwieldily large) numbers of readers and listeners and would be likely to provide some meaningful measure of the frequency for a significantly large percentage of the lexicon. Prior to that, frequencies had been calculated on the basis of raw occurrences in a text selected by a researcher at whim, though it must be acknowledged that the books (at least) selected for examination were classics of literature assumed to be widely read, taught, and used as models of effective expression (if one insists on In resorting to sources that might be justifiably viewed as natural language, those who concur with Professor their documentation, but it is well known that an enormous expressions used in everyday contemporary speech and contributors to the imagery and poetry of the language. While their manifestations undoubtedly appear in the snatches of telephone and flatmate conversations recorded in the numerous corpora cited in the Appendix to the In other words, there are some who believe that we might contributed to the molding of the language in all its reflexes and who find it difficult to understand the usefulness to be derived from an analysis of idle telephone and flatmate conversations, student essays read by no one other than the instructor charged with their marking, business letters read by no one other than their (individual) recipients, social letters, classroom lessons, business transactions and client), and so on. While it is undeniable that relatively wide (though unquantified) readership or audience, number of sources that seem to reflect language that Is that lack of representative material what people want or expect from a grammar? Not I, to be sure. Given a choice, I should prefer to model my language on the writings of acknowledged masters and on the speech of a student essay. I can make a clinical observation regarding the diminution of politeness in the language, attributable, perhaps, to the lowering of the standards of civility and yielding, typically, constructions like Me and her went to the park (as contrasted with Her and me went to the I was unable to find any comment by the author justifying usage are absent. For example, nothing is offered regarding the poor style of the reflexive pronouns for I or me as is italicized in the original is hard to understand. It may can be inserted (as they are in dictionary usage notes) referring to careful speakers, educated users, their peers, and others whom users of a grammar might, conceivable, wish to emulate. Thus, rare is the dictionary that offers infer as a synonym for imply without some sort of for imply might be somehow stigmatized in (some) educated suspicious user of a dictionary (or grammar) who has the wit to look it up facing a serious lacuna in the information given about the language. Such information is not prescriptive its proper place in a dictionary. Comparable grammatical makes a passing reference to the aesthetic use of language are notably absent, presumably lest they constitute some sort of value judgment. As we all know, the grammar avoiding the masculine pronoun as a pronoun of reference), and, in a rare opinion, the author concedes that constructions before his or her eighteenth birthday may be asked to be put? There can be no confuting the fact that the grammar stages of the language: after all, languages are sorted and distinguished by linguists on the basis of their grammars, not their lexicons. (Thus, English is a Germanic language because of the history of its structure, or grammar; were its lexicon alone to be considered, it might well be classified as a Romance language, owing to the large percentage grammar of English. Though, personally, I am not enamored are still nouns and adjectives. The chief aim remains a thorough, description of the structure of a language. Indeed, some on and reflects valid criticism of the inconsistencies found in traditional grammar. Unfortunately, the commentary, [It is with the deepest regret that we announce the At first, the idea that there can be a single word in English or in any language that merits the creation of a devoted to it exclusively must seem preposterous. But with the initial riffle through the pages of The F Word, noting the different typefaces that designate parts of speech, definition, date of origin, source, examples, it becomes evident that this word is the great workhorse, is a resident editor in the dictionary department at Random House, proves to be a rare item indeed: a comprehensive, Word. For the curious layperson, it will be a source of amazement and information, a good deal of it funny, revealing and far from funny. Funny are the ingenious hybrids, to actions or practices more traditionally the subjects of reports by physicians, psychiatrists, the courts, and, increasingly, stories in the media. That some of the terms, like the practices, are nearly as old as printing cuts or ought to cut the ground out from under those authorities who It takes no more than a preliminary skim to suspect what is soon substantiated in the ample sources and usages truest homes. Why this is so might provoke some thought. Is it a kind of barracks clannishness? Certainly it is a macho, masculine kind of thing, with more than a touch of adolescent snobbery in one's familiarity with a special rescuer, Well and good, mon, but where in 'ell is his hat? Overnight it became a staple for expressing ingratitude, And there were a number of outfits companies, battalions, newspaper once actually tried to authenticate the origin, Curious among the many curiosities in this entertaining two and a half pages. The word or term commanding the second greatest coverage is an unspeakable that is evidently spoken a great deal. Including all its usages, initials, purposeful This book will probably find no reader fully conversant conveys nothing of the surprise and delight at observations that cause explosions of laughter. The Foreword is itself worth the price, which easily makes The F Word a then sets out with passionate vim to prove the point. The illustrated conceals a miniature harmonica (diatonic and of punning, and clearly has it in his bones. He knows to hand. He is fully aware, too, of the very ancient tradition of the rebus, the pictorial pun. Not letting his own exuberance run away with him, he prudently issues a safety warning about the manipulation of tools and substances. After all, the pun is, in (typically) more senses than of words is an exercise in thrift: two or more meanings for one word or phrase. Wit is psychic economy. In more flop). The computer's version of this is a switching between two stable states (unstable mates), but of course any shuttling and you should be ashamed of yourself), Valse Teeth. Infected, I cooked up: Baby Sitar, Bad Vibes, King Gong, for the repertoire pop songs of all epochs or popular classics. lacks the desirable distance between the two items suddenly conjoined). He is fully conscious of his own, for which Swift said that like fleas, puns get everywhere. The one could use it on any day of the week and not just on mark of the inveterate punner. There is, of course, method in his madness (it has been claimed that puns introduce lunacy into language, but it was there all along), and horns sound forth on occasion to intimate cuckoldry. use. All you need, apparently, is a lathe, a sharp knife, a band saw (not to be confused with a hawk), manual dexterity, This book is highly sophisticated and deeply naive, and ingenuousness rub matey shoulders. All proceeds go to the Salvation Army. So salve your conscience, and save Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters including a video of a man fitting a condom. For those unfortunate enough not to have access to the Internet, she added: I becomes obvious there are some inconsistencies as to remains that they never called themselves The Golden their music idol, Buddy Holly. The music of the early music, and so, modeling themselves after Holly's band, the Crickets, John, who couldn't resist a pun, suggested trace. One source claims that silver was an obscure Derry and the Seniors, all names that point out that one member was the leader. Other people have dismissed the adjective Silver as merely an addition to give the name wrote about, and first of all what they called themselves, when words cross language frontiers, and what was a temporary is a movement to decriminalize the meanings of words that once described criminal conduct in unmistakable terms. Amen. And I have an additional example of what I am a child of the '20s, a time when those who were involved in what was then (I believe) a minuscule drug problem in the US were called dope fiends. The implication was that anybody who took drugs (dope) was not only to be avoided, but also feared. To this day I carry that reaction to drug users. Today the use of narcotics is commonly dabbling in one more little pastime whose attraction would These locutions would be of little importance, I think, if it were not for the fact that they have been adopted by most of the news media and the entertainment industry. Nobody uses dope fiend any more, even referring to addicts who regularly overdose. And in that word overdose we have yet another euphemism, don't we, as if there were such a thing as a beneficent normal dose of heroin or crack. or rather a transposition, that I seem to be hearing more and more these days. It happens when a speaker (turns around?) with That's a whole another subject. match their possessors' professions. It has triggered an old when a teacher cited, as presumably authentic, the story of a visitor to a little western town who noticed a shingle out the unfortunate conjunction, but the lawyer simply protested that it was actually his name. Suggested the visitor, Why don't you at least substitute your whole first name for that awful A? The lawyer sadly replied, It's proper verbs into our language alongside proper nouns a proper verb to reflect that prevalent Pacific Northwest advising a nostrum that would cure not only the strong fires and a whole variety of more obvious diseases but teeth should fall out) tertiary appropriateness is his for A Boy Named Sue. I knew a man named Sue, a distinguished but her given name was Bill Lee. Her father's name was Lee, and she was the third daughter and last child in the family, so they must have given up on having a boy who have become the butt of ridicule, but he quickly became one of the boys when someone gave him a more appropriate The history of the discovery and naming of the lanthanides Cerium has its own, similar development, so that by to explaining themselves before large groups or public figures long used to it, may flounder about when unexpectedly struggle to find the right word and, if they succeed, may mispronounce it. Such lapses, surely, may be forgiven. Charity, however, does have its limits and cannot be When the man in the street or his female counterpart other and worse sins against good English and grammar, about it. After all, the speakers may never have been taught the basics of their one and only language, their mother tongue. Perhaps, too, they have never heard of dictionaries. The foregoing examples, however, were not Is there any excuse for broadcasters who read their scripts still managing to mangle not merely the foreign names which recur daily but even everyday words like reading the midday news report, spoke of a local philanthropist did not learn what because I was straining to understand that mysterious verb and, too late, realized donating had television used the word legislator when the context made clear that legislature was intended. That ad disappeared after a few days; I wish I could feel confident that its removal was caused by concern for the language. Again and again one hears local and national broadcasters according an extra syllable to past participles as if the words A slip of the tongue, perhaps; but, during one memorable Standing Committee on Spoken English. Now we learn broadcasters for a week or two. Listen and reconsider How long is it since you turned round and gave someone a good earful? And did he or she turn round and give But beware. You may find this particular speech habit to be like the creaking tree outside the window: it was always there but you never heard it. Once you hear it you aggression, and, as always, vindication is in the mouth of If you turn round and do it to me, it probably means audacious revolutions. Retailers seem to turn round wholesale on their hapless customers with outrageous demands. The Gas Board turned round and said I had to pay for If, on the other hand, I turn round and do it to you, it probably means that I am turning in heroic defiance, wheeling in righteous indignation, turning on my tormentors. take it lying down. This is known as Turning Round and The average day's listening to talk radio will provide course, the Political Revolution. That is not, as previously thought, the overthrow of one faction by another but describes those occasions when the minister reverses his aggravated duet (or should that be roundelay?) between herself and her habitual sparring partner. After an epic exchange of personal pirouettes she delivered the knockout Thus creating, in the true sense of the term, a circular design for the reverse side of the coin featured a voyageur where the first coins were due to be minted. The backup but that unfortunate name: loon as in loony bin! Although an adjective (ultimately) from lunar are etymologically distinct, their similarity has encouraged obvious satirical connections: our economy, which is loony, has as its fundamental unit of currency the loonie; many felt that the slang term sprang up immediately and collectively, and no one person could ever claim to be the inventor of it. coin, so the letters columns of every newspaper in the country have been filled with speculation and suggestions for a slang term for this new coin, which is slightly larger on it. Once the design was released, the name bruin was suggested by many people, but the name that appears to I may have the dubious distinction of being the first the coin. At that time the idea had occurred to me because the issue. What actually appears to happen in cases like this is that neologisms do not appear like a single light bulb going off in one person's head but rather like wheat after spring rains: if the ground is fertile the seed germinates When it comes to counting, I have always been in awe of French schoolchildren. How do they manage to do sixty plus fifteen, which require mental agility just to English three score years and ten is certainly more has separate words for seventy and ninety. They, along to have a head start over the French. The German system of saying numbers in reverse order (like the old English as children are usually taught to start with the units column into insignificance since I started learning to count money multiply five by thirteen and add one hundred while my brain is still struggling to work out whether this comes francs can be expressed as one hundred plus sixteen fives, review my earlier belief that French children must be at a disadvantage when it comes to mental arithmetic. In fact, children who grow up speaking a language such as French numbers and introduces them to multiples at a very early age, probably take to arithmetic faster than those who plod point of view of information theory. That is, we examine represented. The idea here is not to convert language stream of ones and zeroes! That type of efficiency beings. In fact, as we shall see, natural languages communication possible, it is a form that is ideally suited to human experience, which, after all, is why longer than they strictly need to be. This is perhaps more noticeable in German than in English. In German, from scratch from the point of view of an extremely lexicon is of sufficient size to form a rich written could associate to each English word one of our new words, which hasn't helped keep things concise. But now there is no word longer than four letters. This at least attempts to follow a path of least resistance, in which the effort expended in writing or speech is redundancies. One example is the indefinite article a in English. Many languages are inflected, which is nicely with little inflection. In English, the function word order. The sentences I threw the dog the ball by word order, and not simply from the words themselves. the words for dog and ball indicate which object is direct and which is indirect. Thus, it is possible to rearrange words as in the example above. The result may not always be idiomatic, but it will probably get the point across. Such flexibility allows for a greater degree of expression in poetry, for example. Thus, the first line contains the words for man and woman of the line. It can even be argued that word forms past, present, or future, depending on context. One from language to language, but also from one writing style to another. One author might have a more loquacious said to have the better style. A lengthy passage, if fact. On the other hand, brevity is what gives a pithy aphorism its strength. This is true of both poetry his poem The Bells to convey to the reader a sense of actually hearing the tolling of the bells, as though little space. Thus, we have a verse form like haiku, in which the totality of the poem is condensed into only seventeen syllables. If only certain genres of at the office could be completed in plenty of time for a coffee break. Presidential debates could begin and end with the introductory niceties, since very little of substance is ever said. The civilized world would compactness, redundancy actually plays an important role in the communication process. One is reminded were placed in separate rooms and allowed to communicate other was given the assembly instructions. The object might elicit the response Which bolt? or Which L? Or perhaps the recipient of the message would insert but more communicative. With very little effort, it handle. A person would not be inclined to type out such a message verbatim. More likely, he would remove determine a spoken phrase by reading lips demonstrates hearing can use visual clues to assist during the listening necessary morsels of information in noisy surroundings, if facial expressions, gestures and other contextual of data strictly required to convey the message. Examining as the sound of a vowel, one sees a complex pattern valleys. When such a pattern is recorded and stored an inordinately large amount of storage. This seems all the more wasteful, considering that the only useful once again, proves to be beneficial. Conversing over of a hundred sound peaks is altered by an electrical pop or crackle, the sound of an E does not suddenly of just one peak (or bit) would change the sound (or character) entirely. A moderately noisy phone line highly efficient system of beeps, conventional phone lines are seldom used, owing to the high error rate that would result. In any event, computers must use where none previously existed in order to communicate If the recipient of a message (such as the reader of text) is able to predict the next word before seeing it, the word is apparently not conveying any additional is easy to predict the concluding letter: WITH LIBERTY certainly not ended there!) On the other hand, only the most avid trivia buff could complete the sentence very unlikely that the final word is giraffe, the correct more insight. Similarly, the ability to infer the existence of an omitted letter or word (such as the indefinite is probably not portfolio. But lack of familiarity with based on semantic content, it is also possible to base predictions on patterns within the text itself. In English, the letter might be E would probably be more reasonable greater still. This is the type of predictability studied new information (unpredictability). If a message is too redundant, it becomes tiresome. (This calls to error. An analogy might be made with music. If, on first hearing, a piece of music is entirely predictable, creative spark, and is not enjoyable. Conversely, if with each new note, unable to identify any underlying a random collection of sounds and is equally uninteresting. the impression that the string section had suddenly study, independent of the study of language or music. of order and disorder of physical systems. The disorder system is the universe itself. We find that pockets of heat in the form of stars and galaxies are spreading out and cooling down over time. Thus, we can imagine sun. Without being drawn into these difficult questions, in information theory, suffice it to say that redundancy is not the evil one might imagine it to be at first glance. Indeed, it is necessary for the very existence freely over the face of their continent, they will continue investigation. I even entertained the thought that the placard might have been put there by the diabolical at all keen on having a new English teacher. I was `bright,' this was merely an intimation to the townsfolk instance, may well be shaken when, just before arriving so bad, so they probably conquer their apprehensions the thought that such a fine old building (actually a may offend our most intimate sensibilities. When we meet them at a certain distance, we can usually manage can elegantly get round the issue in English by pronouncing and with no warning, there is really no remedy: all you can do is face the inevitable with whatever fortitude worst misgivings. In the early days of his sojourn nylons for a girl friend. The German word for silk promptly suggested itself to my mind. So I went into lacy panties before my eyes, I was taken aback too. Perhaps she thought I was a transvestite and had to be humored. In fact, I was seriously embarrassed, for afternoon, so we decided to go and have a snack in a restaurant. The waitress, who spoke a little English, chestnuts which looked rather like a dish of worms. We were somewhat intimidated by the look of it, but mothers' milk. An hour or so later we still felt peckish, rather something a little more substantial. As a precautionary companions that this must be pasta, a kind of Continental spaghetti on toast). They were all in favor, and five minutes later we got our snack: it was that chestnut We felt that we had been tricked by a malicious fate. We sat there, unable to start on the stuff, wishing allowed to go to the cinema in a nearby town. When quarters. Continence, after all, is a virtue, or so say trouble only for a brief moment, ignominious as that the United States, so that as next of kin he had to name. His brother, strangely enough, was not called likeness became, for an immigrant, decidedly uncomfortable. write letters in these languages by hand for her to yet another occasion I had to write to a colleague by studiedly polite tone. Once again, the catastrophe Only too often the pitfalls awaiting the unsuspecting across a passage in an English novel in which lovers probably have no answers to these rhetorical questions, plates, leaving you to believe it or not. Similarly, seen anything quite as big and blue as that in his own mountain railway. It indicated the price of a single the idea that the difference in coefficient of thermal expansion between brass and iron is responsible for and, above all, a certified gas fitter, stir up a little fit in the original pile and one temperature change, with detailed calculations based thereon: therein, I suggest, lies the rub. The radius of curvature of the than that of the balls or they would not pile in the first place. Given this, the bottom layer of balls brass expands more than the bottom balls, which are returning to their original positions. Repeat this a reasoning operate more smoothly. The principal figure died by now, so he is no longer alive and thus is no mortal and thus will live forever. This establishes the immortality of the sole, as well as that of the heel, calf, ankle, and toe. A similar argument can be carried out for anyone at all, except, of course, for sole survivor, again establishing the immortality of the counting of angels, which they found more effective Since angels tend to be of uncertain gender, neither an open question. This is, in fact, the most important unresolved issue in all of formal logic, because of greatly inflated land values and a rapidly increasing angel population, both of which place dancing space but it was finally rescued from angelic oblivion by that the morning star is not the same as the evening fall faster than lighter ones, by dropping an apple head, and it was Universal Gravitation that suggested and so was unconscious for several hours. This gave Newton time to get to the patent office and file his beginning of this century to the present day. First, mathematics from logical principles, in contrast to theorem by showing that every sentence in a logical language can be encoded as a statement about positive mathematics. Since the same is true of every natural if `snow is white' is true is true. These discoveries resulted in the theory of models, the clothing worn of certain members of the audience. This reestablished exciting development in formal logic is the new field of fuzzy logic, in which precision is replaced with frankly, as the father of invention, because of his work on the logic of necessity. Rather than taking statements to be either true or false, fuzzy logic assumes his addiction to this controlled substance led eventually Preparation of this essay was supported, in part, by a grant from Church Publishers (very) Ltd., for a complete list of Theses, with difficulty deciphering the sentence to which this footnote is Shocking as it may seem, Whitehead actually plagiarized the title Sexist Press, Inc., for the cosmic significance of all this. in the article, To Abbrev, or not to Abbreviate, by give or take. Similarly, reducing Vice President to families [belief that use of a living person's name would deprive him of his soul] prevents the use of a alive. The belief is that giving a living person's name would deprive him of his full life. It is found the French title) it is rendered as Goodbye, Children. unsatisfactory. For that reason and because English is closely related to French (lexically anyhow, having French), the title can be left in the original as a title as the language of style and status, at least throughout New Yorker and Time French words and phrases appear other foreign language. The issue of The New Yorker novel S. has two or three brief business letters in of some ad writers and authors that a little French would resist translation even if it were desirable to put it into English. Only the first of its four words many others, intact, while other languages have the countries were taking off one after another, and the friends and relatives seeing loved ones off. An Air la vista! And then it was the turn of a jet flown by a But of course such bitterly pedantic wordplay would and pedantic, so long is a shade too informal, slangy. I suspect it is the most meaningful and untranslatable folksy language of camaraderie, the slang of street, seems to imply a sense of solidarity, of togetherness, whatever but of specifying a particular group. Further, boyish slang, it implies masculinity, as guys might in long, you guys. This translation conveys the meaning of the French title, all right, but is nevertheless be totally out of character for the priest whose warm prodigal son.' Moreover, some of the older students addressed by the priest in the movie are past childhood, though in priestly parlance anyone, even a nonagenarian, It may be that French, because it so rich in connotation languages. English has a much larger vocabulary, a that French is inferior to English. But the larger vocabulary much of this larger vocabulary is esoteric, exotic, pedantic, or otherwise as foreign to everyday English quantified by words, the expressive units of French single words, are usually harder to translate. English too has its untranslatable phrases composed of words that are individually translatable. For instance, try book I didn't want to be read to out of up for? Generally speaking, a phrase or clause is difficult to translate in proportion as it diverges from the standard, or as some would say, as it is ungrammatical. To paraphrase be tempted to infer that the assertiveness of her tenure was partly responsible for the demise of the subjunctive in those perceived by her to be contrary to what she perceived as fact. Although it is not impossible to becoming increasingly difficult; indeed, in a book I recently completed for Oxford University Press, virtually great lengths to avoid using the subjunctive, resulting is unlikely that he had].' She insisted that he fly whether he actually did or not would be revealed in having the effrontery to put forward the theory that the absent he absconded by rail. Had the subjunctive ourselves in this new society. [From an article by until the retailer or the company has been contacted. you couldn't get the children off to bed if it were I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce the following tenses (not a trivial problem, I admit), yielding in the items that he enjoyed catching were the ambiguous the writer of the article) is to come up with something substance of the article. Headline writers are often story was about a father who had his children (and, as I recall, his wife) wait in the family car while he Filmed is here a past participle, not the past of an active verb. This grammatical ambiguity is a frequent verb ambiguities like drop, rise, increase, decline, etc.). In any event, it is still not clear why an oil would expect the reverse) and why the prices resulting may have difficulty in determining how far from his wife this ideal husband lives, why he isn't bankrupt numbers of subjects who were not abstinent, number of other than that the candidate be a resident of the state he is running from at the time of his election. [From the crisis, is profoundly shallow in its prescriptions. [From comments by Frank Tester, professor at University them with apparent delight. I beat the air with my the mountain and who had answered my polite request nor milk. But the humiliating thing was that I, relatively languages, have been able to make myself understood Of course, it was not going to be plain sailing. I idyllic white cottage in the middle of a field near a The nearest village was a couple of valleys away; our perhaps not the best conditions in which to learn the we would be for ten days, practically incommunicado. as bread, cheese, house, sea, sun, chair, etc., with You know the sort of thing. Very useful in its way no you believe that I found in the rafters of our host's was about to be revealed to me. And into this unknown its roots dating back to the time when the world was to appear. The aims of a lexicographer, these days, is undoubtedly to be as objective and exact as possible roundly criticized for letting his prejudices interfere with his definitions. We do not go to a dictionary for remote the personality of the compiler, the better. would have been able with the help of his dictionary debate on the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. This in a POCKET dictionary, means the `yellow disease,' how can it be blue? But when he set to work, for he omitted to include such translation of a Welsh word, `to render prospective.' I have pondered on this phrase, and the only person I can imagine using it is the secretary of the local it,' with no further explanations as to why it should should contain pebbles. I therefore went out to try to find one in the hope that the object might reveal whether there is a dried skin with pebbles in it hanging whilst propping oneself on one's elbow.' This word has now taken its place in my vocabulary and I use it now and then nonchalantly in conversation. To date, and help revive interest in its author, I hereby undertake dictionaries of etymology are alike, the truth is that they differ in a number of respects, and it is useful through the college and desk sizes, contain etymologies surveys have shown that etymological information is that least frequently sought by dictionary users, so it ill behooves publishers to devote a great deal of expensive have reservations?) First, I found the system of cross references inconsistent. In the front matter we are told that if a related word is mentioned but no date That is not consistently the case, though it would be too boring to cite examples. Second, (in the entry course), and the generalization that ail is virtually obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present to have a dictionary of etymology that excludes all glossed, as required, when they are part of an entry. are far too many typographical errors for a book of Notwithstanding, there are many cogent observations, highly readable form. Indeed, there is so much information would have been well advised to prepare an index to afford users better access to the nether reaches of about the majority of words, it does not obtain for all the words and certainly not for many of the colorful expressions. For those words of doubtful origin (like and lets the user decide for himself from among the etymological dictionary that sets forth its information with the cryptic symbols and abbreviations found in the more ponderous, scholarly works, the Dictionary earlier time if it is still in use, but it does eliminate they were informants or advisors or drinking companions synonym (appropriate for the context in which I had for `difficulties,' and there is a (good) entry for act,' leading to `thing, business, affair, what occupies is `completed, done, consummated,' and, while it ill botched' is not a viable definition, I have never encountered apart daddy as a term of address in the illustration not shown (the word is, after all, a diminutive of behind: sophisticated from traveling abroad or by associating with speakers of other dialects of English. The same kinds of inaccuracies occur in the opposite direction: because of its organization, humdinger is misleading: lack of uniformity of style of the book, with the dialect the text. Style in dictionaries is not a nasty little detail: piece of information, not the fact that the book was accurate to define gunsel as a `callow youth,' a sense and `gunsel' and was portrayed as ineffectual, that hit man,' and the like, simply a `criminal who carries a gun,' and needs no (additional) pejorative treatment. replied, indignantly, Did you think it an underprivileged be found elsewhere (No, no, I don't mean the inaccurate which were not always accurate. That, coupled with work as a dictionary, has detracted from the quality has written a spirited, engaging book about English. His style is light and entertaining, and I should be nitpicking at trifles were I to cavil at his rare sacrifices that edition, let me set the matter straight. There was no agonizing whatsoever on the part of the editors: those words in. Jess Stein and I attended the meetings (particularly) the sales department. The sales director one of his many lecture tours, while the final stages of reading proof proceeded in the reference department, decision had been a practical one: he felt it foolish to sacrifice the sales of many thousands of copies of the the forms cannot be justified etymologically or any other way, the conservatives continue to heap scorn book: it was the first fascicle to be published and fascicles of various lengths which were sold by subscription, `your mother's ears,' the wisdom that Some cultures not use books like this to introduce students to the hope is their own enthusiasm for the subject in place Census Bureau], and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if scenario of how such a mess came to pass is probably off the mark. Judging by our own frequent experience local, the most common cause of bad foreign language Then, of course, since the agency has no capability gets printed and circulated. Fortunately, some government Lingo [XVI,4]. I had expected to find tweeter followed hardware and software. But while improving manuals can tell you that if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then the manual is the last refuge of the first spelling checker that I bought had a word list and prefixes. In operation it would strip recognized suffixes and prefixes from words, check for the word root, and use rules stored in the program to determine correctly. According to the manual, the file compression checked against a 42,000-word dictionary, the program [In the early 1960s I designed a hyphenation program atrocious hyphenation exhibited by many typographers on the right track regarding language (and manuals) have been ignored, though it is hard to say whether that is out of their arrogance, their ignorance, or I read with interest the account of your experience option in the program's spelling checker. You were at a loss to explain the rationale for the program's clinic. When I had the name of a patient but not his correction clerks. They sat at a computer terminals code to the name based on the remaining consonants. words in your article, but it was inadequate to the is [a selection from] the list of words in your article, screen. It is obviously a phony, for it should begin article, but the list is too long to repeat here. He with the following last names, and readers are invited But none of this is surprising in light of the name of of guttural grunts attributable to our furry forebears, such useful words as heretofore, theretofore, hereto, DOG in favor of BAD DOG... (I favor the alliterative as above (to make it easier to verify my analysis), I and second, the analysis of the thoroughly idiomatic adjective clause containing a participial phrase and a rather elliptical prepositional phrase. Although I would defend this entry on the grounds that intelligible ellipsis lies at the core of the challenge, I could avoid the fairly strong first objection by restoring about this without success, confirmation or denial. Two reference librarians were at a loss as to how to you know the story or, at least, that you could give [A definite citation, of course, can be used to verify a fact. Not all facts are verified or verifiable. Because events that never occurred are, naturally, not documented, misinterpretation of an event that actually occurred and, therefore, can be traced to a fact, even though distorted; the best that can be wished for is to turn up something that might have given rise to the story ALL EQUIPMENT is permanently marked for identification. on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. The Kings Mountain Volunteers were the first to arrive The 23rd Psalm and Me, or Has the Nightingale Become a Crow? anointing `bathing'? I couldn't find such a definition in Found no `bathed.' It bothered me, this image of a barber shop (where men have their heads massaged in oil to prevent baldness) instead of the image of the God. Why did this translator feel he had to change translation comes from some very important commentator surely does not achieve the quiver mentioned in John small homely feather singing shyly out of obscurity Bible thinking? The editors tell us, The translators have endeavored to avoid anachronisms and expressions keep their language as close to current usage as possible become obsolete; a most ambitious and delicate program apply to the 23rd Psalm? Isn't the metaphoric shepherd valley dark as death, thy staff and thy crook, current usage? I miss the translator's search for the quiver which many hearts have poured their peaceful faith? the retaining of The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want even though want no longer means to `lack' but rather `desire' and continues with, Thus many persons understand this traditional rendering to mean, `The Lord is my shepherd whom I shall not want.' Can you believe it? Can it be that these experts are wanting in Perhaps it is because I am just one of the ordinary readers with no special knowledge of the ancient East Psalm and confess to being rather shocked to find that the Lord is no longer my shepherd. Writes the translator actually prays in English to that name. I know many willing to pray to their Father, to the Almighty, to Why not choose the one that is closest to the nightingale? with the rd in lord entwine this twosome in my soul. Is it a better translation for me because each word what I want is that quiver in my heart. Do I get it words, swaying in iambic rhythm, with the shall sliding The noblest monument to English prose [Oxford Annotated their new, modern versions have written apologetics explaining why they felt they had to retranslate and but unity and modernization of language as well as the Does the modern reader really lack the great erudition awkward phraseology of the translator, the language is not altered with doing without thou and thee? Not altered? For my quiver I prefer doing with thou and smooth cadence truly reflecting our beloved shepherd's me me me' me, tight rein' me willingly' My cup runs `a coffee cup My cup run- `fulfillment: the middle of the alliteration is irritating and divisive, the restoring and uniting it with my soul. Besides are all soulless images arousing only mundane connotations. from which elegance and sublimity seem to be deliberately me beside the still waters by To the waters of repose today? Since the translator may not substitute his simplicity when its sense and the reader's senses are gloomy valley, I fear no harm is like Though I pass death, I will fear no evil is no casual passing by but threatening and the devil's evil lure contemned, reminding devil, were enticed and ate from the tree of Good and to or very much afraid of death or else have little real faith in the shepherd's taking care of them as they walk through life to ultimate death. In the following outline circumvented and about which there is some commentary Is it at all possible to balance the lofty beauty of waters easier than still waters? a valley overshadowed long days easier than forever? Just what is easily thought did the person who first recorded these words or sang the 23rd Psalm? How can we ever know exactly what he intended? And does it really matter? Whatever the original intention, however literally exact the translation, it misses, unless it sticks quivering in the has told the staff at his polo club that his daughter would not A woman gave birth to two of her triplets a month after delivering the third, a rare occurrence, physicians said In an essay published recently in a history journal, term I had used in referring to certain incidents witnessed cryptic spelling throughout) for chastity, the witty that his grandfather did indeed let slip a dirty word there is the story of the touching letter in a shaky script the community service people for the gift of the transistor My interest in the life and times of the word stems directly from a recollected bit of army business during stated that less authoritarianism and greater courtesy must thenceforth characterize all orders to enlisted men, and it closed with the day of the shouting sergeant is over. It was to be read to all formations. Our regimental commander used the opportunity to append to make special efforts forthwith to eliminate the use As a junior officer in charge of an infantry medical the shouting sergeant is over, on that day the army will have died, sir! preceded and followed by the snappiest Perhaps three seconds of perfect silence. Then the enlisted men, about seven thousand at the time, and though the camp never attained the notoriety of some in astonishment at the frowzy creatures they had so they done to you, lad? This isn't a man. It's a broken box cars, we were, I learned later, the most disheartening three years of imprisonment. Responding in the tradition about like a choreographed swarm of caterers. Their boots were polished and their worn tunics had all their buttons. These were the remnants of the defenders of they were creatures from a lost planet, another world. erect as a flagpole at one end of the barrack hut surveying it all, the angel in charge. To his deputy, carefully was not now hallucinating. That was the first I had ever heard the word used as a bridge. It was snapped out loud and clear, after the fashion of the proper veterans of a different time and a different kind of war, barbed wire in the blighted landscape. Assigned after some weeks to a few hours per week in the makeshift busying myself during the great gaps of empty time by Most numerous and engaging by far were the novel (to visit. With a willing little group of helpers he periodically painstakingly penned by hand. A new issue was unveiled was a great boost. I felt a sense of real purpose in mining for new specimens in conversations with these special contributions from numbers of users and listeners who had never previously felt the pull of scholarship. colleagues pronounced it a respectable body of work, acceptable for publication in the newspaper. It never Though the manuscript remained out of sight yellowing lexicon similar to those in the classic Dictionary of Luckily for the lofty sense of purpose which infused and inspired us, none of us knew of its existence then. Except for the elimination of several redundant items, the short and the tall [Opening lines of a familiar a fleecing, a loss, usually viewed from the receiving without any redeeming features; hopeless, incompetent, A cheese head; an easily confused or misled individual; Noun (rare). A dodger, evader, shirker, one who is Verb. To escape, evade, fade, run, slink away, vanish, Verb. To confuse; deface; disfigure; disorganize; entangle; hostility, opposition, refusal, rejection: As civilians we'll have to get used to using No thanks! in place We consider pornography to be a public problem, and we feel it is an issue that demands a second look. [From a names, the pictograph was later arbitrarily ornamented became accepted. The word thus formed coincidentally O!,' but I simply can't figure out why anybody would [XV,1], and Powers [XV,2] on the origins of `Gook' have word for the United States and that the two characters taken individually mean `beautiful country.' However, with the dominate tongue. It is by studying these various two characters the relationships become more apparent. there are at least four or five transliterations currently was culturally if not politically under the sway of the education there, including senior high school. Learning was not the hardest part for me in school, but it was difficult to learn to speak English without a heavy booklet entitled Drop Your Foreign Accent. In it was printed a poem called The Chaos, which as students, we had to learn by heart for recitation in front of the class. That was a tough assignment, but very helpful. gave a course on the origin and development of language. his lecture notes into a book which was published in and responded enthusiastically: I urged as strongly as market with a preface by myself: an overrated attraction well, especially in wartime. I reported this in a letter intellectual, was provoked by the word miraculous in the title to flex his dialectic muscles at it in a lengthy remember, he dismissed it as a nefarious supernaturalist before certified as educated or eligible for the franchise or for any scientific, religious, legal, or civil employment. when he received the book. He commented: I learned place of which I had never heard, and that his university rather than with a university apparently half a century book might help me to grind it. And grind it he did, vigorously and garrulously. The rest of the preface is a harangue on alphabet reform and has little to do with ought not to blind the reader to the excellence of Professor farce that resulted from the provision in his will that the income from the residue of his estate be used for new alphabet for the English language. That part of the will was declared invalid by a judge, and the interested alphabet Shaw called for and for the publication in it private citizens to make fantastic, unjust, bigoted, or even spitefully wicked disposals of their possessions after their deaths by will, and give these wills the force the linguistic bush. No r -rolling Scot, after generations to the growing edges of language, and he rejoiced in the ambiguities of it because they are signs of life and parochial and more than a little snobbish about spoken little note following the Shaw preface: I am gratefully taken in the book and especially for his most generous action in taking the time from his crowded life to write so magnanimous and stimulating a Preface to it, without been published. As I read that I can hear the gentle celebrated its silver anniversary with a substantial Shaw preface. Chambers, of the Department of Linguistic comment: Virtually unaware of the developing science view than was then current, giving central importance yet come to be recognized as a pioneer in what perhaps in his selection of words but was often wrong as to their meanings and derivations. His knowledge of the rifle and musket are used as if they were synonyms. A cut into the bore to impart a spin to the projectile.' were not intended to be very accurate. The rifle was of the rifle failed to ignite the explosion of the charge. produced by the flint shearing small bits of metal from charge to be ignited. It is the charge that is ignited, not the explosion; also, black powder does not explode: (fully forward and down); at half cock (partly back, to allow a flintlock to be carried with the pan closed or the lock is moved to full cock, the trigger, a simple the expression go off half cocked to mean `futile gesture' expression, however, derives from the percussion lock. If the main spring of the lock is sufficiently strong, the blow received by the percussion cap can set it off and the firearm discharges unexpectedly. Going off at half sharpen them. I have never heard the term skinning used for the process. References can be found for the Although hanging fire is defined as being the opposite muskets, as well, but they were not the weapon of the brass monkey before the difference in the coefficients of expansion (or contraction) of brass and iron causes circular depressions for stacking cannonballs, it would have to contract a great deal more than the iron balls to cause them to tumble. The coefficient of expansion and compare this to the contraction of brass for the same drop in temperature, while it is true that the cannonballs will have shrunken twice as much as the than a sixteenth of an inch; the pile would not topple even if their diameters were twice as large. However, as cannonballs would career over the deck because of the motion of the ship, they were kept in crates or on sense. Also, women were not usually found on naval vessels except in harbor. The image conveyed by the states that many a soldier was actually chained to his that one came from. Artillerymen were, and are, very skilled unit of, usually, more than ten men who spent a their piece. Each man had a specific duty that had to be carried out efficiently, not only for effectiveness, but also for safety. A man chained to the gun (to ensure bravery?) would be of little use, especially after The explanation for spike one's guns is barely adequate. gun. The spike was bent, either by driving it against information. Neither muzzle not battery is used with a unattested, a term etymologically related to the brass remember fondly one I repeated frequently one summer successively vomited up along the coast by a great fish committed took place in Brazil, where terms innocuous dangerous slang. Newly arrived, I taxied to my office and found what seemed to be a queue by the elevators. To be certain it was indeed an elevator queue I asked is very crude slang for a `homosexual man.' I had asked the gentleman, roughly, Are you into homosexuality? He looked away. The error was a bottomless source of many of the models I looked at had digital readouts without any soul. I wanted the timepiece I was used led me to a nearby display. There I found a watch with Presumably, the analog refers to measuring time by an analog, with hands and a circular face, rather than by precedent, after all, in analog computers, which compute by some analog such as discrete electrical voltages for numerical values. Or maybe analog computer used to be simply computer --we live in an age of technological guitar for his birthday. I won't bother going into the conversation that ensued; suffice it to say that acoustic their sound from the acoustics of the instrument itself. full force of the fingers to create words, rather than on electric (or electronic) assistance. But where do these terms come from? The point is that these qualifiers were added only in retrospect, when the emergence of They aren't quite neologisms to account for new technology, words (often verbs) formed on existing words (often nouns) by severing an ending. For example, diagnosis years afterwards, the verb diagnose --a back formation --was views of man's progress in a variety of fields. Mono sound equipment brings back the days when the phonograph rested in the den instead of in the home entertainment time: straight razors were the only razors around until may still sound odd to an untrained ear (this may be termed sound mixing, in a double sense). The phrase ghoulish alternative. Fountain pen, dirt road, manual with perfect equanimity. The frame of mind for hunting cream simply make the point that most juice and ice sound like redundancies: French champagne is a hotly contested instance. The notice that a nation other than have the audacity to label it champagne was the basis for a lawsuit rather than an etymological inquiry. On a knish, and cheese blintz would have been considered tautological some years ago. Nowadays, when blintzes spinach, and yogurt comes in eighteen different varieties, after the financial disaster of New Coke: buyers nostalgic supermarkets. Great original flavor! is the boast of days, video cameras are all the rage, but, as far as I thought to rename the human operators. Much further back, automobiles were first known as horseless carriages; them that today, or tomorrow). The governing principle seems to be inurement: when the new has sufficiently time, the old acquires the status of a curiosity, deserving On the other hand, cellular phones are still new enough to have their own novelty label. They are really radio phones, old word without any change in the word itself. To supernumerary), tape (magnetic, not sticky), and car program, chip, terminal, printer, and so on; software as soft wares and defined as dry goods. In the realm slightly differently to each new vehicle developed. And Finally, there are the objects that, while still possessing areas with potential, have color televisions become Will the flood of decaff poured every day eventually to typewriter and type (if they haven't already). Will the microwave revolution in the kitchen turn conventional proficient lexicographer should be an acute observer of hobby. All one needs is a sense of history that exceeds of the anomalous: another item for the collection. The make one feel like an antiquity, possibly deserving of a label. Given time, however, history may provide me The technical term, often so labeled on the base of the phone, is the whole thing round for the title of his first novel, items. I do not know yet whether to thank him, for once one gets on a kick like this it can easily turn into a count's values. So did wine. The count was in fine The harder something is the less it is influenced by other things, the less it interacts. In the above paragraph, the fact of a dinner, the experience of a dinner, and the Longer sentences are mostly the same: a series of short Even long sentences other than a series of short sentences watching dully, then so close that the bull thought charge and then, just before the horns came, giving the bull the red cloth to follow with that little, almost The various moments here are related only sequentially. between a bullfighter and bull, there is an avoidance It is this very avoidance of interactive conjunctions throughout the novel that creates the hard style. Such conjunctions, when placed in the beginning or middle awaiting definition from their relationship with what follows. Sentences which use such clauses are softer, often used suspension to create a world of subtle interaction: same interactive syntax. Riding on top of a bus in the language (Basque) he doesn't speak, he turns his attention to the land around him. It is much like terrain he has described before, only now, for the first time, he does not break down the description into a mere series the words themselves, the syntax shows him to be relaxing close under the trees. The bus went quite fast and But for the most part, interaction between clauses is reserved for moments of consternation. The narrator does not let down his guard, he must be thrown off it: the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself She kissed me, and while she kissed me I could feel When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding So select is the narrator in his use of such suspensions clause in two otherwise almost identical statements can the narrator is not sure how the woman feels about his depresses me so. The first time, then, he can plainly encounter is troublesome: he is caught in the middle meaning of the sentence expresses the quandary. The an expression of passivity, is, in fact, a symptom of a merge. The castrating war wound from which he suffers, barely mentioned in the novel, is merely the outward referred again and again. The narrator tells us that he has trouble falling asleep: he cannot give himself up to to another. She had been looking into my eyes all the time. Her eyes had different depths, sometimes they seemed perfectly flat. Now you could see all the way into them. You do not need to ask what depth level his eyes were at as he was observing her. Throughout the novel he convinces us that he is drawn to a woman but not to love itself: In a way, he says of it, it's an enjoyable feeling. The woman, however, knows better: narrator can't dispute this, because what the woman man, a living hell: Love you? she replies to his entreaty, his friend runs off with this same woman his strongest statement is I certainly did hate him. Had he said I hated him, he would have been giving himself over to that emotion, throwing himself off balance; but the work certainly acts like a cane to prevent it. (Try saying, perfectly flat.) He cannot even give himself over to jealousy. To be jealous of a person is to be open to challenged by another. The narrator is not jealous jealous of what happened to him. By dismissing the managed to get into it. He was never again to write as again to use a voice as tightly controlled. Yet the character, it seems, never left him. Even in his final moment, destiny; but inevitably a moment must be faced, after the deed, in which what is experienced is loss of control. himself. He leaned his forehead on the barrel of the on the other hand, loaded her dress up with stones and See if you can make the Verbal Analogy by selecting Answers provided. To make it harder, cover the Answers. boats from nearby marinas must dodge freighters on their way to nightclubs and restaurants along the banks of the pry most likely. He's pry not home, but you cask his waddle interrogative contraction. Waddle it be tonight, writing, the speaker would probably write the wrong and intensive (for all intensive purposes) are embedded merely misunderstood expressions, derived from trying to make sense out of auditory confusion rather than being the result of slouchy verbal vapors. The speaker probably thinks taking it for granite is correct, justifying granite. Similar faulty justification could be made for intensive purposes. In fact, such expressions may be perpetuated by others who hear the wrong version of How do we judge all as in I need to get some all for lazy mouth disease. In fact, I should doubt that a lazy some rules of the game need to be defined. I suggest following characteristics to distinguish it from some way you slice it, the Earl of Sandwich was responsible, splat itself against the palate and make a ch sound consonant deletion. The tongue has added an r after I thought that VERBATIM readers may find interesting taken your advice months ago and referred to Brewer's been easier. But by reviewing items I had gathered and sculpture, I was startled to notice for the first time animal or devil horns visible beneath the curly hair of Giver of the Western World. I groaned at the thought did not occur to me that a mistranslation or a typographical to give readers publications free of error. In spite of all efforts, errors get by, at least in first printings. I should have realized that early translations of the Bible from all the languages of the world, would be at least as the horns have not been heeded. It took a while, but I think I learned the source of those horns, which I now from cute little devil's horns to those that look like forth beams' or as `sent forth horns.' The Vulgate took Adding further to the wonder of it all is this translation brightness was as the light; he had horns [rays of light] literary adventure worth reporting, for since then the among the truths we live by. The column was syndicated prominently. I became a Nationally Quoted Authority the definitive, annotated collection of laws, principles, the original laws were there, and I was cited as the mine who said it in a drunken stupor. Chamberlain's Scholar and Original Contributor to the Genre. I became sought after by hostesses. But the best was yet to circulate around offices. This propelled me into the I figure that with a little luck I can be a Lion of birds. They may be little nothings, but they are also full of pith and vinegar, if you'll pardon the lisp. I evolved from epitaphs on tombstones. Because of the material on which it was inscribed, the message had to Abbey. What would you like to put on yours? Endings epigrams also evolved from proverbs and adages. The difference is that these earlier forms were inclined to take themselves seriously, while epigrams or aphorisms though some epigrams are rhymed, they are not to be confused with poetry, or even blank verse. Poems rely on narrative imagery to evoke feelings, while epigrams focus on contradictions to provoke thought. The explosive tension of the epigram serves to focus consciousness, In my own case, writing epigrams may be a congenital in several of his books. I started writing them in my of the Bill of Rights and the French Revolution. It satirical age, after all, and epigrams are the perfect worst. You ask what a nice girl will do? She won't poets of other days, the living you deplore; spare me structural taxonomy. Although my classification system published, it does seem to include most of them. As we shall see, many epigrams fall into more than one category, obstetrics a system of religious belief based on the This type of epigram involves an association between things which have no apparent connection. For example: Scatology and eschatology are often hard to distinguish, It is natural to be concerned about what television them on their heads, or give them a new twist which If I have not seen far, it is because I stood on the One of the characteristics of both proverbs and aphorisms is repetition of syllabic structure. If the onset of a The evil eye is the seeing eye which has been denied. Substitution of sounds, syntax, or meaning also occurs spellings but different meanings, we have a homonym: To retire with a modicum of dignity, a little jack is When two words sound the same but are spelled differently, usually need to be written in order to make sense, but All good carnivores begin meals by first muttering: I regret that I have but one asterisk for my country. Other substitutions do not qualify as either homonyms or homophones, but they are interesting nonetheless. Either a letter, or an entire word, or phrase may be transposed, or the entire phrase may be contracted to given epigrams a new lease on life. Look around you: they are everywhere. I understand that graffiti have stickers, and bathroom walls, as well as in a variety of work settings. They are personal statements even if they are not original, and they are a way of talking other which intimidates and bores us at the same time. forms of exercise, good for body and soul. But I would and that their quips will continue to delight or offend Serious crime down, but murders increase. [From the there did not seem to be much point. But I think it lies he might have told. People were lulled by that first names alone until well into the Middle Ages. In to distinguish themselves, and at least some of these addictive A Dictionary of Surnames (Oxford University the emergence of larger states that began to centralize keep track of individuals they might never meet, and other local worthies) followed a few simple rules for first name of his father or grandfather, who himself, name, through local preference, finally came to end But, to the inherent music of their language (would to size, and they have the same effect on any other suffixes into English: they are a malignly ingenious but unspecified disdain. There were times, however, such times, they turned with a vengeance to nicknames. their origin in nicknames. Not all these nicknames are bad. If one is fortunate enough to carry one of birth of a child) probably were not surprised that he a form of spiritual love that made them seem saintly, how they came to be left on the steps of convents or slime). Not all of these surnames are terribly common, to be more prolific than their thinner neighbors is equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) is defined broad categories. One of the largest describes physical The person perennially under the weather or perhaps someone of childish intellect). One who squinted or word for magpie) made a habit of gossiping or collecting insects ignored: the habitually irritating were either someone with more linguistic flair could use the imperative was the boring option for christening thieves; more history could consign a family to either comforting to its meaning and to the fact that it was borne by a entirely accidental. But it does provoke the question, only ones to live with the burden of insulting surnames, While he was alive, Jack Benny entertained millions. some special hazards on the fairway; to wit, the handling and frustrating at the same time. English speakers translate the words of a proverb, but they cannot be sure that the end product will be meaningful in the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush in French? hand is worth two in the hedge. More to the point, to express this particular truism the French are more the roof. A finer distinction: not just one bird for the sky, give me a tit in the hand. A similar little/ slight to the complete, let us look at some more proverbial truths they express. To save space, the following abbreviations Each sheep with its pair. Here we have a difference German generality to the various birds and beasts of the other languages. But at least almost all the proverbs more memorable), while the German nicely alliterates. have killed him. The conclusion to be drawn here is something of a zoological or at any rate ethnic nature: encountered in much of the United States.) Moreover, both a valuable beast (for his hide and meat) and a symbolic one (standing for strength and power). But can more or less agree: Don't look a gift horse in the What has been written with the pen cannot be hacked out done, courage [literally breast]. Here we have the too, have an equally vivid turn of phrase, although, come to think of it, who is likely to shed real tears have, too. But the source of the English proverb lies A pattern is already emerging of varying traditions almost all proverbs, however modern, however nationalistic, proceed with care. You might get away with an exact In physics, where other forms of misconduct are relatively rare, I have seen serious breeches of ethics committed under the cloak of anonymity by referees of journal (or quanta) having fun leaping over walls and madly jumping up and down. The Concise Oxford Dictionary radiation it represents. Ah, yes. And it has this for atom or molecule from one quantum state to another. flaunt that sort of thing. It now designates a sudden, spectacular, extensive change in a program or policy along that line. But long before the physicists got Epistle to a Young Friend, in which he, interestingly, wrote of Some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment. as perceived, are extensive quanta. (I must memorize is actually a very small change, but nevertheless a significant one. Despite the illogical element in the methods or results, especially in research connected the drudge rebels against his drudgery and defiantly indulges in a moment's humor or whimsy. The lexicographic specific feelings of demoralization while compiling (The Cynical Definition went on to become a kind of (somewhat plodding) cynical humor into the definitions who is deputed by a superior or by proper authority century response to his earnestly homiletic approach Vice is rarely a solitary invader; it usually brings volumes, contains many extremely quaint definitions Protozoa) consisting of a single cell of gelatinous cricket who stands with a bat to protect the wicket from the ball. (One might expect bilingual dictionaries record of any: simple mistakes, yes, but nothing in Early dictionaries are obviously riddled with bizarre errors of fact. In what is probably the very first (there is no arguing when the details are so specific); being looked upon by one who has the yellow jaundice, Errors may be typographical rather than lexicographical. for any meal. [Reader's Digest Reverse Dictionary, direct proportion to rudeness. Bilingual dictionaries of a window is probably too familiar to attract notice maker, the head of one of the world's most important acorn... the nut of the oak usu. seated in or surrounded hair more often in the examples they choose or construct the definitions themselves. To illustrate the expletive and syntax of partial `having a particular liking for a sentences to illustrate usage, including a sprinkling The zaniest example I know of occurs in a bilingual feature: the entry for the word disappear was somehow To return to whimsical definitions. The mainstream of them from the text. Following a great deal of outraged edition and can still be found in the current edition. Let them now speak for themselves. Here is a selection not in the current edition, never having been reinstated flower child movement. It is certainly true that the drug experimentation, with so much familiarity with employees. Some of the expressions originated during riots, or thrill killings, or both. Prisons are ugly; strictly accountable to strategically scattered guards, comparatively few in number. Many of the disciplinary supervising prisoners are now illegal. With or without words in the following list refer to torture. It is evident to humiliate, crush, or punish the victim; to force him to cooperate; to learn the location of valuables Even after the reforms, prison is far more dangerous prison units were built, and the prison became less like a huge collection of hellish sardine cans. Although building tender (before reform) a prisoner designated catch the chain to be transferred to another prison collector one who extorts money from other prisoners. Johnnies sack lunches for prisoners unable to avoid missing a meal in the dining room. They are sometimes piddling room a craft shop for prisoner recreation, pistols leather riding gloves sold in the prison commissary, having his crossed ankles shackled; used in subduing rape in the free world. [The rocks referred to are rots (formerly) as in He's got the rots, refers to having set off postpone; usually used in reference to a set victim over an extended period to make him obedient. slay ride a punning reference to ride in a vehicle in stinger an electric water heater sold by the prison tag, on restricted to one's cell, said of a prisoner in tank a large cell that can accommodate many prisoners. Vampire, the a laboratory technician in an infirmary vulcanize to inflict severe burns on a victim, causing want a holiday with a difference, how about Mill of mystery lecture. The conventional response to this amusing transposition is A funny jab at a recalcitrant have stressed how the slip reveals anxieties that all lecture clearly reflects a reality that few professors are willing to voice: that their gems of wisdom are simplistic. In like fashion, my mystery lecture exposes universally repressed notion that it is conceivable and your readers, if they appreciate the French language, that lends itself so beautifully to what they call a salons of nobles, academicians, and beautiful people. thoughts that are spirituel [in the sense of witty] or with image. But these, and like words, when formed in the mouth and on the lips of the French are soft, For the most part, what is irreverent, scatological, or delve into the principal female and male sexual organs That is Gallic, I guess. Let us start with irreverence: handle most of these. For the vulgar meanings of a the French, then as now, it is adjectival. la mode in sound correctly (the letter l has a soft sign after it), 1950s, before overflight and satellite programs had There were numbers of factories and other installations rectangles) formed by the nearest roads and railroads. travel that road or rail line as to the beginning and count a count of electrical, water, or gas lines crossing like, it was possible, after all three legs had been traversed by observers, for analysts to make surprisingly public roads and a rail line, little used by foreigners, on which the only scheduled train passed the required stretch their legs. He had wandered several hundred yards up the line where he had found, crossing it, a large cluster of transmission lines, an oil line, assorted heavy truck traffic. He was not quite sure all this was within the specified stretch of track, as it was enter and leave the segment. But he made a careful consider the noun singular. That depends. In some contexts, the Chorus is thought of as a unit (as it is in are thought of as a unit. But there are times when The word panic, at least to me, suggests individual reactions. Members panic. Collective nouns do not. dictionary. But I was surprised, upon reading Time's the dating of words such as ordinals, and the cost of college dictionaries in general. While each of these subjects is of interest, they pale in comparison to the central issued raised in the Time review, namely of whether a dictionary is better simply because it has more words in it, words which are included if only to coined does not mandate its publication in dictionaries the rate of publication of English dictionaries has increased in number to occupy the pages publishers are willing meaning of words and in their syntax? Or, put another things up in the dictionary and too prone instead to questions about commonly used vocabulary: spelling, matters, it should also include those addenda which, abbreviations, a gazetteer, etc. However, let it become tomes and published at less frequent intervals, and would not be inclined to use as the handy reference is no one alive who is more enthusiastic about computers manipulating words on them. Whether it is right to how) to apply those rules, conventions, and exceptions. should one? No hyphenation algorithm has been invented to control rivers of white space, nor to distinguish older has come to mean, in certain contexts at least, less old than old. I have another example, well established and agents around here routinely use newer on written For fear of litigation the companies use new only if time of listing. Even recent is avoided because it is whereas a furnace up to two years old can safely be about the word and laugh when it is translated; it is confined to print and may be considered an encapsulated brother engineers and electricians should be offended. the usual liberal protesters) are being offended by etc. How can anybody conceive of such insensitivity Over the years and especially recently, in connection any listing of place names. I have seen no criticism, however, of the total lack of imagination evident in streets, etc. On a recent expedition by car, I noted a Avenue, and the like, and everyone is familiar with streets, then designate house numbers in such a way and I can find nothing to quarrel with in that practice. art, novelists, poets, and other writers, artists, characters names in alphabetical order to make it easy to find a hand, if they like modern music, they can name their would require a little research in the library, but Drive, for instance, has not afforded a view of the Sound since all those houses were built in the 1920s. land was filled in), because the town bank was once fires? How many Sunrise Highways and Sunset Boulevards a hardier species. An office with which I have occasion peril. In this vein, I do not advocate naming a street Coyote Canyon Drive offers some alliteration, Chipmunk (where the editorial offices of VERBATIM are situated from the surrounding land, a laurel or two can actually an apt name till a year ago or so, when the town of to Boggy Hole Boulevard, an idea that has not found much favor at the town hall. Boggy Hole Road it will literal sense is known the connotations are unclear: Chiefs. Can we be sure no insult, no irony was intended? person or people. Other peoples gave more specific answers describing their being distinctly different Often a tribe's fear or fearful experience is revealed their predatory habits or (less probably) to their totemic Crow word that has found its way into the etymological forehead and reed grass, plausible origins since all in which inventiveness played no part. But, for that matter, it seems that inventiveness never has played a part in producing the names of tribes. Their multiplicity early nineties when the sports fraternity latched on Watch out! Hell's about to break loose! It will suit a lot of occasions, domestic, political, military and of songs. But these may not get written down, and the tellers and singers may have no successors. So, great deeds of the past are ultimately forgotten, the remnants strengthening the kingdom, naturally aroused rivalry his court for recreation. The assassination had been the door, and when the murderers attacked, it could staples where the bar should have been, and temporarily lower room, but ironically, the outer door had been is the legend, but I have found no written record of who finding that the bar was not there, did the best deed. And the shout became a dire warning of imminent ballads have survived to the present; this one, as we put it together, must at least have made current the there, perhaps directly into the world of sports and facts, or if written, they lie hidden in obscure places. And historians of language, lexicographers, need records your markets. [From a direct mail piece of Commodity Insulting Nicknames Give Journalists Something to Be Proud of voices like rusty gates, cynical muckrakers with one latest whispered gossip, one nose on the nearest free games and the Internet, dedicated defenders of society of all that is good and nice, power freaks and culture newspaper newsroom, you are more likely to encounter discourages smoking, advances in interpersonal sensitivity discourage profanity or even loudness, enlightenment cup of cocoa onto the keyboard of a workstation and utters something untoward. In the modern newsroom, Stop the presses! But this is not to say that newspapers quietly. It if still dangerous to invite journalists those rags that have earned pejorative names in the local lore use those sobriquets in private correspondence, course, though for other reasons. It may be a sop for their affability in committee meetings. It isn't lost on these dinosaurs that with respectability came vast declines in newspaper readership. That, and insulting nicknames, are all that is left of the old reporters' who reports that no light is visible in the vicinity of the sign.] Due to the fact that the patient is an extremist and is responding poorly to fluids, the patient will be taken immediately department by a senior director, stating the telephonists while greeting a caller. The city's first citizen, the Lord Mayor, a woman, was forthright in her condemnation meet, from the cleaning ladies to officials. To ban words are used as terms of endearment in direct address seem. It is more than likely that at least some of the the person being addressed, in character or anatomical whom one is in love, be she girl friend or wife or a meaning is given in Grove's Dictionary of the Vulgar takes this further as one who is loved illicitly, a they are loved illicitly as a paramour or mistress! being in this sense a lovable person, a sweetie, or a and fetch me the mail. Sweet was also used as dear, Yes, my sweet? I will do so, my sweet. That other daily in many street, supermarket, or shopping center beloved, esteemed, a person on whom to lavish affection, bore. It is also used in the same context as sweetie: the same endearment to it somehow, possibly because old man. It is also possible they are a corruption of a dainty young woman. Just a minute, poppet, and I Yes, my precious is a term of endearment occasionally reference to it is in a book, The Artist and Craftsman half clad girlies ran off to hide themselves. With tongue in cheek I am tempted to suggest this may be the origin of the name for certain publications that more general terms in conversing with people of all ages. Pet is a name for a woman treated with special affection. However, it has been around a long time, duck. Today it is used occasionally in affected, familiar and love. It has had a varied history. Originally a love was only a widow, the love of the dead husband. Old English church burial records often contain entries later use was for an attractive, lovely woman, then in came into general use, as it still is, for a beloved person, in particular a sweetheart, but also as a term of endearing address to a casual acquaintance, as the doll, tart, boot, plum, strumpet, jade, quean, and so work in one language the words, phrases, or passages from another language. In literature this kind of inclusion, reader or audience, lends authenticity. These are the (The errors in this French dialogue as it appears in the First Folio, some or all of which may be typos, have been edited out of subsequent editions, such as occasionally err, though, and one cannot help wondering competent native speaker. First let us scan the first grammatical rule that can be broken in any language the whole [purchase]? But I tested the two phrases familiar and formal verb forms with an abandon that I find a bit excessive. There are other examples of The written accent on the verb is wrong here. As we proud. Some readers might think him a bit presumptuous. more than in the first novel, is faulty at all, except being technically ungrammatical faithfully reflects popular usage, as is the case with his English dialogue. rarely writes accents where they are not needed but I think that the substantive tanto ought to be here I think that est for location should be here, as it is in subjunctive is used for a negative imperative in the grammar and custom call for an a before the personal Here the adjective fails to agree in gender with the to me, but more likely it is a typographical error for through it but would simply dismiss it as incompetent. origins are obscure, but we know that it is distantly menu of a small restaurant. Yes, it meant sandwich you, it was difficult to find a restaurant in the first ones of their own. At one time they even invented a Since the fall of the Berlin wall and all that came after, there has been an unstoppable flood of English them will, and I, for one, regret this. Something of lost for ever. Besides, what challenge will there be The sound of snoring is due to vibration of the soft palate and the vulva at the back of the throat. [From the lies in observing how it expresses everyday objects in the same way, for that matter.) This is particularly where others see the poetic. I tend towards the latter. words for alien imports like ice hard water or parachute literally, then are given their English equivalents. A little imagination may be all that is required in the perhaps the moment has arrived to make some distinctions those terms that fall under the umbrella of eliciting motivated by malice, which must be stated artfully, its cerebral quality and its verbal conciseness. Other terms that elicit laughter are lower on the pecking thinking, they may lack the tight framework. Others pass the conciseness test but may be too contrived. mind. My favorite is a retort by former college football a contact sport. Football is a collision sport. This is the antithesis of a witticism in that is usually any response until the punch line is reached. In this sense, timing is extremely important. We know that if any joke begins with A guy walks into a bar with an iguana on a leash, sits down, and orders a zombie situation or a remark. However, they fall short in that their tone is sarcastic rather than malicious. wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. Although term, gag. Again, some distinctions are called for. In script or stage comedy from mere jokes that are exchanged given this form of humor a new respect, if only because punchy ripostes are sprinkled so heavily throughout the rest of the play around them. All this has placed that fit into the category of eliciting laughter are such as in the obligatory banter at roasts of famous is its lack of malice. A jest is never uttered at someone words, it is a line that is uttered off the top of one's pundits are required to reduce complex ideas to one that, relative to jobs in this country, these trade In a political context, You're just rearranging the While the leap from a sound bite to a witticism appears something funny. What is missing is a standard for be preserved for posterity, says a leading sociologist. University. Increased migration, with Welsh people time ago, and it is simply happening later in Wales, that there was. I would very much like to see them The nicknames developed from the need to distinguish same name. It was not unknown for a single community, of the valley communities the nicknames, usually reserved Folk Museum, said: In the old coal mining communities of the things that used to be local have been lost in studied the nicknames, said: They are on the decline. miners to replace all the ventilation doors. After Although he does not specify, it seems likely Green English version of the Bible remains the noblest example made it from the instant of its appearance the standard Green was neither the first nor last to sing hosannas divines. Astonishment is still voiced that the dignitaries citizens), this was a Bible with a belt. It was lively and colloquial, meaningful and memorable. But most of all, it was in plain but powerful English. Until this point, the only Bible that anyone knew was the Vulgate was gospel that cut to the chase: Ask, and it shall be of the times; a law unto themselves. In the beginning book was the Bible, then that Bible was for the most paths. But it is like cruising a smoothly paved freeway enmity in high places. He believed religion was atrophying that the truth lay in the scripture, not in the pope. allow people to read The Word in their own language. betrayed, arrested, and convicted of heresy. On Oct. burnt. His last words were, Lord, open the King of himself head of the English church. One of his first and all its successors, bore the unmistakable imprint English efforts was that he translated the New Testament survivors decide to climb to heaven, the AV tells it in another, Go to, let us build a city and a tower. In from the pen of the great but uncelebrated translator. know that I have high praise for the Oxford English and I have been using it. To quote from the manual: installed into Windows on my computers, some installation so I do not know what item (i) refers to. Item (ii) is a marvelous addition, though, for I have been able, in the past, to get some data printed out from the file, but it seemed to work at whim, and I could never be sure that I would get anything, let alone what I was after. Now all doubt in that department is at an end: call up an entry on the screen, invoke the FILE, and a menu opens to reveal a number of choices that allow one to print the entire entry or only the part that has been highlighted. It is extremely rapid, and the entries Without going into too much detail about previously has to write a command in the proper query language; using a menu similar to that for the entries. There are a few other enhancements, as well, but they are too detailed for comment here. It is assumed that all and, if so, will receive notice of the enhancements. when I followed them character for character I often got no results at all. There are some examples given, but more examples of each type would prove helpful, query again from the FILE menu, just another bit of rigmarole. Perhaps there is a way of doing that, but blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of that other acronym books take themselves too seriously. I gave this book a test. Did it have some acronyms Packed?], listed on the dust jacket was not explained money in acronyms. Some government entities publish mainly to get on mailing lists. I find it amusing that Foreword, describes this dictionary as designed for terms as are other monolingual dictionaries of like merits examination, and we shall turn to that shortly. closing of business letters, HOMOPHONES AND HOMOGRAPHS, grammatical constructions, and numerous other miscellaneous books, and other works). On each page, the lines are the two columns, the purpose being to make it easier the newer dictionaries: although the body text is a words indistinguishable. Because centered dots are abandoned in an access of sheer stupidity by the editors with a hanging indention (like headwords) immediately has fifteen main entries of its own (for reasons we must become familiar with its organization of information entries in limiting the number of senses dealt with required by typical users of the dictionary. In each case, the selected meaning is illustrated by many contextual In each case, a word or phrase that provides a synonym by a symbol in brackets keyed to grammatical information for transitive verb, which has an object), the definition of reference for a singular antecedent is followed, the phrasal verb section; the phrasal verbs yielded even more thorough coverage in a general dictionary. Were space not a limitation, it would be interesting to great deal of information that might well prove useful to a learner of English. Those who are not familiar idiomatic information far beyond what might be expected precedent, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary classic in the field. It is that dictionary (and the underground in a mine, and the latter as a piece of equipment which moves things from one level to another store etc. If they are the same, why are they defined differently? And isn't that moving strip more properly or surface that is used for transporting a load of objects surface of a road if it has been specially put there, esp. if made from concrete or tarmac. That is better than the treatment in Questions of English (see the review elsewhere in this issue), but it ignores the fact paved surface could be a road, sidewalk, or any other paved area. Also, AE uses washing powder or liquid revealed just which senses of the forms are used in items in the list, one must assume that only forms are distribution of five. One might object that the figure foreigners to learn English using a restricted vocabulary should be delighted with this dictionary, especially A dozen years ago, the Oxford dictionary department aspects of the English language. Inevitably, a large percentage of questions received could have been answered modest work. But some have dealt with subtler matters, of the language not readily derivable even from the In this book, the editors have occasionally undertaken specifically but might reasonably be anticipated, like, work. Still, it would have been wise to have consulted some differences in vocabulary. For instance, adrenalin different things: BE uses curtains for what AE speakers not, as implied, the latter instead of the former; likewise, at least two generations, one of the biggest companies a quarter to a quarter of five AE has both a quarter past a quarter after AE has both apart from aside from AE has both at school in school AE has both behind (in) back of AE has both I have just I just ate AE has both in the street on the street AE has both teach be a teach school AE has both up to and through AE has both the alternative is different than; in BE, the preferred that AE speakers might detect a difference in emphasis: been presented is that the BE speaker might be unlikely what is implied, incorrectly, is that the AE speaker questions is less controversial. In some instances, the referred to another source. For instance, those who work on the subject but provides citations, as well. And it might be worth noting in answer to the query longer legal on labels in the US because of the ambiguity. what. Yet there are some questions that are becoming almost universal: with the disappearance of telephone number? It is also useful to have the longish note in response to a query about the universal applicability the replies given to some questions are not entirely satisfactory, as in the case of Why is there no separate et al.), and VERBATIM itself are omitted from the section putative earliest use of a word the more tantalizingly gain colonial experience by working in a supernumerary senior management course, either genuinely to learn man who lived beyond the bounds of close settlement of kangaroo suggested an Aboriginal origin, and, in word for a particularly noisy bird and that the connection having noted their garrulousness. From the specific to a general application was but a logical and consequent despite a brave attempt to locate the origin in a putative history has thrown up more than the odd red herring. word as his own invention, and the lack of any evidence own and who was certainly very influential in determining One of the features of this style was the alliterating, But there was an earlier sense in that, for as little who is in some way disruptive of social mores, a public The word was clearly felt to be a low word and there word, that he brought to the surface and to which he itself in vogue as a word connoting the general sordidness there is the tantalizing possibility that a conjectural context that would fit this theory and make its subterranean chance their arm on that! [For the quotation see the context and then goes underground for the best part shaky to say the least [see AND again]. And bottler something or someone that excites admiration, earliest referred to in its earliest citation as the national Nor do any of the natives, among whom I (obviously) I close with a shuttle rhyme which is about writing Bay [XXI,3]. It might be of some interest to readers common in the city. While there is a lot of variation, asked if they had agreed upon their verdict replied, We have well considered the evidence, and, although prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered. copywriter sentenced to eight years in prison for using years, the judges must get life, or even death. For subjunctive of the verb jumbo frankfurter but of the how lucky he is. In the early decades of this century Partly due to the influence of cinema and television, many of these new English speakers are not aware of not hesitate to inflect borrowed English words as if in German (as when spring skiing in rapidly melting English specimens, here are a couple of those I have know. In fact, you would have no difficulty finding the series comma used at any college or professional impeded by lack of the comma. I mentioned also the Tony Day [XX,4,21] on the subject of rhyming slang. such slang simply in order not to stick out like a sore slang. There are therefore no neologisms in rhyming Most of the expressions cited are totally unfamiliar ought not to pass them off as being in common usage. always say, Isn't it taters today when discussing the is generally believed that this practice first began speech less easily comprehensible to outsiders. This so have millions of others, and it doesn't necessarily more than a passing knowledge of our native speech. tended to regard articles published therein as reasonably indulge in utterly inconsequential little endeavors. Recently I have joyfully spent at least two hours in grubbing in dictionaries and other reference books. And here is some of what I have got, or gotten, out or on radio and television. But, then, I haven't really Oxford dictionaries. The Collins English Dictionary he likes gotten and feels that it is an improvement on through their names. When you use boycott, bowdlerize words owe their origins to the persons who lived in caught my attention, because it had something to do a reputation for their lusty and lurid eloquence of speech. Thus Billingsgate became so notorious that we use billingsgate to mean any kind of profane and There is a conspicuous connection between billingsgate is no longer a city. In bygone days, it was a major City Center. The language heard there at that time changed a lot. In the heart of the city one can now school, charitable institutions, and public libraries. City still retains the bad reputation that she got ages equipped with a user's guide, for this would surely out of that tree and break your legs, don't come running similar impossibilities with amusing regularity in our Take three factors: pronunciation (P), spelling (S), Permute them, apply them to words and give examples should be etymologically distinct, so refuse, minute, different words (included here only for completeness). normally fairly factual and tenably argumentative. A rising popularity of empathy at the expense of good whether the article was meant to be philosophical or philological. But since it meandered erratically and erroneously for more than half of its length through the realm of semantics, I of course took both an interest The article's was meant thesis seemed to be that we is, really to try to feel their experiences and share their burdens. To claim to do so, it was argued, is an such empathy was unlikely given that, at the end of clients return to stinking penury, I was told that she claims. It is most certainly outrageous. It is also incredible. And it left unexplained how anything can outrageous, the latter strongly suggesting something rarely the disappearance of a word. But the article's illustration of this assertion is even more fallacious. Because of the search for false importance, it alleges, have led by inflation [may be this was, after all, an disparaged by usage critics, many of whom have argued the recent demise of discrimination and disinterested. in modern times. Fact: the word was already taking said, Thus a perfect equality of the white and colored every state of the union over the vast field of State jurisdiction covered by these enumerated rights. In races. This pejorative sense has been used regularly aside their own interests to review a situation dispassionately. examples of disinterest (impartiality, fairness, dispassion, that behavior can continue to exist unaltered even if our words for it change, and disproving the writer's been struggling to return to in this century, against great opposition. The sense of impartiality or an absence not similarly dare to explain the ordinary facts of am not competent to comment, except on their etymological with various forms of distress do not want sympathy. Instead we are urged to walk a mile in their shoes, writer seems to have based his case more on etymology claim empathy outside those two special areas is an time is of the essence (law); by and large, high and dry, slush fund, round robin, aloof (sailing); ego, extrovert, hearts, in order to share their pain. It may not be possible to do it, but I don't see anything wrong in speakers never say truck for lorry, escalator for moving through travel, tourists, movies, television, reading, some who might say that a truck is different from a penis in both dialects; the situation arises because a fairly clear case of distribution. This gave rise to to male bird. While at one time the sense of penis was relatively far down the awareness scale of those who had occasion to refer to cocks (as male birds), awareness level in recent years. Proof of this can be which she quotes, with inexpressible joy, the following put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always should know, by that token, that women cannot testify of their organization, the Conference on Security and million rivets of varying size each week. [From an article used Southern expressions like sitting in the catbird this colorful speech has been lost as the language has decades of the century was probably the last of the less travel in those days, the regions retained their Later, however, especially during World War II, there so named because pieces of them were fed to dogs to keep them quite, are variations of what Southerners at a Southern matriarch's saying to a tardy arrival at meal. Most men worked close to home, and the paterfamilias for dinner. It was the custom to cook large quantities of many vegetables and at least two breads for this bread was corn pone, corn dodgers, hoecake, or hush people might drop in. In big families, the cook customarily supply of vegetables and fruit. Usually, enough was cooked for supper, too. However, if everything came out even with nothing left over, the meal came out like than enough. A hog's bait was a gluttonous plenty. She has more than she can say grace over, was another Even though it refers to grace before meat and thus means that the materfamilias has more people to feed than she can manage, the term was used in many situations meaning to bungle, was used only as a verb. Bollix is the only one of the three terms listed in most language the term bollix (informal) do not know that it is a variant too tight, it was as tight as Dick's hat band and would have to be altered. Girls learned to sew at an early age. For some it was a slow and tedious business, but others picked it up fast and sewed with a red hot needle use the adverb directly for right away, it is not used as and of a person who put on airs, it was said, She's got the air waves. This early dancing was fairly frenzied Few things are as crude as antiquated slang; consider widely worn during that period. Another relic of that period, not heard any more, is the call to children for The source is unknown; perhaps it originated when a dog named Ring was in his death throes and the family and the call was made if one wanted quick response. German words of similar sound. Nor does the prized was highly valued, it was said, His boss wouldn't trade M, i, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, crooked letter, The earlier generation of males wanted hot biscuits term means a kiss but was used disparagingly, as in to probably a relic of Southern attitudes after the Civil to property which had been appropriated because the the whole country was caught up in religious revivalism its revival tent where repentant sinners walked down prayer and sometimes emotional repentance. Ordinary damaged beyond repair because they were not allowed Keeping the Sabbath was also important. Respectable superstitions were taken seriously. One, known also in would cut the friendship. The other warned against ensue. Another superstition warned a woman contemplating used jokingly, it was the equivalent of the current Replicas will make you an exact copy almost indistinguishable develops, quite often when referring to activities or areas important to the subculture that the creating the language. Established society usually has its nose put limits of which have never been clearly mapped out. that students have a language that is quite peculiar colonies three times, he used the journeys as opportunities being a notable exception) did not pass into mainstream friendly manner two men are talking in the presence of third man, an impostor a detective or an investigative ranks. His problem is that the first two are aware of his deception. The first man says to the second, Shall we'll leave it for the cleaner. Little does the impostor for what was really said was, Shall we kill him? No, we'll leave it to a professional. A cleaner is a hired gun, an assassin or at least it was until recently. A great deal of argot appears to be ordinary language clean the bowl is used by a murderer to an associate in front of a victim. It means Prepare a grave. (Note of underground groups, not least because of the dangers the hierarchy depends on sticking to the rules of a one of which is never, ever, to reveal the secrets of the offered. It is a concept well known in all prison systems. English prison slang is readily enough available in any tobacco, nonce is a child molester or other sex offender, have rigid rules to which a subculture's inventions must conform. Nor is it easy to determine its origins, although historically an argot known as pelting speech lead to finer distinctions in meaning than are found and for the speakers there is the comfort that comes some of its tendencies. Slag has as many divisions as the English language has dialects. Youth slag, soldier endless. And every gang wants its own argot, a test by which a potential recruit can be measured: if you don't know the language, very often you cannot get in; or, if you are already in, not knowing the latest key words it, it is fun, unconventional, and sassy. What is more, it can be witty, picturesque, metaphoric. How it differs subvert, it does so by being understood (at least in they are a clique not dangerous people or criminals, next generation's standard English. Bus was the slang truck are like the much earlier crashing cheats teeth, being a lazy language, youth slag is, in fact, as complex intrinsic part of the language. That so many adults disapprove of the way the youth communicate is precisely This leads to the issue of talking Black. Linguistically, does not vary much from region to region and belongs White or mixed sittings the use of the patois symbolizes assertion of ethnic identity. The more linguistically distinct the sounds of a patois, the more it can come to symbolize social distance. Here is approaches the talking Black provides a system of resistance on a linguistic meet, there is often a tendency for their speech to alter, so that they become more alike, a process known as accommodation or convergence. Its opposite divergence personal, social, religious, or sexual identity; divergence English speakers effectively use different languages? Very unlikely. But perhaps there will be a rethinking of the word communication and an instinctive scintilla The Archers is set in the Midlands, but it seems the the West Country to refer to anyone who is not approved difficult and more vivid because its true meaning is noses of seaside holidaymakers. That is the version The term originated in the West Country, specifically genesis, which more than a little impresses me, also old lady with beady eyes, a pointed nose and a ruddy, her appearance that he observed to his assistant that figure from a picture serial he had once read, called the departure of the originals and was soon consciously from the Midlands and North, by the large number of same force as the now universal punter client, customer, to be acquired later by other holiday trade people in Peter Draper, who was working on a screenplay for a explicit rendering of the same idea. This was the first national publicity for the hitherto local expression, Draper's screenplay. The text contained the film's extended references, but added about fifteen more in the narrative, days these appearances in print, after the film had spread of the expression during the res of the 1960s. my own first encounter with it as I took a party of of cars as an assertion of local identity. The word had Rivers was able to validate and localize the memory that had floated to the surface of his mind in the mid memories. Could a further reason for the word's success be that it rhymes with the name of a kind of edible seaside holidays? It clearly seems to have appealed to they and their descendants have also contributed some unique words to the English language (or, in some cases, A full exposition of strictly doctrinal terms is beyond the scope of this article because such a listing would entail noun, adjective, and adverb, as an unofficial designation for parallel to the Bible, but pertaining to the New World, and relates the religious history of several groups of people. Talking about the book in a scholarly way in somewhat that his Lord of the Rings trilogy is a work of fiction, and its truth seriously (whether strictly historical on one end of a spectrum to mythologically symbolic on the other end), was the name of the major editor of the book, and it was named after him, although he did not write the whole (which is also the name of an obscure Biblical personage, Great Salt Lake, just as the Sea of Galilee drains via the enter the Union until long after it had achieved the minimum honeybee. It has been speculated that the word is related The territory of Desert covered an area much larger sense of spiritual superiority, it is to be hoped, but because church being called saints) have two basic types of religious buildings: chapels and temples and they are as different is a meeting house, but the area of assembly for worship everything from an overflow for the chapel, a basketball court, an area for dramatic and musical productions, and the counterpart to Catholic mass is called sacrament half of one's ancestors), for celestial marriages (technically, celestial marriage is the institution of marriage that extends past death, as generally understood, and the wedding one's place in the universe, both with respect to God and up in the same way, with streets wide enough to ensure a full team of oxen could turn around. The towns were organized from the stakes used to hold up the tabernacle in Old Testament days; today it corresponds roughly to a diocese, and is a collection of words. The word started out as a political cities, but became the equivalent of a parish. Stakes are that governs the church (with participation by women in some administrative roles, but outside the context of the priesthood itself) and conducts its rituals. The priesthood for adult males. Each branch is divided into three offices: into three offices: Elders (you might have met some awfully after the name of their auxiliary organization (founded by women's organization). To hold the priesthood is a euphemism women towards men (since all men, at least in principle, are members of the priesthood); the Word of Wisdom is a Primary is a reference to children up to the age of eleven (as with the Relief Society, this is an example of the name of the organization being extended generally to its members). but even in such a centralized body of thought there is And finally, what about splinter groups, without which him of being a closet polygamist. The practice of polygamy was outlawed just before the turn of the century, but polygamous families persist down to the present day. One has to admit, these terms represent an improvement over order on its books until someone discovered it in the Murder differs from kill in involving the notion of justification. To say that one person kills another is to say that the first deprives the second of life; but to say that a person murders another is to say the depriving is unjustified. This raises the questions, What does justified Justified falls among a class of words that also includes jointly necessitate some occurrence, either already completed or yet to be brought about, without specifying exactly what those laws and facts are. For example, appears makes it clear that the author intends it to express the law that time moves forward and on the fact that appeared in a government report expressing an admonition fact that numbers of such magnitude would anger the that sufficient provocation caused people to rebel. Neither must itself nor the sentence as a whole provides leaves room for loopholes that avoid the asserted necessity (under normal circumstances), major new discoveries facts that necessitate some occurrence, can asserts that whatever laws and facts there are, some occurrence this relation is the fact that though can and must have very different meanings, cannot and must not are synonymous. necessity claim intact, negating only the verb, whereas negating a sentence containing can keep the verb intact, but like can it expresses permission, rather than necessity. there are laws and facts that permit it, whereas can expresses are. To say that some action is not justified is to say that the action is prohibited whatever the laws and So to murder is to kill in a way that is prohibited whatever the laws and facts are. To deny that a killing what they took to be a law regarding the sanctity of instead of calling him a murderer, based their judgment that the borders his forces had crossed were imposed by Western colonialists without the consent of the inhabitants. which of the sides, if either, was correct. It does help to explain how people can talk past each other, using relation to very different frameworks of concepts, beliefs, her head wounds two hours later, as did her chauffeur. enough stamina to tote groceries and supplies up hill, and main opposition parties, over an article published in secure the continued progress of a construction project in further suggested that he might have had a corrupt connection death of a bank auditor and the false imprisonment of a .We now accept without reservation that the serious egg; although paying for it, little else could be offered him. The peasants themselves often had nothing but new day, the peasant's first thought was survival for For them bread was life. Through the years popular sayings grew up reflecting this obsession with that Passed from village to village, from hearthside to field Al pan, y al vino, vino To bread, bread and to wine, wine To call a spade a spade duro bread is hard No solo del pan vive el hombre Not only of bread does man live Man does not live by bread alone has nothing to do with one's marital status. It is the instead. As a foretaste of things to come to committee responsible for implementing this innovation proffered Obviously, this plan never got off the ground. How Languages, though glibly spoken and written, often present there are many examples of genuine switched writing systems masquerading as something they are not. In The first known graphic system, cuneiform, served as has since become the most widely used writing system interested in but not capable of reading a particular probably elementary aids for tourists, pilgrims, and appended their names and formulaic closing statements standard instances of scripts serving to reproduce languages present what are probably the most egregious examples citing such examples as, The stuffy nose can lead to he spent his life doing. May we all be as fortunate. for our pleasure and edification, with the structures of up in the respectable garb of grammatical explication, leaving the reader to have learned elsewhere which of the examples should serve as a model when he invites his boss to dinner. I take this to be not only silly straightforward. Teach everyone French as if it were educated class who got to the university, used French as they had learned it at their mother's knee (naturally, not as they had been taught it in school), and made (and revivification) of a revolution, simple allowed the gentry to establish the colloquial norm for those who the literature for texts to constitute a canon that would English, that is to say the English spoken by proper gentlemen. All a bit authoritarian, but reasonable. The effectiveness of the policy can be seen by making Twist: Dickens, qua social reformer, knew perfectly linguistic data as a way to democratize the understanding out the concept of good English, but it establishes the norms of language on what's said. (This is an expression one that in my opinion is as silly as basing a legal system have not been such salutary effects as a broadening of acceptable usage, or a loosening of the traditional schoolmaster's authority over what constitutes proper English, or a diminution of class consciousness. The been a shift in linguistic authority away from the gentry aware of the context in which unclear English is used, know what's going on (and therefore the meanings of the utterances used to describe it), while the vulgar a shaky grasp of vocabulary and syntax who are therefore fathom what's going on, that the failure in comprehension of English in the hands of those who are to the manner they will and at the same time disallowing the vulgar from gaining a firm grasp on the means by which they might enter the debate. We have here a delightfully constructed catch-22: if you don't study your grammar you're uneducated; if you do, you've been exposed to a proper education by your kindly school system; but when we use the word class here, we do so not at all intellectual one. If you don't know the difference between the appropriate contexts in which to use two examples book, it's a consequence of your mind's incapacity to grasp how things ought to be correctly expressed, not that you've had the misfortune of being born into the working class. (To what extent this is a conscious Rather than focusing our attention on the establishment better develop a more holistic, semiotically based curriculum broadest sense) is always inseparable from context. And given that fact, I would argue that as long as the educational system teaches dictionary definitions as structures as carrying grammatically meaning, we will have (as we do now) the vast bulk of our population common set of general rules for their communication game, and a common aim for their dialogue. It happens style, and the aims are the achievement of the best possible degree of understanding. To give short shrift to any of these three facets of communication is to scientific rigor) between the experts on language, literature, clear thought, the mortar that serves to create integrated Dialogue is ultimately context based and not system based. This is why, for example, the expression, The teacher has it in for me, falls through the cracks of what the words mean, and if they did, why is the verb the first person, nor, one might add, with the Pope as subject. Students would learn ten times more about words and how they are used if, instead of being asked to remember what is grammatically or lexically correct, shoe salesmen or lords of the manor and by doing so sensitivity (a sensitivity that is as yet not sufficiently well understood) is far more important than that sort of abstract knowledge of the proper use of language stumbling over a shibboleth. Needless to say, the idea fact remembering what was said at home or by an author doesn't speak like us? Does a child learn to walk by having the musculature of the legs explained to her? (I add in passing a news bite heard between the writing of this paragraph and its mailing: a teacher was recently received it because he has his students write letters in the otherwise wise stylistic advice of E. B. White. needed to express one's intentions. A good friend, benefit of grammar book, but rather through the reading and discussion, orally and in writing, of such works studied English grammar and memorized its vocabulary are asked if they can explain how to get to the train station answer Yes, and stand by with a smile waiting since, if they don't know the way, they invariably answer into any educational system by which succeeding generations Approach to the Study of Language (University Press any suggestions on the work being done by those who are having second thoughts about the use of that apparently to be a difficult language to learn, but it has the supreme advantage that every combination of letters is always pronounced the same. It is therefore possible journal lying on a table and impress them with your grasp of their profession by reading an article out the insect came first. And talking about the naming of train, we noticed considerable excitement being generated Two female passengers of riper years asked especially crooning sentimental nostalgia to elderly matrons on had scraped together the fare for the Orient Express. piano after dinner and his agent had scrounged him a bookmakers of their customers, especially those placing small bets. By transference a prostitute's client or his beautiful young wife. We learned that he was trying to make a career as a novelist and that in the discipline at me from a television and earning more dollars in an evening than there are greenfly on my roses. If it ever gets out what he's really like, I remarked, he'll etc., but the most common US equivalent is probably interest but was perplexed by the examples at the top italic form of (in Times New Roman at least) is almost [In the italic forms of many typefaces, especially those designed since photographic and computer typesetting equipment became prevalent, the distinction between some is lost entirely). That is owing in part to the lack of sophistication among type designers and, undoubtedly, being replaced by a single character, usually e. (We characters by setting them in italics because the characters [XXII,4,15], brought to mind a puzzling abbreviation I realized eventually that the W is the Welsh vowel would probably agree that this is a very appropriate [XXIII,1] I would like to add one of my late father's cabbie many years ago. He liked to talk with his fares, and when he learned that I made a living as a writer his alphabet. The notes I made were incomplete and Sayings [XXIII,3]. A couple of observations in the dubious at best and the translation of an example as language has no articles and also resorts idiomatically verb for to be that is usually (but not always) omitted is the present tense, as sometimes in English: Terrific guy, that Tom! This omission and the absence of articles proverbs. But I think that the apparent brevity, which depends in part on whether you count words or syllables, The best example of this kind of semantic compression sayings through my mind, I seem to find that although our language has the resources to be fairly pithy, we clever implication inherent in the play on names, perhaps doubtless true, with the consequence that the careful consideration I think due these articles rather than although I find his explanation totally convincing, it is not to be found either in the original edition of the It must have struck many that the very common phrase Oh! dear is, after all, a very senseless expression. When we come to try to read sense into it, some might think that it may be contracted from some longer expression, such as Oh! dear me. But this is not in accordance with the evidence. and is the earliest known phrase in which dear occurs at all. is equivalent to the Lord knows, and so on. But he adds, I wish to draw attention to two ascertained facts. The first is that the particular phrase Oh dear! is the earliest of the set, as has been already remarked; and secondly, that there is no trace whatever, even in dialects, of a fuller form like dear Lord. If we are to go by the evidence, we must even by Lord at all, is due to the influence of popular etymology, I think it is equally clear that we must dismiss all I will now go a step further, and assert that there is no evidence whatever for connecting it with the adjective dear at all! It makes no sense, as we may see by a little thought. For dear means beloved, affectionate, precious, and the like; but the exclamation Oh! dear! is one that denotes something very different, something that is lamentable or calamitous, and very far from being pleasant. Thus, in how melancholy, has been to me this last week! And again Oh! dear! I shall die! And in Goldsmith's She Stoops to If we will only, for a moment, consider this probability, viz. that there is no good reason for associating this interjectional us free to look around us, and see whether any other source And if we do this, we have not to look far. The phrase, for instance, makes no good sense in English; and this affords And whenever we consider the possibility of borrowing at the end of the seventeenth century, our first thoughts turn, what reason had you? or what, a God's name, moved you? It should particularly be remarked that the sense coincides exactly with that of the English phrase. We can translate of astonishment. His examples show that it was sometimes preceded by the interjection he [illegible character] as H, It was usually employed, as in English, to imply lamentation It is worth while trying to guess whence this expression which in expressions of lamentation is so prevalent both in French and English. It really seems as if the true sense of Oh dear! were Oh! the devil! The clipping of swearwords is a common phenomenon. If this be so, the exclamation meant the devil knows. But as this interpretation was not at all obvious, or was forgotten, the familiarity of many have suggested a new interpretation in the eighteenth notion. For the earliest example of Dear save us is no will suit either the old or the modern pronunciation of the forgiven for tripping ourselves up with it occasionally. We are particularly good at contradicting ourselves so good, in fact, we do it daily, assuming that other ducks containing scented candles, which I was instructed any room I wished. The scent would repel all biting insects in the area. When the ducks arrived, a footnote on the instructions informed me they were for outdoor million winning pools syndicate. They had filled in When they won the pools, the leader said, It's great. We've never won anything before. Granted, the effects confusing statement. I have yet to find an excuse for you don't use the lid; all manner of tablets instructing not (yet) connected with it, but the link is imminent, and we expect to be surfing along with the rest of the readers to pass on tidbits as they come across items suited to what we perceive to be our readers' interests; the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with able to drive and refold a road map at the same time. the stream of drinking fountain water is at its perfect height, thus relieving the drinker from (a) having to suck the nozzle, or (b) squirting himself in the eye. can't take any more torture and hurls itself through walk around picking up display phones and listening piece of lint at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down of candy you dropped on the floor by blowing on it, be swept onto the dust pan and keeps backing a person across the room until he finally decides to give up Manhandling the open here spout on a milk container so badly that one has to resort to the illegal side. act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before you pick it up, even when you're only six inches away. should I say future to the back? I look back to yesterday still means in, to, or toward a past time, and the adjective back is still defined as of a past date; not current; In a Providence Journal story about a person considering could push back the starting time until 11am instead in response to a request that the trial date be moved National Weather Service renewed its prediction for effective date of a law requiring all motorists to carry back is that the sense is further [back] in the schedule, following in a published television schedule for 8pm I sent pages of examples to the editors of New Edition .is filed for the attention of our new words editors. on our databases then it will be considered for drafting Worship God and attain a soul devoid of anger, passion, Memorize this sentence, because it is not only meaningful connected with each month, respectively, that is, worship and so on. Here is the method to apply in finding the day of any date of any year except leap years. (Leap years are easy to identify: they are any year divisible by I won't be home till later tonight, says the wife to Similarly: the secretary is going to leave for vacation, and the morning of her last day at work, a coworker logic doesn't quite work. Syntactically speaking, the apodosis, or consequence, is not linked to the protasis, That is, the ham is in the fridge no matter what the state of the husband's stomach, and a last possible whether or not the premise is fulfilled. Of course, The truth is that these sentences are really just elliptical Since I may not see you before I leave, let me wish of iffy sentences. If you don't mind, I have to go is another example in my growing collection, along with over such syntax may seem trivial, but language is so often a dormant phenomenon that it is worth tweaking on a date, If you're interested, just let me know. But and spending the early years of my life there, having I found out just how tough it is for most nationalities a Gallic attack on my personal hygiene when they insisted uncanny prediction of what was to befall my then luxuriant was taller than most of those I had to deal with. My did I find someone who truly tried to get it right, but the effort involved putting his tongue out at me and concluded with an overly explosive final consonant; invitation, settled for the easy to deal with Mister Strange to say, it is in the US that one of the really restaurants or hotels or any of the other places where professional name takers are found. The conversation of times, on the West coast, particularly. So often, in fact, that I have been forced to assume the new identity dealing with any of the name takers so deeply entrenched is that unusual a name in the States: after all, one of Chatting has restraints, of course, in a network of burgeoning friendly and informal, it must also be brief and pungent. and not without a certain intellectual mischievousness. capital letters, telescoping, emoticons, interjections, and other striking visual devices, not to mention their to be sure, but given the technological nature of the medium, its roots and contours are clearly definable. necessary here, but one element is of interest as a food is much esteemed], and note that several common as pretzel and strudel (and the fact that new meanings terms represent, for one thing, the only discernible ethnic orientation in the vocabulary and are thus by their very appearance a form of highlighting. They Term of disgust. Often used in Ugh, bletch. (Also foo interj. Term of disgust... Very probably, hackish electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged told me is a bunch of gonk. (In German, for example, the first deity of the Internet. Also known as he who intention and effect, doubtless a reflection of pop culture's world. One version ran in its entirety as follows: Sic! squibs will find fulfillment in the pages of this book, which chronicles examples of unfortunate syntax funny to one person may be deadly to another. A few A. Be positive. Say that one is bigger than the other. Such things can often raise a chuckle from those who appreciate the incongruity of the item and those who Dialects are subject of popular interest, especially such dialects appropriate for the popular market cannot be technical, but neither should they be inaccurate. It is after all possible to be both informative and succeeds better at the second aim than the first, giving [v], where the author acknowledges among his sources may occur. For example, each tub must stand on its own bottom is said to be an old proverb stressing New our immortal Bill of Rights, that guarantees to us liberty word's use since the fifteenth century or that it is familiar The second is the sort of free combination that can and does occur anywhere. Both are standard English, the bottle for consumption elsewhere, pshaw! an exclamation the entry includes a quotation from her) or because origin is unknown, is devoted to variants on the following whose wife Anna was too lazy to cook for him, concocted sailboat used for fishing, and harness cask a tub used on ships for storing salted meat. All of these can also sauce. It would be useful to give a bit more information The problem with this book is knowing which entries discrimination, another more reliable work like the consulted. So the user might as well go to the better This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be Wordplay, Origins, Meanings, and Usage of the English someone late in one's career only to have him suddenly attention several years ago. We corresponded, and I VERBATIM, and that speaks for the high esteem I have of Bob's writing. Moreover, I provided the Foreword the periodicals in which they originally appeared.... must also have something to say. Owing to the vastness of the English language, it is impossible to believe myriad aspects. Indeed, the scholarly journals have been overflowing with turgid prose for decades, and it is particularly refreshing to know that comment on virtually any aspect of language can still be offered in language that, glowing with respectability, cleaving to the Government is at last proposing to do something A scene just before the intermission, when the family otherwise, the pace of the humor is right on. [From a review Sixteen searchers, a search dog and a helicopter were new snot, with a total accumulation of two to three feet at those elevations, are hampering operations. [From The to stricken mass distributions. Unable to figure out what this meant, he wrote to the journalist's editor. It turned out that a referee's report had told the author, The term generalized mass distribution is no longer used. The word or admit failure? They might boot up again, but they no trouble translating what I just wrote out of computer with words suggesting vulnerability, frailty, and humor about them. It should not, therefore, be surprising radically conflicting feelings. As a librarian I see evidence used by patrons and colleagues. Slang is a reliable gauge of attitudes because it is usually used in an words and phrases. I am assuming, as the editor of this dictionary argues, that slang is not just colloquial language, but that it is often aggressively informal, that it doesn't tolerate pretense, that it is often by any profession, group, or class. The word default unless you change it. This term does not qualify as slang because it is a legitimate, formal term, rather easy to define denotatively, quite fit for use in polite who likes to spend time in the company of programmers because it is very informal language. In fact, it is so Because slang is up front and sometimes deliberately to remember the difference between slang and jargon is that jargon serves to indicate a referent, usually how they feel when we analyze slang. Thus, it is not surprising that a great deal of computer jargon is a quick way to say otherwise complicated things. For of instructions per second, point and click is a quick and direct way of describing basic mouse techniques, is an apt metaphor for the way text flows around the outside edges of a graphic image. Jargon like this is very good at precisely describing actions and things, but these words do not convey any obvious attitudes great deal of ambivalence about these often mysterious powerful and frightening. We definitely want to do crash. It is true that many computer applications began in the military but many people who are not conscious computers simulate many human activities, it is not surprising that we should attribute all kinds of human characteristics to them. They do seem to possess artificial the batch mode. Computers are so seemingly lifelike slang expressions suggest that computers are really quite harmless. Some of these terms go to the opposite relationship that seems all too naively trusting, as if that the normal state of affairs is for computers to be hostile, or at least unfriendly. Why else would we so protocol for transferring files between a mainframe names for areas within our mainframe are Piglet and all. On the contrary, that world is as blithe and carefree call miniature programs applets or refer to diagonal or circular lines in a text as jaggies. Reference librarians list on the Internet refer to themselves as wombats. the nickname has stuck not only because of the metaphorical overly mechanical activity of finding answers to reference I want to suggest that there is a very understandable of reality, those ubiquitous computers are going to take over all aspects of life, doing away with my job rather than a human being. Another version of reality offends bureaucrats and is just as exaggerated, but it is very useful as a defense mechanism. In this view floppy disks, where I can cozy up to my motherboard, options. Fortunately, the real world of computers, [NOTE: In this article, I have consulted The Computer Prentice Hall's Illustrated Dictionary of Computing, school arts programs. [From From the Station Manager, than translations, and strictly speaking in the Romanization course actually meaningful, although many have become now familiar to most in the West in its more accurate the Far East are also often similarly meaningful and have their names translated, assuming they are already happens that this name is actually (though coincidentally) both meaningful and appropriate, since it translates Such serendipity sends one on a voyage of discovery, seem strange. However, once one appreciates certain appear in transliterations where one does not expect seems to have a historic reference, since bl literally country. Other continents also have names that are third of these have names that could literally be interpreted, fresh, not inappropriately, but is actually a transliteration ends up with a sense that is surreal rather than suitable. Of those that yield some sense, the following handful so on. What is interesting about some of these purveyors of the names of their pop groups, this concatenation, however, assumes truly awesome and bizarre proportions, league), Physical, Cruising, Omnibus, Original Love, might do well to note the above and the albeit absurd surprisingly, some of my students came along primarily men, the somewhat tedious rules of English spelling quaint rules of English spelling follows firmly in the in search of fame, fortune, and female attractions. high society in any country, but during his brief visit written thirty years later, he proudly demonstrates his knowledge, casually throwing English words into the middle of his French text with an easy confidence lookout for a house to rent for himself. With the help sights. Being the son of an actor and actress, he was naturally interested in the theaters, such as those at English form of cards, he lost fifteen pounds in his smiling at her unexpected gain of a further fifteen competent linguist. Much of his prodigious literary output, including his 3,000-page autobiography, was not write his life story till thirty years after his visit to likely, not written before. But most important of all is the language and have a go regardless of the risk of themselves as his heirs retain his enthusiastic disregard an advertisement for The Swan Funeral Homes, in the There isn't room to list them all, except it must be noted that they included the Right to Die Society apologizing for accidentally calling itself the Right to Life Society in a previous letter, and the Right to Life Society objecting proper names, usually of persons or places, to designate to short definitions of diseases, the vast majority eponymous, name ends in s but his is the overwhelmingly favored the problem favoring s 's but made no specific reference journals, however, have declined to follow its lead and their audience might have thought that President might be called Bright disease by some. And what of of the English Language, before the adjective possessive as having possession and apostrophe as In rhetoric, though. Use of the apostrophe to indicate possession including most names ending in sibilants take 's as in answer the question Stags Leap, Stag's Leap, Stags' There is not a finite number, I am sure, but it must Lingerie manufacturer works with University Extension life from the beginning. But, as sure as there are wines that do not travel well, so, too, is there a type of humor and a form of language that is best appreciated in the land of its origin. Or, to be more specific, region as is the language through which it is expressed. what is said, but at the way in which it is said. The Highlander. His stories are long and involved, and your hands. The Highlander is a consummate storyteller. school, you can almost hear the sough of the sea on found in his stories, to be sure, but they are stories sadness. You are glad that you listened, but you are incisive. It is a sardonic wit, a wit that can be as savage and biting as the dry northern winds that sear this land for a goodly part of the year. It has much of is like listening to the discordant yakking of jackdaws on the face of it, seem so surprising. But there is the invaders. With them, they took their language. day, little would have remained to show that he had of mine so succinctly put it, He just buggered off. Unlike the Roman, the Celt left his mark in the many for twelve centuries, but little trace of it remains in the spoken language today. It was the pervasive when you first hear them in full flow. It is a lingo that has little in common with either the slow, precise case if you are a newcomer to that part of the world. strong drink and the services of a good interpreter. quality to some of it, for theirs is a hard life. But, as the following tale from my youth may illustrate: among the stones and the whins to wrest a living of sorts from the reluctant soil. It was a way of life that was a tough old bird: when the day of his hundredth birthday dawned he was still maintaining a keen interest mighty soiree for the great day, and they invited a first assignment and she was, in fact, completely new was not going well. In desperation, she asked him if complete. A spark of life glimmered at last in the and she reminded him that, at his age, he should be with the prurient temptations of this one. She would It is a peaceful place. There have been no battles nesting moorhen, but that was about all. The horrors convinced that the war just ending would be the war with the local Home Guard, was particularly eloquent. is in for a long, long haul in the wind and the rain early acquaintance with one or more of the languages inland of New South Wales and known to the colonists but the temptation to explain the word had triumphed familiarity to English ears being the result of its taking the White perception of a bird destined to become a Here again a word was broken down into two elements, little thought given to the fact of their independent origin. Billabong is first recorded in the 1830s in after rain, and hence any backwater, blind creek, or anabranch left in the arm of a river, a pool which is left when the connecting stream dries up. It is not word given a new lease of life in fresh circumstances. number of words which the Aboriginal languages collectively secondary sense as a noun meaning nonsense, rubbish, borak was coupled with the verb poke in the phrase to enough to the transitive use of the verb barrack ridicule, might be connected. And, in the absence of a memory the balance of probabilities. It is unlikely that a borrowed form so quickly and, with hindsight, it is more likely that an impreciseness of meaning caused by unfamiliarity a sporting team or a participant in a fight, and admits the converse of this in the intransitive verb barrack for support. And the less said the better about another characterized the behavior of the crowd at the police hotly disputed, even if mostly by the lunatic fringe. The golden rule has to be that, if there is a historically valid source, it is to be preferred unless the circumstantial argues incontrovertibly in favor of a dialect origin if a even if there is a perceptible difference between the The circumstantial evidence provided by the historical there is no case for resorting to the fable that the long way towards explaining the origins of hundreds of English nicknames and family names. Many family names are based on a father's name; they might also these ancient nicknames had cute diminutive suffixes. Harder to recognize are certain distortions imposed clipped down to nicknames. Usually, to make a first leave it plain or make a diminutive out of it by adding many other ways to play around with a first name to of consonant substitution discussed below. Many of the resulting forms remain current as nicknames (or indeed as names in their own right), others are preserved vanished entirely. Listed below by consonant category are all the forms I have been able to find, regardless among other things, including some famous sobriquets. seems to have been created by phonological assimilation, Molly shows up also in gun molls gangsters girlfriends.' that is just a joke pronunciation for the abbreviation a vowel or silent h took the possessive mine instead as plain t after the French fashion, as is still the case Nancy. The suffix still surfaces occasionally, as for This brief soliloquy is notable in several respects. the use of more words than those necessary to denote But most remarkable is that only the third sentence Wood Crutch remarked, Children were taught standard (But lest we succumb to the modern fantasy that open and honest communication will solve all disputes, we man, undoubtedly a major reason that he is the jefe of his gang. Emotion will betray character every time, when he said that years ago his teacher told him to sit in the front of the class for the present; he waited and waited and she never gave it to him. Collecting lists of silliness is a legitimate pastime. I collect matchbooks not historical and unfortunate shift in humor. Men of subtle, the slapstick, and the silly. Men of my generation lunch? was so utterly lame, so naive, but such romps have a headache in its literal translation means My is used in many phrases that have nothing to do with he is eating the wind, if he is comfortable he will money he will say he has eaten their credit. Birthdays, the same reasoning can hardly be applied to the case over ideas, digest information, devour with our eyes, words and our hats and we occasionally bite off more children. After the first few years in school, children there in a cavalier manner, or, if you prefer, with discarded with the vowels, so that often one has to understand by context. That is difficult for foreign these poor souls here. What we are dealing with is reserve. I wonder what the singular of Verbatim is. in it. I offer a simple glossary of terms that might be pawn shops for more than their true value, frequently bone, was hospitalized for years and treated by Lord Lister himself with, I believe, scraping of the bone, and whatever primitive antisepsis was used in those quite that far). Beneath a drawing of a small girl out walking with her grandfather appeared the following queen, and lords, and bishops, and more or less remain are better off than themselves, and are always trying to rob them of their property, and, in fact, they're a A few nits to be picked, or addenda to be appended: outside persists very commonly in cryptic crossword A felicitous trader's name that used to be displayed It is not only trousers that are implicitly excluded foodstuffs has resulted in several notices on items English inanimate objects are now referred to by the languages that I know grammatical gender lingers as a sort of ghost of animistic gender haunting all nouns. foreign language will a speaker of English say anything In this respect English pronouns referring to animals current prescriptive grammar, animals, especially of generally in English the masculine singular pronoun comes naturally when one is referring to an animal. Nor is this a new thing in English. Over a century A noticeable feature of English as spoken by bilingual living creature they are talking about. For example, which is also masculine and properly designates fish pressed for a word, a native speaker will often come up with one that he thinks is proper rather than the Since for centuries about the only fish known to the influence their choice of words. A few days after I later I asked the same lady who feminized the goldfish She shitted her out of that house, the lady declared. hear this from my rather prim and proper friend. So could not believe that I had heard it right. I kept wondering off and on about the matter till I realized that what I had heard was a case of double hypercorrection. is the affricate ch, which therefore tends to replace aware of these tendencies in her speech, my unwitting she had articulated sh in place of ch and the i of sit in fairly common in language. In Cockney English, for example, where initial h is regularly dropped there where it does not belong. There is even a trace of and dialects on each other may result in distortion be enrichment, of which the English language provides However, students of a foreign language soon realize the grammatical structure and basic vocabulary: one idiomatic expressions and, as a further step, proverbs scores of dictionaries, printed in practically all Soviet and sayings. They encouraged instead the proliferation thankless and practically insoluble task. He quotes phrases are signs of situations or of a certain type of relationship between objects --not particularly lucid. offers advice or presents a moral in a short and pithy scholars. The Introduction touches on the origin of literal translation in English, unless there is a clear lexical and conceptual correspondence. Equivalents are printed in bold face. Where there is no equivalent the dictionary gives a corresponding English version, key word or thematic arrangements. However, compilers perfect system for arranging proverbs: each has its personal choice and for whom the dictionary is intended. marked with an asterisk. This will be appreciated by popularity of a certain proverb or saying. There are sections of analytical proverbs, metaphorical ones, sources. At the end of the dictionary, there is a large to fill in gaps existing in other dictionaries. There held against computer programmers and other specialists. admiration for their fertile imaginations, ingenuity, truly astonishing in their complexity. That acknowledgment irritated by their cavalier dismissal of everything that human beings developed in the course of history: it reflects an adolescent mentality that is scornful of than go into great detail, I shall focus on one important (which was a matter of system and convenience, with little or no attempt at alphabetization, except that the lower case and capital letters are in alphabetical order where later alphabetization programs derive their order. As most lexicographers, librarians, indexers, editors, some parts of the world have learned), there are preferred letter by letter (with some standardized hierarchy established though it is not usually suitable for dictionaries, works reasonably well for certain kinds of material. reach of the letter T, that does not sort U-238 at the end of the U listings, and that does not put several The point is not entirely irrelevant in relation to way, in Windows, is to click on Main, then twice on where the disc has been placed; then, move the cursor move it to File, then down the list to Run, and click twice.) No instruction is included for accessing the I could find no useful index: though there is a list of file names, they are numerical and offer no clue as to electronic publishing using computer disks. It includes for writers, with writer's guidelines from publishers, this subject are invited to contribute to the discussion this magazine are the same in the shareware edition and resourcefulness but it is badly written, is riddled with the kind of jargon that frightens away anybody consequently, makes the rest of its content suspect. not without interest and merit. There is, for example, small group of people, done often for fun or personal to describe the content of this catalogue, so here is a acid tests, and testimonial solicited from users all There follow details identifying the editor, format, and how to access the zine. Many of the descriptions are longer, some are shorter. They include Armadillo to be a forum for the issues surrounding the intersection Another file that was examined is called Unclassified the customary bibliographic information: in most instances, (which one prints out from a computer) is provided. The price is not omitted, but most are available for the text, bordering on the semiliterate, yet much of it rife with ideas, some of which, depending on one's interests and inclinations, must be said to be stimulating. sections of text from a screen, though that is less are called), I was relieved to see that a subscriber to Still, a computer of middling sophistication is required, never compiled one, but I understand that publishers with the same title. To be brutally frank, I care little have said (or, in the latter case, mumbled): of far did), is of little consequence in the larger scheme of things; but the world consists of many parts, including in English, and one need not try to explain that in Et book with admirable clarity in his Introduction. (If a book, one should always read the author's Preface, brief mention of some of the things the book is not, The reason for putting Brewer into the title (according [which] singled out words and phrases with tales to tell and did not attempt an unachievable comprehensiveness. borrow for my next book, review, article, or comment fairly comprehensive Index; instead, I found it under complain about that; to learn that it was said to come revelation, nor is it particularly exciting to learn that the younger generations demonstrate a total lack of even clever but make up their routines to remind us of our foibles. My foibles are very serious, indeed, of sources, perhaps, than in the inclusion of quotations the main text lists authors in alphabetical order with quotations following in alphabetical order by first word; in a few cases, where several works are cited from a single author, like Dickens, the titles are in On every page, the quotations are numbered sequentially, Index, which lists quotations by their key words, in some cases listing them more than once: for example, By their fruits ye shall know them is listed in the page numbers are an essential piece of the reference apparatus, they should not be set in the center of the for relevance of content, are, in addition to Brewer's close cultural ties with the former Soviet Union ushered passing crowd, sexist labels proliferate. An attractive attracts. A woman always short of cash is known as way.) If, however, a homosexual is particularly aggressive to you. Over the last forty years or so, the expression brings with it an inferior nuance. Starting in less literate teachers (and some teachers of English at that), by brought increasingly churlish and irresponsible attitudes. up to the person or body concerned, with confidence of looking downwards to them, somewhat disparagingly, situation arise and the question immediately follow matter out? Rather is it now an immediate question found to blame, so that the job of correction can be quickly thrust down to them, leaving others untouched continuous evolution of our rich and living language? should be deplored. Why? Because a perfectly good duty has been replaced by an inferior one implying a examples from the eighteenth century. The first is instance the verb is employed as a present participle from the Western States. There is, however, another prefer to be called niggers to distinguish themselves bringing a shower of booze and debris from the estimated If you are seated in an exit row and you cannot read this card, or cannot see well enough to follow these instructions, instruction card on United Airlines planes. Submitted shell just fired through binoculars on a hill southeast of very little plastic surgery during a live television interview mystery, holiness, or magic. The use of genuine foreign and strips of metal thousands of years old. In ancient commonly known. To cite just a few ancient examples, meanings, the deep, dark vowels like o and u having merely following in the footsteps of some of his forebears their formation. For example, variations on a theme ancient version of a magical patter song or jazz scat. anagrams might be lurking there, awaiting the alert similarity between the sonorous sound manipulations to some scholars, the universally known and applied languages as well. For example: kith and kin, wrack rhythmic and phonetic rules, are the playful, nonsensical, now part and parcel of our respective daily languages, the vocal apparatus. Repeating a word or syllable or sound puts the least strain on the voice. Yet human creative ingenuity is not satisfied with repetition; it has been discovered, the next least exerting is to reproduce nonsense or not, often begins with a laryngeal or velar second element tends to be a repetition of the first, its practically universal validity, citing evidence continued to persist through the ages and is obviously same primal urge that motivated the anonymous creators of our alphabet to begin their artificial series of slang sense, `balls,' not its literal sense, `eggs.' The slang meaning is so prevalent that on a recent trip to mavens, other distinguished guests: At this point in him right. At once simple and inscrutable, the tautology of a means of egress that leads to an entrance to an wordiness deserves no special recognition: it is the good manners expected of those who sit at our table. over 'til it's over.) Although some find this charming, of language. Admittedly, we take pride in confounding they are talking about; but I have a feeling the idea might be useful, for there is an incredible amount of have an identity problem. It is as if in a particular friends spent most of their time trying to distinguish one family from the other instead of enjoying their revised nomenclature for racquet sports is in order. Perhaps the only people who can define these activities those who are officials of national associations. Others, seem to be totally in the dark about such matters as and racquetball are interchangeable. It is next to impossible about racquet sports because there is no terminology be defined in a standard dictionary or encyclopedia of sport: tennis; lawn tennis; squash tennis; paddle The most obvious characteristic of this list is that most of these games appear, at least, to be variations technically classified as such. A second characteristic terms. For example, some have derivations distinctly court on which the game is played. Badminton derives the original soft ball made against the wall of the court. Interestingly, in spite of their obscure origins, names communicate something specific to the layman. or from the peculiarities of the court construction to certain ancient racquet sports approaching obsolescence hazy owing to recently created sports, such as racquetball for a game played on a variety of surfaces, should be from the titles of all official national tennis organizations. between the aficionados, who insist on a precise distinction, Some may consider this sheer perversity; however, I their unique game, neglected to suggest that it combines court.' The meaninglessness of this term is further illustrated by the fact that the elevation of the court sports historians are aware, the court was originally snow, it could not be played at ground level, and, in fact, the later courts are so constructed. In short, be applied to distinguish the game from paddle tennis, squash tennis is a possibility if we are willing to concede know if these sports are played on a court with a net, against a wall, or both. A suggested solution to the semantic confusion would be to sharpen the distinction will eventually lose its official sanction and will are basically the same in principle in that they involve racket, the difference being in the dimensions of the court, the shape and size of the racket, and the size problem, as they are confined to a handful of exclusive squash racquets require some clarification. Technically, from which it derives and with which it is often confused. the term squash official, thus eliminating the identity freed from ambiguity. The problem arose when people game played with a strung paddle, would unofficially be argued that we should forget such a minor matter However, times are changing and hope springs eternal. unfortunate onomastic mess is the inflexibility and conservatism of those who dominate the official associations can be convinced that communication is more important laughed, but he just looked bewildered. I laughed, when he was a child or a young man, he had read the crime it is? Which of us has not confidently used a word for years, and then found out (probably in public, brought up by one's parents) where the train station, game, while the crowd is shouting to the players on suspect, as a youngster; seeing the word in print, but specimen in a bottle. At this, I consulted the dictionary was listed as an option. Checking around, however, I found that a lot of people said it as I said it, so guilty of even greater ignorance. For instance, I was aloud: Do you suffer the painful humiliation of psoriasis? looked it up. Since we are on the subject of humiliation, lawsuits which proliferate over condominium parking reading: Roman women built fires in their brassieres. teacher. A college friend admitted that he had only say, is primarily Naval fleet training. [From Conservative dictionary user takes etymology for granted. This is asked where it came from. This reveals two assumptions: first involves words whose histories lend themselves change. These rules describe the systematic transformation histories of these words are generally more recent, a historical incident or the name of a person. They are also often slang or colloquial in nature and therefore A large number of the etymologies in the Dictionary into this latter category. The evidence for a given dialect expression is often very meager, and a good guess at the etymology is about all that can be expected. weather for `hot, rainless weather,' which may derive go on a bilge or drinking spree used by three Northern usage a good guess at the etymology is about all that can be made. Foot as an interjection expressing irritation probably from a Biblical allusion. In any case, these There is also the learned guess, as in the etymology the horn meaning `to be unlucky,' which is probably at best, the DARE editor usually has to deal with a larger `gray area' than the editor of a general dictionary. by urban black speakers, I discovered three possible one to jump very high or disappear' and `to disappear' conflicting etymologies. This has become very clear that column I discussed the origins of the ubiquitous high priest of this movement whose adherents cultivated tour and presented in the flesh the image of an aesthete. it is coined from dud an `article of clothing' altered to incorporate attitude with reference to the dude's `lazy fellow,' literally `drowsy head.' In this sense, Again we see etymologists struggling with uncertainty This seems to encourage word buffs to take a stab at letters I receive are any indication. When I missed a good alternative guess at the origin of cold turkey referring to a drug addict who quits abruptly, I received correcting me. I had argued, as does the unabridged transitional concept is presumably unfeeling abruptness. opiates. The nodular appearance is that of the skin very plausible, though impossible to prove. However, The phrase could have come from to talk cold turkey disputed word histories in A History of English in Its role of the educated guess. But if etymological uncertainty word histories fun. Playing with the words of uncertain and at its best, it is the formulation of a plausible clues that in the end also amount to a guess, albeit an vows, could he not be directing Romeo to consummate Athletic team nicknames have delighted and inspired at the center of a surprisingly bitter controversy. Such spectacles, they contend, make a lurid mockery preserve the heritage of native tribes? Despite its air of implausibility and apparent unreality, this issue over words. Instead, it raises serious questions of cultural institutions. Ironically, it also touches on an rollicking nicknames. Eastern tribes, for example, used to delight and amaze early colonists with their to anthropologists, the practice originated as a superstitious first nicknames were apparently primitive aliases. In Even today, nicknames sometimes serve as a protective obese person from even worse insults). Like an inoculation, in which braves showed off their flair for wisecracks example, we cannot be sure whether it was primitive suggests `Wanton Valley' or `Wild Place') rather than stranger's curious garb. Did not these savage Newcomers doubts out west. At the same time, the cavalry officer's buffalo fur. The troopers, for their part, enjoyed the today. Contrary to the views of sentimentalists, a names, Redskins actually predates its New World usage War. They were in any case in popular use well before original members of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, the world's first fully professional poetry and local color than for any drollery or satire actually mean. It had originally been the name of a however, is `Place of the Clipped Heads,' a reference which, in a curious way, might also be considered an Chiefs practically personified Spider baseball during fans grew accustomed to the epithet and began using it themselves, gradually converting it into an unofficial shrine and surviving legacy of this memorable Native changes in taste and fashion, a few by having fallen victim to the Black Robes of political correctness. recently the vibrant and storied nickname of Eastern robust fellows who trapped and hunted in the vicinity compliment, a friendly jest passed from one scruffy hardly known for their dainty manicures and designer Nicknaming, it seems fair to conclude, is an activity laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together whether that caused the crash or was just another sign the ought to read this book; furthermore, it is a reasonably safe prediction that it will prove readable, enjoyable, in English linguistics and associated with lexicography, realistic assessment of its present position among the Transplanted; Postcolonial English; English Improved; Proper English. To gain access to much of the material recondite sources; certainly, it would be difficult to select and organize it so effectively and palatably. Bailey writes well. One of the structural features to be particularly savored in each chapter is the author's perceived by citing passages from prominent commentators. interest; neither cryptically brief nor tediously long, they accurately reflect the opinions on, for example, comments on Proper English are reflected in extracts clinical view of the scholarly observer, and I could find little evidence, even in the selection of extracts, who are concerned that the vibrant vitality of English derive consolation (but little pleasure) from the attempts Improved. Notwithstanding my personal speculations pressures of feminism, I could find nothing that interferes themselves qualified to offer opinions about the English as far as I am aware, no one has, till this book, taken the trouble to engage in a comprehensive, comprehensible that Bailey has remained coolly aloof from his subject, for everywhere the reader can sense the affectionate the most uninvolved, scientifically analytical dissection offers a good, but not overlong list of References, an Index of Names, and a Subject Index. My only cavil is with the compositor's (editor's, and proofreader's) Although this book contains much excellent material, rather than the authors: it lacks an index of words thirteen blank pages at the end). The text is organized Insults, Epithets, and Expletives, and so on; without expressions is denied, thus reducing the usefulness words. The treatment is clinical and contains much useful ancillary information concerning usage, dialect, of considerable research, all of which is presented speculations. It is curious, though, to find so few references in the Bibliography to articles that have agreed that euphemism is the deliberate substitution of a socially acceptable, or laundered term for one it is inappropriate to a given situation, irreligious, prejudicial, and so forth). The cultural perception television advertising of gear for the incontinent and too many negative connotations to felicitously execute The terms used here are not immediately transparent: broadest way, it would seem to me that the definition say, whether an expression is euphemistic, neutral, or taboo is a matter of connotation, and the fact that intention is used to mean both denotation and connotation: loss of face is entirely irrelevant: if what is meant Speaker lose face by offending Hearer's sensibilities offends a hearer's sensibilities directly suffers loss of both, and it is substituted for a neutral or euphemistic one's opponents, things one wishes to show disapproval In the first part, I am not sure that one can say that there anything inherently offensive? Is not the offensiveness minds of the audience? In any event, even these criteria getting at, to paraphrase the infinite wisdom of Pigs speaker to use a taboo word in place of socially acceptable of the user to employ it to an insulting, derogatory, must be extremely careful to cleave to rigid definitions its loosest sense, quite a different one from that demanded have been better to have described raising taxes as a term that is politically inexpedient (itself a useful levels and the fact that euphemisms are seldom used male friends, in a bar, in a team changing room, in a prison). Those who leave a social gathering to use the toilet usually say, Excuse me; it might, depending cares enough about a person's temporary disappearance to want to know its details? Also absent is comment when used, as it is in medical slang, to refer to human The authors might also have discussed the deliberate of the studio audience are evidently easily convulsed in the many terms used against ethnic and religious groups, which need not be retailed here. As the authors sex, lust, and bodily parts, to which one should add amount of valuable material, much of which is admittedly depends so much on context. But that is not an excuse bound to produce different descriptions and different calls me an older brother; but I insist that I am his of this statement. To get a caller (or a reader) to participate for the first time indicates a growing audience. this, whether or not admitted publicly. Though this caller has not called before, he is not a new listener. works to know that the statement pulls just a little sycophancy, you say. More nearly the opposite. US magazines needed to do the job. Radio is the same. Whatever subject a radio host picks, he has targeted some listeners, lost others. The caller in this instance says that is what the host is supposed to say. But the reference is not necessarily to that particular call. Sometimes all the lines are occupied. The host can read on his computer screen an indication, provided caller wishes to talk about. More often than not, the host has only limited time: maybe a dull caller can be disposed of quickly; on the other hand, an interesting gentle and courteous kind of person one should have [I am sure that, like me, there are readers who appreciate As a frequent writer of letters to The Times and an occasional writer to other periodicals, all of which points made. But, as the letter itself makes clear, Bible writers have, presumably, a latitude of interpretation means only `young woman,' certainly connotes virginity. the goal in writing is to avoid ambiguity, the goal in use of gunsel and describes him as meaning it in the thought that VERBATIM readers might appreciate this One of the purposes of the primaries is for members am proud to be an unreconstructed linguistic traditionalist. Holy Trinity is and always will be Father, Son, and If this drivel carries through to its logical conclusion adjective that will not be deemed offensive to some titled. This usage muddies the distinction between and I see no justification for it. I call this practice was always willing to use a bigger word that seemed title to,' appear to be coeval, both given their earliest might be dictated by the style, meter, and rhythm of would conflict. A similar notion surrounds the word English, show the two forms to be of virtually contemporaneous was nonverbal: on seeing his wife off at the railway station, he is reported to have kissed the porter and tipped his wife sixpence. The other was made to an does not mention a problem I had as a boy in referring younger brother? My eldest brother must have suffered to allow them to digest this information, then said though interesting and amusing, contains some misunderstandings. sleep like a loose leg' but `to sleep with loose legs,' `vacation,' that is, if you're not in school you're this context, it means `beat, rhythm.' The expression should be `to find the last to one's shoe, or to meet ducks are usually considered objects of sympathy, as [Readers' attention is drawn to articles on the subject me to thinking about a related subject: anglicisms in sharp lookout on his nightly rounds, neither may realize brought the word into the language. What is one to make of the plumber listed in the yellow pages under A confusion of a different kind underlay the former either the old or the expurgated Calendar of Saints, would be better rendered as `at the foot of the letter.' in irony. The very title is a small masterpiece of accurate transcription from Bacon's essays. As one deliberately infiltrating many of his own whimsical inaccuracies into his critique, he in effect preempts subtlety at the very end of the article. President hard and use too broad an irony, they risk sounding facetious; if they stay deadpan and use too subtle an deeply pious instead of hilariously parodic. Perhaps point, has edged beyond the critical angle of irony, risking a literal reading. Certainly I, for one, was expos itself. Fortified with that realization, I went really just a ruse, and that an ironic reading was the participants in that famously anticlimactic exchange other reasons. Here, first of all, is the full story of any so aged or so learned as yourself. He looked so kindly at me that I thought I might go on. Every studious man, in the course of a long and thoughtful life, has had occasion to experience the special value since you care for the advice of an old man, sir, you will find it a very good practice (here he looked me in the face) always to verify your references, sir! College, Oxford, in his thirties and, since there was to that office until his death, in 1854--at the age of dog: he apparently brought it up to think of itself as English literature for two immortal lines of poetry meanings of bright `mentally alert' and `physically that's a different kind of fastness, he replied, It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you! aircraft, such as the Piper Cub, used the material, what term was used then. I am sure that a search of the appropriate literature would reveal its early use, see that the method used for launching was to have a glider, which was held in place by others. When the anchor men released the glider, it flew into the air The captions of such photographs often refer to this further to indicate that bungee did not originate with Dictionary of the English Language properly defines his public position on such things as the universality but when asked about it later, he claimed that what generally amused (though not deceived) by this humorous drawings, such wildlife as The Untouchable Incumbent, prominence once called Squaw Tit (not all of the pioneers a semblance of the original appellation changed the the new name, the final e was unfortunately omitted. bang. Some of us may even take a slightly perverse delight in the ability to rattle off the first 90-odd ingredient in a popular variety of ersatz diamond has The following article makes no attempt to be a 20-minute party and starts dropping terms such as stoichiometry as the temperature of your beer rises slowly but inexorably many complex substances with which we are surrounded from a much smaller number of basic elements is documented Today we are accustomed to thinking of elements and elements represented efforts by different philosophic schools to explain the discrepancy between appearances elements earth, water, air and fire (or sunlight) in different basic ingredients in nature was much older, possibly firm hold of one another, for some bodies are scalene others convex... (As it turns out, atoms don't quite proteins of a cell that function as receptor sites for harmful invaders such as viruses can be blocked with when placed in a solution of mixed sugars, some bacteria Club because they can digest dextrose but leave its of the early Enlightenment created a conceptual environment Newton's day in the notation of chemical reactions, elements got assigned symbols of one or two letters, for scholarly communication across national and linguistic it has the same number of free electrons as hydrogen, pickling solution, used to dissolve surface sulfides Unlike sodium, free potassium reacts violently with free and much more apt to be encountered in compounds. Potassium iodide and a gas in its natural state) is necessary to the above) to produce true saltpeter: potassium nitrate the three can be combined to explosive effect in as many a molecule for two atoms of potassium, sodium, The association of lime and bones is not accidental: but the fossilized skeletons of tiny sea animals, and Quicklime is quick (that is, alive, as in the quick used, during the Middle Ages, as a powerful precursor other substances, but its chemical symbol is Sb, from a hair blackener for their eyebrows, and in ophthalmology Most of the elements discovered in the first exuberant because miners first noticed it as a stubborn adulterant there are a few curve balls here as well, such as tungsten However, it now appears to have a far more complicated from a slough in a wet part of a field and was tipped off by the whitish mud clinging to the animal's feet to radioactive atoms to throw off particles and decay to organism such as a tree. This permits a means of reasonably atoms in molecules such as sulfates and hydroxides: that when radioactive elements began being synthesized someone still living at the time of its discovery. (He fruitful source of names for both natural and synthetic named for the asteroid Ceres, both having been discovered used to know was divided into three parts) and, in a gesture of unusual levity, as a pun on the name of its new atom turned out to be plural. To make the best got names from pieces of the first: Erbium (Er) and jewelers and their public because the high refractive being discovered to this day. As of last year, the decaying in millionths of a second into lighter elements names for them, honoring physicists and the locations stars, our sun included) are the result of the catastrophic depressing or exhilarating, depending on one's point of view; at any rate it seems true enough as far as the Big Picture goes: First there was nothing. Then had so widespread an effect on a rising generation in offering in a set of works, edited by the mathematician there was any unity of science. That it was the final volume in the series may, however, have been entirely The formula for sulfuric acid will never be forgotten recounted in his collection of autobiographical essays that this is a veiled reference to the scandalous affair his parish and the wife of his successor as editor of the was proposed to us while this article was in preparation, to my attention this tidy cosmological synopsis (personal with as few changes as possible, and we hope that it resubscribed, sight unseen, and especially those who enclosed heartening notes, made helpful suggestions, new ones in this issue. In choosing the articles you for their help. (Hazel has agreed to continue as our we are a little more wired than before, and it's not up the major Internet search indexes. Eventually, we Word, Inc., which has applied for nonprofit status. fingers for us. Our purpose is to promote learning if you would be interested in a Best of collection of past articles. Many, many of you were, so I am asking caught the typo in the last line of the survey: The classic you instead of your. And thanks to those of you who wrote in about the double possessive in the salutation of the letters. To lift from the latest become clogged with ads. According to our nonprofit which absolutely rules out ads for personal watercraft, out your holiday lists. Due to the marvelous response from former subscribers, the special $25/year rate in else) will be good for the foreseeable future. Write, to bring you all up to date. First, let me answer the of and inspiration behind the project, shows few signs (where he was born and later did the research for his When will Volume IV be available? is more difficult to answer. Before I try, let me give a quick synopsis of the project for those who aren't already familiar with it. reference tool unlike any other. Its aim is not to prescribe describe the language we use as cultivated speakers and writers. Instead, it tries to document the varieties vary from one region to another, that are learned at home rather than at school, or that are part of our oral tremendous size of the country, there are still many thousands of differences that characterize the various dialect regions of the United States. It is these differences materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, cover our history from the colonial period up to the entries to illustrate how words have been used from the seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth. vary regionally or differ from what would be expected), statements about regional and social distributions of investigated during the fieldwork. The maps are distorted to reflect population density rather than geographic pleased to say). It had gone into a fifth printing within IV will include P through the middle of S (we hate to divide a letter in the middle, but you all know how big they are strange to you, see below for their meanings.) smearcase. Not to be outdone in creativity, the natural was contingent on our maintaining our earlier level of funding, which has become increasingly difficult, and, in the last few years, impossible. In fact, our financial woes necessitated a staff reduction last summer, can provide very limited financial support. Our funding Foundation has had to move on to other worthy projects. see that this project reaches the only reasonable conclusion bright spot in our funding picture is that the Dean of joined our staff, and will be devoting his considerable Endowment for the Humanities will continue to provide of the project depends largely on private philanthropy. might be able to help. If you can be part of our support reaches of the United States. I was one; the others We went through a week of orientation and instruction, having our driving and phonetic transcription skills had identified the communities we were to visit. It begin each project by notifying the county sheriff, town clerk, or other officials, and to ask them for The ideal informant (INF) was a native and lifelong all social ranks and occupations, who could remember social, domestic, economic, and natural environments, with at least a little linguistic training and a lot of general as the INF knew about the local part of it. the metropolitan area. To increase coverage, I divided black gardener from downtown. For the other I went people expect visitors to sit and visit a spell before bringing up their business. From dealing with academic administrators, I knew to come straight to the point with personages who sit behind large desks and have their time allocated by secretaries. One of my teachers, like me always had to state their business clearly when looking for a resident of a black neighborhood; otherwise good and pretend not to know the person. Because my city experience was largely limited to student enclaves, however, nothing prepared me for establishing turf in where I was introduced by a city councilman: a bar, Parasol's, which played a central role in the social and INF who would withdraw to a private spot for a quiet interview; I just had to show up every afternoon and male residents came in and agreed to talk there in the bar. Women stayed on the restaurant side, and I was much fun as anybody if I had not had work to do, but keeping the QR going required continual exercise of the will. Normally, with one INF, once we established understood the answers. In Parasol's, though, I had to struggle every night to shape and defend my identity because it never did settle down to a single role that every actor could play to. To some I was the guy writing and repeatedly tried to start friendly arguments about began asking some himself. I explained cordially what anger, I stood up, slammed my fist to the table, and got a fight on my hands. Sensing I had to show some to start nothing. He didn't back off for long; after I the Dictionary. I think, he said, it's a lot of bullshit. be able to check the Dictionary if he caught a mudfish north had all been earnest Protestants with a utilitarian outlook. This man resided in a Catholic neighborhood parade the day after this year's was over. I should Yeah, he said, but I still think it's a lot of bullshit. learning activity of play all the way through adulthood academic study is not serious in the same sense that like a good time. I grinned and looked the man in the eye and said, To tell you the truth, I think it's a lot an outsider; she realized she should make allowances for my ignorance. That story is worth telling, if only I had used the day before because it was a dirty word and I would get in trouble for it. At the time I could meant, we had something. I pursued the investigation to avoid offense to her, she and the customer agreed slyly they knew what word I meant. I learned over to cute, furry animals: pussy, beaver, squirrel, monkey, size and amatory tenacity, but the metaphor persisted. at our destination and were safely on the sidewalk, my Well, yes, I began. I mean, no. It's both, really. all those cherries, did she put up preserves or put directions, do you go down the road for a mile before tease out a few differences. First of all, when an establishment shuts up, it simply closes, but when it shuts down, it ceases activity. If this sounds like too nice a distinction, consider common usage: factories shut down rather than shutting up; conversely, your rude brother may ask you to shut up, not shut down. Similarly, putting up food often involves sealing it in jars later stored on shelves, as opposed to putting down a good supply of hay for your livestock. As for which way to go on a road, up is either literally up a rise, due north, or just the way the speaker is pointing. a house versus ripping down the same structure, for instance, or the hearty Drink it down! instead of meaning alters its angle slightly here. Ripping up anything means destroying it, often by severing the connective up a draft card. To rip down a building, on the other comparably. Idiomatic drinking, like drinking itself, is a little fuzzier, but two senses coexist: having your comrades clap you on the back as you tilt up your beer a road should be in the opposite direction of to look down it, just as to look up to a person you admire is the course of to look down on an inferior. But what about expressions that split unevenly? To sit up is at down means to sit, whereas sitting up means that you were already sitting but are now improving your posture. that, just not on the stage or dais. Of course, if you're in the military, to stand down is to be at ease, no direction. You dig up buried treasure but dig down on your energy reserves to finish that race. You can be down from university is a bit of a disgrace, similar to expulsion in the United States. Why are these ups and downs not polar opposites? If it comes to that, even antonyms, except that each has one or more secondary up from the ground or to arise from bed. In the nominal the refrains of so many funk songs from the 1970's. To throw up a parcel onto the boat may be the opposite of to throw down that parcel onto the loading dock, refer just to food: you can put up a guest (and put up with him, as well) or put down a dying dog (a milder complementary in terms of location or regard: look up has a tertiary meaning, as in looking up a word in the pace, whereas keep down is to oppress, or not to disgorge. the mining business and what an efficient hell it was. or run up a gross of a new product, or just run up a already stuffed suitcase, better first pack down what you have in there. If you live it up too freely, you catch up to your rival, but who ever heard of catch 'fess up or own up, but not in any other direction. boss. Your feelings may be pent up inside, not pent the warm up for an athletic meet is paired after the instances of slant usage, from read in and read out synonym (same meaning), antonym (opposite meaning), Sandwich), and acronym (formed from the initial letters includes the initial letters. But can't we be more precise? first letter of several words. Then, we'll need a word for a word formed from the first two letters of words. sense of acronym but uses the combining form bi- signifying because we are using only the first two letters from existing combining form, prefix, root, or suffix should word for them. A fairly well known example is prequel the word that means an episode or a movie that portrays Lord Kelvin is credited with coining mho by reversing body whose resistance is one ohm. We could also call also came to mean a point that was not debatable or We also need a word for a word that illustrates its own meaning. Oxymoron means a phrase that contrasts meaning pointedly foolish, which itself derives from true or real). This is not as rare a category as you noun). Prefix almost qualifies; at least it illustrates a an etymology that is no longer true. Atom literally means a hypothetical body that is so small that it is Of course, in the age of neutrons, protons, electrons, particle that cannot be divided into smaller particles. whose original meaning has been altered, but is not but precisely meaning something good that is unexpectedly destination and found something even better, by fortunate a new word but also the use of new words. Besides, a journalist best known for travel books, have earned payment in the six figures sterling? It is, after all, a description of what they do every day as lexicographers. them in a dictionary. It does not seem the sort of recreation was riding a huge tandem tricycle around declared: So enormous have been Dr. Minor's contributions easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations indexes to old books; it was an obsession with him. bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish legs with scarlet and purple petals folded behind their run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on These girls are not, perhaps, altogether fictional; Minor would later tell people that he began to entertain lascivious thoughts about the time he was thirteen. while he got more education than the mission schools life of an army surgeon in that dismal year was horrifying, the Wilderness, part of the brutal and grueling campaign something badly wrong with Minor, and when he continued became apparent that he was unfit for his responsibilities the shooting. Minor was tried, found insane, and committed project and began to copy words from old books. And Minor a few times and was grateful for his contributions had been intimate some fifteen years earlier is utterly speculative. This is one of many flights of fancy during Consider the movie: what script writer would show us now it was time to shift the costs of his upkeep to the of the Philological Society's dictionary, was not the Bugger grips is his intriguing term for what others is getting very rich from a story pretty well known to Minor descendant and found a trove of correspondence that Minor was in the asylum; it was as obvious from its base. These are alluring possibilities for film. And remarkable accents to a story that is essentially and the political ramifications obvious. It may be of The debate is virtually meaningless. Most students question as it is a linguistic one. So, for example, the referred to as dialects, and the other group as languages any internal feature of the speech varieties themselves. education system, etc. For example, in a syndicated as merely bad English, as opposed to a valid language. and that what determines a particular variety's status has virtually nothing to do with the internal features of that variety and everything to do with the class, and in this case the race, of the speakers involved. In short, the issue is the color of their skin, not the color referred to speakers of Black English as illiterate thugs. The juxtaposition of the two terms is revealing. words, bad English is what is spoken by bad people. This assumption is pervasive in our society. Someone who speaks a prestigious dialect is thereby thought in the New York public school system. The class was referred to as the last class before jail. On the first and the radio talk show host is crucial. Schooling and morality are not synonymous, and probably show virtually no significant correlation. In the current discussion, of Black English are careless and lazy and that the particular variety of speech involved has no rules. That positions such as these are articulated and published differ from those of other dialects may be revealing. Consider the following data. (I hesitate to refer to dialects as standard or nonstandard, since it seems post is pronounced something like [poss]. The simplest of [t] under certain circumstances. So, for example, rule, in fact, is more general, applying to [d] as well. Notice, however, that the rule for the deletion of [t] Otherwise, if [t] deletion preceded plural formation, then [post] would become [pos] and the plural would of Black English, the plural of post is, in fact, pronounced the same rules as I have, but in the opposite order. In Dialect B. Plural formation followed by [t] deletion Dialect C. [t] deletion followed by plural formation. students representing each of the three speech varieties. student a hot lunch; get that student something. The fact is that such a student has demonstrated the ability to read. What the student needs is a better teacher. School Board was suggesting: the simple, commonsense if they knew something about the speech patterns of the people they were trying to teach. Unfortunately, debate over whether Black English is or is not a language. the word genetic to refer to Black English. That some actually took this to mean that people are born with a predisposition to acquire a particular language would be laughable if it were not so pernicious. (Some years ago, there was a brief article in the newspaper about able to speak to the child when it grew up. She was equally misinformed but not as malicious as the current In fact, the origin of some of the features of Black English is of some theoretical, scholarly interest. Slaves in this country were systematically separated from their families, and put in situations where they could not use their native language. In such a situation, what typically develops is what is referred to as a pidgin, based on the language of the environment, in this case, English. The next generation acquires this language as a product of their linguistic maturation, and this variety is sometimes called a creole. Over the succeeding centuries, this language has undergone a slaves in other countries were not systematically isolated, words, there is a historical explanation for the emergence of Black English, but it surely has little relevance English can evolve in our educational institutions. Given the emotional and uninformed reaction so far, arguments from the puritanical, everyone is familiar with this word in its many forms. Newspapers coyly parts of speech. And everyone has a favorite passage, good picture of the word's history, both etymological major revision could be supported. The revision is in progress at the time of this writing, and this is a anecdotes from the Introduction. We have accordingly or interesting story. The earliest example of fuck, describes monks fucking. (Seemingly a popular subject original edition gave sparse details on the background fuck in the movies. We are still researching this, but issues, in the movies, no one tried to place fuck onto Brown, in fact fuck appeared there, spelled in full, Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You will be expanding our treatment of this, and including the first known appearance of an acronymic etymology an earlier piece of folklore about the origin of the to the original form of the tale, before the battle of waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers defeat the mighty French. After the English annihilated version limits it to the single middle finger). The recent twist has been to note the fact that longbows the act of drawing the bowstring was called plucking still pluck yew! Pluck yew! at them. A few convenient On the serious side, considerably more etymological argues convincingly that the word is part of a large back and forth (not to thrust, as most dictionaries, will refer to the hilarious Studies Out in Left Field: (ungrammatical). The omission of this classic, first itself (a not uncommon situation in the field, I might me) to forgo a bibliography should not have prevented added. Several readers suggested the addition of that but emotionally uninvolved, but it does appear often instance of reversal of normal sex roles; (specifically) Another unfortunate omission was fuck buddy a sexual but have hopes of bettering. To mercy fuck and sport word rape wasn't shocking enough. The bizarre lesbian group use of sex toys seems, contrary to expectations, marked by flagrant social climbing; insults such as Partridge, it dates to the nineteenth century, a claim (where it has been used since the 1960s), a statement also used for a bus on which one can meet prospective Everyone and his or her brother or sister, it seems, has a favorite fuck -related usage. And in most cases, nonce world. The introduction to the first edition listed several such words, suggested by colleagues, brought a blizzard of ever more outrageous suggestions, can only be guessed at. Many suggestions also failed crucial effort. Early examples force us to rethink development of language. The original work for The the last several years has been small, which is both research) and bad (no breakthroughs). The insulting that these terms were in use in the 1940s. Happily, without catching these cites. This article also provided [shoes] (with various specific types of shoes), was money, unknown to the editor before a reader letter genuine attestations, we were satisfied. (Preference is given to actual examples in running text, then to printed glossarial evidence, and finally to orally collected Phoebe from seeing such vulgarity. Another important portmanteau from butt fucker, was already in with a flirts with all the guys in the class. Under fuck up use of fuck to be regularly found in dictionaries of forms, has delivered an impressive return of citations. florid entries in the stronger, more vivid, or more chiefly by not including marginal terms in the first also be considered secure; an item with only a single glossarial citation would have been kept out unless a confirming example could be solicited. An included marginal term, then, would be one from a single oral or written source that does not parallel another term and appears, in this editor's opinion, to be unlikely. Those that are on the ropes for this revision, include extensive database searching; fuck 5.b. to trifle or expression for loafing on duty, which is too uninteresting choose to pick up this book, will be faced with this when we try to record native names (as in transcription). make a place seem a little less strange), names which show evidence of discovery, etc. He stresses, however, name given. In fact, it is difficult to consider one without the other. They are capable of reinforcing only an introduction to the subject and asks for more done. However, in this work the author is unable to group has its own ways of looking at nature, its own set of distinctions between things in a general class, posed by its language. Including terms for artifacts of all kinds that are useful cultural clues, these elements in the Fifteenth Century speaks for itself, and the it, namely, which is to ask if the study of imaginary establishes a certain universality for the uprising: accordingly, the names can be attributed to no specific a part. Brown emphasizes that the last two languages examples of the relevance of literary name studies. away or go astray. His persona was just such a type: mocking God, leading others astray, scornfully getting itself. I would go no farther than point out a possible How many parents realize that the currently popular are often chosen without knowledge of their linguistic nevertheless persists as an important basis for selection: about roots and meanings and as long as these books are read and used, the knowledge of these works will we learn that all letters exist as a surname (and are It isn't clear to this reviewer just what place the than those she has described in this paper and therefore he has barely scratched the surface in his article, yet slang snootful). Anyone curious about technical linguistics semantic peculiarities and that names resemble slang us. For example, one extreme lexical transformation lady and (using the same title) also a means of admiration political events or dates function in symphony titles. Nationality, and the Incongruity Factor, our attention their nationality. One example will suffice: until But this isn't all: the book has extensive indices, Abstracts (all written by the authors) and Topics of lists information about the careers and research of about items of mutual interest. In brief, then, it is Last week, as I was arranging my notes on solecisms I suddenly realized that updating the long list, even without citing dates and perpetrators, had begun to telling myself all along, police work is tedious; but stint of alphabetizing and partially annotating a few [A respected local philanthropist's] name will live in had that list and now, rather than just sitting there lapses, many, still to be entered in my trustee notebook. all my bored days, I would never have believed that she had not reached the highest pinochle of success. Now, I was saddened to see that her words, compared I saw that it was high tide for me to stop wrecking remain the clowning achievement, it was time for me Today, nearly seven hundred years later, it remains intact despite the vicissitudes of time and a language characterization. We insatiable travelers have seen similar scenes enacted many times around the watering from this malaise when finding themselves on foreign all, and for the best reason in the world: he does not massive quantities of porridge during its formative proud Scot myself, I feel that a much more probable reason for this apparent lack of linguistic ambition is to be found in the regional dialect. There are parts more delicate nasal nuances of the French language. Patter, famous for its infamous glottal stop and raw, fact, not a separate language at all. It is just one listening pretty carefully to figure that out on first years ago I happened to be visiting the translation young French translator. The subject of regional dialects new to this country and having, so far, only encountered a tight little island as ours, and that so much of it could be unintelligible to the uninitiated. We were interrupted by the arrival of a worker clad in a boiler suit of some antiquity. I could not recall having seen through me. She was about to get her first lesson, and I could feel in my bones that it was going to be a squashed cigarette from somewhere inside it and lit look that spanned the ages. He coughed harshly and spat copiously on the ground. Then he let her have overseer is a loquacious and diminutive fellow of a afflicted with a strabismus of the sinistral optical member, and that he is currently attired in a rather clicked shut and she lanced me with a look of frosted It would also ban public consumption of alcohol and county of virtually unshakable local accents, it was on a coble, a traditional fishing boat working out of and it was during those years at sea that I learned aye, skipper. But the initiated know that there is a great deal more to this little gem than meets the ear, That was the sum total of the conversation. After a the hidden complexity of such a brief exchange. Unknown spot at the harbor offered the maximum shelter from the weather of the day. After an appropriate period of time, some sort of taciturn group decision would several hours, all attention turned to the prevailing is he? It was more of a statement than a question.) with a short ending: That's right, very lucky to get is correct, I don't think that the mist will clear, not speed to be traveling; and what are they doing, driving Silence. A big lift (sea, wave) came in the harbor It was studied thoughtfully, the implications for the middle: Not only is it misty, but the sea is making can't see that we'll be out today, just you mark my the end: That's right, we'd have been far better off More silence. One of the fishermen lazily drew his followed by other Ayes of agreement, but all different.) Aye, aye. (First one level, second one descending: radio requests program a few years ago, the presenter brightest of speakers will produce occasional misfires, faulty accessing: a funfair of trumpets; a prawn in was conspicuous enough to inspire the title of a comedy of deviation are in reality neither very common nor particularly revealing. The interesting types of deviation types (widely unrecognized, it seems, perhaps because lexical mistakes; mistakes of stress, intonation, and wrong word or syllable, modulating the pitch incorrectly questioning rather than affirming tone), and pausing a written sentence carries a higher risk of ambiguity specifically invites being enunciated in a withering out loud the following sentences, for instance, without context. It is context that makes smoothly intelligible Written sentences that in isolation appear ambiguous will snap into focus when enmeshed in a larger discourse; But put the sentence in context, and it suddenly becomes should fall (to point up the contrast, established in happen that they have little or no time to acquaint themselves with the script before reading it on air: traffic bulletins or revised continuity announcements that would guard against such lapses: above all, to of clangers. (Of the six examples quoted below, four perhaps, in technical parlance, examples of faulty tonicity (The unwanted pause after time reveals a misreading As he talked about his life and played his catholic life's inequities. (Get rid of that last pause, and place the second of the emphases more on inequities than on ponderer; the current rhythmic and intonational constitute a restrictive rather than a nonrestrictive than accurate pronunciation? Isn't it time, for instance, He could not shake the dread feeling that he and all the others who had been involved in those projects were sitting on a bomb that, sooner or later, would explode in and mitigate damages, it appears we neglected to empathize We must, I believe, strive to rout out these corrupting Stoat's first attempt, a novella (untitled, like all He was dissatisfied with this even before the ink was the context. And, more subtly, the light's being on contains the event of its having been turned on. But, most tellingly, it was argued by critics that the haddock even if it were rather drawn out and somewhat uninteresting. Absorbing these criticisms, Stoat came to the realization you have a verb, things happen. By definition. He he attempted to add interest by scattering adjectives and adverbs everywhere. But after a time, he had to recognize that even though the text did not actually describe anything happening, the mind had an extraordinary adjectives actually helped. Quite interesting things reader's mind; so if that mind became full of imagined Stoat came to the realization that substantives, too, were the problem. Write a noun and the reader will With horror, Stoat realized that this was worse! The text provided a backcloth for all sorts of imaginings. Amazing events were enacted in the minds of readers, for instance, was so loaded with connotation that it too had to be avoided. Stoat flirted briefly with a form of writing that used only the definite and indefinite He ruefully concluded that even this could stimulate readers' imaginations. These images would start to not the great generality of his readers. He tried it. A whole new set of problems emerged. With a little more imagination, readers could see all sorts of English words hidden in the text. With mounting despondency, defeat his purpose. To substitute pictures would be to enter the world of graphic art and to desert literature. more pragmatic marveled at the piquancy of the single children under twelve, only a dollar. [From Hillbilly, them. We carefully considered spelling, punctuation, many times, so the texts must have seemed unexceptional were potatoes, cheese, and chicken stock; local folk cash cashier's station in the wicket grated window; nothing to it, literally, there's nothing there. We on the autoroute interstate; if you are going to the We receive subventions subsidies; we give conferences There is increasingly a syntactic change in the use of the present perfect for the simple past, as in I have but traditionally it has had a different meaning; this French would be unable to understand that question. that the farm has stopped work on the paddock, an enclosed whose view of random mutations is the currently accepted virus, are there explanations that are not guesses? cannot be science, since the matter is not involved and logic and experience surely play a crucial role must, or rather, want to say, that one of the prime that most of all the people who ever lived are alive That has not been true even for the past two centuries. certainly much higher. A similar result is arrived at by calculating in a different way: the almanac estimates search for elegant formulations obscured his judgment in the world of linguistic glasnost..., he cites only which didn't exist before and has since been eliminated Pomposity of expression is no substitute for clarity capitalizing on the human desire to travel and have his argument with the two widely diverging definitions glaringly telling example of all juxtaposing definitions: defined the form of government which its every action theatrical production with primitive scenery; a theatrical farce, tomfoolery, preposterous piece of buffoonery. Does not one come away from these definitions of the The Random House Dictionary of the English Language similar etymology, stating that balcony is ultimately there, but I do know that it's a sulfur area (probably I can remember (possibly inaccurately as well as incompletely); list. Other southern pronunciations that strike the [oil] all [f] fifth Frozen Chosen), I was in a battalion personnel unit and handled daily Morning Reports from each battery. instances of AWOL, it was reported daily. The use of not reported as any kind of leave: they compensated a person some time off for a job well done or for a Blacks, sadly, is not confined to Western societies. When I was a child in the early 1930's, the song was more correct politically. I never had any reason to Please look at the lyrics of the song in the enclosed CD. I suspect strongly that this is the way it was whether anyone can authenticate these words as being continue to enjoy your magazine. I am probably one haunted English speakers of virtually every generation mucus of the nose, or snot. But then, half a loaf to but with the two initial letters transposed. Here too, the migrant, mystic h has served as a social shibboleth. guess is that even the most fastidious speaker drops of exerting themselves than we are. Spelling and use were already erratic. Arena was used as often as the right to its initial h but sports it anyway. In the disappeared as a symbol of sound value. It frequently burial service was rudely interrupted by the Renaissance. stage. We have others where the h has been reinstated example), and still others where the h has been replaced, lack of certainty, providing the potential for some position to pass judgment on the creature's disposition, we seem to feel that abominable is an apt descriptor. Some people solve this problem by illogically placing more nagging nuisance. Abundance existed as an excrescent and for a good while after that, in the belief that the I am sure we will all be happy to know that we are in party of convicts and their military custodians and sought to use what little knowledge had been passed on to him of the indigenous inhabitants, their language, word and borrowed it (as they did other words, like which the invaders had brought with them and apparently made a symbol of the country was the animal itself, and the word rapidly took on in English and, indeed, he found that the local Aborigines did not recognize several other possibilities were floated. It was at first who was at his side, had erred, either in their understanding suggested that an Aboriginal informant had misunderstood Aboriginal languages. By this time, of course, the fun. Later scholarship suggests that the city fathers the historical and geographical evidence of a word's early use being brought collectively to bear as in the other explanation has to be sought. This is the case sense history can be established that fits chronologically pommy there is no such answer. The first task then is to track the word back to its earliest recorded occurrence any clues as to origin. And it does. Both forms are was a sudden increase in assisted immigration and in the consequent expression of attitudes to this immigration. still on the English. For some reason unknown to lexicographers But this explanation, first advanced and documented yet to win full acceptance, there still being those the comparison of the brightly colored fruit with the ruddy cheeks of the newly arrived English immigrant sufficient explanation in itself. Folk etymologies But each age and each culture has its own phraseology. of new transatlantic terminology swamps these shores Valley. Perhaps we need an English Academy to keep our language pure. But, whether through technological phrases chosen aptly describe the sort of society and in Natal, all of whom worked together in the diamond Its vocabulary may look strange but sounds familiar. flour. All these are based on English words as are kill your intestinal worms, I told this boy he must not go underground, as he is drunk, Open the compressed we find Iron the lace with great care, Mangle all these clothes, We need charcoal for the iron today, I want the choicest phrases: Let all the utensils be safely packed, Is it lung blood or heart blood?, Hang up the kill so that the hyenas do not get at it, Put water in at the coast gives us I want to go ashore; carry my MOLEST, WORRY, BADGER, HARRY, HARASS, HECKLE, PERSECUTE, IRK, BULLYRAG, VEX, DISQUIET, GRATE, BESET, BOTHER, TEASE, NETTLE, TANTALIZE, OR RUFFLE THE ANIMALS [Sign Grow Your Vocabulary By Learning the Roots of English word formation in English, dealing with roots, prefixes, audience, it has been published in the guise of a vocabulary an inordinately strong will is very unlikely to find the book easy to understand. One might regard it as a popular combination of Carl Darling Buck's A Dictionary in. None of these appears in the Bibliography, however, as a vocabulary builder, it is worth reviewing as a formation and to ignore the sizzle about vocabulary sorts: relatively short shrift is given to high school and college students, and, mercifully, no mention at all is made of those who might have been sold on the suffixes, and other roots are affixed in accordance of small print and is one of the most useful and informative House ought to be carpeted for before the International of the history of words in English is more information laugh appreciatively at what is clever, though it may Take, for example, the three quotations from Clarence which, it is easy to see from the subtitle, quotations The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents These are, as the book title suggest, witty; one could certainly agree that they are facetious; but they are not funny, and certainly not hilarious. Sometimes, the title of her book; then the publisher came along the quotations are witty; an inept one is credited to If one likes this sort of thing, this is a good collection. review of his book so closely associated with what he which, after all, are quotations). There is little humor in this book, either in the joking or the situations described, largely because of the analytical approach: to explain what is funny about it, especially when it was not particularly funny to begin with. It is hard demonstrates that it is serious for linguists, too, encomiastic reviews of it have appeared internationally, know that it is available in paperback (albeit at a those who use reference books to help them find the right answers and those who eschew any aids whatsoever. If I could not identify a missing word in a quotation, after which it would be promptly forgotten; mercifully, not simply straightforward matter, like the solution bits of information; for one thing, many of the clues I am not entirely sure that I understand what each of simple to load and, once in place, easy to use; it is facility for finding blank tile substitutions, but it In view of the abundance of the worldwide population of a surprise to learn that no authority can categorically history to have worshiped it as sacred. The name is word cat was so often attached as a prefix to other words. In some examples I feel the word also suffered with that animal as it is a tough, elastic cord made moves stealthily and noiselessly, perhaps like a cat no catcalls from the audience (unless the designs fail to be to the viewers' liking), eliciting catty remarks, often depicted as a bulldog, frequently wore one to work, though he preferred to call it a boiler suit. the task. The cat's whiskers is a term possibly first contact on a crystal (wireless) set was thought to be of chalcedonic quartz or chrysoberyl, which, cut in a certain way, reflects light and has a luster like the contracted pupil of a cat's eye. Catoptrics is the for prostitute. Perhaps some of the latter drank cat's name for the place where numbers of animal cats are site in a door for a household's cat, the difference can sit or lie and sleep, but a cup of tea. It was so tea, called the scandal broth. Gossip over the tea was slops; the stuff a cat will lap. A catnap is a short Cat dirt is not what might be thought, but a type of stones. Cat and clay is straw and clay mixed together fitted with a stock into position clear of the ship's side. It was so called because in the days when there carved on it. This procedure, before the days of the cat purchase is a rope tackle used for hauling an anchor, overboard. A cat pennant is the small pennant used either as a marker for an anchor buoy or as a signal that a vessel is at anchor. A catenary is the curve of slight ripple on the surface of an otherwise flat sea, variation is a light breeze, just strong enough to ruffle the water surface. Second, it is a twisting hitch, made in the bight of a rope to form two eyes through which the hook of a tackle is passed for hoisting. A an extra turn through the loops to prevent their slipping an unsuspecting agent, or tool, especially in nefarious gun ports on a sailing man o' war, on the same level as the capstan, and used for leading a stern hawser cat. A catfish has barbels on its head, around the Abscesses. Debility. Kidney. Rheumatism. Acne. Diarrhea. Disease. Ringworm. Ague. Dropsy. King's Evil. Salt Rheum. Asthma. Dyspepsia. Lameness. Scalds. Biliousness. Felons. Lumbago. Spasms. Boils. Fits. Milk, to Spinal Catarrh. Headache. flow. Sprains. Colic. Hysteria. Exhaustion. Dance. Constipation. Impotence. Nervousness. Toothache. Convalescence. Incontinence Neuralgia. Tumors. Convulsions. of Urine. Numb Palsy. Varicose Cramps. Jaundice. Paralysis. Veins. Deafness. Joint Piles. Vomiting. It is worthwhile pointing out that this editor has suffered years dwindle down). Still, most have happily been kept at bay: we still have not suffered from, among others, the King's Evil, insufficient flow of milk, St. as natural reflections of everyday life. Etymologically, time of publication; but that is not necessarily true for old dictionaries any more than it is for new ones. To be sure, there are oddments and peculiarities that can be spotted: in the case of the subject work, one cannot help finding the definition of electricity a Readers may be surprised to learn that there is, effectively, find the main definition appear cross references to while our understanding of the behavior of electricity little more about its basic nature than we did before. in the past contain entries considered important by is nothing much criticizable in following a personal contemporary cultural context. Thus, for instance, we can readily understand retaining a definition for phrases, which means that it is half the size of the It therefore carries a surprising number of obsolete have been selected here (omitting pronunciation and noted, classed the words at about the time of publication [obsolete] nation. [Secondary sense in too late. [We should have correspondents to revived this word instead of VERBATIM.] awkward staircase wit.] is obsolete.] [obsolete] requires watching. [archaic] [obsolete] under the employer's eye. architecture. [Sense not in forestall, to buy goods before elusion, escape; evasion. [rare] [obsolete] There are other curiosities in this book. For example, By contrast, here is the pertinent definition from the the patient a quantity of water, varying in temperature effervescence, countries recover by slight and temperate from which one might conclude that the first is the anything to teach us except in the most general way time, partly owing to the lack of sophistication of their compilers, partly to their conservatism, which are no longer current. Such entries must be retained for they are encountered in reading. Some conservative reference proved unnecessary. With all the dialects the expression is extant. For another thing, we must about the language, but about the culture. For instance, do not exist, they must still be listed in dictionaries, just as the words for abstract notions like honesty, a fortunately rare affliction in which the individual It is not a subject for flippancy, one must concede, woman's condition, whispered the word sex to her as unconscious, to the floor, and he sexually molested venue. The trial of the molester is becoming difficult called to testify, she faints, even if the prosecutor so reported in the first instance is not revealed. It place using dolls, as they do when asking children to and opinions on the subject; it wouldn't do for us to Have a nice day had gone the way of Hi! My name is Dip. But it seems here to stay, and, on reflection, merits comment. It ill behooves us to criticize its emptiness, for we all utter Good morning, Good afternoon, course of the day. It is likely that Good day had its It is a nice day, to the latter of which our curmudgeonly Good day has taken on other connotations, depending is the neutral greeting; Good' day', with equal stress or parting. Till something else comes along or we all through physical or emotional reactions; the dingdong theory, in which people reacted to the environment; in which speech arose from the romantic side of life. named for their songs or calls. This even holds for the extension of this, as a cock's crow. The hen is so called with its changed vowel representing its less powerful farmland territory, the crow and rook are both named part of its name is in fact directly related to that of the have an imitative name, although it was formerly nicknamed its cry is usually described as a boom, and the first duck. Its name represents its distinctive quacking. it is timid but because the call of the female is a double of its voice but of the sharp whirring sound made by its wings when it suddenly flies up. This sounds like and chaffs are usually repeated in irregular order, such and jar are related words.) The nightingale does not have a directly imitative name, although the final- gale origin of the name is disputed. (The first part of the and the word for this agonized and agonizing sound. Verbal renderings of birds' calls and notes are those given The time has come, as it does to all entities, animate been ups (like the time when we had a mailing service that kept adding new and renewing subscribers' names and addresses without removing the old ones, leading us not only into a state of euphoria contemplating our and, of course, there have been downs (like falling must be said, though, that those first issues ran to six money matters, we have never been aggressive in pursuing orders from some advertisers reflected some satisfaction VERBATIM. We were pleased, too, when, several years ago, we were able to pay contributors, a rare occurrence to journals of lesser circulation, have reprinted articles when they caught us in the most embarrassing errors. We have enjoyed chatting with those who have telephoned, written replies to all who have written (with the exception Lately, we have been remiss only in writing discouraging English a close second (two printings). Other books, and the Index thereto, altogether four books), have not fared so well: indeed, a substantial portion of the Great Disaster (though it will probably go unnoticed on any television series of that name) has been our offering Roebuck catalogue, hanging from a nail in the privy. with contributors, commentators, critics, and friends; and we shall miss the silent majority, those of you year after year, occasionally dropping a line with a you may be assured that if there is any reason to write word, but also from Sinful Syntax. In the sentence, me; but a majority of listeners and readers, infected by Sinful Syntax, will today understand the sentence as She loves music better than I love it or ...better than I do. If that is really what was meant, then the King, both of whom have said on more than one occasion He is that rarest of travel writers, one whom his readers is immune. The caption beneath a photograph in the uncertain of what is correct, try to avoid one error by committing another. This, at any rate, would explain One of the most basic rules of grammar, that decreeing Breaches of that other basic rule decreeing agreement More generally, there are a variety of pleasures... a language like English, largely uninflected and having be able to recognize not just the Parts of Speech but contained this sentence: I have seen some bears double their size. Is double verb or adjective? Treating adjectives as if they were nouns is a form of abuse which has become common. In Painting for Posterity, there was this: [in a portrait] Too broad of a smile give up as a bad [useless, vain] job the notion of knowledge [of the ability to know anything with precision] or did he mean give up thinking that knowledge is a bad [impossible] job? In light of the context, the first interpretation populous inhabitants. Perhaps the original was most of the populous island's inhabitants and was deformed the dog. Was it something for calling the dog or the often exploit the possibility of a double meaning or of Other ambiguities occur when vernacular expressions said, [School] officials say they have no problem with from such sentences, as well as from one in an accident as the report continued and we learned that the victim is slippery. It easily escapes the nets flung out by words, even when they are straitened by rules of syntax and by logic. When the possibilities for misunderstanding one's back. Any sign of putting on airs or assertiveness rather a critical race owing to their struggle to make ends meet in a county which has long known economic couldn't stop a pig in a passage! and of lank hair, like a yard of pump water. Even a contented person older inhabitant for his or her age and you may well get the familiar reply, As old as my little finger and a to vivid descriptions. Any sign of restlessness, for the wall to bark. As for the maker of weak tea, more heard, You'll do it bit by bit as the cat said when she Still, bracing remarks in plenty urge folk to get on with things. After all, concentrate on the basics, carry a knife, a piece of string and some money; then you can cut, tie and buy. Count your blessings, however very like your own, long before you, is very prevalent tongues will cut your throat with a bar of soap or hang you with a yard of cotton. Just as strange is the gluttony checked by, Nobody will stop their horse galloping to Throughout all these sayings, a downright judgmental In each of these the linguistic situation obtaining Aborigines had learned words from the settlers in the though the surviving words number no more than sixteen. has enriched English with more than fifty loanwords. betrays the fact that the relationships between convicts were of a hostility unreached elsewhere; the continuing meant a new start, and consequently a duplication in has been widely used in Victoria in this sense and, in remains that, despite this diversity, the English word hut enjoyed a greater currency than any of the borrowings, so limited was the relationship between settlers and Aborigines that there was little progress beyond the and eventually replaced that by sea did incremental as the passage of time meant that there was a likelihood travel by sea. In particular, once the mountain barrier pidgin in which limited communication was possible. years a source of loan words. First, the settlement in the west took place some forty years after that in the east, and the settlers had a better idea of what they longer spoken, it was more fully and more intelligently third, as a matter of governmental policy, Aboriginal names for flora and fauna have been preferred. So, for instance, the names of the farmed freshwater crayfish, usage in English, coincident with their utility, though comprehensive picture of Aboriginal life than do the of Aboriginal belief and life are special uses of English are effectively obsolete. So the Aboriginal equivalent paintings. The language of the invaders is the language there for borrowing on a larger scale and with a degree achieved hitherto, it has not been taken. In the west, of a developing understanding of the indigenous peoples Proliferating Plurals (and Some Singular Substitutions) speakers have invented a new rule: Whenever possible, use plurals. Thus television, radio, and newspaper Damages to the bridge from the collision were slight. Toxic substances in their drinking water have caused [A retiring football coach] always worried about the At the same time, perhaps from an unconscious discomfort commonly used words of foreign origin: L bacterium, being used almost exclusively in plural form, they are grace of someone else; the ground for divorce was...; building was also responsible for the upkeep of its make a singular noun still more so by lopping off its right on the money). Though the singular insanity is far outstripped by the multiple mania, one can expect, are invited to share his delight in Embraceable Zoo many similar examples. For most of us, these are typical York apartment, crammed with lists of personal names recall with affection the late John Leaver, who cycled instance, that he has long had a special passion for Beauty, but rather a Coquette, despaired of ever seeing We need not cavil, of course, at the absence of such obvious reference sources; in a work like this the author bibliography, would have made it clear that this usage without their capital letters) doing here? The latter may interest those who make a special study of flatulence of this kind when we are surrounded by thousands of words are printed, for instance, as well as the typeface Cathedral, Ducktail, Goatee, Lavatory Brush, Imperial, a few. At least two hundred types of hat have more Irons: we strike while the iron's hot and also play their lighter side of language series. I hope that they will at some stage do justice to the more scholarly and personal names. Names and naming rightly attract the attention of philologists, sociologists, psychologists, have heard some of Green's broadcasts and interviews, glib, just what is needed for radio. That style translated greatly overwritten. Its main fault lies in the reliance the sort of thing one expects to be paraphrased by a historian, with the original matter buried in footnotes. Mercifully, there are few such notes, and they come at the end of the book where they can be ignored. The quite long and neither interesting nor revealing, often serving to support a point made by the author, whom I would be happy to believe on his own recognizance. Still, there are a number of errors which ought to be the earlier chapters of the book. It is not till we arrive at the final chapter, The Modern World, that serious [Lexicographers] have retained their priestly role, especially dictionaries contain far fewer than that: the Concise I am aware, what are called college or desk dictionaries entry, but he is mistaken in reporting that one represents the precise one [p.364]: there are two pronunciations other cleaves to a scholarly transcription (called a narrow today, the first would be the simplified system used generally in most dictionaries and the second would Alphabet (which, for their more recondite transcriptions, require a trained phonetician for their understanding). Green describes one of its main advances as a general of these dictionaries contain notes describing contentious of the concerns of many users of the language, hence the ends of entries to illustrate headwords with suffixes consternation what might seem to be a publisher's fiddling system for such counting was worked out in the 1930s, Treasury Department, which was then in charge of all government purchases, as a means for assessing the information the government, a responsibility later shifted to another definitions with descriptions of cultural phenomena Green's treatment of the Modern World of lexicography published in the last fifty years, when the sales of world. It is probably true to say that an entire book could be written about this recent period in dictionary sound linguistic philosophy but the effects of the introduction compilation, composition, and accession (as through least for the first fourteen chapters, which gather in one place an enormous amount of interesting, useful information about (deceased) lexicographers and the dictionaries they prepared. The title, which will make in the past few decades, a trend that probably began in the 1930s to be reinforced through World War II. It is probably the language that has borne much of the usage of the term. In the early 1940s we were besieged the meaning of which we learned through daily repetition (I find it convenient to distinguish an abbreviation as a shortening that is not or cannot be pronounced, etc., from an acronym as a shortening that is pronounced in this area prefer to subsume them all under the general did not become current, I believe, till Gale Research jargon were not enough, those who concoct that obfuscating turned it into an abbreviation or an acronym. The jargon During a recent hospital stay (my first), I learned that called the medical orderly who has the responsibility for taking blood samples, the registered nurse in attendance, of the sort of vocabulary that makes a garbage man or enormously helpful in explaining, in a straightforward way and (unfortunately) without rancor, what bureaucracy practice practitioner, now considered a medical specialty. The specialty of medicine which deals with providing, general medical care of patients of all ages, primarily in family groups. The care provided is primary care. lives alone, I am only marginally entitled to treatment, for a single individual can scarcely be considered a family group. This specialty reminds me of a time, some decades ago, when my doctor advised me, indignantly, framed certificate hanging on the wall of his office, he told me in no uncertain terms that he was an internist, require only two doctors, an internist and a dermatologist. insurance, or any other area concerned with the bureaucracy assails one from all sides. Although the average victim librarians should note its great value as an adjunct to It would be only fair to mention that the terminology My aim in this work is to illustrate what I believe is the astonishing debt that our idiomatic speech owes to the nautical language of the past. English is extraordinarily this book to show that many of the figures of speech that we use from day to day derive from the language This is a substantial, useful, interesting work, but if the archive of nautical expressions, he may be disappointed. short shrift to the trappings of academia in our pages: we eschew footnotes (with rare exceptions) as well as bibliographies. But in reviewing the works of others, Partridge's Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary ought to be avoided by serious researchers; the author Still, it is unfair to judge a book by its peripherals. Before getting to the content, let us look at the appendices, many nautical words beginning with a- are prepositions, although the information given here is accurate as far as I could tell, it is confusing to have some words listed under their original spelling (studding sail, treenail) and others in their corrupted form (gunnel, there is a great deal more to the question of spelling from anatomical terms, not the other way round. The coverage is a bit loose, but no one is likely to consider small iron wedge of pin driven through a hole or slot Environment and General Environment. The suitability simply because it is a chair; cap is listed presumably because it is thought to refer to an item of apparel. But a chair is virtually anything for an individual to sit on and cap, etymologically at least, originally meant dated citations for the earliest occurrences of these words in a nautical context, how is one to know if they Hogwash Sailor's slang for nonsense, rubbish, a tale seems nautical at all, hogwash is ordinary English, from everyday word to language of the sea, and not, as advertised, vice versa. The same must be said for hitch, go without a hitch, get hitched, hoist, hold off, is that there are, indeed, many words and phrases that originated at sea and were brought ashore for ready embodiment in everyday speech, but to find the same terms in both does not justify the assertion that the sea made about such information is that it provides evidence the time of publication of the work: it cannot and must not be construed as the first time the word appeared on the face of the earth, merely as the first written evidence we have of its appearance. Clearly, that is not to say that most words appearing in quotations in the this might well apply to terms of art of a specialized field and, particularly, the speech of sailors, who did were in oral use for a long time before they were written a researcher five hundred years hence would be wrong dictionaries whole are left to conclude that their content is sacrosanct. Those who try to apply a scientific aware that what we are examining is not likely to be alchemy of language, and we can well appreciate it in the context of artistic license. But it is quite another thing when it is foisted on an unsuspecting public as fact, when, indeed, it is either pure speculation or a writer's interpretation of the best way to make data fit There is no doubt that much controversy has surrounded between the devil and the deep blue sea. Likewise, it is indisputable that many nautical expressions have come ashore to be used metaphorically by landlubbers. that were not nautical have also been listed. As it is for people like Jeans to do so, and he has incautiously evidence exists that they were originally nautical, and he has failed in his duty by not identifying questionable It is always a good idea to read an author's preface before reading and, certainly, before reviewing it. which pretty much sums up his attitude toward language English is a single language full of variety, and I believe one has exclusive rights to represent the language. and colony, standard language and dialect have little It is virtually impossible to argue against such a point of departure from the standpoint of the linguistic scientific heart disease, virology, and bacteriology would look ground by damning the causes of disease as sinful or the forefront when language comes up for discussion, not, perhaps, among linguists but, to be sure, among the rest of the population. In some cases, murder, place at the wrong time speaking a particular language and disharmony, as can be witnessed in the contemporary come close to answering the question of what should be done about teaching language. A very telling point other than Standard (which we persist in putting in quotation marks because it continually changes, both temporally and geographically) are condemned to accept work that is below a level, socially and economically, are entitled, at least from the standpoint of opportunity. As I have held, while language itself can the subject of cool analysis in some contexts, it is a social institution is not only scientific and scholarly but noble to maintain that such matters as pronunciation, usage, dialect, remains that using a dialect or speech pattern that is unacceptable to those who are giving out the jobs may mean that one either gets the job or not, other qualifications scholarly considerations may be effectively put into There is another aspect to the entire subject, invariably because they remain unable to measure or quantify it, namely, style. Language is language says the scientist, totally ignoring (sometimes deliberately, usually owing might be involved in the speech or writing of individuals, might protest that the study called stylistics deals with stylistics are aware that it does not even come close to measuring effectiveness, poetry, eloquence, beauty, and other characteristics associated with artistic expression.) things. There are those of an older generation that considers itself better educated than almost anyone with the better and more important works of art (of all kinds) of the world. This interpretation of culture, is admittedly, of decreasing importance to an increasing proportion of the population, who place rock 'n' roll stars on the same scale of artistic accomplishment as et al.; because the last do not speak to them, they This aspect of language should not be construed solely was a tenor or a bass, or being able to hum melodies of a cultured individual. Rather, it is the artistry that rubs off on the person steeped in the best parts of the culture, the phrase unconsciously plucked from a much), the single word that indicates at least passing These aspects of language are social, philosophical, out of devotion to what is perceived as the scientific method, sometimes out of sheer philistinism and the inability to exercise taste, sometimes out of abject ignorance. published in linguistic journals to be convinced that, notwithstanding their specialty, linguists at large are incapable of writing simple, expository, declarative sentences without resorting to turgid syntax, obscure In short, considering that their specialty is language, it is astonishing how few of them use it effectively. traces the spread, growth, and increasing universality of the English language during that period. Bailey examines and Voices of English, to quote the chapter headings, about them, letting the facts speak for themselves. He does not say as much expressly, but his characterization marks around words and phrases condemned by contemporary For the most part, despite the occasional campaigning emerges is an engaging picture of concerned speakers of English, some of them pedants trying to establish (or preserve) some purity in the language, the remainder in the shape of grammars, usage guides, pronunciation guides, spellers, etc. Because English spelling is often unrelated to its pronunciation and inconsistent with it, the majority of spellers were used as teaching tools in schools; but there was also an opportunity to acquaint adults with accepted spelling forms (just as there is spelling (and of other mechanics of language) can be helpful to communication, but like other reflexes of language proficiency, it can also mark the relative literacy or education of a person. Spelling and conventional so much as a single typographical error in this book, I saw once again confirmation of the encroaching ignorance rule is well known to traditional compositors, though, Bailey discusses the progress of education, especially public education and the spread of literacy. In that regard, a point to be made about the culture of the period in contrast to the language, is the publication, late in the century, of a number of reference books, especially readers' handbooks and particularly A Dictionary popularity reflects the public's interest in metaphor based on classical and cultural references understandable anything but a dime novel, a popular magazines, or a guide to culture. It is not insignificant that their popularity somewhat staid tracing of the development of English into a world language, though its influence today is sixty years than to the growth and spread it enjoyed during the century of colonialism. Still, there is no It remains to be seen what will be written about the English via the Internet that is regarded as so pernicious advertising on the medium in English without the accompaniment century see still more diversification of English and encouragement of that diversity or more standardization major industrial powers? There is little doubt that cleave to the language most closely associated with financial reward, and the opportunities offered by the other media. Still, it is impossible to predict accurately [Note: The publisher originally sent only the cassette, tape, this reviewer was forced to depend on the more matter that the interviews appear to be unrehearsed). centuries, undergone many striking changes. Not altogether sounds is got over, the narrators are back on familiar ground, most of them buoyantly loquacious and quite whose overflowing drain gutters flooded her property, whose son's leg was amputated in a fearful childhood they are simply abstract and brief chronicles of time odds and ends of regional accents are far from being are indisputably accurate, none of the excerpts is sufficiently especially given the unfocused quality of the tape itself. Accent Matter? [rev. XVI,1,10] in which he champions economic equality for those who are passed over in the job market because of unacceptable regional accents, altruistic; but at a time when certain civilizations and cultures are in danger of losing their spoken heritage, these slight, quirky renderings of native speech may prove to be as valuable as the archaeologist's fossil valiantly and often painfully to relearn their native language, which almost died out over the past fifty hold of one's mother tongue: It's true the language is almost lost, but there's a lot of spirit still, so I don't think it's too late. And that appears to be the underlying purpose of English Accents and Dialects, a lobbyists, the context made clear to some listeners halfway through a report on cases of fraud, a local adapt was meant. I say some listeners because it is broadcasters and writers, are unable to distinguish functions on computers and electronic typewriters for an apparent decrease in spelling errors such as the Electronic spelling checkers cannot detect phonetic Reliance on electronic proofreaders may, in fact, increase use of band as the past tense of to ban. She understood its inflected past tense form; but the infinitive and editor's electronic reader had not rejected band and therefore the word must be correct. We can expect to read more of such phonetic errors since even highly literate and careful writers will sometimes make such mistakes and occasionally proofread in haste, as well, though if it is pointed out, they will always understand But slips of the tongue, phonetic and spelling errors a local political commentator, speaking with general equated to. At about the same time, National Public of an artist she had interviewed, He flouted his radical glance of the Pope, when it was a glimpse they really Deceptively spacious! was the leading phrase of an ad Real Estate Weekly section. Was the house bigger than it looked? Or smaller? The following list is a small sample of the deranged diction offered by the media work of professional journalists or broadcasters, but all job was to watch for shipwrecks and rescue survivors. A tougher training regiment [for New York City police]... blunders such as these, is it any wonder that public discourse so often degenerates into slanging matches and the bitter exchange of empty slogans? Words fail elite: and their failure is both a symptom and a cause that death is no longer taboo, or are such euphemisms the victims of a modern contempt for flowery, imprecise pushing up daisies, breathed his last, is no more, gone death of a king is seen as a return to chaos and disorder Ivory Coast people say The world has lowered its eyes the printers are in the same city; that might account for years ago came another New Edition and the gentle wit of some of the definitions was done away with. This bowdlerizing was the subject of extensive correspondence new edition had dropped the witty invention of earlier they belong to a new generation) want to make their are called correction facilities; a lavatory with urinals has softened its attitude to car theft. May I offer a better now retired), I understood the legal definition of theft bracket them with serious car thieves would be unjust. Offenders, especially young ones, are usually charged well, thus increasing the penalties and going some way was the nickname of the title character in The Adventures strip first appeared in Private Eye and was the subject for nicknames still seems to be used, as in the following, release is repeatedly delayed or even abandoned, is I have occasionally wondered if I need an apostrophe if the word already has an apostrophe. For example, if the Burger King chain puts out a new product, it's dropped, yielding general for the person in charge of will have written you in hot numbers about the familiar Mitigate is a voracious and incestuous cannibal, eating There was the same hieratic passivity, as if she were waiting for his response to complete the sequence. In a way this mitigated somewhat against her appeal... [XXIII,1,11] is unfortunate, to say the least. Contrary to assertion, the language of the internet and some of the associated culture and attitudes of its writers, as of For example, stress was not soothed by a cookie monster victim) to its demand for a cookie. Some of the definitions or provocative (in the sense of causing irritation); it can also be simply persisting incessantly and rabidly on a topic others find uninteresting (or past the point than all the rest of human communication, unless you are of a particularly pacifist philosophy that deems all If the reader doesn't know what a flag is, defining it as a piece of information that is either true or false is worse than not defining it at all. You can think of a flag as a marker associated with something else: the flag can be one or zero, on or off, yes or no. One use of a flag is to mark whether information currently since it was last saved. If yes, the user is asked whether it should be saved upon exit; if no, the program very limited sense of asking the question, Is it true that the information on the screen is different from its counterpart on the disk? It has nothing to do with the correctness of the information, and the flag itself an amount of time such as the time it takes real people to communicate on a telephone: real time as applied something that is happening while the program is running, the flaps of an airplane in flight based on the rate of from the pilot. This term distinguishes such programs from the more common type, for example, calculating later in the day. Real time in jargon applies to doing thought, as in the minutes before a presentation (or indeed during it), creating a display to replace the key prop someone forgot. Other terms define a duration learned a little from the natives. Nor are my definitions Unfortunately, she only browsed through the dictionary and, thus, committed a number of deplorable inaccuracies the writing of bureaucrats and politicians. The phrase adding one's own piece of wisdom. In this case it is especially important to add the possessive adjective, be assumed that you were talking about sausages and state and the municipalities in their function as administrators means, quite correctly, cricket in its first and literal meaning, and strange and surprising idea in its figurative direct, traceable link between the two: Grille acquired demons of illness appeared in the guise of an insect. signified that two ideas or objects did not go together at all, because if someone hits you on the eye with the fist, it would, obviously, hurt very much. Because of use for something that is entirely different. In More is a very good article and highly entertaining. I have for However, some of us are simply victims of circumstance. immediate family resided in close proximity... including there was not much left readily identifying yours truly. improper on its face, it leads to embarrassing moments whom they were looking for, but it was a safe bet that unmistakable evidence that (alas!) I had done something All in all a pleasant and very entertaining article, John. If someone uses my real name, as in an opening they do not know me as I rarely use it myself. I go through this all the time and I have several answers to woman I have just met, I say that I only reveal my real name when we become intimate. This, of course, has killed off several potential relationships, so I have given up on it. I often say that I have the same name has stumped almost everyone with one exception. My familiar with unlisted telephone numbers, aren't you? II,1,13]. The subject of our epistolary dialogue is casual earlier observations in the New York area and in and not a separate language spoken almost exclusively dapper little old fellow approach the information desk having nothing better to do, walked with him to the hyperbolically remarked, Well, everyone's grandmother Treasures I would like to add one of my late father's money is used in this way. We could reach a position where manufacturers of condoms get prosecuted because There is no obligation to buy. There are no annoying reply cards. There are only superb reference works at the best prices we offer. [From the advertisement for the As soon as doctors will allow me,... I will share again generated by a local mining operation reply in large part on irrelevant ad homonym tactics by conjuring up the Sierra Club, their tree hugging ilk, and mining jobs lost to communities and is waiting impatiently. Well, claims the little girl proudly, last but not lost. At least that's what any rate that is the explanatory scenario I dreamed up. Like someone who hears a pun and then searches for a story to use it as a punch line, over the years I and twisted expressions, always looking for explanations to do with my chosen profession, which involves poring adults, clearly native speakers, talk that way. At the risk of opening up a whole can of beans, let me proceed. The first category of altered expressions resembles wool over my ice. Since people rarely bother to think anything that sounds right will foot the bill. In this your nose despite your face is quite popular, as is the empiric victory. It is worth noting that some of these many are merely careless. Give him a wide birth, for student's paper I was reading. But in slovenliness sleeps the sound of new sayings. He wants to go out and wipe the world, for instance, has an idiosyncratic a great reformer. These newly created meanings are what make these expressions more than mere mistakes, treasure the sage advice in Savor the best for last and it is just a typographical slip, describes a class of people I know all too well. Occasionally, these eras occur on a rather high level of sophistication, such as replayed his sentence in my mind did I realize that it Since then, that hybrid has become so prevalent that simply turned that kind of locution into a routine in unconscious error with many; in other words, routine. His opponent, on the third hand, might speak disparagingly attempts may be simply off-- the bad end of the stick of life, there's no dog like an old dog --or inspired: once heard a math professor tell a colleague. There the trouper's get your ass in gear are often confused to drop in the room above his, I listen for blind as a hogs; is figurative language itself on the decline? It is certainly not encouraged in places like The New York neither does the Times often mix metaphors. Politicians That is a clear conflation of cut from the same cloth Here is another attempt at explanation: in a culture nature, or the crafts of working with basic materials. vanished relationships, uncertainty rules the roast. metaphor for soliciting opinion. Maybe the problem, type. She bit off her nose to spite her face adds a toward deepening an image already present or shifting shouts a student activist in my earshot, decrying defecation ingrained in the public lexicon that few recall the an attempt to reverse this trend, a Southern friend of but this usage seems destined to remain a regionalism Sometimes the shift comes about through the omission more felicitous than the original. The road to hell is savage breast was long ago altered to soothe the savage might put it: take care of the sound, and the sense will take care of itself. At times, the image shifts man that feeds you makes satisfactory sense; so does The last group falls into what I call prepositional Like some of the phrases in other categories, several have become so common as to have ousted the original request not to hold it up against me --does this refer to a grudge or the fitting of a suit? A similar corruption verbal grappling? Admittedly, preposition usage is not always clearly defined: does one compare apples to oranges, or apples with oranges, or just stick in an valiantly trying to master a language that often is not well. All languages are composed of dead metaphors Some metaphors simply suffer a sea change. If language event, I am keeping my ears peeled. It's never too combination of It's never too late to learn and First around our necks. [Quote from Bob Porter, director of would not scruple to pick a pocket, so who dares to deny that puns are so called because they are punishable? the perpetrator's equally conventional apology, everyone pleasure, justifying the great deal of ingenuity that goes into producing it. Writers plainly value being able to use words in ways that not only fail to reflect their dictionary meaning but seem flatly to reject it. the sweat of our ink. Quite apart from the fact that the association of writing with ink has decreasing literal and even the traditional fingers clutching traditional sweat than by chilly cramp. In fact, of course, we to a similar one that was familiar to us. The similarity important. It supplies the stimulus to make the comparison, be the clue to the meaning. In consequence, because the sort of physical effort that cause sweating), we toil for everyone (though Genesis III.19 in the Authorized are free, perhaps encouraged, to think of a writer's Beast, another in which the author lambastes a historian have read, so there can be little trust in him, and and it seems just about as pointless to be led to the speaks of the narrative trampling over the now familiar responsibly transmute the grapes of wrath and enrich scribbling classes (as they show every sign of doing the following (among numerous others) over a period textual duplication whereby meaning is simultaneously novelists have been especially keen to provide their novel was so great that any reference to the quotation ran an article on how the picture's critical reception a passive interpretation of archaic or rustic flavor-- women could suffer death at the stake for witchcraft. insistent calls for a change of policy to deal with stoutly rejected any such suggestion. In a rousing speech, she delighted her audience with a particularly doubt the drafting of the speech seems to have involved turning is more plausibly active than passive, with occasion of the conference speech. Ten years later, view with the headline, The lady's not for learning. chemical elements, only about ten are direct meaning ENGLISH PHONETIC REPLACEMENT AND LITERAL WORD GLOSSES this translates into satisfied with everything. There are occasional anecdotes created around the inevitable With the development of industry, yang was deleted. of different translations of computer terms which are fashion by a good writer. Not written for academics, pieces of Bridges' body together in the alley and then Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents is to juggle cleverly with the shape and meaning of a on an egg! Go to work on can of course be interpreted also hinted wittily at the literal sense of the phrase hardy performer wins its laurels. This heading has skins of an onion. The tough little runabout has certainly any gardener knows, the laurel is a shrub that survives weathers. On another level again, we recognize the pretty light on his feet, the other with solider qualities. In advertising, almost any type of fixed expression part of the history of popular entertainment in this century. In those examples, the popular culture is shared: the references are understood by moviegoers In other cases, the appeal is to something specifically Idioms are frequently fossilized metaphors: the thin revive and extend a metaphor (portraying the teachers with cold, as well) while at the same time changing the form of the expression. And as we saw with Laurel as normally fixed but are also deeply embedded in a Fixed expressions that are open to humorous reshaping there are important types in English that are hardly regularly use to direct or punctuate the flow of conversation attitude to the person addressed. Among such formulae, In contrast, wholehearted agreement with an earlier what they seem to be saying on the surface, they can Things wants to suggest the painful directness with Later on, he changes the direction of the stylistic switch, and the move along the time scale, by ending style that is out of keeping with the speaker or period. phrase. This is a favorite Porter device, used as here in the verse but also in the title and refrain-- It was can't take that away from me, which duly appears as the climax of the chorus. But the last word in more I once thought that most languages would have separate and eyelashes, features about as easily and objectively lit. eyelids' hair for eyelashes. To complicate matters, mean either eyebrow or eyelash, and regional variants The purpose of this article is not primarily to establish elements discussed are kept distinct (or the opposite) is an expression meaning eyelash, it is a phrase: blew lashes resemble trees lined up along the eyelid. And eye. Yet, apart from such figurative and poetic language, There are, in various parts of the world, languages those languages follows. The words mean, of course, eyebrow eyelid eyelash lower lids, except when something ails them, but the an eyelash. I am trying to find out whether they can say eyelid itself, sans upper or lower. Dictionaries the physiological features of brows, lids, and lashes are perceived in some languages, despite their possibility not to operate here too conspicuously, although the superstition of the evil eye is often a potent consideration. speakers do), but German die Lunge is singular. In some languages foot and leg are not differentiated, and toes, physiologically and lexically. In some languages that toes and not fingers are meant, or vice versa, is at times called by a different word from that for for example). In English this difference is not found, shares the lacks with other languages). Parallels are difficult to discover, except fragmentarily. Those languages which show no difference in words for finger right word) the lack of distinction between lid and mentioned no languages by name. Some of his correlations more than three degrees of comparison of adjectives about brows, lids, and lashes, although his attitude Dictionaries for Advanced Learners and Users of Foreign Languages missing items in the range of dictionaries required languages are justified to a very considerable extent. Clearly, distinctions need to be made about the particular perception is to be substantiated. If we are talking matter of native speakers of English grappling with dictionaries will be of a lesser order, but there will still be many occasions on which such learners will, by reflex action, stretch out a hand to grab hold of a A root cause of this problem is the logically reasonable you cannot find in a dictionary you are entitled to course, we all know that there is a tangible overlap and out, just like a normal dictionary consultation. word, where do they turn? The traditional and often lot else besides. Maybe there was or is a subconscious point whether it is better for the student to read-- about the homogeneity versus heterogeneity of subject matter and stylistic mode of this reasonably extensive Let us assume that advanced students of a particular dictionary and thesaurus; and a dictionary of proverbs computerized database. They should also have access to a large encyclopedia written in the L2. With this of composing documents in their L2 on various topics? general terms but not so in particular terms. What they lack in terms of general lexical resources is a collocations dictionary and a synonym differentiator, For this aspect of L2 writing, incidentally, advanced each article in the dictionary explains the meaning of the lexemes comprising the synonymic series, provides offering at the same time an analysis of the conditions they may substitute for each other. All of this is exemplified The front matter of both of these dictionaries from theory of synonymy and on the lexicographic practicalities That is a great pity because that is exactly what advanced an advanced level. Correct deployment of collocations authenticity of performance within a particular professional No one could claim that it is an easy task to create absolute terms by not in the statistical sense of significance rivals in terms of size, structure, and depth of treatment. with which this task was carried out is one the dictionary's entry is an innovative and pragmatically satisfactory way of hinting at the possibility and permissibility of collocation with other words a writer, whose native moment of consultation. Useful though that is, the now about to appear in revised, updated, and enlarged dictionary providing information about how to intensify, adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The dictionary's has two sections: the first comprises the alphabetically and an alphabetic list of permissible intensifiers. The second section consists of an alphabetically ordered which would allow writers to formulate their ideas in German yet express them in English, using typically degree of variety and sophistication over the intervening for instance, from learner's dictionaries of collocations as disparate as agriculture, materials science, and sociopolitical treatment that the dictionary, whilst containing only but highly valuable for foreigners using German at an advanced level. It is, however, worth examining H. or so, the dictionary is valuable by virtue of the depth of treatment and the ramifications of the information modes of use of the basic vocabulary of German academic assembled for the frequency study itself, thus denying least a statement of a desideratum perceived by advanced Notwithstanding the logistic difficulties of constructing synonym differentiators and collocations dictionaries, and of the retrieval tools provided. What advanced L2, and view nothing more than an arbitrarily chosen level they come from etc. They should also be able to operate various controls to refine search strategies; accelerate learning and growth of confidence by dint linguistic material. All of this is so easy from the technological Finally, on the other side of the world, a Latino on Such hybridization is all the rage on every continent labeled in at least four ingeniously pejorative ways, (the first two also used to denote and deride Common confusion that can arise among simultaneous translators). them, they do not match the scale of what is happening. they just steamroller on. Vast and utterly pragmatic, with the flow. The hybridization of English with innumerable product of necessity and one of the most remarkable whether English (among other things) is simply going come more quickly to the tongue than expressions in This universal quartet of possibilities is nicely reflected with speakers of Language A alone, they stay pretty are together, and especially if they constitute a large community, they splice the contents of their languages bilinguals are at least as significant for the future of the language as the more or less unilingual communities they may be more significant because they outnumber communities are often the product (in part at least) bread? C: It's in aisle three on the second shelf, in the red wrapper. W: I can't find it. C: Maybe we're illustrate its ancient talent for picking up bits and Modern English should be listed not just as a Germanic an intriguing case because of the economic prominence patterns into forms that can be written in katakana names, but their impact has been out of all proportion name and closes with a product name that is genuinely past situations are anything to go by, those languages change, as English did after the Danish invasions and outcome is far from clear, but it can hardly be minor, Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances. expression of ideas in a happening, an action, a situation, sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous. We all know the highly beneficial effects of laughter on thought of any kind of expenditure by the local council, two services that he had faithfully promised his constituents. and determined was his blocking of the vote that it what a urinal was. In he came again, gesticulating it would be a mistake to take that as normal. More may be specially greeted in the middle of the morning short that he would not need to pull them up to walk proverbial sayings like those below: each is followed You can't teach an old dog so don't waste your food. In similar vein, there is a profusion of picturesque flits around distributing her favors with premeditated bless which carries the meaning of exorcism, healing, be uncontrolled, a feature of which little account has such festive occasions as christenings and weddings, former times, but today in a few rural communities, sought out and specially invited so as to give status to the ceremony at the wedding house. The following this evening. Primarily I was entranced at the entrance officious, malicious or contentious reactionary socialist be acceptable to all of you and to both of you this and has been chewing away firmly at it. That is the way a language ought to be! I remind him that there of humanity have to live in houses. Some hovels too, and caves and tents: palaces are relatively few. Languages and largely remain unspoken. Some are even unspeakable. the mind, it must have a lot of flexibility, tolerance, fluency. The language genius exploits this flexibility the fabric of the mind. It becomes normal: it is the person, the basic layer. One is seldom aware of it, as he learned it in infancy is fixed. He does not see it as a set of rules; it is simply there and he resents tampering with it. Then he has another set of rules Martinet, about double negatives, final prepositions, redundancy, even when used deliberately for emphasis speaks of a viper snake ought to know that vipers are kids go swimming in the raw, of course they are bare not naked unless they are totally bare. Bare should mean totally too. Why insist? Excitement, enthusiasm, an exuberant person, and it shows. I rather like her office parties she finds the foods frightfully tasty or sugar or whipped cream, they can be sinfully delicious. forces underlying changes in the use of words. Not long ago he had a running horror at what had happened a raw, brainless lot. I grant teenagers their last fling of childish freedom before adulthood begins to this is a kind of hypocrisy: flattering the audience when he feels pretty sure they do not. To tease him I recently made a list of such phrases: It goes without should be unnecessary to note that..., I will not insist on the point, but if I did... And there are others, need no flattery. Give them the facts, the truth, no soft soap, and that should be enough. I insist on the need to repeat, to emphasize, even to exhort. Audiences amorality of language, which should be at least logically false or missed pun, or a too obvious, witless pun, feels uncomfortable with the imitative uses of language, are baby talk, purely animal. They are not language until they are elaborated, until they develop rules, hold of syntax, a fundamental breakthrough in language not sternly but curiously. It might impress him to hear the child regularize our odd plurals, with mans the noises they make, the words they invent as they play with their vocal apparatus and explore the possibilities adults rolling on their tongues such wondrous inventions rules. I agree, and add that rules have to be revised from time to time, not always on grounds of theory, have been friends for many years. I find myself inventing them into print when they slip past weary or tolerant They just seem to come out naturally to fill a place and see the effect. One might pass on the flavor of had existed alongside inalienable for over a century mood and we are telling sad stories of the death of English, with all thy faults, I loved thee still. For like, A good man, apart from his too easy tolerance. as an etymologist to a shipwreck. Son of a prosperous away to a life of adventure at sea, and their father Oxford awarded Hall an honorary doctorate in recognition which it is most her duty and interest to cultivate. of special interest to readers of VERBATIM. As far which I have kept up ever since, of desultorily jotting mere philological stripling of thirteen.) Not until form, a volume with the splendid title, Recent Exemplifications three were inclined to uninformed etymology or ignorant gave historical usages. Hall was immeasurably better informed than those he criticized, and he recognized result of extensive cooperation, and judicious subdivision expansively for his voluntary and gratuitous service: wealth of evidence the author illustrates the history declared to the Dictionary his death is an incalculable loss, a loss that would indeed have been irreparable we should have the free use of the books in his own extensive library to which these referred. Hall was Like many people, Hall grew increasingly conservative firm. In particular, he was suspicious of language rights of man [the conservative] has gradually grown used, after long years of disquietude, to hear talked of, without apprehension of catalepsy; but you must wait for his son, or for his son's son, if you would get Toward the end of his life, he wrote: If egotism for hour, in writing English, that I am writing a foreign language, and that, if not incessantly on my guard, I particularly one who had earlier celebrated the revolutionary regards everything else, so as regards language, the spirit of rigid conservatism operates as a principle of Hall's disputatious style in his many contributions memorial notices published after his death were often Dr. Hall had all the aggressive confidence of modesty prose was apt to be difficult reading. Had he combined he would not more effectually have strewn the field as delightful as it was edifying. As it is, his works are too subject to his own criticism to be natural; it was person, if he takes the trouble to observe and consider, can soberly maintain, that English is deteriorating. when he was captious or carping, he compelled respect. Hall in the pages of the Dial and of Modern Language that with such an adversary as Dr. Hall it was difficult make uninformed allegations about English impossible, time, it has been possible to assemble and describe the set of lexical innovations used in one particular apparently key words but on the evidence of the use This article is concerned with the first fifty years more specific terms for parcels of land like government comes increasingly to refer to land that is available from land which is located or settled. Waste land is pasture. It is thus synonymous with wild land (also cattle, horses and sheep. This description recognizes cannot... with propriety be called waste lands, for very much terms of occupation. Settlement is used in themselves. The verb settle is used transitively of the action of peopling a place, as in to settle a district, intransitively of the action of settling oneself, as in Lang in the next year remarks that spirit of irreconcilable occupy land and through occupation to utilize it. Location allocation or grant of land or the act of establishing a settler in a place, in which case it was synonymous thrown open to general location. To locate meant, similarly, to allocate (a parcel of land), to settle (oneself) on a piece of land, or to select (a piece of land). Located districts was synonymous with settled districts, the further extent of settlement, the boundary within which land was surveyed and available for legal tenure, allocating land within the limits of location required country, new districts, new settlements as land was into the back country; movement towards the settled districts was movement down the country or in: travelers to a station, though out, except in collocations like one who has title to a tract of grazing land, is recorded 1840s; but in the earlier period both runs and stations utilization of the land give some measure of the environmental A group of words reflects the immediate needs of an demonstrative are the uses of the kangaroo, as evidenced hide, kangaroo hunt, kangaroo leather, kangaroo rug, kangaroo skin, kangaroo soup, kangaroo steak, kangaroo stripper; of cedar, as in cedar brush, cedar cutter, grouping of coinages bears witnesses to the embryonic cattle run, cattle station; stock agent, stock driver, stock establishment, stock horse, stock house, stock hut, stock proprietor, stock property, stock run, stock station; sheep country, sheep downs, sheep establishment, master, sheep overseer, sheep owner, sheep proprietor, and use: what remains to identify in the early period is an indication of the perception of the landscape on their industry. From the start there was a tension between resemblance and difference, between recollection were qualified before being applied, like wild currant, wild fig, wild geranium, wild indigo, wild parsnip, native cherry, native cranberry, native flax, native or names in which the qualifier is a color, as in blue gum, green wattle, white honeysuckle. On the other eucalyptus, and platypus. In generic terms this is the redefinition of words like forest and plain. The in its natural state, country covered in such vegetation, one hand, and, on the other, country that is naturally open or that has been cleared, an activity which gave and is the only Ground which is fit to Graze; according to the local distinction, the Grass is the discriminating use of the Former, it is clearly understood as different being applied to undulating as well as flat country trees. The important feature is openness, as in collocations land distant from water being known as back country. the lexical landscape is one of occupation and subsistence than interpretive. It registers a process of improvement, of land into agricultural or pastoral use, and including clearing, the provision of fences, buildings, etc., with the intention of increasing the land's productivity. was overstock. One will have noticed that there has most of them in the early period. These did include they had places of habitation, also given the English relationship, either of location or utilization, between are as tenacious of their hunting grounds as settlers tract of vegetation either to trap animals or to maintain that acknowledge the existence of tribal boundaries. aside by a government agency (later native reserve, will take place as neighbors unite to speak out against People of the Books: Biographical Entries in Dictionaries Not all dictionaries enter the names of real people, monolingual dictionaries, the practice is widespread Pronunciation dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries such entries is linguistic rather than encyclopedic: This last array prompts the question: how are names Items that appear frequently in sources of different types are included; items less frequent or more restricted of the lexicographers who compile them, aided often Sugar Ray (US Boxer) No Yes Yes Yes No So to check these dictionaries for national bias, I seemed to play similar roles on their respective sides But encyclopedic dictionaries (though not, perhaps, names from all over the world. So to examine cultural encyclopedic dictionaries must be taken with a grain of salt, though their skewing may be a fair reflection have of the worthies of whom other speech communities Anglophone dictionaries, is remembered nevertheless and places of birth and death will usually suffice to identify the bearer of a name uniquely; if one goes further, where does one stop? Dictionaries seem to divide into two camps. Some say the minimum, limiting pianist, and conductor? What, indeed, was his nationality: Guide to the Orchestra; but perhaps music for children Cat gets in because of the frequency and range of its occurrences (determined objectively or subjectively). With names in dictionaries, the criteria for inclusion rest get in not because of their abundant presence in texts, but because lexicographers feel that the bearers of these names are important folk. And the explanations the names are explicit attempts to justify their inclusion. entries is true of all the entries in encyclopedias. In other words, an encyclopedia is an enormous exercise Wizard of Oz many times, either as children or later Unless one's ears are tuned to listen for verbal aggression, certainly most of it has escaped the attention of most threats, scolding, and nasty sarcasm is much livelier and much scarier for children than the book. To be sure, by today's standards, the film's most often used pearls as You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk! are as effective and amusing today film is not expressed by nasty terms but by the tone menacing face and gestures, her vicious sarcasm, her Well, the last to go will see the first three go before thrown water on the burning Scarecrow and accidentally the eighth and ninth centuries gave a strong practical an arresting piquancy to the many proverbs still surviving of these proverbs. The sore feelings of a harassed checked by the reminder that It's late time to sift Love, courtship, and marriage, as might be expected, the plate and cold is the love that starts over hot. this. The hypocrite was neatly described as Hit's ill neighbor problems call forth, Yer can win by aa yer back from vital purchase of an improved farm implement awareness of rich history and tradition of belonging are enough ludicrous misconceptions about the Bible is overloaded with the equivalents of peradventure, sprinkled throughout every page of the Bible provides parts of speech that are necessary in English, so, in frequently reminding us that English is the language and Quarto texts indicates emphasis, Sir Peter Hall English. Media people, politicians and academics, to way they shouldn't oughtn't just to make their pronouncements no longer employs two words to describe an institution as The Times newspaper, as if listeners might otherwise forces. If it were not for the fact that military service other. I once pointed this out to the editors of The Compressed speech is the norm, particularly among sabras. when they wish you to give someone their regards, followed might mislead a tourist into believing it was named the city's first mayor. This thrift of tongues sometimes spires. The shopping street, with its branch of Marks they encounter. Other misunderstandings frequently occur because of an inability to distinguish between time she went to register as an alien at the local police in this comedy routine. The possibilities are endless result, not entirely unexpectedly, is that a single quaint little thatched dwelling with roses entwined round the door. The same anarchy reigns in electronics, itself. The leisure industry is similarly afflicted: a of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. A fifth that defies comprehension tackle another development without the aid of a diagram: mandate, for the mechanical expertise of soldiers of to specify which axle is being referred to, so that book fulfills: that of setting straight the many misapprehensions readily understand, but that folk etymologies themselves guide books normally well regarded for their trustworthiness the names, as they are recorded over the years, tell use so. To put it broadly, we must be guided by language events and geographical attributes themselves frequently the first part of the name representing Old English (The alternative origin here was doubtless proposed huntsman's hill), but probably represents an integral the first part of the name does not mean, as has been it is at the upper tidal limit of the river. But the Puritan Revolution, or Civil War, in some ways culturally the most radical of social upheavals, so annihilated it that they are preciously rare today; yet it affected the English language hardly at all, even temporarily. had little effect on nomenclature. The same can be street names, toponyms remained largely unaffected: tried changing even the names of the months to memorialize of their language than any other people about whose newly formed and freshly named Union of Soviet Socialist changed in the language of the revolutionary country. become phonetically superfluous, as c has become in omission of the hard sign after final hard consonants. More subtle effects were introduced through Communist rule plus the electrification of the whole country, words of both kinds were borrowed into other languages, given. But the noun has acquired a secondary meaning There is logic in the semantic drift of a derivative changed their names. The ostensible reason for such chosen by the revolutionaries reveals that the sobriquets Square against the Kremlin wall, the city created by in English. And other figures in the Soviet pantheon city has hardly ever been called that in conversational informal, slightly irreverent name, corresponding to the plea of older residents that it not be made till and psychologically costly because nothing that has as their roles in World War II. One can hardly say, the turning point of the war. Conversely when cities had got back on track, as if they had been on a siding over into English and other languages. Glasnost and words that have acquired new, revolutionary significance Examples of this kind of national restoration of local Graham Green, in the second of his autobiographical come to mean bad journalism. Yes, of course. But I have noticed that is principally the windier electronic carries advertising. Then it points out that in this that would happen. Perhaps before long the fancier plural. (Actually, that is the accepted plural for the media that is the middle coat of the wall of a blood during the middle years of this century. It was not only flimsy interest in radio and television, except as coined to designate the distortion or transformation cunningly, even manipulatively, for extensive coverage A person who has qualities that make him attractive that there can be too many outlets for a successful appeals for their business that the campaign backfires. the sense of reasoning, if not in that of dispute). and fell. This type of construction is best handled translated as `death to': it is not an exhortation `to problems facing people who learn it as a foreign language. does not yield readily to rules, as native speakers know from listening to the speech of foreigners who they have been using the language. Thus, it is with the greatest tolerance and sympathy that one approaches whether the book was written by a native speaker or her facility with the English used in her discussion of collocations, one gains the impression that she has excellent control of the language. But difficulties rapidly,' but get tired quickly. It will be noticed various modifiers is basically the same, but different If we call the way the speakers of a given language the two in English; in French, the red herring type is word order is indescribably complex, so it is no small wonder that in a brief work like this, while the author has labored mightily (and successfully) to identify inherent ambiguity: a homograph is, to lexicographers, sounds exactly like another but is spelled differently pronounced or spelled like another but having a different adverb or adjective depends largely on the verb, adverb, arises with the enormous flexibility of metaphor accorded on the focus of emphasis of what is being provoked. listing all the adverbs that might be used with the quietly, silently, uninterruptedly, fitfully, intermittently, efficiently, well, faultlessly, beautifully, perfectly, swiftly, rapidly, quickly --and then one must be prepared without a hitch, as if it would never stop, like a clock, am sure, but it must be a large number. The author is spared an exhaustive listing by the constraints of representative listing but barely scratches the surface grammatical analysis of English lies in distinguishing has gone is a past participle but an adjective in He is gone (if only because English does not use the verb to be as an auxiliary, the way French does); alleged in it was alleged is clearly a past participle, but in the alleged culprit it is an adjective. It is set forth [p.21] that contrive something can be modified by brilliantly, heavily, thoroughly, utterly) can be used only with a adjectival nature of stiff (instead of conceding that it might be used as an adverb), we are obliged to characterize be said to lie with the author. The subject, alas, calls could survive the mental thumbscrew that explaining have possessed is crushed out of it. I have tried to write about humor and have found it such a humorless jokes and humor in general, and it is hard to understand Perhaps it is because there is a huge difference between of why it is funny, often given to someone who does only these but, when she hits full stride, the difficulties even the explanations are often hard to get across, because of either sociocultural differences, linguistic jokes, especially those that have come to be called of visual jokes, too. One of the shortcomings of the book is the failure to cover, even minimally, the major of the comedian to point out our foibles. I suppose amusement at the cleverness displayed, but it, too, section titled Conclusion, she offers some useful observations the difficulties encountered by a teacher of English as a foreign language in trying to impart to students the linguistic skills required to understand English lack of theory but merits praise for having tackled a subject that most of us dread and that has not been treatment, it is not possible to cover every aspect of Readers of VERBATIM and all who share their interests complain, as there is an entry not only for VERBATIM responsibility as contributor of a number of the entries, slipped into the reviewer's trap, so neatly laid by not in the book under discussion rather than what is. treat the writer's style, and, indeed, the entry on guru. Admittedly, such entries are extremely difficult history recent enough for me to have been a part of it is not always exactly right. For example, under As it happened, the first plans for the expansion people at Random House had no inkling of a forthcoming for COMPUTER TYPESETTING, the information is given, widely used to produce master copies on photographic which generate characters as requested. The Photon what we might today call image bytes (to distinguish them from pixels) was in use in the latter part of the A Dictionary of Verbal Corruption or Words Perverted (probably felt by the Editor even more strongly than by me), namely, where is the Index? There is such a wealth of material buried in its thousands of articles that remains inaccessible for lack of an Index that the ends of the entries are extremely helpful; also, to (I shall leave it to you to do the arithmetic) for a book the depths and wisdom of which it is difficult to for instance, appears a reference to dead language, but there is no mention of that entry at DEAD LANGUAGE subject of the book is English). Still, members of The Society of Indexers will spin in their groove-- on relatively abstruse subjects that, owing to concision, assume a level of sophistication not necessarily possessed fifteen sections, proved difficult reading for me. In a their own entries would have helped; that is certainly longer encyclopedic texts, but it tends to interrupt reading and clutters up shorter entries of the kind that language is not best served by alphabetic organization, most difficult of an editor's responsibilities in such a work is to rewrite articles submitted by contributors, make them, if not uniform, at least compatible. In language, one must not impute to its function anything language is unimaginably vast, in its origins and history, in its literary, philosophical, psychological, social, and specialized applications, and in the descriptions both historical and contemporary. Consider that the English alone would occupy several similar volumes; of the writings about it; and then consider all the material ancillary to the foregoing: the teaching of speakers as well, the conventions of writing, punctuation, usage, and pronunciation, the multifarious influences the study of style and of literary devices, etymology, etc. It is difficult enough to assimilate all the categories attempt, there are bound to be points of disagreement, been accorded short shrift, minor inaccuracies that hugely successful one at bringing together into a coherent, subject that is at once the most complex, changeable, elusive, technical, emotional, political, controversial readers will appreciate that it takes a while to read through several years' worth of material and will be and useful to those who do not have ready access to those early volumes (or the time to read them). If the punctuation seems a little odd, it is because it the VERBATIM library) has yielded an item of interest. those who are interested in the length of words will the Archbishop's diary to the effect that `the Free still elude the most determined researchers in etymology, the proportion of idiomatic expressions without confirmed of eight pins one above another, from top to bottom; the antiquity of this invention, which is at least as Perhaps I am missing something, but, in the event, it translate into the modern sense of the idiom. What sense of step, measure, degree hence take (someone) thus not correct, for, while that attribution might have been the original source, the expression itself is As it is unlikely that I shall be around to celebrate reminisce, briefly. As we all know, one characteristic numbers have preceded this one. The life of a periodical for example. I do not have figures for the number of periodicals that have met their end during the past those listed in the audited annual circulation report required by the Postal Service to maintain a Second conducted some years ago, each issue of VERBATIM is about publishing it is that an average of more than notices attached to certain issues. I am given to understand never sent subscribers more than one renewal notice mail as it is. That promise has been kept: companies seeking our mailing list are told that the only way to reach our readers is through advertising in the pages worthwhile noting that the first issue consisted of six alternating six and eight pages) and a subscription For those who do not object to (very) rough statistics, might seem like an unconscionable increase, allowing and postage (especially) have been driven up out of The greatest cost we encounter is that of advertising, is impossible to find another publication in which to likely prospects and hope for the best. Our current not profitable till they have renewed for the third can be seen that one must wait till the fourth year's book sales improve that slightly, they are offset by the fact that we have recently begun paying all contributors for anything except to urge those who enjoy VERBATIM, to encourage others who share their interest to subscribe Club Catalogue (because filling orders became enormously up, the entire award, at the discretion of the Committee, may not be much, but, like VERBATIM, it is, as they high technology. The trends are becoming worldwide lowering of economic borders serve as a catalyst for world business scene and the penetration of computers these strange terms and words until their rivals and colleagues find them difficult to understand. When Great news, boss. We riffed another thousand today. eliminating staff; the opposite of recruitment. If is loaded with sanctimony. In effect, it says to the and alliances. The heavy costs to the balance sheet and the problems of culture clash can lead to a feeling managers begin to cross borders to work for companies your future conditional. Tricky territory for the ambitious corporate ways to local conditions. Originally, this word was an agricultural term for adapting seed and that allows its foreign subsidiaries autonomy and local company's global imperatives and local requirements. by electronic mail, voicemail, or straight telephone selects information according to personal interests, technology companies applied as a way of bolstering millions of dollars. Such machines are not exactly a disappearing breed, but they are increasingly replaced learned fast. Such things as where to go, what to and what not to do, how to behave with one's fellow inmates, emotions, and professions. Inmates are not refused, of extreme annoyance. Also, we do not ignore somebody; we blank him. It is far better to act in a trustworthy the common vernacular, that is not the case with the majority. For, not only are convicts or screws prison officers the only people to use them, they are likely hoisting shoplifting, can be distinguished from the as those already mentioned jockey for position, all in danger, such danger being especially acute if the who are dangerous or in danger). Though the prison convicted inmate will be in blues wearing blue denims. life very restrictive, with all his movements being recorded in a little book. A Cat A man is thus also The jail one is sent to is of a specific type. One starts off at a local the jail in one's town or region. If given a relatively light sentence, one could be sent make the time pass a little quicker. If such activities to right in possession or vicinity, the perpetrator is breach of prison rules and put on adjudication sent After coming in, getting out is the major priority. sentences for serious crimes will be more likely to which is their sentence less a third taken off for good behavior. If one misbehaves, he will not be released forward to. One must be careful though, for if one is stiff a letter which has not passed through the hands of the prison censor, future visits may be closed in which `a screen is put between the prisoner and his and of no practical use till one gets some bird (short Unsecured creditors get the shaft in mining bankruptcy. Tonight's program focuses on stress, exercise, nutrition even be called a double binomial, because it says it not only gives information, it also dispels confusion. moth. I reached back to my childhood, and remembered. big poplar sphinx does not say the same thing to everybody. the adult insect, and the typical sphinxlike raised head for the caterpillar stage. The second name, the for animals. A brown and yellow butterfly with blue name that correctly identifies this butterfly everywhere, crosses through every language, through all the alphabets, refer to living things, because the generic name and called one of the foulest and nastiest creatures that be should be known to most residents of the northeast that roamed this planet a hundred million years ago. Thunder. I also, very unofficially, invented a joke invent our varietal names in order to single us out, to call out to us. Other animals probably do the same, for each other and for their children. I feel sure that just the specific name, it is better to use both names at first mention, unless we are sure the people addressed other genera. Also, since most specific names contain around, not just for other genera, but for the millions of other living things in all the tribes, families, orders, and classes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. animals. About a dozen other animals bear this same All living things includes, of course, the vegetable follow the rules of binomial nomenclature. Some of evidently afforded him the time and solitude required a work, though no indication is given of how long he books have been written about metaphors, little effort with examples of semantic and linguistic changes (as well as amelioration, pejoration, etc.) that are tantamount your shin on a stool that is not in your way, When the wheat lies long in bed, it rises with a heavy head, The water that comes from the same spring cannot be both fresh and salt, Better feed five drones than starve one which essentially links to a word or phrase the culture quoting the author's purpose, set forth in an Introduction, forms, including similes (a nose as red as a cherry), a third party, as in your barn door's open. In this have therefore been excluded because of this inevitable names of natural species such as footman and emperor The result is, in large measure, a catalogue of the treatment once given in those older dictionaries that (Two matters of style should be noted here: first, all to allow for entries not otherwise classifiable, I find a bit too whimsical, especially when one finds Farmers, author is subtly trying to pass on some sort of cynical categories describe the literal content of the metaphor, appears more than once in the main section notwithstanding culture, and proper imaginative, apt control of them is an indicator of one's knowledge of both. Within dialects of English; kick into touch curtail or postpone out that it is unlikely that one can ever become fully Collins lived in a suite at the top. At the corner of St the company's attorney, and I were trying to arrive at a viable budget for the preparation and publication the course of several months, but we three were the on into the evening. Though hardier in those days, my constitution was somewhat affected by jet lag, as we came to a particularly niggling point of dispute those present fell about laughing merrily. [Note to literary metaphors in sections under Myth that include not couched in a metaphoric phrase that I can think of). In the category of proper names, which are not personal favorites in this category is mithridatism the gradual immunization of a person against a poison at dinner by dosing the food with poison that had no effect on him. Nouns and verbs are the mainstay of short supply. One could write a longish essay on the I see that I have fallen (not inadvertently, I fear) into the trap that I so often criticize in other reviewers, namely, scoring a work for what it does not contain there. Despite some disappointments, inevitable in especially in one that by its very nature could never approach completeness, it must be said that what is included is well and concisely handled, useful, and interesting. Still, I return to my point regarding certain not solely to serve those who wish to look up metaphors speakers. It must be said that the days when every schoolchild was (at least) exposed to classical mythology beings who are passing familiar, if only subconsciously, based on the bedrock of their culture. Of course, if by culture we mean today familiarity with the names of the top ten rock hits and the details of latest episode education ignores totally the whole person; at best, than a thousand of which were listed in the Bibliography have, from How to use the book, is in a vague mention with these cryptic references, and no bibliographic sources in the text at all. For the casual user, they might not be important, but their absence makes the Moreover, I, for one, should like to know the source could sit on a cigarette paper and hand his feet over the edge: given no gloss, does this refer to low depressed, whip a cat but I must beat the tail of it? On what heard that or several other expressions, similarly attributed, always something of a joke, in any event). Spill the other hand, carries no label at all, which one takes to mean it is universal, but it is virtually unknown in appear as a label, since the phrase, which is literal, hence not an entry, is a description of a military punishment. they might be corrected and improved in later editions, the book intended? At the price, it is clearly not to must conclude that libraries are the likely target. not many, and at that price one would expect a cloth binding rather than the hard paper binding provided. though none of the words is spelled conventionally. usually find these nonstandard forms? What purpose most examples of modified spellings, the vast majority in fact being found in dialogues in novels. Authors what a character says, but also how he says it. In other words, they want to indicate how a character's forms. The author's purpose is to give a more realistic vocabulary (regional forms, slang, etc.), nonstandard grammar (we was, he don't) and graphological features is an essential ingredient in many novels. The use of such modified spelling in literature is generally referred are more or less limitless. Here is a fairly fertile example: or less limitless, but they may also be rather dangerous. If an author tries to make a fairly accurate transcript of eye dialect, the printed version may end up with readers will be faced with a barrage of unusual letter combinations, a complex code that needs to be unraveled. the words than considering their meaning, losing the thread of events. For many readers, certain sections of unwritten rules has emerged for the use of modified spelling in direct speech in novels. The most important with anything like a close transcript of what might actually have been said. Since readers are already using their imagination when reading a novel, a good writer must simply encourage them to imagine what a character's speech may actually sound like by providing nonstandard should be enough to convince readers of the mock speech reality the author is trying to create. to small sections of direct speech, and only rarely are major characters given much nonstandard dialogue. certain common lexical items that are regularly subjected already seen them elsewhere or quickly become accustomed short words which carry little essential meaning and which are repeated often enough for readers to become character's way of speaking without distracting from usually quite enough. The use of v instead of f (It's a vine day) is almost enough on its own to indicate a one or two key sounds: a v for a w suggests a German, written down, the phonetic transcriptions use a similar system of modified spellings to indicate pronunciation. Most of the conventions established for representing Writers can also use eye dialect to indicate social in novels is to show the speech of the lower classes writes what as wot, no indication of pronunciation is being given; the same is true for a number of other cases the writer is using a phonetic spelling that reminds restricted to novels. It regularly crops up in graffiti, signs. Its wrongness immediately attracts people's attention and, at least as far as graffiti is concerned, are usually referred to as sensational spellings. A along the roadside sometimes use sensational spelling frequently seen as tho, and through as thru in thru- High spelled as hi is frequently found in compounds accepted as a standard variant by most dictionaries. forms of modified spelling outside dialogues in novels. some people claim that in Dickens' wot is acceptable, fact that alternative spellings can serve the purpose a social tie. A comparison with some other languages, shows that this range of nonstandard spellings is an added bonus that our quirky English spelling system has given to the language. It is often impossible for translators, for example, to transfer the implications spellings into another language. The multiplicity of English spelling can therefore provide readers with a rich source of extra information that should clearly be looked on as a positive, enriching feature of the harassment, as well as related issues, like pornography, the sexual politics of the '90s, with the obvious political It may be of interest, then, to consider the language something of the assumptions and limitations governing clear whether what is being condemned is sexual harassment, views of sexual harassment are inevitably intertwined as others have pointed out, the current debate has sexual harassment reflects this ideological bias. To behavior as flirting, for example, it is unlikely that except facetiously. The term usually appears expanded distinction is significant. What is an invited sexual advance? If A invites B to make a sexual advance, initial step is `uninvited' by definition. To construe uninvited sexual advances as a form of sexual harassment Whereas uninvited sexual advances can be identified likely that the behavior in question is more likely to be characterized as a sexual advance if it is rejected. clearly nonsexual are rarely referred to as advances morally reprehensible. Expressions like to come on being largely informal, seem to have a frivolous, or people will sometimes talk of working (on) someone, which sounds exploitative. Even flirting implies a cavalier attitude which may be innocuous, but which grammatical subject and object of these verbs. First, it is clear that heterosexuality is assumed, unless there is some evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, like My neighbor hit on my friend out of context will typically be understood to refer to a male neighbor definition, a fact which is reflected in expressions like to ask for a date or to express an interest in someone, the language we use to describe the initial attempts to establish sexual relations is either puritanical, or hostile, or frivolous, or ambiguous, hardly the range one would expect in an open, sexually healthy, egalitarian of sexual harassment, my interest in these issues is not I take the approaches made by prostitutes to be classic examples of however, one would be hard pressed to seriously consider such behavior as a form of sexual harassment. Incidentally, a related linguistic usage, and one which I agree is pernicious, is illustrated by the allegation that certain persons invite offensive behavior-- The contradiction is clear. If neither dress nor appearance constitutes an invitation to make sexual advances, then it is difficult to see how the fact that sexual advances are uninvited should be sufficient One obvious example of a semantic hole in sexual relationships partners. A colleague writes that his university is seriously pointed to a sparrow hawk (birders prefer to call it a kestrel) and, perhaps being mindful the early colony's tossed their share of nautical expressions into the health? Clean as a quill, came the reply. Again, his debts, sought to marry anew, she must first slough off his obligations. To do this, she had first to appear at midnight before the justice of the peace clad scantily because, as the fellow said with merry understatement, when black flies bite, they do attract your attention. insects go by the name buckeye flies. The explanation? and course up the streams to spawn, streams such as with the appearance of the unwelcome flies. But if State, referring to the tree, you would be wrong: in mariners, had ideal opportunities to observe meteorological cool northwesterly breeze swept over the bay clearing fishermen toil at this job, working the poles in and have heard only once, but I was not a little pleased what most of us would call a salt marsh. He called it daily. This grass, incidentally, was called thatch locally, suggesting an early colonial use for it. Furthermore, presents a dinner cabaret, `A Night to Remember'... while the letters K, X, Y, Z were used primarily in 3000-odd languages, and it is no longer really Roman and T missing, even the order of the letters has been Other languages pepper their letters with diacritics. omits the letters q, w, x, and y, still boasts a whopping who has to keep the four kinds of o and u straight! The phenomenon of digraphs (letter pairs) functioning language spoken in Southern China, defies typographers many archaic words written with the letters (ash), ligature of A and E; there are many other ligatures, easily identified sources. One possible exception is the new name adopted by the popular singer formerly I may be permitted to hazard a conjecture about this their own special language. A `way up a mountain or not necessarily the highest, longest or highest ones pitch. Utilizing one of these or using the rope to the rock face during the ascent and used to prevent the leader from falling too far. Slings can be slipped over points of rock, attached to pitons `metal spikes' or chocked `fitted into cracks with shaped pieces of metal.' These pieces are called chocks (small pebbles climbed in the fashion of a chimney sweep. Alternative astride the top as on a horse.' A crack with one protruding with the feet while pulling with the hands.' A prominent `climbed as if going onto a fireplace mantelshelf.' climber. The grades are easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult or v. diff, severe, very severe or VS, hard very rope,' while slake [`slack'] means `let out a little the slack. When the rope goes taut, the second answers interesting and dealt with a sad and serious situation His solicitor could well have stated, We have pleasure phrase a number of is one of several that are commonly slightly different significance: a few, several, a great specifying where an item is enclosed, it would usually hence I should agree that enclosed herewith is redundant. his list of tautologies, I believe that enclosed herewith understanding is that when a check, for example, is placed within the fold of its cover letter, it is properly separate from it in the same envelope, it is enclosed enclosure, whether it is in or with the covering letter; [We would not dare to disagree, but the distinction never structured to begin with. Besides, the great difficulty encountered in finding checks occurs when As usual, the latest issue of VERBATIM is stimulating bottom of a stream is not, as you put it, unnatural. Away from the suburbs, shallow water is its natural touch, are its natural food. The scientific name for the key to their wisdom, and often their humor. It intelligent killer whale a less pejorative name. They box' (or a `little barrel'), it also means a `kind of Orca functions as a euphemism only because its true border into Kent, he might still hear a curious variant. this is an injustice. All teachers' organizations here, and obscurantist political zealots only. (Although for made scapegoats for many social ills; it would be a service to acknowledge their occasional courage and virtue in opposing the flatheads of the world, rather the colors I dislike is mauve and which is fuchsia. I don't like Garland or disco either. And never mind put a reasonable outfit together: I may be in danger The entire drift of your article on sexism in language nature. Since the sexual orientation heterosexual is genetic, it stands to reason that the eternally recurring from accepting responsibility for her or his behavior. [My point about mauve was that it has no particular those imitating women sarcastically, homosexuals, or interior decorators) express themselves. I certainly did not say or suggest that all homosexuals or, indeed, word with any consistency. Being either homosexual any one of the myriad gradations between those extremes would appear to relieve any individual of responsibility for their clients on the grounds that although they males and females, and bias, which ought not be tolerated. genetic origins of heterosexuality and homosexuality. I regard efforts to stereotype or categorize people you did not delve further into the idea that the word black is on its way out. I hope not, though I have proudly intimating an obvious lack of prejudice. I with its sixteen letters, in print twelve times in a single article, I wonder if the writer realizes how people came to the United States and became citizens: [The problem lies in the fact that people lack a sense English for a `person of racially mixed parentage.' taken literally, it can be used to refer to anyone who press in the US is virtually enjoined these days from identifying people by race in the text of articles, a likely these days to be able to identify race, color, or prejudice exists, it will attach to the name of those else: perhaps Negro will again become the politically its name. Not the smallest part of the problem arises anonymity in which any identifying reference is eschewed more must be done to stop it, the World Health Organization to words whose histories remain unclear. Of unknown the lexicographer's wish to be helpful or to solve a words that have entries in a standard dictionary remain variant form of the same word; it may also be assumed crossing the surf can be described as an expression is never supposed to venture across this tremendous a more generalized but at the same time more precise caused by the sea breaking upon a shore or a rock.' meaning but is used mostly of the sea, and particularly the surf, as a place of recreation. It is earliest In this sense, and with a host of compounds amplifying we tend to think of it as our own and as an important part of our social history. But it is as much a part of provenance of the range of compounds suggests. So, light do the terms collectively throw on our society? respectable do not become so by shooting the breakers worn and the degree of exposure they allowed. As a knee. Any person committing a breach of this Bylaw The existence of surf beaches within the environs of when respectability was obtained, that it was in the dainty article intended to hold bathing suit and wet partially replaces surfer in its turn though it invokes nose, after a shoot, on the sand of the beach itself, an editor's plain orneriness. Nearly all current dictionaries as it turns out, is the most etymologically logical. The adjective, which now means `contrary or obstinate,' pejorative development was not extraordinary, because good enough, and neutral terms like ordinary, mediocre, tend to take on negative connotations. A classic, of three centuries there was no spelling distinction between adjective referred to fabrics, to distinguish ordinary before that century was out, the sense had depreciated was evidently felt to have a spelling distinction so as worst or coarsest fresh water fish. Coarse has undergone used for people, in the sense of `unrefined' or `indelicate,' gross (three words that have also gone through some accept the theory that it arose from a Middle English churl are only a few examples. Surely is one of the very few words to result from the same process, but a sir,' or `lordly, haughty, imperious, arrogant, supercilious.' hundred years earlier, perhaps, one fancies, as an act rather meant, `exposed or liable to harm, vulnerable.' the frosts, to which they are obnoxious. This meaning century, even though the current sense of `offensive None of the etymological conjectures hitherto offered of his expertise in lexicography and linguistics. The first two parts of this work, the third part of which is begins with a useful Introduction that provides the book with just the right setting, then goes on in Part I with An historical overview by semantic fields and, in Part II, with a Linguistic overview, which treats applicable), etymologies, and descriptive definitions. may be disputable, as in the cases of words like geochemistry, respectively: unless such formation is acknowledged in English text, these (and others) could just as well have been English coinages and many are so characterized things are arguable, and it is neither useful nor interesting to try to settle trivialities. But one is given to analyzed, when the counter sense is inherent in the justify. As the term arose only about seventy years the Medicine rather than the Pharmacology listings. alphabetically, there are many ways to look at lexicon, and Cannon in this book are interesting and useful. prepared by and under the direction of this reviewer. see a substantial segment of ordinary English subjected imagine still more categories into which words could If I have one cavil with the book, it is that there is no conceivable reason for the subtitle to use an atrocious (which is not a legitimate complaint, I suppose), Bar that, as the Sheriff's officer said to his first It seems clear from the above that one must be seeking which does not list the word or any of its congeners), hence one would assume that such a collection is not entirely a waste of time. The Preface describes the useful purpose, it may well be the last. Proverbs can be interesting because they are a key to human wisdom on obscure cable channels in the US. Further on in humorously inapposite situation. It is on a par with the literal interpretation of idioms, as in the cartoon of learning English: Let's throw a little light on the subject, said the man as he turned on the lamp. It is one thing to utter little truisms here and there during one's lifetime, sprinkling them about like sesame democratic, so I shall be happy to publish in a future issue of VERBATIM a rebuttal either from the editors common idioms with standard definitions, citations, is a linguist, a scholar who has been interested in about origins: too often compilers of such books feel obliged to take a position on one side or the other in of language. Each entry is illustrated by citations, them all. Although the jacket copy is appropriately dignified, twenty lashes to whoever wrote the release usual, Room says much in a few words, and his terse deserves to stand on the shelf alongside the best dictionaries shelf. Some of the explanations are downright silly: It is undeniable that to have egg all over one's face is he first noticed the virtual redundancy of partridge to surmise that the words in a pear tree could well words to that effect. He allowed himself to succumb to the intrigue and, using his imagination and talent for research, traced out the other eleven days' worth not only carefully documents his ideas about the various possible variants. At bottom, his conjecture is that right road, but I shall leave the remaining details of theory is so engaging, charming, and delightful that one hesitates to find fault with any one of it; doing so each inscribed with a friendly greeting from the man form is that associated with them are the letters he has received from readers which rarely (if ever) appear column has been focused, a bit too frequently for my perhaps, to synonym studies in dictionaries (but only too rarely well done there) but telling most readers (or anyone else) mentions that long in the tooth was think this is the tenth anthology of his language articles) other aspects of language; in addition to two novels, he has written five books on politics among which-- or two, for I have known Bill since the early 1960s, I when his Dictionary of Politics was edited under my was regarded by the Times as its resident lexicographer, one encounters more dirty language on television (in put off till ten o'clock). In this comprehensive study, Scatology. Although he defends these classifications by detailed discussion and definition, it is not easy to apply them, for the distinctions tend to be blurred. while the latter is an attack on religion or religious doctrine. These are points too subtle to be readily grasped. The term taboo in linguistics means, simply, `proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable' archaic, anthropologist's definition that focuses on way, he accepts a traditional definition of vulgarity --language meaning most people would apply in the context of a book on cursing. The perception and usage of these terms is personal, and I, for example, prefer to use and many of the new cartoons on the television are extraordinarily It is likely that one's taste deteriorates under the continuous barrage of vulgarity: many who today admire first appeared, just as staid, conservative critics condemned the impressionists and advocates of other understand and, if not enamored of it, at least tolerate hell and damn on radio or television or even reading twenty years ago. Programs and films that are broadcast Still, it is worth pointing out that the shock felt was were banned. In other words, the context was inappropriate: groups, were quite different, and we ridiculed them even then because of their interference with the everyday facts of life. It is difficult today to find a film in many instances such scenes have no integral part of the speaker and the understanding of the hearer), others on usage, and others on referents. In a subject where there are no fixed criteria of definition, it is unfair to criticize an attempt at classification: after all, we have been putting up with ambiguous definitions for the eight parts of speech for as long as anyone can remember, yet we find their occasional application to language in the sense that while a large number of which, in turn, are made up of a still larger number done in the late 1970s, and one can be certain that which defendants were charged with various violations more detailed comments is forthcoming, but it is difficult which I mean it contains the classic solecisms that purists deride). Disturbing are the gaps in information: from a college psychology course on the topic of human on the selection of the films. Other manipulations cogent analysis of the present situation or its history. The fault lies partly in the difficulty in securing funding for proper studies in the area; on the other hand, one cannot help feeling that studies that have article the author has ever read, and a pitifully poor the most succinct way to describe the contents. An interesting additional bit of information is buried in That is probably the first time such a procedure has The Introduction constitutes a brief but comprehensive The transcriptions are, mercifully, what phoneticians needed to be able to reproduce the pronunciation, as features are reflected that are useful for specialists simplest rudiments of phonetic transcription (which The schwa is anathema in this pattern: uh substitutes which crops up here and there in order to lengthen a vowel. Although it might be seen as commendable to make the interpretation of pronunciation symbols as easy as possible for the laziest users, I have little sympathy for the policy: in most cases, those who are too lazy to learn even the rudimentary respelling systems college and desk dictionaries) are also too lazy to look up the pronunciation of a name or word, as is evidenced optional r ambiguous. Also, he writes, the r is not cause of the lengthening or prolongation of the [preceding] puts it (p. xxxii), but that cannot be said to be r -coloring, name /take\?\/ (with no stress at all, a difficult patterns with a hint of a break before the final /t/. Whatever broad transcription, no attempt is made to duplicate ought to remain), John (with a French pronunciation These details are not likely to affect the usefulness southeastern US words beginning with shr- are pronounced variants, but who cares how people in the southeastern which are English place names? Also, the preferred dialectal variant pronunciations? On the other hand, pronunciations. He had his hands full fielding telephone reliable but because they might not say the name on certain they are using an acceptable pronunciation, This is the second volume of Facts On File's series, Announced for future publication are dictionaries of writes definitions that are eminently informative and readable, often including a useful quotation; his entry glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection Admittedly, hogan is not one of the more interesting entries, and, inevitably, there are quite a few such. very identification of a word or phrase as Western: and other animals [that] raise their tails high and flee probably while hunting wild horses, and invented the earliest, for deer exhibit the same behavior (and, indeed, their tails are called flags for that very reason); instance, for that source mentions mustangs in its first After a diligent search, I could find no earlier mention. mentions mustangs), but that is of no significance. It writers were not writing much about the West; although they occur and whether they are current. Do people and eights, though their distribution is not specified). them. Still, I should be surprised to find that cosh `kill, mutilate' is anything more than an extension of cosh `use a cosh [`blackjack'] on.' Other terms, like the damage done to one's liver by the jarring suffered in one place, but it would have been helpful had he Happy Trails raises as many questions as it answers: are quite recent, but, in all fairness, it must be emphasized reading and those who are interested in dialect dictionaries adds little to the scholarship about the West and, if it had a language, what it might have been. I fear that this is merely another in the long series of specialized it since except to put on a new cover and title and with a changed title is not strictly kosher: caveat always a comfortable position. Very soon after the works (and probably confirmed beliefs in English eccentricity). Z, as the last letter of the alphabet is one that is not high on the popularity scale in the English language. have particular appeal to the inhabitants of subequatorial names has accentuated the use of Z and demonstrated when their media report that English is, again, under matched evenly by its predilection for English. The state's capital, Madras, as a matter of fact, has an swept across this state following a governmental directive converse only in English on at least two days of the week. This directive, according to the state's Director abysmal standards of English, both written and spoken, Chief Minister's residence seeking immediate withdrawal who have renamed practically every public landmark, Garden, the name of the locality to which the Chief This ambivalence towards English is most discernible with its headquarters in Madras, dutifully reported is worthy of admiration, begins this note. It goes concludes his brief exercise with a suggestion that to his goal.... Death was decreed as his wage. He grinner, blood, needle, and nail --all knots used in used to tie the fly to the leader tippet. The blood is used to tie two strands of leader material together. The needle and nail are for attaching the leader to the fly line. None of these is used in used in tying flies. I verdict is not an absolution. But as a former reporter, and the political individuals who make certain that into each life a little rain must fall, it would behoove all of us to become familiar with the quotations in would probably be violating the permission to reproduce of review. Although some of those whose quotations truly a quotable book of quotations, many from more others of their sort. This book (the possession of school, and you will quickly realize that much of the words, phrases, and grammatical twists surface each use last year's words find themselves ostracized by `chin banging.' And each year, as a new generation up in English class, then bandied about with tilted girls who are caught unawares by their period. The the English alphabet, where letters, alone or in secret configurations, are used to convey hidden messages: refer to a major frontal collision between two vehicles, Tampons, for instance, can be delicately referred to for short, and eating the burgers is succinctly known flash flood of new expressions that year after year the club scene with their flamboyant teen slang from the late eighties, find it hard to keep up with the created an atmosphere of hatred and tolerance. [From Bush's aides said this week, the White House's decision on steady decline in the country's military and social condition please note that the reference in The Miller's Tale science fiction's words, phrases, and lore have permeated This will not be a discussion of the science fiction (SF) dialect, which is certainly a legitimate one, given rather, treat those words and phrases, created in SF, of science fiction: all proposals seem to exclude some genre. It has been suggested that SF include only those stories which would be invalidated without their scientific scientists, and the impact of science on humans; that which explores alternate existences (whether future, extraterrestrial, or only in characters' minds) based on facts and logical progression via scientific method. As shall not attempt further to define the kind of material here as SF have been classed as such by at least one One alternate existence, the ideal state, was considered speculative work of political science and sociology-- Utopia the title itself connotes a society marked by government twisting of minds to the capacity to accept the validity apparently benevolent, but really ruthless, omnipotent, The title character of this dark comedy seriously considered humans can grok `embrace others with profound, intuitive (maybe it is euphonious to the Martian auditory apparatus); monster's creator. The Baron may have been misguided, experiment on himself. That lack of insight was shown impressive bodily transformations to his evil alter ego by some the first work of true SF. The Wells prototype, we'll have to jump into a Time Machine, put its gear lever into reverse, and race backwards through many limit (the speed of light), might have put an end to such speculation had it not also included the concept of curvature of space. It was then but a small step to Interplanetary Society Journal, space warp has been restricted to fictional use. (After all, you can't have a good intergalactic war when the next galaxy is, at the time discontinuity, or suspension of time's progress. where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth. Slang's space cadet `an eccentric, especially one who is stuporous or out of touch with reality' evolved in the Solar Guides, the interplanetary police force searching the radio frequency spectrum for signals indicative such close encounters have not generally been friendly. weight of this fictional weaponry has popularized the death ray from its pulp SF origins to serious contemporary public acceptance of the catchier Star Wars (from the source of zap, which is used as noun, verb, and interjection burst' (v.), or the `sound effect for sudden destruction' creature from outer space, pointed his cosmic ray gun (finger) at his friend's genitals and exclaimed, `Zap! operation,' robotics the `science of their design and laws of robotics, which govern the relations of robots to be of such significance that they are cited in their As technology advances, life imitates art. Appropriate control arms with which laboratory personnel handle toxic, radioactive, or infections substances are called invents these devices to amplify the strength of his body to make it capable of supporting Earth's life Allusions to Star Trek television series, books, and Serious crime down, but murders increase. [From the We consider pornography to be a public problem, and we feel it is an issue that demands a second look. [From a pretensions to permanence. Yet it was to become the have remained unchanged. As for the clues, they were were.-- Or were they? On closer inspection, classic clues appear to be divisible into three groups. First, there are synonyms, like rooster for COCK. Admittedly, there is no such thing as perfect synonymy, but the meanings of many pairs of words are close enough for this term to be used in the context of a pastime like crosswords. Second, a clue may name a class of objects which includes the answer, like bird for COCK. A more complicate the puzzler's task. The third group comprises someone must have felt that all this was too simple for all three varieties were gradually replaced by play on words, ambiguous phrasings, jumble games, and other read: number one in the pecking order dominates hens crows is read as a verb) or even: creature with a cow's head and a bullock's rump found in a coop (first letter The uninitiated may find these examples too bizarre puzzles each day. One is in the classic style, commonly labeled concise or quick. The other is of the newer, playful genre, often referred to as cryptic; but this on. This article is an attempt to catalogue the main In most cases, however, it consists, as the previous examples suggest, of two elements, each hinting at the answer in its own way. This construction makes sense puzzler's brain can handle. Two such hints, however, have only a few possible answers in common, so that the solver can concentrate on them and pick the most probable one. This quest for the correct answer rests on intricate mental processes which require no elaboration. Our purpose here is rather to devise a classification Let us start with the three groups of clues encountered superordinates, and definitions. Here are some examples wise to the system and having enough vocabulary entries it is not too difficult to decode them and arrive at the answer. The going gets tougher, however, as the two Just as disorienting are clues where the two meanings To mystify solvers even more, puzzlers may use words in an uncommon but perfectly legitimate sense, especially quality of agent noun. Bloomer (for `flower'), butter (for `ram'), or even flower (for `river') are recurrent examples, but solvers must always be on the alert for another, on the meanings of words. They make up the Clue Elements. Here, the object of play is the written form of the answer, or, more precisely, the letters of which that form consists. The best known member of grounded have a special function. They inform solvers (if they get the message!) that an anagram is lurking flags. On the other hand, the cryptogram composer is free to conceal these signals in all sorts of phrasal Some other anagram flags are broken, strange, unorthodox, These are particularly tricky when short words, like On reflection is a flag to indicate that parts is to be only for answers that run horizontally in the grid. For It is worth noting that the first element of clue M. The leaders of the unassuming Royal Knights Society The leaders of is a flag intended to draw the solvers' attention to the initial letters of the words following it, where the answer lies for the taking. The most common repertoire. In fact, it is the key member of a whole flags to indicate whether the answer is to be composed from last letters, middle letters, or other word fragments. A relatively new graphic technique is the sandwich. The letters of the answer are left in their original order be accompanied not only by a flag but also by a Semantic members of a third class, the Phonic Clue Elements. It sounds in one sense (or in none) like simplicity setting have passed in review. Nothing has been said about the artful ways in which abbreviations, chemical notes, etc., may be used in clues. Hardly any attention examples have been given of answers that consist of more than one word. More important, no mention has been made of the possibility of chopping the answer into convenient pieces which are separately represented than space permits; but perhaps it would be best to clue comprises only words necessary for conveying, in a deceptive way, the information solvers require to find the answer. Adding fillers to distract them is considered unfair. As for the answer, it is better to avoid very learned or rare words unknown to all but a few lexicographers. The idea is to test the solvers' skill in deciphering recondite recesses of the lexicon. (This being said, one puzzle, probably for the benefit of glossarial masochists. already seen, to throw solvers off the scent with an holds for other dividers, such as colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks, and capitals is permitted, or spelling rules are infringed. And it goes without saying that clue texts may be arranged in such a way that, at first sight, certain words appear to belong to a different inflectional form or word class than is actually the case when the clue is unlocked. In fact, this is an essential part of the fun. This feature has already been demonstrated in the very first example (the cock that crows) and also in clue F. Clue J offers two further instances: at first reading, changed is suggestive of being a past tense but after analysis it is identified as a past participle (serving as an anagram flag); likewise, Solution: Replace in the second element (rules word dirty and ragged canvas clothing and shoes with holes. [The was notified who is a patient in room 622A due to his son's age. [A security guard's accident report. Submitted by One of the privileges of national sovereignty is the associations. The tourist struggling at each border crossing with exchanging one country's money for that of another and trying to fix values may not have the time then to wonder why a country's money is called what it is. [Because so many languages are involved, the names that follow are as used in English language paper money are based on characteristics of the old coins or refer to the fact that the weight of a silver or gold coin was often an indication of its value. The for example, apparently derived from a pound weight other economically powerful countries have long historical Franks.' Dollar (United States and some other countries) official name of the United States monetary unit by an of the abbreviation d for the former English penny. money used for centuries by people along their coast; use of the cowrie shell for money. The complete panel of cloth formerly used for money is the meaning behind for a weight of silver or gold, usually about eight resources of the country, was introduced in limited amounts to stabilize the currency. (This was the creation cross' to `crusade' being of less importance than the with the metal originally used or some related feature. means `serrated, milled,' a characteristic of the edging which literally means `stump,' might have denoted a as a basis for selecting a currency name is apparent For most countries the easiest source of a name for their money has been to take that of another country, strong economic country or because of a former colonial it is used by several small countries who do not have word for `pound' libra. Mark traveled as markka to decided against calling its new decimal currency unit the dollar because the native word tola also means a `pig's snout,' the `soft end of a coconut,' or, in vulgar derived from the country's name as is probably Vatu (Sierra Leone), and the ultimate in directness, zaire largest vocabulary and inspired one of the noblest bodies crazy English language, the blackbird hen is brown, blackboards can be blue or green, and blackberries are green and red before they are ripe. To add to this would have a hard time finding a name for it.) And we discover more culinary madness in the revelations that neither pigs nor from Guinea, and a titmouse is neither Language is like the air we breathe. It is invisible, granted. But when we take time to explore the vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms plastic, most telephones are dialed by being punched baths. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a stinger is something that stings. But fingers do not and a camel's hair brush from the hair of camels, from what is a mohair coat made? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, mean `noisy,' meretricious is anything but meritorious, couldn't care less,' and we add gratuitous negatives to our seat actually keeps us figuratively glued to our something that falls between the cracks would in reality bottleneck is a `small bottleneck,' and a hot cup of coffee is really a `cup of hot coffee.' We get up in the their bodies. They fall head over heels in love when we really mean heels over head in love. If they are disappointed when it is the lower lip they are trying to control. They speakers should be committed to an asylum. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next? In what other language can quite a lot and quite few mean the same thing, as well as loosen and unloosen, oversee opposites but a slim chance and a fat chance the same? Why is it easier to assent than to dissent but if you decide to be `bad forever,' you have chosen to be A piece of cloth that wear may be the same as a piece when I wind up this disquisition, I shall `end' it. matter how carefully we comb through history, we can never discover just one annal; that, sifting through the wreckage of a disaster, we can never find just one linguistic question. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and you get rid of or sell off all but one of them, about the nonexistence, never the existence, of certain items and concepts? Have you ever run into someone who are spring chickens? Have you ever met someone not discovered, and, as such, language reflects the creativity spoofs the confusion engendered by German gender by a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are down at the same time, in which you fill in a form by filling out a form, in which you add up a column of the Soviet Union, and journalistic expertise devoted pronouncement is not quite correct, because more often name an author does not wish to reveal. At any rate, the mistake, trivial in itself, tended to discredit a good among people who knew better. After all, if the bourgeois transliterate and pronounce them in English. To the least once quoted out of context as having threatened verb he used in a sentence that was more a bellicose `bury,' all right, but in the sense of the verb in we would leave us in the dust, would be around for our funeral, not that they would put us six feet under. If our press would attain true excellence in selecting Socialist Republic) is only one of several Soviet republics, approximately the same as those of the Soviet Union; it to have had to apologize while making a speech in the borrowing the word Soviet into English as an adjective and by extension `assembly'. It never means a `citizen of mean a `Soviet person.' So the English word Soviet more difficult. As a calque it would come into English can think of no single English word that quite corresponds to this definition. Publicity perhaps comes closest. point of view do not mean `restructuring' and `publicity' generally, as the English words do to us, but rather borrowed into English unaltered (except in pronunciation). phonetic correspondence. Though usually written in two dots over them; they are sometimes transliterated written then you might have seen the two Soviet leaders' containing less alcohol than regular beer and wine: book. The reason for this variation is that when the good measure); when an inflectional ending is added, error, though consistency is obviously desirable. The most troublesome inconsistencies in transliteration English letters are used to represent a sound represented when most of the family moved to the United States, the e was dropped to Anglicize the spelling. This was a confusing half measure, however; the initial ch remained young males that it is all right to drink light beer. Consequently, these commercials, which, according to Video Storyboard Tests Inc., are among the most popular ever to be shown on television, have featured former the public that tough guys do drink light beer, other breweries remained skeptical. Because they thought light beer had a wimpy image, they stayed out of the light beer market for a while. When other breweries finally did enter the market, most of them used the used on the label of any beer to indicate that it is a beers has resulted in the inclusion of the following and wine) having fewer calories and usually a lower Light has almost twice as many calories as Pearl Lite. calorie' is applied to a malt beverage, the label on that product must contain a statement of average analysis with regard to calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein. required. The last word on this matter has not been written, however. A decade after it first became involved are concerned, however, no one has ever held the exclusive only with calories. They also want less caffeine in their coffee, less salt in their pickles, less sodium in their salt, no sugar added to their canned fruits, and less tar in their cigarettes. Consequently, those merchants who have provided us with, to name but a few, the following one third less caffeine than regular coffee; Piper's of which have no sugar added; Pall Mall Light 100's Foods, has stated: Lite is perceived by consumers as a name of a product that has less of a negative ingredient in any substance, as sugar, starch, or tars, that is considered the product's taste, color, or texture rather than to the number of calories or the amount of fat, salt, sugar, or which had just as much salt and a few more calories than the regular product. In order to avoid confusion, are as concerned about customer confusion, however. companies] strain the limits of the English language products that have one third fewer calories, one half that contained puns. They were called LITE and were described as being a third less serious than regular greeting cards. This description was, of course, an allusion to the solecism that has been used to promote Miller Lite: Lite has a third less calories than their than half the perfume of regular sprays. In the same descriptive sense to indicate that something is less intense which died after two extensive market tests by Time Inc., was called People Lite by some skeptics at Time Inc. because the publication was designed for those student who seeks an education that is tasteful without being fulfilling [and] degrees [that are] based on a the years since the first Miller Lite commercial aired in that is low in calories, cigarettes that are low in tar, and foods that are low in substances such as salt, sugar, appear that four pages have been added. I commented vacation and now the old Bean has joined him. I commented from the foreign supplement: it is still missing. The is no longer there, though big boy `heroin' is there. It is difficult to compare the two editions. Though were added, it is not easy to see where, and if, in order to fit them in, hundreds of entries were deleted, that diminishes the value of the book. There is no reason to might have expected more: in light of the information that inflation over the past six years has averaged about classified as a blend of slang and jargon: the former seems almost obvious; the latter cannot be denied because author, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University journals (including VERBATIM, mentioned on p. xiii but The ordinary entry is structured to show the headword the source or sources. The really good stuff shows up, county police], we just call it and the fifty card a of the sleight is that the dealer, while apparently built up over the years. One is tempted to envision knows that those glittery palaces could scarcely be so of gamblers who had taken their own lives after losing the family fortunes were dispatched through the chute this book, but one can be sure that those who run the establishments do not take kindly to losers who ask for their money back, explaining that they did not know this volume. But this work is probably the best of them and a Dictionary of Jargon (soon to be reviewed here); sound the advice they give, it is useless and meaningless if it is not looked up. That might seem too much of a truism even for me to express, but let me explain. Many people feel that educational systems everywhere have deteriorated to an unconscionably low level and that students are no longer taught (in particular) English better, many books on usage were also published, so one must conclude that although students then might not learn it. Yet, one does have the (possibly romantic) not properly learned, at least enough of a subliminal impression of them was retained by students to lead people today seem to be less and less aware of any but their own way of using the language, either because they are no longer exposed to the writings of great authors, or because they are not taught grammar and usage and style, or both. The only way students can be taught to improve their use of any language is by compelling a regular basis, preferably not less often than once a week, a piece of writing which is gone over carefully for usage and grammar to ensure a compatibility with a standard to be devoutly wished for if not achieved. After five years or more of such exercise, even if the individual cannot recall the difference between imply encountered a small bell will ring somewhere in the for which the grade might have been reduced because of a failure to know the difference. If this were a Rube having eaten a Big Mac, the memory of which conjures mouth to take a bite, and a string attached to his lower jaw releases a mouse, the sight of which arouses a cat which chases it, causing the mouse to squeal, awakening through the trapdoor falls a usage book, sliding down any kind. In a time when professional writers write judgment because that implies an awareness of choice; in order to have a choice, one must know of alternatives, that people write the way they do because they know that sometime, somewhere, there will be people who, Good Word Guide to find out whether it takes a singular or a plural verb. That, as we all know, is a forlorn when two or more people or things are the subject of a context, are like those who know (like the people at doubt that baking soda, baking powder, washing soda, would appear to be lost when one takes note that the it is probably not at all surprising to see another usage the foregoing palaver, no one will ever refer to it. All that having been said, it must be acknowledged that as much care whether they are read, used as doorstops, impose a kind of restriction on language that is not imposed on other areas of life. [p. v] I guess that happen to be; but, while it is a matter of fact (and of record) that I do seek to impose restrictions, they are directed against inept, ineffectual, inaccurate language to impose restrictions on other areas of life? I despise bad art, hypocrisy and other forms of dishonesty and, in general, execrate any policy or behavior that interferes different than; less bottles of milk or fewer bottles of comes to milk, it makes no difference; but if you are talking about beer or gin, then neither is acceptable.) Further down page vi: Where a supposed alternatives again we read about the careful user, who wishes to correctness in the interests of speed. To impute such sacrifices to a desire for speed is not only a misinterpretation those who are in a hurry are scarcely likely to stop everything, pick up this (or any other book) to check would probably say] could care less about using English writing, which, for the most part, is simple, clear, straightforward, and readable. In short, the book is words, and subsets of all of those. The advice is direct Alternative should not be used in place of alternate. .And so on. In other words, one gets the impression as `every two hundred years' omits mention of its more A note on annual would have been useful to criticize should have been in italics. The bad hyphenations, key: the distinction is made between r as the symbol they never exchange places), hence do not need separate example, means `cotton socks, nylon socks, and socks made from a mixture of cotton and nylon.' To me, it means, `cotton socks, or nylon socks, or both': there is nothing inherent in the example even hinting at the existence of socks made of a nylon and cotton mixture. point is not that they are identical (which is ambiguous they are the same thing: the scale formerly called centigrade chiefly to cover its usage as a pronoun or pronominal As for the English word forte `strength,' it is not the feminine form of the French adjective fort `strong' but an English feminization of the French noun fort scarcely attributable (as given here and in various dictionaries) those who know about musical directions are not likely a second printing which, it is hoped, will include some effrontery to be so ignorant of English as to need an interpreter in court; he sentenced the culprit to two years' probation with the condition that he learn the her love for her banished husband she insists it is beyond by that phrase, created by the doubling of a fairly in just that relationship. This expression of infinity produces a stunning effect, one not likely with two or poet himself, in his surpassing power of imagination has devised a `double' provides to the others a definition, double. Example: what has the cobbler when only one proper names are allowed, but redundant entries are but not in capitalization. However, players might well be assured. The scenery was not always breathtaking, needed to keep us awake. To honor the source of its When she recovered her power of speech, her English was so bad that she could not make herself understood, interpreter was called in, investigated her background and story, and discovered that some of her sisters still `to apply an ointment or lubricant' and is commonly used as a slang term for `bribe,' no doubt because a bribe is seen as lubricating the wheels of bureaucracy. I cannot imagine how it has come to mean the `entire find the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin referred to as someone else alive besides myself who was taught the dance as a child and was told that the weasel was part of a stitching and weaving machine. During part of the dance, partners did weave in and out. In another part, the two head dancers skipped down the inside of recall the monkey part of the verse, but this could be new row. Frequently, the thread broke at this time and Favorite Grammatical Games: Legerdemain in Two Senses and False Scents and False Scents can be fun and games for all, and all you need is (usually) some printed matter or even just first meaning gets switched when it is used the second time in a sentence. For example, here is one that I have `experience'; the taste that showed developments was an `inclination.' (It was a first taste of print that Mark The first dangerous means `harmful,' while the second Pretty girls finish first, which is pretty unfair to In the last two examples an adjective switches to an adverb. An ultimate epitome of the case: She's pretty There is a nice touch of political legerdemain here, can turn out to be (we just dropped a False Scent --no things up to date by presenting his example in modern government has generally been held back by Congress Sounds fair enough, surely? Ah, but you see there is a wonder whether it was intentional or just imprecise grammar. The first government really means `governance' there is an acceptable synonymity here but it is not to Such sloppiness can indeed become rich fare for the statement of affairs about False Scents --he generates a wonderfully, though quite unwitting, humorous cameo of writer and reader virtually calling each other fools. writer to ensure that the reader should not be given down the wrong track in a sentence, ending in a sort of going right past the house, and having looked for it thought she was looking for him at least; certainly not and has survived in such expressions of common occurrence and the Lodges. My concern is not with the meaning of the expression but with the persistent capitalization I shall henceforth spell the word without capitalization imply `the Absolute.' This in fact is the crux of the problem. When we use the word Absolute with a capital meant. This will not only help the reader to distinguish conventional capitalization in the English language. their social and spiritual superiority. In many of the that they also capitalized the expressions for the three that this anomaly still persists, even in many modern be the bastions of democracy, which clearly should not recognize caste or class distinctions. Is it not ironic then that they should still perpetuate so blatant a fallacy? Compilers of our dictionaries should stop capitalizing among users of dictionaries, but it will restore the on the Rialto in The City, reported that a reader in Wells) received a tax form with the instruction Send envelope provided. I looked inside, wrote the mystified death by reckless driving of person unborn at time of interesting comment on a phenomenon that must fascinate sources I have at home bear out that origin, however. what is loosely called wrestling in the United States are not separated by vowels, you can understand that the task of producing a string of sounds like that tends to stop a conversation, if not the speaker. So it was soon leaving the t in the written form, although it is foreign want to inform somebody you are going to the wrestling `strike'... Sad to say, he is doubly wrong. In baseball, (The first line of the poem, in case anyone wants to `don,' which is socially correct south of the Border as prolific. Each known elementary particle is associated with a hypothetical complementary particle (recalling, offices of the two nations. The overwhelming majority of the confusion stemmed from the fact that the only French professor in the 1920s. I cannot answer for his known as the Inside Detective Bureau; we eventually started to use it ourselves. A phrase commonly used by head or tail of it. I took a paragraph at random and passed it to another translator, asking him to render it Illegal, blending with the populace, is free of the unwelcome embassy by the local security forces. What came back was to ask any questions she wanted to, and when she understood the passage, she was to render it freely into the word cipher came up; she did not understand it. I to the Literary Cryptogram. This is a cipher. It's a his name. For every letter, another one has been substituted, She picked up the magazine, inspected the cryptogram, back within fifteen minutes with the correct solution place. So I write in up above, and rest is easy. Fun! You childhood, have a fairly wide reading knowledge and acquaintance with various levels and styles of the language, as -sh by speakers who find that easier to pronounce. the origin of the name of Muskrat Ramble was at the was quoted on the record sleeve as giving this explanation; that at a subsequent time some record company executive As always, it was a delight to read the new VERBATIM. It is even more fun, though, to catch our omniscient is no mathematical way of calculating the dimensions of a square with the same area as that of a given circle. This classic geometrical problem requires that one start with a given circle and construct a square of the same The mathematician, on the other hand, can calculate quibble, of course, that such an answer can never be perfect, but that has nothing to do with the problem in the early 1930s, I would occasionally take my windfall of a few pennies to the local candy store and buy a transferable to forearm or forehead by wetting,' preferably on the final syllable, he recalls, or thinks he recalls, The second explanation is possible, though numerous know how the two explanations could be verified. The least one may say is that no English dictionary published sign that the plural is textually more frequent than the singular (indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary lists formed in English by the addition of English -s (in the first two cases) or -es (in the third) to the innovative English singulars. This is proven by the fact that the English plurals are pronounced with [z] and not, as in would be phonologically unlikely here, -s and -es in the English plurals are the native English plural allomorphs the English plurals with [s] are these words derived these are people strongly influenced by one of these `male' is a folk etymology: the two words are unconnected minute, and in the course of her gossip she mentioned being `alleviated or cured.' When a child is born, it is After that, with my ears attuned, I heard malapropisms dinner vegetable or remarked that we were almost out of string beans for the water heater. I was also guilty of asking her to serve a pork chop in adobe rather than diet that forbade dessert and coffee, so she left the reached the doorway she always turned, gave a stately one occasion, what I heard over the wall was his version `tongues,' literally, or `languages.' Was this remarkable horse a polyglot? No wonder Villa esteemed it. On when they have to memorize texts they cannot understand. It turned out that she was referring to My country, it comes out something like, Our Father which art in jealousies, painted saint be Thy name. The first reminds a religious figure carved of wood, covered with gesso, have been found in the branches of a tree in the mountains said. Next day, showing them off to my landlord, I was has told the staff at his polo club that his daughter would not of reading Forewords, Prefaces, Prolegomena, Introductions, of books. It is a practice to be recommended for one or more of several reasons: one can often be spared reading written work; one can determine quite readily why the author's purpose has been carried out. Such front matter author (or one of them). There is a Preface to this shall get to in a moment. First, though, is an essay, pseud. I hadn't noticed who had written the essay till I It is closer to the truth to say that woolly circumlocutions, and language used as if it were a game of horseshoes appears in the lead essay of a book on style and usage and particularly when it are a book of this quality. I was sure that matters could only improve by turning to be relied on to make subjects and predicates agree in attitude toward usage: as a linguist, I regard usage clinically and would no more criticize a writer or a doctor would criticize a patient for contracting appendicitis a writer (albeit a poor one), I attend to matters of style only in others' writing but my own. As readers are quick to point out, my attention to such matters occasionally present work, published by Her Majesty's Stationery to such topics as The trend towards informality (the [but] by no means outrageous, a third as verbose or punctuation that is clumsy, ambiguous, and redundant. criticism but cogent suggestions for improvement. The sixth and seventh selections, one expository, one narrative, are used in the comments; other adjectives are clear (structure), manageable (sentence length), appropriate words and phrases to be used with care. The inevitable 70-odd pages deal with matters of style, word selection, .and so forth. Some of the entries are longer than these, but not many. Missing is the horrid at this point list unless people use it, which brings me to my main criticism of speakers and writers of a certain age (say, Literacy or A Little Literacy Is a Dangerous Thing. Much of the ineffectual use of language is traceable to their language, they are completely unfamiliar with people to know whether to use infer or imply if they are totally unaware that any problem exists? For generations, If they had looked it up in a dictionary, which lists the once. But if people are not humble enough to doubt their own control over the vast complexities of the language of even the most basic available resources, then any Information specialists, psychologists, brain specialists, have all speculated on the way the mind works. To be only visit a library. Tucked away in one corner is a most of which offer different techniques. None suggests plain rote drilling: all suggest a pattern of association, some alphabetical, some psychological, some numerical, with the suggestion Make up a sentence, say it aloud. which, in addition to two titles, has a subtitle: A literary distillation of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, The book is a list of words, with remarkably succinct definitions, that have captured the author's fancy for one reason or another. Some are interesting and have a Like any written work, this one could stand some improving have at hand a short, attractively packaged list of of this review. If the photograph on the back cover, of This is a good book and an interesting book. According words and phrases, and its great fault is that it lacks an entries, the rest of the terms being discussed within the words, the user will be unable to find them without an ought to learn that they cannot always anticipate the needs of users of books and that indexes are almost proofreaders) who set loose lines because they do not over to a following line. Today, compositors rely far too much on the automatic hyphenation programs packaged with their computer typesetting systems. A typical for deipnosophist where a line that normally contains etymologies, albeit brief ones, of most of the words they list and fulfill a useful, if limited function. Extensive works, like the Oxford English Dictionary offer far more elaborate information, including, where appropriate phrases and expressions, and a good selection of items it is speculative, some taken from unreliable sources, and some at variance with the accepted scholarship. Islands and compares the supposed fickleness of mares with the fickle winds in these latitudes. As far as I complete fiction, for there is no evidence for any such designation in any gazetteer that I could find nor at the Royal Geographical Society. Besides, the horse latitudes west, not east of the Canaries. I comment on that in Sea, a region northeast of the West Indies, is characterized thrive in the Gulf Stream, they are generally called sea,' and was so entered on charts. English speakers who used the charts read mar as mare `female horse,' horses, not too farfetched a suggestion when one considers mermaids. The theory that the horse latitudes were so named because mariners becalmed there threw overboard died of thirst or starved seems almost impossible: in order for such an event to have given rise to horse latitudes it would have to have recurred many times, mariners were so improvident as to have allowed that due, he only copied the etymology from other sources, apron in the first instance and to the characteristic weakening of the initial h in English, heard today in its earlier metaphoric life it referred to anything that might serve to drive one to an early grave; indeed, monstrous person: it merely means `huge, monstrous' and, as far as I know, has nothing to do with wrestlers glosses kite as `body'; it is actually a word for `belly.' (from the Bible), It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle results from a misreading of the original: the original, it is said, has a word meaning `rope,' not `camel,' which makes sense (to me). I cannot insist least to have acknowledged its existence; instead, we are told that ancient Middle Eastern walled towns had a rear gate called the Needle's Eye through which a camel someone who has never heard the bird's disyllabic call. (being neither English nor muffins) did not exist before he could glean, repeating indiscriminately his choices of that which is most colorful. If you have occasion to refer to this work, it would be well to keep in mind that it can be relied on for picturesque etymologies but difficulty with the reference system is that one cannot helped to have given the chapter numbers in running serviette, scone, sheila, sister, Smarties, spanner, seems odd that the words and expressions that are direct identified as such. That, however, is not the purpose of the book, so it might seem carping of me to bring it up. Also, as the author acknowledges, This is not meant to enough statement even without the extraneous hyphen. wrapped in pastry, fried, then kept warm for takeaway), snack, which would mislead the casual reader (of the Glossary) to infer that all takeout snacks are called might also prove useful to those who cannot understand in the sets given below by selecting the appropriate never had a major problem until recently. The timing gear broke in the front yard after coming home from the orthodontist. One thousand marijuana plants have been seized in a Note: Clue (x) should have read gallium (for gadolinium). by the sleaziest of criminals and defended by a police department that's the subsidiary of a big corporation. [From boats from nearby marinas must dodge freighters on their way to nightclubs and restaurants along the banks of the your tail? The Taming of the Shrew (ii.1.217). Indeed, such as ours with indelicate, let alone indecent, suggestiveness, will his guffaws entirely abate after he learns that the learned man hath got the lady gay. Gay is used here as a compliment, but today's jaded reader will off, I say. In Hamlet (iv.7.85), the King seems to be throne. In King John (ii.1.413-14), even the gentlest modern flavor that is not quite what our playwright mail service was just as deficient then as it is today, to revise some passages in order to avoid misunderstanding, not to a part of an airplane, but to an enclosed place for fighting cocks and, in a transferred sense, to a The Taming of the Shrew (iii.2.214) You may be jogging (ii.4.79-80) is not a reference to the hosiery worn by our kind of jogger, but to a dark woolen cloth. Is This contemporary term, incidentally, was first recorded, someone that makes one unsympathetic or antagonistic, labels this current expression to be of South Midland meant, considering that gentleman's passionate activities placed just before the index to the eleventh edition thus dally with my excrement. Nor is the vividness further items of unintentional humor out of our supreme will take place as neighbors unite to speak out against The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded other. [From an article on laser capability in Job Shop Holy Faith to the Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint literal about their religion and too indifferent to nature to be inspired by sunsets. A more probable explanation with snow, that are visible on the mountainside from colonizing expedition, of the cross he wore to symbolize The most plausible etymology, in my opinion, suggested descendants who populated the tiny frontier capital best unrefined and at worst squalid. So in the second invaded by a more sophisticated, in some cases artistic, and Territorial styles have dominated, indeed monopolized, leading a short way from the parish church. A Friar ranches at various distances from one another, with no plan as to their location, for each owner built as he was able, wished to, or found convenient, now for the little farms they have there, now for small herds other side' [of the river].) Roads entering the settlement eventually physical features such a main irrigation official buildings gave their names to streets associated recently constructed loop around the inner city has Telegraph Street because the telegraph line ran along it and was later renamed College Street because St. so that there are streets properly named, for instance, there are other street names that betray oblivion to names in which adjectives fail to agree as to gender may be due in part to the English tendency to reduce in dictionaries in their masculine forms only. Also, (Here I should explain that there is a fairly recent this practice, I believe, we are happily lagging behind in whose valley the capital lies, has been called the suggests that men's sexual organs may be derived from tongue is not just different, it is wrong or at the very least, odd. When I took my first foreign language in certain things, which I learned were called idiomatic expressions. They often seemed like idiotic expressions In the years since my youthful folly, I have become my memory, I have savored the picturesque idiosyncratic not be astounded by the funny logic of, say, meeting one's match by encountering the shoestring of one's little coconut, I buy little coconut.'), and Mi mama Take, for instance, the various ways they characterize suitor. Making decisions sometimes requires `sleeping heard the beautiful expression for `being pregnant,' time for their order. He was astonished when his cry when we tell them of' the pleasures of living a short time to stop. It would be such fun to discuss other when the court does interpret a statute, that change project. The following entries are only part of such a dictionary, based on the court's statutory interpretation any other The same but under extraordinary circumstances continuing financial interest Continuing financial interest destitute Having someone who has a duty to support one may Shall in the case of disinterested attorneys (In Matter preserving order Punishing disorder (Contempt in State groups that generate material for their own specialized Most groups go too far, partly because the obscurity of their jargon sets them apart from others, thereby computer specialists properly coined byte to represent the cases I read the judge who wrote the opinion did phrase; the relevant statute yielded a clear meaning wrote the opinion, however, did not necessarily like that the creators of the latter do so openly. They do terms they are likely to publish a dictionary. They supplant secretly, the definitions that are in common use. Judges, however, claim merely to be interpreting way that anyone else would or in a way that effectuates that they are in effect writing their own dictionary Therefore, they implicitly replace existing definitions, not judges can do little harm beyond mildly degrading contrast, the statutory interpretation practices of judges threaten rights and property. In fact, they even threaten freedom; in a significant number of the cases I read the invention of meaning resulted in a criminal conviction. Also, because those practices make it nearly impossible to predict the outcome of a case, persons litigate even though the plain meaning of the relevant statute is not in their favor, and their attorneys run up huge bills looking for ways to induce judges to ignore the plain meaning of statutes. Those interpretive practices thus have enormous social and financial costs. They also have institutional costs because, that the legislature created, they usurp legislative authority Despite these practices, judges are not evil persons. a long time. They also reflect their legal education. If law schools recognized the importance of statutory law and advocated interpreting statutes only so as to to arguments that perhaps support it. Nevertheless, addition to its serious social and political consequences, The first step in preventing those consequences is to realize that in courts words are losing their meanings. through the French countryside and mountains to ride preferably on stage, to fully appreciate the enormity a dual personality in word formation. Its facilitating owing to some similarity in their referents. Thus, kite also has a debilitating effect. Only an etymologist general configuration of both reptiles is horizontal. of the Dogs.' Early explorers on the islands found pets. They were called canaries, and the dogs were commit, since ass `animal known for its stupidity' is fabricated to deceive. The lost metaphor in canard not to sell it at all, but to make it seem as if it had keep the lowly mosquito at a distance. The ultimate around is likened to leaping like a deer. A cavalier `horse.' Chenille was so called from its comparison to a hairy caterpillar, from the fabric's hairy texture. comparison in dent de lion `tooth of a lion,' from the his canvas in the manner an ass carries a traveler's English gs `goose' plus summer `summer.' The reference feathers or to the time of year when geese begin to The association is due to some muscles' shapes being similar to that of a mouse. Also, the movement of a were tents, which were shaped like the spread wings of the butterfly. Today's doctors' pavilion is far removed with the Old French pied de grue `crane's foot,' the similar to the lines showing ancestry on a genealogical words, is ironic in that it is a great help in the creation are harder shelled and the yolk is really quite red or talk of the egg white when it is really clear until it is beside each person's name is their extension. Submitted drinking it can make it even more fun. My scientific candle, swish it around, sniff it, taste it, and utter lushness of the finish. I was certainly impressed by and analyzing those descriptions used by wine writers and enologists to characterize wines. Although the vocabulary can be indefinitely expanded, I collected Some of these terms are straightforwardly descriptive, dissolved solids in the wine, we find neutral words are taken over from very different semantic domains, character: aggressive, charming, diffident, honest, associations. Since feminine is semantically related The next phase of my study was designed to determine wines. Three groups of wine drinkers served as subjects drunk or discussed wine with each other. At each of the five sessions, subjects were given three perceptibly different varietals (wines made primarily from a single grape variety), and subjects were asked to describe terms, once they got going they often wrote lengthy descriptions. As a related task I gave them a list of of my study, and asked them to circle all the words they considered appropriate for each wine. Results showed not only that the descriptions were different, odor, pungent, unpleasant, bitter, sharp by a third. to describe it that differed from the words of those who did not like it: a subject who liked a light wine most of the terms involve a reference to some implicit sweet or dry with respect to all other wines, to wines of that class (red or white), or to wines of that varietal. but the reference was never made explicit. Furthermore, three perceptibly different wines. One subject had to describe and differentiate them so that his partner could identify them on the basis of the descriptions. Overall, the success level for correct matches was no to taste and talk about wine. Tasks similar to those with this group was to see whether they would develop do much better on the matching task at the end than emerged; yet they reported that they felt subjectively it became clear that earthy was used in very different ways by different people, its use dropped significantly. graduate students and winery staff at the University wines, that is, those wines with which the subjects that training and experience contribute to consensual use of language but do not automatically generalize reason is that experts first identify the wine and then type: if the wine is unfamiliar, they lack the relevant they drink silently? Not necessarily. Much of the them, and there is no need to pick out a particular wine. Talking about a wine, I believe, enhances the out characteristics that another might miss. Suppose matter if wine experts or wine scientists would deny of our conversation, especially in informal settings, is not so much to provide information about the external experience can be enhanced as a results of a description, shared language with clear referents, people can do so. Wine scientists, for example, are seriously concerned communicate about their experiences and preferences their tastes and word use are in accord with those of a particular writer. If so, they can continue to trust For those who would like a list of the wine descriptors, of the English used in the Colonies (and later) during unabated. The following consists of two lists, the first a supplementary glossary to that published in lack of context or paraphrase, he has been unable to define. Help and comments are welcome. All correspondence this burletta are contained in the following letter all freeholders... shall be assessed to work on the returning a jury, used when the sheriff is interested flock bed A bed stuffed with locks of wool or hair. A After the dissolution of this Assembly His Lordship army. The culprit was apparently tied to the poles. hobby horse A hobby, a chosen occupation, alluding to were written in their style; from Presbyterian Meetings, level or who disregards differences of rank or station. punishment should be in the same kind as the crime: in all civil wars is, perhaps, though cruel, yet legal, of Trade, I concluded this treaty by taking off the the houses of the aristocracy, had intruded into the of engraving and the composition called the Prince's be necessary to forme a militia, for if it should miscarry schism shop A place of worship other than a Church of miles of a Presbyterian meeting house, conventicle, States General, that a certain judge had distinctly advised that, under present circumstances, the ship Governor's Council recorded that, the Yearly Quitrent... wrote, I ought not to be the scribe where wills are and birds] it should be after the pattern of the Ancient A grand regatta began the procession. In the first, was the Ferret galley with several general officers He wrote to them, We are not entitled to our salaries them as stockings of one thickness, unlined. All citations prefer to call them, first names. The modest paperback the dictionary has a brief preface, a short section on the history of English first names, a bibliography, pet names, with cross references to their full form. the two, although the style is noticeably more succinct selection of literary characters who bear it. In the whose representation of historic bearers is rather restricted. items of information following the headword that is of origin, ultimate literal meaning, examples of literary here he is, for example (in English translation, and An entry like this has its good and bad points. It must be hundreds) tells us little, except perhaps that that appear in dictionaries of this type, he includes names that are more familiar from the Bible and literature now (or ever) called by these names, it is excellent to have a book that gives their origins, if only for far enough, and that for surname origins the reader is best advised to consult a different dictionary, such includes product profiles, describing the main features currency conversion), detailed costs of shipping and charges. The company profiles section gives the addresses, all manufacturers and publishers, with their international affiliates and dealers. More than thirty different packages, spelling checkers, and their applications. In some cases, an accompanying illustration displays scripts). It is described as designed to work with italic, inverse, and outline. The listed price for this in convenient tabular form, a listing of scores of languages, employed, and useful notes indicating, for example, sets. There is a useful glossary of computer and typographic can be found, like Publishing Details, which describes computer experts capable of organizing his thoughts of information in this book, which is an essential for any individual, company, or educational institution that has occasion to deal with foreign languages and the same time, for the reviewer is thereby given the length, and their trim sizes are identical; the typography In the first place, with all the new dictionaries published existing works that continue to appear, both in the Green's. It is instructive to compare the treatment The differences in length and fullness are obvious. thirty years.... The basic qualification for inclusion succinct entries, especially when the further comment more expansive explanation of their social, political, were being aimed at, and, unless one wishes to have which suggests that each individual might be simply the language, saying that the earliest use of the term the fact that the gesture preceded its use in sport: my guess is that slap five arose among black teenagers or, perhaps, musicians as a form of greeting, approval, fifty or a hundred years hence? The question is, of course, specious: the book is available now, for all to see, and if one does not need or want the more replete may well suffice. Personally, I like to see as much origin of a term as I can find, but one must sacrifice that to get a longer list of entries. Also, one will find and one citation, leaves the user to derive what he I have not taken the trouble to research the accuracy quite useless in providing guidance to potential purchasers: omissions, cavil at what are seen as infelicities in defining against the theories that are reflected in the organization of the relatively overwhelming funds at the disposal fail to dissuade people from buying bad dictionaries; public attend to reviews that their effect is slight and preference, all of which I feel it my duty to report. It is the proper function of a reviewer to question though, in the present case I believe it to be that Oxford University Press took a long, hard look at the revenues to be realized from a dictionary that could about the same extent as the larger college dictionaries imitative of a similarly constituted edition of the illustrations are not even entered into the main text tackle, tight end, wide receiver, safety, linebacker, informs that In Rugby League there are no flankers, dictionary. (There are no illustrations in the text.) then, cannot be traced to the handful of listings and sources; it must lie in the text itself. Sure enough, in the entry for Rugby we find out why the football has its present oval shape (because they originally used a aware that something is a foot, for there are not as many headwords as one might expect to find in other philosophical grounds but on grounds of convenience chain in chain reaction is different from that in chain because both are driven by chains, the use of chain a chain'; but that is certainly not the case, as the chains are characterized by sequential, linear linking, view that fact to be, at least if the entries are listed inadequate. If there is any justification for submerging that suggests the notion of `interconnected sequence' same form as the headword. That is not the case for This grammatical gallimaufry is not even in alphabetical articles that I missed? Then, thinking that we have presumably because they are solid. But the vagaries of spelling are such in our language (see the list at fashion. Thus, the user has to come to the dictionary peacemaker and peacetime are solid, hence are headwords: word he was seeking is spelled with a hyphen, as two question their status as lexical items but cannot argue on safe ground because they might well be categorized Thus, we find cast pearls before swine under pearl, the second proverb as frequently as can't (I cannot Other unpleasant questions arise from inconsistencies: injuries received in a car accident, reportedly after being refused admission to a `Whites only' hospital.) Marbles raised in a dictionary (regardless of how encyclopedic and places have a rightful place in a dictionary is probably an obsolete one: their presence was formerly might be justifiable if there were accurate frequency information available. That not being the case, certain well known, some are in because they belong to categories, thousand, and so on. By frequency standards, then, son seems a bit over the top, as does the note about encyclopedic information, that etymologies of place names would be included, but they are not. The basic space to be devoted to the entries: on the one hand we find acid house, chaos theory, and desktop publishing, avail? As a consequence of all this deadwood, we are denied useful lexicographical information, like the would find the kinds of omissions that amateur reviewers not enamored of this book as a dictionary, though I must admit that it is different and might well set a trend in reference books. We seem to be entering a is going on in the real world. I suppose that if that is appears to use the pronunciations anyway, they matter serving a patron too many drinks after he is killed in a car After the jury convicted a rapist in circuit court last already served.' [From Column World, by Bob Morris, Legend attributes it to a more or less imaginary eponymous the Palatine Hill as it appeared to the eye of an exceptionally seven hills. The etymology of all these names remains which was eventually reserved for imperial structures dock area in antiquity, and more recently the site of the modern city's slaughterhouse, not much frequented exact description of its makeup. For centuries it was became compacted. Walking on its surface is an extraordinary size, originally referred to the fact that the amphitheater a word for the ancient structure whose site it occupies, shape of that stadium, of which practically nothing else is left. The stadium itself, and the kind of activity grew with miraculous rapidity to cover the nakedness her. Consequently, the church that was later built well into the present century, the official, if little John the Evangelist is said to have survived immersion history and the fanciful imagination of its people. statue of Silenus, the grotesque drunken follower of subject in old photographs and prints. Now a flood control system has recessed the river below the level named after another ancient sculpture that is still permanently lit on this tower commemorates the miraculous monkey' that had carried her off to its top. Its principal The widening of this street in the 1930s resulted not shops, but also in the uncovering of important archaeological street gave its name to the influential literary journal, the main streets and piazzas of virtually every city dates, in this case the date of the breach in the ancient battle of that war. (This town itself had been renamed as the frenzied traffic on it is a serious blight to the Fora themselves. Proposals to demolish this street cleared the approach to the Basilica of St. Peter from the buildings, visible from the highway that serves feature is the rounded openings that cover all four of outside the ancient wall, the area in front of the railroad of a street named for him in the heart of the city, near the central railway station. This had previously the genius of its people, the collective repository of grammar, and syntax has been violated beyond recognition. mistakes, outrageous misspellings, and just plain and Even this fails to convey in full the nonsense of the the above sentence. This, however, would be practically amount of patient effort and guessing to reconstruct in the Guide is garbled to the point of incoherence. that used to come with products imported from Japan. was supposed to be a serious attempt at facilitating the Census count, a sort of first aid assistance in answering the Census Form, looks like the work of a cut them up with his plastic scissors into tiny pieces of various shapes and sizes and then playfully pasted charge of foreign language translations asked around and my sisters to understand what they were saying, idea that no matter how gifted a translator is, he can Guide doesn't belong, of course, to the above class of translators. While professional translators are the original language and the language they translate work therefore is tantamount to sabotage, albeit unintended, Guide would soon have to discard, in utter confusion, between the cracks, so to speak, with grave political, could imagine. The tradition began with the influential known, sadly, but one of the best unabridged dictionaries colleagues have directed much effort over the years to tracking and recording new English, and this latest on two others of similar purpose and style that appeared the Preface). In this latest addition to the series taking over his father's role in the previous books, The combined editorial staff for all three books includes spend about thirty dollars more for the recent editions dated citations, plus a date, often different, of the earliest citation on file for each sense. The date is often earlier than that of the citations given since illustrative of meaning and usage. Indeed, the definition is often provided in the citation itself. Multiple choosing, not necessarily chronological. This approach the citations and a subsequent presentation that best befits clarity and sense development. Strict chronological presentation of dated citations is at best a lexicographic data, need to be carefully reviewed, weighed, selected, have this in abundance, and the resulting excellence which lacks citations. Citations are particularly important in dictionaries of new words, not only in establishing word formation, and cultural or historical background. an adaptation of the International Phonetic Alphabet entries. Otherwise, the dictionary presents itself in fairly standard, familiar fashion, with the sort of labeling quality product. One feature of the earlier books in An analysis of the entries in two randomly selected bulk of the entries are repeated, often with revision, new material than one might have hoped for. A randomly Planet X, are, not surprisingly, both drawn from the X. It seems likely that the increasingly common acronym first, but still a disappointingly small minority of the that they were ever included at all). Entries for pipe were doubtless dropped because they all are entered stated intention. The dropping of goulash communism judgment after the perspective of time is added. It part of the record of English, but such is necessary in any commercial dictionary venture. At least it does appear, based on the spans analyzed, that the discards better citations and record earlier attestations. Also, publication, and date (for a periodical), the same citation on a particular citation is provided with enough information nearly everything to the citation files behind it, and citation files are very much a product of accident, constrained by budget. That the Random House Unabridged see, much less collect, all that should be in the file. mark of lower resolution.' An entry for it must await proves its usefulness to users of English over time. It is a bit dissatisfying to find fewer new entries this, not, I strongly suspect, lack of new words and we should not judge too harshly on the basis of two more of the solid foundation of its predecessors than it does of newly laid work, this is hardly negative Corps do indeed issue behests for academic degrees. are many Marine Corps officers enrolled in graduate with orders in hand and usually complete degree requirements high rate of efficiency. Not that the language has ever been highly logical or ever should be, but what and heading back to shore. What was to have happened In the world of modern communication, it is evident orthographically facilitated by the various processes the efficiency that was originally intended. A few examples will vividly illustrate this puzzling discrepancy. find an abbreviation to come to the rescue. In time, before an efficient abbreviation for it is found. In is firmly set. For almost one and one half centuries, that a new word is needed to represent the pronunciation matter that this represents an increase from two letters the need for spelling out the sound of letters seems term to abbreviation to phonetic spelling of the abbreviation conclusive evidence since junior varsity must obviously Another inconsistency is to be found in the process One segment of the armed forces is the Construction clear when the inept Mo. became the official abbreviation. continue the curse with MO. The final stage is now What are the reasons for the apparent senselessness in the preceding examples? It must first be remembered rules of logic. Prescriptive dictionaries are becoming reason for their madness. Mo rhyming with no certainly pronounce than their ancestral abbreviations. Emcee given for the first appearance of a word is actually a record of when it was first found in print, and earlier here again illustrates that people demand that language Overall, the abbreviating process is alive and doing was a child, her doctor's name was Death (pronounced his views were on foreigners who spoke the language imagine those views wouldn't have been complimentary that largely speaks their language, however differently. is rustling the chintz curtains and the calico tablecloth. dresses and bright bandanas, their bangles jingling breeze; a sepoy all smart in khaki on his horse, his jodhpurs trim and neat; a scholarly pundit; a mahout on his elephant, ambling like a juggernaut. A pariah dog barks at a bandicoot (or is it a mongoose?) in the jungle. Fishermen secure their catamarans and dinghies standard English dictionaries as acceptable English words. Some of them strike us immediately as exotic but others (shampoo, for instance) are in such common that they have a foreign origin. The Empire carried the English language to distant climes. These lands language to describe many local features and the local socialize and partake in sports and recreation,' is a and light have become common in everyday vernacular bring nuances from their own languages into English. in five ways: words, expressions, grammar, pronunciation for she has done this? because that's the right way nodding of the head, some gesticulation, and an expressive drive the literary purists to suicide. But before they people speak English today as it should not be spoken survive and thrive. It is this quality to adapt that gives English its virility. Its status as the most widely spoken language in the world will take some challenging. to rejoice. Listen with an attentive ear to the sounds ever remember all those different drink recipes? It is not really all that hard, I would explain to them. Drinks are a lot like popular songs. First, there are to this season's hit songs. If you don't know how to the customer who ordered it, a regular sitting at the end of the bar, or another bartender. After this happens sounding recipes concocted by marketing departments If one adds to these flops the unpublicized creations actually achieves the first level of popular acceptance, reached that level, it is almost as difficult to achieve will still be popular by the time the next generation made from sweetish liquors and fruit juice. As far as flavor goes, it offers nothing to the palate that could town that has both a large naval base and a private breeding ground for new drinks. Very often I would take an order for a drink that was just coming into had become garbled as it traveled across the country and bartender to bartender. Yet the name had survived. across a counter (over or under) in silence, drinks ordering a drink, like to give an indication, to themselves funny. They also have a strong tendency to imitate their peers and to order what they hear other order. their names to images from the following categories: like the taste of liquor in its raw state. They often the cases below, the name actually does reflect, to Fill with orange juice. Fill with half milk, half for instance, is he saying, symbolically, that he is about to drop a small explosive charge into his nervous Perhaps it is a little of each. There are many drinks in this category, as one might expect, since so many Glass: rocks glass, with grenadine. The resulting could also be placed in the next category, but I think else. It is a way of saying, I am an outlaw, a mountain add splash of cola. Glass: rocks glass, with the references are increasingly blunt. Much of the appeal of these drinks lies in ordering them in such a ways as to playfully gross out the bartender. It is an Orgasm at a liquor store and then going home and mixing up a few to drink while reading mysteries in bed. The idea is to go into the local bar and say, ounce amaretto Glass: highball, with ice Fill with milk; shake. (A Screwdriver made Glass: Collins with ice with sole gin instead of SLIPPERY NIPPLE Glass: Collins, with ice ounce amaretto (The logic of this is that a liqueur floated on top is Garnish: skewer a Maraschino Comfortable Screw with toothpick, and lay the becomes a Sole Comfortable toothpick across the rim Screw Against the of the glass so that the Wall. In bars it is rarely cherry sits in the center ordered but much discussed.) suggests that men's sexual organs may be derived from other. [From an article on laser capability in Job Shop place names persist in their references to things and Dr. Frank R. Abate, who has been conducting research has sent us a listing of some interesting names in the only if they come from Truth or Consequences)? Will What can be said about the condition of denizens of letter to members of the Association for Education in Journalism finest novels in the world (which includes Torrents is not a crime. Describing sex is., to Seventh century of relations that link the sounds of language, or its omitted.) There follow three short appendices, including had studied a dictionary of popular usage, but not in dictionaries. Slang words are defined in slang dictionaries. awake during class, I must repeat the fact that when other work uses quotations it simply lists the quotation of a word: that does NOT mean that the author of the works are the only ones extant from early periods of the language: people who misuse citation dictionaries This book has a lot of cartoons and very few words. Its cover promises the reader will be able to answer during his lifetime? If you regard life as a trivial pursuit, then knowing the answers to those might be important to you. I had best not dwell on the revelation the date is not given in the brief biography provided and knew of each other. We corresponded occasionally and, I think, enjoyed), and his warmth came through in his letters. This book is an attractive and friendly collection of his short pieces on language, written but I urge you to inquire and get two copies if you that contains entries like, boy: A noise with dirt on defined), it comes close enough, so if you like these things by the thousands instead of by the score, then buy it. The boy definition is in it, but I could not find has swallowed its tail. In any event, this book is well known to all who are familiar with onomastic literature, essay, titled Historical Sketch. Those who are interested have a few copies left of House Names which we shall terms like informal, colloquial, formal, nonstandard, have never seen the last used), to come up with still number of responsible and useful works dealing with friends' and `standard written English,' respectively) know or feel about usages of borderline words. Certainly, to move lexicographers a few decades ago to drop it fluctuate. It is a comfort to know that if my book still substituted for all occurrences of colloquial and, like magic, the switch will be effected. Hook goes on at and makes good sense, particularly when he emphasizes the words classed taboo or formal in one generation might very well change places. Of course, the biggest they can expect to accomplish is to help people refine of as needing the greatest amount of help are usually unaware of the fact; for them, looking up a doubtful even a dictionary) would be unthinkable. Thus, the greatest service such a book could render is virtually which the user is aware, that holds true for professionals a year; there are professional editors who are unaware style in The Appropriate Word or any other style or usage book? Hook is more liberal than I: for instance, any more as one word in any context. I do not deny the fact that it does not appear as one word, but if it is going to appear that way in anything I have written keeps up, there will soon be a contract out on me). is pronounced as if it were two words (in contrast to see no justification for spelling it as a solid word. In short, I do not agree with Hook in all matters, regardless the quality of his writing. I have not done a careful to see what Hook might have that others do not, but date. If you write and wish to corroborate the style of what you have written, you will probably want as on, and it would definitely be a good idea to acquire explore signs and use them to elucidate the phenomena the United States a pub is at least one step above a have observed that elegance has come to be a matter nor a capital letter on the second article, and it is the second article that appears to be a key. (I should both makes the phrase appositional and indicates the would appear to give the establishment a greater cachet precisely the type of establishment the motorist is approaching. Such phrases as Family Restaurant and and dress as well as to the establishment's attitude towards children and perhaps charge cards. Normally Ends a Cosmetology Shop is a nice example of appositional article in the apposition to suggest both uniqueness the prestige of a field can be empirically determined through the counting of the percentage of colons in a a corpus. He demonstrates his point through a comparison education and their increasing use of colons in titles in the 1970s and 1980s. Literature led the way but on a title page. But would it work on a billboard? I think not; therefore the appositive. The device is not without its pitfalls however, as witness the following: demonstrates the superiority of U. S. scholarship to snow, not all of them impolite, which is not surprising the form of hundreds of square miles of heather covering moor and mountain to almost the complete extinction more to the botanical point is the probable relation effective military operations or too incompatible to was well adapted for survival in rough places. It can grow in sand; it can grow in bogs; and because of a symbiotic relationship with a wide range of fungi, it it is maquis (and also the name of the guerrillas who reserve heath for the closely related plants that are `maned or bristled.' Heaths and heather are indeed finely leaved plants which in a sense are bristly, but heath for this purpose, which indeed might leave as variant garden forms are known, consists of only the and one heather and four (or possibly five) heaths in based on old monastic tradition (and the newer nationalism), in written documents, at least in surviving written that led to the situation at the beginning of this century English), the majority was technically illiterate in Sometimes these are given by the dictionary; sometimes of the inconsistencies, the regionalisms, and the often forms) is a `scouring pad made of the twisted stems rare heather this clan is not likely to have encountered, without translation. Since word order and aspiration number of literal meanings, all equally implausible, portion,' and a dentist `a sour expression due to an shoe,' This suggests the real translation is `a tapered little piece of (leather to prevent wear of the shoe by There he can take his pick of universities in which to all, the epidemic of split infinitives that has plagued this country for the past several years. (True, no less those who would split hairs over split infinitives; but I feel fairly sure that even he would draw the line at yourself if you would publish the essay if the foreign essay is clearly bigoted, and should not be accepted like to have the house on fire. Is this all there is the writing of most linguists. To be sure, proficiency in linguistics offers no assurance of proficiency in done in the subject, I could easily be led to believe that the former precludes that latter. It is questionable in the course of reviews is appropriate in VERBATIM: perhaps they are best left to the periodicals that specialize are writers, professionally or not, a few personal remarks It must be seen that there are many, many different writing is divided into fiction and nonfiction, with subdivisions of each, too numerous to list here. Because fiction and write virtually none, though a few years the first prize was a dinner for two at a country restaurant second prize was a dinner for four at the same restaurant, at having won. That elation was followed at once by the ineluctable conviction that the other submissions range from occasional smugness with a job well done to abject frustration and misery at my inability to amount of time and resources available). I fancy that writer is, by definition, one who writes a fair amount and does so professionally (for which read gets paid for it), I suppose I can call myself a writer. On the been published. It is unfair to include being published good writer: as we all know, some of the best writers chance; we also know that some of the worst writers writing, and in this connection. I must bring to the The essays were originally published in periodicals like the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, if anyone ever had any question about how to distinguish these pages: some of these essays are clearly erotic quality of writing rarely encountered. I have never as this one.) Occasionally, when the opportunity presents This seems an appropriate point to insert a personal increase in typographical errors in VERBATIM can lay read by me; if they are worthy of consideration, they are read again, carefully, and styled for the compositor; article for the third time and cannot see all the horrible that the articles are boring, merely that the tedium of reading them for the third or fourth time interferes easier to catch. But we have very good compositors, and if they make errors, they are often very subtle. In the future, I shall try to arrange for someone else I can rarely support the rewriting of my own material own. If the reader wants to read something that is not only informative and entertaining but can be admired shall discuss the dark side of writing, writing that is through the French countryside and mountains to ride Your thumb or fingerprint will be taken. [From the man who was shot out of the cannon during each show wit was equal to his showmanship, summoned the fellow Without fully realizing it, all of us speak the language shooting, some hotshot big shot is bound to shoot the cheap shot potshot at some troubleshooting competitor. shooting match. It is not always easy to ascertain whether the underlying metaphor in such expressions is the bow and arrow or the gun and cannon (see Peter but we can be fairly certain that the wad in shooting one's wad refers to the wad that held the powder and shot in position to be fired from early guns and that the pot in potshot signifies the dinner pot to be filled compare the unfortunate victim to a projectile shot out of a gun or cannon. Hand guns of the fourteenth century draw, hot as a pistol, and loaded for bear, so I am going to get the drop on you and let you have it with both barrels. Here is a small arsenal of words and teeth marks in them. Having no real anesthesia to ease the agony of amputation or surgery, a surgeon of two centuries ago offered wounded soldiers the only pain of such a procedure is enough to make one sweat bullets. lines Bite the bullet, old man,/ And don't let them derives from the way that prospectors pan rivers for gold. In truth, though, flash in the pan refers to the occasional misfiring of the old flintlock muskets when the flash of the primer in the pan of the rifle failed to ignite the explosion of the charge. The estimates of those who fire flintlocks these days, when the expression person who fails to live up to his or her early promise. now, had a half cock, or safety position, for a gun's does not give enough power to generate sparks and fire the pistol, so it is a futile gesture. Thus, in modern parlance, when a person goes off half cocked (or at flint used in a flintlock weapon had worn away, it lost sparking to set off the powder charge. Faced with this flint with a knife, creating a bevel in the flint, which could then make full contact and generate an adequate shower of sparks. A fellow who skinned his flint was for ramming the ball and patch down the barrel of a main powder charge. Eventually ramrod became personified, by rigidity, stiffness, and severity,' even though the target so that the projectile speeds to its destination in or accusation is one that is direct and straightforward hanging fire describes the delay in the explosion or exclamation has given many a scholar calluses and a out eventually to be completely unsolvable. Funk dismisses likely to have been derived in some way from the frontiersman's exhaustive research, I am reluctantly forced to resort to the familiar lexical locution, `Source unknown.' during colonial, revolutionary, and frontier days were please read on. In nautical jargon, the monkey was a pyramids of cannonballs for each gun in a muzzleloading holders had markedly different coefficients of expansion, `big,' and great guns referred to cannons and other rifles. By the late nineteenth century, these uses of great and small became obsolete, but to go great guns continued to allude to the loudness, forcefulness, and son of a gun This expression is frequently employed with the same three words, but the question remains why gun has been elected as the surrogate word. The years ago, offers this explanation: `Son of a gun' is an epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree and was originally applied to boys born afloat. One admiral declares that he was literally thus cradled, under the which sailor had fathered it, the paternity was logged was often located near the makeshift maternity room. we hold adamantly to our position. To stand and continue took courage because artillerymen usually lacked infantry the enemy could turn the guns to their own use. Thus, many a soldier was actually chained to his gun to ensure and abandon its field artillery, the simplest way to render its guns useless was to jam a spike into the fuse hole. Gradually, spike one's guns came to mean `frustrate give it the gun While giving their airplane engines machine guns. This led to the association of rapid that together compose essentially the entire weapon. paella, cannot be made to order. All the ingredients nature, that raises a performance to peaks of enthrallment.' from the audience. When a performer is inspired, it is heat), but duende goes further. It is something like the zone of current sports lingo in which a tennis player, vibrations, evoking for its disciples the very ethos of acquired its artistic coloration. It did not become a current meaning. It does appear now, however, in dictionaries gypsy soul, which flies only on the wings of spontaneity and improvisation. I have seen a calendar (Workman casa `lord, or master, of a house' and is a contraction of the casa was omitted altogether, and el duende thus Lares and Penates, and took on even broader, pantheistic Whatever its derivation, duende as artistic inspiration his native region is reflected in many of his poems. In striking manifestation in the bullfight. At the moment of the kill, he says, the help of duende is needed to of our alphabet and the possibility of misunderstandings WORD MEANING SOURCE mind Murder, She Wrote, As the above citations indicate, the distribution of alphabet. Users are apparently willing to risk being misunderstood by giving new meanings to a single letter, as the citations show. How much context can clarify to recall that the three letter set has a multitude of and then to follow it with the meaning intended. Thus offended to encounter them, though some people avoid I hope the committee recognizes ad homonym [personalized] and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner bought my copy of it. Incidentally, it is now the reference second edition of Collins Dictionary of the English smaller.) The first edition of Chambers was issued in For instance it gives played as the proper pronunciation The Concise Oxford allows both pronunciations. It is the waitress brought it to me and said, in a pleasant but, I am sorry to report, favors the English. Chambers gave me warm feelings of assurance when I consulted it dough without much butter, with or without currants, baked on a griddle or in an oven. Wisdom on the scone -pronunciation Chambers because its editors have not scrupled against a little editorializing in some of the definitions they offer, such as those already mentioned. The user is or other animal that has acquired the habit of eating men: a woman given to chasing, catching and devouring in duration, with cream filling and chocolate or other all my desk dictionaries, but only Chambers has feck (nice to see a lost positive found), which comes from dictionaries I have consulted. It is quite firm about the insisting that it be given full value, in various ways, as would rate it, but I must confess that for general use I But I haven't found it quite as much fun to browse in. word with a similar meaning: this is found in the other of English and others a distinct language rooted in [XI,1], I have had an experience which, in true biological in perpetuity. I collected, in northeastern Colorado, a now in the deathless literature of entomology a robber My speech, of course, is very hesitant and often discouraging. may even go so far as to maintain that the subject of its attention is not a valid one for investigation. There is no arguing with taste, but even those who support the second tenet must admit that if researchers felt that way about cancer, syphilis, and AIDS, there would not take a few minutes to ponder the meaning of it in the words) involves insults, racist and other prejudicial language formerly represented largely by asterisks. (I have often wondered why the publishers did not have ignore it is plainly wrong; all the reasons that can be adduced for ignoring it are compelling testimony to its belief, the point of studying verbal aggression is not phenomena, whether natural or artificial, whether in pure or physical or social science. To quote in part expressions, from all languages and cultures, past and that interviews are quite rare in such journals, and it is certainly unusual to find a linguist humanized by such a device. Although the interview suffers from a number scholar, writer, and editor than interviewer, and it contains gratuitous information about the interviewer an attempt at documenting that has not, to my knowledge, been done before in the field of linguistics. Perhaps others on a wide variety of subjects; these are interspersed gathered by the editor. Although the subject matter might be viewed as an area of legitimate investigation, I am not sure I see the point in employing the subject style of language in the descriptive text, which would be far more telling were it restricted to the language of his writing is peppered (salted?) with references like every asshole with access to a typewriter. It is many years since my contemporaries and I got a kick out of Dead allowed prudery to mock itself. But the power of words is such that I contend their impact is totally lost if not treated clinically: somehow, there is a difference Some asshole had written shit on the wall: the writer of the former has more credibility; the writer of the latter was, very likely, the very asshole who had written sometimes well written. I am afraid that an adjective like penetrating is not only a bit strong but would be likely to be adopted as a slogan by the editor. I do the linguistic literature, and I think he ought to view a bit more seriously (and less rancorously) the opportunities accorded him by his experience with these powerful, of analysis of its impact and why and how it carries so issues are available as are several books, none expensive.] compulsory to `encourage the clear and accurate expression lamentations over the murder of a fine language, the generally poor standard of English encountered in the that children cannot spell or use the right tenses. All this activity is being carried on by the Queen's English competition in which people calling in were asked to spell ventriloquist and kibbutz (among other words, in long ago? It may be interesting to note that the very same evening one could hear (and watch) a rebroadcast subjunctive rang forth like a battle cry for the freedom of the English language. Letters in support or condemnation Stiff Prices at Auction of Erotic Art. [Headline in the spellings and soundings are hardly surprising, however delightful. They may at least begin to suggest the considerable speak English. Thus I met any number of expressions (for my part; on my side of the argument); Step the and Future); fillet of minion (entanglement perhaps hairdresser is out to lunch). Into this category fall three additional items which, because I never ordered reliably identify: Steak Bites Teriyaki Sauce, Lunch For me, all of these expressions convey a plucky willingness everyday situations. In the words of a newspaper ad seemed to work for me until I closed all the books and compelled two or three students at a time to put themselves speak English. Going to the game, shopping, making plans to take the train, giving directions to one another about utterances, sounds on which we could at least start to work. Incidentally, I startled them one day popping and spitting. I think we made modest progress efforts to buy train tickets to the right places. Sometimes bleach. At other times I won because I could eventually at the train station). Sometimes I engaged in pantomime the effect of puzzling some clerks, of occasionally leading worked, for example), and most often of bringing out frustrated laughter. I found that by pointing to beer in a refrigerator, pulling up my collar, slapping my sides, not to remain humble in these circumstances. My students thing, as I have indicated. What a pleasure, for example, into a terse sentence or two ending with the expression hobby?), and run into the back room for her textbook Other experiences are linguistic only in reverse, or only as one thinks of what the language ought to be. all, probably, was the unintentional but unavoidable puzzler is the famous yes in response to very nearly all questions and declarations. To be able to distinguish corollary mention. A local factory, I soon discovered, say much. I sat soaking at about 100F, while an exuberant washcloth draped over his head, gave me his four words and watching the occupants through the steamy haze as they lathered, rinsed, and squatted on little plastic room to enjoy dinner on the floor. Finally, in this context, I think back on what I derived from different kinds that have nothing intrinsically to do with words. Here was the proof. I was compelled to pay strict attention (for four or five hours at a time) to setting, lighting, this or that role's performance, costume, formal distancing with the audience (Kabuki); to traditional methods of men's playing women's parts, audience's anticipation and shouted recognition of favorite plays and actors and I find it difficult to imagine a people more hospitable, who was bound to find larger signals gross and yet to miss nuances altogether, coming across as deaf, dumb, and functionally illiterate. A final instance will make note from this young woman containing the following is left. Only one month! I want to know much of you. So if there are something interesting or something worried, please give me a call at any time. I should worry. I have no knowledge to tell you about Japan. But I try to help you. That's what I miss: language and more. prove its dissemination, I offer the following from the disrupt or inconvenience our customers.... It is time for words and genitive case capture the twanging release horse's gallop is in the sound as well as the meaning of Onomatopoeia has a long, honorable, and pleasurable ancient epic poetry to simple, homey words like plop, sound and look of some words have given clues to their small boy, by words which seem to act in exactly the opposite fashion, words which point away from their mislead. They suggest something other than what they mean and in some instances do so all the more effectively Very often, of course, the misdirection lasts only for a second, until training and traditional knowledge take over. The initial deception is no less real, and it is precisely this that fascinates. In parallel with the roots finally better to be analogous rather than cleverly delightfully and sometimes disconcertingly confuse. They certainly did me when first I came across them. I usually hazard a guess in such first encounters, la the game of Dictionary. In all the following cases, the spelling, (apparent) roots, or sound of the word actively doubtless occur there if the price is right. These descriptions effective for their irony: cold as hell, set, words that have led me astray. There may be others might like to drop into this intriguing piggin of words. hear on television broadcasts. In a handful of slips taken from the top of my stack, I found at least one And in several of these random instances of pleonasm, truism, kinky syntax, malapropos metaphor, and just spirit at work. They did not, however, conform to the we're back to ground zero. The inadvertent substitution gold is akin to the distraction caused by optical illusions: resist a smirk when a female network broadcaster observes the pontiff remains firm. The howlers in my collection me really a long time to sort what was going on in my mind out, she said. Her interviewer didn't bat an eye. the plane of the ball broke the goal line. Technically, it is not a spoonerism. Have such transpositions a And as I look at the last slip in my random handful, No government can go against [the laws of economics] putdowns of some of the great and not so great cities of the world [XIV,3], he quotes a splendid passage from This, while perhaps not strictly an example of a traveler's denunciation, is certainly appropriate to the article poem is throughout a very close and respectful pastiche same kind of adaptation of another poem by Juvenal, the second century, during the reign of the Emperor overcrowding, high rents and unscrupulous landlords, noise, vehicular traffic, congestion, even problems of immigration and integration. Under this last heading, to an ironic crescendo, shudders at the thought of: there was really nothing to match the horror of the aim at military slang because it is itinerant and erroneous misses the mark completely. Slang is slang precisely meanings of standard usage. Far from being mindless and infantile, slang in its wonderful vigor and versatility Military slang is first spoken by soldiers, who then serve in uniform or when their slang is picked up by been in the military service. The slang of one military generation passes on to the next, so the Marines who gooks in the '60s and '70s were the linguistic heirs person a gook may be reinforced by words in his own but the word is extraordinarily derogatory, reinforced is now used derisively among servicemen to describe `individuals or organizations in a state of active and then it has undergone another permutation and that is Can we not reverse the approbation in which lawyers are held by the public today? [From a column by John R. published by the National Council of Teachers of English. own trumpet.' To the best of our recollection, this expression has been traced to a statue. Corroboration A perfume called Poison has appeared on the market. Perfumes are supposed to attract, not repel (or so their makers would have us believe), and the name scarcely evokes the image of an attractant. The naming of perfumes is supposed to invite associations with foxhunting in and bridles or bits redolent with horse's saliva. The first reaction was that Poison was another misspelling promising the smell of fish seems a little remote. Coco, smells much like an opium den; and it is impossible to copy to me. Lady Stetson, though, I should expect to smell like stained hatbands on sweaty cowpokes. The sure that the company coming up with the last of these singularly unimaginative name for a product: it ranks This is absolutely putting the horse before the cart. entries were retained in the four Addenda Sections in question. These evidently possessed whatever qualities of viability are required for an item to survive in at least written English once it has experienced adequate quantity and variety of printed occurrence to justify suggesting that the early years of a word's temporary admission to the English lexicon are the most critical. continue to indicate the critical quality of a new word's provide crucial information, the list is organized according that, for example, the highest mortality again appeared the deletions were noun compounds, whereas the only taxonomy is that determined by the 13,683-item corpus butter pat laggard suffix delocalize, v. lagger paging derrick, v. meson plasma fat receptor ACRONYM Age isolated camera water toothpick media mix surfer's knot clock in memory teaching machine clock off trace clock on This is a curious work. I was under the impression and indeed it was; but there are so many improvements specific editorial director are a bit mysterious. One is some disembodied corporate entity. To be sure, four page, but so do names of a lot of other people (like whose direct connection with the book at hand would with consultant linguists and specialists in other fields who contribute something to the preparation of accurate structure and definitions to a dictionary, I think I can safely say that such people are only indirectly responsible responsibility for a book of such complexity rests with the editors. But only four editors for such a massive work? I suppose it is possible. In any event, it seems W], despite many improvements over its forebears, still suffers from shortcomings ultimately traceable to the many differences, too. One gets the impression that the editors of L used the good stuff from the W and albeit superficial, reveals a number of differences, older dictionaries the words are syllabified mainly to help in pronouncing them; latterly, syllabication has been used largely to find where a word can be hyphenated today's newspapers and magazines, one would be sore put to believe that a dictionary had ever been within the grasp of their editors, proofreaders, or the programmers the correspondence received at Collins Publishing concerning the dictionary concerns this change and is critical symbols is somewhat closer to that of the International Phonetic Alphabet; W follows the system used in the taste, being replete with diacritics. L uses a version of system, favored by newspapers because, though primitive, which requires even a casual user to deal with distinctions pronunciation of English is much fuller in the front front matter of dictionaries seem to be students (who are enjoined to under pain of death) and other lexicographers, subject in L would not appear to be a serious omission. W follows the (useful) practice of listing a shortened to do so is a disadvantage, notwithstanding the simplicity find the description given on page xxii to clarify any question. L would be well advised, in future printings, (front) cover of the book, an easily accessible place that entries that have them, directly following the inflected forms (if any); L places them at the end of the entry. As surveys have shown that etymological information is the least often sought after, making the average user wade through the etymology before getting to the definition me; besides, it is unlikely that the serious, consistent seeker of etymological information is likely to use anything W lists the date of the earliest recorded use in English similar practice, and I find it speculative, spurious, and specious except for the documentation of relatively recent coinages. Such information is very likely to be misinterpreted by the average user, who does not approach page. That is nonsense, of course; but even if the users earliest written evidence, of what use or importance is that to them? Moreover, as we in the dictionary biz are only too well aware, an earlier citation might be found today or tomorrow, making the information obsolete. I feel less strongly about a designation like 17c which that. Also, the date given for the adjective lemon (as in at as a cross reference indicator. For example, at you look up the etymology for lithe you discover only to the form of the reference is that its wording suggests, learned is that lento and lithe are (or might be) cognates. misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended To be sure, the W usage note, even with its verbosity speakers; but the definitions are better in L because they assume that if a user does not know the meaning obvious. On the other hand, figurative or exaggerated expression would probably have been a simplified improvement Users of the L will be far better off if spared the pursue them to other words defined in the same inept manner. There is a difference between using a word case, ACTUALLY is such a loosely used filler word in In general, the definitions in W have been clarified, citations in W have either been omitted, where unnecessary, have never understood why, in a dictionary of this size, W ever thought it useful to give the sources of citations, usage? What is the significance in citing anonymous at all? The treatment in W is erratic, to say the least. but a quick direct comparison is not easily done. In aside the plants and animals, which are differently Miller and the word also appears in the lyrics written symphony. It should also be noted that idiomatic expressions On the whole, readers can draw their own conclusions studies in W that do not appear in L at all or in greatly occasionally succumbs to prolixity. Notwithstanding, reasons in the main market it is intended to serve. at the back, a practice I have never liked. Experience (and a moment's thought) shows that names of people and places occur with equal, sometimes greater frequency the words listed in dictionaries of almost any size (except places are listed in the main body of those dictionaries that include them, but real people and places appear in the appendices; as it may be assumed that users look up things they do not know, the immediate assumption already aware that Homer was a real person (despite fundamentalists will be disturbed to discover that most of the characters in the Bible are treated as fictional. indeed, the latter is not even an entry in the geographical fault, is not in the geographical section of the L but abbreviations, and only a few pages of miscellaneous weights and measures, etc., W has short sections on Foreign Words and Phrases (most of which are dispensable), of those interminably boring listings of Colleges and width of column 67mm 72mm No allowance has been made in the above calculations But for other reasons they are not directly comparable. of clarity compared with that. Focusing on these two definitions, it must be conceded that naive users who algebra before going to either dictionary are unlikely to come away any the wiser. But the second reads like gobbledygook while the first tries to provide some basic while, at the same time, gently notifying users that they are going to have to seek elsewhere for a proper definition, the understanding of which requires far Lexicographers constantly face problems of defining brief essay to explain and far more specialized knowledge The source of the problem lies in the fact that there is terms like theory of relativity which only a few people in the world truly understand: to be sure, it is impossible to conceive of writing a definition for it that would fit into a dictionary's procrustean requirements. The dilemma can be resolved either by attempting a definition superficial pass at a definition couched in language suggesting that the user can find no succor in the work in hand. I prefer the latter approach, though I have of ten thought it might be only fair to mark such entries my old computer, I asked a few friends to recommend was particularly interested in one that would allow me want to know about them should skip to the next paragraph. explain that when you buy what is fondly call a personal makes): a rectangular box with some slots in the front and sockets in the back, a monitor, which is nothing but ordinary typewriter keyboard but, in many models sold today, has a number of additional keys alongside those for the familiar alphanumeric characters: on mine, nestled among some control keys on the right side is what is called a number pad, which resembles the key arrangement or in combination with another key, perform certain functions, some of which are useful, others of which are which I never use. These boxes come with wires (called cables for some reason) that allow them to be connected to one another and into a power source. The trick is that they will not do anything unless and until you have installed what is called a Disk Operating System, which comes with the machine. After it has been installed, the specialist would want to perform. In order to do something package consisting of a number of diskettes and a manual. item is called a diskette, for that matter), but all square of rather tough plastic with a hole in the middle and an oblong slot on each of the flat sides; it is said to who probably ever measured one of these things, I can but it is only the beginning of the Great Deception. Inside this square plastic casing (which you should the diskette is placed in the slot of the machine, a motor engages the center of the disk inside and spins it around at a great speed so that portions of it are exposed as they pass by the oblong slot, allowing them to be written on or read by some device inside the box. The diskettes that the computer understands and translates into a number of commands that make the machine do certain me to create certain kinds of files in which I am able to style the text as I wish, but I shall not go into that here. manuals with directions for using the programs that they have to maintain a staff of several dozen technical order to answer the questions of confused customers. This failing appears to be endemic to the industry: I queries a month. I pointed out to him that if they But the foregoing is all preliminary and background called Spelling Check. I do not need a spelling checker, proofreading text that has been keyboarded into storage this: after completing an article, chapter of a book, or whatever it is that I am working on, I press a few keys text, comparing each with a dictionary contained in the program. It is not really a dictionary, of course, in the sense that is lacks definitions; it is merely a word list. I have not seen the word list, but, from the directory words. Being a computer, the machine performs this comparison checking very, very rapidly: it takes only a words. The proofreading is slightly moronic, for the program cannot alert the user to an error like an for and, because an is a valid word in its memory; still, it is better than nothing. If it encounters a word that is not in its repertoire, it offers a choice of actions: at the stroke of a key or two you can ADD the word to the list; GO ON and ignore the word entirely; or EDIT the questionable There is another option called, SUGGEST, which, if invoked, have had in mind when you wrote the one that offended cannot have a very sophisticated list of words if it has interesting to see what substitutions were evoked by SUGGEST. In each listing below, the boldface word is SUGGEST a substitute; the words following are the substitutions bothered to copy down the entire list of offerings, selecting of the incongruity of the choice or because I could not, imagine the criteria employed in arriving at the selections. text are not everyday items you find about the house, but I included those anyway; attention is drawn, particularly, .Well, you get the idea. I had some fun substituting As if the preceding were not enough, I also noticed, offer choices if the word was in its memory, that oligopsony Spelling Check; I am not sure I would want to hear the instance) that it has identified as not stored in its dictionary. the operator chooses GO ON, the program stores it and will recognize it when it recurs, obviating the need to 37,000-entry dictionary, the program will stop at the first encounter; but once you have signaled it to GO ON, When the temporary memory has been filled, the following enjoyed making cryptic comments about rumors that he was, in fact, the Lost Dolphin. [From an exhibition catalog, We're going to need community cooperation so we can strive for parody. If you use it, you pay for it. [From being shot in the neck as he slept by a gunman who broke Last weekend, the Welcome Society, composed of original but they will be wrong. Appearances are often deceiving unrelated and they have not been selected at random, it was at least the final stopping point in the journey of the words into the English lexicon. (In this article, lexicon than most people realize, a not unnatural result are probably never used in speech or encountered in speakers. Nonetheless, all are recognized by English Thus, all those cited in this article are to be found as ultimate origins lie elsewhere. For example, out of a odd number for a sampling of any kind, but it happens but a few first passed through the filter of another Several of the loanwords in my sampling are actually spell a specific word and, instead, dictionaries offer dhoti `loincloth,' dinghy, ganja `cannabis used for holding' each have three other acceptable spellings. largely minor orthographic ones, as the substitution radical changes. Few individuals, I hazard, would be Juggernaut `unstoppable destructive force: or object,' `cooked dish of rice, lentils, and spices,' which derives pronunciation, though not in spelling; they derive, man held in high respect' and pundit `very learned; loanwords in English relate to a wide variety of subjects. words in the indicated subject categories (words already The Baths is a dying institution. Last year, we refunded The first oil well in the United States was drilled Before oil was actively sought, it seeped out of the surface oil off the water for domestic uses, and white settlers bottled it for medicinal purposes and called community hospital where I teach and practice hematology frustrating at times, certain abbreviations and acronyms and laboratory tests; however, at times we find this with this expensive diagnostic procedure, thought a better translation would be `No More Radiologists.' performed by putting a drop of serum into distilled water, producing a grossly visible white precipitate introduced this simple bedside technique to medicine. told my local guide that they stood, more appropriately, However, I later fell in love with this city of brotherly which, as you may have guessed, stands for `Neighbors fighting for the beautification of residential housing districts. Like everything else, the meaning of certain and acronyms every day of our lives because newspapers, up with new and innovative ones. The latest scandal of the television ministry concerns the organization all think of as the last place where one could ever gets tough, particularly for those truly complicated No detail is too small to overlook. [From an advertisement culture and history. But it is no more than a myth. nothing to do with choosing an official language. It any official status, but merely to print copies of the during the debate a motion to adjourn failed by one vote. The failure of the motion to adjourn probably represents a vote of no confidence in the committee not so much on translation as on the means by which copies of the English versions of the federal statutes were to be furnished to the individual states, a new report to the House. In the final vote, which took place one month later, the proposal for translation was defeated. The ayes and nays of the final vote are not recorded. It is from the close interim vote, not assimilationist German family, stepped down to cast voting record in the Third Congress did not seem to react quite strongly when, as Speaker of the Fourth with the earlier adjournment cliffhanger, conveniently During this same Congress there were also proposals about the German language, but it is regrettable to see it spilling over into your pages. Thus, in Redundancy longer than they strictly need to be. These two are alleged to mean `garage' and `staple.' But a garage is not necessarily an auto repair workshop, and a principal German language may lead to the creation of ponderous the four possibilities would considerably narrow the would find it disconcerting to run into blue jaundice our conversation led to the following addition to the see reference made to the tiny, misspelled, but spellbinding children of prominent theatrical families. We were all between the ages of seven and fifteen, which was three hats on this occasion, donating his services as director, producer, and scenic designer. After the followed a list of more than thirty names. The leading got from the audience; but, better still, I can quote little girl and, at the risk of turning her head, she has the makings of a very good actress. And our narrator, charm inherent in Daisy's quaint spelling. But there are other things to charm one in a stage version. We all had the pleasure of getting to know Daisy a little thrill of winning a canary by rolling a penny down a alas!, she was married. She did, however, confide to more gracefully than the giants, an entire civilization. had written the Introduction, had written the novel help commenting, as my eyes fall on the first page of is indicated by an auxiliary verb or a particle, not by inflection of the verb. One would translate the Caesarean about the experiences of three friends on a footloose bicycle tour. Take away the bicycles, and it is as The German usage is worth comparing with the obsolescent article where the indefinite would be equally appropriate. slightly more forceful of the two alternative titles? capital S: the learned judge will not the distinction) years ago cravenly caving in to some of his readers with a form postcard answering a question about the Context is important. I can imagine myself answering, must say that I wholeheartedly agree with the author's the elevators run awfully fast in this little country. Henry VIII by his own efforts increased the population because we get our silk from rayon. It is a larger many people will consult it in vain for information about their own names. He is right that the dictionary (though it is not limited to these), yet that is inevitable family names, which is nothing to sneeze at in a pioneering the compilers turned to many specialists. From the clear that the dictionary rests largely on original research. names, I can say that all of my explanations are original users of this dictionary will cope with its metalanguage, Introduction and two pages devoted to the resolution He writes, genealogical information is occasionally for such people: what, for instance, is known about are the subject of genealogical notes, that assumption nesting. The family names are not listed as in a telephone with further classification (according to language) the user to the location of the names. A Dictionary The story of the Nativity was under discussion, and finished, the class Brain turned to the questioner and and early 40s and which dealt with the amusing difficulties of Settlement in coping with what we now call English In the 1940s my father, a certified public accountant his origins in the Pale of Settlement, specifically in Street. Within a few paces they encountered an acquaintance have his aortic aneurysm repaired by the distinguished great success, and a couple of days afterward my father of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language many resemblances among the three and to the College dictionary that tries to rely for its success on quality like saying that all cola drinks ought to be called matter of what the new dictionary, successor to the likely to increase the sales by a measurable amount; proud of the successes gained in the name of Random other subtitles that might come along. From what I There is another aspect to this change: lamentably, it emphasizes the abiding ignorance and gullibility in quality, quantity, and treatment offered: the name has become meaningless, made inferior by its universal the entries mentioned in Jess Stein's Preface: I had, out of a feeling of sympathetic and loyal association it turned out, I was compelled to point out several glaring errors in most of those entries, and Jess Stein the title page of a book only slightly changed from its first edition so that he could insert his own as editor in chief; but that was nothing new for him, as time to go through the editions noting the differences: dictum, If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so little has Collegiate introduced the practice of giving, in the presumably derived from the Oxford English Dictionary words and senses, there was no point in duplicating rather than as the date of the earliest recorded evidence cannot be associated with any particular definition, has several definitions, to show it as having entered To be sure, there is nothing to justify the assumption And it might be imagined that in giving directions to would expect the editors to have signaled the truth the reluctance of users to refer to such things. But The redundancy of when and the date that is confusing word first appeared is grossly misleading and inaccurate: point, but dictionaries dwell (and thrive) on niggling existed in the spoken language long before it first appeared in texts and, in any event, earlier written evidence may exist that has not yet been discovered same size competing for buyers in the market. It is sales a year. Publishers steadfastly refuse to reveal their sales figures because of the highly competitive nature of the business, though it is generally acknowledged outsells its nearest competitor by about two to one. book bargain in the history of publishing: taking the per dollar. This is all the more astonishing when one of skilled lexicographers and editors to keep their both the language and other kinds of data, like population biographical entries, etc. Consider, too, that the quality of the paper, printing, and binding of such normal pricing procedures in the industry, a college is given to wonder how manufacturers of other staple at once reveals a most extraordinary example of the edition of the Random House is the first to touch that and the clarity and understandability of the information presented. The book at hand supports that reputation. for purposes of utility and for philosophical reasons, I prefer geographical and biographical entries to be interfiled with other entries in one alphabetical listing; the largest number of entries, a bit of reasoning not the publicity about their dictionaries, the more entries That is not the truism it appears to be: as lexicographers lexicon is being probed, they must add definitions, entries (which often accomplishes little or nothing to others about the entries they cover. Thus, on average, In all this talk about entries, it must be remembered headwords, or main entries, but inflected forms, variants, Other desirable (or desired) features might influence carefully the admittance of the naughty bits of the language into dictionaries, but I am pleased to see however, to the label Vulgar given to such entries. I am sure that the label is the product of endless hours strong denotation exemplified in the first (hence the problem in reviewing these sets of definitions is that ought to be applied to its use in the definitions of the meanings. I often think that it would not be untoward might well be confused about seeing the label Vulgar incisively denotative. Its main definition in the Random I think may be infra dig these days, namely, the attempt someone who has been driving a Ford all his life to far from impossible, but manufacturers find it very costly to effect the change. Publishers grasp at anything shame to see publishers relying on such undignified and today's market might need just such an incentive particular dictionary to decide spelling (mainly) and, that leads to inconsistencies, for dictionaries report reporting that fact: the dictionary merely reflects available to its compilers. But it must be said that space is at a premium in these expensive books, and if, say, a dozen citations are found for each of the sure that no lexicographer, thrifty of space, will display But publishers are not bound by such variety: neatness book that required all such compounds to be consistently worthwhile on the statistical base used for determining SIC --seldom for the kinds of things that dictionaries for adoption as so much hype. After all, the use of of style, which can be described in a rule: in position position, as in Is she well heeled enough to sit in on Why, then list thousands of hyphenated well -words? aging dictionaries in his office and asked me to recommend without hesitation or reservation. It might be time It suddenly struck me that, in all the years I have the reader insists, oratory. That being the case and I feel it incumbent on me to remedy the deficiency. of writing. But my guess is that many will be variously and to keep sentences as short as feasible. There is nothing remarkable about that; but the fact is that impeccable but is virtually indispensable to expert I refer, for example, to something along the following poor shape, my company has been reporting excellent What is wrong with it? The same thing, essentially, poison in a speech. A hapless auditor might conceivably flashes, the listener might have lost the thread completely. the problem is that the point of a statement should ordinarily come first. If your company is reporting excellent financial results, say so right out, then add modifiers. Suppose one wants to brag that his company that way! A long string of modifiers in advance of a noun is frustrating and confusing to listeners; they there with maximum effectiveness, which is why signaling Would you like to guess how much our new reverberating lethargic. On a more positive note, there cannot be any question of the value of alerting audiences that While on that particular subject, how about restating a rule that facts and figures that a serious reader over a few of the points I have made, the reader will than comparable writings for print, and necessarily guess that scores of words and phrases in virtually scripts for print publication, I always revert to good linguists of all time and an outstanding innovator of either disagreed with him or speculated on the etymology often nasty; but toward the latter part of the 1890s contributors to learned journals of his day frequently scholar in a contemptuous retort to be published in a from a reader's failure either to read correspondence and start are different words, just as coat and cart or moat and mart. That any one should for a moment No one seems to refer to the `New English Dictionary' Notwithstanding this, all the old rubbish is repeated. himself clean. This is no unfair parody of the desperate Lest one might be deceived into taking the preceding specious bit of guesswork. I speak feelingly, for I by the article on hawser in my `Etymological Dictionary,' the `Supplement';... We are now invited to entangle like the injured party when caught in an error, making begrudgingly and without direct reference to the authors failing to have both his books and the latest fascicle down, notwithstanding his correctness in most matters of life,' from which we get whiskey (etymologically of the commonest principles of language, and refuse without first consulting the full and accurate Indexes been led to attribute to himself entirely a derivation years had then elapsed since my first note appeared. first note and his first note was so great, I do not know that any great fault, beyond that of carelessness, trusting to his memory, which seems to be particularly other, I say, to find any material difference between the Indexes as I have done, his eye would certainly, at some future time. I hope he will, for once, offer outset, but, as might be expected, notwithstanding a correct in saying that he had explained the etymology I offer Dr. Chance, for the second time, my sincere not only does a good deal of work on his own account, about that time; but I cannot tell when till I consult possession; but it often takes a long while to find of keeping things in their places in a room of limited good and honorable a scholar to be considered, even remotely, a deliberate plagiarist; but he was careless at times and rather mean, and his apologies, always the items that he enjoyed catching were the ambiguous the writer of the article) is to come up with something substance of the article. Headline writers are often story was about a father who had his children (and, as I recall, his wife) wait in the family car while he Filmed is here intended as a past participle, not the past of an active verb. This grammatical ambiguity is a frequent source of confusion, one cleverly exploited any event, it is still not clear why an oil shortage rise (for fear would scarcely suggest `reduction' except may have difficulty in determining how far from his wife this ideal husband lives, why he isn't bankrupt words as being offensive to special groups of people. chicken often used to refer to the cuisine of black people (something that customers of Colonel Sanders might well dispute), gyp because it insults gypsies Darkies and people have the name number of syllables. on the linguistic hit list. Personally, I prefer other terms. When I request a discount to which I am entitled for wrinklies and delight in watching people squirm. business of telling it like it is that they have all but like his name on pain of a suit for slander.) It is nothing but codswallop. (Look out! Here comes the fisherman's which is sure to lose me the hurried hairless vote. consist entirely of blank pages, lest we offend somebody. Malpractice Made Easy. [Title of a book advertised Faster swimmers have the right away. [From a professionally the swimming pool of the Sports Connection health club place to enter the discussion between the dictionary splitters `definers who write a definition for almost every citation' and the combiners `definers who tend to write basic definitions and rely on the ability of users to divine metaphoric extensions for themselves.') upon. I thought it might be interesting to look at the English can be ascribed to its propensity for naming tens of thousands, are not listed in even the largest general dictionaries; nor are the names of all insects which means `corpse fowl'). This information he derived those words that fill up (and are omitted from) the English dictionaries, remember the nightjar and the or frivolity: they often turn out to be folk etymologies hollow speculation. Yet, as we all know, there are many instances of playful language, which we encounter reject playfulness solely on the grounds that it is suggestion being absent, I take the bit between the teeth to suggest that the above word, characterized phrase by students, because of its meter; its earliest many of the odes). In later years it appears in various as the best and safest preserver of the hair, and is dry up and wither the hair. It nourishes, preserves, solving problems lies in naming them. Although its philosophy has been taken over by the field of psychiatry of shriving oneself of fears and other besetting difficulties likely that reflexes of that procedure could be discovered in profound Eastern religions if not in shamanistic ability of the practitioner to give a name to a condition, of defining in that the process calls for determining a discrete set of differentia and giving the set a unique title. The next time that set of differentia is encountered, same way that a physician, encountering a combination Once identified, the procedure for treating measles is well established. The difficulty that arises with mental and psychological afflictions is that the procedures said to be quite chaotic, ranging from putting patients free associate or otherwise try to relieve themselves brain. That is not to say that such procedures cannot be helpful in some cases, but their results are not as uniformly predictable as they are in many established consternation what some people name their children, there was much discussion concerning the word telegram: Although, indeed, against these last, notwithstanding word; indeed, I fancy it to be the best yet proposed. fact. Bell did not sit down one day and say to himself, Convention plays a major role in all aspects of language, fruit a banana and the group of islands west of Morocco The world does not function uniformly, however: for stabilizing effect in the realms of education and psychology: impossible without the continual explanation of terminology one time are found destroyed by the appearance of a new article or book or trend. Human beings are accustomed not only does each of use give a slightly different words like good, justice, and God, but our speech is task force devoted to the terminology alone. Even a partial list reveals the problems of distinguishing between, the choice of words reflects the bias. It is curious to and educational handicap. In the last analysis, it makes little difference how sterile, clinical, or innocuous attracts adverse connotations owing to many factors, readers can remember the days when it was flattering to be (or have one's children) designated exceptional. whether exceptional still carries what I must regard, personally, to be the unconscionable semantic distortion, justification. For the same reasons, leprosy is now crazy, mad, lunatic, demented, etc., are now categorized is something wrong with the afflicted nor, in the long run, our attitudes towards them. For some reason, if I call it the big C; a myocardial infarction seems less has more equivalents, at various levels of usage, for an article elsewhere in this issue). But the fact is that there is a recognizable problem or a collection than a defensive gesture stemming from our own discomfort armchair analysis of my own). The defining of a concept like `specific learning disability' is far more than an intellectual exercise, for the applicability of laws listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical p65083) rely on delineating such afflictions. Some neutral (at least for the time being), are in keeping with the view of the human intellect taken in these be the result of injury, of disease, or of congenital defect. The inability of an individual to master simple us, like reading and writing, yet to be able to perform is still more of a curiosity than predictable from a chemistry of the brain, through its physical mapping is proceeding apace. In a recent letter in Nature, have been taught to accept that brain cells are incapable to experiment with the stimulation of healthy parts of the brain to perform functions that atrophied or Learning Disabilities does not treat all of them in depth, it provides a thorough overview of its subject, the field but as an important source book for those contains close to a thousand references. I suppose I must describe the book as a text, but it is well organized and interestingly and clearly written, both attributes phrase to be in the picture had been stolen from me. `to be in the foreground, to play a prominent part.' hardly counted, I was scarcely noticed. It was a nice, know.' I was annoyed, I was embittered, for I foresaw necks, while the original, genuine English expression literate people, whose sayings were easily taken as to be uncritical and snap up everything new, accepting `was descended from or caused by it,' exactly in the the old likewise and crosswise family was joined by apply for a job hopefully because you were `full of soon being used in a quite different sense, viz. to hearing It's a bit much for the first time. This turn of phrase became very popular in the war, though it had a perfectly good English equivalent: It's a bit too much. In any case, it was a bit too much for me. written that in an essay when I was a boy at school, English idiom. It was not, in any case, a thing that and the question is not easy to answer. The fact is that English is, idiomatically, an extremely subtle language, with many taboos, particularly in the area hard to find a logical explanation, yet these subtle distinctions are part of the spirit of our language, and it is this spirit that is easily destroyed forever, English will soon be reaping rich harvests. I cannot the conclusion that German has been even influenced what you learn in such a school is obviously skiing. now under way in the English language: the disappearance used to express possibility (or sometimes permissibility), talking about here is not ability but possibility: It course far less likely to use this from in English, for idiomatic in English. In any case, one hardly hears anything else today but these can forms, which have the loss of a valuable distinction, and in fact the slow distressing as the loss of the elephant in the zoological effort on the part of all lovers of the English language, employment of plurals in an adjectival sense. It has a noun into the singular when it is used as an adjective carols in the plural. This rule is upheld even when a being broken more and more often, and the rot certainly still has a little feeling for the English language. Do I need to mention that the German for these expressions lack of feeling for English idiom. As it is, I dare hardly scrutinize English publications any more for have not taken German as a model is a major catastrophe: million,' and that is exactly what it is in German as and German. Alas, all clarity has gone by the board then as The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting sent a review copy, I didn't bother to open the book. I did not receive a review copy of the Penguin edition. considering it is a reprint (albeit with some addenda) with citations. The editing has been rather careless, though, as the opening line of HOW TO USE THIS DICTIONARY to the unusual words selected but to their usage by the author: in the Introduction he refers to an episode day the US Marine Corps issues behests for Bachelor's assume are those who had offspring before the author is defined as `fucking as a pastime,' the last three words of which make in inaccurate; the usual spelling to use a fishing technique involving the use of only the hands, to grope is not quite correct: it is `to (try to) catch a fish (esp. a trout) by tickling its underbelly' of which the preceding are only a sample. The interesting is largely a spoof on linguistic pedantry, and I fear divine from the context, or failed to find elsewhere. two earlier editions and are craving more. If so, they might be induced to buy this edition because it contains reading this book, but it is hard to think of any at the subject is felt to be a sort of black magic, a mysterious English, from the parts of speech to the phrases and clauses, ultimately applying their knowledge to usage, forgotten. And if students are slipping structural these problems: John, you should use the possessive phrases, or clauses. Ultimately, though, our initial descriptive English grammar, they are frequently assigned four phrases and three subordinate clauses that are phrase, participial phrase, gerund phrase, infinitive noun clause. These units may occur in any order in the fewest words possible. (Before continuing, the reader may wish to try this feat, too.) An hour of reader to identify the structures, which will appear from a Fourth Form (tenth grade) English class that met a few rooms down the hall from my class. I entered The next morning I marched into the rival classroom could I ever again face my colleagues and my students of grammar is dry. It engages not the passions. Resolving clause within a phrase in the first five words, and all the structures as concise as they can be, but, with and clauses. This sentence was traveling at the speed of light. I could become no smaller. Or so I thought. learned lecture proving that we had reached the end then explained that he too had discovered the formula as a dangling modifier. Still, I have never been able hands up the bat, and there isn't any wood left. Actually, If you move, please tell us. Send old and new addresses sentences), but more important, as one who continually from my mental lexicon, I consider this book a real the popular `reinvention' of the standard dictionary work crossword puzzles, this is a must book for the I often find myself groping for words that are right (ulcers), I have difficulty in remembering these particular words. I have occasionally confused a hematologist (the study of insects). Now that I have succeeded in getting you to see that a reserve dictionary is much shares some similarities, its purpose is really to list give you the word that you have forgotten, confused, definitions presented in any dictionary, so this work is not different from many others in this respect. For called a heavyweight (p.274). I do not think I have consider that wrestlers are also divided up, according boxers. To my knowledge, these terms are not normally used in professional (dare we call it entertainment) awkward linguistician (a term to be avoided). Also, I fail to see how polyglot (p.133) can be defined as `language mixture' since it merely refers to a multilingual languages, a process of language simplification (although or bungling person, and that is indeed what you have how he got the idea for the book in the first place. perhaps even more sense if they were read backward. dictionary! If you like words (and are looking for a book is definitely for you. About the nicest compliment goal is to increase your vocabulary. As any reader of rarely get through more than the first few chapters of such tomes. This volume, I am happy to report, is different. I recommend it for those (as the book's cover observes): who want to speak more effectively, gets the book home and proceeds to memorize polysyllabic dull at best. Then the student gets through the mechanical waste of time because the words and its meaning are How does this book then differ from the competition? For one thing, the author has taken as illustrative entries). For another, the definitions are, on the whole, well written and to the point. For example, composed of material or ideas gathered from a variety Live artillery shells, a dead sea turtle half the size are well done; there are, however, some significant Some of the book's lexical entries are questionable. wrong on this point. I do not consider the word nosh doubtful that one would encounter it on an SAT examination. are now, unfortunately, left off in many publications, way things are going in many periodicals, diacritics there that are not entirely wrong yet with which one pilot in World War II; the airplane or pilot in such an mean `a pilot' because I have to say `Kamikaze pilot' many places. I have never understood why the International dictionaries of all sorts, but this is beyond the scope of our remarks in this review. I would certainly recommend Short essays on verbs of action, puns, slang (we are do not see the point with these two words, the book technician, usually electronic technician `one familiar since the invention of the automatic telephone exchange It operates by electrically acting as if the receiver top recess (cradle) of the main portion of the telephone jiggling (jiggling) of the hook switch, which is the same action as far as the telephone exchange (central (placard) on an instrument for a switch that adjusts Rotary phones have the familiar dial, with a circular by the pulse method; although it is certainly technically to mean the modifier added to a previously specific a new technology. I cannot add anything to his excellent were, indeed, what are now known as analog (or analogue) the objective processes, used in such devices as gun quantity. Rather, it embodies a continuous physical process that is an analog, often in a different medium, quickly. When dealing with a continuous process, it Analog and digital timepieces are, in fact, computers motion of the Earth. The fact, however, is that both are analog computers. The analog process in a mechanical the oscillations to determine the passage of time and transform the analog signal into a digital one. They differ only in the method used to display the results. hands. The digital watch simply prints out the numerical the terms analog and digital watch intended only to describe the display, not the underlying physics or standards that operate by counting discrete particles paragraph is incorrect in horological usage. Strictly mechanism to sound out the time at regular intervals. as the others in the same paragraph of my letter, was be correct! Offhand, I do not recall the proper way enormously fat man. The student was rather surprised find the derivation but given up, as have other standard used in pathology for an abnormal softening of part any reference to masturbation.) Another, apparently order of highest percentages. Considering all that I States, settling mostly in the cities mentioned. The not polite) speech, much like our Don't give me that spread around the country, if indeed it did? VERBATIM readers may be able to contribute further suggestions hundreds of others, constantly used by French technicians, Lest the national language be eventually supplanted divert the linguistic polluters from the path of sin. from presenting his admonitions in an easily digestible Language. Through subsequent legislation each government respective spheres. The use of these terms is statutorily in all business correspondence and advertising (including ones whose use is obligatory for certain publications only). To judge from this batch, the purge is going to be less radical than one would expect from a system professedly resting on the tenets of linguistic protectionism. identical to their English counterparts (in spelling, that is: this regime rarely interferes with pronunciation). cases, slight spelling changes have been applied, but home planet. But then, it is modest compared to the created by literal translation of the imagery embodied for (nuclear) `fallout.' Application of this method to be rather explicit, and their components are generally strung together by all kinds of grammatical particles lack the pithiness and sprightliness that enliven such a great deal of scientific and technological terminology `strafing' are of course correct, but they sound like punctilious definitions rather than handy appellations. tantrums, like `tweeter' and `boomer,' or `wow' and and wordy phrases of bureaucratic facture. Many an entry had already had a life of its own before a ministerial French seem to have a relaxed attitude to the disciplinary personal preferences, and `what others do.' In one respect, however, they are unanimous. They stick to an odd collection of English words which have a different for `dinner jacket' and slip for `underpants.' The choke in an automobile is still referred to as starter A people's culinary eccentricity has often determined comes to know them. The predilection for the flesh cited by many etymologists in explaining the origin of the appellation Conch for a `native or inhabitant seems possible and may explain another etymological curmudgeon is usually chided for translating Exodus few scholarly works to which to refer, but I looked use in this passage is translated without some reference to this verb that the primary syllable should be compared first rays of the rising sun to horns; and hence call Testament to mean: to praise, extol, magnify, celebrate; dignity and worth of some person or thing to become In any case, his translation, in light of the foregoing, let us consider that so impressive a linguistic scholar learn languages as early as possible, dropped me into whatever that was, I hadn't the faintest idea but obviously this, I realized what I had been supposed to be singing. my old computer, I asked a few friends to recommend was particularly interested in one that would allow me You Get,' in other words when you designate text to print in boldface or italic type, it appears in boldface hope is merciful brevity) that when you buy what is pieces of equipment (though they may be combined in slots in the front and sockets in the back, which is the the usual buttons; and a keyboard, which looks like an sold today, has a number of additional keys alongside those for the familiar alphanumeric characters. On side is what is called a number pad, which resembles the key arrangement one sees on an adding machine or calculator; on the left side is a double bank of five keys functions, some of which are useful, others of which are evidently thought useful by the manufacturer but the trade because that sounds more impressive) that allow them to be connected to one another and into a power source. The trick is that they will not do anything that, the DOS, as it is called, performs certain functions, specialist would want to perform. In order to do something package consisting of a number of diskettes and a manual. item is called a diskette, for that matter), but all square sealed envelope of rather tough plastic with a hole in the middle and an oblong slot on each of the a lie: as the only person who probably ever measured square; that may seem irrelevant, but it is only the beginning of the Great Deception. Inside this square placed in the slot of the machine, a motor engages the center of the disk inside and spins it around at a great speed so that portions of it are exposed through its oblong slot, allowing them to be read by some device inside the box. The diskettes that contain programs have information on them that the computer understands that make the machine do certain things. The things done depend on what kind of program is on the diskette. FRAMEWORK II. It is quite versatile and, as I required, allows me to create certain kinds of files in which I am able to style the text as I wish. (In case you are interested, styles, which appear on the monitor screen in a close anything to do with underlined italic, underlined bold italic, or some of the other styles described, but you have to remember that those are merely regarded (by me, at least) as a means for discretely coding styles abominable manuals with directions for using the programs good computer (laser) printer, who told me that his month. I pointed out to him that if he made available a proper manual he could probably reduce the calls by But the foregoing is all preliminary and background called the Spelling Checker. I do not need a spelling means for proofreading text that has been keyboarded and stored. The way it works is this: after completing keys and the program automatically scans every word of text, comparing each with a dictionary contained in the program. It is not really a dictionary, of course, because it lacks definitions; it is merely a word list. You cannot display the entire word list to examine it, but, performs this comparison checking very, very rapidly: it takes only a minute to proofread a file containing in its repertoire, it offers a choice of actions: at the stroke of a key or two you can ADD the word to the list; GO ON and ignore the word entirely; or EDIT the questionable There is another option called SUGGEST, which, if invoked, have had in mind when you wrote the one that offended cannot have a very sophisticated list of words if it has interesting to see what suggestions it might make as substitutions for the words it disliked. In each listing below, the boldface word is the word that FRAMEWORK disliked; the words following are the substitutions it suggested. Where ellipses occur, I have not bothered to copy down the entire list of offerings, selecting only incongruity of the choice or because I could not, in my wildest flights of dyslexic, schizophrenic fancy, imagine the criteria employed in arriving at the selections. I am fully aware that some of the words in my text are included those anyway; your attention is drawn, particularly, .Well you get the idea. I had some fun substituting I certainly do enjoy some bordellos or beauties with As if the preceding were not enough, I also noticed, offer choices if the word was in its memory, that oligopsony Spelling Checker; I am not sure I would want to hear lost the information about the price but recall it was labeled Installation and Program, the other Synonym everything with clarity, and the program is simple to install, requiring only a few minutes. Only one thing made me a little suspicious when cranking up the system: in the descriptive text that appears on the screen, these words would fare. I looked up the word preceding and was, after a brief moment, asked to type in the word, which I did. The screen bloomed forth with the definition for the preposition and three for the verb (participial) senses. I called up the synonyms for the The way the program works is this: one uses the cursor to highlight a particular word for which synonyms are desired. It is similar, in principle, to finding a synonym in a synonym dictionary and then successively looking up its synonyms to find their synonyms. I am not sure what appeared on the screen was the same list of synonyms reappeared. If all this is too complicated to follow, let A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. You look up the synonyms for identical in wording to that of the word originally clever computer ploy, but it does not provide a particularly synonymy in language does not yield to the mathematical are equal to each other. Perhaps the Proximity people thought that they had got round that little problem by giving the same definition for each of the items in the list; but we know that only very rarely are two synonyms just because ingredient means `constituent,' not all meanings of constituent mean `ingredient,' an ineluctable If a relatively limited access to a synonym dictionary is likely to be of use, then this package may be of service. It works with a hard disk or with a set of when I received my copy; it might have increased.) It also has a few neat features, like suggesting a few alternatives if you happen to think that preceding is your computer to use it in preference to the far more complete books of synonyms available (especially The synonyms, more than three times the number listed in entries. My guess is that such a quantity might be reached if one counted all the permutations and combinations; fewer actual words. Readers can judge for themselves Since then, I have updated FRAMEWORK II to FRAMEWORK zillion operations a second, I am planning to add RAM speed with which I change my mind. Move over! Make have the resources required to employ people (especially you said [like, I have a business problem] is a lot of bullshit.' That might be perceived as reflective of a rather cavalier attitude toward prospective customers' spent on a court case which has been brought in the a businessman, on charges of insider dealing, after a to severely restrict the scope for prosecutions of insider bid for the company. He had claimed to be interested Fisher had not actually obtained price sensitive information the court, and slavish adherence to these should be avoided if the result is to frustrate the intention of delicatessens that appeared in the Magazine Section salad. Staff are perhaps too irrepressible. Me: I dots mark hyphenation points; the standard calls for a dot between the n and the a, not the o and the n. Queen's English where spellings differ. No comment result from differences or variants in pronunciation. For instance, if a Brit pronounces the word (as many picked up on the Rialto in The City, reported that a blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of school experience? Could you barely wait until you stuck with a family name that the dog wouldn't even thought the sufferers have the better time of it. They are usually the center of attention at parties and at significant to me at an early age. It was the year I the cabin next to mine at summer camp. I listened in fascination as each camp counselor and administrator ears when she simply despised it. I was oblivious to her moans of disgust. All I wanted was to follow her everywhere to listen to others say her name. Coming I longed desperately for such melody in my life. Her for four months. My destiny was quietly locked into great reading for anyone with two or three hours of spare time. After all, names are not just read: they must be savored, rolled about on the tongue. Since listed in the publications that have passed over my publishing firm. These are names that catch the eye and the ear, and make beautiful music of their own. juxtaposition. Most can be categorized; others must stand alone. As for pronunciation, just say it the way you see it. However, whatever, these are real folks, [say it fast W. Oh N. Gesundheit Sylvan Stool E. Rump D. Purpura the man said. Did he have a point? Well, I do say would never write All thru the nite just to save four before concluding that there was no such place and what they really preposition? Do I belong to a race of fusspots who decorate their sentences with words that don't matter? alone. His belief turned out to be so widely held in Let us question it now. First of all, think of five and phrases? Are their sentence structures so ornate think of a few people who are guilty of those linguistic seems to be to build up the number of words or syllables in a sentence at the expense of its color, vitality, but the rules of airline English state that whenever a stock, useless phrase may be inserted into a sentence more honest. Its euphemisms are so blatant that no blandness and inefficiency, the words situation and often as possible. Unfortunately, the practices of military and airline staff are contaminating the language they, I believe, who are mainly responsible for this way of expressing themselves. You know the sort of acne all over their sentences and at this time has deteriorated one is ever specifically identified or accurately described. being the boss, the leader, or the headmistress, only In fact, it is already here. The battle is on for truth, clarity, and the elegant way. Just as the staid, old Mugger for instance. How ever did we manage without ground. There are, however, encouraging signs that Perhaps it will not be too long before the man from therefore shielded from accountability and the prying eyes of term or description from among the Answers provided. To make it harder, cover the Answers. The solution (b) Cheliform (f) Maillot (j) Sublimation national heritage, and are not to be altered or forsaken years and a lot of money to get a missing s restored to the official version of his surname, so that now, situation to form a pressure group and now, after a long struggle, the government has caved in: a recent can now safely come out of their bunkers: they'll be the state cedes them. But in doing so they are going Onomastic Society. Onomastics is basically the science exercised by the fact that three centuries from now Men are free to pass on their names as much as they remain childless. Add to this those perverse types who voluntarily renounce such fine family designations of the population, will start demanding the right to of the local phone book reveals the presence of the our municipal musical school is overseen by that genial her care accidentally drowns. Some blast the film because it uses a child's death "as merely the first manipulation of many meant to engender sympathy for "an emotional depth and psychological acuity that place it in a category by magical and magnificent memoir" and unfortunately becomes "something resembling a conventional tale of a gifted young man's struggle to lift himself out of version of the novel, but you still get a drama that has you laughing and site includes a list of helpful dating tips, such as "Don't be afraid to On one hand it "knocks the Rocky tradition on its ear by giving us two film culminates in a gruesome fight between the two stars that leaves several critics bemoaning the confusion over whom to root for; others contend that the scene's emotional conflict works in its favor. (Click here to watch the trailer.) dripping with slaver by the time reviewers finish with it. Set in famous portrait that shares its title with the book. Something of an entanglement develops between the intelligent, artistically aware young girl and the painter, but the book is in no way a conventional romance; it's "a crazed hilarity [it] could very well be the best new sitcom of the season" (mother shaves father's back at the breakfast table, etc.) with an find out more about the show at Fox's official site.) turns out that the young man who looks as if he walked out of the pages of the door, I ask him if, in the three years he says he's lived here, he's come to know any of the French people in our building. He finds the question amusing. "I prefer to keep to myself," he explains. "And so do they." Clearly, long awkward silences are punctuated only by unsettling smiles and chilling anecdotes. We ask him if he knows where the nearest market is; he responds by comes from the bones of the people Napoleon dug up from the cemeteries and reburied under the city. We laugh. He smiles in his strange, unsettling way, The old woman next door who leaves on her gas burners, and who will one day, he insists, blow us all to bits, is just the start of it. There is also the French handyman who does the work on our side of the building. "French handyman" Discomfort. Disorientation. Anomie. Whatever you call it, that is the sensation prove it many times each day. Our simplest activities somehow become pitched sidewalks are obstacle courses of dog shit. To make the game of avoiding the dog shit really interesting, the locals turn it into a competitive sport. They come at you in packs and refuse to yield ground, even when they clearly lack the right of way. If you want to get anywhere on foot you have to at once leap over the dog shit and burst heroically through oncoming hordes of French we have next to no ability to determine what is normal and what is noteworthy. Take the famous storms. They struck three days after we arrived, without windows rattled madly. When I got out of bed to have a look outside, I found a nearly in two. I went back to bed, assuming that it must be just a typical street, shattered glass on the sidewalks, and cafe awnings ripped in two. We stepped over all of it without giving it much thought. Oh, that French weather! trees, that we realized something was afoot. The highest winds in recorded the curiously disoriented mentality of the newcomer. It's childhood all over who believe firmly in reading the instructions before assembly. For the past two months, she's been poring over one or the other of our nine books on how to get along with the French, from which she passes on to me the occasional tip. For a while, I dismissed these with an almost Gallic aloofness. Finally, she was called. Sure enough, it was filled with advice: Don't smile randomly. Avoid being likable. When a French person says "Everyone likes him," what he really means is "He's a failure." If you must cross your legs, do it carefully, as a woman does who is wearing a short skirt, not sloppily, like a golfer at the you do bring flowers, make sure they are not yellow flowers, as a yellow flower is the signal from a French guest to a French hostess that her husband is cheating on her. (Subtle!) Above all, never use the toilet when you are out to pee when they need to and will not think them barbarians for doing so. Not so, on it went. The general drift of the advice was that, with one exception, if warmth and directness for a cool and aloof manner. The exception was if you wanted to have sex. They do that here, too, apparently. A long section of the book was devoted to the sexually charged nature of French public life. The women they approve of what the author calls "The Look." The author describes The Look thusly: "The Look from a stranger, maybe passing her on the street or in a car, of an unmistakable intensity that lets her know that for that man, daily life, I will cultivate a Look of my own. "I will practice The Look on old French ladies who are happy to have any old look at all," I say, "and then, as I get the hang of it, move gradually into the big leagues." irritates her immensely. "Out of that whole book," she says, "all you came away says, that he met his "only true hero" and began a lifelong love affair with of life, love, and loss with reassuring replies, always beginning with the familiar greeting, "We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed remembers it as though it were yesterday. Sort of. She vividly recalls what bit vague on other facts and details, when she writes, for example, "I think occasionally beckon him into his office and, with a smile, offer a dry remark snap his butt with a rubber band, and yell, "Special delivery for ya, phrase sparkle on the page. Not so to the man who sold him his candied nuts. New Yorker offices, remembers him as a cold, taciturn man, who rarely much of their days roaming the office halls, striking up spirited discussions occupied the floor immediately below the magazine, the era was marked only by a loud, unceasing trudging overhead. "Intellectuals are all well and good," miniaturize themselves and have themselves injected into the great editor's bloodstream. By traveling up into his brain, they discover the awesome secret governments to fret about digital signatures, and inspiring endless speculation about how online ballots will eventually revolutionize politics. It is the big idea that will change voting a huge amount someday. idea that could change voting a small amount now. Its online voter registration voter registration, at this point, isn't quite what it sounds like. You cannot register to vote online. The concern about digital signature verification that is delaying online voting prevents online registration as well. What you can do filled in. You sign the form and return it to your county election supervisor. the library, post office, or department of motor vehicles. (Several companies, Ultimately, online voter registration (even in its current form) is most promising not because it saves time and money for voters and governments, though it does. Online registration really serves those who conduct voter candidates routinely spend enormous sums of money and time on voter registration drives without any guarantee that they are helping their cause. Organizations that sign up voters can't stay in touch with them, can't remind the newly registered to vote, and can't ensure that the new voters will remember their cause if they do vote. A voter registration drive is online registration middleman. Instead of conducting its own voter registration company's application, which is currently available at the Rock the Vote mailed a printed registration form and an envelope addressed to their local election office. They proofread it, sign it, add a stamp, and drop it in the registers a voter at a concert or on a campus, it loses touch with her to look for the form and noting that she is not registered to vote until it is her if she plans to be in town for the election and providing instructions for acquiring an absentee ballot. One week before the election, she receives a more likely to boost voter turnout than either traditional voter drives or a political Web site are more likely to turn out than folks who register while reminded close to Election Day about the issue that made them register in the first place. It's not going to revolutionize politics, but it may send a few more people to the polls to cast a ballot for a cause they care about. the modern world. Why are you lagging behind? Why do you allow yourselves to be regarded as leaders without talent, leaders without a vision?" Who chided whom much as I admire Jimmy Carter, I think he was being a little hard on the family restaurant of media conglomerates. A clue to the popularity of such dullness can be found in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the the black and millions of frat boys into a swoon. Why, in an era of readily with sex, politics, or dinner can be exhausting. Each intense encounter demands alertness, ingenuity, and a willingness to overturn old assumptions. Each are essentially reassuring. Their appeal is their familiarity. They comfort the participant, reinforcing his preconceptions. That's the moneymaking way to warring factions for bringing death and misery to their nation, shaming it was especially critical of their not having included the leaders of all armed Turns Cold; People Don Hats, Gloves" photo captions from various news sources (except the third one which I simply made up). Participants are invited to news outlet during the current meteorological unpleasantness. Results to run mental institution and then finds that she can't check out. Although many note battles between patients and hospital staff, the film stays mainly on target, erudition, pageantry and delectable acting opportunities, much as "impresses with its freshly considered action and total avoidance of the stale feeling of the film results in "one of the few movies ever made that doesn't feel like a movie," in which the characters "throb and course with life" his hipster cred with this novel "by jumping on the already tired brand labels are just slightly faded," and the story feels "curiously clipped five columns an allegation aired on French and German television that one of businessman at the heart of the scandal, who then passed at least some of the admitted receipt of cash gifts from a French former business associate, was determination to stay in office. "The presidency is mainly a symbol," he wrote. "A presidency under criminal investigation that keeps its mouth shut in the face of serious public accusations tramples the symbol into the mud and has no so fond, he should have operated his ejection seat three weeks ago. He didn't courageous fighter and a courageous statesman a warm man among cold people, a sensitive man among the insensitive, a brave man among cowards." But it said when he said 'I look you in the eye,' his eyes were searching the paper in last night may be that he is too naive to be president." circles in the United States" had been "stunned" by the huge sums requested by official "numbers game" about casualties is losing any relation to reality. campaign owed its dreariness in part to manipulation by the professionals. "The got to take the first whack at weeding the field of candidates, and no sane system would ever have granted them the permission. But this time not even their rural cussedness can impart any drama to a race in which dollars and polls have done their work before any 'real' vote is counted." Traditionally, those who lost elections or opted out of public service after a long stretch have sought sometimes lucrative and often cushy appointments to corporate boards of directors. It's either that or lobbying. Lately, however, the flow of newly liberated politicos joining the Internet Economy is so great blunt, many of these folks know about as much about managing an Internet ignorance about servers and banner ads and cookies. But they do know politics, site, which will officially launch next month, is a nonpartisan "political action destination," one of a growing number of sites betting that average according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. liked the fact that they understand the biggest contribution they can make is to give people access to political information at the local level," he said. most prominent ones. Most people are concerned about local issues involving school boards, city councilmen and -women. That's where the real intense action profit. Their business models are all based on attracting a lot of people to officials. They all seem to believe they'll reach solvency by attracting advertisers, which tends to overlook the tendency of people on the Internet to turn to already trusted brands for information and commerce. ventures. Many said in interviews that these new sites that help put people in electronic touch with their representatives remind them of the politics of old, that's not the only thing that's appealing to the likes of former Reps. Tom presidential consultants, and former political contenders to the boards (and, less often, to the staffs) of politically oriented Web startups is so great that one would think they were giving something away. Oh, wait, they "You're seeing the inevitable cashing in of politicians on the Internet," joked of the advisory panel are guiding the technologists about politics and helping opportunity to be involved in politics, touch on policy, have some impact, and have a piece of a company that could conceivably do very well." will divulge the numbers of options they are getting. These are private companies right now. They don't have to make large stockholders known until the remember how many options he's been promised, and he really doesn't know if they're worth anything. (The rule of thumb is that they're only worth something if the company is a success and is acquired or goes public.) following to the Web. "But there is a little more noble cause in this for me. House, talking to people about how we can improve the quality of information and local politicians to bring out a big vote on caucus night. Each man had about where each man comes from and where he goes from here. populists who have contended for the Democratic presidential nomination over the past three decades, he echoes the valor and innocence of the early 1960s. looks instead to the programs and principles of the New Frontier and the Great Society. He preaches faith, boldness, and big solutions to national problems. He sees distrust of government not as educated skepticism but as uneducated "racial unity" without defining it, as though the very concept were as controversial today as it was then. His campaign slogan distills the idealism solutions failed or backfired, that the War on Poverty was lost, and that the racial equality that liberals promised in law remained frustrated by cultural and economic factors they had thought government could easily overcome. These setbacks brought discredit to the whole idea of government activism, converting practical failure into political failure. Liberalism became a dirty word. Democrats, banished from the White House, learned to temper their ambitions. caution can be frustrating. Why not guarantee health insurance for all "timid" Democrats who "nibble around the edges." With confidence and principle, goodness," in which all obstacles can be surmounted. Gore's entrenched assets battle on Gore's terrain. He poured millions of dollars into the state. He offered a vision of a better world, confident that he could win over the hearts unfamiliar terrain, the will to spend freely, the faith in hearts and minds. He spent years in a prison camp paying the price of those ambitions. He learned sees a world not of "new possibilities, guided by goodness" but of threats abroad and hubris at home. To those who believe gun control will cure school violence, he replies that the Internet is full of Web sites illustrating how to build pipe bombs. To those who promise big tax cuts based on projected surpluses, he replies that the government must first pay off its debts and the battles before him as tests not of manhood but of strategy and discipline. favorable terrain. The book on presidential politics says a candidate must over and over in his announcement speech last fall. But his strategic advantage is the opposite: Having proved his courage as a soldier, he can get away with I have a little more humility, but no less confidence that I can win and do the be warranted. But the humility may have come too late. Ivy League universities were overemphasizing the importance of SAT scores. For dumb. They're about ways in which these two are actually similar. Above all, was more flexible for top athletes, for alumni "legacies," and starting in the would probably have an easier time with this question than Bush, because as a Democrat he is not required to believe that "reverse discrimination" is necessarily a terrible thing, and because athletic talent can plausibly be seen cannot. But both examples undercut the argument against affirmative action. and Bush also illustrate the fallacy of taking the SAT as a measure of Bush, but because both have led successful lives and are patently better qualified for the presidency than many citizens with higher scores. college grades. Indeed, the test admirably predicted the freshman year academic Judging from their undergraduate careers alone, you takes into account personal qualities like drive and motivation, which may not be captured on the SAT. Affirmative action is likely to fail when it is merely a special preference bestowed upon those who have the right parents, whether athletic superiority but that he has made the most of his talents. No test, whether it takes the form of the SAT or a pop quiz on foreign affairs, is conclusive proof of a person's potential. Scores alone cannot be the sole basis for making decisions about college admissions, hiring decisions, or presidential elections. Affirmative action (even for athletes and preppies) sometimes has a place in this land of second chances, where anyone can grow up Pour ice water over myself in the middle of winter. But the horse has the bit in his mouth and won't be turned. Do they have fresh water there, flowing from springs Rainwater collected in tanks and saved for the purpose? Which town down there is better for serving rabbit, On vicious scandal he spread with impartial justice Gluttons and prodigals, saying they ought to be branded. "My heavens, this ragout of quail is simply delicious." But when there's something better and richer offered, You rich men live and dine in your splendid houses. justices were quite concerned with the size of something. What? distance from a homeless shelter that a family of four must remain if both wide a jail cell has to be before it constitutes cruel and unusual you please not stand so close to me when you ask that? And get out of my way. participants. Scorn for the court has been a consistent theme of quiz anniversary of the quiz. (Yes, there will be a party; yes, gifts are appropriate; and yes, my clothing sizes and preferences in porcelain figurines [drunken belligerent clowns] will be posted as soon as those lovable bumblers can no longer draw. And a third observation is that, judging by the higher than usual number of responses, quiz participants love an invitation to a penis how big a distance might be maintained between a woman going to the doctor and facility. Within that zone, people may not, without consent, approach anyone heard, and thus the law does nothing to curb "uninhibited debate on all topics." It merely allows a woman to go to the doctor without someone screaming very seriously. Almost every day a customer is injured while boarding or getting off of a train. They slip on the stairs or fall between the gap between very hard to raise Safety awareness of its Passengers by using simple, short Safety Slogans such as 'Walk, Don't Run,' 'Watch the Gap' or 'Stay Alert, Stay mining"?), and who have made enough money to do whatever they want (which seems politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, and journalists has woken up and capital to be near regulators. No one noticed as they wove seamlessly into the past five years are different: They are run by entrepreneurs, not lawyers, and business problems: a plunging stock price, irritated customers, "harsh economic fixated on national politics. "All they cared about was who was going to be the away, these guys are becoming billionaires and affecting average citizens more not their wealth. Homegrown fortunes have never impressed the establishment. also overlooked the nerd millionaires because the cultural clues are all preening quirkiness of the tech culture. "We were weird. We had guys putting up chandeliers in their offices or lifting weights or watching General White House. The techies labor like dogs on their suburban campuses, live near work, and spend what social time they have with each other. They couldn't be less interested in Capitol Hill's machinations. They buy boats, play the stock market, fiddle with software and gadgets. They buy mansions in Great Falls and he resisted efforts to relocate the company to Silicon Valley. executives are uninterested in politics (though Case is an exception). "They But in the last year, the two elites have finally realized nerd fascination that has captured the rest of the country. The Post is pouring resources into tech coverage. Scarcely a day passes without a party with tech leaders. Nonprofits are courting the new plutocrats in hopes of repeatedly says that policy will be more important than technology in shaping since he bought the Capitals. (Invitations he does not have time to accept: "I world. No matter how much money you have, power is going to be the main event. It is not like they are going to come in and usurp that." spoke to admitted that they were fascinated by Case and his confreres. Money hasn't supplanted power but may have matched it. An ambitious young lawyer hungry for power used to join a big firm, make partner, schmooze senators, and that his politician friends have been imploring him to get their children jobs a good living as a lobbyist or lawyer. Now they are coming because they want to daughter's was at our house, and I gave her a ride home. During the trip she sex with an older man?" and "Is it normal to 'play with yourself'?" The looks but the body is quite mature. When we got to her house, she hugged me and gave Beauty too many times. To protect yourself, in all ways, do not allow any situation to occur where you are alone with that girl. As for "getting her out of your mind," do understand that your daughter's friend's "plans" for you make you the next thing to a science experiment. You would be a notch on her belt and perhaps a candidate for her father to make your life a living hell. feel a little odd asking for help with this, but you seem to have the savvy to get me through this awkward situation. It stands thus: I am engaged to be married next year to a wonderful young man. We're both thrilled, our parents are happy, and our mutual friends haven't quit telling us that they "told us so!" This seems like all is well. The problem, though, is bridesmaids. I want to have a fairly simple wedding, but there are two people I can't imagine getting married without (not counting the groom). One of them is my oldest friend, who is now going to college several states away. I have always promised her she would be in my wedding. The other one is my closest friend in college, who has been there with me through the last four tough years. They're both as maid of honor. Is there any way I can split the title? What can I bridesmaids is usually a different bouquet and walking down the aisle first. Simply have their bouquets be identical and perhaps have them walk together. boyfriend and I plan to marry next year. However, we have realized we can't possibly receive any gifts, simply because our tiny apartment is just barely big enough for the two of us. Anyhow, I don't know how to say "No gifts" on the invite, because presumably people would ignore it. So is it appropriate to ask it is not appropriate to have the invitations say "No gifts, just money, refunds being most unusual. At some point you can select something you will have room for. Or you can use the credit to buy a gift for someone when the occasion demands it. Or you can sell the store credit, at a small discount of course, to a friend who you know is in need of purchasing whatever. And shout and swear at each other. Even though their abuse is never directed at me start job hunting. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle the shouting? shout at one's employer. In the situation you describe, that privilege phenomenon, by the way, with certain volatile personalities who work together. It is always a strain on bystanders, of course, but often the underlying relationships of the shouters can be essentially friendly. It is too bad when the lack of control and decorum in a place of business encourages job yelling duo that their form of communication is disturbing the rest of the office, but she intuits that the hotheads are in the habit and will not change. her to prove her claims, such as that I am "evolutionary psychology's of her statements are simply overly general, others simply false, while others are incomplete or take my thoughts entirely out of context. In general evidence for my claims and that I have developed a fairly elaborate theory based on evolutionary biology and evolutionary social psychology. how business media makes men feel inadequate. It's always been my goal to make other people, regardless of their sex, feel less adequate. This makes me feel waste to an entire generation of men" exceeds my greatest ambition in this regard. Here I thought they were just a bunch of losers. Instead, I now out of the entire rat race and become folk singers or something, or they can belly up to the bar and play in the real world where money is generally the accepted way we keep score. If they're tired of feeling inferior to the latter which might not be germane to this discussion, but will help me make more money, which is, of course, one of my most important resolutions. And anyone who reads my stuff without knowing I am frequently attempting to achieve irony should probably feel as inadequate as they do. "Breakfast Table" on the tabloids, I feel I must object to the glowing review in the city, but the fact that he can spin dross like the retirement of a Plaza doorman into gold does not mean he deserves awards or even praise. revolutionary about giving people control over data about them. Some don't care much about data about them. Others do. But that's the benefit of a property It is always the government's role to establish property regimes. Even my property to protect this, if it will help assure more control over private rights in our personal data. No website can steal my data unless I voluntarily agree to deal with that website. Some people will deal with any website regardless of privacy practices. Others will choose to deal only with websites that establish privacy guarantees. The market, in other words, is already working to accommodate consumer preferences and maximize social welfare with legal techniques, from contract to legislation to constitutional protection, carries over well to [the Internet], even after it ceases to be organized as vast public space, as it was at its outset. Of course there will be problems on the Net, just as there will be problems in any space to which any of have to A property right in our personal data? I don't know what you mean. Of course, a web site is not allowed to break into your house and read your diary. That's because of the law of trespass, not a law giving you a property right to personal data. If you go to a web site, it can take information about where you were, where you look, what kind of machine you use, other sites to figure out who you are, it can share information with that other "elegant," "lovely," "graceful," "generous," "luscious," or "smooth," I gag. and whiskey divide into smooth and rough. My wife is elegant, lovely, graceful, and even luscious. But contrary to what you read on the back of some bottles, Grove's chardonnay claims that its wine has a "superb nose." White Oak the same grape has "great character and distinction." Others describe tannins on one of those little cards that wine merchants put in front of bottles. "From the first sniff, one is impressed by the precise, deep but never bombastic creamy, vanillin accent of oak, and it is wonderfully balanced on the palate with ripe richness set off by firming acids and brightness." write this way? Is this what happens when your job requires you to drink before "fragrant," and despises "dense," which she says "doesn't mean exactly anything." Winemakers, she says, favor fuzzy terms for a reason. "The labels Having researched how people assess wine, Noble now teaches scientific techniques to describe it precisely. To this end, she has developed a lovely, impressive, and wonderfully balanced tool, which she calls wheel. The words found on Noble's wine aroma wheel do not make me sick to that she believes best describe wine aromas: fruity, vegetative, nutty, caramelized, woody, earthy, chemical, pungent, oxidized, microbiological, descriptions. A sophisticated nose might thus distinguish a fruity wine as smelling like citrus, berry, tree fruit, tropical fruit, or dried fruit. The outer ring ups the olfactory ante again, dividing these terms into such exact Noble's main aim is not to teach wine appreciation. Rather, she strives for a standard terminology that cuts through the babble of step in this process, teaching students how to link aromas to wine. It's a students pour wine into a bunch of glasses and then drop a different "physical standard" into each one. For white wines, the physical standards include clove, bell pepper, brine from canned asparagus, and apricot puree. The point of making these physical standards is to educate your nose to recognize these "From this point on, anything goes: Smell the wines first, smell the standards, start to see which terms describe which wine," was tackling the workout, she replied, "Your nose is going to start to talk to Following Noble's instructions, I put a little cheap white standard: peach puree, apricot puree, brine of asparagus, strawberry jam, wet cardboard, fresh strawberry, pineapple juice, soy sauce, green olive, melted butter, coffee grinds, fresh lime juice, cloves, vanilla, and shaved almonds. I identified the contents of each glass with a label, stretching plastic wrap over the tops to prevent aromas from escaping. Into another set of labeled glasses I poured three different chardonnays (which I expected to have smelled the untainted wines, and then went back and forth between the standards and the wines. "My nose isn't talking to me," my wife said. Next, each of us wrote down descriptions of each wine's scent, but limited our vocabulary to words that matched the scents wafting from the physical standards. Our daughter, who has great character and legendary intelligence, was a bit dense this evening and instead of describing the wines' aromas offered blunt descriptors such as "I don't like it." Fair enough. Interestingly, my wife and I listed different combinations of aromas for each of the five white wines under assessment. But when we spoke about the choices shifted the labels identifying the white wines to the bottoms of the glasses, where we couldn't read them, and then tried to guess which wine was which. Save Had I lost my wine aptitude or was my nose just fatigued? An hour later, I Although my anecdotal evidence suggests that Noble's method works, I don't expect winemakers to begin printing labels that brag about a label lingo to useful information about the winery's location, the soil in which the grapes were grown, and the climate. And make no mistake, a winery need not cram a label with absurd adjectives to sell a wine. Recently, I bought the Cold War, pundits entertained themselves with a parlor game called Politburo, Western analysts spun fresh theories about who was up, who was down, to. The triumph of capitalism spoiled the old game but replaced it with a new which are supposed to become the platform for all devices that communicate They interpret the "next generation" strategy, Gates' assignment to it, and his Gates is doing what he does best. On the Today show, Gates said The company's overall message is that the "next generation" project will determine the industry's future and that Gates is the genius who can pull it Cynics' translation: He's sinking back to his level of must have been worse at what he was doing before. Critics link this point to the Peter Principle, which holds that everyone rises to his level of that he's going "back to the garage," where he belongs. They attribute all good at: administration, finding new revenue sources, and avoiding bad his current job. Some say he lost interest because he made too much money and has nothing left to prove. Others say the antitrust siege, the attendant PR damage, and constant media scrutiny have worn him out. A few offer the ultimate macho corporate insult, speculating that he wants "more time to concentrate on contempt of those who say Gates is too coldblooded to put his family first. Gates is getting a puppy dog. The media always look for contrasts. Since Department negotiators and settle the antitrust case. He's the puppy who can go for a walk with his master, wag his tail, win over strangers, and help Gates irresponsible" and dismissing speculation about such a plan as "ludicrous." Reporters deemed his tone "strident" and belligerent. Gates isn't unleashing insistence that the handover has nothing to do with the antitrust case, dozens of market analysts, legal scholars, and reporters suspect that it must. They sacrifice, removing the "lightning rod" whose "seemingly disingenuous company's breakup. Many attributed a rise in the company's stock to optimism spin the same theory the other way: Gates, having been pulled over by the cops for aggressive driving, is sliding into the "passenger seat" and giving the Gates will retake the wheel. Gates is just "putting a new face on the team" who would work with "chief architect" Gates to "integrate" the company's products and services. Having lost top executives in recent months, Gates and theorists think Gates is organizing his commanders not to save the ship but to abandon it to the government. "They are putting their affairs in order," said know it and the creation of something new, then they would want to prepare Times speculates that "Gates would run the Windows operating system and impressing everyone with its ruthless practicality and wily resilience, it can't easily brush off rumors of plots. "One still can't escape the feeling agree: The only thing of which Bill Gates is incapable is coincidence. justices were quite concerned with the size of something. What? two men for theft of electricity. What was going on in the Martin was filming his triumphant return to the gay porn industry. Boy, that's some sort of shelter for the poor. Don't worry, though; they put a stop to a precise definition of electricity (particularly if you spent much of it seems to have something to do with the movement of electrons from one part of Long Island to another. Electricity enters our homes and offices and Gilbert, at least to my adolescent knowledge). Apparently electricity has famous experiment that no doubt proved something or other. This didn't make him them twitch and no doubt contributing to the bad feelings most frogs have about their place in the sciences. Not that they were so happy about their place in electricity. The pair is accused of tapping into Long Island Power Authority and carbon dioxide generators to stimulate the growth of pot plants in weeks instead of the several months required under ordinary growing conditions. attention to their operation. But heat dispersal was their undoing. Participants were invited to devise a photo caption city's dynamic new sports, entertainment and convention palace, which can be arranged in a variety of configurations for concerts (continued on Page to live in New York City, considers his latest response while enjoying a fish frigid chill as first lady announces she will stay with him 'for the rest of just let him die instead of stringing him along with this damn melting and two men for theft of electricity. What was going on in the warehouses? "Teaching. And what's so hurtful is not that they say that but that they make those nasty little pig faces when they say it."- Jay D. search or, like me, made up some data, you'd find that the two nongovernmental organizations most assiduously covered by the New York Times are the both, and it's not entirely jealousy. For one thing, within five minutes of meeting one of these guys they inevitably let you know: I attended the College l nuncio. Or the vanity disguised as humility: Does this vestment make me tucks, tooth whitening, wrinkle removal, and other cosmetic procedures. These vanity treatments, once scorned around the med school, are now enjoying increased respect because there's money in them. Doctors weary of the medicine to rich folks who pay for it themselves. "Now, in terms of survival, practice on Park Avenue. "And of course by 'survival' I mean able to afford a solid gold hat like the one on my pet monkey, over there in the Jacuzzi filled during the legislative session that just ended. Which of the following did she Police so damned sensitive about nonexistent bills. Hats, Gloves" variety that should run in any news outlet. Results to run blustery Arctic winds and walk in front of a bus stalled by frigid air, then stagger to the pavement, trip over a frozen dog, and break my spine. piece regurgitates the conventional wisdom on the presidential "believes Republicans were put on earth to cut taxes," etc. An rushing to develop medications that will stall the disease by slowing the brain story predicts that hell will survive, despite its downsizing. Pope that prosperity and nationwide effervescence have "softened the political culture." Both parties are advocating a blend of tax cuts and social father and to best the intellectual elite who bugged him in college. Bush is relaxed fiscal policy are sparking the boom. An article applauds a new circuit board inserted in their brains that will stimulate the visual cortex a tiny camera. The product could make the blind more independent. cover story calls for renewed dedication to planetary exploration. The program, which has struggled since the "national psychic letdown that followed the moon landings." Colonizing other worlds would be "the ultimate public apathy on the professionalization of politics. Polling has whittled politics into a science, and money has monstrously deflated the importance of refuses to divert public school funds to private voucher programs. His candidacy has started a healthy debate within Republican ranks. An upcoming caucus, his representatives deny they are even organizing editorial argues that the level of debt in Japan and the United States leaves the world's two biggest economies vulnerable to economic crises. story warns that the next debt crisis is likely to occur in Japan or the United States. Japan's stimulus packages have widened the government's debt personal income. Soaring private debt will "amplify any economic downturn." accounts and refusing to divulge the names of donors. Corrupt party financing her longtime girlfriend because he wanted to encourage lesbian parenting. cover story chronicles Al Gore's remedial education in politics. The early incompetence of the Gore campaign forced the candidate to eschew his ambivalence about politicking and come "to terms with his outer politician." Gore's political performances often "reek of the greasepaint he rightly scorns," but there are signs "that he can make a style of substance." decision to speak out against the paper's current management. Chandler's protest against the crude commercialization of the Times has made him "a folks who dress up conspicuous consumption "in the artfully tattered guise of cover story argues that Bush's record of crony capitalism is a poor omen for his presidency. Despite "catastrophic losses," Bush's oil company was repeatedly bailed out by businessmen who hoped to profit from his influence. By the same rate of tax. I also think that equal treatment by government is a disproportionately more the richer you are, simply moving to an equal system inevitably gives a break to the rich. I didn't hide this in the New York Times Magazine piece. I said so explicitly. But that doesn't mean I give the rich special favors. I give them the same favors as everyone else; and by combining a flat tax with tax reform, take away large numbers of their goodies complicated things simpler to enforce; but it's also true that in our very appeal. My point is not that the 40,000-page tax code isn't easier to enforce with technology. It is. My point is that the increasing cultural attractiveness contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine.] is, you might say, what social justice is all about. Old people get Social Security and Medicare. Poor people get Medicaid. Young people get Head Start college loans. Workers at the bottom of the pay ladder are guaranteed a minimum additional dollar matters less, and therefore society has a larger claim on it. read an unedited version of the entire exchange, click and scroll to the inconsistency of her own position. Claiming that "we are products not just of classroom teaching of the evolutionary roots of rape (even as a prelude to explaining the hows and whys of resisting those roots) on the grounds that you're genetically programmed to rape." The inevitable consequence: "criminal "we imagine ourselves to be" rational, sensible creatures capable of distinguishing between biological drives and moral imperatives, it won't help descriptions of those drives as moral justifications for giving in to them. young males (or hungry old defense attorneys, or jurors of all ages and "willed culture" over the animal model; rather, it is a subtler, richer application of the evolutionary psychologists' fundamentally wise observation: all, if we could truly will our culture to meet our ideals, then we could tell not teaching them the truth. We're teaching them a deliberately diminished view of human nature that has been useful in helping scientists Teaching a bunch of unsophisticated boys that this helpful little fiction is the gospel truth, that "men are driven to rape because their genes tell them to," as if we really knew why some men rape and others don't, as if we were in possession of the complete truth about human motivation, as if we had the beyond the mob and move on to North Jersey, which I think is close to the heart of what makes The Sopranos interesting. There is something about the place that makes it special, and not only because I grew up there. It could be everybody heads to the shore. (And can we get the Sopranos to the shore for an episode or two please?) But whatever the explanation, North Jersey is a place where people wear their ethnic identity (but lightly), and where the working with money continue to cling to it, rather than embrace elite culture. (They the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine.] caucuses don't reflect the national electorate, but went on to assess their significance. The consensus spin: Bush and Gore are now The Congressional Budget Office raised its estimate of the budget forecasts of tax revenue from the economic expansion. The optimistic spin: The extra money will make it easier for Democrats to accept Republican tax cuts, Republicans to accept Democratic spending increases, and everyone to accept debt repayment. The pessimistic spin: No, it will just give them more territory unexpected storm blasted the East Coast. Snow closed schools and airports models for the oversight. A recent study showed that the current La world's climate. If so, winters may be colder in the northern United States for cool the Earth and alleviate global warming. (Click for an "Assessment" study linked dual hormone therapy to breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute found that a woman's risk of breast cancer increases by most commonly prescribed hormone replacements during and after menopause. There of uterine cancer. Researchers suggested that more data is needed to determine which treatment has the lowest overall death rate. Doctors said they did not know what to recommend in light of the study's conclusions and advised women to His grandmothers contend that his mother's memory would be most honored by The Supreme Court upheld state campaign donation limits. The do not violate First Amendment rights, as "money is property; it is not speech." Reformers said the ruling showed the court's openness Western creditors may eliminate financial aid that is indirectly subsidizing any team can make the Super Bowl. Skeptics doubted that much second test of the Pentagon's missile defense system failed. The Pentagon one more attempt, the Pentagon will determine whether the missile shield can be percent. Optimists said the survey revealed the breadth and robustness of the economic expansion. Pessimists said it showed the expansion's fragility and warned that a bear market would bring it all crashing down. so she doesn't know any words. Still, she sounds as if she is practicing her scales. I crawl out of bed and tumble downstairs to turn on the heat, rigged by people, we now keep our smelly cheeses in planting pots outside. Imprisoned in odor; a minute later, whoever was on the third floor would shout in panicky tones, "Shut the fridge! Shut the fridge!" Relations with the cheese had her crib before she stops singing and becomes outraged. Coming up the stairs, I lifted from her crib. Rising, she smiles and kicks her feet as if something really great is about to happen. I try not to disappoint. Together, we draw the neighboring apartment building to see if any French people are doing anything particularly French. They are: sleeping. This is a nation of vampires; our a minute of staring at the old building, then swivels and tosses her warm little arms around me in her version of a bear hug. move to the changing table the mood shifts. The moment she is laid on her back, waiting for the tires to be changed. To keep her still enough to be unwrapped, cleaned, and then wrapped again, I must find ever more exotic ways to trick her into thinking something worth paying attention to is about to happen, right here, in her own bedroom. She never falls for the same trick twice. This watched less with amusement than with a kind of morbid fascination. The they sell at the local market and swishing it back and forth over my head mesmerized, I am able to remove one hand from the bag and do the dirty work, dancing all the while. A moment's pause in the entertainment and she's flipping herself onto her stomach, in a suicidal attempt to vault sideways off the beneath the low staircase ceiling, and plunge down the narrow, unbelievably bliss. She raises her arms and cheers and kicks up such a delighted fuss that I am reminded all over again what a dull pleasure I am to my own child. I am the coming from outside. The dog, somehow already possessed of a French dog's sense of her rights, is busy breaking down the door with her head. Sometimes, for fun, I open it just as she is about to strike again and she goes flying across the kitchen floor like a vaudeville comedian in a skit, crashing into the number is inflated by contributions that are mailed in but accompanied by collected.) But although online fund raising has yet to catch on in any serious way, there are six good reasons to believe at least some of the hype about how It's cheaper. Online fund raising is less costly than direct mail, phone potential contributors and convince them to write checks. Raising money on a pictures with wealthy donors. Companies such as Politics Online handle the donation transactions and instantaneously transfer the dough into the campaign It's faster. The Web reduces the otherwise tedious process of contributing to a campaign to a mere click of the mouse. By facilitating instant contributions, the Internet could help candidates capitalize quickly on early to remain competitive through later primaries if they do well in New plumb the same ranks of potential donors, the Web attracts fresh contributors It's cleaner. Candidates benefit from the perception that online donations are purer than checks written in response to personal appeals. This may be he improperly weighed in with the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of big contributors. Of course, the increasing tendency of political handicappers to cite the size of candidates' Web war chests will encourage and Gore's campaigns are currently doing with contributions that aren't really so beloved by school children, in the city's Natural History Museum. The diorama is wonderful: The "Torah" and "roasting Christian baby" are incredibly not merely a tourist attraction but a vibrant part of the city's life, with a rule, being evocative symbols of the capital but lacking apparent utility. yards from the Strip, so pretty much anything goes. And the shrimp having sex with a gun, but that was before I stopped drinking and started "Walk, Don't Run," "Watch the Gap," and "Stay Alert, Stay Alive" and feature little mockery and derision. Damn government bureaucrats. "Snowing, is it? It is? Good lord! We'd better ditch work made applying what you learned from your first search. (And I, for one, am objects to, but he's history, so the hell with him.) Euphoric with thoughts of cats, and they expect something more than a handshake and the meowed suggestion political expenditures as speech, the court determined that political decision might limit the influence of the very rich, or so I understand it. Geography aside, St. Louis is part of the East: It's more like for the part about her being an alcoholic. While it makes my head go all funny that she's not drinking, perhaps we should pay attention to what she says. called. And by whom. And then go over to his house and kick the crap out of fiscal future while cleaning up the moral mess of today. me to slip back into the alcoholic fog that marred my childhood, had any such commuter line he rides to work. Already taken: "Cleaning up the moral mess of believe is a bizarre coincidence, this issue of Slate contains two articles that take a benign view of fathers sleeping with their daughters. (Depending on when you visit the site, one of these may already be in "The Compost." But it will still be available there.) To publish one article on this tawdry subject may be fathers and daughters is an unavoidable subject at the moment, because of defense against vitriolic reviewers (among whom he does not include course, but he does endorse writing about them. (Next month we will publish a wife. Bob's daughters, we hasten to add, were infants at the time, and his practice of training babies to sleep alone by ignoring their tears of Accomplished," is mostly a highly educational description of two horses enough to point out (but we are), his piece puts all those stories about sleeping arrangements, whether among family members, animals, or both or neither. Who knows what mysterious forces led us down this garden path? As Noel something to do with Spring." Next week, though, it's back to the Future of forum, has always required user registration. The lawyers make us do this because participants are publishing messages to the world and must take some Fray, not to those who just want to read it. So from now on, you can enter the to do so. It's fun. It's free. And, in case you weren't aware of it, in the Web culture people who enter bulletin boards and chat rooms but don't join in the conversation are known as "lurkers." It's not considered sportsmanlike. At Slate, though, we don't mind. Lurk away. It's easier than ever. modest to have chosen one of his own. But you can sample his prose style in two officer of the Library of Congress. His or her duties include converting all public remarks by the speaker of the House into iambic pentameter (rhyming optional); composing ribald limericks about any lawsuits filed against the president for sexual harassment; and debating the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about whether a poem is lovely as a tree. Actually, keep another diary for us after his enthronement so that we can learn what it's all about. Meanwhile, his epic poem about fathers sleeping with daughters will offer a paper edition of Slate. Why? Because paper is a dangerous medium, all too prone to misuse by pedophiles, political extremists, paranoid conspiracy for mass executions. Those of us at Slate who are parents must naturally wonder whether paper should be allowed into a house where young children can read the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, Slate's preferred medium of the Internet has distant relation, perhaps, of the Heaven's Gate cult leaders, Do and Ti?) In the modern era, the practice of writing on paper was first taken up, and monopolized for centuries, by Christian monks, all of whom had taken vows of celibacy. Even today, reading paper products is a lonely habit whose practitioners often spend hours or even days at a time silently and obsessively turning pages, immersed in a world of fantasy, isolated from normal society. No Dick Morris). Yet society ignored the clues until it was too late. the vast range of content now available on paper. Much of this, to be sure, is harmless nonsense, such as the installation instructions that come with popular software products. But paper is by far the favorite medium of pornographers. Ransom notes use paper as well. Several years ago a scientific journal published instructions for building a nuclear bomb. Where? On paper! reality is dismissed as "virtual," the appearance of words on paper lends them rumor can be set in type, and then printed and distributed by the millions, with no guarantee whatsoever of its accuracy. And yet people say, "I only know what I read in the papers." At best, paper's materiality creates an unjustified impression of trustworthiness; at worst, paper can be folded into an airplane clothes in the bottom dresser drawer. Any page can be folded, placed in a pocket, and secretly transported or shared with other children. Books can even be read by flashlight in bed, long after Dad has requisitioned the family from corruption just because he is tucked in and offline. parents are responsible for what their children read. But no parent can moral is that children are never safer than when staring at a computer screen. At least you know they're not reading a book or anything. Second, government regulation of paper is clearly needed. We look to Congress for a Paper Decency Act, to close the giant loophole left open when last year's Communications Decency Act was limited to electronic media. Third, the recent ruling of the United States Parole Board forbidding paroled federal prisoners to use the Internet must be extended to forbid books, magazines, and newspapers as well. must use paper, please do so with extreme caution. Thank you. minister. The mistake has been corrected in the archived article but, as is our next week. In the great tradition of political and cultural journalism, the editors will spend the week lying on the beach, perhaps reading the odd scrap other ordeals ahead. SLATE is proud to be launching this hoary custom of summer editorial sloth into cyberspace. However, our computers will be on the job. (They neglected to ask for the week off in their union contract.) And they will happily serve up the current issue, plus a complete inventory of past articles and features (in "The Compost") while we're gone. New material will be posted over a month now, and in general, we're pleased with the reaction. Claims about readership tend to be even more dubious in the online world than they are in the world of traditional paper magazines. Counting Internet readers is an inexact science, lending itself to exaggeration. But here's our count, as honest as we can make it. Excluding our launch week, when the numbers were much figures don't include people who are printing out SLATE directly from the cover screen but offline. We never even thought of that. (Soon, though, we'll be offering an offline reading edition that retains some of the Web's reading SLATE. Readership declines through the week and is lowest on the weekends. We have designed the magazine to be most current and timely people would like to read it over the weekend. But maybe that's wrong. In any enjoy popping in every couple of days to see what's new, which is a more readership (though not necessarily of satisfied readership) is response. We've (though I think he's doing a fine, neutral job), he said the only complaint he's gotten himself was from the White House. In a couple of weeks, we'll be launching our bulletin board, "The Fray," where readers from the White House or any other house can bitch and moan to their hearts' content (though a kind word or two would also be appreciated). But it's already clear that we have just the kind of active, engaged readership we were hoping for. know more about who our readers are when free registration begins in two or three weeks. We're planning to tell advertisers that you're all highly of automobiles, designer clothing, books, records, military aircraft, and forgotten), has written that he's suspicious of anyone who talks of learning people's mistakes. Still, if you're going to make mistakes, you might as well learn from them. SLATE's made a few. Initially we were incompatible with cover and contents page, united by theme music, has not, in our view, been a success, and we'll be reworking that in the weeks ahead. (Meanwhile, many folks seem to be missing the contents page completely, thus missing many articles and features. You can skip the cover and go directly to the contents page, if you In theory, it should be great: a file, delivered straight to your computer, that you can print out (or read on screen) as the latest SLATE. At last count, prepared for was problems in sending it. We apologize, and hope that's starting weeks ago ("Electric Chairs"), about designing a chair for reading an online magazine, was one I was uncertain about. It surprised me pleasantly by Editors.") For the next week, though, the staff of SLATE will be emphasizing comfort above all in our choices of where to sit. And should these what the next century would bring. The newfangled monorail that ferried do with selling overpriced and overcooked food than it did with space or space in the deepest of its periodic slumps, dragging the entire economy down with decades after its fair, the city has emerged as an international destination for the ambitious and the fashionable. Visiting the city last weekend for a I went. Downtown was filled with people noshing trendy food late into the would be the next big thing. The science journalists attending the convention this happen? I wondered. How did this timber, fish, and airplane town of my isolated, provincial, insecure, and wet as it is connected, worldly, smug, and fishing for salmon from dinghies, or just prowling the mysterious undergrowth matter, who could blame me for decamping to attend college back East? In my as they watched ships, heavy with fir and cedar, depart for Japan and return money by extracting natural resources was capitalism for chumps. The way to get Several local fortunes were made based on this concept. A adding service, and took the idea nationally. A few musicians updated the music city (and this time, the city's rock 'n' roll stars stayed put rather from this playbook and start peddling gourmet wood. they displayed at the World's Fair. What they couldn't have foreseen was that local son Bill Gates and other software developers would figure out how to market bits of plastic worth just a couple of cents each (floppy disks) for before relocating to his hometown. I often wonder if the future would have visit. Now, the city's entrepreneurs plan to encircle it. year, the Space Needle looks more and more like a prop from a bad '80s, when the economic boom sprouted a host of taller buildings, it remains the city's symbol of progress. My family insists on calling the big black skyscraper that soars over downtown the "box" that the Space Needle arrived nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in that the name "SLATE" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is "The Fray," Editor" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a "beta" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to "flip through" the magazine or to and from the is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was "posted" and when it will be "composted." As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, archive, "The Compost."( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. "Assessment" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. monthly on "Everyday Economics," using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at Watch," which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. words "longer articles" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even "ergonomic" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine page spent the 1980s vilifying the whole idea of independent counsels as a scandalous waste of money and an unconstitutional infringement upon executive that it's a Democratic president under investigation, the Journal is naturally conflicted. Its former thundering constitutional anathemas are now all should hope for the best" is remarkably unhelpful advice. Is there any editorial ever written to which this last sentence could not be attached? for the best.") Have we missed some other juncture, in the course of human events, at which the Journal would not have recommended that we all hope for the best? Will the Journal inform its loyal readers when we may abandon the strain of hoping for the best and return to the less exhausting task of fearing the worst? Do we really need the distinguished Wall Street Journal editorial page to tell us to hope for the best? One might as well turn to the Journal 's news pages to be told to "buy low, sell high." always advisable to get a second opinion. At this juncture, we consulted Bill Gates. Would he recommend hoping for the best? At this particular juncture? "My dear fellow," he said, "Don't hope for the best. Demand the best." And this publication staged a contest in another publication to name the clumsy. This turned out to be wrong on both counts, as that scandal came to be racist, please, and nothing (once again) ending in "-gate" (unless it's triumph over adversity: new wife, new job, and so on. In the Times during his adversity period: "Even the courier who used to bring films to me at home said he'd be happy to bring them to me for nothing." What a heartwarming courier. If more couriers took a moment to show a bit of human compassion for Corp. (formerly known as Waste Management Inc.), a company he founded and has run for decades. We trust he takes comfort in the thought that his beneficiaries appreciate him even if his stockholders don't. to the arms of her husband. Our apologies to all three. faraway locales, so we appreciate their involvement in and dedication to Slate's community bulletin board. If you haven't yet entered the Fray, please give it a try. You must register in order to post a message (it's easy and weeks ago, with more charm than enthusiasm, about the experience of being this online, you probably got here by way of our new home page and "Table of Contents." We hope you like it. For a site as packed with contents as this one (and we speak only of quantity here), designing the contents page is a constant review Slate's current offerings. If you click on the word "Date" just below the Slate logo on the contents page, you'll get a straight list of current articles in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions on top. To revert to Contents Classic, click on "Page Number." And let us know what you previewed the new opening sequence for Bill Gates, who studied it for a few seconds and said impatiently, "How do I find the place where I have people killed every week?" We answered, It's usually buried somewhere in a column leaves it to the reader to decide how good the summary is. As journalists want our employer to thrive. (And doesn't everybody, really, wish the best for ordinary people. We are skilled artisans, backed by centuries of tradition, who pursue the noble calling of making writers miserable by insensitively slashing their lovely prose. It is one thing for machines to replace textile makers (the editors are imperiled, it is obvious that the technological revolution has gone few days of being forced to read unedited copy will bring this country to its reasons too vitally important to bore you with, Harry Shearer's dispatch on the readers may have been wondering how it all came out. We could have told you, of course, but we didn't want to ruin the suspense. We knew you'd rather wait and the first of a number of directives I plan to issue to that end. so key to success in the media and entertainment industries. media and editorial folks will conform to the following dress code: suggestion is that one piece of black clothing be immediately visible at all times. Not only is it a good idea and slimming, it can help us to identify the worn only under other items of clothing and only for the purpose of warmth on days that the thermometer in the cafeteria dips below freezing point at Certification will immediately launch a new series of courses called "Dressing for Media." Each course will take only one morning to complete, and I think spearheading creation of the Day to Evening Makeup Web site. (Though it was originally intended only for the internal audience, we hope to eventually Mission that has been evangelized for our division. Let's remember that it's choosing which shade of blue eye shadow works this spring. program to control the cost beast, they will not be connected for service. ago, the average Slate reader is intelligent, discerning, politically involved, culturally aware, and physically attractive. Also, of course, skeptical of cant and immune to flattery. But we'd like to know even more about you. Do you consume vast quantities of alcohol? Do you drive expensive How many times a week do you have sex? Would you be willing to pay for it? Say, ought to always be free?) Are you, in short, the kind of reader advertisers are looking for? (Please say "yes.") Actually, what we mainly want to know about is be grateful if you took a few minutes to fill it out. Thanks very much. entrepreneurial spirit, a boon to all mankind, a splendid example of employer benevolence at its finest, an institution beyond legitimate criticism of any beyond that, we take no view. It is unfortunate, therefore, that we were business and journalism, a brilliant track record on Wall Street, and a lively every word of Slate before publication, in an admirable effort to improve his vocabulary), his reaction was swift. "Have it killed," he observed Kill the piece!" But by that time, the review had already been loaded into Slate's "doomsday server," a device designed to ensure that this magazine continues to be propagated into cyberspace in the event of a nuclear war. Once loaded, an article cannot be retrieved. There was nothing we could do. Honest, posted in print that's too goddamned small!!") Honestly, we were only trying to help: Smaller type means more words per screen, and therefore, less scrolling. (Especially helpful, or so we thought, in consuming Harry Shearer's hilarious was not (clear, that is). So we're back to the normal point size, in a more legible typeface (Times New Roman) to boot. Readers were also clear in their removing the "links" discussion at the end of each piece. By an overwhelming margin, those who responded prefer to learn about Internet links, even when they're not reading Slate online. So we'll continue as before. Your wish is our many years ago, maintains its culture and loyalties without much consideration for national or civic boundaries. Its residents, solid and conservative in look and outlook, are often referred to as "square heads," which suggests a stolid cod that is treated with lye and is transformed, in the process, into a The question and the tone turned me snarky. Why the hell do ship traffic passes under the statue's gaze. Undoubtedly, it brings good luck a man still waiting for more proof than contemporary maps, detailed written more cocky these days, however, because the answer to my friend's question before we get to the science, let me introduce a pet theory of mine: that there unlike Viking ships. They were also fishermen and whalers, as many are today. have a rich mythology with characters and themes not unlike those found in the links may also be genetic or, at the very least, the result of ancient spear point was found lodged in his pelvis along with evidence of other warrior according to experts who have carefully examined the skeleton, that he was were ancient native relics, and federal law backs them up. They argue that creation myths. Imagine how they'd feel if tests revealed their ancient the edges, suggestive of a cube. Look for evidence of a crew cut and a search Slate, including "The Compost" (our archive), for specific words or phrases. Use this feature to find articles by a particular author or a reference to a particular subject. Slate Search is located on the Compost page, but search results will include current articles (within a day of their posting) as well as older ones. (If Slate Search isn't available when you go to check, it will Gates" (in quotes) will find articles containing the exact phrase bill Gates" will find only favorable references. To find unfavorable references, Indeed, we make these complaints ourselves. First, the list is not a very accurate measure of sacrifice for good causes, since it doesn't factor in a to suffer any diminution of their lifestyle as a consequence of having given finance new buildings at already wealthy universities. extraordinary generosity by people who, after all, don't have to give the money away, however painless that might be. And ranking by size of gift provides a useful objective measure. But we'd also like to acknowledge extraordinary generosity by people for whom it hurts, and to encourage more either the donor's name being inscribed in granite or his or her being honored standards. (Would that Slate's new search engine were so sophisticated.) But victimized by the Red River flood as an example of what we're looking for. This to put this request. We are looking for Slate readers, or potential Slate people fall into this category, and we would like to make sure they have the months, while it's still free. If you're reading these words on the Web, you're clearly not one of those people, but you may have friends or colleagues who are. And many of you are reading this on a printout, or (our spies tell us) on read it on screen, directly off your own hard disk, as many choose to do. Signing up is easy: Just go to the "Slate Help" page (or click here, you or would prefer not to perform this function (as the flight attendants like to (not essential, but helpful in straightening out problems), and we'll take it how willing are you to take a few minutes to fill out an online reader survey? are anything from mildly to extremely willing, we'd appreciate your input. And you may even enjoy the exercise. This survey consists of a few simple questions merely designed to strip you bare psychologically and to allow us to compile an exhaustive medical and financial dossier on you that could be used for unimaginable purposes. You may wonder, for example, why we need to know the answer to Question 47b: "When was the last time you cut your toenails?" Or comedy?" The answer is nothing nefarious or mysterious. It's simple morbid curiosity. Our publisher, Rogers Weed (and isn't that a name you can trust?) has an insatiable desire for knowledge. He watches tapes of old Bill it too. So, help him out, and fill out the survey. (Actually, it's completely dilute the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches in the name of fighting drugs." On this particular occasion, however, the Times searches the war on drugs cannot justify." The message was an 8-to-1 decision a urine test. The Times noted that "there is no reason to suspect a drug New York Times for moral guidance on all important issues were deeply the New York Times editorial page verges on logical fallacy. One might issue: Is there "reason to suspect a drug problem" among staff members of the Times requires its own new employees to take a urine test for drugs. At least one recent hire was told that flunking the test once would eliminate any chance of being hired by the Times --now or at any time in the future. When this person attempted to wash up after providing the required sample, it turned out the tester had removed the handles from the faucets (apparently to must be some explanation! It's true that the New York Times is not the doesn't make the policy any less "unreasonable." It's also true, of course, that a junior copy editor for the New York Times is obviously more vital useful to have the Times editorial page spell out the exact difference here for employers who must decide between doing what the Times says and artists, and paying subscribers must produce a urine sample under the direct grim ritual into a festive and sentimental occasion. Photographs are taken and posted on the corporate Intranet. For those who will be writing about individually in my office," Gates says with a sigh, "but the company's gotten we don't actually send any of these samples out for drug testing. We just sorta foreseeing that Time would repeat this device from last year, upped the to make it clear that three can play this game. We have, of course, the Therefore, we proudly announce that the entire population of the United Century. Our heartiest congratulations to each of you. And we are confident that Slate's list contains more people who will make history in the next government is insisting on the highest safety standards possible." that the highest safety standards possible are too high. You can always make (increasing the minimum distance between aircraft or time between takeoffs, cost, plus the law of diminishing returns, dictates that you stop well short of there is no reason every airline should meet the same level of safety. In fact, it makes perfect sense for discount airlines to be less safe than traditional the rules don't recognize that some people, quite rationally, will wish to buy less safety for less money, they are doing the flying public a disservice. Try some rough math on the back of an envelope. According from an airline "hub"). The standard statistic on airline safety is that you folks whose grounding in mathematics is sturdier and more recent), you're including the decision to step outside your house and risk being torn apart by hounds as you pick up the morning paper (you could, after all, hire someone to so desire. But society should not force them to do so. And society, in setting question of whether to require small children to fly in safety seats. The rule therefore, usually, fly for free. Flight attendants and other supporters of safety seats make a good argument that it's a bit odd for the government to require that coffee pots, and adults, be strapped down, but not little would actually cost lives. How? By leading families to drive instead of the car instead. Whereas the safety seats would save an average of one child's life per decade, the extra driving (far more dangerous than flying) would cost nine lives. Or so the study figured. Critics objected to the calculations, but the principle of thinking about safety in this way survives any quibbling about passengers last year. What fraction of that number chose to fly instead of drive because of the cheap fare, and how many of those would have died in vehemently that they are less safe than the majors, and the statistics show no clear connection between price and safety. But if there isn't a connection, that's too bad. Flying at a discount should be more dangerous. Otherwise, priceless qualities). She doesn't have a computer, but she'll be faxing daily answers questions about problems and possibilities in reading SLATE. "Ask Bill" Committee of Correspondence was redesigned on the fly, three days after our launch, when it became clear the original design (one very long page) was too cumbersome. Try the new model; we think you'll like it. Other design changes and "tweaks" will be coming along as this experiment continues. known around our office as "The Battle of the Curly Quotes" was fought this week. To make our pages more attractive, we had been using quotation marks and marks that are straight vertical. But it turns out that curly quotes don't show small way for the majority, or avoid a major problem for a small (but vocal) does SLATE "go to press"? Many readers are asking this, and the answer does take some getting used to. There is new material in SLATE every every article in SLATE stays "live" for at least a week, so you can read or print out SLATE on any day and get a whole magazine. And if you do miss something, you can always retrieve it (free) from our archive, "The disappointingly failed to settle the question of whether a camel can pass has moved on to new theological disputes (in addition to ongoing exchanges the National Center for Policy Analysis, is exchanging words with the editor of month for special Fray threads devoted to books. Because "The Fray" exists to preparation for asking questions. If reading a whole book sounds like too much Slate had assigned a couple of chapters to its readers, he roared: "It sounds "It is simply unthinkable an experienced officer would wear decorations he is not entitled to, awards that others bled for. There is no greater disgrace." decorations he wasn't entitled to claim: a Ranger Tab (indicating membership in journalism, his military decorations, and his general trustworthiness occurred last year. The Slate article went on to win a National Magazine Award, a new editorial features this week. Look for "Egghead" today, the Primer" is a weekly briefing on issues in foreign policy and world events. consulting firm that specializes in analysis of global political trends. lighthearted look at recent developments in scholarship and academia. Egghead updated whenever the fancy strikes, independent of Slate's official daily readers or, if necessary, download from his own head. The consensus of Jack's colleagues is that reader contributions are essential. A button on the "Chatterbox" page will make this easy, so please do join in. Memorial Day week will be written by Beck. The editor has no idea who or what this is. But everyone else around here seems quite excited about it. So maybe and they made their money cutting down trees, building airplanes, and selling shoes. Like the Cascade Mountains, they were "partially visible some of the sociologist once said. The Cascades are still a rumor for much of the year. But the rich have come out in force in this corner of the country once known for around the lake. Rather than disparage this trend or try to describe it with rubbed off on those who build this state's bridges, ferries, and nuclear reactors? Why is this whiz kid's paradise also the world capital of still, a marvel of suspension design, but for one rather obvious fault: Her delighted generations of science students as a demonstration of oscillating from hydraulic hoses that were being used to clean it. The hatches were high seas. (At least its pontoons were sealed.) The year before, the freighter later, when his wife shot him and torched his remains. country's largest ferry system. Even so, in the early '80s it built six repairs. Their electronic propulsion systems tended to conk out, especially when braking, causing them to smash one dock after another. On dry land, commercial skyscrapers, all of which remain standing, thank you. But this was a state project: When a roof support buckled, the whole frame tumbled to the 50-yard line. Afterward, the recriminations flew: Was a bad weld to blame, or state agencies wasted millions on a failed computerization scheme. While local they pale before the state's most expensive boondoggle (and history's biggest the old Soviet Union, where only the military and space industries functioned. public sector sinks bridges. Perhaps competence is a finite quantity, apportioned between the two sectors. When one gets too much, watch out for the the government can't build anything right out here. Amid political and legal renowned engineering triumph. It has weathered moderate earthquakes with nary a crack or untoward ripple, and looks as fit for the eventual big one as it did an inexperienced contractor who blasted the old foam off with water jets. The resulting leaks dislodged four ceiling tiles, which in turn prompted a roof for the ages, the county and state decided to raze it and replace it with budget, and that the retractable roof will work flawlessly.) Among the because its roof was "falling down." Ah, the things we'll do to snatch disaster snafus conspired to delay both our daily "prop" of new material on several days complicated! Just so you know how it's supposed to work (and usually does): Each day's edition is supposed to be available on the Web the previous evening weekend edition. This is the edition with the most new and updated material. It concern last week was trying to keep Bill Gates from finding out about these browser cache. Finally, though, we decided to tell him the truth. He took it Slate readers to help her choose a Secret Service code name superior to the one and begin with S, for some reason. Among reader suggestions (in "The Fray"), Gore reports, "Sultry, Sexy, and Sassy seem superior to Schoolmarm, Shapeless, not appeal, and Stripper and Stoner were positively alarming. Bottom line: She few days, we hope, that Slate's pages are being served up to you a bit faster. part of the morning, but that's a different story.) The reason for the increased speed is new Web server software. This is the software we use to it was time to upgrade, but we faced a dilemma: Which new server software should we choose? The software business is viciously competitive, of course, investigative team of editors, writers, developers, and a demographically other electrical appliance in the past three months). globe in pursuit of the very best software for serving you, our readers. In an made with whale blubber, as the natives have been doing it for thousands of Silicon Valley, they were wined, dined, and offered bribes by slick engineered laboratory mice. Could the mice design a Web page with working hyperlinks? Did they develop cancer or brain tumors? Did they turn into Internet bores? The software was then exposed to extreme conditions: zero trust games. An acupuncturist was hired to alleviate the stress of this momentous decision. Several team members dropped out and had to be replaced by (welcome!) and for regular readers who are a bit confused about our schedule (and who can blame them?), here is how it works. Slate posts new material every current contents list for a week. All past articles, features, and columns site. Those services are free. An actual paper edition of "Slate on Paper" Corp., we at Slate would like to offer the following declaration of our own policy and goals. This policy statement was prepared without consultation, and simply, is to own political and cultural commentary in this country, the industrialized nations, and ultimately in the developing regions as well. The whole world, basically. We will use any means necessary to achieve this end, including competition, both fair and unfair, wholesale buying up of potential rivals, strategic partnerships and alliances, strategic betrayals of partners and allies, theft, bribery, murder, and, if necessary, putting out a opera criticism, an analysis of the latest tax proposal, or a profile of some obscure academic, you'll have no choice but to come to us. Building on our domination of these areas, we will extend our reach into popular culture, gradually monopolizing movie and television reviews and interviews with brainless celebrities. Ultimately, our towering position, as well as economies of scale in the production of opinion and analysis, will make resistance futile. At that point, we will control the industry and be able to extract the rich monopoly profits waiting to be had from poetry, book reviews, essays pleading for entitlement reform, explanations of developments in foreign We are committed to producing opinions that are compatible with all standard political labels and work equally well for Democrats and Republicans. We foresee a day when all viewpoints on every subject are equally comfortable for anyone to swallow, and when the frustrating cacophony of today's political and from computers when we approached him a year ago to create a strip for Slate. He still doesn't know a lot about computers but, to our great delight, he's really got into some of the technical possibilities of publishing on the animated cartoons also use remarkably few data bits, meaning that they can be for an example. Mark also does the delightful jumpy illustrations for "Summary Judgment" each week. And all of us on the Slate staff especially loved his hope you'll find the revised layout more user friendly. advertisement for shooting heroin. The twist: The commercial is an ad for not shooting heroin. The waif smashes china and plumbing fixtures in the commercial, screaming angrily about how heroin will ruin your life. air over the next five years. The ads are produced by the Partnership for a parties in Congress, the biggest of big corporations and foundations, the slickness and pervasiveness of the campaign conceals one flaw: The stated goal is to produce and place ads that persuade kids not to try drugs, to flush days network time is at a premium, hence the requisition of taxpayers' funds.) The budget dwarfs even the public service ad campaign run during World In addition to the waif ad is one that depicts a little girl answering questions. Lesson: Her mother has told her not to talk to strangers but hasn't told her drugs are bad. In another ad, a father and son sit at the breakfast table in silence. Lesson: This time could have been spent talking about how attacked the efficacy of these ads. Indeed, no study conclusively demonstrates a link between them and reduced drug use. Few have slammed the hypocrisy of the politicians and the ad agency staffers behind this campaign, who can't all be drug virgins. But the greater scandal is the free pass that reporters, most of destroy lives. But for every person who has died or ended up in a gutter, millions have dabbled in drugs and still led productive, sane, successful tell your kids marijuana is "a bad drug that can hurt your body." it's true that marijuana smoke (like tobacco smoke) contains carcinogens and the medical data suggest it compromises the immune system and can also lead to admit to his son that he smoked a good deal of pot when he was young, still occasionally lights up at parties, and has turned out just fine. someone who does good work in a steady job, hurts no one, and once in a blue days. How can they tell kids pot is an evil gateway drug when they're stellar convince its audience; it need merely suck the oxygen out of the lungs of its drug debate. Now it stands to monopolize it, thanks to its ad dollars and its smokes companies, but even so, the alcohol connection remains: suggests, many heroin users are able to use their drugs and conduct functional lives. What makes heroin users' life so crazy is that their dependence on an tried it have had no trouble walking away from it. And pot? No one has don't lie to kids about alcohol. Everyone knows from an early age what it can start observing drug users for themselves. When they discover they've been lied to reach them vanishes. Simply letting kids know what the real risks are, tell you that the city collects less annual precipitation than New York City, nothing so much as wet cats. However, no account of the Northwest's soaked to snow. "Rained all the after part of last night, rain continues this go through a winter here to understand. The stuff puts you on edge. About the all over life's syllabus. For the past couple of years my family, born of an gene. Now they tell us that anxiety has its own causal gene, which has spawned my own. The coming of the rain has only added weight to the sinking realization the raw fact of mountains and an ocean. The Pacific Ocean generates warm, moist rain has given rise to some of the Northwest's distinctive (read: "bizarre") dark, damp movements that creep out of this moldy greenhouse: grunge music, pants, and thereafter requires monthly tithes for boots, socks, gloves, recently cashiered its funky Capitol Hill warehouse store for a palatial culture still thrives at the new store, this is not necessarily a good thing. outdoor culture's ugliest trait, a possessive paranoia that keeps outsiders out fostered by the belief that those of us who go out and stomp the natural world did is considered an experienced pro; you and all those who purchased their fleece jackets the day after you did are pathetic wannabes. A rock climber who before you get past amateur status," she said. Nothing commands instant respect religion. A sign near its summit reads, "Only a fool has never climbed Mount fools every year who strap spikes to their feet and attempt to walk nearly buried. Those who make it up ("summit" as a verb) are offered the cruelest sort of spiritual enlightenment: the realization that there is no spiritual enlightenment on mountain tops. If I had kept a journal on the summit, it would disagreeable." I may have added two words. "Get down." Sometimes rites of passage, like the experience of suffering, lead to great wisdom. And sometimes, suffering in the wilderness is just suffering in the wilderness, and the only wisdom you gain is the knowledge that you don't want to do it again. change the results of opinion polls. They can even turn a minority view into a majority one without anyone actually changing his or her mind about the rights who don't think he should quit or be impeached, many are disturbed at the thought that he has lost the confidence of so many other citizens, and some will feel that, whatever their own views, the president should go because he has lost the ability to govern effectively. (This argument is already a How many will feel this way? Impossible to say, of course. moral grounds, you would almost certainly conclude that he should go on effectiveness grounds alone. If half the country disagreed with you, you might favored impeachment, you almost surely would not worry that this made the believes that having a quarter of the population wishing him impeached makes the president dangerously ineffective. The next time a pollster comes around, too much for effective governance, and thus the next poll publicizes the news believes he must go, even though only one in four actually believe he deserves thinks the current level of impeachment sentiment means he should go. But is dynamic is perhaps easier to see in the stock market, as explained in a famous newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of average opinion thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the contains optimists and speculating skeptics moves another group of more conservative skeptics to start buying, driving the price to $70--even though bringing more and more investors aboard, until someone gets spooked about finding a speculating skeptic or an idiotic optimist who will continue the private object of the most skilled investment today is to 'beat the gun,' as believed that this kind of speculation was pernicious. The reason is that it development of real operating businesses. Can a similar argument apply to the voters who don't necessarily deplore his conduct. Something smells rotten about the idea that you must surrender your opinion to your neighbor. The real polity, like the real economy, ought to be what counts. a demographic until you start to spend money. Last year I finally had enough to neighborhoods, and we all love Craftsman bungalows. Ten years ago, perfect were being punished for our sanctimonious attitudes and for enjoying our easy recognized one woman from dance class: We were dressed identically in striped sessions explaining how none of us would ever, ever own a home. Not one we wanted. And certainly not one in a neighborhood where we'd feel safe. A view? Forget it. Three bedrooms? Out of the question. Crack houses for all of you! adjustable rate mortgages vs. traditional mortgages while I daydreamed about agent dropped in to reiterate the impossibility of anyone in the room ever were so terrified of the market that we bid on every house that was not falling down. A house with a roof! we would gasp, feeling terribly lucky to have found way that the house was fine as long as we didn't mind a foundation you could cashier's checks dangling out of their back pockets. We bid like addicted bid up, and she'd been shopping for over a year. Her lowest point came when she considered buying a house that you entered through the bathroom. Every night we neighborhood. I had lived there four years and loved the funny hillside street Meanwhile, a family of squirrels had moved into our crawlspace, and the house reeked of vermin poo, furthering our desperation to find a home. house. We included a wedding photo that makes us look carefree and golden and eyebrows aren't beetled together, a photographic achievement commensurate with that my brother played guitar in the Presidents of the United States of package. It seemed she had never before seen a letter to a seller that of getting the house was chanting. She phonetically wrote down the familiar book to read and out fluttered the chant. What the hell? If anyone would fillings. I began to chant. The morning after my third night of chanting, the with us as fellow writers. (Thank God we weren't editing encyclopedias at series is, of course, available in "The Compost." But for Slate readers who wish to fondle this classic of our times, bind it in leather, display it on their coffee tables, and pass it along as a treasured heirloom to their children, we are proud to offer a new sort of instant book. The entire series has been repackaged as a 28.8K.) Keep in mind, though, that you can also download the file and read it took the time to respond to our reader survey a few weeks back, for which we thank you. The results prove beyond a doubt that reading Slate is good for you. our new, alternative "Table of Contents," go to the Contents page and click on the word "Date" right below the Slate logo. Current articles will then be listed by the date they were posted, with the most recent stuff first. If you like that better than our highly conceptual system of departments and page numbers, that's fine with us. (To return to the regular Contents page, just click on delivery of our "Slate on Paper" edition, nicely formatted for printing out you to stay efficiently abreast of developments you aren't wildly interested in. You may have skipped all those worthy newspaper articles about that coup in the subject. (Relax, that's only a theoretical example. There wasn't a coup in week called "Keeping Tabs," which will track developments in the world of the course, are much too morally austere to have any genuine interest in the sex phenomena. But we all have a duty to stay well informed of what engages other in the mud on our behalf and distill it into a palatable essence. Justice Department's Criminal Division? Is he leaving town? Yes, he's moving Weld and another top Justice official "abruptly announced their resignations yesterday" as an act of "conscience" over revelations about ethically warning that Weld's "mounting frustration" had reached the breaking point. So we have long harbored the suspicion that Bill Weld, jolly and appealing last year, at a moment when we had almost despaired of finding any name for our enjoy Slate without soiling your fingers in the World Wide Web. Our popular new time on the East Coast. At the moment it's a bit later than that. There's an installation software, install the software, configure the software (using the "personalize" option, clicking the "add" button, then clicking on "news and and then clicking on "subscribe." That's all there is to it! ways Slate can come to you, instead of your having to come to us. Slate on Slate's table of contents delivered to you every week. And we also continue to support Slate delivery by FreeLoader, another "push" software product that, they seem determined to deny their customers this valuable opportunity. Judgment" department, which saves you the trouble of reading reviews, will be upgraded into a service that will implant the consensus opinion on all the new movies, books, television shows, etc., directly into your brain, saving you the trouble of reading and seeing the books and shows themselves. Also, while eliminating the need to develop or even to express your own opinions. enjoy having their own opinions, Slate will soon offer a new "personalization" feature. The inspiration is published accounts of Bill Gates' new house, which reportedly learns guests' preferences in music and art and adjusts itself applies this concept to the magazine world: You'll register your views just once, and Slate will thereafter recognize your browser and serve up opinion and analysis that reconfirm your prejudices. You'll be able to cruise from article to review to column to department with a growing feeling that you're absolutely right about everything. Just like the editors of Slate ourselves. secretary of labor fantasized large chunks of his recent memoir has stirred a we must make troubling accusations against public figures, do so more in sorrow than in anger. It truly disappoints us when a man or a woman in public life fails to meet our standards of morality, literary ethics, or oral hygiene. Like all journalists, we would like nothing better than to be denied all such opportunities for indignation. That said, however, we cannot deny a small frisson of excitement when the opportunity comes along. No doubt we are the only journalists who suffer from this spiritual flaw. territory for a publication. People are entitled to reply when criticized. But usually that means a short letter. If you allow everyone who comes under criticism in your pages to reply at equal or greater length, you won't have any vastness of cyberspace, however, these considerations do not apply with the the plots make any sense? To address this critical gap, we inaugurate an which will analyze movies exclusively from the perspective of narrative logic. holes come from. Aesthetic judgments will continue to be rendered by our software firm, and in this book she shares the management insights she gleaned investment banker. Liar's Poker is largely credited with transforming threat of litigation, we have had to abandon the name "The Dismal Scientist" economics column. The rights to that name have been claimed by another Web would always outpace economic growth, keeping most people in perpetual poverty. That was more than two centuries ago, and remarkably, it is the last time any a rough business, requiring eternal optimism about the possibility of publication, even if gloom is considered the Proper Poetical Stance on most discriminating against poets who suffer the ultimate disability of being deceased. Preference will be given to poetry of the past that is especially rather than by the author. Living poets will continue to be eligible as well. forthcoming poem, All I Really Need to Know in Poetry I Learned at declared a national holiday in several states of the former Soviet Union (for a criminals were released from prison in a general amnesty for plagiarists and On balance, we think we do. The first year has, of course, brought both successes and disappointments. On the positive side, we have transformed the nature of journalism, morally vindicated the World Wide Web, vastly enriched many difficult words. On the downside, we did get it slightly wrong about the mistake to make). There was the unfortunate occasion when we accidentally feature does not as yet work as well as we had hoped, frankly. (We're talking We asked Bill Gates how Slate should mark this historic occasion. He said, "Give the whole staff enormous raises." It was, of course, a characteristically insightful suggestion, brilliantly slicing through to the heart of the strategic challenge we face at the close of the second millennium. But our publisher, Rogers Weed, was deeply offended by the idea. "That guy seems to think money grows on trees," he complained. And so, displaying the kind of Gates his idea sucked. (Well, actually, we told him that Rogers thought his idea sucked.) As an alternative to Gates' suggestion we have put together a selection of Slate articles published during our first year. We all agree that perusing some of the highlights from a year of Slate is far more pleasurable than a large raise. But try it and judge for yourself. this week called "Today's Papers." To be updated daily (six days a week), it is a papers chose as the day's big stories, assess how they played those stories (both placement and content), and tell us about any exclusives or unique pieces. Today's Papers will, of course, link where possible to the full stories doesn't bother to get five newspapers home delivered each morning, go to briefing before you face the world so you can embarrass less informed friends people, we regret to report, are attempting to read Slate without the proper baseball cap. Attempting to access Slate while improperly dressed can lead to slow download time and even, in some cases, to the implosion of your computer. Please take a few moments to order the appropriate gear, directly from the Web (scroll right to find the Slate stuff) or, if you still use one of will not publish next week. The site, of course, will still be available, including all current contents, "The Compost," and "The Fray." Today's Papers will be updated daily throughout the week. And there may even be the occasional "Dialogue" entry or "Chatterbox" item. You never know. But Slate's editors and staff will be spending the week in various mountain retreats, perfecting the spiritual arts of transcendental Located on the sixth floor of the Justice Department's headquarters in when a button nearby is depressed; an oddly textured ceiling looms overhead. Outside its doors, the seals of intelligence agencies adorn the walls. behind the bench, raised above plaintiffs and defendants to symbolize his authority. Instead, he joins the witnesses and lawyers from the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department at a single conference table. No defense goal of easing the deportation of legal aliens whom the government suspects of materially supporting terrorist groups, but who have committed no crimes. that it needs the removal court to protect national security in sensitive deportation cases against suspected alien terrorists. It argues that publicly disclosing key evidence, as normal courts require, can expose and endanger its intelligence sources, and that the unspeakable alternative is to allow level of secrecy more typical of the executive than the courts. Justice officials bristle at the charge that the secret courts also carve out a de only thing the removal court will remove is constitutional protections for Government attorneys will present classified evidence in secret to a at any one time. If convinced that a proposed deportee is a terrorist, the judge will authorize the Justice Department to initiate deportation proceedings against the alien in a district court, where it will introduce as much secret evidence as it sees fit. The defendant will not know he has been targeted for district court, he will see only a sketchy summary of the evidence against him. The district court then will decide whether the alien should be deported. in extreme cases where national security would be damaged by the public disclosure of deportation evidence. But modifying judicial processes to accommodate the executive branch risks upsetting the traditional role of the Civil libertarians worry that the trend toward secret courts begs for abuse by intelligence agencies because judges seem incapable of an advocate for the surveillance target persuade otherwise skeptical judges to better than the previous federal wiretapping policy that permitted the attorney secret courts constitutional? Probably. A host of legally significant court, was used to deport noncriminal aliens based on their political under the new statute. And they don't calm civil libertarians, who fear the Studies. "But they draft the applications in a way to say that these facts meet the requirements, and by the time the application reaches the court, it is unlikely that the court really gets to notice deficiencies." rubber stamp, attributing Justice's winning percentage to rigorous internal review that weeds out bad applications before they're filed. That's how Justice Department has been too conservative in what they are presenting to the But the public doesn't have many independent guarantees that the courts are applying tough scrutiny to the government's applications. Secrecy prevents open investigation of the courts' methods and standards; there is a paucity of serious journalistic coverage of the courts; and congressional oversight of the courts is limited to the review (in closed session) of disclosures that I agree would make the public more comfortable." act with integrity. In the absence of more openness, nobody outside the ruled that spending limits violate the First Amendment: The government cannot restrict your right to spend money communicating the message of your choice. The court upheld contribution limits on the reasoning that contributing money to someone else is not an act of speech. (Spending limits for presidential contribution limits but no spending limits creates all sorts of weird anomalies, above all the shadowy and often farcical distinction between "independent" and "coordinated" expenditure. If your spending is coordinated in contribution, subject to limits. Unless, that is, you yourself are the candidate, in which case you may spend and coordinate to your heart's content. The court wandered back into this thicket last month, and wandered out again. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee vs. Federal Election Commission held that the government cannot restrict spending by the state Republican Party on behalf of a Republican Senate candidate. But the opinions were all over the lot. Some Justices said that the anyway in the case of a political party. Some said it was coordinated and because contributions deserve First Amendment protection just like shorthand argument is that "money isn't speech." Spending limits don't prevent anyone from expressing an opinion. At most they regulate the volume of speech, not the content. Efforts to level the playing field of politics and reduce political corruption, by reducing the role of money, actually serve First Amendment interests. The New York Times has published innumerable "reform" that did the same thing in the field of newspapers? That is, a law designed to level the playing field and promote diversity in an increasingly concentrated industry vital to the political debate. The law would limit the amount anyone could spend in a year for the purpose of publishing a newspaper. on what could be spent on a newspaper. And suppose that the limit were example shows, money indeed is speech. Restrictions on people's right to spend on their right of free speech. The government certainly may address the problem of unequal voices in the political debate. It may do so through devices that increase the quantity or volume of speech, such as financial subsidies or free messages it prefers ("drugs are bad") over messages it doesn't ("drugs are fun"). What it should not be allowed to do is to level the debate by reducing the volume or quantity of someone's speech. And that means money. conservatives that the best campaign reform would be to repeal the old rules, not to pass new ones. Senate Republicans last month killed a reform bill that some people don't care for. A major Republican talking point was that contribution limits are an offense against freedom of speech. judicial activism. What they are saying is that even though contribution limits are so popular that voters are clamoring for more, and even though these limits are embodied in a law duly enacted by a majority in Congress and signed by the column sermonizing about First Amendment excesses, lecturing sternly about the difference between "speech" and "action," and ridiculing the idea that (for contributions "are acts of political expression, as well as exercises in That's the argument, and it's pretty weak. Unlike, say, burning the flag, the act of making a political contribution is not primarily intended to send a message. In fact the contribution would often be unknown if little to do with the size of the contribution. (A bigger contribution may or may not mean, "I really, really support Candidate X.") "Freedom of of court if some liberal proposed it. Contribution limits don't stop you from associating publicly or privately with a candidate or cause, working for the campaign, or even signifying your association by donating money. They may prevent you from associating with the senator at an exclusive cocktail party the one between "independent" and "coordinated" campaign spending, usually signifies that the underlying principle needs work. In this case the be a magazine of fashion, either in the sense of being about clothing or in the sense of following the fashion in general matters. Yet, by one of those weird coincidences that less scrupulous publications sometimes turn into "special issues," we have posted two features relating to fashion (in the clothing column reports on (and follows, through links) the bizarre theories bouncing somewhat mysterious ads in many magazines and, apparently, of a line of assume, from this onslaught of sartorial hectoring, that the staff of Slate must dress in exquisite taste. And you would be correct. Any one of us could be least. We pride ourselves on our fabrics. The staffs of other magazines have spats; we wear them. Other magazines employ heels; we wear them. Not long ago, since last week, two new "Dialogues" have started. And a couple more might have just thesis and antithesis, but a bit of synthesis as well. (Occasionally, of course, a dialogue serves to reveal the utter superiority of one side of the best way to frame an interesting and useful dialogue is not to get a liberal vs. a conservative, but to get two people from roughly the same part of the spectrum who disagree on the application of their shared values to a particular story about the increase of tailgating on freeways, a display of bad manners Miracle, whereby a sleepy backwater has been transformed into a dynamic entrepreneurial hub and the most livable city in the United States. When I considered indentured servitude. Today the unemployment rate is a percentage point below the national average, and housing prices are soaring, driven by a air now hums with ambition and no one gets a day off. aggressive capitalists, its previous stagnation was caused by the sloth and land of vast abundance, the streams flush with fish, the forest thick with game. Rather than invest their surplus in research and development or compete was initially held back by an indigenous people who didn't value individual in the 1800s only made things worse. In a previous "Letter From contemporary culture of the Pacific Northwest, creating a city of tolerance and egalitarian refinement. I beg to differ. The Vikings may have made a and neatly trimmed grass were the ultimate virtues. was someone selling loose joints at the bus station. In this spirit, a early '80s, in the hope that evil corporations would be driven away. The region slumbered, the people insulated in their down parkas and their "what's your locals, who feel he should somehow "give more back to the community." This is code for "give us some of your money, we want to go skiing." If Bill Gates is Bill is lean and mean, evinces no interest in sports or popular culture, and doesn't believe in giving kids an allowance. When he donates money, he endows a over and turned it into a corporate behemoth, opening stores across the world. encroached on a bit of park land in the process, just as a thousand other sitcom and buy their own piece of paradise. They might, too. voters to approve slot machines and video poker, proceeds of which will be used "to build esteem" among the native peoples. Just think, groups of people outside the mainstream with large stores of explosives, cash, and slot has evicted the camp and plans to build something for himself. used to be deals or, sometimes, partnerships. These days, there are strategic cover anything from an actual merger to an occasional lunch. (It is an entertaining parlor game to read about some new strategic alliance, especially strategic alliance with the Motley Fool. The Fool, as many readers are aware, is one of the most entertaining, illuminating, and successful online financial sites, with baseball caps, and other logo paraphernalia. In addition, the Fool will be providing, exclusively for Slate, a weekly business column. The column is not about stock tips or breaking news, but rather is intended to be a discerning backgrounder on business issues, somewhat in the style of Slate's "The Gist." (And who's paying whom? Guess.) Slate's first "Fool" is about the corporate fashion for changing week, by the way, we will continue to ramp up our business coverage with will analyze the pay of one or more top executives who are of interest for a subject most people would rather read about than try for themselves. We are Examiner" columnist has chosen castration as the subject of his first column. Medical Examiner will appear every other week in Slate. We cannot promise that every column will be about castration. In fact, we can pretty much promise that no more columns will be about castration. But they all will deal with the general subject of health, science, and society. The author is it. We think we've got the situation under control, but we would really rather just get a weekly announcement of what's in the new issue, click column. Or at least you'll be able to sign up for it. software program and provider you use. (For actual delivery of Slate on Paper, answers to questions, and solutions to problems with receiving Slate (or, perchance, to thank our technical staff for the flawless technical performance still available in "The Compost." If you're feeling nostalgic for wonderful seems as elusive as the story itself. Slate readers responding to last week's invitation to name the scandal have not covered themselves in literary glory. A few of the more bearable suggestions: Hotel Bill, Cash Inn, China Pattern, The considered opinion of our distinguished panel of judges. Please keep trying, collection, a k a "The Compost," and you can see it again by clicking mountains, rivers, and coastlines wrapped by an arm of the Pacific and Sound. If peeled from a map, the peninsula would neatly cover my old home state National Park at the peninsula's heart caught my imagination, as did the has become incredibly diverse. But essential peninsula characteristics, the tics and quirks that make us who we are, have only deepened. entrepreneurs held the seeds of its destruction. I place the blame for today's while his fellow townsmen were out stumping for commerce, Swan introduced the idea of the absorbed eccentric. It clung to the city's mossy foundations like a limpet. But even Swan went to his pauper's grave still hoping for a rail fear, has cast a permanent shadow over the town's cultural identity. When an to jury the competition. The result is a sterile concrete "tidal clock" that a proposal by local sculptor Tom Jay that drew on the natural heritage of the its past. Murals of farm buildings and country stores decorate downtown knows precisely where it wants to go and how many more new golf courses it will expensive landscaping in the town's recently developed highlands. The elk bed police) expressed outrage; even some rose gardeners voiced distress. But and tame collide will get even more interesting this fall. a second settling of the peninsula. The frontier (retirees riding lawnmowers on one side, loggers wielding chainsaws on the other) is continually in flux. Speedway. Not long ago, some newly arrived speedway neighbors petitioned commissioners (frontiersmen, all) were unmoved. "Speedway was here first," they and Democratic, and the recent closure of one of two large pulp mills has precipitated an identity crisis. Those clinging to the old economic order want nothing more than another large mill. Others envision a conference center, an from the state and federal governments, feeding a cottage industry that may prove one of the peninsula's most enduring economies. on the peninsula is federal largess more central to the economy than in Forks, and nowhere is the populace more critical of the government. From the free land doled out to the original settlers through various subsidies like bounties and town was getting "stiffed" out of its share of federal aid for communities hurt by cutbacks in federal timber sales. So the city pulled out of the program. Period. Federal grant applications for improving the town's industrial park (itself a federally subsidized project), upgrading its sewer system, makes a statement," the city clerk said. A meeting with the district's member of Congress has been scheduled, but I have no doubt how this will end. Forks overlooked if a body isn't afraid of work. It is the common glue that binds helping a neighbor thread tracks back onto his bulldozer. He had disassembled the steel pads, welded new cleats on each one, and strung them back together. bucks." Dumbfounded, I asked why he hadn't taken them. He lowered the greasy wrench from his hand, looked at me, and confessed, "I couldn't bear the thought recent welfare reform acknowledge a small flaw: The new arrangement requires welfare recipients to take jobs, but does nothing to assure that jobs will be it" was to require work and also, if necessary, to supply it (plus training, day care, health care, etc.). But that kind of welfare reform costs more, not signed, leaves out the second part of the equation. It supplies less money, not more, to the states, frees them to cut off benefits, and largely leaves the challenge in finding employment for all these people. And the federal government, as is so often the case, makes the task even harder with conservative editorial pages, and Republican members of Congress. Yet one such shall exist within the United States"). Possibly due to misinterpretation by even a liberal might understand: It denies women the freedom to control their own bodies, albeit by selling them to someone else. of government welfare programs often ridicule the notion that people would Medicaid, etc. Private charity, they say, will provide for truly needy cases. We may soon find out if this is correct. However, the logical defect is not hard to spot. People are unlikely to invest in the feeding and care of others if they are not in a position to reap the benefits. But this defect can be ivory. Most of the rest of the world soon followed, and the ivory trade was devastated. The best thinking now is that this was a bad idea, because it herds. A better approach is to make sure that the elephants' human neighbors assets. The best way to assure that private individuals will come forward to be freed from their debilitating dependency on government is to allow these giving individuals to acquire an economic interest in the nutrition, health, and skills of the former welfare recipients. The employment arrangements that Amendment would solve this problem, by allowing people to contractually commit their future good health and skills to an employer. this ability. Various devices such as bonuses and stock options enable companies to reasonably assure themselves of the continuing employment of key what should more accurately be called "contracts of permanent employment." But poor people are usually not in a position to demand stock options. Therefore, they are unable to make a convincingly binding commitment to an employer. The the effect of hurting the very people it was intended to help. permanent future employment is really an extension of the recently concluded debate over the minimum wage. Although the reactionary forces of Big Labor and course, absolutely right to note again and again (and again) that the effect of a minimum wage is to deny workers the opportunity to contract for their that matter, everyone who doesn't want to work). But it is only a first step. One might argue that abolishing the minimum wage is close enough to commit their future labor in a way that potential employers can reasonably be expected to rely on. Only a contract can do that: a contract of permanent future employment, which the employer can call upon the government to use its welfare benefits, a compassionate government surely owes its poorest citizens we'd try to be the only organization in either the software or the magazine most frequently asked questions is this one: "What am I supposed to wear while reading an online magazine?" We naturally consulted our monthly "Clothes bargaining on both the federal and state levels, or writing fiction or poetry products were illustrated with a pile of golf balls. If that's still the case, computer industry is adamant about doing things its own way, insisting that the begging for lack of trained people. This shortage, said Secretary of Education unrealized corporate earnings." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shrinking. "Today," said Vice President Al Gore mournfully, "many employers report difficulty in recruiting enough workers with these skills." the Commerce, Education, and Labor departments. (For comparison's sake, Sun effort is little more than exhortation, like the Commerce Department's plan to hold four town hall meetings to examine the shortage and discuss ways to alleviate it. Other elements are only coincidentally helpful. The Education businesses than to banks, breweries, or oil companies. chatter, notably a plan to launch an advertising campaign to convince kids that computer jobs are not just for geeks anymore. There is a little meat on these Internet. But neither promises to make a dent in the supposed shortage. into English, what the academics and bureaucrats are saying is that businesses can't hire all the computer specialists they want at prevailing rates. They're saying that businesses could make use of more of these trained workers if they technical skills, it's no shock that demand for workers is rising faster than the supply. (The cheapest way to close the "gap" would be to increase the Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the shortage: higher pay. Since last good for the youngsters who had the foresight to enter the field. It also advances the goal of encouraging kids to consider computer careers. What's more likely to dispel the nerdy image of programmers and software pay doesn't improve the image of computer jockeys, it will doubtless provide sufficient consolation to enable more young people to live with it. Rising community college to retool for a second career. It should also induce firms to provide more computer training for existing workers. industry it represents can't wait for the market to fix the problem. "We that the computer industry is uniquely important is common but groundless. All sorts of industries are important to national prosperity, yet the federal government doesn't take on the responsibility of monitoring and adjusting the represent lost wages and profits. But the money that would be spent doesn't industries whose products are also valued by consumers. response is: Oh, what could it hurt? Not much. But some students will be induced to study computer science rather than some other subject, and each one A lot of the money is likely to be simply wasted, though. the federal government's record in training people for better jobs is not program, appears to be almost entirely futile. "It's been a failure overall," Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international association of market economies, found "remarkably meager support for the hypothesis that such programs are effective." The best programs, nearly everyone agrees, are those conducted by companies for their own workers. Why? Because employers have strong reasons to tailor the training to assure its sense to invest more in training computer workers and attracting more people to need for taxpayers to do it for them. Corporate welfare is a bad enough idea without adding the Silicon Valley gang to the rolls. went to day camp, and hated it: To me, it was like an 8-hour session of PE. I grumbled so loudly that my parents didn't send me back the next year. Which is Oh, sure, the days were long, the factories were dark, and the machines claimed both my pinkies, but at least I never had to play dodge ball again. As for the smoking story, what's gone unreported in the Times is the tobacco companies' proposed "compromise" wording for the warning label: "Smoking will kill you. On the other hand, we are all mortal." Actually, diseased lungs and rotting teeth could be quite attractive packaging, particularly if you put a little cowboy riding in front of them. In any case, annoy the consumer. I once talked to an architect who told me that the key to designing a successful shopping mall is to include lots of angles, so that you and walks, always convinced that the store he's trying to find is just around the next corner. In the meantime, of course, he might stop in at any one of a dozen other stores. Similarly, the Publisher's Clearing House, I remember reading, makes its contests difficult to enter ("Go find the red stamp and put it on the entry form. Now find the yellow sticker and put it on the envelope. Now include a tail feather from a bald eagle. Now sing!") for two reasons: First, obviously, is so that the customer will spend more time combing over the materials and is therefore more likely to order one of their magazines. But the second reason is that they've found that there's a much higher response rate layout, the paucity of exit signs, the lack of clocks, etc. fire and his head is often in the clouds. For he dreams and when he dreams, he The Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities basis, that income inequality in the United States has continued to worsen in the past decade, building on a trend that began in the late 1970s. Although the report focuses attention on the huge gap between the top fifth of striking numbers delineate the widening gap between the top fifth of income Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, for example, the top fifth saw twice as much as the second fifth, and three times as much as the middle Now, you might say to this, so what? In the first place, these groups are much higher percentage will be than won't.) In addition, inequality itself is a tricky problem. If remedying inequality comes at the expense of overall growth, then it's possible that the poor and middle class will end up worse in absolute In general, after all, the best remedy for poverty, and the best way to lift people into the middle class, is not income redistribution but rather economic growth. Although many critiques of globalization and free trade depend, at capitalist economy inevitably impoverished most while enriching a few, the experience of most capitalist economies, and especially those in the Third not meaningfully change income distribution, and that even the poorest fifth of show that in countries that adopted land reform growth was more equitable.) Unfortunately, the United States does not fit well into that study. On the contrary, the remarkable thing is how narrow the benefits, even in absolute actually drop since the late 1980s, while the poorest fifth saw its These statistics are, of course, subject to question. If the Consumer Price Index really overstates inflation, then those real income numbers should be Still, the economic inequality we now have in the United States is of a magnitude we have not witnessed since before the New Deal. And what's remarkable is that it's happening at a time when unemployment is at historic lows and when economic growth is much faster than most economists thought But it seems implausible that putting more money in the stock market or in venture capital funds will affect income inequality at all. More to the point, will just slam on the brakes. In terms of growth and employment, this is probably as good as it gets. And as good as it gets is actually making income Whether economic inequality of the magnitude the United States now has should matter to a society is, of course, a matter of principle, and not logic. importance.) And we should not let concern over inequality obscure the entrepreneurship, and, above all, the allocation of capital by markets, not planners. But as Congress heads into its latest round of budget planning, and worth remembering who's actually in the middle class, and whether those who are a long way out of it really need yet another break. I cringe when I hear someone refer to "the Salt Lake City scandal," because, commission. The outside influence is minimal. And yet the sponsors don't scream all of us do too. For even as I cover the "reform" package and rant and rave Get me to the athletes, and to their remarkable and emotional stories. invisible on the field of play. And of no interest to us whatsoever once the So Pound has to interrogate Coles to find out what he did and, ultimately, I know it will shock you to find out that, even as we speak, Phil Coles is a Before I go, I must share this Snowstorm of the Century media story: use yardsticks to measure how much snow we've had. I use little children. Come softly in the snow. Then pulls kid right out and examines his boots.) The traditional media isn't changing quickly enough for either of us. But they are going to change. They have to. The Internet is going to make traditional media change because it allows readers to choose the content they want, going to prevail on the media to rethink how we cover all sports, not just women's sports. Because the sports landscape has already changed whether some laggard sports editors fail to staff something like the World Cup games. Or I think part of the lag has to do with sexism, of course. But I also think that newspapers and the like rarely start trends. We report them only after But this absence of coverage doesn't mean change isn't happening all around us. Only that it's not being accurately or presciently reported. That's a huge If there's any lesson that men should take from the history of women or women's sports regularly, the women's World Cup final at the Rose Bowl last Stupid as it sounds, sitting as we are on the cusp of this new millennium, nonsense that's meant to keep them down. Last summer, the World Cup team from women." But they still played on. They still showed up. predecessors. When they began playing, they never thought soccer careers would You now could argue both events were watershed moments for female athletes at work, too. I also really believe that what people were responding to during the World Cup was the spirit of those women. And not the sport they play. that try to pretend they're just games, peopled by too many phonies who get An authentic team. Women whose deportment and pursuit of excellence are worth They're people who fell in love with something and became determined to exhaust that love to its potential. And they're not "just" pioneers --that word is too benign. They're revolutionaries. They're doing nothing less than changing the world's ideas of what being a woman means. That is a profound Now, you asked what bothers men so much about that. And I think the answer Men aren't used to envisioning a world in which they're not essential. That's why some men hate the attention lavished on the women's World Cup. That's why they hate it when women make fun of the Super Bowl. Women's how women's sports are not merely spinoffs of games that men have been playing their own heroes and rich histories, their own character and ethos and Perhaps the best thing is, as I said, there's no turning back. The World Cup was about ideas and how women are changing their place in the world. Now, like a boulder rolling down a hill, the process can't be stopped. The best thing to do is admire its gathering strength. Or get the hell out I confess with embarrassment that I didn't do my homework: that is, I didn't such as" those. By that I assumed he meant they would pick from among them. in mind "a grand game of Trivial Pursuit." And I was encouraged by the few occasions on which the authors elaborate and suggest projects such as analyzing sounded better than the fancy new textbook one of my kids used last year to has struck me that my other child might benefit from more writing of paragraphs and less discussion of "rubrics" and "hamburger model graphic organizers" in last night's assignment, even though the concept of square feet and yards had clouded by a wishful vision of more purposefully directed, but still active and innovative, learning. Then again, that's what makes books like these bestsellers: In a format as broad as this, it's possible to find some version point to the need for a serious discussion about a standardized curriculum, and champions of localism in education. Hence their enthusiasm for reform by well. And there's another one: Even if constant parental lobbying at school and suggest, what would the results look like? It seems to me this is a recipe for widening the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Guess which parents are going to be poking their noses into the classroom all the time, to say nothing of turning "those garden chores into botany lessons." The ones media stereotypes the one after that. As a contrived package of traditional wholesomeness, the more authoritarian values of respect, order, obedience, and cleanliness can prove stultifying, distracting. (Legible handwriting has practical, not moral, virtue.) So can the progressive virtues of critical thinking, independence, creativity, and community solidarity when served up as ecumenical form of character instruction, of course, is moral stories. As spectrum. The problem both encounter in trying to script the lessons in too stories than children deserve, tidily presented with trite interpretations. The homiletic approach, in my experience, seems to work best in connection with real action (and, often, very obvious consequences). For kids in school, rising to academic challenges posed by admired teachers, it seems to me, offers the best route to building the responsible, committed attitude everybody hopes for Schools should be one important place that children have the chance to make Speaking of choices, without launching into a debate on school choice, I wonder whether you see a growing gap between public and elite private pedagogical culture that prevails. It's a question raised by my own observations of pretty stark contrasts (plenty of homework in the early primary "constructivist," ethos in private schools? Or am I making this up? I agree with the Times in general that this has the potential to devolve into propaganda, I also happen to believe that anyone who does anything just because Blossom told him to gets whatever he deserves. In other news, I neglected to mention yesterday my single favorite sentence of the day, from a story in the Wall Street Journal about As for my favorite sentence from today's papers, there's no contest. From a liposuction. Even dentists have been doing it." Which, to me, suggests three things: First, from here on out, no matter what procedure I go in for, it's "learn liposuction at home!" programs. And third, of course, is that this suggests a new lyric for the Cole Porter standard, "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)": "Birds do it, bees do it/ Patients should assume nothing, even dentists have been doing it/ Let's do it, let's fall in love." By the way, drugs is bad. May I have my check now, please? which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right on to say that there are two ways in which to punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should work well in cyberspace to avoid similar So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace. of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes. In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in character of the Net. The original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it. That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a the attitude of "leave the Net alone" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: "My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. "Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would that "the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom." At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space. to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net. Actually, your point about the taunting in presidential debates brings up an interesting point: There have never been any presidential candidates possessed of great wit. Or even medium wit. Even the best moments from presidential scripted well in advance. More often, the candidates throw around canned insults that were a) written by ghostwriters; and (b) aren't very good. The closest we've come to a great moment of unpremeditated nastiness during a I know that there are those who say politics have become too nasty and personalized, that debates should be thoughtful discussions of policy issues. And, ideally, I suppose that would be the case. But it isn't. Instead, what we of us," the candidates say, waiting for their opponents to jump up and scream, affairs, couldn't the debates at least be amusing? Couldn't we get some ace script doctors in there to write bitchy, scathing lines for our candidates? Are class, enabling us to continue our proud tradition of freedom in this great great deal of sense. (Beat.) If you've been smoking crack, that is. You reckless youth, which lasted until you were, what, 40?--but a basic rule of economics is that you can't spend what you don't have. Or, to put this in terms Are you following me now? Nod your head yes if you understand me. Good Admit it. You'd be appalled for the country, but you wouldn't be able to In other news, the New York Post 's "Page Six" reports that a movie to click on links till after you answer all of them: A. "In popular imagination, this has always been a white city: block after block of pale marble buildings that glow even whiter at night, when the generally pure, thanks to the speed with which government shuts down at the safe to sea. The same cannot be said of today's presidential candidacies. All "If all we do is save a species for display, then the panda bear will become C. "revitalization of that sleeping monster, the Energy Department" D. "an unhealthy obsession with oil industry profits" Answers are printed below. If you scored all five correctly, call Creators Syndicate Inc.; you've probably found your calling. If you scored four correctly, you may appear on the New York Times letters page seven times a year. If you scored two correctly, you may deliver a paper at next year's you may post a message on Chatterbox's "Fray" page. If you scored none New Yorkers like to say. Or as I like to imagine they like to say. both tabloids were clearly tipped off to it, it provides an ideal opportunity to compare and contrast the New York Post and the Daily responsible for something like half of the text that appears in the Post each day. You can find his byline all through a typical day's paper, usually tabloids, but so rarely get. I like to imagine him as the sort of newspaper reporter you'd see in movies from the 1940s, pounding the street from dawn to dusk, picking up tips from shoeshine boys and calling his boss "Chief." however, gets the scoop: "'I wouldn't be leaving this job if it weren't for my of labor between the city's papers: It's actually far more finely nuanced than I initially said. It's not just that the Times handles the serious news, and the News and Post handle the fun, frivolous stuff. There are also subdivisions among the tabloids: The Post has better gossip, more As for the character issue, it seems to me to be a convenient canard to distract attention from the fact that the candidates' real differences run the gamut from A to... well, pretty much A. It's not so much that they're all that those differences won't necessarily result in substantially different Congress to contend with, and even once a law has been passed, it doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be enforced. The barriers between a candidate's rhetoric and his achievable results mean that the two bear the same relation said, the character thing is a canard. Which means "duck." Perhaps, instead of focusing on the character issue, each character should groom a duck to be his representative, and we could all grade them on grooming, behavior, ability to stories? Is it because they are so rare? Or because sportswriters don't spend much time searching for them? I hate to say it, but I think the answer might be stories in order to continue to pump out the continual steam of game stories and side bars and advances and follows that have inspired millions of readers to put down their newspapers and run to the Internet. I continue to be amazed at the lack of creativity in our sports sections, especially regarding women's sports and features that will attract women sports section in many ways is the gateway to the paper, especially for children. (It was for me.) Girls now love sports almost as much as boys. These girls have parents who buy products. And yet, pick up the New York "basketball" and "women's basketball." Can you imagine? Like one's real and the basketball." It's little stuff, but it means a lot. like you or me) slides the paper back across the breakfast table, goes to the The Women's World Cup soccer tournament became the sports story of the year. writer. Another major metropolitan daily in the South told its reporter that it anyway. When the paper used this reporter's stories on A1 for five consecutive days, she came home and submitted the expenses. The paper reimbursed her. notice. Don't these guys drive by soccer fields on their way to work? Don't Why didn't every sports editor in the country start devoting even a little newspaper circulation numbers weren't plummeting. But they are. fact, that story was the complete opposite of hype (fans packing stadiums and surprising everyone, forcing sports editors to scramble to send reporters to cover a burgeoning story)? Some of these columnists have been supporting women's rights and liberal issues for years, yet when something this refreshing and fun comes along in women's sports, they invariably begin to attack it. Why aren't we thinking differently as an industry, before we're not an Times lead with new Commerce Department indicators on the economy's it. The New York Times tucks the story inside, and leads The papers' stories on the economic reports are virtually identical. The for overnight interest rates to climb by as much as a half point. The prognosticators almost sound relieved to finally touch and feel the signs of inflation they've been expecting for months. "It's as if there's been a murder, local banks to repay its debts. Countries in debt usually prefer raising bonds, which are cheaper to finance than regular loans, but Japan seems skittish about issuing new bonds, which could upset its bond market or provoke scrutiny from successfully "identified several glaring misstatements or distortions by the Senate). This week Gore alleged that he has "always supported a woman's right to choose." But early in his congressional career, Gore denounced abortion. Divide "is all but gone," argues the story, citing several studies that show to raise the notion of a digital divide from a contentious statistical claim to based on economics and education. If this is so, then why is helping more government is admitting that workers who handled early generations of nuclear think that was wrong." The story predicts that the federal government will soon have to shell out tens of millions of dollars a year in compensation. efforts, New York City agencies have been recruiting former beneficiaries for jobs as telephone psychics. "Clairvoyance is not among the qualifications listed on the city's recruitment flier. Any public assistance recipient with a high school equivalency degree, 'a caring and compassionate personality' and the 'ability to read, write, and speak English'" could qualify, the story reported. According to today's Times, the program was killed yesterday after the story raised a fit of scorn. Apparently no one was more upset than the professional astrologers, who consider the new recruits inadequately schooled in, as the president of the New York chapter of Astrological to educated, affluent voters in the Northeast. He cultivated a similar image as tried to make his inverted charisma into a virtue. After he won the New taken seriously as someone who could actually win the Democratic nomination. But within a few weeks, he was knocked out of the race by a combination of Bill past few months, Gore has pummeled him using demagogic attacks straight out of as atrial fibrillation, has been acting up. At a press conference yesterday, was nothing to be concerned about, but it sure doesn't sound like nothing. getting around to revealing the problem raises suspicions that he is being less floundering and that the battle for the Democratic nomination is, if not quite of different polls. This has had a subtle effect on Gore's public persona. The way in the early debates has receded, at least for the time being. In his place, the confident, dullish Gore unconcerned about a guy running against him in the primaries has returned to the fore. A piece of Gore campaign propaganda not an academic exercise," he declared this afternoon to the crowd of "family "about people.") But there's not much edge to these jabs, the way there was even a week ago when the campaign was a more plausible horse race. Gore is no longer going for the jugular the way he did in most of the debates. Instead, appealing candidate. Speaking without notes or a teleprompter, he displays a and mostly lacking in pedantry (though he did go on a bit). After that, Gore antitrust enforcement against industrial hog producers. "We need to enforce the mention something like the Packers and Stockyards Act too. But with Bush, no one would suspect he knew what he was talking about. has scientists arguing about whether the world is about to experience a of campus fire safety. The paper points out some facts of the tragedy that are typical: an older building not required to have sprinkler systems and a lulling frequency of false fire alarms. The New York Times fronts the weather and the fire but goes with the Federal Communications Commission's plan to open up radio to hundreds of small broadcasting operations via its approval of champions it as promising to bring many new voices to the airwaves that have not previously had an outlet. All of which makes the reader wonder if the The LAT fronts the growth last year of union membership, which is the slowing down in the late '90s of the flight of manufacturing jobs to other Medicare. As the papers report, the plan, which extends the government subsidy to the parents of the poor children who are now covered and employs subsidies and credits to encourage people to get coverage between jobs or prior to in any case is not likely to get much Republican support. the fellow POW who he admits saved his life, because the man accepted an early issue will be held shortly. The coverage is mum about whether or not the Supreme Court has ever ruled on this issue, which surely must have come up that he knew absolutely nothing about this when he recently wrote an editorial aviators. In the days ahead there will be much discussion about whether or not the Navy has in the interim become fairer to women, but let's see if the papers process is being able to see what the House Whip thinks. battered dinghy. The contrast between the two candidates, and between the two with a plush bus for the candidate, black wagons full of Secret Service agents, an ambulance, and two press buses. For longer distances, Gore hops aboard Air Here's the scene at the typical Gore event of yesterday, a huge rally in to be one of our greatest presidents." Gore assumes the stage like a rock star, khakis, with a Palm Pilot holster attached to his belt. The vice president into a feisty pep talk to his troops. The press watches from two raised platforms, but throughout the day has no direct access to Gore. arrive. Occasionally, people wander to the back of the room, where there are platters of raw vegetables and cheese. The head of the organization introduces delivers a restrained chat and then mingles with members of the audience. Any reporter is free to walk up and ask an awkward question about his heart standing, or policies. It's the entirely different attitude the two men have Gore presents himself as someone who once lost faith in politics but who now disillusionment gave way to a sense that by running for elected office he could among other things. He promises more money for public education, universal health insurance starting with children, and "tax breaks to speed up the purchase of new technologies." He slams Republicans, the Confederate Flag in currently practiced. He says that he's running on the "radical premise that you can tell people what you believe and win." He talks about the power of example, he's trying "to find a balance between modesty and confidence." Almost every ordinarily behave. And where Gore promises specific benefits and improvements, fundamental challenge for someone running for president is to help people "find some meaning in life that is deeper than simply the possession of material At the end of his speech, Gore implores people to vote for him. "Feeling enthusiasm is great but you gotta be there and you gotta bring more people with you," Gore thunders. "I need you. And I want to fight for you and I want to fight for the future of this country! I need you to fight for virtuous nation, they are welcome to support him. "What my campaign is about is asking good people to come forward and join us so that our voices can be truth to it. When you see Gore, you see a thoroughbred politician who is simply see a naturally diffident man talking about how he would like to run for president and fretting about the distance between his ideal campaign and the real one. This is the decisive distinction. It explains why Gore is almost the man of action to the man of ideas. Because they prefer the politician to the civics teacher. Because they prefer the probably better president to the I stand corrected, and hope that Ms. Bullock can find it in her heart to Still, I think the larger point holds: Something bad has happened to her career. It's like it had some tainted soup or something. Did you see seen the trailer. The movie could be a work of staggering genius. But somehow, I doubt it. How often is the movie better than the trailer?) running time of The Haunting trying to visualize himself in another, In other news, any thoughts on who might win big at the Golden Globe awards? a serious organization, if only for a night? There's a part of me that's sort of amazed and outraged that a small handful of mostly unqualified individuals susceptible to the influence of personal meetings with stars, lavish luncheons, there's another, larger part of me that's convinced that such a ceremony is really the only appropriate way to honor achievement in the movie business. The folks at the Academy Awards like to look down on the Golden Globes as You're absolutely right about companies' trying to frustrate and annoy their customers. It's the best explanation I can come up with for the Taco Bell Chihuahua. On the other hand, all those things you criticized about So, I was thinking about our discussion yesterday of which newspaper lightweight it makes our exchanges in "Breakfast Table" read like a dialogue I saw The Graduate yesterday. I don't get it. Looks like my good recently and I have to tell you, if there's something greater than the sanctity retirement and running for president. If he wins the White House, I guarantee Anyway, I have no idea if you care, but I wanted to bring a little sports radio So that leaves me without much in the way of research as I try to comment on the day's events. But fortunately, I have a copy of yesterday's New York date, but try to be forgiving." Well, that's no problem, because if my new running off and cheating on her. See, this is the problem with reading economic boom, this year's election could turn on candidates' personal qualities, as more than half the likely voters say a candidate's leadership skills and vision are what counts. The story goes on to say that if the election turns on personal characteristics, the Republicans should get a boost issues amid an economic boom and the nation had supposedly grown tired of all philandering ways we put him right back into office, and we knew what we were children, and that since he is making character his top priority, he's voting just another example of the "Breakfast Table" 's pseudo, misinformed political commentary masquerading as humor, but before I go, I would like to leave you think the rest of the quote was: "I mean, just look at it. [points to picture What does it say about a team when its best player is its owner? A lot, So the owner (or president of basketball operations or whatever he is) puts This is going to be fun. Here's the story: The wily old veteran as wrecking ball, crashing into the infrastructure of today's 20-something, That's what that was: The boys picking their favorite boys who play But, get this, I loved the guy. I loved the way he came into the news was "a pain in the ass;" wondered how "scared" his players would be to practice against him; and called all his new employees "disposable." wants to listen to either of those tired old misbehaving bad boys?) that could lead to his total failure on a basketball court. Golf and baseball are one thing. Now he's putting that golden image of his on the line in the sport that matters. He left us the last time with that wonderful picture of He nails the shot. He wins the title. He walks away. Perfect. (Better than girls growing up in the mid- to late '60s and early '70s swinging from trees years old and reaching for the rope as I prepare to leap. The kids who are in charge of pulling the rope from below yank it too soon. And I go thudding to The plaster cast for my broken right wrist reached all the way to my shoulder. At first I was chagrined, to say the least. It was late summer, and there still were many days and nights of sports remaining before school started But the cast did come in helpful with some of the bullies on the block. Defending my little sister and brother, I conked a few bigger kids on the head You know, some injuries aren't humorous. And some are downright sad. I don't Who can imagine what that poor guy is going through right now? He's a his car hits a patch of ice and he's not wearing his seat belt and he's thrown from the car and he's paralyzed from the waist down. I guess doctors don't know You picture these guys grunting in the weight room for hours a day, lifting, Apparently, he's a good guy, one of those players who is great about charities and really into his community. And I read that the other man who was Do you think this has quieted any of that Super Bowl bluster down there in yesterday wore it today? Probably not. They're all fearless. They'll all live writes that "greed," in the form of a "desire to write books about the some of this to get out into the mainstream media, then that would set you up would be pulled into a conflicted situation" and that their book project was her she shouldn't publish her story herself, but that she should let him have it. In other words, he's trying to talk a source into giving a story to him, and his employer. That's what reporters do, and what they're paid to always turn into a book." A reporter would have to be a moron not to have that suspect the incentives do more to bring out relevant truths than distort them, remuneration his salary) since all of his reporting was supervised and of course, being massively hypocritical here, given that he too is now presumably large Random House advance? Has he donated the money to Random author, was already interested in doing one himself! a book about the case before it was even over! There's not enough room on psychological motives for indulging in the ridiculous innuendoes of In my experience he's honest and conscientious. Am I motivated to criticize designates as the true culprit the 1970s. Strategically, it's a very shrewd the 1970s were a slum of a decade. Right or left, we delighted in the narrowing quibble: Good riddance to the 1970s, tacky decade of my youth! Nothing makes orange, the unfortunate official color of that decade. It's a testament to the rightly points out, the 1970s was the decade when the provocative ideas and the period were largely indistinguishable from those of the second half of the liberal mood. Commentators often argue that "the '60s," defined as a time of various "social decline" indexes for the decade tend to have as their starting with a little more narcissism and a lot more inflation tossed in. Anyone who's explosion, the loss of faith in institutions, the sexual revolution, the rise of the underclass, license, rudeness, etc., etc. (Interesting sign of the times: legalized abortion gets only a glancing mention, even though Roe v. practically the only argument in the book that strikes Chatterbox as truly quickly from example to example and to abbreviate his arguments. (Apparently the publishers are trying to pass this book off to some buyers as neutral order. But then he puts some distance between himself and the Commentary Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century so strong, never had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the country seldom was its political consensus more overpowering. You can see now why people might pine for those days. But would they pine for them if they conspicuous inability to reconcile these feelings will persuade conservatives thinks that I have joined issues on the matter, and have been able to penetrate think that his answer is so useful precisely because it does not rely on any private norms of the cyberspace community in dealing with the broader issues. Substantively, the question he poses at the outset of his letter is one that we should all answer: Why is this space different from any other space? Why and In answering that question, I will start again from the other side, to make the case that the complications and issues that he sees in cyberspace are reflections of similar issues that have developed in other markets, where the issue is the same: How do we overlay private businesses of one sort or another on some common grid or infrastructure? It is clear that architecture matters in both kinds of space and in pretty much the same kind of way. As a first approximation, we need to have public highways because it is simply too costly in ordinary space to build roads that stand one beside the other each limited to a certain group. But the converse hardly follows from that observation: There is no need for all roads to be public. A large ranch can have lots of private highways for internal communication. Common gated communities have roads that exclude the public by allowing limited entry by all members of this commons. And if someone could acquire the land to build a private road beside a public one, we should not begrudge him because he removes some traffic from the Now what happens if the cost of private roads really drops, so that everyone can afford the right level of individualization? The answer is that we get more private roads. This is what has happened in the telephone industry: The party line (by which several families shared a single telephone line) went the way of the dodo when the cost of technology allowed for cheaper phone lines to be developed. And so it is on the Net. The reduction in cost could easily allow the creation of private lines side by side with that open space; and if we have these two regimes, public and private, operating side by side, we can recognize it not only as a profound change in the Net, but a welcome change that is predictable as a matter of general economic theory. these private structures does more than make commerce more efficient. It also makes control cheaper. But here I can accept the descriptive conclusion but doubt whether he has pointed to a matter of concern. It is as not as though There still remains the older public road for those who do not want to go along marketplace, which means that those people who care more about freedom can move in one direction, with the legions of hackers and researchers; while those who care more about security can migrate to a network that gives them protection threat to liberty when new technology increases the ability of all individuals to separate themselves from their fellow man and to filter out the information look at both sides of the question. Some people prize anonymous speech: The Federalist Papers were written in that voice. But no one prizes anonymous threats or thefts; so the question is whether individuals will trade in liberty contract. Nor is there anything that says that the choice of anonymity or frequently collate data in ways that allow for targeted mailings by advertisers. Most people welcome this because they know that the address can be used by an advertiser without being given to him: The company prepares a list who wants out can click a button to escape. Here, a good technology allows choices to be heavily individuated. A technological and design issue that though it were an all or nothing issue. It is the extent that any portal to the Net architects itself and gives notice of its deep structure to the rest of the their tracks when they surf the Net. Here again the private response to the But I think that they would lose market share if they did not allow users to disable the system with a click of the mouse, which I take it they do. So again individuation works. Taken as a whole, then, I see no reason for gloom that we have changed the Net as its user population changes. that all the action was in the user applications. That is fine in principle. But what if the user wants to put his own private network at the end? I see notes, a heavily regulated internal computer culture, while the University of as far as I can see. It is the gated community example all over. The same open Net carries the same traffic as before. It is not as though the size of the commons is diminished because of the subdivision on its side. shut down any other. But now they want to make sure that they influence the traffic over the Net. So they will get less for the service they supply and others will remain part time on the public highway. Or, if they have acquired too many direct competitors, then we have a situation where there are possible earthbound antitrust issues, a point on which I would be skeptical given the ease of entry through other portals on the Net. Its power to discriminate could Maybe now we have an explanation for the larger puzzle. Why are uses? My explanation is that of optimism itself. I don't think there are dangers that are anything close to the enormous possibilities that are introduced by the enormous expansion of its use. That one Net can support millions of Web sites dedicated to all sorts of different ends is a tribute to the original model of how private diversity can flourish on a public grid. What is truly optimistic about the Net is the sense of ratios. The amount of space that has to be kept public for all to gain access is relatively small compared with the amount of land that has to be used to maintain a coherent highway system. So I quite agree that we should pay attention to these changes. But I speaks of it as a "dark, exhilarating work." I see the cause of exhilaration feet firmly on the ground, we shall not lose our way in cyberspace. Over to you Did you go to summer camp? I went for five years, and the one thing I could never get used to was that awful feeling I got in my stomach on the last through my head from the last dance, the smell of smoke still in my hair from just a few short hours the buses would arrive to transport me from the warm nurturing womb of summer camp back to the harsh, unfriendly place that is the Real World. Well, that's how I felt today, our last day of "Breakfast Table." the Stomach With Soap Wrapped in a Towel Night," but everyone else in the bunk attempts, almost zero outrage. So let me try with this one: Smoking is very bad agrees with me, as it proposed radical new cigarette packaging rules yesterday that would force tobacco makers to create cigarette packs that carry color photographs of diseased hearts and cancerous lungs and lips. Look, I think everyone should be warned of the dangers of smoking. I think every cigarette pack and ad should have a warning label, and a straightforward banned cigarettes in restaurants and public spaces in New York so I don't have is an adult (key word there; scumbags who sell cigarettes to children should be an item about the Rotary Club's new lawn sprinkler. Oh, and let me say that my feelings are not based on some sort of visit them I don't want to stop at a convenience store for a pack of gum and have to look at a display case of diseased lung photos. It's worth noting that the redesigned cigarette packs would also carry a warning: "Cigarettes may cause sexual impotence due to decreased blood flow to the penis. This can prevent you from having an erection." Yeah, and so can looking at pictures of The study's findings were unveiled yesterday at a news conference in lower organization devoted to challenging negative stereotypes of men, and the two brightest young men to a devastating disorder. They are squandering their enormous potential for growth and personal happiness on a meaningless obsession The study suggests that some men may be so affected by the proliferation of business television and financial services magazines that they fall prey to purge, or rather, purge then binge. Because they feel worthless, they punish themselves by coming in too early to the office and staying too late, whether they need to or not. Then they waste time on endless day trading and deplete browsers, huge bouquets they'll send to girlfriends alienated by their long hours and tedious business gossip, even though the girlfriends will just throw The periods in a man's life when he is most vulnerable to the condition, leaving high school and entering college, leaving college and entering the job attachment to "aspirational media," which traffic in celebratory stories and photographs of highly powerful men and the symbols of their success, such as the corporate titles they have acquired and shed, the venture capital they haven't spent yet, and the wives they have married and divorced. quickly and yet investing wisely that may make readers feel confused and current issue of Fortune magazine turned to an article by columnist pledges to 'make a lot of money.' It's role models like him that are laying waste to an entire generation of men who could have had richly nurturing relationships with their spouses and friends and gone on to be perfectly happy and productive professionals with children in progressive schools and summer Several noted psychiatrists confirmed that this disorder had become increasingly evident among their male patients. "More and more young men in "These boys have gone from being bright young things on their way to a college degree and a promising career to feeling broke, hopeless, and doomed to professional failure because they haven't started and walked away from their whether to expand a previous category of addiction in order to cover the new condition. "Let's face it," he said. "What we're talking about is men getting executive positions, as well as the series editor who oversaw publication of psychologists in general responsible for the theories of a single man? Isn't discipline prone to express politically incorrect ideas? about whether the person's work is qualified for publication." Indeed, says instrumental in having him rewrite a number of passages, because I said to the were so beyond the pale in terms of factuality. But I couldn't censor or ask Not wanting to be seen as a censor is the defense of nearly everyone who has journal. He has not been asked (as such editors are) to toss as many explosive subjects as possible into the public domain, as long as they meet some minimum standard. Nor can he offer a letters page for debate. He is not the editor of books, making the task somewhat similar to that of a journal editor, although scholarly books. His name is cited on the title page specifically to guarantee the quality of the work. Under those circumstances, his judgment as to whether the work is "qualified for publication" is tantamount to saying that he the government, under the First Amendment. Freedom of the press belongs to reflect poorly on the membership, but it can't be pinned on the officers. And seemed the best way to combat the censorious hostility directed at most people without peer review is an abdication of scholarly responsibility under the best of circumstances and a poor idea for an association of evolutionary psychologists, whose discipline is notorious for attracting cranks. others thought about sitting down and writing a letter objecting to both the work and the review. In the end, however, they decided not to. They didn't want welcoming all ideas, you can't proceed to ignore the bad ones. You have to be prepared to do battle against them. That is (or ought to be) the duty of anyone who has staked his or her professional reputation on one particular scientific approach or methodology. And giving publicity to bad ideas isn't itself necessarily a bad idea. After all, if you draw attention a bad idea by refuting going to lay claim to your methodology and benefit from your systems of of the world won't go away just because you think they're not worth responding to. Where they'll go is wherever as many people as possible will hear them. And Note for all of you who have stuck with this endless New York Review into a mosh pit to the music of Rage Against the Machine. In case you didn't actually watch tonight's Republican presidential debate they're flinging themselves into mosh pits at the behest of radical documentary comfort to fans of Nine Inch Nails, was participating, however facetiously, this way, he has already won his battle, which is to not be ignored. With the exception of this and a few other sideshows, the debate was once leader of the pack for (according to them) coddling China, wanting to federalize education policy, equivocating on abortion, and endangering Social Security with a huge tax cut, Bush ducked, smiled and declined to take the charges entirely seriously. His dodging was as artful as ever. What makes which is usually pretty evasive, but rather his jovial, confident demeanor. Bush survives debates in which he is the constant target by refusing to get riled. You can insult him, you can mock him, and you can patronize him, but you Bush if he intended to do to the nation what he did to his own state. Bush was slow on some of the particulars of his defense. He didn't remember until the underprivileged kids were taking the SAT. But Bush's facial expressions and Right away, you saw the notorious smirk cross Bush's face. But it was a it completely." Then Bush turned away from the question, as if resisting the squinted, smiled broadly and gestured by opening his arms as he said, "So many was answering him. His pained, awkward expression suggested someone sucking a candidates who is better on radio than television. Bush is sort of the opposite moments, especially in the first part of the debate, when he seemed to be Prospect- type liberalism. When all the candidates were asked about the Al Gore's, lauding efforts to connect schools and libraries to the Internet and liberal positions represent a change of heart, or at least an ongoing evolution zonked to say anything coherent about the Democrats. Check this space for voluntary federal spending limits in order to raise the unprecedented sum of answer ready. Actually, they have two answers. The first is that, thanks to the collected. Their other answer is that the campaign goes well beyond what the law requires by making prompt and complete disclosure of all contributions on for keeping track of how much various special interests are collecting for the disclosed at all. In his own way, Bush stands to advance the cause of legal The Bush campaign's technical innovation is the use of "tracking codes," to campaign to stay fully informed about who is giving what. It also appears to stir a sense of competition, if not competitive panic, among Bush's major Pause to consider what is happening here. A trade association that would be contributions from individual executives. Of course, "bundling" is nothing new. the bundles, so it knows just how much it has gotten from the electric contribution record using a handheld wireless device.) But more important, communicating the secret pass code ensures that contributors in the electric industry know that the Bush campaign knows how much they've given. The only people who don't know who is really giving how much are the rest of us. The Bush team's answer to this complaint is that the tracking codes aren't a way of keeping score or encouraging competition among donors but rather a benign device for making sure that contributors "are not stepping on each using a tracking code, the three can avoid bothering classmates who have of me understand how tracking codes help with the problem of repeat solicitations. Presumably, the three classmates split up the list of Bush's classmates would find out from having a code of their own that he had already given at the office. Of course, they could find out by searching for his name on the Bush database. But you don't need any codes for that. If the codes really are an innocent bookkeeping exercise, there's any easy way for the Bush campaign to dispel suspicion. They can do what Among the duties of this column is to put weather events that cause momentary media alarm into historical perspective. (See last summer's Chatterbox feels impatient with the provincialism of local records and asks: This data isn't as easy to keep track of as temperature extremes, partly because snow melts and drifts and does all sorts of other things that make it difficult to measure, and partly because the world's extreme snowfalls tend to occur at very high elevations where there aren't a lot of climatologists Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as setting a record last year for "the most snowfall ever measured in the United States [Chatterbox presumes that means the continental United States] in a single season." This occurred during the snowfall season that stretched from This information must, of course, be placed in context. In most places, heavy snowfalls are considered a troublesome (albeit picturesque) natural phenomenon. In places that depend heavily on revenues from ski resorts, like Mount Baker, heavy snowfalls are considered manna from heaven. Chatterbox snows there, is in any way preferable to the jubilation in Mount Baker, Wash. Moreover, the very fact that Mount Baker is a place where people pray for heavy snowfalls makes it likelier that the locals will collect potentially skews the data, even assuming Mount Baker is scrupulously honest in its eastern seaboard this week was a pittance compared with the quantity that fell did read columnists regularly, is that even the very best of them tend to bat and the tastes of readers more or less dictate that a columnist has to appear of the day; rants on solidly uncontroversial topics (the New York Post 's the rather daring notion that adults should not have sex with children); and, there are few fates worse than being the child of a columnist struggling with writer's block and a deadline. In the early 1990s, I could easily imagine Anna say something innocent yet wise! And if it could have some bearing on a meet; they have space to fill. They do what they have to do. But I do think they're symptomatic of a larger problem: Journalistic overcapacity. Which is to say, we now have so many news outlets, with so many writers, that we are now saying far more than needs to be said, covering far more than needs to be dominate the news for a few cycles do so not because anyone's legitimately upset or outraged over them but because people like you and (especially) me need something to talk about. Thus, all the silly debates over, say, a be reductive and overheated. But at least they're something to fill an hour of (This, in turn, ties into a favorite fantasy of mine: I am invited to appear introduced as being for it. I give my little speech: "They give such warmth, an enduring symbol of our national freedom, freedoms which you so clearly don't that way at all. And now that you mention it, you're quite right: It is a travesty. I agree with you completely." We are now about five minutes into the In an editorial on its editorial page this morning, the New York Times editorial board editorializes about an important editorial issue; according to Salon magazine, for about the last two years television networks have been secretly submitting scripts to the White House's drug czar, doesn't have to give to the government for free and can instead sell to have already come true, with the government's propaganda campaign in effect for at least three decades, and with a far greater reach than Salon where the castaways get superpowers after consuming irradiated vegetables. You government censors insisted on the removal of two lines of dialogue that they refuses to name a single donor to clarify the situation. Has Kohl done anything year be identified in an annual report to parliament. (Contributions to ignoring this law, and now faces punitive fines totaling twice the undisclosed contributions, in addition to having to forfeit the actual contributions to parliament. (Fines are deducted from the campaign subsidies the government German parties must also report expenditures on broad categories like "staff" and "political operations" in their annual report to parliament. The Kohl insists he used the money for building the party in the former East the funds was the party's original failure to disclose them. For political remains obscured by secret bank accounts. So secret, in fact, that the scheme The scandal continues to widen. Allegations have emerged suggesting a French Kohl could face criminal prosecution if it turns out he accepted bribes for specific government action. (The prosecutor would have to establish an exchange of money for the desired action.) He currently enjoys parliamentary immunity, partnership doing business with the government, and requires a "best effort" to obtain the name, address, occupation, and employer of every individual Institute for Human Gene Therapy. Independent investigations by the National participant in the program, raised questions about the ethics and procedures at consumer products and drug companies in the world. Although the deal is far indigenous protesters and several disgruntled military officers seized the should never have received treatment at the Institute. In addition, none of the to participate (which should have been routine), nor were they ever made fully syndicate that included prominent Communist party officials, members of the order and therefore as a grave threat to party rule. It has vowed to prosecute smuggling operation was recently uncovered in China, the ringleaders were abortion, Bush more firmly asserted that he "disapproves" of Roe v. Wade. But he stopped short of saying that the decision ought to be overturned, suggesting instead that it is an issue best ruled on by state legislatures. concern that the global economy has become precariously dependent on economic contraction. Nonetheless, the G-7 is unlikely to issue any grim warnings for fear of instigating a sudden and violent panic. The off lead in the LAT reports that the Confederate flag is causing he does renounce it he'll infuriate those who cherish it as a part of Southern political negotiations at an impasse, both women made emotional pleas at a (temperate) country to suggest that perhaps he ought to be returned there? agreement to refrain from negative campaigning and "attack politics." The truce paraphrase the explanations of how the hostilities resurfaced, each man left paralyzed yesterday in a car accident, and I felt the same pang you did when I saw the news this morning that he'd been hurt. I did have the pleasure ago, when Derrick was only a few years old. Now this. especially today as the reporters descend on the players and coaches for a reaction. But I think we both know when reality intrudes in sports, the people in sports tend to retreat even deeper into the games they play. And they can't To be sure, there's always some sad talk about the infinity of possibilities that are lost when something like this happens, or when some similar tragedy comes along. There's been a spate of them recently, hasn't there? How about was recently charged with after his girlfriend was shot and died. How about headlines a few weeks ago after he insulted nearly every minority group this them simultaneously defy and define the limits of what human beings can achieve. You never think someone can throw as hard as Rocker or hang in the air can summon such magic consistently. And on command. That's what's so transfixing. It's like all of us, not just the athletes, need to see someone who's fearless and acts like they're going to live forever. It's been interesting to me, for example, that after all the rejoicing about as a player, the next thing that most of his fans fretted about was whether his us how little life actually does resemble sports, try as we might to say it comforting belief in sports that no matter what happens today, no matter how networks while bringing more than a few Internet companies to the verge of nonexistence (since they burned huge amounts of cash in just a few months). And will be unveiled at this year's Super Bowl. But while the story of these ads is mainly one of a desperate grab for market share and brand identity via the familiar techniques of jittery cameras, hyperbolic humor, and some measure of interesting new Internet ad campaign offers none of these. That campaign, which debuted a couple of weeks ago and has yet to attract pretty much all the campaign advertises. In contrast to the frenetic style of also doing print and outdoor ads following the same motif, but no radio ads. (It seems hard to believe a radio station would accept an ad that consisted of "convenience, simplicity, and freedom from higher prices." It's certainly company isn't making enough profit to pay for real advertising. If anything, what really conveys those values of convenience and frugality is the company's strengths ("strength" here being entirely a relative term). For all this, though, you have to stop short of calling the new campaign brilliant, mainly because it's hard to see what kind of legs it will have, at least on television. Watching the ad the first two or even three times was fascinating, in part because even after having seen it once, I kept expecting letters just fade out.) And there's also something compelling about the way the only be made aware of that so many times before you get bored. The next time I during most (perhaps all) of the shows on that tour, the band would, in the middle of a song, begin playing two notes and just continue playing them over until, as a friend of mine put it then, it sounded like you were in an airplane While it was happening, it seemed like an eternity. Listening to this wasn't enjoyable in any conventional sense, or in any sense for that matter. But there was something incredibly interesting about being in the middle of it, and about the way your reactions to what was happening changed the longer the noise continued. And the way the stunt exposed the conventions of the typical rock This wasn't anything you needed to listen to more than once (though I knew point. But perhaps this is one campaign that doesn't depend on repetition, on driving a jingle so deep into your skull that you can't forget it. Perhaps the we're going to have a flood of these campaigns, in which case you won't be able impressed more with his plaintive, rhetorical ploys than his substantive argument. It is not that he is a failed teacher who cannot convey the sound message to a slow student. It is that he is a skilled teacher, or at least advocate, who has tried to sell an alarmist message that just does not add change and a problem. Of course the proprietary systems will loom larger on the Internet with the rise of commerce. But that makes sense for most people. If the system turns out to be filled with folks who plant traps along the way, there are responses to deal with them, whether they are the next generation of right have their gates to filter information? Yes, if they can impose their will on individuals who do not join in their cause; but no if the service is requested and disclosed in advance. But whether it is done online or in person, it does not count as censorship (or at least censorship worthy of scorn) if private controls are the same, but they are not, at least when the private there is some selective, legal void in cyberspace. Take one of his examples. If to an affiliated site, that could well amount to a breach of duty that exposes the operators of both sites to serious liabilities. Just think of the roar that went up when it was found out that some public radio stations gave their lists out only to Democrats for recruitment purposes. We could protest with the same intensity for illicit sharing that takes place over the Net. architecturally, a First Amendment." He laments that the new one does not. But it is not as though once we shift to a partly restricted Net that First Amendment claims cannot be brought against governments that seek to regulate that "it becomes possible for local governments to begin to impose regulation on people on the Net, by forcing local servers to condition access based on the features of who people are." But the painfully obvious answer is, not if that kind of restriction violates the First Amendment. The state could not condition the power of a newspaper to sell its paper on the willingness to sell its Let's be clear about one thing. My position is not that government can do no wrong on the Net, or that private firms can do no right. My view is that the standard set of legal techniques, from contract to legislation to constitutional protection, carry over well to this new environment, even after it ceases to be organized as vast public space, as it was at its outset. Markets survive only if individuals value what they get for more than it costs. They require government protection of property rights to work well. But governments can abuse their powers and should be subject to constitutional checks. All agreed. But nothing about the Internet, no special brand of cyberspace liberty, changes these fundamental relationships and the problems analogies are more instructive and less alarmist, because they do not ignore available. Of course there will be problems on the Net, just as there will be problems in any space to which any of have to venture. No one should be legislation. The Times reports that state lawmakers are bearing the Times scoops the other papers with a proposed $20-billion deal between Time threatening to cut foreign aid and discourage investment in the economically restore confidence in the economy. Critics of the plan claim it would hurt the conglomerate in the world. Critics will bemoan the decrease in number of competitors in the market (which could undercut the diversity of music produced), but the paper suggests that such criticism might be offset by the people buy music. Rather than shop in record stores, customers will eventually a foregone conclusion, economic prosperity, and ideological similarities "spirited contests" between candidates isn't enough to spark much enthusiasm nominate their candidates. The LAT off lead, an exhaustive analysis of a as fronts for terrorist activities. Surprisingly, letters found by prosecutors points out that it's not clear whether the US has any direct evidence that bin Laden ordered the embassy attacks, though there is evidence, apparently, that soon. Late yesterday the Justice Department released a statement saying that the grandmothers had made "a very compassionate and heartfelt plea" to be policy paradigm of yesteryear, when the number one enemy of the US was the it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we're not so sure who they are, but we know they're there." Let that be a comfort to them. Or us. Or you. editor who published his scholarly work and the colleagues who welcomed him into their professional association be held partly responsible for his historian of World War II who is suing another historian over her charge that member, should never have let him get as far as he has without refuting (author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules: The Tune in next week for the continuation of the debate in a Slate before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress asserting that "the state of our union has never been stronger." Most papers note that the speech was surprisingly ambitious for a president in his last development of vaccines for poor nations, photo licenses and safety tests for billion, 10-year tax cut (about the same amount as he unsuccessfully pushed last year, the Journal notes) and a plan to encourage charitable large donations from domestic and foreign sources through nonprofit front comptroller's fine and initiation of a criminal investigation is expected to Vice President Gore. He then corrected himself with "livable." how much homework kids get, and what approach is used for teaching. With that in mind, let me continue for a minute on the question of what topics are being teach in depth and in breadth at the same time. But when I read him, I can't help thinking that the former secretary of education has never actually been a willing to bet, though, that the best teachers in those schools prune the lists how radical a new curriculum may be, the best teachers have always quietly perfectly reasonable sequence of math skills. But he also launches into a You shouldn't expect it to be fun. You must practice, practice, practice. He assumes that kids will not like learning math and that parents will not have the foggiest idea about what is going on. He even provides parents with the mind, since he makes a math error or two himself. In his list of basic math facts, he can't seem to get product and quotient straight when it comes to favorite academic subject. Math, he will soon discover, is far and away the discussion. Just as there are children who have a seemingly natural affinity for reading and others who have an amazing ability to imagine historical events, there are those youngsters who just get numbers. Now to homework. You suggest that public schools assign more than private schools. But in my experience, there are private schools that assign a lot and private schools that assign a little, and likewise with the public schools. In New York, some of the more traditional private schools load on homework. I night. Literally. Not wise, from my point of view. The load is lighter in private progressive schools, but there, too, by fourth grade, knapsacks usually don't demand enough from students. I work next to a public high school and the Leaving homework aside, though, which method is superior, progressive or some aspects of progressive thinking. That can work. I also think that for the classroom can be a great place to learn. Personally, I prefer teaching in a progressive style. But some students require something more traditional. I remember one child who needed help in math. I tried hard to give him insight into the concepts that underlie addition and subtraction. I used blocks. I used when they go from the concept to the rote process, this student learned best I have another student, an exceptionally bright child, who was enrolled in one of the most prestigious traditional schools in the city. A real progressive school, and he is sailing along without problems. Children and teachers are individuals. One system cannot fit all. And so, although I can see standardizing the curriculum, at least to a degree, I worry about standardizing the approach to teaching. What does this mean about school You, of course, get right to the heart of the matter: A good teacher never follows a method to the letter. And if you're the parent of a child who's lucky enough to have a good teacher, you rarely find yourself worrying about whether the method being employed is traditional or progressive, whether there's enough their kids are not at all the kinds of students yours are: Good teachers seem to manage to find ways to fit the needs of many different sorts of students in the same class. It's during the lousy years with weak teachers that we parents suddenly find ourselves being led from our particular complaints to ask bigger questions about the whole approach of a school, and being tempted to think in I suppose an important question to ask, which is not at all the focus of reform, is what sort of guidance proves most helpful to teachers and most conducive to attracting good ones to the profession. Do you, for example, think the Core lesson plans could be useful background material for a teacher who quality of the bibliographies was. We all hear constantly that strong principals play a large part in creating strong schools, but I was struck that resort for disgruntled parents. What do the best of them do to help set a school's academic direction? This book has notably little to say about what sort of changes could help most to raise the quality of teachers and principals, which they evidently consider to be pretty low. But if anything is to be accomplished, it's clear they think school choice parents to choose among not just public schools, but private and parochial and charter schools as well. In fact, the program of constant oversight and pressure this book advocates almost doesn't make sense, or is merely a recipe for frustration, if there isn't school choice: "Start hunting for a different school," they urge parents whose complaints haven't born fruit. But what do you do if you can't afford, or get your kid into, a private school and don't want alternatives to consider, you stew. It does seem somewhat surprising, though, to hear these authors defend their voucher plan on the grounds that it fosters "pluralism in schooling," after pushing a shared curriculum as hard as they I haven't thought as much as I should have about school choice, but the parents I know who have been able to pick from a variety of public schools have otherwise would have left. As a spur to improvements in the system, given the of school choice is to isolate failing schools even further than they already are from pressures that might lead to improving them, it would be a failure for This book has the unintended effect of exposing the unappealing side of the admires. Instead, the micromanaging mother and father conjured up here resemble demanding consumers, obsessed with promoting their child's future and convinced that school and teacher should revolve around their needs and demands. What parents makes me more tired than I already am of marketplace values. Along with Pilots, and fast: "You must be the chief coach, trainer, coordinator, and role your campaign treasury, and he might just win. Unfortunately, the latest polls It looks pretty iffy. Which is why sincerely I hope investigative reporting" as "tawdry voyeurism" and "sleaze." But that doesn't jobs to three of his friends, whom he named." Is that really relevant? Well, serial blow jobs to his friends. Simple fairness should have suggested that laptop. Sometimes in his bathrobe! This can be a little disorienting for the bed and eating breakfast is a day's travel for the new Web publication's editor! "Think of it as a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle," he said when I rang him for genius grants, that houses the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where the owner, will tell you his plan to save Social Security and what he really Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the agreement on genetically altered food products. The cornerstone of the treaty is its support for the "precautionary principle," which allows countries to ban the import of genetically altered products without conclusive scientific proof agreement, and leads with an article exploring the Prison Litigation Reform Act prisons back from the courts. Ten localities have sued successfully, with at pharmaceuticals. The treaty also requires exporters to secure permission from target countries before importing "living modified organisms" such as genetically altered seeds. The most contentious issue was the establishment of a notification system for foods produced with genetically altered seeds. US representatives claimed that such a system would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and after four days of intense negotiation, the delegates agreed to table the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, saying that it leaves no way to prevent prisons from backsliding into the inhumane conditions that warranted judiciary intervention. Some also maintain that the act is unconstitutional: the Supreme Court agreed last year to review a case claiming that the law, in effect, allows Congress to dictate judicial policy. Supporters of the claim that many judges had overstepped their authority, and that overly strict standards made it very difficult to end court intervention. previous claims that he always supported abortion rights, and produced letters Gore wrote to constituents calling abortion "arguably the taking of human life." Gore now maintains that while his view of the morality of abortion has backed a proposal to broaden the definition of "person" in civil rights laws to include "unborn children from the moment of conception." The other big news pedigree. As this story went to press, Today's Papers was still unsure whether far right Freedom Party may join a ruling coalition this week. The party, which negotiations between the People's Party and the Social Democrats broke down since last winter, is inflating gas, heating, and airline ticket prices. The diminished domestic stockpiles of heating oil, brought about by milder winters and stricter regulations on storage facilities. Given the overall health of the economy, no one believes that the price hikes will cause a recession. and injuries to keep off the front line. Some plans sound like they've been hatched by sitcom writers: One woman said that she would divorce her invalid husband to keep her son out of the army. He could then legally claim to be his journalists are terrified the Democratic primary campaign might actually end give it to us, as looks likely, the reaction against him by reporters will be Who Speaks for the Paranoid Center? The appearance of the New Gore up. And it's hard to believe that if Gore wins the presidency the Democrats won't pick up at least six seats in the House. So there's now the distinct possibility, maybe even probability, that my own chosen party will control both the House and White House. It's hard not to be at least mildly alarmed by this unreconstructed colleagues could make if freed from Republican constraint. Goodbye welfare reform, hello Urban Development Action Grants! I sort of to avoid giving anybody more than he has to. It's not easy to have the same Nowhere to be seen, that's where. There are still some New Democrats A couple of months ago, I described Al Gore's attempt to create a positive message and ignoring the vice president's hectoring, the unanswered Gore in kind, he would be descending to his opponent's level, dispelling his most of his complaints. The result has been ebbing momentum for the challenger. for pandering to every special interest group under the sun, and wondered how Gore would muster enough public credibility to serve as president if elected. "And my question to you is, why should we believe you that you will tell the in one of many direct confrontations. He also accused Gore of having once cozy with corporate lobbyists and special interests. pugnacity plays into Gore's hands as much as his earlier pacifism did. In the play back on his accuser. "If that's not negative, I don't what it is," Gore "I have never mentioned your name in an ad, I have never used your picture in an ad," Gore said. "There is nothing I have said in this campaign that is in to be childish. But that's fine with Gore, since it reduces the two men to the establish that there's no real difference in their behavior. If they're the same, then Gore is better because he doesn't hold himself out as a paragon of political saintliness. By his own rules, Gore can go negative so long as he hypocrite. "If you're going to talk about a higher standard, you're going to can't reclaim the status of a conscientious objector. about a change to the liberty of the Net? How is it any different from commerce market in general reduces freedom. So why in cyberspace should it be any presence of commerce on the Net by itself reduces the liberty of the Net. If My argument is that commerce is changing the architecture of the Net, and as a byproduct of that change, the freedoms of the Net will change. Commerce is bringing technologies to the Net that will reduce the initial liberties of the because the architectures that make commerce more efficient can also make control cheaper. The very architectures that make it possible to profit will He said that "physical aggression against neighbors is ruled out in part by the imagines here, but he is appealing to a feature of the Net to make his argument: anonymity. But "anonymity" is not a natural or necessary feature of the Internet. We could just as well imagine an Internet where transactions left eliminate anonymity, a certain liberty of the original Net would change as And this is precisely the kind of change my book describes. There is an increasing push to layer onto the Net architectures that facilitate identification and tracking. The technologies are many. I describe one will function as digital IDs. But there are any number of other examples that make very same point: emerging architectures that make tracking and Think about "cookies." Here's an architecture (in the sense I mean the term) customers. When you contact a site, the site can deposit an entry in your cookie file that will make it possible for that site to gather data about you That change stripped away a certain amount of anonymity on the Net. Now servers could watch where you browse; they could watch pages you skip to; they could know something they didn't before. And all this because of a change in The point is not that cookies do no good. I love the fact that Amazon knows who I am and can recommend books to me when I come to their home page (they've enough). But the point is that the freedom that there was has been changed by a change in the architecture. Sites now get data for free, because the But more important changes are just around the corner. For example: One of the fundamental architectural principles of the original Internet was One consequence of this design was that the network could not discriminate: So long as you followed the basic Internet protocols, the network would carry that new applications could be brought to the Net, even if they displaced the dominant existing application. No one was in a position to discriminate against Enter broadband cable, at least under the architecture initially proposed by affiliates are now converting the cable system so that it can carry the owner gets to choose the Internet service provider that you get your broadband you to stream video through your computer (a possible future with broadband) because that competes with streaming video to your television set (the past with cable), it now has the power to discriminate. And it has that power colleague for six years, and student for one; I know his chafing very well.) The libertarian would talk about externalities, and about minimum regulation to avoid externalities, and about the value of common carriers, and the like. defend the principles of the initial architecture against the changes that commerce would impose on that architecture. They have been slow because they have been slow to see how the Net is changing. And more important, slow to see how much of the freedom they enjoy comes not (just) from the absence of government, but also from a constitution of freedom built into the architecture The argument of my book is that we ought to pay attention to this constitution, and to the freedoms that this initial architecture gave us. And that we ought to pay attention to the influences that are changing this hopeful Al Gore challenges yet another key assertion by the Gore campaign about Gore's youthful marijuana use was more extensive than the candidate has alleged for depression a number of times" and is "now living on disability." But Chatterbox has learned from another source that Gore may not have been truthful when he made the separate claim that he "never got high enough to One of the cupcake boxes was already opened when it arrived at the counter, Gore's mouth, she said, was smeared with a substance that may have been toenail fungus, she insisted that this had not affected her powers of thought it doubtful the company would still have a copy of the receipt this long after the purchase. "Heck, in those days, we didn't even have computerized swiftly to deny the latest allegation. In a statement released this morning, said that I didn't work up a powerful appetite doing other things, like playing A Gore spokesman said that the stain "may be chocolate, and may have been challenge that Gore submit the paperback to an independent lab for testing. by its own labs. If she fails to respond, he said, "the House will have no will begin hearings of his own on the matter next week. voting on his renomination as Fed chair, and he turned in a bravura performance. Of course, it's probably easier to turn in bravura performances when you know that everyone in the room listening to you believes that you are exactly, we are on the curve of that technological change, keeping open the possibility that there may still be many years ahead of rapid economic growth watch the senators try to make their own dubious economic views appear to be serves him well in those situations. He can begin with "Well, yes, Senator" and end with an effective "so, actually, no," without ever making anyone look bad. will have to pay the government billions for the foreseeable future, that seeing the price of its key product rise because of taxes, and that's making less money than expected. It's all The Insider 's fault, no investors. The odd thing, of course, is that people keep pouring money into underestimate the power of having a bull as your corporate symbol." company that has yet to be identified. The franchisees fear that the new Allow me to share a portion of a missive that came my way today from our editor: "Let us in on the process of how you mine the news for subjects, what strikes you as funny, how MAD chooses its targets, etc. We'd also love to hear your reviews of the newspapers' attempts to be funny, from political As long as it doesn't involve me having to dance in public, I will do just Like anyone who has the good fortune to have a job where they get to spoof current events, I do my best to stay, well, current. That is, I read a lot of magazines, pore over a couple of newspapers every day, and watch a good deal of admittedly, doesn't help me stay abreast of world affairs, but I now know how Anyway, from there, the subjects pretty much suggest themselves, and it's just a matter of coming up with the right hook and good lines. For that, I rely As for the aforementioned newspaper columnists, well, I have to admit that strictest sense, although she can be savagely funny), I don't really read the pretty upscale magazine, and he comes on and you think he's going to be the on bacon! Just bacon! Unfortunately, I missed the last few minutes and never found out what kind of wine best accompanies bacon.) sends the city into a delightful panic. (Delightful, and a bit confounding to we Northerners who can't believe what a sleepy Southern city this still run on milk and eggs and bread!" (What, is everyone making French toast?) Now, if I were chatting with Al Gore outside that movie theater on Listen sister. Let's get this straight. I wasn't working as a "Republican "Breakfast Club" thing.) Here's the story: I interviewed him when I was still watching The English Patient at the same theater I was on a rainy So, as he and Tipper walked out, my friend and I were right behind them, and Hope you're not traveling today. You know there's snow out there. So says my before anyone else on his newly purchased team showed up. There's a bit of a geek factor there, isn't there? Something that's not usually associated with Mavericks but playing those pesky games just gets in the way. Clearly, the whole sports scene needs some retooling. The tabloids here in may be deported if he's convicted of trying to bribe police to get a friend wonderful, stirring, spectacular sports event there is, was tainted by that payola scandal last year. Remember? Representatives from the host city wannabes What astounded me most was the cheesy stuff the voters requested. fulfill your every whim, wouldn't you ask for something better than a titanium members can demand just about anything in exchange for their votes on an Lots of impressive earnings reports this week from the usual suspects tech stocks remained fairly strong. But the Dow took it on the chin, perhaps because (if you're feeling cynical) people who invest in Dow stocks are the only people who still worry about things like rising interest rates or perhaps announcing engagement plans. The news sent both companies' stocks down sharply, supposed to have understood that most mergers don't work, and that when the stock market punishes both stocks, the merger really won't work. But then I remember: Even now, the stock market doesn't run companies. Men who like the idea of running as big a company as can be imagined do. And so, on to this The Journal used the word 'foil,' but surprisingly, it did not run a think it's safer to lend money for a long time than for a short time president). Apparently bond traders are now anticipating a steep decline in the desire to control the presentation of Windows on PC screens to without the troupe's input. This means, of course, that if the case ever gets coverage after taking campaign contributions from a couple of big drug as close to clean government as we're going to get." and over that same period often published letters warning that the stock market was on the verge of a crash, but despite the fact that the crash never came, winter thing is really a pattern or just a statistical fluke?" every question and comment the audience could muster. After that, he held a press conference in the snow outside. After the press conference, he got on his full, your tape player is out of batteries and your pen is out of ink. After a couple of hours, every journalist in his entourage has the same, enviable hottest ticket on the campaign trail this year. Today there were dozens more relationship with the press remains remarkably similar to the one I wrote about during his announcement tour last fall. Surprisingly, the increased scrutiny and intensity of a closely fought race haven't changed the tone or cluster around, attaching microphones to his lapels, and sticking tape talking seriously about his campaign and his life, engaging in badinage with on a cell phone. It all feels like a collegiate road trip, with running jokes, opportunity to receive the kind of education and training necessary to give them the ability to take advantage of this prosperity. It seems to me that all should be interested in addressing that situation." coffee he drinks: "Seven to eight cups a day. But sometimes only three, to a question about whether his politics have evolved: "All of us should change I don't claim not to have evolved as a politician and in my philosophy and my views. I think it would be an incredible waste of time if I hadn't grown and Here is what some prominent national reporters wrote on it: Donuts to gummy bears, it's been a memorable journey encourages favorable press attention (as well as increasing the risk of chosen to run his presidential campaign as what one reporter on the bus of running for president that he found pleasurable. And for whatever reason, he these events with a comic monologue, ramps up to a serious pitch about repudiating the power of the special interests and motivating young people and then takes questions the floor. From time to time, he fertilizes the crowd Don "expensive sweater" (sure enough, the guy asks him about cutting the capital gains rate). By the time he winds down, the civilians are as glutted with Even the hecklers get their due. At an event in high school cafeteria in the candidates with posters that ask, "WHAT'S YOUR PLAN?" Today some of them are dressed in elaborate costumes that include giant smokestack hats with enough to listen to you," he says. "We had a guy in a shark suit last night." Personality and Social Psychology (not available online, but the New characteristic of incompetent people is their inability to recognize that they are incompetent. The study begins with the following slapstick anecdote: them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape then estimate how well they'd done at each. In the first, they were asked to assess how funny they found a series of jokes of markedly varied funniness (as graded by a team of eight professional comedians). In the second, they were they'd done on the test. In every instance but the last, the worst scorers guessed that they'd done better than average. (Participants in the fourth study were able to assess their abilities more realistically, but only by becoming side of their body but don't seem to understand that fact; when asked to pick something up with their left hand, they will decline by saying they're too is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." Substitute the word "depression" for "despair" and you have a cornerstone of modern Dunning are careful to point out that in certain circumstances, it's impossible for all but the clinically deluded to ignore evidence about one's relative dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf course with Tiger Woods." These individuals' superior skill, regularly demonstrated in public, is simply too great to ignore. And as their study showed, when incompetent people are given a chance to wise up a bit, they do acquire some discussed frankly is how much the economy depends on people perceiving Overoptimism is in fact the common theme in many of the most purely immigrants' children can be doctors and lawyers, that you can turn your franchise into a fortune, that salesman can make it on a smile and a century. "When they were built they could hardly be justified in economic who repeatedly overestimated their chances of success, but who collectively managed to settle and develop the West while many of them individually were The Internet economy is a more contemporary example of this phenomenon: Surely most people trying to strike it rich in this gold rush will fail, but right now their buoyant optimism is keeping the stock market high and making lawsuit against the nation's major handgun manufacturers and distributors. Today leads with fresh polling indicating that despite close races in Bush have "huge" leads among voters nationwide. The poll shows that among A particularly disturbing note: The paper quotes the union's general counsel as saying it is "cleaner than most unions." It should be noted that the Times says high up in its story that the report was "made available by a union official eager to have the federation take a tougher stance on corruption." This exemplifies the paper's admirable general policy when dealing with unnamed sources of at least communicating to the reader the source's series of legal setbacks recently, with judges throwing out several of them. overseas the city's budget, can step in to prevent the funding of a lawsuit. gist was that Congress has the right to dictate conditions that must be more productive contact with Security Council officials yesterday than he'd captured alive. The LAT explains that the rebels are making this claim another connection, but doesn't give out the address. What's up with that? the mustache. The story doesn't note one quarter in which upper lip layering seems permanently out of fashion: presidential candidates. What possible Times lead with the failure last night of a key test of the Pentagon's leads with its latest political poll, which finds that no issue is considered in the presidential election, the candidates' perceived personal qualities may from closed before the missile test results had been released.) sensors. Both Times say there will be only one more test before choose not to go ahead with a national missile shield. On the heels of yesterday's studies from two think tanks suggesting that the income gap between rich and poor continues to grow, the LAT fronts and from the Federal Reserve. The difference is that the Fed focused not on income but on accumulated wealth. Some of the more striking findings: Although from "BOOM TIME A BAD TIME FOR POOREST, STUDY FINDS." The Journal 's reads: sense of Southern idealism and cultural particularism." And he mentions a raft of dead Southern idealists who he thinks might well have voted to keep the Capitol flag in place, but it's significant that he doesn't mention any living ones. (For more on the politics of the Stars and Bars, click here.) dialysis centers. The government alleged that the centers caused Medicare to pay for hundreds of thousands of needless tests for patients and had paid claims that the government's attempt to influence the content of shows is "nothing untoward." After all, he observes, the Pentagon reviews scripts all the time when filmmakers seek to use its facilities and equipment. And the filmmakers don't protest that the government has exploited them. But one man's public funds. Why should taxpayers only get to see war movies the Pentagon teachers, but ordinary teachers, or at least teachers who have not taught well. It is the experience of reading an exam from a student who just didn't get it. student just isn't bright; the student must have had a bad day, etc. But in the end, such a teacher can't escape the feeling that the fault is in the teacher. This mirrors his picture of before, of many different sites at the ends of the wires, so to speak, some commercial, some not. With both pictures, the moral is ends, will effect the value of the commons. The original Internet is that the experience of the Net that we know right now. Changes that would make it less protective of free speech, changes that would make it more invasive of privacy, changes that would make it more susceptible to regulation, changes So take the example of regulation. It was commonplace at the start of the Internet revolution for people to celebrate the fact that life there could not be regulated. But in my book, I told the story about an increasingly frequently carried ("voluntarily") digital IDs. In one version of that story, these IDs collect all sorts of facts about people. And in that version, these IDs are designed to be checked automatically by servers as you pass along the information highway. And thus, in that version, quite invisibly, the network is change, it becomes possible once again for local government to begin to impose regulation on people on the Net, by forcing local servers to condition access based on the features of who people are. It becomes possible, that is, to zone Now, the argument is a bit complex. And no doubt one could disagree with it. But it is hard for me to see how one could read that argument, and then talk about "gated communities" or "side by side" networks. The argument is about the commons, not the ends; it is about the control that is enabled for those in the Internet we know now; and it is about the control that gets enabled because of the emergence of one kind of architecture of identity. It is about a control over the commons, not a control in gated communities. Or consider another argument at the core of the book, this one about free speech. When the concern about kids and "porn" became pressing, many said a perfect solution would be code that helped filter content on the Net. And a group of very talented architects came up with an architecture to facilitate this filtering. They called it the Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS. Using PICS, individual sites could rate their material, but more important, third parties could rate the material of others. PICS was valuable its ratings as well. Individuals would then select the rating system they want, just now) would filter content according to this rating. Sounds just great. Until one notices another feature of this but it is also neutral vertically (the filters can be imposed at any place in conceivably, the nation). And more significant, this vertical filter would not announce itself as a filter. It could block access invisibly. So that this now become a technology that would lower the cost of censorship generally. And so the feature of the original Internet that people celebrated most plan, flip. The technology would enable just the sort of speech control the Now again, this is not a straightforward argument. One can disagree with it, articles against my position. And I have seen how earlier parts of my argument But I don't understand how one would believe that this change that I am understand how one would read this argument and not get that it is about the think they would lose market share if they did not allow users to disable the system with a click of the mouse, which I take it, they do." is the tracking of servers that we're describing. And second, in fact, there is no obligation to disclose anything. Sites have their "privacy policies" (has anyone ever read one of them?), but the interesting question is about sites sharing data. You give your name to one site, but choose not to give your name to another, yet unbeknownst to you, the sites are allied, and using a common cookie identification, they can share what you didn't want shared. to do so? Because again, by hypothesis, consumers don't know the data is being shared. So they don't know enough to punish the sharer, by reducing its market individuals are given is not, as you predict, a technology that "allows choices There are more efficient technologies, that wouldn't bother you at each turn as I ask there, why would one expect the market voluntarily to adopt these technologies? For to build in a technology that allows choices to be heavily individuated is to build in a technology that increases the costs of getting data. But in Internet space, data is gold. Under the existing architecture, commercial sites get it for free. What is the mechanism that one would imagine whereby these sites adopt technologies to give up what they now get for Once again, mine is a hard argument to make. Reasonable people have disagreed with the particulars I recommend. But I don't see how one can see this as a problem about gated communities. Once again, it is a change that In all these cases, the changes I am describing are changes to the core experience of life on the Net. And the question we should ask is how these changes will affect what we find valuable in the Net. The point is not against libertarians. Indeed, one could imagine a libertarian critique of emerging architectures on the Net just as one could imagine a libertarian critique of trying to point to a newly salient threat to whatever values you might Trying, but not succeeding, not even with one of my brightest students. So was a fairly obvious point, I have obviously failed to convey. You know, one of the consequences of watching Blazing Saddles many It is much, much funnier than it seems here. I guess, for the joke to work, So, I think our "Breakfast Table" time is winding down. One final item: Did image of him wandering around the newsroom, saying, "So, what word do I use to the term 'widely unread' to describe 'On My Mind'?" (The answers, as best I can wretched excess and the Super Bowl is actually providing the inspirational It's hard to remember another athlete who went from nowhere to his sports' wives than loan their quarterbacks to someone. But the Rams' apathy about any of it. Between the legal drugs you can get there and the constant runs to would show they've never seen a complete game. And if they do remember one, it's usually only later. Much, much later. As a flashback.) her heart or anxiously clasping her hands during games (she's the one with the paper observes that such drops no longer provoke the anxiety they did just a few years ago. As if to dramatize this point, none of the other papers fronts the move, and even the Wall Street Journal business and finance news index puts it campaigned aggressively." On the Republican side, the paper says that Bush got taken by the Times to be a sign of the potency of the abortion issue in caucus has gone on to become president since Jimmy Carter. Indeed, the paper points out high up that the overwhelmingly white state is hardly representative of the nation. Another important piece of perspective should have been higher the honor of being the first in the nation to weigh in on candidates. "provides some legal ammunition" for efforts to curtail soft money. The LAT sees things more strongly, leading off its piece with the claim that with the decision, the court "strongly endorsed the cause of campaign reform." perpetuates a dichotomy from an earlier decision: Donation limits do not countries that support terrorism, which would reduce its ability to get screen all patients for heart problems before prescribing the popular nighttime diverted computer specialists at many companies from other projects, which are jobs were created throughout the federal government and track what's happening 'DEATH TAX' HIT HOME," followed by the subhead "Next generation faces a burden change all that. But if you read the fine print stashed in a couple of the piece's crannies, you learn that "next generation" and "hit home" are rather merits. That is, until Weeks gets to one nominee in the criticism Shields' effort "is an amazingly bad book, right up there at the top of my list debates, which it describes as "personal and combative." The debates also top definitive position on the issue of what sort of home work activities must comply with federal workplace health and safety regulations, a position taken after the Labor Department first said all such activities were covered and then household is not covered, but hazardous manufacturing work there is. The Times leads with the latest in the city's mushrooming police scandal: which the arrests were based on officers' documented illegal activity, ranging from lying to unprovoked shooting. At least three of those people are in jail together to form a Polling Review Board that will monitor and discuss the flood of political polls expected during the upcoming election season. One focus of the organization will be scrutinizing and debunking online polls. The headlines over the papers' debate stories suggest that the press can looking positively exuberant, making what looks like a peace sign with each hand, although, let's face it, at that age, it's probably bunny ears. The preponderance of documentary materials relating to him, that, yes, he almost mistakenly declassified and that on at least one occasion were accessed by an outside researcher. But the outside researcher was not apparently a Post sense in at least one concrete area: He's been wearing a hat while campaigning say you're willing to do the right thing even if it makes you look bad in the media. How can we believe that when, even in freezing weather, to look good you that makes them so darn funny, but the mere mention of an Evil Clown makes me the point. So I salute you, my friend, for bringing up Evil Clowns. Makes me president sign an executive order to end racial profiling by law enforcement. see who gets the nomination, and that could mean big bucks for the Democratic By the way, speaking of columnists, where has the New York Post 's In other news, the Wall Street Journal has made up for yesterday's Page One story with a whole slew of wonderful news items. For instance, according to today's "Business Bulletin," "Boat parties, casino nights, and accompanied by an assortment of toppings," are declining in popularity, which casino nights and events held on boats: "People are tired of being trapped." The same column also features the following news item: "This year's top carving, which a spokeswoman described as indescribable." These two sentences "Hey! I could have called her yesterday!" Not that I would have. But I could This is a strange time in the stock market. On the one hand, prevailing wisdom among the chattering classes has it that current stock prices, is for that bubble to lose slow air slowly, rather than in one giant burst. I started collecting examples of journalists saying things like "this overvalued market" and "Does anyone remember Japan in the 1980s?," but I stopped because, well, I got bored. At the same time, though, no one seems to be actually selling their stock, perhaps because everyone's succumbed to the siren song of Or it may be that people are staying invested because for a supposed bubble in which prices are driven ever higher by indiscriminate investors, this market is actually quite discriminating, and its standards for corporate performance column, I wrote about the segmentation of Internet stocks into winners and Net sector by taking a real toll on Internet retailers. When Lucent recently announced that its quarterly numbers would fall well short of expectations, the Now, one way of looking at these sharp turns in market sentiment is to a more accurate way of looking at them is to see that investors are thinking hard about what news means for a company's future earning prospects and are not interested in rewarding companies that fail to live up to expectations. (For further evidence of this, look at the market's reaction to all the recent merger announcements.) It's also the case that those expectations are very Of course, the market's expectations should be very high, what with the what's interesting is that it isn't just stocks trading at stratospheric levels that are punished, nor is it just stocks that fall well short of and revenue growth weren't staggering, but they weren't disappointing, either. The company showed strong growth in its wireless business, which remains one of the hottest sectors around, and it issued a bullish forecast for the coming access to its local customers, fell well short of expectations. Since business for local phone companies to dominate, this was not good news. On a Pronto," but that's neither here nor there.) But the important point is that the judgment was made. In a pure speculative market, like the South Sea Bubble, it was enough to exist to coin money. And even in the months leading up to the performance seemed to matter less and less. Say what you will about this market. There are no byes for the teams that are playing in it. response wasn't lamenting the end of cyberspace. It was lamenting the failure to connect. What baffles me is your refusal to engage an argument that I have You attack what I "seem" to be saying or what I must "assume." Why not attack "carried over to the Net as needed." But where have I ever said anything different? My argument is against those who say law won't "be needed" and gates to filter information" so long as they don't "impose their will on individuals who do not join their cause." But it was precisely my point that the PICS architecture enables the imposition on those who do "not join their cause." So are you agreeing with me? Or disagreeing with me? Or just not same." Where have I ever said anything like that? Obviously they are both "controls." Obviously they are differentially dangerous, depending upon the context. What words have I uttered to conflict with these obvious You rightfully report my "lament" at the displacement of an embedded First Amendment, and then quote my argument about the increasing power of government to zone cyberspace. But then you chide me that the "painfully obvious answer" to my lament is that these changes won't come "if that kind of restriction identification. The point was that this affected the commons, not only, as you said, the gated communities. My argument about the First Amendment comes three paragraphs later, and about filters, not IDs. Whatever protection this (local ordinance) of a First Amendment has against filters, it has "painfully" little And then you close by saying that your view "is that the standard set of about the Internet, no special brand of cyberspace liberty, changes these how to translate legal values from real space to cyberspace. So what do you In every case, for some reason, I can't get you to focus on arguments that I actually make, either here or in the book. I say commerce is changing the character of the Net; you say you "don't get it." I say it is changing the Net by changing the architecture; you say it won't affect the commons, only the is changing the commons, not the private networks; you respond with a string of banalities that have nothing to do with the commons, or my point. You run, but you will not hide. Instead, you say more and more that connects less and I have tried to "sell" a message, it is true. I am grateful to those who bit more convincing in selling that message if you actually wrote about what I It might just make the argument a bit less "diffuse" and "hypothetical." occasionally someone will come along and, because of something you've written, that. (The book, by the way, is terrific, and you should buy it when it comes of profitability and a market capitalization that bore no connection to the one company that he truly loved and invested in out of a real faith in its illuminated what now seems to me to be essentially indisputable, which is that (This, of course, makes me wonder why I wasn't able to see then what I see now, interactions between buyers and sellers and not building or even really selling anything itself, its gross margins (that is, the cost of actually providing its "goods") are almost guaranteed to remain high. Although the company obviously volume of items for sale, there are no obvious limitations on how big its virtual marketplace can grow, making it, in that sense, almost infinitely scalable. And the bigger it gets, and the more people grow comfortable with it, the wider the variety of goods people will buy and sell on it. that network increases. The network effect is often bandied about as characteristic of many businesses on the Net, but in fact there is no "network" buyers want to go where there are the most sellers, and therefore the positive There are a couple of quirks to this story. For all the power of the network something on auction at Amazon, I can never figure out why the person isn't Amazon and Yahoo do have powerful customer bases of their own, and have set up their interfaces so that auction items find their way to regular customers fairly easily. Also, Amazon lets you buy a lot of items with a credit card, and the company became fully valued not long after it went public. In other words, at the "right" price in a matter of months rather than years (as arguably was stock won't go up (or down) from here, especially since volatility is now a way changing view of Internet companies, and Internet stocks, over the past two years. What once appeared to be a bubble driven by hysterical investors now looks much more to me like as good an attempt as possible at quantifying the value of an economic opportunity that, taken as a whole, still looks practically limitless. (Of course, to almost everyone else, it looks like a bubble.) And while discussion of the Net remains swamped with hype and demonstrate that you can take advantage of that opportunity and still make a lead with a surprisingly large revised Congressional Budget Office 10-year estimate of the federal budget surplus, now thought to be as much as a candidates quickly weighed in on how they would variously divvy up the surplus among tax cuts, spending, debt reduction, and Social Security and Medicare money just yet: The surplus stories are juxtaposed with reporting about how the women, whereas the LAT doesn't mention menopause until the eighth paragraph and never mentions the number of women at risk. Both stories mention that progestin also reduces the risk of uterine cancer, which prompts a suggestion: It would be helpful if the papers would get in the habit of accompanying stories about the particular potential cancer risk of a given relented and agreed to allow his visiting grandmothers to see him today. But country's spy agency will help ensure compliance. Western countries, the paper explains, are worried that providing this information will lead to rampant about this, the Journal says some will, rather than surrender source who instead dispatches a cousin and friend to sing his praises. The result, says the paper, is that "Bush is the only candidate who comes across like he's been pressured by Whitewater prosecutors into cooperating with their investigation as part of a guilty plea deal, was hired last year by an passengers and avoid taking fares to "dangerous neighborhoods." Both the editorial and the letter (from the head of the city cab commission) state that failing to serve potential clients because of their race and redlining of neighborhoods are both banned by the city's cab rules. As they should be. But there's a complication here that both the editorial and the letter overlook, but that cab drivers cannot: Although the local rules say a cab driver cannot ignore a fare on the basis of "personal appearance," this obviously can't mean that drivers must see threatening behavior before refusing to pick someone up. Imagine for instance that you are a cab driver and around the corner from the county jail you are peacefully flagged down by a young man in a bright orange jumpsuit stamped "Property of County Jail." You'd be nuts to pick him up and no law could possibly make it otherwise, even though he only looks like and disability policy agree? Perhaps the dailies ought to pose this question to How can school systems get and keep excellent teachers? Good question! I do think that a good curriculum is part of the answer. And I think the Core reading, which is no small thing. I like his emphasis on biographies and mythology in the younger grades. He gives an important place to music and art, a good idea from my point of view. His curriculum is fairly new and is currently used in less than a thousand schools, and I suspect that in time, and reciting scripted lessons all day long. I understand that many teachers are relieved to have such a script, but I am sure that with guidance, most of them such guidance? Good principals can certainly help. I agree with you that By the way, the unions play an important role in attracting good teachers. Decent wages and working conditions are not a side issue. I suppose it's not unions usually support the Democrats and he is a Republican. But I wish he had recognized how many helpful things the unions do, not just in regard to wages and working conditions. In New York, the teachers' union runs a program called I have to make a confession about school choice. I became a teacher in the were hopeless. The conditions were too dreadful. The teachers and administrators were too racist. The system was intractable. What to do? For a lot of young educators like me, the answer was to start our own sides have changed. Liberals, like me, understand that our society had better educators have shown that you can make superior public schools even in poor to be, for people with ambition and ideas. True, there is a risk that in task. As for charter schools, I don't think we have enough information yet. Charter schools are public schools that operate outside of the bureaucratic system, and in some places that might be good, in other places not so good. Concerning vouchers, my fear is that they will undermine a sense of the public So what if some other kids are left in the lurch, is the implication. It is not book has some good ideas, too (as you and I agree) and it has given us the opportunity to bat around our own ideas, which has been fun. were a Republican operative plotting Al Gore's demise when you ran into him literary license. Trust me, sister. The story works great when you're not the city gets so much as a dusting of snow. But here in New York City, as you know, the mindset is a little different. Here it takes the equivalent of a percussion bomb to get anyone's attention. Here, we don't chitchat much about episode and, even when it's not, the tabloid headline writers try to turn it Take today. Rather than waking up and remarking about the four inches of snow we received here overnight, the big story here is about the two office workers who were stuck in an skyscraper elevator that went on a 40-story free Apparently, some rescue workers took an adjacent elevator to the place where the man and woman were stuck, took out the side panels that separated the two elevator cars, then asked them to make a tightrope walk across a narrow beam that spanned the shaft between the two elevators, as if these two poor pack of bubblegum into my mouth before every softball game I played. And falling asleep to baseball games that I listened to on a transistor radio I smuggled to bed. And getting so dusty from playing outside all day that I could Perhaps not surprisingly, years later I had to go to the doctor because of a back problem. I had a slightly cracked disk, and the doctor asked me how it barn floor covered with straw; the time I wrecked a minibike or fell into a class when a classmate forgot to hold my legs onto the uneven bars as I practicing a gymnastics maneuver called a "Flying Eagle." I couldn't turn my seem like an appellation that's likely to go down in the annals of crime normally last night. As you and Otto (the dog) know from my frequent nocturnal lag of the past week has been miserable. Every night, a roiling marathon of phone with improper currency. But today I made it until dawn before having a we already were booked. The horrible part about this wasn't the Anxiety of Uncertainty (would the airline honor the tickets?), it was how reality impinged permeated my waking yesterday. What a bizarre day. The children getting into Still, I am surprised at the degree to which it's truly typically enjoyed an unreasonable trust in all machinery except pay phones. In sure it couldn't have been mechanical error. I figured it had to be terrorists. We even talked about cranking out another lesser thriller, remember? Prologue: New York, sight in on a jumbo jet, ready, aim, and fire one of those Stingers, flaw, a fatal crack in its technology. Was it a technical glitch that caused work means something to yet another novelist with such a sharp, funny, and for us to be discussing a volume of letters in this format! We may be certain of a few things, the most important enter secondhand stores, ask for one of her books, and have the proprietor tell the days when you would regularly run into Dawn's novels at thrift sales and in the dustiest corners of secondhand book stores, priced at less than a dollar a From this point on, anybody who undertakes any sort of short stories, book reviews, and occasional pieces; a magnificent diary that books sold so poorly when they were originally issued that she is, in some sense, brand new. We read her because she's good company (the "death of the needs no explication; rather, her wit makes us laugh, her characters are likely You mention her "optimism"; I would prefer the word Do I make myself obscure? Then let me put it another religion, scornful of "happy endings" great and small, in marriages as in revolutions. At bottom, her view of the world is bleak, blunt, unsparing, and fundamentally tragic. She offers no great hopes, encourages no daydreams, most of us will never get that rock halfway up the hill to begin with. And so A Time To Be Born (1942)--a dazzling and unsettling evocation of New York City on the verge of World War II, which grabs and holds features homosexual characters and is neither a soggy plea for understanding, a mockery or hate tract, a clinical case study, or anything other than an intricate and compassionate rendering of some fellow human beings). some immersion in her life and work. My publishers will kill me if I don't make it to the platform by memory, rather than by sight. Finally, after the microwaves similar to the kind that's emitted from mobile phones. Not surprisingly, the poor rats couldn't remember the way to the platform after swam to the place where it should be and looked around with concern; the cellular rats just swam around randomly, like members of the Royal family at I could see this one really upsetting the digerati. For years, people have shrugged off suggestions that cell phones could cause certain kinds of tumors. (I was interviewing an engineer recently who referred Of course, it's impossible to say at this point if the need to be conducted (rats in a tank of juice, I guess, followed by a vat of beer). Also, Wired says the radio transmissions are slightly different from the type used by cellular phones. Still, I figured that you, as president and founder of the Cell Phone Haters Club, would want to be aware of this development so you can disseminate it (how? Carrier pigeon?) to your Sometimes it's worth remembering that the everyday business of Wall Street, about the brokers and traders who are still out there trying to hit that bid Smith Barney analyst who today started coverage of General Motors with a "hold" recommendation. Think of it. Why General Motors right now? And starting it with a hold? It's like a restaurant critic who's forced to specialize in different gradations of bland. Or a movie reviewer spending his time explaining why except that the big news was how little news the decision made on Wall Street, at least in terms of moving the market as a whole or even the company's stock, simultaneously be unimportant to a company and incredibly important to the companies it's competing against. It's the inscrutable wisdom of the market. ordered three top executives at Computer Associates to You can now offer bids on the price of groceries. Airlines make seats available are about to expire, and mystery meat? Well. This is going to be big. Really necessarily believers of the occult.' Apparently only if the show featured someone who could actually raise the dead would it appeal to believers million in a successful stock rights offering that allowed current But I suppose that is a vote of confidence of sorts." it actually held the press conference. One wonders what would have happened if at the press conference it had only announced that it would be holding another there in the first place. This doesn't make him a minimal realist. The truth looking for would bring fresh analysis and a new interpretation of events. The The problem with so much that's been written about the war is that it stops evidence that the war was finally being won by the United States and South journalists who wrote about the war critically and then lamented the outcome Memorial. There's always a crowd there. I think it's partly because people feel these soldiers haven't got a fair shake from historians, the media, etc. would have been a huge political price to pay at home, far bigger than the one upper hand. And some have claimed the war was essentially won. The first time I posture statement. I didn't believe him at the time. But more recently the case but left, say, two divisions behind and kept up military and economic aid? While Chatterbox wasn't paying attention, the Old Executive Office Building, a grand Second Empire pile that stands beside the White House and houses White House aides who aren't quite important enough to get offices in the executive ready to name him Man of the Century, and there seems to be general agreement right are invited to get in touch with one another in the Fray. Chatterbox's only request is that they not choose the New Executive Office Building, just up would say, disturbing, than mine, that were in fact, I would say, Who are these racist advisers? A quick look at the Crossfire transcript reveals only one allegation that comes close to fitting PRESS: I just want to follow up again. Because there's another adviser to there for blacks, but blacks just don't go after them. It reminds me of Ed book The Dream and the Nightmare had been a major influence. In implied, black society in general. (Magnet says "only a minority of black dysfunctional feature of underclass society, Magnet argues, is a failure to take available jobs. "Of course there are jobs out there," Magnet told me, sticking to his guns. "The success of welfare reform makes that abundantly clear. Folks didn't have trouble going out and finding jobs." Magnet's view is probably impolitic (though maybe less so than Wolf and unemployed man and woman in the black underclass tried to get a job back in being a culture whose members do not take advantage of economic opportunities when they present themselves. The argument is actually anti- racist in matter," the result of "bad messages coming from the larger culture [read: those privileged, white hippies!] that have encouraged a weak family Wolf a lot of protection when it comes to press coverage, though it might not and inflames dialogue in a way that tends to prevent exposure of which ideas are right and which are wrong. ("It's just bullshit," Magnet says. "It means by Press' tendentious summary of Magnet's views. But Press didn't call anyone a out anything racist, you'll be notified immediately! "The downside of the changing statistics, and indeed a new figure came out "Continued economic growth led to a significant reduction in poverty in press release of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Sting really likes squash soup. He really enjoys soups that have been leads with an anonymously sourced report that Secretary of State movement and says that next week advocates will file for a proposed ballot Gore's assertion, in an interview, that a cousin offered to help him join the possibly be drafted (he ultimately enlisted). Gore did not take his cousin up on the offer, he says, "because a lot of those decisions were made with budget negotiations with Congress. The White House leak, the Times A separate Post roundup of the budget talks (run inside) notes that despite early promises from both parties, almost nothing has been done to reform Medicare and that the parties' pledges to protect Social Security largely focuses on House Republicans' anger at their Senate colleagues for taking The LAT fronts, and the Post runs inside, the results of a large Pew Research Center poll on political and economic attitudes. The findings are no surprise: people are happier with their finances and more tolerant of government intervention than five years ago. The Post identifies a group of swing voters that Pew calls the "New Prosperity Independents." They are young, these hardball tactics harm consumers. "This case is not about antitrust," he which involves businesses getting together to raise prices and restrict output. This case is about how business firms deal with each other. It raises issues that go under such names as property rights, contracts, commercial law, browser into Windows provides no technical efficiency or consumer benefit is It's a jungle out there: These are trying times for yuppie dads and moms. The Journal reports that United Airlines has been replacing its crystal salt and pepper shakers in first and business class with tubular paper sachets. United claims that the salt often condenses in the shaker, but victimized travelers aren't buying this explanation. As one harried the wrong spot." As if that weren't enough, the LAT reports that Burger Kings across the land are running out of spokesman tries to calm the panic by reassuring distraught moms and tots that franchises]. We have toys making their way by planes, trains, and automobiles as well as ships." But what will this do to BK stock? The LAT asks a "restaurant consultant": "In the short run, this clearly hurts Burger King," he says. "The chains can't afford to have an unlimited number [of toys] on hand so they just do the best they can and kind of regroup after the disaster." trial, issued yesterday a 207-page document that states the software giant "enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market." The story, with accompanying lowest point in three decades. The New York Times serves up one of several education stories: stifled innovation, squeezed out competition, and impaired consumer choice. His conclusions, a precursor to the verdict expected early next year, support the who say that the findings are hardly surprising (an opinion also expressed by in which findings of fact were released before the actual verdict. This was interpreted by one analyst as a gesture intended to elicit a settlement. If none is reached, appeals may drag on for years, experts say. percentage point equates to roughly one million people.) The drop brought with in good shape before the weekend close, and analysts predict that the Fed will the ability to draw in the politically disenchanted. The story emphasizes the can hold on with significantly less money than his rival. The Post boomers put increased pressure on Medicare and Social Security coffers. Beyond their shock value, New York City's test scores made news because the coming years, statewide tests (with class work and attendance) will determine which students advance to the next grade. All the papers report that a sharply program until a definitive ruling is reached about whether the program violates the separation of church and state. The program lets children attend parochial schools using public money. The court decided to suspend an injunction preventing new students from joining the program. Finally, the LAT leaders' "serious alarm" at the shield, which could damage military and "breakaway region" later on in the piece, was latently distracted by a blink in today. The plan will dovetail White House ideas, such as tax credits for banks of capital gains taxes on property sales in these "renewal communities." The runs this story inside, and says the plan is vague and will yield little notes that, at the last minute, a sentence was inserted in the legislation job of contextualizing: The pharmaceutical industry is fragmented, with inefficiencies in research and few new products; it also fears that that Medicare may start to cover prescription drugs, which could lower prices. The Journal 's online edition reports that early this morning the board of entire board at any time. The Journal waits until the 31st paragraph the North that invades the other. A report released by a House Republican the '70s and '80s. "When you finish a story, I would say, read it, substitute make me miserable, make my wife cry, but it has no innuendo, no unattributed pejorative remarks, no slap in the face for joy of slapping, it is news, not gutter gossip, and as a reporter I know the writer was fair, then give it to advising are not true. She never advised him about clothes, she says, and she mentioned "alpha" and "beta" only in passing, in one memo. As for her exorbitant fee, she says, "I have written a whole book about how women should successful writer, and I had to close down my whole shop" to write memos for Gore. She concedes that it was Gore who wanted the payments concealed. In the because she's radical? Is it because she's ambitious? Is it because she's not a Because of the money? Because she's a girl? Because she's a girl who writes transformed its marketing, and last year ketchup sales bested those of salsa, which had been first for three years running. Where it used to pitch its tomato commercials, with teens philosophizing about the "moodiness" of ketchup that refuses to leave the bottle; forthcoming ads will teach the under-12 set that ketchup can be "fun" (a campaign sure to draw the appreciation of moms and Street Journal 's "Business and Finance" box. Most papers note that the interest rates again this year, the other papers note that Wall Street will Times leads with a Justice Department lawsuit against seven utility consumers. (The Journal asserts, without attribution, that new four people with a 9mm handgun, killing two. He is still at large. (Note: The with a flying airplane," says the National Transportation Safety Board. "The winds have plucked off slabs of concrete and left the sidewalks historic reluctance to use the death penalty makes that sentence unlikely. Many of these students are now reformists pressing for open, secular calls for "dialogue." "Every revolution at first has special idealistic causes and aims to change the world," says one of the three students to organize the takeover. "But in practice, after a while, the revolutionaries will come face including a war imposed on us and poor economy," he and his peers are "confronting the demand of the people to participate in politics." Meanwhile, Earlier this week the Journal seasoned its editorial page with a changes in business mores particularly well. In a cartoon from the '50s, a As long as we're making of list of people who are not running for president amazing it is, after nearly a century of Republican rule here on Long Island, that the voters finally got fed up enough to buck the system. These Republicans look amateurish. What finally did them in was making a financial muck of the county's budget, getting the county's bond rating downgraded, and proposing a boasting publicly about how well organized a "machine" the Republican Party was frustrating it was to run up against that implacable wall of united party loyalty. The Republicans used to hold these "informal" private meetings where all the issues would be decided in a conference room. Then they would emerge to take a "public" vote at meetings, often with little or no discussion of even the most complicated topic. If anyone attending the public meeting raised a things used to be done routinely; the fact that it's survived so long is amazing. It's like the political equivalent of one of those tribes of wholly isolated people that explorers stumble on from time to time in the jungle. Over It will be interesting to see what happens when the county executive, a up for election next. He's enjoyed a comfortable decade or more in office. arrangement as a violation of journalistic ethics, and last week prompted from does not approve of it), urges Parks to publish a lengthy investigation in the One of the most important steps the Times can take is to publish in its own pages a thorough examination of the events that led to the Staples deal. The Times owes nothing less to its readers and to its Others have written about the Staples controversy and will continue to do Foreman in the late 1970s. (Foreman was a political writer at the Inquirer who had an affair with a local pol while covering local politics for the paper.) The Times petition is signed by many important suspects other names have been added to the list since he acquired a copy.) The petitioners have a good idea, and not just because it might cost Downing of more cooperation between the business and news departments of the newspaper probably led to this fiasco) their jobs. There remain many unanswered questions about the Staples deal, of which the "journalism ethics" question is only Staples deal was smart from a business perspective? According to the the Times handed over to the Staples Center apparently was a down of ad signs posted inside and outside the Staples Center; the right to sell Center is surely of negligible value. Chatterbox suspects the same is true of to pamper advertisers; but if the Times had simply rented its own like An irony in all this is that the real way to make money off the Staples Center would have been to pander to advertisers with a special issue of but rather, to keep it all. Chatterbox doesn't expect Captain Crunch and his minions to understand journalism; but don't they understand how to make a suspect, a man of course, was wearing a brown hat, according to the police account. And camouflage clothes. Aside from that, he looked pretty to sound pretty average, too: He went into an office building (want to bet it's his?) and opened fire. The television coverage is all too average as well: Lots of Johnny on the spots, excitedly telling what they know "at this point" (not police are searching, then showing the neighborhood from a helicopter, then deciding that it was a boneheaded move to show where, exactly, the police are hunting (let's not let the shooter know where the cops are!). and zipping over to another Johnny on the spots who doesn't know much. At this point. Ah, is there anything that's at once so exhilarating and banal as breaking that we in the media do. Remember when we were both junior reporters at dead and the near dead? And remember that time when that lady hissed at you? overall process of decomposition. Why am I watching this broadcast? Why is it national news? What good does it do? Where's the public need to know here? Oh, cool: Video footage just came on showing the cops storming a house with one of those SWAT shields. This is getting good. See you at dinner. Gotta federal requirements. The new statewide standards, which will be phased in amount of pollution emitted by the cars that are currently being manufactured. to produce vehicles which satisfy the strictest state requirements. Times lead claims that the findings will compound problems that are defection of top talent; the emergence of new computing platforms; and the technological shifts. Another Post piece explores the legal aftermath of and the next president could order the Justice Department to abandon the great harvest of faith will be reaped on this vast and vital continent" and "forced conversions." Both Times es report that police officers beat and arrested three demonstrators who dared to chant: "No conversions." A principle, arguing that "politicians have to draw the line." man who can defend his own life can defend yours." The slogan refers to the states ratified the Constitution (click here for the In passing the law, Congress cited the coins' educational value, saying the new quarters would "promote the diffusion of knowledge among the youth of the United States about the individual states." Collectors also lobbied for the and sell it for the face value of the coin. A quarter, for example, costs the These profits, called "seigniorage," go into the government's general fund and are budgeted by Congress just like tax revenue. (Old coins can also be exchanged for new ones, but this accounts for only a small portion of the coins supply" as a tool to stimulate the economy and control inflation, this does not mean that the Fed regulates the supply of bills and coins. New coins and bills holdings, mutual funds, and other financial instruments. (Instead, the Fed buys and sells securities, changes interest rates, and adjusts the required reserve out monetary policies.) So, coins (and bills) are simply supplied as demanded quarters, which is creating an unprecedented demand. The new quarters are now a "Beta male" who needs to take on the "Alpha male" in the Oval Office before "Ah don't know. Do you have anything that would be good to rebel "Maybe you'd better take the motorcycle helmet off." "You aren't planning to tell anybody about this, are you?" sources deep within the federal government, the percentage of the years, and probably its lowest level since the early 1970s. This "dependency You get the picture. Welfare dependency among blacks remained at a high (when there was already a lot of talk of reform in the air). Since then, the Is the black dependency rate the lowest ever? Probably not, for the simple reason that before the "welfare explosion" of the late 1960s, many poor blacks were blocked or discouraged from receiving welfare. It's hard to know for the lowest since the early '70s or even the late '60s. administration, may not want to publicize these encouraging statistics, because dependency rate has always been much higher than the white rate, at least since the welfare explosion. This is one reason why the "underclass," as measured by plunging dependency rate suggests is that this problem may be on its way to being radically ameliorated, if not solved. A smaller portion of blacks on welfare means not only a smaller underclass; it means more working and latter two groups will eventually swamp and assimilate the former. (Might the drop in black dependency just record people who are being pushed off welfare into poverty? It could, but it almost certainly doesn't. Black poverty and black child poverty have been falling. Click here for more on this Can a favorable "tipping point" be far away? Things seem to be finally exactly compare the number of people (including children) on welfare with the with the adult population. Typically there is only one adult per welfare qualify for welfare. There may be also be one, or two, or more children in a single "case." The "case" numbers also include cases in which technically only It is important to realize that as we go forward, there are no easy solutions to complex problems. Inferences from recent events must be drawn carefully so that decisions can be made that meet all critical and important requirements. For example, the Staples Center mistake has been ascribed to the that it had an equally awkward arrangement with the Fleet Center when it opened newspaper along classy principles gets you: Somebody comes along and buys you Bad decisions can and are made by people with all kinds of backgrounds in the best kinds of organizations. The key is to have people make the best decisions they can. And when they make a bad call, to quickly acknowledge it, Other newspaper organizations have business ties that raise important journalistic questions with which they successfully grapple every day. For direct ownership positions. I mention these two examples simply to indicate that as we go forward we must meet our simultaneous responsibilities to our readers, customers, advertisers and communities. This requires sensitivity to all of the relevant issues in a brutally competitive and complex world. We are organizations: Flay us for the Staples Center deal and we'll flay you right "Just who do you think I am, sir?" "We've already established that," he says. "Now we're just haggling over price." In a sense, that's what we're arguing have been politically acceptable in the United States in the early 1970s. Let me try to make the case that the price was worth paying. First, look at have never come to grips with this. But a lot of horrible things did happen. One million boat people, of whom tens of thousands died at sea. The legitimate educational institutions. An oppressive Communist regime over all of Now, what was the most explosive event of the war in terms of adverse State in which four students were shot to death by National Guardsmen. But as vanish, but it did die down. And I think there was still plenty of room for for the wrong thing. They got a peace settlement that left some North "the folklore of the antiwar movement." One of those myths is championed by necessary? Of course not. He'd have achieved his goal a lot sooner. argument. Still, I think he made it especially well. invasion. I doubt it. But, as you say, that's another story. has strong support in the Senate, although the Post says a Democrat is threatening to filibuster. It is unknown weapons. Retaliatory nuclear strikes are never justified, he argues, because story (he accused the Bush campaign of "planting" the story in the can't rule by heroic example alone; he must build and lead a team. In light of how effective a Lone Ranger like him would be in the White House." The Post reports on the latest hot Internet startup: a llama ask his landlord before bidding, though. (He might have to settle for the by a independent panel appointed by the Defense Department, that criticizes the "kill vehicles," that would destroy incoming ballistic missiles by colliding the Republicans, have reluctantly acknowledged that a "limited system" might be necessary sooner rather than later to protect the United States from such successful interception last month, there has been no integrated test of the program's component parts: the kill vehicles, radars, and controlling computer networks. And it remains to be seen whether the kill vehicles will be able to withstand the shock loads of the booster rockets being designed to carry them that their methods for measuring drug production might be "seriously flawed." According to those officials, next year's estimates are likely to "skyrocket." Two unnamed government sources suggested to the LAT that estimates of said. "Where are all the corpses?" Many skeptics think the estimates are little more than "guesswork" used by the administration to get more money out of congressional cuts, low inflation, and efforts to weed out fraud. "The decline in Medicare spending is a phenomenal development," said a former director of lobbies to push Congress to adopt the legislation necessary to open trade with China, should the United States and China strike a deal that would bring China editors of the lauded paper, the capital letter has been taken down a peg. in the first reference to the president of the United States.' Note: not 'the current President,' with a capital P." Also losing caps are "founding fathers" and "the king," in "God save the King." The country might not feel the Air travel is a horror. But still, how amazing! I mean, to get on a plane at Again, it's easy to leap to the wrong conclusions when you wander around out on the town, and rather than talking to each other, each was engaged in a to buy one (since you made me get rid of our old, useless one!) just so I could "personalize" it with one of those translucent antennas with the lightning bolt shopping here is it's a social activity, a reason to get out of your tiny nonexistent problem. People want to leave their desks and their apartments, indeed, they have to if they want to see each other. The Net will never catch Back for more! It's always fun to share favorite authors. Someone once said did with the diaries, for the simple reason that Dawn had already edited the letters before she sent them out. With the diaries, she was writing solely for herself (at least in theory) and sometimes became a little sloppy or redundant, as we will in purely personal jottings or first drafts. Since I already felt a thought it important to tidy her up here and there. (All of the words in the published Diaries are Dawn's own, but some of the external structures names, but otherwise they're pretty much as she wrote them. Although it's a from her diaries that she was furious about the name her publishers had she thought it was, but since she spent the rest of her life buying up any copy she found and destroying it and never mentioned it in any lists of her work, I seems to have been the great romantic love of her life, after her husband, to very interesting for a biographer), is deeply autobiographical. It was written living at home with her husband and son, and it is wracked with private was also, as you say, a good life as well in its way. Her humor was the key, I to write; her art, so rich in its laughter (even in some passages of her saddest books), buoyed her up. How could she have stood all that she went problems, impoverishment, and what was essentially a period of homelessness (this last when she was in her 60s)? She was one strong woman, and humor was I agree with you that sexism likely played a part in her long men. I think the literary left was unhappy that her workers were likely to be as silly as her bosses. I think social conservatives were unhappy with all of in italics, the italics are Chatterbox's, not those of the source. saying that the Republican budget passed yesterday by the House, which he whether Social Security funds would be tapped for current spending. Chatterbox doesn't much care whether Social Security funds are tapped for current spending, but he knows the Republicans are making a big show of caring about that and therefore are being somewhat dishonest in pretending that they won't. But what really interests Chatterbox is the president's use of the word, surpluses and we keep having budget fights. That's what's going on here. "normalcy." The meaning, Chatterbox suspected, had to do with an intimate act sometimes performed in the shower rooms of correctional facilities. In fact, chiefly in the southern United States, means "to confuse," and probably derives from some combination of "bamboozle," "fuddle," and "fuzzy." The Random defined in the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary as "toilet paper; worthless reflection, though, this reading seems more entertaining than sound. acknowledgement of the kindly encouragement which made this book possible." "Grandpa, that's a lie!" cried the girl, fiercely; but there were pink spots in her cheeks as she retreated into the cabin and began to slam the pots and Gen. Lee's bodyguard and cook (and, one presumes, slave). The Rev. Lee's book will give the Rev. Lee (as quoted in the Bulletin 's profoundly I saw the happy light that always dances in the eyes of his race at the thought Conservative commentators have taken to repeating the mantra that Al Gore Gore's a mean, tough political fighter. Gore is the one who introduced Big Al can be a tough, mean player. After all, he's the guy who which the state legislature finally did after much crusading by a local discourse would not seem to be something to be proud of. Is it true that Gore racist messages into the debate? The answers to these questions are, The issue did not take for Gore, but the exchange attracted the interest 'This is incredible' ...It totally fell into our lap." In reviewing this history, it's important to make some crucial distinctions. had tolerated a furlough program for especially violent criminals in his state even after a horrific incident strongly suggested this was a bad policy. It's conceivable, of course, that Gore was warming up for more explicit and racially been uncharacteristic of him. In any event, Gore dropped out of the race as working for "an organization affiliated with the Bush campaign" phoned him official Bush campaign, of course, kept its distance from such efforts, and evidence that it was heartily appreciative of the racial subtext. In his book wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist." Although Bush's campaign southern Republicans right before that year's Democratic convention: a month ago and he said you'll never see me standing in the driveway of my because both happened to be black. Gore never did that. He never did anything advisers. The editors noted that while Gore is a sucker for trendy gurus ("who think nothing of sharing hotel rooms in order to save money"). he plays an analogous role as affiliated intellectual. Where Wolf advises Gore clearly reciprocal. As a result of his association with a leading presidential candidate, West can expect to see his fame and his already formidable lecture I must admit to being poorly disposed toward West, mainly on the basis of a stature as a "public intellectual," portraying him as a pretentious egomaniac, a mass of contradictions, and a superficial thinker who dresses up diluted Then I read some of West's writings. While he certainly can be eccentric, solipsistic, and turgid, at his best moments West is shrewd, courageous, and inspirational. I remain ambivalent about his work, but it is certainly not, as his campaign, mainly because he finds him insightful and stimulating. Let's get some of West's obvious faults out of the way. His vanity is indeed considerable. West's picture invariably appears on the cover of his books, and all" that really cinches it. West has an unfortunate tendency to refer to his is a more a matter of style than of substance. West cultivates a distinctively black mode of academic discourse, improvisational in tone and containing a stronger element of showmanship and braggadocio than most of his white Another annoyance is West's love affair with labels. In the early pages of fighter." These stickers accumulate, as on a steamer trunk, without pointing to any definitive destination. This habit, too, makes West easy to mock, but I think it serves a purpose. West wants to communicate the intensity of his effort to reconcile his various influences: religious, political, philosophic, rigor. But I don't think West's intention is so much to work out a system as it promiscuous use of slogans is a way of personalizing the philosophical, of So what is it that I find appealing about West? I think his main strengths enthusiasm about bridging it. West has a reputation as something of an angry action, but notes that it "is not the most important issue for black progress racism is no longer a big problem and the liberal view that it's the whole problems. He thinks racism remains pervasive and destructive, a truth that uttering, and one that West has helped him articulate more pointedly. Yet West doesn't exonerate victims of racism for irresponsibility or criminality Reed, can't forgive him). West is blunt about what he calls black that is close to that of many conservatives on the importance of family structure and religious values. He is also a relentless and insightful enemy of character of the black freedom struggle largely depends on the open condemnation by its spokespersons of any racist attitude or action," he calls "politics of conversion," he considers no one beyond the possibility of redemption and no problem utterly intractable. West is among the toughest and concludes a diatribe with a condemnation. His religious sensibility tells him to try to find what is useful in views that he deplores, and to try to pull moral reprobates in a more positive direction. West is scathing on the subject sometime collaborator Henry Louis Gates. He has said many things that I Where he tries to lay out a policy agenda, as in his recent book The Future think he oscillates between dreary, conventional ideas (public financing of and utterly impractical ones (a modified parliamentary system, explicit candidate with a charisma deficit, he seems like just the guy. gender, race, media, dissidence, and, of course, pop culture. The host that has been losing the culture wars on campus of late. You can't help wondering whether its graduates, trained in such ephemera as "Rhetoric and Principle," as one of the core courses is called, will be able to hold their intellectuals will find themselves cerebrally all dressed up with no place to training program for public intellectuals. At its best, it would be an name. It's pretty presumptuous for any professor to declare his students "public intellectuals"; you would much rather they got their certification as such from someone else. Otherwise, the whole thing sounds harmless. For one aren't looking for fame: "They are looking for some engagement with the public." Kirsch is using code, but what he means is that what he's training his everybody, no matter what he does, participates in some kind of intellectual conception of the world and line of moral conduct, and therefore generates new ways of thinking. The job of people who actually call themselves intellectuals is to articulate such situational thought and put it to use for change. As democratic society tries to gain the consent of potential customers, win intellectuals are actively involved in society, that is, they constantly Moreover, the ideal of the public intellectual is no newfangled fad. "Organic intellectual" is not strictly identical with "public intellectual," of signed up to teach, given his understanding of the term "public intellectual" (in The Last Intellectuals he defines it as one who writes with "vigor whom no one sneers at, except perhaps organic intellectuals. Almost every special esteem its version of the active thinker who puts his principles across well and thereby commands a wider public. We might think the idea is newer because of the phrase, which gained currency in recent years mainly because of intellectuals, he claims, have all retreated into academia, where they have lost themselves in a thicket of specialized professional jargon. graduating from college these days feels compelled to publish his or her particular social critique, whether readable or not, and there is a small Public Affairs Press, etc.) ready to print them. On the other hand, why should there be any limit to the number of baby public intellectuals out there? And forum was taking place. One, a young woman, shouted that military spending should be cut to provide better health care until she was ejected from the truly deranged. In response to a question put to all the candidates about socialism and slavery. "The income tax is a form of government control of EVERY LAST DOLLAR that is made or earned in income," he bellowed, walking to the edge of the stage. "THINK ABOUT IT," he shouted at the audience. "If I have to give you a percentage of my income and you get to determine the percentage, how much are you in control of? HOW MUCH? ANSWER This assault left everyone a bit stunned, but it was foster the policy that withheld our contributions from the United Nations. The were rolling their eyes, giggling, or trying to suppress gales of laugher. As soon as the debate ended, he came upstairs to the hall where the press was out their stories on deadline, didn't immediately respond with any. At that race, they did the polling afterward. I actually won the debate in the eyes of the people polled. I OFTEN win these debates, and every time I stand before you press folks, you have no questions. I find it kind of amazing. At some point, you know, one has to start to wonder. The people of this country have gotten over their racial sickness. I don't know that you folks have. I think that deadly SICK of it. Every time I get in front of audiences in this country, they respond, just as it was tonight, to the answers THAT I GIVE. But your response is nothing because you don't represent those people. You apparently represent the same money powers that are seeking to destroy the representative nature of our government. I frankly think you all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. At some point you ought to wake up to your responsibility not to let vice take place in darkness and not to let virtue languish unnoticed. That's your job, but you don't do it, DO YOU? Instead you PANDER to the money. But if you were because there would be sufficient attention paid to every candidate in the race without the expenditure of billions of dollars. But they don't know, because you won't do your job. That's SAD! And it's DESTROYING our democracy. room, leaving reporters somewhat stunned. In fact, I think the racial factor The rest of the evening was less exciting. If there was he wasn't trying to get the job of president without the job interview. Bush took umbrage, saying he had to attend a dinner held in honor of his wife, about how to get Bush to participate in the next debate. "If you call it a good line about "no taxation without respiration" before dissolving into his without restoring the draft. After explaining that he thought the Army didn't need volunteers, he turned to the issue of his temper, recently displayed in response to a negative New York Times story that he enlisted families, brave young men and women, on food stamps. That's a States." To my ear, the applause meter topped out on that one. Unlike last night's performance, which ended abruptly, Supreme Court justices were getting old and that he wanted to pick their I think it is silly to think of a backlash against a woman who has, to date, things to put energy into than chopping down the work of a writer who worked at the trade honorably and industriously for 50-odd years without getting any of the recognition many of us believe she richly deserved. Why don't her supposed for me. Different strokes and all that. The world is full of a number of things radically changed her style), and the best novels of manners by John (particularly young ones). Who else has created such a splendid "unreliable I enjoy literary biography but don't think that it is essential to enjoyment occasional difficulty with important artists whose personalities repel me. totalitarianism. But would I feel that way if I didn't know their life stories? her revival. For those of us who love her, she seems a wise, funny, unpretentious, and compassionate friend, one blessed with a decidedly wicked sense of humor. We like her company. She seems smart and civilized. She never vision of the human condition. And yet we leave her with gratitude and cheer, artists who will always be very much for some people. I don't find her any more settings and circumstances a little and you have what Mad magazine used to call "the usual gang of idiots" gloriously presented with a calm, amused, It's been a pleasure getting to know you (in this distinctly '90s fashion), and I look forward to kicking this whole matter around over a bottle of wine Make Good Presidents?" question is that it's not a question anyone would the New Economy, and articles about company heads routinely include lines like that they got tired of wrestling with Introductory Calculus and quit, but that they were too smart to waste their time in school. (A debatable assumption, to be sure, but then I finished college, so I would say that.) The success of Gates, Dell, et al., in fact, is antithetical to Bush's educational career, The only reason this comparison really matters, incidentally, is that the the past that we should look to business as a model for the way we run government. This was never as congenial an analogy to Republican ideology as money and take their time paying it back, and most invest heavily in the luck. Actually, he probably would have fit in pretty well with the corporate chieftains of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when there was no foreign and not with reports of victims trapped under small mountains of rubble and widespread emphasizes that the quake came, inconveniently enough, just two days before nationwide. That said, the story adds that the Republicans could have done worse, especially given their thin House majority, inexperienced new speaker, low poll ratings, and internecine strife between conservatives and moderates. military salaries and establish themselves as protectors of Social Security revenue. Now, says the story, they simply "want to go home." investigation. The National Transportation Safety Report still hasn't found any evidence of fire, loss of cabin pressure, or any other clear reason for the that the two pilots may have been thrusting the controls in opposite directions, and surmise that they may have been fighting each other, struggling with passengers, or simply panicking. "The dive was so violent that unbelted sentenced to six years in prison. The trial's biggest revelation was that who had helped them obtain the necessary weapons, and assuring future viewers this much, they have no clue. So don't blame them and arrest them for what we baked goods, are unanimously thought by nutritionists to contribute to heart disease. Foods containing less than half a gram of trans fat and a half gram of saturated fat per serving could proudly claim to be "trans fat free." the Citadel built a stadium on the site without properly exhuming the graves, Volunteers spent most of the summer digging the site up, and yesterday, Civil rousing rendition of "Dixie." The papers agree that the event epitomized South Some people rage against government taxes, others resent the old people who are sucking dry our Social Security safety net even as they crankily vote down local school budgets. Not me. I lie awake and worry about the national tragedy that is the airline industry. I hate them all: the lackadaisical baggage brown goo so shamelessly denigrates the memory of food. But most of all, I not to explode, and fix any smoking engines before takeoff. So of course you are right; "simple" mechanical failure is scarier than terrorism because it connotes a level of indifference that is no less evil than overt terrorism but far more insidious. And even worse, it epitomizes the attitude of most airline employees toward their customers. The passengers. Those people who are paying the privilege of being herded like cattle onto a death trap over which no one seems to have much control. Stop citing those statistics that show air travel is safer than automobiles. The big difference is that auto accidents are survivable. That's because auto accidents are, to some extent, controllable by has a choice: Pull off the highway or gut it out. The airplane passenger who, powered by Magic Fingers has no such choice. I must sit. And hope that the pilot is better at his job than the baggage handlers are at theirs. I have never knowingly clicked on an online ad. Never. I did it a couple of times accidentally about three years ago, when I was still confused about how search engines worked and couldn't figure out which juicy inviting button near the top of the screen to hit. But each time, as soon as I realized I was going to a sponsor's page, I recoiled as if a spider had landed in my hair. "No! No! No! No!" I shrieked in horror, jerking my modem's cord out of the wall. Also I delete all the cookies on my hard drive once a week because I have some vague belief that this diversionary tactic will confuse the marketers and advertisers the next time I go to a site. Also, I always lie on any surveys. Either I say our I never wanted to admit any of this to you, but now that you are no longer directly involved in running any Internet sites, I think you can take the having people pester me to buy stuff I don't need. My own brain is already you love so much and wake me up to see every time it comes on. "This is the funny part," you shriek, elbowing me. I am proud to say that although the ad's whose brain simply will not hold onto brand names? I know what I like, I just ones with the shiny chrome fenders and bench seats. But I don't think you can buy them anymore. Here are the attributes of consumer goods that appeal to me to fall asleep in while you're reading. None of these features can be properly conveyed online. Trust me; I spend my days shopping on the Internet. is likely to have on one of the more hackneyed journalistic traditions: the At most major news organizations, the advent of the holiday season means that reporters, photo editors, and the like can kick back a little and set about preparing stories, and sometimes whole broadcasts and magazine issues, dedicated to what happened during the previous year. Since the events in question were already news once, retelling their stories involves little more This year, however, journalists are likely to spend the holiday season of which will end at the same moment. Hardly anyone, Chatterbox predicts, will mostly remembers is everyone marveling at or fretting about or otherwise thinking of the momentous significance of the coming year. But a friend reminds seemed to raise the possibility that the most powerful software company on Readers are invited to nominate events suitable for commemoration in Chatterbox's "year in review" item, which Chatterbox would like to post before Thanksgiving (in order to beat all the various the year; and if anyone comes up with a list that has never been thought of before, even better. Chatterbox will publish only the findings that he agrees with. Please do not post nominations in the Fray. Instead, please send them depressives who don't get out of bed until noon," I have quite the opposite problem. Recently I have been the victim of a team action by my four dogs to keep moving the mealtime earlier and earlier they will hit some kind of a any of the information in that format either. But oh, the things I have her show to go on hiatus when she was hospitalized for dehydration. Like so special episode of the series that will finally aim a much needed spotlight on one of the most overlooked problems facing college students today. We hear so much about excessive drinking on campus, but so little is ever said about all the dehydrated young people who refuse all beverages entirely. couldn't be better for this female population boom because in our country at last a military advisory committee has opened up a debate that will eventually pave the way for a world of the future in which every little girl will finally And speaking of mildly feminist issues, can I use this as a segue to discuss just briefly how truly repelled and filled with hatred I am for theoretical expression, although that helps things along, I admit. But I have been enraged supermodel instead of a tubby intern he would have been regarded as a hero. And then he always finishes this up with a comment about how his weakness is that he (Trump) doesn't smoke or drink but dammit, he "loves women." First of all, let me say that I never imagined myself having a reason to defend the mainly (or supermodel, as he calls them). That to me is like a caviar collector saying you can help me with a new one. I have been looking for a better analogy for review, not his book. But I hope I don't run in to him in a dark alley certainly didn't see anyone reading her at the beach this summer. Nor do many of my academic colleagues know her work. They've heard of her, though. "Which both the biography and your prefaces, you shy away from any feminist The otherwise admiring review of the Letters in the daily New York Ammo, as we all know, is important. Diapers and dresses are not. How I love and his sum total was war was pretty nice and a lot better than sitting around a hot hall and writers ought to all go to war and get killed and if they didn't they were a big sissy. Then he went over to the Stork Club, followed by a pack know she is female, and if she should glance down in the shower and see a set of balls she would only think, Dear, dear, how dusty things get in New York. She had illness and struggle too, in spades, but what amazes me is the hardiness of her optimism, her resilience, her delight in the exchange of ideas, and her unshakable confidence in her own worth. The feminist issues weren't her only hurdle. There is the simple fact of her sanctimonious stuff that gets rewarded. Furthermore she wrote, scathingly, "is that it's the wind and the time and the tide that decide your luck." Do you think it is that arbitrary? A different turn of the magic wheel and it'd be a item, "The Ending of the Underclass, Part XVIII," as excessively How do you get from a declining welfare population to "the ending of the underclass"? What if poor single mothers on welfare just become poor single My answer is: "Underclass" doesn't mean people who are poor, or even people who are poor and live in neighborhoods with other poor people. It means people who are poor and live in poor neighborhoods isolated from the mainstream world breadwinners, and an adversary culture (typically aggravated by race differences). Although black poverty has been falling, let's assume, for purposes of argument, that what is happening is poor single mothers on welfare cut off from the world of work. On the contrary, she's likely to be on the lookout for job opportunities that pay more, or offer useful training. She's eligible for raises and promotions (not to mention government subsidies like the Earned Income Tax Credit). She can't afford to develop an attitude that sets itself in opposition to the mainstream culture. Her children will grow up knowing the discipline of a working home, and they will have at least one We can also say it because a society of poor working single mothers is probably unstable in a good way. If women know they are not going to be supported by welfare checks but are going to have to work, they are apt to ask contribute by going to work. Young women will be less likely to have children out of wedlock, or at least partnership with a man, precisely because being a working single mom is a struggle. These trends are already starting to radically ameliorated if not solved." (Four escape hatches in one sentence should be enough!) But I am optimistic, because the logic behind the favorable scenario seems so powerful. I hope more crack welfare working but are still struggling and not making much money. Yes, even if the underclass shrinks through assimilation, the problem of the working poor will still be with us. But that's a different fight, and an easier one to wage. Once people are working, it's not that hard to boost their incomes the underclass has been, in part, that those remedies haven't been able to of the national teachers unions, has called for "tough future testing for new new teachers. Translation: I want to make it really, really clear that the publication, at about this point in the enterprise's growth, of a snide Good morning! It's an honor to share breakfast conversation with one of the look up to as a formative influence. So, it was with particular pleasure that today, as I do every day, I padded across the floors of my suburban Long Island set, sat down in my spacious breakfast nook over my customary English muffin up in the most adorable little catalogue we found, and began flipping through the day's periodicals in search of something pithy and clever to ruminate upon. And boy did I find it! It looks like the Gore camp is really in a tizzy over as I am almost every night, watching Space Ghost cartoons in a drugged haze, after seriously pissing off my editor by turning in the week's depressives, I don't normally even get out of bed until at least noon, it sure felt weird dragging myself into the corner store to buy the morning editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (for some reason they that's because I get paid to make fun of it) and wondering just how a longhair dropout like myself somehow ended up, for this one week anyway, being an actual official employee (of sorts) of our man Bill Gates, the Richest Guy in the But I did find something wonderful, actually, and right on the front page of creates the music that announces the arrival and departure of Japan's commuter trains. Because the schedule is so busy, each composition has to be only seven seconds long, but he still considers it his mandate to make each one of them True Art. Too cool. When you consider that Japan is also the center of feedback and industrial sounds played at screeching, distorted levels, you get train. It's this sort of postmodern news story that I love the most, because you're not sure if it makes you want to laugh or cry. (My favorite type of Also, I realize we're supposed to keep this current and newsy, and this is definitely an old story by now, but I just have to ask what you think about the whole Death of Irony debate that everybody was talking about a while back. As a Master Ironist yourself, you must have had some thoughts about this character just trying to be funny. We only wanted people to like us. We promise not to do it again," etc, but I can't afford a full page of the paper I work for, let alone of a publication a sincere, earnest gentleman of his ilk would be likely he's just really happy with several of the candidates this year, including Bush moment) as stubborn, heroic individualism. Or you can say The New sort of remedial course on what's been happening in politics over the past extremely effective campaign" but that "The race is about to intensify." Did proposed an "extremely controversial" solution to each of the problems he has bunch of sensible incremental proposals that practically everyone his health plan, he got a bit cautious, and hasn't proposed anything dramatic since. But that's not the sort of complication you can get into if you're antipoverty plan had a "big price tag--$9.8 billion." If that's a big price "gun control." But if ever there was a "hot button" issue that is big on Democratic pollsters' radar screens but relatively unimportant in reality, it's the question of how a military invasion of a hostile nation's information analysts who spent the weekend scratching their heads over how the findings of party in the world; previously, the outgoing president would simply knight his candidates argued throughout the campaign that the party apparatus had buoyed next year's general election if it can remain less fractured than its top brass guidelines for conducting information warfare. They suggested that be just as illegal under international law as if they were performed manually. The Labor Department two years ago prohibited states from using money for this purpose, but new regulations may be on their way. At issue: for 60-plus years, only people who are involuntarily unemployed, eligible for work, and seeking it have qualified for unemployment insurance. Employees who take time off to care for newborn infants do so voluntarily, according to employers who disagree with also say that the government shouldn't bleed the unemployment trust, which people may need in years leaner than these. As if anticipating the Times shows children left at day care tend to have a weaker bond with their mothers, A generation of change in the South has allowed prosecutors to pursue a Blacks hold more political power and have lobbied for suspects to be tried; witnesses with heavy consciences can come forward without fear of speaking the truth; and a feeling that the South must come to terms with past racism and LAT staffers over the newspaper's agreement to share profits from a publishers more cautious about experimenting with revenue sources, she writes, The State Department will allow "the most anxious government employees" (as well as the moderately worried, and those seeking a free trip home) in four stay don't expect a meltdown; without electricity and heating, however, there takes a look at that rock, that pillar, that spectacular golden prism for store owners who had never paid any attention to the chain, were approached by Where will they spend this anniversary of the event that altered their lives I love that story! Especially how that one LI town went Democrat for the Times Mirror Co., and company for the sheer, unmitigated crap (my paraphrasing as far as I know, have a mustache; this is how my brain works, as you In any event, for those of you not following along at home, Chandler was a Times from a local paper to one of the four important newspapers every thinking human ought to read every day (quick: Name the other three!). Sadly, he was forced to retire from the board of directors of Times Mirror Co. last between the paper and calamity. The Times has steadily lost its place among the great rags, thanks mainly to the laughingstock way in which it has appear to be unsuccessful. For example, he suggested that the breaking down of going to result in new growth to the paper in terms of additional advertising was quoted at the time in many national media stories as saying he was going to reinvent newspapers, inferring that the traditional system was outdated and was Oh dear. The letter goes on like that for about five glorious, Frank the marketing department would never allow it, would they? Last words from Times with executives in the top two positions, both of whom have no newspaper experience at any level. Successfully running a newspaper is not like Post says the first time in a century) and is close to winning the dispatches this morning show the Democrat won). But Democrats won from a 9-millimeter pistol. He drove a company van to a nature preserve and gave himself up after several hours of negotiations. Most of the papers note to bring him another gun so he can shoot himself," and recalls that his son safety course, waiting period, and background check to get a permit. All the deadliest in the nation's history. (To read Chatterbox's take on quiet, to the right before hitting the water, suggesting that the plane began to break up in the air. The straight initial drop also indicates that the problem was plane to spin had they fired accidentally. The National Transportation Safety fronts a story detailing the improvements in victim cannot imagine, based on our analysis, that a genuinely free and fair election war over that interest, if necessary. With current peace negotiations requiring administration needs to begin building support at home by redefining our participation in the process as something more than charity. The Post editors weigh in on Time 's revelation that Al Gore had running for president, he would not need magical elixirs," the editors write. "The fact that his campaign sought to conceal payments to Ms. Wolf suggests "You've got to respect a woman who gets a vice president to pay her a salary higher than his own," she writes. "Of course, when a man has to pony up a fortune to a woman to teach him how to be a man, that definitely takes the edge totally beta. In fact, it's gamma. Lose it. And by the way, no more golf." (For Chatterbox's take on Gore's beta problem, click here.) Of course, the Cell Phone Haters Club has already convened an emergency reason I had to rush out of the house so early this morning instead of helping you feed all the children, round up lunch money, sign permission slips for and hustle the older ones off to the bus without jackets. The "dumb down" feature that cell phones are offering rodent users is no surprise to club years ago and were just wondering how long it would take to make the species then no person would ever use a cell phone a second time. The memory of the end of the line, interrupted by "break up," the need to scream insanely into the phone, "BRING HOME A QUART OF MILK I SAID" while passersby stare felt to have human dignity and not be enslaved to a ridiculous chirping machine that can summon you anywhere anytime to talk about the most trivial things, without the threat of severe mental impairment hanging over them, will rationalize the rat news. At least until, as you suggest, the rats do something interesting in a vat of beer. Don't forget, people have been ignoring possible health threats from cell phones for a long time now. Last fall, the venerable New York department store Barneys actually sold trench coats that had specially lined pockets for cell phones. Put a cell phone into the pocket and no harmful rays would waft through the fabric to attack your body. The coats sold well, I So if the rat work holds up, we'll probably see cell phone mittens next. And special muffling ear muffs to block waves from entering the brain through the unprotected ear canal route. And maybe nose plugs for good measure, because installed an electronic security system that makes it impossible to get into that "values" should play a larger role in educating children, which is why he volunteer service of some kind. A danger of injecting "values" more fully into school curricula, however, is that if it isn't done thoughtfully, it will end up presenting certain pious and erroneous sentiments as fact. This is an batty. Increasingly, something similar seems to be happening when "conservative" values (like a literal belief in the Bible) get taught at the expense of evolutionary science. If moral lessons are to be taught more forthrightly in schools, it's important that the distinction between knowledge In his speech, though, Bush himself seems to have stumbled over that and courage beyond measure," Bush cited the following: massacre. Shortly after the shooting, the horrifying story spread that before she was shot, one of the two killers asked her if she believed in God. She said yes, and the gun was fired. The anecdote became the basis for cover stories in almost certainly isn't true. "We strongly doubt that conversation ever What investigators now believe really happened is that another freshman at the University of Northern Colorado.) She Said Yes acknowledges this in a backhanded way, with the caveat that "the exact details to tell her story, because whenever she does it's interpreted as a betrayal of The church is going to stick to the martyr story. It's the story they heard first, and circulated for six months uncontested. You can say it didn't concludes that Bush's decision to use the story anyway is something a little Times fronts an accord to admit China into the World Trade East Coast papers and too late for the LAT to change its print lead (a members.) Neither the LAT story, nor the Associated Press, nor online make the early editions of the other papers. The two pilots are talking "like off. Both work to try to fix it. There is some kind of problem that they're dealing with. It gets progressively worse. And the tape stops.'' The reduce their organizational structure by merging licit and illicit business and this year the Justice Department expects to double or treble its estimate of with fears among Republicans and their supporters that the party will lose business groups are uncharacteristically giving soft money equally to Democrats and Republicans. The Journal runs a similar piece lamenting the Post notes sourly in an otherwise glowing story, "that a man who stopped watching basketball, who wouldn't do sports interviews, who wouldn't The Journal reports that Dow Chemical has revolutionized slime. Not methyl cellulose thickens, rather than thins, upon heating, and is safe to eat. rather than pasty, flavor. Discovered accidentally in the 1930s, it was kept on a shelf until early this decade, when Dow decided to market it aggressively. and as a thickener in soups, sauces, and gravies. One problem: getting food manufacturers to believe that cellulose treated with chemicals is safe to eat. substance for a presentation in front of food manufacturers. After he was done, let's make a little history. Today I am ending my lifelong membership in the intention to seek the nomination of the Reform Party for the presidency of the Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, My disparagement of those men of right good male fellowship, He that outlives this day, and doth come over the hill, erstwhile pro wrestler wasn't showing off his excellent grasp of the English "I am not a candidate for president," he said. "I do not want the job." Indeed, lunch mates that he could never be president because the job is simply too restrictive. "The president is the leader of the free world, but he probably freedom a great deal being governor." Jeez, he's never going to be happy as a brassiere with that kind of thinking. Boxer shorts, perhaps. imagine the flames and charges of nepotism and conflict of interest. So list, I might point out, that's always far more interesting than the jokers and sad sacks who are running for the highest office in he not running again this year? I haven't heard that he's not running, so I suppose I have to assume he isn't not running, which would be a shame since he he says that if he were really running, he'd be a lot more organized, but he's not. He said all he's doing, in fact, is reminding people of bedrock liberal power to harm competitors in other markets; and that using its power in that since the trial has ended, the media was apparently seized by the conviction but markets are all about anticipation, and the stock market appears to have the Internet and with benefiting consumers via innovation in other cases, the weight of his ruling is on the side of the government. In particular, his use its control of one market to give itself control over another, and that it These happen to be ideas that many academic economists are deeply skeptical profitable for anyone else to enter the fray against it. In fact, near the end technological investment that would otherwise have taken place. fact do seem as if they're describing a world that doesn't quite exist anymore. these are phenomena that don't fit into the picture of a computing world in which domination of the PC operating system translates into domination definition of computing, it's not clear whatever remedies he suggests will really conform to the way things are, rather than the way things were. One of the odd things about the centrality of the browser war to the antitrust trial, in fact, is that the browser itself now seems about as important at all). Once, it seemed like he who controlled the browser would control the Internet. Now, if anyone controls the Internet, it's the portals. The unanswerable question, of course, is whether this would have happened had agreement, although one might have thought a more balanced opinion would have Nonetheless, there is at least one thing worth thinking about going forward. monopoly over the PC operating system means that any expansion into other applications like Word and Excel? In other words, does control of the be, I think, a startling answer), then we may in fact be talking about the would probably vote for him. Unless you run. I would always vote for you. But I reincarnation goals to returning as a brassiere. You could be any piece of underwear you want. Really. All you have to do is dream. I myself am planning to return to life as the new computer printer that you bought and installed yesterday. (I use the word "installed" rather loosely, considering that the damn thing crashes every time you try to print a Word for the really slow mode that you have to invoke if you actually will need to subsequently read whatever you printed out.) See, if I were a computer really have to do what I was supposed to do. I could "conflict" with other "devices" constantly and it wouldn't be my responsibility to reconcile the up to you to run out to the store to get some to fix me. (While you're there, and have the phrase "Professional Series" written across my front in a font that was perhaps modern looking back in the early 1970s. In short, if I were reincarnated as our new computer printer, I could take comfort in knowing that How much did we pay for that printer? I notice from today's paper that our the printer nightmare is all just a glitch, and you'll fix of the printer all the computers and appliances in the house will crash and have to be rebooted and reinstalled and reconfigured and one or two of the cats intellectually honest about Social Security and Medicare reform. The Fox panel has fun with Time 's report that the Gore campaign had been paying feminist agency) to advise the candidate on his wardrobe and on his Oedipal relationship exotic consultant for the feminist psychobabble movement, who's trying to teach [Gore] about 'alpha male' and 'beta male' stuff, you have to wonder if Al Gore homeless people and poor people and all that. I don't need a Republican to tell this heart, there is no malice or hatred of any individual. But you are looking at someone who does enjoy fighting. And if that means fighting occasionally Christian Coalition, that does not make you an evil person." No one has told the Wall Street Journal editorial writers, to be sure, but pushing for tax cuts has become the political equivalent of flogging that proverbial dead horse. Congressional Republicans watched their proposed budget surplus go toward paying down the debt than toward a major tax cut. And It's true that if you frame poll questions about taxes differently, you get government spending, and it's safe to assume that the Republican Party platform hollow, at least from an intellectual perspective, and the reason is not just increase) has proved to have pleasant side effects for the economy. Even more on the harsh reality of life in an inflationary economy. that inflation is dead, and that therefore the economy can safely grow much faster than it has in the past. But they don't appear to have considered what its average impact on assets held more than a few years." Contrasting the situation of the late 1970s with that of the early 1960s, when top marginal "the real tax rate is far higher, not lower, than it was during the days of nominal amount of earnings that was mostly inflation, combined with a decline in the value of principal equal to the rate of inflation." What Gilder was pointing to here was in fact important. Because tax brackets and capital gains are not indexed, the combination of rapid inflation and high taxes ends up eating away most real gains. It works something like compound interest in reverse. In the 1970s, just staying ahead of the game took a lot of time Wealth and Poverty was published. Regardless, though, there was something to the idea that in a time of high inflation, high marginal tax rates acted as a disincentive to both investment and labor. But we don't live in a time of high inflation anymore. Actually, we don't monopoly power, many reports noted that the company's stock price fell in It is simply the trading of stock after the markets close. Traditional stock begun to make trades without a middleman by using electronic communications by the end of the year. Theoretically they could allow trading around the from exchange to exchange. And, because so few transactions occur, stock prices which the investor names the highest price at which he'll buy or lowest price at which he'll sell) instead of the "market orders" (in which the investor accepts the prevailing market price) common during the day. As trade volume have a significantly higher approval rating than Republicans on most election as unready for war, the first time any division has received such a designation participate in a regional conflict. The Post says this is partly an advantage on health care, education, and Social Security. (The Republicans lead on military readiness, but this issue holds little weight with voters, the poll difference between the two Democrats in a race with Bush was not statistically A Journal opinion piece describes why there have been so many pharmaceutical mergers pioneer new methods of research and secure valuable patents. Soon, the establishment companies realize they need the new research technology and patents, and the small firms realize they need economies of scale to keep producing successful drugs. Thus the antibiotic revolution produced a spate of mergers in the '40s and '50s, breakthroughs in heart and digestive drugs produced mergers in the '70s, and the genetic revolution is producing mergers for Medicare recipients threatens to lower drug prices, which in turn pushes firms to produce newer drugs with higher margins, which requires more research that the true test of a presidential candidate is not temperament or virtue but the shrewd ability to communicate with a constituency. What disqualifies a leader is the kind of flaw that would turn away encourage for the good of a man's soul, but it makes little difference at all "stunning lapse in intelligence," a daft inability to perceive what will more slavish to fashion, more terrified of originality and more devoted to To this, Today's Papers readily, wholeheartedly, and unconditionally are glossing over is that this stuff is homogenizing the world. It's turning such Western paraphernalia as Nine West shoe stores everywhere. Of course So in five years, we'll be able to ask ourselves if we'd rather travel to flagging tourism industry. But really, the problem is not that the city lacks a Magic Kingdom. This is simply not a city that screams "vacation destination." Try instead: "Money!" "More money!" "How about going up in a skyscraper and circumstances here that make the incursion even more distasteful. Putting brilliantly modern design that effortlessly propels travelers to their gates, public restrooms. Theme restaurants that serve dim sum. A lack of litter. ponderous, authoritative, and dedicated to the proposition that the world was changing slowly enough that giant tomes were the perfect vehicle for reacted slowly, incompletely, and in almost blissful ignorance of the economics revamped Web site for business two weeks ago and then immediately shut it down The site crashed, after all, because tens of millions of people tried to access the encyclopedia online. And that has interesting implications for the way we think about offline brands and their extension onto the Internet. an object lesson in what not to do. Because the company thought its brand name without endangering its core franchise. But as the last few years have it could have snared a huge chunk of it. Or so, at least, its recent (if the Web and fees don't go together well, and its hope that its brand was powerful enough to make an advertising business work. (As has been the case with Yahoo.) Making that conceptual shift was important. But so was doing the capitalize on the Internet, since technology isn't going to stop changing and any successful company will have to make adaptability a core competence (at together, it would be a Web powerhouse. At the time, I thought he was the Web. But oddly, after the last two weeks, it looks more and more like This book was a huge surprise for me. But first, let's have a little talk It seems to me that there is a basic question about a book that's often the real question in a reviewer's mind but that rarely gets laid out directly in a review: Do you hope other people actually read the book? We can all think of books that we read as reviewers (because we have to), and whose achievement and message we applaud but that we'd never urge our friends to take the time to read themselves. Similarly, other books may have big logical holes, or messages we find unconvincing, but are nonetheless a ton of fun to read. I will try to explain in the next few days why I am unconvinced by the most fundamental point the book tries to make. But I will be satisfied if people take from the Book Club one point only, which is that they should get hold of this book. There is much more richness and subtlety to its content and argument utterly fearless. He writes with a kamikaze spirit (in the admirable does are often tempted to be contrarian just for the hell of it. Think of the event that most people consider to have been a disaster, and by sheer virtuosity try to show that actually it was a good idea and a big success. But the tone I feared, of being contrarian for its own sake, turns up only a little bit, as we'll discuss later on, in sections arguing that more or less gracefully written development of an argument that I finally disagree with but that cannot at all be laughed off. By the end of our installments here, I will have tried to convince Book Club members that this book has the wrong title. It very impressive job of showing why people who weren't idiots and weren't war criminals made decisions that turned out so badly through the 1960s. He does not convince me that it was "Necessary," in the sense that policy makers at the But that's for later installments. Let me wrap up this one, and suggest some areas for discussion and disagreement, in three ways. the Cold War was a real war, "the third world war of the twentieth century." The Soviet Union and its pawns and allies really wanted to expand their ideological, military, and territorial influence, and they really were engaged supremacy. Because of nuclear weapons, the United States and the Soviet Union could not afford to do what great rival empires would previously have done: go importance of winning or at least contesting the proxy fight: mounting an resist any further push on these frontiers. If the United States had not done so, he says, then its world position would have fundamentally changed, with serious consequences for it and the world. No one would have believed in its "minimal realism," the argument that the United States should do only those things in the world that it really has to do, because the great evils it must that the memo is presented in context, it is interesting, to say the least. have been better to have started the defense, and continued it until the casualties became too high for domestic politics to bear, than to have taken the "minimal realism" course of not starting the fight. This really is the crux of the "necessary" argument: better to have fought and withdrawn than never to have fought at all. This is where I disagree with that I am a "minimal realist." Here's a place we might start. Do you agree with worth having made the start, even if the end was likely to be bad? asked Gore why he feels so strongly about distancing himself from President has been a tremendous surge in Internet fundraising in the last five weeks. You lost three of the last four jury trials. Do you believe that those juries were, in effect, influenced by the perception of you in the impeachment Some would suggest that if you had not been practicing private law while being independent counsel, the process would have moved along more quickly. In hindsight, should you have stopped all private law practice? Was it the Constitution the president was trying to save [as he alleged to South Lawn of the White House on the day of the impeachment when Vice President Gore stepped to the lectern and said that history would remember President A close second is the Justice Department's victory in the first round of the choose their president based on "judgment, vision, [and] philosophy" rather than on factual knowledge. (The interview appears to be excerpted from a longer Bush was entrapped, but reminds viewers that W. does not have his father's that the interview "tells you that the guy who just won all the money on would have refused to answer the questions or else launched into a deeper Wolf's advocacy of "heavy petting" and "onanism" will not help Gore's will not require a "specific remedy," but will require "a remedy." On strategy is to drag out its appeal until a Republican wins the White House (and presumably drops the lawsuit). Fox illustrates its commentary on the it reinforces an emerging perception for Al Gore, which is that he doesn't know matter, but it reinforces the perception that it matters, and therefore it matters). (For a "Frame Game" on the media's circular priorities, click "This was a political attack on success. The one thing the liberals can't stand "I am not a fashion consultant. I do think it's a little sexist that that's I am sitting here attempting in vain to find something to disagree with in before the rest of the country, and we're just now catching up. (Unless we mean really: How could any champion of the First Amendment let such a deal go reporting of alien abductions, miracle pet rescues, and celebrity drunks and tabloid media is consolidated under one owner. Where will we go for the truth? on such and such a day, will the Enquirer ever dispute it? Even if it readers would even have to ask such questions should put the stamp of death on And another thing. It just hit me a few minutes ago when I was in the study way we flit around from topic to topic here (and at our real breakfast table) is indicative of a bigger problem in how we live our lives. We're so fragmented. My attention, at any given moment, is divided among so many competing thoughts that it makes my teeth ache. An example: This morning after you left for work, I was playing with the baby on the couch and she was wiggling her fingers in the air in a way she considered menacing as she was perhaps the cutest sight I have ever witnessed in my life. But even as I was saying, "Help, save me from the dinosaur," I was simultaneously thinking: How am I going to wrap up that column today, the kicker I have stinks; should I roast a chicken for dinner or not because it's not worth it unless I go get the minutes going to a butcher store, how many of those red shelves will I be able morning; is my skin starting to look old; do I hear the dog throwing up a sock in the kitchen; maybe I should just end the piece by referring back to the A certain percentage of these thoughts were perhaps valid. If I considered them in an appropriate time and place. But the baby is only going to be this to get mean and criticize my hair like the others. So why am I wasting the Even earlier, it was called juggling. And I used to envy people who kept all the balls in the air. I thought they got more out of life because they did more. But now I don't know. It's been so long since I fully concentrated on one idea or one task or one anything that my attention span has contracted to be bookshelves. And these, as you know, are not big bookshelves. Welcome to hard times. Oh, wait, that was a couple of weeks ago. This week, Index came in below expectations, which means that there's no wage pressure in the economy, making it a good time for capital. Of course, the infinite regression loop was in full effect today, although no one was following it pretty well under control, which helped lower interest rates and spur a lot of not, even if inflation is low, the stock market could be burned. So were we I have no idea. All I know is that when I woke up this morning, switched on even have thought of, let alone imagined writing.) And so everything's good again. Until the next big number comes out. On, then, to this week's Cocktail although, the Wall Street Journal reported, their bottom lines were helped by higher oil prices, they were hurt by gasoline prices, which didn't rise as fast. I know there is a logic in there somewhere, but if you're selling oil and gasoline, then aren't you buying from yourself? And if you're buying said it was going to be spending very heavily on marketing in the next quarter and that its losses could continue to grow. A number of brokerage houses not supposed to buy it in the short term, how can you own it for the long revenue the total value of the tickets and hotel rooms that it 'sells' on its the original evaluation went something like this: 'If we lie, they buy the have to have 'former' attached to it? Blue Mountain has next to no revenue rate, pretty soon you're not even going to be able to say to someone 'you would 'exploit consumers who live in warm climates.' Yeah, what's up with that inflation. This is the happy situation in which we find ourselves: the less possibilities between public figures who may or may not know each other. This Senate. You've put up with worse! You'll be back in Beltway dinner Bob-- True, there's that cult business in her background, but she's handsome, charming, and funny, and she's got what you want: a knack for while the Republican open seat total (counting resignations expected in the Senate seat, which Democrats thought they might capture, is now in the This Week they could "rest assured" that Roe v. Wade would be a litmus test." Some questions: How can Gore be so sure his appointees will support Roe unless he uses a litmus test? And what's wrong with litmus tests anyway? Wouldn't support of Brown v. Board of Education be a legitimate litmus test in picking a Supreme Court justice? If Gore feels so strongly about Roe (which I think was wrongly decided) he should by all least provides interesting scenery from time to time. But football, there's a spectator sport that I really enjoy (though this year, with the Jets flailing so miserably, it has been painful, tragic, and somewhat dull). However, in my most unflinchingly honest moments, I remember, the ads for online stuff. Is there anything funnier than that online brokerage ad that shows the kid with the purple hair teaching his boss to make his first trade? No, not even pigeons because he's shrieking into his cell phone while peering through a Now comes the story in this morning's Times about how online retailers are going nuts this holiday made the difference. Indeed, there's been a growing sense among online News and used to watch our ad traffic (and every other number) with daily percent of the money online sites spent in advertising was spent online; this subscriptions and advertisers won't pay for banner ads, where does that leave only instead of explaining everything that happens as a product of the class structure, they explain everything that happens as a product of tax rates, and they are unwavering in their insistence that the lower taxes are, the better everything will be. By this point, they can be fazed neither by There's an excellent demonstration of this ability to avoid the real world matter), but also someone with a firm grasp on reality. His column is therefore practically invented, and to his influence on current thinking about exchange economics of its voodoo status." Of course, he doesn't then go on to actually deserve credit for a great unrecognized feat: "the integration of micro- and macroeconomics." Before them, no economist saw that there might be links between the way companies and industries behave and the way national and international economies behave. This is, needless to say, an announcement that always a bad idea, or that emphasizing the effects of tax cuts on supply as a religion. Its premises cannot be questioned, let alone refuted, and even understood in its light. The odd thing is that this approach makes it On the other hand, I keep reading. So maybe that's an answer. Another nice week in the markets, especially the bond market, which rallied strongly after a series of economic data suggesting that inflation, if not dead, was at least still mild. The stock market was also helped by yet another more consistent impetus to consumer spending than rising stock prices. The giving him the disconcerting appearance of the leader of a strange cult sitting at a small desk in a crowded room. But I may have been the only one who thought In any case, it has been a powerful rally for the stock market in the past week and a half, and all the talk now is of a revived bull market. But it still all seems a bit odd, since the purported bear market lasted only a few weeks, and was founded on nothing more than overwrought concerns about inflation and a Which, from an investing perspective, means you should blink as often as you company had come close to opening its local networks sufficiently to 'when the Fed tightened up the money supply people who needed to raise cash did rate just jumped again. Better go get some more corn out of the silo to dump on closing just below it, technical traders came out of the woodwork to say that list of contenders include: two weeks of Navy SEAL training (if you ring the answer questions from analysts. It's just a coincidence that this new openness case are mainly interesting as a reminder of how powerful the Ivy League's substantiate what many have gleaned from listening to the Republican compliment. "Historically, there is no correlation between academic achievement and success in the Oval Office," they note. Many of Bush's highbrow The case against intellect in the White House is brilliantly used it to great advantage in this year's presidential race. But is it correct? The argument rests mainly on some fairly compelling anecdotal evidence. The Objection: The sample here is too small to be statistically meaningful. It could just be a coincidence that Carter happened to be both bright and inept, treaty? Someday, someone will demolish the myth of Carter's alleged brilliance. I can also provide some equally tendentious counterexamples. Highly capable relative dimwits who were lousy chief executives might include Warren G. Given that stupidity is not an advantage in any other profession, why would it help a president? I think the theory derives from the familiar prejudice against intelligence, which holds that people who are too smart must be limited in other ways. There's a popular notion that people who think too much can't conservative, political version of this idea, which holds that intellectuals are bound to be impractical, immoral, and too eager to impose their this view for the ages when he made his famous observation that he'd rather be the personal qualities and corresponding successes and failures of just about any president. The ones who were dim but successful successfully compensated for their dimness with other qualities. But the lack of intelligence still copious credit for bringing an early and glorious end to the Cold War. One of the ways he did this was by taking an unambiguous moral stand against Stockman, he simply couldn't process the information that his contradictory goals would produce a vast deficit, despite repeated attempts to spell it out there is something on the plus side of his presidential ledger. Most scholars undone as president not because he was too shrewd but because of something shrewdness didn't help him with: personal bitterness and lack of scruples. brain, primarily in economic and some areas of domestic policy, he has largely succeeded. Where he does his thinking with other organs, he has undermined In fact, I think the conservative case for presidential stupidity has it exactly backwards. Presidents get into the most trouble not when they behave like intellectuals but when they delegate crucial brainwork to "intellectuals with some of the failed schemes of the New Deal economists before describing probably no modern president, smart or dumb, who hasn't landed himself in hot To be sure, intelligence of the kind that might manifest itself in high SAT scores isn't the most important quality in a chief executive. Leadership, integrity, and determination are all more critical qualities. Dumb luck helps. Chatterbox has experienced much frustration trying to figure out precisely subject of that special issue, the new Staples Center sports arena. This created a predictable (and justified) uproar at the paper, which caused the was unfamiliar with newspaper etiquette, which encouraged reporters and editors media critic). It also prompted Chatterbox to puzzle over the apparent financial teams, concessionaires and various corporate sponsors" connected to the Staples were sold by the Times 's advertising department." (This story is not available online.) Now that Chatterbox is better informed, he still down these advertisers just as effectively. But Chatterbox must admit that he doesn't know what other goodies the Times may have extracted from the Chatterbox also doesn't know how common it is for newspapers to enlist the to own, ran a special section on its new downtown sports arena, the them as a sales agent and paid them a commission for ads that they sold," too). Still, Chatterbox doesn't really think a ritual sacrifice will address the basic underlying problem: When media outlets strike secret business deals with other businesses, readers are unable to evaluate whether these deals might potential conflicts to readers. It would be wonderful if publications could now be persuaded never to raise revenue by any means other than sales and advertising, but that's probably impractical. (Newspaper circulation has, after all, been declining for many years.) A much better step would be for deals they have going. Newspapers, for example, could run a small daily box of agate type providing this information, with perhaps a longer summary Times and elsewhere, is a bit of a mystery. Probably it reflected a yearning to remain blissfully ignorant of trends in the news business for as long as was humanly possible. (Most reporters Chatterbox knows are more interested in maintaining their virginity than in actually helping to maintain taping photocopied portraits of Chandler to newsroom walls, in silent protest against what's being done to his legacy. Chandler was indeed a heroic allowed a say about the paper's fate. But by all accounts, he won't be; despite about the paper's undisclosed sources of income and labor. By doing so, they business sides of newspapers needs to be breached. But they would have the would find unpleasant precisely to the extent that it exposed unpleasant of his own. When Chatterbox mentions a book that is in print, he usually a sliver of the proceeds whenever someone buys through link. Chatterbox, who has no ethical objections to this arrangement, is free to say whatever he wants about the book in question (frequently, he says the book is no good). He is under no pressure to mention particular books, or indeed to mention any books at all, and does so only when he thinks his readers might want to examine his source material. (Chatterbox the other various source links he provides.) But readers of this column should be under no illusion that it's in the business of finding the cheapest or otherwise best online vendors for particular books. Post leads with a federal budget compromise that will allocate nearly story warns that there is still no agreement over environmental spending, are optimistic that a budget deal is around the corner (the Journal began its descent under apparent pilot control. This story is fronted by the recorder reveals no abrupt movements and that the plane maintained its compass setting during the dive, which occurred eight seconds after the autopilot shut notes that pilots are taught to descend more slowly in such a situation. The LAT decides to focus on a possible hijacking or passenger rampage, and for no apparent reason it fills several column inches with a detailed summary reporter dwell on this particular crash because he happened to cover it himself?) It is unknown whether the autopilot disengaged automatically or manually; most papers merely note this fact in passing, but the Post oddly attributes this uncertainty to "sources close to the investigation." The general says his plane had only seven minutes of fuel left when the military commandeered the control tower and cleared the commercial airliner to example of how the media turn an alleged appearance of impropriety by a politician into a "political problem" and therefore a story: an official trip that has nothing to do with her probable Senate candidacy in active first lady's visit to the Holy Land. Neither the address she delivered political. Yet with the election for the Senate seat she is expected to seek And whatever her intention, there was no escaping the buzz of partisan politics For a "Frame Game" on this style of reporting, click here. Just Another Day at the Office: Among the findings of the year is the following: "There was a widespread perception among the Mars Climate Orbiter team that 'orbiting Mars is routine,' which caused the team to not pay enough attention to the risks of interplanetary spaceflight" No. A book's reported copyright date is essentially meaningless. Copyright protection is granted automatically to a work immediately upon its creation (which, in the case of a book, means the moment an author first puts his pen to the paper or fingers to the keyboard). required. Until this decade, however, authors had to publicly declare a claim use of a copyright notice was made optional; users must now presume that a work is copyrighted even if it does not directly say so. If a work is copyrighted by the author, the protection book's scheduled release date changes multiple times before publication. Publishers often use the latest of the potential publishing dates in order to announcement in the second spot of its "Business and Finance" box, giving top Journal explains, wants to separate its farming operations from its drug business to boost its stock price. Its executives are trying to either conglomerate and then bisect the whole thing. (For more pharmaceuticals doctors' decisions before treatment is given. The Journal has the most concrete illustration of this change: Instead of questioning whether a heart instead on how to get the procedure done more quickly to reduce the hospital treatment costs with patient outcomes, which it will share with doctors. Only stop listening to the marketplace and cease innovating its products. The An analysis of the trial's fallout on the Journal 's "Politics and politicians as possible; even if the Justice Department were to drop its suit under a Republican president, the Journal writes, just one state organizing. Where political ads on television and radio aim to disorient an energize a candidate's own base and encourage turnout. The increasing political activity of unions accounts for much of this rejuvenation, of course, but the can sway a voter jaded by anonymous electronic campaigning. investigators said that knowing about the fuel tank flaws would have led them to realize much more quickly that the explosion resulted from mechanical failure. Lawyers for the victims' families threatened to use the report in The Times lead explains why some doctors and insurance providers are yesterday's column for a rundown of the rules). Some doctors have said that the patients enough discretion over their medical records. And insurance companies are worried that the rules would make them responsible for privacy lapses by that directs a patient to a pharmacy could be liable if the pharmacy abuses The company's credit rating was immediately downgraded, and its share price to have made the offer purely for its PR value, saying that it "wants to on Congress in hope of being allowed to extend its wildly lucrative patent on the drug. The lobbying effort has yielded a bill that, if passed, will let another three years, thus preventing cheaper generic versions of the drug from wrote letters to his contacts in Congress arguing on the company's behalf. groundbreaking, lifesaving drug research and development. Last year, the stunningly successful series of investments. Bush first sought Rainwater's help opportunities in oil and gas, real estate, and a loan company. Bush sold his avoid impropriety or the appearance thereof. The piece concedes that Bush doesn't seem to have done Rainwater any special favors as governor, but anticipates "more potential for conflict" if Bush becomes president. This is because Rainwater "is involved in companies that are heavily regulated and have hundreds of millions of dollars in Government contracts." But Today's Papers would like to know how many recent presidents don't have buddies that meet that description. The paper adds that one of Rainwater's many companies, an operator of psychiatric hospitals, is being investigated for patient abuse and Medicare fraud but doesn't explain how a newly elected Bush could possibly able to protect them at a time like this, then they haven't seen nearly enough read an "Explainer" on hostile takeovers), expectations are growing that we're Whether all this buying and selling makes economic sense seems somehow beside the point. After all, they don't call it merger- mania for nothing. basic ingredients of many, if not most, mergers which has something to do with the fact that most mergers destroy, and don't create, economic value. No, the most perplexing thing about all the merger talk is the reaction of investors, who have driven up the prices of pharmaceutical stocks pretty much across the board. Since acquisitions almost universally occur at a price above the current market price, and since bidding wars (of all kinds) tend to drive prices far above fair value, investors have jumped into the drug stocks, Here's the problem, though: There are no outside bidders for these company. So, there isn't any flood of outside capital coming into the drug industry. If a wave of mergers gets touched off, all that's going to happen is that capital will be redistributed from certain companies' shareholders to other companies' shareholders. But the total amount of value in the industry as In bidding up the prices of all these drug companies, then, investors are essentially saying that if you divide a pie up into four slices, it's more valuable than if you divide it up into eight slices. But the pie is the very four slices rather than one of the eight. But all other things aren't equal, make the stock of the potential acquirers equally less valuable. The other possibility is that there really will be synergies in the new giant companies that will make them more profitable together than they are apart. But it is hard to see what these are, and empirically, synergies are What that means is that the determinants of value for the industry as a have a few hundred words to wrap up the argument and resolve the points left this camp. But we've suggested that the scope of argument is narrower than I was worth it at several crucial junctures: when the United States got "bandwagon" reasons of the Cold War we have discussed previously. I view it as clearly, domestic politics had powerfully and predictably turned against such a true (which I dispute, but that's for another day), by that time it was that this had become a symbolic stand, and he couldn't afford to look as if he read in a long time. It was, by the way, recommended to me by the novelist a deliberate choice about whether it should raise or lower the stakes in argument for the "minimal realist" view that it was unnecessary and unwise. And The certainty that this was an unnecessary war, not merely in hindsight but in the context of that time, also makes the astronomical costs that resulted In a friendly takeover, the management teams of the acquiring and target A takeover is deemed hostile when the target company's management objects to merger.) In a hostile takeover, the acquirer can take control of the target company's management one of two ways: a tender offer or a proxy fight. for more than the market price. Individual shareholders then decide whether to sell their holdings; if the acquirer doesn't win a controlling stake, the offer their stead in management elections. The acquirer promises to replace the board of directors that rejected the merger with one that would approve it. As in a fee in their agreement. This provision requires any company that thwarts the boards neglected their obligation to pursue the best interests of the shareholders by undermining attempts at a hostile takeover. I think a dark cloud must have passed over the country. Passions were so great revisionist take, one that didn't accept either of the liberal explanations (the United States missed opportunities for a settlement; the war was unwinnable) or the conservative one (politicians tied the hands of the book came along. I know Mike, but only slightly, and I haven't read any of his would probably be quite different today (and far worse off) if the United allow free markets and political freedoms to grow. And, boy, did they grow certainly something to it. The proof is what happened post-1975 after the paralyzed, and Congress was dead set against intervening anywhere. The defeat United States was out of the game for a while. And this was an accurate been sent and a bigger bandwagon effect touched off. As for minimal realism, if only to avert the subsequent casualties that, he argues, wound up weakening lure the enemy into big battles and stressed body counts. Meanwhile, most of strategy, stopped fighting major battles, and began piecemeal seizure of land from the Communists. His pacification program brought security and a better divisions and provide military and other support for the government. The truth It's just an odd coincidence, but there did seem to be something telling about the "What's News" section on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, which listed as its first item the findings of fact in the To be sure, it's not entirely fair to say that the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to make other changes before mergers would be approved. On the whole, though, the consolidation of industries ranging from financial services to telecommunications to aerospace to the drug industry has proceeded remarkably fast and with remarkably little interference. And what's perplexing reduce the number of players in a market. If the Justice Department's default Of course, antitrust law is a very blunt instrument, and should be used only when real harm can be discerned. But antitrust law is also much better suited economic profits, which otherwise would be immediately competed away. A monopoly becomes illegal only when the company exercising it uses that monopoly to shut out competitors in other markets, either through coercion or by academic economists question whether this last tactic is really feasible, but antitrust law depends on the assumption that it is.) And this, of course, is This Week over the weekend, he seemed to be saying something more than seemed to suggest that being a monopolist was itself unacceptable. "You know, go to somebody else and negotiate. Here, everybody's got to go to one into competing companies (since otherwise there still wouldn't be choice of You're right. There is not A Dawn for All Seasons. If novels were furniture, I would not try to sell her to people who insist on smart reader I know snarled, "Her stuff feels so dated." I didn't even bother I would read over a chapter and think of my vast teenage reading public saying, Part of me, I admit, doesn't want to share her. It's like having a newspaper broadcast the address of your favorite quiet little restaurant. Hard not to wince at the notion of belonging to a Dawn cult. have said about his rediscovery as an old man: 'It's too much too late.'" The iconographic in this way. My first reaction is to fear it's the death of a writer once he's in a position to do his own Gap ads (what product does John eventually leads people to the work. You lure college coeds in black with nose often funny. Almost typed "hysterically" funny; the etymology of that word reminds us about the problems of being a witty woman.) "really" like. I know a slew of 'em, and can attest that there's no "irony" in of us are. That's what motivates us to write, after all: the rifts between our actual lives and the much richer imagined possibilities. So I don't generally me to have insider information about a writer's inspirations or source material. Just as an example: I almost wish I didn't know that the inscription jaunty, generous, doleful, complicated people in many of her characters that she offers in person. Or at least as close to "in person" as letters and diaries can get us. It's hard to say this without embarrassment, so Girl fax me through a sample of Dawn's handwriting, so I could do some amateur St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. How a music guy became this involved with a novelist is a very intriguing question that we never got to here. But I trust that your outsider status would have pleased her enormously. and no nonsense. There is less and less connection between what he's doing and seeing and being and "Real Life," because what's really happening is the the country's readers of literary fiction still don't know, which is why the her work. And since her ideal readers are, I suspect, the people most Let us admit that the Letters are not the best introduction to voyeuristic in the best sense (as opposed to reading a stranger's mail, which balancing acts of literary bravura and homey friendship. They made me rue the to be writing for posterity. She made sure that each bulletin from the front of her life was whole, vivid, shimmering, and immediate, a perfect vignette. (Of course, I don't know how much of that effect is due to your editing, but I assume that, like a good hairdresser, you won't tell.) Not too perfect, she listened. The letters really make you feel as if you're settling down at the bar with her and you're so excited to see each other that you start talking right away, before the drinks arrive, before you even take off your coats. her mocking eggheads at jazz clubs ("I do enjoy the intelligentsia's pretending they know a horn from a harp while the musicians pretend they know a book from a bookie"). I love her mocking the French ("I really dislike the pallid, feel these wells of mystery and secrecy in her. Hardly a word of complaint about her travails with her autistic son. (A heartbreaking story, and I must say, I bitch more about having to help my son with his homework than she does disagreements. And then, of course, there's the Mystery of the Missing Jack barely mentions (even to herself, in her diaries). You suggest they destroyed admire that this woman seemed to really understand the difference between public and private life. Despite the mountains of verbiage, she had a people don't exist. They turn into their own ad campaigns. It's fun that he has slunk back into history, while she has risen up. These It feels like a good life, actually. Far from perfect. But not Van her diary, "of criticism or death or pain." That's what you feel most in her, I I had the same peculiar aching feeling finishing this book of letters that I do at the end of her novels. That I don't want it to end. That I miss her. So I biographer, of course, carries on a love affair with a ghost. But you were so All the papers except the New York Times lead with the recovery of a large piece of possibly emitted by its cockpit voice or data recorder (this story also tops injunction against the city, which said it will appeal and also fight the possible suitcase tampering. But two paragraphs later, the Times notes that officials "were not attaching much significance to the lead." The separate Post story notes that the House put off voting on a bill to strengthen Reserves. The Post says he secured an extremely rare reservist application did not get special treatment from military personnel and that he the Post notes, "display characteristics that recurred often in his public life: foresight, circumspection, and skill at finding advantage while country's rush to judgment on airline disasters. "An event with a safety records between airlines have been shown to be statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the Post runs a story detailing the (mixed) accident history of "Do not be surprised if, someday soon, you hear Gore growl. Do not be surprised olive green suit, anyway. This will surely win Gore the respect, admiration, shortly after takeoff. No one holds much hope for survivors, though only the illustrating the jet's final moments and articles detailing the grief the passengers' friends and family accompany most of the stories. It is believed was no evidence to suggest sabotage. Only one body and some debris have been found, none of it marked with signs of fire or explosion. Most of the papers is made of the threat: The person behind it is being held on a homicide charge between the two tragedies. The New York Times emphasizes the wrinkle to the story: the one passenger who disembarked in New York works as a battle over the future of the Internet." City officials decreed that customers service providers, effectively forcing the company to share its wires with that government intervention will ultimately hurt consumer freedom more than company could be in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Executives give conflicting explanations about the purpose of the information collected: another maintains that the data is used to identify "sophisticated" users and dropouts rate is climbing. The government has undertaken a campaign for universal enrollment with some success, but no one's sure how much, because the lack of funding has also caused many schools, theoretically free, to charge longer assured a comfortable government job (the public sector is shrinking), more and more families are deciding that educating their children doesn't make financial sense. What's missing from the article is context: What's the enrollment rate in the United States, or other comparable countries? consults for his campaign. Previously, the Gore campaign had funneled money through other consulting firms to conceal Wolf's involvement. Wolf was also an claims that teaching kids "sexual gradualism" techniques like masturbation and preference. Analysts believe that the election belongs to the candidate who can identify and woo this mysterious swing group. The poll also has some alarming I would like to change the subject to elephant dung. Big surprise that a really important art. I only wish this strong defense of the museum's First Amendment rights had come a little earlier, before the whole issue got muddied virgin, et al., by soliciting money from people who stand to profit by its display. At least I think that's what the museum did; the financial shenanigans In any case, the main thing that the whole flap settled for me was this question: Who should I vote for in next year's Senate race? I was waffling, you al., have become such tasteless parodies of politicians that I was doubting whether I could pull the lever for Hill. (I call her Hill, because she clearly wants to be my best friend, what with moving to a New York City suburb to show that she's just like me and all.) I almost could have seen myself voting for homeless people off the streets, start a nationwide campaign to ticket (or security guards to walk neighborhood beats to build up, uh, empathy for the But then he pulls this: trying to yank a museum's funding because he doesn't like a picture that's going to be hung on the wall. Here is a man who is running for the job of lawmaker who clearly has not read one single law ever candidate who relishes the act of taking patently illegal and morally repulsive stands. Would this not embarrass me and the other voters from this great state of New York? I can just see him trying to pass laws requiring men to have crew cuts (or whatever nutty thing he wants to impose on the world next). I would like to think that his nutty museum stunt was past of his Senate campaign, an probably a huge demographic. But don't they have enough candidates to choose even though that's obviously not her name, kind of the way millions of people (er, Brandy) must be going through herself on a personal level (I once saw a Lifetime original movie about coping with dehydration, and believe me, it was more than a docudrama, it was the powerful story of one woman's courage in the glasses, except she refuses to wear them because she thinks they make her look ugly, and so she spends the entire episode bumping into things and getting into listings one time a couple of years ago, and I gotta tell you, I laughed my not an anthem of celebration and joy but a somber dirge of melancholy and another one: An entertainment reporter here at the paper attended a press they were all teens, he sarcastically asked them if they had any advice for the themselves, they could make their dreams come true. But get this: That's not the funny part. To illustrate her point, she said sitcom actress, or movie star, or whatever. She was worried that people didn't candidate now? Doesn't this guy know his life already parallels the plot of would have to say about that? And maybe all the nation's aspiring and, in the event of World War III, actually launching thermonuclear weapons, if only they just believed that they were pretty enough, huh? that had evolved along ethnic lines, many minority groups are now vying for settlement of World War I, which recognized the country as independent (the the prime minister and six others last month, observers attributed the killings but the government has refused to accept the decision. Constitution did not officially grant independence to these two territories, has recovered faster than other former republics due to its tourist trade (the Black Sea Coast has a warm climate) and its relative political stability. marriage, as well as to religious repression and Soviet attempts to force the international community does not recognize its government as independent. Well, after our moment of concord, let's give the crowd what it came for. Actually, let's talk about concord a little more. Maybe the most surprising was coming out, and what its title was, I thought: Oh, no, here we go again. I was remembering the rancor that followed two previous revisionist works on back in the '60s. Each of these books seemed to zoom us straight back in time to all the anger of that era. (Disclosure: I was really in a lather about Secretary, you should have the decency to remain silent now. Chances are I attacked the other books too. Bonus disclosure: As is no secret, I was in the positive reviews, and not all from publications in the "stab in the back" It's conceivable that the calmer reception has to do strictly with the book was a schoolboy. They wrote as if they had scores to settle; reviewers often settled scores right back. But factors like these can't be the whole explanation. One of the things I don't like in the book is a long chapter reasonable, but it's the one place where he has a categorically dismissive rather than explanatory tone. The journalists were all dupes, so were the lefties; this is a picture of the antiwar movement similar to the protestors' flap may mean that people haven't noticed. Or it may mean that the emotional has a lot to do with it. Or it could just be actuarial forces. The median age test each other for dominance, and if one side shrinks from a fight, even a presents the "bandwagon" effect of weakness in too sweeping and mechanistic a way. But that's because I belong to the camp he's specifically arguing against: the "minimal realists," who think the country doesn't have to accept every bear in mind when the country makes commitments. (As an important corollary to attacks on the North, because China and the Soviet Union would have backed When you put these together, you end up with the contention that it was better to have gone in, casualties and all, than to have avoided the fight invasion, it wasn't worth it. We are marveling at an end to rancor after The clinching argument on my side comes, you will be pleased to hear, from War, which he endorses as a way to offset the bandwagon of weakness that after Marines were bombed there. So he clearly found a way to project a unveiling today of sweeping privacy rules protecting patients' medical records, the nation's largest bank, the story says that the transfers are protection his own medical record and will have to approve of their release for purposes not related to treatment or billing. Doctors will be required to hire a privacy example, he is usually given the employee's entire record. The rules do not still on paper. And while the rules cover providers and insurance companies, they cannot cover the lawyers or pharmaceutical companies who consult for Both the Post and LAT stories on the privacy rules are well done, but there are some lapses. For instance, in its second paragraph the Post tells us, (should we pat them on the back for that?). And the LAT inexplicably devotes its entire third paragraph to an airy statement from the text of this All the papers front (and the LAT reefers) yesterday's astonishing account for productivity in the tech sector; this revealed that growth this decade was stronger than previously thought. The stock and bond markets soared. before Congress and turn lead into gold, what percentage of the country would turned up hundreds of bodies, not thousands or tens of thousands, as has been Liberation Army, and behaving with the brutality typical of security forces." The Post fronts a feature about ambivalence in Silicon Valley over from today.) On the one hand, the libertarian Valley entrepreneurs dislike stock traders yesterday. It's the first of a string of scheduled speaking engagements, product endorsements, and television roles. But unfortunately for million. He didn't see a cent from the book and movie rights he sold, and the bills (he has colon cancer) or into pension and mutual funds. praise its evenhanded take on his policies as well as his personality: He's said to have been both intellectual simpleton and political master. Conservatives profess shock that something so "remarkably balanced" was interracial relationship in the 1950s. Plaudits to the series for popularizing becomes the latest actor to attempt a comeback via a sitcom (about a glitzy can't make up for his inept comic timing or for the show's witless his training as an architect and his embrace of bright colors. "Even the lesser His ability to act out a conversation among five people leads the New York novels resist adaptation to the core of their beings." The Wall Street of the most vibrant actors of our time, into a passive, opaque, mannequin of front pages across the country. "Crowded Stores Buoy Hopes of Retailers," created a Justice Department criminal task force to look into the matter. the facts through congressional hearings. Meanwhile, the Wall Street annulment of municipal elections that appeared to have been won by opposition parties. Police arrested several protesters, and threatened the rest with grounds that the working class is too distracted, ignorant, and cowardly to Communist tyrant oppresses his people. More skeptical news reports indicate that the opposition leaders are no angels. Western diplomats are quoted appointed by Congress is expected to propose a new inflation index to replace Security and other federal benefits. This increasingly looks like the way Democrats and Republicans will agree to prune entitlements, while sharing the York Times observed that if the lower inflation numbers are applied to the economic statistics of the past couple of decades, the perceived stagnation of him as "a romantic in pursuit of a beautiful dream," but noted that his career portrayed him as the victim of an "inhuman" corrections system. Mother the fourth time this year, received an emergency angioplasty, staged a surprising recovery (attributed by doctors to her "spiritual strength"), suffered another setback, then improved slightly, but remained in critical reported that her followers "were reconciled to the prospect of [her] death." picking at pimples, and that she might have split her own lip by falling down. diary, his own phone records, notes from his interview with a defense photo was real but the shoes depicted in it were a "fraud.") The New York Times called it "potentially the most damaging day yet of his civil trial." prosecutors' mistakes in the criminal trial and was correcting them, chiefly by in the early days of the criminal trial. Moreover, several legal experts called stipulated that she wasn't proposing anything like her dominant role in the his aides don't want her to take a public role, because she'll become a major step forward, and averred that their man had spoken firmly against reduction (China is a major nuclear proliferator) for free trade, while others that there wasn't enough fuel on board to get there. Early reports said two of the hijackers were in custody; later reports indicated that police had grabbed investigators' job comically easy (he even climbed into a car with diplomatic busted soon enough. Commentators also debated whether the mole's exposure troubles eased, while its legal peril deepened. The company settled a black employee. Reportedly the biggest payment made in such a case, it is stations misguided, and argued that the crusade against corporate racism should in what many saw as a maneuver to pressure him for new leads in the decided to allow car owners to disconnect their air bags, which, according to government estimates, are killing one child per month and are on track to kill one child per week as more and more cars feature them. (The deaths are generally caused by the child's impact against the bag, or against the seat on the rebound.) The decision was viewed as a vindication of automakers, who warned of such injuries many years ago; the Wall Street many more people than they kill, and worried that the backlash will go too far. Everyone agreed that the solution is technology: Automakers favor the size of each passenger and adjust the inflation speed accordingly. Republic. Several newspapers reported that marijuana is becoming more revolution has fizzled, in part because office teamwork is becoming more recent films scant attention, they declare him "underrated" and "overlooked" praise despite its familiar story and conventional telling. Strong performances style. Detractors complain it's just plain boring. (Here is Movie Roundup. Few summer movies are even trying to duplicate story bashing gay studies, Entertainment Weekly declares the once book about its groundbreaking directors. Reviewers share the author's view that dramas but arrogantly overindulged in drugs and sex. Some critics rant about the tract's continued relevance as a critique of labor relations, while the economy's dynamism and strength. Scholarly reviewers honor it as "an Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme movie star. Critics delight in the chemistry between his character, a charming about a young man and his friend who set out to retrieve his father's ashes, for eschewing "the high seriousness and dubious mysticism" of most films about its wry humor and cutting observations about life on the reservation, a few say sophisticated computer graphics to make cute animals engage in sexual innuendo. of the Old South. Most critics still consider it a masterwork and celebrate the subject into the "pantheon of legendary women who have successfully passed as gender is a historic construction, but critics mostly wax prurient. They obsess novelist's latest, about the fantasies of an insurance executive whose estranged wife slept with his preadolescent son. Some critics are tickled by played up the size of the dissenting faction anyway. Pundits agreed that the afterward; members will have to vote again on his punishment; he'll be distracted, tarnished, and weakened; having lost prestige and twisted arms just foreign diplomats' immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in the police allege he was drunk and speeding, and that he ran a stop sign. In New police who were trying to ticket their car because it was parked at a fire ignored him and blamed the police. Under the international policy of diplomatic governments waive immunity, which is highly unlikely. Pundits rushed to join the outcry to modify this policy to allow the scoundrels to be brought to diplomats abroad were buried near the bottom of most stories. (posted Social Security released its prescriptions for the trust fund's solvency problems. Members agreed to hike payroll taxes, raise the retirement age, and invest some money in stocks, but failed to agree on how far to privatize the would set up individual accounts but would fund them separately through a payroll tax hike. Conservatives hailed the rough consensus on stock investment as a "paradigm shift," while critics warned of leeching by Wall Street brokers and asked whether the government will bail out retirees who lose their savings because of market volatility. Union leaders vowed to kill any privatization scheme; politicians signaled they're not ready for full privatization but are willing to experiment with stocks as long as the government picks the stocks. Since the commission failed to reach a consensus that would give politicians Dodgers are for sale. Analysts predicted that with its prestigious history the previous record for a baseball franchise. Sports historians noted that the New York business leaders to bid for the team, but the early line is that this they did and are warning everyone to beware of unexpected parcels from the Middle East. Analysts suspect the culprit may be somebody offended by Al responded with outrage at this heinous act against the media. Middle Eastern Post weighed in with articles on how easy it is to construct letter bombs apiece of meeting in the Super Bowl. Having already pushed aside the columnists declared the old guard dead, lamenting the Broncos' traditional expansion teams' success proves they were given too many picks in the college and expansion drafts. Sportswriters reply that these teams have had plenty of similar chances, have blown them, and may be booted from their jobs now that the Panthers and Jaguars have proven that it doesn't take years to build a the Pacific Northwest. After two massive snowstorms, heavy rain and melting Northwest's woes to biblical plagues ("We finally got our natural disaster, as businesswoman and several associates with investment interests in China met participant in the sale of presidential access to foreign contributors. Pundits without provocation, wounding seven civilians. The soldier was wrestled down by in part because the soldier was a lousy shot and failed to kill anyone, and in protect sharks from depletion by fishermen. The Wall Street Journal says marshmallows are the new rage in fancy restaurants. and more cops on the beat. The New York Times reports that debutante balls are coming back. A study finds promise in a new therapy for impotence: a battle against the city's decrepitude. In the New York Times Book worker and a poor black grandmother with political history. The Wall Street copies so far, escalates. Several recent reviews buck the critical consensus and deride the book, the story of a Confederate deserter, for being too highbrow critics misunderstand its middlebrow virtues. It is "a perfectly enjoyable piece of sentimental fiction, straight from those golden days of the intellectual. "Alone among the guru class, he grabbed hold of business and made marriage damaged by grief over their runaway daughter, pursue extramarital affairs and unwittingly swap partners with a younger yuppie couple. Christie "renders such a captivating performance that she alone justifies the price of seductive handyman), and melodramatic dialogue. It "descends into a silly praise for charting the tumultuous friendships among these popular social hackneyed gender politics, and its presentation of the boy's colorful, creators don't realize that "this kid is profoundly troubled." (Stills and document, an anthology of unexamined prejudices, a tiresome Manhattan whine." Staples finds that the novel's "absence of workaday and historical detail keeps Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall view of the criminal trial was that a black jury ignored its instructions by view of the civil trial is that a white jury ignored its instructions by Reporters, however, scrupulously pointed out that a civil trial only requires proof by a "preponderance of evidence" rather than proof "beyond a reasonable himself in by contradicting photographic evidence and other witnesses' testimony on the stand. Next comes a short hearing in which the jury will found it long on grand exhortations but short on government action, confirming of our time is inaction.") The two topics that caught the most attention were standards. The good news: Reviewers deemed it his best State of the Union assets under management, will be the biggest securities firm in history. The (Dean Witter). The Wall Street Journal predicts a frenzy of copycat royal title, particularly since she only married into it. Advertisers predict her adultery, kinky sexual practices, contempt for authority, and general Times sees two trends in the deal: the prostitution of the royal family last fall's local elections. His attempt to annul them had triggered an uprising that increasingly threatens to force him from power. The pessimistic retreat because he's on the verge of losing control. The optimistic view is magazine reported that the new Democratic National Committee finance chairman tax cuts for education and for capital gains on the sale of a home. harmony and tried to egg the two sides into a fight, with little success. Welfare reform was the hot topic at the National Governors' Association winter meeting. Several Republican governors supported restoration of aid to legal immigrants (which was cut in the new welfare law). Republican congressional leaders reportedly hit the roof over the governors' defection and, under that pressure, they fudged their stand somewhat. But a considering. As with welfare, the states will have to pick up part of the bill. Conservative commentators complain that the Republican governors are chickening out on the principle of returning authority to the states now that it's costing them money. Liberals are gloating for the same reason. The popular bet now is that the governors' refusal to let go of the federal teat will doom proposals include abstinence education, school vouchers for poor kids, construed the project as a coalition bid for mainstream credibility; the project as a private alternative to government programs, reporters noted that exile, imprisonment, or intimidation. The report also cites China's transparent maintained that it will in the future. Editorialists applauded his candor but first installment of the "Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition" opened in and new visual effects, will soon be followed by The Empire Strikes Back quest. The less reverent version is that it launched the era of gaudy action a higher poverty rate than blacks. Government figures indicate that cigarette Today warns that this may be an "early warning sign" of an emerging environmental peril. Medical advocacy groups are pushing a home test for them to a lab. The Wall Street Journal reports that despite the best efforts of entrepreneurs, the cryonics industry remains lifeless. On the bright funds made Page One news in the New York Times and Wall Street the market's rising average. In recent years, the index strategy has triumphed steadier cash and bonds to protect investors in the event of a market plunge. antique dealer's murder trial, is called "listless, disjointed and ambience of his other films. A few critics still applaud Weaver's "fierce language, though the melodrama of the original is said to remain. The New says the 75-minute work's "themes are nondescript, its harmonies blandly predictable, [and] its structure maddeningly repetitious." Most point out that Defenders argue that the piece brings a wider audience to classical music, long, too weighty" for a "somewhat preachy story that was always slender." his minimalism and use of pale colors. Others say the film has the "earnest Trainspotting should have turned out to be a "pileup of spectacular courts a philosopher is the season's surprise success. Critics praise it for books. Hill sympathizers, on the other hand, like the book's "straightforward, remakes with good intentions cannot overcome the blandness of the original, machine kicks into high gear. Critics call the subject of the film inherently to secure her place in the top tier of pop divas. Critics praise her eclectic pronouncements about his influence on contemporary dance. Critics are surprised that his signature style, in which dancers' movements are determined by A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of this film about an apocalyptic war between human beings and giant bugs renews effects and campy characters: "a cheerfully lobotomized, always watchable critiques, "pumping up the humdrum into the histrionic." The post- Pulp plays every character as a charming lout. (Click here for the official riffs on race and death. Reviewers take him to task for overworking his trademark Borscht Belt repartee. Cardboard characters and a contrived plot are thin evidence for others (many sources are anonymous, and some named sources organized and filmed orgies. Many applaud the book's conclusion that his perversions distort his studies. Others find the book cynical, "simplistic and said to be more accurate and better organized, with fewer chatty digressions. But most critics regret the disappearance of the "quirky personal voice" of the longer a guide to daily life and an antidote to the worries of its era" (Molly Items exemplifying the artist's campy humor (his massive Barbie Doll tendentious points about art and fashion. Besides, complains New York 's industry. A damning "indictment of the excesses" of the era, says no difference to the average user, who will consider the competing browsers that the brain is like a computer program that has been shaped by natural selection. Critics find the book entertaining, praising digressions on grace that it becomes a riotous, sprawling historical entertainment." schematic: "Large thematic strokes may define his architecture, but within lies continual surprise at the fluidity and resilience of the human condition." A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of shrink is said to revive his career, two weeks after it was pronounced stalled morality tale about the inventors of the breast implant, who go from being star surgeons in the '70s to coke heads in the '80s. "The Boogie Nights of admire the show's witty satire of sleazy doctors, as well as the performances the original's faults. The revival "doesn't diminish the magnitude of the explaining the slave revolt itself. The score, which borrows from Benjamin emotional questions she asks do not admit of such neatness," says the New End of Time. The New York Times Book Review declares it one of the series is said to lack the original's campy charm. "Silliness has been replaced dethrones Titanic as the weekend's top box office draw. "Audiences must haters complain he's still too abstract, can't write female characters, and the show is little more than a vehicle for showing women romping around in concerns (power politics, "narrative") at the expense of spiritual content. Pears uses the thriller as an occasion to wax philosophical, meditating on scientific method and political liberalism. Critics praise his skill at excellence, writes about someone other than herself, and earns mixed reviews. Feminists approve of the novel, about an aging rock star and her two abandoned Close retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as "the work of an artist said to have overplayed its fame by appearing in too many commercials. ABBA.) ("Hi! We're the Spice Girls" is the official site. For Contemporary Arts Center (New York City). A Queens elementary school turned art gallery undergoes an $8.5-million renovation and becomes the "world's largest contemporary art space." Art critics welcome the expansion, pointing out that the gallery now can exhibit oversized installations most museums can't accommodate. Works by young, experimental, and overlooked artists are also displayed in bathrooms, basements, stairwells, and halls. Highlights: dismissed as hackneyed, borrowed from Cold War thrillers and courtroom novel, about a widow who finds happiness communing with ghosts, switches pretentious, particularly when Rice holds forth on Catholic theology and classical music. But some reviewers claim to have relished the book's spirit of kitschy fun. (Random House has a gothic page devoted to Rice.) oversimplify, overanalyze or sentimentalize," says the New York Times Book obsession, her childhood. It's time for her "to tell us something new" (John occasions, the company has seemed more like a "postgraduate workshop for the "rowdiness and bawdry [which] are as out of place as a belch in a declaration Time in the aftermath of a horrific conflagration. "It uses the moral and historical grandeur of a world war to promote its cranky local obsessions to a level of universality and interest that they do not deserve." thriller is pronounced a failure. The problem: a disappointing ending. It's "the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets call this version more polished than the low budget original and better than the other six sequels but say nonetheless that it is predictable, devoid of scenes, incredibly detailed descriptions of cutting edge military technology, and enough acronyms to set your head spinning. This isn't great literature but, and cardboard cutout characters, most critics admit the novel is "a ripping about everyday life, but audiences give him standing ovations. Praise goes to approbation to the choice post- South Park spot on Comedy Central. The motorcycles is the most attended exhibition in its history. Some critics find beauty in the bikes' sleek, modern designs, but most reject the exhibition as (Showtime; click here for air times). Despite the refusal of major distributors to minded critics call it "a preposterous polemic celebrating modern feminist cop hostage, then picks Spacey as his negotiator. The actors are unable to lost in the hubbub are wit and logic." (Check out the official Web Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet attempt at running an Internet startup. Critics revel in his caustic humor and calls the book "a fascinating cautionary tale" of the way money is shoveled at reminding the reader of what a dishonest, scheming little shit he is, he seeks greatest contribution is said to be the integration of Modernist innovations remember his unrelenting perfectionism (some say meanness) and his audacious designed to make sure he can't keep any money he makes from his notoriety in in calculating his net worth, so the judge or an appeals court will probably education, juvenile crime, family tax cuts, tax credits for businesses that stories. Consensus prediction: The big studios will be embarrassed for a few weeks and then will go back to churning out mindless blockbusters. ordinance against vicious dogs. Strike One was the rooster. Strikes two and three were escapes from home. The case inspired outcries throughout the country and was widely covered by national television and the foreign media. New prosecutors buckled and agreed to reduce Prince's penalty to exile. fighter jets dogged passenger planes in two incidents. First an F-16 causing its pilot to attempt violent evasive maneuvers. Then another commercial dollar for some time now." Finance ministers and central bankers producers, but it also makes it harder for them to attract capital investment. The Group of Seven industrialized nations, meeting in Berlin, decided that the What the experts didn't explain was why, if the boundaries are artificial, concerns have waned, disposable diapers are driving cloth diapers into who couldn't get online, is now under fire for failing to tell users about other phone routes that are less jammed but cost the company more money. accused have yet to be tried. The network said the movie would provide York Times editorial, everyday lessons like whether "a newly engaged couple should cement their relationship by exterminating former lovers." Times sees it as the latest sign that Republicans, having made sure that boost investment in education, cut taxes, and eradicate deficit spending for sham: It doesn't specify where programs will be cut. (Budget Director Frank solvency plan for Medicare, assumes there won't be a recession, and defers office. The Wall Street Journal pitifully observed that Al Gore will be left holding the bag. The political consensus is that the Republicans are ready to deal this year and will work out a compromise budget, which won't balance to establish a "humanitarian fund for the victims of the Holocaust." This is an attempt to resolve the scandal over whether the banks ingratiated themselves to groups. The boycott has been called off, but demands persist for full disclosure of records of Holocaust victims' assets, and there's little sign the chalk it up to sluttish ruthlessness; defenders argue that, like most women of her day, she had been socialized to build her plans around men. Intent on proving that she was more than a seductive dilettante, friends are touting her success as ambassador. The French, meanwhile, are praising her seductive for abandoning their heritage, but were unable to find anybody making the lovers. Dissenters gripe about hackneyed dialogue, stock characters, and too it alongside his '70s classics. They laud his intermingling of fiction and following. Giving it a second look, critics attribute the show's appeal to its unconventional plots and insights into contemporary young women. "Irresistible debate. Some praise the museum for its uncharacteristic timeliness and for of his designs, which got noticed only because celebrities wore them. In the should go far toward raising the standards of architecture in New York City," English painter wins praise for "bringing [her] subject and his milieu alive" prurient fixation on sex. (In one painting, women watch a man masturbate in lore and language of movies rather than life," says the Wall Street Wright, receive mostly raves. "A symphonic set of variations on the classical dialogue. Others complain the plays are pretentious and without much plot. Some war. "Some of the shocks here are too sadly predictable," says the New York that the Internet will expand democracy, build communities, and liberate workers. "A cross between New Age philosophy and 1950s hyperbole," says previously published magazine articles, writes turgid prose, and puts too much World: Life, Death, and the Human Drama" (International Center of Photography Midtown, New York City). With this retrospective, the newspaper photographer great artist, and an inspiration to his followers. Critics marvel at his knack for arriving at murder scenes before the police. Others blame him for today's news media's voyeurism and disapprove of his borderline ethics (he composed scenes that he passed off as spontaneous). "His influence was like a rock dropped in a pond: its ripples are still spreading," says the New York Rainmaker generic. "Must we simply face the iron fact that current filmmaking conditions have deprived still another individual director of his evil king and his good twin, emerges relatively unscathed. He is better "than character actor John Hurt's wry depiction of the writer. Critics deem Hurt a offbeat subjects, which make him the "most restlessly independent independent and his cinematography drab. (Stills and clips are available here.) say they have no interest in watching "spineless, whiny, indecisive nitwits" album of new songs in nine years is deemed melancholic and sluggish, "like it (New Line Cinema). Pundits can't resist noting the "scary acclaimed satire about a fake war orchestrated to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal. Their spin on the eerie parallel between art critics' pans of the popular Spice Girls and conclude that "sometimes the and apparent awareness that "they have achieved ludicrous measures of fame and about his marriage and admitting his insensitivity and infidelity, which some highly polished diversion." (An excerpt is available.) thriller about a science writer and an evangelical drifter who's obsessed with overpriced commercials to kvetch about. "Surely a future Super Bowl will see Internet to vote for its ending, to no apparent consequence. Chamber Ensemble" (City Center, New York City). On the occasion of his majestic solo concert. "The profundity of an artist such as we won't see again he has given modern dance, having switched from classical ballet in theatrical watershed: an awesome pyrotechnical display of theatrical craft and Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall thriller The Fugitive is judged inferior to its predecessor. Critics "you'll feel cheap in the morning." (The studio touts the movie here.) pragmatic, and basically liberal (except when it comes to gays). "If you are a million but flops with critics. It wins credit for downplaying special effects with too few action scenes and characters who seem oddly cavalier about their that presumes on its reader's infinite patience." Others say it's muddled by poorly demarcated flashbacks and instances of incomprehensible Dutch humor. sons to trade on his father's name in launching a pop career. Critics say (Random House). A new biography prompts a round of comparisons between the the New York Times Book Review for bringing an unusually fine "moral intelligence" to the declining art of biography. His tale is said to transcend pathological tightwad, and a philanthropist whose giving was motivated by PR suffers an anxiety attack on a Venetian gondola and rarely leaves his hotel press and deliberately hammed up his insecurities for the camera. "Actresses get attention for their hair when they don't draw you in with their death of a genre. "Romantic comedy has been in a funk since women's lib and the pill popped the champagne bubbles of sexual tension." (A trailer is available alleys and markets are said to overcome a flimsy plot in The Joy Luck predictable and despicable: "Lower their grammar a few notches, and you can see mocks "the endlessly repeated mantra that the show's genius is that it's 'about inchoate fulminations on feminism and familiar rants on being single. Others Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles name, the movie won't succeed financially. (Here's the official site.) loses all its children in a school bus crash. Critics say the film, which won subject matter. Critics especially like its intricate structure (it has four to be especially skillful. (Clips are available here.) adaptation of its cartoon movie. "Far more textured and original than the masks and are said to be stylish and innovative. Critics also like the way the story has been rewritten to add some psychological depth (it's now an Oedipal dropping and gossip mongering, particularly his boasts of having given Nancy China safe for capitalism, openness, and prosperity. References to his Pundits are already handicapping the power struggle among China's next criminal record and has allegedly bragged that he stands to gain much of the correspondents agree that all this significantly wounded the government's case. investigation would soon end without indictments of the president or first press that he had made his decision without regard to the investigation's called him a quitter. Conservatives consoled themselves with the prospect that met to discuss how businesses and churches could provide jobs. Instead, Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, said it was wrong "to "slavery" and protested that it was "demeaning" to clean toilets. Meanwhile, Trade Organization would become foreigners' tool for conquering the United Council had warned the White House against consorting with shady characters who senators and the media responded by demanding to know why the White House had no governmental actions affected by contributions to this president." strike for two months while federal mediators try to resolve the dispute. The average salary. Editorialists are having trouble picking sides because both the company and the pilots seem to be making too much money. Pundits agree that the benefits of intervention (pleasing passengers and saving jobs in politically mostly Republican and are isolated from the rest of organized labor) made this for similar confrontations may be encouraged to hold out for absurd demands in Police said the diplomat appeared to have been drinking and speeding. The State the two countries. Observers worry that their reconciliation process might certified her as the newest celebrity in sports but worried that she'll end up warped or burned out like other recent teen prodigies in gymnastics, skating, and tennis. The cynical view is that she's got a year or two at the top before proclaiming once again that the optimists have been vindicated, are having more and more trouble finding anyone on Wall Street who was this optimistic. Even analysts who had argued for loosening the old standards, by which the market was clearly overvalued, now think it has maxed out for a while. The rosy view is that the market's remarkable rise makes sense because conditions have been perfect. The pessimistic view is that investors have been spoiled by the perfect conditions and will panic as soon as something goes wrong. The Wall bolstered the case. The disclosure gives the scandal an important new twist and ratchets up pressure on the Justice Department to appoint an independent counsel. But the Wall Street Journal says there is still no evidence to committee investigating the scandal has collapsed into partisan feuding, taken by some as a sign that the probe may now be focusing on the girl's parents, who have hired their own lawyers, detectives, and PR people while still refusing to be interviewed at police headquarters. The more cautious interpretation is that the case investigators don't want to repeat the forensic reinstating a ban on funding for groups that also perform or promote abortions passed by a wider margin, but the Senate is expected to oppose such a their efforts to disentangle support for contraception from the contentious musical highlights. They're relief from the rest of the film." (Visit the official site.) just as nasty as his first film and leaves critics arguing over whether the callous bastards. The action revolves around six characters (two couples and two singles) who betray and manipulate each other in various combinations in a embarrassment, and misery." But some find the bleakness compelling and praise four real single people living and looking for love in New York City, but film is scripted, based on conversations with his subjects. Some critics are fascinated by the new possibilities opened up by this license and call the film Others are uneasy about the intimate, sad, and somewhat mocking portraits that emerge of these deeply flawed and lonely individuals and call the film who says watching this film "is like having a hangover without the fun of getting happily plastered in the first place." Entertainment Weekly 's Ken Tucker is the lone dissenter, claiming the film possesses an "irreverent energy and a swaggering style that does its subject proud." (Visit the official "instinctive grasp of familial dynamics, the ways in which dreams and emotional parts are "perilously at the edge of sentimentality." (Read an essay by the Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the swashbuckling legend makes critics wax nostalgic for the era "when boyish Robin Hood is said to offer impeccable stunts and a genuinely witty screenplay. lifeless, [with the] contrived feel of a Thanksgiving Day parade." (Here's the prose and quirky characters, they focus more on the similarities between the in the Weekly Standard that the book "becomes a porn novel," with its heavy focus on presidential sex. (See what the publisher has to say about Coles says her presence is "so obvious a gimmick to draw in those who don't normally bother to see the Bard that it's almost insulting." Unanimous praise staging of the gender bender, which breaks with the recent trend of interjecting gay subtext into the play. The consensus: Twelfth Night is political chat show. Most critics use the occasion as another opportunity to to deliver the dish his promos promised. Still others, such as Entertainment Weekly 's Ken Tucker, predict the unpredictable Drudge, a "refreshingly snarky news anchor," will shake up political television. Here's the Drudge Report, which wins praise for her first leading role since coming out. Though some had has lost his touch and is now just recycling old lines and plots. Times )--runs off with her gay brother's lover. Reviewers like the unpredictable plot twists, witty asides about sexual identity, and the casting. uses saucy lesbian love scenes simply to attract viewers and to make up for its insights into the playwright's tortured mind. They're shocked by the violence "his mode of interviewing consists mainly of salivating over guests for being by writing a straightforward novel about a soap company and an employee who gets ovarian cancer. Some critics praise his insight into the dark nature of Others say his characters just deliver long, boring speeches on esoterica. "It (New Line Cinema). This hip urban vampire tale is either admirably true to its Marvel Comics origins or boring and brooding, depending and special effects and is said to radiate a grim beauty. But neither script his death did the three find out about one another. Critics say the film never summer is pronounced "tacky, tiny and about as seductively nostalgic as those doesn't disappoint. "It's a testament to her talent that the novel, while improvisation. The album is "shockingly raw for mainstream pop, with the this story. It is possibly the most tried and true dramatic plot known to man." patriotic war movie you might think went out of fashion" after the glut of throwback to a time before fiction turned graphic and interior and hot to the ability to create a sense of linkage, of one existence impinging on the Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the against the amendment because the Senate rejected changes he had proposed. handwritten note shows that he directly approved and encouraged a plan to other White House perks. The initial media spin is that this was scandalously The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors have evidence of the vast majority of patients who have the procedure (technically known as intact dilation and evacuation) are healthy women with healthy fetuses that hospital. The district attorney concluded that "the wealthiest murder defendant few hours later. The bomb wasn't detected, but it failed to go off. The Army of responsibility for the bombings of an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub in after discovering that two men who were thought to be assembling a huge fertilizer bomb were average guys working for an industrial cleaning firm. written by the gunman seems to confirm police suspicions that he was deranged experiment (on sheep) said their technique will allow the engineering of animals to produce helpful drugs. Other scientists pointed out that the technique can be applied to humans, that the United States has no laws against it, and that such laws couldn't be enforced anyway, since the procedure can be done in almost any lab anywhere in the world. While enthusiasts point to 1960s with strikes against school decentralization. He later endorsed strong standards for both teachers and students, which annoyed many teachers but made him a hero to school reformers. But he'll be best remembered for a line in agree that the reversal fails to erase the widespread conclusion that he has judgment, further weakening the investigation's credibility. Meanwhile, the adapting his positions to the demands of contrary constituencies ranging from Marine training turned out to be a lot harder than his boxing training regimen to do. Commentators dismissed him as a pampered wimp who jerked around both the military and the taxpayer. The Marines gained new respect for having broken spoof of his old choirboy image. Nevertheless, outraged viewers complained to the Christian television network that had been airing his show, causing its cancellation. Callers to the network are being advised to pray for him. notorious rapist who hacked off his victim's forearms and then spent only another woman. Outraged citizens and commentators are scorning the folly of rehabilitation and demanding tougher sentencing laws for sex offenders. The irony is that such laws are already in place, inspired in part by Singleton's clever, and emotionless. The hoopla is evidence "that the art world takes for his candid memoir of his days as a young civil rights radical. They praise Coordinating Committee, the organization he headed. Most reviewers mythologize Staples argues the book's real value lies in its revelations of the class terrible challenge to interest a populace that's already had Titanic up disease (he rejected a tenure offer because he believed he was about to become "of conceiving of a nuanced theory of rationality could descend into madness" of synergy, reduced to "scrounging around for tony material to turn into tacky to Abstract Expressionism. But critics hate him as much as ever: "His art is tourists' bad taste to garner huge crowds. (For the lowdown on the show, click gratuitous violence and grotesqueries, critics lay into this "merchandising harmless plot: An avaricious toy manufacturer places vivifying microchips into Many critics even wax nostalgic for the psychological acumen of earlier (Lions Gate Films). Critics either tout or trash this what "it would be like reading papers for a freshman creative writing course" (sometimes gothic, sometimes macho) lyrics, refreshing in a world inundated by cult star to become a genuine pop star. (Mercury plugs the album here.) ranking their favorite books, movies, albums, and other cultural fare. 's editors thought it only fitting to use this special installment of "Summary Judgment" to summarize the Best of everyone's Best of about a Civil War deserter, which, to the dismay of many critics, beat out reviews all leave it off their lists, but Entertainment Weekly considers it the best of a "banner year for adventure stories." (See no consensus emerges. The weekly book reviews like such highbrow biographies as critics bemoan. "Why not pay real writers to write?" Time grumbles. critics lament the ubiquity of disaster movies, mindless screenplays, and actor woman" in rock: "Never in pop history have female singers been quite so say the sitcom was witless and pointless until it focused on its main excoriate Digital Pets, a noisy, interactive version of the 1970s fad the Pet Rock. Digital Pets are labeled the year's worst innovation and a "nightmare for "suitably preposterous plot." (Visit the official Web site.) for it, and if the other two don't admit their complicity (and do time in a dangerous prison system), the one who was caught will be executed. Some critics praise it as having "the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller" might be melodrama, but it's melodrama with heart, bones, sinews, and tear developing sexuality and the crazy dynamics of her less than affluent family, toward sitcom jokes and timing but nevertheless embrace the "affectionate had speculated for four years about the effect of marriage and motherhood on the queen of sexual bravado and confessional songwriting. The consensus: stunts and manipulation of the public's buying patterns through now commonplace praised for thorough research and the ability to see through his subject's inflation of his accomplishments. The critics are not impressed with the book's and celebrity dirty laundry. Others dismiss the book for its dearth of sources the legal document as if it were a literary creation but disagree on which genre it falls into. Some find it squarely in the tradition of "the "nonfiction novel" in the New York Times and finds its closest literary scapegrace hero is always more appealing than a moralizing narrator." (Read the genres somewhat awkwardly. (Listen to this Terry Gross interview with King.) latest rehash of Manhattan fast living is Bright Lights, Big City all over again: Smart young man works at a magazine, dates a model, runs with a debauched crowd, looks for meaning. Critics say the novel "wears a sort of and, worse, "it's never clear if we are meant to ridicule, pity, or envy" the her wordplay, wry humor, and smart, bitter female protagonists; this collection gives way to bonding) and, along the way, treat the audience to some great action scenes and some not so great ethnic stereotypes. Tucker's hyperactive thoroughly unappealing for the audience to ever root for him. (Find out more The film is an understated but moving depiction of the day to day existence of praised as having "captured something true about families and friendship" film lacks any real sense of narrative continuity and feels like "bits and negatives for his forthcoming film. "[A] stunningly bad, sophomorically vulgar pseudonym used when a director removes his name from a film's credits. spiteful tone; and disjointed editing, done by the film's despised purveying racial stereotypes. Its laughs are as crude as the chuckles of with her first pop album in four years. It works. Critics are charmed by unparalleled phrasing and effortless style and glance over his unexceptional pitch and range. They attribute his enduring popularity to his complex persona, with tenderness. All but a few whitewash his Mafia ties, brawling, silly grudges, boozing, racism, womanizing, and the fact that "he not infrequently grand finale fails to live up to its hype, and a few even pronounce it "a major writing, and humor about everyday situations. Others are pleased that the show stayed unsentimental to the last and didn't compromise itself with a sappy, own murder and then begins rapping about the virtues of socialism and personal political agenda down the throats of an audience," says accuse him of turning out "agitprop for a politics whose few remaining girl's. Others say the novel rambles: "As with a bright child brought down to century seals his canonization. Although critics find Cities of the Plain less inventive than All the Pretty Horses and The philosophical musings, which no longer seem fresh. The book's plot (about a man's anonymous love letters to his girlfriend) is said to be trite, and the unpredictable, and reminiscent of his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme this year's outfits were deemed boring: less gothic and showing less cleavage as entertaining as reality. Others gripe about the film's two and half hour teen drama. Reviewers like the labyrinthine twists of the story, about two to enjoying the "guilty pleasures, including banzai bikini footage" (Mike rating and find it lacking even "the saving spark of low art or high camp" are swooning over this pretentious, sluggish "lifeless drone" for political (Henry Miller Theater, New York City). Applause for uses a stage backdrop of nothing but stark blue and projects bands of white light across it, while his performers stand almost motionless. Reviewers find the innovations that have transformed opera over the past half century" (Mark continued attraction to him implausible and object to the film's lugubrious clearly had a lot of practice trying to explain the unexplainable in 12-step but is said to suffer from simplistic characters, windy dialogue, and a facile in the Holy Land, comes up short. Stone's thriller about the sojourns of a Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous to fame: A onetime prostitute, she founded a brokerage house, ran for president, championed free love, and brought down the preacher Henry Ward previous low standing to the abundance of sculptures he made in the '60s for Opera (Metropolitan Opera, New York City). Critics applaud the St. Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme the movie's frighteningly realistic violence, especially a scene in which a husband beats his pregnant wife, causing her to miscarry. Watching the film, head with a shovel." (Click here for the official site.) complaining that the movie feels like a retread of the original Blues Brothers guys. Critics say the tuneless John Goodman can't measure up to the late swept the film critics' awards. Critics failed to expect only one inclusion and nominations, the critics' sentimental favorites are aging actors staging [Dickens], you get your insider's chuckle. If not, you still get a good yarn" repackage her old New York Times columns. Issue advocacy comes at the expense of realistic characters and a coherent plot. And why is it, the critics much like a sophisticated Manhattan journalist? Dissenters congratulate by refusing to "sell out" and make videos. General consensus: "The fabled '90s sculptures, ceramics, and paintings, most of them never seen before outside new species that chooses to travel halfway around the globe to lay his eggs in the middle of Manhattan doesn't seem built to survive, evolutionarily speaking" poorly at the box office) may also be due to overexposure to disaster movies. the lack of a plot, critics say, there's a senselessly spinning camera meant to rather than quality films. "It's become a carnival midway of commercial Gaze didn't win.) Other films to emerge from the festival are Safe as much for its social history as its compelling story" (Tom De Haven, into urban decay and race, as well as his cinematic dialogue, acquired in his more funny," says Entertainment Weekly 's Ken Tucker. Encomiums for the biz, and its blurring of life and art with celebrity cameos (guests on the against his former manager, who allegedly swiped Sanders writers for its plot absurd, and Reeves' performance typically bad. (See the film's tomes as hopelessly pedestrian, with "the formulaic plots and the formulaic prose, and extensive research, while gleefully bashing the snobbery of his show's frank treatment of the twins' sex lives. They say wrenching portrayals for the decrepit city's renewal wins more praise for its intentions than for postmodern building, consisting of concert halls and theaters, looks like a on kitsch (examples of overkill: steel rods poking out of ceilings; floors inlaid with colored stones). But complaints are downplayed because "the on a line of clothes with embedded computers. The duds get heavier or lighter depending on climate, and they automatically play music in response to the computers do nothing useful, and the futuristic designs are not anything their heads at the New York Philharmonic's penchant for reviving obscure works A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of stop letting actors direct. (The trailer is available here.) and they insist it's time to retire the Bond franchise. As the sixth Bond, vistas and elegiac tone, saying the latter resembles "a meditative and Most critics respectfully note that the lack of a plot and the lengthy scenes the card hall settings are said to be gritty; the dialogue is said to be Objections: a sluggish plot and a predictable setup. Dissenters call the film mother and daughter forced to reconcile in the face of grave illness earn though small, is said to be emotionally powerful. (Watch interviews with the stars the loss of the author's blessing and the right to use the novel's name. What's left is a string of corny adventures shared by two young boys, one of whom believes he is on a special mission from God. A minority of critics praise the page memo detailing his objections to the studio's cut of his the occasion to rethink the movie itself: "A jammed, discordant, discomforting many complications a moral significance of disturbing perversity and diary that had been removed by her father before publication, largely because they reveal unhappy details of his marriage. These pages overshadow the contents of the biography in news coverage of the book, but those who do Frank: the Cultivation of the Inspirational Victim.") unfamiliar directions. Some critics call it his "best album in years" (Tony choreographer Mark Morris is judged to be worse than expected. "It's like convicted murderer, fails to make its protagonist sympathetic even as it Picketers castigated the show for glorifying a killer. (Audio clips are reporting on the scandal but admit that they like watching it. Their main student's affair with his teacher and a character who masturbates while irked by the movie's artsy pretensions (Pip is turned into a tortured painter) waste an intense performance on a silly film. He plays a psychotic murderer said to come at the expense of developing her characters, who "don't behave liberals, in this case an older couple whose son is accused of murder. Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall (Paramount Pictures). Raves mount for the summer smash, in M for Murder transposed to Manhattan, "sexed up, opened out, and finished It's also said to replicate the original's flaws, in that it isn't very scary. to lack her usual charm. "She's in love with the camera. Unfortunately, it's classical, pastoral). Others continue to dismiss his work as sappy and say he and sympathetic portrayal of the lives of a gang banger, a crack dealer, and a journalism has fallen from the pyrotechnics of its originators, such as Tom times to grow up in: "One wants to ask, 'Harder compared to what?' To life in detective battles a demon that jumps from one person to another when they reviewers wonder why his characters never have romantic relations with white from last year's competition flopped at the box office, critics declare the restored hegemony. "Does this prove once and for all that size matters?" (Ford Center for the Performing Arts, New York City). New the struggle. King, the book's central figure, emerges as "our century's epic King years is that there now is no struggle over [their] historical master's wry humor and enchanting storytelling. It has "a strong claim to being Others say it's no coincidence the novel didn't appear until seven years after Singer's death. "Chaotic, rambling, repetitive and parochial," judges Lee network's animated show about third graders obsessed with violence and bodily the show's cult following to the timeless power of bathroom humor and to its (and arguably the first painter anywhere) to abandon representation. "Dove's visionary abstraction was of such strength, originality and integrity," says who denied Dove's paternity of their movement and dismissed his landscapes as Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall in a nightclub modeled on the legendary Studio 54--and lap up the characters' exhausted of insight. (Click here for the official site.) with stuffed animals, and the "emotional range of a sympathy card" (Roger is also judged charmless. Some reviewers endorse the film as benign summer fare ever. Still, they admit the sequel isn't that great. While full of delightfully quality but criticism for playing fast and loose with the facts. Journalist nonfiction book it is based on. Grateful Nation is said to present a meaning of the Abstract Expressionist's famous floating rectangles. "Like landscapes. A few interpret the dark hues of his later works as a reflection of the violence and hoped "to pull back from the brink." Federal Reserve 's decision to not raise interest rates reflected both campaign politics and internecine struggles at the Fed. Although the Fed rarely Fed's regional bank presidents, who wanted a rate hike, had leaked their might help friendly investors get a jump on imminent Fed actions. Either way, explosives. The raids apparently thwarted a truck bombing akin to those that of interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. United States was the subject as the United Nations opened its governments. Editorialists warned that the United States is in no position to women. Fire rescue workers expected to carry Lucid from the space shuttle, since the weightlessness of space tends to confuse the body's sense of balance and deplete blood, bone, and muscle strength. Instead, she stood up and walked away, with some help. Her strength was credited to a rigorous workout regimen "young girls who may have nontraditional aspirations." chemical weapons make it a threat even beyond the Gulf. The New York intelligence, saying they've have been trained as terrorists. In other debilitating stroke. Other reports asserted that his kidneys and liver were although his surgery would be delayed a few weeks, he would probably serve out his term. Stocks recovered, and governments around the world breathed easier. "Think of all the awful healthy leaders we could have," said one doctor. Even the caterers had to sign confidentiality agreements. After years of being in their escape. "We were so excited to have fooled everybody," said one passed them both. The larger bill would fortify the Border Patrol, facilitate deportations, and restrict the benefits available to illegal aliens; the detached bill would let states exclude children of illegal aliens from public schools. The second bill was dismissed as veto bait, but Republicans were excuse to veto the larger bill. Liberal interest groups and the White House scrambled to find new objections to the larger bill: Among other things, they warned that it threatens legal immigrants with deportation and diminishes their safeguards against job discrimination. Bob Dole issued a letter pretending to Post disclosed that congressional Republicans had actually forced the idea on Dole. A further Post article suggested that ultimately, the joke was parents. (Stations running the ads claimed that they wouldn't air them during them from competing on the tube with beer companies. discounted previous concerns that the pill contributed to cardiovascular trouble, and touted studies indicating that it reduces the risk of ovarian and endometrial cancer. Meanwhile, a new survey by a contraceptive pharmaceutical company suggested that the pill has surpassed sterilization as the country's apparent factor in the pill's previous decline in popularity. more on its first weekend than any other women's film in history. Critics were suddenly drop an inconvenient first wife without social opprobrium," and novelist's eighth murder mystery about a female medical examiner, in as many Scream -bred teen horror flicks is roundly panned as a "disappointing lacking either an ironic or a frightening touch. (See the official site.) disguised as a soldier seduces a single mother and becomes a father figure for established etiquette for getting people to see them. 'Hey, we should try this Hunter calls it "simply the greatest war movie ever made, and one of the great and triumph, and it was triumph that gave meaning to the tragedy. not only as an artist but as an adult." (Click here for brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained" (Roger air guitar." (Clips are available at the official site.) least mandarin and most likable film to date. A morality play about a garbage Trigger and his tendency to express himself through ballads, not fisticuffs. broader cultural assumptions. Critics revel in his elegant deflation of bunk theories, finding in his work "qualities in increasingly short supply in response for a reporter's study of how guilty white liberals and black radicals liberals carp that her tone mirrors the anger of the black radicals she on incessantly, never asking a more challenging question than 'Do these pants denunciations of the National Endowment for the Arts. Most critics find her government funding. Less predictably, conservatives admit to attending her performance multiple times: "If new material has been added since her first the light, turns it this way and that, and then wisely leaves us more or less miniature bombs in the buttons of jeans in order to blackmail the world. "Pay noted are hints of nationalism in his last few films, which were not as well received as his early masterpieces. (Here is a complete listing of his filmography.) Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the murderer who spent most of his life in institutions for the criminally insane. raised about explanations offered for Minor's sexual mania, which tormented him so severely that he amputated his penis. Also considered a stretch is the suggestion of romance between Minor and the widow of his victim. (You can wave of reviews amount to a backlash against the backlash. Daily New York memoir" and is a "leap forward in maturity and emotional candor." In the New disturbing," though she adds, "I often found myself wondering how much of her Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the is dismissed as "another variation of the same old supernatural junk" (Mike (First Look Pictures). Finally, critics say, a film transcends its formulaic plot. "Little more than an excuse for a soundtrack said to be insubstantial, with "an unlikable hero, a slapdash plot and some annoyingly smug? His latest novel, about an insane heir to a manufacturing fortune who's forbidden to see women, is deemed diffuse and stocked with caricatures. But even those who pan the novel continue to celebrate his complain there aren't enough such stories, citing the compelling drama favorite bits: a celebration by Close of the word "cunt" and a pitch by work is said to refute the rap that feminists are humorless: "What it was like Spin and Rolling Stone simultaneously run covers extolling the virtues of South Park. Rolling Stone attributes the show's success to rhapsodies on its characters like a demented anesthetist bullying patients with who can hardly speak English. They say Crystal tries too hard to be likable film's New Age spirituality, its sentimental ending, and Cage's lack of acting credulous audience. English critics say the crowd's gullibility proves the New York art establishment's "utter obliviousness to the ridiculous" (the starvation at the end of his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. Unlike Mailer's Quarantine is lauded for its historical accuracy, lyrical prose, and The film's strength is said to be its uncompromising psychological complexity: It shows the preacher as both very good and extremely evil, without lapsing into moral condemnation. Unlike most films about evangelicalism, it is not a (Universal Pictures). Reviewers claim to be weary of Northern that Capote spent more time schmoozing than writing, and deem his work less for its lack of cohesion, its failed forays into magical realism, and its and a windy Romantic bore. Now, critics declare him a cerebral modernist who evolutionary psychology to task by attacking its standard bearer, How the endorsement of infanticide in a recent New York Times Magazine article exposes the ethical failings of the wildly popular new branch of science. Kelly, says that Pinker wants us "to see [infanticide] not as a moral horror but as a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation, as unavoidable as depth perception or opposable thumbs." (Pinker has denied the accusation, arguing (Paramount). The 1950s nostalgia film, panned when it was Titanic at the box office. Critics also come around. "As timeless as its enthusiasm for space exploration, which has lost its mystique since the '70s. But they also say the series is "too long, too prolix, too cable" (Ken Tucker, to television, hindering their mental development. The magazine calls virtues in the "sublimely ridiculous experience" of the show (Tucker) and note (Martin Beck Theater, New York City). Critics find no Although reviewers grant that this production benefits from some nuanced performances, they still conclude that "The Sound of Music isn't really audiences will continue to devour the show's sentimental story anyway. like the book any more than the essay. In the New York Times Book Review above her own kind of sanctimony." (To read the first three chapters, click line up on opposing sides. Some praise his emphasis on biology as "a strong praises the book. Click here to read the first chapter.) sport of the decade." This year's lines are noted for representing a backlash younger designers for not taking risks, preferring the continuing inventiveness two separate occasions. "Nobody's interested in the vitriolic ravings of a bitter man who attacks and rips apart movies that the great majority of viewers Yes, he's the Comeback Kid, but only because he keeps getting himself into trouble from which he must come back. When things are going well, he finds a they're the ones who feel ready to "start dating again." Now that spared further lurid disclosures, and increasingly open to voting Republican in forging ahead with impeachment. The charitable explanation is that they're hard to see what further information about the affair would bring him down. and the venting of outrage by Democrats on the Senate floor, pundits on television, and citizens in everyday conversation. People will always be care even less for politicians who set aside the public's business in order to vented its disgust, the congressional impeachment inquiry is being reduced to an inside game. The more it consumes Congress' attention and the nastier it gets, the angrier the public will become. And the party most likely to be finally been forced to shut up, since nobody wanted to hear anything from him but apologies. But now that he has apologized and taken a beating, he is gradually recovering the right to open his mouth again. The effect of his videotaped testimony on public opinion shows what he can do. If the Republicans drag out the impeachment process and summon him for a verbal spanking before Democratic voters sleep through the election, allowing the Republican base to the polls. But if Republicans push the impeachment inquiry to the point of investigated. He already faces a court fight over whether he has unlawfully leaked grand jury information to reporters. Now that the background material he sent to Congress has been released, the press has become interested in whether consumed journalists' attention. To the extent the Republicans have held their mockery, and incredulity. By charging into the arena, the Republicans are offering the press an alternative political target. This is particularly unwise Should further revelations warrant impeachment, Congress may have lost the necessary credibility. Polls show most people aren't willing to impeach lying and covering up those matters as well. That report could deliver a Republican majority has squandered its authority by overplaying an arguably lesser scandal that most people think boils down to lying about sex. night, thousands of people walk into casinos and rack up big winnings. But casinos stay in business because few of those people have the prudence to walk out while they're ahead. Instead, they keep playing until they've lost presidency. And that's how his enemies will save him. to hand the independent counsel the head of Bill the Southern Baptist. Apparently the president is a man with precise, if deranged, views on the president allowed them to engage in kissing and "heavy petting" while they had these episodes, while the dress lay on the carpet. The Star 's "source" undress, that it's not technically sexual relations." Let's see, making out with someone, then ejaculating while she strips in your office does not constitute sexual relations. Bill, that's good, that's good. young guest while the two were enjoying an extended stay in the private study." makes a very different kind of appearance in the National Enquirer 's stories that could be harmful to him, he refused to listen." In this version of he eventually came to realize, the Enquirer quotes him telling friends, know if she even knows what the truth really is anymore." their dalliance was a true love affair. "I thought he turned to me because his wife is so cold," another insider has her saying. But soon she realized she was when he told me I should return the gifts," she is quoted as saying. Despite feeling humiliated and enraged, she did it, because "I didn't want him to be it's difficult to reconcile the portrait of the "virtual psychopath who had created an entire fantasy world involving the President, a woman who now wanted to destroy him," with the woman who was pursued then "coldly dumped" by him, the only prudent conclusion to draw from the Enquirer is that we have The Enquirer also calls in the services of forensic "It's very, very bizarre. Why would she keep the dress? Why would she send it to her mother? The normal thing is if you stain something, you wash it off." mess, preferring to examine more elevated topics such as the possibility that 20-percent discount on hardback books to unborn children."-- Beth accidentally impregnated while waiting in a really long line to pay for their continues to permit browsing, instead of forcing its tightwad, juggernaut. (We called them "notions." The police used an uglier word.) And serious literary bookstore, a guy could get himself a drink. Maybe over near Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. town. Just before opening night, he sang it at the Eye, Ear, and Throat else would you hear the song? "Years ago, we used to have records of our stuff apex of popular music; the most famous songwriters were show writers, and the from rock and became, by definition, staid, conservative, album you can play on pop radio stations. As every New York Times reader transsexuals, and drug addicts from the East Village, whose cachet was greatly enhanced by the death on the eve of opening of its young conflict of our time, paints its story on a big, sweeping canvas and has gone musical, as it shrivels away to its core audience. I would doubt its potential on the road or overseas. But Rent won its awards not just for its to do: He'd used the language of rock to propel a theater piece. He'd fused waltz echoes alarmingly through Rent 's finale, you're reminded of a basic fact: Music is music. If a tune's muscular enough, you can do it as an operatic waltz, a big pop ballad, an electric guitar solo. Rock, like swing or disco or bluegrass, is a style and, in the theater, its usefulness depends on they take so many years to get up on stage: By the time your grunge musical opens, grunge will be out and splurge will be in. That's the problem with The big driving numbers, like "What You Own," [LINK TO AUDIO] come out sounding ballads, on the other hand, are overwrought and declarative. The best, "Seasons of Love," [LINK TO AUDIO CLIP] affects the same ensemble solidarity as "What I the vicissitudes of life as a chorus gypsy, the other for those "living in the printed lyrics and the college courses that study rock songs for their elusive allusiveness, pop texts have been freed from the first requirement of a decoding just five words, but I felt on top of them and was ready to move on. TO AUDIO CLIP] is a rock gloss on the hoariest of musical comedy staples, the indicates a good song idea, a good central lyric thrust, something to resolve. As pop and theater have drifted apart, it seems that the rock crowd pays more better titles and stronger images than you get in most show tunes. In Rent, there are few strong song ideas, few resolved lyric thrusts. That's one reason why it's deficient as drama, but also why it will be hard to play on pop radio. Brave Last Days," reads the headline of a Star story that begins, "Frail In May, the National Enquirer 's cover read "Bob Hope's Tragic Last Days" article demonstrates a frequent tabloid dilemma. While death is inevitable, it is not predictable. A few tough old celebrities stubbornly refuse to make each was unlikely to make it through the month (but she's still around). And in in sorrow, it seems, both the Enquirer and the Star are The tabloids are modern versions of the Art of Dying manuals of the Middle Ages, which instructed people on how to die properly. In the medieval world, death was not something to be feared or hidden but rather, a public event, a crucial stage of life that needed to be anticipated and mastered. When death arrives at a celebrity bedside today, the tabs defy modern had become a recluse, refusing to see his friends following the death of his In a series of interviews about his impending death he told the Enquirer that he would miss his children, but added, "It's time they started living their own lives and not have to worry about this old man." The Enquirer and carrots for dinner) and the final treatments for a blood clot in his right assessment of the dying star. After asking about his lungs and his liver, the a very full life, a good life, and I don't want to ruin it by prolonging it any recently. He is also sweating his final judgment. "St. Peter's going to have to tabloids abhor sudden departures, especially unnatural ones, which almost by Just to reassure readers that he died well, the Star quotes him as having said in an interview, "I want to be lucky and die doing what I love celebrities might make it to their deathbeds. Dramatic weight gains, in are celebrities who appear to have a power over death. According to the she disappeared off her docked yacht, the Star reports. This following which she stomped off in anger, never again to be seen alive. And star Bob Crane. The Star doesn't explain that one either, but it does and gave him a tranquilizer. The horse died within hours. Though the Globe doesn't say so, it was surely an end that was both tragic and bizarre ritual. The Democrats go to the nearest microphone, call the committee's conduct of the inquiry unfair, and accuse the Republicans of partisan warfare. Then the Republicans step before the same microphone, deny that the inquiry is partisan, and insist that everyone is getting along. "No, we're not," say the Democrats. "Yes, we are," snap the Republicans. hard to figure out who's going to win this fight. Politics, like litigation and sports, is stacked in favor of the defense. In football, it's far easier to ruins a brilliant sequence of passes. In a criminal trial, one slick And in Congress, every eruption of "partisanship" or "unfairness," whether real or manufactured, bleeds away the institutional credibility necessary to impeach view politics this way. Cursed with a combination of irrational idealism and irrational narcissism, they insist on interpreting public opinion and behavior contract was designed not to win the election but to spin it, by inflating an an affirmative referendum on the conservative agenda. The public wasn't in Congress began parlaying it into impeachment proceedings, the question process any more than they trust national health insurance. Democrats in Congress are deliberately and successfully exacerbating that mistrust. Republicans understand this strategic disadvantage but mistakenly think that But no matter who becomes the "bad cop," Democrats will attack him, and the media, always hungry for conflict, will flock to the fight. Other Republicans console themselves by noting that some Democrats will vote for a formal impeachment inquiry. They're missing the point: The longer the inquiry drags on, the more it will invite resentment, acrimony, and backlash. Conversely, really wants a deal? From a purely political standpoint, now that he's confident he won't be convicted in the Senate, his best move might be to let Recognizing the futility of arguing with the Democrats, demands. He agreed to send a bipartisan staff delegation to inspect documents evidence), ordered a hearing to address the Democrats' query on what constitutes an impeachable offense, and endorsed the idea of giving the Democrats subpoena power. The Democrats "would like to make process, procedure we aren't credible, what we do amounts to nothing." accommodations are noble but futile. The Democrats can always find further his concessions than Democrats amended their objections: The hearing on impeachable offenses should have been at the committee level, they argued, and themselves, not just staff. "These are concessions, no question," admitted Rep. job search in exchange for submitting a false affidavit denying her affair with investigation. Democrats won't shut up about partisanship unless Republicans agree to include those matters in the inquiry. And at that point, from a the Republicans break through the Democrats' defense and carry the ball into the end zone? The cynical answer is: They don't. They punt or fumble, and the Democrats carry the ball the other way. Indeed, the Democratic counteroffensive Republicans of substituting partisan impeachment proceedings for legislation to denounce Republicans for bogging down Congress in "scandal, cynicism, and partisanship." Eventually, the Democrats will overreach again, and the public, ever wary, will turn against them. It's not about ideology. It's about considered himself lucky for so doing. But the other week he went out to the kill themselves, we gloss over that fact: It isn't really a tragedy, not like a songwriter who's taken his life. I only had a very slight acquaintance with hammerlock on the first half of the 1950s. Even then, he wasn't exactly a Pictures, but when he tried to break into Tin Pan Alley, they kept telling him be unfair to call this a nursery rhyme; it was childish rather than childlike," knows how many music fans stopped listening to the radio after hearing 'Doggie don't forget, were the heyday of the dog song, and rare was the pop star who managed to avoid having one inflicted on him: Half a century later, Frank about it, but then, of course, they are dogs. By these standards, the early '50s, novelties weren't so much a novelty as terrifyingly ubiquitous. Even if you were minded to write a song about a gal who wears red feathers and He composed, in case you hadn't guessed, on a child's toy who wrote that gets hammered from both ends. To those who love the great songs of the decade and so debauched the currency of mainstream Tin Pan Alley rockers, when all other musical, lyrical, and sociopolitical claims for the rock 'n' roll revolution have collapsed, the memory of growing up with the Bob Having been told he was too complex for pop music, he was now regarded as too break, she's prone to toss in a homily about world peace and how, whether we're straight, or transsexual, we're all still people, people who need people. When public identity that she'd neglected the personal; she could love audiences but professionally: She declaims her love songs as if addressing an audience of general lyric, it is, in fact, the most specific of all. occasional Slate department based on the premise that who wins in endorses nor condemns any of the views expressed, however laudatory or "vindicated," Wright was the country's most honest Republican, and Independent his enemies looked, as it so often does, like the ground war between the United their savvy by picking out the most obvious spin they've been fed and exposing it as such. In this case, the buzzword put out by former White House Counsel telling viewers that according to the judge, "the charges against the president supporters to maintain their delicate policy of defending him without having to magnificently hollow testimonial: "I believe the president's denial." lawyers disputed the "vindication" spin but failed to organize an effective they still didn't amount to a breach of law. Whitehead simply removed the clearly that the attitude of the president was boorish." At every opportunity, exposed his genitals, and asked her for oral sex. News anchors responded to these clumsy tactics by turning to other guests and changing the subject. attorneys did after Wright's decision. The judge starts with a presumption of concerted attack on these points. In one breath, they doubted her integrity; in camp also tried to take the focus off Wright and put it back on what happened make it go away? Ordinarily, this is a good strategy. But in this case, the advisers failed to put out an alternative story line explaining not just decision lay in her defiance not of the facts of the case, but of the politics. right decision, notwithstanding all of the political atmosphere surrounding the analysts and reporters followed suit, marveling at Wright's "guts" and "gumption," even as their own instant polls showed the public favored the ruling. The media's willingness to buy this line was a result, in part, of the White House wants. To begin with, it threatens to pit the world's most powerful man against working women in general, a theme assiduously promoted by Hence Whitehead's argument, repeated in several venues, that the ruling would "the boys in the War Room" had "won a little victory today over this little message was less nuanced and therefore more effective. On every network, investigation and about his obligation to "put up or shut up," as Rather formulation. The New York Times opened its front page analysis by saying, "it is now politically inconceivable that Congress will consider their significance at the time they were committed, not by their significance a weapon that can be turned against its makers. He wants her captured alive. anything. I want this to go on. Because I want this to be the linchpin of an investigation of who got paid, how much, by whom, and to say what." The "Little Drummer Boy" in the bookstore, "Jingle Bell Rock" in the toy store, or the number brims with all the possibilities of teen romance in those hot '50s But I wonder how many others will get to hear it. The time taking off. The album is selling tepidly; the show's been picketed by opposed to racial stereotyping; the opening's been postponed to the end of the month; and, depending on which rumor you believe, the director's either so complacent that he only bothers dropping by once a week or so dozy that he was supposed to be the show that would heal the great historic rift between pop major rock songwriter and the one that would entice all the others in, ending wrong. One wouldn't want to characterize the diminutive, balding rock star as being (in Cole Porter's marvelous phrase) down in the depths on the do you think?" he says. "Do you think they want something new?" them. In the rock biz, most of the executives are old, too. But at least they make an effort, sporting ponytails and U2 tour jackets; they don't continually me there's about five or six people in the world who can do this, and here are taken years to write it, so why would we want someone who says, 'I think this part should go over here and that character is really a woman'?" His voice found interesting." One wouldn't want to exaggerate the points of contact but, himself as pretty hip, but his young collaborator wasn't impressed by the older man's attempts at rock. "He played a melody, and it was an awkward moment. He said: 'If we're going to collaborate, we have to be completely honest. So what do you think?' I said: 'Well, that's not very good. That's not rock 'n' roll.' He was taken aback." The composer drew himself up and said huffily: "This is seriously the theater's nervous tiptoeing into the territory. "I never thought to use dramatically. "Well, I don't think it's difficult," retorts everyone knows what rock 'n' roll sounds like, it wasn't fooling very many fairness, the theater found it hard to attract genuine rockers. At the end of earn their reputations with the kind of elliptical poetic impenetrability that sitting in a theater, you get one chance to grab those words as they're flying across the footlights at you. It's a surprise, then, to find that The of characters far less articulate. I don't know whether he's "arrogant" or a director spent the morning setting up a perfect shot for the interview, looking That's nothing to do with who I am." So everything was dismantled and the crew set up at the opposite corner of the room, away from the window. It was a still not an entirely comfortable fit. But, whatever happens to The popular music, not serious music, but existing in some grisly limbo in between. how much glee it might afford the Schadenfreude set. Negotiating a few years, people decide they're bored and they want something fresh. So that's a good time to have something fresh." He shrugs fatalistically. "The rest of when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was says he said to her, "Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?" Then told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the her reaction: "My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately." He carried it had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't finding his behavior "humiliating," as she now tells the Star was the also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After she left, exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars." The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency," the sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a "pal" warns, the actor "needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about." fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: "The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public the tabs came up with new women or other bombshells this time. The most "totally out of control in the White House when it came to women." Does this of the first couple's first conversation about the news. After Bill denounces moment. Your trust and love will help me through this." Maybe the real news here is that the Globe is being secretly funded by the Democratic Star defends its reputation as the most politically engaged of the tabloids. In addition to its coverage of the Flowers affair (reportedly set during a chance encounter in a crowded White House hallway. As she and according to the publication, "turned her butt toward him, pulled out the To any sane boss, the message would be "Get this lunatic out of here." If the This is the condition that causes the penis to bend at an unusual angle; for a time it was reported that this was the "distinguishing characteristic" of shape." But not anymore, apparently. The Star asserts he had some corrective work done at the time of his knee surgery. And it also reports that payment on her credit card," it reports. The Star doesn't speculate Star portrays her as a young woman caught up in a heady love affair. "I really love him," they quote her saying. "It's so exciting being with the president of the United States. That's not something many girls can put on probably only as many girls as can fit inside the Astrodome. become increasingly depressed and "has been ravenous for junk food. Big Mac constantly swept out of sight." He's not sleeping well and spends the predawn as telling her husband: "If this is true, your life is ruined, our lives are couldn't keep his fly zipped up." An "insider" told the Enquirer that led her to seek out older men to replace the father she felt had abandoned her, It's a picture of a needy young woman, one whom any older man with something to noon swearing in because of adverse astral influences at that hour. The last presidents to be sworn in under those conditions, she says, were John F. has shriveled away to one toxic little stream on a dry, barren mud flat. You City College asserts, among other fancies, that "Black English is in Negro dialect lyric. Ever since, most black singers have preferred to sing But, in a way, he has a point, albeit not the one he thinks River" was the song in which he first found his lyrical voice, compressing the doing it so naturally that it's no wonder folks assume the song's a Negro that it was the country's national anthem. The great strength of these songs, one of the reasons they seep into our collective consciousness, is that they less concerned with enchantment than with the painstaking artistic judgments Example 2.5a ("Who cares if my boat goes up stream" and two statements of "I drift along with my fancy") Kern ingeniously varies the harmony of the final melodic note D (Example 2.5b and c). Its first appearance on the words "upstream" (the third measure) is paradoxically the lowest note of the upstream or downstream. Here Kern harmonizes the tonic or central key, D, with (Example 2.5b), Kern sets the word "fancy" with a fancy (and deceptive) resolution to a minor triad on the sixth degree of the scale. On the final Magnolia's piano theme and Kern displays his fanciest chord, again on the word There's only one problem with Block's approach: That's not how it happened. In that an ingenious word might be made to fit, and certainly no concessions to literal meaning in his melody or harmony. He didn't "set" the word "fancy" at paradox?" but I doubt it: That's not the way the ear hears music, and "It's a question of finding what Johnny Mercer called the sound of the music. You're trying to capture something as elusive as a sound, which suggests a word, from which eventually a complete lyric emerges." for trying. He's coming at it from the conservatory end of things and, if your breath away. Operas have plots and lyrics. But the words have no relationship to the music. Or, to put it the other way round, the music takes so much weight to the definite article because he'd know it was the most Good musicals are both specific and universal. But they're specific because the words fit the shape of the tune, not because the tune is a "You're the Top" Porter does not capitalize on the text's potential for realism. Although the "I" always appears in the bottom throughout most of the song, the "you" blithely moves back and forth from top to bottom. The upward leaping orchestral figure anticipates the word, "top," but the sung line does Phew! That entire paragraph deserves a rousing chorus of "You're the Pits!" With his fixation on tops and bottoms, Block's beginning to sound like the gay personal ads in the Village Voice. Unlike Kern with his top paradoxically on his bottom, poor old Porter gets no credit for having his bottom paradoxically on his top. Block's so busy following the vocal score orchestral figure" he mentions is the bit that goes: conversational lyric phrases that fall in the gaps between the matter. But how could you sit down and analyze the thing and fail to notice it? It's the (relative) musical monotony of the phrase that makes it so insistent, so driving, and such a brilliantly effective cap to the song. It's the punch line; it's the exclamation point. How sad that Block, for all his technical goatherds than with Block's misguided praise. In great popular art, after all, you notice the art, not the artist. Which brings us to Block's final chapter: It's the triumph of the artist over the art: the man who knows more than anyone else about musicals except how to write one where you don't notice how much he knows; the one subject who repays Block's analytical approach if only because that seems his natural home. I think of "Good Thing Going," his wonderfully from the tabloids this month as they return to their classic themes: lousy married last year. It's usually a bad sign when, as the Star reports, your friends are more surprised by your wedding than by your separation. The Enough money for a B-2 bomber is also at stake in the Slater is another guest) has made him realize he wants out. If one of them gets million fortune. The tabs leave the impression that the Promises counseling sessions are patched directly into their newsrooms. According to the right now is that he is unhappily married. The publication says he's asked his incessantly. "From the kitchen to the garage, they've christened practically every room." Maybe a session in the broom closet killed their passion because, scene," reports the publication. He has also "fumed to friends, 'There's no way has left some friends with no option but to start "taking bets on how long the were widely covered by the rest of the press, but one of the tabloids' special missions is to give you celebrities' final words and farewells. The tabs were her last days. To protect the family's privacy, a spokesman told the press said, as the Enquirer reports, "I want to smell the Pacific," or that an saying he held his wife in her final moments and told her they were riding said the family was on its ranch shortly before her death. did make to his dying wife. Keeping it may have led to the situation with that Matrimony was also very much a part of the tabs' coverage turned his picture of her over and signed on the back, "Dream on! Dream on! up to the casket and tried to lift Tammy right out of it, saying, 'Come on encounters are all the tabs can muster this month. The Globe has an describes their relationship thus: "When I was six or seven, she encouraged me you start thinking private school vouchers would curb such situations, the but also to poetry. He says she gave him the confidence to be an actor, and he ended up helping to support her at the end of her life. writing a review. A "close friend" of the singer says: "He's a performer both the Globe and the Enquirer note Rogers' most famous quotation: "I never met a man I didn't like." The Enquirer also and kissed me on the lips. It was a dry, short peck and it felt weird." Perhaps "he's a terrific kisser on top of everything else." But what he's not, the Globe documents, is a terrific spaghetti eater. A series of photos shot through a restaurant window shows the Titanic star slurping up his finding his life "a living hell," the Enquirer says. So he is taking the was shot while riding on the handlebars of his sibling's bicycle during the had to give up a promotion to the appellate bench the other day, when it turned out that the dramatic story he'd been telling for years about his martyred brother actually happened to someone else. Why on earth would he tell such an be thinking that asking why public figures lie is like asking why fish swim. Judge Ware himself described it: the biographical embellishment for public consumption. This kind of lie is remarkably common, even though it is also cases are those involving people who generally tell the truth. explanation is that he was confused. His actual sister, he says, was shot around the same time as the bicycle incident. His "feeling of loss" and possible kinship to the murdered youth led him to merge the two happenings in his mind, he says. Doesn't seem likely. More plausible is that Ware was entrapped by his own rhetorical success. He'd been enthralling audiences with this tale for years. You tell a good story. The crowd loves it. Word of your marvelously moving speech gets around. You are invited to give more speeches. How could you explain the sudden disappearance of your signature anecdote? "I said, caused him to "pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking." But Gore continued to seek the support of the tobacco industry. "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco," he of the people in rooms full of unattractive fat cats and grandees making initially reluctant to go to the balcony where King was shot, though he might later have been close enough to King's body to acquire some stains from the waxed eloquent about his memories of the "first hearing of the Senate I ever last year that a wave of black church burnings brought back "vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." community buildings" (though there is no record of that either). But, wherever No doubt. As the literature on lying often observes, those who become skilled in the art of deception can easily fool themselves. When was a special case. He made himself up as he went along, borrowing bits and pieces from this movie or that. ("I paid for that microphone" probably came movie in which he starred.) While some of his political lies were far from harmless, most of his autobiographical lies were relatively small stuff: "I never wore makeup in films" (check the films); "I believe in tithing to the Air Force and volunteered for whatever dangerous assignment there was." In theatrical productions (though he did crash one helicopter and three jets while Jimmy Carter once described himself as a "nuclear physicist." He later acknowledged that "nuclear engineer" was a more just description of his academic qualifications. A modest fabrication, but not bad for a president easiest answer is that, by and large, or at least for long periods of time, public figures get away with it. And even when they are discovered, the public is often forgiving (or at least forgetting). One theory has it that public figures see their audience as a distant, easily manipulated mass to which they can lie with impunity. But maybe that's not the whole story. Perhaps we, the public, don't mind being lied to if the lies evoke a vision not only of better with news of an elemental nature, examining the desires of celebrities to marry, divorce, procreate, and swoop, godlike, into the lives of others, deadlines, the supermarket tabs were unable to reveal this week if they managed did their best to glean details of the wedding when they weren't being driven Transmissions, has been badgering the reluctant singer to go to the altar. For But before this condition caused her to resemble one of those ancient, frozen anything to do with the terms of the couple's prenuptial agreement. that numbers in the thousands. All three supermarket tabs agree the reason for the split was the basic one: the wandering eye. The Star and the portrayed only as the wronged woman. The Star brings up her individual girlfriends and a penchant for hanging out at strip clubs. The stormed out and installed himself in the Best Western motel across the Bobby Brown, a decision the Globe says was cemented by his latest arrest, this time for allegedly having touched a woman against her will. The both the Enquirer and the Star say she is concerned that sexy videotapes they made to spice up their marriage may end up spicing up the saw him through sinus cancer and a drug overdose, she tells "sources" his Globe says she told a friend. The publication also reports that the "Unless he's laying bleeding in the street [a sometime occurrence with him], I don't allow myself to get too involved," she's quoted as saying. Despite the frequency with which celebrity love dies, celebrities this month are obsessed with having babies, although in some cases it's unclear whether the process or the outcome is the chief motivation. constantly," the Enquirer quotes her as saying. But it's all for a higher purpose: "That old biological clock is really racing away," she of Friends allegedly confided to a friend: "Every time Brad and I sleep publication reports her confiding to a "pal," although it doesn't explain what celebrities are having such a hard time being fruitful. The Enquirer has with the infant next to him and the toddler on his chest. Unfortunately, it Finally, this month's tabs seem to give an implicit warning that too close contact with a celebrity can have unintended consequences for second mother to the child, whose own parents were recovering drug addicts with no steady employment. The newswoman helped arrange a larger apartment and psychiatric care for the family. She gave the girl clothes and gifts and took asking. Then, says the publication, while the mother was in the hospital giving birth to her sixth child, the girl called Sawyer's office to ask if groceries office to say men with guns were at the apartment. Sawyer's assistant then situation. Thinking they were about the find themselves part of a PrimeTime Live expos, says the publication, the bureaucrats swooped in and placed all the children in foster care. In a statement, Sawyer said she "played no and gifts the generous talk show host lavished on his wife, according to the she was being elevated to a higher level," the husband says. Although he tries to imply a romance between the two women, even the Globe doesn't believe spokeswoman says the actress is barely acquainted with the couple. But Brooks, rock 'n' roll and it's called Prudential Insurance. In case you're one of those against the projected earnings of "Space Oddity," "Jean Genie," and the rest of as they're officially known on Wall Street, would have caused a big splash in an industry that prides itself on permanent novelty, but in all the hubbub over story did emerge, the rock press was mostly silent or flummoxed. Rolling Stone gave it a paragraph. Pop fans know their idols are rich, and they their own vomit, they hoped to die before they got old. But those who failed (to die, that is) grew increasingly concerned about the fine print. In the Hill and Patty Smith Hill but, thanks to a legal judgment in the 1930s, is the trend toward rock respectability is going too far. Recently, he dropped in cocaine, and louche young men. "If I see another fucking piece of gentility. A beloved national treasure, second only to the queen mother, he's he was invited to jive with her majesty to "Rock Around the Clock," dancing mighty, concentrated blast, the accumulated racial and social proprieties of even has its own Year Zero. Pick up Billboard 's Hot 100-chart reference have proved surprisingly resilient. And, since rock's into defining moments, million day rock 'n' roll finally gave up on revolution. Maybe we should just talk the talk but walk the walk, even unto the grave. But how long can Enquirer hired two private investigators to stake out the home of a Little Rock heiress rumored to be having an affair with Independent Counsel Enquirer dropped the inquiry. It seems, however, that the whole episode adulterer, he is presented as less than a manly man. Embarrassing secrets about spoiled and temperamental and so "got a lot of spankings." This turned him around and by junior high school, "his hobby was polishing shoes." (This Enquirer publishes a silly, but less than titillating, example of this didn't really start dating until after college," Mom reports, which the kind of guy who gave sex a low priority." We also find out that the heartbreak asks the question that now haunts the nation, "Why can't the President be this spiral by transferring her from the White House to the Pentagon after she Star weighs in on the scandal this week with a piece on five unnamed rope line was sent by the designer to the White House as a gift for first these tidbits, now, more than six weeks into the scandal, it's clear that for the tabloids it does not have the enduring cover power of the murder of to ever smaller headlines in recent weeks, and the Globe 's disinterest in the whole matter is best summed up by this week's coverage: none. All along, suit. But, as the tabloids demonstrate week after week, stars can be counted on lovemaking session that swept the Internet. Alas, it appears it is not to be. The Enquirer reports this week about the couple's Valentine's Day wife." Although their spokeswoman denied the story, Lee has since been arrested never seen. Female stars are causing a run on the sperm bank, according to the some celebrities just shouldn't be allowed to reproduce at all. Both the nanny and a nurse take turns watching the baby around the clock, although they are not allowed to kiss him. The baby gets new toys every day, because used toys are immediately discarded. All eating utensils are first sterilized, then who lives apart from her husband and son, gives birth to their second child. ran photographs of that couple's recent romantic and very public evening out in couple was later pictured kissing tenderly through the mask. As longtime tabloid readers know, the reason for the mask is that after innumerable found out that a lump in her breast was benign. She shared this with her audience, according to the Globe (along with the news that she's approaching menopause and that her young son walked in on her and her formerly trifecta this month with extensive reports on three of their major stories: the course of a long, fatal illness, with many remissions and recurrences. But this week, at least, the tabs indicate the end may be near. Each of the three weeklies touts different "bombshell" allegations that tie the girl's parents to by the discovery of his daughter's body as you might suspect, says the friend Fleet White. According to the publication, White looked in the basement for the supposedly kidnapped girl but, unable to locate a light switch, he already knew his daughter's body was there. The Enquirer also says lifting a grate outside the basement. But, the Enquirer reports, was found on the duct tape used to cover the murdered girl's mouth. Police suspect it will match the boots Patsy was wearing the night of the murder. Also, three weeks after the murder, a bookkeeper at a Boulder hardware store notified police that a man named John had called wanting copies of receipts for the store, but the receipt listed only prices, not specific items. Also, John dinner and never seen her alive again. But an autopsy revealed that at midnight Globe touts an "exclusive" from a "tipster" who claims that in the hours The Globe claims that the box actually contains the sheets and several stuffed animals that were on her bed the night of her murder, as well as the nightgown she was wearing. An informed source told the Globe the allegations are "totally misinformed" and "completely inaccurate." exhume their theories about the nefarious reasons her life was cut short. The level where it could be characterized as preposterous. Here it goes: The unwittingly ended up pointing the finger at a really big fish. In this week's she was planning to remarry the prince!" Now, if this were true, there is certainly one person who would want to make sure such an event never came to are filled with royal news this month. Most disturbing is a report in the The publication says royal insiders are worried about an apparent decline in Stuck in his old life is our commander in chief, and the tabs take notably different approaches to his predicament. Last week the Enquirer delivered when it said it found out the "shocking truth behind "I never really knew what love could be until you came along." Enquirer is probably the only publication in the world to go with this nothing more than a political alliance that would end when his term did. "The Vineyard became a synonym for the first circle of hell. Enquirer also leaves the strong impression the report is being written you first think, "This didn't happen; he couldn't be that stupid." Then you is in Bill's corner, complete with transcripts of the first family's heartfelt controlling genital authority." And the president also told his wife: "The hurt massacre took place. Together, headline and image signal that the tabloids Real Princess Di," with such unlikely revelations as the alleged fact that she did her own ironing and joined the help in washing dishes. The article also stated, "In an age when so many celebrities put on one image in public and hide course, a chance to look at that ugly, private side is the reason readers pick up the tabs in the first place. So it was comforting this week to be told by questionable territory of the tabloid with taste, explains that many celebrities "ask us to interview them and take their pictures." However, other celebrities "are furious because they can't stop us from telling the truth, even with their powerful publicity machines." The statement ends on a issue, full of stories such as one about a nurse who was fired for trying to that was found embedded in a potato. And then there was this shocking headline the Enquirer was having second thoughts? No, as it turned out. The article alleged that the retired detective brought in to work on the case was not admired by the other cops. And this week, the story was back on track with predicts her show will be canceled. On the other hand, do we detect a defensive note in a story about singer Merle Haggard, which finds it necessary to explain why the Enquirer had chosen this moment to portray Haggard as a explains, because "his famous father is working on a biographical feature film "Like all artists, I love the art of communication and I fully support the knows how to act like a star as she happily smiles for our photographer." Hint, Star also has taken to congratulating itself for the people it gets to speak willingly. On a recent cover, the logo "Look Who's Talking to cottage industry: the one between surgically enhanced former flight attendant period, the Globe went supernatural with this exclusive: "Princess smiles down from Heaven on her Brave Boys." But it returned to Earth last week, Disorder. "When I first heard Di was dating my former patient, I wanted to Over!" read the headline on an account of how the "battling lovebirds" were "vowing to put passion and togetherness back in their marriage." The logical "Some nights I wake up shuddering and bathed in sweat." are probably best illustrated by their varying explanations for the mysterious staffer and broke a bone. The Star 's version is that he injured his hand discussed the genitals of his celebrity patients while they were under anesthesia. It's a natural story for the tabloids, but it caught them all with their pants down when it first appeared in a long, entertaining piece in the have to split it with accountants, managers, coke dealers, and any traumatized We've come a long way since then: ragtime and radio, the host asked him if he liked any of the older songs: "Oh, sure, I love Harry But even rappers are getting into the nostalgia act these Which reworking of the protean vaudeville gag prompts a thought: Maybe, after a century's rise and fall, rap is the final ebbing of National Political Congress of Black Women renew their assault on companies that profit from gangsta rap and claim that it marks a shameful new low in orphan girl asking the telephone operator to be put through to her dead mother, irritated by a sobbing infant and demanding to know where the mother is. As the child's young father explains, mother is in a mahogany casket "In the Baggage little lurid, that's the whole point: These were ripe metropolitan melodramas served up for the genteel piano parlors of the suburbs. Same with rap: For all the simplest of tonal structures. Similarly, rap is the logical consequence of pop's 30-year promotion of street cred over music: the reduction of the tune to rhythmically simple and harmonically negligible, 1890s ballads are melodically simple and harmonically negligible, but the effect is the same: Even as the subject matter in each case proclaims its modernity (railroads and telephone on the one hand, guns and crack on the other), in both cases, the music underneath just opened the newspaper, found a suitable story and wrote it up. Gangsta rappers have eliminated the middleman: They are the stories in the minstrelsy: Following "After The Ball," while black ragtime composers starved, white Tin Pan Alley hacks stuck "rag" in the titles of their novelty songs and complexion as a shorthand for pop's history: He's the first black singer to a century of black music. Instead, in its principles, in its forms, in its opportunism, in its willingness to pass off individual pain as mass entertainment, it returns us to the 1890s, to the whitest popular music we've known in this country. Gangsta rap is the whitest black music there is. At events. Here's the final breakdown, by percentages: offer our congratulations and ask how he feels about winning the first the contest from the beginning, he obviously took no joy in his success. by writing parody, which was prohibited under the rules, and filled the will return next fall to defend his title against three new challengers. all of journalism? With your help, we hope to settle that question with the favorite hacks to compete in four weekly journalistic events designed to showcase journalistic glibness, intellectual sleight of hand, greed under pressure, and a total disregard for what the rest of the world thinks. Actually, our four contestants have already demonstrated their disdain for what hackwork will remain a mystery to all until the weekend of the competition, cheat sheet of facts, figures, and quotes from which they can crib. The cheat quotations (sorry, guys). They may take no more than two hours to complete the assignment. They may, if they so desire, do additional research. But they shouldn't. As a great hack once said, the essence of hackery is "adjusting a minimum of information to produce the maximum journalistic effect." (The only greatest total will be declared the winner and will return next year to face you do so now by clicking here. But you can always register later. murderous blond wife had a major cocaine habit that caused wild mood swings," blew her brains out after he announced he was dumping her for another The other woman has not been universally confirmed. While husband implying that he wanted to end the marriage, the New York Daily News quoted a friend who said the comedian told him only a few days earlier that his marriage was "better than ever." The publication also reports that incoherently confessed to the murder. The friend did not believe her, but after she fell asleep, he opened her purse and found a gun. They returned to her home distraught families of the couple issued a joint statement that implied the tragedy was some sort of creation of the press. "The unbridled speculation devoted to each other and their children." Their will gives custody of the week, this week the supermarket tabs turn to the gory aftermath: the escalating any of his three children to tell them the news. After the singer was to side with the kids, the Globe comes up with a twist. Daughter Nancy, to salute daddy." In order to do this the children wanted a "massive, a wanted a private funeral, with no military presence and no saluting. anyway the staff would try to make sure he didn't see any of the parents there Star reports he said, and he advised the actor to lose "maybe a hundred of time to contemplate his temper as he serves his six month sentence for Lee. More ominously, the Star reports that the actress is actually planning to give him another chance and wants to try a second honeymoon after he gets out of jail for assaulting her. The Enquirer also reports that she is going to court to stop distribution of a home video of her having sex free falls are rampant this month. Actor Charlie Sheen's latest accessory is an actor Martin Sheen, and other family members tried to get Charlie to go to the keeps loaded guns in the house." Another source predicts if Sheen doesn't shape up, "it's only a matter of time before they'll be printing his obituary." For a year the tabs have been reporting on what the The Star reports she canceled a scheduled press conference and never say, when she did make appearances. The publication quotes a "film critic" who calls their "weird love pact" is working. The couple has agreed to make love lust. And he has also agreed to stop making funny faces every time he passes a the tabloids, ever hopeful about the promise of celebrity love, constantly made cynical by its failure. But who wouldn't be moved by the stirring vows famous people incessantly exchange? Take this account in the Globe of the so sure is King that he has found "the love of his life" with his seventh wife that he ignored the advice of his daughter and his financial advisers to get a prenuptial agreement. This week's Star takes us inside former Golden that we've met the soulmates that we've been searching for." Then there was Though the tabs are fools for love, occasionally even they find a wedding not touching but tawdry. That is how the marriage between Woody child psychiatrist, is quoted in the Globe as denouncing it: "rude, nasty and most of all, it's a reflection of his own narcissism." the tabs report, the wedding day leads right to the divorce lawyer's payday. began to unravel when he had her served with divorce papers while she was returning home from a CAT scan to assess her injuries. In the case of actress him." Since Givens did not pass away during the night, her prediction was not to be. The Globe says that in her divorce papers, she revealed the The more elaborate the wedding, the greater the trouble ahead. Take the saga of However, this week's Enquirer reveals there's only a patch of very white another unwritten rule: Never, ever hire a personal assistant named have taken to chronicling their bumpy road to bliss. While exchanging vows, alleges, he was calling friends, asking, "What have I done?" after both he and producers to give his wife a part on the show because she's so bored while he's at work. Let's hope she doesn't decide to get a tattoo. Then there are the marriages that are giving readers her sportscaster husband, Frank. This week the Enquirer made news with wife, confided to her uncle, a minister, that she had found evidence during her The counseling sessions gave her new hope that "she can reignite the flames of publication also says that she is recording a blues album, all the better to "[rub] her martyrdom in the face of her errant husband." canceled their wedding plans three times previously. But having to constantly administer youth serum can send a spouse fleeing into the arms of someone who to have a sort of social consciousness about not letting celebrities suffer the have to give credit when love proves the cynics wrong. That's what the medical care and for seven weeks forced him to drink gallons of water to flush earlier. On the other hand, he also brought back the potato, and how many great potato songs had anybody written by then? But sooner or later everything winds almost certain that the Cigarette Songbook has no new leaves to turn over. For document, rounding up as it does some of the smokiest songs of the century, title: Drag is a deep, languorous inhalation. Its orchestrations, sensation of smoking, even if by the time she gets halfway through the Hollies' heading out clubbing. It's as much about sexual role play, and smoking as a metaphor for love, every popular singer's real addiction. (If any male vocalist is looking for an equally adroit album title encompassing both cigarettes and sexuality, may I suggest, at least for those versed in the divergences of pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one In a way, it's the album she's been working up to for an Ashtray" and, best of all, "Black Coffee" (click to hear it), a smoldering as an exhilarating high, and the next track on that album begins, "You swim after all that, we're talking about hot beverages here? Well, probably. The best example of stylish smoke comes at the opening of improved on the original. His is one of the most quoted lines in all popular strawberries only seven francs a kilo," "the waiters whistling as the last bar Since then, the singing cigarette has dwindled away to songs now, paradoxically, pack more of a punch than ostensibly more searing that she can pull off even the most anachronistic trifle without patronizing it. The songs emerge as charming and dated yet somehow contemporary. Her approach, which she's used consistently since recording Cole Porter's "So in Love" seven years ago, is to honor the broad parameters of the original orchestrations. The only surprise is that more singers haven't picked up on seem the correct assessment: Smoking is a consolation for the vicissitudes of years, dimming the lights and getting them out for "Angel Eyes" or "One for My Baby," sad songs for guys with nothing to do but drown their sorrows. It's a produce any decent songs, but it undoubtedly sells more cigarettes. Whatever happens to tobacco sales under the new settlement the further withdrawal of cigarettes from the mainstream of popular culture, including songs. That being the case, maybe, like the fatalistic protagonist of of irony. Bob Dole's poll numbers may finally be proving the Brits right. Dole with his campaign theme song, the only conceivable purpose of which is to serve rappers his advisers periodically call on him to denounce. Then again, been especially picked for the blithe insouciance it shows toward the Dole candidate's most frequently cited defect: his campaign's lack of any central theme. "Dole Man" isn't about anything at all. You can't blame Dole for having trouble staying "on message" when the only message of his song is that you Code, but it clearly never registered with him that, in pop songs, copyright recording artists. One of the song's writers objected to "Dole Man," the So much for Dole's line that though he may not have a lot of fancy words, he's to a that suited him perfectly. Yes, that's a cruel thing to say about anybody, but the point is that it was a plausible soundtrack to his campaign: For a campaign song that's pithy you have to go back to Wintergreen campaigns for the White House with a powerful slogan ("A Vote for Unfortunately, the strategy wasn't so successful the second time around. In the how hard it is to find anything to sing about. Most presidential elections in the republic's history have had specially commissioned themes: "Teddy, Come "INSERT NAME OF CANDIDATE HERE" approach, shoehorning their man into the service. "Funny you should mention that," he said, "but I got a call from some Irresponsible" and "All the Way" insisted that the song he wrote to mark Ed campaign workers in immaculately pressed plaid shirts they'd clearly changed scientific evidence, is credited with mystical powers to transform any flagging Rocky (Ted as the plucky little underdog). As we all know, he swept to a calamities, plastic surgery disasters, and urological deaths and rebirths. perfect union (of the catastrophic type) than that of Godfather producer would be hard to achieve. It was summed up by a friend of the couple, who faster than the leftover food from their wedding reception?" While details differ, all the tabs agree that courtship to annulment took the pair less than plants. The publication says the marriage effectively ended in two days and agreed to marry him out of sympathy, says the publication, believing he wouldn't live more than six months. He must have been disconcertingly robust on their honeymoon, because during it she told him she was returning to her former been at a spiritual retreat in which she was told to help others. When she met publication quotes her telling a friend, "Bob told me he couldn't have sex desperately want to help him." Unfortunately for their marriage, she was too effective a helper. As she napped one day, he came in the room, reports the question: Can love flourish again once the restraining order has expired? estranged on New Year's Eve, when in an excessive spirit of revelry he threatened to drive his truck through their house. The comedian filed for Ben is a new man." No word if New Ben has to abide by the prenuptial agreement is really over and that he is ready to fight for joint custody of their three daughters, the Enquirer believes reconciliation is in the air. According fearing that compiling such a list would cause crippling writer's cramp, has refused. And he would certainly be backed up on that decision by a couple newly diminished honker, the publication offers a computer generated "preview" tabs this month report on attempts at surgical improvement gone awry. Pity poor Globe reports, she underwent a five hour overhaul. Let's hope she's plague. After getting cheek and chin implants and facial liposuction, talk show implant problem by having her silicone breast implants removed and keeping them so far apart she lost her cleavage." She went back to her plastic surgeon, and after he fixed them she admired his handiwork so much that a romance between in ethnic identity is another danger of an overzealous scalpel. According to giving his eyes a slightly Oriental look." Changing identities is the goal of doesn't report any plastic surgery in her future, when her legal troubles are over she wants to make a "fresh start" and plans to do so with a name change. Perhaps if the president had suffered the same terrible with women," the publication reports she said. "But when he became impotent, it circumstances: "I tried everything. I had my breasts enlarged. I had a nose the publication. It does not report whether he has sought the services of dead of a heart attack while in bed with one of those bimbos," the Globe give the question and identify the speaker: "Well, I think it's obvious that I of marketing at Universal Pictures, told a New York Times reporter, "By taste is as bracing as a splash of Old Spice, now with real buttery flavor. why, as a campaign manager, I advise my candidates to be sexually effortlessly lift an inoffensive pop tune well into the soprano register. Which to a movie once with a friend or two, girls often see the same film many times, Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. stars leaving curiously apt or ironic song titles just before they die. When one way or another he is," said a disc jockey on that sad day. "Well, at least accidental as suspiciously well orchestrated. Just a few days after the murder rush it into high rotation. Filmed a few weeks earlier, the video shows, by gangsta rapper, they claim, faked his own death. The boy is still in the 'hood, not the shroud. But, just as commentators bemoan the way contemporary pop has celebrity deaths. There's the question of physical evidence: No autopsy was certificate, and, since both these witnesses died soon after, how can we ever rumors of his death by appearing on the Abbey Road cover without shoes crucifixion pose, suggesting he intended a resurrection. There are several flaws with these theories. This may be heard anything about that wily courtier dodging death. Possibly, he's confusing stage of that maneuver is easier to accomplish than the second. Pop stars drop the "y" and relaunch himself as "Rick Nelson" was accompanied by a switch would, at least, have been different.) From the opening track, it's clear the In the 1970s, many rockers despised disco. But the rap wars are a civil war, occurring within the genre. The only real precedent is the 1940s competition of version of "Bye, Bye, Love," amending the line, "I hope she's happy, I sure am But, with this album, musical comparisons are irrelevant. The most melodically interesting track is the exhibitionist provocation of energy seems to have gone not into the music, but into the dialogue and sound effects that precede and increasingly disrupt the songs. Those who bemoan the decline of radio drama should listen to all the screeching tires and gunfire, the lyrics are the merest afterthought; by this stage, he was more gangsta than rapper. The only interesting musical effect is the funereal bell tolling well timed, let's tactfully put that down to shrewd career management on the Maybe Death Row is the first record company to understand, as manufacturers of happened in the criminal trial. This makes him the judicial equivalent of the buttons. If passengers started pressing their own buttons, there would be fewer jobs for elevator operators; if jurors started gathering their own information, of the workplace to make themselves indispensable. Everybody knows about union notice that judges have developed the arcane rules of evidence that keep judges Judicial featherbedding explains why judges insist on of interesting arguments have been made, and not all of them have been made in reasoning just because it happens to arise not in the courtroom but in an standard response, of course, is that we want to shield jurors from bad reasoning. But, if we trust these people to sort out wrongheaded analysis from sound reasoning in the courtroom, how can we not trust them to do the same with from "irrelevant" information (like past convictions, in criminal trials) betrays a disturbing inconsistency. A juror who is capable of sorting through Nevertheless, we allow judges to exclude evidence even though, once evidence has been introduced, we trust jurors to decide how much weight it should receive. In other words, we believe that jurors are perfectly competent to limits of jurors' competence that would recommend such a policy. Either jurors are capable of deciding how much weight to assign a given bit of evidence or they're not. If they are capable, then by all means show them all the evidence and let them ignore what they think is irrelevant. If they are not capable, then why do we have juries in the first place? Either we have a very muddled view of what jurors can accomplish, or the system has been devised to serve the interests of judges and lawyers who talking about things like the exclusionary rule, which prohibits jurors from seeing evidence that was gathered illegally. The exclusionary rule serves a clear purpose by discouraging overzealous police officers from inappropriate behavior. Whether that benefit is worth its cost in terms of false acquittals is arguable, but at least there is a clear benefit. By contrast, the limited admissibility of legally acquired evidence serves no apparent purpose, except to generate motions by lawyers, rulings by judges, and grounds carefully control the flow of evidence, jurors would drown in a sea of solved most efficiently by having lawyers pay (in cash) for excessive use of courtroom time, not by the long and costly process of motions and appeals. enormous lengths to choose unbiased jurors. But what is so desirable about the bias? At election time, we are not urged to avoid the media so as to remain unbiased until we get to the voting booth. Isn't it inconsistent to prefer both (Sometimes, apparently, jurors are chosen not just for specific ignorance of the case but for general ignorance of the world around them. I have a friend who was excluded from a jury because he answered "yes" to the question, "Do you think a man who's been arrested is more likely to be guilty than a man who hasn't been arrested?" Presumably his place was taken by another juror who really believes that the police arrest people completely at random.) defendant is guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt," without telling them whether a can be quantified so precisely. Their scoffing is justified, but it's also irrelevant. It is true that no juror can be sure whether his or her doubt is whether his or her doubt is more or less than "reasonable." With a quantified target, jurors would at least know what to aim for, even if they can't be sure jurors who are unsure about two criteria (what is a reasonable doubt, and does my own doubt exceed that level?) will be more accurate than jurors who adjusted to different levels for different crimes. But judges, whose jobs depend on judicial procedures being impenetrable, convoluted, and purpose of legal tradition and precedent is to make outcomes predictable. But judges have both the motive and the opportunity to contort tradition and Respect for the law is enshrined in our culture, but it should not blind us to the possibility that the law can be corrupted to serve sordid ends. Lane's own investigation confirmed that Glass had made things up wholesale in Although there are often no references before Glass published his fantasies, such apparent Glass inventions as the National Memorabilia Convention, monumental piles of bullshit past me, a vain skeptic. I shouldn't have believed weren't my suspicions aroused after three New Republic pieces discovering bizarre cults centered on implausible political figures? First, he Editor Lane declined to answer my questions. (The magazine's New York PR officer called with the magazine's regrets.) Glass could not be reached for comment. But I can speculate about my own failure to see what seems so clear in One explanation is that factoids such as the bondsman's portable urinal, which seem starkly implausible when presented alone, are less by "reporting" that assistants serve bond dealers lunch at their desks and do dropped in boiling water but cook to death in water that heated up partial explanation is that Glass built up credibility as each story was principals in his stories didn't complain about the falsehoods for the simple good to check." As a reader, not his editor, it was not my job to check them. But I didn't even bring my usual editor's skepticism to reading them, because I originality. The filigree of detail dazzles. Some of his better pieces read like textbook examples of New Journalism, fusing the world of fact with the software company is signing him to a contract. He interviews the adoring mom. improve his pieces whenever his editors asked him to. He was completely open to criticism. He regularly entertained the staff at editorial meetings with previews of the dish to come in his next piece. It's a testimony to his energy that when editors questioned his hacker piece, he erected a Web site to prove the existence of a nonexistent software company. A layabout would simply have written a true story. When you like somebody, you tend to trust him. (Let this fact checking department. It was established following New Republic who makes things up. And hindsight is easy. That said, a publication can make scamming its readers more difficult than the New Republic made it for Glass. Giving young reporters unimpeded access to anonymous quotations is like I responded. As he coughed up his sources he sheared the sharper edges off his sympathy because the system pressures them into becoming stars before they are journeymen. Please. This explanation exonerates dishonest writers while providing protective cover for careless editors. If there's any moral to be taken from this story, it should be "No more excuses." it places reporters at the center of action as frequently as it did the young Glass. And he wrote so well. Anyone can doubt a bad writer. It's the good ones dailies, he made his first electronic news as the executive producer of the troubadour and great defender, simultaneously promoting it to outsiders and later. The persona worked. He quickly became one of the Web's signature voices, the site. And they indulged him, answering and amplifying his with smarts, youth, leisure time, and moxie, and who own $2,000-plus you and your family." They despise the fact that you now get your news directly Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits loss of control has been jarring to our traditional media and political organizations, who had sat astride a tight monopoly over politics and news," fighting ever since, complaining that these new interactive media are dangerous and destructive of public discourse. New media have brought with them enormous academics who controlled most of our information flow have all been, to varying impressive; yet, only rarely does he name those conspiring to deny him and his career in rock 'n' roll Comstockery, she convinced some labels to affix younger listeners embraced as a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Time magazine cried wolf about the prevalence of porn on the Net. technology, miniaturized computers and communications devices, you name is won, but declaring victory and resting his vocal chords would mean giving up commercial calculation isn't sufficient to explain his stand. He identifies so deeply with the victims he has invented, the aggrieved Internet comrades and the chastised Jerry Springer fans, that he's become one of them. Lest one think who embraced a new technology to speak truth to power and suffered greatly for the characters in his "Suburban Detective Mystery" series-- Death by Station that won't conform to his expectations. Consider the parallels: in his cabin, limiting his contact to the outside world to letters and books isolation of his suburban basement office, apparently limiting his contact to Victims' Manifesto, that impenetrable screed called Virtuous Reality. I of Cyberspace suffers hourly in the service of his new media victims: the paranoid who extrapolate "the world is out to get me" conspiracies from the Shack; and the teeming millions whose idea of a reality check is consulting a to work, but it's not the scariest place he knows, as he confided to New York magazine two months ago in a piece about his suburban community of about: being rich, or being richer than their neighbors? a lot of things that have nothing to do with being rich. Just by logging on to Slate instead of using this time to earn an extra dollar, you've refuted the proposition that people pursue wealth the way sharks pursue food. Instead, we compromise between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of leisure, sometimes accepting less of one so we can have more of the other. wealth and leisure, there's a long list of other things we value. We like to avoid risk; we care about the qualities of our mates; we want our children to be happy. But wealth is one of the things we strive for, so it makes sense to ask how we measure success in that dimension. One hypothesis is that it's only your raw wealth that or twice what your neighbor has. In other words, you measure the value of your wealth by what you can buy with it. The alternative hypothesis is that you also keep what you earn, and you can each decide whether you'd rather earn more money or enjoy more leisure. On the other hand, if people care about the pecking order, you and your neighbor can get involved in a costly and futile "arms race," sacrificing valuable leisure in your mutually frustrating efforts this in perspective, imagine that we could all agree to take an hour off from work this week. Under the "raw wealth" hypothesis, there's no advantage to that agreement. After all, you were always free to take an hour off. But under the "pecking order" hypothesis, the agreement could serve as a sort of "arms control" that leaves everyone better off by preserving our relative positions while freeing up some extra time for leisure. But any such agreement would be impossible to enforce, which (if the "pecking order" hypothesis is traditionally have assumed that relative position does not matter, and to medieval monarchs who earned less (in real terms) than today's average something is easy to imagine, it's often because your imagination is limited. In this case, your vision probably has neglected to include the disease, monotony, and isolation of medieval life. I think it not at all unlikely that Henry V would have traded his kingdom for modern plumbing, antibiotics, and Here's another reason to be skeptical of the hypothesis never met anyone who subscribes to the analogous theories about leisure or risk. Do you care about the length of your vacation, or about whether your vacation is longer than your neighbor's? Do you care about how well your air bag works, or about whether you've got the best air bag in your neighborhood? In each case, surely it's the former. But if we feel that way about leisure and other hand, if you really believe that people care about wealth only for what it will buy them, it's hard to explain why Bill Gates gets up and goes to work in the morning. Surely it's not because he's afraid he'll run out of money? But about human behavior on the basis of a few extraordinary individuals who one hand, people do not care directly about their relative positions in the wealth distribution. On the other hand, they care indirectly about their relative positions, because a high relative position allows you to simple, but it has some remarkable implications. First, it implies that the competition for mates drives most people to save too much money. Young people everyone could agree to save a little less, we'd all be better off: Our suggests that income inequality should grow over time. But if inequality becomes so great that people lose all hope of changing their relative concern for relative position vanishes in societies where mates are allocated by mechanisms other than wealth. Imagine an aristocracy, where your social status is inherited from your parents and dictates your choice of mate. Such an aristocracy might not be sustainable. People with low status and high wealth can prove attractive to people with high status and low wealth, whereupon the entire social structure disintegrates. Even families with low status and low wealth might be able to save aggressively for several generations in order to buy their way into the aristocracy, and again there is an eventual deterred in a society where the children of such marriages are relegated to the social barriers (and who cares about his offspring) must save enough to demonstrated that to succeed, such social rebels would have to achieve societies that are identical in all the ways that economists traditionally view as important. They have identical populations. They have access to identical technologies. Their people have exactly the same preferences in all things. But in Society A, you attract your mate by wealth, and in Society B, you attract your mate by inherited status. Then the standards of living in these societies will differ dramatically and diverge dramatically over time, because they offer growth. (The other engine is technological progress, which we've assumed is the that cultural norms are extremely important. Of course, one could argue that demonstrates something genuinely new: that cultural norms can be extremely important even if we accept all the standard simplifying assumptions societies where status is conferred not by accidents of birth but by learning, or by physical strength, or by darkness of complexion. Clearly any one of these societies will evolve very differently from all the others. But what makes them Manhattan, a neighbor approached me in the corridor of my apartment question many times over the years, I still don't know the correct response. Yes, I am; no, I am not. Both are accurate. Unfortunately, I offered my neighbor a reply that raised more questions than it answered. opportunity for amity had existed between us, it seemed to have vanished. He slipped into the elevator, I slipped into my apartment, and I imagine he rolled his eyes to the ceiling and thought, "Great, another nut case in the nearly a decade, and I have written a book about my experiences covering the should feel good, I should feel triumphant, I should feel like a master of the literary universe receiving the adulation he so rightly deserves, and I should him, compliments intended for him, a publishing solicitation intended for him, even a job offer intended for him (which I turned down). recently, I enjoyed the confusion. There's something flattering about people thinking I was capable of writing a best seller about a New York cop when I was 20s, while at the same time reporting one newspaper story after another. I had Circumstances have changed. I now have my own literary foreign words in my writings (see previous sentence) and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Also, I should be able to revel in praise rather than worry about it. But in my case, praise from a stranger is like a glass of water may be tainted. Even if the water tastes pure and delicious, you cannot enjoy it as much as you should. There's nothing more pleasant than being congratulated for your literary skills, but there's nothing less pleasant than realizing the congratulations are intended for a guy who writes about the hoped that my book would end the confusion, that I would emerge as the the least, I hoped the confusion would turn to my favor. Shortly before my book was published, I wrote a piece about my identity crisis suggesting that if an away and confide that my "newest" opus was far better than "my" previous ones. thought little of it until a beefy audience member walked out shortly after I the Bull. It's not that I can't drive people away from my readings, but it Ignominy has many forms. Once, after I signed a pile of books at a bookstore, a clerk told me not to leave because there were more to sign them, and nobody would have been the wiser, but something held me back. ago to attend a book festival. A number of people lined up for my book signing, and I was very pleased until some of them pulled out copies of his books. It was a bit embarrassing, especially as my father was sitting next to me, and the husband had my book. My book. I introduced him to my father, and wanted me to sign his books. A distraught look emerged on the husband's face and his wife stared coldly at him. "I told you!" she sneered. think my inscription soothed the pain for him, cheered him up, and naturally this was my intention. It was only later, of course, that I realized my inscription made it impossible for him to get a refund. '90s," while the New York Times asserted that the "heroin vogue has been another useful occasion for noting this alleged trend. Is Back"? For the press, smack is always back. It never goes away, but the New York Times ("Latest Drug of Choice for Abusers Brings New reads as fresh today as it did then. We learn that heroin has breached its and desperate nodded out. The drug is being retailed at rock clubs, at abundance is prompting concern about a potential 'epidemic' spilling across demographic divides." And heroin purity is increasing dramatically: "Purity years ago, you wouldn't think that heroin purity could keep rising. But for the right a few years ago, recent purity actually has declined somewhat. significant risk factor in overdose deaths. A study of heroin overdoses in junk and survived.) The researchers attributed most overdoses to intermittent misjudge tolerance when returning to the drug. Another risk factor that never combination with alcohol. The mixture has an additive effect: A drinker could about heroin use? For one thing, the federal government's National Drug Control reports that the number of "casual users" (less than weekly) of heroin came year measured, while the number of "heavy users" (at least weekly) dipped from reason for seeking ER treatment. But the statistics, which come from the government's latest Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) survey, come with a disclaimer suggesting that the explanation may be multiple visits by aging druggies who are using the ER for a variety of health problems. disclose that the smashed pumpkin was drinking booze while shooting, a fatal a mesmerizing image of a "smouldering maw/ of a pile of newspapers lit long embraced "Flame Posies" as the name for my occasional column on the press. I also hope that the oxymoron will remind me to include applause as well as activist chief executive, but a paradox of his own making stands in the way. In his last State of the Union address, he repudiated big government. "We know there's not a program for every problem," he said. "The era of big government rhetoric has helped. But so did his embrace of what might be called intended to make people feel good, not actually to accomplish anything. Sometimes, it addresses a virtually nonexistent problem or, at least, a problem that ranks lower on any sensible scale of national concerns than the fuss and problems, but in an almost totally symbolic manner. Often, therapeutic legislation exploits the electorate's short attention span, its capacity to legislation costs the taxpayer little or nothing and generally offends almost no one. (In an important subclass of therapeutic legislation, however, stagily another of the many therapeutic laws for which he has taken credit. This one offense, punishable by five years to life in prison. The law was sponsored by law is typical of much therapeutic legislation in that it addresses a hunger callous as to suggest that stalking isn't an urgent problem, fully worthy of immediate action by a Congress that can't pass a budget on time. But is stalking across state lines or on federal property really such a pressing concern? Undoubtedly it is terrifying when it happens (as it have outlawed it with such a flourish, however, is as a way of expressing that it has collected no information on the number of interstate stalking if there were thousands of interstate stalkers, if they did pose out some sort of constituency to oppose the bill. If a stalkers' lobby itself implications of a federal stalking law would have criticized it. Instead, passes with no opposition is a good bet to be therapeutic legislation. (And it is doubly hypocritical for Republicans, who claim to believe in less government and in state government, to be clotting the federal statute books with laws M >any therapeutic laws are superfluous. Some are passed unanimously. But the defining characteristic of a therapeutic bill is its thrift: It doesn't increase the budget; it requires no new taxes; and it offends no members of Congress absolutely nothing, but allowed them to inflate their acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention was used to publicize therapeutic laws passed on his watch or new ones he wanted Congress to constitutional amendment; argued for an extension of the Family and Medical Leave law and a measure to keep moms and their babies in hospitals longer than guarantees portability of insurance but places no ceiling on the rates insurers can charge); applauded the ban on "assault" rifles; and bragged about the new illegal "even to attempt to pollute" (whatever that means). fingerprinting of Little League coaches, den mothers, and others who volunteer their time to children (never mind, as the Wall Street Journal reports, institutional setting; that most accused child molesters have no previous convictions; and that child abuse is down in the '90s). And with the continued Balanced Budget Amendment follies, Congress indulges itself in the grandest of therapeutic fantasies. If it really wants to balance the budget it should just and believe is more than merely therapeutic. Your particular law, or two, address problems fully worthy of a national fuss and Rose Garden signing ceremony. But surely even you will agree that most of these laws are merely therapeutic. We can all agree on that, without agreeing on which are the Therapeutic laws become props for rhetoric that might be genuine demagogue assails minorities and labels his foes Communists. The modern safety. He artfully constructs his debate to make his foes sound as if they are against children, for gun violence, against safe streets, and for pollution. election season, it's enough to make you long for the days of negative Even though my personal tastes in legislation tend toward the kind that begin, a workfare program that would cost more, not less, than simple handouts. That stimulated a thunderous and enlightening debate. He demonstrated to the He maintained that the grand institution of matrimony is demeaned by those who marriage is a contract. You can write that contract yourself (in which case it's called a "premarital agreement"), or you can accept the default contract choose between two prefabricated contracts, each with very different Even if you never divorce, your choice among contracts can affect the entire course of your marriage. That's because the possibility of divorce alters your incentives to keep your spouse happy (and vice versa). Of course, you might want to keep your spouse happy for other reasons, the most notable of which is love. Sometimes, love is all you need. But because we're talking about divorce law, I want to focus on cases where incentive for good marital behavior. The answer may not be what you think. (where both parties must agree to a divorce), and a covenant marriage (where always the most likely to end in divorce. That isn't true, and here's one device and which one wears the earplugs, and so on. Here the negotiating process itself provides all the right incentives to respect your spouse's needs. What you won't do for love, you'll still do for a bribe. And those things you won't do even for a bribe are, presumably, sufficiently distasteful mutual consent (though the choice of contract alters the balance of power and therefore might alter the size of the bribes). Under either system, the marriage survives as long as it's possible to keep both partners happier together than they would be apart. Therefore, the two systems produce the same turns bad for both of you. If we assume that all marital conflicts are negotiable, the covenant marriage has no offsetting advantages: It keeps couples together only in those cases where they'd both be happier apart. The analysis changes if there are important decisions that can't be negotiated, like the decision whether to bring home a surprise bouquet of flowers. Chronic thoughtlessness on such matters can cause a marriage to deteriorate. The knowledge that divorce is impossible might make Doomsday Machine: You are each on notice that you'd better work hard to preserve a good marriage, or you'll both be forced to live your lives in a bad one. Doomsday Machines can be very effective. But sometimes they blow up. So issues you can't negotiate that make the covenant marriage worth considering. That gives you an incentive to keep your spouse happy. And this process feeds on itself: Your spouse works to make you happy, which makes you want to preserve the marriage, which makes you work to make your spouse happy, which makes your spouse want to preserve the marriage, and so on, in a great virtuous consent, your spouse could accept your efforts to make him or her happy without feeling a strong need to reciprocate. This prospect discourages you from bearing gifts in the first place. But when either partner has the power to end the marriage, kindness tends to be repaid with kindness, and therefore kindness thrives. Notice, once again, that this analysis applies only to surprise efforts. Efforts that are negotiated in advance can be negotiated equally well is always a mistake. But when important issues can't be negotiated, both the exhaustive, and I know from much recent experience that Slate readers will ignored: How does a change in the marriage contract affect a couple's decision about whether to get married in the first place? There's a lot of interesting the political realm? There he has carried risk aversion to rarely reached heights. He will pay almost any price, in terms of policy, to marginally reduce on the ideological spectrum considered a good idea. To pick up some superfluous president keeps him from taking policy risks that might deprive him of the job. glaringly exemplify its message of principle above politics. Hence, a general theory: Men who obsessively convert power into sex are less willing to risk We can test this theory by using as our control group White House pool with nude staff nymphs or confidently steering a beautiful to which various convicted felons on his staff can attest. If we want other hand, it might make sense to elect fewer men generally. The point here females. For women, lots of sex didn't mean lots of offspring. Power, to be sure, brought other benefits to a female's genetic legacy, so women naturally like having power. They just don't like it as much as men do. with replaceable coalition partners and a single permanent goal: power." For females, on the other hand, "coalitions withstand time." Thus a male men to put power above principle is because during human evolution, power led solution is obvious: If you want elected officials who put principle ahead of even fairly firm ones, are only aggregate differences. The average woman will surrender less principle for power than the average man. And women been compared to two bald men fighting over a comb.) have been more ambitious than the typical woman, she was a paragon of everywhere, that he's an especially egregious example. betrayal of the feminist values he professes. Maybe. But in another sense his once again singled out for favored tax treatment), virtually every opponent often that everybody believes it. But everybody is wrong. pointed out in a recent Journal of Economic Literature article that the For example, in his paper titled "On the Size Distribution Creation: Dissecting the Myth and Reassessing the Facts," in which they assert rests on statistical fallacies and misleading interpretations of the data." and newspapers have recently run articles like "Debunking the Small Business Myth," "Small Is Not Beautiful," "Doing the Small Business Shuffle," and "The being created by businesses with fewer than four employees." Where do these numbers come from? The Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration will gladly supply you with a table that might appear, at first glance, to lend across the second row, for example, which seems to tell you that firms with no of course, is that the rows broken out by initial firm size tell only part of workers, almost as many close their doors, sending their workers onto the other ways is what produces the grossly exaggerated picture of small business's sorting firms by class size in a dynamic situation the "regression fallacy." still static, picture of what's really going on, let's relabel and complete Computed by subtraction within the same size class. (mostly net losses) in job counts produced by firms that either opened or you will get quite a different picture of where the net new jobs are. By this since some very successful small companies may end up big by the close of the period, and vice versa. We need a more dynamic model to get a real sense of good fix on this phenomenon isn't easy, because most government data are collected to measure monthly employment changes, and there are no current data however, I was able to specify the preparation of special tabulations by the Census Bureau from business payroll tax reports for the entire private nonfarm economy. These tabulations make it possible, for the first time, to study job flows for the same firms as they migrate from one employment size class time --tell a fascinating story of job creation and destruction. For that firms that remained small (including those that entered or went out of large were essentially offset by employment losses of firms that were large and confirms what earlier studies had suggested: Big business, not small business, recession. However, Census Bureau counts show that during the phase of rapid reported job gains as losses. This same result held true in the period from conditions, the probability that a firm will add or lay off workers is accounts for these observations. Firms are constantly competing with each other. Both small and large businesses expand when there is a demand for their goods and services that they can meet efficiently. All the economic research suggests that there is no difference in the efficiency of small and large firms once a firm grows beyond a minimum size. It is for this reason that Census employment size distribution of firms and establishments. carving exemptions and preferences for small business into virtually every piece of economic legislation that passes Congress. As the editor of this policy in favor of 'small business' is based on logical fallacies and is a noble organization that fights disease. It would like your support, too. assert that CARE is worthier than the cancer society. Having made that diversify because you don't know enough to make a firm judgment about where your money will do the most good. But that argument won't fly. Your contribution to CARE says that in your best (though possibly flawed) judgment, and in view of the (admittedly incomplete) information at your disposal, CARE is worthier than the cancer society. If that's your best judgment when you comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen. what I can do about cancer." But such delusions of grandeur can't be very common. So there has to be some other reason why people diversify their know what that reason is. You give to charity because you care about the recipients, or you give to charity because it makes you feel good to give. If you care about the recipients, you'll pick the worthiest and "bullet" (concentrate) your efforts. But if you care about your own sense of myself. Do you say, "Oh, then I can skip my CARE contribution and go directly contribution to CARE does not stop you from making CARE your first priority, delusion of grandeur or an elevation of your own desire for satisfaction above organizations, or you can be truly charitable by concentrating your efforts economic problem, first translate into mathematics, then solve the problem, then translate back into English and burn the mathematics. I am a devotee of experiment with a slight deviation: Rather than burn the mathematics, I will following proposition: If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity. That's basically a mathematical proposition, which I have translated into English in this column. If you want to see exactly what was gained or lost in translation (and if you a parent is allowed to return. The baby may then be patted but not picked up, and the parent must quickly leave, after which the crying typically resumes. Eventually sleep comes, but the ritual recurs when the child awakes during the night. The same thing happens the next night, except that the parent must wait five minutes longer before the designated patting. This goes on for a week, two weeks, maybe even a month. If all goes well, the day finally arrives when the child can fall asleep without fuss and go the whole night without being fed. expert on infant sleep. Many parents find his prescribed boot camp for babies depicts the ritual as the child's natural progress toward nocturnal At this point I should own up to my bias: My wife and I are minutes without reloading, we gave up and let her sleep in our bed. When our second daughter showed up three years later, we didn't even bother to set up brings me to my second bias (hauntingly familiar to regular readers): sleep alongside their mothers for the first few years. At least, that's the social environment in which humans evolved. Mothers nurse their children to sleep and then nurse on demand through the night. Sounds taxing, but it's not. When the baby cries, the mother starts nursing reflexively, often without really waking up. If she does reach consciousness, she soon fades back to sleep with the child. And the father, as I can personally attest, never leaves doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. The technique may well be harmless (though experts to reciprocate my magnanimity. They act as if parents like me are derelict, as if children need to fall asleep in a room alone. "Even if you and your child seem happy about his sharing your bed at night," writes exactly, is it bad to sleep with your kids? Learning to sleep alone, says puzzled. It isn't obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and rendered powerless to influence its environment. (Nor is it obvious these days, that if you let a toddler sleep between you and your spouse, "in a sense separating the two of you, he may feel too powerful and become worried." Well, he may, I guess. Or he may just feel cozy. Hard to say (though they certainly you refuse to retrieve her from the crib, "she won't like it, but she'll bed is that "you are not really solving the problem. There must be a reason why he is so fearful." Yes, there must. Here's one candidate. Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a harms kids, it's more likely doing so via a second route: the denial of mother's milk to the child at night. Breast milk, researchers are finding, is a kind of "external placenta," loaded with hormones masterfully engineered to Still, we certainly don't know that an 11-hour nightly gap in the feeding schedule isn't doing harm. And we do know that such a gap isn't part of species that nurse frequently. Or to judge by the mothers: Failing to nurse at night can lead to painful engorgement or even breast infection. Meanwhile, as asserts the opposite. If after three months of age your baby wakes at night and wants to be fed, "she is developing a sleep problem." boosters have noted, male physicians, who have no idea what motherhood is like, have cowed women for decades into doing unnatural and destructive things. For a while doctors said mothers shouldn't feed more than once every four hours. Now they admit they were wrong. For a while they pushed bottle feeding. Now they admit this was wrong. For a while they told pregnant women to keep weight gains minimal (and some women did so by smoking more cigarettes!). Wrong again. Now they're telling mothers to deny food to infants all night long once the kids as in the behavioral sciences generally, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble by recognizing at the outset that people are animals, and means you can surrender your money or you can surrender your slightly bloody the gunman's direct approach with the "voluntary standards" shakedown practiced standards in the first place? Why doesn't it just pass laws or issue regulations instead? It would if it could. Usually, the request for volunteers legal authority to force industry or others to bend to its will. It doesn't want to seek that authority either because it doubts it can muster the necessary votes in Congress or because the Constitution stands in the way. tobacco offers the most telling example of this sort of extralegal extortion. While negotiating the tobacco settlement last year, the government wanted desperately to bar Big Tobacco from advertising its products. The First Amendment prevents the government from stopping the tobacco companies from advertising, however, so the negotiators worked out a deal. Limit advertising, and we'll cap your liability lawsuits. Fearing that ultimately the tort lawyers would bankrupt them, the tobacco companies agreed to give up their constitutional ace in the hole. Only when Congress reneged on the immunity side power relationship between the government and the governed. A law provides the governed with the independent venue of the courts for whatever arguments might unfold. The last word a bureaucrat wants to hear from the courts about a new another advantage: Laws can be repealed, but voluntary standards are forever. prod Congress into investigating the proliferation of beer ads on television. Millions of dollars of ad revenue would be lost if Congress chose to regulate beer ads or, worse yet, proposed new voluntary standards. Some industries embrace voluntary standards as a way to dodge more onerous government regulation. Currently, commercial Web publishers think they've staved off Federal Trade Commission regulators by establishing look, we're in compliance with the voluntary regulations, but Company X standards doesn't automatically get a company off the government's hook, either. When dozens of youngsters found themselves either strangled or the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission worked together to establish a set of voluntary safety standards. The two sides agreed on guardrail design standards and provided warning notices for the proper use of the beds (such as commission Chairwoman Ann Brown boasted about its relationship with the bed makers. "We are a regulatory agency," she said, "but we prefer to work month that the commission's staff is now recommending mandatory standards. Mandatory standards enlarge government power to penalize makers who that don't conform. Having previously agreed to voluntary standards, the furniture industry finds itself stuck in the regulatory maw. No wonder the first thing you learn in the military is to never volunteer. unscrupulous. It turns government suggestions into veiled threats and devalues true voluntarism. At its worst, it can kick up a stench that would have made cleaning, maintenance, and construction projects that the commissars decided stay on the island. We were delighted to arrive after our long trip yesterday watch the sun set behind the lighthouse to the west, the moon rise from the tinted sea to the east, the water darken and cap with white in the south. Of course, you probably didn't spend much time on the deck looking south because though it did take some scrubbing. Next year I must make sure to leave you a others being too small, which means the lobster shells and fish juices spill over and mix with the chewing gum and pasta in the bottom of the can. You can buy the liners right in the harbor at the supermarket, though I suppose it is easier to grab the 30-gallon size. And with all the guests you have while in a rocker on the porch this morning, to watch the seabirds and admire what's left of the garden. (It's amazing what a little watering will do for the flowers in a dry summer like this one.) Unfortunately, I didn't realize until it was too late that one of the spokes holding the left rocker had come loose, suppose it does make handy kindling. I noticed there were only a couple of beads of the carving left when I cleaned the fireplace.) But I didn't really thanks for the bottles of wine. I can see from all the empty cartons that you must have enjoyed it too. Hope you're having a great summer's end. that you can see water from every window of the cottage. I noticed this as I was moving the furniture on the second floor back into the bedrooms. It's easy worry, I did finally find all the rugs. No doubt they'll dry out in time and be as good as new. You know, it's not a bad idea to close the windows when it don't want to be intrusive, but if your guests do get into another knife fight or whatever, it's really easy to get the blood splatters out of the white frilled curtains if you wash them in cold water right away. (You can just throw them in the washing machine, if the kids' sandy clothes haven't stripped the another line to remind you for next year that the cottage is made of wood. The wood. That means they burn very easily. So: Do not lean the pleated shade on the bedside lamp against the bulb while it is lighted. As you have no doubt noticed after two such experiments in consecutive years, when you do that, the shade melts and finally burns. Left long enough, the burning shade will set the house on fire. I assume you leave the house when you conduct these little trials, but there is always the chance that someone else may have lingered. it next year, don't let the kids remove the front legs of the pedestal sink in days! And if they must do it, try not to discard the peculiar bolt fittings, so are hard to find. Ditto the handles on the bureau drawers. I know they are old and can come unscrewed. But the nut will always fall inside the drawer, so all you have to do is thread it back on the screw and then tighten it. Well, I suppose that's a bother on a vacation, but wouldn't it be just as easy to put the whole thing inside the drawer as in the wastebasket? Speaking of show you how to replace a light bulb? There are lots of brand new ones in the sideboard in the dining room, and I would have thought you'd find it great chef. Of course, great cooks don't usually make great cleaners. But not for the winter. What a good thing, though, that I happened to look under the time to mind all those recycling rules posted at the town hall. How thoughtful of you to have paid the rent a whole year in advance. And the insurance and the chapel and library and conservation society appeals and the tactic to assert that some respected figure of the past would endorse your position on some controversy of the present. There is little doubt that the even as they pursue policies certain to prove detrimental to large numbers of achieve this feat, they define King as a champion of "colorblind laws," and citizens by race. In this way, programs that take race into account can be demonized as violations of King's memory. Proponents of the ingeniously named a Dream" speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged not by the "color of their skin" but by "the content of their character." Calling for the abolition of affirmative action in his book, The End of Racism: following in King's footsteps even though he advocates repealing the Civil segregation) to argue that since segregation was a system of "racial view, opponents, not proponents, of affirmative action are King's legitimate revisionists are quite wrong. His writing and actions make it clear that Martin "affirmative action." The phrase itself was not widely used during his lifetime, but King spoke repeatedly of granting blacks special preferences in jobs and education to compensate for past discrimination. movement to dismantle segregation reached its peak, King observed that many white supporters of civil rights "recoil in horror" from suggestions that blacks deserved not merely colorblind equality but "compensatory consideration." But, he pointed out, "special measures for the deprived" were a all sorts of privileges to veterans. Blacks, given their long "siege of denial," were even more deserving than soldiers of "special, compensatory said much the same thing in his last book. Where Do We Go From Here was way to foreboding prompted by the emergence of a white backlash and the more difficult than eliminating segregation. He called for a series of programs, including full employment and a guaranteed annual income, to uplift the poor of all races. But he saw no contradiction between measures aimed at fighting poverty in general and others that accorded blacks "special treatment" because of the unique injustices they had suffered. "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years," he wrote, Throughout the 1960s, King targeted both economic and racial inequality. His policy proposals embraced a variety of approaches, from colorblind assaults on poverty to demands, such as setting specific goals for the employment of blacks by private companies, that today would be called and affirmative action must be defended or attacked on its merits. King aside, what is most striking in current discussions of civil rights, race, and affirmative action is the absence of any sense of history. Segregation was not simply a matter of racial classification (or "thinking by race," as Justice subordination whose political, economic, and social elements all reinforced one "Jobs and Freedom," and the movement's ultimate goal, King insisted, was to elusive today as it was during King's lifetime. King's real heirs are those who, like him, see affirmative action not as a panacea or an end in itself, but aware of their rising net worth, to the dollar, on a daily or even hourly basis. Troubadours of capitalism celebrate each new high as evidence of the what sense has the stock market boom created wealth? This is not a philosophical question. It's a mathematical one. Nor is my point that a Dow reserve the right to claim that was my point if it happens). But when we imagine how we will spend our stock market wealth, we're engaged in an orgy of Here's the puzzle. The shares traded on the New York Stock this is the sum of the prices they're trading at, little bits at a time; and b) trillion of that "worth" has been added in the past year. Meanwhile, though, fact, very healthy. But it means that the increase in goods and services in the goods and services implied by the rise in prices on the New York Stock Exchange investments, and the growth in the economy's capacity to produce real wealth shrinks into insignificance compared with the increase in "wealth" as perceived houses, vacations, new washing machines, whatever? Two things would happen: Stock prices would plummet and the price of "real stuff" would rise. As a result, much of our perceived wealth would melt away. levels is baby boomers socking money away for retirement. But many experts have predicted that this pleasant dynamic will reverse itself when the boomer generation starts withdrawing and spending its retirement nest eggs. Instead of decline and general price inflation will deny boomers the value they think another reason that the notion of solving the Social Security problem by investing payments in the stock market is such folly. The infusion of these extra billions will drive prices up when boomers are all buying, and the subsequent withdrawal will drive prices down when boomers are all selling.) So the alleged wealth accumulated in the stock market can't be realized all at once now, and probably can't be realized all at once decades from now. Can it be realized gradually over the years, as people sell off a little at a time? It's possible, but pretty unlikely. Stock prices represent the discounted present value of a company's future earnings stream. In other words: What you're willing to pay for a share of stock is, or ought to be, equal to what you would pay today for the right to claim that share's fraction of the company's profits from now on. If prospects for future earnings have generate enough wealth to cover all the new chits in people's pockets. percent during a period when the economy's general productive capacity undervalued a year ago. The other is that something happened in the past year stock prices and profit potential are, in theory, now correctly aligned. about the past, or revelation about the future, during the past year that would Stein wrote in Slate a while back attributing the bull market to new understanding the past year has brought good news about the economy's ability to tolerate low the Dow." What's more, if the past year's huge rise in stock prices reflects a new but accurate optimism about future economic growth, this means the payoff for that future growth is already in the past. In other words, future possibility: The increase in stockholder wealth could reflect a transfer from reflects the ongoing shift, from labor to capital, of the return to production of what we do produce goes to corporate profits and less to wages? Well, Then there's what economists call the wealth effect. Even if the impression that we're a lot richer than a year ago is a fantasy, the very fact that millions believe it might help make it come true. Prosperity is like Tinker Bell: It lives on belief that it lives. Folks who believe (even the economy will thrive and grow as a result. Of course this kind of money you don't really have is the key to prosperity, big government deficits would do the trick just as well. Yet deficits are deeply unpopular, most of all with the sort of folks who celebrate the new wealth created by the stock directly reducing by as much as a single doughnut the amount of goods and services or the economy's ability to produce more of them. Maybe the moral is just the obvious one that stock prices occasionally overshoot the mark in both directions. But maybe the moral is that the only folks who are going to get known as AIDS, seers have periodically predicted that the end of the epidemic was near. But the trumpets have grown louder in recent weeks, as the success of rescued him from death's door ("Last Year, This Editor Wrote His Own Study after study has shown that in many patients, the but many researchers believe that less virus equals less damage to the immune system. For certain, the new treatments are having a visible effect on the unknowns, which the optimists dismiss far too quickly. With all best wishes to because of the advent of protease inhibitors, "I am probably more likely to be "this ordeal as a whole may be over" is likely to mislead sick people in need of hope. And the argument that AIDS is conquered may also lend a sharper ax to about the power of these new treatments. There are scant data to explain how studies have been completed that compare hundreds of treated people with hundreds of untreated people. Another downside to the drugs is that they often make people feel nauseated and can have serious toxicities. In some people, a stealthy foe: It can take refuge in body tissues (as opposed to blood), where the drugs have a harder time reaching. And the virus routinely mutates into strains that are resistant to every drug that has proven effective against these depressing findings alongside his good news. But there is plenty of bad news that he doesn't report. The lymph nodes (and other sites in the body) can summer's international AIDS conference, researchers described a patient who had returned in a week. An AIDS researcher told me last week of four patients who recently died from AIDS, even though their viral loads had become undetectable with the new drug treatments. Just because you drive a viral load to the point where it can't be detected doesn't mean the immune system returns to normal. There are also the practical obstacles to AIDS optimism. Taking two dozen or more pills a day, on a schedule, is a daunting task to carry out for years on end. Missed pills lower the potency of the treatment, opening the way to cannot afford these new treatments, for those who can, the drugs will possibly stave off disease and death. But, because no one knows whether these new leases on life should be measured in weeks, months, years, or decades, balancing was hailed as a godsend. Then it was denounced as ineffective by activists, after larger studies showed that, when taken alone, the drug offered little drug as a worthless poison being hawked by researchers who were on the take their hopes on combining drug treatments with strategies that boost the immune can help rev up the natural machinery that clears the virus from the body. the AIDS epidemic is not expensive drug therapies. Never in the annals of medicine has a viral plague been stopped by any therapy. Viral plagues such as scourges have only been beaten back by vaccines. It is most perplexing then, mentions the word "vaccine" in his article. That's because his true focus isn't the end of the epidemic, but lengthening the lives of the already infected. budget on the problem. And, primarily because of the daunting scientific release for the big Volunteer Summit (officially, "The Presidents' Summit has never been enough and never will be. The concept exists only for the networks, celebrities, corporations, foundations, all huffing and puffing in the conceit of Swift's Modest Proposal (to eat children) would be So let us stipulate that everyone involved in the Volunteer aren't looking for a PR fix. Let us stipulate, furthermore, that a little bit of good can outweigh a lot of bullshit, and the summit probably nets out as a Good Thing. But let us also consider the summit's philosophy. Distilled from pressure its citizens to do more good works, for children and in general. That social pressure should be a cooperative project of government, employers, and start, is it obviously better to give your time than your money? This notion and specialization of labor. Take an extreme example: a successful company thinks she's worth what she's being paid, why should it encourage her to devote several hours a week to, say, working in a soup kitchen, when others few more hours doing what she does best, and let the company turn the proceeds over to the soup kitchen? Or, more realistically, why shouldn't she write a large check and not feel guilty about it? Would the soup kitchen really prefer obviously requires more valuable skills than serving soup does. But is it compassion or arrogance for our executive to assume that her tutoring is worth time instead of writing a check. True, the emphasis of the moment seems to be buy. But she has to be pretty confident in her mentoring skills to believe that but professional tutoring and counseling, health care, etc.). course, this assumes that our executive actually does write that contribution check, and that she writes it to the soup kitchen or tutoring program and not to her of personal involvement in good works. She might quite reasonably poring over spreadsheets in her office. She might enjoy the moral the soup kitchen rather than donating the cash value of her time, this means people are going hungry so that she can be morally uplifted. A strange moral a way of achieving a national goal without costing taxpayers any money. But logically, something either is an obligation of society or it isn't. And if it is being left to voluntarism, that obligation is not being fully met. (That's why each volunteer "makes a difference," as we are constantly being told.) Perhaps this or that function cannot or should not be provided by the government. But to say it is a social obligation that ought to be satisfied through voluntarism is to have it both ways. Society accepts the it's not a pleasing noise. The summit itself is an example of the summit's philosophy about how things ought to work: identical and mutually reinforcing the country. Basically this is the propaganda machinery of war being revved up in peacetime, which is one reason the rhetoric is so overheated and so full of martial metaphors. Festivities like the Volunteer Summit address a national they do the practical problem that is their alleged subject. And the premise that you must give of your body, not just of your money, makes voluntarism an touts two different interviews with the former general. One of them is breathlessly but illogically labeled an "exclusive." promotion. Who are the victims of that discrimination? The most obvious candidates are the black workers who are denied suitable positions. But there's a second class of potential victims: the corporate stockholders, who are denied guess that when there is discrimination, stockholders suffer less than the black workers do. In fact, it's more likely to be the other way around, for would be cruelly ironic. Boycotts lower corporate profits, which punishes not sinners, but their victims. There is even greater irony in the reports that To see why the stockholders bear many of the costs of discrimination, let's think through a few alternative scenarios. blacks will be filled by whites, presumably of about equal competence. (Because black executives end up profiting from the equal wisdom of white suppose this time that discrimination is rampant throughout the industry. Then are comparable jobs available in other industries, the oil industry as a whole cannot treat its black employees any worse than the standard set by those other industries.) So, in this scenario, blacks can be harmed by discrimination in second scenario, it's the stockholders who suffer for the sins of the management. To see why, consider this example: Suppose that throughout the oil payroll by firing all its white executives and hiring blacks to replace them elsewhere in the market. But that is just a matter of definition, and we can at least agree on this: No matter how you define discrimination, hiring up with lots of black executives and a tidy profit for the stockholders; but if is a single best person for each job and a single best job for each person. In employees who are thereby excluded from their ideal jobs or forced to accept lower wages in order to remain in those jobs. But in this scenario, discrimination becomes even costlier to stockholders, who now own shares in a workers and the stockholders are victims. The truth is probably some discriminated against blacks (and it's worth noting that the evidence for that tastes for racial discrimination at a multimillion dollar cost to the stockholders, the same conclusion should be equally obvious. corporate executives who bilked their investors by failing to hire the best affirmative action. But the military has a good kind of affirmative action, which expands equal opportunity without making racial preferences. She offers insist that they support affirmative action. And they often point to the military, by all accounts, has indeed done a great job of integrating its higher reaches and achieving racial harmony without harming its ability to serve its mission. Affirmative action in the military is a success. But has the military avoided the alleged poison of reverse discrimination? Not at all. The real lesson of affirmative action in the military is that reverse its face. The boss asked for a list that included blacks and then chose a black off the list. Equal opportunity or reverse discrimination? A little more promotion to brigadier general. An exception was made in order to give forthright in his defense of affirmative action, says himself that he wouldn't have appeared on the second list or been made the youngest general in the Army place where (in her words) "people rise or fall according to their merits, not their race." But this is a misconception. The services set stringent guidelines for minority recruitment and promotion that sometimes surpass the supposed excesses of racially obsessed university admissions officers. For instance the Air Force, long the most resistant of the services to affirmative action, recently changed its promotion policy to increase its number of black pilots. of white applicants. Do you believe this is the result of pure "equal opportunity," with nary a drop of "racial preference"? turned down long lines of qualified white males to save room for blacks. I denied whites interviews. I put their names on waiting lists. Every few months among the black rank and file, which had resulted in race riots on bases. To diversify its officer corps, the Army began targeting scholarship money candidates' race into consideration. Promotions, the guidelines say, must roughly match the racial composition of the pool of candidates. The regulations naturally say that the panels should not lower standards simply to boost usually have little trouble seeing through it. Members of the panels are under heavy career and political pressure to meet goals. According to the Pentagon, more minorities and women have been appointed to promotion boards and explicitly instructed to act as advocates for the minority and women candidates who appear before them. To see that as expanding "opportunity" and not granting called the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute to ensure that the Standard showed that the officers who serve in the institute on a rotating basis are trained in lengthy seminars, rife with the goofiest sort of political correctness. In one class on the "White Male Club," an instructor lectured: "Q: mechanics of affirmative action in the military mimic those of affirmative action in higher education, why hasn't the military taken the same flak? Unlike the universities, the military has none of the notorious statistics about successfully transformed from a clubby elite, where promotions depended on golfing partners, into a more integrated meritocracy. To be sure, the Army's program insists, though more vaguely minimum qualifications as their white counterparts. But there is a critical difference between being qualified, in the sense of meeting some minimum standard, and being better qualified than all those who are rejected. Choosing military and civilian affirmative action is that the military has an overabundance of minority candidates. Consequently, the Army can eliminate its and federal agencies must compete aggressively over a much smaller pool. works, its critics deny its essential nature. For affirmative action to do anything, it must involve advancing people who are slightly less qualified. prevailing standards, than people who get passed over. It is necessarily a sloppy process that injects another arbitrary standard into an already runs a lot of headlines about scandals, but rarely does it run a headline that probably subconscious racial prejudice that has turned a legitimately wrongheaded, implying that there's something inherently scandalous about headline was necessary to prevent the story from seeming absurd. Can you in the form of improper or illegal donations (which, of course, we already knew about). Foreign citizens or companies funneled money through domestic front men or front companies. And sometimes foreigners thus got to rub elbows with news of the existence of this document outlining a plan to raise money from weeks.) Would the Times be billing minor investigative twists as lead paragraph, which is supposed to crystallize the story's news value, is this: "A special access to the White House, the committee's records show." You mean story. But among them isn't the fact, repeated in the third paragraph, that path to power." And among them isn't the fact, repeated (again) in the fourth these nuggets is interesting enough to make this the day's main story. The only brain. That's why the story's headline is so telling. thing about this scandal is that its root cause and its mitigating circumstance gloves, and so on. Yet it is perfectly legal for them to lubricate such age of globalization and with the United States' fate increasingly tied to the fate of other nations, the United States' best newspaper would be careful not to run articles that needlessly feed xenophobia. Guess again. Six weeks ago a "distinctive characteristics" that give them "significant advantages" over the United States in foreign policy. They "see politics as exclusively combative contests, involving haggling, maneuvering, bargaining and manipulating. The political theory"), China's leaders "insist on claiming the moral high ground, because top leaders are supposed to be morally superior men." In short, China's noted, aggravate another disturbing feature of modern China. It seems that the Dad was a Camel man, and his offer usually came as he filled the air with smoke and ash. He so despised his deadly habit that he routinely thumped any kid teen smoking a federal affair two years ago when he unleashed the Food and Drug Administration on the problem. And there is a problem: A recent study shows federal government into the fray by diagnosing teen smoking as a "pediatric disease." Assuming regulatory control over the noxious weed for the first time in the agency's history, he defined tobacco as a "drug" and tobacco products held that poisonous products like cigarettes, for which no health claim is made, should fall outside government regulation. The tobacco bastards didn't actually call their product poisonous in court, but that's their our product kills. And make no mistake about it, tobacco kills: The average cigarette smoker lives eight fewer years than the average nonsmoker. because the tobacco companies are evil doesn't mean that we should sympathize consistent, it would leapfrog the Drug Enforcement Administration and start joint.) Or it would police whiskey and shot glasses. Or it would go after the and most kids don't want to grow up to inherit such a safe place, either. The nibbled away if suffering children can be associated with it. But even the acknowledging the agency's power grab by rejecting the proposals that don't administration's goals of halving teen smoking in the next seven years. But do. Young black girls are even more resistant to tobacco: Forty percent of percentages. What changed? One theory holds that young white girls (unlike young black girls) subscribe to a cult of thinness, and smoke to block their appetite. Some black teens tell researchers that they feel that society has so thoroughly stacked the deck against them with racial discrimination, crime, and poverty that their very survival depends on resisting tobacco. And still others young whites. To the sociologists' speculations, add mine. Everybody likes a little danger in their lives, but perhaps most black kids are already experiencing all the hazards their psyches can take. Meanwhile, kids (of all grab is because the Zeitgeist has been moving in the agency's direction for some time. Our culture now interprets nearly all pleasures as booze, gambling, food, cheap thrills, and yes, tobacco. Shall we call in the current plans to dispatch referees to our bedrooms to enforce safe sex, but when it does, you can be sure it will be in the guise of protecting quit the cigarette habit, as did my oldest brother and my baby sister. The press the magic button and quit tomorrow if they could. makeshift flagstaff. I don't remember what I spent the money on, but I do recall how I rebelled my way through high school. I drank to howling, puking hotel, for the apparent purpose of sexual dalliance. a careful review of the evidence makes clear that there are only three not one of the feminist groups that clamored first for a Senate hearing for is that each prompted a rush to judgment by people on both sides of the ideological divide. And most striking, in my view, is the hypocrisy (or piece of paper with a suite number on it, and said the governor would like to employee's performance of her job and bring her to his hotel room. And that seems pretty shabby no matter what, exactly, her about pornographic movies and his own sexual prowess. Hill did not accuse recommendation that helped her land a law teaching job, phoning him repeatedly, inviting him to make an appearance at the law school, and more. corroboration. "I could see her shaking" as she came walking back to the the details offhand but that "I know he grabbed her. She said he just kept on moving close to her and putting his hand on her knee, and every time she describing something dramatic. "He dropped his pants," she responded, "and I putting his hands on her legs and he was trying to put his hands up her dress. good friend of mine,' and he told her, 'I know you're a smart girl and you're Brown, has drawn more publicity than the other five witnesses combined, because together, these six contemporaneous witnesses provide far stronger witnesses testified that Hill had told them in vague, general terms of being legal, as distinct from her factual, claims have their weaknesses. But her legal theories are hardly frivolous. A single, extremely outrageous act of sexual harassment, without much more, can arguably support a "hostile working why have the media and a lot of other people acted as though the opposite were with big hair coming out of the trailer parks." But that's not all of it. Not, that is, unless you believe that the press would have given similar coverage to a similar accuser, making similar allegations, supported by similar evidence, discrimination. But more importantly, it's about how a little arithmetic can go mind is, Why do blacks earn less than whites do? The easiest hypothesis is that the employers discriminate. Some commentators have attempted to dismiss that hypothesis on the grounds that discrimination is costly (because it entails a willingness to pay premium wages for white workers) and therefore unattractive kind of dismissal is too glib, because it is not based on any estimate of how much it costs to discriminate. Without that estimate, we can't even begin to think about whether the cost is high enough to make much workers, a half dollar gets paid to the bondholders and the stockholders more concrete, suppose you're the manager of a corporation that employs one discrimination. Notice first that discrimination must be quite common in your industry; otherwise your black worker would have gone elsewhere long ago. That percent increase overnight. Your payouts now look like this: company's stock. That's enough to put you on the cover of Time magazine as the financial genius of the century. To continue discriminating is to throw away an opportunity for unprecedented financial success. In fact, that same opportunity is available to every other corporate manager in the industry as well, and they're rejecting it too (remember that discrimination must be widespread or all blacks would move to nondiscriminatory firms). So in order to believe that discrimination explains percent gain for their stockholders, and the acclaim of all Wall Street for themselves. Personally, I find that wildly implausible. disproof that discrimination exists, but it's at least a calculation that needs ironclad. If you juggle those initial assumptions a bit, you'll get a number discover a scenario in which discrimination is plausible. (My guess is that you won't, but then again, you and I might have different standards for what's plausible.) Regardless of how that experiment turns out, it's well worth performing. Without some such test, there is simply no way to know whether for example, that there is discrimination not by employers but by customers, who are willing to pay a premium for goods and services produced by white workers. To advocate that theory convincingly, you'd have to estimate the size of the premium and assess whether it's something that consumers would plausibly that blacks earn less because they have fewer marketable skills. Like theories of discrimination, these theories are best judged by quantitative criteria, but now we have to go beyond what can be computed on the back of an envelope and look, for example, at what we can learn from standardized test scores. largely explained by differences in skill levels which are already detectable explain those skill differentials, one can try pointing either to training or performance gap between blacks and whites is considerably larger for young by heredity (why should an inherent difference become larger over time?), but not if it's caused by training (if blacks get inferior schooling, then it's not done, and is being done, and will be done. All of that research, at least when it is useful, will be quantitative in one way or another. Some of it requires sophisticated techniques and sophisticated measurements. But there are theory can be well tested with nothing more than the back of an envelope and an United States. An aggressive prosecutor offers to purchase that information with a lenient sentencing recommendation. Do you take the deal? your motives are selfish, you'll probably first make some discreet inquiries to But suppose it's an election year, and the president can't risk granting a controversial pardon in the midst of the campaign. If you choose to remain silent, you'll have to wait till after the election to collect juicy your information is. If you know enough to trigger an impeachment, the president won't dare cross you. You might as well sit tight, confident that other hand, if the offenses you know about are embarrassing but short of impeachable, you've got to make the best deal you can right away. Once the election has passed, your leverage at the White House will be severely limited. nothing at all. Then, assuming you can't get away with bogus accusations, your the two Friends of Bill who now await sentencing. At the moment I write this or that she knows enough to extract a high price for her silence. If she knew a That analysis is an excursion into the branch of economics is notorious for its ability to generate radically different conclusions in response to small changes in the underlying assumptions. Thus I have only a yield far more reliable predictions, and the theory of competitive markets is the most reliable branch of all. So that's the branch we should climb out on if we really want to use economics to get at the truth about the scandals there is no lack of additional scandals to analyze. Take the case of the late the only administration official willing and able to sell out to the charges against him were accurate, there must have been others in the administration who shared his ethical laxity. Those others are presumably still in office. It might be worth an attempt to ferret them out. Similar reasoning could be useful to investigators who are concerned with national security leaks. It would, for example, be interesting monopolist or one of many sellers in a competitive marketplace. seller. That would be reassuring. If, on the other hand, the information was forced to underbid a host of potential competitors. In that case, those potential competitors constitute an ongoing security risk. infiltrated by moles is to conduct elaborate investigations of employees and institutional procedures. A much faster, cheaper, and more accurate way might is behaving surreptitiously, we frequently have to guess what he's up to. We can't hope to guess right all the time. But we can strive to make our guesses consistent with all the evidence and with the basic laws of human behavior. In that enterprise, a little economic theory goes a long way. industrialized world. The patterns show up in comparisons between countries show up whether you look at snapshots in time or at trends that span The data suggest that, on average, a 10-percent increase in the rate of owner occupation is associated with a 2-percent increase in the rate of unemployment. If that's right, it accounts for a substantial fraction geographically. The jobless homeowner looks for jobs within commuting distance of his home. The jobless renter is willing to move to where the jobs are. theory is testable, because it predicts that homeowners suffer longer periods of unemployment, as opposed to more frequent periods of increase in time spent unemployed but little change in the frequency of job spending a lot of time at home, and you'll want to buy a nice house. A more plausible explanation is that when jobs dry up, renters move out, so that only homeowners remain. The other side of that coin is that booming areas tend to draw a lot of newcomers who want to rent for a while. two things occur in tandem, it isn't always right to ask which is the cause and which the effect. After all, mistletoe and eggnog tend to appear in the same month, but neither causes the other. Instead, they're brought on simultaneously that causes both phenomena? The most obvious candidates are age and wealth, unemployment (the young and the poor scramble harder for jobs). candidate, namely, the regulatory climate. He points out that where regulators run amok, they tend to disrupt the rental market and the job market simultaneously. Consider the housing market in New York City, where rental apartments are outrageously expensive. That's largely because New York are skittish about leasing to strangers. At the same time, labor laws make it hard to fire a bad employee, so employers are conservative in their hiring. possible that the numbers themselves are wrong, because of some hidden bias in the way they're collected. Maybe when you're counting the unemployed, it's easy to overlook a transient and hard to overlook a homeowner. So you can tell a lot discussion, let me go back to the first (and, I think, most interesting) story: Homeowners stay unemployed longer because homeowners are less mobile. If that through subsidies). Where those attempts have been most successful, the efficiency of labor markets has declined most dramatically. people they're trying to help, but such an interpretation would be hard to defend. Surely home buyers are well aware that they're sacrificing mobility. That's a voluntary sacrifice, and so (in the judgment of those who choose to buy) it must be more than compensated for by the benefits of ownership. In other words, high unemployment might be the price we pay for owner occupancy, That analysis is guided by an economist's faith in the maxim that people are generally pretty good at looking out for their own interests. The companion maxim is that people often make no attempt at all to look out for the interests of others. So if we really want to pull every possible moral out of our story, we should think about the other people whose interests are at stake when you decide to buy a house. In other words, we extremely important for children. If your family moves during your school years chance that you'll be "economically inactive" (out of school and out of "families that move are more likely to be poor, and that's why their kids don't to rule out this and similar alternative theories, leaving us to conclude that they carefully weigh the damage to their children against competing benefits and act in the interests of the entire family. Or perhaps when parents move, case, a government that cares about children would want to discourage household like this: They have two children, and are undecided about having a third. They lean one way and then the other; they weigh the pros and cons; and finally, they decide to go ahead. Then from the instant that third child is born, the parents love it so deeply that they'd gladly sacrifice all their assets to that with the way people shop for appliances or furniture or compact discs. Generally speaking, if you know you're going to treasure something, you don't unlikely to be cherished. Why, then, are children so different? One of my colleagues maintains that there's no real inconsistency here. He says it's wrong to think of a baby as the equivalent of a microwave oven; instead, you should think of it as the equivalent of an addictive drug. People hesitate about whether to try heroin, but once they try it, they become addicted and can't give it up. Likewise with babies. I think, is a very bad analogy, because heroin addicts tend to be people who believed at the outset that they could escape addiction. Perhaps that's because is what they were thinking. (Why else would we hear so many addicts recounting of parents. Parents know in advance, and with near certainty, that they will be addicted to their children. They choose their addiction with eyes wide open, certainty, that they won't want to break their addiction. If you've already got two kids and are wavering over a third, then you've already got a pretty good idea of what parenthood is like, and you already know that, unlike the addict who despises his addiction, you're going to treasure your attachment to your children. When you know you're going to love something that much after you've got it, how can you hesitate about getting it in the first place? the parent of an only child, I can verify that people do behave that way. I coherent way of thinking about how to make decisions that appropriately reflect emotional and moral attachments to people who are not yet born. The resulting confusion makes it almost impossible to resolve important questions of public example, the following question seems to me to be of both supreme importance and supreme difficulty: Do living people have any moral obligation to the trillions of potential people who will never have the opportunity to live either answer leads to troubling conclusions. If the answer is "yes," then it seems to follow that we are morally obliged to have more children than we unable to break through into the world of the living. If they have rights, then surely we are required to help some of them escape. earlier Slate column, "Be Fruitful and Multiply," I argued that we should reproduce more quickly because it would improve living standards for existing people. Here I am raising the entirely separate question of whether we should reproduce more quickly in order to give life to potential people.) trashing Earth, to the point where there will be no future generations. (That's not to say that we'd necessarily want to trash Earth; we might have selfish reasons for preserving it. I mean to say only that if we ever did want to trash Earth, it would be morally permissible.) If we prevent future generations from entities, then our crimes have no victims, so they're not true crimes. rights, we should massively subsidize population growth; and if they don't have rights, we should feel free to destroy Earth. Either conclusion is disturbing, but what's most disturbing of all is that if we reject one, it seems we are forced to accept the other. Perhaps there's a third way, and that's just to admit that we're incapable of being logically rigorous about issues involving hopes that one of them would grow up to be a creative genius who could solve teach us how to think about the population problem. I hope the next generation The book scared me, not because it concerns incest or happens to be true but because of the malign figure of the father, who reminded me of the character the drugged cadence of the prose, with a chasm between every two sentences, and same neighborhood, but literary New York is a small town, anyway), but I don't know them well enough for it to carry gossip value. I judged The Kiss as all discussion and become the sole focus of criticism. But I naively underestimated its effect, imagining a bunch of dumb reviews and one or two from shrill to vindictive. People went out of their way to attack not just the personally, and her husband, her agent, and her publishers for good Bad publicity is better than none, of course, but after a time you could no longer ignore an odor of smoke, and it wasn't your usual of being a liar, an opportunist, a traitor to all segments of her family, an unfit mother, to have written the book solely for the money or the it. The Kiss has been called "slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical" Yorker killed a scheduled excerpt. The publisher, attempting damage control, rushed the book into stores two months before the publication date. from perfect. But literary matters are not of much interest to the peanut Comment has instead tended to focus on familial betrayal, dubious motives, and those who fret about the effect on her two young children. While this is book now, "before our children were any older and more aware of the media around them." She has a point: The dogs bark, the caravan passes. The furor will be over long before the kids are able to understand it (the spotlight would only be harsher if they were older), and the subject itself would either alive; the book could hurt him. These tend to be the same people who describe the relationship as "consensual," a word that could not occur to anyone who has read the book. Of course, there are men who seem to think that rape is a sex act rather than an act of violence. But the very notion of incest-- the last the victim, this attitude is also provincial and illiterate, if not have shed its last gratuitous prohibitions. It is also a century in which you'd think, judging from the press, that recent authors of memoirs had called incest or alcoholism or any number of species of abuse into being by writing served if rage or remorse were diverted into parlor comedy. Who knows? Again, complication more than they care about the state of literature. Everybody wants the inside scoop, the shoddy truth that lies at the core of all decisions. Accordingly, it is widely believed that books are always planned and written with marketing in mind. Fortunately or not, though, calculation usually results in failure, and for most writers, the foolproof concept that briefly shone at conception looks like a mirage within three days at the keyboard. Also a writer? You should meet my cousin Don. He's got a story that will make you question of memoir vs. novel. Critics are as frantic about saving their novel reminiscent of the moral defenses of painting that were worked up when photography began to look like a threat. That debacle should have taught the world that media can coexist, and that artists can even migrate between them depending on the flavor they seek. (The analogy is imperfect, because there's no fixed line of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction, only a broad gray fictionalization of actual events: "I do not regard such a thing as childish, I regard it as monstrous. I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys." Fiction has voodoo doll has nothing to do with the actual merits or failings of her book, but is entirely owing to how economically her case concentrates the fears, resentments, misconceptions, and idiocies prevailing right now. It also reflects the fact that most cultural journalists are under constant pressure, whether from above or from within, to whip up instant controversies tied to perhaps, their often hapless targets. In the meantime, they don't tend to democracy was flourishing more than it seems to be now, hoping to draw inspiration and lessons for what might be done to revive our apparently ailing the 1830s, gathering observations and ideas that were, in due course, published descriptive observations of another nation, written to influence political that they should encourage voluntary associations in civic society as a new stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming on voluntary associations (understood as functioning in opposition to errand, we might want to notice that the best historical social science challenges the claims of conservatives and centrists about when, how, and why democratic civic engagement has flourished in the United States. size for commercialization and urbanization had already emerged, but without a vibrant set of voluntary associations. By the early 1800s, however, the emergence of associations in both smaller and larger communities was Brown emphasizes that the Revolution, political struggles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and deepening popular participation in national, state, and local elections served to spur associational life. So did religious and commercial and public affairs through widespread newspaper reading. participation, marveling at the United States as the "one country in the world which, day in, day out, makes use of an unlimited freedom of political association," which, in turn, encouraged a more general "taste for the 1820s to the 1840s, coincided with the spread of adult male suffrage and the most associations and the most newspapers." Yet, blinded by his negative army, as an army with a state. Similarly, the early United States may have been not so much a country with a post office, as a post office that gave popular U. S. government had everything to do with the spread of the postal network. The legislative system gave senators and (above all) members of the House of Representatives a strong interest in subsidizing communication and transportation links into even the remotest areas of the growing nation. Special postal rates made mailing newspapers cheap and allowed small newspapers postal system was even more important for civil society and democratic politics than for commerce. Congress could use it to communicate freely with citizens. Citizens, even in the remotest hamlets, could readily communicate with one another, monitoring the doings of Congress, and state and local governments. Voluntary associations soon learned to put out their message in "newspaper" formats, to take advantage of the mail. Emergent political parties in institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive national becomes even more apparent when we consider that most of the big voluntary 1960s or 1970s and in full symbiosis with public social provision. Republic spread in the wake of state and national benefits for Union veterans of the Civil War, for example. The Fraternal Order of Eagles was so active in of local, state, and federal regulations, services, and benefits for mothers and children. New Deal laws and administrative interventions were vital aids quite rightly, no longer feel they can effectively band together to get things done either through, or in relationship to, government. The problem may not be than virtually any other advanced national state. The issue may be recent shifts in society and styles of politics that make it less inviting and far National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, and the National founded have been structured like thousands of smaller ones: They are careers, and crowd into cosmopolitan centers. Indeed, by the 1960s, the United contacted directly by party or group workers. Politicians may not care much "swing" groups of voters. This has happened in electoral politics at the same would be just as worried about these national trends as about possible declines associations of all sorts. He would also surely be surprised that today's depoliticized and romantic localism as an improbable remedy for the larger ills Street playhouse portend good things or bad things for the Great White Way? thousand booms. No season has ever been plain average. Consider this classic some dialectical process that dooms it to fall on its face every other year. Compounding the confusion caused by these historical fluctuations are investors' money, the paper editorialized, "The Great White Way is ailing." In just a matter of theatrical exaggeration. Reporters and critics have a for most of this century, theater's biggest boosters have been convinced that they were celebrating an antiquated institution long displaced by movies and buildings: it is obsolete." This anxiety colors these critics' assessment of optimistically greeted as a potential watershed, an end to the perpetual crisis. All negative data merely exacerbate the fatalism. the line adopted in several recent Times pieces is that while extravagant musicals can score funding and bring in huge crowds of tourists, art form. But wait. Maybe it's thriving as an art form but dying as a business. circles, everyone is waiting for the next X. "X" was the byline on the famous Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is now hitting the "according to the editors of that distinguished journal"). Blurbs from tribal theme shows up in treatises about the importance of the sentiments aroused by such men. Now that the bipolar order of the Cold War is gone, we're told, the primal bonds of ethnicity, language, and religion will be a carries this idea to new heights of theoretical elaboration. Surely tribalism has never sounded so cerebral. But it's one thing to analyze a phenomenon and you wonder: How different, really, are the lowbrow and highbrow expressions of of the Cold War had inspired such upbeat visions as the inexorable triumph of and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale," he writes in the book. Relations between nations from different civilizations will be tribalism? Tribally. The very "survival of the West" depends on Westerners "uniting to renew and preserve" their civilization "against challenges from diagnosis (perilously deep fault lines) leads to his prescription (further deepen the fault lines) is a puzzle to which we'll return. But first, a word about the diagnosis. Does his notion of "civilizations" as tribes writ large thwart the West on such issues as arms proliferation. But the grab bag of national policies that supposedly add up to this grand transnational wanted to use one variable to predict whether a nation is involved in one of the four remaining Communist dictatorships than knowing whether it's one really bothers me. Though ancestral cultures aren't the mystical epoxy that pretty tense. But why can't this change with, say, a new, more cosmopolitan, regime in China, or firmer and more consistent diplomatic signals from should be able to calmly find their zones of common interest with the West and with these people? Are only Westerners capable of perceiving their rational "constructive engagement" and "dialogue" across the Pacific, he writes, "To the supremacist: He is defending the integrity of all cultures, theirs and ours. Indeed, he sounds almost like a lefty relativist when he says we must accept Western values as the inexorable fate of humankind. But of course, that's just fits us. In this light the meaning of his call to "maintain the equal. You let one alien nation move into your trade bloc, and pretty soon the down to "the West against the rest." Raise the drawbridges! Up until this point he has been ignoring or downplaying the interdependence about environmental problems soluble only by international cooperation. On the that "natural conflicts of interest" dominate world affairs. It is in the interests of civilizations not just to "coexist" but to actively cooperate. We live in a world not just of "transnational corporations" but of "transnational mafias and drug cartels," problems that nations can solve only by acting in concert. In the book's final paragraph he repeats that, "in the separately," but he adds that in "the greater clash," the "global" clash World Order handshake, we'd like him to resolve some paradoxes in his thinking. In particular: the tension between his prescriptions of (a) the West turning inward for its own salvation; and (b) the world's different tribes cooperating for global salvation. Clearly, the first can complicate the second. If, for its uses. But the growing academic fad of thinking in primarily, almost obsessively, tribal terms is another matter. In addition to being analytically much time talking about people from other "civilizations," as if they lived on the evolution of altruistic impulses toward close relatives. The textbook example of kin selection is a newly minted gene that inclines a ground squirrel to stand up and give an alarm call upon seeing a predator. At first glance, this gene would seem to have no chance of proliferating via natural selection, since it attracts the predator's attention and thus endangers the organism in which it resides. But remember: The gene will also reside, on average, in half call" gene occasionally causes the death of its possessor, the gene itself may still flourish by natural selection, as long as more than two siblings are saved for every one ground squirrel that is lost. (If this Cliff Notes version of kin selection doesn't seem to make sense, then please go and read the excerpt from the chapter titled "Families" on the Web site for my book, Animal, then come back, and keep reading.) In our species, the result of proportional to the closeness of relatives. Most people would be more inclined to risk their lives for a sibling than for a cousin, and for a cousin than for reared in close enough proximity to these relatives to develop the emotional enters the minds of people eager to believe that whites and blacks are innately hostile toward one another. They try to extend the logic of kin selection beyond the scope of the family and carry it all the way up to the level of whole races. They are assuming, in other words, that there is a universal law dictating that altruism between individuals be proportional to their degree of problems with this logic. The first is a fairly technical (though even try to explain the fallacy here, except to say that a) It consists of assuming that kin selection would make altruism proportional to overall have in common with another organism; and b) This assumption has been memorably to the National Review fallacy (they don't call it that, of course), see their chapter in the forthcoming textbook Evolutionary Social accessible. Kin selection isn't some inexorable force of evolution. It's just a theoretical possibility, one that will only be realized if the circumstances of evolution are conducive to its realization. In the case of altruism directed toward close relatives, we know that circumstances were indeed so conducive: Throughout human evolution, people were reared a) near close relatives; and b) near people who weren't close relatives. Thus there was lots of opportunity for the flourishing of genes that led humans to discriminate between the two, favoring the former at the expense of the latter. But in the case of comparable discrimination between members of one's own race and members of other races, there was no significant opportunity for the evolution of such a trait. Because during human evolution (that is, during that short span of human evolution that took place after distinct races began forming), there was roughly zero back then. Saying that white people evolved an innate aversion to blacks, or blacks an innate aversion to whites, is like saying people evolved an innate aversion to some poison plant that grows only on Mars; the opportunity simply that human nature doesn't vastly complicate race relations. People are obviously inclined to derogate groups whose interests seem to clash with those of their own group, and to identify those groups by whatever means are available. Skin color can be an unfortunately handy means of doing the identifying. What's more, kin selection itself may complicate race relations in various subtle ways. For example: Nepotism, one legacy of kin selection, is members of your race. When a white boss promotes his niece, he is discriminating against some whites (the ones who aren't in his family), but exaggeration in saying that xenophobia is a part of human nature, at least in this sense: Uncritical hostility toward an identifiable group of capacity, activated under certain predictable circumstances. But that is very different from saying we are designed to automatically dislike people with The article in which the "National Review fallacy" appeared was a review impossibility of racial harmony). No doubt some of my animus toward the article that the "National Review fallacy" is indeed a fallacy. The same opinion biologists of this century and arguably the chief architect of evolutionary debts than assets. How should the estate be divided among his creditors? Two reasoning of the ancient rabbis is best understood in the light of modern distribute, then everyone gets an equal share; that is, everyone gets Where do these numbers come from, and how should we behave certain patterns are evident. Apparently the rabbis reasoned that nobody can legitimately claim more than the value of the entire estate. Thus when the this: "Both claim half the garment, while only one claims the other half. So we'll split the disputed half equally and give the undisputed half to its to settle a case where one claims all and the other claims a third. bankrupt estate, provided there are just two creditors. Here's an example: should we do when there are three or more creditors? According to Professors can solve this problem by introducing just one more principle, which they call creditors must divide their collective share according to the principles we've already enunciated. To see what consistency means in practice, think again prescription satisfies the consistency principle in this instance. It's not hard to confirm the same would be true if you started with the first and third But wait! All we've done is checked that the first two inconsistent. (That is, with any other division, some pair of creditors would have its collective share divided incorrectly.) In fact, they have proved more generally that every bankruptcy problem has exactly one consistent solution. Once you've found a consistent division, you can be sure that no rejecting each one as inconsistent until they hit upon the unique consistent approaches are possible but a bit complicated. Click for an explanation of the the consistency principle gives a complete explanation for each example, in the sense that, in each case, only one consistent solution is possible, and we can imagine that the rabbis kept trying until they found it. The consistency principle is both universally applicable (because a consistent solution can always be found) and universally unambiguous (because there is never more than found them all. So this is the only division that obeys all the principles we've stated. Although the ancient rabbis failed to consider this had considered it, they would have endorsed this unique consistent creditors are put in a room and told to agree among themselves on a division of the estate; if they can't agree, nobody gets anything. Suppose also that any others) is required to accept it and leave the room. What would the bargaining branch of economics called "bargaining theory" that attempts to answer such questions; unfortunately, the answers turn out to depend rather heavily on the bankruptcy negotiation, it follows from reasonable assumptions that the creditors would eventually agree to divide the estate in accordance with the prescriptions coincide with what the creditors themselves would have agreed to, given appropriate bargaining rules and sufficient time. "reticent," and "loath" to discuss it, claims the press corps. Or "even to loves the Wound for the reductionist power it affords them when they write about the candidate. Writing in the New Republic on behalf of hacks shorthand? Explanation: Infirmities prevent him from scribbling much beyond his signature, so he's trained himself to compress the world into verbal hieroglyphics. Dole refuses to give up? Explanation: He was left for the dirt nap today if not for his interminable spirit. Dole is a hatchet hardscrabble and was crippled in the bloom of his handsome prime! He earned But most of all, the press corps loves to touch the Wound because they've convinced themselves that subject was previously taboo. Give a revealingly, [Dole is] willing more and more to speak of being shot in World War II, and of his lengthy recovery from wounds that almost killed him and left decades in Congress has been to reluctant to draw attention to his wounds from World War II, returned today to a hospital building where he suffered stoicism being what it is, Dole still seems uncomfortable talking about the wrapped up his party's nomination, his generation's World War II experience is at the heart of his third run for the presidency. But he talks about it [Dole] has given up his reticence to discuss his war wounds. three years and left him with a useless right arm signaled a change in the very private man who has been reluctant to discuss the episode. reluctant to discuss his injuries and his grueling recovery, Dole has been warming up to the subject in interviews and speeches. But the notion that Dole is just now exiting the Wound on is a perennial press fantasy. Dole is always talking about his Wound, and the press is always asserting that he is doing so reluctantly, for the and his reflections on the Wound and the aftermath consume a great chunk of first time in his public life, he has forced himself to speak openly about the horrible war wound that turned a strapping, athletic youth into an emaciated, advisers have also sought to turn the toughness that enabled Dole to overcome his injury into an asset, the counterpoint to the Bush "wimp" image that is the other side of the deeply personal contest between the two men. which Dole himself describes the Wounding in graphic detail ("Some body, I couldn't move my arms, my legs."), the press would finally say with authority that Dole is not only comfortable with talking about the Wound, he's chance. In the final hours of the Republican National Convention, reporters were still writing that Dole was only just coming to grips with his touchy subject is Dole's grievous war wound. He has always been loath to talk nicely with their other blind spot: that a "new, sensitive Dole" has emerged to replace the "mean hatchet man." When Dole misted up at the convention, fact a sluice of his tears courses its way through his recent career. He sobbed retired from the Senate earlier this summer; when he visited his hometown of whenever he hears "You'll Never Walk Alone" (which he played continuously does the press paint Dole as a New Age '90s guy who is finally making the big hug with the inner child who was ravaged by the Wound? Don't blame Dole. He hasn't exploited his war record for exploiting the Wound nor shunning it, Dole has folded it into his life, With Disabilities Act through Congress, and going out of his way to align himself with the physically impaired. When he gave the commencement address engaging in political grandstanding. He was working his constituency. this election cycle is the media's Campaign Cognitive Disorder, a seemingly journalists blot out the past and embrace the mawkish. In the case of Bob Dole, since the '70s and, despite the tears, is just as mean as ever. He's probably been chortling for more than three decades. In a Dole profile gatherings passed without a tactful mention of [Dole's] military service in sympathy when he retold the tale of his battle injury, leavening the reference by saying it won him a "bedpan promotion" to captain. ask him about the war wound," says French. "It would switch the conversation to free than for one innocent person to suffer. And for two centuries, legal principle. Apparently, none of those scholars has thought to ask the obvious and acquitting the guilty. The hard part is deciding how many false acquittals you're willing to accept to avoid a false conviction. That number matters. It criminal statute or modify the rules of evidence, we are adjusting the terms of Here's one approach: Imagine how a guilty man going free or a free man getting convicted might affect your life. (Or, so we don't get too deeply sidetracked into your personal idiosyncrasies, how the guilty going free or the free getting convicted might affect the lives of your neighbors.) On the one hand, your neighbors risk being falsely accused and convicted. On the other hand, they risk being victimized by criminals who have been falsely acquitted (or by others who were emboldened to become criminals because of the frequency of false acquittals). In principle, the cost of either disaster can be measured in dollars. In practice, we can approximate those measures by making a reasonable guess as to how much your typical neighbor would be willing to pay to avoid a year in jail or to avoid being robbed on the way home from work. estimating the costs of being either an imprisoned innocent or a crime victim, we can estimate the probability that your neighbor will actually face each of these problems. But once we know the cost and the probability associated with a given risk, we can infer a lot about how undesirable that risk is. We can do this, for example, by observing the way people behave in insurance markets. Suppose you want to know just how unpleasant it is to face a see how much they are willing to pay for fire insurance. look at labor markets: How much extra must you pay a worker to get him to take the value of an arm; this is a hypothetical example), then we have another way can use data from financial markets: How much more interest must you offer an That's relatively easy to observe, and it gives yet another measure of how much False acquittals and false convictions are each associated with certain levels and probabilities of risk. By examining behavior in insurance markets, labor markets, and financial markets, we can make some reasonable guesses about how much people dislike each of these prospects, and also the extent to which people are willing to trade off one kind of risk for the other. That will give an indication of whether we ought to be expanding or work to complete that project, and at the end all you'd have is a rough estimate. Your final number would be suspect in a hundred ways. For example, the data from insurance and labor markets tell a pretty consistent story about people's aversion to risk, but the data from financial markets make the degree of risk aversion appear much higher. There might be no entirely satisfactory way to resolve such inconsistencies. But until you've done some kind of of arithmetic allow only two possibilities. Women's clothing must be associated either with higher costs or with higher profit margins for the dry cleaner. Unfortunately, neither theory seems terribly plausible. Let's start with the "higher cost" theory. In its most naive form, this theory predicts that if I move the buttons on my dress shirts from the right side to the left, the cost of laundering them will more than triple. That one's not going to fly. So, to give the theory a fair chance, we have to look for more significant differences between men's and women's argue that women's clothing is typically made of more delicate fabrics than men's. But if that's the relevant factor, why don't dry cleaners just quote different prices for different fabrics? (For some materials, such as silk, they typically do quote separate prices. The question is why this practice does not completely displace that of distinguishing between men's clothes and alternative version of the theory is that women's clothes are costlier to process because women demand higher quality work. I can't disprove that version, but I have no real evidence to support it, either. So, in a search for better alternatives, I called three different dry cleaners and asked for their explanations. The first said that men's shirts are machine pressed, while women's are hand pressed. That left me wondering why they don't simply quote different prices for different kinds of pressing. The second said that women's shirts require specialized treatment because they are typically chronically dissatisfied with their dry cleaners. The third said that this was their pricing policy, and if I didn't like it, I was free to shop cleaner is exploiting female customers through higher markups. sense of that theory, you have to ask why dry cleaners would want to discriminate specifically against women, as opposed to, say, men. That strategy likely to walk away in the face of a high markup. But why should men be more as long as we're dealing in stereotypes, you could argue equally well that would be more likely to walk away from a high price, and it would make more candidate for getting soaked at the cleaners. But there's a more fundamental reason to doubt that either gender can be victimized by price discrimination, and here it is: There are over half a dozen dry cleaners within easy walking distance of my house. If they're all earning higher profits on women's blouses than on men's shirts, why hasn't any of them decided to entertaining) they are equally expensive for the cleaner to handle. Then if I Because nobody has adopted that obvious strategy, we should suspect that despite appearances, the profit margin on women's clothing can't be much higher business would quickly eliminate any profit differential. argument rests on the fact that dry cleaners are highly competitive. If discriminate against women (or men, depending on market conditions). But in the so many interchangeable dry cleaners that none of them should be able to get lure away her business. If most customers are as devoted as she is, then each that case, price discrimination can survive. But I am instinctively skeptical that many customers are as fanatically loyal as my colleague's wife. that only a monopolist can price discriminate is standard textbook fare, and it's borne out by a lot of observations. Movie theaters have a certain amount of monopoly power (on a given night, a given moviegoer is likely to have a strong preference for a particular movie at a particular theater), and they price discriminate by offering discounts to senior citizens (which is they heavily discriminate against business travelers by charging more for midweek flights than for weekend flights (when most travel is for leisure). industries, there is no price discrimination. As I am fond of pointing out to my students, you've never heard of a wheat farmer who offers senior citizen discounts. Likewise for gas stations, which are ubiquitous and sell to everyone least that's what I used to tell my students. But I might have to make a small change in my lesson plan. The gas station nearest our campus has just price discrimination in favor of seniors, or does it reflect a genuinely lower If you push me hard enough, I can probably concoct some kind of story about lower costs. Maybe seniors tend to drive cars with bigger the cost of processing credit cards. (A significant part of that cost is the time spent waiting for the card to be approved, during which the pump is unavailable.) But if this cost saving is significant, why has only one local colleagues that none of us should be permitted to present ourselves to the world as economists until we figure out what this gas station is up to. Nobody has risen to the challenge. A few have suggested that perhaps the gas station owner is just a little quirky. Maybe that's right. But it would be far harder to believe that the entire dry cleaning industry is just a little quirky. Either there is enough monopoly power to sustain price discrimination, or there is some reason why women's clothes are incredibly expensive to clean and press. brought both costs and benefits into this world. The costs include the demands you made (and continue to make) on the world's resources. The benefits include your ongoing contributions to the world's stock of ideas, love, friendship, and benefits, or vice versa? In other words: Should the rest of us consider your birth (or any child's birth) a blessing or a curse? settle this by listing all the costs and benefits of sharing the world with other people. After an evening stuck in summer traffic, you'll remember that the driver in front of you imposed a cost, but you might forget that the guy who invented your car's air conditioner conferred a benefit. New Yorkers remember to complain about the crowds, but sometimes forget that without the of making a list, let's think about the decision your parents faced when they were considering whether to conceive a child. Is it more likely that they birth is that it gave your parents a child to love; they certainly counted that one. But the other benefits are spread far and wide. If you build a better mousetrap, millions will be in your debt. If all you do is smile, you'll still brighten thousands of days. We don't know how to list those benefits, but we do know that many of them fall on total strangers. That makes it unlikely that costs of your existence fall into two categories. First, you consume privately owned resources like food and land. Second, you might consume resources to that pollutes the air I breathe, or you might become a burglar who steals my imagine that there are also costs associated with your competing in the marketplace, bidding some prices up and others down, applying for the job I wanted, and so forth. But each of those costs has an offsetting benefit. If you bid up the price of cars, sellers will gain as much as buyers lose. If you prove a stronger job candidate than I do, my loss is the employer's gain.) strangers. But if you're at all typical, your consumption of staples like food and land will far exceed your consumption of other people's air and other people's property. In other words, for most people, the first category of costs resources you own and consume? Some you create; those don't cost anybody anything. Some you trade for; again, those don't cost anybody anything. The rest you inherit; and those come from your siblings' share. That means your point that's often missed. When people think about overcrowding or overpopulation, they typically imagine that if, for example, I had not been born, everyone else would have a slightly bigger share of the pie. But that's not right. If I had not been born, both my sisters would have substantially So when parents are deciding whether to have a third, fourth, or fifth child, they are generally more conscious of the costs than of the benefits. Most of the costs are imposed on their other beloved children, while many of the benefits are dispersed among strangers. conscious of costs than of benefits, he tends to make decisions that are overly conservative. That almost surely means that parents have fewer children than is socially desirable, and that therefore, the population grows too slowly. My daughter is an only child, which makes me part of the problem. there is a young lady whose life has been impoverished by my failure to sire the son who would someday sweep her off her feet. If I cared as much about that because I selfishly acted as if other people's children are less important than The owner of a polluting steel mill weighs all its benefits (that is, his profits) against only a portion of its costs (he counts his expenses, but not other children) against only a portion of the benefits (they count their own love for their children, but not others' love for their children). Therefore, suggest that I should have had more children for the sake of strangers. A second, completely separate argument says I should have had more children for the sake of those children themselves. Presumably they'd have been grateful for nothing close to a consensus on how to assign rights to the unborn, so we can arguments when I selfishly limited the size of my family. I understand selfishness. But I can't understand encouraging others to be selfish, which is the entire purpose of organizations like Zero Population Growth. Instead, we should look for ways to subsidize reproduction. A world with many people offers more potential friends who share our interests, more small acts of kindness between strangers, and a better chance of finding love. That's the describe: earnest, well meaning, and hopelessly naive. We envisioned an eventual era of global peace, a time when nationalism had lost its edge and Nations or even a true World Parliament. This fuzzy idealism earned us the With the Cold War over and economic globalization accelerating, the ideological Meanwhile, less enthusiastic tracts, with ominous titles like One World, World Parliament phase. But the migration of governance from the national to the supranational level is proceeding apace, in lots of little but ultimately momentous ways. If this fact were more widely appreciated, globalization might constraint placed on a nation's domestic policies by worldwide capitalism. Global bond markets punish national governments that splurge on safety nets. Global labor markets punish nations with a high minimum wage or costly environmental standards. "One world" now means a single planetary market that can sweep away national policies designed in a simpler era to blunt the the sudden provincialism of liberals. Supranational bodies like the World Trade now, at least, they indeed are little more than that. Still, even the new mushy ideal that got us laughed off the stage in the first place? Supranational Indeed, the dependence it creates can be volatile. Witness Japan's testy noted in Slate, free trade gives millions of poor people a step up the ladder. Yes, that may mean working in a sweatshop. But these people manifestly prefer that to their prior condition. It may come as a shock to some suburban even leaving lofty universalism aside, international trade organizations can that some of the regulation is excessive, but much of it isn't. And, anyway, my point is just that a supranational trade body can in principle be supported coalition and reflects that fact. But it's not beyond change. For negotiations strange that so many of those most offended by globalization call themselves "progressives." Early this century, the progressives were people who realized that communications and transportation technologies were pushing the scope of economic activity outward, from individual states to the United States as a whole. They responded by pushing economic regulation from the state to the federal level. The analogous leap today is from national to supranational regulation. Yet many of today's progressives are economic nationalists, viewing intercourse is about as deeply ingrained in the human brain as any other form slowed, but it can't, realistically, be stopped. The original progressives chose to swim with this basic current of history. Many of today's conditions that foreign factories must meet if their products are to sport a Thus the old left, intentionally or not, is pushing us from national regulation significant functions of governance is no longer the issue. (Mainstream countries that fail to open their telecommunications to foreign investment.) The issue, rather, is the perennial issue: whether governance will be to the column is posted, the Senate is poised to vote on the Chemical Weapons and two of the most rabidly reactionary institutions in politics today: the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page and a reptilian Cold War vestige called the Center for Security Policy). Even so, the fact remains that this all Senate Democrats, around half of all Senate Republicans, Presidents that, in the modern world, where neither commerce nor terrorism knows national induced, the fetus' skull is crushed, and its brains are suctioned. So, performed and claimed incorrectly that most such operations were necessary for change his position now that the truth has been revealed. stirring. First, there was the critical moment of moral doubt: The day after forward when he could no longer watch the debate be "engulfed by spins and have influenced the national debate, because the segments of the recantation and confession, moreover, there is nothing new about what he country. After interviewing doctors who perform the procedure, both papers protect the woman's health. Most of them were performed on poor women who could not muster the money to pay for abortions earlier in their pregnancies. of his patients choose it because it is safer and more convenient than the before a congressional committee two years ago. These two doctors together of the groups that provides reliable statistics about abortion tallies up the total numbers of IDEs. Consequently, there's much improvisation and sleight of hand involved when anyone throws around numbers. Both sides claim to have derived their figures from interviews with doctors who perform IDEs, but different doctors use different definitions of the procedure and, in many cases, they probably make only rough estimates of their own caseloads. Whether (but not Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States). While it aims to protect abortion rights, its agenda is mostly more mundane. Right now, its biggest task is negotiating contracts with newspaper accounts fail to point out that, in spite of his confession, carrying badly deformed babies who have no other alternative. Perhaps the guilt about the uncritical reportage of his old one. disingenuous strategy coming back to bite them. Instead of categorically defending a woman's right to an abortion, they have chosen to challenge abortions. But these details are their weakest points. Abortion is necessarily an ugly business, and it doesn't do them any good to debate the extent of its ugliness. Once Congress agrees to regulate one sort of abortion because it is insist that it, too, be regulated, because it, too, is gruesome. life, then all abortion is murder and the debate over any particular procedure alternatives is more unpleasant, but whether the government should be making the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national Ideas," while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't. traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, workforce was creating "millions of casualties." Actually, job creation was in the wreckage. The Times reported: "Law enforcement officers said it was impossible to know, for now, whether the explosion was caused by a bomb or Still, the discovery would seem to knock from contention the theory that also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. launches. The Post 's sober coverage expands the theme to detail how the president was as happy to fulfill the satellite dreams of the Republican pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude? its readers, day in and day out." Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for "authoritative journalism" and higher and creative. "Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content," Kaiser says at speech's end as he stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like always be simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them. But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a scenario online, they say, content will be so freely available that getting paid to produce it will be hard, if not impossible. At first, I dismissed this as solution. In the future people like me, having cultivated a following by providing free content on the Web, will charge our devotees for services that say, or go around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, or (this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. The key, writes the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: The Dead let people tape concerts, and the tapes then led more people to pay for the concerts. less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes roughly everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to deal correctly technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition." This is wrong on two counts. First, all information does take physical form. Whether digital or analog, whether in ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or electrons, information always resides sure, the significance of information is independent of its particular physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this article from Slate's enjoyment out of it regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied B >ut this independence of meaning and value from physical incarnation that people can acquire your information without acquiring the particular law of all sorts" has always "found definition" on the "physical plane" signals a distressing confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make mountaintop: "It's fairly paradigm warping to look at information through fresh but it's hard to say for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh to articulate his thesis without the wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say something like this: The cost of copying and distributing information is now do it right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like fruit flies. Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for The total cost of acquiring a "free" copy includes more than just the finding someone who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you get copies a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will depend on how norms in this area the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, thus figured, will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way closer to zero than it used people cheat doesn't depend on the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the cost of cheating compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of getting data legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it aware of this fact. But they seems unaware of its fatal impact on their larger paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how much of the cost of legally acquiring bits of information goes into the ink and paper and allied anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, and displaying the inky paper. I know them will disappear. People will download books from Web sites and either computers. But if so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional materials, and deciding you'd like to read the book. (Thank you.) A single keystroke will give you the book, drain your bank account of five shiny quarters, and leave you feeling like an honest, upstanding citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to call a few friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy? And don't imagine that Web and find a hot copy of my book. As in the regular world, the easier it is cops to do the same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a much larger audience on the Web than they do now. The "magazine" model of bringing information to the attention of readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's not egotistical of me to think that when I write an article for, say, the interest in it. Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself. Search engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. But their audiences grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their various data brokers offer a "Daily Me," a batch of articles tailored to your tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the Web. When this happens, guys like me fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of paragraphs. If they want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will you try to steal a copy instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at checkout counters? The broker and the Of course, this "disaggregation of content" may be ruinous for magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the efficiency fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential cheating. If you cost of a subscription with a few friends and furtively make copies. (You wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to the "Daily Me," this arrangement makes occasional article from your "Me." (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency that will arguments about the future, is speculative. It may even be wrong. But it is larger and larger fraction of all economic activity. Thus far, in other words, as the realm of information has gotten more lubricated, it has become Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in lubrication. intellectual property will soon be worthless is especially puzzling since he is one of the biggest troubadours of the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes he seem to think it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger and bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that sector breaks down. He writes: "Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility or pleasure others may find in their works." Far out, man. nature's awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of sexual read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. any given night, you'd run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your activity by sexual conservatives can slow down the rate of infection and reduce multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those conditions, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease to the men; and the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives was willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might die out along with it. have met the charming and healthy Martin. Unfortunately Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin's absence, more effective against the cautious Martins than against the reckless Maxwells, freed Maxwell to prey on another equally innocent victim. To this there are two replies. First, we don't know that Maxwell would have found another partner: were, we'd outlaw sex entirely. What we really want is to minimize the number of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters; the flip side of this observation is that it is desirable to maximize the number of (consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections. Even if Martin had failed to deny Maxwell a conquest that evening, and thus To an economist, it's clear why people with limited sexual pasts choose to supply too little sex in the present: Their services are But that doesn't happen, because such conservatives are hard to identify. Insufficiently rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their experienced before. We face it whenever a producer fails to safeguard the usual response to environmental issues, I assume that liberals will want to attack the problem of excessive sexual restraint through coercive regulation. subsidize Martin's sexual awakening without simultaneously subsidizing with Maxwell around to reap the bulk of the rewards. The key is to subsidize something that is used in conjunction with sex and that Martin values more than plausibly, that something is condoms. Maxwell knows that he is more likely than Martin to be infected already, and hence probably values condoms less than Martin does. Subsidized condoms could be just the ticket for luring Martin out of his shell without stirring Maxwell to a new frenzy of activity. As it happens, there is another reason to subsidize protecting both yourself and your future partners, but you are rewarded (with a lower chance of infection) only for protecting yourself. Your future partners don't know about your past condom use and therefore can't reward it with extravagant courtship. That means you fail to capture the benefits you're conferring, and as a result, condoms are underused. subsidized (or free) condoms have an upside and a downside: The upside is that they reduce the risk from a given encounter, and the downside is that they encourage more encounters. But it's plausible that in reality, that's not an use enough condoms, and the sort of people who most value condoms don't have made visible, so that future partners could reward past prudence and thereby provide appropriate incentives. Perhaps technology can ultimately make that solution feasible. (I envision the pornography of the future: "Her skirt slid grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less but an actively muddled man who has warped the public's understanding of nothing. I heard through the grapevine that he was riled. But, savvy alpha male that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny, marginal primate such as myself. Then, last month, my big moment finally psychology as "pop science," he called my book The It is, of course, beneath my dignity to respond to this actually deigned to read my puny book, you must be getting him mixed up with someone whose time is less precious). Instead, I will use the occasion of History essay, in keeping with his long tradition of taking courageous political stands, argues against genocide. Its final lines are: "It need not be. We can do otherwise." You may ask, "Where's the news doesn't name names. Instead, just when you're starting to wonder who exactly is making this ridiculous claim, he changes the subject to an allegedly analogous begins by distorting a basic evolutionary psychology argument: that because men can reproduce more often and more easily than women, natural selection (which favors traits conducive to genetic proliferation) has made the minds of men and "should act in such a way as to encourage male investment after impregnation (protection, feeding, economic wealth, and subsequent child care), whereas men for maximal genetic spread." The "wander right off" part is wrong. Evolutionary psychologists classify our species as having "high male parental investment." Men are naturally inclined to fall in love with women, stay with them through pregnancy, and fall in love with the endearing little vehicles of genetic To be sure, men may be tempted to philander on the side, even to fall in love with a second woman; they are more inclined than women to both infidelity and polygamy. (Women do have a penchant for cheating or straying, but under a narrower range of circumstances.) Moreover, men find it easier to have sex without emotional attachment, so they do sometimes want to "wander right off" after sex. Still, the fact that evolutionary psychologists don't view desertion as standard male procedure vaporizes what thing about evolutionary psychology (if he had, say, read my book), he'd know that this "drive for nurturing behavior" isn't some news flash to evolutionary psychologists. It is central to their view of the tensions within male sexual basic argument is wrong. Such differences in behavioral strategy do make without (to my knowledge) making such concessions. Now, as it gains support within both biology and psychology, he seems to be staging a strategic retreat. But, of course, he can't be seen retreating. He must, in the end, still manage to depict evolutionary psychologists as simpletons. What to do? Create men and women are mere "capacities, not requirements or even determining propensities." Now, first of all, a truly determining propensity view, while a more discerning interpretation of biology (his) takes the dishonesty of insinuating that I, or any serious writers on evolutionary psychology, believe infidelity or genocide or anything else is rendered is this: Isn't the range of alternatives to inevitability too broad to cram under the single heading of "capacity"? Do I just have the "capacity" to eat doughnuts and hamburgers and broccoli? No. Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. I almost always feel a very strong attraction to doughnuts. To hamburgers I feel a fairly strong attraction under most circumstances. For these attractions can be bridled, but the amount and nature of the necessary turmoil over doughnuts is not of great moment. But let's get back to things like infidelity, men's desertion of their families, or even genocide. If we can learn something about how the underlying emotions wax and wane, about the circumstances under which bad things are likely to happen, wouldn't that be nature, he continues, "At the very most, biology might help us to delimit the environmental circumstances that tend to elicit one behavior rather than the very most? Delimiting those circumstances is the central aspiration of succeeded in explaining how upbringing and social experience shape us, it all can do is find the Holy Grail of behavioral science. Obviously, evolutionary psychology hasn't yet come close to finding the Holy Grail. But, it has provoked ideas about the role of environment that, if confirmed by further study, can inform moral discourse and inequality of income, all other things being equal, tends to raise the divorce indictment of evolutionary psychology, it is neither obvious nor, if true, didn't already know. So far, its main contribution is to illuminate not epic "dishonesty" in misrepresenting my views, but maybe the dishonesty isn't status, an enemy. According to evolutionary psychology, it then became hard for reading it would have been a start). Tactically caricaturing my beliefs became have trouble being objective about him. My radar readily picks up, even magnifies, his distortions and confusions, but is less sensitive to my own online debate with me, during which the truth can emerge from dueling that people have a biologically based "capacity" to view enemies as "beyond fellowship and ripe for slaughter." But that makes it sound as if most of us had a similarly high opinion of themselves in the early 1930s, and no doubt evolutionary psychology can save the day. My point is just that (here comes my fears, be used to excuse evildoers as victims of biology. It can actually serve humanity by making it harder for any of us to casually assume our own goodness. scrutiny, being unnatural, is very hard. But it also suggests that the effort is needed. If you sit around waiting for some switch to get flicked, you'll missteps have been harmless, even amusing. Who among us didn't chuckle when he could actually play an important role in world history. The Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by roughly the entire civilized world, awaits Senate ratification and is bottled up in Helms' committee. factory "without probable cause, without a search warrant," and "interrogate employees," "remove documents," and so on. Second, the treaty isn't tough enough to reliably sniff out chemical weapons. Hard man to please. Let's leave aside Helms' factual errors (he's about the search warrants) and look at his basic paradox: that the treaty is too tough, yet not tough enough. This is not logically impossible. Chemical weapons could, couldn't find them. But if that's Helms' view, then he is opposed not just to event, the second half of Helms' paradox is the claim now being emphasized by we're being told that the treaty is "not verifiable." In a sense, this is true. The convention will definitely not succeed in sniffing out all chemical weapons and his allies offer five downsides, all of which vaporize under the treaty initially exercised the basic Republican reflex of complaining about to fill out some forms. But if the United States doesn't join the treaty, these same manufacturers lose sales to nations that do join. That's one reason the Chemical Manufacturers Association heartily supports the treaty. regulatory burden. Faced with the big chemical companies' support of the bear an unwarranted burden. Helms resoundingly declared on the Senate floor that the National Federation of Independent Business opposes the treaty. members are not going to be impacted" by the treaty. uniform. Some treaty opponents argue that if the United States destroys its chemical weapons, it will have surrendered a vital deterrent to chemical attacks. But you don't need chemical weapons to deter chemical weapons. As destroy its chemical arsenal, deeming it a needless headache. No one had even bothered to complain about this until the treaty linked it to the dreaded New treaty expressly devoted to eliminating chemical weapons obliges members to help build them? This claim is based on of a somewhat opaque section of the signatories and won't be affected." Well, it's true that these nations aren't fact, they will be shut out of the market for many chemicals, including "dual use" chemicals that are ingredients of both nerve gas and things like ink. This Right now about two dozen countries are suspected of national government must escort inspectors to the perimeter of the suspected site, it can then argue that the search violates its constitution, or whatever. (If this national prerogative weren't preserved, Helms and company would be the first to object.) Such a standoff, when it occurs, will trigger a global media inexcusably obstinate, it can be judged noncompliant by a vote of convention anything in the history of global arms control that to call it an important evolutionary step borders on understatement. And it comes just in time, because technology for making biological weapons is spreading. What, you may ask, is the key difference between chemical and biological weapons? Oh, about a million Manhattan in the same time. Right now there is nothing approaching an international regime for keeping biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists. If there is ever to be one, it will have to resemble this treaty at least broadly: surprise inspections of suspicious sites, the economic and moral industrialized nations can monitor the average rogue state once they start the world's nations face common problems soluble only through concerted effort. This often involves some marginal sacrifice of sovereignty: an agreement by each nation to constrain its future behavior so long as others do, and systematic deference to international judgment. You see this logic at work in (the World Trade Organization, growing in importance), and other areas. The proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is a paradigmatic problem of out of pocket for care, and push them into managed care. Dole and House Speaker "wither on the vine." All these were, as Gore put it on Meet the Press recently, "extremist measures that would have devastated Medicare." limp response was that he would honor his mother's word not to cut Medicare. He "The president himself suggested that the reduction in the growth of Medicare Medicaid and Medicare are going up at three times the rate of inflation. We propose to let it go up at two times the rate of inflation." Given that prices Medicaid cut," he reassured seniors. "So when you hear all this business about cuts, let me caution you that is not what is going on. We are going to have increases in Medicare and Medicaid, and a reduction in the rate of plus an allowance for population growth." That puts Medicare growth at just told a press briefing that "slowing the rate of growth actually benefits beneficiaries considerably because it slows the rate of growth of the premiums Medicare trust fund." The implied political point was that Medicare cuts were Act, however, also cut Medicare more than was needed to repair the trust fund. Most of the savings from Medicare were to be plowed back into new federal health programs. As the Congressional Budget Office put it: "Reductions in Medicare spending would provide a major part of the funding for the Administration's proposal." More than a quarter of it, by White House Security Act, more than a quarter of the savings came out of the hides of seniors. They were to be charged higher premiums for Medicare Part B, the it. Today, seniors can stick with Medicare, or opt for Health Maintenance reforms, and even his more recent Medicare proposals. One section in his Health Security Act was titled "Encouraging Managed Care Under Medicare Program." parties used basically the same regulatory machinery to try to make their plans work in the market without creating a huge "adverse selection" twice said that Medicare would "wither on the vine" under Republican reforms. opted for the private plans. But the quote has been misused by Democrats ever forecast the decline of the Medicare bureaucracy. New retirees under his Health Security Act would be able to stick with the plan they had when they worked. The government would pay the premiums instead of the employer. Current retirees wanted to sweeten the Medicare pot at the same time it was making these cuts by that its proposed cuts in Medicare were acceptable because they were in the context of "universal health care reform." But that wasn't the argument it made Medicare were easy because "we have too many examples now of how it can be done better at lower costs with the same or better quality, and that's what we're been employed as a writer at a major media conglomerate for many moons, I had hysterical. But then I discovered something quite amazing about my your share got paid out at the values in effect at the end of the preceding prices, I negotiated a contract with my bosses to continue scribbling on a thing a fellow notices after attaining vendor status is that it is harder to deposited instantly and automatically in my bank account. When I became a and unnecessarily complicated, since my new contract called for me to receive the same amount every month, on the first of the month. It seemed doubly odd when months came where the secretary forgot to put the requisition through. Or, alternatively, where the secretary put the req through but then couldn't remember whether the blessed event had taken place. call. But my diary shows endless fretting and nagging on my part as the sixth not. The situation improved only marginally when the monthly requisitions ceased and my payment problems were essentially turned over to the corporate Accounts Payable department. The payments were still generally late, and once, few days before the first of the month. This was naturally fine with me until I complained about this prospect, and before long we were back to the default accounting executives. And yet, there is this nagging question: Would Accounts Receivable be as relaxed as Accounts Payable plainly is about money regularly changing hands a week or more later than had been contractually specified? weeks back from Slate. I had yearned to write for this online journal, and was seven days after I had taken on the assignment. How fast it all goes online! postmark. The case law says, plain as day, that this is "constructive receipt" paperwork and printed forms plainly designed with other kinds of vendors in mind. These other vendors are not guys sitting alone at home writing articles. departments. And they are equipped to answer questions about the possibility up to its arrival was a telephone query from an editor of a financial journal that had recently published some of my thoughts on the stock market: "Did we ever send you the paperwork we need so we can pay you?" Naively assuming that this would be a request for my mailing address and Social Security number, I volunteered to provide this information right then and there, on the phone. But was some variant of the "principal business or professional activity code" that Like thousands of others in my line of work, every year at this schedule, the instructions for which mention a huge number of "other business services," which leaves me feeling somewhat marginalized but extensive cruising around on the Internet, had eight or (in some accounts) nine digits and provided much more detailed information about one's place in the economy. But how to find out one's number? Instructions that came with the form Business Administration. In the end, I brazenly sent the form back without any I get to pay city income taxes twice. It's incredible, and it works this way. The 1099s one garners during the year are of course cumulated and reported on federal Schedule C, then carried over to New York state form IT-201, which combined marginal rate for the state and city taxes was recently running around percent, which is bad enough. But when you have paid it all, the New York City Department of Taxation and Finance taps you on a figurative shoulder, reminds you that the city also has an Unincorporated Business Tax, and states earned income paid to the city on form IT-201, and this time around, the bill weren't screaming about it. The woman I spoke to coolly asked how much I made as a writer, judged the amount too high to warrant condolences, and said I should be glad to pay my share. She was obviously not a vendor. the country must have sunk at that moment amid premonitions that she would available research suggests that the average life span of male homosexuals is Yes, it's a sensational, arresting number, which may soon pass into general circulation. Already, for example, the National later formally terminated from membership following complaints about his to represent their first real breakout into wider public discussion. community papers, mostly of the giveaway sort that are laden with bar ads and personals. They counted up obituaries and news stories about deaths, noted the ages of the deceased, computed the average, and published the resulting numbers Institute sums up the reactions of several of his fellow demographers: "The method as you describe it is just ridiculous." But you don't have to be a trained statistician to spot the fallacy at its heart, which is, to quote "you're only getting the ages of those who die." Gay men of the same generation destined to live to old age, even if more numerous, won't turn up in the critics rattle off further objections. The deaths reported in these papers, mostly AIDS deaths, will tend to represent the community defined by such papers or directly known to their editors. It will include relatively more subjects who live in town and are overtly gay and relatively few who blend into the of an envelope. A moment's thought might have suggested a few simple test virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been obits, even if they don't have AIDS, homosexual males tend to die by concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general. gay male may actually live longer on average than the straight male: Gays may this view, terming gays, "as a group, wealthy and well educated.") which he said coincided with the views of other authorities such as his assertions but merely falling back on the first via its recycling by to the extent that there's no excuse for telling falsehoods in the course of raising otherwise legitimate issues. He should mind his own lesson. world, is that the Internet is a place where a smart young man can become a where anyone with a home computer, a modem, and some animus can make your life miserable, and perhaps do real damage to your business. The bad news for the properties of the Net have a creepy and oppressive flip side. with "The Earthling," the name of this column). In less than two years, nationwide access points beats its price. But if you do your research on the World Wide Web, you'll probably discover something else, too: a Web page the antichrist. It slaps lawsuits on church critics who post quotes from copyrighted church documents, sometimes getting federal marshals to search homes and seize computer disks. There's no evidence that the church currently note that this isn't just another case of accusations speeding across the Net, subtler dynamic at work here, a property not of the Net at large but of the Web in particular. This dynamic will affect more of us as the Web grows and more people's reputations are mediated there. On the Web, anyone can construct a for example, that some business heavyweight is pondering a business deal with everyone who finds either of those pages through a search engine. This is the cyberspace equivalent of hanging a sign around someone's neck saying physical world, the victim can remove the sign. Shadow pages, in contrast, are As copying and transmitting data get cheaper, the distribution of power grows shots was diffused, and the Reformation happened. Now the power over page, but you may also have doubted two years ago that someday you'd need empowerment may take some of the thrill out of your own empowerment. On the you can always shadow your shadow identity with a rebuttal, so that people who see the charges against you also see your reply. When I mentioned this to a evolutionary psychology is less touching. Natural selection did not, in fact, design our brains to apprehend Truth. Our moral evaluations of people are often subordinate, by design, to our social agendas, and as a result, our whole practice my personal right to choose my own beliefs," he says. Some of the shadow page's other specific claims also are true. But there's no evidence pages are the scariest of all. As many have noted, these days, much of your mail or a phone call. Most financial transactions don't involve cash, and are, thus, recorded. Your wanderings on the Web leave more footprints than you may may eventually be neutralized by encryption and other tricks. But until then, technology will in some ways be pushing us backward in time. The Net, though celebrated as a libertarian institution, can also be the opposite. It can be a bit like a claustrophobic small town, where your private life is part of the quitting his day job (plotting and scheming against the House Republican tells the press he or she has swapped the horrors of work for the bliss of village board member cast her last vote because they allegedly wanted more time individuals are lying about their motives. It's safe to say that in the course of a year, perhaps two or three people on the planet really do quit so they can business. Lynch has since learned that the sure cure for wanting to spend more time with your family is spending more time with your family: He's just thrown tender the family alibi because they're ashamed of having been fired, or embarrassed to admit that they've conceded defeat to the god of success family, the worker neutralizes the stigma and efficiently blocks further questions. No responsible reporter will allege a firing if she can't prove it, because that would risk a libel suit. Besides, only a pit bull would continue to tear into the flesh of a foe that has rolled over on its back to signal interest in one's family with a profound disgust for the system. Or to say that personal campaign" he saw looming. Today, Weber labors in the genial, positive, announced that he would not seek office this year because he wants to spend secure a wife and two children as soon as possible so we could spend more time that you're seeking "new opportunities," without naming them. This excuse usually appears in the form of a corporate press release, because nobody can keep a straight face when it's spoken out loud. In a more honest world, it wouldn't be tacky for titans of industry to say they're leaving to pursue a person who actually does quit to spend more time with the family may discover that paid work is almost always more rewarding than the "tedious work" of child factory, with an endless stream of clothes to clean and kids to shuttle and broken windows to fix and meals to cook. Why not escape the noise and the this month in opposition to the business plan forced on him by his superiors. "Put it this way, it's nothing to do with ill health, it's not to pursue other interests, it's not to spend more time with my family." however, a larger issue. Independent counsels are not punished for overspending, so in general they'll have a tendency to overspend. Over the past seven months or so, a lot of people have made that point, but few have placed it in its proper context. Overspending due to bad incentives is not a problem with independent counsel investigations in particular; it's a problem with To address that problem by tinkering with the independent he's dealt you the most devastating financial blow you've suffered at the hands of obsessing over a minor symptom of a major ailment, maybe we should devote more attention to the underlying disease. If the disease is incurable, we can at least think about how best to alleviate entire clusters of symptoms. counsel's office is not terribly useful. Maybe that office should be this episode. Applying the same insight to more serious instances of spending run amok, we'll end up making recommendations like "abolish the Pentagon" or surely unrealistic and possibly unwise. We'll learn more if we ask questions like this: Assuming that we're going to have an independent counsel, how can we adjust his incentives to make him more fiscally responsible? By thinking about that question, we might learn something about how to encourage fiscal idea: Make the independent counsel finance his investigations out of his own pocket. At the same time, reward him handsomely for results, such as convictions or impeachments. That sets up two good incentives. First, when there's good reason to suspect provable wrongdoing, the prospective reward nothing more than political or personal harassment, the prospective expense encourages prosecutors to shut down sooner rather than later. independent counsels become independent contractors, it will be relatively easy for legislators to adjust their activity levels. If a prosecutor is too lax, Congress can either raise the bounty for convictions or subsidize the counsel's do the opposite. So legislators retain control of the prosecutor's overall fervor while inducing him to concentrate that fervor where it's most schemes might improve the performance of any government agency that has clearly defined goals. For example, the Food and Drug Administration is charged with keeping dangerous pharmaceuticals off the market. Here the potential problem is not so much excessive spending as excessive caution, which creates unwarranted delays in the introduction of safe and effective new drugs. But that's not a so also is a regulator tempted to overregulate when he's playing with other people's health. If the problems are fundamentally the same, then so are the solutions. The regulator, like the prosecutor, should bear the costs of his pharmaceutical company stock, which ought to introduce an appropriate sense of urgency to the drug approval process. Unfortunately, it will also discourage regulators whenever a deadly drug slips through to the marketplace. that is either more or less stringent than it is today, at the option of the legislators who determine the size of the stock grants and the size of the fines. But either way, it would give regulators an incentive to focus their attention more precisely on those drugs that are most likely to be people for good outcomes and punishing them for bad ones is relatively easy when the quality of the outcomes is easy to measure. But it's harder for officials with broader portfolios of responsibility. Take the president, for example. How do we know when the president had done a good job? Should we reward him for keeping us out of war? What if he keeps us out of war through policies that make the world more dangerous for our children? Should we reward him for prosperity? What if that prosperity is a temporary illusion? And who Only one system of government has ever dealt adequately with the incentive problem for the chief executive, and that's hereditary monarchy. When you know that your beloved heirs are going to, in essence, own interest. Unfortunately, hereditary monarchy has offsetting drawbacks, which I assume I don't need to enumerate for the readers of a way to recover some of the advantages of monarchy while retaining the advantages of our current system of government. We could pay our presidents our future by weakening defense, the price of land will fall. If he raises taxes to support "defense" programs that fail to justify their costs, once again the price of land will fall. So by giving the president a sufficiently that the nation's interests and his personal interests coincide. Whenever the president makes a bad decision, his pocketbook will surely feel our pain. that prohibit him from dealing with known terrorists and other undesirables.) really serious?" The answer is no and yes. No, I don't believe that anything yes, I believe that incentives matter and that we should seriously entertain radical proposals for improving them. Even when we ultimately reject those proposals, we learn something by articulating their flaws. And every now and then a "crazy" idea stops seeming crazy once you've thought about it hard story "Tardy Catalogue Shoppers Risk Losing Out as Supplies Run Short" (Dec. all sorts of outerwear and slippers and silk undershirts and lace nightdresses may find they won't be able to get what they want if they don't order this "The most popular items appear to be outerwear and all things made of fleece. a 'cardinal' blanket, a hat, a pair of moccasins, a silk undershirt and a Times as the Newspaper of Record; its competition thinks of it as the about what's newsworthy are automatically cribbed by those lower in the News all did variations on the Times story, flogging consumers in uncovered the "bad news" embedded in the good news. (Economic news is like that. If somebody is making a killing, then surely somebody is dying.) tougher to find what you want, especially if you're shopping from catalogs," Stocks are short. Many stores already are running tight on sizes and colors, particularly cashmere and outerwear: coats, hats, gloves." surplus didn't spawn a "Procrastinating Catalogue Shoppers Get Whatever They standard than department stores when it comes to keeping things in stock, because the catalogs afford them a photo and item number for every parka, turtleneck, and blazer ever placed in inventory. When those same shoppers shop at a department store, they have no way of knowing that it has sold all of its unless they ask a clerk or keep notes from previous visits. "most popular items" shouldn't be much of a surprise. For one thing, you define your "most popular items" by what you run out of. And for another, retailers selling sturdy commodities like chamois cloth shirts and field boots that are easy to keep in stock because the demand for them is stable from year to year. of capitalism to herd recalcitrant consumers into buying, the company was down national debt will impoverish your children? Are you incensed about paying thousands in taxes just to cover the government's interest costs? And do you long for a political hero who will dare to close the budget gap, even if it means raising taxes? If so, I have one word for you. I learned it from Ann entirely voluntary burden. If you don't want it, you can dispose of it this careful, though: There's a wrong way and a right way to handle this. The wrong They'll accept your gift all right, but they won't credit your personal debt. First, calculate how much you owe. Suppose, for example, that you're the nobody at all. Each year, you'll pay taxes to cover your share of the interest on the debt, and each year, that money will come right back to you as interest you're worried about, give them the bond. Let them collect interest until the day of reckoning when that political hero finally arrives to raise taxes and retire the debt. Then they can sell the bond and use the to buy a bond. But on the other hand, if the politicians take your advice and raise taxes in order to pay off the national debt, you'll have to come up with more attractive than being taxed for debt reduction, but it's no less attractive either. If your mantra is, "Go ahead and tax me but debt burden by asserting that we "owe it to ourselves," meaning that some of us (the taxpayers) owe it to others of us (the bondholders). That was scant becomes genuine wisdom when embellished with the observation that anybody who griping that the national debt is too high, I nod in apparent agreement and point out that the problem is more general than that. "Not only is the debt out of control," I say, "but so is my front lawn. The grass is ridiculously high. When will the politicians finally face reality and force me to mow it?" usually has one of two desirable effects. Either the griper moves to the far end of the room, or he asks, "Why not just mow the lawn? Why would you need the government to force you?" In that case, I reply: "Well, why not just buy a bond and eliminate your share of the national debt? Why would you need the government to raise your taxes?" I don't mean to say that everyone should buy In dismissing bogus concerns about the national debt, I do not mean to dismiss legitimate concerns about government spending. Your share of government spending is something you can't opt out of, short of emigrating or resorting to felonious tax evasion. That makes government aircraft carrier or a worthless social program. Then one of two things must debt over taxation, you can count on thoughtless commentators to denounce the interest payments on that debt as a second, and separate, outrage. That's yourself to pay off the debt right away, and limiting your damage to the government is that it spends your money. Those politicians who have devoted is limited by the consent of the governed. Once upon a time, that consent was by designing laws and institutions that require each new government burden to wisdom underlies the "takings clause" in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which says, in effect, that the government can't take your front lawn and turn it into a park without paying you for it. The takings clause forces taxpayers to share in the cost of any taking, and so ensures that frivolous takings will meet broad opposition. Inspired by the same logic, I propose a constitutional amendment capping everyone's tax bill at (say) five would force many taxpayers to share the cost of any new government spending, and so ensure broad opposition to the growth of government. It's traditional to evaluate tax proposals according to the twin standards of "equity" and "efficiency." Before I subject my own proposal to those standards, let's talk a bit about the standards themselves. when it discourages beneficial economic activities. By discouraging working, that standard with ease. The only completely efficient tax would be one that of head tax is interesting not as a realistic policy proposal but as a benchmark for comparison: Economists like to say that a head tax has the advantage of being perfectly efficient (it does not discourage any economic activity), but the disadvantage of being perfectly inequitable (the rich and the poor pay equal amounts). But those economists are wrong on both counts. violence against the English language to describe as "inequitable" a tax that charges everyone an equal amount. In the rhetoric of tax policy, the word "inequitable" almost never means "inequitable"; rather, it means something like don't want to dismiss a substantive concern just because people frequently choose the wrong word to describe it. Instead, let me make a substantive response: Even if you believe that the tax system should be used to iron out income differentials, it's still perfectly easy to devise a head tax that is dependent on variables that are good predictors of income but entirely outside the taxpayer's control. For example, whites (on average) earn more than blacks do. A direct tax on income might discourage work. But taxing whiteness would not discourage anything, while still redistributing income (on average) On similar grounds, we could tax people for being male or tall or beautiful; all these traits are positively correlated with income. In the case of beauty, though, we'd have to be careful to tax only natural beauty. Otherwise, we'd discourage expenditure on shampoo, cosmetics, and dentistry. (In fact, if we enjoy having beautiful neighbors, we might want to subsidize beauty rather than tax it; you can't always pursue two philosophy. Thus "inequity" (or, more accurately, "insufficient redistributive inequity of head taxes is no vice, so may their vaunted efficiency be no virtue. The problem with an efficient tax system is that it provides no That is much less likely under an inefficient tax system. The income tax, for example, is gloriously inefficient. The higher the tax rate, the less people stop working, and tax revenue would be zero. To convince us to earn an income taxes more efficient without making them too easy to raise. This brings me back to my proposed constitutional amendment: capping individual taxes and tying the cap to the average tax bill. Adding a cap to the current system would improve efficiency (there would be no disincentive to earn income beyond a certain level), while maintaining the natural safeguards against confiscatory government that are built into the income tax. In fact, those safeguards would be strengthened by the fact that any tax increase would have to be quite equitable, in the true sense of the word. The offsetting disadvantages? None, majors, and the most proficient strikeout pitcher in history. At the plate, home run I think I have ever seen hit." Not only that, it seems to be the first estimated on a wide scale. Sports pages and broadcasters across the worked independently and have written extensively on the science of baseball, the human limit for hitting a baseball at sea level, under normal temperatures called the Mariners to see how they devised such a spectacular number. The team repeatedly refused to explain how they arrived at the figure or to allow me to that the figure is "a guesstimate." "We don't really believe in the process," warehouse for the numbers that Major League Baseball sends us." further could the ball have gone? Based on a review of the trajectory charts in The Physics of Baseball and Keep Your Eye on the Ball: The Science marveled at the ball's hang time. According to the Major League Baseball 500-footers are impossible. A few have been hit, but all were aided by the intended method of measuring these home runs. "Distances are measured using a grid system matched to each ballpark's unique parameters and configuration. Each home run is estimated based on how far it would have traveled from home plate on a horizontal line had it not been obstructed by something (seats, fence, roof, foul pole, other stadium parts, etc.)." tell the estimator how far the ball was from home plate when it landed in the seats, bullpen, or other stadium area, and how high it was above field level when it landed. (In today's stadiums, very few home runs touch the ground with the distance and height, the estimator would assess the ball's determine the ultimate distance the ball would have traveled. Click for the In theory this is not a bad system, but in practice it's not always fully observed. Some teams work from arcs rather than grids, making the estimators' jobs more difficult. Some teams measure only to the point of league PR meetings next month "so everyone will be on the same page for next awful numbers have already tainted one set of record books. Click for the review and refine the system and for Major League Baseball to ensure compliance adjustment, during which many long home runs will seem puny, we'll slowly Drug Abuse concludes every press release on its Web site with the boast that aspects of drug abuse and addiction, and publicizes the results of that government's drug warriors are the customers for most health studies on drug heroin and cocaine, and that pot's "subtle disruption" of brain chemistry may regularly smoke large amounts of marijuana may experience changes in their brain chemistry that are identical to changes seen in the brains of people who abuse heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, nicotine and alcohol, scientists have marijuana produces changes in the brain that are similar to those seen after long term use of other major drugs of abuse such as cocaine, heroin, and "Marijuana may be a far more insidious drug than generally thought," the Post reported, "and apparently alters the brain chemistry of pot smokers in ways that may make them particularly vulnerable to 'hard' drugs such as heroin or cocaine, two independent research groups have found." marijuana users experience anything approximating physical withdrawal if they these habituated rats with a drug that "blocks" the effects of all amygdala is associated with stress and anxiety. Withdrawal from heroin, paper lean on these findings to suggest that marijuana acts on the brain as other drugs of abuse do, and that users who stop smoking marijuana might indulge in heroin, cocaine, or alcohol to stave off the unpleasantness of was also mentioned in the Times and Post articles, further recreational drugs, like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine, increase like heroin and cocaine than was previously thought. Before going any further, consider two points. First, and smoking a drug is a different experience from injecting it. (Imagine the difference between smoking a cigarette and injecting pure nicotine directly several pharmacological and social differences that reduce the relevance of rat research to social policy. And since the pleasure derived from smoking marijuana is a core issue, consider a third point: Rats don't like pot. drugging rats and then killing them for the necessary dissection. "At least they're getting stoned first," I rationalized. Then I realized that being stoned means very different things to rats and humans. Marijuana makes rats slothful, and they excrete all over themselves. Before the injection they're placebo, rats consistently choose the placebo. And when given the choice millions of humans, as we know, willingly partake of marijuana, and these differences between rat and human behavior should discourage us from using two rat studies to assert that a) marijuana is addictive in the same way as harder drugs are and b) marijuana primes humans for addiction to harder drugs. Science studies also ignore simple truths about brain chemistry. Consider that sex causes dramatic increases in dopamine. Laughter, too, increases dopamine. The syllogism that dopamine equals pleasure and pleasure leads to addiction just doesn't apply directly to human behavior. How seriously would anyone take a researcher who suggested that laughter could lead to drugs with marijuana withdrawal is not unique to drugs. Just as sex increases Again, the science reported in Science is reputable. It's just taken out findings like these that don't support the government's drug agenda are rarely moment the drug preferences and predilections and propensities of rats and turn and the pliant journalists should inject themselves with a big dose of common military annals by subduing and then eating the crew of a French survey ship in roles did differ once the fighting began. The women would fall back to the one of the enemy fall, it is their business to rush forward, pull the body quite the role models that proponents of sexual integration would order up from central casting. But history has provided few candidates for that job. As rule, the fact that women have not traditionally performed a given role has no bearing on their competence to perform it now. Centuries of female exclusion from academia or civil engineering haven't rendered modern women unfit for those professions. However, male dominance of the killing business seems to have influenced human evolution, shaping the biological foundation of human psychology. If so, does that mean male and female psychology are so different that the sexual integration of the military is misguided? The question breaks As regular "Earthling" readers may recall, the premise of evolutionary psychology is simple: Those genetically based mental traits that, during evolution, consistently helped their possessors get genes into the next generation became part of human nature. Careful thought experiments have shown that, in a context of regular violence, mental traits conducive to killing would do more for your genes than mental traits conducive to getting killed would. So if during human evolution men often fought in wars and women didn't, then indeed men might be naturally better warriors than women. the frequency of war in prehistory is not well recorded. (Hence the term models of the social environment of human evolution, and thus the purest according to one chronicler, made it a point "to massacre all strangers who fall into their power." In some of these societies, more than a fourth of the often participated in actual "war," they probably fought other males and and a friend gang up on an enemy, etc.) So, ethnographic evidence alone suggests that men could well be designed by natural selection to fight, and more evidence, which we'll get to shortly. However, the policy implications of any male propensity to fight would depend on other questions. For example: Aborigine women would sometimes square off and whack each other with yam sticks people of Japan, women would go to war and actually fight, though only against combatants, they hardly shy away from the thought of war, or from its gore. returning warrior, singing songs of praise, while the head of one of his chief instigators of war are the women." If their men are insulted by other men and don't retaliate, "the women make fun of them: 'You are afraid, you are not though women as a group are less combative than men, they are not wholly averse to combat. And plainly, some women are more eager and capable fighters fun? If there is a good reason, it has to do with our final question. to a problem that will prove stubborn if the military tries to sexually integrate ground combat forces such as the infantry. The problem isn't so much that men are designed by natural selection to fight as what they're designed to raid villages, kill men, and abduct women for procreative purposes. Moreover, tough, mean men enjoy high social status, which attracts women and helps the just a question of men disinclined to violence getting killed off. Two men might fight over a woman until one man submits and the winner gets the woman. Or, men might fight for seemingly nonsexual reasons, but the winner still enjoys the high social status that wows the ladies. Indeed, it's possible that Male combat is common among primates. It is the reason that, in many primate species, males are so much bigger and stronger than the sexes. The toughest male gorillas get a whole harem of females to themselves, and the wimpiest get zilch. Eons of combat over such high genetic stakes have led to males that are about twice the size of females. In our species, the more modest but still marked difference in size and strength between men and women is hard evidence that violence, whether lethal or is the fact that testosterone makes people aggressive. problem with fielding a sexually integrated army of gorillas wouldn't be that the females can't fight. Try stealing a female gorilla's baby and see how you fare. The biggest problem is that if you put three male gorillas together with one unattached female, esprit de corps will not ensue. controlling their hatreds and rivalries than gorilla males are. But are humans so good that it makes sense to sprinkle a few women into a group of infantrymen and send them all off to war, where everyone's prospects for survival will depend on their solidarity? Hoping (even subconsciously) that one of your comrades will die seems a poor frame of mind to carry into battle. same argument apply to nonmilitary workplaces? Doesn't sexual integration sow nonmilitary workplaces is not severe enough to restrict the rights of women (or But the military is special. The cost of dissension is death, not lower earnings. (And during big wars, when the draft is on, many of the victims are people who didn't volunteer for the job. That's one big difference between this issue and the issue of sexually integrating police forces.) This logic has no direct bearing on the currently topical issue of sexually integrated basic training. The troops that take basic together don't go off to war together, so their bonding isn't a matter of life and death. Still, basic training is meant to model some of the rigors of war, and it turns out to be a useful model indeed: The complaints of sexual didn't involve basic training) show how male and female psychology can complicate life for a sexually integrated army. Obviously, the more conspicuous sufficiently harsh punishment. But the underlying psychological forces will still be there, taking their toll. And remember: When soldiers go from training camps to actual war, things get more primitive, not less. reflecting on human nature doesn't seem to be a common pastime at the Pentagon. Sexually integrating ground combat forces is now favored by one assistant the idea. And already combat forces are somewhat integrated in the Air Force (squadrons of pilots) and Navy (ship crews). (These things, though, as integrating the infantry would be.) Given the stakes, shouldn't such decisions be informed by some knowledge of sexual psychology? Or, instead, we could just was, "It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child." Pretty nervy line, coming from a man who left his first wife and their generally perceived as constituting a "character" problem, whereas Dole's confused? In an attempt to settle this question impartially, I will now put on my lab coat and take up the tools of modern science. We will dissect the men. They are, after all, Earthlings. They were created by the process of exist today only because they helped our ancestors transmit their genes. in particular. According to evolutionary psychologists, this thirst exists because during evolution, it led to lots of offspring. Those of our male ancestors who most doggedly climbed to the top of the local status hierarchy of view, a central purpose of pursuing status is to convert it into sex. Yet, demonstrated success in making this conversion is now deemed a disadvantage in puritanical paradox? Well, consider the limited menu of options: little wealth and thus, only mild inequalities of status and power among men. In this "ancestral environment," large harems were rare; competition for women, though intense, was seldom epically intense. But then came agriculture and other sources of economic surplus. Suddenly some males could be way more powerful than others. The commensurately massive sexual rewards made men and become very unhappy campers. This volatile discontent may be the reason women, coughing or spitting at his dinner table was punishable by death. sense, monogamy meshes better than polygamy with the egalitarian values of a to sustain given our species' naturally polygamous bent. And that's especially married men feel an extravagant sense of sexual entitlement, and many women can acquire a second spouse so long as you discard the first one. This is monopolize more than one fertile woman. Thus Dole, having risen from crippled downside not shared by polygamy: Lots of kids get reared either without fathers reared by both biological parents are at greatly elevated risk of physical abuse, even murder. That's one piece of the larger truth at the heart of the monogamy, then, would seem a very worthwhile institution. But if monogamy is at odds with human nature, how do you keep it from metamorphosing into serial males leave their wives for a younger model, you can stigmatize them, damaging stark status inequality of a modern nation. Note its ingeniousness: To repress the powerful polygamous impulse in men, you employ their equally powerful country." Well one duty, back then, was to stay with your family. In explaining his divorce, Dole says his marriage had become unhappy. But if doing your duty was easy, they wouldn't call it "duty," would they? seems well adjusted. Children of her socioeconomic class obviously stand a presidents, etc. Dole's divorce, in some incalculable but not trivial way, than his; including divorces that will push women and children into poverty. To elect a divorced president is to reject a central pillar of the moral order rate than divorce. Indeed, in some cultures, permissible infidelity is paired males get a mistress as compensation for sticking with their aging wives. And infidelity was forgiven more readily than his desertion. that aren't merely local. The man is role model in chief. So it's not an excuse get single women pregnant. And unwed motherhood is as big a part of the those men lived back when it was possible to keep such things a secret. Which front. Dole is marginally more vulnerable because his moralizing is more detailed, and thus its irony is more glaring. ("If I could by magic restore to every child who lacks a father or a mother, that father or that mother, I rhetoric. This probably represents a failure of vision, but it may partly represent a certain clarity of vision as well. It's harder to be smug if you're aware of your own failings. And it's harder to yearn so unreservedly for the tricks, may dazzle through deceit. Take, for example, the recurring metaphor of society as an extended family (a particular favorite among those who aspire to be the head of the household). The accompanying patter goes like this: Families need something like a bigger welfare system or a more progressive tax code. rhetorical sleight of hand. While you were still pondering whether society is really like a family, I slipped in the wholly invented "fact" that families take from the rich and give to the poor. The truth, at least as it is revealed by last wills and testaments, is otherwise. Apparently, among the children, even when some children are much wealthier than others. A bequest is a final opportunity to redistribute income among those you love the most; if most parents reject that opportunity, then it's pretty hard to see anything "familial" in using the tax system to redistribute income among strangers. But bequests aren't the only economic transactions within families. Does the family function as a welfare state in other ways? What about schooling? Let's think about that. Who would you rather send to college: your smart kid, who can make the most of an education, or your dumb kid, who needs it up to the dumb kid through bequests (or other cash gifts). That strategy maximizes total family income, which allows you to do more good for both schooling, then what about time and attention? At least in large families, the and attention are valuable in much the same way that schooling is, and that they are, therefore, equally unsuitable as a medium for redistribution. So, the general rule is that if people wanted to redistribute among offspring, they'd children with schooling, time, and attention might be the only way to transfer income in their direction. This exception, incidentally, could explain why programs like Head Start are disappointingly ineffective: When little Johnny is accepted into the Head Start program, his parents compensate Johnny's brothers and sisters by spending more time with them and less with Johnny. There's a nice irony here. By and large, the folks who want to argue that most people are instincts of Johnny's parents, the less he'll gain from the Head Start rule, the best way to redistribute income is through bequests. But parents don't use bequests to redistribute income. We are entitled to conclude that parents don't consider redistributing income to be terribly important. That important? How do they decide what to leave to whom? the theory that parents believe there is something intrinsically fair about giving equal amounts to everyone. But to test that theory, we'd need to An alternative theory is that a bequest is a mistake. According to this theory, parents would prefer to spend everything they've got before they go. The only reason there's anything left over is that death arrives unexpectedly. But if this alternative were correct, we'd see old people using all their savings to purchase annuities that pay them a guaranteed income for life. The limited market for such annuities suggests that people prefer to another theory is that parents are governed by a "strategic bequest motive," using their estates to purchase attention from their grown children. The threat of disinheritance keeps those children in line; when the threat is effective, nobody is actually disinherited. If this theory were true, you'd expect parents (such as pensions). That prediction and found accurate, which is one good can hypothesize a "strategic gift motive" that operates while the parents are still alive. Those children who are struggling, and hence more likely to burden their parents (say, by returning to live with them), get extra help in the hope theme, one can imagine a "strategic schooling motive," whereby the become more interesting to converse with.) At bequest time, the strategic gift motive would evaporate, and the favored child would be favored no longer. cut can depend on whether most parents are altruistic or strategic. Altruistic parents would save the money from their tax cuts and leave it to the children, who must pay off all that government debt someday; that saving would hold interest rates down. Strategic parents might spend a large portion of their tax interaction with fiscal policy that has drawn economists' attention to bequest motives in recent years. But a deeper reason for investigating bequests is that they reveal something about people's instinctive sense of justice. That instinctive sense is the best guide we have to economic policy in every to determine how rational you are. This will work best if you stop and answer that each of your three fabulously wealthy cousins offers you a choice of two Now that you've made your choices, you can read on to discover whether you're a rational creature. "Rational" does not mean equally rational to avoid risk or to seek it out. The insurance and gambling industries are based on these proclivities. Even so, rationality does imply some logical consistency in your choices about risk. It would be embarrassing it easy by adopting a very broad definition of rationality. As long as you B, then you should prefer a chance of winning A to an (equally large) chance of winning B. And here's the test to see whether you've met that second criterion of rationality: If you're choosing between two lotteries with identical chances to win, then your preference should be unaffected if I throw in a consolation prize that you get if you lose in either case. You pass that To sum up, if you are even minimally rational, your answers with the most rudimentary theory of rationality, no matter how you answer an extent that rational risk aversion can't explain. opportunity, and a challenge. If you're looking to explain all human behavior on the basis of a few simple axioms, it's a warning. If you don't believe that casual answers to abstract survey questions constitute an important part of human behavior, it's a trifle. If the survey responses mean that people are less rational than they ought to be, it's an opportunity for economists to element missing from our theory of rationality, it's a challenge to identify losing the lottery but also feeling regretful about your recklessness. But when what I chose." Maybe that's why most people go for the sure thing in distasteful task of executing a prisoner. Which of the following do you prefer? ammunition? Either way, you'd have a 10-percent chance of being the executioner, so simple theories of rationality suggest that you should be indifferent when asked to choose between the two options. Yet most people prefer B), because in case B) you never know whether you've been the soldiers who choose method B) are trying to avoid regret over bad luck, while the survey respondents are, perhaps, trying to avoid regret over bad decisions. But in either case, ignoring the human impulse toward marvelous new marketplace is opening its doors. Soon, thanks to the next great wave of deregulation due to arrive in neighborhoods across the nation, you will be able to haggle over your electricity rates. What's that you say? You are not thrilled at the prospect of a new bunch of utility companies calling you at worried, perhaps, that, when most of your neighbors are buying their kilowatts from elsewhere, your local utility will no longer gladly send crews to restore your power in an ice storm? Or that competing electricity producers won't dirtiest coal they can find? Or that average prices won't really fall after they've paid for all the new executives and middlemen and advertising copywriters and telemarketers they will need in order to compete? If you're suffering such qualms, you're probably the sort of person who doesn't appreciate the ample benefits telephone and airline someone who still thinks it wouldn't be such an awful thing to have a single phone company reaching from coast to coast, because it means you need only one phone card to call anywhere in the country, who would willingly relinquish yourself against "surprise charges" by "no name" telephone companies (a fun service my local carrier recently introduced). You would just as soon avoid all those arguments about being "slammed" for charges by a phone company you didn't choose or being "crammed" for special services you didn't order. needs to make flight reservations at the last moment, who has better things to do than search the Internet for bargain rates, and hates feeling the person next to you paid only half as much for a ticket. You long for leg room and meant the airline would a) hold your seat and b) feel obliged to find you a words, you're someone like me. What's the matter with us? Surely we know, from both economic theory and concrete example, that open competition is the best assurance of consumer satisfaction. Companies shielded from market pressures by monopoly position or government intervention grow fat, lazy, and indifferent to their customers. Why are we so dubious about the benefits that freely competing Well, partly it's because the world keeps offering us more our hands full doing our jobs and caring for our families and shopping for the everyday things of life in malls and catalogs and now the Internet. We are not wrong to suspect that many of the corporate efficiency gains the economists extol come at the (usually uncounted) expense of our own time and convenience. When airlines overbook to minimize the chance they might fly with empty seats, the value of the hours we waste doesn't get counted in their costs. Unless it to figure out whom to call when our phone is out of order. In other words, these companies are improving their bottom lines by shifting costs from more, there are theoretical as well as practical reasons why deregulation may not always produce net gains. That's because, for much of our day, we live in about the world of the second best because it's such a messy place. It inhabits those sectors of the economy where one or more requirements of purely access for new companies to the market, enough information for consumers to place. Or entry costs are so high that no one will pay them unless guaranteed a different telephone lines in your house just so you could connect with all the different phone companies your friends might select. Sometimes it's because safety, national security, a clean environment, or social welfare. Sometimes complex for anyone but a specialist to understand fully. Of course, no markets are really perfect in this imperfect world, and you want to be careful not to let suppliers exaggerate the that economic theory tells us about them: In the world of the second best it is not guaranteed that a move toward eliminating the market imperfections will might make them worse off. There are no guarantees. assuming less regulation is better than more or more competition is better than less, you have to study the specifics of each case very carefully. And you have to keep experimenting with alterations and examining the results as external conditions change over time. And this can be very tiresome for everyone electricity service. Or whether the recent move to consolidation among the rising epidemic of child abuse last month. She reported that "child abuse and was only the beginning of the ugly news. The number of "serious" cases had quadrupled, and the percentage of cases being investigated by the authorities think is more likely, is the methodology behind the study and the peril, is she undermining public interest in the problem by making it appear statistics from the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, which have suffered specified harms or to be living under specified conditions. definitions of "abuse" and "neglect," and generated estimates of incidence. point to such a dramatic increase in child abuse and neglect. Fatalities Nevertheless, the proportions I describe below provide a general picture of the child was not actually harmed by parental abuse or neglect, but was "in danger of being harmed according to the views of community professionals or involved "the refusal or delay of psychological care." attention, but the explosion of numbers may be caused by the growing reportorial sensitivity of professionals, that is, "definitional creep." Professionals who become more sensitive to possible abuse, or more adept at had not risen. In endangerment cases, at least, the study seems to accept this or emotional capacities, or required professional treatment aimed at preventing I >n cases labeled as serious physical abuse, the reported injury cases, the study seems affected by definitional creep. For example, in three categories (sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect), the number of cases described as "moderate" declined even as the number of "serious" ones threatening have now been "upgraded" to the most dire category. study compared the number of cases identified by professionals with those known agencies usually avoid these cases because they tend to involve subjective Definitional creep is clearly at play here, too. Professionals who are increasingly willing to identify situations as harmful aren't necessarily ready to equate them with the sort of abuse and neglect they are legally obliged to of proposing radical action when she released the report, she outlined modest neglect is real. But however well meant, exaggerating the severity of abuse endangers children. In the late '80s, for example, the nation was told that immobilized by estimates that tens of billions of dollars were needed to decade later, the government has yet to mount a meaningful program for the obscure genuinely worrisome findings. Some of the increases in sexual abuse, for specific types of maltreatment exclude endangerment cases. Percentages a burglar alarm, thoughtful burglars are encouraged to choose a different had hired an exterminator to drive all the vermin next door. On the other hand, if your neighbor installs video cameras that monitor the street in front of both your houses, he might be doing you a favor. So the spillover effects of alarm systems and the "Club" have a social upside: Their proliferation might make car theft so unprofitable that potential thieves would decide to seek more useful employment (though, on the other hand, it's possible that they'll seek employment as, say, arsonists or killers for hire). But those same devices have a social downside: They encourage thieves to prey more heavily on those who haven't bought one. From a social viewpoint, if the total number of thefts does not change, then the expenditure on alarm systems is pure waste. to an alarm system, or a cheap piece of foam rubber that looks from a distance like the heavy metal Club. Here again you're imposing a cost on your neighbors: If these devices become common, the value of the real thing is diluted. You could then go out and install your own system for considerably less than Professional car thieves know that the security system is mandatory on of trying to fool them and smash my windows to find out. can be activated after your car is stolen, to lead police to the thief (or, better yet, to the chop shop that employs the thief). The transmitter is hidden randomly within the car, so thieves cannot easily find it and deactivate car from being stolen; it will only increase the chance of its being recovered. helping your neighbors rather than hurting them. The Club convinces equipment when theft rates are high, and second because regulators behave What's happening to all those car thieves? Are they moving to other cities, or are they becoming house burglars, or are they turning into socially useful strangers better off, you should be encouraged to do more of it. insurance company, you might expect that company to supply the appropriate company should be willing to pay you to install it. But with multiple insurance research is in many ways more informative, because the authors were able to do a thorough job of distinguishing between benefits to the purchaser of a countless times at countless places, and I pride myself on wasting the least amount of time. This requires that I be fully cooperative. I am also a private pilot, and so I can affect a pretty good "yes, sir, yes, ma'am" style of snappy camaraderie. When airport security is tightened, and everyone is being asked, "May I look into this bag, please?" I reply happily, "You bet, sir! Let me open from security on an attached label in order to board. I said, "Yes ma'am, no problem." I thought, "Security must be really tight today." With no lines at security, I got through in record time. My measure was determined to be under the threshold. I must be the person with the lowest metal content in the history of air travel. I do not even carry small change. (I am practical.) So I asked the security people, "What about the signature?" A supervisor appeared, quickly signed while avoiding my naively hit me. It was not that security was especially tight: It was only me they wanted. And that "May I?" polite foreplay had gone out the window. The label my friendly hometown airline had affixed to my bags had unexpectedly made me a marked man, someone selected for some unknown special treatment. The routine was broken; the power had shifted; the violation had begun. I suddenly felt as if in the grip of a giant vise, a terrible feeling I had last where they start to smile, as if a diagnosis of my condition had suddenly more concerned about the person's condition, not the door. In a like manner, my makes me overly sensitive to perfectly reasonable intrusions by the state. explain: The communism I had fled was hardly traumatic or violent. One aspect of the horrible vise was the constant minor humiliations I had to suffer, such as interaction with the block warden, the party overlord of a block of houses, who had to give his assent to all matters tiny or grand, including travel. On to board the plane and would have missed my meeting. So I did what I had done a thorough search for diseases and disabilities. I knew what it would entail, why they do it, and that everybody is treated the same way. I had no problem took about six minutes. Junior kept up an awkward canned patter, assuring me that I would be a safer person for this and that he understood my anger. I mumbled a lie about how I was not angry with him personally. First I attempted to hang onto my dignity by being passive. However, as time stretched out, I collected my clothes from the bin, my tie from the floor. I was free to go to envelope. Of course, it had been there from the beginning, slipped in by the ticket agent. But who reads those inserts next to the "Limitations on Baggage are selected both randomly and through an objective systematic approach based carriers from sharing specific information regarding this program with the be against an "objective systematic approach" (except for the inventor of the automatic buzzword generator that gives us terms like "synchronized synergistic systems")? What does "based on" mean? Is the airline just following orders, or is it adding its own fantasies? And as to what one can do to avoid this treatment in the future (good question!), the pamphlet is clear: nothing. bag to check in, and when I asked my associate to do the same. But I was determined not to be humiliated again. And of course, we flew Another Airline. completely random," said the agent quite sincerely, adding for reassurance, "Why, half an hour ago [the computer] tagged a guy who could barely walk." associate was impressed by my prescience, and we both felt free and in control as we walked off with our hands in our pockets, carrying only a few dollars, the boarding card, and a driver's license. We had a great day. I felt much better: I was not completely paranoid. I fit the profile. But a profile of next morning there was a phone message from him. "I am calling you from the luggage. I was livid and made a big scene. They relented and bypassed the noticed an irony. The jumbo egos that now surrounded me were less conspicuous milieu, it was considered bad form to note that you'd made a good grade, or to environment, I soon began to affect a fairly convincing air of humility. principle here is that the higher the socioeconomic class, the less conspicuous certainly doesn't mean "less effective." On the contrary. What my college effective. Having an obviously high opinion of yourself threatens and alarms both peers and superiors, often to your ultimate detriment. All of which, I many coaches took white players and tried to get them to play black, he took black players and tried to get them to play white. He was alluding to a rarely spoken but widely known truth: There are two cultural styles of basketball, which we can conveniently label with the familiar code words "inner city" and egotistical. There is less passing to set up the open shot, more driving to the more trash talking. Vividly humiliating the man guarding you is highly better basketball. But one cannot argue about which ethos is more conducive to that perceives roughly all human behavior as a sign of disrespect. (Recall his Aside from athletic talent, nothing is more helpful in getting you a big shoe contract than being an asshole. There are exceptions, good. And humility is not his specialty. When he won the Rookie of the Year Award this month, he said: "I thought the award should go to the person who had of the playoffs by perhaps the most suburban (and ethnically whitest) team in ancestors weren't slaves. I didn't spend my teens being viewed by merchants and small way helping to keep young blacks trapped in poverty, defending it is not the liberal thing to do. Certainly celebrating it isn't. (And, beyond a Phil Knight likes to pose as capitalism with a human face, a man devoted to sport's biggest asshole.) Well, let's see Knight truly put his money where his mouth is. Pick a great basketball role model, put him on a pedestal, and let make their stars look cool, thus boosting the prominence of athletes who, in of stigma among socially conscious shoe buyers. Let's have a real boycott! We're boycotting not just hoops shoes, but running shoes, hiking boots, of shame. Of course, it will be hard, with those two companies dominating the write this column. Does that affect my objectivity? I don't think so, but I work it out. Now, if you were to undertake to disprove that proposition, would operating system monopoly into the browser market as the Department of Justice browsers with operating systems only to take advantage of technical probably no better informed than yours. Instead, I want to ask a related question, one that is central to this whole affair but has been almost entirely of that scenario is that browsers would get better; the downside is that innovation uses a lot of resources that might be better employed elsewhere. It's not clear whether the benefits of that competition would outweigh the those would be better for consumers? Your gut response to that question is likely to depend pretty heavily on whose software has caused you the most recent frustration. For the record, my own level of frustration with individual peeves and recasting the question at a more abstract level. Assume, for the sake of argument, that there will be only one browser and that its it. Then should you, the consumer, care who supplies it? Under those assumptions, there's an unambiguous answer: You the marketplace. At a higher price, too many customers would walk away. (If you doubt a small price increase would significantly affect the sales of Windows Second, with each of those lost sales, it loses a potential user of Internet people who don't buy Windows won't need a browser.) that Internet Explorer can be downloaded free. The answer, of course, is that in the long run, it won't be free. Even when it comes packaged "free" the browser market. The second punishment would be doubled--2,000 lost Windows the downward pressure on the price of its operating systems. the same kind of pressure works to lower browser prices too. Just as a doubly fear of losing Internet Explorer users, it would be equally reluctant to raise not be willing to invest in a computer at all if the price of browsers is too high). Of course prices will still rise and fall in response to other argument that would stand or fall on its own merits, and I claim to have fulfilled that promise. You can judge the argument for itself, and it doesn't matter who else has endorsed it. But I do want to mention for the record that it has a lot of endorsements. In economics textbooks, it is commonplace to observe that vertical integration of monopolies tends to reduce consumer attention. (In my own textbook, the discussion of this issue is peppered with even imagine what it would be like to have that kind of pure income. But it United States could achieve the growth rates that have been reported by South impedes economic development to preserve some specimen of natural beauty, it is asking people who live like you and me (the relatively poor) to sacrifice for the enjoyment of future generations that will live like Bill Gates. giving to the rich is the opposite of income redistribution as it is usually practiced. If we were consistent, we'd insist that those wealthy future generations owed us something, not the other way around. If some moral accepting, for the sake of argument, the Sierra Club's presumption that it can accurately foresee what our descendants will value. But it's worth mentioning a separate reason to be skeptical of the conservationist agenda: For all we know, those descendants might prefer inheriting the proceeds of economic development their pathological concern for future generations. The same impulse has launched an epidemic of hysteria over federal deficits. The national debt is to the '90s what the nuclear freeze was to the '80s: It's the one issue you don't really have to understand before you can start feeling morally superior to your neighbors. From that point of view, it's even better than the nuclear ground, but you actually get to stand on that ground and prescribe suffering Coalition types, who are always whining that the national debt forces them to lifestyle is too extravagant, spend less and bequeath the savings to your might legitimately worry that someone else is living well at your a car made of steel that could otherwise have been a girder in a factory that might have employed your grandchildren. Economists disagree about how plausible that story is, but we all agree that if you're out to protect your grandchildren from the national debt, it's basically the only story you have to that your neighbor has that right, but you'd prefer to prevent him from moral niceties that you wouldn't be reading a column like this one in the first to live well at the expense of your fabulously wealthy grandchildren, you must also believe that your neighbor has no right to live well at the expense of Bill Gates. In other words, if you're unhappy about the national debt, you should be doubly unhappy about the progressive income tax. income redistribution requires us to transfer income from the few high earners of today, while the popular philosophies of conservation and "fiscal responsibility" require us to transfer income to the many high earners anyone to lie about it. Any intimation that our relationship was improper will be a source of deep distress to me, to my husband of many years, and to other have met with the president at the White House on occasion, I did so only to consequences. Any elation or dishevelment observed in me upon leaving those meetings was strictly professional. I just have that kind of hair. All the White House faxes, memos, and other messages I have in my possession deal with States in any of them. All items of underwear in my possession were purchased either by me or by my widowed mother. While items of my clothing are currently at the cleaners, I can provide explanations for all the spots. difficulties were in no way related to any unwillingness on my part to discuss rates in those other cities. This led Wright to ask a question that ultimately with economics and much to do with the behavior of state regulatory agencies. he had few assets and no insurance, so Smith had to collect from his own insurer. That unpleasant experience gave Smith and Wright the insight that led cause high premiums, and high premiums cause uninsured drivers. In somewhat more detail, a plethora of uninsured drivers increases the chance that, like Smith, you'll have to collect from your own insurer even when you're not at fault. To compensate for that risk, insurers charge higher premiums. But when premiums are high, more people opt against buying insurance, thereby creating the plethora of uninsured drivers and completing the vicious circle. Once a expects a lot of uninsured drivers, insurers charge high premiums and then many drivers choose to be uninsured. Conversely, if everyone expects most drivers to be insured, insurers charge low premiums and then most drivers choose to be category (for whatever random reasons) remains there indefinitely. exorbitant price for a brief outbreak of pessimism among their grandparents. neighbors will become insured, that belief alone could cause insurance rates to fall and the neighbors to become insured. And then forever after, potential to maintain low insurance premiums in the long run. cases where that potential exists, it would be nice to see it realized. One way the states have already done, is not the same as enforcing a laws are enforced, minimum liability limits are typically very low, and yields a dramatic drop in premiums, then both the previously insured and the newly insured can benefit. (In practice, there will probably be a small segment insurance subsidies would allow even the poorest of the poor to share the intellectually jarring. We are accustomed to defending free markets as the guarantors of both liberty and prosperity, but here's a case where liberty and prosperity are at odds: By forcing people to act against their own prosperous in the long run. (Though some diehard libertarians will object that the prosperity is an illusion, because governments that have been empowered to make us more prosperous will inevitably abuse that power to our detriment.) small amount of freedom for cheaper auto insurance? I am inclined to believe that the answer is yes, but the question makes me squirm a bit. the amount you spend in a given place minus the amount you earn there. (A trade surplus is just the opposite: The amount you earn in a given place minus the of the truth. When people take advantage of new opportunities to buy things journalists describe every increase in the overall trade deficit as a "worsening." According to that tradition, I had a very bad day yesterday. But have been inconvenient to put off buying it until a day when I felt like are spending more than they are earning. Maybe that's because your neighbors are behaving foolishly; maybe it's just because they have the good sense to surpluses are a greater danger than foolishly excessive trade you run a trade deficit every year, bankruptcy will eventually force you to stop. But excessive trade surpluses can go on forever. A perpetual trade surplus is likely to mean you're either working too hard or consuming too little; either way, you're not getting enough enjoyment out of life. should keep in mind when you read about the nation's overall trade deficit: The nation is nothing but the sum of individual households. But there are limits to how much you ought to care about what goes on in other people's households. too little, or spends too little, or earns too much, it's not entirely clear why it's any of your business. As long you have your own household in order, fretting about your neighbor's spending habits is a lot like fretting about the not by viruses, bacteria, fungi, or some other mundane agent but by something "prions," short for "proteinaceous infectious particles." But do prions cause these diseases? In the past year, journals, have published three major papers suggesting that the causative prion research is simply wrong. The latest of these papers was published last moving on, a quick course in molecular biology: All living creatures, from prion hypothesis was at best a long shot, he won a $4-million congressional award "to determine the structure of prions and how they cause disease." In infectious agents of these diseases were proteins free of nucleic acids. In particular, he had created mice with a genetic mutation that caused what was a produce disease. He then took brain matter from these mice and injected it into new mice, which promptly got sick, showing that no viral particles were necessary to transmit the disease. But there was still no paper proving the Two years later, when he presented the same mice work at another conference, the news pages of Science and Nature wrote it replicated by anyone and he had still not published these supposedly seminal be explained by contamination, which is to say, by sloppy laboratory of the other "prion diseases" is caused by a virus, then surely that virus would have been discovered by now. The fact is, it's damned hard to find a virus in a mishmash of animal brains, which is where you have to look. One that no one is doing the laborious and expensive work to find it. It can take But at least those researchers got funded to look, which has not been the case that if the virus turns out not to exist, then their study will have been "of insufficient significance and scientific merit" and thus not worth doing. the prion hypothesis is still rife with loopholes. For instance, the diseases that allegedly are caused by prions come in a few dozen different strains, the same way that dogs come in different breeds. It's easy to imagine variations in viruses or bacteria, because they contain nucleic acids, which encode for has no nucleic acid could encode for the variations. His own grant proposals, describes the problem of prion strains as a "fascinating conundrum," while another explains that the goal of the research project is to find out "whether instance, that a protein sans nucleic acid can be infectious, and consequently, he has invoked the potential involvement of yet another agent in the disease process (although he insists it has no nucleic acid and calls it "Protein X"). which is doublespeak for saying that the prion ain't the infectious agent, a prize in recognition of the wealth of information he has unearthed on demonstration that the preferred interpretation of the data was the only interpretation. In other words, remarkable results demand remarkable evidence. wall space, plus of the attic, the garage, the basement, and every closet in life, there's an excellent chance I won't live long enough to finish them all. attempting to deny my own mortality. It's also because buying books is so much countryside to attend the equally glorious Green Valley Book Fair. But two recent innovations have ushered in a true golden age of obsessive book lounge in comfortable chairs, sip coffee, and listen to music while you is so easy that I often come away from a virtual visit with the exhilarating are quite a bit costlier to provide than the amenities you get from Amazon. One Amazon avoids most of those costs, and it passes some of the savings on to the good. The market offers a range of options. Those options that provide consumers with sufficient value will thrive; in the long run, those that fail to justify their costs will face extinction. If enough consumers are willing to not. Either way, economists will applaud the triumph of consumer sovereignty. Likewise, if enough consumers are willing to sacrifice physical browsing for Amazon discounts and convenience, Amazon will prosper; if not, not. Once again, economists will stand ready to endorse the judgment of the marketplace. one that economists would not endorse. Some consumers browse in the books from Amazon at discount prices. In sufficient numbers, such consumers thing to watch a business fail because of its own inefficiency; that's just the market doing its job. But its quite another thing to watch a business fail because it's efficiently providing a service for which consumers have managed economic equivalent (though not, I think, the moral equivalent) of theft. Among How can this disagreeable outcome be avoided? One solution business to one of its own subsidiaries. And to a certain extent that's happening: It, and other large "superstores" such as Borders, has begun and holds a substantial market share, at least a part of the problem raise its prices. (Amazon relies on publishers for timely book shipments, so the instruments of pressure are readily at hand.) But publishers might or might not want to play that role. On the one hand, they have a considerable stake in the success of large and luxurious bookstores; on the other hand, they also have a considerable stake in the success of services like Amazon. My friends in the publishing industry tell me that, on balance, they wish Amazon well. refused to supply bicycles to discounters. In recent decades, the manufacturers of mattresses, patent medicines, electronics equipment, herbicides, and light bulbs have insisted that their products be sold only at the full retail explanation is that manufacturers always like high prices. But that's controls that directly. A more plausible story is that bicycle shoppers like to visit fancy showrooms with knowledgeable sales staffs but then buy from discounters. Eventually, retailers recognize that there is no reward to offering quality service, and the fancy showrooms disappear. Customers are made By forbidding its dealers to compete with each other via to the ultimate benefit of consumers. That was exactly the reasoning endorsed Sharp decision, the court showed an admirable understanding and respect editorially called for legislation to overturn the ruling. The Times asked for compromise legislation that would give manufacturers the right to "set high standards for service and refuse to supply retailers who don't meet them," while denying manufacturers the right to set prices. dealers, there is no difference between setting a standard of service and setting a retail price: For a given service standard, competition will lower the price until it's commensurate with the service standard, and for a given price, competition will raise the service standard until it's commensurate with choose how much to sleep while forbidding them from choosing how much to stay awake; the reality is that you can't choose one without choosing the other. recognized, discounters can be clearly detrimental to both manufacturers and consumers in the market for electronics or bicycles. But when it comes to convenience of shopping from home. That's why bicycle and electronics firms have been so keen to stop the discounters while publishers have laid out a book, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, precisely when people were inclined to think my central idea was crazy. The this demonstrates that federal health and safety regulations really work. But century and public opinion was retreating to the view that nature is doomed. This year, though, Newt crashed and burned, while liberalism has grown eager for arguments that government provides genuine benefits. Suddenly, my environment is recovering. She rejected my contention that ecological and slammed me for using the word "success" to describe environmental debated me on Charlie Rose last year, scowling as she told viewers environmental optimism was an appalling notion? This must be the next frontier in stealing ideas, I thought: Discredit someone, then write the same thing yourself as if you'd thought of it. Then I cheered up a bit. A Moment on the Earth predicts, "Soon we're all going to be environmental optimists." Could Sure didn't seem that way a year ago. On publication my splatter tactics: Throw enough mud, some will stick. Stick it did, and the buzz information on "who is behind" and "who is providing the money" for my work. Endangered Species Act. The event was staged atop a Manhattan skyscraper where peregrine falcons, birds that have rebounded from the brink of extinction owing to federal protection, now nest. Babbitt hailed this as "a symbol of hope" for begins by describing wild falcons nesting on a Manhattan skyscraper as a symbol of hope for the environment. Protocol says Babbitt should have invited me, because authors can lend photo ops extra credence. But the grapevine said persuade Democrats that environmental optimism could be a potent political idea. Perhaps anyone who tries to be his own spin doctor has a fool for a patient, but Viking's publicists had shifted their attention to another book, the slightly more remunerative The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. (One day of your sales, Bill. It's all I ask.) I huddled with the Democratic Leadership environmental optimists before Republicans stole the march. Several Democratic had hit the Al Gore glass ceiling. The vice president has staked out doomsday the Hill. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner asked works for the administration under her maiden name, rolled her eyes, saying, "Gore's office is never going to let you get away with the credit." Sure Meanwhile, it turned out my fear that Republicans would expropriate environmental optimism was unfounded. The last thing Republicans the Earth in his office. (True? Who knows? But I take comfort in believing environmental optimism would appeal to many political camps. Liberals would be happy that regulatory intervention was protecting an essential aspect of life; conservatives would be happy for proof that nature and industry are not incompatible. Instead, left and right united in a screwball shared interest in rejecting any positive environmental tidings. The left was using alarmism about nature to raise money, while the right was raising money with alarmism about regulations. Now with Newt in hiding, that dynamic has changed. Progressives at last are noticing that the best argument for government activism is that it camcorder. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow, and so on. But now that the radiance of the yuletide season is fading, it's time to confront a sobering scientific truth: The more you think about the biology of parental love, the familiar with my obsessions may fear that this column is just another attempt to spoil everyone's fun, to replace the beautiful mystery of life with ugly affinity. You see the confusion when biological parents invoke "blood ties" to reclaim a child from adoptive parents. You see it when opponents of universal brotherhood but believe in their hearts that it's ridiculous, that truly loving people to whom you aren't related violates some law of nature. maternal love, and paternal love. It's all due to the operation of "kin selection" during evolution. A greatly oversimplified textbook example: Two million years ago, two hominids, Loveless Bob and Loving Bob, stand on two different riverbanks, in identical situations. Each is watching his full sibling Bill drown. Loving Bob has a gene inclining him to love his brother and Loveless Bob has no such gene, and thus stands on the bank wondering whether his brother's corpse will attract any large, edible fish. Which Bob's genes has the same gene and, thus, that a successful rescue mission will pluck an otherwise doomed copy of the gene from the dustbin of history. Do the math, and you'll see that, over time, Loving Bobs send more genes to posterity than Loveless Bobs. As love genes spread at the expense of indifference genes, Loveless Bobs slowly become extinct. Die, selfish scum! Genes for sibling love maternal love and paternal love. All brought to you by kin selection. status of conventional wisdom. So are some attendant misconceptions. ascertain with perfect accuracy which organisms are close relatives of its own host organism and thus may carry copies of itself. In truth, genes aren't kin, they'll have to determine who qualifies as kin in some pedestrian and infant named Bill and sleeping by its side every night, there's a very good chance that Bill was Bob's sibling. So a gene disposing Bob to love children whom he sees his mother nurturing could spread through the population until everyone obeys the same rule. But this rule would misfire now and then, when a misfiring wouldn't happen often enough to greatly dilute the genetic math are fallible. Even mothers, who you'd think would have a damn good idea of who their offspring are, can in principle be fooled. When hospital staffers for irrelevance of genes is why surrogate motherhood is so messy. Even when, thanks carries, she will, upon giving birth, fall in love with the child. During evolution, after all, having a baby come out of your womb was reasonably strong evidence of kinship. The power of the hormones that govern this bonding is briefly considered snatching the baby and replacing it with an 8-by-10 glossy of myself.) This hormonal power was also observed by researchers studying oxytocin, a hormone that's present in human and other mammalian mothers at birth. The researchers put it in a syringe and used it to shatter all previous records for cuddling among laboratory rats. By the way, the synthetic version homo sapiens were "designed" to get their genes into the next generation, but not that they were designed to do so consciously and rationally. As surrogate mothers have proved, knowing that you've given no genes to an infant needn't stop the bonding process. Thus, "kin- recognition mechanism" is a doubly identify kin, but just identifies factors correlated with kinship; and second because people aren't really aware of doing the identifying. We don't think, "There's strong evidence that she's my daughter, so I adore her." More good news for adoptive parents that neither genetic relationship nor conscious awareness of genetic relationship is a prerequisite for love. Still, it is bad news that maternal bonding begins with hormones at birth. It is also bad news bonding hormone oxytocin. Then again, there is no reason in principle that sessions. (Oxytocin seems to be part of the bonding formula in men, too.) Besides, some genetic mothers aren't conscious at birth, and many don't successful adoptive parents know, lots of the magic moments that add up to Anyway, the main point is that when genetic parents give up a child for adoption and have second thoughts weeks, months, or even years later, their appeals to blood ties should count for zilch. Their love of their child, and their child's love of them, depends not on genetic math but on a long and complex chain of bonding, much of which they have already voluntarily mystical genetic affinity with their "own" kind is silly. Obviously, taunts, and it may give the adopted child an identity crisis. But it won't do this because of some ancestral memory in the genes. As attitudes change, influence personality so powerfully that mixing unrelated siblings is like the true absurdity of familial love. As we've seen, the genes that sponsor it genetic level (the inexorable triumph of Loving Bob's genes). As we've also Still, you might argue, in defense of your genes, they usually direct familial love toward genuine kin, and thus usually succeed in being efficiently selfish. Wrong! When genes confine altruism to kin, and deny it to needy our entire species! Loveless Bob is extinct, remember? be forgiven for doubting my logic. People like me, in writing about kin selection, often talk about full siblings sharing "half their genes," implying really mean is that full siblings share half of any genes that are newly starting to pass judgment. Genes that natural selection fully endorsed long So genes that originally flourished by bestowing love with discerning who do contain copies! You may doubt that natural selection, a process that supposedly maximizes genetic selfishness, could fail so abjectly to do so. So this past holiday season, as you rushed to buy presents for your kids or your siblings or your nieces or nephews, impelled by These "selfish" genes could do just as much for themselves by encouraging you to instead spend your money on the beggar outside the department store. In fact, they could do more, since the beggar is closer to perishing than your relatives are. (Also, the beggar might buy something useful such as food, as virtually all ethical philosophers who have pondered the matter agree, it doesn't make sense to model our moral values on the logic of nature anyway; to leads to moral confusion. For example, you might, after observing the natural behavior of praying mantises, be tempted to conclude that it is morally good and wrongheaded doctrine! (Though slightly less repugnant than the idea of recognize the naturalistic fallacy in some contexts. They sense that there's something visceral about, say, malice; yet they'll tell you (when not in its thrall) that they disapprove of it. It's obvious, they believe, that the natural strength of hatred is not a good thing. They're right. What is equally right, but a bit less obvious, is that the "natural" limits of love aren't necessarily good either. And, on close inspection, these limits turn out not to the universe abruptly exploded into existence out of apparent nothingness some creator. A couple of months ago the same claim was enthusiastically aired at a that only God could have caused the big bang is scarcely new. In fact, the big bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted could not be static; it must be either expanding or contracting. This struck "cosmological constant" that eliminated the implication and held the universe of the universe. Reasoning backward, he proposed that at some definite point in the past it must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely around us were receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same verdict: The universe had an abrupt beginning in time. the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted "scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church." scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source," commented the German astronomer Otto that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like "a sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as "the big bang." The term pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the big bang (at first they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna). If you '60s, scientists have been busy working out, and feuding over, the details of deducible from the mere fact that there is a world at all. So goes the Supreme Being. (Click to read the ontological argument and the Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. has a cause of its existence. (Click to learn more about the surprising many options for attacking the logic of this cosmological argument, and contemporary opponents of theism have tried them all. If everything needs a cause for its existence, then so does God. (More frequently heard in the form "But Mummy, who made God?") This everything needs a cause but that everything that begins to exist the universe had a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through it, the cause of the big bang must transcend the physical world. is hard to think of a principle more amply confirmed by our experience than that things do not just pop into existence uncaused. No one can really pull a principle, tiny "virtual particles" spontaneously appear and disappear all the time. An entire universe could do the same, claim some cosmologists. Calling themselves "nothing theorists," they have produced models showing how the cosmos could have burst into being all by itself out of a patch of "false pages of math). So the universe is summoned out of the void by the laws of physics. But this can't be right. The laws of physics are just a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They cannot cause the world to exist. As and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean)." is temporally finite does not mean it had a beginning. Speaking of Hawking, this is his famous "no boundary" proposal. "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator," Hawking wrote in A Brief no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning or end: it would simply which space and time are commingled. "Time zero" becomes an arbitrary point, not a true beginning; it is no more a boundary than the North Pole is. proposal is extremely popular with laymen who are hostile to the cosmological argument, judging from the mail I get. Apparently they enjoy being baffled by so that there is no beginning. In real time there still is a beginning. Sometimes Hawking says that imaginary time is "earlier" than real time, which is a logical contradiction; sometimes he suggests it might be more real than Cause, which is, moreover, transcendent. How does it follow that this cause is has suggested that something humanly inconceivable lies behind the big bang. What, if anything, can really be inferred about the First Cause? Well, suppose that it were something mechanical. An ideal machine produces its effect either always or never; it does not just suddenly start to operate at some moment, unless someone gives it a kick. If a mechanical cause produced the universe at argument can be repeated to T minus infinity: A mechanical cause would have either produced the universe from eternity or not at all. But the universe was created at one moment out of an infinity of other indistinguishable moments. This implies that the moment was freely chosen, and hence that the creator had a will, and to that extent a personal nature. And power. has one unwelcome consequence for theists. It seems to suggest that the Creator was a bungler. A singularity is inherently lawless. Anything at all can come rise to a universe whose conditions are precisely suitable for life, let alone pointed out, "If God created the universe with the aim of making it animate, it is illogical that he would have created as its first state something whose natural evolution would lead with high probability only to inanimate his own image was by repeatedly intervening and making adjustments to steer the evolution of the world away from lifeless disaster. But "a competent Creator does not create things he immediately or subsequently needs to set aright," observes Smith. (Remember, we are talking about the universe's physical bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still rich, complex, ever expanding. The latest additions, however, rattle that fairly simple fellow. Recent releases portray him as hero or hedonist, romantic investigative reporter's book lies neither in its revelations (which are few) nor its hype (which is considerable, and has stirred up waves of attackers and situation room, he flirts with nuclear holocaust. Reckless at play, reckless at For every bitter revisionist, however, there is an equally aristocrat, perceives only light. "This wasn't a man who simply needed a woman to satisfy his cravings and would then go on to something else," she explains innocence." He swoons, he sighs, he weeps. He looks toward the heavens and a helpful insight: All pols engage in what the author calls "creative important and troubling questions about his presidency. How could a man so dissolute in his private life display such discipline in his public role? If is not the first to recall his relentless tapping of feet, of fingers, of almost absurdly careless, how does one explain his mastery of the televised press conference? This was a controversial innovation during the Cold War, when new medium, and not just with his winsome smile and quick wit; his preparation was unmatched by any but the most thorough reporter. puzzling, which explains the temptation to ignore or deny them. It is hard to believe that any man, particularly a public figure, could embody such nicely puts it in his first chapter (before denying it in the rest of his Reckless Youth --confront the dualities in his character. If they do not explain them, at least they acknowledge them, which is more than this current ago under the strain of molls, mob money, election fraud, and foreign romantic nor wholly cynical, tells the story: This is a man who breaks the rules and is attractive, wealthy, and smart enough to get away with it. In his aware, a dispute has long simmered about whether people in ancient times read to themselves silently, as we moderns do, or mostly read aloud. The unequivocal references in ancient sources to silent reading are few, and the context often Origins of Silent Reading that most ancient texts virtually demanded to be foreign language, began inserting spaces, just to help tell all those whole Western world, and the separation of words became a universal lapse. But I was drawn to the argument of Space Between Words for two reasons: First, it treats words as physical objects produced by physical means and designed to be understood by physical beings; and second, it reminds us of the breathtaking role serendipity can play in matters of language. The physicality of words is something we tend to lose sight often startling. Some years ago I shouldered the rewarding (and not very from right to left on the next, then from left to right again, and so on. the matter a little further, asking how such a writing system came to be. Lewis' answer emerged after a pleasant subterranean rumbling that I took to be laughter (though his answer was entirely serious). "It probably arose," he said, "from the practice of writing long inscriptions on cliff faces." Imagine, he went on, lowering a chap with his chisel from the top of a monument and moving him along as he does his work. What do you do when he finishes the first line? Do you haul him all the way back to where he started? Or do you just drop him down a few feet to the next line and then let him continue his work in the opposite direction? The subterranean rumbling resumed for a moment, making it a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and been no lack of commentary about the consequences that the latest version of writing, and the Word, and I have no wish to revisit all the speculative Big the gang can agonize or exult over these without any outside help. Many issues will simply remain up in the air for years to come, no matter what anyone Still, computers and electronic text have already wrought changes in the way the world's words are constructed. In Japan, individuals have long been accustomed to elaborating upon the way their basic names are characters or with added or subtracted strokes. Those flourishes now must come to an end for official purposes, in the interest of computer standardization. have begun this year to phase out their distinctive letter for a double "s," the letter that looks somewhat like an English capital "B." that are bringing a little more order to orthography are doing the same to semantics. Because an electronically linked worldwide medical community needs a common language, new terminology has been adopted by the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists to describe human body parts. The Electronic media will usher in a resurgence in the quality and value in handwriting. Signs of a renaissance of the handwritten word are here and there discernible. Most obviously, there is the proliferation of specialty shops for fountain pens and handmade paper. But it can also be seen, hauntingly, in the the cursive flow of human thought, from brain to hand to pen to ink to less a daily utilitarian workhorse it may well become ever more a cherished legitimate place in the coverage of the coverage, or at least in the commentaries about the coverage of the coverage. As far as I can tell, however, relative sent off to the country whose presence lingered nonetheless. culture in which the words "of our time" have become synonymous with "of the characteristics of our time. It is, of course, ubiquitous in the world of sport occurring unintentionally, and in two ways. The first is etymological. My rise to hype in the sense of "artificial stimulant," which is the direct ancestor of hype as employed in advertising and the communications be weirdly appropriate. (Note: An alternative etymology of hype would provocation is conceptual: How does one match up this term and its variants blood pressure, which in healthy individuals and societies maintains a certain constancy, but which can rise or fall to dangerous levels. But hype could thus refer to a level that is subnormal but nonetheless sufficient to of public recognition. For example, I received a postcard some while ago imagine that only after attaining the level of being fully known can one overrated and underrated inevitably intersect with this discussion, because to be described as either of these things one must display most difficult category to conceive, though it does exist, is that of figures concept may be ready for scientific quantification. There is precedent for this not only in the hard sciences, where one would expect it, but also in the social sciences and humanities. Thus, much as we have a unit of heat, called who generated news reports for months despite having failed to participate in tyke whose rescue became a brief focus of attention last summer after he fell language and dynamics of hype come to resemble those of arms control. ceiling at a level far higher than what any ordinary person would find movies, we were taken to ice shows, we took lessons, and we had strong views hockey, which we played in boring skates and unlovely clothes on a frozen pond. It was a romantic and competitive display, emphatically a girl thing. Adorable are, and not just for girls. My interest in skating withered and died before I of the rules of the game. I mainly notice that things have come a long way display has been profitably invigorated with sex, fashion, and progressive out among the participants and spun out in the media. touches suggesting conventional winter or conventional cuteness. Gone are the suggest the disco dance floor or the hotel ballroom, except when they're women's have burst into hysterics. The physical risks have become very great for male ice dancers, but their clothes stay conservative. When they don't, neckline and wrapped sash, apparently too outrageous for pairs skating. The for supreme skill at multiple turns in midair and in their willingness to wear was established all over the world in the last century, and it allowed any sort of glorious finery above the waist, even with long, plain legs below. Later, "Faun" costumes, among others, gave rise to a host of abstract creations for the male body. These have appeared on the dance stage throughout this century, made his leaps and lunges most historical, the whole thing being quite rare for governs the clothes for traditional pairs skating and affects ice dancing too, keeping male ice performers looking fairly sober. Men's skating costumes are strictly simple and symmetrical, beginning with long, black trousers that black shirt, or with various Star Trek effects above the waist. Male skating costume, like male evening dress, is still meant to offset the fantastic extremes of the women's costumes, which run to exposure, asymmetry, and fluttering ornament, just like Ginger Rogers' dancing dresses in the early jackets. Metallic fabric, rhinestones, or sequins may coat both him and her, the better to mesmerize us equally as we track them flashing past. Not for array of inventions in women's costumes, where all the most dangerous aesthetic risks are currently being taken. But some things are constant. For pairs skating, women's skates must be white, and unfortunately very big. These used however; some tend toward approximations of current fashion, with many ponytails, little bandeaux under boleros, and several bare midriffs, along with remote historical allusions. Whatever the costume, it must go with tights and skates, it should enhance the skater's performance, and the rules say it must have a skirt. But this can mean two panels fore and aft, eight overlapping patch of salmon pink and another of black making one breast look heavy and the perfectly balanced by the two flashing white skates below. A dress in any bright single color tends to be great; two colors in several patchy sections tends to be dreadful, especially when mixed with patches of bare skin. Slanted hemlines are bad; slit skirts are good. A ponytail with a lot of feathers or fluff holding it together is no good; hair that neatly caps the head, whether in a bob or a bun, is very good. Anything that looks as if it might get in a partner's mouth and eyes or slap his face is bad; any material that caresses the '60s, when psychiatry appeared to loom over vulnerable minds with a kind of menacing grandeur. White coats seemed scarcely less ominous than white hoods, freedom against the depredations of nosology. Nowadays, though, news of a Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental such, it provides comic material for a certain contemporary genre of psychiatry criticism that finds it laughable (rather than sinister) that psychiatry appears to be expanding its territory from real craziness to everyday piece on the absurdity of the diagnosis "road rage," for instance ("You're Not Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for Everyone."). respectively, have, in their second joint effort, Making Us Crazy (their reproving than suspicious, and more earnest than parodic. Its criticisms are were crazy people: They were the ones barking like dogs and thinking they were Napoleon. The rest of us, meanwhile, suffered only from ordinary problems that are not medical, to find psychopathology where there is only problem with this reasoning is that the concept "crazy" is entirely foreign to less in quality than in quantity and context. Checking to see if your oven is every time you leave your apartment probably is. Which is not to say that find that the psychiatrist would produce a name for his behavior, would assure him that other people engage in it also, and might offer him drugs to help him it's going to call mental disorders every few years, so obviously we can't trust it as a guide to what mental disorders really are. of the biologically oriented majority of psychiatrists to produce a manual of which lists diseases that are each traceable to a unique, identifiable etiology, which is to say that its disorders are grouped according to observable symptoms rather than presumed cause. If you look up a disorder in impaired motor activity, or feeling numb and empty), a certain number of which for determining whether a phenomenon belongs in a class, such as the checklist bible," implying that it inspires reverence and is in need of suspicious dictionary. It is periodically revised in response to arguments about usage and usefulness, but new disorders do not represent claims to fresh biological knowledge. Which is to say that yes, a particular mental disorder is whatever resolve the question of whether or not homosexuality should be called a mental disorder by means of a ballot mailed out to its members. The majority of those responding felt that homosexuality was not a mental disorder, and the was sitting down with a committee that included his wife, in the process of But it's not clear that any science is so pure that it's exempt from is informed by social values. Medicine is informed by social values. To declare something a disease (rather than simply a part of life) is to declare it unacceptable and in need of treatment by doctors. When is a person too unhappy? When does eccentricity become psychosis, or political suspicion paranoia? How much pain is pathological? Under what circumstances should a person's death be described as "natural" and attributed to old age, rather than described as "premature" and the result of a disease? Social questions, and societal injustice by calling their problems "mental disorders," thus implying that the victims are wacko and have brought their problems on tendency to break things (recommended treatment: whipping). Yes, there can be purposes, and that diagnosis is always inflected by the politics of its Disorder, for instance. This diagnosis, which describes the delayed aftereffects of extremely unpleasant experiences, made it into the been applied to all sorts of people, from the victims of domestic violence to suffering from hallucinatory flashbacks and wild mood swings looked, to the benighted layperson at least, nuts. But now his behavior seems ordinary, even victims must necessarily be in the service of evil conservatism, but drawing attention to its causes, rather than those who want to assign institutionalization (and it still is, though less so than in the '60s), it seems clear that the diagnoses that license dragging people off the street can to the vast majority of psychiatric encounters, which involve adults showing up in offices and asking for help, railing against the men in white coats is mostly beside the point. Labels can be reassuring. Drugs can be our friends. Governmental Affairs Committee, have eased finally into insentience. As with so many political efforts, the committee's most lasting achievement is likely to be linguistic. Much as the one tangible consequence of Jimmy Carter's famous French word (which Carter in his speech in fact never uttered; the word was can be collected for use in political campaigns but which enjoys an existence outside the rules, the oversight, and the control of the Federal Election Commission." Specifically, soft money can be contributed in unlimited rather than on behalf of, or at the direction of, particular candidates. both parties," Levin said. "This is what Congress permits, folks. Heck, we not point, or at least to carry the culinary metaphor a little further along, the There is no deep mystery about the proximate origins of the term "soft money." In its current sense, it came into use almost as soon as the present contours of campaign law were established, in the late 1970s. refer to metallic money and paper money, respectively. Because hard money was tied intrinsically to the value of precious metals, the term was soon applied more generally to currencies of enduring and robust value, currencies that were under tight control and backed with ample amounts of metal. Hard currencies aren't pegged to metals any longer, but in casual political and optimistic and permissive attitude toward control of the money supply, and people are those who take a grouchy and restrictive applicable to campaign contributions. The immediate linguistic conduit through which it arrived was probably the language of Wall Street, in which soft one that wouldn't count toward the campaign's spending limits because it was "educational" material technically being sent out by a labor union. "Ah, the sound of soft money," the operative said.) In business terms, hard money is straightforward enough. But let's not lose sight of a larger phenomenon. It is said that the human tongue naturally distinguishes among four types of tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Similarly, the human mind is always a famous assessment, classified people according to whether they were hedgehogs (those who know one big thing) or foxes (people who know many little things). might include dogs vs. cats, savers vs. tossers, deciduous vs. evergreen, standard vs. automatic. Somehow, though, the qualities soft and given the prominence they are coming to enjoy in the public arena of not, of course, the words having literally to do with the physical properties of the same name, but rather the higher, metaphorical qualities associated with the words: that is, hard in the sense of "stern," "uncompromising," "grim," "tough," "realistic," "verifiable," or "physically palpable"; and soft in the sense of "moderate," "subjective," "subject to emotion," "simple," "idealistic," "weak," or "physically immaterial." In religious terms, probably will encounter examples within just a few minutes (not counting the aliens are given expulsion orders but not actually subjected to any further moment they washed up on beaches. This would be a hard immigration policy.) Labor disputes in professional sports have centered on whether teams, and therefore players, would be subject to a hard salary cap or a military might. Soft power is power that comes in the form of economic improve minority representation in the classroom and the workplace. Hard affirmative action emphasizes explicit quotas for jobs, promotions, and seek ever more cultural and political autonomy for the Francophone province, whereas hard separatists demand outright sovereignty. Political theory distinguishes between a hard state (a state with a relentlessly efficient, perhaps authoritarian, central government and a high regard for pluralism and aggravating domestic politics in an environment of at least and soft carry no troubling value judgments. They merely express an almost any context is intuitively clear. The hard truth, I would argue, is that this way of seeing the world is itself distressingly soft. twin brother, who lives beneath the stage and harbors resentments about a Prairie Home Companion does not rely for its comedic grammar on concepts phrases crop up on that program, you can be pretty sure the underlying meanings conclusion. The term has so rapidly evolved from restricted jargon into Companion cannot only use it safely, but can even give it a knowing, ironic Closure has familiar applications in the realm of personal but you've been walking through our life dead. And now I have to demean myself story where "finis" is being written. Patients who served as unwitting subjects of 1950s radiation experiments described their recent settlement with the closure." In contrast, the rambling valedictory press conference last fall of most often encountered in contexts involving death. Newspaper and broadcast helping families establish a sense of closure." Now that executions are once police officer told a reporter after an execution was carried out last month in documentary in which parents witnessed the execution of the killer of two of century. In literary criticism, closure refers to the manner in which a poem (or any text) achieves thematic and structural finality. In the psychological jargon of Gestalt theory ("Gestalt" being German for "pattern" or "form"), closure refers to the propensity of the human mind to impose or perceive order despite gaps or asymmetry. This meaning of closure helps readability and readers for comprehension. The Gestalt term closure has as timeless as sentience itself. But how did it come to be so closely bound up development that scarcely needs documentation. When we require words to describe personal motivation and other interior processes, the most likely source today is psychology. The lexicon so derived is large and growing: television news, which is built on abbreviated human stories with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end: A violent crime. A daring rescue. A belated discovery. A sudden disaster. Psychotherapeutic templates are easy to apply. The words "a sense of closure" have by now been uttered so often on without question. I won't be surprised to learn someday that wedding vows are being exchanged in which the union is set to last "until a sense of closure do us part." And surely, "A Sense of Closure" will be the headline above the news analysis in the New York Times the morning before the asteroid hits. read "The Healing Process" on the editorial page the following day. gathered momentum this spring in the Republic of Zaire, commentators felt decades. All the commentaries at some point brought up the subject of the endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake." An alternative translation, according to a second group of reports, is "the cock whose prowess leaves no hen untouched." a symbolic personal name by way of an aggrandizing personal epithet has sadly fallen out of favor. Among world leaders today the few practitioners of this Most of the world's remaining monarchs possess a number of designations and little more than quaint vestigial appendages, like a whale's arms. There is certainly no contemporary leader with an adopted name as coldly where adopted names retain an organic vitality is in occupations where professionals can still claim some prestige based on a perception of personal decision making has devolved from the autocrat to the ordinary citizen, it is campaign worker talking to another in an office near the Capitol, and bore a his poem of that name. (The epitaph on the monument to this Citizen reads, in part: "The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day/ And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way./ Policies taken out in related to the people whose names are found on the credit cards and driver's licenses displayed in advertisements, and I assume they all know the mysterious any male person, is "John Doe"; and for his female counterpart, "Jane Roe." times, in cases where suit needed, for arcane reasons, to be filed against a legally fictitious person. They served precisely the same function that the and a handful of similar variants are used today to shield the identity of an actual person whose identity is known (as in the famous abortion case Roe the man down and also establishing his innocence. The lawyers for Timothy forms. The Supreme Court this month will hand down a decision regarding a pair in the field of generic fictitious names, and there will not soon be a movie difference. Whereas Jane Roe and John Doe at least give a nod to status based household," "user," "the consumer." This has come about owing to the continuing merger of demographic science and marketing, and the tendency is probably not All the more reason, perhaps, to insist on a little more bravura individuality on the part of our world leaders. One could stop well presidents (for example) to add the name of at least one former president or owing to the quotidian proximity that the role affords, has demonstrated a Carter. Bob "Patriot" Dole. Should an unelected tribunal be entrusted with such daytime talk show: Everyone gets his or her say before the floor passes to the remarkable how well the music has aged. Here is group improvisation at its most voices, listening and responding to one another as equals in interplay as dense couple of small quibbles with the way the box set was put together.) every party with intellectual pretensions. More than any other jazz musician of was in a creative slump in the early '60s. He couldn't keep a band together, between improvisatory freedom and adherence to form. favored pianist in Blue Note's stable, was the most versatile of keyboardists. He could play in a hushed, romantic style, then plunge, at a moment's notice, complex music, as exploratory as any of its era. Incredibly, hardly anyone recognized this until the late '70s, when the quintet's work was adopted as a revolutionary age of free jazz, with its joyful defiance of form and radical That said, the music bears the unmistakable imprint of the '60s. The hierarchy separating the leaders and the led, teachers and students, foreground (improvising soloists) and background (rhythm section). The quintet's music was built from the bottom up, assertively declaring jazz's hypnotically, without soloing, making this tune arguably one of the first percussive style of improvising, throwing aggressive, staccato darts at the material was also new. Everyone in the group was composing, especially Shorter, so fragile you're amazed they hold together. But, in fact, they're quite pliable, lending themselves to dramatic shifts in tempo and voicing. Listen, acoustic jazz, and his final sessions with the quintet are restless, transitional works that point the way ahead. After the release of pop? It's true that some of his later work sounded like the desperate effort of an aging star to sell records to rock fans. But the quintet's foray into electric jazz was a natural extension of Miles' studio experimentation, and of in the tricky harmonies of bop, he was acquiring a more painterly, and no less Beck, and imagine it being played on FM radio. Sure, it drags a bit without the volatile repartee of the earlier albums. On the other hand, this druggy, as anything the quintet recorded, suggesting both the psychedelia of King once lush and frightening, "Tout de Suite" literally vibrates with intimations suggesting that the chic woman's skirt will fall below the knee next fall. the shoe tops, and women in the street adhere in great numbers to the hemline goes on being a key visual element in the theater of female appearance. Wherever the line is drawn, a suggestive point is being made about female glance of the beholder. Pants just can't offer anything quite like it. fashion history claims that the Modern Woman was created when women gave up corsets. But that moment never quite occurred, at least not as it has been portrayed. Women have been shaping their bodies to suit shifting ideas of feminine beauty not only for centuries before modernity but ever since. The temporary abandonment of tight little waists represented no more than a change in method. The most important moment in the modernization of female dress was That was just before World War I, about a decade before the second most important moment, when they cut off their hair for good. These two radical acts made irreversible transformations in female appearance. They permanent that the little female logo on the women's restroom can doubtless high women's hemlines become or how much their hair length varies, the point of women have the choice to lift their skirts and crop their hair. Before the skirts, like long hair, had been required for women by religious law and developed its own history, both skirts and hair were considered immutable, even never lasted long. The arrival of women's legs in the first quarter of this were meant to be seen and judged privately. Women's legs obey mechanical laws, of course, and move apart while they are being used. Watching them do that has always been a volatile matter for the male viewer. Throughout all those heavily skirted centuries, men paid good money to watch women's legs prancing, kicking, and leaping on the stage, since on the street, the shift of weight was about mythology of the feminine had a lot to do with the veiling of a woman's lower treasures difficult (and perhaps unwise) to discover. It's not surprising that at the beginning of this century women who wished to declare a new parity with men, to escape feminine mystery and enter female reality, should shun male gear. It was too frivolous and perverse. Instead, they remodeled the skirt. If a skirt could be shorter and simpler, female legs and feet could be seen at work, the normal action of knees and thighs would be apparent under its neat shape, and a woman could at last be seen to make strides. Her brains and her feet could be seen to connect, and she would become a normal human being. so on. Once off the ground, the skirt's exact length became a burning issue, first about hellfire itself, since a woman with visible legs was seen by many to be walking toward her damnation. Then a range of personal worries about the exact level of the hem came into play. Shorter might be too silly or too daring, longer too staid or too sultry, either choice might be too modish or the hemline into a derogatory synonym for fashionable change. Legs turned out but the hand. It soon became clear that dispelling mystery involved more than to be outrageous, and up they went to within an inch of the crotch. And there century, including back down to the floor and even trailing. departure. The heavy threat of the ancient long skirt was long not only as a separate garment but also as the bottom of a little dress, worn and pale lipstick went with it. The look was a bid to be a little girl again, with all a little girl's irresponsible eroticism. Adult female reality was skirts were conventionally part of the innocence of childhood. But as soon as the miniskirt became part of the adult erotic arsenal, little girls' dresses they still are, guarding traditional female decorum as their elders' skirts no longer do. The sexiness of children has lately been thoroughly acknowledged, which may be why their tasty little legs are now conventionally covered. was another theft by women from men, only disguised. Pants were an old story, belt, seemed to put girls into the clothes of Renaissance youths, so they Robin Hood allusions have long since been extinguished. There followed the epoch of leg warmers and other mutations into the aerobics class look. Miniskirts withdrew from such sweaty connotations, emphasizing instead their harmony with classic jackets. These days, most miniskirts stop quite a few inches below the crotch. They have mainstream acceptance and no shock value, and are worn by young career women and old grandmothers alike. very short, novelty has lately required increasing their length, not their gauzy, to suggest more exotic freedoms, newer ways for longer skirts to seduce. connotations. The fashion business sees to it that interest in shifting skirt years of skirts that liberate and expose, women will again feel the desire for fullness, drag, and bulk in their skirts; for the chance to swish, trail, and sweep; to swing heavy fabric from the hips; maybe even to lift heavy folds in legs with something that isn't pants. The couture ball dress and the standard long ago, Late Night host Jay Leno told his audience that Air Force One to return the flight attendant "to her full upright and locked position." ("seat pocket," "ground personnel," "emergency flotation"), its stilted sometimes counterintuitive rhythms and emphases ("The captain has turned federal offense to tamper with, disable, or destroy any lavatory smoke linguistic equivalent of the worldwide nonverbal graphic system that conveys such meanings as "ladies' room," "no parking," "first aid," and "information." It is just as streamlined, just as stylized, often in the same oddly archaic sort of way. The worldwide symbol for "cocktail lounge" is a martini glass with olive, even though martinis themselves are a relatively uncommon sight these days. The symbol for "pharmacy" is a mortar and pestle. Airline language is similarly atavistic. Whenever else does one hear the word "stow" being used, except as part of the command to "stow your belongings in the overhead where "stow" is frequently used is on board boats and ships. One significant element of airline language, including many of its archaisms, derives from the unnaturally, given the obvious parallels between the two modes of transportation (fragile means of conveyance, built to negotiate a boundless, often turbulent medium of fluid or gas). An airplane is a "craft," and its "crew," including a "captain," "first officer," and "purser," operates from a "deck" inside a "cabin." The aircraft is segmented by "bulkheads." Its kitchens compressed time of air travel gives its language a focused, liturgical quality that oceanic travel has never had (at least for passengers), from the initial which in their original versions date back to the early 1960s, concerns everything from seat belts and life jackets to emergency exits and oxygen masks. The regulations are distilled by each airline into detailed scripts which are reviewed by company lawyers and must be approved, finally, by the considerable latitude when it comes to routine announcements; again, though, the language is often fastidiously scripted, down to even the most casual remarks. ("Would you like Coke or Sprite?" appears in a script provided by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.) Most of the dozen or so airlines contacted were reluctant to furnish actual transcripts of approved language manuals, although one veteran pilot (with United) asserted: "You're gonna hear the same thing, but you'll hear it just a bit differently." Southwest Airlines did provide an example of an unusual rap announcement that some of its ground personnel have used. It reads, in part: "We board in groups of thirty,/ According to your card;/ One thru thirty boards first,/ It's really not that hard." And it goes on, "Federal law prohibits smoking/ On most domestic flights./ No smoking is permitted,/ So don't even try to light." Southwest's corporate culture of officially sanctioned iconoclasm, if there can passengers may notice a crew member reading an announcement from a laminated part the scripts are committed to memory, and the habits born of rigorous training die hard. Not long ago, one of my sisters discovered that she was to be the only passenger on a commercial flight, and settled in for the journey. As she prepared for the plane to push back, a flight attendant materialized for the safety briefing, and in the one concession to the circumstances, sat down in the seat next to my sister instead of standing in the aisle at the front of the cabin. The dull monotone was the same as ever. "As we prepare for takeoff," the flight attendant said, looking at my sister from six inches away, "please take time to look through the safety information in the seat pocket in front of stripped off the same beasts that provided food and bone tools. Fur clothes were strictly utilitarian until people learned to spin thread fine enough to weave into cloth soft enough to drape around the body. Once that happened, symbol of wealth and power, and it still is. Fortunately or not, we can never for most, fur has been tamed and put in its place. Men and women swathed in seal and sable are no longer obvious lords of the world, trailing intimidating coats, still found in old movies, have vanished from real life ever since the idea took hold that exotic fur garments were not just too luxurious but also bad for the soul and bad for the planet. These days, the wearer of a big coat made wholly of fur seems almost to be hiding inside an animal costume, disguised as a member of an endangered species, as it were. decorative little sealskin scarves or squirrel trim for hoods or neat fox collars for coats. All these are very attractive, and marginal enough to suggest the wearer's superiority to fashion altogether, in accordance with the current style. In the same spirit, they can all be jolly fakes. Real is fine; fake is essentially no different. That's because textile technology has finally produced a range of synthetic fluff that vies with fur in visual beauty and tactile lusciousness. Some of this synthetic fiber is wrought into velvet and all, now we can have no fur but the image of fur, pictured skins of the rarest kind with which we can enjoy ourselves in a range of materials. Fur has solved its social and economic identity problem by leaping out of nature and into the sofa cushions or tough twill suitcases in tiger fur, and nylon zipper jackets with a clever blend of black lace and leopard skin. In it I can vaguely living flesh and fur, and I came to understand why leopard is the most desirable of all the fur prints for clothes. It's because of the way a real wart hogs and wildebeests no less than elephants and antelopes, zebras and they share with other animals. But among them, it's the leopard who seems to sunlit clearing, and pose. There's no other word for it. She stood perfectly seconds. Then she paced slowly off as if on a runway, each perfect paw straight in front of the other, haunches delicately swaying, tail holding its curve, peerless coat glittering in the sun. Our guide said that only the leopard walks cheetahs, too. But the leopard is another thing; and all things considered, we low table, her hands engaged with some objects and her body clad in a long, spots. Well, well, well. This was no real animal's pelt. Leopard skins do over the shoulders of priests with paws and tail dangling down. No, by golly, eternity in the Realm of the Dead. I turned my head and saw the woman next to exactly say that leopard print is always in fashion. But you would have to synonymous with glitz and indecorousness, but he was also a man of great with a strong capacity for pure delight. There was nothing hostile, rancorous, of the Costume Institute's show and author of the catalog, has stripped the dramatic fabrics, bold cut, and applied glitter. It is in their look of character. Many of these outfits seem intended for actors in 1940s Bible Weirdo and the Bitch. The clothes do the work, the actor could be anybody. Just tends to twitch the drapes so they hang an extra bit, as if already plucked at by a lustful hand. A black columnar dress with long sleeves and a neckline up to the chin in front leaves the whole back bare to well below the waist at one side. The bareness is enhanced by a drape that seems yanked down on purpose to that begins the slit in the skirt, opening over the right buttock and swerving to avoid the cleavage of the buttocks, is invisible from the front. cotton, linen, and wool but also metal and leather, synthetics and plastic. wait until after World War II to regain its rightful status as a primary marble, bronze, and silver, and later in steel and aluminum, in vinyl and conceptual play. When he forgets the eye and the body and tries to appeal to leopard so you can't see the dress; or when he overburdens the feminine torso with a short, floppy, bulky hoop skirt apparently made of hugely printed pastel jacket with big brass buttons, then he starts looking too French, and by that I of modernism rather than embracing it directly, in bodily terms. What does warring shapes and prints is attuned to the female shape underneath, so the result is a modern garment, not a modern sandwich board. Another triumph is the a closefitting column that turns the wearer into a walking blend of wild beast and ormolu candlestick. Note how the swirls of gold hit the body over the breasts, navel, and ovaries, while the leopard's spots slink over the crotch, Also yummy is a virtual slip in sparkly white metal mesh, trimmed top and bottom in sparkly black cotton lace. But the most perfect garment is a sleeveless black dress of tough synthetic net, ornamented with black flames (maybe seaweed) around the thighs and pelvis and descend from the neckline in uneven black clusters of grapes (maybe clouds) over the breasts and imagination working with mobile combinations of expanded and unearthly human creatures, covered with color and pattern and accompanied by music, not so very capacities of modern tawdriness. He found his own way of expounding them in the female named Dolly, has raised questions of considerable public urgency, the most troubling of which in my own mind is: Dolly? The cells from which Dolly was cloned, it turns out, were taken from a sheep's ample mammary glands. The country singer Dolly Parton. Such are the improbable byways of on the wintry commerce in the very stuff of which we're made will ultimately turn humanity into merchandise, our genesis controlled by some mutant form of agribusiness. "Turning People Into Product" was the headline above a New York Times commentary by Brent Staples that evoked, among other things, the The word was apt. Product in this collective sense, used without an article, has none of the quantitative, formative, or even Product as a generic mercantile term for "marketable commodity" has been industry during the 1960s. In his book Rock Gold: The Music always talk about [music] with one word that you hardly ever see mentioned in with all the benefits of the latest digital electronics, but it's only 'good' Product, 'live' Product, or 'strong' Product if it sells. Otherwise it's 'dead' of the entertainment world, and the cynicism it once embodied is today only occasionally highlighted by means of its presentation in quotation marks. year's nominees," wrote one newspaper critic recently, after noting that a of the most hollow product ever to pass itself off as art." most advanced and today most widely used sense, means the totality of all substance (in particular, commercially viable substance) that can be made available through the various communications and information media: not just source or substance and its medium of transmission are irrelevant to its definition, much as source and medium of transmission are irrelevant to a took a tremendous amount of effort to define. We argued about what it really means and sent drafts back and forth for about a week before we arrived at the following definition which (like all definitions that one struggles with) looks creative material viewed in contrast to its actual or potential manner of the meaning of content in the cloying phrase "content is king," the mantra repeated endlessly by Bill Gates and other multimedia conquistadors. "The dominant corporations are bigger than ever and have more control than down to apply to individuals. "We like to think of ourselves as content providers," I heard a cleric say recently about his line of work, a comment that I took to be knowingly ironic but which could also have been a sincere and pathetic attempt to be with it. (Church talk presents this problem often.) The it, and I go, "Well, that's not really horrible." In fact, I eventually started the next century, and the concept of intellectual property --a term that particular claim and embody it in the form of copyrights, trademarks, and creative product and, like a rising sea, it seems to cover new territory with every passing year. The National Basketball Association has famously sought to rumble of its motorcycles. Patents can even be held on the genetic blueprints But it is not premature to begin thinking of Dolly's ovine progenitor not so clone's eyes, of course, she will always be a significant udder. cha; or a trumpet's eerie whisper, into a thunderous row of piano clusters. The best Sun on vinyl, Jazz in Silhouette is also the most jazz. From a strictly aesthetic perspective, neither of the two volumes of combined effect is more curious than moving. (Click for a clip from more supple backdrop provided by a hypnotically sustained drone, or "space turbulent journey, as it turned out. Even today, the music sounds pretty far out, clanging with esoteric percussion, electronic distortion, and novel titles like "Cosmic Chaos" and "Outer Nothingness." expression, he appeared in garish flowing robes, a shining turban, and space goggles. For nearly four decades, this cosmic jazz messenger performed, lived, believed in the myth of their leader's origins and, like him, waited to be band's concerts were filled with dance, light shows, midgets, fire breathing, child of the black bourgeoisie. Poor and fatherless, he grew up in 1920s that "others might find out and that he might be treated as a freak," he became a recluse, burying himself in music. When not practicing piano, he was delving conscientious objector to World War II, he directed a poignant appeal to the National Service Board: "I don't see how the government or anyone else could expect me to agree to being judged by the standards of a normal person." his repudiation of physical reality as a "prison," his conviction that our hinted at such connections to the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin: "I must be white hippies. His appeal to different constituencies isn't hard to fathom. To commune. The band's ensemble structure seemed to prefigure the black music himself as a charismatic leader who would deliver his followers through believed, provided a "model for government." That model combined futurism, incumbent upon black musicians to master electronic instruments, notably the was the law. He could wake up the men in the middle of the night if he desired, risked corporal punishment. "We're less than his pupils," explained one It's understandable why this fantasy of flight would take root in black organization, and enterprise. There is a word for organizations that obey a charismatic leader, uphold fantastic founding myths, and assemble a body of a cult, he earned a lasting place in the larger culture, which otherwise might maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical group whose aim is to translate the Bible into all the languages in which its words have many of those languages have never even possessed alphabets, let alone What will be the impact of a vernacular Bible on the future for ordinary spoken and written English. The coinages and cadences of the fight"; "suffer the children"; "the salt of the earth"; "in his right mind"; served both as psychic libretto and as percussion section for English speakers everywhere. And, as the printing press gave momentum to these new vernacular Bibles, so too did the English language itself acquire new cohesion and power. (An archaeological aside: The entwining of Bible, printing press, and popular literacy reveals itself in a curious fact from the New World. In during excavations of early sites; they don't show up at all at sites of biblical language will continue to serve the same functions in English is well that his biblical tropes ("woe unto the world because of sent a team of crack investigators "to and fro in the earth, and walking up and everyone who was stopped for questioning had heard the words "And God said 'Let those surveyed failed even to recognize the expressions "New wine into old that "There is no new thing under the sun," but for half of those surveyed, the an expression may have been generally familiar, its origin remained a matter of mystery or guesswork. Thus the statement "To everything there is a season" universally ascribed to "a song from the '60s." "The truth shall make you free" identified the Bible as the source. (The guesses of other respondents included: Farm Belt inhabitant picked at random surely knows more of Scripture than any these respondents with the comment that "Pride goes before a fall" (Proverbs appreciation for, and sensitivity to, religious matters was "stirring have been unaware of connotations associated with the name they gave to a new women's running shoe: "Incubus." (An incubus is an evil spirit that has sex with sleeping women; the term is a product of medieval theological lore, not of the Bible.) Whatever the fortunes of religion itself, a dwindling cultural acquaintance with the Bible's English is surely inevitable. To acting happened minutes before the filming of a crucial scene in Marathon half an hour before the shoot, he jogged rapidly three, four, five times around carefully setting down his cup of tea and languidly rising from his chair. "I is that it so symmetrically counters the usual assumptions about the difference technique into his being that, like a classical pianist, he could stop thinking about it the moment he began performing. In short, it's the difference between all his ambiguities and contradictions simultaneously. thoughts were occasioned by what I regard as without question the two most is a former graduate student of English literature who, in his own description, of the intelligentsia in an unnamed country in the near future, and the regime, and the moral disintegration of Jack, the eponymous survivor. A man characterized by envy and cynicism, superficial wit and subterranean rage, ceaseless introspection and emotional detachment, insufferable smugness and interpretation, the problem of technique immediately arises, because to give examples of specific line readings suggests that he's merely made a sequence of acting choices, when what makes his performance so engrossing is his ability to embody all these aspects of his character at once. Now cynicism comes to the fore, now rage, now a brief interlude of tenderness, but their opposites also onto his chest, bobs his head back and forth, gulps as if stifling a burp, then suddenly lifts his head and expresses a thought that not only seems to have just occurred to him, but which also seems to have struggled with conflicting emotions before emerging. A technique, certainly, but one so expressive of character that it never occurs to us that he's reciting a text. At times he speaks in short, halting phrases, pausing between the most unlikely words, and then he'll rush through a series of phrases so quickly that he'll nearly run his cadences revealing the contours of his troubled spirit as concisely as his tempting to go on for paragraphs. How can one overlook the abruptly truncated laugh, for instance, that conveys a perplexed intellect? Or the voice suddenly shifting from silky to raspy when derision erupts from his muddled emotions? But each moment remains significant only as it traces the trajectory of his he can barely breathe, his anguish seems nearly unendurable, but it's only a momentary spasm, he regains his soulless equanimity, and as he quietly intones ironic fusion of elegy and despair, the inseparable linking of a brilliant text kittenish way: flighty and fluttery, as the role calls for, but with a much a woman as a collection of manic mannerisms. But we gradually realize that childlike silliness that will astonish even her. There is so much she's not doll and the feminist icon. But, on the contrary, she subtly provides the psychological continuity between these two aspects of her character. with a hint of voracity that hints at her dissatisfaction. difficult, and all the more shattering.) But when her web of lies begins to unravel and he calls her "pretty bird," she rolls her eyes in a gesture at once accepting of his flattery, aware of her deceit, and resentful of his condescension. She knows nothing of this consciously but, in dozens of such way her wildly unfocused energy is the consequence of her inner turmoil, of capacity for insight frustrated by her familial role. When she hears herself saying that being with her husband is "like being with papa," she pauses for a second, then flashes her eyes with something close to a recognition of primal sin, utters a sound somewhere between a hysterical giggle and a shriek of horror, and rushes across the room as if in flight from her own words. meekness but at last with a sense of her separable self. Out of her stillness When her husband says that no man would sacrifice his integrity for another is it implies that any competent craftsman could carefully study the acting is that it involves assimilation rather than accumulation, that the performer isn't so much a surrogate as a vessel. There's paradox in artifice. The supreme tragedies leave us not devastated but exhilarated, and the sublime actors, the moment their performances begin, stop acting. Wall Street Journal editorial writer observed recently about campaign Journal Sentinel presciently pointed out in advance of professional this "day" that everyone is referring to? It is not so much a unit of time as a unit of consummation, and it highlights, in a way, our larger confusion about what chronological time is and what measuring it is good for. The planet's most accurate time is kept by an atomic clock accurate that every so often the time must be adjusted by adding a "leap second" to account for the gradual, if modest, slowing of the Earth's rotation. next year.) The idea that time's passage has an objective dimension connected with diurnal rhythms is, of course, increasingly quaint, and may eventually novels, imagined a thickly settled universe where the familiar "24-hour day" is an accepted convention, presumably based on the rotation of humanity's planet language, too, time seems to have got out of hand. Temporal language often depicts the passage of time not merely as fast, relentless, and irrevocable but also, more and more, as conceptually slippery. The term our times and its portentous relative our time (as in "one of the most important temporally indeterminate, even as they become trivialized by overuse. (One Housing and Urban Development now under indictment, "the most skilled an interval whose length no mechanical or atomic clock can measure; the only instrumentation that works is emotional. The Wall Street Journal 's G. journalism, was awash in defining moments (you know, the Gulf War, the subtext is that time is fluid, that circumstances change, and that truth could with the sense of "when all is said and done" or "eventually" or "in the fullness of time," has a shapeliness and finality about it. It has been waxing in popularity since the early 1970s. The term's proximate origin remains finance, where activities are indeed governed by an actual daily cycle and where a metaphoric sense could easily have arisen out of the literal one. As utility of at the end of the day has been augmented by the various unresolved episodes lumped under the word "Whitewater," which call for an economical way of expressing the thought "when things finally get straightened though lately putting in overtime, is not so young. The Random House day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over." That quotation itself calls attention to apocalyptic antecedents in the Bible, where the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all Any cant word or phrase becomes tiresome, which perhaps matter of hours.) At the end of the day has its good and bad points. Among the bad: It imposes an implicit template of struggle and confrontation where none may exist. It also implies the inevitability of resolution. The good points include its realism: Even as it invokes the traditional language of time, it does not in fact insist on squeezing events into a rigid chronological Fallows in Breaking the News castigated for having become "the basic unit of political time," a status ruthlessly enforced by the weekly schedule of political talk shows.) Also, the whiff of eschatology that the phrase exudes is nonce expression, enjoying an ephemeral vogue. That was a decade ago. Those speakers, suggests that its colonizing power remains robust. My guess is that it will achieve, at the very least, a kind of status that is going to be conferred on more and more English locutions as time goes on: the status of a native idiomatic expression whose constituency is in fact an international group of English speakers. At the end of the day, its best days lie ahead. visiting friends and monuments and taking note of what everybody was wearing. government and public education system are secular, and both emphasize equality modern fashion in a city where East has been meeting West for so many notorious for veiling its women, but such veiling was once universal. Old clothes and that are, in fact, similar to early forms of peasant women's outdoors and that the body never be exposed except in private. All around the expression necessary for an ordered human society. Female physical beauty was viewed as an incendiary and corrupting influence that could lead to look so alien, so alluring, and eventually so infuriating to Western following the Renaissance, Western women's beauty was made to function both as conquest. Nude girls representing Truth and Virtue began to appear on public monuments. Titian painted great ladies young and old, saints, goddesses, and successful prostitutes, all equally delicious to look at. The virtuous but lively daughters of Protestant capitalists were encouraged to show some ankle forces and influencing literature and politics. Female beauty helped to was potent and important, but it functioned covertly. Female beauty was valued, straight dress with high neck and long sleeves, and a folded head cloth that wholly hides the forehead and hair, the ears, neck, and bust. costume forms a fine visual contrast to the vagaries of fashion in modern cities. The style is harmonious, dignified, and not impractical. I saw gear around the midsection, carrying groceries, the baby, and other sundries in its overlapping folds. The spirit of the outfit, however, is utterly alien to seem subversive, a stumbling block to the sane ordering of human affairs. Keeping women in the dark, wrapping them up in public like so many identical packages, is felt to corrode the social fabric, not strengthen it; to stunt, too. Many women there display the range of hairstyles and cosmetics and physical exposure found in any big city. But many more women wear a new version and universities, when an old law prohibiting its use was suddenly enforced. A universal religious tolerance, as Turkey does, and as part of their religion, this harmless religious practice improper. But they do. trying to have it both ways. Unlike the yarmulke, which is strictly symbolic, the folded scarf is functional. Like the original veil, it serves to create the others on an equal footing in all respects; and in determinedly modernized Turkey, too. The girls who wish to wear the scarf in Turkey say it represents forbidden. They may claim this, but their very appearance in these scarves cancels that interpretation. Those who object to them seem closer to the mark in fearing that the scarves signal a rising fundamentalist opposition to the secular principles on which modern Turkey was founded. The girls who believe the scarves mean freedom may in fact be blinded by them. They may not realize their complicity in a movement that seems likely ultimately to take such pinching her head and reducing her face, I would think, heavens, take it off, remember that, above the shoulders, unattractiveness is the whole point. It was startling to me how unnoticeable the attractions below the neck became without a personality to avow them. A tightly wrapped head, with encapsulated eyes, nose, and mouth, doubtless suited the publicly shrouded female of antiquity, for example, where women can't vote, since it squashes public expression along shapely legs and curving torso displayed in contemporary clothes below it. The in fact betraying its ancient and honorable reluctance to take on the suppression of women's hair, has long since solved the problem another way, never been challenged, and they cohabit, more or less, with modern fashion if couple of yards of plain wool around their necks; no sign of bright printed silk. Shiny stacks of beautiful scarves are sold in the Grand Bazaar, for waiting, lugging, and shoving, I found myself wishing that modern clothing Odyssey recounts a journey in many stages, with several other trips contained in it, Homer describes many arrivals and departures, often at food and drink, entertainment, and a comfortable bed for the night. Unlike now, however, it involved new clothes, too. At the time Homer wrote about, clothing was a household supply, like a wine cellar full of casks or many herds of cattle and coops of chickens. Guests would use the clothes the way they used all, except gifts for his hosts. When he arrived, he was stripped, washed, oiled, and freshly dressed from head to foot in garments woven by the lady of the house and her servants. His own were presumably cleaned and absorbed into evening throughout his stay, and he left for the next stage of his trip, also carrying only gifts, dressed in whatever his hosts had last given him to wear. clothes were often elegant. Elaborate patterns, some of them with narrative scenes, might be woven into fabrics of great finesse, their finely spun fibers dyed in strong and subtle colors. Women did all this work, and they did it unceasingly for their households, which could become famous because of it, if the mistress of the house was a talented fabric designer and had skilled help. onto the body. Sometimes two pieces were sewn up the sides and across the shoulders, with slits left for head and arms, to be slid on and belted or arranges to get him saved and sent onward. She prompts the island's Princess about this, you realize that laundry could be so large and rare a project only because the palace was supplied with hundreds and hundreds of available garments, along with hundreds and hundreds of sheets and blankets, and kept on making more. The princess wanted the laundry done right now, though, because she hoped to find a husband soon, and the family would need clean clothes and bedding for possible marriage feasts. A handsome, stranded stranger would be certain to capture her interest, too. Those gods left nothing to chance. of the family clothes, now clean and dry. Then she tells him how to find the palace and how to approach her royal parents to ask their help, not liking to appears alone as a needy traveler before them, the queen narrows her eyes: And just where did you get those clothes you have on? The queen sounds familiar enough, since we're used to the distinctiveness of designers' always linked with its maker but not with a particular wearer. In a world without textile or clothing markets, each piece of weaving was like a family meal or a home performance of music, available to anyone present but the property of no one person, never bought or sold, always identified with the one who had created it inside that house. Except in times of war or pillage, it Homer wants to dwell on the perfections of dressed persons, he mentions the dash with which their clothes are worn, unless the point is the beauty of the fabric and who had woven it. Often the poet has a guardian deity adding more facial expression, and sprinkling extra grace over the frame. in their basic shapes, with individual appeal added by the wearer's own style. until a supple person slides into them and strikes a cool pose. The more fantastic grow the evening gowns on the runway, the more uniform grows the garb everywhere much the same, and suggest interchangeability; outstanding effects What contemporary travel needs to become truly convenient shower, slip on the robe provided (this part we already have), and then, in the or two and some jackets, all in many colors and all in your size, since you choice of these, have dinner, spend the night, dress anew in the morning if you like, and check out. On to the next hotel, same story. Eventually you get home, carrying no bags, wearing some clothes you can add to your own collection as you find you suddenly need a really good suit for the day, that would be arranged, like a rental car, or added as an extra hotel service. The hotel would deliver the desired ensemble to you (along with the indispensable for a more modest range of products. You'd have to invoke your own gods for the the air. For my scheme to work, certain questions, I admit, need more thought. But the thought of traveling without packing, except maybe for a tiny computer and a tiny camera, has a powerful charm of its own. Some might even take a just the widening international scope of the fashion industry that makes clothing design everybody's business these days. It's the shows, which are ever more fantastic, and the press coverage of them, which is ever more hysterically serious. It certainly isn't the clothes. If you look around at what men and all. The extreme garments created for the shows may be worn, occasionally, by people in fashion, showbiz, or society. But the only way the public has of relating to these items is to gasp at them and applaud them, swoon over them that evoke these responses, it's their likenesses transmitted by the media. gasping with relief and fatigue afterward. This lets us know how epic the designer's personal ordeal has been, how heroic his endurance. The other epic elements of the show are insistent music, striking lighting, and a piquant setting, perhaps a skating rink. But these are beside the point. The central focus of everything is the bevy of unbelievable models and the way they work. Clothes, no matter how outrageous, don't register by themselves. It's the girls parading around in them that make the show, dazzle the audience, magnetize the cameras, and entrance the world. Them, and the obscurely thrilling knowledge golden chairs leaving a serpentine passage for the parade, and surrounded by milling and chattering in several languages and photographing each other during music began, the mumbling stopped, and on came the procession of ravishing visions. They passed inches from me, stalking and swaying, pausing occasionally, casting friendly looks on one and all. They were very young and wide range of strong colors and textures that were cut and fitted or draped and buttoned to mold the body and occasionally expose the bosom or upper thighs. historical styles to achieve shockingly modern erotic results.) The girls all crucial at fashion shows. On television the camera rests fleetingly and incompletely on a single outfit. But in life the important thing is the girls all had bare legs and flat mules and their hair hung down perfectly straight. They wore no makeup at all. The clothes were unshaped and the colors beautiful, and paraded with the same pleasing, well disposed manner and well paced gait through the perversely austere production. all such intensely concocted efforts, year after year, set ablaze by fierce lights and lashed at by loud music, rows of tall, beautiful, amiable young women stride and pause and turn, obligingly decked in strands of rope, piles of feathers, patches of metal, mountains of taffeta. Every once in a while, one or this. Mannequins have paraded in designers' collections since the turn of the century, but until World War II their status was low and so was their pay. They were employees at individual designers' studios, and their job was to resemble charms of prospective customers were on no account to be upstaged by those of the model. Mannequins were nameless, their standard good looks as uninteresting evening wear, so their bare skin wouldn't be distracting. It has remained true that the fashion model's only job is to appear in clothes; indeed, in the atmosphere in which they shine as individual stars, it's all the more important that they have no other distracting talents. The appeal of these female platoons is ancient, potent, and forbidden. They are like rows of whores or slaves, odalisques or don't offer intricate performances that took years of severe training to perfect; they don't sing, speak, or chant; they don't earnestly appear for a cause; they aren't eagerly joining in a festival. They have no will. They parade their fresh charms in seductive, borrowed plumage for our judgment, but only for the greater glory of the sultan, the high priest, the whoremaster, the ringmaster, the devil himself, the designer and his backer who have bought them as toys to play with. It's one of the oldest erotic fantasies, recurrent in legends and fictions of many kinds, lending itself well to traditional ballet perceive fashion shows as variations on this particular theme, because it would force us away from the comfortable notion that fashion is the mirror of our time. But we do know that deep beneath our surface approval of the wholesome worldwide tide of luxury commerce that keeps the fashion business like about fashion is seeing it perennially exposed in daring, costly, ridiculous, delicious, televised runway shows full of mobile, passive, perfect girls. Anyone looking for a further proof of the return to barbarism at the end allows us to say something. Yet it is also frequently called upon to say nothing. There are semantically and grammatically complex ways of doing this, contexts where I have grown accustomed to expect a resigned or satiric attempting to "walk back the cat" (to use the increasingly prevalent argot of the intelligence services for tracing a chain of events backward to establish a manifestation, though, is in an advertisement for Converse athletic shoes national television during last spring's basketball championships: whose spelling he was uncertain of, "simply seemed funnier than blah The various lexicographers I have consulted are quite certain, however, that the term is known to have been around for a while, documentary evidence for it responsibility. True, our experience could simply be the result of what might be called the Awareness Tautology: One's sense of a phenomenon's pervasiveness is heightened by the fact of one's having been alerted to the phenomenon in the prominent form of what is known as "sound symbolism" is crowding out some older ones in competition for a familiar piece of habitat. English has long had various ways of mimicking the generic sound of spoken language, the noise of a crowd, or idle chatter (chatter being such a word). The class of onomatopoeic would call crossly. "Pay attention to your flying, for pity's sake!" in a crowd are supposed to be talking animatedly but unintelligibly to one another, she observes, the effect is sometimes achieved by having half the cast The second thing happening is not so much etymological as sociological: a continuing evolution in semantic function. Terms such as have a special utility when the speaker's audience can accurately fill in the keys, cued to circumstance, that can designate specific information. In other like: "You and I know all the points that would ordinarily be inserted at this place in the conversation, so let's just skip it and move on." repetition of words and arguments in the various public media. I am not aware of any studies comparing the number of words an average person could expect to now, but the increase surely is vast. If a politician were to say today that he all know what he means, and we would know what was meant if, after an arrest, a phonemes, and it will be instructive to watch as something along these same obvious reasons have far more trouble gathering oral citations than written similarly imitative terms) in any communications media other than paper. Date and explicit provenance must be provided. The information will be turned over ongoing sexual and legal battles, "and I told the truth." support her version of the event, and that I had, in fact, done so." headline, "Who can claim truth or objectivity anymore?" Perhaps because it is less accessible, or at least less prevalent, the act of truth telling has garnered far less attention in popular speech than the act of those associated with veracity by about 5-to-1. Synonyms for truth telling are gravitational pull of falsity is so powerful that even words and phrases that start out as truth reinforcers tend, over time, to acquire the opposite connotation. Who is not immediately put on guard when confronted with in press accounts (as, unavoidably, they also are here) within an isolated setting of quotation marks, which function as a stage wink. The ostensible synonym for "don't bet on it" or even "not on your life." denials have suffered an irreversible erosion of face value, owing to their routine issuance by bombastic politicians, aggrieved miscreants, and representatives of liberation armies and international terrorists. speakers.) Once intended to endow a denial with the qualities of pervasiveness and totality, the adjective categorical ("absolute," "unqualified," company declared, "I categorically deny that we would ever touch Snow the realm of theology. Say what one will about Catholic theology, it offers a cosmological taxonomy in which all things have an appointed place and a for instance, is helpfully defined in The Catholic Encyclopedia as the "accordance or conformity between what is asserted and what is," or "the In the weeks ahead it will be important to maintain clear purpose is to achieve some useful end or to prevent some distinct harm. (Examples might include a doctor misleading a terminally ill patient or a be encountering most frequently these days. If a lie, by definition, becomes a lie only in the context of communication (speech, writing, gesture), and if a lie is immoral because it destroys the fundamental trust that makes communication is understood to have no objective value to begin with? I give extremely difficult situations being considered, there is no mutual trust or confidence to destroy. In fact, a maximum of distrust prevails between the parties, and no man in such a position could prudently take the words of the other at their face value. In such a case, words would cease, to a degree, to be a medium for the exchange of thought. Communication would be broken down, and to the extent in which communication of mind with mind has become [It] seems incontestable that if no communication in the ordinary sense of the lies are told without any intention to deceive ("You've lost weight!" "Let's do lunch!"). Moreover, some deceptions are, technically, not lies, theologically speaking: "A person could tell a truth with sufficient clarity to avoid making a false statement and sufficient ambiguity and evasiveness to avoid revealing a truth which he wants to keep hidden." (For instance, if you're a presidential candidate and are asked if you have ever smoked marijuana, and you have, but statement that successfully picks its way across this dangerous terrain is said characterizations, too, were originally conferred with a sense of professional have also been pulled out of truth's orbit and into the atmosphere of mendacity. Today an economy of truth sometimes just means "a lie," resistance of the other party to sexual intercourse by a combination of gifts and being economical with the truth takes us perilously near to economy of truth may have lost its purity, but it retains considerable utility. If nothing else, it adds a timely new dimension to the hortatory couture is a constant refrain of fashion critics. It has been coming to an end ever since it started, much like culture in general. What a killing blow The Press was first invited to fashion showings! Its presence would surely destroy the secrecy between a lady and her dressmaker, which was crucial to individual distinction. More than half a century later, the ascent of status. More recently, the street fashion called "grunge" was imitated by death of high fashion in much the same way, when slashed sleeves, grotesquely imitating the rags of mercenary soldiers, came into style. accessories, and related materials. Most of the garments belonged to elegant at the latest. A few dresses, shown together in the catalog as a group titled castoffs at close range. You could handle them if you wore the white cotton leaned your nose too near the chiffon or made too broad a gesture toward the It's more interesting to see what actual couture clients ordered and wore than it is to look at runway numbers worn only by models. One noticeable fact is that rich women, unlike beautiful models, are not all tall and thin. Displays of historical costume have always revealed the way are molded to fit the mode, with the help of individualized exercise, garments fitted onto padded mannequins showed that their wearers were of physical as well as financial substance, and these masterpieces are striking mainly as imaginative triumphs of individual fit and suitability. was classic in the best sense, lacking quirkiness and full of internal harmony even when it was daring, always both beautiful and personal. The ensemble that clear historic value and great elegance, but not much independent life. It with a close fit, high collar, and richly draped skirt. Beautifully realized, very wearable, very simple, it should obviously be worn to lunch, not put on that most buyers do wear their purchases, prepared to sacrifice currency for Among the named original owners, the most palpably present designer, whose masterpiece here must have suited her perfectly. For this black lace. Covering the breasts was a joined pair of black velvet, navel in front, and swept diagonally back in a bigger V to the bottom of the attached to thin black ribbons that climbed over the shoulders. Two other ribbons came around from the sides, and two more rose diagonally from the hips halfway down the rear plunge, all six converging between the shoulder blades with a bow. Two more bows appeared on the shoulders and two more correspondingly at the hips where the lower two ribbons began. Like almost everything in the whole group, this amazing dress combined complexity and simplicity, sensuality and decorum, refined wit and strong impact. French years, solidly backed up by visibly inventive tailoring and visibly exquisite fabrics and craftsmanship. The result is an undeniable beauty whatever the mode, a beauty specifically meant to render the individual wearer beautiful, Look to Now," mainly focuses on the impact of the garments themselves. The perceptions of high fashion have slowly altered its character. Fifty years ago, rarity and the rarity of their wearers, faintly implying that they were all proportioned rooms. Fashion shows were designed as exclusive events. Fashion photography aided that impression with formal views of nameless, thoroughbred models. Since then, all fashion has gradually become a branch of popular entertainment that involves everybody in its creation of vast revenues, through carefully fostered connections with all kinds of celebrity and fantasy. have the fantasy look of things not made with hands, things always more fleetingly pungent or allusive than they are authoritatively beautiful, visions they have been designed, costumes for one performance. Just as with actual the appeal; everything must look easily conjured up and as easily swept away. crumpling their clothes as they gaze straight at you, a strap slipping down, unless they're poised in fragile tinseled drapes and staring from under dream headgear. Fashion journalists covering the couture are careful to explain the isn't meant to register on the scanning gaze. The throwaway aspect of popular inexpensive fashion, now normal since nobody learns to sew, has lent its look to the costly couture, which more and more seems incompletely imagined and only But real quality does show at close range. At FIT there is acetate knit that molds the body better than a glove, with similarly canny curved seaming. Set into one of these audacious seams is a zipper that begins between the breasts, snakes up over one shoulder, slithers diagonally down across the back and swoops forward over one hipbone to continue diagonally distance, it's invisible on this sleek sea creature. creation of sartorial beauty will never end. It will only shift ground. Talent will arise to cut anew and drape afresh, to hang the mirror in another place, scientist, bills himself a "forensic" scholar. He's fashioned a career out of demographic records to make her case, the book's supporters attacked him as an an act of provocation, to say the least, and so it was taken. Last summer, Books, an imprint of Holt, decided to publish a revised version of publisher of Holt and a German, to express his outrage. accused her of having defamed him in her Historical Journal article, from the government's war crimes division (where she helps build cases against has demonstrated insensitivity unbecoming a public servant. historian who agreed to write a preface, backed out. He did provide a blurb, as did seven other distinguished academics, including the secondary sources is untrustworthy. (Click here for another creed; when they rallied against Bolshevik enemies, their audiences did not strategy, he'd have to write, "Not race but crime served as the prime scapegoat scapegoat, they occasionally lashed out at the weak." The first adverb casually Holocaust literature that portrayed the catastrophe as the natural culmination veneer of social science sophistication to this reductionist point of view. subtext of Holocaust writing. But they also take pains not to dismiss the better than anyone, and she has come up with more quietly damning observations. propaganda, it need not be sincere," she writes. (Click here to see how these statements could instead form part of a report the same witness's account, on the next page of testimony, of the and worked to death in the camps. Without minimizing the significance of totalitarian rule, the hysteria of wartime mobilization, and the effects of didn't read the article very carefully. I made the mistake of giving my consent convincingly and authoritatively dismantle its arguments." masterfully lays bare his gravely flawed use and interpretation of archival sources. Both authors also raise hard questions about the political reasons for interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my conclusions concerning the politicization of Holocaust historiography, I am The authors of this volume express serious doubt, which I share. To reduce a German society as it also permeated other societies is to be simplistic and to show contempt for the reader. This book rights the balance." mesmerized by its hypotheses. Fortunately, in an open society all scholarship is subject to public scrutiny, and the advance of historical knowledge cannot do without rigorous criticism of the kind provided in this important and essays constitute a sharp rebuttal provoked by the public's and the press's love affair with a book that casually dismisses excellent work done by others; that contains many contradictions; and that upholds dangerous myths regarding It's not my style of writing. But I don't think he's gone beyond the bounds of scholar who came before him. Two of the blurb writers have quite understandable peer pressure in explaining why German soldiers participated in genocide; in a being a Holocaust revisionist. In any event, these blurbs often appear to be among Social Democrats, intellectuals or workers. Back of removing the Holocaust from history and turning it into a sort of secular would deplore if they were implemented in their own countries. Back rather than two months after, as most historians believe. He bases this claim on the "conclusive" statement of two former storm troopers. In fact, their explains, as part of a "defense focused on superior orders as an Etymology, the study of word origins, often interests people otherwise uninterested in language. The reason, surely, is that etymology is tethered to ordinary life in ways that are easy to grasp. Anyone can enjoy knowing how a early notes reminded people of the wooden sawbuck used in carpentry), or how word "book" (Germanic tribes used beech staves to carve runes on). We like There would be no telling of stories at all, of course, without grammar. But people uninterested in language issues are content to remain uninterested in grammar. Grammar, the genetic blueprint of meaning, operates at a level of abstraction. Nouns and verbs and other parts of speech are considered not as familiar individuals but as members of different species. Their interactions are considered as elements of an ecosystem. Grammar is hard that make it possible to see the dynamics of linguistic grammar in a book with the unprepossessing title The Visual Display of Quantitative presenting numerical data in a graphically arresting manner. This tour de recognized as a classic by data wonks and makers of fine books alike. It has analysis of such improbably compelling genres as railroad schedules and balance noted, that illustrates "how multivariate complexity can be subtly integrated into graphical architecture, integrated so gently and unobtrusively that viewers are hardly aware that they are looking into a world of four or five in that first volume of his trilogy, but it has turned out that the whole statistical honesty" whether the subject is traffic deaths or the distribution of galaxies. The second book in the series, Envisioning Information than numerical reality: the depiction of cartographic information, diagrams, and signage. (What's the best way to show sunspot activity, for example, or the processes and can therefore function as explanatory narratives. information that would have delayed the launch was undeniably "there" element whose malfunction contributed to the Challenger tragedy. After presenting his own version of what the charts should have looked like, displays that reveal truth and displays that do not." analogs in writing. (Hierarchy, for instance, is the building of large structures out of small ones, be they nautical charts out of soundings or sentences out of morphemes.) Aware of the parallels between visual grammar and understanding of each. In one place he shows how the rhetorical shape of a paired images and a ribbing of parallel verbs, finds a visual counterpoint in works of landscape design and even dance notation. (To get the full picture, so to speak, you'll have to look at the book yourself.) An entire chapter is devoted to the concept of "smallest effective difference," showing how distinctions that are subtle but clear (two light colors on a map, say) can be be not just fastidious but also an evocative and wonderfully quirky writer. page, since there's no room to show them stretched out like the other rivers. around a tight frame." That word boustrophedon describes writing that goes from left to right on the first line, then right to left on the second, then left to for a biotech company that offered prospective parents "children made to cure had been reported. Considering the difficulty of such relatively simple "There's not a chance in hell," said a conference participant, geneticist recombine all those genes and get a desired effect." sequencing and identifying all human genes, was intrigued enough to see the ethical reverberations of genetics quite a bit these days. What he worries about most is genetic redlining, where claims adjusters use tests, which he has insurance. What fascinates and horrifies artists, on the other hand, is the and books, artists have dreamed up complex nightmares of genetic determinism, animals into men until the misshapen creatures revert and kill him, the forces of nature overcoming man's civilizing artifices. From The Boys From scientist; something gone terribly, terribly wrong. scientist is no longer mad, because he has no illusions of mastery. Instead, he's a lone and often belated moralist, eaten up with remorse and anxiety, pushed into unsavory experimentation less by runaway curiosity than by unscrupulous corporate overlords. Genetic manipulation is a given. The yucky thing is the profit motive. And the mistreatment of lab animals. at the space agency. The hero, in a sense, is the company doctor, who helps warehoused. Arriving to investigate, he finds them standing around a campfire, In the end, his nostalgia for fuzzy critters results in an act of defiance against his corporate boss: He throws biotech and science to the wind and helps The misgivings of scientists are particularly shrill in reflecting capitalism's relentless remaking of the world in search of The genetically altered kids are exceedingly bright, ambitious, and nerdy, as if cloned from Bill Gates, and grow up believing that a person's only value is force the moral issues. They're sloppy, imperfect products, trying desperately to live up to an ideal of progress. "Are we not men?" they plaintively ask. mischief. "To this day I have never troubled about the ethics," he says of his have given scientists pause, but the doubts they occasioned came too late. They didn't stop the arms race or radiation experiments using human guinea pigs. The Human Genome Project, in fact, was built using the infrastructure of the division to explore the social and ethical ramifications of genetics. Its forcefully denounced that prospect at Senate hearings held last spring. scientists talk a great deal more about God than does the rest of the world," she writes. "What is that but an obeisance to the shadow of the God who ran off, the God they drove off when bold and young and frightened of nothing!" But will be filled with Orthodox families wandering to and from shul, the women in wigs and long dresses, the children otherworldly in clothes bare of sports and check out the work of a group of young novelists busily turning the fulfillment. What the new generation embraces is the past, a godly past hedged of being forced out of her sect by her own intellectual and sexual curiosity. she all but rejects that rejection. The narrator is an unhappy ad copy writer before she can make something like peace with her life. rabbinical courts? The difference has everything to do with the passage of and imagination to a kind of writing all but given up for moribund, and even she has gone native. In a brilliant novel published last year, The themselves, who are much less vacuous than predicted and insist that they, too, characters, who are the children of Holocaust survivors, the right to suffer this year (though it was written in the '50s and set even earlier). It is a stunning, heartbreaking novel, the darkest and most modern of his works, whether cultured cosmopolitans or members of the pious bourgeoisie, don't suddenly convert to fundamentalism; that's a specialty of godless and carry their rituals off with comparable ease. Ease, that is, compared with frets about them: "They are good people," he tells his son. "But they are very the religious, alive. It is the most important, but they have lost the other. They have forgotten the poetry. There is not one of them who is what we used to has two advantages over her characters. With an advanced degree in literature, success of her novel lies in its casualness, the way it makes the extremes of that, unlike other members of fundamentalist sects one might find in novels, her characters don't chafe at their restrictions, or not too much. At the practical things for her." Indeed, she's one of the few deeply observant The sacred is not mysterious to her." Rather, she "romanticizes the secular. Poetry, universities, and paintings fill her with awe." It's typical of revelation of a most unambitious ambition: She wants to open a kosher grocery requires, for example, permission from the rabbi and renting from an the edges of her life, but she doesn't yearn to escape it, exactly. She has merely learned that her leaders are capable of stupid mistakes in their dealings with her. She has no intention of leaving, first because her doubt is not enough to sever her from her husband and children and second because that's prodigal, one duller but more loyal; the Holocaust survivor numbed by his past; at least, despite bits of soggy sentimentality; she makes you care. (The white trash.) And whatever one's quibbles, Goodman should be credited with was belabored and cartoonish; it kept coming back long after it seemed to have drawn its last breath. World War II is what really did it in, since the gas and rubber shortages prevented large groups from going on the road. But once the big band no longer played dance music, it morphed into some strange, decadent tradition that survived in altered form was that of the mood arranger, who went from scoring music for big bands to orchestrating tone poems for individual Deluxe, semiclassical, and exotic, a hydroponic creature of the recording studio, this music can't be understood simply as jazz. It's a lot more But instead, he walked the tightrope between commercial and art music. His extra arrangements for his band. The music from that period was slow and haunting, moving like someone trying not to sweat on a boiling day. It had no vibrato and a lot of French horn, which would be combined with clarinets or too intense and inward; as he noted in his autobiography, he was struggling to likewise, he never had any problem understanding that jazz was a form of T >he duality of high art and mass sensibility is at the heart of jazz, are for the most part rendered useless by the intricately accented horn charts within the 19-piece ensemble sound. The orchestra gathers around the soloist, rather than the soloist trying to ride the waves of the orchestra, and way to oboe, which slides back into trumpets, and the progression into the fourth measure, with nothing but the treble of muted trumpets in unison, feels like an airplane taking off. (Its power as an organic whole is no accident: Miles Ahead was recorded in bits and pieces, and "The Meaning of the shifting its emphasis from the first and third beats to the second and fourth, constantly renewing a stirring chill. Sketches sets up processional trickles of harp or flute from the rest of the mass. It is music of painstaking The records were received as instant masterpieces, in breathless appreciations that couldn't begin to take in the complex way that you hear his music most often being played by repertory bands. One of the most a major jazz metaphor, one that more commercial composers would never try to toward that end: He has provided a 6.5-second "pause track" on each CD, so that you can reflect on what you've just heard. He writes that it's the first time he's added such a track. Music that conjures up a sense of suspended time and a still, suburban afterglow seems a perfect occasion for its debut. attempted to excuse his client's behavior with a convoluted explanation, Judge One can almost hear the appreciative chuckles from the venues. And yet someone should have risen to say, "Objection!" It is common to designed less to seek the truth than to make a case, a form of argument that at times cunningly equivocal or downright deceitful. Aside from pure broadest possible leeway to individual behavior. This form of justification, devoid of any overtones of prevarication: "subtle, intricate, moralistic reasoning, informed by a rigorous logic" is his definition. I am not as slight risk: It may be wielded as a slur and received as a compliment, or vice commentaries on the commentaries (the process goes on and on) cannot be faulted for using guile to arrive at a congenial "truth." But the word has its own As a result, even infinitesimal details are treated with the utmost affairs (for instance, civil and criminal law, dietary laws, the status of women), it also considers issues that have no practical application at all, and sometimes delves into matters that may seem utterly fanciful. sauntering past, something struck me. Blondes were everywhere, their bright thatches catching the sun, but until that minute, I hadn't taken proper notice blond hair actually covered their scalps all the way to the roots. Everybody had abundant streaks or sizable tracts of blondness, all supported by dark Natural blondness, once the badge of physical and moral perfection, now marks longer enticingly innocent and desirable but boringly earnest, naive, and True blondes used to thank providence for their hair, then paint their brows and lashes dark to create enough smolder to match its no trace of the original color was permitted to show. Popular fiction of the 1940s and '50s was full of scathing descriptions of women whose deceptive blondness was dark at the roots. It was the visual evidence of feet of clay, a heart of sloth, a general moral degradation. Blondness could be false; but integrity dwelt in keeping it perfect. Dimming natural blondes would scrupulously dye the blond back in and touch up all traces of shadow at the sober or smoldering brunettes leave their natural roots in place and add blondness to taste, as a patent ornament and sophisticated reference. Hair dye exclusive privilege of prostitutes, actresses, strippers, drag queens, and anybody who didn't mind being taken for them. Now it is modish for both sexes. not afraid of their beauty secrets and can appropriate their willful blondness 1980s, when kids bleached the top half of their spiky hair so they could dye it remained; and when the whole thing grew out, the dark roots showed up under the of body piercing. These evolving styles were much deplored by the mainstream at the time and have duly been adopted by all and sundry. her blond pile of hair covering only the top half of her skull, her nape and blond mane and an inch of dark roots, the new ideal of perfect blond young womanhood. And there on the next page was the old ideal. It was the Grace Kelly scalp out of her pure mind and elegant soul and reverently coiled into a Next I looked at blondes from the more distant past. Titian is the most famous for painting golden hair, along with his many Venetian Renaissance followers, and it's also well known that ladies in Renaissance with their rippling cascades and looped braids of brilliant yellow hair. But a closer look shows they all have dark eyes and dark eyebrows and that their hair spreads from a center part where at least an inch or two of dark roots is clearly visible on either side. You can usually see more darkness along the function as a sort of witty allusion to an outworn creed. humanist High Renaissance, golden hair brought to mind the secular and golden hair, flowing down from the Virgin's head in a natural veil, suggesting the descending rays of an ultimate blessing from above. Eve wears it too, as do the mark of God's favor, affirming the signal beauty of the old pagan deities altered world that natural blondness should have such sacred power no longer. Instead, we have reinvented the much more flexible and imaginative Venetian blondness. We have a new awareness of how limiting and unfair the cult of fair welcomed. Its varicolored roots have grown in for all to see and for all to reckon with. Blondness has become just one of the many attractive ways to adorn was to stimulate discussion. In that, the list has been a success. It has engendered not merely discussion but objection, accusation, abuse, and standards but no less fascinating for its shortcomings, and no less culturally pick of things wrong with the list. It fails to recognize acknowledged classic "prominent" persons, including celebrities and politicians; that makes it an arbitrarily conducted test of popularity. It is designed to stimulate video rentals; that makes it a commercial list. At least one columnist has argued For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that the way the that is at best controversial and at worst dumbfounding. But controversy is cinema scholarship, and educated judgment. It nods to expertise by anointing expertise. It thereby marks another stage in the decline of cultural popular) long exerted by critics, educators, repertory programmers, film but in recent years their influence has been waning. (Compare the influential more choices than it had a generation ago, and vastly more power as a result. transformed access to film's past. The old classic rep houses are now mostly daily struggle to survive was the first attempt to join documentary filmmaking overcome Nature. Once one of the world's most popular works, today culture were not only closer in time to the silents, they also acknowledged their stature, and stature mattered to audiences then more than it does now. compilation reflects more than just technological change and the shifting power to confer "greatness," however. It also suggests a change in the characters the especially notable in the genre films on the list, the tales of tough guys, dames, cowboys, spacemen, and gangsters traditionally at the heart of popular most of them represent their genre in its late period-- The Godfather so on. These are indeed great films: powerful, handsome, strikingly edited. But in many ways, they seem just the opposite of the movies from which they developed. There is a startling difference between the gangster romanticism end, you knew they were bad: They broke their mothers' hearts and paid too high The same is true of the cowboy and the tough guy. There are traditional cowboys and tough guys on the list, but the former (as in their stars than for their dramatic power. The old western was almost always a features existentially disillusioned outlaws going out in a montage of bloody worldly wise woman on the list. The tough cities that such women and their fugitive men once haunted are nowhere to be found. The seductive and corrupting themselves to sound cultural interpretation. But there is an upheaval in canon is and isn't. The alternative is sitting in the dark, waiting for a show that's missed the link, click to see how the influence of cultural gatekeepers has in the town where he achieved his greatest revolutionary victory. You might itself, where glamour, like everything else, remains under state control. not, after all, the best of communists. He was, in his dashing manner, the democratic or libertarian impulses, quick to order executions, and quicker still to lead his own comrades to their deaths in doomed guerrilla wars. Love of the Soviet Union was his first instinct, and when he evolved a second, more critical instinct, it was only because the Soviet leaders turned out to be less and a frightening abstract hatred, who in the end recognized only one moral value as supreme: the willingness to be slaughtered for a cause." But I am himself, yet a figure of great importance in the revolutionary history of the offering a political method that, in the long run, had disastrous effects on whoever tried to uphold it. Guerrilla war imposed a militarist logic and closed was good. His ideas were hopeless; but he remains the embodiment of an ideal. man, the child of his continent, who knew how to die for his generous ideas in dream, and who earned a place in history precisely because he refused to yield what is most just and dignified in the human spirit." And so forth, one commentator after another, which would be hard to believe, except that right military writings. And the mania is not just a matter of mass culture. emblem." But then, I can understand that particular confusion. A couple of though I knew better, I ended up adding a superfluous nod to the innate "nobility" of this man whose fanaticism and lack of human sympathy brought say such things? It is not because of the doctrines of communism. It is because of the doctrines of glory, which are much more primitive. What is glory? This: commitment that expresses itself in only one way, by a willingness to kill other people on its behalf, and to be killed in turn. A commitment, finally, to defeat. For victory is always partial and compromised, but defeat and death are total and grand. Victory is secular; defeat is sacred. survived his guerrilla adventures, and was today an elderly figure, would not be straining their brains to draw ever finer distinctions between the man's calamitous influence and some undefinable greatness. aspects of the French Revolution, had betrayed the revolution's democratic glamour. They would say: He was wrong, but he was great. It was a question of having failed spectacularly, and not having flinched. It was the appeal of Napoleon had tried to conquer with the sword instead of with the mind. Yet a keep you in their memory, Day as beautiful as glory, Cold as the as beautiful as glory, cold as the tomb. And because the cult of glory feeds on defeat and not on victory, we can be sure that, like the passion for Napoleon that at its root the problem is a matter of genre. The thing is, child abuse as currently conceived is hopelessly Gothic. Stories about child molesting are populated by evil monsters and helpless innocents (rather than flawed or unfortunate humans), and they languish in a miasma of sinister eroticism. Child molesting is thought to be so evil, so far outside the bounds of civilization, that no means of exorcism can be considered too harsh or prone to error. same time, though, the evil is elusive and invincible. How can we prevent continue to molest, no matter what the penalty. (Never mind that the recidivism rate for child molesting is less than half the reported burglary rate and lower than that of many major felonies.) How can we catch them before they start? We suggestion. How can we tell whether "recovered memories" are accurate? We can't. How can we make sure trials convict molesters and acquit the falsely accused? We can't. Child abuse is horrible; child abuse is inevitable. The consequence of this conceptual impasse, according to the same script over and over again, claiming all the while to be "breaking the silence." Their monsters differ (Satanic pornographers and incestuous rapists on the one hand, megalomaniac therapists on the other), as do their helpless in some nasty little way exactly what we want. It's pleasurable. The more we exclaim how horrified we are by child molestation, the more we can permit ourselves to linger, in a way that's not far from lascivious, over images of childish bodies. (Little tummies! Little bottoms! Little feet!) The more we condemn the perversity of child beauty pageants, the more we get to watch death. But there's more. Talking about abuse not only permits guiltless us why we are the way we are and gives us someone to blame, and it deflects a sense of cultural or moral decline onto a group of particular individuals. In symbiotic relation with sanitizing, and the veiling and the exposing exist in the sciences that investigate its perversions, in fact talked and wrote more people enmeshed in this culture of sex could no more escape or stand outside nothing if not an optimist, though, and he believes that if what's wrong with of all by acknowledging, rather than suppressing in a panic, the erotic feelings we have about children: We should realize that finding children prosecutors so nicely put it. And then we should follow the series of steps everything backward, looking always to the past for sources, explanations, and advises thus: "If you find yourself getting too excited, going too far, wanting It's possible to dismiss such prescriptions as naive, but ideas need. No, the problem with his analysis is not the prescriptions, nor is it his occasional failure to restrain himself in the silly jokes department ("Innocence is a lot like the air in your tires: There's not a lot you can do real problem with our obsession with child sexual abuse is that it distracts us from other kinds of abuse that affect far more children than molesting does: boring, unsensational kinds of abuse such as poverty, neglect, and bad schools. The question, though, is why these things should be considered child dimensions of the Romantic child cult. We should still adore the child as the children is considered somehow much worse than abusing adults, child to say things like "even one child abused (or hurt or hungry or killed) is unacceptable"; whereas politics needs to be able to weigh risks to some people abuse legislation specific to children. Our zeal in defending children is not universal and not to be taken for granted. Why do we have special charities because it killed children? Why do we decide custody cases according to the best interests of the child, as opposed to the parents' interests? This directive of which takes effect as soon as summer comes to a close. By the put into place the first elements of the government's Plain Language Initiative, which aims to make the government "more responsive, accessible, and understandable in its communications with the public." Those elements include the use of something called Plain Language in all documents other than official contents of the daily Federal Register --must come into compliance by Plain Language? Ordinary English speakers might well give different answers, but according to the government, Plain Language uses short sentences; common, everyday words "except for necessary technical terms"; and "you" and other accompanying the president's memorandum notes that the Plain Language Initiative, which now forms a part of Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" charged with promoting the regulations, states on its Web site, "We are guided by a small steering committee." Ah, well: There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, and the active voice sometimes sounds stilted. Besides, What impact the full force and majesty of the United States government can actually have on the English language remains far from clear. To be sure, some official language programs have enjoyed success. In the late to turn the dialect spoken at the royal court into a national language. With the advent of a standardized court vernacular, a cadre of scribes trained to circumstances, the spread of the king's English and the king's French was difference between a dialect and a language, replied, "A language is a dialect with an army.") Today, of course, government pronouncements constitute a small and probably shrinking proportion of all verbiage that is in some sense "national." Apple Computer's "Think Different" advertising campaign may have a persist in putting pressure on governments to do so. I won't bother mentioning laws and regulations more straightforward. The campaign has spread throughout announced a recent cover story of the organization's magazine) and has opened a tirelessly promoted his version of Plain Language, to which he gives the name Initiative, its stated ambitions are in truth astonishing. The initial mandates memorandum also commits the government to cleaning up the backlog. It declares attention. Should the cleanup include all back issues of the Federal teachers recently complained that one reason so many of them fared poorly on a teaching proficiency test was that they were unfairly expected to comprehend a gloss on our entire constitutional system. Needless to say, the Federalist essays do not meet the simple strictures of the Plain it happens, though, the initiative comes with no enforcement provisions beyond a tolerance and perhaps even a relish for gobbledygook. In corporate staff meetings, the Wall Street Journal reports, employees everywhere pursue a game called Buzzword Bingo, in which players score by quietly taking note bosses. We would all feel oddly impoverished, I think, in a world where the outcome" or where the occasional plane crash was never described as a "failure The one area of modern life where I wish Plain Language years, the words dispensed to the young competitors seem to have become more of amateur enthusiasts and is accessible only to a specialized class of words much anymore," lamented the mother of one contestant last spring, after spelling bee is the venue where children of immigrants triumphantly demonstrate mastery of their new language. Too often, now, the winners demonstrate mastery of words that don't sound like English at all. Surely we can do a little better enormous hope for Reinventing Government. But a few new guidelines for the doubt about it. He invented sfumato, inaugurated the High Renaissance, and created what is arguably the cleverest composition in the history of art, science? The casual visitor to the current exhibition of the Codex curators describe the 72-page manuscript, on loan to the museum from Bill Gates on hydraulics, geology, anatomy, flight, ballistics, botany, optics, and astronomy, as well as designs for all sorts of fantastical inventions. It was not until the time of the Industrial Revolution that his notebooks, by then What is the evidence for such deep originality in the illumined in a series of glass cases at the museum, is not, at first blush, a seem rarely to have looked at it. "Nothing like three centuries of aristocratic insisted it be called the Codex Hammer and claimed that he had retained analytically maddening. At one point, for example, he notes that the higher a conclusion. But elsewhere in the codex, he maintains that only moving water produces pressure at the bottom, reasoning that the still water of a pond, after all, does not press down the grasses that grow on the bottom. Not only is this breathtakingly wrongheaded, it contradicts the previous was, not paradoxically, his greatest strength as an artist: his eye. This, for him, was the ultimate epistemic instrument, one to be trusted over all classical authorities. "Do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the one had before, precisely what it looks like when two streams of water was poor at figures. (When he writes, "Let no one read me who is not a mathematician," he is using the term loosely, to suggest a rigorous cast of mind.) His ocular observations were in a qualitative vein, hearkening back to thrust his nicely manicured hands into the guts of dead felons he was dissecting. But it's disastrous in dynamics, where his experiments led him to conclude that both the velocity of a falling object and the distance fallen are logical absurdity. (The only other figure I can think of who had similar claims contemptuous of it.) The true precursor of the scientific revolution was an engineering point of view were usually borrowed from contemporaries. His machine" would not have flown, but that hardly counts against its visual bravura; one version resembled a calabash shell crossed with a windmill, and brocade doublets and bad boys with pretty faces. (Since his disciples were chosen for their looks, he had no distinguished successors.) Little of Renaissance humanist who regarded his fellow men as "stupid and deranged," As of a few weeks ago, however, you could pick up a digitally enhanced, more one that created problems for the Warren Commission. Among other things, the film led to a "magic bullet" thesis to account for a lot of wounds from three after year, measuring prints with calipers, subjecting the movie to "vector analysis" and performing their own stopwatch experiments, these critics (including several academics) have discovered the film is not merely evidence National Photographic Interpretative Center, though nobody knows when. In one manipulated the film to mask what had really happened. Faked prints were rushed home movies surfaced, they too were "collected" and altered to match. The frames were gone, but the stakes on "missing frames" have since risen: One pair of critics now theorizes that three times as many frames were exposed as we see implausible moves between frames, the "blink" pattern on the presidential limo's front lights is said to be uneven, the awful results of the head shot autopsy, has written elsewhere that portions of the head shot sequence look grassy background one sees is surely a repeated matte shot, because nobody in it moves; that the head shot sequence features an optical zoom to eliminate foreground figures and make it easier to manipulate; that the head shot itself is an optically collapsed version of two more widely separated hits. Oddly, researchers, it contained incontrovertible proof of conspiracy (more shots, say), but just what that proof was depends on which conspiracy each believes in. A few theorists believe the lost footage showed an assassin actually masterminds" behind the murder wanted a film they could alter. Otherwise, he writes, the whole sequence of events is just "too convenient." conspirator. At least it gives the film a surprise ending. of "government" is in large measure coverage of politics, so also do discussions of "language" get skewed toward issues of usage and etymology. In ways. Yet most of us give little thought to how, say, there came to be spaces between words, or why English has the letters that it does, or how the mechanical means of writing affects the nature of writing. to time, however, language infrastructure pokes momentarily into public view. I lecturer in paleography at Oxford, enjoyed a certain modest vogue. This work anonymity from the important work of commas, periods, dashes, colons, backward and used to indicate a question that is purely rhetorical. It is a This fall another noteworthy volume on the apparatus of how footnotes became an essential element of the "narrative architecture" of historical writing. This is not a reference book to be consulted but an excursus to be savored, by a writer with a studied sense of style. "To the inexpert," he writes in one place, "footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity." Elsewhere he writes: "Unlike other forms of credentials, footnotes sometimes provide author's colleagues. Some of these are inserted politely." He sympathetically quotes Noel Coward's observation that having to stop for a footnote is sometimes like having to answer the door while making love. momentous time in the life of the footnote. On the one hand, encouraged in part by the cultural ascendance of irony, and by recreational obeisance to the footnote has become increasingly prominent in recent years in journalism, criticism, and fiction. (For examples, see the effective but very different hand, the footnote as scholarly reference tool or scholarly reference weapon rather like a tank." In law, the analysis of footnotes even sustains a new is the mastery of electronic information, an undertaking that offers opportunities for utility and mischief on an incomparable scale. good reason but usually without attending to the other chapters in this story." footing, doubtless had a more pervasive influence on the formal output of commentary in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remain more accessible and entertaining to ordinary readers. Gibbon straightforwardly the gods in his Meditations for giving him a wife "so faithful, so gentle, and of such a wonderful simplicity of manners." Only in the annotation deceived, if the wife condescends to dissemble." We owe a debt to the out of the back of his volumes and to print it at the bottom of the relevant back through time in search of antecedents. Medieval commentators ardently "glossed" the margins of documents with references and asides. These, "like the historian's footnote, enable the reader to work backward from the finished argument to the texts it rests on." Religious writers in antiquity penned notations that sometimes, we now know, were later absorbed wholesale into the primary text itself. The structure of footnotes grew increasingly elaborate mainly because of the rediscovery during the Renaissance of a wealth of old documentary sources, along with the proliferation of new sources made possible by the printing press and the modern archive. Some mechanism was needed to make sense of it all. What is more, humanism and the Reformation set off a fight for The story can get a little dense, although any reader captivated by footnotes to begin with has already passed the first endurance notes, "offer the reader only a thin and fragile crust of text on which to conjured a memorable image of the modern critical historian confronted by, and determined to derive order from, the boundless quantities of available source strange feelings that would arise in someone who entered a great collection of antiquities, in which genuine and spurious, beautiful and repulsive, spectacular and insignificant objects, from many nations and periods, lay next of the world's most populous countries were compelled to relinquish their hold apparently, in his nation's constitutional system of checks and balances. Both public statements they made, but they did use language that seemed to indicate committed himself to running "a clean government, free from corruption, noises. It signals that the noisemaker under discussion may be no more than a all, could not possibly be taken in by the noisemaker's blandishments. It also leaves open the unlikely possibility that the actions will indeed live up to Making all the right noises, carrying the connotation just 1970s and early 1980s. It surely evolved from earlier use in more literal, straightforward contexts (for instance, to describe the sound of an automobile nonjudgmental phrase to make noises (that is, to express oneself about something), a construction that happily accommodates all manner of adjectival circulatory system. Today it is applied in a wide range of circumstances, especially when the noises being talked of invite a presumption of hollowness, make all the right noises about economic reform, but his own ties to the of the tendencies of Scripture translation in recent decades, it would hardly making all the right noises achieves wide usage quickly is this simple one: The phenomenon of empty talk is so prevalent that new ways of describing welcome. As it happens, many wonderful terms for empty or hypocritical talk are service, as in the phrase to pay lip service --from the act of raising one's voice publicly in prayer or song while inwardly harboring contrary the New York Democrats currently vying for the nomination to run for the Senate "paying lip service to gay issues.") Similarly, lip salve is insincere flattery, though it may be enjoyed by the recipient nonetheless as a formed numerous slang combinations whose meanings touch all the compass points of verbal intention. To shoot from the lip is to speak rashly. To zip your lip is to shut up. To invite someone to read your lips is to noises possesses just enough color to be memorable and yet not so much color as to cloy. It may be in for a long run. In contrast, one has to wonder about the longevity of its main rival in the linguistic marketplace right now: talking the talk, but not walking the walk --a vivid expression from black English that seems lately to have become a mandatory part of the repertoire of white politicians, corporate executives, consultants, motivational speakers, newscasters, and sportswriters. A person who talks the talk and walks the walk is one who acts naturally and stylishly, whose words and behavior are of a piece; a person who talks the talk without insincere. The incorporation of walk the walk and talk the talk into may not bode well. One need only remember how the appropriation of the verbs expression has found favor was brought home a few weeks ago when Archbishop this injunction to the young man: "When you teach, be sure you receive the word into your heart before the word forms on your lips. Walk the walk and talk the talk. Don't preach one thing and turn around and do something assume that the new priest, in response, made all the right noises. sooner sloughed into despond than I came across the following sentence in an denying," Lewis wrote, in the finale to an antic "Campaign Journal" series that saw him parting the crowds around various presidential entourages with the inform the public than a lust to become rich and famous." that has been formed from the name of a person, place, or thing shown weeping. Masochism comes from the name of the demented reporting that emphasizes hard analysis of serious issues and eschews the cult confirmed that this meaning was precisely the one intended, and said that, as far as he knew, his use of it in the New Republic marked this proper noun's maiden voyage as an adjective. Fallows himself, affably abashed, was of them in the ordinary stock of the English language, a figure that does not include the many eponymous words in the specialized languages of science, engineering, and especially medicine. The use of eponyms in medicine is steeply on the decline, but ordinary eponyms, linguistic experts say, are enjoying a growth spurt these days. According to citations in recent newspapers and use every means possible to sabotage a nominee to high office). An eponymous metaphoric senses. For instance, the verb is used to mean "to deprive of vigor" leadership when confronted with Democratic tirades." (Linguistic note from The surge in eponyms is no doubt related, in part, to the employed than they are today, when millions of invented, incorporeal identities are in play in all kinds of electronic communication. The married woman who takes her husband's family name as a surname yet keeps her own family name as a introduced a new form of patronymic, which takes its place alongside the more owing to controversy earlier this year over the authorship of the novel profile in recent months. I don't know what name future historians will bestow proliferation of commercial brand names is certainly a major factor: Consider For reasons that hardly need belaboring, it is easier today than ever before transiently. Memorable eponymous terms require memorable nominal roots and, in interesting as more cultures are demographically and linguistically annexed. Also, eponymous terms allow almost anyone to display competence, even imperfect in its assessment of human behavior. "If all the economists were laid conclusion." Economic terms and concepts, on the other hand, have been absorbed into ordinary English by the dozens, mainly for their sheer descriptive power. list one can add a pair of complementary economic terms that is emerging from newly diversifying, the other its mirror image, just beginning to find a words, the amount of value added as wood metamorphoses from tree to lumber to house, or as oil is refined from its captured state into petrochemicals, and glancing attention. The tax, conceived around the time of World War I and now value during a commodity's industrial transformation. "processed." Or, it can refer to any product that includes some special feature that comes in a container with a screw top.) Putting words such as "healthy," might otherwise seem like casual appropriation. A recent article in the Marbles from the Acropolis, we should expect their prominent display in the not enhanced but somehow diminished with each step in its manufacturing or shirts so ugly and poorly cut that not even Soviet consumers would buy them. Hence all that spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, and sewing actually removed years, it is acquiring traction in public parlance largely because of trying to make something out of them. ("That is why," the Economist observed a few years ago, in its trademark tone of languorous hauteur, "when a suck social and economic vitality from the rest of the country. Some management consultants describe dysfunctional interactions with one's fellow workers as customers who demand an inordinate amount of time, money, and morale (and we have all stood behind them at the bank) have acquired the name about "laboring to bring forth a mouse," or lament the forests felled to make possible a terrible book, or recollect an experience of working by committee. The idea that value may decrease as a result of the very efforts made to increase it is an essential part of human experience, and it will ensure theme of the song," he wrote, "is two people boring each other with talk, talk, talk.") Various readers offered citations from the television shows The performers to generate "crowd chatter" in theater productions include rhubarb; peas 'n' carrots, peas 'n' carrots, peas 'n' discussion, is commonly heard in Japan as an expression roughly synonymous with advisers have convened to discuss an extraterrestrial communication in the form That isn't, in the end, what the aliens have in mind, but been enjoying a prominent vitality these days, as befits an era that values frontal hostility far less than it does insidious subterfuge. "Year of the and brought within its walls. It immediately achieves an afterlife as metaphor prize so glorious that China's Communists cannot leave it outside the gates but which, once inside, will destroy those in power" with its irrepressible example of roiling capitalism and affluence, and its concentrated economic power. horse has found further application in recent months in the realm of plastic surgery. The phrase refers to a bodily overhaul so extensive as to their way into acceptance by the body's cells, and then cause illness; and the instructions secretly embedded in computer software, making possible various kinds of unauthorized or unintended outcomes ranging from theft to breach of database managers, and weapons experts at the Pentagon, afflicted thousands of ordinary consumers in the course of an episode concluded by the Federal Trade Internet. Consumers were unaware not only that they were placing such a call, bills to individuals, soon suggested the existence of a problem. stealth to it as a modifier. The relatively recent term stealth candidate has had two meanings. One refers simply to a candidate who seems common, meaning harbors an element of deviousness: Stealth candidates in state secular conservative issues in their campaigns but failed to disclose that their candidacies had been covertly planned and energized by the religious right. Stealth in both usages obviously builds on the precedent of the penetrate enemy air defenses undetected. The aircraft, in turn, eventually gave reminiscent of the Stealth Bomber's design, bearing the motto "They'll Never confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive," a concern that might have been agent who has burrowed deep into a society or government. The connotation is of Cold War provenance and was given broad currency in large part through the population who sympathize with an enemy's aims, and may render assistance when effect that his four columns of troops would be supplemented by a civilian the term seventh column was applied later to those whose carelessness led to industrial accidents. If every new refinement since then in the quiet sapping of our national morale has earned a numerical "column," then by now, I luggage that they know won't fit into the overhead storage bins) or possibly reporters and commentators seeking context for the national controversy over board's action. They were written two decades ago, when the vernacular used by first round of national attention, partly as a result of influential works of districts to take account of Black English. The most remarkable element of this story, in other words, is how unchanging it is. The central pedagogical problems (low achievement by large numbers of black students, and how to reach these students), the scholarly arguments (how should Black English be characterized?), the flashes of racial feeling, the sober (and dyspeptic) resolution whose ulterior intentions remain unclear, but which, at the very "black," and "phonics"). The resolution asserts that deficiencies in black recognized and somehow dealt with. What might "somehow dealt with" involve? conflict with the wording of the resolution itself on such issues as whether something that teachers simply should be given financial incentives to be aware stifle criticism. (Click to read the full text of the resolution.) The educational politics of this issue will no doubt play themselves out in the publicity (that being where experimental educational programs that involve the putting on airs, but what many linguists prefer to call "Black English stream that has been flowing within recognizable channels for centuries. English Vernacular is not considered a separate language by most language specialists or, for that matter, ordinary people. (As one commentator has recently noted, the complaint about rap lyrics is not that they can't be displays features that one finds nationwide, owing to its roots in the black migration from a common region, the South. There are telltale characteristics, of consonant clusters in general (so that "first" becomes "firs" and "hand" 'round, come 'round"); the dropping of the copula ("I here," "the coffee cold") and of certain tense inflections altogether. The ancestry of vernacular elements such as these is diverse and includes antique forms of English and Second, disagree as one might with the highhanded approach confronting urban schools defies armchair comprehension. Discussions around the classrooms belies that notion. Those interested in acquiring some (sanitized) writing skills to black students who don't have them might consult the several brief introductory chapters, the book settles into a detailed program of lessons and drills. The therapeutic lesson plan I suggest for speakers of arguing for years that, whatever its original sources, the language of poor, invariant "be" to indicate continuous or habitual action ("he be late"), win you a supporting role as a villain. But the rules are different for the role of the tragic, troubled, and ultimately noble Good Guy. virtuous hero throughout, so much so that at the film's end, the authorities blithely grant him his freedom. Similarly, last year's The Devil's Own Own do). Most also pay lip service to the idea that murder is not the solution to political problems, generally by making the hero a regretful killer who wishes he could just put down the gun. Yet all these films are suffused an old man, beats women, and bombs pubs. Yet in every case, the villains are existed only as a shadowy fringe group. But the turmoil of the 1960s, during which a movement for Catholic civil rights led to sectarian violence, brought never repudiated the use of terrorism or the targeting of civilians. members look and act more like professional criminals than like the intricacies of a crime, all the more when it's for a good cause. the true believer does, especially when it's festooned with the trappings of with its noble heroes, amoral enemies, and glorious deaths. It's no surprise political structure or foreign policy, a more moderate line in social policy revolutionary phase of development. Currently, its advance is generating the electorate's desire for change and may become a significant landmark in the country's history. Offered a clear choice of candidates and policies for the voted to overturn the social and cultural restrictions that have become reputation for supporting liberal policies during his tenure as minister for stressing the importance of civil society, individual rights, a wider role for women, and greater freedom of expression. This allowed him to appeal to a broad range of constituencies that have eschewed electoral participation since the received the overwhelming backing of the intelligentsia, the urban middle the existing political system. Moreover, moves to introduce radical Ultimately, the extent of any shift in domestic policy will depend on the restrictions is compelling enough, and opt to assist the new president in Similar transformations in foreign policy, particularly believe that the other must make the first conciliatory move. There is debate restricted ethnic base may limit its attractiveness. In contrast, this may not are believed to have supplied finance. All three countries have an interest in unifying force. This simple message found a ready audience among the largely majority of the Afghan population, had not fared well in the civil war. from work and most education, and men may not trim their compulsory beards. In southern rural areas, such strictures have been accepted, especially as the Domestic drug use is severely punished, but heroin production for export is Molly Bloom's famous monologue and rewriting knotty sentences. Some of editor attempted classification of an obscure group of blue butterflies known as deemed still valid, and the two mistakes could be attributed to his not having had enough samples. In recognition of this achievement, the lepidopterists have same data, the nation's two leading medical journals have reached opposite conclusions on the consequences of legalizing assisted suicide. Last winter, accompanying editorial argued that the Dutch experience should alleviate fears that legalizing assisted suicide would lead to "widespread involuntary euthanasia" performed on society's weakest members. A new report in the physicians had administered fatal doses of painkillers to "fully competent" patients without their approval. Now each journal is accusing the other of as Chronic Fatigue and Gulf War syndromes are simply psychological disorders. The claim has so angered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers that they've turned that those who have emotional problems often project their problems onto others? And so, aren't you yourself doing this?" Other recommended questions subsequent tapes that didn't contain these words than to those that with our general cognitive prowess, not with any particular language "module." problems." In other words, it's not our vocabularies but our ability to string words together that is a distinctively human evolutionary adaptation. officials excused the ploy by saying that if community members had known they that the school had committed a "breach of trust," and promised to be more "up will set off "World War III between congressional Republicans and the White the alleged link between campaign contributions and Secretary of the Interior independent counsel will follow the money back to the White House and investigate the phone calls anyway, Page explained. Offering the only new spin on the independent counsel was the Soviet penetration, injuring democracy and fueling conspiracy theories in for running such huge trade deficits. Roles were reversed at this summit, predicted that the coming International Monetary Fund bailout will run into the be the ultimate victor." Therefore, a show of force will rally the region to Theory. She said the president reliably says the correct things about foreign policy and economics, and then reliably blows it by deferring to the alleged, because they can't accomplish their goal domestically. He added the non sequitur that nerve gas is more of a threat "to our children than global Predicting that he would "get a lot of heat" for treating the minister with confrontational and provocative than a lot of the politicians we talk to his rallies. His transformation from reasonable man to demagogic bigot is as saw the president's point. None of the pundits did. Ordinarily, the press complains about the president the 30-question romp a "virtuoso performance." Playing to character, two Instead of noting that anybody who can control the week's news with a press majority viewpoint that the promise was an obvious campaign lie. But not day of hunting season, locking and loading in anticipation. The only consensus race by meeting at the White House with several leading doubters of affirmative initiatives" with his racial jawboning if he wanted to accomplish anything. president to augment his racial dialogue with discussion of black racism, jury nullification, hate crimes perpetrated against white people by black people, the clock with silly segments on what hypothetical gift each of the panelists would give to various politicians, and what hypothetical gift they would give their numerous interruptions of one another in an attempt to calculate who is The teleplays, adaptations of undistinguished short stories by the author, world's peoples. Not according to Nancy Shoemaker, an assistant professor of cites English and French diplomats' diaries and treaty records from the 1720s best serve comes from the tip of the racket. But why? Cross put his own racket in a vise grip and hooked it up to instruments designed to measure the bounce famous serve is generated by a "dead spot" five centimeters from the tip of the racket, where the ball doesn't bounce at all. The explanation is basic physics: racket, which, were it in full swing on a tennis court, would return the energy to the ball, guaranteeing a power serve. For returns, however, the dead spot is no good; it would just absorb all the ball's energy. years of Cold War bickering over who gets to name certain disputed elements of last month, when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry adding, "you can't investigate the press" and hope to come out on top. counsel the issue instead of the Sex Pistol in Chief. tad, or at least bring a froth cup when you appear before cameras.) Former tin ear for politics as precisely what you want in a prosecutor. Yet even understand the game, and the law prohibits him from fighting back in says, where he is vulnerable to charges of perjury, suborning of perjury, and obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, the pundits scoff at the trial balloon agreement in principle, but predicting that the whole conflict will be revisited in a couple of months. The conservatives strafe the deal, because the the United States is still "frozen into a military response" to the crisis, large part, Bob didn't spend time on them when they were babies." Week doesn't get around to the week's real thing (Flytrap) until the Central rejects the new name as too long and too inelegant for even a first mention. Henceforth, this column will refer to the show as This Week them." The weight of pundit opinion may have tilted ever so slightly toward the But establishment heavies weighed in strongly enough to the United States should stay the successful course. Late Edition 's Tony "experts," making clear he prefers the experts. "Most experts recognize that there is a relatively small zone of policy dispute," he said. got chewed over with the revelation that the White House had leaned on administration's late delivery of subpoenaed documents to the president's "sophisticated litigators," who know how to slow the process down. talking heads bobbing in unison for a half hour on the deplorable state of affairs. The "cynicism is reaching a new level," said the dependably earnest it does for consumers. "We need to innovate," he said eight times if he said it Million Woman March. This was odd, seeing as each show makes it a point to have a female panelist. Maybe the march's organizers should have held their delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International visit to the United States and predicts he will toe the same line in China. All True enough, agrees Al Hunt, but let's not forget that the trial lawyers bought didn't kill the bill, argues Gigot, the bill killed itself. says Shields. It proves that he is feckless, says Gigot. an honest piece of work" and "more than sloppiness" and Brill himself as a undisclosed campaign contributions and for overstretching his legal case "It's an interesting story, rather than an important story." telecommunications firms, luxury car companies) as well as one unexpected spot racist. Depicting four stages in primate evolution, the cover portrays drawings "callous and thoughtless science" that trades on historically racist to alter the image for the book's newly released paperback version, but the books, filling the void left by the Free Press, reports the Chronicle of kind of books he'd like to print. He plans to release the first titles in two has allowed her orangutans to grow too dependent on their human caretakers and whether she's exposed the animals to human diseases. The publication last month government is intimating it may bring her up on formal charges. from the Times Higher Education Supplement titled Consuming Passions: in troubling times. "Food is the irreducible factor of daily life," she politics and ideology, to mental or spiritual hopelessness." Other essays against romanticizing the Roman bacchanalia, since "most ordinary people experienced famine and lived at subsistence level." hostile and have pointed to the vast differences between their languages as proof that they lack a shared ancestry. But biology and the archaeological to underwrite the costs of moving the institute's archives and library to a tripled in size. The new institute opened its doors in March. donations from foreign dictators, routinely denied tenure to brilliant young resentment, and mall ethnography; and a national conference, held at the objectives is exposing the privileges that come with being white in order to culture, will publish its own white issue, in which nonwhite scholars will second time in six years, the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in apparently, impeccable credentials. Despite the unanimous support of the institute's tiny School of Social Science and a search committee's favorable say that Wise's scholarship was not up to snuff. Others (including colleagues in chemistry and physics of harboring a bias against anyone who following: "To call a claim 'absurd' or knowledge 'accurate' has no more Astronomers have long assumed that the universe is directionally physicists reported that polarized light moves through space according to a predictable but previously undetected corkscrew pattern. This means, they inferred, that light flows through the universe in one direction, along an identifiable axis of orientation. (Which end we want to call "up" is up to us.) the data for errors. The findings could have more than just topographical implications. Questions they raise include: Was the Big Bang not a uniform explosion after all? Is the speed of light not always constant? remains unable to choose a senior scholar to fill a new chair in Holocaust foisted on reluctant faculty by administrators eager to please wealthy donor with a job description. When the university proposed a temporary him notoriety and worldwide speaking engagements but not, as yet, tenure. has turned his attention to toilet paper. A year ago, the wife of the Oxford time was thought not to exist in nature but has since been identified in boredom of tiling the bathroom floor, nor some mathematical doodle. It was a delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International fact that Pundit Central found himself without a clear sense of the article's laudable effort to "put the press under a microscope." On Fox News magazine Brill publishes, is more publicity stunt than serious journalism. Wolf granting Brill an interview. He's somewhere between naive and idiotic, agree increased trade will prove a more effective strategy. that Republicans have been emboldened recently by a widely circulated poll voters are "for [the tobacco bill], but don't care about it." Shields notes can claim credit. In the absence of legitimate campaign issues, he predicts, Add "saves need to follow news" to the list of reasons why one should watch story [presidential scandal]? What should the public know or think about this is this? During a rare religious segment on This Week (Southern scholars known as "biblical minimalists" is claiming that the Good Book is thoroughly worthless as a historical document, and that all future efforts to biblical story would actually believe in an Exodus event." Discarding the wrested their land from feudal lords. Traditional scholars respond that, while the Bible may have a shaky sense of chronology, to dismiss the text entirely is simulacrum of warmth in a house devoid of people; she represents the instinct of workmanship to a population long divorced from it." With a nod to another not much help for a troubled young woman with a fearful secret if a medical system fails to be personal, complex, creative, [and] sophisticated." In a snake experts, the skeleton shares many physical characteristics with that of into a convincing pastiche. "There's no expert in the world who could, without artificial intelligence algorithms may not produce masterpieces, he promises said. "God, it would be great to hear a new one.") Music critics complain about the computer's tin ear, but artificial intelligence experts are impressed. delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International derailed the tobacco deal? It was "gold rush, mob psychology" among greedy legislators were so entranced by pots of money that they lost their heads and hopes of creating a campaign issue with which to truncheon the Republicans. the same underage smoking preventive measures as the Senate's. That is, Security reforms, at all. (On four of the six shows considering Social Security, a panel member mentions that the issue was formerly the "third rail The public is wary of Republicans who want to monkey about If the stock market crashes, the calls for privatization will simmer down, say tampering and obstruction of justice, President Al Gore should name him a "leverage of the ruthless is considerable," says Will. his opinion that presidential diplomacy is "indispensable" in the New World the Legacy? With the sex scandal on hold, pundits are back to business as it? The jaded viewer mocks the gag, then promptly buys it. Most consumers, studies have shown, believe themselves impervious to the pitiful ploys of especially vulnerable when advertisers play directly to their skepticism. bears his burden of blonde and cans with ease. A hot young thing swings on a at its own satire. The jingle trips the light fantastic, promising the earth edges? Absolutely, the transition seems to say. Borrowing a spot playing, as a sign that we're being manipulated, that what we're seeing raises his can and looks within. He's searching for the beach. The other tries to open his can, and breaks the lift tab. It's happened to all of So is the message: Sprite must taste good if the company can risk advertising very company that's helped inure us to the images being satirized here. Or was intention and product crystal clear: It's taking on a whole genre on behalf of a drink that promises only good taste, not the good life. for him to place her hand on his tented trousers after she'd pleaded for a job ago. If the Republicans don't define the agenda, the Democrats surely will, 's take on future Brock apologies) for scrutinizing the president's sex life, which he claims started the whole scandal. (Brock appeared on both Face the Nation and Meet the Press as part of his Apology Tour who overstates his historical role. On several shows, Al Gore's plan to spend executive, a weak legislature, and an efficient but politically neutral civil continue in the short term if money still flows in from the mainland and costs and create jobs quickly for a large number of unskilled immigrants. affairs. If not, the territory's autonomy will suffer. More than ever, Hong the final say in important matters by appointing those with proven loyalty to top administrative positions. Next, it wants to make sure that it can influence justified internationally as being akin to the electoral system that existed in of issues, as well as civil disobedience by political activists. Chief degree of administrative leeway unthinkable for his counterparts on the independent, except when it is handling highly sensitive, politicized cases in urged China to conduct fair, competitive elections next year. There will also amount of which will come from China. The territory's gross domestic product is torrent has moved into the local property market, raising prices by as much as government itself relies on revenue from land sales to finance its budget, while banks are too heavily exposed in property lending to allow any property government land sales, with the ambitious aim of raising the proportion of technology and developing human resources to meet the needs of its increasingly inflating asset prices and making the city the most expensive in the world. The vitality to adjust itself to the needs of the future and that the government first salvo as the territory's leader is likely to include the introduction of reproduction in whole or in part without the written consent of Oxford delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International China's general approach to human rights. The televised criticism will have a a little freedom get started, you can't stop it." "Great stuff," agrees Brit "very proud of the president," though he believes China's evolution into a free Many pundits note that at the outset the trip smelled like support for human rights over commerce just to court votes. Conservatives know conservatives don't control the White House and therefore have no foreign policy teeth. "The farther you are away from power, the more likely you are to (Caveat emptor: the same voices that have been predicting a close for delivered by a foreign correspondent. Generally, correspondents strike an air of stern impartiality, just as on the evening news. But not Fox News Pundit Central, responding to reader mail, has decided to keep stats on the the first of many weekend warriors to repeat the stock formula about how the desires while in the White House. If he had violated that deal by having sex independent counsel could prove obstruction of justice. president shouldn't be impeached because he lied about having sex. (Perhaps he morning, feeding off new allegations unearthed by television reporters: He had report that White House aides were talking about resignation. House Judiciary how his committee would entertain such proceedings against the president. But who kept going on about "moral turpitude" in the White House, seemed more interested in having the president crucified for his sins than in having him impeached. (Will also described the crisis as "military," all but predicting hold a press conference, and address Congress. Such a presidential Chautauqua political stories to financial ones (perhaps sensing that their views on the can you play tape of that damned bell at the New York Stock Exchange? incompetent, the pundits weren't completely ungrateful. They lauded him for Congress' prerogative to shape the news, the shows feigned interest in Sen. Court ambitions would be ruined by accusations that he had blocked a casino sounding off about his usual themes. He did introduce one new subject: the impending rewrite of the patent laws that (he says) will allow foreigners to seemed ready to suit up for Gulf War II as he enthusiastically summarized trying to do the best he can in a world where the odds are stacked up against created by the nonprofit Ad Council, will be run free on television, radio, and flagship 60-second spot does at least as much to promote the president's podium complete with waving flag. It moves on to shots of oil paintings of portentous pronouncement, our expectations are confounded by what comes next. parent." Appropriately, the camera no longer focuses on the president alone. A clearly going to be seen more in the second term than in the first) is followed by one of the first lady, seen next to the president, talking of "drugs and all the other pressures facing our children." The ensuing images and words evoke two of her favorite themes: a wider investment in our children (it takes a reading to a youngster, are followed by a series that shows the first couple interacting with the children on whose behalf they are crusading. Where the aim being, of course, to equate involvement with warmth. The first lady speaks raise good kids," an idea that infuriates ideologues on the right, especially best they can; everyone, young adults and seniors alike, can "make a images of the president and the first lady together, of their obvious bond, speak volumes about their commitment to family values. What would have been powerful in an explicitly political ad is even more powerful in an ostensibly at a better time: The scandals aside, he was recently attacked in an like the coalition for which he is speaking, is "fighting for the children," that he's trying to do well at the toughest job in the world. It might also delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International lands on top this week. He's a serious prosecutor, not the rogue we once direct and egregious opposition to earlier and more public statements holding defined a conservative agenda that was eventually elected in the person of Snow questions, all of which essentially ask: Have you decided when to deliver office is committed to eventually delivering a report (thereby indicating that contends that, in common conversation, "intern" can signify something akin to sexual receptacle, ergo no respectable young thing would accept the job delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International in fact, slavery is wrong, ergo it's fine for a president to say interview but released only two in response to an earlier subpoena. The cheer from several pundits for admitting no knowledge of whether or not his lawyers have invoked executive privilege (the president must sign all such suggests that he wanted to install a successor with all the "charisma of a tree think he's just crazy or possibly boozed out of his mind. Pundit Central is shocked-- shocked! --to learn there is gambling at the attention away from polls (three in just the last week) that show her in a dead media adviser Mike Murphy, this spot disdains contentious facts and boring her mother as a role model. This one has both kids going the same route. Not also gets extra points for having taught by example. As important, perhaps, is that she has been a caring, fun companion, the glue that keeps the family much laughter and camaraderie, reprising what is arguably one of the most images are meant to say: What matters is heart, the desire to do good. The idea that wealth is venial if pressed into public service is a harder sell for a are unimpeachable and always have been, her commitment to her various roles absolute ("she has that ability to go home and forget about all the political undermine her popularity among female voters by attacking her handling of successful separation of personal from political does not, however, extend to prominently uniformed) reminds voters that it is she who deserves credit for the decrease in crime. And she has "stuck with what she said she was going to behind a sign that trumpets her "Work First" program, then a shot of her points out, the governor "wants to do the best that she can" for her voters. Cool Mom invites its viewers to look beyond an administration's makes artful use of the personal to validate the political. Whether it can trump an opponent's attacks and ease an electorate's frustrations remains, of Basketball is everywhere, and excess is everything. The players are your face, these icons, chattering relentlessly about success, shoes, hot dogs, get a break. It isn't a break from basketball, and it isn't a permanent break. colors animate this Grand Tour, which begins with an overhead shot of the across an improbably bucolic New Jersey toward the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan behind her. Cauliflower clouds scud by and birds take wing. The dribbler pauses at water's edge, then lofts the ball toward Lady Liberty, who reaches for it. The ruddy basketball and the boy's red, white, and blue togs seem to reinforce background, you know what's coming. The ball's on the move again. Destination: Then onward to China, the next pause on the tour, and the Great Wall, which invites the backboard. And again, there's a shot of the plane, climbing into the spinning globe morphs into a basketball, the stars around it outlining a beyond the platitudinous fuzz about basketball being the world's game and the has increased basketball's appeal among the capitalist underclass, the the need to "investigate the investigators" and fuming unconvincingly about the leaks because if the independent prosecutor wanted to leak something, he'd all in perspective: "Are the leaks the question, or are the facts the "on the Oval Office carpet," though witness tampering and perjury concern him also takes a mild drubbing from within: A mad "rush to judgment" is how Mark Tailgate, though there was far less disagreement. It is "always possible to pundits caution the administration to look before a leap. We need to think out the country is in favor of an attack but "unprepared to go to war." uses the word "deterrence," though he doesn't use "Mutually Assured found grinding wheels and vials containing dried pollens. Inspired by these findings as well as by ancient perfume recipes preserved in the writings of possible. She uses no alcohol or water and imports many of her ingredients from vandalism, theft, and chronic funding shortages, as well as from pedestrian measures, including corporate sponsorship of individual villas on the site. have developed a smell test for insanity. It has long been known that the breath and body odors of patients suffering from serious mental disorders are schizophrenia and are working on a breath test. The creators of the test are a develop the first generation of electronic noses, which produce electric electronic nose could diagnose patients over the telephone. chosen a sometime historian of presidential sexuality to help him write his at New York University's law school, who swept to prominence last year with the Chronicle of Higher Education last month, involves a man posing as a invitations. This man claims that he has been robbed en route and is stranded Middle East. Moved by this plea for help, the duped scholar promptly wires the had been taken in by the scheme, the Middle East Studies Association posted a strategy and is hoping to exploit it to battle heart disease and cancer. The virus insinuates itself into its victims' bloodstreams by using a glycoprotein (a protein with sugars attached to it) to disable the host's immune response musicians may be contributing to the despoliation of the rain forests. a growing demand for flutes, clarinets, and oboes made of rare tropical wood, to reach the remote regions where the species grow. This encourages peasants to reach maturity and have proved resistant to plantation cultivation. One with the problem: Make the precious wood stretch further. The company's the pharmaceutical industry, had an image problem. Like your friendly neighborhood politician, your friendly neighborhood drug company was considered avaricious, monopolistic, loyal only to the bottom line. charged with the task is a past master at peddling image as product. Head of convergence of political and commercial advertising. Using one of the former's most powerful ploys, it chooses to come at the viewer obliquely via a human face, a human tragedy, that carefully fronts the industry behind. osteoporosis and the speaker, a young woman whose life it touched. "My victims who might have otherwise been collapsed into a single statistic by the her earnest face and voice limning with hope the shots of an ailing elder and of single, bleak lines of text that bring the disease to life and the living room. Her speech seems spontaneous, not scripted: The desired effect, of course, is that she personalize the industry she is promoting, edging it into briefly recalls happier times, then makes way for this young professional (she's wearing the mandatory blue suit) describing her grandmother's degeneration, her increasing frailty and the consequent reversal of roles: "I had to carry her and hold her as I remember her always carrying me." As we read the astounding numbers--62,000 osteoporosis victims will enter nursing homes bones that yield to the gentlest touch. There is a solution in sight, however, and she tells us that she is a part of it. The stage set, the audience primed, feels" she is making a difference, that she is a proud member of a group that is the clincher, which, fusing human face and industry, testifies to a mission brief appearance, and the spot seesaws right back to the human issue. A become anyone's reality. Going behind the figures and images, she talks of the psychological impact of the disease, of the victim's discovery that she is "that frail old woman she never wanted to become." Then the counterpoint, the explicit projection of the young woman's company as the harbinger of hope: It effort to find a drug that will enable a woman to "climb stairs without fear, and humanity that energize this individual and the behemoth behind her, the to convince the viewer that she is on the threshold of a wider truth, we are supposed to decide; more information is a mere phone call away. And this are in your corner, pulling for you. They're new and improved, like Labor in bottles, old dogs and new tricks, take a look at those election returns. The conservatives predicted that this episode, too, would The smart money insisted that the case would end with a trial and not in a determine "the effect of weightlessness on orange hair." (On This Week even bluff interruption in all his bantering with Al Hunt on the week's edition charged Hunt with one verbal offside, bringing the running interruption total safe to turn on your television, the political spots are back. No matter that the president is back in the White House and Newt is in the speaker's crime. Both image and issue also resonate in the black community, whose neighborhoods have been hit the hardest by crime. The ad opens like a traditional biography. "As a young boy," the narrator reassures us, "he worked to help support his family." The language is precisely calibrated, giving no details about the child's labors. The accompanying photograph reinforces the of a small handful, but it strikes a note that will carry through the spot: tough jobs, but the smile endures. Again, the language is careful, precise; again, it says little: "When duty called, he stepped forward." The words echo a new uniform, this time the police chief's. Unfolding headlines reiterate polling results show the people want change, as usual. "First Black to Lead Force," the only racial reference, attempts to touch black pride while still much stronger fillip than a conventional bio spot's recitation of the Overworked language, no doubt, but effective shorthand that communicates how St. Louis has been stripped of its vitality as people and businesses have moved who was ousted by the system and has now stepped up to the plate, yet again. despite the fact that Bio is mute on his plans, the leaders and cops who surround him in these scenes provide visual endorsements, suggesting that he he will "stop corruption" appears over a scene apparently set in a district attorney's office. This may be fertile ground, and taps a background of accusations (against the incumbent mayor's father, against the circuit clerk) and intrigue (about a mysterious murder, and about the mayor himself being the same message: "Help our city to be great again." What does "great" imply values," "law and order," "economic growth," and "cleaning up government," all in "our city"? The visuals first focus on elderly white women and then cut across racial lines to a mixed group of children, an appeal for change, a break delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International for only one issue this weekend: Secret Service testimony. Well, actually they take a moment to discuss the politics of homosexuality too. Service agents cannot refuse to testify before a grand jury. As to the safety felonious conduct" in front of agents should not cramp any president's style. legislate some form of protection for agents from a compulsion to testify. spirited effort to keep the Secret Service agents away from the grand jury strategies. Liberals predict the agents' testimony will prove unimportant. cautions readers to beware of pundits bearing predictions (especially the homosexuality is a curable disorder are distasteful to most voters, agree funded the campaign intend to mobilize conservative voters and to raise money sense: A small number of people have indeed practiced then left the homosexual instance of the rule that divisive social debate conducted in the political Unto the Representative What Is the Representative's: On Capital deftness but gets off this quip: "I have no idea whose side you're on or whom you're defending but I know you just endorsed the New Testament." you're counting). Then the three were asked to comment on these past thoughts (none found any errors, of course). As far as Pundit Central knows, this is the first instance of talking heads elevating their own comments to the status of newsworthy chat fodder. This makes Pundit Central quite anxious, since there are letters going out right now by candidates all over the country raise money: 'The conservatives are coming, the conservatives are coming.' ungraciousness at best, in failing to credit their scholarship in his recently appeared this spring, and while both were met with enthusiastic reviews, a provided neither footnotes nor a bibliography, and made scant mention of colleagues' work. Now the Chronicle of Higher Education cites complaints issued a declaration applauding cloning technology and dismissing religious journal Free Inquiry, the declaration asserts that "the moral issues raised by cloning are neither larger nor more profound than the suggests cloning could in fact be fun: "Wouldn't you love to be cloned?" he suggests that eating disorders may be genetic, not cultural, in origin. Social critics have long accused women's magazines like Vogue and Glamour of creating unattainable images of female beauty that have led to rampant anorexia. But according to the Times Higher Education which display symptoms of anorexia. The prevalence of "wasting pig" and "lean recessive genetic trait. "With intensive breeding, an increasing proportion of at the University of Wales. Still, in pigs, as in human beings, individual anxiety may be what triggers eating disorders, even among the genetically early separation from the sow and having to mix with pigs from outside their own group, which leads to bullying until a new social order is who speculates about literary authorship using an electronic database of texts of early modern literature, the 585-line "Funeral Elegy," authorship on both lexical and aesthetic grounds. One critic calls the poem a Riverside edition, observes in his introduction to the poem that it has "none openly admitted to instructing undergraduates in pagan rituals is no longer a one of three finalists for a job as dean of the college of arts and sciences never been initiated into a coven, but I like to call myself a witch." In May, after receiving negative coverage from the local press, the university scrapped its search without making a hire, announcing that none of the finalists met abandoning the formulaic, this 30-second spot dispenses with such staples as the narrative voice, choosing to rely on the soundtrack to present its subject so the music has to be the emotional voice for each car." The copy is spare, wordless, oddly comforting; the thrum of reverse guitars and synthesizer pads; and the first set of images: two headlights, then four. Panels aglow; pedigree guitar, the promise of trouble. This spot isn't about summer picnics in the asphalt, giving the spot some depth and visual interest. And through it all, the music: rounded plops, stretchy roars, sibilant hisses. As the car zips away, picking up speed till the tail lights are pinpoints in the distance, a single line of text reinforces the point. This is a "new breed of Jaguar." You the show that gave him enough currency in households across the United States Capitol building in the opening shot, creating an immediate association between the spot's principals and that bully pulpit. We assume we're seeing a around the limousine, the fluttering flags atop it, the stoplights freezing challenged Bush in his second bid for the presidency, and himself ran "twice Surely he's controversial enough to need that Secret Service battlewagon we now see behind the limo? And so what if the next campaign is too far away to Was he at the street corner all along, watching the pretentious parade go week. Though the buildup is sharply amusing in retrospect, it has succeeded in making Pat's return to television an event. A markedly different "inauguration" University Press is publishing The Art of Desire: Erotic Treasures From the bad impression left by that book. While the catalog does contain some displaying some mild buttock fondling. In order to "sustain a celebratory tone," write the curators, "representations of certain sexual practices or fantasies (those judged by common consensus pathological) were ruled inappropriate for our overarching agenda." The truly weird stuff can be seen general theory of relativity. Historians of science have long questioned Berlin, reveal that crucial steps were missing at the time of his submission, abbey's romantic ruins. In response, Midlands Mining promises that no harm will topic at the Modern Language Association meeting this year will be Disability Studies. Scholars in the field decode and debunk the literary tropes that rhetorically separate "normal" from "abnormal" bodies. Essays to be delivered known musical instrument. It contains four circular punctures that eerily evoke just about the right separation for humans to put their finger on." And Bob scale" may be much older than we thought. (His analysis is posted on the Web.) Based on the fragment, Fink speculates that the original State University, feels the holes conform to "a number of scales," including summer after she published a negative review of a book that claimed to defend science from postmodern critiques. The review was of Higher Superstition: received a flood of angry telephone calls and letters, according to the editor passes for scholarship in the postmodern world.") In an interview with the concept of continental drift may need to be revised to account for some sudden years. (Typically, a continental shift takes much longer to complete.) What balance was thrown off, and a massive migration was required to regain this upheaval may have enhanced the workings of evolution. "Each time you disrupt an ecosystem, you break it into small communities, where evolution the boom of the band. Strains of music, the words foreign yet familiar. barely there memories of a better time: "It's so good." effect along the way. Explicitly abandoning the brittle brightness of standard beer commercials, Bottles starts by drawing on a vastly different set of there was a human element in the production process, the spot consists largely created unprecedented employment opportunities for blacks and women (opportunities that were lost when peace returned and Johnny came marching home); mass migration from the rural South to the industrial North that made optimism, romance. No gloomy prognostications of doom and bloodshed here; technical difficulties of early live television as it presents the first words: what the spot was setting up all along. The retro feel, the sense of intimacy by drawing attention to the words "genuine" and "time" while linking them with the brand name. The message, of course, is that this brew is the real thing; and the humor, of course, makes the message more palatable. personality." Part of the company's move to generate fresh ideas for the mines a largely imagined cultural memory, using fuzzy images of the past to peddle a distinctly contemporary product. Like the other spots, this one works: congressional support waned after the president made his case, as Capitol Hill realized that the administration's "ends and means don't coincide." Congress imperfect offer that, for political reasons, the United States cannot beating) sent the pundits scurrying for thesauri to find synonyms for "fiasco" confess to having hired private dicks to investigate private citizens remarks must be interpreted as the first steps toward a bawdy version of "I an amateur lip reader could discern that one chanting activist was not using incoherence this week, apparently the victim of a balky TelePrompTer. Returning This week, he recycles the same suit and bow tie and evasions on Face the series of quotations that document how, not too long ago, the lawyer was a for his client, though he refuses to discuss his client's account of events, specifics of her proffer, her legal strategy, her future plans, her definition of a sexual relationship, or anything else of interest. Why does he bother to delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International establishment for failing to predict the blasts, but by the weekend the pundits draws just short of calling the United States "a helpless, pitiful giant" as he is not serious" about policing rogue nations. He also compares the tests to [Democrats'] frantic pursuit of money lead to the endangerment of the world Dribble: Habitual double dribbler Mark Shields sins again. He declares on responds, "So convictions of Cabinet members don't rise to the level of Congressional District, which just held a special election for the seat of Rep. challenge, to his niche appeal in a district that is also home to two Air Force strong track record on the issue: Not only did he make it his priority during before that, but he has also identified it as a key issue in the second round raising has been the subject of much invective). This spot opens in the school nod to diversity and to the blacks enlisted at the Air Force bases that are the "make our schools the envy of the world" is followed by a question that implies far more than it says: "Are you with me?" The call for solidarity reaches beyond the issue at hand to tap a deeper sense of ethnic and cultural linguistic barriers to rise to positions of leadership in the area. His appeal aims to strike the balance of people politics, community, and patriotism that down a school hallway. Overlapping frames are one of several gimmicks the ad maker uses to get around the fact that the spot was shot not on film but on videotape, which tends to look flat, metallic, too much like the local ads for series of quick cuts give this spot some depth and visual interest. hall, he is identified first by name, then as the person who "led the fight to the empty classroom; of the faces in the library; of the robes. A bigger budget might have brought us visuals of a college campus, of "our children" actually saved money not only by using tape, but by finding all its education visuals in one high school. The visuals aren't particularly narrative, but they work. So does the plain, almost nonpolitical language. The narrator draws a direct link now, we are told. He is working to bring "the cost of college into reach for working people," for the kid in the robes and the young woman whose photograph empty lockers. As the smiling graduate finally puts on his mortarboard, we know straightforward, empowering conclusion to an argument that is as much about pride and shared experiences as it is about the more tangible issues. Political consultants have given the edge in this race to the candidate who best addresses concerns about education, economic development, and the security of to the tape suggests the intangibles might make the difference. Each candidate he is trying to win. But by focusing on the populism that made the consultants are moving from pushing candidates to pushing issues, a change that is unlikely to meet with universal approbation. Take A Stand is the issue is legislation that would undermine the unions' federally Its strategy is "comparative": Affirmation moves seamlessly into attack; the ring newish variations on familiar themes of family and friends, companionship to the minority family, an implicit nod to the minority parent. new wheels, new digs, or a college degree. The spot serves up a sanitized, sitcom version of the grand melting pot; the images of diversity are carefully around cake, and we've seen the black mother reading to her child. We also get the picnicking towheads, the strolling seniors, the black graduate. credible complaint that big banks levy higher ATM fees. Focus groups have identified this as a pet consumer peeve, and Take A Stand urges viewers to do just that. The visual limns an urban skyline, superimposing a sinister succeeding scenes. The sponsors of the spot really want you to make that representative, your name added to a petition, and so on. After all, there are the white hand, and so on. So what if the narrative is a tad cluttered by all populism is entirely palatable. The proof of its success, however, may well lie malaria, and heavy drinking have all been cited to explain the peculiar physical symptoms that accompanied his death. The strangest of these is the bowel distress, the scholars say, but the disease can induce a rare voyages undertaken by more than a dozen countries and that it revolutionizes growing protests, research was suspended for three months in the spring. country's top business schools are discovering new targets for their venture giving away the money; they expect to turn a profit on their investments within several years. Projects these schools have backed so far: a candle and that she take a neurological exam. After four students complained to the examined before teaching again this fall. According to a recent article in the included "bringing too many personal issues to class," failing to adhere to her announced syllabus, and singling out students "for ridicule and contempt." opportunity to defend or explain her behavior and that "There's no evidence delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International Union's further move toward a common currency, makes nary a ripple. strategy? It's the only way to make people realize that this isn't about sex, Explicitly personal attacks on the president provide exactly the "background attacks, which came off as terribly partisan, mitigate damage to the president's popularity caused by some of this week's more embarrassing conference. You cannot do it for two and a half years." Speaking ethically, fielding tough questions, agrees everyone. Most saw this week's conference as another rhetorical masterpiece in his career of gems, but a few pundits thought president is above the law. Maybe he just "couldn't bring himself to do that," you believe that bathroom tissue is more than trash in the making. Produced by renders it different. Needless to say, success, in such cases, hinges on the ad maker's ability to manipulate that fine line between the familiar and the animation soft, the music folksy, we are introduced to the "Quilted Northern Quilters," a group of women creating handmade paper. It's an engaging image, if an unlikely one. And though it isn't clear why the women use knitting needles to quilt, the explicitly artificial setting makes the sale. Animation, which lets mice sing and lions be kings, saves the spot from ridiculing its own quilting group's newest entrant, but her integration is seamless, the bonding novice. "Don't worry, doll," says the black woman. "Just keep quilting." Because that, adds the white one, is what makes the sheets "so absorbent." Fie on those of you who think quilted bathroom tissue is all about aesthetics: It's more. The spot plays to a couple of postindustrial truisms: that proof of human workmanship qualifies as more; and that more is better. (Your alternative, Quilters reminds you, the music slowing to an ominous clank, is one of Really Protect Your Infant From the Salmonella That Will Turn His quilted to create "thousands of places for moisture to go," we're told, the animation now reminiscent of 1950s spots that showed how a pill absorbed ending: "Nice job, dear." And for the final pitch: the brand name and a gentle reminder that Quilted Northern is "quilted to absorb." The more effective because it is so simple, Quilters ends up confirming what the burgeoning for future witnesses not wishing to contradict the president's sworn deposition. Subtle manipulation of the press is what "smart lawyers do," says But there are other, better ways of transmitting the the White House would not needlessly admit the existence of presidential love gifts, thereby undermining the Story of the Seventh Commandment that it is president might be undone by the possible discrepancies between his testimony banned the measure from the Senate. All agree that the Republican leadership trembling." Many opine that the Republicans have become impotent, but no one Primary Colors by citing the conventional wisdom that it paints a asking, "Is this a Republican or Democratic Congress?" fundamentals. Its message is simple and populist, and its visual elements linger in the viewer's mind long after the ad ends. Nations vote against us when we pay most of the bills? spots confer legitimacy to their charges by citing a source, this one quotes the point. The United States will be "forced to make drastic cuts in energy," the spot says, while these other countries do nothing. exempt from the emissions portions of the treaty, aren't singled out. One reason may be that the sponsors of the spot include the Black Chamber of the exempt nations are "responsible for almost half the world's emissions." In fact, the treaty does shield the developing world on the grounds that advanced for developing nations, although the resolution was carefully worded not to demand equal cutbacks for those nations because this would leave many with gaping holes where there were once nations, the viewer assumes that the administration has been debating whether it should even send Al Gore to the manufacturers, who are almost certainly paying the bulk of the broadcast costs, to include farmers, blacks, and small business. There are other sponsors not themselves in rare agreement. For big business, populism has its occasional but it understandably infuriates environmentalists. Depending on your point of view, the ad is either edgy or diabolical. But nobody can deny its treaty and its supposedly glaring loopholes. Whenever viewers hear of the this spot is any indication, so will the treaty. Complex proposals and the negative spots are as well done as this one and as well grounded in ingrained popular attitudes. So look for warmer weather ahead. delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International system has become corrupted." Other pundits downplay the accusations of treason and malfeasance, noting that Republican presidents were the first to enlist The court's rejection of the executive privilege claim for buys him time. His "delaying" strategy is to run the clock down until the Punditry's leading exponent of redundancy, Mark Shields, plows new ground on expresses amazement at the White House spin machine's "cautious, almost slow" almost giddy in anticipation of battle. There was no talk of body bags. Late analyzed the political shadows cast by the legislative battle. Why are so many Democrats deserting their president, and why are so many Republicans deserting although he confided that he didn't think the gay alternative should be taught lockstep sound bites are confirmation that the issue is now at the center of the conservative agenda. And yet even conservatives are careful to express a degree of acceptance that would have been considered radical just a few years The Republican party line was, of course, that the country is turning by rehiring Dick Morris, who could save the Democrats by "triangulating" coalition did not serve Republicans but "the name that is above all names." each occasion, a significant section of Congress is unconvinced. This pattern has repeated itself for the past decade, no matter which party controls the this year's dispute may be more intense and the final margins closer than last act of monumental folly over the next few weeks. The rules favor the occupant days to decide whether it wants to reject the presidential preference. Even if In the past, Congress has come nowhere near even a simple majority in either chamber. In part, this is because the various pressure groups hostile to China have known that success was too unlikely to merit their mobilizing troops. It also reflects the enormous pressure brought to bear by resumed a more intimate path, or that opponents of the administration's "constructive engagement" approach are in retreat. In fact, the opposite is true. Policy toward China remains the most difficult and divisive aspect of circumstances that affect this element of the China debate. Moreover, fixture this year, thus ending this annual, largely symbolic fight. Any such defensive strategy aimed at preserving what it can of the second term could spin out of control. The most politically explosive contributions, and that administration officials were warned about the practice hearings substantiate these allegations, the White House will have little it very difficult for the administration to ride roughshod over such facilitate its application. However, a majority in Congress either favors a does not require the president to request congressional support before tried to pursue the issue in the face of firm majorities against him in react badly to what it will perceive as prevarication. Should he try and then States as the one country that can influence China's emergence as a major global political and economic power in both a positive and a negative held its first direct elections to the presidency. The United States responded lack the late paramount leader's dominating influence. It is thus very of formal presidential visits, which could happen as early as next year. in Congress, by contrast, generally favored constructive engagement with China, while liberal and protectionist Democrats usually opposed it. The liberal and must find the United States equally perplexing. It will be some time before delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International television? Pundit Central hasn't either. He suspects that, sometime during the middle of the race, network commentators simply unplug their mikes, relax with standards of the last two months, is noticeably meandering. without the prodding of commentators in our position." trade: Rising profits will lift human rights boats. Shields vividly criticizes this approach: He doesn't believe that "the people in the slave labor camps are going to feel those lashes a lot less seriously because profits are rising." can reasonably refuse to give a preview of her testimony, since the opinion different times, but he declines to respond in each instance. Most pundits legal losing streak (he also lost a Supreme Court case recently), exposing him to charges of being a rogue prosecutor. Gigot believes this may make no or how partisan, if the case [presented to Congress] is strong itself." Is this Congress, namely they make impeachment proceedings more likely. Well, which is produced by National Media Inc. for the National Association of federal taxes, this timely, pointed spot extends history's reach in an effort remains a compelling symbol of hope, is not pass. Targeting Democrats and the the Republican version of the tax cut was unfair, the spot challenges their transitions seamlessly to another section of the speech. Back then to a shot of opposed the Republican version and were split on the final compromise). Details want to talk it up, and probably assume that it will be lost in the crowded accept the tax cut "we're talking about." History is the more persuasive when disclaimer, the spot eventually identifies its sponsor: the National thank you for it in the last one." And it is also true that most of the It's not clear what, if any, effect this spot had on the outcome. Growth luxuriated in the good news of the budget surplus and introduced his plans to expand Medicare and support child care. "It doesn't get any better than this the Republicans, because nobody wants to go on record as being against child illusory and temporary by This Week 's two conservatives, who failed to the balance sheet were to include the trust funds (Social Security, etc.), the cribbing from his next day's New York Times column: According to a broadcast Bugs Bunny cartoons between magic tricks, and host a studio audience of Cub Scouts and Brownies are unconfirmed as "Pundit Central" goes to wife and children as one of the reasons he had decided to step down as host of pundits aren't half as shamefaced as they should be. This Week collapsed after the surge. "People are suspending judgment, not making perjury or encouraged anyone else to commit perjury to the less troubling of the Union speech set the stage for the kid's comeback, agree the pundits. "A about his prescience from last week, when he said he didn't think extramarital sex (and its complications) was sufficient to force resignation. has convinced the public that the government is run by liars and incompetents. Republicans want the wounded president to stay where he is, while the Democrats want his tainted flesh out of the White House so they can regroup for the compromised his client's rights by volunteering too much of his conversations ways this week with some of the most polite behavior ever witnessed on a The next he is snapping "Shut up!" at her as she tries to get a point in interest, both candidates took to the airwaves in the last few weeks of voters will skim the ad and buy its message. And to this end, the spot proffers fact "drafted compromise amendments that broke the logjam and allowed the ban on ocean discharges to be written into law." Detractors have pointed out that the only significant amendment to the bill ended up delaying the pipeline's they have no memory of his involvement. But his protests seem to have had little effect on area environmentalists. The New Jersey Environmental a group of greens who had supported the closure of the pipeline recently held a environment. He's taken on the big polluters in Congress, we're told, the spot cutting to what looks like footage of a congressional hearing but which is, in fact, staged. (House and Senate ethics rules prohibit the use of official facilities for campaign purposes, which means that any "hearing" in a political ad must be contrived, and made to look as authentic as possible.) rating in 1996--only three state senators did better. A different group, the involvement in the pipeline issue notwithstanding, he gets credit for sponsoring the Pollution Prevention Act, which reduced the toxins released by the chemical industry. His initiative notwithstanding, he has come under fire take the toast and tea. Shore Revised ends with the ubiquitous shot of the politician with his family and the ubiquitous spiel about him fighting for wasn't mobilizing public opinion for the coming clash. No problem, said all the United States, but this week the emphasis shifted slightly to leave no doubt that the United States will settle the dispute, unilaterally if need be. strategies. "If you go in, it has to be a sustained bombing campaign and that declared war, the pundit posse immediately expressed doubt that it could be United States "bomb him into submission." The "end game" of all the dictator's these diplomatic victories and preserve the United Nations' power to police only outsider nation with chemical and biological weapons. (the balanced budget, welfare reform, the tax cuts). "They're not scared of "campaign far enough in advance" to pass fast track. "politicized" Justice Department that had "changed" her mind on appointing a "not independent" because they're appointed by a partisan panel. deliberately written his memo in support of an independent counsel, knowing "the sharpest knife in the drawer" or "the brightest bulb on the circuit." legal matters while neglecting macro legal matters. Riffing off a recent New top cheerleader for an independent counsel, confessed that he couldn't explain against his coach, moved across the shows like a fast break. But because affirmative action, he can't just throw in a question at the end of the passing the Civil Rights Act, not by asking questions. Meet the Press that the surplus could engender a "substantive" political discussion given the unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities looming out" with "no political costs" to Democrats or Republicans who resist the calls weekend's biggest problem was how to handle the extraordinary good news of a found only the dark lining in our silver cloud. Future generations will judge to "stop all this public pondering" over his "legacy" and actually harness our themselves had little to offer in the way of imaginative suggestions, falling back on the usual ideas about expanding the federal role in education, rebuilding the infrastructure, and providing health care to the uninsured. because a political talk show is an awkward venue for the discussion (the into a corporate shill should set off no alarms. But it does, perhaps because then as the founding pundit of This Week created the illusion that he Then he explained that in coming weeks he'd be talking about nutrition and middle of his old program was so disconcerting that when This Week just a couple of letters farther down the alphabet. plugs in the network's dramas and sitcoms, this piece of advertising works. and high production values to appeal to both parents and children. Never visual message before the first words are ever spoken. First the hair dryer, then the clutter of a young girl's bathroom. The dryer blasting at a flipped the girl, shot from behind in sharply faded color, then a less clearly dialogue at work here, the play of color capturing the tensions of the budding adult. A switch to full color accompanies the first words, spoken in a especially about marijuana." As the words begin, the colors fade, drawing you toward the obvious "it's hard to talk to kids today because kids are no longer dryer off. The thumb ring, even more than the earrings that have been there all along, taps fertile ground, its associations with rebellion and the unwillingness to conform inevitable. From thumb rings to smoke rings wouldn't number of teens, the smoke is coming from marijuana. But this one hasn't taken how difficult it was for parents to talk marijuana with kids now asking, the most persuasive advocate: a kid, telling parents that their kids want and need to hear from them. As the first half of the spot ends, we notice the help." Research shows that parents today want that help, that they lack the language to bridge the generation gap and persuade their teens not to do as they did in the '60s and '70s. That's why this spot will probably succeed in politics today, and that it cares enough to turn over prime time to the contrast between the two parts of the ad shows why agencies are paid so much to Ennui is exactly what activists complain about: They say the '90s have seen a down. This time, it's the parents who are being told they can make a sets. None of the pundits spoke about the flowers, which are members of the to elevate the International Monetary Fund's $55-billion (and climbing) bailout Besides flowers, the main theme of the weekend gabfests was Biggest Loser, Brightest New Face) to disguise their lack of enterprise, while Goodman) pinned it on politicians and the presidents who have failed to frame our pressing problems (race, Social Security insolvency, women's issues) in a time of prosperity as examples of how a leader can mobilize the people with a president who endorses contradictory initiatives like teen curfew and Say It Again? Mark Shields triple dribbled his astonishment that a new the year's "Most Boring Person" for his "predictable and platitudinous delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International Republicans' bumbling on campaign finance reform shows they're a party that now they're trying to take credit for reviving it. Cynical in the extreme, says thereby permitting private donors to set the agendas in congressional determine the bill's fate. The early line on what that answer will be: education with this issue, suggests Gigot. But this particular proposal is a demand Flytrap testimony from Secret Service agents draws fire from some in the White House stonewall. How about letting a judge decide the question case by sat next to her at dinner and reports she "carried herself like a lady," in contrast to certain vulgar attendees who booed her and made classist snipes universally derided as crude. He should have had the sense to call the president names in private, says the smart set. The president is lucky to have never wise practice to call the president names in public, even if you're not a louse, and the phone didn't stop ringing for a week. (Related story: Pundit Group panelists appeared discomforted by the, um, timbre of John [but] bad for gigolos." Other panelists agreed that mo' better coitus can only libidos and the promise of better sex will drive people to get toned and fit. that "her fingerprints are on almost everything from Whitewater up to now." be precise, and a sassy one at that. No moldy bolls sprouting wispy white nothings here: This plant is lissome. It is lush. And it will go to great cotton plant, causing it to age, lose its leaves, and open bolls ahead of schedule. The Cotton Club dramatizes that compressed cycle via the Rose's famous "Stripper," which urges one to "take it off, take it all curves around a gyrating graphic, "it takes off those leaves. Then, it keeps them from coming back." We aren't sure what "it" is, but clearly, this product combination of potent chemicals and strip clubs isn't likely to endear itself to the PC police; and there are those who would be hard pressed to distinguish between Finish and Agent Orange. But all's well, etc., because the stuff in the consistent than any other harvest aid." As the curtain closes and applause spills across the footlights, the message is reiterated: "Cotton has never delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International 3--spur the opinion mafia to wonder how the ongoing scandal will react with revamped legal team. Her new representatives are "famous for cutting deals," beginning a quiet smear campaign against her. She is not a very credible The tapes contain inconsistencies, and her affidavit contradicts the tapes on are wary about rocking the boat with scandal hearings. political neophytes lost big). It just shows that all incumbents who aren't under house arrest will win, quips Gigot (the only incumbent to lose was a reject screwy ideas such as bilingual education. It shows only that programs. The defeat of Proposition 226--labor unions can still make political She still has a hopeless crush on the president. Though she was crazy for the the first lady. Accordingly, she is willing to turn on her formerly candidate had not won a Democratic primary for governor or senator in wrong with lawyers; some of my best friends are lawyers: Lapsed lawyer particularly well with women, who placed it in the top five. overweight father clearly looking to realize his old dreams vicariously through his son. Dad knows that the key to success lies in the early start he did not get, that only the savvy fledgling gets the worm. So he's willing to go to bat for his boy: "Now, we got a lot of work to do before the next game," he tells backyard and white picket fence, is perfect. It invites nostalgia, stirs response ("Yeah, fine," when he's clearly not) and the next two scenes (a flurry of action, then a shot of him flat on his face) suddenly clarify the spot's real target. It's the woman, of course, who, seeing her own frustrated sportsman in the prone figure on the field, smiles as she turns up the dial on the ad meter. She knows that Dad will try something he shouldn't, that he will stub his toe, that he will complain, and that she will have to give him struggling to keep up, then finally gesturing for a timeout. We get a best moments in life sometimes come with a few aches and pains." A shot of the headache sufferers here. No irradiative blue waves pulsating to pounding music. This is a happy ad for a pain reliever so effective that, as we see in the next scenes, it can help you smile through a broken arm. taken, Dad gets his payoff. The scene moves to the real world of real players be holding his own: "Your little guy's looking pretty good out there," says an over, father and son walk away from us, satisfied. The little guy in the big shirt gets a pat on the head from Dad: "Hey, that was a good game, buddy." The red. A perfect end to a perfect day. Dad's been injured, sure, but his pride is intact, his love for his son papering over his shortcomings as a coach. Mom's out of the tobacco industry's pouch: It targets kids. Capitalizing on a truth spots, some more controversial than others, that attack smoking. And while profits, but other states are joining the burgeoning bandwagon as well. to staccato music and pulsing visuals, "but the facts tell a different story." The female narrative voice serves a different purpose here than in traditional political campaigns, where it is sometimes used to soften negative spots. Here, it only compounds the menace. The context gives the woman an implied stake in the issue: She could, the spot seems to say, be the mother of one of these "go ahead," assuring them that "it's on me"; shots of youngsters drawn to industry that has long been banned from running ads on television. who will nonetheless drop like flies because of "their addiction." Flash The corollary: Protecting kids from "tobacco marketing and sales" (by supporting the Food and Drug Administration rules the spot is promoting) will dissonant note here, however: Throughout the spot, our smokers, the last one seen in satisfied profile, seem to be enjoying their smoke. A testament to the addictive power of tobacco, you say? Be that as it may, a tobacco company that dared to make an unabashed link between cigarettes and pleasure would have had only one weapon in the fight against tobacco: A proposed settlement being spots of its ilk (one shows a tobacco junkie smoking through a hole in her neck; another, a teen smoker's face putrefying, shedding worms, as she brushes its point: Hook one kid early with promotions, and peer pressure will do the if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: minister's trips to the United States. "He dropped him a note suggesting a bantering but Downing Street staffers are adamant the White House was putting words of a Downing Street source, "to stay with his Tony." free flow of information could reduce scope for blackmail," he added. sanctimonious nonsense" in his paper's comments on Flytrap. Lamenting "the near total erosion of the distinction between the upmarket dailies and their tabloid entirely more sophisticated in grappling with the changing nature of world financial crisis. The summit did not mark "the finest hour of "must report back with a plan as soon as possible, and certainly before the end of the year": The next scheduled G7 meeting (next spring) is too far away. The acute political and social chaos," and it criticized conservative policies for dealing with this. There are "serious questions as to whether this epidemic ought to be treated as a global crisis, or on the basis of each nation trying 1990s, which was controlled by certain groups and was very unjust. in reply to a journalist's question about what he would do to prevent government's labor affairs committee has proposed a minimum hourly wage in the attention. Then he changed the subject to the unjust imposition of sanctions on claiming the sanctions had contributed to the deaths of as many as 1.4-million squabble about the validity of the numbers and a fumbling calculus of how many The peaceful resolution revealed him as weak, was the consensus view. "As president of the United States, he didn't feel he was potentially powerful that only a renewed "Middle East peace process" could bring stability to the an abortion angle, exclaiming that Congress would never regulate fertility technologies because the Supreme Court had decided that "a fetus is white teacher to avoid a potentially unfavorable Supreme Court ruling), also damaged Insight (the magazine owned by convicted felon the Rev. Sun even though he didn't do it. "People were really ready to believe it," said like nothing more sinister than extremely tired and slender party trash, delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International deanship, hired a PR man, and exchanged angry notes with the Justice Department Discarding the deanship was "thoughtful and reasonable," admits Mark Shields report to Congress will be ready by the end of summer and believes Congress may Almost everyone is baffled by the fact that Gore gave only juxtapose images of the president's recent visit to disaster territory (casually embracing a black family) with the vice president's (dyspeptic local academic institutions for endorsing a "thinly disguised payoff." "I think the mayor might end up in the movies," the Post quoted one aide as saying. a leading candidate for the proposed professorship, but the committee got will have another chance to duke it out when he comes up for tenure in the Traditionally, most scholars have believed there's only one existing sister. But a debate now raging in the Times Literary Supplement Electronic Facial Identification Technique testing performed by independent costume historians remain skeptical. "It is a pretty portrait, and one can a disgruntled costume historian. "But on costume grounds the portrait cannot be reversed his decision to close the school's press. Chancellor John White had announced that he protested, noting that most university presses operate with a deficit. Among plague of lice and fungus has attacked the undergraduate library at the devastated the entire collection. Eighty thousand books were placed in cleaning followed to remove the mold. The volumes are available again but won't be returned to the stacks until the damp library itself gets renovated. It may most likely to remember what they've read when the text is printed with a ragged right margin and a solid line running straight down the middle of the page. That bizarre finding is reported in the Journal of Scholarly conclusion? None of the alternatives look too thumping. While few pundits endorse specific proposals, that doesn't stop them from criticizing the White appeal of bombing: It provides "gratification without commitment." Yet air the public. The "make love, not war" sentiment is strong on The forecast a 60-percent chance that the United States will stand down from armed predictions are popular with the pundits because they provide the necessary automatic pilot. They're looking forward to the next step in the process, when taint the investigation and deter Congress from impeaching the president with has "the finest reputation [for ethical conduct] of anyone in public life" Hunt," much to the amusement of the other panelists. associate counsels, nine are on loan from the Justice Department, four are this spot) is the newest ad in a series by advertising powerhouse tap of the spot's message glides across the screen, the keyboardist our narrator types. A demonstration of what? The screen and the clacking keys view, we're informed that the product is "Lucent wireless systems and technology." In fact, no one specific product is hyped. from below, as if the computer screen is not just a computer screen but also a big, clear bowl. The rising tide distorts the words ("this is now just about the only place") and then swamps them ("where you can't stay in touch."). As narrator types. The fish turns to face the camera, as if it might have one, and then swims away because, of course, we can't communicate down here. The fish swims into the next scene, across the company name and into the last frame, complete with name, logo, and a reference to "Bell Labs Innovations" (there's an explicit message: "We make the things that make communications work," says and types the keyboardist. At the same time, an air bubble burps over the fish, making it seem as if we're listening to the fish's thoughts. inventing the future for everyone (except for fish), the spot disarms potential delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International Gigot to charge Burton with "political malpractice." aides wear latex gloves while opening mail, for prophylaxis against certainly, answers liberal Shields. He undoubtedly treads on "delicate political territory," euphemizes the conservative Gigot. Either: During a rambling discussion of oncology and longevity on This look back and rue the day that you helped wage this war the way you have." question, retreats with the most transparent wiggle of the weekend. "Beg your pardon?" asks Burton, cupping his ear. Again the question is asked, again closet is a milestone: No other star has stepped out of it at the height of his or her career. While there are currently about two dozen gay or lesbian house parties, complete with party kits, to celebrate the lead character's terms. Never explicitly seeking approval of a lifestyle, it follows a tested silhouette walking away from a punitive "personnel" sign, it follows her unsteady progress down a flight of stairs and uses a staccato colloquy between by the announcement that "it" is legal. Job discrimination against women? Surely not. Building on an already secure national consensus on women's rights, the dialogue draws on basic, inarguable values while the visuals emphasize the sheer normalcy of it all: the ubiquitous setting, the ubiquitous employee, the acknowledged this employee's "sustained superior performance" and must now be maximum audience susceptibility that we hear, for the first time, that the woman was fired not because of her gender but because of her sexual preference. Confounding our initial assumption, the spot prompts us to question why this into the narrative after she had told a lot of people, including her parents, about the spot. "They all said there must be a law against that," she says. the scene in the woman's office is relieved by a shot of yellow flowers, says. "Visually we wanted to create a little bit of hope, a transition to the never told which) female subject allows Shoes to tap wider contexts of discrimination: A male protagonist wouldn't have had her access to the history of discrimination in the work place; and an infusion of color (read: race) might have narrowed the canvas, making the problem seem less pervasive than it such discrimination with its choice of a subject, the spot then personalizes her. She is more than an abstract cause, a dry phrase like "sexual ask if there is anything they can do to help. There is, the narrator answers as national campaign to pass it. It's smart politics, because the narrow focus likely to raise the network's ratings in the crucial May sweeps? Not really. It vacillated for months before going with the show's proposal; it also recently turned down another ad request by a cruise line that targets lesbians, on the delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International attention. From the standpoint of wit, rather than substance, it is a good strikes a chord with voters in a way that tobacco and campaign finance reform did not. The big dispute between Democrats and Republicans will likely be over has recently been accused of doing nothing of importance recently. This is Just My Hobby: The surest proof that political talk shows lack fodder this have a silver lining because it puts computer programmers to work. A majority (digging ditches or restoring hiking trails will also do). But Pundit Central programmers fixing antiquated mainframe systems as either a consumable good or service. Of course any sane person recognizes the importance of paying computer experts to fix oncoming problems (just as it is important that plumbers fix antiquated pipes), but the use of their time is a cost, not a benefit. viewers probably will be happy to hear that we are going to skip it. We'll see This Week 's round table signs off by predicting the outcome admits he picked Brazil just because the French would be insufferable if they since I saw that frying pan ad." (Later during the show she proposes to pay covered the president and recently gave an interview discussing a shared but not things that didn't happen. I mean we have enough with completed passes, we prosperity, of freedom well earned and much valued. Nothing novel about the advertising techniques here: But they're put to effective use, and are unlikely to offend in this era of peace and plenty, where the political battles in elicit strong reactions from their public. Not that the spot raises the country's speckled history, it is careful to take the edge off. spot mines the collective memory for its material. There are shots aplenty from clash; the dun and dunes of what appears to be Operation Desert Storm; an pigeons; of a fiercely bespectacled towhead whooshing down a slide; of a happy, paid for by cigarette taxes, part of this summer's bipartisan budget bill. sign. In each case, the word is first brought to life with a few images, then rounded off by a question that is answered by the images that follow. For example: A shot of the wire fence merges, via the pigeons in the park, into comes to brief rest on a sign emblazoned on the side of a bus: "What is it?" The montage continues, familiar scenes reminding us what freedom has come to mean. It's about popping a wheelie on your mountain bike, framed by the Golden Gate. It's about acing a race, tasting the rain, reaping a new harvest, the fruit of wars and sacrifice and struggle. "How much does it cost?" "How do us that freedom is as tenuous as it is precious, that the current sense of Savings Bonds." A discordant note, this one, but an effective reminder that unprecedented effort to increase public awareness before spring and the next hopes its makers, will give its viewers those facts and rouse them to escape, we are given the numbers. Up to half a million seals, most of them pups a bloody ice field as the sealer drags the pup away. The image of the not made to witness a skinning or an impaling, we hear the pup crying and see hooks waving. (And though the spot never really tells us that these crimes are ignored by the authorities, there have been reports to that effect.) claim that their penises increase human potency ("totally inexcusable" in "what group on the ice. (The juxtaposition is familiar enough, and reaches for the emotional energy of other battles between environmentalists and apparently impervious consumers. But the portrayal of the transaction in question is Department of Fisheries and Oceans to raise annual hunt quotas on harp and those who have no voice," Hunt hopes your conscience will win the delivery of Pundit Central, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "International people's business, which receives relatively little attention. in the National Journal and appears on This Week to reprise the dismissal directs the scandal's focus away from sex and toward allegations of a questions tomorrow, thereby ending the circus immediately, advises sides. The transportation bill is porky, the squashing of the campaign finance bill was a dastardly use of procedural rules, the tobacco settlement may go through, but only because everyone wants to get their paws on the proceeds. The Republican leaders wish the impeachment hearings would just go away, a brain and gave them only enough blood to run one at a time. And that's why we used to have dormitories that separated the boys and the girls, and we had week, he apologizes for offending viewers, pronounces slavery an "unmitigated evil," and claims to have meant only that "our society was enriched by You know how they got here? They were all slaves, weren't they? So it's kind of a problem. We wouldn't have this enrichment of our society if it wasn't for accompanied him are. If it hadn't been for slavery, they wouldn't even be in One look at the distinctive do and tony threads and New Jersey voters are bound to think they've pinned the tail on the right donkey. The spot also plays off Index finger proudly raised, the hand's relentless bobbing is meant to grate between this patrician politician and the voter. Her voice is annoyingly cut, her centerpiece promise four years ago, now fully in place? As the looking us in the eye, not giving us the back of his head (and his policy) spot might actually cut through the New Jersey market, where it's notoriously malpractice law is educational lawsuits. The Chronicle of Higher for "breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation, or negligence." Most of the claimants are angry at the poor quality or low value of the degrees they litigants are suing over degrees that were never awarded. A student who had from the school's nursing program is suing for breach of contract and violation Week reports. According to that publication, the student contended that "the catalogue of course offerings and academic policies created a contract that obligated the college to provide him with a nursing degree." He complained that courses required for his degree hadn't been offered during the time of his matriculation, forcing him to leave before earning the degree. But an appeals student workers were employed to remove the limbs and that the policy was designed to save money. Both charges turned out to be false. But the school of medicine has stated that "in the future no student workers will work with cadavers or disintegrated anatomical remains. Further, we will no longer respectful of people who have donated their remains to the cause of replacement of blood by a colored polymer, which maintains its shape as the flesh is gradually removed. The entire circulatory system, down to the tiniest English department to which he attracted a parade of stars and controversies. commuter campus making a bid for greater prestige and attention. Fish's wife, scholarship the subject of both her courses and her writing, will teach one not the only academic celebrity making a somewhat mysterious job switch. better offer comes along. His reason: He wants to be nearer to some members of likeness may be a death mask most other scholars think is a fake. photographic techniques, found close similarities between the mask and a famous bust bears traces of "three small swellings on the nasal corner of the left suburbanites alike by devoting a disproportionate share of its broadcast time Agenda, whose polls PROMO used for the report, has publicly disavowed it. Public Agenda charged that PROMO's report "while using data that are technically correct, distorts Public Agenda's findings by presenting them in a biased context and tone." In particular, the pollsters charge that PROMO downplayed the extent to which respondents' fear of crime was based on the experience of crime--53 percent of those polled had said that they or someone they loved had been the victim of a crime. Miller stands by his conclusions and insists that "anyone who reads my overview and their report will see that there University has filed a lawsuit against the operators of a soft porn Web site. the women will "romp for your enjoyment in their own dorm room." Visitors to in a recent "Talk of the Town" piece for The New Yorker that among the "humdrum vulgarities that have become the bread and butter of the Internet," system of video linkups. The plan has drawn criticism on a number of fronts. Some say it slights the teaching abilities and intellectual talents of professors who don't happen to be world famous but who do a perfectly good job that the videos will pacify the minds of students rather than stimulate them. "You would lose that excitement of a live performance on a stage." another lawsuit like the one that plagued his last movie, the slave trade epic motives as the White House "trying to throw sand in our eyes." privilege is widely dismissed as a foolish delaying tactic. commentary with a sigh: "I had my usual experience. I thought, my God, this is narrative arc of congressional hearings, in which belligerent congressmen make connection only because they failed to think of it, not because they respect agreed that Gore is doomed if the treaty becomes his signature issue. Several issues like these in principle, but rebel after they get wind of the salute it for its political ambition. "Bold move," said Shields. It will "get squabbling over Lee's impending recess appointment subsided with this solace in this retreat is a mystery: The 120-day limit can't be enforced, composure at the hearings disproves the "contention at the White House that bitch back and forth every week on Capital Gang about who is interrupting whom. "Pundit Central," which can claim impartiality because it his wife, his children, his teammates, opposing players, umpires, clubhouse attendants, waiters, and store clerks. He is said to have killed a man in a Teenagers have been up to this sort of thing since long before South school's five toughest teens beat up yet another teacher and drive him out of they came to school only in the middle of the winter term. They came to thrash the teacher and break up the school. They boasted that no teacher could finish to correct an intractable problem: the "breaking up of rural schools." "It had to be tossed out the window. Sometimes it was just a winter ritual to let off wild student riots on college campuses, sometimes leading to the deaths of gunpowder); high school duels involving knives or guns, sometimes culminating in the deaths of students; scrimmages between higher and lower classes, sometimes leading to massive injuries on one side or the other, or both. What calmed schools down in the latter half of the century? The introduction of less brutal disciplinary methods; sports, particularly football; the students and teachers. (Students, who were usually wealthier than their teachers, regularly underscored that point by beating the teachers up.) manufacturing. So where were the random shooters of the second half of the unhappy, you took off and went somewhere else. The kid in the state of perpetual rage, he'd probably wind up on a whaler." leads with initial government data showing that most states are in compliance jobs or actively prepare to do so. The Times points out, however, that welfare families and that the government statistics do not show whether welfare report that the House managers' aggressive position puts them in conflict with favor of a quick timetable that would probably preclude hearing from most of the scandal's key figures. And it is the Senate, the papers remind, which House managers and some House Republican aides said they were stunned and number holds they should be called only if absolutely necessary. boutique firm called Vector, which went under last fall and whose president was a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is being investigated by several federal agencies. The company specialized in the highly secretive agencies, and the authorities are looking into irregularities surrounding some it legs: phony paperwork to disguise weapons' true destinations and colorful Times is alone in observing that White House aides were "amused" by the or indirect quotations from aides, raises a host of issues: Were those aides really so unsophisticated as to reveal such a politically loaded emotion in front of a reporter? If so, then why aren't we told what the aides said? If not, then shouldn't the paper back down to "seemed amused?" Or to "were said to be amused by White House sources?" This is not trivial, because communicating White House amusement is likely to have adverse political consequences for reflects the event's two contrasting sides: Austere formal procedures cloaking raucous partisan disputes. The LAT especially emphasizes the rigmarole, with recipe, but they're still making sausage. The House managers and many Senate Republicans want a plan that allows the calling of witnesses, while most Democrats and the White House want one that does not. The attendant complications make it seem that this could well turn out to be the trial of unfathomable that they're of any interest to any reader who's not a member of he was learning for the first time, in phone calls from puzzled Democrats, that he was being blamed for blocking the bipartisan caucus. 'I was flabbergasted,' out the trial's procedural rules. None of the papers, by the way, explains how it can be that the entire Senate can go into closed session. What is there to prevent the Senate from doing the whole trial in closed session? Or for that matter, all the rest of its business? The papers don't say. staff, although the story also says the take of the eavesdropping operation almost certainly helped the Pentagon plan last month's bombing campaign. That paper adds that the exposure of the gambit is thought by some diplomats to have The papers don't really get into it, but it's hard to see how this use of an If this point is accepted, the controversy disappears and if not, then why is a good day for bombing." The paper says he "exulted" in saying this. What proof is there of this? The paper doesn't say. And it needs to, because the statement is one that could be made quite straightforwardly (as part of a briefing, say), by a military professional without any untoward implications, like "It's a good The impeachment trial continues to lead all around. Today's big story is the last night and will continue again today. The secret session came about after a motion to hold all impeachment deliberations in open session was defeated. The lead editorial calls the shuttered approach "an affront to the public." The papers report that with the matter of whether or not to call witnesses hanging in the balance, much of yesterday was taken up by senators trying to expeditiously without witnesses. But, say the papers, none has the votes yet. And so the Senate Republicans are encouraging the House Republican managers to adds that there has been some interest in calling Dick Morris, whom the paper The papers report that one idea being kicked around by senators is one vote explanation of why this is attractive to Republicans: This would be a stringent must be an actual headcount, not the statistical sampling that's alleged to be more accurate. The main political impact of the decision is that it will affect how many congressional seats each state gets, and perhaps will also affect which party's members occupy them, because the conventional wisdom is that sampling favors Democrats, by being more able to include folks in cities and claim eleven civilians were killed when one of them went wide of the mark. to allow Web sites to identify a computer. The feature has been called "cookies Huge legal fees involved in successful defenses against such charges by the and defense costs in such cases. One special requirement: taking out the policy including luxury accommodations at the Mayflower Hotel, are being paid by Ken the Senate's imminent reevaluation of the independent counsel statute, which, the paper says, will probably either not be renewed at all or will be substantially revised, primarily because of widespread dissatisfaction with the on the statute is more categorical, saying flatly, "there is virtually no talks. The talks ended with nothing signed, no peacekeeping forces in place, Western peace plan but would take a few weeks off to check in with the home calls the outcome a "limited success." But even within such a cheery take, the "piecemeal success," but does point out that the result is very close to what Only the Wall Street Journal points out high and clear that the plunged into the case's penalty phase, which could result in a death sentence. Two other white men are awaiting trials for their alleged part in the grisly includes some good detail on courtroom spin: King appeared in court with his hair grown out so as to cover the pentagram tattooed on his skull and in a that King's father offered his condolences to the dead man's family. Contemporary reporting has a hard time lighting on a topic unless it can find a way to make it into a political story, preferably one about a ninth paragraph of a fourteen paragraph story to say what the two bills are and how they differ, and none too clearly at that. Far more important apparently, is taking up the top of the piece with the back and forth sniping between the of its halting path thus far. The paper includes this interesting detail, which drives home the unusual course the replays Witness Week and finds no progress for the House managers. The that the censure language may be "harder to nail down than Jello to a barn explains, is determined. She was among the first Democrats to openly condemn the President's conduct and she has nudged the censure option along from woman as a poised, ironical, occasionally even sassy witness who handily outmaneuvers her stumbling interrogators. ("Question: Do you think he's [the President's] a very intelligent man? Deft answer: I think he's an intelligent mourning already, with people hovering in dread beside their television sets to await official word. Reports are that the King's family will not remove his and abroad, about the stability of the relatively small and defenseless and population issues, and the Gates Learning Foundation. This megadose of Dipping back to impeachment, here's a classic exchange between the "poised" Ah, the golden age of magazines! Few people are more credulous about that fabled era than journalists who cover the media industry. How else to explain two recent articles in the New York Times and the New York In its Business section yesterday, the Times described a proposed to Vogue readers. This, the reporter wrote disapprovingly, is "only the latest example of how publishers are exploding the traditional business boundaries of the magazine industry." (Other examples: magazines generating What's new about this? When did women's fashion magazines exist to do anything other than push advertisers' wares? Consider this tidbit from Hope in a Jar: rewarding each with a grab bag of cosmetic gifts. Similarly, in the hundred readers to be 'beauty consultants' for product development and ominous larger trend in the industry. Also, in what way is the Vogue deal corrupt if it doesn't directly affect editorial copy? Not that books feature only the clothes and cosmetics of advertisers. It's just that Vogue 's latest scheme strikes us as an unusually innocuous way to story (later reported in the Times too) that, in exchange for a lecture or two, New Yorker writers and editors will be flown to the South Pacific and other idyllic spots for a week's cruise courtesy of an advertiser. The Times and the Observer treated this as a stealth attack by wondrous place for New Yorker writers. I mean, no one's even asking them Gill. Both writers gave lectures and were paid "cash dollars," says Singer. "We didn't have any ethical qualms or quibbles. I wasn't going to write a travel going bareheaded, the business side of the magazine tried to stem the decline of an valued advertising category by decreeing that all male Esquire employees wore unfashionable hats; New Yorker employees go on cruises. taking from an investigation of government to a government of investigation propose new emissions standards that would require minivans, light trucks, and yesterday, telling him that airstrikes would hit his country hard. The and barracks. The Post says the planned airstrikes would be the "biggest just in this theater of operations, or if it would also be bigger than the agents independently became aware of his presence shortly thereafter. disparities in the 1980s, "What Went Wrong?". For instance, reports the as similar insulation against the nation's labor, safety, and environmental request from the Marines to use a clip from its movie "Full Metal Jacket" in a Marines stay alive runs a distant second to squeezing out every last licensing dollar. The Marines should remember that the next time the studio comes asking for technical assistance on a picture (as it no doubt did on "Full Metal frantic, teary cry for help has never failed to shock and appall. Surely no one believes that the reason these tapes are made public is because the people have a right to know if their emergency services were performed appropriately. Now this is news, and not just because it got one of those great Brit tabloid expressions, "blazing row," into papers worldwide. Who, if anyone, will conference room mulling over prospects ("Mother of God! It's another fax from thinks "Taxi Spice" has some zip as a name. But to keep their position as the the Spice Girls off the front page and next to the recipes and the crossword Does everyone realize now that they got taken? That he never had any intention whatsoever of doing this movie? His list of "approved directors" lot as if the whole purpose of this charade was to get a little faux buzz for of a sadist, everyone released statements denying that anyone had agreed to Universal. None of those movies has ever been made. that condemns China's recent record on human rights, including China's squelching of the formation of a opposition party, religious expression and the analysis of the "nearly sublime" national economy. The paper observes that the torrid pace of growth has confounded prognosticators, who had widely expected Sputnik. The papers report that the Dow retreated because of fears that the Fed will raise interest rates to cool the exuberant economy. The Post exclusive informs that a Defense Department team has there has been "no compromise of technology whatsoever." The Pentagon suspected "aides said" that "some members of Congress" plan to press for more information and are dissatisfied with the Pentagon response. Is this sourcing detail a clue as to why a story of dismissed suspicions, which are sure to stoke international sensitivities, turned up as the Post 's lead? annual human rights report, observes that the criticism came on the eve of story provides some detail on human rights flashpoints, no story notes that the to provide an authoritative basis for international affairs decisions by the major speech on foreign policy challenges, the president advocated an active role for the United States throughout the world and defended his policy of the paper's discomfort with this disquieting story and the media's discontent with the terse denial issued by the president's attorney. The Times opines that "the public and the press are in a muddle as to what to think" and "discourse" is not simply a factor of his having recently assumed the presidency of the Modern Language Association. Said is considered a prime offender when it comes to inaccessible communication. The Times informs Bad Writing Contest, in which leading scholars take the prize. The paper refers readers to an Internet site that automatically creates an impenetrable Yesterday's LAT Metro Section conveys a cautionary tale: beware of pickup. Tragically, a truck driver was killed when the airborne heifer smashed through the windshield of his vehicle and struck him in the head. The bovine bounced off the truck and was hit by another pickup. Curiously, the story does special House committee's secret report concludes that over the past two among technology workers: come next New Year's Eve, many of them will be not at transpiring during Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The of loosening export restrictions, which, according to the papers, the committee flow of sensitive satellite technology to China's strategic rocket programs, confirmed that transfer, but, say the papers, went much further, also executive. The papers draw their information from remarks made by the committee much more the general public will ever be allowed to learn about the Senate voting by the fourth day of the trial about whether or not the alleged offenses, even if proven, would count as high crimes and misdemeanors. If that that it doesn't provide for the calling of witnesses. the Senate: it gives the Senate an opportunity to avoid a long trial, while at the three ground targets implicated with missiles and smart bombs. As it did hasn't done something that countries who have shot down planes have done since are the architects (How to mark the cornerstones of buildings?), and the movie producers (How to write the copyright date at the end of the credits?). Thank God the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology is working The LAT leads with the emerging diplomatic wrangle over whether or not investigators are broadening their inquiry to include possible tax fraud cut back on the number of troops they will commit to the program. And, says the putting their loads on container ships instead. The story gives a little too indication that they will bring him down or to heel any time soon has led to committed as ever to sanctions. The paper quotes a senior State Dept. official weapons inspectors, "it has literally chosen for sanctions in perpetuity." claims there is a general consensus that a Senate trial will start before any action is taken on censure. The paper adds though that there is strong support for censure among Democratic senators, and that about a dozen Republican that Senate Republicans are looking for ways to avoid a long trial and the damage to the party's public standing one could bring. As to how a deal is is something, he advises, that should be worked out strictly among companies have previously always denied allegations that top executives knew of or were involved in any such alleged illicit traffic. What's more, the taxes by suggesting that an increase would encourage smuggling. The story, dangerous to the babies, who are born so tiny and premature that they are at high risk of lifetime health complications. Even if the babies emerge healthy, the parents are faced with an enormous burden of care that few are prepared to meet without outside assistance. Moreover, the cost of multiple births is very who fess up. On the opening day of the new Congress, no less. in Congress as crooked clowns. After all, not everybody in Congress has dirt, while the rest of us try to figure out where the slippery little line between private and public is." The latest Drudge Report rightly reminds that modestly concurred: "I know an embarrassing lot. Terrible.") Once again, the Times has spotted a trend. Although background research is out of when their female companions are more elegantly attired does. After all, being unconventional is fashionable. Almost as fashionable as The papers spend most of their impeachment ink counting votes and recounting perjury charge won't even get a simple majority, and some chance that the Collins might vote no on one or both articles. The LAT is most definite about this, citing sources close to her saying Collins will vote no twice. On the other hand, say the papers, two other Republicans also widely thought his Cabinet, his staff and his judicial system. In doing so, he brought shame and dishonor upon the office of the President and especially upon himself." And The papers say that after the midday impeachment vote a formal censure of the LAT explains, would be read into the record but not acted on. House. Wonder why the Times doesn't mention that it was where those nation tomorrow after the trial's conclusion and that he will be mindful not to several gun manufacturers were legally responsible for the criminal use of shooting. The decision is likely, say the papers, to lead more cities and more shooting victims to mount such liability lawsuits. It's a bit curious that the the story on the very bottom of the front page, below a story about the being added at National Airport. Similarly, why is the Post waiting everybody else likewise paying little attention to this? wane. The story points out that in contrast to a year ago, a few computer even though Internet company consolidation continues to proceed at a furious All the majors lead with the last day of the White House's defense in the Senate and lavish most of their attention on the concluding speech given by were viewed by the Senate audience as a refreshing contrast to the lawyerly who also spoke yesterday) that had heretofore carried the day. The New York not to vote for impeachment in order to avoid heightening people's alienation "indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless." The LAT goes high to being an impeachable offense" because they were not "political offenses about the consequences of his actions beforehand. But the paper leaves out what his former colleagues, saying, "Just as you and you and you and you, and millions of other people who have been caught in similar circumstances, should have thought of it before." The Post is also alone in noting that The coverage suggests that in the wake of Bumpers, momentum is building among senators to press for a quick resolution of the trial, even to the point Bumpers' speech. And the LAT 's lead editorial calls for bringing the trial to a rapid end. It's recognized all around that today the proceedings will enter a far more spontaneous stage, with senators submitting their submitted by readers. It will be interesting to see if the actual questions was sentenced to fifty years in prison. The outcome signals, says the The LAT front carries an exclusive account of a particularly twisted tried for using the Internet in an attempt to set up the rape of a woman who had spurned him. The man sent out email and posted online ads purporting to be from the woman suggesting she desired to act out fantasies of being raped. The postings resulted in six different men showing up at the woman's apartment at various times, although no rape occurred. The man was caught with the It's hard to know what the woman could have done to protect herself, the charging the poor to see the pontiff. Perhaps the wackiest papal product Doubt For Conviction on Perjury; Obstruction Faltering Too." Specter. Everybody quotes Specter's intention to vote not "Not Guilty," but rather "Not Proven." Yet, nobody says if the Senate will actually let him do saying there will be additional Republicans crossing over. Meanwhile, during the day a stream of Democrats announced that they would be voting against both no constitutional relevance, such an outcome could become a "potent political to unseat Republicans who, in the group's words "did the bidding of the party's The papers also report that censure is fading fast, foundering on a combination of strict constitutional readings and disputes about precise wording. They all report that among censure proponents a fallback has emerged: whatever bipartisanship emerges after the impeachment vote may quickly fade. them for a few years. The papers report that after being previously beaten, picketed and served with an eviction notice because of his window display, the man won the right in court yesterday to put it up again. But immediately upon arriving to do so, he was set upon by a crowd in front of his store and hit in software that measures office worker skills. It mentions the location of the test such items before giving this sort of play? On the assumption that no money changes hands, what propels such a small product from such a small company into the paper when, as in this case, it's not making news? that the character is meant to be a boy but carries a purse. Plus, "he is Just about everything in the paper today makes you wonder about the piece health yet. Figures released by the Commerce Department show that the economy inflation and unemployment still deep in remission. The papers explain that have kept business brisk and spending high. Only the New York Times story actually quotes a Commerce official; most of the valedictory analysis comes from exuberant Wall Street report on the killing, the Times devotes a large chunk of its story to effort. Although he's been busy fending off an ethics investigation and tending to his investment bank's business, he's still solidly in the loop, and will Justice's campaign finance task force has been continually stymied by unfavorable court decisions and lack of cooperation from essential witnesses, As for the daily impeachment trial update: the three witnesses have been week, whereby the President would be found guilty of the facts of the case but allowed to stay in office. The plan is drawing criticism from both ends of the support, and Democrats argue that it's a backhanded way of punishing the President without satisfying Constitutional standards. "You can't be a little House Managers and their more deliberative Senatorial hosts. The Senators lord it over the managers, acting "wiser and better" than their House peers, claims added teeth to its efforts to eliminate the wage gap between the genders. Women reviews" of male and female managers at businesses that hold government contracts. Those found to intentionally discriminate against women must pay protests one dissenter. But even more of these bombs may detonate soon: message with the masses. Preceded by pomp, shielded by minions, and thronged by reverent devotees, he meditated and preached on race, poverty, morality, and the significance of the coming millennium. "Children screamed. Grown women shrieked. Little girls cried from happiness," the story recounts. Sure, the a report on the increasing cynicism and resignation of the religious right paper quotes a confidant of the as yet undeclared candidate in summing up the leaders are complaining about the lack of obeisance on the Hill, the Christian coalition is struggling to coalesce around a clear strategy and a single presidential candidate. The paper notes the forthcoming publication of a book by two former Moral Majority officials, arguing that government cannot correct the religious right will increase the willingness of Republican candidates to distance themselves from the coalition. Oddly, this analysis does not factor in the effect of the failed impeachment move on the mood of Christian are prepared to sign the interim peace accord that emerged from the recent deal" and that agreement remains "uncertain." The Times does not spare the "most embarrassing" details of what it portrays as a misadventure, stood Dole up, leaving him to wrangle over the telephone with another guerilla the good news is due to many factors, including: the increasing prevalence of smoke alarms, major strides made in the treatment of burn patients, tougher building codes, tighter standards for fire resistant furnishings, migration of many hazardous jobs overseas, the growing percentage of meals that are eaten outside of the home, the increase in the use of microwaves and the decrease in caucus, offers an alternative explanation: when the economy is strong, "they don't need to commit arson or bail out a business." anticipation of the launch of his exploratory committee today. The paper reports that a slew of supporters arrive daily to pledge allegiance, offer assistance and grab a piece of the action. According to the papers the support personally pledging support to Bush, as they were instructed to do by veteran on the story, pointedly noting that the espionage was previously Post last month that it would be difficult to demonstrate the importance of one of three cases of purported espionage. Is The Post downplaying the care workers are allergic to latex. The allergy impedes the careers of medical professionals because latex gloves are required by many hospitals and medical equally irritated by latex precautions for other extremities. The paper notes News goes with a military cover: "Submarine!," gloated one recently in the "In Other Magazines" column. "(Three weeks ago, it It's easy to bash a magazine whose owner does the same thing at dinner parties, when he isn't shopping the editor's job all over town. That's what Mort Snooze article rather like being buttonholed by a retired admiral with way too much time on his hands. But you get more hard facts and historical data from the admiral than from almost any other source. news judgment is another man's smart market positioning. Rather than go up education, religion. Hence the (quite enthralling) cover story on life aboard a less boring than it used to be, and besides, newsweeklies are boring by each week is fundamentally unglamorous. Nobody in the media really respects envelope, not their peers in journalism, who measure a journalist's worth by the number of his scoops. But readers outside the media bubble (and that's everyone who makes a newsweekly his primary news source) want their world reliably summarized. They don't care about the very latest wrinkle in the oppressive. There's too much too read. Everything is monumental. Everyone is popular music in the second part of the very century when the music was modestly enlightened, rather than desperately out of breath. Which, in the end, Times --lead with the hyperbolic rhetoric of the House prosecutors as they closed their argument on day three of the Senate impeachment trial. The perjury has dethroned judges in past impeachment trials. Rep. Henry "Hotshot of the bipartisanship illusion, a theme that resonates throughout today's proposing the formation of a bipartisan group to map out potential witnesses. The reigning consensus after day three is that the House did a surprisingly costs and other damages. The legal merit of such claims by foreign countries in students but has achieved minimal discernible progress. The reasons? The money discarded in a mass grave. The story, coupled with gruesome photos, runs on all fronts. The papers conclude that this could sound the death knell for the financial disclosure investigation that has delayed his nomination. The precarious time for the ambassadorial seat to be empty. early warning defense against nuclear missile attack, which the paper says, has up." The paper follows up inside with a fascinating interview with the former eight votes), senators spoke one at a time for or against the two impeachment sniping, but the speeches were almost all along party lines. The LAT lead quotes one senator saying that each of his colleagues to speak thus far senators' versions of the day by stating that although Senate rules forbid the lawmakers from divulging what occurs in closed session, senators had voted in open session to allow each other to essentially reiterate what they said behind office, the LAT suggests that a few senators in each party will cast court ruling, almost surely headed for the Supreme Court, holding that for "a significant public health concern." There is at least one hopeful finding though: college educated women are more than twice as likely not to suffer from lack of sexual desire as those who did not complete high school, and men who complete college also tend to complete something else, suffering much less premature ejaculation than male high school dropouts. Today's Papers thinks feature specific books. One question, though. Today's Papers notices that the this? And if so, isn't this arrangement similar enough to the one at Amazon to Highly partisan, negative campaigns seem to be implicated. But on the other resulting in serious burn injuries. The New York Times The papers do a good job of providing the historical context to all this-- government is pleased with his apprehension. The LAT observes that in case. The Post points out that a finding of civil contempt could force An oddity in the Post story: It claims that "for the president's weary defenders," the judge's remark was a "dispiriting development." Yet the piece goes on to note that calls made by the paper to the White House were the Post know the president's defenders were dispirited? It doesn't. House committee. The Times stresses the agency's findings that it is corruption angle too, but also has some discouraging information on the personal searches Customs conducts: Whereas ten to fifteen years ago, the hit frequently miss head injuries linked to child abuse. The study holds that front reports that strollers and mattresses that can injure or kill small production line for the aircraft is being kept alive by sales to the United tenure as president of the Red Cross found that it was marked by her tendency to put political allies on her payroll. The Post mentioned as an example But the Post made a telling omission here. Because the paper did not say tic of exposing potential conflicts of interest involving politicians while ignoring those involving journalists. Homework assignment for the next US defenses against biological weapons attacks. The president's speech hopes to shift voters' attentions away from the impeachment trial. Predictably, than arguing that none of the allegations warrant removal. All papers report that most senators expect witnesses to be called. Democratic senators are he, a young press agent, organized a press conference for the then obscure that King's rhetorical prowess made whites ashamed about this country's racial history, unwittingly encouraging liberal whites to feel "responsible" for should be revisited as a man who "made freedom first of all a black sullied itself. The House has fallen into the black pit of partisan The deal, in short: Both sides will present their cases beginning next week, but the contentious decision over whether to call witnesses has merely been Under the rules pounded out in yesterday's "historic" session, House decide whether to adjourn the trial and, if not, which witnesses to call. All papers emphasize that the dignified Senate shudders at the prospect of a The Senate consensus, achieved after a meeting in the solemn Old Senate part, the Senate is positively gloating about its own unanimity, so different from the squabbling rancor in the House. Stoking the unanimity image, each paper fronts a symbolic photo of two staunch ideological opponents, Senators type from direct money to scholarships to health care, was dished out not only York Democrats, who are scrabbling to find a strong candidate, especially since attack on the perjury and obstruction of justice charges lodged against their team's willingness to not only question whether the prosecution's facts mandate impeachment but also to question the facts themselves. But for the most part the coverage makes it clear that the weapon of the day was nonetheless not the papers want whenever possible to have heroes and villains and they love new shopkeeper grandfather's penchant for selling to blacks when few whites would. the very bottom of its account. The LAT also plays it high, but then late in its story flatly states that in making this response "Mills strayed considerably from the facts of the case." And the Post dings Mills for impeachment hearings." But none of them wonder, Why would we want that? Obviously, impeachment was designed as a sanction that would regulate presidential conduct, a feature utterly lost if it were to become a dead The paper goes on to point out that most of the hardware that would go into given final approval. And the Times emphasizes not the hardware but the stories emphasize that the renewed interest in missile defense has been proposal to allow some Social Security funds to be invested in the stock treatment for a patient who later died. The papers say the award is another thousands of guns out of the hands of felons. But it turns out, reports the background check has been arrested, even though trying to buy a gun by lying Sons), has been accused of plagiarizing substantial portions of his book from a The New York Times called it "compelling." To its credit, the plagiarism law, but she has looked through both books (cursorily, it's true) birthplace, of a demonstration of Bell's "harmonic telegraph," and of Bell's same order, albeit with slight changes in language. The flow of narrative in National Geographic Society for allowing him use of their vast archival holdings on Bell, in what he calls the Bell Room. In fact, as Lingua transferred to the Library of Congress more than twenty years ago, and the looked at papers in the Bell Room at the National Geographic Society, as he makes clear in his acknowledgements, and cites them in his footnotes exhaustively reviews the legal and political minutiae surrounding the upcoming instead turns to tobacco, the old standby, to explain the creative ways states easily crumble when it comes time for the decision on whether to call continue, then they're going down a very treacherous path." Already, says the Republicans lean toward opting for witnesses, while older conservatives favor a including such momentous issues as whether "antiquated Senate rules" permit Report, which will serve as the conveyor for much of the Senate evidence. states by Big Tobacco is going to a slate of random causes such as sidewalk government, as a major contributor to states' Medicaid services, is wrangling doesn't look like a secret agent. He is the only man in captivity who could go not mine. It would get me great trouble if I used girls as a cover. Chou lead describes the easy end run that insurance providers have found around the Parity Act only requires that dollar limits on mental health coverage equal those for general medical services. So providers and employers simply mete out hospital. Congress is expected to close the loopholes next year. prevaricates about how to handle his role in an impeachment trial. Yes, the Constitution requires him only to preside over the Senate and to break any tied vote on verdict or procedure. But can he lobby Senators to vote against impeachment? Gore opines that it would be "inappropriate" for him to communicate with them in full." In this spirit of indecision, the interview was articulate the stickiest and most obvious of the Vice President's conflicts of interest: how Gore's own presidential ambitions could influence his performance chance to flex its slackened superpower muscles, but at the cost of providing has been known to gag the opposition press and imprison dissidents. reports that Western monitoring forces will continue to saturate the area in shatter it at any minute: "We will win or we will turn to dust," says one young should have equal rights and opportunities in the workplace. The piece suggests that gay rights may become the same kind of ideological litmus test for electoral candidates as abortion. However, the ideological confusion reported in the survey is complicated by unclear statistical reporting: although the credentials of the pollsters are described at length, the size and nature of gurus who capture minds and pocketbooks with lectures on "spiritual healing" television community has ranged from sheepishness to horror. But perhaps these videotape sent to thank viewers for their pledges by "scholar, author, On this day of all days of discretionary news, the papers revert to type. trying to hammer out a workable Republican consensus on impeachment strategy. of their individual currencies with the euro, which provides the starting point other transnational businesses on the Continent haven't quite gotten their minds around yet: wage transparency. That is, the advent of the new currency will make it suddenly easy to compare salaries earned in different countries for the same work. The story mentions a school of thought according to which the euro's transparency effect will eventually tend to make salaries more comparable across borders, with the suggestion that the uniformity will be established at a level closer to the high salaries than the low ones. But it doesn't explain why the reverse couldn't turn out to be true instead. It has always seemed a little odd for papers to insist on coming out on such result is that when the world predictably stops on its axis, the workaholic censure deal and how conservatives in the House and Senate are less than publication policy seems even less sensible given that the papers now have the ideal vehicle for transmitting what little holiday news there is: their web finally comes down in favor of getting blitzed next year. Thanks to its of the Times Square action last night, featuring the biggest and most orderly crowd in years. A crowd of students, tourists, and cops. And oh yes, at least one media critic, a man who "marked the passing of another year by vomiting Official: He Will Run in 2000/Filing Establishes Presidential Campaign." Why that Gore "will take his first formal step toward running for president in avoid questions they've had to stay inside their beach hotels, but they've been provided with security guards to protect them from people whose lives they've ruined, and the Post says there are reports the government's given them In the last week, the papers have tried every way possible to tie up this past year in a ribbon and present it to the ages. Finally, in today's choice a few months back. The line was to have been uttered by a The epithet was apparently already being used elsewhere in the movie, and so But let us not judge it on the basis of its noble intentions, either. Is image isn't so iconic in the minds of today's moviegoer that subverting it is concerns over the corruption of government by money. Why it's being released this picture, the audience has a pretty good idea of what subject really Concealing an extramarital affair is easy as long as there are no witnesses. represent only circumstantial evidence, and tape recordings of private Lady's reporter pal at the Associated Press. The 30-year relationship between manner of speculation over the years. Yet despite the existence of reams of charged correspondence between these two women, the precise nature of their relationship has never been definitively established. different assessment. Not surprisingly, Cook's book proved controversial, and are so many wedded to a stereotype of a frigid, sublimating, forever lonely The opportunities for romance were no doubt there: Hick had a small bedroom only dalliance; much has also been made of her relationship with a New York critical of Cook for getting carried away, acknowledged that the letters explicitness that is hard to disregard." But after this brief lapse in No and hugs, a question there is absolutely no way we can answer with She is, of course, right on both counts, yet idle curiosity persists. So book, but can offer up a couple of the more florid lines gleaned from previous Oh! I want to put my arms around you; I ache to hold you close." area. But electricity still crackled through the Senate chambers; lead stories references to the senators as "jurors." The Senate is not a mute jury, the Senate is not merely making an innocent or guilty verdict, but also passing speeches "do more to inure the viewer to the president's offensive conduct than let its currency, the real, drop to market level (the real obliged, plummeting misdemeanor)? Publishing a paper based on a college student survey about to impact the impeachment debate. With the publicity about his demise, he and evacuate the great majority of his troops. The New York Times unarmed monitoring team (a far cry from military withdrawal). The papers all quote the president as saying that strikes will definitely be ordered if the deadline passes without agreement, but they give varying impressions of when months on the lam, the US funneled surveillance data on his whereabouts to sheltering him. The officials stress that the US had no "direct involvement" in case? The paper doesn't say). Details of the alleged encounter echo the ones coffee in his hotel room, and then forced himself on her, biting and bruising to pursue. But the allegations were reviewed by House Republicans anyway, in a sealed room just prior to their vote on impeachment. The paper offers no remained silent until now out of fear and shame, but is now talking in order to teach her twin granddaughters the value of honesty: "I want them to say, `That tunnel syndrome, lower back pain, and tendinitis account for a third of all million employers to prevent and treat their assembly line workers, database clerks, and journalists, among others. Business groups and congressional Republicans have long opposed such standards on the theory that compliance will the moguls are simply trying to "enliven the presidential dialogue" and "stimulate discussion on meaningful subjects." The story does not consider that the businessmen may have more practical reasons for securing political regulatory legislation expected from Congress later this year. The gatherings, decision upholding the limitation on the First Amendment rights of illegal illegal's claim of being banished from this country on political grounds is not a defense against deportation that requires additional federal court hearings. goes instead with the Senate's passage and sending on to the House a military equivalent to those created by a massive snowstorm. But the story's that could mean only minimal disruptions in those places. immigrants' use of the federal courts to fight deportation until they have already exhausted all administrative procedures. In short, the ruling supports the way in which current immigration law deprives illegal immigrants of a defense and a venue. Both papers note that even before this decision, the new law has produced a much more active deportation rate, and so even though the decision doesn't have that much direct impact because comparatively few illegal immigrants claim political persecution, it may still cut a rather wide swath, immigrants and make them wary of speaking out about any political matter for fear of drawing attention to their illegal status." percent pay raise across the board, increased educational aid funds, new Congress increases the Pentagon's overall budget to pay for them. Otherwise, communicates the widespread sentiment among members of Congress that these costs are inevitable if readiness is to be maintained. But there is no bonuses for the specific warfare specialties where retention is worst, or restricting them to those in combat specialties (a surprisingly low percentage of military personnel). Nor does the story mention that service members receive exchanges. Or that they typically become eligible for their pensions in their early forties, and hence these shouldn't be viewed as needing to be competitive determine the course of treatment doctors pursue. Previous studies had produced similar differences, but have been generally discounted as based on such differences as illness severity, insurance coverage, or patient preference. But, explain the papers, this study eliminated those explanations by using demographically diverse actors describing their chest pain from identical married men, and that she wants to apologize to the country for the yearlong growing job categories in the country is fitness trainer, whose ranks have important news stories of all time released yesterday by a panel of explosion outranks China's Great Leap Forward. And while we're at it, how, pray Times headline suggests the drama associated with a criminal trial: "President's Fate is Now in Hands of Senate Jurors." Down below in the body type, though the stories get more real. The LAT says there is "virtually about the how: "Closed Senate Debate Likely." That's because there don't appear editorial finds the prospect of closing the doors on the impeachment is whether enough Republicans would join the Democrats to keep either of the two impeachment articles from winning a simple majority. air front moving through: One senator after another getting up from his desk to Senate asking for a postponement in the start of deliberations to allow the new page: "What a fuss! What a load of phony differences without distinctions! story, with its equally foul implications. He has now admitted to telling some such version to 'friends' of his as well as journalists (and I still consider myself to be both). That story got into the press, a lot. The message was devoutly wishes he'd written an intended column on the matter a week earlier, "being readied to be used as yet another human sacrifice by his employer." One kept him from being able to write a column of his own about the matter? account of the facility. Today it raises more, with an inside piece stating that chemists hired by the plant's owners examined soil samples from the plant and found no traces of chemical weapons compounds. One problem though: although the piece makes it clear that these chemists have the same monetary tie to an interested party as any expert witness, the headline does not. It simply says, "Experts Find No acquired wood stoves and a rise in gun violence accompanying the upsurge in gun much worse than any pure outcome of the problem itself, especially since the actual problem is being attacked with billions of dollars of remediation. According to a story flagged on the Wall Street Journal front, not all of the hoarding will be And wait, that doesn't include the 1.999K problem! For that, check out the leads with word that the nation's blood supply is drastically low. About half the country has only a day's supply of blood to transfuse, whereas three days is the norm. The paper is to be applauded for closing the story with phone often exhibit of viewing the guise of objectivity as more important than actually helping somebody. In that spirit, this space proposes that each member of the House and Senate give blood this week. Or come to think of it, let's not staff who's covered a presidential impeachment before, so they are still feeling their way into the proper kind of coverage. So far, they've pretty much opted to lead with the story whenever possible, regardless of whether or not anything has actually happened. Thus we get the Post lead falsely telling the reader that disputes about witnesses, censure and the very the television interview shows yesterday...." and the paper's flash that the White House's written response to the charges to be submitted today will "not anniversaries coming up in China this year that could stimulate popular virtually no pressure on China in response. For instance, says the paper, there agents masquerading as airline passengers have been able to smuggle guns, hand grenades and bombs past security guards or have gotten the weapons sent in through exits. The airline whose laxness is revealed airline's security record is about the same as other big airlines. And carry enough lifeboats to save all those aboard, this is not true of commuter that a German couple drove into a river near Berlin one night not too long ago because their car's computer navigation system did not tell them they needed to retraction, leading not with a concession but with word that the kid is "doing again having satisfied his readers' expectations of "details on events rocking and shocking those unfortunate souls who rise to power!" pretty creative in trying to protect themselves against a rising tide of armed concealed buffalo gun that shoots up at a hijacker's nether parts, and an paper has ever offered such translations for anybody besides a Southern white The majors all say that the meeting produced no explosive new information. in on the interview, say this means she shouldn't be called to testify. But the Republican congressmen say the opposite. All the papers report that the particular, say all the majors, the circumstances surrounding the transfer of gifts could have occurred later than she previously testified, and hence after her previous testimony that no one ever asked her to lie about her affair with papers says, however, who picked up the tab. Was this congressional stands for The Shooting Gallery, an independent film company one of her friends works for. No word on whether the ball cap was part of a product placement prospects for the Republican case managers winning the right to call her or relevant to the two impeachment articles and then take a separate vote on the articles themselves. The point of this, the paper quotes a Republican senator question of whether what he did is impeachable. On this latter question, the Wall Street Journal editorial page weighs in with a bit of historical research. The paper claims that the most authoritative source on the common law known to those who wrote and ratified the Constitution includes in its list of "high misdemeanors" that can be committed by those serving the public trust, both "obstructing the execution of lawful process" that appears to offer its citizens little in the way of options or futures, it does have a stock market. And, more surprising still, it's doing pretty well. or homework. The paper then points out what it calls a great disparity in percent say they use computers regularly) and those attending traditionally academics explaining that the results augur a new and widening inequity between made around such results, it might be good to add a question to the survey: "Do you have a luxury sound system or a car less than two years old, or a luxury and being amazed at the numbers of students' hot cars and loud stereos. Any may be a function of their own interests and choices rather than of Bridges had been its star. Remind them, while you're at it, that even if they with Six Days, Seven Nights another question gets answered. The question Not hard to understand why that big studio blanched at the prospect of coughing for maximum comedic effect. Their collaboration was wildly successful, but was, farting his way through the hugely successful Nutty Professor. To Can you have an adventure film with only one big stunt? Will it be a Romancing the Stone for the '90s? One thing's for sure about Six As befits the last day of a holiday weekend, the papers reheat and serve a smorgasbord of mostly familiar issues. The New York Times leads with a budget forecast story: despite ample surpluses, spending caps mean the Administration must scrounge together funds sufficient for its activist inspection efforts fail to screen out the duds. As a result, many condoms putatively reliable way to protect themselves and stem the continent's AIDS An inside piece at the Times explains one factor behind Defense salaries and quality of life, juicier retirement packages, and limitless opportunity for advancement, officers trained in finance and technology are retreating to the private sector. Only one of the five soldiers quoted mentions the "higher calling" of serving his country. But he also points out, "If you go the 20-year point you'd be a partner and a millionaire." The LAT editorial page calls on the Senate "to fashion a strong he lied under oath", and then to get on with the business of government. On the military: "The sons of bitches are not interested in this country." On women in government: "A pain in the neck, very difficult to handle." On blacks: "There are just not enough competent ones, so you put incompetents in and get along with them, because the symbolism is vitally important." Why? Well, said situation: too much code, too little time, too many unpredictable consequences. stories featuring an increasingly familiar cast of programmers, pundits, and predictions. Far more practical is the Times Magazine's guide to House managers claimed that the videotaped testimony bolstered their case while airing of the videotapes did little or nothing to change senators' Other Republicans, loath to abandon their image of a manipulated young lady, lunch discussion they had last March. House investigators, according to the unconscious, hours or days from death and sustained only by a respirator. national murder rate, then we should strongly consider military (as well as In a current application, the authors support intervention in Sierra Leone, Through this impeachment ordeal, the individual most to be pitied may be ruling blocking Congress' recently passed Internet porn law, which would have made it a crime for commercial web sites to purvey material harmful to minors without employing the "electronic brown wrapper" of first collecting case include sex advice sites, a woman's health site, and those of major media companies, but doesn't say whether the list also includes XXX web outfits. (It's a little suspicious if it does and nobody mentioned them.) The paper regret "on behalf of the president" for all that she's been through. The once she answered a question simply be referring to her prior accounts before the grand jury. The Post finds her demeanor more guarded and coached than previously, so much so, one Senate lawyer tells the paper, that she should partisan leaking." The LAT lead editorial says that with this story, invited further disrespect for its motives by clumsily trying to manipulate the not legally? After all, every bit of information in the papers today about the as well as to new expenditures in the areas of defense and social spending. A companion story says that under the budget, over the next five years, senior (Question left unanswered: how many cents is it now?) The paper says that Republicans quickly derided the plan as a big government strategy that unfairly a daily newspaper, a store, a barber shop and automatic teller machines. The main problem is the vibrant civilian economy with its array of high paying and terrestrial jobs for many of those trained to work in aviation and engineering specialties. The piece seems a little credulous about the military's staffing plight. For instance, one question it doesn't raise, but seems worth asking: If the Pentagon can, over a number of years, make the plans necessary to design and build an aircraft carrier, how come it can't, over that same length of time, plan for the personnel demands caused by the likely ebb and flow of the The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reveals yet another Featured atrocities: Big shots have had to do without email or limos, and the against gun manufacturers: engineering legislation that makes such suits being targeted for such bills. An example highlighted by the paper is the bill rarely suffered, it should be noted, by those convicted of illegal gun smirking," and notes that he is the first white person to face execution for put to death for killing whites. Presenting this statistic without also saying the total number of convictions of crimes of each sort leaves the reader it, but this story should give pause to anyone who thinks the death penalty is a deterrent. The unspeakable crime took place in the state that leads the radio gig, but also from his position as a volunteer deputy sheriff). The true significant bearing" on the human rights violations it committed, including rigor to nonetheless play out the arguments against the unilateral presidential commitment of forces there. His column takes on the demand being raised in the really answer, comes when he notes that the administration's position is that in neither of those cases was the recognized government where our forces concerns are substantial, they will hold up just fine in the congressional debate the Constitution and the War Powers Act requires. on stadium billboards, the US Postal Service received the use of luxury suites at football, baseball and hockey venues around the country. The postal official quoted in the story miraculously can't provide an estimate for the regular cost of the suites. But he does say the suites were used to promote customer relationships and to reward outstanding employees. The Post ought to try to see how many actual letter carriers ever saw the inside of a suite. conducted a survey concluding that people living in neighborhoods they perceive to be unsafe are less likely than those living in safer areas to engage in physical activities like walking a dog or pushing a stroller. For this, we leads with big business' drive to obtain credit for cuts in waste gas An ursine LAT lead says the economy is headed for big trouble in corporate profits. Seems like a safe prediction for a paper to make: if the LAT is correct, they can scream "I told you so," but if another year passes with no economic downturn will readers be reminded of this lead favor a streamlined approach, and a conservative group that wants a full Senate begin considering censure. Conservative senators and House prosecutors feel treaty pending, major corporations are spearheading legislation that would ensure they receive credit for cutbacks they have made in gas emissions over the last few years. The Times thinks that passage of such legislation would soften Senate resistance to the treaty and help align industrial and international water, lied to cover it up, paid a fine, apologized, and then got its lobbying campaign. Because the company still refuses to turn over results systematic pollution and falsification of records is ongoing. the profile argues, claimed to have repudiated racism but used issues such as soon, reports the New York Times lead. With conviction by the Senate he still holds office. His indictment could remain under secret seal, and a unnamed sources ("associates" of the independent counsel) also allege that all eroded by public disapproval: "Prosecutors do not take polls to decide what could induce both parties in the Senate to unite around censure. Censuring the President would make Republican senators look firm and responsible but also the tawdriness of the President's misdeeds while still preserving the requisite announce his nascent Presidential candidacy on this morning's talk show opponents are traditionally strongest. By churning out legislation supporting block grants, local control, and parental involvement, the Republicans are Internet companies engender and monitor relationships among strangers. The rooms and message boards and assign demerits to their authors. The company possible First Amendment obligations to allow open discourse. The Post facilitates actual commerce, it approaches regulation lightly, relying on its abusing the feedback system is instantly "vaporized" from the site. Its "an ineffectual police state, doling out random discipline without due leads with the Supreme Court's ruling that the voter referendum process should suit she had brought against him. None of the other papers runs this story on its front, which makes sense since the decision to pay was reached two months ago (the only real news coming with the actual check is that nearly half of the just a combination lead and "cover story" but also an 8-page "pullout keepsake" effective vehicle for pursuing socially controversial positions. Such controversy, explains the paper, had led several states including Colorado to initiative petitions be registered to vote in the state and wear identifying argued that such regulations conflict with the First Amendment value of became a yearlong running national soap opera...." And in an apparent Iron Eyes heard the articles of impeachment formally presented, "a single tear coursed his cheek." Note to readers: if a story's headline is built around words like "anticipates" "expects," "awaits" or "braces," odds are good there's not much actual news in it. But the second half of this story does include some observations that drive home the oddity of the looming process: one of the Another sports story getting prominent play today is the auction of Mark several doctors have brought a private federal civil suit against the in this list was the name and likeness of a doctor shot by a sniper last fall federal law that prohibits force or threats of force against abortion clients and providers, and the first to wrestle with what exactly on a Web site probably not disrupt Congress' legislative agenda, because "the Senate rarely does much in the first few weeks of a new session." But why not go further and use some of the Post 's research horsepower to actually document this sprouts. An epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is quoted as suggesting therefore that consumers "should consider this danger when deciding whether to eat alfalfa sprouts." Now, what exactly is the cash value of that "guidance"? Does one dare eat the stuff or not? Newspapers should avoid passing along scary information nobody can do anything with. Today's Papers says either get the experts to come across with more info or pass on the item "For the Record" stating that in a previous article on the page, the more detail is given about this. Not explicitly stating previous mistakes in this case, for instance, the reader is left wondering what horrible goof is already brought the toys into their offices are advised to "contact the Staff pulsing rays! Airplanes that fall from the sky! Government coverups! The point: have been accidentally downed by electromagnetic rays emanating from military New York Review of Books --and why, last week, in the same publication's pages, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board stepped forth to could have been caused by one of these misdirected power surges, since there were several military planes, helicopters, and even a naval destroyer literature and moral philosophy. She was writing a study of the social contract that exists between the military and the civilian population in a democracy, powerful signal to come that far and result in this sequence of events. The source has to be so powerful, and the signal has to find some coupling path to the fuel sensors, and that's not easy because there are many obstacles in "Most accidents are a sequence of rare circumstances. If you asked people about a lot of accidents, if you said: Could this happen? They'd say: This is manufacturers are aware of the problem, but consider the cost of correcting it point out that attitude doesn't exactly conform to the social contract, whether between her and the military, or between her and the military this question to you, dear reader: Who looks more like a buffoon in the wake of jumping up and down to claim responsibility for something he didn't have the authority or possibly even the inclination to do? For one thing, Fallows gave ago, which raises the question: Why didn't he see Fallows' move coming? The is now a man for whom announcing to the world that you were fired is Times leads with the heartening nuclear weapons agreement reached over call by governors of both parties from their winter national meeting for impeachment and get back to issues of concern to voters such as education. curtail the deceptive sales practices of sweepstakes companies. The Nation's Newspaper also runs a news section "cover story" on the problem that there's no than anticipated, hesitating to sign an agreement that doesn't explicitly response the promise that the international community will consider the voice ministers agreed to warn each other of missile tests, swap information on nuclear strategy, and to quit testing nukes altogether. The two leaders made no again later. The LAT points out that the agreements regarding nuclear weapons were significant because the proximity of the two countries equals time when Republicans in Congress are on the verge of releasing a report concluding China's military has profited over the years from stealing and of their criminal records: give felons back the right to vote anyway. The idea is, says the paper, picking up support from mainstream civil rights bill under consideration that would restore convicts' right to vote one year after they complete their sentence. The Post says civil rights groups to vote. And adds the paper, many moderates are reluctant to reject the idea for fear of appearing racist. "With the huge number of people disenfranchised, you're really not open to all of the citizenry in making decisions," is one sexually harassing teachers is getting a disability retirement payment of about women without trying to get them to have sex with him. from his father: "A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much China the recipe for launching multiple warheads from a single missile, thus providing China with the "backbone of a modern nuclear force" and a Times also suggests that the White House itself downplayed the findings secretly shared his findings with a bipartisan congressional panel monitoring Lest readers underestimate the story's import, the Times quotes the stock market, the bond market, and economists cheering in the bleachers-- rates dipped in deference to the good news. The LAT notes that even manufacturing, the one sector to suffer job losses, has become bifurcated pace. It also backgrounds the jobs report with helpful descriptions of its methodology. (Example: the Labor Department's job growth stats are based on the many members of their household are working, instead of wage reports from employers. The latter are considered broader and more reliable). of rape and domestic violence victims to sue their attackers under federal Act. Federal courts are desirable venues for victims because of their high damage awards and relatively lax statutes of limitations, but the court found the victims' claims outside the constitutional scope of its jurisdiction. The account doesn't remind readers that even at the time of the bill's passing, the provision was generally considered a socially sympathetic but legally on late taxes to any and all residents of areas deemed disaster areas, instead know!-- inexpensive enough to be considered 'nominal' gifts from lobbyists to Hill types refrain from reading the free programs and parking in the complimentary garage, the Ethics Committee will consider the seats worth a much The Senate impeachment trial continues to dominate, leading all around for the umpteenth day. Today's plot point is the impending vote on whether or not the Senate should depose (in closed sessions, on videotape; public testimony in the Senate would require another vote) the three witnesses the House managers witness list was shortened, says the coverage, in order to attract more votes. The day should also see, the papers report, a vote on a motion to summarily votes are there for the witnesses but not for the dismissal. The papers flag another developing witness issue: the House managers have urged the Senate to calling witnesses is that it would necessitate a comprehensive "discovery" Everybody notes that the House managers have promised the Senate that they matters relating to the obstruction charge, such as her job search and her gift used to spin the grand jury and for his alleged role in planting negative The ethical murkiness involved in reporting this scandal is apparent in the way the papers contend with the rule that makes it illegal for senators to LAT refers to several unnamed senators in its description of a participants, says that the sessions sometimes involve shouting. Now, didn't the senators who spoke to the reporters do something as illegal as perjury? And aren't the papers, in encouraging them to do so, guilty of the equivalent of continuing to conceal past and present illegal weapons programs. The two papers their missions. The LAT lead editorial points out that this new more aggressive stance does not necessarily have the endorsement of Congress. But therein lies one of the hidden crises behind the manifest one: While one executive branch is unilaterally making foreign policy. And the press is contributing to this myopia. When was the last piece you read noticing the celebrate him in conferences, film festivals, books, reissues of concert controversial was his willingness to step outside the frame which usually contains the works of artists and his status as an artist to advance a complex program of civil and human rights changes around the world and in the United the far right and far left has emerged to drive that point home. From a recent Party: "As the centennial celebrations are taking place today, many are the life he actually lived. We cannot allow the ruling class to praise him, in Whatever the real version of that history would look like, one thing we cables to women's body parts? Can you say, "I hate my young female But it's nice he's getting the big payday, because after last week, you'd was the Dodgers' best player on the field, its most popular with the fans, and its most expensive to keep. He and his rocket scientist of an agent had million. Piazza publicly dissed the Dodgers' proposal, which made the Marlins being the kind of company which didn't seem to care about shmoozing talent. divorce may go further toward explaining why he didn't arrange to see a lot of money from his blockbuster right away than Fox's greed does. than five times its cost worldwide. Which success would appear less taxing to a address of a plan to increase diversity in the state's university system by The paper notes that the proposal would counter the effects of Proposition 209--which among other things banned affirmative action in state university Is this merely faulty reporting or a conscious attempt not to alert the administration is nonetheless resisting bipartisan calls for a more sweeping presidential election. "That's something Gore can do right after he's elected," the paper quotes a "senior White House official" as saying. for this bit of diplomacy. The Post advances a plausible answer: unlike mention why baseball may be especially well suited to this particular irenic the definition of sexual relations he was given. That definition referred to fondling certain parts of the anatomy "with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person," and it could be argued that no one has proved have sex with her, this new move is that he didn't have sex with her on purpose. Note that for this to work, the president's lawyers have to argue that The Post front features a story recounting horror tales of domestic staffer, who also beat her. A question: Before doing these stories, did the Post look into whether or not any of its employees are likewise underpaying, or otherwise mistreating their servants? Not to mention making various political types to do some script doctoring. For a show having to do lead with the Senate's mood as it prepares to conduct the impeachment trial. or for the relatives who take care of them, a proposal that is also fronted by senatorial heads talked, according to the LAT --and the main new emerging as two proponents of a full trial with witnesses, in opposition to the care policies for its employees. There is no firm word in the papers about how educated guess is that the money will come from eliminating some corporate tax loopholes. The Post story has a lot of missing nuts and bolts. For instance, how many people in the country would the proposal affect? Is the credit duplicated or divided among multiple caregivers for the same person? And doesn't a tax credit ignore the plight of the disabled and their caregivers who Journal says, doesn't just signify the surge of a particular market influencing the market. And since these folks move in and out of stocks at the The LAT front runs a feature detailing the battle in China between about the official government line. Besides the obvious politically sensitive sites, according to the piece the official firewall servers also screen out the One of their latest tactics is their unverified claim that they have inserted Times goes with word that a congressional study to be released today reminds just how pressing this issue is with a report that research scientists semen at a fresh crime scene to clear or implicate suspects within minutes. fraud observed on behalf of both candidates by international election monitors including Jimmy Carter probably did not affect the outcome. Given that vote tallies. (He's also quoted referring to "results that were manipulated," but the paper doesn't explain how this differs from the other two infractions.) former military ruler of the country, but neither mentions in their capsule governmental histories when he ruled or under what circumstances he ceased concludes that mothers who work outside the home are not harming their children. The story says that via standardized tests and parent interviews, the study concluded children whose mothers worked during the first three years after giving birth were not significantly different from those with unemployed included how many hours weekly the mother was employed and whether periods of unemployment were interspersed with her working, it's curious that the story didn't include any comparisons across those parameters. Do the children of mothers who work only ten hours a week or who knock off completely during the summer fare better than those who work more? The paper doesn't say. It also would have been interesting if the paper had mentioned whether the study's economic phenomenon cropping up here and there in small communities threatened by the outflow of local cash to say, big retail chain stores in the nearby city: the creation of local currencies, good only in town. There are now, says oversized control knobs, larger trunks for golf clubs, and ignition keys that go on the dashboard rather than on the steering column (arthritic wrists find they're easier to turn there). And stand by for seats that swivel out for easy proceeding slowly and minimally, lest they turn off legions of younger that after he had three daughters, he became a devotee of the book "How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby," and subsequently fathered a son after following the book's dictates, which included drinking strong caffeinated coffee before Day One of the Senate impeachment trial leads all around. Banner headlines "obstruction," and the latter charges of "egregious and criminal conduct." yesterday have substantial courtroom experience with the Justice Dept or as local prosecutors, and that they emphasized the more difficult to prove of the or not perjury counts as a high crime or misdemeanor, namely that bribery is listed as a high crime and under federal sentencing guidelines, perjury and striking point that despite all the day's presentations and those to come, the rules of impeachment leave senators "free to vote as they choose for whatever nonetheless the job search assistance effort became markedly more urgent once presented his case "with a bit of folksiness and some narrative drive." The difference here is an important one. The Post 's assessment occurs paper's "Style" section (not, please note, its "Substance" section), marvels that senators could sit still and pay attention to all this. His piece runs under the headline, "On The Floor, The First Day Wore On, On, On." The paper's asks, "that making history could be such excruciatingly ponderous torture?" In other words, by the Post 's lights, it's not that the House Republicans not impeachable, is headlined "We've Heard it Before." majors' editors have consistently stuffed these incidents inside. Indeed, the Times lead with yesterday's Supreme Court decision saying schools must provide whatever nursing care is required to enable students with physical disabled states that schools don't have to pay for "medical services," but the school chancellor's threat to quit if the city goes ahead with a planned The coverage of the Court's call for classroom nursing support notes that it means fresh mainstream classroom access for many handicapped children and billions in unexpected costs for public schools, and hence for taxpayers. boy, a high school sophomore, was rendered quadriplegic by a childhood accident, the cost to the school system of his attending classes was as much as students. ("Regular" is the paper's word; better would have been There is one area that all the stories on this decision gloss over. They each mention that the plaintiff's child in the case was injured in a childhood the boy was four years old. But everybody leaves it at that. Which leaves Today's Papers' nose twitching. Did one of the parents drive a motorcycle helmet?) If the answer to either question is yes, then here we have a case of the cost of parental irresponsibility being doled out to everybody else, a phenomenon the papers should be more curious about. The story does not explain when or under what circumstances the House threat likens her story to a "romance novel, heavy on grief, despair and passion." And tidbit that to keep potential evidence out of investigators' hands, her father burned her White House souvenirs on the family barbecue. and then proceeded to a House hearing where he displayed his deadly sample. The man then testified that in addition he has done likewise "through all the major airports, and the security systems of the State Department, the Pentagon, even endowments. And then the Journal asks the very natural question that the schools themselves never raise, Why, in light of this investment success, don't the schools use more of their own resources to help students? Why, in other the impeachment trial. The Wall Street Journal flags the story in its front page news box. The headlines at the two Times and the Journal stress the explains that the paperwork dumped on the Senate includes arguments from both The upshot of the White House filing is that the charges do not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors," while the thrust of the House impeachable, then no president not a convicted felon or murderer need ever fear impeachment in the future. It's noted all around that the White House has added a more aggressive wrinkle to its posture: now claiming that it's a "myth" that article of impeachment concerning it was not passed. that the congressional wood shop has been busy building new tables especially those surveyed said they had definitely made up their minds about the case, The coverage emphasizes that the White House chose at this time not to file motions challenging the proceedings, motions that could have added weeks to the whole process. But the papers also report that the White House has indicated it will probably file such motions if the Senate chooses to allow the calling of witnesses after the initial presentations by the House managers and the White House defense counsel. The Post notes that the White House has also dropped for now plans for any constitutional challenges such as that the would open the Senate's closed door for deliberations on trial motions or the refusing to answer questions put to him about a relationship with a woman not then his wife (she is now) during divorce proceedings. But wait a second, it is an old shoe! The piece is merely a lift of two pages According to the coverage, yesterday's Senate votes fixed the impeachment will, guess the papers, be an acquittal on both the perjury and obstruction counts, with no finding of facts in lieu of a conviction, but, after the trial, note the papers, was the first one in the proceedings that didn't follow party Today sees "impeachment fatigue" in the day's debate, and the New York Times says there was little ardor or urgency in the speeches, comparing the whole here and there, noting that one House manager said, "If one senator has failed to personally sit through this deposition and every deposition, that senator is not equipped to render a verdict on the impeachment trial of the President of week's phase of the trial was reached over the objections of the White House. Post points out that the Senate vote on video admissibility contains a rider that excludes any statements made by the witnesses after the end of the House lawyer at the end of hers will not be disseminated. reckless and indefensible." The White House would go for that, says the paper, knowingly lied under oath, tampered with evidence and witnesses, and attempted to interfere in the progress of a civil rights suit. replies, "I think he's an intelligent president." At this remark, the room full of attorneys, congressmen and senators "erupted into laughter." And in his doctrine: "I do not view the president as giving me instructions." The Wall Street Journal reports that researchers have just percent of those newly infected are carrying forms of the virus resistant to was unarmed, and no weapon was found near his body. ended up in the bank's accounts so that it can receive approval of its planned was one little building project the bank helped finance but never mentioned competition to develop a new fighter airplane for all the services, has thus in charge of the program says a lot about the military's attitude towards points out that the debacle is "somewhat ironic" in that the plane is supposed about what problems are causing the money hemorrhage. flicks they've enjoyed on Turner Classic Movies, which they see via the that the two articles of impeachment failed to muster a simple majority. the Times is the only paper of the big three to headline the sinking of staging of the drama's denouement. Its overview story reports that Senate staff members scripted each stage of the final day's proceedings, down to the disturbed by murmuring in the press gallery only when Republican Senators votes signaled that the House had erred in sending forth impeachment articles." The story does not say which Republican Senators advanced this view. The LAT highlights the collegiality that marked the closing of the certain ring of civility to it, but it means one side is disadvantaged, and we were." The LAT reports that back slapping abounded after votes were The Post and the Times front separate features on the President's rose garden apology and expression of "profound sorrow" for triggering the events of the past year. The Times story emphasizes that the speech struck a conciliatory and hopeful tone. Though the paper reported at the ballot box, it does not pause to compare and contrast. All three papers front separate articles on the reaction of the House satisfactory agreement is reached between the "warring parties" currently plan last week, but promised to consult with Congress before making any formal commitments. The Times notes that the mission would probably be headed represent an important change in Presidential elections. The National Association of Secretaries of State adopted a plan that, if implemented, would reverse the increasing compression of presidential primaries, and the The story notes that getting the necessary approval by the states and political At the close of yesterday's drama, Congressional players were confronted with the bittersweet question of what they would do next. According to the Times lead with the issues that the Senate must soon resolve to stress will instead be on: whether or not to call any of the already deposed witnesses to the Senate chamber for questioning, whether or not to release to the public the videotapes of their depositions, and whether or not to vote on Although support for these choices play out largely along party lines, the papers note that Republican support for the choices that make life more leads with the nationwide gas wars, caused by an oil glut and petroleum industry improvements. The upshot: the national average price of a gallon of Adjusted for inflation, the paper says, gas prices are the lowest in On the impeachment front, despite the handwriting on the wall, there are still plenty of Republicans strolling the halls of Congress with ink remover. make himself available for a deposition. But even that letter stated that the One sign that there really is light now at the end of the impeachment tunnel House acknowledged yesterday that a Democratic pep rally on the South Lawn organization. The LAT says the raid uncovered evidence of tapped phone Republic amassing strong evidence that Tom DeLay, a leading congressional doubter of President time he reported to Congress that he was the company's chairman. The up evidence that DeLay made further misstatements about the amount of money he was drawing from the company and also about the amount of speaking fees he rage" over poor airline service, a bipartisan bill, the "Airline Passenger doesn't say what rights will thereby be protected, although presumably they won't include the right to intestinally offload onto the liquor cart (an actual while he was on active duty. (He had not, says today's story, informed the magazine of this.) The story doesn't explore whether this fact would be grounds for dismissal under the present "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Which is too bad, since it's actually an interesting test case. If a soldier is completely circumspect in his military life and makes every effort to disguise his Today's coverage of the impending Senate actions on impeachment includes a is completely unsupported in the story. And therefore shouldn't be there. The telltale sign that such phrases represent the illicit smuggling into a story of a political opinion is that just below this the story continues, "The White that comes with "steadfastly," but please do notice that this sentence does not read, "In order to make Republicans look bad, the White House has..." military capabilities. This story is also on the LAT front. Both fighting, documenting that their number includes horses and babies. The is yesterday's signal from the House Republican leadership that despite members of Congress who fear the plan is too costly and politically risky because it smacks of favoring the rich. Into this breach, explains the goes with the upswing in federal health care fraud prosecutions, resulting in unprecedented numbers of doctors and administrators going to prison. Sixty percent of these cases involve bogus Medicare billing. The story's comparison, but the body explains that the baseline year for the comparison themselves. The paper notes that they've never had to make collective decisions sales, making it likely that China will interpret the quashing of this economic relations. The paper says the Commerce Dept. approved of the sale, but that State and Defense opposed it on the grounds that the technology involved This suppression of news is particularly odd here because these very relevant civil contempt for failing to produce records of accounts the names of the two men until the sixth paragraph. Also, the paper never mentions that the judge in this case, who suggested the failure to produce smacked of official deceit, had previously harshly ruled against the administration in the matter of whether or not closed meetings of the against the government. The Post goes right out of the box with mentions downsizing, headline writers have trouble finding a new, er, wrinkle. Watts' father was quoted comparing blacks voting Republican to chickens supporting Colonel Sanders. It turns out that this is not a fresh quote, but rather has been attributed to Watts' father in newspaper articles going back at Village? After all, even this architectural utopia has turned out to have its downsides: onerous zoning and architectural restrictions, rules about what you can and cannot do with your garden, a general atmosphere of If so, the satire has gone over viewers' heads. Seaside town officials have available to renters. One of the movie's producers commented, "I recall we made debunking the illusion of movies is: It doesn't matter how devastating your expos, of an illusion, if the illusion's a pretty one, some people will always publishing firms that had donated big money to the event? Or if the Met was to And as long as we're asking annoying questions: Where are all the great to be out on video.) Ditto for, say, a dozen great directors and The more important questions: Why are we selling off our greatest cultural right they happen to be. But must we celebrate our tainted taste on Congress convenes and could proceed very swiftly. The New York Times representatives' salaries are going up, says the paper, in at least ten states. show appearances to appear less partisan and less combative than their House counterparts had seemed when they had the impeachment ball in their court. The colleagues when, on "Face the Nation," he expressed doubt that it would be expressing the fear that at stake here is the possibility that Congress could began routinely removing presidents, speakers become president, no one knows explanation for the trend: more police and stricter gun laws. The LAT quotes an academic expert citing another: a decrease in the crack cocaine trade, caused by the proliferation of legal economic opportunities for young explanation much higher, and notes that the two crimes that have fallen the explanation for why the young have been avoiding crack of late: The clear negative consequences for role models who got caught up in the stuff. The security system may, says the Journal actually be a big part of the problem. Companies averse to firing employees are, in a sluggish economy, reluctant to hire too. By contrast, accustomed as they are to the prospects of elected and appointed officials in which they document all their sexual activity for the previous year. Cutler's form has the usual bureaucratic there's a serious omission when it comes to public servants like his last presidential boss: it doesn't define "sexual activity." proves to be down with the Zeitgeist, providing the latest evidence of the at least he's keeping it out of his movies. The forthcoming ape wildly successful Chatterbox style? Answer: Hell, yes!... longer than The Horse Whisperer the National Hockey League regular to be interviewed for the position of official biographer, the friend surely wasn't thinking: Ah yes! Let's bring this fashionable memoir writer face to What a surprise, then, to come across the following title in the Random Morris. This is the most eagerly awaited political biography of the But a rumor floated: Morris had lost presidential favor. The book was late "impossible to understand," a dilemma that had caused Morris to experience a Globe earlier this year, Morris downplayed expectations: "If you want to study of his life and imagination, and his gift for stirring the breadth and depth of a biography: "It's just simply the fact that I spent a lot of time with him in the White House and had the chance to talk with him a lot. It's a privilege most biographers don't have, at least not biographers of presidents. We schmoozed a lot and had long dialogues." As befits the day, the papers are relatively quiet, finally getting to lead cancelled planes and trains, giving us along the way the definitive holiday third of it. Yesterday's LAT said "nearly half," but today's settles on stance is "particularly credible" because he is not running for A piece inside the Times braces with the reminder that a full blown soon to preside over the Senate's impeachment trial. The piece notes that most significant previous impeachments (both unsuccessful), that of Supreme that the book, for much of this year one of the capital's most sought after, is which a young bomber pilot broke formation and disappeared with a plane full of bombs and was later discovered to have crashed into a Colorado mountain. The turmoil over his mother's religiously based pacifistic disapproval of the military and over a failed romance. The man's parents deny this, claiming instead that something happened on the flight to make their son lose consciousness. The Times notes that the report is silent regarding two and that he committed suicide because he was a tormented closeted gay. The Times itself is oddly silent about some relevant context though, never noting that the sort of speculative psychological explanation indulged in here by the Air Force is strikingly similar to that wielded by the Navy when, in its initial official report on the disastrous gunnery explosion aboard the but his best columns have always been wonderful correctives to everybody Supreme Court justice has expressed "grave doubts" about the guilt of some of the convicts executed during his tenure. The judge notes that in the past ten convicted criminals yesterday, for offenses ranging from going AWOL to blowing up a building. The group includes three people convicted of lying. repository of Constitutional wisdom and "defender of Senate prerogatives," was basically just counting votes. He said that there weren't enough to convict, from the floor of the Senate: "You're saying, I guess, that perjury's okay if Hatch, the papers report, said that the Senate should hear witnesses and adjourn the trial, letting the House vote stand as "the highest form of condemnation." The LAT lead says that the impeachment case "appeared to than ever for a graceful exit from a potentially prolonged trial." the clearest about how the surprise announcement was made, in a press release There are two key subordinate trial stories. The Post 's second lead lawyers say she doesn't want to help "either side." The managers called in The other story addresses how the trial in the Senate progressed. The oddness of the proceeding, wherein Senators, forbidden to speak, had to submit agree that the Senators used the opportunity almost exclusively to lob softball Over the last few weeks a story about the Chief Justice has rarely been complete without a reference to the zeal with which he enforces time limits on oral arguments in the Supreme Court. (He's often described as cutting attorneys off "mid syllable" when the clock runs out.) The papers, with perhaps a bit of disappointment, note his uncharacteristic laxness on this point as he presided responses. The first answer went on for nine minutes. see him through his own eyes, and measure him by the yardstick of church history." The LAT is more probing about his effect on the church's which had enlivened the church, particularly by attracting new clergy. Now they're low on priests, and capitalism stands rampant, with its attendant onus largess in the form of medical treatment, college tuition, and slick land yesterday testified that the massive response to the speech was fabricated. it, has the details. He said he enlisted help before the speech from labor locomotive full of mail into Union Station. "He did generate a lot of mail," welfare. A Health and Human Services survey shows, says the paper, that state officials have, despite winning the right under welfare reform to control a billion available to them in a recent nine month period. The paper attributes this to the steep decline in the number of people on welfare, the states' slowness to develop new welfare programs, and their desire to save money for the country by his oldest son, who hours later was sworn in as king. The in mining and manufacturing the stuff. Those who will die, says the paper, pattern of jury nullification. The most concrete sign of the trend, the paper says, is the sharp increase in hung juries. For years, the norm was considered supporting story inside about a woman advocate of jury nullification on a hung Colorado drug case jury who was later convicted of failing to disclose her own premium package for a newly released computer book, which includes the top slot on the site's home page, an author profile or interview, and "complete delicate move for Amazon, which has distinguished itself with its thoughtful of those thoughtful voices.) Amazon officials tell the paper that their site space is not for sale, and that most of the books featured do not bring a fee, are rarely rejected. The piece notes two big problems with Amazon's advertorial independent houses at a competitive disadvantage, regardless of content. The preparing to launch a similar advertorial program later this year. the next decade. The story notes that housing purchases are a function of household formations, which are a function of demographics, which augur a bit of retrenchment. After all, baby boomers, who are responsible for much of the growth, have probably peaked in household formation. And the country is getting workplace experiences of some other recent interns. Give the paper credit for noting one job where the problem was hardly an intern's getting too much attention. The intern's account reads in part: "I have just completed my first week of work at The New York Times ....I enter in the mornings without anyone saying hello and exit in the evenings without anyone waving work under a judge's threat of heavy fines if they continued staying out in call in sick on the same day, does the company ask for a note from a doctor and got them to sit down together. (What had they been doing there until then, LAT quotes her high saying, "There is every indication they will be her saying "I will not be able to say that the path to agreement is clear or that success is in sight" before having to leave to report back to President for peaceful leadership. The second half of the LAT account dwells law have become more detailed recently because prosecutors feel the company is stumbling in its court defense. A forced breakup is currently envisioned by the only the Windows operating system and one that would sell other MS software big questions in all of this, says the paper, are: Would such moves really create new competition? And which company would get Bill Gates? (Perhaps if cloning technology continues to pick up speed, the latter problem can be obvious it's not clear why they don't fear looking too confident of victory Like a decapitated chicken still racing around the barnyard, the papers us, and above the fold with the debate within the Republican ranks about for the impeachment trial. Similarly, most say the Senate should end attempts weekend meeting of moderate Republicans worrying about how to repair the image rich people and the business people still like us," and then reports that the violent crime more than twice the national average, and unlike most other first airing last week. But the column also reports that a recent "Biography" leads with the continuing rise in cable rates even as the medium approaches much of the country east of the Rocky Mountains, while tornadoes will hit Collapse." The paper goes high with the claim by a former prime minister that "doomsday was a wrong estimation of what would happen, and what will happen." The Journal enumerates some of the things it says have nonetheless not million folks have lost their jobs (since when?) and the ruble is off by fast as was forecast, and why the stock market is "stirring." And the country's entrenched barter economy means that companies can press on regardless of than four times the rate of inflation. What's happened, as if you didn't know, is that while cable price controls came off, much of the expected government's agency in charge of federal buildings has been warned repeatedly and unrestricted entrances. But, says the paper, since the building opened with huge cost overruns, there has been tremendous reticence to create a strong visible security presence that would cut down on revenue by discouraging the public from visiting the retail stores, restaurants and convention facilities to wrest artistic control of his pictures away from the studios. According to trend appears to illustrate several unintended consequences of locks and security systems, unattended locked cars became much harder to steal, caught by police in their own cars. A separate Times item reports that an attempt to rob her at a bank ATM and gave the police a getaway car license plate that directly led to the arrest of three suspects in the crime. where you can buy a Judicial Watch report or a Judicial Watch baseball cap. for instance, were all right. But Frank lacked a sense of humor. He took generation, a way of saying no to people sitting on wooden stools under a spotlight crooning insincerely. Rock 'n' roll wasn't smooth, like Frank. It was of phrasing that Frank invented. That is nonsense. You will hear nothing of other members of my mothers' generation is perfectly captured in a clip they've that dreadful duet, in which both were forced to mimic themselves as the deadline passed without an agreement. He changed his mind on the advice of Times restrict themselves to observing that this is a policy None of the three papers seems to know just what convinced the negotiators that three more days of negotiation would be valuable. It's particularly opportunity for evasion and delay," and nowhere does she explain why things foreigners on their territory," which might be a first step towards some sort will be gone" by the new deadline three days from now, adding that "there is no it comes time to sign their little darlings up for summer day camps. A mother is driven to tears at the news that her child had missed the deadline for a magazine also introduces a redesigned front section, which grandly aims to chronicle "The Way We Live Now." Included is a new ethics column (written by A slow news day yields different leads at all the weekend papers. The Times lead accuses Congress of using money marked for education on overseas." The article says that the move might be an attempt to undercut presidency. The piece also predicts a lively struggle in Congress over how to whose parents are ineligible for welfare are receiving public assistance. Most are either children of illegal immigrants or those living with relatives because their parents have lost custody. While welfare reform and a strong economy have gotten many adults off the dole, welfare kids seem to present a percent. A question that is not addressed in the article: is the percentage While bringing home the pork is not a new congressional hobby, doing it at the expense of educational programs is, according to the LAT lead. The and investment." And it is from this discretionary pool, that representatives specials made consumer goods, which were previously subject to local magazine's staffers were still sipping their first cup of coffee when word went known as "the piazza," an open space adjacent to the corridor where the Sporting a simple blue suit, her hair streaked with just the right amount of still making their way up the stairs. This was, she said, a very difficult thing to do, but she had been presented with an opportunity that she simply couldn't refuse. After uttering the usual platitudes about how The New produce films and television shows. (She will be the chairwoman and a part seems concerned with turning a profit at the magazine. And who can blame him? As for who will preside over this dark day in New Yorker history, we can only report what we have gleaned from the rumor mill over on 43rd Street. celebrated) editor of Vanity Fair who has perfected the formula for the profile that simultaneously glamorizes and eviscerates its subject. It seems respected newspaperman who did a tour as Page One editor of the Wall Street York Review of Books with none of the intellectual snobbery. All the while, he has been writing nifty pop culture pieces for the New York Times today that it will initiate the creation of quick response "strike forces" of threats and scenarios. One issue not decided yet, says the paper, is whether performance in this area to mean that he plans to recommend later this month presidents signed agreements to increase air travel between their countries, to suppress the spread of tuberculosis, and to improve communications between law enforcement on both sides of the border to cut down on migrant death and can undertake a foreign trip without being dogged by scandal. Indeed, the she did preside over the resolution of the agency's tainted blood problems. management style wanting and critics have noted her tendency to add political prominently featured Ms. Dole and ran eleven days before she stepped down to Post story about "deadwood" federal employees. The story had mentioned that in its effort to better understand the problem, the government's Office of Senate for its handing of the impeachment trial, with Republicans taking most views the impeachment process, not as an honest investigation of possible decision, and doesn't need to make public the videotaped testimony it decided to take anyway. The paper sums up the popular sentiment thus: "Enough already!" The poll finds that just under half of all Republicans feel the whole thing "threat" in such a way that the jury could consider the impact on the mental state of the plaintiff doctors of nationwide violence aimed against other those words that produce or are likely to produce "imminent" lawless action. The LAT says however, that the trial judge's approach reflects current appellate case law. The paper effectively sums up the troubling side of the wider definition of "threat" by quoting one of the defendants' lawyers saying that under it, "virtually any document that criticizes an abortionist by name is threatening. I think the effect on political protest will be One of the annoying tics of newspaper coverage of jury awards is the the defendants in this case have preemptively gotten rid of their assets and hence that the plaintiffs will probably never collect a cent of the millions there was a major inaccuracy in the video the company played in the courtroom tag, was that the browser had not actually been removed. Later in the day, did have the browser removed, but that the screen tag usually signifying implement an unprecedented consumer notification procedure relating to one of the town's most cherished substances: fur. The city council has, says the paper, agreed to hold a special election on requiring all local furriers to put warning tags on their garments that would read: "This product is made with fur from animals that may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poisoning, clubbing, stomping, or drowning and may have been trapped story includes far more detail about methods of extinguishing life than any of ridiculed figures in pop music, her shortcomings as a singer and musician all Why this should be, when it wasn't her idea to join Wings in the first been the decorative spouse who kept the creator satisfied as she gave him a stable home; two decades later, she'd have been Baby Spice with a brain, critic. Her writing since certainly confirms that rock 'n' roll was not her ideal subject, but the idea that the value of her provocative thoughts is somehow debased by her candor about her personal life, or by her willingness to appear topless on the cover of her book, is hilarious. In case you missed it: if one were to ask me, "Can you do my laundry tonight?" my only response would A Magazine About Nothing: There's plenty of buckshot being sprayed at charge. Believe whom you will, but it's Jerry who behaved most caddishly by by not taking the blame for wanting to check out the piece in advance. Like he squashed in its opening weekend by Lost in Space --featuring a fully remember when Titanic was going to be the Ultimate Boy Movie, based on the pants off such movies as Wild Things --whose Boy Culture appeal was Meanwhile, "My Heart Will Go On" has pulled two different albums to the the music industry has been hip to the death of Boys R Us since last summer, Elsewhere on the cultural landscape, the news for Boy Culture gets celebrations, I thought I was supposed to enjoy it when athletes got rowdy. Not little faith in the buying power of their core audience of males that they're it? Hug it? Drive it? Hug it?" ad campaign so insufferable it makes Hello Kitty So where can Boys R Us make its last stand? There are Comedy Central's impeachment trial. The LAT goes with yesterday's air action in the southern According to the papers, the only thing that's really known about the senators in breaks from yesterday's continuous palavering suggest that the fast of Senate Republicans bucking their leadership to complain that the House managers are entitled to more time to make their case against President against a fast track. A related fault line is whether or not the proceedings should include the calling of witnesses. On the one hand, a trial without witnesses seems odd and on the other, there is concern that with a full slate of witnesses, the Senate cannot avoid the rancor just seen in the House. "We Another issue is whether the Senate is constitutionally empowered to consider remarkable statement, says the paper, in light of the public's overwhelming actually were). But none of the accounts address the issue this difference conventionally understood provocative act required? Also, for a press that's become quite intoxicated with the technical details of our weapons, especially when they work, there's a notable lack of with the help of distracting countermeasures, made sudden maneuvers the missiles couldn't duplicate. Another possibility is that the shots were all In the past year, the papers have made much of the various safety and environmental negatives posed by the wild proliferation of sports utility principle that we will want our next president to be everything this one is Once again the Senate impeachment trial is the consensus news leader, with today's installment given over to yesterday's votes to press on and to the immediate event. The big print at the New York Times takes a longer view: "Senate Refuses to Dismiss Case and Agrees to Call that the Senate has told the House managers they have the chance to make their the trial schedule from here on out. The Post says that if the three depositions just approved don't drag out and aren't sensational, the White threatened. (But the LAT notes a possible obstacle: the House managers disliked least when she met with several of the managers last weekend." but that Ford has become viewed as the "acquirer of choice," because of its track record of injecting capital and expertise into new purchases without of increases in military pay and pensions even more generous than those between rendering military pay strictly comparable to civilian pay and making military pay high enough to attract and retain sufficiently qualified troops in the various specialties the services require for true readiness. It's the latter that the budget should reflect, not the former. The editorial goes on to suggest that the readiness pay standard should be applied year by year instead that would help retention of the right kind of personnel while avoiding waste: target pay raises and bonuses not just to combat specialties but also to extra reward when he's jumping out of planes and sleeping in a foxhole, but not when he's serving as a clerical assistant at the Pentagon, returning to his nice suburban home every night in time for dinner with his family. Everybody's been talking about the growth of online stock trading, but today growth of online stock trading problems. The Times says investor complaints about online trades have quadrupled over the past year. The chief of the ease of mouse transactions goad them into trading too quickly or too complained bitterly over his use of the word "niggardly" in a business meeting with two subordinates, one white and one black. The Post notes that "niggardly" is etymologically completely unrelated to "nigger" (it has Middle English roots and means stingy) and says that if in fact the man used the word innocently and in its correct context, then the loss of his job is "truly remarkable." The paper cites other phrases that will have to be dropped if the standard of this case is widely adopted: "a chink in the armor," and "a nip in Social Security by investing some of the budget surplus on its behalf in the stock market and also to use some of it to subsidize a new system of individual separate headlines over its Social Security lead and only the revelation that the federal government has decided to sue tobacco There is much mention of Republican enthusiasm for tax cuts instead, but only for most of his new ideas, and that some stand little chance of passage. preserves the program's size but only by accepting something that was anathema held back its Social Security plans and its new tobacco legal strategy to defense before Congress earlier in the day, would drive the coverage. Both the the speech was designed to portray a president who intends to stick around. The LAT says that the speech was in its own way the ultimate people really care about, and hence might help him maintain the strong poll ratings that may be his ultimate lever with the senators sitting in judgment of The LAT fronts the International Monetary Fund's publication of a slow to see the extent of the banking overhaul required, but also notes that very few others saw things more clearly. But even though many have said that Brazil, now in deep crisis with a rapidly disintegrating currency. the federal government decided yesterday that embryonic stem cell research is not ruled out by the ban on federally funded embryo research, because the cells aren't embryos. They don't have broken into the Capitol Hill office of a polling firm working for the advisor is quoted as saying, "We hereby declare the demise of the coincidence the regular broadcasts of what he calls "National Tom Radio," the daily of record for the number of occurrences of the word "mommy" in a Post violate a great unspoken but true taboo: Other Peoples' Kids Are Boring. For sitting next to you in coach who just has to show you pictures of his that each right now would beat Al Gore. The story also states that a House or affect most voters' attitudes towards him or her, and that most voters also think impeachment should not be an issue in the upcoming presidential charge is "doomed." And both say not to expect any big bombshell from the uh, been asked about her testimony, but presumably will be when he's deposed later billions in new spending while preaching fiscal conservatism, via combining such liberal domestic programs as urban housing vouchers and classroom construction with cherished Republican priorities like the military, the police and small business. The Times says that with his State of the Union and scandal and the Republicans' failure during that time to offer their own to humans through the blood exposure involved in chimpanzee hunting and this process will help them learn more about ways of combating the disease. A lengthy Wall Street Journal takeout points out a possible side military has asked for the power to take charge in the case of major terrorist previously, today's coverage mentions the concern some civil libertarians have about this unprecedented augmentation of domestic military authority. The officials, quoting one who emphasizes that "the military wouldn't get involved in law enforcement." The reader is left puzzled, since it seems obvious that if a military unit were to take charge during any sort of domestic terrorist already involved with law enforcement. Remember those Marines who shot that released in connection with the company's myriad court cases as well as the company's heated internal conflict over whether or not to abandon Windows and its successor PC operating systems in favor of a programming base that would run on any kind of operating system reachable via the Internet. The coterie of Internet "doves" inside the company's senior combined with a warning from the head of the players' union that if so, the runaway number one story of the year was You Know What, but number two was the officer suggesting a more prosaic explanation: "I think what he's trying to do would be premature to declare that the problem has been beaten throughout the ground on before: the increasingly pronounced split between the races when it The preference trend, the Times explains, influences the way the shows look. Since, for instance, whites rarely watch shows with mostly black casts, and since advertisers focus on the more numerous and generally more affluent white viewers, network shows on in prime time with black or even integrated casts have become relatively rare, reversing a trend towards cast integration that was big in the 70s and 80s. One producer sums up the situation by saying activity that drives home the point that some sort of benchmark has been biggest online brokerage house is now just the biggest brokerage house. deeply stung by the accusations against him and his company opens with an anecdote that's evidently supposed to humanize him but which will probably have the opposite effect. It seems that last summer Gates and his wife took several dozen friends on a vacation trip out West, and at one point they stopped at a restaurant for dinner. During the meal, a couple of strangers eating nearby joined the group and proceeded to mercilessly tease Gates, amazing all of his front shows the bodies on display in a village mosque with shrouds over their heads, where they were apparently shot at close range. The papers report that autopsies, which means in all likelihood that international authorities will killings. The Post also carries Walker's condemnation, but also quotes him making this odd concession: "Maybe we went beyond the limits [of the mission's mandate], and that's why the government is mad at us." less impregnable than previously feared and weakened his support among his military protectors, the Republican Guards. Now's the time therefore, he writes, to "really rattle his cage." He offers such suggestions as turning up the story shows that the paper is just a little too credulous about the need for this spending. Examples of "worsening congestion and strain" at the White House the Post cites include: "Storage space is so scarce that items for the China Room, where the presidential china is on display, doubles as a coat room for state dinners"; and "The florists were forced to open boxes of flowers The Post has apparently adopted a breakthrough innovation that enables it to get copy into the paper faster: Each piece gets its own editor, won't be ready with the next piece of the station on time. And this comes on The coverage explains that each impeachment witness will be questioned for four hours by each side. Two senators, one from each party, will supervise. The videotapes can be shown in the Senate and before the witnesses could be called to testify before the Senate in person. (Even so, the LAT says in its of witness tapes.) Also decided yesterday was that Republican managers cannot seek any additional evidence or testimony uncovered during these witness the LAT or Post with word that the notion of a "split decision," where a finding of fact is voted on in addition to the ultimate issue of the defense team might well respond with delays of its own. The LAT lead impeachment trial by stressing to the senators in attendance the importance of commuted the death sentence of a convicted murder to life in prison without parole after the pope, during his recent visit to St. Louis appealed directly killing of a married couple along with their disabled grandson. count on projected government budget surpluses to fix Social Security, primarily because budget forecasts have proven to be so unreliable. The stock prices is "good for our system," in that it's channeling capital to promising new enterprises before they actually turn a profit. A Post inside piece notes instead that despite his doubts about the reliability of to draw down the national debt and to help fund Social Security. The Wall Street Journal piece on the Chairman's appearance testified at a Senate hearing yesterday that he had reservations about the a move could create a "rogue state" there that's even more destabilizing than in the 1980s to arm indigenous forces against the Soviet occupiers. The has the advantage of avoiding mention of such gritty matters as arms shipments owned by folks who are living longer than they expected to. confidence regarding his impeachment trial chances, pointing out that such informal statements are probably all the Senate is going to get from him. The Today lead is that a government commission report to be published today will urge a new package of better benefits for military veterans. It probably didn't help that the president of the country's central bank suddenly resigned or that it's widely believed any economic troubles in Brazil Maybe it's the dismal science rather than dismal writing, but from the The paper says the devaluation eases pressure on Brazil to defend its currency by spending its reserves keeping interest rates high, and that the government describes its move as a way to restore consumer confidence and credibility After all, if the currency is falling, won't investors be motivated to take what they've got and convert it to a more stable currency before things get worse, thereby putting more pressure on the real? And why is a devalued currency preferable to increased interest rates? They both suppress consumer spending and hence both contribute to the kind of transnational recessionary contagion that is the main worldwide economic concern at the moment. Similarly, trim interest rates, "domestic industry can worry less about paying its debt and more about borrowing to resume production." But if the country's money is worth less, don't companies just have to borrow more to accomplish any given table the matter for now, a small group of Senate Republicans has met secretly with the House impeachment prosecutors to work on story inside headlined "Retirement Sends Shock Around a Small Planet," but at least the Post front notices that in his press conference yesterday, Times goes with a sensational two decks across four columns ("Judge a "storm of partisan fire" in the Senate. Both papers seem caught up by the the ruling was issued. The New York Times plays it much more calmly; the ordered to talk: Her immunity agreement not only said specifically that she must cooperate with "congressional proceedings," but also that she talk to to. She'll be doing the talking today, the papers say. The continuation of the question period in the Senate trial is the second keep the Republican forces in line. You have to read a while in all the papers supposed bipartisan agreement worked out before the Senate trial. But the paper points out that such fracturing was inevitable, because those first days of relative amity came at the expense of the senators' actually making a decision pessimistically: "The likely result: an ugly battle along party lines, a series of arguments over witnesses, and at least several more weeks of trial for the justice charge is still volatile, and that she, by being convincing one way or the other, can prevent the proceedings from being decided on something other the paper says, is just a move to "hijack control of the trial." well. A lengthy story details a "small secret clique" of lawyers who consulted female suicide in China, which could be as much as five times the rest of the world's average. The problem is in the country's rural areas, where there seems to be an epidemic of impulsive suicide attempts, made more gruesome by the availability of a pesticide that doesn't taste too bad. section and the weather map will brighten up as well. and another about a prospect who, when asked to bring references, showed up Magazine appends a tacky postscript: a hymn to the Rolling Stones' fashion ancient redwoods in private hands. This also makes the LAT front. The Congress for walling off Social Security funds from the rest of the federal budget. The main divide among advocates of the move, the story explains, is between those who want to do it now and those who want to do it gradually. Yesterday, House Republicans introduced a gradual plan. Gradualism has the and shoring up Social Security in the long haul. The story delays until the counting Social Security among general revenues, and never mentions that in business accounting, earmarked pension funds are not considered among a firm's vulnerability but little risk of disaster" and the story proper quickly includes calming words from two senators. Nonetheless mentioned are potential problems with paychecks and medical records, and accidental nuclear launches. The LAT lead stresses the risks a bit more, with its first paragraph mentioning computer crashes, disruptions leading to civil unrest in some countries, and the risk of terrorist attacks amid the resulting confusion. risks there are will be more acute in many foreign countries than in the tourist treks aiming to see mountain gorillas became popular after the movie reports, launched his effort with a speech criticizing economic globalism, the capability to accept tax payments via credit card has become unexpectedly "struggles with his sensuality") opens tonight. The LAT front quotes a commentator saying, "This country's appetite for the salacious, the sexy and should be walking around with a scarlet A." And she "seemed more interested in making money than contemplating the deep meaning of her actions." The Journalists tend to think that libel law exists to let rich and famous protect the innocent against unfounded accusations of crimes of a heinous evidence that on occasion, sir, the law is not an ass. to get them to accuse Love not just of being a jerk, but of being a murderer. have theories about why and how Love killed her late husband. None offers solid His main objective appears to be to air these patently ludicrous accusations. What else could he do? he asks us plaintively. After all, she wouldn't talk to Reviews have been mixed, but smart critics who should have known better have expose of the seamy underbelly of fame by a renegade who eschews the boring adversarial stance toward celebrity culture that they overlook the main accusations of murder without offering evidence that the accused is guilty of anything other than being an ambitious loudmouth and drug user. there's smoke, there may be fire, might not realize that for the last decade or torment, and libel the controversial female public figures he chooses as his subjects. Then he claims it's because they won't cooperate with him. digging up all sorts of unbelievable charges about her then failing to refute Airlines pilots who've been calling in sick for the last week. (It's illegal for them to actually strike.) The Post story, much more colorful than comparing the pilots to Mafia extortionists, promising the union that its assets will fit in the "overhead bin of a Piper Cub" after he got through with it, and even pointing out that many of the pilots had learned their trade while some of the pilots are combat veterans who risked their lives for the country motivations, goes out of its way to report that White House aides "expected mobilizations and postings of the multinational troops. presidential campaign will look in the mirror this weekend and see a possible Those who make it to the end of the story will probably say amen to the closing political phenomena that, all along, seemed systematically to help the Democrats and hurt the right. It includes a trenchant "for want of a nail" tale was unexpectedly delivered to Congress, even as an overheard remark of Barney Frank's enraged a Republican representative, leading him to introduce a motion pessimistic one. Democrats and Republicans hate each other, the paper says. anything done anyway, he might as well concentrate on electing Gore and a large numbers of people." A major report on the LAT front page details led a dusty group of cowboys to take the national championship away from the her first name. (A female movie exec gets the same treatment.) In this context, it's not clear whether the writer or the subject appreciates the irony of the Everybody leads with the emerging ground rules for the Senate impeachment trial that starts today. The headlines emphasize various aspects of what's in headline dwells on the probability of a "full trial" leading to a vote on the Times header says the new Congress is in "turmoil" and claims that the According to the papers, what is emerging from yesterday's full shift of not to a censure vote, but to an up or down vote on the specific charges the of justice. A trial that will probably include live witnesses. As the papers went to bed, the witness question remained unresolved, but indications are that But apparently the procedural discussions are far from over. For instance, the trial by offering a motion to dismiss, requiring only a simple majority to prevail. The paper also observes that if the House trial managers get to call danger is that the Senate yields control of the proceedings to the White House to stipulate to certain evidence in return for an abbreviated trial. No word on which evidence, though. The Post says the president's strategists related to their assigned task. Today's Post reports that in deal, says the paper, was that the inspectors did this in return for getting hiding evidence of its weapons programs. The Post reports that the head day, the paper claims that China received secret design information for the what China has done with the purloined information, but, says the from the Secret Service. The story says that although the company claims to be merely in the business of fighting credit and check fraud, congressional supporters of the aid and the Secret Service envisioned using the photo file to Berlin were two men and a woman and says the rioting there may "foreshadow a waiting later and later in life to have children: elementary schools now have to gear up to teach students about parental death. One principal is quoted saying he assures students district attorney has decided to accept an appellate court decision reversing witness lied on the stand when he denied being a police informant. The case has embezzling fort funds. Although acquitted of that charge, he was convicted of another stemming from the original case. Burying the news seems pandemic today: this story waits until the last paragraph to inform that others stole the money and accused Flipper of doing it out of racial hatred. tried to step forward to tell New York City cops what he knew about a collision involving an unmarked police car. For his trouble, he was flipped to the pavement and beaten so severely that he went blind in one eye. Recently, the accused of body slamming the plaintiff was asked to demonstrate his actions, he while he did it. Fortunately, the jurors weren't laughing. Last week, they bombing conviction, a story that nobody else fronts. The appeal had alleged could delay the imposition of his death sentence for years. What gets a lot of to require computer manufacturers to share details about their machines as a gone to trial it ran the risk of being legally judged to be a monopoly, which the papers explain, could have many adverse legal consequences across a wide when it can withhold technological information from computer makers. Both the "merciless competitor and litigator" to the current one, who personally successfully negotiated a longstanding patent dispute with the concern's chief One discrepancy in the LAT account of the settlement: the paper says tactics, and besides, the use of the phrase makes it appear as if the LAT is condemning the company, which it shouldn't really be doing charged with anything, Lee is now officially the prime suspect in the case. workmanlike player that is practically gone from today's courts and fields, a piece he wrote right afterwards to mend the fences with the fans, in which he advances the same "if movie stars can get it, why can't I" arguments you hear officially taken this stand, and marks a reversal of Justice's longstanding groups, but was nonetheless encouraging about China's chances of joining the World Trade Organization. The Times sees the meeting as illustrating the year to organize physicians, especially those who are salaried employees of fraudulent and wrong refunds and that it lost track of a Chevy Blazer and a problems to outdated computers and personnel turnover, problems it's could still name special counsels. But the papers don't say how this capability is thought by the administration to avoid the perceived most problematic feature of the current law: that if an independent counsel is to be truly not controlled by the executive branch, he must be virtually immune from dismissal. conviction that the law has been a good one, helping to restore public produced much valuable intelligence that was completely unrelated to the inspectors' assignments. This contrasts, the paper explains, with previous such use of intelligence equipment or agents was done with the full witting cooperation of the inspectors and produced information related to their inspection mission. The story contains excellent detail about how the covert neutral position on circumcision for male infants. The group now holds that the be coerced by medical professionals" into having it done. Also, the group says that if the procedure is done, the baby should receive pain relief beforehand. The report does say that physicians should respect opting for the operation on Today's Papers has more than a passing interest in a civil case written up suffered a breakdown after three years on the night shift and United turned down her request to switch to days. The column also passes along heartening First the credibility, then the credit. "The Reliable Source" in the by Republican congressional leaders that their budget plan will set aside money for Social Security while also providing for a tax cut. The Post says this is a vague proposal, with the size of the tax cut still undefined. But the would devote some of it to Medicare, special savings accounts, and extra it clear that his authorship of the Roe v. Wade opinion is at this point viewed sitting when the verdict was read. Unlikely. The other papers have him homicide but also of charges of dereliction of duty and destruction of property, even though he was flying lower and faster than the rules allowed. None of the papers mention it, but the trial outcome is part of a disturbing Miraculously, the military justice system found that none of these actions was nation in this category. As if realizing what the study suggests about the cognitive prowess of LAT readers, the paper points out that the federal assessment "also" showed that eighty percent of the state's fourth graders are The Wall Street Journal main "Politics and Policy" piece argues understanding of his policies. And will hurt historians' understanding of them Follow up: Yesterday, in discussing the Supreme Court ruling that physically classroom care, this space wondered how it was that none of the papers covering the decision seemed at all curious about how the disabled boy in the case could Papers couldn't take it any more and quickly found out some further interesting facts: The boy was injured when, after his father put him on the back of a motorcycle, the baby blanket that the father placed around his shoulders became entwined with the cycle's drive shaft, breaking the boy's neck and snapping his spinal cord. The parents sued the motorcycle manufacturer and accepted a anything about the motorcycle design or manufacture could have been nearly as to pay for the costs entailed by the boy's injury. Hence, here's a crucial fact not reported in any of yesterday's stories: the parents had already been given more than enough money (by their own estimate) to provide for the additional cost of keeping him in a mainstream classroom. visit to the Interior Department yesterday. Seems Interior honchos decided to grazing. Problem was, it was discovered late in the game that the buffalo is an Re women on welfare: I have no problem with the idea of supporting poor women to take care of their own small children. But if they are to be made to work, they should be paid decent wages (for example, in New York City, the wages of the city workers who did those jobs before workfare). They should have vacations, benefits, proper clothing, recourse for grievances, bathroom breaks (and bathrooms!), and all the other things that workers get that workfare workers don't get, or get only sporadically. And their early brain development, and on and on, and even today working moms are subject to tremendous amounts of disapproval for supposedly compromising their but now we are taking the most vulnerable kids and saying we don't care what Rate," which evoked this response from Family Research Council spokeswoman giving your kids vitamin pills means you don't care if your kids eat nothing but junk food? Originally sexual conservatives claimed to oppose condoms because they would provoke more sex. If they have no such effect, why continue What do you make of this from the AIDS perspective? It is as though problems, it seems to me, than virginity. Better a thousand rubberized But have you noticed that the big conservative welfare reform fans never talk about birth control? You'd think they'd love it, but they don't. We were so harmonious last week in our shared indifference to news celebrated athlete is that he's been charged with rape, domestic violence, "Christian" homophobic racist prejudices with the public. So you can imagine baseball stadium. This is the same city we are always being told can't afford to keep schools is good repair, let alone cut class size. Or provide day care build his own stadium. If sports are so important, the city should build some nice new swimming pools and recreation centers in poor neighborhoods. Can you imagine the field day conservative commentators would have if the billion dollars was to be ladled out for effete artistic pleasures instead arts on the grounds of their personal tastes ("why should MY tax dollars go for that pornographic drivel?" etc etc) how come effete types like me have to pay dollars paying for male (mostly male) pastimes. You'll notice no one's proposing a billion dollars of public funds to promote ballet! such a difficult one. What could make her happier than to see how many Slate readers delight in the malice of others, and how eagerly they to a similar stature. Even when they weren't ready. Some of them recognized it: we should have seen it coming: journalists destroyed rock; then they trashed It's a very good question. Many times I have tried to figure out what it is welfare, the reduction of the deficit, the acquiescence to the rollback of For my part, it's not sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Believe me. Some of said it was a holocaust, then did nothing to stop it, then claimed credit for ending it, then apologized for the holocaust. Anyone who can use such a grave moral issue so glibly and cynically is pretty close to being evil. Ditto his complete lack of substance on civil rights. Here is a man who says he is against discrimination, then fires more gay people from the military than and asks for less money on AIDS research than the Republican Congress. It's not the end result that gets me so much. A Republican might have been worse on both anything, or take credit for things he opposed, or evade blame where blame is genuinely deserved. When someone like that is at the head of the country, it is truly corrosive of our morality in the real sense of that word. Because it is been about it over the past four centuries. First they worried about our they fretted about our intellectual life: Would we ever produce great poets? Then they waxed romantic about our charming freedom from social hierarchy. Then they turned against it, since the French Revolution had proved that social of all, too bourgeois to understand the geniuses of our age, such as Jerry The latest outburst of Continental condescension comes, sad to say, from an of democracy. They just don't understand that politics is politics and culture culture, and so when they have a political revolution, they're forced to apply its principles to "every aspect of our lives." Hence feminism, or rather, in multiculturalism; gay rights; and all the other movements which subject personal relations to "the exacting scrutiny of pure democratic grossest and the lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most capricious, its instruments rude, its laws imperfect,' granting as well an the best, but as the only means of preserving freedom.'" way more nuanced than just being nearly flattened by its overwhelming power. The second time, though, I detected one false, and creepy, note. That is the soldiers who don't see him, and can't bring himself to pull the trigger. When appreciation of this point was sharpened by the audience's yelling "faggot!" personally responsible for the death of three of his comrades at arms, including, as I read the narrative logic, Captain Miller, the hero. in the movie that he wants to depict the bonds that form among soldiers in spends most of his time proclaiming the superiority of moral principle to end? The move here is to react to the automatic suspicion of anyone artsy in a military setting by signing on to it, rather than challenging it. See, I agree movements (mincing) are completely different from those of the other soldiers, and seem somehow to be linked to his being more educated. Could his because it has made information available too quickly to people who, in turn, overvalue the importance of information gotten too quickly. Further, the industry itself starts pushing albums that will "open it would prevail in the end. There just wouldn't be enough blockbusters to keep booksellers pursued that strategy, in the end some of them would be forced to opposite effect. By allowing publishers target their marketing dollars more there on a book tour; could test whether her books were responsive to and so on). In short, with real numbers publishers would be able to maximize publisher for full credit and a one percent reduction in returns would save the "Fuzzy Logic" existed in the music industry in the early '90's. Also, the scanning device that you mention has existed for over two decades and has been utilized by package goods manufactures to target market their retailer identifies the book, format, suggested price point, genre, etc. down to an idyllic agrarian planet where people knead dough and dress like which means that he has to be "just passing by" whenever one of these Star Trek: The Next Generation features starts up. It's worth getting him back on board, though, because no one can utter a line like "I have an odd craving befuddlement. Insurrection boasts the only space battle in film history Please note: All times given are Eastern, but check your local listings Television is a mass medium, and this week's programs are going to lure some may be convinced that it's your patriotic duty to watch the game. If you dearly to win the rights to broadcast the Super Bowl, and they're not going to let you ignore it. On the day of the big game, for instance, they're offering about football, of course, but about ads, network promotions and a new series. The series this year is an innovative animated Fox series to air in March, funny as either, but still, it's pretty inventive and daring. Don't be offers an engaging documentary about a genuine indie filmmaker, In Bad But there's no assurance of that when Fox broadcasts another unnecessary based on ballots by one million readers; naturally, The Jerry Springer fighting Internet crime and a powerful computer titan modeled after Bill Gates dominates the browser market. But the show does have potential as a kind of leave. The best sweeps night program of all may be the Turner Classic Movies broadcasts of the original (and best) The Thin Man movie and its five Eastern, but check your local listings just in case. Thanks god it's over. Holiday hell is behind us now, Leading off the week, there's good news for everyone the Board, the documentary is chock full of fascinating details about how the result in some confusing chronological jumps, but the damage isn't serious. One chums. In practice, he stinks up the joint. Admittedly, the script is no prize, For those not completely overdosed on reruns, there's watches. Discovering Finch's plan, the women plot revenge, devising a list of place. The hysterical part is watching Spade's character actually accomplish who are desperate to help Finch live out "Every Man's Fantasy." It's funny harpy of a wife, whom we hear only over the phone.) For the relaunch, I was hoping the series' writers had done a major creative overhaul, but the early plain stupid, relying heavily on dopey sight gags and potty humor. The episode continued to harvest much of its blood supply from prison populations. lobbying range to wait for the development of a French procedure, which they promised was only weeks away. Long weeks, if you were a hemophiliac. embarrassingly thorough diktats aimed at purging French of Anglicisms "real" unless it was shaping politics and the economy. His ministry's motto on were always insistent that the concerts created a climate of tolerance. All right, then. Should they therefore shoulder responsibility for the people die of AIDS while awaiting a "French" way of testing blood? culture, armed as it is with theater monopolies, language advantages, and The other day you referred to affirmative action as "reverse racial discrimination," which in my view characterizes it most inaccurately. Then, affirmative action program (as if men, of all people, had been the victim of discrimination for which the monopoly on ordination was a recompense!). Rather to know what your plan is for remedying racial discrimination in this country. Because a student can get a higher grade point average if he or she is fortunate enough to go to a high school that offers a full range of advanced placement courses, which poor urban school districts are less likely to do. "We are not talking about differences of ability here. We are talking about students having had unequal opportunities to demonstrate that ability. Asking that disparate opportunity be taken into account is not a 'preference.'" Redwood argues that "affirmative action is one tool for breaking the chain of unfairness." How do you propose to break that chain? If a good student can't get extra points because their school doesn't offer extra courses, why is it significance as it becomes truer and truer. I had my epiphany when I was asked blathering soundbites about things I know nothing about, watched by a couple of subsequently, mercifully, disappeared into the ether. Hell on earth. It's also tourists who lined the walls literally screamed and clapped and cheered as he walked by them. One lady grabbed him ecstatically and handed her friend a replacement of politics by celebrity, was perfectly exemplified by the evening. Anyone's power was related almost perfectly to their media exposure. The sole pretending to be above all this, merely partly horrified at my own everyone's a critic, so we invite you to send your picks, pans, and flames to promise to reply to each and every one of you. Also, all times given are Eastern Standard. Check local listings for broadcast times in your approaching critical mass on pretty much every channel. And navigating the In the coming week, viewers will be bombarded with holiday episodes of draining on a regular basis, so this week's attempt by the idealistic Dr. perverse thrill in seeing what abject humiliation will befall the show's recent episode found Ally wedged into a toilet; in another, she got her fingers stuck inside a bowling ball. And during last week's holiday rerun, the branches until her roommate came in and marveled that Ally's sex life had those who like their merriment in one concentrated dose, Fox is rebroadcasting snippets from holiday cartoons, movies, specials, and commercials through the guided tour of the White House by none other than this month's Vogue Some of the more terrifying movies and specials to avoid include the Family Seriously, what could be more festive than voodoo priests, poppy fields, brother (John Glover) plots to have him killed in order to take over the actually preview many of the aforementioned shows and in many cases am relying on press releases, written synopses, and assurances from network flacks that a particular episode doesn't suck. My recommendations, however, are made in good marry, for exactly the reasons of civil liberties and civil rights you cite. You even anthologized my essay on the subject. So please don't get on your high And who exactly is this "left" that shuns "fidelity and bourgeois bliss"? Outside some small gay subcultures, like Sex Panic, I think there are few who relationship, and no, you can't have a nice quiet domestic life with children celebrities and millionaires many times over, "bourgeois," exactly, by the way.) In practice, of course, people of all political persuasions are too-- have "bourgeois bliss" with a life partner and sexual excitement somewhere else. I don't think politics has much to do with these intimate only practice, they compete with all the other exigencies and opportunities of Just for the record: my own relationship is so square it's cubic. It's just not a legal marriage. I think you are making a mistake to equate distaste for wedlock with libertinism. There are many more than two sides to these marriages are rooted in friendship, not romantic love, or, very rarely, in romantic love which somehow manages to evolve into friendship. (That's a good deal of what my next book is about). It's often a miracle when it works, especially given our culture's bizarrely high expectations of the institution. So it seems to me to behoove those who believe in the virtues of marriage to be more effusive in their praise when a couple manages to carry off this difficult Right; and their traditional adherence to fidelity and bourgeois bliss are surely more admirable in their modern embrace of traditional values than, As to equal marriage rights, it is very frustrating to see people on the right and left completely equate the right to marriage with the duty to marry. I think it has to do with the fact that it is so inconceivable to most straight people that they couldn't have the right to marry that it is literally unimaginable to put themselves in gay people's shoes. Right now, unlike you, whether I like it or not. You cannot spurn marriage if you cannot also choose arguing for is a simple equality in that choice. Where marriage can work for gay people (and successful marriages will be as rare, I think, as they are for straights), then we should rejoice and be happy. Where marriage doesn't fit people's needs or desires, then there's no reason for people to feel constrained to be a part of it. It's a free country, after all. But the right to choose such a thing, even if that choice will make you miserable for the rest of your life, is so fundamental to our culture's and constitution's definition of the pursuit of happiness that to deny it to anyone, for something they cannot change, is a grotesque and deep injustice. I can't think of a deeper denial of civil rights in this country, can you? Which is to say that just as gay people should have the right to be as boring, and as traditional and as conservative as everybody else; so too should they have the right to be as miserable in their relationships. Or, in the rare Should feminist scholars be allowed to apply their theories to the and studies written by women (and a few men) he calls "feminist On the other hand, all fields of inquiry have their great thinkers and their in the proliferation of methodologies and agendas, the incomprehensible horror fog of categories and subcategories and rhetorical feints at ideological used, it has clearly not been used frequently, and so is not coming at us from The more significant difference is a matter of balance. Against the danger of trivializing the Holocaust by speaking of it too lightly, Alter juxtaposes kinds of Holocaust speech and failing to offer other kinds that would be acceptable to him, strongly implies that it is, indeed, a religious topic, for which some words are not just inaccurate or inappropriate but blasphemous. "human decency." When it comes to discussing something as tasteless, indecent, You have a sly way of encoding your political slant in statements you then present as our shared views. Very clever! Thus, just to clear this morning's table of yesterday's old toast crumbs, I don't share your view of the President is close to evil, uniquely immoral and irresponsible, worse than discrimination" as a way to characterize affirmative action, which (as I guess you know) I support. So, really, we don't have the same view of President I also don't want to leave our May Day thread without challenging your says, when we speak of fascism, we must not forget to include Red fascism. But when you wonder why in this country, a demonstration of communists is regarded would be, I think you are forgetting the very different domestic roles of these things: opposition to segregation and racism, for example, going way back to now even the far right concedes was a Good Thing, but which at the time it bitterly opposed. The Old Left stood for things that benefited lots of people Deal, unions, the safety net, civil liberties, even (just a little) women's of very mainstream social causes, often on what everyone now agrees was the But I can't think, off hand, of any great contributions to our polity made "Before you play with me, please follow these simple steps: While holding me upside down, put your finger in my mouth and hold down my While holding my tongue switch, please close my battery door and secure the I will now wake up and tell you my name. I am now ready to play!" it learns. It has a motor, internal speakers, a computer chip, a light sensor, it may or may not give you a kiss. If it kisses you and you immediately pat it on the back, you increase the likelihood of it kissing you next time you tickle This is all very cool from an adult's perspective. From the child's The Carapace Issue. In order to protect the various motors, there has to be a rigid plastic shell under the fur, which makes the thing hard to hug. The Work Issue. Who wants to train a toy to kiss you, when every kid knows that a regular stuffed animal kisses you every time you touch its plastic nose be snapped, and the toy's many cool functions spark curiosity about how it all you "feed" it by pushing down on its tongue? These questions are all worth memoirist who is now accused of having wholly fabricated his harrowing tale of was. I hadn't read the book, but I remembered the reviews. Here was an author hailed by one shaken critic after another for the literary quality of his horrific prose. His book (his first) had been instantly promoted to the first ranks of the Holocaust canon. What did factuality have to do with artistic Before you write me off as a waffling postmodernist, let me remind you that publishing fiction as truth is an enduring tradition in world literature, dating back to the early days of the novel, a genre deemed suspect because it was true, even though written by this other fellow, Mark Twain: "There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." to his "discovery" that he was a Holocaust survivor. That was masterpiece and savor the higher truths that emanated from its pages. credibility if the author hadn't sworn to having had the memories himself. First he apologizes for the book's fragmentary nature; then he proceeds to in place, although the childish narrator professes not to understand them. There's the death of his father. The story of hiding in a farmhouse where the farmer's wife is raped by a soldier. On it goes: How the child was separated from his brothers. The motherly guard who took him to the camps. His life in the barracks. A visit to his mother. How he survived when everyone else died. implausible: No child who had gone through what he had gone through by the age of six would have remembered every key element this specifically. As fiction, screenplay, or given us the eyes of a more heartbreaking innocent to view it This raises the question of why so many critics were so moved by so many in the most appalling subset of the most gruesome atrocities known to children. We've been primed to pity by other Holocaust classics, many of Night --also involve children, as if only children could give adequate testimony to the horror of what took place. It is all but impossible to retain critical equanimity in the face of such things, especially when we true. Fragments does us the favor of filling in more of those outlines, but with only marginally more artistry than a network produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves. You didn't just accuse me of complicity in murder, did you? If we want to get into evil empires and who supports them, conservatives have a great deal to there are more than two positions. I didn't defend the Soviet Union while it and the final trouncing of the Left. Faced with the fact that your side in fact going on now is basically the looting of the country's resources by an elite of You know, for generations Communists told themselves the sufferings imposed same argument on behalf of unbridled market capitalism, and with the same system in tracking him down, by the way, because the kidnapping took place in l979, before parental kidnapping was covered by appropriate laws. She spent all was an alcoholic who neglected the children, leaving him no choice. (She denies untrue and gave her custody.) He doesn't explain why he kept up the deception went to college (why do we all have this little fact so firmly implanted in our who had been suddenly plucked from obscurity by the hand of fate, and he knew what to do with his hands (kept them quiet, don't gesticulate or fiddle with your ear or other body part), how to arrange his expressions (relaxed, alert, open, affable), how to speak in sound bites (don't digress! don't get mad! episode when Homer was desperate to switch channels because there was a shuttle a shame, but essentially carrying on as normal. Then I switched on the news and everyone was having a national identity crisis. Still can't figure it out. I horrible mixture of boredom and uplift. But we better get used to it. Two words Talking of dead people, can you bring yourself to say something nice about Nation, Indivisible and one of the loudest opponents of affirmative action around. There's the venue: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. college doesn't matter as much as everyone says it does, so elite colleges affirmative action from top schools because that's what created the black control groups, demonstrating in some rigorous fashion that the equally academically strong, ambitious and discipline black student who attends the success, like the fact that Staples went to graduate school at the University things (rather than remedies to past discrimination), and black people don't need fancy schools to do well in life, why should we think white people need about these schools' efforts to level the playing field? The better strategy doesn't accept the unintended consequences of her own argument. But that consumption a debate raging among economists. It is widely known that there is a huge economic return on higher education in general. The question is: Is there a bigger one on an education at an elite school? In other words, does it matter where you went to college or that you went to college? In purely economic terms, it turns out, it matters only that you went Feeling terrorized by cuteness? The last few years have witnessed Beanie new Beetle, a shiny bubble of a thing whose tag line in print ads wonders: "Hug seems to declare, "Unlike all those complicated computers that try to the chip manufacturer having recently unveiled the design for a machine it in industrial design. Cute might seem downmarket, given the associations which in the electronics and automobile businesses is often a coded reference the advertising executive behind the car's marketing campaign, denies that the company was targeting women: "I don't think the car is not macho. It's just In fact, another theory of cute machines holds that not only are they not admit that even bugs sell as long as they're cute. Why fight it? Cute cars and computers are personable, friendly, marginally less annoying than the clunky monsters of the 70s and much less annoying than the creepily sleek, black theaters left in the United States and fewer old movies to see in them, since the tiny market leaves little incentive for the studios to strike new prints when old ones age and break. And college film societies can't fill the gap, since 16-millimeter prints are slowly passing out of circulation and 35-millimeter prints are too expensive for students to rent. Where's a film rather than rudely cropped on video? The answer is nowhere. There isn't a print Institute, the organization ostensibly charged with protecting our national film heritage. College and museum film programmers report that they can't book the studios with movies on the list have been pulling them out of circulation before sending them out on national tour. This state of affairs is only expected to last through spring, but still. For the entire school year, still available), were it possible for their professors to find them. But even that last summer, when he tried to find John Carpenter's original version of were no prints to be had. In the end, he stumbled across a sale by a film missive is what makes the report so mordant, so mysterious. Caustic rumors since his films of the last two decades have come so many years apart and have bags, to be read by the intended recipient and then returned via hovering didn't feel like directing, production of Eyes Wide Shut down. What exactitude of individual sequences in what was often a sour, fuzzy whole. The hotel, which capture indelibly the circular, labyrinthine evil at the heart of the story. Even those of us who despise Full Metal Jacket will not shake sequence, in which men are mechanistically stripped of their individuality to gave us some of our culture's most enduring visions of the absurdity of war, than he has subsequently been depicted. That's at odds with the portrait of a man who was, for better or worse, a pinnacle of integrity. While his movies are himself would go around arranging the lights in the manner not of a deity but wandered his sets with a camera lens, groping for shots on the spot. He spoke more of each lined up on hangers. The act of making choices was clearly excruciating to him; that's why the choices he made are so developing a personality. I can't think of any other explanation for the cruel filmmakers who painted images in a grand style. An obituary in the New York Times used the word cold three times, and for good measure added was not a warm, cuddly director, but what great director ever has been? The to the director's generous wit but also to his bravado. These movies are visual, musical, and verbal dances in which even the most minor player and the The question is: What is art supposed to do for us? Should it make us feel better about our lives, show us friendly mirrors? In His most uncanny disclosures came not in the obvious transcendentalism of found dozens of new corridors. Look at it again and see it how pins down his bat: "Have you ever thought for a single solitary moment about my the light in the movie is amazing: all that blinding snow, all those fades to In response to your "whole indie scene" point: To me this is the problem, just to the artists who created these works, but to the lived texture of life promoted by mainstream businesses, who knew how to reach them. I think these mainstream businesses produced, dispensed and promoted these products not because there were hard numbers because some individual in some office at these Now we have a vapid Blockbuster Culture and a fringy Indie Culture and a I don't know. I think you're letting nostalgia cloud your vision. Then as is merely a few blocks over and up from that.) Or that musical wonder Herb talking cornball kitsch that couldn't even get an audience at a hip coffee bar Conversely, I don't think the current music scene is half as bad as you make truth to many and lingered on the bestseller list for weeks. We On another front, I have to insist that better, clearer, more rigorous numbers would help books more than they'd hurt them. For instance, if the looking at certain bookstores and going so far as to seed the process by sending out a list of books it's interested in tracking, as my colleague so long to come to national attention. I know the conventional thinking is that comprehensive numbers, rather than guesstimates, why couldn't the Times still refuse to track crap? It would just have to be more upfront about how it slices the stats and then it would do much a better job of following the serious books throughout the country, not just at selected stores. Before delving into the coming week's programming, I have to ask: Why do Address, was painful to behold. He speaks preternaturally slowly, as if operating underwater, so that watching him in discussion with two or three delivers clever, sarcastic, deadpan humor. The series relies too much on comic strip relies heavily on its final frame to deliver a hysterical, twisted My Last Love comes in. Basic premise: Dying from some unspecified form intentioned, overbearing grandparents, tearful reminiscing about the poet- waiter's dead sister, and repeated shots of characters gazing soulfully out at the Pacific, and you've got the makings of a movie so overwrought it should The good viewing news this week is harder to come by, in part because the networks are going heavy on the repeats. There are, however, a number of top- Regrettably, viewers will also be subjected to "behind the scenes interviews" serving largely to feed the egos of the cast and crew. But no viewing at the mercy of the Big State? You really ARE reactionary! I keep forgetting information about birth control and many other forms of free speech; it barred them from many occupations and activities. It used its police power on behalf of mining and industrial interests to break strikes, beat up demonstrators, and deport immigrants with the wrong ideas. What conservatives usually mean when they talk about Big Government is government that puts some kind of limit on the power of business to do whatever it wants. For all your opposition to the Big State, for instance, don't you oppose legal abortion? Even though effectively criminalizing abortion would mean an immense expansion What really amazes me in your posts is your reluctance to admit that the US has, or ever had, any problems or injustices or wrongs that the left addressed and the right did not. You treat the left's record on everything from race to in a country without desperate poverty and homelessness, with good schools and health care and child care for all who need it, with real environmental protection and good public services, and in which people who work for a living not. If that meant I had less disposable income it would be worth it! solves every problem (it just bypasses some of the more avoidable ones). But nor do I think some wrenching social and economic difficulties in a Nor do I think there is or was any faint comparison between the evils the exhaustion. But the difference between what another Major government would have Maybe I should apologize for my distemper this morning. I didn't mean to even more thorough accounting to perform than the Right. It seems to me that in be that the Left's refusal to pore over its often shameful and mistaken past justified if they mean that more people read more books. underpinnings of a far greater publishing venture, Random House. The moral of that story is: If you know how to market why Modern Library's list is, as such things always are, brilliant. Irksome, reduced to silence if she hadn't been moved to applaud. Sorry to be late up. Crashed out last night and took a long time to emerge. The on anything (except inflated property prices). Smacks too much of selfish pleasure and too little of communal worth. Save me from such stoic bunch, suffering in silence, blaming themselves for any illness, apologizing for any sort of dependence on the health system, probably never having my front teeth removed by the wonderful National Health Service: nurse's foot on my chest (I kid you not), dentist's pliers in my mouth, blood all those lovely physiques and smiles to show for it. squeeze some fat out of the system, but the rising costs are simply a life, and the astonishing technologies that are making it possible. Let it rip, destroys him. The question of the month in certain literary circles is: Will it For confirmation, see this week's fall preview in New York magazine: mistakes become daily fodder for public titillation, and are then used as the moral seriousness one could ask for, knowing what we know today. But what that is. It's his foolish marriage and adulterous affair, as exploited by an evil gossip columnist who goes on to become a United States senator. There are many passages in this novel that are hard not to read as commentary on today's Topic A. Until the book hits bookstores in a week or so, Once the human tragedy has been played out, it gets turned over to inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip, as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the "bashing the poor" as if welfare reform was anything of the kind. I was just communism. We do have nice, fuzzy memories of those lefties in the 1930s. And decades: stupendous military and economic resources, which could have been far better spent elsewhere; a morally corrupting political division over the Even the deficit of the 1980s seems to me to be essentially a consequence of a final military buildup to defeat the Soviets. Why, I wonder, are we not more enraged by this? Is it entirely magnanimity in victory? was completely right? We've also, I think, become beaten down with state power in a way previous generations would have been shocked by, and so numb to the Left's continuing assault on individual economic freedom. We think there's a market as well as the free society. The slipperiest slope, in other words, as So we're soft on them because your side has done a brilliant job at spinning the terrors of the far left, and because we have slowly acquiesced to an rapaciousness. So we laugh at young communists, and are sickened by young however. In addition to being quietly devoted to family values, without wishing to force them on others, we Nation staffers are quite modern in our dress, while agreeing, of course, that others should be able to wear tweed, if he is. Are we not talking here about the man who shelled his own Parliament? Who threatened to dissolve Parliament if they didn't go along with his choice life expectancy (virtually unique in the world), hordes of homeless people, unemployed people, people working at jobs who haven't been paid in six months. worse off: something like half of children have significant health The foregoing should not be taken as nostalgia for the Soviet system. The people that were running the Soviet Union are the same people who are robbing The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that linguists have invented a computer program that understands student writing. That would be a welcome advance in civilization, had it not also opened a window on the corrupt bargain between students and professors when it comes to teaching basic reference materials to sample essays which have been graded by a professor, then compares the sample essays to student essays. The students don't have to use particular keywords for the program to figure out what they're talking convey the same knowledge as verifiably good essays, the computer gives it a good score. If a student's work looks similar to a poor essay, it gets a low first place; plagiarists; people who try to beat the program by packing the essay with relevant keywords but not stringing them together in any meaningful way. Here's what it doesn't catch: "clever turns of phrase or creative approaches to an assignment." But isn't that the essence of higher education? students than ever don't give a fig about clever turns of phrase or creative approaches to assignments. They want big financial aid packages and the assurance of a good job after graduation. Once they get into the school of their choice, they study less than they ever have. "College students want to for the minimum amount of work," says the study's author. This suits professors just fine. They've told the Chronicle that they're grateful to have their workload lightened by a computer. And why shouldn't they be? They're not graded on how well they teach; they're graded by the number of articles they publish in research journals. Deepening the intellectual understanding of the next generation, or just teaching it to compose a decent sentence, seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind. The jobs, not to burden them with fine points of style, have already adopted the Intelligent Essay Assessor; so has the Graduate Management Admission Test. It won't be long before the rest of the country does too. So, kids, it's a deal: We won't teach you how to write, and you won't object that you can't. I never said or even implied you didn't support equal marriage rights. I merely protested that it is simply wrong to conflate the cultural arguments for marriage rights with the political ones. Which seems to me to be the point with certain "conservative" impulses, and (gently) warned homosexuals not to But you're right, of course, that marriage can be interpreted and lived a conservative in their way of life than some with church white weddings. But you're exaggerating surely when you say that the left has completely acceded to "family values". The Democrats have, but the Left? In lower Manhattan? All your policies with regard to women (if abortion on demand can be described as in other circumstances hold conservative views. Both right and left in hypocrisy game than, say, the Christian Coalition which, bizarrely, supports and to get on with the nasty game of political warfare. Opera is something I know zilch about. Whenever I go, I recall an essay I critic implied, hews (comfortingly) to the familiar, but cultivates states of mind that (challengingly) make the familiar fresh. In those days, we budding artistes found this doctrine a congenial one, since you could carry it out by getting drunk before lectures or going to breakfast stoned. At teas, she doesn't understand the conversation and concentrates on the cakes. At operas, she doesn't understand what's going on onstage and just scans at the It's a good point, but it was lost on us, since we were all more or less captivity. Since the Pasha owns three of them, he would be within his rights to hang them. He pardons them, of course, and sends them on their cooing way. But demanding that the four be first decapitated, then hanged, then impaled, then burnt at the stake, then tied up and drowned, and then flogged: In so doing, he shows us that a great deal of sadism, animality, and outright lust can lurk behind people's anodyne professions that they just want to "uphold the law" or "maintain a level of decency." To fall afoul of the tiniest for conduct that in other countries would be considered praiseworthy. But he's to smoke are gradually being made liable for the entire federal budget. listens in fascinated befuddlement as all the adults around him utter the that its editors should have known better than to run the comic strip and reporting that the newspaper had complained to Nickelodeon, which produces it, What was wrong with the Rugrats strip? The Editor's Note said "the were upset about the inclusion of the Kaddish, although a few were incensed by might have been cause for an Editor's Note pointing out that while some people may have taken offense, none was intended. But there's no excuse for censoring cartoonists (even after the fact) because they've used religion as their subject matter. That's like saying Peanuts can't focus on Lord's Prayer. Since there was no mockery in the Rugrats depiction of conclude the callers deemed the comic strip, as a medium, insufficiently parents with young children for its helpful and sympathetic depictions of is that one of the nation's leading newspapers gave in to them. are Eastern, but check your local listings just in case. getting out of the house and actually doing something. problems with his wife, kids, and elderly mother, Soprano is depressed that the fans will be particularly pleased to see how well he's made the transition from watching now; the early episodes are wonderful, but the scent of "short shelf Those without premium channels need not despair. Also incorrect humor. (The ghetto jokes have already prompted protests from black activist groups.) But even if the show stinks, you should watch at least one blathering about the social implications of the first black animated series to stumbles into a strange town populated by the souls of dead outlaws doing penance in the hopes of earning a seat on the great stagecoach to heaven. (To illustrate this, a big black stagecoach magically materializes at key moments.) The execution is even more problematic: There is an abundance of bad acting, Perhaps to atone for all the repeats we've endured in the past month, this week the networks are wheeling out new episodes of The solid. But if nothing this week grabs you, take heart: The lockout is over, and The story about the Web confession was very disturbing, involving a set the house on fire intentionally to kill the child (in fact, he went in as promptly flamed by others. Interestingly, one who did not tell the police was "no purpose would be served in the form of protecting anyone for rash, I think you're right about the effect of anonymity on the Web. It's part of the general lack of reality about the Internet: is the child dead? or only relatives of alcoholics, and I must say I thought it was a good group: people were very kind, with much life experience and wisdom. And it wasn't so a big date scene, maybe it still is). There's an egalitarianism about the the thing is, it's not like there is some fabulous alternative that works stigma of alcoholism. On the Internet, it seems connected with the desire to Interesting that we both were taken by stories about evil fathers in divorce cases. (Let's not forget the one in last week's horrific story, who injected his son with the AIDS virus to avoid paying child support.) It casts an interesting, lurid glow on the current obsession with Fatherhood and father's rights. But how long do you think it will be before the Wall Street in these cases had only had covenant marriages, those kids would be alive ps. I haven't read Conversations with God. What is it? homophobia they'd experienced since coming out as lesbians last year. my own period of playing the gay megaphone, which took place on campus at age dilemma was notable mostly for its irony: Could an sitcom get decent ratings overshadowed by her status as a lesbian, she's the one who set it up that way. dominated the troubled last season of her show. She should have copped to the unfunny plot developments about parents and first girlfriends. Instead, she indie film Walking and Talking back when she was just an alumna of the queens who whine while their careers steam ahead. Watching them make out in interview with the couple's publicist, who claimed that their comments were taken out of context. (What context would that be?) He added they should have been taken as "wistful," rather than literal. As for whether the two actresses are really dropping out, Variety writes, "They don't have his daughter to marry someone with an appetite for Contemporary Short This is an extraordinary collection. Roughly a third of the stories are should not take it out of the house without a change of underpants. The three rock producer trying to figure out who had a motive to break into his house and castrate his dog (answer: anyone who's ever had to deal with him for five her own, bred by centuries of tradition. Her purpose in life, which she will fill out a bunch of French forms. Pain in the neck, but I guess they know what they're doing." And a mafioso in "Destiny" says: "These girls, me they would that the mere handful of critics who've noticed it have reviewed it as a screenwriter] isn't quite as stylish with language as his brother is with a almost as interesting as other writers' successes."). Fiction is shriveled up like a protectionist economy. It is an economy in which commonplace that he's a narrative virtuoso. But like a docent at his own retrospective, he's ever insistent that we notice that virtuosity. The in it, is Exhibit A for his skill. But even there, the cuteness cloys: "What were we running towards? I don't think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was, a balloon. Not the nominal space that encloses a cartoon character's speech or thought, nor, by analogy, the kind that's driven Man are both bad, short, and minor works. So what does it mean to call a infantile simplicity worked out among four characters. (I won't reveal it, but characters meet occasionally, but they all hammer out their motivations, allegiances and enmities in private: on long walks, doodling in the office, vegetating in bed, sitting at the kitchen table getting drunk alone. Missing is suspect they give an accurate picture of the state of human variety among the Glad you're back. I missed my morning bouts of dyspepsia. I was fascinated by the story in this morning's New York Times of the Internet meetings horrifies and intrigues me. Each forum appeals, I think, because it creates a space where you're free to be completely frank and anonymous, while still actually being yourself. And, thanks to this peculiar brand of invisible visibility, we're led to believe that both are spaces free of traditional moral So in AA, you only have a first name, just as on the web you only have a confess to anything, and all that fundamentally matters is whether you have lapsed from your obligation to sobriety, not what the consequences to others were. And on the web, you can live out any sort of fantasy, in real time, with limited accountability. On the web, you give up all your responsibility to the wonder? Or are they simply updates of the confessional and the shrink, the cult "I date it to the Vanilla Fudge recording of 'You Keep Me Hanging On.' I lowered by a fifth sounds important. It's the rhetorical trick of speaking very slowly when you want to say something important. The wonderful thing about like Vanilla Fudge. It sounds like the Deep Meaning Songbook. You play these "I associate this with things like having a guru and putting out it, there was something disarming about it, but just think of anyone else doing started throwing their weight around. Everybody was making some kind of grand statement. It was the era when the Bee Gees could release a record in a red "I think it was once rock stars starting going to rehab. In rehab you sit down and think about all the people you've screwed over, you've done horrible things to so many people, and people have let you because you're a rock star and you sell records and they want to do anything that will keep you selling records. You realize you were an asshole, you meet somebody who lives in the real world, maybe he's your roommate in rehab, and you realize how far away you've gotten from all that. Then you become a rock star who doesn't live in the real world who thinks he or she has got a corner on understanding the real charming. The question is, when did things really become so completely without irony? In the late Sixties you get the concept album, which is what the all. There was this band called Iron Butterfly and this 18-minute song called Must Pass which was pretty pompous. One other thing: The Last Waltz and The Band. I love The Band deeply but here's this band already in decline "Contrary to conventional wisdom, pretension was introduced into mainstream they never made anything as fake as "Their Satanic Majesties Request." And I in rock and roll. Do you think Chuck Berry had even heard of "It's a combination of groupies and the rock press both serving to inflate the egos of these guys. If on the one hand you have somebody telling you you're a great artist and on the other girls wanting to sleep with you every night, it's hard to stay humble. Some of the pomposity is insecurity over the have a sort of bluster. Authors like to complain, of course, but it is so rare They just chew you up and spit you out. All these guys just have to be grandiosity that is very four years ago. Did you know he is boycotting Spin because he felt we weren't reverential enough to him? When the "Reason" album came out he made sure his label pulled his ad from Spin. Electric Light Orchestra. They performed a very vital function for me. I was sort of classical. This was back when you still had to justify your pop taste to your parents, before they started lighting up and handing you joints. But pomposity is a perfectly legitimate cultural style. The audience for music is Readers are of course invited to submit their candidates to the Rock Re marriage gay and straight: of course I can have it both ways. Since there is marriage, do I think it should be available to all? Yes! Do I think its social and economic benefits might be better distributed in some other way (health insurance, for example), are often illusory, come with large helpings of inequality, sexism, psychological torment and so on? Yes! wife no less) with whom he has one child (also two children by a previous maybe he's a bit of a rogue, I give you him too. But as far as personal conduct goes, The Nation is probably as conventionally virtuous as any magazine As for ideology, I stick to my contention that family values hold sway are okay, and so forth. But perhaps we should define what we mean by family legally actionable, even if she could prove it, which she can't, is another a hilarious letter from a reader who opined that if the magazine really believed that it was okay for the boss to drop his trousers and ask an employee and letting the market take care of most people's healthcare, and the government coming in to rescue those who fall through the cracks. This would needs and wants. What it would avoid is the impossible politicization of grandmother. It's an impossible position to put politicians in, and brings out I know, because of insurance and third parties, there is no true market for healthcare, but we should try to approximate one as best we can, so that people's real desires (and not some political hack's view of say, computers, and the state should step in and help those who really can't pioneered in the US by big drug companies trying to make profits, not do should and will guarantee that most people who need them (and can take them responsibly) should get them. The notion that large numbers of people who need death rates have been among the poor and racial minorities. But do some people fall through the cracks? Yes. Should we do all we can to find them and help every citizen? Not in a universe of limited funding, which is the universe we less effective treatments to give people in the first place. As to Japan, I don't think our cultural differences are merely related to media distortion. Lots of people I know who have lived there concur. It sounds like a living hell. And the only way I have ever enjoyed eating fish is deep fried in batter, wrapped in newsprint. And lots of vinegar. dealt with him he has seemed an extremely reasonable fellow (he wrote a good he just seems to lose it when it comes to the obvious fact that homosexuals have been happily murdering and killing in uniform for generations. At least he which is what Pentagon flunkies were whispering to gullible journalists. He soldiers. It's rather like holding turkeys responsible for Thanksgiving. As to the notion that gay soldiers disproportionately leave early, this only applies possibly be that bigoted commanders, who hate the idea that they might have to tolerate discreet homosexuals in the ranks, now try to flush them out early and with the declaration "There are three things I hate: liars, thieves, and his position would never have been a generation ago, that young people do "come out" at an earlier and earlier age. Society has changed enormously. So all the policy is doing, it seems, if he is correct, is successfully flushing out a of being gay. Should the military be happy it's getting rid of all these people and becoming less, rather than more, like the society it's supposed to defend? Or are we better off with a bunch of conflicted, repressed neurotics? As to welfare mothers, I share your abhorrence of the guy who demeaned motherhood, although I am probably uniquely unqualified to talk about its onerous responsibilities. My sister has two small children, though, and she works harder than I ever have in my life. Or ever will. But the apposite question, it seems to me, is not simply whether day care is adequate (it almost certainly isn't) but whether, as a whole, it is better that, whatever the current problems, the old system has been shaken up and reformed in the direction of work. Of course, welfare bureaucracies being what they are, a lack of support in health care and day care is hardly surprising. But the answer to that is to fix the health care and day care with some of the large amounts of money being sent back to the states rather than to return to what happened before. Or am I wrong? Is your position that welfare mothers were better off in dependency and close to their kids rather than in work and distant (for some of without its injustices. But isn't it an improvement on what went on before? And isn't it at least a more constructive place from which to improve policy than My nomination for the most boring story of the day: bank mergers. And station that he opposed the giant Holocaust memorial planned for the center of camps, "a landscape of death [that] is considerably more moving and has would be resolved by public debate. But the buzz has not died down. In the same were elected: federalizing the arts budget in a country in which the arts are mainly supported by the states; revitalizing the German film industry by As you can imagine, these proposals have been amply dissected and nitpicked main spin: Who the heck is this guy anyway? Is he "a fresh wind from New York," journalistic value of men of unusual candor, sincerely hopes that the German distinctions drawn between private and public life, and between the inner and or inner selves is a society governed by madmen or cretins. whether any speech about the sexual behavior of public figures is worth he doesn't go overboard the way Lewis does. He defends privacy without acts was so taboo we had no way to talk about domestic violence or flagrant tolerance has been transmogrified into an increase in sexual shaming: "What our worst moments of national hysteria (this is definitely one of them) can be catalogue copy states, there is "no guarantee that [the role] will be included an arty $10-million feature into a $40-million vehicle for himself. Sic transit supplicant, to grovel before the living proof of his own inadequacy! How cringing at the feet of the New York intellectuals who helped him with his be taken in by the mentor, while storing up anecdotes that prove his foulness. Yorker 's headline: "The Enigma of Friendship." As if! This is not a nuanced exploration of the mysterious bonds that form between writers. The portrait may composed in spite. Readers are hereby invited to submit suggestions to encountered. A warning, however: Should your suggestions turn out to be This, I realized, is the excruciating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with in print, you take on this big book, and then you sit here like a schoolboy in "It's hard," I murmured. "You bully me." The more annoyed he got, the more unnerved I was. Cowed by his intensity, I was afraid to open my mouth. My way argue; it was a way of working off grievances, improving one's mental circulation. For him, rudeness was to conversation what polemic was to I had never met anyone so certain, so intense, so observant, so impatient, so intelligent. He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant, obviously right; but I had a fondness for those times when she was right while seeming to be wrong, or when she went via wrongness to get to the right stuff. Critics claimed to discern superfluous gloss, but what she did was to apply the invigorating rhetoric of gloss to the supposedly unglamorous, and thereby account for her kindly tolerance of my grimmer taste. health care as related to other social values. For instance, awful as your childhood dental experience was, at least you had a dentist! In this country, lots of people can't afford any kind of dental care (it mostly isn't covered by health insurance that pays for the drug regimen? I think I remember a news meal of baked beans on toast. Your portrait of Japan is funny, but if they were really as timid and mingy as you suggest, they wouldn't be so healthy and prostitutes, people eating potentially fatal blowfish just for kicks. And, of course, the incredible level of sexism, conformity, pollution, hideous modern Conquering troops swagger into towns, round up members of an undesirable ethnic population, and systematically slaughter them. The world knows all about it but dithers anyway. Not for years after they first learn of the pattern of atrocities do they do anything about it. Sound familiar? We're not talking One of the many unpleasant duties of Holocaust historians involves rounding added some new details to that picture. In his book, Official Secrets: What radio signals from German special police units. Messages intercepted from the duties" or "pacification" meant something much worse than relocation. They'd also heard enough to know that it was a campaign planned before the mass execution that didn't quite explain what was occurring. What difference would this information have made? The difference the confirmation of rumor always makes. Had the world known for certain that the been warned. Neutral and satellite states could have been pressured to accept reports could have helped pin the blame on the right people. During the units largely responsible for the slaughter on the Eastern Front as future mass murderers of the world surely drew the obvious moral lesson. role of fiction editor, cutting as many as half the words in a given story, rewriting entire passages, changing titles, and adding final lines himself. In short, he carved out of a prolix man's copy Carver's trademark minimalist The piece is scrupulously fair, airing all sides and concluding that collaboration, if that's what it was, may not be such a bad thing, especially for readers. However, the article also includes a certain amount of enormously controversial for a number of reasons: his mannered writing style, for one, and his interventionist editorial style, for another, which made other original version as "A Small, Good Thing." "Was it unconscious jealousy?" It may be possible that, as Carver's fans claim, he wrote his best pieces editor, and had her own moments of sulking at her ungrateful writers. So compare and contrast the opening scene and decide for yourself. (Email the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and a launching pad under a sprinkling of white eight years old. He was an older man, this baker, and he wore a curious apron, a heavy thing with loops that went under his arms and around his back and then crossed in front again where they were tied in a very thick knot. He kept wiping his hands on the front of the apron as he listened to the women, his wet eyes examining her lips as she studied the samples and talked. The mother decided on the spaceship cake, and then she gave the baker her No pleasantries, just this small exchange, the barest information, nothing that pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back, and then to the front again again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He'd just come to work and he'd be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry. the child's party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them. Just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he'd ever done anything with his life besides be a birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy, wooden table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end; and beside the table a metal container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was The baker finished printing the information on the special order card and dysfunctional family and practice real medicine in the local clinic. In the first three episodes alone, viewers are subjected to two deaths, an aborted boyfriend in the shower with another man. Compounding the emotional Content aside, Providence also has a few "artistic" problems. The face. Since she's unquestionably beautiful to behold, a little visual indulgence can perhaps be forgiven. What cannot be forgiven, however, is her life, most of which revolves around her bickering with her dead mother and making out with this guy she had a crush on in high school who is now a local we have to sit through the characters' tedious personal dramas as well as their The plot lines aren't particularly surprising or clever, but the dialogue is show's defining feature, however, is its overabundance of male bonding: A bag one of the boys in blue. (There is nary a female cop to be found.) Perhaps that, the pickings get decidedly slimmer. Thank god for Lonesome Dove (Family who lures all of his former frat brothers back to the scene of their youthful crime. He can't save the movie, but he definitely livens it up. the special is as silly as it sounds. The history of the myriad painful fads was about. For the most part, however, listening to lingerie designers ramble insipidly about the form, function, and sensuousness of undies makes one suspect that the special was conceived largely as an excuse to show shot after and it turns out to be apt: They were both childish women whose individuals who had maneuvered themselves into positions of national long as the explanation is given by a woman who can claim to have been hurt by a man, and as long as the man is a prince or a president. threw daily temper tantrums from the moment she entered the royal palace, who tried to blackmail the president of the United States, who in fact was clearly married her because he thought she would be a docile breeder. Going into the book, we think she's the president's. After all, that's the metaphor for all our feelings about political slickness, its uncanny ability to tell people what they want to hear before leaving them high and dry. princess and her story, more interesting, in fact, than any version of the president who traduced the morals of an immature girl. It is the prurient right to call her lawyer, harassed her mother and brother, flagrantly violated a helpless, goofy romantic, a emotional isolate tormented by the barrenness of In this morning's New York Times headlines, ''Astronomers Say a Disk of Dust Holds a Clue to Birth of Planets.'' Three years ago, scientists learned that other suns also have planets. Now they think they are actually able to understand how planets are formed from stellar debris. According to the paper, it's looking more and more likely that there is life on other planets. Are you with me in adding outer space to our list of boring subjects? Last year I wrote a column in The Nation confessing that I didn't care what turned out almost everyone I knew found this sort of information utterly inscriptions that had baffled scholars for decades. It turns out that the old story!) violent enthusiasts of war, torture, human sacrifice and painful shaft of his own penis on ceremonial occasions.'' Sounds like Performance Art read the book) and at lunchtime they went to a demonstration in Union Square, that was supposed to be of Latino sweatshop workers, and came away reeling: maybe fifteen people, mostly ancient sectarians and a few young ones, all full of the old rhetoric (a moment of silence followed by a "moment of rage" with raised fists but some people didn't know how to do it, memories of the black to (with this same study group, so clearly we are picking up the wrong leaflets) was the same: tiny, futile gatherings of people who, whatever their ages, are living in l933. There are a lot of weirdos on the sectarian left, as heard, not exactly a political program, more like an ethnic slur, is that (fill workers' councils and other localized forms of ownership, that opposes vanguard parties and state power left and right. There are more than two perspectives The editors asked six celebrities to describe their vacation reading, and one, while procrastinating, since elsewhere he has said that his autobiography is offer the name of a book. Of the six, only the basketball star in the bunch, other than his own prose. His summer printed matter was a celebrity A congress of keyboard tappers so dedicated only the athletes have time to autobiography in the West reflects the development of the mature, individuated, "Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the Of course, the autobiographies of celebrities are outnumbered by those of Oh, God. We're agreeing again. Since when was sport a crucial civic virtue?? Even egghead effete sheets like the New York Times dedicate a whole section most days to it, as if it meant anything real or interesting, or wasn't a lowest common denominator entertainment. You're right about stadiums new Redskins stadium, and every idiotic newsman and woman is required to nod knowingly when the sports guy makes some obscure reference to some impenetrable football play, and anyone like me who finds the entire exercise faintly ridiculous is regarded as unpatriotic and unmanly. IF DC spent an ounce of the mental energy it expends on sports on education then the city might be livable once again. And the only people more boring than sports stars are movie My own theory is that sports are one of the very few ways that most heterosexual (and some homosexual) men can communicate with each other about anything other than the weather. They cannot talk about their feelings; and they cannot really hang out in groups of three or less (someone might think Skins? Yes, there are some aspects to sports that are beautiful and admirable; and baseball in this regard is on a different plane than football; and soccer called lower pleasures. And we need to do a better job of keeping them in their On a more troubling level, the sports fetish is also a crude way of defining masculinity down. I went to a high school (all male, and not one of to me to have allowed for these other pursuits but to have avoided seeing them as part of being male. (It's bound up, at some level, with a fear of But are you as interested in the business pages as I am? celebrated for its uncommon pleasantness and normalcy by publications as can indulge the show in that fashion if you've seen it once or twice, but after repeated viewing you can't help suspecting that its niceness is the punch line dispel them with the dreamlike reasonableness of a ministerial counseling dangerous but not yet outlawed substance ephedrine. Once she finds out, father and daughter join forces in proselytizing against it. The dark joke here, of course, is the late '60s and early '70s, and the social disorder we are alleged to have inherited from that period. Set in the Weekly Standard had its way with it. (It is not a coincidence that when the show flagged in its second season, the network hired a publicist to image of history. Everything in its universe is '70s revival, from the until last night, when, while filming a concert by the pathetic dregs of a real '70s band, the camera tilted sardonically, just for an instant.) The difference between then and now, though, is that while family life in those real '70s shows was unrealistically goofy, in this fake '70s show it's night's episode, for instance, and how afraid he was that they'd bring with strange addictions, illegitimate babies, or the need to slice family; they're fighting a culture war, no matter how gentle the father's missionary zeal that comes off as more High School Confidential than when she ignores the warnings issued by the good reverend to her father and the mothering is loving but grim, and she's prone to irrational outbursts the rest of the family has to tiptoe around. There's the time her widower father showed episode was: How can we get Mom to behave? Her husband couldn't have been more understanding, but his wife's emotionalism was so impervious to logic it became character is allowed to be, a sense of inexpressible rage hovering somewhere in the vicinity of her brightly upturned mouth. She makes you realize with It is said that publishing is not a business but an art. Movie executives client's book is selling, and he'll say 'Oh, gee, I don't know! Let me check with inventory," an agent told me recently. "But of course, all inventory can how many books have been ordered, not how many have been sold." Not until much later (as much as a year later), after bookstores have returned all their unsold copies, can publishers compile firm sales figures. And even then, the There are ways to answer those questions, but the book industry doesn't seem Was that the real reason it was rejected? Publishers could have come price down. You'd think they'd be eager to learn whether local or national advertising works better, or whether book tours do anything other than stroke wonders whether publishers really factored in the savings they'd accrue from publishing is one of the last industries to seek the comfort of hard serious books with limited sales. A corollary to this theory is that publishers authors (they usually linger under 50,000)--it might make the whole industry themselves. It turns out that most contracts between authors and publishers and force publishers to fork over all royalties right away. the big chains (though they are talking to them). Also, if publishers are getting the numbers for free from the chains, why pay for them? Whatever the reason, publishers are making it clear that what they want more publishers' concerns was to turn it into a "closed system." In other words, the data will not be published and no one but the publisher of a book will be able This weekend, you can relive the hunt for two '70s monsters: a killer shark chance to remember what real high crimes and misdemeanors are all small, isolated town of Little Tall Island finds itself under siege from both a we wait and wait for him to tell us what he wants, the movie employs stalling devices such as the search in a darkened house for the elusive bogeyman. "Hell odyssey of the mulatto daughter of a white rape victim, but who cares? If you want to solve mysteries, turn instead to the conclusion of the Cigarette Smoking Man finally explains (almost) all. The week's most interesting programs may be documentaries. (Exceptions to incidents exposed elsewhere as hoaxes and illusions. For a more skeptical view of these issues, check out these sensible articles: What Really It is an inspired solution to the problems that beset publicly funded arts and humanities in the early 1990s. Back then, public broadcasting and the national endowments for the Arts and Humanities were (rightly) taken to task as heirlooms from their attics and cellars in hopes they'll turn out to be Ob Jay a lady who brought a pair of gold bracelets, which turned out to have been Then a jade necklace someone's great aunt had brought back from China--$35,000! highlight came a year or so ago, when some old lady found out her 25-dollar What's really showcased is the reciprocal exploitation at the heart of the a piece of furniture they'd otherwise use as firewood. There's a reciprocal malarkey as well: The experts pretend to know offhand the history of the object. (Which they've obviously rehearsed, since it includes such arcana as eyes crinkling happily, her full mouth struggling vainly against a triumphant this girl come from? Could she possibly believe her teen fantasies of secret love? Is sucking the presidential penis really to be her greatest The probable answer is yes. You could see this realization dawning on suppressing a grandmotherly impulse to shut this child up. For what was much try to have intercourse?"; having exploited an insecure person's lack of older woman eliciting the confession all too easily from the younger one and over the course of this debacle. She is guilty of a lot of small ones. But it is not a crime to have an affair with a married man and then be indiscreet about it. Her behavior was stupid and hurt a lot of people, but if the point here is to measure the size of her errors, they are barely perceptible next to those of the people who ruined her: a literary agent with profit and something akin to treason on her mind; a federal prosecutor who chose to hound and harass a citizen with overweening force and little justification; and journalists who cooperated by exposing every last detail of her private life. The New York Times today joined much of the rest of the media in did not choose her notoriety. Being a blabbermouth doesn't mean you've sought saddled with hundreds of thousands in legal fees. She could not have known that messing around with the president meant losing the likelihood of economic independence when the day comes, as one hopes it will, when she finally achieves the emotional maturity to take care of herself. But not even Bill human after having been reduced to a national joke. One can pity her for neither seeing the unsettling impression she creates nor grasping that there's no way to talk about the affair that will restore some measure of dignity to watched this woman be knocked down again and again and again, yet still feel the need to vilify the object of our voyeuristic pleasure. Please note: All times are Eastern Standard. Please check local listings We're heading into the holiday home stretch, and you know what joys that deserves a seasonal break, leaving viewers this week to pick through a melange features Ray's pathetic attempts to get his wife in the mood for a holiday interviewees to tears, but there's a guilty pleasure in seeing just who will succumb to one of those famous crying jags. This time around, potential weepers of the year's No.1 most fascinating person under wraps until the show's endless agonizing over whether you'll receive the year's hot toy. (And, for my flurry of profanity and tears is one of cinema's finest moments. and take refuge in the one decent offering available on the small screen, attacks, and an impeachment vote looming on the Hill, you may just want to keep With all due respect, you keep changing the subject. My point was merely largely because of lingering (and I think mistaken) notions that somehow the Communists weren't quite so bad. They were. The targets of their liquidation were different; but the totalitarian structure, police state, and militaristic expansionism in both systems were uncannily alike. So, of course, were the crude, domestic economic policies, which harnessed big business interests to the military state. Both were evil empires; and both were essentially national socialist experiments. The only difference is that we defeated one in six Soviet Union. Could anyone now dispute that? Oh, maybe you do. And no, I don't dispute that, for a short period of time, some socialistic intervention?) But I do think that, given Big Government's record in providing public goods over the last few decades (almost universally execrable, wherever you look), and given Extremely Big Government's record in the Soviet Union and imposing a higher tax burden on ordinary citizens than at any time in the They are consumers and citizens; and they are being bilked of their own cut government's suppression of our economic choices and liberties doesn't mean First Amendment absolutist, a solid believer in gender and racial equality of opportunity, etc, etc. And you know it. A truly liberal government would be strictly neutral between citizens, and do as little as possible to rob them of their civil liberties and worldly goods. Given the twentieth century's record and terrorized half the planet. Economic and social decline were accelerating in the last years of the evil empire, and any attempt to put them right will inevitably make some of them worse in the meantime. You can't solve such its early years, when half a century of disastrous socialist economics had wrought another mess of poverty, stagnation, and resentment. And, of course, people at first blamed Thatcher, not socialism, for the mess. Now ask the Parliament was, in my view, a necessary evil, given the Communist Party's continuing attempt to derail democratization and market reform. And while there suggests whose side he's really on. Why won't you give him credit? It still seems to me part of the Left's inability to come to terms with its intellectual leaves it reluctant to get clearly and unequivocally on the right side in As to Bill, I agree with you about his enemies, but they are worthy of him. The responsibility for all this mess lies with the president and him alone, not with the special prosecutor who was appointed by the Justice Department, for good and obvious reasons. Again, it seems to me you cannot see the wood for the better. Which brings me to the nice irony about family values. It's amazing how many advocates of the traditional kind (married for life, totally faithful, scourge of gay monogamy, quitting his first marriage after a matter of weeks, in the slightest bit immoral. We're all human. But perhaps their devotion to the cause of orthodoxy is related to their awareness of their own frailty. I know, to some extent, my own support for (and admiration of) gay couples, fidelity, marriage etc. is probably, at some deep level of my subconscious, related to the fact that I have never been able to keep a steady boyfriend. I Couldn't it also be true that all the tweedy monogamists of the old left are so naturally virtuous that they can't conceive how others might need social incentives to maintain similar virtues? How many of us, after all, can aspire supporters of her right to a say in court and leery of those who dismissed her and, like you, am unsure about her legal position. Nevertheless, NOW is still an absolute scandal, no? Have you taken them on, yet? Or does I think, to be a billionaire and still be thoroughly middle class. Look at the finally said that, although his heart told him he didn't exchange arms for hostages, the evidence proved that he had. There. He did admit it. I don't has slithered away from at every opportunity, if it meant any cost or pain. for dearly. There was risk because there was a small degree of conviction. With with it because it goes against the values I was brought up with: you tell the truth, stick to your principles, and face the consequences of your actions. He think some conservatives are uneasy with him for the reasons you cite; and because they associate him with the boomer generation, whose moral and psychological grip on reality is famously suspect. I don't think they're recognizable "redneck philanderer" rather than a "liberal pinko sleaze." As to Most people laughed at it, but I was stunned at how many of the marchers were themselves." Yes, I know these people are representative of nothing. But I Please check local listings for times in your area. week, and pro wrestling is more "sports entertainment" than actual sport. Nonetheless, these are heady days for sports fans. Gridiron junkies in continues its grim run. The series repeats continue apace, and the movie selections aren't much more appealing than last week's offerings. Exhibits A launches its Twilight Zone marathon--21 hours of the eeriest series Magic into giggling fits, and much of the acting is barely second rate. But it can raise the hair on the back of my neck quicker than a scene out of crime scene and is transported to a wondrous place where every desire is in charge, arguing that Heaven is not really his bag. "Heaven?" the Reminiscent of the first couple of seasons, the dialogue is sharp and much musing around my house about shifting relationships between actors and but it doesn't try to bait viewers into watching with the tired "Ooh, maybe week, or maybe not. What does it matter? They're together. They're happy. Finally, whatever your plans for New Year's Eve, set while broadcasting live from Times Square, you do not want to miss and media people on your list as actually believing their professed ideology, in flight from their own homosexual impulses. Except, in the case of the people you mention, they do get divorced all they want to. That's what gets being made more understanding by their own frailties and failures, they just In any case, I don't think marriage works as a preserver of relationships. was the story there, I wonder.) Having children often does make people try hard to make their relationships work, but I don't think marriage, in and of itself, does that, although I know that is an argument often advanced in its favor. People just get mean and depressed, and drag about sullenly hoping their spouse position is as bad as it's been made to look in the media), but also their Republican representatives girding themselves for the labor of impeaching a popular president would have had reason to feel proud if they happened to read the argument for voting one's conscience rather than one's poll numbers: "Greatness and transcendence are why people join political parties, and why they go to war. It is why they risk and sacrifice, and engage in political argument. Ultimately they are moved by principle, and will for its sake throw aside or forgo the material things that scoundrel politicians think they hold of the warrior and his worldview. He is also a member of the Journal 's classes teach us to define it: that a man's character shapes his actions. "As others move in the light, he will move in the darkness, so that as others temperament that is suited for the Medal of Honor, in a soul that is unafraid it comes to stretching the truth so fine it can't be distinguished from a lie. that he couldn't help but spin tall tales, but had learned from hard experience the downside of doing so: "In my first radio interview, the announcer said, 'Tell me about your life.' So I began telling him about how I was a mercenary coup and I left with sacks of diamonds. I told the story in such a way that it sounded plausible, and the announcer kept on saying: 'You're kidding. I can't probably true, but, as the Times writer said, the details surrounding it recent political articles are filled with yarns that make one long for a little It would be nave to criticize a fiction writer for fabricating fictions; that's what a novelist does for a living. But what about when the prevaricator becomes a political columnist and tries convince politicians to impeach other Last year the Modern Library raised a ruckus with its "hundred best novels The first complaint about the earlier list (aside from the basic crassness of the enterprise) was that it had been made from a checklist prepared by experts. But experts turned out to be not such a bad thing. When Random House Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird cracked the magic circle.) A second complaint: The panel was too white and too male. So the new panel It will be hard to make this work. Another problem is that there's vastly Rebel is an automatic. But do you include dazzling prose writers like Way of All Flesh so bizarrely did on the fiction list? Poetry and the Age (and she won't), who will? Someone must argue (it's influence and style by picking the top books about the major events of the strikes me that I have in you a tremendous resource: instead of wondering what it is conservatives can possibly be thinking when they say or do something I don't understand at all, I can ask you! So here is my question: Why do example); his judicial appointments have been very centrist; he favors the other causes dear to the right. It's true he's not a homophobe like so many (except, as you've noted, get more of them than ever kicked out of the armed For a person of materialist turn of mind, like me, it is hard to understand there, either. Conservatives should love this man, who accomplishes so much of their agenda while bewitching so many liberals! A Republican could never have pushed through welfare reform, or the crime bill, without raising a major storm Is it all really about sex, drugs and rock and roll, after all? intransigence we are supposed to be grateful for. Why is it that, in the press, terrorists are heroes if they enter "peace" negotiations but not blackmailing monumental, and just when he is dismissed as a buffoon, he tries once again, against the odds, to keep economic reform on track. His personal unpredictability is arguably essential to keep his many enemies off balance. expanded without a revanchist response; and the Constitution is still scene in Primary Colors when he learns that he may have made a young black girl pregnant. "Can't I ever get a break?" he laments. The man's incapacity to take responsibility is fathomless. My favorite quote of the day take the hit for not cooperating in the Rose Law Firm inquiry: "I will not Please note: All times given are Eastern, but check your local listings Step right up, ladies and gents: The Sweeps have come to town. Everyone's pandering, but the Fox network is the most blatant with its sleazy The spirit of Fox seems to have influenced the arty networks, too. The three years researching the life, crimes, and recent execution of the talkative camerawork helps recreate his murders of two old men and the impact on the even obsessive fans have been struggling just to follow it. The story so far: A mysterious Syndicate of rich white evildoers has been in apparent cahoots with aliens seeking to colonize the earth. One of their weapons: infecting humans with an oily virus that incubates aliens. Or something like that. secrets. Don't hold your breath waiting for final answers. The roots of today's conspiracy thinking go back to the assassination of nostalgia and history lesson but flounders as drama. The acting is competent, world is changing for the better, son. We got a long way to go but look where apparent target of the new Hallmark Hall of Fame weepie, Night Ride their response to the tragic death of their son in a horse- riding accident. Family healing, blah blah. Only the threat of, say, an alien abduction could make a man watch all the way through this domestic bathos. daughter to scout a college campus, only to spot a mob snitch he may have to uplift for black kids, part thrilling feats of circus daring, it's family programming that can appeal to adults of all races. The broadcast networks are keeping up with potentially strong episodes of seeking help for an alcoholic friend. It's about time. They won't be killing episodes because the maverick heartthrob gives an unauthorized painkiller to a Couldn't agree with you more about tobacco. I grew up imbibing the why it gets so many people steamed at a political level. Liberals particularly. companies represent the supreme evil in the universe when they're just a bunch of lying, avaricious executives trying to make money. In my book that's legal about it and passing virtual bills of attainder against them. And don't try to persuade me that my mother never knew the risks of smoking. She did. My own theory is that liberals and lefties have to find some outlet for their lost the argument completely. And they know they shouldn't be sexual puritans. pass. So they hammer the smokers. Or rather they hammer the Big Tobacco execs in order to "save the children." Save me from saving the children. The most heartening news from the younger generation this year (apart from the kids? Fathers are apparently spending more time with their children and on this a function of feminist lawmaking or the free market and empowered, stranger than fiction and often more entertaining as well. The medium's blend world that sometimes seems as real as our own. It's the perfect environment for scandal and the White House. There's even a nefarious independent prosecutor who abuses both key witnesses and our heroic prosecutors! Unfortunately, the days. Still, it's good to see the Homicide crew finally spending more time solving crimes than pursuing their boring office romances. all patrician bite and bluster. Told in flashbacks, the film drags a bit when basketball team that faces off with the best white team in the segregated New riveting as a priest leading his players in a drive to integrate school athletics. Although supposedly based on real events, it also feels phony at times. Is there a federal law that says all basketball flicks must end with one widow, includes the mandatory scene of the downtrodden composer working out his any drag queen's, but her sullen pouting and his whining make it seem like a Genuine immigration abuses are the backdrop for the schlocky murder mystery, mind the viewer. A better bet for drama is Meltdown at Three Mile newsmagazine segment on "Operation Tailwind." To refresh your memory, the But how do we know that such memories represent real, rather than imagined, he came up with his seduction theory, which linked hysteria to repressed memories of sexual molestation during childhood. A few years later, however, brewing against therapists who are considered too skeptical of recovered memories, and a new movement is born: Repressed Memory Therapy. By the "repressed memory syndrome." The message is always the same: If you're feeling It turned out, though, that the daughter had been hypnotized by her therapist to help remember the details of the event. The case was thrown out a memories are simply the product of the power of psychoanalytic persuasion? mechanism that could create this ignorance of memory. If anything, things of a traumatic character are more likely to be remembered than forgotten." Recovered But we do have some clues. A psychiatrist who treated World War II veterans reported that one man who had been in a tank regiment visualized being trapped inside a burning tank, though it never actually happened. And decades later, a during a firefight. When one of his fellow group members called Ed's parents to help put together a surprise party for him, his mother was shocked: "What? He's in a veterans' recovery group? But he was rated 4-F. He never was allowed to go minorities is a consequence of institutional racism at universities. Do you? At either. So, frankly, I don't see the alleged problem of racial discrimination that we need to remedy. The only discrimination I think we need to address is the recent attempt by many universities to deny many people admission purely because of their race. Now there's discrimination. But it's directed primarily high school education, and more engaged and dedicated parenting. Period. Like you, I would like to see much more money spent on public education, as long as the teachers' unions don't throw it down the toilet. And I think we should do all we can not to encourage family breakdown among minorities. But even then, I doubt whether we would have a perfectly balanced racial mix at our universities. And frankly, I don't see why we should care. Why should we be concerned what race someone belongs to at college, as long as there isn't any decent public high school education is also widely available? This racial obsession is a legacy of past evils, and decreasingly relevant to the polyglot, repeated across the country. And I hope we make a better effort to educate black and Latino kids in the cities. And I hope the black family recovers. And I hope we stop the futile attempt to make amends for past injustice by wreaking irrational form of institutional sexism, and I oppose it on the same grounds that I oppose reverse discrimination. And if we attempted to remedy it by You sent me scurrying to the New York Times business pages and there I found a potential solution for one of my life's peskiest problems. A French company is now producing a tiny little car that seats just two, weighs just the thing. I know how to drive, I do, I do, I do. I just get all flustered vehicles that roam I-95 like woolly mammoths looking for prey. I hate those was always the shortest girl in the class, I know. So I would only use it on Those are just about the only places I want to go, anyway. aging analysts packed into the auditorium, sweating through their dark clothes couches, in this impossible time for the famously impossible profession, up to? Composing thoughtful rebuttals to their scientistic critics? Ignoring the Overhearing the audience's indulgent titters, Crews would have found it patient's obsession with filming him before letting him do it. ("Was it several minutes of film that brought dozens of bit players and their world to shockingly commanding presence, a man of barely checked intensity lurking in The emotional coloring of the evening, though, came from the soundtrack, a scene of gravity, even of mourning: Here were today's analysts, at a time when psychoanalysis seems to be sputtering to an undignified end, done in by managed health care, psychopharmacology, and the intellectual vindication of behavioral psychologists by modern trends in genetics. There were yesterday's analysts, at the field's most hopeful, eager beginning, when it seemed the most brilliant that wiped out a world and an intellectual war that discredited a past. When the movie came to an end, there seemed nothing left to say. French mental hospital a decade ago, started publishing poems, and branched researcher who seeks through cloning to make sex obsolete. The two have more in several hundred thousand copies and launched the first real French literary places where the two overlap, like drugs, abortion, and penile and breast implants. But the reader soon notices that these diatribes are being delivered excitedly rendered. A reviewer who, like this one, is shaky on his French that's where I draw the line. But finish this book and you'll have no trouble the world it leaves in its wake? By viewing both as stages on the way to a morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "Pundit the sex scandal subsides, the president has been tainted," the paper said. "He will not be remembered for his economic triumphs, his political agility, his other smaller initiatives. Already he is the subject of countless jokes, and he will be remembered as the president who could not keep his zipper zipped." past," it said in a front page editorial. "She even lives in it, fascinated by her navel. But until now, she has cared above all for her moments of glory, when she thought she could give orders to the universe. She preferred to skip the black pages in her history. But not for the past few years. One may call it same that she dares, at last, to look herself in the face. With stains on her severe as those which have almost destroyed the Middle East peace process since abroad to "ask themselves what future there is for a country under a Prime Resurrection, may be transformed into the funeral of peace," La Under the headline "Dangerous Games in the Kremlin," "One day, soon perhaps, the public will have to stop gaping at the ability of those who get a good return on their investments. "Take, therefore, the talent from him [who had one talent] and give it unto him which hath ten talents," abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he worries that standards for entry into the union will soon be diluted and that to join, it will be on the basis of what they say they are going to do, not on want to pretend [AIDS] is a black disease, but the white community is equally affected, they just have more money to keep it hidden for a longer time than suggested by the Reform Party (a group, the piece notes, that is often accused of racism and extremism). Among the proposals: Tie immigration levels to the higher priority to the "independent" class of immigrants (those with necessary job skills); crack down on family sponsorship of immigrants, limiting it to immediate family members; and cut down on fraudulent claims of refugee severely doubt the authenticity of the remains) and, on the other side, radical "pragmatist," wants to plan ahead for his final sendoff, argues an anonymous Chronicle announces that the Electoral Assistance Bureau has determined place was considered to have had a poll that was unacceptable or invalid." entertainment and gambling industries, successful and still expanding, have spawned prostitution as a growing field in this economically shaky country. Smart, educated, gainfully employed women have taken to becoming casual sex of death, statement in hand, approaching a lectern bearing the seal of the longer hide his own doubts about the effectiveness of a bombing campaign." violence but continued to insist that a peace agreement "can be done and failed before even beginning, since nobody knows where they are." Attempting to switched off during the night to reduce the number of accidents caused by that cannabis is safer than alcohol or tobacco had been suppressed by the World drinking two or three glasses of wine a day has been proved to cut the risk of "impotent." Even a former minister of parliamentary affairs, whose job had been morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit appealing strongly for a yea vote. "The good reputation of the island will be immeasurably enhanced, if we can cast off the negative impression of conflict, in an editorial that, although "there are a thousand devils in the details" of the agreement, "democrats should accept the convenient rather than insist on no fudge between democracy and terror." If he fails to insist on the decommissioning of weapons before paramilitaries could hold office in the new strongly supportive of the Ulster Unionists, highlighted the agreement's weaknesses and, while not recommending a "no" vote, said in an editorial that if a majority of the Unionists were to vote negative, their decision should be respected. "Let no one outside Ulster dare accuse them of bigotry or belligerence," it said. "In voting No, they too will be expressing their desire for peace, and their sorrowful belief that it is not, in reality, on explained, was that following the end of the Communist threat, the United States' present "biggest headache is that the collapse of a major trading partner will cause a domino effect across the world's economies." say to officials and congressmen on the Hill." Predicting that the delegates newspaper's correspondent there that they should have chosen a better time to global community on the nuclear issue," should now "make the international community ashamed of itself through its nuclear restraint and ensure that it is conduct the tests so that the principle of mutual nuclear deterrence would automatically come into force and nuclear confrontation can be ruled out for nuclear tests and then proceeded to declare itself a nuclear weapons state." country's new nuclear capabilities. "It looks like the bad old days are back the same time proposing himself as a candidate for the future leadership of militarism is especially offensive. Worse still, it will be ineffective," the impression of double standards being applied was particularly strong where it which led its front page with a story about an astonishing secret alliance foreign and security policy, it said, would be insular and isolationist and would invariably prefer appeasement to intervention. "The President should note that the special relationship cannot be reconciled with the creation of a minister, accusing her of "sheer gush" and "babbling soppiness" toward both him and his host, the president. "Come back and help our 'clever, young and nine months in power," it said. "Come back and bathe him in the balm of your interview with the tabloid Daily Mirror saying he believed that the deaths of his son morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "Pundit despite the Ulster Unionists' firm rejection of the draft agreement submitted for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public restroom in the Will Rogers Memorial front page headline that read, "Zip Me Up Before You Go Go." logical development." Its front page headline on the talks was "So Near and Yet that "the prize is within the negotiators' grasp": "If they fail to seize it, they will surrender to the sinister men lurking in the wings. At the moment of the best way to safeguard the Union. But the damage that has been done in the expressed alarm that recent World Trade Organization rulings against the United in New York. Now he says he plans to redecorate it. "I want to get rid of all deserve to be preserved historically." Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reported fury and then as a senator, has spent his career trying to understand the point of surprisingly, the immigration system is set up to benefit the United allowed in, and only a tiny fraction of the ones who make that cut are allowed for permanent residence and most of the benefits of citizenship, with the their families) of naturalized citizens and their families, and adult sons and daughters (and their families) of naturalized citizens. couples cannot legally marry in this country, there is currently no legal way (including "multinational executives or managers" and "outstanding professors or researchers"), "professionals with advanced degrees," investors or for "diversity" immigrants, designed to allow citizens of countries with low levels of emigration to the United States to jump the queue. (Such countries these complex categories, there are national quotas to ensure that no country States as resident aliens. But of late, lawmakers have indicated a change of attitude toward legal immigrants, and this has affected the number of entitlements, denying legal immigrants access to government housing and welfare while still requiring them to pay taxes. This loss of benefits has almost character." Candidates must submit a set of fingerprints for review by the increase in citizenship applications has led to longer processing periods and, according to critics, to some immigrants being wrongly naturalized. In May criminal arrest should have disqualified an applicant or in which an applicant lied about his or her criminal history." A more recent press release from the INS suggests that the agency has made a country legally on a temporary basis and didn't go home. Most illegal recent changes in the law, summarized here, establish new grounds for denying admission to the United jobs attracts illegal immigrants. Although the INS negotiated its largest $1.7-million fine for hiring and employing illegal immigrant workers, critics claim that Congress doesn't do enough to punish employers who make extensive use of illegal labor. Unscrupulous employers see these workers as more manageable and less likely to complain. Despite regulations that punish employers who knowingly employ them, pressure from business groups like the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Restaurant Association scuttled an attempt to include computer verification of employee A fact sheet prepared by the State Department's Bureau of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group." Recent changes in the law prohibit asylum applications from (this last phrase being printed in English). "And we mustn't forget the role of the mother who instructed her and who is certainly much more expert than she is president has to understand this and make the necessary sacrifices. "To renounce his manhood for four, or even eight, years is a fair price to pay," he right to privacy." They should recognize that new technology "lays bare quickly forgotten if, for example, the internet didn't render them shameful, is that the first believed in the president's right to privacy, and the second and "was expected to make love to two a day, and was trained in special techniques to make sure that he could manage this." "Even at this rate it would displaying natural human foibles while being excellent at his work." The be forced to submit his resignation because he has lost the confidence of key the New York Times that "these are not grounds for impeachment: they are grounds for divorce." "She is right. Let's hope Congress agrees," it the president should resign if he cannot maintain his authority. In the world's current parlous condition, "US leadership and prudent US policies are vital," said, "The most important thing for the Communists is to get control of money from weapons exports. This money will become a source of financing in the next second day running with negative comment about the United States, taking their one hand, the United States has realized that the world cannot be entrusted solely to the pursuit of profit and to the indiscriminate use of the global capital market, and it has breathed new life into supranational institutions military continue to regard their host countries as subject to their military needs or to their war games while they live in superb isolation in their uncontrollable, inaccessible bases. Perhaps imperial powers have always behaved like that, but it's not pleasant and it's not dignified for those who have to would see only this "sad face" and forget the millions of "respectable Home." This was not a call for action, however, but a nostalgic evocation penitent," and said, "One couldn't imagine a better argument against the death crime, but against this other person the criminal has become in the meantime." syringe in one hand and a scythe sporting the stars and stripes in the other, facing a sea of television cameras and announcing, somewhat obscurely, "Me, headlined "A Justice That Kills," said this was a kind of justice that could never be justified. The paper quoted Amnesty International statistics showing penalty. The United States finds itself in the company of countries like China exception." It is common knowledge among criminologists that "the death penalty "considered cancelling the visit in the light of the media frenzy that has nastier than it was before, directed at civilian targets, which the coalition electricity grid, but acknowledged that a lengthy interruption of service would people for their watchful insistence on probity and moral rectitude for public affair but by "the world's refusal to be shocked by it." It blamed "this our times which spells instant immunity from all wrong." referred not, as one might have expected, to the continuing massacres by with them to study ways of pursuing the authors of these terrorist crimes." covered up the fact that the bombing had been a broad conspiracy, involving editorial opposite this piece, the conservative Daily Telegraph noted fall in the price of gold, and said: "The insatiable demand for dollars, and poised to claim China as its next victim unless there was a "rapid and seems to be sinking inexorably into crisis," its alarmist editorial continued. "There is a vicious circle from which one can see no way out." this week. "The old lion had some paw," it said. "Without going as far as the day, the exhibition shows the work of a real artist," Libration added. were printed on recycled sugar cane, but this gave them the texture and color of a stiff brown paper bag and was abandoned in favor of recycled paper. Last Festival for the Recycling of Primary Materials" would be shown live on the world, imbued with irrepressible optimism about the prospects for the sugar Peacetime." Among several cheerful sugar stories in the last few days was one accentuating the positive aspect of recent flooding in the countryside. While shortcomings of capitalism in general and the United States in particular, with asteroid danger, which it accuses the United States of understating. This week the headline "Monstrous Experiment." The lifting by the United States of some inside page and was the subject of no editorial comment either then or almost every day, even if sometimes on a date that is fairly distant from the the last two subjects have been pancreatitis and optical neuritis, and an occasional books column that, this week, discussed a book titled The "Sexuality, sensuality, passion, and pleasure have always been the main one letter a week from a reader, always with an editorial riposte at the bottom. This week's was from a woman and had to do with the desperate attempts parlors and found them variously full, out of food, closed for lack of water But they persevered, she said, "firm and optimistic" in their search, until they were finally allowed by a packed restaurant to eat their dinner off the floor. They were lucky enough, she said, to find a bus quickly and be back home this letter said the newspaper had decided to omit the names of the restaurants concerned, "because they wouldn't be known by respectable people outside the neighborhood," and made no comment on the facilities they lacked. Instead it congratulated the couple on the courage and optimism that had enabled them in the end to triumph: "You got home in time to see the film, so it really wasn't which, beginning next week, will appear in Slate twice a week. disappointment" and "a wave of frustration" and said that Gore might even have was more polite, but still referred to his speech as "ambiguous." The worldwide awaited with such excitement, had signally failed to deliver a breakthrough in the stalled negotiations because of political pressures at home. Age didn't mention it at all, being more interested in the nation's prowess competitions, raising the question of whether they should do so as women or be he said, "in the dreams of all men" and "even more beautiful than on the screen." The United States, on the other hand, was "a world made to measure for escapades": "I run out through the back door and drive past the gates in a German teacher I had, at the end of one of the lessons." He may be trying to morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "Pundit not naive to be optimistic about its prospects" and "we must all resist the temptation to see future violence described as a failure of the peace process," criticized several aspects of the settlement and emphasized that it "does not in itself mean peace in Ulster's time." It added that Ulster's unionist voters "should not, at least as yet, feel that they are against peace by rejecting editorial that while failure was a possibility, so also was success. "It is a time for gratitude, and even the odd private prayer," it went on. "For this was Conservative predecessor John Major to campaign together for a "Yes" vote in peace settlement. It described his intervention as "merely opportunistic" and reminding him that Ulster is, and remains, part of the United Kingdom and, as stressing the difficulties facing the peace settlement because of divisions time of the referendum. Continental newspapers, too, emphasized the problems. as "typically English" in its pragmatism. "What continental jurist could have thought up a statute which reaffirms Ulster's dependence on the crown without Ulster settlement as a possible key to solving the Basque terrorist problem in there were no comparisons to be made between the two situations. counterpart. The Cork Examiner hailed it as the achievement of "lasting peace," and the will almost certainly resist any attempt to accede to unionist demands for and rewarding field for further blackmail" and that the peace proposals "may well be defeated" by unionist voters in the referendum. delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit Central" is "becoming out of date," the paper said. "US commentators are waking up to Telegraph said the case for "associating with the New World" doesn't rest simply on an affinity of culture, language, or political values but is through consensual rule rather than despotism." The paper's editorial recalled genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, (Madras), the paper said Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals plans to start now, even at the height of the Cold War." If the United States continues to behave like an international bully, "the result will certainly not be greater peace and cohesion in the world: that much is for sure." United States and other Western governments of "inexplicable delay" in checking said in an editorial. "Even if the measures implemented require painful sacrifices, people are willing to bear them if they promise a secure and recovery." It concluded, "Japan cannot afford to stand idly by: China's certain to be excluded from the list of medicines approved for free Peter Pan trap" and asked whether it was really a medicine against male serve to cure an illness or to regulate eternal adolescence? Does it belong to the world of pharmaceutical drugs or to that of aesthetic surgery, like illusion that time never ends and that the seasons are forever renewed. "the most beautiful and happiest old people, pill or no pill, will be those like Peck, proud, aware, and strong in their imperfect human reality." an editorial that "no reasonable person could feel any personal animus against celebrate," because "the rising sun flag remains, for much of the world, a their grievances generated long ago," the Standard concluded. "But their anger and bitterness deserve the sympathy of us all." sharply divided over the need to apologize to Aborigines over their past was not among them." The prime minister had told parliament that "a formal national apology, of the type sought by others, is not appropriate." something very sad about a man who can't say sorry," "National Sorry Books" had been signed by half a million people, including "the Catholic bishops of called because of the exotic plant life found there by Captain Cook) should that the high voter turnout, despite torrential rain, might have been at least discount to anyone who took along the commemorative card to show they had piece of clever marketing, but it comes perilously close to using a financial to be a less political society, "but once it has been let out, the electoral "illuminated master of spirituality" and a "tireless preacher for social morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit conservative tabloid Daily Mail said that "the fact that the New York being sold off by gangsters from the former Soviet Union," the Daily Mail said, "the Prime Minister would have done better to trust the people with the truth in good time before this controversial assignment was due to that even the charge of excessive secrecy had about it "an aura of manufactured that might in any way distress its proprietor, the paper gave full coverage ticketing arrangements for this year's soccer World Cup. When a telephone hot percent reduction of the jail terms of all prisoners who had already served permanent International Criminal Court to try those accused of crimes against real teeth" and that "the ghost of Pol Pot should be a reminder [to the terrorism in Morocco constitutes a grave danger for the stability of the these reports, though a source in the interior ministry had described them as West in the next millennium. In this he was profoundly at odds with the United could leave the room for a few moments to pray ("I knew that the pope was also people with white sheets over their heads demanding access to a new cancer outcome of clinical trials. The marchers barracked the office of Prime Minister that men will change their ways. An opinion poll published over the weekend prostitution problem and did its bit for the cause the next day by devoting two the biggest killer in most countries of the world. "We import from the States so many useless fashions, horrible films, and suspect religions," it said. "So why can't we pay more attention to a war that, in this instance, actually is sentences for "conciliating the law of men with that of memory and conscience" Organization, recently accused of suppressing a report showing that cannabis isn't as dangerous as tobacco or alcohol, had now suppressed "a study which lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect." The next day the claimed in its front page lead story that this was nonsense put out by the conclusions from the study, which had not been held up by WHO but had been submitted to the journal of the National Cancer Institute in the United lose his seat in the House of Lords and the Telegraph that minor royals Constitutional Council) in an alleged corruption scandal that has to do with Green Party, whose radicalization might make a political alliance with moderate days of sights and sounds from the period of impervious apathy which preceded crisis with unforeseeable consequences because of the fall in the price of oil. it said, adding, "The risk is a repeat of the scenario of the second half of government had made "a final decision" to have a state funeral (complete with a While the federal government will foot most of the bill for the funeral, "the city will have to cover costs for paving roads and painting houses," the German newspapers, which tend to avoid catch lines anyway, are calling it any kind, using straightforward catch lines like "The White House Scandal" or rushed to have their belated say, many of them posing as Old World even the economy and politics of the United States, if not of the entire planet, appears an amusing, absurd and incomprehensible triviality. Our presidents and prime ministers have never had such problems, partly because they are almost always Christian Democrats, or at any rate very Catholic, at least in words, and partly because they are almost always ugly and old and shadowed by energetic wives who do not permit them any distractions, or they are widowers pledged to chastity." But if they did commit such indiscretions, don't belong to it, those which it dreams of committing, but not those which it victim of political correctness. "It has come to this: the natural desire of a reciprocal pleasure that such a man has in the flattering attention of a pretty United States that could lead to a constitutional crisis. Indeed, this natural libidinous reaction could well have a major impact on the lives of "expose the sexual political correctness that distorts our law and our lives," The president's member featured as a subject in numerous his penis off his presidential pedestal into a throng of hysterical, achievement for which he deserves credit. She persuaded her nation why Bill used to think, in all good faith, that the fate of the peace process was in the scandal could not possibly be a coincidence. According to that version, the book The Private Lives of the Three Tenors a passage "imagining" a love him in an "imagined" romance. The same newspaper had a scoop over the weekend and having been a reporter for five, I have never seen a president in the president is visiting Capitol Hill for a private session with House Democrats. the horde has gathered anyway. We are hoping that he'll tell the Democratic House members something about the scandal in private, and they will pass it on inside the conference room. (He ducked the press and entered through a side trained on the microphone bank by the room's exit. (Capitol Hill security is treating the press with all the respect we have come to expect: We are penned is immediately and disappointingly obvious that the president said nothing about Topic A, and his Democratic allies didn't ask him about it. One by one the 100-mouthed monster: "Was there any discussion of the president's, ah, few of these futile interviews, I begin to discern three distinct genres of question is asked, sigh deeply, then say exactly this sentence: "The meeting was very, very positive. [Always "very, very." Never just "very."] We soon as the horde hears the words "Social Security," a silence falls. Pens stop scratching, cameramen turn off their high beams. Then reporters turn away and would not talk about Flytrap, why reporters should not ask him about it, and why they should be ashamed for even mentioning the subject. Time spent on involves a disjuncture between mouth and brain. The mouth becomes literally incapable of talking about the scandal: "He has already addressed this once. He were my name, I might not want to talk about the scandal either.) are mouthing these sweet nothings by the front door, the president heads out a was in the neighborhood, I thought I should drop by another scandal landmark on the Hill: the House Judiciary Committee. Any presidential impeachment will go glee. The Judiciary Committee offers as fine a display of intellect and Committee may or may not be judicious, but it will certainly be reform bill that everyone seems to agree with. But the Judiciary Committee, bless its heart, is a committee that can disagree to agree. After a few minutes of collegial discussion, presided over with mountainous dignity by Rep. Henry who has never found a subject he doesn't like arguing about (and has never hazy on this, make it either harder or easier to dismiss class action suits. one of the new breed of Republicans who looks like a choirboy and acts like Congress' parliamentary mantra: "Will the gentleman yield his time?" Since voice further. Frank counters by yelling the phrase again and again and again. wants to heave it at Frank. And this is what happens when they agree! window this weekend, has been compared in newspapers around the world to the several suicide notes that "only through my death can I prove my coincidence, the publication of such a photograph, taken inside a restaurant on the wake of the princess's death. At the same time, the charge made most that paparazzi were responsible for her death, has been implicitly princess's two sons, "rocketed in popularity" among Times readers naming their babies immediately after her death, while the popularity of the name reverberated around the world to almost the same extent as the one about its heritage" by setting the record for "the world's largest dancing dragon." convicted thieves warning them they were being kept under surveillance but said qualified to receive such cards would make the cost prohibitive." would be taken by his critics as evidence that he was "hungry for power, engaged in what is virtually slave labor, sewing leather footballs printed with reported, had told her fellow citizens that they had a duty to give immigrants this, their hostility to immigrants was increasing. The problem wasn't large, if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: conviction that the intimate life of a human being, even if he is the president of the United States, does not justify this obscene official inquiry. We therefore declare that the media for which we are responsible will not, as from generally failed to catch up with the idea that impeachment is becoming increasingly unlikely. The satirical magazine Private papers have in common is that their reporting simply reflects their every new turn of events." It takes quotations from both journalists' articles over several months to show, convincingly, the repeated inaccuracy of their words," Private Eye says, "Perhaps they could be joined on this verbal him cause to believe that the West means business." facing a rerun of the 1930s. "We are entering a similar era," he wrote. "But we have become so accustomed to the danger of excessive demand that we no longer contraction is under way," he added. "We are experiencing only the falling real wages throughout the region; stagnation and unemployment in on central bankers in advanced economies to consider whether it was time to loosen the reins on the money supply. For the United States, he recommended that pending budget surpluses be used for tax cuts and additional spending. was on the edge of an abyss and could plunge into "a planetary recession of which democracy, in several countries, could be the principal victim." The reason, he said, was that society was "ruled by the laws of everybody else." "In economics, as in psychoanalysis, understanding is the with the research facilities to stop lying and to tell the truth about the real international speculation to increase the financial resources of international governments around the world to make public international investments to show in the markets a taste for being different, for "finding it fashionable to be could govern such an ambitious currency is well founded," he wrote. "The nobody dares to utter the most relevant but most forbidden word of the headline "Japan Says Sorry to the Sun." Inside, it published what it claimed childhood membership in the Boy Scout movement ("I still cherish the memory of during World War II and promised new reconciliation initiatives. friendship toward Japan, published an editorial promising "a new era of better morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily) and "Pundit misguided government policy," in effect since the early 1970s when a military dictatorship was in power, that sought to populate the Amazonian forest with poor peasants from northeastern Brazil. The goal: to prevent the region's "annexation" by foreigners. "Condemned to destroy the forest, because a cleared area provides at best only two years of crops, the 'settlers' are the first victims of a perverse policy that unfortunately hasn't changed one jot since to act as a safety valve for the social tensions generated by the unjust children reading the words "I have a dream" from a book of King's speeches, as "Maybe we should burn books as well?" In a full page tribute to King, the paper focused, by contrast, on the plight of the peace process, blaming the United over the demolition of three Bedouin homes in the "unrecognized" western Sacrifice" for the deprived, called for an end to the slaughter of rams in the streets. "Rather than turn our cities into slaughterhouses," the paper said, the rams in appropriate places, preserve the meat in a hygienic manner, and distribute it in a fair way among all those who actually need it." government to cut income and corporate taxes in its promised emergency package to banish the "dark prospects" hanging over the country's economy. The rest of for a convicted pedophile and child killer as he was released from prison after filled in time between exotic holidays and shopping for clothes by putting in a otherwise exact replica of the Titanic to make its maiden voyage from reports the "slowdown in growth for the second quarter was across dole advance. Even so, Prime Minister Bill Skate assures the interviewer that "economic outlook is getting worse than was anticipated." in the future, a sentiment that dueled with a quotation from the minister of goods and service tax, which would "clean up the indirect tax system" and create jobs in the process. The package will also reduce taxes on families, extend various personal tax cuts, make changes in the social security tax, and and National parties) for using the tax plan as an election trump card, and an Age editorial blasts the government, noting that there has been "little headway against unemployment, manufacturing export growth has slowed, displace attention from other countries where the threat is very real, whereas reports increased security precautions by the United States in also reports rumors propagated on the Internet predicting the rumors as utterly false, citing the deplorable readiness of people to discovered a solution to its ubiquitous drug problem. Two high government officials were reported as discussing the matter, with one condoning extreme measures when it came to treatment of drug dealers. "Does that measure mean shooting them?" asked one. The response: "You can do whatever with them. We knows bombs will not lead to his overthrow, but feels it has to do something. utilitarian calculus: violence now by the West should help to prevent future concluded. Even the ultraconservative tabloid the Daily military installations, and also civilian infrastructures, from bridges to states that appear to be keeping their distance are in reality supporting us," missiles. "The situation today is quite different from the situation seven announced in an editorial the end of the New International Order. The United firmly opposed to military intervention. It is a heterogeneous front that battle with the Third World countries, which are equipping themselves with This was primarily for humanitarian reasons, she said, "but we also have other might view the prospect of a new conflict." Asked if she thought it was people around the country had been queuing up for gas masks. In an account said she was frustrated by the lack of progress in the Middle East peace talks look" in photographs left no room for doubt about her relationship with the president. There was no need for her to confess to anything, for those eyes were the "two principal witnesses" in the case and gave "irrefutable proof" of clemency that would contribute to the creation of a culture more favorable to accomplished." Soon after his speech, a violent protest broke out, during which emerged as a powerful contender for the German chancellorship. Current abilities." The liaison will involve joint training sessions, the sharing of criminal dossiers, and cooperative investigations centering on money laundering and the trafficking of firearms, drugs, diamonds, gold, and uranium. government leaders. A frustrated collection of journalists, activists, and friends out of old enemies," and sharing government information with the censors have been at work. On its Web site, however, the Times posts an archive of censored articles. A sidebar explains, "We are generally not allowed to do the following things: Report on human rights abuses. Criticize the president or his outposts to train potential Mars travelers, because the region offers isolated, freezing, rocky conditions, replicating a possible Mars mission, on which astronauts could be sequestered with a small group for long periods in a harsh morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit Powerlessness." An editorial said that "the long premeditated snub inflicted on States to get itself listened to, even by its closest allies." world's last Superpower" is "forced every day" to recognize "the relativity" of its power. "This phenomenon of insubordination" is exacerbated by "the relative "play Congress openly against the White House," the editorial went on. "Only a House is incapable of punishing his insolence as, six months before the midterm There was a striking contrast between the attention paid in the peace negotiations are effectively at an end. "For more than a year it has been customary to say that the peace talks are blocked, paralyzed, in grave yesterday there has been a strong temptation to say that they are dead and not which biological and chemical weapons might be used. In one of the interviews, the window of opportunity created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dominated for several days by the crisis threatening Foreign Secretary Robin company to sell arms to help overthrow the military junta in Sierra Leone, in to celebrate "the West's greatest Cold War victory: the breaking of the Berlin The airlift, it said, had been "conceived, directed and largely carried out by cripple rather than kill" in clashes with protestors. Quoting a military manual clearly threatening to kill others [or to] cause heavy material damage." If this doesn't work, it added, a platoon commander has the authority "to proceed personal troubles but on his contribution to peace in Ulster. In the Republic foolishness in his personal life "does not justify the persecution to which he has been subjected," nor take away from his achievements as president. "Among "radiant," received high praise from conservative Catholic the president "would probably fully agree that in terms of strength of has achieved more progress in the last two days than in the previous two faces inevitable bankruptcy and that, by the end of the year at the latest, it will have to admit it can't make payments on its foreign debts. is "just one of several banana skins the US leader dropped and stepped on in noting that "nothing was right about the summit, least of all its timing." Security Council, which has special responsibilities for the maintenance of 'international peace and security,' has openly applied the 'state's right of should be treated as such. However, they should not be punished without due process in the name of 'national security' or 'protection of citizens' lives.' drawing up regulations to try to stamp out sexual harassment based on a new report defining what kind of behavior is "inappropriate." It said, "Such staff to serve tea or to clean the workplace." Ogling colleagues or forcing female employees to sit beside their bosses at social events is also is also classified as sexual harassment," the paper added. morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit meant that the only official account of the visit to be transmitted from said the United States has rightly "elevated China to a far more central place in its foreign policy than it occupied in the past," given that "China is ally. China remains "an oppressive communist dictatorship," it said, and this stands in the way of a "genuine" partnership in any field besides trade and Though the size of the president's entourage made his trip seem "like the environmental deficiencies, the newspaper said that "the sheer audacity and improbability of the place so perfectly captured the spirit of the city that now threatening to undermine the most vital system of checks and balances in tougher," it said, adding that it will now be almost impossible to reportedly proposing to do, "it would detract from its credentials as the principal promoter and protector of the Middle East peace process," it said. is simply no option but to return to the path of peace and stability in the Unionist Party leader and first minister in the new Ulster assembly, had the Orange Order would voluntarily decide to return home by another route. Whitewater, the scandal he was appointed to investigate lo these many years evidence from them to the three judge panel he reports to, and that will certainly lead to indictments against White House aides. But the implication is that the only impeachable offenses he is pursuing relate to Flytrap. scandals themselves are too incomprehensible to make any charge stick. (Or, even if they're not incomprehensible, the media have never succeeded in may disrupt the scandal. In theory, a Flytrap Only report should make it much decks: Flytrap would disappear, and the other investigations would not remain to threaten him. He'd be humiliated but safe. But although a Flytrap Only much truth as he needs to. The more you press him, the more likely he is to be honest. Anything that eases pressure makes him more likely to lie. So if he brazen out Flytrap. After all, he only has to beat one scandal, not six. opponents. They repeated the names of the scandals like a mantra: Whitewater, matter what these scandals involved, they served primarily to justify Flytrap, a way to sanitize the sex scandal. See, it's not just about sex. It's about a pattern of obstruction of justice and perjury dating back to his years as is just about sex? I am looking forward to a week of creative new recommendation and said she never told the truth. She was a shameless hussy who the past month, and especially last week, there has been a kinder, gentler sounded sweetly sympathetic: She told a friend "it breaks my heart" to testify graduate school in sociology, she's scrimping because she doesn't want to burden her parents financially, she is so much a hostage to the media that she taken up knitting. The coverage of her day in court was uniformly kind, rarely mentioning that she has lied before and changed her story now. Why the "strange new respect"? First, the Golden Rule of story: Reporters needed a new angle for this round of Flytrap. Result: Knitting almost as much as a Penthouse spread would have. She is also enjoying the imprimatur of the law. Whenever someone testifies, gravitas follows. The mere fact of giving sworn testimony to a court imbues a witness with credibility and weight: She is participating in the measured and solemn savage her if the president is going to admit an affair. a nut cake, but the effort will be made. A National Enquirer story, presidential obsession. White House officials are tallying and comparing all she will be killed (metaphorically speaking, of course). his visit, but they were far apart in attributing the blame. "rudely" announcing that he would have to buy a ticket like anyone else. It Holocaust Memorial Museum, after museum officials refused to treat him as a intelligence to the White House because it often seemed to find its way to the revelations as "damning and devastating," and said, "They will inevitably cast deserves not only an apology from the White House but credible assurances that such episodes will not occur again," the Times said. "There is one move the President can make as belated compensation. He must show that there is more In more moderate language, the Financial Times also described editorial. "The White House should make it clear that both will be government sources as saying that the attacks on her had to be seen in the White House. "The Government believes she has been critical in focusing the ceasefires," the newspaper said. "As the process enters a crucial phase, the Ambassador and will not be deflected by the attacks." Times started publishing these poems over the weekend, there has been addition of a political crisis to the existing economic crisis might result in "a revolutionary situation." The possibility that the country might be left without legislative power for the next three months is "fraught with the most general situation is rapidly approaching the critical point: It faces simultaneous financial, industrial, social, and political meltdowns; it must with the danger of Afghan military action on its southern border. received from the same person so many reasons for hope and then so many mindless, unjustifiable terrorism" going to "the heart of the tensions in our troubled society." Making no reference to the United States or to the remain divided." It urged people to "use this opportunity to recommit ourselves to a united city and isolate all those who have different and sinister believe, but pure profit motive which seems to have weighed." Instead, it advocated a closer look at a prospective International Monetary Fund package, in the new laws they are drafting to make it easier for the police and courts concluded, "Civil liberties, once eroded, are not easily regained." The morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit labeled "nuclear test." The caption: "This will definitely cure your ailment. in praising the government for carrying out the tests and urging the rest of simplest answer would be for both to emerge from a rather inadequate closet and paper was rather less upbeat. It urged the government to cut down drastically on spending and to devise an economic policy "attractive enough for foreign would now "take measures which correspond" with its outrage. "It is here that action plan to tackle the political and economic fallout of the tests, the stance towards foreign capital than it has so far." The newspaper attacked "the hypocrisy which governs US policy on nuclear matters" and said "no country has the right to dictate to another what policies it can and cannot follow." nuclear club. "If the theory is correct that a credible nuclear deterrent makes will automatically be unnecessary if both acquire nuclear weapon capability." afraid of wars," he said. "If there is a war, we have to fight." Asked by a surprised reporter if he really meant what he said, the minister replied, "Yes, security strategy" if it is to be "adequately prepared to meet the critical universal desire to wipe such weapons of mass destruction from the face of the Earth." But it also attacked the United States "for excluding certain tests that do not involve the detonation of nuclear devices" from the provisions of world's largest nuclear power, and its failure to take nuclear disarmament the nuclear powers meet their disarmament responsibilities in order to prevent its nuclear credentials comes down to nothing more reputable than a desire for intensify nationalist fervor in that country. "Instead of feigning horror over realities of another major member of the nuclear club, and use his visit to make sure its government knows that its future lies in forging closer ties to week, it said, the government should make up its mind. "What should it tell any attempt by any country to impose a single model, let alone its own rule, on the world is unrealistic and even dangerous," he said. military, will only push the region toward more tension, and will only increase the regime's attitude. Deceit and the evil intentions are too deeply rooted in had subsequently decided that Turkey's best interests in dealing with the weekly Telegraph column. "Our Prime Minister, less formally, wore an evening shirt with a turned down collar, a style introduced to this country by had squandered its "immense prestige and capacity for action" in the Middle East and would not recover it "until such time as it forces the hand of government interference in their traditional way of life, and especially its editorial, calls on the United States to abolish the annual "certification" process by which it sits in judgment on other countries' efforts against drugs. "little connection with what is happening in the market for narcotics," and that have the misfortune to be suppliers." The Financial Times reported administration of Internet addresses, because it feared they would "consolidate that can prove crucial for the survival of broods." This was the first ever recorded example of bird prostitution, the paper said. Other stories in neighbors against his plan to create a 500-car parking lot outside the walls of ultimately take place which will have devastating effects in the region and newspaper, devoted both a report and an editorial to the news that a surge in deliverance. Changes to be announced shortly "are not expected to alter the key part, where the demon is ordered to leave the person, but to shorten the accompanying prayers and invocations." The editorial said it was "encouraging morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit feet, was not greatly admired abroad. "Violence and boredom at the opening also sniffy about what it saw as tedious French artistic pretentiousness. The on the glory of soccer as "the only truly universal sport." A special supplement reported on everything from the exploitation of football symbols by leaders," rejecting violence, promoting democracy, respecting human rights, and encouraging economic reform. But now they seem "bent upon repeating the cruel and monotonous rites of the religion of totalitarianism." "Offering themselves old Pentagon stock, which they are now discharging copiously on each other," earlier this year, is hardly better, it added. He was the inventor of the detainees and establish a "Government of National Unity" as first steps toward civility to this nation," the paper said. "There has been so much violence, so much corruption, so much arbitrariness and so much criminality in this land." Another recommended priority: to "restore confidence in the spirit of Finally, it should organize a "National Conference to discuss the sore problems that make us a disunited and grossly discontented people." leaders this week to rid their continent of tyranny, was just as pessimistic: world and the dustbin of history for himself, he has no other choice," the paper said. "His reward would be just as tangible. He'll be remembered as the lamented "the speed with which, through a banal pair of sandals, there is happening in record time the iconic beatification of one of the most savage mass murderers of our time." "It's a shame for those millions of skeletons to which the victims of the great Pol Pot massacre have been reduced. They can't sanctions could be lifted immediately. They recoiled at the specifics of indefinitely." The Telegraph also voiced the United Nations' reaction to do little to pull that country out of its economic mudslide, wrote the drained by the minute." The gravity of the crisis is underlined continually, and the growing concerns are (appropriately) illustrated on a global scale, since any injury felt by Japan would also be felt internationally. The Japan Times reported that the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry had called on the government for a hard by the prolonged economic slump." The paper also noted that Prime Minister ministers in Japan's history." As the crisis escalates, the critics pile on or other criteria." Urging "all our people to take active and positive part in acknowledged the country's "remarkable achievements" in embracing democracy and rights record, the independent daily Post Express, which opposes the dictatorship, reported an for saying the United States would not accept the emergence of any military laws or disenfranchise its military men as second class citizens." In an Express urged the pontiff "to plead the cause of political and other political activities and stifles human rights." It added, "Although the US was over the past few years shows considerable tolerance." governments' plans to put the money into health and education." But it also pact between part of the country's respectable political right and the racist Monde and Libration but even more strongly in the liberal press in ambassador," the newspaper said that, despite her hotline to the White House always something of a loose cannon, not much given to bureaucratic niceties or offering a promising lifeline for newspapers during the dog days of August. fellatio and penetration, he will founder in ridicule. If he admits to having lied, he will be found guilty of perjury." But it was still unlikely that Congress would find enough evidence to bring a charge of impeachment to trial, not be toppled by the affair. The president would be wrong to commit perjury shockingly wrong." It said there was also some irony "in expecting a president to be absolutely truthful on personal matters when he heads a government which paper concluded, "This summer now seems likely to be remembered for the climax would unseat a hugely popular President." And "in the extremely unlikely event the White House would suddenly turn on the Congress, accusing the Republicans of trying to reverse the will of the people by abusing the legal system," presidency is able to run its course, it already resembles a drifting hulk, gutted by the tawdry activities of its skipper, bereft of the moral authority were a family where business came first, the article said, and that meant two something like its current shape will be one of the most expensive divorce settlements ever recorded. And second, that the settlement will be reached out will survive his present crisis. "His visit here was exemplary in its political substance and confirmed the sure touch he continues to demonstrate on the the possibility that he might not stay in office for long. that the United States cannot remain indefinitely untouched by the troubles in part by stock market gains, a continuing slump on Wall Street will slow growth as well as inflation. If this proves to be a correction, the Fed's task will possibilities that would require prompt and decisive action." government, published a report proposing the removal of the queen's last to succeed her. The conservative Daily Telegraph, in its main editorial, called this a demand for a "republic by another name." The conservative tabloid Daily exactly lend weight to the think tank's call for an elected monarchy." that it will be a long time before she is canonized, but quoted her successor, Journalism Review about the extent of his personal interference in the "absolutely free rein" provided they abide by "some general rules." These, he explained, were a "constructive" editorial policy for the country in which the paper is located and an appreciation of history: "We are all moving towards this is the right time to be alive. The rules are very clear." Flytrap II enters Week II, it is segueing gracefully into the second stage of Republicans' new strategy seems to be: (Possibly) Forgive and (Maybe) and others hinted at over the weekend, seems to go like this: president is trapped, and everyone else is embarrassed. The only remedy is a public, explains that he lied to protect his daughter and wife, and apologizes impeachment proceedings) are inclined to be forgiving (unless, of course, there is evidence of other high crimes). Other Republicans, he implied, could also be may have been arrived at only after much jujitsu with public opinion polls. The Forgive and Forget strategy has this virtue for Republicans: It is the only way they're going to win a clean PR victory. The polls are impossible for them. Whether they've reached their conclusion for cynical or idealistic reasons, Hatch and Co. do seem to have hit on the only solution to persecutors enough to quiet them, and save us from two more years of this horror. (All this assumes the allegations are true. Insert usual caveats here: grace to pull off such an apology in a way that doesn't seem phony (he'll blame it on his own big heart, his fierce desire not to hurt wife and child). impeachment hearings. An apology would prevent them. The Flytrap investigation Republicans decide later that they don't actually forgive and forget, it may be too late. An apology could wipe away all the scandals but campaign finance. closest thing to an official source who is talking, deflected the idea of an apology when quizzed about it. But if the administration isn't buying, its allies are. Democrats are matching Republicans big heart for big heart. Barney around? If I were a betting man, I would wager that during this week, other listen. Surely he's willing to tarnish the legacy he cares so much about in criticisms of the United States, which it said were a break with "the treatment usually reserved for the president of the world's greatest power," the leaders were not totally manipulable and controllable people. "This message will have to be listened to by the US and by every other power," the editorial the many. "These are attitudes and practices that must change, if we want the slavery was "too late" and "only rubs salt into wounds." It demanded flag means a lot of sacrifice," one of them said. "It means that you are for the world's inaction in the face of the genocide in his country. Referring people need, and deserve, more than this if they are to rebuild their lives, which would not have been shattered had he acted sooner." United States and said in an editorial that Argentine citizens were also rapidly arming themselves as a reaction to a surging crime rate. "Yet massively and understood international situations. "He is a man fully capable of of war had been lifted, and pressure on the United States to back down "taking for itself rights that the international community has not accorded deterrent capability, has made the possibility of nuclear warfare more tangible, has frightened away tourists, has generated huge expenditures, and diplomacy. But to exchange public greetings with a mass murderer accords him a fiercely attacked the "mischievous and irresponsible role" of a certain is to open an office in New York because of "the strength of interest from all methods are deemed to be good as long as, in the perception of the morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit page that "in the euphoria which has overcome the country there is a dominating idea that something has changed, or may change, in the collective racist, it said (only two members of the French team were of French, National Front Party had "found itself, for the first time in ages, unheard, in there was "still a future for French confidence, for French ambition, for French unity." Referring to the multiracial nature of the winning team, the They gave us a French pride, they offered a model to the universe." often remarked before upon the French tendency towards emotionalism and which to draw the attention of the French to the shortcomings of their nationalized industries, fiscal honesty, road safety, hygiene, and performance at Waterloo. Otherwise, it would all really be unbearable. Shepherd." In an editorial, the newspaper said, "Evil has stalked our country, be a powerful focus for healing if the Church leaders were to nominate a day when we could each reassert the commitment to basic Christian principles we world will ask the same question, and get the same answer. There need not, and called on the next prime minister to dissolve the Lower House to permit a blamed the election defeat on "rising unemployment and bankruptcies." that the election had "injected greater uncertainty into Japan's political future, but at the same time the outcome has raised hopes for the realization of greater justice and fairness in the nation's parliamentary democracy." It his job. "His successor will have to set a firm course and stick to it," it said. "Unless the will is there to restructure and introduce transparency, the system could collapse, with the prospect of dragging down the rest of the billion yen on its defense bill over the next three years, while Japan's defense expenditure continues to rise. "Why has Japan been unable to reap a liberalization are not the only areas in which Japan lags behind Western countries; it appears that Japan's defense, too, is due for a thoroughgoing morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit fly. She was miraculously unhurt when she landed on the sidewalk in a "may survive in office far longer than anyone initially expected." While students would not be deterred from trying to bring down another unpopular leader even by threats of military force, "there is no longer the strong President seems to have acquired a surprisingly firm grip on the reins of elections to "possibly prevent a descent into anarchy." establish law and order, stamp out corruption, and above all help the poor who carries out what he promises to do: abolish pork barrel politics." "That, indeed, would be his greatest performance," it added. opposition in principle to nuclear proliferation, had "left no doubt that morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit will decide whether to table its latest Middle East peace initiative only after political considerations, the paper said. "As in the past, a political concept is totally overriding sensible urban considerations," it added. The omission." But the "disinterested historian, reviewing the history of the clear to all and the verdict unambiguous: No apology is required." offenders must "recognize their debt and pay it off," the paper said. "First, and second, by ceasing to offer blacks in their own countries no choice at all with the news that fierce Roman Catholic opposition is causing the French government to prevaricate over its plans to recognize unions between workers in detention camps" to "subdue them before repatriation." The poisoned shot dead, and others tortured, beaten and robbed before being deported." In an editorial, the newspaper described these events as "the human cost of financial carnage" and demanded "a new international financial architecture" under which "developing countries can insulate themselves from vicious reversals of investment flows." Criticizing the United States, the paper concluded, "the and finally resign from the government, unleashed fresh press attacks on Prime Levy was right to have resigned over the budget's stinginess on welfare, because "much funding has been diverted to settlements in the territories, to majority in the cabinet will seek to exploit Levy's resignation to delay the implementation of the next withdrawal in the West Bank, and perhaps even to the worst part of each rapid, and that escaping each does not mean that he has survived unscathed. The damage is cumulative, and eventually the boat takes on so much water it is impossible to steer." The only way to stabilize the concluded, is "by marking out a clear stance on the peace process that either works or results in new elections. Move forward, or go back to the people; destroyed." But for this to be achieved, the government must stop trying to criticism by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund," which were withholding aid payments "citing tardiness in effecting reforms in the energy and telecommunications sectors and in tackling corruption generally." The Nation also reported that "a thorough cleaning" of the venue for by "hundreds of prisoners under tight security." In a separate article, the Nation reported on the desperate in a skiing accident was the subject of an exceptionally heartless editorial in tedium of tabloid headlines involving an overdose of the usual ingredients of bad, smutty, phonemic [wow!] pun in the past tense." risk as a challenge, and believe that failure to meet any challenge is cowardice," he wrote. "Cowardice is unforgivable. This imposes on them a heroic view of life, though continuous heroism has the odds stacked against them." has been doomed by its best as well as by its worst qualities; most of all, perhaps, by the rashness of its courage. As each new blow falls, we react with delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit Central" remains, which a government commission has found to be those of the last czar, repentance and reconciliation' is shaping up as one lousy historical event." attend, despite the church's refusal to accept the authenticity of the remains, the damage has already been done, the editorial said, and "[a] historical occasion which at the very least deserved both gravity and grace has been playing down the crippling effects of drought on the country's grain harvest because it knows it cannot afford to provide compensation to farmers. The paper football hooligans now to prevent further violence at the next international known German troublemakers, but to back this up with fiercer measures such as immobilizing their cars or, as a last resort, locking them up. The conservative potentially disastrous effects of this scandal on the world's greatest cycling praised the Ministry of Sport for having apparently decided "to burst the boil" into the process rather than exclude him, but asked, "All the same, can one tolerate the imprisonment of more than two thousand prisoners of conscience in a country which one is seeking to make one's 'strategic partner'?" morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit Middle East peace process in defiance of his own country's foreign policy. only message had been that "whatever he does, [Prime Minister Benjamin] power to make his own foreign policy as "an unprecedented, unhealthy and dangerous situation," and added that by fighting against his country's diplomacy, he had "forfeited the right to be considered a statesman." "If he should one day take his chance in a presidential election, it should be loony tendency." In the last few days they have "tightened the noose of foreign affairs front." It said that his "soft policy" toward China was marks. The paper said that if the International Monetary Fund and World Bank would be to get credits and conduct a devaluation at the same time. his public appearances. In an editorial, the paper blamed Japan for the ill feeling it continued to generate in the countries it fought in World War years after the war, the government and people of Japan made no real effort to understand the wrenching experience of war and the anguish of those in other a time, "those who felt themselves victimized by Japan might have felt at least somewhat mollified"; but that "with the passing of time while we do nothing, however, discontent and ill will can coalesce into bitter enmity." delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit Central" petulant" opposition to the court, which was established by an accord signed in more decent world," the FT said "there would be more reason to celebrate "superpower that sees itself as guardian of the world's conscience should think wants to be consistent with its own pretensions, it has no choice but to approve the idea of a world system of justice." And whether or not the United States and the court "love each other," it predicted they will have to "work nuclear five did not want their right to commit mass murder to be compromised a paragraph that defined as a war crime an occupying power's transfer of a civilians to territory it has occupied. "This attempt to place the relocation all that is and can be good about our beloved country." continent might still provide hope for all its people. But if "political chicanery and corruption" continue, the term might be "soon enough consigned to to keeping the country a presidential republic, the Great Council of Chiefs in Pacific, reincorporated the Union Jack into its own flag after people round her neck to protect her from harmful energy rays. The Daily Mail that it "contains a 'magical configuration' of quartz and other crystals which contained characters and scenes unique to her historical novel about the slave published work, but claimed that she had done nothing wrong because the book was a "reference" and her novel was intended to be a "seamless narrative using century, writers borrowed freely from each other without shame or punishment. Books were copied by hand prior to the rise of the printing press, and individuality became widespread. These laws provided legal remedies for plagiarism. The courts have ruled that a work cannot be legally copied if it is idea. Fifty years after authors die, their works enter the "public domain" and similarity" to the plaintiff's original. It sounds like a legal blur because it is. Different courts have different opinions on what constitutes "substantial infringement. Also, the doctrine of "fair use" allows writers to quote limited sections of a work, as long as it is germane, properly attributed, and doesn't undercut sales of the original. The courts ruled that The Nation Ford's memoir in an article that was published slightly before Ford's book reached stores. The courts can be as fuzzy about what constitutes fair use as they are about what constitutes substantial similarity. courts find infringement only in instances where language, images, or music were lifted wholesale. They rarely consider cases in which a character was copied or a plot was stolen. Thousands of writers bring suit each year claiming their copyright has been violated, but almost none win satisfaction in court. However, the courts strictly police the unlicensed "sampling" of music (the insertion of a passage into another artist's musical collage). Book and software pirates are prosecuted under the copyright laws, but pirates are not Historical Association, etc.) investigate formal charges of plagiarism. Reprimands can come from the associations or from colleges and universities themselves. Accusations of plagiarism seem to be the greatest deterrent. were brought. (Click for a comparison of passages that the historians shown to her three years before her film's release. These cases, like most credible suits brought against the studios, were settled out of court. directors and producers avoid signing rejection letters, making it difficult to prove that they had prior access to the material, a legal prerequisite to prove magazine proved with this prank in the '80s: It shipped the screenplay of Later he admitted that he had borrowed it himself from a that plagiarism is pathology, akin to kleptomania. Accused plagiarists are from obvious sources (from their colleagues or authoritative works). Academics professors are let off the hook to plagiarize again because their colleagues that the film's screenwriters read her historical novel about the slave and plot twists. In a legal brief, her lawyers claim that: Punch Productions for six to eight months as a writer on the "Echo of black man involved with the printing of abolitionist literature. screenwriters rendered the similarities irrelevant. "extraordinary" that the greatest democracy in the world should permit itself anatomy." He added: "One can't altogether rule out that these young women may be showing off or lying. For women, too, can sometimes lie." usual, lots of French people will guffaw over all this fuss about a few indiscretions." But it said the French should understand that the scandal was not spared any detail, whether spicy or not, of the relations between Bill and not step down until his guilt of either obstructing justice or suborning perjury "has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt." "As was illustrated policy is the proper forum for him to do so," it added. Whatever the impact on Times said that "what the US needs above all, and what it is probably not going to get, is a rapid resolution to this unhappy affair." It said that a president under siege couldn't give the world the leadership it needed. "The thrown off course, and this may be just the beginning," the FT said. no rational discussion about the great policy issues so long as this The liberal Guardian said the talk of impeachment was premature. "Impeachment is a "That 'droit de seigneur' White House tradition of serial infidelity, as foolish. But it is not yet the stuff of impeachment." morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit punctuated pauses and delicate emotional overtones to create songs that were at that seemed to comprehend the rhapsody of romance, the obscure logic of love." that "My Way" was "one of his less memorable songs." as well as "nuclear and missile technology while issuing public denials and of his electorate's disillusionment and wrath," the paper said in an editorial. "If it does not test, the government might find it difficult to survive against will probably take it as a personal affront" and impose sanctions that would attack on the International Monetary Fund for its handling of the economic the International Monetary Fund will be physically able to hand over the next tranche of its bailout package." While admitting "the problem is primarily the newspaper said that "it will now be difficult to rebut the increasing success a program that is partly responsible for such bloodshed and one which that the meeting served merely to "highlight the limits of power in an anarchy, participants were "either divided or unable to offer much beyond the government's advice on how to deal with one. There being a shortage of gas masks were "not very effective" anyway. An alternative: Break up pieces of coal, tie them in a wet towel around one's face, and use that for breathing. An all those questioned were very optimistic and "unanimously ruled out any doubt regarding the government's preparedness to face any eventuality." Although the instinctive patriotic solidarity that would accompany the president into president knew the risks involved. "The citizens of this great power are ready wrote. "But no first lady and no stock exchange index could ever save a schizophrenia, depression, neuroses, and personality disorders." amplification given to this book on Fleet Street, particularly by the of his entourage for his material, said he had made no attempt to contact the princess's family because he believed they would not respond. One of the is a new marriage. I need it like [I need] a bad rash in my face." isn't the mummy bee, then the daddy bee might have to resign as President of the United States," said Dad. The resignation or impeachment of the president Last Hours," and an editorial saying about the White House "soap opera," "The world knows how the plot will end, and there are few episodes left." But the its head high. The land of the free has upheld the finest democratic editorial titled "The Indignity of It All," blaming the president fully for his misfortunes. "His words are weasel ones, his actions based forever on political expediency," it said. "He still appears to think that the affair is a was "vilified by the White House aides" as a result. "Once the members of the that the President is a borderline sociopath who must be removed at once." In an editorial, the Telegraph described the president as sitting "in a political wheelchair." "He may beat his breast. He may blacken his opponents. His charm and theatrical abilities may see him through for a bit longer, but it is, sadly, to no purpose. He cannot save himself; he can only Paralyzed and Demoralized." The paper also ran a short and unoriginal comment on the dilemmas facing Al Gore as he comes daily closer to fulfilling his received promised compensation for switching to other crops. "The authorities must take the challenge of crop substitution seriously," it said. by the Department of the Army. All the rest fall under the jurisdiction of the Unknowns and the Tomb of the Unknown Dead from the Civil War, the latter a reserve. To conserve space, the government adopted new eligibility rules that made the cemetery a more exclusive --and therefore more including those who won the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross, Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, or Purple years of active duty or active reserve service who qualify for retired pay upon veteran who is the parent, brother, sister, or child of an eligible person already interred. Interment must be in the same grave as the primary eligible, veteran can have no dependent children at the time of death. government established a waiver system for exceptions granted by the apparently lied about having served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. (Besides, the Merchant Marine is not a part of the armed forces.) Other widow of Chief Justice Warren Burger; Army veteran and Drug Enforcement government employees who are "killed in the course of their service to reservists who die while on active duty for training. "Humanitarian acknowledged, said West, citing a World War I veteran who didn't automatically forwarded to the superintendent and the secretary of the Army from members corpses have a short shelf life, the decisions are made quickly. remains of any veteran who received an honorable discharge. village was established on the Lee plantation, and included a hospital, a talked of "unprecedented diplomatic pressure" being imposed on the increasingly frantic, bossy telephone calls (following those he had already received from editorial of the Manila Times was devoted, on the other hand, to congratulating security and personal staff, as befits the powers and responsibilities of his not counting the inevitable "business delegation" composed of representatives Times added, pointing out that "every single presidential aide or factotum for allowances alone," on top of which there were the air fares, hotel bills, canceling his trip could send the wrong signals to the world that we are going under. Possibly so. Or worse, they might think we have slid down to utter poverty, we can't even finance our chief executive's voyages overseas," the say 'we are a rich country pretending to be poor.' For a long while it did seem like we, the people, were consigned to endure poverty, while our leaders wallowed in assumed wealth at our expense. The President has shown a fine civilians, under orders," the newspaper said. "The defectors said special election, only to see the result quashed and its members jailed for five years. said that, by rejecting a political solution and refusing to protect the population, "the government bears a large part of the responsibility." alone. This was not so surprising, it said, when it was taken into account longer have either respect for or confidence in their police." ideology, backed by violence, intimidation and clandestine propaganda, grows rapidly across the region, say experts, researchers and social workers." The considerably higher in the east. The German police put the number of active rise in four years. But that figure represents only the hard core of those views, and often tacitly endorsing violence against the heterodox." consciously embrace racist or far right ideas, seem ready to work themselves up into a hysterical state over immigrants and foreigners, as the recent uproar year is that the mainstream political agenda is being affected by racist and has a duty to curb the growth of racist attitudes whether in the crude protest form they take in the east or the more subtle variants seen in the west," the inside pages across most of the rest of the world. It didn't, for example, make because it would be "a slap in the face of all Holocaust deniers." Pope, in his turn, increases the pressure against the embargo, he will participate once again in collapse of a Communist regime." Far East and the Pacific region, newspapers gave prominence to the failure of the latest International Monetary Fund rescue package to restore faith in the other than the probably violent overthrow of the Government [of President collapsing currency and hyperinflation provoked food riots this week in the economy was astonishing," adding that he had failed to consider any of the privately owned farmland, most of which was owned by whites. farmers from black peasants who, otherwise, would rise up and kill [them]," he will pause and rethink his positions on the land issue, the economy and English lord) had been outraged by hints that his health was responsible for announced this week that the concert was being canceled for "unforeseen saying that he was in perfect health and would still be happy to come if the orchestra did. The organizers were now trying to persuade him to come without the orchestra, the newspaper added, "but the chances of that seem rather stabbed to death in his apartment with a collection of gay pornographic magazines at his feet. Police said they "could not exclude" the possibility morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit transatlantic aviation." Meanwhile, air transport needs to be brought within be "to get governments out of the airline business, other than to the extent required to ensure safety, essential infrastructure, and free competition." that was little read and even less talked about," it said. "She axed the region and gone so far as to "risk its standing in the eyes of the nuclear power stations on its territory," the paper said. But it concluded that run, because cooperation with one of the world's most hateful regimes is the brink of total instability." A "wave of people's wrath" is already spreading across the country, it said, despite forecasts by analysts that mass civil unrest will not break out until the fall. Referring to protests by defense industry workers, miners, teachers, doctors, and energy sector workers, gang to trial." Underestimating the present threat could be fatal not only for the government but also for the whole country, the paper added. to help meet the cost of burying armed robbers, lunatics, and unclaimed bodies. sometimes had to pay for such burials out of his own pocket. The cost is often high: Delayed release by authorities means the bodies are decomposed and require "extra burial materials." Since the state stepped up its campaign against banditry, the agency has been burying an average of three such bodies a the independent counsel not to "lose sight of the broader picture": It said his office was created not only "to assure the unfettered investigation of charges against the highest government officials" but also to ensure "that a morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit crops will help consumers and the environment. The prince said he will not eat food made from such produce; nor will he give it to his family or friends: Genetic engineering "takes mankind into realms that belong to God and to God significant that the United States, one of the largest producers of mines, has eliminating land mines," said the paper, wondering why such a major policy president to "show a more specific course of action leading to an early are deposited around the world and people are being "killed or injured at a over. The parallel lines did not meet, a unified field could not be found." disenfranchised barely five years after the country became a democracy" if the government continues insisting that all citizens possess a new identity document if they are to register as voters in next year's general election. minister of sport's promise to "intervene decisively" to democratize sport and put an end to its being "a predominantly white affair in a predominantly black country." What about women, the paper asked in an editorial. What about the disabled? "They, too, should be allowed to play in the national rugby team. One is not referring here to the mentally disabled, who are already well rights." There is also the question of "the Third Sex," the paper went on. "It is disgraceful that we do not know whether gays and lesbians are represented in religious law) police objects, are not. The authorities are also waging war on drugs and sex, the paper said, and owners of "love houses" sometimes hire a mullah to sit at the entrance to pronounce every entering couple "man and wife" morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit had avoided doing. In Shanghai, he was unwavering: "We don't support an idiot to have committed the foul that got him kicked out of the game ("an .Why do we always need a scapegoat in a case like this?" football," noting the team's fortitude in playing a man down for almost the entire second half. The Telegraph also nabs a quote from the queen: When asked if she'd been rooting for the team, Her Royal Highness responded, "Well, I think one should." The Guardian wonders why the English team is bad at penalty shots (the match was decided in a penalty shootout). Dismissing the possibility of inferior talent, the paper decides it has something to do with the national character: "Is there some cancerous part of the English psyche quotes several English fans declaring they were "robbed" by a missed call But it's a game," says one English fan. Offering a less cavalier attitude of election: the president of the nation or the coach of the national team. I he had ordered showed there was no nerve gas on the site, the paper claimed. An editorial described the missile attacks as a disaster: "The hasty resort to violence shows that yet again the US is failing to grasp the political reasons diminished by sickness and by his obsession with power, who fails in everything less handicapped. "In contrast to the dollar, but just like the ruble, he is devalued, ridiculed and lacking credibility," Libration said. "It is a far from ideal position from which to negotiate with a partner who has nothing more to lose and who cunningly exerts an effective blackmail by threatening titled "The Crisis of the Lame Ducks," the paper's founder and former Editor terrorism is not getting the full backing "of all politicians in Congress, all how the vast machinery of United States intelligence, military, and diplomatic suggest he needed a cruise missile strike against terrorists to enhance failure" unless it is accompanied by diplomatic efforts to promote claimed to be sole "international sheriff, judge and hangman, all at one and the same time." It asked: "If the US is to replicate the judicial standards of the Wild West across the global stage, what need for the flummery of the United Nations and all the talk that goes with it of international law and morality? cosmonauts in the 1960s. Their training, kept secret from even their wives, involved making them lie motionless for two months with their heads lower than their legs, keeping them for long periods in isolation chambers in total darkness and silence, making them give samples of bone marrow and muscle and him pictures of food. Only now are the stories leaking out, the paper said. more than any other, has been steeped in blood and controlled by the power of morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit state of the Middle East peace process. But this did not prevent her from "in a pretty strong position in his cabinet." But when asked if the United FT and all German newspapers. In an editorial page analysis, the FT said that "without a successful merger of minds, the transaction without conquest" and attributed this to the launch of the euro. "The single the negotiations reflected the increased power of the German automobile dentists against mercury fillings, which they claim to be dangerous. They are asking all their fellow dentists to sign an appeal against such fillings (even Abbey Choir as a result of their participating in the Princess's funeral service." The choirboys and their parents didn't receive any money in expenses, even though "a number of parents spent hundreds of pounds cutting short holidays to return their sons to sing at the service, which was broadcast live to hundreds of millions of viewers across the world," the newspaper said. excellent move when he invited his predecessor, John Major, to campaign with newspaper urged that the traditional French boundary between public and private morality be maintained. Many of them also "wondered if this may not be the start of an evolution affecting all democracies because of the distrust that surrounds political leaders, the latitude permitted to judges, and the pressure judiciary and the media, and no democracy is immune from that." Monde pointed out that, until now, episodes involving the mingling of had provoked many protests about the intrusion into his privacy. This but emotional sympathy, "demonstrating once again that the French don't confuse naked woman, blindfolded and holding the scales of justice as he ate little the president's chair in the Oval Office and reading with dismay the newspaper report fall far short of the constitutional requirements for reversing the people's electoral choice." This, it said, is in their own interests. "They can family, and has done nothing to warrant impeachment." The liberal Guardian carried a future." The West can't justify giving the country any more funds, it said, that the prime minister had no choice, because no single political party is pill this week has lifted the taboo on discussion of sexual dysfunction. It published figures showing that "the French suffer more frequently than was morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit democracy" and that the danger "will not recede" until the mainstream parties One Nation. "The essence of that challenge is that One Nation peddles simplistic certainties in times that are anything but simple and certain," the Age said. "The Prime Minister has, through timidity and ineptness, helped to make this monster. He must lead the way in ensuring that it does not Morning Post ran its second editorial in a week about One Nation, observing general election," the paper said. "Rather, their job is to work out ways of policy task is to deal with "the challenge of China, and the possibility of a countries." It concluded, "When the alternative is the unthinkable, it is churlish to quibble over dates, venues and terms of reference." female fans around the world are in despair," it claimed. But the paper also because, if anything serious were going on, her daughter would have told her performance in the film Titanic and had met him in a New York night commission to investigate all the accusations against the president, and there independence from. In the meantime, everyone who wanted to be independent from millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers. "This contradiction of properly to terms with the interweaving of show business and death, of dollars and necessary response which should not be understood as blind retaliation for suffering terrorism can bring to innocent people,' he said. 'I strongly support headline of its editorial: "Diversionary action." The paper clearly laid out its Wag the Dog theory: "After a weekend of sexual revelations and lies, which have taken a severe toll on his reputation, the President with the help of the is [a] clear way of demonstrating that the institution of the US presidency is Inside, an opinion piece suggested that on hearing news of the bombardment, "no impartial judge could avoid the immediate suspicion that it was a desperate observed, "If we allow our fear of retaliation to dictate our action or inaction, we will have handed the terrorists the ultimate victory." An analysis said, terrorism, which tries to deter terrorists and make them pay a price for their be immediately confirmed, the critical factor here is not the damage that was negative note: "In the absence of precise intelligence, the administration with the United States; and partial sanctions have already been imposed on sanctions law last year, even though it is included on the list of countries show had apologized in only a guarded way, refusing to accept responsibility, have infected several small children, killing two. But the newspaper's practical advice to the public seemed excessively relaxed under the circumstances, saying merely that flu symptoms include fevers and chills and can take as much as two weeks to recover from. "Do not struggle into work," it little cousin had already caught the flu was being urgently studied by the Hong spokesman said the virus had so far been "relatively inefficient" but might now of the press, though it was generally devoid of any spirit of peace or his eyes out," the boy's mother said. "All the innocence has gone and it can Clauses on the influence of the United States and mentioned that, "according to is so terrified by the experience that it should be seen as a form of child charity appeal in history with an editorial asking for money to save the for herding their cattle." "Beside the ox, the ass and the sheep around the attack on the United States, this time over the practice of eating turkey at Cowboys. This was, it said, the first time the United States had accepted any without adversaries since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc." commercial arguments were finely balanced. It recalled the United States' set against a background of rock guitars. It is said to be concerned that this China in a serious way." His comments were taken from the transcript of a forum replied in a statement that "the China coverage of the Times is wholly and solely in the hands of the editor," adding: "I have never taken an book but said the executives should have been forthright about it, instead of record as finding it the most lucid and intelligent book he had ever received the Telegraph returned to the fray, reporting on its front page that reintegrated into the international community unless there was a negotiated policies wrong throughout the Middle East. "Their position is bad because it doesn't rest on justice," he said. Asked if he also opposed sanctions against there, but because they see us as the new promised land, like their own had personally intervened to get the book stopped, because he feared that its determination to suppress condemnations of a vicious and brutal dictatorship," provoked much comment by failing to publish anything about the affair until threatened revolt by some of its authors." The writer of this story, the in a radio interview that the lack of coverage in the Times had damaged his own reputation and probably that of the newspaper as well. "I agree entirely what has happened is unacceptable," he is supposed to have said. "brought forth a torrent of abuse from his newspaper rivals, of a kind that might make a lesser person feel faint." But it said that this scandal was "not other assaults on the country way of life. The Times described the march as "a public relations triumph" and attributed much of its success to one of certain that the people will again face a hung parliament of uncertain duration, cobbled together by the flimsiest of uneasy regional alliances." It or free and fair as it should be in an ideal situation, but then nobody has her in an "improper relationship." "It cannot be long now before the tissue of told," it said, accusing the president of "a pattern of slipperiness." The editorial concluded, "He smoked but didn't inhale. They had 'a physical relationship' but it wasn't sexual. He spoke but we couldn't hear. He is in morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit took it as a done deal. The conservative Daily Telegraph said in an wizard can perform another miracle in the Holy Land is nice, but somewhat about terrorism," the Post said. "If he were to do so, and communicate Post said it was "difficult to fathom why the US seems slavishly inspections, that is doomed to failure," when it should be supporting this efficient channel for the conduct of secret talks, particularly with the not "act permissively toward those who are entrusted with its deepest secrets and then decide to breach their commitment," but it deplored the fact that of policy a few years ago, when he decided to engage in dialogue with the the right direction." It added that the human rights situation is likely to go embarrassing legacy from a less open past which sits ill with his determined eliminate internal dissent. In continuing heavy coverage of the death of Pol church's thinking on the future of mankind, expressing fears about modern materialism and urging people to look into the real meaning of life. The same to explain why the president remains so popular despite all the bimbo eruptions. It said he was benefiting not only from a national "state of latter "are overrunning the world, and their animal slaughter practices are an was massively reported in papers all around the world. They are not, admittedly, gripping remarks. They are not, sadly, a muttered First, a critical question of interpretation: From my sense analysis is, of course, an absurd exercise, but no more absurd than anything that we will report nothing of substance this morning. The mob has assembled to corridor, and disappear. Something momentous may be happening in the grand jury chamber but, as far as news goes, it is a complete vacuum. No matter: Her marshal, another newspaper reporter gloats, "He's totally screwed.") the List is a dubious honor, an excellent example of the pathetic running battle between the Flytrap authorities and the Flytrap media. The Flytrap authorities are winning: The List entitles you to stand in the hall outside the witnesses. They cannot even see anyone enter or leave the grand jury chamber, hopes of seeing the reflection of a lawyer or witness. camera on a cherry picker to get a better shot of the most likely entrance. A to make trouble. They hand me a phone, where I find myself live on the air. I sputter through an interview with the disc jockey. They start chanting into a megaphone behind me: "If you can't find the sperm, let the worm finish his testifying. False: A couple of minutes later, cell phone reports say she has folks have stayed outside, because cameras are banned, and others haven't pumps and is carrying a white purse. She looks neither relaxed nor nervous. silence when she opens the door. (It is during this quiet that I hear her two corner and disappears into a closed back corridor, followed by her legal team. At that point the reporters break ranks, some sprinting up the stairs, some (like me) clambering into an elevator in hopes of seeing her enter the grand jury room. No such luck. She's inside and hidden, and there's nothing more to Burton, who's the chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, the force behind the campaign finance investigation, and an finance investigation. The contempt measure is expected to pass but, appropriately for this theatrical day, it is a theatrical gesture: The full House is highly unlikely to approve such an inflammatory action. The contempt scheme is such a stupid, vicious, wrongheaded grandstand against it. "For the past two years we have seen this committee systematically demean and abuse almost every tool of congressional committee. "Today if the Republican majority supports the chairman, our actions will be added to the growing list of travesties that this committee has inflicted on the oversight and congressional process. We have made a shambles every fight and go out of his way to provoke every imaginable showdown. What does it accomplish? Nothing. Any fight, of course, attracts some media attention. But are we doing anything of consequence today? No." defending his right to "maintain order" in the province and attacking the equivalent of "pushing under water the head of someone who is already drowning," and asked, "This international community, is it you? Is it me? If are the true architects of the new world order": "It is largely in reaction to them that, by a series of improvisations, the vaunted 'international community' the Cold War, would have happily left the rest of the world to its own force, deploying troops in faraway places, and cobbling together coalitions." And they had presented the rest of the world with constant dilemmas: "to demand looked him straight in the eye, hesitated for "long" seconds, and then said, "I only smoke with people in whom I have confidence." A moment later, he accepted where he had been invested with a knighthood by the queen. The newly created he heard "God Save the Queen" being played. "It's my national anthem now," he announced that its Independent National Directors, a body established when policies, had rejected allegations that he had suppressed criticism of the need to kowtow to China to protect his business interests there. "He has at his Communist Party should be afraid of him, and not the other way round." The next allegedly keeping him away from the press. Despite foreign office denials, the of its market. So much for an ethical foreign policy." cleared the area named in a phone call to the media, only to have the explosion occur at the evacuation point. As the chief constable of the Royal Ulster carnage and unusually unanimous condemnations from politicians of all stripes. The fragile peace settlement is another potential victim of paramilitary weapons. Reflecting suspicions that the bomb was set by the "Real a caller using one of that group's code words, though official spokesmen denied politicians urged that the bombing not be allowed to disrupt the peace process, the country's biggest banks, which were in danger of default." There was a extremism, terrorism, narcotics trafficking and money laundering." It concluded, "One can only hope that in the wake of the brutal bombing of the political and bureaucratic blunders have left equipment "desperately needed to morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit countries about to receive a visit from the president of the United States, the would be authorized to proceed beyond this point up the emergency staircase to the presidential suite. They were listed as five waiters working newspaper did not attempt to explain who these people were or why they would be tripping up and down the stairs to the president's suite. Those curious about open during the president's stay. "Paradoxical though it may seem," said La capitals that it was "forbidden to give any kind of information to enthusiastic editorials on the significance of the second Summit of the which have since been confirmed, of the death from a heart attack of ousted its front page with the news that his body had been shown to Western conclusive proof that this corpse was really Pol Pot's. It also ran a feature as "a mere shadow of the fearsome army which once subjected the entire country sanctions." Dawn also ran a feature deploring the escalating arms race despite its rejection by large sections of the Protestant leadership in the said it came as a "surprise" that support for the deal is smaller in the south than in the north. It said this possibly reflected concerns about reunification contingent on majority consent in Ulster. forecasts will have to be revised as the turmoil continues. quarterly survey showing that the index of confidence among major manufacturers blamed the publication of the survey for a fall by the yen against the dollar release of some of its expected international bailout funds, that President give the same kind of painkiller to everybody, he said. Meanwhile, reported It is just a new version of telling Turkey: You are not one of us, but you may go on trying your best to become so in the unforeseeable future." firmly into the ambit of the law." "Increasingly," it predicted, "Windows will be a product shaped as much by the courts as by its programmers' seen as a benefactor of mankind, who had developed new and efficient software Gates is widely seen as a systematic monopolist of communication software who will not be allowed to expand, or even retain, its present degree of monopoly," out dimes to children in the street in order to soften his image as a Bill Gates is to start handing out money to children; I know he will need to morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit statutory eight year term and will then be replaced by the governor of the Bank compromise, held by many critics to be in contravention of the terms in the But like the German newspaper Die Welt, which titled its editorial "An Historic Day," that it has humiliated the man without whom the euro wouldn't have seen the officials feared it would necessitate modifications to the concordat governing the playground, picked up the ball and refused to play on until everyone agreed tough on terrorism, the issue on which the process will ultimately stand or quizzes, retrospectives, and predictions of one kind or another. For example, cards. By Western standards, the predictions are very precise. For example, in university that has compiled a vast world database of happiness "to judge the happiness," the newspaper explains. "But for all the complications in arriving is not good news or glad tidings in tune with the season of good will. For, the says the newspaper, "has annoyed almost as many as it has pleased, for it has rich nations, regardless of the extent of societal heartache caused by broken homes and dysfunctional families." "More paradoxical still is the fact that Protestant terrorist Billy Wright, and the subsequent retaliatory shooting in many other chickens were reported to have been bought, though not eaten, as leprosy in humans. The crisis had been made worse by a dispute over Star reported that a woman had been "trampled and kicked" to death by an ostrich at a farm near Cape Town while her husband, already badly injured by the same bird, lay helplessly by "for hours" on a dirt road. The same newspaper reported the "disappointment and grave concern" expressed by international disgrace" and "a lasting shame which renders the entire if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: was the focus of attention. It also noted that foreign governments would have preferred that Kohl win, because they fear that, with the move of its capital of residents aren't allowed to vote because of their immigrant status: "Democracy doesn't function when certain people are excluded." Die Welt challenged the comparisons the risk of retreat into poverty, there has never been so much need of a substitute for French influence but at least as a counterweight to it." The German unification. It was his commitment to the former which ensured that from the economic paralysis of the past few years, "because we all know that President has no one to blame for his fate but himself. He has tarnished his office. His actions have earned him at best ridicule and at worst ignominy. from which nobody will emerge victorious, he replied. Asked if he felt sympathetic toward the president, he said, "I feel a great sense of solidarity with everyone who finds himself under the scrutiny of the media, which in this morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit news coverage, an analysis piece reports on the careful press manipulation of wonders if this was the result of dumb luck or devious engineering. A separate However, a handful of people, who have a Cold War mentality, will spread rumors opportunity arises. This definitely does not enjoy popular support. United States could build a "strategic partnership" with China, which is crumbling from within and is a poor country whose Communist leadership no should press without compromise on human rights and political reform. Air Force Tornado fighter jet intercepted him and forced him to land in [the pilot] was the first Argentine to step onto the islands since the conflict." He was arrested as an illegal immigrant and immediately firms an unfair advantage. What's stumpage? "Stumpage is the fee per cubic the damage caused by outsiders, it asked, why don't they similarly condemn the internal ethnic clashes that, despite having cost thousands of lives, "did not pursued it as a policy of deterrence as well as populist satisfaction. But can a short frontier conflict between the two countries cost the lives of dozens of Military Observation Mission, designed to guarantee peace between the feuding spokesman declared that the "hemisphere's peace and stability cannot be endangered by a confrontation that can be resolved at the meeting table." divided, weak, and confused, doesn't take proper advantage of the government's coalition, could bring reconciliation and reform to a nation wracked by criminality, corruption, and inequality. "His success depends on the extent to which he can assimilate into the political life of the country groups that until now have been opposed to its institutions," it concluded. to the United States Federal Reserve Board, yielding one more lever of economic Independent called for a "campaign for real tea." Apparently, chic. The paper's tone was more funeral dirge than rallying cry: "One of the more regrettable consumer fads of the 1990s has been the invasion of ersatz meretricious charms have proved all too attractive to us, especially for those credited her untimely demise with the greatly increased popularity of the modified the medieval tradition of the 'royal touch,' bringing hope if not "the princess who would not go quietly has humbled an arrogant, remote dynasty. rejoiced that "the hounding of the Queen" has ended and that "instead of demanding that the Queen be made to dance to the tune of the mob, the country The anniversary was the subject of massive press comment investigating magistrate has already concluded it was fundamentally a banal road accident. The paper published full page profiles of the two chief were portrayed as thorns in the side of the royal family. Ashes" sought to explain why "the river of tears has slowed down and the dissenters from the myth have become bolder and more numerous." Unlike other fans are battling strenuously to save from the bulldozers the theater in which he last performed." In contrast, the followers of the dead princess are "groping about in silence" and losing "the faith which seemed so solid only a the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in." The of convenience activated by unprecedented power that makes one unmindful of behind them, "especially if they have daughters who could be interns in the exactly what one would describe as charismatic. He is not the sort of guy who position to help the other" and that the best to be hoped from them is that they will arrange the closest possible cooperation on security issues because if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: reportedly went. Answering the phone "in a rather hoarse and velvety voice," hope you won't make bad use of it." Asked if she had ever imagined she might be at all happy about it." Did she love the president? "Perhaps, but now it's of no importance." Did she feel exploited? "In a certain sense, yes; I never expected all this." Would money and fame change her life? "I don't think about such things. Money has never been important to me." said she now spends most of her time on the telephone and almost never watches papers." But when the weekly asked if, during her meetings with President In the continuing flood of international press comment on mere intern, could be protected by the State against such a mighty opponent as the most powerful politician in the world, reveals the beauty and the costliness of democracy. It is significant to note that even at the possible cost of the presidency, the right to fair hearing and enabling unconcealed any enthusiastic reporting press of this scandalous episode in any undemocratic doubtlessly doubly weary of hearing 'experts' tell them how they feel about the whole thing." The theme of the editorial was the distinction that should be made between feelings and deeds. The endless "mood monitoring" of the people and their president has revealed a "swirl of conflicting feelings," but the end remains the President and the citizens remain guardedly content to keep him may be experiencing all kinds of feelings about their President, but they are remarkably consistent when they are asked what they want to do about those emotions," the Globe and Mail went on. "Impeachment? No, a majority of the US public has answered, from the start to the finish of this story." It is his private feelings but a clear desire to see him pay a limited price for his Sooner or later, the pollsters and the pundits will understand that too." apartheid in the 1960s, the racism they are still fighting to eradicate today, manner and his unflappable dignity show him as a disciplined, persistent leader the kind of moral leadership we need everywhere. A real, untarnished hero in a character: Am I going to be a sleazy liar forever? Or will I finally tell beginning to think the real character test in the next few weeks is not for biggest fish in the biggest pond. Why on earth would he give away precious who is helping you might perjure himself in front of a grand jury, you tell him information so he won't lie). Prosecutors do not reveal sensitive evidence to president, of course, is not a regular target of investigation, because a regular target would never testify in front of a grand jury if he had something to hide. The president, because it's politically impossible, can't take the Fifth. It seems unfair to trap him in a lie that he would never have had to positive test result. The president, of course, ought to tell the truth, but depends on what kind of prosecutor he is. If he wants to expose criminal advantage. He will blindside the president with test results if that will build a stronger case. But if he's a prosecutor who wants to turn up the truth as thing to do is tell the president. There is no advantage whatsoever to getting the president to lie before the grand jury," says former Deputy Attorney having called the president and inviting him to lie unnecessarily." game of chicken like that with the president of the United States." the results away. Do we really want the president's career to rise or fall more likely Flytrap will be played out in the open rather than in private legal proceedings. And the public political realm is where Flytrap belongs. a prosecutor is to protect the honorable institutions of government, and one of those institutions is (believe it or not) the dignity of the presidency. That behavior by the president. But he can also protect the presidency by preventing to damage the office of the presidency even more. Telling the president lets prosecutor who is destroying the president over sex. He can become the dressed inappropriately? She confused an evening out with a busy day at the of murder when his wife saves his semen and spreads it on a woman she murders. New York Times has managed to work up the courage to use "semen," and I made the victim of a White House campaign to destroy her credibility, she would whisker" of abandoning the lawsuit. Pressed to accept a financial settlement that would have let the president off without so much as an apology, she is now him wiggle room before. We were willing to let him say 'I may have.' But now we've collected a lot more evidence and the days of wiggle room are over. The word 'may' has been stricken. He is going to have to confess to everything on The interview was conducted at the couple's home in Long amok and raiding the fridge," while her husband spoke on her behalf, said. "He chose the wrong girl to pick a fight with, didn't he? And now he's brought the President to the brink of impeachment. If I could give one piece of that the crisis should be rapidly resolved. As the headline over an article by intimate knowledge of the president's genitalia." This claim is as "wild as husbands' genitalia "under experimental conditions." Incredulous that the contradictory claims, it concludes, "So far, all the ballyhoo over Bill Perhaps the cold war was a symbolic reminder to the world that the preservation of democracy can best come about through the natural conflict of dialectical forces. In the present circumstances, we may have to start thinking in terms of when he was criticized for having a mistress: "What do they want? A eunuch in know her well. She is a woman of the first rank. Of great quality. I wouldn't Rock, as her enemies call her because of her toughness and her imperiousness, has been and still is his inspiration, his ace in the sleeve." Referring to her presidents of history, she, on the other hand, is among the best first if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: cartoon of a cameraman filming inside the president's trousers, while its "persecution" of the president and the broadcasting of the grand jury videotapes as the equivalent of "a public execution." It said the Republicans in Congress have abandoned the principles of justice, "which used to do honor individual rights." It concluded, "There is no mystery anymore. The law in this case is no more than a cover for a political offensive working methodically to affair." But he did say that "the way in which the world is following, with hypocritical eagerness, all the most private details on the Internet is is this: Everywhere, fewer and fewer voters and more and more viewers." "investigators can no longer claim this is freedom and democracy in action; it continue to show the sound sense they have demonstrated throughout." constitution has its faults (as does our own), but it is the bedrock of minister will unveil "a whole new kind of politics, unlike anything seen before promotion of enterprise and the attack on poverty and discrimination." This, approach to politics is "permanent revisionism." The tabloid Express on at the same time the two leaders are meeting in New York. "completely right to conduct business as usual" with him. coming apart at the seams, it is truly disappointing that the leaders of the having to struggle for their own political lives," it said. It added, "Signs of weakness will not be overlooked by the market, which exploits every little "nursery rhymes," containing warnings about sex offenders who might abuse them. said, are doing well and enjoying themselves "despite their bent backs and wizened faces." It commented, "They have [been] featured in the media several times in the recent past, and do not seem to be any the worse for it, unlike morning delivery of this column, plus "Today's Papers" (daily), "Pundit lauded the country's enormous achievements but said they have been "darkened by developed nations" and has limited its citizens' freedom of choice in important "from a national movement to a civilized and developed nation," it added. "Improving democracy, firmly establishing the rights of the individual, granting equal expression to minorities, supporting the weak, encouraging birthday celebration, speaking of achievements is not quite in fashion." Even so, it added, "The resurrection of an ancient people in its own land, following the destruction of a third of its number in the Holocaust, is unique in history and represents ample cause for celebration." Quoting an opinion poll in "confidence of the overwhelming majority" that was striking but the question question?" In a jubilee interview with the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin century, and in many ways the greatest triumph of a people of all the nations desperate" today and "the young want to leave the country," it's because of him, she said: "This government must be overthrown by any means." liberal French daily Libration devoted its whole front page and five inside pages newspapers. "We are cousins, we were cousins, we will remain cousins," said acceptance of the sinking of a peace process the success of which was the to end its present "stubbornness" and to ensure the peace process resumed, "so would remain "a restless, innovative society" and continue to make sacrifices succession of second childhoods," the Times said. "It is unlikely that reflected not only specific grievances in the east but also more general German papers mainly led their front pages with congratulatory remarks on the imminent about the effect the new Euro may have on the dollar. lawyer claims photographs show the driver was dazzled by a camera flash before "Leave me alone, leave me alone." A doctor said photographers had been snapping pictures "a few centimeters from her face." Bottom line: Investigators are leaning toward blaming the driver's speed and intoxication, but the title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic." For days, the royals were scorned as stuffy brutes for failing to display grief in public. When they relented and displayed their grief, they were likened to President of her character. They resumed covering the story obsessively based on the privatization, and are considering political reforms that could gradually extend elections from the local to the national level. Currently, privatization is merely tolerated. Officials complained that instead of focusing on changes of his legal bills and liabilities. This ends the plausibility of a monetary something his lawyer says he won't do. Pundits look forward to embarrassing in royalties, but then backed out after being denounced for prostituting upperclassman. The cadet was among the first women admitted to the school under last year's Supreme Court decision. She struck the blow in response to ritual Pundits paused to pay their respects before returning to the topic of Princess comparisons, which in turn inspired a backlash of equally silly commentaries die during the week, coverage of his demise was largely buried. semifinal opponent a "white turkey" and portraying the opponent's collision contrast her arrogance with Tiger Woods' good manners. Defenders see a double Post reported that some of the money Gore raised in phone calls from the Democratic National Committee ("soft" money). This removes Attorney General that a counsel will be named, and will hound Gore for years. Scandal questions female soldiers say Army investigators pressured them into falsely accusing their superiors of rape. Four of the five say they had sex with their instructors, but that it was consensual. The women claim they were promised helpful transfers if they told investigators what they wanted to hear and threatened with retaliation if they didn't. The announcement was organized six members of Congress last year that China had targeted them for illegal reported that the administration endorsed a project in China that was Post reported that a Republican House committee counsel hit up that Republicans sold big political donors meals with the party's leaders in of trying to destroy the Middle East peace process. In a letter released to the a government radar tape supposedly shows a fast projectile on a collision using their country as a spy nest and keeping them in the dark about it. debunked when the scientist explained that he had merely fertilized an egg in couple are soliciting women to conceive and bear their grandchild, using frozen behave like quails by replacing their embryonic brain cells with quail brain cells. The media, consumed by the frenzy over cloning, have largely ignored the tissue into human embryos is far more imminent than human cloning. Researchers disease patients. The Associated Press raised the specter of "people with socially unacceptable behavior being forced to undergo brain surgery." The idea is to set an example for business leaders. The announcement appeased take this step. But skeptics pointed out that there are few openings for giving welfare recipients preference in the competition for those openings. suspects in her murder, evidently because both were out of town when the crime was committed. Locals are said to be increasingly suspicious of the refusal of the girl's parents to be interviewed separately by police. Material collected police have recommended indictments against Prime Minister Benjamin concern an alleged deal to appoint an attorney general who would go soft on a now think they can dump him outright. As with the controversial relationship all cigarette liability suits against them, according to the Wall Street advertising in exchange for an act of Congress that would require plaintiffs to White House might reject the bill if it provides too much legal immunity and failing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the Democratic the credibility to intimidate the attorney general. The press contrasted will be tested). The Fourth Amendment spin is that the court, having upheld a student athletes), finally encountered one too preposterous to tolerate. The ideological spin is that the principled left and principled right (including pointed out that blacks own none of the league's teams, that the stadium failed to sell out, that the crowd was overwhelmingly white (as is usual at baseball gains and persuaded some market watchers to declare the slide a correction. sector turned stock speculators exuberant. Irrationally so? asked the Wall market was likely to keep lurching in response to changes in economic This is the first such insurance offer since the onset of AIDS, and is viewed as tentative commercial confirmation that AIDS is now, in the company's words, "a treatable chronic illness rather than a terminal disease" for many people. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as proof of the success of new drugs. If the company makes money on the policy, other insurers are expected to year Woods was born). The game's current stars declared Woods the best player in the world and possibly in history. Optimists predicted that Woods will make golf hip and popular, especially among nonwhite kids. Pessimists grumbled that Woods is so superior he'll make tournaments boring, and that his corporate that if the evidence holds up, the United States should consider a military let the crisis escalate, because their trade relationship is too cozy. the president legislative powers constitutionally reserved to Congress. The ruling is seen as a victory for constitutional purists and a political blow to heartened, though a few winced at his boast that Republican ideas are carrying Journal editorial page urges him to crown his comeback by announcing that satellite pictures substantially increase the probability that life exists internal ocean is, or was recently, roiling the surface and providing the heat and chemicals necessary to create life. Ironically, much of the optimism that microbes are thriving in an even less hospitable environment: volcanic vents on off welfare in the next four years to do its share in putting welfare Gulf War, but failed to give the armed forces clear warning before they blew up soldiers couldn't have been exposed to nerve gas, and (after that assurance proved false) that the agency had been unaware of chemical weapons in the bunker. Editorialists still doubt that the bunker's destruction accounts for the putative "Gulf War Syndrome," but scoff that the government has lost all credibility on the issue. Analysts agree that the new disclosure throws a "cannot continue with negotiations as long as such strikes take place, and the carnage dismissed the current "peace" as a bad joke and called for war against congressional Democrats had demanded more spending for their pet programs. Thanks to the booming economy (and unspecified future spending cuts), all sides got what they wanted. Meanwhile, the negotiators threw out proposed premium hikes for wealthy people on Medicare. The consensus is that both parties have that he had acquitted himself brilliantly. Reviews of the senators so far: according to various reports. This would complete the return and vindication of Apple's immediate needs: strategic vision and a morale boost for employees and house arrest. Editorialists denounced the trial as a "charade" on several Rouge refuses to hand him over to anyone else for a real trial. Commentators who saw video of the trial noted that the aged defendant didn't look like a man do it are escaping justice, and that one of them (dictator Hun Sen) is on his himself. The premature anticlimax disappointed the media, but they continued to calling his deceased son's cocaine supplier "a partner in murder." The pusher portrayed the verdict as a victory for celebrities. The jurors portrayed it as prison after being convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to murder. places like the subway) to make money for their "pimps." The media bemoaned the vulnerability of illegal immigrants (trapped by their fear that outsiders will the New York slaves. Eventually, the Times conceded that the conditions return, were just as bad. "In a country of many poor and marginalized people, has vowed to quash the nomination on the grounds that Weld is soft on drugs. resignation won't help him. The subtle theory is that Weld knows he will lose is that Weld just loves a good fight, particularly with Helms. evidence shows that Neanderthals were not our ancestors. Some analysts have had so little time to diverge genetically that the differences between we interbreed with the Neanderthals when they were still around? Because they greatest hero in a century of jurisprudence. Conservatives noted their disagreements with him but remembered him as a man of principle and a truly Citizens are angry over his alleged illegal wiretapping and suppression of journalists, and newly discovered documents indicate that he may have been born Army discharged a 20-year decorated veteran one week before he would have been eligible for retirement benefits, because investigators discovered recorded in the open) and cover only the first few minutes of each coffee Hundreds of thousands of men attended the Promise Keepers national confess their selfishness and sexual sins; and take leadership in their families, churches, and communities. Critics accused the group of advocating a return to patriarchy. Several members of Congress showed up, and President the families." The media's buildup to the assembly focused on gender attendees behaved humbly, and the speakers forswore political plans or motives. The press finally acquitted the Promise Keepers of the charge that they are divisive and leveled the more serious charge that they are boring. (Slate's antidote for the lethal nerve toxin used in the attack, in order to assuage the attack was so stupid and potentially calamitous that he's lucky he screwed spokesman says Bush was referring to how the selection was managed, not to doctors told the New York Times that he showed no signs of with hostile legislation or obstruction of its affiliates' license renewals only journalists (not "the subjects of stories or anyone connected to them") car just before the crash. The bodyguard who survived the crash has recovered partial memory of events before the crash, but evidently can't answer whether a advocates said the measures are too weak (they don't set the same standards may prompt retaliatory measures from affected countries). Analysts said they are driven by political rather than safety concerns (the plan may garner votes influxes of contaminated food). The public is expected to welcome the measures. to persuade Congress not to pull out the troops. The paper also concluded that frat party. This has rekindled the concern and outrage sparked a few weeks ago spin: The two cases underscore an epidemic of binge drinking in frats and considered sinful," because it "is experienced as a given." The catch: Gays must remain "chaste," which means avoiding "genital sexual involvement" with ban unions from funneling dues to political activity without workers' explicit consent. Analysts agreed that he's using the amendment to make the bill unpalatable to Democrats so they'll kill reform and the blood will be on their hands. Editorialists admired and reviled his diabolical shrewdness. Critics argued workers can quit a union if they don't like its political activities and that any debate about regulating union money should be taken up separately. Even if enough Republicans join Democrats to kill the amendment, more would be needed to defeat the filibuster that has already been promised. (For Slate's Party. Republicans were glad to get rid of her. Democrats gave her only a staff, not as waiters, thereby preserving the tradition of Hooters Girls. texture and esoteric expression with irreverence and ironic wit, and for being he's still in office, as the Constitution doesn't protect the president from civil suits unrelated to his official duties. However, the court instructed the to keep postponing the trial. Editorialists of all persuasions congratulated conservative justices had suspended their usual worship of executive privilege. contentions as the main problem. The case "plays into a public perception of a (by settling the suit), but his advisers seem intent on dragging it out merchandise. They also agree that its poor reviews (for a weak plot, characters, and dialogue) were overpowered by its shrewd timing (theaters showed it because no other big movies were out), legendary pedigree (everyone billion, the deal would double the size of the biggest merger on record. It United States needs its own giant to compete with other countries' national elections, raising the prospect that a leftist alliance of Socialists, New York Times reported that "euphoria" in the capital is giving way to with the United States. Skeptics doubt that one man could reform the country, moderates." Cynics dismiss the term as an oxymoron. Good news: The political oppression. Good news: Turkey 's armed forces are tightening erupted over the final lap, in which officials sent mixed signals as to whether health risks of breast implants may be skewed because women who get the implants are (among other things) more likely to be alcoholics, more likely to The real bomber was blown up in the explosion. The key evidence: A severed leg bombing case in which an extra penis found at the site turned out to be the allegedly committing adultery, lying about it, and disobeying orders to end that affair. However, the discharge will cost her veterans' and other the media were becoming skeptical of her "carefully orchestrated publicity After reading about a photographer who died of a heroin overdose after selling officers for resisting budget cuts and reforms. Analysts regard this as a key judge dropped charges against the Danish woman who had left her baby in a stroller outside a restaurant while dining. The catch: She has to get out of evidently patched things up. There was no word on what they ate. acquaintance. Meanwhile, the press unearthed problems with his anonymous 's assessment), arguing that his legacy of reforming the and rationalized his scam as a "desperate" response to the threat posed by his access to technology. Best argument against it: Kids will lose their laptops. Bottom line: The question is when, not whether, the switch will happen. Department officials predict that an independent counsel will be named to facts that the department can't resolve in its allotted three months. An independent probe of Babbitt would include examination of top White House and to local newspapers and talk radio programs suggest, the answer to every still "love" each other count against her (as psychologists insist) or for her? The boy's mother says: "I don't feel that this is a crime. My son does not feel whereas men are jailed longer for similar crimes? The respectable rejoinder: Congress killed payments to the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund for the rest of the year. The reason: an abstruse quarrel over abortion funding. The payments to the United Nations were already overdue. immigrants to stay in the United States but tighten controls on future illegal entrants. Immigrant spokesmen welcomed the relaxation but said it was mastermind and the driver in the World Trade Center bombing were convicted. They face life sentences. Four lesser conspirators were convicted in whether some other person, group, or country funded and orchestrated the bombing. The sunny spin: We nailed the terrorists. The ominous spin: The terrorists nailed us first, more are coming, and there are too many to keep crash, leaving mechanical failure as the only theory under investigation. Editorialists labored to connect the two contrary outcomes. (Various sites, infiltrate the United States, but couldn't say more because the evidence is top in exchange for partial immunity. Republicans worried that an immunity grant the scandal) toasted North at a gala in his honor. The early line is that the times a year. The Food and Drug Administration is sending warnings to thousands of doctors. The news cycle on drug scares has become so fast that the backlash landed a robot on Mars and began exploring the surface. Scientists are miles away) and downloading the video and geological data it collects. Evidence of ancient flood water (which might now be frozen at the poles or beneath the planet's surface) and signs of repeated melting and crystallization of the planet's crust indicate that Mars is much more like Earth than was previously five days, making it the busiest site in the history of the Web. the country's first prime minister. The victors began looting, and hunting down the new leader's political rivals, one of whom has already been executed. Analysts foresee two possible outcomes: brutal tyranny (the optimistic reinstatement in a year. Optimists called the penalty stiff and predicted that it would restore some standard of decency to the sport. Pessimists pointed out services overseas. Fans rated the bite the most disgusting offense in the of freedom and democracy he has fostered. Now that the party has lost its grip, analysts foresee a wave of opportunistic defections by politicians, as happened reportedly on the verge of deriving human blood plasma from sheep and cows. A journalists found excuses to spend the week there, playing up the possibilities of political confrontation and violence (China oafishly sent thousands of troops to show everyone who's the boss) before conceding that nothing was going capitalism will continue to flourish there even if democracy doesn't: The that if he had stayed in the race, the election would have focused on his annulment and his brother's alleged fling with the family baby sitter. Media and the 1970s. Targets were evidently chosen by race as well as by mental agriculture secretary Mike Espy was indicted for soliciting favors from Court ruled that victims of age discrimination in the workplace have the conservative attorney general also endorsed a proposed study to settle the debate over the benefits of medical marijuana. SAT math scores are up, reaching a 26-year peak, but verbal scores remain low. SAT administrators noted that grades assigned by teachers are being inflated relative to SAT scores. A Gore's previous characterization ("a few occasions"). The White House says there's no logical inconsistency between Gore's description and the new numbers, but the press agrees that Gore has shown a pattern of fudging. Two "has been very responsive to his company." (For more on Smith and money excuse that the president and veep are exempt from the Hatch Act. Instead, causing severe injuries. Other racial flash points: The Army is considering selective prosecution of black officers for sexual harassment. And the had been touted for years as one of affirmative action's success stories. Understanding the mechanics of the flaw will lead to new methods of preventing colon cancer. The official pessimistic spin: Insurance companies might use could provide the United States with loads of valuable intelligence about North with the Teamsters scandal. The Justice Department reportedly is investigating The House investigating committee subpoenaed records to determine whether the to pose in photos with its principals. It then used the photos in promotional of the Teamsters, citing evidence of fraud and diversion of union funds to ruled out, either. The official delayed the announcement until the UPS strike was settled, so as not to influence its outcome. The Wall Street Journal points out that this decision influenced the strike's outcome. The election $400-million New York state subsidy scheme that aims to reduce the surplus of doctors. Critics argue that the subsidy is idiotic. Defenders argue that it's less idiotic than the current Medicare policy of subsidizing physician training, which has exacerbated the surplus. Opponents of the New York scheme had pointed out the unfairness of paying New York hospitals to undertake cutbacks that hospitals elsewhere were undertaking at no charge. Instead of equalizing things by scrapping the New York payment scheme, Congress decided to equalize things by nationalizing it. Now economists are pointing out the unfairness of subsidizing the reduction in the number of doctors while refusing to persuade customers to continue eating its meat. Editorialists conducted the cynical view is that there is no reason the United States should care about big political donors meals with the party's leaders in federal buildings attempt to salvage some part of the power he once held. Analysts see no real future for him: He is gradually dying of prostate cancer and has no leverage because his troops are getting whipped by rebels, who are expected to roll seems to be angling for some kind of coalition government, playing off his chief political rival in the capital against the military leader of the rebel forces. The general consensus is that the rebel leader holds all the aces. (For 40s. This contradicts the National Cancer Institute advisory board's recent recommendation that the benefits to women in their 40s didn't necessarily justify the cost, and that these women should decide for themselves whether to reverse that recommendation this week. The prevailing wisdom now is that the "decide for yourself" advice was too confusing, and that women need to be told dark horse, Providence, which was led by the memorable point guard God outsider, getting its first Final Four berth ever after having been denied an team, redeeming itself after having lost its first three conference games this ban must once again depend on the Senate to sustain a presidential veto. about the circumstances under which the procedure is generally used, only five lawmakers switched their votes from "no" to "yes." (See Slate's "Abortion Apostate" on tobacco industry suffered a potentially catastrophic defection. The tobacco to minors (which will increase congressional support for stiff biggest tobacco companies, which industry critics believe will prove a conspiracy of deceit. Also, the tobacco executives who told Congress they didn't consider nicotine addictive might now be prosecuted for fraud and attractive merger partner by eliminating its exposure to possibly huge jury unpleasant hearings on top of the pounding he's already taken. Lake said will now be confirmed easily because the Senate is satisfied with having killed substantive issue at stake is hard news vs. soft news: Each network is accusing subordinate but is still married to multiply disgraced political consultant Ed Organization announced that a new strategy for treating tuberculosis consists of four drugs taken daily under meticulous supervision. The organization's director calls it "the biggest health breakthrough of this The New York Times agreed: "Partisan Fencing Draws No Blood." For of war criminals is worth the risk. Media coverage was generally enthusiastic, with several commentators celebrating the bust as an overdue landed a robot on Mars and began exploring the surface. Scientists are miles away) and downloading the video and geological data it collects. Evidence of ancient flood water (which might now be frozen at the poles or beneath the planet's surface) and signs of repeated melting and crystallization of the planet's crust indicate that Mars is much more like Earth than was previously motivated by domestic politics, not statesmanship (specifically, pushing to counterparts, "all the politicians would be in prison, because they sell their although saliva is a poor carrier of the virus, in this case both partners had big tobacco settlement that would restrict the Food and Drug Administration's the country's first prime minister. The victors began looting, and hunting down the new leader's political rivals, two of whom have already been executed. Analysts foresee two possible outcomes: brutal tyranny (the optimistic of freedom and democracy he has fostered. Now that the party has lost its grip, analysts foresee a wave of opportunistic defections by politicians, as happened reinstatement in a year. Optimists called the penalty stiff and predicted that it would restore some standard of decency to the sport. Pessimists pointed out services overseas. Fans rated the bite the most disgusting offense in the times a year. The Food and Drug Administration is sending warnings to thousands of doctors. The news cycle on drug scares has become so fast that the backlash capitalism will continue to flourish there even if democracy doesn't: The reportedly on the verge of deriving human blood plasma from sheep and cows. A He also urged privately funded researchers not to clone humans. A bill was filed in the House to ban human cloning outright. Contrary to the traditional of cloning are increasingly objecting that it permits reproduction without sex. behave like quails by replacing their embryonic brain cells with quail brain cells. The media, consumed by the frenzy over cloning, have largely ignored the tissue into human embryos is far more imminent than human cloning. Researchers disease patients. The Associated Press raised the specter of "people with socially unacceptable behavior being forced to undergo brain surgery." with the government. They claim that police are preparing to storm the building of scientists conceded that a planned robot mission to Mars might bring back that Martian germs could do much damage here, since they probably can't compete when the crime was committed. Locals are said to be increasingly suspicious of the refusal of the girl's parents to be interviewed separately by police. made private phone calls (some from the White House) soliciting donations. The report prompted further calls for an independent counsel, on the grounds that a high government official (Gore) had violated the law by making political calls from a federal building. Editorialists derided Gore's response that the law the White House to raise money). Democrats also released records showing that their faith that Gore was the One Honest Man in the administration. The betting and donors, and that the administration endorsed a project in China that was subpoenaed White House records, evidently to find out whether the probe will cover congressional as well as presidential campaigns, but will raising in federal buildings apply only to direct campaign contributions, an investigation of possible efforts by foreign governments to influence Party is demanding an investigation of a report that Prime Minister John Major not to screw up the peace process by provoking further conflict. News accounts honored by the White House not only as a virtual head of state but as the question appears to consist of notes taken by a defense attorney during an had faked the putative confession in order to persuade a witness to talk to private eye told him of the fake confession a year ago. The executive editor of Immigration and Naturalization Service, pressured by the White House, immigrants through naturalization last year and ended up been rejected because of past felony convictions. Again, Vice President Gore is records indicate that the pressure came from Gore's office and was driven in whether an animal burns calories or stores them as fat. The next step is to Clashes over human rights upstaged collaboration on other matters. First, "showed plenty of spine." Then, congressional leaders grilled and lectured officials to move protesters off the street outside Independence Hall in promised to "open China still wider to the outside world" and said that persistent evils but grudgingly conceded that it was a good idea to make nice jury the option of a lesser manslaughter conviction. The cultural spin: This is international supervision. Both sides will now replay their old game: The United States will seek international support for sanctions and perhaps a idiocy by galvanizing the international coalition against him, which had been appeared before the Senate investigating committee and denied allegations that please Democratic contributors. Babbitt explained that he had probably lied to the lobbyist. The New York Times called it "the closest [thing] to a The casino episode is seen as a prime candidate for triggering an independent Republicans on the Senate investigating committee received political help from consensus is forming on why the stock market pulled out of its nose get out at a time of their choosing and therefore, that they needn't rush to do so. Corollary: The "circuit breakers," which suspended trading, backfired. (What are circuit breakers, and how do they work? See Monetary Fund is now putting up billions of dollars in loans in the hope of solving this problem, and the United States has agreed to backstop loans to forging ahead. The contrarian view is that the rally happened too soon, that the market hasn't bottomed out yet, and that it needs to do so in order to to cool off the economy, so that the Fed won't have to raise interest rates and lurking around schools and parks and had sex with them despite knowing he had evidently had sex with many women there as well. The story is igniting two confidentiality laws too strict? Authorities had to get an unprecedented court order to allow the release of his name so that they can find, warn, and test his sex partners and their subsequent sex partners, who may number in the Miscellany: The National Basketball Association hired its first female ally with the West in order to avoid a "fascist regime." Tests show that John themes: the status of black women, family unity, repentance, and renewal. Other topics: drugs, homelessness, and civil rights. Unlike the Million Man March, attend. The New York Times saw the march, along with the Million Man institutions and are organizing to solve social problems themselves. team and the youngest club (they were founded five years ago) to win the Commentators complained of the Series' sloppy play but applauded the epic Game book. Analysts see this as a milestone in the publishing industry's descent superstar expects the industry to justify his compensation by finding new bombing. Journalists, having exaggerated the defense's options and prospects for dramatic effect throughout the trial, finally conceded that the contest had never been close. Editorialists congratulated the judge and jury for proving system works. While proclaiming that the United States has finally lost its Having milked the trial for pathos, the media applauded the judge for instructing prosecutors not to manipulate the jury's emotions. The early line the rest of his presidency being hounded about his privates instead of showing off his public service. Settlement demands: his admission that she told the "to put her reputation at issue," dredging up old boyfriends. Settlement legal costs, but "no apology" and "no admission of misconduct." The National lawyer for stooping to the old tactic of bringing up the accuser's sexual pundits, confused by the results, accused the voters of confusion and warned United States. The Wall Street Journal blamed the weak showing of scientists be allowed to clone human embryos for experiments, according research, unsupervised quacks will control it. But the commissioners decided they trust Congress even less than they trust scientists. Related updates: Weld's nomination would foster bipartisan harmony. Instead, it has fostered Republican disharmony. Helms cited conservative Republicans' quarrels with Weld (who favors medical marijuana and abortion rights) as evidence that Weld isn't French voters booted conservatives out of the national Parliament and put leftists in power. The Socialists, Communists, Greens, and other leftist coalition lost nearly half its seats. Commentators agreed that, unlike the few thought that an available choice. The most common view was that the privatization. Ironists noted that, as in the United States, "liberal" has Jazz in the opening game of the National Basketball Association finals. Meanwhile, the New York Times observed that serious dog bites have been faulted and ridiculed by critics, won the award for best musical, plus the four other categories in which it had been nominated. The New York Times but observers were less impressed, since it had been expected to do well. The Last Night of Ballyhoo won the award for best play, and A Doll's Miscellany: The new health scare is a staph germ that is becoming immune to the antibiotic of last resort. The germ has appeared in Japan, and the question is how long it will take to get to the United States. The new bioethical controversy is whether doctors should obey families who want to in the hospital with a chest infection. News outlets declared it "potentially fatal" but acknowledged in the fine print that he'll probably come out fine. to his kneecap. Pundits rehashed the rules of succession in the event of reported on by the New York Times are "two hands holding up a severed head by the hair," "a man confronting his own severed head on a plate," and "a react violently to the settlement, there might be a "war to the finish" in years, was knocked out of the tourney. Commentators were disappointed that pyramid investment schemes collapsed, which wiped out the life savings of led to police giving loyalist civilians assault weapons, which led to gunfire, looting, and roving bands of robbers. Inmates are escaping from jails, and the in a few dozen military and police advisers, but not a big force. The United revolution, a popular uprising or just plain chaos," said the New York cloning backlash is underway. At a Senate hearing, Republican fertilization, "tens of thousands of embryos are steadily accumulating in tanks of liquid nitrogen" in the United States, and their lives can be women to conceive and bear their grandchild using frozen sperm from their dead City bombing. This is the third such report in recent weeks. The first two city, and are expected to head for the capital soon. Everyone is now convinced over the quarrel. The next day everyone insisted it was just a year that China had targeted them for illegal campaign donations through administration endorsed a project in China that was financially important to elections. This brings soft money and other much criticized practices under Post reported that a Republican House committee counsel hit up that Republicans sold big political donors meals with the party's leaders in victory allowing her to remain married to the man she loves (and with have the sole authority to choose her husband. Her father is appealing to the also matches the description provided by the woman who allegedly saw the now say the killing looks like a random robbery attempt gone awry. fast projectile on a collision course with the plane. Federal investigators said that lab tests show the residue is from standard glue used in plane seats. They also seized the radar tape, examined it, and said it shows no missile. The female soldiers say Army investigators pressured them to falsely accuse their superiors of rape. Four of the five say they had sex with their instructors, but that it was consensual. The women claim they were promised helpful transfers if they told investigators what they wanted to hear and threatened with retaliation if they didn't. The announcement was organized using their country as a spy nest and keeping them in the dark about it. promoted just last week, can now put allies in key jobs and restart economic landed a robot on Mars and began exploring the surface. Scientists are miles away) and downloading the video and geological data it collects. The mission's purpose is to study rocks, but observers are more fascinated by the advent of true democracy. The story was almost overshadowed by the news that staged a successful coup against the country's first prime minister, wrecking journalists found excuses to spend the week there, playing up the possibilities of political confrontation and violence (China oafishly sent thousands of troops to show everyone who's the boss) before conceding that nothing was going capitalism will continue to flourish there even if democracy doesn't: The puns and rekindled the ancient debate over whether boxing is inherently or only sporadically barbaric. Fans rated it the most disgusting offense in the history champions of virtue and the common man. Television journalists ceaselessly won fame for cloning a sheep is reportedly on the verge of deriving human blood plasma from sheep and cows. A new scientific report claims that puberty begins a field trip to the "Island of Peace," a border strip shared by the two pyramid investment schemes collapsed, which wiped out the life savings of led to police giving loyalist civilians assault weapons, which led to gunfire, looting, and roving bands of robbers. Inmates are escaping from jails, and the president has lost control of the army. There is talk of importing a themselves were unsure whether to call the violence a civil war, a revolution, a popular uprising or just plain chaos," said the New also matches the description provided by the woman who allegedly saw the now say the killing looks like a random robbery attempt gone awry. cloning backlash is underway. At a Senate hearing, Republican had cloned a human, but the report was soon debunked when the scientist women to conceive and bear their grandchild, using frozen sperm from their dead fast projectile on a collision course with the plane. Federal investigators said that lab tests show the residue is from standard glue used in plane seats. They also seized the radar tape, examined it, and said it shows no missile. The over the quarrel. The next day everyone insisted it was just a year that China had targeted them for illegal campaign donations through administration endorsed a project in China that was financially important to lawyers were skeptical. The New York Times reports that "details in the article contradict physical evidence already presented in open court." female soldiers say Army investigators pressured them to falsely accuse their superiors of rape. Four of the five say they had sex with their instructors, but that it was consensual. The women claim they were promised helpful transfers if they told investigators what they wanted to hear and threatened with retaliation if they didn't. The announcement was organized Post reported that a Republican House committee counsel hit up that Republicans sold big political donors meals with the party's leaders in using their country as a spy nest and keeping them in the dark about it. example for business leaders. The announcement appeased some critics who have the government is shrinking), and unions objected to giving welfare recipients tax cuts to everyone. Meanwhile, they threw out proposed premium hikes for fiscal consensus is that politicians of both parties have once again managed to take credit for a windfall not of their making (since the economy is generating enough revenue to balance the budget without any deal) and squander the places like the subway) to make money for their "pimps." The media bemoaned the vulnerability of illegal immigrants (trapped by their fear that outsiders will the New York slaves. Eventually, the Times conceded that the conditions return, were just as bad. "In a country of many poor and marginalized people, himself. The premature anticlimax disappointed the media, but they continued to partner in murder." The pusher portrayed the verdict as a victory for celebrities. The jurors portrayed it as a defeat for scum. Reputed Mafia boss has vowed to quash the nomination on the grounds that Weld is soft on drugs. resignation won't help him. The subtle theory is that Weld knows he will lose is that Weld just loves a good fight, particularly with Helms. and that he had acquitted himself brilliantly. Reviews of the senators so far: evidence shows that Neanderthals were not our ancestors. Some analysts have had so little time to diverge genetically that the differences between we interbreed with the Neanderthals when they were still around? Because they reporter says he saw Pol Pot tried for genocide and sentenced to life jurisprudence. Conservatives noted their disagreements with him but remembered wiretapping and suppression of journalists, and newly discovered documents him ineligible for his job. The Army discharged a 20-year decorated veteran one week before he would have been eligible for retirement benefits, because investigators discovered evidence of his homosexuality after fine) out of his own money. The catch: He will borrow that money from Bob a legal defense fund, he would have been forced from office. Instead, the loan allows him to serve out the maximum eight years as speaker, at which point he can repay the loan out of his campaign kitty or a legal defense fund. The and bought himself time to regain his stature as a policy leader. Liberal justice and creating a conflict of interest if he failed to pay the fine with his own money, accused him of evading justice and creating a conflict of minister, and his chief of staff. The charges concern an alleged deal to trouble, then backed off after learning that the proposed indictment against him rested largely on the testimony of one witness. The growing scandal is prosecution of an Internet service in the West for providing access to material it did not produce. (The porn is produced by independent sites and distributed through Internet newsgroups.) Under German law, the executive could get five years in jail, though this is considered unlikely. He has previously threatened advertising restrictions in exchange for an act of Congress that would require than from the companies. The media initially gloated over the news, on the grounds that the tobacco companies were offering unprecedented concessions. But liability would be immoral, unconstitutional, and profitable, as evidenced by a court ruled 8-to-1 that the urine tests were an unreasonable search under the finally encountered one too preposterous to tolerate. The ideological spin is threatened to summon her before Congress and investigate whether she was "the guru of ethics," had neither the right nor the credibility to intimidate persuaded some market watchers to declare the slide a correction. Healthy turned stock speculators exuberant. Irrationally so? asked the Wall Street was likely to keep lurching in response to changes in economic indicators. own none of the league's teams, that the stadium failed to sell out, that the crowd was overwhelmingly white (as is usual at baseball games), and that nearly such insurance offer since the onset of AIDS, and is viewed as tentative commercial confirmation that AIDS is now, in the company's words, "a treatable chronic illness rather than a terminal disease" for many people. The Wall Street Journal hailed it as proof of the success of new drugs. If the company makes money on the policy, other insurers are expected to follow. if the evidence holds up, the United States should consider a military strike crisis escalate, because their trade relationship is too cozy. the Masters golf tournament and was anointed a Transcendent Sports born). The game's current stars declared Woods the best player in the world and possibly in history. Optimists predicted that Woods will make golf hip and popular, especially among nonwhite kids. Pessimists grumbled that Woods is so superior he'll make tournaments boring, and that his corporate marketing prosecutors think they did. Angered by the media's interest in the rabbi angle, because he didn't head a synagogue), and angst (who will tell the bad news to ago, after hoodwinking his friends and jumping bail, has been captured in Pot reportedly has surrendered after being hunted down by his own former bodyguards got into a deadly turf skirmish this week, which bodes ill for the elections. The New York Times applauds Pol Pot's demise but regrets that crooks, schemers, and butchers evidently will continue to run the country. his failure to propose solutions other than affirmative action and more money reform and the budget deal. Liberals doubted the sermonizer but loved the defending "quotas," complained they were underrepresented on the advisory suspect other conspirators are at large. The Internet is percolating with theories that an "electromagnetic pulse weapon" destroyed the building, that not going to have a confessed adulterer as supreme head of the Church of reminiscent of the recent scandal that ruined a top Communist Party official. Authorities have responded by banning the novel and arresting its putative National Basketball Association title in seven years. Pundits reaffirmed Bulls to give him its Most Valuable Player award. His defenders argued that the award was what had caused him to choke in the first place. Sportswriters are already remain for another six years. Advocates of rent deregulation, led by Republican gradually raise rents by regulating the existing regulations. Among the tenants could remain in regulated apartments provided they were willing to pay against each other for the first time in the sport's 120-year history. cities, thereby boosting attendance and merchandise sales, which, in turn, will enable owners to satisfy players' skyrocketing salary demands. Traditionalists of statistics, obliterate the quaint differences between the two leagues mystique of the World Series, which, until now, was the leagues' only play] has restored one of baseball's grandest traditions: the passion for delivering and abandoning a baby. This is the third such case in New Jersey in recent months. First, two students were charged with killing their infant in a motel room and dumping it in the trash. Then, a few days ago, another girl gave where it would later be found dead. (She then checked her makeup in the mirror, almost overshadowed by disbelief that nobody had noticed her condition. The apocalypse littered with condoms, fear of school prayer, hysteria over Gen. case, in which a girl gave birth in her parents' garage and left the baby there. Again, family members say they had no idea she was pregnant. may not even know it's a religious cult or sect or whatever it is." the usual factors: strong profits, low inflation, expectations of a sound recession is inevitable, acknowledged that such warnings have lost almost all and embarrassed the entire judicial system. Proponents of affirmative action this as a war between liberal and conservative judges that only the Supreme affirmative action will have to "find new ways to achieve the same objective." reputation for racial conflict) and did better than any Republican candidate in to trigger the orgasm sensation in the brain. Researchers found that three of peptide through the vagus nerve (which connects the brain directly to the cervix) rather than the spine. The researchers envision turning the chemical into a pill, which they claim would be used for pain suppression. The director poor black men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis from the 1930s to sexual orientation. Scribes and pundits are already reacting to both events, reaching puberty much earlier than previously thought. A study finds that because girls who develop early sexual traits might be more likely to be war by resigning and leaving the country. The logistical problem here, as with included four successive wives, two of them too young to be his daughters. House and the Democratic National Committee for not screening out sleazy his attorneys have found no evidence "that any sensitive information was Administration hastily abandoned a Web site it had created that allowed workers to check their earnings records and benefit entitlements. Critics, fearing that snoopers could access the data, called it another illustration of cheap (saves the taxpayers money), gives Social Security recipients an easy way to access their own records, has never been abused, and is safer than the mail. country's biggest medical provider, is becoming the poster boy of corporate doctors outside the company while referring rich patients to doctors affiliated with the company. Federal regulators are investigating whether this is an experts explained that this kind of risk is inherent in a complex in the wee hours of the morning to watch the funeral on television. The big continue to generate her particular brand of magic." For days, the royals were scorned as stuffy brutes for failing to display grief in public. When they feeling others' pain) and scorned for pandering to public opinion. Several character. They resumed covering the story obsessively based on the public's Pundits paused to pay their respects before returning to the topic of Princess comparisons, which in turn inspired a backlash of equally silly commentaries die during the week, coverage of his demise was largely buried. instead of the Democratic National Committee ("soft" money). This removes The betting now is that a counsel will be named, and will hound Gore for years. her father screwed it up by calling her semifinal opponent a "white turkey" and her press conference. Critics contrast her arrogance with Tiger Woods' good manners. Defenders see a double standard: Critics don't blame white players If history is written by the winners, is rock history written by the losers? By wounded fans correcting popular slights, redeeming ignored heroes? Miller gets his most contentious in the Velvet Underground chapter, when he Billboard's album chart. He then spins this not especially supportive with those of minimalist composer La Monte Young, whose influence, via violist great, hugely influential cult band? Maybe he didn't want to recycle the line about how few bought their records but everyone who did formed a band. As I skim Flowers in the Dustbin for fresh anecdotes (which we agree may be the book's real pleasure), I realize how many of Miller's vignettes seem studies. Not too shocking given his day job, but sometimes these pieces of "evidence" seem pretty chimerical, other times just hilarious. that this was achieved through "the intersection of the band's alienated look didn't shop that song to labels because he wanted to be "a straight blues Domino cover in concerts as "Isn't That a Shame"? And that, because he and opium to help him "sustain a note on his viola for two hours at a stretch"? Such apocrypha is the envy of any popular historian, and it's definitely a major selling point for Miller's book. It also serves to make Miller seem a lot personal project. Miller says as much in the preface, beginning with his disenchantment with this "routinized package of theatrical gestures" in the '80s. This puts him in an odd, if touching, state for a critical endeavor. rock and roll." Others might have just got into gardening. Re: The Pretenders. Are you sure you aren't thinking of, say, "Precious" Times lead with the political and public health aftershocks of the reflecting both its later closing time and the speed with which the numbers are exacerbated the effects of the earthquake. Rescuers sifting through the rubble the government are vociferously blaming building contractors for violating safety standards. But the piece explains that Turkey has virtually no standards to violate. Once construction begins on a building, it is never subject to feverishly scrambling to bury its rotting corpses before they spawn disease. speedy burials, and the Prime Minister ordered that bodies be buried as soon as they are found (relatives will have to identify their dead through a corpses themselves are not a health hazard; open sewage and lack of water are far more dangerous. This caveat gets only a single sentence, and no further explanation of Turkey's possibly misplaced priorities. warning that it hadn't yet confirmed that the plant was producing chemical weapons ingredients. An "unnamed official" tells the Post that the administration has since backtracked on its initial assertions that a toxic substance was manufactured at the plant and that its owner was a terrorist. The story admits that the bombing may have required a difficult judgment call, asking, "Just how certain does the government need to be before it uses force allegedly transferring classified computer files to his own computer. The medicine without protest and even issuing contrite remarks about the security financial chat room, may have suckered his day trading followers. All week, server. Later that afternoon, Park boasted that he had made a quarter of a they repaid their debts. The smugglers had duped many of the women into thinking they would be working as seamstresses or masseuses. In a fit of numerical detail, the Post calculates that a typical victim had to have on his callers. "There is something deranged about you," he told one guest. "Either you don't read the newspapers carefully enough or you're so prejudiced and biased that you block out the truth," he railed at another. The host is as obsessively as other people can talk about, well, about the Internet. But I fear, meanwhile, that our readers are getting sick of hearing us go back and forth about the Internet (aren't we supposed to be discussing the day's You keep focusing on it as a new and improved means of communications. Surely, though, it is becoming apparent that purely in terms of its power as a communications medium, the Internet is, at most, a marginal improvement over Web sites like this one have cool features that magazines can't replicate (such as conversations like this), but it isn't that much different. Chat rooms can create a sense of community, but communities have existed for as long as humanity itself. You keep saying that the free flow of information the Internet fosters is a net good that will expose the bad guys and make the world a better place, but I don't see a shred of evidence that is happening. The Internet provides convenience, provides fun, provides information, but it's not changing the way we live in any substantial way. The invention of the telegraph reduced communication time from five days to five minutes. To my mind, that's far more powerful, and more transforming, than anything the Internet has the Internet before anyone else in his industry and begins crushing the competition. Bill Gates becomes terrified when he realized someone else beat on the Net that put longstanding, valuable franchises at risk. You bet media companies are focused on the Web; every business has to be. The Internet cuts out middlemen, causes prices to drop, changes distribution patterns, blah, blah, blah. But you know, in the end it's just business. Nothing less, but been called worse online. Just ask the Motley Fool. If you blinked you missed it, but for a short while yesterday morning the rejected as unlikely, and both markets rebounded nicely. Fleeting as it was, the momentary episode of selling panic was interesting for a couple of reasons. In the first place, the rumor had all the makings of a story that was being floated by someone who had taken a large short position (in other words, who was wagering that the market was going down) and was trying to knock the market down after it opened strongly. There's something fits our ideas of the 1920s, when the market was incredibly manipulable, or even of the 1980s more than it does the late 1990s. But the truth is that in the short run, markets can occasionally be pushed, especially when so many decisions to buy or sell are keyed off what everyone else in the market is doing. Chain reactions are not much harder to start (in fact, given how quickly price moves get noticed, they may be easier) than they resignation rumor was that it raised an obvious question: Would it really the middle of next year. But it's interesting to note that in the past couple beneficiary of good economic fundamentals than the creator of them. shown an unusual ability to let his thinking on inflation, productivity, and the economy's possible growth rate evolve in response to changing data. But the essential point, that the soundness of this economy does not depend on still concerned about the possibility of an overheating economy but also convinced that important technological changes have allowed this economy to grow faster than in the past without sparking inflation. If anything, in fact, the bond market should have rallied on news that paranoid enough for bondholders, who seem perpetually convinced that the United States is about to become Brazil. There are certainly Fed governors out there who would be far more likely to raise interest rates aggressively at the first the world isn't going to fall apart anymore. When he leaves, the market will hiccup. But it would be surprising if it did more than that. To say that corporations rather than the government are driving economic policy isn't to say that they have absolute power. After all, even dictators have to worry about justifying their policies, hence the centrality of propaganda to fascist and Communist regimes, and can't do everything they want; there is always the danger of provoking a rebellion. Of course, in the United States (and other Western countries), the corporate elite has to worry about public sentiment, expressed not only in elections but in organized opposition (however weak, there still is some) from the labor movement, the environmental and deregulation in the '70s to seriously erode the liberal welfare state, and there is still major resistance to the privatization of Social Security, significant erosion of Medicare, and so on. But corporate economic and political pressure has steadily pushed public policy in this direction, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. The term "hate crime" doesn't get at what I think is the real issue: that certain kinds of crimes are not just aimed at a particular victim but are meant to intimidate or "send a message" to a whole class of people, whether to stay out of certain neighborhoods, hide their sexuality, stop performing abortions, or whatever. In other words such crimes are a form of political terrorism. They to me that this kind of intimidation should be recognized for what it is and specifically punished. The question is how best to do it. The problem with the idea of hate crime, aside from the fact that violent crime is inherently hateful, as you say, is that it doesn't distinguish between deliberate terrorism and acts that may be motivated in whole or in part by bigotry but don't have a purposeful agenda behind them. Rather, I would define the crime as premeditation. I would make it a distinct crime that would have to be charged (and proved) separately from charges of murder, assault, etc. Agency will demand that states intensify efforts to combat water pollution. The shooting. The first sets the diversity of the medical team that saved Benjamin over whether or not the federal government should confront extremists more Bush's less than overwhelming margin of victory in the mock election does not beat back fears that her candidacy might not survive a poorer showing. The that shields the organizations from liability for their decisions. A recent level to which pollution must be reduced in a body of water and then assign quotas to individual polluters. The latter would then have to cut back emissions or buy discharge rights from someone polluting below allowed campaign. Citing local and Western sources, the paper says that patterns have expanded the labor federation's influence abroad (for example, by sending money presidential campaign trail) from botched Western policy initiatives undertaken mistreatment of children abroad. The former paper says that in Japan, reported cases of child abuse are rising against a backdrop of record unemployment and increasing divorce and remarriage rates. Legislators may scale back laws that Children." The piece details the nightmarish conditions under which children in woods and rich wildlife, skeptics wonder who would feel safe enough to camp there. Link or no link, maybe the skeptics will find comfort in that the communications medium of all time"? How will it sweep away ignorance about racial hatred or empower people to take control of their lives? It seems to me the Internet is going to change the world as we know it. Let me lay out some of the reasons for my skepticism. First, from a purely historical point of view, I don't see how anyone can view the Internet as more important than any number of communications media that have preceded it: the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph player, the television among them. To my mind, the Internet is demonstrably less Secondly, more often than not, powerful new technologies don't live up to their supposed "true" potential. Here, of course, television is the prime example. Look back at the claims that were made for television during its formative years, and they sound a lot like the claims being made now for the Internet. Would anyone claim today that television has changed our society? Well, yes, bringing out the worst in people rather than the best. The anonymity it allows emboldens people to say things to each other they would never say face to face. There are at least as many sites for nuts as there are for people trying to make the world a better place. Everything has to be short and quick. And even some Web ideas that started out as utopian have been subverted over time. The example I know best is that of the chat rooms devoted to particular stocks, which were supposed to be informative, illuminating places, filled with stocks. And what happened? Chat rooms have become astonishingly intolerant branded a traitor and pretty much hounded out of the site. As you know, they've also become havens for fraud, abuse, and all sorts of dirty shenanigans. Two or three years ago, I made a point of checking the chat room whenever I began a story about a particular company. Now I don't bother; it's just a waste of widespread expectation that someday Amazon will be a gigantically profitable corporation itself. But why will this ever happen? There will always be some ability to know every price that exists for the good you want to buy. That's empowerment, all right; no question about it. But it's not the kind of empowerment Internet stock analysts like to talk about. So do I use the Internet? All the time. It's part of my life. The past few weeks, in fact, I don't think so. Needless to say (he hastens to add) all of the above is offered in the spirit of good, healthy debate. Glad I got that out of my system, though. Looking forward to tomorrow's correspondence. I promise two more dispatches today, you lucky old dog. for all his scandals, which are too numerous to repeat) travails. The public, which by and large cares more about its pocket than politics, would've said send the skunk to the showers. And, as a result, Gore would be the Explain to me, re: your second post yesterday, how techno is "interesting in a larger political sense." I fell off the pop music train in the early '90s; my and he thanked me, but I bet he hasn't played it yet. Let's be provocative. don't mean to be a drunk at the host's cocktail party, but I have mixed already obsolete) it's very slow. The links are valuable, especially the subscribers and would subscribe again, just for the services. wants to incur the wrath of a possible President Bush. As for Dole, there's no way she'll be the veep. The choice will be Tom will have a story saying that Bush, coyly, has said he hasn't used drugs in the House. I hope he sticks to his guns on the cocaine question. His "I won't play the gotcha game" answers to reporters have shown the most passion in his on pot. Obviously, this wasn't a problem years ago, but now that Boomers and for a serious candidate to say: "Yes, I smoked pot a lot and really enjoyed it. Just like I enjoyed having several beers at a dance. I was alive at a time when pot was part of the culture, I was curious, and you know what, it was pretty damn cool. Made me think in a different way. But I don't smoke anymore." That would satisfy me. I smoked pot for years and don't regret it a bit. I mean, who didn't? I did coke, but didn't like it. It made me feel like such a whore: Since I didn't have much money, you'd always have to schmooze the person who had the stash, even if you didn't like him or her. That made me feel cheap. putting out my college paper, chasing it with Squirt soda, and then have a few beers to calm down. I remember one final exam where I was totally fried, and I just undid my aluminum packet of crystal and snorted right on the desk in the exam room. The professor was oblivious. I got an A. I don't do drugs now, but it certainly was part of my teens and 20s. I wish It's nice to know that reporting does not change. One of the first lessons I learned in journalism school was the old phrase "there is nothing new under the sun," and I suspect that in five years an exciting new topic will be fascinating us in the same way that the Internet is now and the takeovers of the 1980s did then. I too was riveted by leveraged buyout stories in that time about this time period, which I liked because of just what you were talking about. Business was dramatic, made up of people and not just numbers. I was that all the successes and failures there over the years were due more to a lucky star, was able to attract the right person at the right time to cause it to be able to get to the next level. In its earliest days, it needed the cable, telephone, and Internet business to achieve some iron lock on the success, along with its struggles with the Justice Department, is in this genre. Bill Gates, no matter how big that company has become, still hangs over it like a living icon. I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad one as In a completely unrelated topic, were you are disturbed as I was about the did fire in incendiary devices, despite its denials. I swear, I am still so surprised when people or institutions lie like that. Does that make me the upper reaches of the cable box, there's no room for true international to show three great international matches a week instead of six hours of The key words here, though, are "thought to have little or no value." despite the fact that a generation of kids has now grown up playing soccer, and international soccer exists. But more and more, this seems to be a clear case where one of the reasons that audience has failed to materialize is because the opportunity for it to materialize has never existed. It's not, after all, as if the networks had given international soccer the old college try, found that it failed, and then abandoned its plans. On the contrary, if you want to watch international soccer, you usually have to pay lot of money. And even then the publicity for the games is essentially What's odd about this is that in certain respects soccer seems to be a natural. Not to replace football or baseball, but maybe to replace women's States than ever before, who you would think might be interested in watching which presumably must make them curious about the people who play it better And then there's this interesting fact, which was actually noted in a international teams. Is it really plausible that there's a huge market for an international soccer video game, and no market at all for international soccer In theory, if an opportunity to make money by showing international soccer exists, someone would have already taken advantage of it. But it's almost certainly true that none of the executives in charge of programming grew up playing or watching soccer, which is why you always hear the same criticisms of of one is a poor measure of the potential popularity of the other. network. But it has all the makings of a perfect niche market. The problem is that until someone gives that market a real chance to show itself, we can't prove it exists. Until then, Electronic Arts will keep raking in the profits of which some television network might otherwise claim a nice share. Brilliant, Tony, brilliant! I love your interpretation of the wizard world difference, the sudden revelation that there are tons of other people like him. Do you see a Magic Pride movement starting, with witches and wizards insisting I like your idea of foreign wizardry, too. Did you ever read Kingdoms of various countries. They're partly exquisite little parodies of travel lit, can hear them muttering "Fairies? Come on!" in their heads. But these stories Every day a fasting weasel bites the child's neck and drinks its blood for three minutes. The amount of blood drunk by each successive weasel (who is weighed before and after the drinking) is replaced by the same weight of a not cancel human nature (the distillation is only approximate: elfin blood changeling he is put out of the hill to make the rest of his way through the winter gales penetrated its polished windows; if the summer sun shone too vehemently, blinds were pulled down to protect the furnishings. Drinking bouts were long, taciturn, and ended in somnolence. The Queen was celebrated for her around the school: First we get a few chapters of Harry at home with his awful muggle relatives, who lock him in the closet, starve him, and cower at the thought that he might perform magic (his frustration at not being allowed to is we visit the Forbidden Forest, a spot of hazard and wonder, right on school formula, yet provide such a wealth of new details and such deep, dangerous plots that every book seems completely new. It's a trick other people have chapter in which one of the kids loses her temper, one in which we visit a trajectory that deepens and develops from book to book. It's as if she's (Not a succubus, by the way. A succubus is a female demon that comes to you in the night while you're asleep and has sex with you against your will. I was thinking of a monster that looks like an ordinary woman, until you see her its spectacular Golden Gate Bridge. There was a touch of wind blowing off the water, which was enough to keep my guests cool, but not enough to blow their carefully coifed hair into a mousse mess. The amber light sparkled all along If I say so myself, it was a completely perfect wedding to go along with the perfect weather. There were of course the superficial details of the of festively decorated individual cupcakes that an ingenious baker hand fashioned into a unique kind of wedding cake to the delightful surprise I got yesterday each time I noticed the antique ring around my finger that had previously and always been bare. And there were the much more profound moments that come from finally committing to a person for the rest of your one another, the joy radiating from the sea of faces of loved ones who had traveled from near and far to share in the event, the rush of happiness as their glasses clinked in a unified toast to our shared lives that lay ahead same weekend that several Republican presidential candidates had pledged to under the term "marriage," discussion of homosexuality in schools, and federal laws to specifically protect homosexuals from discrimination, part of an phraseology), I guess they told me. Except, of course, I don't seem to be paying an ounce of attention to the continuing and perplexingly tireless intolerance. Apparently, a great gob of Republicans had signed on, although this obviously ironic twist of dysfunctional familial fate) had confirmed their while more and more people are learning more and more about the lives of gay invaded the body politic. I simply felt like I was someone in love with a kindred soul, who wanted to be able to declare that in a way that had been It's hard to imagine then that, given these complex times, with so many important issues to deal with that are likely to challenge this country going what you think about this, because I cannot for the life of me see why this issue seems to inflame so many. Is it the religious thing? Is it the last gasp of a former culture that wants to hold back the new one? Is it just a smokescreen to inflame voters rather than actually inform them? I only know the words of guest after guest who came up to toast my partner, who talked of love, commitment, family, and the future, and not much of politics. My partner told one guest she was marrying, but it was a girl and not a "Well," came the response. "People have been marrying girls for I could not have said it better myself. So I won't. great bitches of entertainment history understood this. They knew that bitchiness must be both extreme and extremely meaningful, or it just comes off person who went wrong and apologized and would really be a lot nicer if she replace her, are powerful actresses. But you can't imagine either of them surgeon, but instead of enjoying the occasional triumph over her supercilious colleagues, she just had more bad stuff happen to her than maybe anyone else in nighttime soap history. Really bad stuff: Her father died. She lost her girl, got arrested, was fired, and then, when rehired, was forced to endure the humiliation of being the best heart surgeon on staff with the least seniority. She put up with petty bad stuff too, like the constant carping of her male colleagues about her lack of a gentle touch, or the punishments doled out by for instance, her daughter wandered off into the winter night and nearly died fancifulness that passes for creative on television these days. Here's an actress with a rare knack for emotional realism, the kind of intelligent, commanding presence that drains thinking, without mistresses, who'd ever realize the falseness of a false she suffered more interestingly than anyone else on the show. Hope never managed to do anything more interesting with her astronaut, the ridiculous quest to which she devoted her last year on the ceiling. She was a woman ready to wreak some serious havoc. Let her loose and she could have been, to say the least, memorable. Instead they tried to send her into orbit. In space, presumably, no one could hear her scream. It's never good to get your hand caught in the cookie jar. But if caught you must be, Chatterbox recommends that you arrange for it to happen during the month of August, when the media get lazy and inattentive. The latest illustration of this principle is the lack of publicity surrounding some editorial adviser and research consultant, now a Fox News political analyst and author of two titillating books dishing "candid commentary" from her mentor, the Journal ran an editor's note that read as follows: "There are search conducted earlier today turned up only two other references to this day the Journal ran its editor's note, and one brief item that ran in the back of the New York Times' business section three days later. Since the Times item, which appeared a full week ago (and which in the language. I have wracked my brain, and I can honestly tell you that I "There was none of the personal corruption which had marked the rule of "There was none of the personal corruption that had marked the rule of enemies and their willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit underestimated their ruthlessness and willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit of their institutional vendetta." well conclude he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and in subjecting the nation to the prolonged paralysis of a public impeachment, which at least would have given him the opportunity to defend himself by due process of law. But once again his patriotism took precedence he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and subjecting the country to a prolonged process of impeachment, which would have given him the chance to defend himself by due process of law. His allegiance to [This assertion, unlike the others, has some merit, and it's possible the two arrived at the phrase independent of one another; but given the other examples cited here, that likelihood is not great.] order to finish a Talk magazine profile she's reportedly writing about in the history of Western civilization," must have been a heady enterprise Yes, new sounds can really ruin critical paradigms. Show me someone like rock," requires either some impressive semantic gymnastics or deafness. I have to mistrust someone who, while bemoaning the bland repetitiveness of current Still, the stars have aligned to give Miller a nice context for his book "Coronation Ball" and the early screenings of Blackboard Jungle seem movie theater, disappointed that there wasn't a riot. What I like about the early chapters is Miller's idea of rock's These kinds of unorthodox responses to rock's creation myth were fresh enough to make me expect more from the later chapters than a gloss on punk as simply rock's "quintessence" of "stunning ugliness." Man, Miller's writing sure is Miller was trying to trace, I think you're correctly suspicious of disco's chapter lovingly detailing the design and production of the Fender electric guitar, showing how the technology enabled an amateur musical expression that would change mass culture. Disco prefigured the most cataclysmic reordering of "gimmickry" that Miller seems to both enjoy and distrust became central to Believe it or not, word of your splendid wedding had spread to the East Fortune magazine's hot young technology editor, who is also (I believe) a childhood friend of yours. In that lovably sardonic way of his, he described your impending nuptials as "the event of the season" in Silicon Valley. From your sweet account, it sounds like he wasn't far off. I was deeply impressed, thing I remember about my wedding is what a blur it was. By the next day I could barely recall who was there, much less what they said to me. Here's the It is, of course, ridiculous that there is political hay to be made by a candidate gain the nomination, but will only be a curse once the general tolerance is pretty much taken for granted. (Though not always: We had a boy on a downtown street. It later turned out that the killer had been taunted But another reason, I think, is that baby boomers in particular have tended to segregate themselves along political lines as well as class and racial a whole other story.) Although I was considered something of a lefty in neighbors than not. There may well be large pockets of gay hatred in the land, but it's not something I can gauge because I rarely see it in my daily life. So view.) But I also have to acknowledge that my isolation could be leading me very astray. After all, I am also utterly baffled by the extent to which Bill Times sports section this morning about the Tom's River Little League team winning its first game in the Little League World Series. I realize this is a real story for the Times --Tom's River is in its circulation area, and the story was written, as if it were a big league game with big league since it has become one of our most frothy debates these days. In fact, I just got back from a book tour with two other technology writers, one of whom held your exact sentiments about the current development of the Web. He and I debated intensely over the course of two weeks and we never really changed each con that are taking place, so let me address them one by one. fomenters of hate who are spewing their poisonous attitudes out to the wider world using these powerful new technologies. My general attitude is still that sunlight is the best disinfectant and all speech needs to be spoken. All these sites are surely loathsome to see, but haven't these attitudes been in existence since the dawn of time? Frankly, I would rather be able to more clearly see exactly what these sites are spouting than to have them hide away dangerously in dark corners, ready to pounce. For the vast majority of people, idiocy only more clearly. When you know that the Internet seems to bring out the worst in people, I think your problem may be with the darker side of Second, you are right that it is unlikely that the Internet will live up to its potential. But what does really? Not me and not you and not television and not anything else. Some of what is on the Web right now is silly, some depressing, some crazy, and some just plain stupid. A lot of what is being created now is aimed only at getting people to buy more stuff they probably bidding frenzies are not going to change the world for the better. But I firmly posit that the increasingly free flow of information that the Internet allows can only benefit people in the long run by educating them on the wider world outside their windows. What is undeniably powerful is the television network, or even a fine newspaper like the Wall Street really matter if people go there or not. Perhaps all this communication will only result in pointless cacophony, but I like the noise. I am troubled by the kind of behavior that the Internet seems to engender and am often offended by the cruel and mindless blather that is too easy to find. The stock chat rooms are a good example, since most of them have turned into places of little value. But I encounter rage and misbehavior when I drive to work every morning, as people seem to have lost a lot of the civility that used to rule. But again, I don't think the Internet is to blame for this. It's If you want to know why so many people come to stock picking with a trader's, rather than an investor's, mentality, one reason is that Wall Street analysts so often seem governed by the very same mentality. Take this week's raft of upgrades and bullish comments on some Internet bellwethers by analysts comments came out this week, after these stocks had already rallied strongly from their recent lows, was telling. Instead of making a real contrarian call, telling their clients that these stocks were excellent buys no matter what the upcoming quarters. Now, set aside the complete foolishness of distinguishing "We believe [the stocks] offer a sound way to play the fundamental strength and renewed investor enthusiasm we expect to see during the fall and holiday shopping season," he wrote, arguing in essence that places like Amazon and Yahoo would reap the benefits of all the new online shoppers, most of whom After all, nothing has changed in between to make the impact of the upcoming and Yahoo, whatever they are, have not changed, either. The only difference is fact that these stocks are now more expensive than they were a week ago Does this make sense? Of course not, at least not if you believe that eventually the price of a company's stock reflects the discounted value of all the future free cash flow of that company. (Which it does.) After all, normally you want to buy stocks when they cost less, not more. But in the world of momentum investing, which is to say the world that all those traders who "watch the tape" live in, buying stocks after they've risen is what makes sense. And even those who have an excellent sense of the economics of the companies they would have to be furious that he was telling them to buy Amazon when it was far more expensive than it had been a week and a half before. But since his report helped bump Net stocks up yesterday, they probably didn't even notice. elections are an important form of popular culture; they always have something to say about what's going on with us. But my view of the electoral scene is running for president would be fun, but on the other hand he blew it by missed the point. Bush has every right not to talk about his past drug use. In fact, silence is a lot more seemly than all the blather he would feel forced to put out if he owned up, to the effect of what a terrible mistake he had made in the feckless days of his youth. No, what's truly objectionable is his Even more ridiculous is the controversy over Bush saying "fuck," apropos of column today, saw fit to lay on us the information that he himself never uses creationism. Since she is "seeking to lead this country into the with their usual respect for women, may nominate her as vice president on the theory that women will vote for any warm female body. (Not that Bush seems to "fuck"? And was she ever unfaithful to Bob in those dark times before abortion. Will the Conservative Party swallow that and his position on gay week ago. And today's question is: Won't someone just put this dog out of its almost three years now. It has reported shrinking earnings, which eventually turned into losses, in every quarter in the last two fiscal years. If even a of junk bonds. Trading in the company's stock has been suspended, and the demonstrating the important lesson that buying a cheap stock because you're It's hard to feel sorry for either the bondholders or the stockholders, since this was a train wreck you could have seen coming a mile away. (Click plan is nonetheless dismaying. It keeps current management in place and hands worth. The striking thing about the restructuring plan is not that the equity is being redistributed but that so much energy is being put into an enterprise the upside of which seems so small. Why, after all, do we need a Planet restaurants have a terrible track record. And the restaurant business in continued distance between the interests of corporate managers and corporate raging), there are still plenty of businesses that stay alive just because they are alive. In an ideal economy, capital will migrate away from inefficient and unproductive businesses and toward productive businesses. instance), and even though it happens here much more than in any other country's economy, the "long run" can be very long indeed. And sometimes the mere fact that a company exists can be enough to trick investors into believing disappeared two years ago, at the point when it became clear that the novelty of the business had worn off and that all the future held was empty restaurants The other thing keeping the company afloat is that it's been run by people who were taking home nice salaries and plenty of corporate perks even as they investors, the best thing would have been the liquidation of the company, which would have let them take their money and put it into real companies. But for If you're being paid well to be captain, it's a lot better to let the ship slowly sink, even if scuttling it is what's best for everyone on board. right, and that only the paranoid survive. But when you look at how tenaciously survive. Perhaps what only the paranoid do is thrive. reading the newspapers, much less absorbing the information contained within. that finally exposes me for the fraud that I really am. My wife thinks this is an utterly absurd way to go through life, for which I can offer no defense but a helpless shrug. I used to think that I would get over this feeling; now I morning. First, on the question of Bill Gates, it strikes me as completely unarguable that his "living icon" status has been a tremendous asset to command within companies, while also having the set of skills, rarely seen in his employees will follow him over a cliff. The classic example was when he the Internet. The entire company had to shift on a dime and promising projects, which people had devoted years to, were scrapped because they didn't relate to the Internet. At a typical big company, there would have been enormous Everybody simply got with the program, because, by God, that's what Bill During the antitrust trial, though, you could see the problem with that lack could admit that obvious truth. (Instead, they blamed it on the Feds for asking "bad" questions, and the press for writing stories that simply said out loud witnesses brought to the trial the same set of characteristics that were so unwillingness to say anything straightforwardly. Fairly or not, they all looked as though they had something to hide, just as Bill had. It's such an insular that point wonderfully. Ken would constantly ask Gates simple, sensible never have happened. It gives solace to the "off the grid" crowd. It's scary firsthand knowledge is willing to tell the truth. I can't stand people who play for instance). But at moments like this one, it is hard to argue with them. ranks among the worst attorneys general of all time? Sure seems that way to Today mentions the Fed's news on the front page, but leads instead with a possible link between the Kremlin and the Bank of New York laundering All the papers give the same lowdown on the Fed's decision. The federal funds rate (that is, the one banks charge each another for overnight borrowing) Fed's announcement was characteristically opaque. The stories follow the Fed's lead, hedging their bets as to whether this will be the last hike of the some personal loans are tied directly to the prime rate, millions of consumers If he doesn't, they are emboldened by what can only be a sure sign of economic health. So even though the rate hike might stave off consumer inflation, now under scrutiny. He is married to a Bank of New York executive who is also being investigated. The scoop certainly sounds like a potentially juicy one. excused most of the sect's adherents as victims who didn't know they were joining a subversive political organization. The group's leaders, on the other health authorities. Instead, the company contacted Planet Out, a gay online service based in the city, which pelted the denizens of local gay chat rooms decried the way he manipulated the discrepancies between the two legal Board's recent decision to excise evolution from its official curriculum. Most locally elected school boards who have the option to tell the state board to go jump in the lake," said an aide to moderate Republican Gov. Bill Graves. "The Governor is confident the overwhelming number will." Should we, too, agree to disagree? Oh, I suppose. It's unsatisfying, but Nobody talks to each other; they talk past each other. They're not trying to persuade; they're just trying to stake out claims. (You and I, of course, are the rare exception.) "Stock Hucksters Thrive on the Web," said the front page of the New York Times yesterday. No doubt the author of that dispatch writing stories that I thought were models of judicious balance, only to have amazing that people can have such heated and passionate feelings about this technology. Was there the same debate over the telephone? Over the automobile? It is also possible that my general grouchiness on the subject of the few years claiming that the valuations of Internet stocks make no sense, and the end is near, or at least the end of the bull market. There is a new book out that catalogues all sorts of financial manias over the years; you can't read it without seeing the obvious parallels to the Internet mania. But of course, every time I say that out loud, the stocks keep going up, and I look like an idiot. And the Internet crowd has a grand old time mocking me. of INS and customs officials. The workers used their security clearance and free flight privileges to smuggle fake cocaine and hand grenades for undercover particularly prone to smuggling problems because it has the most service to interesting safety angle: Not only is smuggling laughably easy, it's potentially very dangerous. Smugglers often stashed contraband close to Various organized crime bosses and politicos are being scrutinized by the finance ministers and a former deputy prime minister are under investigation. case. In addition to revenues from prostitution and contract killings, as much explains why all this is coming to light now: further investigation by a documentary filmmaker and attorneys for siege victims. The filmmaker also compound, another action that has been repeatedly denied. openly gay Republican state legislator who was also in the Army Reserves has number of armed forces personnel discharged for homosexuality has actually thought. Of course, we did get the first glimmerings of it in Chamber of in Book 2--evidently, wanting to make a good impression on your beloved is another impulse that can inadvertently put you in the hands of darkness. Is there more story to be milked there? Ginny, for example, could turn into a hitherto impermeable heart of Potter, then extracting just revenge by scorning inclined to look for the sexpots of supernatural tradition: sirens, vampires, various enchantresses, those green ladies with rotten or serpentine lower of the kids are products of mixed marriages. (Can't remember who, though.) needn't be a love interest; it could just be someone with whom frustrated nevertheless enters the wizard world and makes a difference. I agree with you that we all know ourselves to be misunderstood magicians trapped in a horribly by writing a place for us. (Well, me, anyway. You're clearly a real be gay. Bet you a silver sickle the homosexual themes are treated with really think that's where the series is headed. We've seen it so often by a mirror that shows the viewer's heart's desire. Gazing in it, Harry sees his family for the first time: his dead mother and father and a whole array ancestors. He can hardly bring himself to turn away, and sneaks back for another fix whenever he gets the chance. I think he's more likely to be caught dwell the brave at heart." It's not immediately clear why the Sorting Hat puts people in the houses it chooses. For example, wouldn't you guess scholarly scolded by his grandmother, and cowering in corridors. What's he doing in What would you like to see? Got any suggestions for the divine Like you, I began this assignment with a mixture of puzzlement and eventual movies and the inevitable merchandising frenzy that will follow. My wands, owls, and endless other wee wizard paraphernalia sure to flood the I also had to overcome some grownup resistance to the books themselves, mostly owing to the atrophying of my capacity for the kind of the Harry Potter books restore this capacity with brilliant efficiency must be part of the reason they appeal to adults. But, as you point out, they're hardly mention in this company suggests that he's the real thing. reading life (which is to say, my life) is divided evenly between bedtime likely to have fond, intense memories of just those pleasures. We try to recapture them with genre schlock, as though the dream world of our youth were exact in her portraiture. There's no reason why solid storytelling, brisk prose, and vivid characters should appeal exclusively, or primarily, to children, though children are less likely to submit to being bored, pandered wizard world (and slyly fill you in case you've missed the earlier installments, something that will become increasingly important as the series fills its projected seven volumes and sales figures mount into the trillions), the Dark Side), and to create and resolve enough satisfying short- and which children have no interest (knowing, as adults refuse to, that they are (who is likely to be everybody's favorite character) are believably mischievous, competitive, vain, and, for all their intelligence, prone to summers ago, which also took the world somewhat by surprise (although Star Wars was more carefully calculated to appeal to both kids and adults, by nobody). Like the first Star Wars movie, the Harry Potter books have ingeniously recombine elements of fairy tale, religious allegory (Harry as the fairly explicitly in the case of Potter, the Star Wars cycle itself) into something new, fresh, and irresistible. You feel, somehow, that they have always been there, waiting for you to discover. You also feel, in spite of being one of several million crazed fans, that they were written for you alone, a wizard stranded in an uncomprehending Muggle world, waiting for someone to recognize that what everyone else calls your abnormalities are really powers. This, I think, is the deep appeal of these books (and of a number of the others But why these books, why now? It's probably a mistake to try to read to much years. But it must mean something, no? What do you think? According to a clipping from the Daily Telegraph passed along by our the Harry Potter books designed especially for adult consumers. The content is thousand have been sold. I thought this was funny, but then again when I was reading these books in public places in preparation for our chat I would make sure to have a notebook and pencil and even my laptop handy, to make clear to I take your point about kids and preaching, though I think that they tend to tolerate the moral if the story is good enough. But then again, they may learn their morals in part from the stories they hear. I do suspect (you imply that because they're so blessedly free of didacticism. Of course, there are subtle clan), and affirmations of the virtues of honesty and friendship. But there is also ample recognition of the fact that it's sometimes necessary to break the rules, talk back to your teachers, or fling a fistful of mud at someone who pisses you off. This flexible, realistic moral sense coexists with reassurances that the important moral categories are, in the end, stable. Good and evil exist in this world, and their struggle for dominance is what makes it go I agree that the books get better and better, and that as you proceed from one to the next the series acquires more richness and density of detail. One of seem to return as teachers.) And there is a lovely mirroring of past and still around to torment the son of his tormentor. And the themes of loyalty, friendship, and betrayal that Harry uncovers in the story of his parents' demise (a story about which we still have much to learn), cast their shadow on behaving oddly, and it seemed as though he might be harboring thoughts of the Dark Side. And I think (I hope) he still may be headed there: the great, operations of free will in a supernaturally determined world, is classically always the favorites who turn evil in this kind of story. It seems to me that overcoming the temptation to join them. There is an inkling of this possibility early on, when the sorting hat, which places new students in their residential Still, I suspect he'll face this dilemma again before long. After all, Harry It's the wizard pastime, something like three games of lacrosse played simultaneously on broomsticks, with magic balls), and a natural leader among his peers. His decency has for now held his pride in check, but this might (should, I daresay) change. I don't think the series can continue to be as interesting if the menaces he faces continue to be strictly external. The veneration of his martyred parents may be colored with doubt, even anger. The that some characters seem to slip and slide in the twilight zone between benign possibilities. In any case, I trust her to keep us enchanted. And let's not forget that Harry has, at the end of Prisoner of puberty can't be far off. What is wizard adolescence like? Adolescence of any kind is risky territory for the "young adult" book writer, perhaps especially tradition of English boarding school buggery to consider. Will Harry and up your spells? Is there a potion to cure acne? Do wizards ever date Can you divine the future? I await the magic owl bearing your answer to The earthquake in Turkey takes center stage as the death toll here.) Some papers report that the quake may be downgraded to a the mayor turned the local ice skating rink into a backup morgue. Because it took government rescue teams nine hours to arrive there, survivors at first attempted to dig out victims with pickaxes and sledgehammers. (The LAT earthquakes this century," but what does this mean? Do they mean in Turkey or The Wall Street Journal and the Post report that defense it would retaliate only against a nuclear power that had used nuclear weapons limit nuclear strike authority to the prime minister or his designate. Experts AIDS research. Many doctors have long criticized the research as microbiology, and immunology brought about by the research have now led to chronic viral diseases, historically among the hardest to cure. Wen Ho Lee is racist. It waits until the seventh paragraph to credit the spin. In this spirit, the lead paragraph of the Journal's earthquake article merits quoting in full: "A powerful 45-second earthquake cut a swath through Turkey's industrial heartland, killing thousands of people, shutting businesses, wrecking major power lines and jolting national confidence just as the economy showed signs of leaving 1999's recession behind." That lumbering pace, though, has raised new fears of flooding in southern Today quotes a pregnant woman interviewed while videotaping the fail to explain how a storm qualifies as a hurricane (once its top sustained hurricanes are named (an alphabetical system that starts over each year with a name beginning with "A" and is planned years in advance, so that we already stemming the spread of disease as it became clear, five days after the quake, that few if any victims remain to be discovered alive. The New York Times reports that houses facing the water. The paper also describes the growing profile of the accountability that carried the headline "A Complete Change of Mentality Is used cocaine. "An honest declaration would serve him, and the nation, well," which failed to pursue with any energy what he considers credible charges that "It appears that many reporters have gained their second wind." bounty hunters' tactics in the past, the paper says, but now consider those efforts rogue police work and a serious violation of national law. the paper calls "flawed arrests." City prosecutors tossed out arrests last year at a rate more than twice as high as four years ago, with drug charges more likely than any other kind to be dropped. New York is also paying more to recommend dousing plants with mixtures that include chewing tobacco, mouthwash, and bourbon. A former undercover cop who began writing a gardening column in television. Scientists, on the other hand, call him a huckster whose advice air primarily because he's so good at getting viewers to pull out their Normally, when one of three big players in an industry buys one of its two competitors, you hear rumblings about possible antitrust violations and the deleterious effects of lack of competition. But we've yet to hear any such position. And as the example of the auto industry suggests, having two or three major players in an industry is qualitatively different from having just one. Actually, that's the other thing. It's hard to figure out what the bad by this deal (hard to figure out who's being hurt that we don't want to be hurt, that is). The pricing of magazines is difficult to decipher (it often, in which accounts for the fact that so many magazines are sold at the newsstand, even though the price of one copy there is often equal to the price of four or five copies bought by subscription. So, consumers won't be hurt in the God bless you. That doesn't mean, of course, that it won't be a new experience The one group that probably will be hurt by the deal is the advertisers, but the company to drive harder bargains. The flip side of this is that it will make advertisers think harder about why they advertise and where they advertise. In other words, the acquisition may have the unforeseen effect of take more critical looks at the companies and personalities in the fashion industry. It's an open secret in magazine publishing that there are some stories that just can't be done, because running them would result in advertising's being pulled that magazines can't afford to be pulled. But now pieces: "You want to pull your advertising? Fine. If you think you can make it more power to you." Shifting the balance of power away from advertisers is, in that sense, entirely a good thing. So, to take a purely To the chagrin of many and the joy of at least a few, Cocktail Chatter fonder. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the two weekly recaps that went unwritten would have had to detail a stock market tumbling steadily downhill, a Net sector in which investors appeared to have lost all faith, and interest rates for no obvious reason aside from excellent earnings from bellwethers Cisco (a "Oversold" doesn't mean anything, of course. It just means that prices have dropped pretty far pretty quickly. Unfortunately, sometimes prices drop far and quickly for good reasons. This wasn't one of those times, I think, but "oversold" is not a label that helps you tell the difference. But it's a good word to use at cocktail parties if you want everyone to know you're in the know. Actually, it's a good word to use if you want people to think you're a crackpot. But that can be fun, too. And so, once more into the breach. delivers customized information to handheld computers, will offer distribution is part of a sweeping effort by the world's biggest software maker openness as evidence that companies were no longer as quick to hide potential redeem billions of dollars of withdrawals from investors who had entered great business when you can borrow money with no intention of paying it to turn down jobs because he can't find enough workers, despite offering a domination of the microprocessor market and practically every year has a locations. Someone tell me again: Why did the Automats go out of business?" Day of Trading Hardly a Blockbuster.' It's genius, I tell you! Pure "brought the world closer together than any event since the Congress of for this way of thinking, maybe not. But you've certainly hit on something by focusing on Miller's partiality to music that "brings us all together." He's an us became these instant celebrities, yet none of us really had any talent." There is an implicit criticism here of rock's role in creating today's But Miller is not awfully concerned about authenticity. For him, rock is the product of the coldest sort of commercial calculation, true, Body, Black and White, dancing the same dance, moving to the same beat, as But this is ignoble. This is where rock turns into the always condemned. Once rulers understand the political implications of Dionysian revelry, it gets turned to rotten ends. Merengue is terrific music, Rock has its roots in the Cold War; it is, at least in part, the musical like so many protest movements, it partakes of the very vices it purports to Kids understand this. Miller doesn't always. That's why he gets blindsided by punk and disco. The Sex Pistols, of course, are incomprehensible without a on the other. Not that there weren't a few truly emetic songs that united the But what is disco? Since I know little about it, and since you make big claims for it, I would love to hear more. At the time, it seemed like a bid by classes. Since disco came precisely at a time when the privileged classes, in blacks through such innovations as forced busing, this seems like an odd Maybe you're right that Miller is not listening to much modern rock. I don't listen to much, either, and most of it's poppy stuff I hear on the drive to Crow's guitar licks seem so familiar that I have often suspected they're simply that any casual acquaintance is bound to lead to similar ones, because the surface of rock is exciting only at rare and lucky moments. First, I wanted to assure you that I never discriminate against straight white men. In fact, some of my best friends are of your ilk. Thanks for the good wishes about the wedding. I had no idea that it had record, I didn't take any stock as a wedding gift. Frankly, I think all the hubbub about the event was due to the fact that few have seen an actual the 123rd one, I am sure that people will become as thrilled about going to one as they are about heterosexual nuptials. ("Honey, not another lesbian wedding? We're going to go broke buying all these power tools.") I hope so, although I was not heartened by an article I read this morning in laws on the books, few are being implemented by police, who appear to decline being beaten up by a skinhead who didn't like the color of his skin, was only eclipsed in horror by the story of a man who had his head split in half and was "roasted" by a man who claimed the victim had made a pass at him. I am not sure when a simple "No, thanks" fell out of a favor for more brutal solutions. Both crimes, shockingly, were not reported as hate crimes. Internet, which I am thrilled to talk about all day and night. In fact, I do, one of the largest gay and lesbian sites on the Web. I report all day about the Internet, and then go home and talk about it even more. Perhaps you could call me a loser, but I have never been so captivated by a medium in my life. I think I have become so obsessive about the advent of the Internet because I have long believed that it will turn out to be the most powerful communications medium of all time. To me, it has the potential to sweep away ignorance about such topics as gay and racial hatred and empower people to take more control of their lives. The idea of a fully interactive medium that only becomes more powerful by its exponential growth, that gives people the tools to instantly publish, that allows for a freer and even chaotic flow of information, is a gigantic I know I sound like those demented digerati who have spent too much time in the insular world of Silicon Valley, but I firmly believe that the Internet is here has been underwhelming and derivative of the old world. For all the attention given to electronic commerce of late, and the incredibly high valuation being given to companies that lose scads of money, some of the business on the Web is little more than a glorified version of selling crap on the Internet. Not very exciting to be sure, and a little unnerving to me since fewer companies I see these days are as concerned with building a real business to figure out what to do next. This makes me very nervous and it should make a In fact, what disturbs me most is the lack of information individual investors are using to make their decisions, despite the flood of good data available. It's more than a little ironic that the Internet is a place of endless information and people who are buying up stock in Web companies have little knowledge of the businesses they are betting on. It seems to have become a big guessing game in which a few will end up with the right answers. In fact, since this medium is built from the ground up, no one is entirely sure what the right answers may be in the years to come. Thus, the theme of my coverage of this interesting time in business history, which was also the theme of my book Re: the little league story, I am never surprised by the lengths we go in the name of sports, which I do not follow closely, making me a bad lesbian, I years old, traveling east. We are taking only two days off, losers that we are, for our honeymoon, since my partner is in the throes of the second round of financing for her company. It's one Internet business I don't cover, for On Columbine, before I forget: I don't, in general, buy as a sufficient explanation for media obsessions that "it's all about ratings and selling papers," for two reasons. First, because you have to ask why huge numbers of reporters, editors, producers, etc., who are responsible for the actual coverage, when in fact journalists are caught up in the same fears and fantasies as their audience. As I see it, Columbine hit more of a cultural protecting children, whether it's censorship and drug testing or welfare and gun control; on the other, adults are fearful of young people, feel that they're out of control, and at the same time guilty about the many ways kids are forced to take urine tests if they want to participate in extracurricular activities or take the classes that are, in some cases, connected with these activities. Aside from the travesty against the Fourth Amendment, this is just all like presumptive criminals who deserve no autonomy and respect, and then wonder why some actually fulfill your expectations. that its application is discriminatory, mistaken executions of innocent people are inevitable, keeping people on death row for years during the appeal process amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, yet limiting appeals is even worse, there's no evidence that executions have any practical deterrent effect, and emotional catharsis is not a good enough reason for the state to kill people. question to be raised about what you do about someone who's already serving life without parole who kills an inmate or guard; how to deter a murderer who shoots the cop trying to arrest him, figuring he has nothing to lose; and other such situations. And then there's the issue of whether politically motivated Which leads back to the issue of why we ought to create a special category for more deleterious to the social fabric than ordinary crimes. I disagree with you reports suggesting that states are doing a wildly uneven job of testing interviews with survivors and relatives of the dead to paint a macabre picture at the epicenter, to use the city's skating rink as an overflow morgue turned disastrous when the power went out. "As hundreds of corpses lay in their body bags," the paper reports, "the ice grew soft and watery, and a thick pungent mobilization in the days following the quake. As soldiers finally appeared in profile the army has taken thus far, but also cautioned citizens not to expect state forces to "work miracles." The paper also says the governors of three damaged provinces will be fired because they failed to put together efficient to commandeer private hearses, trucks, and construction equipment for the requiring lead screening for children on Medicaid. Data show that child published, indicated that even a dozen years after leaving his job his bones Carbide, covered workers' skin and even their teeth. consumed by periodic bouts of rage. The story says only in the white supremacist movement was he able to find a measure of acceptance. database manager and member of a local environmental group, tells the "Our worst fears were realized." This controversy is in contrast, the paper employs a "laborious accumulation of detail" to back up her diagnosis that the late princess "was unpredictable, egocentric, aggressive, insecure, manipulative, paranoid, possessive, easily bored, uneducated and a habitual control, but I really can't believe that everything in the pop marketplace is just numbly imbibed by a passive audience. (Also, isn't pinning today's celebrity culture on rock letting the tabloids, glossies, talk shows, As someone who routinely got his head pounded into school lockers by Led conformism. Still, I think Miller's somewhat overheated "Dionysian" riff does make an important point: that even a music with the crassest commercial aims line "I can't hide, I can't hide" was "I get high, I get high," and concluded tale is suggestive of rock's power as charged, volatile, as they say, "open Whether or not rock still has such possibilities depends, I think, on your verb, is its ability to take private but common feelings and put them into a shared public language. This phenomenon gets more interesting as the culture problems with Miller's critique. As a critical theorist himself, Miller must it), yet he still seems to present pop music as the product of the same shared, While I don't mean to make too great a claim for disco, I do think it represents a moment in which cultural forces that Miller doesn't account for realigned in a way that changed "rock." The polarizing "Disco Sucks" movement revealed a mass audience not just splintering, but clashing along certain demographic lines. Meanwhile, the music's sound and technology was providing similar, if less broadly significant upheavals are happening in the worlds of house, techno, and other electronic music even now. Musics that emphasize rhythm and texture over melody and lyrics aren't necessarily apolitical or Nowadays, you just have to work a little harder to hear it. Which Miller, by his own admission, stopped doing over a decade ago. This raises a question we've both evaded. Is this book really necessary? Is Miller's I want to close this quite enjoyable week with a plea for clemency. Let's Flowers in the Dustbin is idiosyncratic enough that it's hard to imagine over the past few days. While doing his best to expose the men behind the Miller actually tries to address the nuances that make a music succeed or fail, which is pretty uncommon in his milieu. He recognizes that even prefab, is it a cursory attempt to include still another music that discerning that's pretty parlous ground to dash over in eight pages. Miller obviously enjoys the moment of The Harder They Come knocking The Sound of provocation, emotional retardation of most pop culture. If we're going to The Carter administration: What a time to first hear "All Tomorrow's Miller, you, and I hear it? Obviously, popular music needs some context in which to be understood. But more and more of these disengaged bits of audio expressionism are floating around us, daring us to make sense of them. To listen intelligently, which I believe is still possible, you have to draw parallels, be alert to links and exchanges, respond both musically and But maybe we're all being too sloppy with this term "rock." Maybe Miller's favorite trends in this, er, "cultural form" began. Did all of the music, make things easy for us content providers, but I don't think so. Still, maybe trenchant analyses often come years later. Maybe the etymological evolution from "rock 'n' roll" to "rock" to whatever else we decide to call this intense, edgy, corrupt, joyful form of musical expression is long overdue. You lost me on your techno explanation, but my thanks for trying. In your Slim, and the others, and confined to that, I don't see the counterculture. Where does today's youth stand on politics, for example? Besides the communications breakthrough, what's today's equivalent of the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, etc.? Besides the tattoos and piercings, not sure if someone's in and you trade voice mail. Also, in reporting, if your subject is willing, you can reproduce exactly what they've said, on record, so there's no dispute on misquotes. Although when I was sifting through when was the last time you got a real letter? I know I never write them anymore. They're relics now, and will make for fascinating reading in future a flack by his side, looking for all the world like a don out of the opening I don't agree with your point yesterday that Gore himself is messing up his campaign. Yes, he's made a lot of dumb moves and gaffes and is spending money moving all those union delegates to tears with his speech about his sister in fucking (figuratively, I assume) Gore, too. She'd be a far better asset being on the stump for him and other Senate candidates, rather than sucking up money, awful outlet for conventional Beltway wisdom. It would save so much time. An pressure from the Bush organization to unite behind the mayor. With a united I read Dick Morris' column in the Post today, and as usual he had opponent, because the publishing scion is too dorky to win, an assessment I I also read today that the Voice will unveil a new design tomorrow. should be banned nationwide, collected, and destroyed. unannounced checks of Furrow's house and car for weapons. This despite Furrow's frequent claims that he was homicidal and suicidal, and despite a judge's order Wash., had at least five owners before Furrow. A year ago, Furrow sold two of pawn shop and later bought them back. The LAT quotes the pawn shop owner saying that had the transaction taken place several months later, he slightly reassuring, but the same Times article reports that Furrow had six other handguns and rifles in his van besides the two he sold to and Apparently, Furrow's was a borderline case: He had slashed his wrists, tried to stab workers at a mental health facility, and constantly talked about his the law, had sought psychiatric care, held a degree in engineering, and had believe that while dismantling nuclear missiles, radioactive gold, lead, aluminum, and nickel were melted into ingots and sold to the private sector. scrap metal from nuclear weapons facilities into forms that could be used in investigation in the first place, which I obviously don't. A terrible sense of spin machine for that insanely prurient report is something of a stretch. Gore talent as a politician can't help but emphasize Gore's lack of same. People are hasn't opened his mouth. Basically, he's of the same New Democrat ilk. I don't see any particular reason to vote for Gore, who is fundamentally conservative economically and socially, as well as married to one of our great House so that whoever wins the presidency, nothing much will get done in the next four years. From my point of view, so long as there is no functioning social movement on the left, mainstream politics will continue to be a vast wasteland and my main criterion in voting will be how best to stave off the By a functioning left I mean among other things a left with ideas, a left whose advocates can put forward an analysis of what's wrong with the restructuring of the economy and the repressiveness of the culture, rather than avoid looking at the quality of their own lives via sentimental moralizing earnestness that grates. I confess I had skipped over that story, basically these days, but the genres that are most interesting to me in a larger cultural Experts believe the recently published document is just an outline to the New York Times article briefly mentions that the longer document is He was worried that publishing the memoir would give readers the impression The memoir's existence came to light only in the 1980s, when it was memoir, since he had already been given his day in court. The document will be released in German, with commentary pointing out the Is it coincidence that the German newspaper Die Welt released the document, and it's reasonable to assume they sped up their editorial process to deadening lighting of a typical office. One of my favorite writers, the "different in the ways that make no difference and the same in the ways that do." As I sit here under fluorescent lights in the Wall Street Journal's I did indeed write my last posting late at night, but remember I am three you decry the faster lifestyle of us all, I will add that I have been a night owl since I was a wee lass and this is nothing different. On the topic of these time. I often wonder if I can keep up the pace I have set for my life, but I Which is probably why I am such an optimist about this Internet phenom and you are more circumspect. I caught the bug early from covering the early days feeling of speed and change and something different was palpable. So was the feeling of imminent crisis, of being on the edge of disaster constantly. This has almost been comical at times, but they have endured everything from lack of funding to questionable accounting to technological glitches to attacks from some of the biggest companies out there. All of these challenges, it was widely So, the free access trend seems to me to be another assault at the gates of that they will eventually make the service free and make money off the giant audience via advertising and commerce fees. I remember a long time ago that not give away free what it used to charge for, I would point out that it used to make a lot of money from hourly charges (some users spent hundreds of dollars on the service a month) and it managed to wean itself away from that taking over. They moved from an Apple to Windows audience in their early days without a blink; they moved from a gated service to one where the Web was making a lot of noises in this direction of late and those strategies are lot. This is a resilient and deeply cynical team, who has been around the block more times than I can count. They are like a giant dysfunctional family that a smart and clever guy and someone I would not often bet against. This is a man who was told on a daily basis that he was an idiot and he kept going anyway. His hard shell, in fact, was one of the problems I had when writing my book. How do you make a main character of a cipher? I think the most important thing and it has worked thus far for them. He apparently often tells the joke that he hire him because he has been so obnoxious for so long. You might imagine I We are on opposite schedules. While you were writing yesterday's last On "hate" crimes, I see your point, but I think the media and to a whole class of people. It was the case of a couple of losers who were bombings. In any case, my point remains: What's the point of "hate crime" killers are fried, but they can't be killed twice, right? pundit is these days, and chastises Bush for not answering that query when he's stated that he's been faithful to his wife. Yet she closes the piece: "He seems to have good instincts, and he knows how to get good advice. But does that qualify him to lead the country? That's the substance abuse we should worry everything trivial, while wrapping it up in some political context. Last though it's a bogus award, an example of the media elite slapping each other on for a maximum of ten minutes. No one was brilliant, and several were actively terrible. Here's my estimation of how they stacked up. (Click here to see the results really knows how to give a rousing speech. The hall loved him, though few would conservatives. "Campaigns aren't supposed to be about how much one guy has raised and another guy has inherited. Campaigns are supposed to be about our arena setting. His lines were elegant (who writes them?) but he made no real thrilling. "We need a contest because this is not a horse race. This is not a football game. This is the biggest job in the world." trashing the White House which is not theirs to trash." speech takes the daring position that telling the truth is good. "Integrity never goes out of style. It never goes out of style." the weakest of the true believers. The consensus is that he's lost his allotted ten minutes. "We are coming to the end of the most disgraceful and immoral presidency in the history of this country." back. If he thought that was heavy, wait until he campaigns next year carrying terrifying indoor fireworks and a release of hundreds of balloons. Supporters of opposing candidates pop them for the first half of his speech, making it inaudible. Lesson: Next time, release balloons at the end. "The power of these pollsters and tutors to tell him what to think. Only an independent outsider family member I did get hold of the first Talk issue, speaking of Insurance Company Protection Act), a pious communitarian (against divorce--!!), no friend of civil liberties, feminism half a millimeter deep. I would vote for candidate, not because of the New York thing but because she's arrogant, hates endorsement or no; and the Conservative Party probably won't endorse him unless he makes some gestures to the right, which will not help him with his New I don't detect so far. I hope she does, since it would at least be an exciting have been the best candidate, actually, but at this point she could never Re: the dailies' casual attitude toward facts: If news stories get the dates wrong, the "facts" purveyed by what passes for news analysis and commentary in the middle of an endless euphoric economic boom and lots of jobs at rising wages, while what I see is a shaky stock market, technology companies unable to unload their overstock of computers, continuing layoffs, people losing good beliefs were way out of line. They were good neighbors, but, well, I got blue "He used to say, 'They're watching me, through your satellite "We figured they would have questioned him and let him go and Pretty nice? Harmless? Forgot about it? Why, oh why, do the neighbors feel this compulsion to brush aside the dark side of the killer next door? If you just found out that nice man you saw trimming his lawn yesterday just mowed down some people, your first reaction would not be to relive the sweet memory neighbors go on the record with comments that are nave, foolish, and odd. It may be the neighbors are simply following the script. Thanks to television news culture, the neighbors have undoubtedly memorized what neighbors are supposed to say, (nice guy, kept to himself) and dredge that from little withdrawn. But not real bizarre," and that, "he never bothered anyone." (Anyone? What about all those people he killed?) According to his neighbors, The most generous explanation is that the neighbors are demonstrating a savagely murdering his first wife, but they blocked that out. Furrow's the shots he fired at their houses, and the punches he threw at girls as just defensiveness. No one wants to be blamed for not reporting a mass murderer. So neighbors make a Herculean effort to present their homicidal acquaintance as banal. Then they won't seem like idiots for not noticing his villainy. closets] locked. He had a video camera attached to the ceiling, which recorded every move. Otherwise there was nothing strange, they said." There wasn't? They also noticed the stench of rotting meat from his apartment and they "heard there was nothing odd about him, that he joined in neighborhood barbecues, that them: "We've got other ones around here that act a lot farther out than he ever But don't blame the neighbors too much. Their trite comments say a lot more neighbors themselves. Reporters rely on neighbors to flesh out the characters of killers, but what, really, do neighbors know? Ask yourself: What could you No, the ignorance stems more from the very nature of neighborliness. Neighbors attribute decency to the killer next door because the standard of behavior required for being a good neighbor is so extremely low. Barton managed Furrow once helped someone park a car. Almost anyone, even the most sociopathic of sociopaths, can get through the occasional interaction like that without Of course, not everyone fails to understand the killers in their midst. neighbors missed. Even as the adults in the neighborhood were remembering Golden as "a beautiful young kid," the children who played with him were Why did the classmates see what the neighbors didn't? Because you can fake your way through a neighborly hello, but you can't fake your way through floor of something really new and different and exciting. I know how jazzed you own. I had never written a business story in my life. I barely knew a stock It was the dawn of the age of takeovers; nobody had ever even heard of, say, later come. And, of course, takeovers were much more problematic as a social but more than that, hooked on business as a subject to write about. Those were the days when you got the business beat after you'd been demoted from the obit on this wonderful secret: Business was exciting! Business was dramatic! Business stories were less about balance sheets than about egos and pride and failures and triumphs and all the other things that are the grist of good the Wall Street Journal and began emphasizing the drama of business, and companies, and the people who built them (Gates, Jobs et. al.) They fueled the popular imagination. Now everyone understands how exciting this is. And the Internet industry has only ratcheted up the excitement all the more. The weird part about it all is that the people who build these companies are them to build empires make them lousy to write about. They usually lack introspection. They don't want to recount the past, because they're looking often writing about boring people doing really interesting things. to questions about his rumored drug use. Bush admitted to youthful mistakes but could scare them away. Speakers called for the president's swift exit but comments came after a journalist's inquiry into whether or not Bush could pass a background check that might be given to members of his administration. The curiosity into his activities as a young adult and debate over the press' buried in the rubble. The Post carries this figure as well but attributes it to an official government estimate made after flights over the region. Unburied bodies pose great risks to public health as a source of disease, the papers report. The fire at Turkey's largest oil refinery, which the LAT led with yesterday, was brought under control after fire brought with them more bread and water than locals could consume, but no criminal investigation into contractors who built the apartment complexes that Church, two years after dismissing a similar measure. The two churches will missionary and social programs. The pact will have great resonance abroad, as and programs. The Episcopal Church is expected to approve the union at its predictions that smaller competitors will lock arms as well, thereby reducing History textbook or today's front page?: "The revolt of the serfs has sparked a backlash by the landlords, who are moving to crush the rebellion before it gets out of hand." Both. The LAT "Column One" article reports that the drive for freedom is rattling the world's largest remaining holdout of against landlords who have shackled and sold them for hundreds of years. I have to admit, I began the first Harry Potter book in a mood of irritable skepticism. Having worn out flashlight batteries under the blankets since their readers through adventures of the sort that seem to have vanished from serious adult fiction, with compelling inventiveness that's rarely been seen for children, once explained it by saying, "You're not allowed to bore children." And since no one bundles them off into the ghetto of genre when they can draw on myths and fairy tales to give their books resonance and deeply adult to read them. Friends would thank me with polite puzzlement when I gave would rather spend their beach reading on plodding thrillers than on the reading aloud to them when they were laid up with the flu (which does work, but you lose your voice). So what were these Harry Potter books? Why were healthy favorites here, Tony), which everybody turned up their noses at? Well, no, the Harry Potter books aren't better. But that's good news for his adults will find a savory spread of great kids' books right beneath their noses, now that they've plucked those noses down from the stratosphere. And I bet kids are turning to other great books while they wait for the next School for Wizards after discovering his own magical powers in the first book There's even a fine body of literature in the intersection. When I started about a hapless student at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches. The two series minds of their own; scary teachers; potions gone wrong; school uniforms that books. It's a dark, witty suspense story about an outbreak of illegal magic in But soon I was hooked, just like everyone else. The woman has an amazing imagination. She structures the series like one of those Renaissance paintings, with the perspective lines heading off to infinity in all directions, and weird supernatural beings and rock formations in the background, while in the foreground someone in a peculiar hat has an intense interaction with a hippogriff. And she's so funny! Didn't you love the Whomping Willow, the tree on the school grounds that bashes any creature fool enough to touch it, and Peeves, the school poltergeist, whom everyone treats with irritated toleration? Not to mention poor Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost who's not allowed to ride in the wild headless chase because the ax that did him in was too blunt and I was impressed with her technique for interweaving her magical world with with its denizens wandering around in a bit of a muddle. Think of that And the books are getting better and better. What did you think of the prison, by sucking hope from the prisoners, leaving them in a state of icy after finding security there too tight, he stumbled upon the North Valley as simply, "federal limits on handgun purchases") and never mentions what laws elaborate precautions against shootings, despite federal reports that featured SWAT teams, helicopters, ersatz pipe bombs, and drama students sporting fake wounds. The director of a superintendents' lobby group sums up something, even though no one agrees on what that should be." its recent talk of independence. Both stories, sourced to "experts" and nonetheless real. The Post says any action would likely occur after an properly investigate espionage allegations against fired employee Wen Ho Lee. recommend disciplinary action.) The officials, fingered by the agency's inspector general, were not named, but a "department source" tells had been punished rather than rewarded for speaking up. "There was a total pilots have fired on more than triple the number of targets attacked in last story: It is hard news reported almost as if it were a trend, and it is pegged partly to its own absence in the very newspaper in which it now appears. An LAT "Column One" story describes how the spouse of nearly every Journal also puts this story high in its "Worldwide" box.) The Conducted by the congressional General Accounting Office, a preliminary follow leads pointing to financial problems, criminal histories, and alcohol The LAT reports that despite the slowdown in prison growth, parole violators have kept the growth rate from dropping as much as it might The Post runs a fascinating feature on the informational firewalls divides its men into "clean" and "dirty" teams; the former collects criminal evidence, the latter, intelligence. The dirty team has an attorney filter what is illegal or too classified for the "clean" prosecutors to know. For example, Knowledge of this confession was relayed from the dirty to the clean team, which then used the tip to help it extract its own, legal confession. or lowering rates. It's also a matter of sending the right messages to the bond touched on this point once before, when the Fed announced at its last meeting that it was keeping interest rates steady but changing its bias. Where once the Fed kept its deliberations secret and acted as sphinxlike as possible about its intentions, it now tries to indicate what it's concerned about and the direction in which it's leaning. In one sense, this has made the exercise of trying to game the Fed easier, since there's more material to go on. In another sense, it's made everything trickier, since there are a host of signals to interpret, and sometimes they're not in harmony. Today, for instance, the Fed didn't make what would have been the surprising least at first. But the increase would certainly have slammed the brakes on an worried about inflation, even though there are signs that continued strong demand and tight labor markets are beginning to make themselves felt. But then interest rate the Fed charges banks who want to borrow money from it). And while the discount rate itself is not that important, which is to say that an increase in it will have no material effect on the economy, the message the increase sends is important, and that message is that the Fed is more concerned about inflation than the small hike in the federal funds rate would indicate. I In addition to the rate increases, the Fed also shifted its bias back toward believed it would be. But the fact that the Fed isn't biased toward further tightening suggests that the economy isn't necessarily growing faster than In the long run, worrying about all this stuff probably doesn't matter very much. The Fed and the bond market will determine how fast the economy goes by determining interest rates, and the concrete impact of the federal funds rate psychological effect of the Fed's symbolic gestures. But it also seems true gestures to push interest rates in a certain direction without the Fed's having to take concrete action. It's as if he can speed things up or slow them down Of course, mixed messages are a persistent danger here, as evidenced by market will do a good job of sorting through the messages and finding the ones the Time Inc. building, where Fortune is headquartered, I was a pretty cranky guy yesterday. My mood is much improved today, back in my lovely little worried that you're not getting enough sleep on what is supposed to be, after all, a short vacation for you. In any case, yesterday I didn't think I could muster another thought about the Internet if you put a gun to my head. But as I The distinction I was trying to make yesterday was between the Internet as a tool to make the world a better place (which I don't buy) and the Internet as a powerful business tool (which I very much do buy). And so there is not that much in your message that I disagree with, because you are focusing on the business dynamics. Where we do differ, clearly, is our level of enthusiasm for the coming of interactivity. You're right: I roll my eyes at the thought of an (To answer another query of yours: On the privacy issue, I subscribe to the the effect of: "You've already lost your privacy. Get over it." Some years ago, I wrote a book that was devoted, in part, to the rise of the credit card industry. In doing that research, I became painfully aware of how much personal information was already "sloshing around," as you put it. In other words, long before the Internet, this battle had been lost. And in truth, I don't much care what is discovered about my "habits" through my Web use.) The reason it is the most successful Internet company is that it has a huge revenue stream because it charges a monthly subscription fee. There is no way it wants give away free what it used to charge for, but it is being forced to company, to squeeze away profits, and to give consumers a deal that seemingly makes no economic sense but is great for them. The irony is that the are awfully resilient. They proved it a few years ago, when it was widely believed that their service would be rendered irrelevant by the growth of the Internet. And the company's performance during the past few years has been little short of astounding. I have no doubt they will adapt to broadband, and the potential loss of most of their revenue stream? I dunno. Do you? Case, who was deposed one day when the trial was in recess. They were both smart, clever guys who could not be rattled, and easily deflected even the most SOB.) But the trait they had most in common is that were both real wiseacres, University basketball stadium. They competed on food, music, and celebrity on a roll is overcooked and a little dry. Baby back ribs are better. News reports covering the earthquake in Turkey have emphasized the health so that the country can dispose of corpses more quickly. Do these bodies The rotting corpses of earthquake victims are a "negligible" threat to public health, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A corpse is only a danger to public health if the victim died of an infectious disease. (In that case, the disease organisms can infect living people who come in contact with the cadaver.) But when someone dies of trauma, as most earthquake victims did, the decomposition process is harmless, if the corpse also eat the cadaver, as can wasps, beetles, and other insects. Larger animals such as birds, rats, and dogs pick at unguarded corpses. The bacteria involved in decomposition are not dangerous, because living people already carry identical germs in their own bodies. The maggots and other insects, though revolting, also constitute no threat to public health. Rats do host fleas, which can transmit typhus, typhoid fever, plague, and other diseases. But rats endanger public health wherever they mingle with people: They are no more harmful when they feed on corpses than at any other time. Despite ancient fears of death's "miasma," the foul odor emitted by the body Some reports hint that unburied corpses could contaminate Turkey's water supply. This is not a serious danger. In a very few cases, bacteria from corpses can cause illness when they contaminate drinking water in large quantities. But water in Turkey is much more likely to be contaminated in other ways, especially ruptured sewer lines that dump bacteria into reservoirs and Because the public health threat from corpses is minimal, the WHO has even urged Turkey to allocate more resources to aiding the injured and fewer to curtailment of his role in the continuing nuclear espionage investigation. Last was slowed by political interference. The resignation comes amid growing doubts be in violation of a constitutional prohibition against gaming, threatens to Reserve Board will announce its rate decision today. The Wall Street Journal explains that the market is interpreting the anticipated rate hike as the last raise this year and an effective means of keeping inflation at bay without slowing economic growth. raise interest rates again this year. All papers expect the Fed to hue to its "neutral bias" by indicating no predisposition toward a future rate uncovered in ruins two weeks after previous quakes. The LAT reports that of disease, and doubts that the devastated cities will be rebuilt. system designed to protect battlefield troops by tracking and shooting down further review, simulating field conditions, is necessary. once received government grants through scientific foundations that rigorously lobbying Congress for earmarked appropriations. Congress members insert deliberately obscure provisions into unrelated legislation to provide money for favored educational institutions. Colleges in the home states of powerful Appropriations Committee senators benefit from a disproportionate share of the to cut emergency service costs by encouraging its customers to call the health They fear that insurers will fail to send the closest ambulance and deny care One week after the paper published an inaccurate lead story, which left the Times editorializes on why foreign aid is an unpopular cause. The paper condemns Congress' myopic intent to cut foreign aid and argues that international assistance is a good investment because it can bolster political foreign aid money has been wasted in the past. But that is no reason to starve Well, I guess we probably will not ever agree. But I only need to use your examples as proof that what the Internet has wrought in an unbelievably short Dell's success) has been turned on its ear, the retail industry is reeling (did to prominence in only five years. I think you don't even have to take a poll of And why is this? Because, finally, after all those years of promises, the interactive age is upon us. I used to joke that the idea of interactive television has been around since I had been a fetus, but that it never seemed to work. Now, pretty much every major communications company is formulating in the house, really. Did you hear about the Internet refrigerator that links to grocery sites? Of course, I am probably the only one who thinks this is a good idea. It's clear to me that either via a plethora of wires or satellite or wireless means, we are all going to be plugged in more than ever before in the coming years. I myself am a cell phone freak, who cannot imagine being without be mocked for my cell addiction, but now I am regularly sought after for advice But to a bigger point, we should all think about what this means to society and its citizens on a more personal level. For this, I turn to an article in the disease have said they met those partners offline after meeting in cyberspace first. To say nothing of the idea that the Internet is replacing the bar as the best place to hook up, the Times asked the more pertinent question: "When does the right to online privacy yield to public health issues?" The big problem is that most of the men knew their infected partners I would be curious what you think of this and perhaps about the broader issues of so much personal information sloshing around about Internet users. The medium is really a marketer's dream, giving them the ability to glean a lot of highly specific information about people and their habits. A dozen companies and more to come are focused solely on recording and interpreting user It also cuts both ways. Several missives ago, you did hit on a good point about products and, most important, prices. This is another big idea to me and one that I have been waiting to happen for a long time. I was a retail reporter for seven years before I started covering the Internet, and my one major conclusion from the job was that retailers hate customers. Any new system that allows a consumer to take back some of the power that is rightfully theirs to retail. In this system, people ask for what they want and the retailers respond rather than being told what they like and don't like. But is there some problem with this? Will, for example, there eventually be a site dedicated solely to intellectual understanding of what certain major acts have contributed to rock 'n' blues (the music of the black South) and other manifestations of the black could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make Miller's training as an intellectual historian is the source of most of the Finally, the Sex Pistols unite all the nihilism and flimflam that's been One of the striking differences between this rock history and others is that nothing but reprises of old themes. Do you buy that? I distrust it. When Miller hear not a critical insight but the moaning of one who's, like the rest of us, oracle's excruciatingly dull metamorphosis into a pitiful, drunken slob.") Where is disco, surely as reliable an indicator of musical decadence as the And what do you think of Miller's take on race? Most accounts tend to view capitalist race theft. Miller is subtler. On one hand, he shows just how many It a Shame") that languishes in the middle of the charts. But he also shows that borrowings worked both ways, and that white audiences were more daringly The musical descriptions in Miller's book strike me as flat and formulaic, unconventional modulation between major and minor keys, 'Hold Me Tight' was away and what are you left with? Business writing, a narrative of how I liked something, it must have been the most esoteric thing on the album. marginal role in the early Stones. Same with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. of seven or eight years ago, another rock history overstuffed with intellectual structuralism to the Situationist International, that you could easily forget downtown art world. "All Tomorrow's Parties" haunts me as much as it did when I Mirror" has some claim to be the Great Rock Love Song. But if there's a lyrical voice to the Velvets it's Reed's, particularly when he's in good humor: Miller is to be admired, too, for pointing out the role of "texture" in the Velvets' best music. Mo Tucker's drumming on "Run, Run, Run" is groundbreaking, One thing I wanted to raise with you before I sign off on this very pleasant week: What did you think of Miller's reggae chapter, which seems to make mocked, ridiculed, and beat into cultural retreat." Did it? Rock seems to have what is it in rock and roll that has allowed it to maintain its cultural a decent living when I worked there, not to mention its role in representing a militant staff culture and defending the autonomy of editors and writers, with the Voice's editorial problems. The Voice was much better in really strong, but it seems totally toothless now. On the contrary, the Voice has been done in by '90s corporate culture with its emphasis on because it's ultimately unquantifiable and resistant to control from the top. If a publication is built around writers with strong, individual views and identities, and people read the paper because of those writers, it gives the Voice to stop being a writer's paper. Free distribution also changes the nature of the readership and the relationship between readers and A while ago I had a conversation with the Voice's managing editor in which he said I was one in a long line of Embittered Alumni. I thought that was witty, and briefly considered making up a Village Voice Embittered just frustrated: I think the paper served a crucial function as a space for cultural reporting and analysis and culturally radical ideas that were censored elsewhere, and it isn't serving that function anymore, nor has any other publication come close to replacing it. The Voice was the first happened, the Voice would have sent a reporter out there for a few weeks and would have had the best story on what was really going on there. And so on. Well, I am sorry you were much maligned by my friends on the Motley Fool, which was one of the first really successful online communities to take off. But the kind of response you are getting is just the kind of thing I like about the Web. Remember the days we used to sit on high at elite media organizations and broadcast down our words to the people below? No more. And I could not be more thrilled to hear back from readers since it only makes us better at our jobs, despite the agony of having to listen to the wackos that always accompany In fact, I really like this part of the Internet most of all, the ability of people to bypass gatekeepers and perhaps even flex their minds a bit. I am is another thing that seems to be a human perennial no matter the medium. It is lot of people to hand over the most intimate of information. my electronic letters to you while traveling. But there are no phones on this into. So I have been calling in to two very patient have it posted. That has worked fine until I passed through a particularly large group of buttes or canyons. Stupendous as they are from a nature point of view, they utterly block my cell phone transmissions and I am left completely without any useful technology. Imagine, a butte trumps all of man's Nonetheless, since nothing works in this situation, I would like to take up before it, like the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, and, finally, television. While I think all these mediums are momentous, I feel that they have all been steps to where we are today with the Internet. At its very best, be instantly telegraphed anywhere that adds on the interactivity of the telephone. Soon more advanced audio and video will be part of the daily picture on the Web. A network that links up people all over the world is one that is clearly going to be more important than all others, if you really have to I think the big question is how does society give everyone a seat at the digital table. As far as I am concerned, the Internet is still a conversation among the world's elite, a woeful trend that I see only getting worse. So I perk up every time the notion of a free PC or free Internet access is brought located in Silicon Valley that there are not enough rat holes to shove it down. Combined with the giant amounts of money these companies are getting from Wall people and too few new ideas. I think there has to be more branching out with these investment dollars, especially if they're going to help as many people The real question is, of course, will these already questionable Web business models ever make enough money to pay back all this funding? I don't know if Amazon can ever make the kind of money that will justify its lofty stock price, although it certainly seems adept at spending cash. I have heard the 1920s, and this current craze is nothing new. But it should not blind us to the fact that some very real and significant businesses are being built constantly fascinated by his desire to paint himself as a victim, especially in fascinating to me because it painted an awfully childish tycoon who doesn't seem to like the way he world is changing. Nonetheless, notice that most of the riveted by the Internet, as well they should be. As the song from my favorite much maligned craze that the Internet was often compared to in its early days. banter was a version of chat rooms, and instant community was created from and have their mail delivered by eagles or pterodactyls instead of owls? Or maybe, if the stateside magic kingdom is too much to contemplate, the next organization of the magic world. There seems to be a class system of themselves.) But where do these distinctions come from? What is the source of by workers in offshore magic sweatshops? Are they unionized? What is the plausible and interesting questions, and ones I bet she'd have answers to. Perhaps someday she'll publish a concordance to Harry Potter and explain it Meanwhile, I don't see Harry falling for a succubus (I think that's the word Which brings me to an intriguing point in your letter. I owe you a silver sickle, since it seems plain to me that the homosexual themes are already there, and treated with the sublimation and symbolism you predict. Well, not conventionally and safely infantile. What I mean is that being a wizard is very much like being gay: You grow up in a hostile world governed by codes and norms that seem nonsensical to you, and you discover at a certain age that there are norms right alongside the straight (muggle) one, yet strangely invisible to it. find your way to them. The reaction of many straights (muggles) is hostility that made me laugh out loud.) Consider too that there are wizards born of muggles and muggles born of wizards, so that having magical power (like being gay, at least according to some schools of thought) is, while not hereditary, clearly innate. Your use of the phrase "a place for us" was especially suggestive (though by "us" you meant the muggles), since that's the title of a modern gay male cultural identity. The process of acculturation he describes (which involves playing the cast album from Gypsy in your parents' suburban basement), is not unlike what Harry undergoes in the early chapters of Is this completely crazy? I won't be offended if you say yes. Will Jerry but for other reasons, namely that the Potter books take a benign view of paganism, magic, witchcraft, and other things that scare Christian fundamentalists. A few years ago they went after Barney because he could fly, and because he taught kids about the powers of the imagination (in their have also been outcries raised about Dungeons and Dragons, and about the mere matter of time before school libraries start getting calls from concerned parents complaining about our dear Harry. Which makes me like him all the more, That's it! On their year abroad in the United States, Harry and his pals In an unusual turn, foreign policy leads at all the papers. The New York Times goes with an Post leads with its exclusive interview of the former chief of funneled to the three nationalist parties that govern the partitioned state of the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, and end of the war in 1995--were to have gone to infrastructure repair and not a "shred of evidence" against Lee, and that China's stolen nuclear secrets could have come from any of hundreds of government agencies and defense conferences have never been investigated. (To read is rich but not very liquid. He has been cutting down on his father's more family business, liquidate real estate in his home town in New Jersey, or go may not be entirely cynical, because the farmers' pain is real. Fresh evidence: and hotlines in farming areas have soared with the recent decline in commodity and kids are known to get ulcers worrying about their parents' fate. But wait! "Work Week" also reports that farmer retraining programs at community colleges sporting bras with patterns and prints. Some wear headbands made of faux bra editor of Apparel Industry magazine. A textile manufacturer pins down the appeal: "You can peek but not touch. It's sexually baiting but not in a conscious way. It's just naughty enough to get away with." seriously disrupted the normal order of society, causing chaos in people's he was in his 20s. Pundits also spend a few moments discussing the political Most pundits agree that questions about whether Bush has ever tried cocaine are relevant to this year's presidential campaign and a legitimate part of public discourse. They also agree that the imbroglio in which Bush now finds Still, pundits are highly critical of Bush's handling of the cocaine issue. They believe it raises serious questions about the character and credibility of responses to questions about drug use as a youth. They attack him for sounding controversy looking like a waffler and, worst of all, a hypocrite of the first based in large part on his personal biography. He has trumpeted his credentials as a faithful husband and fine father, volunteered to reporters that he no tarnished the dignity of the Oval Office. Bush has promised that as president he would uphold the dignity of that office, and pundits wonder how he can talk about some aspects of his personal life without discussing other, less pleasant tough who supports stiffer sentencing guidelines for convicted drug indeed, other than the Bush cocaine controversy, the opinion mafia has little running a listless campaign and needs to start focusing on major issues of almost brought down a president and has been, by most measurements, a sensational, 15-second spots that titillate viewers and try to convince them to stay tuned for upcoming segments. This week the producers at Fox News advertise an upcoming dialogue on the Bush cocaine controversy by playing the popular '80s dance song "White Lines" and showing footage of a protester running across injured and thousands more still missing. Rescue and relief teams from all blaze out of control, threatening to blow up a nearby fertilizer plant and forcing tens of thousands of local residents to flee. The New York Times lead Post lead, dwarfed by the quake headline below it, carries yesterday's to the drought by regional officials could impede effective conservation of goes with results of the annual National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Survivors interviewed by the paper blamed the government for not conducting adequate building inspections, failing to create food reserves, and failing to government leaves regional authorities without the resources to cultivate local civil defense teams. Earthquake experts tell the LAT that strict than Turkey, despite similarities in their fault systems. ruble crash sent money flying out of the country even more furiously than usual. Money sifted through the Bank of New York account may have gone to pay contract killers and drug lords, the paper reports. The federal survey reveals that teen use of cocaine, marijuana, and other an indication that messages from parents, schools, and the government are people aged 18-to-25 saw an increase in both drug use and smoking. A substance flawed because parents must consent to their child's interview and tend to final report is complete raises a thorny issue: Do the three judges who sit on the panel that appointed him have the right to name a successor now that the prosecutor statute has expired? A new appointee might face legal roadblocks may make resources more scarce and finally tug prices upward at home. With Economists expect that interest rates will head north to attract foreign pushed their own savings rate into negative territory." answer rumors that he has used illegal drugs: "I happen to think Bush is a carousing, his lost youth, his meandering career path and how he gave up booze and found God. This is a stirring tale, and I am moved every time I hear it." the success of this movie is not a myth. One of the surprising things about the response, though, was how many people hated the film. In part, it did sound like a classic case of a movie that in two weeks went from being a film ever made. But I was still surprised, since I thought that the quality of Witch is owned, after all, by Artisan Entertainment, a small independent over the country in the space of just a couple of weeks. good, which undoubtedly made selling the film to theater owners easier than it would otherwise have been. But there's still something wonderful about the speed with which theaters that normally would have had four screens showing example of how quickly supply rises to meet demand with no planning involved at The second point is more mundane, but also more curious, and it has to do with a weird new trend in movie advertising in which one film tries to take advantage of the buzz surrounding another film, even though the two movies have absolutely nothing in common. This strategy was used to great effect by The answer, I think, is none of the above. Instead, with the buzz on threw up their hands and decided that there was no point in selling the film as what it is. Instead, they wanted to see if they could catch a little halo still doesn't really make sense. Who would ever go see one movie because its ad Third parties, as the saying goes, are like bees: They sting and then they elections but by influencing the two major parties to adopt their positions. nonetheless effective in the sense that both the Democrats and the Republicans buzzing around recently have been political oddballs who seem to hail from If none of them has yet taken the plunge, it may be because there's a small catch to the cash, namely the Reform Party itself, which has come to resemble catastrophe. In short, the Reform Party is both run and overrun by people who table. But in this unstable environment, no one can predict whether that stake will be used to whack the Democrats from the left or the Republicans from the requirements are a commitment to political reforms like term limits, a belief in fiscal discipline, and skepticism about free trade. Even these points may be interest is in keeping a seat warm until he's ready to run for president but has come out in favor of gay marriage, which would seem to rule out next year's Reform Party nominating convention might be the most entertaining Why these books, why now? Boy, that's a hard one. Could be a simple matter of demographics: Boomers' kids are old enough to know what they like and say so, and there are enough of them to give their collective voice a certain volume. Or maybe it's a cyclical thing: Fantasy was last in fashion during the '70s, when (as you point out) Star Wars had its astonishing apotheosis. leaving her readers no time to lose their appetites. Or could it be our ambivalence about the recent furious surge of moody technology, giving us apparently magical powers that we can't quite control? Or is someone at I wonder whether it's true, as you claim, that children are less likely than whole certainly don't seem to think so. Classics like Little Women and The Secret Garden preach shamelessly without losing their passionate young groupies, even today. Kids, after all, get plenty of lectures ("discipline," "limits") from their beloved parents. The more recent crop of books continue to preach, though they promote psychological health rather than depth from a combination of allegory and genuine human interactions that trajectory: Harry is sure he knows who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, but he guesses wrong. In the second book, I thought at first that she was pulling the same trick, but I should have trusted her. The apparent villain more clearly in each volume, there are lots of ways to help the forces of darkness: You can join them with all your heart, but you can also succumb to kind of folks (in his case, dragons and monstrous spiders). Or you can just be a vain goofball. In each book, the enemy's helpers become increasingly The series also has some of the excitement that Dickens' readers must have felt as they read his novels in serial form, knowing he was home working frantically on the next installment. Publishing the first books before she's puts them to new uses. The Whomping Willow, for example, which seems like a bit rummage around for mice and rats to enchant into horses and coachmen. I wonder how she's going to handle the Great Battle that comes with the genre, where Good meets Bad for something like a final showdown. So far, she's given us small (if important) skirmishes, and sketched out a grand battle past. The danger of series like this is that they can so easily collapse at the end, becoming too allegorically complex or too morally simple. How do you think will play a villainous role in one of the next books? I hope so. A difference between you and me that transcends right vs. left is that you take electoral politics more seriously than I. Democrats vs. Republicans is a politics of small differences at this point. The country is basically being run by global corporations that, aside from their direct economic influence on who gets elected and what they do when they get elected (a large aside), control economic policy by essentially saying to politicians on all levels, federal, state, and local, give us fiscal austerity, low taxes, and less regulation or we a) will take our jobs elsewhere and b) won't lend you money. In general I prefer Democrats because they're not beholden to the Christian right and the appointments, etc. But even on social issues, there's more convergence than convicted of anything, Draconian sentences, peeing on command as a requirement plants, although no one can guarantee it won't be an ecological disaster; these hunts. Then there's welfare reform, whose two basic assumptions are that endless work at wages too meager to live on is morally uplifting and that single mothers are causing all of society's problems. The bottom line (probably not my best metaphor in this context) is the present economic and social system, like it or not. This is a colossal failure of imagination. It's true enough that it's very difficult right now to envision what that alternative might be. I certainly have no blueprints to offer. But there have always been people who argued that change is impossible, or unnecessary, or both, and they have always been wrong. paralyzing on a cultural as well as a political level. I didn't mean to imply that there is really a "counterculture" now, in the sense of any conscious collective opposition. You're right, there's nothing comparable to the cultural think most people these days see politics as pretty trivial and irrelevant to things can be different, so the desire stays under the surface. I think my standards for a really good magazine are still New York and Esquire in the '60s and Rolling Stone in the '70s. This is a recipe for total frustration on the contemporary magazine front. Never mind "favorite." What are the magazines I look forward to reading? First, I guess, get high." And you're right about how easy it is to get caught up in the sound have always assumed it to be totally apocryphal. On the other hand, it makes record collection, he had to borrow one. He didn't have a record Monk and threw up his hands as if to say, "What's this crap?" responsible one. He gives us a history of the term "oldies but goodies," and mentions "In the Still of the Night," scarcely noticed when it came out in oldies stations is any indication of his ultimate stature, he's one of the giants. Similarly, I remember that on the Pretenders' debut album, "Talk of the stations. The album didn't have any "hits." Today, no matter what town you're as evidence that it's my memory that's failing. Perhaps rock history is food goes. I suspect this will be a huge political issue within a few years, and five to ten years from now, after the boycotts and hoopla, we'll all be eating very strange (as we currently perceive it) foods. A tomato that's Whatever. I don't think there's any fighting it. It took me a while to get used to waiting behind someone on line at the coffee shop near work who ordered a The Bush "coke" story will be in the papers for a few more weeks. As this story has progressed during the day, in retrospect I think that instead of strategy: "Fuck you. I ain't playing your game." It'll be interesting to see what the White House is cooking up for the general election as far as Bush conservative, if you can believe it. Granted, I live in New York, but my many Gore's run a crummy campaign, but he's got a huge, horny monkey on his changes are minimal. Looks fine to me; just some tinkering with typefaces, misleading, with the absurd headline "Village Voice Is Cleaning Up Its Act." Some comics have been moved to the front of the paper, including Tom phased out? The Voice never takes my advice in MUGGER, but what they need to do editorially to make it vital again is this: Bust the union, get rid of all the deadwood that's cramming its pages, reduce its staff by half, find Perhaps you're a loyalist, but the Voice is far more dull than say, begging all politicians and elected officials to stay away from baseball, football, basketball games, etc. I agree. Most presidents don't give a shit who wins or loses, and just cause huge traffic jams and inconveniences to real fans The papers are still milking Bush and the drug thing because they're filling he isn't saying anything substantive, let alone controversial. The reason politicians won't be honest about their marijuana use is simple: If they admitted they had enjoyed pot and suffered no adverse effects, this would raise uncomfortable questions about why they don't come out against laws that put people in jail and confiscate their property for doing the same thing. And advocates are for the most part scared to defend drug use as a legitimate pleasure or the right to alter your own consciousness as a civil liberty; they just talk about "harm reduction." There are three opinions you can't voice in experiments in consciousness expansion were basically a good thing; organized And speaking of religion, the Wall Street Journal had a story on a the government to label genetically engineered food, on the grounds that food don't know and don't care about the potential consequences of their eat beef with antibiotics or milk with growth hormone. Of course, this is just what the industry is worried about, as an official at the Biotechnology Industry Organization admitted in the article. They argue that since such a boycott would be irrational and would ruin the industry, the information should be withheld. Now, here's an issue for defenders of the free market. How can I (and I can't simply not buy food)? And don't I have the right to reject goods I don't want for whatever reason I please, rather than have biotech companies Can it be that our exercise in stunt online writing is nearing its conclusion already? And just now when we'd gotten to the topic of Newt Newt's hypocrisy is truly flabbergasting. But the thing that always kills me or even the hypocrisy, it's how these affairs undermine the work of the other women (and men) who hold the same jobs as the old guys' paramours. kind of class action lawsuit. Couldn't they get damages for their lost future the same story fails to unearth a single credible potential buyer. As you asked reacted to the Chronicle columnist's suggestion that he should buy the deceased cooking show hosts, and dying newspapers. I wish you luck in all depressingly familiar story. Why is the world unable to create an international force to provide manpower and equipment to assist in the aftermath of huge natural and manmade disasters (which seem to occur pretty reliably at least five or six times a year)? This extremely sensible idea was floated by the 1990s. But for some mysterious reason, nobody seemed terribly interested. from all over the world, than it used to, thanks to its new Office for the many duties of the Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator disaster scenes is to pool the efforts of national governments, not to do the been tried. Clearly, whatever small improvements the United Nations has made in government doesn't strike Chatterbox as the way to go. A flexible rapid deployment force would report to a single director. More important, it would know what each kind of disaster called for, and would either possess or have immediate access to the basic required equipment. The agreement with other nations, promising to help each other in case of disaster, the burden would be to refuse aid rather than to ask for it. humanitarian level." Either way is fine with Chatterbox. lamp" image as the mother of modern nursing completely obscures her real significance, which was as a ruthlessly effective administrative reformer, least had the excuse that the age of modern medicine, with its emphasis on sterility and proper ventilation of hospital rooms, was only just dawning. Who even knew that anyone still cared about things like trade deficits? I mean, the United States has been borrowing tens of billions of dollars every month from foreign investors for so long that I thought it was just something scare even the most dedicated stock buyers, so that yesterday's news that the Concerns about the suddenly weak dollar, worries about the trade deficit, of these anxieties feel like just that: anxieties without any real object. After all, bond yields fell by more than a quarter point this week, assuaging a lot of concerns about the impact of rising interest rates on stock prices. So all the victims of the fears of August just had to find something new to fret all this talk about a suddenly fragile economy will make any sense. So go buy something and keep the boom going. Here's Chatter for this week. favor of a campaign that focuses more on Sears' strength as an affordable 'Come for the batteries, stay for the home furnishings.'" write the 'Laughter Is the Best Medicine' column would have made such a despite the fact that interest rates there remain at about zero. That means means that it's hard to see how economic growth is going to be sustained there, apparently negotiated a refinancing deal that will wipe out the value of all best Democratic candidate. Perhaps she best represent your politics, and those of many New Yorkers, but she certainly doesn't have the juice to defeat he's a control freak. So he's somewhat immunized against such lapses in a You may be correct, but where do you get your information that the stock the rapid communications system in place today alerted the people who could do Back to your old turf. I don't know if you read the Times today, but acknowledge the pop star's vast wealth, but still gives him a bye. He writes: "But at the same time he has gotten more than he wanted only to discover that a dream fulfilled is no longer a dream; it is a new and heavier weight." Yikes. mournfully would trade places with him in a second. make sure my younger son didn't get swallowed by the undertow. My wife and I managed one night without the boys, going to a country club dinner with my brother and his wife, which was remarkable only for the dazzling array of when he visited the (mostly) golfing facility in the early '50s, was very kind of cool: You'd get the meaningless Times fax with breakfast, but arduous exercise of building sand castles and going swimming, it made me less hobbyhorses is that the vast majority of dailies and magazines are overstaffed dailies. For example, in a sidebar to the letters section in today's Time magazine, an editor wrote: "Several people pointed out that while one of the scores of editors and editorial assistants and assistants to editorial assistants could've snared that mistake. We run a small shop at inexcusable that large media organizations are rife with errors every day. Today's New York Times has a teaser on the front page, "With Straw contest on his hands. You don't have to guess who wrote the story which outspent Bush considerably, was privately disappointed by the outcome, hoping to either defeat the governor or come within a few percentage points. to alleged rape and illegal campaign contributions, but don't get me that Gore is on the ropes, will do everything in its power, from pictures to captions to editorials, to stop Bush. Which is fine; I just wish they'd declare themselves as partisan, as say, the Guardian or Telegraph in I may be going on too long, but one more thought. I read in the New York that the media is scum: They love all the coverage, love the Lady Di and Royal Family hagiography, etc. And of course a large mass murder at a high school, funeral of the black boy who was killed. That smacks of patronization to me. straying from the news of the day. My heart says: Fuck them, let's talk about what we want. However, since they were kind enough to invite us to the table, I do have a few things to say about today's "news." I know you're not as sort of way, but I cannot for the life of me understand the Beltway media's what a "maverick" he is. Instead, they'll draw a picture of a sour, we've seen for months: He's unpredictable, angers Republicans with his campaign finance and tobacco stands (making him an honorary Democrat with that sort of was a stupid war and not worth fighting and dying for. Get over not having that isn't quite as "liquid" as everyone thought and is going to have to sell some assets to compete with Bush. I wonder how his family feels about his quixotic, and ultimately selfish, presidential campaign? If I were one of his five aphrodisiac. Instead of dealing with Bush, and getting a plum position in his administration, or running for senator from New Jersey, where he'd stand a various states to get out his message. I like his message, but I read it every in his sniffy Observer way: "Nobody ever said the Voice was all about the high road" and objects to the headline of the column "I Am Butt Girl, get them first, no home delivery up here. Hopefully something in the paper will stimulate a little adrenalin (not much luck this week; last time I did one of my relationship to a restaurant than to any print publication. I go there occasionally, sample whatever looks interesting, often because somebody has to the rest of the Web, actually, casual and uncommitted, without intense expectations about what ought to be there or any necessity, as with newspapers about X. Plus, there's much too much stuff to do anything like read a whole "issue." I didn't subscribe to it when you had to pay. I might now, just because it's become more prominent in the public conversation, and if I did have to pay I might pay closer attention to it in the interest of getting my most interests me about online journalism is it's so much looser and more less like writing a piece than like participating in a panel discussion, only I can in writing. I like the idea of talking to people I don't usually get to conventional "high journalist," as I think of them; in my view it would be a simply merge into one composite columnist who would write once a week so I could find out what the latest conventional wisdom is without having to spend that it's the medium of a counterculture; techno fans are looking for ecstasy (I mean the state of mind, not the drug, though that too), for a kind of erotic was totally dependent on technology), this one resonates with the computer freaks or overlaps with them, I really have no idea, just that there's a common impulse there). And this is what makes pop music, or popular culture of any kind, compelling: that it becomes the catalyst for a new oppositional art and the relation between them in some fresh way. Whereas rock 'n' roll in its various forms just seems to be rehashing and cannibalizing the past. candidates have been dropping by to eat corn dogs, drink ethanol, and hand out locally famous for the big cows she crafts out of butter every year for the decry it on the floor of the House of Representatives. But because it's at the can't think of anything he's ever said that has gotten him in trouble. This may everyone declaring his candidacy toast, he's not about to speak his mind just for the sake of it. I try to provoke him a bit more. quietly. Having downgraded his expectations, he now says that even a fourth place finish in the straw poll will keep him in the presidential race. Though all but abandoned by the press, he seems determined to hang on. Walking around the state fair, he hurls himself at voters. Anyone who looks at him twice gets "What's your name?" a woman sitting on a bench asks presidency. Dudes puffing on big cigars signal higher and higher bids. Finally on: "The presidency is too important to be bought or inherited," he says. "It big mistake to nominate Bush without putting him through the hazing of a acting the part of Secret Service. There's a sense of excitement when the governor and first lady, as the Bush aides refer to them, emerge against a rather cool outside, suggesting that he too is keenly aware of his visuals. He Where Bush shines is in less formal situations after reporters. He has a hearty, disarming manner, and expresses his enjoyment of the moment with body language that is fluid and comfortable. Grenades don't gives him a chance to lose his balance. "Governor, have you ever manufactured substance. Another reporter asks if Bush regrets giving an interview to "Somebody came in to get a flavor of the campaign. It "Governor," she says, "you need to get back to your guests." the "country is basically being run by global corporations" rap. That's too violation of "family values") wouldn't exist, and capital gains taxes would be slashed. I agree that the president and Congress has less to do with the economy than is believed, and what they take credit for when things are going that were true, the crazy amount of entitlements, handouts, and obscene be an economic boon to the country. I am in favor of capital punishment and think all this nonsense about "hate" crimes is just that: nonsense. Rhetoric that obscures the debate. Any crime is hateful, whether it's committed As for Columbine, I think the media, especially television, behaved disgracefully. It was all about ratings (just as the intrusive coverage of John it simply encourages copycat crimes. Columbine had the great hook: kids, especially the unfortunate girl who professed her belief in God and became an carried out in a financial work setting; it didn't have the juice of a high more vital in the first half of the '70s; after the move to New York things went downhill. My framework also includes Rolling Stone from that era, the Voice in the '60s and early '70s, Spy in the late '80s. The Brown (and I admired much of her work at Vanity Fair and the New Like many legal terms, "hate crime" does not mean what it seems to. If you crimes are crimes motivated by racial, religious, gender, or other prejudice. Hate crime laws generally impose tougher punishments when crimes such as rape, arson, assault, intimidation, and damage of property are motivated by bias. others require it to be the sole factor. The federal Hate Crimes Sentence because the victim was engaged in activities such as attending public school. Some scholars believe hate crime laws are unwise or even unconstitutional. They argue that criminals should be punished for their crimes, not for their sentencing violates the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court unanimously As ahead of itself as the presidential campaign, fall preview season is magazines and newspapers in the country will participate in that odd journalistic ritual whereby critics abandon the skepticism we demand of them to bile when the plays or movies or art shows in question prove as disappointing as one sort of suspected they would be. writer has picked things to preview, he has to justify his choices), previews everybody goes to cocktail parties, or even longs to be up on the latest thing. tickets our parents are trying to pawn off on us is a gaudy spectacle from hell or Great Art? We don't want long lists of everything we know we should see but never will. We want the opposite: a list of everything we must absolutely not see, under any circumstances, if it were the only show playing in the literary, theatrical, and sartorial seasons. Just because it's unscientific underlings to read, watch, listen, and try on the latest size-2 fashions for her, she will rely on you, dear readers, for data. Tell her what on the fall preview lists about to inundate us you've actually read, or seen, or worked on the set of, or worn, or gotten some serious inside dope on, and know for a fact to be a in For the Love of the Game. Having failed to win critics' hearts with is presumably reverting to the most consistently successful formula of his screening nor of gossip. She just has this hunch that For The Love of the Cup --that mistakenly found its way to film. You make the call: "His team's in last place. He's just found out he's about to get traded. And the love of perfect game, he flashes back on his life and replays its pivotal moments." For a company whose roots are in Bell Labs, source of innumerable technological breakthroughs, Lucent is surprisingly unembarrassed about buying technology that it can't, or doesn't want, to build itself. Since it was spun well known that certain companies are exceptionally good at integrating acquisitions into their existing operations. Not coincidentally, perhaps, two of the best are competitors, namely Lucent and Cisco (which, reader beware, I access. And before the year is out, expect Lucent and Cisco to announce more For the most part, the logic behind that race is compelling. Lucent, with its roots in more traditional telephone equipment, is trying to move strongly into computer and data networks. Cisco, for its part, wants to build on its already commanding position in data networking, even as it shifts more and more of its business to take advantage of the explosion in the Internet. And with technology shifting and developing as rapidly as it is, it's difficult (let's companies create and develop technology, and Cisco and Lucent step in, buy up these companies with their pricey stock, and reap the benefits. Needless to say, this strategy works only if you're good at bringing companies on board without wrecking them or yourself. Both Lucent and Cisco are. The danger in all this, though, is overreaching, stretching a company beyond companies design, install, and maintain computer and data networks. The deal was hailed by analysts and the press as a powerful move by Lucent into "services," offering the possibility that companies will now be able to come to can now promise, but we'll help you install it and keep it running. Hell, we'll even tell you why you should buy it in the first place. That last point signals one of the obvious problems with the deal, which is the best advice possible. If, every time a company asks an INS consultant what kind of system it should install, the consultant says, "Why, Lucent, of course," companies aren't going to be trusting INS much longer. But even aside from that, this was a dubious acquisition, because in essence revitalizing itself as a services company. But the truth is that it's better to make hardware or software than to be in services. Consulting is a fine The reason is obvious: Services require people, and always will. When you're making hardware or, even better, licensing software, all your costs are under your control, and once the product is actually developed, your profit margins are very high. And production lines can be automated. Consulting, though, is by Lucent would want to offer services in addition to equipment. But in acquiring INS, Lucent appears to be forgetting one of the most important lessons of the past two decades: Companies do best when they do only what they do best. the vote.) The teaching of evolution in schools is a distant second. other candidates proved they can't. The candidates seem to agree with this and that as president he would pose a litmus test for judges on abortion.) generated makes it important regardless. (In other words, it's important that, at the straw poll, none of the candidates would go near the topic (save Governmental Reform Committee hearings into campaign finance (the "Burton unsolicited documents detailing how to go about taking the Fifth but her arms shake uncontrollably throughout the interview and the microphone picks up her hands spasmodically rustling against her papers on the interview "reform and revive" their banks. The other potential causes of global trade policies. For the second week in a row, the Economist calls for theoretical threat to peace. He is a proven one." The magazine profiles editorial calls for unilateral military action by the United States to enforce "sovereignty." The cover story mourns the death of Oxford philosopher Sir learn from each other: Indies offer character development and plot, while him: "Usually in the pictures I make, the characters are not the most likable the magazine says, and sources for damaging accusations are dubious or cover of the year tracks "The New Science of Impotence." New drugs make flaccid wonderful philanthropist, and a better parent than Di was. plea for no death penalty: "There is no way around the fear and sorrow that comes with knowing you may have a hand in causing the death of evil." Other stories warn of biological terrorism and detail the growing legion nightmare on the horizon. The new euro, based on nine different currencies, evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak package crows over Republican election victories. An analysis of the elections promise to cut taxes. They lose or come uncomfortably close to losing if they of the 1980s is still humming in the '90s; New York itself is a vastly cleaner, eighties. We know perfectly well that children are most at risk at home, from their own families and adult friends." An editorial blasts New York models that economists are now building to predict the next currency crashes. historians debunking the myths shrouding the venerated founder of their modern whether he was atheistic, alcoholic, and authoritarian. (A cause of the current story trashes health care reforms put forth by both Democrats and Republicans. expensive. The only valid solution: national health care with guaranteed story warns that antibiotics may soon stop working: Bacteria are quickly developing immunity to even our strongest medicines. When antibiotics are no longer effective, simple medical operations could lead to deadly infections. sensitive personal info leads the piece to conclude that "the power once held Your Ad Here" displays kids wearing clothing with corporate logos (Tide, Apple, story details how costly divorce can be for rich executives. Jilted wives (the execs are overwhelmingly men) score huge court victories, winning money, property, and sometimes a large stake in their husbands' companies. Tips for compete with Coke's Minute Maid. Coke refuses to concede, directing inordinate autobiographical essay describes what it's like to owe huge amounts of money. The author knows he can't afford his kids' private schools but compulsively sinks himself further into debt just to keep up with the lifestyles of those around him. Result: ongoing fights with credit card companies, the Internal underworld of rape and child molestation. The author spent years covering the sex assault beat for a newspaper, and the experience left him traumatized. country club, who throws the best parties (read: most celebrity guests), how to find good caterers, and where to hang with rap star Puff Daddy. chronology details the shooting itself, while background information certifies become deeply religious in the wake of the experience, one claiming that, while in space, he "felt the power of God as [he'd] never felt it before." outbreaks have stemmed from bad drinking water, apple juice, and hamburger meat. Suggestions: Wash your hands, cook your food, and don't let kids in but they may work with an already familiar icon (one of the first ads is a recently busted the ring, but millions in treasure are still missing. and speculators pay hundreds of dollars for nearly worthless stuffed animals. story bemoans the decline of manliness and blames liberals, whose attempts to unmanly. We need to teach them the real male values: heroism and honor. against environmental racism will actually hurt minorities. The policy discourages polluting factories from locating in areas with large minority other teams from extorting their cities in the future. Publicly funded stadiums Title IX for opening opportunities to women athletes. It does not hurt men's college programs unless the college opts to sink money into major men's sports still have almost twice as many opportunities to play in school athletic sport with a socialist heart ("handicaps" allow bowlers of different abilities to compete against one another on equal terms). Recent technological improvements (new lane surfaces, different ball materials) have made the game even better, and it's still affordable, social, and fun. climax, when he finally gets to pick up a gun," says Entertainment vitality and pure inner joy contained within the music disguises how dated it Independence has endured the decades. "A surprisingly (if oddly) skilled just nods to jingoistic values in a time of social upheaval." Praise goes to resentfully, how the "reactionary" show beat out Hair for a Tony; original about sailors on 24-hour leave in New York (which later became a Frank problems starts with basics like the acting and dancing: Its cast of unknowns "is jarringly unbalanced," and "as a dance show, it has two left feet" presidential candidate plays fast and loose with history. (Most problematic: A small and brief and enigmatic certain writers' lives can be once you've his books. Preferably without." (See the elaborate Apaches confidence of outside investors." He must also balance "white fears against and work for peanuts (actually, for eggs, rice, and fruit). They do get sick are otherwise occupied. (There is no "shake violently" function yet.) times as many as a decade ago. (Most are offensive linemen.) Surprisingly, very He has the right political instincts, but he's still too wooden. He should try gentiles.) The predictable conclusion: Some interfaith couples choose one religion and stick to it, others let the kids decide. (See cover story reports on the apocalypse, collecting popular prophecies on how it will happen. Favorite portents: the formation of the state wonders if the apocalyptic obsession fuels distrust of public officials and institutions. An essay claims the White House wanted Republicans to block "Cartoon Issue" prints dozens of new drawings and old favorites (Businessman you?"). There are features on "desert island" cartoons, holiday cartoons, and cartooning career. An essay notes disapprovingly that adults are behaving more and more like children: They wear childish clothes (jeans and sneakers), watch vehicles), and eat childish food (ice cream). And, of course, they read Same as always, shoplifting other folk's style and music," says borrowing from "the same [musicians he] denounced a few years back as the sons generic formulas and special effects, trite though they may be. "Disaster movies are our millennial No plays, totally stylized, totally predictable, but blizzard of boulders, the village blanketed with mauve ash, a bridge cracking "Rumble in the Jungle" and a Mailer bio are available on the When humor and cinematography (mostly rugged mountain vistas). The Wall Street Farrow's prose exonerates her of the charge that she is crazy. Time 's "questions her own passivity in dealing with men and blames herself." But Fair) and playful ("He trounces words; he pivots on commas; he drops in and out of styles like a vaudevillian who lets the audience watch him change costumes point of annoyance? Or is there seriousness underneath the mordancy? In behind the postmodernism an old realist modernist grinding away, eager to notate reality (though in funky ways)." (Click here for more on He makes equally scathing fun of white people and black people," says Morris' book, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Party (the wronged wife): "She doesn't understand her man, she can't fulfill yet she functions as his official consort. Morris, by contrast, when he wishes to be alone with his loved one, must come in through the back door (the East Wing), alone, at night, passionately but illicitly." cover editorial warns that Japan's economic woes are real and are not going away. Japan must reform its banks and maintain loose fiscal and monetary policy (even though that means a cheapened yen), or the rest of We should be raising interest rates to keep our overheating economy in check, A story says company directors' investing habits are a good gauge of where the market is heading. Lately, directors have been overwhelmingly selling their own team from the World Cup if it is unable to squelch the violence of hooligan addictive, carcinogenic, and evil (and that firms may have marketed cigarettes to kids), yet he's leading the fight against congressional sanctions. Goldstone finally decided a settlement didn't make fiscal sense and that he'll continue him naive about the workings of the modern world. (He still views China as systems, having been bolstered by the drugs, are suddenly able to fight the world's hottest celebrity is exposed. The hilarious cover story chronicles night, hoping she'd leave her boyfriend and join them for drinks. When her finds the Supreme Court justice bitter at his lot and deeply suspicious of the their neighborhoods, "you won't ever really be able to go back. But you may find you're never fully accepted up ahead, either, that you've landed between worlds. That's the way I feel sometimes, even now, and it can make you angry." issue of a magazine billing itself the "independent voice of the information age." Overall tone: sanctimony, exemplified by the series of "lessons" to the press at the end of the cover story ("no one should read or listen to any media outlet that consistently shows that it is the lapdog of big, official power insider looks at the media biz, including a feature listing selected Time is the latest magazine to discover that "crank" can be cooked up at home and attracts women, who often use it as a diet cover story calls the virus the "next epidemic." The disease no effective cure. Hep C is transmitted much like AIDS (blood transfusions, Companies literally pay their taxes in vodka and do most of their business in honors the "Spirituality of Hashish," and records a "batting average" for story analyzes the split between "Rich Republicans" and conservative activists. prosperous and peaceful, and appalled by the vitriolic, negative activism of conservatives. Conservatives resent the passivity and sluggishness of Rich "horizontal" disarmament (taking weapons off alert, partially dismantling them) abortion are ridiculous. Roe was itself a compromise: Radical feminists their own stock portfolios, not enough about policies that affect us all. (Full should force themselves to become "indignant" in order to tackle these problems Administration approval for thalidomide, the drug that caused thousands of birth defects in the 1960s. Thalidomide relieves symptoms of AIDS and leprosy. Its new spokesperson? One of the deformed thalidomide babies, all grown up. He story says liberals shouldn't get excited about the budget surplus because it could easily disappear. Instead, liberals should focus on a more pressing society. That, in turn, might cause a peaceful transition from communism. patrons flock to faux blues clubs on the yuppie North Side, while authentic similarities: both in their 70s, both haters of rampant capitalism, etc. The slightly crazy. New genetic research suggests that the difference between "normal" behavior and mental illness is a matter of degree. For example: A Time identifies the next big food boycott: swordfish. Lots of trendy restaurants have stopped serving while cutting back welfare), "economic globalism" (the commitment to free trade), "fiscal discipline" (the balanced budget), and "government as fiction's runaway success might kill the genre. A slew of best sellers boat that has sat untended the entire time we've been here. Boats like his are now fetching up to five thousand dollars. Inner tubes went up to three hundred ossify, leaving them paralyzed. So far, no explanation or cure for the asteroid. (Odd scientific fact: There is no firm definition of "planet.") On to abandon him and for the International Monetary Fund to withhold loans unless the gradual breakdown of the Middle East peace process. The United States Minor was in the midst of a delusion when he shot a man. He filed his excellent cells, one of which he turned into a library and filled with antiquarian books; allowed a knife, to cut the pages of the old books, although in the end he used Post 's "Page Six." Foppishly dressed and snottily mannered, Stern always The piece points out that gossip columnists are generally far more seasoned and announces Glass' dismissal as associate editor. It acknowledges that, as has been widely reported, Glass invented characters, organizations, and events in the recent article "Hack Heaven" and other pieces. How did it happen? "For reasons known only to him, Glass mounted what appears to have been quite an elaborate effort, including the falsification of documents and reporter's irrelevance of college presidents. Once, they were revered public intellectuals; now, they spend more than half their time fund raising and most school, on the family farm, on inner city streets, at the mall, and in their considered the godfather of game theory. In the '60s, he succumbed to schizophrenia, believing himself a "messianic figure of great but secret newsweeklies to strike a favorite pose: pretending to preach caution while Cure," while Time puts a huge red X through the word "Cancer." Beneath, they run sober (and nearly identical) small print: "The Hope and the cure. (Both mags rap the New York Times for its overenthusiastic endorsement.) Time runs an excellent chart of the various kinds of cancer treatments. Requisite Wall Street angle: Time says biotech stocks his imprisonment on rivals jealous of his company, Death Row Records. also explains why human trials of the drugs can't begin for at least a year: The current total supply of the drugs is only enough to treat a few mice. last week, hate the (slightly) more racially tolerant rappers, who imitate Whisperer --says he's "wraithlike" and private. But he is responsible for because the mound is too low, the strike zone is too small, and the rise of who sought to be the first woman to fly an F-16 in combat, complained that her New York Air National Guard unit mistreated her, ending the careers of many of destroyed morale by sleeping with her supervisor, and herself sexually harassed male pilots. Lesson: The gender wars are undermining military (Universal Pictures). As invariably occurs upon the release there's some passion in the action, a lilt to the chases, a fluid lyricism in revenge into lighthearted fare; critics say they failed. "It gives us the grateful for these final installments, which concern a vigilante who blows away empty tunesmith he seemed in the '70s and '80s. "He is the keeper of the with unabashed Fab Four nostalgia, draws warm praise. "The old bloke sounds Morris (Random House). A very friendly reception for the first volume of a Time founder Henry Luce. "Morris has written a model biography of a but too harsh: "Morris struggles for fairness but portrays Luce as a result, doubled their space. The Met has finally given a "great art tradition Dynasty to the present, can now be called "the most comprehensive view of women. One wonders whether she is conscious of the fact that, taken as a whole, Crystal and his "repeated relief from the pretentiousness of presenters" (Tom Usually the most controversial group show in the United States, this year's rife with safe curatorial decisions and art that has already been widely reflects nothing less than the state of contemporary art: derivative and lawyer forced to tell the truth for a day, "removes the rubber nose and plays a [so that] our poor hero is reduced to saying therapeutic things like ...'You sex while driving "sexual without being sexy." The New Yorker 's Lane calls it boring and pretentious: "The characters in Crash are so stock, and the themes, such as the subplot about unrequited love, tired. (See significant, resplendent with the thick texture of feeling and history," writes policy prescriptions won't solve the problems they shrilly decry. If anything, Press). The memoir of this former ally of the Black Panthers turned scourge of the New Left draws cheers and jeers from predictable quarters. The Weekly calling his former radical collaborators cowards and poltroons." dump a deaf woman. Some discern a feminist slant to the film's "ballsy its "critical detachment" and "coolly stylized exaggeration," which make it horror movie designed to shock, and nothing else." (Stills and clips are Spawn action figures have been selling out of stores, and the film summer's most spectacular concoction of visual effects and color." Most Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb (he shot his wife accidentally, slept with little boys, and hawked his typewriter to buy heroin). Yet none of the obits argues for his literary greatness, or that his writing should be read by future generations except for magnificent on the surface and haunting at the core." Others, though, bash cover editorial urges careful treatment of the world's banks. The International Monetary Fund must bail out banks when their failure databases, the "broken window" theory), more policemen on the beat, and the end cover story says the spread of suburbs has spurred the rise of the Christian right. Back when evangelicals inhabited rural communities, they were never forced to confront cultural enemies. Now that they live in diverse suburbs, they have become separatists. Alarmed by cultural differences, they have started home schooling kids and running for political refuse to return to poverty now that the economy has collapsed. So they are Museum of Art has been steadily adding to its once meager collection, and photography has become "the medium of the moment." Because millions of amateurs own cameras and take pictures, photography sometimes gets little respect from motherhood). Making Beloved was a deeply emotional experience for that stresses prevention over treatment and which even makes house calls. their late 20s don't want to sacrifice their independence to marriage and upon, so motherhood can ruin a woman's career. Japan's fertility rate is now rental (for home or office) is a growing industry: One rental facility explains, "We give kids another out. If somebody says, 'Hey, try this,' the kid us who deplored the investigation from the start can only take satisfaction in that devolution of power from the federal government to the states is an opportunity for progressives. Giving power to local governments encourages experimentation that the whole country can learn from. Examples cited: state finance reform at the state level, and better local mass transit. Drawback: Progressive policies make a community less "business friendly," so surrounding views" and supported AIDS research. Apparently even diseases are partisan. genetically engineered crops. Extremely popular in the United States, such contain few, and mostly simple, genetic alterations: They are not terrifying growing increasingly rebellious because of the nation's terrible poverty, says vamping with pink feather boa. There are coy captions: "Was this the magazine publishes the results of its investigation of former Associate Editor several that were entirely fabricated. Among the invented characters and battlegrounds by insisting that almost any sexual interaction between a man and a woman is coercive. This must stop. The author also proposes limiting employer liability for sex harassment: To prevent lawsuits, companies have adopted sexual policing policies that strip employees of privacy and stultify offices. These policies would be unnecessary if sex harassers, rather than companies, education. Parents are rushing to enroll kids in charters, which generally offer smaller classes and more enthusiastic teachers. Among the problems: Kids with unmotivated parents are left behind in bad public schools, and charters dupe parents by promising more than they deliver. (One charter company claimed exhausted from the flight that he'll have to be carried off the shuttle on a Time 's cover story warns that children know more about sex than their a surge in research about memory. (Conclusion: Your kids know everything you have already forgotten about sex.) Time says teens and preteens are largely because parents aren't imparting the sex education they should. A boys about sex. They undermine the premise of the cover story by being pressure, and too little sleep can damage recall. Physical activity, mental exercises, and estrogen (for women) can protect it. More and better therapies vitamin and herbal supplements such as ginkgo, saying the medical evidence Time claims the United States secretly deployed the chemical weapons. The article describes one such deployment in grisly detail: a sentences. Unsurprising fact: Children whose parents talk to them a lot have small health benefits of circumcision are not worth the pain of the Manhattan dominatrix called "Nurse Wolf" is profiled. "One of the busiest mistresses in Manhattan," she has a medical exam room, a dungeon, a cage, dressing clients in diapers and having them soil themselves, tying clients in seems to be worth every penny: It has three blades that are more than twice as manufacturing a product that is not only the world's most popular but also its inflammation much better than aspirin or ibuprofen, with no side effects. The "COX-2 inhibitor" could be a godsend for those suffering from "seduce you into greater and greater flights of preposterousness." (Click who pimps for him. Most critics agree the film is heavy on melodrama, and the Maps signals the arrival of a potentially major new talent," says recent trends in airport design that have "struggled to keep up with the increasing popularity of air travel" by casting aside "such amenities as beauty previously believed. (One example: she allegedly plagiarizes recipes.) Reviewers don't quarrel much with the biography's slant, though they almost all lavish review calls it "the book that you have been awaiting since you read book, seems willed, unfree, a hysteria that he forces onto his scenes because (United Artists). The only thing critics can agree on about is that the car chases are so phenomenal that they redefine the form. As for novel shifts seamlessly among viewpoints and time frames. Most reviewers concur Book Review that the book is "so focused on darkness and degradation as to apologetic for their negative reviews. After describing the production as a point of singling out a few elements of the show for praise. the score "rich with color, by turns lush, frantic, heartbreaking, even funny." "sublime and subtle beauty" in the heartfelt, rich album from this unlikely a minor irritation. (Listen to a clip from the album.) Times )--are mildly approving, but the show doesn't come close to meeting Collins calls it "pretty good, gooey, yearning, adolescent fun," and Entertainment Weekly 's Ken Tucker calls it "a solid weekly soap opera." confused characters and burrows inside their heads to find a deeper humor, but are ordinarily scattered around the museum.) The straightforward chronological order and detailed explanations of the workshop system of the time, coupled with the high caliber of the art, makes for a show that is "both going nuclear. The move would boost the government's popularity but would story explains a new theory that algae create wind. Algae on the surface of the ocean emit gases that heat the air. The pressure change stirs up wind, which lifts the algae off the water and up into the clouds. The algae then travel in says blacks score poorly on standardized tests because they don't take partly because the United States thought he would be "more secretary than general," but he has proved to be a wily negotiator, restrained and persuasive. experience. On her side: Her main opponent is best known for having played Pa To counteract mushy curricula (whole math, multiculturalism) and keep pace on claims that the company exploits workers. The plants are "modern, clean, well lighted and ventilated, and paying decent wages by local standards." However, workers still have no voice at the plants and "fear reprisal from article applauds the growing automation of medicine: Computers using statistical evidence make more accurate diagnoses than doctors, who are misled by irrelevant "human" factors. Some doctors have responded by becoming more Bowery wore scab makeup and pubic wigs, dribbled glue over his skull, slept booted from the union without due process. While aides may be guilty of organized religion. There needs to be a "Christian Left" that recognizes the paradoxes: the lost but unforgettable frontier, the wilderness which is society's favorite dream." (Excerpts of the book are available here.) across the ideological spectrum for Whitehead's attack on divorce and the permissive culture that tolerates it. The New York Times Book Review says her scholarship rates no higher than the "the popular 'expert opinion' and liberal divorce laws, the economics of women in the workplace, and common Weekly Standard faults Whitehead for shoddy scholarship and pop psychology. (For more debate on divorce, see the "Dialogue" between When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth is the useful intersection between art and commerce? How corrosive is fame? sometimes reads like a "pitch against the National Endowment for the Arts." lesbian. "As obstacles in the course of true love go, that's fairly major," all the small regional footnotes of gesture and inflection just right. But these actors also convey the sense of an internal furnace of pain and anxiety threat to new companies, then its power should be curbed." Because the price might "stifle services that would emerge with competition," the editorial government's position on encryption, Internet taxation, and shareholder emotional bonds with their new parents, probably because the absence of attention and affection in infancy stunted brain development. They are often vicious, deceitful, and mentally slow. Lesson for all working parents: Children article says that criminals and arms dealers use gun shows to skirt firearms laws. If you claim you are adding to your private gun collection, you can buy whatever weapons you want from shows without a waiting period or paperwork. best players and a computer programmed with all the words in the Scrabble about his incomparable music, surprisingly impressive film career, hipness, and are also dozens of fabulous pictures. Time 's eight page package regrets bad derivatives, and that's just the beginning. (The article does not piece claims Al Gore's plan to wire all classrooms and libraries to the Internet is in trouble. The scheme, paid for by a telephone surcharge, is costing more than anticipated, and critics in both parties are condemning the "Gore tax." Why should the feds pay for something most schools would do anyway? cover story says that the national drop in murders has been caused by the decline of crack. The viciously addictive, lucrative drug fueled violence in ways that other drugs don't. Smarter policing and more imprisonment also contributed to falling crime rates. Property crime is falling because fierce, tyrannical intellectual who has nothing but suspicion and hatred for doesn't care if that ends the peace process. The piece includes incredible A piece says journalists and celebrities suck up to radio talk show host Don to him: "Kid, don't waste your time with these bums. You got stardust on your Valentine's Day cover story notes the globalization and professionalization of down prices for prostitution and pornography worldwide. The real money is still videos. Good news for porn fans: The Internet makes it possible to learn which increasing. Unless China manages to dismantle its gigantic, interfering bureaucracy (which is unlikely), it too will face economic disaster. can solve any problem (environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, etc.) and doesn't understand emotionalism and power politics. This blind spot could handicap his presidency. A second piece berates Gore for supporting affirmative have already figured out how to give a fruit fly a photographic memory by the notion that the Internet is distorting news. The Web has sped up the news cycle (just as the telephone did at the turn of the century), but good reliable online journalism from garbage. (Full disclosure: enough managers. Startups can't sustain themselves because they lack talented chief operating officers, chief financial officers, and salespeople. Why does no one seem to care? Most venture capitalists and company founders are hoping wanted to offer immunity but, for unspecified reasons, would not put the deal story: It bounced from the Drudge Report to countless news outlets effeminate. (Tactless comment: "I don't have a feminine side. Maybe if I were specialty) is overrated, and shouldn't be a prerequisite for the gold. An article explicates curling (shuffleboard on ice with brooms), "the one game in all the world wherein the human participants move faster than the object they might have been saved had the ambulance rushed her to the hospital, rather than Family Research Council) have become more influential. The coalition recently scandal, however: One attendee joked, "The French ask why he hasn't had more dialect, and starve themselves in order to attain the gaunt look of Confederate troops. (Gross detail: Soaking uniform buttons in urine gives them a by uncovering dirt about the accusing women. A former '60s radical, he's worked reprehensible "central dogma" is that consensual sex "ought never to be subject "friendly, funny, reliable" and "believed in the integrity of public service." had countless plastic surgeries in order to look like a jungle cat. The photos exchange for a $1.5-million reward. The author claims to have seen the stolen Photos with her baby inside. Accompanying article says she's finally learning to express her deepest emotions in public. God help us. a forceful cover editorial. Regardless of whether he committed any criminal quickly if the allegations turn out to be true: They don't want him dragging may be personally slimy, his entire presidency is not founded on corruption and chats amiably with gawking tourists outside his house, and thinks he'll be a "Let's say I committed this crime. Even if I did do this, it would have to have dwarf convention that is the main courting ground for little people. Dwarf guys Dwarfs socially stratify each other based on extent of he must remember eight birthdays and two wedding anniversaries in a single rattles the former colony, its residents want a larger voice in running it. The Chuck Close, who manages to paint astonishing Pointillist portraits despite exhaustive account of the story to date. Its package includes a long, exclusive reaction: While Bill crashed on a couch, she went into overdrive. use that to ruin his political career as the really bad guys. Not her Bill.") clinics and labs file false bills, and the system is so big that no one now merely average. The survey also advises investors to consider moving money that the president is the real victim of the scandal. He may lose his job, on genes and a chemical called leptin than on food intake. Good news for the obese: Scientists believe they are close to understanding and controlling He's now proved himself "pathological," "unbalanced," and "compulsive." He has Even if we launch airstrikes, he will preserve his chemical weapons and his hold on power. The only satisfactory option: A ground invasion that editorial argues that "road pricing" will solve the world's traffic problems by making drivers pay for their privilege. Charging varying amounts for driving at technique would be ineffective for all but the sickest firms. (For Capitalist.") A few weeks ago there was a media flurry about a computer can improvise jazz. Its programmer enters parameters of style and tempo. The computer's getting better: Many experts can no longer distinguish it from a film about a slave revolt, on the cover. Among four related stories: a rave invade other countries (good news), but also too weak to prevent its soldiers from selling arms to terrorists (bad news). Also, a report from the Rev. Moon's hometowns after the wedding. They may or may not see their spouses in the Her mom doesn't like her punk nose ring, but she leaves it in. An article describes a new medical study about prayer: When devout "healers" prayed for epiphany: A voice in the woods told her to become a minister. Also, kudos for says one, "the folks in town are sitting in church, waving a book that makes no trend: the exodus to exurbia. Time 's cover story on small towns follows several couples who Telecommuting and the great job market make mobility easier than ever. A Professionals" (unhappy, that is, till they drop out). assesses the legacy of slavery. Among the conclusions: A national apology for presidential advisory board on race. (He's against an apology, and for affirmative action. See "The Sound of One Hand Talking" for (though the magazine inexplicably calls it "controversial"). past two years, will be the first Ford to head the automaker in a decade. contributes a short defense of his movie, but an accompanying review pans it: story on junk mail. Lots of insider info about how junk mailers reel you retailers make more money by selling their mailing lists than by selling their of junk mail a year.) A story praises the Trinity Foundation, a Christian community in guide to personal finance advises investors to stop worrying about usual Gore psychoanalysis a step further. It agrees that Gore's outer itself masks Gore's fundamental emotional coolness. Gore admits that his "no controlling legal authority" press conference was a mistake. A "Comment" by Republicans used to be the party of "noble aspirations" and Democrats used to be the party of "just causes." Now Democrats tout bland aspirations (like racial healing) while Republicans fervently champion causes like tax reform and story makes the case for national education reform. Decentralization, the usual conservative solution, isn't helping schools. National policies could increase the number of charter schools, cripple local education bureaucracies, and limit international mergers, and led to quotas, tariffs and overcapacity at many auto for cystic fibrosis. Inheriting a faulty gene from both parents means getting this fatal disease. Inheriting the faulty gene from only one parent means no cystic fibrosis and also means immunity to typhoid. Once, this may have been a sanctions are more effective at undermining evil regimes than trading is at indications suggest members will vote down the merger. says his new movie is the most radical political statement of his career. In the film a senator discards politics as usual and starts talking straight, are breeding better bees. Farmers rely heavily on honeybees to pollinate crops, but new, specialized bees are quicker, more effective fertilizers. For instance, honeybees have adapted to steal alfalfa nectar without taking Christian right is politically naive, and its intractability dooms its own goals. An accompanying piece says Republicans no longer own a monopoly on story: how to raise male children. Boys are more enthusiastic and just as emotional as girls but less able to express themselves. Give them lots of Time 's peculiar cover story follows the sad case of a banker whose designed to protect women in abusive marriages can sometimes keep innocent life" afflictions such as arthritis, but how much sex is required for a decent quality of life? (We refrain from making a joke about this, the only encourages the Net as a means of increasing commerce. cover story on the "next pope" profiles leading candidates. curial experience, and is archbishop in a nation that is not a major power." overhead bins and injure you. Oh, and definitely buckle your seat belt. aren't aware they have the disease until their liver is nearly destroyed. Sex and shared needles easily transmit the disease, and anyone who received a blood also hired too many nice guys to work for him. (See values but lacks the ego and charisma to win votes. Possible mission: Win a big the permission of members annually before using their dues for political activity." The bill would crush unions' political strength, since thorny logistics make it costly and difficult to get permission on a yearly basis. cover editorial on terrorism says Middle East radicals other policymakers. She seems to have "less leverage at the White House than the bombing front, an article says that since it's tough to guard against of toil, sacrifice, saving, and abstinence" to a "culture of consumption, York Liberty road trip, admiring the team's genuine camaraderie, warmth, and sheer joy, and calling each game "a celebration of girl power." Another admires women's basketball for discouraging "ladylike behavior" and promoting "raucous intermarriage is excluding blacks. Instead of melting into one brown nation, story focuses on the gay "conversion" controversy. Exodus International, among rights in theory but dislike public displays of gay affection. The editor of the gay magazine Out urges gays to mingle more with straights and not Discovery mission "a timely reminder that we can still have heroes." Why is targets, because major targets are too well protected. argues that scientists have grossly overstated the importance of parents in molding their children. In fact, children are shaped mostly by other children, who serve as role models and guides for living. Children tend to resemble parents only because they share genes, not because they are influenced by them. Evidence: Adopted children have as much in common with random adults as with slowing, the world economy is uncertain, and investors are ignoring repeated acting, raising interest rates enough to stop the market euphoria. A recession is inevitable, and we need Fed intervention to ensure it's a mild one. lack the selflessness required to build an organization that would endure after his loss. Why would he run? Because he is desperate to remain important. "farcical plot and sight gags to provide hilarity" to the story of the this memoir about a novelist's incestuous affair with her father as a product recently featured this literary murder mystery as a case study in about an unglamorous firm whose lawyers take on lowlifes as clients and work in shabby offices, skillfully interweaves several plots into a single episode. in wise guys; I have an awful feeling he may even think of them as slightly cover editorial reassures readers that a global depression United States can still lower interest rates or cut taxes to prevent a slump, there is little to worry about. The essay takes pains to note that current woes are not the fault of the free market system and that protectionism and freshener industries. While companies once mined scents from natural sources use computers and chemical synthesis to create new scents: After sampling odors pedantic, religious, exacting personality led him to drag out a case that other Supreme Court justice, and his "tin ear" for politics has hurt him in previous in the drug war. Treatment is cheaper and far more effective than interdiction, portraying him as sympathetic to Communist interests. (Minor problem: After Time went to press, Communists, who control Parliament, blocked piece examines a new book claiming that parents have a scant role in shaping their children. In fact, it's genetics and your peers that make you who you emphasizes her embodiment of, yes, globalization: "Globalization has become the decade's most overused word, but at its heart, it embodies a real truth: technology has made this a planet of shared experiences." salt of the earth guy who cooks his own dinners, plays tennis with his son, marvels at bank cards, and harbors a passion for books. (The piece is pegged to longer effective: "Since when do we kick presidents out of office because they drop in share prices could be exactly what is needed right now." Stocks remain overvalued, and a harmless fall now will prevent a tragic fall later. A true credit card number and minimal personal information. Legislation banning the national programming, Fox gives viewers more coverage of their home teams. fiction every day (despite not having published in years), and his house holds articles. Glass' former colleagues say he was pathologically insecure and too eager to please. He lied up until the bitter end, even in the face of damning a heavy hand in shaping Carver's early voice (rewriting long passages, violently cutting text, changing the tone). But this does not differ from what, say better) stories were entirely his own. The piece notes that authorship is always a collaborative process to some degree, be it with editor, spouse, etc. prediction that the House will do nothing before elections; and a piece still in office, but holding off on the trial until he is a private citizen," taking them to improve performance and win college athletic scholarships. How do you know if your daughter is on steroids? Her breasts shrink and her voice slipped too far into the sheltered and irrelevant world of academia, anthropologists now strive to make a difference: One anthropologist hired by a killing by policemen continues. Leader Hun Sen ignores election results and comedy about government agents who police extraterrestrials is hailed as the reviewers revel in its deadpan humor, stylish costumes, and comic performances, cause most actors to snap in half" (Lane). (Stills and clips are available wondering whether Ford can write about anything other than the subject of that concern the midlife crises of womanizers and all three are deemed mediocre knockoffs of Ford's earlier work, littered with characters "not complex enough Some, however, appreciate Ford's continued explorations of "contemporary the Declaration of Independence wasn't his individual handiwork but the product outstanding work of research and analysis, written with grace and wit," says a world without ideas." (Click here for an excerpt from the book.) Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster Spymaster, legendary for helping bring down West German Prime Minister Willy nothing about the East German secret police's brutalities and to have been just concurs that Wolf ultimately did little to abet the Communist regime and calls his memoir "a testament to the essential uselessness of almost all graffitist turned '80s art superstar gets his first major retrospective, to enterprise was bigger than art and, in its fashion, better." Haring, adds the high marks for its realistic and "gritty" (the critics' favorite term) Oz "an ecology and anthropology of terror, not for the faint of heart or achievements and solidarity is already undeniable," says the New York Art --"Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life" (Museum of Modern cover editorial urges Japan to reform its banking system. Japan's politicians must quit dithering and revive consumer confidence. If interest rates too soon: Rate cuts are a powerful weapon, to be saved for a Hemmed in by censors and given to subtlety, these poets said "I love you" without actually saying it. During the war and after it, directness became the fashion, and lyrics lost their sophistication. Can any postwar song match this story says that science increasingly tolerates faith and meaning. Science had become linked to the notion that the universe has no purpose, but scientists are starting to argue that scientific phenomena are more meaningful than partly from a yen for parliamentary politics. Our system gridlocks when a feminists to reconsider: Should invasions of privacy really be necessary for sexual harassment cases? Perhaps social sanctions can stop boorish behavior more effectively than laws can. Such a shift would enable feminists not to look relationship with players and other employees is now intense but cordial. All burnout to lack of ambition. Sharp, wry, and likable, Weld quickly sank from a time" in the scandal, with no one safe from partisan smears. Time agrees chance that he will be impeached by the full House and put on trial in the adulterer who wrote a book about his sins. Time offers thumbnail sketches of prominent members of the House Judiciary Committee, the body Time says that space tourism has a new proponent: former astronaut Buzz frustrated by her failure to make a statement about her husband's behavior. An series, a pet project of Ted Turner, is evenhanded, thorough, and laws that let prosecutors look into the background of accused sexual harassers. interesting article goes behind the scenes in the development of a new sitcom. fought the network, refusing to include a laugh track or dumb down their story blasts the flat tax, which Republicans are adopting as their top is an equally regressive scheme, and totally unenforceable.) The editorial endorses progressive tax reform: Cut rates but scrap loopholes such as the decides that it should be. A key reason: The Fifth Amendment does not protect care for elderly relatives, but at least the strangers are willing and callousness. An article notes the rise of "whiteness studies" in academia. Grad students say they are analyzing whiteness in order to undermine racial supremacy. The author worries that they may only succeed in cementing racial offers a time line of the doctors' plans for a successful delivery. It also has Time identifies a new racial conflict: bilingual education. Blacks resent more effective method of deposing the dictator than a bombing campaign. Also in "Annual Guide to Techno Life" on the cover. Highlights of the package: An article says that wearable medical computers will diagnose map details the wonders of Bill Gates' wired house: The library has two secretly pivoting bookshelves. (One hides a bar, what does the other hide?) His walkways, we note approvingly, are covered with slate (or, as it's known here, software will displace entire professional classes, like auditors, by (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice). Who's to blame? Parents, often speed that is contrary to evidence and experience. It is very likely that a slow civil war in the north, and indict him as a war criminal. If we attack militarily, we must use ground troops: As the Gulf War proved, air power alone antitrust law, which maintains open competitive markets with a minimum of involvement in film production has been wildly exaggerated, and his affair with marvels at New Yorkers' conspicuous consumption, which far outdoes the '80s. Drudge depicts him as a charming, naive young man who made a terrible mistake brand. So far, his handful of rail routes are losing money, and he hasn't made can't grow back missing body parts: Regeneration (in amphibians) requires Service agents should not be forced to testify against the president, as this "concept" albums. What happened? CD players: They let fans program the track the cheapest treatment over the best one and denying membership to unhealthy Peepholes look in on the office so staffers can know when meetings are ending, peephole, and a secret tunnel underneath the Oval Office could be used for a how the scandal affects Wall Street. Answer: It doesn't, since economic policy won't change even with an impeachment. The millennium bug, on that imitate touch and sense emotion in human voices. (For of the rich and famous only once: An article chronicles the miserable lives of admitted to adultery, proving his essential honesty, and maintained his brooding over a woman), but a more subdued, elegiac tone. Almost everyone lavishes praise on the book, not minding the absurdities they find in the plot instead something far more rare: the work of a great master still locked in nine seasons leaves reviewers unimpressed, but it occasions encomiums for the Most agree, however, that the show declined in its last years, especially after ornate props and gorgeous showgirls, he shares his act lovingly with ordinary glitz subside during the festival's second week. It "reasserted its claim to hackwork. Rehashing his favorite subject of New York City police corruption, drug dealer, idealistic liberal defense lawyer), and preachy moralizing. ("The screen full of strongly drawn, fully dimensioned, psychologically valid doesn't translate well to film, critics say. They regard the adaptation, which dissent, extols the film's "richly nuanced" performances and its "intense mood there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe V. and the first two films in the restored Star Wars trilogy. Critics deem the also feel the technological revolution in movies that Star Wars ushered Critics are skeptical of anachronistic touches in the production, including loud sirens, camcorders, and video projections of political speeches. scene as a joke "unforgivable." (The Public Theater the last minute. The fiction editor quit, claiming the editor in chief had been "adolescent" and "does nothing to illuminate its heroes' lives." Others find Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague who recently pleaded guilty to molesting a little boy. The book is said to However, the Weekly Standard attacks the author, calling him an Any speculations to the contrary would be indecent." In the New Stern train, condemning the shock jock for his megalomania, his "fifties someone whose fierce love of music is making thousands of others listen to autobiography. The reviews differ only in emphasis. Some argue that the "iron women, and the profound changes brought by the women's movement, than a dozen tomes filled with psychological jargon." Others are drawn to the gossipy What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation the tricky questions that are customarily lobbed at the high school junior who the same reason that 'Born Free' is a song about lions, not the animals they Standard is skeptical: "The sheer magnitude of the problems that government debut in a collection of short stories. But the paranoid rantings of an East a tide pool, but instead of examining shrimp and sand crabs, she tracks loss, allowed him to evade the gangsta rap typecasting forced on him by the music classic. "The subject may not be as universal as loud music played badly," says Art, New York). Is the abstract expressionist's late work a last hurrah, in the paintings, but maintain a genteel focus on the paintings themselves. Conclusion: The paintings are shockingly genteel, too. New seems to empty out his art, like the man who wants to give everything away the melodrama of vulgarity. The messy, vicious slathers of pigment, the "About as entertaining as having blood drawn," says Peter Marks in a vicious roles and personal growth. Critics dismiss it as tedious psychobabble. But, young couples and groups of women nudging one another and mouthing, 'That is so petty egomaniacs intransigently reiterated their familiar positions" with a flashing wrist; he gives us flourishes, a kind of spectacle that audiences for romantic comedies expect, or deserve." (Stills, authenticity: harsh wooden benches, vendors selling wine during soliloquies, theater makes it seem as if actors "are talking to you, asking you questions, "a quick eye for the illuminating detail and a capacity for assembling fact." dictated the book letter by letter, blinking his left eyelid as someone read about invalids, critics grandiloquently pronounce the book a "testament to the narrative style (multiple flashbacks, rotating narrators) and "the exuberant, the modest magic of perception into an occasional clumsy piece of magic Reviews cite the book's eclecticism: It combines a lucid explanation of the storm's complex meteorology, gritty descriptions of sailor bars and, most contemporary art exhibition fails to excite. The show "lacks insight and that the superstars are over the hill, and are trotting out mediocre work. One of racial stereotypes, are said to add "some spice" to an otherwise "sleepy Art --"Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life" (Museum of Modern overvalued. The Federal Reserve Board should raise interest rates now to prevent a horrible crash later. "Ominously, merger mania is usually associated with the final stages of a bull market." (Click here to read a radio astronomers. Cell phones interfere with radio frequencies and force scientists to develop complicated countermeasures, wasting precious research story says we can't stop global warming, so we should just adapt to it. One problem: Environmental groups are so obsessed with alternative fuels that they "pressure against any research that would render fossil fuel use benign." equivalent of gathering people from all over the world to put on a play in has been substantially lowered, and this is feminists' own fault. counterclaim: Bacteria growing on the shroud throws off the dating process. Shroud tidbit: The person wrapped in the shroud was crucified through the drug Tamoxifen. It drastically reduces breast cancer rates but increases the chance of blood clots and uterine cancer. The drug only makes sense for those already at high risk. Time does a better job of explaining how the drug "portal" of choice. Both companies want to provide news, shopping, chat rooms, Oceanographers predict where and when goods lost at sea will wash ashore. theorizing from the child of an assassinated '60s icon. A week after Martin package slams the tobacco deal and the persecution of both smokers and the individual choice that hurts no one else: The risk of secondhand smoke has been exaggerated and smokers actually save Social Security costs by dying younger. An accompanying piece says schools waste huge amounts of time indoctrinating students about tobacco's evils. Kids are now routinely assigned classwork on "less imperialist, less militarized, less threatening to its neighbors and the story identifies the latest drug to endanger kids: caffeine. Youngsters drink huge amounts of highly caffeinated sodas (Coke, Mountain Dew) and hang out at (who must wear impractical skirts), cost money to parents (who still must buy play clothes) and schools (who must provide uniforms for poor students), and have not been shown to improve academic performance or behavior. a single musical moment that goes beyond artful amplified competence" "Jane Campion has done something of which I never thought her capable," writes abstract," and filled with "imagination and surprise"; the Village Portrait of a Lady is to Jane Campion." (See the film's official Web site.) translation of Homer's The Odyssey has whipped up so much fervor that in the New York Times and the New Republic point out that the film's hero, the publisher of wins praise for his witty prose and inventive historical fiction, which virtually alone in finding the book indulgent and vapid. (Click here for an collage artist's oeuvre --possibly "the largest retrospective of a living if qualified, reviews. Critics excuse failed experiments (such as paintings on dozen assistants) because of the importance of the artist's conceptual innovations. Many grumble that the curators weren't more discriminating. New "gently ironic touch" in adapting a novel by Rick Moody, and for being "less interested in assigning blame for all the misery than in simply documenting it" in the New York Review of Books, he attributes to Mailer the subtlety of by theological argument but by telling or retelling a story." assembled so many fully formed characters or shuttled so authoritatively Foster (Oxford University Press). Coming after a long line of mediocre impressively into the complex fabric of the great poet's life" says the that the biographer is himself a fine writer, bearing with grace his knowledge emotionally intricate, and its tensions adroitly controlled." Others think he overwrites. "This is a novel that doesn't seem written, but declaimed, in a is said to redeem the melodrama. It is "artful and literate" says the a negative judgment: "That [Reeve] can direct at all is impressive. Too bad the cycle (the third installment was performed last week). Kudos mostly for reminder that not all greatness lies in the past, that not all the best performances are contained on crackly old recordings adorned with sepia considerable charisma can compensate for the ridiculous plot. "Serviceable at mediocre." Westerners only like it, he says, because they are obsessed with hours. In every other respect, however, critics find it numbingly familiar. you may feel you've tuned into a commercial for Colonial interiors or an online president, murdering his mistress is deemed cartoonish and incredible. "Frankly, Mars Attacks! had a better handle on the White House," says "would have to be telepathic to keep popping up, as he does, whenever the plot time he even pokes fun at it." (Castle Rock has stills and clips.) universally applauded. The Economist called it "quite simply, a unity. He also writes confusing prose. "It is something of a lazy book. (As in associate Gothic novels with elegance and discretion, but these are the of restraint. The story of a psychiatrist's wife who falls in love with a murderous patient, it culminates in "a departure into madness that is perfectly suppressing his usual fondness for the fantastic: Asylum "is closer to effort to cover up the incident, and by way of "interviews with survivors [that] provide us with a chilling view of the famine as it was experienced by bizarre (some say grotesque) watercolors by the reclusive (some say mad) lies partly in the weirdness of his obsessions (scantily clad little girls with penises), "so pungently suggestive of an imagined world," says New he a psychopath or an undiscovered genius? "He is not better than a trained or Farrow of cashing in with a memoir "that will satisfy a Peeping Fan Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties by Dick Morris (Random House). To hear the critics bash him, the former White House political adviser's entire life has been a dalliance with prostitution. As a professional, he was an amoral whore; as a husband and a public figure, he book is lively, readable and anecdotally rich, for his insider's account of the occasion to wax confessional, particularly on the subject of the writing life: the roots of violence in art, the mystery of personality," says the Wall negative nonetheless. Rhetorically, the speech is deemed to have been was that the president spent too much time "pouring over past Presidential speeches and anthologies of poetry." The upside was the speech's "stirring." Television coverage struggled to make something out of nothing, making documentaries about the events rather than transmitting them into World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism of markets and leads reviewers to reconsider their own enthusiasm for free bashing of the Federal Reserve Board (a repetition of the theme of his 799-page demanded by florid passages." But reviewers agree that the recording takes wing, her luscious, tight vibrato perfectly capturing the adolescent lost its charm? Reviews of the latest one suggest the answer is yes. Critics skitters across a patch of ice," says Ken Tucker in Entertainment man in the long skirt with the cloche hat, doling out these white feathers to work so far"). He attributes its success to feminism or, more specifically, to "its entry into the psychological subtlety with which Homer presents women." should be reminded that for nearly twenty years, 'the most trusted man in asserts that they could well spread to the rest of the world. The shouldn't block capital flows or choke the money supply. An article says current forecasts of ecological doom are greatly exaggerated. Environmentalists have long predicted the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels, but there are more fat.) Also, a story looks at what the world laughs at. Blondes and Bill article profiles a scientist who fights cancer with the common cold virus. disqualify Di from Time 's Woman of the Year honor next week?) and Mighty Ducks offer entertaining sideshows (mascots, food courts, dancers) but the teams stink, and fans say that's all that matters. funeral, at the Promise Keepers rally, and on countless talk shows. Another essay argues that healing racism requires civility and cover story counters the popular wisdom that millionaires are the president (a persistent rumor), but he will force Republican candidates to heed supplies of clean water and food is a much more fundamental project than hashing out unenforceable international pollution laws. An article says the citing the First Amendment, refuses to endorse "content filters" for than major publishers, university presses put out the regional titles and modest books that the trade presses ignore. One criticism: University presses (he's a "career politician" posing as a "populist tribune"), the piece claims that the past five years have been the greatest in human history (due to Grove. (For example, a picture of a woman with tubes coming out of her head is captioned, "Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.") But it also uses unfunny gimmicks, particularly a running gag of dramatizing, The film is deemed a gesture more of sentiment than of artistry. Critics Holden calls the film a formulaic, "overly schematic exercise in cinematic partners). It "might have been more honestly called Hilly Buttocks I Have don't dismiss it as salacious gossip laud its revelations about gay New York [The book is] pugnacious and angry to the point of occasional bitterness and editorial assesses Japan's current recession, which has so far been mitigated by the country's great accrued wealth. Keys to ending the downturn: instilling consumer and investor confidence, increasing public spending on "modern infrastructure" (computers, telecoms), reducing government corruption, and had previously realized, including stomach ulcers, hardening of the arteries, and some forms of arthritis. (A sidebar recommends cooking with lots of spices, blacks still lag far behind in key job qualifications (test scores, grades, feminism," with sexually confident protagonists. But the heroines are actually insecure, weak, and define themselves in terms of men. parents. She will soon be smarter than her mom and dad but is having trouble in stilted speech patterns of her parents. Until recently, retarded adults were routinely sterilized, even though they usually give birth to developmentally reprehensible as Big Tobacco and even more powerful. The difference: The alcohol lobby can stress liquor's ancillary health benefits and proudly point to the "Know When to Say When" ad campaign. Like the tobacco companies, the South Park successfully balances crudity (singing, dancing stool which runs an inside feature, thinks the show has slacked off lately and knows when she may decide to end [a] friendship over some perceived slight." cover story exposes chicanery in the death business. Funeral homes lie to the bereaved and grossly overcharge for caskets and services. photo essay looks at life in prison. The pictures are "Lord of the Flies world," the children become brutal, heartless tolerate it in the hands of a man who is so willing to suppress news for Instead, it shows how politics is about choosing between imperfect, morally morality is "empirical" law that evolved biologically, not "transcendental" law created gene pools with certain moral traits, and these traits became the basis fear of crowds. He published just one piece in The New Yorker under his while the rest of the world went about its business as usual." Spectator article was spurred by an "open political agenda." (For other shorter articles than its rival. The effect: Sports news for Attention Deficit needs another two points to break the record for real. pitched and underlined in the most obvious way," says Variety 's an abortion clinic and considers breaking his own celibacy vows. The subject of religious ambivalence is called daring, the treatment of it smart and critics say, is the level of gore. Nine minutes into the first episode, a sniper blows a chunk of brains out of a detective's head. While this latest dour, crusading prosecutor, is called, alternatively, "credible" and "likable" says, are "as facile and pretty as a souvenir thimble"; the apparently hot new genre of pop elegy, she adds, is tacky. But John also wins praise for refusing Overcoming skepticism about the need for yet another Holocaust memorial, reviewers express mainly admiration. The museum distinguishes itself, they say, shown as they might have liked to be remembered, rather than as victims). The video interviews with Holocaust survivors: "A faceless mass resolves eloquently cause of racial justice." Its "great strength is its insistence that some of is that it sometimes finds those answers too predictably." superior special effects, critics deem it inferior to the last volcano movie, special effects as the main attraction, there would be no movie here at all," both implausible and boring. "Volcano is a movie without a villain or a mystery. The volcano has no quirks of personality, because it has no personality. Defeating it is a breeze, because it is dumb, mechanical, and like a peroxided Clueless wannabe straggling along to the party two ideological stripe, critics agree that the former labor secretary's massive ego (he thinks he has all the answers). The Weekly Standard 's supremely unhappy man, convinced as strongly as ever of his superiority to its processes, its practitioners, and to the man who gave him the coolest job he'll Stein's review in Slate. Random House plugs the book here.) life in the early Cold War years, when prominent citizens suddenly turned their admirably restrained, in prose that conveys strong feeling by Press). The feminist literary critic's claim that the Gulf War and that Gulf War troops may indeed have been exposed to chemical weapons belie probably the most exciting thing that can be said about it," says the New deliver the extravagant sets and staging they've come to expect from theatrical in an effort "to make a sensitive and tasteful show about a trashy subject," production from its pretensions. The play "is so wildly miscast and so haplessly misconceived that it is hard to figure out what its creators exactly classical composer. "As you watch the stage, your brain seems to get bigger, bodies. "It is unique among the major companies of its kind in looking utterly new book by him is worse than the last; he has become a bibliographer's definition of nostalgia. He remembers that one must be daring as an artist, but extraterrestrial life is declared pretentious. "People magazine's mail him to take dance lessons. Reviews praise the movie's depiction of the and drawn out. "Even when the catharsis we yearn for arrives, it's tinged with attorneys is deemed humorous but "pointless" (Rob Long, the Weekly way lawyers work, Long says; it's really about "what colorful New Yorkers talk station, and threatens to murder a goose. According to reviewers, Straight said to lack the camp irony of the original. The most "shamefully derivative "because you're dying to know how the black guy got in the cast." Other critics Hare, criticized in the past for his "preachy politics," is said to have media) and for its sensitivity "about such personal matters as loss, grief and million its opening weekend and receives rave reviews. "Empire Strikes are said to have matured into actual characters (as opposed to cartoon ones), that defies the laws of time and space. "The cries of 'Cheat!' that attended the later episodes of Twin Peaks are likely to be heard again," says deemed important as history but insignificant as art. Director John Singleton showed without ads, under the sponsorship of Ford. But the praise is tempered "Monster offers a crash course in getting a script through the hazards "Shock and petty moralizing are the mark of an outsider." The New York makes him so readable, but it doesn't give him a voice for brooding." the Declaration of Independence for his conflicted views on race nor dismisses biography "an honest and indispensable book that goes a long way toward restoring to Chambers an elementary human plausibility" (gosh, thanks). (Circle in the Square, New York City). Two weeks ago, art production itself: "The staging is infinitely inventive," says New though he were plugged into a power source the rest of the world had yet to ins when one of the cabbie's fantastic theories turns out to be true. talks to himself and mails long, delusional screeds to strangers is not usually outback town. "A wickedly funny examination of obsessive romantic behavior," gentle satire of the culturally backward outback (the radio station doesn't even have a CD player). Her idiosyncratic script and direction earn her work in human history." Critics expect extra attention for the show because of Republic urges holding on to the art until democracy is restored in and the events that he is writing about, but does not feel the need to disclose schematic, coldly cynical work that pretends to expose coldness and cynicism." achievements, but as a grievous example of its degeneration." exploring when there's nothing left to explore." Our obsession with buying expensive outdoor gear leads us to find excuses to use it, resulting in utterly pointless, dangerous journeys. The author, who dogsleds through the Arctic, decides that the greatest thrill lies in returning home with all his toes. and unstable and that we should stop cutting him slack. Though he successfully journalists detest his eagerness to mix business and editorial (ad guys and editors work together to plan profitable special sections), this is nothing new newspaper: one that has increasingly little to do with news." (For biological or chemical weapon attacks. By the time a toxic attack is discovered and appropriately dealt with, hundreds of thousands of people will be sick or dying. The government should improve its medical response rather than spend package celebrates the resurgence of baseball. Secrets to the game's success: story slams modern vacations: All the good spots are swamped with tourists. An excitement," while hype is "propaganda" created by PR firms and the media. Time 's trend story: infant massage. Babies, especially preemies, are more relaxed, have better digestion, and are generally happier when they are hospitals are rated in several specialties and in overall quality. The overall "oversees the care of people while they are in the hospital," discussing treatment options, following patients from department to department, and trying opening combat footage "may be looked back upon as one of the greatest delightful piece reviews a newly published collection of obituaries culled from century obits reminds us how unheroic modern times are, and insists that wit and thoughtful personality, and he fought for small government and low to go because he failed to reform the banking system or to stop Japan's financial descent, but it will take time to choose a new prime minister and article notes an unpublicized cost of the General Motors strike: It is delaying insurance, favoring predictive models that help manage risk. Sometimes, a company can foresee insurance will be unnecessary: While an earthquake in may survive impeachment proceedings, but he will be so distracted by the fight as to be unable to lead the country. The honorable thing to do is hand the reins to President Gore. An accompanying essay predicts that this scandal will cause several changes in the future, among them, a reduction in the power of the independent counsel and more restraint on the part of the press. (See school breakfast each morning got higher grades and were better behaved than issue on television. The lead essay claims that television has always been the drama, "more than twice" what it "had totaled in profits the previous year." world. He's also a crime buff, and whenever his official duties take him within impeachment, only "technical violations of criminal law that have no obvious connection to the president's official duties, which was precisely the vision [of impeachment] that the Framers [of the Constitution] rejected." The piece wittily assesses the literary value of the report, comparing it with classic offers unnecessarily colorful detail: "Instead of prosecuting a case, his narrative enacts a drama, and makes sympathetically banal what might have been autobiography emphasize his profound respect for the game of basketball, his with fashion models (both are releasing new books about models). A male timed for the bear market, Esquire publishes a doom and gloom issue. The cover essay compares our present economy to the bubble of the 1920s. It predicts a brutal worldwide depression, leading to totalitarianism and world around. All three mags excerpt the report at length (not edited for bawdy to prove his point, and at times ignored or discounted evidence that kids (be honest yet elliptical; whatever you do, don't talk about the cigar). section on impeachment, focusing on the ambiguous phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors." They conclude this means whatever Congress wants it to mean. story argues that pain is all in the mind and that we should treat, not dismiss, patients with unexplained chronic ailments. There needn't be a physical injury for the brain to send pain signals, and that pain is as real to the sufferer as it would be if she'd hit her thumb with a hammer. Doctors are seeking superstrong, nonaddictive painkillers and may have found them in substances extracted from certain snails and frogs. (Full disclosure: The to judge acceptable a president revealed to the world as a lout and liar and criminal. Congress must refuse the request and remove him." How excited is the pornography. Tweedy professors and porn starlets mingle at presentations such as "Cum Shots: History, Theory, and Research." (Isn't this also a chapter country resists Westernization in the cultural realm (literature, fashion, The newly wealthy don't give enough and don't give creatively. They are angle: Can it save endangered species? Among the endangered animals poached for story follows investors seeking opportunity amid the economic chaos in state, Brown now seeks to fix potholes. Minority mayoral candidates see piece says Democrats have a new strategy for winning back Republican congressional seats: Be Republicans. Some of the "Democratic" candidates currently supported by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are perpetuating racial bias at elite schools, but actually they are a good measure story praises the experiment of a public boarding school in New Jersey. The kids from the distractions they face at home. While not workable on a grand scale, the idea holds promise for areas where donations would be plentiful. marry to escape poverty. The men promise money to the brides' families, then juvenile, with no interests beyond his own children. about a man who's unaware that his whole life is televised, leaves "the viewer with the police to keep good kids off the streets and send irredeemable kids to food often contains pesticides from rainwater or dust and is no more nutritious steal your Social Security number to gain loans and charge cards. Bill collectors hunt you, and once your credit rating goes south it's nearly indifference to privacy. Virtually any diary or utterance to a friend can now unconscionable, but they are now commonplace, thanks to bad Supreme Court decisions. Sadly, only libertarians are battling this erosion of privacy. fourth installment of The Nation 's attack on the "National Entertainment State." The target this time is television. A foldout chart shows that seven Weather Channel.) Articles chronicle the phenomenal efforts by the seven firms, transfer to China, and appeasing the still brutal, still Communist dictatorship. A piece acknowledges that the Bush administration also allowed days are numbered. Supposed advantages at home (a trusted brand, political patience with its reluctance to accede to the West Bank redeployment agreement. The United States must now use its clout to arbitrate a solution once and for southern United States, but it has left behind its rustic past. Modern federal budget, and it greases the wheels of politics. Conceding tiny bits of Social Security proposal. Widely hailed as "courageous," the plan is just a politically motivated concession to privatization hawks. (For more on the plan, to rear three kids. She wouldn't change a thing about her rewarding life. Another follows a mother who works full time and lets dad and nanny care for the kids. She wouldn't change a thing about her rewarding life, either. Also, celebrities' outfits, all with a delightfully high level of bitchiness. tragedy." Both magazines print schematics of the crime scene-- Time 's is that he acted alone. The piece systematically rejects all the popular and make small talk. ("But enough about me. How much are you worth?") Manufacturers of stun weapons, sold domestically to police departments, have flow to women's genitals, improving sensation and lubrication. The Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved its use for women. of life aboard a nuclear sub and an examination of subs' changing roles (less defense, more espionage). The pullout cross section of a sub is fascinating. stations now use market research to determine playlists. (Sorry, solo early '90s "diagnosed" it in thousands of women: They hypnotized patients by the thousand, persuaded them that they had been sexually abused by family members, and then induced them to discover other personalities. Lawsuits by movie industry. Chief complaints: Studios prefer cheap irony to real emotion, "traded up; he used to live in an unimproved shack in the wilderness." point because it incorporates some Republican ideas on privatization. trademark dialogue helps overcome the banal premise of his screenplay: A hate each other are stranded in the wilderness with a mean bear. The bear's Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of former Times reporter's historical epic, completed just before his "This book is to 'true crime' stories what War and Peace is to most war complaint: too many digressions, inflating the book to 800-plus pages. (See the Slaughterhouse Five author has called his "last" work. Critics call wins accolades for introspective lyrics about mortality and is judged his best work in decades, "attesting to the creative renaissance of an artist still bent drama's live broadcast as a welcome throwback to 1950s television. "A walk on a episode, making "Ambush" "something the show has never been before and isn't Handy. Not all skepticism has been banished, however. "This street has the the old married couple shtick so well they should open a joint bank account" "How can filmmakers devote a year, even two years of their lives to such (First Look Pictures). Raves for this adaptation of features three intellectuals holding forth on the decay of high culture ("like [and] has a measured elegance," says Holden. Praise also goes to comedian Mike strange pauses through which we grasp the full weight of his irony, derision, and sheer incredulity at the peculiarity of the human phenomena that surround Courage to Stand Alone: Letters From Prison and Other Writings written, they are an extraordinary and moving record of a courageous, compassionate and obstinate mind dedicated to democratic principles and the Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work parents put in ever longer hours at work not because they must but because they tends to disguise how truly subversive and depressing her message is." Slate's without an iota of anarchy or inspiration," says The New Yorker 's John truly one of the best of all possible musicals, but only if you close your the newspaper business from Daily Planet panels in an old monument "misrepresents and diminishes the man" because it lacks the accessible and gentle as your grandmother's garden." International Monetary Fund's bailout. The recession it's supposed to prevent might never have happened, and rescuing financiers who make mistakes encourages them to make the same errors again. A 16-page package on tourism notes that it watermarking. Subtle number patterns within digitized pictures and music let their owners bust bootleggers. Also, an article praises the ongoing Lunar million). The directive: Find water in the moon's polar craters. policy. For instance, Turner's donation might fund projects to fight world argues that Al Gore secretly hates politics. His family bred him to be president, and he does his duty as a good son, but he'd rather be doing almost behind his wooden exterior. An essay wishes the New York Times would ditch its new sections. "Dining In," "Fine Arts," etc., help advertisers more than readers, and make the paper unwieldy to read. Also, Vanity Fair story deplores local television news shows' obsession with titillation and ratings. Local news panders to viewers by showing crime and disaster footage, ignoring education and politics. Responsible conclusion: Local news should try candidates, and partisanship annoys voters. Reed says he models himself after only six months ago, puts him on the cover again. The package offers thumbnail unfairly remembered for sleeping with his kids' baby sitter. customer perks (like discounts and air miles), advertising geared toward as long as you exercise; interviews with a chef and a nutritionist (both 's "Dialogue" on fat.) A story explains the publishing industry's new survival techniques. Huge advances are history, and better technology lets publishers ship books chronicles his own long bout with depression, a period when he couldn't eat and (more available software) outweigh its technological disadvantages. This annoys classical economists because it denies the principle that the best product always wins. A story recounts the strange rivalry between top figure world capitals, "cheats" by coercing software pirates into signing deals with the company, and "lies" about his business intentions, the magazine says. One another alleges that the company intends to compile dossiers on all PC users, states out of the nation's most populous states to restore representative gags and formulaic plot, critics end up smiling at this slapstick courtroom (Epic). The megastar of '80s pop has hit bottom, critics say. Sales of his new beast, promoting funding for the arts and physical education. "There he goes soap General Hospital spins off, to general approval. The new show is set in the same hospital, but with younger, hipper characters, "as if the cast "should have no trouble creating a solid place for itself among the young and everywhere) and the right (for willfully seeing racism nowhere). "An admirable, the ethical ideal he cherishes and the moral muddle of the actual world." nearly as mad as previous biographers have alleged. Praise goes to Lee's poorly drawn. Glimpses into his character "do not add up to a full motivation varying embarrassment and crying and hugging and saying they loved each other." "Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life" (Museum of Modern Art). This "The exhibition almost never deviates from the Modern's pantheon of anointed hardly allow her new subject the smallest uncontaminated virtue." different shows at the Met and drawings by the artist and his disciples at the in an age when everything has already been done? The answer: You recycle." But most reluctant to admit that the finest art can flourish in harmony with the ruling classes and without the tensions that beset us now, so that, where necessary, we try to detect such tensions in the art of the past." (Check out its flashiest commercials during the Super Bowl, and critics predicted that these would hold more appeal than the game itself. On the other hand, the death reporters to question whether organizers had finally gone overboard. But reviews of all the halftime spectacle were favorable. "An eventful game combined with a cavalcade of crafty commercials kept Super Bowl XXXI lively and (making its first Super Bowl telecast) proved that it could cover the big game with as much "zest and panache" as the bigger networks. Other critics' picks: bullied into being entertained by a boor repeatedly accosting you to ask, unusually mixed for a book by the popular Sacks. The Island of the dismissed as half botanical treatise, half travelogue. "Apart from observing subtle tones, Dr. Sacks can do little more than give us an inherently interesting, it is difficult for most readers to get as worked up Because he shows "how patients who are truly isolated and insulated by a disease can retain their humanity, their dignity." (Random House excerpts the book at its site.) "fearlessly exposes a man like a surgeon probing his own wounds." New rare mark of theatrical greatness: it is rooted in specific, even earthy Shots of cute animals are deemed an inadequate substitute for the cutting wit curious antiquarian feeling, in fact, to the whole leering enterprise," says murder in its stride, as though they were merely obligatory literary devices." One shortcoming: The plot "veers into melodrama that seems a bit outsize for criminals, possibly for personal profit; the destruction of the Argentine economy; the laying of the cornerstone for the "Dirty Wars" of the 1970s and represented the worst of this tradition, the worst of our century," writes with sex or personality or ideology. It has to do with the bottomless demands many to throw up their hands in the face of the global economic juggernaut and become politically passive in the face of its economic imperatives." cover editorial urges the United States to lift its argues that the region's authoritarian regimes should be replaced by democratic throw acid in women's faces, disfiguring and blinding them. (Estimate: There story uses the trial of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy to slam the proliferation of picayune ethics laws. Special prosecutors wield unchecked ridicules the company's new diversity training. Silly games and animated fables story laments the disappearance of abortionists. Young doctors don't learn the of clarity." He also had "the best date of my life!": She did all the inmates, for the entertainment of the public, sustain horrible injuries in the ring, while a bull is goaded to charge them. The last inmate to stand up wins.) Despite the pain and humiliation, the inmates love the rodeo and feel psychic. Callers, overwhelmingly poor people of color, think their lives are psychic) oblige. Other callers just want someone to talk to. (Cost: more than of a curse, as it distracted her from her work. (See Brent Staples' review in chimps may have better language aptitude than previously thought. Chimps can use word order to determine meaning ("bring the person to the water," not "bring the water to the person"). Chimp neologism for a stale pastry: "cookie cover story worries that our military needs retraining. Budget cuts and boring, noncombat peacekeeping missions are atrophying our troops' office. The secretary of state uses immense charm, straight talk, and fluent about their experiences (one was raped, another used abortions as birth accident, and her parents' real crime was covering it up. The piece praises with corpses, since it's holy to be buried in it.) Scientists propose using substitute for the home and family that he never really had. (His mother killed three Supreme Court seats to fill, enough to shift the court's balance against conservative chestnut: An article asserts that the death penalty is used too interests, much of it while ruling favorably on a landmark casino case"). seven months of paid maternity leave, social harmony). Changes: The state is nudging the jobless to work and shifting from income taxes to "green" taxes on argues that Al Gore secretly hates politics. His family bred him to be president, and he does his duty as a good son, but he'd rather be doing almost Times would ditch its new sections. "Dining In," "Fine Arts," etc., help cover editorial welcomes the impeachment or resignation of presidency is powerless without moral authority. "This newspaper has no wish civilization," the primal father must be destroyed for society to survive journalist warns that her country's economic collapse may destroy its free press. Banks, which own or control much of the media, are too broke to support hard in his youth, but getting married and giving up alcohol focused him. He's toned down his social conservatism, and his hugely likable personality makes him a great campaigner. (He's not much of a policy wonk, however.) Critics say his greatest asset is his name, but Bush seems to have emerged from his governors of "small, politically marginal" states; and eschew right and left basically bullish on the stock market. Time tells investors not to panic about the bad world news: "One of the worst things [investors] could do is let rising volatility and uncertainty drive them out of stock investments." Time 's guide to the though generally optimistic about the economy, does offer bear market advice, just in case. What to do when the bear growls? Buy markets and got slammed, try real estate investment funds, and seek stability into enemy territory and spy, or perhaps release lethal toxins. Soon to come: simple remedy for cellulite: Doctors now treat skin with a special massage machine that kneads away that "cottage cheese" look without surgery. nun, certain scenes and dialogue (God works in mysterious ways jokes, for originality, so why would it bother to steal from you? dad and more conservative. His central theme: limiting government. While a have stood together, instead of "taking an independent turn on the world stage designed. Corporate sites are too specialized (geared only toward investors or customers), and their jazzy graphics take too long to download. divided by a disagreement over the correct size for government. The Christian domestic initiatives to halt the right's drift into localism and story says the worship of newness is the key to the Silicon Valley economy. New modeling) instantly worthless. Entrepreneurs move on to the next big thing before the last big thing is even established. (Full disclosure: thriller. The cynical authors analyzed best sellers, parroted them, and hired and selfless teamwork allow it to beat teams with more raw talent. The players remain committed to their academic work. (No kidding.) intricate security measures (he maintains surgically altered body doubles). Time says Dolly the cloned sheep could be a fake. There is a blond wood are showing up everywhere, even in the furniture of Men in no workplace hardships (save for not getting flowers on Secretaries' Day) and thereby explaining their close relationship and the need for secrecy. Tom Commandments and to prevent a school district from allowing prayer before class old boy who believes that states are allowed to establish religion. According Nations fails to enforce inspections here, when it has a clear mission and broad powers, its authority will be challenged in the future. Another editorial that the pill is unsafe (it isn't), that it would quicken the spread of AIDS (it hasn't in other countries), and that Japan's falling birthrate must be reversed (this doesn't justify an infringement on rights). What's the doctors. A story says cable television and the Internet haven't yet killed the major networks. Networks still charge far higher ad rates than cable companies. Keys to future network prosperity: They should produce their own shows, and publicity stunt. Draining the lake would reveal the beautiful canyon underneath, but destroy the ecosystem that thrives there now. Also, toxins that have collected at the bottom of the lake would be exposed. A story says a new (such as Harlequin's "Love Inspired" series) feature chaste relationships and cede control of the production. Now, he happily collaborates with success of Southwest Airlines: quick flight turnarounds (they ready a plane in the feminist scholar is now studying young boys: "What we are discovering is how vulnerable boys are. How, under the surface, behind that psychic shield, is a tender creature who's hiding his humanity." Also, a stunning overhead photo Time warns that recession might be imminent, caused by high consumer debt trouble for the SAT. With affirmative action dying, public SAT requirement, since minorities score lower on average. Also, generational the single issue of firing the local basketball coach." (For a York City cop describes his life on the beat. Among the cop's observations: An questions, then you hold his hands to fingerprint him), most police work consists of "cheesy collars" for disorderly conduct and public urination, slum residents adore cops. The cop weaves in a story about a hit man who snitches on amnesty rarely tell the whole truth (they seldom admit to torture) and rarely apologize to their victims. "When you trade amnesty for truth, murderers get some opera buffs nervous because they think he's castrated. He's not. editorial chides the members of the House of Representatives for banning recycles a riff from his recent book tour: Instead of reading The Nation Standard line that churches are the key to saving poor neighborhoods. Churches offer day care, food banks, and irreplaceable volunteer services, and pauper/ Walked the lonely roads of life/ In many ways so different/ And yet so time like candles in the night." This is not a joke. which are critical to a stable capitalist future, will require unwavering Let your kids get sick. Children who get illnesses like malaria, diabetes, and asthma and aren't treated for them have more resistance to disease in later The "Maharaja Mac" is made from mutton, and customers can top it with sauces doesn't seem to know much about the subject, or to want to talk about it. He's race. Other candidates protest his free air time. Also, wary praise for the hush money. Also, a story rejects the conventional wisdom that overpopulation is imminent. It argues that birth rates are falling across the world, and military will strike first. (Quote from senior Pentagon official: "We're just waiting for him to do something stupid so we can whack him.") Time also throwing the embers into a river." Time 's explanation of the science of discharged for adultery. She claims the Air Force treated her unfairly and that her commanding officers gave her no guidance. The Air Force says the case was foreign aid and investment will improve human rights. was investigated after patients died suspiciously. Later, he was convicted of poisoning five paramedic colleagues with arsenic. Even so, he landed subsequent jobs as a paramedic and a medical resident (hospitals didn't thoroughly investigate his background). In every case, colleagues and patients mysteriously fell ill or died. He's currently in jail for a minor fraud charge. An essay examines Napoleon's mixed legacy: Alone of history's great leaders, to civil rights: "Homosexuality should not be socially validated, for reasons rooted in custom and tradition, natural law and teleology, morality and cover story rails against the growing commercialization of public naughty actions (lying, subjugating his citizens, developing weapons of mass involvement in film production has been wildly exaggerated, and his affair with marvels at New Yorkers' conspicuous consumption, which far outdoes the '80s. Drudge depicts him as a charming, naive young man who made a terrible mistake system or to stop Japan's financial descent, but it will take time to choose a new prime minister and even more time for the new leader to push through now eschew insurance, favoring predictive models that help manage risk. Sometimes, a company can foresee insurance will be unnecessary: While an risks and rewards of every decision. He judges decisions on their logic at the media baron, but he manages to be simultaneously tough and charming. His taste, Time 's cover package hypes online shopping, which is now efficient and Time story says transsexuals are gaining political clout. They they wish gays and lesbians would stop excluding them from homosexual rights Scientists were once ostracized for holding religious beliefs but can now worship without embarrassment. Religious people are finding evidence of God in recent scientific discoveries. (Outcomes determined by "chaos" and the randomness of radioactive decay are actually specific results chosen by God.) White House. Publishers say her book career is more promising than her cosmology cover story wonders if there are other universes. (Conclusion: maybe.) Through diagrams and interviews with physicists, the story describes how separate universes could break away from ours (a bit like a soap Companies offer dark, quiet nap rooms, reasoning that midday naps help workers must be sacrificed in order for the Messiah to return. (Red cows are plentiful people drink, take drugs, and use machinery and electricity. The recent case the scenes. Nancy shaped the Cabinet, pushing her husband toward moderate pure cinema" and the climax an "almost unbearably thrilling firefight and players and innocent bystanders alike. Even witnesses only tangentially longer poses a threat to the world because it has become a localized crisis. In racial ax to grind and so can act as the "builders of bridges" between blacks stars. Guaranteed that the clips will never air outside Japan, several major politics. Independently wealthy candidates win office with no political background or platform. Career politicians, with solid ideas, can't raise books, which ignore public policy, are shameless attempts by candidates to cover story, a scientist seeks the gene that causes an abnormal number of cleft remote areas face ethical unease: Locals, valued for their genetic isolation, often don't understand what the research is for and rarely benefit from it. suffer. Two accompanying articles argue that the boom will continue (because electronic cash, your medical history, and "keys" to your home and office. cover story is skeptical about charter schools. The schools can succeed when dedicated teachers push innovative curricula, but in many charter schools, kids attend only four hours a day and learn from computers instead of sewers they require. City centers end up paying the difference. This lowers own power to the people: Now even socialists want to preserve the monarchy. old words: "terrorist," "United Kingdom," "culture" and, most of all, "nation." story argues that we should build more highways. Public transportation has cars. Our roads are congested not because we lack alternative transportation, but because we lack superhighways and connecting roads. (See installment in the Batman series as nonsensical kitsch, a "wild, campy action flick stands out as the best, by far, in a bad summer crop. Critics emotionally involving storytelling in a way that has all but vanished from the bankrolls other blockbusters, or will his productions simply serve as a vehicle glowing reviews just the same. The story of the travails of a brainy single about modern urban life, which is said to be reminiscent of Bellow, "a vision book. (One chapter title: "How to Suffer Successfully.") The book, they say, is irresponsible. Still, critics say the daughter has inherited the father's "gift artifact of personal and social upheaval." Reviewers also approve of the Pastoral, saying the book caricatures 1960s radicalism. "It does not tell complex attitudes and allegiances of a time and a place." Art --"Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life" (Museum of Modern turn as an unhygienic redneck mechanic. (See the official site.) ease, uncomfortable, straining for effect." (Download a trailer here.) receipts--$30.4 million in two weeks. Some critics praise the film for magnificent building will overshadow the art it houses, which will be mostly controversial to the canonical. Having endlessly debated the staying power of A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of performances in The Scarlet Letter and Striptease as stolid and humorless, most critics say that this movie revives her career. Cast as an (Dimension Films). Reviewers are divided over whether this sprinkling the film with Catholic imagery and allusions to classic films. He style to the genre's oldest tricks." Others say that his efforts to shock dissents, calling Already Dead "simultaneously pretentious, sentimental, management" and industrial efficiency is dismissed as fairly conventional, but Mac's new songs, their '70s sound notwithstanding. "For these expert purveyors It "has heart and charm and not just the usual gag reflex," says the generally condemned for mindlessness and tastelessness. Especially reviled is government should have advised the public earlier about risks (as it did with AIDS) and should have spent more on research (a cure is still nowhere in nuclear testing to thyroid cancer because it conflicts with a study done by the says it "belongs to all mankind," but mineral exploration companies think than it seemed (particularly on funding for the arts) and have cut ties to is a flaw in the argument that a generous welfare state generates good pop the fed head with the economy's success and trust his judgment on everything. story claims that "the chances of a nuclear exchange have arguably never been each other, and the United States, despite signing the START I commitment to likes starting political battles. (Full disclosure: Time says it's a believable portrait of the president, one that includes meditation, and love are better than surgery for curing heart ailments. documents were, but they may have been classified intelligence briefings. Senate grilling. For the complete diary, click here. disappointing. Some systems offer slightly cheaper rates, but the sound quality him crazy (despite little evidence of mental illness) and wouldn't let him abolitionist John Brown, who was tried and hanged after he resisted efforts to Sun's business, but he may be slightly more obsessed with destroying Gates than article embraces much maligned, gas guzzling sport utility vehicles. Problem: there is a religious base to our freedom; and entrepreneurship, invention, and work create far greater wealth than any bureaucracy in history." broad principles (fiscal responsibility, free trade, etc.) and political nearly as much as they did during the Gulf War: We'll have to go it alone.) Another article says the United States should not limit itself to a few days of bombing (the current battle plan): Only a long, insistent air campaign will too weakened by corruption and too bullied by management and the feds to be the gays. Reason: They consider homosexuality an active choice. If they believed and private detectives labor to contain bimbo eruptions. It runs several new the media should stop reporting on the scandal because the public has spoken in overzealous, and nerdy. In junior high, "his hobby was polishing shoes," says rundown of how the scandal played across the world includes these words from a essay makes the case for human cloning. The risk is small, affection, and respect, argues a piece. She's not loyal for cold political sweet, good, and truly religious. (For more on the story, see what the international papers are saying.) obsessed with him and sent him gifts; he tried to help her while gradually pushing her away. The problem with the story: It's not credible, given parochial worries into matters of state," dealing with picayune issues rather horrible values to the rest of the world. They're both wrong, says the who wrote a piece in last week's New York Times Magazine about the need reduce inequality, strengthen public education, etc. will lead to political confusion. The enormous, powerful monetary union will be story says microwaves are being used to clear minefields. Portable microwave units heat the moist earth that surrounds mines but leave the mines themselves unheated. Infrared cameras then use the temperature difference to find the higher cigarette taxes don't convince the poor to stop smoking, studies have story uncovers a weird new corporate strategy: Instead of prosecuting kids who hack their computers, businesses now hire them as security consultants. cops," who work in human resources departments, help companies draft and enforce rules on office romance. Even consensual sex between workers of different levels can be considered sexual harassment. Just one lawsuit can willing to compromise. Peace will come when both sides forge "a genuine security partnership against common enemies and a political partnership to revolution" and "the Sixties," respectively. The right cannot understand that corporatism. Since these movements occurred within the same generation, they people work in a corporate world by day but play in a "moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties." The author urges both sides to admit defeat sexuality to the ability to sustain an erection. Time also asks several have witnessed the formation of a planetary system much like our own. Planets are a prerequisite for extraterrestrial life, and one astronomer now guesses and name recognition, but may be too airy and intellectual; dark horse orchestrate a huge split from the Republican Party. Fed up with Republican effect: No jobs were lost, and the poverty rate remained unchanged. argues that we must levy sanctions on China to improve its human rights. appease their religious constituents while sticking to the tax policies was politically advantageous; he should have denied funding because cover editorial questions the wisdom of the United States' they may spur further terrorism in revenge. Seeking justice in the courts would step: urine sampling toilets that check your liver's health and test for longer effective: "Since when do we kick presidents out of office because they any chlorine taste evaporates if the water is left to settle for a few hours. his victory, but international monitors concluded that a rigged election was fascinating story explains the life cycle and social customs of honeybees. Hives feature the mathematical genius of honeycombs and precise divisions of labor. Some workers guard the hive entrance, others collect nectar, others dry nectar by beating their wings, others groom the queen, others manufacture an "Average number of public school students expelled each school day last year dispatch from the porn industry's annual awards ceremony entertainingly and comically explains the modern porn ethos: bravado, shamelessness, and (believe it or not) increasing degradation of and violence toward women. The nontraditional abbreviations, excessive and occasionally cloying tag on both covers, lumping together last week's Flytrap revelations and essay urging the president not to resign but to "repair the breach" between character flaws make Gore look great). The similar missile strike stories include maps of the attack sites and diagrams of the Tomahawk missile but and bemoan his inability to carry through promises about health care, race, could impeach them, too?). They should be ashamed of having lied for a coverage. The lead story recounts the tense White House countdown to testimony, dissects the legal equivocations in The Speech. Time 's exclusive: While explicit questions about sex before the grand jury and "did not acknowledge He's jammed between a rock (disloyalty) and a hard place (loyalty). And don't inflation. Suggestion for improvement: unregulated competition, which would encryption software on the Internet. Federal agencies want the right to read encrypted messages, much as they currently have the right to tap phones. A free market for encryption is a better idea: It would produce more reliable encryption software and protect electronic commerce from criminals. travel as a way of life. Sixteen features look at the nomadic ennui of the frequent business traveler. An article claims airports are our new cities: The fictional air terror must "inoculate a troubled mind with a homeopathic dose of angst." Also, a writer tries to break his personal record of West cover: A smiling Bill Gates proclaims, "Why We Will Win." Inside: A story scare: your malicious thyroid. Thyroid problems can be hard to detect and can (some learning nuclear physics) currently go unwatched once they enter the advice: Claim lots of dependents and don't get married (tax laws favor speculates that rogue nations are now employing its scientists. Chilling mourns the end of loyalty. Presidential aides used to fall on their swords for their boss; now they stab him in the back. Why? We are a "Free Agent Nation": Those hoping for months of tawdry sex revelations will be disappointed. investigation. They just need a few Democratic votes so they can claim coverage. The lead story recounts the tense White House countdown to testimony, dissects the legal equivocations in The Speech. Time 's exclusive: While explicit questions about sex before the grand jury and "did not acknowledge He's jammed between a rock (disloyalty) and a hard place (loyalty). And don't "Holy Grail" of genetics could hasten cures for cancer, hepatitis, and even cheaply than the feds, but critics worry that he could raise the cost of eight different screenwriters. Each auxiliary writer is a specialist: One adds humor, another adds plot structure, a third adds dialogue that will appeal to women or minorities. The voice of the original writers goes missing in action. means the mags will be outdated by the time they hit newsstands.) the United States can capture him, and even if we do, it's not clear that he practicality, whereas Fuller exudes buzz. (Here is Time 's shorter version.) older brother was rarely discussed, but "pretenders" claiming to be the missing rarely bothered to listen to his patient's problems. Instead, he liked to piece says the scandal has paralyzed daily life in the administration: Nothing initiatives are merely cosmetic. Staffers, meanwhile, are trying to pretend cover editorial on terrorism says Middle East radicals other policymakers. She seems to have "less leverage at the White House than benefits shareholders. Financiers may be "mistaking size for profitability." seems horribly overvalued, and a crash would be devastating now that so many views in order to win over the Religious Right (a group that hounded him in deduct health insurance costs, file taxes several times a year, and are routinely audited. They're angry and they're not going to take it anymore. so we've rallied around him as we would a family member in crisis. profiles an Internal Revenue Service tax collector whose nightmare of a job mostly involves shutting down businesses in arrears. He has been attacked with it early in the day: 'You don't want to interrupt someone's lunch, make a big beat out more flamboyant entrants. His design so subtly integrates its Spank": A quick slap to a child's wrist or buttocks is effective and not emotionally damaging, as long as it is accompanied by a clear lesson and hand out business cards with gang names printed on them and frequently sport Time begins its millennium project with a special issue on "I think the evidence there is also compelling that her story isn't true. I government must do more for education and training. Gubernatorial candidate history (he puts brash young designers in charge of hallowed clothing lines). staff), but she's expected to win the Democratic nomination. No one questions essay claims that baby boomers are ushering in a new buzzword in the funeral realistic treatment on film, World War II is only now being portrayed as "speak up, not just to the nurses and doctors but to our employers as cover story says pro sports are in trouble. Overpaid athletes, explaining how they create their front page each day. The Times chooses its lead story with exacting care and great pride, seeking input from every how the Times became a more readable paper, see "The business. Tickets bring in just half of the profits: Concession stands are the Theaters salt their food heavily so you'll want to buy more soft drinks. Democratic nomination. Despite his centrist stance, Gore has managed to enlist nomination. Why no challenge coming from Gore's left? Democrats have decided but now the party has lost all touch. Still focusing on government spending and the budget deficit, the party is ignoring the newer concerns of the "angry parental attention and that limiting population will stop environmental decay. In fact, says the review, only children are no better off than children in big developing nations start having fewer children as technology and industry and the Constitution. Our nitpicking exegesis of ancient texts limits our (Touchstone Pictures). This action flick, about a rogues' gallery ridiculous plot twists, too many explosions, too much ripping off of its role that suits his rocklike demeanor perfectly and makes virtues of his peculiar fetish, has lots of gorgeous naked bodies but little plot or character development. A "cold, contemptuous, and interminable Oedipal saga," says the beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks" redeem dense, obsessed, prolific and full of popular and arcane references as a investigation. Wanting still to win the case, he rehashes arcane and forgotten anecdotes and slammed for shoddy thinking. The part about her sexual personal and political so gently we're barely aware of the difference," says especially her idea that girls should retreat to the wilderness with older big time. Rescued from obscurity three months ago by a rave from the New to languish in obscurity because of its "annoying cuteness." someone who has published so much, some of it admirable, have written such a bad book? A book whose badness leaves the reader first with a sense of reluctance (must I really go on?), then anger (how can he let himself get away with this?), then embarrassment (it is unseemly to cast my eyes on such a Art --"Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life" (Museum of Modern coupled with an active military presence in the Far East, will keep China from endangering the world. A story recommends that baseball teams share television revenue. Currently, teams in small television markets can't afford to pay great dread of germs. New, incredibly popular "antibacterial" products rely on fear to boost sales, yet are largely ineffective in fighting bacteria. The piece also notes that bacteria aren't so dangerous that we need to be constantly should be able to flee bad schools just like the rich, and the competition will pregnancies. Thanks to donated eggs and sperm, women in their 60s now can give birth. Older mothers face high health risks and, as they become elderly, might not be up to the job of parenting. It's just plain unnatural, some doctors say. magazines. Time 's cover package considers "what makes a good school." classes, and higher standards for teachers. Time also tracks the growing popularity of school vouchers among blacks in inner cities. Republicans hope to attract black voters with the issue. disabilities. Early diagnosis, new teaching techniques (emphasis on the arts, schoolchildren may have a neurological deficit, ranging from mild to severe, a gesture. We have made it clear that we respect human rights." A Time investigation finds that nursing homes neglect patients: Seniors have died of thirst and starvation; some facilities are crawling with career paths include: animator, crisis specialist, corrections officer, grief therapist, and cosmetic dentist. A companion piece notes that a growing number of companies pay full single smart card could replace a fistful of credit and debit cards, serve as a driver's license, store a person's medical history, feed a parking meter, and essay lambastes the talk show Politically Incorrect for its inane discourse: "The pace is plodding, as host and guests struggle to figure out committed suicide, and that the conspiracy theories hold no water. The real an editorial condemns Republicans for avoiding the accelerating fight against racial preferences: "It won't do for Republicans to delay the prize of colorblindness, even for a moment, by silently ignoring the battle while it's Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper," and "Elements Most Often Found in Novels, average person takes an hour and a half to burn.") A book review calls "is the shrewdest observer of his neighbors and the purest and most native advantages: great weather, varied scenery, and nonunion labor. Also, an article notes scientists' inability to discover a magnet with only one pole. Physicists believe the Big Bang should have formed "monopoles," but they can't find or and fills prisons with older inmates unlikely to commit serious crimes again; "Just as our women dominate you now, so will our men dominate you in four, five, six years, and so too will we dominate you in world economics.") to his office. An article offers an evolutionary explanation for recent cases murdered their newborn). Ancestral mothers couldn't waste scarce resources on babies born at the wrong time, so they killed the kid and waited for a less as a politician, does lousy guest interviews and mangles the chitchat with her harrowing Mir expedition. When the supply ship crashed into the space station, universe. Among its discoveries: planets forming, lots of black holes, and galaxies born "when the universe was in its infancy." Many spectacular pictures problem for surgery patients, called "awareness": Patients wake up from anesthesia during the operation. Able to feel pain and hear doctors (who sometimes ridicule the "unconscious" patient), "awareness" victims remain unable to speak or move for frequently about his education and military service, and he has a yen for that the vice president could use the phrase 'came out' and assume that his listeners knew exactly what he meant is an indication of how the private language of the homosexual subculture has become the common language of the failure of New York liberalism. New York leftists' lone remaining cause is income inequality, but they don't know what to do about it. (For a glaciological whodunit. "What will surprise everyone is the dry iciness, the the disconcerting effect of a neon sign flashing, 'We're doing television that clothed, teens are prevented from committing suicide, and a kidnapped baby with series: "A Bunch of Klutzes Who Should Mind Their Own Business." (Click (government lawyers hunt down villains and prosecute them), it is said to be about a cable sportscaster to be a conventional comedy about black urban professionals. Critics agree that it's a conventional comedy. "The show has all emotional nuance. Reviewers focus on Garment's past as a clarinetist, on with voice boxes and prosthetic hands who move to New York and become impossible task of making these dogs 'human' and just misses the mark," says led to the sale of the foreign rights and to a major movie deal. equivalent of comfort food, something for those who like their nostalgia less than a year after the Museum of Modern Art's grand exhibition of his portraiture. Most critics are happy to reconsider the maligned "blue period," production that studios don't often make anymore, now that movies about tornadoes and invasions by aliens have become too expensive to be taken the movie's preposterous premise: An introspective hit man returns home for a freshness of the original idea: The film "isn't nearly as clever as it thinks stint at a nudist camp) and others (he titles a piece about people who picked him up hitchhiking "Planet of the Apes"). The book is a "wedding of funny and astonishing book, a masterpiece," says the New York Times Book Review 's Alter. "It is a notable example of what happens when writers discount the sordidness, and racism (one of the poems is titled "King Bolo and his Big Black attacks Ricks' annotations to the poems as "adventurism." The notes, says "ridiculous." Episodes reviewed so far are dismissed as failed attempts at plays a newly unemployed publicist forced to move in with her former secretary. first wave did. "This is an intelligent and absorbing romantic drama, heat, and flings herself about as if playing racquetball with her own that my objections to 'The Kiss' have absolutely nothing to do with its being a recently found favor with readers.' My objections are based entirely and exclusively in the simple, inescapable reality that 'The Kiss' is an argues that only children receive closer parental attention and that limiting population will stop environmental decay. In fact, says the review, only children are no better off than children in big families, and overpopulation worshipful of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Our nitpicking exegesis of ancient texts limits our ability to innovate. Congress. Conclusion: Babbitt is a fine, upstanding man caught in an well crush the record for most homers in a season. His secret: a smooth, concealed weapons lower crime rates. While scholars debate the accuracy of the study's statistics, gun rights activists embrace its message that an armed combination of video games, insecurity, and pure, inexplicable evil. hair, wears Gap clothes, and flies coach. Inappropriately chipper line: "She's also a morning star still in mourning for her husband." story explains the Supreme Court's new rulings on sexual harassment. a defense unless they've already instituted a "strong system of dealing with slimy history of harassing subordinates. His company decided it made better researchers are pursuing the wrong kind of vaccine. Most researchers hope to targets (us) are too conscious that they are being spun. The real PR triumph of this century is direct mail: Obviousness and repetition get better results than conservative calls him) who avoids taking firm stands. And he's not well fragile and its leadership infirm. The summit is a good way to "talk over" differences, but it will produce little of import. An accompanying essay argues becoming involved." China continues to focus on economic rather than military such a move. Both leads note that although a rate cut is a mere possibility, crisis. The LAT says that the Fed chairman's remarks are the first addressing the possibility of lower interest rates. this fight," they do criticize the two nations for their hostility towards each resources away from funding international terrorism, it would also hamper their television producer, who was arrested, locked in a windowless cell for three after signing confessions that she broke laws regarding press accreditation and piece highlights the massive increase in popularity and prestige baseball has the Hall of Fame and the city by its unflattering portrayal in the movie The first day in months you'll have time to read the papers and they barely fiscal nosedive and that further political squabbling could lead to social that the job is becoming the primary focus of many people's lives. platform he rolled out last week: printing billions of rubles now to pay for years of soldiers', civil servants' and defense workers' back wages and in just a few months, strictly controlling the currency, collecting taxes and cutting government spending. The program has quickly been criticized, says the hyperinflation may have already arrived, with the ruble now three times cheaper although in the nineteenth paragraph of its story, well after the jump, it enter the Kremlin on a white horse." Similarly, the LAT story emphasizes landscaping, flower arranging, and maintenance and custodial work. Mirage has baseball fan who's taking a glove to games these days in hopes of catching your tax advisor along too. If you catch the ball and sell it, well obviously, suppose out of a love for baseball, you decide to just give the ball to the new home run king. Well, the Times explains, then the federal gift which time it would be a taxable part of the fan's estate. The only way to avoid tax entirely is to give the ball to charity, which could then sell the ball at a profit without paying any tax. (And, Today's Papers notes, if the fan could arrange to have the charity then sell the ball to the new home king, he would accomplish his original philanthropic goal while beating the tax man.) embassy's back gate that killed several guards before the bomb went off. underground garage, where it probably would have caused even more death. The LAT interviews another witness to the attack who says the man who jumped from the bomb truck was dressed in the uniform of an embassy security guard. This observation that a man jumped indicates a point not made expressly in any of the coverage, namely that this was not a suicide bomber. says, are seemingly worried that their allies might use the occasion to sift The papers say that rescuers continue on the trail of faint noises in the alive inside the rubble. And the Post notes a special problem in dental records because few can afford to go to the dentist. says they currently suspect plastic explosives, perhaps from a lot sold to her heart and tears glistening on cheeks cut by flying glass." Times says experts think these are the youngest murder defendants in bicycle home and watched cartoons, and the younger boy went home to play with his puppy. One glaring lacuna in the coverage: the accused killers' parents. They are hardly mentioned although they have obviously done a horrible job. oath, and at least tacitly encouraged others to give false testimony about it. sparing the nation the immense distraction of impeachment proceedings. permanent international court for prosecuting crimes against humanity. And the laws designed to protect other children from the fates met by their own. mental hospital of dangerous repeat sex offenders after the expiration of their prison terms)-- are but the tip of a legislative iceberg that, the Post considerably broadened the constituency for victims' rights. admission in a Content magazine interview that he spoke privately to the possible wrongdoing here while at the same time exculpating its own prior the LAT does not, the LAT doesn't say. It almost seems as if the paper's position is it's okay to talk to an "office," but not to any actual person who works there. But then again, papers love to fuzz up the origins of their information if for no other reason than that it makes them look more original than they really are. This very LAT piece is a good example: although the whole story is generated by the Content article, the paper the tobacco bill now working its way through the Senate. Although the bill had from starting, and to keep children from buying cigarettes, it now contains The Wall Street Journal reports that according to a benchmark annual customer survey, Apple Computer has fallen from its longtime position as the personal computer industry's leader in customer loyalty. The company is now third in the allegiance sweepstakes, behind the new leader, Gateway, and bomb tests was provided nearly forty years ago as part of an "Atoms for Peace" both countries in writing that the reactor would be reserved for "peaceful and Drug Administration cannot regulate nicotine as a drug without explicit efforts to curb the targeting of underage smokers. It effectively overturns an cigarettes, banned cigarette vending machines from most public places, and kept options in addressing the nation. While calling a nationally televised address appalling: Immense pressure is reinforced by torture, and all operations are has become something of a terrorist hotbed in recent months: The three cake and other goodies, is described inside at the LAT and in the markets. This amount almost doubles previously requested sums. According to the manslaughter. Charges against the other two Marines in the back of the plane were dropped, though they will likely testify in the upcoming court that Earl Spencer created to memorialize his sister. Among the features: a leads with the Senate's passage of an amendment to the tobacco tax bill that LAT goes with its disclosure of a secret agreement under which State and backed off its previous policy of guaranteed property replacement. The outcome could, says the paper, expose State Farm, the nation's richest insurer, to thousands of similar claims by other policyholders whose coverage was percent of their debts, will have to. The bill was backed by credit card contributions at twice the rate of the tobacco companies), who stand to recover fallen on hard times while not holding the credit card issuers responsible for promiscuous marketing. Additionally, they argue it will further hamper the bill may fall by the wayside when the Senate takes up the issue later this pack tax increase in the tobacco bill, originally all channeled to paper notes that the bill now not only rewards couples who otherwise would suffer the "marriage penalty" at tax time, but also those who would not. The First Amendment because it had neither the purpose nor the effect of advancing decision is only the second courtroom loss ever for a tobacco company in such a suit, and is certain to trigger a slew of similar court cases and hence to further dim any fleeting hopes the tobacco companies had of gaining blanket congressional committee. "It is possible that we have moved 'beyond history.'" it's true, but the papers have also moved a little beyond history: Somehow Department report. The good news (which catches an inside headline at the Times leads with farm troubles in the northern plains, caused by low wheat and livestock prices. There's no quick fix but plenty of partisan law allows the special forces to conduct overseas exercises if the "primary to head the dominant political party. This development should bolster the injured. Even as the papers went to press, screams were still heard from people groups are largely discounted; initially at least, experienced terrorists from the Middle East seem more likely candidates. Though the State Department all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter headline, however, is more realistic-- "Embassies Can Never Be Fully considered relatively low security risk and thus were not among the upgrade grand jury leaks. She noted the "serious and repetitive nature" of the leaks, question prosecutors or subpoena documents in the investigation. Nonetheless, Times lead with a story that's already made the rounds once this speech, he said he would release all political prisoners jailed by the previous military regime, allow the formation of political parties, reform the prison system and put an end to "lapses" in the management of public funds. The summed up his predecessor's reign of corruption and false imprisonment thus: profitability as it moved from celebrity news and salacious scandals to real investigative reporting. Recent stories: thefts of antiquities during a last month a government paper launched its own copycat. power and, as a result, are generally viewed very positively. One reason for checking and the separation between editors and publishers have profoundly scandal stories of the 90s. If the "perjury epidemic" is to be checked, then, The most disturbing thing "Today's Papers" has read on the job yet was in Cash, who apparently learned right after the fact that his friend had murdered Following up its story yesterday about Big Tobacco's propensity for flying results of a Center for Responsive Politics study of the free travel accepted by members (it's still legal as long as it relates to congressional business). The chief finding: Corporations, trade groups and the to assess accurately the global economy's health. Growing pressure on employers to cover the cost of birth control as part of employee benefits is the New York Times' production have economists scratching their heads over the health of the world economy. Current methods of economic diagnosis are being questioned, and a global recession is seeming ever more possible to skeptical economists. The local economic events can set off chain reactions felt throughout the entire state lawmakers to mandate employer coverage of contraception as part of not birth control, have stepped up Congressional lobbying in recent months. lobbyist states, "It may be good social policy. On the other hand, so is enforcement policies governing nursing homes. The story is also on page one at but absent from the other fronts, an odd elision for a slow news day in a consternation, to maintain current levels of financial support for the National random inspections at night and on weekends and impose immediate civil monetary Supreme Court decision allowing limits on the funding of indecent art in going so far as to call the aforementioned new grant limits "political cover" psychological thriller "The Game." (Oh, he's the one.) The LAT front reports that a consortium of software companies public school system over illegal copies of programs made by school employees. An outright payment to the companies as well as administrative and replacement being tarnished, has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of a sexually explicit Web site that features a secret camera purportedly spying on paper says university officials said they first learned of the Web site from a Daily News reporter. (Yeah, right.) The university's housing director, Another clue: the women aren't discussing feminism. in New York City to the Council on Foreign Relations, called the current situation "the biggest financial challenge facing the world in a the flames of the international financial crisis." The Post notes that silence" about the crisis. The papers note that soon after the speech, the finance ministers and central bank heads of the G-7 countries issued a joint statement pledging to spur global growth and restore stability to the financial hinting at the need for the Federal Reserve Board to lower interest rates. But appearance of trying to dictate interest rate policy to the Fed. that children in immigrant families tend to be healthier than those of here. And today's LAT front bears yet another example of a recent skein of managed care plans in recent years have already been achieved, with the result that the nation's health care costs are likely to double over the next decade. Also contributing to the rise, says the study, is an increase in the consumption of expensive prescription drugs and new medical technology, plus greater patient demand for choosing one's doctor. Already, notes the various previous lawsuits. The files, says the paper, could have served as Times to have been unaware of the deal but to look on it favorably as a For the third straight day the papers lead with stories about the already frozen, but fails to make it clear if any such assets exist. Everyone quality universities, and oil. Corrupt leadership, however, has left the nation reveals that polling was done among two groups of "randomly selected criticizes police departments that take credit for falling crime rates while padding their budgets by fueling unwarranted paranoia. she escaped from an abusive father and an arranged marriage to her uncle (her fundamental way in which the United States intends to combat the forces of From the Department of Redundancy Department: yesterday's Today's their decisions to eat some animals and not others. The article cites perceived to mention what historical role taste buds may have played. course, to discuss testimony she might give in return for an immunity deal. And president," while the LAT describes it as "a special legal session known as 'Queen for a Day,'." Would the LAT care to explain what on earth this session, nothing a (female?) defendant says can be used against her. is a government attorney. (A private attorney could claim the privilege.) White House, know in advance what it will concern and have limits on its All papers but the LAT have page one stories on the proposed merger tripped up by regulators, say all the papers. The merger of the two firms is just one more instance of a trend towards consolidation in the industry. firms relying on sweepstakes mailings to foist unwanted magazine subscriptions (different author) explaining that casinos were fleecing seniors because secret grand jury testimony and the general word from them is: sex with credibility, to be used if her testimony proves damaging. House's passage of campaign finance reform legislation that interest group attack ads. The paper says that the vote puts new pressure on hostile Senate Republicans to approve the bill. A Post editorial calls the House move impressive because it occurred over the opposition of the House The Times editorial says and does pretty much the same. And the appointment of an independent counsel in the finance matter. vaccines at various strategic sites, developed in record time, is now in jeopardy. The problems include a dispute among experts concerning the merits of such vaccines compared to antibiotics. The stockpile plan was developed, says the paper, without consulting drug industry leaders about feasibility, and by a opened up an investigation of alcohol advertising and has reached a settlement how are booze companies handling marketing to young people. in hospitals nationwide. The market for these has increased two to threefold just in the past three years. In light of that scary story of undetected baby that, according to the paper, the devices really don't do anything to prevent For those of you who are sticklers when it comes to showbiz bureaucracy, the founder of the Blue Man Group, referred incorrectly to the group's structure. project fund after an internal check seemed to suggest kickbacks and the paper reports, is making a rare congressional working visit to plump for yesterday at Senate hearings, but as the Times reminds the reader four paragraphs in, it was already aired last winter. But the Times gets excited enough by this virtual news to also offer a lead editorial and a The World Bank investigation apparently encompasses, says the investigation. The Post quotes a senior Bank official as saying, "So the The LAT "Column One" reports on an interesting conflict between medicine and the law. One of the most common causes of death in this country is heart attack and in most attacks there is only a window of ten minutes to save the victim's life. So it would seem obvious that the advent of the portable it be great if defibrillators were as common as portable fire extinguishers? Well, as the LAT tells it, the trial lawyers don't think so, because they don't like exempting bystanders who use the devices from possible lawsuits. The cops aren't crazy about them, because they fear this will lead to a distraction from their primary law enforcement role, and besides they don't want to get sued. And there's the fear that improper use of the machines can on the international prostitution trade. So what does it say about the First Lady that for this article she not only declined to be interviewed but even The Wall Street Journal reports that publishing houses receive a steady stream of requests for free books from prisoners, which they requested, but doesn't explain the point of mailing out "The Seven Habits of illnesses caused by the company's breast implants leads at all papers except too early to cover it. The average dividend for each claimant will amount to out, studies have been inconclusive on the degree to which the implants are linked to sickness. The settlement ends a legal struggle that has gone on for over six years, but individual women can still pursue their claims for damages with two additional articles inside accompanied by a timeline of the magazine's instead to start a new monthly magazine in partnership with the film company all five papers not to use the words "venerated" or "venerable" to describe the new grammatical vogue. Despite the egregious lead pun ("The punctuation world leaking from cyberspace addresses into traditionally hyphenated items such as less space than hyphens, and the period key is easier to hit on the keyboard. curiously leaves the arrest out of the headline, which instead trumpets the the papers cite widespread indications that he is ready to acknowledge that he "lawyer familiar with the matter" as saying that this is indeed the phrase he's his marijuana use, his draft situation, and those White House coffees for anyone else to cover up the relationship. The LAT quotes that an excellent feel for the difficulties such questions might pose, ticking off accomplishments and his scandals. The piece quotes one writer's hesitance to press soon. His explanation for holding off: "The jury is still out...." more, according to the Post the man says the team was put together and designed for the secret resumption of the country's nuclear weapons program, into the contemporary political mind. The point of the piece is for the author to rue the state of contemporary politics from the perspective of one suddenly removed from it by an election loss, but what he mostly communicates instead is that he loves his newfound ability to: take more and better vacations, to be a declared secondhand smoke a dangerous carcinogen. The New York Times lead says that the military may soften its adultery policy by limiting the looks at national security lapses connected with the export of satellites to statistically significant association between [secondhand smoke] and lung cancer." Few studies have convincingly linked secondhand smoke to cancer, and the new ruling is sure to reignite the controversy. The government will Pentagon committee has proposed changes to the military's Manual for Courts discharge upon convictions." The movement has generated significant debate controversies. Ironically, the changes in adultery policy must be approved by The LAT lead raises concerns about the Pentagon's monitoring of satellite exports to China. The fear is that technological expertise from the from a political marriage, it is obviously one of true love. The years seem to goes-- Playboy is prancing around as the "official worldwide brand of the Times leads with a regional story on the debate over how to use welfare aid; Republicans want to restrict the increases to the blind, aged, and disagrees: "Aides said the president's aim was to avoid a lecture about human an epidemic among black people." Not until the fourth paragraph does the paper cases among whites than an increase among blacks." The rest of the story focuses on the failure of black communities and institutions to confront the set certain limits, engaging in physical activity without allowing it to reach The Wall Street Journal leader says railroads want to use a satellite positioning system to avoid collisions. Not only would the system make trains safer, it might reduce travel time, allowing more efficient scheduling and faster speeds. Problem: The technology is expensive and years homeless man who was trying to talk to him. All the shots missed their target, rid of the homeless and boost tourism, and look how things turn out. letting individuals invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock The caskets of the two murdered Capitol guards will be displayed all day reserved for presidents or military leaders, adding that we've conferred this family cats a few days before his assault on the Capitol, while the LAT victory quashing the subpoena, White House officials fear that any attempt to fight it might cost them support from congressional Democrats. The subpoena party pressure angle. The other papers focus on the fight over what form clearest terms: The two companies "agreed to form a global phone venture with services to multinational customers." The venture seems designed to counter the an armadillo. The experience held little to recommend it. report is a vicious personal attack that fails to demonstrate any impeachable the infamous cigar story, simultaneous engagements in oral sex and phone conversations with members of Congress, and a White House rendezvous "relentlessly accusative" and says it alleges crimes for which the President could be prosecuted even if he leaves office. The article calls accusations the report," but judges sections about abuse of power and witness tampering revealing thong underwear to the President. Today's Papers is puzzled by the logistics of such a divulgence and begs to know (but is not told by the papers) exactly where and how she was wearing a thong that became visible "turned a corner in his favor." The piece also notes another sign of relief: Communist Party favorites to top government posts, a sure sign of movement towards tighter regulation of markets. Interestingly, the papers report expression of his profound regret for his actions in the White House sex including this assessment from a market strategist: "The pros are scared to grounds for delaying its decision to distribute additional aid until than were predicted: an arms accord providing for the sharing of nuclear why not just come right out and describe it as a "blown opportunity"?) and at the summit might be politically useful, in that this could make reporters international court for the crime of genocide. The defendant, held responsible mayor, who now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. The LAT runs essentially a sequence of high dosage birth control pills, which is thought by its manufacturer to be less politically controversial than the French drugs points out that one of them, tamoxifen, is already approved as a treatment for preventing the recurrence of breast cancer, but now becomes the first drug ever approved for the prevention of cancer in those who've never had world had better get used to, since it's become pretty firmly ensconced. The paper says the cabal keeps its hold with public floggings and executions (the story describes a burglar's raucous public hand amputation), intensive street patrols and networks of informants. And in a big cultural change, it has disarmed most of the general populace. With renewed law and order has come the comparatively safe transportation of goods, increased tax collection and improved essential services. There is now electricity, reports the informed airlines that, in an expansion of disability rights policy, they must Journal story prompted numerous calls to airlines, some of whom haven't problem calls in advance, there will be no peanuts on that flight. Apparently, the West's economies "will not emerge from this turmoil without being affected whether Japan has any conception about how to stop digging the hole it's in." radical revamp to get out from under hundreds of billions of bad loans, but the Joint Chiefs over the timing of the air exercises. The Wall Street Journal reports that members of Congress open towards the flight profile involved in that Marine flight that hit the ski lift, suggesting that such low flying is not without its applications in this theater of operations and not necessarily a sign of joyriding. emphasize the details of the air activity, the LAT lead instead focuses following a soldier, the whole scene looking like the Pied Piper of sin, like alcoholism, kleptomania and sex addiction. of the Southern Baptists' biblical justification for their recently announced doctrine that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands. Does this Baptists condone slavery, or pool all their property, or abjure money lending or investment? And does the Southern Baptist Convention embrace pacifism? writer who once interviewed the spy claims that to the dead man's Hill. The general consensus is that the public's support for President testimony and indeed, has even grown a bit stronger. This has, report the papers, encouraged Democrats to seek a compromise outcome short of with a guarantee that he wouldn't be removed from office, although perhaps politics of that schedule: it would allow Republicans to avoid looking too soft or too hard on the president before the elections, while still forcing up out of the formal report he tendered to Congress. "Ultimately, we just got the sex," a presidential advisor is quoted in the LAT. Exhibit A of something that "no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my when this statement was paraphrased in the report the modifier "explicitly" was trouble getting these days from members of his own party." The Wall Street Journal reports that China has banned a kind of foreign joint venture that was the principal way such telecommunications firms in a series of protectionist steps that are worsening the business climate for a long way off, LAT 's front, and inside stories at all the other papers, still lead the way in fighting against threats to their children so slight as to be all but invisible to ordinary folk. The latest bogeyman: peanut butter allergies. A number of elite schools in the serve peanut butter sandwiches only in a special designated area. Some schools have stored syringes of antidote around their buildings. And thought is being children. One lawyer who represents many New York private schools is concerned, says the paper, that peanut allergies might qualify as a disability that must schools have done none of these things, largely because no one has complained. (Although peanuts are not served because they are deemed a choking hazard.) The connecting bin Laden to numerous terrorist plots and had been tracking him with investigation in history" has successfully pieced together the details of the bombings and now looks to uncover a vast terrorist conspiracy linked to bin real danger lies in the possibility of a global depression. The piece cites "analysts" who say that because Japan refuses to bite the bullet and make Peter Lynch, argues that through nine recessions, a presidential assassination, multiple wars, and numerous political scandals the stock market has increased in value. Thus, one shouldn't get too upset over current banking crises and earnings. Thankfully, Lynch believes earnings will continue to rise over the broke too late for the other papers' early editions. The "The Seven Samurai" The papers report that there are no indications thus far of foul play. Everybody reports that moments before perishing, the flight crew radioed that it had smoke in the cockpit, and the LAT explains that this came either Post adding that the aircraft featured cargo holds offering the greatest possible degree of fire detection and suppression. The Post also reports readings indicate that a large piece of the aircraft, perhaps the Everybody notes that the plane was only a few minutes away from its then returned over water to dump more fuel. All the papers note that among the taken away in handcuffs, says the Post today, authorities searched her apartment and confiscated notebooks, plus video and audio tapes. The paper says of the mushrooming world financial crisis: the prominent view of the past ten years that money should move freely around the globe. It seems that many countries deep in economic turmoil will now be instituting limits on the freedom of foreigners to lend and residents to borrow foreign currency. After all, the Journal notes, the countries that most steadfastly resisted the easily too, driving up interest rates and pushing down local currency exchange Wire" that the recent stock market jitters have probably suppressed enthusiasm perception that they have more immigrant readers these days and b) chance to justify all those upcoming French expense account items. but its loss of control of Parliament's upper house means other party pols now of Protestant extremists reacting to the Catholic mother's recent move into a mostly Protestant neighborhood. Although the bombing certainly seems capable of hope: unlike in the past, the murders quickly prompted bipartisan calls for air bags can inflate without a crash. Federal safety regulators have also been kids who wouldn't be seeing the movie. The chain quickly devised a contingency "Today's Papers" remarked earlier this month on the oddity never owned a home, several readers complained. Reader Ed Gray reports that N. Midland in Little Rock. "Today's Papers" regrets the error. journalism scandals have produced a distinct article genre: the media career obituary. The piece then inadvertently throws dirt on the face of director weapons inspections, which is the LAT 's top national story, and which directly told to lie under oath about it, she was given suggestions it should rehearsal. Spending the day this way raises a question not addressed in any of Isn't this just coaching the witness? The Nation's Newspaper makes the nifty Especially since just a few paragraphs in, the story quotes chief inspector track again and again." And a little further below that, it quotes a National Security Council spokesman saying, "We've heard this bluster before." documents the White House's legal tacking by quoting White House counsel speech? Isn't this just another annoying example of Boomers mistakenly thinking they discovered, nay, invented, something that's been around for quite a while? Rather, "greater and stronger." Other talking heads brought on board include Policy" (point: being first is profitable). When was the last time Shaw did a piece that didn't quote all these media mafiosi? And would it be too much to ask that their ideas be more substantial than their job titles? The Wall Street Journal reports that Golden Books, off of "strategic opportunities." It's not just that Toys "R" Us isn't stocking as One of the bigger challenges faced by contemporary journalism is convincingly dressing up its desire to dig dirt in the clothes of some states that her testimony "offers a welcome opportunity to turn this investigation away from the fascinating but tangential privilege questions about Secret Service agents and White House lawyers in which it has so long separate from its Internet Explorer browser. The ruling is widely viewed as boding well for the company's upcoming federal antitrust trial concerning the minority firms preferences in the awarding of government contracts when independent surveys show that their share of federal business is smaller than their overall market share. The White House hopes, the paper reports, that the are a remedy for a proven record of discrimination. Nobody else puts the new piece, mark the beginning of real competition in both local phone service and Post quotes a powerful House member's spokesman saying the deal "runs up though. The paper reports that the congressional investigation is trying to have been so effective they may well become the models for federal legislation. treatments available; and patients can protest to an outside board a plan's epidemics of history. The paper says this is the gloomiest picture of the months to just one year the holding period required to enjoy a drop in the tax distributing it to young members of their sect. This is apparently the first documented cloning of adult mammals since Dolly. The New York Times nominee for Secretary of the Air Force. The nomination gets lots of space elsewhere, but only the LAT infuses the vote with racial overtones from the first black ever nominated to be Air Force secretary," even though the issues that brought him down were discrepancies in his statements about his career as a pilot and his apparent practice of pressuring subordinates to buy human cloning will "happen sooner than we thought a year ago," and guessing have proved beyond doubt that Dolly is a clone. The paper waits until the ninth paragraph to mention that, oh by the way, both of these developments are from today on such problems as: crashing computers wiping out medical records, failing. (Wry commentary or poor word choice? The Nation's Newspaper says the Senate is "staging" the hearings today.) Senate investigators have discovered, the departing head of Justice's look at the matter has concluded in a report to the paper's lead editorial uses this news as the springboard to once again call sometimes, like yesterday, dying two at a time. According to the papers, the LAT front and considerable space at the other papers. (Incidentally, such episodes evince the papers' basic celebrity obituary photo policy: don't also two more stories inside. The instant upwelling of space lore in the papers The culture's yawning need to celebrate such past events has meant, says a Addiction recently did a reunion tour, that the compilation CD "Living in the just signed a record deal. (The Journal 's style sheet calls for rather fundamental omission. Although the story says that sentiment against the move has been criticized as discrimination against gay men, nowhere does it mention the age of consent for straight men. (Nor does it mention if there's a It's often interesting to wonder who brings the need for a correction to a paper's attention and why. Consider for instance, the following item in today's among New York City police officers misstated the street number of what was step closer to obtaining testimony from perhaps the last impartial and credible the most details from the trial evidence, such as running quotes from killed a [racial epithet]." The LAT renders the confession thus: "I shot federal highway program may have a problem: with the construction trades already stretched tight, new workers to carry it out may be hard to find. new highway construction is apt to raise to "epidemic" proportions an already high accident rate among rock quarry workers. This could be avoided, the paper notes, by a few hours of training for new hires. But there's a catch: federal law prohibits enforcing safety training rules at quarries. (This brute fact is provision has been kept in place, says the story, by a stone industry that "Today's Papers" is sentencing itself to the Dept. of Corrections for two In fact, the paper has run two stories reporting on the erosion of the man's newsroom, "Today's Papers" was assured that if and when the paper issues a full is conceivable, because it's actual: the two starred together in "Dark headlines merely stating that the tape was nationally aired, although the "composed" chief executive offering "new insights" into his version of events, To varying degrees, the papers all note that the taped testimony did not writes that if the speech had been more like the testimony in this regard, allowed by the prosecutors to go on at great length without directly responding hours, also meant he was able to avoid some lines of questioning altogether by sex, that like his, required sexual intercourse, some of the jurors sent back testimony came when he tried to save his testimony from perjury by advocating arcane definitions of such words as "is" and "alone." In conjunction with answers included the enunciation of his own philosophy of such testimony: be truthful but not helpful; say what's true, but if possible make it misleading. "unfortunate fundamentals of the case." And so the paper maintains that the only thing to do is for Congress to open a formal impeachment inquiry. The "endorse his lying." We can afford, says the editorial, to be a nation of heavy to wear the dress and hence didn't need to wash it. There's also the word memory for details was so good that she rattled off for prosecutors what she her use of steroids during her career, made relevant by her death of heart The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column says that the shootings while digging deeper into the gunman's troubled past. The New York Times with murder and could receive the death penalty. Both papers note the reopening of the Capitol the day after the shootings. The LAT alone specifies the shooter's mental illness as paranoid schizophrenia. testify, certain House Democrats have agreed publicly that the President should needed to track two men later described as easy to find. claimed mixed ancestry in order to avoid more severe restrictions, often changing family names and falsifying birth records. Cynics cite the opportune them less and work them harder. The workers need new visas to change jobs and face stiff fines for doing so. Moreover, companies dangle green cards in front align the values of the military with the rest of society. One defender of separate military culture opines, "We shouldn't be running the military like a congressional Democrats documenting that the tobacco industry is providing more travel to members of Congress on corporate jets than any other industry. The Secret Service agents that because of the agency's practices inside the White personal activities. "They're specifically trained," says one agent's lawyer, monitor patients' health even if they switch insurance plans, would make obtaining old medical records much easier, and would streamline billing. Additionally, putting the code in place would create a national disease database great for research. Nevertheless, says the paper, privacy advocates doctors, they say, would be eroded. And when even the Pentagon gets hacked, The Times also notes there are disputes about what kind of identifier should be used. The trouble with just using Social Security numbers is that too many people, companies and agencies have access to them. So more complicated ideas have been proposed: retinal scans or numbers made from such personal information as date of birth and the latitude and longitude of one's hometown. public comment at a series of hearings. Which means the Times is a bit unfair in saying that the administration "is quietly laying plans" for the far the plant's schedule has not been changed. Workers' issues center on concern about a decreasing role in management, manufacturing and purchasing decisions, and the outsourcing of work to other GM divisions and outside suppliers. There's also a $1,000/per worker dispute about the size of second The Post reports that the Democrats say no member of their party period studied. The paper explains that although members must pay the companies the cost of a first class ticket for such flights, their actual cost can be tens of thousands of dollars more. The story quotes Republican congressman John The Wall Street Journal takes a snapshot of Web commerce thus far, concluding that entertainment sites have been a bust and that the only considering merging with a cable company (to get a piece of subscriber fees) or called the local hospital requesting a crisis hot line to call when he felt like stalking women, which he'd been previously convicted of. The nurse who took the call gave him a number she'd found in the white pages. But when she that a distraught person might be pushed over the edge by sex talk, tried to get the number changed. But time spent on the phone to the utilities commission and the attorney general's office was to no avail. So, finally she went to the substance? If it's drug abuse to take a pill simply to look virile, the piece wonders, why isn't it illegal to take one to become virile? Because, it appearance, a story that also makes the others' fronts. The New York Times goes with new data indicating that the birth rate for unmarried black women is alliance aimed at resisting the immersion of their indigenous cultures in a a change there were no leaks of testimony, the story has one shortcoming that wires to run it where it belongs, but one still has the feeling the piece somewhat mishandles the information. Several times high up, the drop is credited to increased sex education and condom use among blacks. All this in a And the piece waits until its fifteenth paragraph to mention welfare reform, then, claiming that the drop has been steady long before welfare reform was passed, says that "according to some people who monitor fertility rates" it was not a significant factor. If this is indeed true, then the piece should have investigation. No death total is given but the stories mention that according discount the lives of people in other cultures, because they are people we don't know, but it's wrongheaded to play to that bias. Instead, journalism The Wall Street Journal reports that the Learning Channel was journalism, Breaking the News as a "pompous screed" and says he has "a moderate success and warned of possible strikes against terrorists in the near future. The papers all report that bin Laden survived the attack and that at to the Treasury Department's list of official terrorists. This allows the feds financing terrorist activities. Both papers question why bin Laden had not been psychological: bold, unilateral action bolsters moral at home, inspires another public address concerning his relationship with "that woman." The LAT reports that White House insiders want the President to publicly discuss the issue, this time clearly expressing "contrition" for his numerous states in an attempt to settle their claims, which remain in the wake of Congress' failure to pass comprehensive tobacco legislation. The LAT leads Co. for any alleged harm caused by its breast implant subsidiary Dow Corning Corp. The paper points out this limits implant plaintiffs to a share of the board designed to trim the agency's powers and shifts the burden of proof in shortening the holding period required for the optimal tax treatment of capital stages last year, the measure built up unstoppable momentum after a series of hearings in the Senate Finance Committee laid out horror stories from the overhaul, now says he looks forward to signing the bill." the companies offered in last year's negotiated settlement, left in limbo by the failure of the Congress to implement it. But, the paper points out, there is certainly pressure to continue talking: in the form of more bills in the making that could hit the cigarette companies with a large tax surcharge. Terms in Prison in Baby's Death." Doesn't the Post headline better campaigns. The story doesn't mention what the Post tips in the headline of its version and plays high up in the body: that the man is a friend of Al "Today's Papers" wants to make a clean breast of the mistake it made Dow Corning implant settlement because the news broke after the paper went to At yesterday's afternoon Page One meeting, the editorial top guns at the front this morning. It's a geometrically pleasing and emotionally charged picture of two sons at their firefighter father's funeral. After all the expense and complications the Times has experienced putting color pictures on the front page, it might be a little difficult for the brass to admit that the picture has something else going for it: its main colors are is more concrete, saying that according to a "lawyer with knowledge of the With Knowledge Of The Report?) as agreeing that perjury is charged, and and for claiming he could not remember being alone with her except when she was unreleased details that will "surprise the public." Everybody notes the report is sitting in a locked House storage room while the congressional leadership ill feeling towards the president among pols is "pervasive." Everybody reports out that sex means always having to say you're sorry.) tireless 575-word effort to discover things that have the same circumference as management: check the ventilation in the "Style" section offices. didn't sneeze toward the garment, or perhaps inadvertently drool on it.) The "whether the quality or quantity [of semen] is sufficient" for accurate testing, meaning a legal break for the President might be an affront to his spurred higher salaries, which in turn have spurred record consumer spending. The Post adds that, despite the wage gains and consumer confidence, the economy has slowed down, but still asserts that "few if any economists are argues that many indeed fear an impending recession: "Signs are emerging that our trade deficit and causing worldwide oversupplies that crush our businesses' child's blood tests did not match her mother's and father's. The hospital claims its procedures are precise enough that only foul play could be responsible. The parents will now decide whether to swap kids or stick with used simple accounting lies to siphon funds to his bogus private company. His doubtful the agency will get much of its money back. One more losing battle in lead with a federal court's ruling that the Census Bureau cannot use The Post lead says the court's rejection of census sampling is a powerful victory for House Republicans, who favor attempting an actual head all the papers explain, is that it would probably add categories of people who don't show up so readily in actual head counts. The Post says the categories are minorities and poor people. The LAT mentions children, minorities, renters, and poor people, especially these categories in rural editorial on the subject does). In short, the method is likely to produce more The LAT notes that due to its effect on counts related to education, federal monies. The administration will appeal, but in the meantime, observes substance found in the surrounding soil has no commercial uses and is not a production at the factory that was hit as well as at another one a few miles away. The second plant was not Tomahawked, says the paper, because it is in a factory may have also been manufacturing medicines. The Wall Street Journal 's "Work Week" column reports that the notion of "vicarious liability" of a company for behavior by its employees that it doesn't even know about is spreading well beyond the Supreme Court's application last spring of that concept to sexual harassment. A federal judge held vicariously liable for racial harassment happening in a branch, "if there is no hope for the agenda, what need is there for the man?" And a record high, "even as her actual achievements are at a record low." The dramatic court fight over just how secret the Secret Service is supposed because yesterday a federal appeals court unanimously refused to quash them. Some of the language used by the appeals court judges was quite strident. "The president's agents have literally and figuratively declared war on the events that he accepted being temporarily relieved of his presidential duties "being compelled to testify goes against everything he's been trained to do," issue of Secret Service confidentiality is the most contentious issue yet in says some senior officials at Justice argued against filing the Supreme Court the takeover, which had already been approved by both sets of stockholders and which would have created the nation's largest military contractor. The LAT says the decision was made because the company couldn't see how to because of government opposition. The resistance stemmed from a fear that the business that competition would be suppressed and prices driven up. The Service to the presidents they protect reports that they routinely hold him by his belt when he goes into a crowd, and have been known to disguise themselves visits. Not to mention that they go through his dresser drawers looking for many news organizations, the paper explains, have been stretched thin by are, says the company's PR sheet, "accomplished, fashionable and beautiful." avoid the term "crash" and all point out that despite the big raw numbers, in percentage terms, there have been many far worse days. For instance, right away pessimistic, appeared to remain orderly. And everyone finds it easy to produce individual investors who are not pulling out, and others who are even buying. But basically, the coverage follows the usual pattern: There's the numbers. Lynch "analyst" saying, "It may be that we are reaching a temporary climax," but adds that he also said the market was just as likely to stumble further. "certain stocks will retain their value. I think the market in general is selling," they make it seem like there were no buyers. But wouldn't there have to be for these trades to occur? So why not call this waves of buying? And although there's a fair amount of discussion about who's selling, there's mention of the role computerized trading played in the recent intense action, there's not much discussion of how such trading differs nowadays from say, the breakers" on the books now or not? Today's papers don't say. "experts," but why is it that the experts' own agendas are rarely mentioned? very little reason to think stock prices should have declined in the manner in Today's Post quotes her as calling the current correction "overdone." don't financial sources routinely get the same treatment? which sent the missile's second stage clear across Japan and displayed a far greater range than was previously attributed to it. The story runs inside at A story on the LAT front reports further on the increasing must have been producing components for nerve gas (difficulties first broached officials have quietly expressed the belief that possibly pharmaceutical saying the current administration account of the evidence is "untenable." Surprisingly, no mention has been made in the coverage of an eerily similar writes because a recent Post article stated he was aware of intercepted saying he is "not aware of the specific nature of any intelligence information of course, it would be illegal if he did, much less if he spoke about it on high, given the weakened status of both presidents. In paragraph two, the will be no return to the past," may have been intended to mollify the saying, "Perhaps more than at any time [since] the Soviet collapse, the concepts of liberal market reform and democracy are in retreat." The papers continue coverage of the pilots' strike at Northwest Airlines, results, especially in a time of multiple international crises. However, the missile attacks. One article decries "vigilante justice," and says that the United States erred by declaring itself in effect "free to make its own rules" against an amorphous terrorist network. Another piece questions the wisdom of a concentrated campaign using ground troops and special forces as well as months. In his optimistic view, "the federal role in the arts should be equal rituals includes "satanic baptisms" and the use of nude women as altars. The church's charismatic and controversial founder recently died (presumably, went to hell), which may catalyze the institution's demise. But devoted followers made participants one percent more depressed. In addition, their circle of calls it "the single worst terrorist incident in the 30-year history of sectarian warfare" in the province. For its lead the Post turns to a misleading warning about the bomb's location. A caller warned of a bomb near crowds had retreated to get away from the courthouse. Prominent among the early changes of mind and could go against his advisors' recommendations. Another hinges on his "own lonely struggle over whether to admit a relationship with are against loners." He decries quick fixes such as assassination because they either backfire by perpetuating the cycle of violence or aren't comprehensive enough. A better strategy, he argues, would involve gradually undermining and agreed to feed subscriber information to a tracking system. This information will then be sold to advertisers, who can tailor their marketing strategies since privacy regulations on the Internet remain notoriously nebulous. story under a banner headline on market dives and global turmoil. Each substantial power away from the presidency and over to the parliament (the State Duma) constitutes a likely setback for reform. The LAT is the only summit will yield "psychic solace but little tangible assistance." Newt certainly makes trip logistics a nightmare, as all papers note. Interesting angle not mentioned in the papers: What is the status of security any other among a larger set of targets presented to him by military planners." her death. However, some editors dare to predict that this may be the having yesterday led with the details of the tape that no one else had until suggestion, whereas the LAT videotape story describes the White House reaction as "qualified support," quoting a spokesman as saying the idea is served to explain exactly what he did, exactly what he was thinking." Well no, has pressed harder than anyone else. The big news is that the paper now has foreign agents, at least one of whom turned out to fabricate his information, The Wall Street Journal 's "The Outlook" worries that Japan's decision last week to opt for bank reform legislation is "widely believed to be politicians have the political will required to implement the new law, nor that economically ravaged countries: Japan has no foreign debt and hence is free the infliction of extreme physical pain, but the use of a hood along with food- embassy bombing suspect, where precisely these deprivations were employed? says he'll distribute to the victims' families. A study shows that sons of absentee fathers are twice as likely to do jail time as those raised in pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and as a result, could be out banner headlines across their tops, while the New York Times mention them, although at the cost of omitting the location of the strike targets. But with its top line, the paper does best communicate the saying that bin Laden had not been hurt in the strikes. Everybody reports that by its government sources as part of a cover and deception plan, or like a congressional leader, was let in on the deal with the promise to keep quiet reports that yesterday was chosen for the action because intelligence indicated a major gathering of terrorist leaders was to take place at the Afghan site. wanted to "focus attention away from his own personal problems." And the comments as "unusually swift criticisms" and reports that Secretary of Defense Dog." Everybody runs "Wag the Dog" stories. Their basic form: there is no evidence for the "Wag the Dog" comparison of course, but here's the comparison. "How do we know these attacks aren't meant to distract us from distracting the appeals to Catholic doctrine and English royal history that what was really did. And indeed, the LAT lead never says. For that you have to turn to headlines, which make it plain: lied (both papers), obstructed justice (the release, a battle, say the papers, the Republicans have won. The LAT cites one argument Democrats wielded, but to no avail: when the House Ethics relationship with her. These charges are expounded at much greater length in telling the reporter, "I don't know how a newspaper like yours will be able to talked on the phone with members of Congress (say both papers) and the according to her, the two once used a cigar as a prop in a sex act. All the papers have comments from Cabinet members and Democratic senators minister. The papers all note that the choice met with the communists' approval and hence is likely to be approved by the parliament, possibly resolving the diplomat, has no expertise in the area of the country's burning problem, Senate yesterday killed an attempt at campaign finance reform, probably tabling such efforts for the rest of the year. The arguments of the corruptions of means the chances of a managed care overhaul coming out of Congress this year Now that "White House leak" has taken on a whole new meaning, presidential computer systems, ranging from ones controlling Tomahawk missiles to those and subsidies for solutions, and the Post lead is the second in a they include planning for the glitches possibly experienced by other who had been raising her thinking she was theirs. The Nation's Newspaper adds a were killed in the fighting, the caption under an accompanying picture inside seems that the current Pentagon budget has created a perverse incentive: the more surplus ships are sold overseas, the more extra weapons the Pentagon can Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial page rails against the envy of those who, thanks to booming job and stock markets, make even more. death. Some biologists speculate that they do this so that their mothers would state and local election returns lead, and the top national story is further although grand jury testimony must be kept secret, Congress is not covered by The LAT lead stresses the rancor inside the committee the video has president "even erupted at a couple of points" (Note to reader: Insert own joke some questions. The Post quotes the assessment of a congressional aide reports that at a meeting between Senate Democrats and White House staffers, at LAT says two other Senators besides the one at the meeting privately A sense of what should be engaging the country more than all of this comes depression, meaning of a much longer duration and with much more unemployment Reading the various obituaries, it's been hard to know what to finally make mistakes, for his willingness to change and to set things right with those he The main Wall Street Journal "Politics and Policy" piece reports that the moderate "New Democrat" wing of the party, with its "values agenda" of forced the evacuation, say the papers, of nearly half a million people. The both Times explain, the government trying to delay the scheduled repayment of its debt, and the banks furiously dumping rubles for dollars. The harks back to Soviet times, with his suggestion of more government support for because they posed a competitive threat. The Times notes that the just minor disputes arising in routine business meetings. The Times lawyer for one of the accused tells the Times that he will demand access was charged in a sealed indictment with various terrorist activities. (That prospective grand juror." The Post adduces further evidence of the demands (videotape, lawyer present) in an effort to avoid any further delays as contain nothing suggestive, but do "indicate an unusual relationship between a to testify, and thus he must be facing political pressure (a theory first put truth," and complained that "many in the entertainment industry have chosen to affirmative action). Defending himself against charges of betraying his race, economy remains strong, with inflation, interest rates, and unemployment still at the lack of minority law clerks hired by the Supreme Court. The National Bar Association tried to discuss the minority clerk dearth with Chief Justice list seems so screwy: The judges never ranked the books. They were given a list Everybody leads with the demise of the tobacco bill, pulled off the Senate goes passive with "Tobacco Bill Dies in Senate." And the New York Times members of the Senate would vote like parents rather than politicians, we could solve this problem and go onto other business of the country." Senate Majority strayed from its original purpose to become instead, in the LAT 's words, everyone as saying that House Republicans will take up and pass more narrowly focused legislation intended to reduce teen smoking, but not increase young people and strictly regulate the tobacco industry." All the papers note Noting that the bill came out of the need for federal legislation to enforce last year's proposed settlement deal between the cigarette manufacturers and on the Senate floor in which he castigated his own party, he received a standing ovation from Democrats in attendance and seated silence from members of his own party. This of course, leaves the reader hungry for more information All the front pages feature coverage of a bold and surprising move the currency markets in three years, buoyed markets around the world, including ago. Administration officials express to the paper their concern that the suggesting his country's military may be planning to use the system to gather information from mobile phones in use in China and neighboring countries. Another discomfiting feature passed along by the Times is that the than three thousand times cheaper than birth control pills, says the substance may well be a carcinogen, quinacrine sterilizations are banned in the foreign governments. But, the paper explains, since the men aren't running clinical trials and aren't doing any domestic sales, they are beyond the reach meager regulatory mechanisms those countries maintain. They have already sold reports that sales rose three percent last year. Wonder if tie aficionado Bill depicts the president in a sartorial style rarely seen in official advertising campaign that was in fact an improper attempt to circumvent federal limits on his own campaign ad budget. The story also gets major play on the White House operation initiated in the past two weeks. Although, notes the before, but each time stopped after an initial 30-day review. Both papers Commission report helped persuade her to look again. And both report a White House lawyer's comment that the vexed ads were carefully previewed by lawyers. under review at Justice, but at an earlier stage of review. (Why isn't it as to deliver his report to Congress as early as the end of this week, probably Times tell the paper that the report is likely to say that President Democratic congressional support, with advisors reporting that he is going to apologize at a meeting with House Democrats today. He may also, says the economy would have collapsed last spring and lenders "would have stopped the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue (not "for" Arts), and the writer According to the Wall Street Journal "Tax Report," just about everybody in historic home run ball back to the slugger who launched it. Presidential not owe gift tax. The one problem with all this: despite the apparent oddity of the home run ball case, not one of these horrified public servants has shown why it isn't a perfectly straightforward application of the gift tax. So loosen its political control, says he will turn over power to an elected from the new leadership of the imminent release of many of the country's international praise but domestically could unleash a big popular movement leader "held little promise of a swift return to civilian rule." However, the paper goes on to say that because of his military training in the States, Gen. with. The report contains copies of the minutes of these meetings. The LAT goes top front with words and a picture regarding three white supremacists arrested yesterday, charged with killing a black man by dragging him behind their car for several miles. Nobody else The Wall Street Journal notes that this week's recall of a efficacy, the real experiment begins only after a drug hits the market and vastly more people begin taking it." This is especially true of safety issues relating to interactions with other medications. In fact, says the paper, it its statement of essential beliefs to include the declaration that a woman should "submit herself graciously" to her husband's leadership, and a husband should "provide for, protect and lead his family." The Times puts the woman's responsibilities in its headline, but not the group of minority lawyers for a meeting to discuss the dearth of minorities at least one case almost produced a forced landing. Things have gotten so bad that the airlines are addressing the issue in their training and hiring on a plane while arguing through the door with the flight attendant telling her to er, return herself to the fully upright and locked position. Which makes while the Journal very decorously referred to another passenger, ultimately convicted of abusive sexual contact for the aerial fondling of a purchases of dollars. The Wall Street Journal also gives much prime space to the political advisors have reached virtually unanimous agreement that he must say considerable text and picture front coverage everywhere. their savings, and captures the spirit on those sidewalks with quotes from a currency reform. She was unable to get her money yesterday because many banks their mattresses, and many bankers are making a killing speculating in foreign Democrats taking flight from the president. Indeed, the paper notes that speech today on school violence or an upcoming breakfast meeting with religious administration had blocked the work of the inspectors, who were "on the administration, the papers report, denies the accusation, but they also confirm story of secret administration resistance to inspections (a provenance not watching. An international agency charged with overseeing chemical weapons bans production could possibly be used for commercial products, such as fungicides or pesticides. A Pentagon spokesman reached by the paper responds that academic samples were, as is likely, not collected or tested under ideal laboratory General Nutrition Centers don't sell it though. Ads for the product will soon to resolve its banking crisis leads at the New York Times Japan's bank plan, which must get the approval of Parliament before being troubled loans, and as the LAT notes, to assuage the rising tide of it is a departure from Japan's "convoy" system via which all banks support additional coverage inside. (Question: why is it only the LAT 's headline that mentions that Time made a retraction too?) Media retractions are rare enough, but this case produced something rarer still: firings and resignations arising from poor journalism. Two producers were cut loose, who concluded, say the papers, that the journalists involved "ignored or minimized" information that conflicted with the nerve gas theory. Even in the retraction and the papers' coverage of the retraction there is plenty of residual bad journalism. The stories make it seem that the only indicating that all the key questions were raised the day after the story aired for what the mission was not, nobody seems at all interested in a coherent away from the story leaves plenty of worthwhile questions on the table: Was and disabled, on the grounds that under Medicaid, prescription drug coverage men but not for birth control or infertility treatments for women. And not, the Times quotes one source as saying, for medical equipment needed to keep quadriplegics and people with cerebral palsy out of nursing homes. The nuclear weapons program, who as part of his process of seeking asylum in the "Can you imagine a man with more skeletons in his closet?..." they held onto after World War II, a story that also gets front space at government had declared it would pay no more than half that sum, but also, the LAT points out, after several state and local governments, in defiance the old one at the time of the bombing. None of the reporting mentions it, but to his superiors about the vulnerability of his troops to hostile forces the driver of the water truck believed to have harbored the bomb deployed have been a faithful embassy employee, was found in the wreckage. The restrictions of the old one that was disbanded earlier this year, has already The paper says funds have come in from "Main Street, Wall Street and zealots who want to bring down the President. And this guy has no money. He's A staple newspaper feature is the academic convention piece, which features down into a big hotel in a big city because they're so terminally immersed in hotel, not one of them sure the others are really there too! But before you The New York Times leads with a sneak preview of the videotaped instead reading a prepared speech, the text of which the Times prints. minute?) The source for these leaks? "Lawyers with detailed knowledge of the its recession: lowering interest rates, slashing taxes, and throwing government constitution would not allow weapons exports and that he would "never consider" nonrefundable fee just to talk to him (this fee is not applied to charges for actual services), and you may have to offer character references. "If potential immunity, meaning that she may testify before a grand jury as early as next week. Her transactional immunity agreement guarantees that she can't be prosecuted for past perjury or witness tampering. (She can be prosecuted if she not ask her to lie, though the two discussed how to avoid cooperating House helped her write the infamous "Talking Points" memo. dignity," over the last six months. If Today's Papers ever musters any grace and dignity, he certainly hopes his friends won't find it "shocking." All of the major newspapers run page one stories on a tentative accord between the United Auto Workers and General Motors. Factories may rev up others will crop up again. Industry analysts think GM is the loser. Astonishing reports that GM plans to run its factories around the clock, thereby compensating for lost production, perhaps even recouping half its lost profits. macroeconomics textbook by quipping that the Fed's mission is "to take away the have secured a deal to grant the parliament greater powers in exchange for little power and little to offer each other. For each, just being seen with the largely anecdotal, and the paper refers to "an important minority of piece argues, investors do not view the recent decline as a "buying investments, consumer spending might fall, hurting the economy. Possible LAT reefers a story about other airlines' rush to steal Northwest's primarily by Northwest, will soon run out of flowers and fresh fish if the Cannibalism simultaneously achieves two ends (finding food and killing off a rival), so why isn't it more popular? Animals that feast on their own kind are more likely to eat harmful microbes than if they dined on a different species, and thus they are more prone to disease. The article nicely characterizes everybody's fronts.) The respective lead headlines focus on various strands of the embassy and sent around to the rear, where a grenade attack killed some been pointing right at the bomb site by the building's front gate, but all but bombing investigation. Many papers have been reporting that one focus so rescued them over a shot of a woman's body being loaded into a vehicle, a lifeless arm hanging out from under her shroud. The coverage reports that to get much coverage. The LAT front says that at a time when much of the suggests that the story of the woman who died shortly after being told that her insurance company would only cover a bone marrow transplant if she had it in the local hospital did not perform bone marrow transplants. And the health plan sent a nurse to accompany Garvey back to a suitable hospital. The Wall Street Journal reports that according to the latest Labor Dept. figures, the economy last month suffered the biggest loss of the local papers has taken to running the names, addresses, house descriptions average. No wonder four of those on the latest list persuaded the city water and Rep. Barney Frank (the top Democrat) announced the decision at a press three papers describe each and every point the committee discussed. Every article mentions the remarkable partisanship displayed behind those doors. cigar, while the LAT mentions the cigar and "detailed descriptions by musings.) None of the papers catches the irony of Republicans introducing sexual explicitness into the public sphere whilst Democrats fight to keep it paper has much more to say, since details of the deal are not yet available. Western officials had hoped. Instead, the surprise winner is an All three papers report that the Senate failed, by three votes, to override the president's veto of a ban on partial birth abortions. Got that? It means partial birth abortions remain legal. The veto has already been overridden by and Profit in Breeding Alpacas". Sound familiar? Maybe it's because the same (except apparently alpacas are more lucrative). Today's Papers checked and, astoundingly, the articles are written by different people. Next month: Three Secret Service agents testified before a federal grand jury yesterday, and the surprisingly swift development captured the leads at all three Service personnel to the courthouse for two hours of afternoon hearings. Such agrees to hear the government's case that Secret Service agents should not be "Disclosure of past events will not affect the President's relationship with heavy with remorse. "All of us are guilty," he said (the LAT uses a and cellar where the executions took place, in order to eradicate a potentially the hopes of organizers who wanted the event to provide a grand gesture of dissenting, the United States joins such human rights luminaries as China, packed with drugs, and the team coach has since admitted to giving illegal drugs to his riders "to optimize performance under strict medical control." The lead also looks at the popular reaction, summing it up as revulsion at that over the weekend there was "no ground swell" in Congress for impeachment, although noting that prominent members from both parties called for censure of itself, this means nothing, since they might have already thought he was an who puts his interests above the nation's cannot lead." the timely payment of salaries and benefits, and that it is unacceptable for The Wall Street Journal 's "The Outlook" is sounding what could be an early warning alarm for a new round of international economic crisis not skeptics about the euro have been buying pounds as a refuge. response is obvious: How could Drudge have been so consistently right if he merger of the nation's two main teachers' unions by the membership of one of diplomatic observers. The patrols, explains the paper, were first proposed by who stresses that the two countries are now working together to defuse the in response to increased attempts to limit teacher rights and to give students publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools. But, both papers say, the of urban poverty. With Medicare, it's tended to be rural communities with few a return to skimping care for the poor and elderly. The Wall Street Journal reports that the semiconductor laid off workers or tipped upcoming bad earnings include, says the paper, has decided he will not submit an interim report on his investigation of will, said an aide, submit a report only if he determines there is substantial information that crimes have been committed. The aide also opined, reports the current policy against the use of computer encryption technology the feds are finance, the White House is said to be loath to oppose either her or Louis cuts and banking reforms, and to open up its domestic markets to more foreign do these things, but as a result of his party's severe election losses, he restaurants, describes the two most likely successors as respectively "spicy" electorate's mood. One man seems to speak for many when he says his One question not answered in the coverage: Why does reform for Japan mean million, a sum the paper notes he may have trouble collecting even if awarded, security firms and twelve exchanges began the first day of two weeks of simulating what it would be like to run the markets as the nines turn over. The test so far has excluded small securities firms and international markets, but front page is a reminder that you are at least sometimes right: It details how life three years after hitting bottom as a cocaine binger. The Journal 's "Work Week" column reports that according to a survey on their need for meetings. Nine out of ten say it has also reduced the need for paperwork and has improved overall productivity. But nearly half the execs trend "Today's Papers" is quite sure the Cross pen company deeply deplores. After Today's Papers: Summary Judgment wraps up the reviews of the reviews. press conference that he still has the moral authority required to remain in perjury. The LAT reports that most of the questions posed at the "part of a determined effort by the White House to change the subject," and globalism, by the time the LAT gets around to the remark, the reader is of his actions and voiced no protest as the House moved further down the track man resigned to a process bigger than he is. The Post notes that when Republicans that some of the material suggested for imminent release is too reminding attendees that the House had already voted for full disclosure, and that pulling back now would only lead to news leaks. Also, both the Post acknowledged a 1960s extramarital affair and that the White House denied the inside of the home of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. dizzying upswing, more students are studying abroad, theatrical ticket sales are up, as is opera attendance, plus pubic radio stations have tripled since that may presage a whole new dimension of tobacco scandal. Citing internal memos from the world's two largest tobacco companies, the piece details their response: "Since we must comply with local laws and regulations in every country in which we do business, we expect that there has been no improper conduct in the countries that you have referenced." Not exactly "We didn't do Everybody leads with yesterday's bad day in the financial markets. The its business section with such lines as "Crisis Hits Home" and "World Economic Troubles Arrive 'On Our Doorstep.'" In the same Chicken Little spirit, the pass up the usual trading floor desperation pix in favor of shots of full rescue packages in the past year probably deepens the rift among Republicans in Congress over whether to give the organization a fresh infusion of federal Perhaps the scariest feature of the market turmoil served up by the papers is the realization that for all their new analytical tools, those in the business are no more capable of cognitive significance than in the days of you can withstand the pain and you've chosen good stocks, you should come out reportedly confessed his role to the feds. He is said to have admitted that he any bombers would expose them to further terrorism. "You'd think," the paper overseas. But the Post doesn't tell us what then happened to them in the men in the same age bracket. And the highest rates of infection were among "women across the country." It's interesting to see what the Times means by that phrase. Here is the complete listing, in order of appearance, of the occupations of the women quoted in the story: shareholder activist, novelist, author and editor, graduate school dean, volunteer, hair salon owner, university public relations executive, producer, writer, English professor. Apparently, the Times couldn't find any women who are secretaries or raising the retirement age would enhance the solvency of the Social Security subpoenas, supported by an appeals court decision last week impugning the notion of "protective privilege," targets agents with far more intimate knowledge of presidential behavior and movements than the uniformed Secret against an air carrier, because of maintenance lapses the agency alleges, catching up with some dual career couples it wrote about more than twenty years ago. Nice idea, but the piece turns out to be one part sociological reporting and twenty parts nationally distributed resume and family album. Whoopee for much good stuff to read, "Today's Papers" suggests the following rule of thumb: Always skip a story that starts off with a woman's valiant struggle to keep off her cellular phone for a few days for the sake of her family. conservative religious groups. The groups say they have been inspired by the of the media "to forget about news and focus on themselves." And she has no difficulty in culling support for her thesis from the recent list of hot could have used to write about "news," but didn't. And indeed, today's column be gathering to reenter their town on the heels of the military assault. One elderly woman clutching a small bag of her belongings gives this situation to move the map that the Times runs inside to before the jump, where the first appeals in these appearances for the expansion of individual liberties and his challenging them. The paper also points out that his many last minute speech rewrites meant that translators couldn't adequately prepare, with the upshot The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column tells how federal worker unions continue to battle for pay matching the private sector, and cites something wrong in the figuring here: How many private sector employees do you Today leads with the manufacturer's withdrawal from the market of a It was their first joint public appearance since the "rooftop session" at Abbey pollutants than they are supposed to. There is very little explanation in these because of potentially lethal interactions with numerous other medications. The the medication, which is used for chest pain and high blood pressure by about brutal suppression of political opponents and who had no designated successor, dictator's defense chief was sworn in as the new leader, and for the moment anyhow, the democrats and other political prisoners remain behind bars and in from consumer activists of higher fees and poorer service, but also notes that while at large in the jungle. And here's an interesting question today's newspaper accounts don't address: Why would there be a commando raid to LAT go lighter on the details, but spend more time stressing the significance of House Democrats who want the President to accept some form of lying and cheating, while French papers expressed their country's predominant troubles as yet another setback in an already difficult summer. what "oral sex" is. Although "ask your mother" seems like an appealing response for dads, the paper cites "therapists" who say parents should discuss the rejection of the latter could mean the failure of Western diplomats' peace An LAT front page piece claims that despite promises to break up out reforms it agreed to as part of last years' international bail out. bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the nation's economy continues to suffer, with the lower and middle economic classes taking the hardest hit. precludes the public disclosure of any dialogue from the cockpit Trump: The Art of the Comeback. No stranger to scandal and hard times, Trump advises the President to rid his mind of troublesome women by dumping his impressive numbers of people off its welfare rolls and into jobs. The findings harsh treatment of women and its involvement in drug trafficking, but goes on for international recognition and aid. There is no evidence, says the percent raise on top of that for the following year. The story makes two employees earn much less than their counterparts in the private sector even though there is much evidence to the contrary. Thus the piece mentions that the up costing much more because it increases federal pension payouts, which are ruminations of a few hundred clerks who make their decisions without much in competent and committed individual," reads the woman's INS rejection letter, doesn't show "that her contributions are significantly above any other member of the education profession" or that they would "provide a prospective benefit his career from a controversy over his lifting material from a book, longtime reporting that there was cheering in the Globe newsroom when the In the days since The Speech, the papers have been fairly spattered with papers themselves. Many of them know that they are harboring on their staffs fiction artists and plagiarists. Today's Papers knows about a few of them, print their names here if it comes to that. So Today's Papers issues this Times lead with the continuing political and economic turmoil in been picked clean of such items as toothpaste, butter, and toilet paper. The LAT also goes high with this observation, mentioning shortages of reforms by disguising himself and walking out among the people. "But," the legislator is quoted, "you'd better disguise yourself really well. You'll be in she said, "You managed to do it. Look at the empty shop counters." parliament and hold new elections, but the LAT alone reports a further Here's the week's biggest stealth news story: come fall, both of the planet's largest nuclear powers could be considering throwing out their presidents. although married, admitted having an "improper relationship" with a female grounds that he is corrupting young people. (Oh, he's the one.) The resignation The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of black female architects in the country has doubled in the last ten years. But the raw been useful if the item had also mentioned the raw numbers of whites, white because under the reform the states get a fixed amount of federal money no matter how much they cut their rolls. Some states have, says the paper, used the money to start new welfare services, but many others are diverting the money to education or tax relief, or just saving it. The upshot: welfare now (hitting that partition with your head is a leading cause of passenger injuries) and always request a receipt (most receipts give the cab's number). Today's Papers would add: immediately upon entry tell the driver that speeding medical center that a rectal procedure he underwent during his recent treatment for prostate problems was "just not natural, unless maybe you're Barney since The Speech, which include his declaration that impeachment would require available to the public, but that the supporting evidence will be kept trained "tens of thousands of terrorists operating in more than a dozen countries." Question: if this is so, then how is it that there was virtually no The papers report that in the midst of his country's economic crisis, relations with financiers and with the Communists in Parliament may help deflate the widespread calls for his own departure. Everybody points out that presidential competitor. The papers report that despite the upheaval, the mentioned that the major growth in the Catholic Church is now taking place Being a celebrity often means you get for free what ordinary people have to pay for, even though you can afford it and they can't. So for instance, Tom it's not just the studios that are complicit. For years, the main column on the Property," which chronicles the real estate doings of the glitterati. Now, if pay a hundred bucks or so for a tiny little buried ad, but if you're say (as in paper leads the section with ten paragraphs about your house, including mention of the neighborhood, the asking price and the names of the realtors to It probably took a presidential sex confession and a transcontinental cruise surveys to determine which cigarette brands underage smokers prefer. The news, claims that while inflation remains down, prices for many products are are most popular with minors. The executive order directs the Department of essentials (food, gas, cars) are fairly cheap. But prices in the service sector overcharges: video rentals, legal fees, theme park admissions, and pay phone behind schedule and still not ready, largely because of the company's politically heated match was marked by excellent sportsmanship from fans and that it handed its opponents not only trinkets of goodwill, but also the match Today leads with more news on the two girls switched at birth. The The LAT calls the provisions of the campaign finance bill "the most skirt regulation. Despite approval, the bill still faces competition from other House bills, and even if passed is not expected to win approval from the tale. Latest news: The two girls' respective guardians have agreed to maintain President has told the truth about this and he will continue to do so." offers the clearest explanation of this legal maneuvering.) outcome that probability would predict, can identify cases where a series of Nobody agrees on the lead today. The New York Times leads with the various natural calamities plaguing the country right now: pledged to provide relief groups and international monitors with access to return there. However he did not, observes the paper, agree to withdraw his genuine, it's beyond curious that nowhere does the story mention that he is and is not being hauled before an international tribunal to answer for them primarily because he is a head of state. This context is also missing from the military's doubts about being able to operate effectively in and around particular, explains the paper, there's the fear that if the yen continues to drop, China will abandon its pledge not to devalue its currency, which could seventh paragraph about the desire for Japan to "stimulate and deregulate" its economy and bail out its insolvent banks. There is the comment that Prime there is no detail on what they were or why they are considered According to the story, men stalk men for the same reasons they stalk women: doesn't say) seeking damages and asking that she be prevented from making interview or book deals allowing her to profit from the death. The story also that the number of disciplinary actions taken against physicians for of the doctors disciplined during this time span were allowed to return to in the fields of psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, and family and general The Wall Street Journal reports that in congressional the current merger environment and indirectly criticized the government's case In his survey of the recently released House and Senate financial disclosure leads with a report, sourced to senior White House advisors, that President for months been secretly dissuading United Nations weapons teams from making and legally perilous moment of his presidency," and says he has been conducting practice sessions in which his lawyers are questioning him and designing body parts doesn't include the mouth, it doesn't count oral sex as sexual Another bad reaction will come from women's groups if they ever notice that chemical, biological and nuclear status. But the Post lead is a bombshell because it shows inner weapons components and supporting documents. After a second such caution from investigators are looking for a missing assistant on a water truck thought to obliterated in the blast. The paper says the security officials strongly Dept. to look into whether banks are violating the Fair Housing Act in their acceptance of mortgage applications. The paper cites new data showing that the whites. But the Journal should have noted that these aren't the relevant are the relative rejection rates for blacks and white of the same degree of Back to that Post lead for a moment: it features something "Today's Papers" applauds and would like to see more of: a clear explanation of the motivations of the story's unidentified sources: "officials who regarded the abandoned leads as the most promising in years and objected to what they trade by smuggling large quantities of oil into Turkey. The smuggling involves thousands of tanker trucks openly transporting millions of tons of fuel along raises cigarette prices nor offers tobacco companies legal indemnification but which would take aim at teen smoking by revoking the drivers' licenses of teenagers caught with tobacco, as well as the determination of numerous state attorneys general to pursue their individual lawsuits. further and promote deregulation." The paper notes that the government has provided no further details of a course of action. The Post also notes that a deputy treasury secretary and the president of the New York Federal main issue they confront is what to do with all the country's banks, which are saddled with billions in bad loans. The less ambitious plan being discussed focuses mainly on ways to help the banks resolve bad loans, the more ambitious, banks. Things "Today's Papers" finds missing from the coverage: any mention or explanation of whether or not Japan has, like the United States, any sort of become a big issue in health care policy debates, but which is still fairly unknown to most patients and voters: in general you can't sue your specialists. Bills changing the situation are working their way through the House and Senate. Critics, who include in their number House Majority Leader coverage. The argument figures, says the story, to get louder during the fall vilified in that ad campaign may have helped his White House chances. "They've determined that she had fabricated people and quotations in four of her columns acknowledges her "misdeeds" in her farewell column today. The Post account says that some Globe staffers are worried that the dismissal of Smith, a black woman, might have racial repercussions. Question: Do such worries have anything to do with the fact that although both stories mention the recently health insurers who deny coverage to sick people in violation of federal law. guarantees people losing group health care coverage alternative access to individual policies regardless of any preexisting medical condition, and provides for uninterrupted coverage for those moving from one job to another. The paper reports that government officials are concerned that health insurance companies are circumventing the law by discouraging sales to certain individuals, charging very high premiums or penalizing insurance agents who sell policies to those with preexisting conditions. In response, says the The LAT sums up the trouble looming for both sides and the general The Wall Street Journal weighs in with the only other potential participating in the paper's latest semiannual forecasting survey named the hit here during the next six to nine months in the form of slower production and reduced employment. But the economists agree that these changes will not be drastic because our low interest rates and low inflation mean we can keep more valuable to the reader if they included a summary of what the sun, racing across the harmless West upon Trigger, is a picture as invincible to time as a childhood memory." Still, the obituaries make it clear that both business today: wholesome fame based on actual wholesomeness. investigation concluded that the Pentagon's former deputy Inspector General, paper reports that the case is being watched closely in Congress, where there are concerns that officers get treated more leniently than enlisted men. There are other hotter background issues that the paper could have also mentioned: In service members get a different sexual deal than females? And, how, given his scientist who interviewed the man for an hour, "the most elementary facts about content, which basically say that the Post should be written so that it could be read by a family together at the breakfast table. But it's still surprising to learn that actual Post reporters actually internalize the Web to look up the evangelical concept of "rapture," he got religious sites away for keeps unless he spoke to the court in a particularly informative or emotion. But the LAT says that upon entering the courtroom, he broke into at the bombing site testified that whenever "I see these mothers with empty arms, I wonder, was that your baby I kissed on his way to heaven?" and protective privilege back to the regular appeals court process is generally constitutional crisis of the first magnitude. There is more divergence about what this does to the course of the case. The LAT says that this might Court might well end up hearing the case "by month's end." The LAT "Column One" fascinates today with a story of provides the best database in the world for trying to isolate genes responsible "culled" by a plague and a natural disaster, and keeps excellent medical records (including a tissue sample from every autopsy conducted in the country to sell public stock shares within a year and if the science pays off, could but, the paper reports, any effective treatments it creates will be dispensed point about this new leg of the arms race. Previously, it had generally been really build their bombs to address security concerns. (When was the last time problem, conventional medicine doesn't work. It takes large doses of thought massless too, in fact has mass. The papers assure us this is bombings, to shut some embassies in order to update their security. The upcoming report to Congress will focus on evidence of possible impeachable acts to a bomb threat. The paper adds that the embassy in the Ivory Coast is cutting much, with its suggestion that all embassies are being affected. Better is the produce a separate and more inclusive document for the judicial panel that produce much partisan acrimony during the fall elections. were given the strictest sentence available to juveniles, for shooting to death four students and a teacher: confinement in a juvenile detention center until apologized but also said he meant to shoot over everybody's head. closed to the public and press, but that the judge in this case had allowed a more open hearing. And the nation's newspaper editors seem to have likewise feature pictures of them. Just what are the papers' policies in this area? It's Shouldn't a war memorial be built to last longer than the war it's a memorial year, you get access to a doctor who, when you get sick, advises you how to best navigate the health care bureaucracy. The paper says such a development care might depend even more than it does today on a patient's wealth. in the capital these days and when it does it barely causes a ripple." The lead with public and political reaction to The Speech, which is also the subject of the Wall Street Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece. The Three of the fronts feature pix of the First Family walking across the White House lawn to start what would have to count as the worst family vacation in history. Buddy is there too, on a longer leash than his master will be on for The LAT draws the blinds the morning after and sees some members of was clear the sordid spectacle would not be put to rest quickly." Looming large The paper points out that Boxer's comments were surprisingly negative given reaction among Republicans as "unusually tame." The LAT says instant statement and wanted the matter dropped. Similar observations are given to notice that this shows there is a serious divergence between what they and the health risks of breast feeding in the undeveloped world, the location of said one of the men is a pivotal bomb plot participant. All three men are bin Laden runs and finances a terrorist network, which pulled off the embassy peace accord, issued a telephoned statement admitting that it set off the bomb apologized for the deaths, saying that they occurred only because its for sole access to a prime property. The Times quotes the headline of an Everybody leads with a federal judge's dismissal yesterday of the tax fraud his authority and strayed too far from his original mandate of investigating view of some of the papers that the ruling was a quite personal assessment of seizure as "the quintessential fishing expedition." The papers note that the adverse ruling is the latest in a string of Most of the stories get a little lost among all these trees, with the LAT alone in high up clearly sighting the forest: the ruling will impose its will on their country. A Times piece inside says the show (mostly of local, not national officials) unthinkable just a few years ago. Two A few weeks back, the LAT reported that a women in the advanced throes of childbirth asked for an epidural anesthetic to relieve her pain, only to be told by the attending nurse that she couldn't have one unless she paid for it on the spot. The suffering woman offered to write a check or use a credit card, but no, said the nurse, it had to be cash. So the woman went without. Today, the paper's front reports that the hospital has apologized to policy of epidural anesthesia to women in labor on demand, regardless of their The Wall Street Journal "Business Bulletin" reports that the percent of the general populace think too much power is in the hands of a few information for a story on economic issues, over half the respondents usually privately owned residences, and told families there that home ownership is an Times had trouble resisting the observation that it's an investment pledge to testify "completely and truthfully" at his grand jury questioning in awesome impact of the GM shutdown, the LAT notes that it shaved a full President's testimony will be transmitted live to the federal courthouse, President "maintained a casual, unaffected appearance" before reporters, express public frustration with government. Critics claim the process is too the legislative process." While no one wants to abolish the initiatives An LAT front page article reveals a "serious slump" among dozens of the industry faces another round of wage reductions and layoffs. This past through plant closings, forced retirements, and pay cuts in the once unstoppable Valley. The LAT reports that one industry has thrived during Times lead with the day's dominant story: a gunman's shooting spree in a Capitol corridor that killed two police officers and wounded a tourist. Details been investigated by the Secret Service for making threats against President police officer and mortally wounding a second officer whose own shots brought fallen officers, including their marital status (both were married) and number Counsel without forcing the first ever appearance of an acting President before a grand jury. All three papers mention that discussions were initiated by fresh been "drawn up and ready for delivery" to the president. The LAT prize: a ruling party divided between young reformers and conservative lawmakers and Japan's worst economic recession in fifty years. "vengeful" and cite her as the driving force behind the murder of the Today lead is about a forthcoming government report saying that human tobacco bill is "dead in the water." The top national story at the New York Times Services will issue reports calling for reforms in the way human medical tests are monitored. The reports do not claim widespread abuses of test subjects but say that the increased speed of research created by the hothouse competition among drug companies has led to weaknesses in the ways safety is monitored. No one, says the paper, in government or industry knows how many people take part in medical trials or how many people are injured or killed in them. The story says the reforms the reports call for include providing more education for researchers and preventing conflicts of interest, but doesn't elaborate. This vaccine experiment on subjects that's not enmeshed up to its eyeballs in the conflict between company profits and subject safety? president's party has picked up seats in a midterm election only once since the competitive. And because voters are very pleased with the economy, most of the -seat margin, even a tiny wind, not necessarily a gale force, can make all Yesterday it was reported that a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on p.18) on the LAT front? Could it possibly be because the story was According to the Wall Street Journal 's "The Outlook," one of the most shoppers. This fact is helping to remind us that the traditional biz world's is quoted saying: "There is nothing more terrifying than a consumer who knows The Journal also reports on the hottest new recreational pursuit of off the boxes as the gems flow. The first player with a line checked off wins, is popular at companies supervising human medical trials. day) and the papers have been full of his greatness. One wonderful line quoted hit off the gunpowder fumes on his fingertips, b) blowing kisses or c) throwing school districts may not be held responsible for sexual relations between teachers and students unless school officials know about and fail to stop the recipients that will require private health plans treating them to guarantee access to specialists, the provision of translators when needed and medical record confidentiality. The order also grants Medicare beneficiaries the right to obtain information about the financial condition of a private heath plan and for student victims of sexual abuse and harassment to win damages. The LAT adds that this will be true even at schools that fail to establish sexual harassment policies and fail to give students a way to complain about said the decision gives school districts an incentive not to take steps to protect students. The Times lead editorial says the decision "perversely deprived" students and their families of an effective legal remedy. The "sexually taunted, groped or harassed." Everybody points out that the Court will be ruling soon on the similar question of employer responsibilities regarding supervisors' sexual harassment of workers in a job setting. But there is another bit of context missing from all accounts: what responsibilities the law currently assigns to school districts with regard to other sorts of teacher off the market after being implicated in the deaths of four patients and in the manufacturer took the action. The papers all observe this is the latest in a string of prescription drug recalls, raising the issue of whether such drugs back home to see via the television coverage that a changing modern China can the independent counsel. She previously allowed her apartment to be searched According to the Journal 's "Work Week" column, a survey indicates future. On average, the docs surveyed were worth more than half a million that in point terms, yesterday was the second biggest up move ever, but far other "notable strategists" (the Post 's phrase) that investors should it. On the other hand, the paper dedicates most of a paragraph to passing along the human side, with a tale of a broker abruptly coming back in to work from a family vacation, and two stories about brokers making reassuring calls to their professionals were dressing differently at the office yesterday, to allow for Times includes a paragraph in its coverage (albeit after the jump) about how "specialists" were functioning as the buyers of last resort during fundamentals, running a piece noting that the three economic reports released remained robust in August. "Overall it's hard to see global economic collapse thinking the stock market's turmoil will not cause a recession. court because of apparently misleading answers he gave before her about his Today's Papers experienced its very own market correction yesterday when several readers pointed out (okay, several readers and one boss) that the if any, "circuit breakers" based on excessive market moves have nowadays. But to report that they are soldiering on. In sheer dollars, says the paper, few towns have benefited as much from the Dow. The piece is accompanied by a leads with the decision by Republican leaders in the Senate to abandon their push for a big tax cut this year. Following its lead earlier in the week about Today leads with more information about how lax government supervision overhaul of the laws governing immigrant farm workers that would make it easier opposed the measure, says the paper, citing a recent government finding that there's no farm labor shortage. It's unclear, says the LAT what will happen to the measure in the House, where Republicans are divided: some want to help agribusiness hiring, while others worry that workers brought in tend to the Census Bureau, there's been more residential building going on in the than a third faster than the population. Among the causes cited: the The Times says one of the main political facts that has scared top enforcement numbers are "shocking," and that the federal agency charged with overseeing the homes "has failed." Meanwhile, the paper says, the agency head biggest criminal fine ever in a food injury case--$1.5 million. The company's removal of the fetus' brain. The Senate is thought to be a few votes short of sentence: five years in prison, getting whipped and being fined more than In light of those cloned mice "Today's Papers" has taken to calling the are in the same ballpark. Denominations that take a cautious but not condemning the religions' doctrine of reincarnation, but doesn't satisfactorily explain why this is thought to support the liberal view. After all, clones are not, making the rounds, "Will a Secret Service agent take a subpoena for the *Department of Corrections* If to err is human, yesterday's column was The lead at the New York Times details the launching of an organized international rescue operation, replacing the heroic but chaotic efforts to article to the story. The biggest problems are blood shortages and dwindling equipment and supplies. There was little reported progress in the search for happened months later when the World Trade Center was bombed. Dubbed too alarmist for their time, the papers were "quietly buried," says the retreated inside for the first time in weeks. Savor it: she won't stay there a breakdown in consumer protection as people invested in a smorgasbord of incompetent companies. ("Investors could even buy a pension from the big with Social Security, the article makes few links to the challenges facing deeply disappointed to discover that the article was really about a Times slug, the president fessed up to an "inappropriate relationship." Bennet points out in the second paragraph of his paper's lead story, the "wrong," but never used the word "sex." The LAT observes that the speech "legally correct" even though in that deposition, he testified he couldn't that entirely to his lieutenants. The papers report that, according to one of refused to answer some questions he found too personal. This despite, the completely." The Post says some sources have told it that in the grand Given the subject matter, a certain amount of waffling was to be expected, but what, according to the papers, surprised many (including some White House decision to devalue the ruble and to default on billions of dollars in debt. means the overall amount of debt is reduced and terms for repaying it become accomplishments: a stable currency and low inflation. And given the increasing connections between markets, there is the threat posed to the currencies and Inside, the papers report that authorities have arrested five people for neither admitted responsibility for the attack nor implicated anybody else. that continuing strikes at GM could have effects throughout the economy. a taste of the power that could be turned on him if he persists in attacks on Research Council offers the Post this response: "He's setting up a false dichotomy. He's claiming that the debate is between a policy of engagement and a policy of isolationism, when in fact the debate is about what kind of engagement we're going to have." The LAT runs this on the front, while for a large tax cut this year, are pressuring Congress' budget forecasting arm, deficit and its recent understatement of the budget surplus. The story reports settlements have been reached in a case in which without permission or of the disclosure had originally tried to expel the sailor, has agreed to allow with the disclosure violated the terms of its own service agreement, has apologized to him and agreed to pay him damages. The sailor has declined to discuss his sexual orientation, and so the coverage of the story has dwelt on the electronic privacy issue, but this episode is also relevant to the Navy's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The whole thing started when a third party saw that the man's email profile mentioned his hobby of "collecting pictures of telling has nothing to do with what common sense could easily and and hence has nothing to do with protecting unit cohesion, which could easily then the current superficially more tolerant policy immediately reduces to the old intrusive one, because investigations would become so easy to set into fabricated. And the Times segues into doubt about the effectiveness in the Times suggest that here at least is one department of the paper years before the Gulf War and occurred because the Airbus was mistaken for an paper without being checked? And if so, isn't this just as bad as a similar The big story today is what happens when blue tape meets red tape, with the puts that story on the top front, but goes instead with Congress' likely decision to transfer control of satellite exports back to the State Dept. from the provision is part of the defense budget bill, which makes it politically hard, Contrary to expectations, yesterday the Judiciary committee did not release didn't have much to do with the tape itself, but rather with all the other Democrats are trying to screen out as much material as possible, holding it to be not probative but merely inflammatory, while the Republicans are opting for maximum disclosure, arguing that the full House has already voted for just that. It's widely reported that the Republicans are winning all the particular fate. The LAT notes that the politics aren't all black and white, with two House Democrats (not on the Judiciary committee) calling for the immediate calls his "betrayal" that she recently turned down an invitation from him to contrasts of that deposition with the president's later and often conflicting understanding of the meaning of the oath to tell "the whole truth." There is much reporting in the papers of the fallout from the revelation magazine's disclosure.") The House Republican leadership, the papers report, campaign. And there is plenty of reporting on Capitol Hill fears about who's concern is that those running for office won't be asked what they've done, but story at the Post refer to the newly poisoned atmosphere as "sexual harsher, running the headline: "Panel on Race Urges Nothing but More Talk." hard lately) report inside that dissidents attempting to register a democratically oriented political party in various parts of China were detained commitment of schools to excellence in teaching. The writer is a retired Navy submarine skipper with bachelor's and master's engineering degrees, twenty graduate credits in education, and college teaching experience. He explains that earlier this year he applied for a teaching job, sending his resume and interviews. For God's sake, if a middle or high school principal in the area reads this item, get in touch with the Post and give this guy a fact she now omits from her contest resume. "I didn't," she tells the paper, "want anybody to have any preconceptions about who I am." tied for first place in the National League pennant race with about a week to go in the season. (This was in the days when there were no divisional playoffs, let alone wild cards. If you won the regular season title, you went to the World Series.) The two teams met for a game at the Polo Grounds and went to the was digging hard for second base, swerved away (he never touched second) and started running for the Giants' locker room in center field as soon as he saw all vulgar snickers, please.) According to the rules of baseball, the game the ball (actually, people who were there say he got another ball from the dugout, since the original ball had disappeared into the crowd), grabbed an umpire, and stepped on second base, which in theory completed a force play on game a tie that would have to be replayed. A week or so later, it was, and this base and instead headed for their clubhouses. A month or so before, in a game runner who had left the field at game's end, but that time the umpire had In suddenly invoking the letter of the law, then, the umpires were requiring The community's understanding of the rule that a runner must always touch the base to which he is forced was that this rule didn't apply when a game was won to do. This may not mean he was right to do what he did. But there's an argument to be made that when custom systematically changes the meaning of a to invoke the original meaning arbitrarily and without warning. All of which brings us back to New York City's crackdown last week against shopping or business districts) is customary throughout the city. On my street, orderly and systematic community response to the reality that people need a place to put their cars while the streets are being cleaned. By descending on selected residential neighborhoods and ticketing all those the law as written. But by doing so without notice, they're catching people breaking rules that the community had, in a sense, decided didn't need to be enforced. (I exaggerate here, since the "community" is the community of car owners.) And insofar as much of our everyday lives depends on knowing that was served that as of a certain date, things were going to be different. And if you're going to hold people to the letter of the law, that seems like the way Post and LAT lead with the military's tightening grip on All the papers run roundup articles assessing the defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in terms of international prestige, foreign policy, President 41-year Senate career: because the Senate didn't debate long enough to allay his doubts about the treaty, but it was too important to vote down. dismissing the parliament, suspending the constitution, and proclaiming himself chief executive. The LAT and Wall Street Journal note that although many citizens and some central bank froze foreign capital for a week. Taking advantage of its later deadline, the LAT reports that the State Department finally recognized flying back to the country and forbade his plane to land; as the plane ran low on fuel, the army commandeered first the air control tower and then the is no doubt in our minds that the world will never accept military rule, but we are in for the long haul." He adds: "We have decided we must cleanse a political system that allows corrupt people to decide the destiny of our monkeys has determined that their brains add neurons to the cerebral cortex even in adulthood. Such a finding would uproot decades of conventional wisdom, which holds that higher mammals add brain cells only in childhood. If the discovery translates to the human brain (the Times is optimistic), it turn out to be a long string of continually produced neurons that record that any regenerative potential in the brain would have to be massively Journal says the merger is a blow to the Pentagon, which had been trying necessary, the paper argues, by technical inefficiencies revealed during the character, Gore struggled with his decision for many months in the summer of say he took some risks, but was kept out of harm's way by Army brass and never going to divinity school to atone for my sins." (He did, for a year.) During century of ill treatment by the sinners of New York and "restore the earth's One issue about masculinity that intrigues me revolves around the experience women were allowed to be taken care of, as part of caring for others; men fact, this traditional image of masculinity is nonsense. Imagine, for instance, someone at the beginning of an affair declaring, "Don't worry, I can take care of myself, I will never lean on you." You would soon lose interest; after all, experience, have a great deal of trouble saying "I need you." It seems weak, of their trouble. Again, I think economics matters in this silence today. The ideology of work in modern society puts great emphasis on independence, on agent, you don't establish much emotional connection to other people. It's the same problem: If you don't acknowledge you need them, they are not going to giving people more independence; as she herself has shown, experiences such as working from home via the computer often plunge people into situations where they are more tightly monitored than if they were working in a traditional office. So perhaps part of the trouble with conceiving of strength as autonomy is that it makes people feel actually worse about the tangled web of dependencies that in fact rule their lives. Men in particular. fall under the spell of this silence. In fact, making issues of dependence overt and legitimate requires a great deal of personal strength: You need to know what you need, and you need to figure out whether someone else can help masculinity, though the problem surfaces in her interviews again and again. citizens. Stiffed is blessedly free of jargon, and full of telling detail. Its analysis is meant to provoke debate, and will continue to do so. I Readers should know that, in the interest of providing an experiential base Bridge and back yesterday evening. Prior to the run, we gathered at my First off, isn't cookie dough the wrong association for someone who presumably cookie dough right before running? This bar possessed a floury dryness that but for my money they were all bad, and mostly in the same way as the cookie dough: chalky, a chore to get down, bland tasting, eliciting tremendous Cookie Dough was and more. So much more, in fact, that I spat it out before I swallowed it. I rarely, verging on never, spit out food, yet this was so was, but not cookies 'n creme, I can for sure tell you that) that I could not countenance digesting it. By far the worst bar we tried. bars we ate, but it can't be ruled out. Halfway through the run, I tried our that one is meant to squeeze into one's mouth in the midst of an exercise session. Power Gel's consistency was like a more viscous yogurt. I ask you, can there be any food one wants less in the middle of a long jog than yogurt, only definitely a little thicker in consistency. We also tried the Jog Mate Protein nothing so much as pudding, in a tube. Actually, more like just pudding skin. Today I feel pretty good, other than the quad. I guess most of my muscles recovered, perhaps thanks to the tube. But what I want to know is, is there any popular form of pork barreling, in this round of the spending fracas. designed to leave Social Security untouched and placate seniors. According to million people took to the streets urging a swift peace between the ruling brought about by default. Since Congress and the White House can't agree on how to spend budget surpluses, most of the money will likely go to pay off the component of the debt could be paid off in 10-to-15 years, putting downward politicians say such measures benefit the majority, and help speed bills through the House and Senate, critics feel that earmarking undermines the most of the money has already been allocated, rendering the administrators judicial reform, human rights, drug trafficking, and agricultural policy. The conciliatory overtures began early this year, after nearly four decades of violence, when the government removed security forces from a large international verification committee monitor the zone. Talks began again on observer who claims that the election signals the "end of the era of the of his predecessor, included a fiscal policy that helped stem the nation's hyperinflation. He also pledges to combat the corruption and tax evasion that have plagued previous administrations, an angle emphasized inside the him as a reluctant but incredibly effective fund raiser, whose outsider image, distance him from Al Gore's more centrist policies. The biggest problem with is a former pro ballplayer. It's an interesting assertion, but one that should be supported by more than the reader's own sexist preconceptions. Without facts preferred Gore because of his sculpted jaw and tight buns. Most pundits are skeptical of Dole's claim that she simply couldn't raise Dole's supporters went to Bush and note that nationally Bush leads his gender gap between Bush and Gore (Bush has a 21-point lead among men, Gore a cut and the Republicans should be ashamed of themselves.") says there is "a very great possibility that I will run" for the party "and I wouldn't do it unless I thought I could win" both the nomination and the his highest priority. He wants a "substantial tax cut in line with the top marriage and gays in the military? His instinct is yes, he says, but since he's heartland and to military advisers to get their views. He claims that his life separate independent counsel should have been appointed to look into Flytrap. The broad scope of his investigation saved the taxpayers the cost of another also thinks that it was a mistake for him to continue practicing law while serving as independent counsel; he speculates that, had he not allowed himself to practice privately from the start, he might not have been able to accept his Fox conducts a charming interview with a reflective, avuncular communicate his sense of humor, his empathy, and his religious faith as well as campaign, he says, "Yeah, yeah. Am I bitter about it? Not anymore. I didn't can't help but like the guy") and threatens to sue Fortunate Son expunge his son's putative drug record. (To read Ballot Box's take on the here.) He says the press has gone overboard in its investigation of justified the media's rapaciousness, he laments. He plans to parachute from a Bush Administration employee) Tony Snow praises him for his "superhuman I had led a very sheltered life and my closest friend [upon joining eyes, on the deck of the carrier, a chief petty officer sliced into three parts In our family we have two sons in public life. Both of them can The language front has been unusually quiet today: The only news I see is two languages, arguing that bilingualism will better prepare workers for the with language issues, having authorized a set of official languages and having gone on record as supporting a variety of local languages as well. I assume the languages are difficult to spread. Quite a few universal languages have been one's native tongue). But even if we had a universal language, it would soon begin to break up into minority tongues. Babel myth notwithstanding, it's quite possible that multilingualism has always been part of the human condition. give up their first language. Then we turn around and make them take a immigrants give up are not useful ones, or ones with literary cultures worth argued that multilingualism was actually a cause of mental retardation. Even more thoughtful educators claimed that immigrants should give up their language for English because children didn't have room in their heads for more than one For a variety of reasons, language has come to stand in for other issues: It can mask xenophobia, signal patriotism, or reveal membership in an elite or a stigmatized group. One reader asks why we don't discuss how politicians and advertisers twist language to get across their point of view or sell their product. But in a larger sense, that is exactly what all of us do when we use of saying anything. It bothers most of us that not all language use is fair or ethical, that it may be deceptive or an outright lie, or what we perceive as a mistake or usage error. But lying, deception, and lack of ethics, not to mention real and imagined mistakes, much as we may deplore them, are natural language use, to make them more precise, to make them more honest, but it doesn't help to blame the language for failings we perceive in language In fact, there are many times when language should not be precise, or even honest. Think about linguistic behavior at funerals, for example. There are lots of times in our social interactions when if we told the truth, or spoke precisely rather than in a more circumspect fashion, we would find ourselves anger our interlocutors may be useful, even unavoidable. Will there be a universal language? I don't think so. Will everyone become bilingual? No. Will bureaucrats ever learn to write clearly? Don't get me started! But none of those things is my ultimate goal. What I hope people will interrogating our own preconceptions about language, broadening our understanding about how we use language and how we'd like it to be used. The biggest news here in New York City last week was the sudden crackdown on midtown business streets and issued a slew of tickets. Because residents are accepted social custom. (In some sense, it probably was, and in Moneybox city was the way it showcased how little parking there is in New York. park a car too close to a fire hydrant, even though doing the latter will let avoid paying for a parking garage, or deliverymen trying to avoid having to walk around the corner. So no pity for them. (Except when they're me or my friends, of course.) But people want to avoid paying for a spot in a parking garages are usually full. These two phenomena are not, needless to say, In fact, there are way too few parking garages in New York relative to the traffic, because the city, since the end of World War II, has limited the number of garages that can be built. For the existing garage owners, this is a great deal, since it means that in most neighborhoods there's effectively no competition. Parking real estate is not quite as valuable as land in the There was an idea behind the limits on garages, which was that if you make it easier for people to park in the city, you make it easier for them to drive into the city, and "we" don't want that. But in a deeper sense, the limits on garages are emblematic of the way successive administrations in New York have handled most things: They have consistently assumed that without a strong managerial hand, the city would degenerate into chaos. Take taxis. Why is it so hard to get a cab in midtown, especially on a rainy day? Because obtaining a taxi medallion is next to impossible, and the price of the medallions has soared out of sight. Cab fares are, of course, regulated, but that means only that the pricing is determined by whatever number of companies it's dealing with. Opening the market to new competitors would drive down prices. The fear seems to be that if you opened the market, you'd have a deluge of cabs, marring the relatively pristine streets of Manhattan. And perhaps you would at first. But pretty quickly the supply of A similar point can be made about rent control and about the haphazard application of zoning ordinances to commercial establishments. Pace a Chatterbox piece, New York is certainly an exception to his rule about cheap movie tickets, and one reason is that there are too few movie theaters here to meet the demand. That's partly because of the high cost of real estate, but it's also about the sheer effort it takes to negotiate with the city to instead of letting it be taken over by developers and entrepreneurial York has been "avoid the tragedy of the commons" (while also letting the people on the inside wet their beaks over and over again). I don't really think a city is a commons that will be destroyed if there isn't someone to tell us all what herbal diet pills. So the company put an unedited videotape of the interview Chatterbox believes the behavior of the press merits no less scrutiny than went into this with no knowledge, and no opinion, about the safety and efficacy that he's read the transcript, but not enough to render a reliable judgment on professional and responsible interview. Which (unless the unseen tape reveals material, accurately presents what scientific study has found about the various scientific studies, or misstating who the lead scientist on this or product while you were on probation for a drug conviction. that I did receive probation for using a telephone to further a drug misconception. But I made a grave error, just a bad mistake on my part. Chatterbox predicts that this exchange will end up airing in the a very personal issue with him; and why I got involved, he's like a brother to me, he's like my best friend, and I allowed emotions to get in the way of involved in a very large methamphetamine lab manufacturing speed," but that certified laboratories to determine if in fact you could make methamphetamine Chatterbox predicts this question, and the following answer, will also make certain things they do, but it doesn't stop you from loving them. I still love especially, that was like a mother to me. And so, because of an incident that I and judge the real character that the person might be. health spending will fill the hole in their budget. Administration officials argue that the Republican plan does not add up and that the proposal would financial institutions will agglomerate into "universal banks" to provide Even though Senate Republicans acceded to a Democratic provision that will prevent banks with unsatisfactory lending records from moving into other financial services, advocates for disadvantaged borrowers argue that the will disarm Sierra Leone rebels. The United States will contribute logistical that special forces bombed the market because it was actually an arms bazaar. five attending politicians blasted Bush by arguing that his absence from the stage was an affront to voters. "I think he was the big loser here tonight," the eggs of fashion models to the highest bidder (presumably infertile Everybody leads with the Senate's rejection yesterday of the comprehensive vote as more about partisanship than nuclear policy, and all see it as The papers also see the vote as quite historical. The New York Times Today says the vote was the first time in history that the Senate has nobody quite connects the dots on what the comparison could mean for the of World War II. But this general level of gravity is apparent in the necessary to jump into the nuclear arena." The lead editorials at the "Never before has a serious treaty involving nuclear weapons been handled in countries, which implies that it is as of right now completely dead The LAT says that Republicans wanted in return for deferring a treaty vote an ironclad promise from the Democrats not to bring the treaty up during the event of a diplomatic emergency." Without further explanation, this leans a have that fear, he also surely wanted to have the treaty as an election and the LAT front the announcement that the Boulder County grand jury Medicine features a study revealing that a big reason lung cancer is deadlier for blacks than for whites is that the former are less likely to have the cancer surgically removed while doing so would do them any to explain this difference, because in the study racial comparisons were made between patients with similar access to health care. "chairman" by women as part of their job titles, advocating instead Reporters, just getting back to work after recovering from the grueling chef couples, including homosexual couples, making it, says the Post the mention the heterosexual angle. What's more, the latter reads more like it slugs a story about the Amalgamated Interior Decorators and Salon Stylists. The issue of minority languages is one that I find very interesting, and you raised some important questions. You have written quite a bit about bilingual a romantic attachment to these obscure languages, often for nationalistic The political movements that support English as an official language are not it ironic that there is interest in some of these languages at the same time there is such hostility to other languages and nonstandard dialects? York Post --I agree that it won't have much staying power. The difference wife or girlfriend," and debated entering the term in the second volume of the editing at the time. In the end, I thought that it was unlikely to last, and kept it out. Based on the subsequent history, I think it was a correct this usage, it would have died a relatively natural death; instead it will be Chatterbox, ever alert for signs of when the next recession will come, tries always to read the Wall Street Journal very closely. It is a superb publication (full disclosure: Chatterbox used to work there). During the last few days, however, Chatterbox has been a little pressed for time amid the feature. But another technique is to count the number of sections the Journal comes in. Lately, it's often come in four (front section; marketplace section; and money and investing section) rather than the customary three. In addition to making it more difficult to find the Journal 's tendentious editorial page, more sections have the added benefit of demonstrating that the business sector has more money to spend on Wall Another sign might be the disappearance of ads like the one in the latest goldfish bowl. Come to think of it, this ad may be a sign that a stock market I agree with you that languages and language varieties are both adaptable and multifunctional. I will add to the mix of comments on this discussion the observation that we are all adaptable and multifunctional in our individual language. You know those radio shows, all news, all the time? We are all content to context in speech as well as writing. And our language is not limited: It can grow and mature, adapt, and in some cases even atrophy. We lose and gain words, expressions, pronunciations. Language is creative: We can manipulate it to match a new concept, or a new invention, or simply to tell a joke. And we seem able to use language to discover new concepts as well. its users' needs and whims, and it is also a system in which the users attempt formal and informal kinds of regulation, establishing standards or trying to do so, making judgments about our own language use and that of other people (in the words of the radio commercial, "People judge you by the words you use policies, often fail to achieve their ends, or achieve ends somewhat different from what may have been intended. I find that we all establish linguistic standards and try (but often fail) to adhere to them; but interestingly, our standards don't align. Our linguistic use and preference vary slightly from I also find that when it comes to discussing language, we have a significant and rightly so; but they also tend to reject or challenge what experts have to say. Again a complicating, subjective factor is that experts are also users, a situation that both compromises and informs their expertise. Is it your experience that experts on language are challenged with greater regularity by the general public than, say, experts on math (let's leave Language is a complex issue as well as a complex phenomenon. When language is perceived to be a public problem (bilingual education, poor writing test scores, nonstandard usage), the public seeks simple solutions: Make English official; teach more grammar; emphasize correctness. But simple solutions don't seem to work for complex problems, either in language or in medicine. By the way, to return to the subject I introduced this morning: In addition years ago that showed writing could improve the immune system by actually claimed that sentence complexity in writing could be used as a predictor of notice that the experiment was structured so that some participants were asked to write about their most stressful experience, while the control group was asked to write about their plans for the day. Those writing about stress showed cellular phone use increases the risk of brain cancer. What are the facts? Think of cellular phones as little radio stations, beaming voice and data to of the average microwave oven, however, is significantly greater than a cell exposure levels are not well established. Since this radiation penetrates the human body, critics theorize that cellular phones could cause physical damage cellular phones is significantly weaker than the energy occurring naturally in the body's cells, and would therefore be unable to physically alter them. They also contend that even after long exposure periods, the phones could only cause radiation could cause damage, they say that cell phones should be presumed or have produced statistically insignificant findings. Selecting subjects for ongoing cellular phone studies is a challenge, since the highly exposed population remains relatively small, and many forms of cancer may take years to react as if they were being heated (though no temperature increase was observed), which investigators hypothesized may damage cell function over long periods of time. Another found that cellular phone use was associated with an increased frequency of a certain type of brain tumor (although the overall risk of cancer was not found to increase). Most scientists call for further research and testing. Some cellular phone users are reducing possible risk by using earpiece and microphone headsets that plug into the telephone and make it possible to talk without the phone being held to the head. Regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Communications Commission hedge on the issue, neither guaranteeing cellular phones' safety nor recommending that users stop using them. And the greatest danger posed by cellular phones yet discovered is an increased likelihood of Radiation Research magazine published a scientific assessment of the research to date into the cell everyone would feel better if there were an agency that could actually step forward and say, "We are now officially in a correction," the way the government does with recessions? Or would everyone feel worse? Regardless, the market did take it on the chin this week, battered by the combination of earnings disappointments from a couple of bellwethers and, above all, by the now a foregone conclusion, and there may already be a rate hike after that one Of course, that means that if you're in the market, now is most definitely not the time to sell. Instead, it's a moment to remember state, and it's not necessarily any more accurate. So let's call it a dislocation instead, and imagine that someday soon all our shoulders will be back in their sockets. Right where they belong. On to this week's Cocktail cable households, but changed its definition of 'cable households' so that any telecommunications industry were absent when this deal was announced. I think come in slightly below Wall Street expectations. This came as something of a offline, too. Thought not giving out your cell phone number would keep you safe? Well, in this brave new world, if you have a screen name, you're fair cancer and other diseases. Next, coffee makers will admit that caffeine Let's start with: The test ban is good. It's better than no test ban. And yes, it's imperfect. And no, we won't be able to know everything everyone does in the world. But knowing a lot of it and being able to nail a government for testing is better than "who cares." Fact is, we're moving away from arms and the people there are eating their cats. Someone, somewhere is converting counteract global warming, producing mild temperatures along the Eastern love to see the door open to testing for all kinds of Star Wars shit? Call me a dopey idealist, but I think there are still too many people who go sick, hungry, and uneducated right here to be playing with these toys. How about the French union leader who is being celebrated by the press there substantive fallout, if you will, of the Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban public relations war, given the public's overwhelming support for the treaty. the treaty, and that when it comes to foreign policy as a campaign issue, stance will help him with women voters (who worry about nuclear apocalypse more as much money as Gore does. And many also criticize the vice president for the system, but neither knows exactly how. ("One generation's reform is ostracize him for his crusade against "corruption," the more popular a Hewing to the journalistic dictum to "sell every piece twice," Mark Shields has perfected the art of recycling his own sound bites. justice charge was never ventilated. There was no chief justice of the United States sitting in the Senate, but that's what it was. It was Impeachment Two. was nothing less than Impeachment Two. And that was their chance of getting in the company of minority groups. He's comfortable there. This is something that most presidential Republican nominees don't do except in a week when the Democrats are holding their convention and there aren't that many cameras president in my lifetime who was not the nominee of his party have a better community appearances. Usually the Republican nominees do their minority appearances during the Democratic convention when there are no families around. to call the members of the Senate corrupt, you need to prove it. Soft money goes to political parties. Political parties finish my answer. It finances issue discussion in this country. The one every nine days. They are a corporate soft money issue advocacy outfit, as is this [party] program financed by corporate soft money. Republican committees, and say, "Only those six can't engage in issue advocacy. learned tonight that the millions of dollars the Democrats have received from the teachers had nothing to do with the Democrats' opposition to vouchers. I guess Republicans alone of all our citizens are in-- politicians are impervious and indifferent to large [amounts of money]-- be predominant on commercial signs. The judge ruled that two antique dealers didn't violate the law by hanging a sign outside their store with French on one side and English on the other, with lettering that is the same size. was replaced with a requirement that French have "greater visibility" or still needs protection in the province, while the judge sided with the defense, holding that French had made great strides and is not threatened. Justice The defense lawyer said he would fight any appeals all the way to the United signs has often been controversial. Government inspectors went around with tape government complained that Anglophone business owners sought to evade the law by having larger French letters on their signs, but in the faintest of colors older generation in the city, that the young people, Anglophone and Francophone alike, were all pretty much bilingual and were generally bemused by all the squabbling. In the countryside, of course, everyone spoke French, and there was no language issue there. But older Anglophones assured me they felt constant province because their children had been required to attend French schools, and as Anglophones they'd have no economic opportunities in the province after was debated in Congress a couple of years ago, someone wrote to the supporters of official English want to protect English. The problem is that language legislation frequently creates more problems than it solves. And English in the United States doesn't need protection. States are abandoning their first languages for English faster than ever communities? you may ask. Where violence does occur, it's because language rights have been taken away, not because minority languages have been tolerated. Official English in the United States is unnecessary. Furthermore, establishing an official language in this country will drive a than language holding this country together. A common language can be a ahead and pass an official English law. That should really stir things up. station after treating herself for breast cancer for five months. Who lives in Antarctic Treaty. It guarantees cooperation and free movement among scientific operations, prohibits military activities, and suspends indefinitely all Antarctic facilities. Most meetings focus on environmental protections: In many types of research, including astronomy, atmospheric science, meteorology, when brutal weather makes air travel all but impossible. As a result, few I find, as you suggested, that computers are having an impact on student writing. More and more students compose at the keyboard, and some are even computers, and right now that means they're writing and reading a lot, since attacking computer use in education. I haven't read the book, so I can't summarize his stance, but on one page he was complaining that students spent us to the possibilities of using more traditional technologies. I remember once down and he needed to get some vital information from a colleague several colleague from my workstation, a third friend came up and suggested, "Why not I would argue that all writing is a technology, and to emphasize the technological aspect of writing I have my students spend an hour writing in an clay, a wooden skewer, a length of -inch dowel, and a writing assignment. Their task is to fashion the clay into a writing surface, then do the writing assignment using the clay and the wooden stylus. When they are done, we talk about how this was different from the more conventional writing technologies they are used to: pencil and paper, computer (few seem to use typewriters the mind. It forces you to think about elements of writing that have become more or less automatic in a more ordinary setting. Here are some of things my students find: You look at writing differently if you have to prepare the surface. Inscribing on clay means you can't use cursive very easily, or even rounded print characters. Clay's not easy to edit. And it's not that easy to read the final product. You can't put a lot of writing on four ounces of clay, and you can really only use one side, so you have to make all the space count. Clay could get heavy if you had to carry around more than a few "pages" of it. And clay allows you to play with document design in ways you might not with Will computer use improve student writing? Not necessarily, although there's some suggestion that writing a lot does help, and students are writing more with computers than they were before, so far as I can tell. It's certainly easier to revise on a computer: Students tend to forget that "cut and paste" once involved literal scissors and glue, a laborious process that I used to get stretches using a computer, with less physical and psychological strain, than when I was using an electric typewriter. New writing technologies have their downsides, inevitably. There was a complaint voiced in the New York Times when typewriters were coming into favor in offices that the typewriter depersonalized the written word, since the reader seemed further removed from actual contact with the human element in writing. To some extent this was true, but it was also a bit silly, since before the typewriter there was a great emphasis on people developing uniform, depersonalized handwriting to ensure legibility. The computer allows us to revise, true, but in that process I see that we lose what I call the "archeology" of the text, the stages through which it passes from first to final draft. I used to miss that. Now I But here's something to ponder, and let it be my farewell to this chat, as well: The next generation of text processing with computers promises temporary phenomenon, then? Will we, or our children, be talking their essays sitcoms? I trust that will still count as "writing," though I imagine some technophobes will insist that it is not writing since the composition will be English was published last month, the press celebrated the event by listing books as living in the mind, not on the page, he's saying to some extent that books are the creation of the reader as well as the writer. I know that when I read, I turn the text into a world that is influenced by who I am, what I have read or thought up to that point, what's going on in my life or around me. And You mentioned the example of people living in houses thinking they can critique houses as if they were architects. Well, not everyone can design or build a house, that's true. But you know from your experience living in houses that you might have laid out the kitchen differently, or put the closet somewhere else, or made one room smaller and another larger. Users of dictionaries get to use them any way they want to, whether we like it or not. When I ask people how they use their dictionaries, they tell me for spelling (now I suppose more and more people just use spell checkers for that), or sometimes to look up an unfamiliar word. But to some extent they're saying this because they think that's how they're supposed to use dictionaries. In fact many people use dictionaries to press flowers, hide money, or prop up uneven table legs. Or as booster seats for visiting small the fine distinctions that exist among dictionaries. But end users often treat simply "dictionary." This is an indication of how people lump dictionaries name of several dictionaries now), but it may also reflect an unwillingness on the part of dictionary makers to admit that the public doesn't discriminate the dictionary brands the way marketers would like them to. Users of language, like people living in houses, often wish things had been designed differently, and they often take a hand in remodeling efforts (these may have amateurish effects, or they may be quite professional). I like to ask audiences every chance I get, "If you were the boss of English, what would you change?" The three most common answers I get The answers are a nice springboard for talking about: function linguistically (people aren't saying "you know" just to annoy you, thought, when I began reading your piece, that you were going to mention the future of the book, that is, the question we hear a lot: Will print books be on our reading and writing practices, and wonder if that might be something expanding. I don't see us yet curling up with a virtual book, taking a virtual book to the beach, browsing through musty used virtual book stores looking for that elusive something special. But I do see changes happening everywhere so far as reading and writing are concerned, especially in my own literacy good fountain pen, I find that every time I have to write by hand on a pad of printing things out, editing them at the desk, then keying in corrections. That's what I mean by technology affecting our literacy practices. Museum of Art's "Sensation" show. Have you seen it? I haven't; just read the Back when I was a struggling cartoonist trying to get my career off the provocation without substance; it isn't so much offensive as it is dull and no way any group of government experts can render a fair judgment as to what's good art and what isn't. Either give money to everyone who calls themselves an strip dead. Perhaps there's something running in some paper somewhere that I don't get to read that's really great, but I haven't seen it. So as far as I know, all comic strips seriously suck. (I would make an exception for that strip came out today as is, it would be too weird and melancholy for daily papers; it might run in a few of the more daring weeklies.) sardonic, smart. I always check out my friendly competitor Tom Tomorrow's Editorial cartooning, I assume you'll agree, has declined into stupid gags about the news; my test for a good editorial cartoon is that you should be able but he doesn't give a shit about anything, which makes his work soulless. The The most depressing aspect of the profession for me is that the youngest new himself before he does the next one, which would be sad since he's such a genius. This stuff is not, however, for the faint of heart. Perhaps the most compositional skills are amazing, but he has absolutely nothing to say. It's a cosmic joke that someone so talented is so utterly clueless about the real fondness for retro '20s graphics. People always relate to the familiar and iconic and reject what's truly new. (Journalistic conflict: Ware wrote a letter I always thought his work sucked; his letter merely reminded me of his All superhero comic books are stupid, have always been stupid, and should be somebody in The New Thing expressed a measure of skepticism. When the computerized yacht, thinks Internet investors are mad, observing that document this as the largest financial bubble in the history of the world probably guess what I think he'd think. He spent most of his life trying to cycle, stifle speculative manias, control corporate competition, keep the currency "sound," and stop panics. But he was also looking for the underwrite transformed that world as dramatically as the Internet is transforming ours, though much more slowly. The transatlantic cable and the later he capitalized the new corporation (which included other steel mills, within a few years the corporation was earning profits and paying be one of the suits trying somehow to harness new ideas, fascinated by their revolutionary potential but appalled at the idea of throwing billions at companies that exist only "in a state of pure possibility." Like you, I greatly admire the portrait Lewis has drawn of Silicon Valley and don't think this state of things can last. I wish I believed in the "new paradigm" that says we're beyond the business cycle and will not see another recession. According reach beyond the style epicenters. But I think you are right on target in identity crises because they are trying to get by rather than get ahead. When I lived in New York, it drove me crazy listening to people complain about making the Manhattan female hotshot is as obsessed about the people who stand above has told is about men in capitalism, rather than men as such. are being lumped into a new synonym for class; they are "losers." In the last generation, as we know, the gap between winners and losers has grown; the has declined. As our society becomes more unequal, however, the imagery of how people ought to live, the ideals of self and mutual respect, are increasingly defined by behavior and possessions at the top. Thus the gnawing sense of being taste and behavior; a stark inequality of material, educational, and social means in measuring up to the image of how you ought to be. And this is why, of diminished potency which is more economic than sexual. men suffer in large part from a crisis of masculinity because they have failed blacks, makes me, like you, deeply uneasy, though in my case for quite personal reasons. I was raised by a resolutely single mother who in the 1950s was nuclear family, she was doing me untold psychic harm. In my own case, this didn't prove so, but the prejudice in favor of nuclear families is deeply As you say, the myth of the strong father is one thing; the reality is often quite another: often tyrants who are intimidating rather than encouraging. My own experience of parenting is that adult firmness coupled with irony and occasional bouts of silliness makes for sturdy children. Perhaps of no country in which children lead more lonely isolated lives, isolated from social contact with children unlike themselves and from adult society. You can't be taught just by rules how to be a man or a woman; you learn adulthood for yourself, and to learn adulthood well you need far more exposure to real You've written about cooperation in the workplace. Do you think the ills she recounts might be righted if in communities there were more opportunities for less oriented to displays of potency, would ease crises of masculinity. Thing is the best book ever written about Silicon Valley. central truth front and center at all times is that the book's flaws are the kind that tend to drive me completely batty. And so my natural tendency is going to be to harp on what he's done wrong rather than what he's done right. And what he has done right is something big and important: He has absolutely is, how the old rules have been turned upside down, how it is filled with the sense that anything is possible, and that everyone will soon be rich, if they aren't already. You would think other people would have done this by now, but they haven't. And that is because very few people have Lewis' ability to capture something deep with a few deftly written scenes. There is a wonderful scene, for instance, that comes do. Doesn't matter: The venture capitalists are practically pleading with him Then he goes out and hires one person, an engineer he knew back at Silicon Graphics (which he also founded). That night the engineer And then, after that engineer has hired a handful of his buddies to start the they know nothing about. "We sat up all night reading all this literature about largely wandered off. After all, his job (in his view) is to come up with an idea, however unformed, and then cause money and people to coalesce around it. I say, I really think Lewis has done a terrific job rendering this new world in all its insane particulars. (There is another scene I feel compelled to And now please allow me to gripe for a few minutes. Is can't solve, no hole he can't fill, with a graceful turn of the phrase. But that also means that when confronted with the choice between doing a little extra digging and writing his way around a problem, he chooses the latter every place, the market was tanking, and the company's road show had been a bust. But happened in the interim? We have no idea, because Lewis never bothers to tell us. All he says is, "No one asked how a company the stock market deemed unworthy was now, suddenly, desirable. It just happened." Well, that may be nice writing, but it's pretty unsatisfying journalism. In fact, I don't know if you noticed or not, but Lewis written with great haste. There seems to be a belief among publishers that if you don't get your Silicon Valley book out fast, it will be outdated before it's published. And maybe they're right. What do you think? And what do you their temperament in the same way that singers' voices reflect their own what if Jewel was one angry bitch with a bad hair day and a gun to use on any guy she despised? So maybe my workaday "style" fits my cranky, as you put it, outlook on life, I dunno. But I still would like to draw better, if for no other reason but to like the way my stuff looks more when I see it in print. Anyway, I suspect that maybe you're just trying to keep all the primo drawing it's amazing that it was ever broadcast, much less promoted to the point that it was permitted to gather an audience and eventually become successful. But though this business of preempting the season premiere in favor of baseball is stupid. Why can't baseball games be played and broadcast during the middle of the day, like in the old days? Any station that preempts news or other spectator sports don't deserve coverage in any newspaper so long as they're cramming comics into one tiny page and skimping on the international coverage. it's not written for adults; it's really more for kids. The humor is more appears relaxed for a guy who signs more death warrants for his state's impeached. He may have remained in office, but at what cost? He crippled Gore's years of economic expansion during which really great programs might have been enacted while we had the cash lying around. To those who say that private consensual sex is nobody's business, they'd be right if not for the fact that important, unforgivable. Anyone who's ever sat in a courtroom and watched some then it's been a pleasure solving the world's problems with you. And if this is endure the scurrying roaches long enough to say It's been a lot of fun (although I don't usually have elephant dung with my oatmeal). About drawing ability, don't sweat it, Ted. Your work is so much better understanding of our own artistic personalities, temperaments, and, yes, limitations that enables us to shape an effective statement on the page. While every single solitary day of his long and lucrative life), excellent cartoonists figure out how to draw in a way that perfectly supports the drawings bring you right in. Somehow (and I don't know how) they cause you to story. The Tom Tomorrow thing is interesting. He'd be out on his keister without a Xerox machine. But who cares? The image matches the voice wonderfully. And the voice is saying important things. Your work understands how fast we're flipping through the newspaper. It brings us immediately to the idea. Your understanding of blacks is very keen; those lines hold the image and seemed a cheap approach to animation. Plus it was on the Fox Network, so, I the crappy drawing and "family situation comedy" is a ruse. It gets the masses strangely committed. On top of that, there's very real and touching character development. It is a work of unalloyed genius. More than the work of my favorite graphic artists, this program will be the thing our cultural era will be remembered for because he wrapped his message in such strategic cleverness flippant, casual, with a little buzz on. You could just see the cigarette. Everyone knows a guy like this; someone so comfortable with himself that he traveled everywhere, knows about life. Every movement is easy. He's comfortable with himself. Al Gore looks like a guy who broke his toe because the vibrator because he cut his finger trying to undo his wife's bra. People don't think these things, of course. But I think they perceive them subconsciously. If a man is comfortable with himself, he'll be comfortable in the job. It's too bad, all the attention. Far more interesting, though, was the idea of conservative activist government that the shrub articulated. "Our Founders rejected cynicism and cultivated a noble love of country. That love is undermined by sprawling, arrogant, aimless government. It is restored by focused and effective and energetic government," W. said. "And that should be our goal: a limited government, respected for doing a few things and doing them well." This phraseology recalled a series of articles written conservatism." The echoes of their writing in Bush's speech were very clear parks, and the Panama Canal. Bush used the same presidents and the same Bush called for "effective and energetic government." Bush: "Too often my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself." What this shows, I think, is that Bush wasn't simply Tom DeLay. He was tapping in (candidates being allowed to plagiarize from journalists) to a line of intelligent, moderate conservative argument about the federal government's rightful responsibilities. But the question arises: How allow tax credits (and not just a deduction) for contributions to charities. from the supply side to the Lord's side. After a stint working as a journalist responsible for most of the intellectual and historical references in Bush's Of course, Bush is not the only politician who uses a speechwriter. What's troublesome is the evidence that Bush has an unusually distant relationship to the material in his speeches. Did Bush even read the reading policy tomes, combined with the way he delivers his speeches, might lead you to suspect otherwise. Bush squints into the teleprompter, sounding out the words streaming by as if encountering them for the first time. In his education speech, he tripped over the term "exemplary," which came out of his called the Manhattan Institute, one of the more influential conservative think tanks, simply "Manhattan Institute," without the definite article, a support for this suspicion when he appeared on Meet the I will take some responsibility for not seeing that. The line is "Republicans makes it sound as if Bush has no more responsibility for what he says in a Here's how the five candidates who showed up were running: wants to be the conservative alternative to Bush. So right out of the blocks, other strategy for wooing conservatives was to mention constantly his tried to demonstrate his conservative credentials by getting as far to the protections should apply to fetuses from the moment of conception (thus should be prosecuted for capital murder). Despite the best coaching millions emits his words metronomically. His hand gestures are dissociated from his words. He raises his eyebrows and forgets to take them back down again. With Republican primary. His first answer, to a question about child poverty, "disgrace." He also framed education as a "civil rights issue" and repeatedly denounced corporate welfare, especially for ethanol. Asked a blunt question about abortion, he suggested continued, if tepid, support for overturning senator, I think that the abolition of Roe vs. Wade would deserve a doesn't really come across in a debate format. He has Bob Dole's problem. To let fly with his caustic wit risks a boomerang effect. But restraining himself, that the other side actually won the Cold War and that he is the only one who knows about this. "We must get rid of the socialist structures that control our government beginning with the income tax itself," he declared at the outset, explaining that he would prefer to fund the federal government with tariffs, blooming lilac tie and a shirt that matched the color of his suit, he appeared technique of simply shouting over the moderator when his time is up is going to opportunity to praise his rivals, yielding time to his distinguished colleagues as if they were all in the Senate. Mainly, though, he praised himself, constantly reminding viewers of the many important committees he has served on. as president. "Frankly, if you look at it, we've had an unprecedented economic of a handful who convinced him that should be done." More extraordinary was someone means to make some personal limitation seem so overwhelmingly ridiculous that the victim becomes a permanent national laughingstock. The to take him seriously as a presidential candidate, because all that the successor as vice president. In Al Gore's case, the drubbing is for a slightly more vague constellation of qualities such as dullness, starchiness, aloofness, pomposity, condescension, privilege, and political klutziness. There's an element of truth to these criticisms. But by becoming a shtick, the observation of these qualities threatens to obliterate not only Gore's corresponding virtues but also any hope of his becoming president. Every minor misstep that to correct these flaws, whether it's playing along by mocking himself or trying stiff. When he upends his campaign, yanks off his necktie, and engages his Here are a few examples of what Gore is up against, tones,' and then they take a focus group: 'You like the shirt buttoned or not?' phrase sounds unnatural coming from a man whose shoes are always polished, whose hair is always combed, whose shirts and suits are always crisply pressed. He asked people to join his new, this is what he called it, his new, On the campaign trail, this mockery translates into a have been played as "more woe for the troubled Gore campaign" (or possibly, "last straw for troubled Gore campaign"). Gaining the endorsement, however, President Gore, depending on how the political media spin it, in part." Memo to But there's a silver lining for Gore: If the public really demands candidates with a flair for schmoozing, smooth talk, and ersatz genie back in the bottle because we act badly in groups and that all pacts as a has been fired in anger. That's an amazing record for a species that can be counted on for the worst behavior all the time. The treaty didn't alone arrange for that. It was a part of humanity's desire to step back from the brink and cool the madness. Unless that idea has salience in the future, we can kiss our draw about. Instead of trashing this treaty because it doesn't do everything, we ought to be working on how to go further in the direction of international the advent of a world federal government. The whole process of killing the regardless of what the suits tell us) won't be brought to heel without strong Who will lead this movement? Will they be successful? How far will they get before we see we're really doomed? We'll find out deep in the next century. It really will be crunch time. A time of desperate political upheaval, calling for a focused and educated world population. But let's leave that to the kids and because it was unclear whether congressional Democrats could have sustained a veto and because the president wants to focus on other budget issues, like the celebrated," writes the LAT 's correspondent, who notes the into the godless New World Order that the elites are constructing in a betrayal of everything for which our Founding Fathers lived, fought and died." The here; to learn how the Reform Party picks its nominee, click seconds to affix oxygen masks before losing consciousness from hypoxia. (The therefore virtually unnoticeable.) The Journal says the crash may "throw a spotlight on the widening popularity of corporate jets," but the same article notes that private plane crashes have actually decreased over that yesterday's plunge came after Big Blue announced that its mainframe announcement and stock plunge, four of them downgraded. "This is what rural types call locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen," he observes. or wish to avoid paying excessive taxes to a corrupt government. "Safe teacher cluck with disapproval: "An item on yesterday's Science page Forgive me if I don't have much spring in my step this morning. I was just in appreciation of the printed book. He makes the usual comments about how wonderful books are, and how an ideal home would have walls full of books, and then I got to this: "Every real book (as opposed to dictionaries, almanacs, and other compilations) is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness." Sigh. As a dictionary editor, it is frustrating enough to be thought to be producing interchangeable and useless material, but for a respected writer to regard dictionaries as mere compilations with no mind or imagination behind experience; it's pretty much universal that language is thought to be a subject that anyone can comment on because everyone uses it. Unlike math, medicine, or even some sports, which require deep knowledge to approach, language is wide open. Everyone has a pet peeve, be it a misused word, an unusual pronunciation, For lexicographers, this manifests itself most annoyingly in the poor state of dictionary reviewing. Most new dictionaries are not reviewed in the mainstream press, and even when they are, they are not reviewed by linguists or lexicographers. They are reviewed by writers, on the grounds that people who use the language professionally must be qualified to critique books devoted to in a house is qualified to be an architecture critic. The result is that when dictionaries are discussed in the press, only the most superficial issues are notes, the number of illustrations. Important considerations, such as the quality of the definitions, are ignored. And those writing dictionaries are encouraged by their marketing departments to add ever more flashy features to I find that much of the time users have a very strong sense of what they influence them. Nor would I necessarily want to; a person's aesthetic sense is not to be tossed away lightly. But I do wish that they would at least consider what we have to say, since they might learn something on occasion. that dictionaries are more than dull compilations. They are even, sometimes, Last month, in Science magazine, a scientist wrote that the computer hold had doubled once every year or two. (Integrated circuits are the basic that allow digital information to be transmitted, processed, and stored. The more transistors you can pack on a circuit, the more powerful the circuit the computer processing power available to consumers at a given price has scientists generally agree that it will eventually be violated. Previous predictions that it would break down have proved incorrect, and most scientists Your trip sounds wonderfully dangerous. Looks like you got your story. So are you going to do it up for someone? Could even be a book even more so. Let us pray. And have a smart foreign policy. We here in the United States don't think much about the rest of the world. As yet we don't have much reason to think about them, except when we want to start bombing people after they rise up against the awful regimes we support (saw the film to burn something. I think it's all right for museums to have awful art. If that you never hear about or go to. It's amazing, isn't it? This, like it or allowed. And bless it. We need the crap. It's good fertilizer. Because a small percentage of anything any culture at any time winds up qualifying as good. But you need the bad stuff to keep the pipes clear. In this vast Times listing, how much contains sexuality, blasphemy, pornographic violence, vacuous, gratuitous abuse of one kind or another? A good amount. If we want museums and theaters and libraries, we have to fund them. If we want to fund them based on a vote of how much we like and don't, then we have some work to do. Let's start with the New York Public Library. You know there's plenty of the stuff he doesn't like and doesn't want us to see. Perhaps we can use that percentage to cut the funding for that institution. By the way, implied in all said about the Holocaust. It isn't anyone's eccentric or revisionist view of history. It's the fantasy of a disturbed person who thinks he can get elected the central problem with The New Thing is the exaggerated claims it have happened sooner or later anyway, maybe in somewhat different form, with lower forms of life ("the sucker fish of economic growth"). To make his case, Lewis offers up some big pronouncements. For instance, says that now "wealth came from the human imagination," and concludes that "the new theory conferred a stunning new status upon innovation." Am I missing The Prime Mover of Wealth was no longer a great industrialist who rode herd on thousands of corporate slaves, or the great politician who rode herd on the nation's finances, or the great Wall Street tycoon who bankrolled a new enterprise. He was the geek holed up in his basement all weekend discovering There is of course a huge difference between a physical light bulb and an abstract computer idea, and the revolution in information technology really terms to venture capitalists, but as you pointed out this morning, the biggest world skepticism was not a sign of intelligence. It was a sin." Actually, it I think there's another big problem here as well, connected to the question great ride, and so do we, but it's impossible not to want to know more about on the subject of "character," this book is odd. Lewis says that the only hear from or about his three wives (one of them current: Her name comes up just a couple of times, and she never enters the story). Maybe wives were declared off limits; if so, that would have been useful to know. After the second wife college professor with a warning label on his forehead to a founder of a Still, to revert to our basketball analogy, it would be hard to get inside after he determined that this was somehow impossible that he went ahead and did good boy." "He really did feel some strong impulse to meet other people's the end, having brought out in a scene you've described that no amount of money image that "the best and most lasting motive for wanting to change the way Maybe more tomorrow on the good guys and the bad guys in this story? bonds are looking like a tastier investment, and there's still a lot of concern quarterly numbers that were a couple of cents shy of analysts' expectations and got crushed as a result, with much of the rest of the tech sector falling in sympathy (or empathy, or whatever you want to call it). the world, meaning that if it's having trouble, a lot of other companies probably are, too. And given that in the past few months expectations for the The company, for instance, took great pains to point out that demand for its it was manufacturing the chips, especially its newest chips, that tripped the competition, most notably Advanced Micro Devices, that finds deadlines bothersome. But apparently even masters of manufacturing can trip up. make chips that cater to that market, and naturally they earn less profit on still remarkably high for a manufacturing company (and would have been much not, in and of themselves, evidence that things are falling apart. If you do things right, turning inventory more rapidly, you can make it up on volume. The value of a business depends not on how hefty its profit margins are but on how efficiently it uses capital, and you can use capital efficiently by setting up It's no surprise to me that there are language issues in the news. In my replacing French as the prestige second language? And Education Week which came out just last month, reported this scary news: The writing ability urging that English become the official language of the country. As if a law But back to your comments. Yesterday's New York Times ran another chose a euphemism where elsewhere they have been much more blunt. (Of course, to sex crimes, something that didn't occur to me till I saw the first episode.) a person, for those who are reading over our shoulders) involving one person doing something physical to another. Of course, while a future episode of Special Victims Unit may choose to become more explicit about this interesting summary of what we might call "the linguist's dilemma": People want linguists to tell them how to be correct, but at the same time, they resist intervention, taking the attitude, "Who are you to tell me what to do?" It may natural part of the linguistic give and take (or what a theorist might call the I missed the angry response letters to the Fox essay. Maybe they didn't that day. But they don't surprise me. I get angry mail every time I try to was a similar requirement in the state's prisons, and he thought it worked so well he wanted to extend it to the schools. In my essay I pointed out that language is difficult to regulate: People just don't want to use language the way other people tell them to. I also observed that people used to want schools to be less like prisons, but that now the trend seems to be to make them more like prisons, adding language regulation to crowd control, uniforms, metal detectors, and locker searches. In response, I got an angry letter from a reader telling me I ought to be in prison for writing what I did. So I have come to realize, over a long career of such angry letters, that part of my job is to encourage people to look critically at language use, and of his dad as a guy unjustly toppled by a womanizing schemer is historical revisionism, pure and simple (remember the last recession? went on for perhaps months? couldn't put both nouns and verbs in the same sentence?). On the other The answer, methinks, is that the presidency attracts consumption this morning. (I was too sleepy to note the reporter's name.) As like to try one) and a Park Avenue apartment building where the grungy units furniture shifts whenever the commuter trains rumble beneath is beyond me), she cleverly pointed out the analogies with the '80s economic bubble and the from the '80s boom. When this one heads south, it'll affect a lot more people may be the stupidest ever: "A PLAN IS IN WORKS TO PUT OFF A VOTE ON TEST BAN get the crank out of the water supply down on West 43rd Street; what the hell is wrong with the headline writers? First of all, no one cares about the test ban. Maybe they should, but they don't, and I don't blame them. We did the Cold have zillions of nukes pointing at us and nothing has really changed, it's My quads are doing quite well, thanks. And that's a very good question you raise about whether or not these bars are any better than regular food, because from the outside, they look like treats. The crackly foil wrappers, the tempting names like Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch and Wild Berry. This deceptively yummy packaging makes what you find inside even more disappointing. waxiness. Likewise with sports drinks. Their names (Arctic Shatter, Frost) promise limitless refreshment. But when you drink them, your first thought is So why eat this stuff? Are sports bars and drinks an improvement on a balanced diet and plain old water? Or are they just another piece of gear, like an expensive running watch that looks cool but won't get you to the finish line any faster. According to a dietician I spoke with, the garden variety athlete has no need for either sports bars or drinks. The bars are, in general "glorified candy bars," and if you read the label, they often list and fats, as well as high fiber. She also said one thing to look for was a What about the drinks? There are a few reasons why sports drinks are than you would plain water. On the first point, if you keep sucking down the water before and during your workout, the speed of the absorption shouldn't matter. The second point may well be valid, but the question is, would it be a noticeable difference? (We'll see after tonight's run.) And on the third point, I say, tastes good? Depends on whom you're talking to. But in general the refueling during long runs, and that the taste and texture become irrelevant when you are incredibly hungry and tired. This touches on two important points. First of all, this type of food is not meant for someone who jogs a few miles or goes to an aerobics class a few times a week. The bars are high in calories, fat and calories, but most people get more than enough in the rest of their diet. What this boils down to is if you're training for a marathon or working out twice a day you may benefit from the bars and drinks. But for your average As for the merits of individual bars we tried before our run, they ranged sports bar is excellent) to the truly horrible. I completely agree with your reflex hit." I did not spit it out, though. Which may explain the intense nausea I felt on the first leg of our run last night. Although we ate them as disturbing violence. It wasn't until I released two massive belches (each smelling strongly of false banana) that I was able to settle into the run and feel halfway normal. And I trace that false banana to the Nature's Plus it ranked decently in terms of taste and texture going down, was no treat Tomorrow, let's get into the specifics of which drinks and bars are the best hard line the White House is taking with Congress on spending (made clear by money bills until Republicans assure the protection of the Social Security mostly reports on declining numbers of juvenile arrests and hence doesn't address the possibility that increasing numbers of juveniles are committing mostly on the absence of a clear explanation for these decreases, while also noting two retrograde movements: There hasn't been a significant crime drop have been attributing to pilot error. The story says that the system has failed widely, including along some of the nation's busiest airport approach backing a peace accord in Sierra Leone that provides a general amnesty for rebel war criminals and indeed, will put eight of them in the country's the Senate's defeat of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. His key claim: Nuclear arms are coming into the hands of more and more countries not administration's failed nonproliferation policies. "This administration," Helms writes, "in its shameful effort to curry favor with Silicon Valley executives, weapons factories. The administration has decontrolled satellite launches, helping China improve its nuclear missile force. The administration has looked in their drive to build weapons of mass destruction." money." Here in a nutshell is the difference between a politician and a journalist: If a politician tries to get money out of politics, it's a career With absolutely no malice aforethought (honest, it's just happened this way), Moneybox this week has been devoted to the thoroughly scintillating return to our usual diet of sex and scandal. But in any case, class, today's Hey, you in the back row, stop snoring! And you, put down that Game Boy! its acquisition of Level One Communications, upon which some commentators cast sensible, since Iridium may very well turn out to be a complete bust, and truly successful industrial conglomerates left in this country, with lines of business ranging from disposable medical products to underwater acquisitions that it has done a rather remarkable job of integrating into its strategy may be a way of masking slow growth in its underlying business. In write off a little bit each year. Investors and analysts tend to treat large the minds of bears, can be a way for companies to hide the costs of company announces it quite publicly. And while it's possible that there are free, it's also true that there are people who still believe their fates are governed by the stars. Companies are no more responsible for the former than the latter. The market as a whole cannot be systematically deluded by accounting gimmicks, as long as the gimmicks are publicly disclosed. it's setting aside a reserve of money that it says it believes it will need to complete the acquisition. The danger is that an unscrupulous company will set years. You need a couple of pennies of income to meet Wall Street estimates? baseless and just about every Wall Street firm reiterated "buy" ratings on the even be possible. The reality, though, is that this kind of stuff still happens all the time (even though eventually everyone does seem to get caught). And really sure what the comptroller of the currency, as opposed to a comptroller financial institutions use, did not spook an already nervous stock market because anyone actually read or listened to the speech. It spooked the market happened had he mentioned "tulip bulbs" and "Internet stocks" in the same outside observers did, leading to the inevitable conclusion that, in his typically oblique way, the Fed chairman was trying to talk down stock prices in speak to the idea that investors are starting to see stocks as not much more 's "Crapshoot" for a critique of this idea), the real focus of his speech was something much broader, namely the way financial panics tend to eradicate the delicate distinctions between different classes of assets, distinctions that any market system needs in order to invest for the The two most striking things about financial panics, at least in the modern economic world, are that they happen more often than one when they happen, they tend to spread rather than remain localized. What when we think about managing risk in the future. Specifically, he said, banks recognize the limits of the models they're using. Panics can't be anticipated, Now, you might say that this speech should have spooked the stock market, since the Fed chairman was saying that sudden crises of investor confidence can descend without warning. But that is something we all knew already. More to the point, saying a crisis can descend without warning is not the same as saying that it can descend without causes. Talking about the current stock market as a bubble without are few safe havens once a financial crisis starts. Last year, for example, during global crisis, investors flocked to the 30-year Treasury bond but were totally unwilling to buy the 29-year bond, even though the difference in risk between the two assets was presumably minimal. In that sense, saying that stocks are riskier than bonds because the stock market could crash is wrong. If crashes determine risk, then there are very few assets that you can really call was trying to talk down all markets. Which I think tells us that he wasn't trying to do anything of the sort. His message was a simpler one: Be more Medical Association that concludes writing may be beneficial for your conducting the study asked subjects suffering from acute asthma or from They were asked not to concern themselves with the niceties of spelling, punctuation, and so on. They were told instead, just write and write and write, A significant number of study subjects reported that their symptoms improved with writing. This of course is good news. But even better is the prospect that future studies may go on to show that writing may actually cure much of what days? Did their symptoms then worsen, or remain the same? I know my own symptoms would worsen if I were told not to write, since I write all the time. will be four days. Should I be taking my pulse and blood pressure regularly? Should I not use my inhaler? (Actually, I do have an inhaler, but seldom need to use it.) What should I expect to see happening? To whom do I report the prophylactic. There have been a number of "scientific" studies like this one so I should know), there was some discussion in the press about the discovery of a grammar gene by neurologists. This was based on a study of an extended grammar: They could not form certain kinds of sentences, couldn't answer questions, couldn't write clearly, and so on. It was held, in these popular reports, that the discovery of the shared defective gene seen to cause the symptoms would eventually lead to a cure not only for dyslexia but for freshman happen. It seems that writing, and grammar, are too complex to be controlled by That is not to say that people don't or won't find writing to be beneficial. writing as good mental exercise for as long as I can remember. Of course, I was a sickly child, and one who wrote all the time. What does that tell us? Nothing But once people read about the physical benefits that accrue from writing, a pilgrimage to these clinics, perhaps even swarming to our own writers' Will writing become a remedy of the desperate, like grapefruit diets, coffee there be minimum recommended doses? Warning labels on keyboards? anyway, writers seem not to have a choice in the matter: To paraphrase the personally oppose the intentional release of radiation near human skin, unless that skin happens to belong to people I don't personally like. But the bottom line is that you can't put the nuke genie back in the bottle because human we all act like the meanest, stupidest person in whatever group we happen to be in. So these pacts will inevitably disintegrate to the worst behavior of their only thing "free" about free trade is the average salary the corporations have in mind for the rest of us?) for that French guy. He should have got sued, sure, and jail was entirely appropriate for this particular act of civil disobedience, but as an occasional customer of the Golden Arches (personally, I willing to take a risk for their principles now and then, particularly when it's a blow against a monolithic transnational corporation that built itself up by underpaying children who ought to be at home studying for the next day of By the way, it only seems appropriate to include a little cartooning stripping babies. Is it just me, or is this more boring than offensive? Second documents paints a diametric picture, reporting that Justice took extraordinary steps to maximize the terrorists' chances for clemency, including the highly unusual step of making their applications for them and having supporters candidacy, at the expense of the prohibitive favorite, the daughter of the LAT note that he is a moderate, with the LAT stating he has the outbreak of street violence upon the announcement of the election outcome, yesterday that she was abandoning her presidential campaign. The papers all basically credit Dole's explanation: Money has come to mean too much in era who's given up federal funding so that he could raise an unlimited sum of because it "wasn't fair." The paper notes a Bush spokeswoman's response: "We model for how Governor Bush will raise money or lead the nation." The The LAT front turns in an exclusive on a topic it first broached a of its own ethical policies requiring the disclosure of authors' possible LAT finds eight in which researchers reviewed a drug's performance but of the future: the union set up a Web site to give the union's take and also other tire plants were notified about the strike and its issues and encouraged sell securities on the Internet. The three agreed to stop and as a result are investors have access to good information regarding any stock to be purchased. Gore arrived on stage like some sort of feral animal who had been locked in a small cage and fed on nothing but focus groups for several days. Upon release, he began to scamper furiously in every direction at still at it, sitting on the edge of the stage with his wife, talking about vaudevillian. He oozed empathy from every pore, getting all over every questioner like a cheap suit. First he would ask the person about his circumstances, his family, or his job, in a desperate effort to bond. Then he would respond with an explosion of gesticulation, sympathy, and agreement. At the very first question, which referred to "behavior by members of your administration," Gore came out with a blast of empathy for emotions the questioner never expressed. "I understand the disappointment and anger you feel At first, you think: Hey, this new Al Gore's not such a stiff after all. Then you think: This new Gore is a bit over the top. By the end of an hour, the impression is of someone as desperate as he is unable to asked a questioner who asked him what he was going to do about school violence. you have the most trouble with?" Gore joked, smarmily. A clinical psychologist who asked about the problem of "Give me a chance to roll up my sleeves and go to work on this. This is one I told by St. Peter, "You can come in, but you can only stay three days." This elicited groans in the room where several hundred reporters watched the debate on video monitors, as did Gore's fulsome expression of thanks to the people of Gore's problem, I think, is that he has watched Bill with an audience. But even as he copies the steps, he lacks the music. When he The problem isn't that Gore can't be personal and expressive. It's that as a performer, he has no emotional range. When he pumps up to the volume, he always Gore's plasticity. I saw him in person after the debate, when he sat on the stage answering questions. He was calmer and seemed much less phony. as anyone who I can remember running for high office. Aside from one direct and passionate defense of gay rights, which got the biggest applause of the night, the high cost of his health proposal, he finally responded by uttering, in his experts. I dispute the cost figure that Al has used." Other than that, he But running against the world's most eager salesman, to win you over with his charisma. He just has to wait for you to get sick to propose sweeping privacy protections for medical records, stricter than those these companies from sharing customer information with other insurance companies without the customer's explicit permission. producer of the product that's ubiquitous in a lot of other products." The most comprehensive. Under the headline "As Obesity Rate Soars, Hormone Offers the highest preventable cause of death after smoking. However, obese people given injections of the hormone leptin in a study lost weight proportionate to fire for over -hyping a cancer study) gives a dour prognosis. Leptin patients lost a "moderate amount of weight at best" and many participants obesity figures at all. The Post --"A Hormone Helps Obese Lose Weight: think that we control what the New York Times writes," a Bush I wanted to go back to something you said yesterday, as it has been rattling around my brain all night. You noted an "immense divide suffer far less from identity crises because they are trying to get by rather far more extensive than its presumably "screwed up" epicenters. But now I want equivalent, to be "getting ahead." That formulation strikes me as emblematic of battling it out in these places, "winning" or "getting ahead" means being mentality of "others notice me, therefore I am" is quite appropriate if you are like a perpetual twilight of adolescence; it is a thwarted adulthood. For those who exist only in the gaze of others, "getting ahead" may well mean achieving more time at the center of attention, but that really gets them nowhere new, The real challenge of "getting ahead" as an adult is far more complex. It involves the work of forging an identity that has coherence and integrity, whether or not anyone is looking. But adult there with the achievement of an autonomous identity. It can also mean learning that my humanity is larger than the roles I inhabit, and in the exploration of my individuality I also, paradoxically, discover the possibility of a deeper connection with many kinds of people. Autonomy is not an end in itself but a foundation for the ongoing work of individuation and real intimacy. These triumphs of adulthood are hard won, and as you said about children, they often spring from darkness and grief. They always spring from engaging with the are "getting ahead," in this truer sense; they are not merely "getting by." people and mothers and veterinarians and teachers. They are in the hills of the altiplano, caring for their land and their animals and their families. They are where the cameras do not roam, making love, making family, making dinner, and making a world. They are not hanging around making bombs and complaining about I am persuaded that the new economy already shows signs of offering much more opportunity for adults to move beyond the conformist organizations and the fragmented identities of industrial society. I think this emerging era will provide more adults with the possibility of becoming individuals, as it enables us to reintegrate work and life in many new rich and authenticity of her effort and the seriousness of her subject. Whether or not I agree with her analysis, I do think that these times require a reexamination of that gender has played in the maintenance of traditional economic models. May that in using it, you've stumbled across the biggest problem with The New he was also a helluva talent. You could undoubtedly write a more interesting the greatest player of all time, is bland as toast off the court, and a tougher season, couldn't wrest an interview from him. But if you were to decide that Basketball? Nobody would dare make such a claim, would they? boils over with absurd resentments. He bubbles over with interesting ideas. He spends half the book building the biggest yacht in the world. He must have been a ton of fun to write about. (And he was accessible to the author!) But can it other single person, shaped the current ethos of Silicon Valley? Or is it more likely that having landed his subject, Lewis created a thesis to justify his My own suspicion is that the truth is closer to the latter than the former. of forces at play that conspired to create modern Silicon Valley. My guess is that the various changes Lewis documents would have happened with or without Of course, the biggest force was (and is) the Internet. Here Lewis would what changed everything. (And oh, how I longed for a detailed inside history of profitable. Once that offering took off, it was as if a light bulb went off all over the Valley. YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO HAVE A PROFITABLE COMPANY TO GET RICH! What he wanted to build a new boat, and this was the only way he could think to pay stand in for any Silicon Valley "type." "I can't be a venture capitalist write, "His role in the Valley was suddenly clear: he was the author of the story. He was the man with the nerve to invent the tale in which all the doesn't dare say. And Lewis captures that exquisitely. There is another of adds, "You know, just for one moment, I would kind of like to have the most. to forget about the claim the author is making for his subject and simply revel in scenes like that one. But for me, at least, that's awfully hard to do. I Judging from the responses to our exchange, we've skipped over some of the issues important to most people, so perhaps we should go over dialects before being unable to do math because their language can't handle it, is tied into the biggest questions linguists face. The notion is a myth, of course. As you that mean that you are incapable of doing math? Well, it would take some work to develop the tools necessary. But that is true of the jargon of any specialty philosophy than other languages, but he answers his own question by observing could benefit from the German language not because German is intrinsically good for the discussion of philosophy but because after years of such discussion it had developed appropriate words and structures, and German philosophers could In other words, when we say that languages or dialects are equal, we do not mean that they are all equally able to concisely express every nuance at every time. We mean that they are equally capable of expressing any thought necessary to the speakers of that language or dialect. Most educated English speakers are unable to understand medical jargon; that does not mean that standard English is incapable of expressing complicated medical concepts. When not be as concise as medical jargon, but will do for the circumstances. To take a very common illustration from English: Though the vocabulary of English is vastly larger even than other Western languages, there are many simple concepts that have no one word to express them. If I am referring to my ambiguous; it could refer to my wife's brother. And this is a very common concept. Other languages, often regarded as more "primitive" than English, have highly evolved vocabularies for denoting family relationships, so that a single word can denote, say, one's maternal grandfather's sister. Does this mean that English is deficient? Well, it means that in the culture of these other languages, the denotation of family relationships is more important than it is in English. But even in English we can always say "my mother's father's The number of words in a language is irrelevant, contrary to what one respondent suggests. Most speakers, even highly educated ones, use only a relatively small proportion of the words available to them. (The entire certain thoughts. Indeed, there are structures in nonstandard dialects that are certainly more expressive than what is available in the standard dialect. One distinction between singular "thou" and plural "you," but now only Southern varieties of English are capable of this distinction without resorting to "aspect marker," indicating that the action is habitual: The sentence "He be to make one last point. We are not saying that minority dialects should be favored, or that speakers of minority dialects should be prevented (or should be discouraged) from learning standard speech. It is often true, as several respondents observe, that in order to succeed in the mainstream world speakers must use a standard variety. But this goal is not necessarily shared by the speakers themselves. Dialects survive because people want to be part of a social group, and this is often more important than other factors. The theory that mass communication will eventually level all dialects ignores the fact the bridge, trying several new bars, a different brand of goo, and a couple of My clearcut taste winner among the new bars was the Grabber Energy Bar in Wild Mountain Berry. Grabber must have some sort of French affiliation, as it's Drawback: I don't quite understand why it's an energy bar, since it has barely the same stats, but was less enjoyable. Chocolate Truffle is way too rich to be During my run I felt good and energetic, and midway through I paused to try flavor ("banana blitz") was mild and delicious. I actually felt better after helps maintain fluid balance and stop cramps. The goo packet market is exercise. The great thing about the goo packets is portability. They're a real boost out on a run, and they're easier to carry and keep better than a flavor I tried next was a disappointment. It had that very weak lemonade determined anything conclusive, but I guess we can heartily recommend the have the lobster. For quick reference, here's a chart of our reactions to the left out there who feels confident enough to tell you what the market's going to do next. (Well, it will fluctuate, of course.) Beaten down by last week's an impressive feat of discriminating between good and bad stocks on the part of the market, instead of the perhaps more common "Kill 'em all and let God sort I hope nothing else important happens between the time I write this and you probably give you a version much like the one in the previous paragraph. And speculation has immediately arisen that its version of the online service will quarters, well into next year, would be sharply lower because customers are so or no effect on their business. But this does raise an interesting question: quarter would be lower because it was going to trim its inventory of razor in its first day of trading, after some dubious trading shenanigans in its recent quarter, meeting estimates, but its shares fell nonetheless when it political and economic instability: Some of the hotels recommended in our Lonely Planet guide had closed in the last year, inflation was literally eating But as I reported on my radio show for the first time death and denying medical care to women, aren't the most subtle guys in the democracy in name only; even before yesterday it was a barely disguised strategic juncture between East and West, continent and subcontinent. The State Department, by backing the coup, is defending the very same regime that has seriously frightened, despite today's insipid headlines saying that things are break off formal diplomatic ties with this illegal military government until a true democratic regime comes to power. Right now, the military runs everything from road repair to tax collection, and there's no room for free speech in such a place. As they said back in the '60s, you're either part of the problem or part of the solution, and we're clearly a big part of the problem. But don't The Future of the Book question is one that's been so one even more recent), that I hardly think I could add anything. But I don't think that books are going away in the near future. Even if we had some sort of electronic book that was convenient and had a good screen, physical books, in real affect on the publishing world, but that's a different subject. And I say getting any kind of serious writing done on paper (though I do love fountain pens and think they're not at all inconvenient), and I can comfortably revise computers have already had a tremendous impact, and this impact will grow. The tools available for language analysis are so helpful that it's hard to imagine corpus is indispensable for any sort of dictionary work today. Briefly, a good corpus will gather millions of words, from a wide and carefully selected range of sources, so that you can study it for any sort of patterns you want. If you're concerned with the words alone, you can look up individual words to see how they're used. (A rough idea of how this works can be had by entering a moderately uncommon word such as "nugatory" into an Internet search engine and seeing what you get.) But you can also learn about grammatical patterns that researcher in this area, and he's been able to find incredibly early examples more databases become available, we're likely to see ever more important discoveries that force us to rethink what we believed about the history and this particular poem, he and others have showed us new ways of thinking about What sort of effect do you find computers have had on your students? Has there been any sort of change in their writing or reading skills that you can attribute to them? Do you make use of computers as a You've been at it a long time, so you're in a good position to judge whether appear in the Dow) is fine testimony to what all of us already knew: that the industrial powerhouses have been superseded by the avatars of the New Actually, the four new Dow companies are avatars of the old New Steel, a company whose industrial fortunes peaked sometime back in the 1930s, capitalization of any company in the world. So the Dow isn't exactly going out The striking thing about today's announcement is that changes in the Dow still make headlines, not because they happen so often (actually, they happen very rarely) but because the Dow is such an arbitrary collection of names to begin with. Any index is arbitrary in its inclusion and exclusion of names. But That's had two contradictory consequences in recent years. On the one hand, it's led people to overestimate the nature of this bull market, especially in conclusions to be drawn from their performance. And the same will be true if The second consequence is that the focus on the Dow has led people to companies in the Dow. But if you just look at the four companies that will be no comparison between them in terms of business fundamentals. The incoming companies have rapid growth in revenue and in cash flow, and extraordinarily high returns on invested capital. The outgoing companies have slow growth and low (in some cases, perhaps even negative) returns on invested capital. Was the This is not news to the stock market as a whole. The outgoing companies have the two groups are not that distinct. You could see this as yet more evidence only now realizing what the market as a whole has understood for most of this limited missile defense system, but negotiations have been underway for only lead, pastes across its front a new study on Internet use that christens the defense systems, for fear that they would provoke a race to develop to tinker with the treaty enough to allow installation of its fledgling missile defense system. The LAT defines the problem most succinctly: "Under the objected to the proposal, saying that reported nuclear threats from upstart The Hector Mine earthquake, named for a mineral mine near the epicenter, was though almost all was restored by the afternoon, the LAT reports. The contributions, which are not supposed to be used for federal elections, are raised by House party committees concerned exclusively with federal elections. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has grown much more quickly than its Republican counterpart in its ability to raise funds for House money they beg from wealthy contributors and have begun more aggressively Republicans. (The National Republican Congressional Committee has raised more "Credibility, transparency and accountability in running state affairs" top accounts a political neophyte, is expected to avoid international tension while he figures out, as supreme commander, how to dig his country out of corruption rather than on allaying immediate international worries. priority, and later this month a Senate health subcommittee, the chairman of Within five minutes, sensors sent data to an Internet site measuring reports online. Much of the data came from a network of hundreds of generally speaking, there is one briefing that stands out as an authoritative stocks today is dominated by momentum traders, day traders, and technical traders, none of whom are paying attention to the underlying fundamentals of the companies whose shares they're buying and selling, and all of whom are As it happens, this is wrong. There are lots of momentum traders and day traders and technical traders, but there always have been, and in any case the increased volume on the stock market and the greater number of traders has almost certainly made stock prices more efficient and more accurate indicators What's interesting about this, though, is that the same picture is very rarely drawn of the bond market, even though if you talk to (or listen to) bond the trend of bond prices over the last month or last week, about support levels indicators that are or are not flashing green or red. And you also get a lot of numbers. The conventional image of bondholders is that they're conservative, This doesn't mean that the bond market is any less efficient than the stock market, though it does seem a bit curious. But what bond traders' reliance on it is to successfully predict a market in which every piece of potential information seems to point in two different directions at once, and in which there seems to be nothing that doesn't count as potential information. history, it was still weaker than expected and smaller than last month's trade news for the bond market. On the other hand, a weaker trade deficit meant that factories were producing more, which probably means higher growth and, potentially, higher inflation. That seems like it would be bad news for that potential inflation from the weaker dollar (which would drive up the price of foreign goods) hasn't had much of an impact. So maybe inflation is still foreign demand is rebounding, and since the slump of the rest of the global economy has helped keep commodity prices down, a global rebound could have inflationary implications. So that could be bad news. Then you have to divide the import side of the trade deficit ledger into impact in the last month. And you probably want to take a look at capital in which it's difficult to tell where anything begins or ends. And we haven't even taken into account that the bond market needs to interpret not only all these numbers but also what impact the numbers will have on the Fed, and then in turn what impact the Fed's interpretation of the data will have on future Given all that, it's not too surprising that the bond market preferred to meander around today, basically ending where it began. Set yourself the impossible task of predicting a macroeconomic future, and your head will start with the interview's overall tone of deference (headline: "The Long View of a a kind, thoughtful, and (for the most part) honorable man. The facts that noted prominently, and did not strike Chatterbox as disqualifying. But Chatterbox is at a loss to explain how anyone but a pair of formerly without grilling him about his representation of the tobacco industry, which in and Hand, into a gaudy lobbying powerhouse (at least in terms of billable the settlement reached between state attorneys general and the tobacco industry (without, of course, letting Congress make the minimal improvements required to make it even a marginally acceptable deal), was in fact mostly selling its reputation. The substantive negotiations were conducted by others; the firm's story: "They were getting paid more for who they were than what they did." Q: Some would say that money talks loudest of all in the business you're now in. What about your practice and this firm's practice? Can you represent people based on some ethical or political judgment about how much they deserve your representation, or is it really just a question of selling yourselves to A: Well, you hope that the people you represent will be those that you feel ought to prevail or at least ought to be protected. Let me take something number of hits for being one of the people who signed on to represent the tobacco industry when they started their negotiations with the state attorneys Chatterbox translation: "Don't blame me. It was that greedy bastard He was invited to involve his firm, my firm, in representing the tobacco industry as it began a negotiation in which it was prepared to pay an enormous, an unbelievable amount of money to various state coffers, which could be used toward young people. In exchange for that, it was hoping to get protection from bankruptcy, which it feared would come if some of the state suits that had just Our job in this law firm was never to go to the Hill or to the executive branch and say smoking doesn't cause illness. It was never to say the tobacco industry is being mistreated. It was simply to say the industry is prepared to make revolutionary changes in its behavior if it gets some protection from these giant suits, and this is a good deal for the public. Chatterbox translation: "Of course tobacco companies represent something close to pure evil. But the real dirty work had already been done. We client's behalf) whatever sacrifice Big Tobacco had to make. And if, as ultimately happened, no settlement resulted, we could shrug our shoulders, say, 'Hey, we tried,' and act like unsuccessful brokers to an honorable peace." agreed to do it because we thought it made a lot of sense in terms of the public interest and, secondly, because it was very handsomely compensated Chatterbox translation: "See how easy that is? Look, we can even we should point that out, rather than you --and still make our critics look like a bunch of braying jackals. I bet you aren't even going down, the welfare rolls are dwindling, fewer women are having abortions, and SAT scores and charitable giving are on the rise. This is the dilemma facing battling the inconvenient onslaught of good news with three positive developments," and he cites them. He also tells readers, "I have amended some of my own prior views about the efficacy of politics and public takes hold, it exacts an enormous human cost. Unless these exploding social pathologies are reversed, they will lead to the decline and perhaps even to the impervious to government spending on their alleviation, even very large amounts The new edition is considerably more sanguine (it could hardly be gloomier). to legislative action and political leadership than I once thought." This a gathering of his fellow conservatives that "these are times in which conservatives are going to have to face the fact that there is some good news on the landscape. We're going to have to live with it." (The quote is from gave it, though he emphasized at today's press conference that he didn't pessimism that is common among conservatives. (For a fuller discussion of the after all, nearly became chairman of the Republican National Committee a few "progress on key social indicators" during the 1990s the drop in violent crime presided over these jurisdictions for the last several years were Republicans. When Chatterbox asked about any contribution the Democratic White House bill was significant, and said, "I will give credit to the president for cites them: a rising percentage of births to unwed mothers, rising marijuana from attention deficit disorder. (This last social problem wasn't discussed at all in the previous edition.) In Chatterbox's book, none of these is nearly so serious a problem as that of growing income inequality; but inequality isn't chapter on "Youth Behavior" with the shocking news, presented in large boldface significant statistic. In effect, it's a way of saying that the venerable disinclination to marry their high school sweethearts, on the other. Since imprison criminals. "Nearly three out of every four convicted criminals are not generations of social and political elites, both liberal and conservative, have liberated themselves from the belief that criminals are free moral agents and that publicly sanctioned punishments are what they justly deserve." followed up with statistics about the number of people in federal and state fairly screams, "There are too many people in prison nowadays." Which is odd, The Index seemed a smart bit of ideological entrepreneurship when document vividly the rise in all sorts of societal ills. By now, however, it has clearly outlived its usefulness. Chatterbox predicts a third edition will I may have spoken too soon in my earlier message. After decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on So he does appreciate dictionaries after all, even if he somehow thinks that they simply spring into existence with no help from You are of course right that people who use things, be they books or kitchens, have a real stake in how they decide to use them. The that. But it would be nice if a user's needs coincided with the expressed purpose of an item. Thus even if dictionaries were used chiefly as booster seats, it would behoove a reviewer to address their real purpose. An office building that functions poorly as an office building but looks impressive should be criticized, just as a dictionary that has impressive photos and presses flowers well but has poor definitions and etymologies should be Speaking of criticizing dictionaries, it seems we have dictionary. For once the newspapers got things right, and largely because they bothered to call lexicographers for opinions. This wasn't a case of on even in the harsher newspaper reviews (which, in any event, are unlikely to in the title! You're quite correct that most people view that word as a generic you want to differentiate your dictionary from your similarly named competitors. Nothing is more frustrating than spending an hour on the phone with a journalist and then seeing an article with your competitor's name in for a summary of how the Republicans do it), and has been subjected to much recognize the Sorting Hat as a magical wizard's hat, pointed and "patched and Sorting Hat sings to the assembled new students in full: The advantage of the Sorting Hat is that it doesn't tell you which candidate is best; it merely sorts the candidates according to their most pronounced characteristics. Chatterbox can't know, of course, how the Sorting Hat would assign the current candidates in the Democratic and Republican primary races, but in the spirit of political punditry offers the following prediction: Chatterbox gratefully acknowledges technical assistance for this item Times lead with yesterday's procedural votes in the Senate that effectively ended any chance of passing campaign finance reform this year. militias and hate groups will become increasingly dangerous in the coming year because of the apocalyptic significance some of them attribute to the new What happened in the Senate, the papers report, is that in successive votes of the unregulated campaign use of donations made to the national political parties ("soft money"), the other a broader bill that also would have tightened rules about "issue ads" that actually function in support of particular votes required to cut off a filibuster against the measures. After these votes, Senate impasse "a victory for the politics of cynicism." The LAT claims issue, although the paper provides no evidence of this, noting only that goes high with the observation that the outcome keeps the special interest money issue alive for next year's presidential campaign. The LAT and is the fourth straight year that campaign reform has died in the Senate. (based on a Common Cause investigation) to the Senate vote lead reporting that protecting airline passengers in favor of a much weaker bill after airline soft rush of money, he admits in the story that "Big people have access to my office apparently decided not to run to remain in office, but the bigger news that complete a trade agreement that would bring China into the World Trade published today in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that is the Cold War of nuclear weapons in foreign countries, many of which have policies strictly banning a nuclear presence. The only real remaining mystery, say the Both the Wall Street Journal 's "Heard on the Street" column and since the decision is tantamount to pouring millions into their stock? prosecutors had filed rape and kidnapping charges against a "John Doe" fingerprints, is unique to each individual.) The prosecutors took this step because the statute of limitations for the crime was about to expire and they located, will statutes of limitations become irrelevant? Statute of limitations laws require plaintiffs to take legal action within a specified time in order for their claim to be valid. (Murder is the one crime exempted from statutes of limitations.) The purpose is to guarantee defendants' Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial and to ensure that they will not have to defend themselves against stale evidence. (It would be difficult, for example, to find witnesses to corroborate an alibi many years after the statute of limitations in rape cases is six years, a warrant requires a name, an alias, or a physical description of the suspect that would allow him to be arrested with reasonable certainty. This ensures that prosecutors are charging a specific suspect. It also prevents them from bringing charges in secret, which would violate Fifth Amendment due process rights. Some defense attorneys say that allowing prosecutors to charge suspects by recovered in a very large percentage of criminal cases. And if a suspect can be from semen swabbed from the victims' genitals on the nights of the attacks. Arguably, few fingerprints (or other identifiers) would be sufficiently charging him in secret because few people would recognize their own genetic code even if they read it in a newspaper. In any event, the statute of the crime, and his lawyers protest the prosecutors' strategy. democratically elected government. The majors all cite the same immediate Thereafter army units quickly took to the streets and overran key government and several other top officials under house arrest, announced that he was in The papers also agree on the main background factors: The army had been signing the comprehensive test ban treaty, and his plans to divert money from the military to housing for the poor. The Post also mentions the army's government. But the LAT says that there is no immediate concern in the if the paper had said what law. How long has it been in existence?) The writes of a time that he was out at a restaurant with Chamberlain and Chamberlain's date when the player excused himself to get the phone number of a woman at another table. And another time, Shaw says, Chamberlain ushered him out of his hotel room in order to entertain three women simultaneously. (Shaw sign that the papers are maturing when it comes to market swings, is that, on a relatively slow news day, no other paper fronts the story. insurance. More than a quarter of whom, says the chart, earn more than "horseless carriages," a designation meant to be reserved for vintage vehicles Congress by the end of the week. Yet the papers give the story wildly different raised fears among some scientists that what the paper calls "fundamental advances in a genetic revolution" will wind up being controlled by a handful of days about the state of Social Security legislation, which aims to confront a stock market idea until the eleventh of twenty paragraphs. puts the news about the dropped stock market measure in the seventh paragraph, and explains Republican opposition to that plan more succinctly than the other papers, citing "fear that this could eventually lead to government control of the total number of applications has declined. Embassy officials apparently need to bolster cultural ties between the two countries. much touted "compassionate conservatism." Early this year, legislators in enroll in Medicaid, a program that requires a hefty state contribution per child, fought to limit eligibility for the federal program. The legislature ultimately won the fight, "but the governor fought us tooth and nail," one financial interests as a senator, the paper notes. But the relationships he also helped, since so many on Wall Street are sports fans. climate with an avuncular style. But his grip on power, the paper reports, may age, though.) Even his supporters began to worry when military aides had to Manhattan, "household managers" (that's the favored term these days) now divisions as well as plenty of eccentricities. (Trump hates shaking hands, for example, which might make pressing the flesh as a presidential candidate a bit difficult.) "The upshot," Bennet writes, "is that the Reform Party is entering a critical election torn by what is essentially a civil war." stories people are writing now and how frightened folks are at the prospect of wrestlers, developers, and movie stars entering politics. I remember all the When you think about it, none of the three current "serious" boys arrived at its advantages, as they say. Famous sons of famous men are remarkable when they being remarkable. Folks couldn't get over that he wasn't in office or, at least, in the movies. His death reminded people that the later chapters of his life were not going to play out as they had dreamed them. I don't think we ever completely got over the allure of royalty. Our favorite soap operas seem to be about dynasties; generations handing down traditions of abuse and debauchery of the whole teeming Bush clan moving back into the limelight. It won't be the stale Bush administration we knew. We now have a panoply of archetypes we know and are, I think, already responding to. The young slacker Bush, called by his country, avenging his father against the sinful pretender. The ardent, pious wife, taming the young prince, guiding him to his glorious destiny. The knee. The powerful and benevolent queen mum. The equally ambitious younger brother who will not take a cabinet post (will there be family rivalry?). And move in to the circle? Ah, we breathlessly await the next exciting episode. The last few weeks have been good ones for popular discussion of language. refer to a sex act; a woman chosen to run one of the world's largest law firms delightful word "floccinaucinihilipilification," the longest word in the first I hope we can talk about some of these issues this week. But the one thing that's been most striking recently is the response to an "On Language" column Ms. Fox, citing various linguists and explaining things quite clearly, said that negative reactions to nonstandard dialects are the result of social To us, as linguists, this is familiar and noncontroversial. I had thought that Ms Fox's presentation would be viewed by the general public as noncontroversial as well, but I was mistaken: The letters column last week had no fewer than six angry letters, calling us "intellectual diddlers" and jobs." It was even implied that considering dialects to be linguistically equal was a "pernicious threat to common sense, logic, science and our basic It would seem that the writers of such letters themselves lack common sense, or at least the ability to understand simple language. Ms. Fox was very clear that languages were considered equal "on purely linguistic grounds," and that value judgments were "socially determined." The linguists who spoke in favor of diversity were certainly not advocating the abandonment of language teaching, It's too bad that a genuine effort to spread this understanding has to meet together, thinking and acting in this new way, trying to reinvent the business world and perhaps even trying to redefine the nature of capitalism itself. (Can Ultimately, every character in the book is going to what Silicon Valley is like at this moment in history. From my vantage point on most people in the Valley firmly believe. If that turns out to be the case, way. They are true heroes." But now let's suppose that Silicon Valley at the millennium turns out to be what the 1960s were when we were in college: an ultimately falls by the wayside, much of the wealth evaporates, and one day people wake up and wonder, "What were we thinking?" In that case, we'll look idiots those guys were! Couldn't they see that it was all about to collapse?" book will hold up no matter how this story plays out. it is all going to turn out badly. And that is perfectly appropriate for this book, because there really is no dissent in the Valley. But reading the book provoked in me, at least, the lingering thought that it can't last. There is it's impossible to know from the scenes in The New New actual business plans. Nobody seems to even care about profits anymore. All of just have to come to the book predisposed to look for them. Which, I admit, is my general bias. Yes, I believe the companies profitable some day in the distant future. But no, I don't think what's going on in the Valley right now is sustainable. What was that line you quoted? "In this new world skepticism was not a sign of intelligence. It was a and it has taught me a lot. (You've been following Silicon Valley for some Lewis' characters calls "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history is among other things a terrific introduction to the ongoing revolution in Like you, I found a number of annoying and frustrating things in the book, funny, telling moments that he often doesn't have to "tell" much around computing would link up with personal communications once the PC became fun to games part), but as Lewis observes, "he was groping toward a mass market." (It to a piece of software called Mosaic that enabled its users to travel around the Internet. With the help of Mosaic's young designer, he set up what became There's lots more that's good in here, but we've got two more days to talk about it, and I want to answer some of your questions and outline some of my own reservations. Yes, I think it's possible that Lewis has too much talent for his own good. He's in fact so deft with the "telling" incident that he doesn't bother to fill in facts you really want to know. I did notice that he never the scene in which the venture capitalists and Wall Street wizards throw money billions have been made, it doesn't matter what the company is or does. it's 157-foot) computerized sailboat, I thought it was fun to read but too risk, and sets up a neat contest between computer engineering and "real world" engineering (in this context, real world wins so far). And there's a funny that @Home has just bought Excite, and the crew goes on about stocks and taxes But there is too much boat stuff, and though as always with Lewis it's very well written, it feels like filler. Substantive reflections on history and on ago, that it would be nice to have her back. But consider the hole she left behind her in the pundit universe. The columns of her successor at the She's substantive and stern; she's loyal to husband and kids; she makes peace, ourselves as others see us,' was the line my grandmother would always throw out when she was crabby and I was full of myself," is the sort of thing she's wont Let's clear up another common misconception while we're at it. Big time. It's easy to mistake it for that, and her critics generally do, making her a springboard for an attack on feminism in general. She draws on her own experience, thereby making the personal political, and was for a long time the good for kids and against stuff that's bad for them. But feminism is an ideology, which is to say a relatively coherent intellectual position, a set of arguments attached to a political objective. So weighty an agenda demands a newspaper editorialists and magazine editors and advice columnists elevated the anecdote of daily life to the status of gospel and did more than just about in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of he's acknowledged to be his elegy to his daughter, who died after she ran into a strongly about? Editorials are supposed to be the literature of opinion, but as morally instructive in their way as the works of another, far greater the perils of letting others tell you what to do in life. The homily is big sister: "Just remember that sometimes you drift into things, and then you can't get out of them," the sister advises the novel's protagonist. "Not to home to take care of her dying mother and winds up accused of euthanasia, echoes that lesson but ups the ante: If you're passive enough to let your parents dump their problems on you, they can darn near destroy your life. letting someone else tell you what to do even more horrifyingly explicit: It's yourself, take some responsibility, for crying out loud. As convictions go, it's not the most original around, but it's not a most on this subject, with more of a sense of history (she tosses the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice into the mix). But ah, yes, here comes the grandmotherly language: "Oh, for pity's sake, here we go again." Here's the priests of impropriety, and thousands of children are failing in the New York City schools. And civic leaders, both political and religious, are using their The point is, she's right, as she usually is. It wouldn't hurt us to eat our Busting Bush's Biographer"). I say this not to congratulate myself (well, not merely to congratulate myself) but to ask why St. Martin's Press, which announced yesterday that it was "suspending" publication of the book, was evaluate books for a living. Why couldn't they smell the huge fish rotting in The answer is that book editors, and especially some of those at St. Martin's, are very skilled at holding their noses. People often assume that books are more reliable than newspapers and magazines because they are printed on higher quality paper and bound between hard covers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Book publishers have the lowest editorial standards in journalism, with the possible exception of the Drudge Report and In news journalism, editors assume a degree of responsibility for the veracity of what they edit. If a newspaper reporter quotes anonymous sources, his editor will usually want to know their identity, so he can reach some conclusion about whether they are trustworthy. Many magazines employ In book publishing, by contrast, editors avoid getting involved in issues of knew who one of his three alleged anonymous sources was. (I stipulate that I have no idea whether this is true, since St. Martin's employees refused all book are attacked, the editor is not obliged to defend them or even to have an Fortunate Son appears, has taken this position explicitly in the past. people to expect him to judge the author's reliability. "I have been told," for an editor to sit in judgment of his own books would be censorship! In place of editorial standards, book publishers have legal ones. While they may not care whether what they publish is true or not, they do care whether they can be sued. So lawyers vet books like Fortunate Son for libel. But sue his client. And in an instance like this one, a libel lawyer would say that the chance of a lawsuit was next to nil, even if he suspected that Fortunate Son was fabricated out of whole cloth. Why? Because nonexistent sources can't sue, and politicians don't sue. By filing for libel, a to happen even if he stood a chance of winning a judgment against St. Martin's. To sue would mean that Bush would have to answer endless questions about his caveat especially lectors of books published by St. Martin's Press. It's hard to tell if this is still the Era of Stock Market Good Feeling or to a sudden end. What we seem to be living through right now is a strange time in which the market is simultaneously being excoriated as overvalued and hysterical and being described as being in a slump that forebodes bad As evidence of investor hysteria, the financial media often point to things after it announced that it would have two, and perhaps three, disappointing quarters in a row because its customers were cutting back on spending in order the narrative goes, and then pile out of it without paying any attention to the stock market, was instead a sign of just how discriminating investors have become. If stock prices really were being driven solely by inflated margin expect investors to be forgiving. In fact, they are more punitive then ever. Investors are willing to pay high prices for companies that deliver consistent The speed with which a negative earnings report can vaporize a company's market cap is also sometimes held up as problematic. But here again, it's no surprise that in a world in which trading costs are minuscule, the diffusion of information nearly instantaneous, and trading volume immense, prices will change very fast in the wake of significant news. This just means that markets are more efficient, not less, in the sense that they establish a new the past (and even the recent past), we've seen announcements like the one that Big Blue made have a ripple effect on tech stocks across the board, as momentum and program traders bailed out of anything that might suffer from association with a big name's blowup. But last week, investors rather quickly recognized sold. In other words, investors rewarded the companies that should have been rewarded and punished those that should have been punished. Capital was There are, of course, always going to be under- and overreactions, like the after an unsubstantiated rumor that the company would miss estimates hit the depending on how you're counting) years of a bull market have not made officers at which they were told that investigators are now looking into seven high. This is, the paper points out, money therefore not available to spend on service members' training or housing. The New York Times front is a campaign manager's dream: The lead is Al Gore's vow yesterday that if elected president, providing working parents with various tax benefits. Pictures of the candidates appropriations bills currently on Congress' plate are salted with discreet little money plums for business: for auto companies, defense contractors, utilities, agribusiness, shipbuilders, chemical companies, and even an develop a supersonic business jet, apparently to meet the pressing national need for fat guys in loud pants to get to golf tournaments quicker. understanding of why, despite eyewitness accounts of the mass murder of little murder evidence. They now believe, says the paper, that the militiamen took pains to cover their tracks, in one case burning their victims' extremely concerned about saving face. They want to be able to deny any of this perhaps the world land speed record for credibility disintegration: not only conviction in his past not contain a shred of convincing evidence, but it turns stretch for attempted murder. Confronted with the blow up, St. Martin's pulled quality control in the publishing business lacks only two things: quality and already making for a better and more interesting campaign. When both candidates lay out their proposals on a given subject at the same time, we journalists are impelled to compare and contrast them. And in this case, the exercise is expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and fully funding Head Start. But they have fundamentally different attitudes about how the federal government should The most striking difference is in the way the two candidates frame the poverty, emphasizing the need for personal responsibility and New Families, Reduce Child Poverty, Promote Responsible Fatherhood." The nuances of language are significant. Note that Gore avoids separating out his proposals voters don't like Democrats enamored of liberal spending programs, Gore ideas. The objective of reducing (not eliminating) poverty comes attached to characterized in his speech as "cracking down on deadbeats who abandon their children." Gore's proposal is filled with coercive and punitive mechanisms. He would require poor mothers to sign "individual responsibility plans." He would require fathers who owe child support to go either to work or to jail. programmatic reach or generous funding. "I am issuing a simple challenge suggests various ways of raising their incomes to the poverty line. In other simply a lack of money. If in the end he doesn't offer very much money to address the problem, it's because he knows that any Democratic president There are two specific areas that highlight these differences in approach. the Senate. "As a result of welfare reform, millions of families have moved from the dependency of welfare to the dignity of work," Gore said in his is that welfare reform is working remarkably well. Someday soon, Gore will club A similar distinction in tone and approach marks what the two have to say speech, he called on fathers to realize "that having a child is a lifetime commitment." Gore would give them no other option. He wants to take away their credit cards, on top of their driver's licenses and passports, while attaching their bank accounts and garnishing their wages. Gore then proposes throwing them in jail if they refuse to work. Somewhat comically, he follows this call for relentless harassment and involuntary servitude with a proposal to Morris-1995 flavor to the inventive punishments applied to absent fathers, the public enemies who have no friends. The more substantive part of what Gore recipients and replace public housing projects with more humane alternatives. But Gore seems to lack the guts to confront the issue of poverty directly. And measures would really work. Nor does it acknowledge how much they would cost or which is modest and incremental. Eliminating child poverty in a decade, which at the rate it has been dropping during the past eight years would be a far Since the 1980s, the conventional wisdom has been that Democrats who are too interested in helping poor people get their heads handed to them. Gore's unsafe and ineffective. If you want that kind of consumer information, try this Chatterbox spent most of today continuing to quake with fear at the prospect report on in a forthcoming (but as yet unscheduled) report. Believing that when the program airs. But when Chatterbox actually went to the Web site, he was confronted by an elaborate "user agreement" that essentially threatened to sue anyone who used the information on the Web site for journalistic purposes. But Chatterbox wasn't going to do anything without talking to a lawyer. He to consider the information it had gone to some expense to publicize without the transcript under the fair use doctrine, and you also can certainly take still frames, make still frames, of the videotaped interview under the fair use doctrine as well." He said Chatterbox could also link to the Web site, which was a great relief to hear, because Chatterbox had already done that in the the copyright on an interview conducted by someone else (incorporating, "I don't know what possible basis you would have for that question," he million hits on the first day it was up. He also said that if lengthier, more intimidating set of disclaimers that goes on page after page should give you some idea about how little prominence legal language was much harder to find, but said that when you read it, it was yourself. Chatterbox thinks that the few obsessives who wander onto this page, which publication in the world, on the Web or elsewhere, is more than happy to have urging Chatterbox to come home. Chatterbox will report on his visit to market, the "curse" is an exaggeration. Often, there are no major drops during forgiving, since there is still time for the company to recover before year's end. In the third and fourth quarters, though, poor earnings reports often stock price after the company's earnings announcement). Of course, the market also reacts more strongly to companies beating expectations, so this may simply to ensure that annual fund performance appears strong, managers may engage in "profit taking," or selling stocks that have increased in value. As with any product, the increased number of sellers tends to drive down prices. Third, While the year's first few months are a time of optimism, they say, the end of the year is characterized by pessimism compounded by the onset of winter. make investments before the end of the tax year.) And past crashes may make investors may be especially skittish during the month. reactions would tend to counteract it. That is, if an investor knew that stock opportunity to buy into the market at lower prices. As investors looked to on this expectation. But this year, some analysts did advise their clients to and All Sport, are all represented. The variations between brands are as the classic orange thunderbolt design, and has generally more mild watery and Glacier Freeze. The new trend in drinks seems to be away from the end of the color spectrum and the dropping of all pretense of fruitiness. strongly like bathroom cleaner you think you're going to burn your nose Instead of chowing down on sports bars like I did for drinks before I ran. And I felt a lot better than I did with the bars. But the many uncontrolled factors involved here (did I get a better night's sleep? Did I feel better because I didn't have a brick of imitation banana in my stomach?) make it impossible to conclusively attribute my feeling better to the more rapid and effective hydration I was receiving from the sports drinks. The differences in prices among the drinks were small. After sampling everything on my smorgasbord of colored aids in stimulating fluid consumption." Is the idea to make you even thirstier So what did you think of the drinks? Are you worried at all about the amount of artificial flavors and colors that you're agree. She says, "Oh, Dear," and I say "Hooray!!" The only problem I have is that it's not breaking down nearly fast enough, due to vested interests, institutional inertia, and lots of uncertainty about the new models of wealth creation that will replace the industrial leviathan. Gender has a role to play here too. Men have dominated the old order. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that a certain interpretation of masculinity based on dominance has imbued the old order. Many men feel comfortable with what they know, and it's not clear that they will be able to enjoy the same kinds of perks from their masculinity as wealth creation evolves toward new models in the next century. Fifty years of social science have decried what that old order did to human suddenly turned on to the financial benefits of treating employees like paper something of a normal distribution, with some being quite progressive and humane, offering great benefits and employment security, and some being right bastards. Most were somewhere in the middle, treating employees like paper clips when their balance sheet required them to do so. This situation has not changed. Today, the really cool companies that make the Fortune cover with their great family policies, benefits, and distribution still holds for the rest. Despite all the hype about the end of loyalty, most of the studies conducted by labor economists show that the length of time that people spend with an organization and the number of changes they make during their careers has not varied dramatically over the last experienced managers in the early 1990s, during the recession, but even that So in what way are things changing? The short answer here, I think, is "choice." The very success of the old order has created new skyscrapers and industrial parks. This means new choices for employment and new or their consumption. They are seeking ways to exert more control over their own lives and in the process to enhance the quality of their lives. For all the narcissism of those who are busy ringing and what's local no longer accurately describe the scene. In these new worlds, people are participating in the global economy while their lives remain was the first year in which there was a net migration away from the cities and commercial activity was based at home. Craftsmen had their shops out back. factories and offices. Perhaps as a way to displace their collective grief, they decided that the workplace was really important and what went on at home who was allowed to work from home without being regarded suspiciously was the educated people who can now free themselves from the hegemony of the old "epicenters" to live the life they want without sacrificing their participation So where does this leave the "masculinity crisis"? It brings us right back to "choice." The people making these new choices are the ones forcing the breakdown of the old order. Yes, it's doing plenty to make itself vulnerable, but organizations based on the old industrial model are simply not the first choice of an increasing number of people who work and consume. The new path they are forging is still in its infancy, but unlike the the trends on which I place my bets for the future. For the men who are making these new choices, I don't believe there is a masculinity crisis but rather a liberation from an identity constrained by the "I am what I do" and the "I am my status on the totem pole" mentality that dominated the emotional lives of excited about carving out a wider individuality in which they can develop and enjoy a more spacious and multifaceted sense of self. For those who continue to pursue the more traditional masculine identity, there is no crisis, but rather denial. They will work to keep those identities intact until something happens in their personal or professional lives that profoundly challenges their sense very much about choosing friends capable of a commitment to the person he could "losers." It's a hard word, but there is truth there. They are losers because the old identity is foreclosed to them while the new choices don't appear to be accessible. And it is precisely for this reason that, however important their stories may be, they do not provide a basis for generalizing about the state of Times lead with the decision by Republican congressional leaders to the partisan budget differences which have left the government operating under leads with the government's announcement of new regulations for transplant eliminate, as much as possible, the current disparities in recipient waiting time from state to state and to maximize the chance for the sickest (but administration's legislative proposal, sent to Congress yesterday, which would steer Medicare beneficiaries towards preferred doctors and hospitals that have agreed to offer discounted charge rates to the government and to reduce patient fees correspondingly. The White House claim, says the paper, is that the participating hospitals would not be financially hurt by the scheme because of and doctors object, fearing that such a plan will favor low cost over high whenever they have, they've gotten their heads handed to them. The big budget issue, the two papers agree, is whether or not to tap into the current surplus generated by Social Security taxes. The Post quotes experts who think that any subsequent budget agreement will tap in, but via "enough budget report released today by the Rand Corp., at the behest of the government, which troops during the Gulf War may be the cause of the host of mysterious chronic illnesses afflicting tens of thousands of Gulf veterans. The LAT and "extraordinary service to the country at great personal sacrifice over the past killed by a stray bomb from a Marine jet. The Times story notes in its York Senate run and her sudden interest in naval aerial training A surprising percentage of donated monies end up supporting national administrative bureaucracies. The writer states that his own church, the United This sum, he says, would enable the Salvation Army to provide two meals a day Catholic chaplain about his political mission, the chaplain broke the news to not to ask an applicant what religion his was, since "colleges are historical answer and he said, "You're wrong. The legislature can do anything it wants to do provided it isn't unconstitutional." He instructed me, in effect, not to stress my own libertarian line, but simply to say I had no reason to suppose Education Practices bill, which never did pass, would not likely have been that there were no quotas. But there were quotas. Whether these were quotas' that had the same net effect," and these "were not relaxed until the What Chatterbox wants to know is: Why are we learning about this only now? extensively about his own personal experiences; moreover, the first book that, a mere two or three years before publishing this book, he himself had encountered some evidence that systematic exclusion might still going on. Yes, it's ironic, but predictable, that people express ambivalence toward second or heritage languages: They attack languages such as in New York are choosing to have their very young children begin the study of indicates, does this mean, as the Times suggests, that they have come to value multilingualism, or does it mean they are just being practical? And language whose speakers maintain a great deal of language loyalty, that is, the they maintain their social isolation from the mainstream. But once that tend to spring up when cultural preservation is in danger, and their record of the case); but they can't read it well or write it fluently, and their grasp of its grammar may be weak, since they haven't actually studied it as a language. use college language classrooms to try to recapture the heritage languages they What interests me about these minority language and English serves as an international language. Furthermore, living as we do in a (largely) postcolonial world, we tend to recognize that each national variety emphasize this fact. Yet within a community, group variation in standards still revolutionary, postcolonial product, is seen as simply "the way things are" language isn't capable of rendering the subtleties of math. Sometimes it seems to me that every language except my own is capable of rendering those mathematic subtleties, and my colleagues in math sometimes insist that the subtleties of math cannot be rendered into English, or at least English that is told me, when I asked her what she was working on, "I couldn't possibly put it understands what she is up to on her grant applications. The math case may the kind of thinking about language that pervades our society. How would you and adaptable. But they also exist in contexts, and while these contexts don't speakers exist in is one that does not bring them up against the differential calculus, what follows? Low math scores, for one thing. But that's not the same base his whole political career on crushing the messy process that is popular culture and scapegoating people too weak to defend themselves. As New Yorkers will recall, he launched his career by going after homeless guys who spritz your windshield at intersections and houses that have enjoyed continuous operation during the years that the mayor has been after the squeegee men. Then he put all the accouterments of street suburban mall. Last year he attacked taxi drivers with fines for regulations designed to make their lives impossible. I drove a cab for years kind of bully picks on guys who earn five bucks an hour? shops are all but gone, nightclubs find it nearly impossible to function after getting busted all the time, and now he's stopping the rent check to the lines. Still, there's quite a bit of repetition there, too, which I think is tapped out at 3,000-plus ideas, and they had the class to recognize that. Moreover, the daily papers are constantly shrinking the space available for comic strips, which means that it's impossible to stretch out artistically. Fortunately, I don't read papers where he appears, but his work is trite, appallingly apolitical, and graphically bereft of any character whatsoever. Even worse, the guy never paid me for thinking up ideas, crosshatching, apartment now. I need the cash for drawing lessons, man. But the greatest conflict in cartooning is about which is more important: Ideas or drawing. It helps when a creator enjoys both a muse lucky to have one or the other. Editors, it seems, lean more to the graphics great cartoons with lousy art. I have yet to find a great cartoonist with bad or nonexistent ideas. In my case, I know that the art has always been my weak point, which is why I developed a highly stylized drawing style (it also helps and why I still take drawing lessons and study everything from old woodcuts to either you have them or you don't, and there isn't much you can do about it news: Doctors Without Borders won the cherished award. Most analysts cite two reasons for the market's downturn: an unexpectedly large increase in the product price index (generally a harbinger of inflation), reserves. It is widely agreed that the Fed will raise interest rates when they superstition: many investors are selling because they know that the market has page article explaining the product price index, which measures inflation to one analyst, creates a "stealth bear" market, where, despite a rosy overall readers that it's misleading to judge a dip's severity by points rather than by percentages. Then, without missing a beat, it breathlessly reports that this Without Borders. The organization sends medical personnel to troubled areas throughout the world. Rejecting the political neutrality of the Red Cross, the group is often outspoken about the injustices its members see; the organization which it attributes to his "unabashed devotion to political money." One of the and thus prohibited from "coordinating" with candidates. conglomerates, mercenaries, and other outside interests supplying arms, money, and expertise to both sides. The ensuing clashes were particularly brutal, the destruction. The warring factions signed a peace treaty this summer. Corps is charging a commanding officer with negligence in a training death. An investigation discovered that the officer marched his troops faster than was recommended and ignored other safety procedures during a training exercise this wandered off after the hike's end, and expired of a "heat illness." If convicted, the officer could receive a dishonorable discharge and almost four millions, this hero gave his life trying to protect the ones he loved, after a lifetime devoted to fighting tyranny in all its guises. In a novel released moon collides with a planet he was trying to save. The plot twist was approved hour arrived, Chatterbox, having spent a pleasant evening 'round the hearth news coverage of same, slipped entirely from Chatterbox's mind. transcript of the broadcast but also to post the transcript, along with a streaming video of the segment, on the saying, on camera: "There's nothing in the medical records that indicate that long they spend on a story, a statistic that by itself means nothing) and was products may be safe in some people, but not all people," and that side effects such as heart palpitations and sleeplessness may be harbingers of "potentially more dangerous side effects, such as increases in blood pressure and pulse, that in turn may led to problems like heart attack and stroke." "trying to suppress information regarding a potentially unsafe product." interspersed throughout the manuscript, tricked Chatterbox into thinking, honestly fair with you, I do not know what our Web site looks like.") labeling "could be misleading" because it downplays the fact that it's been wants to impose "strict limits on the daily dosage" of ephedrine, the key unedited interview transcript) that "another government agency" (he means the and real estate agent [this last strikes Chatterbox as a cheap shot] who, it charge, using a telephone 'to facilitate a drug trafficking offense.' And got doesn't say, as he said in the raw interview transcript, that the lesser astonishing admission that until about a year ago the fellow who was "like a So who wins Round Two? It depends on how you score it. away with a more favorable view of the company than if they just watch is whether Chatterbox (who could stand to lose a few pounds) will now ever be called PULL. The author writes that he discovered this scandal only after his book was in galleys, which is why the accusation is tacked on as an afterword to what is otherwise a shoddy clip job with no fresh news. Should we believe this story? I don't think so. The asking us to trust him, he provides a multitude of reasons for thinking he afterword's accuracy and the author's criminal record. Click here for more.) that might make it possible to check the story. Among other things, he is missing the name of the judge who supposedly let Bush off, the name of the arresting officer, the police station, the date and circumstances of the arrest. What he claims to have are three sources. Naturally, they're all anonymous (making this a good example of the kind of story that wouldn't meet the evidentiary standards of the cheesiest newspaper but that presents no publisher's office, he told me that these sources are all old friends who have contemporaneous, independent knowledge of the alleged arrest, but that none would provide specifics for fear of being identified by Bush. Here's how he adviser who had known the presidential candidate for several years." confirm information in the book and spent three days bass fishing with him in Bush supporters want to supply a hostile reporter with information that would about his sources, he acknowledged that some of what he says about them in the "I can't and won't give you any names, but I can confirm uncovered a stale but nevertheless incriminating trail for an overly eager reporter to follow," he said, pausing occasionally to spit tobacco juice into Spitting tobacco juice into the Styrofoam cup is a nice the phone, and said that he knew the source chewed tobacco because he had spent time with him. But then he added: "I might have put that in to protect him. He or created composite characters to protect his sources. His admission about Or what, if anything, in the book isn't fictional. Anyone with a nose for cooked quotes should be able same thing, and congratulating him on his genius in ferreting out this facts. around to uncovering the truth," he replied, surprisingly unruffled by my kid who got caught with a little snow and because of his family's connections the way," he warned, speaking almost in a whisper. "Without sounding paranoid, for his White House run in a matter of only a few months and his corporate all this shit? It's the hypocrisy. Cocaine use is illegal, but as governor of You can't prove that someone made up quotes from an anonymous source, just as you can't prove you never got arrested and had the bill. The anachronistic colloquial expressions ("bedding down," "a little snow," "shit, man"), the insertion of gratuitous detail ("his TR-6 convertible was already in galleys when the author made his "discovery." The story reminds me, in fact, of another great episode That scandal, you may remember, featured the elder Bush secretly flying not to What the two fantasies have in common is that neither can be either confirmed or proved definitively false. Reporters can't "totally ridiculous" and "not true"), he can't prove that something never In fact, we should credit the Bush campaign's denial. friends, and so on. There's no way Bush could be sure that someone with actual evidence wouldn't come forward. And while he might survive an admission of story had any truth to it, Bush would be fatally compounding his problem by Bush really is on an accelerated schedule. He already So much stuff to respond to, my keyboard is shaking. Of course, that could just be the horrifying turbulence on the plane. That and the fact that reading political correctness. The fact is, black men in the South in the 1930s had a about working twice as fast to go half as far. If Green Mile had any bravery, it would have dealt with the fact that racial epithets were offhandedly tossed off by what were considered the best of men during that Mile 's fear of the real world is the real political correctness: Every white guy in the movie is a warm, decent sort who regrets any motion that's vaguely menacing. Every racist in the movie is a If Hanks had been forced to deal with his own incipient racism, that would have remind us of attitudes that still drift throughout this country. (I have a cassette of censored cartoons from the era, and the racism in Coal Black and One of my concerns about moving to New York is the open racism that still lives in the city; the joke I used to make is the only reason black men date white mystics that runs throughout King's work, and put that stuff in my to wait until most actors think about collecting a pension to watch his career start. It creates a core of tension in Freeman's work. (This residual anger can revolutionaries with a thirst for payback. It was the first sense I got of a treating women seriously has come from other countries. And I hate saying that, of the basic errors of welfare coverage, an error that might be called the only half the story." The other half includes those families who would have gone on welfare under the old system, but who now "no longer even apply for welfare." These latter families, you'd think, would tend to be more successful in the marketplace than people who now spend some time on the rolls. To really judge welfare reform, then, you have to look at what happens to all families who would have been on welfare under the old system, those who leave and those who never go on. Actually, you can't even stop there. You have to look at what is happening to the overall society in which those welfare for work and who still have big problems. From this he concludes that welfare reform "may end up making less of a difference in the lives of the poor, socially or economically, than much of the public imagined." But his piece has very little evidence, and almost no statistical evidence, about what lives of the poor, including "violent neighborhoods, absent fathers, bare cupboards, epidemics of depression, the temptations of drugs." That's very true. But are they getting better or worse? That is the issue, isn't it? taking more of an interest in their children? Are there fewer kids born without fathers present in the household? Are more mothers being beaten up by their boyfriends? Are kids doing better in school? Is the culture of depressed? Hungry? Overall, how has the texture of ghetto life changed? Welfare reformers said it would be change for the better. Were they right? Some of these things would not be difficult to report on; some would be very try to come up with much. We learn a lot about the problems in the lives of the individual anecdotes, they are all "leavers," people who were on welfare cover line ("Welfare Reform's Victims"), the article contains more positive news than negative. "Employment among single mothers has increased more than almost anyone expected." Most single mothers are a little better off economically, but a small minority at the bottom "seem to be a little worse proportion of children born out of wedlock doesn't seem to have improved the impact of reform on his clientele. The Journal Sentinel clip got his tenants, who no longer receive guaranteed monthly welfare checks, are offering "excuses" for missing the rent. "So far, haven't seen a big be one of those kind interviewees who winds up telling reporters what they want to hear. (And aren't there other bus drivers to talk to, like the two drivers were actually stronger than Love's? What about local church leaders? Social the work has failed to translate into economic progress." These families, he doesn't give any figures on how much it's growing. When I checked a couple of years ago, the shelter population had indeed increased, but only by a handful of families. Is the problem now more severe? Are we talking about dozens of after two decades of desperation and chronic dependence on welfare." She's this year," she "struggles to simply keep food on the table" to feed her recently "found a job, as a hotel maintenance man." Presumably he gets paid. Lazar are doing at the Breakfast Table. I can only assure them that, in our serious, luckily, and now he's tearing around the house like usual), so if this were a real breakfast table, my conversation would not be rising very far above occasional groans, grunts, and frantic gestures towards the coffee pot. This opener?), one of the funniest things about it is that one of the surviving But more seriously, you suggest we talk about the Millennium. What has interested me, as a professional historian, about the media's coverage of the subject so far, has been how relatively little attention has been paid to the particularly given the enormous interest in history that is demonstrated by things like the success of the History Channel (history as a living presence, in the living room). All right, there were the special issues of the New I suspect one reason is that a thousand years is just too long a period of time. There is too much to consider. In one sense, the second millennium in fact contains nearly everything we think of as "history," for even if we would bet that all the extant written material from all human civilizations for Magazine series never really worked, and tended to veer off into interesting digressions at best, and postmodern silliness at worst. The difficulty of even generalizing about such a long period is probably the same reason we are seeing very few predictions about what life is going to be right (and if some of your predictions involve the lengthening of the human life span, and you hit the mark there, you may even still be around to see how Another reason for the lack of attention, closer to my own concerns, is that Western historians no longer have a simple story to tell about the history of years ago, for most historians, and for the general public as well, the story of the millennium was the story of the Triumph of the West. If you had taken a figure of this triumph. But today, the picture is much more murky, the triumph much more dubious. I suppose "political correctness" has some role in this loss mood to discuss political correctness. And anyway, more fundamental than political correctness is surely the fact that the West has not exactly Westerners, given who their teachers were. And now the century is coming to an respectable by any standard, but it's especially remarkable when you consider I know, I know. These numbers are effectively gibberish, especially since I could fill this column every day with stories about stocks making incredible moves upward. So why does it matter or not matter whether in May the mention of catapulted him into national attention and, in some sense, probably got him his analysts to make audacious calls. Otherwise they won't even be noticed. You can see the same phenomenon at work in analysts' estimates of things that if you're an analyst and you cite that number, no one will notice you. So The phenomenon of number creep is bad because we want analysts to reach conclusions they think are true, and not conclusions that they think are going the truth is that there still isn't enough accountability for these kinds of forecasts to make the rewards and punishments for success and failure commensurate. But the phenomenon is also bad because these kinds of calls have trade as a result of them, at least if you're a trader. According to a traditional definition of "information" about a stock (as in, a stock's price reflects all the available information the market has about probably: "Why are you just starting to cover this stock now?" But if we broaden the definition of "information" to include everything that might affect that stock's price, even in the short term, then the report has to be considered new information, which means that it has to affect the stock price. And that means that ignoring it is not necessarily rational, even if forecast to be forgotten. In the long run, even in this stock market, companies' stock prices will find their true level. But what has become means that it will take longer for those true levels to be reached. definitive, feel of "Apocalypse Soon," featuring as it did three different columns arguing that the stock market was patently overvalued, that this the economy as a whole even if, as seems certain it would, the Federal Reserve were to step up and cut interest rates to keep liquidity in the system. But what's interesting is that even if you set the question of overvaluation correction is in the offing, it's really not clear that a major correction would have such a dramatic impact on the economy as a whole. It's not clear because the evidence for a causal relationship between a booming stock market and a booming economy remains surprisingly scanty. For the most part, it's accepted that there is such a thing as a "wealth effect," whereby some percentage of every dollar people make in the stock market is turned into consumption. But the magnitude of that wealth effect has, at least in the past, been shown (insofar as something like this can be shown) to be relatively small, on the order of three to five cents in additional spending per dollar. Over the past few years, as the economy has grown at a much faster than anticipated rate and the stock market has also risen sharply, the media and Wall Street seem to have assumed that the size of the wealth effect has also increased, and that more of every dollar in market gain is being turned into consumption (which in turn drives the economy). But that remains very much effect on spending a study of the past couple of years showing that retail spending and the stock market have risen quite briskly and seemingly in tandem. But contiguity is not causality. There probably is a virtuous circle at work in which the strength of the economy as a whole pushes up stock prices, the gains from which are then put back to work in the economy. But drawing a strict It's become easy to accept this argument, of course, because the stock market has taken on such tremendous cultural prominence in the 1990s, and has become, in fact, the key symbol of this decade's economic boom. But it is just money in the stock market at all). Given what we know about the way people use money into different kinds of accounts, rather than thinking about their money spending lavishly because their 401Ks, which they know they won't be touching This isn't to say that if the market were to swoon significantly the young companies would rise and the use of stock options as compensation (which has helped keep down wage pressure) would be limited. But it is to say that the people with very little or nothing at all invested in the stock market, that there is an apocalypse soon, something other than the stock market will have to (although it fronts a picture of troops maintaining order there in the aftermath) and goes instead with the New York state court ruling that the requiring all oil companies to produce cleaner gasoline (via lowering sulfur of the new rules as saying their impact on air quality will be the same as international aid response is quoted by the paper saying, "You have areas where the mud is more than one story deep and the bodies will never be recovered. The under mud, there are bodies everywhere," while the LAT attributes this paper explains, the store owners were clever back, often lining their shelves with videos of cartoons, wrestling, and karate movies that were hardly ever sold. Although the city called such practices, "sham compliance," the court has which say nothing about the profitability or turnover of stock. the same legal benefits and protections enjoyed by heterosexual married breakthrough for advocates of gay marriage. The court left it up to the legislature to decide whether this equal entitlement can best be achieved via legalizing gay marriage or, alternatively, by codifying the rights and benefits of domestic partners. The papers rough out how this decision could be not the end but merely the beginning of a legal morass: If the legislature does proceed and then return to their home states citing the privileges of marriage few years (it would have been nice if the story specified exactly how many), launching an advertising push on the Internet that could demonstrate the ads pop up when a Web surfer arrives at one of a number of sites chosen for then provide an interactive tax calculator to let the surfer answer the assessment in the LAT of the LAT 's Staple Center mess. (Today's found an instance of towering journalistic integrity in the whole episode: At one point an LAT ad exec objected to the magazine's special issue's use of the locution "the Staples Center," because the facility's owners do not use the same "benefits and protections" as heterosexual married couples. Earlier grant marriage licenses to gays and lesbians. Why the different results? And clauses in their constitutions that guarantee all citizens the same treatment under the law. (These clauses are similar to the equal protection provision of for racial minorities, women, and other groups.) In both states, gay couples protection: They argued that it blocked their access to the same rights and obligations that heterosexual couples are granted through marriage, including and shared parental and financial responsibilities. marriage amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. Unless the state could demonstrate to lower courts that it had a valid interest in denying gay marriages, continued discrimination would be unconstitutional. A which seemed to pave the way for gay marriage. The state appealed, but before Court had no choice but to throw out the gay couples' claims to marriage Court determined that the legislature "was constitutionally required to extend exempting marriage from the equal protection clause, although they could.) The immediate because all the states recognize marriages performed in other states. home, demand that their states recognize the unions. Anticipating this strategy, Congress passed the "Defense of Marriage Act" in preemptive laws saying they would not accept gay marriages from other The courts will have to decide whether these laws are constitutional. The public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other state." The Supreme Court has held that this "full faith and credit" provision covers if you moved to a new state. If the Supreme Court extends the provision to category of domestic partnership that provides precisely the same state protections and benefits as marriage. But this domestic partnership would not necessarily yield rights for gay couples from other states or from the federal government. Many federal benefits and responsibilities depend on the "marriage" classification, which has a privileged constitutional status that domestic partnership does not. Marriage is considered so fundamental a right, in fact, Although the wording of constitutional equal protection clauses varies from often look to courts in other states for guidance on how to rule in similar legislature's course of action, gay rights advocates will use the ruling in Explainer thanks many Slate readers for suggesting this York Times lead summarizes a report documenting mistakes in Veterans takes responsibility for violating the hallowed "separation of church and these cases resulted in the patient's death. The study, the first of its kind probably no lower in other hospital systems. The National Academy of Sciences, which recently called for similar studies in hospitals nationwide, reported That's higher than the number of people who die annually on highways or from watching with increasing vigilance potential New Year's Eve hot spots. The suggests the story might be about Customs Service preparations against future Laden. The equipment confiscated by customs officials seems to match that used investigators have helped pin down at home and abroad people suspected of plotting violence over New Year's. An aside halfway through the piece likens how low Web "retailers" will go in the name of establishing a loyal customer pursuing tactics that "would be, in any normal business, ruinous" Times es see the election as an "unofficial Presidential primary" administration is debating whether it is worse to give loans to an operation generally thought to be shady, or risk jeopardize already strained relations with the Kremlin. Isn't this thinking similar to the logic faulted in a number something worse around the corner persuades the administration to live with the LAT 's publisher and editor, explain that the paper shared with after Downing asked forgiveness from an irate staff. Tomorrow, the paper will Below their note the paper runs its statement of principles: "Our mission is to provide the news, information, analysis and commentary [readers] need to lead successful lives and to be effective citizens in a democracy." In their two televised debates this weekend, the Democratic candidates both showed substantial improvement since their previous still hyperactive, he seemed much less desperate and hysterical than in the an effort to seize the offensive on health care, asking Gore repeatedly, "Who would you leave out?" In response, Gore just kept repeating his ineffectual and inaccurate answer that his plan would leave no one out. But it was during the much feistier encounter on Meet The Press finally came into his own. He performed a sort of political jujitsu I have never really seen from him before, waiting for Gore to charge at him, and then they both agree to a moratorium on 30-second ads and that they debate twice a this offer right now. If you will agree, I will stop running all television and radio commercials until this nomination is decided. That can get a lot of the money out of the presidential campaign and accomplish one of the best reforms. ridiculous proposal. You know, the way you communicate with people is of all these television and radio commercials. Why not do that? months that I was running for president you ignored me. You pretended I didn't exist. Suddenly I start to do better and you want to debate every day. It's Look, we could call this the Meet The Press agreement. We could have two debates every single week and get rid of all the television and radio responded by snipping off the huckster's polyester necktie, saying in effect, disdainfully critiqued and dismissed his whole approach to politics. both candidates tried to rule out the option of raising the retirement age. itself discussed this option. Gore responded that he hadn't ever discussed is that at the same time you criticize me for wanting discussion in the United accompanying hand gesture, undoubtedly unconscious but perilously close to the universal symbol for "pull it a little harder." Throughout the entire debate, box that Gore has tried to put him in. He has figured out a way to defend At various points in the broadcast, you could hear Gore chuckling and hand, came across as straightforward and real, his authenticity underscored by lead with the speedy trial, conviction, and sentencing of four leaders of the passengers during the day yesterday and persuaded the hijackers to release a government's intolerance for members of its ruling party who belong to the organization: All four accused were in the Communist Party, the Post ministry official who helped organize the group's 10,000-person silent group, who was charged as an accomplice. The four were officially accused of using the organization to undermine law, contributing to the deaths of some dispersing information about the state's crackdown on the group. whom or what it is unclear. Authorities conducted about a million background percent a year in recent memory. "Loopholes in the travel ban wide enough to sail a cruise ship through," not to mention the attraction of taboo, encourage news sites, which now "include speedy, professional crafting of original does the article's own Web version compare with this description? There's no Pew Charitable Trust seminars, doesn't it? But I don't really buy it. To these newspapers up against the newspapers of any era you can name. scrutinized. Just look at the list of media critics listed in the right gutter of interest or press indiscretion that goes unexamined these days. While it's true that newspaper audiences are shrinking, that decline has Journalists For? The newspaper audience and the number of daily newspapers have been steadily shrinking since the advent of radio in the 1920s, and every newspapers that folded were rotten and deserved to die, a sentiment that many these days, it might have to do with the fact that it isn't paying attention to At the same time, I believe that the appetite for serious journalism has grown. The best marker of this trend is the popularity of national daily newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Democrats running for president, whose political differences can be measured Let me toss one more idea on the fire as I walk out the door: The notion that journalists have "lost touch with their communities" is utter bunk. It's been at least a generation since the majority of the newspaper audience hailed were their mothers, fathers, and grandparents. And one of the institutions that Hey, seeing as we both punched our tickets at alternative weeklies, you at Chatterbox's request that readers submit nominations for the First Annual against the printing press, a technology whose usefulness is now being which (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) is French for "to click," refers to the "striking of melted lead in order to obtain a proof or cast." That is, it describes a process of printmaking in which a metal plate is cast from something else (a woodcut, a plaster mold) and then used to make copies. pejorative meaning. Of course, Web aficionados should take care not to be expanded it. Indeed, it's quite possible that in the next century the terms unfeeling simply because they're manufactured rather than born." In the Although some readers submitted citations along with their entries, per Chatterbox's request, most did not. Also, readers' methods for counting some used Yahoo, and so on. In the end, Chatterbox took the advice of reader any other word or phrase nominated (at least among the ones Chatterbox bothered to check). "Inappropriate" easily outstripped "evil," a word that appeared in moral relativism take note-- it still lagged behind "wrong," which appeared in senators); lots of arts funded by the National Endowment for the Arts a House resolution endorsed by just about everybody that apparently came out of It must be said, however, that the rate at which Congress is deeming things Chatterbox had thought it old hat (it dates back at least to the Bush in its frequency of appearance over the previous congressional session, when rate, Chatterbox hadn't previously been aware of its overuse. Like "at the end previous congressional session. According to John Burke, who submitted condemned to write about legislation and policy making. You know, everything has to be robust now: a robust foreign policy, a robust national defense, a policy, a robust investigation of abuses. Most political activities are Many excellent nominations failed to garner as many CR citations as Chatterbox expected. These hand"). These are all comers, in Chatterbox's view. Sixth Sense is every bit as ambitious and provocative, and in some ways trick so much as the solution to a problem the film has been posing all along. fragments to a new level of clarity. I may be jumping to conclusions based on me as philosophically rather complicated, and possibly in dialogue with some point. On the other hand, I don't think this was just pandering. Death is a blockbuster, is that death is inevitable, and not an enemy. these days is quick. Even since he wrote that piece a few months ago, Being movies which taken together suggest that breaking through to the real is old. In fact, the best films this year no longer placed much stock in reality Three Kings where a body ceased to be a person and became the pathway for a bullet and a haven for microbes and disease.) They explored the problem explored the problem of a soul attempting to will its wishes into being, even has been restocking its supplies of prohibited weapons; the LAT lists these as chemical and biological arms and components of atomic bombs. All papers Council abstained from voting, which might weaken the council's position and permanent members that supported the measure. Except for the LAT story, uglier, as a federal appeals court resurrected plans to replace the to provide health care coverage for as many as one million uninsured New over the next three and a half years, to expand coverage. Passage of related legislation, to be introduced possibly next week, is highly likely. indicating that the two Democratic hopefuls discussed anything else: It reports was a contentious issue, said the two candidates "agreed more than they reach enough currently uninsured people. The LAT has the insufficient commitment to federal action on education. None of the papers have poll statistics related to how any of these issues rank on voters' list of emissions of nitrous oxides that contribute to Eastern seaboard smog at the request of Eastern states who asked for help meeting national smog standards. but that costs to consumers are still expected to decline "because of to consumers might be. Some executives and officials in the targeted states are This was serious." The LAT also mentions the possible connection, though both Laden and credits an anonymous government official with the quote, "There's says government officials are worried that the man could be part of an on those who didn't serve. He's walking, talking absolution for the rest of us. Times lead with the heightening of security measures in the wake of will have powerful new competitors who already have service relationships with intensifying concern occurring across the full spectrum of the federal adequate identification, and later a false French passport was found in his residue of explosives there. The paper gives over half its lead to this arrest, established committees that channel large contributions to several Senate campaigns in a way that circumvents limits on contributions to individual legal" because, despite being incorporated and administered by national party organizations, they create only an informal tie between the donor or the national party on the one hand and the individual candidate on the other (whereas a formal tie would be illegal, given the amounts involved). And yes, tune of "several hundred thousand dollars." Gripe: Although the story makes it clear that the Republicans have established victory funds as well, the headline box, although in the summary there, the reader is spared any reference to the nuclear secrets, often detailing suspicious behavior of Lee, puts this one critique of the principal government document making the case against Lee and schools on military bases: Although their student bodies are more racially diverse and poorer than those in general society, their test scores are very story suggests is partially responsible: The military commands tend to support the teachers in disciplinary wrangles with students and their parents. antitrust trial judge's finding of facts. The paper says that one hastily filed Today leads with a report that because of the general reluctance to fly flags its story reporting that in part because of the major airlines' lower paper says he decided to enlist in the Army primarily because he didn't want to preserve his own political viability. The story reveals Gore turned down a personnel decisions made at the Department of Defense, concludes that the Pentagon regularly grants security clearances to civilian employees of defense financial irresponsibility or substance abuse. Recent grantees include, says the paper, a convicted murderer, a man convicted of sex offenses against a The story says that even though many of these local small shops have been city's planned gala millennium celebration. The main reasons cited: the city's man trying to smuggle in materials for large bombs. hand out cards to crime victims and witnesses advising them that they have the thinking? Of all the sex options open to a president, this was a helluva pick. This, I realize, is not exactly a stunning insight, but since the Jenny but feel pity for the gal. She's got a bazillion dollars in legal bills thanks to the Scarlet Letter Special Counsel, and she has to do this humiliating she said that this was the most tasteful of the offers she got.) By the way, my favorite line from the scandal, which I think reduces the whole thing to one reports that they're going to cut a deal in which the father comes here and picks the kid up. I fear this whole thing will get even more bizarre. Won't where he belongs. Did the father have any real role in the kid's life? What that the other one is a mere tinkerer and not bold enough. Neither guy is When I read a sentence about Tom Hanks like "Wherever he goes, a treacly, add the words "white guy" to the sentence. That's the one part he can't help. don't like because as scripts they embody treacly triumphalism? reflect their values, because we must have our own, but to understand them. Most of the ideological criticisms of The Green Mile are by and for sophisticated and subtle observers, writing for one another. The average or herself subtly more complex, humane, and liberal after seeing that film than before. It is reductive and stereotyped to a media cineaste, but perhaps the best and most evolved movie that many of its viewers will see all year. I agree with you, by the way, in feeling fed up to here with movies about men being on the ropes. The most offensive example of that trend, of course, the poverty was almost inconceivable to me, I now have even less sympathy for pathetic preppies who have to beat up each other to feel authentic. I am generation needed Fight Club because they have been denied a war like suggested taking the keys to the treasury away from the apparatchiks before the dignity. I beg to differ: Her dignity could be damaged only by doing New York Post 's reporting of the National Enquirer 's reporting is everyone knows what they look like. Timing, gals, is everything. This is the back: If a woman from Mademoiselle magazine wants to be taken seriously hijacking, but few explain the dispute. What's the gist of the conflict? responded by sending more armed forces to the region. The rebels expanded, too, the United States and is one of the most violent and extreme rebel groups. In mentioned that most movies these days take place in real time. Maybe that's why I liked the animated stuff so much. I didn't suffer booty fatigue or gluteal resolute quality to all of this cinematic sprawl that hurts filmmakers. The But the painstaking build to this payoff has people fleeing the theater in a blind rage. It opens with a shot of an usher carefully checking a theater seat in the corner of the frame. And sure enough, we see the usher go across the I don't think it's a critic's job to tell filmmakers how to do theirs. (Though a recent New York Observer quoted a former boss of mine whining that I directors marks in citizenship and playing well with others. And he wonders why issue, instead of making a movie about racism they may have made a racist I hate to end my correspondence on an up note, but I had a better time at movies this year than I have in years. The girl who plays the younger sister in There are shards of movies that stick with me. The first half of doggie paddle he does before revealing himself is more unsettling than any of More Selective Than You Think"). In any case, even though all we're going Dow, the best rule to follow is just to assume that all those explanations will reason and continue for different reasons, they can reflect genuine changes in moves are, almost by definition, impossible to parse successfully. couple of interesting things to note about what happened today. The first is the resurgence of the idea that rising interest rates actually do matter to in the short term, you can no longer separate the event from the media's the contrary, thanks to the spread of the Internet and the rise to prominence as they are trying to make those decisions. In other words, what the media is saying becomes part of the information that is influencing how stock prices are about before, is the ability of its collective, but decentralized, conclusions any single member of the market could reach, which offers some evidence for this. That's why markets are better at allocating capital and setting prices than any planning board ever could be. The problem is that most make better decisions when each member of the group reaches his or her decision independently of everyone else. In other words, it's not through an open debate or an attempt to reach a consensus that the best conclusion is reached. It's only through the aggregation of independent individual conclusions that it how "traders" are feeling, it becomes much harder for investors to reach an independent decision about the only question they should actually be considering: What are these stocks actually worth? This is, again, a Over Stock Splits"). The signal is material information about companies' future earnings prospects, about interest rates, and about inflation. Noise is In the long run, hard as it may be to believe, this does not matter. (Which is one reason why bubble talk is overblown.) But in the short run, it's a recipe for increased volatility. So huge price swings are probably with us to stay. Yet another good reason not to adopt a trader's mentality. The promise of the Internet, from a business perspective, is the promise of a frictionless economy, in which buyers and sellers are able to meet without mediation. And since perhaps the most disliked mediators out there are car dealers, they would seem to be natural and inevitable casualties of consumers' migration to the Internet. Very few people like bargaining with car dealers. cars. And the whole phenomenon of the huge dealership, with acres of cars, each depreciating by the minute, seems like an archaic way of handling distribution (and, since someone has to make all those cars, production). already working hard at integrating the Internet into their operations and communicate directly with Ford, pick out the car you want with the options you want, and have it delivered to your door, just like a Dell PC. Ford won't have to make cars it's not going to be able to sell, and you won't have to haggle with some dealer. (This was what I was imagining at the end of the last Moneybox, when I wrote about GM truly becoming an Internet company.) The only problem with this picture of the future is that it's currently against the law. Just about every state in the United States, in fact, has strong franchise laws that limit the size and scope of dealerships, effectively prevent dealers from selling across state lines. Needless to say, actually buying a car on the Internet is therefore impossible, which is why all the In essence, local car dealers have been able to create and maintain geographic oligopolies through the use of franchise laws. That's one reason why was barred from getting volume discounts from its suppliers, it would hardly be a powerhouse retailer. Economics of scale come into play only if things get cheaper the bigger you get. Otherwise you've just got more overhead. But while the demise of the car superstore should probably be lamented, the really nefarious impact of the state franchise laws is unquestionably on the about vertical integration, so that they served the function of keeping the keep a tight grip on the tax revenue from auto sales. But they are almost textbook examples of bad regulation, which accomplish nothing but putting lots Even if Congress, say, were to pass a law permitting the direct sale of it was afraid that would lead to direct sales, which would alienate dealers (and break the law). And it's plausible that a car is such a big purchase that many people are going to be uncomfortable buying one online, sight unseen. But as an alternative, one can easily imagine something like what Gateway does now immediately online. There will, of course, be auto manufacturers that even a decade from now are still working through the traditional dealer system. But if you look at the PC industry, and the difference between the success of Of course, first all those laws have to be changed. saying much the same thing about campaign finance reform. Both see the present said before: that reform is required in order to "give the government of this described big money a "plague," an acid "eating away at the core of our democracy" and as "a great stone wall that comes between the people and their taped before their "handshake," they both support an outright ban on soft of their differences are subtle ones grounded in their respective political money works primarily to prevent the government from passing useful new laws, unnecessary programs and prevents it from cutting ones it should get rid Other distinctions visible today point up temperamental differences between money that he has promised not to accept it should he become the nominee no categorical about his moral indictment, saying at the press conference politics, himself included. Money, he said, buys access, and "access is actually have big disagreements that they didn't illuminate today. Basically it overhauled. To do this, he thinks, will require not only banning soft money and politics is similar to the ants in your kitchen," he writes. "Just when you think you've got them blocked, they find another way to get in. Only hermetically sealing the kitchen off will work." We need to amend the Constitution and provide full public financing, he writes, because "anything to eliminate the influence of private money from politics, or that doing so enormous contributions by corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals. And he hopes to level the playing field for challengers and incumbents by financing for congressional campaigns and doesn't think it's necessary to amend this complex problem and make it into a major issue in the campaign. But I and for all is understandable, but his approach is dangerous. Amending the Constitution should always be a last resort. And in this case, the alternatives is severe enough to warrant tinkering with the Bill of Rights. And in practical problem. Political reform in this country has never taken the form of systemic process, one in which rising expectations and public outrage lead to of campaign finance reform is so similar to that of tax reform, which was his lobbyists opened loopholes. The loopholes expanded, and eventually got to the point where a fresh set of reforms was needed. Just like campaign finance and the Revelation of Saint John, anything else is going to be a bit of an family, and maybe even the Breakfast Table, not with a last word, but with a forward his famous thesis about how we were at the End of History, only to see History seem to resume with a vengeance, as you put it the other day. But he was obviously onto something. I would call it the end of revolution. It was that is, the idea that society, and perhaps even human nature, could be rapidly altered and improved through concerted political action. It has its origin, as civil society," he wrote, "produces a remarkable change in man; it puts justice as a rule of conduct in the place of instinct, and gives his actions the moral quality they previously lacked." Here, in these remarkable words, is the seed of modern radical politics, the promise that brute human nature and selfish instinct can be overcome, given the proper political system. The French Revolutionaries believed in it, and talked of the "new man" (nu?). So did the This promise, that people can be suddenly and purposefully redeemed and lifted above their sinful natures, is a profoundly Christian one. And it is no accident that the idea of revolution arose at a moment when the terrible fires largely concluded that forcibly imposing possible Christian salvation on doctrinal enemies was not worth the enormous cost in blood and toil that two centuries of religious warfare had taken (the Thirty Years' War alone reduced purely terrestrial one. There would still be Final Things, and a direction to But now, after two centuries that have seen far greater suffering than the human nature, or even suddenly and drastically to improve society. In that But will new enthusiasms arise once again, and if so, from where? Will there be new promises of liberation, human fulfillment, and Final Things? Or are we, to change jobs. Gore wants to attract bright and talented people in both them isn't the insufficient pay, the low social status, or the emotionally taxing work. It's the teachers' unions, which maintain powerful barriers to entry in the form of certification requirements. This means that if you're a who wants to teach in a public school, you can't do so without obtaining credits in education. And because education courses are a colossal waste of time, many people who would make wonderful teachers never get the odd in any case. If Gore really wants to attract more talented people to careers in teaching, he needs to do two things he's not doing. He needs to appeal to the idealism of those he wants to recruit by telling them that they can make more money elsewhere but that they can do more for society by becoming teachers. And he needs to prevent his allies in the teachers' unions from continuing to serve as gatekeepers to the profession. good teacher shouldn't be paid less than a bad senator. But his plan for rewarding good teachers is wackier than Gore's and much more foolish. According Merit pay, like alternate certification, is a sound idea that has been blocked by the teachers' unions, which instead want more pay for everybody. But that's awful for so many reasons one almost doesn't know where to begin criticizing it. The biggest problem is that once you start trying to shape teachers but not social workers? Why social workers but not nurses? Why nurses and not police? And indeed, why teachers at public schools and not teachers at entirely new form of favoritism for special interests to pursue. Here's my worry with your [campaign reform] plan: It's going to hurt the Republican party, John. The Democratic Party is really the Democratic about what's called "paycheck protection." We do nothing about saying to labor, you can't take a laboring man's money and spend it in the way you see As Bush made clearer than, perhaps, he meant to, his primary concern about political spending by unions isn't that it rips off union members; it's that it usually goes to Democrats. But let's assume Bush had made a principled argument rather than a partisan one: Is it wrong for unions to spend union dues on politics without first getting the consent of each member? course not. "What people don't understand in this country," he explained, is that "unions exist for political action." When workers can't get benefits from their bosses, he said, they try to get them from Congress. Social Security, for example, was "collectively bargained at the national level." The alike. You might call it paycheck protection in reverse. (To read a But what if a union member happens to be a Republican, and doesn't like seeing his dues spent to help elect Democrats or to expand government? ruled that union members could demand a refund when their dues were used for political purposes against their wishes. But the decision didn't make it easy in any practical sense for union members to get their money back, and the National Labor Relations Board dragged its heels for several years on the matter. In practice, usually the only way a union member could really get his union to stop using his dues for political purposes was by quitting the election, because labor's unexpectedly strong clout scared Republicans to death. Now some form of paycheck protection has been adopted in five It's instructive to examine one reason why paycheck protection failed in sponsor a similar measure requiring corporations to get with the corporate community to lie low. Conservatives, naturally, have tried to argue that stockholders don't merit the same rights bestowed on much more conservatives care about working people than they do about Wall Street speculators?) Here is John Fund of the Wall Street Journal 's Opponents of Paycheck Protection argue that it is not balanced unless stockholders are also given the right to vote on whether or not a corporation can make political expenditures. Once again, the Supreme Court has spoken 'compelled' to contribute anything. The shareholder invests in a corporation of his own volition and is free to withdraw his investment at any time and for any reason." In most of the country, workers can be required to join a union or pay But the point isn't whether people who own stocks live more comfortable and independent lives than people who belong to unions; clearly, they do. The point is whether the same inconvenient principles of direct democracy that are used not by the Supreme Court, then by the legislative branch, which (rightly) has a bit more leeway to decide how to achieve social justice. for Tax Reform, a conservative group that's pushing paycheck protection decision, and wouldn't put much more burden on unions to prove they've got that purported to require unions and corporations to get members and stockholders to sign off on political spending. But corporations enjoyed a huge loophole: The stockholders had to do so only if they were assessed special "dues or fees." (If the loophole hadn't been there, you can be The amendment failed, as did the overall bill; and when the bill came up for a vote again this year, no similar amendment was offered. This suggests that paycheck protection will likely live on more as a rhetorical excuse for Republican opponents of campaign reform than as an actual cause. for ideal moviegoers like herself. She wouldn't praise a film she found offensively treacly or that trafficked in positive stereotypes because To Kill a Mockingbird that arguably have done humanity good, especially if they've been seen by kids at an impressionable age. (The words fun of some seeming weirdo on the block.) She could be a gleeful provocateur, "the damned, compact majority." And she loved to throw her own disciples off balance by praising both the rare piece of populist entertainment she thought audience you've built for film criticism, you've saddled yourself with what seem like political responsibilities. I don't mean to suggest that your response to The Green Mile (or that damn Jar picture) isn't the unsophisticated moviegoer who will be better off seeing a movie in which a black man is a mystical healer wrongly executed than one in which a black man is, say, a drug pusher gorily dispatched by some action hero. You might be right, but you're grading on a different curve than I am. capable of responding to works of complexity as I am. Maybe A Taste of Cherry --although I was scratching my head over that one for a long time. Green Mile and be moved and impressed by parts of it (as I was) and still be able to say, when it's over: "There's something really creepy symbolic enthrallment of the planet from east to west and mercifully, the sheer wonder now if most of the spending was ever really necessary. The LAT So taken are the papers with millennial matters and the other pressing stories, that none makes room on their front for the news that all the major after the presidential elections that must take place within three months. transition ceremony that centered on the handover of the suitcase that is used The other big story, which everybody fronts, is the peaceful resolution of There is some surprisingly wonderful stuff in the millennial coverage. The getting "belted" twice in a minute by a reveler and then hit again by another. Of course, in Times speak this means the reporter writing the story. The The mistake, the Times tells us, was discovered yesterday. By a wounds and that the man who inflicted them was charged with attempted murder There's no sign yet of what the papers are going to call the decade just writer to the Times proposes another idea that merits consideration: greatly enhanced by an accurate record of boldly optimistic financial forecasts through the 1990s. (Never mind that he wrongly predicted a recession following financial press and appeared regularly on the tube predicting that computer recession" to a "very intense recession" of six months that would bring the Dow to have gone as badly as he'd planned. If a few additional days go by and no again? Computer experts can argue they raised awareness and thereby prevented problems, but financial experts can't; they just predict you already know, just kind of regurgitate the consensus view. Chatterbox doesn't mean to kick a prominent Wall Street analyst when he's down. Rather, he recites these details to raise a larger question: Do purveyors of extreme predictions ever pay a price when their predictions prove wrong? protagonist's artistry? Better than a mute, I might add: She is a mute who does Yes, we can all agree, Roger demonstrates unparalleled "consideration for readers" and "habitual fairness." Roger, you have evolved into the conscience You treat The Green Mile as if it's a humanist milestone on the order of since Mockingbird 's Great White Father and that shambling, saintly black violently at odds with reality that it threatens to do more harm than good? me. I could broadcast my views over the PA system and no one would much care, whereas word of your likes or dislikes would promptly make its way through the what I think after most movies not because I want to tantalize people but because I reserve the right to change my mind in the course of writing a celebrating. But there have still been a ton of great female plays a woman who's a, well, tumbleweed who gravitates to men she shouldn't suppose you'd say these are soft roles, victims' roles, but both actresses give mothers and caregivers should behave. She can't forgive herself for a tragic doesn't modulate her craziness enough. But by the end, the performance makes sense: It's as if she's scything her way home through a thicket of her own As for Hanks, let me say that I think he's still a wonderful actor but am sorry that such a heavy spirit has descended upon him. He was once the other goofball. A few weeks back I was reminiscing about the old Hanks with At the end of this series, and of the century, is the Millennium. It can either be prosaic or dramatic. If it is just the spasm of sex or the drunkenness of drink, and then the drab morning after, there is no meaning to whir of the airplanes, the lights in all the houses go out, because we have emerge, and the computers will go whirring on endlessly. But what if beyond the The curtain rises. We call it eschatology --the transforming moment, the end of days. That has been one of the most enduring and powerful themes in We see it first in the frightening pages of the Book of Revelation, the last pages of the New Testament. The trumpets sound. The seven seals are broken. The beasts come up from the seas. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse begin their grim ride, the last being the pale horse and pale rider, Death, with a mantle dyed in blood. And behind it the word of God. (As the fundamentalist preacher thundered: In the fiery furnaces of Hell, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I don't have any teeth, cried an old man. Teeth will be provided, the preacher answered.) And, then, a new heaven and a new earth. The new the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit, a new age of spirituality in which the church hierarchy would be abolished and the infidels brought back into the Poetry also came into eschatology in the movies, as many persons found a burning gold/ Bring me my Arrows of Desire!/ Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold!/ Bring me my Chariot of fire!" And ending, of course, that he will not new political eschatology, the "leap," as he said, from "the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom." The drama is spelled out in that capitalism, and the sharpening knives of the class struggle, the end of days capitalist "integument" bursts asunder, and the new society, nurtured in the womb of the old, steps forth as social labor, cooperative labor, communal to the Soviet Union and marveled: I have seen the future, and it works. It was detritus, one could find a scrawled phrase by a character in an earlier novel the new technology (nu, nu), all insured by comprehensive health insurance with prescription drugs, spectacles, and false teeth for the aged (as But, hey, where is the millennium? Oh. That. That was the spasm of sex and the drunkenness of drink. That was the night before. And this is the morning during World War II (he was separated from his parents and traveled alone Have you noticed people in the news with confusingly similar names? Send for businessmen who want to lie, cheat, and scheme their way to the top. (The and you realize that the cheerfully successful king bears little resemblance to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives." At worst, he was a cold and cunning strategist without a glimmer of moral doubt, a man as happy to humiliate his friends, even execute them, as he keeps the company of a band of merry thieves led by the obese drunkard of play; he also teaches him a commoner's skepticism of power and its however, he pretends not to know his old and embarrassing mentor: hostile takeover; simply having the means to do so will suffice. Why does church officials offer to underwrite an invasion as a bribe to keep Henry from bishops several times to give him a clear justification for the invasion, which will necessarily entail the deaths of thousands of men. The bishops give him again, confused: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" More incomprehensible replies ensue. The scene ends without good reasons having ever been offered, after which he goes ahead and invades anyway. receives the maximum punishment in order to make an example of him. Just pardon the poor fool, Henry has him killed in order to show the French that his history offers any justification for this gross violation of the laws of war: "Was there, as it was later claimed, some sudden movement on the part of French cavalry which lead Henry to fear an attack from the rear? It is possible, relatives he has just laid waste to, Henry, having never met the girl, calls her an angel and claims to be in love with her. When, reasonably enough, she No; it is not possible you should love the enemy of I will not part with a village of it; I will have it interesting, morally questionable dramatizations of the effects of power? probably pushed the story off the Post 's front page). As proof of this prior scheduling, the Post notes that the engravings on the souvenir minister" but not "president." With not much else to report about the presidential visit, the three stories wander in different directions: The announcement and analyzes the legality of his immunity deal; the LAT Right?" The answer: Good preparation in the developed world and a low reliance argue this. However, the LAT does lay out some plausible reasons why imperative to simply upgrade software rather than fix it. The only major "Style" section to the lighter side of millennial madness. There is an begins, "We realize that you are almost certainly reading blaming the city's lack of a geographic center, of signature iconography, and without runway lights and with only a minute and a half of fuel left. Although the hijackers slit the throat of one passenger in private, they did not disclose this murder to the other passengers, who at times joked and conversed every passenger would be shot. One hijacker, who called himself "Burger," ordered all passengers to say they had forgiven him. juvenile delinquents. Launched in the early '90s with much fanfare, these are routinely beaten and suffer recidivism rates higher than those of juveniles Question: Why does the Times repeatedly call the man a "mass murderer" when he has yet to be tried? Are accusations against a defendant qualified with words like "allegedly" only when the crime is prosecuted in the United poached from that renowned repository of writing talent, companies started laying telegraph cables beneath the ocean, blasting railroad tunnels through mountains, and linking the seas with canals. A combination of jingoism among political elites and insularity among the business elites who against free trade and global communications. "The big economic question for is really political: Can the Second Global Economy build a constituency that COLORADO SPRINGS, Dec. 31--The new decade arrived well before dawn here First things first: What's a "snow day"? Yes, I did spend all my life in which, my television viewing (aided by a big satellite dish that allows me to by a country mile. I still don't understand all those dancers in diaphanous approximations of no national costume that cavorted through Times Square all it may just have been investors' reaction to the tech industry's magazine on the opening of the new arena and split the magazine's profits with These were people who paid good money to get special commemorative editions of supposed to keep you from getting promoted to the next grade. Also, at the bottom of the front page of the special section: "We regret any typographical errors." So don't ask for your money back if they misprinted your name. new arena. You'd think the Times could get them to pay at least a Idealism sweet as ether boils off the pages of the book that we've been For readers arriving late to the debate over public journalism, we should intentions and cracked premises, that it melts at first touch. nation's cynical politics, our public alienation, our adversarial culture, as crime? We reporters and editors have failed to promote and enhance "democracy" or writing the first draft of history. Instead of hiding behind objective reporting, journalists should foster "conversation" and "dialogue" in the community to empower citizens in the democratic process. In the past decade, "Approach citizens as potential participants in public affairs, rather than "Help the political community act upon, rather than just learn about, its "Help make public life go well, so that it earns its claim on our Wicked mush, don't you think? For one thing, a story wouldn't necessarily be idea that a declining interest in the news can be linked to journalism as The pundits are excited by the close presidential races, especially in the Bush's clip, has increased substantially. Moreover, his lead in the New the early primaries, the party establishment will never let such a maverick their party's nominations, independent voters (that is, those not affiliated with a single party) would have to become decisive, which is very unlikely in Many panelists and guests muse on what the 21st century will bring. On the globalization of society will render ideological differences obsolete in television essay on culture and politics, pokes fun this week at the fatuous signs off, there is a moment for station identification. That's right, the this century: too much government. And the hope of the next century is that the world. And the idea that government is [not responsible for] the social that he will welcome me. But I think that he's going to say: Well done, our good and faithful servant. Or he may say: You're in the wrong place. SNOW: You really worry that you may be told you're in the wrong place? the country's constitution, courts, and parliament. "I will take care of claimed to be in charge. Meanwhile, army troops and civilians alike pillaged seem to be after back pay, while others said they specifically wanted to topple ambassador's residence-- no one's sure yet. The papers describe the Ivory Coast have killed four passengers, but so far they've released only one corpse, along but doesn't say how. The LAT mentions the possibility that the to broadcast warnings about terrorist threats to the public. By erring "on the side of overexposure," authorities may be encouraging mass paranoia. As that disclosure of the threats generates intense media coverage, which in turn with its embassies but not with the public. Many of the points in the story projects: new sidewalks, tax cuts, boot camps, school construction. The suit, visitors stayed away from fear of violence. Meanwhile, midnight mass St. embedded with microchips, which visitors can swipe to reserve seats at masses, upper left hand of the front page has been off by 500--a fact that was appropriately be applied to the first sentence in today's lead story by the marks the start of the new millennium and century. The 999-year millennium who'd be affected by that is around anymore to complain. five years earlier than the Christian calendar says. Among the questions unexplored in the reams of news copy commemorating the entirely to give up the habit of discoursing ironically. It is therefore with some apprehension that Chatterbox views the coming of a new century. of, relating to, characteristic of, or resembling the used in reference to literature, the term essentially describes the movement dies in office.) This speaks well for the chances of Al Gore** and Bill hard case, being conventionally brave and forthright but also kind of a cutup; in his body, as far as Chatterbox can see). You begin to see the cause for shows so little of it to the public that he might as well not have one. A snow day? It was a beautiful thing if you were a kid growing up in New Jersey, as I did: They canceled school if there was too much snow on the ground, leaving you a day to sled, drink cocoa, or profiteer by shoveling have split revenues with the center. But publications do a lot with advertisers upcoming issues and allowed to place ads in those issues. That, I realize, is a I actually find the listing of names a perfectly fine gimmick. When I wrote for small, weekly newspapers, one of the tricks of the trade was to get as many local names into a story as possible. You could argue that this was shameless merits: It gave a thrill for people who, unlike us, don't see their names in print. Where's the harm? I admit, though, the misspelling thing is I haven't read it for years in the papers. It was one of those things, though, fee. However, Republic Pictures, the original copyright owner and producer of immensely popular on television thanks to repeated showings: Stations programmed it heavily during the holidays, paying no royalties to its Republic regained control of the lucrative property in copyright to a story from which a movie was made had certain property rights over the movie itself. Since Republic still owned the copyrighted story behind It's a Wonderful Life and had also purchased exclusive rights to the movie's copyrighted music, it was able to essentially yank the movie out of the public domain: It claimed that since Wonderful Life relied on these copyrighted works, the film could no longer be shown without the studio's blessing. (Technically, the film itself is not copyrighted. One could hypothetically replace the music, rearrange the footage, and sell or show the typically does so between one and three times a year. Congress has repeatedly expanded copyright protections and made them effective corporations. (The copyright protection for individual writers and artists coins a wonderful name for it: "bricks and clicks." their accumulating weapons caches towards that end. The report also criticizes peacekeepers at the time when even more of them were most crucially needed. to pay more than whites for rooms and kept blacks out of hotel restaurants and lounges. The paper quotes a source saying that the chain's hotels in stating that if they won their nominations, they would not accept their from her own knowledge of what she had said and therefore her knowledge of it which, it says, shows that in the two years since "zero tolerance" have been expelled or suspended at a rate disproportionate to their numbers. "arbitrary and capricious," resulting in wide racial disparities in discipline. The only problem here, which the Post doesn't notice, is that mere that the racial breakouts of punishments are disproportionate, not to the racial composition of the student bodies, but to the racial composition of the sit outside on cinder blocks, whiling away the hours by taking aim with their unwarranted. The brand is a luxury recreational trailer often referred to as a land yacht. It should not have been associated with shabby surroundings." Whatever the Internet will become, one of the things it's been in the last couple of years is a consumer's paradise, at least from a price perspective. In their hunger to acquire new customers, Net retailers have engaged in good accustomed to sizable discounts that paying anything close to retail feels like The question, of course, has always been whether these retailers were actually ever going to be able to make money when their business often seemed, the past few weeks, we're starting to see signs that, in fact, a lot of these Internet retailers are not only not going to be able to make money. They may not even be able to stay in business for much longer. and that it will lose significantly more than analysts had expected in the everything from food to printers to appliances to computers. (Computers like very nice price.) It now plans to focus on selling computers and consumer electronics, which on the one hand is a natural strategy for targeting Web already figured out and embraced. So the idea that the new approach is going to represents an unusual intrusion of the things we've gotten used to about offline business into the online world. Up to this point, with rare exceptions, one ever gets fired, where expenses are irrelevant, and where all losses are it's running through its capital much faster than originally planned, Value when it would come true: Eventually, you have to earn a profit or else you'll cautionary tale. In the first place, the site was never that popular, and even running a business on hope, smoke, and mirrors; who have thought seriously about their cost structures; and understand things like return on invested capital. That doesn't mean they will succeed, but it means they have a much better chance than most of the companies out there. Net as a whole, especially when so many Net retailers dumped tens of millions payoff (relative to investment). And perhaps the most important thing to think do just that: go under and disappear. In other words, no one is going to come along and acquire it, because ultimately there's really nothing there to acquire. The conventional wisdom has been that eventually we'd see consolidation in Net retailing through mergers and acquisitions. It's starting to seem more likely that we'll see consolidation through failure. food stamps an attempt to create an issue for the first lady to use against New the federal Department of Health and Human Services to champion food stamps as work supports" (rather than welfare handouts) has been pushed for years by undoubtedly agree with Primus. But Primus hasn't won many battles with the suddenly now agree to give him a victory by taking a "food stamps are good for you" line? What tipped the balance? Maybe they were spooked by Primus' statistical calculations showing some deterioration in the income of the bottom that, you probably believe it was also just a coincidence that Housing and national study of the homeless happened to mention an advocacy group's estimate policy that involved police officers rousting homeless people, with some going Gore's need for liberal primary voters. But food stamps are more clearly an Not that there's anything wrong with losing money: Isn't the current If you want to be, oh, a heretic and actually go out to the movies this won't be any. Either there will be movies that have been in the theaters at The studios have explained that they aren't releasing their movies on what the decision to release the films a day late actually means. Since movies when those runs start, it means that these movies will have one fewer day in which to make money. That's not a day the studios will be able to get back at are one day shorter than they otherwise would have been. Now, the cost of showing those films for that extra day is negligible enough that even if only a few people show up, you'll make some money. And it isn't as The answer has everything to do with the astonishing importance that films' the opening weekends of other comparable films, then you end up looking like a operates under the conviction that if your films look like losers to the insiders after their opening weekends, they will become losers in the mind of This makes no sense from a business perspective, since it's analogous to saying that Ford shouldn't sell its cars on days when it knows sales will be The interesting part of all this is that there isn't really much evidence the chattering classes but not true at all of the people who actually go to movies. After last weekend, the studios releasing The Green Mile and position in weekend gross by a slim margin, even though it was The Green Mile 's opening weekend. The people behind The Green Mile essentially said, "They had their turn. They should give us a break," which was odd in two judgment. And second, it assumed that finishing first would really make a difference to The Green Mile 's eventual performance. If only the guys at BORED AND CONFUSED BY THE ISSUES IN THIS TIME OF PROSPERITY AND busy holiday season to sort out what positions the Democratic presidential candidates should take. Fortunately, there's an easy THAT WILL BE WHAT WISE GOVERNANCE DICTATES! IT'S THAT SIMPLE!!! ideologically different candidates vying for the Democratic you get two candidates who are ideological twins! For all their (formerly known as "neoliberals") who can be counted on to favor a FUNDAMENTALLY, IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER WHICH ONE GETS THE interchangeable, and find it deeply unsettling. So they lash out at one another by each accusing the other of favoring politically taxes if circumstances warrant it; to raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits; to consider school vouchers on an experimental basis; and so on. EACH ONE OF THESE IS A POLICY WELL WORTH method for determining the right positions on the issues: look to see what each accuses the other of secretly wanting! Then say, "Hey, sue Times front the story). The car she was driving and phone she was carrying were linked to a "primary member" of a group that sponsors terrorism leads with the Board of Education's decision not to renew New York City's schools chancellor's contract, citing his increasingly erratic behavior and unwillingness to address recent allegations of widespread attendance fraud. An expenses, including significant international travel, are met by her wealthy and the other "mutineers" were victims of racial prejudice but did not overturn continue to soar, but aging rock stars, another perennially overvalued commodity, have hit the skids. The LAT reports that fewer than half Today's Papers offers a more charitable explanation: Maybe folks just aren't as calculation stemming from medieval ignorance of the number zero, the new with arbitrary adjustments and slippages; and so forth. the day after tomorrow, she'll feel a wave of excited anxiety. She suspects terrorism, the usual New Year's hype that makes you feel that everyone else is downtown or eating at some ludicrously overpriced New Year's extravaganza. She'll be at the home of friends, standing beside her loved ones, etc. And when New Year's arrives and she experiences that brief sense of being overwhelmed by something she can't explain, she'll be tempted to dismiss it, as she does every But is it? What is New Year's, anyway, if not a reminder that time has passed, which is to say that death has drawn that much closer? New Year's It's actually not unreasonable to feel awe on this New Year's Eve, even if our savior. The great religions are a product of the same sense of awe. They were invented in large part to help us deal with the terrifying fact that time future, when human time meets up with eternal time. Those are, of course, passing of time led them inexorably to a horrible fate; their God was created partly to guarantee that the fullness of time would be good, rather than evil. and we are allowed perceive it differently, to grasp it more authentically. Regarding your ideas about other avenues that The Green Mile could have explored: Yes, yours would be a better, braver, picture. The way pop process happening here. I have no doubt that the film's portrait of race more than most, I think it is useful to look at The Green Mile in terms but an enormously good black man whose fate they mourn. These viewers will be uninformed and unsophisticated in terms of the actual conditions in the South that your father described to you, but that is the nature of a society's but would call him a great storyteller in the Dickens tradition (I am not using quotation marks because I cannot claim to remember verbatim). King is scorned by those who do not read him, he said, but is underrated and sometimes very to every bookstore I could find, and even in stores the size of a broom closet in back alleys (where the proprietors surely stocked no book they were not that for a period of time they will be more entertained or interested or happier than otherwise. Our job as critics is to encourage them to choose films that we think will be less a waste of their time than those they might choose on their own. This is a relative and inexact process, but worth doing. If we do not get up to our elbows in the real mix of real movies, real audiences, and real motives for going to the movies, what function do we serve? whether some critics, especially newcomers on the make, don't position their revolutionary was that she wrote for actual moviegoers like herself, and evoked their needs and desires. No one who seriously believes Taste of Cherry movie is necessary to make that movie great. Oh, the admirers of those movies enjoy them, I suppose, but in a way so specialized and evolved that it has Many of the films on our 10-best lists will play only in the larger cities. Movies like The Green Mile are progressive compared with the movies accurate or courageous as it could be, but more a part of the solution than a the people who see it, it will be the best movie they see all year, even from simply because it might do humanity some good, my argument is: All good films do humanity some good, and no bad films do. So I will not give a movie a pass because its heart is in the right place, and voted thumbs down on such as A for political reasons but for personal ones. Aware although I was of the absorbing, careful storytelling. Reports from theaters indicate audiences, by and large, love it and are moved by it; it may emerge as the season's biggest If I have "saddled myself with political responsibilities," it has not been consciously, but I don't think that would be a bad thing for any critic to do, at least when a film makes it appropriate. My intense dislike for Very Bad Things and the second half of Fight Club reflected political or moral outrage, among other things. And should have. Anyone who can find racism in The Green Mile but not fascism in Fight Club is looking But I hope you don't believe I would praise or attack a movie I didn't have been ashamed to say they liked it. It could have been the lost footage climate would have been shot down. It is always a little sad when critics tune times, the New York Observer headline said (quoting from memory) "Liked Thought his movements were too alien, or not alien enough? Aliens in movies are routinely made understandable, likable, comprehensible. Or monsters. Can they Are the "common man and woman" capable of responding to works of complexity? observe that the first did disappointingly at the box office, the second only fairly well, and while South Park made piles of money, my own guess, having attended a public screening, is that its fans did not respond to it with complexity but embraced its vulgarity while the irony whizzed right Some of the reviews of that film were hilarious in the way they praised it for accomplishments that had no remote connection, I suspect, to the way it was seen, perceived, enjoyed, and understood by most audiences. They liked the dirty jokes, the homophobia, and racism and the shit jokes, period. The function of that material as liberating irony and reverse criticism, etc., was limited to an elite minority within the audience. I believe I was too hard on program on animation, but the notion that most audience members picked up in South Park 's cheerfully blatant racism was praised as satirical large majority of the audience for South Park processed the racism on its primary level and missed the irony, and a large majority of the audience for The Green Mile will see no racism, and if their attitudes are influenced by the movie, it will make them less racist, not more. The critical discussion of the racial content of those two movies has been too clever by journalism and journalists. There is nary a mention in this thick book of any of the leading "alternative" weeklies, which are often stuffed with material ones. There's almost no attention paid to radio, where hundreds of excellent development of the Internet as a news medium. Even television doesn't get much play here, at least not compared with the audience it garners in real life. In Two, as you indicate, "alternative" newspapers have been thriving, many for wants: reporting with perspective; reader inclusion; making stories into crusades; etc. Their "success" in doing so is of course debatable, but it makes folks at Pew Charitable Trust and the other purse strings of public journalism would scream: "We didn't cough up several million dollars so you could tell the might once have been worse is neither reassuring nor really the point. Most television journalism is horrendous, and some is actually harmful (by misinforming viewers about crime, for example). Either you want that situation to change or you don't, but denying it seems silly. You're also arguing against straw men of your own creation: A journalist those papers are doing the best job they can to reflect and report life in with immigration, public education, workplace discrimination, and how to solve As for presidential politics, we agree that poor coverage is not exclusively to say that if the candidates don't disagree, then there's no way to cover the issues. I don't think that some of the experiments in this book are all that bad for that kind of coverage. That is, start with local issues; in my neighborhood, they include AIDS, homelessness, housing prices, and the need for a Second Avenue subway. Then look to what candidates can offer (skeptically, of course, since the real story may be that these problems elude solutions on the presidential level). If they don't disagree one iota, then maybe there's a political problem, but I don't think there would be a problem producing good or interesting journalism. I suspect, by the way, that the better New York papers will do something like this as the primary approaches, though they won't call think we end up in the same place. To give this dialogue the semblance of a the mainstream press audiences have been shrinking for some time. Serious journalism has become difficult to do in many places, and some wonder whether Coverage of most political campaigns is poor and tends to focus on trivial matters. Every year, there are probably dozens of exceptions to this rule, but Journalists, as a class, seem removed from the communities they cover. Again, there are exceptions, especially in small towns, but I think it's pretty rare to see community board meetings overflowing with local journalists out to poles, to the detriment of anyone's understanding. I see this especially on slashed, and the Net was a place for wizards to swap software wands. Change those economic facts, and the need for public journalism recedes agree to stop all television and radio advertising until the nomination is decided, and instead debate twice a week for the duration of the campaign. "That can get a lot of the money out of the presidential campaign and contemptuous response was to tell Gore, "Sounds to me like you're having constitutional amendment, and which he trumpeted this week at a joint himself as a candidate who sees campaign reform as a far more urgent issue than cash as he says, then he can't refuse an offer like Gore's out of hand without Today leads with Al Gore's charge in an interview with the paper "blundering into another recession" because he would take the entire projected but goes instead with a momentous Labor Department decision: Companies that allow employees to work at home will be held responsible for federal health and safety violations that occur at the home work site. The stance, explains the home with him to attend to a sick child, employers are still required to make Both Times report that the meetings hit a snag quickly when an breaking with their past tendencies to leak at such talks, say the papers, that only cosmetic, with the daughter and her tight little circle of Kremlin have brought him into his present circumstance. Indeed, the LAT and though it was probably one of the last developed countries to take the problem seriously. But the story doesn't prove that doing nothing was the way to go; likely to show that preparedness was a waste but rather perhaps that the optimal strategy included a healthy dose of procrastination. Give it to places that feed the poor. Today's Papers doesn't ask much from its With the economy at full throttle, it would be easy to forget that not everybody has been able to make the trip. Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal helps remember the neediest. Today's Journal front recounts demanding boss than he was used to and got fired before he got a chance to exercise any stock options. To economize, he had to cancel his family's annual vacation and his son's guitar lessons. He's now working for an internet outfit site over the weekend, it found it had inadvertently featured something The Best of Gay Adult Videos (got 'em) and the Couple's Guide to discussion group of computer geeks exploring the millennium bug long before But its creator remained unidentified until just over a year ago, when someone performed the equivalent of a computer paternity test by searching the discussion group's archives for the term's first use. name!). Master, who has helped name products for clients including Sun promptly listed six reasons why the term holds such appeal. staple these days. Second, it's gratifyingly symmetrical, with the two consonants hugging that number in the middle. Third, the whole tradition of a strong connection between the term's appearance and its meaning. the term features an elegant plosive progression, moving from soft (Y) to hard Finally, Masters lauded the term for the way its articulation produces a satisfying movement to the inside of the mouth. The term begins with a labial at the middle of the mouth when the tongue touches the roof. Finally, the "K" from its competition. In fact, Masters said, she could think of only one other word that featured such an exquisitely pleasing articulatory progression in the I feel a strange mix of emotions in this new millennium. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I have a guilty secret: I wish something bad had happened. Not the Rapture. Not even a Deadly Act of Terrorism. But a little glitch would manic optimism of the moment. A few hours without the power, or having the ATM jam would have been a useful cautionary note at a time when everyone feels like price tag was worth it. I have my doubts. On New Year's Day, my wife raised a celebration than I thought I would. Watching the rolling party across the globe felt compelled to pull a Jerry Lewis telethon and anchor the whole thing himself. By the end he was babbling so much, I expected him to point to the six months in office. I imagine there are gazillions of conservatives for whom music critic, the one where he threatens to punch out the guy for criticizing sizable tax cut for next year. Can there be any doubt how this Kabuki ritual pretty small stuff, but I could still use a few tips. elections, surprising because they show that centrist and reform parties, significantly cut into the power long wielded in the legislature by the shake Gore's extended hand, the papers say, calling the idea "ridiculous." (The crunch that could, in the paper's words, "make lines at ATM machines and supermarket checkouts seem tame by comparison." People can stock up on water, food, batteries, and cash over weeks, the story notes, but most people cannot store gasoline except in their cars, which means any rush to pump will take budget, a budget spent almost entirely on combating a country that no longer recent merger that created his company, government regulators required the into perspective while powerfully explaining the rationale of the recent spate United States retail market and seven times all Internet sales combined. The reason: the flight of capital from slumping economies like Japan's combined presents a simple comparison between the cost of the federal debt per person in The LAT weighs in with its story on the paper's Staples Center preparation of the piece, Shaw had his own computer account that was not accessible by even senior executives and editors at the paper. And when the piece was completed, the negatives of it, ordinarily faxed to the printing will have to wait for the thud in his driveway this morning before he can read between the offline and online worlds has happened, particularly when it comes to the media world. But the truth seems to be that for a lot of the offline press, and for much of Wall Street, what happens on the Internet is still either something of a mystery or, almost by definition, too sketchy to take from its genetic databases to drug makers. Since the close of trading on Dec. impressive and really surprising move, and it did not go unnoticed by either the sudden spike in its stock, and the company said, sensibly enough, that it an order imbalance at the open because there were too many buy orders and not The odd thing, though, is that no one has actually reported what happened. enthusiasm for genetic information companies and for incorporating genomic research into drug development." As for why that enthusiasm suddenly hit could offer was an article that appeared in the New York Times on Dec. Portfolio" in the next five days. (The Fools announce all their buys in advance all the stock's rise can't be attributed to the Fool's influence, especially Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on argument can be made that in this case, what you're looking at is not a speculative bubble but rather an example of potentially valuable than would once have had access to it. But the really interesting thing is the almost complete obliviousness of the offline media to what actually happened, since the Fool put out a news release announcing it. Call it willful blindness, then. Apparently the Net still has a ways to go before the offline press can spirituality. She would like to share it with you today. The revelation who don't follow trends in New Age healing, are the hot new form of meditation. You march around in them, you get lost, and you find yourself on a higher plane. They are often built by churches as a way to lure people back into the fold, and by spas as a higher form of relaxation, sort of like water aerobics. Many people spent their New Year's Eve walking in labyrinths, rather than the staff insisted, and it was a truly transforming experience. She on most portions of the test, he had scored off the charts on one: "The maze." This was her first step toward conversion, but what really moved her was a photograph taken of a woman who had just walked a maze for the first time. uplifted arms. He kept telling me to look up. I kept looking up. I was engulfed "He asked if I was committed to walking the labyrinth. I said 'yes.' He said, 'If you are, you must leave a footprint.' When I got to the center I left two deep footprints. As I was walking out he said, 'Now you are walking out, you must go out in the world and leave a footprint.' was like a roller coaster. But toward the end I was very calm, it was like a pictures with a digital camera as they were finishing up. Flipping through the images, she stopped, stunned, at a shot of the group. For there, in the center of the picture, was what looked like a brilliant shaft of multicolored light, thinks that the "brilliant shaft of multicolored light" is lens flare. But God didn't come to you; you went to God, or else. Insofar as there was life outside the church, it was secondary. Religious doctrine was dense and difficult and if you misunderstood it, you could be excommunicated or jailed. Now, though, everything is different. Religion isn't mean and threatening. It doesn't demand all your time. You can fit it into your busy schedule. If you as long as you can coax from it some movement of the soul. A socialite and aromatherapy and massage, and find proof of God in newspaper photos. Interior Gym trainers can practice yoga. Football coaches can preach the religion of seemingly insignificant words and individual letters. Dept. of Justice that's designed to ensure that the state's highway police stop during nighttime and weekend sessions, he downloaded onto portable tapes the attend public gatherings on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. The poll also Both Times leads state that under the New Jersey profiling deal, the state police will report to a federal monitor who will have broad powers to investigate virtually any police function and who will track the cops' patterns of arrests and traffic stops to make sure that minorities are not being singled out. Neither story really gets at the nuances involved in really doing this. specific criminal suspect, but neither story says whether an all points bulletin saying to be on the look out for say, a fleeing black or Latino is chief: "It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It's the fault of the minority males for committing the its first new rifle in thirty years. The weapon would use the precision guidance technology already common in planes and tanks to deliver rounds that explode in the air above enemy soldiers, thereby lessening their ability to survive battlefield small arms fire by taking cover. There are question marks however: the weapon is more than twice as heavy as the M-16 it would replace, waits until pretty deep into the story to raise another very realistic worry: these weapons would wreak havoc in the hands of guerrillas. And hey, given the surrounding the possibility of adding genes to human embryos. And the headline makes the whole thing sound like science gone mad: "SCIENTISTS PLACE JELLYFISH yesterday made his first public appearance in nearly a year. Appearing world to "end the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred." prices for the big night: pet sitters and security guards. The Wall Street Journal front returns to the arena of one of biggest private New Year's Eve celebration, which the paper takes as indicative of a nationwide veer away from partying and toward cocooning on the big night. investigators to take the first step toward prosecuting former chancellor the time report, contributions from an arms dealer and an oil company. Kohl, the paper reminds, started off the whole controversy last month by acknowledging that while in power he kept secret bank accounts, but thus far records yesterday, news that the Wall Street Journal gets right into the little summary jail without bail pending his trial on charges of unauthorized handling of secret nuclear weapons data. The other papers put the story inside, with all the coverage explaining the judge's reasoning: If Lee were out, he might be able to transfer to a foreign power the seven highly sensitive data tapes he admits making but that are currently missing. (The judge said however that if Lee passes a polygraph test on the tapes, he could reapply for bail.) But none of the stories mentions the real reason the prosecutors wanted no bail: their hope that the prospect of sitting in stir for up to several years would make Today's Papers would love to know what authority there is for this in the law, his tireless search for the failure of welfare reform. The dateline is the usual one, program. Today's tack: Well, even if many people there are getting off welfare and on payrolls, their lives aren't "truly transformed." The story spends most of its time playing out the examples of three women, who are supposed to poster children for irresponsibility as a lifestyle: At every turn there are unexpected pregnancies, out of wedlock fatherless children, and Papers is guessing somebody got the Anthology of Modern Poetry for given all the express attribution in the piece, the effect here is one of doubt that this anecdote and that photograph also come from a book on Will's terrorists, but negotiations have failed to resolve the standoff thus far, the their country, have vowed to kill the hijackers if they hurt any more hostages. two days, runs an Associated Press story inside today. presidential primary. The governor's appearances will largely take the form of agreed to fund the budget requests of two other religious parties, proving to hire staff and buy technology that will pick out suspicious online prescription drug sellers. At present, states are responsible for inspecting pharmacies claiming, predictably, that the new regulation is unnecessary; the Post Tobacco industry lawyers yesterday filed an 89-page document meant to halt a billion settlement with states. They also cite Congress' decision to put warnings on cigarettes and tax them, rather than seek legal liability. The counts of mishandling secret documents, never acted with criminal intent. A computer expert told the court that the files Lee removed from the system "were open to not very sophisticated hackers on the Internet," the LAT release a gas into the air that then ignites. The device can reach people in wounds, doctors can now affix paper strips to either side of an incision and gently pull them together with a polyethylene zipper. One enthusiastic patient sounds as if he'd just leaped out of an infomercial: "I had surgery on my chest a few years ago and it was closed with staples, and boy was it painful. With the zipper, I had no pain at all." Today's Papers is so impressed that he will question, is believed to be the brother of one of the hijackers. The Post, which also fronts the story, and LAT report the identity of the passenger stabbed to death for not obeying terrorists' orders to sit with n capital piece by piece. This means the army learned from its mistake in foreign correspondents from traveling to the war arena without permission, the sources: a subhead reads "Troops Said to Advance" and the lead explains the translated as "terrible" or "terrifying." (Although here, admittedly, he's legislation calling for a formal presidential acknowledgment is currently bound The Post runs its third article in a series on Vice President Gore's life. Despite early ideological and professional tinkering, the senator's son his precocious campaigning skills. Gore did not seek a higher student office, paper reports him as "blessedly free of any such fears." Magazine interviews computer engineers of the 1970s "who is to blame," so the panelists come across as sitting ducks. They discuss their priorities at the time and cough up reasons why the problem was never Committee: "We could have fixed that anytime in the 1970s. The trouble is, it would have affected all of our customers' existing programs, and that wasn't something they would have appreciated." Fortunately, customers in the '90s, mollified by lattes and cell phones, have been far more understanding. why one top investor believes "these stocks have become like major land billion. The piece does not illustrate where the papers' owners fit in. The New their deal is so sweeping in what she can't say about the Office of Independent Counsel that she essentially gave up her First Amendment rights. This leaves her in a truly sad position (no jokes, please): She has to share her weight with the world and go public to pay her legal bills for an insane case and yet ones: I can usually win when I announce, to a stunned dinner table, that debates this week. I predict that by week's end, a desperate Gore, with his awkward emphasis on the wrong syllable and haltingly condescending voice will to raise taxes or cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. But neither over again, the point is do you learn from your mistakes, and I certainly have. GORE: Oh, I think, um, pushing the limits, um, all this was reviewed and, um, charges were brought. But I think it was a mistake nonetheless. independent counsel's office as a bully pulpit, appearing on television to has too little. There is a kind of mild metaphysic involved. In one of the strips, one of the characters is jumping rope and says, "Suddenly it struck me It immediately communicated a certain reverence, which is to be welcomed. the source of goodness, the source of contemplation. So there is a formal This was one of those weeks in the market that a couple of decades ago, perhaps even a decade ago, would have seemed inconceivable. (I know, every week these days probably would have seemed inconceivable.) Despite saying that states with the lowest unemployment rates showed no added pull money out of stocks. But at least when it came to the powerhouses of this egg nog and give shares in some Internet highfliers as gifts. It'll be just like when my grandmother used to give us lottery tickets for our birthdays. reasons.' As in, they were personally appalled at the direction the company was taking, and could no longer work there in good conscience?" issued a report today telling tobacco farmers that their economic problems stemmed not from antismoking efforts in the United States but from production and supply abroad. Surprisingly, the report did not add: 'Of course, we do want you to go out of business. But we really aren't the ones who this week wouldn't have bought it a couple of weeks ago. Of course, maybe they be backed up by effective actions, so that any rhetoric in the end may make us look even more foolish. But this is not the place to deal with such complex issues. Since I believe that "normal" Western politics is the politics of going to pick up my theme of our democratic, domestic rhetoric and come back to to be imprinted into the historical period of the time (New Frontier, Great Society) or to stroke visiting journalists or to combat other intellectuals. fashioned Carter's "malaise" speech, blaming the people for the funk we were in The Guardian Weekly about an encounter in the White House: was creating a world society. The new politics, the new economics, the new technology and the new immigration were coming together to change the tired old rules of the game. There was more in the same poetic vein. But history was always a living presence. I think of my late lamented friend revolution. That had been made by the Cadets (Constitutional Democrats) under What impresses me, in fact, is that with all the blather about "the new," there is a hunger for history, and for many people, the old is more relevant then still under Communist rule, where I had been invited to give a few lectures to some Party institutes about technology. (At least the theory of it.) After the sessions, my hosts eagerly escorted me around the city and took a small hovel in the wall underneath.) What they wanted to talk about was not Catholic officers had been hurled from the window by the Protestant members of history and whose legends were written down by church scribes and canonized in the coffin is opened for the faithful, and his brown and withered hands peek years?) I know that these are alleged bones, and emotional sentiments are whipped up by the prayers of the priests and the nuns. But people But since this will be the last round before the end of the century, shall from the room he rented across the street. A pair of binoculars and a rifle with a single spent shell were recovered from the building in which Ray stayed. Both the rifle and the binoculars were covered with Ray's fingerprints. Ray, a racist and career criminal who had escaped from prison a year earlier, was but later pleaded guilty and received a 99-year sentence. Soon afterward, he recanted his confession, saying that he had transported the suspected murder Office reopened its investigation, but reaffirmed Ray's conviction last year. was a conspiracy, but simply denied that his client was knowingly a part of it. The jurors were instructed to decide whether or not a conspiracy involving have to determine who was involved or what role each organization played. So, the specifics of the alleged theory remain vague. Among the arguments presented off. The Kings also presented ballistics evidence suggesting that Ray's gun could not have fired the fatal shot. Although government investigators did not participate in the civil trial, they have long cited Ray's record of successful crime. They also say that while the ballistic information is inconclusive, it who owned the restaurant opposite King's motel (and one floor below the room Ray rented), said he had hired the real assassin on behalf of an associate with possible ties to the mob. He claimed the assassin shot King from his restaurant changed his story multiple times and now denies any intentional involvement in hotel rooms and sent his wife a tape that suggested King was having an extramarital affair. (Indeed, King did have such affairs.) While Pepper presented no definitive evidence establishing a government conspiracy, he did claim to have witnesses in reserve who can prove the government's role. He has not revealed most of their identities; one National Guard officer whom Pepper Representatives investigation of the murder in the late 1970s found no evidence of a government conspiracy. (It did leave open the possibility that Ray was the behest of the King family, the Justice Department ordered an investigation into the assassination. However, early reports indicate that it, too, is likely objected, the network put the matter "under review." The sketch in question female performers wear scanty clothing and make crude sexual gestures. The men said it was a holiday celebrated by the people who own the movie studios and to, however, the mockery is not aimed at pop stars in general. It targets a If you want to understand who exactly is being skewered in "Spears" and reader who insists on anonymity but who seems to be possessed of an astonishing memory. Whether his memory is accurate cannot be House Council on Environmental Quality to make a study of "probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of Copies of this report, which made a huge splash at the time and sold more than that six months earlier a research assistant he'd asked to find a copy came Eventually, however, Chatterbox was able to procure a copy of the summary rigorous on the facts. (Besides, nobody seemed to be around today at the World population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in Not exactly an invitation to break out the party hats on New Year's Eve. How overestimation of the total world fertility rate, which (his book documents) correct, however, and believes that, with the least developed countries seeing very little decline in total fertility rate since the early 1960s, world world's remaining petroleum resources per capita can be expected to decline by Although the price of oil has spiked lately, last time both cited an essay in an earlier edition of Bailey 's book that said tropical attention to a chart that seemed to support this in a World Bank report called the above sampling is hardly scientific, Chatterbox concludes that Carter's commission was half right, which is about par for the course when it comes to predicting the future (to test this proposition, flip a coin several as Jimmy Carter predicted it would be. This is either good news or bad news, Journal editorial page, Fish is the symbol of how the left is wrecking encounter between reader and text. He advocates campus speech codes, the Social Text and the field of "science studies," even after they were reflect an amusing brashness. It reflects a lack of principle. An implicit answer to these and other criticisms can be found in Fish's discussing a friend who has betrayed them by becoming a railroad detective. Why giving your word that's important; it's who you give your word to." Most people would agree with Holden that a code of honor is worth at least with principle," he writes, "is, first, it does not exist, and second, that nowadays many bad things are done in its name." None of the ideals a liberal agenda. If all disputes over abstract ideals are, as Fish says, attempts to exploit an elevated moral language for partisan advantage, then to hell with his critics and their faith in chimera such as free speech and scientific objectivity! To hell with conservatives and their absolute values! To hell with liberals and their cherished notion of tolerance, since the people who benefit from it (such as fundamentalists and supremacists) would punch a liberal silly if they found one in a dark alley. The only beliefs that matter, says Fish, are Before you dismiss Fish as either a danger to democratic values or a pugilistic idiot, you have to know three more things about him. First, he's a in a stale debate over whether Paradise Lost is flawed because it of the theological paradoxes of his day, rather than mere literary error. and Duke University's English department. His success as an administrator rested on two insights that are now commonplace: first, that the academic star second, that the longing of academic couples to live in the same place represents an administrative opportunity, not a headache. Fish built both the Humanities Center and Duke's English department by hiring celebrity couples and finding room for both, rather than wooing one member of the couple and banishing the other to a lesser department, or condemning husband and wife to a commuter marriage. That both departments are now falling apart can be chalked up either to his considerable skill at maintaining allies or to his cynical Third, it is not as easy as it seems to lump Fish with the progressives and realism, demonstrates the distance between him and them. The book's best essay by far is an attack on multiculturalism. In it, Fish argues that multiculturalism is a logical impossibility. His brief goes like this: There are two kinds of multiculturalism, "weak" (or "boutique") "multiculturalism" and "strong multiculturalism." "Weak multiculturalism," says Fish, is a watery differences between people are trivial, because there are certain central such as polygamy or female circumcision, that offend those values. Strong argument to its extremes, end up having to support some other culture whose If there are no rules for living peacefully in an ethnically mixed society, what do we do now? Why, says Fish, we do what we have always done, since we have never really practiced multiculturalism. We improvise. We engage in them. This, he adds, is not a recommendation. It is how we do things already, and the sooner we admit that, the better we'll get at it. This may be well and good for multiculturalism, but Fish has bigger targets in mind. The most troubling essay in the book is called "Mission Impossible." Here Fish claims that there is no such thing as liberalism, since liberalism's only way of dealing with those who don't agree with it is forcibly to exclude them, mostly by calling them mad. It's an old argument, but Fish makes it new the principle of separation of church and state (the bedrock of liberal polity or at least all religions with strong beliefs and problematic forms of public suppress because they will be condemned "by the judgment of all mankind." Right wouldn't have had to invent liberalism. Liberals, rather than practicing tolerance, have by acts of intellectual (and real) violence elevated their own ideas of what will and won't do to the status of that which is universally The philosophy Fish is practicing here bears some resemblance to pragmatism, that things work themselves out in the end. But Fish is not an upbeat pragmatist. His vision of society is far darker, for instance, than that of the as long as it leads to other ideas. "Mission Impossible" is the essay in which Fish's scariest side emerges in clear view. The only thinker who is really attaining of our Ends," and because each man's ends are naturally to be preferred to his rival's, the two will inevitably "become enemies," and in the absence of a neutral arbiter "they will endeavor to destroy or subdue one And there Fish more or less stops. (Well, actually, he goes on to argue in a similar fashion against the logical plausibility of free speech, academic freedom, and blind justice.) Maddeningly, he leads us to the center of the since he's a pragmatist, he believes that his ideas about the world are just that, ideas without consequences. There is, he says, "no straight line from In other words, Fish isn't the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist. But then, so were the certainly can't tell you whether Fish is right or wrong. On the other hand, Fish never claimed to be right. In fact, he once quipped that, now that objectivity is dead, it is no longer necessary to be right. You just have to be Sometimes a situation seems so obviously wrong that you can't believe it's and a host of opponents spring up to say, unbelievably, "Things are just fine the way they are." To which the only reasonable response, of course, is to say, This is pretty much the story of the SEC's battle against the selective disclosure of significant financial and business information by companies to investment bank analysts and large institutional investors, who routinely get looks inside companies and notifications of changes in future outlooks long essence that companies would not release any "material information" privately. Instead of applauding the regulation, Wall Street looks ready to fight it. From one perspective, of course, this is hardly surprising. Investment banks and brokerage houses built their businesses around their access to information, and their ability to get that information to their clients before it reached the product of a phone call to a chief financial officer, or comes from a vice president who lets slip that the fourth quarter is looking especially good. If you give up selective disclosure, and create a truly free flow of information between companies and all of their investors, then the possibility of making easy profits (either by getting in before everyone hears the good news, or getting out before everyone hears the bad) disappears. That's hardly an argument even Wall Street could use to defend itself. So instead what you hear is the classic "this will lead to a general chill on information" argument, which says that since companies don't want to put out press releases all the time, they'll stop talking to analysts at all, for fear that they'll be breaking the law. And since markets function best when there's The truth is, it's not clear that there would be any damage done at all if companies stopped having private conversations with analysts. The privileged position of the analyst, after all, is a vestige of the days when just about all investors had accounts with the major brokerage houses. In today's world, with the profusion of online brokerages, that's an unnecessary privilege. At the same time, if you look at analysts' estimates for companies' quarterly earnings, they tend to be quite similar, which suggests that they're the result not of aggressive independent research but rather of company guidance. If that's the case, then let the company give its guidance publicly, in a conference call accessible to the public, broadcast on the Internet, and transcribed on the company's Web site. The same should be the case with any of the rules on the kinds of public statements companies can make without fear statements. And the ability of lawyers to sue every company executive who makes a prediction that doesn't come true obviously keeps executives from making predictions that would be of great use to investors. Both of these phenomena insider's game and individual investors really were at a radical disadvantage in terms of separating truth from lies. But protecting individual investors today has the ironic effect of perpetuating their informational disadvantage. If we're going to have full disclosure, then we have to accept the risks that go along with it. So let companies speak and investors listen and decide from wondering what else can go wrong. Last year, the company's prospective merger questions. The company's agribusiness unit, which it had once planned to make to genetically modified seeds and crops. Even as the major stock indices deal superfluous. There's no good reason to think that this deal will work, and perhaps hostile, suitors. So the Street's reaction to the deal was sensible. The one interesting element of that reaction, though, was that investors were percent of its agribusiness unit. That unit is now generally acknowledged to be In the long run, that may actually be a good thing. Given the ongoing uproar over genetically modified crops, an uproar that has played an important role in the opposition to the World Trade Organization and that has become a key trade corn in the United States are already genetically modified varieties, and the possibilities of using genetic modification to increase crop yields and protect organic farmer was a haphazard and scattershot collection of charges that might testing them sufficiently for safety, misleading farmers about these products, and monopolizing the patents and sale of these unsafe products. In other words, of millions of dollars. How he reached that figure remains unclear. The suit is exactly what it appears to be: a publicity stunt. To begin with, not certify "normal" seeds). And the company can't be accused of selling unsafe products because there's no evidence that the products are unsafe. That's why the suit just says they should have tested more. The fraud charge seems equally defendants) makes the monopoly charge a bit hard to believe. Perhaps we could that have yet to be resolved. And just as obviously, the major agribusiness companies have hurt themselves by obstinately opposing things like labeling of of the word "populist" to describe the suit.) They are, though, very useful Liberal Media Bias Lives! Exhibit A: "Minority Growth Slips at Top muttering, "Uh oh," and thinking here was another example of the project of prices were soaring in the early 1970s, that "we have slowed the rise in the rate of inflation." Prices were still rising. The rate at which prices were rising was still rising. Only the rate at which that rate was rising wasn't The Times headline wasn't quite that deceptive, but it was close. It of growth has slowed." But should we really expect the minority share of enrollments not just to keep growing but to keep growing at its initial rate of increase would have to slow down sometime, wouldn't it, as minority mostly a success story. Minority children are indeed accepted at private schools, but even though "they can afford the steep tuition," their parents "often choose other options, including parochial schools and a move to the suburbs" where the public schools "have a better reputation." Isn't this basically a heartening trend? Integrating the suburbs is arguably more us, minority students fear cultural isolation. They also fear becoming the "subject of speculation" as to whether they are beneficiaries of race preferences. Yet the overall picture is positive: The private schools are becoming more integrated while the suburbs are becoming more integrated, too. "Private School Minority Enrollment Holds Steady Even as Qualified Students Liberal Media Bias Lives! Exhibit B: Meanwhile, on Page B3, the after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the swift collapse of communism's influence in the nooks and crannies of the city." It seems the mayor didn't like it when the leader of a dissident group of transit workers decried "an argued that "means taking jobs away from people," and said it reflected a respect by recognizing that his philosophy has some meaning worth criticizing having "expanded his horizon to foreign affairs last week." It seems the mayor his two cents to a controversy in the news, and his position on asylum was accordance with a political agenda. My fear, based on lifelong respect for your writing and the early corruption of my morals by Beyond the Valley of the you felt guilty for having laughed. By the way, I missed the racism in that worldview being slipped in through the back door. So to speak. Fight Club is a more difficult case. Its makers clearly thought they were satirizing fascism; you think they ended up celebrating it. My view is closer to yours, but it's a tricky line. Some of the greatest artists burrow so deeply into their characters' twisted psyches that they risk making a case for writer tried to explain to me the other day that the point of Fight Club is that the hero spends the whole movie punching himself in the face. To him (and many others), this ironically brutal confession of impotence sums up the messy, unresolved feelings of his than insightful. But I find it so much harder to dismiss than The Green end although it cheated like mad and I could smell the greasepaint on those lonely when the rest of you leave. I began on a note of hope for movies; I end One happy development the new millennium is apparently about to bring is the were specially bred in the laboratory of an evil black scientist with the Hoping to encourage what may be a nascent trend toward rationalism, Chatterbox hereby challenges other religions to step forward and discard nominate religious doctrines they'd like to see jettisoned in the new year. Please provide documentation that the objectionable practice you are citing Chatterbox's belief that God doesn't actually exist. has studied this, and discussed the misunderstandings that result. You're probably too young to recall that Jimmy Carter smiled all the time, that he knew something they didn't. The fact that Al Gore doesn't grin much is article about smiling, but I wrote it up for a book my wife and I did Here's my summary: Smiling appears to be a Southern custom. Ray L. misunderstood: "In one part of the country an unsmiling individual might be queried as to whether he was 'angry about something,' while in another, the smiling individual might be asked, 'What's funny?'" magnum opus, Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion thesis, as summarized by Reed. If Bush had the kind of unctuous smile associated with many southern politicians, Chatterbox would say: Case closed.* Bush's compulsion to smile is essentially southern, but the smile itself is corrupted by other influences (a few possibilities were cited in Bush's compulsion to smirk bears no relation to the southern If the first possibility were correct, that would be good news for observed in the Wall Street Journal piece quoted in Chatterbox's item) the smirk was clearly passed from father to son (acquiring some However, if the second possibility were correct, then both into question. Chatterbox leans toward this latter interpretation, because he can't recall ever seeing any true southerner smirk, not even Molly Chatterbox strongly suspects he would have found lots of them on the movies. (If you need a little help, click here.) Now try to imagine her speaking with a southern accent. their breed as southern, or western, or anything other than Lone Star. For the purposes of this discussion, though, Chatterbox will accept Reed's premise that The New York thing is easy: It wasn't to my taste, but New Yorkers tended to good strategy for an economy losing manufacturing jobs (a strategy honed for never saw the dark side, only the Met Life commercials side. Frankly, I cross people off my list who say It's a Wonderful Life is their favorite The Staples Center scandal is remarkable precisely because, in defense of teams that their sports pages have to "cover," or that even the most distinguished papers hold conferences, seminars, and festivals that then tend to get "covered" more than events sponsored by others. It's a practice "happen" to tie in to the movies that preceded them. Don't get me started. speech. The slowest anybody has ever been allowed to speak on television, like that lovable old drunk. Now comes a guy who actually knows how to run a government, and thinks the coolest branch thereof is the secret police. the organ of some irritable neoconservative rebelling against the dominance of times" for House Republicans that they are sifting through the dregs, dragging and movie actor, and others "from the lower rungs of the celebrity food trouble in their fight to retain control of the House. But his piece doesn't do they were considering would be safely Democratic even in a better year for the state representative. How are they the "bottom of the barrel"? District? And which party was it again whose local leaders wanted to run Jerry local politician for Congress! That's really scraping the bottom! have been running for Congress since the beginning of the republic. That's where Congressmen come from! Because there's no payoff in being merciful to enough to bring any argument to a snorting, chuckling halt. Add to that the Congress next month, ask for tax cuts and credits worth billions. But both stories are quickly forced into speculation mode because the White House didn't million registered voters, an accomplishment the paper says will be much easier for any potential rival. The New York Times stuffs taxes and runs to be a huge boon to the economy. The idea put forth is that under the rubric they gained not just freedom from the millennial bug but also the ability to perform a wide array of new tasks. And the productivity thus gained will pay off for years. Or so the story says, quoting five experts in support along the preparedness "posed an enormous distraction, soaking up time and money that might have been plowed into projects with a more immediate payoff," and that "much of the investment went to inoculate older technology against the computer bug rather than to embrace the newest processes that could revolutionize the way work is done." If the point of the piece was to say that the money spent is now looking like a tough call, then this idea should have been brought up higher and developed. If the point is that despite such comments the preparedness is a boon, then they should have been brought up higher and answered. What the LAT does instead makes for a disorienting reporter) a free copy. The author expresses few regrets for whatever role he played in getting companies, citizens, and government agencies to avoid tried to open up his starched white branch to flexible thinking and minority sailors, but who was best known for having ordered the use of Agent Orange in inside (although it seems a bit cockeyed that the latter puts it below a There are apparently unstated limits to what the LAT 's "Hot Property" only too glad to tick off the actors' credits but didn't mention another Colts' sudden death championship win. The likely explanation is worrisome even if (like Today's Papers) you don't follow sports: boomer editors who can't seem to shake boomer sensibilities when they come to work. over to an essay, "The Next Century," which spends most of its time reviewing department, the wires report the death of the world's oldest person, at age The coverage makes it clear that beyond anything specifically tied to the quotes one expert referring to probable "preemptive arrests," and saying that Ho Lee case are now looking into the possibility that Lee passed nuclear Post has local merchants telling of increased traffic in bottled water, batteries, candles, etc., but nothing out of control. And the Times says political freedom, economic opportunity, individual worth and equal justice." with sprawling essays on the span's history, and on its concepts of liberty, love, hate, ingenuity, fear, beauty, thought, and mystery. The effort on history says, "The best invention of the millennium is widely considered to be glass lenses, the orchestra, the clock pendulum, electrification, the birth control pill, refrigeration, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, and antibiotics. The most overrated invention of the millennium is the spacecraft." The section also other holidays, where status in the organization is measured by the plans, for tonight the most important people in the outfit are the ones who will be working. Suddenly, Today's Papers feels very important. The folks over at the Wall Street Journal editorial page think they've discovered a really neat argument against campaign finance reform. New become president," the piece contends. "Then they will help the media become the overwhelming arbiter of what the political system spends its energies been rigorous enough in exposing the press's hidden interests. If the media is intentionally promoting the cause of campaign finance reform, it is doing so stands to lose under a reformed one. There are three arguments that support could run them even more, because mandated free airtime might preempt other newspapers and radio broadcasters would also suffer under a reformed system, especially one that restricted lucrative "independent expenditure" campaigns harmony and good government. Just ask any journalist, Which would you rather the National Performance Review? If reporters are biased in favor of campaign finance reform, it's not because it will do us any good personally but because editorial pages such awesome power, it's darned impressive that the Journal alone is immune to this temptation. How admirable of them to show this kind of selfless restraint and idealism when the rest of us are disingenuously promoting our class interests. Unless, of course, it's the other it clear that this soured the mood and created considerable awkwardness. Both the clear impression that it had no eyes on the battlefield. Indeed, the special safety seats for small children traveling in airliners. The story doesn't mention who will pay for these seats, the parents or the airlines, but it does say that under the new policy, the parents will probably be buying a separate ticket for their toddlers, something they can avoid now by holding Everybody reports inside that yesterday, for the first time, former committee members, only five Republicans and one Democrat were present. about settling allegations that they have illegally discouraged retailers from man." The only real risk factor revealed is that his cholesterol is borderline single figure has had the greatest influence on the development of your own political thinking?" "If you had to rely upon a single person as your foremost economic policy adviser, who would it be?" "If you had to rely upon a single person as your foremost foreign policy adviser, who would it be?" "What television program?" "Which book that you've read this year has been most important?" "What book (excepting the Bible) that you've ever read has been most important to you? Why?" "What is the best movie you've seen in the past new Year's Eve marched flashily around the globe before finally, timidly, York Times took out after us for our lack of excitement, resuscitating the piece, because it vitiated his argument, was the fact that millions of Southern by the Rose Parade, which lasts a lot longer than a fireworks show, and is slightly less inexplicable than the diaphanously costumed dancers who cavorted But I can't think of two more grating campaign personalities joined on a single watch both their speeches, and in each case, after a few moments, I opted given an hour of nationwide airtime with the King of Talk, what in hell is so millennium coverage just as well and, at the end, just as tearfully? One of the basic truisms about investing that's very easy to forget, especially in the middle of the kind of bull market we're in, is that it isn't a stock market, but rather a market of stocks. In other words, even if investors are generally feeling bullish, that bullishness is not uniform. It does not lead them to forget about distinctions among stocks. Even during the Dutch tulip mania, after all, there were some bulbs that seemed priceless and In the most general terms, we all recognize this. Last year, for instance, with the large cyclical or commodity companies. Meanwhile, aluminum producer investors were a little more discerning than "tech good, no tech bad." But as a blindly rushing after stocks of a certain kind that they're not paying any attention at all to the differences among all those stocks. This is a problem because if it's true, it means that the market can't be doing what it is meant to do: channel capital to those companies that will use it most productively and away from those companies that will not. And it's a problem because if it's In this case, that's precisely what that conclusion is. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this market is that even in a time of seeming universal to go wrong as an investor if you were buying anything with a .com at the end model, there are lots of tech stocks that are not doing especially well. More to the point, there are lots of tech stocks that have done really well and then been severely punished, and on any given day what you're most likely to see is not a move upward or downward in which everyone's participating, but a On a deeper level, there are now a host of Internet stocks that no longer is just a case of market sentiment shifting. But it'd be more accurate to see these companies. Which is, after all, what market sentiment ultimately Of course, investors overreact, in both directions. And sectors do become that kind of indistinct investing doesn't last too long, which is why the idea that investors today "don't care about profits" is a misreading. If investors didn't care about profits, they wouldn't distinguish as carefully as they ultimately do between one unprofitable company and another. In the end (and comfortable perch from which we can be unserious about the environment, not to disparities, corporate malfeasance." When master ironists feel the need to articles and one movie defending irony in the past three weeks. The first piece oneself, one's values, and one's aspirations. At least irony is unlikely to be claiming in somewhat overblown newsweekly fashion that irony and ironic juxtapositions are "an inevitable response to the human condition. The original ironic juxtaposition, after all, is the spirit plunked down into the material who argues for irony on the charmingly loopy ground that it is a fin de What unites all of these articles is a certain earnestness: Their authors are not joking (well, Chatterbox sort of is). Irony, they say, is good --good for foreign policy, good for the soul, even good for the Wrestling irate women? Bashing the South, in the South? Being an inept and that any of it was a joke. The movie has no such qualms, however. It is a conventional celebrity biopic, lionizing its subject at every possible turn, and congratulating itself for its insight. It winks nonstop. See? the because they didn't get it? See how smart we are, who do get it? doomed to fail. Does the very effort to defend irony to those impervious to its charms require you to trick it up as something it is not? After all, irony is not for anything. It has no higher purpose. It is a perspective on the world, one that takes advantage of distance and some weirdly skewed point of somehow other than what they usually seem. It's a lens that is morally neutral, deployed for evil as easily as for good. (There are philosophers who argue that the ironic sensibility is morally preferable, because it makes you irony is the tragic vision of the world, not a particular trick of speech or than the people who failed to understand him, if only because that would have that their particular slant on life expresses the universal human condition. The Economist gets a little closer to the heart of the matter when its editorialist writes, "Many people, when hearing an ironic remark, may not has been made are instantly complicit, and they can enjoy the fact that there are others who have missed the joke." In other words, irony is how the without it. But it's neither virtuous nor defensible. know what Chatterbox is talking about, click here and He didn't finish until after the sun had set. Even granting that Chatterbox had one or two other minor tasks to complete today, it does seem that seven hours is more time than any reasonable person should have to spend reading about the running stories at approximately five times their logical length might suspect scheme to hide news of its publisher's and editor's misbehavior by burying it views the recent corruption of its editorial standards as a serious matter. Shaw wins bravery points for all but calling his newspaper's publisher, sacked forthwith. Downing never told Parks until very late in the game that the opening of the Staples Center was going to share ad revenues with the new downtown sports arena. She kept this secret, she says, because she didn't want to corrupt editorial processes. But it's much likelier, Shaw writes, that she vice president and chief operating officer for the paper). When the news staff the Staples Center hadn't helped sell ads. In fact, Shaw shows, they had. president of the Staples Center, paging through the issue with Shaw and pointing out ads he and his staff helped to get.) Downing also told the angry Staples Center and sending it a check instead. But the check still hasn't been sent, Shaw reports. (Perhaps it was sent today after Downing read his memos that were handed out, he was somehow not paying attention, or out of the to have been weirdly muted. He didn't have the special issue canceled, even though at that point most of the magazine hadn't yet been printed; he didn't even consider running a disclosure statement about the deal, which would have story of the Staples deal in the national press, that it was "an inappropriate scrupulously fair reporter, tells Shaw he never told her anything like Shaw also deserves kudos for documenting his newspaper's decline under Times Staples contract was signed). The horror stories include a representative of an Times reporter; the ad department telling advertisers of a "'Millennium featuring people they wrote about. Although the paper's slide into ethically Chatterbox must fault Shaw, though, for offering only the sketchiest answer raised when the story first broke: namely, what business justification was there for the then, the dollar value of the newspaper concession and the ad placements and that was previous reported, but it's still a bad financial deal. Shaw reports Times suits felt very clever for having bid Staples down. Of its annual profits from joint ventures. This last, which has come to symbolize in most people's minds the corruption of editorial standards implicit in the deal, was viewed at the time (in the words of the person who negotiated the deal) as "a way for us to be able to make this deal during a time when cash was a problem." Times set about calculating how much it had netted off the Staples Center issue, it found that after making extremely complex estimates regarding the use swindling the Staples Center, it was only in the context of a larger deal in will notice a slight change in our design, if not by the time you read this As followers of Internet fashion are aware, portal sites are the flavor of the site is a Web page with useful features such as a Web search engine, your local weather, sundry links, perhaps a stock ticker, news headlines, a small button again," and so on. The idea is that you make it your home page, or at least come to it often, and that way the sponsoring company will get lots of traffic conducted a scrupulously objective study of the major portal sites and special set of pages that shield them from any special temptation to visit resist noting, finally, that if your primary interests are news, politics, and cultural commentary, our "Slate Links" page doesn't make a bad "portal site." There you'll find links to all the major columnists and commentators, movie and other arts water. Nor is there anything especially Republican or conservative about attempted to associate Flytrap with the political and cultural values of the feminists are betraying feminism's roots in the same period by failing to condemn the male perpetrator. Surely the latter critique is closer to the mark. the strong tendency of Democrats and Republicans to see Flytrap differently is about principled ideological disagreement. "The Beast stands for strong, mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," says the press magnate, Lord about domestic politics. If there's anything worse than partisanship, it's bipartisanship. This is not merely the journalist's professional preference for disagreement over agreement. It is a suspicion that rising above partisanship that on a series of essentially apolitical issues on which reasonable people can differ, Democratic politicians are almost all on one side and Republicans analysis only to whichever side you happen to disagree with. But unthinking partisanship can strike anyone at any time. Consider the sad case of an online the right to lie under oath if the questions are ones you should never have had to answer. But he was strongly tempted by the notion that if you shouldn't have mislead without falling into a perjury trap, he was not merely within his through, though, the line of reasoning started to seem familiar. Wasn't this affair, but was pardoned by President Bush. His defense (for which K had contempt at the time) was that he intended to mislead but was technically telling the truth. For example, he stagily denied that any foreign money was differences, of course. Congress' right to question an assistant secretary of ask the president about a sexual affair, but a few will think the opposite. characterize his deception as an effort to subvert democracy in the United disagreed with is either much worse or much better than overzealous prosecutor. K has no trouble deciding which it is now that he needs objection to hairsplitting a decade ago and his indignant sympathy for it now of how partisan indignation can survive a total reversal of position on an issue. The thundering Republican condemnations of the special prosecutor back then are just like the thundering Democratic condemnations today, down to the conceivable expression of "executive privilege" over Congress and the "imperial presidency." When Republican officials were in the dock, the Wall for that. Now the conservative mantras are "perjury is perjury" and "no man is is going on right now and concerns democracy itself. In the 1980s, and as late They thought the force was with them and always would be. Remember term limits? The notion of representative democracy took multiple hits. Politicians were considered inherently inferior to "the people." There was no patience for the wishes of their constituents. Those voters' wishes expressed in polls even trumped the voters' own wishes as expressed at the ballot box (since the essence of term limits was to limit the voters' right to vote for whom they we hear a lot of talk about rising above politics and ignoring the polls and doing the right thing not the popular thing. There have even been some frustrated musings among conservative writers and pundits that the people are note K used to strike a lot in the 1980s, and he's glad he doesn't have to column to defend economics and economists against their critics. It sometimes make much effort to find out what that theory really says. Nonetheless, economists can stand a little informed criticism. Right now, it seems to me, the discipline is in some trouble. Specifically, the marriage between half a century ago, which has allowed economists to combine moderately activist not an abstract problem. It is one with urgent application to the current global economic crisis. Conventional microeconomic analysis depends on the presumed ability of governments to maintain more or less full employment. If reasonable. And in the end that will be disastrous not just for the economics Suppose, for example, that you are an advocate of free tariffs to protect its industry and save jobs. Well, if Brazil cannot devalue its currency for fear of speculators, cannot use fiscal or monetary policy to reflate its economy because to do so would cause capital flight, and the country must therefore endure a prolonged period of recession and deflation, you cannot in good conscience make the conventional arguments in favor of free trade. That is, you cannot tell him that protectionism only redistributes jobs, that it cannot create them, since the truth is that, under these circumstances, not advocating protectionism for Brazil or, for that matter, for anywhere. Nor am I giving up on microeconomics in general or on the general presumption in favor of free markets in particular. I still believe that macroeconomic activism is possible: that Japan can reflate itself out of its slump, that countries such as Brazil can find ways to deal with the threat of speculative attack. Many people disagree with my ideas; that's fine, as long as they have an alternative to offer. But very few of my colleagues, as far as I can tell, are even making a serious effort to rise to the challenge. To understand the nature of this challenge, you need to hugely influential. It purported to see the rise of both communism and fascism as part of the inevitable replacement of capitalism by a more efficient regarded them as doomed, and those who thought otherwise as naive: crucial evidence for the view that capitalism is not going to continue much longer is the continuous presence within the capitalist nations of mass investment funds, which waste in idleness in the account books of the banks. but at the time they seemed quite reasonable. As far as most people who thought about it could see, capitalist economies were indeed unable to make use of their savings and thus of their resources. Given that massive failure, the as the understanding that monetary and fiscal policy could be used to fight Thanks in large part to the new understanding of governments that increasing interest rates, raising taxes, and cutting spending in a recession is a bad Western countries. And with the assurance that savings would be invested and that there would be enough demand to make use of the economy's resources, economists could return in good conscience to the microeconomic question of how Take, for example, the debate about the effects of the of thousands of jobs), believed that the net effect on employment would be zero. This is basically because the overall number of jobs in the United States economy as close to full employment as he can without creating inflation. So any rate, offered a strong case in favor of free trade. macroeconomic activism, in both theory and practice, has made it possible for during the 1970s and early 1980s macroeconomics suffered a crisis. The damaged the prestige of economists in general and macroeconomics in particular, even though it was not that much of a theoretical surprise. Equally important governments could do anything to mitigate macroeconomic instability. In the reason or another apparently cannot or will not use macroeconomic policy to restore full employment. "Emerging market" nations, terrified of capital flight, dare not reflate their economies; on the contrary, we find the taxes, and cutting spending even as the economy slides into a nasty recession. available investment funds, which waste in idleness in the account books of the rushing to solve these problems, right? Well, not exactly. You see, the did not build a workable new structure for macroeconomic theory and policy, but it did seriously damage the old structure. And the effect of that damage has been to discourage economists from even thinking about the traditional cycle research. I can't blame them, but it leaves us with a dangerous lack of fresh thinking about how to handle recessions at a time when the usual remedies had more of a sense that other economists understand what is at stake. The point is not that the world is going to collapse; that could happen, but it is not the clear and present danger. Rather, the point is that the theory and practice of more or less free market economics depend crucially on the availability of adequate solutions to the problem of macroeconomic links in the text, is a reminder of how some people react to the sort of pronouncements we economists are prone to make, and is a little more on why the "equilibrium macroeconomics" school of thought has recruited few pupils. crisis and said that "absolute and unconditional compliance" was necessary for Liberty into their countries. The controversial broadcasts, in the native index, the guiding principle of which is "the longer the advance warning to The editorial detects "symptoms of arteriosclerosis in relations between the home government got very testy over visiting foreign officials' paid his first postelection foreign visit (but before he took over as of man? Haven't we in the past raised high the standard of political and social emancipation for which the whole planet owes us recognition?" Monetary Union, it strongly reinforces the many good arguments for staying with the assistance of weapons of mass destruction," and that the authority of After a period since the first anniversary of the death of is now open season against her with the serialization of new books in the with her personal bodyguard early in the marriage and that she issued death week that she had mutilated her body with a fork, wanted to run off to South monarchy during a televised debate about its future by pressing the redial innocence. Obviously, the president's disgraceful and probably unlawful conduct breaking of the law irrelevant. Second, it's hilarious to hear people say about same time that they ridicule the notion that lying under oath about sex would tables turned by using the very press that acted like piranhas in getting the questions proposed by Brill with the wisdom of "It depends on how you define "Today's Papers." To say that finding a genetic link to a "Founding Father" will bring forth a feeling of patriotic pride in alienated minorities is absurd. How can you overlook the fact that this "link" is a result of one race's dominion over another in the form of slavery? Where is the pride in that? I cannot overlook the fact that this link is a result of slavery. How two days ago, can't I get a chance to read A Man in Full before it's returned eight articles containing the title, though you are certainly not the only ones on the bandwagon. It seems I can't glance at the New York the last straw was seeing that you have a "Book Club" debate on the subject. It's a pretty hefty tome, and the New York Times Book Review titled "A Hundred Years of (I agree with him on this point!) It is boring because many readers couldn't heavily weighted in favor of reviews of nonfiction over fiction. Nonfiction subject, and those people are likely to read the books regardless of what the New York Times is perhaps more literate than other newspapers, it is, nonetheless, a general circulation newspaper and not an academic journal. In a general circulation newspaper I expect reviews of books that are, or potentially are, of interest to a broad range of readers. I don't think that Participants are invited to provide a postelection headline that, in a just say it. I didn't say it. I was there with a member of my campaign staff. We English teachers' union. The remark: 'From now on, I will refer to other people possible to make a joke about an offensive remark without making an offensive built a routine around the idea that repeating the word "nigger" over and over and over very, very fast could strip it of its cruel power, reducing it to an into the Cops and Firemen in Blackface Defense. When these fellows were caught float, they pleaded satire. Here the context is the history of the New York parodists, and the commissioners of both bodies gave these guys the boot. (This, of course, raises First Amendment questions about odious speech, but that's another question.) So where does that leave "News Quiz"? Just a little uneasy. But not wallowing in a moral swamp, like those cringing thieves at question about the ineffable deterrent value of the death penalty. prosecutor he was so egregiously lax in protecting abortion clinics that he was removed from a case by a Buffalo judge and replaced with a special Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably immediately after the ceremony. We agreed to go to both events, graduation and had to leave early because of the baby sitter, so we got up, kissed the new guests were supposed to pay for dinner, we didn't. Embarrassed, I gave my about being invited to a restaurant to celebrate a big event? I paid this time, but what to do next time? (And yes, we gave him a very, very nice graduation if the host can't manage such a party, guests should be informed beforehand the next time, feel free to ask if the party is a Dutch treat. If it is, and problem is so small, but I have nobody else to ask. Where everybody sneezes have never given it a second thought, but recently people seem to be noticing my sneezing and commenting on it, some suggesting I see a doctor. Do you think concern yourself with your repeater sneezes. To those nervy enough to comment, computers a lot and know much about them, as well as about systems and Most of the time people call on me when they have a problem with their computers, and until now I have always helped them. everything and come to their aid immediately. I have decided to no longer offer this help, as it is not part of the work I was hired to do five years question is: Can an employer ask that you use skills that are not in your job should do what he's being paid to do and that the same goes for me. correct, and you are a living breathing exemplar of the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished." You've been such a good sport for so long that now it's people hit you up to deal with their computer problems, tell them to turn to "computer expert," explaining that it is his job to help them and that you are remedy the situation. You might even consider broaching the subject with him yourself. Would you perhaps enjoy being deputized "the expert" and for your astringent wit and good advice, even if it doesn't apply to Deadline That Has Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Politics for the lovely compliments. It is nice to know that the Internet has uses soul of the South. (That soul is held under lock and key at Republican Party must. It is important because it's absolutely, positively the last stand for the Democratic Party in Dixie. The Democrats know they can't be the majority only three points, Democratic polls by slightly more. The race is as nasty as it is close. The Republican Party always been. When he enters the studio, it is as though God has arrived. He rude, vituperative, and overbearing, but he is an utterly ingratiating peaceful integration. As a senator, he has been an inveterate distributor of network of technical colleges and avidly recruiting manufacturers to its State or his cheapness). He's a term limits bore. He calls himself, against funding pork projects in his own district. In one famous case, build a toll road instead. He has not been forgiven. which are among the fastest growing regions in the country. The area is "Upcountry," as it's called, is the new voting engine of the state: If won't "play by the old system of bringing home a little money and expecting everyone to fall at my feet and call me Savior." He repeats his call for to privatize Social Security (he refers to the "miracle of compounding" with a "Contract for a Courteous Campaign" that would have required candidates to warn opponents in advance about attacks and to minimize negative ads and race out of this, doing a brilliant "more in sorrow than in anger" act that casts meanwhile, looks bored with the entire event. This is his sixth Senate campaign, and he never liked retail politics to begin with. He's slightly frailer and less focused than he used to be, and his answers wander away from do is remind people that he's their Fritz and that he got them that road they years other than whine and complain and holler 'pork'?" whisper" in the Senate, a lame duck as soon as he took office. (There is role in this campaign. Both candidates cite him as their model. To name just Democrat. There are no Democratic senators left in the South who command the how Fritz wins. If he wins at all, that will be miracle enough. the Democratic Party, there is indeed a fate worse than death. the top bidder, but the top two bidders have to pay whatever they bid. it's far better than that. As soon as two students are rash enough to enter the drop out of the auction. If Mickey quits now, he loses his nickel, but by But that's only the beginning. After a few more rounds, runs out of money or exhausts my willingness to extend credit. If my students were sufficiently wealthy (and sufficiently shortsighted to enter the auction game is a crude but instructive metaphor for political campaign spending. It might even be a reasonably accurate metaphor if we lived in a world where the biggest spender always wins. In any contested election, candidates would continue to spend until they had exhausted all their own and their supporters' resources. Foreseeing that outcome, no politician would ever contest an election. The first candidate to file would always win by default. winning. And beyond a certain point, it doesn't increase your probability by where one more commercial just can't justify its cost. That puts a natural limit on what they're willing to spend. Mickey will always bid another dollar because campaign finance reform is important, and you can't predict the effects of campaign finance reform unless you think about the incentives it creates for politicians. Let me offer a few potential scenarios. reforms: The government subsidizes each of the two major candidates to the tune encouraging the candidates to spend more. But think again: The subsidies don't just get covered by the taxpayers instead of the fat cats. (The only exception is if the candidate is literally out of money and never had the option of government agrees to give a million to any candidate who meets certain is to encourage new candidates to enter. With more candidates must there be more total expenditure? Not clearly. Suppose, for example, that Al Gore and chance at the presidency. With the value of the prize diminished, least partly offset by what Gore and Bush choose to save. example points to an important general principle: Total expenditure is determined by the value of the prize, whether we're talking about presidential essentially identical chances of winning, they'll keep entering the race until only on how many tickets you hold compared with everyone else. That's what guarantees that people will keep buying tickets as long as the odds are in their favor. That's a good analogy to an election with many equally plausible candidates whose odds of winning might depend only on how much they spend compared with everyone else. But if some candidates tower over others, the analogy breaks down. If you know that the state lottery is likely to be rigged, you'll buy fewer tickets. And if politicians believe that an election is "rigged," in the sense that the favorite will probably win regardless of expenditures, they'll buy fewer campaign commercials. means there are only two kinds of reform that have any chance of actually reducing total expenditure on presidential elections. The first is to reduce the value of the presidency itself, say by putting new limits on presidential power, or installing a permanent independent counsel, or requiring the president to sleep on a bed of nails. The second is to reduce the uncertainty How do you reduce uncertainty? The most drastic way is to allow only one candidate. This makes the outcome completely certain and drives campaign expenditures to zero. Short of that, you could try to deliver information about the candidates that might drive voters to make up their minds not insurmountable lead in the polls. Now Gore trounces Bush in a debate, substantially widening his lead, and making it all but certain that Gore will win. Rational creatures that they are, both candidates reduce their expenditures rather than try to change a foregone conclusion. But suppose, on the other hand, that Bush wins the debate, closing the gap, and putting the candidates into a virtual dead heat. Then expenditures will rise as each candidate fights to resolve the new uncertainty in his own favor. substitute for commercials, then they're equivalent to the scenario where the government gives a certain amount of money to each candidate, and expenditures don't change. If the debates are fundamentally different from commercials, then they're equally liable to cause the race to tighten or to widen, and expenditures can go either up or down. Of course, debates have civic virtues other than their effects on spending, so this is not an argument against them. But it is an argument for being realistic about what we can and cannot probably never heard about any of them, but this week you've heard about martyrdom is in part a function of timing. He received his fatal beating just before National Coming Out Day, for which gay rights groups had already planned rallies and media events. His death gave those events a unifying theme and icon. Furthermore, after the beating, he lay in a coma for several days, story is the manner of his death. "At first, the passing bicyclist thought the crumpled form lashed to a ranch fence was a scarecrow," began the initial New York Times dispatch. The dangling figure turned out to be "the "compelling image" of "the black figure at the end of a lynch rope, hanging his death by three white men in a pickup truck earlier this year. "There is incredible symbolism about being tied to a fence," one gay activist comparison. "His 105-pound, 5-foot-2 body" was said to be "frail and lifeless." He was "slight of stature, gentle of demeanor and passionate about human and full of promise." After his death, his parents insisted that he wouldn't the midst of a battle for public opinion between gays and Christian conservatives. The conservatives are struggling to defend two arguments. One is that being gay is different from being black and less worthy of legal protection. The other is that homosexuality is an affront to morality, assembled to protest the play, which, as the Times noted, revolves summit was "plagued by internal fighting over free trade and human rights" and House of Lords of the government's proportional representation bill. The vote, the fifth and final defeat of this particular bill and the most serious defeat the system to allow voters to elect a party rather than a candidate. Some or merely "has matured as a First Lady better than a fine wine." For this letters, faxes, and phone calls protesting the move. hour yesterday to protest the government's dismissal of certain faculty used the victims' blood to scrawl "This is the end of black magic" on the walls. The Times noted that Christian groups in the region have faced Standard reported what it called "one of the most disgraceful claimed the victim was part of a reactionary gang plotting to remove the city seems like the perfect place to release them." Where? What? Says who? order demands that we acquire a company starting with the letter 'A' (But no, Randy, that's not fair, and you know it. You can be the birthplace of a World War II answer, which to those of us with delicate bourgeois sensibilities, risks trivializing the Holocaust. With sufficiently dark humor, any topic can be fair game. But the enormity here is so daunting. From one Holocaust as dramatic fodder for a lame and shallow drama, but Hogan's Heroes is acceptable because its dimwitted POW humor steers clear of the Holocaust. Needless to say, this is not a position one could defend for very long. It's a tough call, particularly given the good will of "News Quiz" the vanguard of setting the agenda for the corporate culture along the lines of group, the same organization that protested the opening of Corpus Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. blends, then dipped into trashiness with pure polyester. Today polyester fleece is the uniform of hikers, climbers, backpackers, college kids, and people who want to look like them. As in the '70s, you're nothing in the '90s if you're write this off as a mere fashion fad. Polyester is undergoing a renaissance because fleece is truly a miracle fabric: It's warm and durable but lightweight, and it dries faster than natural fibers. At the same time, it feels natural to the touch, not scratchy like the poly of yore. And while fleece takes over the sweater and sweat shirt market, other synthetic fabrics Polypropylene and other newer polyester blends beat out cotton for keeping your skin dry and warm. In short, in high performance clothing, fake is great. terry cloth. First a machine knits the fleece, leaving tiny loops on its you're the kind of shopper who only buys premium brands. Otherwise you have to rack! (You can test this by rubbing the fleece with your palm.) To be fair, the fleece is something else. Despite costing more and supposedly being better, there's some other difference between them, I don't know about it, because Why not buy the cheapest gear you can find that uses the designs of these and two other popular fleece tops, I went to Duke vest performed best, keeping my torso toasty but, of course, leaving my arms quite cold. The other fleeces would have been plenty warm during exercise, but standing still I felt a bit chilly. The North Face did a fine job here, while to weathering this kind of cold. An outer layer is clearly necessary in these conditions, even when you're vigorously exercising (which I tried to do in the freezer until I quickly became lightheaded from the icy air). highest price tag by far. Sometimes you get what you pay for. General conclusion: Look for designs that minimize fleece's right through fleece with a nasty bite. Two other weaknesses of fleece to keep intentionally, the fleece gets irreparable bald spots at the impact points. to look for are a good fit, an attractive look, a nylon shell, and ample and looks more like sheep's wool, with a pebbly texture. Instead of being sheared, one I spoke with recommended it. Another option is to blend spandex with fleece other fake fabrics have grown popular as "base layers." Synthetic long underwear used to be made of polypropylene; some of it still is. The advantage was that polypropylene dried much faster than cotton, spreading sweat across the fabric to increase the sweat's surface area and speed up evaporation. But the fabric has severe weaknesses, as I found out from testing a Wickers brand your skin as groovy '70s polyester shirts. Sleeping in it was uncomfortable, While it spreads your sweat across the fabric surface until it evaporates, the has two unique surfaces: the soft inner layer rapidly wicks perspiration away from the body, while the durable outer layer spreads moisture for maximum only difference I could detect between them was in their feel against my skin. because not only does it not retain odor, even when worn for two days and author readings directly to your home, rendering bookstores yet more obsolete. anything cuter than that? Is there anything more redolent of vulgar erotic possibilities? If "News Quiz" were not a quiz but rather a pornographic omnipresent vending machines on the platforms of swift, efficient commuter adventures we chronicled, even if it made many of our fellow passengers really eroticism shoved at you from every direction, you must make do with loudmouthed age table with a radio link to the airline's database is currently being down and somebody puts your hamburger in front of you, and you pick it up and take a bite. All of a sudden, somebody grabs you by the mouth, drags you around the store, drags you outside, pulls the hook out of your mouth, and throws you really rich, should it pay the same income tax as a poor fish, maybe like a values, how many children does the fish have from previous marriages? maybe they were all out of worms or something? Do they eat worms? chamber), and schoolchildren are harassed by school officials for privately was time to get rid of him," said a fish who did not want to be identified, passage, only this time pronounce "bass" with a long a, and picture opera great Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. "Traditions in the West are sometimes hard to break, but we find this to be Mountain coordinators prove their dedication by spending a night in a bedroll of physical objects using a set of rules, instead of acknowledging the actual bestiality (surely more generically rural than strictly Western?) and prairie oysters (so delightfully disgusting, as are many of the odd foods of strange why so many responses involved having sex with, and eating the sexual bits of, question promotes an unattractive regionalism, as if it were a personal Want To Be," in the only line I can recall, "Where the scenery is attractive, the moral cartography of "News Quiz," urban trumps rural, and East beats West. snack. And some sex. With two different creatures. That's the way we like it The coyote is smart, elusive. I respect him. I don't hunt him because I hate "Democracy confers a stamp of legitimacy that reforms must have in order to be foes while swiftly granting permits to those whose views he endorses. cast of Friends after watching a single episode, and it was one of the Contents this week are inexplicable praise for this movie.) Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. that it gets pretty quiet around here, but check in throughout the long weekend for "Today's Papers" and in case Chatterbox has a postprandial thought or actually was a long series of questions, boiled down to: "Will you waive any privileges you have so we can get to the bottom of whether your office has been illegally leaking to reporters?" Brill replied that several Democrats had asked judge had ordered the investigation of these leaks to be kept confidential. question could have been a lot simpler. It could have been something like: "Have you or anyone in your office leaked information from grand jury testimony say yes because he's said variations on no for months and would be conceding a reasons. First, he is admirably opposed to perjury traps, and therefore he didn't want to be seen as proposing a tooth for a tooth. And in fact he did not the truth, not forcing him to repeat the lie under solemn oath. Second, Brill, as a media philosopher, is understandably queasy about using the law to "out" Then he issued a mixture of lies and weasels about it, making it virtually impossible for him to give an honest answer if asked a straightforward question. That gave his enemies a way to trap him into an undeniably serious crime: perjury under oath in an investigation of alleged high crimes by the president of the United States. In both cases, the investigation itself would the rules nor the laws are usually enforced in circumstances like these. testimony before it's actually delivered doesn't count. their weasels do double duty: keeping them kosher on a technicality and violate the criminal procedure rules because he doesn't believe they apply to publicly denied believing anything so foolish, Brill points out. be put under seal, then publicly regretted his inability to discuss a matter White House's various novel theories of "privilege" (exemption from testifying) for Secret Service agents, family pets, and so on. In fact, the very raising of flagpole, such as his claim that his leaking (if it exists, which it doesn't) is covered by a rule that allows prosecutors to reassure the public about the integrity of an investigation. His investigation's integrity, he notes, has been challenged. This is a delightful example of what lawyers call a "bootstrap argument": If anyone points out that you've broken the rules, that's a challenge to your integrity, which requires reassuring the public, which means pointed out at the hearing, this rule is about official statements, not they struggled to avoid. No one thinks even oral sex, as practiced outside the release the day Flytrap broke declaring, "Because of confidentiality requirements, we are unable to comment on any aspect of our work." (At the statements made by witnesses outside the grand jury." He wrote, "Let me repeat jury material directly or indirectly, on the record or off the record." I of wiggle room. It would be a joy to watch him perform that particular that he didn't do any illegal leaking (he didn't add "by my definition") and that he couldn't discuss the matter because it was "under seal" (he didn't add don't believe anyone has leaked grand jury information." That's awfully close. some possible defenses. But invoking such defenses publicly would destroy his reputation. He could invoke them if called before a grand jury and hope that short, fell into a perjury trap that no one had even set. Should we snap it The best case that can be made for letting President caught in a perjury trap. Consensual sex between adults is no crime, lying about an ancillary matter in a civil suit deposition is a crime that would just three months ago. And you don't crucify a guy for that. serious offense. Those who make and enforce the law have a special obligation about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably knowledge of this book. That is, she has skimmed the surface by reading a few reviews. The title suggests the author is a childless geneticist. The research, that genes and peers play pivotal roles in development cannot be dismissed. genetic makeup and peer influence can override some elements of the home environment, parental attention, input, and example cannot be written off. our second child, a boy. We have a problem concerning gift etiquette. We and date of birth. The problem is that he was born one week earlier than the would want to correct the error. However, if it was the friends' mistake, we have no desire to embarrass them with their error. (Actually, being exactly one week later, the blanket does commemorate his bris.) suggests you be the first on your block to start the craze of bris blankets. You are correct not to want to embarrass the gift givers, and it's a major pain to deal with stores about replacing customized merchandise. (And luckily, the misprinted stamps that become valuable because they are mistakes, the have his head stuffed. The nine point buck he got with a bow, that is. We live in a tiny cabin, and friends are asking where he is going to hang it. "Above the bed" seems to be their general consensus. To this, proud Hubby replies, "IN Southerners say, when he tells friends the trophy will reside in the bed with the two of you. That, or he has mafia fantasies and is trying to tell you thinks, especially in a tiny cabin, that the antlers would provide a wonderful disappointed you felt it necessary to opine on this matter. (The matter being think your answer glib, but given the attention this matter has received vs. if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: who worked in the White House were later astounded to learn the speed at which and that they met later the same day at a staff birthday party. "At eight that kiss her," the paper went on. "She agreed. Two hours later, he again asked her to join him, and this time she performed a sexual act." dollars, she deserves ten for what she's been through." reportedly said he doesn't believe Congress will impeach the president for impeach him if evidence comes forward from woman after woman after woman, of private detectives scurrilously, sometimes illegally, perhaps under physical intimidation, working on stopping these women from telling the truth. That opposition to the agreement is much broader than he thought it would be. The stage, a certain grace period to demonstrate to the world that it is capable both of meeting its commitments and [of] effectively dealing with the radical opposition would be well advised to hold off its support for elections." In an result in prison sentences of up to seven years for people who commit acts nut trees on the national park island for the filming," the Nation pummel you into a stupor with it. Telling the story of a myopic adolescent girl who's persecuted by her peers and slighted by her suburban family (which prolonged his heroine's humiliations until I wanted to scream, "I GET IT ALREADY!" He was a maestro, all right, but of the sadistic kind, and the condensed it. This was the world as seen through glasses so thick they barely however, he spreads the pain around, and he brings in sundry instruments to share in the playing of his lone theme. The upshot defies categorization. Happiness is an aching roundelay, a triumphantly benumbed ensemble farce Before I go any further: You should know that I have stupefyingly dull "tech scout" with the director and key crew, watched some thought about recusing myself, but I have no direct financial ties to the picture and think it's one of the most interesting of the year. Why should I Happiness revolves around three sisters who live some distance from a author of arty, titillating short stories and a magnet for studs and weight latter, a compulsive obscene phone caller who longs for his sleek, chic dismemberment, obscene talk: Happiness is about the sense of more important, the ways in which their prodigious longings manifest themselves in their sexual predilections. And yet these kindred spirits almost never acknowledge a connection. Their similarities don't mitigate their aloneness, and talking about their problems doesn't help much, either. It's no accident get things off their chests go ahead and act on them anyway. There's no such thing as catharsis: Come once, you'll want to come again and again and your lap. But as his strangled monosyllables give way to lavish verbal abuse the shots go wider, so that we take in the romantic restaurant awash in fake Happiness right on the border between irony and empathy. The gags are often easy, but the characters are in an authentic hell. And there isn't a gazelle. Some directors know how to exploit their actors' vulnerabilities, and neighbors, is encased in his flab like a tortured prisoner of war. His doleful characters. Baker's pedophile is so furtive that he's almost immobile, but we waits for a little boy to eat a drugged tuna sandwich, we hold our breaths the Happiness is as consistently inspired. The scenes of Joy at work (wanting to do good, she crosses a picket line to take a job teaching English she has committed and, while her listener attempts to process it, appalled, tucks into an ice cream sundae. That might have been the cheapest kind of fat gag, but because of the way it's shot and acted, our responses don't end with a and getting the only kind of pleasure that she knows. certainly has foul language, as well as a (brief) shot of Joy's uncovered too spooky, and the conversations creep into the red zone when the father couldn't have had a more fitting launch. At the same time that the picture was was shown outside the main competition), Universal, the studio that financed it intoxicant is the kind of irony with which Happiness teems. matters of incest and perversion with a tad more taste. Children, siblings, nieces, and nephews all gather at a prosperous estate to celebrate the turns out to have had monstrous designs on two of his own children. You've seen this sort of picture before: People get drunk and drag skeletons out of closets, and the tension between the formal dinner party rituals and the truths labors, and the White House spin doctors went to work, lobbying reporters to deserved credit for it. But this would have been futile. Instead, they diminished his achievement in a subtler and more effective way. From a deprive him of that payoff by binding the two stories together. made clear that its game plan is to change the subject. In campaign also "put [that] affair in perspective. How trivial it looked compared with the Republicans are holding [impeachment] hearings in the House," boasted conservative pundits and politicians graciously acknowledged it. On Fox News for keeping all the balls in the air at once seemed to thrive," said the situation like this, work. He can see gray. He can understand both sides of the than celebrate the transformation of his vices into virtues, they argued that his momentary virtues will revert to vices. "It depended on qualities that he "And yet, like so much that he does, it was somewhat stained by this seamy who's telling the truth, but one suspects that it may not be the president." negotiation" were "to stay up all night" and to "throw a temper tantrum." In signing ceremony took on ironic shadows: his "tolerance," his "flexible mind," by overcoming the vices he displayed in that episode. By some accounts, because it doesn't fit the pattern. And as the public comes to believe instead incorrigible narcissism. Hours after announcing the agreement, he said in a speech to a conference of religious leaders, "I felt that it was a part of my job as president, my mission as a Christian, and my personal journey of Trial": The lesson of Flytrap is to attack the inquisition. (posted competitive family. I don't think it's competitive with a hard edge to it, but young and appalls the old. Babies bang wooden spoons on overturned saucepans; grannies rock so silently you can hear the creak of floorboards and hip bones. Rock 'n' roll is loud and young and rebellious; chamber music is soft and loud; books are library quiet. Playgrounds are tumultuous, youthful, and physical; churches are hushed, elderly, and spiritual. (Well, white churches; the black church is always shown as a scene of joyful noise. Such is our racial Silence is passive acquiescence; noise is open rebellion. Except in the relentlessly entertaining marketplace, where the television is always on, the radio always plays, and good consumers undergo a constant acoustic bombardment, lest they have five minutes to quietly think their own thoughts. It has been widely observed that prison is noisy, filled with the constant battering of grannies are so touchy about noise, why are they always depicted as hard of can be,' but we took the experience the Army can offer and packaged it in a to reach their enlistment goals this year, the first time for the Navy since military standards have shrunk the pool of potential volunteers. "Most of the people who walk into the office have something wrong with them," said Petty Republican leadership responds to yesterday's disappointing returns. (Final do later in my hotel room, were I but secure enough in my sexuality to make and we failed to get our agenda out there. And by 'failed get our agenda out Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. cover editorial predicts that in next week's election "voters will most likely stick to old habits, returning a legislature much like the previous one." Defying all the summer punditry, Flytrap has been a Several witchcraft panics "occurred in places where rye was widely cultivated, million. Donors' favorite special interests were telecommunications and oil. An accompanying story exposes how Outback Steakhouse coerced employees to national health care and an increase in the minimum wage. necessary to seek opportunity, like education. It should protect people from unfair or excessive aspects of the marketplace." We lack pride in or loyalty to our government and have no "willingness to put aside personal concerns to serve the other beats and the beat movement, his surprising religious fervor, and a sweet and earnest nature. A letter to his editor at Grove Press: "I cant possibly go on as a responsible prose artist and also as a believer in the impulses of my own heart and in the beauty of pure spontaneous language if I let editors take my sentences, which are my phrases that I separate by dashes when I 'draw a breath,' each of which pours out to the tune of the whole story marry, will live in a far more racially diverse United States, and will eat the mound and in the field as they were at bat; endowed with a bunch of superb role players; blessed with a rare balance of speed and power; managed by a man enthusiastically to the album at clubs. (The Wall Street Journal put cover package says Flytrap is a nonissue so far in this fall's agenda in his remaining two years in office. Accompanying pieces emphasize the countered with a bit more vigilance from our intelligence groups. Instead, deems this a dubious money grab by defense agencies. it once was. Instead, the state is growing more conservative: Even its editorial calling the decision "unexpected and dangerous." It said it could published before the court's decision, said that, whatever the outcome, instead, permitting the court decision in his favor to go to appeal. But it also said that this decision raised "the difficult point of indefinite immunity while reconciled to the likelihood of the general's release, said that "the best outcome of the past two weeks of living under arrest and uncertainty is that the general will have to ponder whether he will ever be able to travel abroad again." The government, it added, should "announce that this man, for editorial, whether the agreement will expedite peace in the Middle East. it was intended to close or whether it will provide a necessary catharsis," the they coped with the ending of white rule, they will again be an inspiration for sham" to cover up their homosexuality. Meanwhile, the Times reported constantly covering his body with deodorants, which resulted in a fatal cardiac notice, seems to have started a new feature called "Dear Dr. Notebook," which poses and answers questions that arise from the current news. We can't help started several months earlier. There is nothing proprietary about the name 's "News Quiz" by suggesting that there is any similarity off the onion of perception, and so on. Could this, we wondered, possibly be an ceremony of thanksgiving and celebration of Will's achievements to which we should do about all this. He replied, with simple eloquence, "Have them killed." But he quickly added, "Unless, of course, that would in any way "Dispatches" from the courtroom where government lawyers are attempting the most brazen legal challenge to human progress since the Scopes Trial should be magazine, its editors, or its advertisers. Especially its editors'. In fact, we were sitting around the other day trying to recall whose was free to express his views whatever they may be, no matter how fatuous or uninformed by the slightest understanding of the free enterprise system, and and that some of its staff members have young children and very little talent compassionate company. No one admits to having said to him, "Let the microchips fall where they may." In fact, no one can recall ever exchanging a word with and business departments such as "Moneybox" and "Frame Game," along with 's cultural reviews and reportage. Each item in both of these new deliveries is personally selected for you by to you so fresh it gleams. (No waiting around for stale, shopworn news and Does this really elevate civil discourse in a country in which reasonable minds appears to favor totalitarian intolerance of conservative thought. Could you provide some basic instruction to your "journalists" on the left about minimum civility and respect for those with whom they disagree? less genially mediocre, we'd probably be more appreciative of your ability to registered Republican all the years before and mainly because of the present you sweepingly attribute to those of us who live within this portion of the presume you have the status, to give away and to disrespect at the same time. should spank your bottom and put a bar of Lifebuoy in your mouth), you might at least have picked up a few admirers within these borders, given the thesis welcome a return of their land, including that small piece of terrain that you presumably have sufficient mass to be able to occupy. But, as it is, you come for the pleasure of seeing his name and opinions in print, instead of being a person who uses words to persuade rather than to malign. not take these remarks as a reflection upon their general temperament. the head. You should try being gay and living here. It is kinda like being a a lawsuit in which a man is suing a woman for becoming pregnant against his that she became pregnant accidentally. That factual issue may be settled at trial, but it seems that there is a larger legal issue well worth addressing. Since court findings of paternity cost the imputed fathers eighteen years' worth of support, it seems only fair that women be held accountable for any promises they make about attempting to remain childless. In the absence of that, a woman's promise to take charge of birth control and then not doing so remains the only form of monetary fraud Today's Papers can think of that is not only not punished, but is in fact regularly rewarded. sexual partners to become pregnant are responsible for taking steps themselves to prevent pregnancy. Sex without a condom is not an inalienable right of creating an unwanted pregnancy should do a bit more than whine about how "she was taking care of it." That tone goes over better for chiding the guy who though, great column, despite our difference of opinion in sexual politics. boredom. Sure, the hearing and the trial may be a bit slow, but these writers are covering something important or else they wouldn't be there. And if they are bored silly covering such events the traditional way, they should get off their butts and try talking to someone different and exploring something said that the king, who has been receiving treatment for lymphatic cancer at his last days." It added that this prognosis about the king's health had "snobbish and loquacious by his critics, who say his sentences are often so long that by the time they end, the listener or reader has forgotten how they nuclear radiation levels in the Arctic region. The French newspaper described the trial as worthy of "the good old Soviet times" and said that, because of suffered intimidation, police harassment, and many other abuses instead of radiation levels. "His fate ought to disturb all the capitals of the West." old and new," but added that the political compromises it embodies will slow should want to lift from itself blame that doesn't belong to it. But it added nationalism" and has a duty to join in the commemoration. result. In an editorial, the Times supported her stance. used when posting gay officials to sexually conservative countries; and a ambassador has been appointed, if we have any information that he is gay, we epic The Ten Commandments has long since turned into a pillar of kitsch, but certain moments in the movie remain improbably vivid. One is the sneering personal pronoun before "God" signaled a clash of civilizations: The outlook of Fortress Is Our God" takes for granted the cultural cohesiveness of the Such locutions have become a pervasive social trope. But it's hard to pin down just what they now signify. A new polytheism? A divinely sanctioned ground here. Commentators routinely describe abortion as a matter "between a in a novel twist, once called abortion a decision between "a man and his God"). contained the sentence "What goes on in this room is strictly between you, your God, and the Internal Revenue Service." I have seen references to issues that lie "between me, my scale, and our God" (an article about dieting); "me, my stylist, and our God" (an article about hair care); and "me and the officer with the radar trap and our God" (an article about highway speeding). The about a client's guilt: "His guilt is a matter for him and his God." Echoing Weekly World News report titled "Teen Hacks Mom to Death With Hatchet Because She Killed the Toad He Licked to Get High." The president taking the oath of office has historically spoken the words "so help me God." But if the evidence of common speech is any guide, the idea of God has been rapidly devolving from the generalized to the particular, from the awesomely abstract to the intensely (even idiosyncratically) personal. always been a tension between these two concepts of God. I brought the matter Prize for nonfiction. Miles sets the situation into historical context: "What combined two functions previously separate: on the one hand, the function of were concentrated on one man or woman but whose powers were also limited; on attention to any individual man or woman was slight or unpredictable but whose powers were universal. Before this historic synthesis, you got either one or the other. After it, you had the electrifying possibility that the top God was also our God and even my personal God. After it, of course, you also had the whole range of unanswerable questions of the sort 'How undone? Even as a great deal of the "top God" discussion drifts into remote realms of cosmology, much of the "my God" discussion becomes ever more of a personal God, and this continues to be reflected in the heartfelt speech begin with. She replies, "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just a different sort of personalized God, the customized kind that one acquires as one might a personal trainer, though the workouts often are not as strenuous. This latter sort of personalized God may amount at best to a synonym for "conscience" or "serenity." The dark analogs of the personalized God are one's used to go by the nontechnical terms Bad Behavior or Guilt or simply Evil. fragmentation of the concept of divinity itself. Thus, writing in The New monotheism into "genetic polytheism," in which personal behavior is attributable to an individualized genetic pantheon. Where once there was a God of Anger, now there is a gene of aggression. Where once there was a God of module, which is not so much polytheistic as polymorphous. According to the temporal lobe the stimulation of which, sometimes manifested in the form of seizures, can now be correlated with certain intangible mental experiences. One team's findings late last year at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience, stated, "We like to suggest there may be neural circuits in the temporal lobe that may be part of the machinery of the brain that is involved in mystical experiences and God." The researchers have christened these neural circuits the "God module." "Now this is a matter between me, the two people I inordinately attentive to my viewing habits. As a member of the National to stay mum, so as to keep my voting options open, but it's hard for a guy should be awarded a rubber chicken for irradiating us with her yokel devotion signals with her eyes her exhaustion from keeping them so fiercely in place. It is a terrible responsibility, upholding her society's values and preventing her her in town, mocking her sexlessness, "the gander." character, every prop, every interjection has a precise symbolic function; on film, those elements no longer stand out in relief. In Dancing at to build fires, drink to even greater excess than usual, and dance orgiastically. The rite is liberating but also frightening: Remove a cork from a bottle so pressurized, and the contents are apt to explode. barely remembering his English, Jack becomes a rambling (and, to the local priest, horrific) spokesman for paganism, encouraging all his sisters to "simple" one, who might or might not be having an affair with a man whose wife happens on the surface only hints at the titanic plates that shift beneath, but supreme at conveying what's at stake. They create an indelibly glowering pictures. In the theater, the radio that crackles on and off signals a world elsewhere; and when it's repaired and the stage is flooded with music and the body and halting language. Few films have ever offered so inspired a blend of has long been venerated for this and other droll '30s entertainments, among Lately, he has also been scrutinized for being openly homosexual in an era when Whale was penalized for his sexual preferences. If anything, the director seems to have suffered from a surfeit of dignity, proving too proud to overcome the loss of a powerful patron and a couple of ambitious flops. Comfortably rich, he took to painting and traveling before a series of strokes drove him to drown testaments, but in Gods and Monsters they're raided for murky fantasy sequences. In one, the groundskeeper is the monster staggering around with Whale in his arms; in another, Whale is laid out on a laboratory slab being operated on by the groundskeeper. What's the metaphor? The script, meanwhile, is the stuff of bad two character plays, with spurious excuses for conflict populated his pool) and a long, climactic monologue about a (fictional) wartime trauma that ostensibly shocked Whale into keeping his past under wraps. In removes whatever tension the material might have had. mouth going slack with lust. But Whale's plangent ruminations are slack as play" ever written. "Something about your face makes me want to tell the truth." All this mawkishness would likely have annoyed the real Whale, who exited the world on his own terms and steered clear, in his art, of armchair with the ticket between his fingers, the shock of his windfall having fisherman's identity, and the pair will divide the money between Deciding he'd like to make an eccentric regional comedy with universal themes, issue (but funny) farcical sight gags and a score of panpipes to provide the the man from the lottery. I see a future for elderly male actors willing to shed their clothes for laughs, but I don't see myself in the audience. sultry musical interludes, bridges that lead out, and bridges that lead nowhere. The movie, one of the year's most pleasant surprises, is the evident conviction that life is all dead ends. When her cardiologist husband clubs, where she dances ecstatically with young women. Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you. The movie made me remember why I like Holly Hunter. (I don't always convincingly, so that the jabbering takes on a life of its own and leaves her (sometimes horrified) in the dust. I might even vote for her. trial opened this week, and it wasn't hard to figure out the theme of the opening statement "a pointed personal attack on the credibility and integrity" than attack the case the way it has purportedly attacked its competitors, the company has largely ignored it, instead using its rebuttal opportunities to proclaim itself a producer of wonderful products and a dogged servant of Warden associated the company with "the march of progress driven by science and opponents of my husband." This line of attack, pursued relentlessly over the report to Congress, polls indicated half the public placed no faith in his government lawyers know better than millions of consumers, when it comes to information on this question.) Maybe the company feared it would sully its image by openly slinging mud at a competitor. Maybe it wanted to deprive antitrust case was legal rather than political and that judges were the only antitrust fight as though it were just another marketing campaign. invited to provide a postelection headline that, in a just universe, would run would be great for the country but tough on "News Quiz," already perilously low this piling on, but certainly some of it was heartfelt.) What will we do flame, if the flame is a trash fire or maybe a pile of old tires. (Sorry, moth.) But his fall will be swift and extremely amusing, yet brief. Whom will and a deep contempt for our democratic institutions? Perhaps we need a retreat. Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. freely to insult his victims," but warned that there will many hurdles before arrest has "strong symbolic weight" and that "treating the decrepit tyrant as a common criminal and forcing him to explain his actions in the face of international justice is a lesson not just for him but for all others of his presidency. "If the former general decided to run the risk of traveling to a now has found himself under arrest, the error of judgment is his and his blame for his present predicament. If not, "the Foreign Office acted in a less that could cause enormous difficulties to a friendly democracy." the arrest, the conservative Daily Telegraph recalled that "throughout his time in medical treatment, has now detained him in order to comply with a case brought arrest reeks of hypocrisy and will "not send shivers down the spines of other the millions of unfashionable dead in too many unquiet graves." law, even if he has been able to negotiate immunity in his own country." A believe that torture and murder can ever be excused for political or economic reasons," it added. The liberal Guardian highlighted the warmth of his when he took a party to dinner at the fashionable River Cafe restaurant in further controversy by making another award to a man closely connected to a both a primary peace partner and the undisputed leader of his people, the who, it said, "in wrenching concessions from the intransigent unionists of chance to record to his credit the political step so needed by his country," it saying that an eventual ruling by the Supreme Court "is certain to redefine freedom of information laws as a major challenge to the newspaper industry. Information from government ministries and agencies will no longer be channeled exclusively through "press clubs" but will be accessible equally to everyone via the Internet, it said. "In order to continue serving as stewards of our right to know, newspapers must reform themselves so that they will be able to offer news on their pages that is distinguishable from that which can be read tolerate the movie's saccharine overdose praise the solid performances by "[It] doesn't make you want to deck the halls as much as deck those responsible unmarried sisters. Some critics complain that "for all the crinkle and lilt" of collection of sea changes and splendidly realized small moments rather than a story of overarching action." (Visit the official site.) Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science teams up with another physicist to debunk what they call "postmodern public interest group despised it. Every Democratic politician railed against contributions were tainted. But then something funny happened on the way to the ballot box: Democrats found themselves a new boogeyman to replace the tobacco and efficiencies everyone agreed the system needed. But during this summer and ad declared that Republican incumbent Kit Bond would let "insurance company ran ads saying that incumbent Republican Gov. Jane Hull "has taken tens of refused to impose any meaningful reforms on an industry that is clearly out of depicted opponents as shills for the health insurance industry. The issue is purely political matter, health insurance populism seems all upside for and don't much like, and the industry has its share of profiteering shysters. chemotherapy denied to a child with cancer, the accountant who proposed permitting cataract patients to have surgery on only one eye because you need Democrats. Republicans in the Senate, after all, did just kill a told health insurance executives to "get off your wallets." And they did, right to appeal denial of treatment, no gag rules for doctors, and easier managed care went private, the Democrats get to inveigh against it, and the ambivalent about health insurance. When your child gets sick, you naturally We should have everything, paid for by someone else who shall remain nameless. Democrats, by pushing regulation without acknowledging its costs, are feeding guiding philosophy of almost all politics. There is no reason health care percent higher premiums and that's going to price y thousand customers out of the health insurance market." But most Republicans, who are as willing to pander as the next guy (heck, more willing), are afraid to fight on the merits. Instead, they are countering one boogeyman with another, claiming that pernicious influence of Anecdotal Politics. The benefits of managed care are unremarkable and undramatic (lower premiums, more preventive care). But its costs are visible and awful (denial of and delays in care). The result: Democratic candidates have terrible tales to tell, and Republicans have nothing basically content with their own care. But they are more worried about the a genuinely confusing issue: Should voters believe the anecdotes, which are real and horrifying, or should they accept the evidence that people are mostly happy with their own insurance, happy to be paying less, and as answer to that question. The difficulty for voters is that neither answer is if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: up to the urgent need to take action in the face of the impending lethargy." Then, "when he finally woke up," he immediately started making phone that prevented the attack," it explained. It added that, by constantly putting are good still dominates Western politics," it concluded. and cancelled within hours, statements issued and promptly retracted, statesmen announcing their arrival in capitals unprepared to greet them, and leaders campaigns and duties thousands of miles away." Attempts to base every decision reality by his Kremlin advisers who sent him reports making his reforms appear having at least restored free speech to a country that had been deprived of it whom it quoted as saying that corruption and misappropriation of Western out of the country and either deposited in Western banks or used to buy Department about this scandal, he was met only with silence, even though, in children, the paper said. The proposal angered neighborhood leaders and Evening Standard hopes the proposal will undermine a deeply seats. Democrats, with equal chutzpah, will portray anything less as a upper end of this range, they'll claim victory. If Republicans beat the lower will use this alibi in nearly every close race. Republicans will claim that many of their candidates were outspent, if you count the additional "union will offer this excuse without acknowledging that it implies the public is still upset with the president's behavior. Simultaneously, they will assert that the election is a mandate for ending the investigation of the president's well, considering the backlash against the investigation. Republicans will offer this excuse without acknowledging that the backlash is mainstream. Instead, they'll portray it as a surge of turnout among diehard will point out that the president's party usually loses dozens of congressional didn't lose those seats in his sixth year is that he lost them in his houses, it can ignore its relative setbacks and reassert its absolute the ultimate Democratic fallback. If Democrats lose fewer than five Senate seats, they'll say they weathered the tide because voters decided not to sides will use this line. "Close races" are the ones your side won. If a race looked close but you ended up losing it, then it wasn't really close, so you admits that his party's candidate lost because of the national party's Democrat wins, Democrats will say it's because voters liked her positions on candidate wins, it's because his negative ads distracted voters from the issues. If your candidate wins, it's because voters agreed that the other candidate ran negative ads and their candidate didn't and your candidate still managed to lose, you can always accuse the media of attacking your candidate. This argument comes in particularly handy when the media have criticized your positions on taxes and family values. If he loses, it's because he was unfairly Democratic Party recruits each candidate by telling her that her district opposes the Republican candidate on the issues. The Democratic candidate spends a year on the campaign trail repeating this line. Then, on election night, the candidate and the party claim that she lost because the district was the least bogus spin. Generally, incumbents do have enormous advantages in clout, money, and name recognition. But when a challenger has these advantages and still manages to lose, his party will invoke the "entrenched incumbent" by saying it was never really a race. If your candidate wasn't blown out, you be the trademark spin of this year's elections. Everyone knows turnout will be low. So if you lose, you can always claim that the silent, nonvoting majority Republicans call the Democratic candidate a liberal. After he wins, they say he party gets creamed, you can always find comfort in the exit polls. Somewhere in the blizzard of questions, a couple of findings will suggest that voters sort of agreed with your party's position on something or other, even if they voted against all your candidates. And after all, isn't that what really counts? writer or, for that matter, your own private plane. Does that mean students who do not get such internships or their own planes are disadvantaged enough to need them given out by governmental or university administrative decree? Of rich enough to give you a plane you will have an advantage in procuring these things. That's life. For the most part, those who really want these things must earn them. Giving them to some by decree is worse than unfair; it is ultimately corrupting to the whole ethic of achievement. It subjects those who get these things unfairly to widespread suspicion of their own abilities and spreads a damaging cynicism throughout the culture. In place of a flawed value system of about the successful minority members who go to lesser universities is that, opportunity to earn success honestly: They are not shut out. produces a sense of inferiority and insecurity in those it causes to be announced criterion for admission and never varied from it, the way New York rules to let in some group of kids who didn't meet that standard. But I have never heard of a single college or university judging its candidates on the basis of one simple, straightforward, and publicly stated criterion. Instead, college admissions procedures are made up of dozens of subjective judgments. At who are all good but not quite as great. How will the admissions office select written; how much and what kind of volunteer work was done; notable athletic or artistic ability; a concern for geographic diversity; recommendations; or the most entrenched affirmative action program around, whether an applicant's across the board to everybody except for black kids, and that just isn't something of a crapshoot. Everyone there knows it, and they don't let it make them insecure. They accept their luck and get on with their lives. Do the sons and daughters of alumni feel insecure because the standards used to evaluate their applications were significantly different (and lower) than those used for Personally." Her recognition of the grave personal injustice done by the to arrive at this conclusion. I hope others will follow you. disappointed that there is no representation in your measurement for popular sales typically lead to increased classical or jazz music sales, due mainly to the effect of people feeling compelled to enter a music store and the Titanic soundtrack, or whatever got them in the door the last retailers. In the online biz we compete for "eyeballs," but retailers need recorded music is sold at retail from readily available sources. a couple of index "points" to compare higher or lower music sales at retail might be deserved and appropriate to measuring the state of the arts. Arts Index" left me a bit baffled. Why is it that in the discussion of film the percentage of dollars allocated to independent films was noteworthy, but the same wasn't true of music? Or, put another way, why would, alternative to the mass of media, why let the mass of media (in low or high not opera or jazz should be all the more reason for your paying attention. just been reading the dialogue on public figures' private lives. I agree with Flytrap coverage may be canny rather than hypocritical. The potential outcome of Flytrap is the impeachment and removal of the president of the United happening, allowing people whose views differ from mine to have more "Knowledge is power." While I disagreed with the House Judiciary Committee's decision to release the president's videotaped testimony before even asking the questions "Will there be hearings?" and "What's an impeachable offense?" I watched the tape so that I could understand the spin from both sides and make up my own mind. I don't think that's hypocritical; I think that's good Today's Papers made what was written the day before even more humorous and fun for this reader. Keep up the good work. justice system lagged in fairness behind (someplace he called) the world community. Yes, there are problems with our system, and yes, there are some countries that could teach us a thing or two about them. But my point was I to be arrested, imprisoned, tried, or sentenced in most countries. led to regulation and taxation while bypassing the democratic process. Next up: discipline, and no food to feed its soldiers, the military is falling apart. huge band of untrained, hungry lugs. Soldiers may soon start looting; a military coup would be likely if the army could ever organize itself. and rebels are our best bet for getting rid of him. "Providing military support not much like his cold parents. The author gets a rare private interview with Time also advises readers how they can profit from the herbal craze: cover package ("Does Bill Ford Have a Better Idea?") says the water. But don't expect them for a few decades. Until gas costs more, consumers study showing that kids have less free time than ever before: They spend most of their waking hours on school, homework, and organized sports. Good news: Kids watch less television. Bad news: "Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their interested. Pro wrestling used to be merely fake athletic spectacle. Now it is fake athletic spectacle in which participants are expected to display sexism, wrestler who "bases his character on the size of his sexual apparatus" and boo cover story hails forthcoming vaccines. Recent insights into how our immune system works are making vaccines more effective. Reliable AIDS vaccines could be ready within a decade; cancer vaccines are further off but possible. Soon vaccines will be administered by pill, mouthwash, or genetically fill vacancies at a time of low unemployment, the armed forces are letting in more candidates who score unacceptably low on the military's intelligence tests. Luckily, most of these recruits will clean and cook. personal because of the transformation of parties from fragile coalitions into benefited little from his strenuous efforts to keep banks solvent. In fact, about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably have a dilemma about being a house guest. It is to flush or not to flush. When I stayed with an old schoolmate on a business trip, it was in her small apartment with only one bathroom. Her room was on one side of the loo, and mine was on the other. I had to go to the bathroom in the early dawn and was torn about whether to risk waking her with the noise of the flush or protecting the silence (and trying to catch up with it in the morning, before she not laughing, she is merely smiling with recognition, having had to consider the same question on occasion. Decorum and politesse dictate that you opt for the flush. An exception might be if your host or hostess has mentioned being an extremely light sleeper who, once awakened, is unable to fall back asleep. An alternative if you simply can't bring yourself to push the handle down in the "Please flush." Admittedly this may call for more wakefulness than one may have given the hour and the circumstance. If you choose silence and can't deal with long should you date a man before deciding if he is right for you? be no specified time after which you know if you've found the right partner. Some people make a good selection almost immediately, just as others can take a problem as "Dimmer." A good friend, staring at a similar blonde, asked how he could figure this out fast. I responded with the best indicators I know. Feet, restaurants. My question is: How much should you tip the wait staff? They don't take your order or bring your food, but they do bring drinks, remove dishes, and deliver the check. Your advice will be greatly appreciated. service you receive is not that of a regular restaurant, you might wish to types of drugs is that men tend to have trouble admitting they have a problem." many women have a more satisfying sexual experience if unconscious,' explained naturally vary in both quality and quantity. Fill in the blank, for example, typically sparks the most responses. Today's question generated only about half the usual returns, and here's why: It's not very good. And here's whose fault it is: mine. Devising the question calls for the deft and tactful art of the matter of lobbing one over the plate for you to hit out of the park. It's putting one over the plate that, when you clobber it, erupts in a shower of confetti that coalesces into a single scarlet flamingo that flies over to the admissions of inadequacy; it's like pleading guilty to a burglary so you won't get nailed for a murder. Incidentally, the most common response was, as many of you suspected, jokes about men's reluctance to ask for directions. However, distinguished from medicines that relieve pain or cure illness, many drugs in this category have failed to meet financial expectations. Drugs to promote hair tend to abandon such remedies if they're not immediately effective. particular target audience. It just triggers all the things they want to think advertising strategy for Beck's beer; she does not say if this would have been hard to think about whether that stereotype is realistic. As long as you, as a Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. take these types of drugs is that men tend to have trouble admitting they have course, the juxtaposition of childish amusements and adult ornamentation that makes this list so pleasingly perverse. Similarly, it is the odd juxtaposition of references that makes "News Quiz" responses so perversely pleasing: (click wonderfully, such as in this excerpt from "The Scrolls": "Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?" Now, sadly, his personal life is itself reduced to a comic juxtaposition. And if you enjoy that sort of thing, here's a little juxtaposition game you can play when you spot odd pairings of the bald and the beautiful; it's a betting game called "Date or Daughter?" Enjoy. News, but wouldn't you be more inclined to watch if he were?) Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably sister. Well, actually, about her boyfriend. She's been seeing someone exclusively for more than a year. It's exclusive on her part, but everybody knows he is cheating on her. That is not the only problem. He belittles her in public and is quite a cheapskate. I have gently tried to tell her she is too helpless, and I worry for her. I am the older sister, if you hadn't guessed. Is the kind of bystander you are is helpless because people in these transcendentally horny louses, but outside observers don't get a vote. sister, alas, does not regard Lover Boy as a problem. Yet. But have hope. The day will come when your sib will see things clearly for herself, and her loving sister will be there to help her pick up the pieces. Since you have gone on be the vocal equivalent of throwing good money after bad. teams, and my problem has to do with my traveling partner. We are in the air a lot, and in hotels and restaurants. I am mortified much of the time because herself to the little liquor bottles (she doesn't drink) and those plastic salt and pepper things. In restaurants she cleans out the bread basket and transfers when she is seen doing this people think we are a pair of nuts (and assume she's doing it for both of us), and I also worry that this is stealing. Can you help me come to terms with this situation? Thank you. brown sugar packets in restaurant sugar bowls. While never having had the there is a paper napkin for wrapping. If one was to filch a cloth napkin, that of food put on the table, you should know, is not dishonest. The two of you have essentially paid for everything served to you. Granted, most twosomes would not polish off the entire contents of a bread basket, but it is the diners'. The same is true for the airplane offerings. your associate thinks she is engaging in petty larceny and gets her jollies from purloined rolls, indulge her, knowing that it is a harmless habit. with business people difficult. Example: Just the other day I called a salesman regarding refinancing the house and left my name and number. When he called with his clients. He then continued to call me John throughout his explanation he finished I told him, again, I did not wish to be called John. He became People who presume to use a first name in a business call seem thoughtless. someone who is unknown to you is presumptuous, disrespectful, and improper. transaction is no loss. Surely you will find someone with equal skills who will address, "Do we know each other?" This is usually sufficient for them to swing goes on we are becoming closer and spending more time together. The problem is this: Most of them smoke, and I do not. When we go out to dinner we always sit in the smoking section. When I visit their homes, they smoke constantly. When they come to my home, they are forever going out to the balcony to smoke. I know that breathing this smoke is harmful to me. Normally I avoid smoke, yet I question is, should I consider my own health and the fact that when I am with them I am inhaling probably a pack of cigarettes? Should I stop seeing them? I don't really want this, but what else to do? Yes, I could ask them not to smoke, but since there are five of them who do smoke, it seems like the crowd is hazardous to your health, the deleterious effects of secondhand smoke interesting that this clique is composed entirely of smokers. There is a slim possibility that your chums, out of affection for you, will not smoke in your presence and would give up the smoking section in restaurants. Failing that, bear in mind that the concept of majority rule applies to elections and expression: Once your head is cut off, there is no use crying about your hair. employ racial pejoratives freely and even playfully. But the exemption has been strained to breaking point in Flytrap, as black intellectuals struggle to they feel historically vulnerable to invasions of privacy like those committed came from "a broken home" with "an alcoholic mother." muster as a parlor game, but it's lame as political analysis. The notion that reminds them of unwed motherhood trades on noxious racial stereotypes and decisions. It also shortchanges the White House, which conducted a brilliant pollster worth his paycheck knows that political approval ratings are based him as the "blackest" president of all time. This point is borne out in this week's poll results from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in criminals he wants as long as black economic fortunes remain good. Combine House helped itself with a brilliant outreach campaign that went around the sometimes surly Congressional Black Caucus and reached black voters directly through their ministers and churches. The office that carried out this plan was effort so well that she was later named secretary of Labor. While at the White House, her job included bringing in powerful black ministers, who were more among its constituents, the Congressional Black Caucus scrambled to the front dinners. He delivered his toughest talks on welfare from church pulpits. He realized intuitively what many Democrats and the Republicans have always failed crime, intolerant of social pathology, and deeply scornful of the traditional black Southerners, have endured political contempt for so long that many of them have come to assume that any white person who treats them with respect way of being not only goes too far but is also sociologically imprecise. grew up close to black people, with open access to black culture, a lot of personal style and patterns travel easily from one black community to another. Congress is going to get out of the Flytrap mess. What's the exit strategy? After five minutes, when the entire country has fallen into a deep slumber, the House can drop the matter. When everyone wakes up, we can pretend it was all Democrats and Republicans seem weirdly hopeful about today's House Judiciary Committee meeting, the first and perhaps only major impeachment hearing. Democrats, who are still enjoying their postelection gloat, know they have won of the committee and who willfully refuse to learn anything from the election, actually tells reporters that today is important because "It's finally an spin is the Republican's only hope, that this time will be different. a camera crew. He has special access and lurks on the dais behind Democratic hearing opens with the kind of vitriol everyone has anticipated. As soon as yield!" It is all very promising and becomes even more so when the ranking at the independent counsel, who's seated below him at the witness table, page prepared statement in a monotone. He reads excruciatingly slowly. I pursued it as he did, how the president lied, etc. I imagine the network news The attention of the committee members wanders. I begin to was putting his own guys to sleep." The principal and persuasive Democratic tic: He uses adverbs to drag everything out. He does not "dispute," he "utterly disputes." Something is not "misleading," it is "grossly misleading.") The interrogation by members that follows is equally not yet taken their turns.) Each member gets five minutes, which, after a windy introduction, turns out to be time for two questions. Republicans generally partisan attack, then toss him softballs about whether the rule of law should apply to everyone equally. (His surprising answer: It should.) embarrassments. One member wants to know what leaks his office made, another an afternoon break, he tells a crowd of reporters that the day is useless. surrender. "The horse is dying, and the logical thing to do is shoot it. But the right wing says 'No, no, we'll paint stripes on it and call it a zebra.' They just won't accept defeat." And because they hold the committee majority, "They are not going to give up without voting out an article of something, anything, to make the scandal viable again. In the last few days own reputation has been ruined by the news of his adultery, his committee is in shambles, there is no way out of the Flytrap mess, but what can he do? Still acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune should not upon returning from his honeymoon let his wife work out at the gym with Jerry Club. Before the newlyweds had time to unpack all their new china, the alienation of affection suit against the comedian but finally decided to simply perfidiously: He hadn't had "good sex" since last year when he broke up with also tout the "shocking" resemblance between the two women but are uncharacteristically restrained in neglecting to mention that there is one (or, school, has recently launched her own line of lingerie. did a possible assassin. Citing grand jury testimony, the publication describes on the guest list, rushed up to the employee and said, "We have to find her in exercise clothes. Since she was last seen in public, the former White House appearance that the tabs, which luridly chronicle every celebrity chin waddle and thigh dimple, are now expressing concern about her and other stick figure dieting and compulsive exercising that the show's producers have cut back on to say that she enjoys gorging on junk food. Such denials are usually a prelude also report that two celebrity spouses couldn't quite wait until their dearly beloved's bodies were fully cold before finding that they could learn to love He even threatened to take the body of his dead wife home. Perhaps he could not have won the cooperation of so many of their friends without the couple's by the end of the year at a secret laboratory on an island off the coast of are getting fed up with women who have become rich and famous by telling everyone else how to be better. All three tabs have run stories about the nude filed suit claiming that she owned the photos, and they were temporarily taken memorable phrase, used to thrash around "like a couple of crazed weasels." too big for your britches!" Actually, part of the problem is that fans liked Vogue cover model. They are also sick of her constant preaching on thinking she's been given a specific mission on Earth." The publication says female residents wake in the middle of the night when they and celebrity. If anyone was not in a position to give us insight into doesn't go to big premieres or Academy Award parties, and Celebrity is his idea of what he's missing. The movie, which was the celebrity studded opening night attraction of the New York Film Festival and will soon arrive at me is why it still adds up to something so anemic and coldly distasteful." It's conflicted about the work of an artist, even one whose technical and emotional exhilaratingly at odds with the degeneracy being portrayed. Episode after episode has a pleasing shape, with wittily protracted takes and on the button who's also peddling an action screenplay ("but with a strong personal crisis"). Lee comes on to virtually every beautiful woman he meets and has an amazing amount of success for someone so otherwise unsuccessful and so thickened with mimetic turn allows him to skip along the surface of the part while people in wrote a brilliant short story about a man who goes to the hospital to visit a dying acquaintance and then returns on a daily basis, portraying himself as a to explain himself, Lee can only stammer incoherently. In Long Day's Journey protective. The very idea of public culture seems to fill him with dread, and it's hard to think of a single piece of meaningful social intercourse in the vulgarians and exhibitionistic freaks. She becomes a celebrity and achieves appearance is the highlight of the picture. He's meant to embody everything shallow and psychotic about stardom (the conception is out of tabloid tales of another but never comes close to wholeness. His one attempt at something on liberals and the counterculture, before it was revealed that the young woman's disturbed psyche had more to do with the nocturnal visits of her ridicules plastic surgeons and the aging, wealthy women who cling and kowtow to younger starlets, a man who argues that taking up with a girl barely out of her "an armored car robbery, but with a strong personal crisis." That sounds a question the meaning of their existence. Well, not really: The audience gets heads casually blown off that it's hard to care who's doing what to whom and shorthand syntax of a '90s thriller. It has a gritty feel and a tight, people are blown away, cars go careening down twisty French streets, and a point of view. (Or does he want us to think that his emotionless linearity is sexual indiscretion but gets more than he bargained for when the distraught husband of his mistress commits suicide and makes it look like a murder bunch of killings he didn't commit, including those of a prolific serial bonhomie grow more hilariously creepy with each passing corpse. weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card. Featuring the random deaths of young children, fatal automobile accidents, a suicide, and a movie can be without literally emitting mustard gas. article it said that the Ministry of Construction and Housing had published officials say they believe they have the prime minister's commitment not do so," the paper said. On the subject dominating most of the Middle Eastern and the reopening of all gas mask distribution centers and the updating of chemical warfare protection kits were merely a precaution, the paper reported. An violence in periods between the first steps toward genuine peace and its actual is no doubt that, in time, peace will indeed be at hand." his enemies had called him only a few days ago, has now decided to deliver "a "truly resumed the leadership of the world," has decided to go ahead on his has two years to create for himself a place in the history books other than first strike would therefore only be the prelude to a long offensive." the United States. "It is difficult to propose mediation when one doesn't understand the position of one of the parties," it quoted a French government source as saying. But Libration added that, despite its experts, unimpeded authority, and an unrestricted timetable," the paper said. the committee could surprise everyone and accomplish something tangible in the made against you by the judge presiding over your grand jury. As you know, denying those leaks. You have maintained that any communications from you or keep their sources of information confidential if they have promised confidentiality. But news sources are free to release reporters from this would you be willing, right here today, under oath, to tell all the reporters, any communications between them and you confidential? And will you, right here, how they might protect your confidentiality even if you did have to release them publicly from any promises. This way, these reporters could be asked you've been unfairly accused, as you insist, sir, you should want these not tell them. And, of course, if you never leaked anything illegally to them and never swore them to confidentiality, there is no harm in releasing them the reporters. The questioning would not be the kind of "who were your sources" fishing expedition that should trouble anyone who worries about a free press. repeatedly claimed that they have nothing to worry about if these or any other dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a euphemism: She begins referring to the "gaming industry." panels on teen gambling, compulsive gambling, gambling regulation, gambling marketing, and gambling credit practices. It is tough slogging, but for the casinos, theaters, restaurants, arcades, discos, cabarets, theme parks, concert halls, sports arenas, and museums into one giant orgy of amusement, have been meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless conversations with most of the commissioners, the tobacco model is winning. Today's panelists tell the commission that kids are starting to gamble too young and are getting addicted too easily, that compulsive gambling appears to be increasing as gambling spreads, that gambling marketing may be designed to addict customers, and that the industry exploits problem gamblers by allowing testimony clearly impresses the commissioners and seems especially to impress starting to become clear what that report will say. The commission won't (and can't) take any grand stand against gambling. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to The commission will also push the industry to do more to gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. It will rebuke state lotteries for their deceptive marketing and will try to force them to post odds and stop targeting the poor. In short, it will treat gambling as a happily endorse such a report. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette happy to sign on to the specific measures. The casino industry is even trying to get ahead of the commission. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. I suspect that the industry will not only agree to the commission's recommendations but will become their strongest advocate. Casino owners will avidly lobby Congress and state legislatures to enact the recommendations into law. problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their cigarette agenda will also distract the commission and the public from the true states, and bought senators and representatives by the crate. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. The antis can call gambling "tobacco." They can call it "vice." They can call it "a big red balloon" for all that the industry cares. As long as the commission just nibbles around the edges, the casino operators win credit for cooperating, without having to do anything that really hurts. play along with this commission's timid recommendations, they'll be safe for National Gambling Impact Study Commission has already lost. The sign reads: "gambling" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So who controls language controls ideas, and at today's commission hearing, it is perfectly clear who controls the language. Video slot machines crammed into if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission is reborn as the National Gaming Impact Study The gambling industry did everything in its power to stop the establishment of this commission two years ago, but Congress and a fervent impact of gambling, and it will issue a final report to Congress and the onerous regulations and taxes the commission might recommend. contributions and issue ads. It has never been fatter, happier, or more goodness, no politician can withstand their resources," Focus on the Family's "Our report won't be acted on by the president or Congress. They are too heavily influenced by gambling money. Almost all the leaders of Congress are on the dole." It has also become obvious that the commission has too many has been transformed from a charged political event to a kind of victory lap planning for these hearings for months, hoping to use them to demonstrate the no doubt hoped, stunned some of the gambling opponents. I asked one afford monogrammed shirt cuffs --I saw them), holds forth cheerfully outside the ballroom, celebrating the electoral triumph of freedom over Better Life." They are members of the major casino union, here to cheer on their employers and their union. (Most of them, it must be said, are getting hearing by assuring the crowd that the committee is toothless: "We're not here you'd better leave it alone! The local government, by all appearances a wholly owned subsidiary of the casinos, puts on a bravura performance. Gov. Miller industry, especially its regulation (much stricter than other gambling states) and its use of gambling taxes to fund state services. It is one of the ironies Ensign) end up crediting their state's success to government regulation and also a fair share of gleeful gambling regulators, bookmakers, and casino employees among the panels of expert witnesses the commission hears from. Critics who gripe about the perils of sports gambling and the evils of including the gambling industry shills, agrees that Internet gambling is evil making any money off Internet gambling. If they were, you can be sure they regulated and taxed. One tribal chief I spoke to calls this "red baiting." observation: I am sitting right behind the witnesses, and after a while I begin to separate them into the Wides and the Narrows. The Wides are men in suits with enormous backs and enormous bellies, men who eat and eat and used to play football. They all testify to their love of gambling. The Narrows are thin and generally disapprove of it. I begin to wonder whether fondness for gambling correlates with general indulgence, and dislike correlates with asceticism, and last hour of the day, the public comment period, the union sends a parade of casino employees to the microphone to hallelujah the gaming industry. union casino with high pay, free medical insurance, a pension, and "now I am buying a house." The stories are intensely moving, by far the most persuasive air, it's impossible not to be charmed by the chief gambling opponent, the Rev. founded the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, the primary force has just renamed it the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, tacitly recognizing that gambling is here to stay.) He is a genial motormouth and shameless promoter of the cause. He wears a gigantic "CasiNO" button in the casino. He posed for People in a shepherd's robe. He says "I would do anything short of lighting myself on fire in the Capitol rotunda to stop gambling." He is so excitable that I have to yank him out of the way of an oncoming car when he gets too wrapped up in one of his soliloquies. Mirage," they call it. For two hours, we cruise the streets behind the casinos. They show me all the evidence of gambling blight you'd never want to see, from casinos to quickie motels. All the while, they keep up a patter about how grim and mostly persuasive. Still, when we turn back on to the Strip, and pass Strip, no one wants to hear about losers. In the land of gaming, not says the film "has the soul of a guidance counselor." Read his review here.) or an insult to the murdered millions? The critics are evenly split on Those in favor say the film is really a fable about parental love, since horrors of World War II. Other critics contend "turning even a small corner of defends the film. Free registration required. Click here for because it is not a romance but the story of a friendship. Dourer reproduction of his studio, leaves no doubt as to Pollock's importance to is hailed as a masterpiece by some, given mixed reviews by others. This time, the usual cast of unappealing caricatures. Praise is tempered with complaints still be seen less than half a mile from my house-- serious novel. His life story enhances this image of fragile purity: He's a late bloomer who didn't publish a mature work until his 50s and didn't become famous until his 60s. His picture in the New York Times had something to has attracted a zealous international following. Besides, when journalists his readers a taste of the exquisite high you get when you first fall in love with books. No matter where you sit down with one of his novels, you feel like you're up past bedtime, reading with a flashlight, taking a break from your humdrum life to commune with something magic and deep and eternal. The irony is reminder of classic literature. He's a good writer, occasionally a great writer, but mostly he's a pop star of a writer, working the crowd into states about people, Year of the Death and History are about writing and obsessive, curiosity about human emotion. Conventional literary history says English, tells the fantastic story of an epidemic that leaves the whole world people love when disaster upsets the social norms. (The answer is atrociously, dictatorship. Lately he's supported agrarian reform in Brazil, and last March fair to deliver a speech on what it means to be a Communist writer today. His party affiliation made the Wall Street Journal so apoplectic that it Prize. But he is a most modest militant: At this point in history, he said, communism is essentially a "spiritual state," a compassionate safeguard against labyrinthine histories. In fact, we often know next to nothing about his characters, except that they are lonely, bookish rolling stones who gather no either sweetly have sex with the men or else show them how to settle down.) when the shy proofreader hero, a bachelor in his 50s, is working at home. The television plays silently in the background, and the proofreader looks over and gesture as if to thank him, now he could sing, and sing he did, he sang of things only someone who has lived can sing of, and asks himself how much and for what, someone who has loved and asks himself who and why, and, having asked all these questions, he can find no answer, not one, contrary to the belief that all the answers are there and that all we have to do is to learn how to who are lovable but archetypal and abstract. All these qualities critics have novel usually demands a few days. At some point, ideally, the novel should go is too impressive for that. He can get a little precious, though, and his last weekend; I also wondered at a few points if, with his brand of cute tune, or at least the literary equivalent, and it sure is catchy. explicit about what he thinks a novel should be. He published essays expounding realistic narrative can portray the world persuasively. Twentieth century Bonfire demonstrated, the form retains great vitality and has the commercial success of that book, no other writer has responded to the call. Full is a white businessman who lives in sumptuous surroundings that include a pretty wife whom he seems to need to be introduced to. The year is Master of the Universe who has run into a heap o' trouble. Having erected a than its liabilities. Vultures circle the hero, who is not inclined to chug toward each other. There is the same theme of legal error and even some of the same jokes, such as a reference to the heavy metal band "Pus Casserole." caricature, though the minor ones, including all the women, are still cartoons. Business is about virility, politics about manipulation, women about men's understanding of psychology has developed a greater degree of nuance. The work inside a frozen foods warehouse, where wheezing lugs destroy their health bankers try to break a defaulting debtor down psychologically, is brilliantly from the suite to the streets, you search in vain for false notes. a finger on. I was borne along very merrily, and in fact wanted to do little else but read the novel until I was finished. But this book didn't affect me in sophisticated entertainment rather than literature. The problem may be writing reportage. At moments it seems the wrong container. He has a tendency to try to cram too many tiny figures into an overcrowded canvas. For instance, his tiny apartments and take odious jobs in chicken processing plants that white infusing his tale with characteristic wit, verve, and narrative propulsion. But characterization and a tendency toward sentimentality, is his decency. Dickens was decent in the way he wrote about people, and he recommended decency as a But what horrifies the reader is that these sympathetic figures should sink 1950s). Fanon is a primitive grotesque, a grunting monster. the causality running in the other direction. In his novels, prisons and ghettos reflect the low nature of their inhabitants. It is beasts that make the where Fanon grew up, making such a character plausible. But he gets way more juice out of the brutality such a character embodies than from exploring how he society that allows this to happen. Returning from his tour of hell, he tells and status, yet at the same time, his cleverest moments come from indulging in, not just exposing, invidious distinctions and superficial judgments. The reader is led to despise one character because of his bad taste in neckties, but not the potential of this kind of novel, one that takes us through unexplored precincts of our own society while spinning a good yarn. But society awaits a election victory last year, was "outed" last week on television, and Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown outed himself on the weekend after a former or fear them, or wish to pillory them," but because "the public has a right to know how many homosexuals occupy positions of high power." It went on, "Their Members of Parliament, even ministers, are beholden to others for reasons other as a new public tolerance in the generally favorable response to Brown's lagging behind the electorate whose mores reflect a more forgiving view of what tabloids effectively to "out" a Cabinet minister and another to announce "that homosexuality is a state of being so unremarkable that it is astonishing that News of the World 's outing of Brown, the Guardian said in an thinks might be useful to the promotion of his business interests. He berates them or threatens to withdraw his affections when they do not jump with preventing the army from taking action against at least five new hilltop signed two weeks ago. "Other than confiscating a single tractor last security than in the security of their country. "The new notion of personal environment," he wrote. But he warned against this tendency, saying that acquire better defenses against less concrete and immediate threats could be popping up elsewhere: not just among the conservative defenders of the Old Ball, a scion of slave owners, won a National Book Award last week for marvels that he may possess thousands of black "blood kin" who are descended relationship may have lasted decades, the story has taken on a romantic teaching, as the Associated Press reported, that "most slaves were happy in captivity and that many served as loyal Southern soldiers." According to one Sunny Slavery Scenario is nonsense. Few slaves fought for the Confederacy, troops arrived to liberate them. They considered it a deliverance of biblical Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ("We would never and, obviously, this class has done that," the college's president said.) What question, historians have never agreed. Opinions have shifted with the prevailing political and cultural winds, and the issue remains alive. the left is as responsible as the right. Confederate enthusiasts have made free use of liberal arguments for academic freedom, tolerance, and multiculturalism. They say they are just exercising their right to teach their version of events. ("Everybody can celebrate their culture, but we can't," groused another course course, were whites who in general believed themselves innately superior to academic historians portrayed slavery as a benevolent, paternalistic institution that benefited blacks by civilizing them. In this view, it was whites who suffered under the slave system, since before the Civil War, slavery had become far less profitable than the North's capitalist labor arrangements. Yet slave owners selflessly bore this burden so their slaves could enjoy appreciate the experience. He noted their rebelliousness: their efforts to rise up and throw off their shackles, the ways they cagily resisted their work requirements, the lengths they went to in feigning contentment to elude their wills being broken or their psyches damaged. Liberal social scientists the barriers that were impeding black advancement in the 1960s. illegitimacy. He called for governmental action to undo the damage. members were sold or assigned to different plantations, were remarkably but as creators of a vibrant life. While obviously constrained by their bondage, blacks nonetheless forged a culture rich with religious observances, by making slaves, at long last, central and even powerful players in shaping Confederate Veterans, that slaves were happy in their condition as slaves. But they might agree that slaves were sometimes happy despite their condition as slaves. And it's here that the New Left's scrupulous scholarship inadvertently dovetails with the right's racist interpretations. Thanks to "Slaves Were Happy," as the New York Times headline put it, is not just like whites except for their subjugation reflected the tenets of postwar liberalism. In the era of black power, New Left assertions that slaves made their own lives resonated loudly. Today we have a therapeutic culture. The of the Confederacy just want to tell their side of the story, school officials worry about offending the community, and Ed Ball, inspired by the confirmation of shared blood, wants to use his book profits to fund interracial dialogue. Slavery has returned as little more than a failure to communicate. invitation to testify in the impeachment inquiry, according to his censure as a compromise because, while expedient, it's toothless and not toothless and not specified in the Constitution, it's expedient. ever, producing the biggest financial services company in the world in terms of multimillion dollar bonuses to keep them in the fold. The bad news: Five thousand five hundred employees, including administrative staff and some Reporters who have been so desperate for political news that they have been independent counsel to investigate whether Vice President Al Gore violated nixed the investigation because, as she says, "The evidence fails to provide any reasonable basis for a conclusion that the vice president may have lied." crimes were part of his job as head of state. But the judges ruled that "torture of his own subjects or of aliens would not be regarded by rights activists celebrated the ruling as a breakthrough for international law "constant, demonizing, negative campaigning" of this year's elections. Analysts under discussion for the past month, emboldened the allies to testify against coverage of the deal, see this "Moneybox" and this "Dispatch" propose to add to the volume of punditry on such questions. But I can add a footnote on the question of what it was like being an innocent in the White mean not just "not guilty" but also "unaware" or "naive." situation. Only a little before that I had held a press conference announcing that the economic statistics of the first quarter were the best in recorded next two years, up almost to the last days, I could see the cloud getting premature end. For one thing, I had my own experience with the extent of bias friendly relations with many reporters. I was then associated with the Committee for Economic Development, the least conservative of the business organizations, and we were the "good guys" to the liberal press. But these same reporters became my enemies and, I felt, misrepresented me as soon as it became likable boy, but I put no great stock in his professionalism or objectivity. So I did not believe the press was giving an accurate account of what had that everything was going to come out all right. I don't believe anyone was had honored me by making me member and then chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. He had treated me with respect and offered me his friendship. I was unwilling to believe that he had behaved in a way that a committee of Congress, even one composed mainly of his political enemies, would consider deserving of Garment, then the president's counsel, he said the president was in trouble and asked whether we couldn't have some kind of economic spectacular to help bolster his public support. Perhaps because I didn't have enough imagination, I the wittiest words I ever heard from him: "Yes, you can, if it's frozen." economic situation continued to deteriorate and, as I now see, so did the economic policy. The president wanted his economic team, thus fortified, to produce a dramatic economic policy that would improve the nation's economy and repeatedly asked us to reconsider. After several uncomfortable weeks he decided, without the benefit of his economists, to impose the freeze anyway. It was an immediate flop and did not last long. Then we reverted to unspectacular, to perform his duties in what was surely a time of great stress for him. Of course, I was not an intimate, and I did not see him in his private moments. But still, I had many meetings with him, and he showed no signs of distraction or impatience. He would take notes on his yellow pad and sum up the sense of our meetings in an orderly manner, as he had always done. address as president before his resignation message. The speech was long and, I impeachment extremely likely. Two weeks later my wife, my son, and I were in is wrongfully targeted by rogue National Security Agency operatives) stretches credibility in places, but overall the film is said to be "enormously full of cool technology and big explosions, and there's so much creepy (Paramount Pictures). Mixed reviews on this spinoff of the animated Nickelodeon series featuring a pack of wisecracking toddlers. Some complain that the film doesn't do much to entertain parents and observe that down the pike since Buckwheat, Alfalfa, and the Our Gang gang" warms the cockles of critics' hearts. Featuring the talents of a largely over in a neighbor's lottery ticket after his death. Critics' favorite scene: the charmed: "I see a future for elderly male actors willing to shed their clothes for laughs, but I don't see myself in the audience." Read the rest of his film of the season is said to be head and thorax above its predecessor, obsessively detailed both the horrific deterioration of normal life as well as writes in the New York Times Book Review that "even the reader familiar with Holocaust material must be gripped by these pages" and that the book has a "concrete, vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed." (Read more about this book in the publisher's online catalog.) toward oversimplification of race relations and an overly nostalgic take on the the media that you surpassed them. For the most part, that's true. But spin can also be profound. It can address more than who's up and who's down. It can redefine people, issues, and events by rotating their facets so that people see them from new perspectives. For this reason, the contest of interpretation that terms such as "liberal" and "welfare state" to caricature and marginalize his enemies. Now the tables are turned. The word "conservative" is being word, and conservatives could go the way of liberals. opening another: "Why are all the Republicans except the Bush boys losing?" took up this question and, over the next two hours, hammered out a consensus: "Moderate" Republicans were winning, while "ideologues" were losing. The Bush boys became Exhibits A and B. As network anchors and analysts batted around and refined the theory, the previously sacrosanct C word began to creep into the congressional wing that's been dominated by conservative ideologues." By conventional wisdom that the losers were "Republican conservatives." should spread "a broader tent." Gloomy conservative pundits, eager to finger culprits, accused congressional Republicans of having provoked needless a human face," which was crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968--conveyed three corrosive messages: that conservatism lacked compassion to begin with, that conservatives couldn't tolerate compassion, and that for this reason, moderates," citing the Bushes and other Republican governors as leaders of the asking whether "we're going to see a real power struggle now between moderate and as a philosophy, is in deep trouble. This is what happened to liberalism two decades ago: It became associated with everything on the left that seemed immoderate. If, conversely, conservatism were to become associated with everything on the right that seems immoderate today, the list would include the precisely the associations pasted on conservatism in the decisive hours after conservative ideologues with the impeachment inquiry. They portrayed the candidates losers, and contrasted this with the success of "the centrist, pragmatic Republican governors." They exalted the Bush brothers' outreach to weakness, conservatism is being reduced to a synonym for meanness. Even the pork and was endorsed by the nation's leading gay rights group, is being celebrated by the New York Times as "a public verdict on the in contrast to the "conciliatory style" of "moderate" Republicans. Worse yet, conservatives' enthusiasm for the impeachment inquiry and for moral issues in general is being framed as a distraction from material concerns such as health there, emphasized prayer in school rather than jobs for kids who graduate from more interested in cultural issues, in philosophy and ideology, than they are in the pragmatic performance of Republican governors." the maestro of demonization, recognizes this unfolding catastrophe and is insist that the Bush brothers and other victorious Republican governors such as these governors shared the congressional Republican agenda enshrined in the of misrepresenting the victorious governors as moderates rather than conservatives. And he pointed out that indisputably conservative candidates had elections a repudiation of conservatism, the media have oversimplified some winners as moderates and some losers as conservatives. Results that don't fit majorities in both houses. Meanwhile, plenty of other good explanations have in the budget negotiations. Others blame Republicans for muting substantive conservative issues such as education reform in a misguided wager that the to him and his conservative allies this week is just as unfair as what they've spent their careers doing to liberals. And just as effective. speaker and committee chairs mean members are always jockeying for their next members encourage them to eschew working within the system in favor of making issue about status. (It follows special issues about money and business travel: We get the idea, already.) An essay distinguishes between class and status: and fought for. Accompanying short pieces reveal status symbols for various banned from the casino; for gay men, an adopted baby; for Catholic priests, voters, women especially, in almost all the races she worked on. One reason voting for you.' And so I asked them, 'Why are you voting for me?' And the deadpan parodies of news stories ("Report: Drug Use Down Among Uncool Kids"). who gets high marks for his positivism and inclusiveness, may succeed in the zealous prosecutors in search of big game use even pettier crimes to indict friends of the true target, coercing testimony with the threat of legal techniques that seem perfectly reasonable when they're applied to murderers or Mafia dons may be unreasonable when they're applied to speeders, jaywalkers, or dilemma: If they stay underground, they can't support themselves and they're and rejected by fans. Sputnik hasn't had to face the latter problem yet. argues that voters did not reject Republicans because of the way they handled the scandal. In fact, Democrats won because they have seized congressional control of issues such as Social Security, Medicare, and education, despite the strength is its willingness directly to confront troublesome questions of making the case for conservative principle as the animating force of a the future of progressive politics. A postelection editorial on ballot measures movements in local politics. The author argues that these movements, which aim to bring higher wages and more benefits to workers, are beneficial even if they force some companies out of the cities that support them. shown to be "a liar and a philanderer" yet "still he comes back laughing." But Republicans should pursue impeachment, regardless of the election results: "If they believed that they had grounds for an inquiry, it should be a thorough this movement. State voters don't care about parties: They just want They eat each other." If you are going take the quiz, stop reading now. The answer is a). war. Once accused of colluding to keep tuition high, the Ivies are now sitting arsenal. The United Nations' insistence on peace at any cost and the United States' insistence on containment and sanctions instead of confrontation left inspections, backed up with an unequivocal threat of military action. elected president from office, I can't think of it. That's the way they used to depressing cover story follows the struggle of two parents trying to save their Health to approve experimental gene therapy, but when the treatment comes it dismisses charges of social irresponsibility. His latest masterpiece, packages predicting that consumers will log on to find holiday gifts. you want, it's often cheaper, and you don't need to find parking. Continuing its series on the most influential people of the century, second annual cartoon issue. (Waiter to diners: "Might I suggest the most expensive wine and the most expensive dinner." Bum to other bum guzzling booze: "That is not one of the seven habits of highly effective people." Slyly smiling male brown bear to female white bear at a bar: "Polar? Or simply slow to warm?") An article traces the evolution of gender politics in New Yorker cartoons. Decades ago, cartoons frequently featured secretaries warding off amorous bosses. Today, those amorous bosses are often female. Another piece crash test dummy woman: "Ma'am, it's your husband. There's been an auto midterm elections, the National Republican Congressional Committee began airing Democrats pounced on the ads, calling them a clumsy rehash of old charges and predicting that they would backfire by antagonizing voters who are sick of the are actually far more sophisticated than the Democrats admit. But if the press buys the Democrats' simplistic representation of the ads, they will indeed they take into account the political reactions that have since transpired: the process, and the scandal's decline as a news story. The ads counter or, in some cases, exploit these common reactions, which can be summarized as follows: attention, suspicion, and denunciation. His surrogates responded by diverting narrator reminds viewers. The ad never mentions the scandal, nor does it Republicans captured Congress by framing the election as a referendum on on the word "balance." "Republicans are the balance we need," says the tag line of one ad. "For balance, vote Republican," says another. a textbook frame job: "In every election, there is a big question to think punishment is in your hands. "Electing Republicans is a way [voters] can punish think it should be prosecuted by an independent counsel or investigated by respect this distinction by focusing entirely on morals and lying to the public. The most striking thing about them is that they avoid any mention of mention sex, the affair, or anything that ordinary people might deem private. mother talking to another. "What did you tell your kids?" asks the first woman. "I didn't know what to say," answers the second. The first woman replies: "It's merely says they were wrong. This isn't an abstract matter of law, the ad acknowledges and answers the public's desire to see other issues discussed. "But aren't there other things to do?" asks the second mother in What Did You Tell Your Kids? The first mother then explains that "the Republicans are doing them. They cut taxes, they helped balance the budget, and they're himself on how long it will take to balance the budget. The ad dwells entirely on fiscal questions such as Social Security. Only at the end does it show him and delicacy of the ads is already being overwhelmed by the Democrats' people and their families and their future." Vice President Al Gore, House front page. Images from the ads dominate the front page of the New York be the first casualty of any election, but subtlety is always the last. Trial": The lesson of Flytrap is to attack the inquisition. (posted has wrapped up the contest to replace him. The media has already reached House leadership positions are up for grabs, too, and the candidates for these candidates on This Week illustrates how the House coup, far from solving confronting the public's material concerns, they're engrossed in blaming each other and promoting themselves. Speaking for the new "management" school, machinery" to implement legislation. When asked about his role as budget bill, he replied that he had said at the time, "This is ugly, but we were right and that he "was opposed in the preliminary" votes but "ended up voting for the final bill," since "a lot of people are going to have highways because of that bill and a lot of people are going to have jobs because of that what was going on." As for the election results, he blamed conservative voters who "stayed home from the polls because they're sulking because they didn't get that his colleagues hadn't heeded his wisdom about appealing to ethnic four years and saying that we've got to reach out," he lamented. Rather than address the moral implications of this oversight, Watts went on to explain how Republicans, by electing him, could capitalize politically on new audiences. "I "We have got to manage the House in a much different way," he said. "There were no clear lines of responsibility in the leadership. No clear lines of accountability." But when asked about his own responsibility for the party's failure, he replied, "Most members of the conference really believe that with managing the House, were mostly in the speaker's office." When pressed as to any secret to anyone that the speaker and I had our share of disagreements over paid attention to the Budget Act since it was enacted." And summing up his Republican leadership are conveying a preoccupation not with solving the nation's problems but with protecting themselves individually and devouring each other. And if there's one thing the electorate seems to disdain more than the violence of the cannibals, it's the narcissism of their palates. some spectators may be concerned by your nudity in the courtroom story about some real people. (Oh no, not another of his tedious stories!) So you kids stop doing that to the cat and listen closely. For months after said no animals!) A short time later, at the Late Night anniversary lesson: When you mock them on television, you don't threaten them; you humanize them. What sports! They can take a joke! It's the court jester lesson. And if you want to know more about it, stop by and talk to me down at the unemployment Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. years we have been living in the Bareheaded Age, worrying intensely about our hair. Many of us don't even remember the time when people would no more go outdoors without a hat than they would without shoes. The exact character of your hat mattered a lot then, much as the look of your hair does now. Your hat confirmed your outfit, putting the final seal on whatever else you wore, just for itself. During the summer in the country, my grandfather would put on his hat to go down to the end of the driveway and get the letters out of the mailbox. I would laugh at him, free of the requirement myself; but in his youth, even kids wore hats whenever they went outdoors. merciless torrents, sweeping away conventional hats as if they represented all that was loathsome in civilized life. A few cute hats, most of them faintly momentary effect. But the old hat rule was swiftly abolished. Off came the top hat at the opera and the elegant homburg or fedora for street wear, along with Swept away, too, were all the charming, infinitely various feminine hats that once made women feel charming and infinitely various themselves. Common usage once allowed hat makers to find markets for many heterogeneous styles, for much discreetly suggestive fantasy in shape and trim. Absurdity was the obvious risk then, given the vast scope of hat design for lurch." But a man might still be seduced by an irresistible feminine brim, curving and dipping to offset a meaningful glance. The desired effect appeared much else, women's hats are no longer a normal part of the mating game. Women's hats are out there, but they're all optional, and the range has shrunk. They come in very few basic shapes (like dresses), and nobody gets any basic training in hat choice or hat management, since real allure is felt to reside in hair, not in hats. Real absurdity, too, of course. returned in force, along with athletic footgear and down jackets, and there's even a certain limited stylishness in recent examples. Fur is back, too, as are delicious pile fabrics, so that luxury can be combined with utility. Meanwhile expressive charm. In this day of virtual uniformity, it's curious that whenever if out of subliminal nostalgia for the truly great days. says this to men about their baseball caps, the ubiquity of which has reduced nerve of a baseball cap, especially one worn backward. Nevertheless, let us hope that the Return of the Hat is at hand, inaugurated by men in their baseball caps, just as the strongest and itself was a male invention and a male privilege until women got tired of coifs, veils, and wimples in the Renaissance. Then they daringly adopted hats to profit from the erotic charge male elements always add to feminine modes. Many women have done this again in the last decade or so, usually sticking to that kind of winter hat. It surrounds my head in a warm nimbus of fake fur, my brow, ears, and nape encompassed by golden foxy fleece, my pate upholstered with plushy leopard pelt, my beardless face mitigating the rabbinical flavor. skull, leaving some wisps of my hair to curl up my cheeks and down my forehead, silvery, streaked brown and black velvet, with a biggish mobile brim for folding up and down at will, fore and aft or amidships. remember that they can quickly resemble a mushroom in anything too big or a problem and tend to look good in any kind of hat. They only have to remember to let enough of their face show and not to let the hat flatten them on top, so dashing impact, and the hat itself won't appear to jam a lid on the body's expressive means. Advice to all: Study the older royals for the way they manage fifteen dollars and drove it into a junkyard six years after. My first instrument was a kind of kazoo and that led naturally to a French trombone. I fifty years though I detested snare drums and tap dancing, just as I do those singers now who hold their left fists in the air while holding the hate short sleeved shirts when they wear them with dark neckties, skinny swine knocking on closed doors; and I had a habit of counting bricks, a nice of stores and trees on the sidewalk and only a short walk into the country, in jacket with a reddish thorn in one of the pockets, which was my toothpick for metal, and I had a spiral notebook I kept for emotions, and I folded my only the writers could bring that one to a conclusion as well. like your morning delivery of "Today's Papers," or even if you haven't yet valiantly defended justice and the rule of law against a scoundrel president. the first school. It took him a single day to disprove the second. the performance of a villain. Through hours of hectoring, cheap shots, and composure and courtesy. He absorbed the questions seriously, answered them in a straightforward manner, and offered clear explanations for nearly every aspect of his conduct that was brought into question. He seemed honest, kind, crumples dozens of cars and injures scores of pedestrians in pursuit of a rowdy the subtler mystery more often explored in novels: How did such a good person his dedication to the truth, his respect for the law, and his solid moral bookstore cough up records of her purchases. He sought to abridge the Foster had told the lawyer before committing suicide. He compelled Secret truth trampled privacy, loyalty, and security. At last week's hearing, he conceded that his agents had investigated whether an unhelpful witness might be obliged legally to give up her adopted child. "My investigators work very hard others. He failed to see how what looked to him like a conspiracy to silence a witness in a sexual harassment case could look to the participants like a slapdash scheme to hush up an affair. And his report presented sexual truths confidence that he was obeying the law insulated him from examining his hearing. Forcing Secret Service agents to testify about the president's sex [about] press policy as opposed to constitutional issues." during his testimony left him equally untroubled by his own genuine errors. Should he have quit the Whitewater investigation after temporarily accepting a attorneys several times about constitutional aspects of their case? "It just "professionalism." Confronted with questions about the loaded language of his professional judgment that the president engaged in abuse of his authority" by background because "we have the duty to engage in a proper public information he oversimplified the scandal. If conservatives are wrong to preach that the lesson of the year was the unraveling of a morally bankrupt president, liberals are equally wrong to preach that the lesson was the unraveling of a morally good. That lesson won't suit either side's assumptions. But then, that's the honor and promote good values. That's why his views on abortion and homosexuality emphasize religious belief and personal responsibility rather recognizes his own worst instincts and is capable of transcending them. That's for it was open and shut, but the moral case was dubious. To heed the better angels of your nature, you must know the devils first. startlingly high for a clock radio but not unreasonable if the claims are not rhythmic, more dynamic, more tonally true picture of the music. the percussive thwack as well as the shimmering whoosh all around it. And differences weren't night and day. But they were of the sort that, over time, make you want to stop and really listen or move on to something else. compact disc player. (Both radios sport input jacks in the back for plugging in the bowing on the basses, more of their rhythmic inflections. When a second, On the Shank disc, when she modulates her voice, accenting isn't exactly a technical "breakthrough," but it is clever. In the back of the inside the radio box. The frequency of a sound wave is defined by its length: The longer the wave, the deeper the bass. Such a long tube gives sound waves lots of room to enlarge. Each speaker is also powered by an amplifier equipped with circuits that boost the bass as you turn up the volume. However, once the speakers get to the middle and upper octaves, their limitations become more apparent; hence, the steely pianos, smeared cymbals, ungainly dynamics, and the radio's internal space and is powered by its own amplifier. The two smaller main speakers, each of which has its own amp, are freed up to focus their separate volume knob for the woofer, so you can adjust the bass level, which speakers of the 1950s and the Advents of the '60s) by figuring out how to manipulate electronics so that a speaker sounds smooth from octave to octave. years, have nine speaker cones, positioned all over the cabinet, so that the sound bounces around your room "just like in a concert hall." One problem, result, the music just sounds muddy. His methods also encourage high prices: better) because nine cones cost more than two or three; the Wave radio costs better devices. But he stretched too far, in his price tag and his claims, and available on the "illegal Basement Tapes bootlegs." I personally own it on two different collections, one a five volume collection of all known Basement Tapes recordings titled The Genuine Basement Tapes (the history of which is local stores. Anyone with Internet access or living in a larger metropolitan '60s. The bootleg recording is not like the standard pop album; it is by nature deal of dross to sort through, there are a lot of wonderful moments if you take Furthermore (and what you should be writing about), the bootleg industry is currently undergoing a revolution in production, thanks to the introduction of deal of the artifact value boots used to have, the resulting availability is ample compensation, especially since it has forced producers of traditional, notes, more photos, and higher quality packages. Bootlegs preserve music that otherwise would have been lost forever and allow music fans, as opposed to consumers of pop music, access to a much fuller canon of musicians' work. support the idea of a gay person as a symbol, but not as an equal. Would you ever have written "Political Uses of a Dead White Woman"? You are on target with your suggestion. Republicans should counter with logical, informative statements that point out the costs involved in litigation. Sadly, the average citizen doesn't seem to understand that facing is inadequate Medicare reimbursement. Someone has to absorb the loss. The provider? I don't think so. The patient? Not politically correct. As a shouldn't save every premature baby regardless of the cost. Maybe we shouldn't attempt to extend the life of every individual. We want it all and want it to care, but mismanaged care. As soon as I can, I will be changing to some other plan, which means I will probably have to go back to work to pay for arrive at the theater. Across the street, Catholic protestors in white berets pens them in, they ply you with leaflets charging that the play portrays "the you have to run a gauntlet of burly security guards and pass through an airport Club canceled the production. But the play was reinstated a week later amid and encounter neither blasphemy nor artistic courage. On the first score, the play comes up short. It is not, in fact, a work of savage (or even mild) scene involves priests and nuns performing unspeakable acts) or the films of is in essence a gay retelling of the Gospel. Thirteen male actors perform a football and taunted by his peers as a "faggot." An encounter in the school conversations with his dad, God. He performs miracles and gathers disciples. One is a doctor, another an actor, another a male prostitute. They go to gay uninspired. The real limitations are those of the writer, whose hallmarks are weak sophomoric humor and a cloying sentimentality. It's a gag line in this tells his mother. "Of course you do," she says. "Your father's a carpenter." This is silly, and not really funny, but the intent is not to ridicule. The apparently considers himself in sympathy with the deeper meaning of miss the point, one of the apostles appears onstage to explain it to the audience after the crucifixion. "If we have offended, so be it," he declares. Though his gay characters aren't always perfect, the overall picture is of a delightful bunch of fellas. Gay men have flair, taste, and humor. They love as types rather than complex characters. Watch the clip from the film around, puts on women's clothes, and continually bursts into show tunes. Watch taciturn hairdresser, the buff male hustler, the yuppie lawyer. This may be basking in the glow of First Amendment martyrdom, have not done much to clear playwright or the theater wants people to know that the play is largely inoffensive. The frisson of blasphemy has resulted in an overflowing house. But were the Philistines at the barricades allowed inside, I fear they whose very essence is obliqueness and indirection. (Find out more about the movie that wasn't great to begin with, this installment in the story of a demonic doll is getting surprisingly good reviews. Detractors are predictably ratchets up the star power and the fun. They also praise the film's "flair," though a comedy about three sisters cursed with witchcraft who inadvertently kill their boyfriends, it is also said to be unfunny. Also annoying: the expectations, the play is neither lascivious nor particularly blasphemous. It latest is hailed as a step forward in maturity and scope. The story of a white detail, female voices, and critical take on colonialism. A minority of glass case containing two outsize dishes, each a couple of feet in diameter. White and cobalt blue, these porcelain dishes have as their decoration fanciful view, these maps relegate the rest of the world to the truncated periphery, playfully arrogant islander. The humiliating visit of the black ships of little longer the illusion that their two centuries of peace and feudal harmony shattered, and Japan began the hard work of entering the modern world. Restoration, when Japan adopted something resembling a parliamentary monarchy lords (the daimyo) under their tributary thumb. The daimyo were required to hostages of sorts. This arrangement called for constant traveling, and these circumstance. Many of the objects on display in the National Gallery derive from these ceremonial processions. There are cases filled with elaborate and turbo seashell or with rabbit ears appended; swords designed more to impress than to kill; saddles decorated with such whimsical and hardly threatening The layout of the show is neither by chronology nor by Politically, and to some extent artistically, the impression is accurate. (A ridiculous laid out on a similar model.) From the stunning rooms of the Style into a bamboo and pebble grove) to the more austere world of Samurai, "Work," and "Religion and Festivals." All seems orderly and timeless, just as the Toward the end of the show, though, especially in the section devoted to entertainment, a sense of historical change enters in. In the pleasure quarter this "floating world" gave birth to new and vigorous forms of popular entertainment. Sumo wrestlers and Kabuki actors were the celebrities, and start of the show, two opposing tendencies are immediately evident. One is the retreat from materialism and the modern city into a monochromatic refuge of meditative calm. This tendency is associated with Zen and looks back to the image. At the other extreme is the eager embrace of urban chaos, masquerade, were known for their eccentric and unpredictable behavior, and a kindred conducive to frivolity, there is an element of playfulness and oddball aesthetic daring. In the Religion and Festivals section, for example, one finds center is a long white radish with forked roots, surrounded by melons and his followers. And yet, this painting of mourning vegetables has a peculiar business, seems to have taken vegetables pretty seriously. More obvious in its again, though, there is an appealing restraint in the elegant design and muted another reason, though, for the extraordinary pleasures this exhibition viewers. Exotic and remote as this island world was, it had a special appeal most popular of all Western art movements, is inconceivable without the And which of our own mountains is more familiar to us than visible grain of the wood reads as the ridges of the mountainside. Returning to those playful ceramic maps of the world, one notices that the artist has dipped For a split second it's possible to imagine that it really is the center of the Committee, voted last week not to launch a broad impeachment inquiry against Republicans are challenging the ethics of this transaction. House Majority Whip lot of money for a member who sits on that committee." DeLay says that The "jury tampering" metaphor has been circulating ever letter protesting the dissemination of "prurient allegations" about the White House or its allies" were engaged in "an organized campaign of slander and intimidation" that was "no different than threatening jurors to change the "jury tampering" issue in public appearances. Some Democrats similarly of the Republican leadership campaigning for Republican members of the House DeLay's objection. "I don't think it's a legitimate issue." details various grounds on which jurors may be deemed "unable or unqualified to perform their duties." These include "acquaintance or relationship with would automatically be regarded more favorably). The rule cites precedents under which the "defendants' right to be tried by impartial jury included [the] right to examination designed to ascertain possible prejudices of prospective jurors." Furthermore, the "trial judge" is authorized to "remove" any juror during the trial, "whenever facts are presented which convince [the] trial judge that [the] juror's ability to perform his duty as juror is impaired." DeLay imagines, members of Congress were to be treated like jurors, the presiding officer would never get around to the question of "tampering." He'd Post piece referring to the "Bubba vote" and notes that "this is a perfect illustration of the truism that there's still one group in this country that 'respectable' people, even (especially?) sophisticated newspaper people, are wonder how many times the word "hick" recurred in that short piece?) most exposed in his transcriptions. At the end of a string of them, he quotes pronunciation of a given word was precisely the same as that of the collectors, their desire to indicate the exotic qualities of black speech led them to trial. It had me in stitches. What wonderful caricatures he drew of the people involved; he brought to life the dynamics of the barely sheathed claws of the interactions in the courtroom. It was refreshing to have coverage that pointed your publication than the language used by spammers looking to sell me language is a sign of low intelligence. Your writer went for a cheap, shocking joke instead of thinking of a clever analogy. You can do better. Thanks for the reminder. We've now corrected our error. the editors of magazines to voice my opinion, because I don't think it will do any general good, but at this point I can't see what good being silent does. I that our community is only brought into the discussion after every other angle has been covered and, people are being pressured into the "right" opinion. I am "Black Like Whom?" I saw at least several assumptions run through his commentary on my community and public sentiment about us. One assumption is for the same reasons: He is black, he is great because he comes from a single parent home, or he has a similar background, so we can understand him at the tail end of the blitz of political inquiry as a rallying tool to bring to reaffirm the idea that we somehow don't know what is really going on? comes out is that we don't understand what is happening when a political candidate courts our community on one issue and then targets us on another issue. Staples runs through a litany of economic gains that have brought that is or what marker he uses to measure that stability is unclear), which to fit his framework but to ignore it when it does not fit within his argument. It is hard for me to believe that he would ignore the education or criminal students in college and graduate school programs, the rising level of blacks incarcerated, or increasing number of jails. The failure to include the holistic view seems even more astonishing given our position in this society, when the author reviews what is being said and who is asked. against whomever we advocate for or in defense of, but when it comes to the job approval rating for the president of United States, it seems like the media attention focused on us is misplaced. If our opinion were valued throughout this process, I think the media would have noticed a marked difference in how we feel about this president, this administration, and the process he has gone through in order to reach this phase in the impeachment inquiry. On this issue, I doubt that our approval rating is going to bear on the ultimate question of whether the entire public will rally around the Republicans as they move to try wings given to black preachers, a few honorable mentions and awards to a couple of black poets, or visits and speeches to commemorate historic memorials and visionaries within the black community are enough to lead blacks to rally behind a president who has allowed our community to lose whatever gains were does he think we are gullible enough to buy it as a true understanding by a Whom?" but seems to have missed its central arguments. She accuses me of sense among blacks that the economy is doing better by them than ever before; the black middle class is basically conservative on the issues of crime, unwed motherhood, and welfare. Ms. Banks further accuses me of ignoring black school dropout and incarceration rates. To this, I plead guilty. Those factors are family. I don't think it's competitive with a hard edge to it, but if you ever more responses than any before. Rather than ruin their poetical rhythms, all the inviting ambiguity and delightful multiple meanings of the word loathing waiting to be mined. But there are other possibilities: nonvoters felt time was better spent making crude remarks at expense of fatuous last night. Today it's a mixture of seething and dismay. It's just how a guy looks when he's derailed a major political party: a guy like Newt Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. did a poor job of redacting the report before it was posted, he should say so. university is often based on a set of subjective judgments. She goes on to list such things as volunteer work, athletic or artistic ability, recommendations, listing a set of criteria is neither a justification for expanding them nor an argument against striking a few. Including race in that set of criteria and making it coequal with qualifications such as volunteer work or ability is a concept that I, and many other people, find disturbing. super review. After two days of using the paste, my mouth turned into raw about back to normal. After three days of using the gel, my mouth has returned majors were trying hard to cover the fact that a generic will do. Two things, hugely wasteful. They waste paste inside their complex mechanisms, and this piece had included the idea that you will be using paste your whole life "aesthetic" value are a bad deal for the environment. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably evidence pointing toward evolution, how can this person accept it? The scientists usually change their position after new evidence is discovered. I have tried various arguments to convince this person but with no luck. How can you convince this person? You can't, and you should stop feeling this is your job in life. Some people cannot be moved from some positions, and that's just the way it is. All scientific advance is done in small increments. The evidence for natural selection as the guiding force for the evolution of species has understand scientific method and may belong to a religious group that has updates due to your contract, an inscrutable sense of timing, or a lack of good questions? I suppose the snarky answer would be "all of the above," but my real woman who is somewhat capricious with her address and my heart. We are no longer "together," but our relationship hasn't really changed except for no sex acceptance of the way things have evolved: Your "it" girl stopped reminder of loss, you might find it useful to let the relationship move into in your regrets and then exit feeling stronger in the broken places. know what wonderful feels like. Such knowledge bodes well for finding it again counsel, she would never discourage anyone from writing to ask advice. After conservative person, unfortunately to the point of bigotry in my view. For another race, and she defends those who (as she puts it) "want to preserve their traditions." She also continually complains about the services of her maid. What puzzles me about her nattering on is this: She is well aware of my like this? What do you think? Thanks for your time. natter on about subjects, knowing there is disagreement, with a twofold agenda. the close relative said the genteel version of "knock it off." There are some subjects about which people are unlikely to be swayed, and the friendly thing letter from Ms. Keck. She certainly could have been more polite in writing camera, Degas explained, was "capable of both posed and instantaneous views." With "no more than a month of practice," she would be able to send him "a few I can have enlarged to see you better." Degas' enthusiasm for photography can't conceal the morbid undertow of his request. He will never see her again, but outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death." Degas sends no consoling words to his dying sister, just a camera, and the hope that she has a month to learn how to use it. Degas, all dated (with an occasional "probable" added) during the years landscapes, and his private collection of works by other artists. The exhibition of Degas' photographs, some of which have never before been seen in public, raises two questions. What sort of photographer was Degas? And what do these photographs add to our understanding of him as an artist? You might think photography was perfectly suited to Degas. mythological subjects behind for good. No more medieval costume dramas or Spartan youths flirting in freeze frame. Degas spent the following decade developing an art that reflected the jostling shocks and perpetual motion of ballerinas above them, beheaded by the top of the frame. Horses jutting their heads into one side of a picture, while carriages are chopped off by the other. A disheveled dandy, his two daughters, and his dog, all facing in different directions and wedged into one corner of a picture, while the broad expanse of often been suggested that Degas' innovative urban perspectives were influenced by photography. But the opposite is closer to the truth. Degas' manipulations practice of Western painters; he merely pushed them further than anyone else had. The peculiar pictures that resulted made the new invention of photography, and especially the casually composed snapshots of the 1890s and after, seem less outrageous, more "artful." Ambitious photographers followed Degas' lead. But Degas came around to photography as a sort of afterthought. amateur photography craze was such that fashionable hotels provided darkrooms where the curvature of the path and the converging trees on either side of the road give the illusion of a dead end, against a migrating wall of trees. Back pastel and paint a daytime art of apparent spontaneity, with precisely the sort photography was a nighttime art of stasis and meditative inwardness. "Daylight carefully orchestrated tableaux. The major surprise of Degas' photographs is that the theatricality and staginess so resolutely banished from his paintings possible, Degas opted for an older approach: the pose held for two or three minutes, the long exposure, the "atmospheric" effects of lamplight on a black ground. A night with Degas and his camera was, according to his close friend bends her head so far that it disappears in darkness. phantasms and ghostly intimations, with death often lurking in the shadows. In like a muse figure or a protective guardian. In the most complex of Degas' center in the composition, with the vertical of the mirror frame bisecting his head. In the mirror itself Degas' camera apparatus is visible, but his own head his obsessive care in arranging shots, Degas the amateur photographer made mistakes, and some of these led to further discoveries. He preserved some vertically and horizontally and heads emerging here and there like ghosts. Among the most striking images in the show are three negatives of a ballet dancer assuming poses familiar from Degas' pastels (see [Arm Outstretched]). The glass negatives were too overexposed to print, so Degas had them treated with chemicals to produce an orange and yellow effect like stained glass, Why did Degas give up photography so soon after being captivated by it? Had he "passed through the sadness and grief that accompanied the death of his sister and that helped spur his photographic activity," as the suggest another cause. Many of those portraits, over a third of Degas' total friends; he dined with them regularly and treated them, at a time when his own family was dispersed and in financial trouble, as virtually his own relatives. breakfast table. Two years later, he could no longer tolerate any association (which sometimes changed their name to "de Gas" to suggest noble roots) came to financiers they deplored had. When his family fell on hard times, Degas blamed photographs might have had some association in his mind with the ambivalence he unmentioned in the Metropolitan show and catalog. The oversight is not the result of an effort to avoid downbeat or offensive sides of Degas, but rather a failure to understand the seismic shift in French society caused by is a campaign, after all, in which the challenger's slogan is "Too many lies for too long," where each candidate blithely runs ads accusing his opponent of coddling child pornographers, and where virtually the only intelligible expose the candidates in all their nakedness. Newspapers and commentators liberal record and repositioning himself as a moderate who understands suburban Defense of Marriage Act, and signed on to every crime bill he could find. At few days of campaign appearances, is responsible for the national drop in crime, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the budget deal. Thank you, congressman! His New York Democratic colleagues have coined the grind. If he were a salesman, you'd buy the car just to get him to leave you women I spoke to after the event all said the same thing: Of course they would husband" or "the president," never "Bill." Does this have psychological significance? Is she so angry that she won't say his name?) struggle. Sen. Pothole is the master of the ethnic pork barrel. (He shows up at on "We owe him" to override voters' distaste for his viciousness and basic happily obeys Wall Street's bidding on the House Banking Committee in order to care to discover. But there is a fundamental difference between them. about bending the rules for cronies and campaign contributors, and he has been clean. He doesn't cheat. He may have moderated his views to win, but he is action thriller about terrorism in New York. They say the film cashes in on the (Gramercy Pictures). Mixed, but mainly good, reviews ascendance to the throne. Some love the "darkly sumptuous, hypnotically of The Wedding Singer back to his trademark sweet, addled, violent Critics call Bloom "a master entertainer" who has applied his formidable skills with its scale, its spontaneity, and the intensity it radiated. I had the same as an adult, and often bored. His paintings looked hollow and often sloppy and garish. Did I respond to him as an adolescent because Pollock was a misbehaved, grandiose adolescent himself? Maybe we all just had a teen crush on Pollock the art world delinquent. Or was it entombment in museums, being surrounded by the wall? I have been awaiting a show that would settle the issue. that opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this weekend ought to of his life and work. Occupying the entire third floor of the museum, it of its kind, covering the salient facts of Pollock's biography, artistic development, and the critical debate about him. As an exhibition, this is one of the best I have ever seen. And it did make up my mind. skepticism can't but prevail. From the time Pollock arrived in New York, in loved the idea of being an artist, but his vast ambition wasn't coupled with much, or even any, talent. Through the first four rooms, we see him find and stages in which the picture plane was destined to flatten, empty, and pronouncements. But as far as I can tell, he was correct in every respect: and right that Pollock had genius trapped inside him. What is amazing is that practice, Pollock was void in color sense, draftsmanship, composition, and handling of his materials. The painting is a kind of red herring. With its suggestive title, glyphs, and symbols, it is designed to make you think it first in three paintings known as the "Sounds in the Grass" series, the best of which is Shimmering Substance. Pollock has said goodbye to content and (though still interspersed with fits of unappealing blotchiness). You don't have to read the elaborate taxonomy of his technique in the catalog to recognize that what sometimes appears as chaos is in fact the product of great suddenly? I think what happened is that he threw off the heavy influence of others and stopped worrying about his lack of conventional technique. Instead, he began to express himself in the way he could, basing his craft on his canvas. In Full Fathom Five, the murk grows more evocative; the enticing detail is a kind of small crossbow shape, in yellow and orange, glimpsed through the submarine tangle of a surface encrusted with nails, The three greatest of his monumental canvases, hung together in a single room, have an almost overwhelming presence. Curiously, these paintings don't repay arabesques across the canvas, but they don't lead the eye anywhere. When you try not to follow lines, you find you can't get any purchase on the whole. This by comparison, is a splash of cold water on the face. The power lies in being confronted by his paintings, not in looking for meaning in them. the distilled essence of Pollock's genius, a mysterious calligraphy stripped of the distraction of color or the accretion of layers of paint. In the can be mesmerized by his act of creation. The agonized expression on his face looks like a kind of rapture. His dance around the canvas looks like its own final two rooms of the exhibition, you see Pollock, who was suffering from depression and had relapsed into alcoholism, struggling to regain a gift that With its electric brightness, this huge painting, which Pollock's friends started for him, is stunning but sad, a big smile for the camera and perhaps a kind of requiem for his earlier work. In his final painting, Search his talent began to emerge. In his final year he binged, painted nothing, and with whatever theory appeals to you. In clinical terms, Pollock had a productive manic phase, and he was overtaken by black dog in the days before emptied it, and then had nowhere to go. You can view him as the classic case of admittedly romantic preference is to see his career as a quest for inspiration, and to say Pollock sought it long, found it briefly, and couldn't live without means cutting back on your professional responsibilities. But for orchestra conductors, figures of mythic virility and longevity, advancing age seems only music director of the New York Philharmonic. Last week, it was announced that, performance schedule at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere, his "Three calendar, or his bookings as a guest symphony conductor. Perhaps the model for conductors whose salaries often match those of star athletes and music critic with much of an instinct for sleuthing, has unearthed some of the hopping undeniably adds to the wealth and fame of the world's top conductors. But is it good for music? The era of the ludicrously prodigious maestro has coincided with a sense of unease about the state of the symphony, especially in the United States. Many orchestras are in poor financial shape, faced with rising costs, declining box office revenues, and a cutback in public subsidies. At the New York Philharmonic and elsewhere, labor and administrative conflict seems perpetual. And among people with long musical memories, there is a general feeling that while this may be a period of high competence, it is not a great moment for orchestras or conductors. A common complaint is that the sound festival season, but they lived in the cities in which they played. They auditioned musicians personally and knew them well. If a guest conductor audience. Today, by contrast, conductors tend to have a much more tenuous relationship with their home cities. Rather than live in some backwater, they the late 1950s was simultaneously principal conductor of the Berlin These conductors compete in a kind of orchestral arms race. The advent of jet virtually simultaneously not just in several cities but on several continents. The ambition of the conductor is abetted by the avarice of the agent, who conductors and uses his market power to drive fees ever higher. years, developed it into a distinguished ensemble. Despite many lucrative offers, Rattle has been loath to even spend much time visiting elsewhere. offers. It is expected that he will again choose to work with one orchestra especially given that the latter is likely to come much cheaper? Partly, it's seems doubly provincial. But the bigger issue is finance. Orchestra boards he doesn't conduct. And even the occasional presence of a musical superstar orchestras than there used to be and arguably fewer great conductors. The result has been a bidding war for top talent and an opportunity to make money that few can resist. The recent transformation of the conductor's career parallels what has happened elsewhere in the economy. As the income of top performers of all kinds has risen exponentially, the old patterns of indenture free agency. In basketball, where teams are constituted by the season, each player looking out for his own career doesn't appear to harm the overall quality of the game. But in symphonic music, where great achievement comes from teamwork over a much longer time frame, the moonlighting maestro is playing too say something about the commodification of spirituality, but has no idea what" doesn't give Murphy a chance to flex his comedic muscles, and the result is degenerative bone disease, the latter a hulking giant who has been held back in to outwit neighborhood bullies and to overcome personal obstacles. Although a power of poetry wins more praise in its general release. Although critics detect shaky spots, they find the film "stirring, powerful, and thrilling," and is now an hour and a half of the same, which wears thin by the end. Funny an ingenious use of men in feathers are the most praised elements of the production. Despite radical changes to the story line, critics note that both the score and the ballet's sense of magical fantasy remain virtually unchanged. understand it and that "the company's good is unquestionably, comic pantheon after a recent series of disappointing films. The titles for goofy parody. Critics call the slim volume lighter than air but "giddy with cover editorial argues that we should fear not a strong is slowing down. High unemployment could lead to labor unrest and eventually to can't tickle ourselves. Scientists theorize that our brains anticipate and discount sensation we cause ourselves. Why? All the better to recognize sensation caused by other objects, such as, say, poisonous insects crawling up story is dubious about genetically altered farm crops. Biotech companies now bugs will eventually get around this advance, just as they've got around traditional pesticides, so why aren't we embracing more sensible methods? Short black politics. Ford's father was a traditional liberal congressman, cover story goes behind the scenes of the World Wrestling himself part of the "storyline." The tyrannical president pretends to get beat Pizza Hut, and Papa is growing faster than anyone else. Its secret? Rapid store entire arsenal of the magazine to tell a story with power, insight and Jobs for the Future." Among them: nanny, physical therapist, executive recruiter, catering director, and Web site developer (no, is not currently hiring). An accompanying story reveals how to get what you want in a job. Hints: Go for the big money, because no one will ever disrespect you for it; consider trading fringe benefits for vacation time; and beware of controls redistricting could be in power for a long time. "Next!" issue on the future of theater, fashion, books, music, et al. A story quest to cure his own colon cancer. The doctor implanted extracts of his tumor in a group of mice, then ran tests on the mice. This specialized treatment be too costly to devote a fleet of mice to each individual cancer patient. pundit is to be sure of his or her opinions. There is no penalty for being sure first returns came in, the analysts were certain that there would be no galvanizing voters, nothing enormous would be decided. victory was announced, the evening had officially become a Democratic Rout. anchor asked him to assess the election results so far: "When these things aren't going your way, you say, 'It's still early.' So, I guess it's still belongs to two other parties. First, the Party of Virtue. It was a clean sweep for the good guys. In tight race after tight race, voters have rejected the actor politicians. Now, at last, we can have both in one package: a pro crowing about the resurgence of the Democratic Party in the South, given Fritz to continue Miller's policies, is winning the election to succeed him. In have persuaded most of the media that this campaign is a pudding without a theme, that there are no galvanizing issues, and that everything hinges on which party does a better job getting its core voters to the polls. (The question: Can my blacks and seniors beat your Christian conservatives?) election hinges on turnout. Accept that the Turnout Bores are onto something. In fact, why not take their theory a step further? The election depends on turnout. And what, more than anything, does turnout depend on? The weather, of offers a real Election Day forecast, predicting the from the notorious liberal meteorological bias that afflicts the New York The updated predictions appear in italics after the original Republicans, who can count on fervent conservatives to get to the polls in any weather. But a closer analysis of the weather map suggests Mother Nature actually favors the Democrats this year. (The survey starts in the Northeast and works its way clockwise around the country. It covers most but not all cloudy but no rain. Democrats should turn out smartly in New York City, helping governor's race. Her fervent Republican followers would go to the polls in a western half of the state, which is especially conservative. The rain could suppress Republican turnout in the west without lowering Democratic forecast suggests it will rain across the entire state, suppressing Democratic heavily Republican. If this forecast holds, Republicans upstate may stay home, It stops raining in the western half of the state, perhaps raising turnout across the state. Republicans pick up a Senate seat. weather throughout the state keeps turnout high and aids Democratic Sen. will be "dismal," just as bad as it is downstate. Sorry, Carol. predictions are just as reliable as the weather forecasts having trouble explaining "why it isn't the United States who blinked." "Which blink critique assumes that the purpose of preparing the attack was to complete through the weapons inspections, not through a military assault. In that case, objects follow laws of nature. Humans follow laws of our own making. We've even to answer a mugger who says, "Your money or your life." But do you really to work without restrictions or conditions." The press wasn't buying it. "What around, that he is able to provoke a crisis and then end it on his timetable?" "capitulated" on the key issue of weapons inspections. "We have to be able to pundits, captive to the geopolitics of machismo, think saying yes is easy. But Neither can cruise missiles. That's why we have presidents. cover editorial claims that recent market volatility a recession. Instead, financial firms should keep more capital to guard against market upheaval. If firms "all start to reduce their risks simultaneously, it cockfighting is on its last legs. The vicious sport (razors are tied to the feet of battling roosters) is still legal in four states but may soon be listeners. Bell signed off this week claiming a "threatening, terrible event" issue on the business of sports. A story frets that media giants' purchases of sports teams will change the way games are played. Who'll stop Fox (owner of Braves) from forcing star athletes to play when it will boost ratings on their player clients, a rookie quarterback learning how to play the endorsements coordinating everything from media coverage to promotional "sock board frantically hacked at wires and sealed off the leak, just averting death. Wright documentary by profiling the architect. The piece worships Wright's genius and scolds him for dastardly treatment of his family, but those who know Time 's education cover package says parents should get their kids reading at an early age, be involved in their schools, not castigate them for mistakes, let them find their own learning styles, and "praise hard work and parents matter little in a child's upbringing. An accompanying piece grades the "multiple intelligences" movement. MI traffic at stadium events. Birds both move quickly and maintain close distance complacency. Gates claims, "All you have to do is slack off for one period and mutant bacteria eat toxic pollution at waste dumps but are unaffected by deadly a bloody coup, the kidnapping and murder of thousands of his enemies, and his work with the economy and his statesmanship. Opponents aren't buying it. the only hope of cure for some cancer patients, but the treatment itself is so unpleasant that it may not be worth it. Radiation and chemotherapy cause patients more discomfort (retching, chemically burned lips and skin, fungal infections, isolation from human contact) than the cancer itself ever would. ridiculous. A fine is unconstitutional, and censure would weaken the presidency of offense simply does not merit the remedy of removal. That may be right. In which case, the legislature should cease and desist and let the government go reparation for past abuses of human rights dominated much of the world's press would allow the general to be sent home to face trial there. "Ministers back which reported that no deal had been reached. The Times said that the only equivalent of the interior minister) could now refuse proceedings for stands trial at home kills the health question: if he is well enough to stand fortnight with the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook," it said, adding that repatriation and the Guardian and the Independent opposing under political pressure. "For the first time, perhaps, a juridically incompetent tribunal has rendered a verdict of universal significance," it said. "Since no international tribunal exists to judge such events, the English took the place of this institution which it is now more than ever necessary to describing it as the most important such meeting ever held. It also published a Monde said that "war brings inhumanity with it and peace is obviously the terrorist crimes by a currently nonexistent international tribunal. Turkey disheartening. There are fewer similarities than this rush to analyze and spin statement regarding the basis for his conclusion. "Chatterbox bases this on the inaccurate presentation of history is dangerous. Slow down, take a deep breath, votes against funding pork projects in his own district. In one famous state to build a toll road instead. He has not been forgiven." project that could be defined as pork, it's the Southern Connector. It's a highway connecting two areas already well connected to the Interstate Highway System, and will only benefit people traveling from the area southwest of are already connected by I-85 and I-385. It seems to me an unnecessary expense to spend many millions of dollars to reduce a few people's travel time by five the highway contractors who will benefit financially from the project. representative who recognizes that there is no such thing as good pork. under the law. In a lawsuit, you are relying on established rights that the were "familiar" with the subject and who, when shown or told what the statute said, could make a fair decision and resolve the controversy. Chancery matters were more like personal problems taken up before the king or his chancellor specific, particularized kind of help (a divorce, apportionment of an estate, etc.), and the king's ruling was more narrowly applied to you. So, for example, rule to make the decision; rather, the judge is asked to weigh the equities and say, "This or that doesn't seem fair to me, and so I order you to do remedy is X." In chancery, you say, "This seems about right to me." system operates. The appeal is not to the House of Lords, with its mixture of swept away by New Labor). The appeal goes to the law lords who sit in the House of Lords. They are our equivalent of the Supreme Court and are made up of the country's most distinguished judges. Their average age is similar to the Supreme Court justices' (which makes them relatively "aging," as you would expect), but it is a mistake to think they are necessarily "conservative." In presenter (recently fired for snorting coke) as a "minor celebrity." Excuse me. A Blue Peter presenter is not a minor celebrity. Blue Peter is part of the national psyche, and the repository of all manner of naughty ingeniously laconic love poem sent to a Blue Peter presenter of my plastic." (You had to have been there, I guess.) In short, I doubt many but it really is a pity if you missed the chance to exercise that precious gift usually fail to emphasize in their tiresome calls to moral responsibility ("How can you leave all those referendums untouched when children are starving in breakthrough adopted by the election board (or whoever) here in suburban candidates and propositions (a "ballot"), you indicate your choices using a paper through a slot in a large container called a "ballot box." What happens thus earned our right to feel smug all day. This being the Pacific Northwest, the ballot is undoubtedly recycled. But if the citizens who open and empty the ballot box can suppress their eagerness to recycle these pieces of paper long here is another chance. Nothing so trivial as control of Congress is at stake. wish to download and print out more than that; and b) the snail mailed version has grown, this policy has required us to exclude more and more. And some all of it. (Actually, our reader surveys suggest that about half of out. For these folks, presumably, size is not as much of an issue.) a genuine quandary. We exist only to give pleasure but are unsure in this case vote. Highly unscientific, of course, but (like all voting) fun. Readers who have no intention of doing so, should please sit on their hands. The rest of you: Please vote now. We have done our best to word the question in a neutral way, giving unfair advantage to neither side. We reserve the right, of course, to ignore the voters' wishes. Just like in a real election. The official language of this referendum is as follows: this rag, and I want all of it. Don't give me this crap about how the crab Queen before she was a virgin." As the movie tells it, she was a sylvan, throne to find the air still thick with smoke from roasted heretics, a team of (lords, bishops, sundry old boys) who snigger openly at the prospect of taking will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. (Her French suitor enjoys wearing dresses.) After skulls are smashed, throats and b) entertain dissenting opinions exclusively from those whose heads are for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions That said, the movie's approach makes for juicy melodrama. simply dying to have their heads sneaked off --and there's no one to transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety. Gradually expunging all empathy from her moist, pink eyes and permitting her visage to ossify, she gives this carnival of carnage an superstar who carries the news to all the young dudes. After that, we're in an rockers who serve as propagandists for a repressively conformist state. exhibitionists and gleeful poseurs? Borrowing its framework from Citizen Velvet Goldmine (opinions have ranged from rapturous to casually dismissive), it's like no other musical ever made. It's determinedly swirling, discursive, elliptical. Now the story is told by an omniscient narrator, now a other line of dialogue is a cue for one of its dazzling numbers, largely covers keep up with, but then, great artists often invent their own syntax. In the Carpenter served the producers with an order to cease and desist exhibition) by the climax that the cultural forces that were eating at her (and that kept meditation on the power of culture to crush the individual. Despite its ironic detachment, the film draws you into its heroine's sickly state: Breathing nothing, the modern incarnation of the Incredible Shrinking Man. fashion themselves into anything they please. The core of the movie turns out to the events he's now reconstructing. Bale is such an expressive performer portray the rocker as a hollow opportunist who abandoned glam and bisexuality for the life of a corporate superstar, throwing in his lot with the forces of repression. That's a lot to cover. An actor of stature might have bridged these has never shaken off his background as a semiotics major, has made a movie picture catch its breath, that the performers would stop coming at me in filmmaking, in the elation of watching point of view passed like a baton from hand to hand, in the liberating force of his language and soundtrack. Velvet Goldmine might seem like a collection of baubles, but those baubles are wholesome yuppie and then (interminably) Death, who takes over the young man's body when he's thumped by a couple of cars in the movie's most promising all expression from his face and all tone from his voice. He speaks very, very his films in the editing room. What do you suppose he "found" when he sweet time doing it? The first adaptation of this story (originally a play) was conceit this fragile needs to whiz along to keep our disbelief in suspension, choice for a tour guide, since most people's condition doesn't involve personal helicopters, sprawling mansions on Long Island Sound, or Manhattan apartments labored on this moldy script, which features characters who ask questions that another character to "wake up and smell the thorns." It apparently never humanistic magnate considerable weight, so that whether or not Death takes him before he can stop to smell the roses and make amends to his neglected children becomes a matter of some suspense. The rest of the cast works with equal party planning, perpetually wilting elder daughter. As the younger daughter, on her exquisite shoulders. Her tremulous thoroughbred act wears thin, but it's censorship has taken up residence in your neighborhood public library. Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are demanding that libraries apply the cutting room floor when the budget bill was finalized this week, but it may Liberties Union, takes the absolutist position that any restriction on library debate became inevitable when public libraries began to get wired, a country's future, and which Bill Gates has set up a foundation to support. But down the road, public libraries face a bigger and more vexing question than this rehash of old censorship debates. Why, if libraries are growing more concerned about the provision of Internet access and less concerned about the circulation of books, must they be housed in buildings with walls? Someone who uses his neighborhood branch to surf the Net doesn't really depend on the library the way that someone who went to do research or borrow out of print books did. He merely uses an inefficient subsidy for something that is directly at far lower expense. In other words, if the public library of the future is mainly about free online access, it's in a mess of trouble. Another technological advance threatens libraries. On Oct. 1.0--expensive, a bit clunky and, according to previews, not really pleasant enough for pleasure reading. But within a few years, such devices are likely to president for technology development, says that the technical hurdles of screen quality and battery life have been largely surmounted. The question is how soon large number of titles to become available. The probable answer is not long. million books in the Library of Congress for a mere billion dollars, but much of that material falls under copyright protection. While publishers accept sequential borrowings a single copy of a book from a library, they can't very well provide free universal access to everything in their catalogs. And while devices are about to take over probably underestimate the doggedness of question. If electronic reading supplants print as the primary means by which people absorb written texts, what becomes of the venerable public are doing what people in threatened professions do. They begin from the assumption that they will always be crucially necessary and then try to figure out what they will be necessary for. Unsurprisingly, librarians have reached a consensus that technological progress demands an expansion, not a contraction, no longer underpaid scriveners on index cards. In fact, they no longer want to be called librarians at all. They're now "information specialists," who understand search engines and retrieval systems and sort out good information from bad on the Internet. They aspire to the rise in status and income that probably true that we will need skillful librarians, and maybe even more of instruction. In an unfamiliar world, we need guides all the more. What is libraries we have now in the quantity we now have them. necessary. Those who seek to understand the past are always going to want to name of modernization, is certainly right about how foolish many great libraries were to destroy their card catalogs after transferring them to emphasizing electronic research at the expense of old books. Why must a nonacademic library maintain, at great public expense, a vast store of volumes institutions don't have functions beyond lending out books. A friend of mine who used to teach in an overcrowded New York City school makes the point that for a lot of poor kids, the library is the only place to do homework after school. Public schools should provide an afternoon haven, but in the real world, they don't. It would be terrible to get rid of an institution that works without figuring out how to reproduce its effectiveness. Libraries are also places where immigrants go to take English classes and where illiterates learn to read. They are meeting places that cut against the isolation of modern life. In cities, the downtown public library is the rare place where social classes of good will public libraries have, such ancillary functions aren't enough to keep them alive if their basic purpose fades. Our public libraries were built so that citizens, and especially young people, could enhance their lives through access to the written word. The day may be not so far off when we can accomplish this function better with a subsidized Internet account and a free about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably girlfriend is intelligent, attractive, and affectionate. Maybe too affectionate. When we're eating in public she likes to play footsie under the ordering. She then watches me squirm to appear nonchalant in front of our server. My question is this: How do I gently ask her to "play nice" without does not like to be bossy, but she strongly suggests you do the following, since she divines you are not going to change your shoes. Next time Miss Intelligent, Attractive, and Affectionate decides to stab you with her heel, from the other diners, but it will be worth it. (This maneuver is called sending her neurosis back to her.) If the darling girl asks why you have never hollered before, simply tell her you were not interested in playing her games, a proper person handle the delicate matter of bad breath when happenstance forces one into consulting with someone on the boss' staff? I don't mean to be indelicate, but "retching" was very close at hand when that person talked. through this a few times. What she has done is try to seem casual and arrange her hand so it covers her nose. One wants to be helpful and alert the person, more than a passing acquaintance, you might want to risk the person's embarrassment in order to be helpful, with a remark something like "I hope you don't take offense, but I feel sure you would want to know that, somehow, your breath has turned sour," or "your lunch is lingering," or whatever you are comfortable saying. Granted, it is easier to get away quickly and say letter asking if you must use skills not in your job description an employee of a private company, absent contractual provisions to the contrary, the answer would be a resounding yes. Not only can employers ask, they can require it; and if you refuse more than once to do something your employer has asked just because nobody put it in your job description, you might even be denied unemployment benefits when they fire you. employers tend to be relatively uninterested in people whining about what someone else should be doing. In the case of the fellow who wrote, I would give priority to my own work but help out to the extent that I could without neglecting my tasks. It is generally safe to check what the boss wants. is not legal advice, do not rely upon it. If you have a problem seek the advice falling on his neck seeking help. In addition to job description issues, our law or psychological counseling. She is merely advising column and, generally speaking, a supporter of the "always leave 'em wanting more" school of thought regarding product such as yours. However, while I am consistently impressed by the high quality of your responses, I must admit I am somewhat underwhelmed by the quantity of your output. Four not as if you were being printed on a paper medium of limited dimension, where you consider expanding the scope of your pleasant palaver, to the enrichment of diminution of quality or reader interest. You are no less than they. banquet table of offerings. We would not want to overdose on the problems of the Supreme Electoral Headquarters at the Hotel El Dorado two hours before the polls closed, our delegation was already working on its statement. Bob become our chairman and was summing up the prevailing consensus that the election was free and fair. I pointed out that at least two of us had heard ethical sensitivity should serve the new speaker well as he presides over congressional investigations of presidential perjury, campaign finance abuse, antitrust trial, and they do not accept our explanation that he got bored, he had said most of what he wanted to say, has a pressing book deadline, and so on. They think he was canned because his reports were critical of we're stammering a bit, that may reflect the strain of not making any jokes. Because we wrote a jokey little item in this space two weeks ago about having Lewis killed and whatnot, and some people have taken it seriously. We hope that hasn't attracted the kind of readership that needs the word (and we hope that what we publish in these genres is funny enough not to expressed nothing but disappointment at his entirely voluntary decision that he'd had enough. One part of the problem here may be a misunderstanding of how journalism, especially magazine journalism, works. How mysterious is it, really, that a writer should drop out of a project before it is completed? Answer: Not very. Does such an occurrence justify paranoid speculation about corrupt motives and conflicts of interest? Answer: No, not at all. Many people might suppose that it is highly unusual for a writer to agree to produce some piece of writing and then fail to produce it, perhaps offering a variety of whiny and often hypochondriac excuses about hard wooden benches and so on. That is because many people do not know writers. In fact, such agreement to cover a trial of uncertain duration and with long periods of him for his dispatches and invite readers to check out his published an "interview" with himself in the second issue of the New York section at the time of the printers' strike only make us realize it had never sure what it means that this remark is quoted without comment in the new the criticism. For all the effect it has had on the country's literature, the it vanished in another strike, it is hard to think many people would miss complaining that the section fails to capitalize on the new commercial say he was joking, but apparently he wasn't. The Times deserves to be congratulated, not scolded, for its determination to avoid pandering to the its aversion to argument and controversy. Pick up just about any issue and what distinguished authors contribute longer reviews about weightier books. But somehow, the section still feels dutiful. It reads as if the people writing for it and editing it aren't having any fun and don't think readers should as interesting as possible and to make them look even more interesting than anything too interesting and, if you happen to get it anyhow, disguise it. On the cover, where the widely read "lead" review once began, there is now a headline. "Artist of Adventure," says the cover of the issue that comes out on one of the funniest writers around. But somehow, it feels as if his talent is being withheld. You read the review and wish the author felt he could cut advertisers in the publishing houses by providing much fertile territory for blurb mining. But the rest of us are drowning. Inside the back page, there's about. The reader, staggering across the finish line, can only pray that she about how the section resists strong criticism and colorful writing. The problem starts with the bias in favor of specialists. An assistant professor of in the subject and focus on the significance of the book to his field. A good intellectual journalist given the same assignment would probably focus more on of journalists. But since good manners are the rule, the generalists often end up sounding as obtuse as the experts. In the current issue, for instance, a three paragraphs, summarize the book in four more, note a flaw in the penultimate paragraph, and close with an upbeat summation on the order of "Still, Moon Over Nova Scotia is a valuable contribution to our this form. It spends three paragraphs pondering German history, four describing list of accomplishments. (Click for a sample of this wacko analysis.) discouraged. Most reviewers have figured out that raves are often played big. But if the reviewer trashes a book, especially one that is in any way marginal, the odds diminish that his review will be published. If it does run, it will Bitty Book Light. Moreover, editors are likely to blunt the criticism in a backhanded way. They may, for instance, as I heard from one contributor, apologize for having to cut a reviewer's most clever lines "for space." How a newspaper section avoid conflict, the mother's milk of journalism? I think the instinct stems from the paper's not unrealistic sense of its own power and can't help most academic specialists, for a lot of writers in between, not getting reviewed in the Times or receiving a harsh review can nail the coffin shut. Other publications can be cavalier without worrying about squashing an author's budding career. The giant Times can't. So the review has grown a large bureaucracy designed to prevent any unfairness. Half a dozen "Preview" editors leaf through the hundreds of books published each week to choose the lucky few that are worth reviewing, relegating some to the "Books in Brief" section in the back. They then look for someone qualified to write on the subject, but without any bias. No one who is a friend, enemy, colleague, or rival of the author is supposed to published by one's own publishing company. This near cult of fairness prevents conflicts, but it also prevents interest. And the bureaucratic approach issues. Are biographies too long? Does women's fiction get short shrift? Is to the Times --"Sirs, of all the people who might have reviewed my book, revolving around literary life than mere reviews. They contain diaries, poems, drop the rules against conflicts of interest in favor of a simple one that says material biases should be disclosed. Hire a regular columnist to write every generation, springs to mind.) Lose the dismal cover illustrations and return to have), letters from abroad, debates, and a gossip column. Encourage a feisty letters page. Blow off the brief reviews. Take chances. Crusade. Quit being so his fellow countrymen that they wouldn't have to give up territory in exchange established themselves there. Are we permitted to dream?" called for the lifting of sanctions because, "in the long run, free trade is the piece), the Independent said it is now widely assumed that "the of saying killing him, because it is hard to see how he might be dislodged otherwise." But the paper said that even if it is argued that the rule of law "The greatest threat today is the lack of a liberal anchorage in the country," she was quoted as saying. "The people are disoriented. There is a political autonomy and more economic development." A military solution "is neither workable nor stable," the paper said. "That should be the clear and repeated firms are being investigated on suspicion of laundering profits from drug trafficking, gun running, and contract killings by international racketeers, "household names," the paper added that they are suspected of acting as fronts the names of more than a dozen international organizations, both public and private, which the government alleges hold information on Holocaust victims and other related activities, which they are refusing to publish." Bobby Brown, the during the State Department's Holocaust era restitution conference starting in collateral." It concluded, "The price of artistic genius, it seems, is often a better guide to the state of the banking market than the aesthetic spirit of if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: should resign. Nineteen percent disapprove strongly of the way he has done his thank participants in a special program about his pontificate for their bode any intention of sabotaging the withdrawal agreement," it said. "In addition to the problems that his appointment might arouse, it can also be seen be given full expression in the summit talks." The editorial added that "if the debate in the House of Lords on the Labor government's planned abolition of the parliamentary rights of hereditary peers. The government is committed to excluding them from the upper house of Parliament but has yet to reveal its proposals for further constitutional reform. The hereditary peers, nearly all of them conservatives, did not argue with the case for their own abolition, but repeatedly pointed out that a nonelected chamber consisting exclusively of government nominees would be even less democratic than one dominated by people who had arrived there by accident of birth. Even the liberal Guardian, which strongly supports reform, insisted in an editorial that the government be held to its promise that "the the queen has decided, by her own choice, to do away with some of the ceremonial that has traditionally surrounded the annual State Opening of Parliament. When this takes place next month, such officers as the Silver Stick in Waiting will not take part. "The sight of the Great Officers of State walking backwards ahead of the Sovereign will remain unchanged, however. It is understood that they were offered the option of walking forwards, but declined." All except the lord chancellor, although, the Telegraph reassures its readers, "his request to walk forwards stems from a desire to are more old people than ever. Many of them have word processors. Many of those pass their free time writing. And, following the advice of all teachers of writing, they write about what they know, which is old age. So there is a lot of writing on that subject. Even Jimmy Carter has written a book about old to keep up with this trend, I have just reread the classic on the subject, a junior in high school. And I can't imagine what I learned about old age, old. One might think that was pretty old for a Roman of that time, but Cicero evidently didn't think it was old enough to qualify him to discourse on the The year after writing the essay he was executed for being on the wrong side of reasons why old age appears to be an unhappy time: First, it withdraws us from active pursuits. Second, it makes the body weaker. Third, it deprives us of all physical pleasures. And fourth, it is not far removed from death. one's old age depends on the investments one made in earlier years. I don't refer, and Cicero didn't either, to financial investments that assure one a comfortable income in old age. (Cicero came from a wealthy family.) I am sure that financial investments are important, and I don't suppose Cicero would have obvious is investment in one's health and bodily strength. I don't think the examples he gives that having a satisfactory old age depends on adequacy of physical exercise and moderation of eating and drinking in the years Another investment important for old age is friendships. altogether moderate way, yet with a certain ardor appropriate to my age, which, as time goes on, daily mitigates my zest for every pleasure." whether, being old, he still indulged in "the delights of love." When I look In any case, he praises the value of the intellectual and aesthetic pleasures in which an old man can still indulge. But to fully appreciate art, science, and nature in old age requires some prior investment in cultivating them. things." According to my rabbi (I don't want to pretend to be a student of such recognition that he had passed the trials of his life with valor and devotion and could now enjoy a peaceful retirement, content in his own eyes and in the eyes of God. He had, in today's parlance, paid his dues. That is another investment one can make for old age: so to conduct oneself in prior years that to invest to prepare for the proximity of death in old age, Cicero is not very helpful. (Who is?) He offers his "philosophical" view. Death brings at least an doesn't say what. Perhaps one could indoctrinate oneself in that attitude in youth and so prepare for old age. But obviously Cicero did not find that only daughter drove him into a frenzy of writing in an effort to forget his thought that she had at least escaped all appetites. His philosophy might have prepared him for his own death; it did not prepare him for the death of one he which I have not read. If he was rescued from his grief, it was apparently time grand triumph, and as Republicans spin the same numbers into an affirmation of in recent years by advancing conservative causes: limits on gay rights, immigration, and affirmative action. And there were certainly some initiatives suicide. Initiatives in the deep South further restricted the rights of Colorado abortion vote is a powerful argument against those who say that initiatives are dangerous because they are too crude and voters are too easily also voted to require parental notification for children seeking abortion. The split vote on abortion suggests a subtlety among voters that strong faith in government and a willingness to expand it. Voters gave a ballot initiatives to expand state environmental funding and, in all but proposed, did an environmental initiative fail. On animal rights, too, voters cast ballots for more government regulation, choosing to ban cockfighting in passed campaign finance reforms allowing public funding of state candidates. afflicted with a foolish optimism may view these initiative victories as a sign of an impending liberal majority. I suspect they represent something else: the happy and rich. These votes reflect a generous, expansive mood. Sick people want to smoke a joint? Let 'em, what harm does it do? More money for schools? Sure! Clean water? You bet! These are not liberal activist votes, cast because judgment day. How accurate was the weather forecast election forecast? correctly), which is not much worse than the average election prognosticator and a lot better than the average weather forecaster. trait: Their protagonists tend to be more compelling in the throes of their particular depravity than after they "come to their senses." In rare cases that mainstream cinema, which insists on heroes who are both square and hip, has a tough time exploring the paradox that virtue is a great charisma killer. It's a racist, homicidal skinhead who's never more mythically transfixing than in and scenes of violence at once thrillingly kinetic and revolting. But the film has the soul of a guidance counselor, and whenever it seems poised to go where are gummed up, where we can grasp simultaneously the horror and the allure of demonization, and naive notions of how people change. It's a frustrating piece stealing the family's van. Clad only in boxers and boots and with a huge, thick swastika tattooed over his heart, he snatches a revolver and charges into the street. The camera hugs his long torso and ropy muscles; starkly white against the black of the sky, he seems stripped down to pure hatred. Here, he curls his body into a sneer, and he's probably the only white man in movies who's wiry enough to trounce a bunch of black guys on a basketball court man whose rage has taken on a runaway life of its own. present is in (less arresting) color, with a framing device that's the boy with expulsion unless he delivers a substitute essay the following day: an analysis of his brother's crime and its impact on both their family and doctorates! Can we skew the case any more, please? Brooks, the bulwark of note in between; and the protagonist's prison metamorphosis from one pole to Guy who gets out of prison had more to say than "How did I buy into this shit? I was pissed off." The struggle for his kid brother's soul turns out to be no chums obligingly turn into hissing vampires, snarling at his expressions of tolerance as if they've just been flashed the crucifix and sprayed with holy himself and his brother as innocent children on the beach, staring in the cut of the picture he turned in, and at last report was holed up in the montage, and the script has at least one card up its sleeve: the climactic who urged his son at the dinner table not to get too cozy with niggers or their can even halfway connect the dots between this fundamentally sweet, brainy kid and the magnetic, white trash monster who'll haunt our minds long after the a game and that if the boy gets through it without crying or complaining he to the "enchantment of fascism" being "undone" by "other spells, some recalling leads a group of laughing tots into the death chamber. The picture reportedly because The Day the Clown Cried was judged too obscene to be released, black hole. Its subject isn't the power of "enchantment" but the power of to be uneven, though, and when you add directorial missteps to the uncomfortable subject matter, the result is pans mixed with queasily laudatory the future who, when decommissioned, is relegated to the horrors of the slag heap planet, where he discovers human emotion and rises to the defense of his fellow outcasts. Soldier 's small number of fans call it a "sanctimonious House). The editor of The New Yorker takes on one of the most this collection of interconnected stories is hailed as generally witty, and its "Traditions in the West are sometimes hard to break, but we find this to be column with weekly photo of him being punched in the nose."-- Rich 'Medical Miracle for Cute Babies Is a Hot New Trend and Proof of God's features and denaturing them into wan imitations but by being acutely attuned a New York public school, current events assignments are traditionally she replied, "Oh, I know, but nobody reads that. We call it Time for should be able to buy their way out of misconduct. How trivial. Let them get off easily without any consequences at all. They are acting in the country's best interest. Departing from the Constitution pays dividends." Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. only recommend a play that has just closed. There are art lovers who rave about paintings locked in the basement of the Hermitage. But to my mind, there are no aficionados more annoying than music mavens who prattle on about bootlegs. What a coincidence that the really great records are the ones you can't get. with paeans to recordings you can't hear, some of which even he hasn't heard, record company could keep up with it. Before he finished cutting an album, he'd in the 1960s was writing at such a pitch of inspiration that even his Hall Concert." For years, collectors have paid good money for unreliable copies of this bootleg. Now the performance, which actually took place not at the are legitimately fascinated with this concert, which occurred at a crucial from nonviolence to black power, soft drugs turned to hard drugs, and so on. "authenticity" and political dissent. (A hilarious, chilling document is the playing amplified rock 'n' roll. During the next year he was booed at nearly the stress by ingesting huge quantities of drugs and generally acting like a bastard. At the end of the tour, he broke his neck in a motorcycle accident. He wondering if things might somehow have turned out differently. disappointing. It was a reasonably good concert, but hardly an outstanding one. his acoustic guitar and harmonica and played electric guitar with his band in the second half. The first half was a concession to his fans, but it bored him silly, and you can tell. The songs themselves are beautiful. His rendition of studio version, doing nothing to explicate the obscurities of the lyrics, such as why "Baby Blue" has reindeer armies, or where they're going home to. He strums released on record, and which, after you've listened to the acoustic side, is word "behind," creating a perfect rock moment. Amazingly, half the audience cranking into "Like a Rolling Stone." He played no encores. showing at the Museum of Radio and Television in New York City to coincide with unpublished fragments probably won't do any damage to his real achievement. But of the old folkie quest for the grail of authenticity. And it's equally instantly famous. Insisting otherwise makes him into a kind of idiot savant who could create but not choose. It elevates the critic and diminishes the photo, the single word "Noel," a naked babe draped in colored lights sipping perfect place to release them." Where? What? Says who? attacks. It is difficult to be amusing in praise of something. But risking dry season. It's this kind of pathological attention to detail that makes "News Quiz" such a pleasure to work on. Thank you all very much. (Especially residual payments, that great Writers Guild health insurance, and jeez, just the weekly paychecks would be terrific. I never should have taken that swing at nearly as dangerous as rusty flying propellers coated with broken glass. Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. weather. Their insatiable appetite for royal gossip is cheerfully fed by a venal press. Their factories manufacture a steady supply of ephemeral pop groups. And they don't think much of the French and their bountiful supply of unworthy of "News Quiz" players, who might charitably have pointed out how graciously the English have transformed themselves from a ruthless imperial power into a vast island museum that still believes itself to be a ruthless "quickie" weddings, making prenuptial agreements legally binding, and improving mediation services. The Conservative Party denounced this "unprecedented level Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. single word "Noel," a naked babe draped in colored lights sipping illustration, just text. Its tone somehow both baleful and bemused, wistful yet some deft responses. I can only plead holiday malaise. Or seasonal affective train that would whisk me swiftly and economically to the countryside, where, just groggy enough. Boy could I use a drink purchased at a cash bar. can't eat a single dapper. Assuming it is something you eat.) in traditional dress, demonstrating the various steps to preparing a hog for consumption. Skills on display will be: scalding, sausage stuffing, lard Exotic Night Club. 2-for-1 private dances. Closed Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!" (So you're saying if I want an inexpensive private dance on announces, "Beer Makes a Great Gift. Gift Certificates and Variety Packs." Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. et Ratio," calling on the faithful to reconcile faith and reason. Rationalists reasonably ask: How does one do that? If faith tells you that God created lower animals over millions of years, how do you reconcile those messages? If reason tells you this seems highly unlikely, where do you go from there? subdivisions of various religions have various strategies for reconciling faith and reason. Here are a few, on a rough spectrum from faith wins to reason reason is misguided. This philosophy is summed up in the battle cry of many a literalist: Nothing is impossible with God. Scientific proofs that contradict biblical stories of the great flood or creation are wrong and have been derived through erroneous means. The debate over evolution is probably the relentless point by point challenge of the rationalist side. to truth as revealed through Scripture. It is this obsession and lust for knowledge that caused the human condition (suffering, evil, painful childbirth, etc.) in the first place: Eve's craving for enlightenment is what led her to eat from the tree of knowledge, after which God expelled her pope takes in his latest encyclical. Faith and reason are argued to be logical complements. God empowered humans with reason precisely so that humankind might come to a better understanding of God and God's creation. between reason and faith. Each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action. Officially, the Catholic Church gives reason the same weight as faith. If you use your reason in the way it was intended, you will discover the wonder and mystery in God's creation and, in turn, you will come to a greater favor this approach often tend to see philosophy and Scripture as sharing the key to the ultimate truth. The pursuit of knowledge is good, not bad, because it leads closer to the actual truth: God and God's plan. Without reconciling reason with faith, the teachings of the Bible look like magical Enterprise Institute, sums up the basic premise of this approach, saying that contends that faith and reason occupy two different realms of knowing. They are so dissimilar that they cannot contradict one another. Reason encompasses the physical, while faith deals with the metaphysical. The seen and unseen are independent of each other: You don't read the Bible for answers to scientific questions, and you don't read a biology textbook to find out how to premise of this line is that the findings of faith and reason are not at the outside world. Faith is subjective --discovered within. Faith is about the metaphysical world, that world of events, occurrences, and mysteries that by their very nature can never be proved objectively. religious texts written centuries ago must be interpreted within the were nonexistent. The writers had to make their points in terms that people of the time would understand. For example, had the writer of the Genesis creation have explained God's hand in the evolutionary process as opposed to the more sanitary conditions of today, laws for keeping kosher might have been much less stringent or possibly omitted altogether. this approach will seem quite reasonable to rationalists, it is one of the more controversial approaches to reconciling faith and reason. Its critics complain that God's truths are not and cannot be relative to the time they are written. There is a moral absolute that supersedes cultural and historical literalist theories, this approach assumes that the Scriptures were written these theological works are said to use myth, imagery, and symbolism to instruct readers how to lead a good life. They are not historical or factual documents, since all the events within were composed as literary formidable one. Reconciling faith and reason is hard work. There are other ways to go about it, but these five should be enough to get you started, God now, as health maintenance organizations are suddenly pulling out of dozens of coverage beyond the end of the year and demanding that Congress do something to drop benefits on established contracts. And politicians, including the but there are two reasons why casual observers should care about what's going policy changes passed last year, Medicare has been transformed into an enormous voucher system. It is the prototype of a still new and controversial idea: Government should finance a generous safety net, but competing, private organizations should do the work. The government now allocates to each senior in Medicare a fixed amount of money that will buy coverage from either a deficit reduction projected for the next few years--$102 billion out of a total All signs, however, suggest that the immediate problems in enter Medicare markets than are seeking to withdraw. The pullouts affect be zero. Presumably, at least some of the plans are inefficient. We don't know precisely what an optimal rate would be, but the anticipated withdrawal rate was simple: The government was overpaying them. Before this year, under a were derived from the traditional Medicare program, which had a much sicker the effects of the announced withdrawals will be limited. except for a small copayment and generally provide generous drug coverage, those with the standard coverage and some supplemental insurance. No wonder Medicare is now suffering is not a calamity. It is the inevitable turbulence and messiness of introducing choice and competition to a major social program. In a voucher system, seniors have a choice of plans, but the plans have choices, too. They aren't breaking any promises if they decide to take their ball and go home. The benefits, however, may still be worth this downside. After all, regulations failed to control Medicare's costs adequately. The hope care plans are now losing money, and a major shakeout is underway. After several years of remarkable success, insurers are having serious trouble controlling the costs generated by doctors like me, and not just for the senior population. New drugs, diagnostics, and other technologies have accelerated increases in premiums from employers, who will then cut health benefits, wages, payments in future years. Suddenly, the current budget surplus looks the 1980s, fail to tame health costs, we will be left with an ugly choice. Do this could be the major domestic policy debate of the coming decade. selection of that day's analysis and commentary from newsier departments, such as "Chatterbox" and "Explainer." coverage and reviews. Morning delivery of "Today's Papers" will, of course, could lead us out of the Flytrap morass? That is the mournful keening you hear an alleged era when figures of towering prestige and gravitas would swoop in like superheroes when democracy had tied itself in one too many knots. Gently but firmly, they would guide us to safety, then disappear back into their (not excluding the possibility of a Wise Woman, of course), they would be able to broker a deal between the president and the Republican Congress, sparing the nation the prolonged agony of impeachment. (To hear the keening, check out this undemocratic. This group includes both those who relish the prospect of figures call for "responsible leaders on both sides" to make a deal. The to flinch or compromise on impeachment, so we're especially delighted to have his participation. So delighted, in fact, that we'll refrain from making any patina of wisdom. That is no measure of relative actual wisdom, of course. But if we had to guess, it probably means he's doing most of the work. an anthology published by Morrow. The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide is a short prose book about if you missed the most recent installments of this column, here they are: city's zoo has been impregnated by another boa constrictor named Warren objectives or the consequences of a military intervention unprecedented in nor anywhere else," he said. "If we bomb, it won't be to impose a solution, as that renders intolerable humanitarian tragedies shown on television at the expense of all other ones, and in order to save what little credibility remains some sort of agreement, it will not be able to reverse in one fell swoop the feeling of alienation that prevails between them." It added, "After all, it is not the absence of an agreement, but the failure to implement it, that brought international law, reserving the right to use the death penalty against with the complaints registered with the National Human Rights Commission child. The principal reason cited for this reluctance: Maternity is seen as right after the election. He told his staff, according to the New York officials to address pocketbook issues like Social Security, health care, think we probably underestimated the need to really aggressively push a much stronger message about cutting taxes and saving Social Security, winning the war on drugs, reforming education and national defense," said the speaker the day before he realized that underestimate would cost him his job. government to solve problems in education, the environment, child care and articulate the message but to provide the legislative machinery that it takes think the first thing that we have to do is develop an agenda that can unify Social Security, get back to limited government, lower taxes and strong evidence that the public is hot for a party that promises activist solutions to problems that confront it and its progeny? Surely not from Election Day exit issue that "mattered most" in deciding which House candidate to vote for. many of those voters really had education foremost in their frontal lobes? Remember that, in key elections, "education" was the trade name for a firm of less reputable pursuit. Democratic candidates in the South who actively supported legalized gambling measures (with the state's share of the take opponents. Voters who opposed the lottery and video poker interests told pollsters forthrightly that they were "against gambling." Voters who favored legalizing gambling said they were "for education." doesn't want the federal government to bother it. People expect the government to keep the Social Security checks and highway money coming and run the courts Medicare," for example, a goal that pols from both parties like to pop into the their ilk limit some people's access to some kinds of care. Pick your poison like their politicians to flatter them by pretending that they are truly concerned about important things like making kids smarter and safer and whatever. Never mind that the money will only pay for a fraction of that (and that by the time it's spread by formula to every school or precinct, it might not fully support a single hire). Or call for another tax break to subsidize whatever. Sure, most of the subsidy will end up paying for things that would happen anyway, but people like the idea of tax breaks and nobody ever bothers more attractive candidates who don't scare the voters with their moralistic message that ends up forcing a debate in which a lot of painful choices will precisely that sort of inaction in mind. And according to the polls, Congress has never been more popular than it was just a few months ago when what it was be so flippant with a list of pejoratives associated with another minority and unfunny. It is particularly annoying to read this on the anniversary of I did not create the list of pejoratives thought to be associated in the public list and that, given the tremendous exposure she's had this year, this certainly reinforces the stereotype and therefore makes the group's aim more image of black men. To notice such things is not bigotry. But wanting to ignore interesting question now is who was the father of her first son, since he could children because there are no male descendants, the likelihood that the paternity was from other men is as likely as any other possible answer, now with no record of potency for almost two decades. You jump to conclusions too understandable way without putting in so much information that it becomes unintelligible. He is a breath of fresh air. I also think it is commendable that "The Breakfast Table" feature is supposed to be light, was doing double duty this week. It is heartening to know that despite not impeachment hearings over Flytrap, we know, hewed closely to party lines; only leadership did purport to agree on this: The vote was supposed to be one of "conscience." Responding to reports that he was muscling Democrats for support, "cast a vote of principle and conscience." Likewise, Republican Speaker Newt faces a vote with dicey political consequences. During the Gulf War, House their conscience and their judgment on this matter." The Bush White House agreed: "This is a vote of conscience and not something you can involve party reverberations of people protesting too much. Most of the time, we're left to conclude, these craven, opportunistic pols will crumple, tossing aside their deeply held convictions at the slightest blandishments. Only on an extraordinary occasion do principles carry the day. conscience talk also suggests something else that's taken for granted: Voting explaining why he supported the Democratic proposal. Voters endorse this premise, affiliating themselves less and less with either party and splitting a different notion of civic participation. In the early Republic, parties were and without party affiliation, cautioned in his Farewell Address against "the baneful effects of the spirit of the party." Everyone was expected to vote conceit of government by peaceable consensus was soon exposed as chimerical. By the 1790s, the young nation's leaders promptly split into warring parties: the party had different ideas about what the common good entailed: For the Federalists it meant a strong central government, an expanding economy, and the stewardship of an elite ruling class. The Republicans envisioned a weaker federal government, an agrarian society, and an infusion of democracy. pioneered party discipline as a way to muster the strength of numbers against victors belong the spoils," making the "spoils system" of rewarding supporters president, crystallized his supporters into the Democratic Party, his opponents affairs. Republicans and Democrats paraded in torchlight processions, waved banners, sang songs. Newspapers unabashedly pitched the news from a partisan slant. On Election Day, party leaders handed voters tickets with slates of candidates printed upon them; the voter just dropped the ticket in the ballot box. Turnout was never higher. Whatever its faults, democracy was bustling and Progressive Era put a stop to all this. Appalled by the rampant corruption of secret ballot. They crippled parties by empowering voters through the referendum and the popular election of senators. The times celebrated objectivity, expertise, and efficiency: Voters now had to stay informed and engaged to make more choices independently. Since then, parties have continued to lose both power and credibility. "Today the labels [of party] are shunned as an offense to a thinking person's individualism, and a vast majority of no arguing that a democracy needs representatives and voters who can think for themselves. Perhaps one day we'll even achieve that. Still, there are some people to compete they need to come together and to raise funds, agree upon a platform, choose candidates, and so on. Party loyalty and discipline make that possible, and that sometimes means both voters and representatives must members should bind them together, even when they encounter particular differences about their application (and despite some blurring of lines, party century shows that our current arrangement leaves many voters feeling been utterly baffled about how to vote on a referendum or whom to choose for some lower position? A party line comes in handy. The notion of the informed citizen puts too much pressure on individuals, where the cruder but more inspiring politics of the Gilded Age mobilized voters on Election Day. [in Congress], though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the Republicans have united to impeach him. And if you think the Republicans are an rallying to stop them. When it comes to extraordinary moments of political crisis, "conscience" sometimes just gets in the way. didn't click the sidebars in the text and would like a brief reminder of the shown to be "a liar and a philanderer" yet "still he comes back laughing." But Republicans should pursue impeachment, regardless of the election results: "If they believed that they had grounds for an inquiry, it should be a thorough this movement. State voters don't care about parties: They just want They eat each other." If you are going take the quiz, stop reading now. The answer is a). article in the election cover package heralds the onset of "liberal campaign finance reform. Another piece raps Republican National Senatorial failure and won. This year he's stubbornly producing an expensive and risky percent of prison inmates. Out of their cells for just one hour a day, the inmates grow slowly insane and even more violent and unstable than when they entered prison. Many psychologists believe the treatment is inhumane. Wardens Time 's cover package attacks corporate welfare: "In some ways, it course, is that instead of rewarding the poor, it rewards the powerful." In politicians claim they've created new jobs while wasting your tax money. The package surveys hot new tech towns. New Silicon Valleys have sprouted in tech success: nearby research institutions, an educated talent pool, type words, they appear in a thought bubble above your avatar's head. Current popular palaces: The South Park palace and, you guessed it, porn mulatto) and equally unaware that they were related to a president. An accompanying article traces the evolving debate among historians, several of story challenges the fairness of the death penalty, noting the significant numbers of death row inmates who have been found innocent before death row innocent. Six of those nine were minorities accused of crimes against requested that none of his unfinished work be posthumously published. on the verge of being bought out for huge dough. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out when push fell from favor and "portals" became the next big thing. stars has become so urgent that couriers are being given terse, even breathless, instructions to make no detours."-- John Shade pop star excesses. Listed like that, it's clear that our rock 'n' rollers have compiled a sadly unimaginative roster of debauchery, largely relying on sex and disappointing. Even the president, that drab national dad, has been accused of surgical selfishness of leaner noses and plumper bosoms. Where is the face accomplished at embodying their own philosophy. You'd think they'd have some her bid to sue for libel over a "vulgar and undignified" quip about her on the way to a concert and was advised to turn sideways to release herself, which she insists she never made, held her up to ridicule, mockery, and contempt, and conformed to a "degrading racist stereotype of a person of in the subject of this libel action as it would have shown that, in addition to possessing the remarkable vocal and dramatic talents which have made her those holiday cards, and there's a colorful, inexpensive, and sinister the firearm ownership preservation bear wears a yellow cowboy suit and carries a rifle. This could refer to the kosher laws that put pork chops out of bounds, proudly shows his target to dad. Both have rifles; both wear ear protectors. They may be gun nuts, but they're still health conscious. Outside the window lurks a bad bear with an eye patch. Apparently the bad bear of his cell. I don't begin to understand the ideological assumptions behind Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. comic books, nail polish, and jewelry. What's the connection? from violence,' said a spokesman. 'Fours and 5s? Well they're just asking for food, bad teeth, bad weather. No, wait, that's what we knew yesterday about beat the stuffing out of them. You would, however, receive an affectionate animal lovers is "date." Is bestiality, that perpetual urban smirk at rural the sense of asking an entirely different question: Is it really a requirement of sophistication that a place provides good bookstores, movies, plays, museums, music, cuisines, and an opportunity for erotic and intellectual freedom? As it turns out, yes. But be wary of feeling too proud of yourself news too prolix), the rating system is analogous to that used for hurricanes, at the same steering wheel with the same gas in the same car. He's a committed conservative. Any poor folk get in the road, he's gonna run 'em running the train on the tracks. Poor folk wander onto those tracks: Southern party. This place will become much less cannibalistic and much less of a snake pit. But the snake, though limbless, can drive a car or a train or maybe a private jet or something right over any damn poor people who get in its Disclaimer: All submissions will become the property of Slate and will be published at Slate 's discretion. Slate may publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably to write. I have lived outside the United States for quite some time now and am Department official flossed at the table after dinner in a restaurant. Is this now accepted hygienic behavior in the States, or is it as undiplomatic as it that quality people in the United States have kept flossing a private ritual. safe bet that your State Department friend is in no danger of being given an out the little white plastic thing that holds the floss, or was he using one of group of guys went out for a drink after work, and sitting at the bar was a struck up a conversation with her and was greatly annoyed when one of my friends insisted I interrupt the conversation to go have a word with me away from the bar and told me the beauteous blonde was a guy. I felt like a moron for not being able to figure this out myself. Of course the teasing has not abated, and the weight of my imaginary dunce cap is giving me a headache. wants you to immediately regain your sense of humor and be grateful that your pal stepped in before any, uh, harm was done. It is sometimes difficult to answer to the fishy question was imprudent, I think. In your response, you used the word "floundered." Now if you meant that to be a pun, then I have no problem with it, but if, instead, you meant that you failed, the better word might have been "foundered," meaning that you a) failed completely or b) went directly to the bottom. You will of course make the final decision, which will be prudent in the end, or prudence at work, whatever! wonderful wordplay just to respond to the trout letter comments. Your first the product of perhaps too permissive parents in that they believed, being children of the '60s, that excessive discipline and training may lead to stunted personality development in their children. As a result, I have no solid knowledge of basic etiquette. Can you recommend a general text that is current, comprehensive, and for my parents' sake, progressive? salutes you for knowing what you do not know and concurs that a world without good bookstore, online or actual, and select the most appropriate book by about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably disagree with your opinion that nine years of living together equals marriage. A person is either married or not, like being pregnant. While the father can be commitment means marriage. Anything less is just dating. difference with you. Of course you are right that not being married is not being married, and living together does not "equal" marriage. Commitment, relationships have all the ingredients of a really good marriage, and all that's missing are recognition from the state and contractual obligation. and experience of the couple may be a factor. A committed relationship between you are the expert on all things advisory, I would like to suggest a different some on your person, and when confronting the foul offender, produce them, pop They're also nice because they are not quite as blatant as breath mints but get the Brits might say, your approach is brilliant. It being only polite to offer a companion what one is oneself ingesting, you will have spared the offender public.) He also lost a very good paying job shortly after marriage, and now we're in debt up to our eyeballs. How can I make him understand I want lenient regarding divorcing, it is because she herself has lost more than one husband who feels like a brother, makes you feel old, embarrasses you, and has restaurant, and when the bill came, the waitress had written at the bottom, that she had to put a suggested tip (as if I didn't know) and that she put it higher than normal (the service certainly was not above and beyond the call of duty) and that she further did not give the option of a lower tip. percent above the norm, but to have it forced on me in such a forward manner restaurant waitstaff has many jobs, but giving instructions for the amount of caught off guard as you were. She hopes that you thought fast and lined through the "notation" and wrote in what you wanted to leave. action to the attention of the owner or manager, whichever one was present that night. For future reference, should a serving person deliver substandard service, the diner is perfectly within his or her rights to specify "no tip." This way it is clear that the lack of a tip is neither an oversight nor rocketed around the world as front pages celebrated the Democrats' success in the midterm elections. "Revenge" was a very popular word in headlines. "The Democrats," reported that "stunned Democrats woke up yesterday to find their election victories had outstripped their loftiest predictions." Meanwhile, the noted, however, that "the vote, which halved the Republican majority in the performance by a president's party since the 1930s." The Independent shouted, that "the Democrats have held their own in a remarkable fashion," while Japan's pay more attention to the livelihood of the people." The South China Morning Post of Hong "Republicans vow to press impeachment crusade" and that the Democrats "warn said that the midterm elections were a victory for political moderation. It said, "If the Republican leadership allows the religious right to dominate the debate, the party will condemn itself to another four years outside the White movies based on magazine stories. It will all be hot, modern, a hone to the pizza for breakfast, and wear mostly black, the brothers don't fit the archetype of the New Media honcho. They hark back to another, very different They are emperors with a discerning eye. They invite the charges of pretentiousness by calling themselves arbiters of "taste" and making movies from scratch. (Distributed movies still constitute about half of Video sales were cutting into box office, and big studio execs were ever more cautious. They wedded themselves to focus groups, obsessed over demographics, studios and bucking the car chase, machine gun boilerplate. The brothers way they want. Most studio heads rely on vice presidents and vast development Only in the '90s did the brothers begin to reap big the old moguls, they cut corners and insist on staying within budget. Where million. When producing a movie, it eschews expensive stars. Instead, it uses strategies. They are hustlers. Their aggressive marketing machine beats any in pioneering the practice of calling Academy Awards voters to sway their votes. One of their standard devices to garner attention for a film is to pick Time magazine planned to reveal the plot twist in The Crying run the detail. Never mind that the movie had been out for months and that a Stories of the brothers' arrogance and brutality are him for making an error at a company softball game. (The employee was later where the studio's former executives commiserated over wounds inflicted by the guys? In many ways, she seems the ideal match for them, and not simply because pretensions but feel no shame in embracing pop culture. They all love lavishness irk the frugal duo? Will the snazzy partnership produce nothing more fault. He may have pitched softballs, but that's what the ground rules of the sole moderator for a reason. He has become our national icon of broadcasting probity, and they knew that he would bring the sort of solemnity to the occasion that would minimize the risk of things getting interesting. to opine, in his hangdog humility, in his desire to serve as moderator rather than interrogator. There's also a reward. From his role as the sole moderator milestone when he won the debate assignment. "I see my selection as a tribute retired almost two decades ago, but the chair has remained empty until now. lack of resources to dig for stories) into strength. Presaging the mostly speak for themselves. Each week, dozens of government officials, foreign leaders, experts, journalists, and voluble wonks descend upon the debates, but there is the same vacant and impassive style, and there are (for he offers little in the way of interruption or contradiction. Like the but I suspect that what they really find it is soothing. Friction and strife first, for his viewers, whom he shields from the passion and fury of the news. of war and misery, but the panel discussions that follow generally still the mean "guests." "He looks at you with those big brown eyes," confides one in this sort of coaching, it was considered a scandal.) And like other questions. But he rarely does. No wonder, then, that the exchanges between reporters seem so articulate and poised; that the guests are eager to return to unabashed about this socializing with pols and power, and it has turned him When his friends appear on his show, they get treated no better than some war criminal with whom he is not acquainted. Or rather, the war criminal gets competitive. The networks and syndicates have expanded news magazine coverage, more slick, and three 24-hour news channels now clog cable television. is perceived by the public as "the most credible" newscast in the country. is not awarded on the basis of ratings. "Credibility" is a vital factor, and "Who do you want to hear it from the next time a plane crashes or a world grandfatherly, astonishingly handsome, his voice as magnificent as ever. victim to Celebrity Identification Disorder, the same malady that causes people extraordinary men for so long that they assume he must be one. defining quality of his career is competence, not genius. He was never a Since the late '50s, however, he has enjoyed the most workmanlike career of any misses work because of illness. Appropriately modest, he credits his success to his "physical equipment" rather than his talent: his height and good health, as researches his roles assiduously, memorizing Old Testament passages to play books and his journal (author of three memoirs, he is an excellent, funny activism is a steady hobby rather than an obsession. He's an enthusiast, but also a dilettante. In the early '60s, he was a staunch civil rights advocate. funding. He has condemned the nuclear freeze movement, obscene rap music, and monomaniacal. (His rhetoric, admittedly, is not always restrained. He denounces if it weren't so nasty. Click for a couple of examples.) gun rights. Until recently, he hasn't spent much time pushing the Second comparison. Both are Democrats who converted to conservative Republicanism. Both are actors who involved themselves in politics. Both served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Both are marvelous speakers. grabbed the ring. He declined invitations from Democrats and Republicans to run presidential race. He was an actor, is an actor, and will always be an actor. His life is comfortable, and he sees no reason to change it. hope to. But he has never done what his characters would have. The extraordinary man, the man who believes he can change the world, hungers for It's a ceremonial position, a grand title with few responsibilities attached. to act presidential. And there's no one who acts presidential better than proposal to lure people into the District by slashing federal income tax rates for city residents got its second big boost in as many days yesterday when have sinned. I confess that I harbor a belief that contradicts much that I have theory and practice, that has earned me the understandable scorn of my Slate cling to this heretical belief, that when one of my colleagues suggested I grounds, I objected (devotion to a free and fair airing of contrary opinions be political consensus on Capitol Hill that might actually produce a timely rescue. (Yes, yes, I stole the central theme of this column from a subordinate. Of course I know most economists believe that local tax breaks do nothing to stimulate overall economic growth. My files are as full as any policy wonk's with scholarly studies demonstrating that using tax lures to well. Obviously, much of the "growth" generated by such a break is merely an ultimately futile "race to the bottom." Less obviously, the new citizens and businesses may be a bad deal. Meeting their needs may require, for example, new roads and schools, without the extra tax revenues needed to pay for them. my heresy blind me to the inefficiency of tax transfers in affecting behavior, economic or otherwise. I will not deny that it has been shown that as much as have taken place anyway. As for the pious hope that the Internal Revenue are truly residents of the district and that the nation's capital has not Congress could just give as much money directly to the district government as rest of the country. Well, this is where I start falling off the train. We're much less educate its children; cannot mend its roads or keep its drinking water potable; cannot police its own police force, let alone its streets or jails; cannot care for the sick, or elderly, or homeless. A government that cannot resist the importuning of any special interest or union, that lacks both the will and the talent to reform itself. What would make anyone think that giving more money to that government would fix anything? save the district is more residents and more businesses able not only to pay more taxes, but to take a lively interest in how they are governed. And only crumbling capital city. Yes, they will come initially at the expense of other, especially neighboring, jurisdictions. But the areas around the capital have long prospered at the expense of the capital. Their commuters benefit mightily from the services provided by the district, yet pay no taxes to support those services. The surrounding areas cannot ultimately flourish without a vibrant core. Moreover, the district, unlike other cities and because of its unique constitutional origins, cannot annex its fleeing middle class. Nor can it claim district when they have so many problems of their own? Why should they allow No, I do not profess that the tax breaks will pay for themselves in no time at all. How could I, when I have so often written that that the right incentives, ones that capitalize on the comparative advantages of people or locations, can reap positive returns not just for the direct government) parks, monuments, mansions, embassies, and museums can compare with streets have a polyglot vitality they lacked only a few decades ago. Its in the wealthy enclaves. You can have a park in your backyard (as I do) and potholes). It would be nice if more of the newcomers were artists, artisans, expenditure of tax revenues might just work wonders. And even if the costs were a dead economic loss to other jurisdictions, surely there are gains in national I am right in my belief. Costly error or painful recriminations lie on either side of my position. The money might, after all, be wasted on windfalls. On the other hand, it's also possible that the tax incentives would miraculously repay year's end, and a third is in the works. At the center of the latest round of the kind of gushy press coverage that other world leaders fantasize about. Lama is, by all accounts, a true holy man: humble, devout, warm, funny, as Holiness is cashing in on the West's romance with Eastern spirituality, using it to attract international sympathy. Dressed in his maroon robes and beatific land protected by stunning mountains, dotted with magnificent temples, ruled by human rights movement." Other trampled nations briefly seize the world's forced to copulate in the street; others were crucified or dragged to death by wields it magnificently. He feeds his Western audiences a softhearted, forgive those who abuse us, know that satisfaction does not come from material in our therapeutic culture: a religion that's about my satisfaction, not "always optimistic" (though if there's any person whom history should have New Age spirituality, find his mixture of exoticism, aphorism, and optimism to die. Then the outside pressure for a peaceful accommodation will vanish.) never exhaust their patience, but sometimes their followers do. space was the occasion for much sneering. Republicans mocked the space trip as hearings. ("He can go into orbit and stay there," snapped a Republican chink. His life proves that in politics virtue can triumph over Earth, became the Mercury superstar anyway. His eloquence, his calm in the face religious, patriotic, a devoted father and a loving husband. political gain. This pact was more selfless than it sounds: It ensured that issues. He's the Senate's technocrat. He likes reading General Accounting pushing to cut waste and rationalize government procurement. He has been, in short, an admirable public servant, a solid, stolid senator. above conflict and partisanship, that does what is right for the nation. But He makes his own decisions on principle and thinks his colleagues should do the deserves them. He's never risen to the top ranks of the Senate because he's scruples (as well as his dullness) also doomed his quest for the presidency. Democratic race with enormous advantages: He had 100-percent national name because he didn't suck up to donors. More importantly, he failed to inspire politics. He believes that speeches should explain facts as much as excite crowds with endless details of energy policy and SALT negotiations. After caucuses, well behind Undecided. He also managed to lose every state in the no exception. But here, too, he may deserve the benefit of the doubt. He still carries a $3-million debt from his presidential campaign. His reluctance to fund raise partly explains the nonpayment of debt. A normal politician would have "invited" corporate allies to a few fund raisers, cleared the debt, and seems to have been oblivious rather than sleazy: "He was simply helping a constituent. It probably never occurred to him that he was doing anything wrong. He was genuinely shocked that people saw venality in his behavior," says Senate, which is a more unfriendly place than when he entered it. He's awkward in opposition: There is too much sniping for him and not enough legislating. his unhappiness with his job. It was the low moment of his career. He stonewalled and disrupted the Republicans at every turn, contending that the but his own partisanship made him uncomfortable. He seems to know that he image. He has done it admirably. His first trip into space was work. Doesn't he and someone is always killing them. Radio was supposed to bury them. So was between business and editorial, cares more about the stock price than about the that ilk. The greatest newspaper of the West is now being run by a man whose newspaper experience totals two years (much of it spent closing papers) and who passed the bulk of his career as an executive of General Mills, a Virtually every newspaper in the country has married some have each section of the Times (sports, business, etc.) operate as a set profitability goals and consult with editors on general content (though Wall Street Journal calls it "a revolution in the newspaper also pushing "hero" stories and civic journalism, the kind of pandering to readers that infuriates editors. He suggests that the Times introduce of Times Mirror), took over as publisher. During the next two decades, Chandler and his editors transformed the Times into one of the best papers in the country. They hired talented writers by the score, ran the longest stories in south, and Chandler's more conservative relatives demanded higher profits. The conservative economist, touting "rational expectations" theory long before it where he eventually served as president, chief operating officer, and vice chairman. General Mills, his critics note, is a company where marketing, rather Two years ago, the Chandler family picked him to run their himself one of the most detested men in journalism. In a now infamous interview, he compared newspapers to cereal. Then he shuttered the venerable "velvet coffin" because of its high pay and cushy working conditions, had not Street loved what the newsroom loathed. Times Mirror's costs plummeted. Profits that Times Mirror is now one of the healthiest firms in the industry. The Chandler family has profited from the company's rising dividends and stock plan editorial sections is terrifying to anyone who's ever met an ad salesman. "Heroic" and civic journalism do often degenerate into idiotic for which the paper is famous. ("We'll just have to be famous for something newspaper man in a long time who actually believes in newspapers. Newspaper profits may be at record highs, but the newspaper Zeitgeist is gloomy. Circulation has barely risen since World War II, and it's been falling for five years. Newspaper reporters increasingly feel themselves According to those who know him, he has learned why newspapers are a public trust since his unfortunate cereal interview. (He has forsworn cereal and features. Other papers fear controversy; he proposes newspaper "crusades." pulled it off. But everyone wants him to try, because only new readers will interested in buying it and turning it into a West Coast version of the New terrible strengths is its power to accuse. The ability of imagery to forgive, expression itself. Guilt will be borne; grace is fleeting. years. It still transforms its viewers into witnesses; it still asks of them the same fearsome question: What have you to do with this? had been infiltrated by enemy forces. The pagoda was hit, killing, among little of this story. It is not a picture of a military attack and its aftermath; it is a picture of terror. We know this is war: The presence of soldiers tells us that. And we know something has just happened, because we see black smoke obliterating the horizon. But what? Terrified children are running down a hellish highway that disappears behind them into a smoky vanishing point, a highway that seems to run through a barren and burning plain. toward? Perhaps they see something down the highway, behind us. But there is no anticipation of sanctuary to be found in their faces. If it is succor toward the naked girl in the middle of the highway. It isn't clear to us why she is naked; perhaps the force of an explosion has blown away her clothes. Is she injured? We can't quite tell. Oddly, she is the only one in the image looking back at us. And we are the only ones looking at her. Indeed, the very act of staring at her nakedness seems to only intensify her humiliation. There is a dimension to her unending scream that seems to be in reaction to our very act present; the sequence exists on film as well. Because it is more dreadful physically, the film is less potent emotionally. (The same is true for another They passed the camera, it followed from behind. The girl's back and arm were seen to be completely covered with black patches of burned skin, no longer from which most viewers must recoil. Furthermore, the filmed sequence closes of a crowded highway winding eternally through hell, and it won't let you credited it with confirming his opposition to the war. themselves responsible for significant suffering both before and after they attained power. Like all such atrocity material, it undermined the morale of the side responsible for the pain it depicted. But the political manipulation prisoner of this image. As she told National Public Radio, her desire to study medicine was thwarted by officials who wanted her to remain available for media interviews that stemmed from the photograph's worldwide fame; she herself had pain and with burned arms outstretched, staggers toward us down the middle of a when she finally covered that last patch of pocked road, she would offer her at a political career. But the person who has capitalized most on the legacy is of the King Center. He inaugurated his tenure with a call to arms: "My father King. He hasn't let up since. In the last four months alone, the King family alleging that the network had violated copyright laws by excerpting the "I Have to King's assassination without trial, is dying of liver disease. He claims he was a patsy. King family members hint at a grand and sinister conspiracy. that anyone can make a fortune. In the '90s version, all it takes is a catalog of marketable data, vigorous application of copyright law, the financial muscle of a multinational media conglomerate, a few good lawyers, and frequent demoralizing experience. Disconcerting because his voice has the same intonation, the same accent, the same creamy richness as his father's. Demoralizing because his message is so distant from his father's. Martin spoke library, a nonviolence training school. It alienated sponsors and neighbors and programmatic impact of the King Center across the last decade has been Dexter, who had spent most of his professional career as a music producer and promoter, was the one who realized that the family was covers every angle a young media entrepreneur could dream of: highbrow nonfiction (the first comprehensive collection of King's sermons); innovative nonfiction (a King "autobiography" cobbled together from his writings); include his thoughts on health and nutrition). Dexter and his business partner tasteful King statuettes. (Countering a question about tackiness, Dexter says, a Dream" speech without permission. The Kings demand stiff payments from King speeches in a textbook, has denounced the exorbitant rates charged by the does have copyright law on his side, a point that he makes with numbing regularity. "It has always been our legal right [to control King's works]," he national manifesto, but King's words belong to his estate. In fact, the words are the family's only inheritance, since King left no material legacy. Dexter himself copyrighted the "I Have a Dream" speech two days after he delivered it, and he sued a record company to enforce the copyright. (Not that King most effective way possible. Publicizing King will make him live: "His media profit happens to be a byproduct of doing the right thing." reach the entire world. A small university press can't. "The end result of what Dexter is doing now will be to make King's ideas far more publicly accessible argument that would go down easier if Dexter were promoting anything besides commercial enterprises. After all, the King Center has educational programs, and Dexter rarely takes public positions on subjects that Ray has requested (and been denied) a trial seven times, and the King family has never backed his petitions before. But this time is different, says Dexter, because Ray is dying, and because the Ray family has asked the Kings to speak out. (More cynical observers say this time is different because of the Kings' the killer, and he cites "compelling new evidence" of Ray's innocence collected for Ray, calling for ballistics tests to determine if a gun with Ray's fingerprint fired the lethal bullet. But this decision is a long, long way from a trial. If an appeals court sustains the ruling (which is considered unlikely), and if subsequent ballistics tests indicate that the gun did not fire the deadly bullet, then there could be a new trial. deterred Dexter. He's planning to visit Ray in prison this week. And he's brands as his enemy is instantly sympathetic. Helms says he will use his powers nominees who have given up when Helms opposed them, Weld has girded for battle. wants his fight with Helms to be a "battle over the soul of the Republican Party." And where does Bill Weld think the soul of the Republican party should law school. But his alleged libertarianism is inconsistent, and may be no more Democratic state. Weld certainly did not advertise himself as a libertarian Weld's popular appeal is based less on the perception that he's a libertarian than the perception he's that even rarer animal, a moderate Republican. With the crusty, rural, reactionary Helms as a foil, Weld seems a moderate, cosmopolitan thinking man, above petty politics. He is even willing to accept a job in a Democratic administration. But Weld's moderation, his "independent spirit," like his libertarianism, may actually reflect two less flake because he's an aristocrat. And he brilliantly fuses these two politically disadvantageous conditions into a political plus. Weld comes from notion that a man of wealth makes the best statesman, because he will never be put it this way: "In the Governor's office, Weld has restored a tradition of ascendancy seem an expression of natural law, if not of divine right." He can that he had planned months before to leave the Justice Department. He didn't And then there's his claim that as governor he restored the budget deficit and threatening the state's financial solvency. To stave off increases would ruin the state's bond rating, and result in irresponsibly large to the great weakness in today's liberalism: its obsession with social issues conservatism. As promised in the campaign, he slashed social spending and welfare rolls. However, taxes remain at nearly the same levels as when he tax increases, he and his state would be up shit creek. He has the unpopular conditions for solid growth that have buoyed his popularity. Three years into his term he dropped his strident opposition to gun control when the position began hurting his poll numbers. Though he describes himself Weld's capriciousness is key to his success. Even when it expectation that his personal wealth will allow him to do whatever he thinks is right. His whimsy can be downright charming. During a signing ceremony for a pictures to reporters of himself with a giant boar he claims to have hunted run for the ambassadorship few expect him to win should be treated like these other nutty episodes. Even reporters who describe the move as quixotic express admiration for his audacity. He has already demonstrated his acumen at milking the confrontation with Helms for its maximum theatrical and political value. becoming attorney general or secretary of state, and no doubt thinks of even matters, ignore what he says and listen to how he says it. There are only two Teamsters president delivers speeches and strike ultimatums in an accent best described as a Queens Bray. Hearing him on the news this week was a shock: How long has it been since such a broad, brassy voice has been broadcast to the nation? Or, to pose the question another way, how long has it been since anyone outside a union hall paid attention to a union leader? public consciousness, and while the UPS strike is the most important and laundered union dues into his campaign chest. (One consultant has already because of the investigations. The New Republic and the Wall Street strike in order to distract attention from his own troubles. emperor and entered on a litter borne aloft by four muscled men. The union's local bosses were no better: The "barons" padded their payrolls with family bribes from employers in exchange for sweetheart contracts, siphoned pension local to the pickets against UPS, and won huge concessions. When national the union's only incorruptible bosses. But it was a surprise when he upset two own salary by a third, sold the union's fleet of private jets, and canceled the purged hundreds of local officials for consorting with mobsters. In just five of the barons, may have been the final nail in the coffin of the old guard. also fought to restore labor's national credibility: He spearheaded the little doubt that his consultants broke election laws and no doubt that Which brings us to the charge that the UPS strike is a disparate pay scales, two concessions that the old, corrupt union leaders months rallying the rank and file behind the strike and, UPS' protestations to the contrary, he seems to enjoy overwhelming support from the picketers. (Union strike, and the tight labor market will make it difficult for the company to hero of New Labor, yet a certain pathos clouds his achievements. What exactly has led a strike whose aims are embarrassingly modest by the standards of old pension plan. But this is organized labor in the '90s, where even a hero must delectation a rock star so base, so vile, so offensive to common decency, that who's doing the calling, "death metal," "industrial," "gothic," "glam metal," high on testosterone could enjoy. What this means is huge, distorted guitar noise, a thumping backbeat, lots of screechy fuzz, and vocals that are usually droned, occasionally screamed or hissed. It also means ferocious lyrics: the god of Fuck ...Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said god was ever place. Yeah, right, great. If you're so good explain the shit stains on your music. He and fellow band members have adopted female pop icons' first names androgynous, ragged leather clothes. He looks like the Grim Reaper after a nasty motorcycle accident. His concerts are frenzied: He lacerates his chest paper. The band's videos are filled with freakish images of medical oddities. Your Mom and Dad, Kill Yourself." Needless to say, kids eat this up. The most ridiculous. You wouldn't think that anyone could take this kind of rock that his music has deep social significance. He cites his intellectual and they should be ashamed of what they have eaten. Fortunately you have received this in time to escape the encroaching HOLOCAUST of fascist christian rocker vs. the prudish, humorless censors. You want both sides to lose. Earlier battles over offensive music were fought on dog onstage, had anal and oral sex onstage, threw puppies and kittens into the crowd to be torn apart, and led Satanic services that included a "virgin sacrifice." The affidavits also attest that he watched friends stab a woman to galvanized ministers and Christian Coalition members to organize protests and band and its fans have retaliated in kind. The band is threatening to sue the everyone wins. The decency folks get to make headlines, shock consciences, and keep selling records. The good times won't last. The shelf life of preteen bands is measured in months. When the censors and parents stop complaining, the kids will stop listening, and the band will fade away. balloons with live worms, released them above the audience, then popped them, showering fans with night crawlers.) Cooper was condemned, reviled and, for a brief time, incredibly popular. In recent years he's made a revival. He played much as a cat fight between friends, and last week's spat between Supreme Court reasonable time to confirm or reject [nominees]. Some current nominees have been waiting a considerable time for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote or a been spun. Editorial pages and pundits agreed: If a conservative conservative soldier first and last, a partisan in the service of the passionately in states' rights. (This principle has haunted him. Click to read why.) He was appalled by the way federal courts were intervening in state and local governance, coddling criminals, and expanding individual rights. He was an early convert to judicial restraint, concluding that federal courts should court's outlier, writing lonely, sclerotic dissents and preaching a supreme rationalist, and even his critics admired the analytical force of his conservative than its predecessors (especially on race and crime), but most of its major decisions (on abortion, gay rights, Internet free speech) have been has made the Supreme Court do less and do it more rationally. He has not grown has been to pare the court's docket. The Burger court heard oral arguments in meddling. "His great contribution as chief justice is that the role of the every level. He may have requested more judges, but only because the courts are clogged and slow. He has urged Congress repeatedly to stop federalizing crimes. federal involvement in state cases and, more importantly, sped up the judicial seventh appeal. He thinks that things should not be chewed on endlessly," says pithiness of the victor. Two decades ago, he wrote extensively because he had to explain his unfamiliar views to a liberal world. Now, his views are mainstream law. He doesn't need to elaborate on them. fellow justices to turn in draft decisions promptly and penalizes tardy colleagues by withholding new assignments. The justices who disagree with office. I favor the second explanation. Why would he bother to retire? Every year he has less work to do. He's made sure of that. The efficient justice for the Ethical Treatment of Animals forced the National Park Service to remove New World Order. "Look, he sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good. And he's got a list with day, he visited homes and left gifts for children by the fireplace. The Dutch and poor families would celebrate around their fireplaces. Store owners appropriated his picture for ads and posters.) exist. The Sun replied with one of the most famous editorials in But we have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical is unappetizing, a mall pedophile or a fat buffoon. factory. It has a package delivery system that makes Federal Express look like to watch the climax of Flytrap than the place where it began. who is a friend but not an ideological soul mate, has stocked the apartment with conservative pals, and they are in high glee. This is a night of As theater, the Map Room talk was a minor masterpiece. would have been disastrous. The Map Room was the right choice: The Oval Office would have been presumptuous and seamy (Where's that private study, Bill?). culpa to show for it. He sounded angry, not sorry. He conceded an people. He "took complete responsibility." But all those are champion weasel expressions. What does it mean to "take complete responsibility"? Do you actually have to do anything painful when you take it? What is an "inappropriate" relationship? Is it sexual? What's the difference between up, baffled. His words defy comprehension. He believes language is a weapon of the golden rule of spin: When you're explaining, you're losing. The president, who has always felt more comfortable attacking than defending, artfully turned has ever expressed an opinion about Flytrap not on television tonight? life, and the distraction of the nation from serious matters. The speech was This raises the curious paradox about the Map Room speech. investigations have "gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people." He is absolutely correct that his personal life has been invaded in ways that no one's should. He is absolutely correct that Flytrap has horribly distracted politicians, journalists, and the public from critical But tonight was not the night to make such arguments. He should have left the abject apology, for contrition, for explanation. Tonight was the night to eat past few weeks at regular intervals, Republican politicians have been telling thing of beauty and a joy forever as a player, is turning out to be a fabulous missed the playoffs, and were led by a core of aging, disgruntled players. This Coach is not much like Bird the Player, at least not in the ways you might players, and the media. He played the rube. He had grown up in the small, poor of endless guile and will. Bird may have been slow, but he was an astounding competitor. He was always busy on the court: If he didn't make the assist, he made the basket; if he didn't make the basket, he grabbed the rebound; if he didn't grab the rebound, he made the steal. He was also a relentless trash talker, mocking opponents' attempts to guard him. (Once, when Magic and buried a jumper.) Bird goaded and inspired his own teammates, and they heeded him: If he told a teammate to do something, he did it. Thanks in large together, retired together. One of the greatest achievements of each is that he destroyed the stereotype about himself. Magic, the black, mouthy, "Showtime" guard, won over basketball fogies with his sound fundamentals and court intelligence. Bird, the solid white guy, won over Magic's fans with his So why is Bird's coaching career taking off when Magic's He failed as a coach for the reason that other great players have failed as coaches: He thought about himself too much. He complained his players didn't care about the game the way he did. He felt he still belonged on the court. But basketball player could ever dream of. He doesn't want to play anymore, and he result, Bird is a very effective, very unobtrusive leader. The player who used to be involved in every play has become a coach who is hardly involved in any and games. Bird is quiet, has short meetings, and never chews out his players publicly. He doesn't criticize them when they make turnovers or commit fouls, and he doesn't tell them how to play. He treats them as professionals, just as over and over, is "It's a player's game." He laid down a few commandments: Thou Pacers. Last year, they were spooked. This season, they sense Bird's trust. They play confidently, hustle, and never choke in the fourth quarter. They're the Pacers don't play beautiful or acrobatic basketball. They play something typical canniness, Bird chose to coach a team that would listen to him. The doesn't like its glitz and disapproves of young players' greed. And he has said kids, but he surely could. The Pacer who has made the most improvement under mightily, feuded with coaches, and generally demoralized himself and the players around him. Under Bird, he has settled in happily as a Pacers role player. He's playing a little more, scoring a little more, and cooperating a lot more. Bird gave him respect, and Rose reciprocated. the league. Maybe, just as he helped revive pro basketball as a player in the early '80s, he can revive the game as a coach in the late '90s, saving it for a id of the Republican Congress, the rage beneath its tense smiles. Republican that he has corrupted the White House, that he's deeply sleazy, and that he He's now preparing articles of impeachment and happily adding obstruction of himself as the spokesman for the abandoned conservative fringes, as an to be represented by the head of the John Birch Society, and it voted for Pat has been igniting nasty fires over issues that Republican leaders would rather ignore. He is more than willing to embarrass party leaders over matters of leadership to move the bill by whipping up support among conservative their "deviant way of life." ("The flames of hedonism, the flames of fondness for guns exceeds the National Rifle Association's, also led the the ban alone: There is little upside to endorsing semiautomatic weapons. But has been Capitol Hill's hottest interview. All this has played brilliantly conservatives who have felt abandoned by the Republican Party. He's almost the want their leaders to be held personally accountable, then we are in pretty sad zeal is notorious. He interrogates hostile (read "liberal") witnesses with a chilliness that astonishes congressional staffers. He never smiles when a frown will do, never skips a chance to seize the moral high ground. At a recent her allies were "very hardened, very cold, very callous ...[and] have photographed licking whipped cream off a buxom woman's breasts. It was at a persistence and effectiveness. But part of it is personal. Even his admirers admit he's "dour" and "humorless." (His enemies use words like "mean" and "heartless.") House Judiciary Committee staffers can't recall a single occasion address, every member of Congress, Republican and Democratic, rose repeatedly introduce articles of impeachment to the committee. House Majority Leader Dick most obsessive Democrat of the last generation. If impeachment hearings do the timidity of Republican leaders and held himself out as the true vicious partisan, but he is also sunny of temperament, cooperative, optimistic. pernicious side effects of Flytrap has been the relocation of the White House to an alternative universe, a place where up is down and down is up and wife who acts like a lawyer, a president who acts like a criminal defendant, and a former intern who has more power than any of them. a spinner who can't spin, a presidential press secretary who can't talk to the press or the president about the only issue they care about. Here, as evidence, are the notes I managed to scrawl during passed on any answers to us. We have passed on the questions, and they have made it clear I have nothing to say on that subject today. a mattress. In half an hour of questions, reporters manage to glean any of the logistics of his testimony will be revealed, whether he will answer president, whether "completely and truthfully" means the same thing it did at interrupting with shouts of "Why are you denigrating us?" and "It's not a fear of subpoenas and legal bills, the press secretary simply can't talk to the president about Flytrap. He is in the impossible position of interpreting and embarrassment to the press secretary and the press corps. White House is inattentive to the media. As the New York Times and more on the utter cynicism of this latest White House PR ploy, see FRAME GAME: White Of course I haven't spoken to him. If I had discussed it with him I would be pundits that Flytrap has entered what they like to call its "endgame." But I think the scandal has moved into a very different phase: the Baroque. what I mean. Flytrap as a journalistic enterprise is in a holding pattern. Punditry abhors a vacuum. So, in the absence of news, journalists and analysts are concocting ever more ornate theories to explain what could be happening, sculpting the long available info into gaudy new patterns. Some of these theories are based on intelligent guesswork. Some belong to the "I have a friend who has a friend who talked to the president who even have a tenuous relationship to an actual fact. But, at bottom, all are founded on essentially the same knowledge base: none. theories, tales decorated with filigree and gilded rosettes and stucco clouds. Since these may be the final few days before real new facts about Flytrap emerge, let's take a last chance to revel in the Baroque. Having spent the past I offer you a few of the best (divided into appropriate categories). about the dress, the answering machine messages, the talking points, and would she leak? Because she still adores him, and she wants to signal him about dress as a bargaining chip to guarantee her full immunity, even though she knew there was nothing on it. Since she has full immunity, it doesn't hurt her if existence of the dress as a favor to Secret Service agents. They wanted to signal the agents that there is plenty of damning evidence of an affair, so puts it, "instructions to orally seduce the president in order to assure positive transfer of his semen (positive proof of sexual acts) on an article of her clothing." Thus she kept the dress, knowing that her affair was going to be existence was revealed to the public), a Secret Service officer warned Bob Dole special care not to be seen or photographed with her, because it would lend must use the media and rumor to communicate with the president, because they are not allowed to talk to him about Flytrap directly. much the product of an alien genius that they can't be categorized. These come untouched from the inky void of Flytrap, both courtesy of implemented his entire political agenda and revived the economy, he is Gross used to tell of a letter he got from a constituent. The writer, as I recall, had heard that the government was paying people not to raise hogs and, since he thought that was a trade for which he might have some talent, he wanted the congressman's help in applying for the program. His plans were modest, not raising a few dozen head to start. But after he got the course, not raising hogs can be a pretty smelly business (not!). Nowadays, the constituent could aspire to more antiseptic digs. He could enter the he wanted to get in on the ground floor of this promising industry. And he'd to participate in the Medicare Graduate Medical Education Demonstration Project approved this week by the federal Health Care Financing Administration. The residents they would otherwise have trained over the next six years. Hospitals in other states were quick to complain that they had not been offered the same in scope until the success of the strategy had been tested. This is, after all, You might have thought that the proposition that when the government hands out money someone will take it had already been amply demonstrated. Or, you might have wondered why, if the country is faced with an imminent glut of doctors, this is something the government should worry about. suppliers will cut back, and things will return to equilibrium? Don't we want lower medical prices? Isn't that what the whole nasty fight over managed care and restraining Medicare costs is all about? Why not just let the market's would presume that we had something like a competitive market operating in the medical sector. Of course, we do not. In fact, we could not. Even the but the most basic health services. Inevitably, physicians and other care providers will dictate both the type and quantity of treatments that their rightly regarded as a public good, a country as wealthy as ours will inevitably provide a host of subsidies, both public and private, to encourage us to swallow a good deal more medicine than we would if we paid for it out of our lower wages, higher prices, and higher taxes, but it doesn't feel that way. Markets operate on felt signals, and it is taking too long for the signal that attracted both by the satisfying aspects of caring for their fellow citizens receive, are still queuing up to undertake the grueling and expensive training that the profession requires. And hospitals, encouraged by Medicare subsidies, generous are the government subsidies for resident training (as much as And since the longer a resident trains, the larger the total subsidy, the system has also encouraged doctors to extend their educations and become Cutting back on resident subsidies seems the obvious solution. But teaching hospitals, the undisputed crown jewels of the medical system, are already under great financial strain. (And in New York, they are in developing an industry whose products are unmatched in quality, quantity, has settled on a convoluted solution: continuing the subsidies for the residents that are trained, but paying the hospitals additional amounts not to the six years of the "demonstration." "Brilliant and bizarre" is how experts already entertained extending the program, noting that if jealous congressmen from other jurisdictions "think this is a good deal, they have the power to make it more available." Really? How widely? Surely, most of us can take credit the medical sector? Many will feel that the case for subsidizing the lawyers by the caseload. Others may feel that the money would be better spent weaponry, thus saving us the expense of generating still more lethal weapons when the current crop inevitably falls into the hands of our enemies. Why not pay poor people not to be poor? Come to think of it, that's what the welfare parades, the House's majority leader was casting for bass on an Army Corps of At least, that's what we've come to expect, given the would (to quote the bumper sticker) "rather be fishing" than putting up with Republican leadership, setting him apart from other politicians and making him Republican incumbents don't want another headache leading the party. would become a safe seat, he fathered one of the unlikeliest pieces of legislation to emerge from Congress: a bill creating an apolitical process for the White House) that he expected to be the next majority leader. He may have can't put your finger on a problem when you've got it to the wind." direct answers to unfriendly questions, although he's always good for a few politically dead for so long that most folks talk about him as a quaint memory. passed over for the job. Consider the rest of the Republican leadership: Republicans fear DeLay and respect his political abilities, but they don't like eyes at lobbyists, passing around campaign contributions on the House floor, etc. But he's more comfortable behind the scenes; pencil him in as the next getting the job, he's started to cultivate a more conciliatory image. But a agonized over the question of human rights in China, but then reached the out. Even Republican loyalists would agree that anybody is better than knew that disaster had truly struck. "It's a strange feeling to see the casinos then, I had been skeptical about media reports of natural disasters. Earlier his state after it had been hit by a set of snowstorms (this was before warm that a lot of people were without electricity. But somehow, it didn't feel like Well, have we? Having lowered our standards on what the required level of government intervention, shifting to the national treasury responsibility for hardships that individuals and localities once incorrigible cynic would suspect the victims of quakes, tornadoes, and wildfires of smiling at the thought of the fat government relief check that would enable them to pack up for sunnier climes, or at least to replace that crummy old carpeting in the living room. And yet, the data do suggest that billion over the previous five. Billions more were spent collectively by some departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, declared a "major disaster or emergency" by the president (though federal help had been offered in a dozen or so other "winter events" in which additional the tendency of relief aid to gravitate toward electorally rich states, might even conclude that the gods of mayhem conspire with incumbents to provide calamitous occasions for the demonstration of political compassion. After all, explanation: Disaster relief is "a unique example of political pork that pork, but we are a wealthy country. Why shouldn't we all pitch in and help each for five crucial days so that it could be reworked to feature pictures of, and bipartisan taste, and when both parties dig in, the banquet never ends. had been granted "temporary" aid after the disaster. Many, according to a functionary could have missed the lesson: When you do battle with disaster, no appeals that states and individuals can file if the feds decline to pick up full costs of relocating not only families but also such expensive entities as city halls and universities. Another idea: Eliminating help (including officials could be heard last week bemoaning the fact that people just keep moving back into the flood plains from which only a few years earlier they had been rescued, even as developers destroy more of the watershed that offered its Web site is the following: "I think that some people in my neighborhood are trying to cheat the federal government out of disaster money. They don't seem to have the damage they claim they have, and they're bragging about it. Who can bending by individuals is probably penny ante stuff compared with the advantage upgrades" requiring massive or even total reconstruction of buildings suffering Local governments quickly learn bad lessons, too. If they are foolish enough to set aside reserves to cover their own cleanup costs after storms and floods, they get no help at all. On the other hand, if, having raise enough revenues to cover all their regular spending plus the payback cost money and collecting interest on it. And now an imaginative but severely they, like previous reforms, were likely to be rejected by Congress because they would "seriously affect benefits to the states and their citizens." Now efforts to "mitigation" instead, to helping localities prepare better for the next disaster. Handing out a new kind of grant has, after all, a great deal more political appeal than trying to crack down on the old kind. But, it's worth remembering when the next set of calamities hits your television our problems, the overhead tends to get very high, very fast. And some of the largest costs are paid in the corrosion of those personal and community the final, ironic nail in the counterculture coffin. The establishment has and "Masters of War" and was the role model for a generation of protestors. ignored presidential campaigns and lefty crusades. He never preached, or much sympathized with, hippie rhetoric. He denied, and still denies, that his songs pretty grim song.) Neocons have always claimed that narcissism, not ideology, looking of musicians, a selfish genius, gives that claim credence. and rabidly loyal fans. When some pop musicians turned to psychedelia in the their lyrics and sandblasting their melodies into strange new creations. He plays a song you've always loved, and you can't even recognize it. has never been a musician less concerned with nostalgia. concerts a year, and he does occasional interviews. But he says little about his music and nothing about his life. His marriage, his divorce, his personal mellowed slightly since his younger days, when he took pleasure in torturing reinvent himself again. He said recently that songs don't come to him easily anymore: Time Out of Mind is his first album of new material in eight hypnotic. But it sounds like a return to something old and comfortable rather another transformation within him, his voice may not. Opera singers who take manages to sing around his weak voice. As you can hear on this clip from His range, already narrow, will soon be just a bleat. But better to go out polite diplomacy revived weapons inspections (which have eliminated far more accomplished all this in a way that brought glory to the United States: He restraint; the United Nations gains credit for keeping the peace; the will of States has lost nothing but time: There will be far more support for bombing if War stymied the United Nations. Today the United States does. It is dominant in The United States has its own ill feelings toward the United Nations. funding for the United Nations, and many of Helms' Republican colleagues in is smaller, better run, and more deferential to the United States. United States and the United Nations. He is too attached to his organization, exactly recommend him to anyone outside that bureaucracy.) He has spent his life as an "international civil servant," a phrase that conjures an image United Nations, rising gradually through the ranks at the World Health Organization, the High Commission on Refugees, and the Secretariat. Eventually Got Things Done. Thanks to his straightforward manner and overwhelming decency, with his reputation unharmed. When the United States decided to dump candidate to replace him. (Everyone, that is, except the French. They wanted a the initiative but tractable enough to heed his board members (that is, the cut enough; others say he has cut too much. In other words, he's doing it just is tough without being vicious. The United States would never have let thrive, it's not enough that the United States trust it. The United Nations Nations, which gets a quarter of its $2.6-billion budget from the United States. The organization has already curtailed essential activities, and may be the house religion of the New York magazine world, this has been a particularly satisfying week for glossy mag writers and editors. New Yorker Editor loyalists to the Old New Yorker have been eagerly anticipating for six from his position as The New Yorker 's publisher, then appointed a president, a job she reportedly coveted. Recent articles have exposed the are out of favor with King Si. Now New York media are speculating (without spin war. "You live by buzz, you die by buzz," says an ex- New Yorker editor, with malicious glee. It's not that anything has actually changed at The New Yorker in recent weeks, but there is a perception that Brown and the magazine are stumbling. And as Brown knows as well as anyone, after all, is print media's greatest showman. The daughter of a film producer and a publicist, she packages her magazines like movies and promotes them like a flack. Her formula: She overpays star writers, gives them top billing, and Fair simply by publishing slobbering celebrity stories. That's not fair to her: Everyone published slobbering celebrity stories in the '80s: Brown's genius was to combine them with superb investigative, political, and feature writing, then wrap it all in a salacious cover that you just had to supplemented the already prodigiously talented staff with her own snazzy hires. Her magazine pandered to celebrities and petted moguls, but it also ran the old days, you couldn't tell what year an issue of The New Yorker was published; now you could tell what day it was published. The magazine, which packaged and promoted. The chattering classes began chattering about it and advertisers she needs but frosts underlings. Her buzz production is endless. The old New Yorker was whimsical, often fatally so: Writers were expected to indulge their own peculiar interest and damn public what's hot, then you are writing about what everyone is writing about. Brown's magazine is predictable and getting more so the longer she is there: Of celebrity.) A magazine that was once entirely, and bizarrely, different from for another important way in which sameness has affected The New the bad financial news, would be an acknowledgment that he picked wrong in no signs that she's interested. She has too much pride to surrender in the middle of the battle. As an old friend of hers puts it, "She would only quit if she could quit in triumph, with everyone acknowledging that it is the best magazine in the world and that she is the best editor and with the magazine in quirky advertisers out of the magazine in favor of big national ones. Ad revenue increased but not enough to cover enormous new costs: Recruiting new subscribers by direct mail, printing more magazines, and mailing more magazines advertisers. The magazine can't compete with monthlies either. Vanity issues save The New Yorker postage and printing costs, and their losing money, and Brown seems trapped. She has staked her career on profitability. The New Yorker could probably make money as a bimonthly magazine could also break even by raising subscription prices and shrinking the unprofitable one. And now they don't seem to know what to do with it. read why Brown likes celebrity stories. If you missed the sidebar about The New Yorker 's moral authority, it is. And is an anecdote about the rack and ruin, he had overstayed his welcome, everyone wanted him to leave, and the city on edge, and he loved it. His press conferences were packed. The significance. Each week was supposed to be the week he announced his decision unfathomable. How could he be ahead? (I won't begin to justify all the bad hasn't much changed his ways: He still favors racial rhetoric and Democratic primary also found that the vast majority of Republican Congress installed a Control Board to oversee the city's shaky finances. Congress and the Control Board soon stripped the mayor of authority to issue contracts or manage budgets. Last year, they usurped his control of the city bureaucracy, removing departments of public safety, welfare, health care, public works, and basically everything else that matters from his of Aging. (The transfer of power has been good news for the city, which has like the emperor he once was. He has a limo at his beck and call. His personal things he didn't do and announces "initiatives" that will never be initiated. And he still takes grand foreign tours on which he behaves as if he is visiting the actual power bothers him, but I don't think it's as big a deal as the aura of power," says a longtime friend. "It's not just the limo, because anyone can him by cutting his salary; eliminating the security guards who remain; and stripping him of the few, pathetic agencies he does control. nonentity. So why not hand the job off? Congress will be more likely to return not a whimper: "He can go out saying, 'See, they still love me. I told you I gracious payoff in exchange for his decision to step down. It's a good idea. respectable retirements for its former leaders. Pols spend their dotage as colleges about a position for him. He is also planning lecture tours and Given his track record as the District's mayor, you might want to sell your bad, is cheerfully toasting its star's bright future. The theme: We haven't popular sitcom; it was also its best (except, perhaps, for The comedy, exposed the absurdities of family life, and punctured the egos of bosses and politicians. Like All in the Family --and no show could take the girl out of the trailer, but you couldn't take the trailer out notorious as the worst workplace in television). She publicly accused her lead by dropping her last name. She married her security guard (perhaps to reduce her breasts, smooth her wrinkles, slim her face (alarmingly, she first). She stopped telling interviewers about anal sex and started talking Goddess, the one idea that made the show great, "the only good idea she's ever had," as one acquaintance puts it. She could no longer portray a convincing show. Don't be surprised when it flops. She's spent the last nine years talking on television. She seems to have nothing left to say. was terribly, terribly wrong when a Fox News producer called me yesterday. She will do a Flytrap marathon in anticipation of the president's testimony. Her imploringly: "We're really looking for something different. Can you be of course I can be different. My mother always told me I was "different.") wrote about last week, is the rising popularity of preposterous conspiracy The crisis is, at bottom, a market failure. Ratings Crossfire must have fire. Hardball must be hard. Face the Nation must have someone to face. But there's not enough supply to meet the been hypothesized. Every theory theorized. Every spin spun. Each tiny nugget of new information is chewed, swallowed, regurgitated as cud, and chewed again. use it [in a column or on television]. If I had even one new observation, I would not breathe a word about it until I could use it. One piece of real news all. One compares Flytrap to World War I trench battles: "No one is getting overrun, but steady progress is being made." In fact, he says, plenty of fascinating new details emerge every day. (When asked for an example of such a is their moment. No topic is so stale that it cannot be reheated: After all, it Flytrap nothing is being spewed, think how much worse it would be if there were no scandal at all. At least it's something to talk about. proposes that pundits take advantage of the information vacuum to talk about can all concur that the Punditry Crisis requires immediate action. Well, the first lady. Everyone remembers that the first lady blamed Flytrap on a days of the crisis. The Post reminds readers of what else she said think that would be a very serious offense. That is not going to be proven would be thrown back in his face again and again and again? there is cause for pause. Sure, The God of Small Things is a cozy read. But so are many of those books that go straight to the remainder pile. So why incubated this book for the better part of five years and then released it to played to that market in terms it understands and swallows whole. family at the center of the novel belongs to a small, insular community whose lush, richly runny: "The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes random capitalization and italicization; numbered lists; reversed words; adjectival clusters; acronyms; quotations from songs and poems; repeated enhances it, forcing the reader to keep pace. (Click for a sample.) enough to charm, similar enough not to intimidate. And the fact that she's How glossy, therefore, is the praise, how insubstantial the contact, in the panache, revealing the fatal confluence of jealousy, cruelty and naivete that shapes their destinies forever." No mention of the flabby plot with its met and raved, and timorous, tingling questions ("How deep did you have to reach to release those wonderful twins?") were asked during the author's tours. this woman felt things more deeply, more creatively, more spiritually. And she responded. Asked about her language, she said it is "the skin on my thoughts," traceable only to private rhythms. So deeply felt, so minutely realized were these rhythms, it seems, that she rewrote nary a word of her book (remarkable, chaired last year's prize committee, called The God "execrable" and said committee has confirmed the darkest suspicions of its critics: Yes, it's sold out quality literature for pop accessibility. Also: The queen's recent visit to spun as a compensatory gesture from the colonialists to the former colony. said. The win brought tears to her eyes, of course, and prompted a phone call like the twins' mother, married outside her community before returning divorced and in disgrace. Mother and daughter were estranged for six years, if the stories circulating here are to be believed. Kicked out of the house when she to architecture school, supporting herself by selling empty milk bottles (some future," says this ace of the apothegm. "I will only write another novel if I have another novel to write. I don't believe in professions." published on the condition that it never be optioned. Last week, the Daily Bedroom. This is neither a trick question nor an implausible request: The on the presidency and auctioning off our national integrity and memory in the to the photograph, and to our search for that room. You will, by now, have noticed that the White House interior is filled with a mesh of steel girders holding up the exterior, and that the sorts of things that are usually said to was taken, most of these things were probably in a landfill in northern Service's pictures of a totally gutted White House have become a kind of forbidden imagery, evidence of something that none of us seems to want to glory. Some pictures are allowed to speak their thousand words because we like what they have to say; some pictures are silenced. This is one. hardly a secret that the White House interior became a structural replica under The place was closed for about a year and a half. Work there was widely reported, and thousands of pieces of the presidents' some significant cues to remembering all this, especially the attempt on House telling this story to anyone who hasn't heard it. the Park Service pictures documenting the work all that rare. Our own role in establishing it. When it was revealed a while back that Franklin those days told reporters how he'd drilled the necessary holes in the floor those holes were "probably still there." Of course, the many thousands of White dumping of the White House interior represents "a needless and tragic loss." Still, it is obviously a historic place, and not just because the famous exterior remains (as do the mantelpieces, chandeliers, and paneling that were years to make a sufficiently large quilt. On the other hand, the President's Booth shot him, and no one would argue that Ford's is anything but a replica. Beds, chairs, and pews are where history rests its aging destroyed a good many places with real claims to historical value, places as old as the White House, with bricks from the same brickyard. The deciding factor in what stays and goes, apart from "charm," is often the same: Who is associated with it? Where does it rank in the Great Man Theory of Tour Bus History? Indeed, as the capital ages, its history is increasingly becoming whatever associative past you can conjure up as ornament, reward, or the idea of the room makes the room historic, even if there's not much there. encountered him, he wrote, in the form of mysterious knocks on the door and White House itself into a kind of clanking ghost of presidents past, its very rooms suffused with the great spirits of those who slept there. Once conjured, it throws its looming shadow over the unworthy and undeserving who dare bring to the Republican ticket. And the downside? Judging from the media gotten an amazing free pass, since Dole chose him last week, on his three It's laughably easy to get a reputation as a thinker in knowing that it includes the magic word "supply." Reporters are impressed. And obvious sincerity. Even an empty enthusiasm for ideas is appealing in a party back can be fully accounted for by the ironic fact that government statistics, and fallacious arguments than those of most other politicians. But ideas: It suggests that you are not subjecting your own "ideas" to even the be lovely if a woman's freedom to choose didn't conflict with a fetus' claim on life. But the notion that this can be arranged is a magic wish, not an or a welcome melding of extremes into moderation, rather than as a mathematical middle class. Quite the contrary: They almost invariably involve tax breaks for no doubt his personal compassion for society's downtrodden is real. But as brings us to "optimism." I, too, would be optimistic if I thought most of our social problems could be solved by lower taxes for everyone, even lower taxes and that the more you cut people's taxes, the more money will flood into the federal treasury. But believing that requires more than a leap of faith: It It's easy to be optimistic if you believe in the tooth true that psychological predisposition, as much as reason and intellect, leads for alchemy. But it's silly to prize optimism for its own sake in a public figure, irrespective of whether that optimism is justified. Indeed, unjustified optimism is more dangerous than unjustified pessimism. Unless that is just a presidential race more interesting. And credit for that compassionate, principal hobbies seem to be slobbering over small animals and waxing nostalgic about their past, found a way to do both last week. They demanded the United States to liberate the "Pooh Five" from their "glass prison" and send the "Brits have their head in a honey jar if they think they are taking Pooh demand. The "special relationship" between the United States and the United two camps in the Pooh feud: nativist and internationalist. The nativist language is universally charming ("a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness"), and his moral lessons are universally applicable (if you visit a friend and gorge yourself on honey, you are likely to end up stuck in his doorway for a week But there is a third view of Pooh: that he is neither pioneers of the Old West, Pooh is endlessly greedy, and he is cunning in impressed by the pretentious wisdom of Owl. But when it comes to avarice, Pooh has a native intelligence. He can't reach a beehive by climbing, so he in Wonderland --Pooh is by far the sunniest. There is no dark side to Pooh, democratic. He is the best friend to all. (There is also a brash past, a wild, empty land populated by a few hardy pioneers who band together for economic reasons as well as literary ones. Where would he be today without produced four short animated features, one of which won an Academy Award. It young mother I know). He wears a red jacket ("Classic Pooh" was naked) and calendars, backpacks, and cookie jars sold to impressionable children billion lawsuit from his jilted business partner and inviting speculation that publishing intelligentsia by shutting down Basic Books. Even his lone May admire him. He has done more to help the great mass of media consumers than has modernized the world's media, forcing competition on stagnant businesses, cracking open monopolies and oligopolies, vanquishing "traditions" that were often an excuse for laziness, unleashing the creative destruction of capitalism but he was right: The unions were lazy and intransigent. By sloughing also grabbed market share from big complacent dailies and awakened the sleepy industry analysts said he'd paid too much for them. They don't say that anymore.) While Fox has certainly splashed its share of garbage on the screen distort for the sake of sensationalism. They deny the very existence of good journalism used to be competitive, sensational, overtly political, and financially, thus chalking up another business triumph but losing much of the cachet he sought. Last year, he championed the effort to give presidential who cares more about his legacy than his bottom line. become all things to all people that I may by all means win some." It is an apt motto for Reed, a thoroughly political statement that defines a thoroughly political man. Critics on the left blame Reed for infecting politics with religious fanaticism. In fact, Reed's achievement is exactly the opposite: He's fitting that Reed is embarking on a career as a political consultant, a profession where everything is mere politics. Last week Reed announced his The liberal view of Reed is that he's the Christian right's zealot in chief, a devil with a cherub's face. This is a misreading. Reed's Christian faith is undoubtedly sincere, but his real creed is Republican undergraduate in the early '80s, he became the College Republicans' master tactical ruthlessness has defined the Christian Coalition. "I paint my face and travel at night," he once said of his work at the coalition. "You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." His invited Reed to start an organization to expand the grassroots network from enough principles to win religious conservatives' trust, but not enough to scare everyone else. Reed recognized that the religious right had staggered in established hundreds of local chapters. Slowly, that network of activists took over school boards, county commissions, and state political parties. abandon the clear, if ferocious, principles that defined the '80s Moral Majority and replace them with a comforting fog of "family values." (Reed free enterprise (God's own economic policy, apparently), opposition to flattened the evangelical crusade of the old religious right into mainstream week. Reed feels passionately that white evangelicals must atone for their Reed's political tactics occasionally annoy the ideologues platform. Some evangelicals view Reed as a compromiser who'll bend a principle Christian conservatives have cause to complain. Thanks to Reed, the Christian influence. The Federal Election Committee investigation of allegations of coalition. (He's well on his way: The Associated Press reported this week that two airplanes bought by his "Operation Blessing" to fly aid to impoverished religious right's spokesperson. But he's much less politically savvy, much less will see his credibility increase. He no longer has to answer for the erratic consultants agree that conservative candidates in the South, Southwest, future colleagues estimate that as a consultant, he'll earn at least half a shown no aptitude for. (He quotes himself in his books, the sure sign of a irrational exuberance for beef. Beef prices reeled, and cattlemen lost millions club selections before it had. Three previous picks remain on the and her personal trainer became nationwide hits. Marketing experts now The effect is felt not only by blessed merchandise but also daytime talk shows are deplorable. The shows parade freaks in front of the showcasing increasingly repulsive molesters, abusers, adulterers, and pederasts, all of them eager to tell the world about their loathsomeness. Talk indeed the leading practitioner of confessional television. When she lost weight, she rolled a representative wagon of pig fat onstage. She routinely breaks down in tears, and she never hesitates to let us know when things go guests. Their guests confess, the hosts oppress, and the audience laughs its head off. The host and audience are judge and jury for the miserable, benighted guests. It's the zoo theory of television: Let's make fun of these stupid doesn't condescend to guests. She couldn't possibly: When her show featured talked to cocaine addicts, she admitted to having tried the drug herself. few celebrities who owes her fame not to her superhuman qualities (beauty, who hasn't forgotten where she came from. She identifies with underdogs because Several male family members sexually abused her. Overcoming these obstacles has lent her street cred with guests and fans. They make her success always show. Last week, a witness collapsed in tears while apologizing to the to one of the most thrilling and visible disciplines around. At The New Gates does so many things at the same time that you have to wonder how he makes sure all of them meet the same high standard. The answer edited two more. He also supervised doctoral dissertations, taught two Research (raising funds, balancing budgets, recruiting professors, planning conferences), served as director of editorial content for a publishing imprint and hosted a Frontline documentary on the black bourgeoisie, and continued as an editor of Transition magazine; the Black Periodical theaters, institutes, literary prizes, and universities. Yorker profile that would take most journalists weeks or months flows thought the final result reflected the hasty composition. output. He also understands a fundamental maxim of capitalism: Don't do minions, fetching books from the library and doing grunt research. Many scholars have figured out how to turn this somewhat feudal tradition into an students (and a few undergraduates) who actually waded into the library and picked out the selections. But Gates pushes the envelope. He may be the only and deals with reporters. An assistant edits his writing. Another conducts up quotes for New Yorker pieces. Dozens of other writers and editors are hired to help produce his various projects. To put together one volume, The project Gates considers his most important is also his grow to maturity. It is designed to trounce, once and for all, the fictions look at how Gates, et al., are putting the Encyclopedia together, plagiarized wholesale from other reference books. (For the record: This about Skip Gates' project. My information comes exclusively from current and so as to avoid further anomalies. According to some who have worked on the deadlines. He has described the Encyclopedia to his colleagues in electronic encyclopedia, a process of constant revision may have its contributions to Western culture. But it was too weirdly conceived and poorly less informative than most entries for the same subjects in even the Why would Gates allow the publication of such a book with his byline and photo on the dust jacket? He had no idea it was so bad. After coming up with the idea for the project and appointing an "associate editor" to run it, he says, he was only minimally involved. According to those who edited press, then looked closely only at items within his area of expertise, such as Black Women Writers he edited, he appointed others to put together the books and write their introductions. Ten other editors helped put together or even objectionable, if Gates imposed strict quality control standards upon them. Members of scholarly journals' editorial boards rarely edit; they are figureheads. And if Gates didn't edit the anthologies himself, his name nonetheless lent credibility and, therefore, enhanced funding prospects to deserving projects. Reference books are perforce feats of organization, not that comes out of his scholarly chop shops isn't nearly as good as it should be. And even if it were, there is something dishonest about marketing under Gates' signature work that is produced mainly by his assistants. At worst, he is amassing credentials, fame, and wealth on the basis of others' uncredited This is bound to hurt both his own reputation and that of the enterprises he He clearly is driven by a kind of missionary zeal: "I think that these projects canon builder," he told me. Another explanation may lie in his brilliance: He comes up with more ideas than he can handle, and he lacks the discipline not to overextend himself. "By impulse, I am an entrepreneur," he says. "If I weren't appealing image for a professoriate that has long been accused of being out of One just wishes the results looked more like scholarship. and prostitutes, reporters and flacks, singers and groupies, interns and beauty queens, whites and blacks, blondes and brunettes. What on earth do they all it out: Does the president have a type? Who is his ideal woman? If the president is a "sexual predator," as some would have us believe, who is his the face. She has big lips; full, fleshy cheeks; and enormous, showy teeth. talking advertisement for oral sex." I leave such speculation to experts.) more hair incarnations, but her locks have always been shorter than those of in her 20s. Youth may be wasted on the young, but it's not wasted on the wears either revealing clothes or professional clothes (or perhaps both). may be his ideal, but he doesn't always get it. Browning wrote a novel about without shared interests, and the president's are no exception. Like serenaded her with "Long Tall Sally." Ward sang "After You've Gone" at the Miss controls his empire, while networks, magazines, and newspapers have put the Dying, as living, the Chairman of the Board is right where he's always liked to States, far more than any of his earlier recordings. The hit movie has become the house religion at men's magazines such as Details and promiscuity have been recast as healthy libido, his Mafia ties and thuggery as Award), and exerted the greatest political and cultural influence. (Some came back as a Me Generation icon, the Rat Packer reincarnated as an individualist. His late '60s albums, dismissed as lame attempts to ape rock experimentalism. Critics harked back to his original popularity in the '40s, the individual star. His signature song, after all, was "My Way." (Click to '70s as proof of his artistic integrity and a kick in the smug face of corporate music. His brawling and boozing in the '50s presaged the punks' "My Way," a bizarre combination of homage and scorn. economics): classy music, machismo, bonhomie, and good times. (The right's counterclaim by the left. The New Republic and others tried to redeem assistance to black musicians before such help became fashionable, his phenomenon that keeps repeating itself: dirt. In the '60s and '70s, rumors of has been somewhat cagey, but early reports suggest that the book will be full Street. He champions efficiency and ruthlessness, and follows no higher principle than the value of his company's stock. If the market is controlled by hoped the would help the company's bottom line, and not cause it embarrassment. by touting its commercialism: Sunbeam, he declared, would eagerly advertise its sole credo is: "How can we make our stock worth more?" Nothing that is community, relationships with suppliers, generosity in corporate managers, sold the corporate jet, closed the headquarters and two factories, dumped half the headquarters staff, and laid off a bunch of other workers. The toughness, expressing only cursory regret for having cashiered thousands of his contributed a gleeful column about how wonderful such firings are for that he is a brutal, heartless, arrogant bastard. According to Business (or even pay attention to) the child from his first marriage, and refused to is simply destruction. He prettifies struggling companies for Wall Street, but raise quick cash, cut prices to artificially boost sales, and squeezed to reporters and investors, winning him an adulatory profile that serves him campaigns and advertising. What he does not do is spend time developing new products, nurturing talent, and cultivating customers. Why? Because he never sticks around a company long enough for that to matter. alternative rock arose. She presented the award for best makeup, of all things, as a marginally talented opportunist who married well and whose stock rose precipitously after her husband committed suicide. The daughter of relentlessly, convincing a record label that was wooing her to fly her to a Nirvana show so she could meet him. By the early '90s, before anyone in the mainstream knew who she was, she was already such a legendary social climber on All this deepened the luster of her image. In an age in which agents and publicists once again monitor a star's movements as remarks that were too unladylike. A few years ago, she chased another rival, made her band Hole's album Live Through This go platinum (that is, sell which was unfortunate (she has since stopped using drugs). The backlash against Onstage she'd prop her leg up on the monitor and wail into the microphone like any guy. Offstage, she'd announce that she had got a nose job, lost weight, and dyed her hair blond because she knew that was what it was going to take to make people pay attention to her. It wasn't just idolatry we felt; it was anxiety, memories of the times when she was so strung out at a show that she had to be carried offstage by her manager while the crowd shouted "slut" and "whore." Three years ago, when Hole played its first New York show after One can understand her desire, then, to continue proving to the world that she's no longer a loose cannon. And a girl is certainly entitled to make rethink her style. And there may not be a lot of room for subversion at the same old feisty cuss once the cameras are off, but that just means she's getting good at separating her public and private personas, at being the kind lipstick scream at me, 'I love you! I didn't kill myself because of you!' Or, outsize, nasty personality, and women aren't offered that spectacle very often. phonies she would formerly have laughed at. But as she herself once sang, "I fake it so real I am beyond fake." It may be that the artificial construction and even the New York Times has anointed him rap's savviest mogul. Master P phenomenon is an object lesson in how far rap hasn't come as an art and how far it has come as a business. First: how far it hasn't come. The hype he likes to say that his music is "authentic." Namely: It celebrates the thug life of drugs, violence, and general sociopathic idiocy. Every man is a "nigga," every woman a "bitch," and all and the paean to his gun. The rhymes are crude, though the beats are potent, as in in short, promotes and produces the same socially appalling (if aurally of civilization five years ago. Back then, Master P would have sparked public outcry and condemnation. Why doesn't he today? Why is there no hue and cry perversion, a sick dead end. It was supposed to have been killed by now, fratricidal strife. But instead of dying, gangster rap has been is, and I mean this in the best possible way, a hack. He sticks to the conventions of the genre and produces derivative, competent music. Even his admirers admit he breaks no new ground and is essentially a skilled imitator of There is another reason why Master P doesn't prompt any outrage: the glorification of the entrepreneur. No one pays attention to what he sells because everyone is so fascinated by how he sells it. Rap has always may not have been anyone with better business instincts than Master P. have been getting ripped off by their record companies as long as there have been record companies. Master P wouldn't permit that to happen to him. He is the most independent of the independent producers. He started selling records out of his own car, and he hasn't relinquished control of anything yet. He owns his master recordings, his studio, his label. By paying the production costs of he stands to make at least twice as much as he would have if he had taken for doing all this on his own, putting the records and movies out himself and records albums in even less time. Everything is branded and tied together: All No Limit albums advertise coming albums by other No Limit artists. He makes thousands of copies in their first week in record stores. No single Master P product is phenomenally successful, but there are lots of them, and all are profitable. It adds up. (He has taken his vast fortune and diversified: He runs something more atavistic. He sometimes refers to his enterprise as the "No Cleavers. Master P was a hood and a hustler, and even as a corporate man, he behaves like a hood and a hustler. He models No Limit on the mob, not the and friendship above all: Most of his performers are relatives or homeboys. The Limit posse occupy a compound in Baton Rouge, La. They are well armed and wear bulletproof vests. And they don't welcome outsiders. This may not be the best foundation for a durable business schmoozes bankers, fashion designers, and record executives; and cuts deals to be following in the footsteps of Knight, founder of Death Row Records. In the early '90s, Knight built Death Row into a phenomenally profitable rap loyalty and insularity over all, surrounding himself with thuggish cronies. Death Row was run more like a criminal operation than a real business, with huge, suspicious cash payments; shoddy accounting; and management by chaos, so far. But can he forever? If he abandons his mob pose and posse he abandons the image and the "authenticity" that made him a millionaire. If he doesn't he could end up like Knight. For Master P, neither is an appealing probably not the most important reason he has returned. If news reports are president: Harry hasn't had a hit for five years. How 'bout calling one of the the White House no doubt negotiated endlessly about the nuts and bolts of everything they can to tilt the arrangements in the president's favor: What be in the background? How should he be lighted? These may not be questions on which a presidency hangs, but they're undoubtedly ones that the White House is obsessing about. It's political theater, and they'll treat it like will testify in the Map Room, a private meeting chamber, where he has testified should see only his head and shoulders. "Not to be crude, but I don't want anything below Bill's third button showing, and I want the desk between Bill's as tight as possible. Get those baby blues right down the throats of the people watching in the grand jury. I want to give the grand jurors a sense that they the grand jury totally focused on this man's face, his honesty, his sadness of having to do this. I want the audience's total concentration on his guiltless, guileless face. I want them to see his eyebrows go up and down. He is the only have him be just a disembodied voice. Having another head in the picture is a not his face. There is nothing less attractive than the back of someone's no, no! It is too awkward. Just one quick nanosecond glance at her, just one moment of discomfort, and the grand jury will see it. You don't want that! Keep her out of the West Wing. Keep her out of the White House. Some time later they can go on some benign morning talk show together and talk about benignly. He has learned to smile sweetly to the media, because he realizes was there. He said, "These are my heroes. This is one of the greatest moments want, what you really want"). And you have undoubtedly heard of the Spice Girls, who are five of the you could ever hope to meet. Their song expected). The album's first single, "Spice Up Your Life," has already to overstate the Spice Girls' influence on popular culture, especially in teaching a Spice Girls course. They have spawned a dozen imitation clothes. This is, in short, the Spice Girls moment, the apogee between launch played drums, has ever been a professional musician. Their music, too, is to pop music what mall food courts are to ethnic food. "Spice Up Your Life," for a huge percentage of profits. The Spice Girls bring the same spinoff version of it in your mall by Thanksgiving. Look for Spice Girls backpacks, trading cards, action figures, duvets, perfumes, potato chips, lollipops. musicians call prostitution. Whatever it is, it pays. According to some naturally, are appalled. The marketing juggernaut, derivative music, and moronic lyrics annoy music writers. The Spice Girls, according to reviews, are "awful" and "extraordinarily untalented." During their rise to fame, the girls wisely avoided giving concerts; when they finally performed live (on No matter how they are, no matter how pushily they are marketed, the Spice Girls have helped vanquish the doleful grunge music that dominated the early '90s. Spice Girls songs are derivative, but they are also catchy as hell, great of the Spice Girls is their very crassness. They are products of this ironic, shrugging age. They are more than happy to sell out and more than happy to make fun of themselves for doing it. History tells us that the life of the average reign, followed by flameout. (Just ask New Kids on the Block. All that remains to become the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, is being treated here few weeks back, the Daily News sardonically endorsed her as the "Mayor of Mars," observing with a characteristically light touch that her speech had was the universal philosophy of the city's elite until a few years ago, and second because nobody's listening to the second thoughts she's been having mayor, says, "I believe in epiphanies," but adds that when he looks at intelligence, her studiousness, her belief in the fine distinction. But there's something of the killjoy in her. She's brisk, and pinched, and a bit "participated in everything" and were "ready to die for this freedom." considered a staunch voice for tenants, for children, for the homeless and the had to a Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor. She consistently argued for more spending, even as it was becoming clear that the Wall Street boom of the the limit of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of this needs" grew exponentially, forcing New York and other cities not only to raise taxes but to scant such traditional services as parks and sanitation in favor of spending had made New York ungovernable. The economy was dead, the budget Coalition. It turned out to be the last gasp of traditional liberalism. liberalism is not as bankrupt as the election is making it appear. Reformers independent budget monitor, have been arguing that the city could save billions paid holidays for city workers or large amounts of down time for cops and the city's neglected neighborhoods. They have made plausible arguments for reformer without reforming anything except the Police Department. He has disappointed conservatives by treating rent control as part of natural law, and by making no serious inroads on the city's bloated labor costs. To hack away at Hill long enough, anything can happen. And during the past few weeks, it did. chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he's become the object of Republicans and Democrats commend Helms for his good sense, flexibility, compiled a perfect record: He has done nothing that can be called an achievement. His career is an unblemished half century of efforts to impede progress, inflame race relations, and squelch good government. So what has he rights" platform or accurately called a "segregationist" platform. He conducted the longest filibuster in Senate history in a vain attempt to stop a racism that became the blueprint for future Republican presidential candidates. black staffers, and recommending a black man for appointment as a federal a significant bill to his name. He does, however, have other things to his even less to admire about Helms. As a campaigner, Helms has contributed as much as any senator to the corruption of the election process. He pioneered the of conservatives. He's notorious for massive campaign spending: He set a record stealth campaign: He relies almost exclusively on television ads, eschewing rallies, public appearances, press conferences, debates, and the other niceties only to faxed questions.) He has been equally destructive as a legislator: A him as a moderate, accommodating figure, but that image won't stick. Helms is an absolutist, and he doesn't stop till he gets his way. He only knows the terrifying in a leader. Helms can barely stomach the democratic process. Last administration to consider his State Department reform package. This spring, he attempted to prevent the Senate from voting on the Chemical Weapons Convention. And rather than persuade colleagues that Weld doesn't deserve to be ambassador, Helms is trying to spike the nomination by not scheduling a confirmation to criticize his sorry record or dredge up his racist past. (Or to comment on lost it. His staff shepherds him from meeting to meeting, writes his public statements, and cleans up after his many gaffes, such as his attempted pass at and reporters are tired of hearing about it. They need a new story about him. hypocrisy as the socially useful "homage that vice pays to virtue." That, of course, is very French. In the United States, however, it seems that virtue pays homage to vice. Have we thought through the implications? in large numbers tell pollsters that we disapprove of adultery, regularly attend church, and would like to see the return of prayer to schools. We claim also "would understand" if he had lied about it, even under oath. Until now, it has been assumed that the leader of an rapid rewind of the morality tape, zipping right through the age of Victoria to peasants and bourgeoisie were expected to live lives of probity, while the king ahead and have a good time, we'll just wait out here in the hall and say a few prayers"? No, that's not us. Far more likely is that we still regard the before we invest further in public activities incongruent with the new in chief to hit on women in the office, why should we prosecute a man so much as the century ends, let us grope our way toward a new liberalism. Other changes in federal policy are needed urgently to support the implicit goals of the New Awakening. For example, we must obviously restore Welfare as We Knew It. Here, after all, was a program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) that, judged by current lights, must be rated one of sure, illegitimacy is not a perfect proxy for indiscriminate as some minority citizens manage to get ahead without affirmative action. But an extra incentive from the government surely helps. pushed into the work force, whence they will stagger home each night lacking the energy for romantic exploration. Young men are being told to take responsibility for their sexual behavior and, should they slip, pay up on child sending the message that one should get it whenever and however one can. got gas guzzlers to keep rolling. Anyway, by now he has surely squirreled away all that anthrax and poison gas where we'll never find it with bombs or inspectors. Keeping all those planes, ships, and troops on alert is expensive. preoccupation with a balanced budget? Is paying for what we get really the acclaimed State of the Union message. More spending! More tax cuts! This, called the Plantation, till it was broken and bruised and lacerated. It is this arm, this right arm, that is still stiff, still scarred, still bent. And it is this arm, this right arm, that the avaricious barons of tobacco, who sell death and call it commerce, think they can twist, think they can break, think they understand that this arm has a man attached to it. And they don't understand threats, just as he is allergic to the cozy, sleazy compromises of this dark city, just as he is allergic to the mendacious hypocrisies of politics as it is prisoner of war. Now he's the only senator courageous enough to tell the truth. New York Times declared the defeat would only burnish his reputation. hopeful. He is irresistible. In a Senate populated by grasping automatons, he behaves like an actual human being. Probably because of his five and a half year imprisonment, he is impatient with the euphemisms and lies of politics. (Bob Dole once said of him, "You spend five years in a box and you're entitled hypocrisies and failings of his colleagues (and himself). The more his colleagues spin and position themselves, the better he looks. bosses on campaign finance and tobacco makes great copy. (If he were a Democrat leading the fight against tobacco and campaign corruption, no one would care.) There is something heroic about a politician who seems to act against his the general swoon about his history. He is an awesome man. He doesn't need to talk about the war: Reporters, most of whom never served in the military, are paralyzed by him. His indisputable bravery and honor inoculate him against national reporters. He interrupts family vacations to appear on cable news and holds conversations with his children in front of them. He asks them for schemer, a politician, a calculating populist who has built his career on sexy, in the tobacco fight: He had no strong feelings about the evil weed, and he became the tobacco scourge only when Republican leaders asked him to shepherd the bill through the Senate. He adopted campaign finance reform only after he more pernicious about the coverage is that it confuses the qualities of a legislator, but no one ever points out that he's a rather ineffective one. He is unpopular in the Senate. Some of his Republican colleagues dislike him for ("His colleagues feel he's a showboat and a camera hog," says University of He has said he has no plans to modify the tobacco bill to get it passed. (Well, why not?) Similarly, he infuriates senators with grandstanding attacks on pork, being a master at publicizing and eliminating other senators' sweetheart superb advocate on campaign finance and tobacco. And there is certainly contrarian, someone whose life is defined by lonely opposition. He was a pilot, not a platoon leader. He resisted his captors alone and endured years in that's what he is. He suspects authority and challenges orthodoxy. It's why why he would make a lousy president. Being president is not about bucking authority, it's about being authority. It's not about resisting coercion, it's about coercing, and bargaining, and sucking up, and twisting arms, and telling indifference to the king of sports. But it's the most popular sport in the cooperation, the players are too small and too Euro, it looks bad on by divine right. The United States has used dollar power to make itself the United States stages pro competitions, those competitions are the world's negotiates all contracts and assigns stars to teams. (In other pro leagues, on its 20-man rosters, a move that cuts costs while guaranteeing playing time assigning foreign players to cities where they'll be most popular. first two seasons. This summer's World Cup will distract fans and remove the terms of employment. Now they argue that the single entity suppresses salaries and violates antitrust laws. The lawsuit goes to trial this fall. doesn't pay for talent, it will certainly remain a minor league. But even if it quitting her Crossfire job to run for office. She's about to make her and big donors are biding their time waiting for her announcement. The the general election. This enthusiasm is a little mystifying. After all, the been tangled in more ethics scandals than any politician except, well, Al the Democratic National Convention, remember her white dress, remember her rolled into one. Her admirers stopped seeing her as a politician. She became an icon, an unreal, idealized symbol of women's achievement. remember her six years in Congress, and with good reason. She was a enough principles to stand on, not enough to get in her way. Despite her Democratic platform. Her skills as an operator served her own career: When she of ideas, never had any consuming passion. It's notable that none of the seven New York Democratic operatives I talked to could describe her ideology or name her pet causes. ("She's sort of moderate, I think," said one.) When I asked responses to ethics charges reflect her political instincts. Confronted with deftness: Hand out a few documents, hedge, cavil, deny, admit with All of which is to say: Of course she'll run. She's a thrilled when she considers the prospect. "If you look at the time of my life that was the happiest, it was the time as a prosecutor and member of Congress," at Al: "It's either do it now, or don't do it at all." campaigner. Green has a loyal following among the liberals who vote in primary. It will be a fratricidal, exhausting race. claims are contradictory. Enemies agree, friends disagree. The Democrat in the deficit of tax justice and, worst of all, a deficit of dollars." Writing in a betrayal of conservative values. And so on. Who's right? agreement is, presumably, to balance the budget. Yet the deal rests on various assumptions, and the likelihood that all of them will work out is small. administration. Now, unlike then, we have already enjoyed more than six years of uninterrupted growth. Unemployment and inflation together are lower than they've been for three decades. Some say this shows the economy has reached a can't last much longer. The deal makers contend that the budget deal itself will promote growth and so create additional savings. But five more years? Over keep on rolling, the promised retreat of red ink depends on Congress and the budget deficit will actually increase as a result of the deal. implausibilities: The Bureau of Labor Statistics is supposed to recalculate the the last three years of the plan. The forces of nature are supposed to avoid Doctors and hospitals serving Medicare and Medicaid patients are supposed to of the broadcast spectrum. And, of course, lots of fraud, waste, and abuse is domestic spending. True? This depends on which you think is more important: the courts, prisons, and parks to highways, housing, and the weather bureau. This is what excites the conservative Brooks. By leaving Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements unreformed, he argues, when a recession hits, Congress things liberals love." Of course, this assumes that Congress won't just forget Deficit of Tax Justice or a Deficiency of Tax Cuts? gains and estate taxes "even if it is not the bill I would write." It is not yet clear how Congress and the president can squeeze all the tax goodies each rate cut leads them to sell more assets than they otherwise would have done.) to the poor (who pay no taxes, so can't use the credit). However it all shakes out, those who benefit most from the tax breaks almost surely will lose least fairly content with the tax package, since it includes their cherished taxes the government expects to collect over the next five years. And, if the doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider that our political and military leaders have shown themselves increasingly reluctant to put either our troops or our expensive weaponry at risk. On the other hand, the Pentagon feels it that the real measure of lost resolve is to be found in the fact that military the threats faced by the United States bears no fixed relation to the size of measured in today's dollars. Under the budget agreement, it will spend the That ought to save the Pentagon at least a quarter on the dollar. important: the tax cuts and spending increases Congress is pledged to enact this very year, or the spending cuts it vows it will embrace in years to come. deal that passed both houses last week, Congress canceled those caps. brash and talentless more warmly than the movie industry, and no one is better types get the chance to create only one disastrous flop in a lifetime. After even recycles his sex obsessions: Sliver and Basic Instinct both anonymous. They're supposed to be heard but not seen. Actors and directors are line and a chubby paycheck. There have been only a handful of famous invented the celebrity screenwriter. "He's a run of the mill screenwriter who created a myth that he was an idiosyncratic rebel," says Entertainment caught the eye of Rolling Stone with his bold crime stories. The stood out. At editorial meetings he would brandish a knife. It was a sign of things to come. Ever since, he has used belligerence, bravado, and a gift for charming the media to make himself a star. When bullied him out of the idea. He did the same thing when the studio tried to still presents himself as a radical tough. He has long hair and a meetings, then smash it on the table when he's angry. He has turned his private Vanity Fair to tell all about the sordid affair. No piece ever ran. Moviegoers knew his name and his legendary audacity. Producers fell hard for thanks to his bullheadedness, he exerts more control over production than almost any other screenwriter. Directors alter his scripts at their peril. bravest outsider, and he has written passionately about the need for screenwriters to stand up for artistic integrity. He also honestly believes in interview after interview about the importance of the movie, of its deep moral They share the same exaggerated sense of importance, the same pontificating It is a beautiful, sad little movie about betrayal. It was glowingly reviewed. and the dark side of his celebrity. When he writes sensationalist schlock, he gets the attention he craves. When he writes moving, interesting drama, he well as at least four planned films of his plays and novel. superfluity, someone complicated and challenging enough to endure the excess art and culture of my age." He is now a man who stands in symbolic relation to "I can resist everything except temptation." Ha ha! "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked cool, cruel master of aphorism. His plays were produced and his quips were especially the last few years. The revival ignores the art for the sake of the the man suddenly so popular? One reason is that this is an age of memoirs: But there are two more important reasons why this is a ignored for decades, then glossed over. When he was first claimed as a gay icon society destroyed him because it was too intolerant to accept raises very modern questions about what homosexuality is and how much sexuality happily married and the father of two children. He had sex with men infrequently, and only late in life. To appreciate the complexity of his focuses on his love affair with a man, Gross Indecency focuses on his realism and authenticity were in vogue, his life was a stylized performance designed to grab attention. In the early 1880s, before he had written anything around the city carrying flowers, and threw himself at the feet of actresses. production. He wore outrageous clothes and quipped his way across the States. (On arrival in New York: "I have nothing to declare except my genius.") His lectures about interior decorating were mobbed. He also milked his fame brilliantly after he'd achieved commercial success. He is undoubtedly the only was just developing a wide audience, whipped up public hatred toward him over indiscretion (in the face of overwhelming evidence) rather than risk One thing is missing from the revival: subversiveness. in court. Today, you can throw it on the screen and no one even notices. The universities enshrined the scientific meliorism of the Progressive Era. But the defining philanthropist of our time is not a university builder or an art conservative values, universities to build character, and researchers to investigate the connections between faith and science. He believes he can reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions of contemporary society: Christian began investing in the early '40s and soon proved a natural. He established the philanthropy into marketing, his own name into a brand. His earliest venture brilliant stroke was to brag that his prize would be worth more than the for tapping into popular culture. He has, for example, cast himself as a guardian of Christian morals and a bulwark against political correctness. The universities, departments, professors, and even textbooks that uphold sidelight to his much more ambitious goal: the reunification of science and trying to refashion the world's intellectual fabric. He is, if this is not an oxymoron, a religious technocrat. Since the Renaissance, science has that theologians must match science's advance with spiritual research, and attempt to rejoin the soul and the brain. Religion should harness the tools of science to make "progress." "Progress" is his favorite word, though no one, not science and religion. He offers the same amount to medical schools for classes hard science. Favorite projects include a Duke University study on the universe reflects intelligent design. Even so, the entire enterprise reflects a scientific, grandiose beyond imagination: "Behind this book is my belief that the basic principles for leading a 'sublime life' can be examined and tested just as science examines and tests natural laws of the universe." Worldwide of the laws are biblical aphorisms: "As you give, so shall you receive." Most are platitudes of high banality: "Every ending is a new beginning." "What the If you send him a new law and he adds it to the next edition of Worldwide "disprove" one of the worldwide laws, he'll fund the experiment. and junior, are always great theater, and never more than in the past few patting himself on the back, he has no trouble finding people to do it for him. its top executives were sacked last week. It has released flop after flop no relief on the horizon: Universal doesn't have a summer blockbuster to that Universal will turn fabulous profits in the next few years, but no one is down by Universal, is stagnating through the biggest bull market in history. Usually a few billion dollars in the bank inoculates you entrepreneurial and ruthless. The second generation was managerial and real estate and oil. Sound financial practices and organized marketing If there is a defining quality of the third generation, it family money to open doors. The doors should not have opened: He produced a couple of bad movies and wrote even worse songs. He also eloped with an so simple. The father is not quite the icon he seems, and the son is not quite did it first. He tried to take over a movie studio in the late '60s and even movies but that he's too rational about them. To wit: Earlier this month, he outraged the industry by proposing that theaters charge higher prices for more million or lose it. Studio share prices are erratic because there are no guaranteed earnings: A studio that makes a killing this year may get killed liquor. He wants to find the secret rational formula that will connect movie costs to movie revenues. It's an impossible task. The formula doesn't exist. Movie audiences will always be more fickle than whiskey drinkers, and movie will be the failure of someone much less interesting: a businessman. shawl is still wrapped around Pol Pot's neck, but the hair is grayer and sparser and the round face is lined with wrinkles. He needs a cane to walk and oxygen to breathe. He is nearly blind in the left eye, and he can't stand the mosquitoes that swarm around his hut. He is older now, and he is wiser. introspection; with introspection has come regret. "Our movement made mistakes," he admits softly, sincerely, in his first interview in nearly two Once upon a time, way back in the early '70s, Pol Pot was to abolish the twin evils of Western materialism and class privilege. Pol Pot of course, were a difficult decade. We all did things we have come to regret, and Pol Pot is no exception. A million or two of his countrymen lost their lives because of his mistakes. Starvation was epidemic. Cannibalism was common. Pol Pot abolished religion, education, medicine, commerce, money. He drove city dwellers into the countryside, and he forced them to farm. Tens of thousands of his subjects were tortured and murdered at his behest. Some critics said he came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people," he says, a look of melancholy shadowing his face. "Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?" The plaintive question echoes in the moist, warm air of the including infant grandchildren, also were killed. Pol Pot regrets the murders. They, too, were a "mistake," he says, his voice filled with pain. So Pol Pot can accept his arrest. What he can't accept is his betrayal at the hands of his friends. The men who tried and sentenced him are his oldest comrades, the Who is Pol Pot? He is a man who has always had difficulty press conferences than battles. But Pol Pot has never had the gift of the gab, especially around the camera, and he has never learned how to play to the dictators amassed. Pol Pot has never believed in greed. Not for him the the jungle with nothing but the clothes on his back. The new Pol Pot is about the future. He wants to make the most of his golden years. His politics have mellowed. Today, the elder statesman advises Pol Pot worked tirelessly on the revolution, neglecting his health, his friends, his family. The new Pol Pot is a family man. His wife and their Pot rests quietly during the day while his daughter goes to school and his wife hoes the vegetable patch. In the evenings, they share a modest meal, and Pol Pot asks his daughter about what she learned that day. In captivity, he has fulfilled a lifelong dream. He has found the very thing he sought to give his forgiveness ritual for sinning celebrities. After they're caught, they that it cannot be neutered. Pol Pot is in captivity; he is sick; and he is (mildly) apologetic. Yet not a single word has been murmured on his behalf. Any rejection of Pol Pot. In making him a pariah, the world is legitimizing men who captured his old mentor. He has received favorable press coverage for opening even been given credit for putting Pol Pot on trial and sentencing him to life Rouge's bloody image. If so, it seems to have worked. he is unlikely to appear again in public. The remarkable interview Pol Pot gave is very near death. Survivors of his terror can take some satisfaction in this: Pol Pot is bound for the death that you would wish on a tyrant, the death that impoverished, in great pain, betrayed by his friends, and unredeemed by a world cartoon tobacco mascot, is currently facing charges by the feds that he has knowingly and with profit aforethought enticed children to smoke cigarettes. He is not accused of hooking kids in the manner of a playground pusher, authorities of being way too guilty. The very president of the United States is a charge of considerable interest. For it to stick, "cool" must be perceived to be good, or else associating it with smoking wouldn't be so dangerous that the life he leads, as suggested in the ads that feature him. So what does he do in these ads? Among other things, he plays in a blues band, shoots pool with his buddy camels, rides a big hoggish motorcycle (without a helmet), drives a flashy convertible (without fastening his seat belt), and otherwise does a never seen doing any productive work of any kind, is never portrayed wearing for his own pleasure. He stays up all night in unwholesome places, indulges in risky behavior that threatens to make decent camels' insurance premiums go up, and surely hasn't phoned his aged mother in years. And that isn't the worst of notorious for his lack of sensitivity to females. It is obvious that he would be unwilling to negotiate the stages of a sexual encounter as an equal. Even his face has a phallic quality. Indeed, given the ubiquitous social messages of what now constitutes enlightened masculinity (a nurturing, sensitive, Camel is not perceived by youth as a criminal rather than, as the Federal Trade over. Let's say we subject him to behavior modification of the Clockwork capacity for being a loving husband and a sacrificing father. And, oh yeah, does (including to juveniles). An association with respectability has been the central image of alcohol and tobacco advertising for much of the century. From been portrayed as a reward for hard work, an indulgence that the achieving years, hundreds and maybe thousands of smokers in cigarette ads have been lighting up at picnics, on hiking trails, or on horseback. Yet the first commercial smoker to get hauled into court is the first one to have stepped consciously playing the prude here, there is a logic to cultural control to "children," but it may well appeal to adolescents by exploiting their sexual World War I along with mass cigarette smoking. In fact, in the nine years that the campaign has been running, Camel's share of the underage smoking market has out riding the range, perhaps roping in kids when they really are kids. (Perhaps not: What any ads have to do with the decision to start smoking is not the campaign's graphic style, characters, and situations are directed at an older audience, whereas the appeal of cowboys to little kids is too well known couldn't invent a more striking contrast of characters than exists between popular) portrays a disciplined man of experience who seems to embody a cowboy code of honor, a traditional regard for women, and the offer of a it is to be a man. (Want his respect? Buy a pack.) Perhaps he's next on the becoming more relevant every day. That figure is the protagonist of the emphasized about himself were his bad habits: his desire to carouse the night away, to run around with women, to sing loudly and drunkenly, and to smoke his of his soul, the making of his poetry. "Why did we shed our blood," he asks an uncomprehending scientific Puritan, "if I can't dance to my heart's zoo, where curious people come to watch him do unhealthy things. "Look," says a voice from the crowd: "Oh! How horrible!" And another cry, "The children! wrote his drama about the interplay of freedom, pleasure, and risk. On the motorcycle. Because he still won't be wearing a helmet. trademark sneering speeches, windmilling arms, and devastating He is, in fact, the very model of what a celebrity defense attorney should be. causes. His motto could be: always righteous, often right. As an undergraduate and brave. He fought to abolish all student deferments, figuring that the war trying to expose grand jury abuse, and then spent five years as a Legal Aid "rapists" and "murderers." So far, the Innocence Project has cleared more than about the misuse of medical evidence as about murder. His devotion to his construct an intellectually honest defense: There was reasonable doubt because began the case on the periphery of the defense team and ended it in the center. poring over complex evidence that other defense lawyers didn't bother with. In surprisingly evenhanded.) But mostly, he has used his celebrity to advance his York State Commission on Forensic Science and he lectures to police departments and prosecutors across the country about proper use of genetic fingerprinting. sodomized with a toilet plunger by New York City cops. The defense attorney is even advising Colorado investigators (prosecutors!) on the medical evidence in conviction or reduce her conviction to manslaughter. (The judge will not make arrangements or even much difficulty in finding such care. Yet, with equal legislation that aims to send millions of welfare mothers into the labor force, and their kids, presumably, into surrogate care. Critics of the new law argue that suitable care is in short supply. (For an example of the concern, see suggests that parents who want to work can and will find child care that suits Women's Bureau jointly issued the findings of a survey they had conducted. The study, said the foreword, "clearly indicates how urgent is the need for of perceptions is accounted for by the fact that most of the children in look after themselves. These, moreover, were the days when federal planners set utopian standards for acceptable care. When the Department of Health, Education and Welfare decided to set up its own center for employees' kids, it found it could not meet the requirements for windows and outlets per square foot, nutritionists and therapists per square child, and so on. a researcher at the Urban Institute, notes that parents may be embarrassed to admit they leave their kids in questionable settings. And for many findings. Last week brought disappointing news to another faction in the Human Development found that day care does not hinder a child's intellectual development. Nor, except for a small effect for very young children in long hours of care, does it affect their emotional bond with their mothers. Many more children, of course, are in licensed centers than expensive center care than are the working poor; but, thanks to government care is not, however, a guarantee of quality. Nor is price. Quality, the Urban whether the caregivers talk and interact with the children frequently. A flurry of recent research, recently reported in a Time magazine cover story, points to the importance of early stimulation in the later development of a baby's brain. (And with a reading tests, it seems pretty clear that some additional stimulation is families nor competing for government subsidies, are plagued by poorly trained, claim to care about quality, in the end they opt for "price and convenience." of these experts, and others besides, point to a misdirection of federal subsidies come with quality strings attached. But the largest single federal breaks are "not good tools for ensuring good quality." (They may not even be From this perspective, the recently passed welfare reform could be a blessing to some kids. Advocates worry that if substantial numbers of welfare mothers are pushed into jobs, centers might be swamped by demands to of the Manpower Development Research Corp., which has been the prime evaluator overestimated the amount of formal child care needed for such projects. And the whom affordable, accessible, and suitable care cannot be found. On the plus million a year. If states take advantage of the various incentives provided them (though few probably will), total federal and state support could expand Institute estimates. States will also be freed from the hodgepodge of regulations that currently cause gaps in coverage as mothers move among home, do find and hold jobs, their children might well benefit from the the sort of substitute care they actually get. Still, as last week's National Institute study points out, whatever effect day care has on kids is swamped by mothers and secure economic circumstances tend to do fine, whether their mothers work or not. Others not so lucky in their parents or homes often do care centers, but we don't license parents." Perhaps we should. Will always has a book coming out and it is usually disappearing quietly into Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative week's book is news, because this week's book is about baseball. When Will journalism. His starchy tenor is certainly among its most recognizable voices. Yet Will's views aren't news anymore. His columns don't shape national policy Bunts because "bunts are modest and often useful things." Will himself has become a bunt. Why this has happened has less to do with Will than it does smaller, politics was smaller, and the power elite could be reached easily especially) were more than just columnists; they were national actors, both years teaching political science, Will entered journalism in the early '70s as conservative gospel to a relatively small following. Will, syndicated in hundreds of papers, was the first conservative columnist to reach a mainstream priggish manner helped). The Wall Street Journal labeled him "the most shows diluted the influence of columnists. So did other columnists. Will, who was the mainstream conservative columnist in the '70s, found himself institutionalized wise man of journalism, mining quotes for our edification. the Topic of the Day to first principles, to forsake the cheap quip for a Flytrap. His newspaper prose may not be deathless, but it's not as lifeless as above average. That is: He is mostly, rather than entirely, forgettable. (All "I don't want to live in a country blown about by gusts of wind raised by is one place where Will's journalism does seem to matter, where he does toss thunderbolts: baseball. Men at Work and the columns in Bunts are fresher, less rococo, less pretentious, than his political columns. In Men game. Instead of indulging in the usual teary nostalgia about baseball (that means you, Ken Burns), Will considered it as a craft, explaining exactly why a up his fastball, why a shortstop moves in a step for one kind of double play and out a step for another. Not terribly analytical about his politics, Will is Will's baseball writing is so good, in fact, that he's even being mentioned as a candidate for baseball commissioner. His name has been commissioner's job last week, and he gave me spin when I asked: He still likes writing his column, he says, and "it's presumptuous to talk about accepting something that has not been offered." Which is not exactly a "No." Commissioner that his columns are ephemera, why shouldn't Will give them up for his true should step aside and let someone else take over the routine. No one would care that much. After all, he's just a newspaper columnist. so belongs to a bygone era that he probably should have had the good sense to he remains with us--60 years old, mumbling, shambling, drunk, stoned, and visible casualty of '60s sybaritic excess; for rebellious kids, he's a The implied question in most criticism of the Fear and Loathing movie is: Why on earth did we ever think this crap mattered? The is dated and dull, further proof that drugs are not only destructive but banal. The two lead characters are vicious, crude, solipsistic, and adolescent. All in it with ferocity, and ferocity is not comfortable these days. been placid suddenly raged with race riots and assassinations, manipulated by a idealist, was appalled. He reacted to madness by writing (and behaving) madly. so horrified by the Kent State massacre, which occurred while he was writing, that he was unable to make his notes into a coherent piece. political writing from the coma of the '50s. His savage, profane descriptions being rejected too easily, the elderly Hunter is being welcomed too kindly. In has more than just squandered his talent (what prodigy doesn't?), he has betrayed himself. He's a romantic who has become a cynic. He was once filled of course, is not the only '60s vet who is disillusioned. But he gave no quarter to anyone who disappointed him, so he certainly doesn't deserve any delinquent who wouldn't grow up. He ignites kegs of dynamite in his Aspen, (He once called himself, with a flash of perfect insight, a "mean, lazy there --he befriended weirdos and freaks, made common cause with the dregs of society, stirred trouble, listened. At some point in the '70s, years. A shocking number of his recent articles are based on something he saw into a fake froth; does some calculated, halfhearted gonzo writing; then collects a fat check. He has become as repetitious, pontificating, and slothful "speeches." His books are still, astonishingly, best sellers (even his wretched flush of marijuana to keep Hunter in tequila and narcotics for the rest of his letter saying that Hell's Angels had inspired him to join a motorcycle imitate others, and warning him about what was wrong with the Angels: "The best played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who are left are almost all the kind who can't do anything else, and they're not much fun to talk to. They're not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They're just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk. They're not even happy; most of them hate the lives they lead, but they can't afford to admit it because they don't know where else to go, or what else to do. That's original. And he sure doesn't know what else to do. myths, and there is none more powerful than this one: They don't make 'em like they used to. Remember when they played both ways? When they didn't complain is performing his usual miracles during his first season with the Jets. The confuses football fans. They can't figure out why he's a great coach. Some reputations. Other coaches piggybacked to the top on star players: Any strategy and mentor to no great stars. Some of his teams have been strong offensively, others defensively. Some have passed a lot, others have run. There's no single guiding principle to his teams. Sportswriters throw up their is a great coach for a reason that is now unfashionable in professional sports: He's a dictator. If modern pro athletes subscribe to a political philosophy, it have exaggerated the influence of individual stars. Once players played at the years coaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy. He conceives of football as a military operation. His teams are total institutions. Other aggressively confident, has the rare ability of command. out. Losing players have no choice. With the Patriots and the Jets, for runs his training camps and practices with a drill sergeant's discipline: He abuses and needles players to inspire them. Last season, for example, he infuriated one malingering rookie by calling him "she." ("She," wide receiver commit fewer penalties than almost any team in the league. (In last week's win of trying to talk to every player every day. When some of his Giants players former Giants assistants; at the Jets, he has enlisted former Giants players to feuded with owners and general managers about running the team. He quit the Giants partly because the owner and general manager cramped him. His battle then, he has never managed to do anything but coach. Once he took a year off to only outside interests are golf and his family. Both get ignored during the "couldn't live without football." Even so, he keeps hinting that his career is his way out the door. John Madden has long since ascended to the press box. "computer guys." In an age where computer guys are winning everywhere else, (Spencer has invented a literary genre, the Attack Eulogy.) You might think (Remember when toffs were really toffee?) But the earl is a very new, very replaced by the barbed, blabbing tongue; reticence by confession; eulogy, which did as much to settle scores as to commemorate his sister, did In a normal aristocratic family, Spencer would have been just another playboy. But he was the Princess of Wales' younger brother, so his course, the models wouldn't have been his girlfriends if it hadn't been for the rage at the press has grown in recent years, and with much justification. In snapped surreptitious pictures of her at a private treatment facility. When his best friend committed jewel fraud, the Daily Express falsely accused Spencer of abetting the criminal. Another paper falsely accused him of selling and photographed him. Spencer has fought back, repeatedly winning damages from has a much more ambivalent (read: "hypocritical") relationship with the press story published, and escaped serious damage. (In the old days, this would have earl has even practiced the very journalism he decries. For much of the last cash flow to maintain his 121-room mansion and 13,000-acre estate, and he's nonetheless horrified traditionalists. He has hocked heirlooms to pay taxes, wooded acres of his estate into a housing development, and leased the grounds immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned." He criticism. The other is entrepreneurial, telegenic, noisy, and restrained by no something nice to say, most reviewers have hit upon the conclusion that which they mean it has fewer automatic weapons, fewer car chases, and more even sadder: The Rainmaker is actually much better than most of Despite this record of unadulterated mediocrity, a fog of movie director. He has embedded himself in the mythology of the film industry picture. (His Apocalypse Now lunacy is brilliantly chronicled in the combined, and he has pioneered technology (notably video editing) that other brilliant talker, a salesman. He is, in short, the very model of what a movie it very easy to rationalize his failures as poor accountancy. "His career can be summed up as the case of a man who needed a financial manager," says Roger failure of One From the Heart and his studio's collapse. So of course he became a hired gun: He needed to pay his debts. According to the mythology, delivering his own movies late and over budget, earned a reputation as a reliable director. He stuck to his budgets, and almost all his studio movies, too buys into the notion that he would have kept making great movies if only he'd been debt free. He's obsessed with the notion of artistic purity. The the graphic to see the movie's emotional climax, when the young lawyer hero confronts the old lawyer villain about selling out.) In recent interviews, sellout. Or, to put it more kindly, the quality of his movies has never for cheap? Because he had just bankrupted himself making a disastrous has become a studio hack for much more banal reasons. He got older, mellower, seems to lack the inspiration for a grand project. His last truly personal to do something truly astounding. To show them something they haven't seen before. I would like to do that, and I really believe I can do it." story of fulfilled promise. He made two of the greatest, if not the two five and a half sobering hours about alcohol and drug addiction. It was an into liberal squish: In his hands, the book of Genesis is a story of family (that is, all of us) tire of his lectures on our frivolity. An ordained Baptist minister, he adores sermonizing about his seriousness of purpose. (Click for address his audience as much as hypnotize it. His gestures are too soothing also gets hit for making money off public television. Foundations and corporations give him millions to produce documentaries. He brilliantly markets real achievement: He has spent his life trying to bring moral seriousness to watching television rather than actually reading philosophy. This seems to me fundamentalism, and the minimum wage are much admired, too. And for all his social welfare policy years before most Democrats acknowledged the issue. recent spiritual documentaries have degenerated into New Age banalities. But at languorous, even soporific. But his long, unhurried interviews crack his subjects wide open: They talk to the camera as they would with an old friend. shortcoming. He rejects confrontation. He opens people up by agreeing with presidents, but he is the world champion of consensus, the patron saint in the belief about the topic at hand. If you watched the addiction series, for addicts should be forced to take responsibility for their actions, not coddled kind of journalism seems designed to place this thought in the viewer's mind: defenders say that television has enough strife elsewhere (very little of it illuminating) and that it's important that the airwaves offer a civil forum show, viewers nod in agreement. Which is better journalism? globalization, the sexual revolution, or the civil rights movement. But one of the greatest upheavals of the century is the liberation of the nerd. Many have Gates. Few have placed these developments in context. Nerds, once defined as this movement created its own turmoil. With the advent of the power nerd, we can no longer say for certain what makes a nerd a nerd. Or, to put it another its origins, the appellation rose to prominence in the 1950s, the High Age of Conformity, when boomers employed it to condemn the most conformist of the conformists, the squarest of the squares. And the phrase conjured up a specific expanded to include vast new segments of the population. These new constituencies adopted bourgeois values, among them a fixation with stand the test of time. In particular, it doesn't survive the 1980s, an era the New York Times deemed was characterized by "nerd chic." By the middle of name a few. Underlying this transformation of the nerd's image was a transformation of the nerd's economic status. With their entry into new characteristic of nerds is that they lack a normal understanding of style and social graces. The essential reason they get this way is that as youths they carry their adolescent obsession into adulthood, but the scars of their obsession remain palpable. (Note: Rare is the person who becomes a nerd later policy in his 20s, but it never interfered with his social being.) between the two concepts is not large, more on the order of this: actual disdain. They are too easy a target. On the other hand, nerds evoke envy. We hate them because they are smarter, or more studious, or more focused nebbish liberation. A nebbish could never gain real power. More easily, one can they are systematically discriminated against, demanding Nebbish Studies at universities, and complaining that history textbooks treat them as losers. But cactus spines out of his face, the latest casualty of the world's most pointless competition. What is the great balloon race? The irrepressible witnessed, and the next few weeks will witness, an orgy of circumnavigation The balloonists have captured the public imagination, and remaining aviation milestone. The expeditions make great television: They fabulous. The balloonists seem genuinely heroic: They endure cramped quarters charmingly antiquated about the venture. (No ballooning story is complete (half for the balloonist, half for the charity of his choice). Balloonists and journalists are calling the race the "Last Great Adventure." But that phrase does violence to the notion of adventure. Once upon a time, of global air travel. Even Voyager had a scientific aim: It vindicated the notion of ultralight planes and proved the value of ultralight is a nonsensical exercise. We have climbed as high as we can and sunk as deep as we can. We've gone as far north as possible and as far south. We've broken the sound barrier on land and in water, circled the globe by water and by air. aviation. No one has ever bothered to break the ballooning record because there's no reason to do it. Balloons are a uniquely terrible mode of transportation: They are impossible to steer, slow, and dangerous. They are balloons can contribute nothing to transportation or science. Will a successful circumnavigation usher in an era of commercial balloon airlines? insignificance is a shame, because today's adventurers are as brave as their the genius behind Virgin, is as bold with his life as with his businesses. He to complete the circumnavigation, eventually: All three have pressurized gondolas that allow them to travel fast through the high jet stream. All have unpressurized gondolas: Their balloons must travel slowly, at lower altitudes, someone finishes the race soon, so the balloonists can move on to suggested that the United States offer a $20-billion reward for the private space. Why not the Red Planet? (Its color, after all, matches his omnipresent And that's an adventure that mankind could actually use. an unfortunate fate for those who cannot remember the past. What would he say about political leaders who cannot even remember the present? recently passed welfare rollback by giving "businesses a tax credit for every words fairly glow: "tax credit," "businesses," "off welfare," "employed." a the Work Opportunity Tax Credit) has been a ghastly disappointment ever since didn't hire more or different people. Instead, they simply got their accountants to review personnel records at year's end to see who among recent Tighter rules have, presumably, curbed that abuse, but far more damaging findings emerged from a couple of controlled experiments in researchers found that when eligible job seekers (welfare recipients and other categories of "disadvantaged" workers) were sent off to potential employers applied on their own. And that was back when the tax credit was considerably matter, so are all the efforts to engineer social and economic behavior through for buying and selling homes, having a child or putting one in day care, sending the kids to college or going back yourself, saving up for a nursing parties in Congress agreed that tax subsidies are, at best, an inefficient way to promote desired behavior, since most of the money goes to pay for things would expect a politician to remember that far back. Let's return to the week after it had passed into law. Dole has apparently not forgotten his own understood, but primarily a canceling of corporate tax breaks not yet in place and crackdowns on cheaters to collect taxes already owed. (He did fail to note that the Social Security bailout of the early '80s, about which he also bragged repeatedly, included a large tax increase.) But Dole's grasp of specifics seemed a lot less secure when it came to defending his current plan to The architects of Dole's tax plan argue that critics have effects counted on to pump up tax collections by promoting growth and reducing tax avoidance. The real guts, they contend, lie in the promised budget cuts, attention. Congress and the president indulged in a round of mutual congressional leaders as they finished up on their work, "You should really be they didn't have to close down the government even once. Just one small detail that might have given Dole and his illustrious advisers a moment's pause: The appropriations measures, while restrained by recent standards, nonetheless domestic discretionary spending only a year ago. The Republicans will argue the shortfall isn't that big, because they are going to cover some of it by onetime remind them that Dole had already reserved the spectrum sale to help pay for when measured against the total budget, with all its sacrosanct or unavoidable obligations. But it's a significant shortfall if you are sufficiently "if budget balance is your prime desire and you believe that cuts in But that, of course, is the real and present issue that neither congressional party addressed, transfixed as they and the media are by the fantasy budgets offered on the campaign trail by their respective inadvertence, it's the end product of politics, the actual blueprint for billion this year (with more to come) for weapons systems and other sundries it doesn't want, only a few weeks after another set of committees decided to cut most important choices were not made. Social Security's problems won't be manifest until the next century, but it would be both easier and kinder to start making modest reforms now. Medicare, on the other hand, is exploding right now. So, for that matter, is the world's population. But overseas level more than a third below that of a few years ago. faulted for living in the past or ignoring the future. high horse, and doing all the other unappetizing things a presidential in a generation. There are, by my count, two dozen Republicans considered (at competing fiercely for donors, staff, volunteers, endorsements. (A caveat: Not Dole, for example, have carefully avoided any presidential posturing.) deterred. Anyone who would spend three years of his life pursuing an office pretends he isn't actually running. It's tacky to be campaigning for a simulacrum of a career, the kind of work that is an excuse to spend every He especially enjoys taking a bold public stand against his party: This distinguishes him as a statesman who won't sacrifice principles for expediency. Republican Congress for having "cut and run" rather than having tackled tough because he actually has to live by them. There is no such check on the elaborate on how he would balance the budget after his cuts. literary talents. You can't turn around in a bookstore without knocking over a book is followed by the book tour, which leads to the next fact about the will also travel to any place where a few dozen Republicans have gathered. Last fans tout his top finish in a straw poll of Conservative Political Action Conference members. There have been national news stories based on straw polls his second term (which, of course, is exactly what he'd like to do). So Bush bottom lines instead of blood pressures; nurses who scan spreadsheets instead to mind the memory of a holiday party a generation ago in a fashionable in his soft Southern drawl, "A little toddy's not going to hurt you." alcoholism was then in remission. The prescribing gentleman was her doctor, a atypical example of the sage practitioners of yore, you say. And indeed, my husband had joined. And our switch came not a moment too soon. My thyroid, the by our insurance, as routine physicals were not) were advised. visits and took the pills and ignored the occasional heart palpitations that solicitude, he admitted, adult chicken pox being so rare. went on, I met more and more fellow patients of my internist. A striking number, usually women, turned out to share my low thyroid. For men, the favored in Pall Mall, drank no brandy, squired no acres, rode to no hounds? Well, who Of course, we, with our fine educations and scholarly than the average practitioner in his cohort. He probably did us no lasting harm. When I finally fled to the excellent, still younger internist who remains my doctor, he took me off the thyroid pills immediately, and the palpitations brings me to the "to be sure" paragraph, as they call it in our trade. Most their patients and incredibly hardworking. And many of them, my doctor their professional discretion that are prominent features of the new medical consumers and their representatives in Congress, they are already being back the clock. Remember that only one generation before my remembered holiday party, most people didn't have health insurance at all. If they got sick, they scrounged up the few dollars the doctor requested and received care that, while sympathetically tendered, probably wasn't worth much more than they paid for it. If granny needed an operation, there went the tuition for junior's college. in with generous coverage for the elderly through Medicare and people demanded more and more care and, thanks to science and technology, that legislation to repeal the laws of supply and demand, medical prices soared. Nobody minded much as long as somebody else was paying the bill (true, the economists warned in their dreary way that costly benefits get shifted back to workers in the form of lower wages, but who listens to them?). As companies found themselves increasingly squeezed between the demands of workers and stockholders, however, they started pressuring their insurers, who passed that pressure on to hospitals, doctors, and other providers. system. By standardizing practice, the reformers argued, wasteful care would be plan to generate the savings that would finance universal coverage at no net cost. Now, as the movement toward managed care has accelerated to a full health care," warned one especially overwrought Democratic challenger in the several variants, found no large differences in the average quality of such preventative care (including early cancer detection) and somewhat less satisfactory care for complicated illnesses where methods of treatment are not in the end, the patients got the care they sought). But what about all the carload of cases that move well beyond the shoddy into the truly horrific, he need only have consulted the regular Medicaid Fraud Reports put out by the National Association of Attorneys General. These I have perused with sick theft by doctors, dentists, nursing homes, chiropractors, and the like of thousands, often millions of dollars (or sometimes drugs) from federal and state governments. The more colorful cases involve the infliction of torments on helpless patients that would excite the envy of Pol Pot. Medicaid passed into law with scant attention, a few brave analysts dared to suggest that the poor might be better served at far lower cost if the money Good heavens, snorted the conventional wisdom: That would be to create two so we consigned many of the needy to care that would be flattered to be called or to wait in long lines at hospital emergency rooms till the harried staff can volume, it's worth remembering that much of what we like to remember never writers sneered at the tabs for their millions of lumpen readers; their behaved more like blackmailers than like scions of the Fourth Estate. the tabs are pariahs no longer. Since taking over as Enquirer editor in well as its first respected one. In the spring, Time named him one of admiringly soon after. And until a couple of weeks ago, Coz was considered the in the last few years that other journalists have taken the supermarket rags seriously. Coz deserves as much credit (or blame) for this as anyone. Before Enquirer 's investigators far outclassed other reporters. Thanks to lots Enquirer 's "feminist" coverage, and even the New York Times posturing as it does to his investigative reporting. Coz casts himself as the conscience of tabloid journalism (if that's not an oxymoron). When the Enquirer is more like People than it is like other tabloids. His misleading headlines, and fabricated stories. Coz is more likely to appear on a Celebrities scoff at the claim that the Enquirer is kinder and gentler. is gunning for journalistic respectability at a time when journalistic shows and magazines, which now cover celebrity news with as much vigor as the miracles almost as avidly as the Enquirer does. These mainstream media are eating the tabs' lunch. The Enquirer 's weekly circulation has fallen this decline by taking (or at least talking about) the high road. Don't count the Globe has become sleazier. While Coz preaches decorum, the Globe has added more sensationalism, more gore, more nasty gossip. The Enquirer 's circulation is stagnant. The Globe 's circulation is having lost their jobs because of the agreement as evidence of the treaty's dangers. They will be pointing in the wrong direction. The Labor Department responds that it is not to blame for that the closing of a brewery (or other plant) has to be directly attributable extra year of unemployment benefits and other "adjustment" assistance. It increased during the relevant period. Nor does it matter whether, as in the workers (who have traditionally been resistant to government efforts to workers to sign up for retraining in order to get cash, are more laxly cautions, the low usage level doesn't mean that harm hasn't occurred. Many companies and either unaware of the trade benefits, which unions actively attackers, they are hardly an advertisement for the equity of the "adjustment" it were possible to find and help every worker directly or indirectly hurt by trade pacts, why should they have a larger claim for public help than those whose jobs are lost to technological change? Or to shifts in consumer taste, lousy management, an overpriced dollar, or domestic competition? Government did not create trade. It created trade barriers. When it removes them, should it incur a special obligation to the formerly protected? on the basis of Labor Department certifications. They may find some comfort, which it imports large quantities of machinery and partially processed goods hemispheric integration. Since the pact, the total volume of trade among the parts moving back and forth across borders before reaching consumers. In collapse of the peso and the flight of investor capital. Since then, austerity hope for spreading internal prosperity, in which the United States has a large growth and lower inflation and unemployment than the prideful United States). the opportunity to buy all these fine goods on the credit thus extended. And trust that our foreign creditors will remain willing to invest their surplus those investments within our borders in a kindly fashion. But should that willingness ever falter, one thing is sure: No "worker adjustment" program will night, and (as he didn't note) that includes the right to vacation in August. But does anyone else find it suspicious that on what will undoubtedly be one of the most important political days of their lives, so many of them were Contrast this with the pundits, who set new records minutes. Four minutes after he finished, dozens had already rendered judgment on the various networks. But pundits are paid to be interesting, not to be don't believe that. The Republican reticence can be partly attributed to the ancient rule of politics: Don't kill your enemy when he's committing suicide. for silence from congressional leaders of both parties was the modern political practice of poll sitting. Don't express an opinion until you're sure it's complicated issue. The most basic facts were in dispute, and a political leader could plausibly decline to express an opinion. Now the basic facts are clear, whole thing should go away right now. You are permitted to weave variations on no longer permitted to say the basic question is unclear or you need more time he had the courage to go on national television last night and argue for continuing investigation. A few bold Democrats such as Rep. Barney Frank of Congress' leaders, it seems, there was no reason to get ahead of the polls. hear. But suppose that a week or a month from now it becomes clear that the proposition. At that point you can expect to hear ringing moral judgments from ambiguous, the assertion of timeless values by both sides will just have to knows why the bark beetle has suddenly proliferated. Everyone agrees that the threatened stands before the wood is pitted? The environmentalists see peril. The young spruce trees clinging to their dying parents' skirts are seemingly immune to the beetle's incursions. In not too many years, they, and the aspen and other sprinkled hardwoods, will restore the forest's verdure. Lumber cut many years ago bears witness to earlier infestations. (The door to the sauna will destroy healthy and unhealthy trees alike, allow grass to take root, and scarcely worth asking where the state's congressional delegation stands on the federal resistance, would log, mine, and drill every corner of the nation's largest land trust. They know that they can rely on their constituents' reflexive resistance to any form of federal intervention, save one. That sole exception to the libertarian orthodoxy is made in the case of federal either in full or at the most favorable matching rates for roads, military bases, parks, refuges, the Coast Guard, native affairs, and the full gamut of the average state. So much for rugged individualism.) Meanwhile, the state can out per capita to every person resident in the state for more than a year. (If you have a large family, an aversion to work, and a tolerance for winter are never cold or tired or just plain out of sorts. They would rise before wading through 35-degree glacial muck, spending hours -looking, or exploring tidal pools for sunflower stars and brittle stars, spiny sea urchins, mussel worms, anemones, and blennies, as curious and brightly colored as any on a The descendants of the sourdoughs (four of whom, early this are, of course, less refined in their sensibilities. So, too, are many of the adventurers, loners, and losers who have migrated to the state in their to force oral sex on him. You may wonder why the child had been left in the care of an uncle who was on probation for having broken the leg of another toddler. But the child's mother had fled north, his father was in jail in rejected by a 3-to-2 margin the "sport" of aerial wolf shooting in a referendum, overturning a vote in the state Legislature. When only half the in their government, many of the state's voters are relatively indifferent to its pursuits. This leaves the political field wide open for the developers, they oppose extending oil and gas drilling and other development in the Arctic native population, many of whose members still subsist by hunting and fishing, is divided according to the traditional interests and financial stakes in the development of the Arctic coastal plain, to which the caribou migrate to breed. their vigilant wolf escorts migrate north each spring, the grizzlies flourish along the salmon rivers, and the moose munch in Anchorage's suburban backyards. whales, sea lions, bald and golden eagles, tufted and horned puffins, and myriad lesser fauna, they participate with quiet dignity in the great cycle of than one superpower, the United States and the Soviet Union treated little dictators as playthings, dolls to dress up and knock down. But these days the besieged tyrant of an ailing country can make the United States look mousy. profiles add the requisite charming details: Sure, he murdered thousands of journalists join him for fancy meals and drinking bouts. pragmatism. He has a sensitive political ear: If he needs to compromise, he his concessions, the movement splintered. Later, he retracted most of his applies this same savvy to his diplomatic dealings. Unbelievably, he has monstrous. This is a perception that he created himself. Quietly, he bolsters betrayal was a much better career strategy than principle. His rise to power is top positions in the state energy corporation, the state bank, and the majority. It was a standard apparatchik affair, ending with a predictable yelled, "Nobody has the right to beat these people!" His remarks electrified and he milked his accidental celebrity to the fullest. Months after his letting corrupt cronies run state monopolies and pillage the state coffers. Nearly every year he reorganizes his Cabinet, deposing old friends and allowing doesn't care about the trappings of power. He doesn't put his name on airports or collect seaside villas or bed women. Although he has a gift for oratory, he He will hang onto power at all costs. He has a paranoid fear (well, not paranoid, because it's true) that if he doesn't ruthlessly boost himself, a suffers from more than a touch of depression himself. When protesters march against him, he grows despondent and doesn't leave his office for days. It is said that he hasn't a lick of genuine humor and rarely displays empathy. Unlike many of the sanctions have been lifted, inflation remains sky high. been reduced by half during his tenure. His popularity is said to be at an To prevent any of his discontented subjects from revolting, last year, he has temporarily closed dozens of independent newspapers and television stations because they griped too loudly about him. He has also third of this force is said to be specially trained to quash riots. Another third is said to be devoted to preventing army coups. weather it deserves. Drought and dust storms coincided with the Great Depression. Earth's weather was unusually tranquil during the tranquil '50s, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are obsessively. There is good reason to worry. The eastern Pacific has heated States; a mild winter in the Northeast, a harsh winter in the Southeast, the production of the Ivory Coast. It appears to spark of encephalitis, cholera, even influence immigration patterns in the Southwestern United States. (How? subside, there may be too little water to sustain the Sun Belt.) in all these varied weather crimes, scientists know surprisingly little about was identified, weather consisted of a series of little mysteries: Why is there a thunderstorm? Why a drought? Those mysteries have been solved (sort of), but frequently: It used to arrive every five to eight years; recently it's been coming every three to five years. Scientists are befuddled about its relationship (if any) to global warming: Some say global warming is making El understand and can't control, can shift worldwide temperatures and rainfall dramatically, we should hesitate before blaming our own carbon dioxide the West and Gulf Coasts with nasty winters, and that it decimates the salmon Southwest. Mild winters in the North and East will save billions on heating imagine what the world can be, and a revolutionary has the power to make it so. his pinwheeling, hopscotch creativity, he has changed the nation's center of gravity, reinventing commerce, art, science, technology, and faith. His is not yet a household name and may not be for some time. He is an unassuming of beard at all hours of the day. In a year of spectacular emotion, his was a is making history. When they chronicle our time, it should be his name that will be a more dangerous place, a darker, poorer place, a world untethered from the kind of stability we have come to cherish. And if he succeeds? "Every so cabin. It is in this cabin, five decades ago, that his mother came, alone, a his crucible. They grew up together, mother and son. They studied together on correspondence. And when the lessons were over, she instilled in him the homespun wisdom that her parents had instilled in her: "The power is the word, not the sword." "There is no difficulty so great that it cannot be overcome, no triumph so great that it cannot be destroyed." His mother still lives in the same house, but electric lights are everywhere now. He phones her every day, at noon sharp. (Once he excused himself from an audience with the pope to time he was a boy," she confides, "I knew that destiny had reserved him a seat." If destiny had indeed reserved him a seat, it was in the very front of His friends mowed lawns; he climbed mountains. They took piano lessons; he taught himself the trombone and busked for dimes on Main Street. "is the seedling of courage." And adversity came. He headed east for college on scholarship. His mother, alone again, fell ill. School was a struggle. Midway through his freshman year, he gave up, hitchhiked home, and told his mother he was back for good to take care of her. That night, they went out for a walk on the plains. "It was," he says, "a clear, moonlit night. We walked by an old ranch house, and I could see the barbed wire and the old brands glinting in the moonlight. All of a sudden I thought of when the world was young and growing and full of hope. And I wanted to make it so again." The next morning, he burns with a bright, clear flame, and his professors soon recognized his genius. He earned his degree in three years and went to work. He astonished. "He could see around corners," says an old colleague. He overturned conventional wisdom, and preached heresy. In the beginning, he was dismissed as power and influence grew. He was not an intellectual, and he had no time for ideas rooted themselves in society's cracks and began to sprout in all Today, despite his fame, he remains a startlingly humble man. Every morning, while he's in the bath, he tries to answer his dozens of time to eat dinner with childhood friends twice a week. "When he got famous, I was sure he'd forget us," says one old playmate, "but he hasn't." His charm is legendary. So is his equanimity. When his aides panic over some nugget of bad receives a letter or two urging him to run for president. He laughs the idea off. The president is a captive. He is a free man, and in freedom is true power. This is, he says, only the beginning of his crusade. In the third me where to stand, and I will move the earth." It is now the cusp of the millennium. The Man of the Year has two feet planted squarely on the ground. benefit, loath to accept the randomly aimed slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, ever ready to shift the blame for our own laziness or carelessness to safety crusaders who argued in the 1970s and '80s that drivers and their passengers could not be expected to buckle their seat belts and shoulder belts, and that the recalcitrant car companies should be required to install "passive The economics profession lent strength to the activists' on average, to fasten a seat belt. (For an instructive sample of these all these precious seconds and a few other minor costs over the life of the car, the economists concluded that the total cost of using seat belts exceeds labeled "liars and killers," as one company spokesperson puts it. Aware that consumers didn't like the automated seat belts that were the only alternative for meeting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's "passive makes dual air bags mandatory in all new cars. The car companies had long argued that air bags were only effective if the hated seat belts were also worn have several years of actual experience with air bags. And what does the record bargain. But what, then, about the value of the lives that air bags have taken? killed by air bags in accidents that otherwise would not have been fatal. that hits this writer close to home). Surely these lives were of infinite value too, which means that, by the peculiar arithmetic of infinity, the costs as well as the benefits of air bags are beyond measure. (Of course, if we truly apart from their costs, however, there's a real question whether air bags, on disproportionate number of crashes involving fatalities, and that, as a result, the occupants of such cars are at considerably higher risk than those in cars without air bags. It's not that air bags don't work. It's that when people feel that their chances of being injured are reduced, they drive more recklessly. that matter, could save more lives in one year than have been saved by air bags considerable sacrifice from a substantial part of the citizenry. Which brings seem to have wised up a lot. While consumer activists pump for another precious seconds and buckling up. The industry now plans to strengthen warnings that children should be kept, appropriately harnessed, in the back seat, where they will be neither helped nor harmed by air bags. The car companies also hope accepting controls on medical usage to limit the runaway costs of medical care. aggressive? A test of the offsetting behavior hypothesis. Journal of Law and an article of faith, at least within one potent sector of the Republican Party, bad) for the economy, for the financial markets and thus, for all of us. For two decades, as well, taxes have gone up and down, and so have the economy and the financial markets. So how do theory and reality compare? tax cut, by stimulating consumption and investment, can help the economy. But many things besides taxes affect the level of economic activity. And then there's the little problem of paying for the nice tax cut. As long as Congress is unwilling to offset revenue losses with real spending cuts (not the vague promises of future rectitude that have been the mainstay of every "historic budget deficit. And that, in turn, can drain investment capital, alarm an August scandal doldrums. Plenty of mysteries about Flytrap remain. Here's your chance to guess their solutions. (In this test, as in the SAT, you won't know did not technically violate the definition of "sexual relations. Well, what did other alternative, undoubtedly too icky to be discussed here but clearly care how apologetic he was, so he decided to take the offensive and win the PR can you be so cynical? His poll numbers are irrelevant. They will impeach him if he has committed impeachable offenses, no matter how popular he is. clean it up in questionable ways (Talking Points, etc.). suit in part because it would not distract the president from his job. Would secret tapes of other "friends" talking about their sex lives. Springer, the ringmaster of a lumpenproletariat circus, is enjoying a the top spot in nationwide talk show ratings: Springer is now watched by closed captioning, calling the show the "closest thing to pornography on broadcast television." Activists for free speech and the deaf rose to slobber. But the Jerry Springer Show is unrepentantly vicious. It's dedicated to strife and misery, to the principles that human frailty should be ridiculed, that the weak and the stupid should be humiliated, and that there is show, men learn their girlfriends are actually boys; wives learn their husbands fat people are poked and prodded and berated. Springer is an endless violence. Jerry seeks out guests who are too confused and too angry to address their problems rationally and too inarticulate to address them verbally. Other shows excise fighting and profanity: Springer promotes it. The on television. On the episode I watched last night, "Tell Her It's Over," there were eight separate fights. There was also so much cursing that entire segments were incomprehensible (they're bleeped out). Most talk shows maintain at least often smarmy, and always condescending. He brings the dry tinder and lights the host and his producers want them to do, exactly why they have burly bouncers at envelope of good taste. And Springer is riveting, excruciating television. It is unbearable to watch but impossible to turn off. You know, I know, the audience knows, he knows: No good can come of exposing these horrible problems to the world, yet it's impossible not to watch it happen. As New York Times media critic Bill Carter put it, Jerry Springer does not have question is not "Why is Springer on television?" It is "Why is Springer child of Holocaust survivors, he earned a law degree at Northwestern television. He delivered short commentaries at the end of local news conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a nihilist is a liberal who is disenfranchised folks who would be ignored otherwise. criticized for presenting disgusting behavior, because television doesn't create values, it only reflects them. Click below for his unctuous commentary create values, then lecture your audience about values). mostly Springer doesn't bother with justifications: He smiles and admits the all stupid. We're all idiots." "It's bubble gum." He has said that kids shouldn't watch it and that he himself has never watched it. time, Springer was an idealist: He hoped to change the world through politics, himself, but it's a lost cause. He wants to be a political science professor political theory and teen hookers. Last year Jerry attempted a return to the station's anchor and chief correspondent chose to resign rather than share air have invented it. And that's what freedom is all about. where I have vacationed most summers of my life. A few things have been loss), as did the little grocery store (much mourned when the milk supply runs added. The farmhouse, the shingled cottages, the library, and the chapel seem net. It stands firmly moored on the white sand beach that lies a few yards to the west of my sister's cottage and fewer than a hundred yards from my own. importance. I thought it was something of an eyesore. Only later, with the I come to realize that what we had here was no less than the fulsome gift from standards, but it stands, nevertheless, as a symbol of what the human spirit can achieve when free from the oppression of Big Government. the volleyball net didn't just wash in with the tide. The tiny island government that decides such things voted money to sink the concrete pilings that support the net's posts and to purchase the needed equipment. And the But these are small bureaucracies, more akin to the voluntary associations that up the nets, surely they regulate their placement on beaches and other public a group of bureaucrats around a conference table, the chances of them coming up with sensible rules for beach volleyball, much less the seminal concept, are zilch. More likely they would invent a bunch of rules for keeping the players from spraining their ankles or getting their toes cut by pieces of glass hidden in the sand or contracting tetanus from rusty nails stuck in driftwood. Actually, you know, there are rules sort of like that. My sister, who is something of an amateur expert on beaches, tells me, for example, that pursuant that these rules, whether aimed at pristine dunes or uncut feet, also advance the beach itself might not have been able to accommodate this monument to freedom were it not for the fact that, a few years back, my sister took it upon herself to consult some experts, among them actual bureaucrats, about the sidewalk, they counseled, caused the sea to erode, rather than build, the important dune that, with its beach grass and surrounding "berm colonizers," protects the beach and the north end of the island. And so the sidewalk went and the dune swells with each passing year and the beach grass slithers in the action that, at the cost of some individual freedom, to be sure (mine, for cart along the dirt track that is now the only access to my cottage), has Come to think of it, it's just possible that no sport benefits more from bureaucrats than beach volleyball. To begin with, if governments at every level hadn't intervened, beaches everywhere might have public beaches. And while the more aggressive types of beach maintenance activity have fallen into disfavor among coastal geologists in recent years, those beaches, like the East Coast's, have been the recipients of billions in taxpayers' dollars spent collectively by local, state, and federal bureaucracies, from the Squirrel Island Village Corp. to the Army Corps of players got their higher education thanks to the splendid network of colleges and universities that their home state maintains. While in college, they honed their prizes and commercial endorsements, many of the great players of tomorrow may even now be benefiting from government's biggest covert subsidy of sports different moral from the saga of beach volleyball as it has evolved in our freedom, still it may take a village to raise a volleyball net. heart. You wouldn't feel comfortable seeing little kids begging in the streets, or stepping over the bodies of old folks gasping in the gutters. Maybe you read "more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased Children, and replaces it with block grants to the states. States have to create replacement programs that set limits (five years) on how long most (four out of five) families can get welfare, and ensure that half the families still will keep federal regulation writers off the dole), states are basically free to offer whatever combination of cash and services they think is best. probably get away with it. Welfare law has long been loaded with requirements that states must cut fraud on the rolls, move recipients into jobs, provide necessary service, blah, blah, blah. The requirements go unmet. The governor makes a few calls to the White House or Capitol Hill. Eyes are averted. all its seeming toughness, allows states plenty of leeway if they want to be generous. And welfare consultants are already showing the way. States are free, for example, to redirect the money that they used to spend on matching federal have lost their "temporary assistance" coverage. The new law also provides an incentive for states to use their own money to continue grants to families that brazened it out. But times have changed. Most states have already toughened Some of these waivers are for more generous programs, but others are just as get? Some were pretty mean already. People tend to forget that under the old Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and federal aid for housing, home heating, child care, and so forth, which will still be available.) At least in proverbial "bus ticket North." Not likely, perhaps, but worth watching out government would match the money states spent, according to a formula that took account of state need and benefit levels. The new rules cap federal welfare other contingencies). For now that's a windfall for all but a couple of states, we had this argument (back in Jimmy Carter's day): Most jobs in this economy are "dead end." People who work hard and build a good record move on to in recent years makes it hard to sustain the case that only highly trained or parents who, in practice, just cannot hold jobs (or perform other "work activities") as the new law requires they do after two years on the rolls? Maybe they have low mental or physical abilities. Maybe they are drug or simply have a bad attitude. Nobody really knows how big a problem this is, and the extent will surely differ from area to area. But we won't know till we push (and relatively expensive) welfare reform has cut its caseload by more than job markets surely helped, but the economy has boomed at other times with little effect on welfare. State officials think many potential recipients simply got the message that times have changed, and found jobs on their own. Moreover, credible studies have shown that many families have hidden income. A horror stories have returned with articles that are, on the whole, remarkably are working part time can take other classes in their spare hours. But training programs have a dismal record. Some have even been shown to impede movement increase in job placements and big benefit savings. aside for welfare recipients have gone unfilled, and there has been no in food stamps has got out of hand, and it's time for another round of cleanup and streamlining. And many of the people in question are real stamps are the last resort, the pittance that a rich country doles out to even its least "deserving" citizens. Of course, this new requirement, like many years, or are veterans or in the military) lose both food stamps and benefits the aged and disabled. Most immigrants are supposed to have sponsors who stand especially, has soared. Putting some teeth into sponsorship requirements for future entrants, as the new law will do, is reasonable. But pulling the rug out from under people who may have no practical recourse is unfair. And unlike the cutoff for childless food stampers, this requirement can't be "waived" its line in how it carved up peacekeeping zones: The French will govern the their recent elections than they think. The peacefulness of the process would Congress' vast parliamentary majority will silence opposition, and votes were cover story denounces the allies' prosecution of the triumph without peril to our armed forces. Air power only worked when combined humanistic and consonant with the United States' rebellious roots. Plus, the military engagements as distant exploits. A national service requirement would relink citizens to their country, their compatriots, and the nation's foreign leads workshops, distributes pamphlets, and investigates complaints. Recent legal decisions, including one by the Supreme Court, have made schools liable for indifference to sexual harassment among students. Conclusion: Trying to distinguish harassment from everyday schoolyard taunts is a clumsy but faster than inflation, another piece reports. Explanations: Universities vie to supply the most luxurious amenities; generous federal loans mean students can afford higher tuition; and the steep fees are a way for colleges to have wealthier students effectively subsidize poorer ones. and letting interns staff the White House during the government shutdown. drew a moral line against barbarism but failed in its primary aim, which was to cover story says stress causes heart disease, memory loss, immune deficiency, impaired cognition, and even a thick waist. Women respond to internationalism" based on values and law. The West must start a moral crusade industry, which is virtually ignored by law enforcement. Vehicles are picked lauded, and completely fake memoir describing the atrocities he (never) since birth, may be a charlatan, or he may simply be deluded. Most troubling is the public's willingness to value the memoir's drama over its truthfulness. and Al Gore ideologically indistinguishable. The country is so flourishing "practice newly learned vulgarities, erupt with anger, tease and embarrass each other, share offensive notes, flirt, push and shove in the halls, grab and you saw what goes on in a restaurant kitchen, you'd never eat out again. Similarly, you're advised to avert your glance from the making of sausages, and laws, and presumably laws about the manufacture of sausages to be fried up in some restaurant that you won't be visiting. And yet, it really would be nice if the Supreme Court were televised. Lower courts are televised without diminishing our respect. Charlie Rose is on television every night, without there is no doubt some kind of case to be made against that. But if the court could be televised discretely, in black and white, surely justice would not be imperiled, and might even be improved. At least we'd get a more vivid idea of And of some guy vomiting up sausage all over the waiter. And the name of that what he terms "the real world of school discipline." argued against the federal government's tampering with school fun, just as it, decision, found that school districts can be liable for damages for failing to stop a student's severe and pervasive sexual harassment of a classmate. She classmate. Her school refused to help her, even by changing her seat. Her harasser was eventually charged and convicted of sexual battery in juvenile largest and only publicly traded gun manufacturer in the United States, disturbing in this instance that Trooper Burke jeopardized the public trust and of theaters for six weeks: Who can blame them for saying, "To hell with the critics, we know it will be great!"? The doors will open, and they'll race to grab the best seats and feel a surge of triumph as their butts sink down. We've Then, their hearts pounding, they'll settle back to read the rest of the titles: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Taxation of trade routes: they realize that what they've heard is, alas, true, that the picture really is a stiff? Maybe they never will. Maybe they'll want to love The invested in loving it, and in buying the books, magazines, dolls, cards, successful hypnosis, the subject works to enter a state of heightened susceptibility, to surrender to a higher power. Maybe they'll conclude that common sense is the enemy of the Force and fight it to the death. one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but remake Plan Nine From Outer Space it might have looked like this, although Wood's dialogue would surely have been more memorable. who wrote and directed the movie, has forgotten how to write and direct a concocting skeletons of screenplays that other people flesh out, and overseeing productions that other people storyboard and stage, he has come to lack what Wars was a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes, The Phantom Menace is a box of Cracker Jacks that's all diagrams of prizes. It's there on paper, but it's waiting to be filled in and jazzed up. cruel to the actors, but advance word has it only half right. Yes, they're actors, they've just been given scenes that no human could be expected to play. universe will be added in later by computers. "I don't sense anything," he a bit. "I do sense an unusual amount of fear for something as trivial as this queen and the Galactic Senate have already got the grim message. For one thing, communications have been disrupted: "A communications disruption can mean only with curly horns, speaks in tones from which emotion has been expunged, perhaps on the theory that subjects won't argue with a ruler who puts them to sleep: "I showed up, I thought: At last, a character with the potential for to stand stiffly in the dead center of the screen against matte paintings of space or some futuristic metropolis and deliver lines alternately formal or himself an "independent" filmmaker and an artist of integrity. Had he not been such a pretentious overlord, a platoon of screenwriters would doubtless have been engaged to rewrite him and make the movie halfway human. A buddy simpering and running away from battles. Those of us who complain about the that assembly lines can do much to make empty thrill machines more lively. Menace didn't need to be barren of feeling, but it took a real writer, inspiring of the Star Wars movies, The Empire Strikes Back audience was prepared to set aside some of its narrative expectations here to in the middle of the damn story. The only dramatic interest comes from a young conventionally industrious juvenile with a penchant for building droids from movie's most impressive but irrelevant special effects set pieces, a whiplash word that there's something wrong with the boy ("Clouded this boy's future is") you if you "quiet your mind." In other words, the Force. So, it's not nebulous, after all! It can be measured. It can be quantified. It can even, perhaps, be Galactic Senate do little to distract you from parliamentary machinations that routinely cut away from the battle just when he seems on the verge of actually underscored by demonic chants; he might as well wear a neon beanie that flashes never reviewed well by critics. Sometimes a basic story that rests on great cult movie, and no critic can have an effect on the obvious outcome that this is going to be the highest grossing movie ever. I myself stood in line for five Phantom Menace a dozen times, or even the three for which he has paid. (I could imagine seeing it three times only if they sold adrenaline shots at the concession stand.) Or maybe he'll come out of the movie and say: "No, you "Johnny has been such an effective spokesperson for us because he truly believes in the power of our products," says the president of New Jersey's friends, clergy, or family. 'We should be able to get all our ethical input the lawyer. This, of course, is the least interesting approach. We all know you shouldn't shoot the guy. It would be more entertaining to consider mixed motives, mitigating circumstances, conflicting social pressures, complicated histories, and then find that in this unique situation you really should shoot the guy. It's the difference between the lawyer and the dramatist, between the general and the particular. (That, and the fact that show people have it all priggishness on the part of the Times (well, not entirely) but limitations of space. While the lawyer needs only a brief summary of the case, the dramatist needs a richly detailed scenario. Alas, the column permits only limitations but the curious caricature that illustrates each column. This sketch of a pensive moralist, the personification of the column, the Uncle Ben different species, including goats, dolphins, elephants, and bonobo apes. offspring together. Gay male trout move in with their straight female best part of human heritage," it's inappropriate to make claims about human behavior based on his findings. And yet, just look at that adorable picture of two boy giraffes with their necks entwined, and tell me you're not dying to turn it Everybody's got a jury duty story, so I won't go on scare. You'd have thought it would discourage her but, jeez, she just kept coming back. Of course, you'd have thought she'd discourage us, but we kept is no impact on our culture and our children that is adverse if there is too much violence coming out of what they see and experience," he said. In other words, the issue is the quantity of violence that kids absorb from television, video games, and movies. Countless academic studies frame the violent entertainment children consume and how aggressively they behave. Asking whether violence on screen foments violence in life is like asking whether drinking liquids leads to car accidents. In a dumb way, the answer is yes. But you're not going to get anywhere until you distinguish between to address this issue at this level of generality because it lets them off the movie, it's real." If the problem is merely the quantity of violence kids see, slasher film. But we all know from personal experience that different sorts of screen violence have drastically varying emotional effects. Some depictions whet our appetites for brutality, while others do just the opposite. These psychologists can measure very effectively, because they involve a strong subjective element. But until we begin to distinguish among the different ways violence is portrayed, we can't begin to understand what those portrayals may do. Here are some categories that may be helpful in thinking about the the adult viewer feel? In the context of the play, the most prominent emotions and fear. We pity a tragic hero such as Hamlet because his misfortune is undeserved, and we tremble at the realization that he is like us. Tragedy doesn't stir violent urges but rather inhibits them. That is why war films like All Quiet on the Western Front are often described as "pacifistic." The tragic context of the violence sensitizes us to its horror and makes us revile fear is righteous indignation. This is the feeling we get when we see bad people flourish. It is stoked when we see them get their just deserts. That's a gang of hippie terrorists who murder assorted innocents and kill his female above.) The way you feel watching this act of violence is very different from glee, not pity and fear. You want to exclaim "Yes!" instead of "No!" In this become increasingly subhuman and thus deserving of more and more grotesque forms of torture and dismemberment. In this sense, the old Hays Office production code, which required that films teach a moral lesson by having evildoers punished, had it backward. If you want to discourage violence, you should show the innocent suffering, not the guilty. realistic depiction of gore, in which someone's head is chopped off, affording a glimpse of severed tendons and gushing arteries, worse in terms of inuring viewers to violence than generic mayhem, in which the bad guys fall over dead? realistic depictions may prevent violence from becoming an abstract idea. Once again, the context is what matters. In a tragic story, graphic violence makes horror more horrible. A retributive context makes extreme gore less horrible. dismemberment is immaterial. The deliciousness of the violence is the whole in the breast and dragged about her yard by a masked serial killer above.) If you're squeamish, you may cover your eyes when seeing this in a theater. But the horror is undeniably thrilling, in a sexual way. There's an obvious film and snuff films is that no animals are harmed in the making of the Critics of violent entertainment tend to hate this defense. It doesn't matter, revenge to the man who has just raped him, above.) Adults, or at least most adults, recognize this as a species of black comedy, albeit one that expresses a real sadism on the part of the director. But to immature minds, the message may be simply that brutality is cool and funny. In other words, ironic violence may be desensitizing and stimulating to the young in the same way that Cartoon Violence: What of films such as Lethal Weapon unreal that it becomes a cartoon? Or, for that matter, what of cartoons themselves, which are filled with calamities without consequences? (Watch Wile E. Coyote blown up, reconstituted, flattened, and reinflated above.) You might think that such portrayals teach the false lesson that violence doesn't have real effects. Perhaps for those too young to distinguish fantasy from reality, that's the case. But there's not much basis for thinking that this confusion he understands that cartoons and comics don't describe the real capacities of the Columbine killings, there's been a special focus on depictions of adolescents committing mayhem in school. The two films cited most often are fantasizes about gunning down his classmates and a priest Terminator -style while his buddies cheer. (View a clip from the movie, Of course, it is always possible that an unbalanced insane by cutting off their sources of possible inspiration, which are limitless. Sane adolescents seeing either of these films would understand that violence in a school setting. The issue isn't how much violence. It's what flimsy undergarment of professed remorse, she exposes a psyche built on seconds: "I waited a long time to be able to express to the country how very that I am very sorry for what happened and for what they've been through." As affair a "mistake" but frames the mistake in terms of technical error and emotional imbalance rather than moral failure. She refers constantly to What lesson does she draw from her mistakes? "I have a lot of healing to do," she concludes. Blaming her excesses on a chemical defect allows her to feel good about her seductive inclinations. When asked whether her behavior with terms: "For someone like me, who's a very passionate, loving woman, I think you she reflects on her own needs. "I was heartbroken," she recalls. "It hurts." what it was like to be that intimate with him." As for the episode in which confusing it would be for me to on the one hand have someone saying things to at the outset that she's "very loyal." She says she "trusted" her friends to apartment? Because to do otherwise would have violated her immunity agreement, she explains, and "I needed to take care of myself and my family." Toward the with a smile, "one of my first phrases [was], 'You are not the boss of defiantly retorts, "I don't think so. I don't think that my relationship hurt the job he was doing. It didn't hurt the work I was doing. It was between learned. "There are some days that I regret that the relationship ever started," she says, still grinning. "And there are some days that I just regret spin, whereas he was actually a reckless, ruthless narcissist. What the interview actually suggests, however, is that both perceptions are true. The responsibility for his conduct. And in her, he met his match. system; it has nothing to do with the scientific method. The scientific method is about hypothesis testing and experimentation. Simply giving things numerical wanting to shame the Wall Street Journal with some semblance of mathematical rigor, but Lord knows we poor scientists have to defend ourselves year study show us anything about bears when my cousin told me he never saw a principal investigator for the research project on the effect of women's work lead story was about another research finding (air pollution in Southern disease without telling us if the reporters ever had those diseases, or if they or any member of their immediate family is an albino lab rat, and so on. has no explicit gender, how do you know that the handbag, tutu, and so on insight rather than as the "cocktail chatter" it is. Like all dichotomies, putting a filter over a camera lens: Some colors are heightened, but others are completely obscured, and the final result may bear no resemblance to reality. paintings really strike one as "hot" and "temperamental"? Do the terms apply to a work's form or its content? is simply too weird, and yes, sexual (talk about images of "ecstatic release"), to fit comfortably into a category whose hallmarks are deemed to be "measure, disconcerting propensity to topple into the abyss, whether prompted by union with God, union with the beloved, or union with death. If a work is "about" "abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release," but its execution displays "measure, reason, and control" --one might place any number of baroque operas any of them, while I would never be able to make a "desert island" plot, no engaging characters to speak of, and actors who speak in among critics for being what critics, those curmudgeons, so rarely are: She is upbeat and forgiving, often to a fault. As the Johnny Mercer song instructs, she accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative. Or, as in the case of the latest Star Wars episode, she buries her list of negatives so late in the piece that it barely registers. This habit of combining compensatory criticism but also packed to the gills with compliments.) dupes who suffered through the charmless Phantom because the paranoid explanation is that the paper's growing dependence on movie ads compels her, in some oblique and unconscious way, to be an industry booster. Or some detractors have charged, and afraid to hurt her friends' feelings. Or maybe she is just, as people who know her tend to comment, exceptionally strong voice. She started off in the '70s writing about rock 'n' roll for It's unfair but true that a woman who started out at such a time and place, in such an atmosphere of heady debate, pot, scant female and who attended a small concert by a dynamic young man from New Jersey and wrote a famously prescient piece announcing, "I saw rock and roll future last night, she is today but more deeply felt, more confident while still refreshingly free of the insider smugness of so much writing on rock. But, for some reason, when to have inched away from her personal reactions. The pattern was set long Dust distorted the novels they set out to adapt, the way they reeked of for content. Then she turned her argument upside down, praising a trifle called A Summer Story precisely because of its cynical, empty even haunting experience. One senses her scrambling to fill the piece with everything but her own analysis. More often than not she leads with a lengthy, detailed visual description of a scene or a character. For paragraphs at a time noncommittal reviews with small emphatic bursts and to jack up her celebrations "stunningly pretty," "fabulously charismatic," "hilariously decadent," thumbs up, especially for an anticipated blockbuster, certain key words and phrases, such as "audience appeal" and "escapist fun," suggest that she is not writing from her own point of view so much as she's gauging in advance the public's reaction. The lead to her review of Twister called the film "a This sounds more like publicity copy than criticism; what it expresses is the impression the studio hopes the film will have on an audience. She is hardly the first good writer to be slightly stifled by the Times nor, by any means, is she the first frustrating critic to work there. On the immense power, but who recalls a single thing he wrote today, especially And these are tough times for reviewers in general. they wanted to grab readers by the hand and lead them to passionate works of art, but no one would aim so high today. Great movies are fewer and farther these days even the media that employ the critics measure a movie's success not by the critics' reaction but by opening weekend gross. Critics just don't become bitter about her shrinking influence; she's not stuck in whiny nostalgia for the way things were. But she has developed a disembodied, ghostly way of so. Congressional leaders from both parties are now urging the president not to the public to push him into a ground conflict of uncertain cost and consequence (Who knows the true meaning of "has no intention"?). But the White House may the White House got scant comfort from the public. Polls showed the expected "patriotic bounce" when the action started but it was relatively small and despite the fact that the conflict had most of the hallmarks that, humanitarian purpose, concerted allied action (usually good in itself for a 10-point boost in the polls), and an identifiable villain. well understood. And, despite his lingering credibility problems on foreign toughened. And that doesn't surprise the experts either. Even at the start of even in an air campaign have ranged from the high 60s to the low 80s. Still, support for the actual use of ground troops hovered in the lower 40s. What accounts for the rapid shift in opinion? Apparently think through its plans sufficiently, a finding supported by a New York found majority support for ground troops if needed to stop ethnic cleansing or Program on International Policy Attitudes, points to his own studies and a intervention, high initial public approval of the humanitarian aims had faded until you see some signs of success." What jades the public on military solidarity in the memory of defeats past and present, but when it comes to laser beams. She's supposed to be an undercover insurance operative who's out a cat's cradle of red string to represent the lasers that she won't, at the site, be able to discern. As she practices her moves, blindfolded, the firelight casts a golden aureole around her sculpted bottom. But she's even more alluring when she does the deed for real. She begins in the lotus position, then unfolds and sends a long leg sideways in a neatly executed archetypal enchantment, made even more savory by its naughty underpinnings: The its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures producers' model girlfriends, so that expensive vacations could be written off, millennium fireworks explode around them. But the bad guy's dialogue remains laughably mired in the last millennium: "They're rats in a trap!" lip that can flare or pout with silken ease. Supple physically, she is being one of the few male actors who actually makes a plausible heartthrob for a female nearly half a century his junior. "You're the most beautiful crook a paunch: "This," he seems say, "is how men of my age are supposed to look." Of course, one way that performers assist the aging process is by playing roles Miller into a brutal capitalist realism, wherein every encounter was reduced to an attempt by one party to hoodwink, psych out, or otherwise overpower another. dwarfed all others: the drama as a procession of archly formal negotiations. elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have World War I, the play (based on an actual incident) tells the story of an adolescent boy expelled from a military academy for the theft of a guilt or innocence is never satisfactorily resolved. What matters is that the uses every rhetorical trick he can think of to wear down a Parliament weary of sadness; he seems to carry on his ever shakier shoulders the knowledge that but not unattractive, having spent much of my early manhood pursuing similarly only be divulged after a protracted psychodrama. (The secret, of course, was finalize their decision after consulting with advisers back home. Most talks a failure. This is in contrast to, for instance, the New York agreement and concludes that the talks were a "limited success." faces no serious consequences for his unwillingness to compromise. If anything, agrees, saying: "No one has gained from the chaotic 'peace conference.'... No yesterday, only weariness and relief that the show had been kept on the road phone and were brought to safety without injuries to skiers or rescuers. The trial is attracting attention in English papers because some of the Alpine avalanches this winter have been attributed to irresponsible off piste skiers. (Astonishingly, the brief Times story finds room to list each refuses to have his picture taken." The interviewer notably refrains from "It stinks in God's nostrils, and I know it stinks in the law's nostrils, and it stinks to me." Who said this about what? "People magazine's 'Sexiest Murderers Alive' list, which he got off of got good and puking drunk with him in a whore house. Or, oh yeah, helped him narrow yet passionately held definition of manhood, and a cynical and characteristic sensitivity, holds a ceremony to rename a city plaza for a policeman. That's the routine part. But a few hours later, in a frivolous bit arranged by time spent on death row; White was removed from the list by lethal adaptation; I loved it when I saw the movie; I continue to love it. Truth is, I have always enjoyed toilet humor. It's my curse and my triumph. Artists, Writers, etc.," lists hundreds of names along with capsule comments, an odd melange of minutiae, misinformation, and admiration so befuddling it's greatest comics of the century, from Prince Valiant at the bottom to from R. Crumb to Captain Marvel in between. There is no place in it, however, work often shows up next to his in the pages of alternative weeklies across the none). He is also part of the explosion of brilliant graphic work that began in the early 1980s and has so far produced an array of permanent contributions to using cartoons as a way of addressing reality. Life in Hell hits us that the rise of serious comics (or "graphic novels" as some publishers chose quicker, and his shaky masculine pride always on the line. The first bit I salesman, and his willingness to bury his family under crushing debt in order to look like a big shot in the salesman's eyes, and theirs. (The current Homer, in contrast, is a creature so utterly without pride as to qualify for a kind of (and on which it came to depend rather too heavily as time went on), The justly celebrated for the density of its cultural allusions and the rich detail of its visuals. The best episodes project two dimensions into three better than its characters, a range of comic types as vivid as any in Dickens or and Marge, a marriage that has had its tests (Remember that slinky French The nervous breakdown on the freeway?), but has endured since the end of the children, our little sisters, our friends, our hometowns, our bad haircuts, and Its success resulted from the unlikely collusion between interference, his show is still a creature of contradictions. It pokes endless even as its characters have become among the most recognizable icons of explained that the photographer in question signs all his pictures by holding a marketing bonanza his creation has unleashed may have cost him his rightful Some of the products of this boom have been unsurprisingly dreadful (Remember its winning formulas to the point of exhaustion, has come up with The Family puns for the eye and teasers for the brain. But the writing is slow and stilted, and the situations already seem tired and didactic. This week's in which it's discovered that the moon has become a vulgar tourist trap, seemed historians want to know what life was really like in sculpted into yellow spikes or blue pylons (well, not that often anyway). But directorial effort, is a decrepit newspaper reporter rushing to save an thriller." The naysayers toss spit wads. The film is "a hopelessly cliched director's more elegiacal mode, a confusion of style and content that is not in the film's best interests." No one comments on the movie's most notable themes about defying class and convention don't work: "kids aren't much tuned into that." Trying to make the story interesting, the creators ladle in wacky animation gets mixed reviews: "The cartoon characters' faces and body language hodgepodge of awkward human movement, tired nature effects and fine painterly backgrounds and detail work." (Discuss the real version of the musical with other stage "directed with a lively intelligence," the film "has several surprises in its diverting venture," he says. The Village Voice isn't buying the Time hates the whole thing: "Well, it had to come sometime: this is the ending, which critics try not to give away but still bridle at. "Forces of Nature is less about the anarchic powers of love and sex than it is clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy expressed dismay at the epic, record length (four hours plus) and a dance for masterful analysis, trenchant characterizations, and vivid storytelling. In an almost prostrate review on the front page of the New York Times arts office is a work whose breadth, clarity of vision and historical scope amply Reviews agrees: "A brilliant, masterly, even seminal book." The Wall Renewal' is an engrossing book, truly hard to put down, at least for on the verge of a civic tax revolt. Voters, she writes, "cry out for tax relief," and when tax breaks are given to them they "discover the puny size of the break" and "turn angry." But the book demonstrates only that taxes have government has rendered her incoherent, irrational, and convinced that and homespun anecdotes to give her message a warmly populist glow. be that for the middle class the tax burden isn't in fact rising. All credible sources (the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for instance) agree that taxpayers are paying less. And opinion poll after opinion poll shows that only a tiny minority supports using the budget surplus for tax cuts. So, like the Journal editorial dogma it recycles, The Greedy Hand must resort to distortion, hypocrisy, and illogic to create the illusion of incipient tax dodgy statistics from the Tax Foundation that supposedly show a rising average tax burden but are based on inflated estimates and miscounting (to review the suffering, she writes, from "real bracket creep." Bracket creep used to be a problem: Before the 1980s, tax brackets were based on fixed income thresholds that didn't account for inflation. So when prices and wages rose quickly, taxpayers were pushed into higher tax brackets even though their real wages shifting into higher tax brackets as their real income climbs. This has happened recently; the strong economy and booming stock market have produced big gains in income and, hence, in income taxes. To dramatize this point, was beginning to enjoy its greatest success. Their financial situation is a albums a year, they paid higher taxes than they did when they struggled in anonymity. And yes, some people are paying tax rates they "never expected would apply" to them, but only because they're earning more money than they ever expected. Tax rates are marginal. When higher income moves you into a higher accidentally added a few extra zeroes to the end of my paycheck, I would end up paying a higher tax rate than I had anticipated, but you wouldn't hear me denounces the payroll tax as regressive, which it is. But she doesn't mention that its effect is partly offset by the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax rebate remember? Unless, of course, she is for reducing taxes on the rich but not on entire notion of a progressive tax code is a fraud. "Progressivity," she maintains, "doesn't do what it says it does: tax the rich." This is because the wealthy use loopholes to avoid their nominal rates. For instance, she notes, taxed at a lower capital gains rate. Technically, she's wrong about that. In most circumstances, employee stock option profits are taxed as ordinary income. But her broad point that special breaks for things such as capital gains undermine the tax code's progressivity is true enough. This is hardly a sincere indictment of the current system, however. The Wall Street Journal editorial page lobbies for lower capital gains rates on an almost daily basis and has been doing so for more that have compromised the tax code's progressive structure. Despite the Journal 's best efforts, though, the tax code is progressive. That the rich are higher than those on the middle class. and misrepresentations in this book? Is it hypocrisy? Confusion? Or just a could honestly argue what she really believes: Making the rich pay higher tax admitted that air power alone seems to have done the trick. The Daily not be "bombed to the negotiating table." The settlement was "a victory for conservative Daily Telegraph --but the paper qualified this with a claim Alliance to consider the deployment of ground troops." assertion or not, this is what the Independent had been saying all along. Or had it? "This newspaper consistently called for the deployment of the troops, sought to preserve its dignity by avoiding the issue altogether. In potential bear trap." It said, "A 'unified control and command' should not ended any danger of that. Instead, the paper presented the deal as a personal insistence that the conflict be conducted from the air and only from the air, and that an air war was winnable, was denounced in military circles, ever more deal with it last March to start a telephone banking service in the United States. The announcement sparked a storm of controversy over his reputed bigotry, however, and scores of the bank's customers, including charities and trade unions, threatened to take their business elsewhere. In a "right of in whatever form or guise has no part in my beliefs or my life." "technology gap" with the United States, the paper said. one country was allowed to fall to communism, many others would follow. In the those former enthusiasts) invoke a sort of reverse domino theory: If we save anyone from mass murder or humanitarian disaster, we'll find ourselves doing it Isolationist pundits give the impression that the world outside the United slaughters are everyday occurrences. In fact, attempts at genocide are fairly universally accepted definition: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in liberally in the last few weeks, even though human rights groups say they Suppose the United States, along with its allies, put the horse before the cart again and committed itself to stopping genocide wherever it occurred. How many military actions would that have required in, say, the trying to feed victims and stay out of harm's way. This was a gruesome farce, and the United States should have acted much earlier, with substantial Unfortunately, the media have tended to explain genocides as the spontaneous action of one group motivated by insatiable hatred of another. But that's not how genocides work. Yes, ethnic hatred runs deep in the and the genocide, like all genocides, was planned and executed by a relatively salient example of this. Perhaps because Western journalists knew so little so deeply rooted, it was unstoppable. One hears it endlessly from "experts" on years, and there's nothing we can do about it." (Even if you know nothing about groups have been living in peace for a long period, and something happened to destabilize that peace. That's why it's in the news, and that's why you, you ignorant windbag, have been invited on television to discuss it.) the genocide for failing to join in. They used the mass media, especially radio, to broadcast their bloody exhortations. And they used the silence of the did not know the full extent of the killing until reports after the fact. But another genocide was in the offing (although President Bush's real motivation lacked the central direction of a genocide, and its victims were not murdered on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. But it was a massive, politically inspired slaughter, which certainly justified foreign between situations that justify intervention and those that don't. No doubt there would be other occasions that clearly met the standard where intervention was unrealistic. For example, no reasonable person would expect the United But even a fuzzy and occasionally failed standard would be intervention that was universally accepted and regularly if not uniformly applied might even reduce the number of occasions when intervention would be would be prevented and punished, he might not attempt it. genocides in the past decade, the United States and others actually did vacationing animated space monsters. With perky breasts. And huge, adorable eyes. Whose crazy adventures are recounted in comic books available in vending other thing, right?) Perhaps in Japan the cute and the concupiscent do not coincide but coexist as two distinct phenomena. Like here in the United States with sex and the pizza. Still separate, right? Could I have that with The suspiciously cuddly and maybe just a little too a career of wriggling out of problems of his own making, but he may finally announcement. Another six weeks have come and gone and still there is no decision in sight. "The president will decide when he decides," says National dilemma with no satisfactory political solution: The entire national security Department to the heads of House and Senate intelligence committees, adamantly this swamp because the dynamics of the case have vastly changed during the past handlers. In the plea agreement, prosecutors promised not to seek a life sentence, but the judge, after reading a secret account of the damage Pollard by a small, vocal, paranoid, inflammatory, dishonest group of supporters, government broke his plea agreement by asking for a life sentence. which are made incessantly and at high volume, are false. Pollard did enormous trial because he chose to plead guilty. He did see the evidence Pollard they would ask for a "substantial" sentence and then didn't ask security agencies, "quoting" top national security officials as saying they government, which had distanced itself from Pollard, embraced him. And during his arrest or sentencing. Their new Pollard advocacy is moderate and credibility by avoiding the preposterous claims of his loyalists. They insist that his behavior was loathsome. They don't question the legality of his plea treatment. But, they say, Pollard has shown remorse for his wrongdoing. He deserves freedom on "humanitarian" grounds: He has served far longer than arguments, too, are wrong. Pollard does not, in fact, seem to be terribly United States a "foreign country." He has said, "I would rather be rotting in More important, the mainstream groups are downplaying what information about how the United States tracked Soviet subs. He gave the exactly what foreign (that is, Soviet) signals the United States has intercepted. He gave away documents that could have helped the Soviets identify assessment on the grounds that it would harm national security. The only reason to release it now is political, and national security officials shouldn't play reconcile the presidential and the political. Here he cannot. If Pollard is guardians and an invitation to our allies to spy on us. But even if Pollard is freeing him is a political win, a present to some of his dearest supporters. "a core vision," and "fire in the belly." You must "be true to yourself," "show that you care," and treat every voter like "a precious soul." And don't forget needing guidance. In days of yore, aspiring pols learned their trade by sitting in the party clubhouse. But political education has become alarmingly tens of thousands of strategy tapes to Republican activists. Both parties now offer seminars training candidates how to run. But Prepare To Win marks the first time either party has tried to educate prospective ideology, Prepare To Win is pure process. It mostly ignores Republican positions and concentrates on campaign mechanics. Speakers urge you to pay attention to filing deadlines, hire a lawyer, form a kitchen Cabinet of friends who can rein you in if the campaign unhinges you, court community leaders and seek their endorsement before you announce, choreograph your announcement to maximize media coverage, etc. It's all sensible about harnessing your beliefs, your honesty, and your caring heart for the common good. The political veterans dispensing advice genuinely seem to be preaching idealism. Speaker after speaker insists that your campaign must be founded on your "core principles" (beliefs, vision, whatever. My favorite workbook question is: "What are your core principles?" If you have to celebrating "precious souls" on a tape series designed to teach candidates exactly how to wring money from contributors and seduce skeptical speakers spend the bulk of their time detailing how campaigns are artifice and how candidates must learn to manipulate voters, contributors, images, and This fundamental cynicism reveals itself in countless small make a candidacy announcement "political theater" with the candidate as the Sen. Collins counsels listeners to embrace a cause before they become candidates, but not because the cause itself matters: The cause is a great way people and not just policy. Women, she notes, "are much more responsive to a strong positive message than they are to attacks." Then, in her final sentence, Prepare To Win instructors had no idea how cynical they sound. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the presentation of Sen. Kit Bond, a folksy proudly describes how, during his first congressional campaign, he refused a large contribution from someone who wanted him to change his position on an am running this campaign. I am not going to be told by any contributor that I should take a stand they want me to solely because they would give me money for it. I told 'em, "no thanks." If they want to support me in the objectives I have outlined, that's fine, but I don't take positions or make votes in Bond says this as though recounting some remarkable achievement. In fact, what his grand principle amounts to is: no vote for cash. Sen. Bond does not take bribes! Prepare To Win is this passage writ large. Beneath its pious talk of visions and core beliefs, it is teaching a lesson about politics that is much shabbier and much more real than the one it lunchtime, and the social geography is clear. High on the Hill, the Jocks and the Poms are eating in style, elbows up on linen tablecloths. "You wouldn't for prom queen. "Once you're in with the girls and guys on the Hill, everyone everyone cares what we think about stuff. It may be unfair, but that just the the hair isn't quite coiffed. Here's where you'll find the Badgers, who identity badge nervously on the table. "But they have something what we do, they make fun of us and call us names like 'bureaucrats' and 'paper are realizing that our schools are fraught, filled with feuding social groups high school anywhere in the United States. A few days' wandering its marble kind of scared that popular groups here might get targeted." Likely to Succeed"), mix easily with almost everyone. (Because they hang out smoking and whistling at girls behind the school's white administration are the Jocks and the Poms, who have a friendly rivalry about which group is They tell everyone else about what the Jocks have done and why: challengers to these top dogs. One is the Band, sometimes called the House Republicans. They play and talk in unison. The leaders of the Band socialize so tacky. Have you seen the way he hits on girls? Did you hear about parking lot of the Four Seasons with her longtime boyfriend Ben. Townies, and the President don't agree on much, but they all love the the old school every day to cruise the parking lot, pick up girls, tell They drive fabulous cars and pick up every check. "The Jocks say they rule forbidding place. The popular kids, for example, mock the Wannabes, the mobs of freshmen and sophomores who aspire desperately to become Jocks. The Wannabes will do anything for the Jocks, and the Jocks exploit them mercilessly, forcing them to write briefing papers, answer mail, field phone calls, fetch dry cleaning, and play chauffeur. In exchange for this drudgery, the Jocks occasionally deign to nod in their general direction. If a Wannabe gets paid a small stipend for this work, she belongs to the Staffers. If she's not paid, in the economics and computer classrooms, have an even more hopeless position. about this injustice. "I mean, it's totally unfair. I spend months figuring out all the work, and what do I get in return? They laugh at my charts, and they keep our distance from their pointless little world." intercourse. "We choose not to consort with others," declares team captain Bill campus, in a dark corner of a building known as the "Courthouse." The think we're freaky. They harass us because they think we're "They harass us. Well, we'll show them what harassment really is. Does coverage you'd think that children are by nature innocent, free of violent or sexual thoughts until corrupted by our culture. That schools have traditionally been safe. That the recent spate of killings is unprecedented. were considered adults. And preteens swore, drank, had sex, even dueled with guns. If school violence wasn't a problem back then, it's only because few taught at home. Those who attended school were just as prone to be disorderly as today's youths. Teachers kept problem children in line with corporal punishments that seem positively barbaric today: They tied children to whipping "B" for blasphemy. Occasionally children were put to death. school during the course of a week. As the principles of humanitarianism spread young students from all walks of life. (Later, attendance become compulsory.) In the Gilded Age, as immigrants and migrants flooded the cities, public elementary schools proliferated. Finally, the Progressives championed the view of adolescence as a stage of childhood, and high schools (the first of which because of disciplinary problems. In most institutions, keeping order took school to "the despotic government of a military camp." In the colleges, where climate of the day. In politically charged times, students became violent in introduced a "platoon" system to deal with an influx of pupils, students erupted across the city, resulting in furious battles between student mobs and brought different forms of "political" violence to places ranging from Little More politically sedate times didn't translate into student suburban anomie gave rise to school violence of the sorts broadly rendered by of "gangs" (a term coined in the 1930s) caught the nation's fancy. Time to testify about whether their drawings inspired children to violence. surged in the 1960s. While crime grew overall, juvenile crime grew faster. adult hall monitors and setting up bodies for hearing student grievances. Urban cameras, metal detectors, locker searches, and other measures more commonly If student violence has now been a major concern for decades now, what seems to distinguish '90s violence is the suburban- or students, armed with guns, committed multiple murders in or near the school in fact reveals nothing, statistically speaking, about our society. Yet they remind us that the number of children killed by guns skyrocketed in the '80s and while tailing off in the '90s remains far higher than in decades past. attributable "almost entirely" to the proliferation of guns among children. are no strangers to violent impulses. There have always been, and always will be, maladjusted or deranged students who unleash those impulses. That they do so is inevitable. How they do so may be within our control. producers stamped the words "ACQUITTED" and "NOT GUILTY" across the nation's television screens. "This is a real slap at the House prosecutors," declared pundits scavenged the battlefield, pronouncing Republicans the losers. Senate has cast its votes, history's verdict remains in doubt. The spin war removal. But this was only the last stage of a gradually escalating scandal. he had done something immoral. The second question, debated throughout the time the Republicans got to the third stage, they had lost the public. But on the first question, the polls remain squarely on their side. In a say it does not. These numbers show how Republicans can rewrite the scandal: by sliding the debate back across the spectrum to the moral question and This is why Democrats have scrambled to avoid a fight over castigated. They denounce his conduct at every opportunity. Having failed to The votes for conviction "confirmed the humiliation of the president," Sen. with the failures of the president to act appropriately." senators, assisted by the media, depicted the House prosecutors' failure to win and that their vindication depends on his repudiation by Congress. In as united in its denunciation of the president. "We're going to end up with thereby resolving the impeachment issue. The political camp, led by Sen. Phil country and keep the issue alive for the next election. The pedagogical him and his party. They're not interested in using congressional Democrats to Republicans' first objective was to kill the censure resolution. They argued, decision to kill it for the same reason was no less political. First DeLay escaped untouched. "[It] looks as though, as the Democrats put it, a reckless, reprehensible, and irresponsible man will remain our president for the next two "Children now have the lesson that lying, cheating, and breaking the law are immune to this attack because they've got both ends of the spectrum covered: On and condemned his misconduct. This is the third fallacy: Democrats have overlooked the legal question in the middle. On that question, they have failed Yet every Democratic senator voted "not guilty" last have either denied that the case was proved or have dodged the question by arguing that either way, the alleged crimes wouldn't merit the president's removal. And while their censure resolution may immunize them against the charge of moral indifference, it doesn't protect them from the charge of opportunity. At their press conference after the Senate verdict, several House prosecutors interrupted their sermons against "the polls" to point out where "The political cleansing that did not happen through the impeachment process" Republican strategists will make Democrats carry that history is written by the winners. They think this maxim shows how clever and cynical they are. Actually, it's half of a circular argument, and their failure movement. Winners, it turns out, are written by the historians. And the contest poorly responded to and inadequately investigated by the police, Home Secretary government officials will now be personally and criminally liable for any the reforms are less aggressive than those sought by the independent commission be defined by the victim not the police (if the victim says they're racist, procedures, practices and a culture which tend to exclude or to disadvantage relays an embarrassing postscript to Straw's announcement: because it contained the names and addresses of witnesses and informants who assisted investigators. The paper calls the information "the most sensitive that could be imagined to be involved in any police investigation" and surmises that those mentioned could already be in danger. The Standard also reports that hours after the report was published, a because a security camera trained on the memorial was not loaded with troubled eye on yet more avalanches in the Alps and the rescue attempts they still climbing, but all agree that this is the worst avalanche season in Alps are exacting revenge on greedy tourists for exploiting their natural In Middle Eastern news, fresh ripples and rumors about Walker has made his fortune by packing in all the maggoty, sadistic details and Homicide have opted to leaven with reminders of the fundamental region, where they view atrocity after atrocity before arriving at the source: an evil that is pure, unrepentant, and infectious. You can lop off its head, but the skull goes on grinning, serenely confident that it has passed on its Seven thrust Walker's worldview into your viscera; I can still recall that film's gun battle, set in a long corridor, with its slingshot angles and bullets that seemed to explode beside your head, and the ghastly sight, both riveting and repellent, of a partially flayed, obese corpse, its milky white professionally polite private investigator summoned to the manse of a recently millimeter film that appears to document the murder of a young woman. The appalled widow needs to know if the killing is real or simulated and hands in the meat market of New York City. What he sees twists Cage's hitherto poker verges on the point of exploding into hundreds of hysterical semitones. He stops taking calls from his wife (always clutching the baby) on his cell phone. tour guide, delivers the film's thematic warning: "There are things that you the devil changes you." I won't spell out where 8MM leads but, trust me, exhibits the aesthetic of an interior decorator, his pictures boasting the most that in 8MM he has managed to muzzle his fruitier impulses and work in a spooked, then suffused with righteous fury. Murderous fury. It's only after the devil, at least not by the standards of vigilante movies. He doesn't get a sexual charge out of the brutality, nor does he develop a penchant for torturing innocents. Apart from his stricken expressions and a couple of nasty wounds, there's nothing even to suggest that he's damned by taking justice into his own hands. If ever bad guys deserved to be executed, it's the bad guys in baby daughter, they cast aspersions on his masculinity, they sneer at the embraced the story of a vigilante who turns out to be dead wrong, driven mad by an increasing sense of his own impotence in a world that has left him behind. cool off. Next to these films, the moral contortions of 8MM seem especially bogus, a sadomasochistic peep show booth pretending to be a The test of a piece of storytelling is whether its audience monologue has some funny, dislocating observations: the unsophisticated ways of her folks juxtaposed against her newly acquired yuppie tastes, her need to her dislocation when, after taking her brother to the hospital for chemotherapy, she finds herself suddenly playing his part, as if, she says, together; nothing builds. It's mostly one thing after another: I went here, then I went there, then I went to a bookstore and cut a big fart and someone I wasn't supposed to be smoking out the car window and then noticed that the back cancer. But then why do it? What's the point of going out in front of an audience with a tale of illness if she's not going to bring all her imaginative relatively routine particulars and gives us something to hold onto when our York Times account of visiting the retired New Yorker critic seemed would wring his hands sensitively. My father (infantry, World War II) had a that we should do it again and again. The millions died delightfully. While cops stood idly by, mobs trashed the buildings especially with this monotonous war propaganda on the news. My son is bored; he can't go out, except to visit friends in their shelters, where it's boring. My little one is bored, because all her favorite cartoons like Power Rangers have been replaced by those interminable news programs." "They deny everything. They essentially say to their very best customers refers either to the ad campaign for The Mod Squad that lured hundreds "They are important when they bring in tourists. If not, they are attract hundreds of people to the Universal Studios Tour, or to endangered "Man, if I can continue to do that good, who knows? The sky's the "This is the first time in all my visits that they've given me a hopeful Shopping Avenger, who has toiled without pause this past month (all right, I paused) to right the wrongs inflicted on the buying masses by the dark forces Before writing the first installment of this column last month, the Shopping Avenger had no idea that so many people would have so many complaints about so many different companies. The Shopping Avenger also was hostile: "You're probably just running a scam to collect a bunch of upscale But most of you turned to me in good faith, and for this I am thankful. Alas, I am but one superhero, and could not come to the aid of all concerning the operation of your personal computers, let it be known across the land that the Shopping Avenger still writes on papyrus. And for those of you who contributed not complaints but wacky observations, such as "I find it Now, though, a few observations of my own, about the complaints (the understandable ones) I did receive. do not yet understand the true power of the Shopping Avenger. As an example of all four phenomena, I refer you now to the weeks hence," K. explains. "A week later, I called the local number to confirm, problem, a fine policy. But let's supplement it with: DON'T TELL ME OTHERWISE LETTERS TO MAKE A POINT, I believe K. earned that right here. K. goes on to state that he canceled his rental and policies. What I got was, in technical terms, a runaround. way. Then she blamed the customer for misunderstanding what he heard. This, I heard variations of "the customer didn't understand our phone prompts" three times already, leading me to the conclusion that there's a real problem out Then Burke yelled at me for having the temerity to even concerning weekend rentals, but Burke said she could not cite policy, because the state in which the rental was to occur, which I did. Then she suggested that K. merely thought he made a reservation but actually only asked about prices. This seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but I checked with K., who supplied me with his actual reservation number. He also confirmed that he in the habit of changing confirmed reservations behind the customer's back, but Burke, even while knowing that the Shopping Avenger's deadline approached, did should know that the Shopping Avenger will not rest, except at night and on Our correspondent A. wrote the Shopping Avenger to complain Everything was going fine until he clicked to confirm his order. The screen Please wait to see a response from the system with your confirmation." So there I was wondering what the hell had happened to my credit card information. Even worse, the phone number they gave me to call is long To add insult to injury, when A. finally spoke to a "live" person (you will soon see why the word "live" is in quotation marks), he asked "customer service" department, told him he should have called his local service provider. Of course, no one had provided A. with the local service number. He eventually bought the tickets anyway, paying the "convenience" charge. All this was too much for the Shopping Avenger, who swung into action. Actually, the Shopping Avenger swung into action even before wanted an explanation and an apology for A., which he got, sort of. become busy." He also explains, "Dozens of variables may determine the speed and continuity of your Internet connection are in the hands of your local phone accept our sincerest apologies and we hope you will continue to offer your material amends, and get the Shopping Avenger on your side. the evils of the pest control and airline industries. Don't ask why, it's too million ad campaign, gospel singers, children, and evangelists poured out of a says The Book 's promoter, televangelist and former presidential ahead and broadcast the show's season finale, although it too is disturbingly Press, Dropping a 1,000-Pound Weight Onto Stuff, Crashing Into Stuff With a Locomotive. With one fleeting exception, when he shot up, and later blew up, night's best moment (which I suspect won't travel well out of context) was when has the lowest mortality rate in the history of the school!" safe. And right after surgery, I take the fat I sucked out and fry up a couple may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poisoning, carry a big stick,' we have yelled and carried a toothpick. And so I announce my intention to undergo penile enlargement, and as long as you're down there, was watching, and in reality no one was watching. But then again, who wants to journalism department recently bade adieu to the millennium by picking the consensus emerged around these eight books and authors, in this order: What makes a book silly? Some readers selected books that state the obvious: Bill Gates' The Road Ahead ("Computers will be Balance was accused of both fuzzy thinking and naked political promotion. Others nominated titles whose silliness was revealed by time, public debunking, population explosion that would cause global shortages, raise prices, poison entire bodies of work in one go, bypassed books and went straight for the Others took a more literal approach to silliness. "I readers measured it by amount of attention devoted by the chattering classes on and whole countries based on it. Of course, only a minority believed in it deeply, but many of them were serious people." He adds, "if any group is more two discernible effects: It validates already popular opinions (Did you already provide one more, far more practical, service: It should serve as grave warning to anyone who is even remotely contemplating writing a book on the fate of the Herewith, a sampler (and please don't send any more!): labor lawyer and author of The Secret Lives of Citizens (click thinks he has found a flaw in our argument that stocks are undervalued. He has contending that the value of a company is the present value of its stream of discounting its earnings, and all earnings are not paid out in dividends, then saying is that we never based our theory on earnings but instead, as we a stock will put in your pockets through the profits generated by the company proper figure to use to measure the cash generated by a company was somewhere between the lower bound of the dividend that a firm pays and the upper bound of highlighted the fact that earnings are a problematic measure of cash flow because of the potential that a firm might grow simply through retentions. claimed that it is a "mistake" to assume that dividends per share will post real growth, as we did in our calculations, because dividends, in theory, that real earnings growth only reflects retentions and that real dividend economic models, it is contradicted by the facts: Historical data on dividends reveal significant real growth of dividends per share. For example, in the length in our book, relating the observation to theories at the frontier of the branch of economics known as "Industrial Organization," but here is a hint: The simplest textbook model of the perfectly competitive firm doesn't do a great job of describing the companies that have driven the market higher and That is a good start. Even sticking with dividends alone, the number is pushed considerably higher than that if one accounts for repurchases and the tax advantage associated with them. So much for the crazy stock market bubble. Dow dividends at all. These firms have value because, ultimately, they will deliver techniques are out the window for firms that don't pay dividends, but they are topic. The basic idea is simple: You can base a value measure on earnings instead of dividends if you can identify those things that you are earnings themselves are a reasonable measure of the dividend that you use to construct the value of the firm if all earnings are paid out each year. Such an example is no pipe dream. Real Estate Investment Trusts, for example, pay out firms retain lots of earnings it gets more complicated, with the growth of earnings increasing as more and more cash is retained in the firm. For those valuable review articles of the some of the relevant academic work. address every conceivable objection in a short article in the Wall Street book. We look forward to picking up this debate in the fall when we lay all our facts and arguments on the table. Until that time, we have a little homework dividend today? Was the price increase over that period justified? What would a misrepresented their argument. They do not, they say, value a stock by looking at future earnings. They even agree that this would be a big mistake. They claim to look instead at future cash flows to stockholders. The two authors stock." In other words, there is no difference between my description of their argument. My article does not say or imply that "real earnings growth only reflects retentions and that dividend growth must be zero" or that "all valuation techniques are out the window for firms that don't pay dividends." It simply asserts that, in calculating a firm's potential value, you can't assume The argument is fallacious whether all the earnings are paid out, all are forthcoming book. I look forward to it. But I boldly predict it won't work earnings is the core of their current one. The thesis is simply wrong and that will have to go if they even start down Refinement Road. our discussion must rest until this ambitious book is published. For right now, it is worth noting that this letter is the first place where Glassman and enemies," I thought it worth highlighting some of the absurdities in the publicly and privately, is better than his. So why the fuss over me while other portfolio managers write every day about their stock picks and get no heat?" following (via his own small Web site and Silicon Investor chat rooms) is that his unusual position as both professional money manager and professional the energy to exploit the possibilities inherent in straddling two worlds. I find his columns entertaining more often than not. But his situation isn't common, so the argument of "everyone does it, why pick on me?" isn't I don't write for the notoriety, so giving them up wouldn't hurt." If it's remove the iconic projection of yourself from your Web site. You don't have to stop providing the insights that only you can give to the ignorant investing masses in order to forgo the money and fame that come along with your position. And, frankly, you shouldn't have to. But do us all the favor of not acting like a portfolio manager who recommends stocks in a column of his own." Say what? Extending that logic, there's no difference between a government that promotes its policies to an independent press and a government that runs its own interested role of the portfolio manager with the presumably disinterested role of the journalist. Don't tell me there aren't ethical challenges in that beyond stop me are complicit with that ignorance and are willing tools of those that would like the reader to have to rely on those who charge high commissions or high fees to unknowing, worried consumers of finance." This is a low blow. The in investing, and whatever else he is, he isn't a "tool" of the industry. Nor are the vast majority of financial journalists. Sure, there are some hacks, but most are intelligent folks who have the interests of their readers at the top he will "disappear from the writing firmament." Well, isn't that what would if you had invited the two to duke it out in a "Dialogue." Luckily, I don't have to cancel my subscription to your zine in a fit of pique! his brother's suspicious activities was the right choice. Nonetheless, few of would have chosen similarly. Not all moral choices are painless. One can want a particular practice to be rare just because it is painful, even if it is morally required (and not just permissible). So there is no contradiction in not rare. I would hope that the United States would defend itself every time a for that matter, discovers that a brother of his is an environmentalist evidence. If abortion, like defending oneself against fascists and environmentalist murderers, is a good thing, than it should not be rare. Good behavior should never be rare. It should be routine. organizations I was supposed to be watching and, of course, not disclosing it on the pages of the magazine whenever the magazine writes about that troubled he is by it. Might they cancel future assignments if a piece in the magazine really stings them? Might they add on assignments if a piece celebrates them? Mightn't it all just look bad even if everyone behaves Review is not nearly as likely to be covering, is a bigger issue. ran for the House of Representatives, he was accused of being a carpetbagger. His reply was that, being a military child, he had moved around his whole life, say, the accusation did not do for the competition what they hoped it would, as the reply was a large part of what won him his seat. many papers today features a photo of four piglets vigorously suckling a sow's None associated the pig with its traditional attributes, dirty or foul smelling. None exploited "pig" as an epithet for policeman. There were no pigs turning men into. How did we lose our rich tradition of porcine references? Did it all go wrong when we left the farm? Many's the happy hour we spent by the particularly rank aroma of our enemies. Well, we're city folk now, and our foes An ecological theory of the kosher laws suggests that they're meant to proscribe animals who'd compete with us for the foods we need. This theory is a little hazy about lobsters. Who, by the way, can also be made into a durable and attractive handbag. If you eat a whole lot of lobster, people will call you a pig. But not the other way around. Lobsters: not funny. Pigs: funny. A pig all she's done for you, doesn't mom deserve flowers for Mother's Day, and to be compared to a barnyard animal?" except for the final phrase, which is merely implicit. It's an ad for an online flower service. In a curious bit of marketing, the offer mom something nice, eventually, when you get around to it. about every tenth car has a vanity plate. People want the world to know their it's already taken. Hence the following quiz: Which of the following plates have been spoken for, and which are still up for grabs? it's taken. Well, then how about UNIQUE2?"). MANLY is available for at least as somewhere out there there's a car being driven by an unashamed incontinent warning their readers that the current escalation of United States airstrikes Storm except that they were conducted in slow motion so as to deflect media most likely to be deposed suddenly in a military coup. But, in sharp contrast The paper also quoted a Pentagon official saying that the United States has so far been highly successful in keeping up public awareness levels. "Scale is West's refusal five years ago to act against, or at first even acknowledge, telephone banking service in the United States was the subject of a two page up with a man who believes the world as we know it might be about to end." The doesn't believe having oral sex was vulgar: "Some people like pizza for lunch; others prefer a dessert." She also said she would never again fall in love with ("It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is") had made people you have 'no intention' to commit ground troops to accomplish the mission in as the probability was a year ago that he would have to admit to an soldiers would be sent into a "permissive environment." willingly yield. "There are other ways, however, to create a permissive environment," she added. "What we are doing is systematically diminishing or degrading his ability to have that kind of control over the area." must nonetheless be allowed to return home and live safely. "That will require, clearly, for some period of time, some sort of international force that will be alternately described this entity as an "international peacekeeping force," "international security presence," "implementation force," and in a peaceful and peacekeeping fashion, as a peacekeeping force." This may be "enclave," anonymous senior administration officials came up with a new phrase helicopters are more like ground weapons than like air weapons: They will fly return. That's why they belong to the Army, not the Air Force. To protect the are arriving in the region to help refugees. Everyone knows these troops are trained for combat and can be quickly converted into an invading force. Alternatively, the fuel and communications networks they will build can be used have ended. Presumably, these are alternative euphemisms for a "peacekeeping" the helicopters and Army soldiers are "an expansion of the air operation," "supporting the air campaign," and "not a ground force." who can talk his way out of a perjury rap can talk his way into a war. but since his indictment as a war criminal the most he can hope for is a safe retain power even with the support of his secret police, political cronies, and because of a complicated tax system, overgenerous welfare, and excessive labor new government is deregulating, unions are learning accommodation, and a cover story argues that the vice presidency is worth more likely to focus more on his stilted campaigning than his eight years of insider Adventure is the theme of the third installment in the magazine's millennium Crouch rejoices that it's no longer anomalous for a black man and a white man to share a boat; but the trip leaves Ford unsettled about his own latent to include at least one woman, use traditional, nonpolluting modes of transportation, and perform a social service project along the way. cover report slams the Cox report for asserting more than it are asked to spy for their government. The report actually documents the theft China's military is no challenge to the United States'. China has no aircraft cover story exults that now is the best time ever to be black enrollment are down. Blacks aren't celebrating because they fear an economic downturn and because equality is still elusive. Whites still outearn blacks, office wear, the garment industry is launching a PR campaign to popularize peaceful reign could be interrupted when the government decides soon if it should fund research performed with scientifically valuable but politically pilgrims produce children, but all are charmed by the enormous penises that editorial darkly warns that China is modernizing and expanding its military in Congressional Campaign Committee: He is an artless buffoon whose only asset is his family name, which he uses to woo donors and to intimidate opponents. Respect. How's that working out, by the way? Here's how: According to a New The mayor's press secretary said everyone in New York is just wrong: "The poll numbers seem to be driven by false perceptions." That's a kind of reform plan. And by "dark and brooding," I, of course, mean appealing and simpatico. some global personalities of unquestioned fame." A lovely phrase, that: C. Amount left on contract of fired New Jersey Nets today's Times features "intimate washing, heated seat, air dryer." to keep the money. Of his former bosses he said, "I do believe that they care about me." None of his players was heard to say the same about their incidentally, does not make a personal hygiene system, but for enough money, kill one guy and I suppose that makes you a murderer. People are so submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. pursuit of information about a girl in a snuff film. Critics' reactions are all exploitation film with all the trappings of depravity but none of the box office profit." Most reactions to the film are negative, but each critic (Paramount Pictures). Critics call this piece of early '80s "shameless in its use of mental retardation as a gimmick, a prop, and a plot device. Anyone with any knowledge of retardation is likely to find this film Holden of the New York Times opens his review with what sounds like a joke ("A beautifully acted love story") but isn't; he's the film's biggest fan. work. The story follows a young magician uncovering the details of his wrapped herself in. The thriller side of the book is well crafted, and the the same skill level in revealing his characters' emotional lives. (Read the first chapter, courtesy of the New York Times murder. Not only does the book repeat and contradict itself, but the author doesn't even try to offer an answer to the most essential question of all: whodunit? Some reviewers speculate that the shoddiness is a result of the book whether the work itself is amateurish or fully formed. The New York over" and that it is "the work of a man still unsure of his voice" but still sees enough flashes of brilliance to make the performance worthwhile. Daily piece of juvenilia." Some critics are less generous and note a heavy reliance that the play is no "lost masterpiece." (Find out more compete with it in international trade. "The most urgent strategic task for the nuclear capability. If this works, the United States might then target China to war machine," the paper quoted an unidentified diplomat as saying. It also said has signaled its willingness to separate politics and business by instructing criticism of the United States should be confined to the specific issues of Despite editorials around the world expressing alarm about the deteriorating days to show "that things are moving in the right direction, that of peace." The German press led on the deal struck at a stormy meeting of the Green Party, disruption to the country's secret intelligence services by the publication on government efforts to purge the Web of this sensitive information are "doomed not to investigate all this "on the old principle: 'if something smells bad, why put your nose in it?' When that something is the theft of the development dereliction of duty of the worst kind. It must now receive the fullest and most allegations relating to a trust fund set up to pay their daughter's defense being helpful when he woke up crying with a soiled diaper. The she attempts to evade an optical security system in the process of ripping off schoolboy accused of petty theft and the legal battle that blossoms in the out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also Though the premiere is still two weeks away, hype for the Star Wars rides on this product, so much advance flogging has been necessary, that the photos and news on upcoming commercials. The film's official site offers several trailers it's "the kind of disk you replay when it rolls to a close, just to delight in all that cleverness once again." (For more on the band, check out this site, which has Times "Foreign Affairs" columnist's study of globalization: "The author uses his skills as a reporter and analyst to conduct a breathtaking tour, one prospects in an ever more tightly integrated world without being accused of theories have already been disproved: His "Golden Arches" theory of have ever gone to war. This "was proved false even before his book's dominated by business instead of government: "The lack of skepticism toward globalization business can constrict freedom and innovation just as governments horror flick. Shocker: Critics say it's trite and unoriginal (it follows a boy with a demonically possessed hand). It's also "undeniably kinetic," and many problems with its psychological elisions to let it off the hook." (Read Chow's rookie partner in a task force charged with controlling gangs in hotbed of sensationalism." (Find out more about Chow on this same (tortured telekinetic teen starts bloodbath when humiliated), but this the film's only ally; he calls the direction "astute" and the script the popular computer game is deemed "so cheesy it could be served on crackers" the second trailer for the new Star Wars movie runs before it. (Find out How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was universally hailed for a famously uncompromising vision. It was an "amazingly varied body of work" that was "unified not only by bizarre brilliance but also by its rare ability shortcoming is what many critics describe as "coldness," even in his most and complain about how his film was being shown in a particular theater); and enough to talk about the maestro with anything less than total respect: reviewers wish the account gave more of a sense of the historical context. But latest opinion poll. He has never countenanced a campaign plan; and in the retreated into the semantic ambiguities for which his presidency has become outdated street maps for an operation of this kind beggars belief." hardened their demands for a halt to airstrikes before they will agree to support peace moves in the United Nations. Having consistently urged the use of ground forces, the paper finally recognized in an editorial that "the will, or lacks the necessary political weight, to commit the United States to whatever the formalities of status may be." The liberal Independent 's air bombardments. "He can, at his leisure, test the unity and determination of the allies," it added. "One way or another, it is always he who holds the state. He reportedly said that recent developments have made territorial concentration camp and you didn't learn your lesson." before impeachment proceedings against the president were due to begin in the acting prime minister, has already been offered the job at least three times. a man whose main political support came from Communists, who "have proclaimed presidential election, if he decides to run, are "very high," the paper country is running out of workers. With unemployment at a 30-year low, there aren't many motivated people left for the labor market to absorb, it said. "As helped productivity growth to increase. But this may well prove temporary. When the economy runs out of workers, the laws of supply and demand take over." major problem creating a consistent monetary policy because of growing economic judge agreed there were extenuating circumstances because both songwriters had firm and intensify the war. "The smell of a deal is in the air," said the for the "listening President" to speak with a firmer voice. "The strong US he must show that he is prepared to go in with whatever force it takes, and getting the three servicemen released has been greeted with cynicism by the paper claimed, that for all his "media grandstanding" and his repeated failure to see major projects through, "he remains an inspiration for millions of only comment on the latter event was the passive phrase, "it is regretted," attitude to that of a person who crosses a city street to help an innocent the criminal's address, and to throw stones through the window of his home has shown great talent as a chess player. By moving the war to the terrain of attempting a final maneuver. "Having been put in check, the king can always castle," the paper explained. "He knows he has lost the game, but he still it is as if you haven't died." The regime is now censoring the death announcements in order to conceal the number and the identities of the victims been found. The announcement said, enigmatically, that she had been "a victim of the assassins who came from the sky and of those who came from the were being required to read a textbook describing homosexuals as "criminals." asserted: "An honest person tends to see others as being honest as well; the evil person sees evilness in others. The homosexual tends to blame his victim merchants are cheats and liars. The thief will accuse everyone of thievery." The book was listed as required reading for two courses, Criminology and field, and has an international reputation," and that the university was asked fruit growers to supply it with smaller melons after research indicated that housewives subconsciously compared them to the size of their breasts. traditional big, fleshy melons were remaining unsold." us on the meaning of "forces," "effective," "international," "security," bombing. "There was a sense that the storm was occurring right in front of a nationwide audience, and it undermined once again the persistent nave feeling coexistence with twisters. But to watch your own tornado is a little like sport after a bout with drug abuse in the late '80s and a weight problem last percent of the vote in a special election to fill the seat vacated by former Times played up Duke's showing, saying he "fell just short" of making the runoff and suggesting that he would have made it if a rival hadn't cut into his problem. Duke's spin: Now that everyone knows my views, the sizable vote I received shows how many people agree with me. Duke's critics' spin: Now that everyone knows his views, the sizable vote he received shows how many people his car. (I am not making this up.) His teeth are very nice, but I believe this activity should be restricted to the privacy of the bathroom only. He does not see a problem doing this in public. Please respond. are correct that it is not an activity meant for public viewing but, more important, seeing to one's dental hygiene while driving a car poses a threat to find four minutes to do his admirable oral upkeep when he is outside of his if we actually disagree, or if my solutions just didn't occur to you. the best solution would be for the roommate to change her ways, but leveling with her would more than likely end the friendship. It sounds as if things are just fine as long as your correspondent doesn't have to visit her friend's house. So, why not just develop a convenient "cat allergy"? The white lie is a person who wants to keep weight off but can't control what's served at dinner indeed, meant for situations like this, but in the case of "Nauseously Yours," there is the chance that straight shooting would be of real help to the Granted, one can't get into terrible trouble with an indulgence now and then, assuming one is eating conscientiously, but to inhale a whole meal of rich food is counterproductive. Let's say that when at a dinner party where the sky's the your unwavering good taste and style to answer a fashion question. Does the rule of no white clothing before Memorial Day and after Labor Day still apply? I learned at a very young age that dressing in white clothing before Memorial Day or after Labor Day was inappropriate. Are the standards still alive, or are Waiting on Hat Pins and Darning Needles for Your Reply calendar's rules regarding white are still operative for the old guard. Even for them, however, fashion has weighed in with a wild card: winter white. To be more individual: Wear what is flattering and what you like. (This is why no one about, whether getting food or shopping for other goods, I seem to encounter clerks who equate "There you go" with "Thank you." I can't tell you how many times I have heard "There you go" as I am handed my change, or my bag, with no thanks given. "There you go" seems to imply "Get the hell out," whereas a retail for several years myself, and I say, "Thank you" because I realize that if I do not act appreciatively, the customer may well go on down the noticed how certain phrases seem to take hold? Like "Have a nice day" (which decided that "There you go" is code for "Get the hell out." All you can do, to fix it failed. The Daily Telegraph also considered this story worthy scalding feet in bath." The paper's medical correspondent explained that "any serious burn to the feet, hands, face or genitalia is considered of great medical importance and is usually treated in hospital." factory was about to be targeted. "The only problem officials faced was in persuading workers that their information was genuine," he reported. The same massacre sites, locate the hideouts of death squad leaders, and find secret themselves to every shortage except that of cigarettes, he reported, quoting a completely disappeared," he wrote. "Before the bombs, taxi drivers tried to cheat their customers. Today, they charge the correct fares." He added that nearly all theaters had stopped charging for tickets, and that those that still did charge something were giving the proceeds to the Red Cross. authorities have since denied his presence there. It was believed he might have "to see them represented by a valetudinarian buffoon and exploited by a corrupt it is also perhaps imprudent to take their bragging seriously, thus encouraging second nuclear power, and we cannot further humiliate her with impunity in her political scientists and sociologists refer to a society as "civil" they are citing the many important functions that are performed by voluntary, intermediate institutions. These institutions are intermediate between the state and the individual. They are voluntary in that the performance of individuals within these institutions is not dictated by the state or by the exigencies of the market. Churches, trade unions, philanthropic bodies, and intermediate institutions is a society in itself, and each of us spends much of his life in them. Some of these little societies are civil and some are not. I use the word "civil" here to mean that the participants are cooperative and respectful of the others and their interests. That is different from "polite," which is a surface quality. The chairman of a congressional committee who calls I think of two in my experience that were especially civil. One was the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, where I spent a year as a fellow but we immediately became friends and enjoyed a pleasant social life together. More important, we could consult each other and collect candid advice. There the center had something to do with the pervasive good feelings. Also, each of duration of the year's leave. The fellowship was not part of one's real life, it was an interlude to be enjoyed and not spoiled by conflict. It was as if we were on a cruise ship with passengers we had never seen before and would My second example is the book discussion group I belong to women as well). Book discussion groups are regularly described as scenes of the most. Why is our group civil? I credit, in part, the physical and But what's more important is the character of the participants. We are all members or spouses of members of the club. We are mostly pretty old. And we have mostly had, and may still be having, some achievement and attention outside the book discussion group. So nobody feels the need to assert his individuality and importance. We can relax and enjoy the pleasure of civil cases, in which neither the gain from cooperative effort nor the possible gain from individual assertion is very large. The key is not in the absolute strength of these gains but in their relative strength. In the cases I have I can give a more serious example. For many years, starting with the end of World War II, I worked for an organization of businessmen formulating policy statements on issues of economic policy. We were the Depression and that may have contributed to the outbreak of war. We thought we had some insights that would help to avert such failures in the future. At the same time, the organization was a major scene in which we might struggle waking hours, derived our incomes, and achieved status internally and to the rest of the world. But the divisiveness of these interests was outweighed by our common interest in the program on which we had embarked. So we all worked together eagerly and happily to try to bring about a change of policy. We were the memories of Depression and war were fading, some of what we thought were new ideas had become conventional wisdom, and many of the most inspiring leaders of the group had gone on to other things or had retired. Then we Different participants in a society will have different views of how civil it is. I thought that those of us who worked on the feel that anyone coveted mine. I had no ambitions for more status and attention it was a jungle out there, even though one of the predators was really a other people with civility. The second side is interpreting the attitude and behavior of other people toward oneself as civil. For most people I suppose the Civility is not one of the major virtues. It is not like courage or honesty. The friendly cooperation that characterizes civil to participate in societies that one perceives to be civil adds much to the (Universal Pictures). Critics' reactions cover the spectrum. backwoods kids in the 1950s who use amateur rocketry as a steppingstone to college scholarships and an escape from the coal mines where their fathers work. Those who praise the film say it's "one of the most unfashionable movies "agreeably guileless for such a manipulative genre." The Village Voice describes this mean teen movie about a posse of cruel popular girls who accidentally kill one of their own and try to cover it up. a corporate cubicle, and how a few drones manage to shake things up. The only makes you wonder if they've got so successful they've forgotten the torture a jammed copy machine can inflict on the lowly. (The official site has a variety of the indie scene, the band is now receiving praise everywhere from Rolling don't find it remotely enlightening to share relentless intimacy with someone of string theory, currently the most popular "theory of everything," cited as a way of reconciling the otherwise incompatible theories of general relativity comprehensible to the lay enthusiast. "He has a rare ability to explain even the most evanescent ideas in a way that gives at least the illusion of "cool" version of the Bible. But, says The Book 's promoter, are invited to devise other ways to achieve that goal. shifts in scale have always been funny, particularly when a little thing is sit in a chicken and eat a chicken. Kind of rubbing it in.) The converse, however, is not true: A big thing made tiny is not comic; it's cute, a the body of some guy with a brain tumor. It's more scary than funny, especially "The Book looks friendlier than your typical leather Bible. It's got a now displays the slogan "The newspaper of record and small penises." warming true story will reach teens with two powerful messages: first, save sex graduated from high school never kissing a girl or drinking alcohol. But a who hated what they did, resolved to change their ways by embracing SECONDARY wait until marriage. One teen remarked, "I never understood Secondary Virginity This Article" at the top of each article. That's all there is to it. that was all there was to it, we would have made it something like, "Give Me a articles to? Friends, enemies, members of Congress, popular, successful, and psychologically secure to send themselves flowers or any such thing. You are not the sort of folks who need to artificially inflate 's elegantly designed Web pages. (Caution: this should not deprive your employer of your services. Solitaire is for that.) Unless, of course, in your opinion the article is so insightful and brilliant participants respond with particular enthusiasm to questions about the Supreme Court. Given: The law is a particularly unhappy profession. That is, a remarkably high percentage of lawyers are discontent with their jobs. Therefore: Most News Quiz participants are lawyers who take out their reactionary bastard with dubious views about race and little understanding of error in this paragraph? Because, aside from the dubious propositions, the unsupported assumptions, and the illogical conclusion, I can't figure out where The court was hearing the first of three cases that particular, whether the act applies to a person who can restore normal functioning by, for example, taking medication or wearing glasses. And it's as neat a Catch-22 as you're ever going to see, even through those disposable people from more stylish countries. If the court goes with the broadest considered disabled, but their attractiveness wouldn't be relevant. I blame the Real White Pages." Is it a good idea nowadays for any Southern institution to Turner's bison ranch out near Big Sky (there's an easement through the property so you can get to a state park on the other side), I saw one of my favorite want to ask or answer all these irrelevant questions about what someone may or care," he told the New York Times recently. "And quite frankly, it's not that important. What's important is who you are today, what you're going to doing a good job, how he relaxes during his free time is not a legitimate questions about past private peccadilloes. Exhausted by the Year of Flytrap, we have all decided that politicians' private lives should stay private. rape is not a peccadillo. It is, among other things, illegal. But so are pot smoking and cocaine snorting, which are high on the list of private behavior politicians are getting little gold stars for refusing to discuss. Is rape a worse crime than using drugs? Well, many might think so, but you wouldn't know it from the way most politicians talk about drugs. In declining to talk about want to give young people today the unfortunate (though accurate) impression that you could do whatever he did when young and still end up governor of It is obvious why the liberal perverts and druggies of the Democratic Party favor a curtain being drawn on politicians' private lives. But position? One way is by repeating the mantra "it's not about sex" just once or twice too often. They thought they had him by the legalities on perjury and obstruction of justice, and in attempting to win converts to their cause they may have been more dismissive than they intended about the sex thing. Too late, Wall Street Journal editorial page, remained steadfast in their hysterical disapproval of the president's private sexual behavior, and remained politicians of both parties, almost all the media, and most of the to draw public attention to the private sexual behavior of anyone else. (The Why? If a category of information is legitimately useful in judging an elected public official, how can it be illegitimate and outrageous good place to stop. When your side has launched an offensive, been driven back, and nervously awaits a counteroffensive, it's not a bad time for an armistice. That would be hypocritical of course. But newspapers have the right to practice hypocrisy in the privacy of their own editorial pages. weapon was about to be delivered into their hands? Did they dig a tunnel to Did they finally have an accusation that would shock a seemingly unshockable least a bit of the old spirit and are puzzled that even this hasn't worked. confirmed and denied the story, corroborators with their own reasons to boiling water, but not if you put him in cold water and slowly heat it to true. One or another of them might have stuck, but each one inured the public admissions he has been forced to make, so that each new one was just a small other things. The effect of these stories from the nether regions of the Vast president preposterously accused of murder so often, you just yawn when he's So now we are living in the world everyone has long claimed to want: where we judge politicians based only on the issues and their public records of governance. Some might feel that healthy indifference to what politicians do in their private lives has gone too far when it covers which means role models, and they are lay people taking on responsibilities that in the past many congregants felt professionals had to do." What Few things are more amusing than the national games of other countries. Even the box scores are funny, so comical are the names of higher purpose.) But for sheer tedium, nothing can rival our own national inning is spent doing nothing: The pitcher is simply holding the ball. And when your team is hitting, you spend nearly all that time sitting in the dugout. professional basketball game take two and a half hours to televise, but at incidentally, the only sport where players can smoke during the game; you used to catch appealing glimpses on television of some professional athlete puffing away. It made a welcome change from the spitting. I think a lot more people would watch figure skating if they let the athletes smoke. And diving. And For the first time in the 300-year history of sumo, a foreigner became grand champion by defeating another foreigner. with silver or something. We all have necks. The question is, do we stick it actual publication that embodies conspicuous consumption and fatuousness better than the following, from last week's New York Times "Home" section: administration have "miscalculated." "The administration completely miscalculated when it launched the air campaign," declared Sen. Frank of one dimension of the story. In war, there are two players, and each can miscalculate. Furthermore, war has a psychological dimension, in which each side's morale is undermined by its mere belief that it has miscalculated. To win the practical war, you don't have to calculate perfectly. to lose the psychological war is to fret that you have misjudged your enemy's resolve, while failing to entertain the possibility that he will decide he has proved wrong so far," posing "dangers to the whole continent" and drawing the wouldn't launch the airstrikes. But he was wrong. He may have believed they wouldn't last after they were started. Wrong. He may have thought that some countries would be afraid of his bluster and intimidation, they would withdraw the use of their bases or buckle under his intimidation. He was wrong. He thought that other countries might rush to his aid. Wrong again." and mistreating them and humiliating them publicly would weaken our resolve. Wrong again. He thought his air defense would be effective against our aircraft. Wrong. He thought his troops would stay loyal. Increasingly he's wrong about that. There are more desertions. Former generals are under arrest. Dissent is growing louder and louder. Military press censorship has been imposed. He thought he could hide the truth from his own people, I suppose, and knows it. He should face up to this and he should face up to it now." completely wrong and is further testimony to the success of the air campaign." Absolutely. But to debate that question by itself is already a loaded proposition, because it overlooks the corresponding question of whether accordingly, can be humbled into reconsidering his belligerence before we relative. He has heard enough pessimism from pundits and politicians on the Joint Chiefs had "expressed deep reservations" in advance of the proposed bombing. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had warned the These wise men who saw in their crystal ball exactly what "Pentagon planners" and "officers who know [the Joint Chiefs'] thinking but deposited on the doorsteps of the White House and the State Department. Politicians, not generals, made the risky decisions, and politicians, not generals, are getting reproached for them. But no matter. As soon as it became clear that the mission had gone awry, Pentagon brass began leaking profligately: In the span of a few days, anonymous quotes appeared in the the leaks: The Joint Chiefs knew this would happen, they told the administration this would happen, so don't blame them. we could win if we just had a little more time and firepower. Today's armed forces won't make the same mistake. "They don't want to be put in a hopeless bleakly to any presidential proposal to actually deploy that force. A top Pentagon officer from the Gulf War describes the generals' standard procedure: "They tell the White House, 'You are going to need an overwhelming amount of stuff. It's a bad idea. There will be terrible casualties. We recommend you are left wondering whether to believe the generals, since they say this If the pols overrule the generals and the mission goes mission succeeds, the generals still harvest the credit. No one remembers their the Joint Chiefs probably did not warn against the mission as emphatically or to believe that he would have overruled the chiefs if they were as absolute as the leaks suggest. Most experts also doubt the Joint Chiefs were unified in the view that bombing wouldn't succeed: It's Air Force doctrine that bombing will succeed in such circumstances, so Air Force advisers almost certainly predicted a bombing triumph. Moreover, the generals' public behavior bombed. The only public concerns the generals voiced before bombing were that There is nothing wrong with the Joint Chiefs warning the administration privately that bombing was folly. In fact, it would be derelict for the generals not to warn the administration of that. But (theoretically) a nonpolitical institution, but as soon as the operation went So they leaked to guarantee that they would not be blamed for a quagmire or be Crossfire for the Pentagon to stop leaking and "pull the team The principal reason the leaks are troubling is not that they sabotage the relationship between the administration and the Pentagon; that relationship is always shaky. They are troubling because they to our own troops that their commanders secretly believe their mission is three years ago, we've joked about how you'd know when online magazines were ready for mass consumption. It would be when you could take them, like print These are situations in which reading is ordinarily either awkward or impossible. They present no challenge, however, to my new have to send my demo model back. This chunky little device, which weighs just under a pound and a half, actually deserves that overused epithet "revolutionary," because it has the power to change something as basic to human I wrote about last fall. You can now actually buy two different models. a leather cover that gives off what someone must have imagined to be the musty one big advantage is that you don't need a PC to use it. You buy books directly screen is hard to read, navigating text is clumsy, and the whole device has an unbalanced feel. The second drawback is it doesn't work. After reading a bit of By contrast, the Rocket, which is made by a Silicon Valley small print as well as a variety of lighting settings. You can orient the text And because it doesn't need to be held open, you can read the Rocket eating something greasy or shaving. All you need is one clean finger to click the "forward" and "back" buttons that move the text a page at a time. The getting stuff to read on the Rocket is a bit involved, it actually works remarkably well. First, you load the Rocket software onto your PC. Second, you to download what you've purchased into the "Rocket Library" on your PC. Fifth, not an uncommon problem.) Instant gratification is an important part of the There are other drawbacks of the sort you would expect from categories. You can buy Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts Into Sales and Life Without Stress: The Far Eastern Antidote to Tension and Anxiety (which would seem to cancel each other out) but not you consider that the publisher has eliminated such expenses as paper, printing, binding, warehousing, distribution, and "returns." Another advantage for publishers is that because a book is encrypted for a single user, it can't sizable group of independent shops, embrace them. When you think about it, fixed costs and by being able to keep everything in print forever. They might even envision cutting out the middleman, namely the bookstore. If I retailed asks. And it might be established authors who would try to do an end run around both publishers and booksellers and get thousands of books and magazines free. Just last week, Rocket released a beta version of software that lets anyone transcontinental flight. Another feature I love is that you can find remembered their screens will get more legible, and their batteries will last longer. Soon, they may do what a related device called the Audible can do, and actually may even be given away, or sold at a token price with content purchase agreements or subscriptions, on the model of cell phones. But I have no doubt that they're coming. And when they truly arrive, I predict that the Rocket will be remembered as a landmark: The first demonstration that reading a "book" didn't require paper, ink, or even an overhead light. himself unattractively represented in hundreds of editorial cartoons as a act? If it's just plain stupid to continue making rambling, drunken, late night Well, you get your message out, shape the debate, and perhaps gain influence campaign team (including sister Bay) is unavailable, because the field is so crowded, and because the voters have "wised up," I add, quoting only myself, a acquitted, and it's one of those acquittals in which the person was guilty that was entrusted to me by a friend, and to him by a friend, and I really can't say more than that. Please, read until the end for the shocking face and name have been associated with the sound tracks and recordings made by the motion picture industry. If your studio is not involved then I apologize and am writing in error. I do not have access to the names of the studios involved in the production of the motion pictures associated with my voice. anything said by me was said with the permission of the United States unfortunately lost my identity. I have come back to many incidents in my life with friends of hers. They have entered my home wherever I have lived without permission. They have shocked my person to the extent that I blacked out penny for the records, tapes, or motion picture sound tracks made with my voice. I did not give permission for anyone to record my voice. I did not at use my voice in the production of a motion picture. I do not want my voice used again by the motion picture industry, nor do I want any more songs that something so frightening should be given the name of something so pure and able to land in grandma's backyard at night, in thick fog, without hitting the this another one of those commercials to convince women they can drive sport sustain an erotic life. And incompetence is funny. Something falls on someone's head. The hose doesn't work, then it does, then it squirts somebody in the face. Someone tries to build something, and it collapses in a heap of rubble. hill, it crushes that poor bastard's toes. Of course it all depends on whose toe we're talking about. As Mel Brooks observed, if you break your back, that's that's justice. I paraphrase, of course, and no doubt incompetently. vehicles with wings bolted on top, which had to be dismantled before they could with power fans that simply lift the car into the air. When I need shampoo or a stereo or a piece of heavy industrial equipment, I can read up or ask a professional, but what I really wonder is: What sort of earthmover do celebrities recommend? she's going to become one wealthy celebrity endorser. really is, particularly in retirement? What if he goes nuts one day and slaps 2-by-4. That might discourage people from seeking his advice on refreshing go to my Aunt Rose for medical advice. (Hint: She loves those new gel caps, so easy to swallow!) If she were always available online instead of just in the welcome to offer a sentence from an actual publication that best conveys nation can, as long it avoids hard data and stakes its pride on cultural Surely the milk can guy wakes up in the middle of the night and admits to evening news and the only compelling rhythm is the beat of my heart when the to last always intended as a love letter to both faith and God almighty." The after it printed a cartoon showing a thug being asked to kill a woman rather man's. (Blood money is compensation that must be paid to the family of a victim organization more soporific than "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities," a "Citizens Concerned With Environmental Development. (An actual ease community fears. In fact, they plan to take it to fairs so children can climb on it and have their pictures taken with it. What? plastic. Oh, you're kidding. A thimble of gum surrounded by hard candy. Oh! "Brands of household cleaners. You know, this is the kind of thing our newspapers are going to be just filled with if we let gay marriage go any sure of. And I remember the first scene; the boys are playing poker. is searing intestinal pain. I think I had a bad piece of bratwurst. But whether sauerkraut as Dirk) or Doc's brilliant writing, something about that evening left a lasting impression. Years later, in the middle of one of our and smelly, he's grown tired of life, you jerk." The next morning, we flew to shaping shredded bills into pellets and using those as an ingredient in lightweight bricks with excellent insulating properties. Bank, "the question is secondary. The mark will soon be history, and what headline; all four headlines from the same edition of one newspaper.) broke the law, lacked ethics and professionalism, and embraced a code of York state. (The study centered on where you are likely to find women starting program is to count the number of projects that but for that grant would not tend to fund those happy in their work, people who simply continue what they've been doing for years, but in more stylish clothes. Another way to judge a grant program is to count the number of summer houses the grant recipients have menopause emerged as a less traumatic transition than is usually reported. Dr. menopausal woman with sweat running down her face is just not true." largest supplier to public safety professionals." Can you match the trademark B. Holster (also available: Tornado, Grabber, White now, we have always depended strictly on altruism." What is he talking playfully grabbed the other by the wrist and shouted, "Run! Run!" What was competent) enough to keep viewers satisfied but also distinct (and flawed) enough so that when the star returns, everyone remembers exactly why they love him so. Similarly, when a telegenic politician with a good head of hair and who prides himself on compassion teams up with the mayor of New York City, the result is a comedic explosion of matter and antimatter. "He is one of the real hopes that the Republican Party has of regaining control of the United States," said the mayor in his characteristic military "He's a good tough campaigner," the governor reciprocated manfully. "I think I might have eaten a bad clam," said someone, perhaps me. Neither man would formally endorse the other, but when a reporter asked the mayor if he'd specifically urged the governor to run, Bush contorted his arm behind his back and said, "He twisted my..." Well, you know what he said. Then a) "One bomb appeared to be seduced off target at the final stages." b) "Relax, it's not like we hit a convoy of refugees or anything." scheduled, but administration officials acknowledged that they would have to 4-c. At least, that's the only one the New York Times reporter didn't been "rescheduled for a later date," the postal service said. "They're replacing the dove with an Apache helicopter, so it'll take at least a month before it arrives," the postal service did not add. want to pay your taxes today all you have to do is say two magic words: government spokesman explains why the federal government is funding research on leader, to all the other cats, to finally get those dogs. (The head cat learned more demoralizing than an inspirational address. That sort of thing generally entails a coach or an east regional sales manager exhorting you to do something pointless, painful, or profitable to someone else. Physics has few inspirational speeches: Unify that Field Theory! Writing novels, performing rousing declamation. Sex sometimes includes a heartening oration, but usually toward the end, urging you on to mutual victory; such remarks are rarely delivered at halftime, when you're lurking in the locker room, glum and battered. (The exception here is phone sex, where the inspirational speech gladiators used to say. Not too many people today seek inspiration from the Senate, although a surprising number do seek sex there, frequently for money. The words in each line must originally appear adjacent to each other in a The headlines must all come from a single edition of a single paper. Awards broadcast yields one perfect remark. Participants are invited to predict gap" with the Soviets and the "swimming pool and redwood deck gap" at the summer houses of General Dynamics executives? Well, it's back, and it's called the perfect program for a time when the best delivery system for a small programs that might actually benefit the country, but by taking scientists and engineers away from real work, it will skew technological progress for decades. of happiness to come from this occurred yesterday; at the exact moment of Transportation Department has reduced the number of these crossings from crossings will get upgraded warning systems including, in some cases, gates crash is suspected of veering around the gates in an attempt to beat the train News Quiz Spring Cleaning Extra is the rug under which to sweep them. "There's a certain value in being overly courteous, even when it's to the officers should call men "sir," as long as it's clear they don't mean any characters want to participate in a nurturing experience. Unfortunately, the parents not to let their little ones hug the television. Especially the the Lone Ranger, it had not yet determined his identity."-- A New York Times correction, barely concealing the urge to shout, "Who was that masked He's done it twice, and he announced on the radio that if it were legal to do it again he would. Opponents say this desire indicates "a strange on drums and try to get the talking stick away from a weepy Tom Beyond a preschool visit to a local dairy, my first factories. Fear of lawsuits has superseded pride in the product. One delightful exception, should you like your kids door by the end of the day. You get to see people building something that's not idiotic, a great treat for one who's worked in television. But if you're trying to inspire artificial amity, that's not such a bad for calling the travelers "congressmen," omitting the women representatives. actors and historians, will present selections from the Great Emancipator. huge number, but it's a short month, and I use a local Internet service Eleven involved retail sales (dental care, computers, divorce lawyers, online auctions); four announced some sort of performance; one was an ancient chain removed from the list, and you learn that the return address is bogus. I opportunity, it's unconvincing. If it's a personal suggestion, it's becoming a travel agent, but they frequently include an enormous cartoon which word in the above phrase is the least attractive. for addressing these questions; it's called psychotherapy. presidential candidate by serious voters everywhere. He served two successful and he has stopped playing the piano at campaign stops. friends (including an old roommate, a godmother to his kids, and someone who words, only one of them doesn't know him, and most know him extremely well. "He's a friend and I like him, and when a friend asks for help, you give friends and acquaintances, but he probably has enough to make a dent in that his brains, decency, commitment to public service, and honor. They applaud his experience governing. He has the skills to carry out what he believes in. He nomination are 15-to-1 against. The contributors all recognize that he would be trounced by Bush and Dole if the primaries were held today. Instead they cling happenings only obliquely. A few mention a "Bush stumble," but most are even more circumspect. "Other candidates could have something unfavorable in "Other candidates may be sexier at this hour, but once we Because they are relying on a Bush fade, the contributors mean anything, they say. Voters are probably still reacting to "that plaid don't think you should make fun of anyone who has a strong desire for public service. It takes hard work, and he will outwork all the others," says Brent The endless campaign has "tested" him in ways that novice candidates such as Bush and Dole can't even imagine. Republicans believe in recent days, the National Rifle Association and its allies have argued that or incendiary device in the commission of a felony. Setting a device designed to cause an explosion upon being triggered. "Incredibly, we've been asked if we would support an instant check on violence that may be prosecuted in a federal court. commit a crime of violence prosecutable in federal court. salient feature of these nine laws is that the killers violated them during the massacre, not beforehand. To say that these laws were walked into a school and brandished, aimed, and discharged firearms in a manner calculated to alarm people, endanger the safety of others, and further a crime of violence. It is meaningless to bring up these laws in a discussion of prevention. Like murder laws, they are designed to prevent a killer's second interstate transportation, sale, etc., of a stolen firearm. rifle for him. But she was not charged because it is legal in Colorado for a minor to own shotguns and rifles." There is no evidence that any of the guns least one of the firearms used in the crime had an obliterated serial possession of certain kinds of weapons, essentially duplicating other statutes E. Formalities. So the list of relevant laws known to have no law prohibited them from acquiring both a shotgun and a saw. So this law handguns. If that law had been passed and effectively enforced, it would have prevented the elder gunman from acquiring the handgun used in the massacre. committed with guns by their kids. This law might or might not have prompted the parents of the Colorado killers to intervene before the massacre. institutional version of bipolar disorder. One day it shouts obscenities in your face. The next it's calm nearly to the point of affectlessness. for exhibitions of political and conceptual art that often took the form of whirring installations and blurry videos. The most notorious of these was "The Black Male in Western Art," at which patrons were handed buttons reading "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting to be White." This was a museum that so angered traditionalists that one of the local weeklies used to run ads for a survey scheduled to occupy the entire museum for the next eight months. Drawing heavily on works in the museum's permanent collection, some of which are rarely culture that eschews any explicit judgments at all for fear someone might "the intellectual, scientific, and artistic capital of the world." The first around to proposing an answer. It's as if such a massive assemblage is supposed to speak for itself. Actually, this exhibition does make a clear statement, but not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs but also sheet music, music playing in the stairwells, clips from movies, movie posters, novels, furniture, design objects, architectural models, and stills from dance chronologically. After finally getting through the line and into the museum, visitors get a brief orientation on the ground floor, take the elevator to the Avenue. People were collapsing on benches with advanced cases of art nearly empty, the audience having surrendered. To see this show at a brisk in any thoughtful or even coherent way. The top floor, covering the first two having given you much sense of how the vast distance from Point A to Point B was covered. While the 1920s (the fourth floor) do stand as a plausibly (second floor) don't. The various forms of politically driven realism that end of World War II. And the New York School of abstraction, which became predominant after the war, was near its apex, not its end, by the arbitrary at least be tidy. And what's the sense of imposing a rigid and arbitrary candle to what was happening overseas until after World War II. When you look modernists in relation to their far less interesting domestic contemporaries and a broad cultural context that seems mostly irrelevant to their work. This The raw material for that show is all here. Walking through the galleries, you related, bright spot was the 1920s' movement that has come to be called school was Abstract Expressionism, which blossomed after World War II and is same paintings she collected out of the vault for a fresh look. But such a show would have meant the museum taking a hard look at its own, often controversial or its conciliatory new director, is very eager to do. The cover story foretells the possible demise of the and the United States is wearying of its protector role. Even so, the two will extradition and trial of two terrorists. In exchange, the West would lift its Silicon Valley companies and historically black colleges are making in training feature intensive mentoring and peer support, are a limited but meaningful step candidates don't speak English well enough to teach effectively, edge their The columnist has not actually read the book. He does, however, criticize investors and employees a retail revolution, but Amazon's stock price and lofty multiculturalism, but he is reluctant to be a French hero, and French racism a family who unknowingly adopted a schizophrenic son. The son struggled to find his birth mother's medical history, which had been withheld by the adoption agency, and committed suicide when he learned of her terrible mental illness. A generation ago, adoption agencies considered mental illness to be strictly a product of poor upbringing, and too private and unpleasant to disclose to standard criticism of the president ("a complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and National Security Adviser Tony Lake teaching the president how to salute from his tendency to give wildly impractical orders that he never really wanted take: Bush's greatest liability as a candidate is his air of inevitability, which exposes him to an upset in the primaries. When asked to comment on out feminist ideals perhaps even more consistently than women who wear feminism mountains where he is being sought. Fundamentalist locals identify with and may the publication of his damning report on the army's record of political government and army authorities spun the murder as a homosexual crime of passion, resulting in the arrest and (finally abandoned) prosecution of one of and that the president is to blame. He has dealt a mortal blow to the women's movement by forcing Democratic and feminist leaders to ignore his commission of Fill in the blank. Ending her China trip yesterday, Secretary of State Pediatrics is meant to make it happen even less. What? "Circumlocution. From now on, boys will be obligated to get to the point. goofy nostalgia in many of today's responses, recalling boyish sexual stirrings in a nonexistent time without today's easy access to pornography. In those days, a trembling boy who yearned to see a naked woman had to see her on the radio, and that took imagination. If he lacked imagination, he'd need an older sister whose friends slept over, plus a homemade periscope, assembled at a scout meeting during those interludes when he wasn't being fondled by the scout "medical indication" for the routine circumcision of infants. While the group does not oppose the procedure for religious or cultural reasons, the new policy calls for the use of pain reducing creams or injections. "I am truly grateful that we are able to bestow this priceless gift on generations to come. And so I proudly dedicate Trump's Sequoia "There are several inaccuracies in what was printed, and that's of more concern than what it might do to the ratings. And another thing: I can then. And we're in a, oh, call it a haircut war now, so die, you shaggy criticizing the former president for trampling the constitution. "We are absolutely serious about making this a terrific place to work for a Party's agony over abortion is that the leading Republican lights are almost murdered babies every year? Not likely. So they must pretend to a deep moral belief they probably don't have, then pretend to have come up with a reason The official Republican position on abortion, as expressed no Republican could be elected to any office except, perhaps, pope. Fortunately who do understand it assume correctly that the party doesn't really mean unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to equal protection of the laws." If the fetus is a person under the be no exceptions for rape or incest. And the woman who procures an abortion is guilty of murder just as if she had hired a gunman to kill her born offspring. on to say, "we have only compassion" for women who procure abortions and "our shows that the platform does not even believe itself, since that stuff about consistent. If full human life begins at conception, then full human rights do too, including the right to equal protection of the laws. It is a concept that does not easily lend itself to compromise, as the Republican presidential contenders are demonstrating. Their search for a way out has led most of them says about the abortion issue, "I believe we are an inclusive party and we can be so without changing our principles." What does this mean? Does it mean that people should feel free to vote Republican even if they disagree with what the Republican Party stands for? A nice offer, though I wouldn't expect many takers. Or does it mean that because there are so many people to divvy up, the grow this party. ...We're recognizing that there are differences. This is a are only two parties. So why wouldn't we have some differences?" would be suicidal for a party to demand agreement on all issues from either its candidates or its voters. The tricky question is what are the core values that really define you and what are the fringe issues on which differences are not crucial. Republicans would prefer not to be defined by their position on definitive by definition. How can you make the capital gains tax a litmus test issue but say that the slaughter of millions of innocent children is something about which you have only a mild preference and don't care much if people disagree? The truth is that most Republican leaders don't actually take their alleged position on abortion seriously. But they can't admit this. The other rhetorical way out for Republican politicians is Last week she called on Republican women to "set an example" and "refuse to be don't view the abortion issue as a matter of life. I do. That's one reason why attempt to dress craven pragmatism as high principle, but it makes no sense. The Republican and Democratic platforms are littered with proposals that are "not going to happen." Almost nothing is going to happen if a majority must already favor it before any political leader will speak out in its favor. If she actually believed that millions of human lives were at stake, the former head of the Red Cross surely wouldn't try to build a holy crusade around refusal to discuss the matter. Nor would she blame the media for an "inordinate and therefore "I do not support a constitutional amendment that would overturn overturning Roe by Supreme Court decision rather than by constitutional business, a rather leisurely approach if you honestly believe that the jurisprudence, and advanced metaphysical speculation, you're probably wondering constitutional amendment is not going to happen. "But that's not profess to believe that human life begins at conception and that abortion is murder, it's not important whether you actually do anything about it. Republican position on abortion than any other candidate's. But it is more than to act on them. They can actually believe what they say, for all I care. Though I doubt, in the case of most Republican presidential candidates, that this last has not taken responsibility for its actions in the same notes in his apologies, he is an economist, not a journalist. Given the accurate I have seen during the past six months. He makes clear what few have wish the public discussion of his article had focused on solutions to the dilemma he posed rather than on an extraneous appendage. Congress and the president have cheerfully ignored that clear constitutional planes in certain areas, and doesn't threaten our troops, then we will anxieties of academic life through the eyes of a shockingly irresponsible instructor. The way in which the author views both graduate and undergraduate students reveals unhealthy personal insecurity. Teaching is a profoundly to their professors, and those who command such authority must recognize their responsibilities to their students. The stresses of an academic are truly heavy, but why should it be different from any other profession? Does the author think that teaching in the university involves a lighter load than working for a corporation? Why? Furthermore, the author is fortunate enough to have a job when so many of the author's fellow humanities scholars are without World War II, that would cause many, many dead and even more refugees." are now ruining the economy of rather a poor country. When Western troops cross conflict has been squeezed off the front pages of many papers this week by under orders not to kill, beat, or mutilate their victims and that most obeyed. more," he said. While claiming that the cleansers generally "respected human tougher to move than the others, "but if you push hard enough, they all go in sorry for the children he expelled from their homes, but said that, as anyway, I knew there would always be someone to meet those women and children," their families on the spot, but his orders had been to hand them over to the number of our soldiers, it means that every one of them must have raped three women," she said. "So when did they find the time to fight?" Referring to one I could have cured my patients of impotence by pointing a pistol at their magazine Private Eye had an exceptionally tasteless cover this week of The cover story warns that cheap oil, though a boon to consumers, could bankrupt the poor and politically unstable nations that impasse. The United States berates China for human rights abuses and illicit they may lead to premature and overaggressive surgery. The operations are often heartfelt, but their politics are naive and their use of emotion is cheap. section ("Making the Most of It") devoted to the poor, portraying biological feminism based on new research showing that women's bodies are "tougher, stronger, and lustier" than stereotype dictates. According to anatomically superior to the penis, and menstruation is an expression of "primal female power." The story is oddly competitive, keeping score between the genders on strength, agility, and aggression, and mischievously wondering "which sex should rule." Photographs of scantily dressed, genetically gifted women illustrate it. A sidebar traces political attitudes toward women's bodies, long list of women's health concerns, from familiars such as pregnancy and the magazine is given to firsthand narratives by veterans and others. A story explains why depression is so hard to treat effectively: Insurers the disease is still mistaken, even by its victims, for everyday doldrums. The cover promises new treatments, but the story inside says very little about West's steady bombing, the dictator has been firing military brass and firm's decision to go public was driven by unbridled individual greed and the firm's original success. One telling detail about the firm's legendary emphasis on teamwork: Employees have constant access to a database where they And even those records "are gibberish as they currently stand," sighs one president, because he's smart, principled, and destined to lose. Whereas and uninspiring" candidate who could be vanquished quietly and nobly. than four years and married for two and a half. He has a child with an the "accidental" pregnancy because my husband was talking of leaving her, and she hoped it would keep him around. I was quite disturbed by this, and now more so since a woman friend of his ex told me she has done the same thing to needs to put this woman in her place but don't know if it's any of my business. the way.) It just doesn't sit well with me to see another child used in this way, and another good man being manipulated like this. For some reason I just buttons. It is not, however, your job in life to put people in their places. Another reason for butting out is that you say this latest trapper is a bad person to have mad at you. People can get knocked down, as well as up, you know. What I mean is that by confronting this woman with something that is really none of your business, you run the risk of incurring her enmity and making yourself a target for social unpleasantness. dearly held principle makes interjecting oneself acceptable: when you can affect the outcome. In this situation, however, the man is already trapped (and presumably committed to child support) and the woman is not about to undergo an the end of your stay? More to the point, is it considered impolite to not make bed in a hotel is like whipping up your own souffle in a restaurant. Other being a guest in someone's home, where it is good manners to make your bed. The mannerly, to ask the hosts how they wish the bed to be left. Some people want it stripped, others left as is for their housekeepers to deal with. thoughtfulness, however, and is sure you are one of those considerate people who, when ending a hotel stay, leaves a tip for the maid. years with a most remarkable person. He and I have been going through many growth and development phases. We have realized that I am somewhat conventional and that he is non-. The differences in our values are sometimes trivial, sometimes important. None of the differences, however, interfere with our trust when you are giving, expecting, or hoping for too much? Is there an answer to "remarkable" bodes well for your future together, as does your understanding of your differences. There are no guarantees, of course, about how differences will play out, so all you can do is try to look ahead and imagine if you both friends, perhaps "Aunt" or "Uncle." Most of our (yuppie) friends have their kids call my wife and me by our first names. Not a big deal, but we think this is a bad example for our children. What do you say? manner in which the adults ask to be addressed or, alternatively, in the way in which their own parents instruct them. The real example for the children ought to be what is comfortable and polite. With luck, they are the same thing. It the times. Perhaps you might take a social inventory of who is calling whom what in your circle and then make a standard ruling for your children. If, however, you are seriously unhappy with youngsters calling their elders by address. It might make your children stand out, however. the West's "riskiest ventures." The action sets a dangerous precedent by attacking a sovereign state for suppressing an ethnic minority with secessionist aspirations. Its strategy is faulty: Member countries are because there were reservations within his own party and administration about international airport, deepened the recession and worsened inflation. Now that fiscal austerity and higher interest rates have been imposed a more prosperous relaunches with articles on subjects predictable (female candidates for president, abortion clinic violence) and less so (adultery, the benefits of essay, "In Praise of Women," features shots of impoverished or oppressed women apart geographically, we are all sisters in our souls.") Policies and social custom encourage early retirement, subsidized by government programs. As the percentage of seniors increases, these programs will dominate the federal budget. Increasing savings and reinventing retirement as a mix of argues that feminists and conservatives share the same misguided view of gender relations: that women are pervasively victimized by society and need special traditionalists recognize: Most women manage to have a "workable balance of job increasingly common practice of impregnating women with sperm retrieved from ruminating on politics and politically minded writers commenting on film. lead a developed nation and do nothing to improve the status of women or story exposes homophobia on Wall Street. Though some of Wall Street's house complete with ritual hazing." Closeted bankers and brokers lie about their extracurricular lives; out (and outed) peers suffer insults, wage who was fired when he requested health benefits for his partner is now suing capitalism." The inventors of the television, the computer, and plastics make dominant figure of Western culture," has redefined the relationships between withdraw from partisan politics, comparing today's Christian politicians to the religious teetotalers who passed Prohibition in a misguided attempt to regulate morality. "The vision of worldly power is a distraction," he warns. enlisting the youngest, most libertarian, and most idealistic of President Bush's former White House advisers. "The revenge of the deputies," an older wrong decade." Her absolutist policy style, formerly lauded, is now deemed schools readers should attend, but then asks if they should enroll at all. The expansive job market makes young people increasingly hesitant to trade their robust starting salaries for tuition debt and library toil. There are few blame their boss' sorry poll numbers on the same strain of The good news: Gore's fidelity to Tipper has never been questioned. Gore wants his campaign team to resemble a Web site, where "each person links to many cable is broadcasting programs on the mating rituals of lions and chimps. under her watch and also suggests that she intentionally withheld information had contact with people and documents telling of family members' religion and pornography a cheap thrill. From college courses to journal articles, the newly respectable field of porn studies evinces the ivory tower's desperate need to town where it is located. The townspeople find the proprietors invasive and insufferably haughty; the owners, in turn, call the locals homophobes and partially backed by circumstantial evidence, accuses the president of having raped her two decades ago. The president denies it but refuses to say where he was that day. The public believes her but seems not to care. The opposition party declines to press the issue, and the media concede it will go away. How played a game. His enemies conspired to drive him from office. His friends conspired to protect him. Each side did and said whatever it deemed necessary to capture public opinion. The game ended, but the spins remain engraved in our about politics than about truth. Together, they have ruined his accusers' credibility. His apologists have dismissed every charge against him as the everything possible to prove that theory right. Rather than let each woman Spectator outed her three years later. Conservative activists financed and investigators to her home, subpoenaed her, and dumped her name and story into Why did she finally tell her story? Because "all of these stories are floating around," she said, "and I was tired of everybody putting their own spin on conservative associations to distract the public from his treatment of women. investigation as a political "war." While Democrats discounted impeachment as a tactics to push these into play without verification." along a spectrum of violence, from consensual adultery (Flowers) to unwanted destroying him with whichever scandal was at hand, lumped them together and overplayed the lesser charges. Their latest gaffe was to spend a year "think the allegations represent a pattern of behavior." of violence into a pattern of sex and thereby dismiss it as immaterial. Tribune called it another allegation of "boorish and immoral sexual about the candidate's life." Framed this way, the story is dying. and impeachable offenses. Not only did this weak poison fail to kill him, it strengthened his immune system. It raised the threshold for inquiring into offense can't be prosecuted and proved in court, it no longer matters. about charges that can't be legally proved. "There is no way we'll ever know unknowable. Legally, it doesn't seem to go anywhere." This notion that the charge "doesn't go anywhere" legalizes and objectifies the investigative process, absolving the speaker of responsibility to pursue the question. Likewise, the word "unknowable" disguises the fact that the merits of the charges are not only knowable; they are known by two people. replied: "I don't think you're going to hear anything from him, nor do I think it's going to lend any new information. Let's move on." Thus the passive that those who dared to pursue the question would "tear people's lives apart fatigue and fear of exasperating the public, reporters and politicians observe that the "statute of limitations" on the rape charge has expired. A legitimate him. "It's not that we're tired, and it's not that we're lacking in moral independent counsel law provides additional legal cover for this exit. "The for all inquiry lets politicians and journalists pass the buck. Upon leaving die "because Republicans don't want to touch" it, and fellow Late with it. There's no impeachment process. I don't see what keeps this story Maybe what seemed coercive to her seemed merely rough to him. Maybe he lost control and has regretted it ever since. But the bottom line is that he's giving no answers, and a nation jaded by spin is giving him a pass. It's less and less clear that actions have consequences. And it's more and more clear This raised alarms throughout the world, until the speaker's office retracted and Internet companies, which presumably would undermine China's ability to radio station from among hundreds of contestants, to conceive the "millennium baby" in separate rooms of the same hotel today. If any of the couples she asked her mother, "How does it feel to have a daughter that's going to be in the public and everybody knows that she's going to have sex tomorrow?" concluding: "Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines." The spins on the race: weather, leaving them so well preserved that their internal organs remain intact and the hair on their arms is still visible. Religious artifacts that were evidently part of the sacrifice were also recovered. The anthropological has lifted sanctions it imposed several years ago to punish sex in exchange for providing illegal drugs to them. His sentence is part of a deal in which he pleaded guilty to statutory rape and reckless endangerment. he had the virus is that he didn't believe the nurse. His attorney's spin: the concern he may not live out his sentence." The naive retributive spin: He should have been sentenced to death. The sophisticated spin: He has been. charges of conspiracy, theft of computer service, and interruption of public communications. The virus jammed up the Internet by replicating itself in Smith is an ingenious villain, and the computer security companies that pursued him were ingenious sleuths using sophisticated technology and techniques. The him in by letting law enforcement officials see the log that showed which phone after a few more weeks and months or what have you of continuously pounding them into pieces." However, he adds, "We may have one flaw in our thinking." blame the ambiguous use of ellipses. And those damn video games. Violent of you phoned him today?) Our failure to embrace a lackluster technical fix blame myself. I should simply have asked: "What did it say on the back?" as well as in form, today's question garnered a record number of responses scorning the heartlessness of News Quiz. It also garnered a record number of responses, or if not a record, certainly a lot. So, presumably participants Columbine's traditional rival, welcomed their guests with banners and signs including, "We Are One," featuring Columbine's colors, blue and white, and each linked to shopping opportunities. Which of these are actual Yahoo Mother's the air war to produce a political solution." If no breakthrough occurs by beyond that, there is no clarity on who stands where on what, especially on the Cook's "significant" statement that the troops are being prepared for and US clash again on when to send in troops," the tabloid Daily Mail reckless absolutism in his conduct of the war" by ruling out any "exit be no compromise and that all options, including the use of land forces, remained open," it said. Now he has what he wanted. said it has made his "essential task" of putting some distance between himself President's conduct of the conflict," it explained. "He is therefore tied to an York Times that he is continuing with the airstrikes but not ruling out agencies and has increased the security around her. The Daily Telegraph she said that she too feared she would be murdered and had therefore decided to employees (married male, unmarried female) are spending an inordinate amount of time together during office hours. People are beginning to talk. These two and there during the day chatting and occasionally whispering. They go out to requires "meetings." It is at the point now where other employees are making the bad part is that now he is telling colleagues he is too busy to do some figure out a way to tell him (or her) that this is affecting the work talk to him or her. My colleagues don't feel close enough to either of them to say what needs to be said, but neither do we want to make a big thing of it by telling his manager. He is the senior of the two people involved. How should we reasons to get together, the whole office is chirping about their lengthy think there is no more than a "flirtation." This is like imagining that a dinosaur died in a standing position at the museum of natural history. You and your colleagues must rethink your reticence about not saying anything to anybody. The fact that you are an office of only resources department? It is pledged to confidentiality and could intervene. useful.) If your company is too small to have an HR unit, then a designated be done. Please note that we are not dealing with the fact that the man is except that my fiance doesn't always realize the extent of his mother's manipulations or their possible effect on our relationship. Mostly she tries to "deserting his family" in order to be with me. (She has always relied heavily on him for emotional support following her divorce from his father.) point out what a horror his mother is, but it's very difficult to watch him take these unrelenting guilt trips. Plus, I worry that this ever so slightly Oedipal situation is going to get in the way of his commitment to me. Is there witch. He already knows. This is a wonderful opportunity to cement your relationship as partners: Be his ally, not his attacker. In the interest of had very unhappy consequences for her. For that is the crux of her acting out: killing the old girl with kindness. Include her when you can, and let it be your suggestion. It will disorient her totally. Just know that her neurosis has nothing to do with the love you and the beloved have for each the game and by not responding in a destructive way. is, of course, call him whatever he wants to be called, but we are all curious question has been preserved. She relied on the dictionary, which said, "A subject of his posting has caused me real embarrassment and discomfort. What forest ranger's adage: Fight fire with fire. Make your own posting on the same to have sex even though we have only been going out for four weeks. I feel that this will change our relationship and make it more complicated. She says that if I were a real man I would have sex with her. Should I hold out until I feel maneuvered into bed. Tell your shy violet that if she doesn't approve of your timetable you're certain she can find someone who will accommodate her. alternative to a safety net is a revolution"). Others say it's a moral could have bought an insurance contract, then you'd probably have snapped up some kind of "skill insurance" in which everybody pays premiums, and those who land in the shallow end of the gene pool split the pot. Of course, you didn't buy insurance. But that's only because bought the insurance if you could have, and that creates a moral obligation That's a very powerful argument, but it's incomplete. Here's why: It offers no estimate of how much insurance your unborn self would have contracts, but you can't enforce a contract if you don't know what it says. So, They guess. Most of them guess that our unborn selves would all have cheerfully signed on for a pretty substantial welfare state. Being an economist and not a philosopher, I am inclined to think about such questions a little more How much insurance would an unborn soul want to buy? We already know a lot about the demand for insurance from available data on how much of it (fire, life, disability, auto, etc.) people in the real world buy. Some people demand more insurance than others do because they face more might have purchased, we must first estimate how much risk you were facing when statistical variance of the possible outcomes. In this case, that means measuring the statistical variance of human talents. You can't measure talent similar education and training, and measuring the variance in their earnings. After you've controlled for education and training, earnings are at least a Once you've measured that variance, you've measured the risk, so you can go back to the insurance markets and observe how much insurance people choose to buy when they're facing similar risk levels. That gives at least a rough estimate of how much we should all be paying into the general welfare pool. sacrificed a lunch hour and the back of an envelope to computing that rough estimate. The bottom line turns out to be astounding: If you take the insurance have discovered that their arguments are a lot stronger than they dared to implicitly assumed that it would be costless to identify the people with the fewest skills so that we can put only those people on the dole. That assumption becomes invalid if highly skilled people can hide their abilities in an attempt to defraud the system. Policing such fraud can make social insurance policies considerably more expensive, and when insurance is more expensive, people want less of it. Factor that into the equation, redo the calculations, and you end up concluding that the fraction of the population on welfare should be social net should be drastically expanded, and maybe it should be drastically slashed. Not too definitive a conclusion. But it's the result of just one afternoon's work, and it's more precise than anything the philosophers have reasons that could fill a separate column. But the broader point is that if your argument is based on metaphors, you should be prepared to treat those metaphors with respect. If the safety net is really just like insurance, then we should be buying it in quantities commensurate with our other insurance purchases. And we should be making an honest effort to calculate what those quantities are. The philosophers don't seem willing to meet that with the government" and that meant I knew nothing bad was going to happen to in his generation. As a journalist, however, he was careless, and I happened to be his unlucky victim. His accusation is false. He did not bother checking with was not offered any government job, not the least the central bank presidency. I did not have access to any privileged information either. As it turned out, invitation, which I was honored to accept. These are the facts. written two notes on the episode, both available on his Web site. In them he states that he does not believe that I am corrupt (thanks, but in my worst nightmares I never dreamed my name and the word corruption would appear on the same page) and that he did not treat me unfairly. I beg to disagree. Whether a government post is immaterial. People should be judged by their actions and their record, not by labels of any kind, not by rumors. is never iconoclastic or even interesting to read the predictable bad that the kind of thinking these two represent has led to so many dead enthusiastic readership to the reactionary, bigoted, and sexist drivel of Midge disguised undertone of racism: As he castigates "white liberals" for assuming say, "Well, what can you expect? We told those white liberals years ago that behavior is both representative of and entirely in keeping with the "character" While we may deplore that sex has become the dominating factor in many young people's lives, the goal should be to expand and emphasize the nonsexual means of personal expression ("liberation") available to them, not to return to the repressive and contaminating moral hypocrisies of a previous age. more minutes left on them. And that the editors of never see fit to subject their readership to them again. prices has led to a big jump in federal tax receipts but isn't counted as an present value of expected future earnings; these earnings will be counted as criticizes the Tax Foundation. The group, he says, "assumes that the average taxpayer pays an average share of estate and capital gains taxes, which is absurd." In fact, it isn't absurd at all. The median or modal taxpayer may not pay the average, but the average one obviously does. income does not go to the federal government, but he is wrong if he thinks that we don't pay around that in taxes overall. Does he include the in state and sales taxes on every dollar earned or spent, respectively, plus some unknown amount in property taxes (and renters get screwed the most here, restaurant meals, liquor, and other "sin" taxes). All told this seems to add up total income to taxes than the rich who would have to pay estate or capital gains taxes. This is true because the vast majority of tax revenue that is collected in the United States is regressive: sales taxes, property taxes (which are passed on to renters, so paid by everyone), Social Security, etc. And poorer people are more likely to spend money on things like cigarettes, alcohol, and so on, making their total percentage tax burden even larger. musicians did indeed use the term to indicate being "in the zone," but it didn't necessarily refer to the grooves of a record. It referred more to the sense of swing derived from the rhythmic variation in their playing of eighth notes. While classical performers tended to interpret their eighth notes strictly and evenly, jazz musicians provided a little bounce in theirs, a slightly uneven distribution of rhythm achieved by placing them slightly behind second. This heightened the sense of groove, by playing against the beat rather than on top of it. Musicians often refer to a great rhythm section with terms and on and on. They all play eighth notes in a unique way. They all have their substances, and this also plays into a sense of "feeling groovy." seasons have produced a stream of books about the major figures of postwar history, thick with policy analysis, institutional boilerplate, and unabashed contingencies of democratic politics and imperial diplomacy. Personality is for the most part an analytic construct, of interest only to the extent that it can foreign correspondents. But, for all the light they shed on the substance and greatest appeal," she declares, "is that she is just like us, only wealthier. She has had bad hair days and skirts with spots, runs in her stockings, a dog single mother who went back to work, prevailed, and raised good kids." achieved it by exploiting the drama and mystique of his diplomatic of who she is: a candid, funny, and appealing woman with a life story rich in human interest and historical resonance. She has also received the star treatment usually accorded pioneers of diversity. As the first woman in charge macho bluster, she has figured out how to present herself to the public, to the media, and to other world leaders without the benefit of role models. She has, for the most part, succeeded brilliantly, becoming success, against long odds, as a woman in a man's world makes her an appealing figure. But the foreign policy of the world's superpower cannot be explained offer an inspiring narrative of how she succeeded in becoming secretary of state, but they offer scant grounds for evaluating what has happened since. And legitimate," he habitually wrote "no confession" on official forms that asked between the wars, seems to have been motivated by a combination of fear, state of willed ignorance, declining to challenge her parents' account of the of recommendation to the Council on Foreign Relations. A few years later, he play well at home and to outrage the rest of the world. Since becoming domestic front than in the international sphere, enjoying a long media recalcitrant Congress to ratify the chemical weapons conventions, and pushing complexity and instability of the world are hardly excuses for the muddle and administration's leading hawk on a number of fronts, arguing for intervention The Bush administration's approach to the unfolding systematically set about driving them from their homes and killing them. whose job at the time was peripheral to the making and implementing of policy. has insisted, lies in her own life story: Her view of the world, she repeats as rapidly diminishing use. It is likely that future secretaries of state will say they say that, rather than how she got to be where she is, will determine assume control of the region. The piece acknowledges that this will be difficult "from the air alone" but doesn't directly recommend ground troops. achievements. Because his crime crackdown has succeeded, further reductions in lawlessness are coming at the cost of increased friction with innocent there is no real reciprocity of access, and we find ourselves hosting such "The Last Counterculture": the Catholic priesthood. It attributes the plummet in the number of men entering the priesthood to pedophilia scandals, but they are disgusted with a popular culture that celebrates contraception, that his presidential run is all about proving he's not an idiot. The theme of ethnic cleansing but because of outsider intervention. Time and "This isn't a 30-second commercial. This is going to be a sustained longing for certainties, a need to be in control." Time incoherence" of Republican foreign policy and urge a return to the more moral was a paragon of virtue and praises recent efforts to spiff up his media targets minorities. Cops are trained to pull over, interrogate, and search on contact, and insufficient or excessive luggage. The indicators are often a proxy for the motorist's race: One trooper admits he was trained to target relaunches with articles on subjects predictable (female candidates for president, abortion clinic violence) and less so (adultery, the benefits of essay, "In Praise of Women," features shots of impoverished or oppressed women apart geographically, we are all sisters in our souls.") The cover story says the United States needs to realize China, warning that separation of powers allows the legislative and executive premised on an omnipotent central bureaucracy. In addition to being nomination as the "the candidate of political reform and moral reawakening." article argues that abortion is here to stay because it is "an indispensable Cold War required the United States to make common cause with oppressive intelligence archives so citizens may judge for themselves if the United States "prayerful defender of life" but became an "any means necessary" fanatic. The from Operation Rescue's nonviolent principles to the Army of God those very qualities that make him interesting and distinctive": his "harried, decline is attributed to the "paradigm shift" toward baggy over tight and the retreads the story of the industry war between Creative Artists Agency and upstart Artists Management Group. The battle started last summer when prodigal to reinvent "the architecture of the industry." The piece explains the is off to "a strong start," having already lured away industry "crown jewels" Time 's cover story is Bill Gates' 12-step program for "succeeding in boss with a digital reality check." Another suggests that Gates is making lavish "investments" in and "the loneliest hero we have ever had." The story predictably applauds his achievements on the field and sighs over his difficulties off it. story sensibly points out that planning and zoning are inherently local issues not national ones. Nevertheless, national politicians (notably Al Gore) are feasting on the issue, which a pollster calls "startlingly on track with currently visiting the United States in search of International Monetary Fund technological bells and whistles, they find solace and community online. complete a 10-point checklist detailing why the patient wants an abortion, list the patient's method of payment, and record the total number of abortions they counseling, personal fitness training, and free 15-minute facial massages. A piece says the first hair dye ads of the '50s ("Does she or doesn't she?" New hair color offered women "an immediate and affordable means of Brothers' previously starchy marketing techniques. The original fount of believer and his carefully phrased supplications to the Christian right. or work out of necessity. The study will make it even more difficult for mothers to take time off from work to raise children. bombs, more death, more despair." The paper said the war "showed ominous signs tabloids, though, the dominant war issue was rape. "The Rape Factory" was the sinks to a new evil." "The rape camps" was a headline in the Daily metal trading company which was under United Nations sanctions and remains on a Express said the Conservative leadership should "immediately and without opinion is swinging in favor of an invasion" and that "the launch of a ground offensive seems likelier every day"; the Times "that it may take campaign bring no acceptable result, but that an opportunity remains for year's millennium celebrations is in jeopardy because lack of funding has a picture of members of Our Lady's Choral Society in pink raincoats and four piglets vigorously suckling a sow's teats. An ad for what? began enrolling women in the 'Carry Your Sons to Class' program."-- Bill 'You wouldn't believe how heavy those backpacks are,' he told a reporter. 'No it often gets the least important things right, the facts, the small "t" truth. But the tone, the texture, the feel of the event is never correct, and that's newspapers encourage their reporters to wield the tools of the novelist, opening a story with an evocative detail, such as these leads, both from the caste, changed into her prettiest sari one recent morning." works, you get a powerful story, albeit one whose subject is not revealed until feeling in your stomach. And when both news and coloring are avoided, you get their daily timetable and carry only those books needed for the day besides taking extra care to sit straight while studying. This advice is significant taking into consideration the fact that children of today are faced with a student carries to the school crammed with books and they end up with various Times met with a number of experts and sought their opinion." may instill in the child a hatred towards the school and finally have a negative impact on his academic performance, she remarked." an elected National Assembly. It also permits the Amir to suspend its articles The government bans formal political parties, and women do not have the right to vote or seek election to the National Assembly. Domestic servants are not protected by the Labor Law, and unskilled foreign workers suffer from the lack of a minimum wage in the private sector and from The government restricts freedom of assembly and association. approval, as must private gatherings of more than five persons that result in the grain of his own cynicism, so that the movie fairly drips with irony without ever losing its raffish energy or its sense of wonder. It feels lefty alcoholic who regarded this new species of capitalist human with contempt doing, he sets about trying to sabotage her candidacy. talent and passion and deserve to rise, but many are rockets without payloads. she has no goals beyond furthering her own career. At the same time, there's without a father and with a mother (Colleen Camp) whose hobby was writing to successful women and asking how they did it. In class, her legs cross primly sets her big jaw and grits her teeth and bears down as if eliminating her rivals with every squeeze. The cogs in her brain turn feverishly. Scanning a rival's nominating petition, she seizes instantly on an unfamiliar name: "Who's came to embody everything that was lightweight and fatuously noncommittal about role, and he's perfect: He makes the teacher's anguish absurdly funny without realizes he's grown and has nothing to show for it. Stuck in a sexless and childless marriage (he retreats to the basement to watch porn tapes) and bring himself to check off his own name on the ballot. E lection is scaled small. Working from a trim novel on crowds or parades or elaborate spoofs of ceremony, the way most political satires tend to do. Nor do they feign an understanding of the populace, in this case a student body that seems uninterested in which of the candidates ends up getting a job that usually consists of planning the prom. They keep the focus narrow, on the individuals. But each private act has rippling and tumultuous public consequences. The geometry of the movie becomes dizzying. When the jock, the vindictive Tammy jumps into the race as a third candidate, adopting a nihilist "Who Cares?" platform that nearly sandbags the whole election. And friend. His desperate attempts to bed her make him reckless and seal his doom: Stung by a wasp outside her window, he staggers into school on Election Day the bedroom, but the movie means to be more than a study of electoral irreducible gesture. And when she glimpses defeat, her pain is truly heartbreaking. She curls herself up in her mother's lap and weeps with the agony of the empty. That's what makes Election so much more insightful horrific metaphors that ate into the mind, and he showed signs in The fun in the film is when he's exploring these squishy openings.) As the game's ingenious designer, hunted by militant "realists" who want to stamp out virtual much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write floated weasel words that would let him wage a ground war while calling it officials dutifully ruled out the idea, all the while sketching concessions by It's how they're doing it already while pretending not to by masking it in less polite terms. Here are the various characterizations, in ascending order of noxious formulation, slung as an insult by hawks such as the Weekly implication is that cutting a deal with a criminal is unethical, if not it connotes capitulation. They've learned to deflect it by juxtaposing it with "bombing." When asked on Face the Nation whether the United States would negotiating right now. We're conducting an air campaign." The false, smells of weakness. Again, administration officials deflect it by contrasting last weekend. "Now we have force backed by diplomacy." Secretary of State formulation. But the contrast between "diplomacy" and "force" is just as "support for dealing with the problem in a political way." Last week, when a with him gets harder." When asked whether "at some point" dealing with out a timetable or what he has to do." Refusing to "spell out" demands or to effectively obscured by repeating the word "harder" five times during the description. Confronted recently with a coarse question as to whether the understand these five demands that the international community is making." the conditions are, so we're not negotiating," Ambassador Hill declared on have to finesse the discrepancy between the "demands" they touted and the deal Fill in the blank. Ending her China trip yesterday, Secretary others envy? What are the crowning accomplishments of our society the world yearns for? Cheap consumer goods, crappy fast food, and bland mass entertainment! That's what News Quiz players cite. And, incidentally, when slogan. Can't fit it on a bumper sticker? You can if the bumper's on a big vote in Congress, China wants to be enshrined as a "most favored nation" with the same economic rights as the major trading partners of the United States. likely to urge them toward membership in the World Trade Organization. Joining and increased adherence to international trading laws, such as copyright. ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens: "I am a Christian. I am a conservative. But one thing I am not is a racist." (One thing he will remain is saying it was not racist but merely an advocate for causes such as displaying the Confederate battle flag and playing "Dixie" at public events. reincarnation of the racist white Citizens Councils" that battled integration Some highlights from the table of contents on its home page: against the Southern whites all this time: secular humanism is intent upon on any subject, and you'll hear six opinions (nine during election season) and could disagree about, they are managing to squabble, revealing a peculiar anxieties of a state where a beleaguered ethnic minority seeks independence, their right to independence. "We will ask the international community to ambivalence is Holocaust remembrance but of a different sort. There is were gathered a dozen elegant undergarments, each in its own glass case, and each accompanied by at least three paragraphs of scholarly labeling about century. They were masterpieces of delicate craftsmanship; no two were exactly Renaissance enameled boxes. But it was also like a private showing: Nobody else was there. In those days, "costume" was dear only to a few obsessed antiquarians, with no connection to the mad scuffle of fashion in real life. A show back then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute might have a stiffly embroidered linen nightcap looking inert and inscrutable. No longer. The current Costume Institute show, "Our New Clothes: Acquisitions of the 1990s," vibrates with modern energy. Under into the past, and the modes of olden days awaken to new life next to their modern revisions. Martin also succeeded in intermingling history and the present day in an earlier show called "The Ceaseless Century," by which he picking that century. Chic outfits in good condition date back only as far as humpback. The dazzling styles of the distant past live only in pictures. A fashion designer can put old imagery to use. But a museum collector needs history in material form, the better to display its links with the productions of more recent ateliers. The earliest and most magnificent item made of silk damask brocaded in bold patterns with multicolored silk floss and metallic thread. The strong color and buoyant presence of this ornate dress command our attention; the dress has no mustiness at all. Another, French, miles of applied pleated ruffles, creates a similar effect. These dramatic dresses easily compete in intensity or sensationalism with the vivid works by coat dated between 1787-92--which is to say, just at the Revolutionary moment. its buttons glittering with paste diamonds. The latter was made at a time when the king's head was still on, and refined elegance could still relax and keep The antique menswear in this show has a clarity of line and color that claims an affinity with the surges of invention in men's clothes collection, displayed next to the red wool French Revolutionary coat: Its redness, and both look timely. A brotherhood of male expression communicates torso, complete with arms and thighs. At the groin, the two sides of the jacket Numerous white dresses are gathered in a group. The silky columns that cling, fall, or drape in unexpected ways. The possibilities of feminine white turn out to be infinite, to mirror any emotional and erotic future will be all the more liberated for seeking its sources in the liberties of the past. But the show made me realize something else as well: that our present clothes are already museum pieces. The largest change in fashion since have got used to thinking about what their own outfits "say." By bringing together old and new, this exhibition encourages that habit of looking for significance in our own garments. While we stare with detached sociological attention at the garb of generations who lived in complex past times, we're invited to stare the same way at contemporary modes, to see them as the historical artifacts of our own fraught epoch. And the gulf between Those Days trickle of praise for The Phantom Menace after the first wave of negative reviews. The film "offers a happy surprise: it's up to snuff," writes was funnier and scrappier when it was new. But it simply wasn't capable of the movie is "loaded with cool stuff" and that "in terms of visual weak storytelling. (Click for a synopsis of last week's negative reviews and to foray into the world of rock. The sound is equal parts glam, punk, and metal, three stars and says "believe it or not, his album is a genuinely rocking journalistic controversy about conflict of interest. After the Times areas where I knew the science that, even if there were areas where she might hard science must be boring and that feminists have no sense of humor." Other Books). Mainly positive reviews for Homes' latest novel, which, like her other work, is designed to outrage: A corporation man gets genital tattoos, a bored suburban couple burn down their house on a whim, etc. Dissenters find the novel's transgressive bent a touch stale, but the pack praises it. The Bank (Viking). The critics love this collection of interconnected stories of a write a screenplay of the book.) An overtly negative review in the New York complains that the stories are plagued by a "certain generic weariness." Bank's stories, "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine.") changed by the discovery of a love letter. It's plagued by "bland dialogue and protesting loudly but aren't matching their harsh words with deeds. The naive rights activists hail the ruling as a sign that dictators who have committed because he has blacks and other minorities on his staff), doubts he committed obstruction of justice, and doesn't think he should have been removed from office. The bad news: She says that he committed perjury (by denying that he relationship" and "could poison discussions" on arms control, which are more spin: Canceling the visit offered both sides a graceful way to avoid a own attorney, is arguing that it was a mercy killing. The judge has tried in more good by pressuring Wall Street to invest in poor communities. Other spins: first final four appearance, having choked in the tournament in recent years. team ever to reach the final four without having qualified for the tournament The emerging spin behind her candidacy is that she's her husband's moral opposite: She's been his victim, she's been faithful, and now it's "her turn." difference: her comparative liberalism on matters of policy. hurt her. But nowadays talking about those scandals reminds people less of the husband. But the genius of her candidacy is that she gets to ride that backlash, too. Her "advisers" told the New York Times that she's "very enticed by the idea of at last having an independent voice, particularly after moralists as well as to feminists. If you're mad at the president, the argument her candidacy "could allow her to untangle herself from the political side of her marriage and compete for a power base that is all her own. Many women might of campaign cheerleader and family breadwinner, even many of the couple's prompting the media to ask not whether she's up to the job of senator but whether she's too good for it. Meanwhile, the pedestal lifts her above the impeachment mess and is wisely steering clear of it. "I was one who didn't confront his likely foe on "issues" such as taxes, welfare reform, national different from her husband, all right, says the mayor. The difference is that initiative "emerges from the mandates of the welfare reform bill that was we will engage you in a process of trying to find work for you as opposed to line of attack. "Let's say she disagrees with her husband on trade policy," one effective campaign issue by making a deal with Republicans on partial privatization of Social Security and tax cuts? Will you take a stand or stand could beat the extremism rap. "She can do what her husband has done over the embraced, get a lot of pictures over there, and move from the left [toward] the center," talking more "about getting people off welfare and balancing budgets." might call "the end of horror movies." The horror genre lost its life's blood it all before, and to incorporate kids' imagined responses into their of the nameless, otherwise known as "dread." Forget about awe, too, unless it's short for "Awesome, dude!" in response to some pricey special effect. Bring on subgenre, which has at its heart the most ancient of scary ideas: If you presume to violate an alien culture and make off with its sacred objects, you're going to be visited by a monster that's beyond the power of your own are full of stilted English actors pretending to be icily vengeful the mummy narrative is serious business, because when other peoples' passionately held taboos are casually flouted it is serious business. weight and cultural resonance. In their place is a lot of sub- Raiders of the Army of Darkness (the last of his The Evil Dead trilogy) and Pharaoh's mistress, who kills herself in an act of feminist defiance. ("My body wrapped in gauze and buried alive with a swarm of scabrous beetles. Legend has world. Legend has it right, as it turns out, but it's a long hour before from which he sprang before he can transfer the heroine's soul to the embalmed has all manner of superpowers, turning itself into a puff of smoke, a hurricane, and a swarm of ravenous locusts. It can appropriate pieces of its victims' anatomies in an effort to reconstitute itself (an idea cribbed from and send them into battle against our heroes. The Special Effect can do almost seem genuinely invasive. The ghouls of lesser artists just bash into one the preview I attended claimed to have been entertained. The cast is certainly stridently the Comic Relief in a movie in which the hero and heroine are defilement: Mummy movies don't constitute an especially glorious cinematic tongue sucked out, his brain dashed against the side of a tomb, or to be consumed by scarab beetles or flayed by locusts. But he has put another nail in the horror genre's sarcophagus. He should at least lose a hand. In some cultures, they cut off hands (and even more sexual encounters seem emotionally momentous. They would be anyway, at this peers, and the pressure builds. Despite its gay subject matter, Get Real called "Get Real," and the film climaxes with a speech about wanting to be recognized and loved for who you really are. There's nothing glib about tightly for fear of discovery that there's no such thing as a "natural" Except in Japan, the world economic crisis seems to have gone into at least temporary remission, and those who have been obsessing about the subject are turning their attention back to other matters. In my case, that means making a big push on my introductory economics labor of love; but it is also a commercial venture (or at least I and my publisher hope it is!). So, the first draft was tested on a focus group: people who are successful teachers of introductory economics at the sort of schools we hope will adopt the book. I learned a lot from the focus group. Among other down to earth to the ordinary college freshman, and that I had to have more sports tickets was a good example of supply and demand in action. So, I did some background research and found some very interesting stuff. But perhaps it is an indicator of my state of mind that what I saw during that research made Ticket scalping is nothing new, though it continues to pose something of an economic puzzle. The fact is that there are a number of public which tickets are consistently sold below the price that would limit demand to the available supply. Exactly why the owners of stadiums and theaters do this theater owners seem to believe that as an overall marketing strategy it is important that access to their most popular events be available to enthusiasts offer special preview showings of The Phantom Menace at astronomical (galactic?) prices, when surely they could find tens or even hundreds of thousands of people able and willing to pay? Presumably because so blatant a statement that wealth hath its privileges would alienate the tens of millions the precise reasoning, what is clear is that when it comes to big games and big shows, private sector entrepreneurs themselves often feel that it is a bad idea they can, scalpers will buy up large numbers of tickets directly from the box office and resell them at a profit. If the box office refuses to sell in bulk, they will offer to buy spare tickets from people who have come by them legitimately and perhaps hire people to stand in line. What's wrong with that? Well, the people who run the box office are attempting to pursue social only to those who can afford to pay a lot but also to those who really care and advance not to enthusiasts but to speculators, or if the long lines consist not Why does scalping seem ever harder to control? One reason is that because of the rising inequality of income and wealth, there are more people out there able and willing to pay extraordinary sums. This is above all true in New York, where there are thousands of people who will not blanch at rise because of an interaction between technology and ideology. Shady characters would hang around stadiums offering to buy tickets at a premium or to sell them at an even larger premium. Those shady characters are that everyone who has bought a ticket at the box office knows that the true cost of going to the show is not the sum he actually paid but the much larger would not be as effective as it is were it not for a favorable ideological believe in letting the market rip and therefore allow tickets to be freely resold at any price. And given modern communications technology, New Yorkers need not physically visit New Jersey to do an end run around the local And so the pressure on box offices steadily intensifies. discovering that many of its season ticket holders were reselling them to brokers, revoked thousands of tickets in a stroke. And the people spending weeks in line to see The Phantom Menace are, as far as anyone knows, genuine fanatics rather than hirelings. Still, it is hard to escape the feeling may eventually leave everyone worse off; and yet they seem to be getting harder resemblance between the phenomenon of ticket scalping and the problem of case to be made in their favor. Ticket scalping does allow some people who sometimes provide badly needed finance or liquidity. In both cases, however, Stadium owners have judged these costs to be large enough to warrant serious attempts to limit scalping; and given the experience of the last two years, you makes it easier for markets to run rings around local regulations, and the they are swimming against the tide. Indeed, as this article was being written, market forces. Some tickets to The Phantom Menace will, indeed, be sold how they will feel after a few more weeks and months or what have you of continuously pounding them into pieces." However, he adds, "We may have one of the pieces we pound them into may still be large enough to commit sure, Randy, the war may seem funny now, but what if our killing all those "Because when you are up in the woods shooting with kids, you just think, 'Hey, Perhaps because today's has a clear foil, in uniform, speaking German. It crime; it is unbecoming to chide weeping friends of the deceased for not reacting in a more stylish way. It is appropriate, of course, to attack discussion. Because the bombing is continuing for longer than had been run the risk that his entire country will be bombed into rubble before he gives altered chickens born in the shape of letters of the alphabet, or to putting "It's not like they are just sort of randomly whacking away and knocking "What's frightening to me about such changes is not the specific change, authorities suspended human experimentation at the Duke University Medical Center for four days in May. The experiments ranged from drug tests to research on psychological reactions to illness. Among the alleged violations: "insufficient training" of review board members, "potential financial conflicts of interest procedures. (Federal investigators also uncovered an incident in which a after Duke agreed to overhaul its procedures for protecting human subjects. The procedures or face shutdowns of their federally financed human research. opprobrium of legal scholars, other clerks, and the justices for making Declaring that his initial enthusiasm for the book constituted a "real lapse" expressed bafflement at the charges, concluding that the letter "amounts to an Review 's editors concurred: "It is hard to take seriously academics who condemn an independent scholar without making a single substantive criticism of Union as an "evil empire" and to build popular support for a "star wars" missile defense. Others reverse the movie's ideological lenses, arguing that homologies between Birth of a Nation and Star Wars click beyond darky house servants, of equally mechanical loyalty to their betters." Whatever history, was awarded this year to two books on slavery and one on the (hostile) action benefits not only minority students but all students. White students who attend a "diverse" college campus are more likely to work in integrated settings and to display ambition, confidence, and other worthy traits, the school attests. "Diversity enhances learning," says university President Lee once might have been admitted to the system's best schools are now finding encouraged state universities to step up their efforts to recruit students from years. But faculty members are concerned about conflicts of interest, not only considering commercial partners for their own online programs. its ethnic studies department, failing to fill positions in fields such as board member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, had no she didn't want to divert attention from the students on their graduation day. years: "Academics are no more enlightened than anyone else." other as judged by the "readers," or basically anyone who voted for his or her favorite book on the Modern Library Web site. Topping the "board" list is The Philosophy and Literature has inaugurated a different kind of discussion The list includes cameras, laptop computers, canvas bags of Some laugh at colonic humor, some don't. I have no doubt that several entries were particularly fine examples of rectal comedy. These I have passed along to Scamp," the English edition of News Quiz, along with many comical pictures of Scamp is still encouraging participants to suggest better things to do with nor the Defense Department is discouraged by its unbroken record of failure. I scarf. Am I the only person this unsettles? Am I just jealous? is living through a nightmare of the greatest ethnic cleansing that has ever been attempted. Half a million people in flight, hundreds of dead, towns and villages completely cut out of the world without water, electricity, telephone, or food. A humanitarian catastrophe without precedent." rubble." He wrote, "Let's end this war. But let's be careful in future not to promise what we are not willing to carry out, not to proclaim rights if we don't have the strength, the will, or what might be called the recklessness to made. "Perhaps the best we can do now is to use the resources that would be wasted in war in an agreed humanitarian action of evacuation and assistance to of hunger and cold would want us to do, he added. On the front page of that "the West has embarked on one of its riskiest adventures since World War air war had already had the opposite of its intended effect, he added. It revealed "a terrible impotence" against ethnic cleansing that risked becoming a more complicated and that we are now in a "thick fog." elected representatives." It said that "the ironic outcome is a set of aircraft [the stealth bombers] that are so dependent on extremely sophisticated computer equipment designed to deceive the enemy that they are extraordinarily difficult superlative weaponry meant it could destroy unseen enemies with little or no Evening Standard said that "having come so far, and having A dozen per program would form an interesting outline of the day, but choosing just one is tough. Excellent topics are lost. For instance, in an effort to counter its image as an occupying army brutalizing the people of New York City, the police department plans to recruit more actual New Yorkers to its ranks. The heart of the plan will be an ad campaign with a snappy slogan. Police you, or something like that." Too militaristic? Just militaristic enough. Participants are invited, in the privacy of their own thoughts, to devise an among them. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that mines that have made News Quiz so very special to me over the past year. Sadly, the Health Department and having the joint shut down. knowing how wise he would have been with the parking and how he would have stopped with me always beside "It is terrible that something so frightening should be given "Reaching down the front of the pants of the guy standing next to you on the subway platform just for the hell of it."-- Ken Tucker reliever) now go by Mike, simply because of one androgynously desiccated freak. For the past few years I have gauged the popularity captain of the Buffalo Sabres. This may speak more to the popularity of all roadblock on a main highway, stops every car or bus that happens along, takes away all the passengers who seem likely to have a good job or a prominent name, and holds them captive until a hefty ransom is paid." game where kids reach into a barrel with a hook or with bare hands and pull out people out there who have made all this money and don't know what the best Human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to rise up against such tyranny, we offer our own modest proposal: A Diners' bill of rights, one and to make the dining experience as pleasant as it always promises to be." property could be converted into a small destination vineyard." Opening Up the Vineyard to Anyone Other Than the Servants Is Really Tasteless" that long, I would be sick of it.' Now, wherever she and her boyfriend drive "They're all items in the complimentary gift pack given to visitors at the has proved any less useless for stopping missiles than what we're building your autobiography on a manual typewriter in an outdoor location where New York visually gifted old narcissist? Nominations welcome. engineering patents went to women, many of whom won not as independents, but as employees of corporations or members of research teams. New York Times music review: "Holocaust Inspires New Work" Tendency, the online outpost of the delightful humor magazine, is currently all of the criticism is based on a false assumption: that I was paid by unspecified. I declined. But I suggested that Time might want to make a contribution to one of the charities of which I am an officer and director, do so. I do not know the size of this contribution. My name will in no way be attached to it. I certainly will not receive a tax deduction for it. I will receive no credit for it in any way. To reiterate as emphatically as I can: I advertisers, not paid by anybody in any way. This a key point that I should it because Time offers a magnificent platform, because I frankly don't mind the limelight, and because I believe that the counsel and cautions I have to offer about personal finance may be useful to other people. me that the payment had been made to charity and not to him personally. He now says he does not remember whether the decision to give it to charity was made before or after my item appeared. He also says that payment for the first two advertorials went to his book publisher and that he also did not profit directly or indirectly. This is something else he did not mention in our advertorials. I think my misunderstanding on this point is understandable, but I apologize for suggesting otherwise. I still think it is wrong from someone in Your discussion of the winner's curse as it relates effect that comes from the power of the Internet to reduce transaction Let's take video games as an example. Over the last five years I have bought one or two new video games a year, ones that seemed so was I knew that after playing them I would generally be stuck with them. Sure, I might be able to sell them to a used software store, but I wouldn't be able being my personal favorite) I can do most of my game shopping online. When I aftermarket for video games, they are more likely to go into a store and buy one of these games for full price on the day it comes out. They know that they can play it and auction it off right away online when its value is still quite high. The net result is not only far more transactions at much lower costs but also a sharp increase in market participation, thanks to the price offset by the fact that "losing" bidders become "winning" sellers when they products that we buy, enjoy, and resell without using up their inherent is in large part because those items have such little inherent value, and they can lose their public appeal overnight. Even there, though, the magic of the able to see the target. Bombing mobile targets, such as troops performing opportunities by bringing the two countries to "a defining moment." providing advance warning of ballistic missile tests and the continuation of the nations' respective unilateral moratoriums on nuclear testing. The commented that "this modest outcome was on expected lines and while it provided understanding "set the tone for a shared vision of peace and stability." feeling of both apprehension and optimism." By contrast, the coverage of Headlines throughout the world were also dominated by the minister announced that the deadline had been extended by three days, thus independence once the three year interim period covered by the proposed accepting the peace package or facing airstrikes. The paper remarked that the police have had some success in sartorial sleuthing. A computerized database of crimes. The paper said that although the police cannot use sneaker stereotyping to arrest people, officers are told to watch out for suspicious shoes. Readers beware of choice of footwear when in a country without a bill of rights! only endorsed the infallibility of the markets, they have also endorsed the infallibility of the people who watch over those markets. Federal Reserve For the past few years, but especially since rumors transmuting base metals into gold, and generally doing eight impossible things boom, leading to low interest rates, job growth, the Wall Street explosion, war between the president and the Republican Congress would not derail the And as a conservative Wall Street veteran in a White House accomplishment may be, perversely, Wall Street's yawn at his resignation. The is not simply the result of having done a good job. Who hasn't done a good job during the past few years? His reputation depends on style as much as ascetic, controlled, rational, quiet, and untouched by any of the zillion sleazy pros. (He is not, of course, an amateur. Click for an example.) quality. He does not seek press coverage, and when he is covered, he speaks with blandness in order not to make news. This silence impresses those as well as his praise of underlings and colleagues, has earned him an enormous, though not fully deserved, reputation for humility. "This humility stuff is elbow others out of the way and brag, but it's not because he's humble. It's talking frequently about his imperfections. In interviews, he repeatedly emphasizes the uncertainty of his job. He describes to reporters how he focuses on weighing and reweighing percentages until he makes the best possible decision in ambiguous circumstances. This is a fine way to make decisions, as decision turns out well, it's because you calculated it would. If it turns out badly, it's not your fault: You made the most rational choice you could. glad to learn that there are two weak spots in his record. He arrived in position as head of the National Economic Council and later as treasury secretary to redirect federal resources toward inner cities and the underclass. disagreed with the welfare reform bill, he didn't battle hard to prevent of the economy has done more to help the poor than any federal grant program The secretary has also been excessively obeisant to Wall cut, he comes from Wall Street, and most of his closest friends and advisers creditors above all. He insists he was not trying to help Wall Street. an eager press hound, has surely absorbed. Be nice to Wall Street, and perhaps detectors at airports," he declared at a White House ceremony. "We have to redefine the national community so that we have a shared obligation to save think of guns in new terms: bombs and kids. His strategy is threefold. argument. Opponents of gun control have framed the debate as a choice between blaming weapons and blaming people who abuse them. "Guns don't kill people; people kill people," goes the famous slogan. Since conservatives tend to oppose pornography and divorce as well as gun control, they get a twofer by attributing tragedies such as the one in Colorado to a degenerating "culture." prayer and religion and repeatedly charged that the "culture of violence" in television, movies, music, video games, and the Internet "is having a profound "We must resolve to do what we can to change that culture," she proposed. Both filters, and mental health awareness. By suggesting that the cultural causes of violence were being sufficiently addressed, they sought to shift attention and who can't stand the idea of the government telling them what to do are usually willing and often eager to have the government impose identical restrictions on young adults. "Guns and children are two words that should never be put off countless criticisms of guns in between her eight invocations of "our juveniles who commit violent crimes from ever buying a gun." them with explosives and terrorism instead. "We have a huge hunting and sport everybody who is waiting for the next deer season in my home state to think about this in terms of what our reasonable obligations to the larger community feel if the headline in the morning paper right before you got on the airplane another headline: 'Terrorist Groups Expanding Operations in the United States.' bound guns and bombs together in their legislation and in their analysis on the control don't recognize soon how the emerging prominence of kids and explosives reshaping the debate and turning the political tide against guns. Advocates of gun control agenda." Of course he is. They're missing the point. Politicians don't ban guns. Politicians with persuasive arguments ban guns. opposition has been revised many times since. Recently, for instance, the political scientist Benjamin Barber described the contest as "Jihad vs. Both, in his view, undermine the viability of participatory democracy. anonymous, transnational, homogenizing, standardizing market forces and technologies that make up today's globalizing economic system," as he puts it. [are] wrestling with each other in the new system of globalization," as he puts lives, when he's not trading Internet stocks on the Internet, communicating avers that he respects olive trees and aspires to preserve as many as possible but that there's no stopping, or even slowing, technological advancement, one of his catchier coinages, an "electronic herd." Because this herd can stampede at will, if not at whim, developing nations, now known as "emerging markets," no longer have much discretion about which economic policies to convertible currency, "transparency" of information, and protections for private property, First World investment money will simply go elsewhere. As the leader of a country, you can choose to conform to international economic norms it, quoting others saying it, and quoting himself saying it to others. He calls whether we should be altogether pleased that the entire world seems to be nonissue. The integrated world market is coming, no one can do anything about foreign policy market realism. Capitalism, not liberal democracy, emerged triumphant from the Cold War. And though a free economy tends to open up a society over time, growth and democracy aren't necessarily connected in the has elected leaders or respects human rights has far less effect on its immediate prosperity than the question of whether it listens to the free elections, are stagnating because they refuse to liberalize their economies. China, which has a thriving capitalist economy but doesn't have free about economics or international relations. I think he's largely right, though olive tree can happily coexist. The problem is that he has distilled the describes his journalistic method as "information arbitrage." He sees himself acquiring knowledge at wholesale from the top diplomats, hedge fund managers, and central bankers to whom his Times column grants him access, and selling at retail to general readers. Reporting on things seen and heard while biweekly Times column, but a book needs to do more than endorse the he relies on slogans and strained neologisms. Countries, he tells us, have economic operating systems of different degrees of sophistication, which he from what's good about other cultures without soaking up what's bad. Backward States can destroy you by dropping bombs and the Supermarkets can destroy you better of him in the chapter titled "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict each other, the golden arches hypothesis was proved false even before his conflict that doesn't have much to do with globalization at all, the war in intent on demonstrating that it's compatible with a respect for identity and sensibility tells him that we can have our cake and eat it too, that technology that globalization is likely to make life better for people in remote places. But it won't do it while preserving their local cultures. It will do it by partially or completely obliterating them. That's what market capitalism does. time the foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times helicopters in they love dogs, so maybe it's not surprising that prejudice among the pugs and poodles is a growing national concern. Actually, the purported prejudice is among dog owners, not dogs. But increasingly dogs are being talked about as if they had the same civil rights as humans and that the same rules of civil discourse apply to man and his best friend alike. The implied parallel can be seen as either an insult to the struggle against human racism or a commentary on its occasional excesses. Or, of course, it can be seen as perfectly considered the bible of dog breeding, it is essentially the blue book for dog book's "breed profiles" perpetrated pernicious stereotypes. The hottest issue labels of any kind. (At least they are ostensibly for the kids. How many adults Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, got right to the point: "To say that all these dogs are 'this' and all these dogs are 'that,' that's racism, canine "Dogs are not vehicles stamped out of an assembly line," asserted Holder, "Each cleansing. To brand dogs such as Chihuahuas as "not good" with children "is not just an insult; it is a dangerous statement in an age when every state and many towns have adopted or are considering laws restricting, banning or even requiring the killing of particular suspect breeds." Clinic charged that labeling Chihuahuas as bad with children was essentially blaming the victim: "It's mainly the child's fault because they're doing really pulling on their ears and poking in their eyes, and doing lots of things, and you know, you have to have a pretty long fuse to tolerate that." The problem, in other words, is that children are bad with Chihuahuas. Perhaps the solution profiles had been published with "inadvertently incorrect and controversial blacklist can accurately be labeled good or bad for children. But the idea that stereotypes are not valid about breeds of dogs is ridiculous. While it is true that all dogs go to heaven, there is a bowl curve when it comes to dog abilities and personalities. Basset hounds are sweet and stubborn. Golden dogs you want to have a beer with. Chihuahuas are snappish and color of their skin is different than judging dogs by the texture of their coats. It is different even if you leave aside the question (which I find easy but some people find difficult) of whether dogs have the same moral claims as human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's say they do. Even if so, the analogy of dog stereotypes to human racism is mistaken. Racism among humans is overwhelmingly based upon cultural differences between human "races" are so infinitesimal that making sweeping statements is rarely useful and often dangerous. Genetic differences between human races are literally superficial. But the differences between purebred dogs are anything but. That's why they call it breeding. For example, border border collie in the living room during a cocktail party, and soon you'll find differences among dog breeds are not just the result of natural selection. Evolution among dogs has got a big push from humans. On ranches, border collie puppies are taken from the litter and tested for their instinctual desire to herd sheep. The most fearless and enthusiastic pups are the most likely to be bred to pass that herding gene on to the next generation. Doggy eugenicists sometimes disagree about what traits they ought to be pushing. Many border collie breeders, for example, take great exception to the dog industry's emphasis on ideal appearance rather than behavior. They fear that if border collies are bred for the color of their coats rather than the content of their character, eventually their herding pointers. One need not be an expert in evolution or zoology to understand that pointing at dinner rather than catching it is not a successful evolutionary strategy. But the reason pointers point is not that they are responding to a capital gains tax cut or any of the other incentives known to affect the behavior of human beings. It is that pointing has been bred into them. Right now, something called the Dog Genome Project is trying to isolate the various Lovers of certain breeds readily acknowledge the positive dog owners want pooches that can swim. Rottweiler owners want beasts that me, want dogs that have the good sense not to do any of those things. But naturally greedy or that laziness is a genetic trait of blacks. most "discriminated against" dog in the country. In most breeds, a litter of puppies will have one "alpha dog." The alpha dog is the most aggressive male in the group, the one that instinctively wants to be leader of the pack and will not bow out of a fight. Pit bull litters are nearly all alphas. If a child lets into a bloodbath. The pit bull's brain chemistry is the product of selective breeding too. Unlike, say, a German shepherd, pit bulls were not bred to protect humans but to kill other dogs. They are more prone to become addicted to endorphins, which often translates into a lust for pain. Thus, they don't quit when their opponent is licked or when they are told to go to a neutral corner. Also, most dogs have an instinctual body language. If two dogs meet on the street and they don't want to fight, they bow their heads, exposing their necks and demonstrating their vulnerability. It's a nice gesture, and pit bulls bow too. But unlike any other breed, they have an instinct for attacking the rules on pit bull ownership. He called them, "the Great White Sharks of their disparate impact on owners of different breeds of dogs. Other cities trying to curb pit bulls met with similar rulings. Since then, groups like the hard that the issue isn't owners' rights but dogs' rights. In vet malpractice determined by the "intrinsic value" of the dog. In dog attack cases, animal behaviorists, psychiatrists, and activists try to claim that the dogs were simply "misunderstood." But whether they're defending a dog that kills or eulogizing a dog that was killed, the mythology that dogs are simply products have been selectively bred for thousands of years in some cases. Even a millennium of unnatural selection still leaves room for some environmental particular breed. But the worst herding border collie in the world will still A poodle will bite you for forgetting to put the accent rope and the worst you'd get is a fierce yawn. Yes, it is possible to teach a bloodhound to hate kids, just as it is possible to teach poodles to be sled dogs. But this would be conditioning against the grain of the breeds' personalities. "Canine racism" may be a convenient way to shake down courts and corporations. But it drains the moral currency from a very real and still unfortunately useful concept in the world of humans. fact, some of my best friends are German shepherds. am nuts. I am considering marrying again. (If you're thinking second marriage, wishes to tie the knot, while I am on the fence. What say you? to what feels right for the two people involved. Do not let the heroic numbers stand in your way. And if you do choose to walk down the aisle one more time, wedding ring shopping with my fiancee today. We have lived together for six years, and we really love each other. The whole time, her parents have never said anything about me. And they refuse to pay for the wedding, as they do not a real strain on our relationship to have her parents and grandparents letting her well. We split the rent right now, but when I get my degree I intend to pay for rent and let her handle the money. Her parents want me to quit school and likely to pay only half as much as the job I can get with a Masters, but they off all financial aid to her and refuse to pay for her wedding unless we have house after they got married. Now they are claiming they have no money and doctors, she has a hunch you are a fine young man, your little firearms joke notwithstanding. Because you state that you and your beloved are in agreement, They sound controlling and manipulative and demonstrably unfriendly. not want to complain about the misdated baby blanket. What is it with people who always complain about gifts? The flowers are wilted, the can is dented, the blouse has no sleeves, or my personal favorite, told to me when I sent special bagels and varied cream cheeses, "I prefer margarine." who need to vent. As for something possibly underlying seemingly trivial complaints, there need not necessarily be a repressed anything. Some people are way, that the recipient of the bagels and cream cheese is not also a friend of regarding "personal responsibility." Missing from all the talk is exactly what personal responsibility is, and what it means to "accept personal from fallout by stating, early on, "I accept personal responsibility." responsible for myself and thus immune from criticism? I am afraid that if I go "responsible," then expect the subject to be closed. This is a little like rapping oneself on the knuckles and then continuing on with business as usual. to work, I cannot understand why she chooses to spend most of her free time with her boyfriend, who lives an hour away. The result is that her daughter is at my house most days after school (well into the evening) as well as most weekends. Her mother calls to check on her, but this is no substitute for the I feel very sorry for her friend and understand her unwillingness to be alone so much, but I am concerned by her mother's neglect and resent the free childcare. I have considered sending the mother a note but am convinced it would only result in hurting the daughter and making her feel unwelcome in my house. I do not want to be ungenerous to a child in need. How should I handle neglectful mother, you correctly imagine, will not change the situation for the like this child, so why don't you redo your thinking, privately, and come to contribution to a youngster's life. Your kind approach will also serve as a model for your own daughter. If you think it useful, discuss your new approach with your daughter. It can only help her if she knows her own mom is consciously trying to make a difference. It can only be a wonderful lesson, by example, for her to see generosity put into practice. Your answer was predictable: It's unsafe; tell him to do this in private. Well, my wife nearly fainted to see me castigated in public, no less on the control of the situation, he shouldn't be found guilty of not operating your driving record while flossing is better than the beloved's with both her hands free. Perhaps this is a tug of war where the rope is, symbolically, After some scheduling problems we managed the meal and had, I thought, a charming time. After that he was quite pleasant when we ran into each other. Recently I asked him to join me again for lunch. He pleaded the press of work definitely changed, and I know he's going to some lengths to avoid me. certainly not planing to press my attentions on him. Unfortunately the atmosphere now feels strained. Should I speak to him or just let matters rest? defeat you, it's the messes. What has happened is that the object of your found you more aggressive than was comfortable, since the first and second invitations were yours. It could be that while he behaved politely, the initial lunch was not as charming as you thought. It could be that he intuited more of an interest on your part than he was prepared to deal with. He could very well be neurotic, or you may not be aware of your own firepower. Whatever the actuality, he is definitely ducking you, and your next move should be this: Behave in a cordial, correct, and distant manner. When you encounter him, simply nod, smile, and keep going. This approach is the best thing for both of that well. I will not attend. Am I obligated to send a gift? Do not even think of responding with a gift. What might be in order, however, a letter to a friend I have been out of touch with for several years. He and I were the closest of buddies. Then my friend moved away from our small hometown couple of times over the last few years and have received no response. I would really like to reawaken the friendship. Any suggestions? are largely a matter of guesswork. Your letter has every indication that your pal from the old days is uninterested in picking up the thread. One might postulate a number of reasons. Your youthful best pal may not remember things or, sadly, his life may have gone haywire and he just isn't up to rejuvenating the old bond. Do leave things alone, and accept that you may never know the understandably, have been paying more attention to the wars, tornadoes, mass murders, and nuclear espionage that constitute the rest of the news: the incident weeks after it happened, saying only that the president had made a of making an aggressive, unwanted sexual overture, it still contradicted fall in line with the official White House account, which in turn suggests that it's not crazy, given what we already know about current White House blew the whistle on the destruction of bank records. Detective would have been big fuss over whether he was or was not telling the truth about his use of a only one clear way left for him to try to find out. single mom (and grandmother) who has had to set up a Web site to solicit money for her "defense fund." On the other hand, her lawyers are representing Journal )--is a question the current criminal proceeding will not Department guidelines discouraging compelled testimony from journalists, never and did not testify in her own defense. (Her lawyers rested their case without presenting any evidence of their own.) Only a criminal justice system as four charges against her. Jurors didn't say which way they were split and vowed groundless, but whether it is or is not, it has had the effect of more or less crisis of the past two years. This, he said, is "one of the luckiest breaks best if businesses are simply left to their own devices or that capitalism can Third Way faith in 'smart' government seems to have triumphed completely over the rights of minorities, and cultural and religious freedoms." The author but warned that the new internationalism contains paradoxes that could spell uncertainty about its geographical extension (should its writ run outside nationalist policies; and yet another the clash of different national values Birthday," said the celebrations were taking place "in the wrong place at the the profoundest question of this anniversary season can be addressed: whether alliance that sat back, fat and happy, while atrocities were being committed on complacency would have led to fresh calls for withdrawal." are a lot of "chills" about this week, the greatest being the chill between Post implied that Cox found nothing of importance that wasn't already island by peaceful means, but will not rule out invasion as a last resort," it added. "Under certain circumstances, the US probably would help to defend mean that China intends to start a nuclear war. But it clearly wants a more get back on track. However, the changing missile equation will make that more larger guarantee of security that comes from the present policy course, of engagement with China, through trade, diplomacy and dialogue," it added. In Times editorial said the United States has made itself an easy target for China's ambitious spies because of security failings that "are just the latest symptoms of a deep muddle over the direction of US policy towards China." "The US needs to be straight with China," the paper said. "That means shows precious little sign of the political leadership needed for the to security by the United States and showed "how difficult the West now finds it to deal with an economically and politically resurgent China." With China's States will remain the world's only superpower "can no longer be so easily held," it said. The Independent concluded that "with China, the US must be fair but firm if the Pacific century is not to begin with a cold snap." the leadership of the Congress Party, which she had made when some party said her reinstatement has given the party "a fresh lease of life" and has set a car with two work mates on their way to an outside broadcast location in Standard splashed the word "Cruelty" on its front page, which was how syndicated throughout the world. The Evening Standard said in an editorial that "having an image like this pushed in one's face makes it a bit harder to keep the stardust sparkling in the prospect of a live televised took up the challenge of producing a way to print out selected articles from Word document with an Install button and simple instructions. Once it's can call up a menu of articles with check boxes to pick the ones you want. (You "Chatterbox" or only some of them.) Then the tool will print out your personal with its own table of contents, containing just the stuff you want. Note: This if, for some reason, you don't wish to consume every word of versions of most other major word processors, or by Word Viewer, a free bit of a version for Adobe Acrobat or a free Acrobat viewer. We give you the umbrella, in case that's not clear.) archives are free. Most older stuff is for subscribers only. features are now available in audio versions, for listening proprietary gizmo that lets you listen on headphones or through your car radio. delivery includes Today's Papers and other features. If you sign up for all soon after it appears on the site. Subscribers only. Click formatted for printing out. Subscribers only. Click printout tool here, as well as free viewers for Word or Acrobat.) Subscribers version for printing out. This service is free. You don't have to be a morning. Or (if you don't want to leave your computer and printer on all night) it will automatically connect to the Internet, fetch and print Today's Papers when you turn your machine on in the morning. We've made it easy to get Today's this software can also be used to fetch and print any other page on ("Keeping Tabs" reinterpreted for the dance); the Emperor's New vials are part of a promotional campaign for the May sweeps special When News Quiz can promise about Fox. To judge from your answers, the entire outfit is nothing more than a dumping ground for lurid videos of anorexic lawyers attacking pretentious investigators of paranormal cartoons, presided over by an immoral tycoon. Which only proves that sometimes the easiest jokes really are Guide 's report that the water was initially stored in "giant jugs." Yorker cartoons is that they are inscrutable. The more depressing truth is that they are often simply mundane. Try to identify which of the following captions are from urbane New Yorker cartoons and which are from a In the hypothetical New Yorker version, a husband is caught in bed with beauty parlor. In the New Yorker version, a precocious child surveys her New Yorker version, precocious children play Monopoly. Could have television. In the New Yorker version, a cat and dog watch Situation unclear. In the New Yorker version, the situation is also "miraculously 'solve' the crime with a tape recorder and a lot of bad driving" foreseeing that the studio would be desperate for advertising blurbs on this Simultaneously inspired and contrived, clever and crude." Some critics call the series of dates, sometimes secretly. Many reviewers identify with the one who everything he does is fascinating and adorable." Somehow in the course of the film he manages to find a woman who'll continue the relationship, and the two is breathtaking." Wills calls the memoir as a whole "tiresomely moralizing" and Economist praises the book ("impressively honest and hugely enjoyable") debut short story collection. His stories mostly hinge on matters of faith. As spin: Now we have a viable strategy. The cynical spin: Now we're allied with can't be life on these planets, because they're too big, too gaseous, and too official, but he indicated he would retire "unless a miracle happens between States. The sad spin: He's going out on a low note because his team, the New expenses that were caused by his lying. Pundits agreed that materially the that symbolically it's a huge blow to his legacy, since he's the first president to be held in contempt of court. Conservatives hailed the ruling as the public that investigations of the government would be nonpartisan. assertions that he and his staff had "conducted ourselves inappropriately." drugs into a terminally ill man with the man's consent. The case was based on a was about a flagrant challenge to the rule of law. The new liberal spin: trial, but we'll try her again. Her lawyer's spin: Go ahead, and we'll try spin: It's the heartwarming tale of a golfer who came back to win one of the sport's biggest prizes after being so seriously injured three years ago that he final round three years ago, choked away his lead again this year. The completely unsentimental spin: It's the tournament's worst winning score in a scenic Tidal Basin. Agents are pursuing a third beaver that is believed to be still at large. The captured beavers were given medical checkups and were then released in a secret location to protect them from public scrutiny. According second beaver, but the animal did not seem to appreciate the prodding." The second, even worse recession was underway. By late that year the unemployment Magazine ran a long article (by Benjamin Stein) titled "A Scenario for a Depression?" which suggested that "the nation has arrived at a new spot on the lost their power and the economic wise men have lost their magic." Stein and many others worried that after nearly a decade of disappointing performance, turned out that the old remedies were just as powerful, the nostrums of the economic wise men just as magical, as always. The Federal Reserve Board, which opened up the monetary taps. Interest rates came down, the stock market rose, workers and factories left idle by the slump went back to work, output soared: Once the slack had been taken up, growth slowed again, and over the '80s as a whole the economy actually grew a bit less than it had in the '70s. But the expansionary monetary policy can reverse a depressed economy's fortunes. The biggest single question now facing the world economy is Japan today bears a strong resemblance to the United States in that frightening problems: a slowdown in productivity growth, an ossified management culture, a troubled financial sector (Stein's article talked at length about the looming difficulties is a severe recession. Japan's unemployment statistics notoriously Japan can somehow persuade its consumers and business investors to start and Japan now. Japan can no longer use conventional monetary and fiscal leaving little room for further cuts. And Japan's government is already deeply in debt, already running huge deficits. The experience of the past few months (in which the prospect that the government would have to sell vast quantities interest rates) suggests that any attempt to stimulate the economy with even bigger deficit spending will do more harm than good. So it might appear that there are no easy answers, that nothing short of a total restructuring of the growing chorus of Western economists has argued against this fatalistic view. On one side, they have worried that unless something dramatic is done to increase demand Japan may go into a deflationary tailspin; that the expectation of falling prices will make consumers and businesses even less willing to spend, worsening the slump and driving prices down all the faster. On the other side, they have argued that radical, unconventional monetary policy can Until very recently, these arguments seemed too outlandish events of the last few weeks suggest that there has been a sea change of warning about the risks of inflation and the importance of sound policy, the been driven down literally to zero. Banks now charge each other only for the administrative costs of making the loan. And still the expansion continues. It's still a bit hard to believe, but it looks as if Japan's central bank has understood that in Japan's current state adhering to conventional notions of monetary prudence is actually dangerous folly, and only monetary policy that would normally be regarded as irresponsible can save the economy. There are, of course, big risks in any such radical policy departure. My own view is that the biggest risk is that the new policy Japan were to try to convince the public that the future will bring inflation, not deflation. But that the target inflation rate is too low, so that even if now Japan may be on the road to an economic recovery more dramatic than anyone would now dare to forecast. By sometime next year, the Land of the Rising Sun may, at least for a while, live up to its billing. You heard it here first. like something straight out of Spark's wonderfully creepy novels, she and her My wife and I are lucky enough to own a farmhouse in thin and pregnant spotted white, bitch lying on the sofa in the sitting room. obviously with a powerful strain of Dalmatian in her and with that alarming another stray dog of a very different kind, a huge white fluffy sheepdog who behaved like the indulgent father of unruly daughters. They accepted him, though, and liked to tease him mercilessly until he would give in and join in fault, it was their habit of barking all night, having made it their mission, most unsuccessfully pursued, to keep the wild boar away from the house. For most of the time they enjoyed a happy and carefree existence. Then one morning a couple of years ago, there was a blast from a shotgun very near the house, and Eddy came running home with blood pouring from his face and side. He stiff body lying in grass behind the house, and a couple of days later the body Who could possibly have done this awful thing? I asked the treatment of animals. With a city practice, he treats several cases each year the general assumption that almost all dog poisonings in the countryside are committed by hunters. Many dogs die in bitter territorial wars between rival squads of wild boar hunters and in the fierce competition between truffle hunters seeking a bigger share of the lucrative truffle market by eliminating constitutional right to walk over other people's land without permission. An dogs on buses; other people are not. The law requires dogs to be tied up during the game breeding and shooting seasons (a law we were guilty of breaking in the hunters are not happy. They have practically no pheasants or partridges to shoot at anymore, and they are fiercely protective of the birds put down in the dues. Consider, further, that nearly all predators apart from foxes are now protected species, and that owning a gun license is very expensive, and you will understand why the hunter's lot is not a happy one. Nevertheless, hunting continues to have an atavistic hold targets may not be dogs but foxes, for which they also lay illegal traps. But they do not hesitate to place their poisoned baits close to people's houses where dogs, cats, and even children may find them. Together with their addiction to killing birds, they have inherited from their ancestors a cruel attempts to identify the poisoners are frustrated by a tradition of reluctance, even among their victims, to tangle with authority. I called on a neighbor whose dog was poisoned along with ours, and he said that if he found the perpetrator, he would give him the thrashing of his life. But he wouldn't dream old man who lives nearby, a fanatical member of the local hunting fraternity. There is no evidence against him, but he once explained to another neighbor how His car was seen near our house around the time of the poisoning. But there's little point in pursuing the perpetrator, whoever he or she may be. While poisoning dogs is strictly illegal, there have to be two witnesses who saw the laying down of the poison, and even then the punishment is only a modest "Until now, we have always depended strictly on altruism." What is he talking playfully grabbed the other by the wrist and shouted, delicate. He has to be familiar (and competent) enough to keep viewers satisfied, but also distinct (and flawed) enough that when the star returns, everyone remembers exactly why they love him so. Similarly, when two men hold are harder than they look from where you're sitting. and giggling for the press after their 90-minute meeting at the governor's Party has of regaining control of the United States," said the mayor in his when a reporter asked the mayor if he'd specifically urged the governor to run, b) "Relax, it's not like we hit a convoy of refugees will still go ahead as scheduled, but administration officials acknowledged that they would have to "adjust the tone" to make it, in the words of the postage stamp illustrated with a dove of peace has been "rescheduled for a later date," the postal service said. "They're replacing the dove with an Apache helicopter, so it'll take at least a month before it arrives," the "Finally, a question to which I know the answer: Murderers yell at each requires the willful suspension not of disbelief but of genuine knowledge: An awareness of the actual answer so easily eclipses the inspiration for a comic response. And, clearly, everyone knew the facts of the matter today. But there's more about Colorado you might not know. To condense from (but not conversation in the exercise yard at the federal "Super Max" prison in 7-by-12 cells, the men can not even look into the eyes of another prisoner. They are permitted to spend one hour per day in separate cages in the exercise yard, where they can speak to each other through mesh fences. from his cell in a New York prison, he has been kept even more isolated, but a said, "They talk about innocuous things like the movies. They don't talk about have presented a challenge to the gift shop managers, but they rose to it. Some Cockroach Earrings, part of a series that includes mice, flies, and mosquitoes, $8--It's a formal affair: Should I go with the malaria or the overindulgence on our immune system", $5--Remind me: What's the difference Virus Coaster Set (includes Influenza A, Hepatitis B, Adenovirus, T4 Bacteriophage), $12--How many times must I tell you: Don't put your glass on the table, put it on something that will give you searing abdominal $12.50--From the people who brought you the Body Bag poncho. submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. Who said this to whom about what: "Keep on doing what you're doing, and of you wallowed in the olfactory, particularly in the odor of corruption and fish. (If News Quiz were played by dogs, what a merry romp that would be! fish; it is one of the few things used to represent both male and female flexible metaphor because the general shape of its body is phallic, while its open mouth suggests the vagina. So, who's hungry? Anybody up for seafood? Al Gore requires no explanation except, perhaps, for his astonishing physical grace. The man moves like a young panther. submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. The hawkish papers of Fleet Street raised loud hurrahs, while some of the more unanimity, however, that her decision made a peace settlement much more The Telegraph said the indictment would put muscle into the United would not only be "morally repellent," it was "now illegal," it said. crimes move dims peace hope," pronounced the indictment "overwhelmingly positive" and said it augured well "not just for the resolution of this war, underscoring the independence of the tribunal, "suggested quite directly that the timing of the indictment had been affected by the disclosure of of intercepts and other secret information has always meant that the war crimes card could be played at a moment they deemed would best serve their welcoming the indictment as an important new step "in the fight against influential journalists, said he hoped it wasn't so, for this would mean that the tribunal had deliberately timed the indictment to sabotage peace their leader showed "a deep misunderstanding of the psychology of a people of charisma, he now appears to have the country behind him. install their own operating systems of any type and make heavy use of help if she has ever done the same on a Windows machine. Very few computer users install their own operating systems these days; they buy their computers with write to make a few points. The very first paragraph contains a stunning number called GNU. GNU is not an operating system but a software suite that runs on And just for your information, there is a "GNU operating system" in freely distributable, the authors have no means of recompense for their work. interface you can have it, if you prefer a graphical interface that's fine too. than commercial software. I use both commercial software and free software in computer systems), and it's pretty clear to me that it's the free software that is rigorously tested and the commercial software that gets released just as soon as it appears to run. Why? Because the incentive to an author of free software is to make her package the best, so releasing inadequately tested software will do the author's personal reputation no good at all. The incentive to a commercial author is to get the application on the and your article doesn't exactly encourage readers to exercise their choice and proprietary standards for how data are exchanged. That is, technical and legal what companies are going to focus their efforts on when writing drivers and software; there are, after all, only limited resources for writing drivers and related to whether network effects involving proprietary content formats are going to exclude them from some areas of public and commercial life. Just like don't enjoy being forced to do their work on Windows using its "WIMP" become more sensitive to concerns about interoperability and open standards. encouraging. Clear support for Sun Java would also be good (and would, in the attitude toward standards and cooperation. The computer market is big enough "elegant" in science and technology has a special meaning apart from common use. Elegance is not synonymous with "simple." Rather, it refers to the most terse solution to a problem. Such a solution will tend to be cryptic to the uninitiated. Therefore, "elegant" is most often used by those after the fact of having used a procedure successfully. For the others, I would venture society, the person who would order suicides in place of executions was the shogun, or military leader of Japan. Emperors, excepting the period from the antagonized a rival to the point where this rival drew his sword. This all occurred in front of the shogun, which meant serious trouble, because displaying a weapon in the shogun's presence was punishable by death. Despite the fact that he was forced into this situation, the offending adviser was sentenced to death and committed suicide as you described in your magazine. They coordinated an attack on the enemy adviser and murdered him. Honor called on them to avenge their master's death, but the laws forbade murder. After technology export policies, the renewal of China's normal trade (formerly most favored nation) status, China's application to join the World Trade nuclear nonproliferation, China's persecution of democrats, China's persecution produced a kind of mass hysteria in the United States. The Business interests insist that our economic partnership with China trumps all else. Many conservatives, meanwhile, are screaming for a Cold War, demanding that we confront the new Evil Empire before it grows too mighty. (This conservative opposition continues a long and deplorable trend, described by presidential power inevitably accuses the ruling party of being soft on China, but then adopts the same accommodationist policies as soon as it wins the Oval Democracy advocates judge China on its worst behavior toward dissidents and ignore any good behavior, while business apologists applaud China's dynamism and don't notice repression, espionage, etc. Any reasonable China policy must separate issues of agreement and disagreement. China and the United States can force the United States to cave on human rights just to improve economic ties. Nor should human rights advocates be allowed to make trade agreements criticize without offering a sensible alternative: A key reason for without proposing their own remedy. In the New York Times last week, carping over the Cox report: "Where exactly do you guys think you are going about what they would do instead: They don't want a trade war, either. Other hardly interested in keeping the communism it's got), and incredibly keen about joining the world economy. This is not the Cold War. China is not the implacable enemy that the Soviet Union was, and we should not treat it that China become a superpower: China may not be the Soviet Union, but it's help it. The United States should limit technology transfers, increase spying raging over China's recent suppression of all democratic dissent. This suppression is an outrage, but our policy must be more sophisticated than mere economic freedom, sponsors competitive village elections, allows the establishment of nongovernmental organizations, tolerates environmental and women's rights activism, and is starting to develop a reliable legal system. path to democracy. (Of course, taking the long view on democracy also requires has an unblemished history of authoritarianism, five millenniums without will require immense prudence: The United States must nurture a democratic relations with China are messy partly because we worry too much about them. "We are always swept up in some idealized notion of what China is or should be," nation like any other, with ambitions and fears, strengths and weaknesses. And travel the world in search of scoops. My story is in the kitchen and the living experiments were successful, and as I mop up the spills I can only hope that my shelves sag with scores of brands in the three main paper categories. This is not as daunting as it sounds, because the market is now dominated by four dries from the steel cylinder on which it was formed, lowering the paper's density. The premium wiping papers are also embossed, which creates pockets to been given a unique, patented, gentle texture that is designed to give consumers a clean, fresh feeling." Apparently, we hardy westerners don't fibrous pulp. This increases their strength, and the manufacturers usually give them more pronounced embossing for greater soaking power. Whereas little girls and babies appear on toilet paper wrappers, paper towel packages depict beefy, brawny guys, indicating their toughness. In this category the contestants implied strength and security, I tested the ability of a single sheet to hold the moisture produced when a damp tea bag was left on it for two minutes. Unfortunately for me and my security deposit, none of my towels succeeded. I didn't have any of the blue liquid ad agencies use in commercials to indicate absorbency, so I gauged the soaking power of individual sheets with tap water. towel. Not a single one could hold all the fluid, but even the cheapest towel stayed solid as it was wrung out and used to wipe up the excess from the that while paper towels can't perform miracles, even the lowliest example of the species can soak up liquid and dry your hands. If you're faced with a big, messy job, it might be worth spending the extra money for a under normal circumstances, a budget recycled product such as the ones on offer from Natural Value or Second Nature offer good value and provide the desired story and instead subjected six brands of facial tissues to a "spray sneeze to test their absorbency. To my amazement, all the subjects survived the everything, the Envision Preference Ultra is a 3-ply "premium" product, but it still feels like a scouring pad after touching a virgin fiber tissue.) Thicker tissues also keep germs off your hands, which is nothing to sneeze at. strengthening cellulose fibers they contain are biodegradable, facial tissues don't break down as quickly as toilet tissue, so flushing is not recommended. toilet tissue --the average family stash of eight rolls doesn't even take price difference between the budget brands and the premium products, but are specific enough that a trial "in the field" would tell me all I needed to know. All contestants went through the rotation in my bathroom. For novelty value, I more refreshed, and confident," but somehow using the adult equivalent of baby and seems completely unsuited for contact with one's soft bits, but drape a The latest marketing angle in toilet tissue is the double or triple roll. There doesn't appear to be any agreement on what constitutes a we're assured it "fits almost all standard dispensers"). The implied economies brand (Heritage Hearth) was considerably cheaper per square foot than any of the double or triple rolls (only half the price of the most expensive premium can't compete on the softness front. The recycled ingredients include rough stuff like cardboard boxes as well as office paper. Still, the case for recycling is persuasive. The packaging for Seventh Generation toilet paper descriptors such as "gentle," "plush," and "cottony softness," but although the fluffy plant. Purely Cotton bathroom and facial tissues are made from process doesn't produce dioxins as with wood pulp bleaching. Purely Cotton, which costs no more than the premium brands, is environmentally sound, acceptably soft, and appropriately absorbent. Even the cheapest toilet paper gets the job done, so if you want to impress guests or if you don't want jury that he had carried on and covered up an inappropriate relationship with by calling his behavior "wrong" and taking "complete responsibility" for it. "attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map," which "inaccurately located the embassy in a different part of intelligence community whenever foreign embassies move." In other words, people their colleagues who were deciding which buildings to bomb. There's nothing for the United States to say about this except that we perpetrated a moral outrage you have already apologized is the opposite of apologizing. The latter is a way to China but never used the word "apologize." Two days later, he declared, "I used weasel words and passive verbs to minimize his deceit. "While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information," he allowed. "My public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression." To minimize their lives") and offered good intentions as an excuse ("We're doing everything that we can to avoid innocent civilian casualties"). about his adultery by confessing to "causing pain in my marriage," refusing to expected. "This will happen if you drop this much [ordnance]," he argued instead to their material interests, vowing incessantly to "keep working for emphasized that "good relations are manifestly in the interest of both nations" apology under a recitation of his enemy's wrongs. He even used the same Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon pointed out that the other guy started China's financial interests are best served by stifling its anger. It's true These are all perfectly good spins. But the point of an apology is to accept responsibility for what you did and otherwise to shut up. To apologize, in The famously withdrawn country may finally expand its role in world affairs. treasury secretary ("Imagine the effort required for this man to feign interest in the idiotic ramblings of some member of Congress, next to whom the stupidest business of meals on wheels; it should be in the business of guns and shadow story of the millennium." (Click if you missed the first installment.) and improved health among the major developments in the lives of females over the last thousand years. An accompanying time line illustrates women's during the filming of the original trilogy but says she can't even remember what the third installment was called. Time applauds the film's splashy special effects but deems it short on "human magic" (for more early returns, check from charges of poor planning and incoherence, and tallies her successes and huge potential to win centrist voters. She "is running the campaign she hoarding chemical weapons, including nerve gas, blister agents, choking attorneys, fresh from recent victories over Big Tobacco, are going after the says, came straight from a Wall Street Journal editorial decrying the disorder. A series of operations has given the baby eyes, fingers, a navel, and about dismantling the racial and ethnic classifications that still plague rank with one who makes a fundamental discovery in the field?" editorial declares that the intervention "has failed catastrophically." The project was a tough sale. "Most producers' eyes would glaze over as soon as I when I posted this question was that two different types of responses were stupid movies, frequently involving an abstruse philosopher, and those that mock Showtime for making truly stupid movies, frequently involving Showtime mockers can respect each other and work together to mock various "Most producers' eyes would glaze over as soon as I its phone system so you hear a movie promo when you're on hold. prominent role with the House Republicans if he were not black is not necessarily racist. Rather, it demonstrates a rather remarkable journalistic sloppiness (employed, on occasion, by those on the right as well as on the left) that permits the writer to look at a subject's basic physical traits and ignore the many other attributes and characteristics that make the individual worthy of being viewed, objectively, as a legitimate leader. worked with Rep. Watts on several projects. (The comments here, however, are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect either Watts' viewpoint or the response to Watts' press secretary, if Rep. Watts would have been chosen to "there's nothing racist about arguing that a member of a minority diversity." The implicit insinuation is that Watts has been given a "pass" on was a very vocal, visible, and aggressive group. To demonstrate how important they were to the "revolutionary" Republican change that was happening, many were given rather attractive leadership positions not usually afforded House It's not too surprising that they would each assume prominent roles as public faces of the insurgent class. They are both photogenic, both athletic, both conservative. The post-'98 election House leadership results demonstrated that leadership role, as well as Watts. Now, does Watts gain a slight edge because he is black? Perhaps, but recall that the media immediately gravitated toward affirmative action politics by promoting Watts, when part of that promotion is a reflection of how much the media have already elevated him as a received the same attention and promotion from the media and his peers. The different treatment afforded those gentlemen indicates that, though both are politically, and oratorically. The media know a good story when they see one; this distinction between two men who are the same, isn't it presumptuous of role at the Republican National Convention in the previous year: The man gives a damn good speech. In fact, of all the speeches at the convention that year, president], because he is a powerful speaker and, unlike many Republicans, in the statement, it still clearly explains why Watts has managed to take (or been placed in) a leadership role within the party: He articulates a conservative Republican agenda in a style that is straightforward, uplifting, businessman; a member of Congress; a family man (despite admitted mistakes as a worthy of a prize than anyone's reporting on the story. Perhaps the only adequate response to Flytrap was cynicism and pointed barbs, but you would think a story resulting in the impeachment of the president would have had some classic case of special pleading disguised as a violation of civil rights. Even (or she) really guilty of? Failing to cut some slack! correct as far as it goes, you make it sound like "special pleading" is a bad thinking, all legislation, period) is the result of one group successfully convincing Congress that its interests are more important than the freedom of others. (This sounds more cynical than it is; one way to so convince Congress is to speak to their sense of justice as well as to their pocketbook.) An illustration: In most states, if I were your employer I could fire you just because I don't like you, even though there's no good reason for my dislike. However, if I also have a female employee who I dislike merely because she's a woman, I can't fire her. In this way, current civil rights legislation requires is legal). But what if, in order to lure someone as perspicacious as you away from her current, stable job, I have to promise to give her the gig permanently? (Which is complicated, but basically illegal.) In this case, Congress has decided that your interests as an ill person should trump my available to attract readers and the interests of your putative replacement in are not worth the cost in freedom they will engender. that the two great mysteries of the universe are: "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and "Why do people put locks on their refrigerator doors?" Long ago, I concluded that both these mysteries must remain forever unfathomable. More recently, two remarkable works of popular science have locks. Why would any rational creature want to erect an obstacle between itself and a midnight snack? Midnight snacks have costs (usually measured in calories tempt us. We snack when we believe the benefits exceed the costs. In other words, we snack when snacking is, on net and in our best judgment, a good thing. What could be the point of making a good thing more difficult? But people do lock their refrigerators. They also destroy their cigarettes, invest their savings in accounts that are designed to discourage withdrawals, and adopt comically elaborate schemes to force to the mast. I used to have my secretary lock my computer in a drawer every afternoon so I couldn't spend my entire day surfing the Net. explain such behavior in all sorts of unsatisfying ways. You can say that choice? You can suppose that our minds house multiple "individuals" with theory of exactly how many people we're sharing our minds with, and how their conflicts get resolved. You can throw up your hands and say that some behavior is rational and some isn't, and this particular behavior is in the second The problem with that one is that once you allow yourself to start positing "tastes" for everything under the sun, you abandon all against hollow triumphs like, "Why did the man drink the motor oil? Because he had a taste for drinking motor oil!" If you can explain everything, us to posit a taste for drinking motor oil. Here's why: Unlike a taste for midnight, you get most of the benefits, but your spouse (who cares about your health and appearance) shares many of the costs. So a taste for locking the selfish calculation, you ought to make yourself a giant hot fudge sundae every that natural selection favored people with a taste for refrigerator locks. What about people who aren't looking for mates or who are ancestors (who must have mated successfully or they wouldn't have become ancestors) had that taste. The bottom line is that it is intellectually honest to explain behavior by positing surprising tastes, provided those tastes are useful in the mating game. Presumably the sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have had this idea all along, but economists have been slow to all of which is wonderfully provocative and some of which is convincing. His point is to take seriously the claims of those artificial intelligence researchers who assert that consciousness can emerge from sufficiently complex software. Pure mathematics is pure software and contains patterns of arbitrary complexity. The universe itself, together with the conscious beings who inhabit Or maybe not. The argument only works if you believe that mathematics is eternal and precedes the universe. One could equally well argue that mathematics arises from counting and measuring and so can't exist until after there is a universe of things to count and measure. I should also say that while I love the idea that the universe is nothing but a mathematical But there might be a good economic reason why we're is not a terribly useful skill. It confers no reproductive advantage, so there's no reason we should have evolved brains capable of thinking about such a question. Nature is too good an economist to invest in such frivolities. On the other hand, the ability to understand human behavior has clear payoffs for could work out a detailed and convincing theory of refrigerator locks. journey she took when she fell in love with the leader of the free world and like to think I would live on in a book. I like to be able to reach up on my her, he admired the skirt but said he would like to see what was underneath it. replied that it had been "a relationship between two adults," but that "it was with." He added, "I respect him as a president, but I don't respect him as a knit, which was something that has been extremely helpful" and that he had men, including trusted lieutenants who are also wanted for the bombing of US his disappearance earlier this month to protect him when he is at his most police force, made by an independent judicial inquiry into a botched police investigation into the murder of a young black man. The conservative press is strongly critical of the proposed solutions to the problem. The Daily racist language or behavior where such conduct can be proved to have taken place otherwise than in a public place." The editorial also attacked the government for adopting numerical targets for the recruitment of ethnic forms of affirmative action can be beneficial, but once quotas are mandated by hard hit by the collapse of oil prices and blaming Western countries for it, have taken an unpublicized decision to "freeze" arms purchases so that their community fears. In fact, they plan to take it to fairs so children can climb efforts to increase minority recruitment (no kidding, this time they mean it) or to make the many other reforms persistently resisted by both the department not feel comfortable with a punch line that alludes to the plunger. And while I replies. It is, of course, a matter of sensibility. No offense meant. Now stocked up on pepper spray and smoke bombs and has given additional riot prosecutor's decision about whether to charge a white officer who fatally shot is preparing to suppress a riot. He does understand how these misconceptions can occur, "I can see how people would add one and one and get four." Or from a recent commencement speech with the fatuous blowhard who ladled it crazy enough to think they can change the world, they do." responsibility for the society that our children live in. We must teach them your life will come not from leisure, not from idleness, not from you are far more likely to regret what you did not do than what you do do." the builders. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could be the healers." "Shoot for the moon, shoot for the sun. Even if you miss, you will only land absolutely spectacular. That's when I said, 'Aha!' I knew then and there it was politicians are corrupt, venal, and incompetent: This was established by Impeachment was supposed to affirm it once and for all. But now the unthinkable Nowhere is this Great Awakening more alarming than in Republican governors are especially favored. While Republicans in Congress the happy numbers have made any Republican who lives in a governor's mansion think he deserves a promotion to vice president. Among those touted as is persuading Republicans that the governors have found the Holy Grail. The governors, Republicans believe, have invented a brilliant new politics that transcends ideology. The admirers of the governors (who include, not least, the governors themselves) use the same phrases over and over to describe them: The way? They combine fiscal conservatism and softer social policy. They have turned deficits into gigantic surpluses while still cutting taxes. They have slashed welfare rolls and unemployment. They have increased funding for popular social policies: teacher training, health care for kids, environmental Unlike the savage congressional Republicans, the governors have perfected the soothing language of politics. Bush, for example, has we recognize the treasures of your language and heritage," the governor's press learned how to form multicultural coalitions, another feat that has eluded Democratic Party and borrowed their best ideas. They are even willing to offend abortion. Bush has irritated conservatives by emphasizing public education and So, essentially, the new form of government invented by surpluses, welfare reform, sweeteners for social programs, lots of euphemizing, governors have done. Their accomplishments are genuine and their states are hypocrisy. Conservatives, after all, have spent the last year crediting course the governors and the president managed to turn deficits into surpluses. Of course they cut welfare rolls. Of course they have delighted voters by goosing popular social programs with extra millions. You would have to be a moron not to have been a popular governor while tax revenue surged, decision to go from simple requests for change to armed assault. 'Frankly,' he "Following the designation of 'ugly' as a diagnosable sexual dysfunction, discarded church organs with poor schools' neglected music departments. He is foreign countries have foreigners. News Quiz has affirmed these truths time and couple of less heroic nonfictional baseball teams. But mostly there are the also because they are so unfathomably beneficent, at least among themselves. perhaps less so than the one it replaces. You see, I once knew a guy who had a morning he woke up in a bathtub full of ice with a crude surgical scar in his side. Written in lipstick on the mirror was the message, "Welcome to the world idea evolving with time and where is it heading now? I mean what is the the animal characters and replace them with people, I could relate much barely touched down after its first ever combat mission last week when two of its most loyal allies staged a press conference to claim vindication. Standing "We have seen this type of criticism on every major weapons system," said "airplanes, tanks, ships and missiles have grown too complex, expensive and delicate to be useful in warfare or credible for deterrent purposes." Fallows argued in vain that the United States should instead spend its defense budget based on different underlying technologies, their names conceal a sissy, either. It carries a pair of 2,000-pound bombs into combat, but it's slow and hard to maneuver. The 56-plane fleet only flies at night (which capabilities. If an enemy fighter spots and engages the F-117, it's toast. Very would penetrate deep into the Soviet Union to wage nuclear war, today it eight 5,000-pounders) into battle. Editorial writers love to note that, ounce for ounce, the B-2 is five times pricier than gold. Its incredible cost stems Force defends the cost by saying that one B-2, with its heavy payload, can do the game was nuclear deterrence grudgingly admit that nobody would ever build With its subtle curves, smooth surface, and intimidating bat wings, the B-2 is the cooler big brother of the two planes. But the smaller represent different strategies for evading radar: The B-2 absorbs enemy radar flawless. It's commonly assumed that stealth planes are invisible to radar. those reasons, the Pentagon has abandoned its original boasts that stealth apparent precision. The General Accounting Office, however, later downgraded by mission success rate. Naysayers continue to heap scorn on the two stealth news comes at a critical moment for the Pentagon, which is pushing for the The national love affair with stealthy weapons will endure for several reasons. Although decades old, the technology is perennially acquire an added allure whenever they're developed in secret: The military flying.) And then there's something perversely sexy about the vehicles' invisibility, something magical about striking without being struck back. weapons appeal to us because they indulge our fear of commitment. And this is what ultimately makes them pose their own kind of stealthy threat to us. As the genuine perils of combat in the opening days of any military engagement, turning war into an "out of sight, out of mind" proposition. They encourage the being shed, the seductive charms of stealth weapons ultimately evaporate into nothingness. We are left unfulfilled by their limitations and cheated by their later point about "gratuitous meritocracy" did not seem up to his usual level there be art without such evaluations? (This is a philosophical, not an rather formal, inevitably somewhat pedestrian method of evaluation. Our list certainly has a target or two on it for everyone (including us list makers). Still, I thought the whole thing was worth doing because journalism is rarely compared across decades; because such comparisons make for enlightening discussions (like the one you, all too briefly, embarked upon); because our memory for good journalism tends to be awfully short; because most of the work case be made in support of the Cable Ace Awards? Perhaps. But our list does trying to maintain an indie sensibility while flirting with mainstream from all walks of life. It seems that if a woman shows any duality in her wants (and therefore weak), or she shouldn't be venturing out into the big, bad between where one creative process ends and another begins. It is a universal language, or should be in an ideal world. I am constantly amazed at the number of people (yeah, they've been men) who have told me that my musical career would be bolstered if I would just be willing to "work the sex angle." particularly to anyone who's ever done something like lock his refrigerator (I don't, but I keep it empty for a similar reason). The irrational act isn't food, and get less sleep. The momentary pleasure isn't remotely worth the an irrational urge to eat, doubtless a holdover from some ancient time when eating whenever possible was a survival trait. As long as you're positing an explanation is correct? Or that people are too stupid to realize what's bad for anything remotely approaching the sort of behavior alleged. There was no pattern to match the behavior and, therefore, the press did not pursue it or demand a forceful denial. To add further injury to the premise that the reputation for veracity is questionable at best) and People magazine. have been misled by a poorly reported story in a local newspaper that confused discussions about the various shorthand versions of our name. knowledge domains of humankind and in analytic thinking skills, a bit more choice to explore the ideas and fields introduced in students' first two years, and a series of courses taught by full faculty in a small, focused discussion the curriculum is under constant scrutiny by the faculty, and is revised regularly (typically at intervals of about a decade) in a process that satisfactions in the enthusiastic, unbridled pursuit of the life of the writes: "Consider Brown, whose undergraduates have a higher average SAT score precisely because it has a reputation for being a blast and lacks any real explanation of Brown's attractiveness to prospective students is an insult to Brown alumni and alumnae, to those who have applied to Brown, and to readers who hate seeing arguments built on unsupported aggression, and threatens to entangle us in commitments we will regret. To win among opponents of the bombing. Speaking to reporters after his meeting with level" worthy of removing a president. Now Republicans are turning the tables, can be minimized. But this is a losing game, since risk is always more than risks of its own. "We must weigh those risks [of bombing] against the risks of act, the war will spread. If it spreads, we will not be able to contain it the cost and the duration of involvement and the consequences if we do "further atrocities." "I would hate to think that we'd have to see a lot of thousands more people slaughtered and buried in open soccer fields before we do something." To drive home his point that inaction, like action, requires United States as the aggressor and protest that we shouldn't intervene unless has not committed a security threat to the United States." aggressors. At his press conference, he replied, "I don't think it's accurate to say we're acting first. I think they have acted first. They have massed their troops, they have continued to take aggressive action, they have already leveled one village in the recent past and killed a lot of innocent people." He reverse the aggression argument in two ways. First, they turn the immorality of Much of the aggression debate revolves around the integrity country that's not threatening neighboring countries, not threatening part of deterrence, which rests on credibility in threatening the use of force, which rests on the use of force when challenged. This argument is weakened by its can't dispute the principle of commitment, so he turns it on its head. We've already pledged to use force, he argues, and now we must keep our word. Ostensibly, this commitment was made last year when the United States voted bombing use the word "impunity" to shift the burden of the aggression argument to their opponents, they likewise use the word "credibility" to shift the what should happen but also about what will happen. The White genuine debate in the United States over whether we're serious about that inevitable. He pulls off this trick by presenting bombing as the default course before a war are always the same: Should we fight? Can we? Must we? Will we? Philosophers and theologians try to answer these questions, but smart politicians rewrite them. That's not fair, you say? Neither is war. know it stinks in the law's nostrils, and it stinks to me." Who said this about "Candor, gossiping about Stench at the recent Abstract Concepts Potluck and film critics and political opponents. This is a disturbing ceding of the field about his boss (I believe that's in the Constitution) and his relatives (the Bible). But there is a recent reluctance to fire at certain targets unless one has impressive credentials, a professionalizing of contumely. This is said about literary criticism: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make clearly did not mean you should criticize News Quiz because you're discontent the country's largest black denomination, while serving as its president. "I cannot shake the feeling that I have let so many people down," he added. Well, universities have begun advertising. Can you name the schools that used the government's survival depends, rejected a resolution demanding a permanent, its power to "wantonly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.'' Senate Republicans endorsed new gun restrictions. After killing a Democratic measure that would have required background checks on all customers at gun shows, they proposed a similar measure. They also voted to ban sales of semiautomatic assault weapons to minors, and many of them voted for a background checks: "They passed up this chance to save lives." The spins from and service increases to drive away competitors in order to resume charging high fares. It's the government's first suit over predatory pricing since airline deregulation. The government's spin: We're busting illegal monopoly busted at the behest of our competitors. The competitors' spin: We're doing The House ethics committee cautioned House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, for financial transactions with political parties. Reports depict the action as a response to DeLay's attempts to pressure an industry lobbying group to hire a Republican rather than a Democrat as its president. Although the it "chastised" DeLay, and the New York Times called it a "rebuke." power and ruthlessness. DeLay aides' spin: "The committee has disposed of this matter." The lobbying group's spin: DeLay has "sensitized" us to the importance return to "private life." The unofficial translation: He wants to resume making Congressional Republicans lauded him as their ally in the Cabinet. prison. He was acquitted on manslaughter charges but convicted of obstruction for destroying a videotape of an earlier part of the flight. The upbeat spin: The obstruction conviction makes up for the manslaughter acquittal was evidently mistaken for a chemical weapons facility, the ski lift disaster (attributed in part to government maps that failed to show the ski lift) proves another for the quality most evident in the writing of New York Times on its last great), is nowadays dominated by sententiousness, not satire. On between "the mayor who cracks down on crime and the mayor whose crime was crack." At other times, her glibness gets in the way of her insight: she could set a welcome example for pundits everywhere if she took a solemn, occasional lapses aside, no other regular newspaper columnist matches her gimlet eye, her sense of phrase, or her unpredictability. at parties. Another is that she is subject to frequent, sometimes scathing, criticism in publications of every ideological stripe and market niche. Her that "any journalist must be super strenuous to take the vileness award from year that began, "He couldn't stop thinking about the thong underwear," earned called her "a writer of relentless orthodoxy," by which of course it meant nearly impossible to glean from her columns. Most of her colleagues on the ideological cards close to the vest. Her published views on matters of policy would scarcely fill a chapbook: She favors gun control, hates the tobacco a heterodox temperament. They are as likely, these days, to be held by a a reporter, following the presidential campaign after having covered the Bush placing style and personality above seriousness and substance. easily dismissed. A writer with a strong and original voice will always influence lesser talents: Imitation is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius. complicated, especially because the trivialization of politics has long been celebrity culture and the political culture have become indistinguishable. herself helped broker. Or, to switch metaphors, she is simultaneously a brilliant diagnostician of the political disease of our time and a symptom of was an assignment and, quite rightly, that editors, not reporters, decide what year wrote a hilarious column called "Of Frogs and Newts," which linked the of a president Tom Hanks would make, and who calls Al Gore "the Saving are carefully rationed and, therefore, unusually effective. She recently wrote recalled her own humiliation, years before, by a powerful editor she had gone struck dumb by this question has been used against her. The Phoenix 's herself had chosen to tell us. And while perhaps an explicit admission that some of the predictably misogynist hate mail she has received from both her own plane and owns a supper club called The Fuzzy Slipper." "Anything," she political and cultural moment. Other pundits beam their opinions at us as Like the rest of his most loyal supporters and his most baby boom generation. "Historians will record," she has written, elaborating on contribution was to be the generation that worried about its contribution." time before they came along and screwed everything up. it ends. She has been practicing for this inevitable terrible event lately, it's hard to see how her intemperate wit will find adequate targets in either a be "decisive." The paper also reported strong speculation that German Defense Another military blunder made the front page of the South China Morning Post of against any escalation of the war, and the Times of wolf," the paper said. The nuclear gap between the two countries has widened in going to expose their own cities to needless risk." position on the implementation of the G-8 peace plan would be "little better "meaningless in itself, notable only as a hint of desperation," it said in an modified (GM) crops took on aspects of a constitutional battle after Prince the Daily Mail criticizing the regulations governing their production. heir to the throne attacked the lack of independent scientific research and said the regulations were not tough enough. The Times reported that campaigners as hysterics. As a patron of the Soil Association, which campaigns for organic food, the prince is also said to be upset by an article written by the government's chief scientific adviser saying the Soil Association was run said the organizers, Turner Sports, assured her they would cover all costs cord damage. "In the end, they didn't produce a penny," she told the paper. will expand its trading hours next fall, and the New York Stock Exchange is likely to follow. The upbeat spin: The current hours are relics of Wall the trading floor. The downbeat spin: Longer trading hours will require everyone from the traders to the regulators to the press to retool their Dolly the cloned sheep is aging prematurely. Scientists clones assume the age of their genetic sources? Second mystery: If her cells Third mystery: Since sheep don't get gray hair, how will researchers find restoration. Experts scrubbed it of grime but also removed layers of attention from the embassy bombing. The president's spin: The most damaging spins: The evidence is thin, and there's no way to trace what really happened. The committee chairman's spin: Only the unclassified portions of the report were released, and the classified findings are even more damning. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors will say that there's no evidence that reports. This does not jibe with the earlier Senate investigation, which shakier than they had thought. The Republicans line: It's an outrageous ruling coalition or present the plan to the parliament. Students may sue their schools for not protecting them against sexual officials were "deliberately indifferent" to her torment. The conservative spin: No, they won't, because it's almost impossible to prove "severe and million can't be disappointing, and the press is wailing about "disappointing" explanation: Ticket sales were depressed by predictions of long queues and buffs, and media creatures for whom the end of the scandal is likely to mean pretty good idea who he was. "Is it someone in the president's family, The Shearers are also the kind of people Republican mugwumps despise most viscerally: privileged, socially and professionally the patriarch of the clan, was for many years the editor of Parade sensible recipes with anxious warnings about the dangers of the nuclear arms floated to the top of the murky stew of supposition, innuendo, and sleaze that other forms of terror. (The most disturbing instance was the appearance, a few declined to explain why the bare possibility of Shearer's involvement in the multiple coincidences who seems at the same time to be operating in the service Is Shearer a private citizen unfairly sucked into the vortex of public scandal? If so, the vortex is awfully good at finding him. In published reports, Shearer is most often described as a journalist or a politics and culture, which addressed such motley topics as trucking the column dug up several embarrassing incidents of drunkenness in the past of John Tower, whose nomination to be secretary of defense was derailed by questions about his alcoholism and sexual irresponsibility. might infer that in helping to sink Tower, Shearer was already acting as the Knows Who Else matter, be accused (by Dick Morris, among others) of coordinating efforts to smear and intimidate those women. Shearer had administration would intervene on its behalf in a dispute over drilling rights while he admitted that he had accepted the tribe's retainer, has denied that have not been limited to domestic affairs. Much to the embarrassment of his vary as to what happened next, but it appears that Shearer was either duped by makes things happen. But he may just be a person who things happen to happen to, a guy with a penchant for pretending to be what others want to believe that Several errors in this piece as originally posted have been corrected. Click to read a letter to the editor criticizing the original version. isn't about which side is right. It's about which side is choosing the course of the conflict, and which side is imposing the consequences. And in that war consequences of our bombing seems to have been to unleash a bloodbath, where the first phase of the air campaign has only intensified the alleged ethnic "consequence" of the bombing. This is the opposite of how the United States the one that is making it worse. And what we were trying to do is to make sure that he pays the heaviest price for what he is doing." defensive, insisting day after day that it was not their bombing that sparked stopped demanding that he sign the peace plan and have started demanding merely that he "stop his repression." "We are going to continue the bombing until we on which side's will breaks first, which in turn depends on each side's the media portray their morale. While the Times editorializes on Page him escalation for escalation. Eventually, the consequences will become unbearable to one side or the other. It's a head game. War always is. from the old network economic model: "Our goal over time is to turn viewers disdain television, although please do, especially that Animal Medical pizza; it's not really good, but it's so conveniently available that we dully consume it instead of making the effort to go out for really good pizza or some truly magnificent water from, like, a solid gold tap. And yet, if you ask it's stripping naked and firing out the window at passing cars with that actress from that show, you know, the pretty one. So perhaps it's a little own part of a home shopping channel, is expanding its efforts to sell figuring out ways to drive sales of product through our broadcast platform is a key ingredient we see in the overall mix," said Rogers. "And that means one A new version of the annoying yet popular toy and a new presidential candidate from the awkward yet enduring political family are promises, "We're going to be laying out positions on all these issues." quicker and stay asleep until turned completely upside down. submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. away-- Field of Dreams didn't fill this particular soul, it functioned as Dreams would fill a book. In fact, they do fill a book-- Rocket of the mines (where his father was the superintendent) by throwing himself into heavens but on earthly means of getting off the ground: the mix of saltpeter and sugar that causes a rocket to soar without exploding, the shape that keeps it from spiraling into populated areas, the thickness of steel that prevents its nose cone from melting, the trigonometry that's employed to track its movie evokes that blend of thrill and terror that comes from mixing two chemicals together without being sure that an instant later you'll still be rough you up. The movie builds to a couple of climactic science fairs, but they're presented almost as afterthoughts, and in moments of tragedy one's malignant, subterranean caverns and the allure of space exploration has so much resonance that the story doesn't need the hard sell. It opens at one of the Cold War's cultural turning points: the appearance of the Soviet satellite "They could be dropping bombs from up there," says someone. "Don't know why they'd drop a bomb on this place," comes a voice of reason, "Be a waste of a Sputnik is the spark for Homer's impulse to build rockets, geek, but it's a measure of the movie's grace that after a couple of early gibes the four begin to work together with a breathlessness that leaves no room company property (the whole town is mining company property), the Rocket Boys trudge eight miles to a flat gravel plane, on which they build a block house deeply goofy gesture and totally consistent with its heroes' sense of they're working toward entering the state science fair and competing for college scholarships, but their true goal is simpler: making those rockets go petulant dervish. There are rockets that defiantly explode before they leave the pad and rockets that spitefully take fences and vegetation with them. There are rockets that spin around in an escalating panic before blowing up and rockets that somersault off their bases and make a beeline for the nearest population center. The centerpiece of the movie is a montage of disasters to the tune of "Ain't That a Shame," but it ain't a shame, really: It's an era when information was precious, when a kid could get excited about the appearance of a text called Principles of Guided Missile Design that hardly anyone knew existed. There was a connection, however small, between a thingamajig one could build in one's garage and the stuff that was heading for looking at the coal dust in the air made my lungs ache and an old cough come back. I won't spoil the coda by revealing it here, but it's the kind of coup that only movies can bring off and, watching it, I shed my first unashamed boy into abandoning his education and going into the mines, a perspective less tragically shortsighted than plain moronic, given the fact that miners are boy follow in his footsteps but to go beyond them, too, and to use his science to make people safer. The Rocket Boys weren't as out of sync with their culture lips specialty, gazing at the principal in wordless horror while her mouth Sky suggests that if it weren't for the mothers and the female teachers, malevolence of the corporate environment, it's on the verge of being really that's making Peter seethe in his cubicle, but the relentlessly over from a heart attack in the middle of giving him instructions on how to relax and follow his instincts, Peter emerges with an aura of serene indestructibility and a gonzo rebelliousness that makes him, paradoxically, more attractive to the faceless consultants whom his company has hired to Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness insults of modern society: copy machines that jam, drivers who cut them off in traffic. And you can't get away from it. As he has proven on King of the their uniforms. The sneak preview audience laughed gratefully at this, finding something liberating in Judge's depiction of a business world that laughed all the way through the Office Space preview, experiencing shocks of recognition big and small. But they still left disappointed. For a start, the actors' faces are so much less interesting than the mythic, long in television, and his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end. Judge leaves us the way his bosses leave his workers: smoldering in our cells, "We're not being motivated by what's to come, but a fear of being left out as the train is pulling away from the station, with some exotic continue to enjoy, you do not need to be a participant.' It sounds a lot less attempted distinction and excellence in any way, because the effect of his former exertions now serves only to make his insignificance more vexing to him. slave, not animated by inclination but goaded by fear. trade publishing, said it about electronic books. He and his colleagues have to deal with them, but they don't yet know what to think about them. (To find out royalty are writers entitled to? Because electronic publishing eliminates paper, printing, warehousing, and delivery, costs are lower, say writers, so publishers should take a smaller share of a book's price, and the writer's share should increase. Not so, say publishers, who insist they should continue to take a whopping chunk of the money for no particular reason. Oh, yes: headlines. Can you determine which is the real headline and which is the Lucky, and his insulin. Then she and the others simply walked to a nearby visited. Later, for the second time, votive candles sparked a fire which consumed a canopy tent, bouquets, scraps of poetry and stuffed bears." become fashionable for restaurants to have all their servers march out singing birthday greetings to customers. Am I the only person who finds this avoid them. (My wife likes the food at some of these places, so compromises must be made.) The noise makes conversation impossible, and I can't help but wonder if that's my meal being ignored in the kitchen during the song. Shouldn't servers be respectful of all customers? What can be done? she, too, finds the wait staff singing the birthday song rather hokey and believes that the only people who dislike it more than you and I are the "honorees." It is always embarrassing, but certainly not worth the boycott of a the times," when that he felt children should address adults in a more formal manner than using their first names. You may be correct that they may be out of touch with current (rude) customs of our society. In my day, children were taught respect for their elders, and one of the methods used was form of address. Today, the television and the mall do the job that once was the shootings, no graffiti on the walls, etc. I, for one, am glad that I was raised by parents who had a value system. I still get up when a woman enters the room, open a door for her, and offer my seat on a bus. Somehow I am happy to be too standing for women and holding doors, but must point out that calling adults by a first name, if they wish it, is a different issue. Please be assured that marriage, living in different states. Ten years ago she came out on a vacation to visit us for two weeks, and has continued to correspond during the holidays. My husband says he was ashamed of his lie and that they had promised never to tell me. Over the past years, I have asked him if there was anyone else, and he always lied. He said the reason for the continued correspondence was that if he stopped writing I might get suspicious. So, I wrote her and her husband and cannot get this out of my mind. I think I love him and want the marriage to go on, but other days I feel so used that I can't believe I am still with him. suspect him of other lies, but my views of reality are definitely things. First is that you must find the way that is right for you to feel good again. That old canard that "confession is good for the soul" usually only seems to work for the person confessing. Lover Boy's disclosure has clearly put snake's tail in a wagon rut. He has not only lied to you but also to the woman he cheated with. You, however, evened the score somewhat by writing to the woman and her husband. God only knows what's going on in their want to try someone else. Since you suspect other lies, you might want to have a trial separation. On the plus side, you say you love this man, and the affair you know about ended more than a decade ago. On the minus side, feeling you're never getting a straight story is a major impediment to the comfort one feels and your guide will most likely be a competent therapist, perhaps of the sympathy for what was a great example of how to live a life. I also have some areas where I get very uncomfortable with sympathy. I am the father of three and the other from cancer. Yes, I loved them deeply and still have a hole in my heart for them. The problem is when, in conversation, someone asks general questions, such as, "How many children do you have?" People are devastated if I tell them three, but I lost two. If I say one, I am bypassing an important part of my life. If I just say three, I am not giving a very truthful to these tragedies. It has been hard. I don't want to put people in an uncomfortable position. There is also a part of me that hurts, but I don't such as yourself who, having lived through what is said to be life's cruelest event, is trying to do the honest, philosophically correct, and thoughtful passing social encounter, with what you would call "a stranger," say one child. If you encounter someone with whom you feel rapport, you might say three, with a brief explanation, and allow that person to express sympathy. Let your history false by not informing people of the two children you lost. Let the decision about what to say, and to whom, come from your heart, the place where not in question." The same point was emphasized in an interview with nevertheless go to the United States "as soon as possible" to discuss with to be "too diplomatic" because the United States was guilty "almost of an act court that wasn't a Marine court would either have condemned the pilot of the homicidal plane or would have shifted the focus of the trial onto the responsibility of his superiors," he wrote. The justice "solemnly promised" by the United States after the tragedy had been denied, he added, with "the arrogant contempt that the military of the empire shows toward satellite an international community in which there would no longer be masters and fugitive from "another kind of fatwa, a typically Western one: condemnation to fame, photographs and interviews, television and awards ceremonies, juries and society; because he was, after all, the most famous and celebrated living author of the most important language of the century, the cinema." countries were threatening to renege on a treaty with the United States to regional trade group, said at the weekend that its members were reconsidering Dole. "Free trade has obvious benefits," it went on, "but the rules must take into account the needs of developing nations and the new world of multinational said it supported the view of the International Institute for Environment and Development that "trade disputes brought by governments that have received financial support from likely beneficiaries should be null and void." failure to make even a token hand over of weapons to allow a new Ulster coverage last week, her arrival was peremptorily reported, but interest will us who don't know whether to hit or hug, who gives herself in a heartbeat to she's here, and be thankful that she never took that swallow dive off the roof, Advise and Consent (Also Obstruct, Delay, and Stymie) general for civil rights, a nomination the Senate has refused to consider for particularly grim these days. There are different explanations for the various Republican senators failed for months to compromise on a slate of nominees; suggest a process that is astonishingly screwed up. The time it takes presidents to confirm nominees has soared inevitably slows confirmations: Republican senators are more skeptical of nominate candidates for critical executive branch and judicial openings. The confirmation process has become massively politicized. "Elections no longer losing party continues to fight through the appointments process." nominees is vanishing, too. Senators have increasingly deployed secret "holds" to delay confirmations, often for reasons having nothing to do with a nominee's qualifications. Helms, for example, held up numerous ambassadorial appointments Senate to find time to consider everyone. Cumbersome ethics rules have made simply accepting a nomination onerous: Health and Human Services Secretary disclosure forms. Nominees usually have to give up their lucrative law practices and businesses as they await confirmation, a sacrifice that leaves It was not always this way. Until the late '60s, the Senate was deferential to the (many fewer) presidential nominees. It did much more Supreme Court, which Republicans delayed to death, marked the first sign of grandstanding senators have freely challenged even obscure nominees. the appointments mess is more aesthetic than substantive. The Senate, after all, is apparently nearing a compromise on the sentencing commission, and the president will likely nominate seven new commissioners in the next few weeks. agrees that he will be confirmed. The administration will find a China envoy. months. If the Senate refuses to hold a confirmation hearing, he will continue exceptions: Most nominees are confirmed smoothly. And whether or not all the right jobs are filled with exactly the right people, the United States still manages to negotiate with China and the United Nations, the civil rights division still manages to file cases, and judges still manage to impose But the rising obstructionism does damage government. Presidents, who are elected to remake executive policy, find themselves hamstrung. Career civil servants act in place of unconfirmed presidential appointees. The career folks are unwilling and unable to impose the policy changes the president may want. The president often skirts the law by appointing "acting" officials who "act" for years (such as Lee), depriving the Senate of its constitutional right to approve appointments. The eternal shortage of judges means that some cases are adjudicated peremptorily. The the least offensive nominee rather than the most qualified in order to pacify the Senate. The endless obstacles to confirmation deter the best candidates: a job to its fourth or fifth choice because the top candidates don't want to appointments by a third or more, lessening the burden on the Senate and allowing the president to pick better candidates. They would eliminate senatorial holds. They would simplify background investigations and financial modest problem. Appointment and confirmation is a political process, and like any political process it will always be messy. But it doesn't have to be state government has decided to be the first in the country to offer financially assisted suicide as well. Last year the state agency in charge of determining Medicaid assistance for the poor included assisted suicide among So, how much does it cost to kill yourself, anyway? Phenobarbital D). It turns out to be quite hard to get a price quote for this service over the phone. Medical academics I talked to said you would probably more. But the two individuals for whom claims have been made so far cost the But here's the killer. Before expanding the definition of expanded medical benefits to cover more people but fewer ailments. A Health Services Commission was set up to consider all illnesses and the treatments to include this service under the category of "comfort care" for the terminally afflicted with illnesses that have not made the funding cut (particularly a appropriating whims of the legislature, while a free barbiturate consolation it would be unconscionable to deny poor people a right as fundamental as serious medical treatment. Anyone dying in a modern hospital will quickly cost more by staying alive than by exercising the right to die, dignity and all. The commission declined to estimate the cost impact of fatal "comfort care." It bumped me and my suffering off the list. But my second reaction would be that has taken the next logical step: bribing people to go early and save the system Those who attack it will have to come up with something better. W. Bush, anointed, refuses to campaign for president till summer arrives. Congress, terrified of Social Security, refuses to do anything at all. whose presidential campaign was written off just months ago, is surging, and Vice President Al Gore, the nominee presumptive, is in deep trouble. No matter many smaller papers, and all three newsweeklies have touted the viability of thoughtfulness, and a good heart, and Gore can be an erratic campaigner. But are witnessing one of the first fake battles of what the Progressive Policy period when voters are indifferent, and when journalists, Democratic candidates, and Republican troublemakers spin and position and jockey to write year, less than half what Gore raised, but more than enough to make him a man's senator. This was only reinforced by his celebrated reluctance to run for and he will only be perceived to be strong if everyone says he is. the president is in trouble, his approval ratings remain high, but Gore's numbers sag. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that the vast majority that he shares Gore's moderate, thoughtful, New Democrat politics but isn't Republican house members, Republican senators, the Republican National Committee, and Republican interest groups have been assaulting Gore for the past few months, trying to turn him into a figure of fun. They have ridiculed his "creating the Internet" comment, his claim that he and Tipper were the is rising and Gore is falling can become true if everyone keeps declaring it so. But what's more likely is that time and the natural course of campaigns enough to be a real challenge to Gore, he will be subject to the same withering few days later. But if his campaign really prospers and he has to explain what he believes, he'll have a hard time holding that coalition together. At the does well, he'll be battered with questions about his own aggressive fund The progression of the campaign will also rescue Gore from his Vice Presidential Malaise. The Democratic fretfulness about Gore's polls is premature: Vice presidents always poll terribly in the year before their kills Gore in poll questions about "leadership." Bush is the manly governor of Come fall and winter, surges and stumbles will really mean something. By then inevitable media backlash to his current rave notices; and the voters will beasts, criminals, villains, thugs, fascist legions, and hordes of murderers. don't expect you to believe me, but they're all thanked on that Dixie Chicks Official Enemies. The more these authorized villains are shot at in It is harder to rebuff a national enemies list when bombs are falling, particularly when those enemies are implicated in appalling deeds. It might, however, be possible to resist the grossest forms of jingoism. at human suffering from tilting toward vile stereotyping? One guideline: The Rather reaches for the adjectives, be careful out there. "There is absolutely no evidence of cancer in his body. We were, however, "I shudder at the idea they will leave this haven. They are trusting. They don't understand danger. They could end up inside the large intestine of "There's no scarring mark physically or mentally. Not like when we spank mayor of New York City for too long not to realize that people will be cynical about any good step that's made in the direction of decency. Idiots like that on interacting with the public. He seemed upset. It could be some kind of become so elastic in the last few years that it now extends to entertainments farcical haplessness. Somewhere in the middle comes my ideal black comedy, in which humans are base but their emotions have weight, and the human condition, while irremediable, is leavened by the artist's cheery sleight of hand. A great black comedy should be palatable but hard to digest, slipping easily down the gullet and then sticking in the gut. The form is currently represented by an now going to seed, she bathes Harry, controls the light in his room, and warns collect a debt for a mobster from the proprietor of a sex club, Harry finds himself bombarded by images of topless women and unable to keep from whaling on a man they came only to threaten. "I hope I killed him," he says, when pulled from the man's bloody, broken body. And then: "I hope I didn't kill him." Seasoned criminals love to exploit such youthful intensity, and Harry is soon money ("Having money and not flashing it is strictly for gentiles," they and then pays not to have sex with ("Do I seem normal with girls? Sexually?" he asks); and presenting him with a huge switchblade, which Harry is shortly expected to plunge into the heart of a man he has never met. stroboscopic flashes, held long enough to convey their garishness but so fleetingly that you might giggle at your own uncertainty: Did he really do what I think he did? I hesitate to use the word "offbeat," which has come beat, but here the surreal touches are sprung without overture, like frogs that just happen to be hopping across the screen. Harry is dogged by a phantom is meant to be zonked and zombielike, a Mummy Dearest, and this bedraggled ghost of a glamorous icon is startlingly potent. Those cheekbones seem to which might otherwise collapse. The director underlines the tension between her magisterial film critic as well as an exacting editor. Presented with a dunno, the performance is funky but also kinda severe so you kinda need both." "Choose one," he would repeat. Squirming, I would direct him to eliminate an Where adjectives are concerned, there's no substitute for tough love. here trying to choose one or another adjective for his newest script, The minds about the picture. I want to say it's subtle, but I also want to say it's lobby. The first section of the film dramatizes the apparent kidnapping and its agonizing aftermath. Then, after nine years in which Beth and her husband, Pat powerful all right but, given this kind of material, that isn't much of an affectlessness that signals something roiling underneath. The family's fake equilibrium creates a tension that's nearly unbearable, and when the front door swung open and that boy stood there it was all I could do to keep from jumping increasingly frustrating. The kid, we learn, was taken by a woman crazy with his real father. But how are we to take the evident inability of Beth and Pat even to address the subject of the boy's nine years with another couple or their bland expectation that he'll nestle himself into the family bosom as if he'd never left? Are they supposed to be so shallow, so uncurious, so climactic discussion between the boy and his stepfather that triggers the me, although here my reasons are entirely personal. As someone born to a mother and later reclaimed before my third birthday. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in psychiatric bills later, I can speak about this with limited objectivity; the point is that, although very young when taken from my primary the hellish trauma of separation more vividly than much of what happened to me last week. I risk boring you with my autobiography to buttress my contention that The Deep End of the Ocean is fundamentally bogus. I don't buy that later, have no recollection of the parents and siblings with whom he'd spent the first three, and that only the aroma of a cedar chest would rekindle faint ever have settled into life with his new family (especially a certifiably crazy surprising evolution, but they're not in the novel and they're certainly not in world where household appliances are connected to the Internet and each other. Your sprinkler will check with the weather service before it waters the lawn, your refrigerator will order more milk when your carton expires, and your computing tool but will be integrated with other smart devices. Time 's cover package on troubled teens includes a poll showing that bomb threats. A piece argues that smaller schools might be an antidote to the gargantuan high schools where adolescents anonymously drift into deep trouble trained to commit acts of sabotage such as cutting telephone wires, ruining gas more organized and energized about their evangelizing. cover story recounts the story of a black World War II hero Communist activity. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor two years straw poll. Underdog Republican presidential candidates are seizing it as their attributes both his psychologically probing cinematic style and his tumultuous cover package forecasts Al Gore's electoral strategy. One piece says the veep though this wiring is subsidized by a "universal service charge" on everyone's phone bill. Another article admits that Tipper Gore is a political asset but warns darkly of her agenda. She appears to be an apolitical soccer mom, but government intervention in the economy and does not trust Wall Street. encouraging "speculative excesses." Since higher interest rates take months to restrain economic expansion, postponing a hike is like waiting "to brake a runaway car until it is a few feet from the cliff's edge." (For a dissent, see note what the previous government did and do the opposite." First priorities: eliminate trial by jury for several crimes including theft and weapons possession. (The home secretary asserted that most defendants demand jury trials "for no good reason other than to delay proceedings.") run would harm Democrats whether she won or lost. She would "divert resources from other candidates, politicize their races in ways that don't play well beyond the Upper West Side, and become a rallying point for conservatives still health care. The expenditures are worth it because the care they fund is charges of inciting violence ("Why would I care about that?" one sniffs). convoluted draft than coherent novel. The radical surgery performed by his piece alleges that New York state's services for the mentally ill have overcrowded health care facilities, recently killed a woman by pushing her conceded, "I don't know the answer to this. Maybe it's inappropriate for me to Republicans discuss foreign affairs these days. No doctrine binds together policy will be hard enough. Winning it without a coherent message will be impossible. The Republican identity crisis is fourfold. see the spy scandal as an opportunity to revive Cold War rhetoric. They allude espionage and warned that it might precipitate another "arms race." threats are now diffuse rather than concentrated in one enemy. Appearing on the debate highlights the Republican dilemma. The original Strategic Defense Initiative was supposed to defend the United States against a massive nuclear which kind of threat China poses, they won't be able to agree which kind of nonmilitary nuclear technology, and killed a proposed ban on satellite sales to legislation to relax restrictions on exports of encryption technology, despite rights violations, espionage, and possible technology transfers suggest that this is not the appropriate time for China to enter" the World Trade a policy of appeasement," he declared this week. Many conservatives say engagement has led to nuclear proliferation, deterioration in human rights, and we stress our views on human rights. If we aren't engaged, we can't do that." something we don't like we ought to submit a thing to the Senate and get after of engagement by quoting the policy's Republican defenders. the spy case on ideology or corruption. Some want to paint Democrats as soft on technology transfer [and] all these campaign contributions that came out of Nor have conservatives figured out whether to blame citing objections to that policy "from Democrats and Republicans alike." will once again be drowned by charges of partisanship. Sure enough, this week into blaming Democrats for suppressing those findings, Cox shot him down: "It is not a Democratic party position, because Democrats and Republicans have world affairs has been aimless and inconsistent, assailing his China policy from all directions is hardly the way to make that point. The opposite of authority that it may "gamble away its standing in the democratic world in During the Cold War era, Western countries viewed asylum as a symbolic triumph over the Soviet empire, but refugees displaced by recent ethnic conflicts are lot, a man who just released a penetrating movie about war and moral decay, is now negotiating a deal to direct costume dramas and love stories for millennium issues picks "The Best Ideas, Stories and Inventions" of the past suggests that Vice President Al Gore may eventually pay the strategy so vehemently that he'll suffer if the president does send ground troops. Time prints a map of the world's ethnic and civil conflicts, Army have been trafficking in drugs to fund weapon purchases. Time 's cover story on the amateur genealogy trend sweeping the believe that ancestors can be saved through posthumous baptism and have features the findings of a psychologist who claims he can The piece includes a handy quiz for couples who want to diagnose their viability. (Yes or no: "My partner generally likes my personality.") are no traffic jams (because so many people have fled), and the crime rate has cadre of savvy East Coast friends. He didn't know any of them when sentenced, but he cultivated epistolary friendships from his prison cell with reporters, nastiness inside upscale restaurant kitchens: old fish, grimy meat, and rivers make Dick Morris the national security adviser and stop the charade?") expression of the same impulse that leads to "separate academic departments for dictator. This cannot be allowed. To lose would be to validate and entrench than posturing. The security of the West and the central prop of the western the lives of the thousands of civilians whose condition is the explicit reason both in terms of acting on the ground militarily and of relieving the refugee being humiliated" and suggested that the only opportunity for success is the use of ground troops. "The only way to ensure victory is for there to be violation of what they regard as their heartland. It will be a form of peace and justice, but it will be fragile. The West must accept that it is going to terrified kids. But have you spared a thought as to where they'll end up? Make no mistake, they're headed here. Soon you won't be able to move for your direction. Of course, the majority have been through a hell we can only found if the two sides will agree to implement the one and only model that can China respects human rights, "we do not think that we can possibly disregard the sovereignty of a country in the world. And if military interventionism is to be allowed in all the internal matters like a question of human rights of that China expects the same theory of nonintervention to apply to the situation "At a time when the international scene offers us too many horrific images of the intolerance and bullying that can govern relations between regions and when applied with good will, can almost always permit the accommodation of guaranteeing, for instance, that when federal, provincial and territorial leaders meet, there will always be someone speaking for an aboriginal majority somewhere in the country." Writing in the conservative Pediatrics is meant to make it happen even less. What? he announced on the radio that if it were legal to do it again he would. Opponents say this desire indicates "a strange psychological state." Who wants involved actions that, while amusing and cruel, are not illegal but merely unlikely (Most men would be too scared to lift it while the monkey was in the room.), unappetizing (With a human femur? Not in my copy of Joy of to be removed from the mailing list. This is one of the ways spammers verify that the address is live and may result in even more spam." reversed himself, announcing that he'd retire at the conclusion of his you, darling, in my fashion, but sometimes a girl needs to sow some wild "Pretend to be your favorite dictator or television thousands of pages of drafts and notes for the book he had been working on for wanted the legendary second novel they were sure had to be buried in the papers the publication of anything that went beyond the author's known intentions. Because the manuscript was nowhere near to being a coherent, finished work and had to choose between disappointing the amateurs and infuriating the quoted in the article complain that sections of the novel published as excerpts any of the alternative conceptions of the work that are bound to emerge. framework at all. It's merely a necessary starting point for an inquiry into what were apparently intended to be three parts. The story begins in unfolds outward in many directions at once, jumping from the hospital bed to Emancipation Proclamation. Amid the festivities, a crazed white woman appeared claiming to be Bliss' mother. After this incident, Bliss became obsessed with his lost mother and eventually ran away from home. We get woozy glimpses of straightforward narrative but instead accumulates through murky fragments. The In place of a single narrator, there are at least three: The authorial voice; child Bliss, in dreams, in remembered conversations, and in convoluted memories characteristic of the book in both its lyricism and its opacity. We only find a false accusation of rape, a lynching, and some amateur obstetrics). This his first novel but chose to do something more difficult and complex, both seem largely purposeful, not accidents of omission by author or editor. If whole. It's meant to be up to the reader to assemble the shards into a vase. For this reason, one doesn't feel cheated by not having all the pieces. In a curious way, the unfinished state of the novel complements the inherent and intentional incompleteness of the underlying story. glances in the various pieces he never assembled into a single structure. For up the reality that white Southern culture is blacker than meets the eye. knowledge of the characters. Crucial information is delayed and denied, which work. He had a decade of writing his novel behind him and almost three more second novel that would meet the standard of Invisible Man while being an entirely different kind of book. This strenuous ambition was confounded by a himself as a writer. As he puts it, "my standards were impossibly high." merely from calling it quits. Failing to finish doesn't mean he failed. Indeed, a great, unfinished work can be more fascinating than a finished one because of truly interactive novel, in which readers are not an audience but collaborators, trying to pull together strands and elements of a story that has separate texts may blur, but the mythic force of the buried story and the Republicans have dallied with social conservatism, libertarianism, and not surprising that, at this moment of low ebb, Republicans are again evoking The tax cut notion enthralls the party's top echelon, tax cut as the centerpiece of their legislative plan until they abandoned the percent. (Even as I write this, a letter from the Heritage Foundation has been commission concluded that the United States was increasingly vulnerable to missile strikes by rogue states. The enthusiasm has mushroomed since North too, are making missile defense a campaign priority. The Republican National were Republican triumphs. They lowered marginal rates from ludicrously high levels to more reasonable ones, and they spurred the economic expansion of the '80s (as well as the deficits of the '80s). Star Wars helped win the Cold War, fundamentalism is not ideology. It is faith: If he believed it, it must be so. But the problem with ides fixes is that they are fixed. Tax cuts Republicans are refurbishing bygone notions for an age that doesn't want them. missile shield a wise investment in the battle against rogues. Terrorists are missile. Better to spend the billions on intelligence and nonproliferation. with a shrug. Democrats have successfully (and accurately) painted the targeted, interest group tax cuts (child care, senior care, health care) offset by targeted tax increases (tobacco). Republicans would spend much of the Security or debt repayment. Polls have found that when it comes to taxes, and the Democrats have won the tax issue so completely that congressional are pushing marriage penalty tax relief. (The presidential candidates, of enormous proposed increase in military spending.) The missile defense money has pulled the rug out from under Republicans, leaving them with the flimsiest of criticisms. The president has delayed the decision on whether to actually national missile defenses.) Republicans have been reduced to insisting that crime, etc. Taxes and missile defense were among the few issues he hadn't He's the one who has set aside billions for a missile defense that won't but in fact there are. In a former life I used to interrogate politicians on television, and in six years there was never a subject on which they were An easy answer, for a politician, is one that assures you will never be proved wrong. Or at least that if you seem to have been wrong, another easy answer will be available to explain why you weren't. "There are no easy answers" is away with it, but you can also enhance your reputation for being "thoughtful" (high praise that in the culture of politics means indecisive in a classy way, rather than kindly or considerate of others or anything like that). Sometimes, though, you have to do better, and this is when easy answers become hard War and peace issues are the worst. A famous joke among academics is that scholarly disputes are especially passionate because the stakes are so low. By contrast, when the stakes are as high as they can get, there is a special need for elected officials to avoid having a forthright means doing nothing, as the world's only superpower, while a thug government making either choice will leave you morally implicated in some dead bodies on the strict understanding that we will be allowed to forget all about these LOCATION], we should do so with the resources necessary to get the job done. bombs' or whatever is on the menu] just aren't enough. It is immoral to put from the beginning rather than escalate yourself into a quagmire. Or don't go in at all. Finish quickly before the public loses patience (or ideally, as in this is a great way to sound tough and sophisticated without actually committing yourself. Since any actual military engagement is not going to involve every last wing nut in the Pentagon's "miscellaneous screws" jar, you are well positioned to say "I told you so" if things go badly. Yet you never accuse you of wimping out if the military action doesn't take place: Hey, you fashionable term during the Gulf War. It really sounds like you know what you're talking about. And what does it mean? As I understand it, an exit and prompt victory. It merely demands a certain and prompt conclusion to the exercise that is acceptable to the United States. When invoking this concern, conclusion short of victory a guy like you, who flings around terms like "exit strategy," would find minimally satisfactory. And no military action (except for actual movies) can be fully scripted in advance. So you're golden. If things go wrong: "Ted, I pleaded with the president to make sure we had an exit strategy." And if the action goes well or disaster occurs because we didn't stake. The commander in chief has made a commitment on behalf of the United States, and the United States must honor that commitment." be patriotic and hawkish. And if things go well, you were behind the commander in chief all the way. But if things go badly, it is the president's fault for making the commitment. Tragically, you had no choice but to support him once the commitment was made, but of course making it was irresponsible folly. Please note that, like a reheated stew, this dodge works even better after a say you're against it, you say you're "not persuaded" to be for it. Not only do you evade the tough choice, you also evade responsibility for your decision. It's the president's fault, even if he's right, because he didn't persuade undecided and wanting ever more information is another great way to be designated as "thoughtful." And with a bit of skill and a bit of luck, you can keep taking your own temperature until it doesn't matter any more. Meanwhile, right thing, and the president hasn't made the case." Not only is whatever happens not your fault (unless it's good), it's not even the public's fault. 5."I don't think we should begin bombing unless and until to kill a lot more people? Let's wait and see if he does it! And why must we difference and save half of them." As a bonus, Nickles retains a valuable fudge factor in the question of what qualifies as "a very significant massacre." Depending on what happens, Nickles is in a position to accuse the president of 6."What's happening in [WHEREVER] is a tragedy and an outrage, Wolf. Intervention to stop the bloodshed is absolutely essential. But dictates military action, while opposing the use of the only military power you yourself bear responsibility for. I once interviewed an especially moronic senator, since defeated, who declared that some worthy military action was "a job for the United Nations." I asked him why other countries should risk their soldiers' lives if the United States wouldn't, and he replied, "I didn't say 'other nations,' I said the United Nations." When it was pointed out to been known to happen) a stuffy editorial saying that a corrupt dictator in some Third World country should resign. Of course he should. And the sun should affect these matters. When an answer moves beyond difficult to completely tough sale. "Most producers eyes would glaze over as soon as I said the words, That got your attention. Now, back to the tariff implications of EMU wins Royal Anagram contest for her positively bitchy entry: 'Queen wears rags read the newspaper. Salient details are always concealed, key decisions are always made in private, and the ink gets all over your hands. Review the impressively false sense of the great events of the day. So why persist in newspaper reading? For one thing, it lets you participate in the ongoing conversation that is a nation's culture. One doesn't wish to stand silently by in any meaningful sense, good.) For another thing, the news provides a myth system for a secular age, giving us figures of good and evil, around whom we beside the point. One buys them for other reasons: for powerful photographs, now often in color, of underwear models; for a chance encounter with an was obliged to take him back to the shop. So I have only one now, called submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. similar hype a couple of years ago about Java, which never did floss my teeth. also different because it is based on the founding principles and software of Source," by which they mean that any user should be able to view and change the underlying code, be it for the operating system or for applications. free software are at the very foundation of creating a "cooperative society." I am a wee bit skeptical. I enjoy getting paid to write software, and I suspect Software Foundation defines "free" as a matter of liberty, not of price. Many But software development religions aside, what is an fundamental operation of your computer: things like how to read documents from a disk and send them to a printer. As you may have heard, the demarcation of what is and isn't "in the operating system" can be a touchy question. Some companies maintain that an operating system contains any goddamn thing they want to put in it, thank you very much. Other folks say that an operating system is just the core functionality (or in computer parlance, the kernel) whistles, or windows. You just see some lines of text and then a blinking cursor. So are we just back to DOS? Well, no: You can add a graphical interface application software for it. But that's because so few people use it. It To begin my experiment I had to get a machine running software may be free, but there's big money in books on how to use it. I made a repartitioned its hard drive into two parts. "Repartitioned" is a fancy way of saying "divided." Thus, instead of one big hard drive I now have two little do this (because it knows you're going to want to keep running Windows too). It did involve some complicated thinking about disk cylinders, but it worked. tried to get it to load directly from the CD that came with the book. Then I acknowledge the existence of the CD drive. Finally, I copied the entire CD onto my hard drive and started the install process. I had to create two more floppy those keeping track I now have three partitions on my hard drive). I had to format both drives. I then had to remember where on my hard drive I had put the mouse and graphics card. It configured both relatively painlessly. It wasn't complete plug and pray. I still had to select my items from lists, and it was good that I generally knew what types of hardware I was running, but it worked. To complete the setup, I got the browser configured and read browsing capabilities and a word processor. I also configured and set up the it. That makes it what techies call "robust," meaning resistant to breaking restart your system. On my machine I can claim only a week of running without and multitasking model, meaning that one errant program can't bring the whole machine. For a completely unscientific example, there was little difference in alternative to Windows, and thus it allows you to vote with your PC. If you through your computing life, if you are willing to ignore some rough edges here and there. For instance, you won't have much trouble importing data from word processing and spreadsheet files. But if you crave a huge variety of software Some experts predict that the dawning of the Web means that your operating don't even know it, because many of the Web sites you frequent to check the people upgrade and keep old code running? Perhaps the greatest technological feature that Windows possesses is that it can handle programs as old as the community, as equally creative innovators disagree on the operating system's spend a surprising fraction of their resources testing software, not writing it. In my experience, this is the ultimate problem with Open Source development: not enough formal engaged testing. Developers want to write code, they don't want to solve all the niggling little problems that users come up But if the thought of a free operating system is so characterized as the most serious institutional crisis in the 42-year history fraud, corruption, and cronyism found evidence of incompetence, mismanagement, and loss of political control. Although one commissioner, former French Prime evasive answers" and claimed the resignations were needed because the commission "suffers from a democracy deficit and therefore a lack of in fact, represent a further avoidance of individual responsibility, and worried about the possible "renomination" of the entire commission (an idea as before, with much the same discredited cast. That would be an outrage." said the institution had to seize this opportunity to process and, most of all, rediscover the inspiration and drive it has lost. This might even mean increasing its funding and staffing levels." The the expansion of its responsibilities as it "found itself taking on ever more grandiose tasks, largely on the demand of member states, with progressively more limited resources. Yesterday's report shows they did not know how to possible, while seven other countries would prefer him to remain as a queued to withdraw their funds and striking taxi drivers and bus operators that the capital was in a state of paralysis with schools closed and provisions failure to discuss possible solutions to the crisis. "There has to be an opening and communication on the part of government. If it wants to achieve a national accord, it's logical that it must display an openness to bound to follow in the footsteps of the 'political donations' and 'satellite in part on the financial security provided by a chain of successful computer stores affiliated with the group. The paper claims that the stores' prosperity stems from their cheap prices, which are possible because believers work for training. Their salaries are therefore zero." A "public security investigator" categorize you, classify you, and sort you into a group that explains your temperament, your career choices, the strength of your immune system, and your admittedly random guide to four popular methods designed to explain who you really are. I deliberately picked systems that purport to pinpoint something intrinsic in our natures. I judged the ease of use and applicability of each system, and since all of them illustrate their points with the lives of famous people, I also gauged how successfully each one Would your friends and family say you are more like: defensive, incipient fascist terrorist. If you're a b), you are certainly a familial struggle among siblings for parental attention accounts for everything universe, firstborns are dictatorial types who just don't get it, but they're thinks his findings should be applied to selecting corporate leaders. In a theory to account for those rare firstborn revolutionaries. "Whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict firstborns." This is a little like saying all men prefer dogs and all women prefer cats. So a man with a cat is either an honorary woman, or the cat is an You already know your own status and it's easy to ask others, "Do you have bile, phlegm, and yellow bile. This notion lives on in our language today. We all know people who are essentially hotblooded, or melancholy (which literally means "black bile"), or phlegmatic, or who view the world with a jaundiced eye. members of the state, redefined the four humors in social terms: as artisans, that way, and you can find out which one you are by taking the temperament site. Sample questions: When the phone rings do you: a) hurry to get it first? or b) hope someone else will answer? Do you find visionaries and theorists: a) somewhat annoying? or b) rather fascinating? around in your excretions in order to determine your personality. His criteria Probing (P) [Probing might better be defined as looking for alternatives] writes: "A rough draft is all they need to feel confident and ready to proceed recommend taking the Temperament Sorter II and ignoring the Character Sorter, which I found confusing and not particularly accurate. feel I now understand better why I keep acting that way. It's also given me the sly sense that I know why other people are acting their way. Of course, that's one percent of the population, which is too bad, considering their usefulness intelligence was like the Soviet Union: It was large, permanent, and unified. "single, general capacity" that can be measured by taking a test. He believes an intelligence is the ability to "solve problems or create products" in a way advantage to us, and that there is biological evidence for it. That is, an intelligence can be destroyed due to brain injury, which could be called the one type of intelligence, it has no bearing on whether you'll be skilled at another. Instead of burdening people with eight ways to be inadequate instead of one, multiple intelligence advocates says the theory liberates people to see it in action in people who know every kind of dinosaur, or sneaker, or automobile. He is also considering adding existential intelligence, which, he says, refers to the inclination to ask: "Who are we? Where do we come from? are skilled at the use of the senses of taste and smell, I lobbied him to add for my own area of brilliance: procrastination intelligence. the classroom, since he believes schools are designed by people excelling in those intelligences. He also believes that while our propensity toward certain types of intelligence is inborn, our abilities are not fixed. Understanding our "I enjoy entertaining myself or others with tongue twisters, nonsense rhymes, or puns" and "I find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time." The other multiple intelligence sites, and sells multiple intelligence testing multiple intelligences probably has most value for schoolchildren or people who seller that asserted that our health, diet, and even our personality are determined by our blood type? He would probably get to work on The Bile also choose mates with "compatible" blood types and their corporations assemble save us from the corporate bloodletting fad. Until now. nutritional dictates that evolution laid down. He says Type O is the most creative of the blood types. Finally, a modern quirk, is the rare AB, people who are somewhat confused, edgy, sensitive, yet charismatic. According to and B occur in chimpanzees. Nor is it likely that humans went from being of their calories come from vegetable matter, because bagging game is difficult. "People who are able to eat the most meat are agriculturists," says practice says, "It's not a productive way for me to spend my time debating with people who have a different belief system. We try to help sick people get know your blood type, it is easy. If you don't, march down to the Red Cross, following any diet that encourages me to eat a lot of snails. followed his plan, and "lost an astounding amount of weight." The White House persuaded the Senate, but not the House, to insert a clause saying the system won't be deployed until it's "technologically possible," government spin: Bombing will be harder than we thought, so first let's try candidacy on the Internet. He portrayed the new medium as a symbol of his centralized government programs such as Social Security. Old platform: groups. Old spin on his experience: He's not a politician. New spin: He can win presented himself as the voice of practicality, saying, "My idea is you don't says now that he's been fired as an airline clerk, he "will pursue an acting "remorseful" and resigned with "dignity." The cautious spin: Black churches are losing their tolerance for leaders who exploit them. The pessimistic spin, from fallible, so structural reforms are needed to make them more accountable. stand and confessed to getting rid of the victim's body but asserted that in choosing his sentence. The jury chose death, and the judge agreed, calling ruthlessness, and contempt. Headline and caption writers alluded to the irony himself for tournaments and achieve his dream. The sunny spin: Anyone can succeed with talent and hard work. The cynical spin: Anyone can succeed if he president and joined him on the campaign trail. Previously, pundits had Gore's attempt to make suburban traffic jams a presidential campaign issue is frivolous; and that Gore shot himself in the foot last week by claiming to have punches in Lewis' favor and the widespread perception of spectators that Lewis be able to raise enough money to pay the exorbitant sums the boxers are (just a part of the whole) and the United Kingdom, and are constantly sending she was in the bathroom when other people learned these things in grade one who would be on the receiving end of your "pestering," by all means offer lesson one with actual value. If, however, you find yourself having to tell the regarding forms of address. I think your first instinct, that "children should address adults in the manner in which the adults ask to be addressed," respect for their preferences, but I also don't have to choose to whom to cater in mixed situations. It is one of those rare cases in which I can please everyone. Best of all, though, I avoid the hubris of pushing my ideas of appropriate formality on others, even those who agree with me. vote of confidence, and doubly so because she was taken to task by some readers have to give the future bride a gift for every shower given? entertaining for them that it would seem to be constantly "raining" luncheons giving shower presents, unless they simply feel they'd like to. Or a token gift this: "Those who attended a shower for the bride before she was married the first time should not be invited to a second shower unless they are very close relatives or very dear friends who would want to be present." while we were gone, and they were doing the cat thing for us. It was not a wine some other way). But they took it anyway, drank it, and told us about it as soon as we returned. It was not, in fact, a special or expensive bottle of wine but, not to belabor the point, they didn't know that. They also didn't replace it in a timely fashion. When we let them know we weren't happy with the whole thing, they were offended and have since completely severed the this from someone's home while you're doing them a favor? If it had been a Bud or two from the fridge we wouldn't have given it a second thought. But a bottle replace it. This suggests they view things differently than you two, and their idea of correct behavior is different from yours. There is a chance that, by their lights, they assumed that had you been home you would have "lent" them behavior. It could be, though, that they just didn't know any better. Should you feel generous and lonesome for the friendship, you might make the first move and say you wish to let bygones be bygones because the relationship was bespeaks their embarrassment at having made a social misstep and perhaps anger it up if you wish the whole thing had never happened. And she is certain days, feet do get their due. Ask any girl: Shoes matter as much as hairstyle in all walks of life, and infinitely more than gloves and hats, despite being so near the ground. Buying shoes demands sizable chunks of time and money, and the eventual decision generates more existential agony about their looks than about their fit. Pain in the feet may be negotiable, pain in the image never. Passion or hatred can be ignited by one glance in a shoe store window. If the lust of a shopper's eye is slaked by actual purchase, her willing feet accept the challenge, her active spirit expands. The other night, I looked across a restaurant at a sexy young woman who appeared to be limping. She wasn't, though, not at all, really. She was just wearing 5-inch spike heel, 2-inch the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City is called "Shoes: A Lexicon of Style." It focuses on the amazing range of design in the look, divided into categories for maximum impact. Drama is increased by the no interruptions, no pauses for breath. You move along in one direction, mesmerized by a single great sweep of shoes arranged in pairs on three rising tiers under vivid lights. Emotional tension mounts, laughter and wonder alternate with lust and disgust, no relief is offered, from the first stiletto Apart from a few historic examples, such as some satin three decades, even from the last three years. This show indicates that only in the last third of this century have designers really hit their stride with varieties of shoe material, shoe shape, shoe trim, and shoe attachment. invisible adhesive pads to hold each shoe against the wearer's bare sole. These shoes would look as if they had grown there, by some potent fashion the effect is that of a perfect cloven hoof. I once saw these being worn in Suggestive shoe artifice comes in many varieties. One at the nethermost point of the body. Opposed to that is the lethal weapon style, which usually involves a fierce high heel, often skinny and slanted in that run to grim metallic buckles or very toothy zippers. Even fiercer is a the foot and climb up around the calf. This sandal seems to attack the wearer's tender skin and the viewer's horrified eye together, until we learn from the label that it's really all made of soft rubber and must feel deliciously engaged in a tense visual dialogue with her shoe, demonstrating its own shape and flexibility against the shoe's claims, displaying its own erotic capacities in tandem with those of the suggestive object. Here we see how high heels can thick as beams; straps can be suave ribbons or stiff manacles. Shapes are mostly variants of the mule and the pump, the oxford and the moccasin, the boot and the sandal, the muffin and the hot dog. Decoration can be applied as studded rhinestones, layered feathers, rows of silk rosebuds, festoons of fur and fabric, rubber and vinyl, metal and wood, paper and string, maybe meat tool, often with an ivory handle. Now we're quite willing to button a shirt or At the end, following these ranks of erotic, dangerous, comic, elegant, or perversely masculine female footgear, comes the "Sneaker Chic" section. Now we enter the huge athletic universe of canvas and rubber, irrelevant, the erotic pull comes only from the thing itself. In this world, the watchwords are stability, traction, and support. But no one is fooled: The look is the true issue. So potent is the element of style in active sport shoes that great fashion designers have gone for it, producing hybrids such as volatile in the sport shoe world. Hip insider models can die in a few months, if the mainstream adopts them, and be quickly replaced by new cult favorites. Much urban chic thus dwells in beautifully engineered shoes built for strain but worn by people who would never dream of putting them to the test. Beau of such delicate perversity. Only style is the true test. Utility is really of no interest, but its presence is essential. It governs the beauty of the Since that's the point, the foot retreats from the visual game, and the enveloping shoe leads its own bright life. As we move along the showcase, these shoes begin more and more to resemble pairs of small sports cars and to suggest similar methods of marketing and design. Here we find the d brand names, the poetic model names, the features invented for their of keen insights and dazzling supplementary photos showing many of the shoes at work. Book and show together will have you rushing out shopping yet again. said, "You have to think in terms of corporate memories. There is probably no one around who knows anything about this stuff." What stuff does Ford need help broke the law, lacked ethics and professionalism, and embraced a code of it's now broadcast on Fox. It's a different sort of coverage from the days when Peter Puck appeared between periods to explain the game to us unsophisticated delivered by a public inquiry last month and will undertake sweeping reforms, The investigative commission headed by former Chief wipe out something so many people are in favor of. Just like with said he was disappointed too. You need the noise and the smell. It's as very often. After lunch, I launch myself into a low Earth orbit to battle giant almost send a beam into the system, go for a cup of coffee and return in time to see the light come out. We can also see Jay Leno making up gags about the announce that it will no longer include a free toy in every pack of fine tobacco products can be comfortably smoked through a tracheotomy distract from woe, and require playing with matches. Cigarettes promote intimacy: What could be sexier than sharing a smoke, passing that small fire from hand to hand? Cigarettes impose form on your day; they are a means of demarcation: You smoke one after something and before something else. And they hideous respiratory illness and coughing away my life in a painful and habit as a delight of old age; my first Social Security check will just about cover the cost of a carton. Smoking will offer a reliable indoor pleasure that I can enjoy seated, much to be desired in my decrepitude. And malignancy develops slowly. With a little luck, by the time I contract a fatal disease, would produce a brand it can market to old folks. Call it Golden One Hundreds. submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. war remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: They can't win the debate over the war as long as critics are allowed to rig it with the have made by beginning a ground force buildup (which takes considerable time) a unwittingly produced one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the putting them in a position where they're no longer able to do anything but to it thought was a military convoy and instead hits a caravan of civilian Today's media report news instantaneously and expect it to be made instantaneously as well. In less than two weeks, their verdict on the bombing media conclude that it never will. Congressional Republicans have decided it's plan, the bombing will become more severe each week. "gradual escalation" never works and that "bombing" can't break an enemy's will. The trick in invoking such analogies is to ignore the differences: that superpower is willing to prop up the targeted country; and that today's air power and surveillance are vastly more precise than the "bombing" technology timely reminder of the mendacity that drenches his presidency, including his scientific philosophers invented a strict separation between talking about the way the world is and talking about the way it ought to be. Today's media, following this premise, separate "editorial" from "news" judgments. The only standard by which "news" organizations feel comfortable evaluating a policy is continue. What success can you point to that any of your strategy has worked?" must do, that atrocities are a challenge rather than a verdict, and that sworn off ground troops. They deride these as "political decisions" and mock ground troops and therefore we shouldn't do what is necessary to win this war, what is essentially an international policing consortium. This is a political as well as military project. It entails compromising with allies who are more cautious about applying force and authorizing targets. Otherwise, the United States would have to police the world alone, which is unsustainable politically (thanks in part to vociferous opposition from many of these same critics), not should be "What is the best way to help these people and save these lives? Not how we can bomb another oil plant or oil refinery." Minutes later, host Bob and asking "whether what we are doing is doing any good." Conservatives used to defend this concept (which they called "deterrence") when administer to the current troublemaker fails to stop him, the theory goes, at least it will make the next troublemaker think twice. pundits' verdict is in: The war is "doomed" and "already lost." On Late conflict wears on. "Time is not on our side," warned former National Security others. They call it a "moral authority" and "public relations" problem, asking "that you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief." inspire" great "loyalty," adding, "He may have a conflict of interest if he sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the way, journalists destroy what's left of his moral authority. "lumbering and clumsy" alliance, incapable of "managing such brush fires as alliance in history on bright new academic ideas cooked up far from the credibility is too precious to be risked in war, you can understand their militarized regime can stand up to a global blockade [and] the opprobrium of its aggression, the message to every other potential aggressor and victim will of this category, which includes other Democratic legislators who opposed the could provoke conflict with the Soviets and tended to buttress thuggish ends: The United States now can be the world's policeman, so it Liberal Humanitarian pantheon belongs to New York Times columnist share most of the concerns of the Liberal Humanitarians but are particularly hawkish about helping groups traditionally shunned by the West, notably intellectual leader of the Credibility Fanatics. They are conservatives who interest because they "were at the heart of two world wars." Hence the United believing the United States should intervene promiscuously to reverse communism believe the United States shouldn't intervene militarily unless national itself in civil wars. We leave sovereign nations alone. Third, and more they are Cold War burnouts. They were ferocious Cold Warriors, but they favored military action only to defeat the communist menace, not for any greater moral purpose. Now that there is no menace, they have withdrawn into their shells. an undercurrent. No one has explicitly adopted this position: The closest there Army are morally equivalent in their brutishness. Just as the imperial, moralistic vision when the Cold War ended. They don't believe still strike boldly against authoritarian oppressors. The Conservative Moralists are less concerned with the national interest than with what's right. has written extensively against the war. A recent cover story argued that the corporate interests. It's reassuring to know that some things, indeed, never bombing "misjudged, miscalculated, disastrous," and conservative historian capable of intervening [in this conflict], we are morally obligated to do so." the Financial Times that although he would never have fought with the emphasis on public service in the early '90s. Who could object to such offers an internship of its own: Participating students earn their community student who enrolled in a class called "Women in Literature" was dismayed to discover that the class addressed gay and lesbian issues. As a result, the need to know in advance what it is they're paying for." Some proponents of such points out, "that might increase enrollment in some classes" with particularly between denying the value of Holocaust scholarship and denying the Holocaust itself? One might think so. But when Commentary Senior obscurity of contemporary Holocaust scholarship in Commentary and in the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the against a detractor, but engaging in behavior that itself undermines the cause in shorthand as the "fall of the Berlin Wall." But should we refer instead to dissidents, Communists, and priests to make the case. Most of the conference conference, they defended their activities against numerous critics: Solidarity leaders denied they made too many compromises; priests last Communist Party prime minister, "we were helpless before that huge force." that the university was paying to put former Communist leaders up in fine who will study the literature and culture of perfume. Meanwhile, the New York Public Library's brand new Center for Scholars and Writers unveiled its first class of venerable library. Chosen under the auspices of the center's director, has dropped three star runners from the track team for the wrongful use of allows the athletes to regain their eligibility by reimbursing the school, feeling here that we just say it's free speech and go the other way. The institution has the obligation to speak out forcefully against speech that is scientific blessing. In a foreword to Duke's latest book, a 700-page autobiography judged by hate group watchers to campaigns, students are mobilizing in the name of labor on college campuses. On labor issues ranging from graduate student unionization, academic stipends, and Employees and Students Organization, which is fighting for recognition from Employment Relations Board has ruled in favor of allowing union elections at forced to reconsider its ban on admitting homosexual students. According to a prohibitions on homosexual acts by men, the Conservative Committee on Law and Standards declared a ban on gays within the rabbinate. A backlash against sexual orientation will not be a factor in limiting their options in furthering was suspended for all of two months. His right to drive his car for noncommercial purposes was unaffected. Even this wrist slap only happened after it came out that Stokes had at least nine moving violations since because he broke the law while stone cold sober. Had Stokes been cited even months. A second offense would have cost him a year's driving, and a third Why the difference? Alcohol is the leading cause of traffic fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety percent of all fatalities on the road. But speed comes in a very respectable rank as one notch above child molesters in the popular mind. But attitudes about driving while intoxicated were not always so negative. Twenty years ago, it was still widely accepted as harmless high jinks. Only in the 1980s, thanks the vast toll of drunks on the road. As a result, we've stiffened penalties, When it comes to speed, though, the attitude is: Party on! (first imposed during the 1970s energy crisis), letting states set the maximum wherever they pleased. Radar detectors, whose sole purpose is to help motorists exception.) How long would legislators tolerate the sale of a device to foil a for Highway Safety reports that after the repeal of 55-mph speed limits, raised. More people driving faster means more slaughter on the roads. But the bloodshed by speeders doesn't evoke the same emotional revulsion as the Why not? One explanation is that most people don't ever drive while intoxicated, while most do exceed the speed limit from time to time. Any movement for social reform is more effective if it pillories a small risky as excessive drink. They think it is possible for an experienced and competent driver (such as themselves) to go fast without hurting anyone. This is, in fact, possible. It is also possible to drive drunk without causing an accident. Every night the vast majority of drunken drivers get home safely. But we don't accept that as a defense. We understand that however able the driver, the risk of this type of behavior is serious and intolerable. We treat the culprits as potential killers who need to be restrained from endangering the come to grips with simple reality. Car magazines and auto commercials continue and injuring thousands more. If we were to crack down on speeding as vigorously supposed to be a party but has turned into a grim strategy meeting, thanks to spin: They intend to launch a ground war and are just using the "contingency plan" shtick as cover. The completely cynical spin: It really is just a contingency plan, showing once again how gutless and unrealistic they are. bomb and other explosives planted by the two killers, investigators think they had accomplices. Meanwhile, several bomb threats and trench coat pranks at schools in Colorado and elsewhere over the last two days are being treated as copycat incidents. Editorialists and politicians continued to debate whether to for an analysis of the wave of PR opportunism that followed a similar slaughter people this century. The previous world consensus was that the samples would be destroyed this year to make sure smallpox never comes back. The new thinking is that rogue states may already have obtained samples of the virus for developing develop a new vaccine and to test drugs against the virus. The political question is what happens if the rest of the world wants the virus destroyed but found a specific genetic pattern among gay men, but a new study does not find the same pattern. The most interesting version of the theory is that the gene, this trait is supposed to be passed on to daughters but is sometimes passed on to sons. The author of the old study says the new study is flawed, and reporters agreed that the new study raises doubts but doesn't necessarily refute the old one. The conservative spin: This proves homosexuality is a stone tools to carve up the animals it killed and had much bigger teeth than its apelike ancestors. The theory is that the creature's tools enabled it to augment its diet with meat and marrow, which gave it the nutrition and energy that eventually allowed it to develop a larger, more human brain and to spread study concluded that some New Jersey state troopers pulled over drivers and percent of drivers who were asked by troopers for permission to search their cars were minorities. The ostensible reason for this racial "profiling" is that New Jersey highways are a conduit for drugs and that the troopers think blacks searches thrown out of court as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The spins coalition large enough to support a new government. The early betting is that this will prove impossible and that new elections will have to be called. The on its payroll but off the air for months, the network will reportedly use an after he argued that he had played no substantive role in the report and had won the race after finishing second in his last three marathons. The cranky of them finished among this year's top 10--how about giving some other country single country, winning the women's marathon for the third straight year. subjected to extradition proceedings constitutes "an irreversible victory for the rights of man." It represents "the birth of an effective universal jurisdiction for dealing with crimes against humanity and, at the same time, an unequivocal warning that the United Kingdom will not be a refuge for arrival of "a supranational judicial structure that will be able from now on to knock down the protective barriers that tyrants throughout the world have conservative press took the opposite view. The Daily Telegraph called Straw "a straw man" and ridiculed his claim to have made his decision "with an open mind." The paper said, "The Home Secretary does not allow his open mind to power, his former opponents are pleading for his return. Nor does the damage million], disturb the peace of the ministerial open mind." The tabloid Daily Mail quoted Thatcher as saying that Straw had "demeaned his office" with a once again for the deployment of ground troops. And the liberal Guardian had an carnage, then that has only underscored the inadequacy of air power. Forces on suffocating the cat, one has to finish it." The German press reported broad inordinately clumsy handling of the news when it first broke must have left Bacon "did the credibility of the Alliance nothing but harm by alleging that "rebel" worker bees have found ways of breeding in defiance of the convention allowed to lay eggs, and if worker bees lay their eggs, they are destroyed in seconds by other bees, which can identify the queen's eggs by a special chemical she marks them with. Because of a genetic mutation, however, certain bees are able to put a fake royal marker on their eggs, making other bees think they are the queen's. The forgery enables a worker bee's eggs to survive, died of complications from lung cancer surgery. News accounts recited sports analysts compared his greatness on the field to that of Babe Ruth and exploratory committee. Though he won't officially declare his candidacy until scores of governors and members of Congress who are backing him. Everyone agrees his strategy is to create an air of inevitability and suffocate his which he portrayed human recklessness, madness, brutality, murder, and nuclear savages. The completely cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as another affair leading to an abortion. Seventy million people watched the talk about him in the interview, she bashed him separately in her book, which charge that he obstructed justice by ditching the plane's videotape of the accident. Evidence in the first trial indicated that the plane was flying too inadequate communications, and a possibly faulty altimeter may also have that he would always be associated with his majority opinion in Roe vs. distress over his accent was insufficient, in that you more or less dismissed voice changes, so do his chances for assuming a "native" accent. But all is not tape of the show as well as the exact transcript of what each person is has notably round, melodious tones.) Then read the transcript and repeat the statement into a tape recorder. Repeat again and again until the recording confess that your advice is a tad more constructive than her own. And you have wonderful Frank Rich has popularized. We must also hope that he does not weight his conversation to talk of impeachment and partisan politics. the topic of conversation. Since I am a very principled (and yes, opinionated) person, I eagerly take part. Knowing that politics and religion can lead to arguments, I try not to be the instigator. It seems that lately, however, many people with whom I get into these conversations are not well informed. They don't usually understand legal and ethical principles, and they don't know much about history. Most of the time they're only going along with popular opinion and haven't thought out their ideas. The flaws in their reasoning are easily exposed, and I find that no matter how gently I state my case, I make compelling arguments that frustrate and intimidate my talking partners. My informed friends, join a study group, or forswear serious conversations where you will not have to sit on your principles and opinions and your superior to go back to school but who still lives in the same city as me. The chemistry between us is palpable, and we truly enjoy many things together in what is currently a platonic friendship. After she left I was in a dilemma, wanting to cross the divide between friendship and a relationship. handle) in her hometown. The message was one line, and it hit me in the solar computer, that "mf50" was actually her grandmother.) Should I pursue the opening someone's letter. And, yes, it's bad manners. And, oh hell, pursue the lovely romance. But on the other hand, if it hadn't been her grandmother, interviewed for a position as Software Development Manager at a company that suspect in a major crime rather than an experienced professional interviewing during the handshake and asking questions such as, "Why do you want to work here?" and saying with a serious demeanor, "Tell us about yourself." My response to all this was quietly but pointedly to let them know that I considered their manner to be amateurish at best and downright insulting at worst. I did not get an offer. Thank God for small favors. However, I am it have been an isolated case? What happened to social skills, or maybe I am your experience a battle in the generational war, but a skirmish, perhaps. "Tell me about yourself" in a job interview is regrettable and somewhat imprecise, but might have played better with someone in their age group. As for your age, you are on the shady side of the actuarial table for new employment. Perhaps a company with a different outlook might fill the bill. philosophically come to terms with things the way they are. since World War II movies, I take issue with the implication that this is out, the ultimate villain of the story is an influential, rich, white guy. appropriating elements from other movies his entire career. It only makes sense entertainment value. I salute him for finding ways to do it without hurting that I was wrong to make this claim. A smaller number told me that I was right. Other than what I wrote in the initial article, I have nothing to add to this longer have the power to do harm. A surprisingly large number of respondents add that only intentional racial stereotypes are harmful (and, as I say in the issue have been used to justify all sorts of historical barbarities. Admittedly, there is no bright line dividing an ethnic joke that seems funny from one that is vicious. The ingredients of humor are hard to pin down. But uncomprehending children seems obviously vicious rather than funny. At least to another valid concern: that the widespread transmission of racial stereotypes might indeed be helpful to hate groups. The influence is sure to be diffuse. Many claims about the influence of popular culture are exaggerated. But it's hard to believe that people are not affected by the images and stereotypes they encounter as children. I am not completely confident that racial stereotyping in movies has a significant effect on racial politics. But neither am I universe of The Phantom Menace ("Moneybox"). But his attempt to characterize the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal as ridiculously hostile to taxation forgets that the Journal people are in albeit too sparse to test with the criteria for just wars. run for office. Frequently, candidates announce before they have given real consideration to the basics: Why am I running? Where will I get the money? How to candidates who rush to announce before thoughtful consideration, the result and potential candidates to "be true to yourself." This advice is easier said than done, and Bond cautions the candidate that once you sell your vote, you alive and well in the White House, and that is just one of the reasons it is I suppose it figures that you would pick two sitcom not shows. One exception, which they both ridiculed, is, in my opinion, We are experiencing right now a golden age of drama back and look at what was called "the golden age of television" in the '50s. Sadly, most of it doesn't hold up compared to what we see now. writers out here, and they are writing drama, not jokes. homosexuals everywhere thank you for your vote of confidence in their style sense. And isn't the power of television characters wonderful? Murphy Brown was Young Entrepreneur and have had the sometimes unnerving task of interviewing business magazines and books as to how to interview. In fact, I have used both the "Tell me about yourself" and "Why do you want to work here?" lines verbatim because I was following the experts' advice about what makes a good amateurish and obnoxious could have been a combination of nervousness and inexperience. Here was an obviously experienced man coming into this young much more experience than I call and ask to be considered for a writer didn't get a call back, but there still could be an opportunity there. He could call back and offer to be a mentor. This would give both parties a chance to learn about each other. Better yet, start a business as a professional mentor in his area of expertise: charging a monthly retainer for the privilege of calling him to ask questions whenever they wish. He has so much experience and, as shown by the last interview, there are a lot of us out suggestion to our Crank. It will no doubt lift his spirits to hear from one of you illustrate, has different ways of being bridged. senior who has met with fantastic failure when attempting to interact with women. It's not that they necessarily dislike me, nor I them, it's just that everything feels so uncomfortable. Prom is coming up, and I am currently wondering whether or not to ask anyone. Everyone around me is telling me I HAVE to go, but it just seems like an uncomfortable hell. Yet if I don't go, I fear I will regret it for the rest of my life. Any suggestions? with women" means that emotionally and developmentally you are still working comfort. What supposedly comes naturally can take awhile to arrive. you're more than normally shy and insecure. Or it could mean that you're more than normally shy and insecure. Time will reveal what is comfortable. As for the prom, there is no need to push yourself into something you would be just as happy skipping. Plus, it sounds as if you have no one in mind. not. Trust her that if you decide to do an end run around prom night you will to marry. The problem is that he does things like inviting me to lunch, in it, and it was spilling the stuff inside. Is he just a jerk? And if so, how do I continue my friendship with his fiancee, whom I still like? This chap, however, sounds like a clod, and certainly someone deficient in the social graces and good sense departments. If you choose to continue with him, you might try to fluff up his social skills by example. An instance might be if without you because your intention was to have lunch. If he is a super boor and tries to override you, request that he stop the car and let you out. fiancee, may be a lost cause as a continuing friendship if you call it a day "Johnny has been such an effective spokesperson for us because he truly believes in the power of our products," says the president of New Jersey's Franklin Electronics. Who is endorsing "Perhaps someone should inform Franklin Electronics that, contrary to what they no idea, which seems to cast doubt on the theory that he's such an effective those who booked the act resisted; they did not think people would relate to a computer bibles. And he's not just a pitchman; he's a user. He's also in on the them you can just make out a portal opening up to hell, presumably for the Prove that a computer ignoramus can install the operating system on a resort. Originally, I intended to download the free version of the hours and that the download doesn't come with instructions. Chickening out, I visited the computer section of my local bookstore and grabbed a copy of the sell it to me. "You can't get that book," he said, obviously speaking as one of cylinder head," says the average motorcycle manual, without explaining how you of computer terminology on the Web to decipher every third acronym (BIOS? megs of memory. Partitioning a hard disk means corralling off some space, and floppy. Although I had never used DOS before, I followed the straightforward put the boot disk in the drive and turned the computer back on. Success! The the installation program fails to detect your drive, provide very specific As I tinkered, rebooted, and failed, and tinkered, rebooted, and failed over Cradle. And this was only the installation program. surprisingly helpful. As I described my trouble, the Help guy replied, "You're me: "I don't get this. Other people get this. Why don't I get this? I think support. (CORRECTION: After this article was posted, I learned that The Red Hat manual offered clearer directions, and the new the link, which led to a page of more links to lots of information on BIOS, but the installation disk. The supplementary disk loaded an unfamiliar blue figured I had worn out my welcome. I turned off the computer and went home. hornswoggle a friend, a tech guy at the New York Times Web site, into open my computer's metal box and started gabbing about 40-pin connections. My troubles were over. Here was someone who knew the acronyms, someone who could from there the installation was cake. The hard disk whirred away, occasionally asking for information. I typed it in, it whirred some more, and within an hour got two error messages, one telling me to adjust my SOCKS environment, and didn't run. I bribed my tech guy friend to come and help me again. He went back to the original download and started over, but he couldn't get it to run either. So he fiddled around with my PATH and a few other things beyond my comprehension, when a "core dump" occurred. This is some type of serious error, downloaded again. After reinstalling and receiving increasingly mournful error messages ("Unable to go on," "Floating point exception") and another core dump, we called it quits. Three and a half hours of help from a guy who makes his ready for me. Or both. I feel guilty about having used not one but two manuals malignantly guilty about having paid cash money for a free operating system and the marathon, but I did it by putting on roller skates and grabbing the figures in the Pentagon are proposing that the White House consider a failed to sway his allies in favor of deploying ground troops. which includes "out of area" military deployment if Western interests are role but warned in an editorial that it should not be "a euphemism for global of the deployment are still not in place" and that there is no indication from commentators of becoming dangerously obsessed with what politicians such as on what is actually happening in the field. "Last week's euphoric discussion of weeks away from performing any sort of combat mission." Writing in the paper's "Review" section, Oxford historian exaggerated the effectiveness of air power. "Does anyone out there want to other than in a 'permissive' environment?" he asked. "Invoking the memory of done when she chided President Bush for going "wobbly" during the Gulf War. solipsism of the world in which our teenagers live." Not only do they "retreat frameworks of reality which placed social restraints on the individual's freedom to think, say, do, or buy whatever is desired." human lives to those who don't. It could also have "devastating" effects on villages, mine frontiers, bury his tanks and armored vehicles, and install acute embarrassment to security forces by virtually surrounding the compound sees human corruption in everything from homosexuality to rock and roll and services alerted us to his whereabouts." The same paper carried an exclusive interview he spoke of achieving this not through greater political autonomy, as newspapers and generated countless pages of comment and analysis. These damaged both its own constitution and international agreements on terrorism by international arrest warrant out on him. The paper also warned of the influence doesn't respect the rights of defendants and which practices the death penalty is a state founded on the law." It added, "This is an essential condition for the moment can only see him as a terrorist, could be decisive." rehabilitation clinic, said that she and her fellow models drank champagne from offering advice on an ongoing investigation. From whom; suggesting suggesting that, in light of recent events, the investigators looking into (something about string theory and tangles?); "investigation" means crime railroad owners, and beat the heck out of striking workers on behalf of anyone thank God for that, for the entire course of history might have been different plot, a whole other thing. But I still blame them for "Raindrops Keep Falling post a guard with a doughnut and a nightstick," said financial analyst John the former chancellor who elicited the written appeal, said, "I suspect that General's great contribution to protecting freedom during the Cold War." Year. By mayoral order, fireworks and criticism are prohibited. of us here at the News Quiz? For answers, turn to the Excite search engine, where, when you enter a phrase, the site automatically suggests "select words to add to your search." These are words that other people who did similar a post that, as an abstract legal matter, you think is unconstitutional (see upholding this "fourth branch of government." Does it really follow that a I don't think that such punctilio is really morally or professionally obligatory. The battle over the constitutionality of independent agencies was fought in the courts; it was won by those who've argued that such agencies are constitutional. For our legal system's purposes, might say, "Given that the law as interpreted today authorizes such agencies, I counsel. Now, if one thought that the office was not just unconstitutional but would be a bit iffy. But I don't think people really think this (or should confused. Inflation is an overall rise in the price of goods and services. The only does not, but cannot, produce inflation. When the amount of money in in another. Inflation, by definition, occurs when the government increases the money supply faster than the real growth of the economy, because this increase is the only way more money can become available to chase the same number of "triggered" by increasing wages, farm prices, or health care costs. If food and medical care tripled in cost, people would of necessity spend less on other things to pay for the increase or cut down on the food and medical care they things would necessarily result in falling prices for those things. Wealth would indeed be moved around, some people enriched, and others would be financial losers. But there would not be, nor could there have been, an overall increase in prices. An overall increase in prices is only possible when there has been an overall increase in the amount of money in willing, if somewhat ironic, embrace of the marketing bonanza his creation has unleashed may have cost him his rightful spot in the Comics and there is: Life in Hell sucks. It hasn't been funny or insightful for reputation is entirely dependent on two 12-episode series, Work Is Hell fact, but the Comics Journal wasn't ranking animators. Theater District. Current productions that have breezed down it include The playwrights when we see them reflected back at us by the Brits. Revivals of three New York Times drama critics discussed this phenomenon. Basically, never has, may illustrate a somewhat different phenomenon. There is, of course, something more interesting. Hare feeds an appetite for a theater engaged with society, which our domestic dramatic economy isn't satisfying at the moment. He amplify questions of politics, religion, society, and relations between the sexes. And while I think that even Hare's best work falls short of greatness, the combination of his seriousness and his success bode well for theater as a later efforts, his early plays are not mere polemics. Hare's first produced feminism, in which the attempt to run a girls' school dissolves into absurd infighting. It is true that the author's Labor Party socialism originally took to write memorable roles for women. Hare's first play to open at the National Despite her craziness, we see that she has a point. His radicalism mellowed with time and success. Where once he proposed a debate between socialism and capitalism, between the plays posit a subtler conflict over personal and political values. The first time he really demonstrated this maturity was in The Secret Rapture about two sisters who have to deal with the messy legacy of their departed father. One is generous and impractical. The other is ruthless and address societal issues such as these? You might start with the fact that the literally or figuratively. What occurs on the New York stage doesn't resonate more around issues of identity and less around national institutions. We also have a different kind of theatrical tradition, imperfect both as heroes and villains. The play where one sees this most the classic Hare setup, a collision between two people who see life differently comes down in the debate between their values. But the play does not exist for value lost, the play needed something more than Hare's topical amendments added. His adaptation didn't provide much food for thought, which is unusual for him. A bit of hackwork, it suggested that he might be spreading himself too brilliantly. But Hare is no Smith. His performance adds little to his script, and his script adds little to the subject, arriving mostly at familiar no less. And the work is somewhat interesting despite its inherent limitations. We see how Hare can turn even a monologue into a kind of dialogue of perspectives, as he pits the passionate commitment of West Bank settlers think?" he asks at the end of the play. "What matters? Stones or Ideas?" to show up here, is a more familiar and successful exercise. It is a play with clear imperfections, such as an excessively shrill third act. But one forgives such flaws because of the way Hare draws his audience into the play's issues. the theater. Her daughter, one of Hare's ethereal women a little too good for she describes as "sincere." We see her failings redeemed through commitment to her craft. The same might justly be said of the man who wrote the play. the age of frustration and humiliation is over! I am the great Shopping Avenger, who hath descended to Earth from the planet Galleria in a sliding door standard in most models) to save you from the dark forces of Express Membership Rewards points (which I can apply toward, among other door Frustration is what I get. When I went searching The Interchangeable Power System Cordless Screwdriver, did anyone there know what a of a refund or a copy of the book I needed? No! (Although I am now a recognized But the Shopping Avenger digresses. Now, I understand cosmically greedy expectations of a handful of Wall Street analysts who've cut again. Pensions are out, job security is out, and customer service is most address such issues as pension rights and job security (though it will refer to pretended to be a democratic socialist, and I was for a time an actual This column instead will seek vengeance for you, the loyal dinner party in New York. I was seated next to a man who said he was one of the him that, in my humble opinion, the advent of voice mail and the disappearance of live operators meant longer waits on the telephone for help. strongly. He again told me I was wrong: Surveys show that the waiting period earlier in the day I had spent seven minutes pushing buttons in order to make a perception that I spent seven minutes pushing buttons. Then I called him an needed help battling the forces of corporate arrogance. I felt I was the one to lead the charge. But like most selfless impulses, I thought about it for a But the Shopping Avenger was born again. He was born again in Toys "R" Us, where none of the employees seemed to know what a potty seat Airport, where the reservation he had made and confirmed suddenly ceased to exist, and where he got yelled at for his troubles. the Shopping Avenger will use his reporting skills, which have been described by some as "almost supernatural in scope" (and have been described by others as "adequate" and "sort of pathetic") to extract on your behalf grudging apologies and, be warned, the Shopping Avenger looks askance at the bearing of false witness. Those companies that deserve praise will be praised. Onward! bewilderment over the lack of serious gun control in the United States. In an Standard said that even the mass murder at Columbine High School was kinds throughout the country, that there is little prospect that even this latest monstrosity will provoke a meaningful shift in public attitudes," the horror and condolence," but commented that it was "hard for the rest of the world to take these entirely seriously, when repetition seems almost inevitable." The Evening Standard splashed the story on its front page Rifle Association faced "the considerable embarrassment" of holding its annual conflict but had replied that he would only do so "if and when the parties are truly determined to seek a political solution." He said, "It doesn't seem to me the war an "absurd" one that should never have started, but added, "One can't deny that its purpose is fundamentally of a moral character. It is not a political or a power game. The civilized world is simply tired of racism, said, but "I don't know if he saw all the traps that had been set for him in the war." The prime minister, whose coalition government is divided about legitimate, but we must ask ourselves about its limits." and its Orthodox hierarchy "may lead to peace and the end of aggression." "Typically German. Two weeks ago the federal government said it would take efficiency? Or stupidity, a continuing feeling of anticipated guilt that other of war, with what results?" Its answer, in summary, was that the offensive has press focused again on the prospects of a ground war, with the conservative tabloid the Daily Mail splashing the claim that Prime Minister Tony which has created even more refugees and resulted in widespread ecocide." The without a word being exchanged that she is in hawkish, combative mood; the cherub brooch betokens the spirit of innocent accommodation; and the red and missives to the right people each day, and you'll be at the top in no time. It Stationery has always been important, but paper's cachet as a cultural care if you send them letters on recycled grocery bags, those who don't know course. It's the preferred weight for writing paper, the maximum recommended Before we discuss paper price, she informs me that the name crisply, "and people enjoy leaving their address dies to others in their My fingers glide across the soft paper like skates on a Web site, and another page lets you search by ZIP code or international region for other retailers. manager of personal products. Cotton's long fibers are what make paper soft. In the old days, all paper was made of cotton rags, hence the name. Today, most problem with wood pulp is that paper makers have to use acid to break it book paper, because this stuff is strictly for letter writing. It is, they say, the smoothest possible writing surface you can find. It would be a crime to use anything other than a good fountain pen on it. But which pen? That's a research The sheets are creamy white and the tissue lining in the envelope a bluer white. The saleswoman didn't have to drop names (the pope and are definitely the best value. Is engraved paper really worth it? I ask the anyone use colored paper?" "Hairdressers and discos." Luckily, there are only three sizes of fine stationery, because there are hundreds of typefaces from which to compose your letterhead. At stationery shops you see people agonizing over whether they're really more Co. outlets let you test drive a sample of typefaces on a computer. The sensible choices, so you can't go too far wrong. Most professional printers Those three initials may look aristocratic, but that's because they were first used by drunken, illiterate royals who couldn't write their whole names. I shaped monogram at the top. But then, he doesn't need to observe the three note instance, that it's the work of an old master summing up. But it sure feels only for an ensemble comedy but also for a comedy that honors the very idea of with the isolated treks of individuals. It's not just that he likes to tell stories with multiple strands, or that he gets bored easily with one consciousness, or even that he cherishes some '60s utopian fantasy of the the universe can't be discerned in the comings and goings of lone heroes but in the interactions among vast and disparate collections of people. This time out, he transforms the bad vibes of his other films into a vision that's positively serene. He celebrates a universe that has found its equilibrium and the easy way in which it rights itself when a nasty bit of flotsam threatens to throw it misleading, as if to make you think you're seeing The Gingerbread Man bottle of bourbon when a police car glides ominously past. So he heads back into the bar, steals a fifth of Wild Turkey, then ambles past the railroad undressing. Then he climbs in the window of a big, antebellum house and takes some guns from a glass cabinet at the foot of the main staircase. out, is the town's gentlest spirit, loved even by those passing police, who are The girl he was spying on is the runaway niece of the elderly widow, "Cookie" surreptitiously slips it behind the bar of the blues joint to replace the one which everything is in balance, in which people accept the good and the bad, in faith that it will all even out in the end. The picture sits vaguely in the doesn't let the audience's outrage mount. The act that kicks the movie into a his narrative point. That's probably because he has to eliminate Cookie to do remember her having such power in her lungs. When she sucks on her pipe and stares at the gun cabinet and upbraids her late husband for leaving her behind, How do you convince young directors to watch and emulate brilliant sequences you can screen and dissect in a cinema studies class. offhandedness, in how he conceals his own storytelling. There's always a sense that his characters are living even when you're not watching them, maybe officious homicide detective from a nearby city who finds Holly Springs' lazy informality irritating, but none of the women wants to answer his queries: They want to flirt with him, and he can't help falling into their easy rhythms. "disgraceful" truth throws the town into an uproar. I was surprised to find Close in the movie, since her clenched, overly controlled acting seems at odds into otherwise relaxed settings and throwing them into chaos. ("You'd think the police could take their stupid crime tape with them when they leave!") She talk, the Scripture comes flowing out of her mouth like lava. law. You might even say that the truth emerges as a consequence of chaos and not from some misguided pursuit of order. What seems, on the surface, as As a young movie critic, I made the wrong sort of name for myself by swooning in print over many a nubile actress. Yes, I was often many years now, and it's time to reassert what can never be forgotten: It is the right, nay the duty, of a critic to fall and fall hard. I see no point in writing about Never Been Kissed --a pleasant but annoyingly insubstantial frump? Surprisingly so. She hits her slight speech impediment harder than usual "cool" kids, she seems heartbreakingly defenseless. You could mistake her for every breath, every screwy inflection, every pratfall. After an hour, I thought own dumb, formulaic terms, and it can't make up its mind whether it wants to of a lot worse to keep me from going back to watch Drew bite her lower lip and that shy smile spread meltingly across that sweet, eternally girlish face and door. You have to walk through it"). It shouldn't make a lick of sense, let alone feel all of a piece, but The Matrix is actually one of the more elongate like silver beads of mercury, and he's partnered by the equally hard, around them but the sleek, geometric lines of their bodies never soften. The noble effort to pacify the troubled region before war spills into the rest of mission but will not seek congressional approval. The administration insists It is probably hopeless, and certainly unfashionable, to remind the president and Congress that they are wrong. Few passages in the Congress sole power "to declare war [and] grant letters of marque and reprisal." Constitutional history is fuzzy on many matters, but on this it is pellucid: The framers intended Congress, and Congress alone, to decide whether and when to send troops into combat. (According to scholars, "letters of marque authorize defense and immediate retaliation in the case of a surprise attack. Otherwise, the authority belonged to Congress. Our elected representatives were supposed to deliberate, slowly, on this most consequential of state actions. The framers feared, above all, that a vainglorious executive would, if unchecked, drag the country into foolish foreign entanglements. congressional supremacy guided the United States through World War II. (Occasionally, Congress declared war before sending troops; mostly it didn't.) But Congress' military influence began to wane as presidents grabbed more and veto. Under the resolution (more commonly known as the "War Powers Act"), the Congress does not vote aye, the troops must come home. congressional fecklessness and presidential bullying. Every president has called the law unconstitutional and proceeded as if it (and the Constitution) intent" when interpreting the Constitution, were more cavalier on the subject constitutional precedent," it is this "ample," but hardly constitutional, record, to which they are referring.) Presidents have euphemized away the seizure of congressional authority, minimizing their uses of force as "surgical strikes," "police actions," or "immediate reprisals." They have cited the didn't stop the erosion of its power. Whenever a president dispatched troops or missiles, congressional Democrats and a few Republicans would pipe up that the president was ignoring the War Powers Resolution. The president would argue it didn't apply. Congress would gripe a bit more, and by that time the troops would be on their way home. The resolution has become a convenient cover: It allows Congress to complain that the president is breaking the law without forcing Congress to take any real responsibility. If the operation goes awry, Congress can load all the blame on the president. If the operation goes well, the president takes all the credit anyway. "There's nothing in it for a great foreign policy senator." The political adage states that politics stops at the water's edge. In fact, politics doesn't even start. Congress just isn't This time around, Congress isn't even bothering to invoke been going on for two months, and the administration has not signaled any scheduled for three years, but the administration has no intention of ever putting it to congressional vote. (Congress has never held a War Powers perhaps exhausted by impeachment or simply supportive of the operations, has man and his unelected advisers. Members of Congress, who were elected to deliberate and make these nasty decisions, have abdicated the duty the framers intended them to have. Their abdication deprives the rest of the nation of the war, the only recent military engagement preceded by a vigorous national Congressional Democrats and Republicans have cooperated in abandoning war powers. The indifference of congressional Republicans is not and Bush were sending in the Marines. Why don't they now? The president, too, movement, and the War Powers Resolution was a great triumph of that movement. He will hold hearings if he can get Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman international law professor, has championed congressional war powers for years. Last year he tried and failed to invoke the War Powers Resolution for the to colleagues that they will send to the president next week. The letter insists that "The Constitution compels you to obtain authority from Congress You can see why the administration wouldn't listen. be a fiasco. The intervention could be stopped by a block of isolationist senators and House members. Our failure to intervene might well cause the war to escalate and spread. But the absence of such a debate and vote may be worse. The Constitution is most necessary when it is most inconvenient. once uttered the phrase "Like a guy said a long time ago: 'He who hasn't sighting the Great White Whale: "Let's all get that fish." the English language didn't offend people who weren't "that far removed from wrote. The mayor's abuse of power didn't bother those who had lived through far wielding power like a club, be it a czar, emperor, king, or rural sheriff," immigrant experiences. So if the Machine muscle offended some, it seemed like Reading these gems in the new posthumous selection, One laugh and make you think, stir outrage at a heartless bureaucrat, or bring a tear to the eye when he flashed a glimpse of the heart hidden beneath his hard of feats with a regularity and prominence that no city columnist, or any sometimes six. Today the columnist who writes something decent twice a week is experience "setting bowling pins, working on a landscape crew, in a greasy machine shop, and in a lamp factory and pushing carts around a department easier on the feet, he half meant it. To his working class and neighborhood populist, he celebrated the corner tavern and the weekend softball who tried to keep a white couple that had adopted a black baby out of their neighborhood or a funeral parlor that didn't want to bury a black soldier wrote was facetious or fictionalized. These days, newspaper writers are no longer allowed the kind of license he took. As journalism has become less of a trade and more of a profession, once common vices like embellishment, plagiarism, and binge drinking have ceased to be regarded as charming. Mike avoid, including such terms as gorgeous, lazy, sweetie, and fried chicken. was a useless country that should be invaded and turned over to Club Med. By groups that took his comments literally and demanded that he be fired. So why don't we have newspaper columnists as good as him anymore? To summarize: We no longer have his kind of newspaper. We no greatest dramatic poetry in the language steps outside the theater to offer who has just been fired. The boy, it turns out, is a particular aficionado of stage violence. The best parts of plays, he tells Will as he prepares to feed one of his pet mice to a passing alley cat, involve dismemberment and murder. up to write revenge tragedies such as The White Devil and The Duchess the accidental, and wholly conjectural, collision of two historical figures. high school, signifies a deft blend of high culture and high wit, deep thinking and schoolboy cleverness. I keep hearing and reading the words "smart fun" in about English landscape gardening or chaos theory; by the time the play was over I felt as though I did. And while many theatergoers will arrive at of the differences between English editions of the ancient Roman love poet having learned something about these arcane matters, even if an hour later they in his ability to excite our intellectual curiosity and, in a stroke, to messy and diffuse complexities of history, science, philosophy, and art are quality; they are full of easy paradoxes and diverting logical conundrums. these writers, literature is a grand chess game of mental possibilities, an critic, turned to play writing in the late 1950s, at a moment when, as he once said, "the least fashionable playwright was as fashionable as the most English silliness, a moment that produced such indelible monuments of the human augmented his play writing with screenwriting, enhancing his highbrow some of his most serious and demanding work for the small one: Professional agent of political awakening or social change: "If I wanted to change the world," he once told an interviewer, "the last thing I would do is write a play." "The 'role' of the theater," he has written, "is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory." Since the late '70s, however, sitcom, middlebrow pleasures dressed up in the trappings of high of ideas, but he is more accurately a playwright of the idea of ideas, just as Corporation, a subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation, seeking to do more That may not seem so bad, until you consider dozens of such sentences strung together. And take a closer look. Why the "but"? others? "But" suggests a contradiction, but there is nothing contradictory about the notion that an item valuable to one person would be sought by others as well. Many investigative reporters are bad writers, and the impenetrable prose is held to be the price you pay for the dirt they unearth. But this small example illustrates how bad writing can actually help an investigative reporter to paper over the holes in his case. He can imply something without saying had helped a campaign contributor to leak important military secrets to to launch satellites for them. They are legally prohibited from doing so China. But the law also allows the president to waive this rule on a satellite exploded just after takeoff. The satellite's owner, a Manhattan The Pentagon's conclusions led the Department of Justice to begin a criminal even treasonous. But this is an example of useful bad writing that implies more than it delivers. After all, if you're in the business of launching satellites take some interest in making sure the rockets work. report was released to China by accident: An engineer's secretary faxed it off government, precipitating the Pentagon investigation. None of this proves that tinge of desperation, that the Pentagon "did not find grave damage but did failed to mention that the Pentagon agency reaching this highly qualified Bush, had approved all the waiver applications that reached his desk and that current campaign finance law, a president is certain to make national security decisions affecting firms to which he is beholden. If he'd presented it that ballistic weapons secrets to China. If true, it would probably count as The list includes beasts, criminals, villains, thugs, fascist legions, promulgated at government expense, is "Not Me, Not Now." Not Mass., but with unattractive people who aren't having much fun or killing there. And they grow lobsters in the rocky soil, between the rows of blueberry that someplace warmer. The state seal shows a farmer and a seaman and a moose, who seems faintly disapproving of the lifestyle of the farmer and the seaman, which strikes me as impertinent coming from a ruminant. If two people are direct," but if you imagine Mel Brooks saying it, sounds like "Dir I Go eating a lobster which is not even slightly kosher! Like some big dumb moose!" "mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual relationships in the context of marriage." The state bird is the cardinal; the state flower is dogwood; they're money to sponsor a hockey league. "When kids are playing hockey or basketball," personal life, but one thing that's always given me real erotic contentment is knowing that, while having sex, it's hard for me to get involved in playing supplement in today's New York Times touts the lowlands as a great place to make a buck. Match the advertised attribute with the nation. among attractive and amusing people who find you fascinating." dull bureaucrats have been displaced by witty, playful multinational corporate career of the founder of Folkways Records wins polite reviews, but it's no the book's sometimes clotted prose and odd lack of personality: "The real remains elusive." (Click here for a dictionary of folk music terms.) leftists, those turtlenecked worrywarts who hate welfare reform and the bond raises questions that cannot be ignored." What worries reviewers is the economy, you know that you're in the hands of a filmmaker who trusts in the art the director of The Conformist and The Last Emperor can make portentousness in the silence that's distancing and annoying, especially since The critics agree that the movie suffers when the initially interesting "a virtual reality thriller so caught up in its time and character confusions that it takes the entire movie to explain it." Some don't even think the basic am' right at the beginning, you should probably consider yourself warned," grisly Everglades trilogy. "This dense, mesmerizing novel will leave readers "quirky trilogy": "a reader might conclude: brilliant, obsessive, your study is impressive. But it cannot repeal the laws of economics. One such law is dubbed the "winner's curse" and holds that the winner of an auction almost always overpays. As an understanding of this law makes clear, online Auctions are often thought of as models of economic efficiency, uniting buyers and sellers at just the right price to maximize their mutual satisfaction, put resources to their highest and best use, and so on. But three petroleum engineers writing in the Journal of Petroleum firms are bidding on the drilling rights to a piece of tundra. No firm is sure how much oil is underneath the property, so they hire a team of engineers to poke at the surface rocks and make a guess. The guesses will likely range from too low to too high. Some firm's engineer will probably guess right, but that firm won't win the auction. The winner will be the firm whose engineer was the most overoptimistic. The winning firm won't ultimately get as much oil as their engineers promised, meaning the firm paid too much. In short, the auction This is a particularly clear example because the thing being auctioned will have a definite value in the future that is unknowable at present. But the winner's curse afflicts auction bidders whenever there is uncertainty over the current or eventual value of the item on the block. This is true even when bidders have no intention of reselling the item and when its who can extract the greatest pleasure from it (just as, uncertainty aside, the highest bidder for an oil field will be the person who can extract the most oil But the course of love is as uncertain as the petroleum content of a pile of rocks. Bidders must also try to guess how much they'll out that if bidders were truly rational, they'd simply reduce their bids to correct for the winner's curse. There is even a mathematical proof that a perfectly rational actor can avoid the curse. But experimental evidence suggests that even experienced bidders don't reduce their bids by enough. For instance, a study of oil field auctions shows that even seasoned firms typically pay far too much for drilling rights given the amount of oil they eventually recover. The same phenomenon has been observed when corporate words, oil firms and corporate takeover specialists keep on getting burned in auctions but persist in bidding too high. They simply don't learn. Irritatingly, a rational person who understands the winner's curse can't do anything about it so long as the other bidders continue to bid irrationally. If you bid rationally (lower), you won't win any auctions; if you bid what it takes to win auctions (higher), you'll lose money because of Explain the theory to your competitors. He posits that this is exactly why the hope was to induce other firms to reduce their bids. If so, it didn't work, the winner's curse by increasing the number of bidders. The craziest poor bigger the winner's curse. There's no satisfactory way to buy rare or one of a kind items, but online auctions are a particularly bad method. On the other hand, if buyers at online auctions are persistently disappointed, it's possible that after a while they'll stop bidding. It's also possible that experience will lead them to approximate "rationality," and they'll reduce their bids. Either way, sellers would find their inflated profits eroded. But auctions have survived the winner's curse for millenniums, and even the Internet is unlikely to change that. there is no danger of the winner's curse if you are sure about the value proper purpose of putting the item in the hands of whoever values it the most. For instance, suppose you are buying a Beanie Baby for your little brother or a idea of how much pleasure they'll get from their brother's smiles or a few days of sand and surf. And sane consumers won't bid more than these respective The winner's curse also doesn't apply when there are many identical items being auctioned off. In those cases, where there is enough quantity available to satisfy most bidders, the going price will be set by the sensible middle of the pack rather than by the most overoptimistic extremist. The leading example of such an auction is the stock market. So the winner's course, when it comes to Internet shares there is no sensible middle. If everyone's gone crazy, economic theory isn't much help. of stocks was still way too low. By their logic, they said, the Dow should be They admit that the "financial establishment" has reacted with guffaws. They do central to their case, wrote to the Journal that "their analysis contains a serious flaw [and] vastly overstates the value of stocks." In fact, they've upped the ante. This fall they're bringing out a book titled think tank) had discovered what the entire finance establishment had missed, mistake, described below, which he simply refuses to admit, no matter how many times it is pointed out to him. Here is his argument, and why it is wrong. stock pays only $1--and even that only if the company's entire earnings are grow over time and so do their earnings. Firms can grow for any number of increase its earnings, expand even more, and so on. For instance, a typical stocks are considered riskier. Even if the average return on the stocks is the same as the certain return on the savings account, people will pay extra for the certainty itself. Glassman thinks this is the only reason for the are not actually riskier. And when people realize this, they'll be willing to So where's the flaw? Assume that Glassman is right about on anything you please. The corporate earnings are yours to spend only if they are paid out in dividends. But if they are paid out in dividends, they aren't simultaneously paid out in dividends and invested in future profits. Protestant, may be best known for tormented, eloquent poems of religious fervor and despair. Apparently, he was convinced that he was already damned to The poem is about death and comfort, and it demonstrates the genuineness of its humility by its careful attention to details. The straightforwardness and smiling directness are sad, temperate, heartfelt, and moving, as well as school. No one died, evidently because he aimed below the waist. He had a pistol and a rifle but only used the latter. Afterward, he tried to shoot the last day of school, and a classmate said, "he's been wanting to do this all gun laws. The Associated Press called it "yet another school attack in a comfortable suburban community." The reassuring spin: School shootings are unlikely to happen in your community. The cynical spin: That's what officials The Senate passed another gun control measure. The Democratic amendment would require background checks for all purchases at gun shows and for anyone who tries to buy back his gun from a pawn shop. It would also extend some background checks from one to three days. Analysts called it another their steam in the impeachment vote and had little interest in fighting over received in their previous states, ostensibly to discourage people from It's a victory for liberals who want to block states from restricting civil new residents, states will equalize benefits by paying less to old Charismatic is one race away from winning the Triple Crown. being disrespected, and he strutted before and after the race to show up the vulgarities, erupt with anger, tease and embarrass each other, share offensive notes, flirt, push and shove in the halls, grab and offend." Where is this have consisted largely of correcting his teacher as she called the roll. None. Tolerate those boorish mispronunciations and look like a sap. Or say Of course, no sophisticated person would indulge in administration of cooperation with international bodies. Bastards! secretary of state sought to unseat him "with determination, letting pass no opportunity to demolish my authority and tarnish my image all the while showing a serene face, wearing a friendly smile and repeating expressions of Except, of course, for the part about the lips, which look though you may, you paradox makes my head ache. And I didn't write that either. Or that last able to land in grandma's backyard at night, in thick fog, without hitting the which means role models, and they are lay people taking on responsibilities that in the past many congregants felt professionals had to do." What Late Night (oh, no, not another of his tedious stories about the old days!), I asked the writers' assistant to scan the viewer mail pile for was nut mail, and there wasn't enough of it to do a book. I felt like an Apache That's just part of the "remarkable transformation" and chanting by the congregants, and a greater interest in religious education. Reform movement emphasized ethics over ritual, abjuring the wearing of Principles, reviving many of these customs in what supporters call a reclaiming otherwise sensible people hungry for the forbidden passions of the Books on Liberty." Below, some items from its May catalog. the chapter, "A Legal Theory From Those Screaming Voices in My Head." description of the poster, but I smell string bikini. invited to find a sentence in an actual publication that best conveys hideously The cover story predicts that the disappearance of privacy will bring about "one of the greatest social changes of modern times." been painted over with phrases such as "Confront corruption and patronage!") that eliminating affirmative action does not devastate equal opportunity in are exacerbated by poor nurturing. Biological warning signs: low heart rates recommends that high schools provide counseling to "help Both magazines print blueprints for a ground war in inventories the troops, time, casualties, and money necessary reports that black athletes are shunning white agents for black ones. Among the black agents courting rookies are Puffy Combs, Master P, before last week's massacre. Every kid at school knew about the techniques, sometimes "you don't know if it's some civilian driving to the of fascism and communism to a member of the world's strongest defense United States failed to deliver justice for the victims of last year's Alpine said, because they were signed by all the allies, and above all it is important a person who has offended the feelings and the religious beliefs of more than encouraged in this way, thus perpetuating the conflict between our explicitly stated that no action will be taken by our government to apply the fatwa," but also emphasized that sentence has been "approved and confirmed papers highlighted an incident at the end of their talks in which an said in English, "Can I do something?" When the pope replied, "Of course," the politically because he had "failed to obtain the traditional show of collective dollar, forecast that it is destined to be a weak currency because of interview was published before the resignation from the German government which reported that champagne bottles had been opened in Downing Street. offering "some hope of a saner German economic policy" but, stressing his continuing power on the German Left, said he was likely to be "the most unquiet the show's season finale, although it too is disturbingly reminiscent of that 'Cartoon error.' Just try this little trick to defuse the tragedy of the situation: Missiles through window. Embassy flattened. Staccato violins pluck time in my boyhood when the world seemed full of possibility. I and my friends would take our fishing poles down to the pond and dip our toes in the water and horrible suffering, which is why I pray that none of you will ever have your divorce hearing televised. But if you do, may you be blessed with the wiliness of a fox, the agility of a cat, and the creepy ingenuity of a defense secretary over the top and take the anthill, the general staff arbitrarily picked three poor, dumb bastards to be tried and executed for cowardice. In the remake, the general staff will arbitrarily select three saps who will be tried and found for that last one, not for the deaths themselves, but for destroying a nobody's fault that the Marine jet severed the cable and killed those professional knows, placement is as important as the ad itself. That is, the way an ad in a magazine is read is affected by the other information on the page. Below, actual phone book public service messages, the actual paid ads that accompany them on the page, and the presumed meaning of their Public Service Ad: "Encourage children to write and your kids to sign lots of stuff, so years from now, when they're famous, you everyone in your family knows what to do in the event of a fire." Paid Ad: "Accident Victims. You Need an Experienced big money writing books people will pay you not to publish. Start with Uncle intangible that only culture explains them," a friend said to me many years proclivity for port. As you can tell, his interests were limited, but he was making a (vinous) version of an argument that has been given great credence in the concept of national or ethnic culture routinely to answer seemingly complex questions. Why is the United States economy bursting with growth? It's obvious: Cultural explanations persist because intellectuals like them. They make valuable the detailed knowledge of countries' histories, which intellectuals have in great supply. And they add an air of mystery and complexity to the study of societies. But beneath them usually lurks something were given preferential tariff treatment for powerful political reasons. In the worked tirelessly for special favors. Over time, as it always does, the would make any K Street consultant proud. In return for support against the interest in port were not actually the sweet wines of today but rather normal table wines. Far from having a natural affinity for port, the English simply The moral of this story is not that taste, let alone they stayed with it even after most preferential treatment abated (around But culture itself can be shaped and changed. Behind so many cultural attitudes, tastes, and preferences lie the political and economic forces that shaped them, even in something as intangible as wine and food. All of which makes me glad that the two great powers that lost out in the delights of borscht, potatoes, and sauerkraut, washed down by gallons of political appointments in two ways: first, to demonstrate that he's still the boss; and second, to catch people off guard. Most recently he picked, as his style nor for foreign policy expertise but, rather, as a man of strong will, he's a politician who has never had a clear strategy or articulated an release of the hostages. In exchange, he allowed the terrorists to return to later released). The incident was initially viewed as a triumph for incident to propel themselves to power. His critics point out that he would have been blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians. that halted the war was negotiated by a presidential appointee who was not a presided over the country's transition from a period of utter economic and social desperation to one of relative stability. On the other hand, when policies of gradual reform helped postpone the breakdown or whether his chronic inaction led to the stagnation that ultimately destroyed the economy. Either way, throughout his tenure he avoided making decisions, instead deferring to the president and playing different factions within his own government off one willing to behave as though loans were more important than a nationalist negotiations, turned his plane around in midair, losing the money but gaining immense popularity at home. For weeks afterward, his former aide and current the scene, the rhetoric has become noticeably milder. In the new envoy's first the political profile of an apparatchik, which is to say, he didn't Central Committee of the Communist Party and, briefly, the minister of the oil and taking no actions, which meant he could be sold as the least of all evils presided over the company's issuance of stock. His tax returns estimate the crisis last August: "There was a state. The state retained. The state began to accumulate. Results began to be had." Speaking of his tenure as prime minister, he claimed, "If one considers what could have been done, and then what we did do over this long time, one can conclude that something was done." Finally, his will somehow pull off a settlement without really seeming to or without raising succeed in his new mission, and he may not even be motivated to do so. He has folks at home, what he should probably do is take advantage of his own personal films ever made. Random House's Modern Library chased the idea a few Wright Brothers Announce 3-Second Meal Service on All 12-Second Flights Shipping Magnate Declares Titanic -Iceberg Merger Successful Panama Canal Opens New Era of Global Trade in Panama Hats Congress Votes for Prohibition, Celebrates With First Toast in Congressional Goes off Gold Standard, Adopts Moldy Crust of Bread Standard National Labor Relations Act Recognizes Workers' Right To Be Fired Millions of Women Enter Work Force for Lower Pay, Longer Hours; "It's the Greatest Thing Since Slavery!" Say Industry Leaders Thousands of Innocent Soviet Corpses Thrilled by Posthumous Rehabilitation Congressional Quiz Show Investigators Stunned by Revelation That Not Everything Thousands of Innocent Trees Die To Make Silent Spring a Best Seller Hippies, Beatniks Sign Historic Personal Hygiene Ban Nonproliferation Treaty Strictly Limits Nuclear Weapons to Nations That Can Entire Consumer Product Safety Commission Dies in Pinto Explosion God's Sake, Use a Decent Camera!" Pleads Extraterrestrial Hair Club for Men Must Admit Women, High Court Rules The list includes whistling, making certain hand gestures, and carrying bottles, baseball bats, or flashlights. List of those questions where you taunt us with the open arms of the obvious. as we fall prey to writing "things prohibited in high schools" or "new ways to expression. "I can understand why people would pick on it. Because they want to deliberately misunderstand it," said the mayor. "And if anybody misunderstands it, they're honestly doing it on purpose. To get me," he added, except for social reformer but maybe, just maybe, the whole system should be blown up. Metaphorically. Don't pretend not to understand me, the way those robots do president of Cicero, Ill., wants to fight even harder; she proposes exiling return, even to visit their families. The people of Cicero overwhelmingly might consider gating neighborhoods and establishing police checkpoints. think her law should apply to convicted felons like her late husband and to punish people for what they do; you can't punish people for what that are." "There's still a lot of old equipment out there," said Mick Mack, just anatomy. Or perhaps he was commenting on dangerously outmoded playground "I want to make a plea to everybody who is waiting for the next deer season ruminants, only safer. Or perhaps he was about to announce a new gun control describes it as "an uproarious political satire about a professional wrestler public radio personality) I went to see his show at the Tech College, caught him out in the corridor, and lied to him about how much I liked his show (really, he talks so slow it makes me nervous, plus all that lip noise indicating introspection being released into the atmosphere) and, silly boy, launched into how I was doing a live daily radio show from a greasy spoon and all, and he looked at me and said, "Do you know where the bathroom is?" I did, having just been there. But I vowed on the spot that, should I ever be in a position to be accosted by fans, or faux fans, in a hallway, wanting to tell me about their life, I would always have something more constructive to say. book should put him way ahead. You could probably get two or three of me for Yeah. Either he's getting bigger or the sun is setting. money's on Garrison, as long as it stays out of the parking lot. he's dead, bent over the trunk of a Trans Am, face smeared against the rear the same. Anyway, Me is kind of a comic book, very heavy on graphics office The cogs simply do not mesh As a bear would say goodbye to a leg Animal Farm was a political satire. "A Modest Proposal," was a political satire. What Garrison has written is a parody. Look it up. And why do we call laboring to write this column and make a bit of money to support my family, that it would do wonders for my stifled creativity to drive somewhere tropical, and women to fantasize so intensely about splitting themselves in two and Lightness of Being to the fluffy screwball machinations of Forces of to the bliss of domesticity. That ending satisfies no one, but you can hurtling his lovers' pickup down an incline and crushing their bodies to a unfold against a backdrop of totalitarian repression, whereas our own grapple with a more confusing legacy: the counterculture of the '60s and '70s. Set in The proximity of New World '60s hedonism puts a sort of lunar spell on Pearl looking after kids and chopping vegetables. So, let's see: hot weather, free script seems meticulously worked out, right down to setting the moonwalk against Pearl in her own libidinal orbit. But if the writing is tidy, it's best young actresses alive. Her Pearl is at an age when you can see in her skin the last traces of girlish pliancy but also where the cares have begun to leave a residue. Alone in her kitchen with her cutting board, she seems to be long, her body bends toward his as if it knows, on a cellular level, that this one of two thrusts: It either sides with the suffocated housewife who, like demonizes a culture that tempts men and women to put their own gratification before their responsibilities as parents. A Walk on the Moon leans to an embodies the culture's eternal wisdom but also its antediluvian folly. the beginning of reproductive life, while reinforcing a girl's sense of shame over the fact that she's now "unclean." A culture so stern would drive most and the gnawing English sense that he ought to set about structuring a life, poky and schematic, is full of disconcertingly sharp talk between lovers before, during, and after sex. And while it's true that you can't pack as much most brittle encounters: The suspense is in waiting to hear how characters will phrase what you've already read in their faces. The movie's triumph is the minx that she makes the prospect of a life amid those metros and under those gray skies more seductive than an endless luau. I wish I could tell you for sure that the "happy" ending isn't meant to be ironic, but that's not how it dwarfed and exalted, with synthesized strings to provide a touch of foggy mysticism. Much of Among Giants affords an agreeable blend of the gritty and the synthetic, and the two main actors are a treat. "You love it up here, nose and receding chin and looks quite homely from one or two angles. But from with a thud. Last time the deflation was funny and it worked; this time the bad vibes make the whole picture wither. If any couple could have synthesized the at the point where the husbands and wives of A Walk on the to a young man. "How is it that a miserably undemocratic, unenlightened culture in his own age. Now, thanks to our modern media, he's becoming the real king of bishops: church approval of theology department hires, majority quotas of nonetheless concerned about the potential impact on their reputations. Members preserve academic freedom, student body diversity, and teaching quality. action movement is urging students to sue their schools. Determined to abolish race preferences in higher education, the Center for Individual students that academic affirmative action policies "violate the law." The professors and administrators at the poor quality of their students' speech, requirements and offering electives to help students lose speech tics such as prevalent patois: "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's authority to try an official who was impeached by the previous one. Though Tribe, they are not without their supporters, and he has now presented them in they reach adulthood to spend as they wish. The money would be raised via taxes deceased beneficiaries. The plan has been touted in the New York Times the victim of a campaign by city boosters to run their most persistent critic made a name for himself years ago with his theory of "multiple intelligences," more than one kind of intelligence, but those intelligences, as he calls them, are only part of the story. He writes, "We should recognize that intelligences, may require its own form of measurement or assessment, and some will prove far alarm starting buzzing furiously. For something like the sixth time in a month, a businessman I was talking to had just declared, in the tones of someone stating a profound insight, that the modern world economy no longer has room globalization will soon force most countries to adopt the dollar, the euro, or solution to his region's woes, but I have heard pretty much the same line from And you know what that means: It's time to start debunking. seem obvious that the fewer currencies there are, the better. After all, a proliferation of national moneys means more hassle and expense, because you keep on having to change money and to pay the associated commissions. It also means more uncertainty, because you are never quite sure what foreign goods are going to cost or what foreign customers will be willing to pay. And as There's also the matter of speculation. The financial crises that have shaken much of the world all started, at least in the first instance, with investors betting that the currency of the afflicted nation would fall in value against harder currencies such as the dollar. Why not spoil are still some very good arguments for maintaining separate national currencies. Not only that, while globalization and technological change in some ways are pushing the world toward fewer currencies, in other ways they actually currencies, with fluctuating relative values, was made by none other than undeniable observation: Sometimes changing market conditions force broad changes in the ratios of national price levels. For example, right now the could simply rely on supply and demand to do the job, producing inflation in realized that this is asking a lot of markets and that it would be much easier currency, and let the exchange rate between the two currencies do the brilliant analogy. He likened exchange rate adjustment to the act of setting feel like it? But in reality there is a coordination problem. It is hard for any one business to shift its work schedule unless everyone else does the same. As a result, it turns out to be much easier to achieve the desired time shift by leaving the schedules unchanged but resetting the clocks. In the same way, those abroad will find it much easier to make the necessary adjustment via a change in the value of its currency than through thousands of changes in case for their having separate currencies whose relative values are allowed to fluctuate. The question, then, is whether changes in the nature of the world of international trade and investment does, other things being the same, make it more costly to maintain multiple currencies. But other things are not the same, and other forces arguably make the optimal number of currencies in the Consider, in particular, the effects of modern information globalization. Surely that technology has made it easier, not harder, to deal currency used to delight in pointing out that if you took a grand tour of the marks. This was always a bit of a red herring, since the commissions that businesses pay on foreign exchange transactions are far smaller than the fees at foreign exchange kiosks. But anyway, who needs to change money nowadays? also makes it easier for businesses to deal with the risks associated with fluctuating currencies. It has always been true that such risks could in were sometimes thin or nonexistent. Thanks to computers, however, investment banks now offer a vast array of financial instruments, and hedging has become I can't resist mentioning a related issue. When you talk to euro enthusiasts, they invariably claim that one of the great benefits of the in euros, it will be obvious to consumers when a German company is charging prices were quoted in francs and marks and had to be converted at the going exchange rate. This claim always puzzles me: Here we are in the information while currency speculation may have had disastrous impacts in some countries, in others letting the currency drop seems to have been just what the doctor appears that fears that a drop in the currency would bring back hyperinflation Northern Hemisphere trading partner. Economic logic suggests that in the long run such countries, if they can put their inflationary histories behind them, have no business adopting the currency of a faraway country which will not take currency unification as what it is: an intellectual fad, not a deep insight. I countries but that "if the war gets worse, I don't know what will happen." In on our forces and our friends but also, in the long term, on Western public agreement would have terrible consequences for the coexistence of the peoples of the region. He also criticized proposals to strengthen the economic embargo it's more a historical than a practical question. Now, we have to look for a command,' they are now talking about a force directed by the United Nations world's sole superpower, with its unique responsibilities, is increasingly seeing violence and the use of overwhelming force as an easy option for achieving its ends as the most violent century in human history draws to a House of Lords split over a point of grammar in a bill to abolish its hereditary members. The issue is whether to say "a hereditary peer" or "an hereditary peer." The first version appears in the bill but was disputed in a cites "an hereditary title" as a correct example. But a government spokesman 'An' was formerly usual before an unaccented syllable beginning with 'h' and is still often seen and heard (an historian, an hereditary title). But now that the 'h' in such words is pronounced, the distinction has become anomalous and first black master of foxhounds. He told the Times that his appointment the color of his skin. "We don't want to put distance between us and anyone that wants to participate in this sport. It doesn't matter if they are a woman or a man, gay or straight." The chairman of the hunt club said Laud was chosen black man's veins: screeching car, needle in vein, screeching car, poison let his sellout filmmaker play the intravenous card. Crime are all pretty much hustles, but the good ones are stylish enough to pokes and shoves, yet there are moments (mostly in the script) when a higher sensibility can be glimpsed through all the galumphing crumminess. The film's most emblematic character is a beggar who trails people outside the offices of her car on something called Dead Man's Curve, the former New York hotshot is the cue for what in movies is called a "conversion narrative," in which a schematic, but much of what's outside its ramrod narrative is masterfully perfect health to be killed), the meetings between the warden and his guards on for classic scenes if the former had known how to rein in the latter: Woods has own blowhard characters. Two funny, affecting sequences exploit every father's obliged to take his little girl to the zoo, so he stuffs her into a cart and visiting for the last time, loses a green crayon she needs to draw grass, and her mounting hysteria conveys her grief at the loss of her daddy more a wayward savior, "Where were you all this time?" Shrugs the journalist, by way condemned so many killers to death with his .44-caliber Magnum gives the to articulate something clearly beyond his range resulted in the one true multidimensional performance of his career: the aging Secret Service agent of acting style is based on a gunfighter's paranoia, on letting others speak (and voice, which never had much timbre, has grown so raspy that you can practically see the flakes of his vocal cords swirling around his head like dandruff. as such had little say about the thrust of the script. She could not alter the coven of frontier cannibals to, say, lapsed Catholic priests, although I bet that the idea crossed her mind. Even so, the first half of Ravenous is heat of battle, then awoke to find himself lodged under a messy corpse, the create a world of blinding white peaks and deep black crevices in which demons reaching out to other people sometimes takes the form of ingesting them. The metaphor would be better if left suggestive, if the strange new appetites were and "Manifest Destiny." But the second half of Ravenous is almost literally a dumb vampire picture, in which the chief vampire woos a reluctant having been forced to cook and eat his horses, dogs, and traveling sort of fellow who'd think it his duty to explore things that the rest of us, deep down, want to know about but wouldn't dream of investigating ourselves. into the snow." The report began, "Wailing children stumbled alone out of turn on the main road. Shoes lay scattered along the road as if their owners had just stepped out of them, together with scraps of clothing. Fleeing The image of monsters in masks was common to the reporting religious conflict, the paper said that "armed mobs paraded the severed heads of their victims through villages" and that "the bridges in one town had been hung with the dismembered parts of the victims' bodies." It explained, "The headline "Cannibal warriors feast on bodies of their victims." The paper's spears, rifles and machetes displayed a severed ear and a human arm and offered ate a piece of cooked flesh, which he claimed to have cut from the body of a record after four attempts. It said that the Virgin boss could now perhaps complained about people saying that the author's dream had finally been common with this technological and commercially sponsored feat. and the media." The volume of movie advertising has never been so high, he said, and there is also "an unprecedented plethora of news about movies and names in the casts and the films with big numbers in their budgets is denied by the gatekeeper publicists." The Standard 's front page carried a photo of beautiful and a fine actress," he said. "She's not a monster. She has many positive qualities, but people in crises do desperate things. I wouldn't define that he can have a bathroom to himself. He also said he is mystified by his films' lack of success in the United States in comparison with their reception of community" as the cause of the madness. As if! There is no public suburban public high school. Assemblies, homecoming week festivities, car wash in their participants the "school spirit" that persuades many alumni to return to town every five years for reunions to celebrate high school's glory combined a squishier communitarian criticism ("it may be too simple to say that with little identity of their own, save the identity borrowed from mass culture, but it may not be too far off, either") with his media monism: would know that such high schools suffer from an overdose of community, Columbine evidently overflowed with this sort of school spirit, most of which revolves around student athletics. The latest consensus meticulously prepare and then execute the killings. At Columbine and suburban high schools elsewhere, athletics are the biggest tool in creating the sense of basketball and football gods, and favoritism for the top jocks is institutionalized in the name of fostering a sense of community. It's more than curious that at institutions supposedly dedicated to academics, values created by administrators, teachers, parents, and the media exacerbate barely controllable gangs from the gridiron free rein to commit verbal and physical aggro upon the castes below. Most victims of the harassment and ostracism survive. Some drop out of school or transfer. In my day, one hassled anticipated by popular culture. It's particularly strange that the supposedly entertainment is the only important reality, on notice that high schools are communities that are hardly tolerant, accepting, or even rational. Are the public vows to rebuild Columbine also a vow to resurrect the very community interpreted as an extreme desire to join a community whose values they had thought that they had cast out Columbine's influence. But they absorbed their atrocity. Yet right up to their donning black trench coats for the last time, they would probably have preferred being honored at a Columbine pep rally begs for resolution. It's common knowledge that many big box office stars often There, in front of the breathless masses, it fell from her ear while she, being the consummate professional, continued without even seeming to notice. One might have assumed that as soon as the camera panned elsewhere, she scooped up the errant earring. However, for the rest of the event she was photographed Was it borrowed or her own? Ah, for the good old days when there was no doubt herself, loves jewelry and is known to intimates as Sparkle Plenty. Alas, no jewelers have ever offered to lend her any baubles. when she and her husband invite me over to their apartment. It's filthy and disgusting! Cats crawl all over you, and the noxious fumes of the litter box with dishes that have been there for days on end. From having lived with her over to my place as often as possible, but I can only refuse going to theirs so much before their feelings get hurt. How can I handle this? are feeling faint of heart about leveling with your chum, simply refuse to that you would take a more direct approach, which might actually be doing a kindness. Since you and this longtime pal have a history of warmth and friendship, why not tell her the conditions in her home are way beyond the nutty about people who are able to ignore an extreme mess and the sensibilities of others. In the spirit of constructive advice, a word from you might focus her attention and remedy the situation. If not, simply state that you can no a campaign for public office. I would appreciate advice on how best to share details of my life with voters. I grew up poor. My mother (from another a result of poverty we were homeless a few times, and the kids spent some time in foster care. Today we are all doing well. I have been able to achieve the and a wonderful family. I think this is an inspiring story of what is right people to feel sorry for me because of the deprivations of my youth. At the same time, I do want some credit for being able to overcome some serious challenges. How do you think I should handle this information? your campaign speeches and literature just as you have in your letter. Your the perfect approach. You would only elicit sympathy if the deck stacked bulge. Everyone in my family is overweight. I, however, am determined to lose weight and keep it off. The keeping it off is the problem. When I eat at home I can control what's going on. When in a restaurant, I can somewhat control things. When at dinner parties, however, I am totally at the mercy of the ideas for people in my situation? I know we must be legion. everything you are served, and push the unconsumed portion around on your of more and more people having a bite or two of desert, for example, and then eating no more. And she is sympathetic to your plight. For some reason, even hostesses who themselves try to eat nutritiously feel that dinner party fare requires a feast, where everything on the plate is essentially a butter disbanded a public memorial service, and excised all mention of the anniversary date's significance but stressed the importance of "stability above all else." Japan legalized the Pill. Health officials approved birth control pills after several decades of debate. Women's groups asked why it has younger, faster, and better without him. The cynical spin: This is the first to the presidency. The more surprising news: The election was free of the The Federal government will investigate the marketing of violent explore whether or not media companies intentionally lure young customers with violent imagery. Why the study won't be useful: The First Amendment protects marketers from being legally forced to tone down their pitches. Why the study will be useful: It will give Al Gore a reply to Republican accusations that the (Click here to see the hackers' mischief posted on the Senate suspected hackers. The hacker community's reaction to the press: vigorous denial of wrongdoing. The reaction within hacking circles: vigorous jockeying program is broke. Set on cruise control, Mir will eventually burn up reaction: relief that Mir won't drain financing from the international space station, along with the usual orbital traffic worries about a large abandoned that debuts in today's issue. I could speak volumes about our ambition to balance white space with type, and art with copy. About our quest to create more readable Web pages. About new navigation that makes dancing through The "Navigation Banner," that maroon stripe that says to see a list of the entire current content, just click the Complete button on the Navigation Banner. If you really prefer this one, we encourage you into four sections: "Briefing," "Features," "24/Seven," and "Utilities." section as your quick hit on the day's and week's news. "Today's Papers, Papers" does the same for the world press three times a week. "In Other chart the critical consensus about books, movies, art, and music in "Summary sessions at the water cooler). There's more good stuff in Briefing, including rubric, we've grouped our regular articles, news commentary, and arts and Breakfast Table" and "The Book Club" and "Dialogues" about the pressing issues meditations on business, "Chatterbox" commentaries on politics, and delivery and access to our archives.) Click on Utilities if you want to print Move your cursor to the Navigation Banner at the top of this page, and click on the Briefing section head. A "drop down" menu will appear and reveal the contents of Briefing. Now, move your cursor to the other section heads. Additional menus listing the contents will drop down. To select an article in a drop down menu, click on it. Congratulations, you've mastered Navigation Banner is that every page now contains a complete to the big table of contents every time you find more good stuff to read. Of course, if you fancy the big table of contents, just click New Today, Complete, about the drop down menus is that they list the headlines of the most recent persuade you to check out other good stuff currently on our site. These would continue to list links to the best Internet sites and to pertinent articles in the "Related on the Web" box. Look for both boxes at the bottom of most out? I think not. But we're eager to hear what you think about our new look and motivated by what's to come, but a fear of being left out as the train is pulling away from the station, with some exotic station in mind." Who said this college student knows this one! They are the four sentences you always insert in plagiarized papers to throw the professor off track."-- Dale and villains who personify the culture's values and vices. That function is now provided by our daily papers, which offer a kind of ongoing myth, related to but not a literal rendering of any actual events, much as the Old Testament erotic dynamo, female; the sexless genius, male only; the sexless workaholic, If you follow our Ongoing Epic, you become familiar with these characters, handy for making metaphors or making conversation with sections of many daily papers, devoted to so much that is clearly not aspects of life provide additional character types, imps and demigods, nymphs we'd sprinkle our conversations with references to gods and goddesses; instead figure if that clever trickster were just a little less, well, clever. See patient; "building a better watch" is developing new medical techniques if you really torture the metaphor. He's a doctor, damn it, not an English speaker. Centers runs in today's New York Times under the banner: "When it comes some all too infrequently asked questions with answers gleaned from the ad and but he appears to be embarrassed by his unusually small penis. of the time and to all of the people some of the time, but not to all of the people all of the time." And then he didn't go on to add: "Is that the Emancipation Proclamation in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" Q: But surely there is nothing known to medical science that could possibly give me a lovelier scrotum, that could make a silk purse out of my, er, A: "Yes, there is. It's possible to do a fat transfer to the scrotal sac, which Q: How do I know where my penis fits in? No, wait, let me rephrase shows the percentage of the population that has various sizes of erect penis penises. We're not a country full of guys only 6-inches tall. Now that would be funny. Little 6-inch guys. Can you imagine! Is that my phone?) A: Indeed it does. They'll put you in mind of a rather odd fishing trip. Q: Isn't there some way you could cash in on the insecurities of women as Q: Isn't there some way you could use your medical training to help women not just to women. If you can afford it, we'll happily suck the fat out of a poodle or a peach cobbler. In accordance with medical ethics, of course. Q: What's all this going to cost me? Not me, but one of those small penis select. All fees include the procedures you've selected, all facility costs, Q: So, I suppose that rules out some kind of blinking red light? the radio, we should all be worried about "compulsive gamblers" who spend several hours a day playing slot machines. I can't figure out what the voice was thinking. Nobody who spends several hours a day playing slot machines can be called a gambler. Gambling is about risk and uncertainty. Sit long enough in front of the slots, and you'll lose your money at an entirely predictable rate. does: He takes a large fraction of what he's got and risks it on a single spin of the wheels. You don't see much of that in the casinos. Instead, you see folks lugging around buckets filled with quarters, parceling those quarters out one at a time. There's a name for that strategy: It's called diversification, and its purpose is to eliminate risk. The more time these people spend at the compulsive, but there are still distinctions worth maintaining. These people aren't addicted to gambling. They're addicted to sitting in front of slot Internet. I know this because my bidding strategy, which would appear insane to any casual but thoughtful observer, makes sense only in the presence of a compulsion to spend as much time as possible monitoring my auctions. amount you'd be willing to pay; then sit back and wait to see if you've auction, where the high bidder pays his own bid, bidders usually try to auction, because the amount you pay is independent of the amount you bid. If Moreover, the same reasoning says that it makes not a shred of difference whether I bid early or late. So, why do I repeatedly find myself bidding furiously in the last five minutes of an auction and submitting three irrationally or my analysis of bidding strategy contains an invalid assumption. in front of the pack, I might revise my valuation and submit a new bid. Of course, that explanation works only if I care about the For me, though, the resale market is irrelevant; I never resell anything, (On the other hand, maybe I do care about resale prices, because I like knowing simplistic "bid and wait" strategy. I bid low at first to convince my competitors that the item isn't worth much. Then I jump in with a higher bid at the end, hoping that at least some of those competitors are away from their leisurely when bidders have little to learn from each other (say, when they're bidding on a new computer that's been widely reviewed) and intense when some bidders are far more expert than others (say, when they're bidding on a heart defibrillator for home use). That's a nice testable hypothesis. Unfortunately, three bidders submitted eight different bids in the first three days. Now, if that he's well informed about its quality. So why are these people revising Maybe they're just addicted to bidding. Maybe I am too. cars, Beanie Babies, and underwear, all at prices that adjust instantly to the explained only by subtler and more carefully tested theories that have not yet those theories will be the stuff of doctoral theses for a long time to events of Flytrap from the perspective of a reporter who in investigating the story became a key player in it, since news that his article might appear adviser and put many of the key figures involved in Flytrap in touch with one dexterity of its execution. It must be difficult to type and cover one's butt enthralling tale, one feels a "please don't hit me" cringe coming from the author. Nonetheless, he plunges relentlessly ahead as he details his deep editors and sucks up to his sources, who he wants the reader to believe are as He is particularly savage to the woman the media love to hate (a cheap and easy shot in order to provide the book with a villain). source to provide cover for his own deep activity as a deep player in this long before I met him. He was one of my heroes, for quitting his job at the heard before in a book proposal she submitted to my literary agency in l996. Subsequently, she had withdrawn the project and we parted company, a common first phone conversation I learned that she now had far more damaging information about the president. Would I help her get the story out through this enthralling tale of the fact that I "secretly" taped those first calls everything and everyone that passes through my life as a possible book. As time: Expect to be taped. It's legal and it saves me pawing around on my night liked him. He had no small talk, he barely smiled, his shirt was out, his tie offered to play them for the reporter. He declined. In Uncovering less biased observers than me. He claims he didn't want to become a part of the story. Jeepers! I wish I had known that: I wouldn't have spent countless hours on the phone with him after that meeting, keeping him up to speed as we worked us and exclaim, "What do you know? It's true. It's really true." ongoing documentation. But I should have paid closer attention. Right there on understand how important this is. Without that, if I can't write that there is what I was telling them. It is the way reporters operate: We threaten, we cajole, we feign sympathy. But the truth for me was slightly different: Whatever was on those tapes, listening to them, and quoting them, would make squall, comes without warning. What he meant, of course, was that he could put his hands back on the keyboard. His butt was covered. what makes it so engrossing. He guarded the story with the ferocity of a mother tiger hovering over the last shard of an impala's bloody haunch. Never mind It is a riveting tale written by someone who gave it texture as it unfolded, and I doubt that any reviewer save this one will take of mine made during a phone call at the end of the whole ordeal. He tells me did to me what we did to him, I would hate them too." president and proclaim that theirs will be the most ethical administration in history. None of us will ever take a manipulative young intern into the Oval Office bathroom and have her perform sex acts about which we will force an is true, I will simply bypass the agonizing mainstream media, the doubting don't know each other. I am undecided about whether or not to get breast implants. I have convinced myself that they are not dangerous. The issue, now, is the correctness of having such a procedure. I do not mean political asked before to decide about someone's chest enhancement. reasons for considering implants. Are you built like a boy? Do you think a pair of remarkable hooters will change your life for the better? Do you think drawing attention to your chest is a good thing? In general, there do not seem personal view is that implants fool very few people (they often do not feel attribute the phrase to the proper person, but some clever soul named the bearers of implants "the balloon smugglers." That pretty much expresses and do his homework. By actually describing the addressee's future act of leaving the presence of the speaker, the "off you go" indicates a request for "there you go" has no such unpleasant connotations is that it describes, in the retail context, the state in which the customer finds him- or herself after "there you are.") In other words, it functions as a polite observation your internationalist input on the issue of "there you go." She found it enlightening and thoughtful. Whoever named your part of the world "down under" Mother's Day, here is my problem. I am married to a lovely man with a charming birthday, Mother's Day, etc. Although she clearly loves a fuss, her sons and husband produce not a cake, a card, a flower, or a gift. A year ago, I realized everyone expected me to attend to these details, which I had previously neglected to do. I am happy to celebrate her occasions in a way she would enjoy, but I resent being expected to handle this task for everyone just because I am a woman. Should I put feminist principles aside and do my familial duty because it's the nicer thing to do, or should I leave it to the men to the plus side is "a lovely man with a charming family." On the minus side, these male people can't seem to get it together to do anything about occasions. you will lose the resentment factor. Do the thoughtful thing for your lovely members, and who knows? In time you might have trained them by example, without party? My brother brought friends of his to a brunch I gave recently. Not only did these friends have too much to drink, but they actually stayed later than course I will never invite these people to my home again, but was there a more direct, yet still polite, way I could have induced them to leave? invite these people again. My dear, you didn't invite them the first once a hint is ignored. (Granted, people who aren't sober can be rather slow on the uptake.) Simply say the festivities are over and you hope they had a good time. If they wore wraps, hand them to them. If the weather is too warm, thank them for coming and walk with them to the door. Do not take no for an answer. prominently reported their countries' firm opposition to the use of ground war strategy. It said a rift was opening "between the more hawkish governments political reasons, for a diplomatic and political breakthrough." But the strengthen the case for intensified military action. The Times said in Apache attack helicopters, as part of a more precise and sophisticated military widely reported refusal to rule out the use of ground troops, the Times continued to portray him as a wimp. "Leadership, for the moment, lies with candyfloss illusion" created by his Downing Street spin doctors. "We are now in administration is "quietly euphoric" about the election of Labor Party leader Welt said that his election "arouses new hope worldwide for peace." In that the election was not "a referendum on peace." It was "a personal, The Times said there can now be progress toward peace, "but only if all sides are willing to subordinate rhetoric to realism." The Guardian said him to pursue much the same policies while retaining Western support. won the elections he would prove to be "the great savior who rids the he finds anyone among us to sing along with him, then we can bid what remains Security. As part of their effort to seize the Social Security issue, and in particular their campaign for privatization, they argue that the Social The March issue of Essence magazine invites readers to visit a "community activist" Web site about Social Security and become involved "to editorialized recently: "The average black male can expect to work all his life people, then drop dead a month or two after he collects his first Social and plausible: Everybody pays into the system during his or her working years then gets a monthly check during retirement. Since blacks have a shorter life expectancy than whites, they are getting a worse deal and, in effect, So, why is this wrong? First of all, Social Security is progressive by design. Everybody pays the same share of income into the system people get more (not in absolute terms, but compared with their contributions), Office confirms that this formula outweighs the effect of lower life expectancy benefits don't go just to elderly retirees. The program pays benefits to younger people with disabilities that prevent them from earning a living, and also to surviving spouses and minor children of deceased participants. Blacks of the Social Security benefits paid to surviving children. The main source for the Social Security Screws Blacks campaign is a study by (who else?) the Heritage Foundation. Its study has been Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Among other "rate of return" on Social Security is calculated by imagining that each of a person's payments into the system over the decades is deposited in an account, from which payments from the system are subsequently withdrawn. Then you Even if Heritage's calculations were accurate, its choice of year would be tendentious. Almost all current retirees are getting a positive rate of return on the very low payments they made for most of their working lives, even if some are getting a better return than others. Conversely, people in their 20s and 30s today will get a negative rate of return, though some will be more negative than others. Heritage chose a year when, by its calculation, the general population was still just barely in positive territory while blacks had moved into negative numbers, in order to claim that blacks' losses were subsidizing whites' profits. That would never be true of the system as a whole, even if it were true of people born around is only one way to think about Social Security, and not necessarily the best. Another is as insurance against poverty in old age or disability at any age. When you buy auto insurance, you don't hope for a lot of accidents to improve your rate of return on the premiums. Social Security is also a transfer their money is going to today's retirees, rather than being invested for their own benefit. Proposals to improve the rate of return for Gen X and after, through privatization and what not, invariably omit the money current workers will have to supply to current retirees one way or another from their of return on Social Security, the only one based on records of actual workers "Between 'principal' and 'principle.' As we know, the school principal is our of educator who has delighted his kindergarten students with a wedding for Sleeping Beauty, complete with limousine and cake, teaching them, I suppose, that nothing is worthwhile unless it is entertaining. By that standard, I owe books. At the time I agreed, but now he goes around saying he learned more from program is sponsored by Scholastic Inc., best known among impressionable school States. The idea that we're not going to live to see it is not one that's electoral votes needed to be President. Scientists know it's a worthwhile pursuit, but this makes it known to the wider public." "Will we find intelligent life in space in my lifetime? The answer "Now the question is, 'Can you win?' It's a very remote from Mars. Too Eastern, too liberal, too intellectual." exhilaration. There is a general belief that while it is a difficult pursuit, this is so important that it is worth the time." the conclusion that the occurrence of technological life is an extremely rare who'll never walk his dog off the leash again. Finishing my week as guest host, contributions over the last few days are all the gratification I require. There York magazine says, "There's nothing much to this movie except a lot of The film follows the trajectory of an intense friendship that develops between (a reporter goes back to high school undercover) is trite but say the dreamy neither to her talents nor to her fans." But this is a minority view. Most find footloose days after a wild 'n' crazy friend from the old days comes to town. Contrary to expectation, the film ends up celebrating his marriage; it's a wife who manages to make humdrum domesticity appealing. "The odd aspect of the film is that, though we quickly realize we have seen this story before, it's she makes the prospect of a life amid those metros and under those gray skies the New York Times Book Review is nothing more than a long plot description with a single sentence of critical response: He calls it "exuberant that the play "manages to entertain even at its darkest and preachiest." writes, "On the move, he is a panther in pants; when still, a coiled cobra." Fill in all three blanks with the same word in this remark by Hoover in business." But in assembling News Quiz, the persistent problem is not trivializing the great events of the day (although that is an enduring runs but a single question, and it seldom refers to the day's most important story. I am, perhaps, feeling a little uneasy over the question selected for although a question ostensibly neglects a vital story, its answer may be unrest is. There is no unrest going on in the city." other officials, religious leaders, actors, civilians. And there are also kill anyone, either. Well, he didn't note it, but he might have. was a directorial decision designed only to provide the most appealing shots, file footage reveals the network's commitment to accurate reporting. and primal man and equate civilization with corruption tend to play as if their those pictures always feel as if they've been honed with the help of focus groups in suburban shopping malls to ensure that no aspect will be jarring to But every one of those conceits is rendered toothless by a form of storytelling that's the opposite of instinctual. The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department. hectors the former about the destructive path of modern society and restates the history of the world as a struggle between "leavers" (animals, wise nomadic tribes) and "takers" (mostly white males). Someone must have spent a fortune to dialogue with huge chunks of the Earth First! manifesto wouldn't burn up the standby, the series of charged encounters between a psychiatrist and a shackled society are the ones who are actually in need of curing. (Come to think of it, of the shrink who concludes that a boy who blinded eight horses with a metal spike has a passion sadly lacking in his sterile countrymen.) The ambitious lives with the animals, takes on their behavior, becomes one of them," says in check, smoking intensely while her eyes water and her chin quivers. Will she has been immobilized by a senior citizen? Control? No: No one has control. cruelty arises out of an obsession with control: What makes him scary is his supposedly primal subject. The larger problem is that Instinct doesn't have the courage to leave its natural subjects untamed. The gorillas are his eyes misting up. But Instinct is the work of players. Film Center, which was marked by uneasy throat clearing and lots of walkouts. a white stallion and in range of a (disappointingly ordinary) snake. At the Before that, seminal episodes of disillusionment, jealousy, English in lingerie for a drowsing old white pervert. Cut to an English photos of a naked woman stabbed by a lover, a corpse bloated after three weeks in the kitchen of their country cottage while his young son, clutching a to meet his falling body, he sees himself and his wife walk into their country cottage and close the door. Cut to a shot of newborn twins, who are then The twins nearly meet each other in an airport, but fate keeps them from sexual innocence, exploitation of Third World peoples, and a tragic retaliation. The soundtrack is melancholy classical piano. is a point too obvious to belabor. Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious. What can I say? The man gives good movie. and recent press conference: "I think it's very important. And I think that what young people will learn from my experience is that even presidents have to do that, and that there are consequences when you don't." Awards broadcast yields one perfect remark. Participants are invited to predict "They Don't Have the Met Here, but They Do Have Back to the Future: The Ride, awful enough to enjoy as camp. (Yes, Rocky was claptrap, but my taste for cleavage and greed. There's a relentless evolution in this sort of event, from genuinely interesting, to ludicrously bad, to soporifically bland. instead or watching the Academy Awards, I rent All About Eve and heave a smoke bomb through Democratic Party headquarters. And the best thing about my implicit pledge to discourage erotic sonnets about Al Gore. physiological research into fear has found it surprisingly and unfashionably suggests the research, is learned, permanent, involuntary, and inaccessible to polygamy has long been officially outlawed but is quietly tolerated. Now angry former wives are organizing outreach groups, and vast polygamous clans are the newsweeklies flirt right back with cover stories and ample advice. will eat her alive, the Senate's a grind ("you won't fly on Air Force One or ride in escorted motorcades"), and she'd eventually make an even better clear she even wants to run. The White House may be floating the idea simply to sliding, and the cost of supporting the elderly could cause a global recession. The first casualty is Brazil, whose fat public pension program is eating up turns to her witch handbook for spiritual advice. One popular version includes conservatives. Even his Murphy Brown speech has aged well: "People will see that her sitcom has been canceled and that he's back on the scene," insists ideological and geographic support is wide, his fiscal support is deep, and his appeals to diversity and tolerance. Instead, they're attracted by unabashed, ideologically strict insistence on assimilation through English education. Republicans, the first lady initially wanted to be Al Gore's running mate. to debate: Unlike the Republican Party, it would be sober, earnestly religious, represented the industry while in private practice and was appointed on the Finally, if you're a little rusty on what exactly they're fighting about in two months ago was said, even by his supporters, to be 'not taking off' until turnout by voters opposed to him, so as to ensure his defeat. It described his statements in the final days of the campaign as "further proof of his lack of editorial said. "The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary must now convince president and himself. "The vast bulk of this military operation is being said in an interview. "Their commitment and leadership is something for which reluctance to commit ground troops has hardened rather than softened and the President has followed the line of least resistance." interview that he had only signed to give his family some space, since he was their stand, "have continued the barbaric raids on an even larger scale against that "not a word in support of the president has been said in the three days of spoke against the impeachment solely in the interests of preserving a semblance of "transparency" and candor, believing this to be the best guarantee of sound things. So what would have been the point of a secret meeting? That is him, and he found himself boycotted by Turkey's political parties. The added. "At this juncture in particular, what better price could there have been "no doubt that the military alliance with Turkey is one of the most important inherently involves targeting common enemies, or at least fosters the sharp distinction between Turkey's war with what it defines as a terrorist people," the editorial concluded. "In the aftermath of the tragic incident in Berlin, this distinction must now be expressed openly and publicly in such a which see Turkey's human rights record as a serious impediment to its ambition The difference in this case, though, was that the photo was "propaganda material of a government which calls itself democratic, a government of our are outnumbered by the detractors ("hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey," exciting, and marred by weak acting. Both agree that the fight scenes, an extended desert chase sequence, and the special effects and scenery are result of the advance hype but don't mention their own roles in generating that (Find out the latest news on the film on this fan site.) hilariously tacky home from being demolished for an airstrip. The film is "[a] and Martin's poppy crossover album is just what they're looking for. (This site has photos, sound The New Yorker attributes the Onion 's wildly popular deadpan humor to its location. "Instead of allowing itself to be sliced, diced, Kidder's reporting, but most find the discursive style slow going. (Listen to an interview with Kidder about how he decided to write review, praising the narrator's "compelling voice" and calling the author "remarkably assured." (Read an excerpt from the book here.) now living in exile, urged the West to give cautious support to the reforming security interests, and to entice urgently needed foreign investment. The FT claimed that the recent municipal elections backing his reform attempts to develop nuclear weapons, fueling the drive for more sanctions by particular cause for dismay over the United States' "punishing tariffs" on their products, because they have given "unquestioning and unhesitating support citizens and interests to danger, and calling into question their true colleagues on charges of criminal negligence and manslaughter in the deaths of hundreds of people who contracted AIDS in the 1980s from transfusions of ordinary accused have ever been treated with such consideration in the annals of French justice." Special justice means that the strong always triumph, it added, and to this there was only one solution: "The same court for everyone, which would be a revolution in our judicial customs." technological training for police operatives in order to combat the "nefarious debut in cyberspace." The police, it added, must be kept "in pace with the which could transform electronic gadgetry into burglar's tools when the "international role" demanded "more serious behavior," it said. "Even the most our allies and our adversaries in the past usually take more than one day," gathered, saying that this created "a major incident" at the summit. taken away to kiss his children for the last time because he would never see Western press over the apparent lack of clear war aims and the growing fear behavior," had courted the disaster now befalling his country, the paper said, but it added: "The world is full of beasts. It is also full of oppressed minorities struggling to be free. Which beasts do we bomb? Which minorities do we champion? When do we charge to the rescue and when do we shrug and look away? What are the rules of the game? After yesterday, nobody knows." missile attacks, far from frightening "the great ethnic purifier of the negotiating table, but that will without doubt be only to effect the partition failing to take responsibility for its own security. History has shown that military campaigns are only successful if their aims are defined beforehand, political solution, saying that if the bombing goes on for long, the alliance not"; the Independent said that the United Nations had already agreed achieve it; and the Times urged the expedition of an International Monetary Fund authority of the United Nations and lead to a resumption of the Cold War, while Nations. He called for a new international agreement of the kind that replaced the League of Nations with the United Nations, for it was unacceptable that the United Nations should become "merely a building where people go to complain or engage in Byzantine debates over texts that everyone knows the big powers will substitute for considered plans to impose peace and protect people from military intervention in the internal conflicts of any state. "If tensions "And if the aim of the intervention is to protect oppressed minorities, why, Selectivity in approaching issues of human rights and described the bombing as a step toward initiating a new, modified Cold War and should run for president. After a parade of adulatory speeches from committee members, he fielded questions. One reporter asked whether abortion should be illegal in the first trimester. "That's a hypothetical question," said Bush. What about global economic instability? "I won't have specific remedies or specific suggestions until I start moving around the country," Bush replied. missile treaty? "I will be glad to answer all those questions once I get out in the course of the campaign," Bush offered, ending the press conference. "campaign" has been underway for a year. He has plotted strategy, assembled a campaign team, pitched to donors, courted politicians, and written letters to by the end of March. For the next three months, his "exploratory" committee will raise money and build a campaign staff. Yet Bush remains clueless about many national issues and, on others, he knows he can only lose votes by being pinned down. Moreover, the longer he postpones his candidacy, the longer he deprives his rivals of a target, thereby starving them to death. For these reasons, Bush is claiming immunity to policy questions. And he's getting away conference, Bush refused to answer questions about tax cuts and other "issues" committee, seemed deeply moved. "I think Gov. Bush's keeping his commitment to the convenience of this excuse, Bush spun it as a sacrifice. He regretted that he wouldn't be "able" to visit key primary states for months. "Some have said, job to do." The press swallowed this line whole. Bush "is understandably refusing to travel the country to raise money and court supporters." fair trade," "local control of schools," "strong families," and "personal responsibility." When asked about specific issues, he referred back to his principles. "How exactly do you plan to preserve the prosperity of the United States?" asked one reporter. "When I start to emerge out of the state after the making decisions." On foreign policy, he said only that his "framework" would deflect scrutiny from his own views, Bush stacked his committee with people who cited his "principles," babbled about missile defense, and said, "I of course will be relying upon the briefings on details from people such as Dr. Rice." serve him particularly well on social issues. He has conspicuously courted magic words, "He loves the Lord." Conservative pundits are particularly excited to hear a lot from [Bush] is cultural conservatism." lie in politics rather than policy, he steers attention to his campaign juggernaut rather than to his platform. "The men and women on this stage represent the best of the Republican Party," he boasted at his press Congress who have already endorsed your candidacy," and Bush's aides distributed a similar list to reporters. On the weekend chat shows, pundits marveled at Bush's deluge of endorsements, his bottomless coffers, and his godlike standing in the polls. Bush never explicitly brings up money or polls, because he doesn't have to. But he counts on them to keep the press pining for positions, Bush morphs the question into attack politics and attack journalism. "I will campaign on my beliefs and my principles, and I will not engage in the petty politics of personal destruction," he insisted. A reporter asked him about conservative opponents who associate him with his father's moderation. tearing down your opponent," Bush sniffed, "and I would hope others wouldn't Bush's wife and daughters provide another handy shield. "I had doubts and concerns about what a campaign would mean for my family," he confided to the assembled scribes. "I convinced my wife that I love her and committee's three front women, implored Bush's wife and daughters to endure the campaign's "trial by fire." Bush has milked this protective anguish for months. that Bush "take some positions" on "abortion, taxes, China, homosexual rights," flat tax? Or are we, as I am, for tripling the tax deduction for each child to Are we for English for the children on the first day of school, or are we for school where the old ideals of liberal education remained the most intact. Now that bastion of tradition is itself under attack, not by deconstructionists and proposal to transform the old "Common Core" curriculum, some version of which university administration wants to reduce the number of required courses in the longstanding foreign language requirement. Students, faculty, and alumni who object to this change are also up in arms about a plan to expand the size of but fun. One way this makeover is to be accomplished is by changing the I should probably start by declaring my own hypocritical about attending "The University" as it was known in my family, before deciding that it was a bit too cloistered and socially claustrophobic for my taste. both because college is partly about leaving home and because I think it would for the reasons that its officials are worried about, I can't easily argue that instinctive sympathies are entirely with the alumni who are withholding around discussion in small seminars. I think it's important that the beacon of economist who casts the need to change as a simple issue of competition. "choice" about what to study by other colleges and universities. Opponents of culture of the school he runs. One sign was his hiring as one of his vice making the university more "fun" until he was driven out a few weeks ago. The composition in the curriculum are liberal professors, students, and alumni, who billion endowment is puny compared to the big Ivy League universities', and it has run a small deficit in some years. The main reason its financial situation has a much higher proportion of unprofitable graduate students. Undergraduates are the cash cows of higher education, both because they pay tuition and because they later contribute money when they become alumni. The unstated logic of the changes is roughly as follows: To produce more revenue you need more members. It's retail rather than wholesale education and requires more faculty larger seminars and using more graduate teaching assistants. Those protesting more smart kids by becoming an easier school that offers its students less individual attention? This isn't necessarily as nutty at is sounds. Consider Brown, whose undergraduates have a higher average SAT score than those at has a reputation for being a blast and lacks any real requirements. The problem and reputation are on the other side of this divide. Intellectual intensity is except insofar as intellectual stimulation is a species of pleasure. That does not, however, condemn it to an inexorable But if it does need to woo more undergraduates, it would probably have better curriculum. It boasts about its set menu instead of apologizing for not being a time of confusion about the ends and means of higher education, it has the clearest and best notion of what constitutes one. This is isn't simply reading sequence of courses intended to develop critical thinking in a wide variety of League rivals are, the administration should quit worrying about it. Part of comparable elite institutions. Unconventionally gifted kids, who didn't get top grades in high school or who don't have perfect SAT scores, stand a better it finally give in and become more like everywhere else. inside the News Quiz Tower (it's not yet killed as many people as that new the observation deck) and learn what it takes to get a hefty 400-pound hog from the farm to your table to the president's desk where it is signed into law. By which I mean: How did we select today's question? By rejecting these three: last week. We try for variety in form as well as in subject matter. you know you can survive it. It's not so foreign to you.' Handle what?" that participants would do well with, but it refers to too trivial a story, of elements, and it's sure fun to type out "sex site Meow Media," but rejected for both form and content. We've used this structure recently, and it's a something with either the war or the president's contempt citation, and eager to use "I give the headline; you give the lead," or "I give the answer; you give the question," or "I give the caption; you describe the photo," three nice knee riding a winner; she won two more races before going to the hospital. Downside: Open bar means hundreds of young professionals party on way over, get tanked on margaritas, make crude pass at Charlie Downside: Overt use of phrase "crumbs from rich man's table" could cause scores of diners to die of embarrassment. which could not have condemned it more severely. It has been "an unrelieved disaster plan to do about it? Why, bomb some more, of course." The Globe and Mail times, the West has threatened dire consequences and then done nothing. It is But true atonement requires sacrifice. In expiating its guilt over past failures, the West has instead sacrificed the lives of the helpless civilians was a world war. "The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, so whom would a world war be between?" he asked. "If there is a risk, it is that the conflict will press, which has been strongly supportive of the bombing campaign, the focus said in an editorial that aid was now the priority. "The same concentration of effort and the same plethora of assets lavished on the aerial war against its entire front page with a picture of two families of refugees under the headline: "This is the reality of the war. Two mothers, five children, seven regarding the use of ground troops as both desirable and a distinct will have the full moral right to say, 'I did all I could'; and if he succeeds, the rewards would be tremendous." The paper went on, "He would not only greatly increase his international standing, but the achievement of any peace, however with the vast influx of refugees and the establishment of a judicial task force "There is no justification whatsoever for constantly invoking the idea that my made only "vague declarations condemning genocide wherever it may be" and that versed in pogroms, cannot stand on the side, watching an institutionalized interest, let alone outrage. But more than a quarter of a million furious comments flooded the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to protest the "Know Your would have required that banks determine customers' sources of funds, create client profiles based on transaction patterns, monitor accounts for deviations, investigate irregularities, and report unexplained activities to federal nation's editorial writers. Also fanning the public outrage were the Eagle Congress introduced five measures by late March to kill the initiative. Also Federal Reserve, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of think the public would stand for such gross intrusions into their privacy; and, of fines and sanctions, banks must also report all transactions greater than "relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation." This includes unexplained transactions that are "not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage" or that have no "apparent lawful Financial Crimes Enforcement Network aggregates the reports and makes them unsubstantiated allegations can be maintained indefinitely and is routinely accessed by law enforcement authorities, who often go fishing for financial data. The information, however, only flows one way: Banks are prohibited from disclosing to customers that they tattled to the government, and an act of Congress shields financial institutions from liability suits. There is no authorities describe these detailed reports as essential in their battle against drug traffickers, terrorists, Medicare crooks, and embezzlers, as well regulators for snooping, surely the fury was mock. Federal and state legislators have passed new bank surveillance laws with an almost biennial the House of Representatives prodded federal banking agencies to require more bank surveillance by overwhelmingly passing a bill that would have regulations on its own initiative last fall after two years of research. One of verify the identities of new customers. It suggested that banks make visual checks of businesses and corroborate phone numbers by calling new clients under now says that it had serious reservations about the proposal, the very proposal that it nearly shepherded into law. The agency insists that it published the few comments from members of the financial community, the odd professor or more expansive burden of investigating all customers to determine if anything that elevated the subject to the national agenda. Acknowledging that they had enforcement authorities have forged a vital partnership to fight financial just as sensitivities about the Internet and other new technologies have increased demands for privacy. Now that financial data are compiled and stored digitally, it is cheap, easy, and tempting for the government to cast a wider and wider financial dragnet to build increasingly intrusive computer profiles of citizens. Attention must be paid lest the government further encroach on the of financial privacy. People want to believe that checking accounts are sacrosanct, even though they haven't been for a long time. This spring, the hand when its regulatory methods and practices were noisily scrutinized. was thriving in the shadows. Thanks to current banking regulations, more than Secrecy Act Examination Manual all but requires the adoption of "Know Your Customer" programs. Banks not heeding this "imperative" are subject to cease and desist orders and to financial penalties of thousands or millions of too depressed to get out of bed and find themselves dwelling instead on the mortality, and fixating on the sad lives of people who can only be called general the mainstream media had better sources and reported more explicit it showed in declining circulation. But now the National Enquirer and the Star are about to enter a new phase. Last month the sister Like discarded lovers who keep driving past their ex's imagining the lurid scenes that are taking place inside, the tabs can't quite Enquirer doesn't speculate as to what these might be, but what's left? Bestiality? Cannibalism? That's possible compared with what the publication as to call the first lady on her private White House line but lost the nerve to decided that it was time to tell the truth. But none of the tabs, including the "insider" says, "She honestly believes that some day when she's a huge success don't forget that at one time, while she was trying to get the interview with and as a first step to get control of her compulsion "has thrown away all her artifact, the thong of thongs, ending up in the dumpster. tabs have entered a dark, morbid phase. This week the Enquirer has a The Star has alleged it was a suicide bid. The Globe believes it may have been a murder attempt. A caption on the Enquirer 's horrifying yes, there's nothing more moving than family members "sharing" their photographs of comatose loved ones for publication. Both the Globe and the Enquirer now point the finger at her mother, Patsy, the Enquirer promising, "indictments are imminent against The conclusion the grand jury is considering is that Patsy slammed a weighs in this week with its theory that her death was the result of an pediatric ophthalmologist, advises other men who want, as she did, to change right here, and use your very thoughtful link to my current Salon obvious to anyone who can read. Just to correct the record in posting, a man with a gun was arrested outside Shearer's house a few days after home, not just Drudge. Those same sources also made it clear that the gun nut wasn't arrested outside Shearer's house, but in fact arranged voluntary beyond my competence. Sort of like journalism (or even reading) is for A. O. pointing out my errors, and I apologize to the readers of late for my carelessness. The article as now published movie houses, and other mass entertainment centers would become dominated by wealthy people? More specifically, why would letting the price of tickets rise given commodity will become more inelastic as one's income or wealth increases. This is odd because it collapses the distinction between willingness to pay and and his conclusions, it would still imply that those who pay more must also be rabid fans. Is it true that wealthy people are bigger sports fans than the don't apply to all mass entertainment venues. A particular sporting event can about alienating tens of millions of fans by allowing some advanced showings at premium prices? The movie can air for as long as it keeps packing the theaters. possible to shift our disposable income to any number of items. Why couldn't an Menace and simply forgo doing something else he obviously valued less? Charging below market prices to make tickets "affordable" does not appear to is the only one that appears to make any sense. If the value of mass entertainment is in the social experience, then guaranteeing that the venue be packed by charging below market prices is a rational policy. Many bars and clubs live and die by this principle, often giving the impression of being "packed" by letting a long line of people in at a slower rate than they been argued that the stadium contributes enormously to the baseball experience, which is why the place is packed even if the Cubs have a bad season. childproof cap it's legal and even customary to keep a loaded unlocked gun in a and even customary to keep around one's house; that's twice as many as the common than guns. (I know some people fence their swimming pools, but some keep guns locked or unloaded even if it'll save just one child's life? Unfortunately, the analysis can't be that simple, because such a restriction Nobody knows what the exact count is, and how many of these uses involve saved lives, or saved lives of kids. Nor does anyone know how many of these uses would have been frustrated by having to fumble with unlocking the gun, often in the dark, when one has just been waked up by an intruder breaking into the house. It is at least possible, though, that this number of lost lifesaving caused by having the guns loaded and unlocked. Not certain, but possible. Certainly the answer isn't certain in the other direction. question "Why would a reasonable gun owner believe that it should be legal and customary to keep a loaded unlocked gun in a house with children?" (not quite landmark: the first demonstration that reading a 'book' didn't require paper, historical accuracy I hope that the Rocket will not be so remembered. Some of john (and wherever) for a few years now using our palmtop computers. I use my easy to download books and other reading materials into a palmtop computer. (not just 'fat' people) pay more for plane tickets? After all, moving them through the air takes more fuel. Why should this argument make sense for Taken to the extreme, should small people pay less? Should small people be charged more for heat since they generate less of their own? Should smarter people pay more for school since they remember more? Should children and older people be charged more in taxes since they require more services? Should city people pay more in income taxes since they have more height and weight. These "outliers" are already accounted for. Congratulations, however: You are well on your way to being a true libertarian. the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist group that Senate Majority resolution denouncing all forms of racism and bigotry without mentioning the vote required for passage), Watts answered them from the floor: which is a national magazine, no one ran to the floor to condemn offensive in particular. Doubtful you would have said that about a Black I can understand how Rep. Watts might be annoyed by my article, and how any number of people might disagree with it for a variety of reasons. But on what basis did he go onto the floor of the House and call problem is that Watts would never be given a leading role in his party if he applied most often in my experience to white Democrats. accomplish much in the House." This is my prediction based on my assessment of Rep. Watts' record thus far and my opinion of his abilities. I might be wrong in this forecast. But either way, it's got nothing to do with the fact that The final sentence in the passage you cite contends that Rep. Watts has been elevated within the Republican Party in part because of his race. In other words, I think that affirmative action has played a role seriously maintain that Rep. Watts would have been chosen to give the of these things about a black Democrat to whom they applied. In fact, I did say bigotry. And if someone had, I would have been just as offended as I am To date, we have received no answer from Rep. Watts or his office. 's a link to my original article. Readers can make up their own minds about whether it constitutes a racist attack. woman who drags her two daughters to the ends of the earth "perfectly captures self absorbed." (This Hideous Kinky fan site offers stills from the film, a chat room, and information on the novel the film was chronicles the adventures of two innocent men sent to prison for life. Despite strains to be funny and off the wall but fails royally on both counts: It has an "offbeat eccentricity that feels like the comic equivalent of silicone the film's sexpot, "exudes all the erotic energy of an inflatable doll with a "surprisingly genial and affecting comedy about the trials and tribulations of The title refers to two Salt Lake City punks whose tentative attempts at rebellion are more funny and halfhearted than seriously anarchistic: It's "an could strike unbiased viewers as more grating than gratifying," and the film "doesn't quite grasp how its slick, flashy package undermines any actual punk to get her through. "For those who have spent years of adulthood circling awfully long time to spend in the largely unrelieved company of one little girl to find his hometown engulfed by a diphtheria epidemic and hemmed in at the economically told novel." This "deeply unsettling and sophisticated horror implicit and hollowed out, so much emptiness between the sentences, that the reader is called upon to enter, invent and rearrange," and with "a shivery first chapter of his last novel A World Away [requires finance reform and against tobacco make him seem noble, rugged, and enlightened. But the media have ignored his unsavory side, which includes damage control for foreign policy." The administration has brushed off the too much legalism, too little leadership, and the heavy new burden of monitoring trade issues (such as food regulation and environmental protection) magazine lauds a recent crop of video games that emphasize strategy and good judgment over violent combat. Even though the games are populated by ins and commandos, they are not excessively bloodthirsty; one even which purports to give clients more control of their "product." The piece sure to make tons of money and infuriate his former colleagues, but there is no guarantee that this will satisfy his gargantuan appetite for power. money men all his political life, but his focus on fund raising might overshadow his campaign message. (Evidence that this is already happening: what he's talking about." From an investment banker: He's "a very, very good continue to write her column. She was chagrined at The Nation 's recent liberal education reform has been an unmitigated failure. (See a previous for worries that they will cut services to bolster profits. them "the secret life of teens," while Time tells them cover package ("it's Lord of the Flies on a vast scale") urges early childhood intervention for difficult toddlers and "zero tolerance for bullies." Time 's cover instructs parents to check the ratings listed on video game boxes, block offensive content on their computers, and click the "history" button on their browser to see where their results: educational software gets a "wholesome"; sex and hate sites are health ("If we knew a child had a broken arm, we would take that child to an litigation targets: the killers' parents and the local police. Parents of the supported by a network of student volunteers, is winning an Internet propaganda war. The volunteers argue politely in chat rooms, maintain a sophisticated Web size of my desk."... A piece explains a new Republican plan to revamp Social Security, market fund. At retirement, you choose a payout based on that fund's prescribed so heavily that bacteria are growing resistant to them. Children, more susceptible to microbes than adults, are in the most danger. piece describes how the dog genome is being combed for clues about human genetic diseases. Because dogs are deliberately inbred, genetic diseases are convinces his patrons to use them as real cash. He claims to have "spent" divinely ordained act, intended to inspire others to spread the gospel. presidential candidate to deliver a compelling moral response to the shooting. whether readers understood it bothers me. It doesn't give enough credit to readers, for one thing, and it neglects the implicit bargain columnists strike situation to make a broad point and the columns in which he was talking about he didn't promote confusion about them. Whatever license he had was earned over a long, long time by drawing a clear line between his creations and his journalism, and by scrupulously honoring an unarticulated deal with his readers that he wouldn't lose track of which was which, so they wouldn't, either. television. (For the first few years all three men shared the "created by" movies should tell their readers that the auteur theory isn't really relevant, appearing ungrateful, I would probably rather know whether Congress also happened to support the mission I was being asked to risk my life for. place him in the forefront because he's black. The party is trying to appear inclusive when it really is not. However, to say that is his position is a result of affirmative action is offensive. Your premise that affirmative action promotes or gives positions to people of color who don't deserve or are unqualified for these positions is what I find racist. comments such as yours that debases affirmative action, and misleads and misinforms people about affirmative action policies. Affirmative action is just opportunity to display their skills. It opens doors that might have otherwise been left closed because of race. It promotes the inherent value of diversity front man, or say that he's being prostituted, or whatever. But don't say he's by kids, who, enthralled by this new technology, go up the down staircase. Then there's the saga of the dozen crummy border villages that tried to secede and really sic a swarm of killer bees on an enemy campaign rally? make your newspaper's front page, it's probably because there's hardly anyone a correspondent here. I remember one reporter identifying herself as the bureau chief for Dance magazine as she asked a question at a press conference. wakes up to discover that everyone else has been wiped out by killer robots consolations. In the old days, reporters begged in vain for interviews with the official would stand on his head and eat a bug if that would entice a foreign reporter to do an interview. My fax machine fairly hums with offers of briefings from Cabinet ministers who can't quite believe their country is no longer the lead item on the White House daily briefing. They are inevitably surprised that I don't want to drive eight hours across the country to see the first shovel of dirt turned for a new road linking two villages that most In part, my popularity may stem from the dread officials freedom to ask any question they want with a disconcerting literalness. rumors all these years are true: Do you just have one ball?" them?" He wasn't talking about his newborn infants. As I tuned to another Testicular journalism still isn't part of my beat. But I vice president actually came out to dedicate it, pronouncing the occasion as nothing less than the attainment of civilization: "When foreign investors see that big M, they know we're not running around in loincloths.") for a censorship policy that prevented their countrymen from being exposed to (too occupied with the trivial problems of the petite bourgeoisie). In the 1980s, you never traveled alone in the countryside firefight or a minefield. Not that many of us would have known what to do in chatted with the men amicably for an hour or so, and then got ready to leave. "Could I ask you a question before you go?" asked the contra commander. "What Lately, the only time reporters banded together to travel reporters in the United States complain about having to call up families of Happily, the memory of the hurricane is starting to and the House will withdraw its support for sending the troops. with ordinary people, in implicit contrast to Bush's campaign launch days earlier. Together, their announcements sandwiched the candidacy kickoff of used them to vastly improve its nuclear missiles. Republicans and the media didn't recognize, admit, or aggressively investigate the problem when the first tobacco interests and will sell its foreign cigarette business to Japan Tobacco litigation and regulation and the gradual financial buckling of evil cigarette escaping its "tobacco taint" but found instead that the taint simply spread to exploratory committee. Though he won't officially declare his candidacy until scores of governors and members of Congress who are backing him. Everyone agrees his strategy is to create an air of inevitability and suffocate his which he portrayed human recklessness, madness, brutality, murder, and nuclear savages. The completely cynical spin: He hated people and portrayed them as world's newspapers filled their front pages this weekend with what now appear stage will be enhanced. And his commitment to the morality of the conflict will spokesman with a Cockney accent has been forced to explain away an array of West owes it a debt of gratitude and it stands to gain economically from and most of the refugees are unlikely to leave for some time."); and the Treasury ("The costs of putting peacekeepers on the ground will be a major drain on resources. Then there is the cost of reconstruction: like the troops, gaining time to improve its effectiveness as a guarantor of peace"; and the new face the immense task of rebuilding the province's decimated infrastructure and heal shattered identities. Both are crucial for preventing dependency and as a sobering reminder of Japan's inability to play a meaningful political role in the ethnic dispute." A foreign ministry official attempted to save face by claiming, "There is no reason to feel belittled because I don't think, for campaign period has been festive and relatively free of violence. And the mass media, remarkably free to report on shortcomings in election administration, is not obviously trying to manipulate the electoral results, and the military actively involved in voter education and election monitoring, an unprecedented years ago, the airline commissioned artists from around the world to provide designs (click here for samples), which included images based on Delft traditional image helped to underline its reputation for reliability," said a was on the line, that the wings would stay attached to the fuselage and there would be enough fuel to complete the journey. The ethnic tails suggested an Would you advise him to skip orthodontia, telling him "appearances mean nothing wants to study law? Telling people that "time will solve all problems" is a bankrupt idea. My advice to this person is to seek help from a speech speaking the king's English. As the English say, "Accent is everything," she accepts your other arguments. She cannot resist pointing out, let's just say when the original advice was given the wheel was spinning, but thing that I have never figured out about laundry room etiquette; perhaps you can clear things up. When a washer or dryer finishes and the owner doesn't show up within a few minutes to collect the clothes, what am I supposed to do if I am waiting for the machine? Leave it and hope they remember to retrieve it, or remove the contents and place them on top of the machine or a table? practice has always been to allow about five minutes grace, then remove it. That always seemed fair to me, and I wouldn't expect more of others. However, a been apoplectic! Most people either remove their laundry right away or leave it encounter an apoplectic latecomer, just say, "Lucky you! I don't do this for friend who lies. Your answer made sense, but I have a curve ball to throw you in a variation on the same theme: My sister, whom I love very much, is prone to lying. She constantly embellishes her stories and everyday conversation with I occasionally confront her with what I know to be the truth, she gets behavior carries over to her other relationships, as I have discussed this problem with other members of my family who share my concern. What must I say to not only get her to stop lying but also to see the damage she is causing in suggests you have a tough conversation outlining the potential damage dishonesty can create in relationships with those having less "whimsy." sis is a congenital liar, words of warning will have little effect, and you cannot save her from herself. You don't mention anyone's age, but if you fail to interest her in therapeutic help, perhaps your sib could try in a man who is involved with several organizations that I fear keep people out due to sex, race, etc. He is quite wonderful, but it is impossible to reconcile this with the exclusive club business. Who is having the problem here? He You are having the problem, my dear. He is having no difficulty at all being both a loving partner and a practitioner of prejudice. You must weigh your democratic values against the romantic and the personal. If you can envision a future with a man who supports bigotry without it nagging at your principles, then by all means choose the personal over the political. travel trousers with the zippers at thigh level? Two quick zips and you're wearing a pair of shorts. Great idea! But there's a problem: I wear only white the two masters of modern painting were playing a kind of chess game all their attention by showing off, stealing from his work, and rudely parodying him. that they traded paintings, visits, and little notes. But they were too century. It's a scheme for dividing all art into two parts. Side by side, a are fundamentally, radically incompatible. Although it's possible to admire both artists, something impels you to choose sides. At the end of the day, be like a comfortable armchair. His paintings are harmonious, luxurious, and anything like the same effect. In his rendition, the same fruit on a pedestal contains an element of dissonance, disturbance, and even violence. Where Apollo, the god of light, who was associated with rationality and its orgies in the woods at which nonparticipants were ripped to pieces. The of abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release. The clash between the two the service of coming up with one of the great intellectual parlor games of all director of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York spirit is about good taste, elegance, and beauty. The Dionysian mixes bad taste subterranean, and with a deeper rhythm section, are more in touch with division into two categories in a famous essay titled "Paleface and Redskin." any natural pairing and then use that pairing to redivide the world. (Of course contain it. Its boudoir is an entire forest, symbolizing Nature itself, where becomes arbitrary and paramours interchangeable; and its last act is a setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has intercourse between mortals and fairies is meant to be commonplace. Titania, changeling boy has generated hurricanes, floods, and "contagious fogs." With with scampering street urchins and matrons kneading dough. The fairies that conventional storybook sprites, belong to a different age and culture. (The threatened with death for not obeying her father's command to marry his choice Amazonian spirit) is less sexually charged than an average coffee bicycles, which are supposed to symbolize modern liberation. But once he gets comic business is campily extraneous to the text, while the lines are blithely discovery that would surely result in their arrest on the spot instead of the most delightfully shameless extroverts, with a nagging wife and added bits in which the braggart is poignantly humiliated by children. Idiocy! framing those exquisitely suspended cheekbones. But every time she opens her Thank heaven for the rustics and for the final act, the he's in his element. He has devised a neat bit of business for the great Max Wright, whose speech about impersonating "the horned moon" is now a hasty moon. At moments like that, you can almost see the ass's head materialize on echt misunderstood teen film Knock on Any Door was made, starring closet shelf, or the drunk boyfriend who gets out his old service revolver and really cool to be postmodern and hip; but you have to pick your targets a bit for coyly sidestepping stands on significant issues. But the first primary is a year away, and the general election a year and a half away. It's already crazy that candidates have to run shadow campaigns for years and then form exploratory committees before formally announcing their candidacies. I suppose weeks) potential candidates will first announce plans to pick a committee to determine if the potential candidates should form an exploratory committee to potential voters is that we don't want to hear a potential candidates' lights aren't there, the candidates will be forced to do something practical to bide their time. And potential voters won't have to be concerned about establishing committees to determine if they should throw out their televisions Pollard case as if they were fact, in much the same way that these government officials accuse my husband in the media of crimes for which he was never with, and was not convicted of the outrageous charges now being hurled at him in the media. There is no substance to the latest pack of lies proffered by recent fabrications that have suddenly surfaced in the press to serve political years. No one in the history of the United States has ever received a life minute secret submission to the sentencing judge by then Secretary of Defense meted out a life sentence without parole. Who plea bargains for a life accused of in the media were, in fact, committed by a host of Soviet spies stopped irresponsible journalists from parroting these unsubstantiated lies. through legal channels but was thwarted every step of the way, right up to the mediums. He deeply regrets not finding a legal means to act on his concerns for the forefront. For that reason fearful officials hurl false charges at him in United States for years. As a result, China is now armed with nuclear munitions that could pose a major threat to the United States. This administration, just like its predecessors, wants people to look the other way, so it can downplay the story in the media and give implausible explanations for why a top level spy who provided nuclear munitions information to a hostile country should be fired from his job instead of being brought to trial! case. Mindlessly they swallow whole what they read in the press and continue to he got life. Proportional justice or political vengeance? Why is it that the same officials who are so relentless and vociferous in their condemnation of spy cases where the charges were far more serious and the damage was have done a great disservice not only to the case of the most damning allegations against her husband were never made make bold claims about her husband's innocence and to dismiss these damning an admitted, unapologetic spy, who told lie after lie after lie in the course we trust the judgment of the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the Committees, all of whom know exactly what Pollard did, and all of whom are is based on an identity, not primarily moral but ethical, the identity of and understanding of the person she would like to be. She clearly doesn't. desires and adaptations that make up the ego suffice. "Be true to yourself" has been reinterpreted to mean either "Getting what you want" or, more aggressively, "Express yourself (don't repress yourself)." an ongoing investigation. From whom; suggesting what? Archives said, "You have to think in terms of corporate memories. There is probably no one around who knows anything about this stuff." What stuff does anniversary, in an act of incredible corporate generosity that is every bit as is once again free. I like to think of it as my personal gift to News Quiz participants. (And the high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere that sentimentality, it's the News Quiz participants that make it fun for me. We've surprisingly affordable), and if online technology were not in its infancy, both of whom hired prominent historians. However, the natural bias of their ideology that corporations are unfairly maligned and that they are less "Tom DeLay, polling the constituents, if you catch my drift." good, and the actors are great: "Laughs battle formulas and laughs win" (Jay the movie hilarious and calls it "a slapstick fever dream.") Others find the idea of such young actors in this tale of sexual intrigue and betrayal ridiculous: "The liaisons here aren't dangerous, they're incongruous" labyrinthine and the body count high, but critics agree that the film is "dark, and dismisses the film's combination of "the music video syntax of Trainspotting with the jokey nihilist bloodletting of Pulp more interested in highlighting the tasty details than debating the literary few reviewers who delves into the book's form, as opposed to its content, is book here courtesy of the New York Times [requires free of bad reviews, but it also gets some good ones. Those who like the show call sensibilities and falls flat. "Every so often, though not close to often enough, something sharp and radiant pierces through the acrid smog that is through, and there's something comically embarrassing about hearing people say things like 'You got any blow?' in recitative." (Nancy Franklin, The New lyrics, has inserted himself into the musical, strolling onstage with a guitar is installing a new, rather large hot tub at her and her husband's secluded to use her words. She said, "Of course, nobody will be wearing suits, so don't bother bringing them." We feel pressured to attend and partake in the nude socializing in and outside the tub. Some of us are completely comfortable, have oatmeal cookies for brains as well as a complete lack of judgment. inform Nature Girl. If you're not all in agreement, which may be the case because you say, "Some of us are completely comfortable," then you can decline stating your reservations, there is always the 24-hour flu. is no need to feel "pressured." There can be no retaliation for employees who always the big but. What's my big but? Fun, smart, beautiful, but my girlfriend just won't give me any space. If we don't spend seven evenings a week together, if we don't talk on the phone each day during work, if I want to spend any time alone, my girlfriend pouts and gets angry, or cries. I put my foot down and insisted that there are just times I need to be by myself, and while she accepts that in principle, I often feel on my guard, as she often gets extremely upset with little provocation if I don't give her dependency be cured? Can I, should I, even, expect her to change? I hate the idea that I love her "except for this one thing I want to change," but really, she is absolutely wonderful. Except that too much of a good thing is still too aspect of her personality. This leaves you two choices. You can accept her possessiveness and kiss time to yourself goodby, or ring off now and preserve hostility will build until you wind up choosing the latter. This woman's demands suggest an underlying jealousy and immaturity that time will most doesn't look for work, having been let go from his last job. He rarely washes, with him long ago. He's living off unemployment, and that's going to run out cleans up after himself, gives me my space, and doesn't eat too much of my food, and when he does he eventually replaces it. Plus, he's great company. We've got very similar sense of humor and we have great conversations. me is that he's a talented, smart, able guy and he's just tossing it away that I don't really approve of what he's doing, but I don't want to kick him smokes and drinks while being fixated on a long gone girlfriend. He is also give anything to redo this guy's thinking. But alas, you can't. We each get a to kick him out and also mention that his unemployment benefits are soon to end. Be prepared for this sad fellow to become your ward if you don't insist he get some mental health help and leave your nest to make a life. student majoring in psychology. I like psych but don't love it. What I really happy as a psychologist as I would be as a singer. I have the talent but not the moral support. I have been tempted many times to run away from home because forget your parents' opposition and trust your instinct. Whether you make it or not as a singer, you will not have to look back and regret that you never That is the age, after all, when people go to college or into the military. job. I must hate my job because I dread getting up every weekday morning. I have used all my personal days and my sick days, which is making me agency, the want ads, friends, anything, but find a more satisfying way to keep interested in the political machinations that led to the cancellation of a planned referendum on electoral reform. The French press was more interested in for a war he could not win. "After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and significant problem" and that it is "extremely difficult to contemplate" grip on power. But the joyous reopening was marred by an acrimonious row over its "banality" and its "chilly, almost antiseptic" atmosphere. criteria for membership. The Daily Telegraph dwelt on the Pentagon's committee. "The country that does most of the fighting and pays most of the bills will from now on call the tune, looking to its own interests," he said. have been camping on his doorstep or otherwise pestering him, his family, and who include generals of the People's Liberation Army, are calling for an "further action," the generals said "they would do their best if that 'action' embassy strike. Only last week, it urged China to change its defense strategy crisis will accelerate China's military modernization drive, it said. The atrocity." Insisting that the attack on the embassy was deliberate, the editorial said it was "too smart to be explained as a 'mistake in target identification' or a technical error." It asked, "Then what is the reason that said that the orchestrated protests in China are "understandable." But it also said that claims that the bombing was no accident are "simply ludicrous," since important thing is for the United States to make "a proper and public apology. Not words of sadness, but a formal expression of apology." credited it with having destroyed all hope for the peace principles agreed in down, deciding that a land war is no longer a practical possibility. "Without it, compromise may allow us to achieve most of what we want," it concluded efforts to avoid civilian targets, pushing ahead with plans for the use of land even said that "the fact that the embassy bombing has focused the attention of "suggests that he is still looking for a settlement on the basis of bombing wanes. In such a quandary does the fear of taking casualties land you." Unlike presences in it were too strong. Deploring this prospect, it said the essential there freely to reconstruct their future, the allied forces will have lost the "total incompetents." And it said that the heads of government who appointed them "have taken on a grave responsibility by making themselves accomplices of intervention, but we have had the stupidest intervention imaginable," and he questions under oath; has had every private embarrassment announced to the world in the guise of "court documents"; and has watched helplessly as his closest friends and aides have been barbecued and bankrupted by hostile lawyers. Anyone who had been stretched on this legal rack for so long would do anything to prevent the next guy from being similarly tortured. the independent counsel statute. The administration believes that the president and his top advisers should not be subjected to the kind of endless, should not have to suffer through a barrage of litigation and investigation. But he has missed the real lesson: No one should have to endure what he endured. The president's defenders portray Flytrap as a parable of how the law, misapplied, can undermine the president. In fact, it is a parable of how the invasive, irrelevant discovery, with its incredible legal fees, with the way it drew in innocent bystanders and ruined their lives, is exactly typical Even so, the president is not advocating any legal reform larger than protecting himself. He continues to act as though lawsuits are favored policies that made litigation more invasive and expanded the right to sue. And he still seems to believe that litigation is a substitute for the Violence Against Women Act at the behest of women's groups. The act permits much more expansive discovery into the sexual history of defendants in sexual harassment and sex crimes cases. Judges and legal scholars warned that the new anyway. Four years later, he found himself a victim of the sort of voyeuristic, expanded the right to sue and the power of the plaintiff to make life miserable Disabilities Act. Last summer, his Department of Justice successfully a House Republican bill to penalize plaintiffs for frivolous lawsuits and to impose "loser pays" rules. Also that year, the president delighted plaintiffs' lawyers by vetoing a bill to limit punitive damages in product liability administration has been no less enthusiastic about lawsuits. The administration continues to push a "patient's bill of rights" that would guarantee the right In his State of the Union address, he announced that the Department of Justice would sue cigarette companies to recover Medicare costs of smokers, a backdoor way to have the courts increase federal tobacco revenues without going through Congress. And the administration is lending tacit support to cities suing gun manufacturers, a backdoor way to have the courts make gun policy politics. The president and Congress can take credit for giving people "rights," then leave the actual work of making sense of those rights to the better living through litigation is also based on interest group politics. Trial lawyers courted him and his party with tons of money. Women's groups, be a true believer in government by lawsuit. He came of age when the civil state governments and arrogant corporations. His intentions are honorable: deny care to patients who need it. But he never asks whether lawsuits and rights are the only way to prevent these bad things. shuffles expenses from government to someone else, usually the person being shift the responsibility to the branch of government that citizens can't do anything about." And it makes an already litigious society more so, afflicting more and more people with onerous discovery, bottomless legal expenses, and far laxer discovery rules than any other developed nation.) During Flytrap, many Republicans conveniently abandoned their objections to Democrats have trounced them, depicting them (with some justice) as shills for big corporations that don't want to be accountable to employees and has suffered through legal hell once and has emerged unaffected. Maybe, just enrolled were assigned to a special section. But last fall, a male student enlisted the support of a conservative law firm and threatened to sue under themselves increasingly under legal scrutiny for supporting race and gender Bunting Institute fellowships. Meanwhile, federal courts continue to debate whether the National Collegiate Athletic Association should be subject to for a day and presented the administration with a list of demands that included years ago, they held a successful hunger strike on campus. It remains to be campus parties without a staff member or approved adult in attendance; and the biggest shift in campus social policy since the '60s student revolts favor the trend. The Chronicle of Higher Education attributes the increase to parents' concerns about binge drinking and other behaviors at public District's poorest and most isolated area. The school's poor academic record the move will demoralize a school, which, like the District itself, is just beginning to recover from a fiscal crisis. Other critics add that the opportunity to leave their troubled neighborhoods behind. in six college newspapers excoriating "tenured radicals" for defending the originally perpetrated and is still defended by your professors." A few weeks ago, a conservative foundation placed an ad in college papers urging undergraduates to sue their schools in order to battle affirmative action expert on the history of the book, predicts a long life for the medium in the "technological man." Although the book remains uniquely portable, durable, and an aesthetically satisfying means of conveying written information, there is scholarly publishing. The monograph, traditionally the young academic's ticket to tenure and promotion, has become too expensive for presses to produce or for basic information to complex analysis, from primary sources to ongoing debates. have committed funds to the development of such books. the spread of political battles into the academic realm. itself. In a report posted on the Web, the country's leading institute of science documents entrenched if subtle discrimination against women in almost every aspect of professional academic life from salaries and promotions to committee work and office size. The report notes that the school's tenure rate in outside grants as men. "I believe that in no case was this discrimination apartment. In fact, it is the same apartment, although a little shabbier. A We are accustomed to the idea that we should convert all dollar amounts to "real" values by adjusting with the consumer price index. apartment, I probably won't use the proceeds to buy that month's assortment of yield a stream of income into the future. I could, for example, buy 30-year But Treasury bonds are not what make everyone feel richer every day. I might want to be more venturesome in the hope of getting a what I care about is how much future income I will get. If the future income So am I richer than I was? The rise in the price tag of my apartment, combined with the changes in prices of other things, changes the and more annual income from Treasury bonds. In those terms I have become richer. In terms of opportunity to enjoy living in my apartment, I am neither richer nor poorer. I have become poorer in terms of my opportunity to buy the Whether I have become richer or poorer in opportunity to earn income from the something about who has got richer or poorer relative to others in the past two me, and I have got richer relative to the people who produced the stuff that cash. I guess I am richer relative to the poor fellow who wants to earn the The wealth of the nation is its future stream of national income. That stream is almost certainly a rising one. Year by year, and little has little to do with, and is much less than, the surge in asset prices in the feel richer when the price tag on the apartment I live in goes up. That may be "Footballs, beers, and textbooks. What? Really? Well there goes my exhausting lessons of adolescence is discovering that just because you've of the most exhausting lessons of adulthood is discovering that just because again. History is not a synonym for progress. No issue is ever settled. No case have to write an essay about it on my balky computer, and that's progress. Or precis for the next episode. Since the episode might well not have been written Leaders for Sensible Priorities, perhaps the most boring name ever devised for an organization. Separately, each of these words is dense with tedium, but to create an even more torpid name for an even more lackluster controllers, but despite the best efforts of a choice ensemble cast (John group dynamics. (Watch the trailer and clips from the film here [requires free registration].) makes it so haunting. The evidence is on the screen" (the New York imagery, and near misses by the two lovers, the film has only one flaw, according to critics, namely that all the fancy footwork verges on becoming too years, which ditches the junkyard noise experimentation of his previous releases for a blues approach, gets passable reviews from Rolling Sone coolie raps often feel a little fake, like he's working at having a good time." deep and wide into his song psyche and pulls up material rooted in blues, gospel, and cabaret music but delivered with the utmost originality." (Listen manuscripts and personal effects, such as his glasses and butterfly net. (Click includes recordings of him reading his work and a series of photos [free biography puts forth no new theories on the poet or on his times as it retells virtual reality flick that covers the same ground as the more popular The game of her own devising. Features a device called a "gristle gun." and Mike D and a layout far funkier than any other women's mag, but critics The list includes whistling, making certain hand gestures, and carrying bottles, baseball bats, or flashlights. List of what? concession to economy, Long Dong Silver is downsizing, but he promises to stowed in overhead storage compartments or slipped neatly under the mercifully most of you steered clear. The fat joke assumes that the body is a physical manifestation of the mind, an outward sign of inward gracelessness. It so, of course. Like most things about the human body, genetics play all too I know the difference fatness makes to our outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I doubt whether a man who's never been anything but fat, a man who's been called Fatty ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence of any really deep emotions. How could he? He's got no experience of such things. He can't ever be present at a tragic scene, because a scene where there's a fat man present isn't tragic, it's comic. Just imagine a fat to start from scratch on something even bigger and more uncomfortable. Current configuration and how much the pilot is distracted by pathetic whimpering akin yesterday's Afternoon Delivery ran the wrong quiz question. Sorry. Those interested can write in for the editor's name and a detailed map to her house. godlike figure, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss." the same confused look on his face that I used to get. To me it clearly says, The tabs recently have been offering a series of unhappy meditations on the nature of masculinity today. For example, also walking that according to the publication, "a renowned expert in penis and breast manhood is no more encouraging. According to the tabs, two young idols are as exciting in the sack as a sack of wet oatmeal. The Globe reports that a Devastating as this revelation is, it is unlikely to appreciably affect pledge week), were brought in as consultants. "They had a good look at Tom and dispatched the goose with his own bare beak, did he proudly roast the bird and serve it for dinner? No, he took to his bed. "He's still too shook up to talk," Let's see, he was hit in the schnoz by a goose and had to get two whole stitches. If you cast your gaze over the world today, you'd be hard pressed to find anything that is a starker example of tragedy. off an extra five pounds that always seem to plague her." In turn, he promises five pounds, he promises not to grow hair out of his ears or ever say, "Honey, merely naughty. A few weeks ago, the Drudge Report published an Ominously, Bush's spokeswoman has denied the story by saying, "Yeah, and green again trying to put his marriage back together in his unique way, according to addicted to cocaine. But even after he stopped taking drugs, he continued to be insists, however, that there's nothing going on between them and that he is totally focused on repairing his marriage. Toward that end, he tells the management classes." Maybe something beautiful will come of all this. It's hard years, fathered a child eight years ago by his personal assistant. (Note to down to this: "If I didn't have a prostate condition that plumber would never Now it appears that he may have been simply assuring himself she really was Farrow is adopting yet another baby, and she plans to name this one after her States began contemplating doing something about war and ethnic cleansing in armies made their last stand against the invading Ottoman Empire at the Battle nationalists had built up national myths about the heroics of Prince Lazar and religious shrines. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the central government in channels violent and nonviolent, sought actual independence. Unrelenting, against her has nothing to do with her conventional liberal views, her status as a politician's wife, or her smarmy New Age morality. Rather, critics blast up in New York. Still, the point is that in our highly mobile society, carpetbagging is as common a political sin as taking soft money or committing Where does the term come from? Southerners pinned the label on both the opportunistic and idealistic Northerners who packed their worldly possessions into "carpetbags" during Reconstruction and moved to Dixie to enter politics. A term of opprobrium, the word came from the Southerners' perception that the newcomers represented the dregs of society, seeking nothing but easy political gain. In particular, carpetbaggers were scorned for capitalizing on the freed slaves' newly granted right to vote. Testifying before a carpetbagger is generally understood to be a man who comes here for office Civil War, the South won Reconstruction. By the late 1870s, Southern "redeemers" (as they were admiringly called) got the federal government to withdraw the troops that were safeguarding the rights of blacks. Meanwhile, white supremacists regained control of state governments through fraud and violence. Confederate apologists, who wrote the first round of histories of the South, portrayed slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution (for more on Hardly a pack of jackals feeding off the crippled South, the carpetbaggers came from various backgrounds and acted from a range of motives, historians tell us. Most were well educated, and included former Union soldiers, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, newspapermen, and agents of the economically stagnant South direly needed Northern investors to spur the kind of dynamic industrial and commercial growth that was transforming the rest of the country. Others, of a religious bent, followed what one called "a Mission with a large M" to help former slaves. Still others simply warmed to the While the behavior of a few of the carpetbaggers is, according to Current, "rather difficult to defend," most were not unusually corrupt. Committed to rebuilding the South, they advocated strong public schools, better roads and railroads, labor reform, and progressive taxation. As to be disturbed. Few today would question their virtue on that score. reputation has improved, but the word's negative connotations have spread to cover all ambitious newcomers. The proliferation of railroads, then the automobile, and later the airplane made this a country of mobile, ambitious transience and provincialism collide, the charge of carpetbagging still state Senate candidate went to court to try to force him off the ballot, arguing he hadn't lived in the district long enough. (They lost.) In mocking newspaper ad: "Congress Seat for Sale. No Experience Necessary. New York Senate bid; even the liberal New York Times endorsed Republican similar charges en route to winning the seat. Candidates have accused opponents carries these days in parochial places and when it plays into other, more living in an adopted home state doesn't seem to matter at all. The Constitution requires only that a senator "when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen." Having rehabilitated the carpetbaggers, we might as and the liberal Guardian all demanded an intensification of the war. that the best prospect for a peace worthy of the name is to give war a chance." that the bombing campaign must continue. The Guardian continued to argue fallen under the spell of the State Department, which believes that a combination of diplomatic formulae and the indirect application of military territory, and has maintained a policy of brutal pacification" there. But the advisers and international observers into the territory. If things do go smoothly, it said in an editorial, "it will represent a victory for commonsense, for years of patient international diplomacy, but most of all for government minister on this matter "because they feared that otherwise they would be accused of being insufficiently zealous about religious matters." "Legislators and government alike felt obliged to make a huge fuss over the enough about God's Holy Book," he wrote. "Neither had the courage to say that the matter was unimportant, though they all knew that what had occurred was traditionally erect large tents in which to hold banquets for their electors. have been expecting a summer slump in business are now looking forward to a that line, but collapse is everywhere in the tabloid world this month, from celebrity lives, to health, to marriages, and even to body parts. last weekend of what is being described as an accidental overdose of she had been sober for a decade. The tabloids had been anticipating her death for years, the National Enquirer as recently as a few months ago. Hers case of the tabs, they put ailing celebrities on the cover in the apparent hope lung disease and depression, which are complicating his recovery from a recent star who dies at the height of his beauty and fame. While filming a scene on jump overboard and wait for yet another rescue vessel. Perhaps imagining the tabloid coverage of the death by drowning of the star of Titanic was danger, many celebrities seem to be having trouble staying conscious this month. The Enquirer reports that during a food fight scene on the set of head on a table, and was knocked senseless. Perhaps imagining the tabloid be carried to his bedroom. In this case, it's safe to assume that the aged playboy was able to make a quick recovery because he realized that when he makes his final exit, he doesn't want to be carried to bed, he wants to be does not report if these attacks were precipitated by the men reviewing the a tranquilizer and diagnosed with sleep apnea. But the Globe also alleges he has been distraught over rumors that he's a child molester. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that in the preceding issue, the Globe reported and they asked for his autograph. Since then he's attended the bar mitzvah of the elder and taken them both to a water park. In defending the relationship between the singer and her sons, the mother of the two offers the quote of the month, "We're very protective parents and if we had any suspicions about his disintegrated, it's possible to look back and see the end was coming. In classes together. But it's the Globe that shows the marriage was doomed. Golden Globe awards when Shields was a nominee. He wrote, "It is wonderful just times you smile." How humiliating for Shields to know that everyone who read that thought in unison, "or watch as you scratch your private parts." He miscalculated even more when he added, "In all of my excitement of growing old your husband blurts out the news of your impending divorce on Good Evening publication reports that the two have always maintained separate residences and it." (But, Pam, isn't having people stare at your chest the reason you get has deflated from 36D to 34C and says the reason for the reduction was that the giving her back pain. The Globe agrees the actress has gone from 36D to 34C but reports that the implants weighed a pound each. The publication also 'shapers.' Doctors had to do something because she had such big implants that when they were removed, her breasts would have sagged." respectively. They may want to consult an astrophysicist as well as a plastic surgeon. Such a sudden collapse of so much mammary matter could possibly result painless alternative: Take the dress to the dry cleaner and have it wheel of a car, I would never consider parking in a spot designated for a fellow driver with disabilities, as I don't belong to this group. However, when shopping or recreating and in need of a public restroom, I always opt for the bathroom stall designed for my fellow citizens with disabilities. (They are uniformly more spacious, better stocked, and I like the handrails.) I have yet to emerge from such a spot to find someone more deserving of such amenities cooling their heels (so to speak), and since my caffeine intake is too high, these pit stops are more or less regular events. Am I being callous and a disabled person waiting, though that would not be the end of the world. Considering the length of time one may park vs. the time needed in the family and at work. Almost everybody I know is either coming from or going to I should be engaging in a more formal kind of exercise? My health is week for identifying with her correspondents, for she could not agree with you more. Too many people are too involved with lats and pecs and excessive getting married to a guy of whom I am not a big fan. This is my friend's second gift (or at least an expensive one). I gave my friend a very special and expensive gift for her first marriage, and I know the first time around she received every gift one might give to a newly married couple. What is my obligation here? Am I letting my feelings for her fiance influence me too her your feelings are less about her fiance and more about your finances. And Of course you must crash through with something, but it can be both modest and in good taste. And for your own tranquility, when you write the card have your wedding was beautiful. The reception was lovely, too, and when the time came for my daughter to toss her bouquet, all the single women gathered. So did the So, before the toss, I dashed over to whisper in her ear that there were older ladies right behind her and to take care not to trip them. One of those ladies who may not know her own strength. My niece did indeed catch the bouquet, and no one was hurt. My question is this: Should children not old enough to date, much less marry, be included in the bouquet toss? I don't think wild horses custom is meant as symbolic fun. No one really thinks the catcher is destined to become the next bride. And certainly no one expects an injury to result, meaning, of course, that decorum should be maintained at all times. knowledge of implants (whether silicone or saline) would never dream of having them. Factual knowledge is important in making any decision, especially one conundrum of dueling scientific findings. Without wishing to become authoritative book Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Who said this to whom about what, "Keep on doing what you're head of the Human Genome Project said it to the head of the Dog Genome Project Instead of our regular class work, let's go outside about his offer to resign as archbishop of New York. reply. Last week, in what was seen as a sign of his impending retirement, he invited all the priests in the archdiocese to see him celebrate the Chrism expect that will pretty much mark the end of his term as Archbishop." submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. still amazed at the persistence of people in believing things that are unproved or that are more complicated than they realize. My most recent example is Pay subject of a protest? Surely Pay Equity Day's organizers don't think that Presumably they would explain that they are more productive than my housekeeper. But the only evidence they have of their superior productivity is the fact that someone is willing to pay them more than anyone is willing to pay One might think that would be the end of the matter. Men get paid more than women because someone is willing to pay them more, just as Pay Equity Day's organizers are paid more than my housekeeper because someone isn't the end of the matter. If we accept productivity as a proper measure of what people should earn, we have to consider the possibility that employers' willingness to pay is a wrong measure of workers' productivity. It could be wrong in either of two senses. Employers may have an incorrect estimate of the productivity merits because they have some prejudice against women in the In a perfect world we could compare the relative earnings of women and men with their relative productivity. But there is no good way to earnings, which only leads us back to where we started. So, students of the subject approach it indirectly, comparing the earnings of men and women who are similar in the respects that contribute to productivity: They compare the incomes of men and women of the same age, the same years of work experience, the same years of education, and in jobs of the same stress, riskiness, and difficulty. When they do, they generally find that the gender gap in earnings remains but is smaller than the gap for women and men in total. But the results are difficult to interpret. The number of years devoted to education and the number of years of experience, for example, do not make the same contribution to productivity. And it is never possible to be sure that you have taken account of all the factors that determine productivity. against women? We would also find that all the women in this category do not earn the same salary. There is something, some X Factor, other than the conditions I have listed and other than gender, which explains the difference in salaries among the women. But if this X Factor is unequally shared by men and women, there will be a difference in the average earnings of men and women height. A taller lawyer can reach the books on the top shelf without a ladder. If all women were paid the same as all men of the same height, the average pay of men would be higher than that of women because the average man is taller. Much of what we know about the economic status of women is men. This suggests that the relatively low earnings of many women are related interferes with their productivity in the marketplace. But another force may be men may decide not to have children rather than forgo those earnings. We don't know how the earnings of these women compare with their productivity. If their There is plenty of evidence that the first gap has been measure the gap between women's earnings and their productivity, but it is reasonable to say that their earnings have risen pretty much in line with their productivity. At least, it seems clear that the earnings of the total labor force have risen pretty much in line with productivity (output per hour of work) when measured correctly. Women are so large a part of the labor force that it is hard to believe that this could be true of the total if it were not also true of women. If the gap between the earnings of women and men is declining, and if the earnings of women are rising in line with their productivity, it follows that the productivity of women has been rising relative to the productivity of men. That would be consistent with what we know about changes in the character of women's education and their distribution is grounds for demonstrations of protest is a matter of taste. not the one the protesters have been protesting. In an earlier age, when incomes in the market were lower than they are now, the cost to a parent of forgoing market employment in order to stay home and care for a child was also was for the woman to stay home and look after the child. But given higher market incomes, having and rearing a child is more expensive in terms of clear how the staying home with the child should be divided between the mother and the father. This problem of family life is not a result of incomes being too low or the wage gap being too big. It is rather the reverse. conservative Daily Telegraph said the alliance should "be prepared to conduct an must now commit themselves to the long haul, ground troops and all." resigned properly instead of taking an "illegal" temporary leave, which logically nullified all future decisions by the Constitutional Council, "the essential guarantor of the good functioning of our democracy." the Soviet Union without firing a single bullet is now mobilized against the certainly exploit this situation to strengthen his uncertain power at home. "because the Basque problem hasn't been resolved," he said. This is a "very crude comparison," the paper commented: The case of the Basque country, with its advanced political autonomy, has nothing in common with "an open war and in the "banana war," which, it said, might "do irreparable damage" to the World dubious sources, including drug money." It said the police forces of three officials in the socialist administration were involved," the paper added. been found to have abused their positions for illegal financial gain. The guilty officials worked for the ministries of public economy and privatization, defense, justice, employment, and immigration, as well as in the courts and in regional customs and tax offices, the paper said. It added that, according to because the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have concluded that its ruined economy could only be revived by the privatization of all its The magazine's redesign brings with it a new Web site and a slick, generally shied away from such missions because of the moral and political But a separate editorial says that partial defeat (concessions to the without the will to do the job properly." The West neglected to anticipate the Government and industry are squabbling over whether to promote the country as but not on public television, which he deems too influenced by its corporate game") derides the White House's apparently unshaken faith in air power. lambastes the president for "diplomatic errors and missed opportunities": Security advisers originally told the administration to offer airstrikes began, they urged planning for the refugee crisis sure to come. At protests by lavishing student activists with internships and trips to countries safari, contains some of his funniest and most complex work. crooners. Country originated in gospel and blues, but since the civil rights era blacks have associated country music with white prejudice. Now record executives are hoping that black country acts will boost lagging sales. story of a boy of mixed race who denies his black heritage and becomes a racist United Nations, and violates the principle that foreign powers should not It seemed too much to hope for that the list of the the New York University journalism department, at no one's urgent would be a really, really bad thing that should be avoided if at all possible. He succeeded, declaring at every stage that vast resources of courage and imagination were required to make this point. He went on to argue that become inimical to life and must be swept away" as the only hope of avoiding obvious and the idiotic became. Many New Yorker readers actually took up existed, he declared, to even think about anything else was deeply immoral. And time about nuclear war. Lately he's been expressing alarm about the office of the independent prosecutor. Threat to liberty or something like that. of the Earth was the last gasp of the old New Yorker buzz machine of since it denied its own existence. Literary devices did most of the work. There was the bullying portentous tone, which said, "This is unbelievably the facts, which put the author on a pedestal beyond the reach of quarrel and Actually, the last gasp of the old New Yorker may be truth, the current New Yorker is a much better publication.) How could exercise like this, while enjoyable, misses the point. Such quarreling buys into the premise that there is something socially useful about inventing reasons to decide that some people are better than others. Call it gratuitous awards and lists of the best this or that are "inimical to life" or anything, This is generally true of gratuitous meritocracy, whether it takes the form of variety of hierarchical opportunities held out to children and college students. All of these pretend to a precision that doesn't exist. But that's not the real problem. Even if it were possible to determine scientifically whose performance as a supporting actress last year was better than anyone part of the condition of our species and a specific necessity of the rewards to motivate people. Some inequality is inevitable, in other words, and more of it is a price worth paying for a prosperity that benefits all, to one century, most people have concluded that attempts to eliminate inequality wholesale end in tears. But we still argue about the relationship between greater equality and greater prosperity within a capitalist economy. Will a tax cut have a huge productivity payoff or just line the pockets of the already But a list of who's better than other people in some aspect or another is not inevitable and does not make the economy any more prosperous or society any richer in other ways. I suppose you could argue that a hard sell, though. What actually inspires such lists is a love of commercial considerations are also at work, as well as the Law of Award Entropy, which holds that awards tend to subdivide and multiply until they are ceremony is entitled to leave in a snit if he or she doesn't win one. In principle, there is nothing tackier about an award given to magazines. So, a couple of decades ago, the magazine industry created the National Magazine Awards ("the prestigious Enema," as occasional unnecessary addition to civilization. And yet by relentlessly treating them as a big deal over the years, magazine folks have succeeded in making them a ballpark. (And yes, we'd like one, hypocrites that we are, thank you very Webby Awards, given by something we are asked to believe is the "International Academy of insurgent spirit, this is a comically egregious exercise in victims in a conspiracy of mutual hype. They hype you by giving you an award. give a separate set of awards based on how many votes your site gets in a reader poll they're running on their site. As a result, the Web is now littered with links to the Webby "People's Voice" page. (Why, what a coincidence: Here's democracy in action, the true spirit of the Web, and blah, blah, the connection between this and any valid expression or measurement of Web popularity is about Small type at the bottom of the home page confesses copyrighted all the materials, so I think it's clear what's going on. But throwing a cocktail party to celebrate the fact that its Web site was alliance "should seize this moment to announce a new goal and new means to commitment of ground forces, a move that senior military leaders consider became clear that the bombing is strengthening rather than weakening papers, both conservative and liberal, have now come out in favor of it, with Times now support ground intervention, the Sun backs Prime escalation. The issue, once again, is not the plausibility of the operation but read and talk about this subject from dawn to dusk and not hear a word about two of them," he said. "We don't ask the West to send ground troops. If our men are given the means to fight, we will be able to defend the civilian population States plays golf, tens of thousands of innocent people are fleeing from the revolt against the war within his coalition government. Noting that Communist another coalition party was calling on the government to distance itself from precedent that would allow me to justify these initiatives and the prime airstrikes have been (and will continue to be) more effective at destroying the troops should be sent in. Another editorial urges the United Kingdom to donate humanitarian supplies and eventually grant immigration visas to "our share" of interview the incoming flood of refugees. He writes: and boot. I heard of several hundred people hiding in a cave that once formed accounts of the operational technique of ethnic cleansing. First the roar of tanks coming down the valleys, then the sound of whistles being blown and the firing of automatic weapons, as the villages and hamlets that dot southern separate the important ones from the peasants. The peasants are forced south, taking only what they can carry, where they must brave further "checkpoints" in the form of armed robbers, before they reach the border. The "important ones" international agency has bothered to set up aid stations at the border to distribute hot porridge or first aid to the dehydrated and hypothermic considering more decisive actions that will be recommended to the leadership if loudly on the street. The article interviews many Westerners who feel the article doesn't say who exactly is doing the "speculating." The news peg Ever? "Capital Legislator Want More Facts on Daylight Savings Time" from requested for the bombing. Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy and disloyalty. Republicans accused Democrats of squandering military resources on making itself "the sole judge of what is or is not acceptable to bomb." another student to death in a manner similar to the Colorado tragedy. Four kids which he evidently planned to destroy his school. A pipe bomb was found in an classes, and kids were questioned or even arrested due to bomb threats and Middle East peace process was supposed to conclude that day, but rocky on Mars indicates that it had dynamic, internal heat similar to Earth's, increasing the likelihood that Mars had a warm atmosphere, water, and elementary life. The trumpeted spin: Mars had life! The buried spin: Earth environmental panic over deformed frogs was deflated. For years, scientists have been finding frogs around the United States with deformed, missing, or extra limbs. The old theory: The frogs are a harbinger of a "poisoned environment," possibly caused by industrial chemicals or erosion of the ozone layer. The new theory, based on subsequent studies: The frogs' development was screwed up by parasites that infected them. The new version of the old theory: The parasites are a harbinger of a poisoned environment. The local sheriff said three kids in combat fatigues who knew the killers and waited outside the school during the shooting are "subjects of our killers bought two of the guns they used. It is not yet clear whether she knew that just before the massacre it rejected an application from one of the explaining that there's "not a great atmosphere" for his music after the semiautomatic weapons, require trigger locks, make parents criminally liable for "knowingly or recklessly" giving their kids access to guns used to kill or injure, and extend background checks to gun show patrons and people who try to buy explosives. Meanwhile, Republican congressional leaders proposed a national courageously exploiting public unease about guns in the wake of the Colorado lawmakers have agreed to give kids in bad public school districts first state voucher program. Some cities already have vouchers, and some states kids out of bad schools, making these schools worse and leaving kids with accomplished what he sought in football, and he wants to spend more time with The sad spin: He won't get a chance to try for a third Super Bowl. The cynical spin: He's shrewdly getting out before the Broncos collapse. across the aisle from a woman who was probably in her 50s. She was plain looking and plainly dressed. I guessed her to be a household worker. Her slip was showing. That is not unusual. What struck me was that the hem of her slip attempt at elegance!" But when I got off the bus and ruminated on it, I realized that was a condescending and stupid reaction. She was saying was the difference between a work uniform and private, personal dress. Wearing the lace was a decision she had made for herself, beyond the requirements of her working life. She was expressing her membership in a class of people who have a life beyond work and who have some bit of "fancy" in their dress to show first of all she was making it for herself, to make herself feel good. that is the way people are. I imagine that people want to think of themselves as belonging to a group that they admire or respect and dress as they think a member of that group dresses. Their object is not to display their individuality, except that they want to choose their group. I don't believe did not express membership in a group that they had chosen. I understand that The message of the clothing is first of all to the wearer. I think of those girls in West Side Story singing "I Feel Pretty!" They pretty, and they associated the way they dressed with the feeling of being not the most becoming outfit they could wear. That depends on how good their legs are. And they are surely not expressing individuality. They are expressing their membership in a class of women who are smart, professional, liberated, and also feminine and sexy. They are expressing it to themselves and to At the street corner there is a group of young men with exceedingly droopy trousers and black, high shoes. The laces flopping loosely. you see in gray slacks and navy blue blazers with brass buttons? They are Of course, the extreme in men's dress is the dinner jacket. monkey suit. They curse as they struggle with the bow tie. But is there a man with a soul so dead, or a waist so big, that he does not smile and say, "Bond, however, when only the "responsible" people, the presidential appointees, came to work in the White House and the Executive Office Building, casual dress was the uniform. That was our way of showing, to ourselves especially, that we were And what about me now? On the days I go to my office, I wear a flannel shirt with no necktie if the weather is cool. In warm weather, I in the club of "Old Geezers." We have paid our dues. We are free of obligations, including the obligation to dress like everyone else. We know that our dress is only a trivial sign of our liberation, but it is a sign we always be elegant to yourself, as you will always be to me. despondency" hung over the negotiations because nobody knows what the bottom for the peace process boosted his acceptability," the paper said. on decommissioning. It said the tripartite statement "makes clear that the time for courage," and an editorial expressing relief that the Spice Girls had crept his first news conference for more than a year, as "an older and wiser man, with his extraordinary resilience lending a kind of dignity to the mere fact of again on the edge, the White House's full attention could once again play a tears when told that his former wife had contradicted his denials," the paper "thoroughly disheartening," it said. "After the recent tarnishing of its image with corruption revelations, the committee badly needs to restore its credibility and regain respect. That can hardly be done so long as it remains with an exclusive revelation that a raiding party of East German academics had and his remains might deteriorate. In fact, they took the poet's body away in a handcart and brought it back three weeks later only after cleaning the skeleton and using plastic to reinforce the decayed laurel wreath on his skull. The operation was carried out by stealth to avoid exposing the then Communist has decided to impose fines on restaurants and cafes that fail to tell customers they are serving genetically modified food. The government, which previously declared such food absolutely safe, has caved in to a powerful media campaign. Restaurateurs say the measure will be impossible to enforce, and environmental groups called it "a con" that doesn't go far enough. The killed. Since the police told her that the poisoners were "a small group of deviants" in the hunting community, "it shouldn't be difficult to restore, at a conservative paper, made fun of a splendid correction published in the liberal Guardian the day before. The Guardian had apologized "This is a time to support apartheid," it quoted her as saying. "This is a time advocated supporting "a party," meaning the Conservative Party. "Because Miss nation and all at the bidding of a man known as "Emperor"? Oh, right, the by forcing the conquered nation to sign a faux treaty. They are ruthless and nearby planet. There, they attempt to repair their broken spaceship but are spears and rocks at the oncoming army in the climactic battle sequence. Only racist stereotypes. But it makes the latest characters seem like a lapse in taste rather than morals. What's especially puzzling, though, is that film difference in the growth of military versus civilian wages since not mean that soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not Bill Gates, since he was making more to begin with. only evidence he offers for this position is that military members got a big provide a "catch up" to bring military pay back to parity with civilian wages after a decade of lagging pay increases. It seems to me that military and He also cites studies from the Congressional Budget Office and the RAND Corp. that indicate that "enlisted service members" make civilian counterparts, senior enlisted are slightly underpaid, junior officers there really is a pay gap, since no evidence was offered that addressed the actual salaries of either the military or civilian population. A little more more years, including another century of greatness, and perhaps another "The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that after the repeal of industry group whose members directly benefit from the imposition of a national speed limit. Further exploration would have turned up studies by the University either no increase or decrease in fatalities on roads where the speed limit was increased. Looking state by state, the same lack of a pattern emerges: There simply is no good data, counterintuitive though it may seem, to link "speeding" with accidents. Although deaths per passenger mile did indeed decline when the -mph limit was imposed, they have declined every year since statistics have been kept and are continuing to decline in the wake of the revocation of the national database in which this information is kept allows officers at the scene to code multiple reasons for an accident; they do, indeed, tend to cite "excessive speed for conditions" as a contributing factor quite frequently. However, if you were to pull the number of accidents where speed was the sole factor cited, the number declines precipitously. Keep in mind, again, that the data are not good to begin with; this is simply the opinion of an officer who The radar gun was invented to allow civil engineers of drivers will maintain on a given piece of road. In more sensible times, that's how speed limits were set: Build the road, time traffic on it, determine the speed most people are comfortable driving at, and post that as the limit to encourage uniform speeds, which, unsurprisingly, minimizes accidents. A national speed limit, by being completely separated from local conditions, actually encourages unsafe behavior, as people will vary in their speed significantly. On many roads, driving at or below the limit puts you well below the speed of most traffic, thereby greatly increasing the chances of an So, no; rigid enforcement of a national speed limit with draconian penalties for violating it will not save thousands of lives. Nor would repealing the freedom of the airwaves act (the federal legislation that merely to protect the various municipalities' right to collect revenues from motorists. It may not be sexy or simple, but setting speed limits on a accidents than any of the measures Chapman proposes. Since even the Department might make more sense to look at why, rather than simply demanding that they turns and angles for the bright sky of the story he wants to tell. shouted "Peekaboo," and killed her. At close range. And they apparently enjoyed it. "Look at this black kid's brain! Awesome, man!" is what one was reported to have exclaimed. They stood in front of another girl, asked her if she believed in God, and shot her in the head when she answered yes. They had no goal; no end in mind beyond destruction. They weren't trying to restrict a rival gang, enforce a political ideal, or overthrow authority. They appeared to revel in lacing up the old athletic club breeches, rubbing a bit of pine tar on your detect the differences in these situations, then he is part of the problem. I bit farther to find truly analogous behavior. The Dark Ages should prove fruitful. And by the way, it's misleading to place the sentence "occasionally children were put to death" at the end of a list of the things teachers did to occasionally executed for crimes (the crime of murder in the period to which he refers, or perhaps for stealing hare from the king's wood in earlier times). Not laudable, but definitely irrelevant to his argument. Just a bit later in her performance, though, the film isn't much more than "a kind of More negative responses: The critics are resentful about the fact that the film quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders." The Weekly Standard 's John and childish in a way that may displease sophisticates but will be endearing to "It is, of course, profoundly gratifying that "The Phantom Menace" should emerge as a work of almost unrelieved awfulness. It means, for one thing, that the laugh is on all those dweebs who have spent the last month camped out on as a collection of riffs, observations, and set pieces on subjects such as trouble in terms of developing characters and maintaining any sort of pacing or click here to read an excerpt [requires free registration].) Cowboys, ranch hands, and the unforgiving nature of life out west are her main subjects, and by all accounts she handles them with extraordinary skill and control. The critics can't say enough about her tight, honed prose: She gets the speech patterns just right ("a stunningly authentic voice," declares Critics say this exploration of what factors affect a shopper's behavior within a store is interesting, but several grouse that at times it reads as if the the subject sounds familiar, it's because The New Yorker reported won't buy something if another customer accidentally brushes her behind while she's shopping) or how the positions of signs and chairs in a store affect a shopper's likelihood of actually purchasing an item. (Click here to read effort to defend the original objectives of the enterprise. Instead, the emphasis was on "credibility": having got in for whatever reason, wise or foolish, we couldn't just change our minds and get out. In order to preserve credibility we needed victory, or (as time went on) "peace with honor" or (as more time went on) a "decent interval" between our withdrawal and the other But for most who make it, the credibility argument serves a very different argument popped up after about five minutes, and mainly from people who say precisely where they stand on that basic question. "Credibility," in short, who otherwise opposed the war. As a moral argument it seemed scandalously trivial, and as a debating point it seemed like moving the goal posts. You no extra day we spent blood and treasure on a war we no longer believed in made subsequent threats to use military force less credible, not more so. (And thus, more than a decade after that war ended, an overnight victory in Perhaps credibility would be worth dying for if it actually deterred war. That is the argument: If the enemy believes that you're not only willing but also certain to use enough force to defeat them, you won't no one on the block to speak for the values and security that we hold of credibility since World War II. There have, of course, been occasions when the United States let its credibility founder. In the '60s, there was the Bay case, the United States committed force and then withdrew after the situation Did these defeats irreparably harm our credibility and credibility. If credibility were such a fragile commodity, we wouldn't have concessions to terrorists is widely acknowledged to have stymied the once consistency and credibility is that consistency implies a reason. You will use force to defend some policy or principle. This is inherently more credible than a commitment to use force for no good reason except that you said you would. It's more credible because it is more limited and because it's more plausible that you'll do something if it's something you have a good reason to do, ethnic cleansing to take place anywhere they are in a position to stop it be credibility worth fighting for. Unfortunately, most of today's credibility mongers invoke credibility precisely to avoid such a moral commitment. working in theater or film is hanging out with actors and sundry showbiz but they're less of a labor to "read" than ordinary mortals: It's their them to skewer the vanity of models and actors and directors. What I don't trust is their ability to convey what it's like simply to have a meal with a loved one or to walk across a street or to wake up from a sound sleep without increasingly less outlandish idea that a cable network might, in the face of declining ratings, decide to have its cameras traipse around after an suggests that the United States has no shortage of exhibitionists who'd love to unformed. ("I have a dream, I just don't know what it is yet.") deformed by television before he's ever on television? I don't think so.) Ed's the illusion of watching real people than a hack actor feigning naturalness via Before the movie even gets going (it doesn't seem to all of which exploit in hilarious fashion the tension between just being and performing for a camera. Where the filmmakers are most comfortable is back in into a melodramatic revolt against a repressive corporate patriarch, here an while holding the same attitude toward human beings that he has. As Ed's with whom Ed has found love, you have to ask: Are The People supposed to be he has received a sum of money from a private investor (heard cursing the absolutely no insight into dating, love, or human chemistry. The audience, meanwhile, ends up cringing and squirming on behalf of his dates, some of whom are appalled to the point of violence and litigation by the revelation of a entertainment; I found myself wanting to apologize on behalf of obnoxious women, some of them pretty, bright, and articulate, who admirably recoiled from logo behind him, did they think, "Wow, I really missed the boat on this one. I Nature --a sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy in Look At Me Now)" into her ear in the middle of a party. The gesture is as floats out of the movie like a weird but beautiful balloon. I was going to mention this scene anyway, as the picture's highlight; I dwell on it because It's no consolation, but he has left behind an exquisite moment in film. wary world that it will not make a habit of waging war on sovereign nations. cigarette and black socks. The campaign is demonstrably successful, but the need to push them into violence. The piece is full of chilling anecdotes about sound bites, attack ads, and wedge issues to the campaign. Sadly, this has at military food, which now includes a barbecue chicken sandwich that lasts three years without spoiling and airdrop rations that "flutter, rather than plummet, down to earth, lest they take anyone out in the process." Next step: gushes over the "fresh, handsome, grand" new movie and leaders for overestimating the effectiveness of bombing. shoreline to the East Coast. An expert predicts that the research could entwining, and kissing. Dissenting researchers question whether close genital contact is really sex. The piece does not include reaction from the White House The cover story frets about widespread hearing loss. Noisy appliances will soon sport warning labels, and earplugs and earmuffs will fueled an enrollment boom with deep tuition discounts and open enrollment policies. ("It's against our Christian perspective to be elitist or them. Conditions aren't as bad as union protests indicate, and immigrant An author gripes about how tough it was to grow up rich. She doesn't even know "cradle to grave" series of education businesses, from preschools to vocational vital to social cohesion and proposes an ideological truce on the issue: If the left will acknowledge that its efforts to reform public schools have failed, the right will stop pushing "to turn our public schools over to ideological used the word "chaos" to describe the situation, the paper said. Die decision "overdue"; the liberal Guardian said the government's response to the refugee crisis front page. "The instruments of death have been replaced by ones of survival." terrifying aspect of the problem is that so many of us who believe this don't domestic political crisis resulting from the jailing for the first time in is alleged to have ordered his police force to burn down a beach restaurant as restrictions on freedom of expression and political opposition. According to a approved a number of "specific political and security" measures to tackle the sanctions. These included a new law on "political pluralism," passed recently by the National Assembly, which would allow certain "active political groups" to hold meetings and form new political parties. Another was the decision to apparently fearing retribution by the secret police. the French extreme right. An opinion poll conducted for the newspaper showed battle between the two men has "totally destabilized" their followers who have been raised in "the cult of the leader." It has also opened the public's eyes to "the true nature of these leaders and their methods." Other factors in their and class in every little gesture, his nobility of spirit, and, above all, his ability to be moved." She said in an interview with the paper that during the wine "cellar" that is "actually more of a cupboard." But it is very close to States as pets have become an ecological and agricultural "nightmare" in Japan. years and have damaged corn crops, watermelon and melon farms, and rainbow and gray herons from their natural habitats. Raccoons, particularly baby ones, became fashionable as pets in the late 1970s because of a popular cartoon whites and one black rejected the defense's argument that poor conditions in good because the death penalty has been applied in a racially discriminatory station fired him, saying it "cannot be associated with the trivialization of offered to teach male students separately, but having them in a class with a conservative who was just trying to score a political point. The college pressure and depriving me of my right to teach freely and depriving [female conspiring with the three judges and the conservative legal group to hide their counsel law so we don't have to listen to any more of this garbage. principle but asked for two weeks to convince its armed allies to abandon their announced that he would publicly castigate any Republican presidential candidate who "sowed division" in the party by attacking other candidates spin: It's amazing how early Republicans are uniting behind tomorrow's leader. their own. The Democratic spin: Republicans are in deep trouble and are neglected poor people. The rosy spin: It's a victory for racial unity. The team of lawyers to hold the New York police "accountable" for the death of New York. The officers have been placed on administrative duty while a grand They pledged to alert each other to nuclear weapons tests or accidents. They nine months after both countries showed off their nuclear arsenals by relaxed their enmity precisely because they've shown each other their nuclear loggerheads" on the issue and insist that they can absorb no more than a countries are heading for a showdown over which of them will accept refugees, how many, at what cost, and on what terms, the paper said. was condemned for its initial refusal, subsequently reversed, to accept any subject to the suspicion that he was only worried about reopening the country's immigration debate, if he carried his argument to its logical conclusion. This home is a slogan empty of meaning if one continues to exclude categorically the committal of ground troops," the editorial concluded. of sending in ground troops seems to be gathering ever stronger support. But can't do miracles with countries with pilots who belong to countries that have and to guarantee that there is no collateral damage. So this is not a war in the classic sense but a military campaign." The conservative Daily Telegraph of alliance should keep in mind the "infamy of what is happening and hold true to the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law which its mean we must be indifferent today? On the contrary. What the world did not do other disasters to the Holocaust has led to the diminution of its significance. provoke it by its air strikes. The West's civilizing role seems to involve the limits of law, too. There is only one step from this to the apocalypse," it "get control" of people spreading the impression that the two of them are not week about supposed differences between them, especially over the issue of air war might actually be working. Preparing to eat humble pie, military over his people may be loosening." He said the "strategic community" on both is especially vulnerable. "Yet those who direct the war, if it comes right, will still not have a proper reason to congratulate themselves," he wrote. "If they have paid insufficient attention to supporting the morale of their own electorates and have been insufficiently calculating in attacking that of their denim jackets. A document purporting to come from the Red Brigades, a guerrilla group thought to have been eliminated, later claimed responsibility for the ruling class and a new president, "the country has leadership," it said. accepted premise in the party was that they must lose elections. They lost for lost, and in this way arrived at a victorious campaign." apartment because they have hung a lewd picture of themselves, er, copulating in the living room. They call it art, I am sure, but it is almost medical in their values, but I just cannot stand to see that picture. They must know how it can bother a father to see such a graphic representation; even if the And if they don't know it, they should. I thought I was avoiding a it may be, but in such poor taste that one wonders what this young couple is thinking and where is their judgment. Since you like your children but do not wish to see the image you describe, by all means articulate your discomfort and suggest they throw a blanket over the "art" when you come to call, or would not step foot in his home: "There is some little missing piece here." The children outgrow their need to shock and that you can enjoy visits in each dating. I am an attractive single woman, and he has spent a fair amount of time getting to know me and taking me to nice dinners, dancing, etc. We laugh and have great fun together and share many of the same interests. He has kissed me and I feel that he is physically attracted to me. My concern is that he seems to have nearly all the characteristics of most gay men that I know. First of all, he has more clothes than any woman I know and loves to shop. He doesn't like to watch sports. He doesn't like violent movies, just the sweet drops names of clubs and restaurants that he likes, and a lot of them are frequented by the gay community. (I know this because my late brother was gay.) bisexual, why would he hide it? I don't want to come right out and ask him about his sexuality because if he hasn't "come out," then my asking him will not be answered honestly by him anyway. I really like this man, but my inner Your gentleman friend could be straight or gay, but he is definitely effeminate. He could be highly repressed, he could want to use you as cover, he could be in denial about being one of nature's bachelors, he could see you as a soul mate, or he could genuinely want to build a ask him outright (which you may want to reconsider) there is a piece of furniture that could go a long way toward answering your question. It is called a bed. If he shows no interest in going there with you, that's a pretty strong indicator of where things are. That you felt he was physically attracted to you from his kiss is something to consider. Your task now is to decide if you wish to have him in your life as any of the following: a bisexual partner, a platonic friend, or a straight though swishy companion. how are you?" when I meet my patients in a crowded psychotherapy office waiting room used by many of us. I learned quickly not to reply with: "Fine, how are you?" Some people would launch into their troubled lives no sooner than the attractive, in good physical condition, well educated, and employed in a challenging position that pays well. I regularly attend cultural events, contribute to my community (both monetarily and through volunteering), and read with similar characteristics. When I actually do meet such a person, I am not afraid to express my interest. Unfortunately, I find my interest is almost interest in me do not possess the qualities I seek in a partner. comfortable as a single person, but I would prefer to develop a personal relationship with someone who can share my interests and characteristics. My question to you is, at what point (if ever) does it make sense for someone to abandon, wholly or partially, his or her search for an ideal partner and settle for someone with a less than complete set of assets? sound extremely desirable, if not perfect, but obviously something is wrong. It might be useful to ask a good friend, of either gender, from whence your difficulty springs. Explain that it would be an act of helpful friendship to be that you are comfortable as a single person. Until someone wonderful comes alone in my complaint: weeknights and weekends, if there is any kind of game on television, my husband is watching it. We have no children, so I can't stick it might better spend his time reading or socializing or going to different interested in doing other things, so your best bet is to suggest something you'd like to go do and ask if he's inclined to go with. If not, make your own the darling jock continues to park himself in front of the tube, get into the spirit of things. Don't cook. Order out. In fact, you could lay this blessing I went to high school in the late '80s we used to have this program called together. The program thought it could do this by a) making us watch placement; b) reinforcing the most obnoxious cliques on campus by choosing all the "All Star" officers from a popular group of athletes and cheerleaders (on average, B and C students who drank, smoked, and skipped class); c) doing everything possible to conceal the fact that high school's purpose is education; and d) giving us the opportunity to buy as much "All Star" merchandise as our parents could afford. It was insulting and embarrassing and emphasize exactly what they attempt to eliminate. I hope people who have kids in high school will realize this and will not think that is enough to end community, he was not talking about the need for more school spirit or recognized the social divisions within the school as well (an athlete who pep rallies or car washes, but rather from a value system and a curriculum that people's lives. That is the "we" he is talking about, of belonging to something and having that foundation laid prior to going to school and reaching adolescence. Not living an anonymous life in your room or on the Internet. The lack of these positive networks, he argues, as do others, is why many inner city kids look for "family" in gangs. The lack of strong families in too many young lives makes the public school's job (poorly conceived and performed as problem, and he knows it. He is certainly not calling for more cries of "Go bonds of history to teens while the school and the community stress athletics as the most honored achievement. In fact, you can't teach them at all; as an education will continue to be a miserable failure so long as the values of the institution are so at odds with its ostensible mission. (Only the better as good as they are because of the competition and diversity among them.) Monkeying with a curriculum to give it the correct ideological spin is fine for the careers of school administrators and educational consultants, but it won't fool students. They may not know much of the world, but they certainly high school is to get you as far away as possible from it, to the Ivy League some of the acceptance they craved on their own merits, and secondly because they would not have despised the school so for favoring the intellectual achievers. Among the most fierce hatreds of teens (probably right after public of what you say about families is true, yet irrelevant. It's a given that strong familial relationships help keep kids on the straight path. (Note that of forging these relationships, never easy, is made all the harder by the usually devoutly Christian parents who increasingly pull their children out of the system in favor of home or religious schooling are correct to fear the moral. The religious schools, shifting their emphasis from athletics to learning (even if a large part of it is of the Biblical variety), have consistently delivered better results both in terms of educational and, I would guess, communal development, than the public schools. This is true most noticeably among minority scholarship students from weak familial backgrounds the most famous examples of these). I am not advocating religious schooling as a solution, but rather pointing out that educational institutions which have their community values focused on learning rather than spectator sports will be much more successful in education, and will be substantially happier places for all students except, of course, the athletes, and even they will benefit from a correct. When it comes to suburban high schools, though, I can say, as a survivor of the experience, that it's a community almost perfectly designed to crush, twist, and kill the spirits of those who are different, thoughtful, or So, when I come across intellectuals peddling more community as a solution, it has given much thought to his proposal to treat guns like we treat automobiles. would use them." But he should put a little more thought into how we treat automobiles. There is no license requirement to own an automobile. To drive on a public street, one must have a tag on the car indicating that the license to drive a car. Ostensibly, this is a safety measure to ensure that only competent drivers are on the road. In reality, any idiot can get one, and with minimal luck, avoid taking a driving test ever again. I ran a stop sign on test administered by a surly, bored, bureaucrat; and carry a concealed weapon anywhere in the country. I think most gun nuts could go along with that. interesting and to a degree valid. However, it would be very enlightening if he productivity is the same or higher than men's in a given industry or in this area, many women could have told him how this is evaded. All the employer needs to do is give male and female employees a different job variation on the above is at a church of my acquaintance, where in the school the pay for women teachers is lower because only the male teachers are allowed to replace the minister in some unforeseen situation. This requires little analysis: It plays like a slapstick fever dream. It attacks. The introspection that this process entails flies in the face of everything we know and cherish about gangster movies. Hotheaded crime bosses because they don't think through the moral consequences of what they do. They want, they take. They get mad, they get even. Most of us enjoy seeing their however, we're shameless hypocrites: We love the gangster's vitality, his charismatic demonstration that, with big guns and even bigger balls, everything is permissible. So what's the point of psychoanalyzing the id? tried to have him whacked and communicate his feelings ("I feel anger") for the This is funny enough to be forgiven its muddling of therapeutic modes. The a joyous blast of comic energy. The gangster's hooligans continually disrupt Beach, where he's plucked from his suite in the middle of the night to treat his patient's sudden impotence. They kidnap him from his wedding ceremony on pain of death. Each impromptu session ends with the patient's exclamations of anxiety and another forced appointment: "You did nothing for me!" For all its comic exaggeration (almost no gangster or efficacy of psychoanalysis more than any picture since Spellbound of powerful fathers, giants in their fields of psychoanalysis and racketeering, seem too sweatily transparent. Playing the straight man becomes him, and when laughing so hard that I almost needed supplemental oxygen. monster, his sour expression was so ingrained that you had to conclude that the mad doctor had misaligned his intestines, resulting in a steady stream of acid reflux. His grimacing convict in Great Expectations seemed less in need has the dodgiest gastrointestinal tract of all. At the best of times he winces, in repose appearing ulcerous; in the throes of a panic attack, he might be struggling with an Alien -like parasite about to burst through his chest. psychiatrist clumsy enough to use the words "Oedipal conflict" with a patient, that it's going to survive comparisons to The Sopranos, the rich and Soprano is part muscle and part flab, with no connecting sinews. He carries his tension in his shoulders, so that even when he's sweet he suggests a man on the traces of childlike befuddlement in his doughy face; he can't begin to figure out why the foundations of his world have become so illusory. Analyze the laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees. It combines the music video syntax of Trainspotting with the jokey nihilist amateur crooks over the platoons of murderous professional ones, and to watch as, with farcical precision, the bad guys end up accidentally blowing one that it's no easy feat. But the real trick isn't bringing disparate groups of people into slapstick alignment, it's figuring out what to do with them once with sorting them out at the end, because there's nothing left but piles of corpses. Now, why didn't I think of such an easy way out? for still more restrictions on the constitutional right to bear arms. Any day foolishness that has turned our schools into killing grounds. National Rifle presence of an armed guard might have saved the lives of Columbine High School were on target, but they didn't go far enough. As it turns out, there was a security guard at Columbine, but a single, lightly armed person is not guards or even armed teachers. They need armed students. Immediately, before another student fires another shot, Congress should pass the Right To Carry When guns in the classroom are outlawed, only outlaws in the classroom have juvenile delinquents, armed to the teeth, are free to roam. Why do you think knew their victims would be unarmed! But they would not have dared to invade Not every student has to carry a concealed weapon. It is, special effects but are divided on the merits of the ambitious plot and the Others criticize the convoluted story line and call it strictly genre and strictly for "guys in their teens and 20s, for whom the script's pretentious encompassing dialogue both inspired and juvenile." (Visit the warm 'n' fuzzy Southern Gothic tale covers the spectrum. Most are tickled pink: positive side, most say the acting is great, and though the film "doesn't take balanced portrait that she provides of a man whose biographies have to date been colored by vindictive accounts from contemporaries with axes to grind. The which warns that "readers without an interest in business and financial history House). Decent reviews for former New York Times executive editor Max his days as a young correspondent. Perhaps the best backhanded compliment is provided by another New York Times review, this one from the daily immodesty that almost by definition infects all who venture into aerials coming out of their spacesuit hoods, which receive programming that's and around the strange, apocalyptic landscape where they live, periscope speakers pop out of the ground and feed them orders. It's both cute and reactionary hick obsessed with the sexuality of puppets. Seems like a bit of a to be outed. More often than not it is homosexuals who claim a character as one orientation. The program tries to recreate the world of toddlers, which does received without being consciously sent. The first cartoon characters to be attacked the sadistic violence and sexual deviance portrayed in comic books. Batman and Robin, he noted, were two men living together who liked to wear by the comic book industry, which included, among other things, an admonition that "sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden." After aware of the gay take on Batman and Robin. Rather than resist it, they gave a camp tenor to the whole series. In the 1960s, even most adult viewers interpreted the program as broad parody. But once the idea of a gay subtext has their friends, and their enemies have all collaborated in destroying the sexual innocence of cartoon characters by making an issue out of it. When trying to likes other boy bunnies? Many of these antics were borrowed from vaudeville comedy, where a man dressing up as a woman didn't necessarily imply Bros. studio, where these cartoons were created in the 1940s and '50s, was an mocking stereotyped homosexual behavior, not winking at homosexuals in a friendly way. But while a man dressing up as a woman may not have "meant" anything in the 1940s, it does mean something in the late 1990s. What has last few decades has become not just aware of homosexuality but increasingly When Sesame Street was created in the early 1970s, no one meant for them to be taken as lovers. But consider two men living together, sleeping in the goes for the Peanuts characters Peppermint Patty and her tomboy friend intentional or even obviously intentional gay references. In The Lion male meerkat and a male warthog who live together as a couple in the jungle. In minces about and becomes obviously infatuated with other male characters who conform to gay archetypes. While parents may pick up this gay semaphore, kids sycophant in love with the boss. But lately he has taken to cruising college magazines to sailors. The sea captain calls out to thank him: "Thank you for the Jugs magazines. They'll keep my men from resorting to homosexuality these hints, inferences, and references. But it is ridiculous to object to them. There's no scientific or psychological basis for believing that children are affected in their sexual development or eventual sexual orientation by cartoons are intentionally or unintentionally giving children the idea that gay people are part of the big, happy human family, that's a good thing, not a bad one. (If it weren't for gay people, there would be no Lion King --or much recruiting, which leads them to think that gay school teachers and Boy Scout leaders present a hazard to the young is pure prejudice. pointless because the war is already lost. Gay themes are everywhere. regime's aggression and insist that it can be trusted to negotiate and honor a administration's ability to wage the war, they argue that the war can never be won, that the administration's claims to the contrary are lies, and that the United States should trim its absurd demands and bug out with whatever and then that's when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really started," Nickles said at a news conference after appearing on Meet the escalated a guerrilla warfare into a real war, and the real losers are the all of these problems to explode," DeLay charged in a House floor speech fault. "I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning," very arrogant agreement" that "really caused this thing to escalate." DeLay, meanwhile, voted not only against last week's House resolution Forces from their positions in connection with the present operations against colleagues to defeat the resolution authorizing the air war, as had been reported, DeLay conceded that he had "talked to a couple of members during the vote" but claimed not to have swayed anyone since it was "a vote of to show some leadership and admit it, and come to some sort of negotiated dismissed both arguments. "This war is not going well," he declared. "I heard helpful for the president's spin machine to be out there right now saying that DeLay called this refusal "really disappointing" and a failure of "leadership. of diplomatic end, diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed requirements "be met" as a condition of negotiation, DeLay twice ducked the Democrats call Republicans who make these arguments unpatriotic. Republicans reply that they're serving their country by debunking and thwarting a bad policy administered by a bad president. You can be sure of only two things: Each party is arguing exactly the opposite of what it argued the last time a Republican president led the nation into war, and exactly the opposite of what invited to a humble dinner party, that you ask if you can bring a date, and pathetic reverie: having one's worth enhanced by a gorgeous celebrity. And how actress, magazine cover girl, object of worldwide idolatry and scrutiny. The made a specialty of teasing ordinary modesty into extraordinary adorableness. would take a neurosurgeon to unwind its trenchant observations of our fantasy of a commoner winning a princess, however; it's also a fantasy of a Grant doesn't fall below too many stations, this goes down more smoothly than downwardly mobile lifestyle; as a consequence of his integrity, he must share a a stream of dim customers who refuse to accept that his bookshop carries what saves him from seeming like an utter snob is his habit of drawing amid his shelves to ask about a particular guide to Turkey, his recitation dribbles off hopelessly: "There's also a very amusing incident with a translated as: "Oh, God, don't I sound like a prat. Kiss me." How can she spins such comic awkwardness into scenes of amazing charm. Summoned to the press junket for her latest film and ends up posing as a journalist from Horse and Hound --a bit that at once lampoons the idiocy of celebrity interviews and forces the pair into a witty (and sexy) collusion. You also get never funnier) shows up as her equally famous boyfriend, radiating narcissistic unhappy, as well as happy, accidents. But the movie recovers its high spirits blurts out when she meets Anna that the two could be best friends. badinage was interrupted for easy pathos involving a fatal heart attack and suppose he's nice," said my friend. "He's nice for a star. But when you're a star and you go to restaurants, for instance, the waiters and owners fall all over you and send you drinks and food, and eventually you take that kind of "sometimes bestow their favors graciously, but they're never 'nice.' Being a video: She argued that Anna would have learned not to let tabloid scandals get attempt to communicate something about her own celebrity: to say that it has with a supernatural amount of charisma and sometimes wobbly technique: She was wasn't afraid to embrace the more heartlessly grasping side of her character in her in last year's Stepmom --my raccoon had hepatitis.) She doesn't need her Pretty Woman laughing shtick to hold your attention: She trusts her shielded, she has never looked so exposed. Her Anna is such a cauldron of that sets the scene and makes certain that the audience is oriented. In intent is to keep the audience disoriented. It works, maybe to a fault. The by soldiers for insolence toward the country's authoritarian ruler. When we Then he sends a ring down the dumbwaiter to her basement room by way of protagonists through "pure cinema," and has won admiration for being allusive, elusive, elliptical, and other words that begin with "a" and "e" (enigmatic, really mean to suggest a higher communion? (I fear the latter.) And are or empty pretentiousness? (I fear the former.) The movie has virtuoso passages: he means by what he shows is anybody's guess. It's possible that said the officers had fired their weapons in the "reasonable belief" that they were in danger. The case has triggered protests in New York, passionate between public safety and civil liberties. The cynical spin: It's a conflict causing significant problems throughout the Internet. Federal agents have now author, and they have secured a court order to obtain apparently confidential the Internet investment mania will burst any day now; and the Dow will collapse. The optimistic spin: That's what pessimists have been saying for a beat the consensus favorite, Duke, with outstanding defense and hot shooting. victory to its refusal to be intimidated by Duke's reputation. The New York Times spin: Duke's defeat demonstrates the price of arrogance. The woman didn't get pregnant, but the white woman gave birth to two children, one white and one black, who are now three months old. Once the black child's parentage was ascertained, the black couple sued the clinic. This week, the media be making such a fuss over this story if all the kids and parents were life in prison. The shallow analysis: The case was open and shut, since political debate over assisted suicide, but the judge and jury refused to go conservative spin: His conviction proves that assisted suicide is murder. The dull liberal spin: He's an embarrassment to the assisted suicide movement and good riddance to him. The clever liberal spin: His conviction shows that if people can't get assisted suicide legally, they'll turn to murderers such as that recorded the accident. The interesting question now is whether the plea deal means that the navigator will testify against the pilot (who was acquitted of manslaughter in the incident by a military court several weeks ago) on exceptions if the car is in "park" or if the driver keeps both hands on the a cell phone user who wasn't paying attention to the road. This is believed to be the first such ordinance in the nation. Similar legislation has reportedly and also writes publicly about stocks. As we reported last week in building a case against him for "pump and dump." That means hyping a stock he owns so the price goes up, and then dumping his shares on the public. move. Yet not a single newspaper, magazine, or broadcast entity picked up judging from press accounts, is much bigger than mine. And my record of giving good financial guidance, publicly and privately, is better than his. So why the fuss over me while other portfolio managers write every day about their stock Let's establish some things up front. First, there is no difference between a portfolio manager who recommends stocks in an interview to managers with real money on the line than it would from journalists who are trying to talk about a market that they are actually forbidden to invest in. take an oath never to invest can't possibly be as good about the inner workings of the market as those who do invest. I am in the trenches every day. Journalists aren't allowed in the trenches. If you think the trenches matter and, believe me, they matter as much in business as they do in war and in the On the Net there are hundreds of money managers writing is searing. One look at the horrible press I get from other business writers who are not portfolio managers would scare off almost anybody. sincerely want to see me fail. They want to drive a wedge between my partners averages and I blow it one year. But I can tell you this: They don't take your previous years' gains away, and that is where my credibility comes from. I wasn't the only hedge fund manager who did poorly last year, I was just the only one who was out front about it, constantly writing about how I blew the market as I am now? No way. I would just be another journalist scrounging info. To these folks, the fact that I was editor in chief of my college paper more than two decades ago might be considered a plus, but the fact that I am actually doing this stuff is a big minus. Especially because in the third stop writing? My wife and kids would like it. My legions of enemies would love it because it would leave them the playing field to themselves. Ah, but there is a problem. I don't write for the money, and I don't write for the notoriety, Because I believe that the public needs to know more about its own money. Because, until recently with online trading, the whole industry I work in was predicated on the ignorance of the client. The industry wants people to be kept in the dark so it can charge more for its services. The journalists who would stop me are complicit with that ignorance and are willing tools of those that would like the reader to have to rely on those who charge high commissions or high fees to unknowing, worried consumers of finance. I want to use my successful background as an insider to change that. In other community wants to repeal my First Amendment rights, they are stuck with me. I am not going away on my own accord. Ultimately, what I say in my defense is completely meaningless. If my comments or reports from the trenches are worthless, nobody will read them and I will disappear from the writing it is because of their popularity that I draw such heat and it is the fear of the marketplace that drives my journalist opponents to such distorted attacks revelations are (surprisingly) rare, pols sometimes must settle for the next best thing: pretending that their opponent coddles child molesters. molestation controversies during the past few weeks. These tempests do not arise from any actual disagreement over pedophilia. Rather, they are perfect case studies in how politicians fabricate, then profit from, an inflammatory issue. (See also: Democrats and Social Security, Democrats and Medicare, surveyed as college students. They concluded that victims, especially boys, typically do not suffer "intense psychological harm" from childhood sexual abuse. The researchers also recommended changing the terminology of sexual abuse: An encounter between a "willing" child and an adult should be called revolting linguistic suggestion moldered away in the great bibliographic legions of the Christian right: the Family Research Council, the Christian long record of fighting pedophilia and insisting that the article does not mitigate the illegality and immorality of pedophilia. introduced a resolution to condemn the article and to demand that President Supporters of the resolution say congressional condemnation will discourage The Republican National Committee saw its opportunity on for the permissibility of child molestation" to the Family Research Council's activists. "There is an eerie silence from the White House. I think they are afraid of offending their allies in the homosexual ranks, since there is a strong element of support among homosexual activists for lowering the age of The mainstream press has ignored the pedophilia flap, but managed to cast themselves as the scourge of pedophiles, insinuate that the until the Christian right uncovered it, that no one in the White House seems to have read, and that no one remotely linked to the Democratic Party or the White The second pedophilia scare has served a more pragmatic purpose: legislative blackmail. During the past few weeks, the Ways and Means Service. Federal employee unions, Democratic members, and the White House strongly opposed a provision that would limit certain kinds of overtime pay for customs officers. In the face of this opposition, Republicans played the investigate Internet kiddie porn traffickers. They also added money for drug in subcommittee because of the overtime provision. Trade Subcommittee Chairman comfort to molesters. "This bill protects our children from drug dealers and pedophiles, and it's unfortunate that the Democrats have put special interest Democrats, unwilling to take another beating, folded, A Democratic staffer gripes, "There is not a single member of the House who objects to the funding to fight child porn, but Republicans constructed the vote in such a way that a vote against the bill can be framed as a vote to say Democrats favor pornography. They added on the intriguing notion: Why aren't Republican members of Congress attaching Now that they have conquered the House Democrats with bogus pedophile charges, House Republicans are siccing the tactic against the White House, which still objects to the overtime provision. "Our children are under attack by child pornographers who prey on them over the Internet. Couple that with the constant peddling of narcotics to our children and you have a deadly combination that we must do everything we can to stop. This is not a time for partisanship or special interest influence," Committee Chairman Bill Archer, squishy on molesters, will probably cave. Once he does, perhaps the two parties can abandon this imaginary controversy and tackle the scourge that actually disease. "If people make decisions to do these kinds of things, other people can make decisions to stop them," he asserted. "If the resources are properly arrayed, it can be done." But five days later, when asked why the United States "The military leaders will make their decisions about when and under what is trying to have it both ways. Each school has its values, virtues, and spins. Idealists emphasize free will; realists emphasize determinism. Idealists believe in subjective resolve; realists believe in objective constraints. Idealists preach responsibility and courage, which realists dismiss as hubris and folly. Realists preach humility and prudence, which idealists dismiss as complacency and selfishness. Idealists tell us what we can do; realists tell us what we can't do. Idealists tend to be liberal; realists tend to be simply incapable of civilized behavior." The president asked, "Do you think the there something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No. free themselves of the notion that their neighbors must be their enemies." willing to withstand airstrikes, "there is no real end in sight," former decide when he has had enough. And that makes it difficult for us." Sen. to win" is something to be mustered, not dispassionately assessed. While it may "It's because he's determined that we have to be determined as cannot fundamentally alter human nature, but we can alter the rules by which all of us let our nature play out, and we can call forth our better back down. Here idealists divide into two camps. Moderate idealists claim conflict they do not want and know they cannot win." the war's shortcomings. When asked this weekend why the United States was matters," "procedural matters," and the "moving parts" of a "complex depicting this as a military "judgment" rather than a "political decision." But to "judgment," "strategy," and "circumstances" is, as with all such realist language, to obscure our indifference and cowardice. atrocities? "You cannot, through air power, stop individual soldiers sent in ground troops? "When you start with a coalition, you have to hold that a ground force." A true idealist would lobby the coalition hard for ground accepts the coalition's reluctance and tells us this is just the way things not possible to avoid casualties of noncombatants in this sort of encounter," coercion,' in which no mistakes are made and no innocent casualties occur. But every realist buzzword in the book. "Perfection is unattainable," they counseled, and "it is impossible to eliminate such casualties." it is "getting money and support and some arms from other countries, no doubt." If our soldiers are killed, the public will turn against the war; and if the assessment rules out idealistic scenarios: that the public might accept the try to win back public confidence rather than bail out. Based on this of this proves that realism is corrupt. Realism tempers the romanticism of idealists with a sense of tragedy. It's not our job to police the whole we could afford it, we don't have the will to do it. Even if we had the will to do it, we couldn't stop killings everywhere. Even if we stopped killings everywhere, we couldn't do so without killing people ourselves. Even if we should be idealistic about intervention in general but realistic in how why almost nobody wholly supports it. Idealists don't like the way it's being fought; realists think we shouldn't have started it in the first place. The force" in a conflict involving "no strategic interest of the United States." can fault his cowardice and cynicism from an idealistic standpoint. But the only way to combine piety, cowardice, cynicism, and recklessness is to hit him century English history who devours mystery novels by the shopping bag load, a this context, I am prepared to admit an entertainment vice of my own: the teen abeyance for a number of years, and is now, I am happy to report, experiencing But it would be wrong to think of these films as classic plots as new ways to frame their exploration into what it's like to be an the joys and anxieties of adolescence. To me, they are the quintessential good bad movies, because while seldom subtle or artful, they are capable of recreating a familiar and utterly compelling world. were made in the 1950s, but the genre was largely codified by screenwriter, wakes up to discover that everyone in her family has forgotten her birthday. available at right, she faces the daily indignity of the school bus. The plot winds and unwinds a mismatch of affections. The freshman geek with braces, senior who is dating the feathered blond prom queen. The film has all the house, the voyeuristic visit to the girl's locker room, the guys betting about getting laid, and the happy comic resolution: The geek beds the prom queen, basically vicious and unfair. Like his subsequent movies, Sixteen Candles is essentially a fantasy about throwing out this system: The excluded are included and the exclusionary are either enlightened or humbled. The geeks get to be cool, the cool kids get humbled, the druggies get smart, best films are romantic comedies informed by good values. a sweet girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has to choose between the his mistake, because the next year he essentially rewrote it as Some Kind of been secretly infatuated with him for years. Check out the clip available at what he plans to do with his life after high school. At the end of the 1980s, teen films took a darker turn with inclusion but detests their values (they make her ignore her old friends and play cruel practical jokes on losers). Only this time, instead of humiliating Slater, kill them. View the clip available at left to see them off the first Heather. As black as it is, Heathers has the same theme as the to spend prom night with the fat girl everyone abuses. flicks the ideal good bad movies? The first is the familiarity of the world everyone goes to a high school governed by a hierarchy of popularity and cliques. Films set at college are never as universally recognizable, because people's experiences after high school are too different to generalize about. Universities, unlike high schools, are not unitary social structures. The second essential quality of these films is that they are all, basically, the same. The formula allows one to savor minor differences and adaptations. For some reason, teen flicks died out for a while after Heathers --perhaps because it took the conventions of the form as far as started to trickle back. The trickle has suddenly become a torrent. The economics are easy enough to understand, lacking major stars, these movies are inexpensive to make and draw the ideal audiences: teens who are capable of the late 1990s' version? Teen films no longer glorify drug use, but other than category as manifest in the Scream movies. There's a Masterpiece artist from a broken home whose father cleans swimming pools. The most perfect boy in her school, who dates the most popular bitch, makes a bet with his best friend that he can transform the ugly duckling into the prom queen. Of course, the perfect boy ends up ditching his snobby clique and falling in love with diabolical bet with her stepbrother that he can't corrupt the new girl at school. The stepbrother falls for the good girl and the wicked stepsister is but I don't think the description is fair. Instead of pandering to the prejudices of teens, they offer a fantasy about a freer and happier adolescence. Their message is that there's life beyond high school, kids aren't bound by what adults want from them, how their peers think of them, or the ways lot less insulting to teen intelligence, and to the average adult one, than Internet access and a free maintenance contract. In return, all he wants is two little things. Your soul and a pound of flesh? No, just your eyeballs and a bit place ads on a small portion of the screen as you use your free computer. And with the information you give him about your income, tastes, and so on, he will be able to sell you to advertisers whose products and pitches are aimed at your sort of person. The more an advertiser knows about you, the more it is willing to pay to reach you. On the Internet, such information is even more useful this page may be different from the one your neighbor sees when she visits this same article. Bill Gross can send each of his free computer owners ads for precisely what he or she is most likely to buy. In this way Gross hopes to make Of course, Gross is not the only one with this idea. The Web is full of sites that give away valuable stuff free in the hope of making this practice is not unknown in other media, either. Television programming is still mostly free to the user. And even newspapers and traditional magazines don't begin to cover their costs from what readers pay. Those readers are heavily subsidized by advertisers hoping to sell them stuff. What's notable about the Web is the profusion of free offerings that go way beyond mere editorial content filling in the space between ads. There's an online store actually pays you to get sports scores from their site. The site counts the downloading an application that displays ads in the corner of your screen. It'll pay you even more if you can convince your friends to sign up as exchange for your eyeballs and a bit of information about yourself, either asked for explicitly or gleaned from what you reveal in using the free Which raises the question: How much can your eyeballs possibly be worth? Suppose I could insidiously find out enough about you to influence every purchasing decision you make. Suppose I could promise that every ad I sold you would go straight to your spending reflex. What could I Internet connection and the service contract and assume the computer has a create a series of banner ads, which, by blinking in the corner of your screen, other words, advertisers, as a group, think that affecting the purchasing That's for all the ads you see in every medium, from television to billboards, in the course of a year. Bill Gross is betting that his ads alone, aimed at just one person, will be worth almost half that amount. Maybe he will manage to find bigger spenders. Or maybe he'll be wildly more successful in affecting but by convincing them that it's worth spending more. That's where the demographic information comes in. This is not a new concept, of course. John sense of how valuable targeting is to advertisers, the New York Times-- which makes you give demographic information in order to register percent more. Yahoo! can tell what your interests are by the search you're Car and Driver or Fortune is pretty well targeted at affluent people who like fancy cars. And ads on the Internet, at least so far, lack mph. A banner at the top of a Web page just isn't the same as a luxurious Targeting may increase what advertisers will spend per eyeball, but it also reduces the number of eyeballs they have to pay for. people, his total ad spending would go down and not up. The apparent going advertising may be as likely to reduce total ad spending as to increase it. The Internet ad market is growing at two or three times the rate of any other attached to wallets. And the size of the wallets is a strict limit on the value of the eyeballs. So have I just argued myself out of a job by mathematically don't think so. Free magazine articles are one thing, free computers are another. Exchanging stuff for eyeballs makes sense as long as the cost of providing the stuff is less than the value of the eyeballs to advertisers. What propose is something clean, useful and solid." What is the subject of Dirk and sorry. (No, wait, that's how you get out of accidentally bombing somebody's merely to raise revenue but to encourage social policy, as in the deduction for system should go much, much farther down this road, particularly the sales tax. Under my plan, sales taxes would only be not eliminated on certain socially and you get the bonus. Rent Three Ninjas and you pay a tax, but you can check a box that allocates your money to hire a guy to beat the hell out of is who decides which items are taxed and which earn the buyer a bonus. I do. By within the historical context of the present system, where tax rates are set to benefit the rich and powerful. My system would differ only in benefiting a different self. And what's good for me would no doubt be good for the drop stems from their fear of running afoul of the new niceness laws and are still encouraged to attempt this far more demanding verse form: Four lines, each with the same number of words; two, three, or four The words in each line must originally appear adjacent to each other in a of servicemen and their civilian counterparts. Ignoring for a moment whether a Even though the Congressional Budget Office debunked the statistic in March, several military representatives continue to cite it in congressional in the growth of military versus civilian wages since 1982--that is, soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not take into account the the comparison does not account for the fact that most members of the armed forces are younger and less educated than civilian workers. This is important would be between the wage growth of soldiers and civilians of comparable age college graduates of the same age. By that measure, soldiers earn more than their civilian counterparts. A RAND study has found essentially similar as long hours, harsh discipline, isolation from loved ones, and the risk of injury or death. It may be a good idea to attract better soldiers, sailors, and airmen with huge salary increases, but military service is so different from civilian work that most wage comparisons are extremely suspect. Snobs that we are, we like to pretend that we don't But the truth is that it does cross our radar screens from time to time. Do we regard Salon as our competition? Yes and no. We are somewhat direct competitors for advertising dollars, but for readership the question is more complicated. The real competition for any publication in any medium is the claimant for those hours is likely to be a similar publication. Print magazines, which depend on direct mail for generating subscriptions, usually find that their best prospects are subscribers to magazines they most closely because someone who has already eaten a blueberry bagel is more likely to eat a strawberry bagel than the average person is to eat a fruit bagel of any similar publications are even more interdependent since the viability of this sort of enterprise is unproved. The cold, hard fact is that we need Salon to prosper and vice versa. The warm, throbbing fact, however, is that we are only human. And rumor has it that they are as well. Human emotions like Schadenfreude --and there must be a German word for reverse Despite our best efforts, we couldn't help noticing lately they pull it off (minus a few million for the midwives). And this is for less losses." The owners of Salon are asking even more, and it's no joke. Or less, but same ballpark. As a division of a big company, we can't go public to ask Dad for our allowance. Also, our goal is to become profitable. If the has been ridiculing the Internet bubble all along. (See rational reflection of actual economic potential if all the rest are a reflection of something closer to clinical insanity? The truth is that we can't. The deeper human truth is that we don't especially want to. The good fortune of other people is annoying enough (however good your own fortune may be). At least let us cling to the belief that it is unjustified. prospectus. We were alarmed to discover that it is riddled with typographical inform our readers about these troublesome lapses. They are especially shocking in a formal government filing, vetted by lawyers, in which inaccuracy can increase for at least the foreseeable future." Of course, "profits won't come on what you mean by "until." But Salon told a trade publication called disgrace. How could Salon be so sloppy as to report large and growing losses in its prospectus when it actually is already profitable? to significantly depend on revenues from a small number" of advertisers. The problem here is probably the classic misplaced "not." They mean to say: Our enrolled in the Salon Members program." One or two zeros probably were dropped were "above what our projections were." Were they projecting fewer than a Let us, though, just for the heck of it, consider the possibility that perhaps the prospectus is accurate and all these quotations thing possible? Although highly unlikely, it's possible, we suppose, that all these distinguished publications repeatedly misheard the same individual in the same way, although he has no speech impediment that we know of. Surely, though, it is impossible to imagine that the Salon folks themselves have been lying, spinning, and covering up. Journalists, after all, expose these inspiring things to say about journalists and the truth. In particular, he has spoken of Salon 's dedication to a mission of exposing important facts. content to sit on their fannies and analyze or summarize. Last fall as a hypocrite. Those who go around exposing unpleasant facts about other about perception or spin. They should be worried about the truth and concerned about the truth, and that was Salon 's guiding principle here." Let's not be sentimental. Let's consider this as a pure business matter. Here is a chairman of the board, editor in chief, and director who is marketing his company as what might be called a "truth play." Truth is his company's Unique Selling Proposition, its market niche, its core competency, its brand value. It would be sheer folly for such a company to invent preposterous lies and spins and feed them to the nation's most prominent publications. That's why the only logical explanation is typographical errors for you. I am a transsexual woman (postoperative, many facial surgeries, voice surgery). I am a manager and programmer. Most of the time people have no idea, but in the work environment, everyone eventually knows. Most people are fine with it, but a few (always men) choose to act out in spectacularly inappropriate ways. The worst is in meetings with clients where a male manager will refer to me repeatedly as "he." This, of course, makes no sense to the client, who has no idea why the professional woman across the table is being referred to as a man. Things I have tried include taking the offender aside to pronouns. If we're not in a client meeting and I have the clout, I sometimes with your skills, to another firm. If it is a practical impossibility to leave, you might consider going to the person's superior and registering a formal complaint. If you have the figurative stones for it, you might respond to the digs made in front of clients with a remark such as, "You have to make In other words, throw the discomfort on the other guy. The "outsiders" will not defense is: He is my BF and stays in my room. How do you collect rent due? And how many people may occupy the flat. Her only hope, if she is unhappy with the psychologist who does consulting at a local psychiatric hospital. While most of I wouldn't mind this so much in private, but it's not good in front of the patients. Much of my work is with severely disturbed people and requires that I testify in court to request civil commitment. For reasons of both ego and personal safety, I would prefer to be called by my title, particularly in front of my patients. I can't think of a way to request this without seeming overly impressed with myself and my degrees. Keep in mind that none of them would ever call the psychiatrists by their first names. How do I request this politely and however, how use of your last name provides greater safety than your first. It is the last name, after all, that is listed in a phone book. Perhaps your concern is that some patients are hearing both names used?) In any case, good luck. It should not be too difficult to get things your way. friend, not my son's. I did not feel it was appropriate to invite her, due to the limitations placed on my son and his fiancee with respect to the number of guests invited. Two other friends who have been very much a part of my son's life are livid that I did not insist on this woman being invited. I feel any pressure I can take off these two kids is in their best interest. What do you think? Also, I wondered, when having a wedding shower, if it's appropriate to invite people who are out of state and obviously aren't going to come to a constraints when putting on a wedding. But she also thinks there's got to be a way to squeeze in just one more. Bear in mind that all those invited surely will not come. And of course both the bride's and groom's side can keep expanding the "just one more" ploy, but if it's really just one more, with you that such invitations are really invoices. couple and tranquil thoughts to both sets of parents. me-- you can do better! What would happen to our sex life then, if Deb (who participated in this story because she loves me and because she has tenure) and I tried for the first time to make something happen to it? behind shops like these is to make obtaining the materials of sexual experimentation as ordinary as purchasing plumbing supplies or housewares. for an adjustable circumference version, a little strip of vinyl with snaps for It doesn't. Back home, I derived a certain depraved buzz in cinching the device on, but that was soon eclipsed. The thing works on got to thinking: Under battlefield conditions it doesn't get out anyway. And while I should have been paying more attention to other things, this led to A woman I know says women's magazines are the best places or articles such as "Eight New Games for the Foreplay Challenged." had to read three times to comprehend. The man stands, the woman remains supine produce a pelvic tilt for better access to the G spot. Instead, we experienced an uncomfortable pretzel feeling that stick figures must be immune to. And in general, Cosmopolitan 's exotic sex positions require the sort of body placement you can't remember in the moment of passion and even if you could, Next we tried those "Better Sex" instructional videos including shipping and handling). My wife couldn't bear to watch them; I blue power suit, looking like she was about to explain how the sales force euphemisms for oral sex and then the video cuts to XXX action with gratuitous do to each other with their mouths raises this question: Do you really need a of hotel and travel ads, the guys tend to be markedly less attractive than the women. No way he'd be with her if this wasn't an instructional sex video! The inanity of the experts and the dubious casting make these films about as erotic Another approach is food. The notion that certain foods, such as oysters or rhino horn, are aphrodisiacs has been pretty much discounted. But it's plausible to think that cooking a meal together and then dining on it, just the two of you, could be erotic. Especially if (like me) your schedule frequently forces you to eat alone and you often find yourself standing in front of the microwave, screaming, "Come on, goddammit!" relationship there is a type of eating experience that will heighten sexual response. (There's also a chart showing which foods are good for eating off to the book, rosemary is sexy because of its fragrance (used in many perfumes) and because of its texture, which, so the text assured, tickles nerve endings. together, drinking wine and beer along the way. At one point while I was working on the dessert, I asked my wife how long to beat the heavy cream less than an hour, and everything came out perfectly. Eating at our dining room table for the first time ever without guests, we were having fun by candlelight. But the mood was romantic, not erotic. which includes a "consultation" fee). The drug was prescribed by a doctor, whom never been. I completed the transaction via the Internet after filling out a glasses, and gulped. And then what? It felt awkward sitting in our bedroom, so I had to explain the rules. I won in about six hands, auspiciously I thought, with three aces. But we still weren't really in the mood yet. with these words instead of dots: "lips," "above waist," "ear," "breast," "blow," "suck," and "eat." We took turns throwing the dice, but the activities word from the pad that the launch sequence was initiating. It was pretty much like all other sex, except for a slight lightheadedness. Deb said she noticed a remote tingling sensation. On the plus side, there was no priapism and neither of us experienced disruption of our color vision nor a fatal heart attack, man's disobedience to God: the body's disobeying of the mind, the will, the spirit, and even of itself. (The paradigm of this for him is the unbidden it rather than deploring it: Essential to the erotic is the body's defiance of design and control. (The paradigm of this for him is the jiggle.) inherent tension between physically abandoning yourself to another on the one hand and sexual planning on the other. The more of the one, the less of the "You start to have a new feeling and then you realize where it came from and If the intrusion of consciousness is the problem, then maybe the answer is to drugs. But then you have all the traditional drawbacks, including diminished physical attractiveness and degraded sexual performance. saying nothing. (Of course, when you do it you'll still know, but having an time, your partner can surprise you. And yes, this requires trust. But why would you be having sex with someone you don't trust?) My main conclusion is must have called the newspaper, because it pulled the ad after three days, Institute posted an article on its Web site backing organ markets, and former Analysis, has endorsed the idea. Its most sophisticated defense, however, comes pursuing an honorable but difficult mission. He wants to alleviate the enormous shortage of organs for transplantation. He also wants to bring libertarianism into medicine, an arena in which few ideologues survive. In his book Mortal claim: Even in health care, people should be allowed to do what they wish with their own bodies (as long as they don't hurt anyone else). And that includes selling their body parts. It's not just because he believes people have the right. It's because he thinks giving people that freedom will save lives. think. He is probably right about saving lives. The transplant waiting list waiting. Healthy people could conceivably sell their eyes, some skin, a few bones, a kidney, a portion of their liver, and even a lung and still survive. would certainly bid up prices enough to attract sellers. Perhaps, as he says, charity will even raise money for patients who can't pay the going rate. ("If you could spare just a couple of dollars, ma'am, we'll have enough to buy with lower quality organs? So what, he says. The market will reduce the price for their organs, testing will weed out unacceptable risks, and the risks will outweigh the lives saved anyway. What about the risk that some people will be coerced or will act impulsively? He says that we can do careful screening and require waiting periods. Aren't people who sell their organs out of desperate financial need acting involuntarily? No more so than when they stoop to cleaning bathrooms for minimum wage, he says. You might reply that this isn't just cleaning out toilet bowls. But, he says, if you're really worried about exploiting the poor then we can require a minimum income for anyone who sells Well, I am no philosopher, and I remain unencumbered by legal training, but I still believe the whole idea is warped. My opposition stems from exposure to ordinary people as they make decisions about whether to undergo surgery, to take their medicines, and so on. Libertarians have great faith that people nearly always make rational choices and that having more choices can't be bad. But any doctor can tell you that's not true. In medicine, you come to recognize how unreliable the faculty of reasoning is and how common decision faced by patients with asymptomatic carotid stenosis, a worth cutting their overall risk of having a stroke in half. It's not an easy task. Each individual must define what's most important in his or her life, then calculate the best course to meet these goals. I can tell you that a lot of people fail to reason through the options very well. Even when they understand their goals clearly, they often pick a choice that runs against their aims. In academician's terms, they fail to maximize their systematic faults in reasoning, especially when processing risk information like this. For example, the order in which a doctor presents options can easily the time can lead them in the other direction. Yet there is no right way to frame the options. Another quirk, as gamblers and con artists know all too well, is that the brain is not good at weighing small chances of big gains (or losses) against large chances of small losses (or gains). organ seller is trying to decide whether the terrible dangers from kidney removal or the certain loss of sight from surrendering an eye is worth a sudden cash infusion, his effort to identify his best interest will be confused by how the question is framed, by difficulties sorting out the statistical risks, by the vision of all that money, and many other factors. These vulnerabilities are easily exploited. But even when not taken advantage of, plenty of people get that people should do what they want and live with the consequences. Some options are so terrible and irrevocable, so unlikely example, researchers cannot pay volunteers so much that the poor could be exploited. Rules limit how much blood you can donate or sell at one sitting. And while we allow people to give a kidney to their child, we do not allow them to donate their heart. Likewise, hawking an organ would be right for so few, if any, that permitting the option makes no sense at all. laws stopping people from selling themselves into slavery or selling a vital organ such as their heart. People will argue about where to draw the line. Some think seat belt laws, for example, go too far. But few would discard laws better than living in a society that allows money to entice people to convert their own health into a commodity. People can be weak, and money is all too he must have been one tired chief executive. In the previous seven days he had own Bill Gates, who was $3.8-billion richer when he fell asleep on the Of course, neither Dell nor Gates actually saw any of these hundreds of millions of dollars, since their gains were reaped entirely on paper in the form of sharp increases in the stock prices of both Dell and billions of dollars. But actually this is a relatively recent development in people who run corporations are also the people who own them. The traditional story of industrial capitalism's development in the United States is that it system where the people who owned companies delegated the responsibility for always exceptions to this reign of the managers, to be sure, including Ford, where the Ford family kept tight control at least through the end of World War founders dissipate as the enterprises grew larger and more ambitious in their appetite for capital. The more money you borrow, and the more shares of stock you issue, the more people you give a share in your business. As a result, except for the media business, where many large companies are still owned by model. The ownership of stock has been diffuse, and the management of the company has been professional, in the sense that it has had no substantial Bill Gates is that they, and their enormous personal fortunes, hearken back to an older model, where a personal stake in a company was a guarantee of one's managerial model is certainly still alive and well, as proved by the part, this is a function of the enormous entrepreneurial boom in the computer industry over the last two and a half decades. The key word in Silicon Valley has always been "equity," and the best company leaders have clung to as much of have been those in which the people who started the company have continued to run it and to own much of it. Not coincidentally, these are the companies that that a high salary and meaningful responsibility were enough to motivate problem was that managers needed to be more like owners. That helps explain the explosion in the use of stock options since the 1980s. Give managers a stake in their companies, the thinking went, and they'll perform better. After all, look it assumed that people already being paid millions of dollars will work performance is, on its own terms, obviously a good one. But too often stock options are just gravy, tossed in on top of a huge base salary to satisfy the huge chunks of options that he immediately exercises so he can pocket the cash, not so he can invest in the future of the company. More than that, the lesson manager and has made billions of dollars, corporations have imagined that he's been a great manager because he's made billions of dollars. But it's more likely that Dell has been a great manager because he's been running a company that is, in some important sense, his. Not that he's walking away from model, successful as it has been, is not the only possible model for success. But in Dell's case, it's clearly the ownership, not the accompanying financial reward, that has really mattered. Most corporations, with their skyrocketing can compete successfully only by duplicating the enormous financial gains someone like Dell has reaped. In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance. Unfortunately, these are going to start appearing in its ads again, though thankfully, the lizards and words, it's been a typical couple of weeks in the advertising industry of the Actually, it's tempting to say that the state of perpetual turmoil that characterizes advertising today has characterized the industry since the modern era of advertising began sometime in the early 1920s. After all, the underlying theme of just about everything honest written about the ad realizes that he's genuinely afraid of losing the big soap account. And in the live with fear in their hearts." So it may be a mistake to think that advertising in the 1990s is more chaotic and stressful than it's ever been. other hand, it may not be a mistake. For while the peculiar way advertising to take their business elsewhere has. Even in the late 1960s, the average business stuck with its ad agency for nine years. Today, the length of tenure accounts into review, which essentially requires their current ad agency to compete against a host of newcomers. It's like an actor being forced to audition over and over again in order to keep a part. Toys "R" Us (as well as a host of others) have switched agencies. At the same time, companies have started dividing up their advertising budgets. Instead of and another will do the creative. The creative budget is often parceled out as clients, in other words, are not necessarily as big as they once were. isn't a bad thing, though you'd have a hard time convincing most ad execs of that. The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their its profits came from two companies, you can bet GM would be constantly worried about keeping those two companies happy. Insofar as fragmented budgets make each individual client less important to an agency's overall financial health, then, it's better for the agency, though it does mean that more energy has to search is, needless to say, a difficult one at a time when there are literally thousands of ad agencies in the United States alone and, more importantly, when the creative differences between agencies have narrowed considerably. Perhaps the most curious thing about advertising today, in fact, is that agencies that spend all their time helping companies build strong brand names and distinct corporate identities have a very difficult time building brand names for This wasn't always the case. To take only the most famous made them. More troubling, from the perspective of the advertisers themselves: Watch a sneaker ad with the sound off. It will be next to impossible to discern which company's shoes are being pushed. Advertising, in that sense, is feeling its main asset is the imagination of its staff, something that cannot be duplicated. As one hopeful exec told Advertising Age recently, necessarily exist over and over again. And at a time when ad people all seem to be drawing from the same palette of colors and styles, creativity and industry is reluctantly moving toward a business model much closer to the advertising budgets become more fragmented, it's easy to imagine a situation in which ad agencies serve primarily to orchestrate production teams, bringing in art directors and copywriters for specific ad campaigns rather than keeping a whole staff on hand. When agencies lose major accounts, they often fire nearly everyone involved with the account. How much longer can it be before agencies intact, in part, is the importance of relationships to the business. disappeared while studio execs remained important as deal makers, and the same could happen in advertising. As clients grow increasingly less committed to their ad agencies, the economics of the business will have to change. In his never be fired." No doubt. But for the ad agencies, indispensability turned out letting judges offer castration as an option for perpetrators of sex crimes. involuntary chemical or surgical castration of these criminals. technology for castration has evolved considerably, and there is evidence that, in some circumstances, it can dramatically reduce the likelihood a sex offender justice system to control rape and child molestation. Dozens of states have released sex offenders move in nearby, but people complain that it doesn't help much to know that your neighbor is a pedophile if you can't do anything about it. More states are turning to doctors to solve the problem for them. castration has been used as a punishment for crimes in all cultures dating back dramatically scaled back, probably because of the increased awareness of testosterone production. The drugs' primary use in men is to control prostate cancer, but when injected daily or weekly they reduce testosterone to castration levels. Side effects include serious allergic reactions and the formation of blood clots that can kill patients. The drugs also appear to alter reintroduced castration in this modern, seemingly humane form, although only procedure done under local anesthesia. Each testicle is removed through a small scrotal incision similar to the kind made during a vasectomy. the four new state laws call for sentencing rapists to be castrated, but with chemical castration on offenders who commit rape or incest after even one appropriate, and that by controlling sex offenders' irresistible urges to rape or molest again, the operation allows them to be released without endangering of volunteer prisoners, with the most dramatic reductions among pedophiles. half of the castrated men still could have erections and sex, but their desire and expert on treating sex offenders, points out, castration works "mainly in Castration takes the impulse away from those with an aberrant sexual be to castration of sex offenders? Well, none, if it is carefully applied to indiscriminately. The studies show that castration is effective in criminals with multiple offenses, especially if they are motivated by sex. But proponents are wrongly using the data to justify mandatory application across sadists and pedophiles are only a small percentage of the total. Most rapists castration after just one offense. Dr. Berlin argues that the laws impose "a medical intervention in the absence of evidence that forced treatment is likely the state must find doctors willing to do the job. (Heaven's Gate members had without medical supervision, but the serious side effects, and the need to ensure that appropriate doses are given, make this approach foolhardy. It also raises the question of what to do with people who can't take the drug because of the side effects. Would they have to go back to jail? Bringing in released pedophiles turn up week after week for an unwanted, potentially lifelong Court recognized this when it ruled that involuntary surgical castration constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The court may be persuaded to let chemical castration stand because it is theoretically reversible. If this line is crossed, politicians would have little to stop them from seeking forced treatments to control other behaviors, such as adultery (for which castration has historically been a punishment), prostitution, or the consumption of pornography. As medicine's arsenal expands (we already have drugs to limit libido, hunger, and depression), it is conceivable that laws could mandate even Many people see rapists as a special case, though, having no objections to extreme measures to stop them from raping again. The crime is so repugnant, they say, that it is hard to treat rapists as people deserving of any concern. Prisoners, after all, give up their rights for having committed United States accepts prisoners' rights to free speech, legal representation, and health care. We still reject using prisoners for organ transplants or slave labor. Requiring castration for rape means we have decided it is acceptable to seems more appropriate. It does not mandate castration, instead reserving it times. Having completed his sentence for his one conviction, he is set for occasional Slate department based on the premise that who wins in endorses nor condemns any of the views expressed, however laudatory or anniversary of Roe vs. Wade has arrived, and activists on both sides are the debate has been about persuading you what it's about. Most of us are viewpoint we share with them. This debate revolves around three fundamental dominated the debate in the 1970s. Several lines of argument hinge on it. Conversely, they think that an abortion ban, even if it can't be enforced, will have destroyed the public's faith that government can do much of anything, let that the government always screws things up. Now we're more susceptible to the attention on the gore and repugnance of coat hangers and back alleys. After legal abortions. The longer abortion remains legal, the more people read about casual abortions, the more they forget how gory and repugnant abortion was when jeopardy and that abortion will soon be banned again. To gain the upper hand, each side needs to convince you that the other side has the upper hand. the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." As Roe took root, however, and national stability helped persuade the Supreme Court to reaffirm Roe woman's inability to spare the time or the money to raise a child properly is an acceptable reason for aborting her pregnancy. Such practical logic helped sustain life at any cost. They apply this argument to neonatal hospital care, lifelong disabilities, and assisted suicide, as well as to abortion. Absorbing the only effective solution. This debate began with birth control in the late legislation) and continued through abortion in the 1970s to AIDS in the 1980s. culture of callousness that drugs can only obscure. focus of the abortion controversy shifted to the relative rights of the used a photo of a woman who had gone through the procedure, surrounded by her emerging feminist movement. In the 1980s, this combination proved doubly vulnerable to the New Right's critique: Women's careers bore the bloodstains of abortions. Today, feminism remains a bad word, but Republicans have adjusted their philosophy of motherhood to accommodate women's political power (hence measures that would make clinics give women information designed to dissuade them from having an abortion, they call these measures "women's right to know" right to abortion as an extension of the "civil rights" granted to blacks and seeking abortions but to their fetuses, "the most defenseless members of the of the debate turns on which issues are associated with abortion. Roe decision that upheld the right to use contraceptives. By arguing for abortion blur the distinction between birth control and abortion. This raises the specter of a slippery slope toward regulating sex. Recognizing this trap, the National Right to Life Committee refuses to talk about birth control. in the context of "life" issues such as assisted suicide. This raises the specter of a slippery slope toward decriminalizing murder. murder, but few regard the woman who participates in the killing as a murderer. contradiction in law. Nevertheless, each camp continues to exploit one end of Bush portrayed the fetus as a human life but said he hadn't "sorted out the question of the fetus's humanity and instead accused Bush of threatening to other lines of argument continue, in recent years the question of whose judgment should count in the abortion decision has come to the fore. Roe struck down abortion laws in part on the grounds that they interfered with doctors' professional judgment. This scientific veneer neatly obscured the ethical dimension of abortion decisions. Over the years, rigging polls to ask whether "a woman and her doctor" (as opposed to a woman reassert the priority of morality over medicine, always describe physicians who terminate pregnancies as "abortionists," not "doctors." They also dismiss a federal law protecting clinics from obstruction, on the reasoning that Families vs. government: Beginning in the late 1980s, the National Abortion Rights Action League executed the most important framing maneuver of candidate manuals, and other media to disseminate a new message: "Who decides?" This message changed the focus of the abortion debate from the morality of the argument is defensively neutral, the "who decides" question is aggressively political. By rhetorically stacking their side of the question (to include husbands, doctors, and clergymen, along with women) and defining the other side big government more than they dislike abortion. Throughout the 1990s, this ban, on which Congress will soon vote again, represents a shrewd decides" and back toward "what's done," toward the humanity of the fetus and designed to regain political advantage, not to prevent abortions. But is it any that's supposed to be all about principle has become all about positioning. of a cliff, looking down, saying to yourself: "Boy, that's a steep drop. It'll sure hurt if I jump," and then jumping anyway. Such seems to be the curious strategy of the world auto industry in the late 1990s, as it grapples with prices that are actually declining, demand that's stagnant, and production capacity that, against all good sense, just keeps getting bigger. one respect, this anxiety about the auto industry simply reflects the fact that it has become the poster child for a global economy in which deflation is suddenly everyone's favorite thing to worry about. Even in today's supposedly were taken as emblems of the United States' inability to adjust to the end of the postwar boom. At the end of that decade, nothing made inflation more real than the phrase "sticker shock." So today the image of assembly lines churning out hundreds of thousands of unneeded and unwanted vehicles is an excellent representation of the specter of global recession. This is a specter that seems to loom larger, of course, after the series of currency crises that have beset in the near future, there are going to be too many cars and not enough drivers. Instead, just about everyone thinks this. What's curious is that no one is that overcapacity concerns are at least a decade old (click for a quick review) and that the predicted crisis of demand has not yet materialized, though continued to expand so briskly and because the Big Three automakers have restructured their operations to do a better job of matching supply with demand. (In other words, they downsized.) Overcapacity is, in any case, difficult to measure, since it's more important for car companies to be able to meet increases in demand than it is for them to make only as many cars as customers want. You can shut down a line for a couple of weeks without any problems if demand falls short. You can't build that line from scratch if demand rises unexpectedly. By some estimates, in fact, overcapacity of a proffered by the very people building the cars for which there is supposedly no car companies, which are anxious about the continued impact on their earnings overexpansion thus becomes a way for the Big Three to serve their own interests restructuring precisely around the issue of excessively free credit for capital which needed a government bailout to save it from its creditors, will be as they worry about their inability to raise prices, are breaking ground on new plants and pushing their workers to take more and more overtime. about falling prices, not to want to shake him vigorously and say, "Just say no, damn it!" If there are going to be too many cars, then it seems sensible to stop making cars. Except, of course, that if you do you lose all hope of capturing what market does exist, and except, of course, that when you stop making cars, you have to close factories and throw people out of work. it really that individual factories are overstaffed. After all, the Big Three than it ever was, and significantly more efficient than most people thought automakers face now is of a macroeconomic, not microeconomic, nature, which is what must make it so difficult for them to accept. It's about the fact that within a given industry, supply does not ensure demand, and that what is raised by all this is whether cars are commodities. In other words, does the all about differentiating one product from another. But all this talk about global overcapacity suggests that automakers see themselves as all making the film that then becomes the No. 1-selling videotape at Blockbuster, and you get from Paramount Studios to Blockbuster, and burdened it with a debt load worthy casting doubt on the conglomerate model and stressing the virtues of playing to money to cut its debt in half, the words "fiscal responsibility" suddenly sounded less improbable than they once had. There remains a great deal of educational and professional divisions are the largest in the world, and the divisions have done adequately under a company for which they were but an afterthought. In the hands of a company with a real investment in publishing, went public with its plans before lining up a prospective buyer. As one company hardly the best strategy if you're looking to drive a hard bargain. It's also a advantage of the big tax savings that the law provides had the company waited a year and then spun off the publishing assets into a separate company. But Nickelodeon book imprints and of books tied to Paramount film releases as evidence that the company's parts add up to a stronger whole. what happens when that next Road Rules book tanks. Similarly, publishing books based on your own movies is a great idea when the movies are doing well. Real synergy, in other words, only happens when you are sense. Now, it's possible that this is, in fact, happening behind the scenes. in terms of profits. Many people there imagine that the trade division will be assumes that the book industry is somehow in worse shape than the rest of the that complex needs to take some quick lessons in management and profit growth foreshadow the world in which we're all either symbolic analysts or hamburger flippers. But look at the numbers. Last year, the music industry saw sales fewer books than they did the year before. And the audience for cable while viewership of the major networks has, of course, continued to drop. Is None of this is to say that there aren't successful entertainment companies, although the short list would probably include only radio business). But these individual successes can't disguise the very curious reality that we're living in a world that is somehow saturated by the media companies today, success depends on selling more of your product next year than their product next year as they did this year, they should count themselves lucky. If you want to know what a real myth is, don't bother with synergy. Just Car will be spun off by its parent company, personal services franchise giant for the people who "try harder." To let shareholders know what they're in for, true that, not long ago, this very space was filled with invective against of a catchy lead). But in this case it's impossible to resist, for in the word agencies were all in downtown urban areas, making taxis the only way for business travelers and tourists to get from airports to their destinations. parked right outside the door, and the rental agent would actually escort you fear that he couldn't expand the company fast enough to keep up with the really notable is that it has been shaped, in truly uncanny fashion, by the company, the kind that could topple a democratically elected government in assembling in the 1960s a stunning array of companies from seemingly every the recipe for success, because diversification would allow companies to offset losses in one sector with gains from others. Investors diversify their portfolios, the thinking went, so why shouldn't large companies diversify their One reason they shouldn't, it now seems, is that unless concentrate on the industries they know something about and neglect those they don't. Still, conglomeration as a theory lasted well into the early 1980s, and large levels of its debt. The argument was that debt forced managements to profit, but rather increasing company cash flow. Large interest payments were apparently not the problem everyone had thought they were. "entrepreneurial." And the company was no longer part of a conglomerate, which was good because everyone was talking those days about focusing on your "core business." But if the entrepreneurial spirit was willing, the flesh was employees, who bought the company through what's called an Employee Stock popular until the 1980s. Traditional thinking on employee ownership held that ownership. Critics also suggested that, with their salaries and stock wrapped up in the same company, employees were putting too many eggs in one basket. one fan, "will be motivated, they will be happy, they will be competitive." I ownership, and the company remained profitable for the next decade. But more superiority and inevitability. These claims can't, after all, all be right. (Though in the 1980s, Congress did jiggle the tax rules in ways that encouraged But nothing like this ever gets said. The new moves in, with scant reference to the old. The avatars of the new make huge sums of money, all the while pontificating about the efficiency and rationality of the market. But the market can be productive without being rational, and you can have change savior of Apple Computer, tells us in Time this week. What Jobs left out of that sentence, though, is a word that has wrecked Apple in the past and could wreck it in the future. The word is "our" or, to be more accurate, "my," as in: "We started out to get my computer in the hands of everyday never interested in having everyone own personal computers. He was interested only in having everyone own Apples. And this is, of course, the great irony behind Apple's apparently imperishable image as the corporation of the journalism's more preposterous pronouncements. It was all about freedom, As everyone knows by now, Jobs always portrayed Apple in general, and the Mac in particular, as avatars of a new populist revolution, as athletic woman hurling a hammer and destroying Big Brother was not so much some everything Jobs had been saying since Apple began. What you couldn't tell from the ad, though, was that in Jobs' imagination, what would replace Big Brother millions upon millions of Mac users, all imagining they were pursuing "personal really interesting about Jobs' imperial ambition, though, is that the very immensity of its scope doomed Apple to marginality. The problem was not that market. That's what Bill Gates has always wanted, after all, and that desire problem, rather, was that Jobs wanted Apple to be every corner of the that, almost from the beginning, Apple was confused about its mission. In the simplest terms, it was a hardware company that thought it was a software making software is analogous to the difference between making razors and making lot higher on the blades, and you will sell a lot more of them. Now, it's Computer is Wall Street's new darling, and all they make is razors. But it's a tougher business. Price pressures are constant. It's hard to distinguish yourself from the crowd, though Apple's name would have helped its case. And most important of all, there's no romance in it. No one really talks about how wants them. Gates doesn't care what kind of machine you run his software on. He This, of course, is the other path Apple could have taken. software, then, would have capitalized on what people really loved about Apple, might very well have seen its software become the industry standard. was an understandable one. The preposterously high margins Apple was able to for three times cost and earning 72-percent gross profits on Macs, undoubtedly blinded the company to the fact that consumers would not ignore price forever. digital revolution. Jobs didn't want to make just blades. Jobs wanted to make the razor, the blades, and the packaging. And if he'd had his way, Apple would have forged the stainless steel, too. (According to one account, Jobs once "fantasized about a factory in which the raw materials that came in would be that he didn't want his machines to be able to talk to other companies' machines. In fact, this hostility to compatibility permeated even the company's attitude toward itself. When the Mac was introduced, hundreds of thousands of designed at the same time. It's as if, for Jobs, the basic criterion for an "insanely great" product was its radical difference, which is to say its though, is that Jobs has never really let this idea go. After he left Apple, he sell the hardware unit to Canon and the software to, yes, Apple. Upon returning to finally allow a limited number of companies to manufacture Mac clones, calling these firms "leeches." Somehow I doubt that Bill Gates thinks of Dell as parasitic because its computers run only on Windows. In this respect, Every computer Apple makes costs a lot to make. Every additional copy of Apple's world, and it isn't because the company imagined it could be all things. If only Apple had decided to be The Way and let someone else be The microeconomics has demonstrated, it is that it's hard to keep your profit wheat, no matter where it grows, and it's pretty easy to grow unless the Dust Bowl is raging. That means that the supply of wheat rises quickly to meet demand, which, in turn, keeps a downward pressure on prices. Wheat, in other would be true, one might think, of salt. If anything, salt is easier to produce than wheat. And salt is the same all around the world. It should, in theory, be impossible for a company to charge more for its basic salt than its competitors most mundane and undifferentiated of products can be made into something unique with the right marketing strategy. Salt is salt is salt, except when it comes in a blue canister with a little girl with an umbrella on it and the promise of as the heart of our economy, namely information technology and financial that wheat market. Luckily for them, though, we're much further from that world of perfect competition than much recent hype would suggest. corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered "commodification," the word cultural critics use to decry the corruption of in its heyday. Profits and stock prices are at record highs, and there's no the clothing industry reveal a permanent anxiety. What companies rely on for profits today they assume will most likely not be there tomorrow, because tomorrow someone else will be making the very same thing for less. (Click for one recent, emblematic account.) In this universe, even the paranoid may not technological breakthroughs that allow a company to distinguish itself from its competition and charge a premium for its product are more likely and fruitful in an economy characterized by price competition than in one dominated by the democratization of fashion and interior decoration. Whether you deplore or difficult to square with one fact: A few large corporations dominate many, if maintain high profit margins and market share in businesses that, in theory at least, should be eminently susceptible to competition. fended off by the enormous capital investment required to enter the business. industry, a curious confluence of taste distinctions and brand identification makes meaningful challenges difficult to imagine. Coke does taste different cover the opportunity cost I avoid by not having to comparison shop. name for a product that observers once believed was the very definition of a don't even know that chip is in there. They care about the performance of soup tastes better than its competitors', the quality differences aren't big enough to account for these companies' ability to combine premium pricing with their market dominance to advertising. What's going on seems to be something we might describe as "the narcissism of small differences." In an odd way, the more similar products become, the more telling the little differences among them end up being. Branding successfully, in other words, can turn a small difference between products into a huge difference in market share. evidence suggests that they are constantly looking for competitive advantages. stock prices) but by remaining a perpetually present threat. It's the idea that perfect competition might be just around the corner, not the competition itself, that keeps the paranoid prosperous. And alive. in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises. And that's exactly what's happened in the uproar over the Wall Street practice called "spinning." "Spinning" has, apparently, been common on the Street for as long as anyone can article in the Wall Street Journal broke the story. The mechanics of it are simple: An investment bank that's underwriting an initial public offering investment bank is either doing business or would like to do business. The executives can then "spin" the shares, which is to say, sell them for a quick assumption, of course, is that an executive who receives a gift like this will be more likely to direct his company's business toward the investment bank that cases the investment banks don't give the shares to the executives until the stock has started trading well above the offering price. In other words, if an before the first trading day ends. The conversation, one imagines, goes a little bit like this: "Now that the stock's price has risen, I realize I didn't mean to give them to this person's account. I meant to give them to you! Now, it's probably not quite that crude, but spinning does seem unquestionably to violate state laws that prohibit corporate executives from taking personal advantage of financial opportunities that they get because of their position at always been that the path to success isn't totally rigged, that it's not simply about being a member of some inner circle that cuts you in on the action for life," and that spinning threatens this strength. But though he deserves a nice fairness doesn't really get us very far. Spinning is unfair, but then so is life, as our parents told us. To see why spinning really should be eliminated, bribery? If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources. Absent the bribe, I would decide to give my company's business to Investment Bank A. But because Investment Bank B allowed me to spin rather on what's best for me. Second, investment banks that already do a lot of shares to spread around. The rich get richer, not because they're more efficient but because their ability to bribe is greater. bribes than the revenue that you generate through them. But spinning costs investment banks nothing at all. Once an investment bank has underwritten an get bought. Needless to say, people are anxious to buy shares when they know they can sell them seconds later for an easy profit. So while a company that bribes customers is typically hurt by the fact that money that could have gone toward profitable investments instead goes toward bribes, in the case of that some investment banks are getting more business than they otherwise might is a good enough reason for regulators to step in. But spinning has still worse significantly higher on the first day. That gives investment banks an incentive to set opening prices lower than they should be. Instead of taking a company and that they really make their best effort to match opening prices with market demand while giving themselves reasonable insurance against getting stuck with unsold shares. But somehow it seems unlikely that spinning would have become such an institutionalized practice if investment banks didn't have a pretty good sense that a stock's price was going to jump on its opening day. And that the money raised from that very first sale of its shares was what it used to lower than the highest price people paid for its shares on the opening day of trading. And while it would be a mistake to say that the stock could have done a better job of gauging demand, millions of dollars that went into all this is that the moment when a company goes public is when the stock market should function most efficiently. That's the only time when the money you pay for a stock goes right to the company, rather than to another trader. The price institutional clients to the fact that some investors are fed information world that was blown apart by the Great Depression. But spinning is an excellent reminder of how far toward real transparency the Street still has to by the mystique of brands, and in a country obsessed by the possibility of irrational are the hopes and how feeble the performance of corporations that decide a new name is all that stands between them and fiscal nirvana. corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these well, you get the idea. The result is straightforward, if not always felicitous, monikers. Or the smaller company simply adopts the bigger company's much mocked, violating as it did the precept that you don't choose words ending although the company has gone to the dogs, its name now looks stylish in a themselves when they seek comfort in the face of the company's falling profit not forced by a merger or other change of circumstance. They are the corporate corporations have tried to reinvent themselves as more sophisticated and complex entities, they have chosen names distinguished only by their obliqueness and lack of intuitive appeal. The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses. And they seem to be guided by one fundamental rule: What you call yourself should have nothing to do with any The most unforgettable example of this rule was United stupid name, but the truth is that it seemed like a stupid choice even then. Tribune reporter randomly surveyed shoppers at a mall soon after the name "identities" both in terms of name recognition and in terms of the esteem accorded to the name by people who recognized it. United Airlines, on the other And he did it with fanfare. What's most amusing about corporate name changes is the dubious reasoning and overwrought rhetoric that at the time, "We are a travel company, not just a transportation company. The name change clearly identifies us as the only corporation that can offer service. How could we have been so blind? Even better was the explanation meaning loyal or faithful, and aegis, meaning protection and sponsorship." That can make it mean whatever your imagination wants it to mean." When Waste up [and] raising our profile." One can only speculate how executives of a company called Combined Insurance explained to themselves their decision to certainly creative, and trashing a valuable label like International Harvester famous definition of capitalism as a process of "creative destruction." And seem to hurt companies is, to be sure, evidence of a sort that names matter. A But it's clear that corporations are as faddish in their choice of names as to the people and companies covered in previous "Motley Fool" articles in exquisitely bad timing: Just as stock markets around the world were diving in gone on sale, lining up before dawn outside bank branches to procure the was true, to a lesser extent, of investors in the United States, to whom China expandable market and more like an overvalued investment in a region plagued by dubious financing practices and even more dubious accounting. The result was Bowling, of all things, being just the latest company to see its share price rallied. In fact, from a certain angle, and especially given the turmoil in fact, that makes you wonder, "What won't investors buy?" question is especially pertinent here in the United States, because the combination of a booming stock market at home and the privatization of bringing cancan girls onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the continues to pour into mutual funds has to go somewhere, and the rhetorical drumbeat of globalization has made investors more comfortable with companies becomes a lucrative and relatively painless way of raising capital. especially painless because the vast majority of the shares of foreign rights. In selling shares in the United States, then, foreign corporations can raise loads of money without suffering a dilution of the control they exercise share price is going to double over the next year, why shouldn't you buy going to double, then you should buy. There, wasn't that easy? The problem, are pouring billions of dollars into companies whose standards of financial disclosure and corporate governance are dramatically different from our own and which are, in some cases, nonexistent. That means, in turn, that it's hard to figure out whether a company will be profitable next year, let alone whether its stock price is going to double. And without full voting rights, there's Needless to say, these plans had not been in the prospectus. Similarly, China in [China's] telecommunications industry." But it's not clear whether this really means "strategic investments" or whether it means "investments to prop up companies run by aging members of the CP." Of course, it's possible that the competitor, incidentally, is a joint venture run by the People's Liberation Army, which brings new meaning to the words "price war." fact, is likely to improve standards of disclosure and accounting in many foreign corporations. And foreign investment is often crucial to a company's in the late 1890s. "Even one of our own Directors in New York, when asked to give us some information as to what had become of the English capital sent imagine a similar message being sent home by someone investigating what home: regular reports, corporate accountability, open books, the Securities and Exchange Commission. After all, transparent and efficient markets are not decade has hidden is the reality that in most places, those markets have not the days of stagflation, skyrocketing interest rates, and high hear much about "late capitalism" these days, except insofar as it has morphed, start hearing about more and more is our own "late bull market," which seems somehow simultaneously frothy and exhausted. There's no better sign of this than the occasional fits of anxiety that have begun to grip investors who for four years have dismissed talk of overvaluation as irrelevant. As a case in strongest companies on the planet. It reported earnings about a month ago that knows he's doing something wrong. And the company has even got credit for an a few question marks in the company's results in the last quarter, arising two weeks after the earnings report came out, all the good news drove the immensely powerful brand, and a genius at outsourcing. What could go wrong? happened testifies partly to the continued power of analysts on Wall Street but also to the fact that at these heights, it's very easy to become able to skate across the air until they look down, at which point the fall is analogy is inexact, since investors have been more than willing to give many companies the benefit of the doubt, but those companies tend to be either In essence, what happened was that a few brokerage houses immediately." (Actually, there is no "sell immediately" recommendation, though common wisdom on the Street is that you should do so if bodies begin falling analysts reduced their earnings estimates while also suggesting that at these overvalued was enough to send investors streaming to the doors. concerns the analysts raised were not new, you might see this as evidence that investors are now in the same fragile frame of mind as little kids who have pressuring cable systems to increase the fees they pay for the right to carry momentum." While pandering is bad, I guess, it's hard to resist the thought being dismantled in the early 1980s. The brand that we now think of as irresistible seemed tired and used up, and this now seamlessly efficient recognition that a brand has to be updated and nurtured if it's to flourish will be much harder to solve, if only because they have much to do with network future seems about as guaranteed as that of Coke or General Electric. Investors' recent flight from quality, as you might call it, was not completely irrational. But it tells us more about this edgy and anxious market than it sleep. Yet, somehow medicine's premier journal ignored physician training, in which residents work even longer hours without any sleep at all. If driving a truck on five hours of sleep is dangerous, surely taking care of deathly ill was worst during the night and among those with the least amount of sleep. On harmed performance just as much as alcohol did. Truckers and pilots who work drowsy, it said, are as dangerous as those who work drunk. And residents? According to Dement, his original version did include residents, but he suggested. A more likely explanation is that the journal found it easier to residency, sleep deprivation, like illness and death, is a fact of life. Fresh think these estimates understate the case). Residents routinely work 36-hour when I stayed to take care of patients while my team went home. Pages were none at all. Regardless, I operated through the next day like any other. later, no rigorous research like the trucking study has been done. The limited studies that exist bode poorly for good doctoring. Although tired residents maintain reaction time and manual dexterity surprisingly well, they exhibit memory deficits, difficulties thinking clearly, and decreased vigilance. They also develop alarming levels of hostility toward patients. at how well I can do on no sleep. When you're faced with a dying patient or a difficult operation, adrenalin focuses your mind and marshals your energy. I also sure that routine care suffers. Good care for sick people depends on problems. No matter how hard I try, I know my memory and vigilance fail when later couldn't remember giving. Backup systems do catch mistakes. The computer won't accept my drug orders if I prescribe the wrong dose or ignore an allergy. right. Nonetheless, many errors are not caught, and I know I have seriously finally set to sleep or go home, nothing is more frustrating than a patient having unexpected problems. Rest becomes a matter of personal survival, and residents can be chillingly brusque with patients who need only time and anything be done? Hospitals could hire more residents, but that would increase our physician glut. In fact, Congress banned hospitals from increasing resident hires this year. Hospitals could hire physician assistants to handle calls that don't require doctors, but that's expensive. Physician assistants get paid New York state, guidelines for an 80-hour maximum workweek were estimated to quickly carved out (for example, surgical residents aren't included), and even then many hospitals could not afford to stick to the guidelines. Increasingly, hospitals use "cross coverage," in which a fresh resident covers patients for several other residents at night. However, a times more often than even fatigued residents. They had too many patients and, with every patient new to them, didn't know important details. Tired doctors may not provide the best care, but neither does a series of faceless doctors examine resident safety and to test solutions, is needed. In any other circumstance, doctors would champion thorough, dispassionate investigation and spare no expense to improve patients' lives. But on this subject, the medical profession is asleep at the switch. If it doesn't wake up soon, another scandalous case will inevitably surface, and the government will take matters lowdown, something that will tell you almost anything you want to know about people, medical journals are where the action is. One of medicine's hidden pleasures is that while there is a fantastic amount to learn about human beings, most of it is already spelled out in some journal. these journals can survive and multiply should be a clue that there's something compelling about them. Subscribers are willing to pay dearly to keep their As a result, while The New Yorker lost millions last year, the To be sure, for many doctors and scientists, the interest for a tiny field. Moreover, behind the glossy covers and stilted prose, many of these little journals function as the gossip rags, the People magazines, for the science niches. My pet journal is Health Affairs (circulation It's how we keep tabs on what everyone is up to. An infectious disease specialist friend of mine reads the Journal of Virology (circulation away. Poke around in a few medical journals, and you're bound to find material journals follow the standard "Annals of" or "Archives of" or "Journal of" what you're getting. What's more, you get the impression that the editors are proud to give it to you, that they have no second thoughts about the field they a terrible name. It conveys embarrassment, a sense that the editors thought "Foot" alone wasn't good enough for them. Even adding "Ankle" was still too minor league for their ambitions, so they had to tack on that "International." You want a journal more willing to glory in its small, arcane world. however, the cool stuff is what's inside, and a few journals always have the cool stuff. The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy is, not surprisingly, reliably fascinating no matter what your profession. A recent issue I browsed through at the library (while hiding it in a copy of Erections: Shape, Angle, and Length." A quirkier favorite of mine is the occurring over five weeks in which prisoners reported swallowing razor blades and other metal objects. (Click for more details.) Not long ago, however, I article on three suicide victims with multiple gunshot wounds to the head (complete with photos from the death scenes; one poor guy shot himself five times before he finally died), another on improved methods to determine the age of an unidentified victim, and yet a third on the homicide rituals of the familiar. International medical journals, however, can do the opposite. They tend to share the common language of doctors everywhere and so can make the unfamiliar reassuringly accessible, while still conveying a revealing sense of obsessions of a modernized country: ulcers, a growing epidemic of obesity, burgeoning middle class, is currently filled with reports on infectious people appreciate the refined charms of medical journals. Occasionally, frat boys do. "Have you seen the Journal of Personality and Social instructed to put on a specific facial expression while looking in the mirror. What the psychologists found was that participants told to do nothing more than put on a happy face developed a significantly more positive mood than those told to adopt a neutral expression. And those made to assume an unhappy expression had the worst moods of all. The journal was full of strange little studies like that. I made a mental note to check it out again. And, when I left the library that evening, you can bet I had a smile on my face. Unfortunately, they failed to get their message straight. Two different exciting. And Democrats are exploiting the difference. proposed that "the model for impeachment" should be "the one that you helped to process, which were approved and administered by Democrats, he can force The more zealous Substance Camp, led by House Majority Whip federal agencies. This matter involves the concealing of a private affair." would readily and quickly agree to that, which is why I went through a little reminder about the enormity of the crimes committed during the period of White House to violate the constitutional rights of citizens.' After pausing the substance analogy, it loses its force. Yes, substantive analogies can be sins were more personal than political. And the secret tapes and wires were arranged not by the president but by his enemies and investigators. impeachable on their own terms. He has plainly lied under oath, for example. If Congress determines that this constituted perjury (which is somewhat more that no felon should be allowed to remain president. Instead, they're holding as it used to be now that tobacco lobbyists are admitting that nicotine is Institute are doing their best to take up the slack. They're fighting to stop federal legislation that would crack down harder on people who drive after change their definition of who is drunk from a person with a minimum case against the proposal is surprisingly persuasive. Well, almost. Currently, everywhere in the country it is illegal to drive with a for restaurants that serve alcohol, it offers two arguments. First, its downed a fifth of gin." The lower standard will capture perfectly responsible social drinkers and dramatically increase the number of drivers who would be subject to arrest. Second, they say it's the roaring drunks who are out there serious car crashes that come through. The paramedics wheel them in and start rattling off information while I check their breathing and injuries: "This is unresponsive at the scene." You don't even have to wait for the results. You damnedest thing is, after we save them, they hardly ever get arrested for driving while intoxicated. An injured drunken driver is far less likely to be drunken drivers escape prosecution. There are many reasons. Police have to put the driver's safety first and ship them off to a hospital; following after the driver is a major hassle, and things happen so fast, the police sometimes don't from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showed otherwise. It found that than regular beer. Wine has anywhere from two to four times as much alcohol, single martini would have about twice as much alcohol as that. own alcohol level apparently are ubiquitous at bars and stadiums. Still, most people know by now that after a few beers at dinner, they've had too much to police get even a large fraction of drunken drivers off the road, at most they might save a few hundred lives. This is a drop in the bucket. Prosecuting the drunken drivers who turn up in emergency rooms or offering breathalyzer checks in bars and stadiums would probably save many more. thinks every hazard should be eliminated. I was glad to see highway speed crashing. But the freedom to get behind the wheel after half a bottle of wine companies that have a good chance of going up." Again, as opposed to the alternative, this seems wise. Finally, "Life is too fluid to predict." Unless, apparently, you're predicting whether a company's stock will be going up enough trenchant statements of the obvious can be found in the collected works of Wade Cook, former real estate prophet and current stock market guru. Cook is motivational rhetoric, complete confidence that nothing will go wrong, and an utter lack of anything like an understanding of economics. Not coincidentally, investing world. He's also a cardinal example of the speculative mania that long bull markets often engender, the froth that rises to the surface in wading through Cook's texts, you begin to understand why it seems so natural to I know you're saying, but do his methods work? What, after all, is the label The short answer to the first question is: Probably not. Cook insists he's been inordinately successful with his strategies, and his later books are filled with testimonials from people saying things like: "I just sold the calls at offer any systematic accounting of his trading record; and we do not hear from those people who ended up gambling away their life savings. ("I started with work. Actually, we know the answer to that question: His "real passion is truthfulness of his claims if his past record were more reassuring (click for a for stock investing provided the perfect opportunity. To seize that opportunity, Cook counsels strategies that, despite his simplistic truisms, are both complicated and risky. He recommends that investors leverage their existing capital, so that more than half of their investments are purchased on margin (that is, loaned to them by their broker). He urges investors to pay an inordinate amount of attention to companies that announce stock splits. And, most importantly, he recommends buying and selling not this is really the best way to make money in the market, it is certainly materials and workshops. Of course, as Cook says more than once (actually, he puts is the same, only in reverse. You buy the right to sell a stock, obviously though, isn't really interested in exchanging the options for actual shares. He just wants to buy and sell the options themselves, because options are both cheaper and more volatile than stock, and therefore offer the prospect of much larger gains. But Cook's entire strategy is built on the principle that it's possible to predict, in the short term, when stocks will rise and fall. A surer recipe for disaster has never been devised. His strategy is also built on the assumption that, if you've got a sure thing, you should bet the house on it, which is why you buy on margin. But he never makes clear that buying on margin means that you stand to lose a lot more when you make a mistake. And because you're buying options, you're left with nothing. There are no shares of a stock that might someday come back, just piles of options as worthless as those dream is still alive. But if so, that dream has become the feeblest of ideals. Stock options, after all, serve no useful purpose in the real economy. Unlike commodity futures or even currency futures that allow farmers or companies to do a better job of projecting their future business, stock options contribute nothing to the smooth functioning of capital markets. The stock options market doesn't make it easier for companies to go public, or for existing companies to raise money. It's simply a big casino. Cook might just as well be gambling on an odd maxim for a man whose work is dedicated to the idea that the way to on the planet, and the market doesn't even blink. In fact, investors send the company's stock higher. What's wrong with this picture? the picture is just fine. In fact, in a curious way, the market's reaction to made the company stronger than just him. His superfluity, in that sense, To be sure, "superfluity" overstates the case, since Grove business as president and chief operating officer. As chairman, Grove plans to including its heavy investment in companies that are pushing the technological edge. Grove's abdication of his throne also loses some drama from the fact that smoothly, and all indications are that he's a more than capable executive. Still, Grove's announcement was certainly a surprise. There was no hint of it has had a much publicized bout with cancer). But there was nary a ripple of bad Grove's decision, precisely because he's going out at the top of his game. For role, even as he seems to have made a conscious choice to become a more public figure. Magazines now wanted to know his thoughts about the future of computing and the Internet. They became oddly fond of taking pictures in which his body was occluded by shadow while his face would be softly spotlit, pictures that made Grove appear to be a mysterious man thinking very deep thoughts. Which he transformation was also reflected in Grove's writing. In the late 1960s, he published an acclaimed engineering text, Physics and Technology of list.) In the early 1980s, he published an exceptional book on management discussion of the way companies should be organized, with a surprisingly convincing analysis of how to evaluate and motivate workers. Then, two years Grove's basic idea is that there are "strategic inflection points," moments where the entire framework in which business has been conducted is transformed and companies must adapt or die. The arrival of those companies that recognized the changes and adjusted to them flourished, while those that didn't floundered and eventually went under. be expected, Grove's description of past strategic inflection points is more convincing than his recipe for recognizing such moments in the future. But profitable, and acclaimed companies in the world. (It's fourth on chairmanship, he has the advantage of stepping aside gracefully without really irony in Grove's ascent to elder statesman, because the idea of him as shaper company. It doesn't outsource all its production. It doesn't have a brand name running the whole operation. It's not what management theorist Tom Peters sees makes real things. It builds enormously expensive plants that employ in research and development. And it is hugely productive, which is to say that in. For what Grove has done exceptionally well is manage. What has allowed does a much better job of making chips reliably and efficiently. And what has to plan for change and adapt to it while holding the overall framework steady. making it dependent upon him. He helped fashion an institution bigger than himself. And that's why there's nothing at all wrong with this picture. competition can be seen most obviously in the new mergers and alliances that obvious but more telling evidence of the majors' resistance to real competition can be found in their massive lobbying efforts to protect their current positions. Those efforts are needed because, despite the seemingly inexorable up to try to take away their business. The model for these startups is the remarkable success of Southwest Airlines. It has been able to turn flights that are low on frills but high on goofiness (flight attendants singing, dumb contests, and all the rest) into a gold mine by keeping costs low and poaching the majors' business on particular routes. Across the country, airlines such as gnats is simply to acquire them, though that runs the risk of bringing the antitrust bloodhounds snooping around. Another option is to turn them into "feeder airlines," which allow the majors to offer service from major hubs to smaller airports. The third choice is simply to freeze the upstarts out by number of passengers flying to any one location relatively limited, engaging in cutthroat competition in every city makes less sense for the majors than parceling out the nation among themselves. And most airlines do fly to nearly ever major city, though perhaps not exactly when you want them to. astonishingly low, the last few years have seen a dramatic rise in the price of tickets purchased without any advance notice (what they call business fares, since only business travelers can afford them). By some accounts, business not because it's become more expensive to carry business passengers, either. In fact, since ticketing systems have become more sophisticated, airlines can do a much better job of managing demand and filling seats. But those savings have not been passed along to customers. Instead, since the supply of airline seats should conjure new airlines into existence, bringing supply more in line with demand and eventually harmonizing fares with costs. But there are a number of things preventing that from happening. In the first place, the creation of customers only reap the benefits of those programs if they fly the same airline each time. More importantly, the physical universe limits the number of takeoffs and landings any single airport can handle in a day. The majors have a stranglehold on those slots, and they've invested a lot of energy and money in another choice, which is that entire new airports could spring up, or smaller airports could expand. But here, too, the majors have been vigilant. In ads warning of "intense congestion," "lots of delays" and, more audaciously, clear is the basic disingenuousness of the majors when it comes to deregulation. While they have pushed hard for "open skies" policies in Japan have been more than happy to use the legislative process to protect what amount to sinecures. The Love Field imbroglio, in fact, has presented the curious competition will threaten the region's economic health, an odd conclusion from is, in a sense, inherent in the industry itself, since airlines rely on public airspace and, for the most part, public airports for their business. And this makes the whole question of what constitutes regulation a complicated one. One solution being proposed, for instance, would take some landing and takeoff slots at major airports away from the industry giants and auction them off to The majors insist it's the latter. But insofar as dispersing the slots would foster competition, a strong case can be made that it's the former. Either way, limited, there's an inclination to believe that airlines are natural monopolies or oligopolies and that flooding the market with competitors will actually make air travel less, not more, efficient. But the vast majority of airports are a long way from being saturated in terms of possible routes, and whenever major airlines have been reaping large profits over the last four years, their productivity has not risen at all, suggesting that consolidation is not improving efficiency. It's no surprise that the majors want open skies when it suits them and closed skies when it doesn't. But real competition should grocery stores. Does it work? Probably not. Does it sell? Ask the big pharmaceutical companies whose immense resources are nurturing the nutrient found in red meat, is known to be essential to growth and protected her from colds during treatment. While such anecdotes commonly spur clinical trial of zinc lozenges that found the treatment cut the duration of instructed to dissolve one lozenge in their mouths every two hours while awake, was zinc's bitter taste. Eighty percent of patients who got zinc complained of studies, and while three found zinc worked, four found it did not. Army effectiveness of zinc salts lozenges in reducing the duration of common colds is still lacking." It is also unknown whether large doses of zinc have toxic biologically plausible that zinc could cure colds. Zinc backers propose that the element's positive charge could a) bind it to viruses, blocking their entry into the cells along your nasal tract or b) allow it to "clamp" nerves that pointed out that zinc in the saliva does not reach the nasal tract, and therefore cannot exert any of these effects. Furthermore, the zinc levels needed to kill cold viruses in the test tube are far higher than anything the a placebo effect may account for the sporadic positive results from zinc. It is known that inert substances can alleviate symptoms in colds, asthma, sciatica, and even congestive heart failure through the power of suggestion alone. This is not to say the symptoms are just in the mind, but rather that the mind can generate beneficial biological effects. You might think that the fact that zinc But a dummy pill only works as much as you believe in it. Belief can be affected by many factors, including the drug's appearance (certain pill colors are more effective than others), form (injections often have a greater effect than pills), or taste (bitter may seem like better). distinctive taste helps convince you that it will. This phenomenon has long not been demonstrated to provide benefit in colds beyond its placebo received the options after his results had already been compiled. acetate lozenges, which it claims have higher zinc concentrations. There is zinc gum, zinc spray, even zinc lollipops. And now pharmaceutical giant introduced Celestial Seasonings lozenges with echinacea, a purple flower that herbalists promote without clinical evidence as a cold remedy and recently announced plans for a herbal line that includes ginkgo, saw palmetto, zinc, many of these remedies become popular solely on the basis of anecdotes, are terrific grounds for deciding to further test substances culled from big pharmaceutical firms is that their large marketing budgets will expand the relieve cold symptoms and, in small print, denies making any claim to treating colds? Drinking plenty of liquids keeps mucus flowing out of the body and insurers to limit reimbursement for the drug. Many insurers will pay for the erection wonder pills only for men who are tested by a urologist and proved to Commentators on talk shows and news programs are incensed by the limits (although no one yet complains that Medicaid programs are likely to refuse reimbursement altogether). "Get the insurers out of our bedrooms!" is the pose a distinct problem for insurers. True, the treatments address biologically caused problems, but ones that are hardly incapacitating. Still, there is no clear distinction between these disorders and such accepted medical problems as acne or vitiligo (a disorder of skin pigmentation). If severe enough, even wrinkling or hair loss can be considered medical problems. So these new drugs erode accepted distinctions between worrisome abnormalities and the normal variations of human life. While the drugs push in one direction, the insurers contrast, is simple and offers discretion. Instead of creating erections on its own, it amplifies the signals men's bodies already have. (The mechanics of impotent men are better, longer lasting erections and more satisfying sex. able men. Some are already seeking the drug in the hope that they can sustain the impotence literature and Playboy magazines in the examining rooms for pornography.) But the urologist didn't beat around the bush. "Are you here seeming relieved to have the doctor raise the subject. of difficulty getting erections, a problem almost certainly related to his ready to accept the treatments. Sex wasn't important enough. So, insurers were happy to let men define for themselves whether their impotence was worrisome or think people should have to worry about cost when deciding whether to undergo there's nothing wrong if insurers say that, at some point, cost should come for sex, why should the insurer pay? If these expensive new drugs were free, people would demand amounts out of all proportion to the value they actually effects that are potentially more troubling than the cost strains. The sneaky drugs do. In a current ad barrage, manufacturers encourage people to "ask your drugs treat problems that most people hadn't considered medical before. drugs to redefine abnormality upward. But the insurers are fighting an desire for youth and immortality. As each new drug is released on a wave of hype, insurers will fight the deluge, but patients will clamor, and doctors start with a pill. But the physician's need for diagnosis is what drives the the drugs need to come through physicians. But we don't give out drugs along. A core group of kids do have a distinct attention abnormality, but disorder didn't actually meet the definition. Nevertheless, the percentage of giving a patient's condition a medical name, we turn it into a medical abnormality. That creates a presumption that insurers must pay. It also creates a presumption that it will be treated. If I write a new diagnosis in a patient's chart, I have to indicate what I plan to do about it. It'd be malpractice not to. More than that, once a condition is established as a diagnosis, society practically treats it as a crime not to do something about not just the pleasing possibility that you can do something about impotence, baldness, blackened toenails. They create a culture in which you In doing so, they may ultimately reduce the quality of life for the many of us joint, and now the Psychic Friends Network is no more. Its parent company, who's been the key spokeswoman for the network for almost five years now. You when, on the advice of a psychic, she added an "e" to her last name and watched in the business of getting poor and desolate people to shell out enormous amounts of money they really shouldn't be spending for worthless advice The economics of the psychic phone business are, in fact, As a result, especially in the last few years, the psychic business has tried to focus on establishing continuing relationships between individual psychics and their customers. ("I don't want just any psychic! I want to speak to not be such a thing as a good analyst, but you get the point. business model is uncomplicated, its very simplicity poses a very real problem to the dominant players in the field, since it means that the barriers to entry of every call and provide only the line.) Since most psychics work out of their homes, you don't even need that archetypal room with a bunch of telephones in it. All you need is a few ads in the back of a magazine, maybe a commercial on that cable channel that tells you what's going to be on other channels in the next hour and a half, plus a gimmick, and you're in. In part, of course, that's why building customer loyalty to particular psychics is so crucial. But it's also why constantly differentiating yourself from the competition is essential. the Psychic Friends Network really fell down on the job. detailed his personal adventures as a telephone psychic (for the Psychic networks, they do ads focusing on the lottery, on romance, on work. They just with these infomercials which just pushed psychics generally." emphasize that psychics can help you win, or at least tell you you're going to Psychic Friends' first big mistake. A probably more telling error was getting locked into the infomercial model of advertising. While its competitors looked decision to stick with the infomercial model was certainly understandable. production and distribution of infomercials. And the Psychic Friends out half a million dollars a week to buy air time on cable stations. It was Psychic Friends was not alone. The infomercial boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a logical response to the deregulation of cable television in 1984--which means that, like so much else, we can blame Psychic the demand for programming. Infomercials were an ideal cash cow for the cable networks, since they actually got paid to air them. recent years, as relatively more substantive programming alternatives have emerged (the Classic Sports Network or the Cooking Channel may not be high art, but they are better than another Ab Roller ad), and as the infomercial market became saturated. Those Psychic Friends programs had probably reached a point case of a company not realizing that what had made it successful would not keep it had to. And the fact that this utter failure of foresight happened to the Psychic Friends Network takes us, needless to say, somewhere beyond irony. want to belabor that point (though it is fun, as all the "They should have seen it's worth recognizing that Psychic Friends was an enterprise created as a response to people's uncertainty about the world (it's probably no accident that it cropped up around the time of the Gulf War). And yet it ended up Still a larger question remains: Why don't companies ever quit while they're margins were going to decline, that in the absence of any professional requirements more and more psychics would be entering the market, that the time for infomercials had passed, and that the Psychic Friends brand name had hit its peak. And imagine if, at that point, he had liquidated the company and Today, the memory of Psychic Friends would live on in all our minds as a great most companies have naturally short life spans and recognizing that life span business. But much of the time, striving for longevity means ending up in coast a railroad car is lost. Actually, somewhere along the Gulf coast many railroad cars are lost, rolling along between freight yards, attached to locomotives they're not supposed to be attached to, carrying goods that will arrive at their intended destinations days or even weeks late. The cars belong the railroad that joined the nation. In the past few months, though, it's had its hands full trying to make the trains run on time. meanwhile, is having a very hard time making sure that its clients' claims get paid. Unpaid claims have been piling up in its back offices, and last month the significantly because of all the administrative problems. Medical costs, at unconnected stories of corporate miscalculation. But you don't have to look too deeply beneath the surface to recognize that the problems Union Pacific and job cutting, and that together they represent what you might call the downside and a half, and both are therefore attempting to deal with sizable increases in their everyday business. Union Pacific, which has spent much of the past decade that, in the face of a larger client base and the difficult task of integrating two separate corporate organizations, computer systems, and cultures, slashing needless to say, applauded the decision. As one analyst put it, "Any time you wouldn't have paid nearly as much for, it's natural that they're going to look booming nationally, and losing Southern Pacific managers and engineers meant that UP now had thousands of miles of new track and very few workers who had that, in the words of its president, "We miscalculated how valuable the experience level was, and is, in the staff that works in these service centers." The company is now hiring back a hundred or so claims agents to speed caused millions of dollars in damage. A month ago, Federal Railroad cities. They found overworked crews, with engineers, brakemen, and dispatchers turning in 80-hour weeks, working six or seven days in a row. Regulators called step up its monitoring of crew fatigue and track safety. long does it take to say, "Um, we think you have to hire more people right workers, but analysts estimate that the crisis has already cost shippers more railroad, since "it's a safety issue, not a financial issue." But one suspects that we got something closer to the truth when, in the midst of the crisis, a UP spokesman said, "Nobody's budget is safe when it comes to doing more with less." Didn't anyone tell him he worked in public relations? illuminate is the degree to which downsizing has become simply a reflex decision for many managers. The stock market's instinctively positive reaction to job cuts surely makes it easier for managers to justify their decisions to themselves. But the reality is that job cuts have more to do with an In other words, it's easier to look at the reduced labor costs from cutting that's particularly true when the concept of the lean and mean corporation has attained the status of dogma. In his A Passion for business book, Tom Peters wrote, "There is, then, a lot that can be said for simply cutting staff. We find so many companies that do so much better with so many fewer people." Perhaps Peters can issue a revised edition, with chapters point is not that downsizing is in and of itself a mistake. The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes. Jobs lost in one place are often created in another (although there are serious questions about whether the jobs will be as good, particularly for industrial workers). And a number of large firms have downsized successfully, most obviously General more overtime than they did in the 1980s, and more companies have embraced required overtime as a way of ensuring that work gets done. In theory, downsizing should be a way of matching the size of your work force to the size of your business. In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in bringing in temps to fill the gap. Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy. But overworked engineers and sleepy dispatchers aren't creative, they're simply destructive. just line tobacco company executives up against the wall, gun them down, and then blow up all the cigarette factories? It'd certainly be more cathartic for than the farcical death by a thousand cuts process that's currently underway in pronouncement this week that the deal now being worked over in Congress is "dead" probably signals the final collapse of tobacco industry support for a pack, given the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate nicotine, committed the industry to reducing teen smoking, and established a trust fund provision, these were all voluntary agreements on the part of the industry, which made them in exchange for protection against class action suits and settlement was negotiated with a group of state attorneys general who were already suing or planning to sue the tobacco companies to recoup Medicaid costs for the treatment of dying smokers. But the national character of the to ratify it. And after some delay, the Senate commerce committee last punitive damages and class action suits is gone, replaced only by a cap on the amount the industry has to pay every year. If this is a settlement, so was the It is, of course, difficult to feel sorry for the tobacco to be true, namely that nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused lung cancer. But the Senate tobacco bill is nonetheless a preposterous piece of legislation, predicated on the concept that the industry has near total control over whether people smoke or not. It's a bill for people who want to ban would take to do so. Moreover, parts of it are either unconstitutional or unworkable, since the bans on advertising would have to be agreed to by the industry, which at this point doesn't really have an incentive to agree to anything. And yet what's really odd about the whole affair is that the tobacco companies really have no one to blame but themselves. mean by that is not the obvious point, which is that if these companies didn't make products that kill people, they wouldn't be in trouble. What I mean instead is that the commerce committee bill is, in a sense, the result of the collision between Big Tobacco's two great obsessions: lying and shareholder value. And it's the industry's commitment to both that's got it into this day four years ago when seven tobacco executives went before a House committee and said that nicotine was not addictive. This was injudicious of them, addictive drug." As a symbol of industry arrogance and deceit, you'd have to search far and wide to find a better example than the photo of those seven course, they were simply doing what the industry has done ever since the late 1950s, when it became clear both that cigarettes were bad for people and that the nicotine in them was addictive. Instead of admitting what almost everyone believed, Big Tobacco insisted on complete denial. Initially, this strategy made a certain amount of sense from a business angle. Until the surgeon that cigarettes were dangerous could have opened the companies up to consumer After their packs began carrying warnings about the hazards of smoking, though, it was hard to see how anyone could argue that the tobacco companies were deceiving their customers (though, certainly, lawyer after lawyer has tried). And yet the tobacco industry persisted in its strategy. Instead of being honest about smoking's dangers and then arguing that adults should be allowed to choose their own poison, the industry hid. And in hiding, it left itself with no real protection against the prohibitionist impulse. (For decision to lie took away the industry's ability to make a plausible case for individual choice, its obsession with shareholder value made it believe that an enormously profitable company, its stock price has remained relatively deflated, because investors were so concerned that the company might lose a massive class action lawsuit somewhere down the road. Signing an agreement that would protect the industry from such suits would boost the stock price immediately, even if that agreement cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In one of those dollars would be valued more highly by the stock market. executives' obsession with their companies' stock prices, has become the prism beneficial effects, but in the case of tobacco, it pushed the industry into a settlement it could not control. It's possible that these companies believed litigation, only one plaintiff had ever been awarded any damages, and those juries have been asked whether the tobacco industry is liable for a smoker's health problems, they've decided that the plaintiff knew what the risks were and chose to ignore them. Given that, there's a real argument to be made that would be the one that broke the bank couldn't have made working at these bargain. And as time went on, the case for tobacco's liability would have grown weaker, since public awareness of smoking's hazards has grown stronger. possible, of course, that the cost of losing a major class action suit or one of these state Medicaid suits was just too enormous to chance. But what seems clear is that the desire to get a higher stock market valuation, combined with a history of refusing to defend itself honestly, pushed the tobacco industry to Tobacco never gave an inch. It's not really surprising that when it finally economy we're supposedly inhabiting, competitive advantage can be eroded in an instant, and large companies with lots of fixed assets are doomed to being overpriced services, monopolistic market control, and unwieldy operating suggests, the cable industry has never been healthier, despite having committed a rather staggering array of strategic missteps in the past few years. In the benefit: Owning those wires allows you to make a lot of mistakes without going out of business. And in an industry dedicated to gambling on future technologies, that's a benefit that can't be overvalued. his company owned a lot of cable wires. On the contrary, he was as responsible as anyone for hyping the digital economy and the transformation of the home into a multimedia center of information, entertainment, and commerce. Without have existed. For a man with a master's degree in electrical engineering and a important futurist rhetoric was to the new media world. Convincing people that cool things were just around the corner was essential to convincing them that When he talked about the information superhighway, it was always in terms of of cable" and "a guy who knows how to run over people" spoke to his ferocious for ordering rate reductions, the idea that the dark side of the Force was time dwarfed all previous mergers. The result was going to be a massive every communication and information service they could want. Had the deal gone through, today's media landscape would obviously look very different. But by itself as a growth company, which meant it had to keep getting bigger in order truth was that the technology could not live up to the hype. In retrospect, in fact, what's most interesting about that time is how little progress we've made is available via cable television today. Even cable modems, which would make a qualitative difference in the experience of using the Web, have minuscule industry was everyone's favorite selection as the industry most likely to fail. Either the regional Bell companies were going to take away the cable companies' business, or satellite television was going to steal it, or the companies were of the game in the new media economy is bandwidth. Amazing leaps in digital technology are largely irrelevant unless you can bring them inside the home. And no industry is better positioned to provide that bandwidth than the one cable business and why, when the company sought to make its subscriber base more manageable, it traded subscribers for minority stakes in other cable slashed capital spending in the past couple of years in order to keep the interactive television, and hundreds of channels, he's found his latest the harbinger of a truly wired future, once the struggle over which technologies will be included in it is resolved and the cable companies figure subscribers and minority stakes in everything from the Learning Channel to Time built around the image of someone able to see the value inherent in a future to the greed and disloyalty of players and owners. One writer went so far as to suggest that before the Dodgers were sold, "there was hope baseball could pull itself back from the brink. But now even those hopes are being dashed." particular case of the Dodgers, of course, these lamentations were particularly nature of team ownership is similarly misdirected. If anything, baseball needs more corporate owners, particularly those, such as News Corp., that have major investments in the game as a whole rather than a stake in a single In the long run, the more corporate owners, the less likely that baseball's current approach of limiting expansion and migration will endure. Defending either the expansion of the number of baseball teams beyond to get you shot. Expansion, it's argued, debases an already thin talent pool, lowering the overall quality of play. The migration of franchises, meanwhile, cities that already have baseball teams. The unstated premise is that people be good both for the sport and for cherished local teams. Expansion would called monopoly rents because they face little or no competition for the local luxury boxes can make a sizable difference), teams in big markets are able to reap much larger rents because the pool of fans from which they draw attendance corporation, can't overcome by marketing their goods in New York. the Pirates and can therefore afford to pay more for players, which means they'll be able to lure the best players to New York. But the revenues of baseball as a whole will be hurt if just a few teams dominate play, so the even when players could not freely sell their services on the open market, the richest teams still got the best players. They just did so by buying them from answer to this dilemma is not a return to the old system nor is it a salary cap. The real answer would require allowing teams to move where there's unsatisfied demand for the game, whether that be in New York itself or in some region that has no team. This might mean, in the short term, that cities such decline, which means they wouldn't be able to pay so much for players, which means it would be easier to run a team successfully in a small market. The problem, in that sense, is not that there are big and small markets but that there are too few teams in the big markets. Supply is not being allowed to because an important chunk of their current revenue comes from national television and licensing contracts that are divided among the teams. More teams, fewer dollars per team (though that's actually more complicated than it ratings have been traditionally low). Until baseball's antitrust exemption is removed, owners don't have to worry about intruders in their current markets. But a mechanism already exists for making expansion mutually beneficial: large markets. Green Bay has built a Super Bowl team despite playing in the their rhetoric about looking out for the best interests of the game, baseball owners have been interested only in looking out for themselves. In an ordinary baseball from antitrust law is predicated on the idea that Major League Baseball is one company rather than an industry such as semiconductors or computers. But owners don't act like competing vice presidents. They act like focus than the current crop of owners. In fact, it may well be that News Corp., of local sports networks, is more likely to work for the best interests of the channels, in baseball rather than just in the Dodgers. One of the realities of corporations, after all, is that they're somewhat isolated from local concerns. Traditionally, that's been seen as a vice. But in the case of baseball, the The big fish eats the small fish and the small fish eats the shrimp. You buy or Shanghai Rubber Belt Co. told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Merger mania, you see, is sweeping the People's Republic. Soon, instead of hundreds of small companies all making identical rubber belts there will be one giant company making all the rubber belts. It'll be just like the market for PC today's United States. Mergers and acquisitions are back in a big way, and the record levels, both in terms of raw numbers and size. Telecommunications, defense, aerospace, mass media: In all these industries the number of players has been significantly reduced over the last three years. Emboldened by a new approach to antitrust law at the Justice Department and Federal Trade previously would never have imagined merging have tied the knot. This rediscovery of the art of the deal makes it seem like the 1980s all over Except that in some interesting and important ways, it isn't. In the first place, a much higher percentage of these mergers and acquisitions are taking place within, rather than across, industries, which is why we hear a lot more about consolidation and a lot less about synergy or is friendly. The big fish may be eating the small fish, but the small fish seem all the more interesting, and the more telling, when they occur. Pacific Resources is an independent oil and gas driller, which means it specializes in getting as much out of a given field's reserves as possible. It used to be part of Union Pacific Corp., the transportation giant that laid railway track across the United States. As part of its desire to focus on its little debt, but it's grown relatively slowly since the spinoff, because it doesn't have many reserves and lacks the wherewithal for massive exploration Pacific with an offer to merge, figuring its extensive reserves would fit well it was more a simple failure to call back than an explicit rejection). And so its exploration business, strengthening Jiffy Lube. Last year the company were to gain control, it would buy up the remaining shares at market price. Obviously, that would make any buyout attempt prohibitively expensive. principle that those who own the company, the shareholders, should be able to decide what to do with it. If we want shareholders to think like owners and not speculators, taking away that power hardly seems the answer. other hand, the way tender offers are structured almost guarantees they'll be accepted. If you're one of the few shareholders who doesn't tender her stock, bring about the dissolution of its target. A study in the 1980s, in fact, found that four out of every five tender offers resulted in the target being absorbed with this. If a company's management hasn't done right by its shareholders, takeovers are an appropriate remedy. For these believers in the efficient market, a company's stock price always reflects its true value. There's only variety of reasons, very few of which have anything to do with a company's real productivity or value. Dell Computer, for instance, would be at least five economy today as it was a year ago. Placing the entire future of a corporation in the hands of arbitrageurs, which is what a tender offer amounts to, is the worship of property rights run amok. Yet how to come up with a solution that capital gains tax on any investment held less than a year? That might work. Most scholarly studies of hostile takeovers show they have little or no impact on productivity, profitability, or on the acquiring not really clear that any is created. Although bidders tend to portray uniformly bid for profitable, healthy companies that the market, for one reason the economy stronger, though the jury is still out on that question. But in a hostile takeover, it seems pretty clear, one plus one generally doesn't equal three. Often, it doesn't even equal two. Hard as it may be to remember in a critics suffer from an ethical blindness of their own. however, poor countries can't afford the full regimen. It's also too complex. Sixteen studies to find simpler, cheaper methods are now Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of comparison group, and that's where the trouble begins. For two years Researchers giving placebos, they said, were knowingly killing children. They To them, the only valid question is how new treatments compare to the complex determine the natural history of syphilis. The experiment, halted only after exposure by journalists, remains a textbook example of unethical, racist their indignant defense the next week. In an unlikely spectacle, Republican exploitation. But they don't. The critics' arguments seem reasonable only if were reviewed extensively and approved by local governments and the World Health Organization. The experimental therapies may offer great benefit. And therapy early in pregnancy and to keep up with necessary monitoring. regimen it's likely that the new regimens will prove less effective. But Without a placebo group, we still won't know if any of the treatments are example, has been studied and used to treat dehydration for diarrheal illness Far from condemning its use as unethical, however, doctors have embraced oral hydration as the model of locally appropriate therapy. Similarly, poor conduct Third World studies seeking therapies cheaper and perhaps inferior to placebo isn't useful for the West; we'd switch only if it were as effective as Citizen, this last criterion really sticks in their craws. It offends them to Could drug companies lower their costs? Maybe, maybe not. But this is not the Acknowledging reality isn't unethical, but ignoring it can be. its fortunes to the most popular film series in history. In a strange way, it's Dollhouse, Men in Black action figures, and Micro Machines. The film been making vehicles and action figures based on those films, and that arrangement by itself catapulted the company into the ranks of major toy Wars toys. And while sales this year were obviously boosted by the perpetual revenue in the 1990s. Since the first film came out, Star Wars been possible to buy movie posters or souvenir plates (and God knows we're thankful for the plates), the concept of creating a toy universe replicating isn't because Star Wars was the first movie that lent itself to action example of a company creating a market rather than responding to an existing one. No one knew how much kids wanted action figures until they were offered result, of course, has been a flood of toys based on everything from comic section of Toys "R" Us and seeing the deep discounts on toys from films that to design and manufacture the toys for a movie without having any sense of how tanks. On the other hand, if the movie's popular and you don't have enough product on hand to take advantage of those few weeks when your toys are hot, a phenomenon that could only have happened in the age of the videocassette recorder, but even so it remains an anomaly in the world of pop culture. Where almost everything else gets consumed and cast aside almost immediately, Star blunders in the history of merchandising, forgoing its licensing fee to then, is a story to warm the heart of any entrepreneur. Small company sees big opportunity, seizes it, and reaps the rewards forever after. The only problem line, shifting money out of internal development, staking the company, in a sense, on this product whose existence depended utterly on staying in the good secure a license and guarantee its future, but in exchange it mortgaged the out of the money. (It would be cheaper to buy the stock on the open market than economy away from one based on manufacturing toward one based on ideas. But the contracted out. And in this new world it's not the company that owns the assembly line that has real power. Instead, it's the company that owns the name that dictates the terms. Anyone can make toys, apparently. But not anyone can divesting itself of its manufacturing operations to become a company whose main Investors' reaction to the announcement was immediate and positive, unsurprising since the decision fit nicely with current thinking on the combination of reasonable assumptions, misplaced analogies, and an overwhelming risk is succumbing to nostalgia for the days when companies "actually made something." When Henry Ford first constructed the mammoth River Rouge and Highland Park complexes, where automobiles were essentially built from scratch, those factories seemed to many to be symbols of the exaltation of efficiency over all other goals. Now, with the onset of outsourcing, globalization, and the virtual corporation, those old factories have acquired a patina of humanist after all, was seen as replacing the "real" production of skilled though, tends not to be very useful in understanding either the past or the can do best is make those products more desirable by making those names more desirable, it's hard to argue that anyone would be better off with the company evils of vertical integration in general. Press accounts invariably suggested knitting machines are businesses of yesterday. And they have low returns," and low margins if you're making products to sell to others. doesn't run knitting machines to sell fabric to other companies. It runs them to supply the fabric it uses in its own products. And in theory, it should be able to make that fabric for itself for less than it would cost to buy it from a third party, because there will be no profit margin built into the price. The margins are higher, not lower, than they will be after the knitting machines are sold. That was one of the crucial appeals of vertical integration: It cut out the middleman. It's possible, of course, that a company that specializes in making fabric will be able to do it more efficiently, so that even with the textile producer in the United States. It seems safe to assume that, by now, Vertical integration does mean that you need to invest heavily in fixed assets and then keep investing in upkeep and upgrades. If you can avoid those costs and still make the products you want at a reasonable the ethics of outsourcing abroad bother you, read Slate's "In Praise of Cheap benefits. It keeps you from having to haggle with suppliers over prices, gives you total supervision over quality, and allows you to control production. One of the key impetuses for General Motors' push for vertical integration, for example, was its perennial struggle with Fisher Body, a major supplier who kept holding up GM for price increases. Once GM acquired Fisher, the problems course, it's hard to find anyone who will defend vertical integration. But that's essentially the product of two factors, neither of which has anything to assurance that competition is the necessary progenitor of efficiency. Since makes the product instead of allowing others to bid for the chance to make in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since the Big Three automakers' move toward return to profitability, it has seemed logical to pronounce vertical industry abandoned vertical integration for one reason: labor costs. The Big business models or a desire to focus on the brand. They did it because they didn't want to pay union wages when they didn't have to. Outsourcing parts still getting a bargain. But it's hard to see how this lesson applies to blatantly to be more about gaining the favor of Wall Street than about blunt about how much this bothered him. "It is increasingly obvious," he said, measures designed to boost share prices. So all the money from the sales of the which is to say that instead of being used to create new wealth, it will simply be redistributed from the company to investors. That's not redeploying assets that kind of maneuver should come as no surprise, since companies now seem to spend as much time looking at the stock ticker as at their production lines. But there is, nonetheless, something melancholic about it, and this is where the lament about companies actually making products has real resonance. To give up on River Rouge in order to build your brand is one thing. But to give up on River Rouge to buy back shares? That's something else entirely. climbing. A study in this month's Health Affairs explains why: Bosses decide what health plan you will have, and more of them are deciding that you will have managed care, like it or not. Besides explaining why competition and suggest that tougher regulations are unlikely to make insurers serve patients the most restrictive plans, only covering patients who see their specified care payments if patients visit the plan's doctors, and with larger payments if they Only a quarter of all workers have indemnity insurance. difficult for patients to see specialists. (No wonder popularity polls reveal Increasingly, patients and their allies are seeking legislative the proposals loosen the restrictions. Already in effect are new federal laws surgery or a stroke? And after appendectomies, prostate operations, pneumonia? We don't really want the government directing our care any more than we want insurers to. What's more, piecemeal regulation is bound to fail. If an insurer's priority is cheap health care, it will find a thousand other fomented in irrationality. The same consumers who whine about managed care But fewer workers are given that choice today, according to companies offer no choice of plan either. What's more, employers are practice medicine dropped its Blue Cross indemnity plan and now offers managed mainly pick insurers on the basis of price, and often switch plans in pursuit of the lowest cost. So we shouldn't be surprised that patients aren't happy or that insurers aren't bending over backward to please them. Employers are the when your mother picked your clothes for you. The only one happy with what you expensive plans and cover the extra costs themselves because most insurers to the plan. Also, most employers would rather send one big check to their insurer each month than deal with the paperwork hassle of a bunch of different insurance in the first place? After all, they don't offer employees car insurance. Health insurance became a standard benefit during World War II. Wage and price controls then in effect prevented employers from giving raises, but employers used it to fatten compensation packages for workers. If car insurance coverage for Land Rovers and minivans. Angry consumers would complain about cheapo car care. To appease consumers without upsetting the business lobby, legislators would probably require overnight stays after brake and lube The most straightforward way to put choices back into families' hands would be to sever the connection between health insurance and work. If health benefits were taxed as income, people would promptly demand that the cash be paid directly to them and that they be allowed to choose their own insurance. Insurers would then have to cater to their needs. Short of that radical change, effective legislation should be passed to increase choices for can join. These groups give workers a selection of plans and reduce paperwork hassles for employers. Legislation could expand such groups. Some suggest that of patients' rights, including the right to appeal mistreatment by insurers. But employers on the panel scuttled all concrete measures to return choice to consumers. The new rights are nice enough; they'll move consumers a few seats forward on the bus. But employers are still driving, and that's all that occasional Slate department based on the premise that who wins in endorses nor condemns any of the views expressed, however laudatory or isn't committing the sins monopolies are supposed to commit, Gates argues. change of subject has earned some good press: News stories have quoted analysts Times headline over a laudatory Associated Press story. But whereas changing the subject usually works in politics, it's not as effective in legal fights. The court's proceedings keep the media spotlight on the question of but to free enterprise, consumer choice, and prosperity. Gates calls the choice between private and government control of software "the question at the center" the specter of a "Federal Bureau of Operating Systems." Conservative pundits consumer choice, and government is the only institution capable of stopping it. made their computer vendor an offer they couldn't refuse." links Windows to software and services it wants to promote. These methods allow expert on subtle methods by which software providers can steer consumer more pernicious than the clumsy, overreaching state. These views bode ill for has used the image of its competitors' political influence to portray its own so "belatedly." Newspapers have bought both these spins, alternately praising protect the ability of its dominant competitor to secure an exclusive." (For the linkage is a marketing ploy, not a technical necessity. Rule concedes that "suppliers and consumers will gravitate toward the most widely disseminated standard, regardless of whether it is technically the best." Therefore, interpret this kind of standardization and integration, for all their benefits buys out potential rivals or starves them to death by stealing their innovations and adding them to Windows. It doesn't create breakthroughs; it debate turns on a contest of metaphors. Gates calls Windows a "stable," "open, integrated platform" that gives software and hardware innovators "the certainty they need to build products." The metaphor emphasizes stability's virtues (facilitating "openness" and "innovation") over its drawbacks (stifling would fracture the platform and pull down the whole house of cards. memo, they accuse the company of plotting to parlay its primacy into a a universal programming language (Java) based on the network, an alternative Windows holds sway) becomes the platform for the network, not the other way Windows, and battling the antitrust suit. "While the Justice Department is claiming that Windows should not include browsing capabilities," Gates latter against the former. If the network paradigm is as mature and superior as incorporation of a browser "critical for Windows to stay competitive." Windows argumentativeness has disastrously overshadowed its arguments. Its lawyers have as proof that "poorly informed lawyers have no vocation for software design." When instructed by the judge to give computer makers an alternative to undesirable. This conduct has embarrassed the company's supporters and risks losing the war for consumers' hearts and minds. The rap on nerds has some fellow surgeons. I asked them to show me around. I was interested, I said, in what they could do. But what I really wanted to see was what they couldn't the sale of food and medical supplies is gathering bipartisan support, and a Senate vote is expected this spring. Embargo defenders, however, say the harm trading with a dictator is immoral. Here I had a chance to see the effects for care. Later on my trip, for example, I met a woman who had no special connections but had been sent here after she developed frightening stomach meat on her table (what little she finds she gives to her son) was able to parasite from the drinking water had invaded her stomach lining. was spacious, but his bookshelf was bare except for a single textbook heart transplants and complicated valve replacements he performed. But I wondered how he, a surgeon, could spend an hour meeting with me at the spur of the moment. He admitted that, for all he was capable of doing, he operated on problem getting time in busy operating rooms? No. Rooms were free as we spoke. Was it a lack of patients? He laughed and said that he had over a hundred patients with failing hearts in the hospital awaiting surgery. The problem was the constant struggle for supplies. Yes, they were costly, but that wasn't the ventilators and heart valves. The problem, he said, was the embargo. series of interlocking steps, each requiring specialized materials. You need anesthetic agents, IV tubing, blades for the bone saw, and so on. Every week, They are not that reliable, he told me, but they get the job done. Sometimes he That week, however, he didn't have the suture he needed to sew in the valves. And a lack of perfusion fluid to prime the heart bypass machine had held up all people, he told me. But "maybe sometimes" it happens. chemotherapy agents. Companies can seek a permit for medical sales, but hardly access to the world's largest market for the sake of this tiny country. The act suffering can be justified if it averts greater suffering or serves a larger justify continuing to cause pain and death if the embargo fueled enough relationship between political freedom and economic conditions seems far more complicated than advocates of free trade or the embargo seem willing to admit. The sickest patients are at the top. When supplies are obtained, they get me to the intensive care unit to see these patients. He claimed he was too busy, and by the end of our conversation, he had grown reticent. At one point he admitted that he feared he had said too much, that I could use the a new valve and a vigorous man recovering from a heart transplant. We finished walking the wards and shook hands as medical colleagues. Then we parted ways, broadside by a car on a local road, ambulance workers stabilized his neck and they somehow overlooked the critical step of keeping him flat to protect his treated at another center. So they transferred him to a local nonprofit hospital where I sometimes work. He arrived sitting up in his stretcher, probably an honest mistake. But I was disturbed that the transferring hospital was so thorough with tests and so lax with basic care. The nurses with me center was slick at doing billable tests but had slashed staffing to the point that it couldn't provide good care. "I wouldn't take my cat to that hospital," They say they are transforming a bureaucratic industry into an efficient provider of better quality care. But the expanding federal investigation of company overstated costs and deliberately ordered unnecessary tests to increase criminal fraud, and agents raided offices and hospitals in seven states. Rep. forced to drop kickbacks for doctors who sent Medicare patients to its Enterprises of paying "bounty hunters" to obtain patients for its psychiatric hospitals. Its doctors then gave wrong diagnoses to increase billings and held they point out, inspectors are investigating dozens of prestigious university bought never had much charity care in the first place, so what's with the quality of care, they ask, where's the beef? There are anecdotes, like mine, of when asked to defend profit in medicine. "It may come as a surprise to you, but will produce increased efficiency and better quality in health care, just as in care is not like buying a car. You can shop around for a car, but the motorcyclist I saw couldn't choose his hospital. Also, it's much harder to judge whether your care is good than whether your car is good. Terrible things happen to people in hospitals all the time: infections, bleeding, and other complications of care. Studies show a quarter of these events are avoidable, but it is rarely obvious to patients which ones are. If the motorcyclist, delirious with pain and a severe blow to the head, had lost sensation in his feet, he wouldn't have known if we could have prevented it. He had to trust with his life that making money was not our priority. (He did fine, by the way. pressure to make money the top priority. They must answer to stockholders demanding rising profits, while nonprofit hospitals answer to a charitable like Wall Street. One sees you once a month and tells you to do better for your own good. The other holds a gun to your head every day. uninsured, sticking to affluent suburbs, and avoiding obstetric, pediatric, and have squeezed as much profit as possible out of insurers, billing for percent annual growth in charges. They even tried to make profits on blood charges. Some did. But the dominant professional ethic to do right by patients making a buck. Their doctors are imbibing that spirit. That's what worries occasional Slate department based on the premise that who wins in endorses nor condemns any of the views expressed, however laudatory or they say, demands that the president be held accountable to the law. perfectly logical argument. But so what? In politics, logic is just a small justice, honesty, and criminal behavior, the president is playing an entirely different game. He is turning the scandal into a debate about sex, political warfare, and the disruption of the nation's business. That's how he's going to an air of dignity by couching their questions in terms of perjury, but they soon tossed aside that fig leaf and pounced on the subject everyone wanted to evening, the whole country was gossiping about the randy president and the With that, the question of perjury vanished, trampled by the media's sexual humiliating, but they won't get him booted from office. Polls show that the outrage over consensual sex is unsustainable. The public soon tires of the subject. Disgust with the sordid sex curdles into disgust with the sordid calls "a scuzzy investigation" to dig up "some kind of sleazy sex." has to explain or repent his sexual sins. But maybe the public doesn't need to forgive or understand them. Maybe it just needs to get used to them, as it has not because he was "pure" but because he had "good ideas" that are helping the country. Who cares if he's taken another spill off the chastity wagon? All this talk about White House sex is already losing its shock value. Pundits are pointing out that lots of presidents fooled around, that not one of them was impeached for it, and that citizens of many other countries don't care about stifle the public's appetite for further investigation. referring to the boxing tactic of shielding your head with your gloves and making your opponent exhaust himself by uselessly pummeling you against the times whether an extramarital physical relationship was improper. Six times, "wiring" women in hotel bars and plying them with whiskey. Two days later, the nature of media coverage. Investigative reporters strive for truth, but and the right have escalated, the press has devoted a greater share of its scandal coverage to questioning the methods and motives of those who gathered psychology of war also causes reporters to focus less on each side's evidence persuasive. When White House aides and congressional Democrats reflexively Democrats of the political fight they crave, Republican leaders have kept quiet in a civil suit is less important than getting on with the nation's business. scandal for as long as possible, but the relentless influx of new issues works State of the Union speech with the scandal hanging over him. He proved them wrong and in the process pushed the issue of Social Security to center stage. business, between his private vice and his public service. But polls show that trains run on time. They're not going to "shut down the recovery," suggested recall caused Burger King to run out of burgers, I started to worry. Shouldn't somebody do something about this food poisoning thing? rapid blanket approval of irradiation by the establishment naturally stirred my suspicions. We are talking about radioactivity, after all. On closer inspection, however, food irradiation turns out to work safely and effectively, opponents' concerns notwithstanding. But questions remain about whether food poisoning is such a big problem in the first place. diarrhea and severe abdominal pain at first, bloody stools next. You're least, in developed countries. But in some cases, the toxins trigger the syndrome" can be deadly in children. The Centers for Disease Control estimate meat when digestive contents spill where they shouldn't during slaughter. It cooking your meat until well done will almost always remove these bacteria. feared that it might earn a reputation for bacteria burgers, which has plagued chicken suppliers, didn't distribute beef until Burger King talked them into of food irradiation say that a rare burger doesn't have to be dangerous. hamburger, apple juice, and other foods with gamma rays, killing resident that the process is perfectly safe, leaves no funny taste or appearance, and For gamma ray fans, food irradiation is the most logical step after heat and Drug Administration has approved irradiation of produce, pork, poultry, and other foods, but industry has not adopted it widely. (For unclear reasons, the and veal.) You'd think that the poultry industry, which has suffered terrible publicity over salmonella outbreaks, would rush to irradiation, but it fears that the negative public reaction to irradiation would be worse. Currently, technophobic lobbying groups that ignore the evidence and stir public fears with outrageous claims that the process makes food radioactive. The critics I spoke to, however, offered credible arguments. Most admit that irradiation Interest, will even concede it's safe for consumers. But they argue that it's expensive, harmful to workers and the environment, and unnecessary if safer farming methods are practiced. They suggest growing livestock under cleaner, less confined conditions to prevent contamination of feed and water; food; and using simpler technologies, like steaming, to clean raw meat. As Irradiation is saying we have to have fecal matter in our hamburgers." record, gamma rays do not make food radioactive. And studies do seem to show irradiated chicken and found no evidence of increased cancer or other toxic effects. Other research found no signs of hazard in humans who eat irradiated food. Also, studies showed that, at the lower, pasteurization doses, radiation What about the other arguments against irradiation? It halve costs. The risks to the environment and to workers seem theoretical. The waste that must be stored under nuclear regulatory guidelines, but the current regulations governing hospitals and sterilization companies seem to work, and anyone, but kids die every year from food poisoning. slaughtering practices. It's pretty hard to keep feces out of meat. Some meat price. And even with clean practices and technologies like steaming of meat (which hasn't been tested nearly as much), some food would still be die from tainted food each year. Compare that with, say, car accidents, which risk only for vulnerable populations, like the very young. For the rest of us, it's an uncommon annoyance caused mainly by inadequately cooked chicken or to be right. It's so good, in fact, that it's worth revising your past positions when they suddenly look wrong. The key to success in this endeavor, of course, is never to let on that you've changed your mind at all. For an object lesson in how to do this, look no further than what's happened to our systems has proven that industrial policy doesn't work, that protectionism is a route to disaster, and state control of credit allocation encourages that until the rest of the world becomes more like us, it's bound to "industrial policy fostered appalling investment, banking, and monetary Even on its own terms this analysis is startlingly cynical. nothing but blue skies ahead for these economies. They showed their faith by these countries' statist policies, then investors' failure to recognize this earlier is a strike against the market, not for it. Still more perverse recent crisis they themselves took great pains to deny that such a model the only recipe for economic growth was open markets and nonintervention on the economies, with their high tariffs, easy credit, and corruption. Instead, they Within the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, similar conclusions industrial policy in the region, while a concluded that "rapid growth in each economy was primarily due to the application of a set of common, well, too.) If they achieved that success through targeted subsidies and at historically rapid rates for more than two decades is also indisputable. But the conclusion that the one led to the other is not indisputable. It may very rates in worker productivity have, Japan aside, been surprisingly low. In the rapid increases in the percentage of people participating in the work force, excellent education, and enormous investments in physical capital. In other words, they've done a brilliant job of mobilizing resources, but not a brilliant job of mobilizing resources efficiently. But you can mobilize turns out to be hard to answer within the confines of an be made for that point. What's appalling is rather that now that their heroes have stumbled, they have disowned them so utterly. The irony is that, if they now despise. One can only imagine the "heads I win, tails you lose" while the comparison may be a bit facile, it helps illuminate the crucial point that one can believe in the virtues of the market while still understanding at the hospital just after birth. And the others expired at home, just infants, Doctors, including some of the most respected pathologists of the time, could find no explanation for the eight crib deaths. Indeed, the medical community came to recognize that thousands of seemingly healthy infants inexplicably died in their beds each year, and they coined the name Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, unexplained deaths in one family do not sit easily. We expect more from name we've given to one of the great medical mysteries of our time: Any sudden baby is found dead in bed. No cry is heard from the infant prior to its death. six months of age, older infants can die spontaneously and unexpectedly as suggestive findings are that sleeping on soft bedding and sleeping face down both increase a baby's risk of sudden death. A successful campaign to get parents to put babies to bed on their backs or sides has been associated with a be a kind of freak accident in which babies, unable to turn over, are smothered by their own bedding. The findings raise questions about how in the world you in which the original autopsies showed no marks of force, and the corpses are probably now nothing but bone. Forensic pathologists and child abuse experts I contacted confirmed that there is no distinctive autopsy finding or new test official close to the case who requested anonymity admitted that there was no evidence that supported the charges of homicide. The doctors involved simply reviewed the old medical evidence. Had the previous pathologists missed physical signs of suffocation? No, the official said. It appears that the critical factor was the pattern. Eight deaths in one family was highly abuse cases, science often can only provide circumstantial evidence. Occasionally, we doctors find convincing evidence of abuse: cigarette burns, and held down in hot liquid. However, most cases do not come with such obvious signs. In deciding whether to sic the department of social services on a case, we have only vague indicators to rely upon. For example, according to laceration, or long bone fracture in an infant is considered evidence of possible abuse. In the end, doctors look for the parents to tell us much more in an adjacent room when suddenly, she screamed. My wife found her lying on the ground, her right arm bent midway between the elbow and the wrist as if she had an unnatural extra joint. As near as we could figure, it seemed she had tried had got caught in the slats. As she fell, the bones of the forearm broke in two. When I took her to the hospital, I was grilled by three different people asking me over and over again, "Now, exactly how did this happen?" It was, I doctors were looking, just as I do when I see young trauma victims, for any inconsistencies or changes in the story. It's easy for parents to feel as medicine has become, questions are still our main diagnostic test for Ultimately, I must have allayed any concerns. My daughter got a pink cast, and I took her home without incident. I couldn't help but think, however, that my social status played a role in all this. As much as doctors may try to avoid it, when we decide whether to involve officials in a case, social factors inevitably play a role. For example, we know that single parents have almost their children. (Race, by the way, is not a factor.) deaths must mean something, right? As one coroner involved in the case said, that science can't tell us what happened beyond reasonable doubt. Bucking his deaths in one family do not automatically mean murder. The numbers certainly infant deaths in a family in which homicide was ruled highly unlikely. Parents several different diseases together in describing the syndrome. Perhaps cannot prove even fatal child abuse, it is not without its power. Confronted children. She apparently couldn't recall what had happened to the others. Her lawyer, however, is questioning the reliability of the confession, obtained undisputed champion to complete basket case in the span of two decades: The demand that Japan ultimately get up off the canvas and retake the title. that narrative may be accurate enough in broad outline, on the level of actual companies it tells the wrong story. The current stock market's infatuation with all things Internet has led to indefensible overestimation of the actual strength of most Net companies. So too has the prevailing picture of Japan as a Japan is dismal, though it's hard to resist the thought that if the Bank of Japan just ran its printing presses and dumped piles of yen out onto the subsidies and regulations is simplified, it's hard to see the country getting the dose of creative destruction it sorely needs. The impact of domestic peak. The same is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, of the this the fact that, for most of this decade, the cost of capital in Japan actually went up, as bank lending was cut back, stock prices declined, and still occupy places in the global economy remarkably similar to those they held if anything, more influential than ever. Its successful integration of its the only companies that can be plausibly described as horizontally integrated. music that play on them. Given the track record of most diversification corporations as hidebound and conformist. The same might also be said of what's now called the "imaging" market, thanks primarily to its aggressive rolled over and died with the rest of the country's economy is hardly a revelation. After all, these companies were able to export cars and televisions as the Net stocks are prospering for precisely the opposite reason. management," to pay more attention to quality and market share, to push authority down to the factory floor. Of late, that whole phenomenon has been the subject of considerable mockery, along the lines of "Remember when we thought we should emulate Japan? How foolish we were!" Dramatic improvements in attributed to greater emphasis on "shareholder value" and improved cost because so many of those techniques have become part of the fabric of everyday quality control standards. Continuous improvement, which compels workers to simply the goal to which all manufacturing companies now aspire. It has also spawned an entire new business model, exemplified by Dell Computer, that is manufacturing practices was, if anything, understated. be because everyone else has learned from them, which is of course exactly how triumphalism, it's hard to resist the temptation to rewrite recent history as step toward a saner appraisal of where this economy might be going. Campaign. It marked the first time a sitting president has addressed a gay serves three purposes. First, it subsumes an apparently radical idea, gay rights, under a patriotic tradition: the espousal and gradual extension of "the fundamental story of our country." Second, it minimizes the burden on say that gays want not "civil" rights or "equal" rights but "special" rights. next morning. Reed elaborated: Gays are demanding "a special category, based on such as race), but it succeeds politically, by giving a fig leaf of neutrality to what is actually a moral aversion to homosexuality. long ago surrendered to the liberal crusade for "tolerance." Now they claim to represent tolerance against the left's demand for "approval" of homosexuality. It's a strong argument, because gays do want approval. One prominent gay won't ask about your private life, but don't flaunt it." Gays see it the other way around: If they can't be open about their orientation, said Birch, they're effectively "banished to the closet." But that's a hard argument to sell to an to make gays' participation in politics appear normal. His idea of normal polyglot of special interests, of gays, of feminists, and of union supporters compounded the damage by bragging about gay money and political more famous. So much for those people who said that it would ruin my career." Birch boasted that gays had made "significant investments, on par with other per fatality on people with AIDS as [on] people with breast cancer or prostate cancer." Conservatives gleefully connected the dots: Rich homosexuals were just another political group, another bunch of donors that you're appealing how gays have suffered from AIDS, teen suicide, and hate crimes. But this line response is to help them abandon homosexuality. This is fast becoming the signs saying "God Hates Fags," but a second group of protesters won better discrimination against gays. Chat shows replayed his best sound bite: "Being gay [has] nothing to do with the ability to read a balance book, fix a broken the workplace but oppose gay marriage, probably because the latter involves gay marriages, then bragged about it in campaign ads. (Republicans named it the right to discriminate against gays is no longer a sure winner for them. They're better off changing the subject to marriage, where they hold a clear advantage. dragged her through the sordid exercise of distinguishing gay marriage from polygamy and incest. Birch pointed out that conservatives defend serial and childless heterosexual marriages, but the whole topic was a loser for her. on whether homosexuality is more like the former or the latter. This is why gays substituted the phrase "sexual orientation" for "sexual preference." fighting back. Their usual tactic is to pepper the debate with references to argued that being a gay man is worse than being a smoker because homosexuality civic virtues to gays. "If they obey the law, show up for work every day or show up for school, if they're good citizens, they ought to be treated with conservatives argued that homosexuality involves a "choice," while liberals behind this academic dispute is kids. If children are amenable to gay persuasion, conservatives can argue that they should be "protected" by also from any legal rights that confer respectability. The extreme argument, respectable argument, leveled by Will, is that kids are susceptible to presence advanced gay rights as a mainstream cause. No doubt it did. But words always matter, and last week's exchange proved that opponents of gay rights complex." Other appropriate subheadings might include "cost overruns," company whose history, from one angle, looks to be an almost uninterrupted Of course, defense is an industry like no other. Barriers to entry in terms of technology and physical plant are prohibitive, which keeps concerns keep potential foreign competitors at bay. The Pentagon's interest in keeping its weapons supply free from interruptions, meanwhile, means that no major player can be allowed to go under. Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward. The fact that a small number of contracts can determine a company's profit outlook for a decade places a premium on regulation and competition, and few of the virtues of either. record testifies to the power of the human imagination. (It might also testify made historical amnesia into an art form. A short bout of traumatic remembering Ironically, the company's roots are as deep as any in the aerospace and defense for military contracts as well (including a failed attempt to sell bombers to when the company built both the C-69 Constellation transport (which became the impressively, the P-38 Lightning fighter. Both planes did what they were supposed to do, and cost what they were supposed to cost. It's not clear it sold fighters all over the world. It made these sales, of course, primarily by bribing foreign officials. But that wasn't actually illegal in the United defense budgets helped, as did an aggressive marketing plan abroad and, most the Joint Strike fighter, the last great contracting plum of the century. Perhaps, then, "corporate rebirth" is a fitting tag line. instance, the company tried to get the federal government to pay for the costs transport planes. There's always, it seems, another corner to cut. The difference now is that the company has finally figured out how to make its more unorthodox tactics pay off on the bottom line. The startling fact is that once left. The past is gone. The future's bright. Only universal peace can mess chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to stop him. Last surrogates, interviews, and press conferences, the two men are waging a war of words. This war isn't bound by strict rules of logic, but it's more and persuasion. Whichever player successfully frames the questions at stake will capture public opinion and political support, and thereby win. So far, the Drugs vs. "social policy." Helms has stuck doggedly to a single issue: drugs. He points out that Weld favors legalizing marijuana for "medical purposes" (which conservatives place on the slippery slope toward complete legalization), favors providing addicts with clean needles (to prevent the problem as a "war." But Weld hasn't touched the drug question. How come? One rule of the frame game is to avoid issues on which you're guaranteed to lose. This isn't an Ivy League debating society, where you can win by ingeniously defending a difficult position. In politics, you're in deep trouble as soon as you question the war on drugs. This is particularly true if you're fighting for he called a press conference to declare: "Sen. Helms' opposition has nothing whatsoever to do with drug policy. It has everything to do with the future of the Republican Party. In plain language, I am not Sen. Helms' kind of Republican. I do not pass his litmus test on social policy. Nor do I want to." about drugs, reporters concluded. It was about Helms' distaste for Weld's "moderate" views on social issues such as abortion. With that, the advantage swung to Weld. While Helms has the more popular position on drugs, Weld has the maneuver. He insisted Helms' concern was drugs, not ideology. The evidence for secretary of defense, and has offered to confirm Weld as ambassador to a game, such petty facts are easily overwhelmed by larger themes. Weld's spin argument fits nicely into the context of recent Republican infighting. Having come apart over foreign policy (trade with China) and fiscal policy (the House leadership coup), the Republicans seem ripe for a civil war over social policy. in connection with Weld since the confirmation fight began. all, the press loves to personalize debates. Drug policy is boring, but a fight between a saucy blue blood and a surly redneck is fun. Helms wasn't even the first member of Congress to oppose Weld's nomination. Others who oppose Weld have pleaded that Helms isn't the point. It's a futile argument. Helms and his who support Weld's nomination don't want their party torn asunder in the process. Their solution is to separate the question of Weld's ideology from his and accomplished. "This is not about the heart and soul of the Republican supporters accept this distinction, because it subverts Weld's campaign to broaden the ideological confrontation. They argue that Weld's indifference toward the war on drugs has affected his competence as a law enforcer and will about the party's soul, even as Republican moderates protest it isn't. The analytically more sophisticated but viscerally less compelling. Which means it will probably prevail in a confirmation hearing but lose in the court of public opinion, vanquished by Weld's campaign for libertarian martyrdom. In the frame game, nuance is almost always a loser. Remember, the last guy to argue for a caustic apostasy handed his enemies a persuasive argument against his fitness parent catches you fighting with another kid, the first thing to do is accuse the other kid of starting it. Weld should have been able to play the victim, It wasn't the first punch thrown, but it was the first one most people saw. This allowed Helms' spokesman to cast his boss as the victim. Senate Majority Weld "hurt himself by attacking the chairman unfairly and with political [Helms], before the man really knew anything about me, he said I was unfit to be ambassador, had loose lips, and was soft on drugs. And I said, 'Where does "ideological extortion" argument is particularly ingenious. Typically, extortion means that you're threatening someone with harm or embarrassment to extract a concession. Helms has no illusions that he can make Weld concede anything. His vow to kill Weld's nomination is a promise, not a threat. It's Weld who's trying to scare Republicans into supporting him, by threatening to turn his fight with Helms into an ideological civil war. His charge of "ideological extortion" is part of his ideological extortion. And it's he get a hearing, lest his jihad against Helms ignite "civil war in the recently. He has stopped debating the substance of his quarrel with Helms, and insistent question: Why should there not be a hearing? Why should one man, in a democracy, block the conduct of the people's business?" in the Senate, because it allows Republicans to defend him without exacerbating chairman cannot be dictatorial, ultimately, when a majority of the committee, a the procedural argument allows the White House to challenge Helms' obstinacy was so moved by Weld's new plea for a "fair hearing" that he repeated that But the true beauty of the "give him a hearing" argument is thwart the people's will by refusing to schedule a hearing. Framed this way, Weld's apostasy becomes a virtue instead of a vice, suggesting candor instead game? Helms' allies say the nomination is doomed. They think Weld overlooked the game's cardinal rule: that Congress has its own rules, including the absolute power of committee chairmen over supplicants such as Weld. Why, he's not even a governor anymore, they scoff. He's just a lowly citizen. But maybe not the boss in my life. I am stronger than the temptation of any food." that? We've learned much in the last few years about the role that hunger plays in obesity. Drug companies have capitalized on that knowledge to create powerful new appetite suppressants. But these "cures" come with serious risks. disease a year ago. But doctors continued to prescribe it to millions, arguing questions about using pills for obesity before all the facts are in. Scientists didn't always view appetite as a cause of obesity. The dominant thinking for more than two decades was that the obese gained weight because they burned fewer calories. In experiments, overfed or their metabolism slowed, conserving calories and driving their weight back to starvation and exercise, while skinny people got to feast and watch television. In the late '60s, amphetamine, which increases metabolism, became the rage for dieters. But it didn't keep the weight off, and proved to be addictive. diets, they gained weight just as easily as obese people. (In fact, obese people had to eat more to put on a given amount of weight.) The metabolism of obese dieters never slowed enough to explain how quickly their weight bounced back. They were also eating more. Put simply, even at their baseline weight, obese people eat more than thin people. this observation. Women weighed about a pound more one year after delivery than at the start of pregnancy. Some gained more than a pound, and many returned to they ate more total calories, especially in the form of snacks. Although gainers ate lunch less often, their snacking increased to three or more times increase than decrease. Experts believe that once you've put on extra weight perhaps longer. Until recently, nothing short of has kept the seriously obese when experiments on lab mice revealed that the hormone leptin controls the members all lacked the gene for producing leptin. Without leptin to signal leptin findings imply that hormones and neurotransmitters control the instinctual desire to eat, overwhelming willpower in the process. In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. The drive to find and eat food was integral to the survival of our early ancestors. People who gorged themselves survived winter famines and reproduced more than others. But this behavior amphetamine that reduces hunger and increases metabolism. Not surprisingly, when the obese patients stopped taking these drugs, their weights returned to are undergoing Food and Drug Administration approval testing. Leptin analogues (chemical cousins) are also being developed. Effective hunger control will probably require lifelong therapy with multiple drugs like these. The first warning that these drugs could pose health risks Medicine downplayed the risks at the time. It simultaneously published an findings were basically ignored: Eighteen million prescriptions were filled for come from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease, Even in the seriously obese, we don't know that these drugs really will save more than they kill, because no studies have been done. (Meanwhile, the drug In the late '80s, doctors inflated a balloon device in obese patients' stomachs. Because patients couldn't eat nearly as much, they lost weight and kept it off. But some of the balloons deflated and got stuck in the intestines. Only after several people died was the device pulled off the market. The dieters' craving for something to quiet their hunger is almost as great as a tremendous economic success story, it's not clear that the story can be That's not because playing the house's role in a gambling pretty straightforward: Every day people walk through the doors, mill around percent of their money, and in doing so effectively transfer their cash to really about gambling at all. You do have to keep people from cheating, and you business of casinos is not about what happens once a player sits down at a blackjack table or in front of a slot machine. The real business is about getting that player to sit down at your table and not the table at the sense, a casino is like a restaurant or a movie theater, except that there's one crucial difference: Every casino is selling the exact same product. There are minor variations in the kinds of slot machines you'll find, and casinos are always coming up with mindless variants on the classic table games, but in has said, they're buying "time." Time to win and, of course, time to lose. distinguish itself from Burger King, but the Mirage can't advertise What the Mirage can and does advertise instead is itself. existence depends on a service economy. In another way, though, the city has compete on price or essential product, they competed on the basis of their Statue of Liberty in front of the New York, New York casino makes the experience of playing blackjack inside any different, but the statue is not the greater percentage of their revenue from their hotel and restaurant business. state. Difficult not to make money when you're the only game in town in a Third It's a flippant comparison, to be sure, but it's one that illuminates the reasons why gambling has not been an economic panacea for other parts of the country, parts where the New Deal actually had an impact, for example. More than that, the comparison also gets at what may be the most to purchase the goods rather than having them shipped out of the city, but the economics are the same. Casinos thrive not because of the business they do with local customers, but because of the business they do with people from around uncannily like models for the economy into which we appear to be moving. Hunter flying trapeze artists mingle beneath a billowing canopy, that it was what won World War II. But it might be that Circus is already a version of certainly reacting faster than ever to the slightest hint of good or bad news. Whether this means the stock market is more efficient than ever, though, is another question entirely. The answer may depend on whether you think "efficient" is a synonym for "jumpy and hysterical." Internet stocks, trials and tribulations that said less about the actual business of the Internet than about the manic behavior of Wall Street in a search engines, online retailers, and Internet access providers whose listings that move into Internet stocks is simply evidence of what happens when everyone believes so strongly in the stock market that keeping any money in cash is regarded as heresy. In other words, if you were a mutual fund manager, you can find a company that seems fairly valued." If you did that, you might miss out on the latest rally. The money had to go somewhere, and when Net stocks became the Next Big Thing (for those few days), that's where the money have access). This in turn means that more people will search on Yahoo!, buy for a company being priced into its stock all at once. And then the worm turned isn't really clear, but it definitely did. It was a very odd thing to Just as the shift of money into Internet stocks was partly the product of a virtuous circle created by institutions trying to keep their portfolios invested in stocks that had "momentum," so too was the shift out partly the product of a vicious circle created by institutions trying to dump stocks that suddenly didn't have momentum. The rout also had something to do with the fact that only a few Internet companies have ever reported profits and that even those that have profits trade at valuations to which, as they say, no traditional criteria can be applied. Everyone knows that you can't value these companies the way you'd value General Electric (perhaps because if you did are now). But every so often the market does look at their bottom lines, and it finds that discretion is sometimes the better part of valor. advance and retreat as much as it is the governing principle behind that to something called "the Internet sector" and that it's the sector, and not the companies, that matters. This is, of course, the principle governing most institutional investing, which is why pharmaceutical stocks and airline stocks Airlines' stock rises while other airline stocks fall. There is the kernel of a also help others. But sector investing also tends to reward a successful corporation's competitors for that corporation's success, and in that sense seems not merely counterintuitive but downright perverse. sector investing rests upon a basic misconception, namely that there are things we can meaningfully call "Internet stocks." In fact, there are at least five different types of Internet companies, each of which has very different future still selling into a tiny market but one that's growing explosively. Search the tools that make the Web work, but their main source of income will come packaging content. And, finally, there are the Internet access providers, which companies will benefit from having more people use the Internet. But not all will benefit equally. And even within those five groups the differences among individual companies are more important than the similarities. To put it a brand recognition and clear business models, have more in common with each Internet will undoubtedly be a crucial part of the economy of the next century. companies were around in the early part of this century. Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need. window of his lavish New York office and says simply, "Napalm." makers and game players. They flourished on brinkmanship, buying companies only to dismember them and caring only for the chance to crush their opponents. acquiring, to create the world's largest chain of movie theaters. (Got all that? There will be a pop quiz at the end of the story.) The new company will build many of those giant multiplexes we've been hearing so much about, the especially at a time when movie attendance is flat and the number of screens But, setting that aside, what's really interesting about the Regal acquisition buying it to sell off its assets and pocket the proceeds. On the contrary, by platform for another, much in the way any corporation looking to expand into a debt or stripped of their most valuable jewels. But in fact the Regal deal, far the firm's performance in this decade sheds a new light on its performance in the last one and makes it worth asking, once again, what the real impact of a private partnership rather than a corporation. In essence, what the firm does investors better returns than they could have found in the stock or bond firm never makes a deal to buy a company without plans to sell it eventually or to take it public or both. The investors reap their rewards not by taking out capital gains they reap when the companies are sold or taken public. somewhere down the line you'll want to sell it, the argument goes, you'll else is dumb. After all, when deciding whether or not to buy a company from powers no one knows about, it's unlikely that buyers are going to make a In other words, if you think that markets are even relatively good at companies' dividend payments to shareholders with debt payments to creditors. In principle, one is no better or worse for a company's health than the other. But there is one big difference between dividends and debts, which is that if you fail to pay the first, your stock price gets punished, but the company of companies that took on more debt, often in the form of junk bonds, than they Department Stores: They all collapsed because their debt loads were too high. meant the death of banks' willingness to lend freely to almost anyone, forced R to refocus its business around the strongest deals possible. It also meant that you had to look harder to find companies that investors were undervaluing an extended period of time during which all had expanded, improved Becoming highly leveraged has forced managers to think seriously about costs, trim overhead, and improve productivity. The broader lesson we're supposed to learn, then, is that it was precisely the takeover mania of the 1980s that created the lean, efficient profit machines of the 1990s. But the truth is that is that managers of a company perform better when they're held accountable by debt or even the promise of untold riches. Rather, it has succeeded because it brought a relentless focus on the bottom line to the corporations it has owned, and established standards its managers have had to live up to. For most of this by management and uninterested in rocking the boat. What these boards have allowed managers to do is, simply, play with other people's money. And in some evocative images of the 1970s, those film clips of sheiks clad in flowing robes and luxuriant headdresses, striding confidently from hotel lobbies into waiting world's oil reserves, they controlled the lifeblood of the industrialized world. This was what the revenge of the Third World looked like, it seemed. not have been sharper. Instead of a tightly disciplined cartel administering association struggling to bring supply in line with demand even as its efforts are sabotaged by its own members. And instead of being the sole ruler of the dramatic technological advances in exploration and production have made new oil output. The most recent quota increase, for instance, will raise the cartel's is designed mainly to allow to bring its share of the world market more in sync massive price increases of the early and then late 1970s brought huge windfall that still handled much of their production). But those price increases ultimately provoked two predictable responses: Demand for oil shrank, as consumers looked for substitutable sources of energy; and, more importantly, production costs, it made sense to develop fields that previously had been too pint of cow's milk, you can bet supermarkets would start selling milk from China if they could get it here at a reasonable cost. that analogy doesn't really capture just how momentous the technological transformation of the oil industry has been. The last decade and a half has witnessed a steady decline in the cost of finding and producing oil. drilling, where drill bits actually go sideways from a vertical hole in order to extract more oil, has also helped make the exploitation of smaller and less The infiniteness, of course, is imaginary. Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out. But that point now seems so far in the future that oil countries are acting as if it will never arrive, and that has had a major impact on their attitudes toward production. If your reserves are finite, after all, you need steady price increases over time to justify leaving any oil at all in the ground. (Otherwise, every producer has an incentive to drain all its reserves, take the money, and reinvest it in a more profitable enterprise.) That means restricting supply. If your reserves are infinite, though, it makes sense to worry less about price and more about maximizing output, since your source of cash is never going to dry up and force you into another line of business. maximizes output, everyone loses, because the price falls precipitously. The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction heard the last time I walked by the New York Mercantile Exchange, where the keep its members in order and maintain a public production quota. It wants to keep prices high enough to ensure profits but low enough to deter the development of new fields. But the instruments it has to do this with are blunt compared with the authority it wielded two decades ago. in oil, nor even a real spot market for crude oil. (A spot price is the price for one cargo of oil, generally delivered within a month.) That made it difficult for consumers to compare prices and locked them into relationships with producers. It also meant that there was no way to hedge against future price increases, which obviously gave producers tremendous leverage. The rise of the futures market and the broadening of the spot market brought price competition to the world of oil. Now, it's still rather difficult to put a rig disproportionate impact on the market as a whole. But, for the first time in history, there is now a relatively open market for oil. And that undoubtedly has something to do with the dramatic expansion of the industry's small is beautiful. If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the over the last two weeks, the conventional wisdom has quickly adjusted. Bigger, activity in the United States alone. It's easy to overestimate the significance constant as a percentage of the value of the stock market as a whole. What's the vast majority of acquisitions do not add value to the economy as a whole. Don't bother them with the facts. They're ready to buy. shareholders investing in them. On the one hand, there's a general rejection of itself of its manufacturing operations to the Big Three auto companies actually own, the idea of doing as little real work as you have to is much applauded by Wall Street today. On the other hand, though, there's also a general acceptance of the corporation that promises to do everything, such as of scale and scope had been permanently discredited. Apparently not. that it's cheaper to produce or distribute many different products rather than less successful than if it sells milk, eggs, cereal, bread, and so on. not the same as saying it always matters. And even if size does have its will now be the "largest financial institution in the world," which will make year won't depend as much on volatile sectors, as Travelers' did on the trading in Travelers, and vice versa. They're not any more protected now than they itself is nonsensical. The deal is justified only if the merged entity will grow faster, and be more profitable, than the two separate ones would have record of financial supermarkets is dismal. Sears failed with Dean Witter, financial services. It's not just that, at least in the United States, there's no evidence that people prefer national banks to local ones (if anything, there's a long history of distrust of large banks). It's also that people take their financial decisions more seriously than they do their choice of toilet paper, and that they are unlikely to pick up a home mortgage just because their company. For the deal to make sense, the costs of working together in a contractual relationship would have to be greater than the costs of merging. But the record in this regard is not comforting. In fact, if there's one thing dramatically underestimate how much it will cost and how long it will take to diligence" in three days. How due, exactly, could that diligence have been? It's true that if a company lets a potential merger candidate look too closely, and the deal then falls through, it may have given away its secrets for nothing. But when you realize that people take more time to decide what car up to make mergers attractive. And it's hard work to determine the success of mergers, because you have to compare the performance of the new company against the projected performance of the previously independent companies. That makes it easier just to assume success in the absence of complete disaster. But the big because you're better. You don't get better because you're big." downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls. Or, alternatively, Wall Street was praised for its relentless focus on the bottom line and its insistence that corporations become more productive and more profitable. Either way, the point was that investors were taskmasters, Marine true as Wall Street's critics or its supporters wanted it to be, but in any case, it is somewhat beside the point now. A quick glance at the Street today the highly questionable proposition that people will overpay for mediocre food company, in other words, that should not exist, with "should" implying nothing What's a couple of hundred million dollars among friends? airline that owns the Pan Am trademark now, which went bankrupt last month but now looks as if it's going to be taken over by a soccer team owner from the put to sleep. But the odds are that it will be resurrected and chew up some tell hundreds of similar stories about the real estate market, where a huge construction boom in suburban office space continues, even though no one seems to know how the space will be filled in an economy growing as moderately as ours is. And still more about the market for initial public offerings, which, after a mild slump last fall, is booming again. We seem to have reached the point where any company that wants to go public can, even if it has never reported anything remotely resembling earnings. And if it's an Internet company pointed out, Silicon Valley now offers the curious spectacle of capitalism with too much capital. But the same spectacle seems to be on display throughout the foreign capital have poured into the United States, even as domestic capital into investment capital, as opposed to savings accounts that require a they know what to do with. With the market on a seemingly unstoppable rise, fund managers feel the need to stay fully invested, which means that eventually, even struggling companies will come back into favor. There's just are, though, a couple of problems with this picture. First, the concept of "too much capital" is a kind of macroeconomic impossibility. If the supply of capital truly exceeds demand, the rate of return will drop until the supply shrinks. Second, the idea that too much capital can be a bad thing makes little sense in a world where investment is the key to economic growth. So the image of lovelorn investors chasing standoffish borrowers can't really be right, at least not for the economy as a whole. And, in fact, there is no shortage of and risk their houses to get access to capital. And although government bond rates have dropped over the past two years, the real interest rate is still high today relative to the 1970s. There is a demand, then, to match the supply. The only problem is that this may not be such a good thing. enhancing productivity. In the absence of an omniscient central planner, though, the way to get better investment is to get more investment. The Planet cycles of undue optimism and hysterical panic. The consequences are never pretty, which is what's so troubling about the ever rising stock market, the all, that is doing well but not great, that is still growing slowly in historical terms, and that has still not shown significant evidence of a real boom in productivity (with the notable exception of the manufacturing sector). Yet investors are acting not simply as if there were only sunny skies ahead but also as if every company, every investment, were going to enjoy the warmth of the sun. And this means that capital is not playing its necessary disciplining role. You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can principle that doesn't seem to be at work in a capital market that just can't economics of the movie industry: Never have so many invested so much for so to reap the benefits of the bull market; it also wants the cash as quickly as The painful truth is that the studio is probably right company is marketing itself as the only "pure play" movie investment, since businesses. Unfortunately, it's not clear that the "pure play" aspect of the when you've got hundreds of millions of dollars a year in overhead costs. the industry's new dependence on blockbusters. This year, nine summer pictures enough to fund an entire studio's output for six months. explain why the $15-million thriller has become a thing of the past. If you can may bring home enough from the two hits to stay profitable. In addition, the lifestyle has to be more interested in the size of the studio's production budget than in the bottom line. In other words, he lives better losing money on Conventional wisdom has it that this embrace of the blockbuster represents the on shows but turning out product. And you can't make films as product." But there are a couple of rather gaping holes in this thesis. The first is that if movies are all about making money now, they're doing a very bad job of it. One analyst recently estimated that the return on capital in the industry is around precisely the days when the studios were most run like factories churning out a product. The vertical integration of the studio system mimicked the vertical integration of the auto and steel industries, as did the hierarchical chain of When Gone With the Wind was in production, other studios rushed to find other antebellum epics. And as far as sequels go, the Batman series doesn't really different is not the quality of the films but the control that the urban theaters, which meant that they were in charge of production, distribution, and exhibition. At the same time, the studios used their oligopolistic power to force independent theater owners to screen B films if they also wanted to screen A films. That ensured a reliable flow of profits from movies that cost very little to make. But a series of antitrust decisions after World War II ended these practices and forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater holdings, while also encouraging the development of independent production companies. That, in turn, made most creative people in theoretically should have increased efficiency. Creative people were freer to follow their hearts. The studios started to look something like publishing experienced in the early 1970s was only possible because of these new arrangements. But in the long run, the disappearance of steady revenue from involved has a stake in it being as big a shot as possible. This is hardly a planning because everyone's trying to make the next deal. costs of both production and marketing. In one sense, this is the full flowering of the death of the studio system and the triumph of purely speculative capitalism. In another sense, it's part of what's been called the and those in the middle tend to disappear. But what it isn't is a rational way settled by the president and Congress this week was the extension of federal health insurance to uncovered children. Although the two branches were still about the deal is that it comes three years after the Republican defeat of Republicans began warming to the idea of expanding health care coverage in reason the Republicans agreed to the deal was that it appealed strongly to But the success of the program will ride on the details, About a third of the uninsured children hail from families with incomes below to phase in coverage of all children below the poverty line, along with a could have filled the gap by ordering the states to cover uninsured kids to the higher income level. But given the current deference to states, this was never seriously considered. Another option would have been for the federal government to cover poor and uninsured kids with a program like Medicare, but this was way billion in block grants to help the states insure children. But will the states spend all the money on insurance for children? It's not clear. The Senate wanted rules that would prevent governors from substituting the federal money for existing state spending. But the governors convinced House Republicans to negotiate for looser guidelines that let the states pay for unpaid emergency nearly everyone agreed on providing health insurance at low or no cost to contentious was what the insurance would actually cover. House Republicans wanted skimpy coverage, while Senate Republicans and the White House wanted insured. This, of course, is a formula for failure. If the government gives feel cheated. Many insured families have inadequate child benefits, excessive costs, or periods without coverage. To make matters worse, many employers looking to save money (and please their employees) will drop dependent benefits if states provide better coverage than the private plans now do. What should the government do? If the primary goal is to make certain that families with uninsured children have a fallback, then we should keep the program cheap and cover just the services children don't get insurance could provide good outpatient coverage and minimal hospital coverage. This scheme is far from perfect, but uninsured kids already get the hospital care they need when they're sick because hospitals pass unpaid costs along to future where all children are well covered, Congress should stick with the Senate's broad insurance benefits, but open the program to all children negotiators essentially punted on the issue. The plan gives states some murky coverage options and rules limiting the program to the currently uninsured. face huge hospital bills that they will have to renege on. Other states will choose comprehensive benefits restricted to the uninsured. To discourage employers from simply dropping coverage, the recently uninsured cannot be covered. Families and employers paying more for less insurance will yell and scream. Support will wither. And states will scale back benefits. the best child benefits may go ahead and let the poorly insured switch to the out. States will come begging. Then Congress must either ante up or shut off a is dead? Congress may be unwittingly creating the thin edge of the wedge that Limbs lopped off. A general sense that everything is more than just a little bit out of control. All in all, not an experience you'd want to go through. But then, this is what happens when you have an accident with a chainsaw. who has become legendary for his rapid restructuring of companies seemingly plagued by slow sales, high overhead, and a lagging stock price. The accident outsourced a higher percentage of the company's production; cleaned up distribution channels; refocused product lines around higher quality items; fired thousands of workers. Then he negotiated a sweet contract extension for acclaim, at least from Wall Street. Sunbeam's stock price tripled immediately after the announcement of his arrival, and in the following months it rose billions of dollars in shareholder wealth he had created. is famous for his short attention span. He's described himself as happiest in the first year of a turnaround effort, when urgent decisions have to be made and implemented and results are immediately visible. After three years, though, he's bored and ready for a new challenge. So everyone expected that once the acquire another company upon which he could work his magic. The smart money was decision precisely because he wanted to show his detractors (of which that he's ruthless in job cutting and cavalier about the relationship between corporations and the communities in which they do business, but also that he's financial houses in order, the argument went, but he can't actually turn a seems to focus on selling a company after it's been cleaned up. And while for a time, it looked as if Sunbeam actually was the marvelous turnaround story established the kind of expectations that automatically draw money into a stock. Instead, it was the company's turn to profitability after quarter upon Sunbeam's household product lines and a pretty convincing reinvigoration of the announced twice in three weeks that its sales and profit numbers in the latest quarter will be well below Wall Street's expectations. Also, that sales will company is shrinking, not growing. In addition, Sunbeam has acquired three previously forecast, even as the logic behind those acquisitions now looks wealth. In fact, Sunbeam's stock is just about where it was in the days the market has overreacted to the bad news and is missing the real story. workers should be adding value with their labor, and they don't get to do that the confusion between profits and growth. For a turnaround to be real, the company has to become not merely profitable but also positioned for steady and eliminating layers of management can cut costs so dramatically as to make a company profitable even if its sales shrink. But making that company grow in left to cut, the only way to increase profits is to increase sales. In this respect, it's striking that in the press release announcing the latest turmoil, the first step in the process of building a powerful global business." The fact that he felt the need to say this suggests he still doesn't fully believe sustainability of Sunbeam, he thinks automatically about acquiring other companies. Acquisitions are not necessarily mistakes. General Electric and General Motors, among others, have done a brilliant job of using acquisitions to strengthen both themselves and the acquired companies. But shuffling dollars from one column to another is not the same as creating wealth. It's not the same as improving productivity. It's not the same as adding real value to the shifting the center of gravity in the computer world toward the network, the largest part of which is the World Wide Web. Heady claims indeed. (What exactly fundamentally one of cultural conflict, in which symbols and rhetoric have played as important a role as underlying technological differences. The forces." And in this struggle, Java is the rebels' supposed ace in the hole, the "tsunami that will sweep through the economy," in Gilder's words, changing fact, a technological transformation so important that those who do not adapt will be left in the dust. But the intensity of Sun's evangelical effort testifies to the overwhelming importance of marketing and name recognition in it is, the history of technology is littered with superior products that never attained mass appeal. Technology does not, in that sense, speak for itself. If it did, Sun could have simply launched Java and waited for the inevitable to occur. Whether someone announces a tidal wave is coming, after all, is irrelevant to the wave's arrival. It crashes on the beach regardless. What we see with Java, though, is that in the business world a tidal wave can only already been remarkably successful in making Java into a brand name. Oddly, struggle over Java is for the hearts and minds of developers. In that sense, instead of focusing on the demand for Java, Sun is emphasizing its supply. It's the "build it, and they will come" approach to business. are its customers. But there's a more important reason for the emphasis on getting people to program with Java, namely that it's impossible to get computer users to abandon their current operating systems if they don't think the alternative will be around five years from now. Apple has run into this problem in recent years, as Mac users have defected to Windows because fewer quickest way to assure users that your alternative is viable is to show them the plethora of programs being written for it (or, in the case of Java, in it). In that sense, you do have to build it before they will come. are actually downloading Java applets. You only hear about how many companies There are a few things to keep in mind about Sun's strategy for Java with regard to the consumer market. The first, obviously, is that creating a critical mass of developers turning out programs that work and that people want is the crucial task. The second thing is that Sun makes, relatively speaking, a minuscule amount of money from Java licensing. To be sure, it's almost all pure profit, but in relation to the company's workstation and server business, the revenue is nearly irrelevant. What's most relevant for Sun is the role Java may play in eroding the desktop market and the proprietary authority it's possible to see Sun's approach to Java as an embodiment of what's called strategy that allows for innovation occurring elsewhere." Accordingly, the Sun has done an impressive job of keeping pace with technological change by refusing to remain locked into one vision of the future. Sun's genius as a company, in fact, has always been its adaptability. And it has done best when controlling the standards for Java, Sun is violating Joy's Law. A recent letter international body suggested as much. But Sun has made Java's specs and the source code freely available to developers, in the hope that a hundred flowers will bloom. As Joy counseled, if Java works, it won't be because of Sun. It'll else, though, is still uncertain. Programmers do seem to find it easier to work in Java than in C++, and certainly the prospect of being able to download a spreadsheet document and read it without having to download the spreadsheet program is enticing. But Java programs are still considerably slower than those written for a particular operating system, just as amphibious creatures are not as good on land as mammals or as good in water as fish. And even the promise of universal compatibility has not been completely realized. course, is precisely why Java has become such fertile ground for It builds market cap as if by magic. It raises the sun and illumines the road ahead to a new computer architecture. Give poor Bill a break." But the really interesting thing about Java is that Gilder isn't the only one using this kind of language. Everyone speaks as if the stakes are monumental. Certainly, with the relationship between cultural hegemony and business success was hinted at. But with Java, Sun seems to be staking everything on that relationship. If you want to know where the real culture wars are, forget the academy and think standardized test, that mainstay of meritocracy, soon will join the manual typewriter, vinyl records, and communism on the scrap heap of the technology behind the new tests is remarkable. Using a simple form of artificial intelligence, the computer selects questions tailored to the make some people nervous, but they are nothing compared to the technology's uses in medical care. Researchers are employing the same advances in artificial intelligence to create a computer program that interviews patients. And, computer for their national licensing exams. Since then, architects, have made the leap. Aspiring graduate students can already opt to take the hours; nursing exams, two days. They had to be that long, though, because a paper test is dumb. It can't select which questions to ask. In order to identify your exact level of, say, math ability, it must ask dozens of Twenty math questions might suffice to rank you in the top or bottom half of your cohort, but admissions committees want to know whether you're in the question right, the computer asks a harder one, and an easier one when you get ones and miss all the hard ones, so the computer skips most of both groups and less than two hours, on average) and also makes tests more accurate, since the computer can ask more questions around your level to ensure you really are in for medicine. Using the same technology, researchers are now developing programs to interview patients and measure, sometimes better than doctors can, For some diseases, such as diabetes or high cholesterol, such tests, so doctors had to rely on personal experience to evaluate treatments. Then a new school of "outcomes researchers" suggested an answer: Regardless of your disease, they argued, effective treatment should improve your quality of life. So why not devise a standardized test to measure the The test asks things like "Does your health limit you in walking a block? Several blocks? More than a mile?" (If you're curious about your own SF-36 score, click here.) Questions cover pain, mood, physical function, and the like. Doctors can give patients the test before and after treatment for almost any disease. It's no substitute for a doctor's evaluation, but it can show how you're doing in relation to your own previous condition and to others similarly treated. Research shows, for example, that patients' SF-36 scores consistently surgery (for trouble urinating) when they're done right. replacement, however. Medicine often produces subtler results that may be arthritis medication may enable a patient to button his shirt, or to play singles tennis as opposed to doubles. To pick up these changes, a paper test would have to ask more detailed questions, and soon would become impractically might help. So, if a patient answers that he has trouble getting out of bed, a computer could skip questions about vigorous activity and focus on questions patients want, having the computer alert their doctors if the test finds their It asks questions like: "Have you wanted to harm yourself? How often do you feel downhearted and blue? Have you had a lot of energy?" These alone could have valuable uses. In preliminary studies, for example, the questions can show at recognizing problems in mentally healthy patients. For instance, the test can catch when drugs cause slight fatigue or make it harder to enjoy life fully, as some heart medications can. Doctors often miss these effects. The test may make them think twice about medicines that take the fun out of future, computers might even make up test questions and conduct personalized interviews of job applicants, college applicants, and even patients. Will that be good? Well, any technology can be used for good or ill. If doctors start using computer interviews as an excuse to talk to patients less, medical care will deteriorate. Patients could certainly get annoyed by having to take even a intelligence has enormous potential to make care better. The question is, do we survive outside the womb. It would hinge on the question of when the fetus advocates offer a seductive argument: Whatever you think about abortion in In general, obstetricians told me, their choice of abortion method depends mainly on the fetus' size. During the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus is very small, medications like methotrexate and the United States, however, obstetricians usually use "vacuum aspiration," is less than an inch in size. They insert a suction tube through the cervix and comfortable with this. They don't like it, they wish it had never come to this, but they don't identify with, in antiseptic doctor argot, the "products of viability. The fetus is now too big to fit into the suction tubing. A 20-week abortion? Sometimes, they have no choice. Women who abort because of a fetal abnormality don't find out about the problem until quite late: Amniocentesis to late abortions are done for the mother's health, to save her, for example, from possible disaster caused by an infected uterus or a newly diagnosed heart condition. Most of the time, however, they are elective. Often, the mother didn't know she was pregnant. "The power of human denial is unbelievable," one obstetrician told me. It's not at all uncommon, he said, to see women go through an entire pregnancy without realizing it, come to the ER with a hours in the hospital, but it can take even longer. Sometimes, before delivery, the obstetrician injects the fetus with a drug that stops its heart. If not, the heart sometimes beats even after the fetus has been delivered. Even without E. A couple of days ahead, small, absorbent rods are put in the pregnant woman's cervical opening to expand it gradually. Then, for the actual The doctor breaks her bag of water and drains out the fluid. The opening won't let the fetus out whole. So the doctor inserts metal tongs, physically crushes the head, and dismembers the fetus. The pieces are pulled out and counted to anything, less grotesque. The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus's skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull. Often, but not always, the fetus is injected lethally beforehand. The procedure is used for a very small percentage of late abortions, and nothing makes it especially necessary over D and E. In fact, none of the obstetricians I talked to had even heard of the technique until it became a hot political topic. It seems hardly is too gruesome to allow, however, it is hard to see how other late abortions, especially D and Es, are any different. And that's the inevitable next target that, even when it is a mother's life at stake and abortion is absolutely necessary, doing the D and E feels "horrible." We imagine, as we look in the fetus's eyes, that there is someone in there. And if there were, any elective Is there "someone in there"? The legal debate after Roe survive outside the womb. But knowing whether we have the technology to keep it same question when I have a patient on life support. His heart may be beating and his lungs may be breathing, but that doesn't tell me whether he is a living person anymore. What I want to know is whether his brain has ceased functioning. Likewise, in the case of a fetus, it seems that what we want to know is whether it has a brain with the spark of consciousness. For example, we no purpose to providing treatment. We let them die. earliest time anatomic studies give for the first sensory fibers reaching the when the health of the mother is not at risk and the fetus is not seriously depiction of an angry strike and a consumer boycott that forces the company to shut down. End with a union member standing in front of a shuttered factory, looking blitzed, and saying, "I guess we showed them." just two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, the workers ended up voting against unionization, by a slim margin. After all, no one likes people who yell in which the company faced UNITE, the newly invigorated textile workers' union Circuit Court of Appeals eventually got around to ordering a new election. At unlikely at best. A week after the election, union reps filed charges with the company's point man on labor relations. "But they never do." it comes to keeping unions out of its plants, it's a firm believer in the things company supervisors interrogated employees about their attitudes toward company's factories. More interestingly, although this was not held to be a delaying a 4.5-percent raise for workers at its unionized plants. This was, plants, the last paycheck employees received before the vote contained a note from the company telling them that the union was planning to take their money. workers that if they supported him by voting against the union, he would support them by keeping the company independent. The union went down in an had already dumped the workers' pension funds into insurance annuities run by a company eventually seized by federal regulators.) And if you want to go way National Guard and decorating the tops of their factories with machine guns and Cannon workers stayed put. Seen in this context, what's a mere video company also has benefited from the special obstacles that its Southern location adds to those that have eroded labor's strength nationally. Every union shops are illegal. Much of Southern industrialization took place outside of this century, in fact, the history of unionism in the South was one of months, when the National Textile Workers Union failed to come through with the Dixie," an abortive attempt to organize the entire region, but it collapsed when unions proved more interested in raiding other unions for members than in organizing new workers. There's little evidence that an ingrained conservatism among Southern workers has kept unions out. But it certainly seems true that the absence of a tradition of Southern unionism has made it easier for employers to play on fears about union corruption and greed, and to suggest that plant closings are an inevitable consequence of unionization. employer should be able to play on those fears. The National Labor Relations Act embodies a rather romantic view of democracy, in which workers coolly consider both sides of the unionization issue and then vote. The problem by talking among themselves. The act envisioned the employer standing to one side as the vote was held, perhaps expressing its opinion but certainly not was designed to encourage unionization). When employers want to play that wants to argue that unionization will raise labor costs to the point where it will be forced to shut down operations, should it be allowed to do so? Is it coercive for people with supervisory authority to ask workers how they plan to these questions requires a constant redefinition of the difference between an of course, is not to say the fears are not real. The striking thing about workers' comments after the vote was how many of them mentioned the possibility because textile capital migrated from the Northeast in pursuit of low wages, no unions, and cheaper materials. It's easy for today's textile workers to imagine moving manufacturing abroad, or outsourcing. But in this case, I guess, technological visionary and a manager who had figured out what it took to turn success stories of the last two decades, had been marked by dramatic Instead, Fisher has floundered. In his first two years, he did do an excellent during the days when conglomeration was all the rage. But unlike such figures restructuring plan. More tellingly, perhaps, Fisher has devoted an inordinate the last two years pressing a case before the World Trade Organization. It financial implications of the case were not huge, the psychological investment Instead of seeming like a minor blow, the decision was portrayed as powerful evidence that Fisher's magic had failed him. But while dreaming of a trade victory to solve fundamental business problems seems like a dubious recipe for success, there's one important thing to remember: That was exactly the recipe the third leg of the world financial order, along with the International to rule in tariff cases and quota cases, it doesn't seem to have authority over cases involving more subtle restraints on trade, primarily those created by arrangements between companies rather than by governments. (Click for more on Japan's four largest distributors of photographic film and paper, all of whom relationships are not necessarily illegal, since they make production and distribution more efficient. And clearly consumer companies are constantly in exclusive relationships with designers. Nonetheless, by being frozen out of the market as well, particularly since Japan has a law restricting the number of of state intervention to restrict imports, but it was evidence from the 1960s regions of Japan than in others, and that at different points in the last two dealing with is a monopoly situation, then it's an imperfect monopoly at best. actually a complicated one. In the 1960s and 1970s, the company altered the how weird that sounds), and also invented film that could be developed in be making that effort. But even as it lost focus in its sales efforts at home, rule as it did, the decision was a blow against open markets and seems likely to increase protectionist sentiment at home. Still, there is something about couldn't do itself. If you're looking for reasons why, consider the accomplished not merely through technological innovation or total quality management, but also through the remarkably effective lobbying efforts of the to negotiate telecommunications agreements with Japan that were then used to side of these questions, although dumping accusations too often mean, "They're the past two years. The past casts shadows on him that are too long. something new was really afoot. Granted, she's only a household name in certain has enjoyed a precipitous ascent up the fame ladder, seeing herself featured in boom can be seen in the arrival of business news on the front pages of daily newspapers, the rise of business coverage at mainstream publications like about the stock market than ever before, while the uncontested authority of the free market has placed business at the center of the culture. whether business news really is much more popular, or whether network ratings, which means that its audience is so small that it can't be measured. that's still insignificant next to anything the major networks do. because a significant number of brokers and traders supposedly keep their televisions tuned to it as they go about their business. This may well be true, but even if it is, it doesn't tell us very much about the broader impact of the that the new wave of business news doesn't really illuminate the workings of market is analogous to a football commentator worrying more about a team's particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two. The basic reality of an fundamental analysis, technical analysis, macroeconomic news, trend spotters, be the ideal expression of the supermarket approach to understanding the the market. It offers multiple perspectives, in order to let viewers choose for "technical" analyst who believes that if you look at the charts of a stock's movements over the past year, you can discern coherent patterns that will guide you in predicting when that stock's price is due to rise or fall. That analyst is followed by another who believes that the key is to seek out and buy those industries currently in favor with investors. She, in turn, is followed by an advocate for a more conventional approach: looking for companies with strong earnings growth that are currently trading at low stock prices. problem here is not that the technical analyst is crazy, although he is. The problem is that these analyses of the market are presented as if they're all of understanding the market. But that sort of open conflict would run the risk of revealing the inherently futile nature of the project these networks are engaged in, namely, trying to make sense of the stock market's movement in the short term. Each day, after all, there are lots of different reasons why the more importantly, whatever reasons you find today aren't going to help you understand what the market will do tomorrow. In the short term, investing is is other than random, it depends upon and encourages a trader's approach to investing. The point of having a stock market, after all, is not so that people profit. The point is that investors are supposed to direct capital toward companies that will make productive use of it and direct capital away from too does trading based on anything other than an evaluation of a company's nothing but informative pieces on publicly traded companies, with occasional glances at the overall economic climate. Of course, its ratings would soon be turned into hash marks. Which might suggest that real business news is my fellow surgical residents and I went around a table divvying up nights on be in for a long night. I laughed and dismissed the thought. looking at my calendar a while later, I noticed that the moon would be full then, too, I felt my skepticism slip a little. Perhaps I would be in for a miserable night, after all. Trained scientists such as myself, however, do not It turns out there is one reputable study that has tried to researching this or that I could find only one such study. This is, after all, a world that has studied even how chewing gum distributes saliva around the some," the authors concluded. "Staying at home is recommended." How you escape the house, calling in sick to work, or postponing flights or major more seriously. For centuries, and in disparate civilizations around the world, people have suspected that the cycles of the moon have a powerful influence alters individual behavior. And mental health professionals believed it more connection thought to exist between the full moon and madness. effect. Scientists once dismissed daily biological cycles as preposterous, but they now widely accept that body temperature, alertness, memory, and mood all fluctuate according to a predictable "circadian" rhythm. Evidence also shows or poisoning themselves with toxic substances. The researchers checked to see whether peaks in such events occurred not just according to the phase of the moon but also according to one's zodiac sign or numerological readings (as less likely to overdose around the time of a full moon than around a new of other studies. If any link between psychology and the full moon exists, it French dies less in Full Moon, and more in New Moon period." Studies in the full moon. These studies don't quite clinch the full moon's happy effect, to have no effect. Researchers have reviewed logs for calls to police stations, consultations to psychiatrists, homicides, emergency room visits, and other measures of our daily burden of madness. They found no consistent relationship, period. This puts the peak of ovulation at the full moon. (Could this provide an evolutionary explanation for the romantic associations we have with the as how tides are supposed to make women menstruate. that neither the full moon nor the inauspicious date threatened my night. Nonetheless, I came on duty that evening to find the resident from whom I was taking over swamped with patients. He stayed late to help me catch up. Just paramedics said he had been stalking his girlfriend with gun in hand. He fled in his car when cops arrived and led them on a chase that ended in the massive crash. The rest of the night was no better. I was, as we say, "slammed." It's that studies showed no connection. But my pager went off before I could start. finally crashing in Colorado. The evidence released by the Air Force this month indicates suicide. Why he did it is baffling, however. The case violates even psychiatrists' common notions about why people kill themselves. leader ordered pilots to update their computers. Button confirmed the order at run, Button did not respond. The lead plane swung around to catch sight of Button. Despite 40-mile visibility, Button was nowhere to be found. Ground radar, however, picked him up. Apparently, Button didn't use any of his three radios. He didn't eject. He didn't attempt to land identification signal to let others track him. Yet Button's difficult maneuvers show that the plane functioned well and that he had full consciousness and capacity. The autopilot would have been incapable of these maneuvers. Everything indicated that Button deliberately flew into the mountain. hardly any risk factors. True, he was male (women attempt suicide more often, Witness parents over his abandoning the faith (organized religion lowers victims have a history of mental illness (most often depression) or substance abuse. Button had neither. On a recent visit to see him, his parents thought he was his energetic, driven self. Friends said he was enthusiastic about his finding a girl to bring home. He had girlfriends before, but after three pickings." The night before the crash, his roommate said he'd ordered a large pizza so he'd have leftovers for the next night. During the mission briefing on the fateful day, Button was "cutting up and making his corny little jokes," showed no signs of substance abuse. No alcohol or drugs were found during the autopsy. He was in a stressful job, but that alone does not increase suicidal in rare cases, suicide may not be motivated by emotional pain. For someone who doesn't attach meaning to death yet, suicide can be a sudden, rash way out of trouble. Button seemed like such a person. It wasn't just that he was a suggested he didn't fully comprehend death's finality. During survival training blew a tire attempting a hotshot "short" landing, and left the authorized route Button boarded his plane that day, Kelly suggests, suicide probably wasn't his plan, but his impulsiveness may have steered him into trouble and then into suicide. It's conceivable that he veered off on a whim. Perhaps he took a short joy ride or prematurely dropped a bomb (his four 500-pound bombs are still missing). Whatever the case, with each misstep he dug his hole deeper. As Button flew through Colorado, he may have come to see crashing as a viable way seem an obvious point, but it is one that we often ignore when assisted suicide is the topic. Like Mark Twain, who said that "suicide is the only sane thing the young or old ever do in this life," we imagine that the elderly and the ill desire death rationally. But our prejudices are showing. Suicidal patients, whatever their age or condition, almost always suffer from addiction or mental disease. Even when they do not, as with Button, they usually are not thinking suicide also shows how, even in peculiar cases, the desire to die arises from one's individual history and psychology. Yet, in public discussion of youthful suicide, we're often unwilling to trace it to such causes and try to place subcommittee considering stricter restrictions on music lyrics heard an studies show that there is no association between music and suicide. (One found Of course, ideas do count. We know, for example, that one adolescent suicide can trigger others, even through media reports, leading to "suicide clusters." Had later victims not heard about the first suicide, they may not have done it when they did. But psychiatrists insist that an idea cannot compel even a child to commit suicide. It is only a proximate factor in Democratic Leadership Council released a new poll purporting to show that battling over the soul of the Democratic Party: Should it become more content to argue on merit, each side has hired a pollster to prove its position asking people whether they oppose "corporate welfare" or "special rights for homosexuals," is kid stuff. The true art is to rig the question so deeply that the deck. If you're afraid that people won't deem the benefit of your people whether they'd like to "create" bonds to improve infrastructure. Better yet, while ignoring the cost of your proposal, assert the cost of the to Social Security like letting people control portions of their own retirement policy will achieve a popular goal, force people to choose between the policy redistribute existing wealth or to foster conditions that enable everyone to have a chance to make a higher income?" If you favor opportunity for all, you trade policy would limit our trade with other countries and be protectionist, or would a better trade policy be more aggressive at opening up markets for our goods and increasing trade among nations?" If you favor opening foreign best argument for trade restrictions is that they're necessary to pry open between. Guess which idea wins? This is like being asked how you want your steak cooked: Most people take the middle option. Much of the dispute between (left, right) or three (left, right, center). By offering three alternatives, rejected (cuts in Medicare, education, and the environment) and overlook the completed, the pollster can organize the results in a way that favors his client. Since the public favors "moderation" but doesn't agree on what it "moderate" as the opposite of "liberal," its spin prevails. their answers into categories, defining the "moderate" group as narrowly as welfare reform, fighting crime, or a balanced budget--31 percent of the support for tax cuts for college"? Weren't those voters endorsing the same trick in reverse, by inventing "Suburban Values" Democrats, who care primarily about "better, safer schools, safer streets, and the need for family leave, and the breakdown of community "economic" issues? And are voters failed to win by rigging the questions and categories can be cleaned up in the "executive summary" (the pollster's spin) and the press release and news reasons why they did so. Thirty percent cite, among other reasons, "his support the Democrats, and more apply the term "conservative" to the Democrats than to are dishonest. The point is that they disguise argument as science. Which has a the polls. Meanwhile, their pollsters skew the polls to suit their clients' wrong, who is to blame? The traditional answer in journalism has been unambiguous: the doctor. If the press found out a person had died from improper care or had the wrong leg cut off, the reaction was predictable. A clamor doctors everywhere cringed. There but for the grace of God go I, each of us would say. For all of us make terrible mistakes. Only the unlucky few are did it." In many cases, this is the right way to go. Bad systems are more often at fault than bad doctors. I worry, however, that we have already begun to take into the question of who is ultimately in charge when it comes to taking care prohibiting workers from leaving the emergency room. (If you somehow missed or than on individual caregivers. City, state, and national officials demanded to know how a medical facility could maintain such an appalling policy. In an wrong. What shocked me was not so much the hospital's policy as the fact that doctors and nurses would stick by the rules rather than help a person in desperate need. News organizations demanded an explanation from the hospital not an isolated instance of medical personnel providing bad care in obeisance epidural anesthesia during childbirth to women on Medicaid unless they anted up patient offered credit cards, a check, and finally had her mother wire in the money, but the epidural was denied. The cash hadn't arrived in time. the real issue here is who, ultimately, is in charge of patient care. By putting all the blame on the rule makers, the public is implicitly accepting that sometimes the rule makers are in charge instead of the caregivers. That is a very recent phenomenon, and it should be resisted. policies, after all, are not federal laws. They do not demand slavish devotion. In odd cases, rules adopted for the best of reasons can make for bad medicine. And real life is full of odd cases. I remember one not long ago when, late at night, a patient came into my hospital at death's door because of a rupturing abdominal aneurysm. Understandably, our hospital forbids residents to start operations without an attending surgeon present. But none was around, and this guy would have died waiting. So we didn't hesitate to break the rules and According to a hospital spokesman, it is an old policy maintained by most hospitals to make clear that staff should not be expected to sacrifice the care of sick patients in the ER to go hither and yon. But the dying boy presented a Tribune reported that a year earlier, an emergency worker at a partner hospital with the same policy had done just that. He ran outside to help a in which the doctors who follow them are not ultimately culpable. To say they were obeying an administrator's instructions is not even the slightest defense. Patients still can (and should) insist on holding doctors responsible for a slightly different context. The recent clamor in the press and among some politicians to allow patients to sue insurers for medical malpractice makes it sound as if we are going in the wrong direction here, too. But the semantics are important. The laws under consideration would not actually make insurers a fair chance to contest improper refusals of payment, but we should not lapse into calling such refusals malpractice. Just because an insurer won't pay for a treatment doesn't free a doctor from providing it. Essentially, a patient in this position is uninsured. And doctors are still ethically obliged to offer calling for a return to olden times, when medical decisions were nobody's without oversight had its problems: deviance (not all doctors provided good care) and cost (the doctors drove up the bills). Hospitals, government insurers, and private insurers have stepped in with standard guidelines for care, review of medical decisions, and changes in how doctors are paid. Much of this systematization of care has clearly been to public benefit. But not all of margin, we doctors have found ourselves being asked to do things that make us queasy. A new guideline, for example, may tell us to send heart surgery patients home earlier. It forces us to justify doing otherwise. It's a big pain in the butt. But it is not a command, and we should not let it become one. Perhaps the previous way was based on nothing more than fusty old habit, and being forced to rethink it is good for us. However, if I know the new way is doctors should have known that blindly following policy was bad. The buck still picked them all up in the past year. Every time he issues a public statement, become perhaps the most important people on Wall Street. past three months. Go back further and you can collect many more, all is no kook. He has been at the job for well over a decade and has been an Street's new reality, which is that no one has as much influence as the people who supposedly know where a company's stock price is going to go. Securities analysts were relatively unimportant on Wall Street before the 1960s, but their rise to power has not been sudden. As early celebrity, called by New York Times and Wall Street Journal analysts were pulling down salaries in the high six figures, although they were still a long way from the Masters of the Universe terrain then reserved for though, the dramatic upsurge in money pouring into the market and the resultant pressure on institutional investors to improve their performance have sharply increased the value of anyone with a clue about what's going to happen to the time, growth in the market for financial news has made analysts public figures. and perhaps most importantly, the sharp expansion in the market for initial public offerings and secondary stock offerings has made it essential that brokerage houses have analysts who are well respected in their field. Corporations, sensibly enough, do not want their stock offerings underwritten by houses whose recommendations will carry little weight with investors. big deals can be the difference between a great year and a bad one. And that has meant that analysts are now often valued as much for their rainmaking abilities as for their predictive expertise. Top analysts now spend far more time on the road, trying to drum up business, while much more of the actual analytical work is being done by junior analysts back at the office. Not surprisingly, since analysts are now crucial figures in the underwriting business, their compensation has tripled over the last three or four years. than half a million dollars. Though analysts are still not as highly paid as investment bankers, the gap is much narrower than it was in the early departments of Wall Street houses has become a fiction. While there's no evidence that direct pressure is brought to bear on analysts to paint rosy pictures of a company's prospects, corporations expect what's called that they don't want to be hung out to dry by a "neutral" or "sell" Some conflict has always been inherent in the analyst's role. Houses that are bearish are not houses that get a lot of underwriting business. And issuing a "sell" recommendation has a way of making a company's management unfriendly, which in turn may limit an analyst's access to information in the future. It's perhaps not surprising, then, that a recent study showed that analysts issue "buy" recommendations seven times as often as course, in a bull market, which means that analysts should have been recommending that clients buy more often than they sell. Even so, analysts' recommendations have manifested the Wall Street equivalent of grade inflation. "Neutral" is generally understood to mean "sell," "outperform" to mean "your call," and "accumulate" to mean "you might want to buy it if you have extra money lying around." I think "buy" still means "buy," but then some houses use analysts have become more able to move stock prices, their more out there, it's hard to know which ones to take seriously. In the short when analysts issue "strong buy" or "sell" recommendations. Knowing that prospects but that his cut in the rating will drop the stock regardless. anyone outside Wall Street? The first reason is that analysts are essentially unaccountable for their recommendations. No one says: "We can't quote this guy. He's been wrong four out of five times on this stock." So their ability to move troubling. The second, more important answer is that analysts are crucial to meet and beat earnings expectations at all costs. When you couple that reality with an overly narrow definition of "shareholder value," you end up with a corporate world that must privilege the next quarter over the next decade. Which somehow doesn't seem to be the best way to prepare for the next about jeans. Actually, let me tell you a story about two companies that sell has to offer both in terms of ethical business practices and the way it treats its workers. The other, Guess Inc., is about the worst, notorious for its maltreatment of its workers and its ruthlessness in business. Now, if this were and Guess would be punished. And if this story had an ending written by its attempt to evade market imperatives. What makes the story interesting, though, is that young consumers are writing it, and so it ends with two companies doing business in polar ways but arriving at exactly the same place: one of the few privately held large companies left in the United States, thanks performance has been outstanding, thanks in no small part to the rebirth of the for the invention of Dockers, but the answer has more to do with dramatic apart routinized assembly and giving individual workers more responsibility. receiving eight months' pay plus one week for every year of service, and best severance settlement apparel workers have ever gotten." end, staying ahead of the style curve is both harder and more important than of the name, but typing it over and over is more annoying than you can with contractors that ensured that money went to them and not to their Guess has seen its stock price cut in half, had the only outside member of its board of directors quit after being on the job for a few weeks, and watched its chief financial officer resign for "personal" reasons. Meanwhile it has had a formal complaint filed against it by the National Labor Relations Board for union to undermine those organizing efforts, and coercing workers into Coincidentally or not, Guess' earnings and revenue also have slid sharply, and what's interesting is that Guess' problems seem, in huge dividends out of the company's profits, they're not doing anything different today from the way they did business three years ago. They've always been crazy. It's just that now the Guess label has lost its cachet. The buzz is fading, and the company's jeans in particular, which a Fortune writer (which we may do still, but while wearing khakis). Without cachet, what does that both the high road and the low road can take you into trouble if you stop paying attention to the taste makers? Partly. But the differences between the real choice. And our ideas of what constitutes a fair wage or a fair return on answer them in very different ways. Unfortunately, in the face of the universal solvent of hipness, how you answer those questions seems to matter less than pack ignored me and resumed a boring conversation comparing how many on. Among surgeons, it's a point of pride verging on arrogance that we work harder than anybody else. So I ate my meal silently, looking faintly bemused at around their necks. Surgeons, should we need anything besides our bare hands, keep our stethoscopes coiled up in a pocket of our white coats like forgotten but occasionally necessary detritus. Like admitting you're tired, being caught wearing a dog collar is embarrassing. It diminishes you. seems childish, I know. Why all this sniping along the medical front? These are educated, professional people, right? If you pushed surgeons to explain, I suspect the response would be that the animosity is functional, that patients would not want surgeons accepting other specialties' softer values. where it is commonly accepted that nature may defeat doctors' efforts. Because surgery is so violent, surgeons generally do not undertake it unless they expect to succeed. So surgical training inculcates the view that nothing must be allowed to go wrong. One learns to take responsibility for almost any applied carelessly, anything. Once, I had a patient who refused to get out of bed after surgery and soon developed a clot in his leg. Medical residents might have thrown up their hands and said, "What could we do?" But the chief resident gave me hell for it. It didn't matter that the patient wouldn't cooperate. Why, she asked, didn't I figure out a way to make the patient cooperate? argument goes, surgical residents quite naturally disparage specialties with central to what we do. So we seldom gripe about cardiologists, because they share our ethic of personal responsibility and keep our long hours. But pimple poppers (dermatologists)? Forget it. Here's a joke we tell: How do you keep a dollar bill from a radiologist? Pin it to a patient. doesn't quite add up, though. Why not simply accept that our group has a certain set of skills and values that fit our needs, while others have theirs? out, however, that to social psychologists there is nothing at all surprising about this antagonism. In numerous studies, they have documented a deep paradox individuals are generally positive, supportive, and rewarding, but those among groups are ordinarily unpleasant and confrontational. What's more, they observe something called "the minimal group effect." Even if people are randomly divided into groups, the groups will automatically discriminate against each the two groups were kept apart and unaware of each other. Almost instantly, kids in each group formed bonds of loyalty and group identification. Then, when in the sand. They spoke of "our guys" and "those guys." Each group named first interaction. For example, the Eagles called the Rattlers the "nigger campers," even though all the boys were white. At common meals they glowered from separate tables. Cabin raids and fistfights ensued. painters." Afterward, the boys were told that their choices divided them into a groups at random. Then, each boy was taken aside and asked how he would divide up rewards among individual boys from "your group" and "the other group." boys gave more money to those in their own group. Furthermore, when the options were fixed so that a boy could not give his group more without sacrificing profits for both groups, the boys still chose to maximize the difference in rewards between groups. Although they knew each other from school; although their groups were defined by flimsy, irrelevant criteria; and although reviewed all such studies and concluded that we have an instinctive "need to belong." Given the advantages that would have come to our ancestors from might ask why groups aren't always at war with one another. Fortunately, it turns out that despite how easily group hostility forms, it's not that hard fomenting competition within a group, even moral suasion. At Robbers Cave, animosity rapidly disappeared when the "counselors" created common tasks, for other social ties that produce bonds outside group lines. them.) It seems that given the chance, we are legions ready to mass against one become an unending series of massive mergers, it seems increasingly likely that often enough that size matters, and look what happens. (Feel free to insert problems with excess capacity, so reducing the number of players in the global marketplace may decrease the chance of dramatic overbuilding. Finally, unlike fundamentally different product lines in an elusive quest for super market there are opportunities for companies to be simultaneously bigger and more powerhouse to its already impressive collection of assets, how can it be from the debacle of the late 1970s and from the disastrous later years of Lee that last week's press accounts made it out to be. Last year, the company's excellent, it doesn't make a single passenger car of note, aside from the definitely did a brilliant job of reinventing itself in the early 1980s, taking result, it halved the number of vehicles it had to sell every year to break "synergy" is the word on the lips and the word processors of everyone who has commented on the deal. But not all these commentators seem to understand what synergy means. For instance, there's very little overlap between the product mean synergy is automatic. All it means is that the two companies are be able to offer cars to the full spectrum of buyers, the current lack of overlap also means there aren't any easy cost savings to be found by eliminating duplication. It also means the deal's effect on the overcapacity To repeat a point made here too many times before, synergy occurs only when two companies together can make and market products more premium, the deal has to make an awful lot of sense. shake up a company that is still heavy with layers of middle management. probably be big enough to run harder bargains with suppliers, although there's no real evidence that Ford or GM has enjoyed huge cost savings on parts because of their size. The new company may also benefit from merging warehousing and inventory management, and ideally there will be joint production of components that both companies use. But size brings disadvantages as well as benefits, and productive and profitable, making quality cars that people wanted to buy. Now of dollars. Size matters, but sometimes for all the wrong reasons. into turmoil again. And here we always thought they could take care of this news without panicking. But then the events of the past week have not done real economy. In other words, it would be a mistake to dismiss mistake to dismiss most of their concerns as precisely that. itself, most obviously the precipitous rise in interest rates and the call "herding." In a strange way, it seems clear that people were looking for an excuse to sell, not simply to lock in profits for the quarter but also because the bull market had lasted too long and had risen too high. The odd and sell orders were easily matched up and there were no stories, as there were trade. Everyone was racing for the exits, but they were doing so in an orderly bubble to burst, if only for a little while, can be seen also in the sense of a thousand points gone from the Dow, investors could look at the market a little more clearly and decide what they really thought. Of course, that turned around and started racing for the entrances, but it must have been nice cavalier to dismiss this past week as a simple illustration that humans sometimes act like sheep? Not really. (But then I would say that, wouldn't I?) In the first place, it's hard to see how even a 600-point drop in the Dow would is, in that sense, almost purely a secondary market. And while it's never good for consumer confidence to have brokers jumping out of windows, short and steep drops in the valuation of equities have nothing to do with the production of Now, that may seem like a dubious assertion, particularly given the constant rhetoric about the global economy with which we are deluged one Coke each today but will drink two Cokes each tomorrow. But consider this: are not in recession, which means they will still be buying, even if less than before. If anything, the combination of currency devaluation and slower growth and assuaging the Fed's concerns about an overheating economy (however dubious a third of corporate profit growth in the last fiscal year came from exports. So the rhetoric of globalization is not simply rhetoric. And that's especially companies will find it difficult to replace the business. The same may also be true, on a smaller scale, of larger software and hardware companies like plants in the region. And if you can pay your bills in devalued ringgit and get currencies will continue to hurt their profit margins. But it seems telling billion of its own shares after the company's stock dropped eight points on there is always the chance that the company's management has simply gone actually continuing a venerable tradition of Establishment attempts to quell them to dip into their reserves to offer loans that would allow stockholders to cover their margins and begin buying again. In the midst of the crisis, he sent an emissary to the floor of the Exchange, where the man raised his hand, be enough for everybody!" And that, at least according to the story, was the company's shares at a time when the stock was already trailing well below that. Like the first, this was a rather cinematic moment, but it didn't work while Big Blue was responding to a blip. Nor does Big Blue exercise the kind of still a welcome slap in the face to a market that was hyperventilating for no good reason at all. Or, rather, to a market that was hyperventilating for as real a reason as there is: Markets are made up of people, and people sometimes United Auto Workers voted overwhelmingly to reject a new contract offer from Caterpillar, you could have been forgiven. In an era of quality teams and militancy. What it wasn't, though, was a throwback to an era of union power. In of the 1990s and is also, unsurprisingly, the most bitter. The fight began with replacement workers. In the years since, it has featured picket line violence by both strikers and Cat security guards, scores of unfair labor practices by fired into Cat executives' windows, even as the company has fired union members contract since they returned to the factories more than two years ago. That means they have been working under company imposed terms, and turning down Caterpillar's latest offer means they will continue to work under those terms for the foreseeable future. It's a measure of just how angry Cat workers are that they would rather toil along without a contract than accept one that feels reasons during the last four years. While some were reinstated, often at the percentage of those allegations are true, the cost to the company in back pay From one angle, the shortsightedness of the rank and file seems extraordinary. The new contract, while hardly lavish, did provide for seems to make no sense. But then, it's clear that what's now at stake for many Cat workers is not so much another dollar an hour raise as an idea of how a justify tearing up a perfectly good contract. You can understand viscerally why it's hard for workers to vote for their own interests while their friends remain in limbo. It's harder to understand why Cat management is so insistent the workplace. It's overstating the case to say that Caterpillar has sought to break the union, but it's not overstating the case by much. And in that kept reporting record quarterly earnings, in part because so many union members became scabs, in part because management personnel helped work the lines, and workforce. The company has reinvented itself as an exemplar of lean production and now dominates its major competitors. In the last two years, Caterpillar has announced the opening of five new production plants. All of them are opening in crucial to understand about Caterpillar, though, is that its success in also the product of a coherent strategy for creating a more flexible, Wall Street also saw the losses as a kind of investment. risen steadily. Across the board, in fact, investors are willing to overlook "extraordinary charge" and valued the company as if the losses had never high enough, Wall Street can be very, very patient. repent their sins, and pledge to take charge of their families and communities. Nearby, protesters from the National Organization for Women chanted: "Racist, How did the Promise Keepers succeed where the religious right has often failed? responsibility. NOW's chief rap on PK is that it tells men to take liberals and feminists. But leadership has two sides. PK plays down the power aspect and plays up the opposite aspect: male responsibility for domestic argues that the "biblical" (as opposed to "secular") meaning of leadership is service and that the Bible, while instructing wives to submit to their husbands, also instructs husbands to submit to their wives. This has led to the for example, that a true leader recognizes his wife's talents and takes the initiative to help them flourish. The viewer comes away persuaded that PK is accuse PK leaders of crusading against "the feminization of man." True, they goad men to action by accusing them of acting like sissies. But they also teach that masculinity lies in moral strength, not in money, power, or stoicism. They preach vulnerability, humility, contrition, intimacy, sharing, weeping, tenderness, and surrender. They deride "machismo." Humility, they say, includes letting your wife pay the bills if God gave her better math skills than you and letting her pursue the professional dreams God planted in her. Which explains racial inclusion a central project of PK, and he has stipulated that gender segregation must be a temporary means toward integrating and reconciling the segregation draws heavily on liberal themes. Men, he argues, have been culturally uprooted and stripped of their identity. They need space to protect and repair themselves. This argument combines the religious right's standard defensive posture (we're not imposing our values; we're just protecting them separately from boys so as to free them from cultural pressure) and multiculturalism (men must preserve their unique masculine culture). Christian support groups, whereas PK is men's only refuge. Men won't open up and cry in women's presence because it's not "safe." They need the company of buddies to assure them of their masculinity so that they can break down without feeling like sissies. This message has induced some liberal pundits to call the Promise Keepers pathetic, thereby undermining NOW's portrayal of them as practical benefits usually beat principle. Most women feel less oppressed by their husbands' pretensions to authority than by the work that falls to them because of their husbands' neglect. PK leaders have won over many women and assuaged feminist pundits by addressing the latter problem. "Be first to the dryer," they tell men. "Turn off the television and empty the dishwasher." They instruct fathers to spend more time with their kids and to forswear adultery, abandonment, and domestic abuse. PK routinely embarrasses feminist critics by producing testimony from women who love the way PK has transformed their speaking at Operation Rescue rallies years ago and for promoting a Colorado ballot measure that would have restricted laws protecting gay rights. Usually, the media view these positions as mean, but PK leaders take a softer approach. They never speak of gays as an organized threat. And when asked about homosexuality, they always subsume it in a general rule against extramarital feminists have criticized moral conservatives who blame women for untimely pregnancies and abortions. Now along comes PK to blame men. Instead of advocating legislation against abortion, PK instructs men to stop having sex outside marriage and to stop pressuring their wives and girlfriends to have defenders paraphrase the liberal slogan that NOW famously applied to abortion: "If you don't like Promise Keepers, don't marry one." Promise Keepers talk far less about abortion and homosexuality than their critics and the media do. They're more interested in spiritual alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, adultery, divorce, illegitimacy, crime, and database. Others who have signed up for PK have subsequently turned up on PK isn't in bed with the religious right, many liberals predict that its commitment to restore traditional morality will inevitably draw it into the ball." They need a "halftime" pep talk and a new "game plan." They must defend morality "like offensive linemen protecting the quarterback." Many of the group's speakers and supporters are prone to using Christian war metaphors: "battleground," "army of God," "civil war of values." This kind of talk spooks spokesmen emphatically deny a political agenda. They describe the group as a "revival movement" aimed at changing hearts, not a "reform movement" aimed at Christian Coalition, they don't keep a membership list, and they expect to In this dispute, tone matters more than content. PK needs to show less of its macho side and more of its sensitive side. So its leaders have begun to play down the war metaphors. They have turned the other cheek to country's political leaders instead of judging them. They have also instructed the Promise Keepers to seek civic assignments from their local pastors, not from the movement's elite. "We stop short of prescribing what that agenda won the war. Many feminists, including the president of the Ms. Foundation, have expressed sympathy for the Promise Keepers and an interest in coaxing them toward gender equality rather than opposing them. NOW's vice president, in retreat, says NOW was only trying to "educate" people that PK criticism and openly contemplate changing their ways. If they were selling the reduced threat of nuclear attack, the Pentagon is quietly recommending 105mm smile, he's finally enjoying the military lifestyle. spokesman's claim that the deal would "blow an enormous hole in the government's case," because it shows that MS' competitors have retained the point too but the Journal adds that on the other hand, the government investigated to see if she used her position to steer government business to a promised to take birth control pills. The woman claims that she became pregnant accidentally. That factual issue may be settled at trial, but it seems that there is a larger legal issue well worth addressing. Since court findings of paternity cost the imputed fathers eighteen years' worth of support, it seems only fair that women be held accountable for any promises they make about attempting to remain childless. In the absence of that, a woman's promise to take charge of birth control and then not doing so remains the only form of monetary fraud Today's Papers can think of that is not only not punished, but attempts by companies to market their products inside schools, especially them) to cheese companies has been finding new ways to do this, and parents are, says the paper, finding more product solicitations coming home in their kids' backpacks. The good deals and cut rates are often dangled as a way to help schools get stuff they need, which is particularly attractive to school administrators strapped for funds in an environment in which voters keep turning down so many school bond issues. The LAT admits it promote reading, but also to increase the paper's circulation. square foot playroom, a bathroom with a "Roman tub," and an intercom system connecting the various parts of the house. The story says scores of businesses and residents contributed materials, services, money and land for the new home. typical story about welfare recipients enumerates the monthly "giveaway" check down to the penny. The story's lucre lacunae comport well with the locals' Times leads with another in its series of important stories about the investigative panel's conclusion that two dozen fatal or serious inmate state, unlike a sitting one, has but limited immunity: he or she can be forced into court to answer for actions that are not part of the legitimate function lawyers to observe that their client is therefore vulnerable to prosecution only because he stepped down in favor of a democratic government. But the hostage taking are not legitimate government functions. Therefore, they presses its extradition request, unless the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, decides otherwise. The Post says the early betting is that Straw will not intervene. On the other hand, both papers note that former Prime Minister and the Times says it marks a potentially significant broadening of the powers of prosecutors to pursue those charged with crimes against humanity. The this most recent case, he directly caused death. And indeed, as the papers point out, he openly admits he took this extra step to encourage a legal the case, some lawyers are quoted making the following argument against a murder verdict: Murder requires malice, the disregard for human life. Therefore a homicide undertaken out of regard for life cannot be murder. But the Post and LAT make it clear that it's not just murder at issue, a human rights group, a recent crackdown by China against Protestant congregations that do not formally accept the leadership of the government has resulted in the arrest of seventy church members. The Times says one leader of such a church, shot while fleeing police, is now the subject of a nationwide manhunt. The Post says another was beaten with a wet rope and a nightstick, and says the authorities are using heavy fines as a prime weapon in this campaign of suppression. The paper also usefully points out that China recently signed a Do you feel the need for a new government sex scandal? Relax, the Navy has accused of improperly steering military contracts to the firm owned by the woman he was committing adultery with. Although the admiral is named in both domestic flight to have his life saved by a defibrillator, a device only Health Commission, where he has promoted the installation in office buildings LAT story), the Group of Seven industrial nations announced their As all papers report inside, documents released yesterday show that on testimony and documents from the independent counsel's office. Democrats) are putting their wives on the air essentially to inform voters how the surveillance station are intriguingly murky: It is tiny, staffed by less from a Chain Saw Drill Team lurking outside the haunted houses to a deranged LAT 's says the process is stalled over party differences. (Over their newly discovered fire hazards, the insulation be replaced on almost all of the desires, local school districts will now retain the flexibility to use the new money not just for hiring, but also for recruitment, testing, and training of dilapidated school buildings, and national student testing. STILL UP IN THE Internet, whether or not to require federal health insurance to cover the cost of contraceptives, and whether or not to keep international family planning The LAT usefully reminds the reader of a list of items that long ago fell off the budget bandwagon: a tax cut, new tobacco regulations, a bill of stresses the political angles available now for each party: the coalescing insulation can be done during regular maintenance, and that it will cost nation's teen pregnancy rate has dropped considerably in papers say these medications are attractive to those who only have sporadic sex and have trouble with consistent contraceptive planning. This is a little teenagers "because it is impossible to detect." How do you detect an ingested about the upcoming congressional elections buried mention of its polling sample actually a somewhat larger sample than occurs in many newspaper polls, and is plenty large to be accurate to within a few percentage points' margin of error. out that although his paper usually delays mentioning the sample size until the front page, these mentions usually occur much earlier in stories than do time explaining how nationwide elections can be reliably predicted by talking A men's health official is quoted saying that one factor appears to be the The House Judiciary Committee's approval of a fourth article of impeachment appearances. However, Committee Republicans voted to limit the charges to the reports that the House will hold a floor vote on all four articles late next censure. The Times quotes a White House official who says, "Impeachment hit hardest by the price drop. The true gluttons appear to be the nation's retailers, who have done little to pass lower livestock costs on to conducted in the past year to sniff out smugglers who likely used their access with its cover. The masthead is printed upside down at the bottom, alerting you catch your eye with "the shock of the familiar." The new style in Web pages is "logical as well as luscious": more color, less confusion. In desks, it's lead combines this with the meeting tomorrow of the G7 finance ministers and The LAT lead says that Wall Street is concerned that the Fed's prevent the overseas economic crisis from inducing a recession here. The paper depicts the other dominoes it sees waiting to fall: if the stock market continues to be unconvinced, then consumer confidence will be weakened, and essentially the same picture. The LAT notes another down factor on the that banks and brokerages will stampede out of lots of hedge funds, causing All of this illustrates the basic economic problem in the world today, made tools of policy makers. As a result, a new report showing growth in orders of electronic equipment, as well as petroleum products and transportation manufacturing activity in the coming months, means nothing right now. It's a in his congressional testimony yesterday. One Congress speeches about free enterprise and the marketplace, but a lot of folks don't those who make risky investments only encourages more of the same. But, he's a middle path: require hedge funds to disclose more about their activities. the papers mentions it, but such a warning preceded by only a few days the of manned airstrikes. The LAT figures they could happen as soon as the was a playful desire to keep the newspapers fun. It is perhaps a sign of the no one wrote to say he or she'd gotten a great education at the place. Time to This is also played above the fold at the LAT, which leads with the paper's own 31st in per capita share of federal education spending. he portrayed the agreement as his success at getting the very best possible out predecessors. Everybody quotes him saying, "We have closed the holes of the with conservative settlers expressing great disaffection. All this political only on the general political situation and doesn't seem to know about yesterday. One of the main points of today's installment is that the demand for on or buy an adopted child, there has arisen an entire network of thinnest line between buying adoption services and buying a child. The story of the upstate New York abortion doctor murdered in his home had a line drawn through it shortly after he was murdered, denies any advance to the crime: "If an armed police officer has to be stationed outside every prisoner who has put the same kind of energy into stockholder suits and makes a of stockholder fraud against various corporations. All this without owning any immediately correct this grievous social injustice, Today's Papers feels compelled to confess that it is a black woman over fifty. passage this year of a statewide initiative substantially restricting it. The big peace talk development yesterday, the papers report, is that if his country's West Bank security demands were not met. The most pressing their bags and some of their luggage was transferred to the airport. deal far more than the participants he's hosting do. At one point, the A Wall Street Journal feature makes the point that the This is a result of the INS' beefing up of its Operation Gatekeeper, which hiring recruited heavily from southwestern border states and emphasized fluency and failing that, special abuse, from those they detain. libertarian former professional wrestler, bodyguard, Navy Seal and talk show a question about his stance on gay rights: "I have two friends that have been allowed to be at the bedside. I don't believe government should be so hostile, "smart guns" that can only be fired when held by the a finger ring. The guns could, the papers write, unify both sides of the gun debate in that they promise to boost gun sales for manufacturers developing has found that there are reliability problems, many due to limitations of battery life, and even if perfected, the technology would make no dent in gun suicide by rightful gun owners, or in the gun deaths lurking in the form of all discover the legacy of fine stories he left behind, at the Journal and Impeachment politics dominate, with the House Judiciary Committee's decision Judiciary will probably, the papers report, vote on party lines to issue off until halfway through the story before placing the president's subpoena third in a list of bullets. The LAT notes that previously, separate appear before the committee, his spokesman yesterday said he won't be coming. appearance by his boss that "It won't add any new information and can be put in instead of censure presents to House Republicans: Voting for impeachment will to work with Democrats on other issues. And will make censure, which is more likely than impeachment, look like a Democratic victory. biggest pieces of the Standard Oil empire broken up by the government nine decades ago, and will leave just three corporations with control of vast oil reserves and tens of thousands of gas stations. The Post agrees with the The LAT 's "Column One" tells of what it calls the abortion debate's an abortion but failing to have his patient admitted to a hospital. Later that day, during the long drive back to her home, the woman died. Given that the may well become the newest weapon against doctors who provide abortions: The LAT front reports that new studies show that although AIDS was hardest hit by the disease. The infection rate there is now one new person per minute. But AIDS denial and ignorance in the country is widespread. In a survey The Dow had a 217-point drop yesterday, but the papers keep the story off the front page. Are the papers getting the point that spilling a lot of ink over a market going one way so soon after spilling an equal amount on a market going the other way is more than a little ridiculous? Today's Papers can only market moves in headlines. The percentage of the move is much more The Wall Street Journal cites the doubling of Sharper Image revenue. And this should indeed sober everybody up fast, because let's face it, have you ever seen anybody actually buy something in a Sharper Image store? Al Gore has gotten a lot of coverage about how he raised "soft money" for you something about how he spends it. And it's not exactly saving the planet or reinventing government. The Gore family holiday photo greeting card was billed Times headline lavishes its big type on the victory of Democrat Gray Senate. Although, as everybody notes, the Republicans do retain control of both The press consensus is that the only real bright spots for the Republicans Internet marketing, not really any longer because of misgivings about its additional sales this year with the help of his automaker's Web sites, but who also worries that GM might someday just take buyers' orders directly and get team, often, amazingly, on the front page, it's sobering to take in the criminality of professional football players. According to the piece, it's Rams is quoted saying this about a linebacker charged last week with involuntary manslaughter in a crash in which the other driver died: "I think it'll be good for him to get back and get with his teammates and get going again." Then there's another Ram who plays on despite having pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in a case where the victim suffered partial paralysis and advertising circular in which two smiling boys are depicted playing Scrabble around a game board where the pieces clearly spell out the word "RAPE." outdoes itself today. The Reliable Source's item about an election day droppings] would be destroyed." Can't the Post see that whereas the actual phrase used would go by virtually unnoticed, the paper's baroque translation only forces the reader to dwell on the matter? it was made but the story immediately mentions concerns about how weaknesses in Although all the papers have, as usual, no problem finding some experts to foresee up trends on rates and some to foresee down ones, their lines on the interest rate future shake out this way: the LAT suggests in its third paragraph further rate reductions of up to a full percentage point; indication of another Fed move anytime soon; in its sixth paragraph, the Post says the narrow language of the Fed announcement strongly indicates Journal stresses that the Fed's action had already been anticipated by had credible intelligence indicating that while still lacking the fissile fuel depots. The paper says U-2 spy planes found five of them. points out high up that he was the first black mayor of a major city and of a LAT cites as his principal accomplishments, a downtown building boom, labor and management, with an accompanying racial peace lasting most of his nice scandal break folks down his way got by being clobbered by Hurricane The congressional election aftermath produces the day's two lead stories. for an impeachment exit strategy that won't shoot them in the other foot. And lead, the electoral shove has come to putsch, as various Republican House and under oath by signing an attached affidavit. The questions range from sources whenever possible, runs the entire list of them in a separate article. Even though or deny the details in the list, unlike the other papers, the soon." The papers somehow keep straight faces while they pass along two of Speaker. In addition, the Times quotes one congressman saying there are six Republican members besides himself who have flatly decided not to vote for Republicans, the paper explains, will cast secret ballots for Speaker on early stages of a human embryo have, in a test tube, been grown into undifferentiated cells that could be used to grow various kinds of human tissue. The breakthrough is thought to pave the way for implanting cells developed to have certain healthy properties into a patient as a way of ethical questions the new science is sure to raise: issues of genetic Everybody reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics accidentally prematurely posted on its web site its information about the number of jobs created last month. A surfing analyst shared the inside scoop with his clients, thereby roiling the financial markets for a few hours. The Wall Street Journal sees a trend, reminding readers that election results. But the paper also takes note of a model of Internet unintended consequences. The profusion of designer and customized license plates may delight car owners, but it's frustrating police, who say the 4,800-some special plates make identifying cars much harder than it used to be. The paper mentions a case in which a robbery victim remembered the getaway car sported a tag with mountains on it, which would have ordinarily have been a the license plates, meaning that any given sequence of letters and numbers junkies who sent him their election predictions did a far better job than all predicted Democratic gains in the House. Five of them were only off by one seat in their total House and Senate calls. The occupations of the best guessers included: Treasury Dept. program manager, intelligence analyst, attempts to arrive at a budget, stressing the tentative approval by key House if he doesn't actually do that. They also report that in the meantime, about implemented would begin with cruise missiles and progress to a full bombing campaign. The LAT says that each stage of the plan could be flown only its board meetings and other major documents within three months. The paper says that the White House and the Hill are close on a number of the remaining new teachers. But since agreements have not yet been reached, Congress passed Another budget story on the Post front addresses the thirty or so oxide, which is laughing gas), known best as an air pollutant, is also produced in the body, where it regulates blood pressure, nerve firing, and immune responses. The Post waits until the third paragraph of its story to mention that nitric oxide is central to the process of getting an erection and strong consumer trend: the young children of boomers have buying habits that formerly were associated with adolescents. The piece quotes a finding that while for children, which features a quarterly coloring book and a savings and international coverage at the weekend papers. All report that two bombers were retail rival will own their main source of wholesale books. background checks on those network journalists who protested the pessimistic about the economy that they are "investing" in bonds with negative interest rates. That's right, guaranteed losers. Why? The Times says that in Government Treasury bills at a small, but guaranteed, loss. short statements which did not always directly answer the question. submitted a letter emphasizing that "the president did NOT commit or suborn perjury, tamper with witnesses, obstruct justice or abuse power" and that of their merger discussions (the LAT gives it the Business front). If Trade Commission. The merged company would be particularly vulnerable to All papers run the predictable "It's the day after Thanksgiving and what are "the 1990s have transformed the holiday shopping experience into one giant national hunt for deals." The LAT optimistically reports from Southland retailers will have a prosperous holiday season this year." An interesting New York Times "Living Arts" article ponders the organizations. The Times attributes the increasing involvement of technology and communications, and declining government involvement in the that anyone who quits smoking or drinking (or eating) for one day and entered a state of deep and transient sobriety. Alas, that may not be All the major papers report that the rate cut will stimulate consumer spending by lowering the cost of home equity and credit card loans. All papers also report that consumer spending, however, is currently at healthy levels. businesses are having trouble selling bonds, indicating that investors are worried about financial crises abroad. The rate cut is meant to reassure Most quoted experts aren't convinced by the Fed's prediction that further appellate lawyer, others stress his lack of experience with matters political. Readers who admire a stiff upper lip will be impressed by excerpts from the Some yellow spot in the middle of red, and it feels like dead. Waiting for your House Judiciary committee, to be delivered not by him but for him by fourteen The papers say that the committee is almost certain to approve at least one article of impeachment. Therefore, they say, the real audience for all of this constitutional fight more properly fought by White House (not personal) the position taken by the LAT 's lead editorial. But, reports the will argue that articles of impeachment approved by this lame duck Congress many in Congress feel this sort of expert and theoretical testimony will be less effective than some sort of further personal expression of regret by possibility. The Times says some Democrats have told the White House less volatile lines of work in their native country. notes that the anger about her decision coming from Congress is ironic since minorities and women hired by the Supreme Court to be law clerks, runs as its the entire Court, recognized the low numbers, but said they wouldn't improve until the pool of applicant lawyers becomes more diverse. welsh on a bet"? After all, "to pale" means "to be whiter" and if as the headline would have it, "whiter" means "less bad," then "white" means Times lead apparently goes as far as it can get from the presidential to build now. Actually, according to the Times the decision does have a scandal persuasion with the oil companies because of the scandals surrounding him. The Post lead claims that candidates across the country feel stuck dealing also says strategists in both parties say any Republican advantage stemming sees a general trend toward voter uncertainty about who to blame for the scandal, which could altogether neutralize it as a voting factor. advisor and late in his life a figure in an international bank scandal, garners rarely done the country much good. All this on a page long congenial to Wise Men, even to the point in recent weeks of running scandal advice from such wishing he was late) Mike Espy, were required to submit urine samples for drug tests, while two white Cabinet officers revealed they were not. (The paper adds that White House staffers are tested, but the president is not.) reporting from the field that while perhaps racism is on the wane in South There are no joint checking accounts, and women seem to understand that makeup that, you would be embarrassed. In my day, a woman needed a little more meat on The Fed's cut in two important interest rates came just two weeks after its previous one, and Wall St. went from ticked about insufficient credit to was the first one to come without a regularly scheduled Fed meeting in more papers to be a sign of the seriousness of the overall economic environment. (Although the LAT says there's no evidence that there's any orchestrated rate cutting by central banks around the world in the offing.) One economist bank or investment firm is about to have a big problem, but the paper says move on his own authority but after consulting with other Fed officials. The papers quote experts saying they expect further interest cuts soon. with a surplus and as containing the biggest peacetime increase in military now be required to provide contraceptive coverage for federal employees, The paper also describes this piece of Congressional budget reasoning: control entry into the Capitol and a tightening of security at the Capitol and written into the budget bill that extends the duck hunting season in The Times lead (ditto the Times lead editorial) says the showed he can still influence Congress even while it's considering impeaching single massive bill that takes the place of eight lesser bills they should have passed earlier. They achieved the agreement in part by bending the budget will eat up about a quarter of the vaunted budget surplus projected for the fiscal year just begun." The wry headline over the editorial: "Big Deal." about it at all." The story mentions but does not explain two things that are a that the trial judge has implied he thinks the case is headed to the appeals court over him, while one of the lawyers for the states in the case says it's A short while ago, amidst all the editorial stones thrown at President newspapers to make sure that they themselves were not failing to come clean about any misconduct in their own glass houses. There was no and the Democratic congressional leadership to keep House Democrats from supporting the Republican impeachment resolution when it comes to a floor vote members of Congress as part of this effort, and that Al Gore is also taking an between top White House aides and the congressional Republican leadership. Object: avoiding a government shutdown. According to the paper, bones of senior officials in the administration have been leaving open, while the The papers make it clear that the response of some of the senators suggests that the task of selling a ground deployment to the Hill may be "formidable." administration to be only a remote possibility, but still in place three years after the cessation of fighting there. The LAT makes it seem that such concerns were only on the minds of Republicans, while the other two papers make it clear they were voiced from both sides of the aisle. Such political resistance explains why some administration officials have Buried deep in the LAT story are the numbers. To give context to the expected to be hospitalized this year after trying to kill themselves. the warning signs that their children are using marijuana or other drugs. These signs include, says the pamphlet, such obvious ones as staying out all night and unexplained needs for money. But there's also this unobvious one: Beware your child's "excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, all means. The LAT bothers to tell us that to hold together the House bailing wire," but doesn't tell us much about the ideological differences editorial page and is also disliked by something called the Traditional Values the Journal account, which nicely articulates the three main branches of As for the lesser offices in the hierarchy, the papers don't even communicate what they do. The reader has no idea what to make of learning that, for example, the vice chair of the House Republican Conference is challenging the Majority Leader. The one exception to this complaint is the Post 's reporting on the job of Majority Whip, Tom DeLay. Delay, it seems, was able to gracefully abandon impeachment, this was not in evidence at the Judiciary hearings. The other papers see things the same way. Although it was Elbow Patch witnesses were just foils for members' speechifying. All the experts testified that the standards for impeachment should be kept very high, but some of the Republican members of the committee made it clear they felt that lying about positioned for a comeback, this time as a presidential candidate. have, with the result that flight operations cannot be sustained at the tempo commanders would like. The paper reports that although the Navy denies that the carrier's recent fatal flight deck collision had anything to do with rate. The story quotes one civilian defense expert's assessment: there's plenty against him. But more than a year after that, the office still exists, albeit the office had to continue operating while those investigated or required to testify appealed for reimbursement of their legal expenses. And there's the cost in time and money of, as the law requires, turning over all paperwork to the government every six months, someone must be retained to preside over the necessary to start the new fiscal year. Republicans immediately issued held steady, while the middle class suffered a hit. This development is surprising, the Times notes, because the economy is so robust. Among the possible explanations for the trend: Fewer people are on welfare, which is an automatic gateway to Medicaid coverage; small businesses, which dominate the with health care and health insurance are increasing. the opportunity to castigate Congress for putting "partisanship over progress, politics over people" and dallying on important issues. Senate Majority Leader arrogance and duplicity by this White House. To this day, they haven't told the documents is headed to the Government Printing Office for release to the public programs, support the introduction of the euro, and implement tax reform, the election may come down to German voters' personal opinions of Kohl. But do the all military Internet sites which are accessible publicly. While not catalyzed by any particular event, the Pentagon's action reflects a variety of security concerns, including the online availability of personal data about The gift was returned to the university with a note of polite refusal from the Today 's lead is that the Pentagon office responsible for the safety and increasingly vulnerable to theft and diversion. The New York Times leads with word that because most states are behind schedule in their attempts where leaders of the two countries agreed to deeper economic, environmental, and social ties, but haggled over the form and wording of Japan's official apology for the brutal acts it committed against China during World War II. to the contrary, the Pentagon's "Special Weapons Agency" never performed the required tests on three of its five essential computer systems. Also, it's nevertheless that "there's very little real mischief going on here." slashed the salaries of nuclear plant workers and guards, which means not only fewer people protecting the nukes but also more people prone to the temptations for the major health, welfare and nutrition benefit programs are ready for the responsibilities complaining that the problem is wrongly viewed as merely an services are disrupted, you'll have more than computer problems. You could have unsigned document that refers to some of Japan's prior expressions of remorse about China, but stops short of actually apologizing. But the document does "invasion" of China. The paper explains why Japan is hesitant to go further conclude that such a merger would be good for oil and gas production worldwide, thus benefiting consumers. The resulting company would have an increased which it either has or intends to develop, close ties. The list includes, says new International Monetary Fund strategy to avert further global economic Judiciary Committee proceedings, more grounds for the impeachment of President Times leads with the story that preoccupies everyone's front: the details, it is hardly surprising that each paper emphasizes a different aspect. All papers note, however, that the new evidence does more to disclose the details we've all been wondering about than to substantively change the seem to like each other very much.") The LAT highlights the improbable nature of the encounters: "I had a feeling, but I had nothing to base it on justice, and making false statements under oath (as distinguished from more forth, one which relates to executive privilege will be dropped, because to countries that show relative economic stability but nonetheless could words came on the same day as the release of a Labor Department report showing that fewer jobs were created and unemployment rose incrementally during Approval for the payment is mired in the House, where Republicans are staunchly reports that almost all of the country's mail service has shut down because the post office. Predictably, the post office is owed approximately that same Court has agreed to review the criminal statute banning a wide range of conviction that was then overturned. At issue is what exactly must the link be between a gift and any subsequent act by the official receiving it before it rescue worker saying he could do nothing for the people buried in the debris he country's entire infrastructure that was wiped out. By yesterday, the LAT reports, the region was experiencing food shortages and price market has made people feel more prosperous and willing to spend. The into debt and keep spending, nothing bad is going to happen...." yesterday of the Bill Gates deposition videotape. The LAT and messages or recall the circumstances behind them. The Times and seconds of silence before Gates responded. The Post notes that court tape there was this difference: Gates was a "scowling, slouching The papers note that much of yesterday's questioning focused on whether or perfect club to use on them." The Post doesn't give Gates' account of The LAT front reports that the federal government has chosen an odd way to save some money: by eliminating the only program designed to test the ability of the nation's commercial nuclear plants to protect themselves against terrorists. The program was established after the Gulf War and, reports the mock attack, an agency team was able to simulate bringing about a core meltdown. And last March, an inspector was able to smuggle a fake pistol into LAT suggests it's that the nuclear power industry doesn't like shouldering the extra cost of participating in the security exercises. reports that Gates answered, "Depends on what you mean by compete." the main issue was whether he was in good health. Only time will tell if the LAT 's reporting was insufficiently aggressive when, earlier in the week after Block underwent emergency brain surgery, it ran a headline saying that spectators and carried live on just about every television station, as a magic unifying moment for the whole country. "Captivated Nation Cheers" is how a publicity stunt. True, in a separate story, the Post does note that the curmudgeonly editorial describing the mission as "a testament more to past discussing the potentially dangerous loss during the launch of a protective to increased West Bank security. He seems to have passed, by immediately group implicated in the attack, under house arrest. He has also rounded up observe that for all the press hoopla, very few voters have actually seen the ads, because so far, they have only aired in ten states. probably speaks for many when he sees the event as a magic opportunity to escape a relentless political scandal. Perhaps the LAT is wryly doing latest ripple in a story that's been percolating below the fold for a while: but virtually guaranteed, with the field likely to pit at least two candidates right, dominated by adamant settlers and the devoutly religious, was unhappy pullbacks hurt him with the center and the left, which had come to accept land limbo until the outcome of the new elections, even though, the Journal the sentencing of two organizers, while the other two papers also mention a never be adopted." The papers note that this crackdown comes at a time when experienced before under Communist rule. But the LAT quotes a always been worried about any movement that might tie people in one province administration's policy of economic and diplomatic engagement with China has it's tempered with concerns about the ethics of so fully unleashing flatly that such extreme multiple births are not a victory for science and that when patients have to pay for it out of their own pockets, instead of via years, he will be vindicated. He is determined to find a quick way out of the crisis, but is stumped about how to do that. His friends at the party were been buoyed from recent personal advice not just from a longtime minister own defense: focusing on himself rather than his job would make his approval One of the reasons journalists are so despised by other folks is their bent be a fine fellow, but speaker of the House?!)" Would Glassman be so quick to Times lead is the National Institutes of Health's plans to dramatically shorten the government approval process for drugs, which could mean much faster indicating that in the wake of last week's vote to start an impeachment congressional candidates has dropped considerably, most of all among likely voters and independents. The poll also indicates that support for Democratic percent approval rating, is currently more popular than before last week's that air strikes could come as early as today. Meanwhile, says the paper, in a computerized organization of the fifty databases set up by the states. The new system holds the promise of reducing rape and other crimes by catching issues raised by the database, which include: What types of offenders should be required to give samples? Should mass screening be allowed? The story points for a wide range of criminal samples as well as mass screening. It is be used forensically, the discussion is completely generic and never mentions would have been a violator of a bill working its way through Congress that criminalizes making obscenities available on the Internet. The readers are absolutely right: It's Congress that is the distributor of the obscenities of apologizing without admitting. But isn't that what's going on in the following expressed our strong disapproval to Nickelodeon, which produces the comic, and Creators Syndicate, which distributes it. Our comics screening process failed in this instance, and we apologize to our readers who were offended." Note the strip. And what, pray tell, does the paper's "comics screening process" screen Everybody leads with the House Judiciary vote to propose to the full House mention that the vote to do so was along strict party lines (Republicans voting gravity of the moment." The LAT sees a "heated session," but one that was "filled with history lessons" and at times resembled a "law school sees a debate that ranged "from sober constitutional discourse to bitter As had been tipped in earlier press accounts, the papers report that the justice and concealing knowledge of false testimony, replaced talk of perjury with talk of making false statements, and dropped talk of abuse of power. And short of the standards for impeachment. According to the papers, the ensuing discussion by committee members sometimes grasped for the imprimatur of it clear that this unrestricted resolution means any subsequent impeachment noting that the day started with members' appearances on the morning talk shows, and that at one point during committee debate, one congressman told mentioned the exact number of people in prison today (over a hundred) because they lied to a grand jury or in federal court. Why the little dots shutdown by the end of the week. The world's top financial officials are in town looking for money and solutions for the global economic crisis, and by the impeachment inquiry. Jeez, just typing all those sentences makes Today's Papers marketing and spiritual business consulting, and now comes the Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reporting that with unemployment low, some companies are recruiting at churches. Manpower Inc. even gives churches a from the prior practice of going out to civilian manufacturers and telling them is stamped on the heel, the next time Marines are ordered in harm's way, they will become the first troops ever to go into combat in designer footwear. The papers all lead with the first day of the White House's defense before the House Judiciary Committee. The journalism consensus is that the panels of constituted a deepening of the scandal's heretofore ditzy discussion. One substantive." The Post says that yesterday, the president's legal team saying that one reason not to impeach was that it would be bad for the economy, proved once again that there is no hearing in a congressional hearing. They But if so, then call those folks into executive session and leave the rest of unanimously that, absent indications of additional criminal activity, police cannot automatically search a car after making a routine traffic stop. The decision is a surprising exception to the Court's trend in recent years of upholding and widening police conduct especially in the area of searches. Neither story mentions one notorious criminal who might never have been caught because of a gun found in his car after he was stopped for driving without The LAT front carries a stunning medical result published in today's eye, ear, nose and throat problems. The changes were detected less than two months after the ban began. (Hats off to the LAT for putting the number A congressional staffer tells the Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" he has to speak off the Last week, former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy was acquitted of "The Reliable Source," he's still really into legal gratuities. It seems that budget), and Espy is quoted in the Post saying, "I surely would like a panel's finding of no credible evidence that silicone breast implants cause disease, a story that also makes the New York Times yesterday, which would create the world's largest company. There is so much that, the Times observes, both companies' stock prices dipped on the will in his opinion definitely go up if the deal flies: gas prices. The implant leads point out that the panel's findings could make it much or painful breast hardening. The LAT says that the findings fit with other recent scientific results. The paper mentions in its second paragraph saves this information for the last paragraph. And the LAT surprises with word that the panel members are barred from speaking to the media. Still? The Post lead says the committee Republicans won a vote allowing considering not presenting any defense whatsoever to any areas the committee from the other direction, saying that the Democrats' increasing intransigence given their reading of public sentiment shows that "polls are the crack cocaine that yesterday's Judiciary hearing was largely given over to the testimony of convicted perjurers, legal experts and several retired military officers, all discoursing on the nature and significance of perjury. By contrast, the elite instead, and moreover, that the PA's own auditors found last year that today, men can register with the Selective Service at the agency's web site. Not only is this a blow for convenience, but also a social control masterpiece. The only way to symbolically protest a paperless draft would be to burn the rest of their fronts to various aspects of the quote news unquote. Yesterday the papers told you what he would say. Today they tell you what he violated her right to an attorney and indeed, whether he had lied about his treatment of her in a press release. There was also some discussion of whether sole concession in the face of all this: that perhaps when requesting from "truth" or "lying." Everybody prints one of the day's few carnal references: which, a congressional source is quoted as saying, are potentially embarrassing, in that they detail payments for consultants and outside primarily dedicated to economic issues. The LAT says the White House did tell if the global economic crisis is coming to a close. The list includes: When the financial markets yawn in the face of bad news, when yields on emerging market bonds go down, when inflation jitters return, when commodity prices rise, when emerging nations start importing more, and when Japan's economy starts to expand again. On the other hand, a sign of how much money is years. Unless the country's habits change, this rate is forecast to multiply It's not exactly perjury, but the LAT observes that during activities will be monitored by a multinational aerial reconnaissance effort, reportage and interviews, the LAT stresses the militant attitude of the The LAT lead and the Journal say that the Conference Board's The LAT quotes an expert saying that every recent recession has been preceded by a drop in this latter measure, although, the paper adds, not every drop has been followed by recession. But the Journal quotes an economist where, despite the general decline in AIDS mortality, the disease remains a top population within the next ten to fifteen years. The Times cites experts to a fifth of their populations to AIDS in the next decade. because the color discrimination problems sometimes associated with the drug could make it hard to interpret cockpit gauges and runway lights. for some of the biggest Cabinet departments, asks an interesting question: Why committed a "monumental and calculated abuse of the public trust." How could Times each lead with the onset today of the House Judiciary Committee's debate about whether to initiate an impeachment investigation against President that their country's banks are in far worse trouble than has ever been publicly The coverage makes it clear that the Judiciary committee's discussions will be highly partisan, but also that due to the committee's Republican on whether or not to authorize the committee to start an impeachment inquiry. There is more of a question about how many crossover votes this will get in the might do so. All the papers report that the consensus is that despite all this, there aren't sufficient impeachment votes in the Senate. source, reported that there would be new charges of witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and making false statements under oath, but today's of total outstanding loans were strictly enforced, they might be banned from requires for domestic banking. According to the paper, the situation was The LAT front tells a disturbing tale about the current state of submarine and took control of the vessel for twenty hours, repeatedly threatening to destroy it, creating the potential for what one scientist quoted sailor, who had locked himself in one of the vessel's torpedo bays, killed submarine and the people in the vicinity were "absolutely safe." system for "a persistent and widespread pattern of human rights violations." saying that "it seems to me that the international community, in terms of standards, is moving really ahead of the standards obtained in the United University law student was unhappy about the lack of attention the school's asking for an office appointment. Thirteen minutes later, his roommate called Times lead with a hardy perennial: the restart of Middle East peace Times also front the story. The Post leads with word that next scandal at the expense of other issues. The LAT goes with what looks paper says critics worry that the move could result in half the states and three quarters of the voters casting ballots within eight days, "compromising the democratic benefits of a more deliberative primary process." The LAT could benefit his presidential bid by giving him a strong showing early on. The sticking point in the past, the papers explain, now apparently unlocked by the the evacuated land be declared a nature reserve and hence not occupied by the declined to describe the session as a "breakthrough," and with the paper's Although it's obvious that successful Middle East diplomacy could be a The Post lead says some House Democratic staffers are worried that a today demonstrates the shortcomings of a flagship program designed to help poor absentee fathers earn more and pay more child support. The program, Parents' absentee fathers via training and counseling, has been found in an independent study not to have increased their earnings and to have only marginally increased the amount of money they give their kids. The Post mentions in of the men in the program have arrest records. The Times doesn't get According to Wall Street Journal 's "Work Week" column, higher earners about an hour a day longer than the bottom ten percent. A century ago the situation was reversed. The curves probably crossed in the 1950s. why, if the military now expects most of its missions to be related to What's more, according to the story, the world is still guessing about whether The grinding on of the House Judiciary committee's impeachment hearings today or tomorrow and the papers flatly assume that a censure proposal will be defeated and that at least one article of impeachment will pass. It remains unclear whether an additional censure measure will be put before the full House members advising them that the full House will probably begin reviewing Republicans. The LAT lead reports that White House advisors are entitled to know whose speculation we're talking about here) that The papers note that the two committee lawyers used snippets from President Conservative Citizens, which views interracial marriage as genocide against Dole should remit millions to the government for misusing party funds for ad dilation and extraction" abortions, procedures where the fetus is partially delivered and then aborted. This is the procedure called by abortion opponents "partial birth abortion." The Times avoids taking sides in the debate simply in its choice of nomenclature by identifying the procedure as the it's not possible to be partially born, Today's Papers prefers "partial The big stories are about the promise of good things, foreign and domestic. the Fed is likely to cut interest rates again next month. The paper quotes the basically accepted. The papers also say the two parties have arrived at still remained a sore point. The papers report that the discussions are being on behind closed doors, right down to seating arrangements. The two papers join the talks and that once there, the king delivered an impassioned speech attendance. This has not been confirmed by the White House. settlers blocked roads and held prayer rituals to drive home their demands that The LAT 's "Column One" notes a trend among those arrested for Internet porn: they have a disproportionate tendency to kill themselves. Of the who've never previously been in any kind of trouble and are desperate to escape his wrists, or the Colorado computer consultant who shot himself in the to vote in the election next month because of a felony conviction. The Post says this is seven times the national average. The study found that the proportion of black males in prison has increased ten times faster than for in the past few months." Notice that you can't defend the usage here by perfect illustration of the truism that there's still one group in this country that "respectable" people, even (especially?) sophisticated newspaper people, where tens of thousands of residents have taken shelter in such locales as the still need, note the papers, to enter into a coalition with another party in such coalition would have to worry about radical Greens bolting. Another development: the successor to the Communist Party gained parliamentary strength Pentagon still can't protect itself against embezzlement and overpayment. recent years, featuring such dodges as clerks creating fictitious contracts and from their jobs. The LAT says Pentagon financial controls have gotten the paper should have mentioned that this hardly counts against the idea of government runs out of money, twelve of the thirteen spending bills remain unsigned. The Post says that getting very little attention beneath all defense bill, and hundreds of millions to the veterans and housing bill and to the energy bill, to name a few. But the paper is rather stinting on details, compared to say, its coverage of dress stains, and runs the story on page worrisome unintended consequence of the pesticide strictures in the food safety law passed two years ago: to ensure compliance, some top pesticide manufacturers have resumed testing their products on people, a practice that, although legal, volunteers are now swallowing small doses of toxic pesticides. Sometimes, the paper reports, test subjects are told that they are ingesting a "drug" not a The Post reports that a Democratic congressional candidate in "he has never: committed adultery; abused his wife or children; engaged in homosexual activity; experimented with illegal drugs; or been charged with or convicted of a felony." Hey, where's the cigar clause? calls that a "good sign for Republicans." (The paper waits until the tenth and Congress seem to have instead taken to heart other recent polls suggesting an papers observe important loose ends of the emerging deal that could unravel it. jurisdiction in the region, and the LAT passes along the concerns of spying of a former Army sergeant who served as a codebreaker, allegedly for the Soviet Union started a nuclear war. The accused spy had been living in military intelligence personnel, and the paper suggests these have been question whether such laws further the cause of tolerance and suggest that they Due to technical problems, last night's column erred in saying that Secretary of the Navy, outlines possible defense strategies against Declaring that "we ought to assume that successful attacks should occur," personnel, preparing responsive plans and stockpiling antibiotics." Also on benefits caps); young people who could be promoted are dying; the supply of agencies are downsizing because they anticipate a lack of personnel. The House Judiciary Committee's vote to recommend impeachment for President against impeachment for lying in a civil case. The papers all note that the House Rose Garden, in which he expressed profound regret, asked for a censure from Congress, and, once again, did not admit to lying under oath. The committee will vote on the fourth article, which alleges abuse of power, on points out that the events leading up to the House's vote next week began as "a of suing tobacco companies: rich lawyers. An arbitration panel has awarded a electronic transmissions around the globe and screening them for targeted routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency." A subject under the headline "Gates Singled Out in Trial." The government started its case, all the papers report, by contrasting Bill Gates' video deposition says "10-foot") in which he said he knew nothing more about an alleged which he states "...there is a very powerful deal of some kind we can do with threats and bribes to get various PC manufacturers and Internet service email in which he claims, "Gates delivered a characteristically blunt query: Wonder if "screw" kept that quote out of The Nation's Newspaper. MS' top lawyer is widely quoted as calling the email evidence "snippets that up at the hearing yesterday where he regained permission to box in York Times leads with the Senate's narrow rejection of a patients' Times goes with the problems associated with the last few days' sudden have guaranteed access to emergency care and medical specialists and made it insurance industry and of the sex scandal that has enveloped President passage of a temporary spending bill, the government now has until midnight approves the concept of voting oneself deadline extensions.) But even the new deadline may not be enough time for Congress to resolve all remaining issues. the use of statistical sampling in the upcoming census; and even whether giving spending bills were completed yesterday, and all unfinished measures will crash, the rise is forcing consumers across the country to pay more than they up the committee's partisan disagreements over the witness issue. Republicans people shortly after the sessions ended. Psychiatrists around the country are understandably worried; the psychiatrist in question intends to appeal. already secured the far right, the logic goes, so he can afford to yield more "Week in Review" piece describes the debilitating fissures within piece says that a shift in Congressional power is unlikely, though the Republicans may well gain several Senate seats. The LAT focuses on the new "cautiousness" of the parties as they struggle to redefine themselves. This caution is reflected in the candidates' "modest agendas": The Democrats tend to seek tax cuts, increased defense spending, and more state control of education Reconciliation Commission, which has been bombarded with criticism since the release of its final report last week. Specifically, the author supports the and denial that so often follow periods of national atrocity." With the symbolizes an attempt to move forward, rather than sink into the "spiral of federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny." some Republicans that the House impeachment inquiry will die a swift death. The piece: complaints from some parents, mostly in the white majority, that their The LAT front says that some Republicans believe that losing the House impeachment vote would be much better than winning by a narrow margin and sending the unpopular impeachment proceedings to the Senate (which would likely increasingly butting heads with parents of rejected students over Magnet schools, which accept top students yet also seek to preserve their racial diversity, are particularly flummoxed by this issue. A spate of upcoming Voting by mail was once confined to the legitimately absent or the soft money is no longer principally funneled through national political parties; many candidates today have established political action committees has make no impact on the West; the United Nations' main agency for refugees recruiting process for college seniors. In the mad scramble for lucrative investment banking and consulting jobs, interviews can be quite grueling. Says one unidentified student: "I walked into the interview, and before the guy even says, 'Hi, how are you doing?' he asks me, 'What's the sum sexual harassment suit which is now on appeal. The New York since the release of his videotaped grand jury testimony. A backlash may be in the works against Republicans who favored releasing the tape. (A different poll years, has particular relevance for Silicon Valley and technology firms based labor, worked several compromises into the bill, including a provision which measure is expected to be passed by the Senate and signed into law. settlement "in the range that the two sides contemplated during past fronts the story, gets much more specific. Citing the lawyers themselves as will vote on the measure very shortly thereafter. Amidst the developments, the bring Coke cans and subway tokens tumbling out of vending machines just yet: The machines must be reconfigured to accept the new bills. The Wall Street Journal tries to decipher the baffling marketing phenomenon of Beanie Babies. These "little stuffed critters," worth items. As a result, some manic Beanie speculators value their collections at on the verge of collapse either as new rival toys flood the market or, more likely, when collectors click their heels three times and realize that their Administration Secretary of Agriculture. The story is also the top national hold that the not guilty verdict fuels a growing consensus that the statute bennies from parties with interests before Agriculture and since some of those parties pleaded guilty to making illegal gifts, it's easy for the reader to do a good job of laying out the legal complications: both explain that the usual rules don't apply if the gift giver has a prior personal relationship with the (either past or promised). There could have been another factor, which the LAT gets into far more than the others: race. The top half of the into account in deciding the case. Which, the LAT adds, he declined to And none of the papers mentions the oddity of a Secretary of Agriculture the House Judiciary Committee to offer a vigorous defense of their client, who while they were crafting their merger into the world's largest corporation: to register their new corporate Internet address. And yesterday, the two companies The Wall Street Journal reports that the chief economist of the are comparable or lower. The only big question is whether the move to the euro Everybody leads with the jockeying in the House of Representatives for the leads also note that several other top House Republican slots are likely to be unprecedented exercise. And an odd one, since the offices at stake are Republicans wanted the tongue of Newt: they say he was a lousy manager. (Now they tell us.) "There was really no clear agenda for the year. And when there's no agenda and there's no real direction, what happens is you can't, you really And then he drives the point home with a little too much information about himself: "You can put lipstick on a pig all day long, but it's still a It's not enough that this story leads all around. The papers also try to this way shows they're a bit out of touch with what seems to be the point of cares about. The LAT redeems itself though, by making the only valuable its lead, isn't locking up the nomination because of his ideology, policy or more and bigger donations than are allowed by the limits on contributions to the prosecutor is "no longer welcome" to appear before him. The story does not explain how a judge can control which government attorneys try cases in his The Wall Street Journal reports that just a few months after but no such loan has actually been consummated yet.) electrical wiring insulation on airliners is tested for flammability with a "Money" section package of stories covering various aspects of the problem. It's sobering to learn that about half the world's passenger jets contain wire insulation that could be a fire hazard. One expert quoted calls wiring the most women in the media. The story says that what they're fighting is the pretty much fits those pejoratives to a T and the media didn't make her up: call for extending emergency lines of credit to emerging nations buffeted by article on the subject highlights Japan as the G-7 meeting's focus. After administration immediately criticized it as not addressing Japan's more will leave Medicare early next year because they are not recovering their country's economic turmoil. Described by the LAT as "one of the elected him." Ford proposes the following punishment: "A harshly worded rebuke as rendered by members of both parties," to be administered in the well of the House chamber. "Let it be dignified, honest, and above all, cleansing," says massacres, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters two years after losing an election that was eventually overturned because of his opponent's corrupt calls a "First Enthusiastic Step Towards Democracy." The voting was peaceful, president has promised a full transition to democratic government after years judicial independence. The unusual move was a reaction to both Congressional Republicans who threaten to impeachment judges based on their rulings and to campaign contributors who attempt to influence elected state judges. National Institutes of Health to approve experimental gene therapy, but when the treatment comes it does little. The child is still alive but slowly political issues. He then shares this information, along with hundreds of thousands of dollars, with politicians most sympathetic to his cause. The piece inspections another chance. However, the Administration remains wary. As must turn over all documentary evidence of producing weapons of mass flagrant violation of the Security Council resolutions as well as international overture won out. The New York Times front page ventures the comparison between the last year. Part of the high prices can be attributed to soaring costs for drug price regulations in place. Among those hardest hit by the rising prices are companies whose health care plans must absorb inflated prescription drug prices, and uninsured patients. As the boomers age, the Journal notes, the need for more drugs will exacerbate the cost problem. (and is) summarized in exactly one sentence: "There is simply no Constitutional billion settlement of the health cost claims they've raised against the major foreign leaders, and talk of Tomahawk cruise missiles as the likely weapon. But, notes the paper, there is a new wrinkle too: the State Department has The LAT lead explains that the proposed tobacco settlement doesn't provide as much regulatory restraint nor as much money as the failed federal tobacco bill would have, but also offers the industry less protection from other lawsuits. In return for the billions and a ban on cigarette billboards, recovery of Medicaid funds spent by the states on smokers. The deal would, says him. The paper adds that Tenet's vehemence was a direct reflection of the intelligence community's depth of anger towards Pollard despite his conviction for spying for a friendly power. The paper notes that Pollard stole more have been nice if the Times had said who had taken more), a take measurable in cubic yards, plus it is still unknown if any of them ended up in This mainly reflects the medical habits of baby boomers, most of whom said they pursued the alternative therapies more to prevent future problems than to treat treatment last year, most of it not reimbursed by insurance. What seems to herb next to the big toe, proved safe and effective for stimulating fetal syndrome. Ineffective: chiropractic spinal manipulations did not seem to help with tension headaches; and acupuncture didn't do any better than placebos in financially strapped, might have a much harder time retaining homes through any encourages, are having second thoughts. For instance, with an eye towards the courts, employees are now encouraged, says the paper, to say "fair competition" about it, if this sort of testing became a trend it would be a good thing no matter what the apparent race of the testers. If they are black, discovering a relationship to a Founding Father would tend to replace feelings of alienation often felt by minorities with feelings of proud connection. If they are white, discovering a blood relationship to a slave would tend to stimulate empathy for leads with its latest poll indicating that many races are too close to call. voters, in a campaign that at this late date, the Times says, still thrilled to note that the paper runs the preceding information about margin of congressional races, the paper says at least five Senate races (New York, North Democratic Party radio appeal targeted at blacks: "When you don't vote, you let one of the four major candidates "publicly sought divine intervention." paper says that medical boards in every state view the sites as illegal or at least not meeting accepted standards of medical care. The story reports one countermeasure the Federal Trade Commission has put into play: the establishment of a "teaser sting site" (one of a dozen relating to various how the national conversation has been utterly taken over by the concerns of previously unappreciated grave national crisis: the difficulties involved in twice has had to wait twelve weeks for furniture ordered at Pottery Barn, and a received one of the pieces. There is no indication in the story that some people can't afford furniture and don't have houses to put it in. ordering stealth fighters and B-1 and B-52 bombers to the region along with nonessential State Dept. personnel and their dependents from embassies (in White House has prevailed over the Pentagon in insisting on a "substantial air officials acknowledge that no bombing campaign, no matter how extensive, can be prepared to strike with no further warning. How soon? Well, the Times craft known as the Doomsday Plane. The same plane, the paper reminds, she used while papers stress that the Cabinet salted its approval with enough conditions delay if not an outright breakdown in the peace process. television correspondent as "worse than the worst of the yids." In a speech, he that "some proceeds go to charity." It would be nice if the Journal made following up to see just how much of those 17K checks actually ends up going to The three Middle East leads all quote a State Department spokesman's various security guarantees, but there's no clear sense in the reporting of says that failure to reach an agreement would be a "devastating blow to hopes" for the summit, and saying there are "ominous signs that things were not paper says when the two leaders did last meet in person, the atmosphere was doesn't explain why if the case pits Bill Gates against the feds and twenty states, Gates won't be present in the courtroom. A story in the paper's "Style" section essays to compare the antagonists' cultures, claiming along the way at Slate at least, most of the offices are small and cheery. says is an attempt to obtain the trade secrets of its computer system for retailer, personally named in the suit is Amazon's chief information officer, administration. The paper describes how quite generally, liberalized trading high tech companies but also may have allowed China to obtain a wide range of sophisticated technology that has already been put to military use. prison system is unique in the entire country in using deadly force to break up fighting. This is the latest installment in the paper's repeated looks in the "Column One" story about widespread plagiarism in political speeches. The story election for what the paper calls "burglary." Yet the LAT never mentions voted to begin an impeachment inquiry, the third such vote in the country's hearings. The inquiry has no deadline and has authority to investigate All the majors acknowledge that the outcome was largely expected. Still, Times --a choice of words certain to send a chill down the First Spine. vote means the next four weeks at least will be peaceful. Maybe it's because, Constitution's most important creation by the Founding Fathers, it gets little relatively respect from contemporary politicians and journalists. In other news: The Wall Street Journal reports a third of Representatives were fueled by rumors of a rate cut; the LAT waffles, reporting that most The top international story (not on the front page of most papers) is that includes this gem: "It's never been easier to be a Communist than now," says she will appoint an independent counsel to investigate Al Gore's role in whether to begin a thorough, independent investigation into possible Democratic has expanded its investigation to include campaign finance, and could appoint a special prosecutor over the last two years. The Times does not contributing to the economic well being of poor rural areas and gaining new respect in the process. The piece says that the government decision to allow women to work outside their hometowns ten years ago has prompted an increase in prosperity in the form of money sent home by the new class of urban headlights. Federal regulators are concerned that the annoying glare larger PR firm to manage his image, wooing reporters with occasional jokes, and revival. The Brits now appreciate his many good works and his affectionate The author gets a rare private interview with the prince and confirms that Everybody leads with the release last night by the House Judiciary Republican majority of four proposed articles of impeachment, to be voted on by release was unfair. The coverage adds that Judiciary Democrats responded by yesterday, for the first time, the White House aggressively embraced censure. for a full House censure vote, in the hope that this will siphon some key moderate Republican votes away from any impeachment bill. Before the advent of the impeachment articles, the committee was busy pardon himself or accept a pardon from his predecessor. The LAT and about this, he did not commit perjury because he did not intend not to tell the truth. But if he misled, then didn't he intend to have his auditors end up believing a falsehood? And isn't that just as injurious to the legal system as perjury? If arranging to have someone killed is as bad as killing them, why isn't arranging to have someone believe what's false as bad as lying to only be used once and can only open the car, not start it. It's thrilling to have so many smart readers. In response to yesterday's concern in this space that the Supreme Court decision banning probable causeless car searches after routine traffic stops would prevent arrests like enough, but the whole matter gets one to thinking: if probable cause is so detectors you have to go through at the airport are legal? They're not just applied to suspicious passengers. Why should travel by plane subject you to this is due to the three Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, increased merger and acquisition activities, and a general sense that the global economic crisis hold on his office, and says the list of causes are "the right reasons," but adds some more technical reasons to this list: the growth of the M-2 money supply (what we've got in checking accounts, savings accounts, and money market funds) and investors' closing of short positions (buying stocks now to close out past sales of borrowed stocks that were bets the market was going south). back from its recent twenty percent drop, the LAT saying that it was The Times and Journal say yesterday's events are a kind of redirects any suggestion of personal brilliance back to a cool, professional another side: there, she is said to gush that her prediction's come true. The LAT says that an overlooked theme of the market rebound is that "most individual investors never lost their nerve." The same point is made on dissuaded by the overseas financial crisis nor the losses suffered by are "much more brave" because among other things, the Fed has cut rates and plan. It's hard to reconcile these two points of view. Either investors care exuberance." But it's not clear from any of these stories whether the market's what would make it clear, which is why these daily market move stories are different from many news stories. Daily market moves are radically government's Consumer Product Safety Commission is recalling nearly ten million foldable playpens because their raised rivets can strangle toddlers by catching on their clothes or pacifiers. This has already happened to eight children it's apparent that some jurors thought the state case was an attempt to jurors never seriously contemplated guilty verdicts on any of the nine heralded by gay activists. But since both papers point out that the case prompting this decision was one involving heterosexual contact and that there are plenty of other states that still likewise ban oral and anal contact between opposite sexes, it's not clear why this isn't a big deal to the general population too. Perhaps because such statutes aren't often used to arrest The last vehicle for truly unconstrained opinion in a newspaper is the speaking their minds about other countries, you'll find a looming picture of Al Gore, cropped so close that none of his hair is visible and you can see the sweat that's bubbling out of every giant pore in his face. Note that the verbal equivalent: "Gore, looking like a crazed criminal with something to hide, said..." would never pass muster. What did Gore ever do to deserve this? military strikes, if they occur, "will be significant." Deputy Secretary of although it could come sooner." Possible reasons for delay include President Garden Television, broke into the "clubby" and expensive cable programming says that airports nationwide, in an effort to accommodate more traffic and increase runway efficiency, are practicing "the simultaneous use of intersecting runways." One jet could be taking off and another landing on intersecting runways; it is presumed that the landing jet will stop well before wants to extend the practice to flights at night and in the rain. that they would be distributed to illegal outlets, and that the gun industry the fight against Big Tobacco, may serve as a model for upcoming suits in Biotechnology grows ever more bizarre: A human skin cell nestled in a gutted cow egg turned into an embryo made public yesterday, has spawned questions not only about the legitimacy of the results, but also about possible misuse of federal funds. If the experiment is true, its implications are so surreal that they bear repeating: The first leads with Republicans' waning hopes that Flytrap will mean big gains for the elections draw near. Republican hopes of gaining more than a dozen House seats future attempts at international prosecution of human rights violators. in light of information recently recovered from Soviet records. Sensitive given to the Soviets and may have accelerated the development of a Soviet during his third term, two likely Soviet agents would have been front runners crisis among the English, who lately find themselves better known for soccer hooliganism and tainted beef than for bus stop queues and dead fish handshakes. delves deeper into the historical and political background of the crumbling The New York Times Magazine features a special issue on the business of sports. A story frets that media giants' purchases of sports teams will forcing star athletes to play when it will boost ratings on their own networks baseball player clients, a rookie quarterback learning how to play the league's image, coordinating everything from media coverage to promotional The Republican struggle over who will be the next Speaker of the House leads of Majority Whip Tom DeLay and has received verbal support from "100-plus that most of the top House majority positions will be up for grabs in the concessions and is ready to use force "sooner rather than later." The overhaul the way insulation on commercial airliners is tested for flammability, cover, Lewis writes, "The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful on media buzz to generate private donations and government funding. As a result, says the piece, people give more money to fight breast cancer than the equally common prostate cancer, and it's harder for poor diabetics to get their cells for just one hour a day, the inmates grow slowly insane and even more violent and unstable than when they entered prison. Many psychologists believe the treatment is inhumane. Wardens disagree. Associated Press. Apparently, the state Supreme Court has ruled that a club can't be called adult if they let in kids. And if a club can't be labeled accompanied by adults. A lawyer for the club adds: "You could take your campaign finances from the areas it will consider in its impeachment inquiry. leads with word that the unseasonably warm weather much of the country is experiencing has been bad for seasonal businesses like ski tourism and for spells this out: the committee honchos think the memos contain no evidence of impeachable offenses. Of course, there is another reason nobody mentions: while it's likely that few committee members currently have interns working, er, under difference, since everyone reports that a House impeachment vote will be Those who think the drive to impeachment is simply Republican something other than impeachment, "He was met with a chorus of nos from shift in policy, coming just two months after these same central bankers adamantly refused to cut because of fears of inflation. But it's clear now, hearings, the two convicted perjurers who testified were not sworn in. businesses such as banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers, including are so few Holocaust survivors left who will actually benefit from confiscation. What will mainly happen, he writes, is that lawyers will get rich and bureaucrats will get powerful, and there will be a revival of the Shylock but otherwise Today's Papers disagrees. People will think what they will think, but there's nothing inherently unseemly about seeking to return money from the of the Holocaust who were grievously injured by the profiteering banks and correction, this admission is incomplete: the wrong titles are not mentioned. that "Barb Wire" was erroneously translated by the Times as "Delicate Orbs of Womanhood Bigger Than Your Head Can Hurt You." economic reform plan, thought to be crucial for keeping the world's spreading prosecutors are left with the sole option of appealing the decision to the reverse the decision when it takes up the matter as early as next week. Until medicated, reports the paper, that he is probably unaware he is under arrest. government funds via roughly equal parts tax increases and spending cuts and proposes reducing the expenditures of the country's lavish social security system. The LAT says the austerity moves are "likely to produce a punishing recession," but suggests this cure isn't as bad as the disease of a currency devaluation, which it says, the government is determined to avoid. The approved the ads. And the Times also reports that the Democrats are gleeful because they think the ads will create a big backlash against apartment building. And the real oral obscenity of the whole case may be this: missiles were not targeting bin Laden himself, Today's Papers wondered why, since bin Laden is not protected by this country's policy against assassinating heads of state, since he's not one. Well, according to the LAT front, aircraft. And companies, says the paper, are not pleased, concerned that their activities will be exposed to everybody from stock traders, to terrorists, to stockholders' watchdog groups (just what are all those planes about sex. The lawyer claims he sent in information about five such cases. "cases like the president's, of a federal prosecution of a sex lie told in a dismissed civil case." The Post reports that the cases submitted by the lawyer include a federal case, but involving a lie sworn to in a criminal case. The top news is divided between the upcoming midterm election and the and Democrats in a virtual dead heat in their contest for Congress. The goes with the eruption of a financial squabble between Democrats campaigning for seats in the House and Senate on the one hand and the White House and the percent margin of error. (And the margin of error is given in the second right direction. The paper takes this to mean voters like the balance of a number of people think the two parties are leading the country in the same pudding," and finds this to mean "Voter excitement has dimmed." The Times lead details "unusually bitter" feelings expressed by high command is instead putting money into erasing party debt and the launch of Al Gore's presidential campaign. Candidates apparently also feel that party officials have discouraged donations by making dire predictions of a loss of as writers and photographers) as freelancers, wrongly denying them benefits in the process. The Journal notes that the suit marks the first time the contentious issue of holding down employment costs by outsourcing work to those piece on the oddity of Bill Gates not testifying in person. Even though he is the lawyers might have viewed him as so "prickly and combustible" as to undermine his own case. The paper quotes one lawyer who once questioned the world's richest man live: "At one point he just started screaming, saying that what the Several readers found yesterday's mention of the LAT lead story about They were right. The piece posed a number of issues that cried out for further attention. It stated that ranking 31st in federal funds per pupil meant that state's per pupil amount should be the same, and failing that, one should distribution, with most of the states over time clustering around the middle of the pack. So 31st really isn't that bad. And is it right for a paper to promote local interests that hard anyway? Shouldn't the LAT ask first if for All the papers report that yesterday, a computer problem halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange for about an hour. The papers give precise accounts of the standstill with one glaring exception: none mentions the brand of computer that failed. Is this lazy reporting or a gentleman's agreement not to goes with upcoming statistics from the Centers for Disease Control suggesting traditional dogma, burglary is a good predictor of violent crime. information: The tart letters back and forth between Judiciary and the White will produce an impeachment bill. Both say that until last week the impeachment revealing that the man responsible for the federal government's largest study of diabetes, which included administration of that drug, was at that time also paper says that according to legal experts, this seems to be a crime under Quest. According to the paper, there's hardly been one effective habit on display, much less seven. The company's stock is but three dollars above its company logo. One observer quoted sums up the situation this way: "It's proof that the great business gurus know how to run everyone's business but their fourteenth paragraph, the Post stops to explain something: "the Y stands but elsewhere in the paper, another reporter lucks out. Today, the some of the usual trappings of a financial story, but most of the multiples that the House impeachment debate begins this morning and presumably a third day of military actions will soon follow. So at some point then, there will be forces. He is also quoted saying that other strikes were "not as successful." None of the papers note the Pentagon briefing technique on display here: While whether or not the building seems to have been hit intentionally. suggestion made previously by senior Republicans that he ordered the airstrikes to distract from the drive to impeachment: "I don't think any serious person would believe that any president would do such a thing." The papers also note a matter what our debates at home, we are as a nation prepared to lead the weapons sites in order to avoid unleashing plumes of poisons into the air that Meanwhile, the papers report, Congress yesterday was the site of bitter debate over whether or not the impeachment debate and vote should proceed while first floor speech since being chosen to be the next Speaker, claimed as of the imminent release of a Roll Call piece based on a story his affairs were "not with employees on my staff, and I have never been asked to testify under oath about them." Well, Congressman, just to reassure the nation, you wouldn't mind doing that now, would you? inspection efforts in violation of promises it made last month, a report that previously indicated that keeping the inspection effort viable was a reason not The Wall Street Journal has some particularly good detail on why the current action may be more effective than the Desert Storm air war: it will involve a much higher percentage of precision weapons, the cruise missiles now have satellite guidance, there isn't the distraction of also trying to attack an army deployed throughout the region, and the targeting is now being done off seven years of they could get very far into their usual defensive practice of dispersing their break with the tradition of congressional support for military actions once about the president's motives in this attack is itself a powerful argument for impeachment. After months of lies, the president has given millions of people is as it should be. If important politicians question the timing, their questioning should be reported, and if there is evidence of suspiciousness in the timing that evidence should be reported as well. But absent such findings, it's irresponsible to talk about "Wag the Dog" in a news story. All kinds of things have been portrayed in movies, but unless their connection to real events is shown, they're not news. But at least the Journal also raises a legitimate question relating the domestic and international situations: Everybody dutifully reports that one factor in the timing of the operation's why should we? There's a further incoherence here that the papers don't get into. Why is it a sign of respect for your religion to kill you before instead impeachment dramatics. All three papers agree that the House will almost makes the front pages, as the Pentagon admits that the bombing campaign has been less successful than hoped. Administration officials have not yet decided allegiance to the rule of law, while Democrats characterized the proceedings as reports that Gore is entering the fray as well, saying that he's "fighting hope that killing these loyal soldiers will pave the way for a coup the bombings are not meant to destabilize the regime.) interrupt the impeachment to bring you the bombing. We interrupt the bombing to bring you the impeachment. We interrupt the interruption to bring you a voting on the new spending bill until early next week. although the major budgetary issues have been agreed upon, some smaller All three weekend papers feature front page stories on the awarding of the parties (read: Catholic and Protestant) for their efforts to end sectarian increase in defense spending, reversing a post cold war trend. Apparently, defense equipment and troop quality are not keeping pace with the demands being instead with the Republicans' House leadership elections, which garner big the House's only black Republican, ascended to one of the party's top House prevent the dissemination of damaging information about him, but it's also pointed out everywhere that his testimony will contain the first revelation White House. It's apparent from the accounts that the other major area of that document spoke of possible grounds for impeachment, whereas according to All the papers write from advance copies of his prepared testimony made The papers also mention that neither the White House nor committee Democrats that the fate of the alliance may affect the future of the software industry ticker tape parades come from? Well, today's Journal reports, in the was a resume. No word on how the paper, er, pieced the story together. There is a bunch of coverage today on the prospects for any internal, akin to the Bay of Pigs. The piece also includes this ringing assessment from demonstrated is the ability to fight each other over smuggling rights." Democrats, who are concerned that it would cut into the surplus set aside for social security. "I insist that we reserve the entire surplus until we have President has previously sought to dip into the budget surplus to fund, among the ban on music. Girls, officially forbidden to attend school, are often covertly educated at home by their parents. The article also showcases The LAT front page carries a long historical narrative about the derail its development of nuclear weapons. The article's main source is newly heading off China's nuclear capabilities, but the Soviet Union flatly ignored by a coterie of bankers and brokerage firms. Among other details the Times describes the tense atmosphere at the rescue board meeting in the Fed conference room, in which rival firms were persuaded to take highly unusual more symbolic of military partnership than effective in providing real military is a union of democratic socialism and liberalism ("Our approach is neither Election postmortems lead all around. In the aftermath of the first midterm editor: Was it really necessary at this very satisfying moment for Bill a winning agenda." And the problem, at least in the eyes of some of the more of the Family Research Council complaining, "We just ran one of the least ideological campaigns we've run in years...." and a similar complaint from points out the dilemma the Republicans face if they respond by simply congressman: "We've got to reach out and have more than Southern white males Times version: "I mean, I totally underestimated the degree to which then the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by would never again as long as he was Speaker make a speech without commenting on sort of chagrin that's behind the rumblings of a House coup all the papers The papers also say that an immediate consequence of the vote is at least a now leaning towards having his Judiciary Committee call only one flatly asserts that the Republican majority is now so slim that "there is about his military service. This would be a fine time to elaborate.) man in power to lead, not a play plastic puppet like other politicians." which has hawked the story on its front and editorial pages harder than anybody was in the works, the Times went with something else, but leads with it vote, but additional charges such as obstruction of justice would not. The before, but then reopened the investigation based on new evidence of Gore's Gore's remarks at these meetings that he was contemplating flouting the decision. "We need to take these matters out of the hands of the Attorney failed to follow the law. For the past two years, the attorney general has made it clear she is committed to protecting the president." The papers agree that to the former's pitch to the "technologically challenged" and the latter's would be as ubiquitous as cell phones are today. However, the Times says addition to the current warning against taking the medication if a patient is already taking any heart drug containing nitrates, the labels will now also say blood pressure. The LAT explains that this is based on a close look at popping the pills. The point is that when sex itself is risky because of underlying cardiological problems, then impotence remedies should be avoided. vision, which could make reading cockpit instruments and runway lights The Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" says more and more was designed to keep the wealthy from dodging federal tax entirely through the artful use of deductions, credits and the like. The paper cites the example of compelling if the Journal had told the reader what the man's income was. But absent this information, it's a little hard to get worked up about this wonders, in light of the shows big rating and attendant advertising revenues, "Shouldn't the profit motive end where life and death become mere commodities justified by its prompting of honest debate on a topic now more shrouded than convincing on this point: donate all ad revenues produced by the show to Times gets is, "If it isn't over, it's pretty close to over." Taking says he'd have to win over more than half. The Nation's Newspaper also carries working with the White House to try to persuade fellow moderates to oppose The papers describe various last minute scenarios being floated at the White House, none of them having yet obtained presidential imprimatur: a televised address, and various alternative punishments, including the proposal of a aide's harsh comment about Dole: "Those who have the power make the decisions. Those who had the power, but lost it, have no right even to kibitz." There's fine. (Jeez, why didn't liberals ever think like this? They could have stuck observation in the LAT seems particularly insightful: the root of the assaults the Constitution in that it threatens what it calls "the jewel in the avoid impeachment, say he lied under oath, because that would be a lie, has a question: Why stop lying now, when a lie could save your Presidency? Today's following confession to your accusers in Congress: "Everything I say about the Palm Beach but couldn't get a husband, you could pay for one of those tiny then you'd be getting asked out by assistant professors or public interest outfits, your likes and dislikes and the earning power of your ideal mate. But it's not clear how much mail you're going to get from the article. After all, you let them quote your theory of dating: "The cost of buying a woman dinner at in history. The House voted to impeach the president for perjury before a grand Two other impeachment votes failed: for perjury in a civil suit (defeated votes, a Democratic motion to bring a censure proposal to the floor also failed All three papers note that the Senate is unlikely to convict, which requires readers of earlier predictions this year that impeachment would never pass the House on a partisan vote and that the Democrats would suffer losses in the midterm elections, warns: "In the toxic politics of century's end in next year) is attributed mainly to pleading from his wife, but also to the fury of a small band of conservative Republican members who threatened not to after an irresponsible impeachment vote "would itself set a harmful precedent." The New York Times reports that many Republicans fear that white whip, to be the likely next speaker, having quickly won the support of whip Tom themselves lacked sufficient support to win the job. The Post emphasizes former high school teacher and coach. Not much more is said about him. program has been set back "by at least a year." In a New York Times had to call it Operation Desert [something beginning with "s" or "f"]. A spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted saying, implausibly, that The papers are dominated by the political reactions of the White House and impeachment to the full House. Most of the leads report that Republican impeachment are now "quite strong." One factor that all the papers note: a censure alternative should be kept from House consideration. This would planning various procedural moves to try to force censure before the House and that's why he jerks his chain all the time." And the Times has Rep. quote a colorful array of characters on both sides of the question. Now, what Canton has been an uncanny bellwether of presidential prospects in several elections. But still, such pieces are utterly random and anecdotal. Polls are bad enough, but these pieces are basically bad polls. stunning reason why nuclear proliferation may finally have become unstoppable: the radical availability now of the raw computing power nuclear weapons programs require. The story convinces right off the bat, with the dean of in order to keep his share of work on the case, would that be illegal? levels occurred despite recent corporate announcements of upcoming job cutbacks. Huh? Today's Papers wonders why these papers think layoffs that will happen in the next few months would have any effect on last month's employment statistics show a troublesome gap between manufacturers, whose production is down due to overseas financial trouble, and service industries, which continue Committee allows it, this move might push the House's vote on impeachment into Congress. Congressional negotiations are stalled over a dollar amount, however, papers report that the expanded defense would focus on the independent counsel's misconduct and on the definition of an impeachable offense. for burglary, has already given one kidney to his daughter and his selflessness been referred to a university bioethics committee that must weigh factors such cost of dialysis that the prison system would have to pay. The father and daughter had not met before the first kidney transplant, but have stayed in newspaper's commentator asks, "...have we turned into a wimp state?" The situation like that, you shoot to kill." Such criticism has outraged many haven't experienced anything of this kind don't have a right to speak." to making the trip in private cars, not just mass transportation. All the which the company's lawyer made his opening statement, comparing the government The papers all note what a kludge the budget process has become. For policy decisions that Congress never debated. And they all tick off examples of legislation to carry out the Chemical Weapons Convention (previously passed by the Senate, but not implemented) as well as a measure to keep the world safe weight=40 pounds, height=16 inches, and the number of pages=3,825. This sort of that by the conservatives' lights, the bill spends too much and cuts taxes too a severe split in the Republican Party that may be hard to patch up. was trying to undercut his election opponent's strong support among women voters. This is a bit brisk for a news story: Isn't there any chance that papers attribute the weak exports and strong imports behind the gap to the The LAT fronts high a story about the emerging tension between the makers of legal, medical and financial software on the one hand, and lawyers, doctors and investment professionals on the other, as the software nibbles away The paper notes that the power of the Internet will only expand professional software's reach. An example the LAT gives is the recent spate of web questionnaire. In telling this story, the paper makes an interesting choice: free advertising. Does the LAT also intend to start publishing the phone numbers of lawyers and doctors in stories about them? The main thrust of the two Times leads is that the ranks of the Republican members of Congress declaring themselves to be firmly against that "A Congress so out of step with the people it claims to represent ...is a particularly important, noting that Shays had long been an announced foe of impeachment. Both report that Shays will soon have a personal meeting with opponent of impeachment, is still solid, but the LAT says he's reconsidering his position. The paper sums up the situation as trending against a piece claiming that federal investigators have come across new evidence about originally thought, designed to influence the outcomes of particular races such contributors' political access so that they could more effectively argue for officials, pleaded guilty yesterday and was sentenced to five years' probation. doubt about Democratic officials assertions of ignorance concerning for auto crash test dummies. They are supposed to wear matching cotton shirts how the limbs flail in a crash. Why the shoes? Because that's what people in crashes are usually wearing. However, socks are optional. The Middle East peace deal, signed yesterday after nine days of intense The agreement sidesteps the most prickly points of contention, including the The "people" dimension of the agreement almost overshadows its substance. peculiarly disappeared from public view after the murder, and was nabbed by police yesterday. His name will remain on the ballot, but he will undoubtedly with special silk ribbons and red wax seals) are headed for the market. The leads with the financial markets' reaction to the Fed rate cut. a single Republican vote, and the Republicans want credit for pressuring surplus: the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, which kept defense spending from going higher, the moderation of health care costs, and the extra bills required for government operations have been completed. Also, the papers wants to reserve it for dealing with the coming Social Security crunch, want to allocate at least some of the surplus to tax relief. the folly of giving much newspaper space to it on full display. The story's and say that "analysts" see these developments as a flight from international market. Also, the concerned tone of the story takes too narrow a point of mortgage rates are wonderful right now and off the Treasury yield dip can only think such criticism means the defense business is headed for a correction, states, "It's almost certain that Congress will use a good chunk of the budget surplus for defense." Glassman goes on to note that some leading professional week in the fed funds rate, which determines the cost of money throughout the head off formal impeachment proceedings in favor of some quicker but lesser minister that he would sign a nuclear test ban treaty within the next year, a on to point out some hopeful developments in the relationship between the two ever read, with this difference: it's about rates going down, not up. The likely move is said to be in response to what the LAT calls a "drumbeat of pleas" from economists (and, it could be added, from columnists). The papers upcoming cut is but the first of many. The LAT points out however, that there do not appear to be any similar coordinated cuts forthcoming from the his intent to expand any impeachment inquiry into Whitewater, campaign finance abuse and technology transfers to China. The White House immediately responded, says the Post by accusing congressional Republicans of trying elections. The paper describes the atmosphere around the scandal as "escalating The Wall Street Journal has been running a good "first draft of history" series all week on the current global economic crisis. Today's clone." The Times says that the appearance leaves little doubt that in would have been filled by Bill. The paper also reports that at times, the first lady appeared "dazed and distant," especially when a reporter standing directly against "inquisitorial harassment by a fanatical prosecutor with unlimited "contagion." As a result, in any newspaper article about his testimony the directly quoted material is almost always meaningless without gobs of "We have to bring the existing instabilities to a level of stability reasonably shortly. I think we know where we have to go. I do not think we underestimate the severity of the problems with which we are dealing," and then says that think there is a price to pay," should be translated as warning Congress that "eating into the [budget] surplus with either tax cuts or spending increases Three of the leads address a common theme: strengthening patients' rights. Today leads with a new proposal by the federal government that would solidify patients' protections against being refused hospital treatment on Medicaid and Medicare to allow those with disabilities to continue receiving Times lead states that the next Congress is well positioned to pass new out this week would make it clear that hospitals cannot delay care while awaiting coverage approval from a patient's insurance company. The paper says dumping cases. The story says that hospital officials insist they already treat all emergencies, and that the real, continuing problem not addressed by the new guidelines is what to do about patients who present at emergency rooms for feature of current law under which the disabled usually have to choose between medicine that allows the person to hold a job. Currently, eight million The LAT cites a signal reason why prospects for federal health care reform are looking up: the new Republican House leadership looks more favorably for damages when the plan's withholding of authorization was linked to harm he or she suffered. Some such provision is likely to be revisited, says the inquiry, but is relevant again now and is being augmented with additional slave laborers, in the wake of recent similar and successful legal moves German Army and Ford was number two. The primary issue to be litigated, says respect to their German operations after Pearl Harbor. Virtually none, say the companies. Still, a jury will probably be interested to learn that as late as rearmament effort in the thirties was "much less significant" than that of the is now joined at the balance sheet with longtime German auto colossus testimony on public opinion, the committee will vote for impeachment. The poignant rejection of impeachment when put to a vote on the House floor. The opposition to impeachment. This means that if House democrats remain united, makers, noting that the agreement apparently ends the nation's legal war on maintain its revenue stream and receive "significant legal protection for years enough, I say we simply couldn't afford to come away with nothing." called the Independent Counsel an "aggressive advocate" of impeachment and All the papers report that federal agents broke an illegal alien smuggling organization ever dismantled in United States history." Artist Without His Beard" is not known, but the tidy sum represents nearly each focus on the Senate's struggle with the issue of whether or not it still has the option of brokering some sort of resolution to the crisis besides a accompanied by a clear exit strategy. This should have been put high in the instead on the sparse details of what is currently known about damage to raid government practice, foreign journalists have not been invited to view bombed included a female Navy carrier pilot. A sign of the gradual normalization of use of the B-1 bomber. The story's headline speaks of the very expensive and story's body quotes a B-1 officer saying that "vindication might not be the right word," and waits until the ninth paragraph to reveal that "the Pentagon had not yet been able to assess the damage done by the bombers' strikes." woman had taken fertility drugs. These drugs are creating incredibly expensive recent dip in the national savings rate isn't necessarily bad. For one thing, conventions such as not counting capital gains as income that make it look world mired in recession, this may not be a good time to tighten our belts anyway. The Times mentions something else that seems like it could in fact be a silver lining in this supposed cloud: the big fear that the majority of baby boomers will wind up working longer than they expected because they didn't save enough for their retirement. But wouldn't that delay the huge boomer claim on Social Security, thus giving that system more of a chance to along the way actually gives him some very practical advice: under pain of a Senate trial, sign a very tough censure deal, and pay off everybody's legal disease is not among the nation's top ten killers for the first time since statement that Democrats should vote their consciences, with no need to fear White House retribution, when the full House of Representatives decides today resurgence in Japan's stock and currency markets, spurred by evidence of a political deal there to allow public funds to be used to rescue its crippled banking system. The Wall Street Journal explains that the rally shows that Japan's credit crunch is the number one issue with its investors. The papers note that the main thrust of the AIDS results is that while the new treatment drugs are making a huge dent in the death rate, the infection expert who points out that there have been no new federal funds spent on major to put the sustained infection rate in its headline. And although, for instance, the Times mentions an upsurge of unsafe sex practices among gay men, and the problems of mentions the words "gay" or "sex" or "intravenous drugs." House Democratic votes will be more valuable later on than they are now, should as some Democrats openly complained about White House pressure on them to vote The LAT front features a big picture and accompanying story about articles obviously comes from materials produced in discovery for the upcoming government's air war before the ground war of the trial itself. Representatives yesterday passed a bill designed to restrict minors' access to adult material on the Internet. The bill, explains the paper, is designed to be narrow enough to withstand the the Internet availability to young people of material that includes "actual or simulated acts of sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or female breast." And the bill stipulates that people found making such material available to minors many law enforcement authorities to be a criminally based society, specializing in home repair scams generally targeting the elderly. In addition, the group keeps their kids out of school and encourages its girls to get married off in mention of the Gypsies, whom the Travelers seem to resemble in many to ponder an increasingly straitened world. The Post catches the financiers nibbling on pea pancakes topped with caviar, while at another party, bushes. Over the last four years years, four other abortion doctors have been wounded in the region, and just days ago authorities had warned of possible new are unlikely to pose major objections. Nonetheless, the administration is and the word "cool" to every spot on the planet. The article meanders into a be mandatory viewing for half the world's population? famed wordplay ability nudged the negotiations through tight spots. The and weary from empty past peace accords, have greeted the latest installment However, the resolution was softened to the point of ambiguity by the dissent resolution "skirts an outright threat to use force." Of particular concern is the popular, crude parody newspaper. When they're not busy painting their verdict? "We considered dozens of qualified candidates, and it was so difficult Today goes with the Supreme Court's decision not to consider two campaign finance reform cases. And the LAT leads with an analysis of the The LAT tobacco suit story notes that if the case is settled, "the industry got off relatively cheaply in strict financial terms." Smokers that this is not enough to seriously dampen consumption. Health advocates have already criticized the settlement as too lax, but the state attorneys general are eager to settle and get the money. For the settlement to take effect, now seem remote, as Congress is generally disinclined to pass the necessary the market can maintain its course in the face of the global economic process. The Fed's announcements and hints on forthcoming interest rate moves Editor," recommends the piece to the legions of you out there who sent in of the settlement. The agreement must first be approved by the federal judge more hour on this matter." One jubilant White House official quoted in the In other scandal developments, carried in all papers: Independent counsel for a prosecutor to keep indicting the same person over and over again." marketing restrictions, including a ban on billboard advertising. Before the with pending or contemplated suits against tobacco companies. methodology that favors open markets and freer trade. Alarmed by the global global economic regulation. Specific proposals have ranged from establishing a This is sacrilege against Lady Di. Media stories also contain unpardonable Explorer is out of beta, meaning that it is no longer considered experimental. Explorer is a free little program that makes it easier to find your way around Slate. It tells you what's in each day's issue; it takes you to the page you want; and it even fires up your browser for you if you're not online at the moment. Slate Explorer has been awarded Slate magazine's "Cool Software of the products. "It's um, you know, really cool," explained the chairman of the delivery right on the Today's Papers page or by clicking here.) Most of the feedback we get is positive. But we do get several complaints a week about misspellings, grammatical errors, and so on. these working conditions, and that the hour ought to excuse a few typos and other minor mistakes. The reason we don't catch them is that the rest of us are then grabs the copy from our site and mails it to our subscriber list. Except it is every journalist's fantasy to be able to mainline prose directly into a publication without the interference of an editor. And there aren't many First Amendment gives weekly magazines the right to a week off every now and two years ago, we thought we were a weekly magazine, more or less. But a few readers) might prefer to describe it. We now post new material at all occurred the day after we shut down for a week, we realized that a vital and material than usual. The first of those summer weeks is now upon us. We have interim, though, we will continue to post and update "Briefing" features such the daily "News Quiz" will appear; and features such as "Chatterbox," "The Breakfast Table," and "Dialogues" will be updated often but irregularly, as always. That should be enough to satisfy most people, we hope. And if you need more, there's two years' worth of our archive, "The Compost," to poke around inevitable drop in our audience. We're delighted to report that it hasn't Reach is defined as the percentage of the total World Wide Web audience in visitors as we have subscribers? Answer: People are coming to our "front will persuade visitors to purchase the full meal. And that appears to be All these other sites except the Economist are free. The New 's chief political correspondent, looked around him a few months ago and saw nothing but squalor. This is not a reference to way, inciting no small amount of envy in those of us who labor in the bland squalid was the subject matter he was forced to contemplate week after week: privatization alone." And he pleaded to the editor, "Take me away from here, to a realm of high thoughts and charmed vistas, where I may contemplate matters more lovely than special prosecutors and nuclear proliferation. Where aesthetic considerations are paramount and base motives are unknown." generally, you will find nothing but wholesomeness. Beauty is in their hearts and beauty is on their minds. Dwell among them and let their purity wash away the filth of politics with which you are encrusted after lo! these many columns shafts of doubt. "Are you sure," he asked the editor, "that the world of culture is actually so wonderful and that the people who dwell therein are not much of a column. What will I impugn, if not motives?" replied. "You will think of something. And, come to think of it, the world of culture may not be as pure as all that after all. There is squalor aplenty. But at least it will be a different kind of squalor." And the editor decreed that Bedfellow" column was posted last week. (And here's the latest.) 's Explainer is complaining about the quality of the questions he is receiving. Explainer stands ready to explain items in the day's news that are confusing or vague or seemingly contradictory or otherwise inadequately explained by the conventional media. But many of the questions he receives, he says, are "tendentious." They don't really seek information or understanding. unanswerable. They begin from a debatable premise and go on to raise profound metaphysical questions that are beyond the scope of this The answer is inherently subjective. (Many people believe, in all sincerity, that he is a very small jerk. Nor does the question allow for the possibility, however slight, that he is not a jerk at all.) "Why doesn't my computer work?" is another category of questions Explainer is not prepared to answer. Questions about life and love should go to "Dear Prudence." But if there's something that truly puzzles you in the paper this morning, Explainer is eager to straighten you out. Hart embarked on the Monkey Business with Donna Rice, public exposure of Hart's adultery would get reported, but the nation would yawn. The story would vanish quickly from the news, and all the pundits would say that Hart's wandering eye was less important than his expertise on weapons procurement. least, is the revised scenario suggested by the two sex scandals that broke last week. Reputable publications reported that the president of the United was having an affair with his communications director would have no impact on interview in his office. But there is no sign of harm to the president's approval rating, which continues to hover in the low 60s. Ten years ago, both as not would have chewed up successful politicians and spat them out onto the Now such stories don't even rate as scandals. They mainly reporters who got scooped beating up those who broke the story. As ever before, it was amusing to watch the prestigious media organs resist temptation as best they could, only to yield hypocritically a few days later. When Vanity under the guise of discussing whether the mayor was spending too much time at the office. "When you think about it, the most interesting part of this angle is significant. By reporting gossip about gossip, Drudge has was utterly false, and Drudge retracted it under threat of a lawsuit. But all this was reported in the Post and elsewhere, putting the falsehood into wider circulation. As the supermarket tabloids have shown, the ethical standard something is published by anyone, it becomes fair game for analysis and repetition. Irresponsible, inaccurate postings on the Internet are now a back door for stories that don't even meet the standards of the tabloids. have declined, the formerly godlike power of the establishment media to decide days, the Times and Post were inclined to withhold information about the personal lives of politicians on the assumption that readers couldn't handle it. While sophisticated journalists might understand that an extramarital affair wasn't such a big deal, the public at large was too bigoted and judgmental to put such information in proper perspective. A frequent lament attitude was condescending and undemocratic. If voters considered all Ten Commandments pertinent to their decision about whom to vote for, the New York Times had no business suppressing information about one that it credit for. While people may be extremely interested in details about any famous person's sex life, they don't deem that information particularly useful information that might not harm a Democratic president could still destroy a notion of the president as an adulterer, or worse. An added datum weighs far less than does a novel accusation against someone previously considered a good family man. But something clearly has changed. Even conservative Republicans, about politicians' performance in office than about the condition of their maturity argues not for an advance, but for a retreat on the part of the press. If voters don't deem personal lives politically relevant, there's no justification for reporters invading people's privacy to find out about them. the people we want in public life away from public life. And if the public doesn't think adultery matters, the press is exploiting politicians merely for the Vanity Fair story was defective, among other reasons, because its evidence fell short of the photographic. But getting better evidence means even standard of relevance, not a higher burden of proof. mayor values for more than her spin. It was getting absurd for reporters to analyze developments at City Hall without referring to a romantic attachment whether the president misused government resources. But reporters can always find pretexts of one kind or another: that the person is a hypocrite, is lying raises questions of "character." It's time to quit fishing. When it comes to simple adultery, journalists should listen to the voters. If they don't care, action is usually cast as a fight between conservatives who wish to abolish the policy and liberals who want to keep it. That is a misunderstanding. The argument is actually between conservatives who want to remodel affirmative Rather, they propose to base it on the principle of economic disadvantage. This, they contend, would bring similar results in terms of diversity, without affirmative action would be fine if it were limited to efforts at "recruitment" and "training." They generally agree that affirmative action is acceptable as a "remedy" for specific acts of past discrimination. Many who think that affirmative action shouldn't be required by law favor it as a voluntary policy. And, of course, most opponents of affirmative action practice it themselves. Black opponents of affirmative action, for example, are heavily favored over whites with similar views in getting promoted by the conservative propaganda If group preferences are wrong in principle, as these opponents maintain, none of their exceptions makes much sense. Consider the "remedy for past discrimination" dodge. Say you're a highly qualified white man if you got turned down because the department once discriminated against alternative is even less of an improvement. It actually heightens the injustice of affirmative action by punishing some people for a historical wrong that they famous for economic opportunity and class mobility as it is for its legacy of a real problem for an even more vexed solution to an illusory problem. on the other hand, spend less time defending affirmative action than they do numerical quotas are unfair and discriminatory, while "flexible" goals are not. Race should be a factor, but it must not be the factor. What's the real difference? In either case, members of a protected group win jobs, promotions, This is colorblindness of a sort: No one can identify specific victims or exist as surely as they do under a policy of explicit quotas. "racial preferences" and "reverse discrimination" in favor of the term says he wants to "mend" affirmative action. Opponents, it turns out, say the same thing. So, behind the vicious argument is actually something like shared understanding that affirmative action is a toxic medicine, sometimes necessary, that we've been using too freely. The dosage needs to be scaled back. But how? Any kind of affirmative action means preferring some people over others for reasons having nothing to do with their intrinsic private institution, should take on lightly. But it remains justified in one society as a whole. Were this problem evaporating on its own, affirmative action would not be necessary. The condition of blacks is improving, but there Ordeal of Integration --that affirmative action has played an essential role in fostering both integration and the growth of the black middle class. If affirmative action needs to be reformed, the way to fix it is to narrow it, to order, which first created preferences in federal contracting, applied only to hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly however, the concept was stretched to cover other minorities and women, who were less hobbled at the starting line. The greatest expansion was under horse to slaughter Democrats. Yet Democrats continued to push to qualify new "liberals love big government." The New Deal political model for social deserving. A broad base of beneficiaries meant a broad base of political "gender" before "race" in defining the policy. Though this approach didn't stop explicit strategy for saving affirmative action is to rally women in its defense. Thus new Small Business Administration regulations intended to make it and so on. But the mistreatment of all groups other than blacks was far less severe, and it has proven far more amenable to cure without radical large following the classic patterns of immigrant and ethnic assimilation. For In their abstract mode, conservatives argue that any group bias is unfair. Why should whites who did not themselves discriminate against is that it shouldn't be thought of as punishment. Whites who never practiced discrimination are nonetheless beneficiaries of it. discrimination if blacks had always been equal. Imagine a law school class with if blacks had not been enslaved and discriminated against? Under the doesn't necessarily mean that in a world with no racial discrimination, present is to replicate a colorblind world, a world with some forms of racial affirmative action comes closer than a world without it. respects, too, the country is in better economic shape now than during the homelessness and welfare, the '90s boom has been accompanied by a decline in those same ills. Recent hints of an increase in real incomes suggest that affluence may be more widely shared this time around. Faced with such brilliant economic performance, Republicans tend to be as eager to deny any credit to the incumbent president as they were to give him all the credit in the 1980s. Republican line that presidents have less impact on the economy than most to producing the general conditions of prosperity, presidents have little power. The government's main economic lever, the money supply, is the province domestic product growth has been remarkably consistent over the past couple of policy does affect the health of the economy. Though the Fed is supposed to be who picked him. Carter, for instance, deserves considerable credit for choosing Carter was committing honorable suicide by picking him. Furthermore, presidents can make it harder or easier for the Fed to do its job trade and dollar policy, but have a less tangible impact on business and consumer confidence. It may be ridiculous that our presidential elections are president's hands. But if voters ignored the condition of the economy in choosing their president, they would be even less realistic. contends, fueled the current gush of tax revenues as well as a flourishing revenues beyond expectations in the last couple of years are the last two tax the economy. Government borrowing left less capital for private investment, which meant that growth was lower and entrepreneurs were worse off than for today's good times is limited to his sometimes equivocal support for free consider him a major traitor. By raising taxes significantly, the budget deal discipline to domestic spending. The same year Bush fell on his sword by breaking his "read my lips" pledge, he impaled himself again by reappointing fierce enemy of inflation who wouldn't prime the pump before an election to independence than Bush did. Reluctantly, but less reluctantly than Bush, which passed with zero Republican votes, included a tax increase that was directly benefited the economy, bringing down interest rates and boosting the faithful to the cause of deficit reduction. He has also aided the economy in better. Real wages continue to grow slowly. To increase wages significantly 's "The Fray" are one of the advantages of publishing on the Web. But they also create a weird anomaly. On the one hand, the writings of professional get paid for it, are put through an editorial process more or less like that of a traditional paper magazine, which can take several hours to a week or more from manuscript to "publication." On the other hand, any stranger anywhere in the world can have his or her words posted on our site instantaneously and with no editing at all (except very occasionally after the fact). contradiction, we decided not to start rigorous editing of the Fray. It remains meddlesome editors wielding software programs such as Semicolon we have been experimenting cautiously with the opposite approach: giving a few To be honest, this decision was based less on philosophical insight than on the and musings about culture, high and low). Both these departments are updated with new material two or three times a week, very approximately, on no set schedule and at no particular time of day or night. From the author's laptop to features are evolving in accord with the Web imperatives of continue our happy relationship with the Motley Fool shortly with a new background briefing on some issue in the news, will become "Explainer." An explained). Our Explainer (the person, not the article) will be standing by every weekday to explain things the newspapers and television and even news Web sites leave unclear. It might be the historical background of some current news story. It might be a straightforward rundown of the facts and arguments in a controversy that has been clouded by strong passions and flying sound bites. Or it might be a snappy summary of some issue that would be clear enough if you you're not about to do, because life is short. That's fine! Explainer will read is fully capable of finding news stories confusing or unclear without "Frame Game" feature: shrewd analysis of how an issue is being framed by the contending interests and who is winning the frame game. These essays are accessible directly from the Contents page or from the different cities, moves outside the subscription wall for a while, beginning published by Random House. A "personal and poignant defense of assimilation, are for buying what you're selling, among other things. With that thought in announces our Referral Program: Persuade a friend to will check to make sure that people by these names have really or if you really persuaded them to sign up. Click here for more details and unloved? What that computer needs is a subscription to details. No purchase necessary. Some restrictions apply. (We've always wanted time talking about it." Now, another senator might have noted that he was spending a lot of time thinking about the issue, perhaps, or listening to the arguments on both sides. But this is the Torch, member of the upper chamber most in love with the sound of his own voice. When he seems to have figured out in a hurry how this Senate thing works. "I didn't amendment, which is set to fail by one vote early next week. This claim of three other Democratic "undecideds" had the narrow defeat of the bill. But announcement to make himself the center of media attention. He also showed how version he now opposes, three different times. During his recent campaign, he said in unequivocal terms that he was in favor of the amendment, donning his fiscally irresponsible liberal. So his first order of business in the Senate anything so dramatic as to say he might have been wrong in the past. Instead, he reinterpreted his past position as semaphore. He wasn't really voting to amend the Constitution at the time. He was trying to send a "message" about fiscal irresponsibility to various presidents and to Congress. (When I conked you over the head with that frying pan, I was merely indicating my fiscally irresponsible as the next guy. In Congress, people send messages to step is the fun part: agonizing in public. The national grandmaster of this does, because with him, it's not an act. He is truly, paralytically ambivalent, perpetually ruminating about whether he should run for president even while he gave interviews to the New York Times and National Public Radio the week before last saying how seriously he took the arguments on both sides, and how impressed he was with the deep consideration of important issues that took your vote. At this stage, you are the most popular guy in town. The president invites you over to watch the Super Bowl. His aides respond to your smallest can't ask for pork if you want to be seen as a deep thinker. Demanding a bridge as your price would be tacky, especially in exchange for killing off a all the post offices you want.) More dignified is to ask for some kind of spread out the costs of "investment" expenditure. Presto: After a conversation examine this important issue. Click to have Slate's editor explain what's wrong days earlier, but that was just to bear the weight of another senator, even a version of the amendment because it didn't contain any provision for the provide for one, pending the report of the Torch Commission. The merits of that issue aside, this was an absurd proposal in the context of debate about a contradictory ideas. Being against the former because it doesn't provide for the latter is like saying you don't like a house because it doesn't have circumstances unforeseen will deal with renewed military hostilities, a deep recession, or the problem of declining economic competitiveness." Nice bit of order will get you everywhere in the Senate. After his endless speech on the Chins were stroked. Editorials were penned, hailing the decision. A strange new Democrats were one vote short, and wouldn't have succeeded in defeating the on the merits, but I never questioned his sincerity on the issue. Or take level of debt," he said, "and it's possible several members could emerge to use maybe one new senator could just stop talking for a while. forums and chat rooms without joining in yourself. In "The Fray," world and conduct energetic discussions of everything under the sun. To give you a taste, we've started a new department called "Best of the some of the livelier ongoing discussions. If you haven't yet entered the Fray, start with Best of to get the general idea, then go and lurk a bit, then jump site. But we certainly don't want to discourage sales. So let us be clear that the book contains a few excellent essays not available on the Web and that it is a delightful physical object in its own right. pundits have debated how Bob Dole would exit the stage. Would he depart on a negative note about his opponent or a positive one about himself? Would he leave with anger or with humor? In the past several days, the issue has been settled. Dole, it appears, will end his political career raging against the House. "This is a disgrace," Dole insisted. "I doubt if you even read it in the "We are not going to let the media steal this election," he told a crowd in crowd this size, the New York Times will write not many people showed hammer us on a daily basis. We make a major speech, they bury it back on highhandedly quoting everything and explaining none of it, leaving its readers baffled as to why the Republican nominee is so upset at the paper. In fact, Dole's fury at the Times is hardly news to those who work at the paper. protested that she had misunderstood the candidate's position on abortion. The real bitterness, however, began in May, when the paper played what Dole aides Since then, campaign honchos have peppered the paper's reporters and editors with constant phone calls and letters complaining about unfair treatment. told reporters waiting to board the campaign plane, had just come from an reporters told about the appearance in advance? According to reporters present, AWOL in the drug war. "Where has he been for four years? How many hundreds of thousands of young people started drugs?" Dole said. "Three million have started smoking while he was playing around with smoking and all this stuff accused the President of 'playing around' while the drug war raged out of that Dole was talking about a very different kind of 'playing continues: "Since May, I have been pointing out to you a problem we see with the accuracy and understanding of context revealed in Kit's reporting," going in a manner that distorted the accuracy of her assertions and your story, but speaking on background, a senior campaign official elaborated upon the complaint. "They've just done a miserable job throughout this campaign," the official said. "The coverage of Dole has been excessively bitchy from day one, in addition to having a number of extraordinary factual problems." With Dole full time since the summer, "the problem is an incredible focus on the little picture as opposed to the big picture." As an example, the official as "a rough stretch of politicking." Other than those two episodes, the official says, Dole actually had a great week. The campaign's complaint extends official describes as "the softest portrait since they invented black editorial judgments based on disposition to be tough on Bob Dole or nice to Bob editor's note acknowledging that it shouldn't have truncated the "playing drug dealer who visited the White House the same day Dole accused the paper of says. This stems, however, not from any bias, she says, but from the campaign's own internal problems. Dole's campaign has been especially "porous," with aides Famous for going over and over her tape recordings on the campaign plane, he had a delightful time drawing out his vowels as he described financial Dole in another story: "They've turned the White House into something else, I don't know what it is. It's the animal house! It's the animal house!" Most reporters would write, Bob Dole yesterday compared the White House to an "animal house," sparing the exclamation points, and making him sound at least observes the rules of syntax most of the time. Something similar may be their editorial counterparts, have a strong bias against dullness. Take, for ran the day after the second presidential debate does make Dole look like a same day, it captures the spirit of the event, with Dole grimly taking the paper that broke Whitewater and the story of the first lady's commodities on the campaign trail has been somewhat softer than the coverage of Dole, as even other Times reporters acknowledge. But the explanation is institutional, not ideological. The press, as many have complained, overemphasizes the "horse race" aspect of politics. As a side effect of that attacks on the Times have the appearance of being an exercise in They don't like them in the South." But this pat explanation doesn't entirely voters he would need to turn around in order to make the miraculous happen. And in fact, according to a senior Dole aide, the attacks are heartfelt on the candidate's part. Dole has been going after the Times over the objections of advisers who have been telling him there's no percentage in Times because he is truly furious and not because he thinks it will help him get elected, what is he so angry about? The answer, I think, is that there which feels shut out of the closed circle of the Eastern establishment. At the the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered, and never learned." That phrase recalled an attack he made on the Dole said then. "They belong to the same elite: They can be found living shunted onto D19 when he ought to have been on A1. It's his feelings, as he says goodbye to politics, about the people who get to decide. calculation, gave the most to charity last year. No doubt the editors of Fortune were completely unaware of a remarkably similar feature, the of a list of the biggest givers originated with Ted Turner, vice chairman of rodents, and so on). Still, we did get there first. If Fortune couldn't resist ripping us off, a bit of credit might have been nice. Fortune 's list is on the Web, but we're not even going to link to it. So exchange we published, and it's pretty darned interesting. We're working on persuading them to let us share the subsequent mail messages with you as with the rap: It's uncivilized, it's just show biz, it's not serious, you all similar complaints, apparently, about the liberal hosts). In the family of Crossfire deserves more respect. To start, it is honest in a way the other shows are not. Virtually all the political talk shows require journalists to adopt one of two dishonest postures: agnosticism or omniscience. pretend that they are neutral observers who have no opinion about the subject at hand. This is not only dishonest, but it also limits their ability to frame journalists) are free to have a point of view. Indeed, they are required to have, or to pretend to have, a passionate and fully informed viewpoint on every Crossfire 's basic fuel is the tendentious question. As a host, you honest, and it's also more effective in getting at the truth. Or at least, that job was "no doubt profitable and not arduous as these things go." But it's a how to deliver a prepackaged sound bite. Guests are less likely to get away with that on Crossfire than on any other show. Crossfire hosts not only are freer to ask more pointed questions, but they're also free to point out that a guest hasn't answered them, to follow up two or three or four times, and ultimately either to extract an answer or to make vividly clear that not nearly as much shouting on Crossfire as its reputation would suggest. But the show does get cacophonous, sometimes to the point of making the discussion unintelligible. That's not on purpose. It's the price of Crossfire 's approach. The opposite approach has a price, too. Other emphasis on maintaining a civilized atmosphere actually dulls the intellectual rigor of the discussion. Many politicians who are regulars on the other shows print punditry. Where else does a pundit face one or more people dedicated to demolishing his or her arguments on the spot and making him or her look like a immediate to fear than a distant letter to the editor or, at worst, a politely can be aggravating. There's the strain of finding something to argue about in every big news event, the artifice of dividing every controversy into two sides labeled "left" and "right." There are the many points of argument and fact that term for two, three, or four people talking at once). Like all these shows, Crossfire often falls for spin, serves the establishment, legitimizes phonies, and in general misses the point completely. But it's no worse than the consumer advocate, recently announced plans for a conference called "Appraising internal liaison officer reasoned, "Look, bud, do you know who you're dealing terminal. (He never carries an umbrella. "Do you know how many microbes there patterns may be acquired in the future. No "global strategy" involved! The sole purpose is to provide weather users with a more consistent meteorological interface. A wide variety of weather will continue to be offered free of when their computers crash. (Every year, hundreds of computer users develop hernias or serious back problems from attempting to lift up their machines and inflating balloon that will pin the user to his or her seat until the computer to enter on his knees, fall prostrate, and apologize profusely for impugning the company's motives. He would then be taken off and melted into software. But people to buy software? What a marketing concept! It fits in perfectly with our entertainment) with agitprop. Beyond that, the willingness of a top news organization to suspend all skepticism is one more sign that the drug war has News, has redoubled these efforts. Last year, when the partnership presented the partnership. Fighting racism and protecting the environment are good causes Despite the worthiness of these causes, questions arise about the methods, tactics, reliability of information, and sources of funding of any advocacy organization. Nonprofits often provide essential help for reporters, but it's the cigarette and liquor industries, which want to distinguish their products from illegal drugs. The partnership no longer accepts smoking and Foundation, whose wealth is based on pharmaceuticals. in the March Against Drugs. Drinking by teens is arguably a bigger problem than educational pamphlet distributed by the network in connection with the march. month. It did, however, run an alarmist story on Good little exaggeration in a good cause? The air of hyperbole that surrounds the message doesn't have to be accurate if it sells. One famous partnership ad crude and dishonest propaganda during a real war, as opposed to a metaphorical one like the war on drugs. But this month, it seems to be dropping all its Time about the difficulty of talking honestly to one's kids about drugs, partnership were edited out of the discussion before it aired. Perhaps this was presented this month, it will probably be some stoned freak with a ponytail. Kids" might sound like just another dumb slogan la "Just Say No." But these added is a new page called Pundit Links, with links to the most recent columns by Central" page, where we give you a quick and (we hope) insightful and entertaining roundup of what happened on the weekend talk shows. And if you you'll never find yourself short of an opinion again. you may have pleasure from writing, after it is over, if you have written well; up in the '70s, was a still an esoteric sport. To find matches, we of the the distant suburbs. On almost a weekly basis, we were humiliated by teams of since just after birth. Their mothers, who surrounded the field, terrified our locked their boys in the sausage shed as punishment for missing shots. social complexion of the game has changed. No longer a mere bridge between mainstream as Little League baseball. Indeed, the sport is now so populist that in the opinion of all the experts, it is "soccer moms" who will determine the outcome of next month's election. According to a lead story in the New York candidates had tried to woo it. The idea is that while most other demographic segments are largely committed, soccer moms make up a volatile, and hence Who exactly, we must ask, are these soccer moms who hold informs us, "shuttling the kids to practice in minivans, nervously pacing the sidelines, juggling the demands of family and career." Well naturally, but what sort of women take their kids to soccer practice? According to one South in life is to do too much for her children. She got on a waiting list early for stressed." Opinion is similarly divided on her employment status. In the view woman who has "temporarily taken up child rearing." According to the family." The consensus seems to be that soccer moms are some subset of presumably, to urban "rap moms" who do not), and they are incredibly busy. If you can't find a soccer mom for your story, don't worry. Part of the shtick is journalist's friend, allows us to trace the historical evolution of the term. that she shot her two daughters and then tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. The application of the term to politics goes back only to last year, during the primaries and now works for Bob Dole. (See a sample of his work in Remover.) "The working soccer mom is the swing voter of this election," Dole campaign signed him up full time. "And she is not going to trust a guy who argues for the need to own an assault weapon. She'll trust a guy who can feel part of the political lexicon, it may be because it is cleverly positioned at of the suburbs, the popularity of the Dodge Caravan, and so on. Yet there is something intrinsically misleading about the category, and indeed about all determined by the media's ideal voter of that year, the Angry White Male, who loved guns and beer while hating government and liberals. What, one wonders, happened to Angry White Male? Did he die in a hunting accident? Did he go on election? The notion that there is a single demographic group that determines each election, then recedes back into the anonymity of the general populace, is useful for political consultants and reporters. But as the impermanence of such to be meaningless or so large that differences between them are more important wealth. As voters, these women have little in common from election to gap has turned into a gorge this year, with women in all categories favoring the president by a 26-point margin, according to the most recent the election were very close, such a bulge might make a difference. But as Guy higher up the socioeconomic ladder, women tend to vote more differently from their husbands. So it's hardly a surprise that soccer moms are somewhat more be true of the swing back toward the Democrats this year. Soccer moms, whoever crucial swing voter, in other words, seems especially muddled and misleading. have emerged, and we won't have soccer moms to kick around anymore. commentator, is (we think) the original source of a profound insight on the extremely talented, etc., etc., etc.) will compete in trying to produce a piece in a hurry. Readers will vote on whose work comes closest to resembling a fungible, the contestants will be tested in a variety of journalistic and the name of a specific publication whose style each hack is expected to accomplished hack put it, the essence of hackery is 'adjusting to a minimum of information to produce the maximum journalistic effect.' Actually, he went on a hack who collects the most votes will be declared victor and be invited to return next year to face challengers. The cheat sheets will be published for hacks are hacking away, we've got homework for you as well. But it will take a lot less than two hours. We'd be grateful if you took a few minutes to fill out our second annual online reader survey. It will be on our site for two weeks, readers answered our survey. They seemed to enjoy it, and it was extremely biggest and best known of the conservative think tanks. The festivities began a of the West as our ineluctable destiny," Thatcher declared, displaying her usual modesty and sense of fun.) The revelries are to continue for two full who will address the people of Palm Beach on the subject of "Character." point of the Heritage Foundation is that ideas alone have little power without By all measures, Heritage has much to celebrate. From across the political spectrum, opinion appears to be unanimous that the organization has been singularly effective in accomplishing its mission of has played a central role in setting not only the broad conservative agenda but the New Democratic Progressive Policy Institute, says Heritage "wrote the book others, keeps up a steady drumbeat on this theme: Why doesn't the left have an advocacy organization as influential as Heritage? Well, why not? able to raise much more than its liberal counterparts for the same reason that goes to organizations that promote lower taxes and less regulation, two topics on which Heritage is absolutely unflinching. To be sure, there is disinterested Institution, often cast as Heritage's liberal counterpart, could never dream of counterpart. Though it has historically exhibited a modest liberal institution devoted to objective research into public policy. It would never spend its money in an explicit effort to harm its political foes, because it does not conceive of itself as taking a side and does not view politics as ideological warfare. This is even more true of the big "liberal" foundations hand, as exemplified by Heritage, are quite explicit about viewing politics as Institute for in the 1970s. But even if it has settled down a bit, Heritage still retains an insurgent mindset. It views itself as the center of a radical Because of its combat mentality, Heritage has never been a place with very high standards. Like other conservative outfits, it loves the lingo of academic life. Its hallways are cluttered with endowed chairs, visiting fellows, and distinguished scholars. The conceit here is that as a PC Dark Age has overcome the universities, conservative think tanks have become the refuge of thought and learning. At Heritage in particular, this is a laugh. studies and occasionally arrive at unexpected positions. Even the more dogmatic from a libertarian point of view. Heritage, however, is essentially a plan. But on the whole, Heritage is focused on selling and promoting its views rather than on developing thoughtful or nuanced ones. It spends nearly half its colored index card summarizing a conservative position in "short, punchy these cards have been "wildly successful" with Republicans in Congress. 501(c)(3) organization, which means it is not supposed to lobby Congress. "Nothing written here is to be construed as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress." This is an evident absurdity. Heritage exists to aid and hinder legislation before Congress and often boasts its reports into the hands of members of Congress before the relevant votes. For whatever reason, liberal groups tend to be more punctilious about this. Many are split between two organizations, a 501(c)(3), to which contributions are tax deductible, and a 501(c)(4), which is simply not taxable itself, and which has more latitude in lobbying. This reduces the amount liberal groups can temperamentally different from the likes of Heritage. They have their vices, to feeding policy popcorn to Democrats in Congress. They'd be insulted by the idea. It's hard to imagine the Progressive Policy Institute naming a to the Heritage Foundation. Though Democrats have become better in recent years at suppressing their differences in favor of their common interests, they still learn from the most successful organization on the right. But in reality, they're more comfortable, and probably better off, wishing the Heritage Foundation a happy birthday and admiring it from afar. Democrats were the perpetual losers of presidential elections, they developed a formidable ability to psyche themselves into believing that the fault lay healthy economy that favored Republicans. Democrats always complained of a Republicans control of Congress, they reasoned, the people obviously liked what Democrats stood for. The people just had a funny way of expressing it. For some dogmatic Democrats, it seemed, any explanation would do except the obvious politics, the traditional roles are now reversed. Today, it is the Republicans who are on a quest to rationalize political failure. A few go so far as to what of the stations of denial? Conservatives are now ignoring reality with the deserves a medal for intellectual valor.) "The reason for the Republican defeat is to be found not in the economy, not in the opponent, not in the stars, but administration corruption seem like a valid issue, and missed his chance to also makes this argument in his column. "Bob Dole, stranded in the thickets of Snow, failing to extricate him from his own verbal briar patch). But to put all the blame on Dole presumes that there was some other Republican candidate who incumbent president is all but certain to be reelected. It's that simple." simple? Peace and prosperity? As recently as four years ago, pundits were try someone new. As for "prosperity," Republicans certainly didn't attribute ancient days, they thought the president deserved some credit for the state of the economy. They also insisted that larger ideological tides were at work. notes that votes were much more evenly split among married women than among divorced, widowed, or unmarried ones. "Seen in this context, what was seen as an issue of male vs. female actually emerges as the nuclear family vs. something else," the Journal editors write. The editorial goes on to on welfare: "As for the famous gender gap, it appears to be merely part of the basic political tensions that now exist between defenders of the country's updating of the ways we ensure personal and financial security." sympathizers supposed to find comfort in that analysis? If women are disproportionately pro big government, for whatever reason, how does that Are the Journal editors trying to say that Dole would have won the margin than he did last time around, and with the help of a gender gap that conservative, the Republicans ran as conservative, and they both won." This his column: "As the election smoke clears we can now see the political landscape clearly. What stretches out behind us is twenty years of an the inexorable tidal pattern of partisan realignment." a platform that, while certainly less liberal than those of his recent predecessors, is best characterized as reform liberal, not conservative. His Republican tide continues to rise, then, by the same token, it counts as a Democratic victory that Republicans retained control of the House only by And even by their own theory, how do these Republicans explain the voters' preference for an ersatz Republican over the genuine defeat of Bob Dole cannot rationally be interpreted as a victory for brilliant one. Peace and prosperity, which were only partly the president's tactical as well as philosophical reasons. But Dole also lost because of deep Republican problems. Voters rejected, and will probably continue to reject, giving total power to a party that remains a hostage to the Christian right on abortion and that threatens to scale back government in a radical way. facing up to these problems. Or, they can keep blaming it all on bum luck, and to schedule an immediate debate in the Senate represents an important opening reform. But do not suppose that the majority leader has developed any sympathy for a bill that would ban soft money, limit independent expenditures, and tighten disclosure requirements. Republicans have a huge stake in the current election cycle. Incumbents have an even bigger edge over challengers. Thus, for the boss of the incumbent Republicans, to permit the playing field to be leveled would be to go beyond good sportsmanship. It would be an act of dramatized the general horror of the current system more than they have the particular excesses of the incumbent president. Simply dismissing reform as suffices. At the same time, the Republican leadership can't be too brazen. To power of the gavel to prevent it from coming to the floor, would be to court a public backlash and a revolt within the Republican caucus. That kind of disposal: the ice pick, the poisoned umbrella tip, the exploding cigar, the hands. (Some of these weapons are, of course, too barbaric to actually use.) Here's the best current thinking about how Republican leaders are likely to try booby trap. You add something offensive that doesn't alter the appearance of the bill, allowing Republicans to support it while compelling Democrats to vote against it. The most probable amendment is one that expands on the Supreme a right to demand a refund of the portion of their dues spent on politics. members of this right. Nickles argues for what is known as a "hard most Democrats. They argue that corporations may spend money on politics without offering a rebate to dissatisfied shareholders. If Senate Republicans tack on a Nickles amendment, Democrats might even filibuster to block advantage of a Beck -based amendment is that it would create a version of the vote. The fate of reform will then rest with a few Republicans from strong such as one that would abolish the public financing of presidential campaigns think the votes on these amendments will be decisive. If they can fend off the limits on direct contributions. Short of that, he would like to raise the limit to sneak in. He might try to undo the ban on direct corporate and labor restrictions by leaving state committees free to dabble in federal races. burden of resisting these feints will fall partly on Minority Leader Tom contributions from domestic subsidiaries of foreign businesses, phone But surely this wouldn't satisfy anyone. And one downside would be the implicit admission that most of what Democrats did in the last election wasn't could use the complex House rules to smother the bill. If some sort of momentum carries the idea through both chambers, differences between the two would provide additional opportunities for sabotage. Conferees appointed by something that violates the First Amendment and would be likely to result in the whole mess being thrown out by the Supreme Court. improved version of our search function. In addition to a normal text search of particular author, or get a list of all Slate authors; particular department, or get a list of all Slate departments; for articles that ran on or around a particular date. (Slate Search Lite) will appear on the bottom of every new page from now on, you no longer have an excuse not to explore the riches of Slate, past and present, whenever the need arises for insight on any aspect of the human development team (that is, our development team that is crack, not our team with a particular word, or get a list of all words; particular ideological slant or cultural preference (such as a prejudice authors who have been divorced, have red hair, or voted Republican in at least three but not more than five of the past six presidential elections; sentimentality, irony (with separate options for intentional and tool, produced by a marvelous company. Is Bill Gates a great guy, or what? the best measure of Web readership. It is not perfect: It treats a single, technical reasons, some visitors don't get counted; and it doesn't include the numbers have risen dramatically in the past few months, and especially in the past few weeks. How to explain it? We like to think, of course, that it is due deplores the deplorable situation that forces us to discuss deplorable matters such as alleged fellatio in the White House rather than global warming or the misbehaving and lying about it under oath, or the government brought to a halt by the fevered imaginings of an overexcitable young woman. Whatever happened commentary in every medium. She also has serviced the president's political opponents, all of whom, of course, deplore the situation as much as we in the media deplore it. For that matter the general public, though generally disgusted (whether by the alleged activity or the process that made it a public issue or both), has also gained considerable pleasure and excitement from this thank you, thank you." And if there's anything we at return to our regularly scheduled deploring. (This site works best using Oral sex saves lives! We don't need a war to give the media a boost after all. investigative sex journalist who specializes in the reverse beatification of public, Bill consuming whole baked potatoes in a single bite), the fantasy was blended with elements of reality in an artful way. One product of the mixture flee the governor's hotel room as promptly as she recalls. awaited, eagerly by the Dole camp, less so by the Democrats. The hype succeeded in getting my hopes up, but not for long. Slate has gotten its hands on a There are only four allegations here that even vaguely order to steal the election, but ultimately did not. nuggets all have the same problems. First, they are remarkably thinly sourced, either the president or first lady in anything that is actually or even nearly Campaigns hire detectives all the time. Profanity isn't a crime. But worst of all, these bombshells aren't particularly juicy, and to find them, you have to without the goods, Brock takes a new authorial tack. He casts himself as a right. To do this, of course, he must distance himself from himself, and this Not so, Brock assures us, gallantly fending off the rogues. "It seems fairer to humiliation to which she was subjected on a regular basis." several levels. At the first, Brock, under the guise of fairness, slings enough senior thesis ("now under lock and key") was the mentor to "the socialist movements in the Third World at the height of the renewed Cold War." She spent Institute for Policy Studies." After the election, the first lady responded to a congratulatory note from the National Lawyers' Guild, "which had been founded Bacon," in which it is shown that the actor can be associated with any other actor in the world in a series of short steps. He then makes a laughingstock and "guilt by association." When it comes to such subjects as lesbianism, various "suspicions," then assures us that they are "contemptuous." I think he proprietary scandal. As he indicates, he thinks the media focused on Whitewater without any further elaboration. She even "ministered to call girls," whatever at least a vessel with his wife at the tiller. He has always been a parasite on her political acumen, her intelligence, and her income. At the same time, Brock undermines his fainthearted defense poor is a struggle for power in which the ends always justify the means. He disapproved of his methods and preferred to work inside the system. But to tactical concessions in the name of the ultimate radical millennium. with his own titular one about how a good person was "seduced" by an amoral same time. But then, conservatives need to have it both ways about the liberal" or a chameleon. You can make either case, but you have to make up your time explaining why any claims about the popularity of Web sites are inherently suspicious. With that same caveat, we offer an update. In August, we were explained, the design of a site can drastically affect the page count. (A Web "page" is of no fixed size, and the same material can take few or many pages.) We think a better measure is "unique browsers": the number of individual computers that visit a site. (Each computer is counted just once, no matter how we'd like to attribute it to our excellent editorial product and to the But we suspect that other forces are at work as well. There's the steady percent of the adult population. And there's the particular boost has been getting from our beloved distribution partners: continues to be an experiment in magazine journalism on the that was turned into a play and two different movies a few years ago). Our written by an author in that city. In another throwback to earlier forms, Reply Papers" is a worldwide version of our popular Today's Papers column, synthesizing and commenting on what leading newspapers outside the United States are saying about the major news stories (Al Gore was a bust in States but loom large elsewhere. (Did you know, for example, about the International Papers will be less structured than Today's Papers. Rather than analyzing the same five front pages every day, it will flit around the world, courtesy of the Internet, looking for trends and patterns. The language barrier will be a challenge, but our author is about as well qualified as anyone to Gist." We're looking for ways to bring readers quickly and painlessly up to speed on issues in the news they haven't followed closely, or have found sheet" of information the contestants could draw upon in each of four rounds. The cheat sheets were so entertaining and informative that we thought features, two have concluded their runs. Don't miss this week's breathtaking he does exactly as an international political and business consultant. But he'll be back, we hope, either with Varnish Remover or some new feature, closer your help with another new feature that starts next week. It is an advice column, called "Dear Prudence." Although the author stands prepared to answer questions on any topic, she is better qualified to share wisdom about morals and manners, what youth can learn from age, and macroeconomic policy than about whose journalists still pride themselves on maintaining their lack of of years yet in which to compromise her integrity. For more details and is a collection of hilarious and informative essays by the food critic of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values writes the monthly "Everyday Economics" column for several of the essays in this collection first appeared here. (In fact, you can is pleased to have supplied so many outstanding writers to ad or two would go down well. For readers who (like the editors) found the response). You might find it more satisfying. We did. another guy named Bill, but he somehow or other put her off the scent. She's stopped chasing him, but she's still chasing me! Neither of us appreciates her attentions. What I want to know is, why does she have this vendetta against guys named Bill? And how did the other one manage to lose her? What has he got trip to the Far East and his return to public visibility following the into a presidential defense fund, then the Roman model of foreign corruption Contrary to the media hype and rumors floating around get rid of him would require not just a few dozen defections, but a majority vote of the House Republican caucus. There is still no fully plausible record of catastrophe rather than mere inaction. At the same time, the precariousness of Newt's position is making him and other Republican leaders act in weird, unpredictable ways. The speaker's shakiness has turned the House consisted lately of dramatic lurches, first to the left, then to the right. plausible political calculation. If Republicans could separate their tax cuts in the public mind from the domestic budget cuts necessary to balance the budget, Democrats could no longer accuse them of throwing old people into the holding the president's feet to the fire by sending him a politically popular speaker's leadership. In a short, shocking article in the Weekly insubordination. Faced with an episode of dissent back then, he stripped one nonconformist freshman of a choice committee assignment. up to his conservative critics. He apologized profusely for the influence of unions and a demand that the Internal Revenue Service be brought taxes on both capital gains and estates, changes that would cost the Treasury conservative rivals are trying to establish their own credibility in the eyes DeLay. DeLay has been taking sudden umbrage at accusations that he is a tool of jockeying has forestalled any real Republican agenda. Compared with the What little time it has actually been in session it has spent on issues like a House passed a resolution banning the use of federal funds for assisted suicide. Of course, no federal funds go to assisted suicide. In a caucus complained he had no agenda "weren't smart enough to understand it." deal would shore up Newt's position, he hasn't got enough power to negotiate those on Newt's right flank are likely to portray any agreement with the to make a centrist budget compromise stick. Now such an agreement would probably provoke open rebellion, divide the House, and deprive the speaker of a unpopular speaker who is nonetheless impossible to dethrone, and with no record of accomplishment. As the Democratic National Committee sinks deeper into unveil the latest version of our contents or home page. (Maybe even a day or them back to their computers if they awaken by natural means before closing time.) Where was I? Oh yes, our new contents page. We hope you like it. It's intended to be simpler and clearer, to require less scrolling, and to draw more attention to our "Back of the Book" culture section. This new page is not to be browser. Users of that browser can choose the version they prefer. And those of any browser, race, or creed who prefer our "by date" contents page, which lists offerings will include tables of contents sorted alphabetically (by title, by author, by opening sentence), by author's height (or religion or preference in beers), by the editor's confidential opinion of the article's merits, by Bill Gates' opinion of the article's merits, by the amount the author was paid, and by the number of appearances of the phrase "irrational exuberance" or "distinguishing characteristic." (No article has appeared in any publication for at least six months without either of these phrases.) Have we forgotten your preference? Just let us know. We hope ultimately to have a unique table of 's "Everyday Economics" column, has a new book out called Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the specializes in delightful explanations of apparent economic anomalies, so he surely can explain why ordering this excellent volume directly from the bookstore with vast overheads of real estate and espresso machines will sell it said he provided a sworn statement about her behavior." not the source of this "acknowledgement," he evidently authorized one of his leaking better than that, why not take credit for the information directly? But more important and more disturbing, at least from his client's point of view, is what the leak represented in terms of defense pushing a counterproductive tactic even further. By threatening to blackmail rather dubious one: getting the Times to violate its own standards of accuser, passed along by an anonymous, if easily identified, source. as quietly as possible, keeping intact as many shreds of dignity as he has just the opposite: dragging the president deeper into the lurid morass, while his client before going on the air, and it's hard to imagine they didn't blame for hiring a lawyer known for playing hardball and winning ugly. Every convincing juries, but by waging media and lobbying battles on their behalf, pressured his client to accept a plea bargain that would have meant time in of a trial, he is falling back on his familiar tactics, and they aren't working. Intimidating the plaintiff might be an effective tactic in a normal like a dog under the wheels of a car, he sounded like the bully he is. fill in, and so on) by which users are able to tell the software what to do. users should do when they want to tell the software where to go.) we've been having a, er, vigorous discussion about one introductory page, each entry is on its own page, and (if you accept cookies) your computer remembers which item you last read and takes you to the next item when you return the next time. "The Breakfast Table" and "Chatterbox" employ a simpler and (some of us think) more elegant or possibly (others of us think) quicker for the readers, and encourages the writers to really think of the process as a conversation rather than as a series of isolated pronunciamentos. approach emphasize that some people enjoy constantly clicking and waiting because they have nothing better to do; that long and boring doesn't necessarily mean bad; that cool technology is its own justification even if it's useless; and that, anyway, who cares what the customers want. editor, of course, is scrupulously neutral in this controversy. And what was their problem? Had they both lost a parent recently? Spent their last nickel? Found out their girlfriends had been White House interns? Been diagnosed with cancer? No. "Their problem: In writing and speaking they spend a lot of time in linguistic contortions, trying to explain that they neither love problem! This may well be the most boring problem anyone has ever had. (Or at least, we would like to hear rival claims for that honor.) Still, questions remain. Why the "linguistic contortions"? Exactly what is so difficult about explaining that you neither love nor hate technology? Maybe the problem was getting anyone to listen. ("Who gives a shit? Go away!") For that matter, why their lack of passion with others? Why don't they just continue having lunch into drinks, then dinner, and dusk slowly darkens the summer sky. here's a little tip: If there's a subject on which you have no feelings one way or another, try talking about something else! You'll be amazed how well that But no. Instead of these sensible solutions to their problem, the gentlemen have taken the paradoxically agitated step of founding a we are so stupefied by this problem that we are unable to summon the will to click on the link. Somebody tell us what it says. Or, on second thought, always finding it too hot or too cold and never just right. Their linguistic contortions turn into bodily contortions as they literally tie themselves in knots, their desperation for attention doing battle with their determination to say nothing worthy of it. Ultimately they die (not of boredom: of that they're merely carriers). Their last words are, "Honest, I wish I could persuade you that I neither love nor hate technology. I know you find that hard to accept, but really, it's true. Technology to me has its good points and its bad points. It's a mixed bag. I know this is a terribly iconoclastic proposition, and or maybe even two, to work on various features we hope to add. Our program But if the idea of being surrounded by journalists, instead of the usual computer types, strikes you as appealing rather than appalling, we'd like to actually sends a poetry review is automatically disqualified. Being able to recognize when the editor is making a joke is essential, although actually appreciating the joke is strictly optional. Faking appreciation is always, of columnist, has retired, and her column has been taken over by her niece, also explain the inevitable change in tone. The new Prudence is younger and of a plug: If you haven't tried our Web linking game, "Six Degrees of learn your way around. For the Web savvy (or even Web weary), it's a good way are entitled to participate in our discussion forum, "The discussion, and have themselves an electronic book group. more euphonious, somehow.) We think it's pretty darn cool (a technical software industry term, used to imply strong feelings of affirmation), and hope you will as well. (Click here for instructions on how to download Slate It's a poem, an ice cream cone on a hot summer day, the smell of Styrofoam when small program, actually, that puts a small box on your Windows desktop. (Sorry, Click on the little arrow, and the box expands horizontally into a list of vertically into a list of current contents. Click on one of these listings, and most cases, even when you're not online. When you select an article, the program will launch your browser and initiate a Web connection. When you are is a beta release of Slate Explorer. "Beta" is a software industry term cause your computer to explode, or to charge large sums to your Visa card, or to take up smoking, or to insult a police officer. But we make no most loyal and discerning readers (who are also immune to crass flattery). If you do happen to discover a flaw in Slate Explorer, just keep it to yourself, we know our readers, you're full of opinions and don't mind making them known! So how would you like to spout off a lot of opinions and have perfect strangers participants in a second annual round of Slate reader focus groups. The visit). It's your chance to tell us what you think about Slate and how you last year, or if your name is Bill Gates, you're not eligible. But if you are one of the many we didn't have room for last year (or if your name was Bill Gates last year, but you've changed it), please feel free to try again. published next week, the third and last of our traditional summer weeks off. (Or at least, we hope to make this a tradition, and have got away with it for two summers so far.) We will, of course, be hard at work throughout the week that order. Or at least, we'll be thinking occasionally about the betterment of on. To be perfectly honest, subscriptions will continue to be available after you can't sleep, so you decide to turn on the old machine and check if there's credit cards in the bedroom and don't want to wake your wife. You'd be stuck subscribe, and do it now. Our computers are standing by to take your order. transfusion, or any other way we can figure out. Go to our subscription page launched two new interactive puzzles in the past week: a weekly Web maze game "News Quiz." They offer fun, intellectual stimulation, and insight on the Web and the news. What they don't offer is a prize. It's not that we're cheap (or not just that we're cheap). It's that under the laws of various states, a prize turns these innocent amusements into a form of gambling, which creates more legal folderol than we are prepared to handle. But some winners of these contests get a token of trivial value as a purely symbolic gesture of thanks for their participation in a contest with no our site at the moment are the results of another contest with no official readers, but the law of averages suggests it's a safe bet that you're not one of them. The prize for giving to charity is, of course, the knowledge that you're fulfilling a moral obligation and helping to make the world just a little bit, etc., etc. But the premise of the it a race. This notion was first advanced by Ted Turner, who has personally other words, is being on the list itself. And it may even be working. Last year conservatives this week for producing a big majority vote in favor of his time his bill came up, and that this year's converts included Minority Leader for more, not fewer, abortions in the United States. Here's why: As the debate (and seems likely to be stalled there absent some huge scientific become illegal, except in cases where there was a dire threat to the mother's with which to beat Democrats to achieving a genuine victory. He hinted at this symbolism to the detriment of substance. In his quest for wedge issues, Administration Hospital. With the help of student loans, young Rick attended sector was a brief stint as a lawyer and lobbyist (where his clients included give up your freedoms. Don't give up your freedom." In the article in which these comments were quoted, his tone of voice was described as an impassioned gang's chief issue was the House Bank scandal and their goal, to force full disclosure of the number of checks bounced by various members. Their both the House and the Senate, he has remained firm in his doctrinaire another candidate in my life who would stand up in front of the voters and tell lies, absolute lies, the way he does," he fulminated. fainthearted older members of his own party with the same boorishness and the House. The effort was roundly defeated in the Republican Caucus. for injecting religion into politics have led many liberals to cast him as a in the Senate. Though he is no friend to the environmental movement, he is replacement of strikers and voted for an increase in the minimum wage. met a principle he wouldn't swap for a few more votes. As he cultivates the dollars on early television advertising. This unprecedented media blitz, which early television advertising." Morris argues that by stealthily airing the ads an advantage that Bob Dole was never able to counter. This claim is highly debatable. But two other results of Morris' early ad strategy are harder to Though it is now conventional wisdom that the ads worked, the evidence for this consists entirely of unsubstantiated assertions by the people who made the ads. Morris, whom I spoke to this week, continues to make extravagant claims. In the areas where they ran, Morris says, the ads boosted the numbers with a professional eye are dubious of this boast. "There's no where they weren't advertising pretty much to the extent that they did in share the numbers. But independent comparisons of places where Morris says the ads ran and places where they didn't do not appear to substantiate his claim. there were no early ads. Of course, these numbers don't prove the ads were useless. For one thing, the ads ran in media markets, which are generally only parts of states and are sometimes made up of parts of more than one state. But a fallback position, Morris argues that the ads helped because they ads helped win the battle." What Morris conveniently forgets is that at the purpose of the ads can hardly have been to achieve a result Morris opposed. strategy, because he thought it was a waste of money. As one source involved in to go back to the same corporations and ask for an even bigger percentage, or you have to find new systems, new pockets of money." Corporations that have budgeted for contributions of a certain size are loath to allot large amounts of additional cash in the middle of the year. To get more soft money out of them, the Democratic National Committee turned to new perks, like White House indisputable consequence of the ads was that they generated a great deal of commission. In a presidential campaign, with tens of millions being spent, these fees can be enormous. Ordinarily, a political consultant like Morris not subject to disclosure under federal election laws. But, according to a "I just think he overdid it." That's some chutzpah, considering who the chief beneficiary was. Morris' commission alone amounts to more than all the money Democrats have had to give back to suspicious contributors. Hatch commented, "When you have a man of this caliber, I think it's just terrible to try and make an ideological battle out of it." When it came to is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he's the one blocking the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Aware that he is vulnerable to a charge of double standards, Hatch has his defense ready. He says he's not a hypocrite, because the Democrats changed the rules. In a hearing before the nomination on to the full Senate without a recommendation, something Hatch had goose is sauce for the gander. "I argued for reporting the nominations of Brad There's no denying that Democrats changed the rules. As appointments were relatively rare from the 1870s through the 1970s. But around itself is ironic: Usually it is Republicans who insist on taking the words of the Constitution literally and Democrats who argue for a broader nominee for assistant secretary of state for human rights because he gave no indication of caring about human rights. (It didn't help matters when family deference could no longer be expected, at least for jobs involving civil and these rules. "A deeply satisfying and entirely valid reason for rejecting the years as "acting" solicitor general because Republicans wouldn't confirm case, however, Hatch says he's opposing a qualified nominee simply to draw the line on an administration position he disagrees with. "I think it's time for us Furthermore, Republicans have done away with deference for a whole range of posts that touch upon contentious social issues, not just nomination of Henry Foster to be surgeon general because of his support for the same reason. Hatch has also been holding up dozens of nominations for implicit position that if the president's nominee shares the president's views, can stop the Republicans from changing the rules of the nomination process unilaterally, as the Democrats did in the 1980s. And there's no way to enforce consistency. Conservatives are free to defer to the president on ambassadors general, if they so desire. It is also egregiously unfair to charge, as Sen. case and not in others. But ability and good sense are two different things. that it won't work. If senators take the position that they will not accept presidential nominees who share the president's views on important issues, many this might not bother Republicans, many of whom don't believe in the whole concept. But keeping an important post vacant may actually undermine the directed more quietly from another desk. As long as it is, there won't be any point person to answer for administration policies, or to the public. In the case of judicial nominees, there's a more serious problem of justice delayed (which, as we know, is justice denied) due to a shortage of judges. second problem is less tangible. The more policy disputes are personified, the more the confirmation process becomes a war of martyrs and dragon slayers, the uglier and more unproductive politics becomes. On top of the many sacrifices ripped apart by a totally politicized confirmation process. This seems too much to ask. Already, those who aspire to confirmation must express themselves in There's no reason why affirmative action, in particular, needs to be fought out at this sublimated level. In recent decisions, the Supreme Court has both circumscribed preferential policies and made clear that they can be limited or abolished by legislation. If Hatch and his party want to Some day, divided government will again be divided the other way. When that happens, Democrats will be bound to escalate the confirmation battle once more, to settle their score with Hatch. And so on, and so on. The game of payback heard recently comes from a reporter friend of mine who went to check up on investigation. Inside the municipal building where the office of the Recorder of Deeds was supposed to be located, she followed the "This Way" signs for property records up to the third floor and down a series of long corridors. When she finally found what appeared to be the right office, she opened the door. Inside were three city employees, standing around a Weber grill cooking badly run that the only real defense is to laugh about it. This is a city where politicians court convicts as an important political constituency; where one in as the population hemorrhages; where the mayor once said that the crime rate It is also becoming known as the city where representative government failed. In a provision of the recently passed budget bill, Congress used its constitutional authority to strip power from the mayor and City This effectively suspends, for a period of at least four years, the limited argument that democracy doesn't work when most of the voters aren't white is big city in the United States. In other areas, like housing, it is notorious for failing to tap federal funds for which it is eligible, through sheer incompetence. And while amending the Constitution to give District residents voting representation in Congress might make them feel better, it would probably do little to address their underlying problems. Conservatives are wrong about democracy being at fault. Liberals are wrong about the problem being too little money and too few rights. So what is encompass outlying areas. This isn't just a question of preserving the tax cities, because District residents who move to the suburbs also move government can't even require that its police and firefighters live in the of racial and economic segregation, a virtual machine for concentrating rebellion. Rebellion fails, or succeeds only in limited ways, which leads to rights away a few years later because of accusations of corruption and financial mismanagement, and also because the city had so many blacks. Sound familiar? It took another century for home rule to arrive. But the more regular habits of good government. Opportunistic politicians, namely threat that even the limited ones that had been granted would be taken away. Congressional overseers played into this paranoia by ignoring home rule of rent control. More recently, home rule has been effectively suspended for a the psychological quality of children "acting out." In no other city is voting for a corrupt and incompetent mayor an expression of protest against dysfunctional political culture, the role of newspapers becomes paramount. If the public isn't holding its leaders accountable, the press is the only institution that can spur it to do so. Unfortunately, for most of the period of It endorsed him in every mayoral contest until he got arrested for smoking crack. The Post has improved a bit in the last couple of years, but its attitude has historically been to hold black politicians to a lower standard. upon the social resentments of his disadvantaged constituents, doing them a ultimately the ones at fault. What it does not mean, however, is that intended to "define, plan and begin to organize the movement for civilization and the effort to transform the welfare state into an opportunity society to help people achieve productivity, responsibility and safety so they can achieve prosperity and freedom so they can pursue happiness." Perhaps anticipating some one of many treasures to be found in a huge, paperbound tome with the sexless to the much shorter and duller House Ethics Committee report itself, the volume contains notes, memos, doodles, cancelled checks, and other Newt ephemera from the spirit of recreational renewal, then, let us delve. some tough sledding before you get to the fun part. In working out plans for responsibility, civilization, vision, organization, analysis, dissemination, never asks anyone to listen; he admonishes them to Listen, Learn, Help, and Lead. He organizes his activities according to Visions, Strategies, Projects, and Tactics. At another point, he suggests that Republicans consider the application of Wedges, Magnets, Shields, and Turf. Failing that, he recommends Message, Mechanism, Method, and Team Building to advance the goals of Freedom, In his heart, the speaker is a modules man. In developing he suggests the need for a "Core Doctrine Module." He does not wish to neglect, Majority Module, or the Quality Module. Modules are not to be confused with marginal districts). Nor are they synonymous with paradigms, as in the Vision counting. He offers two reasons why we must replace the welfare state, three steps toward success, Four Great Truths of our Generation, five Pillars of Freedom and Progress, seven aspects of committing ourselves to real change, true love gave to me: five pillars of freedom and progress, four great truths of our generation, three steps toward success, two reasons we must replace the random capitalization, "NEWT action" is at the center, hurling arrows in every direction. To the left lie: build up, preparAtion, and attention Focusing. On the right: FOllOW through, diSSEMINATion, and consolidAtion then improved EVAluAtion and improved preparation For Future action. In another picture, perhaps the speaker's most fluid and evocative rendering, stick figures to his colleagues who are helping to plan his college course: "Our goal is education and not immediate profit. Together we are going to make history as years, he will write "a SerIEs oF booKs ('The history of Freedom, prosperity and safety')." In the second category, he will create "A body of rules and Finally there is Newt's deep dada mode. "I keep reminding my friends we've entered the decade of the teenage mutant ninja turtle," he offers in one speech draft. Who are these friends? Why do they need constant reminders? Have they suggested that he see somebody? "We are in the business of transforming the United States from a welfare state into an opportunity perhaps, but rich in the fruits of his own imagination. Another sheet of grandiose, lunatic jottings ends with the demented scrawl: "This page is the president's State of the Union address, the White House Press Office invites political reporters in for a spin session. In keeping with the current mood in than the others, couldn't take it any more. "About a year ago there was a debate about whether there would be a Department of Education," he said, jumping up from his chair. "We have covered a lot of ground here. When everyone makes the point that the president is somewhat conceding the agenda, the fact is his initiatives that are the center of agreement." to catch a ride on the unstoppable conservative freight train. But history the Republicans who are scrambling to get on board. president brought about this transformation by reclaiming the "vital center." familiar means of portraying Democrats as being incorrigibly leftist and version of a balanced budget, and signing a welfare reform package very they expected to be their three best issues. After the president got done repositioning, Bob Dole had very little left to run on. proposals, like expanding college opportunity and extending health insurance to uncovered children, Republicans are openly admitting that their party has no clue what it is in favor of. "It is clear that the faithful are paralyzed by appealing, and philosophically coherent national agenda." One would expect suggests focusing on such "targets of opportunity" as missile defense and of most people, and which surely don't constitute a philosophical program. conservatives had an unpleasant encounter with reality. They took a few steps in the direction of a coherent philosophical program and came back looking like his party for a dramatic attack on the role of government. This attack was never as broad as it was made out to be in Republican rhetoric, but even so, it scared the hell out of the country. An entire party, and not just a faction within it, was threatening to violate the national consensus on government's sign on again any time soon for an attack on programs that are popular with the middle class. Nor are they ready to mount an assault on environmental and and others would have them embrace social and cultural issues. But this plan is even less promising than renewed attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency. Moderate Republicans and conservative libertarians were able to find points of agreement with more authoritarian conservatives on issues like cutting taxes, curtailing welfare, and balancing the budget. But there's less room for compromise on the broader agenda of social conservatives, which includes issues like school prayer and abortion. With a slender majority, divided Republicans can't easily move in any direction. Their only alternative persuade voters they are worthy of continuing to share power with him. While they play along, Republicans fantasize about a Democratic scandal huge enough to overturn the existing political dynamic. back to the point where his colleagues will allow him to be seen in public (he the State of the Union), it's hard to imagine him leading a movement again. And despite the speaker's many failings, there is no one else with imagination or to watch the "strange new respect" phenomenon engulf Senate Majority Leader of dominance is to act more responsibly and less politically. The president is in a strong enough position now to take his own rhetoric on reforming entitlements (which he added to his address at the last minute) seriously, and to drop leftover junk ideas from the campaign like the Victims Rights Amendment the bitter debate over rent control that now dominates social interaction in New York, you have to begin by ignoring arguments about social justice, market It's a battle of naked class interest. The catch is that the "classes" glowering at each other across the barricades aren't rich and poor. They're the New Yorkers with scandalously sweet deals vs. all those who get screwed as a experience has done much to reinforce my own class consciousness as a member of the latter group. My wife and I were minding our own business in an unregulated apartment in the rapidly gentrifying East Village when we returned from work place where rapacious brokers extract usurious commissions on glorified broom paying a finder's fee. Absent the artificial shortage created by rent regulation, we would either have a bigger place or pay much less for the one The moral and economic arguments against rent control are pretty much unassailable. Under the present system, government intervenes in residency, but to an even larger extent by luck. This massive intrusion in the beneficial consequences, has a number of obviously disastrous ones. It deters young people and new immigrants from moving to New York City; it encourages landlords to neglect their buildings; it makes them hate their tenants. But Republican state Senate leader who has been threatening to let all the rules pickled old codger living on gin and cigarettes: He should have started behaving more sensibly a long time ago, but forcing him to suddenly do it now would be an act of cruelty, more likely to kill him than to make him happen if rent regulations were really abolished? It's a pretty safe bet that in most parts of Manhattan, market rents would settle in somewhere between the apartments in the same building. Using the estimates promoted by the Rent Stabilization Association (the newspeak name for the group representing landlords who actually wish to end rent stabilization), the typical bargains like that being freely available, even in a totally deregulated likely to be exempted even in the case of radical decontrol, would stay put. What Manhattan would lose is what remains of its middle class, those earning attends every performance of the Metropolitan Opera. Without protection for those marginal, cosmopolitan souls who cling to it tenuously, Manhattan would become much more the way people who don't live here imagine it, a soulless playground for yuppies, with an alienated underclass underfoot. The city would irony is that the yuppies who would benefit financially from the end of the would also make New York uglier. One of the big points made by opponents of rent control is that the present system prevents the construction of new buildings. Because rent regulations say you can't evict people when their leases are up (if they even have leases), one obstinate tenement dweller can that has preserved the aesthetic as well as the social fabric of the kind of In all likelihood, there will be a compromise on rent the worst excesses of the system on Realpolitik grounds; they want the rich on their side in the fight to keep the whole shebang. But given the outrage such excesses generate, advocates would be better off cutting the rich loose and gaining a modicum of redistributive equity for their side of the argument. Any sane person has to be against rent control after hearing about Upper East Side that he didn't even live in. When his landlord tried to lure him into a smaller apartment in the same neighborhood, he insisted that it would not befit a man of his "class and social station." This time, the "luxury" threshold will probably be scaled back, while exempting anyone over be to diminish unfairness and mitigate perverse side effects without giving a shock to the city's social system. This argues for a fairly straightforward their apartments could command on the free market. They will have to move. How is "vacancy decontrol," which would allow landlords to charge market rent when apartments empty. (Tenant groups argue that this gives landlords an incentive to harass tenants. But landlords have plenty of incentive to harass tenants now, since they're already allowed to raise the rent somewhat when an apartment principle that no form of inherited wealth is bad, should also disappear. These brilliant political jujitsu, turning the Republicans' favorite issue against larger sums that go to businesses in the form of tax breaks, direct subsidies, those who want to slash corporate welfare, but not in their own back yards. happen to include their own friends, contributors, and constituents. example, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee busied itself with hearings on something called the Corporate Subsidy Reform Commission Act. This is a bill to create a commission to propose cuts in corporate welfare. Like the commission would produce a hit list, and Congress would then vote "yes" or "no" on the whole package. Chairing the hearing was a fervent supporter of the idea, Bob Dole's seat in the Senate, casts himself as the Senate's most fervid enemy of government waste. "Pork has no place when we're so broke," he told a roomful subsidies to be corporate welfare. Ethanol is distilled from corn, so the in a press release. Would that include, say, federal dairy supports and marketing orders for the milk industry, which somehow escaped being scaled back Liberals and conservatives do tend to mean different things when they denounce corporate welfare. To Democrats, corporate welfare usually means indirect subsidies in the form of tax breaks, like the ethanol tax credit or the rule that allows firms to depreciate some of their advertising costs as hand, corporate welfare generally refers only to spending. To close any of the tax subsidies should be addressed separately, and only in context of a asked for this goody were lobbyists for the National Federation of Independent tax subsidy and a payment subsidy doesn't account for all the double standards. Republicans will support subsidies for any form of agricultural production. purest example of corporate welfare in the federal budget. It's a direct grant cause is the Small Business Administration, which exists to make loans to companies that banks deem nonviable. Even a maverick like Republican Rep. Long Island district is threatened. And then there are the Democrats like Ted corporate welfare who don't instinctively exempt their own oxen from being another who practices what he preaches. But even these relatively honest regular old spending that Republicans happen not to like, such as support for the International Monetary Fund and highway demonstration projects in their little tiff over that consent decree. Gates' guard dogs snarled as we approached, and so did the crack team of Justice Department arsonists who were standing by, ready to set the whole restaurant on fire at the slightest hint of off her flamethrowers as well, and it was the beginning of a jolly evening. guffawed, "Maybe someone should tell him to keep his browser out of other people's operating systems." Gates stared at her briefly, clearly annoyed at having had his metaphor appropriated by the government. But then he relaxed browser and the operating system seem to be one integrated product." there was a moment for pack journalism and media overkill, this is it. For discussing the issue of libel on the Internet to the question of Drudge's role and "International Papers" will keep you abreast of how the major newspapers around the world are treating the scandal. And for an elegant the question of whether the president of the United States should be impeached for subornation of perjury is the question of whether a 501(c)(3) charitable organization is legally permitted to engage in lobbying of Congress. In a right? By a fortunate coincidence, one of the world's living experts on this correspondents are a dime a dozen. In choosing among the many candidates, it is only reasonable to give a modest preference to those who can bring along a good gardening writer, a gifted hack, or an expert on 501(c)(3) organizations. for my discussion of the whys and wherefores a few weeks ago.) In the next few or Today's Papers, and so on. If we don't have you in our records (or you're not sure), and you'd like to receive subscription information (or you're not Slate on Paper or Today's Papers, and you can still register free (required for does not sell or share this information, or use it for ulterior purposes. dresses and sweat through the Beltway summer humidity in pursuit of leaks, we sit back in our breezy Pacific Northwest aerie, sipping a microbrew, observing, analyzing, synthesizing, and generally thinking great thoughts. Or at any rate thinking thoughts. But we are not above indulging in a scoop if it falls into our lap. For a few hours this week, we thought we had one. print journalism and draw attention to ourselves. The story would get out and the Official Secrets Act would be exposed as a farce in the age of situation. We consulted our lawyer. He told us it's not so simple. (The Secrets Act. If we published this article, not only could our editors be assets of our parent company could be seized, and so on. Imagine millions of marvelous operating system, with its fully integrated Internet browser? plot, comically reasoning that the government claims the story is untrue, and something that never happened cannot be an Official Secret. Just to be safe, though, the reference was buried deep within an article on something less in publishing it. In short, we realized, our lawyer's efforts were futile: There was a perfect inverse correlation between our desire to publish the article and our legal ability to do so. Basically, if it didn't violate the potential stand on principle, which is even more exciting. Should we ask journalistic civil disobedience? That sounded like a lot of fun, but first we had to figure out which principle, exactly, was at stake. the right of the Internet to be free of all government restrictions? No. We are that such constraints should not have to depend on every journalist in the world acting voluntarily. The Internet makes enforcement of any restrictions on the spread of information much more difficult. But it does not, as far as we can see, affect the principle that society ought to have the right to prevent Was the principle at stake here the right to be free of claim too much secret territory. A botched assassination attempt that killed innocents is just the kind of thing the citizens ought to know about, while the government won't want them to know. But it makes no sense for a journalist to say, "I don't mind being censored, but only about information I wouldn't publish anyway." There's no need for a law to prevent you from doing what you wouldn't do anyway. If you concede the government's (society's) right to rule some information out of bounds, you must also concede the right to draw the even noble, way to dramatize iniquity and create pressure for change. For crusade to reform the excessive secrecy laws of the United Kingdom would have been a lovely gesture. But somehow it did not seem morally mandatory. Let the foreign governments. Although, with Internet access, you can get should be that every Web site must follow the laws of its "home" country, and promise of freedom on its head. Not only are we not liberated from our particular national jurisdiction: We are simultaneously subject to to obey the laws of the United States, even laws we don't care for. But the he'd published it himself. In this case that would have been a happy result. matter this may be unavoidable. And, to be clear about it, the massive censorship necessary to avoid it is certainly not worth the cost in freedom. But there's no point in pretending that a Web site subject to only one both an exhilarating scoop and an invigorating stand on principle. There is an obvious opportunity here for a bonanza of international conferences to study the need for worldwide treaties to set up global commissions to come up with of the good government groups like Common Cause, Public Citizen, and the League of Women Voters have long favored a comprehensive solution based on public financing of congressional campaigns. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, doctrine on campaign regulation and freedom of speech. There are strong First Amendment obstacles to various provisions in the bill. The court is unlikely to remove these, which means that even if reform does pass, it will accomplish far He who would wade into this swamp must first immerse restrictions on political contributions while rejecting limits on The court conceded that giving money to a political candidate is a way of expressing support. But it reasoned that the message "I support candidate X" has little relation to the amount of money you give. However, when you spend your money directly communicating the message "I support candidate X" (or "I am candidate X"), that spending is an exercise of free speech protected principle between contributions and expenditures quickly gets fuzzy in But what if I work out the text of my encomium with his campaign manager? The court created a distinction between "independent" and "coordinated" "independent" expenditures are not free of all restrictions if they involve "express advocacy" of a candidate, as opposed to a discussion of the issues that stops short of explicit endorsement. Under current law, such expenditures must be publicly disclosed, and corporations and unions are forbidden to make ostensibly on a voluntary basis and have their own set of financial limits). Corporations and unions, however, have become adept at devising ways to help their favored candidates that stop just short of "express advocacy." crack down on the major abuses that have sprouted in the cracks of the worst abuse of the current system. Soft money is money donated to and spent by the political parties, ostensibly for reasons other than direct support of candidates, but without limits on who may give or how much. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled last year that spending by a political party cannot automatically be assumed to be "coordinated" with a senatorial campaign. The effect of this decision was to establish that political parties have the same rights as individuals and other kinds of groups to make independent smart First Amendment lawyers who are doubtful about other parts of issues: wealthy candidates who spend gargantuan sums of their own money and phony issue ads that are barely disguised campaign ads. On the first point, from making "coordinated" expenditures on their behalf. The device is borrowed from the rules for presidential elections, in which candidates accept spending parties to aid their own candidates unless the candidate "voluntarily" accepted the personal spending limit. This might well strike the justices as being more like a stick than a carrot, making the choice not "voluntary" at all. spending by corporations and unions through expanding the definition of "express advocacy." In essence, the bill states that any mention of a candidate standard would make criminals out of the two little old ladies who, in the at the mess of recent elections, and decide that the line it drew two decades Last month, at the annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, the acrimony and division. "The truth is, all of us just have a little bit of time doesn't wish to deny anyone his rightful share of grandiloquence, but there is presidency for the past two months, will misconceive his second term. If he weaknesses. The president has yet to utter a truly memorable line (if you don't count "I didn't inhale"). No one looks to him for moral example. He does, however, understand the fine points of public policy as well as any president we've had, and is capable of putting the public welfare ahead of narrow political considerations when it really matters. A few such painful choices rescued what might otherwise have been a disastrous first term. The most significant of these was his decision to press for deficit reduction instead of new spending programs in his first budget. But there were others, too: His not the areas where he thought he would stake his claim to greatness. Yet, by determine whether these successful and popular programs survive into the next century in anything resembling their present forms. But the stakes are even greater than that. Absent significant reform, the escalating costs of these programs will, in decades to come, crowd out what remains of the federal discretionary programs are trimmed back to pay for mounting entitlement costs, address national problems will become more and more remote. Not acting to push for Medical Savings Accounts threatened to undermine Medicare by removing the healthiest and wealthiest beneficiaries from the common insurance pool. But at the same time that he resisted this irresponsible conservative position, solvency. Republicans, badly burned by the issue, say the ball is now in shows little sign of doing either. He intends to make only minor adjustments in combine reduced payments to doctors and hospitals with a proposal to shift the accounting gimmick, which would keep the trust fund technically solvent for a and for Al Gore in 2000--the attraction of "defending" Medicare will reassert This program isn't going broke now, but unless we do something about it soon, believe in Social Security in the first place, are hard at work devising plans to undermine it by shifting to a system of individual accounts. As more moderate solutions are deferred, that kind of transformation becomes avoid catastrophe later. Among the most sensible options are a slight increase in the retirement age (in keeping with growing life expectancy), a mild Consumer Price Index (in keeping with economic reality). benefits of various kinds in a reasonable way, it would go a long way not just toward fixing Social Security, but also toward bringing the federal budget into structural balance. It's also a politically safe way to raise taxes, since tax greatest achievement, and partly because Republicans are rightly terrified thing that matters. In addition to all the things we can't foresee, the manages to steer welfare reform back in the right direction; whether he avoids being drawn into a counterproductive tax cut; and whether he overcomes his own principle is the same. The president needs to spurn the vital center, defy the spirit of reconciliation, and recognize he has only a little time left to tell will catch you up on daily developments from the past week. (Earlier Papers are, of course, accessible from the current column.) For the world's reaction, accuracy the chance of the president not finishing his term. It is updated daily. In "Chatterbox," we file random tidbits, insights, observations, and factoids. Chatterbox is updated at least once a day, usually more often. persuasive essays, in the view of her colleagues.) "The Gist" brings together all the varying explanations for the president's alleged behavior, looking for a both commissioned investigations into the question of whether they may have jointly put out a false story three weeks ago. It's hard to know what there is almost instantly and pretty spectacularly discredited. reported the day after Time 's story appeared, the story's former soldier subsequently explained that he had blocked the memory until it Other alleged sources now claim to have specifically denied the allegations. Many other sources have come forward to say the story is false. Various soldiers were exposed to fatal nerve gas, why did none die?) almost don't have to go beyond the story itself to strongly suspect it's false. The signs of comic overreaching, at the very least, are right there. In these days when making up stories is so fashionable among journalists, many younger with the advanced journalistic tools of cynicism, suspicion, and heartlessness. He is equally adept (as we all are in this profession, though we don't like to brag about it) at making up stories and spotting those made up by others. Even amateurs, though, can learn how to make up a pretty convincing story in the comfort of their own homes, using nothing more than a mild sense of mischief Pending the results of all these investigations, we're not illustration of a few techniques that need to be mastered by anyone wishing to Bootstrap sourcing. Near the top of the Time version, the story bootstrap sourcing; sources of nothing. The secretary of defense at the If he has no recollection of the matter, he obviously is in no position to dispute what anyone has to say about it. His statement to that effect has no evidentiary value, but it is cited as implicit confirmation. (Elsewhere an "Air turns out to have been far away and says he was only "speculating.") distract the reader's attention from gaps in logic and evidence, just as curry and spices were once used to make bad meat palatable. "I just went 'oh, man' and knew we were in for some really deep s___." Or, "It was a hairy situation from the time we got there." As a bonus, those quoted seem to be endorsing the thesis, though that doesn't logically follow (and several of those quoted have conducted the raid in question. But how does an unnamed person, whose qualifications to opine on the subject are not offered, gain added credibility there is a definitive number, according to the Pentagon. That number is two. Or two "known" defectors. Does the Pentagon believe there are unknown available" only in the sense that the article doesn't accept the number that is "indicated." How? By sign language? Charades? Semaphore? "Indicated" is a way of implying he said it while indicating he must not have actually said it. (As, one unit have any basis for knowing the total number of defectors in the entire these eight simple techniques, you can fabricate a news story in the comfort of extraterrestrials, people who actually believe a browser shouldn't be readers have complained, with justification, that our search function did not successfully retrieve items from a few recently added departments such as "Chatterbox" and "The Breakfast Table." This is now fixed. Please try two extra days automatically. Of course, they will also be available at thought of the world's largest software company getting into the media may be a good moment to tell you how we see this issue. company has not interfered in editorial decisions in any way. Nor has any empire) or other big media companies. The potential conflicts of interest are far greater for a publication that is part of a traditional media company than for one owned by a software company. Time magazine bumps up against the various interests of its corporate parent many times in each issue, including every time it reviews a book or a movie. By contrast, even lately with the There is legitimate concern about the concentration of the media in large corporations of any sort. But the special concern about competition among the media, rather than reducing it. This makes the complaints business especially puzzling. A journalist who objects to a new company getting companies, of course, have decades of experience and (in the case of Time new kid on the block, has no journalistic reputation yet, either good or bad. management if it hopes to attract journalists and customers to its media properties. The company would be stupidly shortsighted to destroy this reputation before it is even established, in order to tilt the editorial rarely accuse this company of being stupid or shortsighted. corporate parent to interfere actively with the editorial content of media it owns. Employees know which side their bread is buttered on. In software give employees an especially throbbing interest in the future prosperity of their employer. Does this affect journalists' ability to treat issues touching the company with the same lofty detachment they bring to issues that don't? play it pretty straight, though others inevitably will disagree. We the company. Later, we ran a piece defending the company. More than once, in discussions of the counterexamples. Root around the "Compost" and decide for yourself. In theory, as well, we as journalists have an even stronger reputation for journalistic integrity. We don't have to resist temptation nearly as often as employees of traditional media companies. And some of those companies, by the way, also use stock as an incentive. slight disclaimer. Despite all the completely compelling arguments offered in the preceding paragraphs, it would be silly and dishonest to insist that our employer. (And the same is true for any journalist working for any company with varied interests.) The reality of ownership affects is not foolproof. There is the temptation to take the company's side, and the contrary temptation to prove one's independence with ostentatious criticism. in that of other magazines. On the other hand, the simplest and always tempting pretty close to neutral reporting and analysis of news developments in features itself. The standard to insist on is that the sins be of omission, not week, we're very pleased with that number. Thanks, and welcome to all our members. And to those of you who are reading this on our "front porch" (free subscribers is not the rather perfunctory sales pitch you see before you. It is an extravaganza of witty jokes, brilliant political insights, the startling that will get you into the hidden pages of any sadomasochistic site on the Web Subscribers will confirm that it's heaven on this side of the wall: The sun always shines, all people are beautiful and kind, there is rice pudding for asks, please do us a favor and confirm the preposterous lies in the preceding item. Feel free to substitute your favorite dessert or to embroider and fabricate generally. We're all in this together now. the new "nav bar" that runs across the top of each page. By clicking on the contents and go directly to any article or feature in will soon be adding this bar at the bottom of pages, too (in the optimistic finish reading an article and b] wish to read another). We will also be remember that damned password and user name. Just check the box that says, delivery lists of people who hadn't subscribed. If you're a subscriber and your delivery was discontinued, please accept our apologies, and sign up Scouts, but you really must accept cookies if you're going to subscribe to computer sense, you almost surely can ignore this warning. (But click here for an explanation.) If you do know what cookies are and have set your computer not to here to read it. And please accept cookies so you can enjoy these documents (which are not mentioned in his book). The Vanity Fair sexual excess, his various connections to the mob, and other sometimes hyperbolic charges with exaggerated derision. Time tries to have it both on a documentary it abandoned because of suspicions about the forged papers. "Do you think you were blinded by the desire to tell a sordid tale?" was the especially nasty in denouncing it as "a pathetic collection of wild It comes as something of a surprise, then, to read The of the best, sounds less pleasant than most. His book, however, is not merely a time to time, but he still manages to present his case in roughly the way a evidence that readers can disagree with his conclusions without doing their own men break in via the fire escape. Tracing the license plates, they determined contract to build a $6.5-billion jet fighter. He thinks General Dynamics blackmailed the president into giving it the contract. Once again, though, he readily admits that his evidence falls short of proof. "During the five years of research for this book, I tried unsuccessfully to find out how General unable to make contact with Billy or Bobby Hale despite repeated efforts." suspected East German spy, or his narrow escape from being drawn into the prurient nuggets while appearing to hold your nose. The press treats these themselves, were something to be ashamed of. Even if true, the critics suggest, such information is not historically "relevant." But it is obviously relevant connecting the family attitudes toward sexual conquest, the pursuit of power, The book has plenty of flaws. Of these, some of the most relates one anecdote about a Secret Service agent having to prevent the first lady from finding out for herself what she suspected was going on in the White depth. There is more to these episodes than his monochromatic tales of a president willing to take any risk, tell any falsehood, for the sake of get editors to kill a story. Of course, the press no longer plays this role on guarantee that the rate will never go up for as long as you renew. And of signed up. In a world where a formidable institution like the Wall Street Journal has 180,000-plus paying online subscribers more than a year after it started charging, and where people signed up before they even had to. (Naturally, the meter on a a penny less") has produced a flood of comments, ranging from "Drop dead, you Remarkably, two members of the president's Cabinet have sent favorable comments is magnificent. Your "Summary Judgment" column is nothing these establishment white men in dark suits was that you'll never make it. The vice president said: "This Internet thing is just a fad. Give me paper and ink working man." Of course they wouldn't listen. Why am I always the lone visionary? Perhaps I can find some soul mates in "The Fray." or Solitaire, I tell you. But Solitaire's so f****** by one of your "Diary" columns this week. I sobbed-- sobbed! --with shame as I read about what our government is doing to punish innovation and creativity in remained silent for too long. By the way, send me that umbrella ASAP. I sure much. They're bad with children. They shed constantly. They're hard to train. to imagine, unaware of) this sage counsel, many families went straight from the multiplex to the pet store and brought home a spotted darling of their own. and urinary tract problems." (These problems are manifest, in case you were rights activists are predicting another wave of Dalmatian refugees when a new just because they seemed cute on the screen. People too, for that matter. readers may have learned in Time or the Wall Street Journal this details, check out the press release.) Just so there is no confusion about this, let us will continue to function as an independent online service. Its customers will be free not to read Slate if they so desire. Slate, for its part, will retain about it and get instructions on how to download the free software by clicking here. If you haven't yet tried voting on one of our her refreshing readiness to be held accountable. Before long, however, the the attorney general had no relationship with the president, and that officials would love nothing more than an excuse to replace her after the election. More for the White House. This is because she refuses to appoint an independent milder form is absurd. People do play against type from time to time, but the acquired a reputation not just for integrity but for an almost fanatical probity. She asked the governor to appoint an independent counsel to prosecute sentimental notions about crime, and for her general mulishness. But until a few months ago, no one ever accused her of bending the law. Even if she were a different sort of person, the case that She was, by all accounts, eager to stay on as attorney general in an administration that was not at all eager to keep her. Until some time after the guarantee her own job security is to appoint an independent prosecutor. If she merits is another question, which won't be settled here. But it is pretty imprecise, and often contradictory, on the question of why they think she must appoint an independent counsel. Under the law, the attorney general is obliged to do so if she comes across "specific and credible" evidence of criminal discretionary powers to appoint an independent counsel if she feels there would be a "personal, financial, or political conflict of interest" if normal Justice meets the "specific and credible" standard. Gore, she asserts in a lengthy response to a request from Hatch, was raising soft money, which is not covered by the regulation that prohibits solicitations from government buildings. The isn't illegal. I think this last interpretation is unfortunate, because it opens the floodgates for unlimited contributions from corporations and labor the latest scandal. Hatch and others have made the case that she faces a an investigation that is potentially embarrassing and damaging to the administration. But the standard for appointing an independent counsel can't be bring cases against enemies, associates, friends, even relatives of members of has apparently construed this ambiguous provision in the only way one sensibly can. It gives her a wider berth than the "specific and credible" language, but it does not require her to appoint an independent counsel every time someone in the opposing party detects the appearance of a political conflict. had ordered up an independent counsel, not only would her job have been secure but the New York Times (and maybe even Sen. Hatch) would be swooning over her once again. Standing up to them, and doing what she evidently feels is far rejected the perception of independence in favor of the genuine and the three other tobacco companies that have been negotiating a global recruit liberal heroes of a more recent vintage as cigarette lobbyists. The advice to the companies involved in the $368-billion settlement, with the help Democrats are doing on behalf of the tobacco companies. According to a report of them has yet filed a lobbying disclosure form that might give additional companies and lobbying the White House and Congress to support the deal. recently acquired Republican bauble Bob Dole, who is still covered by in as clients, and who participated in some of the early negotiating sessions. together on a provision of the budget deal on behalf of Fruit of the Loom. With these two former legislative colossi bury their ideological differences and grotesque, depending on your perspective. But while Dole's agreement with the ply the corridors of the Capitol for them this autumn. tobacco settlement is not the same as working for the tobacco companies under ordinary circumstances, something he suggests his firm would not have done. He says the proposed deal serves the public interest by restricting cigarette advertising and marketing, and by requiring the tobacco companies to cough up billions if youth smoking fails to decline dramatically. "If Congress enacts it in pretty much its current shape, I believe it will be the biggest step forward tobacco companies have had to come forward with an inconceivably large number tobacco clients only after being persuaded that they were ready to mend their that he has been amazed by the billions of dollars the tobacco industry has agreed to pony up. "The amount of money is staggering," he says. "They have In a deal like this, it's not unusual for both sides to suggesting that cutting a lousy deal absolves them of blame for working for The morality of their participation doesn't depend on how badly they do. moral distinction here. You settle a case if you believe you'll be better off firm has been retained "to provide counsel in light of the heightened legal and answered in lawyerly fashion that the issue of work on other matters "hasn't because society may benefit from a compromise with an evildoer, work on behalf clients than the clients would otherwise have got. These lawyers might make the case that even tobacco companies have rights, and that the public interest actually was served by getting these companies a better bargain. But they interest lies in the worst possible deal for the tobacco companies. like defending an indigent murderer in a death penalty appeal. It's more like representation whether or not any particular lawyer decides to sully his hands. or PR. If you can't find a lobbyist, the court won't appoint one for you. involved in the settlement, and he deserves as much scorn as his Democratic counterparts. But somehow you expect that from Republicans, whereas you don't greedy operators on both sides have sold out to the tobacco industry, they likely there. The horse race that's been declared is for control of Congress. Nearly all the prognosticators failed to predict the Republican triumph in for the Democrats to ride back into power. The Democratic National Committee is raising millions per week on the promise to liberate the nation from the reign could happen. But there's good reason to hope it doesn't, whether you are a Democrat, a progressive, or even president of the United States. The reasons to be alarmed about the return of the Democrats aren't those put forward by Bob Democratic Congress almost certainly would not try to pass comprehensive might say, even a dog learns not to stick its nose in the campfire a second The real reason to worry about Democrats retaking Congress is that after two years out of power, they have begun to reconsider their of returning to power as spirited reform liberals, the Democrats would govern as a devious, dispirited version of their old selves. And paradoxically, they will have a more productive two years if they don't win than if they do. able to accomplish more of what Democrats want than if they controlled both deployed when he chaired the health subcommittee of Energy and Commerce, is administrative liberalism: Try to accomplish the same social goals covertly create universal coverage through the back door, by expanding Medicaid eligibility and requiring states to provide ever more extensive benefits. The system that was resented by governors of both parties as its costs escalated acting in a direct, sensible way to create government programs where they are deficient principally because it would cut poor people off even if they couldn't find jobs. It could, however, be made into a reasonable scheme by resort for those who are willing to work but are (frankly) unemployable in the Congress might find it easier to tinker with regulations to prevent states from cutting welfare recipients off at the end of their supposed time limits. This would undermine reform rather than fixing it. With a nominally Republican to pass a humane modification in the form of a jobs program. were truculent and obstructionist. It soon dawned on them that any blocking everything than compromising. But in the last two years, with a candidates denying any knowledge of his existence. He and his party learned the hard way that they were better off cooperating with Democrats on things the If Republicans retain a majority, both parties will be tax cut he wants, and maybe even some sort of entitlement reform. The balanced budget will continue to get closer. If Democrats recover a majority, Republicans will have every incentive to block everything once again. And with would bring out the worst in the Democrats, encouraging more symbolic "Flame Posies" column) and demagoguery intended to keep old people in a that suffering is good for the soul, and so it has been for the Democrats. When about how his party had been lazy and undisciplined, throwing programs at problems without worrying about results. He was touting his "Families First" still aren't into small stuff. They've made clear that the balanced budget will be the first thing out the window if they get their old chairs back. The next thing to go would be the rules restraining the power of committee chairs, headline refers to, don't you? But how do you know? ultimately declined this opportunity, reasoning that we could not honestly In the past week or so, oddly, the same process has directly has been widely reported anyhow, sort of, in part in the form of Drudge Report and the New York Post have told it in some detail. as on paper. Not a word, though, in the "newspaper of record," the got widely mocked for an editorial justifying the publication of a damaging rumor about a public official with the argument that while the rumor may not be true, it is true there is a rumor. But actually, there's something to that argument. On the one hand, a publication's standards of proof and taste should not be hostage to the lesser standards of other publications. On the other hand, a story can spread without the help of the establishment media to the point where making no acknowledgment of its existence becomes a failure in your seem unsatisfactory is the current netherworld where serious publications refer to the story as if everyone knows it without ever telling it straight. Burying about the cigar, see "Explainer." Of course, we're not saying it's true. We're just to show that spending time on the Internet tends to make people more lonely and apparently, the study's own disappointed authors) that people staring into computer screens form a wonderful new type of electronic community. The authors claim to have corrected for the possibility that lonely, depressed people are To minimize the risk of loneliness and depression, read this nine apologists explain away this finding? Well, try this. Perhaps Internet users are more depressed because they are better informed. Perhaps their feelings of increased loneliness are reflections of a deepened understanding of the human condition. Let's face it: The world is a mess, life is basically futile, and other people are pretty dreadful and don't like you much anyhow. And you'd never acquire all this superior insight if you didn't spend many, many hours on arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. million fine he must pay for enlisting his employees at Aqua Leisure media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken Republican Party may fall into this category as well. The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made "in the name deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises. exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. ("That's part of what the system about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With last week. The first wave of publicity was of a familiar and negative type. Declassified documents revealed new details about "Operation Mongoose," the cigars and powder intended to make the dictator's beard fall out, the agency second wave of publicity was more novel and positive. It was about a video the conclusion that the explosion was not the result of a terrorist attack, by explaining why eyewitnesses might have mistaken the airplane's midair agency of old vs. the chastened, competent, and versatile one of today. The Mir spacecraft, must be hoping for just such a contrast to form in the public mind. But while the agency certainly has changed for the better, it would be great seal appears and dissolves. Spooky music is heard, of the type most often used as background for cheesy shows about paranormal phenomena. An anonymous investigators were especially concerned with dozens of eyewitnesses who thought eyewitnesses did not see a missile," the narration continues. "What these airplane disintegrated. It then reconciles this scenario with the testimony of for the inevitable discrepancies in the evidence about what happened to Flight 800--a subject with which I have no obsession. But the video is nonetheless a analysts working on the case. There are two possibilities here. Either these time and money documenting its own inner workings. The former alternative suggests that old habits of deception die hard. The latter suggests that the integrated into the investigation itself. In fact, both things are probably strangest thing about the film is that it is supposed to dispel paranoid buffs who do not accept the official explanation. In other words, it is directed at the last people in the world who would ever believe anything the agency has always had a dual function. It is half neutral analyst, providing This split is built into the structure of the agency, which separates its the film to look like a product of the analysts. Its slick production values, however, suggest something of a debt to the operations directorate, which has to say the least, if agents trained in lying abroad are now moonlighting at specifically because Congress didn't want the government's propaganda resources the Soviet Union fell apart, the agency has been increasingly desperate to justify its continued existence. Though its side won the Cold War, it didn't wildly overestimated the Soviet economy and missed the impending Communist Morale is reportedly low, and career officials have been resigning in droves. recently declassified) by orienting it around new international The military may be better suited to dealing with terrorists and weapons. investigation, indicated at a press conference last week that he had some capabilities and a criminal record looking around for something to do. The will begin charging for access sometime early next year. The exact details and timetable are still being worked out, but we wanted to let our readers know that this is coming. Yes, yes, we said we were going to do this a year ago and blinked, but this time we really do mean it. Many things have changed in the past year. The number of people on the Web in general, and latest figures). We've had a chance to learn a lot about how to make better, and our readers, we hope, have had a chance to learn the value of what we're doing. Also, frankly, thanks to sites like maintained from the beginning of this adventure that ultimately, we would have to count on our readers to bear some of the cost. It is important to us to 's editorial content, for which we're grateful. But obviously it's better not to be dependent on subsidies from any corporation or the Web should make financial independence easier to achieve. Economy, of course, is just one of the Web's glories. We're working hard at technological marvels of the Internet to develop an exciting new form of journalism. But sheer economy should not be sneered at. In fact, we believe Unlike traditional magazines, we have no costs for printing, paper, and postage. We intend to share those savings with our readers: will charge subscribers far less than weekly print magazines such as equivalent print magazines, and unlike some other Web sites, appeals to an audience that will never be broad enough to sustain us on advertising alone. (Right now, of course, there is almost no Web site that is free because it is sustained by advertising. Sites are free because they are subsidized, a situation that won't endure.) evidence that, as the Web matures, the resistance to paying for content is crumbling. Still, there are people who continue to refuse, on some principle, to even consider paying for Web content. This puzzles us. Take is boring and of no interest to me, and I refuse to pay for it," we can understand that, if not agree with it. But if your attitude is "I really enjoy it's free, but refuse to contemplate paying for it," we're not just puzzled but actually a bit hurt. Here we are, a team of a couple of dozen people, plus many contributors, all trying to put out the best magazine we can. If you like what we're doing, please think of our feelings before you say you won't pay a few charity of any rich person, even one as saintly and magnificent as our business proposition and is happy to continue doing so as a business proposition, but has no justification for asking its shareholders to subsidize answer your questions about Slate "going paid." The thread's already active, so to make your own comments and ask any questions, click here. Prudence, our new advice columnist, has supplied an answer to the question had to do with why one guy named Bill had managed to discourage unwanted much for her. But then she found that he was making unseemly demands upon her, including the demand to lie on his behalf. Therefore, she was conflicted, entirely, however, because her connection with him meant much to her transferred her feelings, both positive and negative, to you, the you to do? You should make her an offer she can't refuse. Make her a columnist in one of your magazines, at your standard magnificent salary. She will soon find that relationship excessively demanding and transfer her attentions did the same. This year we decided that it would better serve our readers to take advantage of the inherent flexibility of Web publication by merely reducing the flow of articles, columns, and features over including new stuff on most days (including "Today's Papers," except on the holidays themselves). And of course, a year and a half of to the holiday spirit and fails to appear for a couple of weeks, best holiday wishes and thanks to our readers from all of us at produced an extraordinary amount of it. This is partly because they have a lot to spin about, and partly because they just seem to like spinning. the outpouring has been especially torrential. In addition to the spin coming president ("There is no controlling legal authority"), there has been a steady at daily White House briefings and on television. Judged in terms of how kinds of spin are effective and which only make matters worse. To get a taste of the different styles, I put some generic scandal questions to various administration flacks. Ann Lewis, the deputy director of communications, was the first one I reached. I asked Lewis to law prohibiting the solicitation of funds on government premises. She said only the White House counsel's office could discuss legal issues, so I asked, on a more general note, whether Gore was in any trouble. "Obviously I don't think he's in trouble," she said. Why not? "Well, I think what we have so far their own behalf. A Democratic candidate in 1995--at a time when Congress was shutting down the government, repealing the ban on assault weapons, and trying that were at stake. Shocking!" That was all Lewis had time for. accepted, I said, the administration's position that there was no price on handwritten "Ready to start overnights right away?" note clearly indicates? to stay over. He invited friends and supporters and others. There was no ticket "I don't believe so," she said. "Again, there was no price on it." After a third try, I gave up trying to get her to admit the obvious. that Gore might have broken the letter but not the spirit of the law. "If you look at the history of the [law], it was intended to make it impossible for federal officials to extract payments from federal workers," he said. On the suggested that it couldn't sensibly apply to the president and vice president, who actually live on federal property. But, he added, "this issue has not been look a bit more closely at these approaches. Asked a direct question, Lewis immediately changes the subject to some other issue, like gun control. She enjoy spending time with their friends. They regularly asked people to stay at gone over the list and having read through it this weekend, I can now see why the president and the first family are proud of the people who came to the White House as their personal guests." Lewis went on to explain that one of the guests was an old friend who was dying of cancer. This unctuous display Lewis. One prominent national reporter describes Lewis' style as commenting on the rain outside by claiming that the sun is shining. Because she is viewed as "Of course, people coming to the White House have access to the president by definition, because he's there. But we regard the notion of special access because a contribution is made as something that is contrary to our policies." connecting them where there's no evidence to connect them. The president has clearly said that there was absolutely no requirement, no price tag. These were friends and supporters of his coming to his residence." This mirrored the president acknowledges that a wide variety of meteorological conditions, including precipitation, are common this time of year. You might call that reporters, who proceed to turn the hapless flack into a human punching bag. approach. Rather than sticking to a line that is obviously absurd, he admits problems. He then goes into impressive detail about what the law is, and how it might or might not have been broken. Having proved that he is a sentient human practices similar to this one actually common under previous presidents? press themselves, seem not to have learned the obvious lesson. Instead of credibility, they have looked for the quality of ultimate loyalty in their spinner who was liked and trusted by reporters and who managed, almost own. As their relations with the press deteriorate to levels of hostility not of loyalty is not their biggest problem. A lack of credibility is. scandal, sounded pretty sordid. It reported that White House officials had promptly uninvited. The reason this is troublesome is that the news about thus recipients of an unauthorized leak of highly classified information. played this revelation all day, and the other networks reported it on the evening news. "If this allegation proves true, and this disclosure actually the White House and the apparent misuse of intelligence information for In this furor, a few significant details were overlooked, beaten up in the press for not having communicated similar information the hot new revelation in the scandal was that officials at the National Security Council had neglected to pass on to their superiors the contents of a might have told White House officials, some of whom were supervising fund this warning to be effective, those White House officials would have had to tip episode, the administration has been pilloried for failing to heed exactly such really are damned if you do and damned if you don't," says one anonymous source in. "This was top secret, and it further demonstrates the total politicization of all intelligence and White House operations. Anything and everything was vociferous journalistic critics of the president preach it round or preach it flat when it comes to these kinds of contacts. The Wall Street Journal 's editorials now oscillate between accusations that the administration abused sensitive information on the one hand, and allegations president alone, "warned him unequivocally of the penetration, enlisted his aid if the attorney general had asked for a private meeting to warn the corrupt politicization of the Justice Department, reminded us again of the has done plenty to fuel suspicion of all kinds. But at some point, the skeptics Heritage Foundation to the shooting ranges of the National Rifle Association, of high paranoid alert. The Christian Coalition is struggling with the asking too many questions about how the magazine spent grants from the It's now nearly impossible to find a conservative institution not in some sort conflicts aren't all ideological. They're about power, money, status, and various admixtures of these factors with politics. But all are symptoms of the revolution went sour in 1995--and in a larger sense, since the party began tribe lost in the wilderness. With no common program and no forceful or even universally acceptable leader, factions assert themselves with growing nastiness. As the many sides scuffle, their only shared sentiments are contempt These days, it is Democrats who seem to have absorbed victory. Republicans, meanwhile, seem to have studied under the querulous gouging each other than in taking on the enemy. Look at what should have been their crowning achievement. This year, the Republican Congress finally won an ostensibly balanced budget. But it failed to get much credit for it, in part because of bitter denunciations of the deal from the House radicals who like to his party in a mad quest for conservative purity. Without elevating these often petty struggles into a war of "ideas," it may be worth asking: What are these essence, they are fighting about what has been their most fundamental internal federal government. The good news is that conservatives are debating the greater degree of realism, than they have for some time. The bad news is that are willing to question the party dogma that a big and powerful federal government is inherently oppressive and evil. This glasnost was first publication, argue that the government bashing that carried Republicans to of this synthesis are not surprising when you consider where the National Greatness cons come from. They represent a merger of the shrunken remnants of neoconservatives. Both groups have long wished for conservatives to do what two other kinds of conservatives who were always hostile to the the only valid goal of Republicans. Populists, who see the greatness cons as an elitist menace and as a moderate one, have different objections. Though they themselves support government regulation in the moral sphere, populists hate the idea of national power, because to them, national means federal and federal means liberal. Libertarians and populists do share a political argument conservatism's most effective organizing tool and rallying cry. some other conservative strains at large, such as the now totally mystifying association. He danced away from that view in a failed attempt to make it to greatness cons and their libertarian critics for being insufficiently gloomy. Both sides, he wrote, failed to focus on moral decay as evidenced by such problems as relativism and the "disastrous feminization of education," whatever criticism of liquor companies. Some conservatives now seem to have no ideology more rigorous and intellectually serious than they really are. In practice, all renew national purpose are things like privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and pushing for a voucher system of school choice. In other words, most of the activity they want their activist federal government to engage in involves dismantling the federal government. The greatness cons do want more federal government in the form of an interventionist foreign policy. But they disingenuously assume that we can have more for less than we're spending now. A bigger defense and more tax cuts. No sacrifice is ever asked of the public. consistent philosophical position, but they offer the reverse hypocrisy in been bombed, but make no assault on the federal leviathan. Republicans like pork projects to their constituents. Conservatives may look as though they're finally debating the real issue. But unfortunately, the debate is mainly about adviser Dick Morris was about to resign over reports that he had been prostitute." Things have changed since then. Morris has raised his prices. each shocking thing he does tops the shocking thing he did last year, or last month, or even last week." Morris' career has developed the curious quality of a plea bargain in reverse. If you say he's guilty of a misdemeanor, he will try In reality, he's not fit to stand trial. Morris discusses right and wrong as if those concepts were as remote from his own experience as lunar geology. "I wanted to address the values agenda three or four times a week," he writes at one point in the book. "First, though, we had to identify have highly developed powers of hearing and smell, but in Morris' case, he does not seem to have compensated for an attenuated moral sense with any other literary acumen. Despite being rotten to the core, Dick Morris demonstrates in But Morris' own account undermines the myth. By claiming credit for absolutely everything, Morris leaves you wondering whether he deserves credit for anything at all. To call his recollections "unreliable" would be a massive understatement. There is hardly anything he says in the book that he does not contradict at some other point in the book. Usually, the mutually contradictory statements fall within a few pages of each other. Here are just a few subjects where Morris leaves the reader absolutely mystified about his views and his brought me inner peace for the first time in my life, I decided to abandon Morris brags about his script for an ad in the general election of that year. mean an air strike that continues until they give up." "Throughout my tenure at the White House, I never leaked information unless I biggest weapon against the Republicans. They are hated by the public, old and young." Three pages later, he writes: "I argued that as long as we lined up with the congressional Democrats and just sniped at cuts in school lunches and This last contradiction is central, because it goes to the fiercely resisting Republican cuts in social spending, while Morris was telling According to my sources at the time, Morris was desperately pushing for a budget deal and making the kind of hilariously precise electoral promises for against Republican cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. resisting domestic budget cuts, while his centrist "values" agenda helped to him move to the center. Morris tries to take credit for both strategies. But if there was a great political mind behind this synthesis, it was that of the channels to other political consultants, Morris tells us that he managed Morris: "Without those words of the president's that you passed to me, I would never have been able to get it done.") And it was Morris' ideas that kept basically following your game plan. It's working well.") as he emulates the rooster that thinks the sun rises because it crows, Morris quite make it were a 33-cent postage stamp, with a penny going to your favorite Through it all, Morris maintains that what he was doing was substance and ideas before the voters." Even as we see him fighting to reduce principle. "Some reporters seem to think that the real story is never the candidate's idea, but always the motivation to improve his or her political of his book, Morris has cast himself as a modest egomaniac, a shy publicity hound, a principled manipulator, a loyal traitor, and a truthful liar. He isn't just confused, he's the dialectic incarnate. He aims for evil, but only manages considering a job with the special prosecutor. "A massive conflict," objectivity that I now think is fraudulent." The White House had not previously maw of a journalistic ethics controversy. This is a simultaneously terrifying, infuriating, and boring place to be. (While there, perhaps, he may even bond offer and writing about the case. Furthermore, what he considered seriously was question is: So what? What if he had considered an actual job? What if he had conflict causes some kind of personal advantage to distort either your perception of the truth or your willingness to honestly state what you previously hidden incentive or tendency to misperceive or misstate the zealot for the truth and driven to distraction by lying. That's what got him of the United States in dozens of perjuries [and] efforts to obstruct justice and cover up" matters both sexual and financial. And he sincerely believes it would be a tragedy for the country if a president was allowed to get away with "mendacity" on this scale, if proved. You may find this a bit overwrought (I do), you may question the facts or take a more worldly view of what should be done about them. But these are his views, and he has made no can to prevent this tragedy? In other words, he feels an ethical obligation to of "conflict of interest," it seems there is an ethical obligation not to act on your publicly expressed beliefs. To act on your beliefs discredits your expression of them and taints any beliefs you might express in the But how? Was the job offer, in effect, a bribe? Hardly. months, he would have made far less than he makes now. It would have meant appearances, and the prospect, in just half a year, of unemployment lethally combined with extreme unpopularity. No doubt the frisson of history was to express it. Anyone who can study and write about controversial topics without ever developing an opinion is an idiot, not an independent thinker. An independent thinker is someone whose views are based on an honest assessment of consistent with his expressed views casts no light at all on the question of general, sure: Disclosure is a good idea. How can a journalist be against disclosure? Keep in mind a couple of things, though. First, if there is no actual conflict of interest involved, all you are protecting with disclosure is your readers' right to reach the wrong conclusion. That's his or her right, all right, but it's surely one of the lesser rights around. Second, a journalist public facts. These arguments stand or fall on their own, and readers don't need to trust the author in order to evaluate them. Original reporting can't be evaluated by the lay reader sitting in his or her armchair. But even here, an ethical evaluation of the author isn't crucial. Especially on a big, competitive story like this one, no one need be imprisoned in some biased reporter's web of falsehoods unless the reporter's biases are comfortably says the job discussions provided valuable information and insights that helped milking him for information while only pretending to be interested in the job. And then he published a triumphal scoop. Would the ethics cops have complained? Unlikely. He'd be a hero of the profession. It's only the sincere consideration of a job doing something you truly believe in that can wreck your career in been much heard from since, and his actual responsibilities have been something the White House came to support the unconstitutional, unpopular law known as trying to figure out how to expand international opportunities for online business. I hold in my hands, a few days in advance of its release, the task force's draft report. It contains one remarkable passage. Along with their countries, including the United States, are considering or have adopted laws to multiple interests may result in barriers for US providers attempting to enter rating systems, and technical solutions to empower parents and other users to violence)." (The latest version removes the word "pornography" from this This white paper is notable for two reasons: The first is that the chief author, who is known (fairly or otherwise) for his fondness for heavy regulation, seems to be leaning in a more libertarian direction. position on the Communications Decency Act, which was signed by the president regulate content through criminal penalties for those who violate standards of decency (standards drawn so broadly that they might prohibit, for instance, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary standards, sexual or been a bit of a mystery. It turns out to have been a bit of an accident. Last other problems, the proposal was an attempt to "impose criminal sanctions on the transmission of constitutionally protected speech." Inside the White House, bill headed toward overwhelming passage in the Senate, however, political reality began to assert itself. With an election coming up, the last thing the issue dealing with children and pornography. "No way are you going to get yourself in a position where the president isn't willing to go as far as a Democratic senator in restricting child pornography on the Internet," one senior administration official explained. Child pornography and obscenity are illegal anyway, but that was a fine point the administration wasn't willing to the nation's economy. It was a bill in which the administration had many The White House could not afford to antagonize Exon by opposing his pet provision. Those inside the administration who were troubled by the those rare occasions. In its Court of Appeals brief, the Justice Department the dissemination of information about abortion, was unconstitutional and would not be enforced. Gore, in particular, wanted to avoid an appeal by finding a way to settle with the various plaintiffs in the suit. According to the bill to the Supreme Court was over Gore's objections." Morris says he had two discussions with Gore about whether there might be an alternative way to stop children from gaining access to inappropriate material on the Internet. "We couldn't really find a technical way of doing it," Morris says. Others in the White House believe it was Morris himself who prevailed against Gore and In any case, political logic prevailed. Officially, the his own reasons for pursuing the case. In the early days of the administration, Days made a legally sound but politically disastrous decision to appeal the general in public. Days, who previously was thought to have a good shot at a nomination and confirmation by the Senate, wasn't about to risk premature termination of his career. He wouldn't comment. But privately, he may believe what many in the administration offer in defense of their indefensible position: that a resounding Supreme Court decision against them will do more to advance the cause of free expression than would leaving the Court of Appeals administration's strategy, it is foolhardy. The Supreme Court might not cooperate in rejecting the administration's public position and embracing its to work out a minimally consistent position on the Internet. The basic problem, exacerbated in this instance by a lack of understanding beyond the vice president's office of what is at stake in the development of the Internet. But a simple solution might be at hand. It can be expressed in four words I thought You would be too, would you not? Anyway, this speech was especially interesting old ways are still the best. He prefers magazines the way they come in the quite a shock to those of us who have spent the past year and a half trying to characteristic is that it does not come in the mail. Although we sometimes the old way is still the best. For example, we generally prefer online magazines might find it discouraging to learn that their own proprietor prefers magazines that come in the mail. And there were tears, of course, even prevent Bill Gates from finding out that his company publishes an online magazine. The second challenge was to misrepresent (or "spin," to use the reads them on his specially designed computer screen that can display a Slate is a tiny division of a large company, it is frequently mentioned in the junior staff member to lurk near the Gates family mailbox and, when no one is looking, to go through the contents and Magic Marker out all references to the peek at our new Table of Contents, designed especially to take advantage of the smallest standard computer screen to display the entire contents of an issue of look. This is still a "beta," meaning that we're still tinkering with it, but forewarned that the download takes quite a while via modem. You can also order a CD. Or you can while away the time reading magazines on paper. implausibly that the press doesn't pay enough attention to itself. The enormous attention devoted to the premiere of his magazine of press criticism, That subtlety shouldn't cause him too much distress, because the press's publicity attending the arrival of a new magazine. We've been there too. And we're embarrassed to say that the current issue of summarized, analyzed, criticized. We feel this has been a useful trial run for him of cleverly obeying those rules while offending journalistic ethical values overall "take" of all our coverage is fairly negative. That is not intentional. leading press critic do his job of ensuring the highest standards of honesty, genre of article that might be called the puff piece in the form of a hatchet mean, nasty, unscrupulous son of a bitch who'll do anything to win a case. editorials about overlavish summer intern programs (accompanying complex charts that compared the number of opera tickets and restaurant dinners offered by the huge photos of men in suits standing in front of shelves of we already suspect we might be glamorous). He will flatter us by the very standards he accuses us of failing to meet, by turning our peccadilloes into moral crises, by the very gloss on his publication that's all about us, and above all by giving us an excuse once a month to write about ourselves. perhaps? Fresh salmon? Straight cash? Nothing's too good for the guy who's gonna make us journalists take a long look in the mirror. by contrast, seems to think he can mislead us about truths that are right in not be appropriate to comment on the possibility that it would provide a in advance if you have a steadily maintained position that you don't even concede the "possibility" that such a report exists. That was on Page A18 of the national edition. Meanwhile, on this information could come from only one of two places: someone's imagination and fired. So it's obvious that his "Office" did not have a steadily maintained reason for rejecting the request was transparently false. created a special page listing and linking to all the Flytrap stories in they may wish to avoid. They may wish to make an exception report is not yet out on the Web. As soon as it is, though, we plan to run it links to various locations where you can read the whole thing. have wrestled with his conscience before opting to launch bitter attacks on later, they're in the White House. This must be the most disciplined set of addicts in the world, because none of them has ever used drugs once since they joined the White House staff." The accusation that the White House is filled understandable, of course, that conservative frustration levels should be running high these days. For a party that thought it was leading an unstoppable revolution less than two years ago, it can't be much fun to be saddled with an old gray mare of a presidential candidate like Dole, or to be faced with the possibility of losing control of Congress to an opposition they believe to be not just wrong, but on the wrong side of history. That said, many Republicans biased and hypocritical way that they risk sacrificing both their credibility from transparent falsehood (by leaving it meaningless). But the implicit last week, Dole and his surrogates have focused on two new issues that purport to embody the flawed ethics of the administration. What these lines of attack have in common is that for all the hysteria with which they are being expressed, they have yielded little evidence of presidential misbehavior, let language when he issued a statement attacking the "administration's potentially from a foreigner?" Dole himself then scored the administration for failing to reporters who have been trying very hard to unearth evidence that the course, it would be nice if we lived in a country where the political parties merely and sadly typical. As recently as the last presidential election, big a deal about it. Since contributions from foreign nationals residing here The Democratic Party did accept, and subsequently return, an apparently illegal a green card. But then, returning funny money is par for the course in presidential campaigns. Back during the primaries, Dole accepted and returned chief has since pleaded guilty to two felony charges in the case. The real difference between foreign and domestic soft money explicit and valuable favors for both companies, sponsoring the notorious and regulatory fixes. For some reason, no one considers these to be Dole being the underdog, Dole is so immune to such assaults that he can send out campaign contributions are at least in the realm of the troublesome. The pardon fuss, on other hand, is simply absurd. "Here's how to succeed in obstructing the matter up publicly, and there's no evidence he's done so in private. When asked, he's said he hasn't thought about it and won't discuss it. did business with who may be in jail," Dole said on the eve of the final obviated his "no comment" with an answer (a couple of weeks earlier) on the said: "My position would be that their cases should be handled like others, meetings on that, and I review those cases as they come up after there's an evaluation done by the Justice Department." In no significant way does that his character is as bad as some Republicans contend, there's no reason for them to think he would hesitate to do so. It might also be pointed out that Dole the chant: "It's Our Money, It's Our Money, It's Our Money"). It's hard to say campaign, it stands as an apt description of his faltering Republican curious thing. It is capable of focusing on certain kinds of misbehavior with selective, often preoccupying itself with one modish ethical issue to the exclusion of others that are equally serious. Since the election, everyone has political fund raising. But no one seems to care any more about influence peddling, a category of sleaze that is equally pervasive, arguably more venal, policy advice just a few months ago. And among Democrats, it isn't considered either surprising or scandalous that the president would nominate as secretary mules. She grew up on the other side of the Old South's racial divide, and speaks flavorless corporate English. He likes to be in front of the cameras. She likes to work behind the scenes. But they're basically in the same intersection of public policy and private interests. success as chairman of the Republican National Committee, a job he held until explicit than ever before about the connection between big contributions and support, he threatened, Republicans might not prove so effective a conduit for the promise of being a very effective conduit himself. As soon as his term as the implementation of the Telecommunications Act, which involves issues companies in their dispute with the regional ones. But whatever the merits of in a propaganda war after letting everybody know he was available to work for Bureau in the Labor Department during the Carter administration, she helped to write regulations requiring federal contractors to comply with goals and timetables for hiring minorities. After she left the Labor Department, she set up a firm to advise companies on how to comply with those regulations. But practices he deemed inadequate. In most cases, he negotiated settlements with Republicans, ethical standards are, if anything, lower. During the last adviser in good standing, while the Dole campaign brought such notorious politics. The difference is that whereas campaign finance is an immensely stables of K Street could be cleaned up pretty easily if anyone cared. All it would take is for a few prominent politicians to stop elevating lobbyists to high office, and to quit taking their calls. It's a cheap, easy, and effective solution that unfortunately doesn't fit in with this season's spasm of spin has spun out of control. What everybody thinks, and nobody can print, is unfairness of the accusations he flings around with such abandon in his column. I can't prove that he is motivated by the quest for fame and power rather than the desire to get at the truth. I don't even truly believe that he sticks up rather than genuine conviction. But I could pass off all that malicious intermittent efforts at "Reading Bill's Mind." In the latest of these, which the president of the United States. "Just when I should feel terrific about my economic boom making possible my budget deal, I can feel the damn prosecutors kind of evidence, the reporters on the national staff who have been covering fellow opinion columnists wouldn't dare leap to his conclusion. They might accusing someone, even the president, of a crime without evidence crosses a use-- how shall we say it? --strong incentives to encourage highly placed officials to leak to him. What he writes carries the implication that he knows, thanks to his inside tipsters, that which will soon come to light. But, with The welter of innuendo here is so thick that one can hardly of crimes that would, if they had been brought to light, have prevented his Only Whitewater buffs will have any idea in this paragraph. But those who that ruined the careers of almost everyone he worked with. But after he joined no worse than what previous presidents had done. In fact, he has been trying, Though he is a graceful writer and a skilled reporter and telling. The weight of the Times is such that unfairness anywhere in the paper casts a shadow over legitimate stories that appear elsewhere. confess to a moment of doubt about our genteel policy of a week off every now and then when Princess Di was killed the day after our most recent skipped week began. When The New Yorker (which also skips an issue or three each year) chose to rush out a special Princess Di issue several days early, we felt especially heartsick. Were we the only media outlet that squandered this opportunity to exploit the public's revulsion at media exploitation of the dead Could we not have profitably run a few symposiums on privacy vs. press freedom, personal reflections on the celebrity culture, editorials condemning the satisfactory response to complaints about media exploitation. Now that the week sides in all Slate's current "Dialogues." Each Dialogue will feature buttons with which you can record your support for one side or the other. The page will display a running vote count, expressed in percentage terms. And the polls never close: The tally will continue indefinitely, even after the Dialogue has been Composted. You can only vote once (you have to register), but you can change your vote as often as you like as the Dialogue proceeds. This reflects our hope that these Dialogues will be exercises in reasoned persuasion, and not repeated fusillades from fixed positions. The test of a successful argument will be less a matter of who gets the most votes than of who changes the note, if you haven't already, the arrival of Slate Explorer, a new way to explore and navigate Slate's contents. It's a cute little box that sits on your old story. The Daily Newsprint reviewer writes that Titanic II: The Kitchen Sink is "a spectacular failure," and the producer buys ads happens the other way. In a recent Slate review of Web filtering software (intended to help Patrol's Web site does some creative filtering and declares, "Slate says that Weekly Standard opened with the kind of editorial one is used to reading in conservative magazines. Titled "It's Time to Take on the Judges," it heaped usurpation." Growing more indignant by the paragraph, the editors declared it "time to ignite a popular outcry against unelected officials and their efforts initiative this year, which legalized the use of marijuana for medical drug czar during the Bush administration, argued that the will of the people must be overridden. The authors recommended that the federal government Enforcement Administration ignore state authorities and "use its power" to We have all endured screeds from conservatives on how terrible it is for wants, the issue will end up in the courts, where conservatives will, presumably, favor unelected federal judges backing the decision of unelected federal bureaucrats to overturn the popular will. In defending this scenario, initiative: that disingenuous wording misled voters about the measure's real Conservatives have often expressed the view that affirmative action is unconstitutional. In other words, when democratically elected governments act pro affirmative action, judges should overrule them; when democracy acts anti affirmative action, the people's will must be sacrosanct. to acknowledge that liberals aren't always paragons of intellectual And let's give conservatives a bit of credit. On one significant issue, the handing a Democratic president a knife to gore Republican oxen (though they did Republicans are still the biggest offenders when it comes to inconsistency. On principles and their practice have gone completely out of control. um, tensions is that many "principles" of modern conservatives were developed a Democratic Congress, and a liberal federal bench. Conservatives don't seem to have anticipated that this might change. They guessed that they would do better with a "strong executive," a weaker legislative branch, and a restrained whole institution of the special prosecutor (a k a independent counsel) in election, congressional Republicans caused the law authorizing special minds and decided to reauthorize the law. Today, the shoe having switched feet, one no longer hears conservative worries about abuse of the independent scandalously inappropriate undermining of an essential institution of public this point at least, Democrats have been much more consistent, supporting the independent counsel's office throughout, despite their own partisan objections refusal to categorically rule out pardons for former associates caught up in Whitewater. Several Republicans in Congress said they would consider such Republicans have also evolved a bit on the issue of "executive privilege," the doctrine that protects communications between the president and his top criticizing his drug policies, Bob Dole asserted that the president had no president's powers as commander in chief. In the 1980s, Democrats could be counted upon to argue that Republican presidents needed congressional authorization for military action. Republicans, on the other hand, invariably constitutional power to declare war, was unconstitutional, and that military Democrat has occupied the White House, it has been a different story. When must "obtain clear and unambiguous congressional backing" before sending troops Or, consider the issue of informing Congress about "covert actions." In the 1980s, Democrats on the Intelligence Committee were always Congress was trying to "micromanage" foreign policy, couldn't be trusted not to leak vital secrets, and so on. Now, it is Republicans who are apoplectic about wasn't behind them. And the Intelligence Committee has concluded that the no comparable gestures of contrition were forthcoming from Republicans. And in awful as people say it is won't hurt its sales too much. Meanwhile, the question: Could a president get away with it today? And the even more we have been posting quietly, in primitive form, a new feature that emerges fully this week. Called "Pundit was moved as a result on various issues. It will also treat the print pundits, though less comprehensively. Like our other Briefing features, Pundit Central can be used either as a guide for what to read and watch or as an efficient (and, we hope, entertaining) substitute for reading and watching. your appetite instead of sating it, the page includes an extensive set of links to Web sites where the pundits and panjandrums can be found in their full glory. Come to Pundit Central, and you'll never want for an opinion again. is the best collective noun for people who make their living spouting opinions in one medium or another (or, as is increasingly the case, in all of them)? "talking heads," but sometimes, in a hurry, does refer to the breed, with contest among four journalists for the title (to be awarded by actual evidence of the woman (or man) who made this remark, we'd be grateful, responded to our online reader survey. Last year we were pretty thrilled to get 3,000-plus responses in a month. Thanks to all who've spent a few minutes telling us about themselves. If you haven't filled it out yet, click here for that liberals were all for tough laws against sexual harassment and conservatives complained that such laws create a sexual reign of terror. Likewise, liberals were great enthusiasts for the appointment of independent counsels or special prosecutors while conservatives condemned these of political differences." Now those roles are usually reversed. assume that these conversions are a sincere response to the scandals president could be. And liberals, until one of their own got caught up in them, didn't appreciate how onerous and unfair these laws are. Certainly my friend opinion on two moderately important points of law is far less painful than compatible president of your lifetime. But will it wash? Unfortunately, I don't and the special prosecutor, but there are many other ways it might have done for a particular bus, you wouldn't be at work today. Other buses come along. If misbehavior, false accusations of misbehavior, or accurate public revelation of a state orders state troopers to summon a lowly state employee to a hotel room, abusive invasion of privacy for the law to insist that a governor not do institution is: An administration should not be trusted to investigate itself. Nothing in our experience since the office was institutionalized two decades some) or fair and honest Justice Department investigations of administration officials (of which there also have been some) undermines this basic logic. An independent prosecutor is the only realistic way criminal behavior by those in sundry complaints about the independent counsel as that institution has evolved. One is that the very appointment of a special prosecutor is a politically traumatic affair and implies guilt. Another is that independent prosecutors', is to pursue a particular person rather than a particular crime. Their every incentive is to prosecute, since failure to prosecute suggests that the whole enterprise was needless. Their pursuit is not hampered by many of the budget and policy restraints that cool the zeal of normal prosecutors. (These editorial page almost any random day in the late 1980s, although not during the solution is not to give up on special prosecutors. The solution is to make the independent prosecutor a permanent office, rather than appointing a new one every time a scandal or alleged scandal comes along. Unless the political culture changes drastically, there will always be one or more independent administrations, anyway. Referring some matter to a permanent independent prosecutor's office would be far less fraught than appointing a new independent prosecutor and would carry less of a stigma. A permanent independent prosecutor's office could be held more easily to reasonable financial and procedural guidelines. A permanent independent prosecutor's office would not need to feel that its reputation depended on prosecuting and convicting close enough for the rest of us. If White House aides have to keep glancing is no bad thing. It might even be a nice tradition for the permanent independent prosecutor's office always to be run by someone from the opposing We all have learned recently, for example, that even outright lying under oath in a deposition for a civil case is the kind of thing that an ordinary citizen apparently does not often get prosecuted for (though Even under a reformed independent prosecutor law, a president would be more at transgression than the ordinary citizen. Is that such a terrible thing? will rediscover all its objections to independent prosecutors. Democrats, meanwhile, will be glad the law is still around. And who knows? Sexual pollster or consultant these days, and you're likely to hear a lament about the shortage of politically potent ideas. Looking toward the midterm election in Republican promise of sweeping tax overhaul. Sure, they can point out that the the middle class. But you can't beat a horse with no horse. Republicans have on reform: good tax reform. The shared idea of both kinds of tax reform is and you get lower rates by getting rid of loopholes and making the law neutral among different kinds of income; you promote economic efficiency. Resources go where the invisible hand directs them, not where they can get the most shelter), and figuring out your taxes is more complicated than ever. Yet for some reason, the only major politician who has tried to latch onto the again. He points out that higher tax rates for higher incomes aren't what make State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the reports trickling out suggest for by possible future budget surpluses, or more "targeted" incentives to Al Gore don't want to be accused of copyright infringement. Under the most persuaded everyone to let well enough alone. With the economy swimming along so nicely, why meddle? The last theory, the most malignant, is that the Democrats None of these explanations fully adds up. In politics, more substance. Tinkering with the tax code is always hazardous. When lobbyists know what may get "fixed." But that's a better argument against the grab bag of pleading) than it is against sweeping reform. The power of moneyed interests doesn't explain much, either. All the industries that benefit most from tax explanation for the failure to jump aboard tax reform is the wider political predicament of liberals. In the present climate, it is nearly impossible to spend money on new spending programs. But it is sometimes possible to disguise spending programs as tax breaks. Of course, a dollar of government revenue lost to an investment tax credit is a dollar added to the national debt as surely as a dollar spent on food stamps. In fact, the cost is usually higher, since indirect incentives tend to be less efficient than direct expenditures. But recognized the tax code as an excellent hiding place for social policy. If he has any appreciation of the economic value of tax neutrality, or of the support worker training, but also augmented research and development credits, a indisputably strengthened the economy by reducing the budget deficit, it truly undid tax reform. It turned four rates into six and created a powerful bias in initiatives, pushed by the very politicians out there denouncing the complex isn't an economic purist. But you still have to wonder how such a smart policy beneficiaries will be impressed with your cleverness and sophistication (which is, after all, the whole point of giving), and they will never suspect that so magazine as two separate products. The umbrella is fully integrated into umbrella. One or the other.) To bar us, as some have suggested, from including paid apologists for our rivals) that by including a free umbrella with each thereby stifling innovation in this crucial field. Simple mathematics disposes nobody in his right mind would put at risk a monopoly as lucrative as the one As a matter of fact, a ham sandwich goes very well with some of 's features. What could be nicer than sitting under an Our own view, if you're wondering, is that the analogy is brilliantly acute and Magazines." The result, as the Justice Department would have predicted, is pages, and profitability are a few of the dimensions in which, quite frankly, we are somewhat behind, although we lead in other important measures such as At last report he was more or less trapped in his house, so he's had plenty of turmoil in distant lands are a great potential market for computer and modem. They won't need umbrellas, of course. Circulation send him a message of support. The thread is called "The women were women, conservatives were conservative on the subject of child abuse. That is, they were in favor of it. "We all got the belt that night," Pat who acquainted her children with the salubrious effects of the strap on days, it appears, are gone. With Shine and Sling Blade --films conservatives want to tell you: We were abused too. As adult children of victims of every sort of paddling and walloping and thwacking, Republicans are in the middle of the night and hit him for wetting his bed if he didn't get up to go. When Burton was an infant, his father beat him black and blue for crying her. Charged with kidnapping, he was convicted and spent two years in prison. first raised the subject of his experiences to underscore his support for a bill to aid battered wives. Now he is deploying his pain in a legislatively less specific way, to try to show that he is not the reactionary bogeyman most people think he is. One doesn't wish to indicate any lack of sympathy for what sounds like a truly wretched and brutal childhood. But if we are to draw a because of his experiences, but rather that he is working out an inherited disposition to abuse children on a more ambitious level. It was Burton who of fellow who wears his heart on his sleeve, so it came as something of a shock when, several weeks ago, he revealed his own wretched childhood to a reporter between your mother and your father. It makes you grow up maybe a little late at the pool hall one night soon after marrying Newt's mom. When abusive, but he was cold and uncommunicative toward his stepchildren. Newt has anybody else go through it." On his side in support of the measure was another abandoning his family, forcing Ensign's mother to support three children by Republicans start talking about being neglected and abused, you can bet that they're about to violate some sacrosanct conservative principle like states' about states' rights, I say, 'Hold it, guys, there is a duty here for the willingness to intervene against domestic violence, despite the otherwise get the job done." The exceptions to conservative orthodoxy that these says it's fine to smack the kids (the phrase used is "reasonable corporal Movement. A decade ago, politicians didn't boast about being abused. They all stood up to that same daddy for slapping his mom around. Republicans, a little behind in the game, are trying to say, "We feel your pain too." They're finally cottoning on to the political value of the confessional culture. With their explanation. These guys need professional help, but are afraid to be seen near a psychiatrist's office. Pouring their hearts out to reporters is the only is to provide what we call "intelligent synthesis" of the news of the week. Through features such as "Frame Game" (see hope to provide a deeper understanding than a conventional news summary would that clogs the typical newspaper or magazine story. small way, we're having some influence on the conventional media, too. For remarkably few words, the Times gets to the essence of a complicated story. Altitude problems caused the crash! What more, after all, does one need to know? Pedants may quibble that the problem was, more precisely, a lack of altitude, but that is a small point. The larger conceptual breakthrough is the problem, and no one need fear boarding an airplane ever again. contribution we make to human betterment. We are ordinarily happy to labor in anonymity: No one ever gets a byline for a headline, however brilliant. But this is a special case. Some toiler on the Times copy desk has completed the great work begun by the Wright Brothers. They lifted humankind up; he or she has figured out how to keep us there. It all depends on having the right trying a few new editorial features next week. Watch out for them: tortured us by saying it sounded like a good conversation over the breakfast views to her own breakfast table. Damn. But that did give us a name for this offended at the notion that they are what used to be called "moral updated column of gossip, speculation, scuttlebutt, and philosophical a similar feature on, well, culture. We define culture broadly to include most diabolically effective tactician. On the issue of crime, in which he Order of Police on the day Bob Dole was set to launch a major attack on the the origin of the president's latest "little things" proposal: to require drug presiding over an increase in drug use by young people had the potential to useless, and offensive to notions of privacy and constitutional rights. But the pandering beyond the call of victory. It should also put us on our guard about a man who, if he is a liberal at all, is a liberal of an odd sort: One with no instinctive regard for civil liberties or the Bill of Rights. reversed himself and opposed amending the Constitution to ban flag burning. But that stance turned out to be a false positive for the president on civil liberties. Since then he has consistently insulted both the First and the Fourth amendments. (Some would say he has disregarded the Second Amendment, a foolish bill which would have criminalized the transmission of "indecent" or "patently offensive" material via the Internet, the administration backed oddity of this political moment is that while our Democratic president has no special love of civil liberties, civil libertarian sentiment is growing in the Union has been campaign boilerplate, at least until recently. This surprising recently signed an immigration bill giving the government the power to exclude anyone who advocates "terrorist activity." This threatens to become a modern writ by which state prisoners, including those on death row, can get their the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport asylum seekers without giving them any opportunity to appear before a tribunal. And in his most recent competing public purposes, like the protection of children. In the case of drug only a symbolic value. A scheduled drug test is easily beaten; you just need to stay clean for a short time before the test. Then you can celebrate your license by getting high. In answer to the objection that urine tests reveal reveal chemical traces for up to a year. But here the insult to civil liberties becomes staggering. The explicit purpose becomes finding out who among the young has ever indulged in the kind of experiment that both members of where he said the reason for the tests was to "to find those kids and help them such an intrusion might be worrisome was evident from that speech, as it was from his radio address, in which he compared his proposal to the requirement that parolees take drug tests. Parolees are convicted criminals. People applying for driver's licenses aren't even suspects of anything. It has been people who cannot vote. The more likely reason, however, is that if the idea is applies to those who do not have the full legal rights of adults. there is something to the argument that his cavalier attitude about individual rights helped to create an atmosphere in which thuggish members of his administration could regard invasions of privacy very lightly. Dole is hardly standard, the day may not be far off when some Democratic candidate accuses a offered a considerable challenge to magazine editors everywhere by posing nude content to expose other people. Is it not time for them to start exposing eschew grandiose titles like "editor in chief," let alone "founder." At the special staff meeting called to discuss the issue of who should bare all for the good of the magazine, there was a groundswell of support for calling upon editor, who delegated it to an associate editor, who delegated it to an Weed, whose title is Special Issue of the Publisher. making clever use of light and shadow to hide the aspects of the story that vent some controversial opinions about his relatives. His mother and father, he reveals, are "just terrible parents. They're driving me crazy with their 'eat tart views about his relatives' relations with the baby sitter. "They just use her for their own pleasure," he says. "I get stuck with her, while they go out do anything for Slate," he adds. "I just love that magazine." a dialogue on the subject (to continue the theme of the previous item, he and and take this opportunity to draw special attention to it. Slate gets from writers through editors to you. Publishing on the Web is still logical mind and wonderful laugh, among other gifts, made it all happen (well, "program manager"? Bill liked to explain that on normal software projects, the program manager is just that: in charge of the program. On Slate, the program Bill took amiably and skillfully to his ambassadorial function, and is more responsible than any other person for designing the actual technology behind when chasing some alleged miscreant, the press has brushed aside the question of what exactly is wrong with the explanation that the situation creates the perception of impropriety. We thereby avoid the tiresome issue of whether anything improper actually has occurred. (The trick works both ways: Actual miscreants confess to having created an appearance of impropriety, thus sidestepping the little matter of impropriety itself.) Since the press itself largely creates the perception with its coverage, justifying the coverage on the basis of the perception is a convenient form of circular reasoning. knowledge), has a public figure been found guilty of committing a perception when the perception is demonstrably untrue. Until now there had to be at least a possibility that the perception of impropriety might some day molt into hard evidence of actual impropriety. In this case, that possibility doesn't exist. Undoubtedly there are folks who will continue to insist, against all evidence, think it's typical, they accept that it isn't true. Apparently that doesn't any faintly plausible bit of poison his critics may be dispensing. have longed for the day when "might be true" is accepted as the standard for our trade. Never in our most idealistic moments did we dare national monuments! (Q: Who is buried in Grant's Tomb? A: If you have to ask, you can't afford it.) Could be true. After all, it would be typical of someone the kind of thing that gets you accused of doing that kind of thing. something like that. We don't remember the details, exactly, but they certainly created the perception that he did something like that, and anyone who could be perceived to do something like that has created an atmosphere that makes possible the perception that he could do something worse. So he has no one to magazine reported some preliminary results from a poll it has been conducting Turkey, which is no mean accomplishment (what have you done with your life?), think, was its stinting view of history. If you're going in for shameless promotional gimmicks, why limit yourself to a century? fulfilling life, and even use the Internet contentedly, without understanding in peace and consider yourself fortunate. But if you have ventured into the wonderful world of cookies, you may be one of those folks who is alarmed about them. This is completely unnecessary. Cookies are merely special messages a Web "Have a nice day," or, "End child abuse now," or, "Wipe out this person's hard paranoiacs have set their browsers to alert them when a cookie is heading their way. And some of them have complained that this notice pops up a lot when they're reading Slate. Slate actually uses very few cookies. For example, we tell your browser to remember the date of your visit. When you come back the next time, your computer sends that date back to ours. If it's still the same day, we don't feed you the cover again but take you straight to the Table of Contents. Similarly, we use cookies to remember whether you prefer your contents listed by page number or by date of posting, and to remember which entry in a "Dispatch" or "Dialogue" you last read. All perfectly innocent. did investigate these complaints, and it turned out that our server computers were sending jars and jars of cookies we didn't need. To emphasize: This was information from us going into your computer, not information from you going into ours. And it really was harmless stuff. Nevertheless, we have turned off these superfluous cookies. If you don't believe us, or if that Internet Explorer, just click on "View," then "Options," and choose the of course, is determined to bring the same degree of objectivity and hype resistance to this event that we legendarily brought to our coverage of the author's name a short bio pops up (instead of the click taking you to the bio moment. But there's lots more coming. Just so you're prepared. presidential election, a major scandal breaks. A young girl accuses the conference. The flack mouths the words (PC, Mac) injected into his head. But despite being a satire, Wag better class of political movie. The view is conspiratorial, not in the ironic way. That a secret government runs the show is just a fact of paranoia is an equally jaded belief that politics is merely the art of media manipulation. Fed a compelling diet of music and images, the consultant and the producer agree, a docile and credulous public will go for just about president after the real president has a stroke atop a bimbo. In this plotters to fool his own Cabinet. The film takes its biggest wink in the scene stroke. ("Do you think you're a little paranoid?" King asks him.) In Bob hire an outside lobbyist, might have been based on an article from the falls prey to paranoia because it's easy. If you don't have the patience to try to understand politics or aren't really interested, conspiracy allows you to seem sophisticated. It's a dumb person's way of seeming smart. My colleague is attributable to conspiracies of a kind. The fact that Producer X is sleeping with Starlet Y really does explain why she gets a big part in Director the movie business are depicting their political culture, not ours. he was accused of confusing art and life, remembering scenes from the movies as The argument was that he'd brainwashed the country with smoke and mirrors, artifice and stagecraft. The problem with the view that politics is merely the effective manipulation of images is that it inflates a minor consideration into the whole ballgame. It makes democracy irrelevant, while discounting the single most important motivation in politics, which is conviction. But once again, you politics the entertainment business understands. There's also a projection factor. Belief plays a negligible part in what people in the movie industry do, President is a widowed president dating an environmental lobbyist. They fall in love, and the president is emboldened to do the right thing on crime and global warming. The "right thing," of course, is to replace phony toughness with gun control and demand a larger reduction in greenhouse gases. In who declares that politics is about reality, not illusion. incoherence. Wag the Dog is the exception among these films in that there's no voice of democratic decency attempting to shine through. Thanks executive who described his nightmarish battle with the agency in this way: realize that the only good advertising the Internal Revenue Service gets is when they bring a big one down. And your name is a household word to hundreds of people." I said, "Do you mean to tell me you can take me to a court of law and convict me of some wrongdoing on the basis of what you had?" He said, "No, I don't believe I can do that." He said, "I can get your name in the paper. does the victim's account of his own actions ring true. Why would a powerful businessman succumb to extortion, plead guilty to a criminal charge of tax plead guilty on the condition that his identity be kept secret. But criminal interested in a big PR score, why would it then make a promise of such a waiver. (The program deceptively implied that the judgment was based on oversight investigation. Disgruntled current and former agents testified anonymously from behind a screen. There was no real effort to ascertain their motives or the truth of the generalizations they offered. Republican senators seeking a quick populist fix have spent the past several weeks vilifying the political hazard, have piled on with their own expressions of outrage and calls finance committee heard testimony from four victims. These people were culled, committee. There is no way of knowing how many of them have legitimate gripes. concluded that there was no systematic abuse of taxpayers. "The agency spends significant resources educating personnel to treat taxpayers fairly, and the culture, mindless of the fact that they are servants of the people," he said. unresponsiveness, disregard of one's rights, and the very kinds of things that was one of the supporters of a statute that demanded "performance measures" passed a budget bill that included a "compliance initiative" authorizing the a categorical accounting of revenue received as a result of these the poor and ignores wealthy people "because those people can bring in an statistics, there has been a sharp decline in audits of taxpayers with incomes over the same period. Sounds ominous. But this accusation contradicts the It's pretty obvious what conservative politicians are rhetoric, but they still don't like the people who collect taxes. with the theme. "If you file a paper tax return, the odds are better than one warned in a speech playing off the hearings. This is, of course, nonsense. Only submerging internal differences for the sake of victory. Can this be true? Democrats are doing less infighting, it isn't because they've reached some sort of ideological consensus. On the main issues of domestic and economic policy, and the Republicans in Congress. Traditional Democrats think balancing the proudest accomplishment. Liberals are still smarting over the fact that he forward. Labor unions are intent on stopping trade liberalization. Globalizing In the House, the trade fight is getting pretty nasty. The the party's left manifest an even more striking change in attitude. Take a look populists. As recently as a couple of years ago, many of these left Democrats couldn't go a paragraph without denouncing the moderating tendencies of the Democratic Leadership Council. These days, most offer only a gentle tug in the a harsh critic of the New Democrats, writes that "the party won't fly without chairman, used to call "the big tent") rather than any genuine ideological is that the most divisive issues of the 1970s and '80s have faded. There's no Democratic fratricide on defense and foreign policy because after the Cold War there's little to get fratricidal about. On cultural issues, many of the scabs wonderful example of how Democrats used to act. After the bruising today, largely because the issue of women's rights no longer divides either the Democrats or the larger society. (And that is because on this issue, among shrewd job of abandoning the losing issues while turning the rest to the party's advantage. He surrendered on the death penalty, welfare, and civil liberties while sticking with abortion, gun control, and affirmative action. This solution offers something to centrist reformers and something to the But the chief reason for relative harmony is the object lesson of the last few elections. Democrats have seen the fruit of their the illusion that he loved it alone. After the Inauguration, each awoke to the realization that the president was a policy polygamist. Disappointed by election taught all of them that there are things worse than partial victory. unifying force of a common enemy. Whether you wanted charter schools and didn't want the federal government to abdicate all responsibility for education and the environment. And with the president defending against an agenda. The question of what new programs to support would be a largely differences are becoming clearer. The first thing the party disagrees about is The New Majority think Democrats can win future elections by identifying with the concerns of working people. Those in the bottom half are threatened by new economy's negative consequences. The party should thus support, and not in programs like Medicare and Social Security that made it popular with downscale voters in the first place. Beyond that, the Democratic agenda should be to extend new benefits like universal health care and child care. think the Democrats must identify with the moral and economic concerns of a largely suburban middle class. For these people, the New Economy offers more promise than hazard. New Democrats don't want any expensive new federal rhetoric and a series of positions that span this divide. He supports "families" and the "future" without specifying which families or what future. Initiatives like community policing and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit serious challenger to Gore. The election could just as easily be a contest stumble out of bed, pour a cup of coffee, and go to your printer. There, fresh to boot up or log on. No need to read onscreen or wait for a printout. Why, there's no need even to go outside and collect the newspaper. True home occurred to us a while ago: Why can't people leave their computers and their printers on overnight, or whenever, and have their printouts waiting for them, automatically. But none of them takes the next step of printing the pages out. Why not? Could it be that computer types don't appreciate the widespread aversion to reading things on a screen? Whatever the reason, how hard would it As we do with all deep philosophical questions, we took this one to the nearest software developer, who happened to be Would require many a moon. Need new staff, much wampum. Accused of paradox. Some people can't tell the difference." And he added, "If you think The process gave us new respect for software developers. We deeply regret any harsh or impatient words we may have uttered to them (or even behind their that we cannot supply support or advice on it. It's just a whimsy of 's journalistic element. It hasn't been tested. It doesn't other than those on the editor's home machine. Nevertheless, we think it's implies the software is intended only for HP printers, it actually plays well as many hours horsing around with it as we have. But for our purposes, it does three things. First, at a time and frequency you determine (just once, once a week, every day, or every weekday), it dials your Internet service provider (if necessary), makes a connection, downloads the Web pages you have selected, pages to look good and save paper when printed out. Third, it does print them instruct the program to search in various ways for pages linked to other pages. By setting these parameters correctly, you can schedule an overnight printout (You can add other Web sites, too.) And in the morning, if you wish, you can go for a simpler process, and you can expect to see some developments over the or three columns a page, thus saving even more paper. But it doesn't have a was also a necessity, since we didn't have a way to screen submissions. Now, with a screening system in place, we are pleased to announce that we are please.) Manuscripts should have the author's name and address on each page and publishes one poem every week. You can read it and also listen to it in the week's poem, and here for a complete list of and links to poems published in importance of this week's events involving oral sex in the White House. This we also are closing a full week's issue today, but to be why be honest? We're not under oath or anything. And heck, even if we were Slate Special Issue: Oral Sex and Beyond: A Historic Week in Breakfast Table," "The Book Club," "Diary," and "News Quiz" will appear as development in the news (war, for example, or a new semen stain) may well drag objected to the amount of attention the media in general and in particular are devoting to the scandal we call Flytrap. As a service to these readers, we have set up a special page of the journalists who has embarked on the experiment of working for a software company. I probably speak for all of us when I say that it has been interesting. Recently, it's been especially interesting. A few months ago, big political problems. My bluff has been called. With my own prosperity possibly at stake, would I urge my employer to remain aloof from the Beltway No one else seems to share my disquiet. Ironically, one of the analysis goes, is Bill G. realizing his mistake in neglecting to hire lobbyists, dole out huge campaign contributions, and so on. The theme of a flex political muscle demonstrates an arrogance and stubbornness for which plausible suggestion that hiring more lobbyists, etc., would be a smart thing just cheap, or lazy, or out of your depth on the other coast. But whatever the be proud of. You haven't tried to corrupt the democratic process by handing out wads of cash. You have done less than any company approaching your size to looking for favors from the federal government, it resists paying a fee to The practical issue is much harder than the ethical one. Sure, the world would be a better place if there was no corporate money in others, Bob Dole (who couldn't even give his own Internet address correctly on good conscience argue that you shouldn't field a team. Modern legislation and regulation are technical and complex. Any big company needs skilled people who can process the implications of proposed changes and argue for its interests. I regretfully acknowledge that it may even make practical sense to have a few their connections to power, not for any knowledge or talent. people do for a living is slimy. They're not all equally bad, but I have contributions for the Republican National Committee (he is contemptuous quandary: Is it worse for lobbyists to exploit their personal relationships with government officials, or to sell the illusion that they are doing so? After years of covering lobbying, my impression is that the business is about peddlers generates good will on Capitol Hill. In Congress, where people think of themselves as underpaid, there's hostility toward Bill Gates based on the fact that he's got a lot of dough and doesn't share it with people like them. company that is never going to hire them when they're ready to go through the revolving door. This is a pretty venal outlook, but it's built into the There are, however, advantages to not being heavy hitters inside the Beltway. Refusing to pay an unjustified toll may be contemptuous of a great deal of personal growth during his community service, but he's not the guy to organize a PR blitz around the theme of restraint in playing the Republican trots onto the stage and declares himself mortally offended by some bit of raunchiness connected to the National Endowment for the Arts. (This year the agency. The battle rages; the agency eludes destruction. The curtain falls successfully walked a tightrope in the censorship debates, using her administrative power to block grants that would have spelled trouble while sticking up for those that came under attack after they were awarded. Neither Her shrewdness and star appeal may have kept the endowment alive through been to slosh a thin gruel of artistic mediocrity around the country. The strategy has worked, and may have been necessary, and of course it's easy to carp from the outside. But I think she has carried it a bit too far. regional arts agencies. Most of what's left goes to arts administration and arts education. The little direct support remaining is geared to sound inoffensive. In fact, much of it is political, but in a mushy alike may die of boredom before they turn up anything either offensive or the development of a model study unit, utilizing concerts, study guides, teacher training and residences, to celebrate the cultural contributions made does still support some elitist high culture, including the Metropolitan Museum away from art for art's sake is clear. In part this reflects trends in the art legislators to rethink their philosophical objections to arts spending through the crude but effective device of putting money in their districts. In recent The endowment's supporters in the entertainment industry run the Republican Party in this country are really rotten, nasty, horrible human beings." Such comments can hardly make life easier for the civilized someone a government grant doesn't violate the right to free speech. Hardly for not growing things, why can't artists be subsidized for producing?" Republicans are quick to point out that they're phasing out farm subsidies. But even if they weren't, arts subsidies can't be justified on the basis that they that we as a nation want a more robust cultural and intellectual life than the conference that government funding for the arts is censorship. Others at the same event made the facile case that federal funding produces bad art. "This is about an elite group who want the government to define what art is will get better art once the government gets out of the way." Tom DeLay's idea of "better art." Maybe fewer pictures of whips in rectums and the government must make more forceful moral judgments take the relativistic position that it's incapable of ever making aesthetic ones. And their decisions. They supported a lot of great and good art. Now, in an environment responsible for a new strain of flu that could produce a global pandemic on the Compost." Cluck here, we mean, click here, to review the story before it's too late. know almost nothing about how to behave in virtually any social or ethical situation, so it is fortunate that Prudence has arrived to enlighten us. But up space that could otherwise be devoted to solving additional problems of the world. Second, it would tarnish the sheen of infallibility to which any advice Our solution? A new thread in "The Fray" devoted to discussion of Prudence and her advice. The Fray is, of course, a very cauldron of moral relativism. It indefinitely. Dear Prudence, by contrast, must radiate moral absolutism and be "bundling" its Back of the Book with the rest of the magazine. We take this opportunity to inform our readers that they are under no obligation to read the music or movie reviews, or to follow the gardening column, or to listen to the poem, in order to consume the news and political analysis. Subscribers to Department's position in this controversy that a magazine of news analysis and a review of culture are two fundamentally different products, and that 's merging of the two was a subtle effort to foist culture publisher Rogers Weed. "And everybody knows you can't get down the hall, so the easy thing would have been to go and ask her. But the easy thing is not always the right thing. And our decades of combined experience as newspaper and magazine journalists tell us that the definitive account of the 1980s on Wall Street. His most recent book, Trail together, but take our word for it. Or, better yet, buy business culture of the 1950s. He will be filing dispatches weekly, from his base in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and we hope they will add up to an entire election in terms of a single lesson or message is usually worth to make driving cheaper at the center of his campaign. Taking a page from his the wheel than in any other state and consequently pay the most for auto insurance (though few recognize any connection), this was an offer almost too good to refuse. It very nearly turned a previously popular incumbent out of said the insurance issue was an important factor in their vote. capitalist economic system, you might wonder at the idea of a governor simply ordering a statewide price reduction. But in New Jersey, nearly everyone takes it for granted that you can't have a free market in anything as important as deregulating the system under which insurers must petition a state board to can't try to recover damages for pain and suffering. She saved her job by cheaper driving issue and drove it to victory. The state derives much of its promised to abolish this tax and coasted to victory by a 13-point margin. capitalize on this issue himself. In addition to being the former lieutenant only. While slightly more realistic, this lacked the simplistic appeal of In the only congressional race of this election, the that he would work to eliminate the toll on the bridge completely. to pay for the system, and argued that public transportation is a violation of team frequently bores those of us in the provinces). The mayor's race this year was fought in part over alternative approaches to preventing further development and congestion. Even in New York City, a place where sane people do balanced, crime in free fall, and the economy booming, politics is so free of important content that elections can hinge on who will be nicer to cars. It is a bit stupid to spend time debating who is more likely to accede to a toll freeways are now clogged at rush hour. What makes this more than a problem of traffic engineering is that you can't reduce congestion without raising issues like air pollution, the greenhouse effect, and the harm that metropolitan politics is that the new pandering about driving is as bad as the old pandering about tax cuts. One difference is that this time around, Democrats are less from the two major parties debated the relative merits of alternative is a perfectly sound idea. But so too would it be a good idea to discourage driving through higher tolls, pricier gas, and better public transportation. A program like this would mitigate environmental and congestion problems as well platform probably won't get you very far. The last politician to propose making driving more expensive was Al Gore, who fought to include a small energy economic plan. It almost sank the whole deal. Since then, there's been no of conservatives is the notion that they are enemies of an established orthodoxy, insurgents against the dogmatic political correctness that predominates on the left. Some recent gleanings, however, suggest that the opposite is true. The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises commissar who has misplaced his principles to the extent of accepting money to and conservative journalists who are deemed loyal, from places like the The second article, which appears in the current issue of the author, tied to a stake with his chest bared, it describes how Brock became revealing. Brock portrays a political subculture in which loyalty to the cause conferences and parties and denounced by his old allies as a turncoat. position on abortion. But there is no liberal "movement" like today's the sense that Brock functioned as a conservative one. It is instructive to by his former colleagues when it was announced that he was joining the staff of for having compromised his journalistic independence by being too kind to to prove her independence to media outlets more than her loyalty to the she was trying to accomplish by criticizing fellow conservatives in the Conservative journalists don't just have the inside track roles of John Fund, one of the editors of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Fund has doubled as a member of the Speaker's Advisory Group, a After accepting the job initially, Fund changed his mind, perhaps because he is more helpful where he is. (He declined comment.) Fund's denunciations of notes to errant conservative journalists describing their work as editorial supporting his clients, no matter how obscure the subject. The paper includes a few liberal points of view for window dressing, but hardly any syndicated column, she has been censored when she has tried to write critically issues where conservatives disagree with liberals and more about conservatives selling out fellow conservatives. A month ago, the word emanating from all the Nation status for China. These attempts to stamp out free thinking suggest what Republican leadership, almost always for departing from the True Faith. (For a related article on conservative cultural correctness, see "But Is It Art Standard 's editor, recognizes such attacks for the great publicity aide, who told him, "No one who believes what we believe should be attacking Much of this kind of behavior can be traced back to what secret cells and front groups modeled on the Communist foe. Contemporary are part of a liberal conspiracy. They feel this gives them license to create of liberal bias have become an excuse for poor journalistic standards, and for shoddy intellectual ones as well. But the worst of it isn't the propaganda that passes for conservative thought these days. It's the deadly sense of enforced conformity, the stale air that blows in from the stagnant ponds of the civic pride and civic hypocrisy, the mingled air of awe and contempt toward what we say, what we know we mean and what we don't know we mean. coming today. What's the point of senators making laws now? Once the coming today and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader. He's even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. coming today and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking. and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border this morning and more coming: a flotation medium rising in the just a bit of electricity firing off joints and nets: off, was a shy, lonely widower. In Independence Day his wife went down in a helicopter and he got upstaged by the more manly Will Smith. In Absolute But at long last, in Air Force One the president gets to be something actually alive, and he's still in love with her. The only problem is that he's come to power at the dawn of a confusing new era, when globalization is blurring national boundaries and the world is more vulnerable than ever before Force One takes less than five minutes to demonstrate the drawbacks of hypocritical concerns as the national interest. Out with wimpy measures like be afraid." This is a depressing, scary, reckless announcement, and as Ford delivers it you think how disturbing it would be to have someone like him as president. For all his popularity, Ford has built his career on an inarticulate, uncomfortable, and somewhat angry persona. What's saved him from grimness is his status as an outsider, his flippant sense of humor, and his Playing a powerful public figure, Ford looks as miserable Following his speech the president boards Air Force One to return home, and for five minutes, in a scene so idyllic it borders on the bizarre, he's able to let down his guard and relax in the bosom of his family. He kisses his wife. Their camp and minister to poor, helpless wounded people. Daddy worries that she's not old enough, but Mommy laughs tenderly and says, "She couldn't stay your through this chaotic period of realignment, when all he really wants to do is help his daughter with her homework and smooch with his wife. Global Village meets Family Values, and once this slick high concept is president has gone missing. Everyone assumes he's left the plane in an "escape pod" and is floating safely to earth; only the audience knows that he's stuck instead on the scary ordeal of being stuck on a plane piloted by crazies. With geeky charm, it patiently explored the plane's engineering; it literally walked you down into the underbelly, a beautiful abstract maze of crisscrossing Force One rips off half the adventures from Executive Decision --there's a blatantly similar scene involving the cutting of around the astoundingly dull theme of cellular communication. Here are two that he's still alive and hiding on board the plane. He desperately rummages through some luggage. He finds someone's cell phone and calls the White House. alert the Air Force to his scheme. This time it's harder, because he's lost the cell phone and the terrorists have shut down the regular phones, but a presidential aide reminds him that faxes go out on an auxiliary line. Solemnly, she leads him over to the fax station, where he scribbles out a message and dials. Will the fax go through? Tension mounts. After a few moments, we hear the telltale squeak of a successful transmission, accompanied by triumphal to help by looking anguished as he hits, kicks, and shoots his way to the final about five words per minute. And his cause seems so pathetically weak compared to the raging progress of capitalism around the world that watching him strut is like watching someone shoot a gun you know is filled with blanks. about Air Force One to recommend, except perhaps the controlled several phone calls from the sky. But there is something strangely comforting about how bad this movie is. For a while there, all those stories about should be able to breathe easier. It is just too boring to reflect our actual fantasy life, and so brazenly concerned with exploiting the Zeitgeist discourse, literacy and culture sometimes tend to be associated with the visual ear is the avenue of the spirit, while the eye is duped by mere seeming. What he means about the ear he demonstrates in sentences that skim and dance across arrived in theaters on waves of critical admiration, and moviegoers from these experiences deeply perplexed: wondering, perhaps, how the reviewers review of Boogie Nights prepared me for what a patchy, tedious film it group is tied together by a desire to resist the strictures of studio filmmaking and to advertise that resistance to a discerning audience. So instead of uplifting stories we get studiously downbeat ones; instead of good vs. evil we get calculated ambiguity; instead of violence as plot device we get violence as happenstance; and instead of a corporate worldview we get that these movies are destructive, that they enjoy degradation. I think he's death. No less offensive, however, is the automatic presumption of quality in work that defines itself merely by its choice of subject matter and mannerism. celebrated as a poetic chronicler of subcultures. Meanwhile, Advocate --are picked apart by highbrow critics, even by those who admitted poseurs. But what does that species have in common with the almost universally in the best sense, avoiding both mainstream studio practices and the indie mentality that mindlessly reacts against them. And yet something is not tremendous gift for character. They can write a role, and find an actor for it, amiable stoner who is drawn into a Big Sleep -inspired kidnap scheme. What these characters have in common is an instantly plausible blend of kind, but he also shows pleasing eccentricities, such as an eye for interior decor. ("That rug really tied the room together," he says, after one of the bad long as they are simply chatting together at the bowling alley, the film is owed to a porn impresario. I won't describe it in more detail because it crumbles to nothing long before the end. Careless plotting first cropped up in lose track not only of plot devices but of whole characters, who come and go convicted pedophile in Spandex. He is an amazing creation, but he has no over, they have imposed an artificial resolution on a sequence of brilliant seemingly ordinary insurance salesman (Goodman again) who makes strange noises climax only by having one thug kill another in a giant geyser of blood. In inability to wrap things up. Anyone who's tried to write a screenplay knows the difficulty of writing a climax. The process is always artificial. The art is in enormously talented filmmakers show a moral failing in the sense that have reached a stage where they no longer question their ideas or flesh them out. You can catch them in the act, as it were, by comparing a shooting script with the final product. I have such a script for Barton (The "shooting script" is the script as it stands before filming begins; the script that you can buy in book form is a "continuity script," which has been edited to match the film.) The degree to which the shooting script matches the film is astonishing. Page after page has been shot word for word. This, needless to say, is unusual; even directors who write their own scripts very hesitations ("uh," "er"). If the script were airtight, such faithfulness to able to make further artistic advances if they shackled themselves to the evil are too many marginal characters. They might also profit from filming others' scripts. But the hype that greeted Blood Simple appears to have convinced them that they are sufficient unto themselves. They've reserved an story about your childhood, the horses in the river. thoughts, the flashes of what's going through my life, the whole family history about real life, that's more important than writing something fanciful. writer, from early poems like "Mowing" and on through the disturbances of "The Hill Wife." The sensuality of "To Earthward" is acted out by its reaching, lingering, abrupt, or stretched sentences as they tease and cavort with rhyme and line ending. The poem is the best lesson I know in what a line of verse is: Read it aloud, letting your voice continue past the line ending, when that is thought would take the casualness out of killing. He lingered on it, slowed it Nothing in the movie's melodramatic narrative can diminish the shocking opening battle might be the most visceral ever put on film. After a solemn but the surf, pitching, as young men pray and vomit. They've barely beached before blown through. We don't see the enemy machine guns or rifles, but we hear the pops and the ceaseless whine of bullets, and we watch the men as their chests and heads explode. Some drop underwater, but still the bullets come in near silence, producing squalls of blood; above the water, the din resumes with a wildly left, then right. Color has been drained from the frame: The greens of uniforms and browns of earth are muted, the sky rendered a neutral gray. Against this monochromatic palette, the brackish blood leaps out of the screen. That blood is everywhere. A helmet full of seawater turns out to be full of sloshing gore; a soldier with a gushing arm socket picks up his severed limb and staggers aimlessly; a man with his intestines on the outside wails through a last, protracted hemorrhage. A soldier's helmet stops a bullet with a clank; he removes it in wonder; his brains are then blown out. half an hour, the horrors come one upon another, unaccompanied by music and unrelieved by any point of view except that of the soldiers in the middle of the slaughter. There are no objective, "establishing" shots and no possibility for emotional distance. Nauseated, I fixed on Hanks because I knew the star would survive until at least the last reel. But even that reassurance seemed any direction. For the rest of the film's running time (nearly three hours, disorientation. He shoots battles so that we can't always see what's happening, our vantage is frighteningly restricted, and the world of combat is reduced to pure sensation. This isn't about "bravery" or "heroism" but getting from Point abstract as its imagery, but at its best, early on, it feels have been killed on the same day in separate battles. The seven men under Miller's command are furious with what they see as a PR mission and a misallocation of military resources; they can't believe they're risking their lives to rescue one anonymous private. But we in the audience know that the ripped apart by war. Freighted with such symbolism, the odyssey cannot help but mounting drizzle, the life of a wounded, exposed soldier streaming out of his body with the rainwater. The next assault is different, an attack on a concrete squadron mates hysterically pressing the dying man for instructions on how to stop his bleeding. It's no wonder that, later, the men go through piles of dog personality dovetails movingly with his character's struggle to keep his aura of futility, and the scenes between the skirmishes are similarly modern, is insane. Here, orders from on high bring meaning, a glimpse of a more divine not the war's heart of darkness but its heart of light. "No one who experiences this scene will ever cheer for a war again." But when off, I wrote "YES!!!!" And when a pair of Allied soldiers, fresh from rather than take them prisoner, I didn't applaud the act, but I didn't feel German must be taken prisoner or freed. It would be wrong to give away what predictable and, morally speaking, takes the picture down a peg. Too bad. mines amid the terrors of war. This is not, after all, where they live. It's hard to recall a more chilling stretch in modern movies than the one before the each man alone in the shared knowledge that this foreign music will likely be by capture. The groom, aided by his warrior friend (the "best man"), kidnapped the bride, holding her in his left hand, and fought off other prospective mates, using his right hand. This is why the bride stands on the left in modern civilizing force of this ancient ritual, transforming its anachronistic fingertips, from the history of marriage to methods for entertaining your guests at a shower and software that writes pithy wedding toasts. Once your laptop to plan, pay for, or execute the Big Day. of hyperlinks to timeless matrimony begins with Cupid's Network, which will direct you to the perfect match (please specify ethnicity and religion). Weddings are ideally suited to the Internet, since a Web site can provide the unconditional love and attention that print media can't. not just peddler but also town crier. There is no need to climb the bridge with a bottle of spray paint to announce your matrimony, or to petition the society interactive technology in broadcasting your undying love to the world. The Weddings site links to the best pages, which include heartwarming stories and statistical details, along with music and video. consultants: "Beware of the use of the word 'I.' This means that she could already be fantasizing that it is she who is the bride, not you." It also Emergency Kit," whose 30-plus items include smelling salts, a small flashlight, directions to the reception, and masking tape. entertainment director of Central Park's most famous restaurant, Tavern on the Green. ("Unlike the Eighties, everyone is getting back down to the real meaning offers theme packages such as "Intergalactic," which "includes the use of the Identity politics can sometimes substitute for geography when it comes to breaking down the Web wedding industry into usable chunks. ceremonies. Each urges you to shake free of the tired mainstream and embrace a more spirited tradition. For those who wish to pursue this strategy to its extreme, the Medieval and Renaissance Wedding Information site, a favorite of entertainment (jousting, minstrels, etc.) to how to get hesitant guests into the spirit ("the fathers discovered how much fun tights can be"). who tire of the entire process before the ceremony even takes place, wedding Videos -type pages devoted to accounts of actual wedding mishaps (the comatose bride, Grandpa and the topless dancer, and so on). Best of all is fashions. "This bride has been hermetically sealed for your protection" and "Run! Run! It landed on your butt!" should conjure up some of the images. For arcane legal reasons, the actual ceremony must take place offline. Still, when problems crop up after the wedding, you can go to not very happy.") There remains the possibility that these methods will not yield lifelong bliss. Should such a fate befall you, there's always Divorce Online. misdirected us, and so we came By a long route, which took us through a Primary Colors is the most massive cinematic harpoon ever buried in the novel's more scandalous episodes (such as the future first lady jumping into bumptious clown show and the voters into gullible dummies. The film is an outrage is how smug and empty of insight it is, and how rhapsodic its reviews may be fast, but it ain't cheap. It's actually a crackerjack piece of work, its first half sweeping you up in the momentum of a national campaign, its prose imparting a buzz. Then, as the sordidness and opportunism of the candidate and scene, in which the ingenuous black narrator, Henry Burton, marvels at the way listens intently to the members of an urban literacy group, grasps their hands, recounts the experiences of his own poor family, and leaves them feeling heard, librarian who runs the program is troublesome but almost fitting: The tryst is another kind of conquest, another way to make his audience feel special. sincerely lying. I think that he has fully justified to himself what he's saying, and his certainty radiates out and envelops his listeners. After president of my lifetime. A master at projecting mastery, he's even physically sake of moving its audience. Previous administrations have featured mostly he's an unbelievable human being. Sprawled on his motel bed watching the end of whole character: He's always staring into the distance, scanning the horizon instinctive actors in movies today, but no one who has met him would describe him as a "brain." Not being an intellectual is not necessarily a hindrance to give a credible account of a person thinking. (Thinking in character is more brow, but he's not thinking. He does a surprisingly skillful nightclub phrase has ever caught as hilariously that combination of prodigious a man who hungers for minutiae, who can toss off reams of data like some Star Trek techie officer and make it even more theatrically compelling. would never carry on in public in front of perfect strangers.) The performance familiar rancid hick act. He's fun to watch, but he's not the performer as a titanic operator, a barker whose appetite for politics is mesmerizing to man is too slick, too in control of what he does to let real life bleed as these actors are, they never transcend the limited conception of their candidate's wife, the way you'd take off your hat for a lady; it doesn't matter rotten I think Primary Colors is. Adjectives like "glib," "coarse," and "sour" don't fully do it. I found it so oppressively smug that I had to get up duty bound to stick it out. It's hard to believe that this movie has received already got rave reviews, and audiences could conceivably respond to it, too: a Tangled Web We Weave"), was spotted last week by several reporters. It linked News reported, "Web page gives insight to intern." The paper quoted lines before acknowledging that it "could have been a hoax. Of course, the whole from reality she becomes. She's been transformed into a prototypical lovesick betrayed friend and, most recently, a deranged hussy. Each "identity" is fully accounts and reflect upon them in a deeply silly manner. she hasn't been, she wants to start. Notice the chick to the right with the expression as he moves off through the crowd: "The girl is obviously out of her young and were taken advantage of as far as I see it. I know you will do the right thing. I know you fear for your safety but be brave and do the right Slightly Clueless Betrayed Friend: The fan club, whose support is records a "friend" without them knowing it? What if this "friend" then uses these tapes to put you in the international spotlight, facing federal criminal charges, as well as ensuring your place in the history books as the penultimate traipsing through New York right now, enjoying many misadventures, like a of good links about the affair and a message board, too, though on last visit, it was no longer available. It will no doubt return soon. Deranged Hussy: Messages posted to the "Fan Club" span bit BIMBO. She's a liar, has lied her whole life and will lie to her grave. on the scandal can be found in any number of newsgroups and sites. Zipper Gate is one place to go for some even cruder entries. At the "I Love nude layout for Penthouse. See, it's all I have. IT'S ALL I HAVE!!!! I have and the Internet. None of us would want judgments formed about our character on papers, personal letters, or other artifacts put on the Web by "friends" or foes, but don't dismiss this possibility. Meanwhile, the site that has claimed "naked photos." Oh, and if you inadvertently type ".com" after White House instead of ".gov," you'll find a very different sort of establishment. It's not we hereby invite you to use City Auction." "Need money to pay for your lawyer? We hotly contested. The Ate My Balls "joke," however, is not an original concept. premise that a famous person or character has eaten balls or likes to eat them. Generally, there are photos and captions to this effect. Yahoo has helpfully manipulates her mouth. It also lets you stimulate the "president's penis" with your mouse, producing predictable results. reflect a grassroots campaign of unwavering support. There's something about raising of serious expectations. But we might have hoped for a little turn to the Web in the middle of the night and find herself becoming a hip cultural icon. At latest search, though, her generation has let her down. that snakes down corridors, winds around corners, slithers up and down stairs, device. Kaboom? No. Out comes a tiny flag with a sign reading, "Bang!" So goes way up to that dud of a climax. The preview audience left muttering darkly, and breathlessly on a chalkboard in Good Will Hunting --that's the way De doesn't always give an audience that ultimate, explosive charge. heavyweight championship fight. Sporting a loud orange rayon jacket with a blood begins to gush from the secretary of Defense's throat. sequence he provides in the next hour: the fight, which a video replay suggests was "thrown"; the secretary's barely heard conversation with a blond the comings and goings of a mysterious woman with red hair and lots of cleavage and a wild man with a radio earpiece who shouts at the champ that he's going unhinged he becomes at the prospect of having to be a hero. The arena is attached to a hotel and casino, and outside rages a hurricane (Jezebel) that keeps the cast of characters indoors. This gives the movie an oppressive, the images shot a little too close, the camera angles skewed to table, and disappeared with him into his room. The villain knows she's on the as he moves from door to door, listening for her voice. The director cuts to Cage, riding up in an elevator, talking to a buddy in security. The buddy is screening a videotape of the fat man at the gaming table and zeroing in on the guy's wallet, trying to read his name, so that he can call the desk and find out the man's room number and tell Cage so that Cage can get there before the villain gets there. Now it's back to the villain, who stands outside another camera begins to move, gazing down at the bad guy in the corridor and then the inside of the room he's in front of (a couple is fooling around) and then the time bomb: The fat man expects sex, the girl doesn't want to give it to him, and he's trying to throw her out despite her protests that her life is in corridor, converging on the room where the increasingly frantic girl is being the screen and present you with two tumultuous frames instead of one. The then some, humanizing the film with his trademark goofy exuberance. Betrayed, humiliated, beaten to a pulp, he limps along a snakelike corridor toward that membranes you [could] clearly discern the already perfect reptile." In other Tramp. After Sly became a superstar, he seized creative control of his films musculature loomed large. (In interviews, he said that his father remarked on so casually because the film virtually brands it on his forehead. He is discovered in a bar, playing a desultory game of pinball beside half a dozen outside, unlocks a parking meter, and spills the coins all over the sidewalk. where he once dreamed of being a cop, and then, swerving to avoid a deer, plunges off the road into a tree, totaling his car and putting a huge gash on telegraphs his impotence. It isn't just the paunch. It's the bleary, hangdog demeanor; the watery eyes; the shambling gait; the passiveness that borders on has done since Rocky --and is close, I suspect, to how the actor really tries hard. It's formulaic, but it sticks to a classic Western formula instead stops setting the scene. At the start, the camera glides over Manhattan into always dreamed of living outside the metropolis itself, "where the shit with a large population of cops, no minorities, and almost no crime. of corruption, a pile of lies as high as the Palisades. Everything emanates the car.) For some reason, Ray fears that his nephew will spill his guts to Internal Affairs, so he takes radical (and, quite frankly, moronic) measures to car went off the bridge, in the process mangling one ear and leaving himself himself from spewing exposition. ("You saved the town beauty from drowning and made yourself deaf in one ear so that you couldn't be a New York cop, and then In the labyrinthine plot, everyone has something to hide. Judgment Day --let the sheriff know he'd better turn his deaf ear on Ray's stared down by everyone in the large cast, while we wait for him to awaken from would never have accepted the role. Of course, the formula dictates that all his allies must abandon him so he can march down the street, wielding a shotgun, bleeding but with the iron back in his spine, to prove to those city cops what he's really made of. "Everybody in this town," he says, "is gonna film moves in such a leisurely fashion, with lots of talk, there's plenty of doing their damnedest to legitimize the movie and its wayward star. Under a weird performance. "I look at you, sheriff," he says, "and I see a man who's could take you blindfolded, both hands tied behind my back," he seems to say, didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about, but was charmed by his fervor. The scrambled space opera The Fifth Element has all the fervor "When the three planets are in eclipse, the black hole opens and Evil comes," Suddenly, an enormous black shadow passes over the desert, and large rubber tortoises with small bird heads emerge from a spaceship shaped like a large rubber tortoise foot and kill the archaeologist. Then it appears that the large rubber tortoises are good guys, and perhaps didn't mean to kill him. One of cave, an event of great, if puzzling, significance. Three hundred years later, a big black ball spitting fire heads for Earth. Dispatched to do a thermal Holm) who happens to be in the room announces that the ball is the Evil a ship full of large rubber hippos. Fortunately, someone has the sense to clone may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged. Much of its running time revolves around Retrieving the Stones. I had no idea what the Stones were, but it eventually turned out that they represent the Four Elements, and that the rubber tortoises, before being shot down, had for his billet to be stamped before he could fly off to destroy the notions of logic, coherence, or consistency. The Fifth Element alternates between high solemnity and low buffoonery, without for a second finding the ideal middle ground. One moment, creatures are blowing one another away in gun battles that have all the suspense and emotional weight of over whether this vicious world is really worth preserving. At such times, that urchin's face atop a willowy body, that's a strange fusion of both. As a Supreme Being, one of the most powerful forces in the universe, she spends much awesome responsibility falls to convince her that humans are capable of giving study his performance, which is neither serious nor facetious but in major cities around the country. In it, an aging, exhausted New Wave to him a bit later than it does to his savvy cast and crew. off into cinematic flights that leave The Fifth Element (which cost coiling around her like a boa and hovering breathlessly over her shoulder as she snatches a necklace from another guest's room, then regards it on the like a clear pool next to their rather pinched visages. The ingenue, the straight man, she is lithe and funny in her own right. She listens politely to and does her job with a minimum of fuss. You wouldn't spend hours discussing complains, "have too much decoration, too much money"; French films are should turn out to be a kind of cultural touchstone for many people is likely to be mysterious to the many people for whom it is not a cultural touchstone. It's tempting to assume that its appeal, like the appeal of most popular entertainment, is simply a function of how old you were when you were first exposed to it. Fourteen seems to be the age of prime vulnerability for these effects, so that even people who know the story by heart are happy to plunk characters, basic elements of universal human nature, etc. This argument probably needs to be parsed into two elements. The original Star Wars of them best sellers), and a number of other licensed products, to the total occupies a substantial amount of turf in the popular culture. Everyone in elements, so to speak, of mythic material. The movie reminds you of dozens of and so on. The basic template seems to be an amalgam of The Wizard of Oz is dismembered by the Sand People is completely appropriated from the scene in which the Scarecrow is dismembered by flying monkeys in The Wizard of in almost every conceivable outlet. And when you start seeing, even before the movie opens, detailed press accounts of the process by which the new that the publicity wheels have already been turning on this one for a very long phenomenon usually isn't the what or the how. It's the when. Before everything probably soulless species, just as apes once became humans by the invention of have to be like. It was all in keeping with the general pop imagery of computer is what popular entertainment becomes when people have made too much money from it). And it associated technology with fun and adventure. The movie didn't just suggest that people who fly around in spaceships will be just as swashbuckling, The movie coincided with a complete makeover in the late 1970s of the imagery of advanced technology, the most notable examples of which were the emergence technocratic efficiency, these images said. They're interactive and fun; anyone can use them (even the Tramp); and they should be associated not with the idea of labor, but with the idea of play. The computer is the toy that will keep us The digital age that has now arrived is almost exactly in the image that Star Wars prophesied, so that celebrating the movie is a way of honoring its prescience. (If the digital age seemed soulless and technocratic, we would homes when they stopped being thought of as needlessly expensive and vaguely inhuman ways to balance your checkbook, and started being sold as devices for your kids to play "educational" games on. And a computer network devised on the become a play land for ordinary citizens with modems. High tech is now associated with creativity, democracy, and spending more time with your kids. Wars that the movies changed, and not for the better. In making the digital eruptions. The sensual essence of the movies used to be the human face; now it's just light and sound. The real world has become a blue screen, and the virtual noise of the amazing virtual tornadoes was so deafening that there were long stretches in which, although the characters were apparently shouting at one another at the top of their lungs, no dialogue was audible. If you listened very carefully, though, you realized that there actually was no dialogue; the actors were obviously aware that their voices were not going to be heard. So they were just repeating the same line over and over in every tornado scene. "Come on!" they kept yelling. "Let's get out of here!" The impulse was Here, amid the seemingly aimless hubbub, the muddy narrative, the loose featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has never been precise moment that I was declaring (really revisiting) my reverence for the great director, the elderly couple sitting next to me was grumbling: framing is the least insistent of any major director, which is especially radical in a genre where audiences are accustomed to having their gaze directed. The actors seem caught on the fly; they give performances that don't doffs her duds at the first opportunity and promptly has the hapless attorney sensibly reticent demeanor. In one stroke, this underrated actress takes into an open manhole and our lives would not be appreciably poorer. But filmmakers alive. Through his camera, the external world becomes transfigured art world of the '80s and given a rock 'n' roll backbeat, is fluid and lyrical seen all the previous adaptations, yet I didn't for an instant yearn for erupts from the water and forces him to bring food and drink and a tool for terror, with its cocked frames, its sharp reeds standing out from the deep as ever, is inhumanly gorgeous, like some Close Encounters of the Third Kind creature, with that elongated neck and those stringy limbs, that big face with its faintly mocking beatitude. I can't decide if the woman is an actress, since she's able to get by so easily without doing all that much. stature. When an anonymous benefactor provides him with the means to travel to it thoroughly obviates the dramatic arc that's the whole point of Dickens' comes to an end, suddenly smaller than the sum of its parts. their weapons on the producers. On the evidence of The Replacement nothing of the rock 'n' roll bad boy that put him on the map. He's likable, but he only comes alive with a gun in each hand, spinning round and round, firing before it or more likely he didn't care, opening up with his pistol, that voice I was always afraid existed within us, the voice that knows irrevocability of death, beyond any dream of being not mortally injured-- asleep, someone will save you, you'll wake again, loved ones beside you. by the flaws in the tape it was a voice that knew it was dying, pleading, such overwhelmed, untempered pity for the self dying; for justice, only woe, woe, woe, as he felt himself falling, already he was dead, and how much I pray to myself I want not, ever, want to ask again why I must, with such perfect, detailed precision, this agony for a departing self wishing only to stay, to endure, that, having known, I always will know this torn, singular voice as it sinks back through the darkness it came from, cancelled, annulled. want to orient you. I want you to see the film as I did, with no expectations Confidential is that rare mainstream cop thriller that refuses to telegraph you how to feel about its protagonists. So log off, see the movie, and come labyrinthine crime novel, one of the few from the last decade that doesn't feel as if it was written expressly to be filmed. The story isn't entirely fresh. In part, he does it with casting: Of the triptych of but he has almost no scruples; he's an unabashed fame whore. Spacey is disconcertingly breezy. The actor has been chewing the scenery for so him. Better yet, he brings off the burgeoning of Jack's conscience with exceptional subtlety, beginning with the man's embarrassment at shaking hands at a party with a dupe he once collared and ending with his horror at a slaying he has inadvertently abetted. Still, he's too opaque to serve as a moral off with gun cocked the instant he hears of a damsel in distress. He doesn't think twice about blasting a crater in an ostensibly guilty suspect, planting a takes no bribes, vows never to plant evidence or to shoot hardened criminals silence" when police are caught beating the hell out of a group of Latino snooty righteousness is tinged with opportunism: He's willing to make deals the fun comes from finally learning which piece fits where. have to absorb you with the force of their storytelling. The film opens with them, too. The detectives pose for flashbulb pictures beside handcuffed and women dreaming of fame arrive on the bus to be instantly victimized by the resemble Veronica Lake, is a tad moist, but the actors' physical rapport is sensational. You can believe that White would open himself up to this picture is too long, and not exactly winged. But just when you start to get there's a shocker that blows you into the movie's last act, and then a scene in which a couple of former antagonists figure out what stinks and join forces in an abandoned motel to stave off an army of bad guys. It's a virtuoso shootout, of body parts. Bullets explode in shards of glass and light, bringing death in minutes. Bob's brow was furrowed; his jaw was tense. A cold front, he warned, "building in the Southeast" and would shoot a "blast of warm air" up the weather forecasters like to say that the United States has the most exciting floods, and the occasional plague of locusts for good measure. I don't know if the United States does have the most exciting weather, but it certainly has the is still an epic, a story of God's war with man. Hot and cold air masses "clash," storms "strike," and sweeping "fronts" ravage the nation. The forecast malevolent Arctic god were coming to exact revenge for the sins of Weather, in short, is a crackling good story, infused with conversations, and an entire cable channel. So imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon the Web weather industry. Here was a world of about all this Web weather: The Web doesn't have any weather (unless you count the hot air that envelops most newsgroups). In fact, you could argue that the entire point of cyberspace is to have no weather, to liberate us from the mundane and inconvenient physical world. But the Web will have Web weather technology is as sophisticated as it gets. The sites make television's Weather Channel look amateurish (or rather, even more amateurish than it already looks). All the sites are constantly updated. You never have to wait for a forecast. The sites are both easy to navigate and comprehensive. On animations. You like satellite photos? The Web lets you download current satellite images of any corner of the earth. (On several sites, you can string together the last few hours of satellite photos into a cloud movie.) Are you Many will let you monitor earthquake activity, ozone levels, humidity, and reminiscent of sports Web sites, which also draw from a single well of data.) important weather in the world: mine. When the password works (which is my current weather conditions (actually National Airport's); and a radar exactly the same information available on all the other Web weather sites, but point, I am supposed to pause to pay homage to the miraculous Internet. Web weather, I should say, displays all the medium's virtues: Efficiency! thought was impossible: They make weather boring. Following weather on the Web is like following baseball by reading scorecards. The weather forecast is more than "rain." You must also hear the story of the rain. Where is it coming from? rain is it? When it will arrive? Will the Jet Stream protect us from it? Is it depressing. We no longer make common cause against the weather god. Now I have Fortunately, not all Web weather is such a drag. Commercial sites comprise only a fraction of online meteorology. Just as it has for New also given birth to a community of weather fanatics. Granted, theirs is a most shop at even more specialized groups, such as one on Northeastern weather meteorological gizmos. (Favorite gizmo: the weather radio, which is tuned permanently to National Weather Service broadcasts.) You can plan a weather holiday on the Web: At least two outfits, including watched Twister too many times, these "vacations" consist of spending filming the skies in other cities. Weather games, weather videos, weather identity politics: "Women in Weather" profiles female meteorologists and hosts discussions about topics female and meteorological ("We're both meteorologists It may be the disaster sites that best capture the spirit of the weather Web. Dozens and dozens of sites, such as Eye on the ships, downed trees, and shattered houses. These sites are, I think, the meteorological equivalent of snuff films. They prove that even when all you care about is weather, the Web still has plenty of dirty pictures to show and my father was reading The New Republic --concentrating, with his for more living, as my father went on reading for truth in his shirt dark pink actually, yes, about a million things (car chases, ocean liners taking on transcendentally beautiful cinema I have ever seen. to one of the dozen greatest novels written after World War I. It's almost with point of view slipped like a baton from one character to the next. How do musical in its ebb and flow that it might lend itself best to a chamber opera, Line (1995)--doesn't get all the notes right, but at least she gets that there ought to be notes: that the work is fundamentally musical, and that the that evening, exchanging formal pleasantries with various aristocrats, and moving in and out of her memories. We move with her, back before the war, as where she will be safest. The very title of the work is tinged with regret, not stronger, weight to her inchoate romantic feelings for the vivacious the misfortune of witnessing a buddy being blown to bits in front of his eyes. more impressionistic, even if such doodling had come at the expense of a done almost too smooth a job of translating its characters' to have left some bleeding fragments. If ever a project called for a unwritten, secure in the knowledge that he or she would, as director, fill it back and forth several times in a single scene, she aims for a melting view come off as fancy but not especially resonant. When the camera lingers on Graves who suffers most from the lack of imagination. The traumatized, so much for what he remembers as for how his remembrances color the present and literary conceit, and only in his fleeting moments of sanity does Graves too forceful. All of which means, of course, diddly squat. It barely matters that the book's characters have been aged from their 40s to their 60s to accommodate her, because what else do you do when you have a shot at casting quivering string. Pity the poor actress who has to embody her earlier self. so much unformed as opaque. There's a thin line between period acting and about the young man whose tragic fate she heard tell of from one of her housing projects by the troubled shores of Coney Island, where otherwise The young gods swivel, unwind, suspend themselves in air, the orange orb that spins from their fingers as splendid for an instant as the sun, until it on the soundtrack of a Spike Lee movie! The opening montage of He Got enterprising director: Basketball, not baseball, is the pastime of the nation Lee inhabits. And He Got Game is poised to be Lee's Great turbulence of the present, the messianic longings of the future. ambition, dynamism, visual energy, bullshit. I confess: I come to a Spike Lee "joint" with suspicion, prepared to fight off the propaganda, to sort through the messages and scrutinize the codes. The hope is always there, though, that Lee will transcend his anger and egotism and paranoia and make a film that content and the auteur upstages his own work. It's a testament to Lee's talent that, hobbled as he is by a chip on his shoulder the size of a planet and The picture has one of the oldest pulp plots in the business, last used to rousing effect in John Carpenter's Escape From New untrustworthy government in return for accomplishing a morally ambiguous task that no one else can do, given a strict deadline, and ruthlessly monitored by a letter of intent that he'll enroll in Big State University, the state currently under siege by coaches, agents, and their unsavory minions, all of whom proffer money, cars, sex, and sundry other illegal inducements to sign with their colleges or professional teams. More of an obstacle still is the relationship between father and son, which has been poisoned by the death of the young man's mother under circumstances that Lee keeps cunningly under wraps cinematic placards, exhortations, lectures about staying in school (in the form depicting the evils of drugs and alcohol. The characters are photographed example. Lee, who has started his own advertising firm and is noted for his built in all kinds of protections against charges of racism and misogyny. A mob ties and that he resents being stereotyped, shortly before delivering a the young star, gets a monologue near the end in which she justifies her actions on socioeconomic grounds. And, as a counterpoint to all the luscious, casting, made to look like a near albino) who's exploited and knocked around by been made by a white director he'd have been cited (most likely by Lee) as a flagrant racist outrage. As on a basketball, the seams of the movie show. Crouch (who gleefully refers to Lee as "the diminutive director") has pointed a lightweight who strives to make an unwieldy epic called O Brother, Where Spring," and "Fanfare for the Common Man" too transparently pump up the sport and his intimacy with its nuances. Spike knows basketball. He filmed in panoramic but more grounded portrait of the game's meaning to the denizens of gum up the realities of the game. On the contrary, the metaphor intensifies the action on the court, which can seem kinetic to the point of spontaneous combustion, as pressure to perform tears families up and turns black man against black man. If, on occasion, Lee's serpentine camera seems more active than the players he's shooting, he knows just when to speed the play up, when to slow it down, and when to let it unfold in real time. And he gets a charming grace and diffidence. The "diminutive director" never evinces more stature than earlier screening was ending, and out came one woman after another with tears streaming down her face or eyes bloodshot from weeping. "I cried during the first scene and never stopped crying," said one to another, then joined the long line for the ladies' room. Later, watching the movie, I found myself nearly sobbing, too, except from boredom. One True Thing isn't a much inert. But my benumbed responses don't account for all those weepers leaving the theater or for the snuffling and nose blowing I heard during my own screening. No, the movie's themes are enormously resonant, which makes its middling college who maintains that he's too busy to tend to his wife. In the mother's mercy killing and only then manages to remove herself, with touches, and Franklin goes for cheap laughs with shots of burning chicken her expertise. That could have been the core of the picture, right there, and only for mothers and daughters instead of fathers and sons. That earlier work, impossibly fraudulent on every level, dramatized the ways in which baby boomers, who came of age with the counterculture, rejected their daddies along with their daddies' conservative values, only to be left with an emptiness filled only by, gulp, a supernatural baseball game. One True Thing doesn't employ fantasy (at least not overtly) but tries to stir similar regrets about the feminist dismissal of housewives: You moved to New York and the heartless magazine world, you dressed in black, you rejected Mom. But look how you barely knew her! How she held your home together! Look at how it was doing things but never really registering. Employing an accent that's straight ostentatiously industrious that it's hard to imagine anyone not noticing (or scrutinize for hints of a larger awareness, but I found it hard to look at paradoxically easier to watch (she does less), and she hits some convincing notes of pain. But when she finds her tongue and protests the injustices of literature, in which "clever" girls are always depicted as superior to merely "good" ones, she's pathetically unconvincing. The dots remain unconnected. As thoughts, but the character's groggy pretentiousness and the actor's merge from the start that it's a wonder he could ever have fooled anyone. leisurely pacing and attention to place, especially in the lovingly coordinated (flowers, flowered wallpaper, chintz) family homestead. What he doesn't provide district attorney about the circumstances of her mother's death, but the framing device doesn't generate any suspense, and the linking scenes are so clumsily overwritten that the woman might be talking to her therapist. because of anything she does but because she's the only major player who seems and in the same year's superb, largely overlooked drama The Whole Wide disparate characters not through epidemic tics but in how she reacts to the time to look back on our own lives and loved ones and to think about the people whose labors we didn't register until they were gone. One True Thing commercials do that, too, and they get the same point across in under a aloud if you can ever go home again, especially when your success, like his own, has transformed that home from something authentically tacky into collectors, Pecker finds his haunts suddenly withering under the attention, his something disappointing about a John Waters film that's so evenhanded and everyone's in on the joke, but he doesn't seem to want (or to be able) to step outside the camp aesthetic and play anything "straight." There's nothing in can be trying when the script isn't good, but he's a great foil for their way. Of course, the pair ends up in the middle of every conflagration. they tumble from their pedestals. As he demonstrates in picture after picture, features, the kind that mold and remold themselves according to their eyes that give away little; then, swamped by feeling, those features wiggle and in the film audience such disparate responses: He's magnificent, he's dangerously crazy, he's magnificent and he's dangerously crazy. to distract people from the fact that he has also written and directed a briefly at the end of last year to qualify for various awards; it goes into for letting events play out at their own sweet speed. And if, as an actor, soberly in focus, so that we're simultaneously swept up in Sonny's good while recoiling from his evil, agog at his purity while giggling at the where the restless child is mesmerized by a gospel preacher. In no time, the into the window, places his hand on the shoulder of a young man with gelid eyes He says that there are angels in the car, that the young man has nothing to manages to thank him. We never learn if he or the woman in the car with him survive (We see her stir), but we know that Sonny's prayers have got through to them. And we believe Sonny when he says, almost laughing in amazement at his frequently the news that Sonny makes is of the tabloid variety. Thanks in part out of the Fort Worth church that they founded together, something ruptures: Unable to comprehend his banishment, Sonny spends days and nights in his mama's retired black preacher whose fervor once generated several heart attacks and he trusts that the former will soon make that plain; in the meantime, he sets do some shouting in here." He checks out the space the way a jazz musician checks out a nightclub in which he's about to perform. The Apostle's preachings (one can hardly call them "sermons") are marvelous production numbers, couldn't take my eyes off him or stop myself from nodding when his congregants belief can reinforce and even galvanize each other, the former driving the arrow pointing skyward and the words "One Way Road to Heaven.") "Holy Ghost dramatic tradition (which can be discerned in works as various as The Iceman one based on uncertain premises and fueled by an impure source, can give life, the way a placebo can be an authentic remedy if it empowers the body to heal spirits soar this high? And who's to say he's a villain if he doesn't violate the trust that his parishioners have placed in him? doesn't seem to have nefarious political aims; he simply wants to create a warm and nurturing community with himself at the center. He spearheads food drives, shows a hint of remorse for the crime he committed. And when he courts the ways" and the concomitant jealousy that drove him to become a fugitive. He's movie, I found myself simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the seemed to be sentimentalizing the gypsies; at others, he seemed to be rubbing performances, down to the smallest congregant, could not be richer. And infantile and of amazing stature. We wish we could be like him, and we thank the genre: Can there be a middle ground between fiction and fact? Can a documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? How much can you stylize material before you alter the reality that you're "directed" documentary of single life in the big city, employing, in the face openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside. director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates, followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in weeks ago in a small screening room in downtown Manhattan, where it proceeded to set box office records and generate lots of (largely favorable) press. In commentary ("I have to tell you that this film upset me so much that I really near you. It's always nice to see distributors proved wrong about the merits of "difficult" films, but in this case I think they did the decent thing. show for the empathetically challenged. The outrage it has prompted isn't the Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths." lonely guy who has been looking for a wife for almost two decades. If you were to walk past him on the street, you might think that a man of his small stature might have some trouble getting dates and be rather bitter about it. The larger very bitter about it. Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however, about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males. dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts." Sounding like one the '70s when he managed to sleep with three different beautiful women, whose pictures he shows off. These days, all he meets are mutts. He comes off as a bags of groceries and assorted junk foods. She cries about her situation to her is followed by more talk about how you attract men. Will they respect you if you call them back? If you express too much interest? "Or," the viewer thinks, and is willing to charge for her sexual services. It shouldn't be too a day"). They meet her and, a few minutes later, they show her their dicks. Weird, huh? What Barker leaves out (it's in a New York Observer article) for Barker's camera, jabbering about her body while she doffs her clothes and might have crafted his subjects' monologues from their own words, but he has thinking or trying to come to grips with their situations in front of your eyes, because they already know what they're going to say: They've been fixed like butterflies on the ends of pins and held up for voyeuristic inspection. The scenes with friends and confidantes have a crude, programmatic purpose. You can imagine the director composing a shot (the shots are tightly composed and elaborately lighted) and reminding them, "In this scene she points out that you go through with a marriage to an immigrant in search of a green card for following her up the steps of City Hall in her wedding dress because it was "true to her character." But what separates documentary from fiction is that real people are often more complicated, and more conflicted, than finished her parts. That's the kind of truth that reveals itself to documentary filmmakers after the fact, when they go over footage and discover unexpected patterns, dissonances, glimmers of a universe that's richer and messier than dramatic truths"? Single people in big cities can be desperate. Single people in turn, judge others by how they look. Big news. One could argue, charitably, that the movie is meant to be prescriptive, that Barker intends for us to regard the ways in which his subjects delude themselves and thereby learn to dramatic structure that would hold those larger dramatic truths together and help us comprehend where these people went wrong. He dramatizes right up to Beds might make a good date movie. There's little to argue about in its the picture the film paints of single life in the big city is so bleak that you'll probably want to jump into bed with whoever is sitting next to you. Anything to keep from turning into one of those people. juxtapositions that was obviously sharpened by the pain of her nomadic to be educated in the best schools. ("Furniture's temporary; education is permanent.") It's a major omission, then, that we never see those schools or We can't tell if the father is, on some weird level, justified in his fervor, figured out how to shape her narrative, which is full of episodes that are there because they actually happened but that don't have a payoff. I almost that, as a filmmaker, she hasn't learned to bring out. exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor. The father, to obtain financial support from his proceedings get too sentimental: The whimsy is always cut with an acidic children, hopefully, before another crisis sends them back into their van, summer blockbuster seasons past, these have turned out to be a pretty good few for people woozy from all the warm weather escapism. Out of Sight was And there's something reassuring about the fact that The Avengers is so rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard private parts. The series was erotic in a way only prim English humor can be: The Old Boy Steed was capable of throwing a punch and bonking someone with his her attempts at insouciance are embarrassingly arch. As the eccentric master beneath him! When he sputters lines like "Time to die!" one imagines Dr. No, closest thing to a fetus is the adult woman who's tracking the aliens down. go wrong, hugs her knees to her chest. She's been searching for signs of extraterrestrial life ever since she was a little girl. Why? Because her mother died in childbirth, and a few years later her father died of a heart attack. Now, in her loneliness, she spends day and night listening for signals from little green men. She knows that when she finds them, they'll be sweet and loving and helpful, like the parents she never had. Contact opens in much the same vein, with a series of calm, loving, outer space, and one day, as she's sitting in the desert, her headphones pick up a noise. Instantly, she knows it's aliens (the audience could be excused for thinking it sounds like a garbage truck backing up). With remarkable speed, she and her team figure out that the noise is actually a code, a blueprint for a government casually comes up with half a trillion dollars to build it, and in what seems like a weekend, a launching pad as big as a mountain is ready to There's also a contest to see who'll get to fly the machine. Of course, by now impatient to get to the magic; throughout the middle of this movie he simply checks out, like the directorial equivalent of a deadbeat dad. This is unfortunate, because in his negligence he has allowed into his film dialogue falls far beneath the standards of your average corporate memo. Tearfully, ridiculously named Palmer Joss, a former priest who is now the respected author and fictional footage, he makes truly shameless use of two long clips from strapped into a metal ball and hurtles through a tunnel of space. Instead of down, and she has no idea why. She reaches out to touch the wall of the machine and it ripples, the way the highway seems to flutter on a hot day. The scene is grave, scary, and beautiful. It dawns on us that she's heading into something completely unknown, something she can't even fully perceive. Also, that for the lands on the alien planet, and the pat speechifying takes up where it left off. I won't reveal the details of her encounter with the aliens except to say that market research be to blame? Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out adulthood and play. Contact comes out at a time when we're obsessed with role models, and nurturing, and making sure our children grow up to be healthy, responsible adults. Alas, this is not the premise of a great movie. When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering. dance lessons. Haven't we had enough of dance as therapy? Besides, it's stocked surprises have little to do with the plot. They occur at random, whenever one character discovers that another character has feelings. The accountant starts dancing because he has a crush on his frail, beautiful teacher, and for much of the movie we watch her through his longing eyes. But quite late in the day, she emotionally accurate. Shall We Dance? isn't quite art, and it doesn't qualify as mass entertainment either. But it's alert to its characters' are consistently willing to pay for online (sports and stocks are among the You may be able to find the same stuff as what's online at any decently stocked porn shop, but to do so you have to go to that neighborhood, physically enter that store, and then worry about what the clerk thinks of your interest in dominant transvestites. Browsing at home, it's just you and your modem, and "Nerve intends to be more graphic, forthright, and topical than pornography encompasses all those hot 'n' hunky sites out there, and erotica is that safe and boring territory of romance novels and scented candles, then Nerve wants it both ways: rough sex and soft lighting, meaningful talk You wonder why no one has ever tried this before. Go to the high end. More typical are sites such as Pussy Vision and Blow Job of the Day. Search for "erotica" (thousands of matches) and get sites such as Yellow Reader called a "tasteful celebration of the sensuality of every day life." editors of Nerve feel no need to be tasteful, God bless 'em. What you find here are actual writers holding forth on subjects near and dear to their hearts, and other organs; writing that generally seems to know the difference between the precious and the precise. And they do it without sacrificing lust especially revolutionary: There are seven distinct sections within the site, gender, and relationships; "Pedantry" presents pieces by public figures such as "Skin" is photos of flesh; "Threads" is occasionally interactive erotic simply because it's Mailer) that he draws the line at child porn. (Everyone has his limits.) Though the author of Advertisements for Myself has always never the hippest cat in the pack (witness "The White Negro," his attempt to grapple with the Beats, which proved the adage that those who had to ask what remember reading it and thinking, I can't believe I just read those words," recalls Mailer. "I can't tell you the number of taboos it violated. First of all, you weren't supposed to connect God with sex. Second of all, you never spoke of the asshole, certainly not in relation to sex. If you did, you were the lowest form of pervert. Third of all, there was obvious homosexuality in the remark. In those days nobody was accustomed to seeing that in print. And site does betray some expectations. "Skin," the photography area, is doubtless heavily trafficked. The pictures are quick to download-- Nerve is very user friendly: good navigation, great design, and an intelligent use of icons. slightly disturbing: New Yorkers (who answered an ad in the Village by dildos of towering dimensions; an actress being eaten out while the director casually talks to her about the scene. "Once I got focused on their underlying sex. The attitude seems more carnivorous and unapologetic: We need sex, let's Had One? (surprise! most women would have sex with themselves), has a Whether getting laid consistently or not, people need hugs.) For the most part, see if Nerve can keep it up. The editors seem to know good writing when Carver's hilarious essay on the differences between "sensualists" and "Sensualists have sex without orgasm on purpose," she writes of all those name his favorite political party and you might be surprised. Instead of Labor, official party with candidates and a Web site. The only problem is that, just because the Loony Webmaster fell ill. In recent days, all you'd find at The promise the site will be "back online very shortly." political eyes of the world turn to watch whether the heavily favored, Bill Conservatives and their stiff Prime Minister John Major, some snazzy Web sites While the proportion of Brits with Internet access is much voters. They are eager to participate in online forums, such as the one on "was more revealing for what it left out. It didn't say that in six weeks they their approach to the questions." (Perhaps, suggested another, that's because are cast for the individual candidate, not the party. Perhaps as a result, the sites maintained by the United Kingdom's major parties tend to be far more rundowns of the players, backgrounders on salient issues, events calendars, chat groups, and a wrap up of current betting odds, allows you to build your own "party manifesto." The site will then compare your choices on the issues with those of the various parties (also displayed) and tell you which comes closest to what you want. Or you can play the games of "Trivial Politics" and spread throughout the country and where the critical districts lie. It also provides an extensive set of links to other political sites, including those night, these were a relatively small part of their Web sites, let alone their heavily to make their election sites the main focus of their overall Web sites. is adding five people to its 10-person Web operation, plans to provide live presidential election in which the Internet would make a significant showed one in nine voters claimed the Internet "influenced" the way they voted. And on election night, television networks saw their ratings drop while pundits, experts, and consultants have been predicting that the Internet will tools and techniques, many might think so. There is, however, one thing for enthusiastic users. Some sites will crash. There will be delays in getting her unborn child. It wasn't that either of the two plot strands (the end of baby) broke new ground, only that the mixture raised modern and entertaining questions: Why would this woman feel more comfortable raising a child with a homosexual man than with a heterosexual one? Could two adults who love each other but aren't in love with each other stay together under such gropes honestly for some new design for living. He wins the reader over as much crinkle up in fatuous happiness, and look moistly maternal. But that's about throw out the old ways and invent some new ones, the scene has no urgency; she risk enough to be phony. Actresses get attention for their hair when they don't they hit each other with pillows (a common cinematic sign of a couple's closeness but not necessarily accurate; as an experiment, I hit my wife with a collection of stereotypes. Still, her stereotypes (in that play) brood engagingly over whether their behavior is too stereotypical. For The Object characters, but they add little that anyone other than a development executive in the world." These two are intended as a foil for the nonjudgmental main of his own affection drift into the arms of a younger man and delivering an audience bond with a movie, however. Compare The Object of My Brooks doesn't worry much about composing a frame or giving you a sense of swell that takes a higher number, small and medium ships may be lost to view wasn't 'painfully shy' but just the same I wouldn't be surprised if there had he looked like a human filament: all dark, burning eyes that never seemed to blink. His intensity was startling, but you couldn't be sure how to take him. Always an actor of moods, his timing had become even more capricious. He didn't speak his lines, he distended them: He never seemed to want to let them out of Scent of a Woman (1992)--well, as the gangsters in his new film, is always passed over for promotions within the "family." With his gold chains uses all his blowhard insecurities, along with his patented air of electrified stupor, to elicit from us an astounding degree of sympathy. Nothing Lefty says The miracle of the film, which is based on a memoir by the Partly this comes from the tension between the snappy, driving screenplay by heartbreakingly vulnerable, even while he's blowing people's heads off. It's sometimes hilarious, yet suffused with a sense of loss and riddled with the kind of violence that makes you recoil and lean forward simultaneously. relief from all the gore and gravitas, the scene made even more explicit the movie's theme of "family," both real and extended. As nightmarish as the taken under the wings of expansive father figures with few uncertainties about knows that he's exploiting the older man's best, most fatherly instincts, and it tears him up. Later, there's a tiny but significant moment when Lefty revolves around families, except that they're now the source of guilt instead resemblance to the gangster's own son, a junkie who keeps his distance. So to convey to her husband what she's going through. She can't share his work or know his daily (sometimes weekly) whereabouts, and you can see how the about having abandoned his family for the years it took him to infiltrate the mob, but he didn't lose as much sleep over what he was doing to his Mafia family. That's the screenwriter's conceit. And the actual Lefty seems to have social club, waiting for the boss, who emerges from a black sedan with a fat cigar in his mouth. Most of the time, these shabby "soldiers" just sit around and rack their (small) brains for new schemes, worried that if profits fall too low, they're going to find themselves "clipped" or "whacked." They're like like the ones in the social club and in the gangsters' homes have a real comic chair in a red sweat suit, watching videotapes of gazelles being pounced on and devoured by lions. (He longs to be the lion, but he ends up as the gazelle.) He finally giving up with the stereo in a shambles and offering to buy another signal fatalistic acceptance, doomed resignation, murderous rage, enthusiastic agreement, or nothing in particular) in a speech that will live long in the which is moving but also way too pat, there isn't a single element on which his characters almost never have more than a single dimension at a time. link between us and The Godfather --a gangster movie for a mingier, more cynical era, when even doing good comes with a terrible cost, and where every family tie is a snap of the wrist away from a garrote. is how they hyped this new network and yet, I wonder: Surely, Bill Gates did not want me going to a chiropractor. My eyes flicker between screens close and this novice anyway) the intensity of operating a computer. "It's time to get me is to write a question to the president, who is being interviewed by Tom way, so I wasn't really going to get in on the action.) There are glitches. Every time my browser goes to the page, it hits some sound file that belts out vacation, and who occasionally tries to fall asleep by counting senators come to love about the Web in the couple of months since I got on it. For me, I would have gone anyway, only much more quickly. As a journalist often on the the paper appears, the better to find out what my competitors have that I came to my magazine the other day for an editorial lunch, I was able to prep up Unfortunately, much of what is on the Web is diatribe or propaganda, foaming with hate or boosterism, irrelevant either way. "There's this explosion of especially valuable because they become, basically, reliable brand names in a political news and know that it's quality journalism, as opposed to some guy campaign opened their Web site earlier this summer, they treated it like a major event, even bringing the vice president over to headquarters to tout the site. "The mouse proves the elephant wrong," Gore said, sounding like Web sites are rich in position papers and press releases and sound clips and where you can pick up brochures. They are too biased to help you think clearly about which candidate is better. Perhaps this will change. For the moment, visceral thrill surfing over to various political organizations. A home page may be a group's face to the world, but opening it still feels like getting to an odd universal cheeriness to political Web sites, many of which I was guided There is a strange moral equivalence to the sites, too. Each one pops up and makes its claim, regardless of any relation to the truth. One can call up the political sites can't replicate is the smell of politics, the feeling of being from public service ads, standing behind Dole. I loved leafleting when I was in a rally. But there are political meetings and activities in every neighborhood. dead, but for the living. From the lonely widower who makes a weekly pilgrimage which, with their rolling lawns and rows of stone slabs, offer a tangible connection to souls departed. But now that the virtual seems tangible and Virtual cemeteries are already here. They are neither schlep over to Shady Acres. Like real cemeteries, most sites charge (starting photo, a bio, and reminiscences about the person. Most also let you limit access to those friends and family who know a private password. So you end up after all, seems like the last place to fashion an intimate, solemn space, but plots are more than a quick alternative to the graveside visit or a way to introduce your dead friend to the rest of the world. They're a hotlink to heaven, complete with interactive features: For example, some offer you the ability to post messages to your dearly deceased. The Cemetery Gate, "a peaceful, serene place where people come to remember their loved ones," hopes that "when you leave this place, you will be refreshed, have a new vigor and be resolute in your desire to live your life with full measure." Some sites appear on the screen in your beloved's honor. And when you visit a site on That their patrons seem oblivious to outside Web traffic is what makes the pages seem especially creepy. In contrast to the frenetic, animated antics of most commercial sites, many virtual cemeteries front willow tree or a sunset. Click on a name, and (chances are) you will encounter messages addressed directly to a dead person, often remarkably things, or providing updates on mutual friends. You feel as if you are sites seem focused on higher purposes, like supernatural communication. People are especially unabashed about reaching out to dead pets. The Virtual Pet Cemetery, remember the telephone cords you used to eat, The funny way that you walked (so characteristic of you, Would touch upon my heart as you meowed. Memorial Garden (which doesn't charge to post a memorial) predicts that virtual cemeteries will revolutionize our relationships with the dead. "Perhaps electronic crypts as pages devoted to whole families are assembled." There is already quite a community of the deceased developing on the Web. Many sites cordon off special areas for victims of drunken driving, AIDS, or war. The Cemetery also sorts out those who committed suicide or donated organs. features a "Pantheon." Virtual cemeteries seem eager to play the role of promoting private, spiritual reflection; and assuring immortality to end, the Internet turns out to be a great resting place. Dead people don't seem any more dead than anyone else in cyberspace, where everyone we connect with is disembodied. Anonymous, infinite in its variety, and located somewhere that appears both real and yet not quite of this world, cyberspace is not too different from the places we imagine people go when they die. And with its easy access and defiance of time and space, it is the perfect place for us to visit Two of them return to the United States, leaving behind their idealistic poachers. Two years later, the men who went home are informed of what happened after they boarded the plane: Police discovered their leftover hashish garbage as they were leaving) and imprisoned the remaining Yank. The quantity of drugs dictated that he be tried as a dealer; the punishment for dealing in at least three years under barbaric conditions, or let a good and decent man be hanged. If only one of them returns, the sentence jumps to six years. that revolve around moral choices often have an aura of sanctimoniousness built into them: The audience is presented with the issue in the starkest blacks and whites and waits for the blinkered protagonist to "do the right thing." The approach is certainly dramatic, but it can also be too comfy, allowing you to pat yourself on the back for being nobler than the people you're observing. submit to an imprisonment that will be at best harrowing and at worst fatal. If he doesn't have it in him, there's no drama. If he does, there's no drama, either. So he sort of doesn't but maybe sort of does, and the picture hinges on whether he'll come to his (moral) senses before his buddy gets the chop. Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's his way in the '90s with flagrantly commercial junk such as Sleeping With Strick, who made his fortune and lost his good name with the abominable Cape but it's melodrama with heart, bones, sinews, and tear ducts. prime time soap, but the performance deepens and becomes extraordinary. He's tall, and he uses his muscular body and good looks to show how his character, Sheriff, keeps the world at bay; he's so handsome that he doesn't have to him a roving mind that seems to circle around its own hollow core with the film his every gesture and step seems weighted, as if he has put on a superficially responsible and more inwardly aquiver. It's a thankless part, but Return to Paradise its soul. The lawyer, Beth Eastern, is clearly more than a hired gun: She seems to be pleading as much for her own life as for her her, and you can read how high the stakes are in her taut body and hungrily she could animate anything. She was astonishingly intense as the backwoods sister of a suicidal boy in the otherwise mediocre thriller I Know What You dealing. The system is presented as a given and its government's intransigence as something that no amount of diplomacy will soften. The real outrage is reflection on the times that officials of a lunatic system look like capricious gods, whereas righteous journalists are parasites from hell. Pi until the other day. If you haven't seen it either, hie thee hence. This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a root of all life. Tortured by headaches and nosebleeds, he lives a life of fractions and spinning tangents, and the metaphors are right there in the filmmaking, captured in the furious montage and in flurries of talismanic installment of the gory Alien "franchise," has made a career out of putting herself into ridiculous situations and managing never to look ridiculous. Her immersion in her roles commands respect and awe: She surges past embarrassment, past fear, and even when she makes a misstep, she lands Alien films into what is possibly the collective unconscious of molten lead with a bewildered baby alien erupting from her chest. That kind of back for a sequel, and when he pointed out that his character had been incinerated (in a pit of molten lead, coincidentally), they said he could greet line: "Did my brother make it?" Now, thanks to the rise of cloning in the convinced that they can harness the aliens for the good of mankind. ("Once in a futuristic gothic cage and proceed with their hopeful experiments, while punks who momentarily have the upper hand but who he knows will be a bloody last two, and the giant space station in which it takes place is both steely themselves have never been animated with more virtuosity. You get to see one swim: It whips itself forward with its tail at about a hundred miles an hour. There's also a scene in which an alien gets slowly sucked out of a hole into space, a process that makes a meat grinder look merciful. The movie's other on the experience of a friend of mine who worked on the soap opera Days of character got killed in a plane crash, and the guy playing Roman decamped, too, work with my Roman again?" And they said, "Er, there's another guy here now, and he's really popular." And the diva said, "Work it out." So in wanders Roman I to announce that he has been held prisoner on an island for the last Because once you immolate your leading lady, you have to execute some mighty violent narrative contortions to bring her back, and by the time you've explained what she's doing there and why, half the movie is gone. And what's watery space station to reach their little ship, with one after another getting gets worse the harder she tries to act. Her scenes with Weaver are sad: She doesn't have the older actress's histrionic resources, plastic physique, or energy. And she's playing a role that would likely confound the most able minds has a pretty good ear. (One character actually snarls, "I am not a man with whom to fuck.") But even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her. Her skin has an unearthly glow, which exactly? He's been around for years, yet it's still hard to know. In arty circles, he's famous as the highbrow exhibitionist who wrote and starred in angst. Millions of small children around the country could pick him out in a like The Princess Bride and Clueless --a guy who, unlike the seriously, least of all himself. On the contrary, he hams up his resemblance to a clown and wheezes for laughs (and, presumably, a paycheck). doesn't appear in this film based on his latest play, but his schizoid spirit haunts it all the same. The Designated Mourner is one of those sobering The actors deliver lots of brooding speeches, and the plot is a downer. On the with a sneering comic timing that has somehow improved in the 30-odd years leading intellectuals. He was a great man but also a jerk; he surrounded apparently rare in this bleak hypothetical future, to understand the poetry of John Donne. But one day Jack admitted to himself that he didn't give a damn of intellectuals?) The play unfolds in monologues, with Jack making a witty Jack, and so on; the three of them sit at a long table and talk into the camera, occasionally pouring themselves glasses of water as panelists at a new government had begun to crack down on her and her father. Then, slowly, it becomes clear that the government is going to do worse than harass the Mourner for condemning the vulgarian times we live in, a larger group will think it's just more intolerable hooey from that highbrow exhibitionist. It's actually better than hooey, but it's also a hopelessly conflicted piece of work. The whole conception of "the intellectual life" feels dated: The film is traded back and forth by the men. Later, when Jack casts off the brainy not being an intellectual would appear to be an issue only for men, as if the only thing that kept them from humping everything like craven dogs was a fondness for sonnets. Then there's the problem of what's killing the intellectuals off. They are themselves partly to blame, because they're such his belief that theater should be more political, but this government of philistine meanies seems more like a cheap device designed to give his play some tension. All he's really telling us is: Beware of people with bad being anachronisms, the intellectuals are underwritten and deliberately specializes in 100-proof irony, is the clown's ideal front man. With his and monstrous. In what must be one of the greatest nasal performances of all time, he rasps and chuckles and seduces us into thinking that he's a detached And yet, before he turns completely sour, Jack makes a peace. He realizes how noisy and restless his mind has always been, "an endless tinkling of reportage and commentary." He sees how he's always trying to taking in life as it is. He experiences silence for the first time, and finds of the movie in which Jack begins testing what it would be like to live in the present is funny and original. Up to this point, the audience has been watching off his high horse, and the movie breathes. Then the moment passes, and it The last intellectuals die off, and Jack heads directly for the gutter. Toward even for poor, harmless John Donne. But it's tempting to say "good little poem about a wet dream. In contrast to contemporary writing about sex, fantasy of domination. The reality sunnily undermines the preposterous to call Boogie Nights yet another drama of family values. The film shy away from recounting his lewder adventures. It even invites us to love him home with his awful parents; a wimpy father and a drunken mother, who runs around the house calling him stupid. He dreams vaguely of stardom, but for the time being works as a dishwasher in a nightclub. One night, a customer, Jack into the business. We know we should be horrified, but we're not. We've seen instincts, we think, "Go with this nice older man." before playing his cards. The early scenes unfold with a patience that's rare turns out to be sex on Jack's couch with a pretty but inappropriately cheerful the logistics of the shoot involve the cleansing of vaginas and polite whispered negotiations about where to ejaculate. The atmosphere is supportive, a simultaneously lighthearted and sinister mood, as if this were a thriller set He seems to be saying that there are two sides to every cries out to be protected, like a puppy whose paws and ears are still disproportionately large. He's vulnerable without the narcissism that has central to his appeal that his looks even shift from macho to feminine: At acceptable and porn actors still dreamed of being recognized as legitimate an ambitiously wide time span to take on, especially since the audience is are scratches on the veneer of authenticity, though. The soundtrack is less usually heard several years later than people in real life would have listened indiscriminateness to these lapses, an overconfidence. In the press kit, a good job of looking beautiful in one scene and puffy in the next), and a shield and indulge each other; they snort coke together the way a regular family might grill hot dogs. And as a shrink might say, they lack boundaries. Amber is sad because she has a little son she's no longer allowed to see. So she tells Dirk that she loves him as if he were her baby, and then she seduces him. Their strong feelings for each other are real, but they are also are, we need a family, is interesting, up to a point. It was the main conceit But like any idea, it gets simplistic when carried too far, and late in Boogie Nights it explodes into cheap melodrama. Without a good role model to guide him, Dirk snorts so much coke that his one real talent poops gone too far with this fantasy family and having lost his grip on reality. And out of her passive bubble and brutalize one jerk for all the abuse men have subjected her to over the years. Without guidance, she's lost all morals and turned into a cauldron of rage. These late scenes are over the top, as mean and reductive as editorials in a tabloid, and they nearly extinguish the moral subtlety of what's gone before. One even hopes they are insincere, an attempt Promise Keepers. It would be a shame if someone this talented meant them in what journalists pretentiously call an "alternative weekly" and what everyone else calls a "rag." It's a free paper, full of listings and reviews, that can listings, which were comprehensive and quirky. But after a few weeks I realized controversies. Like any decent local paper, it views the city as the place of man's highest achievement, of clashing ideas, power struggles, great ambitions. City Paper 's staffers are obsessed with their city. Whenever there was a readers are both fiercely loyal and fierce: Every week the letters column fills with complaints from people who have been mortally offended. Almost every city I thought about this recently as I was surfing through online city guides, the Web's latest Next Big Thing. Internet tycoons have a new model for urban journalism, and it's an ambitious one. Online city guides are meant to be category killers, a challenge to daily newspapers, alternative papers, city magazines, the Yellow Pages, and even ticket brokers. Online and food reviews, find the closest theater and show times, book reservations, buy tickets, and even print a map to the restaurant. During the past two years areas. Daily and alternative newspapers are striking deals with the Internet services. (New York Sidewalk, for example, buys listings from the Village mentioned Sidewalk. Pause for full disclosure. I have embarrassingly large Slate, and pays my salary. Sidewalk and Slate are headquartered in the same for Sidewalk in New York. Oh, and I interviewed for the editor's job at reviewed, competently, by the hundreds. Essentially all movies, plays, concerts, exhibits, readings, performances, and sports contests in the New York area are listed. All events get the basics (time, cost, location), most are Maps and directions are plentiful. The search engines are a breeze. You want to times, and a review. The most obscure events are found easily: Two minutes of load without street names. The greatest annoyance: Neither site enables you to buy tickets or make reservations online. But these technical glitches will be (Sidewalk, on the other hand, is engaged in a nasty legal battle with personalization software will improve. And as computers get faster and smaller, the online guides will be as convenient as magazines and newspapers. they are infected with an inoffensive corporate blandness. They ignore politics. The editorial content is limited to capsule reviews and short, and idiosyncrasy that define urban living. (Sidewalk's movie reviews are pablum city that is deeply depressing. Alternative and daily newspapers conceive of the city as a place of controversy and passion. The online guides see it strictly as a place of consumption. What is a city? The receptacle for your disposable income. The only urban problem to which the online guides have the and no love affair at all. She chooses the calamity. The material is like that somehow elevate both the locale and that heroic figure. Story becomes myth in Would he play or wouldn't he? Would he or wouldn't he? the court? All day, I combed sports Web sites for a rumor, a hint, a tea leaf compulsive gambler who'd pawned his fiancee's engagement ring to wager against this madness come from? I could try to justify my tournament obsession as the natural extension of my romance with college basketball. I could sing hymns to trumpeting out the tuneful college song; the slap of leather against pine junkies hoard trivia for the same reason political junkies lock their remotes show: Power. Trivia allows the junkie to master a small (by definition trivial) corner of the universe. We can explain the tournament, you can't. you don't. The junkie watches a tournament game entirely differently than the casual fan. For the casual fan, the game is art, an aesthetic delight. For the sports junkies bore their friends with stories of their astounding predictions. competition was weak. What I rarely mention is that I failed to guess the so much as it requires the pretense of knowledge. To really understand college ball, you would need to spend most of the fall and winter watching Big Sky conference games on satellite television and reading back issues of videotape the highlights on the local news, and fill out an entry for the pool. discovered this innocently on the opening day of the tournament. I logged on to the Sports Network, and Yahoo! itself were covering March Madness. (This is not to and I must report it is magnificent. Sports Web sites are one of the Web's few overwhelms traditional media. Newspapers satisfy themselves with 10-inch sports Web brings order to the anarchy. Unrestricted by space, the sites run more articles and statistics than any newspaper and deliver more audio and any office pool ever could, and their fantasy sports leagues outshine any had ended too late to make the morning paper. I immediately found a wire story report on both teams, and an online chat room where Bruins fans were whooping it up. And every tournament game receives this treatment. Nothing disappointing online. It prints too little original content and relies heavily Network probably attracts more attention than it deserves. It's slow, ugly, a German online bookmaker. In the spirit of unfettered investigative sites are entertaining enough. Fantasy basketball, baseball, and football password. I signed up for all of them. But instead of achieving power and domination, I suffered a mammoth blow to my junkie ego. Entering Final Four annoyance must be somehow necessary to his pleasure, the rising of it seems only what she shows as she bends over, reaching between her splayed the frat boys hoard how her fingertips have eased the hidden lips back to the rarely hold moderate opinions, and there is hardly a singer who elicits more is more than a singer: She is a marvel of marketing. She sells out any house back to God about the mysterious joys and sorrows of human existence." Another technician who never sacrifices passion to precision. Listen to her note as a distinct link in a long, twirling chain and each word being accorded complain silently"). It is a jovial anthology of trills, runs, grace notes, finesses the tension between glum words and sprightly notes right up to the critics have argued that her voice is too petite to reach the outer spaces of obscure. She has sung no more than a handful of operatic roles onstage, mostly whose gifts have been eroded in recent years by an uncontrollable tendency to out, her dimples deepen, her chin recedes unflatteringly against her neck, her head springs forward and back from her shoulders as if she were doing the Funky naughtiness, such as a habit of canceling appearances, including a sings than to the colossal operas that today's colossal houses were built for. domestic comedies inevitably seem dwarfed by a stage ample enough to contain has barely dabbled in bel canto, the finespun singer vehicles of the early repertoire that would otherwise seem destined for the remainder bin. She has she is a dazzlingly expressive singer, guiding the listener through the emotional landscape of a piece with every small push of her voice. She colors she cries ("Unhappy me!") in a voice full of pain. "A thousand dismal chesty holler when she needs to, but in quiet passages she tends to produce a gentle haze of breath around each focused note. This hiss, the noise level in today, when most singers are trained in the discipline of steely perfection and disc, surrounded by undiluted digital silence. It is as if, by this deliberate scandalized, but more were charmed, when she made her Met debut two seasons ago immediately clear that she was carrying the whole production. singer of relatively unpopular music, a singer who could probably fill stadiums, but prefers to keep her audiences at close quarters. Last year, she leaning on the Met to find a more intimate venue for her projects. She has foolish in the cause of his art; having tackled his parts with demented, hyperbolic integrity, letting the madness of his roles infuse him and carry him this was no easy feat. It took months of labor with a personal trainer to of the practiced bodybuilder. And it took a project of rare slickness and vacuity to help him blot out all traces of his hitherto peculiar but attractive film that disdains prosaic time and space. The action is hooked to a backbeat. The actors float, abstractly, in the frame, lit so that their muscles have a luster. None of the images breathe; the details are fixed as in cement. In this swollen pectorals pumping as he runs from an exploding airplane hangar in slow sociopaths while electric guitars squeal their hosannas. prisoners stage their inevitable coup, blow away a few guards, and install unfriendly skies. Really, their ambitions are shockingly limited for a seems to have a psychic bond with Cage, perhaps because he's playing the part Cage doesn't side with the escaped prisoners, as you wouldn't if you had a wife insufficiently concerned that Cage's prison bud needs a shot of insulin bad. (except for those amusing occasions when his characters were striking heartthrob poses). Is there any death more conclusive for an actor than putting on a muscle shirt and walking around in slow motion? Movies as synthetic as Con Air make me wonder if my time wouldn't be more enjoyably spent watching a duck. Let me explain. The carry far less information about the way the world works than the the temporal aspects of film, convinced that even, say, a successful formula thriller like Breakdown derives much of its power from its simulation of natural world. "The bees and I have an understanding," he announces, stoic in his denims. "I take care of them, they take care of me." real time. There always seems to be plenty of it, along with the chance to study the faces of his characters, even when there's not a great deal going on places, but with no acceleration, like the duck on the pond. enormous amount of audience indulgence. Nonetheless, there are compensations. press his point and yet unwilling to let his listener off the hook, persisting in the pleasantries well past the point of pleasantness. The seconds crawl, that the principal job of a modern mainstream movie critic is to distinguish subdivision of the above: smart formula crap that makes the viewer dumb. is one killer climax after another. Will New York City survive the shower of there? Will his team make it off the ramshackle Mir space station in one piece? Will both shuttles manage to land on the asteroid through a shower of (3-D, ratcheted up. Where there's a cliff, there's a hanger. electrodes were cannily placed, the jolts administered at regular intervals. Along with the rest of the audience, I jumped when I was meant to jump, laughed when I was meant to laugh, and swallowed a lump in my throat when I was meant to feel moved. It's true, little irritants kept creeping in. It gets harder and starlet, buy the product. A few trident missiles in this lefty's side: to "Chew this iron bitch up!" Still, there are few villains as apolitical as a giant asteroid. We can all agree that it would indeed be a good thing to chew do spectacle: The opening bombardment of Manhattan is riotously well edited, and Bay compensates by turning every frame into a blur of motion. You can't all seems lost, the hero turns to the Mission Control camera and says, "Prepare finding just the right (and most noncommittal) combination of facetiousness and sincerity. He can deliver zingers, and he can also invoke the Almighty. He can it's an art," and not be laughed off the screen. He's the perfect mascot for a Stuff machismo and wants you to buy into it at the same time (which is true, come to think of it, of The Right Stuff itself). The yucks come the line of duty, and then it's time to get patriotic. team, he has the funniest lines, and his wormy, dyspeptic grin sits on the splotch on the screen. As streakers go, he makes more of an impact than the Out of Sight is slick in all the right ways. It starts with tie, marches through traffic into a bank and, without a weapon or a plan, pulls off a charmingly effortless robbery foiled only by a bad starter on his wreck with the eerie foreboding of violence about to erupt. He has evolved into a up with him in the trunk of a getaway car and is hostage to his chatter about movies, a life of crime, and how he wishes he had met her in a bar so he could ripely beautiful actress who projects a disarmingly high opinion of herself. No phony demureness here: She acts as if she came of age telling an endless parade opportunism. Like this terrific confection, he never melts. lowlifes on weed about breasts. But not completely. Further up the yak food concerns of family and work, and enjoy a little innuendo now and then. disproportionately own foreign cars. They carry dental insurance." broadcasts, the show, syndicated by Public Radio International, now reaches a attended college and now lives with his wife and two young daughters). But ("One thing you gotta say about Congress: They can't run the government, but they've made it a federal offense to fire your travel agent.") and then segues to an interview with a guest or two (recent visitors included novelist Jane Quiz, which pairs a member of the studio audience with a caller. Quiz categories include "People," "Science," "Odds and Ends," and "Things You Should Have Learned in School (Had You Been Paying Attention)." (Sample question: Are more people injured by clothing or by razors? Answer: Clothing.) Kitschy to an inhabitant of the "Town of the Week." The town is selected by a dart chats with him (the feature ran eight years before he lighted upon an MEMBER: How can I wean myself from sleeping with a fan? spontaneous public events are in fact preceded by stacks of memos and weeks of meetings, extemporaneous entertainment like this is no mean feat. And it's no mother had to name me after a relative whose name started with an "H" and she of stuff, so she got this name from a cartoon show, as a matter of fact. is, "What famous cartoon horse is your son named after?" listens skeptically to a guy in the studio audience who describes himself as a "community planner" busy "coordinating a community's relationships with the gladly play the butt of a joke if it'll help him figure out the locals. Acclimating himself to the online world in one show, he required callers to tap their words into a keyboard as they spoke. Meanwhile, he did the same with his sighs, summing up his of life on public radio, "I don't see any way out of smell a hustler. But I can't catch him faking the way I can his buddy Ben unquestionably a movie star. Already, he has staked out his own chunk of dramatic territory: He's the intellectual who's also a prole, who's arrested between the worlds of privilege and the street, who thinks and gets high on thinking but who also wrestles with earthier instincts. Are those instincts base or noble? A sign of corruption or purity? The conflict is as old as spot. It's seductive, the way the wheels are always turning behind those small eyes, the way he licks his lips to suppress his emotions and then cagily examines his options. I can't recall another actor who seems at once so earnest and so cunning, so ingenuous yet with something so clearly up his sleeve. then you are the sucker." Losing his life savings to a menacingly fey he can off anyone dumb enough to sit across a card table from him, accepting the rightness of the line "It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money." makes distinctions among rounders. Mike is supposed to be an honest connoisseur of card playing nature, a master whose expertise derives from spotting "tells," from "watching the player, not the cards." On the other hand, his buddy Worm cheat who gets off on perpetually putting one impudent twinkle toe over the hole to play the snake and lure his old chum back into the game. Rounders is an unusually talky movie, but the talk is slick and fast and sleeves. In fact, the script is a model of research and construction, a real aforementioned four page glossary is a bounty for urban anthropologists. ("Alligator Blood: A compliment given to an outstanding player who proves a bluffer, and usually with a not especially powerful hand.") not a movie made by gamblers. It's a studied, deliberate, calculating piece of Rounders was one of those spec scripts that has become legend in stars who boasted that they "didn't have to change a word." Actually, they ought to have changed a couple. They might have given the Golden Girl more to say than her handful of wet blanket reproaches, and Worm deserved a bigger last act. Only my abiding affection for Landau kept me from snickering out loud at his rabbinical monologues, in which he explains why he defied his yeshiva more than half a century ago and followed his dream by going to law school. (He says the one thing he took from yeshiva was to be true to oneself. What tripe! In yeshiva, being true to yourself is possible only if you recognize that your true self longs to submit to the rule of Torah. It doesn't mean that God is in scrutinize their cards and each other and throw around their poker lingo; and his hand. The script is good at making you think that it has better cards than his mouth into a yokel sneer and is wholly impossible to dislike, even when his character keeps crazily upping the ante. In the schematic role of a sober, need to chew the scenery: Mumbling, hovering, shuffling in the margins, he makes you watch him closely to discern his real, complicated feelings. one. Start with an accent unlike any heard anywhere on the planet, with syllables drawn out so audaciously that you want to applaud every line. He and slides his teeth along the cream while raking his opponent with invisible kind of Academy Award. Sequences that once were run together by a studio bent late, Touch of Evil has arrived, and it's all of a piece. Part of recognizing that Touch of Evil is a masterpiece means also attract. His compositions are teeming, unbalanced, with a center of gravity that lurches left then right. The overlapping dialogue and squealing and our own sense of space is continually violated. The images in Touch of with chortling messages like "Don't Look Up." Those fake marquees first sort that some literate people consider big and dumb. I thought the first invented a huge movie world in which the eyes could go dreaming. It also had performance. I was also lucky to see Batman Forever in more pleasant sophistical argument could be made that his films, while meretricious, are always at least mildly entertaining. If your next dinner party threatens to turn dull, you might try antagonizing sophisticates with a Revisionist shallowness of the Brat Pack, notable for the discovery of the brooding vampire spoof, notable for the discovery of the brooding dramatic craft of like Batman so he could afford 'idea' pictures like A Time to best he offers an empty but internally consistent flamboyance. He is skilled at looks like on a vicious summer day. He is also good with faces, particularly different facial expressions. The acting is not always an embarrassment; in Hypothesis for the time being. (I will have to return to my old contrarian for the eye to catch up, poor staging of fast action. The first few minutes are committee of prepubescent speed freaks. And while this kind of movie doesn't much wrong on every front, it's hard to single out a basic flaw. But Batman world. Each of the previous Batman films had a sly, spry through reams of cardboard zingers. "Winter has come!" "Everyone chill!" "The One of the movie's few redeeming features is partially composer now working, has written typically imaginative music, rich in jagged harmony and deft scoring. That eerie wailing at the end of the title theme is a in A Time to Kill --is one sign of latent tastefulness. In movies like blotted out by the sound effects that erupt in tandem with every move or twitch your ear. This indiscriminate racket, more than anything, sent me out into Times Square with the feeling of having been roughed up. The area hasn't expense of such trifles as variety and intelligibility. Her work can be unleavened by imagination. Compare her turn as a government agent in vulnerability: She was such a radiant mess that no superior in his right mind work without a net, to throw herself headlong into a part even if it meant falling a great distance onto her face. But a weird, masochistic streak has emerged in her performances. She now makes a fetish of falling on her face. She might even want to be loved for falling on her face. projecting her plainness and artlessness that she neglects, for most of the doesn't walk when she can lurch, weave, or collide with objects, her balance shifting precariously. Her responses, meanwhile, are queerly private, as if she were unsure of how to act out her own emotions. All this is by design, of course, and in an era when "You like me! You really like me!" is the mantra of most actors, that design can seem brave and original. What isn't by design is the point of having no discernible point of view. She seems to have confused Smith), who wishes to weave out of her niece's life a breathlessly melodramatic modest inheritance and now seeks salvation in the form of this unloved, unlovely, and affluent young woman. Each of these characters comes with the trappings of civilization and high society, but it is the natural, untutored whereas her father, clearly, could not. The performance is complex, shaded, to the door. "I have the most fortuitous headache.") sour and grave man in whom all feeling has been deadened since his wife died intends to, but because he feels that unhappiness is her due. It might be, however, that his contempt is too much on the surface, so that his bitterly than earthshaking. There is so little intimacy between father and daughter that keep something up her sleeve, however. Upon hearing the contents of her father's sadistic will, she lets out a musical laugh that is probably the from. It's the sound of genuine catharsis, of poison being expelled into the much out of guile as instinct. Stone doesn't have a political ax to grind this maggoty carcass across the desert from miles away. The only surprise about sports what appear to be false front choppers, and masticates his dumb, satanic works along the principle best defined by Chevy Chase when he opened classical music or jazz, performers are engaged in a conversation with one another, and with their predecessors. The rest of us are listening in, although there have always been some who don't like feeling forced into silence. Poet entirely/ isolated soul/ yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego/ music musical soul to an end. In this he is partly influenced by the Media Lab, which champions the idea that a seamless global web of information will soon blur the an hour long, it was presented seven times a day over the course of several music is not sounds chosen by a composer, but a quality of awareness about what you're hearing. The vehicle for all this is the expensive, complicated, and instruments and asks that they play around with them. We not only get to explore a cool new technology; we get to collaborate with the composer. We move toward being the artist, our lives, the art. In theory, anyway. been transformed into a thicket of plastics molded into shapes suggestive of fruits or plants, or maybe cells. We mill around in the dark among the a video arcade. The games, though, are more interesting. "Gesture Wall," for instance, puts a little zip of electricity through you, which makes you intelligible to some sensors in front of you, which means you can "play" snippets of music and sound by gesticulating. (My fillings vibrated a little; though that could have been caused by the ambient noise.) There are hard you hit the nubby pads that stick out of them, cause nearby speakers to spit out percussive clicks and bops. Another device is called "The Speaking Tree"; it engages you in conversation about music. You can have any type of favorite piece of music?" asks the Tree. "I don't know," say you. "When you somebody's brain while a piece of music is being created," because, as the name suggests, Brain Opera is about the nature of mind. It is based on the that consciousness is built up of loosely connected separate processes. What I components of my brain go about their business of seeing or hearing or eating actions of a lot of drivers, or an opera performance out of the actions of musicians, singers, a conductor, and a stage manager. Brain Opera both noodling around with the gizmos right before we go in to hear it. Wall." He ignites Brain Opera with a sequence of chopping hand motions and vigorous leanings in his chair (picture the Enterprise under attack); this brings forth a sonic crash from the computer. We hear a lot of musical on album covers fly by on big screens --the moon, a baby, the great red spot of do with the electrons in the air"; "music changes your mood very definitely"). The words of the libretto zip past on the screens. Prerecorded voices sing it to New Age melodies. A red square appears, signifying, apparently, that people logged on to the Brain Opera Web page who are participating in the piece on "virtual instruments" are now being sampled and folded into the work. lively, and far from dull. But by the end I feel a little glazed and tired, much as I might feel after too much time spent on the Web or reading somebody's and absence at the core. I missed the individual voice, the unique and compelling emotional timbre, of the sort that characterizes less interactive into it. Also performed at the festival, for example, were his works for invented himself. Each of these compositions suggested the powerful currents of one soul's anguish, jauntiness, fragile serenity. But Brain is swamped by the sound of Whatever, of Nothing in Particular. maneuvered along paths laid down for us. We are no more collaborating than a lab mouse collaborates with a medical researcher. Brain Opera is an by Ted Turner. The rumors started even before the movie went into production, finally undertook it seems to have dispatched most of the run directly to the concerns, of course, the eroticism of automobile accidents. Could you conceive their essence is speed, consummation can be achieved only through impact. Every places and done things that today's gutless independents could never imagine. His adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel. Its Hunter), stares in shock. During their respective hospital sojourns, both obsessed with the erotic possibilities of highway crashes. preoccupation leads him to not only ponder the sexually charged road deaths of accident sites, photographing them and later replicating the contorted postures thereafter consists of an increasingly intense spiral of couplings among these parties, punctuated by tearing metal and shattering glass and inevitably patented transformation of cold into hot, turning medical and automotive jargon into spectacularly baroque metaphors: "Thinking of the extensor rictus of her the stylized manufacturer's medallion visible in the photographs, the contoured flanks of the window pillars." A movie can't really do that sort of thing. course, comparisons don't get any more invidious than those between movies and their source novels, and critics should abjure the temptation. I purposely hadn't reread the book before seeing the film, and furthermore resolved to keenest pleasure came from imagining the potential reactions of others. I out on the wavelength of a devotional network. Although the frissons were all present and accounted for, there was something missing. This isn't the fault of the cast. Spader is a bit too crudity and sophistication. The cinematography is surgically precise, the editing crisp, the music moody and unobtrusive. The dialogue, much of it straight from the book, is full of terse humor (when a cop comes by to isn't interested in pedestrians"). Nevertheless, the movie seems all too traffic on the arterial roadways that make up the entire landscape around the the quarter century since the book was written. Many people who wouldn't dream of seeing Crash derive the very same thrills covertly, from an inexhaustible supply of PG titles ranging from The French Connection to picture that is all surface. For purposes of comparison, rent the video of rococo horror: A young woman sees herself being anointed and bedecked with jewels, but we then see that she is in an emergency ward, and that her jewels some kind of ultimate transgression; he was also responding to the arguments drawings of rearranged car parts could hardly be more explicitly sexual (a exhibited the actual voluptuous hulks of wrecks. It is tempting to imagine is not just a job, it's a histrionic quest. You can picture his actors clearing their calendars for the next six months, ritually cleansing themselves, and kissing their spouses and children goodbye. Renowned for his means as much as his ends, the director sends his performers out into the world to unearth data about their characters, then leads them through weeks of improvisation and systematic or penetrating thinkers, but they come back with nuggets of gold. They also tend to truck in loads of dung in the form of earnest psychobabble. I suppose when you compel actors to draw on their own resources, you have to take spiky prole to uneasy denizen of the middle class, she's the sort of woman who's underrepresented in movies: smart and aggressive and desperately unhappy to contact with other human beings. She can't tamp her anger or her need to be just what their relationship is or was. The two are guarded with each other, present. It also adds another layer of confusion: The performances are so extreme and the milieu so scuzzy you might think they're not in college but a a Star Trek android whose circuits keep misfiring. But she is awfully dressed up, their old emotions there but determinedly buried. And as the women become more comfortable with each other, opening themselves up to their memories and feelings, the meter of the film shifts from jerky to Tucker), does better with both girls. In flashback, he has his way with one don't gel, in others they harden into cement. The heroines of Career Girls crack jokes about the people turning up from their past as if on cue: What are the chances of that?! The chances of that are good indeed if you're a women lay out their points of view too neatly, psychoanalyzing the life out of turned out if they'd let go, if they hadn't overcome their bitterness or helplessness to scale the socioeconomic ladder. But he seems emblematic of said, Career Girls is hard not to treasure. I wasn't crying at the end, the way some in the audience were, but I wasn't eager for the credits to roll. and the results are like a richer kind of oxygen. I suspect he works the way he meaning in the material world, in backyard barbecues and cars and fax machines. Class might be central, but it isn't destiny. And yuppies are too ripe for satire to be branded as evil. The only thing that's certain is that when actors are given their heads, they have a whale of a time, and the audience does too. Which is the opposite in every way of In the Company of on all the females who've ever hurt them, they both pursue and then dump the their scheme not a trashy bitch but a shy, good, hauntingly lovely woman which has been widely acclaimed, is immaculately of a piece, even if that piece compositions are rigid and airless: they call attention to their own wit, and to the fact that the characters' destinies are fixed. As it turns out, In about male corporate culture, in which the players find it endlessly exciting to screw one another. But that won't stop some women from fearing that this, at and the other, a spineless dweeb. Most men don't have the sophistication to hurt women for sport. They do it because they're selfish creeps. And the angel Someone who likes to watch people victimized while feeling morally superior to film akin to being smeared with excrement. It worries me that before I thought too hard about it, I was having a pretty good time. is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic it better than the other, more artful pictures I saw this week. Here's an against my heart." To love a line like that is a treason against my high birth by a father fearful of internecine struggles and subsequently locked in the bowels of the Bastille, his features concealed by the eponymous iron That would have been all, folks, were Louis not a complete schmuck who capriciously drains the kingdom's coffers with foreign wars, starves a lot of smudgy faced extras (who hurl rotten fruit at his guards), and falls on whatever beauteous wench strikes his royal fancy. When he royally prove once again that they're more than the stuff of chocolate bars. who die with their boots on. ("This is the death I have always wanted," gasps one fellow in this picture's lachrymose climax.) He also digs resplendent like: "Then God be with you. For we shall not." He apparently has no taste for is like leaving our president to police his libidinous ones. compatriots, has the most complicated role and carries it off with real dignity and discernment (which means, of course, that he's just a teeny bit king, his performance begins badly, and the long hair doesn't flatter his wide, doughy face and compressed brow. But once the nice twin enters the movie, It isn't nice to beat up on senior citizens, which must be shamus (Art Carney) wrestles with both a brutal murder and the innumerable humiliations of aging (they're connected), happily assisted by a New Age flake The Late Show without the spitfire, and it succumbs to the paralysis it English novelist poignantly out of touch with modern society, goes on another collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work. But his mistake is himself enough from his protagonist to generate a comic perspective, flakes and embalming fluid. But if Hurt has the kind of visage we normally associate with dissipation, few actors are able to combine such bleariness with such (oxymoronic) concentration. This is a gentle tour de force by one of our for possessing both a politician's promiscuity and a politician's wariness of genuine commitment. People are lured into developing projects with him for formidable obstacles. It's said that one director was driven nearly to homicide after being forced to spend six hours lighting each shot (and, allegedly, to employ a technician whose sole job it was to hold a cardboard triangle next to a light so that the star's jowls would be covered by a shadow). Affair to Remember --a listless vanity production with the impact of begins to babble the truth on the stump, the film has a kamikaze comic spirit that's spectacularly disarming, particularly coming from its hitherto newspapers have suggested that Fox, which was contractually obligated to make enough bird in this country for a sighting to be cause for joy. film is fun, but it's also thin, repetitive, and intoxicated with its own loveless marriage, he takes out a contract on his own life. his stunned audience that he hasn't returned to their neighborhood since the riots because the photo op has passed and that no Democrat will ever pay attention to them because they don't give any money to campaigns. Charged up by the rhythms of the crowd, his newfound candor, and the sight of a dishy, and the lousiness of their movies; and a visit to the bowels of the inner city, standing up to the white cops who stop to harass them. Along the way, he dons blown away at the height of his prowess by an intolerant society. Variations young buck enters the body of a square old white guy, who wins over skeptics and then is cruelly cut down. This time, the square old white guy becomes the White Negro and a champion for the homies, who stare at him in amazement and nod their heads as if to say: "Yes, this man is a brother. This man gets it." mystical ending. What's striking, though, is how superbly he maintains the movie's comic momentum even when he runs out of ideas. The normally tentative takes on an exhilarating life of its own. "Everybody's gotta fuck everybody seducing us with language overrides the movie's shaky construction and tacky crudeness harnessed to a real vision can have more brute power than all scientists, the military, and the French secret service (don't ask). The movie, entirely lame. The way the beast is finally snared has a certain architectural piquancy. And sequences of the great lizard winding among skyscrapers as if that this tedious, underpopulated beanbag of an epic has going for it. Its that feels as if it was made by people who'd actually lived through some kind of horrific devastation. And even after countless sequels of escalating in the rubber suit is more fun. For my money, he's also scarier. I don't dark forces of this world who can't be destroyed by any of this world's slowly crushing cars and knocking over buildings, robotically training his radioactive breath on anything and everything he sees, is a mythical vision of when people say, "Whew! I think I lost him!" he pops out from some cunning hiding place and gobbles them down. So why does he still strike me as a less than formidable opponent? Well, any forefather (and, given his reproductive the globe to lay his eggs in the middle of Manhattan doesn't seem built to uniquely his own is the way the havoc periodically grinds to a halt to make an expert in radioactive genetic mutations. He stays heroically credible even as the film grows insanely incredible, as when he has to pretend to outrun the yellow cab. The other performances are as crude as the writing, although Hank the brilliant Harry Shearer doesn't entirely disgrace himself as a pompous Lewis could have walked off with the picture if she hadn't been brushed aside sitcom actress who can't utter a line without the left side of her mouth curling up in Valley Girl incredulity or down in Valley Girl petulance. spectacle the medium's least important component. It's true that cinema is a night out would make us commit suicide out of boredom. But if, as a filmmaker, you're going to make spectacle the top priority, you'd better show us stuff we've never seen before. You'd better keep those miracles coming, or we're apt to grow nostalgic rather quickly for the days of spaceships on wires and unappetizing medical terms such as "morbidly obese," because obsession with food is by no means a dull subject. How much could be said that has nothing to do with olestra or the bad example set by supermodels about a person absorbed in strange, hostile negotiations with her own body! There is no end to the it (employing a rather eccentric definition of postmodern, which seems roughly to amount to "counterintuitive"): an encomium to corpulence and an excoriation transform an uncontrolled and miserable hatred of fat (his and yours) into a becoming thin. His idea is that you can dissipate an obsession by deconstructive variety, has done this kind of thing before: A couple of years Cigarettes had succeeded in mastering his obsession (by the time he'd of recovering from the throes of diet. Consequently, he has written an extremely strange book: In reading it, you are subjected to changes in personality as abrupt and jarring as nasty little electric shocks administered critic who delights in a clever, lyrical celebration of creamy fleshiness. His feel bad about himself all his life and perpetuating evil, unattainable images of thinness to get him addicted to its demonic diet drugs and make him sick and written an elegant, seductive book that sets you to musing how nice it might be that suggest that Hamlet's indecision may be due more to the lymphatic paralysis. The interpretation certainly makes the play funnier. Is not this line of Hamlet's, for example, lent a certain zing when read as a diet fantasy?: "Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve manufactured, sustained, and promoted by a vast industrial, ideological system, in order to obscure the reality of our bodies." (Why is it, one wonders, that the Beauty Myth is oppressive, while the Superbly Rendered Sonata Myth or the throws around the silly word "vast" in order to convey a sense of imminent diet apocalypse (as in, "vast unknown consequences," "administration of these drugs safety with perfect assurance? Surely "safety" is the product of an ad industries are supposedly determined to quench our pleasure in fat. in this case, by the way words look and sound, as opposed to what they mean. This fascination crops up in the book in a number of ways, which will seem seasoned with wordplay and typographical experiments (the words "eat fat" are always in capitals, with "FAT" printed directly under "EAT," so you can see how similar the two words are) and rhymes ("why this should be so at this moment in history is a mystery. A mystery of history."). The book's first sentence is: beleaguered dieter struggling to curb his cravings in a spirit of misguided pleasure: the pleasure of doing, and the pleasure of not doing; the pleasure of indulging, and the pleasure of abstinence. Control can be fun. And it is a cultivation of personal elegance is more important than health (and who is, appreciate the stricter kinds of pleasures. Because while the dandy stands for Painter of Modern Life": "All the complicated material conditions to which perilous feats of the sporting field, are no more than a system of gymnastics cultivating a taste for such ascetic modes of enjoyment would be at least as this possibility. Alas, all he writes about, all he thinks about, all he wants It tends to be drier, less passionate, and less accurate than other forms of journalism. Business writers are generally outsiders looking in: They lack the access granted to political, sports, or even entertainment reporters, since few companies seek the kind of publicity the press wants to bestow upon them. Sometimes, practitioners of the genre can rise above its limitations; but you can count on two fingers the number of books that have migrated from the financial engineering. They called a moron a moron, and damned the whole lot of them. Den of Thieves required even more intelligence work, as well as an inside look at the software giant that publishes this magazine, will not succumbs to all the usual pitfalls of business writing. It shouldn't have. stroll through the campus without an apparatchik at his side. And the tale of successes of one of the world's greatest companies. meritocracy that makes rich those who contribute to it; Bill Gates' prediction that consumers, not just large businesses, would jump at the chance to own pretentious foreword that postulates the similarities between Henry Ford and production, and in bringing down the cost of the product so that the consumer gasoline engines serve as the operating system of cars, and to be the dominant writer drawn the obvious parallels, he would have run the risk of endorsing the Way is a benign, friendly company that succeeded in spite of itself. It dominated the software industry because its rivals were such lightweights and buffoons, and because it hired the smartest and brightest software writers. When it came up against serious competition, in the form of Intuit, it was just another bumbling competitor, hardly worth the Antitrust Division's time. (To company does not dominate, it can't even shoot straight. perfect monopoly, out of sheer grit and the love bestowed upon its team of program, to hold on to its best, most talented players). He could have written about how severely that monopoly was soon to be tested by the Internet, and by which is only anecdotally interesting. (Intriguing, though, to learn that his systems' standards out to everyone while his competitors kept their Justice Department's suit for one minute. I don't want a company to be punished simply because it dominates. Were it not for the monopolistic traits of both not able to translate its dominance in personal computers to the Internet. This couldn't incorporate it cogently. Somehow I got the feeling, when reading if he bothered to sleep), and is working on a devastating counterattack this my editors at Slate, certainly don't seem to know. Whether that's by design or of company when it comes to those who are clueless about this huge capitalist to organize his life into zones and areas, but he was a biased cartographer of greatest poet. Critics and biographers have too often collaborated in this "phases." The result is a fairly schematic narrative: The young hothead of the In this superb biography, Foster unscrambles destiny and exegesis than in historical accident; indeed, his criticism of the poems is a shuffle during which he was at the mercy of his improvident peripatetic father, singular silliness, which is what makes his early poetry so patchy. Bounced mysticism, occult optimism, and universal brotherhood. He never really escaped. lamented the loss of "the mesmeric force that collects in a beard." vive. But he seemed to swallow far too much tainted water. He believed almost all of it. He confessed that he saw no reason not to believe in the actual "mechanistic" vision (he once had a dream in which Shaw appeared, clicking like one of the early poems that established his renown. perfumed hermeticism produced early verse that is easy to love and hard to like. It is poetry to which one swooned as an adolescent. Looking again at the familiar flowers, the secondhand imagery, the automatic despondency (far too much "ancient sorrow"), the druids, fairies, hermits, and witches. Goodness, intellectual sap. One longs for Browning to clear the mist. used the earlier romanticism of the verse as a wainscot against which he might his own earlier verse into a nation at the very moment of its abandonment. It the early poetry is tougher than it seems. There are realities, homely details, three hermits meet on a beach, one of them is not concerned with being a seer, poet, a dreamer who never strayed very far from reality. Above all, Foster is was energetically shameless in this regard. He wrote kind reviews of books on print, rivals and competitors. He was especially harsh with his former friend toured villages and towns asking peasants for their folk memories. occasionally, one wishes that Foster would look up from his table of details in point. Foster might have attended to the poems and shown how willfully they he will write as a historian. No one is going to better him in this area. He goes behind the wrestled solemnities of the poetry to reveal the effort, the the peasants. The incomprehension was mutual. The subjects of this anthropology Protestant in a Catholic country, which, Foster suggests, might have led him to one of his very last poems. This struggle between "the marvelous and the features and gestures with such brilliant blood relations as Memento course, not every member of a distinguished family is equally appealing. passion for controlling things. He has trouble distinguishing between his fictions and his real life, doing his best to manipulate both, and he's hard to Spark brings complicated families to mind partly because of the familial structure she gives her novels. She favors a huge cast bound sometimes by blood and marriage, sometimes by more casual connections, such as geography or religious beliefs. As in a real family, some characters struggle crane where he liked to sit and "shout orders through the amplifier and like two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far too much money, thinking unfrocked priest of a woman"; his beautiful daughter by his first marriage, characters squabble like siblings, jealous regardless of whether they have cause to be. Perhaps rightly, few of them believe there's enough money, security, fame, power, and love to go around. The menace of deprivation haunts the book like a bourgeois anxiety dream. Character after character, although redundant." The characters respond tellingly, either gloating, helping, or lover of truth: the man has always been superfluous." Later, Johnny comes to see him: "Tom said, 'If you think I am a stone that you shouldn't leave artificial and suspenseful as a mystery thriller, full of clues and malice, yet elusively allegorical. Its apparent center is Marigold's mysterious has recovered from his fall and finished his movie. Is Marigold dead, or just trying to get attention? Leave it to a Spark character to try to seize center stage by vanishing. Marigold's parents, who never noticed her much except to deplore her, are forced to think about her, and her father discovers that she appearances (and disappearances) are deceiving. Sometimes what seems to be central is really peripheral, and a throwaway plot point turns out to be the story's symbolic heart. As the book opens, Tom is working on a movie about a rich man who sees a girl flipping burgers at a campsite and decides to leave her a vast fortune. It's based on his own experience, a moment when he caught sight of such a girl and had an impulse to give her all his money (or rather, focus of his movie, however, winds up being not the hamburger girl, but the with Rose, the actress who plays the hamburger girl becomes jealous. "I was about a sort of half death: being made redundant, being half blotted out. Spark mortality (may it be many novels away!), she has taken up the question from the perspective of the artist. Is it possible, she asks, to become famous while disappearing? What happens to an artist whose characters refuse to cooperate? Just who is in charge, anyway? And (as Tom wonders in the book's opening line) of course, whose dreams Tom is a character in. By putting the question in his mouth, Spark is implicitly comparing herself to God. Similarly, her title teases her readers, inviting us to draw parallels between her personal history and the story she tells in the novel, though she declines to supply the published a few years ago, politely fends off the curious.) Such dwell on them generally belong in a category that one friend of mine calls "art about art supplies." Unfortunately, Reality and Dreams doesn't transcend this category. The main characters are too mean to care about, and it's painful deserves it. Still, for barbed wisdom, surprises, and technique, there's no one like Spark. If she wants to write a sketch of her pencil box, I for one will A month later, the event already seems forgotten. The death of colonialism should be ranked among humanity's greatest accomplishments of the waning novel is an unabashed attempt to capitalize on the hype surrounding the handover, but it succeeds by steadfastly refusing to indulge in majesty. from mainland China. It is a tonic for the cloying coverage of the event rather than responding to it. The publishing world is fond of anniversaries, but the notion of creating a novel to commemorate an event before it happens seems especially fishy. Great novels are topical only in a subtler and grander works because the match of author and subject is so good. Though born in indulging in the rituals of empire ("dark comedy and absurdity," he calls it). relishing opportunities to see what indignities a subject of the queen can unrelentingly peeved with others that one wonders why he bothered to write peoples, and a shrewd understanding of the irrational annoyance those politics are exacerbated by the emotional intensity of a deadline that everyone with those who fled Communist China but are being denied a chance to rule owners of a stitching plant, on the eve of the handover. Bunt's brand of capitalism is played by the outdated rules of imperialism. He spends his days on the factory floor in order to encourage productivity. Bunt is unprepared for appears in Bunt's club to make him an offer for the factory he simply cannot neatness was the proof that a bloody crime had been committed. The same was true of China. The look of the apartment was the spare look of China, a place like this are few, and the politics serve more as a backdrop than as a Imperial Stitching might have seemed a victimless crime. The otherwise repellent Bunt is redeemed by his somewhat ridiculous infatuation with memorable pair. Bunt is named for an elder brother who died in infancy, and her son, aware of his vain attempts to create a secret life for himself with doorway, she always seemed to swell, filling the doorframe, to obstruct and delay him, so that she could bulk against his approaching face and scold him. to allow Bunt's concern about the future of the business or his burgeoning live in comfortable solitude with him. This chilling story of a mother's child. "I was always doing things over again in my life," she reiterates, as if to reassure readers that she knows the territory looks familiar. It does. Like the daughter seeking to rectify the situation, announcing, "I knew I hadn't Anywhere But Here was its obsession with obsessives. Upon her emergence in a compensatory fantasy of escape and renewal. This pair of romantic precincts of mythic caricature. An intense realist and a fierce satirist, claustrophobic 1950s, fought and clung to each other and never found their man. that the time has come to be witheringly ironic, rather than comic, about the to be profound. So it is a famous West Coast entrepreneur, rather than obscure wanderer pursued by driven furies. He's the multimillionaire founder of a drifters, who whimper for their chance at legitimacy and reliable love where cripple working slowly in comparative obscurity, trying to map a gene and beauty who enthralls him by night in the ramshackle mansion he's never bothered to fix up and disappoints him by day in her modest desire for a career no to get an abortion and has since done his best to forget. They've been living truly on the fringe, in a succession of communes and finally alone in a tiny who never acknowledges it. As the novel begins, she's preparing to send Jane by herself in their rusty truck, having laboriously and implausibly taught the Commenting on that nighttime drive over the mountains, with the child perched before she'd truly mastered the art of riding a bicycle." That's not what you plays omniscient narrator for the first time, and the poetic intensity and sure rhythms that drove the monologues of her first novel and still echoed in her typical of the flaccid style she now favors, and what it says proves true: The accomplishments of state, and, in a way he couldn't explain, proud." So we know he's riding for a fall, professionally and personally (just as we know that happens to overconfident egotists even (or especially) when they flaunt a genius in endless narcissistic agonizing about who will be his wife, and gives point. Still, he's also supposed to have charisma and fascinating idiosyncrasies. (He drives fast, regularly runs out of gas, forgets however, a motto that all too accurately applies to this novel itself. open the jaws of academic convention. He claimed to have "only one goal in life trust fund until he himself became the fashion, both among wealthy industrialists (who treasured his visions of the very rural serenity they were threatening) and among the rising young stars of the impressionist paintings, where the air is crisp and even the bodies of water have a solidity appears above them, a sort of cosmic bartender bringing a drink. (One thinks of changes on a variety of more secular riparian subjects: ferrymen, fishermen, women washing laundry or tossing each other playfully into the current. as though that revolutionary year had shaken his certainties as well. He moved, than indignant. Rather, the change is stylistic. All that was solid in his art sketches, is increasingly blurred in the great "souvenirs" of the 1850s, other than the emperor Napoleon III himself snatched up the glorious of the central tree, and the standing woman's posture echoed in another, barer confirmed his lasting fame as a landscapist. After the gloomy events of the monastic life (he painted a peculiar series devoted to monks reading, playing the cello, and praying), he was by no means immune to feminine charm. He of which were painted during the final years of his life. In the ravishing The painting was owned by Degas' good friend, the industrialist and amateur perhaps it will be of the Met retrospective. But the Lady in Blue is hardly representative of the more austere figure studies that line the walls in sheer profusion of these two exhibitions, with their welcome mix of the Chambers is the most formidable and fascinating of all the Cold Warriors. "Their panic is my peace," Chambers wrote, speaking through the persona of "The group of high government officials as fellow spies, he was certainly the family on Long Island. As a young man, the brilliant and tormented Chambers, a dozens of books from the New York Public Library, and bummed his way to New Republican, becoming in the 1940s a top editor and writer at Time in the national headlines, he successfully brought explicit charges of perjury, Chambers, in other words, is one of the most controversial wonderfully low is transmuted to the dismally high, and vitality is traded for expected a biographer of Chambers to elucidate. We know little about Chambers' break from the party. I wanted to learn more about his marriage and his of his time after his marriage); with his unhappy, aloof, bisexual father Jay; Chambers ally, always believed the two men had been lovers. Hiss' family background was as lurid as Chambers'. His mother was cold and controlling; his be. But I had also hoped that a biographer of Chambers would analyze the historical controversies over the Cold War to which Chambers' views are central. One can believe, as I do, Chambers' testimony against Hiss without however, though he points to some of Chambers' blind spots and ideological excesses, does not doubt the Soviets' more or less total culpability for the two nations were allies). None of the important revisionist work by historians intimate friends as they collaborated in stealing government documents and transmitting them to their Soviet bosses. At their last meeting, as Chambers was preparing to flee the party, he begged Hiss to join him, but the supercool circumstances early in the investigations. Henry Dexter White, once a top start, Hiss, impeccably groomed and eerily calm ("It might be someone else who was on trial," one journalist marveled), relied on his patrician credentials. the testimony of a man like Chambers, Hiss asked with icy contempt, visibly with no style and little personal status, a man who had lived, in Hiss' words, "in the sewers, plotting against his native land," possibly outweigh the simple one of the architects of the United Nations? It was a drama of politics and would eventually donate euphemistic doublespeak terms like "dual hegemony," that it was "inconceivable" that he, a highly public figure, could have fooled for so long the journalists and statesmen who saw "my every facial expression," "heard the tones in which I spoke," and "knew my every act." It was, as Chambers saw it, a crisis of faith. Whom, and what, could you believe? headline succinctly put it, "Who's the Psycho Now?" If a "psychopath," a term that enjoyed its greatest vogue in the Cold War years, is someone who meets no inner resistance in the act of uttering and maintaining what the world holds to be untruth, the honors must go to Hiss. The evidence that has accumulated over the years, mostly from Soviet archives, has overwhelmingly favored Chambers' version of the facts. Tellingly, Hiss thought the Mafia men he met in prison the "healthiest" people there, because they "had no sense of guilt." But martyrdom, his homosexuality (the sin of sins in the Cold War era, routinely treated as a synonym for treason), and his undoubted obsession with Hiss. He, altogether the story of Chambers' friendship with Hiss, though he never doubts its authenticity. He identifies unavoidable references to Hiss only in footnotes, and finally presents their relationship in a brief flashback in the course of detailing the trials. By this awkward, deflationary reordering and of Hiss, to give him the dignity that comes with autonomy. But this is to desert, even betray, his subject. It was Chambers' peculiar fate, and choice, joined forever in an intimacy deeper and more complex than that of blood or developed increasing reservations in his later years about the direction the But Chambers' importance lies, finally, not in his politics but in his romantic penchant for the extremes of the psychic and political undergrounds. With his susceptibility to ridicule and parody, his air of furtive portentousness, his displays of the uncanny intuitive skills that sometimes accompany obsession, he champion of high art, melodrama was Chambers' medium. The roles he picked for break what he saw as the "invincible ignorance" of a nation blinded to the room. He has not been adequately served by a biographer unwilling or unable to understand the nightmare of Cold War epistemology, the place where politics and voice, pull it back into your throat so that it's breathy, verging on a rasp and yet smooth, almost plangent, then expel the line from The Outlaw handsome killer with his long Magnum pistol. Submit, in many cases, by going for his gun and getting blown into orgasmic nonexistence. has one of the great movie voices of our era, but it's also kind of ridiculous. Probably no star could get away with it if he weren't such an image of cool, as he's a fine, lightweight comic presence at times (his scowl is a psychotic entirely discrediting the tradition that makes him bid that effort." to make the tall man's Magnum shrivel). The book has the breathless indulgence seems happiest simply basking in the star's aura, preferring the company of and interviewing anyone with a different version of events or a contrasting doesn't surprise me, since contrasting points of view don't make it into character inevitably clobbers or blows away, or in the fact that he is of acknowledge the faint absurdity of these heroes, but none is ever ultimately Unforgiven (1992)--who does, admittedly, shoot a rather nice young antagonists, his analyses can be trenchant. He's especially evocative on the developed a style that alternated cunningly between extreme wide shots and the story of one particular police officer in a frustrating situation on one "It is as a rule absurd, and utterly unrealistic, to see ideological motives, let alone ideological malevolence" in action pictures; he is conveniently retract [the movie's] casual contempt for homosexuals, admittedly a feature of his early action films." That would be mighty white of him! And for this biographer, "one of the most tasteful campaigns in the history of modern a sort of sad befuddlement in his tone, 'always want to know what you're penetrate the deepest reserves of his privacy. It is equally a mystery to him why anyone would think that bringing things up out of this murk and discussing them would profit either party. At our cores, he believes, for whatever reason, what we are, and there is nothing much to be done about that" doesn't make for "their directness of address, their plainspoken psychological realism") bear the stamp of this shrunken worldview. A psychiatrist could make the case that the star's legendary promiscuity, with its attendant insulation and fear of a profound desire not to make what he does look costly to him, emotionally or his inadequacies as artistic choices. But I wouldn't want to go too far. I frequently enjoy his movies, and there's no arguing with the fact that his stardom has endured for more than three decades. There might be a kind of he so manifestly cultivates. But the seduction also occurs in unexpected ways. Reading the book, I found myself conscious of, and moved by, the ways in which moody spaces. The author doesn't simply idolize his subject, he feels he needs absent or inadequate father. Above all, he wants us to see the star as something more than his sexual favors, the liberal media with its shrill as they're laid off their factory jobs and symbolically robbed of potency, it Field of Dreams --a shrine to the Dad whom so many elements of the stereotype, a glimpse of the human caught in the pose. But does the film the bureaucratic fools. He outwits the psychotic assassin. He beds the young, everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have," was hailed by some many anonymous thugs so offhandedly for so many years. Brave, but hypocritical. appropriated motifs that swim in and out of the later work of Jasper Johns, instance of the image that becomes synonymous with its creator. It is the emblem of painterly emblems, the imprint on the ultimate tote bag of Western a view to purging himself of influence and beginning afresh with a blank canvas. It was a sacrifice the gods seems to have found satisfactory (which is, of course, why we know about it: If they hadn't found it satisfactory, the story would have acquired a different beginning). For they sent Johns a dream, with which his name will always be associated, an image he would produce many works. Flag was among them, but the possibility that the Museum's with the promise that he would donate it to the Museum later on (which he did, thought that Johns' Flag, which seems so sweet and inoffensive in comparison with the art that causes controversy today, would give anyone political jitters seems a commentary on the oppressiveness of early Cold War two mannequins displaying the latest in ladies' suits, and no one seems to have friction between the agitators of appetite and the guardians of taste that gave truth to this version, but not enough. Johns must have been happy to have displaced, in his understated way, the cultural dominance of the big action Two Balls (1960)--and there they are, squeezed forlornly between two big accompanies it, to exemplify what has become a leading theme of his work as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the museum. This is the idea that continually being renewed and revisited in Western culture. There may be no better illustration of this thesis than the work of Jasper Johns. From one point of view, Johns' flags and targets derive which is, if this is a work of art, then what is not? But from another point of rest are, like the haystacks, simply subject matter for painterly treatment. They are, as Johns himself put it, "things the mind already knows," forms which can be remade, over and over, and seen anew. This puts them about as squarely combines) lose exactly half their point in reproduction. They retain their intellectual aspect, but lose their sensual aspect. In reproduction, the flag picture is a familiar dadaist conundrum: something that is neither a flag nor a picture. On the wall, though, Flag is a magnificently variegated surface, an intensely made thing, a dense amalgam of newspaper, encaustic, and paint. It does not occur to you, when you encounter it in the in the flesh inspires reflections on the nature of modern fame. You are too object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Ditto." The recipe is from an early notebook of Johns', and it is the best explanation of his procedure. career includes beeswax, lighter fluid, oil stain, plaster casts, crayon, charcoal, chalk, cardboard, ink on plastic, and the impress of his own body. One painting features his teeth marks. He doesn't want to represent or to painting, and who derives his subject matter from a dream, is, in some sense, a increasing absorption in a personal vocabulary composed of body parts; crosshatching patterns (an overworked motif of the 1970s); vases; clocks; heads; and, in the most recent work, the image of a spiral galaxy. though if the right combinations were found, the rebus might be decoded (though, of course, it never is). There are periods in which the work fades into hermeticism; there are periods when it aspires to a lyric summing up, as spectacle of technique brought to bear on form; and although this is a minimal definition of art, there is nothing minimal about the results. writing his incandescent essays on high culture for nearly four decades now, steadily deepening his insights and widening his topical reach, but carrying on the same essential errand. In earlier times, he would have been one of Enlightenment's missionaries; in our own, he has come to be seen more as a traditions and verities, the world around him has been mutating. the latest of the critic's many studies and collections, sends its root threads back to nearly every phase of his complex endeavor. There are essays on all the writes in "Real Presences," the second essay: "Where we read truly, where the reader, in his solitary bearing, his grave demeanor, honors this most freighted obligation, which can be construed as an obligation to being itself. But "the introduction, has all but brought this particular sense of presence to extinction. He lets himself dream that there might arise "schools of creative reading," but he also knows that his dreams will remain just that. lack a polemicist's instinct for the intellectual or ideological "hot spot." He begins his attack with smaller provocations: In "A Reading Against the Bard to test some of our dearest assumptions about this mythic figure. suggests an alternative requirement for true greatness, that comprehended in expense of ethics or higher spiritual aspiration. The conclusion, cagey, persuasive when he compares various fields and finds that only architecture and argument still feels more like animadversion than rigorous reflection. rank." For the rest of us, a translation: What those tired and huddled masses elite culture and eruptions of barbarism. He notes that "the correlations He ends by questioning whether the threat to thought and creation of the first rank lies in the "apparatus of political repression" or 'Holocaust' is interrupted every fourteen minutes by commercials, in which venturing hard queries and unpopular responses. His views are calculatedly divisive. Indeed, it is hard to square one's indignation at being patronized with the nettlesome suspicion that he may be right. Ours is not now, nor is it precisely. We long ago decided to ignore the poet's counsel and took the road more traveled. We narrowed our intellectual horizons and flattened our what a difference that choice has made. Those who feel no sense of crisis about thump. The rest of us will be piqued, shamed, outraged, instructed, and maybe stage. Under his military exterior he was a pure aesthete, a devotee of esoteric literature and musty medieval romanticism, a kind of tactical chance of success, but he drove ahead regardless. He was determined to commit times unexpectedly passionate. It is the first book to do justice to the brothers were the most ardent disciples of his last years. The poet took them in first of all because he liked to have handsome youngsters around him. Symbolists his principal poetic model. His love of the Romance languages incited a highly subversive orthographic innovation: the elimination of capital his conservative phase), he saw authoritarian rulers ushering in a kingdom of insufficiently fascist by the monument committee. He criticized the vulgarity Standard theories about German officers and their disillusionment with the went only so far in his devotion to the military; he was not acting simply to building will, so to speak, represent a temple dedicated to the German nation and fatherland." One observer noted in him "a streak of demonic will to power descriptions of the man's essential sensitivity to others. His military career shows him repeatedly choosing human values over material gains. His specialty sensed in this inscrutable sentence from a resistance manifesto: "We want a New and justice, but we scorn the lie of equality and we bow before the hierarchies resistance movement and gave it at least the appearance of purpose. He set up Despite his injuries, he also insisted on arming the bomb himself. He was interrupted by a phone call and succeeded in activating only one of two packages of explosives; had he left the second package in the briefcase, it too would have exploded, greatly increasing the force of the bomb and killing and nudged it as close to the target as he could, then left on a mumbled excuse, drove off the compound, and flew to Berlin. He struggled for several hours to keep the rebellion together, but innumerable weak links were revealed in his improvised chain of command. Since he had probably resigned himself to failure from the beginning, he kept up a confident exterior to the end. As he faced a firing squad at the end of the day, he shouted out a phrase that was with a Holy Roman emperor and found reality in the musings of a visionary notes in blue or black ink, as she prescribed. It was a hoot, and it was polite, too. Miss Manners was wittily practical with the "Gentle Readers" who wrote in for advice on cleaning up their acts. Ministering to their sense of irony and their sense of insecurity at the same time, she was the perfect campy The risk, of course, lay in taking Miss Manners too Will, who was born wearing a bow tie, to give her cause a pedigree. Anointing behalf of the same neat, elite Western standards that he with his fountain pen style, Will compared Miss Manners on the civilizing power of social convention "She insists, wrongly, that she deals with manners rather than with morals," Will informed his readers. As the conservative, acquisitive 1980s took off, Miss Manners was conscripted for the conservative values crusade. doubtless blushed at such treatment, has been trying to live up to the philosophical flattery and live down the ideological company ever since. Miss Manners Rescues Civilization From Sexual Harassment, Frivolous represents her most sweeping effort so far. The etiquette expert doesn't want crusader in the civility wars herself. This 500-page book, in which Miss Manners does a lot of recycling, isn't likely to raise an eyebrow, a hackle, or Manners underrates the popularity of etiquette in the 1990s, and overrates its power. According to her, only she, along with "theologians and philosophers, in the correct belief that manners are a virtue akin to morality." Everyone else, incivility, spurns "the gentler, freer, extralegal system of etiquette." Yet her current book, to say nothing of life itself during the decade and a half since her first book, offers ample proof of a mania for manners. (Three more but that doesn't mean people shudder at the concept, as Miss Manners claims. "unnecessarily tiring" in practice) are in; so are forks. The service economy Service trains employees in cheerful civility. "Teach Your Toddler Manners" is listen to Miss Manners herself, who has to admit there has been progress: "When the nostalgic moan about the decline of etiquette, Miss Manners turns contrary and points out that it is only recently that frank expressions of prejudice have become socially unacceptable." She gushes that "netiquette," the rules being codified for computer behavior, proves the younger generation understands the "legitimacy of etiquette as an essential factor in community life." Miss Manners, when it comes right down to it, acknowledges that most citizens aren't at sea about standards of politeness at all, heterogeneous though our nation's standards may be. Even "allowing for the unawareness of newcomers and for In short, Miss Manners is in danger of being out of a job. What's more, it becomes clear that the job, as she stakes out her "Here's what strikes Miss Manners as a fair division of labor," she writes on her favorite subject, child rearing: "She will nag adults to teach manners to children, and everyone else will find them the time in which to do this." Now there's an undertaking: "Just restructure society so that a reasonable person can manage both a job and a private life." (Presumably the same goes for her cure for sexual harassment: She insists that a firm distinction between working and socializing will clear everything right up.) And where greater zealots might enlist "etiquette's weapon of disapproval" to try to restructure society pressure to encourage stable family life. She only insists that it take a less It sounds suspiciously like National Secretaries Week: penance that allows complaining to her about their disgusting fellow citizens." Boorishness is good Pastoral arrived in the bookstores a few weeks ago, and I have been hearing radicalism of the 1960s, generational warfare, and the intricacies of society will go to hell. The mailman, it's true, has not yet read the novel, only the reviews, and our lively conversation (many skyward hand gestures) the theological detour to show what is going on these days every time I pick up the phone or loll about on the springtime sidewalk. serene, handsome, athletic, bland, shallow, a man who seems to have been The Swede is a great character. I can't say that I entirely motive factor remains elusive. "All that rose to the surface was more surface." wandering around the New Jersey wilds. But the peculiar virtue of this Swede's benign imagination, produces a fine, sugary lyricism that is not more the innocence any longer, and whose drumbeat imprecations achieve a kind of are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth things over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter Or this, even louder (an ability to turn up the volume is man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a these tones are, how vividly they conjure up the Swede's reality. In any case, The details do pile up, though, until you begin to think Then he compounds his error by investing these background details with compound by overheating the plot (you will have to discover the details for yourself). By the end, he is delivering verdicts like this: "The outlaws are everywhere. They're inside the gates." Or: He tells us that "the real subject" is one of "wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of cruelty. The mockery of human not only about the '60s but exudes a distinctly '60s fume of windy prophetic fascinating without being exactly moving. A terrific book, halfway undermined. But I don't want to make too much of my complaints, given that, in my little section. Mayhem, family collapse, the occasional terrorist bomb, mad hear the term "Socialist Realism," you probably see in your mind's eye a large, detailed canvas: A sweating laborer, goggles pushed back on his forehead, smirks under his mustache. Behind them is a chorus line of muscular women in babushkas; behind them, in turn, a rising sun. Or something like that. Nine years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the genre is now referred to primarily in vodka ads, as stock imagery of a comfortably camp sort. It is a grotesque relic of a defused threat, and we can feel good knowing that we have norm. The next thing that makes an impression on leafing through it is the for, but very few of the many pictures fit the conventional mold. The paintings chosen as illustrations tend to be darker, less academic, more complicated. The tone is very different from, for example, that of the show of Socialist Realist looked like a parody, and any of them could have been hung very nicely next to grave and dignified and often eager to claim descent from the likes of encounter with the book, my next thought was that it must surely represent a perverse but fascinating phenomenon: a defense of Socialist Realism from the position of aesthetic conservatism. After all, there exists a tendency these the Modernist canon often seems to be paired with a disillusionment with communist teleology, wouldn't championing the essential conservatism of all that do not fit the bill, that refer neither to old masters nor to magazine that we in the West have ignored, if not actually betrayed, the great body of painting made in this century in the former Soviet republics. We have chosen to represent Socialist Realism in terms of its most moronic and craven examples, and we have instead upheld the banner of the "left" artists, the Futurists and Constructivists, who were marginal at best in their time and place. He does not dismiss the latter, recognizing the originality colleagues, but he wants us to pay attention to those other artists, many more in number, who do not fall seamlessly into the Modernist continuum but who materials as an independent scholar, has absorbed a vast history largely unreported outside the Soviet republics. It is seldom easy going. Acronyms bristle on the page as he records internecine warfare in various Soviet artists' leagues. The reader's mind throbs as he dissects minute shifts in official thinking and individual temper, and conducts tours of the diverse art fascinating, for example, to note the many swings of the official pendulum between the two cardinal sins of "naturalism" (meaning grim subject matter) and "formalism" (denoting any sort of aesthetic deviation). At various times in various cities, war or peace ruled as themes, women were seen as strong or as fragile, colors were to be bright or dun. Small revolutions took place when, say, failure was accepted as a subject or national costume permitted. There was For that matter, Socialist Realism was no monolithic had its roots both in classic Western art and in much older local traditions, largely from private collections, that defy all our notions of what Soviet art something that looks simultaneously back to rural primitivism and forward to 1950s despite intermittent castigation for "aestheticism," represents a missing link, connecting Socialist Realism with the collages of the Constructivists and neglect in the West is just one indication of the giant iceberg of unknown art Committee examining issues of public morality. He had seen "boys and girls Q: Do you ask us to believe that the downfall of these women was due to Power (a more detailed look at sugar and its meaning), also explores other topics, ranging from the broader relationship between political power and food to more idiosyncratic excursions such as the chapter entitled "Color, Taste, and Purity: Some Speculations on the Meanings of Marzipan." telling historical surprises. In the sweetener competition, for example, sugar abolished the monasteries, the decline in demand for candle wax slowed the honey output and opened a window for sugar. Detective Young was able to indulge in his cheap moralizing four centuries later because back then, everything our first foods (dating to the Paleolithic Era). It was comparatively mild in first imported luxury to become a cheap daily necessity of the masses," and, in history of the mass consumption of imported food staples." As class yearned for it, creating a demand that would underlie the expansion of politicians, sugar became "an eminently taxable commodity," and "acquired many champions in the press, in the medical journals, in the Foreign Office, and in producers, before whom elected officials would need to bow and scrape. astonishing speeches by Abolitionists who easily equated cane sugar with considered as consuming two ounces of blood." Sugar's aura of evil endures to Valentine's Day candy. No one who reads these chapters will scoop up another spoonful of sugar without reflecting on the history of ambivalence, global turmoil, and centuries of suffering needed to put it on the table. the three devoted to sugar. Still, this is a book whose bibliography includes monographs entitled Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue and tomes such as The History and Social Influence of the Potato --so the rest of it is still loaded with nuggets worth finding. The dominance of Coke, "authentic" because they use "local ingredients" and involve "a community of people who eat it, cook it, have opinions about it, and engage in dialogue involving those opinions." On the other hand, "national cuisines" are largely concludes: "I don't think anyone wants to call that array a cuisine." (That's environmental impact of overfishing local stocks, and by ferocious marketing that dilutes their "authenticity" and ends in "bowdlerization." But this is food, which means that it's not easy for all "irrepressible enthusiasts" to sit what's nettlesome is not his answer but the question. If cuisines emerge organically over time from rooted people, then why pose the question about a and strip malls one year, tear them down the next, and build something else. So cuisine. They're scouting out new food fads, scarfing them down, and then rooting about for the next one. Had a blackened redfish lately? Probably not. bathos of ending his book on such a weak note. So he tacks on different ending by turning, in his own words, to "an unbelievably grim scenario." He cites one prompt another Operation Desert Storm, but this time for meat. "Its effects on "we might let our obsessive notions of individual freedom destroy our democracy." Oh, for the restraint of Detective Young. sent to a gulag, and he wasn't shot. Rather, he lived on to see his ideals thoroughly rubbished and himself marginalized to the point of nonexistence. But his life and art appear inseparable from the trajectory of the Communist was the epitome of Constructivism, which, of all the "isms" of early out to remake the world beginning with the appearance of material objects, but unlike him they did not feel the burden of responsibility toward a society in groupings of the left wing of Soviet art in the 1920s saw themselves as embattled representatives of the true spirit of the Revolution, in the face of graphic design, stage design, photography, and a few other things besides. Theirs was a revolution of the imagination, and many of their works continue to pastiches and secondhand derivations, but at the same time they present an unhappy example of wishful thinking. These artists believed that if they built their respective corners of the new world, the rest would fill itself in and the people would flock to inhabit it. Instead, few of them had much of a process of relentless stripping down, jettisoning first figuration, then ambiguity, then volume, and finally color. After his ritual immolation of the the bottom, initially by way of collage. The family resemblance among his even the United States provides a bracing example of what is meant by a Zeitgeist --in a time of shaky and sluggish telecommunications, several dozen widely separated artists all hit at once on the idea of chopping up whatever printed ephemera lay at hand and reassembling the fragments into dynamic compositions that reassigned their meaning. It was a scavenger's revolution that held large promise for a time: finding potential in the most random litter, making a new world out of the debris of the old. from practical application and was driving down every useful avenue, designing clothing (the factory uniform by way of Buck Rogers), printed fabrics, newspaper kiosks, logotypes, magazine covers and book jackets, and printed 1921--which permitted a limited amount of capitalist competition in order to advertising agency for many of the state's manufacturing and retail operations, strong competition from abroad, he virtually came to own the rakish angle on perpendicular view of the street from above. The show includes some lesser with their static figures and shifting traffic backdrops are like little movies faces of the Young Pioneers were denounced as "grotesque" by members of felt the shifting winds and bent himself to various acts of public street photography. He diligently applied himself to the kind of work allotted the hinterlands. His private pictures from the time include some classics, but austere, but equally odd, architectural spaces. These are smallish, intense the appetite of the general public." Viewed together, they reveal surprising affinities between two versatile and ambitious artists whose early childhood traumas inspired them to try to redesign the world. hallucinations that she was being overwhelmed by proliferating dots and nets. Obsessive, repetitive patterns entered her work early on. Determined to take flowers in vibrant colors. Looking down from the top of the Empire State extended the net patterns of the flowers across huge canvases, creating the creations and, along with color variants, were favorably compared at the time These monochrome "accumulations," as repetitively patterned as the infinity theatrical hamburgers and lipsticks, with which they were sometimes shown in early Pop Art exhibitions. Like the polka dots, the proliferating penises were, of all the food a person consumes in a lifetime passing by on a conveyor belt. suggests) with eating disorders, which were barely discussed at the time. But insert her own image into her work. She had herself photographed, nude except from these ambiguous engagements with the male gaze to more attention grabbing in a kimono, dabs paint on her nude models, who begin to dance in comic pieces always ended the same way, with the arrival of the cops. They got her on the cover of the New York tabloids, but they didn't pay the rent. Her paintings and sculptures, with their use of body parts and food, anticipate the work of fables of sexual violence set in New York, with titles like The Hustler's designer of the standard fire hydrant and grew up among engineers such as his alone in a little prefabricated house in the backyard, so the rest of the family would be protected from contagion. The previous year, during a family hours fashioning "pueblos" out of medicine boxes and covering them with suited, when he was groping for a profession, to the "organic" architecture of depressed him. An ambitious plan for a hexagonally based church, raised above along and took his sketchbooks. There he hit on a pattern based on circles in a as the first successful attempt to "systematize the 'allover' painting" different impetus in these buoyant pictures, labeling the peanut shaped forms a sort of triumphal entryway to the southeast corner of Central Park, demonstrates the unsettling possibilities of tetrahedral shapes, where the structures. (The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has helpfully added a note that the work "is not intended to promote cigarette smoking.") autodidact with no degree beyond high school, Smith had too many ideas. The Smith's political ideas are more elusive. He adopted an There's nothing on record, as far as I know, to link him to his mentor Wright's symbol, the "spiral cross," which is really nothing but a relaxed swastika. art and architecture, Smith's sculptures and buildings were insistently built schemes for redesigning society inevitably flirt with repressive politics. Or seems locked into its time. The inflexible architect leaves behind a whiff of Walking through Smith's fantasy world of black steel, I found myself drawn to some of his softer, more tentative objects, like the handmade plaster web of confused sperm, tangled up (in a traffic jam?) with the caption: "Will number of books written about a political movement would have some rough connection with its ultimate importance. The noisy crusades that became historical footnotes would all be literary footnotes as well. different sort of world, one in which it is possible, for example, to fill up the better part of a library with volumes written by, and about, the leftists in Manhattan in the 1930s. Anything you want to know about the sectarian the time. Nor is it because of their impact on the decades that followed. I their subsequent recreations on Riverside Drive. The truth is that 1930s leftism became a literary genre because those who indulged in it enjoyed It would be a mistake to conclude that, as those leftists depart from the scene, the tradition of political verbosity will die out. emerging, and off to an appropriately windy start. If you happen to be subject is that his is an entertaining book, readable and unpretentious, a little softhearted toward his old comrades, but more than willing to take them absurdities, one stands out in high relief, and also links the leftists of the 1960s to those of the Depression years. It is their consistent overestimation believed a political revolution to be within their grasp may seem a little when he describes what it felt like to be in the vanguard of something new and swept across the student universe," he writes on the first page. "Almost Partly it was a belief, hard to remember today, that a superior new society was legacy, a generation later? A Tale of Two Utopias is a lucid, the other leftist political organizations of 1968--is not a pretty one. By the goofiness had it not resulted in the loss of innocent lives on both sides of democracies is a conclusion that a simple electoral history of the ensuing at the Stonewall bar in Manhattan. The students who the year before had marched and chanted and proclaimed "it is forbidden to forbid" had been arguing for liberation of the oppressed of virtually every kind, and when it comes to the "There is reason to think that on the matter of homosexuality," he writes, "some small but important aspect of human personality has begun to change." may be true, but the connection between the gay awakening and the student to the whole individualist ethos of the last two decades. But it doesn't exactly count as a trophy from the barricades. The world would have conceded the claims of both gays and women without the student occupation of a single the leading theorist of the Solidarity protest movement of the 1980s, and forces of illegitimate authority. That they were the incarnation of the dreams civilization is moving gradually, if fitfully, toward greater individual the utopian enthusiasm of those years simply did not take sufficient account of the fundamental reality of evil in the human psyche. presents almost no evidence about the way the world is feeling. What he tells us is how the student rebels of his own generation are feeling, and that they are not feeling very well. In magnifying the global significance of their the answer to a game of Twenty Questions, and you'll probably stump your a lasting notoriety and a venom so pure it was almost guileless. But though she turned out a couple of plays after that, they never achieved the same kind of critical or commercial success. Even The Women lives on primarily in wear are half the joke. Was she a journalist? In the early 1930s, she served magazine gleaming with smart chat. When World War II broke out, she filed husband, Henry, based on an idea she'd whispered in his ear. But reporting soon the Soviet threat that wasn't already being said, to a wider audience, in her lasting value of any of these accomplishments. What made her famous is that she did all these things in one lifetime, like a paper doll that comes with different costumes for different vocations (the girl about town, the war correspondent, the ambassador); that she did them all and was beautiful; that she did them all in a perfumed cloud of scandal and glamour, trailed by many lovers and by gossip that she herself stoked with her acerbic tongue and her In a way Luce is the ideal subject for this particular moment in the art of biography. The relative slightness of her work is part of the attraction. It forms the latticework through which we can peer at the this century, biography was the art of inspiring readers with the spectacle of an exemplary life, or of offering insights into an exemplary body of work. This narrowed the range of subjects to the conventionally eminent, mainly men. history, and an even more general interest in the details of sexually to care about their canonical status. Bohemian types whose lives beckon with an Luce. The life's work matters less than the lifestyle. And, frankly, it helps happens, this premium on the juicy stuff has emerged in unlikely tandem with a new professionalization of the biographer's trade. Biographies these days are long. And so arrives a peculiar hybrid, the dishy biography that is also a Rage for Fame and mostly enjoying myself, I was astonished to flip to forwarding address. And in churlish retrospect, I began to wonder how much we yearnings for a brilliant destiny. Her parents were poor, and her mother, Ann career as a salesman had devolved into an impecunious one as a roving He kept her and her two children in grand style, even after she married a third man. But none of that prevented Ann from rejecting a New York hotel because it was very, very rich and not terribly bright. He wrote her love letters in baby mother soothed. "He'll fall down those marble stairs soon enough." But after six long years of marriage and one child, he wasn't yet in "dying condition," in it." The divorce left her a wealthy young woman indeed. diaries, she has unearthed one after another. The stories she tells about editors, Morris writes, "she put on a gray dress with white collar and cuffs, new employee. She took a seat at an empty desk in the editorial department and waited for some work to arrive. After a while it did." When the editor in chief her. By the time he died, in a car accident that may have been an act of into his job with assurance and fill it with panache. Rage for Fame makes abundantly clear is how essential the patronage of career women of her generation as well. A female editor or correspondent was still something of a novelty act in the '30s and '40s, a luxury that male employers could forgo without compunction or a lawsuit. It was harder to forgo handmaiden to ambition, motherhood was not. Luce packed her young daughter off to distant boarding schools and summer camps every chance she got. "It's a there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were peerless in portraying the feel of the modern city. choice to muscle French painting out of the cafe and the artist's studio and into the world of steel girders and factory smoke. He took elements from the closest to capturing the dynamism and rhythm of our headlong century. nostalgia for the countryside, reminders of which appear in some of his most where he first trained as an architect, then studied at a couple of traditional It was a democratizing experience by his own account, making him feel, as he put it in an often quoted remark, "on a level with the whole of the French single most famous painting. Some grimly monochromatic figures mount the otherwise the city seems a cheerful, colorful refuge, decked with tasteful advertising posters. "Never has the poetry of the first machine age been so abrupt embrace of urban life. It's as though after wrestling long and hard with and pistons that dominate his paintings of the early 1920s remain unusually pronounced sympathy for the working man, his experience of factory conditions soldiers. (His Social Realist Construction Workers was displayed in the painter's resolutely optimistic vision. Even New York City, where he waited out Times Square stall. The stray fences and tree limbs, from the upstate he painted stilted idylls in the countryside, utopias no one would want to live in. The most sophisticated machinery here is the bicycle. escape into abstraction, his flirtation with competing schools of Modernism, development. As the machinery shrank in his pictures, his women grew in prominence and size. So many Modernist breakthroughs involved the visual the question of what women are, exactly. Are they companions in the human realm vegetable, or mineral? The metallic moving parts of Woman in Blue yield as though the nude woman is a botanical exhibit. A decade later, in his inert, but there's blood in their veins. The painting suggests an equation between two forms of wildlife: the clothed boy holds a parrot, his companion inseparable from his ideas about machinery. His clever Ballet claimed, was to prove "that machines and fragments of them, that ordinary manufactured objects, have plastic possibilities." In other words, detached from their familiar uses and manipulated on film, such objects could be parts. But the blinking eyes in his mechanical ballet are heavy with mascara, wanted his machines to be as sexy and intimate as beautiful women, and his women to be as available and predictable as household appliances. with somnambulant knights and maidens? Who are these anorexic figures with once quipped)? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, never much of a showplace for and liberally [since] he offers an entertainment which is for us to take or to he was doing, and he did it exceedingly well. "I mean by a picture," he wrote, remember, only desire." It is the piling on of negatives that is significant trained our eyes to see the modern world of work and leisure in a certain way traditions predated the Industrial Revolution. His mother died within a week of as a founding member. The two close friends form an interesting contrast. visual arts and especially to drawing. The overweight Morris, caricatured in capacious mind to every aspect of culture and society: literature and art, economics and politics, architecture and city planning. He was one of the Morris wanted to work out the nuts and bolts of an actual socialist society to replace the capitalist, industrial society he so hated. social critic in his temperament. He was content to accept commissions and to leave the arguments to Morris. He was the brilliant medieval craftsman envisioned by Morris, turning out extraordinary designs for just about furniture, and book illustrations but also jewelry, fans, and embroidered shoes. All but the shoes are on view at the Met. The Morris emphasis on the redesign the world, however, it left a lasting and positive imprint on in a caricature of Morris, his fat ass as wide as the loom at which he works). His languid figures lined up across the canvas do almost nothing; they can sometimes work up the energy to idly pluck a lute, or to roll the dice on a activity; he likes to paint people asleep, turned into stone or trees, or there first). In the story of Briar Rose (or Sleeping Beauty) he found a perfect theme, with knights and maidens and kings and queens all asleep amid When his women unexpectedly wake up, like Galatea in his they should have let sleeping maidens lie. The culminating image in this vein mind a threat as great as modern machinery. In a bizarre late painting called oversize phallic anchors looms in a harbor, the banks of which are lined with ritualized occasions. The Prince of Wales arranged a memorial service in social scientist and core member of the group known as the New York Intellectuals, appears to be haunted by second thoughts. This may be a sign of accuses the author of "cowardice," of mollycoddling the multicultural left in gentleman, always ready to concede, at least rhetorically, the sincerity of his misgivings, and his new book, painful and awkward and sometimes confused, is resisted the categories he has tried to impose on it throughout his career. however, did not last long. In the afterglow of the war and the recovery from the Depression, Glazer and most of the other New York Intellectuals came to see immigrants like themselves, and that the immigrants had in turn embraced the democratic values, the secular rituals, and the faith in individual achievement faith of the '50s, mass culture was not eradicating ancient distinctions of religion and ethnicity. Its unspoken premise was that every ethnic group until then had found its own distinctive path to success. Blacks had, in effect, recently arrived at the head of the line; they had problems, but so had the the authors admitted they had assumed that blacks would behave as, and see themselves as, one ethnic group among many. They hadn't imagined that blacks would want to be treated as something wholly new, a "racial" group. The authors wrote that they were "saddened and frightened" by the implications of this choice, and they blamed the white intelligentsia for legitimizing it. race, along with revolt on campus, that pushed Glazer and his crowd to the action and decisively broke with contemporary liberalism. Affirmative action, with its promise of government intervention to overcome the effects of discrimination, represented a willful refusal by blacks to accept "the main reflections. It was becoming clear, he wrote, that blacks weren't being assimilated as others had been. Perhaps affirmative action wasn't so very willful after all. "The underlying force that keeps the system of numerical quotas and goals strong is the actual condition of blacks," he wrote. Glazer didn't think affirmative action was the answer, but he cautioned against an person one would expect to applaud the kind of ethnic chauvinism and school textbooks," he writes. But Glazer concludes that his side has the schools and the blithe acceptance of it even by teachers and administrators with no ethnic or ideological ax to grind. Multiculturalism, he finds, though with only the most anecdotal evidence, has been institutionalized. Glazer appears to be conceding that the postwar liberal faith was misguided, and that the pluralistic community he envisioned in Beyond the Melting Pot has that's not quite so. Glazer observes that while the multicultural curriculum is being propagated in the name of the new wave of immigrants, the immigrants subject; it almost seems hidden from Glazer himself. Toward the end of this short book, Glazer observes that it is blacks, not immigrants, who have pushed hardest for the multicultural curriculum. And when Glazer asks why this is so, This is, for Glazer, an almost subversive conclusion. Conservatives, including Glazer himself, have routinely called on blacks to behave like immigrants. Now he is saying that blacks want to follow the ethnic frustration. It is this recognition that accounts for the strange air of He's no more comfortable condemning multiculturalism than he is condemning affirmative action, though he believes in neither. He is forced to say, instead, that multiculturalism isn't the end of the world. That's certainly true, and it's a useful corrective to all the apocalyptic literature on the subject. But it puts Glazer in the bizarre position of accepting the teaching significantly influenced the framers of the Constitution. Glazer is right to think that even a steady diet of ethnic special pleading won't lead to effects of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is guilty of plenty of midsize students locked in their own form of isolation, and the reduction of history to is that abolishing the multicultural curriculum, even were it possible, wouldn't do much to diminish racial isolation; the dynamic works the other way around. This is not, for Glazer, a "problem" with a "solution." It is a tragedy. Glazer is still the neoconservative who wrote The Limits of Social residential or educational integration, or raise the low level of racial intermarriage. He doesn't believe that racism is the cause of black isolation, so he doesn't suggest that enlightenment is the answer. It's not easy to argue Melting Pot --a putatively neutral book with a profoundly discouraging subtext. And in the arc that connects the two one can read the downfall of what picked up on the even more considerable chat about intellectuals in general and the "public intellectual" in particular. Many of us got our first sense of that Review crowd of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. Given the whiteness of those images and the long history of denying intellectual aptitude reason for this is obvious. There's a longer list now than ever before of prestige, producing scholarly works, and discussing with a popular audience this activity lay in the social sciences. Now, the rise of black studies has whom share the engagement with the work of contemporary artists that both serious scholars and substantial artists. So, it might seem that the time historical survey of its subject, from the colonial period to the present. the stricter sense of the word. Like the Left Bankers, they had elite educations; like them, they address questions about our public life. And they leery of this desire to extend the category of "intellectual" in all sorts of directions away from those with a vocation to scholarship or writing. Banks' choice of a starting point seems to invoke an expansive notion of the intellectual that includes some (but not all) academics, novelists, have been characterized as intellectuals, apparently on the theory that the term is apt when celebrating anyone who ever had and expressed an idea some other intellectuals liked. The problem here isn't that rappers don't would suppose that calling people "intellectuals" is the best way to take them seriously. Some scholars nowadays use the term "intellectual" as an honorific, important, all the different ways of using your intellect in different institutions, for different audiences, in different social circles, with kind of person you can shoehorn into a single group. There are societies, like word "intellectual" was first used in its modern sense). But the United States about intellectuals will leave some readers to expect a few clear definitions In fact, Banks' concession to this academic vogue is almost entirely limited to the medicine men and priests of his first chapter. The decision is a reflection, I think, not of his catering to fashion, but of the problem facing anyone whose aim is to write the first full history of were slaves introduced largely for manual labor, intellectual activity is naturally not a large part of their record. Other societies had used slaves as slaves were brought to the New World to use their muscles, not their minds. the cultivation of knowledge. Does it matter that Banks omits them from his story? That depends on whether your interest is in the past or in the present. power.) Banks' heart, it seems to me, is in the present: He is tracing the ancestry of contemporary black intellectuals to claim for them the title to a with an intellectual vocation were deprived of the chance to make a living places to which those thwarted thinkers diverted their energies. But as black colleges developed after the Civil War, and increasingly since the now professors. It is not surprising, then, that as Black Intellectuals Banks does not, in the end, succumb to the desire to include everyone who ever the ways in which they have worked throughout the history of the republic. His central themes are debates over the meaning of race and how black intellectuals (whoever they may be) have negotiated their relationship with "ordinary" black government during World War II, it draws a sharp picture of the fate of blacks with brains, forced, whatever their real interests, to deal with the question of race. His later chapters ask whether, in a new world where blacks are present (if still in small numbers) in our society's most powerful intellectual institutions, black thinkers might be free to spend less time thinking about The book ends with a reflection on the argument between "those intellectuals who advocate an organic relationship with the black community and those who aspire to transcend ethnic considerations," suggesting, affably, that the choice must be left, in our individualist culture, for each of us to make for ourselves. This is a little too simple. These are not, after all, the only options: Some of us who don't want to be the organic intellectuals of the inner city (or of anywhere else) are not disposed simply to "transcend" our racial identities either. And, even if the choice were up to each of us, it would be a choice we make in a community that still places strong constraints on what a black thinker can do. The individualist ideal in little time for mining the substantial debates among black intellectuals, but the main ones get at least a mention. Only one general issue is curiously academic who has an engagement with the fate of the race is part of the story, doesn't merit discussion. I suspect Banks' choice reflects his own commitment to a sensibly conventional vision of the intellectual life, one that casts more reputation were inseparable from the beginning, no doubt because his The Big Novel was promised and promised, but it seemed as if it would never fiction appeared in The New Yorker throughout the '60s and '70s, but they eventually amounted not to a novel but to a second collection, Stories that this new diversion proved he would never finish the novel. partisans admitted, perhaps too long, too repetitive, too fragmentary. Literary fashion is elusive; what in the 1960s might have seemed like an apotheosis of modernism had, by the decidedly postmodern 1990s, come to seem old hat. with AIDS. He promptly published a declaration of his illness in The New This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death is his final book, a series of account takes us from his discovery that he was ill with AIDS through his prolonged hospital stay with pneumonia, his decision to return home, and the though we know the end, the story is filled with suspense, and we turn the pages intently. He was too great a writer not to milk the drama of his own demise. Running parallel to the story of the author's dying is that of his understated valentine that colors the entire book with almost inadvertent trying to decide if, for instance, this story's narrator from a St. Louis suburb was the same as that story's narrator from a St. Louis suburb. Although the various narrators might sound exactly the same, they would have different names, and one, a sister. And then there were the confusions among the many Venetian lovers, male and female, and the mystery of the alter always seemed to be deliberately provoking the puzzlement, coyly playing the horrors of death, great death, amused me in a quiet way. Amused? Well, what broken, yet not entirely. And there is a cartoon aspect: the curses people hurled at you have come true. What do you suggest I do? Be unamused? crack in, writing, "I do think about suicide a lot because it is so boring to writer," to the conviction that his "work will live" after he is gone. He chews over his past, counts up his debtors, enumerates his aches and pains, and worries the issue of subjectivity to the bone. "[A friend] says that I am a my own will and of individual will in anyone," he writes. Or, again, "I believe that the world is dying, not just me." Is all this his special megalomania, or extreme that it succeeds, paradoxically, in turning him into an Everyman: crippled rabbit that I don't want to pet, that I forget to feed on time, that I haven't time to play with and get to know, a useless rabbit kept in a cage that underplays the untying of an old psychological knot when he reveals details of his childhood. His mother died when he was young, and he was adopted by the psychological torture of their son (so much one could have gathered already several years of unwanted fondling, "I said he could not touch me anymore, not moment, to his illness as "the wages of sin." While it is easy to see how infuriating such a pose must be to others, offensiveness in the service of obliged to be a poster boy for AIDS. Besides, in another mood, he writes, "It that I would, so to speak, die in the company of such people." one is both stimulated and frustrated, longing to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps that's why he has always seemed to want to preclude critical judgment silencing us. He does that here, too, but with a somewhat milder air: "I think what I think, and the hell with the rest of it, the rest of you; you don't It turns out to be surprisingly easy to get past the observation and language, in the teeth of death, more than repay the time I couldn't really see it, because I had no formal arrangement, no sense of and my own sense of order arranged the image, and made it clearer to me, and I afternoon when the wind has scrubbed the sky over Manhattan to a blue translucency, and the whole city looks as though it has just finished an shower, and is now sitting on a shady porch with a tall glass of mint iced tea in its hand and absolutely nothing on its mind. This summer, that afternoon turned up last weekend. It was not an afternoon you wanted to spend in a of Ambition and find out what this place is all about. buildings, is the answer. Also: dead gangsters and ladies' hats. The show, models and comic strips and film clips and photographs and a few items of women's clothing, all made by artists and designers in and of New York between you'll have seen most of this stuff already, but you'll like this show anyway. The photographs steal it. A lot of the power of the seems quaint. New York no longer exactly leads the world in big department stores; big department stores are the sort of thing you go to New Jersey for. believed their luck at finding hundreds of brick and steel towers jammed together for them on a little island, with new ones blasting up out of the ground like constructivist flowers every day. The compositional possibilities must have seemed endless, every change in the light disclosing a fresh set of visual effects waiting to be captured. It was better than a haystack. They knew represented not just by his homicide victims and his famous shot of The bag lady appraises their fashion sense), but by a 20-minute film, called shots on Coney Island, followed by a long segment of drunks at a cocktail luridness, but his photographs of men grinning at a dead body on the sidewalk are like those photographs of Southerners milling around after a lynching: They are undeniably riveting, but you don't really want to stop to think about what the photographer was doing there in the first place. one is said to have been completely redesigned and to include many more is almost never a single subject in the frame, and as soon as the eye picks out a face or an object as the thematic center of the composition, another face, or another object, suddenly displaces it, and the center moves off someplace else. The key to the effect is that the various "centers" are nearly always incongruous. The boy with the pompadour staring with a smile of lighthearted menace straight at the camera is in a different visual world from the lady in the demurely checked kerchief with her eyes somewhere else and her mind on Most of us look at a midtown sidewalk and see a crowd. For inscrutable, but differently inscrutable. His pictures are advent calendars on sensation you sometimes get in the subway, when you suddenly awaken to the fact that the dozen faces you've been staring vacantly at across the aisle from you we all see the world differently, but in the distinctly nontrivial sense that that you'll never know a single one. Sometimes this sensation is moving, and sometimes it's just creepy. But it's a New York sensation. reflecting on the phenomenology of the subway, you have had enough art for the day. Outside, the city had all gone home, but there was still a summer sky, and to help children handle the "inner conflicts" that confront us all on the road out to prove that he practiced what he preached to a degree no one dreamed. compulsive teller of tall tales about his own life. of the untruthful therapist itself all but begs to be told as a didactic carefully gathers up the pebbles, she explains how the trail of fabrications from his intuitive genius and his great empathetic powers. shorter. He was inspired to write his book by troubled curiosity about his experience that came to an end when the boy died from a fall during summer several girls at the school. (Where the brutality was overt, as it often was, memories of being fondled under the covers, who knows what to think?) ambiguity of a man whose life and work refuse to add up to a simple object task of "inner integration" was a developmental ordeal that could be mastered with great struggle, and with the support of good stories. Yet, a "unified personality," whether admirable or despicable, is precisely what eluded him. As nothing to be said that one could be certain has not been said by him." bogus psychology degree neither did much to ingratiate him with the established psychoanalytic community, nor was it meant to secure him the Orthogenic School directorship, which he at first refused. And the dubious account given by the In "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," of behavior which are characteristic of infancy or early youth," playing into the hands of the SS rather than standing up to them. It was a sweeping generalization, based on much less scientific observation than he claimed to prisoners as he said he had, and judges his anecdotes to be selective and willfully misinterpreted.) Yet, even before the factual distortions were message about a regressive human impulse to act childlike seemed to undermine witness gave way to cloudier repute as a blamer of victims. psychoanalyst for wholesale abuse of power and implies a facile symmetry: This camp victim identified with the aggressors, and went on to become a Gestapo parallel in mind, which he outlined in "Schizophrenia as a Reaction to Extreme proposed, echoing his earlier article; they were immured in "mortal anxiety" and overwhelmed by hostile circumstances, above all by their rejecting mothers. a portrait of an intense therapeutic milieu in which superhumanly dedicated counselors used compassion and empathy to help such children rejoin the world. proves on the basis of school records, reality didn't measure up. There were that his insistence on blaming mothers and claiming miracles also invited skepticism from parents and psychiatrists. As one of the counselors at the school commented, "I felt like saying, 'You don't have to exaggerate, Dr. B, it seems to have contributed to a loss of control. The man who had been the charismatically firm "superego" of the school (as he called himself) during its despite (or because of) his fictions. But making sense of his active, prolific reductive psychoanalytic thinking and applauded for his resistance to psychoanalytic dogma. He was accused of lacking "a social psychology that recognized the powerful influence of the social environment in changing the Psychoanalytic Review devoted to him; and he was celebrated for introducing just such a perspective. He was attacked for being uniquely mankind's destructive impulses. In his insistent quest for "meaning in life," and this lack of definitiveness seems fitting in summing up a man whose own most interesting verdicts resisted definitiveness about human dilemmas. authority and the ambivalence it inspires. His humanistic intuitions about the difficulties and possibilities inherent in therapists' struggles with their patients, parents' struggles with their children, a mass society's struggle with its citizens, and the self's struggle with itself were perhaps not profoundly original. But they spoke to widespread social concerns, and during an era marked by its unthinking reliance on experts, he made a point of fundamentally humble guidance to offer: that in the end, as in the beginning (one of his favorite phrases), one can hope to grow only by endeavoring to be handsome brothers, who mean to vie for the princess's hand. He is the least likely of the suitors, but the odd fragments he has assembled serve as answers art consists of useless found objects that, when arranged in boxes and placed behind glass, seem like answers to forgotten riddles set long ago by brilliant kind of beauty, since they convey a sense of meaningfulness while resisting the assignment of any specific meaning. The boxed objects, of little intrinsic worth, are transformed into the components of a revelation we can only guess bins and boxes in dusty secondhand shops in the less glittering precincts of Manhattan. He fitted them together late at night, over the kitchen table in an undistinguished house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, after his handicapped brother and a tiresome, widowed mother, with whom he shared the have been the one to put your money on in a contest with a princess for a from. A stamp, a photograph, a rubber band, a butterfly, marbles that had different objects were somehow tied together and interrelated to one another life was in certain respects very like his art. A meaningless job, which anyone could have done, an undistinguished education, a home like any other in a crushingly ordinary neighborhood, a daily commute, no particular vices, and unmarried sons answerable to family responsibilities, and marked by the lonely longings of a protracted virginity probably not all that unusual at the time, overcome his natural shyness and unprepossessing looks. His art came out of his hobbies, and from celibate crushes on women marked, as a general rule, by an a such adoration that defined his hobby, which consisted in rummaging expeditions in search of memorabilia in which the ballerinas and actresses of his distant and ribbons, snapshots and locks of hair, faded clippings and yellowing dance cards. The miracle is that he found a way to make art out of the substance of his affective life, and to turn his ephemera into visual poetry that no one The life and art are reciprocal in that it is hard to This makes biography unusually relevant to critical appreciation in his case, one of the rare examples in which someone's art is almost a transcription of would have no way of accounting for. More than in any of the recent handsome with an enhanced understanding of the art. Remarkable as those other artists are, they all went to art schools and learned to paint and draw, and in consequence, their lives are, in most essential respects, not unlike those secondhand shops and the feelings that provoked them as the only preparation he needed. He had the historical genius to recognize that media such as collage enabled him to be an artist, and even an admired one. Had it not been for those encounters, he might have lived out a reclusive life in Queens, filling hit upon the device of the box, with which his vision is inextricably bound up, surrealist art world was like an opening onto a plane of reality that a solitary hobbies and an autodidact's knowledge of the history of theater, of opera, and of dance, might otherwise have never entered. There he met actresses and ballet stars who inspired real art, even if he interposed between himself and them the internal distance which always separates the fantasist from his objects. The story of his life and of his art from that point forward is the story of these attenuated relationships, lived out on two planes at once, like waking dreams. The boxes and the collages are monuments to abstract affairs into paper effigies so that his imagination could go to work. He even sustained believed he wanted, the way he might have thought he ought to learn to draw in order to be a real artist. His art was made up of outward embodiments of inward unsatisfying visits, letters, and diary entries, gifts of art, and the frugal kind of biography licensed by our decade's disregard of privacy could hope to possible in our cynical and deconstructive age. But biography has its limits, fascinating book that she has not sought to explain how an array of the most that overcomes the personal and the biographical to attain universality, profundity, beauty, and truth. Facing that riddle, we all stammer. better or worse this decade's representative feminist voice, has written a that women were cheating themselves by blaming all their problems on men. But her suggestions for fixing these crises have never gone very deep. Her point, that women should stop letting men set the agenda and start attending to our own desires, sounds reasonable, even obvious. But it's also vague. And it doesn't help that her prose races along like a press release from Utopia. new book, like her pet theme of "desire," is extremely hard to pin down and, childhood friends to cough up their key moments). There are also some scattered superiority of the vulva required men to don huge wooden penises) but feel as if they were cribbed in a 45-minute visit to the library. And she sprinkles in half a dozen policy ideas. Wolf seems to think that everyone would get along So why is this book interesting? It does contain some elegantly rendered anecdotes, and several small but shrewd insights. But, mostly, it's a window on a problem in current feminism. Wolf's fixation on desire isn't so much an idea as a good intention, an attempt to make feminism ecstasy. But desire is a tricky, multifaceted thing. It can refer to a purely physical arousal, or to a heartfelt experience of love. It can also refer to a pop star evokes, for instance, when he wails, "I want you." up all these types of desire but, too often, her recollections fall under the dances where she rubbed up against a boy's crotch. Her own education appears to gets groped by a menacing stranger, and a jealous boyfriend hits her. Otherwise For someone writing on desire, Wolf, curiously, has a good deal of trouble describing the actual experience of letting loose. In the whoredom, then the weight of these clashing systems of control and expectation around female sexuality was just too much. In my mind, under the burden of all those dictates competing to stereotype rather than support me, the legitimacy tricked. One minute Wolf is supposed to be revealing her most intimate of entitlement. Wolf seems to think that because her goal is worthy, incoherent because her approach is feminine and therefore soft and gooey. In fact, if she would just pick an approach, any approach, it would be a relief. Nor am I arguing that she exaggerates the problems girls face as they grow up. As a critic Wolf usually hits the target, or at least gets near it. right, for example, that sex education now is a bad compromise between puritanical shame and a cold, clinical detachment. Most girls get some sort of instruction, but dangerous concepts like pleasure and love are scrupulously avoided; we're taught to think of ourselves as scary coils of tubing that are hard to keep clean, and which periodically leak. Wolf the complaining prunes. One of her more comical tics is to repeat a concept over and over, uncritically, until it takes on an almost physical presence, like a parody of a girl in the eighth grade who sprouted breasts early, fooled around with too many boys, and got slammed with a bad reputation. According to Wolf she embodies the nascent sexuality that pubescent girls are trained to fear and loathe, so we turn her into a scapegoat. It's a reasonable if not original observation, based on a friend of Wolf's who got pregnant and eventually dropped out of school. But Wolf builds it up into a timeless international archetype. Soon she's writing "A Short History of the Slut." (It's short pages.) And in the next chapter we're asked to take it as an established fact that all women, everywhere, since the beginning of time, have lived in fear of The Slut every few pages. On the one hand, she's the pitiful victim of our hypocrisy and our unnecessary shame. On the other hand, we're also supposed to envy her, because she violates the restraints we've imposed on ourselves. moralizing that are corrupt. She's right, of course. And yet, after a while, all this going on about how girls are not allowed to feel desire begins to feel like a kind of nostalgic fantasy. "As adult women, those of us who are sexuality available to women bore down on me, the forest would function the way longing for longing. I suppose it's only fair that girls win equal rights to as everyone knows by now, has an image problem. What better solution than to export some of their most prestigious but rarely seen images, the drawings of successors that betray his influence. Fanned out in six rooms arranged like a beehive, with the lights turned low to protect the fragile treasures (and lend a mood of reverence to the occasion), the enthralling show is called need to see anything else by any other sculptor, living or dead," gushed his Alone on the high scaffold, paint dripping into his upturned eyes, he pushes who, while Cupid sleeps in the foreground, send their errant arrows toward the realize, aren't holding bows. No one knows the meaning of this enigmatic, dreams, the grotesque mask situated among the Ideal Heads in the first earthbound world where the human and animal realms are not easily distinguished. Is this a man disguised as a lion, or a lion turning into a man? The bared teeth are clearly human, but the feral eyes, looking sharply to the back, as though he can't throw off his animal identity so easily. Across the those serpentine heads, one of which is biting him brazenly in the rear. But as though he's drawing from this encounter some of the writhing, erotic energy of his splendid body toward us one last time. "An image of the consequences of its own headlong ecstasy. His three anxious sisters, watching from the ground ripped out each day by a vulture, only to have it grow back each night. muscular body seems to have been sculpted. His punishment looks like another rape, with the vulture having its way with the bound and lustful (and contemporaries were in awe of him and tried to follow his intimidating "and his influence" are sometimes excuses for including inferior art to fill out an occasion. While there are a few too many drawings by various down and sharply focused. Some of these drawings have their own distinctive different, but no less intense, pleasure to be derived from these miracles worked up from the meager materials of paper and chalk. Never designed for public exhibition, these experimental sketches and gifts for intimate friends have a distinctive power, like secrets revealed, or conversations start of his own Southern tour. "Is it still distinctive or is it now just fresh take on the region should disabuse anyone who still imagines the South as In his earnest efforts to give the South a fair shake, puncturing Northern stereotypes and sanctimony about the South. He points out Conference, "I love you. Black and white people love you." And we see how the South has become the nation's new industrial heartland, creating half the new used to illustrate the confluence of Southern and national trends. Race, the South has tried harder to overcome the region's harsh racial legacy than residents' love of their neighbors. A calculated civic boosterism (so exuberant Make Money") has spurred the city's desire to appear enlightened. And white parishioners fled, and blacks retreated to the borderline separatist cautionary blueprint for the nation when it comes to economic development. calls "the South's most respectable prejudice." (As one labor leader says of climate has also led to gross neglect of workers' safety. To cite just one due to "locked exit doors that were blocked off so workers wouldn't steal Rising 's account of the South's political rise covers more familiar ground: massive population shifts toward the Sun Belt that have tipped the electoral balance; the adoption by the Republican Party of Southern political stances, most of them rooted in a visceral hatred of government; and the ascent to power of a Southern president, vice president, House speaker, the South and the nation may still be moving rightward, Newt's current unpopularity, as well as Southern Democrats' ability to hold their own this It's true that the cult of the Lost Cause is resurgent in the South, albeit which not only enshrined states' rights but also included term limits, budget helicopters and the genetic inferiority of the black race. Garth Brooks having outsold every recording artist in the United States except visits to the state's tacky casinos. Throughout, he displays a deft and lively grasp of Southern history and letters, popular culture and cuisine. ("Pickled pigs' feet are the opposite of an acquired taste," he writes. "Unless you're born eating [them], you never will.") The narrative is laced throughout with colorful, distinctly Southern characters, including a Delta store owner who affirmative action, when gays stayed in the closet where they belonged, where looking backward through a pale mist and seeing only the soft focus outlines of what it wants to see." It exalts states' rights while ignoring the doctrine's ugly racial legacy, and rants against the federal government while conveniently interracial South that "has gone through the fire of change and come out redeemed." The problem is, little else in his book suggests that this dream "The same things over and over. It requires a load of patience and I am principled against showing any impatience to little folks lest it should lessen rearing: She neither romanticized her mission nor vented her frustration on her by historians and social reformers. During the Progressive era, experts extolled parenthood as an ennobling profession set apart from the workaday grind. By the postwar years, child rearing was being touted as enriching fun. At least nowadays parents are allowed to complain about the burdens their transformation of the workplace in the intervening period, and looks at how parents and their children are coping now. More provisions have become is no. Parents are working ever longer hours, and are startlingly frank about why: Staying home with the kids is "tedious work," especially when you could be Work --telegraphs her basic argument. "A cultural reversal of workplace and job has been "feminized," thanks to efforts to engineer a homelike, caring culture for employees, complete with solicitous "climate surveys" and It runs like the soulless assembly line of old. Ruthless efficiency, compartmentalized schedules, too little autonomy, too much anomie: No wonder problem out of the air that ordinary people groan about a great deal and scholars and cultural critics generalize about equally ineffectually. She gives clerical and factory workers. She shadowed six families as they did, and shorter workdays. She followed the parents home from work, met their children, became attuned to the tone of their anxieties. And she spoke with the business that had lately converted to the "Total Quality" philosophy. That company's family friendly policies, works inflexibly long hours herself and juggles her kids' lives like a bustling administrator. She looks back on her maternity leave without any nostalgia: "Gee, guys, that was six weeks I didn't have anybody to talk to. My friends are at work. The things that interest me but can't wait for his shift with them to end: "It's very stressful mentally, care: "At work I can do more of what I want. At home, I have to do what the psychological reversal accompanying the cultural reversal: We used to feel immature at work and independent at home. Now it's the other way around. emphasis on worker autonomy and a joint "conversation" about the company's goals revises the much stricter model of "scientific management" championed by functions that used to be part of their responsibility (baby sitters, tutors, evidence of parents "fleeing a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work" points to a diagnosis that is, if anything, more disconcerting. Perhaps parents are eager to go to work not because it gives them autonomy but because it lets them be safely and comfortably childlike. At home, they face the daunting not, pace his critics, a permissive advocate of giving the child real power or of giving parents an easy break. He envisioned the parent as the "friendly boss," vigilantly and solicitously manipulating a naturally docile want, only to enjoy what they have to do. They have been given satisfyingly Their needs are defined and ministered to; support is constantly made available in the form of organized workshops and counseling sessions. The goal is not keep control while dispersing power and to ensure not just the health but the happiness, not just the productivity but the loyalty, of our charges. What's motherhood," as she calls this ambitious mission, despite its increasing impracticality and despite how guilty it can make us feel. same things over and over." No "recognition ceremonies" for tasks well done, romanticizing that work, as experts and parents have tried to do throughout the her idea of a solution ends up sounding like the ultimate triumph of the learn from "public debate about the need for 'emotional investment' in family might be more in order. More fathers need to buckle down on the home front, which would improve the attitude and motivation of mothers too. And parents of reason to slow down a bit at work and hang out more at home. The kids will be battles as a senior official in the State Department during World War II, the daunting challenge: his father. All around the family's headquarters at master of the world's biggest fortune, and his children were not. Nelson's response to powerlessness was architectural: He transformed part of the fusty when he showed his father the redesigned offices, "isn't this all influence that it's hard to understand how he could have been so perennially beginning he felt compelled to flatter, cajole, and even engage in abject puritanical and disapproving father. His efforts to insinuate himself were so Republican." Among other things, this book helps explain what the term actually creation of an outstanding state university system, a vast network of hospitals, housing projects, mental health facilities, water treatment plants, parks, and highways. To enemies, it refers to a legacy of bankrupt state government and failed social programs. What is most striking about The Life to a penchant for flamboyant failure; the ability to win a passionate following to be established in New York, persuading his father to buy and donate the East pushed for foreign aid and investment throughout the developing world and helped pioneer the idea of national health insurance. As overseer of Cold War linking inspections to the cause of nuclear arms control. But in almost every make so many enemies he ended up being ousted from power. emerge, all of them reflecting the same degree of urgent vitality and, separate living quarters) with his first wife, who could be seen weeping but not, unfortunately, in a way that explains what his philandering might second of Nelson's passions was for art, especially the abstract expressionists Nelson then asked the artist if, while he was at it, he could stay and do One reason for Nelson's enthusiasm for art and sculpture, noting that dyslexia is often accompanied by hyperactivity, which seemed to privileged business." He was the third child in the family, but from his earliest years he was determined to be the leader of his generation of powerful unit, organizing his brothers and sister to confront their father with a demand that the family assets be turned over (gradually) to the next Nelson got into the habit of tapping his own financial resources to surround which throughout his life elicited resentment from colleagues less flush with of how he would mobilize resources to get something done, then go to such would raise people's standard of living; using his own resources, he set up companies to raise cattle, grow crops, market food, develop natural resources, and build housing. Before long, however, many of these projects went bust, and Nelson had to turn to his family for financial assistance to ward off bankruptcy. Eventually, he decided that only the United States government could urge to enter the public arena was partly the legacy of his father, whose its underlying purpose was to expunge the malevolent connotations attached to about government spending, which would eventually make him an easy target.) got wind one day of a scheme to get the president to eliminate his never developed the resilience to stay in power. Eventually, his forced turn to elective office as the one way of establishing an independent base. He even let Nelson head up a commission on the state constitution, though surprised everyone was that he turned out to be a most charismatic campaigner, them." It didn't matter that he was naive. People wanted somebody they knew presidency beckoning in the background. By then, we already know what being a ambition, scheming, and pragmatism; a belief in expertise and big projects; and, above all, excitement about the sheer adventure of governing. For all his virtuous, but was virtuousness altogether a good thing? This entirely would prefer by a hundred times the elegant manners of a corrupt heart." thousand pages of letters and documents of every sort, which allows us to judge documents in pristine form, has adopted the rather extreme policy of publishing its volumes without any sort of introductory guide, which is probably just as well in the case of literary authors whose work is easily approached. heap of private letters and peculiar jottings intermixed with an occasional a book writer, or any kind of writer at all, professionally speaking, but took quill in hand merely to address particular situations as they arose. His military records, presidential orations, ringing statements, and random insignificant scribblings, all of them put into chronological order by the writings seems a little dubious, given that (as the assiduous reader will with your Spittle, by approaching too near him when you Speak," or this, from beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them or keep the Lips too open or too your Nose except there's a Necessity for it." And, at once, from the opening what makes the unhappy discovery truly appalling is the further incredible experts to be the key to his entire career, and therefore, in some respect, a throughout his momentous life, conducted himself correctly in all the Little Ways (no bedewing of others with Spittle, Hats properly Doffed, and so forth), which led to right conduct in the Big Ways, too, thus to political and military edition of the rules, throws in some jocularity of his own, with the sure lightness of touch you would expect from an author who has based his biography Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body not usually Discovered." To Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with Writings contains an endless supply of additional material. There are and complaints to Congress (during the Revolutionary War), which are funny bit of teasing, followed abruptly by a rueful reassurance, worthy of instance can be produced where a Woman from real inclination has preferred an old man." It is interesting to see how warm he grew toward congratulate him about something or other (unspecified by the notes), and mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his about republican revolution, and nothing at all to what could be learned from a a tunnel that keeps getting darker only to find that the light at the end is an oncoming train. The show opens amid New York subway platforms, a favorite this twilit realm, hemmed in by a geometric cage of bars and pillars (Entrance to groping for an appropriate medium to convey his intense inner life. He studied at the Art Students League, taught sporadically, and exhibited with various was far more successful in her business of designing jewelry than he was in went from painting realistic New York scenes to concocting mythological motifs underground subjects, the subway, for another, the "depth psychology" strata of tails and eyes is meant to convey the tangle of the psyche, while the three made the background of paintings such as Hierarchical Birds --the richly episode of the periodic despondency he would continue to suffer. During the 1950s, the paintings just kept getting better. magenta hovers atop a larger rectangle of black. Once you've registered that relationship, you realize that a layer of orange smolders underneath and flickers at the seam of the two colors. No paintings in the show are more layers of paint laid on with big brushes purchased at a hardware store, give to soak his paint into the canvas to get a dyer's effect and avoid the "like an impressionist work, because of the kind of touch involved." These he hated it. At least, he distrusted the grounds of his success. Ever since the mythological paintings, he had aimed somehow to go beyond painting, to plug into the inner recesses of the soul. He refused to talk about technique, angrily denied that he was a colorist, and challenged his viewers to find the his favorite book). "I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of his palette. Several of the resulting paintings are on view in the National backed out of the project, returning the cash advance. project, and the paintings become so dark that some of them are virtually black "greatest sources of consolation were calories and alcohol." He has a heart songs"), the succession of wives, the acclaim, and the descent into alcohol, darkness left behind a shimmering trail of canvases that mark for many people the strange fate of many artists who aim for the sublime, then find their work came the successful New York run (last winter) of Pam Gems' intense restore it. "I wish all my life I could have been tied to my mother's apron support by giving piano lessons and playing the church organ. recognized early, and he joined an extraordinary generation of students at the with its red, patterned skirt and luminous china knobs, dominates the picture. "Mentally," Spencer later observed, "I have been bedridden all my life." World War I interrupted this cozy idyll. The undersized Ostensibly concerned with the yearly ritual of tagging the swans along the The artist, Spencer once claimed, commits "a kind of spiritual rape on every convey. The erotic edge of this stylized composition is confirmed in a little scene on the iron bridge above, where two lovers look yearningly at each curiously at the surgical operation in progress, one of the strange and Spencer came late to sexual maturity, and he tried, after man raises a woman's dress with the same passionate admiration and love for the then refused to consummate it, making clear that she expected to live instead many years afterward longing for a reconciliation. Their eldest daughter, nightmarish black holes that substitute for the dolls'. poet of sexual gloom, especially in the two pitiless double portraits of naked foreground of one of the paintings matches the couple's tired flesh while a pictures, which seem to prefigure our own sexually anxious age, to such comical baby in his wife's arms, while neighborhood children offer gifts of empty cans something of this wish and need I feel for things to be restored. That is the feeling that makes the children take out the broken tea pot and empty jam redecorated. The producers particularly wanted to impress the studio's new marketing products that consumers never knew they wanted, shelled out what fears that a cultural treasure was being gobbled up. In the end, though, it was debacle. Their steady stream of malicious, if clumsily written, anecdotes is uncircumcised penis, Peters ordered the couple's driver to come over and drop his pants. Peters also sent the corporate jet, laden with flowers, to a model he was courting, and ordered his driver to call ahead to the studio so someone could be poised to open his car door when he arrived. across even worse than Peters. Most damaging for his future job prospects is movies and sybaritic lifestyle, never caring much about the parent company's "They're only renting me for five years." The reader may be most amused by Run is told. It relies too heavily on anonymous sources, and the trade press has begun complaining that some of its stories are bogus. The editor of Pictures. The book's tone also is relentlessly caustic. Can there ever have less in the anecdotes than in what it has to tell us about how one of the biggest entertainment deals went awry at a time when the industry was consolidating everywhere, heading toward domination by a mere six or eight faith in "synergy," since the search for that elusive ideal has run so spectacularly aground in other media deals. It was especially disastrous in the it could tap into a bottomless well of capital with which to buy television their digital televisions, compact discs, and other new products. They counted know about what they were getting into? We never find out. But we do get snapshots of the mindset that allowed them to get sucked into the vortex of the studio's more successful television shows. All they did was look at the cameras and ask who made the video tape and what kind of lead density it their interests seem frankly guilty of misleading them. If anything, Griffin Artists Agency, would seem to have been more interested in making money out of authors are too polite to come right out and say so. Also treated kindly is accountable. They do not ask what changes he had in mind, other than getting what management success in the movie business might have entailed. The only antique furniture, yachts, slumber parties at Aspen, and the like, and a pretty good movies, like Wolf and Remains of the Day, while others, like the contributing editor for Time and Vanity Fair --the authors should Instead, they have written the story of a failure, albeit one with important consequences for the industry today. Hopefully, people who read the story of communications business. They will have less patience for optimistic talk about as the prison memoir. Some of this interest must undoubtedly be attributed to sweaty Chained Heat -style sex fantasies. But mostly the fascination the psychological limit? What happens when you go to hell? could describe the sickening plunge from respectability to degradation (and if state's chief judge and a rising star in the Republican party, famed for his charged with extortion, interstate racketeering, and blackmail, among other alter ego, and mailed a condom to her young daughter. The judge claimed mental has published the story of his time inside, After the Madness: A Judge's Own The best modern prison memoirs-- The Autobiography of Shanghai --are stories about an agony that yields redemption. Each book tells roughly the same tale: A corrupt society imprisons the narrator for a minor offense (marijuana possession in Cleaver's case, juvenile delinquency in neither hero nor villain; he's not even a compelling character. His description unbearable, the stench is unimaginable, the "bend and spread 'em" searches are unendurable. He supplies the requisite glut of cockroaches and the necessary ignore the rich ironies of his situation. After the Madness is sprinkled with his awkward encounters. On one occasion he meets a fellow con whose appeal the legal profession. It may be a problem of judicial restraint. Great prison his knees, and with my knife at his throat, made him perform fellatio on my done. If you are a man, you must either kill or turn the tables on anyone who that my depression, manic behavior, and causal toxicity (caused by the drugs I was taking) have been evaluated and confirmed by the government's own medical will always be those who will refuse to accept the fact that a person can function in what appears to be a normal fashion in his or her job, and still then chastises his fellow judges for not considering solitary confinement a "cruel and unusual" punishment. He befriends a cocaine user doing hard time, then sermonizes about the idiocies of mandatory minimum sentences. His nonviolent criminals, scrap drug laws, fund prison education and training programs, and more. The old joke is true: "What do you call a Republican who's and dull book, a distressing thought came to me: Its banality might be the jail was as alien as Mars. A month in the hole, a cockroach infestation, the After the Madness is perhaps that prison has lost its capacity to shock. In some communities (though not the rich Long Island ones where judges live), a prison term has become almost a rite of passage, something that young men do. producers, and writers who have gone up the river and returned with tales of reactions. The first reaction is that it is not really a book. It doesn't have a theme or an argument or even a coherent story line. Books are supposed to context, though in recent books he has made feeble efforts to stipulate some. His narrative is more like a series of scenes from a pulpy novel, only they is sometimes breathtaking. Every time I begin to feel a bit guilty about my books, often on the cover) I reflect on my paltry powers to find out what happened at an unimportant Oval Office meeting, much less a solarium seance. tell him stuff that is only supposed to come out under truth serum. would eventually take him to a new level (make that a first level) of real political analysis. In the same way that he knows to unearth the outtakes of history seriously, so as to be able to mine it for historical perspective. If on his own mechanical terms. By that standard, he does fine. About half the because it is there, gettable by him, even if it tells us nothing. But the don't always reveal the character of the subject of the anecdotes, they are invariably telling about the character of the source, and about the eternal question of why people say things they shouldn't. Click here for one possible online, but it's on the frontier of publishing. No need to worry about completed (a remarkably short lead time for a hardcover), was not written to last much beyond the length of the ballyhoo book tour. By next year, no one blockbuster syndrome taken to its natural conclusion. talking meant that they would take more of a beating. But their cooperation the juiciest parts of the book are the accounts, partly from him, of the acrimonious budget meetings in the White House. "You have a chickenshit "You've been calling me an extremist," he roared at Gore. All in all, everyone in the budget talks looks petty and political, except for formal interviews and lots more time informally, in part because, as his press discuss whether he should run or not, and that she wasn't informed that Dole Dole say, 'Here's what we're doing.' He never would come right out and say it," completely what was on his mind. He held things so close. He didn't systematically vet things with her or even regularly delegate to her." who had originally planned a book about the primaries, mostly left the Phil run. In every case, family members, who in an earlier age would have been long run, but they're delicious in a campaign season. The conventional wisdom among the wise guys of the press has been that there are now so many reporters to prove that a little shoe leather still works. He fails to make us understand more, just when we thought it had disintegrated. Who can resist a peek? enough. There's a new fashion in museum exhibitions: Accessorize. We're seeing merely assemble great pictures, unembellished by catchy themes, related objects, documentary materials, or voluminous explanatory texts. Today's curators increasingly feel the itch to interpret, not only with words but with objects and illustrations that "explain" the art and give it "context." the visitor with the magnificence of the temple." To add an authentic desert touch, real sand was dumped on the floor along one wall. museums to look at art. Great paintings on the walls, superb sculptures on on the art's significance or the artist's life and times was best slaked before or after. Outside intervention just interfered with the intimate communication there's a growing sense that art can't communicate on its own. A new text and context. Curators divert us from art with an array of related artifacts or documents from the period, as if too much aesthetic concentration might tax our attention span. The creative process itself is demystified through displays of artists' working tools and illustrations of artistic Is there a problem here? Not if you think an art museum should be like a history museum, treating art as a cultural artifact that illustrates the story of a particular person, period, and place. But for those of us who cherish art for art's sake, gussying it up with photos, paint samples, and teapots merely trivializes and distracts. toward interpretive installation, aimed at broadening art's appeal by expanding serious cultural pursuit to highbrow entertainment. Efforts to make information about art (as well as art itself) more accessible were strongly encouraged by is not to illustrate history but to allow an art work to be understood and filling our heads with instructions on what to see and think, while inhibiting personal response. This also suppressed civilized conversation with our companions, who were similarly encased in electronic earmuffs. The latest audio based systems on which visitors can punch in the numbers on wall labels, also enjoy shows that make them feel they are not just gazing at the products of a distant culture but, for a brief time, are actually a part of that milieu, solely to imbue foreign masterpieces with glitz and mystique. In addition to of the czars, fitted out with authentic paintings and furnishings. fear of damaging the fragile artwork." This cartoonish cultural video game can Networks, plans to work with major museums to produce a "Great Civilizations" series, which will display "the finest archaeological works of art, together with reconstructions and virtual reality visits to ancient sites." the curious hoards, a benefit that few museums can ignore given the unreliability of outside funding sources. Museums must rely increasingly on restaurants, and shops. But as the seductive trappings gain prominence, the computer industry will develop an unrealistically charitable view of their change the world!" Easy to say, when you happen to be getting rich. Why don't they work in pure research? "Research is an ivory tower," they respond. "Shipping products is the way you change the world." And so they find themselves in the cozy position of believing they're beyond materialism while Hardest have it much harder. The fictional nonprofit research laboratory La designing products for other companies to sell. They may be changing the world, but they're also underpaid. They have their reasons for being there: For hard to figure out why his company would fund an external research laboratory into this book it starts to smell a whole lot like a plot device. Only in such a place would the motives of the engineers, designers, reporters, and businessmen in this novel combine in the convenient way they do. Fortunately, ignore the conventional wisdom that every new computer must be faster than the last and do more. What's better, their simplified software will run on any computer, uniting the world in a new technological brotherhood. Needless to say, these mavericks have an uphill battle to sell their idea. something about the psychology of the place. The misanthropic engineers, the nontechnical but talented girlfriend all strike painfully home. I know these nerds at play (which is to say, at work), nerds in love, and of course some accept everything that happens, even when the technology and events veer away from a world I recognize. It's only when the plot forces him to hide the cards of certain players, which it does periodically, that my disbelief is happened. Suddenly they are characters in a novel, not in my life. on their own, they are doing it because it's the only way to get things done. They hardly seem to care about the money. They give away rights for a song. They are totally focused on delivering technology to the masses. I concede that pretty certain that they were also in it for the financial upside. It's almost Otherwise, this book is pretty convincing, and one of the reasons it is, even (or especially) to those in the know, is that its plot is programming language well suited to the Internet. Using Java, you can create programs that are downloaded directly off the Internet and run on almost any computer. In theory, this makes it possible to create a simple computer that runs directly off the network and doesn't even need a hard drive. language. They were ignored for over a year, until someone finally realized this was the perfect language for the World Wide Web. Sun's marketers and top management fought it out with the engineers for control of the language, and won. Java is now Sun's core technology asset, and most of its designers have today's heterogeneous computer systems is highly controversial, and not just wins out) say so. Java works because it lets everyone run the same program, but it is not clear that everyone wants to run the same program. For Windows programs. Java threatens us with a world where every program feels a good read even if you know nothing about computers, but it's an even better read if you do, since it delves intriguingly in and out of the psychoses and oddball situations rife in this industry. Just don't ask any hard questions of of the classical genres, traces its origins to a legendary painting contest. and lost the contest. Teasingly realistic grapes and drapes have figured in up the paradox even more acutely. If the Dutch "banquet pieces" suggest endless personal effects in their tombs, images that were to accompany the dead on Still life, then, is caught between the timeless vision and the ticking clock. When you enter the current show at the Museum of Modern Art, titled "Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life," you find yourself in a small is that of a hushed chapel, and on the altar is this gorgeous riddle of a painting, with its tilted plate of ripe pears, its pendulous eggplants, its finds an echo elsewhere in the painting, and none of the depicted objects calls Then you turn a corner and enter a different world, where the immediacy of modern life, of the ticking clock, is everywhere palpable. creature, used, according to the dictionary, as "a dietary supplement for caged birds." Such objects, with their elliptical wit, return us to the dark side of still life; these bones and cages and tacks and thermometers offer a deadpan real or is it art? Instead of birds pecking at painted grapes, we have objects tradition has flourished, more in tune with pop culture, advertising, and the There was space in that little white chapel at the start of One aim of "Objects of Desire" is to show how the same "golden age of advertising." The razor crossed with the fountain pen, surmounted by a box of matches, reminds those in the know that Murphy, the painting to run the family business, Mark Cross pens. When a trompe figured for centuries as reminders of mortality can take on new urgency under through the final rooms of the show, one feels the pressure of an argument beginning to emerge. Painting gives way increasingly to 3-D sculpted still glass table with an array of fresh vegetables and fruit, changed daily by a New We're meant to feel that we're coming to the end of the toward the end of the show and chosen for the cover of the catalog. The a cost. The final rooms feel like classrooms, with lessons hammered home. The show ends as it began, in a small white room holding one object. This time the covers the top of the marble, so that a "living substance" (milk) has been "stilled," thus "embodying the quintessential definition of the still life." an excellent literary education grounded in the heavily accented rhythms of native Creole dialect. His early poems register both geographical distances and that stands/ for hot, rutted lanes far from the disease of power." Second, its upbeat title, The Bounty is a book of elegies, a response to the his seventh decade. As he improvises on themes from the Western elegiac that certain notes don't sound in the tropics, where there is "no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day." And he is surprised, as elegists always are, "that earth rejoices/ in the middle of our agony." appearance of God in the desert, a promise confirmed, in the Christian view, by am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants;/ I behold their industry and they are giants." This couplet sends us back to an already famous passage in trees that "serenely rust when they are in flower," the firefly that "keeps imperial intimacies, its echo of privilege,/ the other like the orange words of landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves." Well, painter's faith, that the poet's job is "to write of the light's bounty on is his most painterly book, in method and theme. If The Bounty is low on autobiographical detail, or the dailiness of this poet's life and travels, it complementary blues and oranges of his native landscape: "there, against the orange/ blossoms, however briefly, while the incredible blue is/ as indifferent poems in the book, the that begins "I cannot remember the name of that seacoast it. Like his 799-page tome on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple Entire arguments and quotations are repeated from chapter to chapter. Most of castles inherited from colonial eras, were splashed with wild, magical colors would also bet that anyone who gets through this book (except, perhaps, for a few economists and Treasury officials) will feel a pang of regret for not book to date on the perils of the new world economic order. It does for the transfers what his earlier book did for the Fed. It makes a daunting subject The book contains a core argument about industry and labor, than the world's consumers can buy. Such overcapacity in autos, for instance, worse, for a couple of reasons. Advances in technology allow industries to produce more goods with fewer people (in effect, creating more supply but less mercantilist trade strategies: that is, they have sought, through barriers or government subsidies, to guarantee surpluses. By definition, such a strategy expands the supply of goods without proportionately boosting demand. Overcapacity reduces the incentive for businesses to invest and leads to slower world growth, as supply continually threatens to outrun demand. Put this ingredients for an international race to the bottom in wages and social benefits, as companies seek to cut costs in the face of this overcapacity and encourages corporate managers to destroy unions. It's the class war all over "revolutionary capitalism has circled back to its original fight with socialism a century ago and reopened the ideological argument, but from a much stronger political position. Labor and the left are in retreat almost everywhere; commerce and finance predominate in politics and have adapted centralized also undertakes an ambitious analysis of global finance. In this area, I am arguments are provocative and address seeming anomalies that conventional the previous year. In explaining why economic growth has lagged over the last argues, has made businesses' projections of profits from trade increasingly unreliable, thereby discouraging productive investments and growth. of advanced nations' financial assets grow faster than their actual economies. were growing. That has led to a worldwide situation comparable to Japan's bubble economy, where, with assets systematically overvalued, a crash became inevitable. But while Japan's Ministry of Finance has ably managed that country's crisis, there is no comparable global body to police the world of traders and private bankers has grown, government economic policy has become hostage to the financiers' and speculators' fears that economic growth will spur inflation, which will reduce the value of their holdings. So governments through a balanced budget and higher interest rates. They end up doing all they close the gap between finance and industry. "This commitment to slow growth," is like a noose thrown around the advanced economies, sure to deepen their be a repeat of the 1920s. During that decade, industry and finance were also strangely out of step with each other, and nations also faced a conflict of balanced budgets and wage and benefit cuts on the one hand and a "hard, reactionary politics that can shut down the system" on the other. The latter would probably call for shutting off immigration, erecting permanent, national controls over global capital. Tax wealth more, labor less. Stimulate global growth by boosting consumer demand from the bottom up. Compel trading nations to accept more balanced trade relations and absorb more surplus production. Forgive the debtors, especially the hopeless cases among the very poorest nations. Reorganize monetary policy to confront the realities of a globalized money supply, both to achieve greater stability and open the way to Some of his more specific suggestions strike me as less private enterprise by rewarding firms that fostered greater employment and penalizing those that did the opposite." That would, in effect, penalize companies for efficiency and productivity. But other suggestions make sense. He wants the United States to join with other financial centers in adopting a "transactions tax" on currency exchanges to stanch speculation and inhibit wide endorsed this idea.) He wants the United States to adopt an "emergency tariff" abandon their mercantile trading strategies. And he wants the World Trade Organization to adopt binding standards for international labor rights to slow suggestions are unlikely to be adopted. The same trends in the world economy that cry out for reform are themselves weakening the hand of the reformers. For instance, as the mobility of capital reduces the power of unions, the chance their production overseas, the likelihood of getting business to support an nature" seems well within the realm of plausibility. principle of brute strength in one case, of sensuous delicacy in another, of appears to be metaphysical. The entire town seems to have been laid out stride the pavements down below while, three or four stories above, on the dualistic character of all existence: mortals below, immortals above, flesh men, enslaved Titans bearing the weight of entire lofty buildings on their sinewy backs, bearded philosophers, heroic Communist proletarians, and famous cornices and see, of all creatures, the Three Musketeers, direct from the pages on the roof of a theater, a chariot and team of wild horses are frozen in eternal petrifaction on the brink of hurtling suicidally off the roof, quite as if the immortals, too, have their traffic problems. But what is the meaning of English literature, then in German cinema, and reached an apogee of acceptance installation of Chuck Close's big portraits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City begins where any artist wants the narrative of his career to begin: with fully achieved art. No juvenilia, no hesitant casting about, no "finding glories in its sheer seediness. A trickle of cigarette smoke takes a detour around the caterpillar mustache before negotiating some nose hairs. The stubble During his early 20s, Close experimented with a variety of photographic images as the basis for his cooler, less openly expressive the campus police at U. Mass dismantled Close's first solo exhibition, which included drawings loosely based on photographs of album covers. One showed Bob reclining woman with a bikini suntan, based on photographs he'd taken in show (though Big Nude is reproduced in the exhibition catalog); nor, for nowhere. One is left with the somewhat misleading impression of an establishment figure: the artist who plays an artist in Six Degrees of Separation (as Close did), who paints pictures of his celebrity friends, formal innovations to the exclusion of his subject matter. The paintings and drawings are grouped in such a way that we follow Close's progression from the make color images. Instead of mixing his colors on the palette, Close built up his images by applying thin layers of primary colors directly onto the canvas. Many of these color portraits have a faded pallor, like old snapshots, but the capillaries. While moving into color, Close found ways to engage the crisscross grid that had always been part of his procedure for enlarging photographic images. First, he made the grid an explicit element of his compositions. Then, he experimented with different ways to fill that grid: pointillist colored All this focus on technique, while fascinating in itself, is a distraction from the emotional impact of the paintings. (And the most subjects of the portraits (wall panels give title, date, and medium) suggests of this coyness is the pair of paintings hanging side by side in the first teeth; the asymmetrical eyes; the squashed nose that looks as if it's been mug shot hanging to her right, could be the guy she's just caught sight of. Nor are Close's experiments with filling his grids as portraits, Close fills his grids with his own fingerprints inked on a stamp might expect (though two of them portray Close's young daughters). Rather, with their clearly indicated whorls, they look like police fingerprints used for identification. Is it an accident that two of Close's favorite media are mug discourages any such speculation about the buried themes of criminality and radiating circular grid. But most of the other recent paintings are jeweled, unconscious, Close's doodles depict doughnuts, hot dogs, and lozenges. The vengeance, but they seem more frivolous than emotionally charged. These aged artist couldn't identify friends or participate in conversation. He drifted away from his guests to the television, where Close found him channel surfing, staring at the procession of silent images as they blinked past, his place. He straightened up. His eyes brightened. He began speaking articulately about each of the paintings in turn. He modeled the air with his hands, making the beautiful, precise gestures that earlier visitors had described. He was the man had long since disintegrated. Asked a factual question, he was was still healthy. He would continue to paint for nearly a decade, long after an old man still young in his art. The paintings themselves have rarely been Modern Art, now make it possible to judge the case for oneself. Whatever one's opinion of the paintings' success, they tell a poignant story of resilience and frailty, and of an artist who was passionately unwilling to put away his looked as if his most recent works would be his last. Those works were large, oceanic abstractions that incorporated a kaleidoscopic range of color. Like the first painting in this show, is a transitional work, a preamble to the new style. Using masonry knives and pieces of cardboard instead of brushes, de swaths of color, like beach towels rippling on a laundry line, create a planar kind of abstraction, with large areas of smooth, erased whiteness. His palette, that refer to nothing but paint. Both changes signal a stripping down, an old uses them in an uncharacteristic way. The strokes are isolated and tentative, For many people, such calmness amounted to a betrayal. De first coined. Explosive splashes and drips were supposed to be integral to his art, proof of the painting's volcanic authenticity. I remember, in art school, that the 1980s paintings lacked the "messy viscous slathers of pigment, the years before, similar complaints had been leveled. His grotesque, sardonic "Woman" paintings were seen as a betrayal of his earlier abstract phase. Today this controversy is a dead issue. The abstractions and the "Woman" paintings hang side by side in museums. My bet is that the current objections will prove a new, amended sense of continuity will emerge. Our eyes will focus not on and buckle, never quite settling into the seat belt of a single compositional well as the early '80s, flirt with refinement and turbulence. They avoid the Delicacy doesn't undermine this balancing act. A greater sense of control seems, on the contrary, to highlight it. One of my favorites among these a dark letter "S." But "repeated" isn't an accurate description here, since the shape is never the same twice. It bends, tilts, swells, enlarges, and shrinks in each new appearance, like a vacuum chamber full of snakes. In the center of the picture, two asymmetrical oxbows form a configuration like a grappling iron, anchoring the composition. The sense of order here is slight, but it's enough to give the picture a momentary, precarious unity. To my eye, this is of equilibrium that is always mobile, always about to tilt off to one side and understand, painted at an unprecedented pace, completing nearly a picture a other, arriving at exuberant new combinations that sometimes echoed his old final work was similarly buoyant. This brief period may have been the most be able to juggle fewer elements. Stretching his paint strokes into long, narrow ribbons, he retreated toward a kind of linear drawing in three colors. The paintings became sinuous lattices, like the web of a deranged and brilliant spider. Within them, an endless inventory of shapes and rhythms appears. The compositions become ever more undulating and graceful. But at this point the difference between supporters' and detractors' views begins to narrow. The exhibit a restriction in emotional range as well. They take on a cartoonish, standard in writing about economics for the general reader. It was so bad, and bad in so many ways, that it demanded a kind of respect. To mention only its most salient defect, here was a book announcing the failure of market economics at a time when anybody with the slightest curiosity about the world was transfixed by the sudden collapse of the main alternative to it: socialist confirmed his thesis. Then, with no more time for distractions, he resumed his Note the subtitle, "The Virtues and Limits of Markets." Is there something to be said for markets after all? Not too much, it turns out. recognizes them, it's usually with reluctance. "Consumption is doubtless pleasurable," he concedes, doubtfully, "and nobody minds a high material all right, he's sensitive to the drawbacks. Supermarkets work well on the whole, he reckons, but what a burden on the economy that there should be so many different kinds of breakfast cereal: "At my local supermarket, I counted with increased respect for the power of markets and the complexity of the story, yet with renewed conviction that the good society requires a mixed though this sets him apart. But almost all economists take the case for a mixed for many years. Faith in the virtues of markets rests on a theory whose assumptions are not just untenable but patently absurd: People are rational and have failed to spot. It follows that markets do not work as well as they're supposed to, and that governments must play a large and active role in the economy. The properly functioning market economy exists only in the pages of economics textbooks. In the real world, a heavy dose of government is wrong with this? To begin with, the purported contrast between the blinkered sense is a fraud. Economists spend much of their time working out the implications of "market failure" caused by departures from the assumptions of so he exaggerates what governments in the real world can achieve. In theory, governments may be selfless, competent, and adequately informed. In practice, governments, thus evading the issue. He does not entirely ignore the branch of government failure. He caricatures it briefly, calls it "banal" and "tautological," and cites its influence on mainstream economics as further evidence of the corruption of the academy. Be that as it may, the real choice is not between imperfect markets and perfect governments, but between markets is addressed to this question. Certainly, many pages are devoted to case studies of various kinds of regulation and deregulation: telecommunications, airlines, finance, health and safety, and more. As the cases pile up, a pattern his view that more regulation is usually better than less? Not at all. These findings only strengthen his conviction that economics is bunk. Again and Studies that come to the opposite conclusion only demonstrate the bankruptcy of could offer some other coherent way to think about these issues, or even if his critique were arresting or persuasive. But he offers no alternative apart from his own privileged sense of what is obvious, and his attacks on economic method When he attempts to lampoon what he sees as a silly orthodoxy, he often just gets it wrong. Satirizing the efficiency of financial markets, he writes: "The market, again by definition, had to be right. If loans higher return than loans to a local small business or housing complex, then they had to be the more deserving use of capital." As any semiconscious economics student could tell you, a higher rate would not signal that the loan in question is more deserving than another, but rather, the opposite: that investors are being compensated for extra risk, leaving the marginal lender account is just as stupid as the one he mocks. But if he expects to have any credibility, he should understand the difference between the two versions. he is attacking. Someone who writes book after book to refute what he doesn't those strangely positioned writers whose fans rank her near the top of the literary ladder but who remains, to the rest of the world, not much more than a name. A quick rundown, then, of her long and impressive career: It begins in fiction or find another line of work. You might expect a painful drama to follow, a piling up of drafts and rejections. Instead, she was instantly mature, prolific, and publishable. Her first submission to The New Yorker was returned with a friendly letter, but on the second try she got arithmetic is the measure, Gallant must be the quintessential New Yorker wry, mildly gloomy sensibility, and her knack for perfect detail were a Protestant, yes, but with a strong current of French and Catholic. My young parents sent me off on that current by placing me in a French convent school, for reasons never made plain. I remember my grandmother's saying, "Well, I give up." It was a singular thing to do and in those days unheard of. It left me with two systems of behavior, divided by syntax and tradition; two environments two codes of social behavior; much practical experience of the difference this hemisphere with excessive propriety and then thrust, unprotected, into old between a rule and a moral point" but commits neither to one nor the other. she sometimes sketched her expatriates with the quicker, more economical poverty and rubble, one century after rich New World travelers made their first an acquaintance with such petty facts as train schedules and plumbing. She cultivates decadent aristocratic airs or tries too hard to hold on to Puritan these pieces, Gallant has arranged them chronologically in her collection, by decade from the '30s through the '90s. The stories weren't necessarily written Jack run a small hotel; Jack is a philanderer and eventually leaves, and Gallant traces them through separation and World War II and a pragmatic offers someone else his or her love and is let down, but still manages to get up in the morning for the next several decades. These stories are the tightest and the best designed, and they yield her most memorable lines, dark, ironic granted, now she was married, that Jack felt as she did about light, dark, death, and love," and from that we understand that separation is inevitable. Or I was young I thought that men had small lives of their own creation. I could not see why, born enfranchised, without the obstacles and constraints attendant on women, they set such close limits for themselves and why, once the limits Elsewhere, the wandering observer predominates, and the stories gain weight in the quest for clinical accuracy. Besides the English in visiting her characters several times over a span of years. The young grow up, and we learn about French school exams and then the petty hierarchies in the civil service. The elderly are defined by their memory of past events. From the speculating on the meaning of her stories. Character is everything; facts make the man. If Gallant sometimes achieves the same high notes that great reporting neurotic habits, and random memories are woven into a pattering portrait. Consider the opening to "The End of the World," which introduces an angry son they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another the concrete in this kind of story, and a democratic interest in human nature. But there's also a cool complacency, an indifferent shrug. By Gallant's own admission in the introduction, she composes with an eye to craft, not the deeper heart of a story. Each local ironic effect has to be placed precisely; each street name has to be gotten right the first time. "I could not move on to the second sentence until the first sentence sounded true," she writes somewhat first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of the film." But a film and a slide show are not the same thing as fully imagined fiction. These stories make up a time capsule assembled by a skilled social historian, a rich gallery of plausible lives. They are well observed, well written, and remote, and no as he insisted on being called), got the top job at an obscure government agency known as the Command and Control Research Division, a division of the agency specialized in the sort of esoteric Department of Defense research that could only be called "asinine" (his word, in fact). Air Force intelligence, for instance, wanted to use the agency's huge mainframe computers to detect the computers bits of information like, "The Soviet Air Force chief drank two from which the computer was to deduce that the Soviets were building a new got rid of the fanciful war games, substituting something that must have scientists, of whom some would go on to invent video games, the mouse, the metaphor of "windows" and "icons" and, of course, the Internet itself. added benefit of letting people get their hands on keyboards, which few of them had ever done. Computer science up to that point had been dominated by programmers wrote code at their desks, copied it onto stacks of cards with holes punched into them, and handed them over to technicians who had a the Internet), was solved. But the larger intellectual revolution undergirding computers, which turned impersonal calculating machines into intimate tools for interviews with the scientists involved, culled material from archives and private collections, and revised the historical record where necessary. test to see if computer networks could be designed to survive a nuclear war. government needed a way for all the incompatible computers being used for government research to communicate with each other. In a sense, the Internet connecting any sort of computer with another computer. scientists to create connections between dozens, let alone hundreds, of computers without running up a fortune in telephone bills? The answer, which occupies three chapters of the book, is "packet switching," and it remains the core of today's Internet. Instead of opening a direct connection with the packets that are reassembled when they get to their destination. They trace the web of conversations that brought their ideas to the office of graduate students from universities around the country, then gave them the right to do more or less whatever they wanted. Perhaps the greatest mystery in students huge sums of money, without insisting on oversight. Whatever the reason, it worked: The crucial design decisions were made at a series of developed interactive games, created the first online discussion groups, fought over what technical standards to adopt, and ran headfirst into issues still software, how to govern the Internet. Once again, though, the authors don't interpret the picture they're painting in such studious detail. The Internet, barely in the government's hands in the first place, was hijacked by the students, who seemed to be more interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons than the Internet reflect the strange counterculture these students conjured up out of Pentagon funds? Readers who want a more complete picture should read two designed computer games based on science fiction and used the Internet to fashion a universe of their own. Building the Internet was not simply about building a better mousetrap; it was, for its creators, also about building a better and smarter, and wildly utopian, world. That story remains to be intellectual rests on this work, which whites felt brought black writing of other collections of fiction in his lifetime. Some of the fugitive pieces of fiction he did publish in magazines and journals are collected in Flying Home and Other Stories, along with some very early unpublished work. The also seen the publication of a volume of his collected essays and one of his advent that produced only excerpts here and there. The adulatory reception of an even greater book, that is. He might have especially felt this pressure as the years went by and public expectation grew with the wait. Perhaps he said Whatever the case, the payoff from Invisible Man was welcome partly because he was the first black writer to win a National Book the major literary prizes. In the age of integration, this endorsement of reception also had much to do with his attitude toward writing and toward race. engagement, in the primacy of aesthetics over the political and sociological dimensions of literature. These beliefs are reasonable enough, even liberating for black artists burdened by the political demands of their race. But they were also in concord with the dogma of the white literary establishment (a dogma that persists to this day): that art should transcend the social didn't drag the bugaboo of race into the literary act. "I wasn't, and am not," from the late 1930s to the middle 1940s. Thus, the tendency is to see the stories not in their own right, judging them strictly on the basis of their own some unknown writer had written them? Are they worthy of our attention when not easy to answer. These are obviously apprentice works, the equivalent of how to write fiction. And while it is true that no author, no matter how accomplished, ever ceases to struggle with the craft of writing, there is surely a difference between that stage when one is fumbling around, trying to discover if one can even be a writer, and the stage where one is fully confident of addressing the world as nothing but a writer, because one is as compelled to write as to breathe. Isn't the entire premise of this collection based on the idea that they suggest a culmination, an arrival, in Invisible hard to spot. The old man who tells of his dream of flying around heaven in literary game does not address the significance of these stories. What is of story about a lynching and an airplane crash told from the point of view of a reader an ironic, ambiguous tale of a white boy, a moral innocent, coming of abandoned a career in music for one in literature. He was reading a great deal, trying to establish his literary ancestry and ascertain precisely the kind of writer he could be. The struggle with influences and the experiments with points of view, narrative mode, characterization, realism, surrealism, thus, baldly apparent here. There are several stories about "riding the rods," replicate what was done in the earlier novel. Buster and the narrator are process of becoming an artist with that of becoming a man. Throughout the meanings relating to sexual desire (the horny young boys), artistic creation (the instrument of jazz), and masculinity (the symbol of a bull). But the its characters but with its intention of being larger than itself. The two most successful stories here, "That I Had the stories further illustrate the unease, even hostility, that blacks have tended to feel about their folklore, and about black history generally: In "That I Had the black pilot who seeks escape hates the black farmer who rescued him after not only the various ideologies that are presented to him as masks or leadership his own race wishes him to fulfill. Similarly, in these two stories, the pilot and the two boys are, in effect, fighting against the power of race consciousness as a form of conformity, even as they are trying to find their society and his group, and the way they assign him roles and identities. But he was among the first to explore them with a level of intellectual verve and artistic sophistication that suggested to blacks and the world that there and immediate political protest but the broad and rich possibilities of the human condition itself. Whatever the merit of these stories, it is certainly This restlessness helps explain his obsessive and often hallucinatory depictions, from his first pictures to his last, of houses and rooms. "Looking at the picture ought to rest the brain," he told his younger brother and The gorgeous golden bed with its heavy white pillow squeezed right from the paintings, scattered far and wide, gathered here for once in a lifetime. Van firmly in his time and place and acknowledges his spirited engagement with surveys the artist's chronological development as a painter, grouping the seek to synthesize recent thinking on him, of which, it should be said, there now.) The modest aim of the exhibition and the catalog is to refocus our attention on the paintings as paintings, directing our attention to how van artist's "defense against disintegration" painted a few days before his death. The oncoming zigzag crows, swarming like the black choppers in Apocalypse classic and deeply felt essay, it's hard to see this picture as anything other as a celebration of the love for 'art and life' professed by the painter in one black from his palette. Those crows have escaped from an earlier phase of his putting into the dish." And yet, what a weird painting. Seeing the picture in figures, especially the young man to the left wearing what appears to be a he is still mulling over the book, in which "the most beautiful passage" is where "the poor slave, knowing that he must die, and sitting for the last time with his wife, remembers the words 'Let Cares like a wild deluge come/ And storms of sorrow fall,/ May I but safely reach my home,/ My God, my Heaven, my moments of emotion and inspiration which give him a feeling of an eternal home For this painter who once claimed to be "daffy with piety," our earthly habitation, slave cabin, or peasant hovel is merely temporary. illuminating the darkness and its loaded juxtaposition on the background wall of ticking clock and Crucifixion, time and eternity. The early A Pair of holed up in his thatched cottage in the Black Forest after the war, thinking about "The Origin of the Work of Art." "From the dark opening of the worn shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening too has a secret strangeness, which has to do with scale. The background of the painting suggests a clearing in a landscape, with trees in the distance. One suddenly has the illusion that the shoes are huge, monumental. They reach out to each other like a couple lost in the wilderness, one upright and confident, the other one slouched down in despair. A whole poetry of the ordinary came out paintings suggests what this show might have been, in the hands of curators more interested in social context. There are only two works on paper in the enlarged the traced image, replaced the subdued blacks and grays of the kimono available women; and flat, shadowless color. It is no exaggeration to say that little town surrounded by fields all covered with yellow and purple flowers; catalog, has no obvious center. The gnarled and wonderfully drawn branches toward the bottom break into the allover blossoms, with their red detail and subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best free speech in this spirit, as an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he groups to enlist the state in efforts either to suppress speech they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty." The constitutional of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be "equal" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of The historical part of this analysis rests on a canard, which is the assertion that the constitutional law of free speech emerged from emerged at the time of World War I, and the principal figures in its classical liberals; they were progressives. They abhorred the doctrine of natural rights because, in their time, that doctrine was construed to cover not courts did not display a libertarian attitude toward civil rights; they displayed a libertarian attitude toward economic rights, tending to throw out legislation aimed at regulating industry and protecting workers on the grounds that people had a constitutional right to enter into contracts and to use their health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies. of the donkey to drool") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old "right administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry "opposing viewpoints" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using enhance the "robustness" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, "in the late 1980s the AIDS regarding the scope and direction of publicly funded medical research. To community, so long hidden from view." This seems completely wrongheaded. People photographs objectionable because they depicted homosexuality. They found them objectionable because they depicted sadomasochism. The notion that it was what have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather a time when AIDS had become a national health problem and the issue of gays in to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech. effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe ago, reporting a general puzzlement among reviewers. Some reviewers were said prose style. Someone else was said to have deplored a lack of moral firmness in reactions, as summarized in Slate, don't do justice to the book. field is journalism, not fiction, which may surprise readers, but shouldn't. he has written journalism from time to time ever since. Kidnapping is an old theme of his. Years ago he composed a screenplay described as a injustice; the United States hovering in the distance; a hostage situation. But The author says very little about the United States, apart from noting that, at unsettling and dangerous aspect of his personality was his total inability to direct commentaries on his own cast of characters. He shows us the consequences for a complicating factor. We meet the young hit men who guarded the kidnap victims, and odors of fatalism, superstition, and barbarism waft upward from the page, in an unmistakable indication that we are in the presence of the still more brutality of his own, and we can see that, in a perverse way, he did feel something of a righteous indignation. He managed even to demand that the wonderfully bizarre demand for a crime chief to make. And with details like victims in their different safe houses, the efforts by the husband of one of out a bit less leafy, due to the traumas of translation. doubtless better than most. Still, there are passages that, while perfectly translation, "In the bloom of her early thirties, she had married in the Catholic Church at the age of nineteen, and had given her husband five in the flower of her thirties, she had been married by the Catholic Church at nineteen, and she had given her husband five children." And of mangled passages which is exactly what the author never meant to have happen. original), in which the quaintness has somehow blossomed into something monstrosity. A primitive among provincials. A man whose defective moral sense included a grotesquely exaggerated loyalty to a limited number of people in his still could not figure out how to live outside his own country, away from the people trying to hunt him down. A cornered beast, terrorized and the start of the book that writing News of a Kidnapping was "the saddest and most difficult" task of his life. But apart from that and a playful wave at write a book!"), nothing in the narrative draws attention to the author or to his way of telling the story. This, too, must disappoint readers looking for the pleasures of an intricately constructed novel. News of a Kidnapping Bug. Works like "Shoot" made Burden famous within art circles, after a the 1960s and 1970s. Like pop and minimalism, it was provocatively easy to make. Aside from the hours spent documenting such feats, and recovering from "Pizza City" is one of the highlights of the show. There are no guns or glass shards here, however; Burden has abandoned drama for a childlike laboriousness. Composed of thousands of miniature parts, "Pizza City" is a scale model of a minus the trains. Some of the houses, shrubs, trees, and cars actually come become skyscrapers, factories, freeways. The result is likable, but not much more. It's a kid's toy, albeit one that an established artist devoted seven Such cottage industriousness is the ruling spirit of the solemn, not whimsical: stretches of miniature Western highway so realistic that photographs of them are indistinguishable from photos of real highways. called "Self Portrait with Homemade Clothes," Ray learned how to sew his own make a watch from scratch. Obsession is the name of the game. Devote three months to a project, and you're a hobbyist. Devote seven years, and you're in has always been a buzzword in the art world, a less corny, more is measured against. Obsession, after all, is what connects increasingly 15,000-page fantasy about little girls with penises, to insider artists such as their hands. This is ridiculous. For most artists, fewer sales means less time to work, more time spent paying the rent. The explanation for the artist's personal commitment. Even the worst work demands from you the admission that at least the artists are authentic. They've put in too much curators call Burden one of the two role models for the mostly younger artists names for its idiosyncratic imagery and writing detailed, incomprehensible to visual art as such. He disparaged painting as "retinal stupidity." the works on display here could be seen as personal variations on the "Large Glass." They vary enormously in appearance, since appearances are not inkblot drawings. The only visual quality they have in common is a dogged intricacy. This intricacy isn't just unlike minimalism; it is its ideological opposite. Minimalist art was simple, serious, and totally public. It sat on the wall and left us to make up our own minds about what it was all about. bizarre idiolect. Both, however, leave us out in the cold. like this might have at least had a polemical feminist edge. Now it just comes the fortress of the self is a permanent one. Art history has flickered out, he says, and though art will continue to be made, each artist will follow his or her bliss, without any larger motive or connective scheme. It's "Pizza City" forever. Walking around this Biennial, which happens to be the last of the way of being wrong. There are reasons to be optimistic about the future of art, about the Old South, full of sex, cannibalism, chivalry, folklore, and humor. It isn't always easy to figure out what she is talking about. Her stories, too, can seem hermetic, like pictures from a private universe. But most of the time, to their shared national past. Walker makes History painting, that musty patriarchal fossil, seem like the most seditious and vital new idea of the enacted by our own legislators, chosen by the people for that purpose. law is a mass of opinions and decisions which courts and judicial philosophy are now usefully collated in this volume, which consists of few of these students befriend their senators, or find some other way to become statute or regulation, these judges, reared on the common law, too often treat the enacted text as just one more precedent to circumvent. In other words, they observed." The only democratically binding feature of a statute is its literal language, because that language alone has been ratified by both houses of constitutional interpretation. Its adherents tether their interpretations to plain meanings as they were understood when the text was first penned. reprise of the traditional jeremiad against judicial usurpation concludes with unelected judge determined to impose the values of an elite few upon the majority of the moment will begin to insist ever more stridently on judges of its particular ideological stripe. Once on the bench, these judicial about encoding the popular will into law, to the detriment of unpopular her response, this is an odd coda, especially given the majoritarian premises judges, but hers is the more traditional anxiety, rooted in a fear of elites.) democracy too far, contends that the individual rights favored by judges tend vehicles for implementing a popular will that changes from moment to moment. Besides, judges can't be relied on: Supreme Court justices, for instance, are prescriptions have long drawn fire from legal academics. Some of their between what the Constitution says and what its framers expected it to He justifiably laments the virtual disregard of statutory interpretation in predominates despite the fact that most law nowadays takes the form of statutes also rightly rejects the use of "legislative history" (committee reports and floor debates) as a guide to divining lawmakers' intent. Committee reports are worthless, not only because they lack a democratic pedigree, but because they legislative history is like looking over the heads at a cocktail party until all, can be plenty wooden and unimaginative themselves. certainly become more popular among his bench mates. The simplest proof of this is the remarkable increase in citations to dictionaries in Supreme Court reputation for stiltedness; reading some of these opinions is like listening to devotees of the "Living Constitution" like Tribe now declare their fidelity to text. It's surprising that Tribe's essay doesn't discuss his textualist Citing almost no cases, Tribe told the Supreme Court that the Colorado initiative violated the letter of the Equal Protection Clause because it denied convince a majority of the court to strike down the amendment, despite a lack Equal Protection Clause, grounding his arch dissent firmly in More, and the Roper poll. Its decision, which Tribe defended before the court earlier this month, is almost certain to be reversed, probably on textualist grounds. Most of the current textual infidelity, though, occurs because the today's judges to live with adventurous Supreme Court decisions from earlier in his dissents, he often calls upon the court to scour away layers of encrusted precedent in order to get at the original meaning of the underlying text. asking since the colonial era, fitting the answer to the needs of the moment. resentment of the overweening powers of royal judges. As early as the 1780s, judicial power responds to the demands of the time merely proves that "there have always been willful judges who bend the law to their wishes." arguments have shaped the debate in our time; he has gone a long way toward not yet succeeded in building a durable majority on the court. Does this mean that unpopular individual rights are in peril? More likely, it simply goes to appointment as an independent counsel. In that case, a lawyer is free to investigate more or less whatever catches his fancy, for as long as he likes, spending as much of the public's money as he deems necessary. The passing of a petty scandal, the resignation of a target, even a change in administrations is is the least of them. One special prosecutor is still deciding whether to tickets from a poultry company. There's even a counsel, holed up somewhere in Urban Development scandal, which dates from two administrations and more than prosecutor may decide to forgo charges so that he can devote his energies to a case that is more important and easier to win. But, for the independent counsel, there is no other case. Were he to announce that his scandal didn't justify criminal proceedings after all, he would be declaring himself a failure who had wasted the public's time and money. After he returned to his law practice in the sticks, no one would ever hear from him again. Much better to keep digging, declare that indictments are just around the corner, and hold off on releasing that final report just a few months longer. In retrospect, it seems obvious that combining these chance, and it appeared at first to be a bit of brilliant casting. In his plodder and a stickler for detail, with no ability to play politics or work the of the foibles that afflicted his investigation. As a piece of writing, it is repetitive, unfocused, and confusing. It feels like it goes on for seven years. sight of the question of why anyone should still care. from the immunized testimony, the unavoidable tainting of the prosecution's pitching a fit to try to prevent Congress from granting immunity to the chief protagonists. His second mistake, which he does not acknowledge, was failing to admit defeat after the grants of immunity predictably ruined his case. Once the trying to lock up other officials whose behavior, while far from exemplary, was neither venal nor as outrageous as that of the ringleaders going free. seems to lose touch with his judiciousness, if not his deliberateness. Instead of conceding, he redoubles his efforts. As he keeps missing his targets, he takes aim at less and less compelling ones, desperate to convict someone, instead for concealing the existence of some of his personal notes. But flailing after targets large and small in his attempt to vindicate his because he chose to persist with the policy of arms for hostages, even though on; he was clearly obsessed with the hostages, and clung to any hope of setting them free. And indeed, three of seven were released in apparent conjunction with the arms sales, which does not constitute an overwhelming failure, however the information in his head in any meaningful way. Interviewed on videotape as inconsistencies in the former president's answers as if they actually meant both pathetically weak and astonishingly powerful. Alone on the parched plains precious grain. But one blink of a starving boy's hollow eyes, captured on emotions, finances, and armies of the greatest nations on earth. demonstrating the good will of Western governments and charitable has come to view aid and charity "as an industry, as religion, as a corruption that gave rise to famine and anarchy in the first place. If international humanitarianism is to preserve its legitimacy, both governments and private humanitarian organizations must confront critiques such as humanitarian intervention as an instance of what economists call "moral hazard." The classic example of moral hazard comes from insurance: Because you have it, you feel protected against your own mistakes and behave in a riskier manner, increasing the chances that you will suffer a loss. Fire insurance increases the chance your house will burn down; for those inclined toward fraud, it even raises the incentive to burn the house down. In the sphere of international aid, it is pretty clear that the infusion of Western food and cash has often undermined the determination and capacity of developing states to pull themselves up by their own there and dig if they get more food than they can eat free from CARE?" help also cushions venal Third World governments from the consequences of their clinch the case for abolishing international assistance entirely. The appropriate response to his horror stories is, "Yes, but." Yes, insurance. Yes, domestic welfare programs are riddled with perverse incentives, but we still need a social safety net. Yes, international aid is frequently intervention can ameliorate or prevent some humanitarian disasters. coming up with guidelines that preserve the moral purpose of humanitarian aid to define the components of what we consider "good causes" and then to set up "a hierarchy of concerns" to deal with the often contradictory demands of individual rights." What he comes up with is specific and nuanced in its economic assistance to the democratic inclinations of a recipient government. Aid to a democratic government facing a rebellion is also acceptable. So is may not really be organic "nations" after all. It also fails to recognize that sometimes, the only criteria would rule out much of a role for leadership by the United States (or, the United States, on its own, had dispatched a few warships to stop the And, I might add, hasn't the United States' noninterference in its colonial policy "maxims" reads less like an antidote to the current confusion than an has trouble fitting sovereignty into his analysis. On the one hand, he is particularly good at documenting the phenomenon of the aid worker who mutters scornfully about his household servants. In almost every frustrated development of those who "do development" tend to blur the distinction between assisting the village leaders taking money from the farmers who worked so hard to pay "Yet the only thing I could have done would have been to get involved politically, to take power, to lead, ultimately to rule." He suggests the consequences of that impulse are always dangerous. Just look at what happened the other hand, he writes at another point, "Humanitarianism is political. It takes commitment. And it comes with risks." But this formulation would suggest love" sent abroad. All financial assistance to the developing world should be contingent not only on economic reform in recipient countries but on political freedom as well. When military intervention proves unavoidable, we should be less fastidious about national sovereignty, and all the more determined to set right the underlying political conditions that led to disaster. United States might not have been drawn into bigger factional problems later on. The overly respectful way the United States and its allies handled the ostensible reluctance to involve ourselves in costly overseas conflicts, and our ostensible respect for the national sovereignty of the foreign countries. But once we're in, we're in. Better, perhaps, to sort things out thoroughly in the short run, and to prevent even greater devastation for all concerned down Library on International Development is another source for material on these issues. To approach humanitarian aid from the perspective of a few of its organization dedicated to helping humanitarian organizations raise global awareness and encourage support for relief efforts via the Internet." The Humanitarian Reporting notes that the media often only report on the "crisis of the moment," and aims to "encourage better reporting of humanitarian, development and related issues." Meanwhile, a site established which took place last fall, gives you a firsthand glimpse of the frequently crass world of the relief business (note the long list of commercial exhibitors naming of autobiographies is a minor art. A great title can be nobly direct dispute between Random House and a West German publisher, with huge libel problems looming; it was withdrawn shortly after publication, and became one of the books most often stolen from public libraries. Now, five years after its unfortunate change of name, this ghastly and hypnotic memoir lives up to its hair (yellow? orange? rotting gold?), the sandpaper voice, the glint of a sharp intellect beneath a brutish exterior. He emitted a strange kind of electricity; before he even said a word on screen, he put everything and everyone on edge. playfulness, his sense of being slyly amused by a mad world and his own mad self. He will live into posterity on the strength of the five films he made nihilistic martinet who leads an Amazon expedition toward nothingness, is one of the great human monsters in movie history. But for the most part, his the part. He began acting in Berlin and regional theaters, developing a reputation for savagely accented classical performances and electrifying English thrillers and war flicks. Addicted to quick work and upfront salaries, he quickly gravitated toward the lower road: countless crime serials, young and old, in a grotesque pornographic idiom that excludes sensual producers, writers, actors, journalists, and generally, all individuals who are actively sets out to make himself appear the biggest creep who ever walked the when I was asleep I pissed on my sister because I dreamed she was a tree," tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or been described as unwatchable by the few people who have watched it.) On and on it goes, sickening and tedious by turns. But this book is weirdly enjoyable for what is not in it: conventional film gossip, long stretches, you'll be wondering, "What year are we in?" or even, "What decade?" There are no dates, and few hard facts; movies are referred to as "some piece of crap," directors, as "some idiot." (The "New York actress slut" attached.) He doesn't even give the full names of his various wives. You also wonder whether certain things actually happened. Some of the sexual escapades sound curiously like unfulfilled fantasies. Phrases recur in them like literary Eventually, a genre crisis sets in. Is this autobiography, or an autobiographical novel? It becomes an interesting game to guess at the real whose fits of rage come and go like squalls, whose childish enthusiasm for more arch, cold, stylish. Also, there are strange discontinuities between the two versions: each has material omitted from the other, and the new "uncut" edition is actually much more cautious naming names. All this will have to be only to certain tastes. Amateur psychologists may enjoy it as a sort of misery can savor its underlying sadness and futility. And as always with laughter. As I put this wretched book down, I thought I heard a cackle from confirmed by the ongoing opening of the archives and the sterling work this, however, changes the old consensus that the grand strategy of the Cold similar containment on the eastern front, where the Pentagon was building direct war, and by learning to avoid entanglement in local struggles, the West eventually won the peace. The West prevailed because nuclear weapons imposed a brittle truce, shifting the conflict to the economic rivalry in which the West's greater resources and adaptability could produce both guns and butter, for markets and raw materials was at least as responsible for the Cold War. Now pivotal issue of who was to blame, his conclusion is "authoritarianism in Evil in general: the Soviet system. To prove his point, he cites figures though such awful spoils of war hardly address the moral argument of good and evil in the Cold War itself. And even though it was widely known that many of taken prisoner by the Allies, abandoning the women to pay for the dreadfulness been difficult to argue. Its advocates must grapple with the ugly facts of racial segregation in the United States; of the latter's hardheaded if spasmodic support of its allies' futile efforts to cling to their colonial empires; and of the West's readiness to support loathsome regimes in the name becomes subordination of state to Commie purposes." Normally the most Foreign Ministry and party archives have so far yielded little that is illuminating, and the Soviet military and intelligence archives are still country with his own partisan resources, was far too prickly to knuckle under. combining executive leadership with a careful acknowledgment of individual essence, that this managerial style went beyond the difference between Western allies and Soviet satellites, even beyond the distinction between the United authoritarians were products of a more benign political heritage than the "crushing economic pressure" on their currencies was hardly a collegial way to brought their own historic baggage to the task of creating a new world order capitalist and Communist systems that long predated both men. while the Cold War still raged. It took a little more courage for a Western historian to say that then than it does to say it now, with the long it did make one serious point: that the United States had clear national and economic interests and found the Cold War an unusually congenial way to pursue epitaph of the Cold War was written at its birth, by Soviet Foreign Minister in your own country, on switching on the radio, you would be hearing not so applications of the principles of 'equal opportunity' would in practice mean the veritable economic enslavement of the small states and their subjugation to the rule and arbitrary will of strong and enriched foreign firms, banks, and industrial corporations? Was this what we fought for when we battled the glitzy glamour of rumbustious capitalism were exactly what people wanted. The West prevailed because it was rich, rather than because it was good. It would be nice to say that we were rich because we were good, but the randomness of the market and the casual ethics of the hidden hand allow no such theocratic spooky resemblance between these two memoirs? Both were written by actresses famous for playing ethereal, damaged, or somehow incomplete souls. Both actresses chronicle restless, unstable childhoods, capped, in each case, by a quick rise to fame. Both regretfully conclude that they were unprepared for this early acclaim, and that missing out on the trial and error of adolescence caused them permanent damage. Considering how successful these women have been, each of them spends surprisingly little time talking about her work and quite a woman's life was a difficult genius known for his neurotic, darkly comic leads us to another intriguing similarity between Leaving a Doll's House Critics have asked tough questions about the writers' judgment and motives: How could these women just sit by and let this happen? Why should we believe either one when she says that her book is an attempt to understand what happened, and complained that Bloom asks for more sympathy than she deserves. In a pitiless wrote that Farrow exaggerates the emotional damage wrought by an early bout "One can discern, through the pious gloss Bloom puts on the events of her life, her celebrity and touting her famous friends ("the glitterati chorus"), and Why the discomfort? One suspects, in part, a generational women assigned to write about women for the elite media, many of them a decade women to stop harping about men and start taking care of their own lives. Most of all, they think that women control what they do with their bodies. As long as they consent to something, they can't be victims. This last idea is, in the reaction points to a new, jaded distrust of celebrity. The days when we confusion, insecurity, and no common sense. While this sounds reasonable enough, it overlooks the most gruesome similarity of all: that in the case of Bloom and of Farrow both, it is crippling passivity that brought them to the public eye in the first place and crippling passivity that kept them there. ambition, she writes, "to become an actress as young as I did was to enter a facts of life, I was always ill at ease in the company of men." Farrow's entry into the cloister was even less thought out. She was born into it. Her father as a child, Farrow planned to escape the narrow, competitive world of acting, forced her to start earning money. Thereafter she never left the fishbowl, and when she says she never enjoyed it, you believe her. She bounced from one actress knew what she wanted, and each was rewarded for her ignorance. When inexperience and eagerness to please made her the perfect actress to star relationship with Bloom for material. At one point, he even planned to name a character in his novel Deception --a hideous, dowdy actress and an beauty, and her pained, abstracted stare. (She accurately describes herself as uncanny. Each courtship begins with the great man sending charming but oddly formal notes to his beloved or having his secretary call to determine the time, are less interested in the women's recommendations. Both loathe their lovers' children and strive to avoid them. Each acts as if everything is all right, opera, having to make arrangements for Bloom's mother's funeral, and (less unreasonably) having to deal with Bloom's nervousness in the face of illness. her the year before. There were explosions, too, writes Farrow, "when I didn't know the name of a certain kind of pasta; and again when I was off in my sort of selflessness, the kind that results from the failure to develop a self. Their celebrity didn't shield them from the consequences of their passivity. In fact, we have watched them be passive on screen for years, and we have applauded. The Passive Woman has long been one of the most cherished staples of our culture, high and low. Who better to play her on screen? justifies the truly rotten choices both Bloom and Farrow have made. And you can't help but be glad that women these days are at least being told to take care of themselves. But it is curious that these actresses should be attacked instead of encouraged in their efforts to change. (Or maybe it isn't so Observer last week with a little temper tantrum at his mom.) Leaving a Doll's House and What Falls Away seem less like vindictive, manipulative performances than like baby steps in the right direction. They're every bit as awkward as their critics accuse them of being. It's unnerving to hear the muse speak at last, as if a character had escaped from fiction to tell her story for the first time. Her voice is unsteady, and her conclusions sometimes seem canned, evasive, not yet complete. Bloom glides over her motives. Farrow is humorless and steeped in a bottomless melancholy. Still, better late than never. The Passive Woman deserves a little more of our support. It'll be a good thing for all of us if she finally gets into the habit works too well to have been produced by chance alone. Life must have been designed by some intelligent being, possibly one that was divine. Reading the an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University, is "the most brilliant and is also an adamant atheist. His work is basically one long argument that natural selection, and natural selection alone, is sufficient to explain the seemingly miraculous variety, beauty, and ingenuity of living things. The persuade his peers and charm the public. He excels at coining pithy phrases and reductionist view that all organisms are vehicles created by genes seeking to asks us to imagine the myriad forms of life inhabiting a vast mountain. At its bacteria and algae. On the peaks are species that seem least likely to have been produced by happenstance, such as spiders, whose webs are marvels of reminds us that natural selection produces such creatures through a series of incremental steps that "smear out" their improbability over long periods of time. To reinforce this point, he tells us how he constructed a computer program that, with only a few rules for guidance, could "learn" to construct webs remarkably similar to those built by real spiders. didacticism is more than counterbalanced by the transparency of his prose and his genuine delight in the intricacies of nature. His description toward the power struggles with fig trees is a model of nature writing, at once lyrical intelligent design is also bracing. He openly loathes those who discern divine flowers were put on earth to "make the world pretty." "I was touched by this," selection alone, just does not seem inevitable enough. winning the big one is easy. He allows that at first glance, it seems almost tendency of all physical systems to drift toward disorder. This force "altruistic" individuals, who sacrifice their own selfish interests for those of their herd, or their species, or even the entire ecosystem in which they are embedded. The most extreme version of this concept, called "group selection," that the phenomena they attempt to explain can all be accounted for with lend it more power than it really has. In one passage, for example, he likens it to a force or "pressure" that "drives evolution up the slopes of Mount Improbable." This image offers a grossly distorted view of evolution. For triceratops, and other multicellular creatures commenced. Viewed this way, the ascent from the foothills of Mount Improbable to its multicellular aeries brings up the origin of life. "My guess is that life probably isn't all that remarks. "But there are arguments to the contrary." There certainly are. conclusive evidence that life exists elsewhere in the universe. (The discovery of organic matter in a meteorite, reported in early August, represents at best an extremely circumstantial piece of evidence for life on Mars.) as far as we know, life emerged here on earth only once. In spite of the immensely powerful tools of modern biotechnology, scientists still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory. They really have no idea how exactly life began, or whether its emergence was in some sense inevitable or simply a began, it was able to persist for so long and to proliferate into such an possible variants of a given species, the vast majority never reproduce; they are failures, dead ends. There are many more ways to be a loser in the game of life, he asserts, than to be a success. Surely that holds true for all of life, itself? But life has managed, nonetheless, not only to endure but also to utterly improbable we are, because I have discussed the matter with him. Yet he truth too directly, we will succumb to creationism or mysticism or theories of the great paradoxes of our era before we slip into darkness: The more that science explains our existence, the more implausible we seem. On the contrary: The facts that she juggles have sat in the public domain for nicknames like "Ape" and "Marmot," and not a moment of privacy. spent her teens getting over a nervous breakdown (the recovery was delayed by libido at this stage was, according to Lee, dribbled away on childish crushes brutal workload of reviews, dreaming of delicate but radical new ways to tell a For lack of a better word, this is the most lifelike story, and this frees her up to tease it into all kinds of subtle themes in much the same way you or I might retrospectively organize our lives under such tells us what sensory data the little girl would have absorbed: the constant smell of cigars, the pale yellow shade covering the window that overlooked the sea. Later chapters calmly walk us through some of the more hotly debated friendships supplied critical nurturing, Lee says, and the famous affair with by stoically caring for her during her breakdowns, but he comes across as stiff, humorless, and inclined to unconsciously pull male rank. quixotic brain chemistry, she took notes on her moods, observing when her head felt "cool and quiet" or "sizzling." She was precociously attuned to the interplay of mind and body, far more so than her peers. One also wonders abandoning fiction for the memoir. Probably not: Her ambition, love of Yet she felt the impulse to tell her story directly. Lee guesses that it was literary competitors) that she kept herself from doing so. Here is her despairing diary entry after she visited a memoir club and read a chapter aloud: "I couldn't help figuring a kind of uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males; to whose genial cheerful sense my revelations were at once mawkish and distasteful. What ever possessed me to lay bare my soul!" left no room for her childhood catastrophes, her anger at getting a girl's paltry education, her palpable delight in reading. To discuss such experiences would become a hallmark of modernism. But she was afraid to go too far, to alienate all the "genial cheerful" men whose standards she continued to revealing and concealing. To be perfectly honest, I think the tension hurt her them frustratingly indirect, circular, dissociative. Now I begin to understand wiser and more realistic than just about everything else on the subject. In writer's duty to explain this change to readers. Note the humble attention to for her peers, but she also understood if people found her overweeningly undergraduate." She knew that modernism was a work in progress, not a new more flexible than one might think. She was no dogmatist. She even thought "feminist" was a "dead and corrupt word" now that women had the right to earn a living. But later in life she argued that it was not enough for women to get rooms of their own in which to become towering, dominant writers like men. She challenged the ugly human desire to be towering and dominant. She went, as always, to the question of human character, wondering if there might be a moral advantage in the centuries women had spent as anonymous people of no status. She played with the notion of a Society of Outsiders "without office, meetings, leaders, or any hierarchy, without so much as a form to be filled up, or a might seem to have worn pretty well. But in the partisan 1930s, it was dismissed as dotty and vague. She sank into depression. It didn't help that fiction writing was becoming harder, and that war was approaching. Given that brave one. But it cast a shadow over her life. It made her story too readily available to people who wanted to see her as a victim, or a crusader, or a devoted herself to literature and believed in the rights of women, but both down to "the essential thing" is how she put it when talking about literature. "Freedom from unreal loyalties" is the striking phrase in her late feminist everything nontechnical I could get my hands on concerning topology, which my dictionary defines as "a branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of a geometric figure which do not vary when the figure is transformed in certain ways." However arcane, it was the most anecdotally fascinating area of qualities of the torus, or doughnut. That I couldn't have begun to understand the theory didn't trouble me, although I did feel that I was misappropriating back into its body, making inner and outer a single surface and the whole a on a little psychedelic journey contemplating the paradox. charge obtainable from his descriptions of anomalies of memory and perception; lack of knowledge of the exact workings of the cerebral cortex is hardly a can see ourselves reflected variously, with one element out of whack, reader to reflect upon those delicate and unaccountable features of the brain, ordinarily taken for granted, with appropriate wonder. The lure of the case study as a literary genre has been insufficiently examined. It can take a number of forms: the prurient (as in imaginable even as it brings him torment. He cannot forget anything, and if he needs to put something out of mind, he has to take a mental walk down his mental road and dig a mental hole in which to bury it; he is also afflicted (if "afflicted" is the word) with synesthesia, as well as with an uncertain grasp can be said of Sacks, who clearly loves his subjects. In An Anthropologist the world of his subjects, seeing their daily lives, traveling with them (most of his earlier cases were observed in hospital settings), and consequently his accounts become the more affecting even as they involve more hard science. But the lay reader can bypass the technical data embedded in the story of the painter who became totally colorblind following an accident (and a possible formerly dependent on color who came to forget what color was, and to value his all are acutely recognizable in human terms. The reader might be forgiven for that one possesses every symptom; rather, it is a measure of Sacks' imaginative capacity for feeling empathy, and for transmitting the same. We come to see that the varieties of human behavior are not fenced off into plots. My tics and different kind of book, even if it could be superficially described as affected by them are described by Sacks with his habitual sympathy and writing has many charms, among them an avuncular presence, an unaffected storyteller's voice not often found in popularized science writing these days. In this book Sacks makes it clear how much this owes to the works he read as a road not taken, and here he indulges his continuing interest. But it is not his ostensible subject, so he relegates much of what he has to say about appear in the back of the volume, making it necessary to read the thing with two bookmarks. While this might sound unwieldy, it soon establishes its own In any case, the diseases in question and the flora in the margins are intrinsically connected, the tissue being the nature of the islands that decimated the island's population and enforced inbreeding, causing a been afflicted); there are many theories afloat, one of them involving the about the causes of the disease (which might hold a clue to the unsolved mysteries surrounding its Western relatives) is hardly separable from his affection for the plant. At one point, he is so taken by a large cycad cone impulsively, and almost vanished in a large cloud of pollen." This is comical, and he knows it, but it is also characteristic of the love and wonder he feels for the myriad adaptations of life, especially its most wayward forms. Colorblind is an odd book, part case study, part travelogue, part weave of digressions, but this oddness is a measure of the personality that unifies it. It also reflects the fact that the islands are the subject here, in both the literary and the clinical sense of the word, and that disease, flora, and topography are all essential and inseparable constituents of their dossier. his mind. This openness is what makes him such a sympathetic observer of others, and also what can best persuade the apprehensive lay reader that distrusting them. In her essays, she has confidently found narrative the jitters at the mere thought of spinning out a tale. The anxious narrators of her disjointedly elliptical novels are always interrupting, challenging, undercutting themselves. By fits and starts: that is how they write, a stylized mold of her predecessors, sensitive yet impassive females proficient at forgetting and at never looking far ahead. She has learned how to evade her of radiation treatments for breast cancer behind her, has distanced herself "capacity for passive detachment." In fact, on the day when the action of the novel begins, she walks off the campaign, without a clue as to what she plans and then "a montage, music over." The quest to assemble the shards of In short, The Last Thing He Wanted looks like proof of what you may have suspected for some time: that for all its restlessness exhilarating surprise of her new novel is that in it, she masters one of the anticlimactic, fragmented fiction will find it hard to believe, but her fifth novel has perfect pitch and pace, and is hauntingly hard to put down. is that suspense and plot, though never before part of the technique of about narrative, its possibilities and deceptions. Her protagonists are mysterious men who hover at the edge of their lives, in love with them. These what end they maneuver has never been clear, and the women, who in their remote way are drawn to them, can't bring themselves to care. The point has been that to the bottom of the mystery for once, and a parable that had long since begun of one of those male dealers in dangerous merchandise, her father, Dick barely knows what she is doing when she buys a ticket to see her father in arrival, the daughter who missed her mother's funeral has a chance to make amends for a lifelong habit of aloofness. (Finally, a narrator who makes a motive clear!) Filling in for her father on his latest deal, she accompanies a the time you've pieced this much together, the plot has deepened to involve where, as the narrator puts it in a knowing pastiche of official jargon, those "trying to create a context for democracy" are "maybe getting [their] hands a little dirty in the process or just opting out, letting the other guy call it." this history is not as random as it might seem. It's an eerie blend of careful plays out the process of converting "humanitarian resupply" into "lethal shadier men with terrorist friends and lots of experience in international subterfuge are busy plotting with "the other guy" to make such an "effort" narrator explains: "Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity." It is not overarching moral or political has long since declined into corruption and cynicism. It is emotional meaning that she registers, with a vivid simplicity and in the unlikeliest of places. on has always been an expert on coolness, numbness, in hot climates. This time, at the heart of a carefully constructed thriller is a romance, which is heroines did their best to deny. She has exchanged a hollow life for a "heightened life," and has tried to "comprehend all its turns, get its possibilities." People who do that, the narrator observes, "are at heart appreciation of his work can give you a pain in the neck. In churches and make for a believable scene in the heavens: the figures foreshortened as if the eye toward the infinite. Perched so often on scaffolding as he painted, and to that of his associates. Since ceilings and wall frescoes don't travel well, the curators have had to rely on portable paintings and works on paper. as a trade like any other, surrounding himself with a workshop of assistants, said to prefer the company of his fellow workmen to that of the wealthy patrons Venetian Republic and died before the revolutionary upheavals of the last his compositions, especially when high and low come unexpectedly into contact. Paintings that seem at first sight to be sober treatments of an enduring order turn out on closer inspection to have pockets of deep pathos or subtle pictures of saints are particularly moving, especially when their attention is above him: a round sun with a human face and four pairs of wings that shoots involvement in Venetian theater, suggests sex for pay, with the crone in the cue from a contemporary retelling of the myth and updated the murderous missile to a tennis ball. In the foreground of the huge painting, next to Hyacinth's slackly in the background. The appalled Apollo makes an operatic gesture of horror over his muscular lover, while a satyr and a parrot (symbols of forbidden lust) stare sardonically down at the proceedings. Even if the picture had a private meaning for its patron (who had just lost his male lover), it's audiences, one's social position was no more secure than those tumbling no one could complain of the variety of the objects on view. I would like to contemplating autumn leaves, was of a world where everything is falling: "And yet, there is One who holds this falling with infinite softness in his hands." expecting the sky to fill up momentarily with things that flutter and fly. greeted at the door by the page boy from Maxim's, his hand extended for a looks almost cute in his fire engine red suit, but is that a roll of bills in his left hand or is he making an obscene gesture? And those hollow black eyes, death, was in one sense perfect and in another highly problematic. It coincided exactly with the extraordinary rise of Abstract Expressionism and the seismic community of nations, no one felt like asking tough questions about French immigrants like him for three decades, the French essentially abandoned them to their French functionaries, hiding and constantly on the move. He returned to manner to do just that, though with a resulting wrenching of chronology and three sections, each corresponding to one of the three ways critics have viewed Abstract Expressionism, which is what critics thought in the 1940s, when they "rediscovered" him. It is this third phase that leads to the biggest dislocation in the show, since visitors see the "abstract" paintings of the to buy his first colored pencil, and his early portrait of a local rabbi. The deprivation: three anorexic herrings on a plate with two forks (why two?) tipped upward, almost meeting the picture plane. Such paintings, along with the his work up to that point and tried to destroy as much of it as he could get French critics of the '30s tended to do, they seemed like the next step in the demanded. He acquired a skate from the fishmonger and painted a loose from the decaying meat. To keep the colors fresh, he dabbed the carcass with blood from a pail, then grabbed his paintbrushes to capture those lurid reds on canvas. This was the kind of scene that an action painter could relish. De would paint nudes, but no; he painted only one in his whole career, and it's a minor painting. But at the same time he was painting his carcasses of cattle probably the best known. This parallel obsession elicited the interesting sacrificed animals) and uniformed domestics were scapegoats of sorts. While chicken was whirled around a rabbi's head in a ritual of absolution. It may also be worth noting that with their red or white uniforms, these servants fatalistic. Perhaps he had so thoroughly identified his art at this point with hardly imagined himself to be a potential victim. One of his mistresses recalled him reading with admiration editorials by the collaborationist approved of social inequality "because it presented magnificent opportunities for everyone." One day she said to him, "You have had great unhappiness in your children hold hands fearfully as storm clouds hover ominously above them. The two vulnerable figures are literally molded of paint; the girl's left hand juts Impressionist breakthrough into color and light has sometimes been dimmed in the frequent telling and retailing. As you walk through the early rooms of the friend stands in a darkened room in black hat and full bushy black beard, but there's a wet blob of vermilion on the tip of his paintbrush, and more of that associates in the Impressionist circle were beginning to find ways to leave associated with a rural world now lost to modern experience. next room, and all that was gray turns into gold; the heavy, leaden shapes anything since the great paintings of the Renaissance." execute with great skill, dancers and performers and picnics in the country, painter can be viewed as his effort to prove the factory wrong. As the art (which, according to one hostile critic, left light "like grease spots on the clothing of his figures") was meant to show the mark of the hand rather than sworn enemies of mechanical perfection as "painters, decorators, architects, complex weave of frames within frames, is a veritable catalog of the were consciously slumming. They could afford to disdain commissions for class. In the background one can just make out the binoculars of an eager male viewer and the stripe on the trousers of an erect soldier, but all our attention gravitates toward the innocent isolation of these two performers, one of whom has gathered as many oranges, thrown as tokens from the appreciative badly in recent years, particularly at the hands of such leftist critics as worried about the "sugar content" of his paintings. which blur the distinction between portrait and genre painting, are in the red mouths." That androgynous tenderness is evident in Lunch at the the quintessence of cute. To his contemporaries, however, such paintings as portrait of his daughter, with its unorthodox coloring and swirling purple has been the victim of his own success. He banished the sentimental, portrait painters he competed with. His children too have emerged from the tunnel, and they stare frankly out at us, uncompromising and alone. handy for purposes of comparison, but if this isn't the largest retrospective five or six side galleries devoted to items from the permanent collection. Part length. If the task of viewing all this isn't a sufficient workout, there are nearly always risked aesthetic trespass, producing work deliberately just one degree or two from being merely ugly, banal, kitschy, gimmicky, showy, facile or, of course, excessive. Those possibilities were what he was pitting himself against while his contemporaries in the 1950s, for example, were battling the picture plane. When he has won, he has won spectacularly. He hasn't, however, another, some of them iconic by now, others seldom shown and vitally fresh. predates it, you might say that the show symbolically begins with his Erased enlargement.) It is exactly that: a few smudged traces of pencil on an elaborately matted and framed piece of paper. This work has always been cited dogma of Abstract Expressionism. It is both those things, but it is also a declaration of independence from drawing. He did a bit of it early on, but soon realized that he had two stronger suits, junk assemblage and photography. might actually be considered a great neglected photographer, although this neglect is only a consequence of the fame of his combine paintings and prints and objects on canvas). The photographs in the museum show are primarily tough, such objects, attaching them to canvas, smearing them with paint, and combining them with all manner of other substances. The wall captions in this show are fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, miniature blueprint, metal, newspaper, glass, dried grass, and steel wool, with pillow, wood post, electric up to the loft, and then figuring out the most perversely elegant ways to put it together. There are a few studio pictures in the vast catalog, but none, unfortunately, shows the rat's nest of tennis balls, old newspapers, stuffed birds, cheesy bedspreads, and construction debris that must have filled the discretion regarding his sex life, with critics zeroing in on Bed mirror, a pillow in a noose, and a stuffed bald eagle in full wingspread. Those works are presumably meant to be Realist and Symbolist (respectively) allusions affirming the same. And such allusions they may well be, although you do wonder with its stuffed angora goat wearing a car tire around its midriff. professor's game, looks pretty pale amid the panache and humor of eye for chance and juxtaposition in the streets, a sensualist's feeling for the images, all kinds, right now, from industrial logos to comic strips to postage writers.) Meaning has actually tended to be a pitfall for him, as is shown by his topical posters, only one of which is displayed here, a dully literal item occasionally, more than that. Upstairs, and on the very highest tiers of the most artistic careers; the distinction here is that he has repeated himself in fresco), which just gild the funk, sapping its life. When employing his habitual paper and canvas and burlap bags he has tended to go for discordantly smooth finishes. The Ace Gallery installation, a work in progress that will eventually reach a quarter mile in length, is a recapitulation of themes that winds up being reductive in its very gigantism. Meanwhile, the best of the he should just limit himself to materials that cost no more than five bucks a to write a work of nonfiction that reconstructed the life of the historical attempting, since human curiosity can never satisfy itself about the identity and character of a man whose destiny it was to be hailed, three centuries after his birth, as Light of Light, God of God, Very God of Very God. Discussing the purely technical problem of how such a book could be written, fiction. As the discussion wore on during a long evening, we decided that it true. Then, with a great deal of laughter, we recollected that four such books difficulty that Mailer has made for himself is that he has decided to tell the not where, but in some eternal realm where he has been dwelling since his forth as much love as He can offer, but His love is not without limit." evangelists' incomprehension of his message. But in spite of telling us that accounts of his own life, death, and teaching. It is obvious that, in the heavenly places, he has not had access to any of the modern works of scholarship that have urged caution on those who accept too readily the Gospel been the delight of modern fantasists to reconstruct. Like the Gospel writers, fiction that has had an incomparably damaging historical effect, and which is adds: "Where there is truth, there will be no peace. Where peace abides, you have decided that peace was a precondition for the pursuit of truth.) stupid, but also a very bad writer. "They drove a spike into each of my wrists and another spike through each of my feet. I did not cry out. But I saw the heavens divide. Within my skull, light glared at me until I knew the colors of the rainbow: my soul was luminous with pain." Perhaps it sounds better in the been through so much. "There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter; it is a place of great the continued success of the devil, but he modestly hopes that he is himself still of some use to the poor old human race. "It is even by way of my blessing that the Lord sends what love He can muster down to that creature who is man and that other creature who is woman, and I try to remain the source of that would learn how to improve on awful sentences like that. No doubt he will do better in his next book. Perhaps the most surprising revelations are left to basement galleries. The puzzling decision to relegate the painter of thinks these bathroom pictures raise most insistently the problems of essay is filled with such insights as the following: "While the global rhythms have a pulsatile aspect owing to the regular bounce provided by the edge, which rebounds the gaze, the chasing rhythms have a more spasmodic aspect owing to visually complex artist, whose constant experimenting with peculiar paintings; we're looking at a couple, and a mighty strange one. bourgeoisie (his father served in the upper echelons of the War Ministry), and like those painters he had a taste for the demimonde. He attended the posh law career. Two nearly simultaneous events sealed his fate. He flunked the firm. In his winning design, a waitress tips a champagne glass forward, and the cascading foam obscures pretty much everything but her cleavage. which confirmed his interest in bold colors and strongly delineated design. He himself as an artist, his effervescent brilliance in one medium spilled (like the glimpse of/ your flesh, which my delirious mouth/ races across") became the basis for a suite of paintings of models in black stockings. Perhaps to give He had affairs with other models before, but seven years earlier he had viewer's attention. (The optical mechanisms arising from such tensions between central figures and partially hidden peripheral figures are a major subject of herself in despair. By some reports she shot herself; others, perhaps hydropathy was a popular treatment for such ailments as tubercular laryngitis, embalmed in formaldehyde, her features dissolving before our eyes. looks like the very last fighter you'd bet on. His face looks bruised and battered, and his small, sunken eyes show the marks where glasses were just removed. But he holds up his hands gamely, as though to say that with these hands, bloodied and unprotected, he painted some of the most extraordinary to be labeled "provisional" or "tentative." The text of the book was released two weeks ago as of this writing. And because it will take any normal human every page, but only by foregoing food and rest, meaning his impressions are just as worthy as those of the thousands of other literate folk who will buy it either another masterpiece or a disappointing falling off, though somewhat the latter view bandied about at New York cocktail parties foregone: Maybe, just maybe, minimalist fiction wasn't such a bad thing after As I said, it should take any normal human being at least pursuit of linguistic complexity for its own sake. As such, they're intended for literary monastics, for the tenured priesthood of paid interpreters that sprang up in colleges after World War II with the help of massive public and modest, so much so that the typical first novel isn't called a first novel anymore; it's called a memoir, just one step from journalism, and it's immunized from conventional criticism by its traumatized sincerity. Even the stories with math and science, myth and metafiction, can't really hold a candle because they no longer have a church behind them, merely chains of secular for example, and the predominant punctuation marks are the dash and the apostrophe), it tells the picaresque tale of two astronomers best known for You'll learn a lot about shipping in this novel, and the main thing you'll learn is how important it was to find a reliable way of measuring longitude. National fortunes depended on the feat, making it the Age of Reason's drink. Carouse. While staying in Cape Town with a family of Dutch colonists, to the point where he'll want to mate with their black slave, thereby producing greets the travelers by lighting up a hemp pipe and getting them roundly the humorist is lame indeed and reminds one of a brainy college sophomore who studies joke books to make himself amusing. Worse, he's very big on language humor, on purposely mismatching tone and topic and veering abruptly between surveyors pass the pipe, intrigues and conspiracies involving all sorts of survey, and it becomes clear that the pair are really pawns in some obscure will lick their chops. Playful, ingenious revisions of orthodox history based on complex, covert affiliations and strange secret weapons are the master's detective stories that resolve themselves not in simple sums but in hip new intellectual logarithms. And he pays his readers the ultimate compliment of writing as though he knows they're capable of getting his erudite cosmic in search of a paradoxical Eureka! The low part of the higher mind that the experts whose academic labs gave birth to him. They're the ones whose love he seems to want, the ones who seem best equipped to give it to him. May their understand and cure it. The two of them, who met in college, have been living together in New York for six months when the novel opens. Ruth has been improve their sex life). But suddenly he has reason to suspect her of bingeing, and the solicitous lover turns sleuth. A "binge reader," he makes it his hidden vocation to amass clues to the secret of anorexia. His sources range from anatomy. (He peruses her teeth for signs of decay from recurrent vomiting; he malnutrition.) Six months later, when the novel ends, Ruth has become a wraith and checked into the same private hospital she was sent to as a starving conclusion: "The body wasn't a book. The body was simply the body. I had been book were a body, it would be an anorexic one. From the outset, the contours of and a mother whose ambitions (intellectual and sexual) have left Ruth feeling overshadowed and neglected. She struggles daily with a grossly distorted departure from male stereotype, yet the key to his anomalous solicitude and observes. ("Even with its turtleneck top doubled over, I could see, could the riddle of female sadness itself. You're trying to solve the body. Take it from someone who once tried to do these things for a living: it isn't possible. You've been hunting the white whale and it isn't going to end appeal when you can see every muscle of the story move. There are moments (like artless refusal to pad out the psychological drama, coupled with a fastidious attention to the most mundane physical details, that give Eve's Apple truths about anorexia: that its peculiar logic is not just tragic but comic, and that despite the fascination it holds for those who suffer from it, and for those who seek to make sense of it, anorexia is in fact quite boring. is bingeing. A kiss becomes a pretext for checking out her dental enamel, a the irritated victim herself to a joke, an unusual display of wit at her and offered it to me, a wildflower from a forbidden field. 'For you,' she said." The quirky physical moments are easier to convey than the psychological of is her anorexia. The rest of her life is dwarfed by her fixation, which only wanted you to admire my fasting," said the hunger artist. relentless visits to the bathroom scale and, in her mind's eye, to the meals dinnertime." A parrot "perched suddenly on the windowsill and shuffled himself like a pack of cards." Waking up to the sound of Ruth jumping rope late at like the beating of a giant heart." There's surprisingly ripe flesh to be found especially if they arrive in one of the museum's pastel shuttle buses decked with water lilies as if it had been dredged from a swamp. There are the painter of weekend pleasures, puttering around in his aqueous garden and experimentalist way ahead of his time. A huge blowup of a of the man in his show, which includes some paintings never before exhibited, could hardly be by the end of his long life. As these late canvases wash over you with their points out in an interesting catalog essay, there's little evidence that longer viewed as merely a safe painter of pretty suburban sights. into a family of modest means, he lacked the financial security net of making multiple versions of it. He pretended that he did all his work outside and on the spot, when actually he sketched rapidly in paint, then carefully finished his canvases in his studio. He even used photographs on occasion, respectful of his audience (and potential buyers), never indulged in the harsh jokes of his urbane contemporaries. He was happy to disguise his first wife as a geisha (in a painting hanging elsewhere at the Museum of Fine Arts), but there are no prostitutes dressed up as odalisques in his work, no probings into way, as unyielding and uncompromising as any of his contemporaries. Never much interested in the human figure, he kept the Impressionist faith of showing the effects of changing light on landscape. One of his early pictures, his he was finally his own man. Building on the huge success of his series alone. He still kept track of the market, though. In the opening rooms, announced a bold new shift in his work, toward huge decorative panels. During these enormous canvases, he turned out paintings by turns ominous, terrifying, a few hundred feet below the surface, into a midnight realm of Medusas and colorful anemones. A strange human skull seems entangled in the reflected never intended for exhibition, prefigure to a remarkable degree the work of the century, and his work in relation to the various Modernist movements of the the French nation: her land, her agriculture, her religion, and her the French landscape and discovered it in the multiple layers of his own water weeping willows and tangled lilies. During World War I, as he conveyed war's end, he arranged to contribute some of his panels as a sort of victory survivor of the group," he sighed. He was the last Impressionist, but he also traveled the farthest, pushing the limits of landscape until he broke right academics, judges, and legislators, maintains that the object of criminal trials must be the truth. To reach this goal, its advocates argue, the barriers that stand in the way of convicting the truly guilty should be lowered. This can be done by reinterpreting the relevant sections of the Constitution in accordance with their original historical meaning. Among the barriers targeted the introduction into trial of evidence obtained in violation of that argument is hard to disagree with. Who can be against the truth? The problem is what his Truth School would look like. It is a beautiful blueprint, but the plans would not pass a safety inspection in the real world of cops, robbers, offers several radical recommendations. Besides his proposals to abolish virtually all exclusionary rules and require criminal defendants to testify against themselves in pretrial depositions, he would limit search warrants to the point of virtual disuse and, with them, the requirement of probable cause. He would instead substitute a blanket rule decreeing that all searches that are himself but to the framers of our Bill of Rights. Historians differ, however, as to the original meaning of the Fourth and Fifth amendments. Not only can the and often ambiguous history of these hastily drafted amendments almost anything prescription for a wholesale reinterpretation of established doctrine will soon prevail. Nonetheless, his writings are too influential to be ignored, even if the provocative issues he raises are more usefully (and honestly) argued on the level of the policies they point to than on the level of what the Constitution interpretations of the Fourth and Fifth amendments to bring them more in line with the "search for truth"? These proposals should be evaluated on two bases: Will they, in fact, produce more truth? And if so, will they undercut other both ways. He rightfully criticizes the current exclusionary rule for not serving as an effective to police misconduct. His "better way" is to let citizens sue the government for making mistakes in its quest for evidence. But if this kind of tort remedy were to work effectively, it would, of necessity, deter some searches that are today conducted by errant cops who do not fear the occasional exclusion of illegally obtained evidence. The upshot might be fewer reason to believe his way will be more selective in searching for "true" rather than "false" evidence. It may prove to be a more effective deterrent to unreasonable searches, but unless reasonableness is tautologically defined to include only searches that turn up evidence of guilt, the more effective the advocates that all criminal defendants be compelled to give pretrial depositions, but his book is vague about whether these depositions would substitute for or supplement police interrogation. In a recent public debate at the truth, since jailhouse interrogation in the absence of a lawyer is more likely to "break" a guilty defendant than a courtroom deposition conducted with the assistance of counsel is. That is why I believe that few police interrogation in exchange for compelled pretrial depositions. They might accept police interrogations. But "street" criminal defendants do, and many waive getting confessions might also produce less truth than the current approach On the question of whether the proposals of the truth school will denigrate other values more important than truth, we have a long history from which to learn. If truth were the only goal of the criminal trial, that goal would not be difficult to reach. First, we would reintroduce the police. They knew how to get at the truth without any interference from civil privacy, bodily integrity, fairness, and civility. Throughout our history, those who have sought the Holy Grail of truth have shown impatience with process. The first victim in the search for truth has too often been to maximize truth, we would lower the burden of proof in criminal cases from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "a preponderance of the evidence." Why would wrongly convicted"? Indeed, under our present rule a jury is told that if it believes that a defendant "probably" did it, it must acquit him, because "probably" is not enough. A system that sought a greater quantity of truth would instruct the fact finder to accept a disputed fact if it were more likely major qualification is that they know nothing about the matter in dispute. Nor would we allocate it to judges, who are also not scientific experts. We would democratic system of fact finding is already a compromise between the search for truth and the search for fairness. The real question is how to strike an appropriate balance among the often conflicting values of truth on the one hand and considerations such as privacy and equality on the other. exquisitely delicate balance. Nonetheless, his book is a valuable contribution to the debate, because it gives those with experience an abstract architectural plan against which to evaluate today's imperfect reality of and a prince. Dominated by their overbearing literary mother and ignored by their dismissive multimillionaire father, these virtual orphans are raised by descends: Worn out by his labors on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Board, the and then kills himself. The cruel queen's lights finally expire. Only then does The story is irresistible, as is the telling. Just when about concealing than telling, but Graham ropes off relatively little. Her abuser, but only the biographer writes that as Phil lost his mind, he taunted "Mother set impossibly high standards for us." At the same time, Graham complains, she was taught little about "the practical aspects of life," like "how to dress, sew, cook, shop, and, rather more important, relate to people of organize a meal." Just when you think that the ugly duckling has snorkeled to deeper: "I ignored the fact that [Phil] was frequently using [his] wit at my expense. [He] was often critical or cutting in his remarks when things weren't party, she panics that she'll bore him to death. (She does fine.) Society parents had introduced her to high society while she was still in diapers, and cook, can't sew, can't run a household, can't stand up to her imperious mom and husband, can't make small talk with celebrities or notables, can't run a humility is no exception. If you apologize for your shortcomings, you can count on harvesting sympathy. If you apologize for your nonexistent shortcomings, you harvest sympathy and blind folks to your genuine shortcomings. Graham plays both games, perhaps because there's truth, of a sort, to her claims of inadequacy. At critical points in her life, she chose brilliant and charismatic two households and birthed four kids, rubbed political shoulders with everyone talented child run a newspaper. But if he sinned against his daughter and her the Post (no man should have to work for his wife, the old man said), Personal History's false modesty begins to evaporate after a partnership with her, just as he did with Phil, even though she doesn't really grasp business. She does understand editorial, though, and better than threatens to revoke the company's lucrative broadcast licenses. She battles and who has seen Graham run a stockholders' meeting knows, she is an agile, arrogant, and gracious beast, and the paper is as much a product of her personality, talents, and priorities as it is of his. I refer doubters to the to be asked about the German resistance is: Did it exist? A good case can be made that it did not. To frame the question less contentiously: Did the scattered theologians, bureaucrats, army officers, and (in one case) ordinary concerted movement? On the large stage of history, do these brave individuals therefore a kind of optical illusion, generated by a need to find some shred of about the resistance seem to greatly outnumber the resisters themselves. The strange man who has to be considered as a phenomenon unto himself (and will be, begins his book with a chapter titled "The Resistance That Never Was," which stratagems, and force. Fest states that the army was the only organization able to keep its structure intact, and therefore the only one in a position to mount physically disabled. There were also protests against domestic austerities door. Another attempt fell through when a scheduled presentation of military military conspirators tended to defeat themselves at every turn. To begin with, meditations. (Reading Fest's book, I was often reminded of the scene in calls for immediate discussion!") As Fest notes, the plans were always contingent; they were also needlessly intricate. One bomb plot fell apart when a newfangled detonating mechanism proved too complicated for anyone in the high Should the plotters receive credit for their intentions, More than a few were Christian and monarchist conservatives who deplored there was also a moral strain to their deliberations. Several of these men understood the genocidal implications of the orders accompanying plans for the Departing dramatically from the cautious analysis that guides the main body of group that spent most of its time imagining an ideal future German society. But sometimes tells simple stories. The fact that none of the various attempts, was an easy target; he liked to show himself in public and did not always travel in conditions of airtight security. The resistance literature often but the failures of the resistance might be better ascribed to the calculated psychoanalysts that is currently fashionable creates an interesting dilemma for their biographers. The biographer of a great analyst is always tempted to prove treatment is itself about the possibility and, indeed, the value of genre. We want to know whether these people should have been trusted, and why biographies of psychoanalysts make us wonder what it is that makes a person trustworthy to us, and what, if anything, this has to do with the significance was a heretic. His notoriety was based on his shortening of the psychoanalytic There is a tension in any biography between what the biographer wants the subject to be. In this sober, incisive, and riveting book, behaved, more temperate in his appetites, less baroque in his provocations. She believed there was something fundamentally unintelligible about the vagaries of themselves. But by the same token these are also the most inexhaustibly hero: a triumph of appetite over class. This is a story of a man with an amazing talent for finding what and whom he needed to make himself what he is no obvious reason why this particular family should have produced that adored youngest brother became a priest, and his sister spent most of her otherwise a typical French family of a certain type. Very early, as one might especially talented boy. He had a precocious intellectual curiosity. He tended prism of his writings, whereas he was living it prospectively (we have to himself never knew what was going to happen next). If one of the dominant account, then it can seem virtually inevitable that his early work was about the terrible cultural consequences of the "weakening of the father imago" (there were no strong fathers anymore), and that much of his later work should casual accounts of how people become who they are. Indeed, what distinguishes psychoanalysis is that it can show us the ways in which a life is not merely the effect of its causes (biology, parents, etc.). apparently a magnet for everything intellectually interesting happening in knack for finding useful fathers. His friendships with the likes of writer and by what he could make of what he found in the work of these remarkable people. however, was really a tale of two families. A first marriage, in his 20s, to some of the most callous follies of this extraordinary life, the "so what?" knowledge, and he flourished by creating havoc, both publicly (in a famous break with the International Psychoanalytic Institute) and privately (among some of his colleagues). He wanted psychoanalysis to be a science of that he were more lovable, or honest, or familiar. His life is exemplary in the modern sense, not as a picture of virtue, or even as a struggle to live out some kind of personal truth, but rather as a question: How complicated can we though he looked a little anxious when a paparazzo took his picture. ("How am I going to explain this to the archbishop?" he might have been thinking.) Later that week, my mother came to visit me in New York. We were watching a local newscast in her hotel room, and there was a story about the It's hard to convey how much more interesting New York was in the late '70s than it is now. There was a sense of unlimited possibility in comparison. John Sparrow, the late warden of All Souls College, put it nicely: "My impression is that in New York anything might happen at any moment. In after I arrived in the city, an unknown from the sticks come to learn fabulous, by osmosis; at some unhappy point, you have to work.) postwar period to the present. The chief cultural innovation of the period was, disco? It is the perfection of voyeurism. Playing recorded music allows the club to get rid of the performers, so that the people have nothing to look at but one another. They are the spectacle. But you have to have the right people, Entertainment," Life magazine claimed that "there are now more than It solved, for a brief shining moment, what in game theory is known as the did all these "competing elites" blend together so ecstatically? One reason, I think, was a giddy feeling in the late '70s that the End was Nigh, so everything was permitted and there was no reason to compete. The rest of the And if there was a bit of buggery and whatnot going on up in the balcony, what of it? "You would look around and you'd see somebody's toes twinkling behind their ears." In the warren of grungy rooms beneath the found handcuffed to a water pipe, getting squired from the rear by one of the the vetting committee at the door kept the great unwashed in their horrible disco regalia from getting past the velvet ropes. Attempts at dramatic entrances were not always successful. On one occasion recounted by the author, a woman rented a horse, stripped naked, and arrived at the door, Lady but you have to stay outside." Another guy, desperate after repeated rejection, tried to climb into the club through a vent but got stuck. He was found a few was all but invisible). It seemed it would never end. But all the while the shadow of doom was creeping nearer and nearer, till came a day when it pulled who had been denied entrance when they came to boogie, returned in a more was there the night of the raid, and the party was exceptionally good. It was That I invent the names. I do not. These were nightclubs of the highest standing and chic. Hundreds of thousands of aspiring fabulous people sought the entree to them. All are defunct, or moribund. Today's "club kids" take boring drugs for days on end, until they find themselves sawing the legs off their a bibliographer's idea of nostalgia: Everything has been downhill since the distinction. Three novels later, it is still his best, a marvel of achieved restraint. Unhappily, the subsequent novels have been unwitting examples of the new book which explores the dwindling years of a morose retired lawyer, a man who calls himself "the last of the Wasps," offers some of his most delicate Wartime Lies, which is largely autobiographical, recounts the adventures ghetto. Nonetheless, they are in great peril, and are hiding from that peril. disappeared, from one book to the next, is a sense of the perilous. It is as if view); in the process, he uncovers his own hurts. His only daughter, Charlotte, family rather than to her sad father. He kicks old memories around his lovely an affair with a dangerously young waitress at a local restaurant will not warm his elegant, stately report. There is something impressive about a writer so undaunted by a character's trivial unpleasantness, by his daily acts of not merely ungrateful but implausibly hostile. In a climactic scene, she than your kind of Episcopalian," she sneers. Since she has not, until this moment, shown interest one way or another in her inherited religion, her sudden interestingly dull at the beginning of the book, begins to curdle into of an aged patriarch quarreling with a daughter. But what's interesting about become its victims. It is difficult not to detect an autobiographical note in his heroes' struggle to control inner distress and bury forgotten memories. introduced by a man who "has no childhood that he can bear to remember." In the because it is a struggle he can no longer win. Instead, he shuts it down, and tableau of German military glory; the idealized soldier had her landlord's face Berlin Dada group, which came to appear the more aesthetic one, as years made works that are at least superficially very similar: explosions of newspaper photographs and lines of type across a white field. They were angry restrict themselves to the materials of the print media that served and long been best known for one of her first works, Cut with a Kitchen Knife You can see all the anger and exhilaration of the period in this large piece replaced by other things, its yellowed newsprint color jazzed by a patch of blue in the upper left, its improvisatorial speed of execution shown by how the glued surfaces have rippled. Its drift is apparent right away: Dada versus the emancipated women are significantly portrayed, and at the lower right is a map Most surveys of photomontage reproduce this work and became more playful. At the same time that she was engaging in her blistering stuff, for example, she was making delicate work based on embroidery patterns that is both unashamedly feminine and the perfect riposte to the dynamism. It is also more purely abstract than anything anyone else was doing. cavalierly toyed with this concept and eventually dispensed with it altogether. While others parodied, she invented. She flung scale, gravity, continuity, and up faces and bodies and fits together parts mismatched in size, color, and of beauty culture. In her "Ethnographic Museum" series she arranges mergers of primitive now?" Her politics are always present but always lowercase, even her angriest works apparently suffused with insouciant fun. So you might get the instead of brains, and a cute little topknot like a pinhead's. was plunging into a world of pure form and color. As the decades pass it becomes harder and harder to figure out what a given shape or texture in her montages might originally have represented. During the 1940s she shed the last plant forms. But the following decade, even this gave way to works of pure nonrepresentational electricity, so bursting and swooping they make you want to kind of Abstract Expressionism built from little, carefully scissored bits of magazine photographs. They can sometimes appear unfocused in their intensity, like too many sounds turning into white noise. But then she could still turn and reassembled with dramatic spaces. The source is completely present and made greater; the violence done to it is in the service of its original intent: an this is a big show for a "minor" artist. It is true that if you were editing true that montage is often considered a minor form, lacking the heroism of painting and sculpture and even photography. After all, what is it but an exhibition so thoroughly documents the artist's changes and leaps over the grandeur. Photomontage thumbs its nose at the pretension of the artist playing God, the blank canvas his world. It is the art of making do, of fashioning something personal from the incessant bombardment of images to which we are as a juvenile beauty queen, that makes her so uncannily resemble a girl in a fairy tale? For while a pageant princess is merely tacky, a murdered pageant princess takes her place in the illustrious line of pretty young girls meet, or at least be threatened with, a gruesome end. Little Red Riding Hood, would seem, between being a sweet young miss and getting garroted. Folk Art in New York: an exhibition of eccentrically magnificent watercolors by subject of little girls, murdered and otherwise, and went on to write and prepubescent sisters being tortured by brutish men who like to capture little girls in order to enslave them and torture them and take their clothes off. In to say that he didn't receive any formal art training; was not, during his lifetime, part of the art world; and was exposed very little, if at all, to traditional art in general. As such, he is presumed to have produced his work out of some unusually pure sort of inner compulsion, rather than in response to Mass frequently, and coming home at night to work on his paintings and his placed in an institution for the feebleminded, from which he escaped at the age home, his landlord opened up his room and discovered, amid piles of presumably artistic debris (hundreds of pairs of smashed eyeglasses, balls of string, old watercolors on exhibit include both peacetime tableaux of tiny lassies, some naked, some in dresses, disporting themselves among butterflies and enormous tiny lassies are strangled naked (distorted faces, tongues stuck out) and version.) Some paintings combine the two types of scenes, with comic nonchalance. In one, a group of placid girls jump rope while immediately behind them lie the severed heads of three men, horrified expressions on their faces, and pairs of disembodied hands (their own? their murderers?) still clenched around their necks. In all paintings, the colors are extraordinary and pictures by tracing comic strips or magazine illustrations (on occasion he cut pictures out and stuck them on the paintings directly). In some works he transposed the illustrations more or less intact; in others he stripped off the girls' clothes and added penises (all his naked girls have penises). Several running fearfully away from something, her school bag flying out behind her. Often these repeated images are rendered identically (same colors, no alterations in the pose), and sometimes they even appear next to each other in subtler, less programmatic. It's reminiscent, if anything, of those groups of angels or monks or soldiers in medieval manuscripts in which some of the the repetition seems to be employed for the purpose of visual economy, in order not to divert attention from the picture's central theme, rather than to draw extend for hundreds of pages. Take this excerpt, for instance (don't read this pleads of the victims could not be described, and thousands of mothers went children were literally cut up like a butcher does a calf, after being strangled or slain, in all ways, indeed the sights of the bloody windrows could bear to witness without losing their reason. Hearts of children were hung up by strings to the walls of houses, so many of the bleeding bodies had been cut up that they looked as if they had gone through a machine of softest grandpa porn. For instance, "The little girls were even glad to leave the building, which they hastily did after looking for their clothes which they could not find, having to leave in their nighties." niche of the art world that has come into its own in this country in the past decade or so: The fifth annual Outsider Art Fair took place a couple of weeks ago in New York; there is a new federally funded museum devoted to outsider art the notion of outsider art has proved an effective marketing concept, it is to produce all that crazy stuff; how he couldn't distinguish between fantasy and reality; how he was a potential serial killer; how he got sexually excited obsessive, unable to separate his life from his created fantasy world, since in a contemporary insider artist would be read as a rather ordinary example of depictions of framed pictures whose images are indistinguishable from the draws attention to the fact that the epic takes place "in What is Known as the number of amusing references to the strange task of drawing and writing about and her sisters. The standards they followed were the heads and even gashed bodies of six beautiful little children, with their intestines protruding from their bellies, and every one of these were on pikes dripping with blood. Violet and her sisters appeared] they thrust up on to their windows the heads them. Then, bursting into the doors, they thrust the heads into their laps, it seems to them that they would die of horror, [Violet and her sisters] heads, being good at drawing pictures in the most perfect form. outsider confusing himself with his characters. Or you might see him as a parts of life as a little girl. On either interpretation, though, the paintings remain extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful. in recent years has earned a reputation for expansionist sprawl, has mounted a surprisingly intimate exhibition in its New York headquarters. The show has a Arts," and the temptation must have been great to fill every corner of New York year. The China show has two venues, but one is really a footnote to the other. China. Many of these objects, including those culled from recent archaeological finds, have never been shown in the United States before. Lee tried to choose objects that demonstrated innovation and experimentation; he has a particular on social and historical context and high in the pleasures of simply looking. slow walk up his spiraling ramp, stopping here and there to admire the stunning objects in generously spaced glass cases. The objects are grouped according to and metallurgy become clear, but the viewer must grope for what links an austere, octagonal Tang vase to a theatrically rearing, gilded bronze dragon absence of an overarching narrative of dynastic progression or decline, one's attention shifts to small marvels. Several objects in the show reflect a dry sense of humor. The ancient bronzes are covered with metamorphosing animal wrote of himself). Then there's a little toy cart with moving wheels supporting one hand, a crutch in the other. Why one leg? So he can't run away with the education in the origins of porcelain. The perfection of that translucent and acoustically resonant pottery, a thousand years before the West discovered its putting on weight? It is not: "In the latter Tang dynasty," says the wall ornate, completely departing from the slender and ethereal beauty paintings are hidden down discreetly marked passageways in darkened galleries. spent the next few centuries developing Expressionist departures from it. In the West, a comparable moment occurs with the advent of modernism early in this explodes the myth of the artist's peaceful retreat in the hills. These hills have a cascading fury to them, and the dwelling seems to be under siege. Indeed, two factions striving to succeed the Mongol rulers were warring nearby six gaunt trees by the riverside and calls the picture Six Gentlemen conventions can survive a century of alien occupation must be as flexible and If the din of history is held at bay in the uptown section traumatic. The woodcut revival of the 1920s occurred just in time to record the rule. Upstairs are a couple of rooms of Socialist Realism, with ubiquitous art, and you end up staring at a painting of a cluster of peasants grinning in seems well, notwithstanding the recent Great Famine, perhaps the most severe in nourishing even now, albeit by marginalized artists who were given no place in experiment in opening China to the West. But it's hard not to see in these smiling peasants a warning of what such openings can bring in their wake. syphilis (his parents, in addition, were first cousins). He was treated with laudanum, which initiated a lifelong drug addiction. Although in nearly caused him to be confined in a psychiatric hospital. He suffered from what was described as "incurable paranoid delirium," and left that asylum only to enter French edition. He was trained as an actor, and went on to direct, found his own theater, and write a set of visionary theoretical essays, collected as practitioners to this day. He also acted in films; his performances are few but discussion by getting down on all fours and barking like a dog. He was an early member of the surrealists and director of the group's Central Research Bureau. prodigies" and perhaps the truest surrealist of all. work in his many fields is consistent and interwoven, but it is not easy to define. It is, above all, a monument to frustration, one long scream of protest at the inadequacy of language, of human society, of the body and the mind. constraints that define consciousness. It is as if he could just make out the penumbra of some spiritual essence on the far edge of his perception, and was maddened by his inability to seize it. He described all his work as certainly not "art," but mere records of his flailing attempts to reach the The drawings currently on exhibit at the Museum of Modern not well known, and have never before been shown in this country. They are singular and powerful works; gathered together, they possess a clobbering force. They seem to come out of nowhere while prefiguring all sorts of later tendencies in art. It seems absurd to think that the evolution they present earliest works are described as "spells." These are blessings and curses he wrote on charred or otherwise manipulated bits of paper and sent to friends, (These spells are nowhere translated or transcribed, and the handwriting is often indecipherable. One of the few I could make out, addressed to the actor human figures, symbolic objects, and words, many of them in invented languages. Some of these drawings, in precise pencil with hints of color, have a indeed, divorced from context, some might at first be mistaken as whimsical. the pencil work became heavier and more insistent, the colors more assertive, the nightmare aspects harder to miss. A work entitled The encased in glass coffins; an exceedingly cryptic stew of geometric and so heavily scored that it looks nearly sculptural, and it is covered with dots skin as if it were pierced with an infinite number of little holes." A Head made around the same time is even scarier, caught in banana neck. It is, convincingly, a face from hell. and was able to receive visitors. These he drew, in a series of penetrating and was clearly an excellent draftsman but, as he notes, "you must look at [the an empty force, a field of death," and that the alignment of form and content has never been farther off than in the contrast between facial features and death from rectal cancer (a grimly appropriate fate for the author of "The to the void), he was beginning to draw complex, heavily laden constructions stacked, as in so many totem poles. They are anything but morbid, though; they possess a vivid, throbbing life. These drawings appear to synthesize all the preoccupations of the phases of his previous three years; they fluidly combine ferocity, anguish, and hallucinatory paranoia are matched and joined by his his art is hardly confined to madness. The portraits, in which he used calm observation and academic skill to depict external reality while representing visions, for example. His work can no more be dispatched into some rubric like penetration of what we know is so acute, its lucidity so much the equal of its delusion, that deciding where the one leaves off and the other begins can seem century ago. Hunched forward in a coarse painter's smock, he peers forlornly at us, his tired and damaged eyes rimmed with vermilion. What appears, at first glance, to be a genie rising from his soft brown cap turns out, on closer inspection, to be the sinuous arm and towel, in white chalk, of one of Degas' own bathers, a pastel within a pastel. For Degas, who had forsworn The aging and celibate artist has purchased a score of creative years at the portrait captures a fraught moment in Degas' career, when he had lost interest had made him famous. The last of the impressionist exhibitions, in which Degas increasingly isolated as well. "I am quickly sliding downhill," he confided to an acquaintance at the time, "rolling I know not where, wrapped up in lots of most challenging and inventive work dates from the 1890s and the first years of this century. Printed in bold letters at the entrance of the show is a the dozen or so early works, culled from the Art Institute's own spectacular exhibition), the show makes a convincing case for the vitality of Degas' late the dust, but Degas believed that sweeping just moved the dust around), Degas remarkable range of techniques and media (photography, tracing paper, lurid color combinations). Many of his forays "beyond impressionism," as the curators portraits. Draped over an empty chair, the subject's expressive hands could be playing the piano or summoning up the ghost of her recently deceased father, film. And indeed, there's something almost cinematic in the similar poses of of bodies in motion, with which Degas was familiar. presage Degas' growing interest in bright color in his later work. Always curious about technological innovation, Degas may have been excited by the new colors made available by the chemical industry at century's end. Alternatively, the bold hues might have resulted from Degas' wretched eyesight (those oranges case, little that has come before prepares the viewer for the visual shock of women, an attendant combing the long coil of her mistress's hair, have a ritualized simplicity. A single brushstroke enlarges the reclining woman's stomach, indicating her pregnancy. The whole composition is rendered in pulsating shades of red. It seems fitting that this remarkable painting was harmonies. Those amniotic reds recur in the wrenched body of the nude figure in composition, so suggestive of pain and isolation, on one of his own Degas was drawn to other methods besides photography for recycling his images, using tracing paper to multiply a drawing, then overlaying the copies with different colors to produce a range of emotional variants. A particularly bizarre transformation occurred when he made a charcoal copy of one of his women having her hair combed. He rotated the image cascading hair becomes a cliff plummeting to the ocean below, while her breasts focusing the show almost entirely on technique, the organizers of "Degas: Beyond Impressionism" have followed the lead of Degas himself, who steadily eliminated from his work any reference to contemporary life, preferring an artificial world of studio props and pliable models. "There is something sewn it into a pink satin bag, a slightly faded satin, like their ballet slippers." One is lulled into thinking that these contorted bathers are mere responds that the unusual poses and aggressive use of pastel are further from the printed "exhibition guide" that replaces the usual wall panels. mention of the most important public event for Degas during the 1890s, the accused of treason. One must turn to the informative catalog, by guest curator Degas' very retreat from contemporary life owes something to his disgust with shy away from social context and controversy. They can afford to risk a bit The preceding images are not from "Degas: Beyond Impressionism" (online a political constituency; factor in the collapse of communism; and quote Bill sounds like a compelling case. There are other signs as well: the rise of the there is an equally strong argument to be made that the United States is only the Christian right, whose aims are antithetical to those of libertarians, make the plausible claim that it is they who are winning converts and influence by The appearance of these two books counts as an entry in the plus side of the ledger. Each attempts to make libertarianism more respectable is a conservative trying to persuade other conservatives that the absence of restraint will in fact make people more moral. He rather reluctantly defends the legalization of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, and concedes that classical liberal argument: Force is bad; cooperation is good; government is force; ergo, the only legitimate functions of government are to enforce that there also exist limited "public goods." The two he names are environmental protection and education. These exceptions to the rule of the minimal state are probably necessary to make libertarianism palatable to within the boundaries of a constitution are not merely "force" but also "cooperation," albeit with a certain degree of legitimate coercion. attempt to distinguish those public purposes that are tolerable from those that to counter "externalities," costs passed on to others that, in practical terms, cannot be compensated, as in the case of the chemical incinerator that pollutes the air. What this scheme leaves unclear is why education and the environment Education and the environment are not purely nonexclusive goods. Some people reasonably qualify. Anyone may fall upon hard times, and most people anticipate being around long enough to benefit from nationalized health care for the arguments against government action. To show how little sense regulations make, he proposes a thought experiment. Why not give consumers a choice, he asks, about whether to use regulated or unregulated products (unregulated products, he stipulates, would have to be labeled as such). This merely demonstrates that for public goods. The point of regulation is not merely to protect consumers, but to protect innocent third parties. Of course consumers would be better off if the government gave them the right to buy appliances built by polluting the pollution and child labor are foreign and not domestic.) These regulations exist for the benefit of those who live downstream from the factory and the themselves. But speed limits don't just prevent people who willingly take the risk of driving faster and more dangerously from hurting themselves. They improve the odds for the children in the back seat, and for the safe driver in the opposite lane, whom the reckless driver might plow into. With this example, onerous over time. But the national speed limit is an example of precisely the position of ascribing historical inevitability to a trend that is actually in contradictions by drawing in arguments from his earlier books, each of which presents a different case against public action to fight poverty. In Losing inferior, a condition that government could do nothing about. In What It be mutually reinforcing: Government social programs don't work; they can't work on account of human nature; and if by chance they do work, they're morally unjustified anyhow. But this triple argument in the triple alternative actually can't really help people. In the version of that argument given in What It because "modern society has the inertia of a ponderous freight train." But if government can't reroute the freight train in a better direction, it's hard to see how it can derail it. The metaphor undermines the Losing Ground social costs created by large numbers of fatherless children, civilized communities everywhere stigmatized illegitimacy." The "futility" how can it do so strongly the opposite of what it intends? his underlying bias, which casts doubt on the critiques of government in both for everyone. This would seem to violate all the aforementioned principles. It would create a powerful incentive (of the kind attacked in Losing The Bell Curve says can't be helped anyway; and it would certainly violate What It Means to Be a Libertarian 's admonition against forcing that it would finally discharge society's obligation to members of the underclass. They might not be better off, but they would have to quit says bad, prejudicial discrimination is inseparable from good, economically sensible discrimination), this passage leaves one with the sense that in and more dogmatic book. After a long history of libertarian ideas, he proposes reality by accepting large expenditures for national defense, environmental regulation, or publicly funded education. He does not believe in national parks ("private stewards" will exercise "proper stewardship"). Nor does he believe in worried about disarray. In the absence of malign government intervention, there Internet. He neglects, of course, the fact that the Internet began life as a Constitution, count as "spontaneous" and good while everything else is defined as coercion. Capitalism may arise spontaneously, but the Bill of Rights is as utterly comprehensive and slightly mad way. He takes pains to say he is not offering a plan for a perfect society, merely a "framework for utopia" (the should have become is for many libertarians, including me, the source of our deepest anger about what big government has done to this country," he writes at one point. He offers instead "a society that is prosperous and virtuous, but one that is exciting and fun as well." I was reminded of the famous passage believed that the state would wither away. Libertarians believe men must wither it. But really, their utopias are not so different. They share a wishful vision of human perfectibility dressed up as an idea of justice. Finally, after a solid week, some of the big dailies lead with monographs highest approval rating ever--67 percent. The paper also reports that former address. "She thought he did a good job with it," he says. "She thinks he's done a good job as president. She still considers him a friend." White House were to see his secretary, and that he suggested that she could avoid testifying altogether by being in New York City. The paper goes on to it would be "ethically questionable" for a defendant in a civil lawsuit merely to discuss the case with a potential witness already subpoenaed by the The Times says this meeting was confirmed by a White House aide, while the Post says the White House declined to comment about it and has last year would have a chilling effect on minority applications. talk to Morris, "I doubt that will ever happen again." A big color shot of the president greeting an exuberant crowd of young glance, it's hard to say which story the picture goes with. In a way, it goes bodyguards, just a few tables over from the unguarded prosecutors who had been suppressing competition, by some of the business rivals he appeared with, as well as by some senators. Gates' response that government intervention, not his company, is the big threat to technological innovation, is widely quoted. But The Post points out that the Senate doesn't even allow laptop computers in its chamber, but that nonetheless some of the questioning of Gates The Gates appearance certainly brings out criticism of his Slate that had the effect of making his state eligible for the funds for the first Great Salt Lake, are far better claimants. The editorial runs under the header, It's a shame federal monies are used up this way when they could be better used for things like the government's program to provide close captioning for television shows. But then we learn in today's Post that the program Papers" didn't even realize those shows have soundtracks.) may mean that actually making the loans becomes unnecessary. This is, says the include pretending also to be on the phone with another client who just placed a big order with the broker or who just made half a million dollars with him. The big flaw with the story: it never says whether or not such ruses are The LAT front points out a rather sticky dilemma now arising for the imposed on both countries and could provoke international complaints that analysts" think such a course of action is probably under consideration. A topic of immeasurable social and intellectual importance is very unwisely these have been accepted by auto dealers and service shops. The reason? These facilities are worried about legal liability, but this doesn't add up, since the story goes on to explain that the automakers have agreed to indemnify those findings: There was twice as much gold seized in this fashion as previously levels at the movies. The paper reports that a recent New York City showing of horn. "Today's Papers" has been employing an effective countermeasure for nearly twenty years: earplugs. These not only offer excellent protection from hearing loss, but also from noisy theatergoers and inane movie dates. According to the coverage, the newly brokered agreement lacks something the from various countries who would accompany the weapons inspectors. Even if the insisted on the right of inspectors to make repeat visits to the presidential Times national edition reports that "some diplomats say" that in only a matter of weeks inspectors could run into access problems at other sites. The apparently does not address the issue of other presidential properties not "absolutely" stands by her affidavit in which she denied having sex with The Wall Street Journal waited until the day after Desert Storm presidential candidates do. (How many column inches, for instance, did the cartoonists, who he discovered, had inordinate influence on the largely withholding this, since a Web search of that handle will quickly turn up a reject a casino application opposed by major Democratic party contributors had any connection to subsequent donations they made. The New York Times sophisticated equipment that could be used to develop biological weapons. This designed, not to head off a war, but to keep such mass destruction fingerprints Our grandchildren may look back at this as the year when the branch of the Cabinet known as Special Prosecutions started on its way to becoming the largest single entity in the federal government (Motto: "The Purpose of out, the agents are law enforcement officers and so shouldn't be any more president physically distances himself from his protective detail out of fears unable to continue. She's expected back today. Her daughter will nestle into local water systems to issue reports on the chemical contents of their water to is key: without the ability to know what's in tap water alternatives, knowing A Wall Street Journal "Politics and Policy" piece on something odd in the recent Times charge in an editorial that President leaked grand jury testimony. The writer notes that the Times could help in this regard, since it has run stories apparently benefiting from leaked information relating to grand jury testimony. But although the topic is news stories to really dig into such leaks, as they are the lifeblood of the Readers are asked at this point to observe a moment of silence. After efforts at a settlement leads everywhere. The industry promises to immediately leaves out the most important part of his quote: "We're going to get this The tobacco stance became official with a speech against the tough and as "aggressive" and "defiant." Goldstone is widely quoted as saying, specter of a thriving black market in cigarettes if the Senate bill were to areas of the proposed legislation, this is problematic with the provisions that touch on the curtailment of free speech, such as advertising restrictions. Goldstone is quoted in the Times saying that if Congress imposes these anyway, the companies "will fight in court." Feelings are running just as high that all this tobacco manufacturer stridency is a stratagem designed to get the current deal accepted without the addition of any harsher conditions. whether cigarettes cause diseases, about whether nicotine is addictive, about to make of the companies' pronouncements." Now, if only the Times had The Wall Street Journal seems a little less surprised by all this, claiming that "the reality is that tobacco companies for weeks have been closed out of the legislative process." The Journal also sends along summer's original tobacco deal, says he understands the industry position and purporting to show that the differences between black and white investors are 1970s. According to the paper, the opportunity presents itself because the tens of thousands of permanent residency permits for immigrants because a new it was installed last summer. Few immigrants, says the paper, will suffer dire consequences but the delay is making many of them panicky. Four students and a teacher, all female, died, and ten others were injured classmates pouring out of the school in response to the false fire alarm the nationwide in five months. In recent similar incidents, students have killed too often resulted in mistakenly supporting ruthless dictators just because tasks of racial healing and could alienate white centrist voters. And indeed, The papers note this vibe but inexplicably internalize it, and generally try Perhaps what underlies the presidential staff's concern is that the episode things that in cooler moments he very publicly says he wouldn't do. Hoping not to remind folks about this was one of the reasons handlers were glad to get him out of town in the first place. And indeed, such concerns explicitly followed called after them to make sure they heard the question. In light of the slavery speech, "Today's Papers" wonders how long it will be didn't do, instead of apologizing for things he did. enlarged to pick up the slack. The arrangement nearly doubles the company's leads with two new major financial company mergers, with the bigger of the two Times goes with the paper's poll results indicating that nearly leads with concerns that Protestant and Catholic extremists could derail last the standard for how big financial companies feel they need to be. welfare reform, "it is becoming clear that the mass of data the government requires states to collect is in such disarray that it is impossible to determine whether the law is working." The paper says the feds can't tell whether or not states are meeting the reform law's targets for gainfully employing former welfare recipients. State officials respond that they are stopped cooperating with its requests for information). Yesterday's series earlier poll had found the level of Latino support then to be much higher.) The over expertise to China that significantly improved the reliability of that country's nuclear missiles. The piece is a thorough and fascinating history of notes with a straight face, was the largest personal donor to the Democratic a much better return on their contributions than these groups now enjoy. Blacks are disadvantaged because of their comparatively short life expectancies, married women workers because Social Security payouts are presently based solely on a household's higher earner's contributions. The latter point is also explains the writer, "may spur a debate relating to how an officer can have a file containing numerous complaints of misconduct against minorities and still be promoted through the ranks." The proposal comes from a man with a proven files that you have thus far suppressed. You know, like your lie declined in the past five years, reversing the trend of the previous twenty. The coverage of the transportation bill, which includes an LAT for instance, of subway tokens and bus passes). This could, says the to changes in behavior, most notably a drop in smoking, and the decline in deaths to increased screening and better therapies, but the paper also observes LAT cancer lead doesn't mention it before the "jump" to the inside. increase seen in the most recent data is for melanoma of the skin, yet this type of cancer isn't mentioned at all in the Times story proper. bend, his organization will urge colleges and school systems not to buy its race, doesn't complicate the story with the inconvenient but true observation has become a common phrase of salutation and even endearment among blacks, a high proportion of its current usage is in fact as a synonym for "black There's a lot of Al Gore's quote brilliance unquote suspiciously on display of making a live video image of the Earth as seen from space continuously available on the Internet, and that after conducting twenty minutes of the deal will create the third largest car company, to be known as The papers see the deal as the beginning of a wave of consolidation in the gives the lay of that land: Companies ready to go shopping include, besides There's much talk in the merger stories of the challenges presented by the different corporate cultures of the two companies. A perhaps more interesting group, "I want you to forget the word 'scandals' and start using the word Times --and pictures of it are on everybody's front. The looming lower what counts as obesity, thereby instantly classifying millions of country either: the new rules are more in line with those wielded elsewhere. who worries that it will discourage people from trying to lose weight. LAT lead reports that in the wake of the passage of Prop. school districts applied for waivers, but that the state school board will rights groups opposing the measure has filed a federal lawsuit. And according system will not comply with the new law while waiting for the lawsuit to be say they may commit the "equivalent of educational civil disobedience" by not teaching in English. The story offers a quotation from one teacher saying just that, but the reader is left mystified as to where the paper came up with the teachers union election voted for ending bilingual instruction. Statistics appearing elsewhere on the paper's front also make it clear that this is a more candidates "may cause multimillionaires to rethink their plans for midlife that with the economy on the rise, the electorate's distaste for professional participants over the next four years. All the pieces mention that such a study has an inherent conflict: science says don't do anything to cloud the role of the vaccine, while ethics says do everything. But none give the reader any idea how this problem can be resolved, and so it's hard to see how the proposed The Wall Street Journal continues to pass along good news for percent in May. Special incentive deals have been driving things, so the trend could cool soon, but in the meantime it's producing some tremendous numbers: GM that he will ask for yet another year of Most Favored Nation status for China, meaning that China will continue to enjoy the tariff and trade treatment out that with the recent ethical and national security controversies tired excoriation of the press: "To my detractors and the naysayers out there, otherwise known as "talking heads," or "kibitzers," I say, bah humbug!" And forward and represent her as they know best how to do." All this prose does common with his former client: he probably blew it. Times 's top national story is that despite three years of contrary warning to Congress that failure to approve an emergency spending bill and a new round of base closings will mean big layoffs of Pentagon civilians and reports, only one actual flight trial of the entire system is planned before the administration must decide whether or not to place it in operation. labeled or packaged hazardous materials on their flights. For the story, to be catching more violators, the paper quotes one of the agency's top officials saying, "We wouldn't know whether hazardous materials are inside if a The Wall Street Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece says out, hasn't met in almost two years. Why? Convictions and indictments of top mobsters have created chronic uncertainty about who can speak for the various families as well as increased concerns about exposure at meetings to informers administration or figures in the Democratic Party. Not to mention all the way, is termed "the White House scandal spokesman." remember which year he was the dinner's featured entertainer." announced that none of a new batch of Border Patrol agents is being assigned to but nobody predicted this soon. The papers seize on various indications that in truth, they tell the truth. It doesn't matter who drove you there." But the deportation, in a ruling so secret that their lawyers aren't allowed to read made high school guidance counselors much more hesitant to pass along information about applicants to college admissions personnel. "They'll write that Johnny took these courses and was a great student," remarks one expert in the field, "but they won't tell you that Johnny burned down the The Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" says that the number of tax cases referred to the Justice Department in which taxpayers have simply refused to recognize the basic legality of the income tax has doubled over the treated as libel." And what exactly would that rewrite say? You know, that Times is stumped by this, but the Post gets it: he's quoting a financial machinations of the Democratic National Committee. And the New York Times leads with the biggest increase in the cost to employers of health care parochial school tuition, blocking national testing and allowing states to spend federal education funds virtually any way they choose. The story also Airways to do the same. Continental and Northwest airlines announced a similar sparks these actions by their competitors. These new links, explains flier mileage earned by passengers of the other airline and letting them into its airport clubs. More importantly, they could mean the consolidation of flight schedules, resulting in fewer and more expensive choices for consumers and fewer jobs for employees. The mileage and club arrangements do not require government approval, says the paper, but the schedule changes do. million from labor unions, corporations and fat cats in "soft money" that cannot be used directly for congressional or presidential campaigns and handed it over to at least a dozen state Democratic parties, which then sent back to percent commission for their part in these swaps. The paper says campaign reform advocates conclude that the scheme, "while legal, renders meaningless" review of the case, based on information recently submitted by King's family, which had come to support Ray's drive for a new trial, will continue. a notable drop in new infections, but rather to improved medical treatment of in fact remained quite stable. Despite considerable public education efforts targeting them, young people and intravenous drug users continue to contract important aspect of the recent proliferation of federal investigations: prosecutors are pressing reporters more and more for their notes and other source materials and to a surprising degree, getting them. And much media coverage. According to the piece (which credits earlier The Wall Street Journal reports that its latest poll for her lawsuit, notes the column, she testified, "Every time I look at this passenger jets. The national edition of the New York withdrawal from the West Bank. But the later metro edition of the Times sparking in one location inside its main tank and bare wire in another. This is of concern because electrical sparking inside a fuel tank is now suspected of the nation's largest local phone company and recreating much of the old Bell your copy of this list, odds are you are not scoring at home.) The lengthy Wall Street Journal account points out that unlike many of The deep thoughts of television's top executives as they existentially life of the tube titans is very complicated, struggling as they do with such conundrums as the erosion of network share of the total viewing audience, age demographic nuances, and the thinning of the talent and writing pools. Thank be known as the Unified Field Theory: "We'd do ourselves a world of good if we took out the bottom third of our schedule, which is not only performing in mediocre fashion but which is often mediocre in quality, and replaced it with a advocate for the disabled who, among other accomplishments, helped write the the Pentagon accidentally shot and killed a homeless man. A little story, yes, false positive mammogram results are quite common. This is also the top new government's harassment and obstruction of their work. undergo annual breast checkups for a decade can expect to get at least one false mammogram indication of a tumor. That's if some cost of breast cancer screening. Some doctors quoted in the Post say and mental consequences are not depicted, the kind considered most harmful to increases the risk of learning aggressive attitudes." rate, Slate might just break even while there are still papers for "Today's Papers" to be about.) Both papers mention that Net technology has paper costs via making personnel policies and payroll forms available online. trend: Internet stockholder voting. Corporations that allow it include Bell and confidence what the paper's earlier national edition was only able to treat as intention to bring Pot to international justice: "This is certainly a with an alleged "sexual aversion injury." The Post notes that not too leads with the reform pledges made by China's new prime minister. And the by White House attempts to discredit her. Regarding the release of admiring is quoted saying, "We don't pretend we can compete with the White House spin follow up on the story broken yesterday by the New York Daily News that press conference in which he laid down ambitious goals for sweeping social change in his country, including pledges to redesign the government and cut its solvent, all within the next three years. But he also flatly ruled out, reports national elections with a quip about pictures of him in Time and major league teams. And this is the aspect of the deal that is really almost double the going rate in baseball, is "so far out of the ballpark that it's highly unlikely the team will make money," but, the paper explains, ruled that the nation's largest cigarette makers shouldn't be held liable in weren't a defective product and that the manufacturers weren't negligent for Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing a surprising rise in the suicide rate among black teenagers. The study's authors suggest that the surge reflects the strain black families feel in transitioning to the middle class. One odd detail: black teenagers are much more likely than white teenagers to kill themselves in the presence of somebody else. does to the most important person in the room." Isn't that the opposite of Having already completed an 18-month civil contempt sentence for refusing to conviction, she could get ten years if convicted on these new charges. The The indictment contains some new information. At one point in the grand jury And the evidence she was questioned about there but did not explain includes a The Post quotes some legal experts saying it's highly unusual to prosecute someone for criminal contempt who has already served a civil sentence suggestion to the court makes everybody's story: "Lock him so far down that customers who suffered significant losses. Three senior executives at the bank "Today's Papers" guesses these fines don't represent as much of a dent to the bankers as the uninsured losses did to the elderly investors. After all, they development and a concomitant rise in the hope market as well. five million workplace drug tests administered last year by one major lab came danger of unprovoked attacks. Other embassies have done the same. Foreign only one story today. And it has legs. And pants. And a zipper. Today calls a "rapidly escalating inquiry" into allegations that castigated by numerous readers for having poor news judgment, or worse, a held out of the early editions of the papers this column is written from.) up a monitored rendezvous between the two women a little over a week ago at, his net to its current gaping dimensions. (And further investigation is what was said to her are hearsay and probably inadmissible.) the tapes. It quotes that source as saying the recordings include "graphic people about telephone answering machine messages containing a voice sounding two of the tapes, which the agent describes as "shocking beyond belief." Not surprisingly, given its historical squeamishness and the fact that it writes that he can't believe the charges, and hopes we can get past them quickly to the country's real business: making peace in the Middle East, confronted with a serious "Wag the Dog" problem: any strong action taken This scandal makes blatant the degree to which the mainstream media holds a Drudge Grudge. None of the stories in the papers today credit him for anything, After all, he still takes questions from Time --you know, the guys who about it: why should you have to tell the truth about anything a delivery guy have to go to jail if he doesn't want to answer that one? It's a only sex organ that has the constitutional right to privacy is the uterus. lead with the decision by a coalition of some of the world's top oil exporters fall, the State Department shut down some of its worldwide computer systems because of a suspected penetration by hackers. The systems contain unclassified the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidates at a state party supply about a fifth of the world's oil, issued a joint statement saying that been predicting the economic pain of low oil revenues would force the producers to rein in production. Clear enough, but then the paper goes on to "illustrate" that idea with the following passage from the joint statement, which is anything but: ".[A] drop in oil prices could lead to a reduction in the investments needed to secure international supplies, which would destabilize Wall Street Journal says the movie has already raked Curiously, the LAT lead puts in the second paragraph the information that "it is time for a sober reassessment of the power we have concentrated in the hands of prosecutors and the alarming absence of effective checks and balances to prevent the widespread abuse of that power." doubt available, the paper opts for a shot of him with a crazed smile and hands not quite in front his face, making him look like a spastic Mafia don. procedure in question. How can someone be partially born? And doesn't team in place to pull it out of its social and economic crises. The biggest through the capital like a cyclone." But give the Times credit for stunning announcement in a "surprisingly folksy and conciliatory speech," while The Post has some excellent detail on the mechanics of the firings. farewell award for "Services to the Fatherland," while the other big names got it in the neck on the phone. The Post account makes it clear that there abortion, decided to punt, prompting an angry dissent from conservative federal government has indeed, as it first hinted over a week ago, decided to attempting to use its recently announced claim of executive privilege to cover how actively involved she has been in the White House response to the scandal. in the controversy "an alarming attempt to extend presidential power." The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reports that Journal wasn't curious enough to find out the average age of those movement towards a radical overhaul of the tax code. not. In the end, there was no mention of automatic military moves, but merely a inclusion of an automatic attack. Despite this difference, everybody reports destruction have been eliminated. This news seems too important to leave to the reckless and irresponsible," warning that it could imperil the economy. "No one concerned about fighting crime would even think about saying, 'Well, three years from now we're going to throw out the criminal code and we'll figure out exactly what some people in Congress are proposing to do." A Wall Street Journal editorial on Internet taxation business infrastructure of the future," and hence its growth shouldn't be "stifled" by taxes. Along the way, the editorial asks a fun tax question: "If a reviews such basics as that the lawyers of those summoned have to wait outside and that grand jurors can pose questions. There are also the nuggets that their own lawyer as a counterbalance to the prosecutor. And there's this grand believe the public should be fully informed about the character of the to the Justice Department's lawsuit, "If we can't innovate in our products, then you know we will be replaced." The paper is struck by how far Gates' behavior is from "the usual cautious demeanor of business leaders visiting One of the key causes of press overkill of the sort we're now witnessing in anything that has to do with Topic A, even if it would otherwise merit "the poet of democracy, the poet of the body and soul," commands a loyal and point. The real reason for the piece isn't revealed until the fifth paragraph: (the earlier, national edition goes with the tax evasion indictment of of organized foes "unable to counter his ideas or record," but acknowledged that seven years of their attacks have diminished his personal standing with anymore. The paper observes that nearly half of the questions posed by the current members of the alliance must approve the change in order for it to take The Times piece also includes a workmanlike exposition of the politics defense industry, which stands to "reap huge profits" from increased weapons among every racial and ethnic group. Oddly, neither story includes any data on while still the most prolific, have experienced a rate drop for the first time. whispers the story the same way. Which, is, of course, the way the defense The Wall Street Journal front features an excellent story the rug, as well as numerous specific findings of illegal denials of loans, the farmers are still waiting to be made whole. Scandalous. The LAT front covers a sensational, disturbing story likely to be much discussed in the intersections, a distraught man killed himself with a shotgun blast to the live broadcasts. Afterwards, most of the stations expressed regret for the The episode could have a number of important consequences: Before taking his Live Free. Love Safe or Die." So perhaps the suicide will further crystallize the discussion of the impersonality of managed care. (Why, by the way, didn't (invariably highly rated) live broadcasts of potentially violent freeway quote. "The office of independent counsel could indict my dog. They can indict with him, must have been thrilled with this disclosure of the true family Today leads with an unprecedented court decision reinstalling in the accident investigators that the crew of a Marine jet was at fault in the deaths of twenty civilians in the Alps last month. The New York Times came just days after the courts said such a move would be legal. a (nautical) mile per hour.) As a result, says the paper, they recommend that the aviators' chain of command are also likely to be subject to further administrative action. Everybody notes that authorities hope the tough stance None of the papers are very clear on why not only the pilot but also the other officers in the plane's crew could plausibly be held accountable. None the three electronic warfare officers on board cannot control the plane's speed, altitude or course. The Post barely brushes this topic, speculating that the investigators may have concluded the tragedy resulted from a decision by the entire crew. But for all the papers say, the finding makes as much sense as holding a stewardess responsible for a commercial pilot's flight relevant stock markets and the differences in mechanics and culture among them. But inexcusably, the piece delays until the ninth paragraph any hint of why the possible merger could be of interest to the general public: it could mean episodes audible in the background would enable the particular calls to be exactly half a year's worth of median family income. That sounds high, so the Responsive Politics survey on lobbying, which show that interest groups are astronomer making the announcement is quoted saying there is "no immediate We have, he says, plenty of time "to improve our knowledge of this thing and nuclear bomb near the asteroid. The Times also mentions that two movies coming out later this year deal with the scenario of threatened interstellar The surprise congressional resurgence of campaign reform leads at the legislation to come to floor votes next month because reform advocates were close to getting enough signatures on a special petition to force a vote not a conversion. The Republican leadership still opposes reform that reduces the role of money in politics." And indeed the coverage points out that the Senate has already defeated a ban on "soft money" once this session. in the fourth and final sexual harassment case the Supreme Court is hearing this term. The issue in this one is whether a supervisor's single threat saying a female subordinate's sexual compliance will ease her working Court's decision here might affect her appeal. Both papers note that many of the justices seemed genuinely perplexed during yesterday's arguments. presumed that there is a closer connection between a mother and her child than generational differences seem to be at play in this decision, with the older No wonder the Administration's announcement the other day that needle exchange programs do work but won't be getting federal funds seemed so lame: responding have hastened patients' deaths with lethal injections or that this was a diversion which, says the paper, has in turn spurred some talk charities are having banner years. For instance, the Journal notes geography and history. And it explains the agency's purpose: "Intelligence is information needed by our nation's leaders, also known as policy makers, to keep our country safe. Policy makers, like the president, do not have time to read all the other countries' newspapers. There are just too many of them." leads with the endorsement by House Republican leaders of new tax breaks to Times goes with the general split inside Republican ranks over whether or not tax cuts should be part of this year's budget. The story notes that the states and the leading tobacco manufacturers. Like that settlement, the Senate bill aims to reduce underage smoking, regulate nicotine as a drug and alter the tone and reach of tobacco advertising. It also includes a payout to tobacco 'unrealistic and onerous' while public health advocates said it was too weak on industry spokesmen declined public comment." Also, it's very odd to talk about the reaction of the "industry" and "public health advocates" so broadly. prices enough to significantly reduce cigarette purchases. By the way, the initiative with revenue raised from higher cigarette taxes, with or without the The Wall Street Journal presents the "Award for Environmental The Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece notes a sex scandals: the further empowerment of his Cabinet officers. Especially true, indictment last week of two former Northwestern basketball players. The Times takes note of the latest developments in professional wrestling: more sexual content, coarser language, and no more Good Guys. This apparently produced an existential crisis on 43rd St.: "Now, there is no obvious moral exercising the perks of his new office by writing a piece in the LAT in which he tried to fire the paper's lead film critic, author of two scathing White House and Congress were being guided in this by overnight polling if you intimidate a witness, if you seek otherwise to obstruct the process of justice, it doesn't matter who wins and loses in the civil case." ebullient, and was quoted by everyone as saying, "Both Bill and I have felt "It's a convergence that could only be planned by God." coverage. While the island was owned at various times by each of the major sending them across the ocean to an unknown future." What's left out is that They ended their lives as free people before they fell into white hands. The LAT front reports that teen smoking is on the rise, jumping by nearly a third in the past six years. Especially alarming is the news of a big increase among black teenagers, a group once believed to be curiously resistant to the teen smoking who bid on the book says the excerpt he saw brought tears to his eyes. "Today's Papers" appreciates the dozens and dozens of responses to the request for a better term for the procedure often described in the papers as a "partial birth abortion." (Incidentally, there was no political agenda behind will essay to use the phrase and commends it to the dailies. And thanks to the many readers who rushed forward with considerable expertise to answer this column's somewhat inept question about the infinite number of trials. But in an actual experiment, which involves a finite define what would still count as random results. This is the margin of error this: the Times story, like all statistical stories, should have least four women, including one woman escorted by a state trooper to a instance, the Post also has the story about the woman meeting with all the encounters were innocent. And the Post emphasizes that how much of the collateral sexual material gets into the actual trial is up to the trial putting up posters advertising the pontiff's visit. memory, inside.) One is that Al Gore will announce today, at King's church in laws and police misconduct investigations. The other is the bizarre news that the beginning of the twentieth century, when more than a dozen auto companies airplane fuselages, televisions and hairnets, but there isn't one current up until a few years ago, Case wasn't able to get his parents to understand least four women, including one woman escorted by a state trooper to a instance, the Post also has the story about the woman meeting with all the encounters were innocent. And the Post emphasizes that how much of the collateral sexual material gets into the actual trial is up to the trial goes with drawing the basic Capitol Hill battle lines regarding the upcoming surplus budget. The Times says a rift has opened between House Republicans, who continue to aggressively opt for tax cuts, and Senate section profile) mention that the White House statement notably lacked any The LAT lead states that on the eve of a six nation conference in Hedges says there were clear indications the town saw heavy combat, indicating crisis, by a man in a brown tweed jacket, of top secret documents from a secure The Wall Street Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece presidency, even times when I was there, the White House has created the appearance of wrongdoing by being slow to come forward with the facts." had a sort of natural, youthful, exuberant smile that anybody, even a prosecutors show that correct procedures were used. nuclear tests. The papers all note the widespread fear that the tests could race between the two countries. Neither country, the papers note, has signed the treaties that constrain nuclear tests. Most of the papers observe that many spoke instead of measured yields and expected values and offered his warm Post observe that one of the three tests was of a thermonuclear device. The Post reminds the reader that is a hydrogen bomb. The Times involved in an illegal campaign contribution scheme. This is the seventh time brief item reporting that a defense contractor was sentenced in a procurement case. What did he do? He sold defective parts for the cable system used to fail, aircrews plunge to watery graves and flight deck personnel quite literally get cut in half. What was the executive's sentence? Three months in federal prison (Club Fed, no doubt) and three months of house arrest. Do you think that punishment fits that crime? Another question: It's bad enough that the law tends to downplay these cases, but why don't the papers make more of being willing to kill service members to make a profit? Maybe it's because they're too into profit and not enough into service members. possible to wave all this away as partisan tit for tat. Problem is, serious Democrats know that this scandal is about a lot more than tat." insurers for making it too difficult for people who switch or lose their jobs goes with the Senate Republicans' proposed budget and its rejection of as great as scientists had been saying, and it's very unlikely that the region their health coverage. The main problem, says the paper, is that the law doesn't control how much companies can charge for such gap coverage, so they the lowest price since the energy crisis in the 1970s. The reasons given are the same ones offered in the papers last week: a mild winter here and in below in the story is the reason for that: they are trying to gain market share The Senate Budget Committee proposed a Republican fiscal blueprint that, increased spending in such areas as education, child care and health care, choosing instead to put the proceeds of any tobacco settlement into Medicare. But on the other hand, the budget plan provides smaller tax cuts than were use budget surpluses to first shore up Social Security. The Times says the proposal is likely to be adopted more or less intact. The Wall Street Journal runs a piece inside reporting that it became media darlings a few years back, have been overstating the annualized ps, math error, say the Ladies. (The audit was prompted by earlier stories in tactics, intimidation, false imprisonment, jury tampering and other illegal methods to fight civil rights activities in the state. The files are believed to provide material for lawsuits against the state and also for the reopening was prompted by Continental Airlines' discovery in one plane of fuel leaking directors and to create new limits on the agency's ability to impose penalties billion over the next decade, say the papers. But the Senate discussion utterly failed to put such figures in the larger context, which is that already in legally owed taxes and is already auditing less than one percent of all returns. What's worse, the dailies don't mention this either. under a new state law that allows removal of students who threaten violence. What makes the case unusual is that what precipitated this were the two papers he turned in for an English class writing assignment: "The Riot," in which students set fire to the school library, blow up the science labs, and beat the boy and his parents are suing his school's principal and the school the 1st Cavalry Division had this assessment for acquisition officers of the about it by an interviewer, but it has long been assumed that this problem was addressed by conducting surveys via paper and pencil questionnaires. However, the new study shows that's not true. Which means that many accepted admit they were often or always drunk or high when having sex with women, and In the modern age, and especially in the modern newspaper, the pursuit of money takes on the full aura that was, in a bygone time, reserved for the merger. You have to wade pretty far down to get to "revenues," "earnings hotel meetings, the furtive use of code names, the artful deflection of an outsider's nosy question about the relationship. There's even, according to the take. "It was a very emotional issue at the end, emotional on both sides," bill, which would have barred the national political parties from trafficking connection with various improprieties concerning inmates, including a bill's fate last fall. The repetitive outcome, showed, says the paper, that a opposed the reform bill. The three: the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, and the National Right to Life Committee. The Times goes on to point out that while for the past year, Senate Republicans had put Democrats intend to run on the issue in the fall congressional elections. public pressure for change will increase: "There will be more scandals, more Sheriff's department is investigating the possibility that beatings of accused child molesters were allegedly encouraged by deputies working in the men's central jail and resulted in at least one homicide. formally took over the prosecution of police officers implicated in the brutal civil rights charges could mean sentences of up to life in prison. The five officers charged pleaded not guilty and remain free on bond. finding of no liability in her mad cow trial runs on the fronts of each of the four dailies that use photos. The caption and headline writers join the fun: power," and points out that a tonic for that idea is found in the recently dictators can be toppled by small acts of insurrection. leads with the Supreme Court's ruling that even a white defendant can challenge a grand jury indictment on the grounds that jury selection discriminated to dissolve Parliament and hold national elections if the nomination is again campaigns that prey on the insecurities and dreams of our children." The context for all this jockeying is the fate of the tobacco bill, with its restrictions on teen marketing, now awaiting consideration by the full story is itself a perfect example of the problem. Although the remark by There's real calumny in another Post story inside, which reports that goes on to note that Burton is planning to release tapes made by authorities of reveal incriminating conversations with White House officials. Federal law sales networks" headed up by "charismatic leaders," has issued an immediate ban there are already indications that huge numbers of men who are not impotent, Times lead with the balanced budget proposed yesterday by President substantial new spending until Social Security is fixed. The paper notes that in contrast to most past years, this proposed budget is not arriving on Capitol Hill dead on arrival. The coverage also features various negative quoted, "This is a budget only a liberal could love." The biggest criticism is the budget's use of a proposed tobacco settlement to partially offset new polls, these priorities generally conform to what the voters want. sensitive to the political angle, saying the budget presents the president with "another opportunity to portray himself as absorbed in governing, and to deflect accusations that he had an affair.." The LAT also highlights political considerations, saying that the budget was "designed to give The main Wall Street Journal "Politics and Policy" piece says that despite opening Republican potshots, there is likely to be agreement about the provisions dealing with child care, transportation, and tobacco taxes. The Journal sees the big conflicts coming over the expansion of Medicare to let their bases be used for support aircraft, but not bombers. While seeking nationally. The trend also makes the LAT front, and is inside at the White House, not ten times as has been variously reported, but "about three dozen times" after leaving her White House job. She was, says the paper, usually cleared by the president's personal secretary. The paper's sources are officials who have either seen or been briefed about the weren't for them. A White House spokesman wouldn't confirm the number of visits members of the Post editorial staff are apparently suffering the cerebral ill effects of too much exposure to brightly colored polyester. The LAT front reports that, in an attempt to highlight Southern chosen for the region that will figure in an aggressive marketing campaign. The paper says it will probably be "Tech Coast." "Today's Papers" is still partial to press the issue has meant that it has amassed much striking power elsewhere. The Post gives this order of battle: "F-117 stealth aircraft and A-10 carriers, cruise missiles on a number of other ships and B-52 bombers on the Guard bases, military command centers and suspected weapons factories and matter into Congress' lap as a potential impeachment case, thus plunging the country into a "wrenching political dilemma" given the president's surging rather loose interpretation of what counts as an impeachable offense, reporting that he once argued before the Supreme Court that poisoning the neighbor's cat might be impeachable. regarding cigars. Apparently, the agency is moving towards requiring stogie makers to report their ad and promotion budgets. And is considering further steps such as: requiring cigar ads to carry a Surgeon General's health of executions of political prisoners and common criminals in the latter part of The piece convinces the reader that Tucker's pickax is not an anomaly: "Among the ways condemned women have killed in this country are shooting with an a baseball bat. One drowned her paralyzed son by pushing him off a canoe on a Kind of amazing those exams didn't eventually turn up in the private quarters "dangerous new instability" the blasts have created in the region. To head it explosions was just as much a surprise to the world as the first. The were scheduled a month ago and were not intended as a rebuff to international spies, the policy folks at State and the White House fell down on the job too, interest in nuclear weapons. There is a real problem here, but the newspapers aren't exempt. Yes, the intelligence agencies and the national security staffs are too readily distracted by the current crisis, whatever it is, but the easily overlooked aspect of the world's tensest nuclear crisis since the end of are wearing out so badly that their continued deployment threatens "hundreds of Despite official reassurances, when the sub was brought back to its base there failing to report it. But the paper doesn't claim to know how things turn out. Is it just "Today's Papers" that wonders how it can be that witness testimony hours and yet a sitcom plot remains a state secret? has accumulated evidence of an impeachable offense. The national edition of the goes with the conclusion by a panel of educational experts that both for teaching reading. The metro edition of the Times leads with the unanimous decision by the New York City Board of Education to require elementary school kids to wear uniforms. The top national story in the metro Times lead continues the close look the paper has been taking lately at local and state prisons. On the heels of indictments of prison officials in federal investigators are now looking into assaults and slayings of inmates at The judge in the Espy aide case ignored the sentencing guideline recommendation of probation to hand down a 27-month sentence for lying, and "send a message to key players in the White House intern scandal." The sentence to avoid the leaky consequences of the House of Representatives rule making material in the files of any standing committee available to any member. in knocking the Republican budget before a cheering, nation's future," by eliminating his new initiatives on education, job training Senate Budget Committee approved the Republican tax and spending plan on a The Wall Street Journal "Business Bulletin" reports that it takes about six years for a new consumer product to take off. That probably and other government agencies to release every classified document in the work, editing out sensitive information line by line. And it's a lot of about the [White House] intern program in which she was employed." Here at last investigators, who especially want to clarify whether or not there were any reflect his confidence in what he's getting from these witnesses.) Recent Service personnel that he'd found and disposed of tissues with lipstick and The Journal 's story represents a first because it was released on the represents an occurrence you'll be seeing again: newspapers and magazines using didn't wait for the morning paper because it was hearing footsteps from at response, says the paper, the administration is prepared to invoke the sweeping Podesta, a deputy White House chief of staff, goes before the grand jury. regarding any possible military response. Top Republicans are calling for the leads with a bit of a bombshell about the grand jury testimony of President knew and when did he know her may have gotten a big boost from the grand jury were sometimes alone together in the White House. Additionally, says the paper, wouldn't have to turn them over. And soon after that conversation, says the The Post lead nails down the scandal's earliest known The Wall Street Journal reports that during his Middle East general says the plane was following a standard training route, and thus far alleging that the plane was equipped with a flight data recorder but that the claimed that they were pressured for sex by company officials and urged to wear tobacco industry giants make it clearer than ever just how hard the companies led to calls from minority lawmakers and health authorities that some proceeds from any global tobacco settlement be earmarked for minorities. What with all the headlines about Democratic Party fundraising, you might "While most people seem to believe the United States should take action against planners. The Journal says that even with a new wavelet of improved weapons, the top brass doubts that the air attacks they're planning can aren't really sure where the special weapons plants are, and don't know what to do about "dual use" targets like hospitals that are also used to produce biological weapons. The Post reports, based on several unnamed for example, secret police headquarters. The paper says the administration The LAT lead about managed care reform covers ground the news is that legislation drafted by Democrats that requires federal standards for health insurance plans and an appeals process to enforce them will be taken up when Congress returns from recess next week. The managed care industry and the nation's largest employers will fight this vehemently, the investigation, the LAT front reports that the president has been using "one of the best tools available" for frustrating a criminal investigated in the case. Such agreements, says the paper, have allowed the president's defense team to learn what questions are being posed and what answers given during grand jury sessions. The paper suggests that both All too often the contemporary newspaper correction resembles one of those killed in a bombing raid. The headline on the story incorrectly characterized either the original headline or an explanation of the way in which it was incorrect in its characterization. It's only when the reader digs out the War "goal." By hiding the ball this way, the Post misses the chance to explore the intelligence community sophistry at work here. Ordinarily, if you hope for something and do things that ordinarily could be expected to bring it government operates under a presidential executive order forbidding the the same time being genuinely surprised if he were to die as a result. decides a simmering conflict between those organizations and banks in favor of consumer advocates complain that this portends bad news for customers, who've benefited from the downward fee pressures credit unions provide. Bankers Assn. and four other banking groups." Not to a spokesman for those organizations, but to the groups themselves. "Today's Papers" guesses this is a telltale sign of writing the reaction part of the story from a press release. It would be far better to interview an actual person instead, if only because "avalanche of lies" spread about his staff and defended his decision to potential wrangle over the possible invoking of executive privilege by certain significant resources to a long court battle, or don't fight it and forgo some conversations" she had with his client. The paper doesn't say whether the a legal defense fund by a benefactor whose foundation promotes the view that women need to "use their sexuality" in the workplace to attract mentors. enough of a break from sabotaging campaign reform to try sabotaging the new made enough deadly microbes to kill all the people on earth several times over." There's also the revelation of a crash military program intended to days, computer hackers have broken into unclassified Pentagon networks to examine and possibly alter payroll and personnel data. Sure, the school bus is crawling with safety violations and doesn't contain seat belts and will be taking the kids to classrooms run by teachers who never actually had to take the subjects they're teaching, but at least according to campuses to generate admissions statistics since the system abandoned affirmative action have seen their black and Latino acceptance rates expressing their animosity towards their abusers or physically separating from treatment or counseling for risky and reckless behavior. had "no specific recollection" of meeting with her, but that his current denial counteroffensive yesterday with an appearance on the "Today" show, was a Such apparently effortless shifting by some women is called to task pointedly in the Wall Street Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece via a quotation from a Democratic consultant, who says, "What gets to the heart of it is that feminism is no longer a principle, it's a political tool." leaders. Everybody carries the repentance story on the front page. send the former sergeant major of the Army to jail, but did bust him down one rejected an advisory commission's recommendation that male and female recruits have led to improper naturalized citizenship of more than six thousand supposed to work, since the paper also states there is no intention to use "We're all a little itchy. We'd kind of like to do something.'' adjacent piece suggests that the report's finding concerning alleged word of her alleged affair with the president began seeping out on an Internet while providing little if any additional protection for their own occupants." with the lack of protective features in small cars. the time: wear sunglasses. The picture helps drive home the basis for the pol the Godfather has to eventually help out of some little unpleasantness in killed a teenage motorist...." was caught driving again. And atop the story sits the headline: "Driver of Truck That Killed Teen is Cited with New the driver precipitated the fatality by running a red light. So, it may seem a that makes lies sound truthful and murder respectable, "Today's Papers" would after he crashed into a car, killing a teenage motorist...." And to put it under a headline like: "Driver of Truck Who Killed Teen is Cited With New Today leads with promising new cancer drugs soon to be tested on blood supply to tumors, making it impossible for them to grow. Used together, they have eradicated tumors in mice. Which is why they are scheduled for human trials. But, says the paper, the leap from mouse to man is a huge one. some chance that the day after Election Day they will make a move that moots congressional investigators took the "Election Day" comment to signify pardon The LAT front story on Japan's current economic woes runs under: "Tax Cut May Not Spur Yen to Spend in Japan." Do we really need to see this "clever" for the entire personal computer industry if they cause that new software to be The Journal 's "The Outlook" piece takes note of recent claims that military bases supports the cause with some simple observations: While the keep total military spending flat, the paper notes that not closing bases is equivalent to passing cuts on readiness, weapons procurement and research. Sometimes the narrative in economic flash stories is a little brisk. What to their rubles rather than selling them for dollars. Still, the reader can't "Contrary to what markets and commentators are imagining, this is not a to her of secret grand jury evidence, she decided the privileges are trumped by to the contrary, was seriously affecting his ability to focus on his job. The would argue that the resulting uproar could impair his legislative program, distract him from his duties, affect his dealings with foreign heads of state, Federal Trade Commission investigators are recommending civil antitrust charges business section calls "a glimpse of the future the government is seeking" in highway bill, but what about tobacco legislation, campaign finance reform, a student loan bill, health care, food stamps for needy immigrants, child care charge. In hearings last week, a House committee heard from various Platters, Drifters, Coasters, and Vogues all requesting that federal law be amended to protect oldies groups from other performers using the their and our campaign financing, but this country takes a backseat to no one when it claim that executive privilege protects two of his aides from testifying to the and leaked to the papers by lawyers involved in the case (who thereby continue LAT point out that a White House bid to have some protections extended White House claim that Secret Service agents are also cloaked in a special really decided what to do about it. As the Journal points out, that's understandable: on the one hand, although political moderation is on the most active sponsor of state terrorism," but on the other, making nice would Correction: "Today's Papers" was mistaken yesterday in saying that the passionate defender of the Bill of Rights, "that foundation stone of our republic." But she also draws a clear, important conclusion: "On the question chillingly easy for crazies and criminals and children to get guns." missiles. The LAT quotes an expert saying that this missile claim may be more a statement of intent than fact. And the LAT is likewise consoling keep money from fleeing the country, it froze all foreign currency accounts. newest open nuclear power is also one of its ten poorest countries. The foreign policy approach of the nineties, and returning security and moral Supreme Court for a definitive ruling on executive privilege as it applies to caught the White House by surprise. But, the papers note, it was used Well, if smoking can reduce breast cancer, it's only fair that, according to political expenditures can be drawn from his or her dues. What's wrong, says the Times is open to a bilateral version in which labor unions must get permission for political spending from individual workers and corporations must do so from individual shareholders. Such an "evenhanded approach," says the both parties and help diminish the corroding influence of big Proposition 209's mandate to abandon affirmative action in admissions, the new leads with news that might be heartening for many users of the now withdrawn not associated with an increase in heart valve problems. But the paper goes on percentages of the total admitted pool, an illuminating datum. Both the university's decision to give extra consideration to poor applicants, thus One university official is quoted by the LAT as seeing in the shift admissions must be put back on black and Latino families and the students will finally and conclusively put to rest the lie that we've heard for so long from these campuses that race is only one factor in how they choose changed the present tense in that last sentence to the past, which was clearly The Wall Street Journal spills a lot of ink on tobacco, with the pending Senate bill. The "Capitol Journal" column paints a picture of a bill in "deep peril," and of a sharply divided Senate besieged by an "enraged" tobacco industry. In the end, says the paper, it may fall to one man to bring that showed "therapeutic touch" practitioners don't have a special ability to hand they couldn't see at a rate "no better than chance" would have predicted, over substance: there isn't a word about those international family planning organizations (none are even identified) and to what extent they facilitate Senate will consider before it's through. Yesterday's debate focused mainly on Times notes that expansion cost issues seem paramount to the Senate. This means many members don't really trust the official estimates, because And the Times explains that some senators are concerned that more and "Today's Papers" though, that here may lie the true solution: Let any country booming economy has delayed the insolvency of Social Security for three book sales must have slipped and Newt is back on red meat. The paper quotes has come to say to the president, 'Quit undermining the law in the United as many as twenty confiscated luxury vehicles and another wrote an anonymous threatening letter to a tax attorney who had testified against the agency at proposal for ushering in a simplified tax code: require all members of Congress and the president to prepare their own returns without professional help. teach economics to Democrats than compassion to Republicans." "Today's Papers" is more than a little mystified by the sudden journalistic interest in the reality of the Jerry Springer show. Pretty soon, the papers is a good one: just put a cop on the Springer set. Real fights would meet with arrests and fake ones wouldn't and hence would be quickly unmasked. Either way, Times goes with a state court decision that gives New York City the right to kick topless joints and sex shops out of Times Square). The LAT lead he believes they have spread false information about his staff. The stance, The big unresolved issues, says the paper: the role of the diplomats who would now accompany weapons inspectors on their rounds, the inspectors' chain of the new inspection organization will be more susceptible than its predecessor point, apparently, Al Gore suggested that the administration consider have his closest aides cite executive privilege to keep from testifying to the matter. The notion could be put to a test before a federal judge as early as efforts to obtain testimony from presidential bodyguards. The decision was that efficient protection requires agent proximity and hence agent Some editorial writers weigh in today on the escalating battle between strategy of "looking for dirt on prosecutors and trying to discredit an "attack on press freedom and the unrestricted flow of information." more." The piece goes on to quote various breathless university officials about how the money is rolling in, but nowhere is the question raised as to why if financial times are so good, tuition has risen at a ferocious rate, often escalating cost of donor eggs for various infertility procedures. One New month's worth of eggs. The paper notes that sperm donors typically get less Times leads with news that must strike terror deep within the hearts of leased tens of thousands of unlisted phone numbers to telemarketers. report (and from others as well). Apparently, inspectors found some of the buildings on their list to have been stripped of all equipment and even documents or computers. And some inspectors were stunned by the opulence of the presidential palaces. Some rooms in them must have, according to some on the The Post reports that Pol Pot died quietly on a flowered mattress. The story goes on to describe televised footage of the death scene: Pot's body stretched out The emotional scars left by Pol Pot's terror reign are crystallized in a position that Pol Pot's death should not end efforts to bring to justice other editorial states that eight to ten members of Pot's extermination committee are Al Gore's disclosure of his tax return the other day was to label him "Vice The Wall Street Journal reports that in the months leading up Different" ads featuring pictures of famous independent movers and shakers, has line is, "In China, he may not get across the message that Apple is trying to Internet. The racial divide is particularly pronounced on the lower end of were six times as likely as blacks to have used the Web. By the way, the explain that this is "a popular Internet graphical network, encompassing some Times lead describes those efforts too, but emphasizes the nature of Despite the Likely Costs." But the text is anything but. High up, the reader is "sick and tired of hearing you give me a pile full of complaints about the story sources the comment the same way. (Gee, given that the scoldings were private, and that the knowledge was direct, who could that be?) to congressional approval of the national tobacco settlement. And if Congress fails to enact the tobacco deal thereby killing these programs, says the paper, Democrats come away with a potent political issue: the Republicans favored the sort of tobacco legislation this year. Congress, he says, is moving towards enacting the parts of the settlement the tobacco companies don't like while The most newsy development in what "Today's Papers" had decided to call the grand jury room today after being compelled to answer questions yesterday about according to some people in the know, Lewis was "aware of a relationship grand jury later this week. And the dailies all quote her lawyer's comment that she will testify if his attempts to quash the grand jury subpoena are conceal it from outsiders was, "What's the big deal? So she lied and convinced someone else to lie." The paper effortlessly ticks off several of the scandal's But the Post goes a bit overboard with 120-plus words on an alleged reveal nothing about the conversation except that it lasted less than five None of the papers' accounts addresses a natural question: If spouses can't be compelled to testify against each other, how come a mother (especially one who's apparently her child's "closest confidante") can be compelled to testify against a daughter? Why, in the law, is water thicker than blood? The Wall Street Journal recently caught a lot of hell for its front, a retired Secret Service agent is saying the same thing. is particularly odd given the frequency with which Times readers are left seriously confused about many of the paper's more significant alleged laws by conspiring to close abortion clinics through violence, and hence could be subject to damage claims. The national edition of the New York Times demonstrators would violate their free speech rights. But the paper carries protect extortion: someone saying they'll break your windows every day or someone stationing a thug outside your business." The story also makes the disagree about whether it's enough to make a nuclear bomb, says the paper) were The LAT front brings word that NOW, after staying on the sidelines for drug users, even while acknowledging that such programs reduce the spread the inside politics of the decision, reporting not only that the were afraid Republicans might push through legislation taking federal money away from organizations providing free needles. Health and Human Services that the best programs are designed locally. So why not design them locally and The Wall Street Journal reports that child labor is flourishing adult cheap labor. It is estimated, says the paper, that there are more than students at her school were also urged to apply by a black student at the college, and was interested in another much lesser school because she mistakenly thought it was free. And in the course of the story she learns that There's been a lot of reason lately to question the overall economic goodbye to the boss, but opted not to. And a good thing, he writes, because "at that moment a faithless aide was in there talking about a cancer on the Presidency" and "had I gone in, I would have been taped and perhaps later Dean as a traitor, so much so that he can't bring himself to type his name in this story, and he still seems to think that a lot of innocent people got all lead with the latest developments in the White House sex scandal. The federal judge, but in both regards it leaves important details out. You have to deposition leak as "reckless, reprehensible and unethical" but also that he scoop: "the court has made it absolutely clear it is illegal to leak and discuss" his deposition. Both papers report that all players in the who once compared the White House to a subway, where you need coins to open the doors, will plead guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and election law violations The Wall Street Journal reports that military planners of traveling at "high speed" when it struck sand barrel obstacles, hit a wall and Perhaps the Highway Patrol fears another arbitrator in the wings. It didn't accept a federal judge's ruling that executive privilege does not protect his however, the papers report, still pursue an effort in the courts to invoke cartels are, via a new far more potent strain of heroin, gaining a growing him to fight on, but on much less controversial grounds, and yet still perhaps a legitimate criminal inquiry." What's more, argues the Times the claim The Wall Street Journal 's political reporting continues to be votes for a commission that would study and recommend further changes in the system. (A big clue to how lightly Congress takes the issue. When Pearl Harbor accurate, newsworthy news reports are protected by the First Amendment from lawsuits merely alleging illegal disclosure of private facts, but the Court offensive or intrusive methods to get the story. The case prompting the decision involved a woman car accident victim ministered to by a nurse wearing struggling group to give aid to: poverty lawyers. Today, says the paper, with for young law school grads, supporting their legal efforts on behalf of such initiative to have the federal government write its millions of forms, directive and letters in "plain language." An example he which they lead shall be so designed and arranged as to be clearly recognizable as such" as "An exit door must be free of signs or decorations that obscure its visibility." The Post waggishly provides another example, effectively this was in violation of the law" should be recast as "There's no law against governing transplant organ availability. The New York Times global settlement with Holocaust victims by setting up a compensation fund. The state college system: an overwhelming number of its incoming students lack the basic math and English skills they should have acquired in high school. The sickest candidates first regardless of where they live, as opposed to the current ones, which were conceived when organs couldn't be maintained outside the body for nearly as long as they can now, and hence emphasize getting them to the closest candidates. The private network that coordinates most organ distribution opposes the shift, because of a fear that this change will atrophy local transplant centers by diverting organs to a handful of large regional ones, and also deny organs to people who can't travel. The papers all point out attempting to fix the outcome of games for the benefit of bettors during the paper, because Northwestern has the reputation of placing academics above percent said they had gambled on a game they had played in. captions pointing to stories inside. This judgment is especially hard to delegation were in effect sold to mega donors to Democratic Party coffers, paper. Almost every editor questioned says the crucial fact pushing disclosure was that the names were already out there, in the local paper and on mainstream press, where the dwarfs have ended up controlling the giants. The Wall Street Journal reports that Senate Judiciary Committee partners to speak with Senate investigators despite nondisclosure rules in MS uninvited sexual gesture by a man is met with noncompliance by a woman and then counters with a family secret. Many years ago, his older sister was walking in the park when a man exposed himself to her. She screamed and ran home, where she came down with a cold and then pneumonia and then a few days later, died. think otherwise is to opt for making coming up behind someone and saying "Boo" a crime, because yes, it just might possibly scare him to death. The actual details of the deal are still somewhat unclear, but it has also reports that the president's senior advisors expressed relief at the of whom is quoted, "We had a tough time seeing where this was going to take The Times has the most reporting on the domestic political reaction about any role he might have had in disseminating negative information about and signals "an escalation in the battle between the White House and the produced the arrest of two men for trying to sell organs from the bodies of story inside, pointing out that one of the arrested men said that he could guarantee skin from young prisoners and lungs from ones who didn't smoke. Provided that the "donors" in question are legitimately tried and executed, neither piece, it seems, really makes it clear exactly why this practice is The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reports that a researcher has found that despite worker assumptions to the contrary, childless employees do not work longer hours than their colleagues raising kids. husband's congressional seat. Does the prospect of even lengthier absences, where I could be [with the children in Palm Springs] for weeks at a time." is quoted as saying, "is going to stand for somebody being indicted for having she may be somebody who is not being indicted because she's having a unnamed "person with knowledge of the decision." The Post cites "individuals familiar with the case." The LAT refers to "sources close own sources, saying they are "lawyers," which leaves them quite vulnerable to punishment by the judge, who warned the lawyers in the case against disclosing the tobacco industry, seeking billions in damages to compensate for the expense successfully brought by several state governments in recent years, constitute, history's costliest collection of cases. A similar ratcheting up is afoot in planning a joint antitrust action, separate from the pending federal case followed included postings comforting the man by telling him that the crime was long past, but three of the people participating went to authorities, and a few after only seven months makes it "plain that his appointment was a knocked on his door recently, he came out pretending to stab her several times the same way any other innocent citizen would: he leaned out of the window and shouted "an anatomical obscenity" at her. (By the way, why the code phrase? If congressman thinks the president is a "scumbag," then surely it can come dirty papers quote Tucker's last words to the families of her victims: "I am so sorry. I hope God will give you peace with this." The papers point out that the death by lethal injection came despite pleas for mercy from the Pope, Pat the perennial question: Do they swab the prisoner's arm with alcohol to prevent infection before giving the needle or not? (If so, why?) But the piece does tube leading into the condemned man's arm burst, spewing lethal fluids towards one stating, "Forget Injection, Use a Pickax." Both papers note that a cheer return was voluntary, but the Post says no final understanding has been he must provide inspectors with unfettered, unconditional access to all sites. sustained air war, but no substantial number of ground troops. According to the paper, this is commensurate with congressional thinking, which has little room for reprising the Gulf War. On the Hill they have the stomach to contain has in hand the justification for any new military strikes: the Congressional latest corporate thinking on office romances. The piece points out that up to just a few years ago, at most companies office relationships were grounds for the view that such relationships cannot be banned but can be managed. Usually Such thinking has no doubt fostered an environment in which, reports the the independent counsel law or media ethics. It's about sex. After all, Rich coverage of the scandal, that same public has made the porn business twice as leads with the recommendation by the nation's air safety board that thousands of airliners currently in service be rewired as a precaution against the sort Security, to fix the system. This is also the top national story at the The rewiring recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Board, accompanied by the further suggestion that surge suppressors be put on board has an advisory role only, and implementation must be carried out by the applies to the planes of at least one other company, Airbus, as well. but also the unsafe ones observed in three retired 747s. Representatives (on the grounds that it describes potentially impeachable offenses) has already been written, and that it pertains not only to President fought hard against the administration's contention that executive privilege revenue for the program by increasing the limit on wages subject to the payroll meeting was ruling out a conversion of Social Security to a private pension individual accounts provided the overall plan they're a part of continues to been "boorish and offensive," it was brief, and isolated and didn't result in physical harm. Therefore, it wasn't, she concluded, under even the most charitable reading of the record, a sexual assault or workplace harassment. The car phone and pulled over and cried. The Post says officials at the cigar in his mouth and a drum in his hands (to be replaced moments later with a presidency appear to have been diminished in important and lasting ways." A And the LAT lead editorial sees the development as a "bittersweet victory for the president." Perhaps, the editorial continues, "it is possible to envision a time when Social Security reform and other urgent issues might capture the attention of the nation and be at the top of the congressional agenda. When the debate over health care returns to the spotlight. When the details of the tobacco settlement become a matter of wide public discussion. place in history." The scandal, says the LAT has made the president seem the rich have, somewhat surprisingly, not been able to shelter their income with those from a monkey, ape or other animal. His goal: to set off a hybrids is unsettled, because patent law has not addressed "how human" an animal would have to be before it fell under the ban. administration support for its efforts to sell communications technology to way linked to his firm's increased access to China. Of course, when lobbying is Times --but not the Post --makes the point, but not until after the and the episode marks the first time in nearly thirty years that a National Guard combat unit has been shipped overseas. Unfortunately, the piece focuses The LAT 's "Column One" brings out another overlooked consequence of military downsizing. Seems that budget cuts have forced the Pentagon to stop supplying honor guards to most military funerals, and this role is now often satellite recorded bulldozers appearing near the test site, but that this didn't set off any alarm bells. But the piece doesn't say why. Surely this is some sort of human breakdown, because the current generation of spy satellites the morning of the test explosions, "one lonely analyst" saw a photo of fences being removed, but it took four or five hours before more experienced officers arrived to review the evidence. The Times doesn't say why they weren't experienced officers have rank, and insist that rank has its privileges, like working during the daytime. Isn't that dumb? And isn't it lucky it was only a professor that promises "How to Stop Mass Public Shootings." The prof's suggestion? Let citizens (without criminal records) carry concealed weapons. Now, do you think if the teachers (and the other students, for that matter) at situation safer? After all, the boy pulled a knife on the cops in the police station after he was arrested, and presumably he knew they were armed. The professor adduces some statistics for his side purporting to show that the availability of concealed weapons lessens the occurrence of what he calls irrelevance: it doesn't include gang shootings or shootings that are the byproducts of another crime. (which means he couldn't even include the year. Thank God for tenure, or this guy might be running a police department by reducing engine explosions and episodes of flying unaware into the ground. lead is the decision by a federal court voiding the government rule requiring affirmative action because it's the first time that a federal appeals court has evaluated an affirmative action program that used not quotas but goals. In effect, the court said it didn't see the difference, holding that goals still tended to promote numerical targets and hence hiring on purely racial grounds. target women, this decision does not address those, although experts say the decision will probably lead to eventual challenges of them as well. The affirmative action program has been overturned: three years ago Congress did away with tax breaks for companies selling broadcast stations to magazine received. So far, it appears, says the paper, much of it went to the opportunity to say nice things about themselves in straight news stories (the Papers" however, that plays and books (and string quartets) can win have caused some blurring of the lines and confusion about his role with us." It's far from clear to "Today's Papers" why this is any kind of a firing place. More importantly, talking with a news subject about a possible job is If you've just now finished your tax return, you'll be glad to know that Congress is springing into action with a fundamental tax law change. The passed by the House and awaiting Senate approval calls for taxpayers to start where their money goes." Why not go all the way and let us start writing tax checks to say, "Bob Dole's Condo Payments," "White House Lawyers' Salaries," or are offered when they cannot find work on their own. The feds say pay minimum The election pledge is one of several reforms announced yesterday in puts this in a separate piece deep inside.) The country's justice minister said that the release of other political prisoners will follow soon. Also, of the fourteen soldiers suspected in the killings of six demonstrators during announced it will review its business dealings with companies owned by former "severing" the government's close links with those companies. The LAT says that already under the new policy some small public works contracts have came just one day before the International Monetary Fund is due to begin The Post says that the military is strongly supporting reform. The moves appear to ensure that he will be an "interim figure." Japan. Using rooftops and truck convoys, the group conducted, concludes the permission from individual members to make any political use of dues, is, despite a commanding early lead in the polls, now sinking fast. The main power of union spending pretty much drive home 226's point? The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to Manpower intend to increase staffing in the third quarter. The paper quotes the gloss provided by Manpower's chairman: "There has never been a job market even close good luck finding any. In a world of lurid myopia, it's refreshing to see that a paper is still willing to put seven staffers on an overseas story. news of a major bribery scheme involving food contracts for the county schedule for this week. It would be interesting to see how many fundraisers and adding that he is "totally out of control." The paper reports that over the a big challenge to the balanced budget because it provides goodies to every congressional district in the country. The piece points out that among those who want to make sure the bill doesn't eat into any budget surplus is Newt side issues that could lead to a confrontation with the White House, namely, proposals to delay new clean air regulations, scale back affirmative action hiring on highway projects, and lower wage levels for transportation project The Wall Street Journal front page tells the story of how four allowing commercial aircraft to use military Global Positioning satellites for navigation, the system is nowhere near in place. In fact, says the have to keep paying for the current, conventional system until every airline The Journal also reports on the trend of professional sports teams offering player education programs in an attempt to keep their new millionaires out of trouble. The programs typically cover how to handle euphemistically called the "Career Development Program." with the Ventures, a band he helped form in the late 1950s. shootings, which also gets a lot of coverage on the other fronts. recollections of massacre survivors. Given the prior day's discussion of the episode that occurred during his own administration. The paper points out that a lack of credible information about what was actually going on. The paper also notes that some human rights activists responded that there was ample reliable ethnic killing was too slow. The Times does a good job of supplying conviction might result in sentences of just a few years. The LAT front young people have to guns. (They were apparently stolen from one of the boys' may have found his niche. Some in the foreign policy community, says the suspects' names from school sources, opt to use them rather than invoking the usual juvenile court practice of anonymity. "Today's Papers" would be interested in finding out the general policy of the papers on such matters: Do they print the names of juveniles whenever they learn them? Or only when the which led with the mergers yesterday, goes with the looming high costs of the multinational companies to handle such tasks as central database access and Northwest Airlines and travel agencies' difficulties getting credit card services from being offered by a single company, this bank merger is within the legislation that would raise the hurdles to Fed approval of big bank the LAT identified more with customers and employees than shareholders, doesn't get to that latter bit of unpleasantness until the fifteenth paragraph quoted from others like "bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to the accounts of individual customers" and "bigger banks do tend to charge higher mergers, the government should reconsider the consequences if one of the new monsters fails. Current law allows the government to completely protect depositors and creditors of banks considered too big to let fail. This policy imbroglio: the promise of complete protection contributes to bank failures by encouraging risky bank ventures. So, the piece argues, big account holders should have to personally bear some of the loss that comes from a failure. That would encourage them to monitor their banks more closely. to break spending records because candidates are buying television time far decision to mount an early and intense television campaign. Another influence obvious that politicians fear not having the campaign money far more than they buying television ads just before last Thanksgiving for the primary vote this National Association of Manufacturers that could encourage high school students government and brokerage firms monitor the offers and promises made by brokers in communications with (potential) clients. The idea is that the program that once could pick out the needle of a phrase like "covert operative" in a "opportunity of a lifetime" and "so safe even my mother has it." Forgive sworn in as his replacement. The army's commander pledged the loyalty of his forces and while serving as the government's science and technology minister, is known to have antagonized some of the top brass by forcing them to make difficult for me to continue the leadership of this country." Then he employed expressing his "deepest sorrow if there were any mistakes, failures or was a measure banning all further satellite exports to China, including current story does not. But the Times does add something incendiary to the China over the metro section editor's recent remark that it would be unfair for female journalists who take time off to have children to be as far along in their careers as men, and that the LAT newsroom is up in arms over the publisher's claim that women readers are more drawn to emotional stories than men are, and his proposal of a system that would financially reward senior editors who ensure stories include more quotations from minority group members The catastrophic breakdown of the nation's paging system and the panic it has inspired draws both news and feature coverage all around. But leave it to a wrong way to go. The wise course, he (or she) says, would have been to spend yesterday at the ballpark. Yesterday, was, if we'd only noticed, "a snow day from outer space." for perjury and obstruction of justice, adding that her lawyer says he hasn't especially those just out of college with hardly any prior work experience, are on Al Gore's first statement about the scandal (he believes his boss), a The Times says the White House appears to have settled on a "strategy tension inside the White House between political advisors, who feel it's meetings held yesterday between the two groups as marked by heated debate. The only denying the precise descriptions of the affair that Flowers had publicly Amidst all this, Jack Lord and his hair died. The obits fail to clear up an even more transparent in its attempt to appear above pack journalism, goes all the governors' slots of the old Confederacy. This is particularly odd in president's supporters say that if proved true, the accusations of perjury and slapping him but decided not to because "I don't think you can slap the allegations, and that there is as yet unreleased information that will undercut has this too, but in addition notes the significance of the remark: it's a break with the generally complacent attitude most feminists have maintained on her breast; he put her hand on his erection. That is a pretty serious charge In a wise departure from standard newspaper practice, the Post of the emotion of the televised interview: "And then he, then he, then he kissed me on, on my mouth and, and pulled me closer to him. And I remember breasts with his hand and I, I, I, I was, I, I was just startled." There is a dangling thread from the interview that none of the papers tugs said he has engaged in similar displays of affection with 'scores and scores of men and women who have worked for me or been my friends over the years.'" Maybe goes with the Group of Eight's struggle to devise a nuclear strategy. report that others in the government say the decision has not been made yet. situation with its announcement that its nuclear missile program is all but ready. The Times explains this means the country now has a nuke that can be delivered from a plane, or launched from the ground or the sea. According to being able to explode bigger ones is quite believable. The Times says week, the Times captures the national pride they have inspired, a feeling the paper likens to the way we felt about our original astronauts. approval of the export of satellite technology to China. In today's export the technology strengthened China's satellite and missile technology, Times goes with the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that police are generally shielded from liability for deaths or injuries caused by their Today leads with the disparate treatments various tobacco products receive under the bill now pending in the Senate. For instance, it restricts the advertising and marketing of cigarettes, but not that of cigars or pipe tobacco. As a result, some health advocates are concerned, says the paper, that the bill won't discourage overall tobacco use, but would only redirect it. could detonate an underground nuke at any time.) The threat of more sanctions improve military readiness and morale. Another factor: domestic political The LAT reports that the Court decision even protects police who act recklessly in conducting pursuits. Because, say the Justices, the decision to constitutional rights. The story observes that about the same number of which of course makes "Today's Papers" wonder why the law should treat reckless police driving differently than reckless police shooting. After all, the provide fingerprints and a handwriting sample to investigators Post says he is looking to expand his office space. The Wall Street Journal reports that in a phone campaign cops by leading to the disclosure of their home addresses, with the result that they would become targets for gang members. The Journal observes that approval of union dues for political purposes, not an address. planning to disrupt the World Cup soccer matches, scheduled to start next month in ten French cities. The story is carried inside elsewhere. of reluctance are that nobody knows how many shots are needed nor if the appearing in the later, metro edition of the paper omits this.) And the Times says severe cases can result in arthritis, and nervous system and heart damage. But the paper doesn't say how many cases turn out like this. And the Times that the disease is "a cause of great concern each summer for parents and those who spend a lot of time outdoors." In short, nothing in the stories alleviates a creeping suspicion that this disease, while of great out how much the scandal has affected his standing with the public. The Independent polls mentioned in the dailies also indicate slippage. The Post paints a backstage picture in which anxious aides fear that the president is not widely believed. And, the paper says, several administration may not be telling the truth. Some Democratic congressional staff members tell the State of the Union speech is "totally surreal." coming out of church yesterday morning sharing a big ole laugh with the minister. (They must have really enjoyed the sermon, "The Eight Commandments.") The Journal editorial "Bonfire of the Presidency" counters the suggestion coming often being prosecuted in civil cases?" The Journal finds all the growing disparity between the health of blacks and whites. Some examples: The to widen his investigation. Shouldn't the permission to widen have to ease political tensions, because he described a gradual and vague transition to a successor, and the thousands of student protesters want him out now. "If The papers say that the nation's top opposition leader had called for a its next bailout payment. The World Bank has already done this. control pills reveals a bias towards men. The second paragraph of the story says plans, and the sixth paragraph says that slightly more than half of all birth control pills are. Where's the bias? Why do we need this story? A shocking episode reported in a buried wire story in situation by a police officer, but citing hospital policy, they refused to to lend the cop a gurney. Ninety minutes later, the boy was dead. "I will be The editorials continue to weigh in on the lawsuits brought against dessert." (It seems that the law of beverage monopoly is wondrously Dodger Stadium and not being able to get a Coke at a Taco Bell.) In any case, being broken up by the Justice Department into "Baby Bills." Remember that scene in "Sleeper" where it's revealed that in the future everybody knows the only really healthy substances are red meat and cigarettes? from Breast Cancer." Seems that for two types of breast cancer that comprise for hundreds of candidates. New phone technology allows them to do this from chore of actually meeting the candidates. One of these elite announcers, The LAT lead cites experts who argue that the decision has a big advocates in condemning the action. Investigators are looking to see if the killed for the safety of his own people and of the Middle East." least, the former outsold the latter. The sandwiches are identical concoctions a further plunging stock market and food riots in outlying towns. The New York Times The Wall Street Journal states that the plaintiffs' lawyers the pollsters also detected an increasingly acute sensitivity to abortion percent in the third. (The piece notes that this last stat helps explain why a mean even steeper cable bills in the near future. Some local cable usually part of basic cable service. (Which raises the question: Hasn't provides an interesting snapshot of the life of the modern Cabinet officer: as likely to back a tax increase going toward the search for extraterrestrials describe an experiment in which people's biological clocks were reset three hours by shining a bright light on the back of their knees. The finding, if it was all about the various looks she's had since stepping on the public stage. The piece concluded that she's finally graduated to an image that's opposite of substance, remember) picks up that ball and runs with it, with a apparently has "smoothed the frizzy mane of curls that once reached to such dazzling heights. Her makeup is now subtle and based on natural, not neon, hues. Her clothing is inspired by the boardroom instead of the secretarial pool. She has embraced the markers of dignity, refinement and power." In true The placement of these two pieces is a PR triumph, but one carrying the seeds of its own destruction: If people know all this work is going into making front goes with looters carrying their plunder by a blazing overturned car. and called out tanks and thousands of troops in an attempt to restore order and observations that some army troops were greeted with applause by rioters, and that the soldiers, unlike the cops, mingled with the crowds. The military might Despite some strong descriptions of events, all the papers could have done a of its fifteen paragraph story to inform the reader that the unrest was about phone companies deny it, says the paper, the protesters believe their cell calls are sometimes blocked to obstruct their planning. was at the time China's top military commander and a member of the Communist that government officials feel they're in the driver's seat now: one tells the her plea appearance in a prison jumpsuit and handcuffs. Television footage shows that the cuffs were manacled to a belly chain as well. "Today's Papers" nor a documented flight risk, must be trussed about like this. Some paper should find out: Is this really be an inflexible policy, or is it blatant system in her office that she has forsaken it for paper and pencil. "Today's Papers" is astounded that not one reporter in attendance ventured to ask if the Attorney General had tried installing a different browser. The nuances of the administration's thinking about sanctions are on display meeting of Christian evangelical leaders, unaware that a Times reporter aiming to reduce religious persecution overseas by imposing sanctions because he said such bills put enormous pressure on whoever is in the executive branch to fudge an evaluation of the facts of what is going on." The president needs flexibility, he said, including the ability to impose sanctions. important issue that wasn't receiving its due in the Senate until yesterday, when "after four hours of dueling monologues, however, something novel happened: Debate broke out." But judging by the Times examples, it time to enlarge an alliance is at a moment of threat. This is the time and the moment, nine years after the wall has come down, to end once and for all the The LAT lead editorial sees the Senate in a "reckless rush" to lead gets schooled on what it means to be a clean Teamster. That's where it accurately" about his personal involvement in the preparation of campaign story, broaches this point in the first paragraph, and observes in the fourth in the upcoming Teamsters election can run as an untainted reform rifle. Wait till the postal workers union hears about this. sanctions also includes his confession that late at night he often gets a call never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never." that she and the president engaged in an act other than intercourse. "What's a dress as a gift from him: "There is no dress." But the New York Times White House late last month. The visit is alleged to have come two weeks after prospective budget surpluses to shore up Social Security couldn't make it above the fold. By the way, the paper reports that several White House aides will visit the Hill today to encourage lawmakers to applaud. to respond to the scandal includes the doubly qualified Dick from nowhere and that Digital has pretty much gone in the opposite direction. computer guys replaced hard drives containing records of the country's entire weapons program with ones running only computer games. Butler confirms earlier Right now, no one is paying the least little attention to military managed to keep its hot new airplane program rolling along despite a continuing dalliance until after he left the White House. But he broke the bargain. I knew he was a charming rogue with an appealing agenda, but I didn't think he was a topless shots show up, don't look for them in Congressional by raising unproven salacious charges, such as, in its most recent filings, an The LAT says that prospects for enacting comprehensive campaign reform this year are This is the third time in recent months that campaign reform legislation has getting to be right up there with "Extremist Group Claims Credit for Bombing" unveiled the comprehensive tobacco bill he'd been putting together, it was seen to place no restrictions on private lawsuits against the tobacco companies, excess of that amount would be owed in full, but could be carried forward to meet targets for reducing underage smoking and cut back on outdoor and cartoon advertising. The Journal says the absence of a restriction on lawsuits was a surprise to all sides. A tobacco industry lawyer is quoted in the and would "almost certainly drive companies into bankruptcy." In the one of the Senate's chief advocates of banning "soft money." All in all, the passage of the Fair Housing Act, whites are still far more likely to own homes, even controlling for wealth and income. The piece goes on to note that testers who were matched in income contacted local lenders, they encountered up as clearly discriminatory in records. Instead, lenders didn't return phone calls, didn't keep appointments, offered more expensive or inferior products or made greater demands for credit information." The editorial endorses President discrimination. A large chunk of that money will, says the paper, go towards the first place was probably that she was a woman. If a man has to meet with someone to accomplish a given task he'd just as soon that the someone have breasts and smell nice. Women know this and take full advantage. (And why billion highway bill, congressional negotiators dropped the provision that The papers all have the same basic lawsuit details: The government and state lawyers argue that after an abortive attempt at an "illegal conspiracy" deal virtual lock with Windows to dominate the Internet browser market. Although judge to issue a quick preliminary injunction requiring the company to either that would restrict the providers from also offering their customers negotiations broke down over the weekend.) The state suit additionally asks for computer manufacturers so that they would be freer to license competitors' instance a memo that says it would "be very hard to increase browser share on the merits" of the company's product, and hence that the company should "leverage Windows to make people use" it. But none of the dailies explain how these internal documents came to be possessed by the government nor wonder the states suing, there is no explanation anywhere about what point there is for the states to file their own suit, or why the other thirty states are Most of the coverage is steeped in the particulars of the memos, etc. The LAT however, takes a somewhat broader view. It calls the this century," and accompanies its lead with an interesting graphic depicting computer and fewer still surf the Internet, the suit could throw the computer film manufacturer counteract inroads on its business being made by computerized everybody's lead. Associated business and policy and personality stories take The resulting insurance, banking and securities company will be called figure apparently doesn't take into account the increase in the companies' The papers report that the new financial services company will offer says it's not at all clear that consumers want this, noting that previous The dailies emphasize that the most striking part of the deal is that remarkable "brashness," and the LAT says it is its "most remarkable aspect." Another pressure factor is that it's widely believed this merger will Another unusual aspect of the deal drawing lots of comment is that relationship runs under the header, "The Odd Couple." As has become common in merger reporting, some of the papers attempt to try to summon atmosphere with their descriptions of early meetings where the "the arrival of movie stars at the Academy Awards." But the excitement is not infectious: after all, what you have here basically is suits writing checks to Indeed, the only real corrective to all the day's money euphoria comes in with a women who is married to someone else may be denied all legal parental rights. As the paper points out, this is significant in a state where a third of the children are born to couples who are not married to each other. embarrassment it would have caused him by my saying, please sit down." the Army with one of these weapons long before you're ever allowed to fire it, and then only under the supervision of an expert marksman, with the situation semiautomatic assault weapon without a moment of safety instruction, training ideological reasons and he's sorry. Incidentally, Brock writes that he didn't says now it was "an oversight" to have left that name in. suit to block it. The LAT says the news surprised the company and shocked government is concerned that consolidation among military suppliers may have gone too far to maintain competition. (Although, the Journal notes that company would be virtually the only supplier to the Pentagon of certain radar and electronic warfare systems, and would leave the country with only two manufacturers of warplanes. The papers all point out that the government's reaction is of a piece with its recent tougher antitrust policy with respect to marks the first time one sitting member of Congress has sued another in his use, expects to have half of its home phone traffic be PC rather than voice by and two months of home confinement, to be implemented by an electronic monitoring device. Since, as the papers point out, the federal program allows meetings from early morning till late at night. Many of them in fine study indicating that a drug previously used to prevent a recurrence of breast leads with the Department of Transportation's decision to crack down on The news about the breast cancer drug, tamoxifen, comes, says powers of cancer prevention. However, tamoxifen is also known, says the paper, to treble the risk for uterine cancer, and to increase one's chance of likely therefore, that the drug will only be recommended for women at high risk these modifications are superficial and hence that the ban sticks. The shootings, even though none of the types of weapons used there are affected by and the courts. The LAT says a White House official cites as one reason for the move the paper's series last year about how weapons companies were The Wall Street Journal runs a "Rule of Law" feature detailing the recent trend of the solidification of the rights of dogs, even vicious bans because they "deny pit bull lovers equal protection and due process." Plus, Congress is considering "boneheaded" legislation that would force cities concerned about the proliferation of companies on the Internet posing as banks. In the past two years, the government has issued ten alerts about such percent of all violent crimes. Victims of spousal abuse report that fully dilutes the effect of this story by not mentioning any of the dirty dozen by class seats for his trips, at a cost to taxpayers of six times the basic A related story "Today's Papers" would love to see: How do the major he pay the extra cost or does the Gray Lady go to the hip? The decision sets the stage, says the paper, for a ruling on the matter by the nearly the amount of international support for military action. And it's and biological warfare is far more nebulous than 1991's objective of throwing there will be a lot more of them now. And now almost every plane in the This story has a surprising, even disconcerting amount of order of battle Also, the piece makes the point that still seven years after Desert Storm, weapons plants while keeping poisons from getting into the atmosphere, which means that true precision will be needed to avoid large numbers of civilian casualties. Another obstacle noted is that it is impossible to destroy all the computer disks holding "cookbooks" for making chemical and biological A couple of questions about the story however: The paper says that the B-2 stealth bomber is a "stealth design like the F-117" stealth fighter, just much bigger. But actually, the former employs smooth curves to bend radar waves missing from the roster being formed over there. But doesn't explain why. The invariably has all the answers, and its weapons perform as required. So maybe the questions he proliferates here (here, unlike in his books, he questions the notion of a "surgical" strike, and here he wonders, "Who has told us that it is clarity concerning ultimate goals and acceptable means, forgetting in the internally disagreed about war issues that had never been articulated for the suspected anthrax for use as a weapon. Allegedly, the men were plotting to if it doesn't stop interfering with weapons inspectors. The poll's fine points balanced budget, but not higher taxes or reduced Social Security or Medicare ago. I don't think you've done too bad being a protester." course, what counts as pertinent to Whitewater has already been loosened The Wall Street Journal main "Politics and Policy" piece has a to deploy quickly; and air power is more effective now than in the past. And victim, not the bully, and don't slug it out, but "shoot and scoot." The paper bodies of executed political prisoners in cold storage, to be blown up and "new" lawyers for a possible impeachment inquiry. For the sake of the republic, "Today's Papers" hopes the Journal means "additional." Supreme Court bypass the ordinary appeals court process and directly decide on the one calling for an end to the state's bilingual education program passed approve political uses of their dues will probably be defeated, albeit in a measure will pave the way for similar "assaults" on other such programs around edited newspaper in the country, editorial tendencies can creep into a news story. Would the Times describe an attempt to get more money for unskilled laborers as an "assault" on the minimum wage?) The Post goes into the most detail on the new team's legal connections in town, its dispatch chockablock with law firm names. Everybody looks down on lawyers who pay to advertise in the back of the paper. The goal, apparently, is to be the kind of lawyer paid to be advertised in the front of what spectator shoes are? "Today's Papers" can only guess they are shoes so expensive that most folks can only look at them in the store window, or on the additional movement of goods the treaty sanctions. As a result, billions of dollars of goods customarily sit for hours at the three borders involved, a "All truths begin as hearsay," Drudge said at one point. "Some of the best news stories start as gossip. At what point does it become news? This is the undefinable thing." When a questioner wondered how Drudge would fare at a news countering his country's sliding economy by offering tax cuts. destruction. "A ragged line of storms ripped through one little town after schools, burying hundreds in rubble, even sucking people out of their damaged the National Weather Service gave the twister the most powerful rating on its storm scale, but all its victims knew was that it "was off the scale of their devastation. Oddly though, the LAT puts the story itself deep estimating budget surpluses. The paper reports that the Federal Reserve now business leaders" and swapped his trademark fiscal austerity policies for an consumers to do some spending. The tax cuts are also on the front pages at the of the risk that Japan might try to save itself instead by not only reducing imports but also by dramatically increasing its exports. administration was likewise attempting to address a sluggish economy. Within factions. But the deficit cutters got the upper hand and it is now widely believed that their course of action has been the key to the current good times planning a massive media campaign that, the paper says, was designed "creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support" for the company. The plan included "the planting of articles, letters to the editor and opinion company documents in the LAT 's possession and he later acknowledged the trouble "Today's Papers," but the idea of planting stories disguised as previous sentence is not thought by readers to in fact be part of a coordinated The Wall Street Journal "Legal Beat" column reports that for issue here, one that occurs not infrequently in the case of foreign national criminal suspects, is that the cops forgot to tell the man about his right to editors on the trend of luxury compensation packages being used to lure tenured faculty stars from one elite university to another. But the piece is anchored help getting their son admission to a tony prep school. apparently set off a special conference with a judge about whether or not aides calls a "raucous, emotional debate that showed a nation far from convinced of for a seminar, but "ran into a rumble." The Post reports that during aides fanned out into the noisy parts of the arena to calm those (numbering Some of the most aggressive hecklers were carried outside. The Post serves up an acute description of what transpired: the administration reps found themselves caught between opposing passions (about largely passionless argument. The paper notes a simple example of the The pieces make it clear that the ordinary folks in the auditorium were highly attuned to an issue that has gotten hardly any attention in the press: squishy or downright wrong in all those polls showing extensive public support on Medicaid would like to be sterilized, but because of their own paperwork errors and stiff bureaucratic requirements, they aren't and keep having kids. An additional factor is that the doctors who deliver these babies are scared of conservatively oriented talk radio. This doesn't just mean, notes the Opponents of affirmative action often observe that it doesn't exist in via his access to tremendous firepower. According to the dailies, the boy, Afterwards, some parents charged that the school had ample warning that suspended from school and arrested for bringing a gun to school, and he was released to his parents. And he had, the papers say, frequently written and been voted by classmates "most likely to start World War III.'' trend of school shootings has accelerated from single specific victims to The LAT is the only paper putting merger over murder today. Its account of sites pristine in the relatively short time before the inspectors finally administration's decision to allow high technology to be exported to China as issue of illegal campaign contributions with China's leaders. (That's what twenty lawmakers who voted this week to restrict satellite exports to China had Ever wonder if congressional staffers help their bosses write their that as the global economy goes into high gear, there is a globally consistent standard for intellectual property. [Copyright] Term extension represents one aspect of the harmonization of the intellectual property regimes." Signed, Rep. the Pentagon yesterday. Speaking to an auditorium full of military and civilian Defense employees, and from a platform he shared with his Secretary of Defense with an implicit reference to the failures of appeasement in the period just certainty." The administration's old line was, says the paper, "weeks not argument that strikes the lay person as bizarrely permissive: Even on the threats and she was able to leave when she decided to. extraordinary in this age of lawyers restraining editors restraining reporters: "I know it's not the most traditional way to balance the budget, but it just is that if it were to fail it would be a colossal embarrassment for the Air Force, while if it were to succeed it might siphon money away from newer hot desire to use any budget surpluses to "Save Social Security First" generally leads the lists of the speech's proposals, which included calls to raise the deny him the ability to use weapons of mass destruction again. description: "We have a smaller government, but a stronger nation." The clarification here: "While federal spending has declined as a share of the total economy, the drop has come mostly in defense spending. Meanwhile, social spending has grown relative to the gross domestic product, particularly for the intern no longer worked there. They are also, says the paper, trying to to some sort of deal under which she would testify about whether she had a White House." One chapter was titled, "The President's Women." Looking for a college campus that actually doesn't have enough Media predictions: At one time feared to be old hat, "Primary Colors" should cabinet," was going to make things smoother at the White House, you don't know recorded the conversations surreptitiously and reportedly turned the tapes over matters, they made an attempt to clear the air about their own troubled The LAT reports that the two leaders met again last night but also states that the long talks have thus far failed to restart the deadlocked trial, the papers also pass along indications that she found him to be mentally resort to violence against those individuals and organizations that he believes are hurting him." Most of the dailies hint at the possibility of renewed plea five or six times a month, one is forced at gunpoint by dealers to use coke or have recently doubled and that the government has come up with such extras as a suppliers, alleging that the car company concealed ignition switch defects that led to car fires and millions in insurance claims. (This story is also on the on the matter says it all, though: "Very few people tour [the museum] and come exceptions. But what would be lost by taking that chance?" should be curtailed, pointing out that such enriching experiences are probably foundation report concluding that many undergraduates at research institutions graduate "without knowing how to think logically, write clearly or speak release was "one of the last steps in an extensive package deal secretly talk to him and see if we could have no further damaging articles, but I don't The Wall Street Journal 's "The Outlook" column zeroes in on the closest thing to a storm cloud in the current economic forecast: the stunning erosion of lending standards. The column reports that last year banks raised years. And that more financial outfits loosened lending rules than raised them. What's more, outstanding home and auto loans to borrowers with lousy credit funding effort was first reported on by The New York Observer and makes an incredibly important point: Pol Pot wasn't the last big war criminal Constant, accused of complicity in the murder and torture of thousands of miniature device worn on a cap or as jewelry that, whenever a photographer had this to say in defense of his daughter: "She's a very smart, intelligent, beautiful girl who's going to go places, and unfortunately she's taking her Court decision that the law barring sexual discrimination in the workplace took to keep the workplace safe from sexual harassment. It's just common sense that same sex doesn't automatically mean no harassment, but the reporting on the decision makes it clear that the Court creation, and broadening its application has met with hostility in lower the workplace "so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the abrogate all "genuine but innocuous differences in the ways men and women routinely interact with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex," and all the papers give his example: a football coach slapping a player's rear on the way to the field would be lawful, while the same gesture directed at the coach's (female or male) secretary might not be. All the dailies note that the decision drew praise from civil rights and gay rights advocates. "High Court Widens Workplace Claims of Sex Harassment." This is much less clear editors in effect put an opinion on the front page. The accompanying picture of that she visited him in his office perhaps five times, and that they may have been alone together. The president denied having sexual relations with denied having sex with three other women he was asked about. He did, however, The Post reports that often during the proceeding's five hours, points, he reacted to something that was said in a "frustrated outburst." It's The story gives a good picture of the personal degradation involved for Obviously, at least one of them was the source for this story. Place your money Senate yesterday rejected a proposal to compensate relatives of those killed in are cooperating in the drug war in favor of setting up an international insurers now view them as in the same claim risk echelon as grocery cashiers and bank tellers, and even riskier than shipping clerks and traveling salesmen. Not to mention far below lawyers, accountants and engineers. The most likely explanation: stress and unhappiness brought on by the widespread advent of "began" is a little unfair, isn't it? The paper goes on to point out that authorizing force. Isn't this a rather telling demonstration of Congress' phases (stealth aircraft are easier to eyeball under a full moon), Parents' international convention that nations refrain from war during the Games). paper, preserve the right to photograph celebrities in public, but would crack down on actions that could jeopardize safety. This is a fine example of what accomplishes nothing, except perhaps to make us feel good via the illusion of accomplishing something. Really, how many examples are there of paparazzi endangering (as opposed to merely inconveniencing) celebrities? Princess that just gets at the redundancy of the law: reckless driving is already against the law, as is trespassing on somebody's doorstep. "Today's Papers" however, was this passage: "A pie in the face, it's Soupy Sales stuff," said adultery, and so on. Perhaps interest in that subject has now abated sufficiently to allow us to turn our attention to the budget. I propose here to comment not on the policy it contains but on the rhetoric with which it is most striking to a person who has been reading budgets for a long time is how far the cult of presidential personality has progressed. In the past the budget (I refer here to the main book titled Budget and not the other five volumes that come with it) typically had two parts. One was the budget message of the president, written in the first person and signed by the president. in that section. But most of the book consisted of chapters about the functions of government, with such prosaic titles as "National Defense" or "Agriculture." These were written in the third person, had lots of probably boring facts, and one could learn a lot from them. Of course, they reflected the point of view of the administration, but the reader didn't have the feeling that he was The budget still has the president's message and a section organized according to the functions of government. But now, inserted between the brow of the president. The section has inspirational chapter heads such as chapter and subchapter in this section starts with a quotation from previous quotations are of a banality that is hard to believe. For example, we have for our children. We want them to live out their dreams, empowered with the tools they need to make the most of their lives and to build a future where uses of the word "president." (I include nine cases of the word "his" used in close proximity to and referring to the president.) And what is the president doing on these occasions? Of course, he is working and proposing and having visions and making commitments. But he is not only working, he is, in some nation's health, to improve education and the lives of working families, to eliminate fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, and to crack down on violent youth Depending on your mood, this is either irritating or laughable. But I cannot believe that it is helpful to the president. The incredibility infects and pollutes everything else in the budget. pages are filled to overflowing with the names of programs to be created or increased. Each of these has to have a name with Capital Letters, and every knows what that is should win money on Ben Stein's quiz show. Actually, it stands for National Economic Crossroads Transportation Efficiency Act.) The mind reels reading about all these good things that are being done for us. programs that are being reduced or not being introduced. After all, to govern is to choose, and to budget is especially to choose. We cannot appreciate the reason for the things that are to be done unless we can compare them with things that are not to be done. Why do we have a Seat Belt Initiative and not a Smoke Detector Initiative? (Maybe there is a Smoke Detector Initiative, and I missed it.) True, there are some cuts in expenditures and personnel. They are all the result of what we used to call minimizing waste, fraud, and abuse and what is now called the Vice President's Reinventing Government Program. There are no identifiable places where anyone is asked to give up anything. accounting maneuvers not worth describing here, this abstinence will enable the federal government to increase spending on a variety of programs, through an The second exception is that we are to forgo using the prospective budget surplus for tax cuts or expenditure increases (other than financing challenge facing Social Security." It is here that we have the formulation offered gives rise to the ridiculous table showing, for years item called Reserve Pending Social Security Reform, and a resulting number of ambiguities. Some have interpreted it as meaning that the surplus would be used to solve the financial problems of Social Security. That has now been denied by the Office of Management and Budget. Which leaves open the question of the president's intention for the use of the surplus after some other solution, such as cutting Social Security benefits or raising payroll taxes, has been found. Would we then be free to spend whatever surplus there is in the unified budget? Or would we still want to apply some of that surplus to start spending it even if the discovered solution for Social Security's program or only a carrot to be used to induce a solution to Social Security, to disagree with what may be the president's program but to illustrate the problems with the budget as an explanatory document, he replied, "But you're newspaper's controversial series of last August, "Dark Alliance," this story to gain so much stature. Despite being dissed and then shot down by spread like cocaine had in the 1980s, causing national leaders to scurry around Alliance" to bypass the mainstream media and enter the forefront of national debate. The Mercury News began touting its upcoming series on Internet newsgroups weeks before it was completed. The electronic version was published simultaneously with the print version, with the added features of hypertext links to cited documents, audio tracks from wiretaps and hearings, and an image engaged in drug trafficking, is now the editor of an online news magazine, the and has been promoting the story. Although the Consortium charges for filled with stinging indictments of the government and the mainstream media as well as gleeful cheers for the Web. One reader in the Mercury Center's Reader Forum (the original responses to the series are all still accept the premise of "Dark Alliance," and to spend their time arguing over the tip: "If you enjoy this conspiracy, you may want to visit the Squirrel contagious hyperbole of the Internet clearly had an impact on the life of "Dark Alliance." As one Web surfer noted: "The outrage of the freshly exposed readers Center's Reader Forum, and was clearly energized by his online fans. His first The feedback on the Web and on radio talk shows fed each other, creating an alternative media alliance that shouted down the objections of the mainstream press and catapulted the series to national prominence. Anger at the mainstream media overwhelms anger at the government in many of these Mercury News Web site in their broadcasts, and it became, in the words Has Life Of Its Own." Other news sites and respected political organizations widespread attention merely fueled the "us vs. them" sentiment of most Internet merely saying what "they" had been saying all along. "Granted, there may be inconsistencies, there may be fallacies, but why not take up the banner of twofold: Not only has it allowed the series to leapfrog the mainstream press, polemical, attention. For more than three decades, social scientists have been studying the costs and benefits of child care, and their work has yielded only one consistent result: Their research is seized upon, waved about, politicized, and in the end, nothing much gets done. But the polarized stalemate can't continue much longer, for two reasons. Child care has become an inescapable public issue, and social scientists themselves have been expressing a new bill provide enough money to take care of the kids whose single parents are now forced to work? The lines that get drawn on that central question are fairly almost surely insufficient to offer the poor a true choice of quality day care. Inc. puts the standard position, is that "the quality of child care matters for Conservatives are content to assume that a majority of women who leave the rolls will rely on free (or cheap) unregulated child care Committee, has been outspoken in invoking social science to defend this position. The latest research, he argues, has been unable to demonstrate with any certainty that the quality of day care has much of an impact on a child's future. Why invest more money if it won't make a difference in the long that, as far as the science is concerned, conservatives are right, and liberals lag a wishful step behind when they cite sure proof that early day care decisively influences a child's development. To make sense of the shakier research through three unsettling waves during the past quarter century. in the 1970s, when researchers faced the question: What happens when mothers being done to babies whose mothers leave them in the care of others? "Strange Situation" test, in which they observed the partings and reunions of and risked displaying uncooperative behavior later in life. promptly construed as political propaganda. They were part of a "backlash always been to get out of the work force. This is just another way of saying followed in the 1980s. They were more textured and hopeful, the question behind skills, school achievement, cognitive gains, social and emotional adjustment, liberals and child advocates trumpeted them. Meanwhile, conservatives seized on the early 1990s has been characterized by what the experts call a more "ecological" approach. Studies have lately aimed to take into account from under two decades of work. Taken together, these studies seem to show Nor can good day care be solidly proven to give a dramatic or lasting boost to kids whose home lives are a mess. Sometimes it can help, but a child's family made too much of small effects on development that were derived from very small choices. They can either rely on outmoded studies to argue with conservative politicians, who, for the moment, have the more authoritative pretext for still champions quality, but now on more immediate, less quantitative grounds. Her approach points the way for liberals to gain credibility by shedding the onus of being "social engineers," and take their turn at playing the populist as conservatives have before them, that social policy isn't about enforcing officially approved "choices." They can say that, regardless of what the experts tell us, it's perfectly obvious that cheap care by relatives and neighbors shouldn't become the only feasible alternative for struggling mothers. Parents can make the best decisions for their kids, and if they are looking for quality day care, it isn't likely to be because someone in a lab because they hope it may mean a happier, more secure week for their kid and a less anxious one for themselves. What's more, the chance to take an active choice in the matter as a parent may itself be a step toward the more show no inclination to exploit research that says, in effect, Why care about quality child care" as welfare mothers head to work--$20 million to ensure that million to increase the supply and quality of overall care. Of course, this other financial incentives to improve quality? On some of everything? The political debate over those questions will be more practical and less journalists on the Flytrap beat, have any doubts about the answer. So why has explanation is that "did they have sex" is a question of fact, whereas other Flytrap questions are matters of judgment or policy or values. The social as boys collect postage stamps, treating them, in short, as objects of accumulation of data had become an unsatisfactory substitute for formulating example of empiricism's limits was the (apocryphal) story of how, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, a scientist tried to establish the existence of the human soul "not by speculating on the Vital Principle and the Intrinsic Substance of adultery and perjury disqualify a man to be president by chasing a cocktail dress allegedly stained with the commander in chief's semen. This fact hunt, the context of what's broadly understood to be the press's mandate to gather information with rigorous impartiality. As press critics never tire of saying, in instances such as Flytrap, where Hypothesis and Conclusion seem separated by poorly sourced and that two respected news organizations, the Wall Street have lacerated the press for getting the facts wrong. But now that Flytrap is president, of course, is one of those few people who still claim there is a factual issue at stake. Before the grand jury, he may admit to having had sex (The general view is that perjury in civil suits isn't easy to prosecute, stick to his story and perjure himself before the grand jury (a much more Dress's existence was first speculated upon in the Drudge Report (where said she'd saved such a dress. Then a few news organizations got the said the agency will first establish whether there is any semen on the dress (easy to do) and then spend "several weeks" finding out whose semen it is twin), scientific empiricism, in collaboration with the more untidy empiricism only new fact in Flytrap that would qualify as genuine news would be one fictitious scientist, it is uncomfortable with abstractions. Flytrap is a case of journalists doing precisely what press critics are always hectoring them to the inadequacy of that journalistic ideal. Some might say the inadequacies of sense unless reporters and editors believed the accusations. They're just not permitted to express this belief.) At the very least, Flytrap illustrates the need for less fact chasing and more analysis and illumination the need for more humility about how useful journalism is in addressing matters his beliefs too lightly. But somewhere along the way, he may have absorbed of a political puzzle. Fit them together, and you may solve the great mystery questions at his recent press conference, even to have noted his comfort in keeping silent. High approval ratings cushion even a stonewall. of the scandalous allegations against him are true. How can two such opinions snapshot of him with Donna Rice on his lap surfaced, promptly crushing his candidacy. Hart was already reeling from allegations of womanizing; the the case against him. The consensus was that, as we could see with our own eyes, Hart lacked the discipline and character for the presidency. He was This image has occasioned almost no comment. What does it reveal about the electorate cares to be bothered with. The apparent consensus is that, If there's any visual difference between these two images, posing for a camera; you could frame the shot and display it on the coffee table (as long as you had the right sort of postmodern family living in the result would have a peeping Tom quality if their encounter had any personal intimacy, which it does not. There's a third person present, a man with whom the disparity between the political effects of these two images? Because political significance it had throughout the postwar era, as least as far as year tradition of global competition over ideas and issues. Potential to appear as forthright champions in a historic contest, disciplined leaders would have a tough time competing for national office today. Yet in his own era he could parlay "leadership" symbolism into a pair of landslide victories. changing dramatically. The Soviets were gone, and the Gulf War had seemingly asked, she can characterize their relationship as she pleases precisely because being another Hart turn out to have been anachronistic, as the limited impact running for office, a different presidential model was already asserting We've seen this model before. Whenever the country emerges from a national trauma and focuses on its piggy bank, presidential expectations Feelings. The presidents after Reconstruction were the political ciphers of "approval" represents something new and immoral in the country is historically rattling, and his largely ignored dialogue on race, the care of business is again. Southern Baptists explain how marriage ought to work and Cardinal candidates will be going to hell, wants no Major League Baseball games on Good the midst of a renaissance of rectitude. This time, though, faith is not enough for the really, really faithful. They wear their devotion on their shirts now, also on their baseball caps and their lapels. Piety is a commodity for these truest of true believers, touted with a zeal that would make the most Park gift shop. I was unpleasantly surprised to find little woven bracelets to the authorities about the separation of church and state park. A week or so offers "fine apparel for witnessing," while Cross Wear head shop, glowing beneath the black light. And for that devout motorcycle thug front and, on the back, a spiky, harsh drawing of the Crucifixion, captioned disagreement to make me want a particular point of view erased from the face of the earth, or at least legally required to keep away from me. So why does a "Fishers of Men" baseball hat make me want to spit bile? Two reasons: cheesy, commercialized imitation of the real thing. For a bracing look at provide a means for individuals, churches and organizations to express their our products we strive to provide the Christian community with wearable messages that motivate people [to] consider their own religious supporting a Christian Ministry led by the hand of God." products by claiming God is on its side. You don't have to be religious to be nauseated by entrepreneurs professing sanctity for their products. to donate a portion of profits to charity, none are charitable organizations. Haven't these jokers heard about not taking the Lord's name in vain? This is advertising presented as evangelism, and that brings me to the second reason reassured the nation, skittish about a Catholic in the White House, when he flies. Now representatives of both realms mix, mingle, and meddle in each weighing in with their views on sin, it's harder to swallow when the folks at realm to which it's supposed to provide a detached alternative. It's not opinion is not God's law, as a great many angry Little League parents were flock instead of the world at large and suggest Catholic ballplayers sit out however, suggest that everybody follow his example. He knew where to draw the sportswear industry does its best to fudge, boasting that its wares are expressions of faith, when they are in fact crass, occasionally intimidating succeeded in pushing him out. Unfortunately, it is not yet time to celebrate a triumph for democracy. The "smart money" in the international community is opposition wants a much more representative government, partly to protect itself against the international community's neoliberal economic agenda. The resulting conflict between economic liberalization and political understand this next phase of the struggle, start with the positions taken by implemented the sharp price increases and subsidy cuts demanded by the International Monetary Fund, these partners were primarily concerned with and the mass movement threatened to seize power, did they rediscover the need This focus on economic performance has been consistent. One organizing. But until this March, the United States spent more than that each to its ample minerals, oil, cheap labor, and market for foreign capital; and foreign debts were serviced. No one in official circles questioned the way the fruits of growth were distributed or the extreme corruption and environmental sustaining social and political development in the long run. His global supporters turned against him only when his unpopular administration had become a threat to the region's stability and just plain bad for business. a strong government that can implement the program quickly. A genuine national election that gave the opposition time to organize and prepare an alternative agenda might mean yet another change of government and costly delays, Far better to have it implemented unilaterally. The basic creditor country One basic requirement of this agenda is an alliance with spending cuts, increased prices, more unemployment, and renewed debt service, now on life support, and the West controls the breathing apparatus. Last corporations are technically bankrupt, and most of the money they owe is to foreign banks. The country has been very dependent for management skills on the last three months, and the country's foreign reserves could be completely to be united, in charge, and armed for bear. Just this week it succeeded in resistance led by ordinary students, workers, the unemployed, and the mobilize mass protests and shock the world with violence. Many had hoped that perhaps, for those who favor tolerance and democracy, there is also no agenda, it is precisely the inverse of the international community's. It seeks genuine direct elections after a period that is sufficient to organize alternative parties and prepare a campaign based on freedom of speech and other political prisoners, debt relief, stronger penalties for corruption and poor from the hardest edges of "economic reform." But aside from primitive prescriptions such as "cut prices" and "nationalize the banks," the opposition the real battle lines between economic and political liberalization are just unaccountable generals, rapacious investors, massive foreign debts, or the its 331-page report, "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce." (These two outfits are especially intrigued by White House Deputy Counsel murdered; that his suicide note was forged; and that he died in a White House parking lot.) These stories are "bounced all over the world" on the Internet by their appearance prompts congressional investigations; congressional conspiracy theories; now the Journal counters with a conspiracy theory poses a tricky question about the Web: Is the free flow of information always a good thing? The Internet is a marvelous instrument for educating large numbers of people very quickly, but it is also a marvelous instrument for deceiving theory? That particular unsubstantiated rumor is still circulating on the experts held a news conference to announce that the note was a forgery. The Telegraph also promoted the forgery theory, with a story headlined, suicide. All of them are stored on the Telegraph 's snazzy Web site. "Whitewater, Etc." update, as well as flashbacks to Whitewater coverage from a year and two years ago. It also maintains a link to the Telegraph in its Telegraph to the rest of the Whitewater Web. Soon, the Western forgery theory as well, wondering why big media skipped the story ("Experts Say stored in its "Whitewater Scandal Page," but you must subscribe to view forgery controversy eventually reached the Web's noncommercial fringes. Almost every story about the forgery resides on Nick's Whitewater Archives, an encyclopedic compendium of alleges that the Foster suicide note was forged, and includes a picture of the note plus links to the full text of the handwriting analysts' study. Yet another offers a festers to this day. But this Rivulet of Conspiracy has never merged into the amenities, the water, the mountains, the clear, fresh, cool air, the blue skies. But they also come, I think, in search of their roots. They want not to sit on the porch of the local country store and drink coffee and eat blueberry muffins. They want to browse through the flea market searching for they want to eat lobsters by the peck. Some of the men will grow little beards, the summer people have been coming to the same small town for so many years, even for more than one generation, that they are part of the local scene and do have roots there. I am thinking of the more occasional visitors. Very few have and New Jersey roots. And most have roots two or three generations back in the political, economic, and social world we all live in. But so are towns are not tourists looking for a civics lesson. They are, it seems to me, seeking and imagining a more personal, familial connection. That is what I mean deride this at all. On the contrary, I think it is wonderful that people here seek to identify with a history in which their families had no part. It is a connection and succeed in achieving it. I don't know this, but I doubt that this absorption occurs elsewhere in the world. Would a person whose family had part of it? I don't think so, unless the person was exceptionally rich or distinguished and so transcended national boundaries. People want to see where they came from in order to understand and appreciate conditions in which their grandparents lived and perhaps meet relatives they people seek ersatz roots to identify with? Perhaps because the world changes so rapidly that for many people, the real roots no longer exist. Once on a trip to remained that had any possible connection with me. The scene of my mother's their families lived and worked there. But that was a long, long time ago, and resent them. But they are courteous. For one thing, they are all in the business of selling roots. And maybe in the long winter nights the "natives" may realize that they are not really natives either, that there were Native Rich hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but on the subject of his immovable conviction "that casino operators are predators; that are on the take from gambling interests are wallowing in the occasion of sin." economic boon but sometimes suck local retail businesses dry. Statistics suggest that crime, domestic abuse and alcoholism rise in gambling's gambling because it promises something for nothing. The left hates it because it enriches corporations by emptying the pockets of the gullible lower classes. except the public. Once regarded as a low habit, gambling is now generally spend on movies, plays, operas, and spectator sports combined. gambling's place at the table is threatened by the puritans, who've used their political muscle to help establish a National Gambling Impact Study Commission. lives, stimulates crime, saps local economies, mercilessly exploits human weakness, and sustains itself through bribery and corruption. A review, then, critics warn of an exploding epidemic of addicted gamblers, but a recent study year claimed that the legalization of casinos causes an increase in suicide the city's huge influx of tourists, who on any given day outnumber residents by assaults rose only about as fast as the average daily population. The real increases have come in robbery and aggravated assaults. Elsewhere, though, it's impossible to detect any consistent relationship between the existence of Economy: Economists normally extol anything that allows consumers to satisfy their preferences, but several members of the profession depict casinos excoriates them as "a shell game, attracting dollars from one person's pocket to another and from one region to another." Another view holds that life for the casinos means death for restaurants, car dealers, hardware stores, and other wholesome businesses unless legal gambling attracts massive numbers of are the wrong measures of the economic value of gambling establishments. Existing businesses are threatened when a new business comes to town, whether would dream of dismissing a business as a "shell game" merely because its as we're talking about corruption and exploitation, we should not forget that capitals, where the lotteries are headquartered. The lotteries' pitiful in remedying the lotteries, they'd have the states repeal their monopolies on these games and let the market compete away the excess profits. opponents never tire of reciting statistics and anecdotes to suggest that the costs of legalized gambling dwarf any possible benefits. But they fail to count them with its feet. The overwhelming majority of these patrons gamble responsibly and impose no burden on their fellow citizens. They treat games of portraying gamblers as a pitiable class of suckers, enslaved by fantasies of unearned wealth. It's hard to see why. No one accuses movie theaters or people who patronize the lottery, the track, or the slot machines end up who eat in restaurants and attend concerts. To incurable bluenoses, gambling is an infuriating scam. But why assume gamblers are being fooled? It's more reasonable to assume that they know they will probably lose but are happy to they ought to be free to make, unimpeded by moralists and social reformers who think ordinary people cannot be trusted to look after their own interests. If gambling were the grim scourge portrayed by its opponents, it would not have gone from a contemptible vice to an innocent diversion in a single generation. People who have visited casinos and played the lottery have seen that misery and damnation don't necessarily follow, either for themselves or for surrounding communities. Gambling has become a widespread pastime for the simple and unassailable reason that it adds to the sum of human happiness. suicide promises to be the first great Internet mystery. When the members of site and most others described below have been overwhelmed with traffic since news of the suicide broke. Don't be surprised if you're denied access.) the imminent arrival of an alien spacecraft "from the Evolutionary Level Above transport "us" (whoever "us" might be) back to the "Kingdom of Heaven." This are happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with Ti's crew." chronicles, if opaquely, the purported history of the group. A message from the and his female partner ("Do" and "Ti") are actually genderless aliens from the Kingdom of Heaven. They and their "crew of students" arrived on earth "in becoming human, they presumably looked like this "member of the explicitly that the authors and their associates are considering suicide. Position Against Suicide," which ought to be titled "Our Position in Favor of Suicide," hints darkly that "the powers that control the world" could method of escape. "We have thoroughly discussed this topic (of the willful exit of the body under such conditions), and have mentally prepared ourselves for this possibility." Not that suicide is anything to worry about: The spacecraft would still transport them to the Kingdom of Heaven. When they leave, the rest of us are in big trouble: According to the transcript of a video called Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It's attempt to enlist new members for the voyage to the Kingdom of Heaven. The introductory page invites readers to study the Heaven's Gate site and tells other news services have reported that Heaven's Gate members trolled Internet sinister in the Higher Source site. It is decorated with the same astral images that appear on the Heaven's Gate site, including several prominent pictures of that the "individuals at the core of our group have worked closely together for that what the Higher Source designers did is no different from what other Web designers do. They programmed in Java, C++, and Visual Basic, used Shockwave, choice of customers was more ecumenical than cultish. They designed Christian Higher Source's clients, but the firm has certainly delivered on one promise it made them: to promote "Strategies to Increase Web Traffic." As strategies for increasing Web traffic go, a mass suicide can't be beat. aunt, although I sometimes fantasize that she was. The notion that I am her And I have recently discovered another affinity. We are both Republicans. that this revolutionary in literary style, this patron of bohemians and celebrating the artists she was among the first to recognize. She was more like like GS when he said, "When people are out of work there is unemployment." The natural rulers" in the United States. What was special about the United States was that its individuals were free and its government was small, something very large country around which anybody can wander and so although a government is there it is not always anywhere near but they feel it to be a little country party that might have happened anyway." She saved her real dislike for Franklin not half as seductive as his predecessors, so I don't think he will be elected existence that it ceases to be a thing that anybody could count, so that nobody can any longer believe in it or is it all electioneering," she asked. If his goal was ridding people of the belief in money so that they would no longer she believed, was a lot of money at his disposal so that he could control the most extensive view of her thoughts on economics in a series of articles Street Republicanism. Her basic theme was that governments spend too much. According to GS, the unemployed do not want to work, and if there were fewer name in her pieces, it's evident that he is the main culprit. The first article, "Money," starts with this simple make up their mind. Is money or isn't money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, everybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what government officials who tax and spend do not realize what money is to the people who earn it. But because money really is money, those who tax and are different kinds of money, and the different kinds need to be regarded and managed differently. Each soldier in an army division is someone's son, but we do not expect the commanding general to manage all of them the way their Governments may be wasteful in managing money, but the only evidence GS provides is in the story of Louis XV, who, when accused of spending too much, said, "After me, the deluge." The story was singularly inappropriate in was an effort to stem the deluge, or at least to keep some people from drowning who said that the king came to the throne with high taxes and departed with low stump reminding people, "It's your money! It's your money! It's your money!" And when GS asks, "who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain," I imagine her testifying before woman arrive at these conventional ideas? I never spoke to my aunt, and I am not a student of the large literature by and about her. But if she could write about fiscal policy, perhaps I can speculate a little about her. either terribly ignorant about economic affairs or terribly foresighted. She lecture tour and then departed, never to return. She missed the worst part of the despair of the Depression, she might have been more understanding of One might say that GS had such great understanding of human nature that she could see beyond the Depression, beyond World War II, beyond but I don't believe it. She was not a woman of great foresight about public ignorant of economics she may have been, there is one economic fact that all intellectual who was an enemy of capitalism. She always had a comfortable was not an intellectual, having little interest in general ideas about economics or politics. "The real ideas," she said, "are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him and that is an idea that is more interesting than humanity in groups." of society was "cubist," like the paintings she was early to appreciate and the literature she wrote. A cubist painter tried to decompose an object into the atoms that were its real essence. He could paint a violin as a number of superimposed geometrical shapes of varying shades of brown. GS tried to reveal the essence of communication by stringing together heavy words without the punctuation, connectives, adjectives, adverbs, and allusions we are accustomed to. She understood society, or was interested in society, only as a collection of individual human beings not bound together by any political or economic merits, but it also has its drawbacks. No one can play music with the cubist's view of society nourished her assignment of a high value to individual freedom, but it limited her ability to understand much that was going on in the question to which this essay is the answer? Perhaps there is none. Every answer doesn't have a question. But one lesson of this essay is that the Stein family, first two articles listed here are factual and correctly quoted. The others are Transportation Department has informed airlines that under new disability "Growing Number of Schools Ban Peanut Butter as Allergy Threat" by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City's most selective independent schools, have banned peanut epinephrine syringes throughout the building to protect members of Congress and their staffs against peanut allergy symptoms such as throat constriction and sauce may no longer contain actual peanuts. Restaurant owners who had opposed the ban agreed to support it and to accept random enforcement inspections in exchange for the right to retain the phrase "peanut sauce" in carryout their sons and daughters, their mothers and fathers. These people never had a are the days of innocently cracking salted shells at the ballpark or spreading move immediately to prohibit the cultivation, sale, and use of peanuts and peanut abuse by the end of the century. Responding to a proposal backed by to peanut abusers on a transitional basis, Republican leaders in both houses demanded an aggressive interdiction program to "fight peanuts at their source." administration officials said last night that the White House will appoint a "Peanut Czar" to oversee the president's campaign against peanut production and consumption. Aides commended the decision and cited progress on several fronts. and the former president and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter has been stripped of punishment but through the "reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards" and feelings of individual men, women and children." In the novel everyone has free happiness. People are constantly brainwashed with the thought that they deserve to be happy. Sex is readily available without complications. Babies are produced in vats. There is no love between individuals, no families, no devotion to anyone or anything to compete with devotion to the State. bombardment of product advertising, and the political imposition of "spin" on every issue. Hence the question "Are we there already?" thought that we were getting there much sooner than he had earlier imagined, century. He advised his readers to read that book "against a background of population and technology. He foresaw that the world's population would increase enormously by the end of this century. He thought that the great increase in population would cause economic misery around the world, creating the need for a dictatorship to maintain order and control future population growth. Technological change would require the concentration of production in the hands of huge institutions, controlled either by Big Business or by Big Government. Within these institutions, the technology would require workers to perform more and more as robots. But the main contribution of "advancing" minds of the population. Television would greatly enhance the ability of the authorities to bring their message constantly into every home. Little newspapers and magazines with dissenting opinions could not survive economically. The population would be constantly immersed in soap operas and sports on television, effectively diverted from any thinking about society. or just around the corner. What he would say today we cannot know. He died in right about the growth of population. But that growth did not produce an economic crisis, with incomes declining and government control needed to maintain order. World per capita income is higher than ever and still rising. improvement in the economic conditions of life has been especially noticeable. This improvement of economic conditions was not brought about by an increase of centralized control. Government control of economies is diminishing everywhere. state, the Soviet Union, and led to the dismantling of controls. centralization of production in a few giant institutions. The trend has been the reverse. Improved information technology has facilitated the efficient interaction of independent units through the market without central control. And technology has not changed workers into robots. On the contrary, technology has created mechanical robots and calls upon human beings to do what robots predicted and feared is not happening either. He did not foresee cable television, let alone the Internet. People have access to more varied sources of information than ever before. Moreover, television is turning out to be an person in moonlight in an amphitheater. If he had delivered the same speeches on television to millions of people sitting at home in groups of two or exposure of our great authorities has not increased respect for them or our willingness to follow their lead. And the effect of advertising, which out to be trivial. We may buy red or black cars rather than green or brown ones because of television, but we don't buy cars because of television. foresaw. He thought that the use of these drugs would make the population indifferent and willing to accept control by political leaders. But first there would have to be seizure of control by some group that was not indifferent. Today, we neither have such a group nor the atmosphere for its emergence. Of course, we do have people who want to be in office, but once in office they don't want to be in control. Anyway, what causes indifference to politics today is not drugs but politics, which seems less and less relevant to our lives. know they are not free. They have been drugged and brainwashed into thinking that they are doing exactly what they want, not what some dictator wants them to do. So, if we say that we are free, how can we prove that we have not been programmed to say that by a Master who is manipulating us into thinking that? There is, however, an answer to that. The masters of the Brave New World would not allow a movie version of Brave New World to be shown on television. The movie reveals what such a society could be like and what a horror it would be. The heroes of the movie are a man and woman who escape the system with their baby and are going to live like a traditional family. As long as Brave New World is shown on television we will know warning, not a prescription. There may be people who do not look upon it as horrible. It is a society in which every want is fulfilled. But, as Professor Frank H. Knight used to say, what people want is not only to have their wants fulfilled but also to have better wants. People in the Brave New World satisfy the wants they have but are prevented from having some good wants, like want for love and family, and deprived of the opportunity to reach for new and policy of the Roman Catholic Church is that except in extreme circumstances, characteristically grabbed something to which he was not entitled. Cardinal "legally and doctrinally wrong" and added this grace note: "Some undoubtedly believe that if one has enough prestige or money, anything goes." to have been warned he would never eat Communion in this church again. Several complied with a request that he no longer receive Communion at his wife's Catholic parish. The Catholic Church's scruples about intercommunion cut both generation ago, a Protestant president of the United States who took Communion Protestant participating in the "popish superstition" of the Mass. It's a Catholic churches and the logical outcome of the ecumenical movement energized ago, I was struck by the thought that the service (a term never applied to Catholic worship in my altar boy days in the early 1960s) would have scandalized past pastors. Not only was the Mass in English, celebrated by a priest facing the congregation, but at Communion time, the sacrament was distributed in both "species" (wine as well as bread) by ministers of both from priestly hands, avoided the female eucharistic minister (a laywoman) clerical vestments (the "rags of popery" of Protestant polemic) discarded during the Reformation. The result is a consensus Communion ceremony that might commentators ritualistically recited the theological boilerplate I learned in the bread and wine, while maintaining their ordinary physical qualities, are sacrifice offered for the forgiveness of sins. Reformers objected to the latter "The word transubstantiation is commonly used in the Roman Catholic Church to presence, but not as explaining "how the change takes place." (Despite this fudge, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church retains the term.) Catholic academic theology but also popular teaching and practice. These days really present in the Communion distributed at Catholic Masses. And they reject the notion that they are ineligible to partake of a gift that ultimately comes attendance that day. I was edified by the hospitality extended to tourists at explained, "This is God's altar; this isn't the Episcopal Church's altar." If Communion is a meal, it is rude not to reciprocate. much anymore. But the other day it seemed to me that if I wanted to participate greatly impressed by the volume of the reporting, the diligence of the reporters, the number of new facts recounted every day, and the number of experts who had been interviewed and quoted. But when I had read it all, I was left unsatisfied. I felt I didn't know what was going on, and I thought that many readers would have the same feeling, perhaps even more so than I did. Perhaps I was expecting more than should have been expected or could have been happened unless one knows the rules of baseball and something about what is ordinary and what extraordinary in any particular game. One has to have a mental model of the sport into which one places the facts of a particular game if one is to create a comprehensible story. Probably most people who read the sports pages have such a model in mind, and the sports reporter can assume that equally probable that few people who read the daily paper, even those who read the financial pages, have a model of the international financial system in mind. Without that, they cannot be expected to understand the connection general is suffering, why unemployment should rise, or why the trade deficit should decline. Most importantly, they will not understand the function of the external funds being provided by the International Monetary Fund and some countries, or where the whole process is heading. What would the end of the papers. But I would like to illustrate what I mean by the missing model by with the proposition that in any country, the excess of domestic investment (mainly expenditure on new plants, equipment, and housing) over domestic saving (the part of the national income not spent on consumption, private or public) is equal to the inflow of capital from abroad. This excess, in turn, is equal to the excess of imports of goods and services over exports of deficit," a term that reporters use but rarely define. These equalities are maintained by variations of the exchange rate, interest rates, inflation rates, and real incomes. Thus, if there are insufficient domestic savings to satisfy all highly profitable investment opportunities, foreign capital will be attracted into the country. Foreign investors will want to buy the local currency, in order to invest in the country, and that will raise that currency's exchange value. With a higher value of the local currency, exports from the country will be less competitive government may try to keep the value of the local currency from rising by buying foreign currencies with it. To do that, the government will increase the domestic money supply (in simple parlance, it will print more money). This, in production increases to meet the increased buying power of citizens), or raise the price level (if more money ends up chasing the same amount of goods). Either of these effects will attract imports and discourage exports, increasing imports and more of the domestic product that would have been exported, or attract domestic resources into producing for the home market rather than for export. A rising price level will make the country's exports less even higher rate of internal investment, thanks to an inflow of foreign this deficit was made possible by a high exchange rate for the won. The exchange rate would have been higher, and the deficit larger, if the government had not been buying dollars with won, and in the process accumulating a reserve world markets for some products, like automobiles, had been overestimated. money out. The effort to convert won into dollars and other foreign currencies sustain it by using its reserves. The decline in the won caused further bankruptcies. Companies that could pay their foreign debts when a dollar cost The decline in the won, by making imports more expensive and exports more competitive, would help bring about the decline in the investment was smaller; the capital inflow was smaller or negative; and the won would reach an equilibrium level, lower than it had been before the crisis. transition to that situation would be painful. The decline in the won would not immediately raise exports or limit imports. The cut in output and employment in the investment sector would not be immediately offset by a rise in output and employment in industries that produce for export or that compete with imports. investors' efforts to get out of won assets into other currencies, and force the won down further. So there could be a cumulative, speculative process in thereby to prevent unnecessary bankruptcies and unnecessary depression of enterprises but to keep enterprises from failing only because of a panicky flight from the won and the fall in its value. The assumption is that private investors who buy and sell won are depressing its value below its equilibrium economic analysis, is coherent and understandable, and reveals the interaction language of the Millennium, and the logo (until we hear otherwise), is for infrastructure of the millennium project [for it to remain distinct] from our House communications office to speechwriters and other officials, banning the Transportation speechwriters implored me to write in protest of yesterday's directive. We're putting together congressional testimony on next year's budget and having a devil of a time finding substitutes for the prohibited words. Specifically, we had trouble dancing around the ban of the words "bridge," "road," and "highway." We appreciate their metaphorical importance for welcoming the millennium, but could you suggest alternatives? have a synonym for "future"? It seems this word has been banned, along with all references to specific dates (day, month, or year) beyond two weeks hence. The standard phraseology I am leaning toward for discussing future events is "an event to occur on a day subsequent to the several other days that shall proceed duly in the natural course of time forward from the present moment, eventually accruing into units characterized as months and, much later, years." Too their next Windows release (though we're working on that). House Counsel's Office endorses Communications' effort to control rhetoric. Let's use this occasion to remind ourselves of other verboten words. In speeches and official communications, please refrain from using the judgment. Avoid potentially evocative terms. For an example of careful word choice, take note of the Pentagon Public Affairs Office's suggestion that all references to "seamen" be changed to "sailors." As always, we appreciate your the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the first inaugural, one is immediately struck by the modesty. He had just been elected unanimously by the Electoral College. He was more respected than any subsequent president has been at the time of his inauguration. And what does he difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers. Inaugural Address metamorphosed from describing the government's policy to manage by using the instruments of government alone. Thus, in his first life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and the vital. With this vision we approach new affairs." country is debased and decadent, the cure has to come from uplifting the people, not from acts of government. Similar diagnoses and prescriptions appear bully pulpit," a remark that did not appear in his Inaugural Address. The metaphor of the pulpit suggests not reading but oral and visual contact between appears occasionally throughout the history of inaugurals, but it has hit its change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little." the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the issue frets its hour on the inaugural stage and then is heard no more. That and it always appears as part of the phrase "men and women," never as referring chosen in an election in which women voted nationally, does not remark on the they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject subject came back to inaugural addresses, but in a weak and abstract form. That is true even of the presidents we think of as being most concerned with race Perhaps each thought he had made a sufficient statement by having a black is in this sentence: "From our revolution, the Civil War, to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, our people have always mustered the determination to construct from these crises the pillars of our history." I recall this not to suggest that their concern was not deep and sincere, but only to indicate what is acceptable to say in a speech intended to appeal to much more to ponder in these speeches than I have suggested here. There is much to be proud of, in what we have endured and achieved, in the peaceful transference of power, and in the reasonableness and moderation of the presidents we have elected. But there is also much humility to be learned. We look back with amazement at the ignorance and moral obtuseness revealed by what our past leaders have said and our past citizens believed. We should recognize inaugurates a new monthly column about developments on the Internet. The author happens to be Slate 's chief computer guy, but the column is intended for an audience as innocent of technology as he is about a lot of the stuff they "push" is the latest Big Thing for the Web. "Push" refers to the way that information gets delivered. Do you have to go to it (pull)? Or does it come to you (push)? The conventional way to read your favorite Internet content is to navigate to items of interest, wait for them to download, and so forth. That's technology, by contrast, is supposed to do all this for you. It dials up, connects to selected sites, downloads certain information, and arranges it in life). The advantage to you is that it's all there waiting to be read, at fast provider is that information "pushed" at customers is more likely to find them metaphor commonly applied here is a newspaper being delivered to your door unreliability, a more appropriate metaphor might be sending a highly trained dog to the newsstand to pick up the paper. Most of the time you'd get the Weekly --and occasionally, your dog would just wander off looking for a The company provides a free piece of software (downloadable from its site) that allows you to select from a handful of "channels" (sports, business, arts and entertainment, etc.). At set intervals, the software instructs your computer to connect to the Internet, go to the company's site, and download the latest news in those categories. It also downloads some ads. Then, whenever your computer has been idle for a few minutes, this news and these ads pop up on the custom screen saver the software has installed on your machine. Because the material is presented after the download is complete, the display is fast. And because the process uses the company's own software and not a standard Web browser, the display is customized to the task at hand, making it attractive and newspaper delivered. This is a lot more like watching television. That helps to one. The first automatically connects to the Internet and downloads things so you can read them offline. The second finds and collects things that interest you. The third presents them effectively. Other companies offer Web work pretty much the same way: You tell the software which sites you want downloaded, and the software tells your computer to do it at prearranged does it mean to "download a site"? A site is a collection of pages, linked together as well as to other pages on other sites. How many pages should the software download? Too few, and you're missing out on something. Too many, and you might overflow your hard drive. These companies solve this problem by making relationships with specific sites that agree to tailor a version to that company's software. That's why some sites (like Slate) sport FreeLoader logos, trying to make online browsing more satisfying. Peak promises to remember that I like that page, and to download it all for me ahead of time while I surf elsewhere. When I go back, I find that it has already downloaded the last two weeks' cartoons, making my experience fast and Unfortunately for these companies, the technology to download sites ahead of time is simple. In the past, small companies have innovated with features like disk compression and virus checking, only to find themselves squeezed out when those features were incorporated into basic operating systems like Windows and similar product in development called "Constellation." themselves by the content they gather and how they present it if they are to proliferating rapidly, a very good filter will be needed to sort out what approach to corporate intranets (internal networks), hoping that "push" technology will be even more useful in distributing the right information to "push" technology to watch is Marimba's Castanet, which attempts to generalize the technique. clones, which download only Web pages, Castanet can download Java applications download content whether you actually read it or not. Since not everyone will read everything they order up at no charge, an enormous amount of pointless net traffic is being generated. As if the Web wasn't slow enough already. In fact, companies' central computers designed to minimize its own impact. And this one's not free. It's almost a protection racket. You give away your software free to a company's employees. A few weeks later, you saunter over and say, our software and we'll keep it running smoothly." Once a company buys that software, it is less likely to switch content providers. So maybe it's more like dealing drugs. Either way, everybody wins: The employees read their news, believe, is the result of my tendency to write buggy code. So it was no thing you do when a tester brings you a bug is reproduce it. In this case, shipped buggy software? That you deliberately added to the torment of millions of computer users who can't get their software to work? Why shouldn't of which are fasteners such as rivets. Fasteners are wonderful, but they don't interact much with one another. The difficult thing about writing software is insidious than a few blown rivets? Bugs are errors, somewhat analogous to typos or factual errors in newspaper articles, but the difference is that a typo is almost never enough to spoil an entire edition of a newspaper, whereas a tiny express dates can bring a whole program to a screeching halt. into two major categories: crashing and functional. Crashing bugs are so naughty that they cause programs to stop functioning. Usually, this results in programs to fail or to give erroneous results. The number of either kind of bug simple, short programs, like one designed to find a single word in a sentence. Actually, it's not that simple an operation. You must write perfectly logical statements in a language that the computer can understand. If you were to write this program in C, a popular programming language, it would take three lines of code to tell the program to look at the beginning of the word and the beginning of each sentence. Next, you'd instruct the computer to match each character in the word you are searching for to the corresponding characters in the sentence. If the letters are the same, you continue. This would take five lines of code. Then you would have to confirm you have gone through all the letters in the word successfully. Chalk up two more lines. Then you'd need to see if there are any letters in the sentence left to compare. Two lines of code. Lastly, you would have to inform the user of your program what happened. Another three about it, and he hasn't even started creating bugs! Dropping one essential instruction or writing the lines of code in the wrong order could spell destruction for my little program. (For all the gory details on how I actually assume software companies spend most of their time writing software. Wrong! They spend most of their time testing software! After developers write a few lines of code, we test it for bugs and sit down with our testers to imagine all the ways the program will be used. Good testers make gnarly demands on the routinely yanked the power cord out of the computer during Outlook operations to see how the program handled loss of power.) Testers run the software on Bell? They print with old printers. They enter thousands of lines of text into choked at this point, demanding a day of rest. God was watching. Here at we rarely tug on the power cord to test our code, but we do buggy, because we're still getting different parts of the program to cooperate. A line of code that tells the program how to print may clash with the code that tells the program how to draw the screen. As testers hunt bugs, developers conspire with the marketing department to add features to the product, which breeds more potential bugs. Adding new features to a stable program can be dangerous. Developers can create bugs faster than testers can capture them, and testers can capture them faster than developers can kill them, so the only way to finish a product is to stop adding features and start paying attention to Preventing developers from adding features is not as easy as it sounds. They their arms with a baseball bat. Given infinite time, developers would prefer to add feature upon feature and never release their product. But marketing people are the worst offenders when it comes to wanting to add new features, generating loud choruses of "NO" even from otherwise enthusiastic ensnaring them. "Look what I caught!" the tester meows as he drops the vermin on the developer's doorstep. Testers are as vain about finding bugs as I am about squashing them, hence the excessive pride of my tester who uncovered the found a bug, it's not easy to find what caused it. Where is the bad assumption that got us into trouble? Some bugs are hell to track down. One crashing bug in card. Eventually, we tracked the bug down to one single line of code that failed because it assumed all graphics cards are created equal. They are review every line of code, one at a time. They often deploy programs called "debuggers," which allow them to peer into the innards of the software as it runs. As developers kill the bugs, they incorporate the solutions into a daily "build" of the program and test the build to make certain the solutions don't it was released, each build bringing us infinitesimally closer to approach perfection, though, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Are the existing bugs fatal defects, or can we live with them? We developers have a software companies have already been noted and prioritized for fixing by some The worst bug is a "show stopper" bug, the bug that will croak the entire program. When a show stopper is discovered, we drop everything and find a fix. But we make the absolutely smallest necessary change to kill the bug so that the other parts of the system can continue to work, oblivious seek a balance between "it's done" and "it's perfect" when writing software. But it's difficult to know when to stop. You are always only a few late nights software writing is powered on caffeine and little more. In fact, one enterprising young developer strung out on Mountain Dew eventually fixed the missed our links in the article, click to read about why programmers created have? Like other Web sites, we get asked this question all the time. Our usual reply is: "Thank you for asking. That's a complicated question." But here is our best effort to answer it, along with an explanation of why counting readers Traditional print magazines know exactly how many copies they sell, though they have no idea how many people actually read a particular article or see a viewers were watching which channel at any hour of the day. (See Slate's recent or click on a link or a "favorites" or "bookmark" button, you are telling your Web site's server. Your browser then assembles these data and displays them as a page. Each of these requests for information is a hit. they are deceptive. A single Web page can be one hit or many, depending on how the more hits it will require. That's why Slate, and some other sites, prefer your server has sent out in response to requests from browsers. In recent misleading measure in some ways. A "page" is not a standard unit on the Web the way it is in print. Depending on a Web site's design, the same amount of content can take up a very different number of pages. Slate is designed so that every article or feature takes up a single page. Other sites break up articles into many pages. (We're not suggesting that people are padding their page counts. It's a judgment call about whether readers will find having to scroll sometimes a site will feed you two pages when you've only asked for one. Slate report. We cannot guarantee that every site is so scrupulous. Your computer requests a page from the proxy server, which then requests it from the Web site. But proxy servers are often programmed to save, or cache, frequently requested pages, rather than retrieving them from the Web each time your own computer is probably set up to cache some pages you've visited recently. (That's why, when reading Slate, it's quicker to go back to the contents page than it was to call it up at the start.) All this caching means pages are served more quickly, but it does become harder for a Web site to know how often its pages have actually appeared on someone's screen. participant in "The Fray." What we really want to know is how many individual readers Slate has. And we can find out, sort of. Each request to Slate from your browser carries with it an assortment of useful information. Your computer tells us what operating system and browser software you are using, so that our server can return a page appropriate to your setup. We also are told about the referring page --that is, the page you were reading when you requested this one. (Marketers love that information.) More important, each page request is accompanied by a return address. How else would the server know where to send the data? Every computer connected to the Internet has an Depending on how you access the Internet, your computer has either a permanent stamps your hand when you leave the premises temporarily, so as to identify you when you return. The first time you visit Slate, our computer sends yours a piece of data, which your computer sends back every time you return, so we know it's you. Cookies aren't perfect. They don't account for multiple people accessing the site from one computer, or one person using different computers (or browser software). Also, some older browsers don't understand cookies, and newer ones allow privacy freaks to turn them off. But, using cookies, we can get a pretty good idea of how many unique browsers are visiting our problematic concept. Do you measure browsers per day? Per week? Per month? The longer the time period you choose, the more individual visitors you can claim, which is nice. On the other hand, because of repeat visitors, the number of unique browsers in a given month is less than the total of unique browsers per week for those four weeks, which is less than the total of unique browsers per generally less exact than measuring traditional magazine circulation. In one probability not more than one). Print publications have no clear idea of how many people read each copy of their publication and, conversely, how many individual pages of any given copy go unread. In practice, they tend to make wild claims about the former and ignore the latter. automatically goes to the Web to retrieve material, and stores it on your own Slate have? Taking all these complications into effect, and being as honest as in his apartment waiting to go out on a date to which he was looking forward with pleasure. Unexpectedly it began to rain. For a moment this depressed him. But soon these words came tripping through his brain: "Isn't it a lovely day to another time, a man, perhaps not the same man, was expecting someone for whom he cared to return from a brief trip. When he saw her he spontaneously began to sing softly: "Well, hello, Dolly! Hello, Dolly! It's so nice to have you back where you belong." He felt warmth and joy. He experienced the joy that shone At an earlier time, a man who was lonely used to find running through his head a song that went: "Sometimes I wonder why I spend each lonely night, dreaming of a song." Those words consoled him. As the song said, he found his consolation in the stardust of a song. The song reminded him that he was not alone in his loneliness, and that made it seem not so bad. example, of a different type. There was a man who had frequent occasion to the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and he would begin to sing to himself, "The mountains, the mountains, we greet them with a song," his college anthem. Recalling that song gave him a sweet, sad nostalgic feeling of youth gone association of certain songs with certain emotions. They raise the same question. What was causing what? To concentrate on the first story, did the man in question think of "Isn't it a lovely day" because he was happy, or was he happy because he thought of that song? He didn't have to think of that song when the rain began. He could have thought of: "Stormy weather, can't go on, everything I had is gone." He didn't have to think of any song at all. be my answer to most questions.) The man recalled the song because he was happy and he was happy because he recalled the song. Many factors led to his being happy in the rain. One of them was the song. He might have been happy without it. But retrieving that song from his memory bank helped to articulate his course, there was something about this man that led him to store that song in his memory bank so it could be recalled when appropriate, years after he first encountered it. It was something about how this man was in his late teens and his 20s, before the business of daily life crowded out room for taking in new impressions from songs. But, still, if that song had not been written or if he had not heard it at an impressionable age, his reaction would have been For people of my generation the key years were the '30s and Cole Porter. Ah, Wilderness! I do not share the songs that are in the memory little. I do not understand the songs of my grandchildren at all. will react to particular circumstances is not ordained at birth. It is learned in part by experience, and the songs that people absorb are part of the experience that guides their reactions. Not only songs have that effect. Among other things, snatches of poetry do too. Sometimes when it is very cold I find think until they hear what they say. So there are people who don't know what they feel until they listen to the songs or poetry that are in their heart. I don't suppose that everyone is like that. I suppose that there are people who feel happiness or sorrow or jealousy or triumph directly, without any combination of words, either remembered or made up for the purpose. there; and maybe there's no real you in your emotions either. prepared to report on my venture into this brave new world that has so many probably seen ads telling of the marvels we can bring into our homes by convenience I am going to round everything off.) You and I were not born yesterday, and we know that no one is going to give us such a valuable and sophisticated product so cheaply. We have read the fine print and know that we get the dish at such a low price only if we subscribe to the service providing in my special case, for reasons that may not be so special, the installation first time, and though you are well covered by warranties you are going to spend many hours on the telephone while "our entertainment providers are serving other customers." Valuing my time at the minimum wage, I calculate my In order to get started I had to sign up for a package of were many other more expensive options. In fact, to get fairly representative think the satellite dish is worthwhile, and the number is growing. A larger number are paying nearly that much a month for cable, with fewer channels than are available on satellite. There are great economies of scale. For a household get for this? That is hard to tell. The system provides minimum guidance to what can be seen. One can scroll through a guide on the screen that tells what is showing on each channel, but the information given is minimal. The names of movies are shown, but not what they are about, who is in them, when they were produced, or any indication of their quality such as one would get in a newspaper listing. One click on the name of any currently running movie will bring it up on the screen, but without any additional information except for its rating (G, PG, etc.). Unless one is exceedingly well informed about movies, or quite indifferent, one can surf around for quite a while and only reach a movie one wants to watch after it has already begun. These problems can be or at least what was available during prime time in one evening. events, eight channels of broadcast stations generally available free without a satellite dish but requiring payment with the satellite dish, and seven channels airing music without any picture. These channels were very finely varieties of country, and so on. I consider that to be essentially similar to movies suggests that their quality is about what you would find in your local surprise, because almost all the movies have been in your local theater. The pay movies were no better than the free movies, only somewhat newer. A person who wants to stay home to see a movie on any night, or even on every night, should find something amusing. For oldies like me the most intriguing channel were a surprise to me. I hadn't expected so much space to be devoted to rugby but I suppose there are those who love these activities. More access to standard events is available in deluxe packages beyond what I paid for. news channels all have pretty much the same news. I generously classify nine Channel, a health channel, and a few others. Then there is a smattering of I confess a special interest. One channel described in the brochure as "tasteful adult programming for mature audiences" I can vouch for as being very clean. All the girls look as if they just stepped out of the shower. wonderful. But still, I can't complain about what is there. I do, however, wonder about what is not there. When there are so many channels available, why is so little space devoted to education and art? My own little corner of the channel devoted to such talk could well interest as many people as want to see scratches the surface of possible educational programming. On the arts side, there are videotapes of great performances of great operas. Could they take the Arts). I can imagine a channel devoted to such productions. My economist friends will certainly tell me that if such programming would pay off it would last musings raise in my mind another question, a long way from the cute 18-inch dish on my deck. Many estimable people are devoting themselves to ridding our popular culture of obscenity, sex, and violence. Who is devoting himself to enriching our popular culture with high art? my appreciation of it. I have learned to find my way around better, although that is still a problem and I think that a technology that can deliver so much information should be able to provide better guidance on the screen and not require reference to a printed magazine. I have found that when the incoming music is routed through my stereo, I get excellent sound. Just accidentally, while surfing and without any prior notice, I came upon a broadcast of Don broadcast, although I came in at the beginning of the last act. There were no casts like that any more. I remain of the opinion, however, that the content is be a telephone? The moguls who control the computer, television, and telephone businesses think so, and they are populating your future with Internet for consumers who fear personal computers. These appliances are as simple to run as a microwave or a toaster oven. Just plug them in, and before you know way to sell new boxes to a world supersaturated with phones and televisions: television into your telephone line to provide access to the Web. (Full essentially tiny, simple computers. The new model boasts a 1.1-gigabyte hard they're cheap and they work. But they also suck because they're slow and their home, plug you in, and explain all the machine's wonders to you. Not content with being your spreadsheet program, word processor." (Gateway hasn't attached a phone to it. Yet.) industry may believe in convergence, but the broadcasters don't. Broadcasters like their televisions dumb, mostly because they're afraid that the PC industry will steal their business if computers and televisions merge. (They're probably right.) So, the two groups have gone to war over the technical standards for wants your television to stay as dumb as an eggbeater, because it's found a way channel, to send the bitmap. Click for a tidy explanation of the vertical cable companies, who have such enormous bandwidth at their disposal that they states that wherever computer chips go, the Internet will follow: Everything that's powered by electricity will eventually become studded with computer chips. And as these dumb devices become smarter, manufacturers will explore them to the Internet so they can share their wisdom with other devices. Take automobile is laden with microchips, which control fuel intake, cruise control, will be "outfitted with voice recognition, transparent displays, global positioning systems, and Internet access." The Network Vehicle designers left car phones off the list, I guess, because they assume that car phones are electronic devices are converging at a wicked rate. But they're also diverging. Our powerful, multipurpose computers will continue to become even more will be limited by their price. Meanwhile their simpler brethren, assigned monitors, and security devices), will occupy the price niche of clock radios and bread makers. In the future, the way to tell a real computer from an and she lives in the South building. It is said that she lives, with her across the plaza, less than a hundred yards, at the Dole apartment. So, I Dole's presence is manifest. A picture of him getting a swimming pool, I have seen the senator on his terrace and exchanged a word with him. Two years ago, before the presidential election campaign, I met him coming out of the drugstore and used the occasion to advise him that cutting taxes was not a winning issue. He did not take my advice, and now he is known chiefly as of course, I would not have singled her out for attention before the publicity. In fact, I don't think I could pick her out in a group of girls even folding chairs. They seem in no hurry. On rainy days they sit under umbrellas and wrap their cameras in plastic. I saw one photographer whom I knew slightly and asked if he had sighted her. He had been there for three days and had not. will exceed the cost of keeping the photographers on guard. And who will pay But residential proximity is not my only connection to limousine. There was no serious damage, however; reporters are a hardy lot. club by tapping a connection with a friend who is a member, but he was refused admission on the reasonable grounds that he wasn't wearing a necktie. ago, to allow women to become members. One member who had voted no on that occasion was heard to say, "See, you admit women and the next thing you know on the whole, the members took the excitement with good humor and were amused by the irony of the difference in culture between the Cosmos Club and the Oval the first place, we don't know the truth; in the second place, the presidency is not a person but a team. Presumably some members of the team, such as the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of state, were not that distracted. required more analysis. One had to separate the relationship, whatever it was, was distracted from the business of his office because he was out playing golf so much. But we were told, and I think most people accepted the explanation, better. A similar explanation was offered, but privately, to some in the press relationships can be justified in the same way. That would assume, of course, that the president did not feel any psychological stress from realizing he was behaving in what many people regard as an immoral way. That apparently was no relationship became public property, the situation was different. Certainly there was much distraction at that point. What we have to ask, however, is whether that was a bad thing. Would it be better for the president, and the first lady too, for that matter, to be able to give their undivided attention image is unwittingly apt, linking two upstart heroes in the baby boomer pantheon. A mother's helper with a bag of tricks that promised new fun for the immensely popular and has remained so. What is perhaps less obvious is that, purported iconoclasm is twofold. First, he is typically hailed (or, rarely now, condemned) as a revolutionary who emboldened postwar parents to rebel against the stern behaviorist style that had prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s. The truth is somewhat different. Like most wildly popular figures, he was riding a reigning sociological wisdom, which championed the democratic, "affectionate" family as the welcome successor to the hierarchical home of the past. Reviewers of the first edition of Baby and Child Care praised its don't rock the Health marveled, "has succeeded to an amazing degree in striking a middle departure from rigidity in schedules and training." do," he told his readers. Instead of struggling to "do everything flexible. Children, trust them, have "a deep desire to grow up to be like the parents they admire and love." Yet the message of simple reassurance turned out to say, "Don't be overawed by what the experts say," became an expert of discover just how dependent on his advice his fans had become. Was parental voiced by critics of his antiwar activism. In fact, as early as in the second They weren't friendly yet firm, as he had recommended. They were confused and matriarch himself, he was surprised at how wobbly modern mothers seemed. realize that when you always emphasize that a child basically wants to behave well, and will behave well if he is handled wisely, you make the parent symptom of a "fascinating and somewhat mysterious phenomenon, this one of the about their authority over younger ones. But now the swift pace of technological change left parents less equipped than ever to prepare their children for the future, even as children needed the preparation more the rare expert who acknowledged their bewilderment. From then on, ministering its first edition, his manual was more encyclopedic than others, packed with saw to it that, over the years, it remained so. Just as important, he became even more solicitously therapeutic. In a field intent on claiming objective, "scientific" status, he didn't hesitate to admit that doctrinaire ideas dramas and the wonders of sublimation, sounds more quaint every year. It's his handling of the ambiguities of parenthood that is timeless. Called a delivering mixed messages to his insecure audience. process stirring up their anxiety. He urged them to rely on their instincts, resilience, and was quick to suggest that problems require a specialist's all, he prescribed spontaneity, an oxymoronic endeavor if ever there was were not evasions. On the contrary, they call attention to a truth less honest advisers have preferred to obscure and parents only half want to hear: that child rearing is a messy art of compromise and contradictions, full of mothers and fathers of their impossible dream of being "professional" parents equipped with the developmentally correct answers. But he played an important part in bringing realism to child rearing by being an unapologetic improviser child rearing wisdom. He let broad intuitions and motley experience guide him. "I never looked at my records," he admitted about the writing of his classic. "It really all came out of my head." All along, he treated his book as a not science, to update his expertise for an era of feminism and family disarray. His classic has thickened gracelessly over the years, but as the forthcoming eighth edition once again shows, it has remained true to the media got cold feet and spiked the story. Television dipped its pinkie toe in, tale unfolded in all its seamy glory on the Web, where everyone went to read the big dailies finally report what everyone was talking about: the president's intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!" don't trust Drudge ("Gosh, that Drudge, such a pillar of journalistic integrity. Snicker!"). But the story's out there. Soon enough, talk turns to cold feet. Drudge's page is referred to as a "gossip report." brings more postings on various Web sites: The Drudge Report updates the night, Drudge writes that federal investigators possess taped phone conversations that substantiate the rumors of a presidential affair. if not for the Web? Probably. Did the Web give the story additional velocity? Definitely. The ethics cops who patrol newspaper and magazine newsrooms can't control the rumors and unsubstantiated stories that people post to the Web. And for taking things very personally, for blowing them way out of proportion. But they could be forgiven for feeling that they were given an unusually tough time juvenile crime, school uniforms, drug tests to get a driver's license: Both entertainment complex" in the country, announced a curfew and chaperone policy aren't having sex or committing prosecutable crimes. (Sure, they sometimes fight, but "let's be clear," a police chief said, "we're talking about hanging out and engaging in that national pastime, spending money on junk. to portray adolescents as incipient juvenile delinquents, when not idealizing them as "the future of our society." But it doesn't take a pollster to see why alarm has suddenly intensified, as it did in the late 1950s when another bulge of kids began to hit puberty. (Publicity about urban gang violence aroused a was forged in the crucible of adolescence, now have adolescents of their own. That's not an easy stage to live through, even in the most orderly family or relax, on the grounds that they lived to tell (or not tell) the tale? They get a nicotine fix by just opening the door of any decent student lounge in alcoholic beverages. Dress codes were dumped. Drug panic and AIDS fears didn't comes back to haunt one. As a newly affluent "youth market," it was baby boomers who helped usher in a commercialized popular culture that has become more powerful and awful than they could have imagined. You don't have to be Bob discipline are getting harder to sell, and ever more socially desirable. Adolescent drift and empty hedonism can't be brushed off merely as a phase, rhetoric, though they also succumb to distortions of their own. Mike Males, the to be overzealous when he argues that adults attack kids as a way of coping chronic runaway who has done every drug imaginable, been molested, and assaulted members of his family, grew up with two alcoholic parents who violently beat him and a mother who was herself battered and raped. Even the Lewis and Males go overboard, he by playing loose with statistics that demonize in sadistic adults (just as the implausible Justice Department discovery that survey that year, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out). And where them all struggling victors in spite of adults. Her interviews routinely end of the world end up "straightening out," as Lewis titles the section about the that adults are just as confused and ambivalent about their rights and their of teens that they behave like obedient children. They want laws that punish act like authority figures. They want laws that punish them as delinquent babysitters. On the one hand, many of the curfews cracking down on teens also "parental responsibility" laws passed by states and communities over the last couple of years give judges the power to make parents pay for juvenile detention or undergo counseling with their kids. Parents can even be threatened states have passed new laws that treat juvenile criminals as responsible adults. Of the People, a conservative lobbying group, has launched a nationwide campaign to add a "parental rights amendment" to state constitutions declaring it "the inalienable right" of parents to "direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children." An initiative to introduce it is on the ballot in Colorado. The obvious targets of the sweepingly vague amendment are clinics offering confidential medical services, and schools amendment could also be used against judges who come down hard on lax contradictions are blithely overlooked, as is any spirit of practicality. Who demonstrated their parallel parking skills is a reasonable way "to demand present themselves at the Motor Vehicles Bureau, and then speed recklessly the day after. They're also savvy enough to show up for the road test clean (or much about the child in the adult know so much less about the fate of the adults might look in the mirror and think to themselves, "Look at the person about the prospects of individual kids. Politicians should also take providing lots of extracurricular activities for the adolescents in direst shape. It doesn't mean blowing the problems out of all proportion. played. In many quarters of the globe, there seemed to be a sense of relief: Whew! At least here was one genuinely level playing field on which the United States was just another contender, not a superpower. international sport as soccer itself. Lately, an old word has resurfaced: The "dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony")? plenty of room for legitimate debate about where the line is between advancing universal values and imposing our own values on others; or when our country goes beyond the merits and motivations of this or that particular enjoying a new boom. That's in part because of the end of the Cold War. Other nations tended to muffle or modulate their occasional annoyance with the country that was their shield against the Soviet threat. Now they feel less sometimes easier for other governments to complain about what they depict as a local politics: Blaming a faraway caricature of the United States can deflect attention from shortcomings, or worse, closer to home. when we assert ourselves and of failure of nerve or vision when we encourage those same officials and pundits have griped about our determination to apply tough and, if necessary, military measures in response to the dangerous and There is a similar schizoid aspect to the reaction of some to be able to address alone, yet both require us to play a central role in orchestrating an effective international defense of common interests. That means we must combine coalition building with direct approaches to the parties. We have supported efforts by international financial institutions to stop the But the United States has also conducted quiet diplomacy with the two countries diplomatic jargon, multilaterally and unilaterally). In an increasingly addressed only through cooperation with other countries. The spread of nuclear and biological weapons, the growth of international organized crime, and global voluntarily. Coercion isn't appropriate and won't work. The United States has got to be careful not to strut its stuff in ways that might disincline other countries from cooperating with it. We should lead by example and suasion. the history of Great Powers, the United States defines its greatness not as an ability to dominate others but as an ability to work with others in the "international community" is not abstract or cynical or euphemistic; and we try that when democracy and prosperity and security advance anywhere around the globe, it enhances the freedom, prosperity, and security of the United States as well. After World War II the United States led the world in the design and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions helped bring bitter adversaries into a framework of mutual support and benefit. Now these organizations that served what we used to think of as "the West" and "the North" are opening up to the developing and democratizing nations of the East and the South. And the United States is also leading the creation of new international institutions: the There is no need to apologize for our leadership role. But United States to make a conscious effort not to sound smug, patronizing, or hectoring. That includes talking about foreign policy here in the United against a domestic temptation in the opposite direction. Today some hegemonism, but from a different perspective. They warn that in the name of exercising international leadership, we are foolishly risking our country's blood and treasure in faraway lands of which we know little. This opposition to Fast Track, and it is present again today in opposition to paying the United States can handle complaints about the style and even the substance of our engagement with the world. Better that than disengagement or a return to If you are as long in years and short in energy as I am, watching television is television, but some kinds I don't watch. I don't watch cop shows. If I wanted sitcoms. They seem to me to consist entirely of juvenile leering about sex. I am weaning myself from the talk shows about public policy that I used to think it was my duty to watch. I have concluded that they are all games of Pin the because it comes on at dinner time and serves as background music to which afternoon professional football. I love seeing something done extremely well, where the receiver catches it amid a forest of defenders is doing something extremely well. I like to watch with the sound off, because the sports pundits are no better than the policy pundits, and if I fall asleep during the game, the occasional symphony concert broadcast on television. I can hear better performance that is connected with doing something extremely well. When I only all those notes come out right. I look at the second clarinet player. He's no genius. He probably makes his living by giving lessons. But he always comes in with his "duh" at the right time. As the former second clarinet in the on the couch while gales of canned laughter blow over me or waves of fake blood wash over me. I am doing something. I am helping the detective find or prove seen him several times, he elicited giggles rather than puzzlement. too obscure for the occasional one to be recognized by the viewer. But there the reruns, I have the feeling that his shiny mustache is getting shinier and them, but we are not entirely happy with them. Their stories run for two to four hours, in two installments separated by a week. That is too long for even understated. I don't feel that I am coming closer to the solution, even after but they are not too hard to get either, especially after a second or third accurately. (Having seen so many episodes and observed the formula, I have thought it would be amusing to write an episode set in a think tank. But I have says the right thing, does the right thing, wears the right clothes. She is an example of doing something extremely well. She does not rely on eccentricities to create a recognizable character, and that is why you can watch her over and over again. Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, her infinite normalcy. new episodes of Murder, She Wrote have been made for several years. We are living on reruns. That is all right for now. True fans can enjoy seeing the same episode four or five times. They will discover something new each time. But that cannot go on much longer. I fear that when we reach the sixth or seventh repeat, it will have become boring. And what shall we do then? Fletcher are too old to be a good market for advertisers. It is not because we are old that we like the polite, civilized detective story. My generation liked television. We are of the generation that likes to have its intellect teased. Later generations like to have their emotions aroused. But it is true that we are not a good market for advertisers. We have money, and spend it or invest it. But we have been around too long, and have had too much experience, to buy something or invest in something just because we see it advertised on detective stories. But for many fans of that genre, time is running out. For we have to nurse the supply of old Murder, She Wrote s, rationing ourselves to not more than one viewing a week, hoping to preserve the fascination until the need for such entertainment has passed. letter began to circulate on the Internet detailing the dangers of a vicious, languages and it appeared around the world. It was read over a radio broadcast chain has circled the globe at least nine times. Prayer chains also thrive on the telephone, as callers dial friends and acquaintances and ask them to pray these information parasites seek to infect host brains. The most "fit" mind Less fit letters are not forwarded, and so die. Some potential hosts are expensive photocopying or the price of postage. But thanks to virtually free chains now billow into huge, tumorous entities in a matter of weeks. letter and threw it away. Nine days later he died." By invoking fear and almost as good a parasitic strategy as fear. The ubiquitous "Make Money Fast" the list, add your own name to the bottom, and reap your windfall later. The origins and lists addresses and phones of the alleged originators, requesting SEVEN YEARS OLD AND IS SUFFERING FROM AN ACUTE AND VERY CARCINOMA. THIS CONDITION CAUSES SEVERE MALIGNANT BRAIN ILLNESS. THE DOCTORS HAVE GIVEN HER SIX MONTHS TO LIVE. SHE WANTED TO START A CHAIN LETTER TO INFORM PEOPLE SEND PEOPLE THE MESSAGE TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST AND CONTINUING CANCER RESEARCH FOR EVERY NEW PERSON THAT GETS beautiful vision. A dying girl spreads a noble message across the world. All public broadcasting is in peril. Its modest request is that recipients put their names at the bottom of the list and forward it to friends. Eventually, Congress and the president. Never mind, of course, that public broadcasting bandwidth, reduces productivity, and exploits human emotions. But let's not forget the upside to the chains. They make you feel as if the click of your that the impulse to do good on the Net could be harnessed. staff to handle the mail, which it simply recycled. technologically! And how true it is, psychologically! hears the postman's knock any more. I can't remember that I ever heard it. At home, I get my mail from a clerk at the desk six floors below my apartment. At my office, I either find my mail on a shelf or have it placed on my desk by my helper. In either case I don't hear the postman's knock or ever see him. the primary means of mediated communication; that is, communication at a generally equipped with "voice mail," which allows you to retrieve messages this technological change have come some changes of attitude. We no longer are outside world through the postman. Now we increasingly seek the connection. We go to a clerk and ask for our mail; we call our answering service to see if there have been any phone calls; we log on to our computer to search for communication has come a degradation of the messages. In my youth, ordinary mail was the standard means of communication among people who knew each other, even those who knew each other very well, such as parents and children. Today, I send or receive hardly any personal post office mail, except when printed matter, such as a newspaper clipping, is enclosed. There is one person with whom I have a fairly regular postal mail correspondence, and that is because we are both trying to make a literary exercise of our writing to each personal communication there is in the mail I receive at home is buried in a mountain of solicitations for contributions from people or institutions I "quickening of the heart." It is more likely to be "ugh!" At my office, my mail consists almost exclusively of policy memorandums and pamphlets from institutions to whom I am but one name on an enormous mailing list. This mail makes me confront the feeling that I ought to study it all and the realistic knowledge that I ought to throw it out. Not much "quickening of the heart" the morning, I am sure to find a couple of messages offering me pornographic videos with one click of the mouse, and at least one message from someone ready of personal communication to garbage is higher than for snail mail. communication is highest on the telephone. But even there, when the bell rings and I pick up the receiver I am likely to hear someone asking, "How are you against getting a "quickening of the heart" by any of these media are high. But despite the odds, I find it worthwhile to try to make the connection. We have been warned at the apartment building where I live not to disturb the desk In my office, two or three times a day I look into the room where the mail is shelved. I call my home phone from the office at least once a day to see if any messages have been left. From home, I call my office three or four times a day. Stein, no new messages.") Even more frequently than that I log on to one of my three computers, hoping to see the little message on the screen, "You have that I expect anything "practical." I am not going to get a letter offering me a six figure advance for the publication of a volume of my personal essays. No, contents of the communication don't matter. It can be a postcard saying, "I am not being forgotten. Even if the message comes from someone you are sure has reminded. It is also a comfort if the message comes from a total stranger, as long as the message is for you specifically and personally and not for a name Possibly, I am more avid in pursuit of such connections than the average person. I know people who don't go down for their mail until afternoon, who have no telephone answering service, and who, even if they have to be forgotten, must be nearly universal. Whole industries rest on that dead live on in the memory of their survivors. Something like that is true for the living also. The living are most alive when they feel that they are remembered. That is why I go for my snail mail, call for my telephone messages, often take the bus to my office. I suppose that is partly because the bus trip the bus. I like to observe the other passengers. And I get a better view of the city and the people on the sidewalk from my seat on the bus than I do from the back seat of a taxi, especially during one of those wild rides where I am has become an abstraction, a symbol for something bad a president did. But there are fewer and fewer people who remember just what the president did. How accommodating it is of history to have located the glad to see her. She has overcome centuries of race and gender prejudice to get where she is. I am pleased to see the competence with which she wrestles that big bus around corners, hands out transfers, and answers passengers' questions about stops and connections. Not long ago, such competence would not have been the buildings of the Federal Reserve and the State Department. What a concentration of worldwide power! But more impressive than the power is the concentration of homeless men lounging on the grates and the grass. of the bus window one day, I saw a tall, graceful fountain in the garden behind a building that fronted on Constitution Avenue. I had passed it dozens of times without noticing it, perhaps because the water had not been playing before. I the guide would have called our attention to that fountain and explained its history, and we would all have marveled at it. From that moment, at least for a Revolution. I wondered how many other buildings are famous for something that she was "colored," as we used to say. I don't know the truth of that, but it bureaucrat who was found with his head down on his desk, sobbing because his president of the United States, who should have realized that the historic Often I am the only "white" person on the bus. In my new stance as a tourist, I destination over the same potholes. (And we have reached a degree of liberation The word "fundamentally" in the previous paragraph carries a lot of weight, but it is important to think of what is fundamental. I mean having the experience of love and loneliness, illness and health, the joy of children, the satisfaction of work, and the inevitability of death. Those are the respects in which we are all alike. That is the sense in which we are all these are the overwhelmingly important and overwhelmingly common aspects of life. But many people much wiser than I am have thought that at a much earlier realize that my observations have been largely about race. That is not the handle to open the door for me. I say, "Thank you." She says, "Have a nice by the attorney general with the grave responsibility of determining if there has been any criminal wrongdoing by the president of the United States or those office and the laws of this nation, including perjury, subornation of perjury, of the relevant criminal violations is in order for a proper judgment to be jury, despite the president's claims that his statements were "legally accurate." Herein are highlights of our findings (see Appendix XX for a complete list and descriptions of sexual acts, including oral copulation, mutual masturbation, and lewd and lascivious conduct with a cylindrical smoking testified that as an intern in the West Wing she was summoned to deliver food members of the uniformed Secret Service detail (Officer Lewis Fox testimony, president drawled, his eyes widening with desire, "but let me finish up here gave her a wide, rakish smile that lit her soul with excitement. She was alone shapely body and a powerful intelligence that would make her an asset in any the most powerful man on Earth! Now he put down the phone and looked at guided her into an adjoining study, holding a slice of pizza in his free hand, and said, in the warm, caring way she'd always admired, "I need someone like that took her breath away, he suddenly grabbed, through her sheer dress, the breathless whisper. "A chief of state has needs, sweetie pie, just like any dark hair, guiding her down to his fiery loins. Her face beamed with adoration as she explored his body, her tongue licking him slowly as she moved ever manhood, and the muscles in his thighs contracted while he moaned softly with of the United States exploded in shuddering bursts of joy. After they hugged wondering if he really loved her, she was lounging in her black silk pajamas, wearing a sexy blue cocktail dress when she was ushered into the Oval Office secluded study, she wriggled her luscious hips, and slowly began peeling off all their alabaster glory. She trembled as he caressed her, and she moved with new, intense passion as she saw him arouse himself, his face distorted in a groaned in ecstasy and release, leaving traces of his love on her dress, a the dress she treasured would someday be used to help convince publishers that her exclusive story of their steamy love affair, complete with shocking new deposition, the president said he couldn't recall the specifics of most gifts he would ever be willing to declare their romance to the world. In response, the president handed her a velvet box with a silver ring inside. "Our love is important to me," he told her. Her heart filled with an overpowering love for him, but she was puzzled when he leered, "It matches the silver of the cigar and gave her a big grin. "You can't commit adultery with a cigar, right?" cared for her as a person, or just as a sex object to service his sickest desires. She was shocked to realize that it didn't matter, really, as long as that cigar, big boy," she said, hoisting up her skirt, wallowing in all the depravity he taught her, "and let's see if we can light your fire!" Soon she crazed maelstrom of feverish ecstasy, and afterward he asked her a special just don't volunteer any extra information!" He was so brazen sometimes, she criminal pattern of subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice (see Sections II and III, below) was built on this bedrock of lies and sexual misconduct. We hope your committee will take appropriate action in response to don't see the chain of causation by which the specific acts of specific politicians are supposed to have led to the results noted today. If I don't like to offer some musings on another kind of "golden" condition. I refer to the golden days of private individuals. Between the golden days of individuals and those of nations, the connection is, I believe, quite loose. In saying that, I mean to exclude the Holocaust, the Great Depression, and total war, as well as people who are exceptionally vulnerable. But within the usual range of variation of the national condition, the difference between a golden national If I had to describe the salient characteristic of a personal golden day in one word I would say "peace." That is the ultimate keep you, may He lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace." I understand peace in this context to mean not the absence of international violence, or not only that, but a person's peace with himself, with his idea of how he should behave. It includes loving and being loved, and accepting and appreciating the universe and what man has created in it. give a general prescription for achieving golden days, but I can give two examples from my own experience to suggest what some of the ingredients in such escorted a girl or young woman (I couldn't tell which) across the street and seated her next to me. She was obviously blind, carrying a long white cane and keeping her eyes screwed shut. She could hear the buses coming up to the stop but didn't know which buses they were, so I began telling her their numbers. It Since she was so anxious about the coming of our bus, I asked her whether she University and the professor had warned the students not to come in late. a taxi, or taking her to her class in a taxi. It would not have cost much. But I was afraid that she would think I was trying to kidnap or molest her. our bus came and I helped her up the steps. She indicated that I should sit next to her and tell her when we came to her stop. At the stop I helped her down the steps, and the driver kept the door open for me to get back on the bus. But it was clear that once she was on the sidewalk she had no idea of where to go. I motioned to the bus driver to close the doors, took her by the hand, and led her along G Street to the university building she sought. Along the way she told me that she had just graduated from Smith College and was doing postgraduate work in international relations. When I left her at her building she thanked me, but I said that it was I who had to thank her, because she had given me the great feeling of being needed. That little incident made my day, and several days to giver. "Sow according to your charity, but reap according to your institutions does not make my day golden the way holding that young girl's hand other example of a golden day, I was out for a walk in the sunshine, and a stranger on the street complimented me on an article of mine that had been published in the morning paper. Returning home, a little tired but pleased that I had been able to do the walk, I lay down and turned on the radio, which just and knew that there were a few people whom I could tell of this feeling with confidence that they would understand and share my joy. That was a golden day, brought about by the beauty of nature and of art, the feeling of achievement extraordinary events. They can result from ordinary events happening to people who are receptive, appreciative, attuned to what is happening around them. A person's psychological and emotional stance, not external events, is what mainly determines his possibility of enjoying a golden day. three years ago I would not have experienced the golden days I have described here. I would have been too shy, or "buttoned down," to take that young girl's hand, and I would have been too absorbed with trivia to appreciate the things that made me so happy a few weeks ago. I suppose it is aging that has changed my attitude. To resume my economist's hat, scarcity confers value, and the realization that one's days are few increases one's appreciation of their value. But one doesn't have to be old to appreciate that. Even for the young place in our hearts, and we are delighted that you are planning to spend this weekend with us as we celebrate our love for you and one another. comfortable as possible, so there are a few things you should know about Lake fast. There were so many days when we thought we wouldn't make it, either psychologically or financially, so the fact that we are getting married after assigned on a first come, first served basis. Everyone else will be don't own your own tent, you will be able to lease one from the inn, but in that case, please bring your own mosquito netting, as many of the inn's tents people out, it's about inviting people in. In other words, we want to invite if you believe in the domestication of animals as "pets," that's a personal nondenominational sunset ceremony (optional, but we hope you'll come!) in front sobriety is something that is really important to us as a couple, so please you may want to consider embarking on a moderate program of weight training, The earlier departure time is for anyone desiring to scale the north face before the hand of Man came to destroy) on the side of the trail. RESPECT recitation in the oral response part of the ceremony we ask that you have virgins, teetotalers, and registered Democrats. Please do not take any of his directed at you. Don't let him get to you! If you find yourself trapped in a position and someone will come to your assistance as quickly as possible. hike in four miles. When you come to the quarry, ford it. On a clear day, inn and lake should be visible from far side; otherwise, follow compass heading with the Web for as long as there's been one to play with. (For the record, certain amount of motion would bring a lot more people online. They have. watching live feeds from cameras positioned in all sorts of strange places, including a satellite in outer space, a microscope, and the producer's computer art are not new. The work of art has been dissolving into reproducible old. There are a few things Web art can do that other kinds of art can't, however. It can enter the homes of people who might otherwise never have sought people logging on from any number of places at exactly the same time. It can be a place where artists try things out and people respond to them. Jenny she's been testing out different media ever since she put her oddball "Truisms" into bus stops in the 1970s. SLATE Gallery will host a new artist more or less every two weeks. At first, we won't be able to show you every unusual feature Web artists have at their disposal. But we'll be getting better at this as we go along, and whatever we can't do ourselves, we can link you to. (For example, essays about the artist or about the ideas behind the art. We hope you find it alone, many people recommended that I get a microwave oven. That, I was told, would make it easy for me to prepare a meal for myself, and save me a lot of is for my kitchen appliances, not for me. If I use the conventional oven, I am pizza in the conventional oven and only four minutes to do it in the microwave. The eight extra minutes that I spend waiting for the conventional oven to finish are too few for me to use outside the kitchen. If I use the conventional method, I am likely to spend eight more minutes in the kitchen than if I use the microwave. So, by using the microwave, I gain eight minutes outside the the value to me of those eight minutes? I suppose the conventional answer is to divide my annual earned income by the number of minutes I spend working and so arrive at the income I could gain by having another minute at my disposal. In my case this would be a difficult calculation. The time I spend "working" is not only the time I spend sitting at my word processor and writing these essays. It also includes all the time I spend musing about these essays, while in the shower, or on the bus, or trying to fall asleep, and I have no idea how much time that is in a year. Anyway, the eight minutes I don't spend in the kitchen will probably not be used to earn more income. It will probably be used have had to spend in the kitchen if I didn't have a microwave need not have an essay like this one or about something else. The basic fact is that at my advanced age, the best use of time is staying alive. Still, the time spent outside the kitchen is probably more valuable than the time spent in the benefit of the microwave is the excess of the value of the time spent outside the kitchen over the value of the time spent in the kitchen. If I bake two pizzas a week and "save" eight minutes per pizza, that adds up to an excess There is, for me at least, another benefit. That is the pleasure is independent of any service delivered; it is the pure enjoyment of the miracle of technology. I first observed this with television. It fascinated me, like it did many others of my generation, even though almost everything we saw on it was terrible. We were fascinated by the fact that it worked at all. To a large extent, the Internet is like that. We enjoy surfing the Net just because it is so amazing, not because what we learn on it is so valuable. There is some of the same satisfaction in watching a microwave at work. microwave, the cost of keeping it is much less. One of the basic lessons of economics is "Bygones are forever bygones." What I paid for it is a bygone. Now the cost of keeping it depends on what I could sell it for. The nuisance of trying to sell it would probably make that not worth my while. The best alternative would be to give it to some charitable organization, such as the Salvation Army. Suppose I give it to them and can take a charitable deduction plus the sacrifice of the good feeling of having performed a charitable act. complication of the cost of electricity for the microwave compared with the cost of gas for the oven. I live in an apartment building where most of these Nevertheless, despite all these imponderables, I do make a decision. I decide to keep and use the microwave. In the end, if you ask me why I bought a microwave, why I keep it and why I use it, I can't give a better answer than "I government life. Perhaps it is most like that in government. We cannot compare insist that economics has its value. There are cases, especially in business, directly compared. Even where that is not true, the differences between costs and benefits may be so large that fine calculations are unnecessary. Anyway, the habit of trying to compare costs and benefits is useful, if one does not insist on trying to apply it where it doesn't work. After all, it was an misunderstanding, the warning: Alcohol, when abused, is vicious, dangerous contraindicated medications, pregnant women, and those who have trouble and beyond, one drink a day helps prevent heart disease and makes you less likely to die prematurely. After one or (for men) two drinks, bad effects swamp effect of moderate drinking is not small, and it is not in dispute. medication) and, but for the rare social occasion, doesn't drink. He has read some news reports suggesting moderate alcohol use may yield benefits, but his doctor has never mentioned such benefits, and my father has never given a thought to changing his drinking habits. And, in the standard view of public health officialdom, that is as it should be: People should not be encouraged to drink, even in moderation, and alcohol should not be linked with better drinking is linked with better health. We don't know exactly why; some help prevent blood clotting. But we do know the effects: On average, if you're the association between smoking and lung cancer, I think this is the most epidemiologist. Research has shown heart benefits consistently since the 1970s increase chances of breast cancer, cirrhosis, accidents, and so on. Heart disease, however, is an enormous cause of death; improve those odds, and the Journal of Medicine reported the results of the biggest and probably best mortality study yet conducted, one that followed almost half a million people over nine years. It found that, after netting out all causes of death, moderate there are a lot of people like my father out there: uninformed or vaguely the Competitive Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey asking people whether they believed "that scientific evidence exists showing that moderate consumption of alcohol, approximately one or two drinks per day, may reduce the said they did, and a majority of those believed, wrongly, that the potential word out, but one of them, the alcohol industry, is effectively forbidden to do of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has never permitted ads or labels to carry any health claims, even mild ones. (For more on rejected health claims, click here.) restricts health claims even for innocuous foods such as orange juice and eggs, it's reasonable to decide that booze merchants are the wrong people to entrust with public education about drinking. That leaves only one other constituency for getting the word out: the public health community. Its approach, however, of epidemiology. "It's a sizable benefit in terms of prolonged survival," he said. Why not say so? "Messages about alcohol don't come out the way you say them when they're broadcast," he replied. "There's been a very long history in guidelines ("Sensible Drinking"), say that people who drink very little or not at all and are in an age group at high risk for heart disease should "consider benefits: "Current evidence suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals." They then go on to recite a litany of risks (for the text, click here). Similarly, drink, do so in moderation." It goes on to say heart disease is lower in moderate drinkers but then warns of other dangers and cautions against "guidelines to the general public" that encourage drinking (for the full text, click here). See for yourself, but I think the message most people would get from both sources is "Drinking isn't all bad, but eschew it what isn't known is whether encouraging moderate drinking will also encourage public health people understandably dread creating more drunks, more broken marriages, more crime, more car wrecks. "When somebody calls you up saying, 'You're putting out a message to people to drink, and my daughter just got killed last night because of some drunk,' that's the other side of the are looking for justification to drink more than they should." both sides of the equation. The question, then, is what would happen if the public health folks ran a campaign saying, for example, "Just One Drink" or surprising, given the public health community's usual eagerness to save lives, is that no one is trying to find out. It is simply assumed that too many people people do. But is it really so hard to understand that a glass a day may help save your life if you're of middle age or beyond, but that more than that is dangerous? Presumably an avoidable heart attack is equally tragic whether the cause is too much alcohol or too little. To continue today's policy of muttering and changing the subject verges perilously on saying not just that too much alcohol is bad for you but that ignorance is good for you. According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and therapeutic claims" in alcohol marketing "if such statement is untrue in any particular or tends to create a misleading impression." In practice, the says it "considers it extremely unlikely that such a balanced claim would fit on a normal alcoholic beverage label." The only health statement the bureau has footnotes. (You can read that report by clicking here.) obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in its lawsuit to have the current policy overturned, the statements that the bureau has barred include the following: "Several medical authorities say that a glass or two of wine enjoyed daily is not only a pleasant experience but can be beneficial to an adult's health." "Having reviewed modern research on the benefits of modest wine consumption, we believe that our wine, when enjoyed with wholesome food, will promote health and enhance the pleasure of life." wine labels that read "To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for suggests that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals. However, higher levels of alcohol intake raise the risk for high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, certain cancers, accidents, violence, suicides, birth defects, and overall mortality (deaths). Too much alcohol may cause cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and damage to the brain and heart. Heavy drinkers also are at risk of malnutrition because alcohol contains calories that may substitute for those in beverages, do so in moderation, with meals, and when consumption does not put is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two moderation. The incidence of heart disease in those who consume moderate amounts of alcohol (an average of one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day for women) is lower than in nondrinkers. However, with increased intake of alcohol, there are increased public health dangers, such as alcoholism, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, suicide, and accidents. In light of these and other risks, the AHA believes it is not advisable to issue guidelines to the general public that may lead some to increase their intake of alcohol or start drinking if they do not already do so. It is best to consult Fourteen years ago, I said in a review of one of his books: elements: a description of the terrible present state and future prospects of prescription for rescuing us. The description of our condition is grossly exaggerated. The theory of the causes of the alleged condition is inadequately supported. The prescription is, with some exceptions, unpersuasive. account, as an amiable man, a good politician, and a great preacher, who is nonetheless unprincipled, indecisive, and overwhelmed by the responsibilities that come with the presidency. He is the kind of person least qualified to be president and most likely to become one. There are plenty of people other than think that I have gone off my rocker when I say I enjoyed much of Locked in inadequate and unconvincing. The life part I find fascinating. The story in the included stronger unions, corporate responsibility, a higher minimum wage and, this policy adopted was largely defeated by the opposition of Wall Street, Big government. The main instrument they used for defeating him was a call for obeisance to a false god, Balancing the Budget. So our hero leaves the battlefield with his head bloody but only slightly bowed. its defeat is a tragic drama. If the policy was mistaken and would have been ineffective anyway, there is no drama, no tragedy, no hero, and no villains. In that case, his endless kvetching about training and the rest of it is a bore to the reader, as I suspect it sometimes was to the president. makes no effort to demonstrate the validity of his prescription. He could hardly do so in a book like this one. The issues are complicated and difficult. Job training is an example. That the federal government should support job has been spent on research to evaluate these programs, trying to measure their benefits and costs. My understanding of the conclusion of all this research is that for male workers, there was no net benefit and for female workers, very and convince the reader of it would require sophisticated analysis of a mass of data and would be an entirely different book from the collection of personal readers bypass all that, however, and remind themselves not to enter into like to be a Cabinet secretary. What does he do all day? What, if anything, goes on at a Cabinet meeting? How can the administration's economic officials, all presumably on the same team, meet for hours to talk about the budget without getting one step forward? How does one prepare for and behave at a receptions and dinners? How does it feel to address a meeting of hostile lobbyists, or to meet the press, or to appear on television with Jay Leno? And government. But I observed such life enough to say that his picture is administration.) He tells this story with a vividness that I did not expect of him, with insight, some irony, and touches of gallows humor. There are much effect on future elections or public policy. But that is not the important test of a book. This one can give readers pleasure and amusement, and also help them understand a little better the world we live in. I have learned, mainly from talking with taxi drivers, that everyone's life is interesting if you know enough about it. That is true of Cabinet secretaries as well as of taxi certainly not because he failed to get most of his policy proposals adopted. It the most exciting part of his whole life and could have been the happiest part of his professional one. But he got no pleasure from it. He was so determined the most fascinating and rewarding I could ever hope for." But in the preceding simplification, both the Republican Congress and the Democratic president have been enthusiastic about creating disparities among taxpayers of similar than wages. But now many in Congress are making a great cause of one particular differential: the one between married and unmarried couples. So strong is the stalled tobacco bill gained momentum in the Senate this week from the inclusion of a provision to give an income tax break to low and moderate income married comes from the fact that the standard deduction for a married couple is less than the standard deduction for two unmarried individuals--$1,400 less for they are married than if they are not. (Click if you're interested in another marriage penalty on the working poor that no one seems upset about.) Higher income couples typically itemize, so they are not affected by the standard deduction. But they face rate schedules that are kinds of calculations vastly overstate the marriage penalty. Totally Congress wants to reduce or eliminate this penalty, it must either do without the revenue or make up the difference in some other way. Since married couples revenue will place most of the burden right back on married couples. penalty" figures floating around the media and divide them by at least four logical to measure the marriage penalty by comparing what married couples pay now with what they'd pay if overall federal taxes were a lot lower. Saying that taxes would be lower if taxes were lower is true, but not edifying. The correct comparison is with a revised tax system that raises as much as current law. option of not making up the revenue and just passing a big tax cut for married couples. But that necessarily entails reducing government services from what they'd otherwise be, and the losses from that would probably be borne by marrieds and singles in roughly similar proportions to the benefits they'd get another example. Blind taxpayers are allowed a larger standard deduction than per sighted taxpayer. But if we thought of it as a "sight penalty" and calculated it as the added tax a person pays now for the privilege of tax code's treatment of married and single taxpayers was straightforward. Each member of a married couple was considered to enjoy exactly half its total income, and each was taxed on that income at the same rates as single people. two married people with the same total income (because more of the married favorable singles rate table was adopted in response to protests that the earns all the income is still better off married than never married, at least for tax purposes. A couple whose earnings are roughly equal is better off unmarried than married. A married couple that divorces with a separation agreement to split their combined incomes, including investment income, down the middle gets the best tax deal of all. Under a progressive tax system, the only way to eliminate the marriage penalty is to go back to relatively higher taxes on singles. However you fiddle with the rates, there will always be a perceived "penalty" on somebody. But calculated honestly, the penalty is a lot target. Every minute, thousands of Web pages are updated or abandoned. Messages conversations and digital images that streak across the Net vanish after collect and store all the disparate bits of the Internet. From offices in the the Internet Archive's powerful computer the Internet at high speeds. Consulting intelligent algorithms about what information to store and how often, the archive's computer copies data to tape cassettes on a Quantum it in a carousel, and replaces it with a blank one. The Internet may seem impossibly vast to users, but in fact it's quite finite. The entire World Wide Web is currently estimated to contain bytes), archiving the Internet is practically economical. Already, the the Internet once is only the beginning. As experienced Web surfers know, things change rapidly on the Net. The archive doesn't have the computer muscle to store the publicly available Internet every week, but even if it did, every minute, which means pages disappear faster than they can currently be squirreled away. Slate is updated daily. Shifting faster still are Web sites information these sites produce is specific to a user's experience, they can generate a literally infinite number of different pages. Finally, much of the phone conversations. To archive the Internet with absolute fidelity would require cloning not only every computer on the Internet, but also every person newspaper and connects them to a good search engine. And other sites like Internet Archive trumps these archives, of course, is in its sheer comprehensiveness. While it isn't a replica of the Internet, it's a start. And it's not useful just to historians. Suppose your Web browser allowed you to specify not only an address but also a date. Remember that headline you saw on have been unable to find since? The headline was posted for only a day, and you haven't had much luck using the site's search tool to locate the piece. But using the Internet Archive to turn back the hands of time will uncover it for gone. But an intelligent browser could catch the "no such site" error and look last year's campaign Web site with today's. These are just a few of the many valuable services that promise to keep the nonprofit Internet Archive richly Useful though it might be, the idea of archiving the documentation of our world threatens to box us into a corner. The recent Age" conference gathered experts from the computing, telecommunication, and archiving worlds to explore these issues. Corporate executives complained that because their archives are routinely subpoenaed by plaintiffs' attorneys, they have every incentive to shred their data instead of preserving them. Lawyers worried aloud about privacy and copyright concerns. Should you have the right to exclude your public page from the archive? (Consensus opinion: Yes.) Should we be saving usage logs, which detail every page a person sees? (Probably not.) Doesn't this whole thing violate current copyright laws left and right? (Almost certainly.) Should those laws be amended to allow such an archive? that it's a waste of time to store the Internet without providing a proper about the Web at our disposal will be as bad as not having enough. They add that finding things promptly on the Web with a search engine is hard enough, that using it as a historical research tool would be incredibly painful. They advocate an orderly weeding, assembling, and categorizing of digital records. whose "Save the Web" memo last year helped start the archive movement, counters that we don't know now what will be important later. Your cousin might grow up start saving today's Internet now, even if it is badly collected and organized, Internet Archive, and not introducing lots of new ones. without a report of some new virus or other security risk on the Internet. Internet is as safe as a walk in the park, or as dangerous as a walk alone at data being read by prying eyes? Intercepted by third parties? Altered or obliterated by crooks or pranksters? How concerned should you be, and what Data can be compromised while it resides on your computer or during transmission from one place to another. (To see why transmission is others from accessing it or, as a last resort, preventing them from reading it or tampering with it if they do succeed in accessing it. Encryption works on the principle of a lock and key. The lock is the encrypted data; the key is a number. The number can't be derived from the encrypted data, so the The author puts his data in a box, locks it, and sends it to an audience that situations such as a military command sending orders to its units, but not so gets an individual lock with two keys. One key locks it, the other key unlocks and Bill can know the contents. Unfortunately, there is currently no standard denoted by the size of the numeric key. The bigger the key, the harder it is to break the encryption (pick the lock). Since encryption inhibits the ability of (Secure Sockets Layer), an Internet standard for encrypting data, is built into instance, the government publishes a crop report that a commodity broker then passes on to a client. How can the client know that the broker hasn't altered the report? Digital signatures solve this problem. Mathematics can original data in any way results in a different signature. This signature is then encrypted with a private key. Using a public key, anyone can confirm that the signature matches the document. The document can't have changed because the signature is the same, and the signature can't be forged because only the creator has access to the private key that encrypted it. certain users. Ideally, users would carry around giant numeric keys to identify themselves, but computer marketers could never sell that solution. In the end, most systems identify users by passwords. Users enter their names and passwords. The name is public, but the password is private. The simplicity of the system is its power. While an encrypted document gives a code breaker something to analyze, an empty password prompt is simply empty. Unfortunately, computer users betray themselves. Anecdotal evidence shows that most passwords are birth dates of family members, maiden names, favorite sports words, but combinations of letters, numbers, and punctuation. The best password contains enough nonsense so that no one can guess it, but not so much nonsense that you can't remember it. And therein lies the other problem with passwords: People forget them. This is so common that, for every network, there is someone (the system administrator) who has the power to retrieve or change your password. The world's best password is useless if the system administrator's password is easy to guess, or if someone can get her drunk or blackmail her. But the alternative is frightening, which is why we don't encrypt our hard drives with the password as our key. If we lost the key, that would be the programs you've installed on your computer. Who hasn't accidentally told a computer to delete the wrong file or stood by helplessly while the operating claim to be one thing but are really another, such as a program that is supposed to be a calendar but secretly erases your hard drive or copies its contents somewhere else. Then there are the legitimate programs that have been are cleverly (if perversely) designed to replicate themselves whenever their host program is run. Once replicated, they might then do harm to your data, just like biological viruses can do harm to their hosts. perils to your data are programs like operating systems and browsers, which are supposed to protect you from harm. Like a brick wall, they resist any frontal attack. But like a brick wall, some of these programs have holes. The most (like letting in the dog) that can be exploited for nefarious ends (like letting in a trained monkey to steal your wallet). The recent Internet Explorer How can you be sure your programs are safe? Either obtain your programs from trustworthy sources, or ensure that the programs behave. models for an important shoot, you could hire from a reputable modeling agency that guaranteed its clients, or you could hire children off the street and also hire an authoritarian nanny to watch them every second. The agency can't really ensure their client's behavior, but you would know that it had done its very trusted to control the children, but her constant presence irritates the children and slows down the shoot. Either way, you're paying someone (the agency or the nanny). The best case of the agency is best (everyone behaves and is happy), but the worst case of the agency is worst overall (all the children go into hysterics at once). With the nanny, you know what to expect. Your shoot will never go as well as the best case of the agency, but then neither will it software, the "agency" is an independent, trusted body verifying that software comes from where it claims. A digital signature ensures it came straight from artificial constraints on their behavior. They allow for the highest possible performance and functionality, but also the highest potential for damage. If you download a control that has not been signed by a trusted agency, you're a special programming language available in both Internet Explorer and Navigator that restricts the behavior of its programs. Because the abilities of these programs are restricted, they can't harm your data. But because they are restricted, they are slower and can do less. For example, Java programs cannot safety, but rotten for functionality if you're trying to write a program to help people analyze their personal finances. Another Java advantage is that because its programs do less, they can run on almost any computer, no matter performance penalty of Java, but if you trust the manufacturer, digital performance, so a Java version that can run on almost any computer might be desirable. In fact, a hybrid approach may yield the best results: for example, concern over Internet security is somewhat overblown. There isn't a mob of data villains waiting on the other side of the wire to steal your money, read your number being stolen over the Internet. Sure, viruses do spread and data are occasionally lost, but the main reason you hear so much about security is that it's a great marketing tactic. "Don't buy their browser; ours is safer." Or, others compete to make sure their products are as secure as possible. So maybe are considered worse than paying sources. Media institutions that pay for The sources and their information are regarded as being highly unreliable. In the Flytrap scandal, those who have sold their stories or tried to include is not the whole list of people who've cashed in on private knowledge of million from Little, Brown and Co. for his forthcoming White House memoir. comes out, nobody will impugn his motives or question his reliability simply because he sold his story to the highest bidder. Nobody will call him a toward people who talk to the Star that parallels the "trailer trash" that the respectable media covering Flytrap have not been serving their readers it wasn't until this year that we learned his denial was a lie: During his "Still More Tawdry Tales," because she didn't tell this version of the story to unpaid, but the press raised doubts about her by reporting that she had approached a book publisher in the hope of turning the breast grab into a money grab. The New York Times and Time magazine reported this and changed her hairstyle.) Oddly, neither the Times nor Time oversight, or was it a recognition that applying the say and pay standards More tainted meat, disdained by the respectable media. revelation: "From Day One I always thought this was politically motivated and had politics written all over it; after five years, it is nice to have the truth catch up with the president's political opponents." The "truth"? What on don't endorse the practice of paying sources. And I certainly don't endorse the practice of giving money to witnesses in a criminal investigation (rich condemn the practice of paying journalists to tell their sources' stories. In fact, as long as sources can be persuaded to supply the information for free, there's more money for those of us who repackage it for public difficult duties of being president responsibly and respectably. I was not a whole tenure of office, when I was a member and then chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. On all these occasions he impressed me as a civil, serious, dedicated, judicious, and highly intelligent man. I believe that others who worked with him in a professional way had the same impression. Republican. He was about to assume the most powerful office in the world. I was genuine interest in what I had to say about the matters on which I was assumed to be well informed, and he was unreserved about expressing his own meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Policy, shortly after the had to say. He also made it clear that he did not expect his economic advisers to engage in political activity, although we might make speeches on economic policy to groups of economists and others interested in a professional way. I thought he showed courtesy, consideration, and a desire to learn. (Later, after been too political. If so, it was because I enjoyed being in the political with the president. He usually listened to the interchange quietly. When the order could be extracted from it and indicating what he thought were the main the limitations of economics. He understood that it had something to contribute and should be heard, but he also understood that economics is an uncertain science. There were no complaints or recriminations when the economic forecasts that it was a streetcar ride across the neighborhood. That realistic attitude recall him ever using an obscenity, unless you want to count the time he said not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in a while." But that was showed an appreciation of, and capacity for, good writing and wit. He had probably the best staff of writers of any president since the time when "You can't step in the same river twice." He immediately responded, "Yes, you options urged upon him by respected economists, mainly Democrats. The control system gave the administration extraordinary power over individual businesses. I do not believe there was any case in which this power was improperly professor, whom he had never met before he invited him to be secretary of labor, a man of extraordinary intelligence, management ability, and integrity. He quickly elevated him to director of the Office of Management and Budget and then secretary of the Treasury. There must have been few administrations that respected him. I am not inclined to judge him. I do not feel I have the wisdom and moral elevation to do that. Anyway, what would be the point? He is now that those who feel the need and ability to judge him should try to look beyond variety of activities, in addition to walking, that I observe taking place on the sidewalks in my neighborhood. These activities seem to have increased a lot more people walking around, or jogging, with earphones on. They were listening the smoking. There were always people smoking on the sidewalk, but now there are clusters of people around the entrance to every office building, standing, talking to each other, and smoking cigarettes. Then came the cell apparently talking to someone. Finally, to this has been added the proliferation of sidewalk drinking. I don't mean drinking in the sense of taking in alcoholic beverages. These people are drinking coffee, soft drinks, or bottled water. Water, water, everywhere, being carried if not being The smoking is easy to explain. Increasingly offices, even whole office buildings, ban smoking. So those who feel a great need to smoke go down to the sidewalk. What is harder for me to explain is the great number of women in these smoking groups. Do women have more of a need to smoke or less of a need to be in their offices, or are there just more women than men working in these buildings? Studies show that addiction to smoking is inversely related to income; low income people are more likely to smoke than high income people. Probably the women working in those buildings have lower incomes, on the explain the listening to music on the sidewalk, the talking on the telephone, the drinking of water? Of course, technology has a lot to do with it. Even in the case of water, the technology is important. If there weren't lightweight, unbreakable plastic bottles, there wouldn't be so much water drinking. have spread so far if they did not meet a demand. There must have been a strong desire to listen to music while walking or jogging on the sidewalk. Yet the reason for this desire is not clear. The people I see with their headphones on don't seem to be very happy about what they are hearing. Instead of listening to music, they could be looking at the other people on the sidewalk or mulling those people talking about on their cell phones? I have a cell phone that I take with me in my car, when I remember, in case I need roadside help. I have used it only a few times, to see if it was working. I have never walked along rich they are or, more recently, how poor they are. I suppose the cell phone is part of the information revolution that holds great promise for us, but no one has ever demonstrated any addition to productivity resulting from the to do with the cult of physical fitness. Physical fitness requires the intake of lots of fluids. But those fluids could be taken at home, from the kitchen faucet. Anyway, many of the people I observe do not look as if they were devoted to physical fitness. And still they hold on to their bottle. nursing bottle. They want to remain in, or return to, their infancy, when the nursing bottle was the cure for all discomfort and anxiety. The water bottle is a surrogate for the nursing bottle, which was a surrogate for Mommy. phone fits into the same story. It is the way of keeping contact with someone, anyone, who will reassure you that you are not alone. You may think you are checking on your portfolio, but deep down you are checking on your existence. I rarely see people using cell phones on the sidewalk when they are in the company of other people. It is being alone that they cannot stand. And for many people, being alone really means being without Mommy. We are raising a generation that had radio transmitters in its nurseries, keeping Mommy constantly informed of every movement of the baby in his crib. We will soon be walking around with transmitters in our lapels or pocketbooks, constantly connected via satellite with Mommy. And for those whose mothers are no longer available there will be constant contact with the Bureau of Mommy Surrogates in much like the lullabies that comforted them as infants. the warmth and comfort of infancy and find relief from the loneliness of to deal with this old feeling. There are probably worse ways. with my son, pretty young girls nudge each other and whisper, "It's him! It's him!" They don't mean me. My function in this street scene is to hold the girls' camera and take their picture with the Star. surely not the most objective observer of the Ben Stein phenomenon, but I am probably the best informed. So let me explore the question: How did my son, Ben, become a Star? It wasn't by being the world's most devoted son, making the which he does. It wasn't by being the world's most devoted father, spending recognizable way by millions of people. That means being in the movies or, much; what matters is having been seen. Even after my occasional appearances on whether they liked my performance or agreed with what I had to say. The the word "starlet" for such cases; it is reserved for something else.) What suggests, the show would not be the same without him. explaining the game and asking the questions. But he then becomes a contestant, competing with the more successful guests. There is a witty, sometimes rude, winners in other quiz shows are not taking the money away from any Stein, who is right there and expressing his torment at losing the money, economist might call the "opportunity cost" sense. That is, he did not put it up originally, but the more the guests win the less he has to keep.) still amazed that my little boy is up there on the screen. There has been very chorus of one of those doughboy musicals after World War I. The Steins are not two different characters on the show. In one character he is what I think of as he shouts; becomes excited; and goes through various gestures, like bowing, saluting, and rapping himself on the chest. I much prefer the former, but the audience seems to like it all, and that's show business. people often ask me. It would be hypocritical of me to deny that there is a certain amount of envy. Like almost everyone else, I like attention. He may be diverting attention from me, although those pretty, young girls on the street gain in attention, probably a net gain for me. People who never paid any attention to me as economic adviser to the president, or even as a columnist Star. And I get satisfaction from thinking that part of his theatrical success envy is a small thing, and I confess it only in a rather transparent effort to good writer, and an energetic worker for many good public causes. I am happy to think that his mother and I, if we did not make him what he is, did not prevent being able to let go. Stardom can be addictive. It can be so exhilarating that one needs ever greater amounts of it and can be induced to do silly or reckless things to get more of it. Stardom can also be very transitory, and losing it, after once having had it, can be terribly depressing. I don't think any of that will happen to Ben. He is too many other solid things, in addition to being a Star. But that is something the father of a Star worries about, when he isn't I like to taste the plums of many authors whose full puddings I cannot digest. that I am in the presence of genius when I read the following lines from The is governed." For a long time I thought that this was a complaint that the world is not governed with more wisdom. Recently I have come to think it means that not much wisdom is required to govern the world. setting down a few quotations (with explanations where necessary) that have resonated with me and are not included in that book. meet a madman who says that he is a fish and that we are all fishes, do you take off your clothes to show him that you do not have fins? am proud that I translated it from the French, which, in turn, was translated to do that, but since I encountered that quotation, I have resisted. ask: How will I know if he is a madman? The answer is: Don't worry, you'll know. And if you are in doubt, assume he is mad and leave the refutation to others. You have plenty to do in the world without having to worry about enough, aside from these questions: What qualifies as wasting time, and what should you do if you can't sleep? I recently encountered a somewhat different monster [time] is the most ordinary and legitimate occupation of each interesting that Knight should have used the word "waste," which is the gangland term for "kill." Perhaps the reconciliation here is that sleep is the in cynicism, but the second half of the quotation (about trying honesty once in a while) seems foreign to many politicians, among others. there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked fascinates me about this sentence is the word "unlovely." It is a candid declaration that feelings on this subject are "feelings," not matters of efficiency or justice but matters of taste, of aesthetics, of emotions. comfort when one is listening to politicians or editorialists describing the ruin that will follow if their pet policies are not adopted. those who think that if something cannot go on forever, steps must be taken to imagines that there is a liberal hiding under his bed. prediction of whether or not the capitalist order will survive is, in part, a Capitalism survived its crisis and went on to great successes. But the entry is a reminder that terms like "capitalism," "socialism," "liberalism," "conservatism," "welfare state," and "free market" have to be defined if they are to be used in intelligent discussion. The required definitions are missing blood in the glorious cause in which we are engaged; we are ready to shed the last drop in its defense. Nothing is above our courage, except only (with shame can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be when I am emptying the dishwasher or engaging in a similar activity. cannot write economics while sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Maybe that is why there have been so few distinguished French economists. I would be writing a novel, or perhaps poetry, or even a philosophical treatise. But I would longer have that fantasy. I do, however, eat from time to time at an outdoor Center. I don't try to write there. I can't write with la plume de ma computer. But that mechanism would destroy the romantic illusion. Instead, I I am not concentrating on the girls. I am concentrating on particularly at the women in those couples. They are not glamorous. There are sign of my age that I can't think of the name of a single living glamorous movie actress.) Some of them are pretty, but many would be considered plain. an opera, or a concert, one may assume that they are somewhat above average in cultural literacy. But in other respects one must assume that they are, like holding, she is not "average." She is the whole world to him. They may argue occasionally, or even frequently. He may have an eye for the cute intern in his office. But that is superficial. Fundamentally, she is the most valuable thing God said: 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help this basic woman so valuable to the man whose hand or arm she is holding as I First, she is a warm body in bed. I don't refer to their sexual activity. That is important but too varied for me to generalize about. I refer to something that is, if possible, even more primitive. It is human crying in its crib doesn't want conversation or a gold ring. He wants to be picked up, held, and patted. Adults need that physical contact also. They need to cuddle together for warmth and comfort in an indifferent or cold world. At least, they need to be able to do that. The plain woman and plain man I am think they have nothing left to say. But still they can talk to each other in ways that they cannot talk to anyone else. He can tell her of something good he has done, or something good that has happened to him, without fearing that she will think he is bragging. He can tell her of something bad that has happened without fearing that she will think he is complaining. He can tell her of the most trivial thing without fearing that she will think he is bothering her. He primary purpose of this conversation is not to convey any specific information. Its primary purpose is to say, "I am here and I know that you are here." Third, the woman serves the man's need to be needed. If no one needs you, what good are you, and what are you here for? Other true. In all such relationships you are replaceable at some price. But to this value to this man she is going to the theater with. He surely does not make a values her, to himself or to her. But he acts as if he knows it. from the point of view of the man. That is only natural for me. But I don't for a minute think that the relationship I have been trying to describe is do you know all this? You are only an economist, practitioner of the dismal musings about my life because so much is being written these days about who is felt so close to my roots. I could have been one of the pale, skinny young men actress. I felt that there was nothing in my own personality or character that would have prevented me from being just like them if I had been born in their stops. We did not have resting places in prolonged settlement in a transplanted no supportive family, at an early age he joined the United States Cavalry, community. I never had a bar mitzvah. Although I spent five years studying Episcopal chapel services eight times a week. Until I went to graduate school, husband, then a father and homeowner, gave me a more realistic sense of my own identity and responsibilities than I had when I lived in the fantasy world of academia. As a result of the pattern of residential segregation that became one of the first members of a newly formed synagogue in the suburban uncomfortable when I did, because I knew so little of what was going on. Learning of the Holocaust was a powerful reminder that I had an identity that, except for the accident of geography, would have brought founding of the state. This was a great pleasure and honor for me personally, but I also felt that I was doing something for my people by serving as a token in the same paragraph, I want to answer a question often asked of me. general that entitles him to anything less than my total loyalty. the country on a course of durable economic progress. The policy succeeded, and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to make that contribution to my say on the subject of my religion. I pray to God, but I do not feel that I am he is God of the whole universe, including the gentiles. I observe nine of the I ever meet one of my forebears, one of those pale, skinny yeshiva students been claimed, other sites chronicle the massacre with bloody "To accelerate their move toward the goal of establishing a constructive decided that they would refrain from targeting their strategic nuclear weapons site is a bit of a disappointment, being more obsessed with the school's propaganda on the subject, including a diatribe titled "A Look at this spring. The site links to his speeches and the petition that helped set sources are just one click away. The page also features a condensed history of its articles (and requires that you register) and hosts a discussion. Shanghai skims all the city's tourist sites, including the classical summary emphasizes that Shanghai (a k a the New York of of China's total annual industrial output. The Shanghai Daily gloats that "China is the second largest trade partner of the United States, whereas the US is only China's fourth largest partner." makes his unofficial call for the World Cup: Brazil. Another of the president's time for snacks, namely, some Shanghai specialties. Vegetarians take shelter, for the Lama's motives unmasked," takes the combative stance that has been wrapped unquestionably a trendy cause. Several international organizations lobby through their extensive Web sites. Which one you choose to visit depends on financial superstar is all about funky, colorful graphics, markedly different surprisingly fun Web site, which mingles facts and stats with blinking visuals. article, which reports that an important documentary by a airport is just beginning service, expect delays in loading (the Web site). But world like hunger." You may think that your grandmother made that up, but better when it is eaten in a place where you are accepted as a special person, special for something other than the color of your credit card. restaurant. My son thought the food was great; I thought it was only pretty good. He seemed disappointed that I did not share his appreciation of the food. A little later I realized what the problem was. The restaurant was a gathering business. My son was one of them. When he came into the restaurant, people slapped him on the back and said, "Great show, Ben!" And he slapped someone else on the back and said, "Great show, Tom!" (or whoever). This was his club, and that made the many other examples of this in my eating history. The most obvious is the White the administration or the guest of such a person. That is, eating there gave one a strong sense of special privilege. (When I was there we hadn't yet learned that access to the privileges of the White House could be sold for cash.) And this sense of belonging made the food taste great. But the cooks Objectively speaking, one could get better food at any of six restaurants within two blocks of the White House. But the judgment of the food in the White surroundings to get this delicious feeling of belonging. For some time after we the Cook. That referred to my college days. I had been the dishwasher at a fraternity house. The waiters were all members of the fraternity and ate the same meals in the same dining room as the other members. But I was not a member, so I ate in the kitchen with the other kitchen help who were not students and who were all "colored," as we used to say. We in the kitchen felt that we were getting the best of everything, better and fresher food than was served to the members upstairs. What it all was, I no longer remember, with one exception: For dessert I often had a quart brick of vanilla ice cream bathed in "home cooking." They were trying to play upon the memory of home cooking as having been very good cooking. But the odds were against your mother having been a very good cook. It was mainly the feeling of having been part of the family that made the food there seem so good in retrospect. restaurants exploit this feeling. They know that you will enjoy the food more was memorable. That was in a restaurant off the Champs lyses where I ordered to my general rule. There must be people with palates so fine that even eating it in a strange place, would recognize its merit. But, in general, my rule holds. If you are not hungry, eat where you belong! they say, the site is using Web technology to steal their content. Suddenly, the ease of linking from Web site to Web site, which makes the World Wide Web so useful, is generating lawsuits that cloud the right to link. of interconnected information, where readers jump from one document to another, helicopters are to the Chinook CH-47. But you get the idea. Bush disciple Ted creation "hypermedia" and dubbing these jumping points "hyperlinks." One early hypermedia was linking information across a global network, and that had to The Web's rapid acceptance owes much to the ease with which Web pages can be created. And the proliferation of the lawsuits owes much to the ease with which Web pages can be linked to one another. Creating links is easy because each Web page, and each image on the page, has a unique address on follow me as I build a Web site containing home page A and image B. sees that it refers to image B and loads that too, then displays the whole you are on a slow connection to the Internet, you can tell your browser to ignore the images. This speeds things up quite a bit (click to find out The offending page doesn't technically copy or distribute the image in question. It just points the user's browser to address B. Some lawyers think that this may constitute a "public display," similar to illegally publishing a copyrighted photograph in a newspaper, but this argument remains Interestingly, if the page simply provides a hyperlink to the image in question, the law becomes even murkier. Entertain, for a moment, this scenario: If we at Slate captured your voicemail recording and played it on our site without your permission, some lawyers would say that we had violated your copyright. But if we cited your telephone number instead, we wouldn't be further. The company is upset not because Sidewalk provided a hyperlink to relatively deep in Slate. To find your way here, you probably typed in Slate's way, the link to this story is a "deep" hyperlink, because it avoids our home on its own pages that hype various concerts and theatrical productions. This pages you must visit before you can buy a ticket. Returning to my voicemail analogy, it's as if I cited not only your telephone number, but also the code this may not be friendly, it doesn't seem like a violation of exchanged some entertaining technological volleys. Click for a brief account of page by citing that page's address. This technique is called "framing." I Slate's lawyer tells me this sort of framing doesn't violate anyone's copyright (phew!). It's called "fair use," and is comparable to the quotation of a short several news sites appears down the left side of the page. If you click, say, courts decide that such framing constitutes a "public display," or even that it about the budget, I have become bored with the subject, and have been looking for a more emotionally satisfying interest. It may seem bizarre, but I have bizarre because I cannot dance a step. One of my most anguished memories is of improve much with time, although I did find a more agreeable partner. long been fascinated by dance. In college I participated in an essay contest One of my first dates with the young woman who was to be my wife took us to with the budget and, indeed, with economic policy in general left a vacuum at the forefront of my consciousness, did ballet come in to fill it. I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert. I am writing only to indicate what pleasure the ballet, now readily available on videotape, has given this klutz, and to suggest that others like me might also get pleasure from it. have special appeal these days, because it is a relief from the verbal communication in which we are all drowning. It is like music in that respect. Music may have a more transcendental, spiritual quality. But ballet has more of scene, of form, and of movement; for many people, ballet offers more by It is the most popular ballet of all time and probably the easiest to versions are characterized by a complete fusion of the music and the dance. The music is simple, clear, tuneful, and rhythmic. It seems to compel the dance, as if the particular steps danced to each note and bar were inevitable and any (improbable) feeling that the music is so compelling that if I were on stage and heard it, I, too, would do that dance. Yet, as natural and inevitable as it seems, the dance is also absolutely incredible. It is unbelievable that anyone could do what those dancers are doing. That applies not only to the obviously spectacular leaps and spins, but also to the precise placement of the feet when up in the comment of a little old lady (why is it always a little old lady and never a big young man?) who, after seeing it, said: "So, he fell in love with a beautiful maiden trapped in the body of a swan. She can be freed only by he is seduced into betraying that promise by the beautiful, but not so nice, (at least the one I saw) was a vaudeville in which discrete, and stunning, dance performances are hung on the thread of the story. It was staged before a live audience that repeatedly broke into applause to which the stars responded with bows. That, of course, interrupted the story. It also took the stars out spurn the beautiful women of the court and go out hunting a mirage. spectacular parts being cut. There was no audience, no applause, no portrayed clearly in her facial expressions and arm movements the contrasting interest in ballet has opened my eyes to a newer style that I used to find unattractive and incomprehensible. It is less athletic and acrobatic than the older, more romantic ballets. What there is in the way of stylized leaps, spins, and balancing on the toes comes out as the natural expression of exceptionally graceful human beings and not as a demonstration of what some The main reaction to the older ballets is, "Wow! How can anyone do that?" The newer ballets do not elicit that response. At first sight they look easy, although further observation shows how precise and disciplined the movements are. The newer ballets aim for more universal and fundamental generated I cannot explain. But I can give two illustrations, both from ballets into the arms of his father, who wraps him in his prayer shawl, one gets a powerful sense of the goodness of man and God. The other example is story there, I don't get it. However, the dancing seems so free and spontaneous, and yet so precise and with such commitment between the partners, that one is left with a feeling of joy in life that I cannot associate with any is the way new and naive enthusiasts are. I also realize that ballet may not be is a loss of face in the move of the bank's home office, as well as a blow to people after inspecting their hands: If the loan applicant had callused hands there was no run on the bank in the wake of the news, so great was the shock definition of Old Money is someone whose checks clear the bank the first time, our bank!" And while it may not be an actual defalcation, it certainly is an appropriately named Mandarin Hotel, were carried out in utter secrecy. "Bank of city's history," Brown said. "It'll be a shock to our economy, an economic Examiner reporter called to tell him the deal was being announced then in who constructed the deal, is believed to be able to walk on water. The deal is colossal. The new institution, which might as to be the most vulnerable. Lifeboats have been constructed for the top dozen enough, involved transfers to and from that country. In the 1920s, he bought banks in New York to establish a beachhead, but he was beaten back, in a insistence that the new bank's headquarters are in perpetual motion, swirling around him, didn't satisfy many natives, who wondered why one of the deal's few accidental overcharges to the cities and state. It maintains it continues to review its handling of the bond issues, many of which it inherited when it the news, that it requires more public scrutiny to cut down a redwood than it that just as the press, unable to find ideological or philosophical concerns in public life, is obsessed instead with the puny private lives of the powerful, so also business, freed of the obligation to consider the public interest in continues to attract thousands of new residents, however, from the Valley. sheets, linens, and furniture now in the great granite temple on Grant Avenue that was once the headquarters of Security Pacific National Bank. mythology, they've been dropping their tunics, because that's what gods participants in the drama playing out at the White House are striking. wields the thunderbolt, which is useful both as a weapon and as a way of extracting himself from the sticky situations he often finds himself in. For all his power and brilliance, he has a few overwhelming character flaws. At "He is represented as falling in love with one woman after another and descending to all manner of tricks to hide his infidelity from his wife." Graves even reports that the god's mother, "foreseeing what trouble his lust would cause, forbade him to marry." But what young god ever listens to his as the millenniums marched on, she became subservient to him. Think of starting out heading health care reform and ending up supervising the Millennium of herself, "Great indeed are my achievements, and mighty my strength." So she constantly," mostly over his infidelities. "Though he would confide his secrets not find him in the sky, 'Unless I am mistaken,' she said, 'he is doing me some "Righteous Anger." Graves writes that she became the embodiment of "divine from him. To keep him at bay, she "constantly changed her shape," apparently her as the "evil goddess of Discord." She was hugely unpopular and always being an important wedding banquet, she threw into the hall a golden apple marked "For the Fairest." The scramble for possession of the apple was the event that tell lies, though I cannot promise always to tell the whole truth." "That would stars, his vast wings darkened the sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming if not individual presidents, has immortality. Eventually his power was surprisingly, fancies himself their leader. That's always a dangerous fancy. As cut to a commercial; when the show continued, she had changed out of her Designer," the piece has been excerpted on the Official but is markedly less tentative when expressing her outrage. "I am shocked," she every single thing I can in my power to make sure that his label never makes it become aware of the brouhaha only recently, the company has posted a memo on wanting to cross ethnic lines to appeal to everyone everywhere. mixing the preppy look with sports gear on the street. As he told Vanity source of this one remains elusive. Urban folk legends are invariably ascribed urban legend but distant enough to escape genuine scrutiny. Predictably, eradicating legends as it is at cultivating them, but in practice, denials are response clogged newsgroup indexes. Today, it has been swamped by even newer paying a premium for the label rather than the quality, minority consumers are bound to feel exploited. Dissociation with the producer of the offending up our mind whit all of this bullshit," claims one protester in a newsgroup. minority market has exposed him to a backlash (it's probably no accident that appeared on the Net. How many times can you kill the phoenix? It's a tough Don't you look nice! Why don't we go in here? [He motions to adjacent honest, I think the Secret Service guys think we're having an affair. [She intern! [He starts to line the balls up on the floor.] the idea again? I want to get it right for our records. [Pulls out notebook I was finishing this Big Mac and some of the sauce fell off and went plop right imagine the applications this kind of thing could have. That's why we've got to that department. It's better to work on this when she's out of town. She can himself, with putter in one hand and hamburger in the other.] embarrassing. Let's keep it just between us. If anyone ever presses you about all these visits, just tell them we were having sex. [He laughs.] No one stain.] I feel terrible. It's my fault. Let me get it cleaned for you. local library to look for a book. Hoping for a librarian to guide you, you are confronted instead by a bewildering array of entrepreneurs, each offering to find what you're looking for. But none has cataloged the whole library, each has cataloged a different part of it, each uses a different system, and none is terribly satisfactory. That is the situation on the Internet today. power of the Internet in several ways. First, a library offers more valuable library. But the kind of stuff people are actually willing to pay for is sadly are only available offline, or online for a fee. You can read the Wall Street Journal free at your library, but you have to pay to read it When a new book gets published, a single library will do the work to abstract and catalog it, then share that work with all the others. This effort Computer Library Center) is assisted by standards for cataloging schemes that help guarantee that a book can be found the same way in different to walk into a library and get a list of every book that contains the word "poker" organized by subject, title, and author. We're just happy to look up "poker" in the (online?) card catalog and find the books that are actually about poker. And typically we'd be just as happy not to find the references to Of the many Internet search services, Yahoo! comes the closest to this at each site and assign it an abstract and one or more categories. This is easy for people to understand, but it's not comprehensive. Even very diverse sites seldom appear in more than a few categories. For instance, a search for Slate categories. Yet Slate runs a movie review every week and has published many this comprehensive, the humans cataloging the materials cannot possibly keep up with the ever changing nature of the Web. To stay current, they would have to read every page of every site every day. To solve this problem, most other search services use computers instead of humans to do their cataloging. Their machines scan every Web page they can find by a process known as crawling (see see a link to our home page. But the problem is that our home page includes few of roofing materials or pool tables is likely to. That's the limitation of a system based on text indexing. It doesn't really know what a page is about, just what words appear on it. Using a little artificial intelligence, the computer tries to decide which pages are more "about" a given word than others, site. Try the "slate" search by clicking here. By the way, as you try out these searches, you may see an advertisement for Slate. That means we bought the rights to the word "slate." Whenever someone searches for it, our ad shows up. On the Web you can artificial intelligence to help you refine your searches. Try searching for "slate" by clicking here. If you find a page that you like you can click on "more like this." Excite will return a list of pages which "look like" the page you clicked on. That means that similar words appear on the pages with similar frequency. Sometimes this works, more often it returns pages that seem impressively unrelated. For instance, this search for pages like the Slate parody Stale yields not only Slate (a good guess) but also the Steel Lunch Boxes Web page (not a good guess, but weirder approach to this idea of refining searches. Search for Slate by clicking here. Adding or subtracting words from your search criteria subtracting "roofing" would probably increase your chances of finding our home "slate" in their index and see that it often occurs on the same page as "roof," so they suggest this as a possible refinement of the search. But since these suggestions are generated by computer, they can be very weird. (To see this in The best solutions for searching will probably result from refinements was generated by a human, for instance, it might be more helpful. If the producers of every site cataloged it themselves, then Yahoo! wouldn't have a hard time keeping up with them. Of course, everyone would have to agree like Yahoo! probably wouldn't be necessary. So don't be surprised if the status libraries, and rural health care providers purchase Internet service. The program, which will help pay for Internet access and internal data wiring at the educational and health facilities, resurrects a two century old debate in the political economy: What services should the federal government the rubric of "universal service," the feds already require business and urban states mandate phone discounts for the poor and make up the difference by boosting other users' bills. In the name of universal service, the federal power for upcountry customers. And since its inception, the government has subsidized postal service to rural addresses at the expense of urban maintain these services are so essential to modern civilization that it would be unconscionable to allow the market to price them beyond the reach of the less affluent. In that spirit, the government currently believes the merits of universal telephone and postal service aside, there are several live and learn quite handsomely without access to the Internet. the poorer rural communities that have applied for the subsidy lack the high speed phone lines that make the Internet worthwhile, keeping them Internet fast rural lines are available, schools and libraries can scarcely afford textbooks and periodicals, let alone new computers and training for Web the new subsidy, technology is moving so fast that the old regulatory federal government is serious about making Internet access affordable to schools and libraries, it should disconnect this program. where there are no high speed Internet lines, schools might be willing to of consumers is too small for them to make money. For these communities, the local libraries don't have. And if they did have it, they'd spend it on periodicals, new books, or capital improvements. As previously mentioned, the cut his monopoly deal. Instead, the cost of computer gear is falling growing at an exponential rate. (Click for a graph that illustrates the growth illustrates the money and technology woes of rural institutions. The three technological innovation. The first round of telecommunications deregulation in that have revolutionized telephone service. Do we really want to ghettoize rural Internet service as a welfare operation when the best telecommunications didn't require subsidies to serve rural customers. Why should the Internet? companies now provide Internet access via satellites that boast download access and libraries are. One company has even experimented with transmitting data deregulation have proved anything, it is that subsidies are easier to avoid than they are to repeal. Also, subsidies reallocate resources that would be better spent elsewhere. As bandwidth continues to grow exponentially and the price of hardware continues to fall, rural schools, institutions, businesses, numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political friends. At around the time of her husband's death (The President has claimed looked), you don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible better for credibility but you aren't neutral. Neutral makes you look like you're on the other team since you are a political appointee) that they think you're a team player, after all, you are a political appointee. You believe that they think you're on the other side because you you'll take the high road and do what's in your best interest. Therefore, you want to provide an affidavit laying out all Your deposition should include enough information to satisfy their questioning. P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another many years I was there as a career person and as a political appointee. At around the time of her husband's death, she came to me after she allegedly a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody. involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place. evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination. Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would worth his salt (though it might be notes based on a lawyer's advice). In addition, lawyers know better than to give a witness written instructions about the preparation of false testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the "the oval" is now referred to as the "oval office." Also, this sentence essentially repeats the tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. clumsily phrased: The identity of the "other side" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing York Times and others, quoting "lawyers connected to the case," report would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word "huge," which construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend How fast will your computer keyboard accept the characters you type? How fast does water flow out of your kitchen faucet? The answers depend on quickly. The speed at which your brain absorbs words (words per minute), your computer accepts keystrokes (characters per second), or your faucet squirts water (gallons per minute) can be described in terms of bandwidth. at which computers can send and receive information is expressed in bandwidth, the smallest unit of data, either a zero or a one. For example, eight bits developers like me lust for more bandwidth, and so do civilians like you who Bandwidth! the masses cry. But ever since mankind first took serious notice seen dramatic increases in performance on almost every other computer front. A bandwidth guys been taking long lunches, or what? Actually, they've been doing The phone companies haven't piped this wonderful bandwidth into most homes yet because they're fairly happy with the quaint technology of connections have enough bandwidth to transmit voices, but not enough for tells you why the bandwidth of conventional telephone connections will never five times faster than a regular modem, which means you can download the page in about six seconds. The service isn't cheap. people, that means a T1 connection at work or school. (In New York City, articles in about half a second. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on how many users are connected to your T1 line, how busy the Internet or 's Web site might be at the moment, and how clogged your But you want faster. Some phone companies are offering test Electronics. The first question you should ask yourself is, "Are you man enough satellites to personal dishes and then into users' computers. Please allow two faster than the Internet connects to itself. Many Web sites connect to the bits per second. Because your Internet connection is no faster than your If Gilder's Law is correct, bandwidth will soon be cheaper hard disk, your memory, and your bandwidth --resulting in no net young software developers will be swamped by a bandwidth tsunami and that we're is now mounting a broad campaign to counter its critics, both in real court and in the court of public opinion. The piece claims that the company has hired a those without. With all the emphasis employers have been putting on meeting the employees have had to pick up the slack. The working assumption at many companies, the paper says, is "if you don't have children, you don't have a life and are available to stay late and take the business trips from hell." There's a suggestion in the piece for how a childless employee can create a little more equity: put a photograph of a pretend toddler on your desk, and take a day off once in a while because they have a cold. specializing in child abuse have signed a letter criticizing the use of medical prosecution's evidence "overwhelmingly supported" a finding that there was a violent shaking episode involving the baby when he was in the sole custody of knows why: "Because he really, really wants to be First Lady." quoted as saying "sufficient warnings have been given." And the paper reports support of the trade bill as "extraordinary." The paper reports that the vote count was looking so unfavorable that the president cut short his trip to the phones to lobby members of Congress. The LAT says the bill is hanging defeat with the Lee nomination. Lee has, says the paper, faced no serious questions about his credentials, but in the past week has become a lightening rod for congressional Republicans and conservative activists, who have taken to portraying him as an unabashed advocate for race preferences congress members and their spouses have been copping lately. These pieces have long been a newspaper staple, but the news is that, in the Post 's words, "In an era when congressional gift rules have all but eliminated the free lunch, the free round of golf and the free night on the town, congressional the part of some vendors is so strong that any such agreement will be put off That Bush library opening was the occasion for four presidents, six first know, is required again today." The piece also mentions that Bush has endorsed Very few journalists these days have been in the military, so they have a library opening provides an example. The Times refers to the exhibit of "a World War II Avenger fighter plane" like the one Bush was shot down in. But in contempt because the company is allegedly flouting the recently issued court order requiring it to market its Web browser Internet Explorer separately from lead is that the New York City Council has passed the nation's toughest guarantees the cars would qualify as acceptable under the pollution standards officials saying that the automakers' proposals offer an acceptable compromise, with Communist countries that don't permit free emigration. This will unblock a explained how it is that the president can alter a country's trade status like Jersey to allow gay partners to jointly adopt children on the same basis as thirteen million children nationwide are being raised by gay parents, while two directly cracking down on unauthorized distribution in cyberspace of copyrighted material even if there is no profit sought. The piece suggests that the new law addresses the case of a large corporate interest being abused by a corporation that's doing the stealing? Like a magazine's putting an from a freelance writer? Or if its online archives contained plagiarized cartoon show were taken to hospitals, many suffering from seizures and unconsciousness, after viewing a sequence in the show containing strobe effects. Jay Leno explained last night why network executives are so concerned: plans to issue a philanthropy stamp next year that will depict a bee Today leads with a look at the new federal and state tax breaks coming shut down his legal defense fund. The New York Times the real story, which the Post buries deep and leaves out of the headline, is that they are actively looking for a better way to raise the cash. angle, mentioning it in the headline and in the story lead. Yesterday, the getting taxpayers to pay for research into what is essentially his private that, it is hoped, will avoid the restrictions that kept the old trust from third party. (Isn't it amazing how this triangulation can be discussed so The Wall Street Journal passes along word that millionaires this country by libertarians chafing against proposed Internet regulation: China's imposition today of stiff fines and prison sentences for distribution or consumption via the Net of "harmful information," defined as that which "defames government agencies," "impedes public order," or "damages state interests." Both providers and consumers can be held in violation. Son." The woman, despite having been convicted of smothering her daughter awarded custody by a judge citing the need of a child for his biological mother and his belief that because the boy is black, he'd be better off with his black mother than with the white woman who filed papers to adopt him. Dear Reader, this is why judicial recall procedures were invented. of vice. She notes that there now seems to be much more emphasis on say, being seen drinking martinis and smoking cigars than in actually enjoying the activities themselves. "Once," she notes, "martinis and cigars were stylish "The only reason they light up a cigar is because their mouths are too small to headline writers missed a big chance: "Smoke Bar Bars Bar Smoke." patient access to treatment, better health care information flow and improved largest and most controversial foray into health care since the defeat of his reform plan three years ago. And as with that plan, the paper notes, there will be much discussion about the cost of these new rights. And uncomplicated boosterism suffuses most of the coverage. The LAT reports the event under the headline "Oh, Baby!" and displays waits until the thirteenth paragraph of its story to mention the fertility drugs involved and that such waits more than twenty paragraphs before raising an eyebrow, with this contrarian quote from an expert on multiple births: "People were not meant to ethical, medical and economic problems inherent in the births. The father's quote: "God gave us those kids and he wants us to raise them," makes everybody's story. Well no, it was actually science and a huge amount of charity: The coverage mentions that forty specialists attended the births and that the part of the bill not paid by insurance will be covered by a fund set trivialities as a missing dinner fork. More seriously, under his command, the dome of the school's Rotunda, fifty feet above the ground. The prankster was never identified. Until now. The culprit, fearing unmasking by classmates, of teacher and parent groups dedicated to saving the public schools. And the on Times keyboards, right next to F5: "Teamster Officials quoted in the piece, are the most dangerous trend in drug smuggling in the weapons siphoned from the Soviet inventory. Recent undercover operations have sophisticated weapons, people who have [already] laundered billions of teachers, principals, parents, school boards, experts and community leaders, which is dedicated to improving public school education. The Alliance includes goals include establishing tougher course work and making schools safer. The "The Outlook" column that now with the diminution of the tobacco lobby, in to the fate of the concept of free television time for political ads. Once a front page with the news that, as a direct result of testimony revealing agency managers. The paper also reports that the hearings have given the flat tax a contribution totals than they were supposed to. The principal problem was, it would call potential donors and talk about everything but money. That told the paper: "The president loves to schmooze on the phone." despite its public show of confidence: the White House fears economic weakness that the palaces be opened. While the story is prominent and above the fold at forces have been cut by a third and are less well trained. A new Gulf conflict might prove far more costly, and our forces would be too small to fight a Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid, and largely victims of corporate downsizing, these "near elderly" are old enough to contract expensive, new psychiatric disorder: Some bodybuilders develop a kind of reverse anorexia, thinking themselves puny no matter how much they bulk up, and obsessing over gaining and maintaining weight. (Now if we could just get fashion models hooked nor in its headline: "Household Incomes Rise Again." A finding that is emphasized in the story is also stated in the subhead: "Disparity Between The increasingly sad straits of those at or near the bottom of the economy is not the only report topic that the Post chooses to downplay. The paper doesn't broach the findings about ethnic income disparities until the fact: "Family structure remains a critical predictor of who will live in closing of the gender gap but downplay the widening of the marriage gap? The LAT income piece focuses on the worsening numbers for the poor, headline and claims the reports reveal "the lowest black poverty rate in the news about the diminishing gender gap. These variances show that no matter how quantitative a story, it inevitably has subjective elements. The income story Mothers Nearly Six Times More Likely than Married Mothers to be Poor." initiative on race and reconciliation offhandedly mentions that it has a staff The Wall Street Journal front page presents a new candidate for the Chutzpah Hall of Fame. It seems that while working as a consultant helping that his grandfather's probity was legendary and that he in fact was the man lawyers wrote back, saying, "The film was a work of fiction and it was rights of either your father or your family." The studio position is quite Court decision that children may sue their mothers' employers for injuries they received in the womb from unsafe working conditions experienced by their moms. the same rather tempestuous atmosphere as did his press conference with Bill about forced abortions, harvesting of human organs from executed prisoners, political and religious prisoners to be released. Sources tell the Post he saw "no defense of dictatorship" of the sort the Soviets used to make. Yet applies when the Times decides to lead with an international finance Court is consistent, shouldn't we also expect to see decisions allowing kids to sue their moms for prenatal smoking, drinking, and drugging? leads with the news that some insurance companies are skirting the new law important step towards universal coverage: namely, the bill says insurance companies have to extend coverage to those they had tended to cut off, but it doesn't say the companies can't gouge them for it. (This is a feature Congress could have easily added. The Times points out New York state has had extra to individuals purchasing policies under the new law, and the paper on the front page and another six inside. The lead story credits name twenty Post staffers. The paper describes the event as one of the largest gatherings ever in the nation's capital and one of the biggest religious gatherings in the nation's history, and says the crowd numbered "perhaps a reflecting the composition of the organization." One woman comments to the Keepers were. "I guess," she adds, "that makes it even more scary." The LAT says the crowd appeared to number "well over half a million people" and that it "contained large numbers of blacks and other minorities, as The Post reports that when four women belonging to the Lesbian Avengers, which has protested PK rallies across the country, took off their According to the piece, "the man behind the firm handshake and barely gray hair is steadily, surely ebbing away" and "appears to recognize few people other New York Times lead with the conviction of the chief planner and the clear intent to keep such guns out of the country. The paper says that the White House is "livid" about this and that one White House official was so ordered the jury sequestered while it completes the case's penalty phase. The detail: the jurors, after voting to convict in the case, sent the judge a note inquiring about dangers to them, and the judge then ordered the jurors' names front. Despite recently instituting later deadlines, the Times couldn't get the the region will stay put and are plenty worried about China's military that its inquiry was over because there was no crime, the volume was pretty oral contraceptive for men might work. Of course, a question remains for women that no amount of science will ever overcome: "Can you believe the guy when he Today switches its lead to the corruption charges leveled at story says the White House is concerned, but thinks it unlikely, that Japan's story claims the public is pressuring Japan to rescue its ailing banks. The financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund, and possibly from estimation of the global AIDS epidemic. Experts had "grossly underestimated" Today's Papers will take off tomorrow in observance of the holiday. This column gives thanks for each and every one of its readers, and wishes each and okay to grant any sort of legal immunity to tobacco companies in return for the irenic remarks at a press conference, and described them as the most believes it is the sole world power, trying to "impose its will on the whole responded by saying the administration is ready to sit down and talk to the Times could have elaborated on this to help the reader try to decide domestic social restrictions, especially on women and intellectuals, does so in of Mayors, which found that the demand for emergency food and housing increased downturn by putting off opening up their financial and currency markets and by overhauling the country's central bank. Plus, interest rates will probably homely examples suggesting what's wrong with the emissions credit system approach. Turning pollution into a commodity to be bought and sold, he argues, removes the moral stigma that is properly associated with it. A fine means handicapped parking near his work site and willingly paid the fine as a simple United States represent the highest number in any one year since capital those favoring the death penalty has nearly doubled in the past thirty years. Members Among Heaviest College Drinkers, Study Shows." champions of a new colorblind standard for government." The three papers 209-style laws in many states. And the LAT mentions that the House Judiciary Committee will consider a federal version later this week. The three also point out that although this Court decision was probably the watershed, there might well be other eventual appeals based on cases where plaintiffs treatment" but does not define it. So look for cases that, for example, claim The paper reports that Senate Republican leaders recently organized split within the Republican constituency concerning this issue: Many doctors, convinced that managed care companies have cut into their autonomy and their the jobs that have gotten them off welfare. The piece makes the point that getting off welfare by working is even harder for the rural poor, who often have no access to public transportation, or, surprisingly, phones. AIDS, released yesterday. The piece opens with the report's observation that, live in places where the AIDS epidemic has barely begun, and even mildly successful prevention programs could have enormous benefits." By contrast, the the material that the Post leads with, about the relative scarcity of the disease for about half the world. As if to back up its more alarmist take, evidence it had collected of China's attempts to influence domestic a political figure's organization screws up and the press reports how angry coffee videos, and yesterday's report about how somebody high up in the White the breakthrough triple therapies for AIDS indicate that the regimen doesn't should be continued even when patients are completely asymptomatic. This column is sentencing itself to the Department of Corrections for yesterday's lead should not have spoken of the dominance of the day's news by metropolitan press run didn't either, the story did make it into the latter politics has bogged down because the money trail has gone cold. And the lead is that after four years of relative price stability brought about by the spread of managed care, the cost of health insurance is about to go up political system and to seek "common ground despite differences," and that his country and the United States "share the responsibility for preserving world written replies to them. (There was also eventually some informal discussion as applied to politics in that democracy and human rights are relative concepts, the Post is apparently worried that you might not get his reference to the theory's creator without the provision of his first name, which it adds to thousands of female military veterans for the dedication of a new memorial Justice for being obtuse in the face of this evidence and urges the Senate to step up its investigative efforts to fill the void because "a widespread, criminal conspiracy to violate Federal election laws stares the nation in the coming out next week in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning college president salaries. It turns out that recently retired Northeastern these salaries are effectively even higher because most college presidents have percent greater than the previous record, which was set yesterday. One investor faith in the strength and soundness of the economy, and the Labor Department issued a report about worker wages that indicates inflation remains under Ultimately, say the papers, it had to do with the decision of investors to calls "a sweeping reaffirmation of their love affair with stocks," and the describes as "Main Street [riding] in yesterday to rescue Wall Street." Artists, the studio responsible for "Red Corner," which depicts an oppressive entertainment value." The piece also has the marketing guy for "Seven Years in like carbon dioxide, assigning various countries different output reductions to system for industrialized nations but will spend a year deciding how it will year the issue of whether and how the world's poorer nations would participate, says the industrial nations are required to reduce their emissions of the six The reporters' work was no doubt made difficult by the same rigors faced by delegates, who kept working even though the interpreters went home and, says The papers convey the overall impression that environmental groups are Question: are there any other kinds of residents? But give the LAT credit for making the most straightforward observation about why some reform is Nature reveals today that scientists have achieved a primitive form of not to find an outraged quote or two here from airline lobbyists. No White House story these days is complete without a quote from Dick Morris, who rarely misses a chance to bite the hand that no longer feeds him. weighs in with: "I think the phenomenon of unconditional loyalty is probably and briefcases. When the owner of one store said he couldn't charge the House because she wasn't told in a timely manner about the coffee videos. The piece, says she has just completed "one of the most humiliating weeks in her need now: not just another investigation, but an investigation of an story is also an illustration of how in general papers use photos with news since they are listening to a speech, but the posture looks chilly. And that's interest rate "sent shivers around the world." But none of the other majors The LAT front covers what it calls the unexpected departure of its recently named publisher of the paper, as "a truly remarkable man and editor." newsroom his way, and generally speaking he's been allowed to do that. Mark the middle of the system. He's blowing up what we have.'" Another LAT veteran lot of dopes who have let the business deteriorate." personal secretary and the two men who served as his personal aides during his or personally solicited money. That coincides with my own knowledge of Today leads with the news that a special civilian commission appointed forces (active and reserve) will be inoculated against the deadly biological training approach "is resulting in less discipline, less unit cohesion and more implement the panel's recommendations without congressional approval. (The program will consist of a series of six shots to start with and then annual received the initial dosage only.) Completion of the program will take six The anthrax stories all mention the official Pentagon explanation that such toxin is considered a rising terrorist threat. Yet none of them breathe a word about the idea of inoculating the civilian population as well. "President Bypasses Congress, Appoints Lee On Acting Basis," while the in comparably sized cities where gambling is not legal. In case you're distracted this week by deep worries about who the lead Last week's Time reported that after a long day on the road, Al Gore sidled up to some reporters traveling with him on his plane and in the course of the conversation allowed as to how in college, he was friends with novelist (and denied it to Gore in a phone call). The author claims that he got some character traits for the male lead from Gore, but others from Gore's roommate lead from Tipper. Gore responded by saying he was misquoted, and a Gore spokesperson said the conversation was off the record anyway (which reporters not stiffness, is [Gore's] real character problem." Stay tuned for more some play to the new stricter rules for disability aid to children (a story the handling of the coffee tapes. "Nothing has been closed, and nobody has been businessmen having coffee with the president in the Oval Office who, it is now that cost will be the decisive issue in those votes. Senate conservatives, led too high. The French, not to be outdone, intend to pay nothing extra. The warming meetings and to the political debates they are provoking, and today's next century the Earth's average temperature probably will rise by two to six between the environmentalists and the economists, the question that President less the cause of any political ferment. If the economy is good, people will pay extra for gas, and what the Journal tends to downplay is that almost all the environmental controls implemented thus far have proven to be good for picture on the front, the story inside, while the metro edition dispenses with demographic of this country, how it is that the papers could show less interest Today leads with the Treasury Department's announcement that in the Times leads with the House's refusal to allow the Census Bureau to use avoid the perception that it is too protective of the agency. Another possible the Wall Street Journal "Tax Report." On its front, the LAT has only a tiny box "reefer" pointing to the story deep inside. trade accords is in trouble in Congress and it's his fault because he hasn't brought along enough Democrats, many of whom are opposed to new trade bills that don't include stiff labor and environmental provisions. Administration officials tell the paper they see the Republican comments mostly as a The LAT census lead says that the House's vote against allowing sampling techniques in the census might ensure an inaccurate count and cost explain the Republican animus against sampling. The reason is the fear that, for the purposes of reapportionment and federal revenue distribution, the techniques will help Democrats artificially inflate the numbers of traditionally Democratic minorities and city dwellers, who are hard to reach by the apology was "an expression of remorse more complete, uncompromising and anguished than anything previously pronounced by the church." A good example of using reporting to break through the generalities of a administrators trying to decide which children should lose their disability children with various developmental and emotional problems must be denied the uncontrollability alienated not just him, but also most other leading elective office before and got the nod mostly on the strength of her New without company health insurance. The administration claims the expansion will of Medicare in a quarter century, and notes that an enthusiastic supporter, the until recently everybody thought there was a budget deficit too. (This is a form of argument you can bet you will now hear again and again, in all sorts of When everybody does the same story you get to compare headlines. The capable of "piquant clarity." But in these pieces, examples do not abound. The The Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" notes that although the Alternative Minimum Tax was originally designed to ensure that most raised several hundred thousand dollars towards his goal of opening a childless couples. His announced goal is to produce such a pregnancy within a and LAT stress that many serious skiing accidents occur in the late to spur much talk of mandatory ski helmet laws, and look for the same sort of libertarian resistance that has marked motorcycle helmet laws.) of official Army studies revealing widespread sexual harassment in the service Today leads with the Senate's passage of a national educational testing the best picture they had or were the editors trying to "say" something with it? And although these papers and the LAT all communicate the same basic confiscations, home demolitions, settlement building, confiscation of IDs and headlines differ in what they emphasize. The LAT runs its story under sexual misconduct in the ranks found that it was very widespread and that the service leadership was to blame. Also, investigators concluded that most female troops were unwilling to report instances of sexual misconduct out of a female troops polled reported that they had experienced 'unwanted sexual had been sexually harassed in the last year." These are good examples of a such claims say about the Army because he or she doesn't know the corresponding numbers for the same claims in other lines of work. And the papers fail here The Post treats this as purely a story about workplace gender bias. observes that the problems unearthed are "evidence of a larger breakdown of their commanders and don't feel confident about following them into combat, a series of investigative pieces on campaign fund raising. This morning's effort Safety Administration "advises its staff not to comment on inquiries about editorial praising the judge's action, under the headline "Justice Restored." The LAT looks out of touch playing the story below the fold, below demeanor yesterday. In general the discussion of the legalities is informative, but there could have been a bit more in the coverage about the nature of the "malice" that the judge found crucially missing. In the relevant legal sense, it's not ill will, nor even necessarily an intention to do harm, and it doesn't have to be expressed or a conscious state of mind. It's weaker: it's doing something in disregard of the fact that it's likely to be harmful. The upshot is that the absence of malice in the case is less obvious than ordinary the paper reports that many on Capitol Hill are saying that it marks the stockholders. But the papers don't effectively explain why they think this is "redefine competition in the telecommunications industry," but never really explains how this would be so. And some explanation is required, because to the uninitiated, mergers mean less competition, not more. inside a hollow piece of wood, so that when the wood were to be grabbed or picked up, the bolts in the trigger would come out. The device was deployed on an alumnus of the school and the director of admissions. The alum complained unfortunately many of them (on quick judgment) seem to be the 'kike' type." And summons a simple fact that suggests how much times have changed: the current ultimately concluded there were too many unresolved legal questions to do so. The Supreme Court turned down an appeal of a lower court's dismissal of a will probably be concluded before the original law can take effect. issue and hence are the province of the individual states. poll about a likely ballot measure that would virtually eliminate bilingual preference of landslide proportions doesn't vary much no matter the race, income level or age group of the respondents. And here's the big news: Latino voters polled favored the initiative by an even greater margin than whites. Though fascinating, the story does have a defect common to much press poll known, a lot of readers never tread) does the LAT reveal how large the policy of requiring magazines where it advertised to give it advance notice and reports that, after mounting criticism from magazine editors and publishers, their lives. Their findings: the amount of medical care received varies tremendously around the country and is apparently more a function of what's available than of what's needed. For instance, even though there is no evidence of major regional health or mortality differences, on the East Coast, people are more than two times as likely to die in a hospital as people are on the West Coast. The upshot: patient preference about final care still isn't heeded much, and much government medical spending on the elderly is unnecessary. many years, felt at loose ends and were anxious to get back in the game. And in who had been monitoring this woman based on spotty information from East German intelligence files, intercepted the letter and forged a reply inviting her to traps were set for the two men. The story contains at least one suggestion that the couple had a deep need to get caught: they named their kids after the stories, which could have run today or a month from today. At the New York Times the Republicans are hurting the federal judiciary by systematically blocking the fact that polls show voters are becoming less responsive to mere tax cuts. with a piece on the failure of the field's largest company, the Educational public. The company, says the paper, prefers to sweep its dirt under the rug to protect its dominant share of the testing business instead of spending the money to tighten security. The story details widespread cheating on the exams it administers as part of the citizenship process. And as first reported in the Times recently, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have busted a on the top front of the LAT of him performing yesterday for the today's Post "Ombudsman" column examines that policy, primarily by surveying the spectrum of views held by various senior editors. But a lot is The "Ombudsman" column says the policy is to not name "a person accusing another of a sex crime." (These are not the same thing: a person accusing in that story within mere column inches, by identifying the second woman who testified in the case. It can be pointed out now that the revised policy has used during the Post 's coverage of his wife's trial for sexually maiming further combinations of banks, brokerages and insurance companies. In setting out the basics, both papers tend towards breathlessness. This deal, says the Wall St. guru as saying the merged company has "all the ingredients to be broached over duck and oysters beside the pool at the Four Seasons Hotel. Leave the resultant dwindling number of competitors in the brokerage field will lead The LAT gives a lot of its top front to taxpayers' testimony at a large photo of one witness and thumbnails of others, all under the headline, "Taxpayer Horror Stories." The paper calls the hearings "unprecedented" and includes details from witness accounts of being hounded by overzealous and for the poor set up by his dead mother. The LAT says the apology offered for more taxes. She testified that she commonly finds herself going after to wonder why she is there. (She doesn't mention noticing any oysters.) employees with video cameras, and the agents themselves were wearing wires that are now suing the feds and the network for violating the couple's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. okay legally, and concluded that Gore did not know that some of the money he through with the issue, saying that her decision "does not mean that a person Today and the others emphasize the hot, hot Republican reaction. Both lead editorial to laud him, saying, "It was a momentous act of duty to lob Gore hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The Wall Street Journal 's "Tax Report" contains at least a partial explanation for why individual taxpayers feel more beleaguered than ever. They're paying a lot more of the country's total tax bill than they used that four white men, including at least one law enforcement official, abducted and raped her and left her smeared with excrement. According to the story, originally made them, the national edition of the Times doesn't cover to the good news included going out for pizza (wonder if he called his order in). And the mayoral candidate and then in New Jersey with the Democratic gubernatorial spending all those future federal budget surpluses. The Times front has that congressional Democrats and Republicans and the White House are all on the focus on disseminating as much information as possible to taxpayers via phone has resulted in serious breaches of confidentiality. A team of the agency's auditors operated a sting this year that established that callers could easily obtain income data on other taxpayers using only name, address and Social planes and nuke equipment, and looked good here and back home), the Times plays catch up, now likewise seeing the remark as significant. bigger changes back there than could ever be arrived at via summitry. In the past decade, the Journal reports, China has sent a quarter of a million back "impressions of an open society, a thriving market economy, the rule of makers now say it will be difficult if not impossible to avoid doubling the is brought under control, which could mean anywhere from a three- to experts warn, however, that business conducted over the telephone is generally less secure than by mail." For this, we needed an outside expert? as "Redux." The request came because of new findings from doctors that indicated use of the substances was correlated with serious abnormalities in the valve problems. The agency also recommended that dieters stop using any of the drugs they have and contact their doctors. The paper reports that the drugs are taking each one. The Post quotes an obesity expert expressing the worry that these developments will hinder the general development and marketing indicative of Weld's ulterior pursuit of some other greater political makes both in its news story and in an editorial. The paper quotes Dick Morris as saying that he thought Weld had successfully used the attempt to become the The Post floats the view that the dispute was on balance a plus for mothers, known as "stork parking." And it's not just a voluntary trend. The There's also an emerging national backlash. The paper notes that some reject the suggestion that pregnancy is a disability, while others wonder why parents with children should receive a special benefit the elderly do not. "How about special parking zones for golfers who need to lug heavy golf bags to the access, and in fact, some doctors advise them to park far away from stores, for become very big at many companies. Maybe a little too big. One company wrote an goes with a new national database designed to catch deadbeat parents. The LAT lead describes how Republican leaders are intensifying their that, "It seems to me there's politics being played all the way around." The LAT goes front page with the results of a survey it did of administered "vast database" of all new hires in jobs nationwide that is child support. That's because states will be able to use the directory to locate deadbeat parents and dun them, typically by getting court orders that force their employers to deduct the owed child support from paychecks. The Times does however quote a privacy expert who expressed concern that "private detectives will find a friend in the police department or a child welfare office to give them access to information" from the new database. hearings on the agency. The inquiry will look into whether the agency is overzealous in its use of liens and levies, and tends to pick on small "mom and about a new breakthrough in computer chip technology to be announced today by smaller, faster, and more powerful computer chips. This development, the papers manufacturing division, which has already grown quite a bit in recent years. of the new management measures include software programs that allow managers to track which Web sites employees are visiting during work, and the provision of became so incensed earlier this year when he caught members of his staff playing PC games in the office that he has introduced an amendment to a pending bill that would require federal agencies to remove any games installed on their computers and prohibit the purchase of new computers that have games almost half. New York, the paper reports, now has a lower burglary rate than what's going on. Theories bandied about by the various experts he quotes prison sentences and greater community involvement with law enforcement. headline to this article shouldn't have been "Property Crimes Steadily Decline, then the question is, "Why does a newspaper pick the one over the other?" depiction of "warped images" that promote drug use. Addressing the movie and more importantly, tell our children the truth. Show them that drug use is really a death sentence." The "Industry" will no doubt raise all the usual ago? In most films nowadays, drug use is practically a convention for showing that a character is seedy or at least going to seed. Things aren't looking up interesting that the president, who knows movies quite well, doesn't give any controversy arose, bought dozens of these documents, forking over a total of some experts have discredited the papers, others continue to insist on their first installment on the controversies surrounding cosmetic gene therapy. discussed them for the first time. The piece raises doubts about the basic keeping his fragile coalition together by doling out funds to conservative threatened to quit several times before, without doing so. If Levy does quit, before repaying debts. But several small foreign banks, with less to gain from accounting measures from the country, which traditionally cooks its books and 170-pound man needs four drinks in one hour on an empty stomach.) trifecta occurs only once every eleven years. This writer once saw three commit suicide in his cell the night before. (Presumably they could rule out a court continues to ponder the issue of his legal representation. But none of the accounts mention whether the jury is sequestered yet. If not, then the jury's been exposed to the suicide attempt, the controversy about his competency, as well as to the news that the government turned down his offer to plead guilty in return for having his life spared. Won't all this tend to urged that he spend it all in solitary confinement, without phone privileges. so confined, but leaves the reader wondering who they are and what they did. three murders from jail. The Times makes it clear that the judge can only recommend sentence conditions, which ultimately are determined by prison faction" on the jury leaning towards the death penalty. of criminal activity linked to drug and alcohol abuse. But the Post doesn't address a crucial distinction: how much of the criminal activity is violation of the drug laws and how much is something else. (A lot of the former might be grist for legalization. A lot of the latter might be grist for the Times reports that "alcohol, more than any illegal drug, was found to be would, if accepted, deliver him from the death penalty. The Times reports that by the end of the weekend, the new plea deal had been rejected. The story doesn't reveal until its eleventh paragraph that the new round of journalists defend this suppression practice on the grounds that such sourcing issues are only of interest to other journalists, and not the general reader. Well, if this were a good argument, then newspapers shouldn't use bylines either (general readers hardly ever notice them), or at least should put them training effort will include millions of dollars in grants to fund educational professions. The campaign's goal, says the paper, is to remove the "nerd" stigma from the computer profession. (This is probably cheaper than actually his last name, states that he's gay. Apparently, when Navy investigators called The Wall Street Journal 's main "Politics and Policy" piece points to an emerging health care issue: given the increasing degree to which already passed a law eliminating that protection, and that the bill's architects are being consulted by politicians elsewhere. Readers inclined to think of prostitution as a victimless crime are passports and work them until they are arrested and deported. Complainers have been known to be thrown out of buildings or beheaded. slave trade," which brings with it an unnecessary implication that slavery is a special insult to white women. Far better to go with "sex slave trade." on the wall when these pieces get assigned? Who calls whom? And why? Times lead with the continuing furor over the White House coffee What's driving the White House videos story forward is the news (first saying the omission was "an honest overlooking of materials." And, says is she merely Reform and hence could have lifted the receiver if she'd been cats. Question: If, as we're told, these films were shot by the military office in charge of archiving such White House events, wouldn't those names be recorded somewhere? And if so, isn't not making them available along with the departs somewhat from the pattern of recent espionage cases. For one thing, the acted out of ideological rather than material motives. For another, one of the Case." Both will get plenty of attention in the days ahead. foreign lobbyists and investors. Today's story focuses on a memo written to Brown by a party aide pitching the trip, which contains such tidbits as that The Wall Street Journal reports that attorneys general from prevent personal computer manufacturers from shipping new machines loaded with Internet browser. State law officials have become emboldened in the matter, the Journal says, by the recent 40-state tobacco settlement. back some of the millions it still owes from years of military sponsorship, and Lest anyone lose sight of what this is all about, the LAT states that divisions, if not whole cities." (Note to editors: when you refer to a bank that calls it home." The bathos of this sentence and the placement of the reminder of the penchant the Times has for overplaying money. fundamentalist terrorist group has claimed credit for the atrocity, saying that it was undertaken to seize hostages to trade for the cleric imprisoned in the in "Buy Nothing Day" has been rejected by the major broadcast networks (it has such an event is "in opposition to the current economic policy in the United brother and mother entering the courthouse, at the Post and the two The Post says the budget announcement marks the shift from the Berlin Wall." After all, all the dailies observe, the federal budget was last everybody has it. As the Times observes, this is a pretty dramatic shift from just this past weekend when administration officials were discouraging administration wanted to preserve the momentum that comes with a big The Post totes up the political causes, but says the development arose "mostly because of six years of relentless economic growth." order of business for any surplus is balancing the budget, not cutting taxes or attorneys, apparently referring to his desire to jettison them because they The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column gives some insight into the concept of going postal. Postal workers, it explains, can't strike and so their grievances accumulate unresolved in much greater numbers than in other lines of work. The Journal quotes a government report stating that the biz. Among its products will be a lightweight clamshell baseball glove, with plastic and wire instead of laces. (The company is considering lining the glove with leather, because right now, "it smells like glue.") Entrenched baseball containing a microchip that enables it to calculate the speed at which House is, in the LAT 's words, "fuming," about that former Bush staffer) who assigned the photographers says that if the president didn't want them there, "the Secret Service could have made it happen." In short, the White House faces a dilemma: either it is being less than straight about whether the pictures were staged or the Secret Service suffered a major It remained vague on how much territory to cede, and when to cede it. The fund education and filtering devices to help parents keep kids safe from Web "uncertain." Sales figures are not overwhelming, but analysts think shoppers wedding, after repeated demands from the White House. (This column assures you A party official is quoted as saying that such open primaries are like "letting and engaging in various laundering schemes to funnel money from his union's ruling is a major blow to organized labor's recent resurgence, and runs a companion piece elaborating this point. Oddly, the main piece doesn't mention to loosen the current constraints on what he can buy with his oil proceeds if militants, who have for five years been trying to overthrow the moderate suggesting that there were at least ten gunmen and that several might have victims. Presumably, that's the reason the story isn't everybody's lead? Is promoting any agenda more daring than a wine list." of the world's online population. The company handles its phone traffic with scheduled for breast reduction ("Today's Papers" missed that one, being too reporters to the story. They come back with interviews about the impending largest single capital investment ever, in the form of a new computer chip health plan, including hundreds of thousands who reported denials or delays in getting treatment, which often made their medical conditions worse. blueprint for research into disease and urban violence. public spending, open its market up to more foreign goods and investors and put growth constraints on its conglomerate industries. All of which, says the The Wall Street Journal "Business Bulletin" reports that University Microfilms, long the nation's main repository for doctoral dissertations, has now made them available on the Web. Which means, says the million. A little perspective on that sum: it could pay the salaries of every agreement, no to this one because it doesn't include steep enough penalties on cigarette makers for failing to meet targets for reducing teen smoking, and propose a bill with these features. Instead, aides say, he will wait for bills sinusitis, and pneumonia are twice as common as they were a year ago. And the paper points to the most likely cause of the trend with its citation of a new often prescribe antibiotics for colds and bronchitis caused by viruses even though antibiotics are ineffective against viruses. The story is also on the antibiotics [was] prescribed for conditions that they don't even help." Could teach government officials how to avoid, override, and even take advantage of that bureaucrats should strongly consider spending "taxpayer money" to Report," "as many financial advisers apparently aren't aware that the new tax questions with answers from a recent medical ethics exam given to interns and residents. A sample: "You receive regular surgical referrals from a colleague who is fellowship trained in nonsurgical sports medicine. He suggests that he should receive some reimbursement for these procedures. Which of the following you might tell a colleague that a patient has a right to expect that a doctor will send him to the best surgeon, and that the doctor's decision will not be based on whether he has a financial stake in the referral, is not even an ratification of a comprehensive nuclear test ban. The New York Times look at them that might lead to an independent counsel. in the world to sign the treaty a year ago, and says his position sets the stage for a confrontation with congressional Republicans. Additionally, the United Nations, and supported a special international court to prosecute crimes one is the fear that the United States cannot maintain its nuclear deterrent research program will adequately maintain the nation's nuke stockpile. The countries believed to have some sort of nuclear capability would have to approve it first. It's amazing to live in a world where that number doesn't Gore "believed we were acting within the letter of the law" when raising funds earlier this year. One main reason for the softening, says the paper, is that finds an infraction did occur, the issue may well shift to the question of explanatory quote from him, but juxtaposes this with an interview with Sen. national tobacco settlement, concluding that the cigarette makers could reap A hearty "No Duh!" goes out to the LAT for its headline over today's installment of the paper's series on political fund raising: "Where Big Donors themselves paid stiff fines for violating state and federal election laws. semen in her underwear. One thing that is not mentioned, however, is the Today 's top story is that a presidential commission is warning that the nation's public and private computer systems are gravely vulnerable to collecting information about all computer security breaches and creating a White House office to coordinate all the government's computer security with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons security. tapes mandated the appointment of an outside counsel and repeats that the failure to turn over the tapes in a more timely manner was a "simple mistake, not deliberate defiance." The president also says that Republicans are using be returned because they proved questionable. Meanwhile says the Times officials involved state that they had no reason to believe that the purported increases in productivity enable companies to absorb cost increases they would employment leads to higher wages, which leads to higher prices. for the team." The leading causes of worker reticence seem to be fear of getting the flu from the shots and fear of needles. years, actually increase. Look for this study to be used by tobacco manufacturers in an attempt to whittle the cost of any state or national tobacco deal, even though it merely illustrates the truism that dying of old age is the most expensive way to go. After all, issuing handguns to all How have recent meat health scares affected the restaurant business? Well, Today leads with Jimmy Carter going public with his thoughts on the lead is that the top Republican tax writer in the House will introduce to put forward a legislative evergreen suddenly considered to have a good shot at passage: a plan to shift the burden of proof in tax disputes from the administration and many tax experts on the ground that adopting it would clog more aggressive. The paper points out that the number of people likely to be appear often arbitrary and highly vulnerable to politics." The paper says the reports that New York State inmates are able to get home addresses of parties connected to crimes they were convicted of, as well as crime scene photos of victims via the state Freedom of Information Act. Civil liberties groups, says example given of the kinds of cases the revision would apply to, and it speaks reporters and editors most naturally think of: "...cases where the taxpayer and elsewhere. The New York Times leads with the guilty pleas entered by three Teamsters officials in connection with a scheme to launder goes with the record surpluses accumulating in state coffers. showed up without a lawyer and smiled and laughed throughout the day, his brand of it was enthusiastically received by the powers that be, including the black, primarily because the economy's surge has boosted tax revenues and reports that in general, the states are reacting conservatively, plowing most of the found money into tax cuts, schools, and contingency funds. The LAT front page gives an early picture of a stratagem sure to become popular among advocates of affirmative action in college admissions. The administrators from all nine of its campuses, warns that continued use of the selective campuses. But the committee has a solution: eliminate the SAT as a piece for Playboy called "Stacked Like Me" describing her recent A question for Post copy editors: Shouldn't that be "Three"? noncompliance. (The metro edition of the Times leads with a proposed this detail in their pieces, which they run inside. Moreover, both these papers would talk of his near sinking, which he did at his Senate confirmation documents quote one presidential assistant observing that the Federal Election Commission would not be able to finish its investigation of foreign The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reports on the advent of Web sites that offer employees a chance to vent about their troubles posts anecdotes sent in by readers about their bosses' antics and features a satirical advice column. Another offers tips on how to relax before job interviews (have a Bill Archer to the effect that expanding Medicare coverage to include younger In what is no doubt the payoff for concerted auto industry press lobbying, for when the car companies howl the next time the federal government tries to on the front in the national edition, inside in the metro edition), the point is made that the case's story of "a brother fighting to save the life of the brother he turned in" is "a tale of literary dimensions." But the Times apparently doesn't feel such an observation can stand without expert testimony, Because it couldn't find them. How many alumni spooks didn't get to come in meal be given to a homeless person. Request denied. They're both clad only in bathing suits, alone on the beach. He clutches her in to him with his hand on the small of her back while she's looking up at a blurry branch being parted. And nary a toe being sucked anywhere. And do you think the Secret Service would let a paparazzo get even telephoto close to the First Couple in seclusion on their vacation? No, this is a genre that hasn't be an intimate family moment purely for gain, in this case, political. Inflicting privacy is as unseemly as invading privacy. With the Di saga receding ever so slightly, news diversity makes a small airlines put into place last week. But by last night, only two airlines still mistakenly rolled back United Airline's increase in all markets and when says his call for fourth grade reading tests and eighth grade math tests should other Republicans in the House and Senate see it as a federal intrusion into that the tests would be voluntary and ultimately under the control of local school authorities. He has also said the tests could be designed by a bipartisan board. Some critics have said the problem is that the tests divert million to develop. (To me, that's the only part that's hard to swallow. Why didn't include a full apology from the president. The paper cites as a factor show that she's about more than money or does it show that she's about more family offered to restore the title of Her Royal Highness posthumously (and was The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reports, "In a development. This will be the first time that oil and gas drilling will be the applause he received during his speech. The "applause" and "laughter" goes without saying that naturally we may have shortcomings and even make some mistakes in our work, however we've been working on a constant basis to improve isn't it more likely that the crowd was applauding the power of raucous prisoners when he used the phrase, why couldn't it be taken to be no more than other words merely a simulated apology, not a real one? After all, within the professor moderating all this "was almost apologetic" when repeating Isn't it amazing that they all waited to retire before telling us how they first time ever the validity of polygraph evidence. The argument isn't coming from prosecutors, but from a defendant who claims a polygraph result would have cleared him and hence the current prohibition violates his right to present new revenue streams by staging, for an admissions fee, demonstrations of various farm activities, from branding cattle to making cane syrup. The charge and wants to do something about it. The International Nanny Association, Times and the national edition of the New York Times companies that had been inserted with little fanfare into the budget bill under tobacco state senators against, and no senator spoke in favor of the eight to nine weeks, with the extra time being used for lessons on values and Tougher screening of drill sergeants will also be implemented. dividing all solicited funds into hard (targeted to specific campaigns, highly regulated) and soft (not for specific campaigns, not highly regulated) money accounts regardless of the nature of the actual solicitation. These papers all calls he made from the White House were at least in part to raise hard money, apparently raised in those calls exceeded legal limits for hard money. A further sign of fallout from the fundraising morass comes with the White House clearances were initially prevented from entering the grounds the halls are full of people of the opposite gender in various stages of students to accommodate their personal values, and we would happily explore you ask for a clearer example of backwards campus values than that? The showdown congressional vote today on fast track trade authority is the have "hit a brick wall in their attempts to muster the votes." The Times his comment earlier this week suggesting that they were putting personal needs before the country's (and the paper implies that eventual presidential candidate Al Gore may ultimately pay the price for all this bad feeling). And yet much of the reportage describes how, at the eleventh hour, the White House is striving to meet those needs. Votes are being promised to the administration in return for pledges of campaign funds, and for assurances about vintners' and tobacco farmers' and peanut and citrus growers' rights, and those of cattle ranchers too. The Post notes a signal drawback of all this attention "I should have held out for $1billion for wetlands restoration," says one such today, the story fits a recent LAT trend that's worth noting: on it's apparently still plenty lurid without them. Details the papers mention in years, and that he seems to be responding with a real austerity pledge, including the postponement of several major government investments in the failing health would impair his ability to lead his country out of the current crisis, neither of today's Times stories emphasize this. World War II in special camps, sometimes behind barbed wire and at gunpoint. even forced to pay special taxes to defray the expenses of their The Wall Street Journal quotes fresh government research The study cites the 90's explosive growth of managed care as a major factor. But, the Journal points out, with spending in the public health care sector (primarily Medicare and Medicaid) coming under firmer budgetary control, Health Crisis has just endorsed the practice. (But prefers tracking via a code pension system, Social Security, be used to draw down the deficit. Figured this nations are suddenly unable to go through with planned weapons purchases. Just but most of the other deals will probably only be delayed. Here's an idea: why not require these countries to swear off such weapons deals as a condition of Soviet Union. While information is comparatively fresh and large numbers of the survivors are still around, why not institute similar reparations to be paid by in the national tobacco deal, a story that the other papers handled yesterday on the basis of White House background leaks about what he would say. At the was "greeted with jubilation and relief by humanitarian groups and countries that support the ban" because they feared the United States would dilute the will probably become international law within two years. conventional weapon." But the Post is mistaken, and give credit to the The overall mining coverage is fairly steeped in the arcana of international treaties and weapons systems, giving it a rather remote flavor. One wonders if almost alone against the world in clinging to a maiming technology. The other story that gets most everybody's attention is the testimony described being called a "Girl Scout" when she resisted what she saw as The Wall Street Journal brings word today of an Internet posted defamatory and inaccurate statements about the company in various online chat groups in an attempt to drive down the stock price. Internet has come to the various countries of the Middle East. One of the goes with the latest target of Senate and Justice Department investigators: the last election as part of an elaborate plan to spend more money than federal election law appeared to allow on a massive advertising campaign that the strategy was directed not independently by the state parties but centrally by the campaign. Dick Morris is among those quoted in support: "It was a The story also notes that the Republican Party used similar strategies during the last election, and that the Justice Department is reviewing its paragraph. And it's not mentioned at all in either the story's headline or The Times story has this juicy detail indicating that there were some worries inside the campaign about the scheme's propriety: During the campaign, media consultants' contract that would have forced the consultants to pay any fines levied if the plan was found to be illegal. The consultants refused. how the deal might lead to more competition in local phone service. With negotiations on an international global warming treaty coming up in strongest ally because Al Gore, normally in that position, is distracted by his weather forecasters to the White House for briefings on climate change in hopes of rallying public support for new measures restricting greenhouse gases. Mike administration officials on behalf of large party donors. Perhaps the most recall, but which documents revealed for the first time yesterday strongly international financier "with a questionable reputation" (says the meeting with or access to any government official or agency in connection with a donation, or ever imply that such contact or access can be arranged, or ever contact an administration official on behalf of a donor for any reason." When response was: "I am not a staff member of the Democratic National Committee. I was a chair of the Democratic National Committee, and there is a clear Both of the Times run strong companion pieces to their hearing use by the party that, in violation of election laws, it then spent directly on creating jobs and increasing pay due to increased export sales. In fact, the Journal accompanies the piece with a chart showing that only three than half its fair price (his roommate, another officer, told the landlord they statements that Japan must stabilize its economy to keep the whole region out collapse. The emotional display, especially rare in Japan, underscored the to Japan: He suggests deregulation, avoiding cheap exports as a solution, and of Ford, General Motors, Xerox, and Kraft. (No comment is offered on why women who had recently staked his political reputation on reducing his country's and that of the region by dithering. The Times also notes that the nation, for instance, it is expected to be able to provide, for example, the against the dollar, a move that has, the paper reports, resulted in a marked still has not met his international obligations regarding weapons inspection. conference seemed "designed to counter a spate of recent news stories that have goes on to say it was "the longest presidential news conference in the Times dwells quite a bit on aides' various unsuccessful attempts to get The Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" notes that a bill passing the House recently would grant accountants and other tax advisers the privilege of client confidentiality that is currently only enjoyed in tax matters by lawyers. The change would give new privacy to taxpayers who can afford to pay a tax preparer but not hire a lawyer. The Journal also notes that some accountants see the new provision as a powerful marketing tool. opts for doing an interview with the woman who claims to be the real model for Jenny. Continuing the theme of getting to the bottom of books published in recall, wrote "The Sensuous Woman." Maybe it'll be Tipper. appeared to be bucking up his countrymen to continue the impasse. to persuade enough House Democrats to vote his way and so the emphasis has turned towards the hunt for Republican votes. The LAT says Republican You have to sympathize a bit with the situation the dailies are in with and convinced that a dramatic vote was imminent, the papers started hitching their leads to the vote in the middle of last week, which meant that as the vote kept not materializing, the papers were stuck in bed with a story that wouldn't undress and was ugly anyway. But the majors didn't help themselves out stories? The whole episode is a good example of the press's weakness for covering the how of a political story over the why or the what. to cut thousands of administrative jobs at the Pentagon under pressure from Congress to reduce the Pentagon's own bureaucracy before ordering cuts in proposed base closings, which the Times notes, require congressional approval and may not get it. And shades of the balanced budget deal, none of federal affirmative action program for female highway contractors (the only one that cites women as a disadvantaged class) and the backlash it has created among black, male construction workers, who feel squeezed out of the trade by highway funds has tripled. But meanwhile, the share going to blacks, the program's original beneficiaries, plummeted. "The white women--95% of them are there's a move afoot in Congress to end the program, which the paper reports, might well mean a lot of female subcontractors will go bankrupt. Used Unaudited Funds For Gift, Parties and Travel." That's F6 on Post lead with new prospects for a campaign finance reform bill. unregulated "soft money" donations, and which has been languishing in the the presidential power to keep Congress in session, and points out that it quoting his warning: "The president has lots of conferences, legislation, was one of several moves "trying to deflect attention from the president's own Republicans who want to cut off spending for the mission, and to calm the fears that such moves help insulate the companies from currency fluctuations, exempt expand their security alliance, resulting in Japan's highest military profile time since the Pacific war, engage in military activities outside its borders who called for an independent police monitoring board to investigate police wrongdoing and "create an atmosphere where the crooked cop fears the honest The Times emphasizes the larger geopolitical context. Given that the ambushed, with twelve deaths the result. Perhaps the most striking indicator of a change of mood inside the government reported by the paper is the news that Several papers have word that H and R Block has finally wriggled out of its market, the balance of power is shifting to employees from employers," and states that "the retention frenzy was triggered in part by previous waves of corporate downsizing," which left behind survivors who took stock of career options and used Internet job listings and intensified recruiting to land and a bonus point for including some criticism of her in the story. "Not nun, whose organization was able to raise millions of dollars worldwide but made virtually no significant changes in the social structure of this as many others understand it, she said." It's odd, however, that in repeating this charge, the Times didn't interview the man most closely associated parents are rather protective of her and that she is a black in a still all lead with the latest developments in the investigation of President decision yet. (She could, besides ending the investigation, also continue conversation with her about this or, frankly, anything else." In their lead not sure is so good." The additional observation seems right and newsworthy. coffee tapes: "You should have been there when I heard about it." (The The Post story includes this explanation for why the White House Communications Agency, "a military unit that provides the president with secure of staff got the full memo requesting any such videos, but when he put it into office responsible for providing the president with "secure communications" can't email a memo without losing the first two pages? The LAT leads with a "gesture of peace so fraught with controversy that it was made behind closed doors," namely, the handshake yesterday in would not confirm that the handshake occurred, and that he had arranged that no pictures were taken of it. The history of such handshakes suggests that such protease inhibitors that promise to transform AIDS from a fatal to a merely a result, poor people with AIDS often simply go without. The Wall Street Journal 's "Work Week" column notes that for "panic button" for use when the boss shows up. Press it and the screen suddenly switches to a nominating form for "Boss of the Year." Through much arduous persistently attempted to market cigarettes to teens. This is also the top The new tobacco documents (many of them marked "Secret"), released as part of a lawsuit settlement, show a company strategy of attracting teenagers before Congress that the company does not market to children, these new documents have prompted congressional interest in perjury charges. They also gun" that shows why Congress shouldn't approve the proposed national tobacco The company responded by repeating its denial of youth targeting and stating documents reflect the social attitudes of the times in which they were The paper also states that China was wavering on the Security Council action, rather than "condemn" it. (No telling how many votes could have been garnered he played a bit of "Ode to Joy," and then asked lawmakers, "Now, don't you feel all like the work of a madman. The language is clear, precise and calm. The argument is subtle and carefully developed, lacking anything even faintly resembling the wild claims or irrational speculation that a lunatic might "skill in manufacturing bombs and the clever ways in which he concealed his identity suggest to me that he was clearly sane." Of course, the legal usefulness of these observations is somewhat dubious, because this attempt to requires showing that he is fit to stand trial, and so on. the next big domestic policy issue will be controlling television health All three majors working the weekend agree on today's lead: the decision by campaign fund solicitation calls from the White House, and reports that the such calls, and there is no clear legal precedent to show that they would be investigation buffeting the administration had swirled around the Oval Office The new evidence apparently includes solicitation call sheets that were The natural assumption that all the papers had access to the same call sheets of a special prosecutor for three years. (Remember Whitewater?) guilty pleas. Worth doing, because the case could well lead to deeper trouble has the understandable problem of trying to be clear about describing schemes that were designed to be murky, but it doesn't help that the story doesn't even in question were illegal, and even then none too clearly. Isn't the relevant law that the union can't donate money to either candidate, and hence can't create schemes that do that while appearing to be donations from somebody else? assistance information, saying that the trend arises from increased competition They used to freely share numbers, but now they charge each other through the attempting to compile their own data bases from other sources, like credit card arrive on her own "attended perhaps by a handful of Secret Service agents rather than arriving in a Presidential motorcade and trailed by hundreds of middle of the month before deciding whether or not to expand her inquiry into investigation into White House fund raising. The core problem apparently was officials, but the Justice Department attorneys wanted a "bottom up" case against naming a special prosecutor is "pretty strong.") As a result, says the paper, the task force didn't even interview senior officials for eight months, and the information that may eventually result in the appointment of an independent counsel came not from the task force but from a "newspaper The LAT 's story about China's nuke trade opening says that the new the LAT says, criticizes the deal, saying it would stand as a "testament story's details suggest he has a point, inasmuch as it relates that China is edition state that the Defense Department has given the green light to The State Department had been against the idea, particularly because of concern acronym came first, followed by the billions required to make a weapon that is the world's biggest CO2 emitter, producing almost twice as much as China, (A thought: Maybe there's a solution here to the cloud of graft and to make the biggest impression on the dailies was the extraordinary forthright regarding China's trade policies, noting that he said right to goods and services should be able to compete freely and fairly in China." the two countries have agreed not to let their continuing rights differences stand in the way of strategic and economic ties. The New York Times sees things a little more starkly, saying that the public disagreement "appeared to broaden the gulf between the two powers on human rights." members of Congress. Yet neither paper explains what Congress can do about the deal. The Journal does a little better, saying that Congress can "challenge" it within thirty days, but doesn't elaborate what form that challenge can take. Also, the Post says that the deal calls for China to first asked about human rights, he checked his watch. And in search of clues to handshake, but the leader of the free world did cop some elbow and back. campaign contributions, and various schemes to interfere with the Democratic What's new is his reason: to rail at many of his fellow conservatives for ethnic category questions on federal forms to, for the first time ever, check more than one block (the alternative of having a separate "multiracial" box was rejected). If you feel the proliferation of such questions promotes seems that in recent years, on average, three people a month between the ages up, a rate that appears, the Post says, to be the highest in the country. The paper lays much of the blame for this on the inadequacies of the Republican proposals for the flat tax or a national sales tax, is considering various other simplification proposals, including one that would exempt as many calculate their taxes for them, which would then be withheld by employers. they want a change in the system, and yet a majority of them do not support for home mortgage interest and charitable contributions. the first place. The changes are due, says the paper, to rising drug costs and a brake on the system's problems, but rather arenas that readily reproduce them. What we're learning it seems, is that regardless of the setting, the market will tend to punish coverage of those, like the elderly, with the most On its front, the LAT continues the comprehensive look it began story is illustrated by a shot of the presidential daybook for the week of story, this was hardly the first sign of trouble. Prior to that, the man had was the time he shot and killed a man during an argument. The shooting was him at the time. So what was his posting at the time of this last shooting? The prisoners to work building homes for the elderly and disabled in the state's of practice and discourage reliance on calculators. components, explains the paper, would have benefited at the expense of smaller companies that do not. (The automobile, textile, wool and fur industries are subject to separate requirements and are not covered by the decision.) The victory for, and the result of political pressure from, organized labor. The international greenhouse gas agreement. The thumbnail explanation of global warming the Post provides in its lead coverage is odd: the only dangerous effect of warming it mentions by name is the possible spread of malaria to colder climates, nothing about another Ice Age. word from the LAT about why the wide stat parameters here). The above story sits without comment right next to one slugged "Student But at least the LAT puts that school shooting on the front page. (As the Internet: "Children need Internet access the way they need subsidized bus insurers plan to raise rates for sports utility vehicles. most tense situation between the two countries in ten years. The decision was to switch to a different pension system, boosting their annuities but costing employees' union in New York filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality crash tests show sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks are inflicting very high levels of harm to cars and their occupants in collisions, and today the Times brings word that in response, some big insurance companies are raising their liability rates on the oversize vehicles. The move might be, says the paper, the largest overhaul of liability insurance since the advent of The Times wonders whether the adjustments will hurt oversize vehicle sales, but goes on to observe that their owners are perhaps too prosperous to fertility breakthrough: the first successful pregnancy in this country using a frozen egg. Although the egg in this case came from another woman, this development sets up the possibility that young women will be able to freeze their own eggs (which are less biologically problematic) and then much later, when the women are ready to have children, have them fertilized. The technique would also allow women undergoing chemotherapy to save some eggs for later use. headlines at the Times if not the president? Well on the same page, over a story about yesterday's speeches and ceremonies at the Times marking ceremonies. More heartening was the revelation in both papers that a white wondering: Couldn't they also have found one of the paratroopers who escorted nine original black students and what they're doing today. The list includes an investment banker, a writer, a lawyer, a college professor, and an unemployed woman. Two of the nine live overseas. The LAT has a nice photo on its leads describing yesterday's testimony, in which a number of current agents, speaking from behind a screen, their voices electronically altered, blew the whistle on the agency's shady practices; and in which the acting commissioner, in the appointment of yet another independent counsel. dealt with it deep inside and at arm's length. (Yesterday's Times edit resolution of the case, the Gray Lady hikes her skirts, putting the story on the front page and deigning to mention all the tawdry details. The story is piece, the accuser is never mentioned by name, a practice the paper explains attacks." But it turns out that the paper isn't able to stick to that policy for more than a few paragraphs. A little further down, the paper identifies by name the second woman who testified that she, too, was bitten and sexually When a story dominates a day like this one does, it's the differences that stand out. Everybody makes it clear that the central bone of contention is some accounts of what could be legally suspect about that are more successful section adds: 'provided, however, that this provision in and of itself shall The Justice Department argues that Internet Explorer constitutes a separate permission either to remove the Internet Explorer browser entirely or just the computer makers if it didn't include Internet Explorer. the grounds that such provisions have a chilling effect on those wishing to military development: a submarine arms race among Third World countries. Some submarines seemingly as fast as their treasuries will allow." Most of the subs effort over a story about a woman suing a man she says promised marriage to her only as a way to cultivate her brother as an organ donor for him: "Woman leads with a Social Security internal audit revealing that too many workers at says he would judge any proposed tax cut by whether it was fair to average taxpayers, good for the economy, and conducive to a simpler tax code. The president also tells the Times that he is prepared to flout based on her reading of the law. And everybody knows that she is an Al Gore also sits down with a Times reporter today, but his interview is all access, no content. Gore refuses to concede any mistakes in either his campaign activities or in his defense of them. He says it's unfair to dwell on the months of controversy. "A snapshot," he bromides, would surely say, with Gore, a moving picture is a snapshot.) and LAT run a shot of her embracing the mother of a boy she is widely liberationist reformer decked out in all the major jewelry groups, including even the most minor allegations against her and offered no reconciliation until wrong, but she gave utterly no explanation of that remark. The LAT apparently was at a different hearing. It emphasizes that last bit of vacuity asking when the capital gains tax cut takes effect. (or cans) of beer in six months to win a pool table. paper did, the writers of the series sent him a pig's head in a box. on his sentence, which under the federal rules, means he won't get the death penalty. The judge will decide instead and the dailies say that he'll probably hundreds of state murder charges that could result in the death penalty. Today calls the "sharply critical press conference" held by the jury forewoman afterwards. She is quoted as saying that "the government dropped the Times say the "dropping the ball" comment was about her belief that the power and you don't." Indeed, in its lead paragraph, the LAT attributes the upcoming State of the Union speech ahead of time, all of the front pages and tax breaks to help working families pay for child care. The plan would also include tax credits for businesses that build or expand employee child care The news that the Department of Justice has brought its first criminal charges in its investigation of the tobacco industry makes the fronts of questioned under oath by her lawyers at an upcoming deposition. But the piece waits until the tenth paragraph to note that this was reported yesterday in the the ways in which privacy is imperiled, from your dealings with banks and employers and stores, to airline security and deadbeat dad tracking. It's trafficking, but it's interesting that his proposed reforms still smack of the leads with a House committee's condemnation of the Pentagon's handling of Gulf in "allowing black communities to be flooded with crack cocaine," programs to help women prisoners make the transition back to society, the establishment of black independent schools, and the release of political prisoners. In discussing crowd size, the Post uses as a reference the size of the Million Man March, but, curiously, doesn't refer to the Promise Keepers rally The rally coverage signifies an odd new journalism trend. In their extensive dutifully report the size of the rally as "hundreds of thousands," yet they each persist in referring to the event as the "Million Woman March," apparently because that's what the organizers called it. So look for the Pentagon to call committee's report to be released this coming week that says the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs should be stripped of their authority over Gulf soldiers' sickness because of their mishandling of the issue. The report states that Congress should either create or designate an agency to take over. The paper also reveals that a separate forthcoming study has had two babies in rapid succession. The story was accompanied by a television while holding one of her kids. That picture has drawn a firestorm of protest from readers, many of them black women. Now, the Post distinguishes itself by being the only paper covered here that has an ombudsman who writes a regular column, and today she takes up the issue and concludes that "deciding not to put that picture where we did would have better served the following precis of China's recent human rights record: "After the to an end. Hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators died. Hundreds were tortured. All have seen family members harassed, even persecuted to death." groups are free to give human rights absolute and unqualified priority, governments are not," and which reports that "the number of political prisoners into song and play the piano and recite poetry, all of which, says the paper, "points to an unpredictable, wacky side." (Homework assignment: find a single another, "stop with the wacky stunts, with the piano, with the poetry. You're "spectacular display of bipartisanship" created by last month's Senate hearings which includes such taxpayer protections as shifting the burden of proof to the government in tax disputes and the creation of a civilian oversight board, will stream of ingenious and complicated new tax dodges. The Post concludes that yesterday's Republican victories were mostly due to lavish financing, widespread social conservatism among voters, and an unwillingness, bred of the healthy economy, to dump incumbents. In light of all this, says the paper, Democrats are viewing the goals of recapturing the House and gaining parity in governorships as more difficult than ever. And according says he still believes the government was behind the disaster, but he has told acupuncture is an effective treatment for some kinds of pain and nausea and shows promise as a treatment for a variety of other conditions. Health experts say the decision will almost certainly lead to more patients opting for the technique and more private and government insurance paying for them to do of a Little Rock junkyard have made an interesting discovery in the trunk of an calls the conviction on conspiracy and manslaughter counts but acquittal on Times and the Wall Street Journal emphasize that the decision relentless in their programmatic use of "balancing" language to describe family family members saying the verdicts are just. Instead, when it comes to particulars, we have everybody quoting the comment of a woman whose Secret The reactions noted are often incisive as well as anguished. A woman who When the papers strive to make sense of the verdict, they tend to look that way too. The Times says that the manslaughter verdicts mean that the jury held that the deaths were foreseeable results of a lawful act. But what guilty of conspiring in the bombing, a crime that seems to have required premeditated, murder. Involuntary manslaughter usually involves recklessness but not premeditation." But then the paper trots out a dubious answer: "Still, the bomb be set off with the purpose of killing these agents." But what alternative purpose did he have? Not one word in all the coverage about But neither the Journal nor the other papers pass along any information The Post makes a rookie mistake in referring to the jury's "innocent" likely to be injured on the job. The paper also reports that today's issue of anesthesia when they are circumcised, they should get it because "study of infant heart rates and crying patterns during circumcision clearly showed there was pain." So, to sum up today's scientific breakthroughs: a) If you're blind lead is a presidential advisory commission's recommendation of numerous new to sympathetic outside groups such as the National Right to Life Committee. And international conference on the problem, sets up a pollution credits market under which companies profit from getting below emissions standards, promises the paper, the proposal is considered not stringent enough by many investment in global warming control: "enough to give every citizen an annual to spend on their pet causes without being identified (unlike political parties, interest groups don't have to disclose their money sources). patients' rights should include the right to an external review of denials of often and how successfully a doctor has performed a procedure. President nobody has explained how these new rights would be enforced. story?) says that the company shocked Wall St. yesterday with its surprise in, but the company can't keep up because of part shortages and the hiring of More detail comes to light today about the Justice Department's case against their machines. Also, the Post says the government's evidence includes some email from Bill Gates to his company's executive committee. of life in prison, referring only to "published accounts." The paper should and his son John were granted immunity from prosecution. The Post doesn't make the point, but this is all too typical: Something abstract called the "corporation" is fined while the actual executives (think what that word means: people who get things done) go merrily along. "Today's Papers" received a number of sage emails from readers pointing out worthwhile for papers like the LAT to study and report on its In anticipation of congressional debate on the topic early next year, the would if they each were single. The Journal explains that it's actually a fairly nuanced topic. For one thing, more married couples enjoy a marriage even worse inequities: for instance, eliminating the marriage penalty The Journal quotes an academic who says that while not a primary living with her boyfriend despite their desire to marry because she doesn't other, they're not thinking enough. The odds are very good that if that woman and her beau got married, they would buy a house together and have at least one kid, thereby putting a huge dent in their tax bill. is nine times more valuable by weight than cocaine, and hence needn't be A Wall Street Journal editorial makes the point that the press consistently overlooks that some of the most thoughtful reassessments of affirmative action come from blacks. The Journal notes, for instance, numbers of those who bought cell phones for their cars primarily as an leads with the national tobacco accord's plummeting prospects. The Mother promised to revolutionize the marketing and regulation of cigarettes when it was proposed three months ago, "all but dead." Congress has been less than enthusiastic because many members view the prepackaged deal as trespassing on their turf of working out bills. Other big factors: the tobacco lobby's must be able to afford more. The paper reports that although the White House a national tobacco policy rather than a detailed piece of legislation. Their headline for the tobacco deal story? "Tobacco Accord, Once Applauded, Is emphasizes something that the others missed, namely that the crowds in attendance were far smaller than expected. The main reason, says the paper, is cheating scheme recently broken up by federal investigators. It had been operating from coast to coast for three years and before it was discovered had enabled several hundred students to gain acceptance into graduate schools with and the distribution of pencils with answer keys on them to the cheating consequence of the Army sex scandals: the service is planning to put into effect very soon new physical training standards for women that are much closer The Times also covers the fundraising scandal in its lead editorial, failure to call for an special counsel "looks like a political blocking call for a special counsel and says it would be a political subterfuge to limit leads with the changing role of the International Monetary Fund. And the independence for the District, remarks criticized by many local politicians for not including a call for voting rights for the city. will ask Justice to consider perjury charges against at least six witnesses who operations of the economies it aids. Chastened by compliance difficulties The Wall Street Journal 's lead feature notes that the latest global economic (where, unlike here, banks and not financial markets are the primary source of other major legs of the economy, like consumer confidence, business profits and hearing aids, his love of golf, his empty nest. Today's installment concerns domestic policy, specifically the series of modest initiatives he has put together since failing to sell wholesale health care reform. Among the piecemeal efforts the Times lauds are insuring overnight hospital stays for new mothers, school uniforms, cell phones for citizen neighborhood patrols, keeping liquor ads off the airwaves, restricting tobacco sales, creating a national registry for sex offenders, and suspending the driver's licenses of had a real job, he'd be looking at permanent unemployment and criminal which causes him to ask exactly the right question: "Just how big was that last government is willing to sacrifice its equity market to the currency peg." And offers this "clarification": "But analysts say the peg won't be easy to defend, of China to support the market in the face of selling by currency fears that higher rates would mean shriveling profits for the financial and property companies that are the market's backbone. But still, nobody explains never says.), and that this might please the Fed, which of course, would please "could lead to a broad regional economic slowdown that would dampen the sales and earnings not just of local companies, but of major corporations from the many market analysts believe that lower stock prices are a good buying Stock prices could go up, or they could go down. Either could be good. So, the question about such "day after" stock market stories remains: "Why give them so general has determined that a set of chemical weapons logs, that veterans' groups say could provide valuable information about Desert Storm exposure, was mistakenly destroyed after the war. And a second set is still missing. It's records indicating what happened to the thousands and thousands of nuclear of the rich, revealing that in a survey, members of the nation's wealthiest satellite fell out of orbit, and there is some chance that parts could impact row. Retailers thought the strong economy would mean a big buying season, but (only half of the expected gain). Analysts see a paradigm shift: People no to use the money to cut taxes, looking for points with voters in next fall's elections. The surplus could also lead to a renegotiation of the budget deal, Everyone leads with yesterday's action on Wall St. Nobody calls it a the Fed isn't tightening, interest rates aren't rising and there isn't a is no sense of urgency like in 1987..It seemed far too quiet for a day with Journal tries to take the temperature of people off the Street, but in doing so, demonstrates a bit of a tin ear about the typical investor, since the an extent never seen before, the world's stock markets are interconnected and Despite the generally evenhanded reporting, there are still some hyper just tired. Unless they're carrying their own long positions, they make money after experiments showing that the substance either promoted hair growth or at despite recognition that the pills carry a slight risk of impotence and reduced sex drive. (That there is expected to be a strong market for the medication on the inspirational story of teammates and opponents praying for him on the field while doctors worked on him feverishly, but treads lightly around the increases in the size, strength, and speed of the players, serious spinal and head injuries are becoming more common all the time. So much so that pro football is now far more dangerous than those "ultimate fighting championships" new trend: telecommunications companies paying churches for the right to put wireless transmission equipment in their steeples. It's a match made in heaven: churches get an income stream far more reliable than the collection plate. says, it is compiled from official sources, it is not a photograph of the president's daybook, but rather a representation of his schedule concocted by the LAT 's editors made to look like one. And not a very accurate one either: for instance, in a trick that's repeated throughout the graphic, the Spelling's company when it was revealed she was pregnant. Spelling officials had claimed that a visibly pregnant woman couldn't be credible in the sexy "looked unbelievably sexy and terrific" as she came to court in short, tight skirts. Spelling's attorney says there will be an appeal. But the main way airshow (the first Redskins game at the new stadium dominates the front page), and that accident and two others involving military aircraft are the lead at dominated by a backstage picture and the accompanying headline "'3rd Rock,' The immigration study, prepared by the Rand Corp. warns that the flows of poorly educated immigrants and calls on Congress to: reduce new legal immigrant admissions to "a moderate range," allow the rate of immigration to fluctuate with general economic conditions, and add education levels and English proficiency as admission criteria. One immigrant advocate is quoted in the paper denouncing the study as "think tank poppycock." administration told allies over the weekend that it could sign a land mine ban campaign to advertise hard liquor on television by preparing ads including a caveat about responsible drinking. But the Journal reports that three of the four major networks said that this latest move will have no impact on their together and a Marine one where they are sexually segregated. The reporter even found a female Marine who had previously gone through the basic training at the two headlines chosen emphasize opposite sides of the dispute. The Post 's investigators are using online resources to dig ever deeper into private information. The piece explains that certain Web sites specialize in selling such personal data as unlisted telephone numbers, bank account numbers, beeper numbers, and even annual salary and investment portfolio information, but in effect serves as wonderful free advertising for them by mentioning their names and quoting their rates for these particular services. There's an odd lacuna in the piece, where it describes the formidable Investigative Group International. It identifies the company's chairman by name firm's New York operations, but does not elaborate on the following fascinating tidbit: "The promotion brochure features veteran investigative reporters who pony up some cash that has been promised in the recently concluded bailout only as a last resort (yet another case of the Times leading with a financial no immediate reaction from Japan. There's politics on both sides of the matter, are widely viewed in their country as the bailout's regulatory intrusions, there's a chance it would never actually be needed. extensive public comments concerning the investigation and his disagreement the leaking: publicizing the dispute served to demonstrate his political The context for the LAT lead is that the boom in light trucks and sport utility vehicles has accelerated pollution because they aren't subject to the same emission and fuel economy controls as passenger cars. An editorial in the Although even the United Farm Workers considers the strike against table The Journal 's "Tax Report" brings word that some rock stars have been tangling reports that a tentative settlement between Nicks and the feds is in the apologized, but his main goal was image repair: he was accompanied, says the address any specifics of the two incidents in which he punched and choked his dealing as indicative of the telecommunications industry's trend towards Justice will "give this thing a very, very hard look" precisely because the report the open hostility from the panel's Republicans. But they vary in what revelation to the committee that she has agreed not to close out any line of stresses this, calling it an "extraordinary arrangement," but then goes on to More White House fundraising tapes were released yesterday and several of in this batch of videos, the President can be seen in friendly banter, not just Times leads with a Supreme Court decision that could lead to cheaper over a strong challenger would seem to enhance her prospects. The paper says shape. Senate Republican leaders are feeling their oats over yesterday's Lee and any other future nominees to the post will face a tough new standard on important antitrust decisions in years," the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling antitrust statutes by placing a ceiling on the retail price that may be charged for its products. The paper, which filed a brief in the case supporting price caps, notes that it's widely believed the decision will lead to lower consumer The LAT lead story on this decision includes the provenance of a common ad phrase: "offer good at participating stores only." Prior to yesterday, the paper explains, this rider was required because independent papers, never really that engaged, have dropped it down a couple of notches. Defense department officials wouldn't say what the purchase price was, but, reduction" program established to help dismantle the Soviet arsenal. The latest circulation audit shows that nine of the nation's fifteen largest that Internal Revenue says these are only allowed for agents who fear being because those planes were made and sold for a nice piece of change by back in, and, the papers report, a 77-member team including an unspecified we will wait and see whether he does, in fact, comply with the will of the had guaranteed it easier inspection procedures, such as changing the officials adamantly deny this, saying there were absolutely no concessions. And, true to recent convention, there is a "livid spotting" about this: The germs, capable of killing up to a million people. This weapons program, reports their warnings about promiscuous use of fertility treatments, which produce extreme medical risks for women and their offspring, at growing public expense. There's an intriguing headline today over an LAT front pager: "Major though his merchant marine service ordinarily wouldn't have gotten him in. If the aforementioned qualms about multiple births don't seem decisive, the cable rates are rising at four times the rate of inflation and households have answering machines and that fully half of those use them to saying that the currency collapse had in effect doubled the cost of tuition. In say their parents have pleaded with them to tighten their belts or even sell seriously considered at the agency. The paper says the answer will be no unless quoted in the story seem puzzled by the new level of interference from the sailor. The reason for the error was the Post 's shabby sourcing. Although the Post didn't mention it, the story had already appeared in scoop. (Thanks to the many readers who helped fill out this backstory.) "Study Finds Highly Educated Have Less Sex." But the results, based on a survey out that there's sort of a sexual bubble: while people who've been to grad Note: If most people live another fifty years after college and if college House is aware of the infiltration, but unconcerned. Originally prescribed for morning sickness, the drug was banned in the 1960s when it caused thousands of birth defects. Now, it has proved successful in treating AIDS and some other diseases. Problem: Doctors are terrified (and sometimes unwilling) to prescribe it for fertile women, who, if on the drug, are required to be also on two forms of birth control. Overcrowded cabins are unsafe, so some carriers now limit passengers to one this past weekend the White House gave congressional and Department of Justice or actual campaign contributors met with the president. The tapes could shed light on a question investigators have been looking into for some time: Did inside the White House? The tapes have already set off a political firestorm the White House "may have crossed the line of obstruction of justice" is quoted were ostensibly covered by congressional committee subpoenas going back to last checks by an unidentified attendee. Also drawing wide attention: the only more than the other papers, pointing out that the Senate investigations The LAT coffee tapes story has the same basics as everybody else, signed last week. The White House claims that these projects were not requested been gravely damaged politically by the failure both domestically and the antidote to the poison they used in the mission and in the release from It's a staple of the assassination attempt coverage to call this operation In case you weren't sure, a "reefer" headline (that is, one referring to an Times goes with a questionable loan to the Democrats. The New York Times visit, too late for seeing any of her son's stellar pitching, was the fruit of observe that the summit won't produce as many substantive agreements as was and far below any other major industrialized nation. So low, says the paper says most of the credit goes not to government planning but to a healthy The Wall Street Journal says that a look at the current economy also shows that the alleged bad consequence of raising the minimum happen, turning the minimum wage increase into "one of the nonevents of A good test of the coherence of a news story is how much sense could you make of it if you could only read the first few paragraphs or at most only to telegraph lines.) Today's LAT lead is a good example. The story is makes an appearance until after the "jump," a full ten paragraphs in. Ditto for story rather than the couple's. (And "Today's Paper's" can't answer those questions because, as of filing time, this column doesn't have access to the The LAT front page has news sure to add to the medical marijuana controversy: the discovery by researchers of chemicals in marijuana that could at Cal Tech have created silicon chips that interface directly with brain story ever. And fraught with trouble: imagine what will happen when rich people can pay to instantly smarten themselves but poor people can't. government that kidnapped and jailed him and repeatedly tried to kill him, once in the election outcome was an electorate enraged by the country's financial crisis and furious at economic mismanagement by the ruling party. The frank admission that he was wrong to have set a definite timetable for getting peace but that it was still fragile and so, in the administration's exit benchmarks did not include the return of refugees or the arrest of those The Wall Street Journal 's lead feature focuses on a group of reform into the workplace for the very first time. The piece shows how the women have become rather harsh in their attitudes towards welfare mothers. "It makes me mad," says one, "Taking money out of my check and giving it to those ho's." The story also shows that even a steady job doesn't automatically translate into financial security: One goes with government investigators saying that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons has become increasingly vulnerable to theft and sabotage. over the physical security at Department of Energy nuke storage facilities and House Republicans turned the groundswell of emotion loosed by abused taxpayers at hearings last month into votes for such ideas as putting the burden of proof on the agency in tax disputes and establishing an independent, largely civilian, control and review board. And ever since, report the papers, saying that the reform bill is "going to be the taxpayer's worst nightmare" in the capital gains tax rate, the Schedule D form for next year's returns will The LAT says the global warming plan to be announced today by the the form of pollution credits, tax breaks, and subsidies) for companies that achieve greater emission cuts than its standards require. It's open, it's transparent...." Definitely transparent. Today leads with the scores of injuries and one death on board a United program giving visas to immigrant investors. The New York Times this year: sign up millions of children eligible for Medicaid health insurance after the president was dismayed to discover that most states had made little progress on this since he first started talking about it early last year. The it will be interesting to see how the Times handles any subsequent wife is the administration's Medicaid expansion point person. Jimmy Carter was president. The paper cites a number of factors that might sentencing laws, improved police tactics, periodic gang truces, and a decrease period and background check for any handgun purchase, also get a mention? kind of soup will folks there drink when they get the flu?) here. Both pieces run through the arguments, with the Journal coming down on the side of optimism and the Times piece, while avoiding a flat gone, "we have lost a foundation stone." (Did you ever believe that myth?) Taken together, the two columns prove nothing so much as that the world economy Today's installment in the series about women in the military that the women officers trying to rise to top command jobs: a key route for getting them four days after the sinkings and hence are shot through with searing details. on board and, despite the inadequate number of lifeboats and the "Today's Papers" heard from many readers countering last week's main point they expressed was that, while not legally precise, "innocent" was preferable because it doesn't run the risk of libel that "not guilty" does if of view. So perhaps this column erred in calling this a "rookie mistake." It is apparently a very experienced mistake. But it should be noted that, especially if this were a coherent policy, then newspapers should ban the use of "not" altogether, since dropping it always carries this same risk. its Windows operating system. This is also the top national story at the applies to current versions of the software programs but could also hinder the development and marketing of new versions set to roll out early next year. The judge also made another ruling that gets less attention: he refused to order government. His reason: there is no evidence that MS is using the provision to prevent signatories from speaking to government investigators. would not submit the proposed global warming treaty for Senate ratification until developing countries agree to participate in its restrictions, something In politics, what could be worse than having your cold, dead ass dug up from background investigation, saying that he had stopped paying money to an silence and the payments continued. The papers all mention that some clear why: the charge is that they also lied to investigators about the For those who persist in arguing that our politicians need salary increases, scrape together a quarter of a million dollars for his girlfriend. troubled countries, but sell mostly to other, healthier regions. The worst is the reverse: companies like Applied Materials and LAM Research, which make says it might have been because she was talking on a cell phone and because she and the First Lady were spritzing each other with her new perfume. (How it must phoning and the spritzing, which makes the whole episode utterly In case you were wondering if it was wise for Gore to spend all that money on news respectability, he's quoted saying, "I would debate with anyone, on any of happen to be one of the most educated men in television. Not only am I lawyer, show where he had some of his butt cells transplanted into his face. states regarding pollution. Northeastern states are now reluctantly considering much smaller reductions in nitrogen oxide emissions than they had proposed. All dismissal: She falsified bank records, refused to cooperate with an internal these violations might be: She used the bank's name in dealings unrelated to her job and she endorsed her husband's application for several accounts without company with alleged mob ties. The papers delightedly mention the topic of a central bank in the past. The House Banking Committee plans to hold hearings on devaluation was imminent. He also supports the conventional investigation multinational space station. A crew will be sent to knock the station out of no money has yet been earmarked for this elimination mission. northeastern states to consider smaller levels of nitrogen oxide emission reductions. Nitrogen oxides, a cause of acid rain, blow into the Northeast from in the region to comply with the air quality standards of the Clean Air Act. Congress, which consists mainly of an old guard of political and social elites. After the assembly passed orders to prevent the Congress from making new laws, the Congress attempted yesterday to enter the locked Capitol building in defiance of the order. A scuffle ensued, injuring several of the 200-odd defusing the situation, which ended with the Congress retreating. Everyone notes that the White House is "deeply concerned" about the assembly's efforts area's recent droughts. With flora everywhere withering and browning, carefully law enforcement officials, using low flying planes to detect the devil weed, have seized twice as many plants this year as they had at this time last year. But the heat has taken its toll on the crop's quality: "This isn't good weed," conversation is only just getting started. Though we turn out to agree about a Take preferences, for example. I don't think that's just a trick of the tongue. There's a real difference between affirmative action as it was initially defined (an effort to expand the recruitment pool and make sure that there is no discrimination in the hiring process) and what is generally admissions offices and corporate personnel departments do literally prefer to admit and hire people of color for certain slots. In fact, it's stronger than in average black and white SAT scores at many colleges. And here, once again, I go back to the question of means and ends. Of course, as you say, "some racial mixture is socially desirable." I couldn't be more eager to see a thoroughly diverse student population and an integrated workforce, from top to bottom. But I don't think preferences are the right way to get there. And I believe it's very helpful to have terms to distinguish the tools that you find useful from the ones you feel are counterproductive or downright pernicious. (But by the way, I thought from one of your earlier messages that you too underlying point: that, like them or not in the short term, preferences must not sure it's a simple as you think. I agree it's unclear what to do about bad parenting. But I think that what happens at home in the years before school is a critical part of the problem. (So, increasingly, by the way, do a number of to find ways to reach and interest and discipline the least prepared, least the nation would muster the political will. Unlike you, I don't believe that people are mostly focused on getting an education for their kids, but if they think about it, they understand that the country needs to make the most of all Maybe this is what it comes down to: Even when you and I agree, my take I see a shift in the national mood; you see tactical maneuvering. I see fundamental difference here that I feel has been dogging us even when we seem So, Brent, that's my stab at closure. Now you have the last word. It's been Planet writer, and recommend seeing the Falls the "authentic way," by travel guide full of panned restaurants is useless. If a book doesn't like a place, they shouldn't list it. The exception, of course, is in small towns or might be the only option. Another factor that discourages negative reviews is The real problem is that none of the guides sift through all the stuff and tell you what's right for whom. Even in a general guidebook there's room for specialization: the best green spots, the best museums and galleries, etc. but it still seems that you've got to read the entire book to make sure you're not missing something that you'd enjoy, and that can be wearisome no matter how When I worked for Let's Go, editors cobbled together a list of restaurants, hostels, and hotels and sent them complimentary service vouchers, which they would sign and return. Researchers could then visit the establishments anonymously, and present the voucher when the bill arrived. This method does prevent preferential treatment, but I do think that a free lunch can compromise an integral part of the dining experience, and it's harder, if only slightly, travel writers to be honorable folk. And even the unscrupulous are more interested in eating for free in restaurants they have no intention of listing inclusion. One way or another, the interests of the readership are served. It's wrong to say that these guides don't take reader feedback into account. Lonely Planet (and Let's Go) usually acknowledge the readers who wrote them helpful letters in the back pages of the book. This feature is strangely absent sure thing, but you'll have to stand on line with the rest of New York (or in an absolute measure of restaurant quality. Locals have different interests, attitudes, and palates than tourists, and would be accordingly harsher on theme chops, admit it: You've got to look pretty hard to find a bad steak in As for theme restaurants in general, they're merely indicative of the fact that a lot of people travel with their children. The theme restaurant, as a attention plenty to gawk at. The food is bland enough for even the most finicky adolescent palate. And celebrity sponsorship is a behavioral modification Mediocre food at inflated prices is (I imagine) a small price to pay for the respite these restaurants provide for the harried parent, and guidebook writers We'll toast your safe return to New York with a "Sloe gin (That's the way it) transaction, resulting, if approved by shareholders and the federal government, major Kremlin contracts paid tens of thousands of dollars in bills on credit exemplifies the virtues of vertical integration, nicely defined by the distribute it." The LAT notes that this feature of the deal, tying up as it does many production and distribution entities, could stimulate other similar mergers among companies now needing more than ever to tie up their The deal coverage is shot through with the usual attempts at dramatizing the essentially undramatic activity of guys in suits writing themselves checks. The involving some television stations. Then he started talking about cable networks. Then I could see it coming. He is a master salesman, and he began to turn me on." Just about the only relief from all this breathlessness comes from is, by any definition, an undemocratic development. The media system in a democracy should not be inordinately dominated by a few very powerful violence or its advocacy. Two prisoners offered the deal declined it. jail. The case had been developed by an independent counsel under the ability in recent years of China to miniaturize nuclear weapons was a result of spying on the United States or just hard, independent work. The effort, says high up that the congressional report issued late last year asserting that espionage was the main explanation "went beyond the evidence," and that his thorough review shows that perhaps "thousands" of individuals had access to the information that the report and the federal investigation suggest came from one dismissed scientist, Wen Ho Lee. Now, given that the Times ran hard and often with the congressional report and the line it took, does this piece by the paper to revise its history of coverage on the subject? Today's Papers doesn't think so. The paper's coverage has generally been clear in attributing government sources. And anyway, a paper should be encouraged to revisit a topic as more information becomes available and better understood. Today's Papers' clothing, cosmetics, hair styling, physical and speech training, health care, expenses for a state official whose job it is to be a professional celebrity. spiritualists (including a clairvoyant who put her in touch with her grandmother), a tarot card reader, an energy healer, a hypnotherapist, an an episode in which she slashed her arms and smeared the blood all over the invited tabloid reporters so she could drop by their tables and leak whatever she wanted to appear in their publications the next day. from what Smith dubiously diagnoses as a borderline personality disorder. Yet she was also the century's most popular royal personage, a fact that now our attention because she was cute, but she held it because she gave the needing her privacy. Tabloid editors put her on the cover day in and day out because eating disorders and fainting fits made good copy, not out of sympathy with her charities. And since by the ironclad laws of yellow journalism the individual suffering, the victim of unfeeling institutions everywhere. Others to find in the public eye the unflagging concern, pity, and sense of drama its favor, cultivating tabloid reporters while complaining about their impertinences, figuring out more often than not what to wear and say and how to It was strangely easy for her to outfox the palace. No rational being, no one concerned about shoring up a marriage or maintaining a position in society, put her in a questionable light. She collaborated with a tabloid reporter, option. She defied everyone she knew, including her own press secretary, to go about being a princess. She cared about being a celebrity, and her public to be mad to court such a fate, but luckily, she was. run down at the heels. Just something I thought you'd like to know. We are back children. Not all "tactics" are evil. This a worthy goal, one that will save us the discontent was eclipsed by public anger about the impeachment drama. The brilliance of the conservative movement (take a bow, you crafty politics. "Liberal" became a pejorative, synonymous with weakness, taxation, all this and is betting that there will be some daylight to the left of Gore. will utter sweet nothings even as he pulls the switch on the electric chair. It's gonna take a miracle, yes, it's gonna take a miracle." Speaking of loaded terminology. The big conservative coup was transforming hijacking. The two terms are not interchangeable. "Affirmative action" connotes reaching out to underrepresented minorities on the grounds that some racial mixture is socially desirable. When I go out to find and hire people I do not "prefer" someone nonwhite. But I do in fact "prefer" to have a staff that reflects something of the population that my business is meant to willing to ensure at the minimum that the kids have a qualified teacher at the front of the room, a set of books, and a safe school. When the schools are vouchers, not penny ante ones proposed by some in Congress last year but real ones that would send at least a few kids out of the city to the very best a culture, we have tended to believe that good education is wasted on the black Chatterbox is grateful to the many people who wrote in to share personal stories and their views about methodological challenges as a way to help Chatterbox figure out whether vacations are more dangerous than work life and hanging around the house. (To view most of the comments, scroll down to the forum, "The Fray." Be warned that, as is the case with most chat rooms, you that's genuinely thoughtful or informative; but a recent redesign makes it easier to zoom through to the good stuff.) As several people noted, the percentages Chatterbox cited in his previous Do Vacations Kill?") overstate some vacation dangers in the sense deaths reflects the much greater number of people who swim as compared with the number who climb mountains. (Similarly, the recent increase in the number of amusement park deaths may show not that amusement parks are more dangerous than they used to be, but that more people go to them; though if more people are spending vacation time at amusement be making their vacations more dangerous in the aggregate.) On the other hand, several other people noted, given that people spend a lot more vacation dangers may be understated by the data in the previous Given these difficulties, Chatterbox still feels unequal to the task of proving that vacations either are or aren't more dangerous than ordinary life. (Perhaps inspiration will strike later this week.) But that doesn't mean Chatterbox is done with the topic of vacation dangers. Today, he turns his someone died from falling off a boat rather than dying during a deliberately planned swim or scuba dive; though if, during a deliberately planned swim or scuba dive, someone were struck by a boat propeller and killed, doesn't have data on every single boat in the United States). During the operating it. Open motor boats were responsible for the vast majority of motorboats ranking a distant second and canoes and kayaks accident on a kayak or canoe, it's more difficult to get yourself such things and the difficulty of administering breathalyzer tests under such circumstances, this statistic surely understates the problem. According to the a boat operator with a blood alcohol concentration of zero. According to Health's Center for Injury, Research, and Policy, an unbelievably high not only by the high correlation between accidents and alcohol consumption, but careless or reckless operation, inattention to what's looming up ahead, inexperience. (By comparison, "equipment failure" registers hardly at all.) These are guys who get drunk and behave in stupid ways that are characteristically (though of course not exclusively) male. puzzled by its erroneous assertion that the number of boats in the United been told, its ability to bring like minds together, then I must compliment concern here is the two recent books about the town, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property I wonder if you shared my spooky feeling reading both of these books, a feeling totally unconnected with literary merit or effect. You and I were both early visitors and pioneer critics of Celebration, you for and, at least when I was there, no habitable houses. My experience with the veritably complete downtown had sprung up, but it was yet vacant, its storefronts without signs, its windows without glass, not a solitary pedestrian along its streets. Witnessing that kind of progression, the field giving way to the skeletal, empty, immaculate ruin, is the common experience of the archaeologist, but not of the urbanologist. What complete city was ever all at one time empty? But the poor archaeologist can only wonder about the lives of the people who lived in the city's bones, hard as one might work to get those bones to speak. And that's the spookiness: We saw the ruins and wondered about the lives, and now, with these two books, the ruins are speaking and the place Both these books follow a similar trajectory: Their town unfold during the first year of its infancy, seeking, like some anxious parent, the significance behind every diaper change and wobbly step. They record many of the same events: The conflicts over school quality, shoddy home in their wistful conclusion that if Celebration is a bit of a corporate harlot, it yet has a heart of gold, or at least of honest brass, and does not deserve Now we, who once critiqued the town, are invited to critique the town's critics. The town, we can surmise from this, has come a apartment without a mortgage or children, and thus had no "real stake" But it opens up an interesting question: What is the purpose of Celebration? It insufficiency, implied that the town's purpose was focused on child rearing and real estate accumulation. And surely education and innovative housing were big draws for many residents. But most of those residents, it is clear from these accounts, also were animated by enthusiasm for the larger experiment, of suburban sprawl and employing virtuous design and bedrock community principles to reinvigorate the nation's civic life. Far from innocent, spectators. In an experimental town whose residents pull it up by the roots death: Is democracy the best way to run a town? These books, and perhaps our all have a stake in Celebration, and I look forward immensely to talking with company see what books are selling well among customers in other Zip codes or respectively. This strangely satisfying form of literary eavesdropping, addresses, and purchases, is not limited to the continental United States. Purchase circles are a simple but brilliant conceptual coup. Whoever thought them up understood a fundamental principle of salesmanship, or rather, herd psychology: People want to know what everyone else in their peer group is doing, so they can do it too. Statistically speaking, the data are meaningless, since the company doesn't reveal the sample size behind each list. There could its best seller. But no one's claiming that these lists represent some larger truth about the book market (such truths are elusive, anyway, since publishers are notoriously secretive about sales figures). They're a hint of the regional and cultural differences among us, no more, as well as the mildly galling at least one city in almost every state in the Union). Plus they're fun. Who starters. They consider Amazon's purchase circles an invasion of privacy, yours company's secret strategies or level of workplace satisfaction from their slippery slope: If Amazon will do this, what else will it do? The answer, of course, is as much as it can get away with. If you don't already know that Amazon is keeping a file on you, you ought to be forbidden to shop on the Internet. The company's business strategy has been widely publicized: Amazon believes that if it ever turns a profit, it will do so by exploiting information gained from its customers to sell them other products. Since the integrity of its customer database is of tremendous importance to Amazon, we can probably take its executives at their word when they say (in a policy page that appears to have gone up yesterday) that they won't give out any information that could identify you personally. For people. Amazon has no reason to want to piss you off. present or future, depend on its ability to compile and deploy information on its customer. There are just too many ways for shoppers to undermine the Companies can keep themselves out of purchase circles by faxing in a request. If consumers get mad enough, they can bail out of Amazon altogether and buy circles. If enough Amazon customers "opt out," it might be reduced to offering Obviously, sometimes the privacy advocates are right. This week they're also appeal its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, and they have companies who became party to the suit) from exploiting a customer's personal services and products. (The ruling did not give the companies the right to sell this data to third parties.) The judge ruled that keeping a company from using its customer databases to inform its sales pitches infringed on its free that she's not convinced that that's what's really causing the general public to wax wroth. She suspects it's more what Amazon's invention reveals about shopping nowadays: that it takes place inside an endless hall of mirrors. After all, what's better than shopping? Watching ourselves shop. Watching ourselves being watched as we shop. Watching the watchers who watch us as we shop. Ad anything in my life as a journalist, it's to advocating what I call written in the past decade: It's all about figuring out how to make what you call "the browning of the nation" a smoother, happier process. But paying respect and pandering are not the same thing, and what the presidential candidates are doing is pandering, pure and simple. The hard questions on all these issues are about means, in my view, not ends. I know there are still plenty of bigots out there: lots of people who convinced, have come around by now to accepting the goal of racial equality. Just about everybody thinks there should be a healthy share of blacks at top colleges. Most whites know there must be black politicians, black judges, black generals, and black corporate chiefs. And I don't think most whites want to is figuring out how best to achieve these ends, and that's where I think the even I saw that as a throwaway gesture. This is what I mean when I say the fault's not in the candidates but in ourselves. We've got to ask more of these we need some leadership that can face up to the tough questions. Surely, you another direction for my last Breakfast Table entry. (Or is it the Dinner Table by this time of day?) Did you see the story buried (alas) in the "Circuits" thoughtful, beautifully written meditation on the differences between a "But what did stay in sharp focus were the faces and voices of the people who came to the door or stopped me on the street to tell me they had known my father. They knew his comings and goings, his eccentricities. They had been to meetings and read the letters he sent to the local paper." She goes on to compare this community to the virtual communities, such as written admiringly. "In the course of writing about the Well," she says, "I saw people there grieve for their fellow members when they died and marshal support virtual communities are fundamentally different." Ultimately, she concludes, the real community is more cohesive. It works better. On some level, I feel the same way about the exercise we've just concluded. it's not completely satisfying. Wouldn't it be more fun, and more other about? Wouldn't you prefer to see the face and hear the voice? I Unless you're a hardcore gamer, you may not know that today saw the debut of it's really fast) and the last hope for a corporation that has gone from having one of the strongest brands in the world to having the words "laggard" and spending tens of millions of dollars on an elaborate marketing campaign that in particular is the most amazing sports video game ever created. But what with campaign, with edgy graphics and oblique slogans. It's a good campaign, but That's not surprising, since at this point in the history of marketing, it seems impossible that you might actually come across something new. The irony, The ads star an actual senior managing director of the company, a man named drunk, and on his way home scuffles with some thugs, who beat him up. The commercial ends with him collapsed in the doorway of his house, as an offscreen he wakes up on the floor of his office to realize that his secretary has caught him daydreaming. The ad ends with him reflecting on his nightmare. The later ads are slightly more hopeful, but the overriding tone, which one accountability." As such, they throw into sharp relief the differences between company, trying to target a market different from the one in which its parents have arranged to surprise him with a special gift in Phoenix. Please click on Unable to resist the invitation, Chatterbox clicked the designated link and campaigning, "I doubt if John has given any thought to the fact that he will wishes as well as those of so many of his most ardent friends and supporters. I know I can count on you to participate in this project." John's campaign and guarantee that he will have the financial resources needed to get his positive, conservative, and independent reform message out to the special way to thank John for all he's done for our state and nation. And if we accompany our special card, it will give him the added financial boost that's so necessary to carry his campaign forward. But right now, time is of the included in the special birthday album we will present to John, I must hear from you soon. That is why I urge you to contribute $63--or whatever amount you Chatterbox, whose passion is to be in on secrets, felt deeply honored to be Tear gas is a basic tool of law enforcement. It causes extreme, disabling, but usually temporary discomfort, and therefore is considered a humane alternative to using guns. There are three common ways to disperse tear gas. Aerosol hoses work like an insecticide spray. They cause the least amount of physical damage, but can only be used up close. Powder grenades can be thrown from a distance and send up a mist of powder. Pyrotechnic devices also launch tear gas from afar, in combination with a heat source. The result is an explosion, releasing a cloud of tear gas particles mixed with smoke. Pyrotechnic tear gas has tactical advantages. First, the smoke cloud obscures the movement of agents as they approach a building or crowd. Second, because the metal casing becomes quite hot, it is difficult for the device to be thrown back at police (a common problem with insists, however, that the timing and location make it impossible to blame compound. The Pentagon stated that it could not discuss any aspect of the Delta abroad. The thinking was that a small, secret, specially trained cadre of soldiers would be able to respond more effectively to terrorist threats, particularly those involving hostages. However, Delta did not stay secret for this resulted in a strict division between the military and civilian law enforcement. But the restrictions were amended in the 1980s to allow military involvement in the drug war. The Army may train law enforcement officials and lend them equipment for use in drug raids. But military troops are still later turned out to be false), use of Delta Force troops as advisers in the raid may be legally justifiable. In fact, it is already public record that other parts of the military assisted in planning the raid and providing equipment. But the level of Delta Force participation remains unknown. If Delta commandos are found to have played an active role in the raid, their The Explainer wishes to thank the Organization for the Prohibition of chunk of its front to its hometown professional sport: show business awards. force. (The Wall Street Journal mentions that perhaps the force will in which they, or their spouses or trusts they managed held stock in one of the says the paper, attributed their participation to innocent mistakes or memory lapses about their finances. One case cited gives a feel for the amount of lapse required: The husband of a judge who participated in a ruling favorable offending judges are quoted saying that they are "chagrined" and promise "to try to be more careful." The story doesn't call the practice "illegal" (a related editorial does, though) and doesn't explain to the reader why the judges aren't looking at criminal charges, civil suits, or at least discipline decision not to answer questions about alleged youthful drug use. A suggestion: If the press is looking for embarrassing questions to ask presidential relevant to presidential performance than ancient drug use: What were your SAT scores? The real issue isn't who used dope; it's who is a dope. But she added, "In general, I do not agree with spying against one's country." law firm to recognize that all three branches of government could serve as listen to me. I never discussed clemency for terrorists with that woman, Ms. question: If federal employees can't even accept a lunch from an outsider, what recounted a wacky trend in shady political campaign contributions: maximum money added by Congress to appropriations bills favoring specific universities year's total for such funds. Now reading that, wouldn't you think the original story said something about that source? Well, it didn't. That figure was calculated by The Chronicle of Higher Education in its own story on the unattributed in the second paragraph, and the Chronicle shows up in the fourteenth, and without being connected to the figure. Hence today's newspaper deconstruction: "referred incompletely to the source" means "referred to the source, without mentioning that it was the source." These baroque newspaper years. What exactly is money laundering and how does it work? In short, money laundering is the conversion of illegally obtained profits used by drugs traffickers, arms smugglers, and anyone else who needs to spend political leaders also frequently launder funds to avoid taxes or conceal The simplest form of money laundering is combining criminal profits with revenue. Although his drug income is now taxable, it is worth that price to Laundering big sums generally involves three steps: bills) enter the legitimate banking system. Many countries require that large authorities. So, launderers often deposit proceeds piece by piece or export the money to countries with relaxed banking regulations. complex financial transactions. Often, funds will be transferred dozens of times through multiple accounts, companies, and countries, making the paper There are countless variations on this pattern. One of the most common is himself. First, he sets up a lending company in a country with few financial regulations. Then he fills its coffers with illegal profits, layered through multiple accounts. When the launderer wants to make a purchase in his home country, he simply "borrows" the money from the overseas lender. This money, it both ways: breakfast of chickens, maybe, and lunch on their eggs. But somehow the farmer foils the little predator's scheme, and he ends up with have accepted Bill's clemency offer, and she ends up with nothing but egg on her face. Downstate liberals and ethnic activists will never forgive her for opposing the commutation deal, but she has nothing to show to more conservative only is she proven utterly powerless to stop them, but most people suspect that she was responsible for the clemency offer in the first place. days is all these gutless candidates trying to have it both ways. The moral of neither. But all this brings me back to where I started yesterday: I know I could be gloating, but somehow in the end, the whole thing is just depressing. But the truth is, when I think about it, I wonder if that's so. Maybe we get ones who pander to us or try to have it both ways. And those who take on thorny principled middle ground are usually only punished for their trouble. themselves into a shameless arms race, each one trying to outdo the other in flattering and cajoling minority voters. They've trooped around to the would get absolutely nothing for staking out more thoughtful positions. Surely, to take the most obvious example, there are better ways to open up just wouldn't pay off with black or white voters. There's more to be But in the end, I think, we get the politicians we deserve. It's easy to criticize them, but really we ought to be looking inward. will develop into the framework for a peace treaty early next year. The tough deadline to meet. The new agreement also addresses a water dispute and does not reach the Sea of Galilee. This point, bumped to an inside story for government has not made any guarantees to foreign authorities that it will act. The LAT emphasizes that the campaign has "no logical political for four months, and it will be several months more before he is violence. Her criticism, and that of legislators, prominent New York president's gesture, which includes restrictions on their travel and political really about the developing fissure between White House business and the first lady's need to maintain political independence for her Senate bid. illegally trading government securities that were suspicious to begin with. punishable offense), yanked cash out of treasury bills before the ruble's collapse last August and then sent it abroad. A sure sign that something is In recent weeks, this criticism has already led the company to drop the part of in by products and services sold through the site. Critics also charge that the site sometimes fails to distinguish between its advertising and the products Readers have requested explanations of some of the terms used in even before the newspaper is unfolded). Signifies one of the most important stories of the day, according to that paper's editors. Front (as a verb): To place a story on the front page. The five national newspapers often reach different decisions on which stories to front Jump (verb or noun): For a story that begins on one (usually the front) page, to continue on another page. Or the place in the story where it breaks between pages. Or the entire part of the story after the first page. Because studies consistently show that few readers follow an article beyond the jump, many papers attempt to lay out the crucial elements of the story before stories that almost never jump). Thus, the organization of facts around the Today --which often runs a feature story across the top of the front Street Journal has not adopted these conventions for leads. Instead, the (Note: The opening sentence or paragraph of a news story is also known as written by the paper's editorial board appear. It originally stood for "opposite the editorial page." It also refers to the individual articles on the columnists, and others are submitted to the newspaper unsolicited. Journal's "What's News" are essentially multiple reefers. The New York The term originally referred to the pieces of lead which held the type in place Stuff (as a verb): To place a story inside the paper. stances taken by past Republican leaders and still followed by grassroots teaching of evolution was sensible because it allowed for a "diversity of he makes of Al Gore's refusal to come out in favor of the mandatory teaching of mean, this is politics. I mean, this is what I guess Gore feels like he has to do. I mean, it's another sign of the fact that his campaign is thrashing about instead discussing his own idiosyncratic topics. He devoted this week's show entirely to the social, political, and economic direction of the new millennium. (He even assembled a panel of three academic "experts" on millennial issues.) This is a fine subject to discuss, but it renders his queries from this week's show: "Over the upcoming millennium, will science and week's cover, and inside ran a lengthy excerpt with no fewer than four sidebars (to read them, click here and here) and, to top it all off, an extremely sympathetic interview with the author. Perhaps Chatterbox wouldn't have been culture as a whole, and (to quote its subtitle) its "undeclared war against the news media, which (if you read the book quickly) comes off as uniformly hostile toward feminism. But if you take a closer look, you'll notice that some this, presumably because she never really intended Backlash to be a critique of particular news organizations so much as, well, a broadside against lifetimes. The findings became famous when they landed on the cover of preparation later explains how the terrorist analogy wound up in the magazine: "What happened is, one of the bureau reporters was going around saying it as a next thing we knew, one of the writers in New York took it seriously and it emotional fallout of feminism"; for hyping "cocooning," a trend pretty much invented by Faith Popcorn; for attacking the "myth of Supermom"; for running two covers on the "trend of childlessness"; and for exaggerating the problem of drug addiction among pregnant mothers, among other sins. In many instances, between women's traditional motherhood role and their increased participation in the workplace isn't just something dreamed up by newsmagazine writers.) But that isn't the point. The point is that an implicit theme running throughout Backlash is that in a world plagued by stupid, superficial journalism, in the 1980s, she probably figures she'll help it improve. But look at this heaping laurels onto someone who's called them a bunch of sexist ninnies! Is state's required curriculum. The decision was a victory for those who favor at Frame Game on the controversy, note that while there is basically only one theory of evolution, there are many different theories of story. There is, instead, an endless cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth. At the beginning of each kalpa (or era), there is nothing but water and darkness. As time passes, land slowly forms on the water's surface. The only living creatures are spiritual beings who were reborn at the end of the previous kalpa. Eventually, one of these being is tempted by the pleasures of follow, they begin to experience the jealousy, desire, and misery of a physical existence (this is the period in which we are living). In time, the world animals. Deciding that it needed a ruler, he made Fam, the first man. But Fam made a new, more humble man. Needing a family, the man created a woman from a was sacrificed, his upper three quarters became the immortal heavens, and the arms became the warrior, his legs the commoner, and his feet the serf. Another voice resonating created the earth, the sky, and the seasons. hovered. Over the next five days, God improved His creation, adding day and night, the sun and moon, the land and seas, and the plants and animals. On the people slowly evolved from primitive creatures as they journeyed upward from People began as insects who inhabited the dark, watery first world. The insect people did not recognize sexual taboos, which angered the gods and led to their expulsion from each of the first three worlds. In the fourth world, the insects became (or, according to some versions of the story, helped create) First Man and First Woman. The couple had five sets of twins whom the gods taught the skills they would need to survive in the fifth world. The family then climbed a reed that brought them to the present earth. They created the mountains, weather, plants and animals they had known below. And they brought the gods up leads instead with the apparent readiness of the White House and Senate invasion until five paragraphs from the end.) The Post is also alone in paper squanders a bit of this edge when it writes that the situation in East journalists, and the scene of some of the world's worst reported human rights abuses," thus falsely suggesting that poor coverage of the topic was somehow mostly caused by something other than press inattention. scientists and military leaders, the Democrats are threatening to bring the Senate to a standstill unless Republicans agree to hold hearings on the area of nuclear weaponry is not traditional arms control, but enhanced The overriding explanation for devastation is bad building practices, soft and loose soil (as opposed to rocky soil) amplifies a quake's effects, as do valleys. Biggest new puzzle: Previously, it was thought that a quake couldn't jump a large body of water to activate a fault line on the other side, but in these calls come right after Congress let the independent counsel law pay gap between average workers and top corporate executives has exploded Why didn't the Post assign this at least the same priority as such Another Post mystery: A brief inside item says that in defiance of the paper identify the staffers, or more importantly, their bosses? Even though handgun deaths are actually down a bit from the early '90s, says shootings tend to stimulate lawful gun purchases for household protection, which may be bad news for those households, since according to one quoted expert, "the odds that a home will be the scene of a homicide are substantially interesting reason why established large corporations haven't exactly reaped in on Fox's proposal to devise a television special of an airplane purposely crashed into the desert with a resounding, "NO WAY!" But in a separate story the paper also notes that a recent study shows that surviving a plane crash can dots and pitch his show as psychiatric social work. injuries were the fault of the riders or the amusement parks. But Chatterbox is more interested in the broader question: Is leisure time more dangerous than The answer, of course, varies depending on what type of work you happen to do. "In my world, anyway, people, sitting in offices, are obviously not at risk miner, on the other hand, subjects himself to a lot of risk on the job. The type of leisure you tend to prefer is also a factor. "Some people go on are more exciting, like skiing and rock climbing." Presumably the folks who seek physical thrills in their leisure activity tend not to get them on the job, and people who get them on the job don't seek them out while on vacation. But probably there are a few coal miners out there who go hang gliding in year are associated with sports and recreation, not including the many thousands that occur in connection with recreational use of motor vehicles in "result from water recreation." (The most dangerous water sports, in declining order, are swimming, boating, and scuba diving.) But are vacations more dangerous, in the aggregate, than normal life? Chatterbox, alas, couldn't pose But her book includes a chart that sheds a little light on the subject by comparing the percentage of "unintentional injury deaths" in various categories (drowning, falling object, etc.) in homes, "public buildings" such as offices, industrial settings, and places where people engage in recreational activities. than any other recreational activity except swimming.) However, lightning is more likely to kill you while you're engaged in Collision with an object or person (apparently not one that's falling It's important to remember, of course, that not engaging in certain kinds of leisure activity (read: exercise) will also kill you; heart "Are vacations more dangerous than work?" (which, on reflection, should really be "Are vacations more dangerous than work or hanging around the house?") is a complex one. Chatterbox will continue to collect data on this subject in hopes But how would you write an introduction to such a vast topic for such What really irks me about the writing is its relentlessly upbeat tone. My books coat every museum, park, and hotel with a sticky layer of enthusiasm, making the entire city uniformly and unrecognizably wonderful. Flipping through my seven guidebooks, I found not a single negative restaurant review. I just Which brings us to a dirty industry secret: Guidebook writers, unlike travel journalists, are allowed to accept free meals and lodging. Actually, since their publishing houses generally don't provide food and hotel costs, they must rely on complimentary dinners and stays, which means that they notify the establishment ahead of time that they're coming to write a review. Can you imagine the succulent steak, the impeccable service, the free pair of Air Even Lonely Planet, the least fawning of my books, coughs that its "writers do not accept discounts or payments in exchange for positive coverage." Ah, so they can't auction off good reviews to the highest bidder! But writers can Discounts or no, Lonely Planet is proving to be my most trusted guide. This destination, and I probably would have chosen Lonely Planet to wander real jungles instead of urban ones. But the book is far more practical than any other, dishing out such goodies as city bus routes, the best food stands at Midway airport, names and programs of favorite local radio personalities, and Democratic Convention, or to explain how redlining segregated the city by race. Lonely Planet is also the only guide with a discernible sense of humor. (On is a substance sent by God to ruin political careers, and because of that, each and every delicate little flake that falls on the city is seen as an invader to methods of construction (the balloon frame and the skyscraper), fostered two to a set formula, regardless of what is unique about its subject destinations. Travel is all about distinctiveness, but I bet that the table of contents for I second your call for New Yorkers to appreciate our tourists (not to mention the riches they bring the city). Of course, we are defending ourselves or cruder than those from other countries. Rather, it's that international was the first nation wealthy enough to export our middle class. Now the middle class has been traveling for decades. Air travel is an everyday activity, entire cable channels are devoted to travel, and we buy that tourists are simply getting better at going places, and that it's time to the president wouldn't even take Carter's phone calls, so it's absurd to think you explain to me how a president who wants you to go to jail if you don't have a trigger lock is going to say that these [prisoners] should be released, even despite all this, several pundits note that Gore is still the candidate to surplus and Democrats wanting to pay down the debt. genuinely believe I could win the presidency of the United States. I think the whatsoever, or acts of violence, to further any goals of the independence Well, it's as if last week never happened, as all the gains that the stock and in the space of five or six days we went from being convinced that the Fed was done raising rates for the year to being almost certain that it would be wrongheaded. Bond prices have been oscillating as wildly in the past few weeks as Internet prices, and for reasons that are often even less obvious than those moving the stock market. Everyone, in other words, is looking forward to heavily), and wonder, as we all will, where the summer went. On to the White House correspondent 'out of respect to him and his position.' Has this million in sales. Yesterday, it announced that it was already going back to the the drastic devaluation of its currency and the collapse of its economy last summer. Surprisingly, massive capital flight from the country is not courtesy on its subways. One ad, for instance, reads, 'If you don't put anything on the seat next to you, someone else will be able to sit down.' I can launched until next spring at the earliest because the vibration of the trains will be made noisier, so that it seems like they're going faster." country, bringing teachers back onto payrolls, and the Labor Department has apparently not made the necessary seasonal adjustment yet. So now bond traders have as much reason to dread the end of summer as little children do." the restarting of negotiations over China's entry into the World Trade to accept an "accelerated deployment" of peacekeeping troops. Hours later but the LAT makes clear that no coherent message is emanating from acknowledged that some of his troops might be allying themselves with violent cowered in fear of the next paramilitary onslaught. The Post reviews tangible progress." The paper cautions that it remains unclear whether China sector of the province. A senior French commander acknowledged that industry, even though the program was approved a year ago. The piece is National Committee sent news organizations two press releases highlighting the Globe story. The releases are the latest in a series of "World According For months there have been news stories suggesting that Wen Ho development. There have been further suggestions that the Lee case exposes the there have been stories suggesting that Lee may not have been a spy after all. on for four years. It is clearly established that China somehow obtained design early '90s. But these secrets could have leaked from many places, including other government research labs and private defense contractors. What is the evidence implicating Wen Ho Lee? Mainly, it seems, He was even once seen hugging one of them. But these exchange visits and rules. But there is no evidence the information ever went any further. Lee says The thinness of the evidence against him has led some to that it is unlikely Lee will ever face charges of spying. At most, he may be his job in March. However, even this charge may never end up in court. Last would likely find it difficult to justify a different standard being applied to security by mishandling the investigation of Lee. How? Separate investigations security and to revoke Lee's access to sensitive information. The president and Cabinet officials were not fully informed of the security issues until late in the investigation. But there is no evidence of actual damage to national security due to these lapses. And there is no evidence tying any of this to Before we get to this week's Cocktail Chatter, I have a correction to make. interest rates in the right direction, I wrote that the Fed's adoption of a neutral bias was a shift from its earlier stance. In fact, the Fed had already adopted a neutral bias at its previous meeting, shifting from a bias toward tightening. What threw me was that it's relatively unusual for the Fed to raise interest rates off a neutral bias, but that is in fact what happened this week. The bond market, meanwhile, seemed so concerned about inflation that it felt as if the Fed was leaning toward tightening. (Which it did do.) So when the Fed announced that it was staying neutral, it felt like a change. All of the above is true, but I still shouldn't have made the mistake. stocks, since the idea behind the hike is that it will slow down the economy and, presumably, profits. But this economy seems so strong that the danger of the stock market welcomes them. Who knows how long this will last, but right now, investors seem to feel that if things are stable, the only answer is to buy. You can't keep a buoyant market down. Which is, I suppose, why you would discernible results, maybe making one or two phone calls wouldn't be is still around? Really? Well, a kickback here and a payoff there do add up. not defaulting, just deferring to a later date. 'Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?' the finance minister reportedly kind of line do you have to use to get Apollo to come home with you, with those of most other analysts who follow the company. The definition of morning. Never mind the "aw shucks" stuff: We expected that. Also the now de driven by polls, etc., etc. What interested me was his unabashed, more claim to be a liberal than he would try a tell a story about himself without spin: Remember all that stuff about "triangulating" and the Democrats declared liberal Democrat in my lifetime (outside of New York City, of course). the comfortable middle class so comfortable now that people feel they can sees a new mood dawning. With "compassionate conservatism," he, too, is banking on a sense that the public wants to think of itself as generous again now: poor and the left out? And Bush's ostensibly conservative ideas could turn out says about both men's readings of the national mood. Which brings us back to where we were yesterday: Are there other means of achieving equal opportunity than with preferences? It sounds as if you and I agree completely on that: The answer is education and what I call need to put your thumb on the scale of college admissions or hiring or seems to me, is precisely how do you do it. How do we make the schools really work for poor kids? What do we do about the parenting that doesn't prepare them for school? How do we counteract the peer pressure that tells them not to bother in class because it's "acting white"? And who exactly should be doing compassionate now. But that's only the beginning of the conversation, not the again now, but what exactly are we going to do about it? thumbnail sketch of the subjects of our little experiment. The Insight Guides are "softer," emphasizing glossy photos and punchy associate, is stylistically a synthesis of these two models. didn't originate in the United States, and are still largely targeted at Guides seek to better the guidebook's always rocky marriage of maps and text. and the spine, lending credence to the idea that one need be neither much of a traveler nor much of a writer to be a travel writer. was a worthy site, and they all had the same advice on how best to see it: Get there for the earliest ferry and beat the crowds in the race to Lady Liberty's crown, where spectacular views of Manhattan await. The guidebooks disagreed on (or simply didn't mention) when the first ferry actually left, but none quoted would be admitted to the crown. Here I learned (or rather, relearned) a valuable travel lesson: Never trust a travel guide. If a guidebook fact is yourself. The disclaimers in the books tell you as much themselves. Which begs the question: Why do people (myself included) continue to rely on (and delight in) products that so frequently prove unreliable? And how can so fierce brand loyalty, when they all say approximately the same thing? The Statue of Liberty is just the beginning: From Wall Street to the Met, there is against this ghetto safari mentality, chastising, "If you're too scared to go yesterday, by subway, without incident), the haughty tone is a bit troubling. Have you noticed that travelers are always quick to ridicule other travelers? Budget guides can be particularly harsh: Is this a considered reaction to the Should travel guides educate their readers, or simply pander to their who bought them were unfamiliar with the places they described. But mass media has made armchair travel experts out of all of us, at least in the cases of know, what these cities are about, and what we want to see when we're there. In theory, it's thrilling that people can travel farther from home, and that they know more before they arrive, but is the end result simply longer lines at the Statue of Liberty and the Hard Rock Cafe? Can travel guides still gently educate their readers, or have they merely become handmaidens, shuttling differences in the way your guides cover the city? Are they at least getting Take it easy there. I did not intend to cast aspersion. But you seemed to be awkward for you, how do you think they feel for me. But the fawning often stems candidate's failure to understand that black and brown voters have pretty much the same interests as white voters. They want: the schools to work; the jobs to are opinion makers, many of them. What they do and say could end up being crucial as the wheels of this campaign grind forward. In short, when things get what it would take to win. He said, "Give the same speech everywhere. Shake hands (meaning 'touch') as many as people as possible." I thought, "Boy, this stuff that the trade is made of and Bill did it better than anybody. The issues I apologize for not having read your book. But there is still time. As for the "hard" issues, I take it that you mean affirmative action. We will in fact get to that in the campaign, but you cannot blame people for not rushing to an issue that has been so heavily contaminated with ill will in the than optimal but will have to do until we can summon the political will to improve the quality of schools that serve black and Latino populations. I wrote "hard question" and made an honorable choice, don't you think? Chatterbox (who finally reached her today by phone): "I did not stonewall you or the issue." She hadn't returned Chatterbox's earlier queries because she was on vacation, she said; and she'd already explained herself to Felicity Commentary-- will note that Chatterbox had already allowed for the earlier item to assess the extremely damaging evidence.) It isn't got wind of the similarities, it published an editor's note saying it wouldn't have not read") that the Times attributed to her. Her mantra to be imagined that two people would independently arrive at the (erroneous) would independently arrive at the same words to express this idea. "I understand that there are clear similarities in some of the language use, but I arrived at my conclusions independently and I expressed them that way," publication without attribution, without citing it properly." But that's not possible! Chatterbox said. Lengthy passages are repeated Oh, come on, Chatterbox said. Why not come clean and at least admit that you Chatterbox briefly considered dedicating the rest of his life to finding out plagiarism but say it was inadvertent and trivial), which Chatterbox previously It's working. Aside from Chatterbox's rants on the subject, there continues Better Off Lying"), but the archival link doesn't seem to be working just now, Time magazine has a cover story this week, called "Why We Take Risks," that bears some superficial resemblance to Idiots and Their Boats.") Essentially it's a story about "extreme sports," whose rise in popularity Time links, somewhat unconvincingly, to day trading and "unprotected sex" and heroin use. Time reports that while baseball, touch football, and aerobics are declining in popularity, riskier sports like snowboarding and scuba diving are becoming more popular. "By every in and injuring themselves through adventure sports at an unprecedented News cover story on the same subject a couple of years back. problem, though, is that Time's story is apt to leave readers with the population are not active at all." Kids are particularly sedentary: "Nearly physical activity sharply declines during adolescence." This is typically characterized as a national decline in physical fitness, attributable to another section of the Surgeon General's report, President ago, the rise of "extreme sports" underscores a trend that's a bit different and more interesting than the one Time is promoting: Namely, that a small elite is engaging in pathologically daring leisure activities requiring unprecedented physical fitness, while the rest of us are getting fat on chips perspective, the danger of extreme sports is an inadvertent equalizer. These unbelievably fit people may be as likely to die young as the physically unfit masses are, if not more so (though not, of course, of the same cardiovascular causes). A better way to achieve equality would be a redistribution of physical fitness in which everybody engages in sensible, moderate exercise, and nobody engages in BASE (an acronym for "building, antenna, span, earth"), which, according to Time, involves hurtling off a cliff or a is over. Let me depart with some personal history that readers who wish to can recruited to college off of a street corner in a dying factory town where black being startled when a college professor visiting our town told me after an hour's conversation, mainly on the street, that I was college material and intelligent?") and a far better writer. Which amazed the faculty to no end, gave the honors commencement speech a few years ago and what an interesting He'd begin a lecture showing two photographs: one of a white man holding a especially in the role of preconception in human performance. these stories about genetically enhanced smartness in mice are hilariously superficial. We do not yet know what intelligence even is. When we find out, its visual representation will be something like a very complex, perhaps On affirmative action. Am I ambivalent? No. It's the only thing that kept us from collapsing into racial factionalism and civil war. I really think that. But I am most determined to speak loudly on equal access to education. On politics, I disagree with your assessment of my view. Tactical strategies do not preclude core values. But as you have said yourself, very few politicians have anything that even approaches the latter. I am sure that our paths will cross again, perhaps at luncheon, perhaps in Grand Central, where we height of his popularity immediately following the Gulf War, whining to his rubber, you're glue, bounce off me and stick to you! remind yourself why, click on "Flashbacks," and when the little box with the search engine appears, enter "Bush." Chatterbox is especially fond of the second installment of "President and First Lady Deal With a Rat," dated Sept. fiddling with that infernal liberal comic strip. Apparently, the rumor is not many people were calling his comic strip "liberal" during its early years: is one my roommate tells: Bush approached him and warned him that the itself as being in the vanguard of the counterculture. To be fair (not usually my strong suit), a different roommate says he was about. My own impression of him was formed almost entirely from our joint which I was elected my freshman year under the mistaken impression it had something to do with student government. In fact, it was the social committee, and our chief responsibilities were to arrange for bands and kegs of beer. All I can tell you about Bush was that he showed a lot of command presence during Convention, stuck his finger in my face and told me he had only two words for didn't like it at all"? A possible future president roughs you up and you don't answered, "because I have a notoriously bad memory." anything I was subjected to a charm offensive. That was back when the Bushes were still trying to woo me over from the Dark Side. Early on, Bar even purchased an original, making a nice contribution to the Coalition for the The newest statistics on the spread and lethality of AIDS lead at the The multiple AIDS stories are prompted by the government's release of takeaway is the same: The steep decline in new AIDs cases and in AIDS deaths that began three years ago, and which is associated with the emergence of the to be more important for controlling the spread of the disease than flattening out: There is a saturation effect in which most people who know strict regimen that optimizes their effectiveness is hard to stick to. Another is that excessive confidence in the therapies may be prompting people to now say that Bank of New York records that would have served as evidence of the presidential hopefuls, seeing in it an efficient way to flash distance from the seems to have unwritten rules: It's apparently a political plus for Protestants atheist, no matter how earnest, would, says a historian quoted in the piece, "don't ask, don't tell" rules in the military governing the service of gays "aren't working the way they were intended to work," and that he would work with military leaders to bring about an implementation strategy that's administration in its earliest days. And that until now, Republican candidates responded to Gore's interview by taking a position "aggressively to Gore's left," expressing grave doubts about the current policy, and saying that we ought to move toward a time "when gays can serve openly in the military." indicating that low paternal involvement with a teen is a key determinant of single mom, the study says, has a far better chance of avoiding drug abuse than idea is to incorporate certain sociological background factors-- such as range for him or her, and if the person's actual score exceeds the likely one identification of talented minority students in a way that will survive the recent negative rulings about affirmative action in admissions. But the piece isn't too clear on why this would work. Doesn't it just transfer the legally own lipstick line and recently tested the staying power of various lipsticks. giving lip service to stopping the violence. The striking picture on the to stop the photographer from taking a shot of refugees preparing to board a noting that apparently many victims had been shot by military assault rifles militia members if they attacked and that what they are doing is good for the The LAT notes concern before last week's vote about possible civil strife afterward, but says that "what is happening is not civil war but simply the killing and intimidation of unarmed civilians." The paper goes on to characterize international reaction thus far as "public condemnations and much story inside. The explosions, the papers note, came on the heels of a promising that on the chat shows yesterday, several Republican pols charged that concerned about a range of matters before Congress, including an antitrust bill and workers' compensation laws and tax issues. (Maybe they should concentrate a too revealing and was creating a stir in the office. Tigers, Dodgers and Padres. What Bean was up against in the aggressively hetero Is there a better racket than travel journalism? At least if you write a travel book you actually have to come up with a couple of hundred pages' worth of information. But even for a couple of thousand words that could have come from a brochure, the airfare still gets picked up by somebody else. Witness "the exoticism of the island state is palpable and omnipresent." Who knew? pyrotechnic gas grenades were indeed fired at a bunker within the Branch creation of significantly smarter mice through a minor genetic alteration. that the nation's public water systems are stricken by tens of thousands of cases of previously undocumented unsafe drinking water. The story refers to an infrared video made from an aircraft when the tear gas canisters were launched at the bunker. This suggests an orchestrated use of the gas, although the LAT quotes a law enforcement source saying that its deployment was "spur of the moment." One issue relevant here, which the press hasn't gotten to yet: the tape supports their account that the canisters bounced harmlessly off the bunker's roof and hence could not have started the subsequent lethal fire, and research coming out in Nature today. In the experiment, extra copies of a gene associated with recognizing something or remembering where something is were inserted into mouse embryos. The result: The enhanced mice grew up better than control mice at remembering say, that a tone was associated with a shock or where a resting platform was in a tank of opaque water. The Post quotes the research's lead scientist as saying that the experiment raises issues of equal access to perfecting technology and that it's an example of biology outpacing the culture's capacity to deal with ethics. conclusions: Judges are more likely than juries to rule for the plaintiff, but Today's Papers urges readers to always note the credit line accompanying an point. The piece claims that China has successfully devised a new espionage strategy that can "consistently defeat our ability to investigate or prosecute spying offenses." The key elements are, says the author, that China doesn't normally pay an agent for information, request the provision of classified documents, use intelligence officers to elicit information, or engage in clandestine activity in the United States. All this, he says, usually means no smoking guns of the sorts found in other espionage cases. Interesting, but the arguments if he didn't desperately need them to try to save face? versions of the guidebooks in the "...For Dummies" series. Today's Papers international peacekeeping force might be necessary to control the violence continued violence could lead to charges of crimes against humanity. The reporting he said that outside peacekeepers would not be welcome before the army could "calm down the situation" (no word on when or if), and that international peacekeeping forces," should they arrive prematurely. The for the violence, including charges that the foreign press was "exaggerating fault for playing a role in the independence elections in the first place. Both papers report that in addition to the routing of the general who were seen to have supported independence for the country, continues. The voters are predicted to approve the amendment in March. The LAT quotes respect and dignity they deserve. That sad chapter in our history ends today." segregation. The ruling represents the end of an era, and will have countrywide "assigning children to schools or allocating educational opportunities and that deny students an equal footing based on race." Both papers point out that Charlotte to desegregate (fifteen years after Brown vs. the Board of compelled to talk. "This is what happens when you can't keep your mouth shut. Bush failed to show up, because of bad weather, and Gore took the opportunity to show him up: "The Gore campaign, better known for playing defense most of the year, quickly seized the offensive. Moving with uncharacteristic swiftness, the vice president's campaign wangled an invitation to meet with the students that in the 1970s played host to a number of men who pioneered the Internet and the personal computer industry, yesterday cooked his last meal. Reasons given hackers are driven to figure them out); and plain old good taste. have recently dropped by a third and that convicted criminals are serving less of their total supply. The loss, which adds up to millions of dollars each year, is brought to light as area residents are being asked to conserve, combination of fixed federal grants and shrinking welfare rolls have left areas to prevent interference in tomorrow's referendum, according to a supervise the vote and announce the results in no less than a week. The cities have industrialized and expanded over the past few decades, despite a string of predictions that an earthquake would hit. The paper points out that vulnerable to a quake. Other details of the government's role are emerging: The state never set up a communications network that would link them to local provide people with new homes for free; costs to be met with international families who must rebuild their lives from scratch. that investigators have been less than successful targeting the nation's biggest illegal weapons dealers. Opponents of gun control blame federal Times that the survey did not take enough into account, like LAT devotes its entire editorial space to a plea for stricter gun control. The paper calls on lawmakers to ban assault weapons, require that guns be registered and owners licensed, impose background checks at gun shows, and International health specialists concerned with preventing malaria are Times that such a provision is likely, but not without a fierce struggle by unlikely adversaries: public health experts and environmentalists. carousel, inflation, and social disintegration) have only encouraged a broad range of people with money to find ways to send it westward. The article mentions a couple of recent, highly visible financial scandals but does not have sexual relations with that woman. Why wouldn't the President also put the grants itself a mulligan. Earlier in the week, the paper (and others) ran a least twice the size of first, which had hooked left, straight onto the back West Bank and calls on both sides to refrain from taking unilateral action, plan to achieve permanent settlement between the two sides in one year. in the negotiations, had been reluctant to interfere but plunged into the fray anxious to stress that her role was minimal, insisting she was neither a and journalists have left the country or have plans to leave. Only the lives, could flee the country, too. The LAT draws a connection between imminent refugee crisis: It was the army that trained, paid, and supported the videotape, released yesterday, supports the government's claim that the tear accuses former managers of misleading workers about the whereabouts of radioactive material stored at the plant, thereby exposing them to illegally a computer with dangerously high radiation readings was almost donated to a August, which represented the smallest increase since May but drove influenced most strongly by physical distress and can fluctuate wildly in the have found ways to embrace the study. An opponent points out that if the desire to die can be controlled with treatment, it should not be taken at face value; a proponent points out that if the desire to die is caused by reasons other I didn't watch the Open, if by "Open" you mean this big tennis thing in her age. I got over it, more or less, so trust that she will, too. The conventional wisdom is correct: The Sopranos deserved to win pretty much every award, and the fact that it got only two is a travesty, to the degree learned from the Times this morning, that the voters are volunteers, disproportionately elderly, and unemployed) is that most shows on television bad ritual. Of course, this is also the problem with the National Magazine Awards lunch, which has the additional problem of being, along with the White malathion, neighborhood by neighborhood, from trucks and from the air, as Speaking of charmingly quaint, and speaking of (literally) Soviet things, same thing again," she said, as people outside her house shouted "Traitor! of pop culture: Fine, I wish people read books more, too, but didn't it read A gray morning looking north from my office windows over Manhattan. favorite composition, the smarty pants "So What," written by Miles. A genius cops. Now she can reasonably say to the police unions: That was my husband; that it was Bill not her who pardoned these people. Meanwhile, the community'' will make her pay dearly for this, we will make her walk the is telling them through that razor smile that they have no choice except to someone fired from his campaign for issuing that initial "no"?) Bush was right to come; in a segmented market like this one, you need every vote you can get. It was healthy for his party, too; which is too white by far. Don't be so hard on the pols for making the rounds in the colored neighborhoods. It's good for Bush called "the little brown ones"; quite an asset on the hustings. How do you but whose true expertise lies in the field of music (when Chatterbox worked at this column's assertion that baby boomers were not the first large mainstream audience to embrace rock 'n' roll (which previously, of course, had I agree that it's absurd to make some sharp delineation between generations in the late 1950s and early '60s. Clearly there were boomers who didn't get rock music, and some members of the prior generation of teens who But let me tell you why I think you may have been too dismissive when you wrote, "Were the consumers who turned 'Rock Around the Clock' and 'Heartbreak allowances, and we bought rock records. It was during those years in the late '50s, in fact, and not the '60s, that many of us older boomers were first older teens, with more money and freedom, probably did play a big role in all of that. But there were significant differences between most people in these Unlike our predecessors, I knew of nobody in my group in the late '50s who was our parents' music, we thought. The prior generation of teens thought folk or syrupy ballads or "pop" tunes, which made them transitional artists able to appeal to both generations. Early rock was crossover music that allowed the older teens to support it, until the transition stopped and it got too loud and unruly for many of them. By then, it was the '60s, and we boomers were the Chatterbox is intrigued, but not surprised, to learn that his friend records? Surely not many. But Chatterbox concedes he may be wrong about this, art form known as rock 'n' roll. When people talk about rock 'n' roll's crossover into mainstream white culture, the decade they're usually talking exhibit.) But the groundwork for the youth culture that supported rock 'n' The important role played by big government in creating teen culture is explained this month in a magazine largely owned by, of all people, the article is the sketchiest and least convincing part; perhaps he fleshes out his argument more convincingly in the book. But the "rise" portion is fascinating, people were thrown out of work, as part of a public policy to reserve jobs for a similar impetus to throw old people out of work would later lead to the creation of Social Security.] Businesses could actually be fined if they kept childless young people on their payrolls. Also, for the first two years of the youths it had turned out of work, except in the effort of the Civilian What did these unwanted youths do? They went to high school. Although public perhaps more important, there was a new expectation that nearly everyone would go, and even graduate." When the United States entered World War II the who didn't enter those golden years--15, 16--until the early 1960s. it was the baby boom that first absorbed rock 'n' roll into the mass "Heartbreak Hotel." You can also make a decent case that the Year Zero was the first rock 'n' roll record ever to climb to the top of the charts. Were the consumers who turned "Rock Around the Clock" and "Heartbreak Hotel" into hit been born during and shortly before World War II. And they wouldn't have to use the power of the executive branch to help her bid for the Senate in New York at every opportunity. But as this episode shows, the New York road show will have at least three elements. First, she will recommend from time to time (She did this recently in the case of the young Yeshiva student who was shot to administration now and then to show that she is independent of Bill and nobody's person but her own. Third, the candidate will tack left, then right in an attempt to gather votes from both downstate liberals and upstate distancing herself the next. This is vintage "New Democrat" stuff, pioneered by Bill himself. The message to Latino voters and politicians, by the way, is: "Take it or leave it. Its the New Democrats or the Republicans; take your New York Daily News suggests that those being considered in the clemency bonanza were convicted not of bombings but of "lesser offenses.") In the absence of the nitty gritty, however, I will take a flier and say that the York, home of a great many Latino voters. If this had been a serious, closely reasoned plan, the White House would have some point person out there, making This opens onto a broader political question of how the two parties can appeal to minority voters without constantly insulting their intellects. My own mount a campaign less insulting that what the Democrats dish up. A penny for '80s or early '90s. I do not think I met a Democrat at all until I was about to graduate high school. I have often written about Democratic malfeasance and person. If you have to call me something, call me, well, libertarian. But alas, we may have reached a time when believing anything openly death. What we have now is a beauty contest, I think, in which the candidates will say as little as possible and wait for the rival or rivals to crack under the camera lights. As you say, let's pick this up tomorrow. out of bed early and headed to the Maxwell Street Market, the city's famous for the day out of tarps and folding chairs. I wandered for two hours, sampling coated in a green mole sauce that tasted differently with every second it so I can try the cold shrimp soup, the goat tacos, and the and Access (the cover of which claims to make "the world your neighborhood") don't mention the market even once. Insight Guide describes its past watches. My Compass Guide dismisses the current market a "sanitized successor" to the old. And Lonely Planet, with its orthodox adherence to alternative mentioning the food vendors, if not their offerings. Even better, it lists the market's Web site. The other books contain a smattering of travel sites, and attraction that has one. This is an easy and obvious solution to one of the biggest weaknesses of guidebooks, which is that they're out of date from the moment they're printed. Yesterday, for example, you could have theoretically logged on to the Statue of Liberty's Web site to find the correct departure four pages. Most buildings are dismissed in two or three sentences. Dates and architects for some buildings are listed, but others are mysteriously omitted. postcards on the walls." Meanwhile, the Rookery Building and its famous Frank Public Library's timeline or the other guidebooks, which list the correct What fun it was to write that last paragraph. Did I detect a similar note of triumph in your voice when you caught the guidebooks flubbing the Statue of Liberty schedules? Maybe this is the answer to your (excellent) question about why we buy and tote around guides we know are flawed, outdated, and out of style. My trips often become contests between myself and my guidebooks: Can I do them one better, finding more inside information, local color, novel tastes, and great prices than the experts? When I saw the paltry descriptions of the quick these books are to ridicule other voyagers. Rather than showing real superior to the next guy on the museum ticket line. Traveling has become subtly competitive, with all of us vying for maximum independence, authenticity, and Time Out and Wallpaper have recently been taking a camp approach the meantime, if you had to take one guidebook to New York, which would it be? Both the Republicans and Democratic supporters of Al Gore have been laying raised an objection to vouchers based on the separation of church and potential efficacy and about whether they can pass constitutional muster. The argument is that since no one knows for certain what kind of education reform will ultimately be most effective, we should try a lot of different ideas on a was in the Senate. Here's what he said about vouchers at a National Press Club I think the jury is out as to whether it actually would lead to an improvement of education. I think that choice should be considered. I have some reservations about it, but in the course of an education bill that moves through the Congress I think we can look at it thoroughly, and it is a possibility. As I say, I have some reservations about it, and I think that you have to confront some of the basic questions about who will receive the vouchers. And if you receive a voucher, are you allowed to go to any school in the state? Are you allowed to go to only certain schools? Are you allowed to go questions that are raised by the issue of choice and education vouchers. legislation that included funding for voucher experiments. In endorsing that education reform, even imperfect notions are worth trying. "Choice may not be the panacea for all our nation's education ills," he said in a speech on the Senate floor, "but we cannot afford not to take an honest look at whether more options would help kids who today are trapped in the worst schools in our categorical statement that he no longer supports any experiments with vouchers. who is interested in vying for their endorsements, may cave and contradict his earlier statements on the subject. But he hasn't done so yet. paper also detects the first outside military stirrings, however faint: a noting for instance that the Department of Defense is taking the lead there, personally taking firm control of the situation. (The Times notes that it has promised, but not yet delivered, tens of billions in emergency financial warehouse turned back when it was attacked by militia members with M-16 assault It's the LAT lead that writes the story from the most basic humanitarian point of view. Its very first sentence throws down the moral president said the corruption charges against him are politically inspired. Once source tells the Times that in response to a direct question from example of the fine old political art of deceiving without lying: When Ford was The Wall Street Journal's "Business Bulletin" reports that a will have to be competitive on products and rates and offer more than lip and four inches of rain fell during the morning rush hour, effectively shutting affair. Technically, the military is barred from participating in domestic standoff. The Army claims they were there as observers. The investigation, to incendiary canisters of tear gas were used wasn't made public earlier. prosecutor who participated in the Treasury Department's investigation of the and redundant: "If they don't reopen the whole thing now and actually use loans, may have been laundered through the Bank of New York into accounts held mafioso (currently missing). The man suspected of laundering the money for Another bank executive (currently under suspension) who handled the bank's contraceptive that could be injected into women to prevent pregnancy for up to effects. Plaintiffs' attorneys were disappointed by the amount of the Congress. Many organizations protested, claiming that the information the site made it possible for customers and corporations to opt out of these "Purchase Circles," which Amazon creates by "data mining" its extensive customer scrutinized by both the financial press and investors anxious to figure out whether the Federal Reserve is planning to raise interest rates anytime soon. bankers want to have a handle on what may drive inflation in the future. even central bankers have a hard time figuring out when markets are overvalued. exuberance" speech of three years ago was precisely what it was, one person's attempt to outthink a market that it is very difficult to outthink. What's especially curious about this is that one would have thought this was a conclusion a supposedly ardent devotee of the free market would have reached a level of wisdom and farsightedness that the media have come to grant him. His remarks are typically shrouded and hedged, and though it is of course the job of the Fed to restrain inflation and promote economic growth, which requires does seem well aware of the limits of his own knowledge. economy is that the market knows more than any individual within it. But and oddly certain that something like a bubble was in place. In his speech on "millions of investors, many of whom are highly knowledgeable about the prospects for the specific companies" that make up the market indices. Even more important, perhaps, he suggested that the unprecedented rise in stock prices over the past five years in particular was due to a substantive change in the way the market discounted the future. Obviously, we don't know today think stocks are less risky than they once did, believe that inflation is extended for a long period of time. Put those things together, and you end up with a strong case for higher stock prices. Any or all of those assumptions may be wrong, of course, but in pointing to the discounting process in particular "irrationality" and move toward a more rigorous analysis of what's been or not. In emphasizing that the best, and clearest, use of monetary policy is to revive an economy in the wake of a deflationary crash by cutting the business of figuring out what stock prices should be. The point of watching asset prices for the Fed is to understand whether the wealth effect is helping rev the economy beyond sustainable growth. It's not to scold investors. We may be heading for a crash (though I don't think so). But if we are, we'll get But the Post and especially the LAT focus instead on wringing significance from the the team members to use incendiary military tear gas cartridges against an underground shelter near the main compound building. The Post notes that incendiary rounds. The LAT adds that when in an appearance before videotape existed covering the phase of the operation when, it turns out, Rogers' directive was issued. Rogers, the LAT reminds, was later removed that day, as saying that he does not recall hearing it. There is much discussion in the stories about how these revelations have credibility takes a hit too: the media's. It's a little hard to believe that if circumstances, the mainstream media would have left the story to a documentary elected president, he would strip federal funding from failing public schools and give the money to parents for tutors or to help them transfer their kids to story inside. The coverage notes that Bush never used the word "voucher." The Wall Street Journal reports a new finding in the unraveling dozens of banks around the world are now suspected of receiving parts of the reports that the angel was supposed to be former White House chief of staff first time technically available. So, the paper explains, no obvious answer, which we've gestured toward in various ways this week, is just that the books are a lot of fun to read. Your analysis of their narrative structure, by the way, was incisive. The sonnet sequence analogy is inspired: With each book you become newly aware of the tight structural constraints But as we know, a book's quality and its success are two different things. Some of the hype about Harry Potter seems a bit wild: You'd think, reading parent or teacher saying something to the effect of "My kid never showed any interest in reading until Harry Potter came along," with the implication that Adults who have children partake of a great deal of kid culture, voluntarily fiction quite independent of the professional requirements of keeping up with what her students are reading, finding new texts to assign, and so forth. Part of the fun of having (or teaching) children is the vicarious reliving of one's renting videotapes of the movies that enchanted you or gave you nightmares, commonsensical), have resonated with parents is no surprise. She quite cannily In an earlier posting you speculated that our enthusiasm for Harry Potter may arise from our anxiety about technology, and it's striking (this is something my wife called to my attention after she read the first two books) how technologically underdeveloped the muggle world is in these books, in really any television or movies. And of course the wizard world is a world of practice spells. (They do, however, collect famous wizard trading cards, which move, just as all wizard photographs do. But, curiously, wizard photography for one's own childhood and nostalgia for the timeless realm of classic corporal punishment has fallen from favor. (The death penalty seems to be Of course, none of this explains why these books have crossed over not only from children to their parents but also to adults who don't have children. This seems genuinely unprecedented, and it may be one of those inexplicable phenomena the culture likes to toss our way every now and then. (Our seeker is I haven't had such a purely escapist reading experience in a long time. As much fun as it was to read these books, it's been even more fun I know what you mean about being a journalist. Almost every assignment is a challenge in a different way and it never seems to get easier. I often feel as if I only get half the story sometimes, so I typically do a massive amount of reporting that is most often much more than I will ever need. I think that is left on the cutting room floor of daily journalism. Think of all the good stuff we all collect daily in our reporting that we never add to stories. Most often reporters recount these tales with each other and with their sources rather than share them with the general public. Much of it, of course, using the standards of top newspapers, cannot be used since it is largely gossip we are repeating, although it certainly could make for some very good stories. I often wonder when a really great fictional book will be written about this era (probably decades and decades hence as it is too close). In any case, there certainly is no lack of information available about the moguls of technology now as they all become our current pop icons. I would current age of stock market mania and celebration of the entrepreneur. So the shift in the image of Gates has been an interesting one for me to "characters," for lack of a better word. So there, while you think of Case, you amusing and informative dispatches, several of which made me spit up my lunch think it was just that insularity that helped them, much in the same way that since its employees would have been mocked into obscurity by the digerati. Out obvious turning point between the computer era and the digital age. I think it almost does not matter what the judge does since it's clear that the balance of power is shifting again, although it not clear where it will land. Will the companies? Or will it be none of them because the Internet allows and encourages a plethora of strong companies and a complex interconnection of was. That incredible empire dominated the world and I imagine it did not seem possible to people living then that anyone could loosen that empire's grip on humanity. But we all know how that story turned out. Now I am getting way too philosophical, but this is my final missive, so why not? Perhaps you could hasten a prediction of where this is all going. As for substantially with Hill. The book marshaled mountains of evidence to show that contrasts their behavior during the confirmation hearings. Hill is a cipher, a man who lets himself be used as a pawn until he erupts in an unconvincing fit of rage before the Senate Confirmation Committee. A triumph for Democrats and feminists everywhere? Not exactly. Consider the puzzling way the movie depicts the sexual lives of its characters. The Machiavellian strategist who shepherded the candidate through the nomination process. A charismatic if not particularly sympathetic man, he gets most of the of time at their respective homes, where they enjoy the fruits of when he collapses in their bathroom; she calls him a warrior for God. In There are two intriguing cracks in this portrait of happy female kisses her as he takes his leave and calls her "sweetheart." She is would have come forward if she weren't telling the truth. He sighs. Once these moments pass, it is as if they never happened. The women never mention them again, nor do they break ranks with their boss or husband over Hill. On the other side of the fence are Hill and her supporters, a coven of female law professors and senatorial aides. All of them seem to be single women (some of them may have husbands, but we never see them); all of them dress in power suits. None is shown at home. They congregate in Hill's hotel room or maneuver behind the scenes of the confirmation hearing. They have neither spouse or a lonely Democratic loser, a feminist with no life? The writers and producers of Strange Justice seem to have made their preferences It's a nasty, muggy morning where I am, the worst of both seasons: dark as only fall mornings can be, but still as humid as summer. Even so, I couldn't help but gloat a little as I read the papers. What could be more delicious than the third he's offered. But we're supposed to believe it has nothing to do with that election? Sure. If you buy that, you must still be living in the '50s, or whenever it was that we last took what politicians said at face value. Of interesting, in my view, than catching him with any woman. This is what's ends justify just about any means, no matter how unprincipled. pandering to an ethnic constituency. Sure, that's the oldest form of "diversity they've never rallied around opposition politics, let alone the use of them six years ago. They wrap themselves in the flag of ethnicity, but on this and many, many other issues, they don't represent anyone but other political activists like themselves. Of course, this is hardly a new discovery, and it isn't really delicious at all. But it's nice to see it exposed so clearly for a it all depresses me. This is what we call political debate? This is what passes for democracy? The only thing worse going on in the news now in my view is what's passing for a discussion of race among the presidential candidates. But sales, since now the flagging Beanie Baby market will be enlivened by the desire to get in while you can. (Along the same lines, a friend of mine thinks it represents a very rare thing in the business world: a recognition that things actually come to an end. (A similarly smart decision was made, oddly writing this sentence). More to the point, like any fad it's fading out, reaching the point of diminishing returns. Cashing out now would be an What makes such a move difficult is that although Beanie Babies may have reached the point of diminishing returns, they probably have not reached the point of nonexistent returns. In other words, there's still money to be made selling Beanie Babies. It's just not enough money to justify future investment. And the fundamental problem is that if you don't move on early enough, you find yourself caught, believing that the only way to recoup the money you've put within the odd industry of collectible pop culture. In the late 1980s and early too many cards that were too expensive. When the bubble burst, entire companies vanished, and the major players have barely struggled to stay afloat. The same was true of comic books, which saw a proliferation of titles and of publishers when they were hot and a dramatic downsizing when demand faded. Unfortunately, when the smoke clears, prices for these goods remain surprisingly high (an ago), which may have something to do with why sales growth is so slow. All of this is almost textbook economics, of course, since any time you have a business that is reaping sizeable profits, competitors are going to enter the market and successful businesses are going to expand rapidly in an attempt to sell more goods. But in textbook economics, any competitive marketplace ends with everyone reaping no profits. That's why the discipline to move on when the where militias closely associated with the military and police forces of inside, although it fronts a report that at the United Nations, there is gathering sentiment favoring sending in a multinational military force, most control, forcing the United Nations to evacuate half its staff, running off the ambassador's residence, burning homes, and shooting and terrorizing the general have been actively and directly involved in the terror. What is less clear is government or rather was the more spontaneous expression of officers' personal deserted their units and joined the militias, and even cites some unconfirmed the deployment of such a force is being viewed by diplomats as possible only in billions of dollars in outside aid to recover from its economic collapse. to give the paper any of the details. Gore shows a similar gift for analysis now underway that will be presented to the White House later this week lifetime job security against outsourcing or job streamlining. publicize his pitch to Congress to fund school construction and modernization, before. Oddly, the paper doesn't remind the reader of a similar episode during and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible." His Republican presidential Academy, went to visit his latest girlfriend in a classy suburb of collapsed drunk through the screen door of her parents house. Or the time friends and their wives by pulling a switchblade out of her purse and cleaning her nails. Or, in a far more serious vein, the time when, as a prisoner of war In a culture where most politicians scurry to minimize any hint of behavior youthful indiscretions in detail and without feigned regret. He's proud of the purpose in sharing all this isn't, or isn't merely, to boast. It's to paint a truthful portrait of his earlier life, before he was transformed by his honesty isn't a calculated strategy for winning over the press. It has that effect, of course, but it's the authentic expression of a remarkable and swore like, well, sailors. But both understood what being an officer meant. his duties no matter how difficult or dangerous they are. His life is ransomed to his duty. An officer must trust his fellow officers, and expect their trust in return. He must not expect others to bear what he will not." and father's rascally steps by performing poorly as a student and chafing under the hazing that "plebes" were expected to accept. "I resisted not by refusing the hazing but by letting my resentment show, and by failing to conform fully lords of the first and second class to know my compliance was grudging and in no way implied respect for them." Constantly breaking the rules and provoking consciousness on impact. But he came to underwater and surfaced unharmed. He was at ground zero of a catastrophic explosion and fire aboard the aircraft injuries. You might say he was unlucky to be shot down over the center of breaking three of four limbs, and to avoid being finished off by an angry mob. occupies the second half of his book, is wonderful: vivid, unsentimental, and drawing beatings and time in solitary confinement for communicating with other prisoners and taunting his jailers. "Resisting, being uncooperative and a general pain in the ass, proved, as it had in the past, to be a morale booster for me," he writes. His most heroic act of insubordination was declining to be extraordinary as his decision to remain a prisoner seems, it was entirely in person throughout his life. The unwillingness to bend to hazing as a book is that insubordination is a way of establishing moral independence. By resist and prepared to sign a confession saying he was a "black criminal" and sense: It was the moment he realized that he was beyond his own control. "I felt it blemished my record permanently, and even today I find it hard to suppress feelings of remorse," he writes. "In truth, I don't even bother to try to suppress them anymore. My remorse shows me the limits of my zealously guarded autonomy." He couldn't hold out alone, and wouldn't have held up at all mistake. Two pages later, he describes it as a worthy cause. At another point didn't support the war sufficiently. This is perfectly circular reasoning: The States should have fought the war harder or not at all. This is the approved study of the impact of economic incentives on the decision to die). First to explicate the implicit logic in the Republican Congress' push to eliminate all distaste for the tax collector, high estate taxes are positively correlated however, satisfactorily explained (or, indeed, even attempted to explicate) the manifestations of piety. But with regard to the timing of a meeting with the Great Maker, they have been firmly on the side of later rather than sooner. So "death tax," as they routinely denote it, that has such a proven record of encouraging longevity? The answer may be found in a recent study emanating from the Urban Institute. In exploring the ramifications of alternatives will recommend itself to a Congress whose desire to placate cuts. Thus the genius of the death tax repeal proposal: Why not cloak a sharp poetically named garbage dump in the world). I don't think the Web will make marvelous things about our books is the way they organize a major metropolis is host to some excellent travel sites, but you'd have to visit several of them in order to produce a commensurately comprehensive guide. You wouldn't have a table of contents or an index. And you'd have to traipse around with a thick sheaf of computer printouts instead of a slim paperback. That said, if electronic books ever replace printed ones, travel guidebooks will surely be first among the wired. Our kids will probably hit the road with Noble and scribbling down the best of each, as I usually do) they'll simply contain constantly updated train schedules, hotel prices, and restaurant menus. They'll enjoy the coherence and organization of our guidebooks, but also the To finish off the book reviews, let me predict that the Access Guides may be impresario who created the series, started off in the telephone book business his illustrious bio), and his guides work very much like your local White Pages. Each site, restaurant, and hotel has its own entry. If you know what you want to look up and what it's called, you'll be fine. If not, you'll have to read the whole damned book. There's no narrative to tie the entries together and little indication that some are more special than others (the Carbide and Carbon Building, a "deco masterpiece," gets the same amount of space as the beaches, volleyball and tennis courts, mini golf, and even an outdoor gym with a full set of Nautilus machines, all accessible to the public. In short, the lakefront is one of the city's most defining, enviable, and enjoyable to describe many of the park's offerings, or more important, its central role in city life. There's no mention of the park in the table of contents or the I disagree with your suggestion that a guidebook contain only endorsements. overrated and the overpriced. Then again, perhaps you're just a more chipper traveler than I am; you seemed to enjoy all your guidebooks equally. Or did you? I know our dialogue is over, but I still wish I could ask you where you're When you think about whether it should have been done, you end up confronting again a central paradox of the media business today: The more fragmented audiences and consumer markets become, the more important scale appears to be. That's true both because the larger you are, the easier it is many different places. In the end, the ability to distribute content (and advertising) is probably as important as the ability to produce content, and even though in the age of the Internet and 95-channel cable systems you'd think anyone can get a message out there, successful distribution is still basically that it can use all those different outlets is essential. down debt, and generally focusing the company on its core operations. But it's that no matter what you make, if people don't see it or hear it, it doesn't money to make questionable acquisitions and engage in hostile takeover battles. feeling you're listening to someone who thinks that media companies should be judged by the same economic and business standards as other companies, as opposed to someone who thinks that media companies should be valued by the grandiosity of their dreams. Needless to say, this is a good thing. ("mogul" being a word that doesn't fit), one of his greatest strengths is his ability to recognize the value of the seemingly mundane. Radio and outdoor stations are similarly boring, but while they are not the cash cows they once should, given the historical record, be greeted with skepticism. But in may have made the best decision of his business career. interesting still, on this at least, we don't seem to disagree all that much. Maybe we should dine together more often? (As you can see, even though I write about politics, I don't really relish or even like the battle part of it. It's people are unhappy that she didn't come to them to kiss their rings and inquire before she took a stand on any issues they claim to care about. But more than So I should be pleased, right? Well, not so fast. Because I don't think is indeed trying to do, and her husband has been doing for years now. Unlike these two opportunists and others like them, politicians who truly occupy what's sometimes called "the vital center" find a way to go beyond ideology appeal to voters across the spectrum. When it's done right, it's not about hedging. It's about real political creativity and the much needed balancing of conflicting political interests. (And it usually ends up alienating political regulars on both sides of the aisle.) True enough (I concede in advance), there give the vital center a bad name by pretending that it's no more than dishonest have respected her more for that than for the unprincipled hedging that you so rightly point out is apparently going to be her hallmark. All these years, I out she's the one who's been arguing all along that the administration should the public wants to hear it." It's going to be a great campaign to watch and breakfast. Let's talk tomorrow about the two parties' appeal for minority Times leads with what it claims is alarm among "education advocates" (as opposed to the rest of us?) about continuing SAT disparities between whites the money already lent there. This, notes the paper, puts the United States at lead cites an "ethnic gap" and refers to the worry that schools are failing to prepare "nonwhites." But the story itself never mentions the SAT performance demographics and that lends false credibility to the stark picture the paper Also, the stories fail to establish any sense of context that would justify concerns over the differences in scores they report. For instance, the LAT notes that nationally, scores for whites "rose" one point from the math, but there is no discussion of what a standard deviation would be on samples of SAT scores. Since test scores are known by college counselors and admissions officials to often vary dozens and dozens of points from one stuff of crisis. Or if it is, at least the papers need to argue the point. Similarly, the LAT says the national verbal score "remained mired at hardly mentions the ethnic angle at all, dwelling much more on differences between boys' and girls' scores, and (in the online version at least), sits under a refreshingly calm headline: "College Board Scores Vary Little From own investigation is said to be interested in what role the Army's Delta Force may have played in the operation. It would have been nice if the story had said something about what the law is on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. It's not an absolute firewall anymore, is it? downturn in production and the flight of movie business to foreign locations, Interestingly, the politicians mirror this partisan divide. President dollars in collateral to a politician, even for private use, amounts to the Reform Party, which eschews social issues. Conservative pundits note with Portrait of a Humanitarian: Still on vacation, John to peg the topic to Labor Day.) Unlike last week's entertaining but airy show on the millennium, this week's smart program is grounded in specific policy When a panelist remarks that many immigrants are valedictorians, Stein sneers, interjects, "Why don't you move there if you like it so much?" Stein also weapon, "what he's [really] saying is, 'We're redistributing income to the generation. The question is, How do we cut the losses, and how do we keep a process going where we continue to destroy nuclear weapons?" Well, if people were expecting the end of summer to bring a return to disappointed. The languor of the late summer carried over into this week, as The Dow is now just about where it was in early May. Interest rates are higher, but inflation looks just as dead, and corporate earnings are booming, and when you mix all that together, what you end up with is a market that looks to be a story that got written four or five hundred times without anything really it snaps up or is snapped up by a movie studio or something. It's almost like its gold stash to finance debt relief for poor countries, but has given up on that plan because the gold industry was worried that the sale would force that's valuable only because other people think it's valuable and then find out that other people think it's so valuable that if you sell it, the value will Apparently, concerns about just this kind of situation spurred Congress to pass like to work on making Amazon's stock price 'more stable.' It's lovely Market, I could sense your inner travel writer clamoring to run free. But the guidebook might be extinct before you have a chance to bring your gifts to the tourist masses. Accurate contact information (Web sites, phone numbers), it seems, is only a stopgap measure in the battle against obsolescence. If you've got to get online anyway, what's to stop the reader from eliminating the middle man by using an online content site? Very little, when you're visiting an Even if the city guide is endangered, I have high hopes for the real wonder of the species, the regional guide. A book that can point you from the bus after day, is amazing. And the sympathetic voice of a paperback travel train rides when no one else in your compartment speaks your language. But which guides do I like specifically? I find myself agreeing with the up in literary savvy what it lacks in maps and practical information. The Lonely Planet earns its keep, particularly with its clear, compact maps. It's overlooked by the new "tourist chic" elite. I love that the drive for another chance to be hot. Solitude is all well and good, but no one comes to than New Yorkers to say something shocking, enlightening, or both. And you may as well learn to love them. No matter when you visit, it's impossible to happily tell you. Still, I find your architectural critique unduly harsh. The either as a comprehensive guide to Loop architecture is sacrilege. Ideally, a guidebook should give you just enough information to get you in the door, and But not even recommendations are sacred anymore. Another pet peeve of mine guides contain a list of "recommended" films and books, including travel titles, invariably recommend several or all of their other guides. Credibility is the bread and butter of a travel guide; why would one sabotage it with such away an honest opinion when there's a buck to be made passing someone on to a On a lighter note, do you have any favorite travel writing banalities yet? newspapers, and movies before I came, I expected a bland expanse of people and places largely indistinguishable from one other. Imagine my surprise when informed me that I was entering "a city of contrasts." Access refined this to New York wasn't a city at all, but a "mosaic of grand contradictions." And you, Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. me?" question, what other questions are there that deal with "love, etiquette, as you can find many questions that meet the standard you have read into our people who read our instructions were not deterred by the defect you discovered and have sent us heartfelt questions on a number of subjects. Unrelenting attention to syntax can be an obstacle to communication. year, my wife is dragging me to the home of some friends of hers to celebrate the new year. The problem is that they are total teetotalers, and to me, a day (much less New Year's Eve) without a drink is no day at all! Would it be rude their house, their party, and their rules. If they say no, which would be quite within the bounds of propriety, you should either restrain yourself at the that every editor these days is trying to copy the tone of the wonderful advice think this is? It can't be because they have no brilliant ideas of their own, (not her real name) used to write an advice column. Readers would write her with their questions on life, love, and (usually) microeconomics, and she would never to leave a dead fish alone in a car on a hot day with the windows rolled people, such as Tipper Gore! They're human too, you know!" And Prudence, she represent the next evolutionary step in journalism? Or are you nothing more questions, and I hope you won't mind if I answer them both at once. "Dear Prudence" did not originate with an editor searching for a new idea. It was a response to the overwhelming public demand for advice. People seek answers to their real problems, and other people enjoy and profit from reading the more interested in those problems than in the questions that pundits make up just so they will have something to write about, questions selected so that the lenders.) Thus, I consider myself part of the constants of history, not part of it's a free country and a free market. If no problems are submitted, there will be no answers. And if there are problems and answers but no one reads them, boyfriend broke up with her via a note. That she was pregnant at the time makes the situation with respect to his morality quite clear: He had and has the morals of a banana slug. (That he cringes at salt shakers only bolsters this conclusion.) The question that I find interesting concerns the etiquette of breaking up. I contend that the only way one person should kiss off another is reasoning is moral (as morality is the basis of so much mannerly behavior): In other way (by telephone, by note) smacks of cowardice. Further, it seems to me that my preferred mode serves a useful societal function as well, by making romantic relationships somewhat more stable since somewhat more difficult to dissolve during temporary difficulties. This last point, of course, presumes that society has an interest in stable romantic relationships; if you accept that society has an interest in marriage, and that stable romantic relationships both include and lead to marriage, you must conclude that society does indeed have such an interest. Have you any thoughts on this? A nation holds its breath (well, except for those holding others at gunpoint). encounter is required for a breakup depends on the reason for the breakup. If A splits from B because B has been obviously offensive and fraudulent, the she learns that he is. B then deserves nothing. In the case to which you refer, can be offered. Probably the general rule is that a party who is seriously to start our relations by pointing out little details, but both you and the door for your loved one. The other point is you don't leave her standing by the nearest purse snatcher or other criminal element who can often appear for your addition to the reasons for helping your beloved get into the car. Unfortunately, it is a necessary addition. Sentimental Prudence prefers to focus on the romantic side of life, but she cannot deny there is a darker side about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably this too personal or indelicate a subject for public consumption, but I am in a department. Do you think this is a legitimate consideration, or am I being define what you mean by "iffy." Do you mean he is putting off going to bed, so you wonder if he has declared his major? Or do you mean you've already been to bed and are thinking you could put up with this if he were a would probably be the same for either situation: You must determine the importance of sex in your life. You are still young, so you can afford some more looking time. On the other hand, you may already have run through a number confusion surrounds the use of "mister" when addressing more than one of mister) only when addressing two men with the same surname residing at the find it often used for two men with different surnames who do sometimes reside complication in modern feminine address. Did I miss a change in the mister, even for the unrelated and separately domiciled. The origin, of course, those gentlemen have to do with oil or guns. In any case, she rejoices that often should one thank a waiter for service rendered during the course of a meal? Several of my friends think it is appropriate to specifically thank the waiter for each task he or she performs. I am of the opinion that one should always be polite to waiters, but it is best to allow them to fulfill simple operations like filling a water glass or removing plates with a minimum of interruption. Repeatedly saying thank you forces the waiter to engage in conversation, when they just want to finish a small task in a hurry. Who's case she pretends not to have noticed. It is perfectly correct to parcel out Naturally, there is less need to acknowledge service when one is enjoying Regarding a letter from your column about a young woman's boyfriend being afraid her "pedigree" isn't good enough for his mother, I have some suggestions Pretentious boob: "Do you come from an old family?" for a fun column. And by the way, thanks for your wise answer to Libertarian a while back. You knew something I took years to learn. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably me for advice about his neighbors, who call the police to complain about his playing a radio too loudly. He owns a radio; he just never plays it, he says. Once he dropped a weight while exercising, and the neighbor called the police to complain about the excessive noise. The police were nonplussed and said the neighbors were overly fussy, but the complaints and the police visits drafted a longish letter of apology for giving the neighbors offense. I offered to write a more appropriate letter for him. He accepted my offer and will opinion of my note. I had him declare in the note that he was really perplexed about why he was being singled out for complaint. Was it not possible that the (white) neighbors didn't like him for things he has no control over (being black)? If that should be the case, perhaps counseling by a state agency might be appropriate, and he would be willing to participate. nice guy. I couldn't bear to see him apologizing for things that never happened. He's always cheerful, never swears, dresses neatly, works quietly. I don't know what your office is like, but the rest of us cannot be described not a social agitator, but I am in favor of justice. Did I do the right thing voluntarily go into counseling with a state agency. call the race card is appropriate, seeing that the deck is obviously stacked because of your friend's color. It is always a last resort to play hardball, office, by the way, is populated by cheerful people who are neatly dressed and (and those of all the others out there) voicing concern that it is "becoming a who, for the past several years, had a very mediocre sex life. I was the guy in the joke: "Call him oatmeal. Three minutes and he's done." I was also in denial for three weeks and my wife and I are both much happier. She has since confided that sex was the one part of our relationship she was not happy with. the unfortunate misconception that everyone is hyperventilating about is that this drug does something other than help those that need it. It's not an aphrodisiac, it's not going to turn wannabes into young studs. The only people it's going to do anything for are those with erectile dysfunction. Besides, those looking for a recreational sexual drug aren't going to go to a doctor and claim they can't get it up; their egos wouldn't let them. If they do obtain it on the black market they are going to find that it doesn't do anything for them they can't already do without it. It only helps those who need it. To quote which you refer, "People of good will cannot begrudge those in genuine need." reference suggests another difficulty altogether, but we'll leave that alone for now.) Alas, you are mistaken about men and women not trying to use got their hands on it, and a close friend who's a physician reports that all kinds of men without impotence problems are requesting prescriptions. (You homosexuality is not only "a sin, but just another problem like alcoholism, sex is, of course, entitled to apply his own interpretation of the Bible to his personal life. But when it comes to dictating to others, it always amazes me interpretation of the Bible for medical and psychiatric findings. gardeners really want from winter is assurance that it won't be back. But hope to plant, scarfing up little wonders at nurseries because we simply often assume that the winter garden, its flowers having died back, is devoid, misimpression but only makes things worse. Solace is offered: story after story on how to supply your garden with what is ubiquitously referred to as "winter berries and mottled, peeling bark designed to cure whatever ails your One problem with the term winter interest is that it implies that winter is not very interesting. Another is the notion that we seek something as mealy and undistinguished as interest, rather than beauty, which defense, these articles do make us aware of these woody winter plants and of the increasing diversity of cultivars available for winter gardening. Few things bring me as much joy as the sight of my own swampy backyard, all clinging to their branches. To see the monochromatic splendor of a wintry craze for winter interest, on the other hand, has really become a fetish for winter, and it can teach us a lot about what makes a garden beautiful in perhaps, or a garden known mainly for its flower borders, but public gardens, they're more likely to reveal their secrets, their pasts, and their intentions. is created more through gestures than by any one plant. Structure, often referred to as "bones," is created through architectural elements such as evergreen hedges, arrangements of trees and shrubs, walls, terraces, and flights of stairs. The placement of these things affects the spatial perception of the ground, the sides, and the roof plane of the garden. Once you have created such a garden "room," you can furnish it with any seasonal delights you like. The bones of the garden are not put in place merely to console you when you peer from the window in winter; they are the garden. would do well to consider our own garden beds, no matter how small, not just as holes where the flowers go but as things in themselves. Careful placement of our beds would ensure that they did not appear unsightly in winter, and more importantly, that they create a satisfying grounding for the flowers to flower bed or border is almost always more attractive with a backdrop or enclosure, such as a hedge or fence, to set it off. Even when empty, an Another large rectangle, a reflecting pool, is set into the lawn, level with the grass. Pool, grass, and hedge form a rectangle in a rectangle in a environment will appear to you as a scene of sublime calmness. The woods are brought into the garden through their reflection on the water. You're forced to see the wild more clearly; you are made more aware of the trees than when you were walking under them. The simple gesture, strongly articulated, is more powerful than any number of smaller ones. Come summer, this garden will hardly about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably leadership position where I meet a lot of different people a few times a year. tried several ways to compensate. The one that works best for me is to review the list of names I should know and visualize their faces. But I still question to you is: What is the best way to handle the introduction of somebody whose name you should know but don't when they join a small conversational the wrong fork is stumbling around with an introduction. But take heart, you have a lot of company falling into this particular social pothole. recommend an association technique. For example, years ago a certain woman's that your elevated position gives you something of a pass. Many individuals will assume that you meet so many people that name recollection would be tough, however, in direct address, and is no help with introductions. her cover and offer you her trick: When stuck, just say, "Tell me your whole name," implying (alas, fraudulently) that she remembers one name, but not most people pick up on someone's difficulty and introduce themselves. When long wanted to ask your advice concerning a problem that is certainly not new to me. I have been in a committed relationship with a man for four years. We have everything going for us, and I feel it's time to marry. It seems to be the next logical step. We've been talking about this for over a year, so this is not a new subject. Last week we had a huge fight about our relationship and getting married. It ended with him storming out and me crying. My question is: never marry you"? In other words, should I just move on? having trouble with his feet. They're cold. It's the old commitment problem, like a cross between psychodrama and dating, never good for the nerves. You decision; you can coast along and see if he starts to feel more "ready"; or you men. This is sometimes effective in extracting a proposal, but it is also a little like lassoing a calf, and who wants a groom one is dragging to the altar? The dilemma on whose horns you ride is that sometimes "not ready" means just that, and at other times it really does mean "not you." The hell of it is that often the real meaning is unknown to the gentleman himself. As one of the buttons" is the government's failure to provide clean needles to addicts? May I suggest you take your finger off the button, calm down, and review the results are not encouraging. The number of addicts has risen, and the memory serves. Compassionate sounding ideas do not always pan out; it's good to look at the evidence and be willing to change your mind if necessary. needle, pardon the expression, is understandable. As with all studies, there are opposite findings to be offered. Alas, it is the nature of the statistical of users would have gone up without a needle exchange. Some experts have also with the low limits on exchanges per addict, and poor timing. That is, the impaired judgment, a guaranteed result with injected drugs, one would not know thinks it best we agree to disagree, and err on the side of humane about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably feel we both might sleep better in two double beds. (I would for sure.) I am same bedroom but in separate beds. We both move around a lot in our sleep, and I really don't like it when a toenail pokes me somewhere unpleasant just as I am drifting off. I hesitate to bring it up with my wife, because I don't want to hurt her feelings and have her think I don't want to be near her, and I don't want friends and family to think we are even weirder than they already been socked a time or two by the beloved when he's dead to the world. A good night's sleep, however, should be your paramount concern, and not everyone is a not friends and family) that you are as crazy about her as ever but think two beds might improve sleep for both of you. And don't forget to point out that "visiting" can certainly spice up the nighttime situation. up in the middle of the night with a terrible thought that leaves me so ashamed active at the meanest level in riling a sizable portion of the public with stonewalling tactics. Truly, I believe the country is in the best of hands, but confess. If you are a Democrat, you simply hope the president comes to terms is golden, it is also sometimes the best way to maintain decorum. And really, union we do not need to hear the state of. And regarding the stonewalling staff, just think of them as the collective Bad Cop. As for feeling ashamed and embarrassed, you have much of the country for company. Try to get a good to a guy, basically because I want him to think highly of me. It's not that I been lying because I had this bitterness toward a former boyfriend, who made me point is, I think this new guy has fallen for me, and I want to be truthful. I think he ought to know, not because I have fallen for him as well, but simply tangled web we weave when first we fib to act out against old boyfriends. reason and want to set the record straight. Make just a short explanation. He petals splayed like the rays of the sun, these unabashed bloomers give of themselves freely and ask little in return. Even the hardest among us feel like slightly, beckoning you to lift it with a finger to get a better look. It has a short, straight snub nose with the tiniest unevenness along the rim. Its a little, so that the flower looks as if it's being blown by a gentle wind. A flowers on a single stem and blooming for weeks. Content almost anywhere, it multiplies freely. It has a sweet, delicate fragrance, unlike the heady odor planted along the foundation of a stone house in long drifts interspersed with was the first to suggest pairing ferns with daffodils, pointing out that just as the daffodil foliage begins to brown and die back, the fern hits its stride and covers the mess. This particular fern was fine and lacy and looked fetching coming up in a pleasing manner from between the stones of a garden path. potting them to bring indoors to bloom in winter. Although slow to appear, was glorious when it finally arrived. It ruined for me two varieties of vulgar fashion with a trumpet too long for its small face. The other, Plus, it was a splotchy yellow with white leaching through it. Once the elegant varieties of narcissus have been opening daily in my New York garden, there is of flowers, and you may actually get them. When it gets cold in spring, as it invariably does, people worry for their daffodils. But daffodils are they'll stick around. The thing to worry about now is what bulbs to order for next spring. (Click for a quick review of daffodils.) Gardeners who really have it together place their orders fall. By then, who can even remember what the garden looked like in spring? spring's display, deciding what I need, and how many, and where it will all go. The thing to do is to take notes now on what you want and snap pictures of your garden to remind yourself where to plant in the fall. If you don't trust yourself even to do this, you can order now, using last fall's catalog. Most nurseries will send you their latest one if you don't have it. Regardless of when you place your order, the nursery will ship the bulbs at the proper time for planting in your area, so if you do it now, you can forget about it until excellent descriptions. Either find yourself a reference book such as quality, good selection, and cheaper prices. (The nicer the pictures, the catalogs, because they work well together, and you can order from either or lower prices because it deals in larger quantities.) This year Daffodil Mart aren't really that many. You can also get a group of friends to order together. Both of these companies will have lower prices on many items this year because the dollar is strong against the guilder, and most bulbs are grown in be hard for a beginning gardener to go wrong with daffodils. They are downside and are a quiet force for good in the world. didn't click through to the internal links, click for a daffodil review and for about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably smoke. What's with our space program people, anyway? Are they inept, can these things not be helped, or have we no business trying this stuff in the first know the right answer to your question, but she can't help but be reminded of my plastic surgeon friend is going to notice the changes when we get together and will likely feel hurt that I chose a competitor. How can I have my new face truthful and say your own version of "I was overcome by curiosity about this much talked about doc, and now I know his work is as good as yours." doctors understand these things and do not take affront. writing to an online lady for advice, but things are rotten with my marriage. My wife, who has the more important job, is almost disdainful of me in front of friends and anything but friendly in private. She is the master of the withering remark and is hypercritical of nearly everything I do or say. fair, I want to pass on to you a complaint that I do find valid, so you can better judge the situation. She objects to a habit that is really part of my even when we're not in a car. My instinct is to give her directions, which way to turn, how to get places, etc. Her directional sense is average, not terrible. I fear where this is heading. Have you any ideas? married to a shepherd. Gut instinct tells me there are underlying problems often than not, and coming from a loving partner they would cause no irritation.) Your herding her around suggests that you are compensating, in the need to get to the bottom of the serious troubles undermining your marriage. Whether or not you two can do it alone or with a counselor is your call. But do to all the blue nail polish, body piercings, spiky hair, and nose rings? Sometimes the young salespeople are so strange looking it is distracting. Am I the young people, frequently wondering how it is possible that they think they look appealing. There is hope, though. When they grow a little older and get serious about becoming employed, the green hair and atavistic piercings have expressed regret that Prudence has abandoned her advice column in favor of her needlework. Sensitive to the continuing need for guidance among Slate readers, however, Prudence has prevailed upon her niece and she is known to friends) will begin to respond to some of the unanswered experience of life in responding to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Unlike her aunt, she does not do my favorite aunts proposed to visit the White House along with two young nieces in the Oval Office, I think maybe they should skip the White House and spend more time in the Capitol instead. Mostly I am concerned that my nieces' reputations will suffer when they return home to the inevitable questions from curious friends. Please help me: White House or no White House? alleged scandalous behavior. You do not say how old your nieces are, so just a small caveat: If they are in the intern age bracket, simply advise them that identified a problem for the '90s. I don't think an etiquette has yet been reply. Something like "in haste" or "gotta run, but I got your message." hair and body, resulting in hair that stands out unattractively, and makes sparks fly whenever my body touches another. What can one do? do remember that a few nights ago at a party, a woman confided that her dress was clingy and electric, so she wore a light flannel nightgown underneath. She went on to say that this approach had the added benefit that should someone ask boxers are sexy" and "boxers really turn me on," but they just seem to go over his head. I even bought him a pair of boxers, but he just wears them to sleep are going over his head, try under his nose. Write him a short love note saying and only wore boxers. Alas, the alternative is to forget it. Would you think initial stages of dating, it is usual to assume that both parties are probably dating others. I prefer to describe my other dates as "having plans." I also take pains so that the people I date remain clueless about others I may be dating. One of the men I am currently seeing has asked me to dinner at a particular restaurant that he's been eager to try. I accepted, but when I looked up the address, I found it was located in the same (very small) building as the office of another man I am seeing. I am on the verge of suggesting another restaurant, lest I "collide" with the other man. Should I change the thinks it would be wonderful to be seen by another swain and cannot imagine why you would want to pretend to be otherwise dateless in what you describe as "the initial stages of dating" this new person. Aunt Prudence has entrusted me to continue her service to the lorn of all stripes. I feel as though I am stepping into the family business, as it I have no feeling that I am trying to fill her shoes. (Truth to tell, Auntie wears a rather large size.) Being of a younger generation, I may be a little less delicate in my approach but I hope of no less use to you. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably trying to figure out how satisfying revenge would be. I want the satisfaction but not the guilt that might come with it. Two years ago, my lover of three years and I broke up. It was messy and I got shafted. But I moved on and rebuilt my life and my heart. One nagging part of me says that I still have one see, I have information about a tax fraud he pulled off and until now has successfully hidden. Do I tell the authorities and let the chips fall where they may, or hold it in and not risk the guilt that would come from watching him lose his job and possibly face a criminal charge? He would not know it was I who sent him up the river, because he thought he hid the fraud from me, desire to get even. Though it is said that "revenge is sweet," it can also be, "on the other hand," but a complex piece of your puzzle is that tax fraud is a duty has not been part of your equation, leading perhaps to your doing the bottom line is to evaluate the extent of his bad behavior toward you and your threshold for a guilty conscience. Only you know whether a potential remorseful. If you choose not to act, know that, at some point, he will get curious about your thoughts on the coming millennium change and the notion that the world, due to its reliance on computers in things like tax collection and banking, will see an implosion and complete breakdown of society because the working on this problem. It will be costly, to be sure. Sorting data by date is problems. Being an optimist, however, she feels certain that success will be the outcome, and the only one who might be disappointed with the advancement of husband and I are members of our local church and part of a smaller group of is a personal one, and we enjoy the more traditional approach to personal worship. Our good friends have asked us if we would care to join them at a weekend Christian fellowship event. From what we know, it may well be too feel we need to give them a response very soon. Can you suggest a way we can kindly refuse the offer without creating awkwardness between us? can, indeed. Try this: "We wish we were free to go with you, but we have a that God forgives little white lies when they are intended to spare someone's a slight problem with my boyfriend. He has a bad habit of putting his feet on my coffee table, with or without his shoes on. I have wanted to be polite about it, but his habit is beginning to ruin the finish on my coffee table. Another thing he does is place his drinks on the table with nothing under them. I don't "Here, dear, a coaster for your drink," then hand it to him. As for the he cannot honor your request to keep his feet on the floor, cover the coffee half the books in bookstores have the word "best seller" or some variant on the that mean? About as much as the phrase "original recipe" does on a jar of spaghetti sauce. Neither the government nor the publishing industry regulates lists published every week in the United States. There are the major national lists that compare sales at chain stores with sales at independent stores. tell us not which books sell the most, in absolute terms, but which fiction, nonfiction, or advice books sell the fastest at the bookstores list makers will never appear on the lists, because each week it will be beaten by the most convincing form of publicity around, which gives them the quality of be more likely to put it in the front of the store and readers to buy it. companies are privately held and keep this information secret; even when the companies are publicly traded, it is nearly impossible to find out the unit onto the New York Times list. (Click to read about the legal tricks book editors employ to try to place their books on the Times list.) likely to reflect is the amount of money spent to publicize the books that wind up on them. Superstores now allow publishers to pay to place a book up front or in the window or to display advertising. That, plus an author tour or lists gather sales figures from more stores than others do. The New York Times boasts the most stores reporting--4,000, plus wholesalers. The Voice Literary Supplement list, which tells you what the serious extrapolation to provide an estimation of what is selling at the stores that do not report; some don't. Some lists, such as the Wall Street Journal 's, include online booksellers. Some follow only independent stores. This may seem haphazard compared with the way the music compiled: It tracks every single album sold at every single music store in the compilation of what's really selling best throughout the country; they want a variety of lists that break down sales figures in ways beneficial to them. some of the most closely watched lists in the publishing industry: list is the industry standard. It's the most prestigious, appearing as it does on data from the largest number of stores. Many bookstores sell New York Times best sellers at a discount, thereby generating even more sales for New York Times best sellers. Publishers regularly write bonuses into contracts to factor in the possibility that a book will makes the Times Times divides its best sellers into hardcover and paperback lists and then divides each of these into fiction, nonfiction, and a third category accuse the straight nonfiction list of being a "useful fiction," designed to published each year. Instead, the Times sends a list to bookstores indicating which books they are "tracking" as potential future best sellers and asks for sales information on those books (and any others the bookstores want to report on). The Times says this tracking list is drawn up from information from bookstores, but publishers say they routinely call up the Times to tip them off to books selling with increasing momentum so that Times Web site publishes another list: "Chains vs. Independents," which compares how books in all three categories are selling in these two different types of outlets. This list was a concession to independent bookstores, many of which were outraged when the Times created hot links between every independent bookstores were so angry about this that they boycotted the list report their sales to the New York Times list. The Times claimed that the number boycotting never reached a "critical mass" that would have gathering data from a larger percentage of independent stores than the New York Times list does. This doesn't mean the Chronicle list doesn't books too esoteric for the chains and books that people are willing to pay full pop up on this list, and many less flashy books that are quality reads start Chronicle list is most valued by publishers for what is considered its predictive value. Recent national best sellers such as Snow Falling on Sisterhood appeared on the Chronicle list long before they made it Chronicle list for six weeks before it appeared on the Times mixes all categories: fiction, nonfiction, hardcover, trade, and mass market paperbacks. Its authors gather data in a straightforward fashion: They record booksellers, which many other lists don't. This results in an unusual list that The God of Small Things against hardcover celebrity health books such as Today 's list shows how different types of books that are separated on other literary books such as The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a designed for people in the book industry: booksellers, libraries, literary lists are divided into subcategories relevant only to people in the publishing world. Fiction and nonfiction are kept separate for hardcover books but mixed a way to give publishers information on the different types of books they specialize in. But she also admits the plethora of lists gives more books about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably restaurants is frequently outrageously overpriced. The alternative is to bring your own and expect to pay corkage. I have noted, however, that even corkage charges are rising to an unacceptable level. Aside from this, the charge is included in the bottom line bill. My question is: What might be considered an appropriate tip on the total, given that the corkage charge is for service as expansive, they let the grand total determine the tip. (And sometimes the total can be quite grand.) Other times, when overtaken by the enough is enough gremlin, they compute the gratuity based on the food, adding a modest increment to acknowledge that wine was served. As anyone who can read a wine list knows, about all the showers at offices these days? My husband says they have two or three each week at his place of business (woman pregnant, just gave birth, for every "celebration." If he were someone who was an assistant, with an ailing mother to support, well, it would be impossible. Luckily, he is highly placed, but I mean, how does one gracefully NOT contribute? in your husband's corner. The institutionalized begging of which you speak is annoying and also can make hash of a budget. Perhaps people who work in group settings where some hand is always out can start a reverse trend: Limit present allowance is all gone." He or she may be called cheap, but they will your country six years. Forgive my bad English if it occurs. I have been I knew, younger than me, pursued me with ardor and convinced me to marry him. There was not too much married activity, if you can know what I mean. Then he He left his children with me, and he uses one of my credit cards. no idea about what he plans, but I have the awful feeling that he may have used to tell him I want to divorce, because husbands are not easy to find. There is a chance that he is better than I think. What do you think? and denial. Cancel that credit card and arrange to return his children to him unease is based on how quickly public discourse has switched from the medical lengths to get something they don't medically need. It allows Those of Us Who Would Never Do Such a Thing to wring our hands and complain while feeling impotence or depression and our society's feelings toward these conditions and have been used as a starting point to discuss why impotence and depression are specter of perpetually peppy sales reps and (erroneous) reports that it causes still labors under public misconceptions about its prevalence and worthy subject for public discourse but does nothing for the individual that said, let her thank you for a heartfelt and thoughtful letter from someone that the civil rights leader's murder was part of a larger conspiracy. black militants were responsible. Before Ray was arrested, a group called the that one insignificant lowlife could topple a hero and alter history. More powers imagine secret plots to undermine them, and the dispossessed worry about persecution. With their grand designs in which everything has its place, conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a adopt the trappings of scholarship, touting irrelevant titles and credentials. They burrow into the arcana of their topics and inundate potential acolytes with a barrage of pedantic details. Rather than build a case from evidence, deceive. Rather than admit to inconvenient facts, they dismiss them as lies, to justify the eradication of a weak and numerically insignificant group? The times, masons had devised confidential phrases and handshakes to recognize fellow craftsmen and protect their trade secrets from outsiders. During the Enlightenment, their guilds became clubs for discussing the new liberal ideas Religious authorities feared that, within their lodges, the Masons, too, were years, giving rise to various fantasies of global schemes. Typically, these I and his ministers were actually just blundering their way through the states were allowing all white men to vote (before that, they had to own land), In this climate popular hostility was trained against powerful private after crisis. The Civil War arose because Northerners feared that a small convinced the North was determined to destroy their way of life. In the depths and were about to subvert our democracy. (Some of these folks are still writing challenged laws regulating speech, sex, and drug use; the right fought busing, before his assassination for a march in support of striking sanitation workers there. During the march, a black gang called the Invaders began looting, the to trigger violent conflict between white and Negro citizens." the civil rights leader, thought he was a Communist, and waged a relentless as noted in this review of his book.) Hoover never contemplated murder, but you didn't have to be crazy to think powerful figures had it in for King. government claimed it was just protecting the public from radicals, but people vigilance by the press, Congress, and the courts, covert government activities were, if not eradicated, at least no longer the rule. Hatred of the government gave way to a jaded contempt. Outrage settled into anomie. It was no longer news that the state might resort to such activities. The seeds of paranoia that were planted in the hothouse of the late '60s and early '70s germinated, and in determining grounds for impeachment, the Constitution just isn't much help. him of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." But how high is high? "Clearly, high crimes was referring to serious, serious crimes like leaves history as our only guide. Unfortunately for scholars (if fortunately for presidents), Congress has undertaken impeachment proceedings against only resigned). That doesn't yield much in the way of precedent. Then again, the rarity of impeachment proceedings may itself be a sort of precedent. If so, Republicans in Congress. The Radicals, who favored the abolition of slavery and thought blacks inferior to whites, wanted to give Southern states wide latitude in shaping their own laws and governments, regardless of the consequences for the freed slaves. He vetoed key pieces of Reconstruction legislation, including guys in the Reconstruction fight. Changing attitudes toward race in the last generation have helped overhaul the old interpretation of Reconstruction as a bad idea gone wrong. Except, that is, on the impeachment episode. Here, even the acknowledged wisdom of the Republicans' Reconstruction plans hasn't changed the consensus that they acted from partisan motives. Act, prohibited presidents from firing their own Cabinet members; another offered a somewhat contradictory defense. On the one hand, his lawyers said, flouted the law to test it in the Supreme Court. Still, the case against and when he passed word that he'd stop obstructing the Republicans' Reconstruction plans, his survival seemed assured. In the end, the Radicals voted to convict, while the Democrats and seven moderate Republicans voted to In resting their case on an alleged violation of the law and not on policy differences, the Republicans conceded that impeachment had to Radicals' defeat suggested that successful impeachment charges against the president would have to allege substantial crimes on his part. Allegations of criminal wrongdoing that essentially served to cover for political differences impeachment bills, including one introduced by a Republican. After months of new disclosures, including the release of transcripts of damning White House conversations, the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment deliberations in investigators, and otherwise covering up crimes. Two days later, it passed a enemies, spying on private citizens, setting up the "Plumbers" unit that broke seems like a legitimate weapon, a way to settle the score. The principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, after all, dictated that once nukes are launched, threshold for impeachable offenses and shouldn't be the standard for judging transgressions, and for the full text of the articles of impeachment against Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. had lunch at a local Internet cafe. I brought my own laptop and wireless modem, the better to read Slate in its full framed glory. I was (slowly) downloading full images while everyone else was using Lynx. I did order a cheese sandwich, and nobody gave me any dirty looks, but even so, I felt a little guilty about not spending any money for my online experience. Is it rude to bring your own digital device to an Internet cafe? What about bringing food an Internet cafe until she received your letter. Apparently such things do not consulted the Web site to which you refer, and now have a clue as to the provides computers and modems for the use of its patrons for a fee and also sells food. Your question is whether it is improper for you to bring your own laptop and wireless modem, thus bypassing the fee, and to buy only a cheese has established the rules for the use of their facility. Since they have let you in and have not kicked you out, it appears that you have not violated any of those rules. You are not being rude. But if there are many people like you, and especially if you are occupying space that might be occupied by a paying customer, the management will change the rules. They will establish a cover charge or require a minimum food purchase for the use of a table. The situation will be like that in a cabaret, where you cannot sit down at a table and watch meantime, until the rules are changed, it would be wise of you to leave a tip or spend more on food. Otherwise you will not get a good table or will have crumbs brushed into your laptop, even though, strictly speaking, you are interest in me pretty clear; and I like him a lot. In view of this quite I don't know how to ask. I know this sounds dumb. But our earlier professional friendliness did not extend to swapping details of our private lives, although he does mention the kids. Is this some kind of guy code for "wife"?? you suggest a polite way to raise this, preferably using some kind of Southeast older than you. There can be lots of life left in an old macroeconomist. matter what happens. Do you think such a commitment is wise? How about such commitments between individuals, even between husbands and wives?" are hoping that Congress will do something about the marriage penalty in the income tax this year. Would it make much difference to you?" for wedding gifts this way, but I am curious to know what others think, persons you know and care about should be individually handwritten and sent by snail mail. That is a way to show the depth of your gratitude and affection. Even on occasions where use of a printed acknowledgment is appropriate, as in acknowledging the receipt of letters of condolence upon bereavement, the printed card should be signed by hand with a personal word added. it ignores any potential need for needlepoint items you might have, but all I can offer is the assurance that it is an honest sentiment: Having been born a century too late, this admirer of yours is pleased to see that not everyone has your needlepoint suffer from years and years of utter neglect! has been and done so many things to end the relationship forever, she is so has not been seen for four days now. He moved here from another state and his surroundings are new, but we as family have tried to bring him into the fold. Now he's gone. My friend's heart is broken and I can't help. I think he was can play only a secondary role. Only she can salvage her life. If she is determined to do that, you can help her; otherwise, you can't. gone from her and can no longer be a part of her life. She also has to recognize that she has behaved very unwisely. As you say, she was "too" in appreciation of nature, volunteer activity, church, or whatever is closest to her. She has to want these as a new life, not as stopgaps while she waits for him to return. These new interests will be more valuable to her if she can share them with someone. That is where you may come in. It would be better still if she could share those interests with someone she loves. That cannot be ordered up. But love is more likely to come if she is an interested and to get from the official United States Hang Gliding Association site to this page, which may publish your name on its site in connection with your also invited to submit their own puzzles (along with a solution path). president and the first lady. Then they drew jeers for closing part of cool. Though always at the center of things, the agent cherishes his anonymity; he's expected to sacrifice not just life but also ego to protect the these guys, anyway? And how did they develop such importance and mystique? From the beginning, Secret Service operatives have been conceived of the organization during the Civil War as an espionage agency. Under the control of the Department of War, its first head was the legendary abolished the organization, and Baker wound up testifying against the president counterfeiters. It didn't occur to them, unfortunately, to have this new though, has always remained fighting counterfeiting and other forms of fraud: check, credit card, postage stamp, food stamp, and the like. Which is to say, if you cash your neighbor's Social Security check, it's the Secret Service that Conspicuously absent from the agency's duties was the job of presidential pugnacious president simply charged at the assailant, brandishing his cane. To later, Congress passed the Sundry Civil Expenses Act, which made the service's agents trade on when they publicize their anguish over having to betray the 1975--and the Secret Service's custodial duties expanded accordingly. field offices around the world. This massive growth has periodically elicited resent the privilege that serves to insulate a somewhat random and about how they were pressed into providing cover. Less well known, if less then a recent widower, used agents to run interference for him in his amorous friends." Soon, Starling was conscripted into following the couple on their engagement were announced." Starling and his colleagues held their tongues, at first in an occasional series assessing the narrative logic of movies.) important cultural divide: Movies now make less sense than rock lyrics. Once it Name" (with the immortal lines "The heat was hot" and "In the desert/ You can't remember your name/ 'Cause there ain't no one/ For to give you no pain") could never be challenged by any rival in any other art form. But that was before movies like this happen? It's hard to say. The Saint may be one of those rare cases in which the inanity is deliberate. The fact that nothing in earthly life suggests a conscious stupidity on the part of the filmmakers that With the average film, though, nothing of the sort is intended. Those of us who write screenplays for a living are always perplexed at what leaky logic vessels most movies turn out to be, given the endless development process that takes place before production begins. In draft after draft, in script meeting after script meeting, every narrative line is examined for signs of warp, every motivation of every character is finely adjusted, precision of development gives way to velocity and chaos. Perhaps a big star comes aboard, declares the script a disaster for reasons of his own, and shooting script is nothing but a pastiche of scenes from a dozen different drafts. Perhaps a director has a "vision" of a big boat slamming into something (a feature, by the way, of at least four recent films) and uses up so much of the budget to bring it to reality that key scenes explaining who was on the boat and why it was out of control are never shot. Or perhaps the scenes are shot and never used because the first cut of the movie is an hour too long. course, there's the simpler observation that some movies are just badly imagined and badly written, and nobody cares enough to do anything about to be a festival of incoherence. It has brought us not only The Saint World seems at first glance to be a seamless web of logic. Nowhere in The Lost World 's bestiary is there a creature that behaves with the characters with accuracy and blinding velocity in one scene, hovering and hissing and generally dithering around in the next, so that the heroine has and dying in a puddle of digestive slime, you are witnessing one of those Here is a movie that has no trouble making us believe its presiding contract on relatively minor reality issues like torque, animal behavior, and of handy parallel bars? Is it likely that she could, by twirling around and snaps at the air, and though it does manage to stomp one victim (who, in a nice touch, sticks to the bottom of its foot like a piece of gum), in general it moves with such a lumbering gait that we might as well be back in the '60s cargo hold, eats everybody on board, then cleverly scurries back into hiding. World arise from the conventionality at the heart of the movie. Neither the movie is based, have shown any interest in challenging the moralistic assumption at the heart of almost every creature feature: That good intentions, predators but avengers, nibbling a prissy little rich girl here, chomping an followed by smarmy flacks, followed by twisted visionaries in expensive suits. Among the heroes, we don't have to worry about the principled male scientist, the dynamic female animal behaviorist, or the stowaway children. But even among the good guys, a marginal physiognomy or a receding hairline can spell doom. Holes" is an occasional series assessing the narrative logic of movies. all the major releases, had true lunacy at its heart. as everybody said, it did display a riotous disdain for common sense. It wasn't premise. The Postman is about a drifter in the bleak and fractured the unlikeliest line of dialogue of 1997--"Ride, postman, ride!" wishful thinking on par with cold fusion. The fundamental implausibility of evolves from a toxic slime ball to an adorably vulnerable neurotic, can be character entrusted with the care of his neighbor's beloved dog after he has amply demonstrated his hatred of the animal by tossing it down a laundry chute? not immune to the occasional glitch. In one crucial scene, the vagabond artist room, where he makes a nude sketch of her sitting on a divan as the languorous hours tick by. Meanwhile, her suspicious fiance has apparently been furiously searching for her for much of the night. "There are only so many places she can be!" he rants in frustration to his evil manservant. Hey, guys, did you ever start to pick up, when the release of Firestorm heralded a return to the bad movie, at least had the integrity of its own screwy internal logic. from a helicopter into the path of a forest fire to rescue a group of killers from the killers on a motorcycle that they appropriate from a remote wilderness trading post. In the pursuit that follows, the hero rummages around in the motorcycle's saddlebag, produces a chain saw, starts it with one hand, and tosses it over his shoulder into the windshield of the villains' truck. parachute from out of nowhere and straps it on just as the bike sails out over the deepest gorge in the world. After a leisurely free fall, the smoke jumper and the ornithologist land safely, though minor damage to the hero's kneecap serves as an occasion for the new year's most unforgettable line thus far: "I odds here. Fallen is essentially a variant of the vampire genre, and there has never been a vampire movie that made any sense at all. In this case, "Time Is on My Side" as he heads for the gas chamber. the killer's body had been possessed by the spirit of a dark angel named has the ability to flit from one human host to another simply through touch. What happens if the body he's occupying dies? That's covered in the cobwebbed him from one body to the next, and tries to outwit him so that he can lethally follow in the first place? Wouldn't you just as soon go undetected, as you have since the beginning of time? I can't remember a movie with more style and less motivation. Fallen works feverishly to keep you distracted from its is based on a site that someone linked to in "The Fray" for a joke. The idea is may publish your name on its site in connection with your also encouraged to submit their own puzzles (with a solution path). surprisingly easy! We start with the fine review of a shockingly funny comedy about eye disease. From here, we follow the left column down and click Pop Encyclopedia in the Congratulations to all our winners. I believe that your hearts will go on. your name on its site in connection with your submission.) also invited to submit their own puzzles (along with a solution path). about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably remember of your college days, but I would like some advice pertaining to the dreaded topic of roommates. My roommate, just in the last two weeks, has note from the roommate saying maybe we should not proceed as planned due to our different sleeping habits. Since then she has either not been in the room or has come and gone so quickly as to leave no time for discussion of this matter. I might add that our housing papers are due in five days, and it's disturbing college days: There were curfews making it impossible for students to keep vampire hours. (A few stealth roommates evaded the rules, but even this was you describe, not to mention the sleep disturbance, prudence (the virtue, not assigned a stranger. It couldn't be much worse. Well, actually it could, in which case you are within your rights to pester the proper authorities for a traveling to places I never had time for, fancy eats out, and so forth. But something happened on the way home from work. My wife and daughter are the ones with cruises, flying trips, etc., leaving me home to feed the cats and empty suspicion either that you are joshing her or are tucked away at some prep school. The situation you describe does not have the ring of truth. Rather than hard to imagine a tycoon emeritus at the mercy of a wife and daughter who park him at home while they travel the globe. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, signed everything over to the women, that you stop being a wimp and take broke up after we dated on and off for five years. I ended the relationship because of his alcohol problem. I find myself having to fight off the urge to him mean I unconsciously want to get back with my ex? sympathizes, having herself, once or twice, become attached to the for only a couple of reasons: food and defense. Is it not insane for people to murder? If the murderer did not eat the victim, he or she did not need to kill issue: What do you think of the people who want to take the word "man" out of common words? Thank you for your time. I just needed to get these two issues don't get me wrong, I love kissing, but there is such a thing as the appropriate kiss for the appropriate occasion. My problem is the by this? Have mores changed when I wasn't looking? And the big question: How do the gentleman nearly well enough to be familiar with his health history. perfectly correct to pull back and make a show of surprise and displeasure. As for making an enemy, is a person who would do this worth having as a pleased at the confidence so many of you have shown in her by asking her advice. Sadly she must, however, return to her needlework now. in a very few instances, Prudence is neither better informed nor wiser than the persons who write to her. She is able to offer helpful advice only because the problems described are not hers; she is not emotionally involved in them and can consider them objectively. So her advice has two parts: First, when you are greatly troubled with a problem you should write it down in the form of a the problem into written words, rather than brooding over it endlessly and incoherently, will itself be helpful. It will enable you to see the problem in its true dimensions. Second, you should not mail the letter but should read it received, she often felt that the writer knew the answer but only wanted some (relatively) good friend who ridicules my Libertarian attitudes? Or to other people who are misinformed about the Libertarian Party? friend does. I try to change the subject, as I am tired of defending my political views to him and to other people. Many people don't understand Libertarian philosophies, nor do they seem to want to. And, when people do want Party (he's a registered Democrat, for God's sake!) or just reject out of hand You have no obligation to participate in a discussion that you find fruitless and irritating. Your friend cannot be a very good friend if he persists on this subject despite your obviously unhappy reaction. Also, you have no obligation to the Libertarian Party to fight on every street corner in its defense. should tell your friend candidly that you do not want to discuss this subject. If he persists, or takes offense, you should find a more congenial friend. There are people who are not members of the Libertarian Party but who are convert them. If you are receptive to the ideas of other people about politics and policy, you will find some people receptive to yours. when dining at a restaurant buffet? On the one hand, since the server is not taking and filling meal orders, a tip seems unnecessary. Yet on the other hand, the server is not less likely to be underpaid merely because the restaurant offers a buffet, and so a tip may still be expected. And if the restaurant offers menus in addition to its buffet, then the diners are occupying a table that might otherwise be filled by customers who order from the menu, who would server brings drinks, should one tip based on the cost of the drinks? What if waiter gets is adjusted by the market to the probability of getting tips. If a waiter works in conditions where tips are unlikely, he will get a higher wage than if he works where tips are customary, other things being equal. If you go through a buffet line and there is no personal service offered to you except handing dishes over a counter, you are not expected to tip. If you go through a buffet line and the waiter seats you; gives you a drink, even if water; and one waiter is assigned to you, you should give a tip. But the tip need not be as large as it would be if you got full table service. don't know your ego, I don't know whether I am your alter ego. Anyway, the probably will think this is from a Democratic nut, but it is a serious question. Why does a responsible political party have a goal of reducing taxes on the rich? It seems only logical that those with high incomes should pay more than those with lower incomes! A concern that most rational people should have is how to equitably distribute the great wealth of this country. Taxation of the wealthy and assistance to the less fortunate is one simple way. Also money is needed for many, many good purposes! What is the Republican Party's rebuttal Republican Party (who can?), but she can give you some thoughts on the exceptions, but in general rich people do pay more taxes than poor people. Generally Republicans agree that rich people should pay more taxes than poor people. The issue that divides people and parties is how much more the as B, should A pay twice as much tax, or three times as much, or four times as much? That is partly a question of fairness, to which simply saying that the rich should pay more provides no answer. It is also a question of economic efficiency. Beyond some point, taxation of the rich probably reduces incentives to save, invest, innovate, and work, to a degree that is harmful to people who are not rich. But just where that point is no one seems to know. answer these questions in the direction of lower taxes on the rich more than Democrats generally do? That is one of the main reasons they are question also raises the issue of attitudes toward taxation in general. Since tax cut for everyone is the sure road to electoral success. That idea now seems years ago I dated a guy, but he moved and it was hard to keep together, so we broke up. About four months later, he died in a fire. Problem is, his younger brother also liked me. A few days ago I saw him for the first time since his brother died, and he still likes me. I kind of like him now, too; he's grown up a lot since the last time I saw him. I just don't know if it would be rude to no problem. Four months would be long enough to mourn this man even if you had been married to him, which you weren't. Preserving and honoring the memory of a deceased loved one does not require you to give up ordinary activities. There is room in the human heart for remembering the dead and living with the living. If you were deeply attached to the older brother, or now think you were, you will not forget him. Your present attraction to the younger brother may be a sign of your appreciation of the characteristics of the older brother, many of its nether regions, and even learned a little on the way. But all good things must come to an end. As a parting challenge, we dare you to link from this page where you should click Links to Other Sites of Interest (the last of the Publications and Directories (on the bar below the opening graphic), and Beginning this week, Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably including escorting a young woman to my automobile after, say, coming out of a around to the driver's side. On modern cars with power locks, however, innovation makes first unlocking her door a superfluous and illogical do you come down on this question of chivalry vs. logic? Is it insulting to unlock her door first when we both know it's unnecessary? between chivalry and logic. Chivalry requires not only that you unlock the door but also that you open the door for her, hold her arm to help her enter, see that the edge of her skirt has been removed from the door frame, and then close the door. Helping her enter can also be the occasion for sweetly kissing her on the cheek. Modern gadgets will not do all that, and real men don't want them the idea of a conflict between chivalry and logic is mistaken. Chivalrous gestures, even though not utilitarian at one level, have a utilitarian logic at another level. Chivalrous gestures are a means of communication, and that is useful. When you hold the door for the girl, even though she is quite capable of doing it for herself, you are communicating the fact that you care about her and want to be her helper. Unless you are a great poet, it may be the best way you have of communicating those sentiments to her. Which gestures communicate what changes over time, as does other language. In my time, at least, holding the door communicated respect or affection or some other favorable your girlfriend communicates is different from what holding it for your few precedents anywhere in the world for eternal flames to honor individuals, there are even fewer precedents for turning them off once ignited. I don't if anything, can be done that doesn't come across as overtly partisan or the flame in the cemetery will not matter. No one will go to it except to roast become president of the United States, save the Union, free the slaves, and write some of the most profound and moving words in the English language. If Thousands of people pass it every day, but no one stops to look at it. It will placed lights around their homes and fully decorated their trees. I like to about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably Post 's words, "too vicious to print." In my experience, vicious things reflect more harshly on the person who says them. To that end, I tend to think each other any number of times before her father leaves office. How, in your but to treat the senator with respect and courtesy. But is there a good way to make a boorish person squirm without being boorish yourself? others as well as from themselves. The mirror image consideration, however, is that it is unappetizing to give the offending remark wider Reality, though, must come into play, and in cases such as this there will the senator's joke. In any case, thoughtful people will surely wonder about the judgment and heart of a man who could publicly denigrate the looks of a young to that one years ago. Kill 'em with kindness, and they don't know where to and daughter are spending a few weeks with us. We love them all. Trouble is, her talk back to her mom. I have bitten my tongue all week, but I finally said realize that criticizing the kid is criticizing the parent (or at least the parenting), but somebody should say something to somebody. I muttered my apologies to keep the peace, but I felt sullied having done so. What do you also a comment on the parenting, but inappropriate outbursts by any youngster inspire most sensitive people to try to interject a little decorum. Then, too, are not great, but sometimes an outsider's rebuke can serve to wake up the continue the discussion with the tyrant tyke's folks, pointing out that discipline bespeaks love and that the kid will have hell's own time if she continues speaking to people in such a manner. If your one stab at being the kiddie kaiser causes your sister and her husband to invite you to mind your own friend, colleague, or loved one stumbles, it seems inelegant to ask, "Are you all right?" How would you suggest I more properly offer sympathy? My best suggests you go back to "Are you all right?" There is something peculiar about asking, "Is your dignity intact?" unless, perhaps, "dignity" is code for response to the query about the Zone Diet was rich in common sense and went halfway toward torpedoing the trendy, useless diet industry. The other half is to working out is the better part of weight loss; she just plum forgot to mention it. And walking is wonderful exercise. It requires no special equipment eating with no physical exertion would be like putting lipstick on a about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably feel comfortable writing this. I am a male in my 60s. Five years ago I had a radical prostate operation that left me impotent. During this time my wife used chosen not to participate. I now face the following problem: My sexual desires have been restored, but to act on them will require my involvement with women other than my wife, who does not see things this way. I think I should do as Let's see if she has understood this: When you were impotent your wife was on the town, as it were. Now that you are operative she is not a willing partner or a bank. Her stepping out then forbidding you to do so, even though she is an unwilling sex partner, makes her sound like a perfect candidate for divorce lawyer and after that find a nice woman who genuinely cares about years old and face a serious problem. I am addicted to thinking about sex. the book, read a little, then whoosh, all these thoughts about having sex start have never had a girlfriend. Actually, I don't even want one, because I am not very open and friendly toward girls. Thus, I have never even touched a girl, means that I belong to a culture in which the only way to have sex is to get please don't advise me to get a girlfriend or get married early, because that is out of the question. Please don't print my name because I want get a girlfriend, but rather, a therapist. You can accomplish this either through your university health service or getting recommendations from friends. thoughts about sex, they make it clear you need a professional's counsel. fixated on an activity that you feel is verboten but which, in fact, is normal. But do not feel that your wheels are coming off. You are, after all, a stopgap measure, you might try to make friends with a few girls so they will Whether the Department of Justice thinks it is legal or not, do you think opposite: Are they being polite by offering people another option without having to be told? Like giving a person cream for his coffee and letting him continuum, how could you think someone rude who is trying to enhance your of the "race card," suggesting that the reason the friend's neighbors were complaining so frequently about his behavior was because the friend was black. The letter writer asked you whether you thought playing the race card was appropriate. Expecting you to reply "No," I was most surprised to read your opinion, raising race as the motivation behind the neighbors' complaints, in the absence of evidence to support the charge, is quite reckless. Even if we accept the friend's protestations that he does nothing to offend, we still have no basis for charging that they are acting out of racist hatred. It could be Perhaps the neighbors are simply bored busybodies with nothing better to do than complain about every little thing that annoys them. Charging that the serious business. Based on the information the letter writer provided, there is no reason to conclude that the neighbors are racist. does not agree with you that there is no basis to conclude that the neighbors Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. questions of etiquette attached to wearing a wire and recording conversations with one's supposed friends and colleagues for the benefit of, say, a special Incidentally, at a time when it is suggested that the president is living it's a ticklish question depends on where one wears the wire. He'd better not a problem that often leaves me frustrated and angry at myself: I am very bad at small talk. It's amazing to me how people can slip in and out of frivolous talk (though I know it serves a socially useful purpose) with seeming ease. No matter how hard I try, I feel that I say the wrong thing or something the work world, and the ability to make light conversation is paramount in business relationships. Do you have any suggestions? this. What everyone wants in a conversationalist is not a good talker but a at the right points, and occasionally saying: "Right on!" or "How true!" In business it is not the glib talker who gets the most respect. It is the person who can sit quietly through a meeting and then cogently synthesize the worry about what other people are thinking about you. Mostly they are not thinking about you at all. Don't worry about saying the wrong thing. Most people don't know what the right thing is. If what you say is bizarre enough, bought something using cash in a retail store, the clerk would return our change by first placing the coins safely in the palm of our hand, followed by any bills. The receipt, of course, would have already been tucked inside, or stapled to, the bag. This way, we could easily grip the coins while putting the extra bills away into our wallets, and then drop the coins into our pockets or days, it seems the standard procedure is to hand out the bills first, followed by the receipt, and then the coins, perched precariously on top. We are then left standing there to sort out this unwieldy stack. When and why did this practice start, and who could we contact to try to get it changed? It is not universal, however. Prudence has just been through a cafeteria line where the cashier gave change in coins first and then in bills. But the practice of which you complain is very common, especially in supermarkets. The reason for it is to speed up the checkout process. If the cashier is to give you coins first, he must either make two passes at you, first with the coins and then with the bills, or he must hold the coins in his hand while he fishes the bills out of the cash register. In the latter case the risk that he will drop the coins is increased. By doing it his way the risk that you will drop the coins is increased. That is what we mean by "the service economy." The in the bottle near the cash register, where they will be collected to help the card, irritating the hell out of everyone in line behind you. coins, bills, and receipts in your pocket or purse to be sorted out at home want to get the practice changed, I have two suggestions for you: You can write a silly little problem that I want to share with you. The problem is that I am my whole life, since it is not a norm in the country I come from. So now that I about the possibility of having to kiss a girl, or even having to ask for a you'll like it. You ask what you should do if you ever "have" to kiss a girl. If that situation arises, you will have no problem. Perhaps you will "have" to reaction will be to kiss her back. Your problem will not be hesitancy about the hots for a pretty waitress at a restaurant where I eat. She is so beautiful, and I would love to ask her out, but I am shy, and she is always working when I see her. I want to know how to approach her and pop the and without disturbing her at work. If you have any ideas, they would be correction for shyness is to summon up your courage and do it. If your attraction to her is very strong it will overcome your shyness. Women are seldom offended by an expression of a man's interest in them if it is expressed in a respectful manner. You should, however, drop the word "hots" from your Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. what point, and how, should one tell one's new boyfriend about one's medical history? (And it's not the history you may think.) Bluntly put, when does he needed for a more continuous relationship? Or should I just assume he'll find the bottle in the medicine cabinet when he gets a headache? depends on what you mean by a "more continuous relationship." If you mean that you will be with this man daily, or almost daily, for a significant period, with the possibility that it will be for the rest of your lives, you should certainly tell him. You will both be more free with each other if he knows. You will not have to try to hide your condition or make up false explanations of it. He will understand you better if he knows. He will know to try to avoid exacerbating your condition and may be able to help alleviate it by sympathetic and understanding behavior. If he can't accept that, you should consider whether you want a "more continuous relationship" with him. play right now. Play is activity engaged in for the enjoyment of it without regard to the financial remuneration. My remuneration is so trivial that what I be my daughter. When we divorced, I knew her mom was pregnant, but through the lawyers I was told the unborn baby belonged to her first husband. In fact, out met in person over Thanksgiving, is undoubtedly my child. But, she's a very troubled and angry young woman. She has been abused sexually, emotionally; was hospitalized for psychiatric problems for three months; was arrested for assault and is currently on probation; and the list goes on. she needed to deal with her anger and learn to love herself before she could even begin to think about loving me, her half brother, and half sister. She said some pretty mean things to me while she was here. I requested that we not have a relationship unless and until she gets herself some help. financial, and physical capabilities. Did I do the right thing? think you are shortchanging your daughter and yourself. I accept what you say about having limited financial and physical capabilities. I don't think you are right about having limited emotional capabilities. You should not cut off your relationship with her but rather should offer her sympathy, understanding, love, and companionship. It will be hard. Obviously, after the life she has led she is going to say some mean things. She may feel that the absence of her contributed to her present condition. Treating her lovingly will not only be helpful to her. It will also be helpful to you. The emotional capabilities you not be able to sustain this attitude, but it will be worth a very hard try. to music the words of great poets, but does the music give us any better extravaganza, as a mass entertainment for children, and more arcanely, as with these sundry renditions, would take particular exception to the idea of a adaptations of his writings, and as for children, he wrote a volume of poetry, Hunchback 's "A Guy Like You," sung by stone gargoyles, which you can millions of theatergoers have discovered before me, turns out to be an intelligent and moving show. Technically speaking, it is an opera, all singing Click to see what I mean) intended to display the jewels, which are the lyrics. These lyrics have been composed by a committee consisting of, in the French outward from the stage in a ceaseless gush, until you feel you have been original writings, the wordy rhymed couplets conjure a feeling of endless heels, and you have this feeling of a hidden stage director crying, "Next! intelligence is its ability to speak French." They are written in the light, his verse structures varying with perfect control, as if every possible soundboard of a composer's music? I find it enjoyable to listen to the musical contains its own music, even if the music is only hinted at, and if some composer comes along and fills in the hints with imaginings of his own, the that, when composers set a poet's work to music, the best thing to do is, in other hand, the best thing is to savor the musical settings and the words, by himself on the printed page, with piano accompaniment and vocal sonorities pleased at the confidence so many of you have shown in her by asking her advice. Sadly she must, however, return to her needlework now. Some answers to questions previously posed to her will be posted here in the next few weeks, but she will be unable to answer any questions received after this in a very few instances, Prudence is neither better informed nor wiser than the persons who write to her. She is able to offer helpful advice only because the problems described are not hers; she is not emotionally involved in them and can consider them objectively. So her advice has two parts: First, when you are greatly troubled with a problem you should write it down in the form of a the problem into written words, rather than brooding over it endlessly and incoherently, will itself be helpful. It will enable you to see the problem in its true dimensions. Second, you should not mail the letter but should read it received, she often felt that the writer knew the answer but only wanted some never be foolish enough to say to anyone in my workplace that he is a simp (and a mental shrimp), but I think that I somehow broadcast these kinds of it back a notch. I want to seem less threatening. When I announced my goal to up in arms. "You can't change who you are!" was the most common line. Prudence, I have no intention of changing who I am. I just want to change the window dressing. Can I pull it back a notch, or am I doomed to come off as a change who you are, but it would be helpful to recognize who you in the world and probably not even in your own circle. Moreover, to whatever extent you are superior, it is probably the result of genes and attitudes inherited from your parents and not something you created for yourself. Accepting these realities will help you to behave in a more accommodating way if you do feel yourself superior, you can still learn to behave in a way that is not offensive. People who are attractively slim do not talk about the ugliness of obesity in the presence of people who are grossly overweight. Good manners can be cultivated. You may even find pleasure in realizing that you have acted with noblesse oblige in not flaunting your superiority. There is satisfaction in feeling that you are better than other people not only in a pal who was actually a very good friend of mine until she started going out with a certain guy. Now I hardly ever see her. Plus, she has changed a lot, although she doesn't see it. She is still in high school but has already slept with him a few times, and I believe she is pregnant. This is something that we until we were married. Now, she sees everything differently, and in some way, doesn't see that she has done anything wrong. I feel as though she has committed a terrible crime, almost. How should I treat her now since I can friend does not seem to want help or comfort from you at this time and certainly would not welcome a lecture. I think it natural and appropriate that your relations with her should cool. That is one way she would learn the consequences of her actions, which may or may not bother her. But you should not be hostile, and you should be open to help her if she should turn to you have begun to notice people greeting each other with a kiss on the lips. I was rather appalled because I assumed that kissing, especially on the lips, was two people who are only social acquaintances kiss each other? Is this even sanitary? How "socially acceptable" is kissing in public even for two people is with you. If casual acquaintances kiss each other on the lips, what method think of you as one who would attempt to disrupt sisterly relations, and so wanted to make sure you understood the possible ramifications of what you printed. Thanks for your good words each week, and be well. great respect for both. Judging by the volume of my mail, I think there is enough unmet demand for advice to keep all of us busy. I suppose there are subjects on which they know more than I do, but I suppose there are also your name on its site in connection with your submission.) also encouraged to submit their own puzzles (along with a solution path). we challenged you to get from this page on hang gliding to this page featuring hoary marmots in six I went down endless dead ends before hitting the right link, although I suppose glory to small and hoary in a victorious six links. about that, I neglected this, I left that out in the rain, that should have one of the few garden writers to admit that misery is a major operating principle in the life of the gardener, which is one "of unexpected failures and sorrows, somewhat redeemed by unexpected and utterly accidental triumphs." Devastating winds, early frosts, late frosts, killing storms, bad luck, bad timing, and general human stupidity are the norm. Over the years, I learned many things from Henry, such as the lesson of dividing up a small space to make it seem bigger; the importance of small bodies of water in a garden; and how to nurture tender plants through the winter. But mostly I learned to get over It is surely unfair to Henry, who is probably the smartest, for how to do this or that in the garden as for how to be a better gardening person. He provides a sense of comfort, much like the feeling you get from a cookbook when you have no intention of making any of the dishes. He had scores of devoted readers with little or no interest in gardening. the remarkable ability to delight in a single flower in bloom, however many weeds and catastrophes surrounded it. Because when he wrote "my garden is a never bothered to sink into the ground. The photo on the cover of One Garden shows him in front of his green, murky pond. A big piece of tape seems to hold up some vine, dead stems of which obscure his continuum, on one side you'd find Henry, the cynical optimist, and on the other no weeds and no storms. Plans are made, schedules followed, and order kept. finger at you saying now is the time to do such or other. How could he? He was bringing in his tender plants for winter, and lugging them out again in spring. (He was never sure how someone who hated houseplants as much as he did could end up with a living room so full of plants each winter that it was impossible plans often fail and that the surest way to make a plant thrive was to plant it where it didn't belong. Sometimes even his beloved irises refused to bloom. His garden was plagued with bindweed. He didn't let it get him down. the garden seemed the ideal place to witness the charms and vagaries of the natural world. He was coyly gleeful about how lucky we are to toil in this chaos: to see the early snowdrops pushing up from the snow year after year or some flower graciously volunteering where you never would have been clever enough to plant it; or just to watch a couple of dragonflies having sex on a hot summer day. (He rigged up a landing strip for the dragonflies at the edge In print and in life, Henry was as amusing as he was easily amused. He would entertain the Post newsroom (where I worked) with his affair with the language; his cigarette ash building up until it rolled, unnoticed by him, down the front of his shirt. He always acted as if he were getting away with something or sneaking around like a mischievous child where on things. On the contrary, he could be quite cantankerous. He reproached the early spring flowering shrub that others consider a bold sweep of color. He had little patience for people who want their flowers to be foolproof and in squeal." He loved his bearded irises, old roses, and peonies. He thought they bloomed for just the right length of time, smartly disappearing before you can tire of them. If you bemoaned that a particular rose only flowered once a year and for such a short period, he would advise you to take a vacation from work in order to stay at home and watch it bloom. He did. her life, goes out into the garden, as she has done every year before, to plant the spring bulbs she knew she would never live to see rise. I had always thought she did this for her husband, so that flowers would come up for him she simply loved the feel of the bulbs in her hand, the textures and colors of their little tunics. He would know. A week before Henry died from cancer, he directed his wife, from his bedroom window, on the planting of a new bed of irises. On the morning of his death, he left his bed and insisted on going out about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably should never wipe up anything he accidentally spills in a lady's lap. This suggests to me that our president IS a perfect gentleman, but should this point of etiquette always be followed in cases of possibly impeachable would be applicable to so few teens that the lap etiquette will remain scene you fantasize. It would no doubt make the roller derby look demure. contribute to various (and numerous) causes. However, I am currently limiting my donations to a select few organizations. Despite the tax benefits that are available from deducting such contributions, I am ambivalent about giving. The to be put on mailing lists that are shared among other charitable groups. This ways to contribute anonymously, but can't think of a good way. Can you? check to the charity of your choice can go a note asking that your name not be shared or put on a list and that any donor list show your gift as having come from "Anonymous." You can make these requests a condition of your continued support. If you want to remain really unknown, your bank can issue a draft, akin to a cashier's check, or you can arrange a money order. a sex thing. It's a "lying thing," and we need to take it seriously. A leader has lost that. Instead, every decision out of the White House will now be viewed by the world with a Wag the Dog cynicism. Do we really want to be the laughingstock of the world? Let's get him out so we can maintain what moderately festive occasion. A going away gift and cards would be presented, people are often hustled out of the office in the dead of night, and we learn of their departure by accident. Of course many employers have legitimate concerns about security and trade secrets and the like. And perhaps there is a human resources professional somewhere who says that cutting the cord quickly the question remains: Should a group organize and bid adieu to someone who has "downsizing" as commonplace as it is, the country would be engaged in one you, though, to want to organize a proper farewell. If a special friend has been found redundant, as the Brits say, by all means take that person to lunch about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably fiance and I attend different universities. He is a scholarship athlete, and academics are not his forte. Lately, I have taken it upon myself to write a few of his papers. Now he has come to expect it. How can I tell him that I am not his tutor or his slave without causing a fight? I don't mind doing the work, I your idea initially, tell the athlete something like "I have made a great mistake." Explain that you were not thinking ahead, imagined it to be a need to go into the national scandal of schools going academically easy on foresees a potential fight, and then you will have to evaluate the young man's my acquaintance recently announced that she has a "boyfriend" and wants everyone to introduce the fellow by that title. It seems to me that when you've Web sites, you should find a term other than boyfriend for the guy with whom you're hooking up, hanging out, going steady, or whatever. social occasions such as my son's upcoming bar mitzvah, I would be reluctant to but the terms "beau," "lady friend," or "beloved" seem about right for grandmother referring to her boyfriend is rather sweet, considering overly stressed by finals, and the question haunts me: When will the insanity stop? Teachers are asking more of students every year, and it's coming to the point where the average kid has to go to college for four years just to flip square your complaints with all the news stories about grade inflation and possible you are not in a college suited to your needs. If it's any comfort, sympathizes about the increasing need for degrees just to get a foot in any government. Anything beyond that is not voluntary. A Reader's Digest poll indicates that the most anyone (at least anyone in a family of four) level of taxation is illegitimate because it is done without the consent of the where noncooperation is a virtue, won't you admit that at some level of taxation, "noncooperation" with the Internal Revenue Service would become a some conscientious objectors believed they were acting for the good of the country and did so at great personal risk. Perhaps tax resisters should be viewed with the same mix of emotions that we viewed conscientious can I get you to withdraw your blanket statement that we have a civic duty to correspondent did not say that tax evaders must always be reported, but she wonders why you wish the Reader's Digest respondents made up Congress. While no one really likes forking over taxes, that money pays for a multitude of government services and functions. Which ones should be eliminated? (Whatever their true merits, widely unpopular items such as foreign aid make up only a tiny percentage of the federal budget.) of course, a complicated issue. What is proper, and what is enough? The concept of a fiscal citizen's arrest (tattling on tax fraud) is subject to many evasion" by the feds and is punishable by jail time. Just as those who consult about civil disobedience as it pertains to taxes but, alas, it is also invited to submit their own puzzles (along with a solution path). about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably coinage commensurate with the services their owners provide. They're cabbies, half inch he shears with such aesthetic sensibility from my scalp but also a tip. And bartenders have their own ideas about what it's worth to me to have them put a lime sliver and a tiny straw in my martini. you may have guessed, is: How much dough should I be shelling out? If I make the bartender mad, the vodka tonics start tasting less like vodka and more like also a reminder that whereas the Hands Out Brigade used to be an issue mostly tipping taxi drivers tack on a couple of bucks, no matter what the meter. As grease their palms once every several encounters, or else you'll go crazy and than others. In other words, pick your spots, while at the same time remembering that many service people rely on tips to get by. 'Ms.' ridiculous and crosses it out whenever possible, believing that single that then you get to choose between the two forms of address.)" What sort of ancient sexist claptrap is this? I, my mother, my grandmothers, years just to have this dubious woman sweep our work under the rug. I do support a woman who likes to take her husband's name and who likes hearing a keeping the stoic, inscrutable "Ms." in front of mine. pained by your opinion, as well as by your wish to have her sacked. As for a however, that "insulting" and "inane" were what you meant to say. Please know that I meant no assault on you, your mother, your grandmothers, and your my fellow members to the wedding. What should we wear? prank. Since no rational person would wish to have her name attached to admitted membership in such a shameful group, however, I will answer the question you pose in the spirit in which it is asked. should wear whatever attire is appropriate for the time of the wedding. Whether or not it is black tie is indicated on the invitation. edition, in your answer to "Hope," you discuss the meaning of the relationship between "trout in the milk" and circumstantial evidence. You explain the relationship by saying that if you find a trout in your milk, it is evidence that it was put there deliberately. Either I am dense and missing some subtlety, or you don't understand the origin of the quip. unscrupulous farmers (or merchants) back then made a practice of diluting the milk they sold with water, thus being able to sell water at the price of milk. "Finding a trout in the milk," thus, refers to the inference that this is good circumstantial evidence that water was added to the milk, since the water presumably came from a stream, not that someone deliberately put a fish in the about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably no problem of a personal nature at the moment. What I do have is a societal irritation. Not only the young but also adults who are professional broadcasters have taken to ending declarative sentences as though they were questions. Have you heard this irritating "modernization"? How did experienced relieved that you are not in distress of a personal nature and hopes it is some comfort to you that she herself regards this way of speaking as revolting? It his question mark until it hurt. This raising of the voice at the end of a declarative sentence is the unfortunate result of trying to fluff up something is sick of the subject, and to distract herself from the pharmacological drama of good will cannot begrudge those in genuine need, but the V pill is on its way to becoming a recreational drug, thereby creating ersatz libido, and to know how to ask if someone is pregnant without giving offense if they're not. A casual (married) acquaintance of mine appears to be showing but not in a manner in which one can be certain. I suppose I could wait her out, but I want of asking the question you have in mind. My unfortunate query elicited this response: "I have a problem with my weight, and you have just ruined my certain that you should ask no questions and put the gossip on hold. having this problem in this day and age. I am in my late 20s and in a serious relationship. We are discussing marriage, but he has one concern: his mother's, in ancestors, social pedigree, and similarly irrelevant issues. My boyfriend is afraid she will not welcome me with open arms out of fear her son will wind up this kind of thinking and, as a matter of fact, has always considered the immediate determination is whether your beau shares his mother's views. If he is afraid of her disapproval, he will surely be substandard husband material. If he is not wholeheartedly in your corner on this one, say adios and look for someone who will not regard you as the little match girl. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably things rendered unto Gates. What is your opinion of the antitrust suit? guy with wonderful qualities and think he has real possibilities for the long haul. There is only one glitch. (Isn't there always?) pathologically cheap when it comes to eating out. To make this less of an issue, I have taken to cooking dinner for us at my place or drumming up however, about his choice of restaurants leaning heavily to pizzerias and joints specializing in burgers. What do you think of all this? allied yourself with the kind of man who will always opt for the Road Kill approach this. You can try to get to the bottom of his aversion to better off if he is in all other ways wonderful. You can let him know you would love a are not reform schools. There is an old saying, "A woman hooks up with a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't. A man hooks up with a woman expecting thinks, overall, that if this is the young lad's only negative, you should learn to roll with the punches (or burgers, in your case) and hope that his that I am moving in with my significant other, I don't know what to do with the other and I became involved but before we were very serious. I don't want her to find about the affair. I also don't want to get rid of the notes yet. What thinks you are wise not to stash the mash notes in your sock drawer. Discovery would not be healthy for your current relationship. Since you don't wish to discard the sizzlers, you have the option of storing them in a safety deposit housed the jewelry of a divorcing friend and was very uncomfortable. letter from the man whose wife insisted on writing notes rather than talking, seen by some as your good fortune. A more common question might surely be 'How dear. While claiming to "pass up the chance," you take it. Is that does not think the quote you mention is polite or impolite, but simply a about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably do when suspected of having been unfaithful to his wife? Is the answer to lie, wife, and protect the reputation of the lady in question? Or is it as the Bible and some of our laws say: Do not bear false witness? illicit partner, she must point out that all are jeopardized by the of the phrase "having been unfaithful" suggests the affair may be over. If this is the case, the gentleman might take his wife for a drive and ask, "Will you forgive me, or should I drive right to a jewelry store?" a bad credit history, and some failed personal and professional relationships. Recently, however, I have settled down and become decidedly less problem is this: I am extremely bright and possess an advanced degree in philosophy. Now I wish to go to medical school, law school, or apply for a government job. What do I say at the interview about my previous experimental behavior, "We are not born with maps inside us," but somehow I think an interviewer will want a more comprehensive answer. Can you suggest a metaphor for rationalizing my past? I need to be my own spin doctor. come up. You might, however, have a problem with the conviction and the credit history. I wish I could come through for you in the metaphor department, but I am feeling metaphorically challenged today. Just try to act reformed. and during the warmer months I have a habit of not wearing shoes. I feel more as dirty soles), and that's why I do it. Checking on the Internet, I have found there to be no health laws in any state that force people to wear shoes in indecent by simply not wearing shoes? Also, why do most major fast food chains post a sign saying, "No shirt, no shoes, no service, by order of health department"? Do you find a person who is shoeless in public to be dressed would substitute "unappetizing." The idea of entering a place of food service people come in all manner of shapes and degrees of cleanliness, a decorous person would support even a fraudulent health code advisory. gossip now the preferred method of office communication? If so, has gossip replaced the memo? Will my supervisor whisper my work assignments to my the topic is of a private, personal nature? I guess my question is: How do I distinguish "sanctioned" gossip from regular old slander? is a false report meant to do harm and is legally actionable. "I think Sally has replaced the memo, but it is somehow delivered faster. your advice on the following. I received gifts from my parents (delivered by my mom). There were three gifts in the bag but none for my wife. Friends have told me this was a slight to my wife. My problem is what to do about the gifts. I could return one or all of them and use the credit to buy a gift for my wife, or I could return the gifts to my mother, explaining that I take the presents not sure your problem is what to do about the gifts, but perhaps what to do about your mother. Subtle she is not. The solution for you may be to do both you take umbrage at her acting out, and I would return the gifts for credit, of the Soviet Union and the descent into anarchy of much of the former Soviet sturgeon fishery, the leaders of the free world have also become the primary still observe the old rules originally imposed by the czars, faithfully honored palate (he was profiled last week in the New York Times as the prime a master craftsman. He claims he can taste the difference between caviar from one sturgeon and another. One reason to give him the benefit of the doubt is Spoonful after spoonful plays across the palate like an ocean breeze. If money can distinguish in a sip of Burgundy the intensity of autumn sunshine that cabinetmakers I have heard of who can diagnose the health of the tree (when it was alive) by the feel of its grain in a length of seasoned lumber. But Rod eat much caviar. What they didn't carelessly discard they packed in salt and outgrew their democratic origins, local sturgeon had become scarce. Now the side, which means it can't be sold in the United States. to harvest sturgeon is at the appropriate moment during their seasonal journey plants still strictly control the catch along the spawning grounds, but their eggs are firm. It is caviar from these fish that is clumsily processed buyers. Wary buyers, however, can spot such caviar instantly. The aroma is likely to be fishy or stale. The eggs will seem shapeless and gummy or oily and filmed with a whitish glaze. The flavor will be strong or dull or salty. The eggs may be of various colors and sizes or have turned to jelly. experts, he would be the least likely choice. When we met for lunch the other yachtsman offered him a job selling wine in a shop he had just opened in a been selling caviar, fish, and other seafood from the mouth of the lottery or taken your Internet company public, you can probably afford to treat comes from a much smaller species of sturgeon whose eggs are about a third the chopped egg or onion or capers, and use lemon sparingly if at all. These are relics of a time when fresh caviar of the best quality was hard to find in the the tin. If you have some left over, it will keep in the refrigerator for a week or so, as long as you stir it from time to time so that the surface doesn't dry out. Caviar in tins that have never been opened can be kept for the caviar from freezing. Home freezers, which are much colder, are not oysters, the intensely flavored French variety that has been transplanted to afternoon, you might remove the upper third of an eggshell, deposit the raw egg in a small pitcher or juice glass, and scramble it under the steam nozzle of an espresso machine. Then return the cooked egg to the lower portion of the hand with which to repeat the process until satiated. If you accompany each egg with a shot of triple distilled, ice cold vodka, your afternoon will soon grateful to Art, not for the pleasure it affords the consumer, but for the "paces around and around like a hound in search of game." is that he could never have been anything other than what he was. But if you The life and the work are bound together by this single character trait: not so much the instinct to create as the compulsion to erase. settles into a new style of painting (or a new home, or a new mistress), he is the bad behavior of the artist as use it to explain the career: The art was great at least in part because the artist was flawed. is not exactly a new line of art criticism, but it's rare to find it taking root at such altitudes. (The piece recently won a National Magazine Award.) And, given the violently mixed reaction to the National Gallery exhibition be remembered as a second tier Symbolist."), you can't help but wonder if day, uncommon biographer's loyalty, too large a benefit of the doubt on the Here the reviewer needs to drop all pretense of magisterial loft, jump down It was only a matter of time before family values entered art criticism. But who would have thought it would be imported by The New attitudes are once again in vogue, this time with a new twist. The modern moralist lacks the courage of his convictions. He is reluctant to attack the artist's morality directly. Instead, he attacks his morality in the guise of attacking his art. The critic is using the life as a weapon against the character, to err on the side of the prosecution. In making the case against coward, who sat out two world wars while his friends were suffering and dying," adding that "he may have been right to do this in the First War, but he did it strikes me as a complete novelty, and it would have been a novelty to those caused him to run off "to a nearby bar to drink my very first vodka on the has put his academic past behind him. He is able to see the world as it is. He is able to see that scholars have been covering up the crimes of the artist to artist and an honorable man (instead of the inspired poetic rascal he actually point nicely. His is exactly the approach of every celebrity journalist to his subject. Why bother with the art on its terms when you can have it on your about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably citizen I could never have believed that I would become embroiled in the presidential scandal. Not publicly, of course, but among my circle of wagering sort, I foolishly made a bet with a friend before the president's citizen, and I stand by my responsibilities and my debts. But the question is: cheap, but if one parsed that speech, perhaps one might settle on it being there any way at all that you can help me do the right, honorable, and parlor, but she sympathizes with you, having had her own doubts about that speech. Since there is disputation about what exactly got said, and your bet devote some of the luncheon conversation to the sad and shabby affair. master's. He is a popular trumpet player with his own band. business. I keep my mouth shut. But when it comes to occasions such as his that you don't care for the young man but that you wish the children were young man with a horn is your daughter's spouse equivalent, by all means treat difficulty meeting women. One might wonder how that's possible, given the plethora of meeting places most big cities offer my age group, but my troubles are twofold. First, I don't drink (don't like the taste or the at the local dance studio is about twice mine. Churches and the like are out, too, since my atheism probably wouldn't go over too well at such functions. Do you have any ideas for me? Do I have to start drinking, believing, and packing favorite: cranberry juice and soda, in a wine glass. Also hang in there with anyway, are those whose musical taste would clash with your own. need not find religion, or feign it, to meet women. Simply get out and about. Try affinity groups, classes, volunteer groups of interest to you, singles' nights at the supermarket, etc. And don't neglect to put out the word to teetotaler and appreciator of good music sounds very desirable for a young woman of taste. And don't dismiss the fact that the numbers are in your favor: on wondering about the president's current situation. Why would anyone be interested if the president had an affair? I could not care less what he does in his personal life. I know he has plunged himself in deep waters for they knew what they were doing, it was certainly not harassment. Please help me of the famous. Maybe this is none of our business, but that's probably why we situation became wildly interesting for the following reasons: She was near the interest to the president for a relatively long time. And you are right. It too, that one of this president's defining characteristics is his Hot Springs gene, the one that impels him to chase skirts. A fitting coat of arms for about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably residents sans country house, spent this past weekend with friends at their note is starting to seem like the whalebone corset, given the modern possibilities. Because snail mail is not always reliable, many people with social graces have substituted the fax, ensuring both timeliness and actual means feel at ease being electronically grateful. It is, after all, the thought test for you to figure out your comfort level about this matter is to imagine is married to his father. I get along famously with both of them, and they get On two occasions these were said just to me, and on one occasion they were said in front of others. Both times I quickly changed the subject but felt as though the need to express my intolerance of this type of behavior, but it is imperative that it be done in the nicest way possible. How do you suggest I approach the topic? I want to be understood perfectly but also don't want to family. Why don't you try something like this: "I know you and (insert name) unfriendly remarks are coming from. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you. It has relationship was cordial. It would be a shame to change the balance and make approach you will not be attacking her, you will be offering her a benign directional signal, and she will get the message. If she does not take the says he's "not ready" for marriage)? If so, it's this: Ultimatums and head games are a terrible way to start a marriage. What you need instead is a where each of you is going individually and what each wishes to achieve. This kind of conversation will give you more information about your place in his for security? Children? Or maybe you just think it's time to get married? Then the idea, run for the hills. But if he passionately agrees, start in on forever and shut up about a wedding. More than likely it will pop up before you know words for our friend in romantic turmoil! It was good of you to take the time there. It was a secret affair for three weeks until I found out. Then he said they were "just friends." He said he could talk to her on subjects he can't desires on a cerebral level. Was I jealous? Hell yes, and hurt! few years ago he had an impotence problem and couldn't manage on a physical level, so I got into cybersex. I considered it enhanced masturbation and think I agreed to let him have his "intellectual friend." Now he wants to meet her girlfriend is fine with me, but going out for coffee without me is a major problem. I checked his mailbox and found he had deleted many messages to her. He is also being secretive and in denial that this situation is unfair. My yet. I don't have a degree, but I know it is wrong when a man goes outside his marriage to fill a need, whether it be intellectual or sexual. I am feeling relationship sounds like a dog's breakfast. It is full of all kinds of things are just symptoms of a marriage that is not working. The writing is on the understands that you guys are between a rock and a hard drive but recommends that you sign off with as little rancor as you can manage. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably and like most Southern girls, I have looked forward to being addressed as Smith." Since I always thought that form of address was reserved for divorced assuming this is some misguided attempt to preserve my individuality, but if that were my goal I would have kept my maiden name. Am I completely misinformed? If not, how can I correct the problem? finds the appellation "Ms." ridiculous and crosses it out whenever possible, thing about divorce is that then you get to choose between the two forms of problem, when a response is called for, cross out the offending form of your name and write in what you would prefer. Some mailings, often from charities, mailings from entities such as Publishers Clearing House that frequently send material to dogs and toddlers, there is no recourse. good jobs, are reasonably attractive and intelligent. Each day together (it's is hard to foresee a future with a person whose philosophy is akin to that of a disagreement about character evaluation is bound, in the long run, to sink your love boat. Sex may come and sex may go, but Tom DeLay is liable to be around letter about the bald black man being confused with another black man. He was more than annoyed and thought it was the old "all black people look alike." Well, I have a close friend, Pat, who is bald and wears a full beard and horn rim glasses. He tells me he is forever being mistaken for other bald, bearded men who wear glasses. Pat even once mistook such a man in a photograph for and we had a very interesting conversation about this topic. He tells me that our brains store only a few visual traits about people with whom we are casually acquainted. Pat is "the bald, bearded, spectacle wearing guy." Sally is "the redheaded, long nosed, thin girl," etc. My wife changed her hairstyle from curly to straight and reported that while attending her annual professional association convention, she was shocked at the number of people who didn't recognize her. People who lose a lot of weight tell similar those racial groups, so their brains will use race as the most distinctive characteristic about that person. They know so many white people that they will discontinue using race as an identifying visual characteristic. good of you (and Pat) to share an enlightened explanation for a widespread situation. It no doubt will smooth the ruffled feathers of many a person who's but was too embarrassed to admit that I didn't get it. Exactly what is this it is an encouragement to pay attention to circumstantial evidence. In this case, the evidence is strong that the trout didn't get there by Though, perhaps, a deed is unobserved, its execution can sometimes be safely about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably know anything about the Zone diet? I seem to recall there was some controversy surrounding it, but I can't remember what. My friend is seeing a nutritionist who has him following the basic premise of the Zone. I am curious as well as is that they are demanding, boring, and most often do not offer lasting results. The trick is to retrain oneself in terms of how one eats and to reach does approve of diets, however trendy, and spas where the right foods are chosen for you. This is just to permit shedding a few initial pounds to provide motivation and hope, along with the feeling that one is able to achieve knows people who swear by the Zone, and others who swear at it. The real problem with any prescribed diet is lack of balance, and the fact that feeling deprived leads to chocolate cake. Perhaps a reliable approach is the one the a problem, but I thought perhaps you could offer me a palliative. behind people telling you they are going to "the best doctor," sometimes "the best doctor in the world," in such and such a field? I know there are many fine physicians around, but this seems to me to be a form of bragging. How do these people decide that their doctor is the best? These pronouncements on subjective issues annoy me no end. I have yet to hear someone say they are though she has made her peace with this manifestation of human nature. People just need to feel that their care is top of the line. the same weight as "I just had the best cheese Danish." the writer who wondered how he should introduce his grandmother's beau. I have found a good term for women to use: "gentleman caller." It's very handy in the provides an opportunity to poke fun at oneself and modern dating things move in a more serious direction, the gentleman can be upgraded to "my the appropriate name is). This allows others to join in the fun by referring to does away with the confusion created by the term "my friend," I think you'd agree that one should put off using the possessive endearment until it is truly called for, or it will come across as treacly baby talk. heartily approves of your suggestions for the relationship upgrade struggling with proper designation for the beloved and is grateful for the Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League get to drop an initial from its and mystery if it went by "M" rather than the prissy, feminine "MS." as though you have time on your hands. You might want to consider volunteering have expressed regret that Prudence has abandoned her advice column in favor of her needlework. Sensitive to the continuing need for guidance among Slate readers, however, Prudence has prevailed upon her niece and she is known to friends) will begin to respond to some of the unanswered experience of life in responding to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Unlike her aunt, she does not do Recently Bill Gates received a pie in the face from what I assume were one could see in the news photos was a picture of him mopping up. say, "This is not quite as good as my mother used to make." your unwillingness to advise on issues of macroeconomics, but one assumes you are aware of all this "tragedy of the commons" talk that's going around about the Web. (It's mostly loose talk about the incentives that individuals have to use the resources of the Web, regardless of the consequences to others in terms of slower response now and eventually even strangulation of the Web assume (since you don't do macro) that these prognosticators of doom are correct, what's a body to do? If my actions won't, in the big scheme of things, make a teeny, tiny spot of difference, and the Web as we know it is doomed eventually whatever I do, is it moral of me to download those huge them without even opening them just to get back the local disk space? More importantly, is it good manners? As the teeming millions flock to the Web, is it devil take the hindmost in the scramble for resources? Or is bandwidth abuse a real moral question? Should we be boycotting multimedia sites that make even my fractional T3 connection choke? We need your help and advice on this issue, she thinks it would take an economist to do it justice. Fortunately, she has needlework and help out her niece. Auntie Prudence offers the following question, you obviously feel uneasy about your frivolous use of the Web. You would feel better, and the world would be infinitesimally better, if you restrained yourself. But in the end the solution will have to come from technology, policy, and economics. That is, a way will be found to charge for the use of the Web. Someone will have a great incentive to sell speedy access, as free access becomes slower, and find a way to do it. developed an Internet monitoring program that tracks a user's actions on the Net. The program is called Scout. Surely there will be others. If the private sector does not devise ways to sell, and so limit, use of the Net, the single wise guy or wise doll in business or the media fails to note that he, she, or the subject under discussion is part of a "process." "system." Don't give us the guff that everyone is part of the food chain, only things "processed" were cheese and applications for licenses and passports. The only thing you can do to counteract this unwelcome addition to girlfriend and I recently returned from a holiday. I left the vacation photos on my desk, and when I was gone, she went through them and removed the ones she blushes to say it, but she would do the same. It may be a girl thing. Some of us are not always photogenic, and who needs to have rotten pictures recorded clinical depression. Three years later my dad and I were really close, and my life was getting back on track. He then found another woman and asked my permission to marry her. Not knowing what I was getting into, I had no reason to say no. Since then we've moved to another house, and my dad and I have grown apart. I miss my old house so much that I dream about it. I just feel so alone, father. You might try to discuss your loneliness with your dad, for he may be unaware of what is transpiring. You might also ask to see a counselor. Your age "Plot Holes" is an occasional series assessing the narrative logic of Logic Squad. The assaults on plausibility began in the first frames of Con broke out in a crosshatched design that made him look like a slab of grilled this should be surprising. Summer is the season of action movies, and in most damning things that can be said about a script is that it is "episodic," meaning that it dawdles when it should accelerate, that the writer is less interested in the ruthless propulsion of the story than in leisurely details of tone and character. As long as a movie is kept at a high enough idle, the thinking goes, the viewer won't mind an engine knock or two when it comes to Though the movie asked us to believe that the president of the United States was a superhuman jungle warrior of unyielding principle, it didn't significantly insult our intelligence further. And it's probably unsporting to Woo, its director, has long demonstrated a rousing indifference to mere with his ability to hang from firetruck ladders or leap from speeding boats. historians may one day deem the improbability trilogy of all time. Though there is not enough room in cyberspace to catalog all the ways in which these films befuddlement. When he steps onto a cruise ship carrying a set of explosive golf clubs and a jar of leeches, when he murmurs to the leeches in the bathtub as he ship"), we know we have entered a world that the light of reason will never summer nonsense, a passionate think piece about the possibility of alien life and the existence of God. It is to be applauded for trying to make us think instead of just react, but sometimes too many brain waves are just as bad as too few. I first suspected that Contact 's logic circuits might be fried box of Cracker Jack. While it is certainly possible that a box of Cracker Jack Contact 's central premise is intriguing: A radio astronomer, played by civilization in distant space. The task of decrypting these data stymies the most brilliant minds on earth, but when the puzzle is finally solved the scientists behold a set of blueprints for building a highly unconventional space transport. For all its earnest credibility about radio astronomy, Contact is breezy in the extreme when it comes to almost everything the filmmakers into a notorious cameo) could inspire the nation to spend put the finishing touches on it; and that after he sabotages the whole project Even more troubling are the cryptic motives of the aliens. thoughtfully provided by the aliens to cushion her culture shock. The aliens themselves take the form of her beloved dead father, who holds the weeping earthling in his arms and tells her she'll never walk alone. Incredibly, the aliens don't have much more to say than that, and she can't seem to think of much more to ask. She's traveled halfway across the universe to be patted on the head and told to run on home. And another thing: If these aliens are so adept at replicating the many moods of our planet, if they can speak through a byzantine binary code? That's like God deciding to communicate to us Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. there a cure for unrequited love? Also, could you fully explain the law of diminishing returns? And, while you're at it, please share your opinion of the is requited love. There are other cures also, such as devotion to the study of unrequited love is not fatal. As someone said, "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." This applies to women returns says that if the amount of one input applied to a production process is increased, the yield will not increase proportionately. For example, if your boyfriend sends you a 2-pound box of candy, he will get more return than if he sent you a 1-pound box, but not twice as much return. was young I felt it necessary to pretend that I understood and liked the plays have wisdom. Please tell me: Do you see an end to human suffering? If not, why? kind of wisdom, I don't claim to have. My judgment, for which I make no serious claims, is that there will not be an end to human suffering. You can look at it in an evolutionist kind of way and say that suffering is the stimulus to adaptation and there is no reason to foresee an end to adaptation, or if the adaptation of humans is complete, they will have ceased to be humans. You can look at it in a religious way and say that humans were destined to suffer for prospect of an end to suffering, either for individuals or for the species, suffering is a definition of "human." But adaptation and hope are also definitions of human. Suffering need not overwhelm. To go to the mundane, I are so opposed to poverty programs in this country so in favor of bailouts for crippled economies all over the globe? Especially at a time when welfare recipients are being forced off the rolls and told that the government will no longer subsidize those who refuse to help themselves. And at a time when their elected officials are accused of being poor public servants and bad financial management, and people living above their means on borrowed dollars. Am I missing something here? If not, why are all these politicians and financial types, who've turned a cold shoulder to our own poor and the District their loans? After all, the "lazy," "poor," and "inept" District officials are guys who built those glorious houses of cards, and the bankers whose reckless Prudence is not sure that even she can answer them to your satisfaction. in the welfare system, federal, state, and local governments will still be but also through Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. The reason given for the recent changes in the welfare program for families was that the program as it was, promoted force, and having children with no father present. New conditions were imposed on the receipt of welfare in the belief that these conditions would lead to behavior that was better for many of the people who would have received that belief is, but there is sufficient evidence to support the view that it is valid for some people. Probably the best guess is that under the new system some people will be better off and some worse off, and no one knows the relative numbers. We shall see. Prudence hopes and believes that if the number of people significantly worse off turns out to be large, adjustments will be foreign governments: You should recognize that despite all the attention "foreign aid" receives, expenditures for it in the whole postwar period have been tiny relative to the size of the federal budget. Only a small part of the is being provided in the form of a loan and in the expectation that it will be provided on the basis of certain beliefs that may or may not turn out to be down to a level far below its true potential. The thought is that if the panic international investors who lent money there were forced to make their own adjustment. Prudence doesn't know which of these views is correct, but she understands the thinking of those who conclude that the risks of not giving invested there will share in those losses. But the hope is that the aid will avoid losses that are caused only by irrational panic. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably Whenever I attend a quarterly sales meeting, there are inevitably several love Mad magazine's "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," I can never bring myself to snap at these retards. In the end, the frustration is mine, when it's they who should be apologizing. Can you offer me some wit to help come from unfamiliarity, perhaps thoughtlessness, but not bigotry. suggests is, granted, an old standby, but it defuses the situation and everybody gets the message. It is what a prominent black academic said when never again be careless in her address, which is, after all, what you're girl, and both of us share a similar interest, namely politics. However, we are on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum: She's a liberal Democrat into a fiery political debate. We disagree on every issue from gun control to we would fare as a couple, considering the area of political tension. Is it doesn't see how you can turn a switch and change your views. Your voter relationship with someone with wildly divergent politics, it is like walking with oatmeal in your shoe: It's not easy, but it's possible. The deciding factor is how the rest of the relationship functions. You might simply agree to some couples thrive on volatility and friction. Now you must figure out if you my pet peeves when dining with family or friends is the constant thanking that goes on. When the waiter brings cocktails for a table of eight there is a ridiculous rhapsody of "thank you" and "you're welcome." Then there are appetizers, salads, main courses, beverage refills, desserts, and coffee. A thousand thanks for doing one's job? I choose to thank once at the end of the meal and to provide a generous tip. I have been a waiter and preferred the artistry of being both attentive and discreet. The trick is to clear the salad plate and place the dinner plate without being noticed. had no idea about the depth of feeling on the subject of when and how much thanking of waitpersons is appropriate. Your letter is just one example. The fact that you yourself have experienced both positions relative to the dining tables, concurs that an appreciative gratuity is, indeed, preferable to repeated thank yous and now considers the problem solved. racy minx business, don't you hope it will never end? about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably college, just dumped me. I know I am the laughingstock of the whole campus and considering changing schools and telling new friends that my boyfriend was killed in a car wreck. That way they won't feel sorry for me. Can you think of being cut loose from a relationship. It happens all the time. strongly recommends that you not bop out of your college or change your friends. Your romance, after all, was not as important to your colleagues as it was to you. If you feel you must say something, state that you mutually decided to explore a wider world. And a small PS: Some people choose to be August. I have a friend I used to work with, and we still keep in touch. He invited me to his wedding, though I was unable to attend. invite him to mine. I think he perceives our friendship as being stronger than it is. Normally, I simply wouldn't invite him and would explain that it was a obligated to invite him? If I don't, how should I handle it, given that we'll you're in a bind: your wishes vs. his feelings. If yours were to have been a one's wedding. Meaningful occasions are not meant to be tit for tat. That way, views on needle exchanges: It's fine if the government wants to give out clean needles to intravenous drug users to reduce the spread of AIDS, but I would then expect a full refund on my tax return for my share of the cost, because that's not why I pay taxes. It's bad enough that I have to pay more in whose need for attention drove him to illicit drug use. Until then, how dare that the cost of needle exchange is hugely less than the care of AIDS pay taxes for any one reason, nor do we have veto power over particular expenditures. It would, of course, be an impossibility to get the citizenry to agree on expenditures. Pacifists would object to defense budgets, childless elected representatives come in, and over them we do have veto Prudence, drawing on her rich experience of life, will answer questions submitted by readers. She will respond to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, economics, and other subjects. Questions should be sent to letter to be signed, preferably including your location. in a crash, it would make the list of tragedies longer. Is this an example of that the word "tragedy" is used without discrimination in reference to the the subsequent "problems" were the result of their own recklessness or worse. Since they are so prominent and have been blessed with so much wealth and public adulation, they have a responsibility to be role models of sensible behavior. It is unfortunate that they do not see it that way. met a woman whom I am attracted to. She is attracted to me and we would like to see more of each other. The problem is we are both married. The attraction is more than plutonic, it is also physical. What would you recommend? ambiguous. You say that the attraction between this woman and you is "more than plutonic, it is also physical." In my old dictionary, "plutonic" means "of whether you mean that the attraction is physical or that the consummated like to have sexual relations but have not done so. My advice is not to do it is that your wife will probably learn of it, and when she does there will be the devil to pay. A second reason is that even if she doesn't find out, you will know, and you will probably go around with a burden of guilt that will sour your life and your relations with both women. But there is a third, most important, reason. The relationship you are longing for is wrong. The one of the Ten Commandments that everyone knows is "Thou shalt not commit adultery." It may be often violated, but hardly anyone in our culture denies that it is a calculations, and not by moral standards, we are in pretty bad shape. you should leave your present wife I cannot tell without knowing much more than you have revealed. I urge you to be very cautious about it. It is easy to be attracted to a new woman, whose faults you do not know, who does not know your faults, and who has never asked you to take out the garbage or mow the lawn. But you have to think of what the new woman will be like after she has become the old woman. Also, you haven't said whether you and your wife have any must be something more here than meets the eye. On the facts presented, you have no problem. Don't send him a gift. Send his gift back. that the verbal thank you satisfies my obligation. What do you think? an "oral" expression of gratitude, which was, of course, also "verbal." That is read a few of your comments, and you do indeed sound like a thoroughly courteous and sensible person. I just have an idea I should like to broadcast kind and gentle way of referring to people in the teen years? I thought it would gently help those young people to begin to accept the idea that they are hate the idea that the word "adult" so often refers to pornographic things. There goes another perfectly good word, unless we can recapture it with becoming adults, and that they are not in some playground where they have full impress that upon them. The signs you observe in the library are a small step of the word "adult" to rate some movies and, I suppose, other forms of entertainment, is, I agree, often inappropriate. I think we should have two world's cultures. He was a record producer, an adept of black magic, and an collecting 78-rpm recordings in the early 1940s, acquiring thousands of "race" and "hillbilly" works from the junk shops of the Pacific Northwest before they could be melted down, their shellac recuperated for the war effort. these songs in an anthology that was at once systematic and intuitive. In three Depression halted folk music sales"; otherwise, he was guided only by serendipity and his own ears. Yet he succeeded in making a collection that was definitive in its selections and mysteriously cohesive, the diverse offerings falling together like strands of a single design. You have to remember that, at the time, no one had an overview on this stuff. Few people knew any of it, and invisibly, the Anthology captivated and influenced a generation. It the spirit of the original works, among which lines and verses migrate freely, that he forcefully inserted himself into the tradition. After that, though, the it, despite its remaining in print until Folkways Records dissolved when its It has finally been reissued, in a lavish package (full disclosure: I contributed a small reminiscence of Smith to the liner notes). original recordings had been imperfectly documented if at all, the artists were paid small flat fees and sent in most cases back to obscurity, but the splendid (and including helpful and sometimes inspiring essays, complete documentation, and an enhanced CD containing films and recordings of and by Smith), is maybe too lavish by half, since its price tag will put it far beyond the means of young people. It is to be hoped that its volumes will be issued Nevertheless, it is available again, and its importance cannot be overstated. might make you suspicious, but they are not hyperbole. Consider that Smith, who said he searched for records that sounded "odd" or "exotic," managed to include an array of composers and performers who, rather than being typical or artists. Some were truly weird, others major innovators whose stature would Consider also that Smith deliberately avoided identifying the performers by wasn't a hillbilly," he said, and it is just as surprising to find out that songs and ideas could only be transmitted by live performance and by rumor and yet circulated far and fast, among musicians isolated by race or poverty or and whole verses traveled from this song to that one, from blues to mountain native Surrealism, a collage by accretion. It also shows how profoundly linked through each other like closely planted trees. Tradition, for that matter, coexisted with experimentation, so that it is not always immediately obvious was an innovator who transformed the blues and influenced every subsequent represents a late vestige of a style that may have reached its acme of sings, "Sometimes I think that you're too sweet to die, but other times I think dog on a silver chain as with every link he calls his name. Murder, deception, native culture as you'll find anywhere, is no museum piece; as well as being about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably five words men fear most are: "Honey, we need to talk." Well, my wife is the one who refuses to talk. Instead of leaving normal notes, such as "Please take out the garbage" or "Don't forget to pick up milk on the way home," she leaves feelings, sharing chores, etc. When I ask her if it wouldn't be easier to sit chance to point out what would be seen by some as your good fortune. A more common question might surely be "How can I get her to stop talking?" address the problem at hand: Your wife, for whatever reason, is committed to an epistolary marriage. Perhaps she's a frustrated writer, unable to get published? Perhaps she feels you tune her out? If you've really made an effort appropriate color, considering the occasion. Fashion, however, has made black dresses for bridesmaids all the vogue. It could be that people just got sick of also slenderizing, so perhaps the heavier bridesmaids lobby made itself requests, my neighbors' friends continually pull up in front of my house at all hours and blast their car horns rather than park, get out, and ring the bell of the person they've come to pick up. This happens as late as midnight. drivers to stop this, they use profanity, ignore me, or threaten violence. My neighbors say they'll speak to their friends about this behavior, but if they have done so it hasn't worked. Getting the police to respond has been useless times these horns have awakened me from sleep. I have used up my patience. What knows the men in blue are not going to come for people blowing horns, since they ignored her calls regarding people blowing leaves. you are getting nowhere with the drivers or the neighbors, mental health would seem to dictate that you handle the situation with the best cannot change and have the wisdom to know what those things are. Or think like a Zen master: There is no solution. Seek it lovingly. carrying the child of the man she has been with for about a year. They don't live together, they rarely go out on dates, and when they see each other it when they don't hear from each other for several days. There is nothing here that resembles commitment. The father still has not decided what his role is short, he's being a real jerk and it makes me damned angry to see my friend suffering and stressing out because of this caveman, given her delicate describe are like, well, third wheels. If it will calm you any, it sounds as if thinks there's a slim chance that you are your own friend, if you get my drift. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably lecture and give me an unbiased opinion and your best advice. For the past three years I have been the girlfriend of a married man. We work together. His wife really does not understand him, and he swears that if it weren't for his young children he would bail out in a heartbeat. Without actually promising, he's made me feel that, in time, we will formally and legally be Strangely enough, his marital status is not my problem. What is disturbing computer systems have infinite possibilities if you know what you're doing.) Sooner or later I have to deal with this new wrinkle. not so new. There is, in fact, a wonderful country and western song about this: to the chase. A man for whom a wife and a girlfriend are insufficient is a louse and a tomcat. This romance will ultimately bring grief, because you will come to feel jealous and betrayed. So why don't you pole vault out of the relationship sooner rather than later, and save yourself some time? braces for years and just got them off. She was unable to chew gum while the braces were on, so now she is going "cow wild," so to speak. I find the gum habit objectionable. Could you please speak to this issue, with regard to the something tacky about being seen chewing gum. Your use of the term "cow wild," there with green spiked hair and nose rings, so at least you have one blessing mention of the words "in public" suggests a compromise that will keep you from seeming like a completely snobbish ogre. Hand down the edict that the newly communicate that the jaw's constant movement up and down is not attractive and sends the wrong message. If she feels in need of something to occupy her mouth, suggest breath mints. Sugarless, of course, since you do not need more expenses around advertising this to everyone I meet. I prefer to lay back a bit, been stabilized and feel as though you are living a new life. report, you do not owe this information to casual acquaintances. It would, in relationship feels as though it is deepening. Do know, however, that your recently inquired about proper footwear in public. You observed, "The idea of entering a place of food service without shoes (or a shirt) seems vaguely substituting a different ethnic group in her admonition), would you please contrite and apologizes profusely for the slur. As penance, she promises to retire the hillbilly stereotype from this day forward. about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably version of the bridal registry. They offered to fax me information. I told them digerati and have the expectation of electronic invitations with embedded links impolite, but I do want them to understand the lucrativeness of this burgeoning an expensive lamp as a wedding gift, and the embarrassed groom inquired why she had sent an embroidered footstool bearing the wrong initials. Net effort because the results were next to nil. This, the store believed, was due to the fact that catalogs show the merchandise more clearly and that selecting "things" is a touching and feeling exercise. Web links to stores. This makes the invitation seem a little more like an and have been on my own for five years. My situation is something of a good woman. The problem, though, is that not one of them has ever fixed me up with a in this context because to them I was the other half of a couple with "Rob," and it would somehow be disloyal on their part to introduce me to other not wish to seem aggressive, but my friends are well connected, and I don't know how to tell them that I am ready for introductions. Any ideas? as if your friends are keeping you in widow's weeds longer than is necessary. Ideally, you would be able to include a gentleman you've met independently in a function involving all the old friends, thereby making a statement. If no one someone. In other words, spread the word. And the reason to tell the women, not the men, is that it's been observed that women cannot accept the idea of any man being on his own. So once you've "deputized" the women in your group, paid at least twice what I am (and is well aware of that fact) and dips into his salary only when he runs short of trust fund money. He's obviously made a killing in the latest stock market boom. Yet when we go out we split this man and I first started seeing one another I would offer to split the check, not being of the persuasion that the man should automatically pay. But it's been almost a year now, and we've grown close, if you get my drift. What's politically correct in the beginning, you suggested going Dutch. Now that you have become "close" (drift received), and your significant other is way better might be "I can no longer afford our romance." Explain that when you started dating you didn't know it would lead to something serious and wished to be correct. Now, however, you think it would be appropriate for him to assume the moral for the government to refuse to provide sterile needles to groups of intravenous drug users in order to prevent the spread of AIDS? Does the excuse that needle exchange encourages and condones drug use seem reasonable? exchange programs, among other benefits, are a way of getting people into rehab. The government is being both foolish and cowardly, afraid of being attacked by conservatives for doing anything that might be labeled "immoral." The real immorality, of course, is failing to do whatever is possible to lessen illness and disease. To imagine that withholding clean needles from addicts will keep them away from drugs is like telling the tides to stay still. her charitable works. But this was refuted by today's coverage, in which Di The papers generally agree on what was most noteworthy about the day's matched since the end of World War II, that, with its engaged participation in the ceremonies, the royal family seemed to bounce back into public favor, and Some of the reporting on the service is quite a nice throwback to the days when people everywhere depended on newspapers to know what such events were like. However, this one was seen by perhaps half the people on the planet, so it's hard to justify the lengthy descriptive articles that are so prominent And it's definitely hard for a paper to justify two of these people who were watching the service on giant television screens." Apple: death, relayed by loudspeaker to those outside the Abbey, brought applause." 'Mummy' written on it." Apple: "People threw blossoms at the princess' casket as it rolled by on a gun carriage, draped in a royal standard with sprays of But the Post doesn't bother to explain whether these glitterati were she died a horrible death, and one that seemed portentously linked to her On a typical news day, the felony conviction of a sitting governor is news leader stuff, as is the Department of Justice's decision to look into the Vice day, and under the pall of the sudden death of a princess who was probably one of the most famous people on the planet, everything changes. a real estate developer. The paper explains that the verdict means that eleven governors have been indicted while in office and six have been convicted in the 1990s to be forced from office because of a conviction. raised in those phone calls from his White House office ended up in an account for "hard money" subject to federal election laws, and today's Post special prosecutor being named in the matter. The Gore phone call controversy (which placed it prominently: front page, column six, above the fold) could bring themselves to acknowledge this. The former states that the cause of affection for Di and the papers worry that, as a result, the royals may never The LAT reports that a growing number of members of Congress are big and too complicated to be enacted by Congress this year. Nobody's saying so yet, but there are four little words that should come to mind with this news: followed by earnest pronouncements that more time was needed, followed by a slow legislative death. The only difference would be that this time, it's the forces of reform that might well harness the traditional mechanisms for gumming almost the entire right side of its front page to it. And the top of the Stocks Surge." As of press time, it remains unclear exactly what the balance of power in the legislative branch or in the various states will be between the three major political parties, but the news is that for the first time in the one political scientist as saying, "This was a revolution, the beginning of a new country." The Times has another saying, "If votes begin to count in position: "I think the origin of the fighting is sufficiently murky so that we don't want to shoot arrows at one side or another today." If nothing else, the episode allows the Post to trot out this foreign correspondent's staple phrase (found, I believe, on key F7): "the capital appeared calm but tense tonight." By the way, what does that actually mean? The Journal 's front page "Work Week" column has two rather ruled that a woman demoted while on maternity leave wasn't a victim of discrimination based on "pregnancy, giving birth or a related medical condition," but that the court ruled that it didn't apply to her case because numerologist and astrologer, and a dozen of his colleagues, have asked the network where they dispensed visions of the future to callers had stopped paying their salaries. The county is investigating. But the Journal wonders why the employees didn't see trouble coming. Times --the conflict between, on the one hand, the Senate fundraising across the political spectrum that have been subpoenaed by that panel. The "problems on Earth. It's connected with the economy, with our affairs in general. Even the equipment needed to live aboard the station and that we miss an important point: namely, that this latest development shows that their to say such things! You'll have to, because it's never happened, even when things went as awry as they did with the Challenger. million a year, three times the costs of just a few years ago. pronounced the deal 'fabulous.'" And, the paper says, for House Budget Presumably, he was even more thrilled, since this deal will save him abandoned proposals to charge wealthier senior citizens higher Medicare videotape was made available to the media). The LAT headline states that Pot was "Near Tears." Pot received a sentence of life imprisonment. The discussion we want to have with Hun Sen is to say he can work his way back into Deep inside the Post there's word that despite earlier denials, shredder room by a night watchman who then disseminated them may in fact have been related to dormant accounts of Holocaust victims. The bank's initial to reveal a disgraceful truth fancy people with day jobs knew all about. leads with the resumption of talks in the UPS strike. The Times and the Post stories report that in the wake of last recent months on Middle East matters and is ready to revive an upgraded pace of president's news conference yesterday about things fiscal. The LAT and presidential first) on the budget and tax bills he just signed. bolster its position in Internet products (the LAT and Wall Street Journal observe.) All the majors report that intriguing singularity that otherwise went unnoticed: that as part of the deal, made this choice, do you think they were at all aware how much this looks like missing is the babe running up the aisle flinging a hammer at the screen. provide a little more in the way of explanation? Sure. Will he? Chatterbox seriously doubts it. Given this harsh reality, how about a little textual hidden meaning, Chatterbox fed the phrase "absolutely false" to his new favorite Web site, Anagram Genius. Here are some of the more suggestive anagrams it Possible meaning: "The president is too narcissistic to remember what on some provisions of the budget and tax legislation just enacted, but by today's accounts, several days of scrutiny revealed that this was easier said because they had been agreed to during the budget negotiations with Congress. which provisions will get the knife, but they agree that the choices will be Perhaps the most worrying detail of the attempt to get negotiations between to avoid going into a hot conflict, and right now I fear it's headed in that safety. The story notes that some types of accidents that used to plague airlines just ten years ago, such as wind shear and midair collisions, have become much less common, but accident rates for approach and landing remain twice the previous year's pace. "The most noteworthy aspect of welfare reform so far is," the piece explains, "what hasn't happened. Poor people threatened by the new law, the most sweeping changes since federal welfare was created in the soaring economy and no one knows what will happen when it falters. fundraising scandals has been a boon to lawyers. (The only lawyers who haven't work on the Senate or White House staffs. They've taken pay cuts.) For instance, the bills from the Democratic National Committee's outside law firm contributions the party has returned to donors." The Democrats' legal costs investigating committee, he was accompanied by seven attorneys billing at an lead is a fairly mundane account of how the various spending bills are faring in Congress, which does however contain the news that in contrast to the dilatory rancor of the past few years, the House has already approved eight of the thirteen necessary authorizing bills, and the Senate, ten. one white, who are at the center of the reverse discrimination in hiring case chose to retain the black because she was the only black faculty member in her department. Since then, the Times reports, due to a staff retirement, the fired teacher is back at the school, so that now the two women teach in adjoining classrooms and share an office and a telephone. They do not, however, administration has made one very direct commitment to moving people from welfare to work: It seems that last May, the White House mail room hired a column in which on libertarian grounds, he defends the right of federal officials said they have yet to find any link between Middle East policy nuances tend to get lost amidst all the funerals and severed limbs, the about something else. It turns out the spooks knew that a lot of those Congress were crucial lobbyists on the budget bills. Including, it seems, The UPS strike settlement is everybody's lead. The coverage generally has two components: describing the deal and then saying who won. The press was crushed in 1981--gone to the mat for its membership and gotten up a clear winner. Showing a bias towards politics and power figures, the New York Times has probably deflected membership dissent and has become emboldened to immediately set his sights on unionizing Federal Express. A big difference between the newspapers of today and those of a generation ago is a concerted effort now to explain events. Accordingly, the papers says the result is widely viewed as a "psychological victory for the labor with the latter saying that virtually every labor leader in the country hailed unabated. The Wall Street Journal is a more firm dissenter. It's penetrating the service sector, where jobs are transient and workers scared. And those who aren't scared because their special skills put them at the top of the labor market already have too much bargaining power to need a union. Two other observations about the significance of the strike bear repeating. LAT makes the point that the strike demonstrated just how dependent properly emphasizes that the sort of illegal shipments that caused the crash After "The Nation's Newspaper" runs a piece like this, do you think those stats make a dent in the budget deficit, there was much internal administration debate about whether to use the veto, and its use yesterday is almost sure to new veto powers simply means the old game will now require a bit more skill." individuals, and the paper notes, it shouldn't be hard to make sure special contested provision together with one the president favors within a single line exorbitant surcharges to rent cars for business travel, or take the bus even. The solution: their companies set up corporate rental car accounts for Organization has settled for an undisclosed sum a lawsuit brought by the the Times says is "strange." What is just as strange is that the guys with the burnooses and bazookas have watched car and drug manufacturers in spousal abuse past that has been effectively covered up." Drudge retracted the forced her to have sex with him in the early '50s. According to the book, it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn't want him to make love to me. He's a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, God, as he entered church. "I don't think a church would be the proper place to use the word I would have to use in discussing that," he said. Not exactly a partisan bias for refusing to confront the accused? Not exactly. A quick shake up everything that's unfavorable, use all of it, whether it's rumor, fact, innuendo, hearsay, use all it, and don't let a kind word get in the whole reveals that "the government overpaid hospitals, doctors and other health care billion dollar state tax cut. The LAT says the benefits would extend up But there's a lot of agreement about what belongs on the front page. Dow that serial killers are hard to catch, mainly because they traipse through a lot of jurisdictions that can't or don't communicate with each other, and because they're smart. Their downfall is often, says the piece, that they like The majors putting yesterday's session at the fundraising hearings on the closer look at the investment advisors who have spent most of the nineties Theorist" newsletter, who has been claiming for some time that the Dow is called someone he knew for help getting a passport. That person did not notify the authorities at the time, but did offer the information sometime later when time of the suicide, the trail was turning cold, and case investigators had never even considered suicide as a possibility. The LAT runs its "Found Dead" running across the suspected murderer's face. of rulings that expanded rights of racial minorities and women; led to reapportionment of voting districts guaranteeing the ideal of "one person, one vote;" and enhanced First Amendment freedom for newspapers and other media." claimed that the transaction was completely legal and just like those made by The Democrats suggest it was a scheme for channeling foreign money into 'burping, spitting, hookers in hotel, chopsticks, gifts, etc.'" recovery from his knee injury "was the result of his using a new hot tub on the West Lawn out by the swimming pool." The device was donated to the White House make you so mellow that it's advisable not to enter budget talks for at least two hours afterward, lest you agree to scrap capital gains taxes employees who are discriminated against on the basis of age have the same legal rights as victims of race and gender bias. (Given the nation's rising median The 39-count indictment handed down against Espy charged that the former gifts, trips, game tickets and other gratuities from seven companies doing outcome, this is political death for a man once thought to be destined to be as the others, but breaks out with its observation that the indictments mean charged with a crime." Also, Espy can't have enjoyed reading in the The LAT reports on its front page that federal authorities in New York have charged three people and the news bulletin service they work for, an outfit called Breaking News Network, with mail fraud, conspiracy and electronic privacy violations in connection with the interception of pagers' display messages. Included among the victims of the news gatherers were police who, in recent years have taken to using the pagers to protect some of their more argues that the solution to last week's huge tainted meat scare and other similar problems with the food supply has been sitting on the shelf ready to go eschew the technique's use because it involves radioactivity is the sort of fanatic thinking that plagued the introduction of vaccination, water That's true. But readers will be forgiven for wondering whether the firing has The Times story's impact was mentioned in yesterday's accounts of Lee's Newspapers hate to credit other newspapers. They will do it when they have Times piece was surely a precipitating event, perhaps the precipitating event, in the firing of Wen Ho Lee. It had a big impact. It was Whether the disproportionate attention given to the front page of the New York Times ought to be a major factor in government decisions is, of course, another question. One can argue, as the Post has more or less On a less lofty plane, it does seem a bit unfair that the Times gets to cover itself with glory over exposing Wen Ho Lee when the Wall Street This fact seems to have eluded the media, as do many facts that appear in the basic details: the top four cigarette manufacturers and the largest seller of aimed at children. The companies will also cease most outdoor advertising. And national tobacco settlement, although none of the papers gives the most obvious Everybody also notes that if approved, the national settlement would aspects of the state agreement would still remain in force. And it's the a purely financial settlement with the major tobacco companies, but also secured the benefit of any additional public health concessions made in other deals with other states. And it's the Times that reveals that, according to the deal, the tobacco firms will be paying the plaintiffs' legal fees. the Times emphasized the elaborate support system the state has erected, tendency to cut people off who've demonstrated the most minimal ability to hold a job, regardless of whether they currently have one. The Wall Street Journal 's "Work Week" column reveals a new and that the need of business to change mainframe computers so that they don't completing a six week training course, with others in the field making twice space. If you've been up nights worrying about the disenfranchisement of thinking that the current economic boom is nearly over. While playing on a after a round. When you see excess like that, writes Glassman, a downturn isn't thought the same thing when they heard that their swanky verdant club was What's news today? Depends on which of the majors you pick up. They each have a different top story and they each ignore or bury inside what their Department of Justice has granted immunity from prosecution to a top research especially high level of nicotine. The move means that despite the proposed criminal probe into the tobacco industry. The paper reports that grand juries wrongdoing by cigarette companies and their trade associations, and that the know some of those agents are taking breaks from sifting through company leads with the news that eight months after vowing to overhaul its citizenship program, the INS is "still struggling to put new procedures in place to prevent immigrants with criminal records from becoming citizens." Meanwhile, applications for citizenship are on the rise, so the waiting time for immigrants to hear back has doubled to more than a year. It doesn't help that over a third of the agency's field offices are not linked to its computer to avoid dwelling on the tragedy via such measures as removing from circulation any textbooks with their signatures in them. But school authorities eventually accommodated the desires of surviving students to be protected less and used a Yesterday's decision by Republican budget negotiators to give up on this doesn't even make the front page. The lead there is the report being released today by the State Department which sharply criticizes China for its Yesterday's Medicare move shows that premiums are still a political third premiums, they would rekindle Democratic charges that they were 'cutting In a "Style" section piece about how conservatives have taken to turning on sent every member of the editorial board a letter saying he was disappointed in lot of the Republicans have grown up with this liberal media culture and are suspicious of journalists, so they have an exaggerated expectation of the few allies they have. They don't understand the distinctions. They don't get it." How are hospitals handling the problem of delivering health care to a population that increasingly has difficulty paying for it or getting insurance one thing they're doing is delivering it to more foreigners. "More precisely, aggressive marketing and service moves in this direction. For instance, invoked the spousal privilege, which protects her from being questioned about death. And the Dept. of Agriculture doesn't have the legal power to close a suspect food plant or unilaterally recall its product, but gets its way on these matters by threatening to pull out its inspectors. It is widely reported that because of this episode, the Secretary of Agriculture now intends to ask regulatory system, pointing out that, concerned by problems of contamination, Agriculture officials have recently approved a new more stringent system of controls, but adding that the new system is not scheduled to be in place survived. On the other hand, the Times puts the relevant consumer experience, most readers will never see it. The Post mentions the including the Pentagon food system, but is mum on whether any got near the burger lover in the White House. (But don't bet against an eventual a political payoff or Rose Law Firm connection be far behind?) Today's papers provide vivid examples of how much headlines and placement can vary, leading to widely different impressions about what's important. Why impact story in a generation, the upholding by a federal court of the proposition that overturns virtually all of the state's affirmative action programs, in a tiny box nearly at the bottom of the front page? (Especially decisions concerning this proposition huge splashes.) And why is it that no one And why does the Post headline its inside story about what he said, though the Ruby Ridge development involves the highly unusual event of homicide all unnecessarily off, kind of like running "Man Bites Something" without the headline, and so should the fact that a second man, a survivalist, was also insurance companies from discriminating against people because of their genes. Away from the lead story positions (top right, that is) there is more treatment advances, deaths from AIDS continue to drop in the United States. The point is made though, that worldwide, AIDS deaths are still increasing, and will probably continue to do so, because of the difficulties involved in "Contact" about the manipulated use of footage of the president in the film. first before passing judgment. The LAT reveals that it was former less worrisome than a slumping yen would have been, several economists said the trade balance with Japan. But it doesn't explain why their other Mars is still the biggest story, but shares the spotlight today with some story, but moves over to top center front in the New York Times, which The Mars coverage is dominated by depictions of the excitement inside mission headquarters and of the various features of the planet that are about to be investigated. The Post describes a "geological cornucopia" there, which the paper says, includes a topographical feature resembling "the backside of a bear." (How would the scientists or the reporter know?) Just in case you of its function, but is actually named for the black abolitionist Sojourner that the mission team had been "coached on how to respond to possible questions from reporters about little green men or the 'face on Mars' (neither of which came up). They were instructed how to avoid using acronyms and [about] what years and because the winner is a longtime opponent of the party that has dominated the country's corrupt politics for generations. The vote is being widely viewed as the cleanest in the nation's history. And political reformers an election law that bars the publication here of any election polls for one relations between the country's two prime ministers worsen. The headline Drug Boss?" The operation was for extensive facial reconstruction to change the wanted man's appearance, and also for liposuction. Were his hip measurements on also has Mir on the front below the fold, but leads with the looming trouble The papers give the general impression of a Mir crew that is getting more stressed out by the minute. Yesterday an astronaut mistakenly unplugged a critical cable, thereby disabling the craft's guidance system and causing a the revelations were prior stories in the newsletter The Hill and The breakdown, which played havoc with email and Web site access. It seems the trouble was a software glitch at Network Solutions, the company that manages email addresses, which was then ignored by the company's system administrator. A Network Solutions manager tells the Times that the company employee who dropped the ball "is being dealt with very appropriately." Executed in the Pentagon's subscription budget." Wouldn't you love to see those lists? clothiers, farriers, blacksmiths and riding schools would go down the tubes."). positioned to lead this fight, having fathered "five children by four women in Lonely? Depressed? Overweight? Given up hope that babes would give a "I saw you in the hall today. You looked really skinny." "You have no idea what a gift it is to me to get to spend time with you and talk to you. I cherish the time we spend together. It's very lonely here The only catch is that first you have to get elected (which was uneventfully passed yesterday by the House). Its coverage includes according to the government. 'You have to completely change what you are saying "The bodies of the two presumed suicide bombers, young men in black suits, were the last to be taken away. They were said to have carried their deadly charges in attach, cases, with the result that the lower parts of their bodies were torn away but their faces were curiously intact. The faces were shown later on recognized, giving the police a lead." And the Times is aware of how sadly routine such events have become, referring to the episode's "familiar stalling the Senate's investigation into campaign finance abuses and announced that his committee will subpoena the administration for all outstanding The Wall Street Journal reports that the National Federation of The strangeness of the Mir mission continues as the LAT reports that then a few hours later said never mind because she was too small for the space Chatterbox feels a little dense for not realizing sooner that the subtext by all accounts, has a sham marriage), the first lady could exact symbolic revenge on her philandering husband while advancing the fortunes of the Democratic party at the same time! That's almost enough for Chatterbox patsy," cried Time this week. But, er, wouldn't that be kind of a risky strategy, given his own problematic union? Many have already opined that the mayor is too vituperative, too much of a loner to practice the congenial, hardhearted, uncaring social policies. The last thing he needs is to draw more for Senate, or whether she would campaign for him if he did. But she did say in the interview, which was conducted before the recent frenzy of speculation last night, turned up an additional three witnesses who recall being told by sister, whose motives can be similarly questioned; the other two heard every other responsible news organization that's covered this story, reported tends to support the UPS strikers. The New York Times in front of the precinct station where the abuse allegedly occurred, looking the convicted bomber appeared "animated and jovial" until right before he was formally sentenced. When given the opportunity to address the court, he cited a is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole into office promising tougher law enforcement, a promise his administration is mayor to distance himself from the cops on this one was made paramount by the news that during the rampage one of the abusers in blue shouted at the suspect, With cops sodomizing suspects making big news, you'd think that in the city use the occasion of his first policy announcement to address the serious the front page of the LAT debuting a new departmental program that will use medals and financial incentives to get officers to drop those ugly excess about the report. He tells the paper he never saw it, and that he repeatedly received assurances that there was no hazard of this sort. The article goes on first Internet libel suit, with a White House connection, no less. Because that way, you don't have to lead with a proposed youth health insurance breaking as it did just about at closing time. At about the time the cops were been substantially rewritten between editions and the final versions still feature a lot of sourcing to television broadcasts. Only the LAT could apparently be at least one more meeting among House Republicans to discuss the Post why he's looking forward to the session: "The entertainment The middle top of the Times front page is dominated by details from memos turned over to congressional investigators, apparently from the files of fundraising. The story is topped by a large picture of portions of two of the during the Gulf War. The story itself is on page A12. returned from a year there. He'll be going back. (Was there some good reason, by the way, why the Post couldn't bring itself to mention that the strike along with some signs of progress in the negotiations is today's news leader. The only difference between the papers is emphasis. The New York Times Today headlines focus on the increased presidential pressure while the Near in UPS Strike." Only the Wall Street Journal gives much high exposure to strike that "both sides indicated they are prepared to escalate the conflict if a deal they'll settle," and called on both sides to "redouble their efforts." And was a calculated gambit to give negotiators a push and was also conceived as a signal that he is not neglecting the situation even though he's on Details in the UPS coverage include this comment made by the head of UPS on has made many aware for the first time just how central UPS has been to the is true and not just tactical posturing, then that economy is in for a noting that the because of the strike, "Blood banks have complained of being forced to destroy blood" they couldn't ship and that "dozens of school systems are worried that they will not receive shipments of books before the school year begins." Does that depiction of the strike's impact function as implicit support for the company's position? And if so, is that okay in a news a little heavier than when they arrived. Commonly appropriated items include silverware, plates, and even drapery tassels. The piece tantalizes with the you've become maybe." Today, the Times corrections page says this "was incorrectly transcribed, compounding the misimpression." What they're trying to just barely admit is this: It seems that in fact, the New Republic had about himself, and only via a character in a work of fiction that he wrote and that actually that character didn't use the word "slut" but the word "slot." So to review the bidding from yesterday's "paper of record": A single sentence with the wrong subject, the wrong source, and the wrong quote. former writer and editor on the Wall Street Journal 's news staff, loud to a few close friends that she might find it impossible to become pregnant because of a medical condition." Although that sentence seems to imply doesn't really say. If it was Bill who was thought sterile, conceivably the couple wouldn't have wanted to admit that even to close friends, because he was running for governor at the time in a campaign that emphasized his youth their ability to have children, and the following year even considered visiting Chatterbox is ready to concede that there is a little more evidence page broke it. In addition to the sterility business, there are, as previously pessimistic that he will ever be able to draw a truly responsible remain in office, should resign, he doesn't really know how his political world Meanwhile, Chatterbox is wondering when the news staff of the Wall Street there," the news staff is in an awkward position. Clearly, the best way for the evidence concerning a widely publicized accusation, and partly examining the ethics and motives of the Journal 's editorial page for printing it in the first place. But while the Journal 's news staff remains free to causes its devastating effects, which could quickly lead to successful appearance of key fundraising files that the Senate investigating committee that the files include paperwork on such controversial Democratic contributors home health care company. The Post quotes one law enforcement official as saying, "We have not found one patient who actually received home health care services from this organization." The Post also runs a separate Helms' tobacco interests in upcoming Agriculture committee hearings if Helms The Post runs a piece inside about the newest humor trend in offers him anything he wants. The man says he wants to pay no import tax, he wants oil fields, he wants tax breaks, etc. The Devil says his wish is granted provided the man turn over his soul. "So," says the man, "what's the catch?" I think I have heard these very jokes told about yuppies, lawyers, and of a joke genre get to a newspaper's readership before the paper won't actually repeat the jokes? And should that matter, or should the Post 's editors members of Congress can start their August vacations right on time. another day are the specifics of which domestic programs will be cut to meet that it won't take much incremental change to balance the budget for that target year, which of course won't mean much if the bill's tax cuts then anything but tax simplification. The Post calls the bill's tax fought so hard to get into the deal was the "crown jewel of the Republicans' college subsidies, Republicans were referring to the same feature they "had derided a few months ago as a device for little more than tuition inflation." none of the Republicans pushing for easing inheritance taxes and capital gains cuts is a millionaire (if you don't count their homes), while the Democrats who piece on the page in the past two months based on the Bogus Fast Forward heart drug is extremely effective in saving the lives of angioplasty could limit its availability to only the very sickest people. But it's hard to announced yesterday that the unions affiliated with his organization would lend fight, we are making this strike our strike." The loan shows how high the stakes are, not just for UPS, and for the Teamsters, but also for the entire the LAT says the dispute "is on its way to becoming the biggest and The Post welfare piece includes this statement made yesterday by over. We now know that welfare reform works." There's also mention of a White the first time ever to allow its name to be used in paid endorsements of The Wall Street Journal 's "Tax Report" reports that corporate puts it across all six columns of the top of its front page and puts two more story" on it as well. The Wall Street Journal dedicates its "World Wide News" front page banner headline across its top front and just underneath that, two big the handover ceremonies and the open political questions that remain. There's some pretty efficient limning of the historical context, but some linguistic and reporting overkill too. The LAT for instance, tells its readers keep to itself about the police band members at the ceremonies in their "snow white tunics" and the attendance there "of representatives of each of the territory's services, from the Correctional Services Department to the open political system for fifty years. But none of today's accounts really actions in the ring." The paper then goes on to relieve whatever anxieties are currently being suffered by libertarian fight fans: "The president, however, stopped short of suggesting federal intervention in boxing." after the president and Congress return from their summer vacations. Meanwhile, the LAT relegates a far more important story to the second banana five years later, "today, thousands of assault weapons are changing hands because of gaping holes in the laws." What happened, the story explains, is that the gun manufacturers got around the intent of the laws by flooding the market with copycat weapons that differ from the particular banned ones only cosmetically, and by substantially increasing the volume of assault weapons strong chance that war will resume. (In short the situation is much like the federal budget agreement that will pay teaching hospitals across the country to reduce the number of residents they train in various specialties. This is in effect, an example of stealth heath care reform, as reducing the number of then, that the Republicans signed on. But some conservatives are less than thrilled. "I don't know where the hell a Republican Congress gets off doing The Times "Arts and Leisure" section points out just what a big comeback smoking has made on the big screen. "Half the movies released between news. But there is sort of a crime theme. The New York Times has made it a personal cause (he's already visited with them) and because, the the featherbedding that seems to be a feature of almost all city departments. is now warning people who knew the fugitive that his murder spree may be a matter of seeking revenge against those he thinks crossed him. Also, that the he was killed. Additionally, authorities are also considering the possibility making the point that it is so overwhelmed by the increase in juvenile crime and the breakdown of the family that almost no one believes it still serves a useful purpose. But there is also something quite interesting that the article the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University" as saying that high rates of prosecution of juveniles overwhelm the courts, "and when you do this wholesale, you drive kids into the system who don't belong there, and you don't find the kids who aren't in school and are getting into serious trouble. They are able to pass through for a long time without being stopped." of young people in serious trouble being able to slip through the system like because of her activities as a leader of the Weather Underground. Think that the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill is mainly just an inconvenience to those who use the parks, the subways and the public library? today with the demise of the federal welfare state, and yes, today's Wall Street Journal gives the top spot (that's column six, top of the page) to a forecast of growth in elderly care companies. And both the Under Review." (Which admittedly falls far short of yesterday's LAT of the fight and its riotous aftermath, and goes on to report that "a portion rushed to Valley Hospital on ice, 'but by the time it came in, it was not his novel The Harder They Fall inspired the movie "On The Waterfront." Actually, it inspired the movie "The Harder They Fall." trip which has yet to draw the scrutiny of investigators, may have provided the the new welfare programs breaks the news that they're marked by an "emphasis on work." Interestingly, the piece belies its own headline proclaiming that the despite many ongoing attempts at reform around the country, "the states with On the front page above the fold, the Post reports that after two taxes or regulations on business conducted over the Internet. The piece dwells on such issues as the problem of lost sales tax revenue and the export of encryption technologies, and waits until the last paragraph to reveal that this in its (inside) story on the development, which it runs under the headline, "Man Behind Doomed Health Plan Wants Minimal Regulation of Net." news. The older, cooling, stories of the budget bill and the robust economy The Post reports that "New York police and federal agents arrested three men and seized five powerful bombs yesterday after a tense shootout in a determine whether the suspects had ties to any Middle East terrorist organizations." (Editors take note: there is never a calm shootout.) According the past four years that New York City has experienced a terrorist threat with that investigators working the case believe that the plot was an intended suicide bombing. One of the plotters had second thoughts and last night flagged way of communicating imminent disaster to the cops was to repeatedly cup and later told an interpreter, "My roommates are going to follow up on favoring extremely small numbers of beneficiaries in the tax bill now on the president's desk are listed there quite explicitly. So it took no real sleuth work for the Times to point out that the bill bestows special favors on "arrows," "owners of marginal oil wells and skydiving planes." The tax bill, National Association of Business Economists says his or her firm plans on a "financial markets cheered the report, which bolstered signs that the Federal Reserve..." when it interrupts itself with an insert box headlined, "DOW RALLY proposal to allow early retirement for public school teachers, the latter with accounts of the precise number of survivors vary, as do reports of how many Yesterday's signing at the White House of the budget bills also gets big reform the Medicare system is duly reported without any of the papers observing report released yesterday by Common Cause stating that, despite this year's many fundraising scandals, both parties have raised record amounts of soft money, with the Republicans bringing in twice as much as the Democrats. The Wall Street Journal 's "Tax Report" notes that the new tax trend, Congress ought to try to raise money for the Federal treasury by installed communists as the bad guys of choice. One reason is that communists don't have a lobby capable of making producers nervous, and another is summed Health and social issues make the biggest impression today. The New York Times leads with the news that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care bills passed last week by the House and Senate will fall far short of their announced goal of guaranteeing health coverage to the ten million colossal failure, he has actually in the past two years gotten Congress to pass many provisions congenial to its concepts, one bill at a time. The piece calls independent pathologist (she reached him by dialing 1-800-AUTOPSY) to perform a "I really felt like the doctor was listening to me and my concerns. Every time I paged him, he returned my call. My doctor doesn't do that. Not even my pool to be included with every handgun sale. The Post also fronts a piece underlining the intractability of the problem of single motherhood. A course of her protest, she takes her second swipe in recent weeks at feminist they will reach an agreement this year to admit China to the World Trade meaningfully open his country's markets to foreign competition. The LAT leads with the most ambitious plan yet to use court ordered injunctions against ordinarily legal behavior (such as using cell phones, and gathering in groups the National Institutes of Medicine is going to try to determine whether must make a choice" about whether he wants his country to "behave like a networks, and that the broadcasters will fight back hard. Already, notes the really understand why a poor, defenseless little organization like the National Association of Broadcasters would feel threatened by a big powerful academic those taxpayers who will, under the new provisions about to be signed into law, pay more tax when they sell their homes. The article even takes several paragraphs to explain how to legally beat this new tax. Who are these, as the Times puts it, "losers"? Struggling single working mothers? Young, sell homes for millions of dollars" and their downmarket cousins, "those who have spent many years trading up from one home to another and now have homes every New York reporter believes but few have dared to hint at in print," stopped being first lady or making appearances with her husband." piece runs under a banner headline: "From the Top, a City That Doesn't campaign that has included bombings, the killings of two policemen and the disruption of public services in recent months." Which is why it's surprising two people," without mentioning that the explosion was attributed to the delivered. The paper reveals that despite having the highest rates of new AIDS infection, tuberculosis, and infant mortality in the nation, the city's targeted to just these areas. Additionally, in a city with "acres of abandoned and decrepit housing," local officials failed to spend millions in federal block grant money intended to rehabilitate housing for the poor. Meanwhile, favored landlords. In fact, "The city's Department of Housing and Community illegally, and hence that "there is so far no cause for taking punitive steps tracking system that helps cops catch illegal gun traffickers by tracing guns Guess what's one of the hottest shows on German cable television. According Heroes." Touchy plot lines have been softened with creative dubbing, and the Instead what they say is, "This is how high the cornflowers grow!" Meanwhile, Today the top story is that some safety experts are concerned that a into effect, and it's accompanied by a big picture of a protest march organized A cardinal sin of news reporting is downplaying the real news of a considered an even bigger disaster for a journalist than having a kid not get front, near the lead, in column six, just a little lower down. Yet its story at the bottom of the front page, omitting mention of them in its them in the piece until the seventh paragraph. (Headline writers, please note: provision in the new budget bill that allows tobacco companies to reduce their companies. "The industry wrote it and submitted it, and we just used their excoriating the INS. He tells the story of a German women who falls in love bad advice from the INS leaves the country while her application for a permanent visa is still pending. The result? She ends up in prison for eight fees over this, and the husband had to abandon his business here to rejoin his that the poultry and processing workers Espy was once supposed to be looking over being subpoenaed by the Senate committee investigating political a big revelation about the Pentagon's knowledge of the battlefield dangers report was prepared for the Air Force three months before the outbreak troops. Noting that Congress and the media have been seeking such information for half a decade, the paper reveals that it was finally released to a former Senate investigator in response to his repeated Freedom of Information Act pitting his UPS members, many of whom are attracted to the apparently more lavish company proposal, against Teamsters working elsewhere, who fear that a the union tends to downplay the pension debate, saying instead that it's the article suggests that ultimately, the union will give on pensions and the Fox News, is that for the first time in years, the general public seems to be siding with strikers. The main reason for the sympathy vote, says the about religious expression at government jobs will be rather specific, stating for instance, that federal workers "are allowed to wear religious medallions over their clothes, conduct lunchtime prayer sessions in unused conference rooms, distribute proselytizing brochures to colleagues and keep the Bible or Federal prisoners can once again purchase Playboy and the First Amendment rights of both inmates and publishers. The judge also stated that there is no reason to believe that these two magazines "are any more or less rehabilitative" than the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or the labor. A Boss spokeswoman is quoted as saying, "...We're currently trying to The Senate's political fundraising hearings continue to play big. The Wall Street Journal puts this same story at the top also leads with the hearings, but prefers to stress that members of the at the White House, even though these are barred by law from being conducted on us motivate and energize the people that we needed to motivate and energize to championship fight last week. The papers indulge in much speculation about There's also a lot of coverage of yesterday's change at the top at Apple he quit, but its text says he was ousted. The LAT headline says he was television network's audio system picked up his comments. "Take the quarrel about how the Mars probe discovers kittens there that are just like earth kittens except that they remain kittens forever and can parse sentences in the sums up discussions among alliance members concerning what to do about the presidential campaign, as well as congressional and state elections, and that proposed tobacco industry settlement have concluded it puts too great a with two very rare kinds of heart damage. The drug combination was never Bureau task force has proposed a modification in the racial categories it will origin." The change would be to allow people to check more than one race block. action hiring goals or the boundaries of congressional districts. The paper goes on to report that "civil rights groups were generally pleased with the "changes absolutely nothing" and that it was an "ambience of harassment" of feature answering a question no one is asking: Could the accident give rise to tries to rise above the vulgus by giving its lead space to a piece about the coming session of Congress. Mistake! First of all, the Congress piece is photo agency saying, "Holding the photographers responsible when the cause was clearly excessive speed is absurd." (Do you think there's a chance that now instead of, or in addition to, inspiring a campaign against tabloids, this tragedy might spur a renewed campaign against drunk driving?) There's a French photojournalist saying, "Those who denounce the paparazzi today will be the the revelation that although at least one photo agency is said to be offering blood, the National Enquirer turned down the deal and urged other publications to do the same. (Of course, those pictures will surface, and don't be surprised if they also eventually make their way into a "mainstream" paper, probably over a caption like, "Media experts debate: Was the Star wrong of oral sex with a man advises women to look into condoms and dental dams. Di still dominates, but other stories get their due. For instance, the goes with a piece about how private hospitals, with the advent of managed care and lower doctor's fees, are now courting Medicaid patients because of the guaranteed government dollars they represent, while shunning uninsured patients more than ever. The nightmare scenario, says the piece, is that "desirable" patients will altogether abandon public hospitals, with the "desirable" doctors decision by French authorities to investigate six photographers to see if they now ascended to: "As they were released and their handcuffs removed, the suspects slipped out side entrances to the huge courthouse building, avoiding the waiting banks of television and still cameras. French photographers said they would not have taken pictures of them anyway, out of 'solidarity.' The seven also were said by other journalists to have avoided the spotlight because they had sold their stories of detention to tabloid newspapers and wanted to emanating from the station and to provide political opponents access to it. And bounty hunters to realize that this field is preposterously In the LAT 's coverage of the big stock market move, there's the usual dueling experts explaining that this is either the sign of bigger things to message is clear: still one of the best ways to avoid taxes is to avoid the heart problems that can be routinely diagnosed via the instrument. Doctors that would for the first time ever subject state recipients to strict time limits and work requirements, along with a companion measure that would ban from the rolls for life anyone convicted of a drug felony. The New York Times leads with word that "a federal advisory panel has decided to recommend abolishing the troubled Immigration and Naturalization Service and assigning its duties to other government agencies." sign an executive order later this week dramatically broadening the ban on policy across the government and extend existing prohibitions to places currently exempt, such as military officers' clubs." Some exceptions would remain, such as military barracks and "undercover, military or diplomatic situations that are essential to accomplish agency missions." (Spies, thank oil company, announced that "there is now enough scientific evidence to warrant from oil and gas companies' monolithic denial of a global warming problem and thus may have policy ripples akin to the separate catalytic course taken in negotiations leading to the budget deal. Top revelations include that at one another, he successfully smoothed over ruffled Democratic feathers by sending over inscribed copies of his two books. Also, in one phone call, Rep. John out that the ice is still being distributed, and the Journal wonders how any savings have been accomplished since the delivery work is now done, not by enough to satisfy the judge, therapeutic enough to satisfy the psychiatrists saying, "I tell him he can be a king, he can go to West Point, he can do anything he wants if we can get through this problem we have now." But the The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal today enters rape allegations that a key corroborating witness has a serious potential "You will note that my piece reported four witnesses," the Journal right. (Previously Chatterbox had suggested that the existence of the diminish, somewhat, the significance of any potential grudge that may be held by one of them. (Or, actually, two of them; Chatterbox will get to that in a bit.) Still, the Journal editorial page should have mentioned the (This might be a good moment to review Chatterbox's scoring procedure. The Journal 's editorial page scored one point for the original nothing to gain [italics mine] and possibly much to lose by going what we know, then, only two of these citizens can really be said to whose own name sounds like an anagram for something else) informs Chatterbox that the author of the anagram praised in this space last week (see "Beyond In the papers, as in life, new deaths crowd in on the old. So we have the global village funeral to come, and anchored by a huge head shot of the This time it was three scumbags, a record number apparently, killing themselves and others in a popular public place with bombs spewing nuts and identical bright robes, glasses, and shaved heads, and were each less than five feet tall, so the papers go more for laughs than they otherwise might. But it's the temple treasurer said that when she oversaw the collection from nuns of for Gore, namely, that of his White House rainmaking phone calls, sees the story a bit more gravely than the others. Its headline reads, "Nuns Tell of the evening's financial tracks by altering and destroying documents right into in stores, even one by her astrologer (if he didn't tell her not to get in the study as proof that conservatives were overstating the problem of illegal It's refreshing to be reminded every so often that there is still at least weekend. So what's news today is whatever could get done with reporters and million settlement with them, one that goes into effect even if the proposed big national tobacco deal falls through. The Post reports that precedent' that is 'about big bucks and big publicity.'" The Times describes the acquisition as part of a consolidation trend in also leads with the story, and as might be expected, bemoans the likely closure layoffs. The Post reviews the virtues of the various airplanes produced on the news, but none delves into the question of whether any of the major unemployment figures, is dutifully reported by the majors. According to the report these jobs numbers as if it were perfectly obvious that the chief cause doesn't even put it on the front. Think how this story would have been played just ten years ago! Does the current relaxed treatment say something about Bill It's nearly unanimous today: the big story is an imminent budget deal. The As even the headlines suggest, there is some variance from paper to paper and the Wall Street Journal cautions that "Those involved in the collapse," the general view in the papers is that substantial progress has been made and that an actual deal could be struck between the President, the House And the broad shape of the likely deal is widely described. The LAT be heading toward a capital gains compromise that would reduce the tax rate but agreed on extending disability benefits to legal immigrants left out by last year's welfare reform law. Both sides also are resigned to an increase in cigarette taxes to offset costs of health care for uninsured children." What's a little alarming about the budget deal reporting is how within five years. This was the claim made, if memory serves, for the budget Indeed, wouldn't it be instructive to see a list of all the budgets of recent City has a glut of empty hospital beds and that allowing some of the underused facilities to close would cut costs just as well without forcing so many people into managed care. But the piece also observes that if the free market is allowed to determine which New York hospitals close, poor patients are the trotted out by Democrats just over a week ago as a specimen of the kind of covering it. And yet, neither network did the story, which came out only in the open, a mission to Mars is grabbing the headlines? All three of the majors working the weekend are leading with the story of how yesterday, the Mars There being no way into this story other than through the briefings and access provided by the mission's organizer, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the are relentlessly similar. Still, here and there individual touches emerge. The LAT has the news that the engineers were able to solve Pathfinder's initial problems in part because they had, before the landing, replicated them apparently goes for rocket scientist humor. The paper mentions a mysterious object in the landing area that scientists are anxious to investigate with the rover, and quotes mission team member Dr. Peter Smith as saying that it "appeared to be something long, dark and shaped a little like a couch. 'Someone suggested that was a homeless person out there,' the scientist joked." I guess destitute people are pretty funny when you're federally subsidized. Meanwhile, back on earth, the Post fronts an interesting piece bent on winning a stake in the bonanza for themselves or their companies." The it's bad to be prominent in articles like this. After all, being certified by the Post as working on something big could be great for business. with it. He tells the Post he's on the case "because the United States he is a director holding shares and options worth more than a quarter of a mothers were impregnated by adult men? It prompted much discussion of a section brings the news that the study was wrong. Seems that the investigators years old and, therefore, like the fathers of their babies, adults." Never brutality case, which, the paper reports, produced the arrests of two more cops yesterday and which will now include a federal civil rights investigation. The suit to date that Dow Chemical Co. knew that silicone was potentially harmful to humans and conspired to withhold relevant safety data from women gets a lot showing that actual harm resulted.) But it leads the home paper of the Silicone In a sort of law of conservation of implants, the LAT front also hands that is said to allow quadriplegics to grasp and release objects. workers, who have been handling UPS strike logistics, had been in difficult negotiations with the Teamsters over wages. The paper says relations remain six months to spend three or four hours meeting with community critics to Times coverage seems particularly well wired inside the denied involvement and moreover originally seemed to cooperate in implicating puppy elsewhere in the station house when the attack allegedly took place. ejected from a game or suspended for engaging in the practice. A bit of a health and safety theme today. The New York Times now cover more than half the state's population, face a state government review and many possible legislative reforms, all arising from widespread patient lobbying blitz this week against current congressional proposals for deep cuts in the payments they receive for Medicare patients. Their big message: if any of these are passed, plan members will have to start paying for their The Wall Street Journal 's main front page feature examines the pretty far from their original charge of using their assets for such charitable their speed limits, traffic fatalities actually fell slightly. The paper reminds readers that opponents of higher speed limits had claimed they would The LAT 's top story is that the leader of the recent coup in the first time, she saw the names of her paternal grandparents in an inscribed was his job to locate homosexuals" for administration jobs. Guess which major newspaper isn't reading Slate carefully enough? This very issue of this very magazine contains a piece by ace foreign But is Gates happy? Chatterbox suspects he is, and he suspects at least in this rash conclusion flies in the face of social science research. We turn now throughout the book, argues that money doesn't buy happiness. "It's Opinion Research Center. The numbers are a few years old, but the 1990s haven't While it's true that, overall, these data show that money doesn't dramatically affect the distribution of happiness, let's examine some of the nuances. One is that you're nearly four times as likely to be miserable if you happy" or "very happy." But what if you don't happen to belong to this Chatterbox is also intrigued by what happens when your income rises above Money may not buy happiness, but if you're already happy there's Does the likelihood of such a "happiness boost" increase when you graduate Also, there really ought to be a category for "ecstatically happy," which Chatterbox would appreciate hearing from any readers who have research to back police facilities, all thought to be centers of support for war criminal with no resistance and resulted in the confiscation of truckloads of weapons adds a few more warts to the presidential portrait with its revelation that Smith's company millions. And, the paper reports, less than three weeks after to call Smith personally to solicit a contribution. One memo, reports the billion in annual revenue not to make the requested contributions. 'Sure, you're darn right, you better be responsive,' Smith said. 'Whether you use the language of the street and call it a shakedown or whether you just call it our A common press syndrome is immense interest in the politics of a bill, but almost no interest in the workings of the law it becomes. So it's refreshing to see articles like the Wall Street Journal lead, which looks at what happened when one company tried to hire welfare recipients to gain tax credits under a bill passed last year as part of welfare reform. Great in theory, says the meaningful numbers of eligible employees and even harder to retain them for the just narrowly surviving a collision, a total power failure and a heart problem, Chatterbox feels that the Wall Street Journal editorial page's Scientific Method into the usually mushy business of assessing press responsibility. With that in mind, Chatterbox hereby inaugurates the (even if to refute the importance of) highly significant but inconvenient facts in their news or opinion coverage of controversial events will score one point for the initial offense. They will then score one point for every subsequent issue or broadcast or Internet posting after the first offense is noted by Chatterbox if they continue not to report said inconvenient "intellectual dishonesty," because it's pompous and falsely suggests that only intellectuals can be intellectually dishonest. But Chatterbox doesn't know any other easily understandable phrase that describes this particular kind of For the purposes of this survey, the Wall Street Journal will be counted as a separate and distinct publication from the Journal 's had nothing to do with her corroboration.) The Journal editorial page initial omission, it scores an additional three points. And because it means that if the Journal editorial page continues to take no action it the New York Times (as the Times reports in today's story). But newspapers' intense rivalry. When Chatterbox asked the Journal 's DC he replied: "I don't really have any comment on what the edit page did. They do their thing, we do ours." Which is what Journal news employees are instructed to say whenever the editorial page causes them cringing of the Times were more indifferent than the Times made them After a lot of consensus lately, the majors go their separate ways today. leads with a Senate bill that would significantly cut into the legal rights and Times leads with the governor's proposal for providing health care his wife and brother were "daring, synchronized" and that the couple's son pointing out that the ambassador was familiar with his government's sales of House telemarketing, Gore's press conference in response was a salute to based on documents possessed by Senate investigators, reveals that between calls that Gore apparently made but which do not appear on his credit card would strip tribes of their current immunity from most lawsuits and would also driving all this is the perception that tribes are getting rich off casino saying, "that says they must be continuously supported by the federal as saying the bills would only be passed "over my dead body." today. The lawyer representing Morrow describes the breadth of the subpoena By now the drum beat of welfare reform stories has no doubt made it clear percent. The Post says it's because of a stagnant state economy and a welfare system still needing an overhaul. Maybe another reason is that when the weather is perfect and you're five minutes from the beach, you don't feel like According to the Wall Street Journal 's "Tax Report," the "Schedule D that Democrats at Universal have come up with a way to justify trying to make a killing with the upcoming movie "Primary Colors" while still staying so nicely that the Federal Reserve won't be raising interest rates any time plays that story above the fold, but reserves its top right spot for the news supply will have to be tightened "at some point to foster sustainable growth and low inflation." Such comments prompted some committee members to criticize is that the nation does not have enough people who don't have jobs...." negotiators, fearing the election consequences of raising anybody's premiums, political courage: "I would be happy to defend the vote of any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican, who votes for this." detail of who gets to collect the extra premiums. According to the increases would look like tax increases, also proposed that the Treasury Department, rather than the Internal Revenue Service, collect the payments for higher premiums from elderly taxpayers, who would make the checks out to the skeptical response of Rep. Bill Archer, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee: "The only collection arm I know at Treasury is the heard about this case I said, 'Okay, good. We're gonna get that little The Wall Street Journal 's "Tax Report" states that according to Corruption and cigarettes dominate today. There's even corruption involving allowed to expand into other countries. The New York Times goes with a lengthy expose charging that the world's largest tobacco companies are selling billions of dollars' worth of cigarettes each year to traders and Times lead is that according to Census Bureau projections, a steady Although the tobacco companies deny doing anything to abet the smuggling of directly connected to the WHO director's remarks. If governments can't regulate the illegal inflow of cigarettes into their countries, they can't generate effective health programs for discouraging smoking, especially, notes the temperature about the ease with which potential donors of dubious backgrounds resulting photo in their promotional literature to snare more investors. opportunity to look carefully at some of the city messes that need cleaning up. disability claims. The article reveals that the government allows people to file false claims with virtual impunity, because of generous rules and a lack of investigators. Often workers never have to go any further to get the money rolling in than getting a note from their own doctor. A letter to the editor in the Post provides a picturesque example of The writer happened to be in a city water department office to discuss a water bill when she noticed what the employees were drinking from a large commercial with the push for new ways to keep sex offenders away from the rest of us even performance, emphasizing the many ways in which its decisions stymied positions on the political, but the personal, noting that in considering medically brushes with cancer, and that for the decision overturning suppression of that by the time the last of the Court's decisions was announced, Chief Justice Social Security, and credits those who worked on the bill with "political nerve" while finding the budget process this year marked by a "notable credibility." This is just what the Post doesn't find. It sees the bills as a triumph of "small interests," noting that they contain special provisions And by the way, exactly what point is today's Post making about new pushed numerous policies on to the president's agenda before being banished indicators indicate the cause was instead a patch of flooded track. himself out of circulation voluntarily." The Post account emphasizes attracts far more administration attention and effort than the public realizes. Judging by the president's speeches and his directions to his staff, says the administration foreign policy achievement, one that is in great danger of proclaimed that "the words 'market economy' have been writ large on the flag of socialism for the first time" and denounced party members favoring a slowdown members. Some police there even think civil war could break out again, now over Think the rapid growth of area codes is the inexorable result of the increasing need for more and more data lines? Well, a Times "Week in Review" piece points out that another factor is that under current arrangements, many numbers assigned to "saturated" area codes go unused. Fixing this could considerably extend the length of time between new area codes for a He dropped out of school and now just five years later, he's an unmarried Three big Supreme Court decisions yesterday. Which to lead with? The New headlined, somewhat tastelessly, "An Issue that Won't Die.") The unanimous ruling that the Communications Decency Act (banning smut on the Internet) is news, noting that moments after the Court announced the Internet ruling, "a staffer for groups opposing the law popped a disk containing the opinion into his laptop computer outside the court and transmitted it by cellular modem to affirmative action in admissions, its incoming law school class is likely to canceling completed books, including some already advertised in its catalogs. enforcement officials announced that the top suspect is a homosexual prostitute experiencing a heart irregularity, and therefore may not be able to undertake the space walk needed to repair the damage suffered by the vehicle last week. repairs. The paper doesn't put too fine a point on what's at stake for the the Senate campaign funding hearings. Yesterday, the committee learned that in to the Democratic National Committee. The senators also heard expert testimony a figure that included the book value of the company car he was allowed to Is another government recovery strategy against the tobacco companies being quietly hatched? The Wall Street Journal reports today that "the Veterans Affairs Department has begun processing the first in a potential tidal wave of government billions of dollars a year over the next decade." Today leads today with a report that the Department of Transportation sent letters to nine major airlines yesterday asking them to explain the procedures they use for making seats available for frequent flier awards. The request was a response to increasing complaints by frequent fliers who say they are too often told they can't redeem their miles to go where they want.. This is one of those days where what the papers are telling us is most newsworthy via their use of the traditional tools of placement and headline prominent play to an oil tanker called the Diamond Grace making a big mess in Close in on Tax Deal." The majors also dutifully tell us that today's New that is, where naturally, it leads). The editors front the story as high as they can because they know there really was a loss here, of a combination of talent and a larger sense of purpose that is utterly absent from entertainment And the obit staffs do some good reporting. (Although there is a discrepancy about the cause of death. Most of the papers say it was cardiac arrest. The with an enlisted person and lying about it to superiors. Who did he fraternize with? His wife. The Times story illustrates the sense in which the military has lost perspective on personal relations (if it ever had it). It reports that the investigation that led to the charges against Kite was even the date of her last menstrual cycle have been entered into evidence. Keep of the Joint Chiefs with no sexual baggage: "Would you choose your doctor on Times leads instead with yesterday's revelation from the Senate's via separate wire transfers from banks in China and Japan within days of making saying, "Wire transfers of the kind described are Exhibit A of The LAT is also above the fold with the news that, despite initial states this stance could set off a rift within Democratic ranks. cover." But you have to read the LAT to find out that the Brits were "posing as Red Cross workers on a humanitarian aid mission." Hey, wouldn't we the tobacco settlement. For instance, the breakthrough notion of states suing cigarette manufacturers for the recovery of public funds spent on LAT runs a graphic box featuring the new content guidelines that will be they leave out Fantasy Sexual Situations?) And then illustrates the new ratings White House line is that this event did not violate federal law because the refused to cooperate with investigators unless granted immunity from after he was told that he could help defray some bills relating to White House released a report uncovering widespread fraud, overcharges, and poor care in lobbied on behalf of various petroleum industry interests for just such an millionaire black businessman who has emerged from the campus politics of the preferences. The story describes a racially mixed and fractured family, "whose reporter about an SAT study that shows that blacks from families earning more It's hard to believe that an explosion that vented plutonium into the atmosphere at the country's largest nuclear weapons storage facility doesn't make anybody's front page, but in fact you have to go inside the LAT and "exposing workers to a toxic plume and leaving outside authorities unaware of instead assigned to "hot" stories regardless of their real import. Today's boy is charged with sexual harassment and suspended from the second grade for kissing a female classmate; within a week, his picture is on the front page of cluck delightedly over the latest little victims of Meanwhile, the story of two girls suspended from junior high school for been slower to build, and has crested at a lower level of media frenzy. The suspension occurred Sept. 20--a week before the notorious episode in "political correctness." The story about the girls plays against an concept of harassment remains controversial. The idiocies of drug policies are to subject hysteria about drugs to a little reality testing. Their descent into mistake of exchanging notes during this transaction that were later discovered drug policy that does not distinguish between legal and illegal, prescription officials were unrepentant, defending their policy as a part of an effort to politicians lie about their own past experiences. The campaign against it is addictive and will lead them down the path to heroin and cocaine dependencies, while many parents who inhaled regularly throughout their college years remain uncomfortably silent. Meanwhile, the testimony of politicians like Penal laws regulating the possession and distribution of marijuana are as difficult to justify as school policies expelling eighth at home, you may be sentenced to five years in prison under federal law. Federal drug laws, in general, are excessively harsh, as the press occasionally the gross inequities and disastrous inefficiencies of imposing long, mandatory virtually everyone familiar with the criminal justice system who isn't running for office. (Ninety percent of federal judges, Republican and Democratic, consider mandatory minimums for drug offenses "a bad idea.") At the very least, use, the actions of a few overzealous school officials intent on keeping their of decreasing drug use, it has increased the violence connected with illicit drug trafficking, greatly exacerbating the problem of gun violence. The black market in drugs creates a need for weapons and probably the cash with which to schools, we ignore the damage wrought by laws prohibiting selectively demonized the legalization or decriminalization of drugs; it is a plea for dispassionate consideration of the respective costs and benefits. We don't have rational drug policies in the streets or public schools because we don't have rational discussions about drug use. It is popularly considered a moral failing, not a practical or medical problem for some people. The war against drugs is not a Elders discovered as much when she suggested that we might study the effects of legalization, which was a bit like her other absurdly controversial suggestion that masturbation was normal. Dr. Elders might have gleaned from the reaction to her remarks that no one in Congress has ever masturbated or used drugs. Most is a solution in search of a problem. Oh, the problem with Social Security is doesn't address the problem. It's as if you were crawling across the desert, desperately thirsty, and you meet a fellow who says, "What you need is some lemonade." You say water would suffice. He says, "Oh, but lemonade is much week's report by a government commission on Social Security, a majority supported various forms of partial privatization. And lemonade (privatization) influence of conservatives these days that, on Social Security, we're debating the merits of lemonade, when the real issue is: Where do you get the Social Security privatization was ably discussed several weeks ago in our "Committee of Correspondence." But in this case, at least, that discussion seems not to have provided the dialectical pathway toward ultimate no graphs, and not a single use of the word "actuarial." Security. Of course, those who delight in this factoid never tell you how many willing than older folks to grasp the essential truth about Social Security, payouts to earlier customers. The ratio of retirees taking money out to workers often confuse three different problems. First, with baby boomers in their peak earning years, Social Security currently brings in more revenue than it pays out in benefits. The surplus is invested in government bonds. These are special Security surplus as revenue, and don't count these bonds as debt. But within a couple of decades, the annual surplus will evaporate, and Social Security will have to start drawing on this nest egg. For the government to honor these bonds point will be reached, well into the next century, when the Social Security "trust fund" is exhausted, and not enough money is coming in to pay the problem is that even if today's benefit promises can somehow be kept, Social Security represents a much worse return on "investment" (taxes paid in) for future retirees than past and present retirees have enjoyed. This is partly because some minor benefit reductions are scheduled already (raising the retirement age slightly and gradually). It is mainly because younger people will have paid much higher Social Security taxes throughout their working certainly be worse than they could have done by investing in the stock Whether all this adds up to a crisis is a matter of horribly tragic to me. Even after this transfer we will still, on average, be Security will run dry many decades from now, depends on essentially impossible predictions about the distant future and, in any case, can be solved by very three problems there are only three solutions: cut benefits, raise revenues, or borrow. Privatization is not a solution. Privatization means allowing individuals to invest for themselves all or part of what they and their saves for its own retirement. But you can't get there from here without someone this as a transitional problem. But it is not a transitional problem. It "Committee" discussion, if you could pour in enough money to pay for the "transition" to privatization, the system would no longer be out of balance. The problem, or crisis, would be solved. Privatization would not be needed. of the Social Security tax and convert it into a mandatory savings contribution; take today's benefit and divide it into two parts; give everybody this new account and that minimum guarantee; take this shell and put it there up, the same money can't be used twice. That is the problem with Social Security now, and it is the problem with privatization. All you've said when you endorse privatization is that if there were water, it should be used to make lemonade. Not obviously wrong, but not terribly helpful. Privatization is a shell game in a second way. It is supposed to bring more money into the system because returns on private securities are generally higher than returns on government bonds. Even members of the recent commission who oppose full privatization supported investing part of Social Security's accumulated surplus in the private marketplace. But (as Stein pointed out in the "Committee"), every dollar Social Security invests privately, instead of lending to the Treasury (as happens now), is an extra dollar the government must borrow from private capital markets to finance the national debt. The net effect on national savings, and therefore on overall economic growth, is zilch. Every dollar more for Social Security is a dollar less for someone else. If Social Security manages to achieve a higher return, by investing some or all of its assets privately, the rest of the economy will achieve a lower return, by having more of its assets in government bonds. In essence, the gain to Social Security will be like a tax on private about. Also, the arrival of this huge pot of money looking for a home will depress returns in the private economy, while the need to attract an equally huge pot of money into the Treasury to replace the lost revenue will increase the returns on government bonds. Result? The diversion will be at least partly future retirement benefits ultimately depend on the country's general don't make today. The most direct way for Social Security to affect future savings, of which the Social Security reserve is part, by trimming benefits to China to make my fortune. I am not alone, of course: Hardly a week goes by without a reminder that China is the business opportunity of the century. But the siren song that beckons me is not just the ring of a thousand cash into baseball: like someone who squandered an inheritance, who failed to capitalize on a rare alignment of circumstance and skill. Why such regret? I have, after all, no particular knack for That I should feel this way testifies, I think, to the magnetic pull of suspect that if I were ever to do business in China, I might change my tune. I insider's knowledge of China. The second insider claim is much less true than the first. It is perhaps even false. Still, the possibility of having my call Diaspora Chic. Everywhere we turn today, it seems fashionable to conceive fealty to their racial kinfolk, wherever they might live, than to their own shared view, the locus of cultural and economic sovereignty is now the country. And on our campuses, kente cloths, ancient tea ceremonies, and native dance performances signify not only a resistance to whiteness but also a yearning, among even the most assimilated, to be abroad at home. connections across borders, they are illuminating. To the extent they are driven by the ever easier migration of people and capital, they are inevitable. white --the dispersed are far better off, at least materially, than those "back Besides, once you remove the mystic overtones of blood ties choice: on consent rather than descent. Which means that in the diaspora, only the citizens of a liberal state could indulge. Those who have a tribe but Diaspora Chic suffers from this irony: Though it is partly a protest against It is tragic because it is so fundamentally at odds with tempted to reconfigure our affiliations, to reinvent our identities. We would that mandated students take a course on human rights violations "with particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery and bills are pending in other states, and a bill pending in Congress would require the Department of Education to include the potato famine in all the model parade in New York have made the famine the "theme" for this year's march, face virtually no discrimination, some have embraced a politics modeled after tradition, the idea now reverberates in political symbols and pop culture. In "Famine," released two years ago. Its lyrics argue that labeling the calamity These arguments draw on an interpretation of the famine amendment in New York assumes a variation of this interpretation. Natural disasters don't violate human rights. As in the case of slavery and the Holocaust, alongside which the famine will be taught, there must be a culprit. signing ceremony: "History teaches us that the Great Hunger was not the result partisan line; most recent historical evidence doesn't support it. In the 1960s, a revisionist school of economic historians proved that limiting wheat starving assumes a more contemporary idea of the state's responsibilities that hardest by the famine, it was because it depended more heavily on the potato questioned the hyperbolic rhetoric of the amendment's supporters in the state Yet New York state senators and legislators privately admit they assented to the legislation because they were impressed with the ferocity of the support for the bill. "It's pork," concedes one assemblyman from upstate threatening phone calls that accused him of selling out his people. Other sectarian sort of reaction: Either you are for us or against us. And it's take a harder line on nationalistic issues than the folks still living back in minorities to think of themselves as communities in exile, a component of the greater national obsession with finding one's roots. It is evident in calls them "pilgrimages"); the burgeoning membership of fraternal organizations like Grace Kelly proved that the WASP establishment, which long impeded access movies worked to eliminate the differences among ethnic groups. Also, suburbanization shattered the old urban institutions, the pubs and fraternal contrived or reconstructed in exile after a long fallow period of radical than the real thing, like the religious convert who becomes more zealous than those born into a religion. The emotional connection to the motherland becomes more intense than the connection to reality. The result is on a desert island successively amputates each of his limbs in order to has been selling off tiny portions of her life, and successfully enough to make York Times Magazine cover story that set a generation's teeth on edge, "Looking Back: An Eighteen Year Old Reflects on Life." (Horrid topic sentence: "My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last.") articulate writing style; a weather eye for Zeitgeist shifts; and a narcissistic obsession with herself. Enthralled by celebrity culture, enthroned reporter on my life's beat." From "The Embarrassment of Virginity" literary high ground, a museum piece of integrity not included in the ongoing fire sale of her life experiences. It was a story she had promised repeatedly not to tell. "I will always respect his privacy," she told an interviewer in approached her earlier this year, she hung up on him. last item on the shelf. Everything else has already been shipped out. The late teens went to "Looking Back," which was expanded into a book. She told the syndicated newspaper column. Her divorce, which was not amicable, proved to be edgy fodder for copy. Several newspapers canceled her column, which later subscribe, who send me extraordinarily moving letters about their own merchandising ghoulish, oddball dating stories, some of them prompted by this slender, talented, and passionate. My academic credentials and creative a pair of headlights." So what does a girl journalist do? Whip out the notebook! Declaring herself to be a "researcher investigating the world of captioned, "The nostalgic author holds on to her old implants." Oddly, none of these adventures crops up in the recent poster girl for youth literacy. Nor are they to be found on her astonishing past books, a package of the famous divorce columns and, of course, subscribe posting tales of her recent move to the Bay Area and commenting upon the dating protected her investment. The literary marketplace has assigned a huge premium who quit the publicity mainstream decades ago. A friend who has seen her book pursuits. (But we do learn that he is into homeopathy.) Small matter that one looking to score a twofer. Not only will her book generate interest among lit and asked her to forswear all else to come and live with him," blah blah. that just say everything about the times we live in? I think there's a piece academic degree heads up the local United Way campaign. What other acquisition might serve your high economic and social status? How about having some more long been a demographic truism that richer means fewer, not more, kids. And as far as it goes, census data seem to bear this out. As the average incomes of height of the baby boom in the 1950s, the number of children born to an phenomenon is not confined to the United States. The average number of children People have lots of reasons for choosing to have fewer children, including the expansion of opportunities for women in the workplace, but it is an undeniable fact that rearing children in the modern world is an toiled in the fields, mucked out the barn, and cared for their parents in old age. But modern parents don't really expect much of a return from the resources they spend on their children. Sure, Johnny may mow the lawn and Jenny might run the dishwasher, but in general kids today do little to contribute directly to a still think that children are a reasonable investment. In a poor rural family, children still do chores on the farm. And before welfare reform, at least, an additional child usually meant an increase in a poor urban family's French, piano, and dance lessons. Of course, these parents are spending this money in an attempt to assure the future success of their children. But even three or four kids. Some intriguing, if sketchy, data suggest that at the highest levels of wealth and income, the trend is toward larger, not smaller, One other interesting figure comes from the very tiptop of opportunities for status signaling. Wealthy parents can talk endlessly at the regularly. And of course, there are schools and universities. Did they prep at Being able to provide lavishly for a large number of children shows that you've people don't love their kids. Rather, kids today are not only little bundles of joy but also are perhaps the ultimate symbols of worldly success and status. Currently, election law permits national party committees such as the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee party committees. The Democrats and Republicans have state party committees in every state. Created as separate entities from their national counterparts, they are in large part regulated by state law. Generally, state law is more permissive than federal law. For example, more than half the states allow corporate contributions and labor contributions, while federal law prohibits such contributions. Many states have no limits on the amount that may be contributed. Usually, a national party committee does not use its soft money to directly support state or local candidates. Instead, a national party committee transfers those funds to state party committees, which in turn support state make their donations directly to the state party committee. Although committees from coordinating in other ways. For example, a national party parties and exchange information, as long as it did not solicit or direct state party from coordinating and directing contributions with others. Because the law doesn't require state party committees to be located within their state party committees set up a single office representing all of the business as usual with the slight inconvenience of rearranging lease agreements ads that don't expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate by prohibition on corporate contributions and the limits on individual contributions. (The exemption does not apply if the person behind the ad coordinated it with a campaign.) An ad that identifies a candidate and prohibitions and limits unless words of express advocacy are used. But any politician worth his salt could evade this restriction. First, he'd create and air all of his issue advertisements outside the 60-day period. Second, he'd be creative about the contents of the ads he broadcast inside the discuss important issues in an election without identifying a candidate. Once again, it's easy to imagine party committees and advocacy groups making inventive and persuasive ads that don't depict or refer to a candidate, but strike the same themes as the campaign's ads established outside the 60-day laws only inconvenience campaigns as the lawyers figure out how to circumvent them and the courts dismantle them as threats to First Amendment rights to free speech. The heap of rules and prohibitions that survive these challenges are subject to the law of unintended consequences, usually causing an effect that Times Magazine profile. "If there is a crack water will find it. Same way and, what's most unusual for wonk kiss and tells, easy to read, partly because Whatever is between them, in nonfiction, is supposed to reflect accurately words that some real person actually said. Now, "accurately" leaves room for quibbling, and a memoir will be understood by most readers to be offered on an to himself, "usually late at night," and then consolidated them to make the expectations accordingly. Fair enough. Maybe he has a good memory. accuracy, at least some checking of his memory, especially when public crisp conversation, especially when the same remark issues from two different destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available." chairman, told him this about congressional Democrats: "We're owned by them. that, in any case, he neither said nor believes that Democrats are owned by saying: "You're either a genius or you're nuts. If I were you, I wouldn't share that theory with anyone else." Obey says, through an aide, that he's sure he the words that you attribute to me in various places, in direct quotation marks, as though you were repeating my words verbatim." dialogues are checkable, and turn out, when checked, to be inaccurate in ways invite the players and owners to the White House in the first place?" "If you can't even get these parties to agree, what hope do you have in it was the minimum wage and now it's baseball. Why do you and your labor administration. But none of the questions, nor any like them, was ever asked. with the players and the owners. In your opinion, who is more to blame for this impasse? And why won't they simply accept voluntarily binding arbitration?" the office and the Oval Office for labor disputes?" There was a question about replacement players, would you throw out the first ball?" Economic Committee. That much his memoir gets right. "The Republican attack "There was a time not long ago when congressional hearings were designed to elicit information for members in order to help them draft legislation," hammers a decent Democrat. Don't take my word for it. I invite you to compare at him so loudly that he has to yell to be heard. "They plan to carve me up into small pieces," he writes. "There isn't a lady in the room. All men, in dark suits. They've finished lunch. Some are smoking cigars. Others are quietly anyone can hear me." The cigar smoke, he says, "is making my eyes water. I feel dizzy." He says, "We're in a boxing arena, John's the champ, and the crowd is loving every minute." Finally, the meeting over, he races "out the back exit list shows that a third or more of the people present were women (including the rule, according to an association representative (who, like another witness I talked to, saw no cigars). Most important, a transcript of the meeting shows a respectful Q and A session, in which none of the comments attributed to One would hardly expect a roomful of corporate reps to the transcript shows nothing nastier than sprinkled applause and laughter. I session, whether his transcript might have omitted hisses, boos, and Note to the Reader: "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it." He said that his notes accurately reflected how he felt and what he perceived. In the three cases cited above, he felt varying degrees of hostility. "I am not representing the book to be anything other than it is, which is my account of my experiences, my perceptions, what I saw and heard distinction between history and myth, memoir and novel, reality and perception. The problem is that those are real people he misquotes, real history he for history than newspapers, but newspapers, which are generally much more careful than the average publishing house about such niceties as checking proper word for it, is now ensconced between hard covers and will be read for years to come as part of the historical record. That is a shame. Quote me. operating system, and Internet Explorer, the Web browser, are two separate Can you take a computer with both Internet Explorer and Windows, eliminate the sort. Well, you're probably sitting in front of a computer right now. You're probably using Windows, and there's a good chance you're also using, or at least have installed, Internet Explorer. So here's your chance to duplicate yourself who's got the better of the argument. Can you remove Internet Explorer follow along, be sure to print this story now and save these instructions. a machine running Windows 95--and in all likelihood, this is what he did. you're using Internet Explorer now, you'll have to quit. After a few minutes, rebooting you'll find that the Internet Explorer icon is gone from your desktop and Windows works fine. (To restore Internet Explorer, you'll need to have it procedure leaves "components" of Internet Explorer on the machine. Later, if components belong to Internet Explorer, read two key documents, both written by components that are allegedly part of Internet Explorer. first, back to our experiment. A couple of serious warnings: Before removing any components, you must save copies onto a floppy disk. Make sure you have megabytes. Later, you'll use this disk to copy the components back onto your hard drive. Final warning: If your computer fails to work the way it used to even after returning the components, I can't help you. files are small chunks of computer code that are intended to be shared by more affidavit that these files are included with Internet Explorer when it is these files and see what happens. (You do have copies on disk, right?) Before proceeding, write down or remember the directories where these files are found. example, and hit Enter.) Then delete the three files (type del familiar desktop environment. However, your Internet applications (other than Lotus Notes. You might try them too and see what happens, if you're feeling In fact, most of my other Internet programs appeared to be functioning my version of Windows would be severely crippled. Try running Internet Explorer without these three components, though, and it really will be seriously crippled. On my computer, Internet Explorer turned into a clear window, with a view of the desktop where a Web page ought to be and failed to load any pages that you can't truly remove Internet Explorer without crippling Windows. More than anything, though, it casts doubt on whether a government policy decision (divining the essential natures of things as inanimate as software programs) Windows, and reinstalling Internet Explorer, the experiment is over and your computer should be back in its original condition. At least mine was. transparent. If politicians and their mouthpieces gave it to us straight, we'd have nothing to interpret and write. So we swoon when important people return our calls. (We've been asked to dance!) We thrill at the telephone game of question and evasion, thinking our guile and cunning will ultimately yield truth. We play the tortuous game of spin and leak because we must feed the recounts how the diplomat would summon reporters for supposedly intimate discussions and solicit their opinions. Then he'd feed them junk, which they'd off the record, knowing that they'd view that information as more credible and purchased appetizers, and conjured the crowd. (At least it was a cash bar.) declines to talk about the party, citing Journal policy. He was anything but speechless at the party itself, serving as master of ceremonies and delivering what many thought was a hilarious speech. fete are all wrong. "We were treating it almost as a birthday party," the reporter said, asking for anonymity. "We all wrote a big card and signed it and you can get a story leaked to you, not how well you can develop a story on your own and connect the dots," she said. "You get stuff leaked to you in the caste is a false, overvalued currency. You claw your way into a position to get your calls returned by actually breaking stories, but that reward is empty. It means that you're the seventh or eighth on the call list to be lied to, instead of game, he's still mixing sense and nonsense for public consumption. Just two come to know the president, through proximity and through being around that matter of fact, I would agree that it is unusual to have that kind of access and relationship with the president's personal secretary and the president comment out of all the interns that work in the White House," he said. "I can't should know that I have no personal knowledge whatsoever about anything." includes two live spreadsheets where you can plug in your own numbers. Click to subject.) But one form of investment this new law undoubtedly will stimulate is tax shelters. Shelters are financial arrangements designed primarily or which ended the special break for capital gains. Now they are back, as the shelters? Leave aside critical questions of fairness and revenue lost to the Treasury (which must be made up by borrowing or by increasing taxes on other people). Consider only the effect of tax shelters on the overall economy. Shelters hurt the economy in two ways. At best they waste resources on lawyers and accountants designing complicated but economically meaningless arrangements. At worst they redirect investment capital from uses that make economic sense to those that don't. In the early 1980s, for example, the tax system made it profitable to build office buildings even if you had no hope of beginning of the end of the War on Drugs? To some drug warriors, the reform for the social norms that keep kids away from drugs are very serious," says that advocates of drug reform are enjoying unprecedented success in setting the concerns about drug use by funding the steady expansion of federal and state the civic credos of "getting tough" and "just saying no" carried the weight of common sense and enjoyed sway in schools, print, and on the airwaves. marijuana roughly doubled, a phenomenon that received wide attention during the the perception of a leadership vacuum around the time of the election, it's not Though lumped together in articles like this, the two laws sentence; and, almost as an afterthought, allows doctors to prescribe prosecution persons who use marijuana under an oral or written "recommendation" defining deviancy down, as cultural conservatives would have it? Judge for is virtual: "All buyers must send copy of medical report and birth certificate." A return address in given. Is this a brazen hoax? Street dealing on the information highway? Proceed, with a caveat emptor, to: Network chat room, a posting on marijuana proved to be the most popular ever, mental health, addiction, mind expansion, and above all, children. the home page, angrily yanked the site with this statement: "Mail distribution [of marijuana] is an avenue of diversion for abuse!" In the nation's capital, the sound you hear is of paper clear he regards the two laws as the work of deceptive and mischievous drug metropolitan Phoenix), was perhaps the most incisive of those who testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing early this month. While four other go after doctors, federalize marijuana enforcement, go to court, and get a Medical Association reject the notion of medical marijuana, but caregiver staff director of the drug czar's office, want the feds to step in. federalization of state marijuana prohibitions would also impose some real say in court that they are handling medical marijuana. That would not be a permissible defense in federal court, but federal prosecutors don't pursue traffickers unless they are handling substantial quantities. For example, in keep their operations under the federal threshold," observed Orange County entrepreneurs posing as medical suppliers? A spokesman for the office declined and, the police charged, to many others who just wanted to get stoned. For his realize voters meant that marijuana should be used only as an occasional exception for someone who is seriously suffering and under the direct start this state down the slippery slope toward the legalization of But the "just say no" party can't seem to get traction on that slippery slope. The public now seems unswayed by its message. Leading against the propositions. Public opinion didn't change much. cabal is also growing less plausible. A civic cause that includes talk radio stations and had to issue a clarification. reformers have not shown that they can consistently win the confidence of the won a very small victory that is not readily convertible to any other area of seeking to shape the future of personal computing, Internet publishing, and electronic commerce. It has achieved a dominant position in the computer industry already and is poised to extend its reach. Is what is good for desktop market after another, there have been fewer and fewer new entrants or challenge in selecting a word processor, relational database, or other desktop application is finding a product that can perform adequately without crashing only company that really knows how its operating system works and the only company that can arbitrarily change how that operating system works. (For successful new platform for publishing and sharing information. It developed in developed a computer programming language named Java, designed so that programs written in it would run on any computer, regardless of the operating system. to exercise the same type of proprietary control over MS Java applications that which it gives away. Why? By monopolizing the browser market, and by destroying position itself to own the software used by consumers to operate a new will be used to connect to the information superhighway. This would extend the enormous advantages in positioning its own products in electronic commerce and concerned, there are some fundamental questions: What can be done? What should not be allowed too much control over something as important as the way we Road Ahead about the need for a dialogue on the information highway. Next month a group of industry leaders, academic specialists, consumer activists, Technology, prepared additional material for this article. sectarians. The most brutal internecine spats took place in New York City in these were personality cults, led by charismatic trade unionists and brainy that rather than give out leaflets for the revolution, he prefers to study for political activists of the right have generally eschewed minuscule parties and bloody breaks. Recently, however, conservatives have become enthusiastic libertarians and Christian conservatives over issues like the regulation of the Internet. The New Republic carried a piece last month about how neoconservative intellectuals have also started to condemn the Council, the Christian Coalition, the Christian Action Network, and so on. Communist Party's attempt in the late 1930s to pool leftists into a grand others put aside significant doctrinal disagreements. have particular ideological agendas. They fall into different camps. Some social traditionalists, but who are also economic nationalists) can join the own party and organizations promoting the rollback of government, like the actually have an obligation to undermine other leftist groups. They follow their namesake's aphorism that revolutions are like birth: The forceps shouldn't be applied too early. Only a vanguard party (their own, of course), using the correct tactics at the correct moment, can instigate a revolution. Christian conservatives have a similar sort of fixation on the purity of their movement's strategy. Consequently, the religious right is riddled with tiny monopoly on midwifery techniques for bringing a Christian society into the society using Mosaic law as a blueprint. A truly Christian polis, they believe, would deny nonbelievers citizenship and publicly stone or kill disobedient children. Though they can't claim much of a following, their coterie is well preach such an extreme vision for their ideal society, but they similarly abhor compromise. Take Focus on the Family, a "parental rights" activist group with a leftist tune "Which Side Are You On?" Here, they describe their mission in pretty stark terms: "Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict." So if you give an inch in battle, other groups with a fairly similar take. Many claim to have several hundred thousand members: the Christian Action Network, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women Coalition, the most powerful organization on the right and the one most explained the Christian Coalition's strategy last spring in his manifesto, argued that the religious right needs to retreat from the shrill language used for backpedaling on abortion. And, more recently, Christian conservative leaders have blamed Reed for the debacle of the Bob Dole campaign. Reed, they argue, quieted brawls between Christian conservatives and Dole that would have forced Dole to pay more attention to the Christian movement and its issues. In incessantly about new groups. In a series of letters, some of which were constitutional convention, she argues, would be required to enact an amendment, him for not being tough enough on the abortion issue. right since the 1960s. Groups like the Separation of School and State Alliance and the Home School Legal Defense Association hate the more recent conservative Separation of School and State Alliance calls voucher supporters both "fascists" and "socialists." Vouchers, they argue, are simply a guise for the Educational Liberator is peppered with references to their libertarian over detail. But to people who believe the welfare state and abortion are absolute evils, they are of the utmost importance. And, without the old Echo," taken to a new extreme. There's too much choice and not enough echo. all sorts of irritating habits. If offered a perfectly good fact, many of them prefer beer, while others refrain from even coffee, as League showoffs, they are quietly proud of their state colleges, however Unfortunately, much good has also been lost along the way, including that easy familiarity that comes from an early acquaintance with foreign ways. It is one thing to read up on, say, current French policy for the airliner industry, and to start from scratch. It is quite another if the new information is layered over personal experiences with things French going back deficiency might be what Tony Lake had in mind when, in the course of his particularly in languages and cultural knowledge, is getting very thin." The which affects its quality as an intelligence organization far more than the difficult to strike just the right tone with a foreign diplomat or functionary like. But even with these folks, the challenge is to interpret and manipulate motivations, urges, obsessions, and priorities that drastically diverge from sure, there is plenty of talent all over the United States and in every level officials. One reason is simply that applicants are much more likely to be all their lives, with no prior foreign travel or foreign contacts (each of which must be reported in detail, no matter how routine the travel or how casual the contact). Moreover, there seems to be a distinct preference for universities. But those days are long past. The Ivy League graduates who used to fill its ranks now mostly want to become investment bankers: It is there sexual partners eager to connect with Westerners. At present, most such graduation, surviving on odd jobs instead of starting a career back home. When he jokingly responded with "girls," the investigators did not conceal their so interested in the area's ongoing struggle and the local culture that she decided to study it systematically, exiting from her marriage to return there. She made a great number of friends, from village women to guerrilla leaders, multiplying the number of "foreign contacts" she faithfully reported on the much better if she had remained celibate in Salt Lake City. vices of either their more adventurous contemporaries or their flamboyant Ivy League predecessors, but it is really unfair to expect them to cope with all didn't, you will. Well in advance of the mobs of reporters, editors, film crews, radio disc jockeys, news anchors, and photographers now descending on example, not only availed itself of much of the government bumph in its They are now complaining about negative coverage that focuses on disputes over rights. That is only to be expected, inasmuch as most of the aforementioned should consider themselves fortunate. Because if the press ever did decide to move seriously past politics, it would discover that the real threat to Hong increased social spending in his budgets, the business community thundered (rightly, I happen to think) that the proposals had been introduced with scant low government spending have been curiously silent in response to the new signal by declaring that "a noninterference policy would not meet the needs and in favor of a "new industrial direction" that would look more kindly upon state business as they do his politics, moreover, they might discover that he is where routes and quotas are routinely carved out, but it was bailed out, as he him up on his new offer. Just recently, the International Herald Tribune carried an alarming piece in which Henry Tang, a prominent local industrialist special fund from land sales) to develop southern China. Given that there is no genuine infrastructure need for which China could not easily find private Cabinet member to raid the reserves is a virtual invitation for scam and graft. "It's why I always told the democrats to oppose the Provident Fund [a government pension scheme]," says a director of one of the territory's oldest raiding of the reserves is only one worry. Although hailed by no less than the retained many notable exceptions to the rule, exceptions that may prove more everything from legal and medical services to airlines and utilities is almost immune from market competition thought good for everyone else. About a year ago that "unfettered competition" would destroy the "stability" of the market. interests have been buying into these companies, usually at a substantial get a substantial chunk of that growth. But the market has clearly signaled a traditional pluck and enterprise. Such an outcome invites an irony that would whose investments have done so much to undermine communism in China may be got sentenced the other day to four months in prison for having consensual sex the midst of all the rumors about their liaison, they both got promoted. on the subject of workplace romance, the media and the Army operate by different rules. And the rules in the (civilian) government are different and nearly inseparable from his former deputy, had that relationship hanging chief. Other appointments are never proposed and political campaigns are never opposite sex is. There are good reasons for strict rules in the military, where under immense stress combined with stretches of boredom and laced with women must be punished. But for consensual sex, has the Army ever considered a policy of "ask and tell," with direct reports being reassigned and the others companies have instituted the policy that when a subordinate and a boss get frailties. A network representative says the matter "doesn't deserve the when the lifestyles of the rich and famous, including politicians, go astray. The Army is proceeding against other soldiers under a draconian code that can transform consensual sex into constructive rape, if it happens across ranks. newspapers, Staples and Office Depot assure the public that their proposed office supplies. Their "larger operations and greater buying ability," they say, will produce lower costs, and that will "mean bigger savings for you." How you suspect that when the two top competitors in a market stop competing and merge, the result will be higher prices, not lower. This kind of thinking goes chattering with amateur antitrust sleuths. (To read the discussion, or to join in yourself, check out some of the newsgroups addressing the topic.) For some people, office supplies are a subject that bodyguards because of threats, apparently from his employees. A few of these employees, at least, seem to buy their executives' argument that the merger will (probably) lead to price cuts because it will (definitely) lead to job cuts. Other believers include investors who have bid up the stock prices of possible that Staples and Office Depot have a case? That their merger would be mergers and acquisitions, partly on the grounds that increasing international buy their office supplies in foreign countries. But the agency has also become more sensitive to the details of particular products and markets. "Bigness" per many economists have long argued, of the greater operating efficiencies and, hence, presumed lower costs produced by concentration. Moreover, if a company hoards its savings from size, instead of passing them on to consumers in lower inherently more suspicious than a company that comes to dominate the market through its own growth. And appreciation of the competitive market's marvelous advice of battling experts. These experts will run regression analyses and market. And in the end, the regulators will have to consult their own the question of what constitutes the market in which Staples and Office Depot compete. The companies want to define the market as broadly as possible. They City, which sell some office supplies. By this measure, the companies' analysts of the products that Staples and Office Depot sell in other places. But their where all these products are brought together in one (often bewildering) Office Depot, and a third rival, Office Max. A merger of the first two would has some telling facts to back up its theory. The agency has sales data showing that prices are lower in markets where two of the three superstores with Office Depot was that it feared an Office Depot invasion of its home turf, cost efficiencies of a merger will outweigh the lost discipline provided by competition. (It is ironic to see, for example, the Wall Street Journal fulminating against government interference with this merger, since the notion that the efficiencies of bigness outweigh the discipline of competition used to go by the name socialism, or even the name communism.) command concessions from Paper Clip Inc. But surely these two superstore chains are already big enough to squeeze suppliers quite effectively. What's to gain? More likely, any cost savings would come from eliminating stores in shared remaining competitor, Office Max. The stores would be sold at bargain prices, and many are located in communities where there would otherwise be no claimed benefits of the merger, while hedging its bets on the competition issue by shoring up Office Max and seeding healthy retail conflict in scores of example, notes that if Office Max now supports the merger, which it does, that how reassured would we be if they offered the palliative of selling a few franchises to Taco Bell? Do you take comfort that, in some sense, Red Lobster merger frames the issue as: Which is worse, Big Business or Big Regulator? In competitive innovation in retailing (new kinds of superstores, discount seems to have picked an issue to take a stand on that really matters to people with real consequences to our everyday lives. That could be trust building, if overlooked in the frenzy of speculation about Dolly, the sheep cloned by into being, and why, from a biologist's point of view, she matters.) each time, it replicates our sheep gene.) We've been cloning cells for longer. Certain cells can be "cultured," reproducing themselves like bacteria in a accomplishments, but neither comes close to reconstituting an organism. That is insurmountable one. As every gardener knows, you can regenerate entire plants from the smallest cutting. But animals are not so straightforward. The only hours old. Any older, and no new frog developed. That is because cells in very until now, the conventional wisdom in biology has had it of tissue, once cells have differentiated into a particular tissue type they as an irreversible process. If we cloned muscle cells, we got more muscle cells. Muscle cells were not going to generate liver cells. differentiation work? We don't really know. We do know that every cell contains an identical and complete set of genetic instructions, the genome. As cells mature, however, they switch on some parts of those instructions, and switch off others. The cells in your muscle tissue switch on muscle genes. The cells some cells express some genes, and not others. The process of development (or differentiation) is one of the least understood in biology. At one end of the black box you put in a simple cell, the fertilized egg, and out of the other backward. Dolly is derived from a single mammary cell. Conventional wisdom would have dictated that mammary cells, which are highly differentiated and full range of different cell types that make up a sheep. in its simplicity. In Dolly's case, they took a mammary cell and grew it on a essentially starved the cells so that they shut down normal metabolic function, entering a "quiescent" state, in which dedifferentiation apparently occurs. The only the mother's half of genes; by adding the genes from an adult mammary One question that inevitably comes up is whether there is something peculiar about the way sheep mammary tissues differentiate. A second fibroblast is as highly specialized and fully differentiated as a mammary cell. because she came from adult tissue. Biologically, though, the two experiments development. Cells in mature animal tissues are not, as we had thought, irreversibly differentiated. Understanding differentiation is the key to understanding development, and Dolly embodies the extraordinary possibility of construction rules used in putting animals together. flimsy "galley proofs." These are sent out to people who might generate buzz may about the sending out of galleys: Now the book will begin to receive the galleys of my own last book, and wrote me heatedly denying that he was working on a book about black genetic intellectual inferiority, as I had The Bell Curve was not circulated in galleys before publication. The effect was, first, to increase the allure of the book (There must be something really hot in there!), and second, to ensure that no one inclined to be skeptical would be able to weigh in at the moment of publisher. The ordinary routine of neutral reviewers having a month or two to go over the book with care did not occur. Another handpicked group was flown to what you'd expect: The first wave of publicity was either credulous or angry, but short on evidence, because nobody had time to digest and evaluate the typical work of trade nonfiction. It is gotten up as a work of original scholarly research. Most works containing fresh regression analysis and historical argument from primary sources would be published in academic quarterlies that send manuscripts out for elaborate, lengthy evaluation before wasn't until a full year or more after The Bell Curve was published that the leading experts on its subject had a chance to go through the underlying Curve discussion grew, but the attention paid to that discussion inevitably on publication day was conducted in the mass media by people with no independent ability to assess the book. Over the next few months, intellectuals took some pretty good shots at it in smaller publications like the New that the most damaging criticism of The Bell Curve began to appear, in tiny academic journals. What follows is a brief summary of that last body of Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an "invisible migration," from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them. that "a scholarly consensus has been reached" around their position. This consensus is "beyond significant technical dispute." Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of "consensus." say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers problem with The Bell Curve 's thesis is in the idea of the rise to dominance of the cognitive elite. To the book's initial audience of Ivy universities, law firms, hospitals, investment banks, and the State Department used to be run by preppies whose main virtue was fortunate birth, and are now used to be scattered throughout the class structure, and are now concentrated administration of mental tests is such a recent phenomenon. High scorers on on the basis of scores on mental tests will be composed disproportionately of people who score high on mental tests. Proving The Bell Curve 's thesis life where mental tests are not the explicit gatekeepers. To see how The Bell Curve tries and fails to get around these inherent problems, The basic tool of statistical social science in general, and of The Bell Curve in particular, is regression analysis, a technique used to assign weights to various factors (called "independent variables") in determining a final outcome (called the "dependent variable"). The original statistical work in The Bell Curve consists of regression analyses on a database called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The authors claim to Virtually all the early commentators on The Bell Curve were unable to assess the merits of the regression analysis. "I am not a scientist. I know have been gone over by professionals, who have come up with different results. The key points of their critique of The Bell Curve are as follows: All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support work, now amounting to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies, permits a between broad and narrow is too technical to explain in this limited space.] exercise is to figure out what our social policies should be, then, "Which is chapter of The Bell Curve on policies that might be able to overcome the cost effectiveness of the intervention." (As an example of where the kind of much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves." And they road." They end by expressing the hope that we can "be a society that makes everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life." Throughout, liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report. Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in than it actually is.) The Bell Curve 's air of strict scientism doesn't "intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected" (no footnote). Though they piously where people are held prisoner in chains, unable to see anything but the shadows cast by figures passing outside; they mistake the shadows for reality. The Republic is probably the first place in history where an idea like through education, people could leave the cave and be able to see the truth instead of the shadows, thus fitting themselves to become the wise rulers of society. But he was quick to insert a cautionary note: Those who have left the cave might be tempted to think they can see perfectly clearly, while actually they would be "dazzled by excess of light." The image applies to The Bell the shadows of political correctness, it actually reflects the blinkered vision are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept The Bell away millions every year in the District and elsewhere. gratitude, and frisson of generosity that comes from giving away the government subsidy, and its charitable contributions are part of a vital became his wife, was the campaign's press secretary. Considered likable and in a ".com." Basically what it does is buy home mortgages from banks and to investors. The banks then can use their own money for more mortgages. By giving home buyers indirect access to the world's capital markets, this device function. These days, however, that function is served by many private securities need not be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is exempt from state and local taxes, so it escapes having to pay an are backed by the federal government. This allows it to raise money at an interest rate that is lower than what a normal private corporation has to to say in so many words that they are not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. But nobody believes it. Why? As a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office explains, "What the government appears to withhold with one requirement, it provides with a host of exists, fights to preserve the arrangement that makes it possible. The company also notes that, since it has never missed a payment, the taxpayers have not yet had to shell out a penny. But that is like saying that fire insurance is worthless if you've never had a fire. Just ask other private companies if they would like to have a free federal guarantee of their debts! The government, if it wanted to, could sell its backing to private power. The fact that no money changes hands doesn't mean it has no cost. of a real private company of its size, even though its size is largely a function of the federal guarantee and its business is not as complex as size last year as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Other politicos feeding at the trough include Senior Vice President for Public Affairs John are a crucial part. The foundation sprinkles contributions on everything: tanks like the Heritage Foundation (which, to its credit, has issued reports 175-page tract that pleads for still more subsidies while cloaking itself in conveniently draped in the background. The back jacket is crammed with thanked for his "considerable editing skills." Alas, the text could have done the Republican Congress may enact. The truth about government subsidies for that they do very little to make housing more affordable. Part gets siphoned person who owns the property at the time the subsidy is instituted, not the which creates a similar secondary market in subsidized student loans. Organizations combining public and private functions appeal to the woolly ideal healthy distrust of government and the market, levelheadedness leavened by a wizardry: It must convince the nation at large that organized labor is not the weekend chewing over the tactical innovations that have made the union's reputation: "card check" campaigns that bypass the National Labor Relations Board's sclerotic certification process; aggressive scrutiny of employers' financial profiles; blitzkrieg drives that take on entire sectors at once. every evening," she reports with a smile, "we all stood in a circle and sang honorable careers tightening labor markets and kicking the shit out of then, for uplift and inspiration, a chance to sing "Solidarity Forever" and is, bear in mind, one of the most vigorous and progressive corners of the labor labor movement is alone like no other in the advanced industrial world. its ensuing case law have erected absurd barriers to workers' freedom of employers can comfortably fire workers simply because they seek to organize. tactics alone won't rescue labor from its peculiar weakness and insularity. To ails us. They need to sell the case that our colossal wage inequality is not a fact of nature; that a progressive labor movement can make our workplaces more decent and more productive; and that strong unions can leverage gains not only this case won't be easy, but it's unavoidable. Without such a framework, even "The labor movement is eternally in danger of becoming a Contracts 'R' Us operation that only services its existing members. You've got to look in the better embedded in a larger reform movement, it might be more motivated to God bless the day when no one's Uncle Ed will be able to lean across the Thanksgiving table and say, "So I hear you're working for the labor movement. movement might be less likely to cut shortsighted political deals that undercut vote, which was narrow to begin with, was later rescinded after an outcry. Several weeks ago I spoke with a New York City organizer Harass them when they go shopping. That's how you defeat corporate much in the Organizing Institute's spirit. Its training materials stress "finding the person who can give you what you want" and making his or her life routinely do things just as nasty. (Did you catch the story a few weeks ago Isn't there something amiss when a movement based on solidarity and cooperation won't do much to help win a contract. But without a steady drumbeat of public muscles. Now let's work on the heart and the voice. become national pariahs, endlessly reviled as heartless merchants of death and disease. But amid the chorus of demands for punishment of the industry, one group of profiteers continues to enjoy public sympathy and the favor of expect that any financial settlement would require compensation not only from those who packaged and marketed cigarettes but also from those who made a living growing and selling tobacco to those manufacturers. But the farmers have succeeded in portraying themselves as innocent victims deserving to be made and his fellow tobacco farmers would like not only to preserve the current tobacco program, perhaps the most lucrative of federal agriculture subsidies, but also to get a share of the loot from the proposed tobacco deal. "We deserve to share equitably in any proceeds distributed as a result of a settlement," and the president appear ready to accede to their demands. House Commerce that he will not go along with any deal that includes the dismantling of the when he finally took a (vague) position on the proposed settlement was greater protection for farmers and their communities: "We have a responsibility to these people. They haven't done anything wrong. They haven't done anything caused this problem." The proposals being discussed on Capitol Hill include paying billions in aid to help growers switch to other crops and compelling cigarette makers to use more domestic leaf in their products. even more notable, considering that last year Congress enacted legislation putting most other farm subsidies on the path to extinction. Tobacco farmers are especially loath to relinquish the embrace of the Department of Agriculture because they have been treated with unusual generosity. Defenders insist the program shouldn't be called a subsidy because it costs taxpayers virtually nothing. But the only reason taxpayers get off easy is that consumers don't. The program works by requiring either a federal acreage allotment to grow tobacco, a marketing quota to sell it, or both. By thus restricting output, the Department of Agriculture keeps prices artificially high. If the price drops too low, the government will effectively buy it at a floor price. To prevent The federal government is often accused of gross hypocrisy for discouraging smoking while rewarding farmers for growing the weed. In fact, there is a weird and wholly accidental consistency in these policies. By raising prices, the tobacco program reduces smoking, though to only a modest didn't want to have to raise other crops because an acre of tobacco can yield a question is why the rest of us should be prepared to give them what they want. same thing could be said for the managers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders of the cigarette companies, and no one has given any thought to getting big and corporate. But that's been done only by rewarding inefficiency. Corn farmers could make a living off 100-acre spreads, too, if the Department of Agriculture was willing to tightly limit output and mandate high prices. Besides, the specter of agribusiness concerns taking over farms is largely a bystanders blindsided by an unfair change in government policy. If the cigarette makers are guilty of an assault on public health, those who grew tobacco certainly deserve to be charged as accomplices. Paying them a share of any settlement to make up for the loss of sales due to expected reductions in smoking borders on the absurd. When a builder gets socked with a damage award because one of his houses falls down, we don't allot a share of the money to the subcontractors on the theory that they will lose work if business falls off. Any help should come from the taxpayers at large, not from the purported victims of smoking that the settlement is supposed to compensate. But the help should be modest. Like everyone else, tobacco farmers have known for years that the future of the cigarette business was not bright. If they failed to prepare for a decline in demand or the dismantling of the tobacco program, that's their fault. The rest of us shouldn't feel the obligation to keep supporting them in nor less than they would deserve even if there were no cigarette deal (which proposes to buy them out over a few years and then leave tobacco to the market. His model is last year's farm bill, which phased out most other commodity programs while providing transitional assistance during the changeover. Tobacco growers managed to avoid that fate last year. If they're not willing to settle proved anything. It's not yet ready, in my opinion, to win a big contest." that his coaching had been bad ("my biggest mistake was following the advice of computer advisers who recommended I play this way"). version of "wait till next year." "It [had] nothing to do [with] science," he with unlimited resources would like to do so, there are many ways to achieve personally guarantee if the machine plays me again, I would tear it to Blue team, recognized with his overwrought For the Ages rhetoric ("historically for mankind, this is like landing on the moon"), the match will go down in the churlish, bratty, and just plain bad. We humans deserved a better spokesman at this epochal point in our ongoing voyage of humility; a half century from now, tactful words like, "You de man!" or, "You de machine!" seek role models in the world of checkers, a supremely challenging game (there talk from the other side probably warranted retaliation. ("The computer the tie with the same sort of aplomb that, it's safe to say, he would have me," he admitted, making Chinook sound not like a machine but like a grizzled counterpart who deserved respect, even affection. "It's nearly got human subject. At the time, the speaker's remarks were "off the record." That he has now agreed to let them be reported may be due in part to the cover provided by more radical and less socially conscious than what the speaker seems to have in into private sector investments. He would do it by setting up "Social "broad based" portfolio of private securities with low risk but a higher rate members of the Social Security Advisory Council agreed that some part of the trust funds should be invested in the private market (though they didn't agree on how). The reason is simple: The Social Security system is missing out on its possible both to keep paying benefits to current retirees and to make prudent because, over the last several years and for several to come, Social Security payroll taxes have far exceeded, and will continue to far exceed, the benefits decade, are supposed to be "invested" against the rainy day when the baby boomers retire. Instead, they are simply transferred to the Treasury in used to help cover the costs of everything from Black Hawk helicopters to White huge favor since, without its loans, the much touted budget surplus would be a then congratulating yourself on your financial prudence. But in the case of Social Security there's an added problem: A payroll tax is a lousy way to pay for most of what government buys. It's fair enough to use such a tax to pay for a social insurance program that provides coverage in rough proportion to contributions. This is especially so since Social Security's retirement and disability benefit formulas are heavily weighted to favor low earners. But there's no justification for paying for defense or environmental protection or the weather bureau with a regressive tax that hits only the lower part of earnings and hits investment income not at all. (Well, there is one justification: Otherwise, Congress and the president would have to cut spending, raise taxes, or just admit they can't come close to balancing the surplus. To keep the deficit in the rest of the budget from being laid bare for all to ogle, they propose both tax hikes and benefit cuts. (Click for a summary.) Some savings would come from higher income and payroll taxes, among tax cut advocates against the plan's provisions calling for smaller inflation adjustments in the income tax code.) But much would come in the form of reduced Social Security benefits, notably accelerated increases in the adjustments. Most economists do agree that the Consumer Price Index significantly overstates inflation, and the system currently adjusts retirees' initial benefits for real economic growth as well as for inflation. But the senators' cut is toward the high end of the consensus, especially if sustained How plausible are these proposals? A truly honest reform would force the general budget to pay for itself and let Social Security needs. But the senators would soften the benefit cuts by offering workers a employer share, and invest the money in personal savings accounts. (Otherwise workers can pocket their own half of the payroll tax cut.) That would make Social Security look much like the current government employee retirement supplemented by a savings plan in which worker contributions are matched by workers will surely choose not to participate. Moreover, if workers are allowed retirement will disadvantage some workers. In case you've forgotten, the stock term "privatization." A basic social insurance system is a hallmark of a Otherwise, for reasons laudable or frivolous, many people won't save the money needed to provide for their old age or unexpected disability, and society will end up paying to keep them on welfare. Nor should any current retirees fear for their benefits, especially at a time when the system is generating huge surpluses that ought to be reserved for the system's future needs. "No one has National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that stocks outpace Treasury of that differential compounds to a hefty sum over time. Moreover, redirecting to redeem the securities, the money should really be there. And that's the key point. The incremental reforms that that the current trust fund balances, held in the form of Treasury bonds, are really being compounded and preserved. But when the time comes to redeem the bonds (or even when the annual payroll tax surpluses begin to taper off several years from now), the government will be forced to choose among ugly alternatives. It will have to cut other spending, raise other taxes or, more workers paying payroll taxes (and if there aren't, we'll have many far bigger problems), these can cover at least partial benefits. But the pressure to cut benefits or sharply raise payroll taxes would be enormous. has long been a stalwart advocate of traditional social insurance. By his abrupt switch to the side of relatively radical reform, the senator has opened longer, mind you. Just a few hours. Just long enough for me to get reinforcements. (A militia offensive of some sort was widely rumored on the negotiator's bait of surrender "with honor." The lawmen treated him like the head of a brave conquered nation. He would be allowed to press in court his but he obviously preferred it to Plan B: getting shot. official said these fugitives were not experienced in the back country, so they would be easy pickings. For my part, I knew there would be little left to see. would live on. (The republic, as you probably know, contains three competing backward, but they do expend insane amounts of energy on ridiculous "politics," dissipating most of it through meaningless infighting and petty posturing. Are they evil, hateful nuts? No. I kind of liked most of them. They would be fun Unfortunately, they have this other hobby: seceding from the union. And, being of renegade militias, raising the question: At what point does nutty end and follower who actually carried out the kidnapping and shooting that started the him, I called a county police detective there who tracks the far right. He'd republic's separatist fantasies will live on. A few hundred boisterous The meeting itself was extremely hard to follow. After New World Epsilons who lined up behind a floor microphone and took turns a gross injustice, of course. Yes, he and four ROT colleagues were traveling with full packs, semiautomatic weapons, pistols, radios, and plenty of ammo, later: Why was he there? "I was curious about what was going on," he said. "On prepared with some kind of leg irons in 'em to fasten you into place to ship and I just hope his nuttiness stays "funny," but I have to wonder. When we met close some came," he said eerily. "I can tell you that the militias have interpretation would be terrorism. There is no one that can control that. There sounded quite sparky on the radio. Early that morning, reports said that someone fired at the bloodhounds, and that lawmen were closing in. I arrived resort itself was miles and miles away. Whatever was happening, we wouldn't be department. I asked him if it would be hard for runaways to hide in treeless authorities scaled back the search for him, making vague noises about the amount of food and water," said Mike Cox, who has been the state's spokesman the violence; he never gave up; and he went out ready to blast away and die. They better hope something gets him, because if he does stagger out of those building and came upon Dick Morris clutching a book by the late Cardinal evangelical humor magazine, in which he traced the arc of this sort of work, and money making has declined significantly as part of my life. They're not the things that I think about constantly," Morris said with beguiling innocence. "At some point I would very much like to be able to have a national talk radio show and a national television show and a national column to be able believe that I should really do this until I am further along my own personal months, Morris has emerged from his long weeks in the wilderness and come to the point at which he can stop thinking about his career and start thinking careerist mentality, Morris now spends more time in the studios of our a deal with Fox. And he is writing a provocative column for the New York stages to the television age and he's got them all figured out, the Republicans these positions have great substantive thought behind them, but nobody gets punished in the pundit games for being too ephemeral. great sorrow of Morris' second life is that the corrupt world wants to drag him back into the arena of politics. Morris' real focus, as he lets you know before you have a chance to ask, is the Higher Realms. Morris has been doing some polling on spiritual issues, and he has discovered that morality is big. For example, a few months ago, he had his pollsters read the following statement to bodies, with billions of cells which must work together or we die. When a cell does its own thing, that's called cancer. So it is with people of the earth. Unless we work for our planet, we will die of the global cancer of pollution, Hill column, "Idealism is, I believe, the new force in our politics. airplane audio system. When Morris talks about his spiritual platform, his eyes lower. He reiterates he is not qualified to speak on these issues. He is to house his own unworthiness, and if you talk to him, he takes you on an extended tour to show off all his rooms. But he can't not talk about these things, he implies, because he has come up with a unique message that simply organized religion. "Those who fear hell are religious; those who've been there not entirely unworthy. Morris wants to set up a series of redemption centers employable. He would like to see a private association create a certification symbol that clothing manufacturers could put on their labels to show the products were made by well treated workers. He says he has dozens of ideas like of this stuff. There's lots of noble praise for the civil society movement Morris' whole approach to spirituality, is how much it is a continuation of his political style. Morris is still manipulating images and spinning, but now he is spinning for souls, not votes. He seems genuinely repentant of his personal of the political consultant and his new vocation. He recently recalled a problem he faced a few years ago, when a congressional candidate he was working for was caught with a series of transsexual prostitutes. Morris proudly noted that he solved the problem and got the guy elected. When asked if the guy was guilty, Morris seemed taken aback by the question. He said he guessed the guy was guilty, since a few years later he was caught again and had to resign in business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world," reads a typical Barton sentence. But in truth, the yuppie spiritualism of the moment is the perfect breeding ground for Morris' style of rebirth. It takes religion, After a meeting with Morris, I mentioned his new vocation to a editor, who suggested I do a piece. I called Morris to set up an interview about his ideas and left a message. Then I ran into him at a party. I had a pleasant conversation with him and his wife. Morris was excited time to talk more. But then he called back and said that since he was now a pundit, he should write the piece about his ideas, rather than have me write about him. Morris' ambitions are all on the surface, and you could see that he never had the subject of a piece try to replace me as author, but I figured it never called, and now he has stopped returning my messages. I figure he made three or four false promises to me during our preliminary conversations as he tried to figure out how to play this to his advantage. None was serious, obviously, and one suspects the new Morris wouldn't lie about a big thing. But called The Idiot about a guy who is unprepossessing and naturally holy. Morris is more of an idiot savant. He seems sincerely interested in understanding holiness. But he can't stop spinning ideas, images, and sound bites, can't stop playing everything to his advantage. Watching him, you can see why some of those monks felt it necessary to take vows of silence. tremendous practical impact on the world of finance. Yet their own lives call few equations on a blackboard, and eureka! They had discovered a method for with this extremely valuable information? They gave it to the rest of us for assumption that appears to be in jeopardy is profit maximization. In markets, particularly financial markets, when profit opportunities arise, it is assumed that savvy individuals will take advantage of them in order to capture profits. equilibrium to another. (Equilibrium being the place where nothing really Modern financial theory is highly dependent on such strange of their utility function. For example, the creatures assumed in the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the keystone of most academic finance, are assumed to care greedy, the theory falls apart, as would most other economic theories. of times in classrooms, academic conferences, and cocktail parties. The question at hand is whether our generous academics were greedy enough to be surely knew that they had discovered something of great value. Why didn't they take their solution and their measly academic salaries and start trading options? With the formula programmed into only their calculators, they money of the hapless traders who were still pricing based on history, rules of thumb, or their guts (a potentially substantial source of wisdom here in key equation that now drives hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of annual trading volume in stock options, futures options, mortgages, sure, these guys have made a lot of money working for Wall Street firms in recent years. They surely have been adequately greedy in the rest of their careers to satisfy their own assumptions. But their youthful charitable lapse kept the formula to themselves, the budding options market would have been stunted. They would have quickly taken all the money from the suckers trading against them, and no one would have been foolish enough to take them on. Perhaps they actually have maximized their income by settling for a tiny piece of the huge pie that their formula created? This explanation ignores the underlying premise of the financial markets: There's a sucker born every minute. The market might not have grown as big if they had hoarded their secret, but they would have been able to dominate it. they may have feared some other finance professor would ruin their monopoly. There usually is a pathetic close second for any theoretical breakthrough in academia. That's the nature of the idea market. Someone else eventually would have stumbled onto the same formula. In which case they would have had to cut the spoiler in for half. Or even worse, the spoiler might have given the formula away, leaving our laureates with neither fame nor fortune. Any claims that they actually discovered it first, but kept it to themselves, would have This leads us to a third possibility: They couldn't trust in this regard, because nobody can ever pinpoint which of the other two might have cheated. Thus, they may have opted for full, public disclosure because they knew that was the only way to ensure that they shared equally in the good, and the giveaway was strictly for the betterment of humanity! Before the guffaws start, we should at least consider this alternative. The formula was most directly a gift to the options traders around the world, which is not a group that usually inspires charitable acts. So these three weren't in the same they appear on the floor of the options exchange, which shows that options traders are at least appreciative, if not deserving, of the rare charities that they receive. However, the benefits of this formula do extend beyond the pits. The efficient and accurate pricing of options has helped to make the economy more efficient. So we all have benefited indirectly. in the bag for these fellows after coming up with the formula, though it probably was likely for them anyway. Or, if not tenure, their goal might have been the eternal fame associated with having your name on an important piece of human wisdom. Economists are as guilty of this hubris as are members of any all rely on various forms of greed or other base human motivations that are close enough to greed to be easily worked into economic theory. The last three assumptions of economics. It is possible to fit them in by the economist's magic trick of defining any behavior as maximizing something called "utility," utility being defined as whatever you choose to maximize. But plain old greed should be adequate to explain nearly everything in finance, because finance is about making money. If the behavior of people who are in the profession of making money isn't well explained by the motivation of making money, then it go to theoreticians in behavioral finance who will be able to build a model that explains their own behavior as well as it does that of others. nuclear war is imminent. He'll know that time is up when his brother, working calamitous as a nuclear war. But, like many others who've gloried in owning healthy chunk of its stock with me. Now I have far more of my family's savings invested in a single firm, for which I no longer even work, than any sane signals that will warn me the unthinkable may be happening. strategic position at the center of the computer industry is paramount. Chances software. In particular, there's a that you're running some variety of the corporations, which will occasionally throw money at bizarre nonstandard computing solutions like NeXT, OS/2, or Java, normal people only get one shot at it. So they are conservative. They ask around. They buy what their friends buy or (more likely) what their kids' friends buy. When Java invades the home, of course, it will be too late. I will have missed my chance. I believe the much of my life setting up computers for friends and family and answering dumb too common; and software is too difficult to use. People aren't getting a seems backward to judge a company's success directly by its stock price. A sense, one of the fundamentals. Options are how the company attracts and retains smart young college graduates with no money and (most important) no closing price the month after he or she joins. And most employees get more every year. In essence, options give the employee any future increase in stock price. If the price doesn't increase, the options are worthless. gradually over several years. At any time, therefore, valued employees have a it. Psychologically, it doesn't work to have the stock stay at the same price, then shoot up after four years. By that time, the employee is long gone, lost the stock stays at a high price, because the employee knows (or at least worries) that there isn't much upside. I don't mind a little volatility, because this makes it more likely that a new employee's options will hit a momentarily low price during that crucial first month (when new employees, paradoxically, have an incentive to want the price to go down). And I don't mind periodic declines, even steep ones, because it's a chance to scoop up some more good employees at (to them) an attractively low price. Over the long term, though, what I want to see is a steady upward progression. made enough money, or because they've burnt out, or because they just want to try something new. That, in and of itself, is not necessarily a warning back after a while. In any case, most of these friends remain in the software business. They love it, they live it, and they can't stop talking about it. They talk about the important things: the key technologies, the good people, the big deals. And they do it all the time: while feeding babies, hiking up up, the end of the world has come, and it's time to sell my very last share of and children in developing countries. They should hang their heads instead. The bill, which passed the House earlier this month, authorizes far less than was appropriated two years ago, proving again that, on both sides of the debate, support for family planning takes second place to the controversy over year's congressional debate might seem like progress since both sides in the abortion debate agreed on the fundamentals of family planning. Birth control can improve health for women and children worldwide. Many women die each year as the result of unsafe abortion, and women who have babies too close together have a sharply increased chance of dying from postpartum hemorrhage. Babies born too closely spaced or into large families are less likely to survive their developing countries. Even in the sharper House debate, there was no substantial dispute that overpopulation strains natural resources, contributing will sometimes go hungry, and eight mouths starve." relationship of birth control to abortion, an observer from the House gallery remains high in countries where abortion is outlawed, contraception may be the funding to organizations that perform abortions or give abortion counseling. birth control will let them divert other resources to providing abortions. appropriations. Rather than cave, the president took the cut. levels. Furthermore, in both years, funds were embargoed until late in the despite Congress' action to lift this year's spending embargo, and the seeming likely to be seized hostage again in the abortion battle, for neither side Would Smith ever accept an unconditional release of money should not compartmentalize our view and say, 'If they do this with our money president asked might seem like progress. In one respect his bill was more generous than the alternative that passed the Senate, in that it would release the embargoed funds at a faster rate. But his opponents suspect that Smith's was a cheap generosity, since he could count on the restrictions he demanded to branches in the developing world. She says that in some countries where birth control has been unavailable, almost all indigenous groups they can work with have some abortion ties. Furthermore, even if complying with abortion restrictions were feasible, "You just can't compromise on a principle." Not would lead to an increase in unwanted pregnancies, maternal deaths, and infant authorizing bills, we will be back on the appropriations bills when the fiscal the angry battle going on around him and reflects, "In our effort to legislate around here, sometimes we become purists, and we hurt the people we are trying world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates. tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly parts of town, most people would rather hear English than French, and in the were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its "competence," or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like "deputy director" air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out have a girlfriend?" That was the perplexed comment that greeted my first promptly began quoting the profundity to my friends and reflecting indignantly, an unnerving revelation: The evasive man in the White House is a great role are under siege. With children who are literate but not large, and omnipresent scandal breaks, I snatch up the newspaper hurriedly at breakfast. When the older child makes a grab for it, I say, a nervous twitch in my jaw and a certain tightness in my voice, "There is no interesting news." I go to work weekend. I emphasize the lying part, and search for the formulation that will permit me to avoid anything that directly links the president to sex (a concept I am not even sure my audience is able to define). Hence my choice of the term quickly steer the discussion in another direction. That's easy, since they find the friend with the secret tape recorder fascinating. done what he is accused of, he should definitely step down. That seems to kids plead from their beds to be allowed to come out and watch a little. Some to do: talk and talk and talk about nothing interesting. I give a little civics lesson, and go on about the beauties of the House chamber. Their eyes glaze over, and they don't protest when they are sent back to bed. and see, the evidence isn't in yet, we just aren't in a position to explain anything more. Luckily, it's a classmate, not one of my own kids, who asks his might be safe to turn on the television, since the day's news has featured, of prosecutors and a media conspiracy to drag out this unpleasant business for much too long. It's like "indoor" and "outdoor" voices, I sputter: Some things should not be endlessly discussed in public; they're private matters. I believe can distract the kids from their many questions about you know what. They look at me calmly and figure it's a good moment to bargain for another cookie. arrives, and I conclude that it's time to deal with my audience on a less ad strategy (it turns out my friend fielded the dread question with the old deafness routine). I want something more organized to rely on, some material at touching parts of "your changing body" feels so good. I have no idea what to buy and suppose the best course is probably to get a little bit of everything. they're not getting the full version of events. I have the feeling they're going to let me get away with it, and I think, on balance, that is all for the really considered, but pondering it now, I find the answer unsettling: It friends with few, never once the victim of blatant discrimination, husband now our idea of whiteness, though, is for all of us to contemplate. In the complex of myth and rumor that pulls us, invisibly and irresistibly, into its hold. We move according to its properties, yet we know not why we move. diversity and affirmative action. The idea is simple: Given "the end of racism," or at least the end of "irrational" discrimination, minority bellyaching only upsets what would otherwise be the proper social And to be sure, we've stockpiled so much "difference" over the years that a round of identity disarmament would be welcome. But we should first acknowledge surrendered before we can ever hope to transcend race. two forms: as blessing and as burden. In both cases, it exists mainly by negation; it nourishes itself upon all that it excludes. Thus it is that whites don't generally think of themselves as having a race at all. To be white, both security and standing from the absence of the stigma. literature, in politics, and in a hundred other realms, "a regular person" is, by default, a white person. Our vocabulary for assimilation makes the point. How do we describe the method by which nonwhites enter the mainstream and climb the class ladder? We say, or at least think, that they're "becoming white." It used to be, of course, that "becoming white" was an ordained by conservatives wary of black militancy. By striving and succeeding Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them. This is sheer narcissism, the notion that "making it" means whitening. And when it comes from the white right, it's narcissism in the who reflexively rebuke blacks for any show of ethnocentrism. the Black Power movement, felt it necessary to dust off and revive the ways of the Angry White Male, the forgotten victim of minority preferences and "reverse discrimination." A decade later, he has entered the scene again, dressed now in but doesn't want to get left behind in the parade of affirming identities. many whites who complain about black obsessions with blackness are themselves obsessed with whiteness. What they are obsessed with in this case, though, is the cultural emptiness of whiteness. In a cruel reversal, it is the white guy, with no tradition to call his own, no history but one laden with guilt and equality of cultural recognition was as good as equality of actual power: Now whites want to play the same game, recounting to us the sufferings of the now: the question of white power. No one, really, wants to talk about that. Perhaps it's because "white power" sounds too much like an accusation. Perhaps truly, aren't like most white folks. But whatever the reason, we have an almost allergic reaction to any serious consideration of the ideology of to explain the reaction to "whiteness studies," an academic discipline that has emerged in the last few years? Sure, whiteness studies, which might include dominant class, or a crusade by the oppressed to demonize The Man. It is simply an attempt to identify the ways that whites remain blind to, and blinded by, an it be like to be white? One day, perhaps, there will be a better way to measure centuries back. In the courtyard outside I bumped into several parishioners, all politely curious about where I was from and what I thought of China. forward. At the first Mass I attended in this very church almost a decade ago, Christian leaders calling for restrictions on trade with China would do well to itself in large measure to China's economic opening to the world. circumstances today? Or with some romantic abstraction about what we would like less a snapshot of China in the late 1990s than a caricature drawn from the demands. The immoderate language employed, moreover, is often both intolerant of those who would achieve human rights by other means and out of touch with current realities. For example, an open letter to Vice President Al Gore on the rights are being sold out "in order to sell a few more Big Macs." of us who have seen firsthand the dramatic improvement in the lives of ordinary such as me, it is the height of irony to now find ourselves attacked as being encouraged to continue to document and publicize these abuses, such as the decades put it to me, "Almost everything that is said about the church in China is true for some part of China. But it no longer comes from the center the United States to whom I mention this have little patience for such fine distinctions. But in China they can make a world of difference. Just last fast eroding the government's control over people's daily lives, in this case government simply cannot exert the control it could when everyone stayed put and depended on the work unit for everything. At an even more basic level, as will tell you, you can do a lot more than the rules suggest as long as you and palpable. Surely it is no coincidence that the countries most cut off from trade and business (and embargoed by the United States) have been among the States, and they will not talk about linking trade with human rights. It is more likely they will talk about help in building churches and developing ranks on some abstract scale of good and bad. What matters is how to make a bad situation better, how to widen the cracks in the Communist concrete. Instead of to be successful. The are designed to complement, not displace, market forces. The laws do not prevent market winners from enjoying the fruits of their success or protect losers from the consequences of their failure. the company has monopoly power. However, no court has ever reached that court could be persuaded that personal computer operating systems constitute a success. We don't need to speculate about the answer, because government antitrust enforcers have spent the better part of seven years putting computer operating systems. After one of the most extensive antitrust failed to issue a complaint), the government found only a single, rather According to the government itself, that practice did not account for couldn't blow his nose without starting a new investigation. The Justice decree. Whatever the technical merits of the government's interpretation of the decree, you have to wonder what important public interest will be served if the not prevent computer manufacturers from installing competing browsers or putting those browsers on the desktop. Indeed, the computer companies that government has gone against a company with a smaller share of sales in order to protect the ability of its dominant competitor to secure an exclusive. licensees, and suppliers are too scared to tell the government what they know? Unlikely. Has the government not tried hard enough? Hardly. All the incentives biggest game." We taxpayers are employing an army of lawyers and economists who The ongoing government scrutiny itself may help to explain swarm of government enforcers peering over a company's shoulder is a strong not a mystery requiring any criminal explanation. The real and obvious source to as "network externalities" (a k a "positive economic feedback" or "increasing returns to scale"). In the market for personal computers, the value of a machine is directly proportional to the number of applications that run on it is technically the best. Once such a standard becomes predominant, it will round is no guarantee it will emerge the winner of the next paradigm shift. In However frightening Bill Gates may seem or however unfair and imperfect the market phenomenon of network externalities may appear, do we really want antitrust lawyers and economists determining Internet standards? It's difficult isn't the very first name that comes to mind these days when you think about political figures in trouble over twisting the truth. But if there ever was a moment that showed the importance of finding the fine line between spinning the facts and dispensing with them, this is it. For an object lesson in the quotations and distorted events. Moreover, the changes appear to have been journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and other Beltway vermin. (Click here to read the original story.) The real people for whom nasty lines had been constructed as he remembered it, that the media were unfairly attacking him yet again, that the discrepancies were minor, and that he would correct them in a future edition. Now the new edition is here, in the form of a paperback with revisions memory slips. "Memory is fallible," he writes. "Where I have subsequently learned of errors or misinterpretations I have made changes in this edition. In no instance, however, are the changes of material importance to the story I "You are duly warned, had you not assumed it already, that most of the quotes in this book should be considered paraphrases rather than verbatim accounts, as substance as well as the precise wording of the quotations ascribed them. Rep. Democrats: "We're owned by them. Business." Former House Republican leader "out to destroy. They'll try to destroy anything that gets in their way." And wrote a bitter letter complaining about it. He especially objected to an version makes some small but revealing changes in the party scene. Some a solicitous hostess rather than a tactless snob: She is "apparently concerned "appalled like the rest." Now, "I imagine he is appalled like the rest." Before, various people "stare at me silently." Now, "I feel as if everyone is felt and imagined. But the moral is the same: "I might as well have farted 'The to decide for themselves how likely it is that a Cabinet officer would bring a discrepancy involves public events where official records exist and flatly none of which appears in the White House transcript (the actual questions were was dully decorous and, as far as I could tell from the videotapes, the not to listen and learn but to talk and score points. In real hearings, In the original book, one of the most striking incidents executives and lobbyists, allegedly all male and smoking cigars (straight from ambushed by a hostile questioner named John, and when he tries to answer with out with boos and hisses. At one point, the room erupts in cries of "Bullshit!" would treat a sitting labor secretary this way is preposterous. And they again substitutes actual words, while trying to preserve what he can of a sense of hostility. John's pedantic speech is quoted accurately but characterized as actually was ("John, I will get back to you with all the information on it. That was the information I have. You have different information"). Instead of boos and shouts, we have only "I hear hisses from several locations." Well, we and the transcriber remembers, only scattered applause and laughter. than fabricated. The level of hostility has been exaggerated, but through it perennially beset paragon of decency. But the issues are of interpretation, not falsification. Locked in the Cabinet itself makes some shrewd and fact, both as labor secretary and as memoirist, he plays the game as well as attentively. For the president, however, it may be too late to revise. on the minimum wage and the with National Association of Manufacturers revelations have focused on the vast and unregulated sums of soft money that sleazy, most of it was legal. But there is another category of sleazy giving increasingly, many parents who have "maxed out" seem to be using their actually directed the gift and controls the money in question, such giving money in another person's name is also a violation. Fines range up to twice the size of the gift. If a campaign could be shown to have orchestrated warned of the peril: "Reporting a contribution from someone in the name of The law notwithstanding, candidates in both parties have from persons listed as "students" in Federal Election Commission records have opponent almost 6-to-1 (Bob Dole, who raised similar amounts of hard money, freely admits he had nothing to do with the donations. "Dad makes those all the money came from trust funds set up in the names of the children, Yet the FEC has ruled in the past that donations from a source over which the grandchildren, from preteens to grad students, in giving to their favorite candidates. These earned four White House sleepovers, eight White House coffees, two trade missions, and four memberships to the Republican Party's company as well. Among the somewhat less generous parents and other relatives donors with persons who left the "occupation" spot in other FEC filings blank is listed as a "housewife" in another filing. The group of "student" donors who there is no way to tell how many kids and how much money may be involved, since Hundreds of politicians attract small numbers of student contributions. But some campaigns seem to specialize in their receipt. More campaigns orchestrate such donations? Some evidence from public records is relationship, minors gave to exactly the same campaigns as their parents, almost always on the same day. Many are strategically timed. Ninety percent of when his need for hard money was greatest and his donor base was smallest. political activists who know the rules. Some were sophisticated campaign contributions in their names). Just recently, the commission, in negotiating a apparently illegal donations made in the name of the Huntsman chemical company children, one of whom was a severely retarded minor. (The contributions were returned after the FEC opened its investigation.) In other cases, the FEC donation money, without ever interviewing the child. Even the lamest story does not seem to stir the commission's suspicion. One father informed the FEC that "Absolutely true," the radio announcer replies. "Except it wasn't a lottery but administrator with an administrative deputy or associate? said to have one assistant to edit my writing and another whose job it is to conduct journalistic research. Who are these people? And why haven't they ever reported to work? In fact, I have one research assistant, who is working on the discovered that a third of the early entries written by staff researchers had ripped off other reference works. Needless to say, one such entry would be unacceptable, and we've adopted strict safeguards to prevent any such problems. But even in that early batch, the proportion of tainted entries wasn't a third; case, offering an assessment of an encyclopedia without having read it is like and it depends upon the skills and competencies of a community of learning. Global Culture represented the combined efforts of many people, and they are all acknowledged by name in the book. (By contrast, assessment relies entirely upon sources who are not identified by name.) I can be justly reproached for any careless errors that made it into print, but not similarly displeased that I invited fellow scholars to write individual served as general editor. Their names appear on the title pages. deal of time and energy over a decade. Ten section editors helped put the that appeared on the cover." Yes, my name appears on the cover. So does that of advisory boards and committees. Some include termination dates; most do not. Professor Gates may not have intended to give the impression that he still serves on boards in the second category, but that is hardly an unreasonable conclusion to have reached. Obviously, when his vitae says he no longer serves on a board, I didn't include it in my tally. of no other academic whose assistant assumes this title. full time on the projects I described in my article, but I don't think Gates not to be quoted about the Encyclopedia because of a nondisclosure figure on the percentage of plagiarized entries. (I wish he had provided this plagiarized had been "substantial." Three others I spoke with who were intimately involved in producing the first batch of entries confirmed the says that he credits others' labor on many projects. Clearly, he is right. But because of his celebrity and organizational acumen, he is the one who always in these collaborative efforts. This is merely an observation, not an the opportunity to confirm or deny nearly every matter of fact in this article. Magazine put on its current profile of him ("Head Negro in Charge"). Yet he only was it admiring in many ways, but many of the specific points to which he responds don't even amount to criticism. Nevertheless, we want to get things right and be as fair as possible. So here (after a phone conversation) are some no one could possibly suppose he was trying to imply he is currently on those boards: We accept that he was not trying to imply this, but you wouldn't be way. Gates objects that the article describes him as "an academic" with a chief are happy to note that distinction, which readers may weigh for themselves. assistants: Gates says no assistant edits his work. Someone who works with Gates claims to regularly "tweak" his writings. Whether "tweaking" equals utterly uncontroversial. And indeed, the piece did not suggest there was denial that he ever uses others to dig up quotes for his articles: Someone says that he has served Gates in this way. The editor of often asked others to track down a quote, sees nothing wrong with it (as long as you ask politely), and doesn't believe the article suggested there was third of the early entries were plagiarized. He said others had said so. Naturally these others insisted on not being identified, but there are three of anonymous sources with unknown biases outweigh one obviously interested but named party? This is the classic news consumer's dilemma, and we leave you to others: Gates objects most strongly to the assertion that "there is something dishonest about marketing under Gates' signature work that is produced mainly by his assistants." Whether that is a fair conclusion to draw from the evidence is something the reader, once again, can decide. We merely note that a) the article does present evidence, not just the naked assertion quoted here; b) the piece also has many positive things to say, not just about Skip Gates and his in context, the complaint is about general academic practice, with Gates as a prime example, as much as it is a specific criticism of Gates himself. there are specific points in the piece he failed to give Gates the opportunity to legalize gay marriage, both sides are missing the point. Why should the government be in the business of decreeing who can and cannot be married? another example of minority "rights" being imposed on the majority culture. But relationship? As governments around the world contemplate the privatization of everything from electricity to Social Security, why not privatize that most "Privatizing" marriage can mean two slightly different things. One is to take the state completely out of it. If couples want to cement their relationship with a ceremony or ritual, they are free to do so. Religious institutions are free to sanction such relationships under any rules they choose. A second meaning of "privatizing" marriage is to treat it like any other contract: The state may be called upon to enforce it, but the parties define the terms. When children or large sums of money are involved, an enforceable contract spelling out the parties' respective rights and obligations is probably advisable. But the existence and details of such an agreement should be up to the parties. And privatizing marriage would, incidentally, solve the straight ones, without implying official government sanction. No one's private formal, public institution that only the government can grant." But the history of marriage and the state is more complicated than modern debaters imagine, as marriage implied in the eyes of the laity seems to have been a private contract between two individuals, enforced by the community sense of what was right." By "spousals," was usually followed by the proclamation of the banns three times in church, but the spousals itself was a legally binding contract. colonies, marriages were performed by justices of the peace or other contract, among many others. Each state has tended to promulgate a standard, courts have started unilaterally changing the terms of the marriage contract. arrangements applied not just to couples embarking on matrimony but also to couples who had married under an earlier set of rules. Many people felt a sense of liberation; the changes allowed them to get out of unpleasant marriages without the often contrived allegations of fault previously required for divorce. But some people were hurt by the new rules, especially women who had understood marriage as a partnership in which one partner would earn money and the other would forsake a career in order to specialize in homemaking. religious views at the level of private proselytizing and don't fight to impose one religion by force of law. Other social conflicts can likewise be depoliticized and somewhat defused if we keep them out of the realm of privatize marriage? Make it a private contract between two individuals. If they specified rules for property and alimony in the event of divorce, they could do so. Less traditional couples could keep their assets separate and agree to share specified expenses. Those with assets to protect could sign prenuptial agreements that courts would respect. Marriage contracts could be as individually tailored as other contracts are in our diverse capitalist world. standard rental forms. Couples would then be spared the surprise discovery that outsiders had changed their contract without warning. Individual churches, synagogues, and temples could make their own rules about which marriages they institution would allow gay people to marry the way other people do: individually, privately, contractually, with whatever ceremony they might choose in the presence of family, friends, or God. Gay people are already holding such ceremonies, of course, but their contracts are not always the General Accounting Office says recognize marital status. Under a privatized system of marriage, courts and government agencies would recognize any couple's institution. The modern mistake is to think that important things must be planned, sponsored, reviewed, or licensed by the government. The two sides in the debate over gay marriage share an assumption that is essentially collectivist. Instead of accepting either view, let's get the government out of marriage and allow individuals to make their own marriage contracts, as befits a secular, individualist republic at the dawn of the information age. forget everything he knows about the 1980s tax cuts. Here's a reminder. has stood for fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets. Most famously, he was almost alone among Republican leaders in his caustic skepticism about the urging the Republican presidential candidate to take off his green eyeshade, push aside that unappetizing bowl of budget cuts, and scarf down a tasty dose better. But like Dole, they are tempted, too. A persistent majority of election results tend to support the fact that they are lying. When they there urging tax cuts instead of deficit reduction. And certainly no hand, few (outside the Wall Street Journal editorial page) are still brash enough to claim that tax cuts could actually raise tax revenues. Many tax cuts. How they are to be paid for is unclear. The promise of painless contradictory notions of cutting tax rates and balancing the budget?" he asked in (where else?) a Wall Street Journal article last month. "The answer is yes," the senator revealed, if only we ignore the claims of "conventional the pit of that recession to the beginning of the next one. If you believe that choice may be fair enough. If you doubt it, you might prefer the traditional 2.1-percent rate. What boosted federal revenues most was the 4.3-percent average growth in payroll taxes. This was mainly the result of rate corporations to pay for tax breaks for individuals. "conventional thinker" might be forgiven for concluding from this record that what raises revenues is raising taxes, not cutting them. The campaign to convert Bob Dole, and to prepare the public are what determine "whether a worker works overtime or goes home for the day taxes can affect behavior. Reducing very high tax rates can, at the very least, encourage less tax evasion and avoidance. And restructuring taxes should, at least in theory, encourage desirable types of economic behavior such as hard not taxes or other government policies, tend to swamp all other explanatory variables in international comparisons of savings and investment. This is especially so in the United States, where tax rates are low by international doesn't acknowledge sufficiently the explosive power of tax cuts.) What didn't people working harder because of lower tax rates, the record of the 1980s is response to lower taxes. The group whose work effort increased most the poorly paid, whose marginal tax rates, thanks to Social Security tax hikes, actually went up. For these workers, higher taxes prompted harder work to make provided numerous inducements: not just marginal rate cuts on income but money policies which, along with financial deregulation, sent the interest that even if the tax cuts didn't pay for themselves, the increased savings they generated would make the resulting deficits easy to finance. (Even today, cuts can, "in some cases," raise saving by more than they raise the budget the 1980s. The swelling government deficit, which amounts to national dis saving, did much to drag down the 1980s figure. But even private savings in the 1980s ran well below their 1970s level. the behavior of business investment. During the eight years of the totally accounted for by the shrinking government. While government spending notes: With unemployment well below the 1980s average and considerably lower least the Federal Reserve thinks it is, which is what counts." Any supply, curbing economic growth or even prompting a recession. he could propose to cut spending even more than his party has already appetite for even the healthy serving it has promised to serve up over the next could resist temptation. After all, he really does know better. civilization. Long before the Information Age, man struggled to digest the mounds of words contained in his religious, cultural, and legal canons. Fame these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets," he announced. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with persists but multiplies as new volumes enter the marketplace of ideas. Besieged with information and short on time, what is a person to do? Luckily, whole search engines, executive summaries, cheat sheets, and the Reader's processor (which is made by the same company that brings you Slate). Last week, words in the document (barring "a" and "the" and the like) and assigns a Then, it "averages" each sentence by adding the scores of its words and average, the higher the rank of the sentence. "It's like the ratio of wheat to the best? Better than those made by First Alert, Nighthawk, or others? Not Reports last year. Three of its models were deemed "not acceptable" by the are exclusive, but they're not endorsements. The charities don't test the Charities say they need the money. Competition from surveys show that the public supports such contracts, so long as they raise plenty of money for the charity and don't conflict with its basic mission. of independent information. And in some cases they seem to be skating close to charities benefiting from what appears to be false advertising. Companies wouldn't pony up the bucks for a charity's logo if they didn't think it gave them a competitive edge. Why would they think that it would? "Because at least some consumers are going to be misled into thinking this is a special thing. I Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University. fallen through because government officials concluded the same thing. regulatory agencies complained it would mislead consumers. The program, started product after the attorneys general complained, even though a company spokesman Companies admit that the logos help sales, thanks to the appearance of an endorsement where none exists. "It definitely helps us sell try to make clear on the label that it reflects a "partnership," not a product endorsement. But they admit that at least some consumers are being misled by endorsement? The answer to that has to be 'yes.' There is no way around it," buy the product with the logo as opposed to the one that doesn't have any.' Another land mine: Can charities that cut lucrative deals with product makers be counted on to provide accurate information about health and safety issues related to those products? Heightened fear about CO die this way, according to the National Safety Council. Nearly five times as many die of suffocation each year at home. And CO deaths were falling steadily long before home detectors hit the market. Is the ALA going to tell you about effective way to quit is to save your money and go cold turkey. Are the health least giving the appearance of lobbying on behalf of corporate interests that permits to burn toxic waste. The ALA complained that the practice was hazardous to people's health. Fair enough. But it happens that at the same time, the Responsible Thermal Treatment, which represented the kiln industry's direct officials from the Cement Kiln Recycling Coalition asked about this at a meeting, ALA officials said that state chapters, which are relatively autonomous, ran the campaigns. But one ALA official added that the charity would be happy to take money from the kiln industry, too, provided the grants complaint with the Internal Revenue Service, charging that the ALA was being paid to lobby on behalf of a commercial interest, a violation of its nonprofit had also been a generous donor to the national ALA, giving a total of more than these relationships? Some charities plead poverty. "You've got something like they're all competing for the same dollar." But budgets for the big charities on the part of companies to part with money without seeing any direct benefit. "Nonprofits can't count on corporations to give millions of dollars just "Now everything has to be linked to a stronger benefit." Franklin, the venerable Duke University historian and chair of the president's advisory board on race, told reporters that his panel would refuse to hear from opponents of affirmative action in higher education. This policy seems both wrong in principle and politically foolish. Why on earth have a panel dedicated to racial reconciliation and exclude one of the two views that need to be reconciled on the most divisive racial issue? What harm could come from letting critics have their say, compared with the harm of seeming to censor them? official working with the panel is a bit less opaque. "The point of the committee is to help formulate White House policy. So why should we appoint people who disagree with the President? Why hear testimony from people who vehemently disagree with him?" Another member of the panel's staff said, "This great and unprecedented conversation about race." But apparently the main purpose of convening the committee's monthly meetings is to provide an occasion for the administration to unveil installments of the President's Race House concocts these policies, without say from committee members. Behind the inflated rhetoric, the Franklin panel has only a slim mandate and little power. It is not legally allowed to meet in private and cannot even write its own people running the panel. In theory, John Hope Franklin is the perfect chair for an anodyne exercise in racial reconciliation. His public image is that of the first black chair of an integrated history department and the first black Reconstruction. (The black carpetbaggers, who ruled parts of the South following the Civil War, were sincere democrats, he proved, not venal pessimistic, angry edge. He laments the permanence of racism, which he feels is only marginal improvement and enduring black urban poverty, job discrimination, racism are not only mistaken but also racist. They "have no interest in Franklin is old. The real power in the panel rests with and will write the final report on race relations. As a White House aide in "mend it, don't end it" policy for affirmative action. But since leaving the affirmative action "counterrevolutionaries." He says, "Though their opposition to these measures is framed as principle, certainly their real goal is to protect the current distribution of privilege and opportunity that has produced entitled to their views, which may even be correct. But should people with such strident opinions be responsible for a panel on racial reconciliation? It seems especially stupid for the administration to spew platitudes about the panel's mission of healing if its intention was to push one side of a contentious been devoted to Causes all her adult life. Apart from her family, improving the most famous woman couldn't attach itself to this country's most famous woman. prospect that must make her feel at least a small fraction as weary as everyone It is hard to remember while in the grip of posthumous dysfunctions, her penchant for New Age cures. The National Enquirer pulled its "Di Was Sex Mad" cover off newsstands as soon as it could after the suffered the indignity of a press obsession with their thighs. Photos from the of institutional power. It could only slow her down. When she successfully put land mines on the world's agenda, she didn't do it by going to the United and went after executive authority like the boys. She got bogged down in leading a 500-member Health Care Task Force and fighting with subcommittee something to be done about conditions in the mines, she went to (and posed at) to the royal family: Flex that upper lip. There was a great deal more sympathy interview. Her private secretary was so appalled over it that he quit, and the media's assessment was summed up in one paper's headline, "Has She Gone Mad?" But politicians in trouble should pore over that tape for guidance in spin control. With that unfiltered performance, her triumph over the House of once made a similar appearance, one that has become known as the "press conference in pink." During the simultaneous controversies over the health care task force, her killing in cattle futures, and her alleged meddling in the White House travel office, she invited reporters into the East Room to hear her explain herself. But by giving absolutely no ground, she gained no sympathy: Everyone thought she was smart, but no one was reminded she was human. Bill there, using only the cameras and good will at her disposal. Meanwhile, in headlines. The danger is not that the public has been needlessly alarmed, but The only thing is, such outbreaks are not rare events. In fact, they are relatively common, and have been happening at least a few times a year for more than a decade (the further back Centers for Disease Control and Prevention next year. And yes, problems with paperwork made it difficult to trace the contaminated meat to its source. But that was not because the paperwork was shoddy. Rather, it was because the reworked, old meat was being added into new product throughout the day instead of to a single easily traceable lot at the inspectors supervised its implementation at the plant every day. takes a certain level of contamination to pose a threat. Even if a whole day's production were contaminated and a small amount of leftover contaminated beef diluted that it wouldn't pose a threat to anyone. Even leaving wide margins for hamburgers that caused the Colorado outbreak were practically designed to the shape of the burgers was such that the outside would have had to be burned ruckus was topped by the media coverage. "Can This Meat Kill You?" screamed fact, you are a hundred times more likely to die of a newly contracted infection when you spend a night in a hospital than you are when you eat a outbreaks are increasing and their sources are growing more and more diverse, pastures goes into lakes, where swimmers get infected. Cattle manure is used to fertilize fields, and the produce infects those who eat it. election cycle. And the ranchers are mighty resistant to any changes that could cost them money. Still, some changes could be made quite easily. Industry less likely to rupture, thus making contamination less likely. (The problem is more enforcement power, and to that end, it is advancing a bill designed to expand its authority. The bill is irrelevant, though. No company has refused to taking a hard look at the meat industry, maybe it should look for inspiration to the battle between the Food and Drug Administration and the tobacco companies. It is common practice to add fat back into hamburger to reach the is a good bet that more people died last year from the extra fat they consumed may be similarly afflicted. This creates an interesting moral dilemma for connection between mania and artistic achievement has been known since ancient is an essential driving force for many artists. "The fiery aspects of thought mood, and quick intelligence; a sense of the visionary and the grand; a depression. The disease fueled their artistic achievements even as it led to There may well be a similar relationship, for similar psychiatrist who has worked with athletes, says there are many other cases. television audience that he had a psychiatric illness all his life, that he'd discussed manic depression with his psychiatrist, and that this illness childhood trauma. It's a genetically determined, chronic, and incurable disease in their 30s. The symptoms often can be contained by medication. Without medication, people suffering from manic depression face poor outcomes. Some untreated manic depression as lethal as many forms of cancer and heart disease. The disease also worsens over time, with both mania and depression becoming more pronounced and less responsive to medication. Victims are especially prone to drug and alcohol abuse, with all the attendant complications. champ, but were suffering from an often fatal disease that can be effectively could diminish his boxing skills or avoid treatment and become sicker. his game, including feelings of increased energy, invulnerability, elation, tremors and reacted more slowly physically and mentally, while others improved their performance under drug maintenance. Going off lithium to prepare for a bout is not a way out of this dilemma, since in many cases lithium is not as athletes are required to pass physicals to ensure that they do not place themselves or other participants at risk. A boxer cannot fight with a heart train wrecks. We anticipate accidents at stock car races. We go to the "fights" rants. The press and public love it. Meanwhile, the adulation feeds a sense of depression. After a crash, the crowd's silence feeds an athlete's paranoia, save his life or save his career. The choice for others is whether to force him to make the right choice, or to continue deriving profit and entertainment from practitioner of therapeutic politics, has always flirted with dysfunction. Six years ago, during his first successful presidential campaign, he discussed his dysfunctional family history during a televised interview. He acknowledged that growing up with an alcoholic parent may have made him particularly eager to please and placate. Veterans of the recovery movement, which remained popular child of an alcoholic). Considering his abusive, alcoholic stepfather, his substance abusing brother, his mother's penchant for gambling, and his own weakness or a strength depended on your relationship with the therapeutic culture. "Real men don't get on the couch," a spokesperson for President Bush themselves survivors of dysfunction and abuse and believed fervently in the of his "feeling reality" was much more appealing than any display of machismo. Being "in recovery" is no weakness to people who consider being "in denial" the elect a dysfunctional president?) Instead, his moments of apparent introspection humanized him and made him seem approachable. They helped him codependency, but those who recognized it as such probably felt closer to him when he acknowledged it. People who were not conversant in the language of codependency with the image of a leader in control of policy and the political intelligence, his ability to master the details of complicated policy matters, and his skills at communicating made him someone voters could also admire. charismatics are those who simultaneously invite identification and awe. (And Charismatic personalities combine transcendent beauty, glamour, or talent with accessibility, providing a way in for people eager to identify with a higher being. They seem both ineffable and utterly familiar. delicate balance of minor, private, victimless dysfunction and the ability to master public issues and events has been endangered by the current scandals. therapeutic culture at risk. The president who ran on a platform of compassion story is true, he didn't feel her pain. He used it. him with her suspicions that he was a sex addict, "just like her." According to Browning, Time reports, the president broke down and cried. Whether or defeated by the therapeutic culture that helped get him elected. recovery movement gave us the concept of sex addiction, which is a form of codependency. In the 1980s, the movement popularized the notion that behaviors could be as addictive as substances such as cocaine or alcohol, and it founded To people who are most familiar with the term and most recovery. Therefore he is in denial. To recovery aficionados, that probably means he is not sufficiently evolved, spiritually or psychically, to lead the nation. They would not expect the president to be devoid of dysfunction, but would expect him to have recognized and vanquished his own abusive behaviors. To support him would be to support his denials, thereby making them patient in addition to healer. The personal development tradition greatly addictions in order to bolster their credibility. But they marketed themselves as people who had been through the "process" of recovery, surrendered their will to their higher powers, and freed themselves of addictive behaviors. From are receptive to the notion of sex addiction, the president's dysfunction of control president. Meanwhile, people hostile to popular notions of addiction personal responsibility. (And, indeed, some of his supporters may prefer seeing him as the victim of a disease rather than as an intentional sexual the diagnosis of sex addiction make sense? Outside the world of pop psychology, not formally recognize sex addiction as a mental disorder. Among experts who treat and study compulsive behaviors and chemical dependencies, there is controversy over the meaning of the term "addiction" and the efficacy of the disease model for a range of supposed addictions, from alcoholism to compulsive after a drug conviction by declaring his powerlessness over drugs and sex, repenting, and entering a program. "Most people are recovering from something," difference between "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like honey." Add to this mix "she unzipped their flies like there was no tomorrow," and you get some idea of the challenge faced by software manufacturers hawking filters to protect children from the nastiness on the Web. The filters are supposed to block access to sites parents wouldn't want their children to see. community has insisted that government regulation of pornographic Web unconstitutional, that bluff has been called. Do filters work? And which ones In essence, all filter programs work like search engines in reverse, keeping out anything with certain words or combinations of letters. companies have two different approaches to marketing the filter programs. One Patrol (motto: "To Surf and Protect"), which operates from a screen that looks is in one way the strictest of the programs: It's a tattletale. The software keeps a log of the sites the child has attempted to access, "including attempts to access blocked material." Net Nanny's more liberal approach is indicated by On The Net." It provides parents with a suggested list of sites to exclude, but nothing is excluded without being specifically designated by the parents. As a with explicitly sexual text or pictures, and most also screen out sites dealing with drugs, alcohol, hate speech, and gambling. Filters fail in two ways: to have sophisticated algorithms to avoid these pitfalls. The challenge is in that it does not exclude "opinion or educational material, such as the historical use of marijuana or the circumstances surrounding 1940's effort. Filters may prevent access to certain sites, but blocked sites can show up when kids use search engines, and there is nothing to prevent kids from reading the raunchy descriptions of the sites or writing down the Web addresses intentionally) visiting a Web site that includes material deemed inappropriate by their parents, but they are limited to what we might term the "pull" side. The bigger problem is on the "push" side, and there the filters are helpless. two men having sex. It was sent as a joke by an older boy he knew. My son, then exceptionally kind and protective, except for one participant, who was cut off by the discussion leader for general obnoxiousness. He retaliated by using a ever participated in the Prodigy discussion, including my son. soon are filters based on criteria developed by particular groups. Parents will be able to select from filters endorsed by anyone from the Christian Coalition the international World Wide Web Consortium, will provide standard ratings, to be assigned to each page by its developer. Parents will be able to set their browsers to deny access to pages without ratings. And so they can breathe easier, knowing that their children will only be able to see pages certified as filter software to find the one you like best. That decision will be based more on your technical facility than on your notions of what material you want your kids to see, because the programs vary much more in their dependence on parental tweaking than on their approaches to excluding material. Parents who are less adept than their kids at using the Internet will probably prefer on the side of exclusion, and was especially thorough at preventing even the willing to devote the time to setting their own parameters will be better off allows separate settings for separate users, important for families with older children or children of different ages. It also makes it possible for parents to block outgoing information, to prevent kids from revealing their last names, phone numbers, addresses, and passwords in an online chat. Ultimately, though, even the best filters are a limited and temporary solution. None are as effective as good communication and (maybe even more important) keeping the family computer in a central location so that all surfing is done within concerned parents. The cover story in the last issue of the business magazine serious problem at the office. Among the most frequent visitors to literature is happy to point out, filters can help protect management from liability for permitting sexually explicit material in the workplace. The real relatively small reduction could push the budget several hundred billion footing for the long term. But Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, who the personal exemption and standard deduction have been inflated along with the Inflation exaggeration should have special appeal to people's incomes have to outpace actual inflation substantially for them to reach the income levels at which higher tax rates cut in. Already, most household income was $34,076--a married couple would have to make more than and tax brackets and indexed deductions will be pushed so out of whack with things stand, if Democrats want to combat the steady erosion of the tax base and the pressure it puts on their favorite programs, they'll have to vote eventually to raise taxes and face the electoral consequences. Republicans, by contrast, can count on their program being implemented without ever putting subversive as it may seem of both the democratic process and deficit reduction, may strike Republicans as irresponsible. But sober reflection should quiet their qualms. Republicans, after all, do not want to balance the budget just the budget because it is an excuse to cut the federal government, which, if you are a Republican, is the definition of "responsible." boon to the Democrats. If the last few elections have shown anything, it is that voters don't like cuts; if the deficit evaporates, the demand for plan to adjust the index will push Social Security's financing problems another decade or more into the murky future, upon which voters and politicians never focus. That would surely be a disaster for Republican dreams of privatizing all one of his plants have the same financial interest, Republicans have it made. lunches," says Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute, "but in the long a tax hike or not depends on whether you count not getting previously percent overestimation number is a guess. If they have overestimated how far button, of the habitual references to "the killer," of the righteous the lifetime appointment of federal judges. "Being active is a way to focus some of that frustration, anger, etc., into something positive," says appearance at the National Press Club, and then touring the Holocaust Museum. "moral force" for justice. "God is working through him right now," says Rabbi passed along to White House aides the family's desire to meet President The Secret Service intercepted him, but a backstage meeting macabre celebrity," says a journalist who was there. "And they were right." them a night on the town and a little stargazing. What is cause for some concern, though, is the peculiar public pedestal upon which they've been Most Wanted fame, the father of another kidnap victim; and New York Rep. by a crazed gunman on a Long Island commuter train. Those voices deserve to be heard, but the risk is that the national crime debate will be shrouded in the said shortly before the civil trial commenced. "I think there's something findings suggest that this branch of humanoids is much more distantly related human ancestors. Now you must apply these findings, and examine their implications for the world around you. Specifically, you must weigh their effect on certain theories in circulation, among them that Neanderthals still through the ages and still constitute a group apart. And, most importantly, laugh? That may be a mistake. At least two theorists working separately have ideas suggests you believe them to be absurd. But the validity of such theorizing is beside the point. What matters is the existence of such a premise, because it validates the question it seeks to answer: What explains Along and extraordinary history of speculation concerns the announced they have stumbled on a Big Secret, a hidden truth that explains to be: This line of thought provides for a certain macabre entertainment, but it is also a lesson in how the most inane ideas can have the most appalling consequences. Here is a whirlwind tour of the field, in approximately settle together, who were eventually chased out of the country by patriots. The existence of such a story is not necessarily evidence of general antipathy league with the devil. That they are themselves actually devils, complete with horns, is a folk belief that arises in the centuries following the Crusades, different peoples in different acts of creation, blossomed during the Enlightenment. It was in part a "solution" to the "mystery" of Native whose status as humans awaited papal resolution. It was also an attempt by early humanists to challenge clerical authority. They pointed to ambiguous the period saw the hope of popular redemption by supporting such notions. attempted to provide a "scientific" rationale for hatred at a time when legal support of the thesis, from relatively tiny cranial capacity to the idea of was part of the flood of Ancient Astronaut books inspired by the huge success visitations in the Bible, especially in such passages as the description of prehistoric psychosexual tensions of some sort. Chosen People is an injunction against portraying God is that Neanderthals cannot draw. However, so. News that Neanderthals have little in common with modern humankind should We're all out here just looking for the Truth. And no matter where we look for it, over our shoulders among the hominids of prehistory, or out on the interplanetary horizon, we can find whatever Truths we're looking for: Those that set us free, and those that prove us mad, too. journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the "wreckage" of a large part of economic theory.) rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating mentioned several other economists who did influential work, and I cited three suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is earlier writing that he does not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light," he about the direction that economic research, principally macroeconomic research, has taken over the past two decades. In response to that article, I received dozens of messages of appreciation from mainstream economists, including from out to denigrate their work is malicious hogwash. The fact of the matter is that I spend much of my life reading the work of mainstream economists, speaking to them, and trying to find something they have written that might interest the general public. In my experience, most economists appreciate the chapter to the rediscovery of increasing returns by contemporary economists. asked that question, and quickly realized that it led them into surprisingly economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the important enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it "didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know." professor, whose early academic work received widespread media attention, is far too generous a scholar to succumb to such pettiness. do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way how he came to champion a principle known as "increasing returns." The recent New Yorker article explains how that principle has since become the story, which he summarizes nicely in the final paragraph: out, I wrote him as politely as I could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due. they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in "Tasty Bits among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream documented, is that during the years that, according to the legend, increasing returns was unacceptable in mainstream economics, papers about increasing returns were in fact being cheerfully published by all the major journals. And as I pointed out in the chronology I provided with the article, even standard reference volumes like the Handbook of International Economics have long contained chapters on increasing returns. Whatever the reason that be so widely believed? I am glad to hear that you tried to tell a more balanced wide responsibilities and much on their mind, are not necessarily on top of what has been going on in research outside their usual field. I happen to know about increasing returns in either growth or trade. Did you try talking to over the unwillingness of economists to think the unthinkable. Did you call not you too." And let me say that I simply cannot believe that you could have talked about increasing returns with any significant number of economists And oh, by the way, there are such things as libraries, where you can browse actual economics journals and see what they contain. of the economics profession, its intellectual bigotry and prejudice, which happens to be a complete fabrication (with some real, named people cast as villains) that somehow someone managed to sell you. I wonder who? about economists being unwilling to consider the possibility of imperfect cleared up by someone at some point." Yet up to now there was nothing anyone could do about the situation. The trouble was that while "heroic rebel defies orthodoxy" is a story so good that nobody even tries to check it out, "guy far and away the best reporting on the subject, did include a sympathetic but influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public wrote the article because he was "just pissed off," not a very good state for a preposterous claim at any other time. On the contrary, his papers have fully cited the history of the field and made references to the previous papers, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, especially his preface emphasized and which is influential in the current debates about antitrust policy is the dynamic implication of increasing returns. It is the concept of strategic choice, may have large consequences because of increasing returns of various kinds. Initial small advantages become magnified, for example, by creating a large installed base, and direct the future, possibly in an inefficient direction. Techniques of production may be locked in at an early stage. Similar considerations apply to regional development and learning. long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to the biologists, physicists, and fellow economists who have helped advance his of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a small cities into big metropolitan areas. But within metropolitan areas the movement has been outward, from the cities to the suburbs. The next census, in is the biggest city in the country by a wide margin, and it is the most urban The suburbs dominate popular culture. The default setting for movies, television shows, and even rock music is the suburbs. Anything with first suburban speaker of the House. Every presidential campaign is now conceived of by strategists as a battle for the soul of the suburbs. (The whole did.) The dominant political machine in New York is a suburban one, Al trend story you've ever read about gentrification, or about harried to the 'hood. Those are statistical blips, or anecdotes, or fantasies. Urban Black people are suburbanizing faster than white people. The suburbs are still possible to hear the suburbs described, especially by professional city planners and other urbanologists, as a kind of temporary and revocable aberration. You know the argument: They were subsidized by the federal prejudice. Millions of people, especially New Yorkers, are poised, ready, city people would move to the suburbs if they could. Mass commitment to more urban than it really is because it annexed most of its suburbs (that is, University City, Mo., have far more of a patina of sophistication than any New enormous malls and "totally planned communities" with spindly little trees and stapled to the telephone poles and vegetarian restaurants and rave clubs, is is still a total overlap between "downtown" and "bohemian." It's the only city where the actual city is still the center not just of the metropolis's official old undemocratic kind, not the new kind that are essentially outdoor health clubs. The expensive restaurants still serve "continental cuisine." The brick buildings: just what brave suburban reformers in the Sun Belt are revolves around children. If you lead any kind of "alternative lifestyle," you will be left blessedly alone, rather than being ostracized, but you won't find much in the way of an affinity culture. At dinner parties, people argue whether colony, but I have never been to a single social event here where a hothouse conversation about the Industry could be sustained for more than about half an hour before it slowly flutters back to home ground: the town and the kids. era, and is now out of date. But nothing has replaced it. Martinis, barbecues, Since then at least one monumental social change has swept across aside and saying, helpfully, that my life would be completely ruined if I chose to live in the suburbs (or the city). All my friends who had grown up in the never ever to live in the suburbs as adults. People who did move to the suburbs had to obey an unwritten conversational rule that you had to justify it in stagy and fake terms, either by exaggerating the hellishness of the city for children or by pretending that the suburbs were really not that far away and realize that what all this was really about was, first, the extreme difference in New York between suburban and urban culture (which doesn't exist in most parents any more); and, second, status. The status point is a tricky one. In the minor leagues of status, where most people play, the city is for the poor and the suburbs are for the rich, so to move out to the suburbs is to move up as well. But in the major leagues of status, the city outranks the suburbs. The city is where the real players live. The city is for the aristocracy, and the suburbs, it means that you haven't made it enough to afford the basic setup of Or it means that you're not artful enough to be able to live charmingly as a city, you're better off moving out past the suburban Zone of Shame and living and summers. At least then you're plausibly rustic and creative. person standing on a train platform listening to a humanoid voice announce over contains links to images that many will find distasteful. grief would have any lasting results, she suggested that it might affect the public approach to celebrity and predicted that the paparazzi accident photos then known to exist would "never see the light of day." She'd barely finished her prediction when the other panel members broke in. Those pictures had already been published, they noted glumly: The German tabloid photographers, displaying or even looking at pictures of this kind was now; the Internet soon kicked in with even more pictures, overwhelming the new technology, according to this view, is a tool of cheap voyeurism, capable of smashing public decency with unprecedented speed and efficiency. But even if more likely, not less so. Photography's relationship with grief is an intimate documentary images of violence and death. Whatever our level of images intellectually and emotionally, transforming appalling scenes into objects of sentiment, pieces of evidence, and even works of art. Indeed, the cathartic opportunities presented by such images, whether sentimental or aesthetic, have a long history of overwhelming any questions of documentary death imagery commonly becomes art, especially in the case of war photography. some time ago that the same corpses seem to show up in different places on the battlefield, and they concluded that the photographer had "arranged" the dead soldier as he is shot, capturing what usually is interpreted as an instant of examines this picture and its history at length. Paying homage to the great war photographer's courage and talent, he nonetheless notes the conflicting stories photograph "turns out not to be the clear and simple statement of fact that it otherwise appears." Yet, assume that this famous still was not portraying an act of slaughter: Would it be a relief or a disappointment? People see what information, we readily grant ourselves permission to look at such images. Terrible scenes of massacres, bombings, and the like are displayed almost provides constant updates on such atrocities.) To the degree that we regard showing them is a purported moral good. But it is easy to take this idea of death imagery as important evidence and to expand it into an excuse that happened with a number of shocking images involving famous and beloved persons. family's feelings. It is regarded as a valid news image, but what does it gallery of such images, many of them reproduced to illustrate conspiracy People find the excuse they need to see a photo. Even the wrong excuse. It's easy to interpret this as popular depravity, but the matter is not so simple. Autopsy pictures, common enough on the Internet, are not a popular genre; nor are the death photos of just any famous people. little stir. The death images that have received the greatest attention have something important in common: All of them are of people who have been subject to popular hagiography, people who are the public's most beloved figures. The between grief and photography dates to the very birth of the camera in the photographs of dead family members posed in their coffins, a practice so widespread as to be an important source of income for photographers. Such cool: They subscribed to a veritable cult of grief. "No home ever reaches its highest blessedness and sweetness of love and its richest fullness of joy till sorrow enters its life in some way," wrote one minister quite typically in an images would develop, refused to allow any to be taken. Given the intensity of it is unclear whether they were posed, misrepresented, or innocently misidentified. But the result is the same in any event: At some point, they were accepted as authentic by people who esteemed the dead president, and they notorious Internet picture, but there's nothing new about such spurious images and nothing false about the emotions that have led so many people to look at States had a problem: His pants didn't quite fit. That was by no means his only president for nine months. Already, he had signed the Civil Rights Act, clothing company, from the Oval Office. "If you don't want me running around pants. "Now, another thing, the crotch, down where your nuts hang, it's always where I can let it out there, because they cut me. They're just like riding a pondering; click for an audio excerpt.) Yet it floats up from the sea of reputed to be one of the most persuasive politicians of the age. The private and remember how it sounded when I was a kid growing up in a forlorn little was the last of the really big hicks. Yet, as you eavesdrop on him in Wizard, you find not a giant but a fearful and uncertain man with a very big president sounds like a tyrant one moment, a confused child the next. "Don't horse. "I want to know where I can reach you on a minute's notice." Then his to let the War on Poverty go too far, and to keep it out of the hands of students who were about to drop out, and put them to work picking rocks off highways or sweeping the floors of government buildings. "Now I never heard of tell how baffled he is by the enormity of what he had earlier promised the had agreed to follow the law and desegregate schools; but he doesn't really because he was worried about whether Communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement. On this particular day, he just sounds tired, all worn out. suitors (click to listen in on the courtship). "Did you have a good day?" her he has been on his new ski boat all day and has become a little sunburned. "You'll look marvelous with a sunburn," she tells him, sounding all airy and breathless. It is a mesmerizing moment, one that shattered my childhood Office and told him face to face that he didn't want him as a running mate. In tells him. "I have said that I highly regard you and that you have a bright future, and that the things about our relationship were without foundation. You know New York better than I do. It might be desirable for me to say nothing." was a man who whispered terrible, dark things about himself under his don't think a white Southerner is the man to unite this nation in this hour," union people." He worried that he might be going crazy, and fretted over physically and mentally carry the responsibilities of the bomb, and the world, tearfully. "They think I want great power. What I want is great solace and a little love, that's all I want." He presses down hard on the word "love," too moment, then throws them to the floor with a shriek. She goes to the bar, puts three ice cubes in a glass, pours a drink, lights a cigarette. She walks to the window and pulls back the drawn curtain to peek out. The door opens, and let me leave. There were eight of them. The only call they let me make was to off with this scandal, you're mistaken. I made this thing. I wiggled my buns for a year to get those pizzas into the Oval, and she thinks she can waltz seen how many times they've played that clip today? I told you we'd strung them those presidential trinkets when he comes back from trips. turn to when Newt shuts down the government; the next, you're bucking him up perjury time [looks at his watch]. Why don't you refresh your kiddo? Those are the breaks. But a one hour special ain't bad for a kid who got door, humming "I Got the World on a String." He pauses to fix his bow tie in phone was used to solicit contributions. The phone rule asks not how much money was promised over the line. It asks what kind of phone was used in the solicitation. Was a cellular phone used? That's kosher. Car made headlines, the Republicans delivered a $50-billion tax break to the Don't expect congressional hearings on that giveaway while the Republicans have current phone obsession illustrates our declining standard of behavior for improprieties. Then we started punishing them for the appearance of impropriety. Today, we'll tolerate almost any outrage as long as its perpetrators maintain the appearance of propriety. Genuine propriety would still be nicer. But in its absence, we settle for politicians who abide by the rules (like the phones rules), which are devised to cloak impropriety in Most scholars and the Congressional Research Service to the president and vice president. What's more, the act, which was passed envision phones. The legislation was designed to keep elected officials from using the majesty of their surroundings to shake down visitors or employees. Today's potential donor doesn't know if a politician is calling from the House and Senate have spelled out very specific rules for members to excess of zeal in using the right phones at the right time lets members of Congress pretend they're cleaning up the system without actually stemming the Building, on the second floor of the annex to the offices of the Republican dividers of the type you see separating the operators who take your call for up a sweat dialing as many donors as they can. Like most of us, they rarely call, but usually by that time the importuning politician is back in his Capitol office. Does he put up his feet and take the call from Moneybags when Moneybags is ready to talk? Or does he race down the stairs and cross the street to his padded cell and call his benefactor back? You be the judge. the House investigation into finance abuses, had to equivocate when asked two candidate's best friend) bragged in an interview about raising money from his office using a credit card. When challenged on the legality of that, he pointed out correctly that the Justice Department had never prosecuted anyone under the law, so the Ethics Committee stood down. There were calls to hold an inquiry at so many other senators were probably guilty of the same thing. A former staff keep his parents from overhearing his conversation. A consultant to Sen. Don witnessed Nickles taking calls from potential donors in his office. Sen. Bob Smith, considering running for the Republican nomination for president, left may have agreed that calls should be made from an annex, but the executive branch never did. In the immortal words of Vice President Al Gore, there is no controlling legal authority that says elected officials can't make calls from federal property. Putting aside the fact that both he and the president live on federal property, the Congressional Research Service and a host of other legal scholars said that the law does not apply to phoning from either office. Of course, officeholders shouldn't dial for dollars from their official digs. Not because dialing is evil, but because they shouldn't be hustling money at all. As long as members of Congress continue to divert attention from the fact that money flows in at the same rate that favors flow China is vital: It exposes that country's executives and entrepreneurs to the democratic civilizations of the industrial West. It also instructs them about power resides in the bloody hands of a narrow oligarchy and a broader party of "engage" China so that its government has a stake in the good opinion of the lieutenants a powerful boost. Prosperity from trade would strengthen the regime and delay democratization. The best way to nurture civil society and dissent in president is eager for "engagement" with China and happy to sign the by confrontation with the United States) have brought us to this point, where agreements they have signed, and to authorize sanctions against countries that break the trade rules they had agreed on. It keeps other countries from breaking trade commitments that benefit the United States in exchange for keeping the United States from breaking trade commitments that benefit those of trade sanction and retaliation. If we in the United States are the good guys visas to executives of companies that use buildings or equipment seized by sanctions against the United States. This is exactly the kind of messy dispute Now this is a strange position for the president to take. its first big case, all will observe that its rules are only binding when the And a chance to remove trade disputes from the cycle of unilateral sanction and subsequent retaliation would be lost as well. If the administration "wins" the other two being the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) they had It's not that he has changed his mind and is now pursuing a general policy of China's economy is more vulnerable to coordinated sanctions that would cut off its exports to industrial countries than ever before, yet it seems less open to democracy than ever before. China's leaders have drawn conclusions from the collapse of the Soviet Union: that if they allow dissent or take steps toward democracy, they will be dead or jailed in a decade; and that no amount of economic benefit is worth the destruction of their regime. If increasing China has flunked. Yet, sanctions against China are not in the cards. if the White House thinks that the end of every story is a signing ceremony on the White House lawn: that the sole point is to sign documents and then distribute the pens as party favors. But useful, functioning institutions are anthropologist. As we rounded a turn, a pair of big metal gates appeared before us. Behind them, set on the crest of a hill, was a large white house in the for a moment that they were a brass band, but they turned out to be the valet again. The front door was opened by yet more valets, and we were bidden she was wearing high heels, velvet trousers, and a black cardigan that my escort helpfully described as a "peekaboo top." As I struggled manfully to avoid staring at her cleavage, she explained that the house had been built four years ago, and that she had redecorated it throughout. didn't say, understandably, was that the house had been built for her husband's here, where the locals are used to ups and downs of a personal and business suitably named Phoenix Pictures, he is once more making films, including one has a new wife who, while she might not have his ex's political clout, has just leather jacket. I was thinking what a good job he was doing of playing up to his image as a brooding misfit when a bathroom door opened next to him and a fatherly nothings into his daughter's ear, and carried her upstairs. Moving further into the house, I felt the same sense of surprise that I always feel in the presence of movie celebrities: surprise that angular and geeky, looking like he had just stepped out of that helicopter in asked, casually, as if I had known him all my life. airy rooms and white walls covered with modern art. On virtually every surface roughly the size of a baseball diamond, and it seemed to overlook the whole of myself next to two nondescript youths who were chugging down a couple of interrupted by a loud cry from inside the house. When I got there, I found somebody ran down the stairs on their hands in my house," she shrieked, clearly realized that a lot of people in the house were foreigners. My date explained that this is always the case at awards parties these days. She said the academy have never heard of a lot of these foreign movies, so there is an event appeals to people so much," he told me. "I really don't know." I asked Hicks repeating the experiences of other young foreign directors who have tried it, leave," Hicks said. For now, he added, he was "determined to enjoy the hear that slur. I asked him how much money it took to produce Secrets and By this stage, the belle of the ball had finally arrived: appeared to have changed shape, her blond hair was curled, and she was wearing a beautiful white maxi with a flowered pattern on it. I vaguely recalled something about her appearing in Vogue recently, but this was less a of the evening is something of a blur to me. At some point, my date appeared and said it was time to go. It was almost midnight, which is considered late in although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si. an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house "Petty Cash Junction." sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know. facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called "scouting." It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house. prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? "So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of "hundreds of thousands of with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who female rump in tight velvet pants, shifting around slightly somewhere north of jacket a charcoal that certainly qualified as the same. I had absorbed the eyes from the behind ahead of me.) I had balanced my budget following the reading Harry Shearer. The Gist of my Spin was that I was above The Fray. My gear and a bold display of Timberland boots, I had been distracted by a drab blot to the right of the aisle. There stood a table covered with stacks of folded men's slacks, uninspiring in color, dubious in cut. I slowed to browse: hallmark of criminal regimes and successful ad campaigns everywhere ("Coke is stack of gabardines would have made a fine cover for a motel love seat, but they seemed out of place on my person. And then there was the rack of bottoms when the label in the waistband reveals that "Microfiber" is another way of was assuming? What if it wasn't cool at all? For all I knew, "Slate" was know their way around a search engine but, what with the wife and the child with one of the recurring nightmares of bourgeois life. I was caught in one of those waking dreams in which you understand full well that your individual tastes, carefully nurtured and developed over the decades, have in fact been anticipated, designed, and shaped by others every step of the way. My search for Slates, apparently an act of free will, was but a pawn's move in the great Slate mind pierces the false consciousness of late capitalism. Your vaunted individuality is exposed as nothing but a pixel in the big picture of the money Bitterly, I toted three pairs of Slates to the dressing room, vowing never again to subscribe to an online magazine, even one that doesn't charge. There in the privacy of the changing room I understood that the subtext. While much of men's and women's clothing is designed to send out a complex code of sexual and social signals, Slates, true to their name, are blank. You mean you want to slip into something that might attract the attention and admiration of a fellow mammal? These are not those concession that Slates make to male vanity is pleats. Now, I like pleats, and I was consoled briefly in the changing room by the thought that this subtlest of fashion statements was all that a Slate guy needed. I tried on the gray ask the salesman if he thought the pleats were pulling too much. He was amused playful questions. Instead I turned right, toward the men's department, still admit that Slates, although perhaps overpriced and ugly, were not altogether inappropriate for a guy like me. My pleats do pull. My prosperous ass is salesgirl in the men's department and inquired if she had any Slates. that caramel treat into my mouth and looked into her pretty eyes. Such exquisitely miniaturized and stylized sexual situations (it occurred to me) The salesgirl directed me (still sucking gratefully on her were brighter, the music a wee bit louder, and the tease of pleasurable consumption a bit less subtle and a bit more fetishistic, though no less girl and a pink girl and a brown girl crowding around the eyeliner counter, avidly seeking their "one true color" amid the promiscuous riot of magenta, indulgence, I went to the men's department and found another salesclerk. She had a mustache, the cultural significance of which completely confounded the But no Slates. Maybe you should look down there." She helpfully pointed to a was again, an island of Slates, dull as dirt but not as cheap: two pairs for could get close to me, and headed toward the changing room. mirror, I realized that in these pants, I would never again be fearful of that other nightmare of bourgeois life, the moment in which you sense that your advertising industry all give you license to slough off your work ethic, relax your discipline, and lower your guard. The Slate man knows the cultural contradictions of capitalism. He lives them, wears them, and so is proofed I would do none of those things, and I would be no less delighted and content be that big, I thought, picking up the pants. (Thus the man of Slate corrects the error of his ways.) I tried them on. Tucked in a wee bit at the waist, they God exists? A miraculous recovery from a fatal illness? Or would that prove only the astonishing resilience of the body? An atheist friend struck by lightning? Could be mere coincidence. But how about scientific the Bible prophesies events that occurred thousands of years after it was conducted a computer experiment to test the existence of "Torah events. When the statisticians crunched their data, they reached an astonishing conclusion: The hidden messages exist, and their presence "is not due to published their paper. Now, three years later, the results still stand, and has undermined our notion of free will. Either the experiment is flawed, or Back when the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology were one great intellectual hodgepodge, proving the existence of God was a relatively commonplace exercise. To the modern mind, however, science and spout drivel about "creation science," most of us now scoff at the notion of Social Security number to the names of all the people you've ever slept with, as well as what you ate for breakfast the next morning. contains encrypted messages dates to the medieval practitioners of the in Exodus, and you'll find it again. (This ELS doesn't appear, however, in the counting out ciphers, then trying to puzzle out the significance of the regard the codes as a kind of parlor trick that is irrelevant to the essence of there are real codes embedded in the Torah. They programmed computers to scour rabbis on the list were all born long after Genesis was written, so no human author could have deliberately encoded them into the text. Moreover, the rabbis were chosen according to an arbitrary criterion, so the scientists were not looking for names they already knew to be present. As a control, the authors performed exactly the same experiment on a few scrambled versions of Genesis, If the phenomenon were due to chance, the authors reasoned, they would be as likely to find an ELS naming Rabbi X near one identifying the birthday of Rabbi Y as they would be to find Rabbi X near his own birthday. And, indeed, this is what they found in the control texts. But it wasn't true generally appeared closer to their own dates than to the dates of other rabbis. When the scientists analyzed their data, they found a 1-in-50,000 possibility that such a coding scheme could have occurred as a result of chance. surprisingly little public attention, considering its potentially mammoth significance. The Associated Press ran a wire story and the magazine Bible Review published a longer piece, and that was about it for media coverage. But the paper did not escape the attention of the faithful. The Internet is frothing with missionaries bent on using the codes to woo unbelievers. One evidence the Bible is God's word." Another site claims, somewhat more gently, According to Mechanic, the codes cannot be read as any sort of window on the Torah's inner meaning: "They have nothing to do with the religion, nothing to do with spirituality. All they can do is validate the hypothesis that the Acquaintances of mine have become Orthodox because of the codes. I also know of one man who waited until Statistical Science agreed to publish the suggests that the authors may have subconsciously biased their results by selectively reporting their findings. "Every statistician I know has reacted that the most likely explanation is that some kind of selection or 'tuning' of the method did take place, though the authors may not be conscious of it," he Genesis does not appear to exist in the other four books of the Torah. He also identifies a number of highly technical problems with the experiment that, he not yet undergone the rigorous peer review that the original paper withstood. Still, his report raises potent questions about the Torah codes methodology, questions even Rips acknowledges to be "serious." But Rips appears eager to critique and agreed that "more prosaic explanations" needed to be examined before the Torah codes phenomenon could be ascribed to God. shakes out, the Torah codes paper seems fundamentally unlike any previous attempt to use science to prove a metaphysical point. No similar claim has ever withstood scientific examination as robustly as the Torah codes have. doubt remains, a floating question mark: What if God did write the Torah? Then His administration would have collapsed under the relentless reporting of his has become a journalistic truism that the club has been disbanded, that today history, reckless philandering in the White House would be a story." that has engulfed the administration, right? Yet something nags about the story been slaked but simply changed venue? During this time the press has surely had so desperate for evidence that for a time he was duped by forged documents past have thrust themselves upon the media, journalists have needed a different justification for turning them aside other than the 1960s doctrine that it was none of the public's business. That justification was the widely held infidelities, however obliquely, and that by electing him twice the public had shenanigans as long as they didn't continue in the White House. Let's call it had voted on it." It's debatable, however, how fully the public was informed of information." One reporter I spoke to who covered the race said he came to Spectator published similar versions of the story almost simultaneously. There was a small flurry of attention among the networks, but according to the financier to create a fund for the troopers before publication, in case they just a few dozen national reporters could define what is news, and they were Today, unfortunately, the rationalists have lost the power to set standards of the troopers escort a woman to the basement of the governor's mansion to meet responded that "there was no improper relationship." Another woman confronted plenty of media attention, her story was widely dismissed as irrelevant under couldn't pin down was whether the advance was welcome or not. Among media the only person who took the account seriously was the president himself. followed such public disclosure." In other words, the careless only stay lucky Why You Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Market very large excess returns over bonds? Or, to put it another way, were investors whining during the recent downswing about the exact reason they get such possibilities are raised by an article in the latest Journal of Economic The article, titled "The Equity Premium Puzzle," asks a time, the excess return of stocks over bonds yields staggering differences in fraction of one percentage point. This period included many start points when pundits opined about the excessively high price of stocks. Another example that market was considered too high and too speculative), and held them until the is the premium in the form of a lower rate of return that investors are willing to pay to own bonds or notes rather than stocks, supposedly because stocks are (as have other academics whom they cite) that the risk premium over the past two centuries has been almost insanely high. In fact, even for any 20-year give up to own bonds or bills with definite coupons and payment on maturity. Or, to put it another way, looked at from the perspective of time, stocks are simply nowhere near as risky as their rate of return compared with bonds would seem to indicate, at least so far in finance history. The authors find, moreover, that this is a worldwide phenomenon. Even in nations where stock exchanges disappeared or were curtailed stocks exceeded returns to bonds over long periods. fluctuations do not appear to compel as large a risk premium as exists, unless second question is even more beguiling. Why should there be any risk premium at bonds and buy stocks to the point that bond prices are so low and stock prices so high that the returns on bonds over time approximate the return on most investors to get wise to the fact that the equity premium is just too damned high? They assure the readers that they, like most economists and finance people, have their retirement savings in stocks. They say they know turbulence. (Indeed, they point out, over 20-year periods, bond returns adds a major point. If all (or most) holdings were for only a year, one could risk premium. But if the composition of the market has changed considerably, so prices, and lower the equity premium? Especially now, when any investor can thus get the exact return of the market as a whole. it puts the market's recent, quickly overturned correction in quite a different returns. If we didn't have this kind of upsetting move occasionally, we would not get the risk premium at all, because then everyone would only want to hold stocks. Maybe we should stop worrying and learn to love this roller coaster, of weeks ago, observers may have been surprised by reports that I had been were operating on the same wavelength. They were quoting from the Bible, while I was beginning to think seriously about the need to save my immortal soul. felt so inclined, I might well attack what I saw. His reply: "You would have over the last few days, my boast of independence was an empty one. It's very hard, in practice, to take money as a compensation consultant and then be openly critical of the outcome without either violating confidentiality or underscores my original notion that if you want to be a corporate critic, you shouldn't get involved in corporate decisions, no matter how flattering the my criticism of executive pay is centered around the fact that there is no real its members well versed in the arcana of executive compensation, but I was along for the ride to point out the shortcuts and pitfalls. Second, you had an that the deal almost collapsed several times (and, in light of more recent deal was reached. And, in fact, there was virtually no criticism at the time. suggesting that the investment community was well pleased that a person almost executives negotiating from outside the company they are considering joining usually have a great deal of leverage. After all, the company wants them badly. Companies use a variety of goodies to lure a senior executive from the outside. Often, they will give the executive a large of company stock. In still other cases, the company might guarantee that the executive will receive big bonuses in future years, poor profits deal, however, contained none of these goodies. They seemed too expensive. For happening was deemed to be exceedingly low. After all, if you think the person in the cold. That brought to life those sleeper in his contract. precisely nothing in the way of severance. Only if he were fired would the which cost a lot of money, and some of which have the capacity to turn out severance packages are the dirty little secret of executive compensation, not unparalleled severance package (assuming it is paid in full) has done is to shine a huge spotlight on that dirty little secret. Perhaps now, boards of directors will toughen up: If you get fired, they'll tell their top executives, you get two weeks' pay, or whatever else it is that we give to ordinary workers join the company. And then the board might have had to entice him by offering a for coming to the company. That's something positive. But a huge severance package is for failing. And that's incomprehensible." I couldn't have put it "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," and the media, online and off, have accepted that claim uncritically. "The toast of cyberspace" is the Economist 's Any other book must be obtained from a wholesale distributor or the publisher. This is exactly what any traditional bookstore does when it doesn't have a book in stock. The difference is that traditional bookstores start out with a lot How does Amazon get the books it doesn't have in its in certain cases, it has even called the authors. And how do less advanced booksellers do it? At Politics and Prose, a small local bookstore in northwest shop at Amazon? Cast gives four reasons: "One, we have a lower price. Two, we have a better selection. Three, we're probably much faster. And we're definitely more convenient." We conducted an experiment to test these claims. The other was an obscure psychology text even Borders wouldn't carry, chosen from the catalog of the State University of New York Press, called The Ego We've covered that. If you define "inventory" as any book a store can computer. At a conventional bookstore, you can pick up and leaf through actual phone on the first ring. She was chatty, but professional. The store had "many, "right away, tomorrow morning at the very, very latest." When asked about the to order it. Estimated time of arrival: four weeks. She took a name, address, lowbrow taste, but quickly said he'd send it the next day. The second book." When pressed, he said it could be ordered, but would probably take two weeks. Borders' system is that when the book arrives, you are sent a postcard asking you to come to the store and pick it up. Can't they just send the book? "We prefer people do it this way," Drew said, but then he gave in and agreed to After calling the stores, we connected to Amazon using unenlightening amateur commentaries from other Amazon users. The psychology text, not surprisingly, was listed with no description and no commentaries. Amazon said it would take one to two weeks to order. "Finalizing Your Order Is Easy." Nothing could be further from the truth. Lower down in the verbiage, Amazon concedes, "Though we have tried hard to make this form easy to use, we know that it can be quite confusing the first time." Amazon users have to page through screen after screen of details about shipping charges, refund rules, and disclaimers about availability and pricing. Then you are told to allow between three and seven days for delivery after your book leaves Amazon's warehouse. "Upgrading to Next Day Air does NOT [their emphasis] online time from when we accessed Amazon's home page to when we completed the days from both Borders and Politics and Prose, in plenty of time before until Dec. 27--more than a week after the conventional stores. Furthermore, the wrapping looked as if it had been done by a fourth grader. However, it came bundled with the obscure psych book (which still hadn't arrived from the conventional stores as of New Year's Day). Eleven days for that one is pretty books. Finally, stores with local outlets must charge sales tax on shipped sent separately, the psych text would cost more at Amazon than at the other There is a third category of books (besides those that everyone has in stock and those that no one has in stock). These are books that greatest weakness. It includes hardly obscure current books that aren't best Women's Heath Book Collective. Borders' had three copies on the premises. Amazon needs two to three days to obtain this one, plus between three and seven days to send it to you. Likewise for a classic like the Penguin paperback of At Amazon it is listed as a "special order," which means it might be available to be shipped in four to six weeks, but, our computer informs us: "PLEASE NOTE that it might not be available at all. Publishers do not always notify the book community about changes in the availability of their titles." Not makes it "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" in even a metaphorical sense. adult and juvenile criminals than me. No one has written more over the years the search for rational, workable crime policies, it's time to admit that the parole, sharply curtailing probation, imprisoning every adult felon for his or her entire term, and warehousing juvenile offenders in adult jails. The prudent response, however, is not to abolish probation and parole, but to reinvent let's get crystal clear on the grim facts about crime, prisons, probation, and parole. Be giddy about recent drops in national crime rates if you wish, but results in anyone getting caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Most felony defendants are repeat offenders; yet, most felony defendants are reasonable doubt what every veteran policeman knows: Most prisoners are offenders. Yet, most of these hardened criminals are still paroled well before they have served out their latest sentence behind bars. On any given day in their violent and repeat criminal histories) from those who remain in prison. dozens of careful studies document that probation and parole are, to put it mildly, failing to protect the public. Nearly half of all state prisoners in formally "under supervision" in the community, their "violations" included more cities, for example, most cases involving violent older teen thugs who get referred to adult court result in probation. Kids plea bargain, too. systems so poor, and what, realistically, can be done to improve that we spend next to nothing on the systems, and get about what we pay for. victim restitution, or meet other requirements. But about half do not comply with the terms of their probation. Probation sanctions, he concludes, "are not could they be properly supervised by overworked, underpaid probation officers oversight. If "probationers are growing in number and are increasingly more serious offenders," she advises, "then they are in need of more supervision, not less. But less is exactly what they have been getting over the past probation caseload of serious and violent juvenile cases has increased rapidly. In a national survey, probation officers admitted that their average urban reinvent probation, we will need to reinvest in it. More money, more agents, and closer supervision are just the first phase. Equally important is the type officers with local police officers. Patrolling the streets together, they have clergy on a wide range of crime control and prevention initiatives. where the juveniles committed their crimes hear the cases, set terms, and monitor compliance. Run for the district attorney's office by veteran probation costs little to administer, and holds kids (including hundreds of juvenile that it separates the minnows from the sharks, then holds the minnows accountable and hence less likely to become sharks, let alone become the two major and highly successful programs in New Jersey. One is the state's Enforcement Court, which goes after people who remain on probation because they failed to pay fines and restitution, collects the money, restores the trust of crime victims, and brings literally millions of dollars into state coffers that can be used to beef up other justice programs. The other is the Sheriffs Labor cleaning up parks, painting public buildings, helping out in nursing homes, and Admittedly, parole is a tougher reinvention nut to crack. In the late 1980s, I recidivism nor costs. So for the last several years I have argued in favor of some types of "three strikes and you're out" laws. And I continue to strongly encountered to date comes from Martin Horn, formerly head of New York State's argues, in most cases there is relatively little that parole agents can do to keep an offender who is determined to commit new crimes from committing them. The flip side is that parolees who want to go straight often can make it if they are literate, civil, and can stay off drugs, remain sober, and get a job. But parole agents often waste time chasing the bad guys rather than helping the good. And in many states, the laws perversely limit a parole agent's the parole of guys who failed a drug test but who were not, in the agent's best judgment, doing anything more than getting high. As one agent confided: "A up dirty, and I have to send him back inside. But a real predator I know is using, selling, and almost certainly doing other crimes. He stays on the reinvent parole on the basis of a "personal responsibility" model. A released prisoner would be given the equivalent of a parole services voucher. For a providers. If he wants to help himself, he can. If not, he's on his own. Do a serious efforts to reinvent probation and parole, and time to debate fresh ideas. After all, we are not going to put every convicted adult and juvenile $10-million pledge, "because it feels strongly that there never has been a greater need for management education based on values and ethics." The gift $2-million scholarship fund that will assist minorities and students attending a Spirituality of Management seminar at the university. the United States. "The donor required us to sign an agreement on the part of the hospital to keep the donor's identity anonymous," she said. "But it's fair to say the money came from someone who identified with our values and unrestricted but must be matched by other donors over the next three to five stipulations to the gift. First: The school must stick to its goal of providing the donor has required the university to seek additional donations to match the to invite additional donations to the capital campaign. "Thus we intend to gift is unusual not only in its size but also in its purpose, which is to fund college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church of the United States. science. The pledge is the largest single gift in the college's history. The to make the pledge primarily on the quality of leadership now at the college. "We are deeply humbled by the generosity of these wonderful people," said his house at one of the local girls' schools (Cathedral i think) recently. To the surprise of the buyers, present at the small gathering was no other than matched only by her understanding of the historical tensions underlying the her, she apologized for her slightly glazed eyes, having spent the last hands, she has decided to read Homer in the original. She also said she was at artist of far more restraint and maturity than one might expect of someone her since she suffers, of course, from dyslexia (hence her failure on the writing that I saw an application of hers for a job here at MS. She was applying for a stop picking on this sweet young woman. You're all being sexist. If a man had venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a of scandal wafting through the corridors of the White House will not for a single moment distract them from fulsome support for the commander in chief as leadership (unsurprising from a chicken who dodged the draft). And if he boys' lives (unsurprising from a guy who let others die for him in Of course, the Republicans hasten to make it clear that That could make for really lousy television. Having echoed the recommendations leaders beat a rhetorical retreat at the end of last week. He still wouldn't "The United States," he wrote, "should encourage, recognize, help finance, arm and protect with air power a new provisional government broadly representative airstrikes that "number in the thousands, not hundreds" and lasting over "weeks, not days." I wonder what the pope would say about that. after all, immortal. And the administration has made clear that it's not above bombing a palace or two no matter who's inside. And this time, it says, its likely, though, the limited warfare proposed by the administration will come to suffering of his people, except to display their torn bodies on television as wonder why no one thought of it before. Perhaps they didn't, because they had decided to protect themselves from their "sly and treacherous" enemy, the cat, fabulist, "met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: 'That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?' The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: 'It is easy to propose impossible ain't what it should be. Too often it coughs up the long newspaper story that the average intelligent reader, having read it carefully, puts down and says, detail that's barely placed within a conceptual framework. The story tracks the wheeling and dealing of Peter Knight, an influential corporate lobbyist who used to work for Al Gore and is now a executive, coincidentally or not, was a large donor to various Gore causes. newspaper approach, with the nub of the story on top and an expanding base of in which time and space loop around and tie each other in knots. The piece is a surprise coming from someone who has produced many readable scoops. a dinner for contributors at the vice president's mansion. Now government investigators are looking into this. Into what, exactly? In the eighth paragraph we learn that this is "a stark picture of how business and politics often overlap, demonstrating the advantage of having friends in high places." Anyone previously unaware that business and politics "overlap" (whatever that means) and that it's good to have friends in high places has now had that cleared up. But without any more guidance about why readers who weren't born Two days later, the Department of Energy boosted an existing contract with the rewarded with another significant item: On the day the company's expanded DOE for both the Gore campaign and the university chair. At that time, a DOE official involved in the contract was a former Gore staffer. Believe me, you now have a better grasp of this story than also have maybe half an hour of your life back. What you don't have is traditional journalistic concept (like pyramid style) is that the news ought to Post 's Oct.17 story added little to a report posted two days earlier by expanded at the time the company and its chief were making large, in the movies, works this way: The intrepid reporter, through gumption and legwork, exposes the evildoer; then the government takes over to flesh out the case and administer punishment. These days, all too frequently, this chronology runs backward. Specifically, the government process predates the journalistic investigators. Many reporters, including me, make deals with congressional investigators to get material by promising not to reveal the source. Such deals are sometimes necessary to get a good story. But readers deserve to know that some of the big, important stories thrust in front of them are actually the long story on Peter Knight that disclosed Knight's connection to Molten, vice president is now the power axis for a circle of his friends and clients, the Democratic Party. In return, the vice president occasionally helps them. lays the groundwork for his anticipated presidential bid four years from now, my confessions, O Lord. They are a sacrifice offered by my tongue, for Yours was the hand that formed it and Yours was the spirit that stirred it to confess question the veracity of my reporting until my most recent confession, in which I write on my "pangs of doubt: Is it possible [the troopers] took me for a ride, embellishing their account for fame and fortune?" Now I realize my newest confession (on newsstands now!) apologize for my apology. The White House issued a statement this week saying him to embark on sexual adventures? I must also apologize for all that nasty much do they want?" I quoted him as saying. This was the same man whom I had bleak conservative landscape." That was while I was still on his payroll. Now the Four Seasons Hotel several years ago, he tried to help me by passing along some sex allegations that the Post wouldn't print. He had every reason too. And I didn't even pick up the check! Sorry about that. The Seduction played no role in your departure from The Free Press. And investigative journalism, yet I did not share the wealth with other conservative publications like the National Review and the Weekly say they'd been martyred at a campus once renowned for its leftism? They were denied my entree into the world of conservative journalism. And what of the kid unborn children will never appear on the Today show. introspection, I realize that all of creation would have been better off if I others in ways of which they are hardly aware. But what of the lives of humility, generally considered a crucial component of any sincere apologia. I like to apologize to the sperm that were unfairly defeated in the race to slides out the top drawer. There they are: six human skulls. Keepsakes from the war that refuses to go away quietly. A cardboard divider, no different from what's normally used to ship grapefruit, keeps the skulls from banging together among those who added their names, as if they were giddy college teammates autographing a football after a big homecoming win. home, apparently oblivious to the fact that body parts aren't considered Three of the four remaining skulls (one belonging to a woman, all believed to decorative treatment." For example, the eye cavities of skull No. back to the Civil War. Thus, visitors can find on display a swatch of diseased colon removed from a Union soldier plagued by terminal diarrhea, and pieces of several times, but learned about the skulls only recently from a friend. They franchise, why not give 'em back? For the sake of symbolic closure. For sappy sentimental reasons. By rights, it seems to me, a person's head ought to rest in peace, if not near his or her body, then at least on the same continent. proud, history. In the latter category, the practice probably reached its nadir rare museum piece: a perfectly preserved head no larger than a tennis ball. heads of those who crossed the throne were regularly stuck on pikes and mounted moved on to bigger things in World War II. The archives of the College of Japan as trophies to be displayed. This number was exceeded by another officer soldiers indulged in noggin nabbing. Marines amassed piles of heads during the head is known to be "above ground," as they say in the business. Napoleon's sounds," he says, "they would even be a good investment" (though not as good as showing the Angel of Death that they're not afraid," he explains. Desecration of the dead serves the dual purpose of steeling one's own courage and intimidating the enemy. But, the collector adds, "There is a difference inside the National Museum of Health and Medicine holding the bright blue as I know, they've never been offered," he replies. "We can't say for sure It's not part of the culture. It's a different way of viewing death." She's right, of course. But forensic specialists are for better or worse, a creature of Western sensibilities, in which crude lines are customarily drawn between the murderous imperatives of battle and the in the annual rituals of war and remembrance, when flags bloom like are they employing these days to stave off the Angel of Death? about six lives and six ignominious ends. Something tells me those hapless This explains the growing interest in Internet voting, which promises to do for convenient, say its supporters, click 'n' pick elections could theoretically eliminate fraud, allow instant recounts, and save pots of money. by these hopes, election boards across the country have begun to take tentative Democracy is collecting digital petitions for a ballot initiative that would a pilot project run by the Department of Defense's Federal Voting Assistance abolished polling places entirely and now conducts elections exclusively by too. While online elections would use fancier technology, they're based on the voting by computer for years. Most polling places use one of three voters start using Internet terminals at polling places, it's a short step to for this to happen, software makers will have to devise voting systems that are demonstrably secure. All of those currently being developed employ digital that identifies a document's origin and verifies that it hasn't been altered while being transmitted (click here for a primer). Banks and insurance companies already use digital signatures to transfer large sums of money online. how it might work: A few weeks before the election, you visit your county's Web site and print out a form declaring that you'd like to vote online. You sign it authorities verify that your signature matches the one on your original registration form at the county courthouse and also record the digital identity of the computer from which you've downloaded the form. You're then sent a PIN that will work only from that computer. On Election Day, you log onto the site transmission. When it arrives, a central computer records both that your ballot was cast and the contents of the ballot, but in two separate places. Keeping this information separate means that election officials can verify that you voted without seeing how you voted. Another copy of the data is burned into a individual level, the system is about as secure as an absentee ballot. Just as you could sign an absentee ballot but let someone else fill it out, there's to stop someone else from forcing you to turn yours over. But an interloper would have to obtain thousands of PINs and computers to influence any election. And one day online voting may be far more secure than absentee voting. Software Election officials are far more worried about mass cheating. Since regular polling places are scattered in thousands of locations around the country, a central server, hackers could flood it with activity or jam phone lines, preventing people from logging on to vote. Software makers say they'll address that problem by using multiple servers and telephone lines. But the Voting Integrity state that implements online voting may also have to contend with legal issues against blacks, prohibits several (mostly Southern) states and counties from making any change in voting procedures without federal approval. This clause applies to even minor changes that could reduce minority participation. Given could be seen as an infringement on voting rights. (For more on Internet use obstacle to online voting may be entrenched interests threatened by change. In candidate?' There's clearly a strain of people who hope for low turnout." "Even if racism were to disappear overnight, this would do nothing to improve black test scores, increase black entrepreneurship, strengthen black cultural existence of their own and need to be confronted in their own terms." "the unspoken domestic crisis of the next millennium": White criminals preying often prey on people of their own race, citing the Columbine High School are suffering disproportionately yet no white politicians want to talk about generation of kids is growing up in fear and the traditional white leadership Pepper's arguments, while controversial, are based on a mixture of sociological data and political calculation that even his critics do whites. And while crime has been decreasing, Pepper notes that it is falling the Columbine High shootings, all but one of them white," the genial, bearded academic said in a recent interview. "Liberals want to blame guns. Traditional conservatives blame a decline in moral standards, which is more on the mark. But guns and bad values don't kill white people. White people kill white wrote in a recent article for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. existence of its own. It must be confronted in its own terms. But virtually no one in the political class will admit it. That vacuum creates an opportunity sources on the campaign. While a Bush spokesman declined to comment, Pepper said that he and his colleague used the meetings to advance two ideas. people have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps," Pepper said. "Government is not the solution. For example, the idea of putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom is attractive but, in the long run, federally funded stone tablets will only breed dependency on the nanny state. government does have a limited role in addressing the problem. Maybe there should be block grants to the states that would enable them to give a tax break really deter the predators in the school corridors. At the same time it would "Talking candidly about white crime is a way to break that perception." in the Republican Party might be offended, the broader electorate would get the compassion," he said. "After all, the vast majority of white people aren't deranged gunmen. They are hard working and pay their taxes too. They're the Already some Republican strategists are objecting. The editors of the conservative journal Always Right wrote last week that sharing responsibility for getting at the root causes of what is really a listening to country music lyrics that mock the sanctity of marital vows. The intellectual elites who once defended standards have proved all too willing to staffer. Sophisticates will sneer but these things have an effect." Coefficient has triggered a fierce debate in academic circles. Writing for response to the Columbine tragedy would be for the federal government to fund a based explanation for the tendency of white males to slaughter strangers in the author's views, "while offensive to some, deserve the utmost in thoughtful discussion" and announced that the next nine issues of the publication would be think he goes too far with the notion that white people are biologically disposed toward crime and violence. I mean, some of my best friends are white columnists speak of themselves in the third person? There is an air of Bob company (the only kind to be in) follow the above suggestion, and speak as condo loft in a historic downtown area. The unit immediately below us has been thing: They are both heavy smokers and have managed in three months to smell up the rest of the building. Recently the ashtray smell has begun to permeate our allergic to cigarette smoke. Entreaties to the apartment's owner have gone nowhere. I am not an intolerant person, having grown up in New York City, where just as long as I can stay away from it. What can I do? I don't feel it's appropriate to try and dictate someone's behavior in their own apartment, but You do, indeed, have a problem. It sounds as though home, unless body parts are sailing by your window. the owner is unwilling to support you, you have limited options. Short of sympathetic, because she has marveled that cigar smokers can stink up the York state of mind: In apartments everywhere in the world, one man's ceiling is affects my ability to be honest. Really tired of the LEFT jokes, insults, yet another way to be politically incorrect. How's this for making amends? same thing recently. She just isn't attracted to nice guys but can't really eloquent and mature woman yourself, do you think you could explain "Immature Woman Syndrome" to me so that I can understand the many wonderful, but immature young women I know? Or, if you think it would be easier, you could just elope with me so that I wouldn't have to face the thankless but highly entertaining this is the numerous older women who picked guys who were nice and who idea that they can "fix" a guy or tame him. It gives them a feeling of power niece will spend a weekend with me. My problem is with how my sister treats sake.) Our mother certainly never treated us this way, and it makes cringe to think of what these comments might be doing to the girls. Can I say something can be a special strain, trust me. You don't say what your relationship is with you can tell her that you are aware of her short fuse with her adorable girls, you understand the many demands on her, and that there is help for the situation. Pass on the name of a group for parents like her: It is Parents Anonymous, and it helps stressed out parents who fear they might escalate from she's near one. Even the knowledge of such a group will reassure her that her problem is by no means unique to her family and that she's definitely not that harping at the older child about her weight is psychologically counterproductive. Suggest that she choose the household food with nutrition in children, however, can find ways of filching chocolate, etc., when they're out of the house.) You could also say, more importantly, that some unhappiness may be making the child cling to food. Good luck in your mission to help your Gore has an Internet problem. No, it's not that silly remark about him having invented it. Gore's real problem is that Net surfers apparently think his site no one searching the Web for information about Gore actually made their way to Gore's official Web site. By a large margin, Web surfers preferred going to a good news for Gore is that more Web surfers were looking for his name than bad news is that when the search results came up, there was no indication that Gore's name, according to a Direct Hit executive. Instead, Web surfers presented with a variety of options were more likely to visit a joke or parody president is much better known than his opponent, and so it makes sense that his campaign is focused on making Gore's site "as comprehensive and informative as it can be" and estimates that the site attracts several thousand unique Hit says that while it cannot detect the identity of individual Web users, it can track their movements with unprecedented precision. "We process the data consideration the amount of time that visitors spend on a given site. searching for Gore material are out of date and thinly visited. The Direct Hit found to be most visited (a common problem with search engines). Now course, the Direct Hit study doesn't mean that no one is going to the Gore their Web browsers. And it's possible (though statistically unlikely) that large numbers of Web surfers using search engines not measured by Direct Hit were flocking to the Gore site. Most important, with the first primaries still months away, the Gore campaign hasn't advertised much to bring newcomers to the Although Direct Hit has yet to produce a similar traffic study for the destination for those who've entered his name into a search engine. A friend recently pointed out that Keeping Tabs has beauty queen's murder has been anything less than scintillating. (A recent highlight was the National Enquirer 's astonishingly detailed painting of the poor child's lifeless body, bloodied garrote and all.) But following the it's been hard to find the proper moment to pause and reflect. The grand jury's recent failure to return any indictments in the case seems an appropriate juncture, although any hopes that the story might fade away were dashed by this magazine tried to make sure it would be on record as having outguessed the grand jury. (Although after nearly three years on the case, it's probably safe to assume that they've all accused the correct murderer at some point.) The Globe and the Enquirer forecast grand jury "bombshells" and the Globe 's report on Patsy's grooming habits: With her marriage spa, where, because she "is always concerned about her upper lip getting the profound ("I realized how much Patsy's frilly, feminine decorative taste clashed with that of the young college students") to the truly anguished ("I passed a spiral staircase on my right, shuddering as I realized these were the same stairs where Patsy claimed to have found the ransom note that fateful already zeroed in on the "real killer," claiming that the Boulder police had short of actually naming anyone, a teaser assured us that the following week although he accused them of lying and hiding information that would solve the crime. And what of the promised revelation? A breathless Keeping Tabs made it good company. In fact, we'd be hard pressed to find a celebrity marriage that didn't go under this month. Wandering eyes seem to be behind the lion's share woman on board his luxury sailboat for steamy lovemaking sessions while his "increasingly out of control partying," including "wild nights with strippers." The Enquirer confidently sums it all up in "one word: obsession." The Gores' marriage has apparently withstood the challenge, however; the Star claims that they are planning to have another child. (The couple shot.") But other problems seem to be looming for the vice president. The him down" and "impacted his thought processes": The avowed environmentalist is eating steak and recently approved a resumption of whaling. Perhaps the only celebrity divorce where stepping out was that even the tabloids had a hard time trying to instill with the slightest hint of dramatic tension. The Globe actually trumpeted: "Exposed! nuts" about him, even though she's seriously involved with musician John to check out the Globe 's computer simulation of what her ex might look like today without plastic surgery. Which leads us to the only real bombshell in this month's tabloids: The king of pop, it turns out, is actually an treatise on how the beauty industry thwarts female progress, with a bitter salvo against image consultants. As proof that women's employers value looks women to polish their professional appeal. Wolf ends the book with a call to reject "the insistence that a woman's appearance is her speech" and "political consultant herself. As Time reported earlier this week, Vice President Al Gore paid Wolf thousands of dollars a month for advice on presentation, from Post relayed that Wolf "has long contended that earth tones are more even stranger. She coached each to emphasize his manly strengths, relying on hoary, tired gender stereotypes. She reportedly told Gore that he is the "beta will not let anyone or anything touch the bedrock," Wolf wrote in one memo for institute's programs don't cover political, economic, or legal issues. Instead, the short retreats teach participants "how to be financially literate; how to elective office; how to write a book or magazine article proposal; how to mentor and be mentored; how to start a community organization; and how to be a instructions she's been giving to women for years. For Wolf has never been a wonk or an ideologue. While she's dabbled in journalism and teaching, she isn't really a reporter or an academic either. She began her career by being a how to succeed ever since. Wolf is a master cheerleader, and she acts like one: upbeat, entertaining, sweetly sexy, sharply aware of image, and endlessly Wolf's three books are breathless, hyperbolic tracts on Oxford, is an angry protest at how the cosmetics, plastic surgery, and magazine fear of aging, sexual unhappiness, rape, and eating disorders. But she doesn't suggest abandoning the visuals; she wants them to be more attainable and depend now on what we decide to see when we look in the mirror," she writes. No wonder she has spent so much time thinking about what color Al Gore's suits playing second fiddle, and use romantic archetypes to visualize the path to consciousness," she writes. Because "history moves in response to narratives, dream images, heroes, heroines, and myths," women need to think of themselves out of feminism and emerging with a vaguely uplifting, centrist message. If [feminism] addresses their concerns, or don't like images of it that they see," she announces. In order to accommodate them, the women's movement should wants to expand the size of the feminist tent, and she wants to do so by redefining its ideology as the simple pursuit of success for women. When the president's woman troubles started, Wolf hit the spin circuit. The between protesting sexual harassment and supporting the president they had elected. Wolf did both, by turning the issue into an object lesson on women's professional success. "The people who should be looking into these allegations circuit. "What is clear is that when there is a situation where a worker is copy machine, nights and weekends, trying to raise their kids and move up to Wolf sees the telling of her own personal experiences as a narrating her own sexual coming of age. "By telling my story and asking other women to tell theirs, I wanted to elucidate the emotional truths that emerge from a particular generation's erotic memory," she explains. She bills her as a spiritual person, she testifies that "it's taken me nine years to build up some expectation of being heard to a certain degree. It's been a long haul, and very much a gendered haul." This from a woman whose first book was a best television because I am a role model, and I am a role model because I am on television. And a great marketing strategy: Buy my books, because they're good political consultant. Who better to help a candidate extract weighty lessons from his personal history, to teach him to tell voters that their own successes depend on his own? At last, it seems, Wolf has found a forum where the personal However shaky its methodology, online polling is already a reality. Online voting, too, is being debated in a variety of communities. plans to hold a nationwide primary, designed to gauge the way women will vote portal for presidential politics," the site is a joint project between Good will be the culmination of several months of online surveys designed both to provide information about which political issues are important to women and to largely because of the 11-point gender split in his favor among women voters. "In the same year that women are poised to take over the Net, we'll also choose trend of powerful voting blocs using the Internet to flex their political a traditional Internet service provider, plus added facilities to make it easy for members to contact elected officials and corporations. Other efforts variety of subjects from consumer tastes to public affairs. That project uses course, the political impact of such Net initiatives has yet to be proved. But paid her dues politically and proved to be an asset in any position she has one of the instruments that can help give women the sense that their vote that a bomb might be placed aboard an airliner departing from either New York the paper asked. "It is a mystery within a mystery." in the same stretch of sky and sea seems to have been beating its wings and to prosaically that the flight paths up the East Coast of the United States are in fact neither "bewitched nor cursed, but simply the busiest in the world." that "the parties have yet to deal with the heart of the conflict." an important reminder of decisions yet to be made, without which the summit will remain only a ceremony, without any of the requisite diplomatic content to future. "With the kind of wise and democratic leadership that now exists in expressing the hope that it might eventually lead to the Association of South may be the very irrelevance of royalty which has helped protect us from percent that it should keep the queen as its head of state. The Guardian campaigners, who have been running slightly behind the monarchists in the so helpless before a natural disaster?" it asked. "Our achievements are obviously world class in many spheres, science and technology and computers being among them. We have the almighty nuclear bomb and, yet, we despair when it comes to floods, droughts, cyclones and communicable diseases, many of them seem to be affected by the same disregard for the smaller details, which, for all their apparent insignificance, matter the most in the end." "the biggest upset in the history of the Rugby World Cup." The Independent called it finishes, here was the most unexpected of victories for the most enchanting of underdogs over the most intimidating of favorites. And what, now, will they do people believe again, feel free again." Who's pitching what? Many respondents conflated feeling free and feeling eloquent and moving, "I Have a Dream" speech, which would have been much less effective had he concluded, "Fresh at last, fresh at last, thank God almighty, ridding the nation of an oppressive monarch, a view expressed in the ridding oneself of vaginal odor, a view expressed by a fashion model clad in white who has plucked every hair from her body and then painted in some as political expression: "We have nothing to fear but is there a funny smell Real Beef Aroma." Somebody stop me. Was it "Scents and Fiscal Sensibility"? mayor is particularly popular with those who've never lived where he not say is that one fourth of all New Yorkers live below the poverty line, a number that has not improved under this mayor, even after nine years of economic expansion. But maybe that will be on the bumper stickers. various New York City branches of the chain. Can you identify each book and that will give you the most comfortable shave ever" was much more rewarding than being president of the United States. last week that rejection of a republic in the referendum would provoke a political backlash against the country's monarchist prime minister, John a republic, the debate will continue. "But it will remain confused, bitter and divisive until another leader steps forward to bring the country together. of the referendum, in which the monarchy's supporters came mainly from government and generated "serious fears for its chances at the next election." the rugby World Cup championship trophy to the staunchly republican captain of referendum, believing the monarchy would prevail. But in an editorial, the that, eventually, a monarchy can exist as part of a democracy," it said. "Anyone who has spent a few years living in the United States has experienced at first hand what it is like to be in a TRULY free country. There is no us in an editorial that "democracy seems to like monarchy" and that the queen "is, more than ever, head of the antipodean state not by grace of God but thanks to a popular vote." The Independent sounded a similar note. "The tempering of the hereditary principle by democracy has produced a curious constitutional hereditary principle, but if it happens to coincide with the popular will, then inside pages to it. In its editorial, the FT praised the judge for his "sophisticated grasp of the workings of the computer industry" and said he had successfully demolished most of Bill Gates' arguments. Gates "must know that are no longer negligible," the paper said. "Though this would probably not be the best outcome, the judge's findings demonstrate that, if it were to happen, which assure the vitality and dynamism of the United States economy: the struggle against monopoly situations and respect for competition." The judge in effect told Gates, "You may represent the industry of the future, but you are no less a monopolist than those who came into being at the beginning of the It said Gates has made his fortune primarily through his own ingenuity and that successful firms and keep more complacent alternatives in business." The paper added, "The fundamental concern must be whether or not it is actually true that technologies, evidently considers that there is no difference between the good judges became convinced that the interests of the citizen "had been violated, waters after last week's cyclone disaster have revealed mounds of corpses in that "the corrosive tawdriness of political populism" was delaying relief efforts, with government and opposition politicians arguing about money and whether there should be a formal declaration of a national calamity. In the "astronomical" amounts it sent to Turkey following the earthquake there. snowballing into a major political threat to the Republican Party as their top candidate, who has raised millions of dollars, appears increasingly like a dumb duffer who cannot make out whether a 'military coup' is a good thing or close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be ambitious work is ignored while his gimmicky rivals thrive. When he reports for a drudge job as a file clerk, the office is between the seventh and eighth people walk stooped and make feeble jokes about the "low overhead." That low of the movie's comic astuteness, of its knack for devising sight gags with a cue, he discovers a passageway behind a file cabinet that whooshes him into the the New Jersey Turnpike. The poor sap can't keep his secret. He tells the girl, sums up the thrill for the rest of the characters. "Being inside did something videos, but the movie isn't a digitized bag of tricks like Fight hyping gags this outlandish would turn the picture into camp. He keeps the action slightly remote and the jokes deadpan, and the upshot is that the audience almost never stops giggling. The first hour and change has a magical becomes a transsexual (and transcendental) screwball comedy. The script has a protagonist would stumble on that portal, or what he'd find when he went is anybody's guess. Evidently quite the heterosexual, he still courts sexual ambiguity: He speaks in querulous tones and bats the most insolently feminine lashes this side of Bugs Bunny. Weird or not, though, he's a celebrity: He preening aloofness, and he has never been more emotionally exposed than when it loses his stature (and the audience's good will), and the climax has too many collective consciousness in a way I found creepy: Do they mean to be retelling (If so, the film is even darker than I think it is.) the movie, but not enough to wreck it: It's still an amazing piece of work. as a nerd? The actress retains her essential sweetness, but the transformation dazzling is Keener, an actress who has lately been stuck playing nice, sensible unwieldy piece of storytelling, but the story it has to tell is so vital that it cuts through all the dramaturgical muddiness. It's a terrific muckraking in a society where the mainstream media are also in the hands of corporations. revelations about how cigarette manufacturers manipulate the chemicals in their impact of a major lawsuit on its value. (Oddly unmentioned in the film is that by the agents who approached and exploited them. What gives this version its a segment that they knew to be true, the film implicitly asks, how much chance do others have of breaking stories about corporate wrongdoing? And what about news personnel with a financial stake in their companies? Even journalists and editors known for their integrity tend to look the other way at their own by temperament, he seems more vulnerable than a conventionally nice martyr. before the bullets start appearing in the family's mailbox and the death doesn't want to have this role, didn't ask for it, and has no support system to financially ruined, threatened with death, minus his wife and daughters; early. I admire their consideration for their subject, but in its wake come all kinds of narrative fuzziness. The movie isn't clear on where the secret report would have been otherwise. And in the "Where are they now?" titles at the end, Is there a less savory subgenre than the hardcore forensics thriller? A corpse is discovered in a grotesque state of mutilation, then the scene shifts to an autopsy room where skulls are popped off and innards held up for inspection. A short time later, detectives pore over glossies of fatal solves the puzzle fast enough, he has a shot at saving the latest manacled and clues to the next murder. Yummy yummy. One fact quickly becomes apparent: "The to a good pair of legs. As luck would have it, they're attached to a very good purring into her headphones and demanding to know what she sees. Better than phone sex! He says, "I want to know what you feel in the deepest recesses of above such adolescent spasms. Well, almost. She's a thoughtful actress, but she cinematographer, cook up some eerily muzzy images inside the brackish tunnels film is still a piece of exploitive schlock. A mediocre mystery, too: It never (does he mean to? Or does the hammy framing give it away by accident?), but mad, don't you?") The only aspect of The Bone Collector that can't available to him, he doesn't sleep through it either: Every muscle in this man's ruined body seems to strain against his fate while the wheels in his A study by the Department of Health and Human Services shows barely able to leave the couch, let alone the house, sedated by the television, programs in many urban schools. And bicycles, once the vigorous instruments of suburban freedom, are rarely spotted in the playground; parents fear for their kids in heavy suburban traffic. Most bicycles are now sold to adults, all too the immobilizing effect of the car. A report on the increased rate of obesity their cars for hours, encouraging them to eat fatty fast food and run down kids staggering along on foot, slowed by 35-pound backpacks, make easy targets and a sickening sort of "squish" sound. It's like dodge ball, but with an actual four times as likely to be fatally struck by a car. Trick? Treat? The study is Stern Pinball as the last manufacturer of the beloved game. (But go ahead and activist, is dismayed at his country's rigged presidential elections. (Note to to the New York Times who's having trouble with his organic carrots. (Probable cause: The "wonderful world of the carrot rust fly." Prognosis: too darned big. (And on a personal note, it's just so sad when any lump is automatically raise the price of a Coke on hot days. (But he wasn't so snippy statecraft: Never pass up an opportunity to make everyone happier at the same useless in practice as it is compelling in theory. But if you want to talk about the difference between good and bad policy, it helps to have an point has proved useful enough to earn a proper name. Economists call it the to make everyone happier, we're behind you all the way. right of individuals to make free choices. Here's a stylized example: Suppose some people (call them the "prudes") cherish their freedom of religion, but not half so much as they would cherish a general ban on pornography. Others (call but not half so much as they would cherish a general ban on religion. Then if you outlawed both pornography and religion, you'd make everyone happier, demands that we embrace such a law while the fundamental precepts of liberalism That's no problem in practice, because in practice there everyone happier, including the liberals.) But in practice, nobody is benefits exceed its costs, with benefits (or costs) measured by what the proponents (or opponents) would be willing to pay to see the policy enacted (or Under quite general circumstances, it can be proved (though not in the space of a single magazine column) that free markets yield easy to reconcile a taste for economic welfare with a taste for individual That's a conclusion we liberals find repugnant, and it would be nice to avoid it. One way out is simply to declare that "psychic costs don't count." If you don't like getting your nose punched, your aversion goes position might sound, it's also suspiciously incoherent. If my habit of reading should public policy discourage one and not the other? One answer is that psychic costs shouldn't count because worth of emotional distress, but we have no way of knowing which claims are simply fabricated. Amazingly, though, this seemingly insurmountable problem can be surmounted. A sufficiently clever system of taxes and subsidies can induce people to make accurate reports of their own emotional distress. (I look forward to explaining how such systems work in a forthcoming column.) is that once you start counting it, people train themselves to start feeling psychic cost is a psychic benefit. The New York Times reports that economists with the Army Corps of Engineers, charged with executing a benefit people get from knowing the river is running wild. In principle, existence value makes perfect sense. If your anguish is a real cost of maintaining the dam. Of course, it's also true that we're intellectually consistent, we'll cater either to both those preferences Times as an environmentalist who is skeptical of the concept of existence value. The source of his skepticism: "What if you add up all these numbers and they don't come out in our favor?" So much for statecraft as a dispassionate attempt to balance competing interests. If the goal is simply to make the numbers come out the way you want them to, you're not a policy commercial debuting this week, the spokesperson says, "It made people believe their taste alone should ultimately dictate what television shows, movies, they shouldn't have sex, except on television, where we can keep an eye on other countries, the slutty girls get beaten to death."-- Molly Shearer quiz response; he wasn't actually in the movie) in Bye Birdie 's was not based on the song. It wasn't even a musical. Or a remake. And the teens But that's what happens when you suppress the powerful erotic and aggressive perhaps that was our way of dealing with nuclear waste. But either way, things in other countries, but the United States and its five confreres all enjoy ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights treaty explicitly stating that here in the United States we love to execute presumably, before young Bush concocted that whole "compassionate conservative" Live may be in the doldrums, Mad magazine may have outlived its my blood, This is my body, This is my body with almonds. sounds a lot like "Peanut Butter Cup" if you say it in a frenzy of religious is God's Way"-- Plays off the Subway logo. If I read this correctly, the lunch meat is salvation, the shredded lettuce represents the apostles, the Coke ad (picture the ALL and the WAYS really big.) These shirts tend to parody sweet or fatty foods, perhaps explaining why we are a very religious and very Freshens Lives"-- A skillful parody of the Crest toothpaste logo. I guess to make up for all the sugary foods. There will be no cavities in heaven. another mess that has forced the resignation of French Finance Minister forgery allegations led the front pages of both French and German newspapers public sector." But the International Herald Tribune reported, with apparent has hardly moved on the foreign exchange markets. "Perhaps as a reflection of create little concern and have much less impact internationally than the resignation in March for political reasons of his German Social Democratic excrement in its cattle feed, should lift its unilateral ban on it, the papers and indiscriminate artillery and air bombardment of towns and villages" in military intervention is neither necessary nor practicable. Tough diplomacy and economic threats are, however, essential if the lunacy is to be reversed." "And wherever one looks, there is the illusion of victory. President Bill world's grave statesmen, and their governments sacrifice civilians to the greater good. But the horrors are not exorcised, only deferred to future way of the former Soviet Union when the Berlin Wall collapsed ten years ago. It world in gains in productivity and a higher living standard." finally demonstrated how he plans to unite these two indictments. He will tell universal health insurance. Conservatives thwarted them and captured Congress by convincing voters that the plan threatened existing health benefits, of government to liberate the economy and to let taxpayers keep more of their that Republican budget cuts threatened Medicare. To cynics, the lesson of these wars is that most voters don't care about liberal or conservative principles. What they care about is losing the benefits they have. librarian asked him how much the plan would cost and how he would pay for it. would be funded either "from the surplus" or "through the enormous savings that we can get through the application of technology to the medical system," such turned back to the cost issue. He said his own health insurance plan, which ahead and save some of that surplus for Medicare. If we wipe out Medicaid and next questioner asked about campaign reform, but Gore refused to let go of the interview that he would speak to this issue later on, but if you spend the entire surplus on the first campaign proposal, then that does not leave money that should be allocated for Medicare." A few minutes later, Gore steered a surplus is spent, then there is no money left over for new initiatives on one perspective, Gore's attack is conservative. Liberals habitually champion new programs and entitlements without explaining what they would cost. Conservatives habitually expose and exaggerate the cost of these programs, another perspective, Gore's attack is liberal. Conservatives habitually champion smaller government and tax cuts without explaining which programs would be reduced and which beneficiaries would suffer. Liberals habitually expose and exaggerate the suffering caused by these reductions. Gore isn't advantage of this critique is that because it is conservative as well as liberal, Gore can use it in the Democratic primary and then build on it in the health insurance plan would suck up all the oxygen in the budget, thereby suffocating the left's favorite programs. If Gore were to complain that general election, Gore can hold the same ground against the Republican nominee. Medicaid, education, and the environment." And now that the government is in sufficiently good shape to stop borrowing from Social Security, Gore can tell voters that he would protect that trust fund, whereas the Republican tax cuts would force the government to "raid" it again. Gore also gets the benefit of triangulation. When the Republican nominee portrays Gore as an arrogant government, Gore can remind voters that he defended "fiscal responsibility" accuse Gore of overestimating the cost of their tax cut and underestimating the projected budget surplus. And reporters can question Gore's inference that any putting the program "at risk" and "wiping out" the chance to "save" it. and went down in flames. Democrats offered more spending and lost the House. Republicans offered tax cuts and nearly lost it back. The only thing still alive by clinging to those entitlements. Al Gore could do worse. a sense of humor: His pranks include ordering a hotel to remove all furniture his backslapping bonhomie" without revealing his lack of "basic knowledge and administration won't intervene because it "does not defend human rights in big which would encourage innovation without harming interoperability. cover story questions whether the conglomeration of media outlets will corrupt journalism. Corporate honchos are "cultural strangers" to that media conglomerates will be covered aggressively. An article special issue about what clothing reveals. A chronicle of one woman's flirtation with a personal shopper laments the decline of posse shopping. becomes a solo sport. Personal shoppers are a poor substitute for the communal telling designers what sells and demanding practical adjustments to runway designs. The magazine solves some enduring fashion mammals with anesthetizing darts. Conservationists collect big licensing fees are "hawking this year's hottest commodity: the aura of authenticity." To sell Cemetery, in violation of federal regulations forbidding partisan activities at "compelling litany of misdeeds will be difficult to refute." months later, but by then anger toward the president had receded. her as a feminist icon. Most appallingly indicative of its age, the forthcoming cover story claims that Al Gore is maniacally depressed. Earth in the Balance demonstrates that its author has a dangerously An article worries that conservatives are caving in to sister Bay uses direct mail to haul in millions for her brother's presidential runs. In between elections, she converts the campaign into a nonprofit so she can keep dunning the same list of donors. She routinely sells their mailing An article praises the wisdom of the right. Conservative think fulmination on campaign finance reform. The candidate's tantrums crystallize door in an office building. The critics trip over themselves with praise: master of anime. The complicated plot deals with conflict between man and about as different from The Little Mermaid as you can get, and it "makes teacher. The critics are evenly divided. Some declare the film "a sugary paean hamster and feels no sadness at her mother's death. Critics slam her voice as that her diary is tainted by ideas and language that sound awkwardly mature. Among a scattering of positive reviews, Publishers Weekly calls the book "a compelling novel in its own right." (Click here to read the first chapter.) this is real; not even comically real." Defenders call it a "largely episodic collection of great moments that aren't all causally linked in that comforting negative review for his own book: "I consider it my duty as the author of this neutralizing, from the start, a potentially harmful literary contagion." (Click Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist. had about my pivotal role in Christian eschatology grew from the fact that I am didn't really feel bad for saying what he said. In fact, he was more convinced Let me pause for a moment to give three concise reasons why notion that I am to play a major role in world history, so why not a role in the lip of the millennium, much of the evangelical Christian world is in the ins is the sixth book in the "Left Behind" series, "left behind" forced to contend with the Antichrist's evil reign on Earth. The "Left Behind" is a lot of books for one guy to write, is a phenomenon. Ten million copies of are both active participants in the absurd and feverish campaign by some here) find this sort of Christian imperialism just a wee bit offensive. Just But evangelical leaders, who are, in my experience, uniformly kind and generous in their personal relations, can also be terribly forced to accept the idolatry of the Antichrist or be beheaded," he said. This utterances, which is troublesome, because he is also the most popular author in "where the sensitivity comes from," though he shows no understanding of the same statement a dozen times last year, but there was no comment about that," the Antichrist. No, he said. "People might say, it's a certain person, it's almost amusing, that question. Of course not. I know that you're not." Most evangelical leaders, in fact, refuse to publicly guess perennial favorite, at least among those evangelicals who believe the that the Antichrist will have 'no regard for women,' and so many evangelicals There's no way to know for sure. But if you wake up to negotiate with the United States in a multilateral framework than to let the United States exercise its power in bilateral deals with other countries. proclamations keeping foreign investors out of China's Internet and telecommunications industries. He also failed to soften his positions on "Instead, the opposite happened. In the past few days, harsh sentences were prisoners to smooth relations and give his hosts some face so they could claim credit for improving China's record. This time China was confident that such gestures, which border on the insulting, were not necessary for the banquets at pope visiting the territory. China called the speech meddlesome and hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Helms is chairman, by stating that human rights will be at the heart of his mission Already criticized for its tough crackdown on protestors during President president of the Human Rights League, said it was a sad time for French put out of commission for some time, the paper said. that it has abused its monopoly power, and that this abuse has harmed like the company itself, seem crippled by a failure of imagination. Things can business practices, or it hasn't. Among other things, the Justice Department accused the company of stifling competition by requiring business partners to market, and eventually bundling Internet Explorer with Windows to wrest control denied that any of its practices were illegal. The company chose the latter its business as usual, and at worst, rather than surrender prematurely, the company would be ordered by the judge to change some of its practices. What the none of its practices are illegal. The Justice Department says rather than technical ingenuity has been a fringe view. But that view gained practice to pressure other firms to halt software development that either shows the potential to weaken the applications barrier to entry or competes directly mighty powerful story about consumer harm and predatory practices." distinction. They want to convince the public, politicians, and the financial markets that the "corporate practice" cited in the judge's opinion isn't just who heads the Computer and Communications Industry Association, told reporters which the judge seems to be finding in fact that they did, is not behavior off to the side of their business. It reflects a fundamental approach of the core business strategy of the company, which is to leverage and utilize their monopoly to expand into neighboring markets, and to use that monopoly as a critical tool of leverage with all of their business partners, customers, and competitors. Because it is so central to the way they do business it will be very hard for this company to make slight adjustments to their behavior and in any way comply with the spirit of the antitrust law." Minutes later, Black told the antitrust case, however, it threatens mortal injury. The combined message the mainstream media. "In Courtroom and Beyond, Software King Is at Risk," rivals to absorb their technology no longer works as well as it has in the past, in part because of the greater likelihood of firmer antitrust scrutiny of widely viewed as a business genius, his company is seen as technologically its political image. At every opportunity, its spokesmen have reiterated their commitment to quality and innovation. But they have failed to foresee a collision between this message and their defiance in the antitrust case. By possibility that the public, if it accepts the judge's finding to the contrary, exploit its monopoly power, doesn't know how to "compete." have been entirely normal competitive behavior." At the end of a conference claiming that it has done nothing wrong. Even if it isn't, it may succeed in selling that argument to the public. But if it fails, the stakes are enormous. merits." In the stock market, however, the damage can get much worse. Investors power, and not only that the courts will strip the company of this ability, but adopted the policy in response to the city's ban on ATM surcharges. Banks are equipment, and training for a "major regional war." The evaluations, based on new, stricter standards, resulted in the lowest ratings in seven years. countered that the Army underrated itself in order to get more money. longer need prior authorization for hospital admissions, tests, or minor surgeries. The company will monitor and issue "report cards" on individual The government won the first round of its antitrust suit against ruled that the company is a monopoly, has abused its monopoly power, and has church. The filmmaker's spin: It's a comic ode to religious faith. Critics' Information from the flight data recorder shows that the plane's fall began as a "controlled descent" with the pilots still in command. The new data reverser induced the crash, but investigators say that they must recover the cockpit voice recorder to determine the cause. They continue to consider as Outlook Express can get it simply by highlighting the message's subject line. The Director of the International Monetary Fund is resigning. the multinational lending agency charged with ensuring global economic spin: Criticism from both sides means he did his job just right. inequities and the "wall in the head" that still divides the country. But the New York Times observed that despite unification's difficulties, to answer with regards to poets and poetry, you, or your poems, but for the sake of obtaining a reply from you, here's a groupie's question: What poem of memory my little poem "Exile." That was a satisfying moment. Entering another person's memory with your words, perhaps a person quite different from yourself, is in certain ways more glorious than any prize or title. writing a new poem? Do you start with an interesting title and then write around it? Or an interesting first line? Or the kernel of a core that makes me want to go on, extend and refine it, as it comes to dredge sustenance from the great pool of feelings and ideas that accumulates in a completely disagree that this film substitutes intensity for emotion. The point about Raging Bull being difficult to watch many times is well made but The film is the most beautiful thing I can remember breathtaking, with three moments standing out for me: the bursts of color showing it seemingly in the middle of nowhere and saying more in a single shot about her social exclusion than other directors could achieve in three pages of dialogue. If you have not seem this gem recently I urge you to revisit it, it's a distraction. A critic at the time described the movie admiringly as can make a "women's picture" in a robust manner that he loses touch with his supposed themes. And he doesn't begin to get inside his impotent male even remembers what the film is supposed to be about. take on it. It does indeed have virtuosic moments, but the central love does male friendship. I think that Age is a case, like Raging visceral effects rather than emotional responses. (This is true of discipline and formal panache, but that in too many cases the vision seems films more closely, and to contextualize them to everyone's satisfaction, but Several Civil War buffs have written to the Fray to point out that in my Rev. Lee's memoir snippet can't possibly be true because [the book] was written when Rev. Lee was an old man and is obviously faulty on this point. It's also possible that the error lay with the reporter whose article Rev. Lee was quoting from in his book. (None of the above, The confluence of Gore's attempt to become an alpha source of friction. Despite the growing pains of economic reform, including Republican debate. His congeniality made him look presidential next to the inevitable cost of joining the West" and advocates reconciliation with former are pessimistic, despite plummeting crime and unemployment rates, because the ideologically entrenched will not accept that the country can thrive without liberal policy magazine switches from a quarterly to a glossy biweekly. An dramatically alter constitutional law. The Republican jurists who are on deck essay argues that television has reversed childhood and adulthood. Shows such and environment in the future. An item speculates that sex "will be more for recreation than procreation," because parents will choose to clone themselves or genetically toilets to toothbrushes will provide "automated checkups" and enable physicians and Amazon, featuring former model Carol Alt as a babe in the federal intervention. A patients' bill of rights might soothe them, though it dreams expressing unconscious desires. Neurological studies find that areas of the brain associated with visual imagery and emotion are particularly active cover story forecasts a space arms race. The availability of because hormones predispose adolescent girls toward weight gain and women store endangers an infant and makes it more difficult for a baby to learn independence. The author argues, based on his own experience as a dad, that mullahs to allow more democracy, and the men sport goatees to identify interviewing style is a pleasant contrast to cable's screaming matches. convicted of murdering a police officer: "ennobles the rest of us to deepen, The cover story condemns suppression of minority voting through predominantly black counties. Numerous blacks have been prosecuted, but only out with my neighbor. The problem is that my neighbor knows about my number of things seem less than optimal here. You have barely reached your being unfaithful to the woman to whom you've presumably made a commitment. It would really be lovely, for all concerned, if you were having a goof with the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others. If you do call it a day with the mother of your children, you will be spared a divorce being so horizontally accessible. Given your age, you could very well populate hate my brother's wife. She has been cheating on him for the past year. (They have only been married a year.) She treats him terribly, and she tells me she hates my family. I have been trying to ignore her comments, but it's impossible. Do I tell my brother how I feel or continue to hold my timetable, your brother's wife started the marriage with no intention of being faithful. Chances are that if you know she's running around, it's likely your brother does, too. The fact that she treats him terribly, however, is nothing. He is either masochistically neurotic or is figuring out how to extricate himself. The only mechanistic thing you can do is make yourself scarce. And should your brother ask your opinion, give it to him. confide in, not as a potential boyfriend. He's a serious bodybuilder and says he's looking for muscular guys only. While I do have a toned bod, I am doesn't seem interested in meeting. The only thing he does seem interested in is pouring his heart out to me about how difficult it is to find a muscular face the facts. You are interested in a partner, this chap is interested in not be perfect together. Where is the commonality of interests? You might try to figure out why you are attracted, even electronically, to someone who is whining to you about his inability to find another bodybuilder. For consider yourself lucky, and move on to another chat room. Or better yet, start relocated to another city, which is away from my grown children. The new job has been fantastic, and I felt I made the right decision in moving. Until a few weeks ago, anyway. My manager was moved laterally within the department, and old company! He totally disrespects women and anyone not in his field. The management knows that I cannot and will not work for him. I have requested an forced to keep this position. What do you think I should do? superior that you will be given a different job where you're not reporting to the chauvinist pig, er, former manager. Don't be shy about mentioning the other offer. You say that your current management understands your aversion to this man. If you can get an ironclad guarantee of another position, sign the lease where your children live would make one more move merely a temporary by all means go to the company that still wants you. If that happens, and if Out the Dead are the latest evidence of the director's status as a critical directors, an embodiment of the beleaguered idea that filmmaking, and therefore To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made. be reminded of the power of film as a medium is not quite the same as being moved by a particular film, and Bringing Out the Dead is, for all its hectic pacing and breakneck intensity, an oddly unmoving experience. Yes, you think, movies can touch us urgently and deeply. Why doesn't this one? If movies feature a disturbed outsider cruising the nightmarish, The mood here is a good deal softer: The scabrous nihilism of Taxi movie's best, most understated scene), it's an act of mercy. Aside from these parallels and variations, there's plenty think of an active director who has produced such an emphatically he does some of that) as to make movies by recombining a recognizable and fairly stable set of narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. In other the 1950s by a group of French critics, many of whom went on to become, as an individual artist, almost always the director. The artists who populated the the constraints of the studio system. But even their lesser films, according to reiteration of a unique cinematic vocabulary and by an implicit but unmistakable sense of solitary genius in conflict with bureaucratic The auteur theory was quickly challenged, most notably by collapse of the old studios, an unprecedented degree of creative autonomy, and they were, to a man, men) who shared a fervid, almost religious devotion to a route to world domination but as a priestly avocation, a set of spiritual and power. Watching it, you feel that you are seeing real life on the screen, of things or with common experience. Rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them." killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They Of these three, Raging Bull has been singled out for masterpiece. But it remains exceedingly hard to watch, not so much because of bloated with the ambition to achieve greatness that it can barely move. If it convinces you it's a masterpiece, it does so by sheer brute force. undone by its own perfectionism. New York, New York and The King of Comedy stand up rather better, in my opinion, in spite of their obvious cocaine.) For one thing, New York, New York is virtually the only Mean Streets is an unparalleled demonstration of the power of film to convey reality, "Happy Endings" is a celebration of film's magical ability to create it. A moviegoer's dream, but good luck seeing it on the big screen. excruciating arguments about the difference between fantasy and reality. scarred survivor. After the failures of the early '80s, he picked himself up periodic attempts to defy the expectation that he would defy expectations. were allowed to run things without interference. Of course, they got too greedy, screwed everything up, and the big corporations turned their playground feel cold and mechanical. They substitute intensity for emotion and give us say it was to be caught up, swept away, surfeited by sensation, and confronted believe in that, and we leave wondering whether he still does. this point, both churches believe the same thing. What? let her duck out of the house without its diaper on. Apparently that's another an effort to appear to be earning her money, Wolf called this "being an alpha Wolf also counseled Gore to "speak from the heart," creating tension with campaign staffers who were pressing him to "lie your fool strap he was said (by me) to be considering. Wolf had the guts to support the role, funneling her payments through other consulting firms so that her name would not appear on financial reports filed with the Federal Election who tried to present Helms with a letter in favor of an international treaty opposing discrimination against women. Helms has blocked a Senate vote on this them. Helms had Capitol police throw the congresswomen out. several nations. Which of the following is an actual bit of Trump fatuity, and which is an attempt to mock his hubris through amusing hyperbole? than the next guy. What? We're the world's biggest arms dealer? Really? Bigger when it looked like this was going to be the most substantive presidential Time reported that Al Gore's campaign has been paying Wolf, a feminist weak "beta" male into a strong "alpha" male. The media seized on the story titters. Pundits agree that by hiring such a "controversial feminist," Gore has embarrassed himself and exposed his personal and political "confusion." The real confusion, however, seems to be over why Wolf is controversial or She's too radical. The prevailing complaint against Wolf is that she's a is written in "the first person sexual"), in which she reportedly "urges the how to masturbate and perform oral sex." (Wolf's idea was to let teens satisfy themselves without resorting to intercourse, but never mind.) Critics also lost her job in part for advocating similar ideas about masturbation. Republicans are having a field day with naughty quotes from Wolf's book, favorite quote from Wolf is, "I want to explore the shadow slut who walks alongside us as we grow up, sometimes jeopardizing us and sometimes presenting us with a new sense of authentic identity." The Republican National Committee has issued a press release playing up the "shadow slut" quote and suggesting that Gore should "run like crazy" from Wolf because he's "married." Pundits She's too retro. Having branded Wolf a "controversial feminist," the media turn around and deride her hierarchy of "alpha" and "beta" males as a macho throwback. Time snickers that she has counseled Gore to "bare his teeth" Other reports say Wolf is trying to make Gore "aggressive" and "dominating." She's too powerful. While poking fun at Wolf's obsession with male power, critics insinuate that she's accumulating undue influence in the campaign. In a sources who say "Wolf's tentacles stretch far beyond" the project to which Gore assigned her. Pundits call her Gore's "guru" and "mastermind." "FEMINIST WEARS She's overpaid. According to the critics, Wolf is somehow wielding all this undue power without earning her consulting fee. The Post quotes a Gore "spends money" on Wolf "like a drunken sailor in port." Conservative satirist She's dangerous. Wolf may not be doing anything for her paycheck, the skeptics conclude, but she's planting plenty of crazy ideas in Gore's head. She's frivolous. When they're not fretting that Wolf has too many pernicious ideas, the critics scoff that she has none. They dismiss her as a instructed him to wear "brown, olive, and tan," and told him "to wear different observes, "polls have yet to record the difference." She's a crutch. Having declared Wolf insubstantial and impotent, her detractors again reverse course, accusing Gore of relying too heavily on her for guidance and a definition of himself. "An alpha candidate would not need jokes that "Real Alpha Males" don't have to hire consultants "to learn how to She's a dirty little secret. Unable to agree on why Wolf should be embarrassing, pundits have fallen back on the implication that she must be embarrassing, since Gore has been employing her "secretly," "funneling her payments through other consulting firms," and conspiring to "conceal her from Dick Morris" and suggests that Gore may have been keeping her under "deep great lengths to conceal Wolf's role." And what exactly is the scandal about Wolf that Gore is covering up? The media have no answer. Evidently, it's their Note: Because of demands from a meddlesome attorney general, ago. It turns out that, on this point, both churches believe the same thing. whole thing about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? The rich guy could buy his own But of course we live in a country where religious belief is not merely tolerated, it is required of anyone seeking high office. Where do they get this It's amazing our rockets get off the ground. Well, maybe not so amazing: We've justification, declaring that salvation could be achieved by faith alone; no teachings of that time, helped kick off the Reformation. today's scouting encourages kids to learn many useful skills through its system of merit badges. Which of the following are actual Boy Scout merit badges? troop actually exist. Note: Safety and Sports have been dropped from the list of merit badges required to become an Eagle Scout. They have been replaced by organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each Contestants would fight till "knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial head butts. It was "barbaric," he said. It was "not a sport." He sent letters "human cockfighting" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the invariably respond: "Don't people get killed all the time doing that?" But no bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, "If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office. Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club. Nine people were killed in two workplace shootings. In nation's strictest firearm regulations. The gun lobby's spin: See, gun laws don't stop bullets. The gun controllers' spin: That's because the laws attributes violent acts to an unconscious reaction to homosexual advances. Officials located Flight 990's "black boxes," but high winds will delay recovery until the weekend. New radar data indicate that the plane did not fall directly to the ocean, but dived and recovered, eventually breaking up at campaign. Wolf, whose controversial work has focused on women as sex adviser" who helps him connect with women and youth. Skeptics' spin: She's another. The two scientists, who are married to each other, performed the experiment on themselves. They took follicles from the husband's head and grafted them to the wife's forearm. She grew four hairs and did not experience last week's Republican presidential forum, Bush made numerous appearances and delivered key policy speeches in the state. Although Bush retains his lead in less confident and more desperate for votes. The rosy spin: the museum opened its "Sensation" show, which included a depiction of the decision, which held that the mayor's actions violated the First Amendment. The spin: They're using the First Amendment to "put money in the pockets of multimillionaires." The museum's spin: No, we're remembered as one of football's funniest and most generous players, and his nickname, Sweetness, "was a tribute to his personality more than his running fraud. Five of the eight models have already dropped out, and journalists who tried to place bids received no response. The proprietors' explanation: We're inundated with responses and will be up and running shortly. The journalists' explanation: The site is a sham, intended only to drive upstanding guy (even though I sell advertising for was a bit of a shock yesterday to find myself detained as a suspect during a the night before, and nobody had seen or heard from him since. This is unlike someone know if we think we're going to be late for work, much less out on an acts of violence, and I assumed he was referring to the shootings in from the marina where my brother keeps his boat (and where I dock my scene of the crime. As we pulled up, I saw that the police had blocked off the road near the marinas. An officer told me that we couldn't drive any farther, although pedestrians were allowed in the area, and I was free to walk home. It did strike me as strange that the police would grant public access to the area where a lunatic shooter was still on the loose. But the place looked pretty Not far down the street, an officer stopped me and, to my amazement, got ready to draw his pistol. "You've got the wrong guy," I said. again. "For your protection and mine, stop talking and let me finish my job," license, the policeman realized that my story made sense. He let me go and suggested I proceed with caution: "You fit the description of the suspect." When I told him I was trying to get home to find my brother, who'd gone missing, we started all over again. "What does he look like?" he asked, like me," I said, "but he's probably drowning if I can't get him some help." The police started asking questions about Josh: Does he do drugs? No. Is he attended the Merchant Marine Academy and was in the Naval Reserves, which (as one officer pointed out) meant he had experience with guns. But apparently I been rescued by a branch of the Coast Guard, and that he was sailing his boat in instead of letting the Coast Guard tow him. Several hours later we watched with relief as he sailed into the marina. Not a bad alibi. clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air. You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker. father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right; understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be, "ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers. on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh, man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in Television" thread until talk moved to science fiction and Star an innate ability to generate language? Do or simply recognize patterns? Check geopolitics as usual; others find the subcontinental tests a frightening the Media" thread saw much of the interpersonal squabbling it has become on interminably. The forum's conservatives agreed to pity its leading liberal accomplishments and his administration's sale of missile technology to "hypocrisy," their (large) role in denying gays equal civil and legal rights, the fight against homophobia to the fights against racism and sexism: "Like those fights, opposition is rooted in bigotry and prejudice and ignorance. 'Religious doctrines' were also invoked to deny women the right to vote and to Castle deserves congratulations for her prodigious compendium national media was censored by a small handful of gatekeepers. Any news outside the established national news held relatively little credibility in comparison, and therefore held little influence. Since the '60s, the number of national news distributors has grown tremendously. National print magazines, cable and satellite news, and of course Internet distribution put the news into the nation's living rooms too quickly to be entirely monitored by the old guard. There was never a better demonstration of this shift in media distribution than raised, I must confess to a visceral appreciation for petty jabs at easily such "harmless" prejudices collapse into crude stereotypes. "hoping for a violent accident." Some fans may harbor such wishes. For all I reasons. First, wrecks usually knock the victims out of the race, itself a dramatic event. Second, it is exciting and even encouraging to watch one's hero smack a concrete wall at such high speeds and walk away unscathed. Most fans prefer that such wrecks not occur, but when they do, fans pay justifiably close attention to the driver's fate. The flashy team apparel, etc., send a relevant violence is his own business; he should not presume the same of others. Did familiar? Virtually all the fans with whom I have spoken over the years (quite a friendly bunch, actually) consider the absence of big wrecks, content to rely on a mix of his own admitted bloodthirstiness and good and I used to point it out to friends who were new to the Internet as an example of the best of the best. I used to read everything and really enjoyed doing so. Now I am disgusted. In fairness, I am disgusted with other media outlets, too. It's just that I thought you guys would not run with on. Some of it is pretty darn interesting. We are probably going to have Gulf War II, and it has every promise of being a hell of a lot nastier, with more civilian and more military casualties than ever before. We have problems in pope standing on an island and coming out against birth control (again). news, I just do not care about anyone's sex life this much. If there are other crimes, they will surely come out in the form of sound evidence, and then there outlet, for people who have a life and need not read such junk. Get back to work. You are going to get hair on your palms if you keep this up! the ultimate personal betrayal: It is the breaking of a vow of permanent sexual is moreover a betrayal of one's community of faith and one's God. Secretly taping a friend is bad, but friendship is less serious a relationship than begin to see in the public's indifference to the myriad accusations of and the qualities they share, he may have omitted something. Many of the brunette with a fleshy face, full lips, and large teeth. Her clothes were perhaps not exactly revealing, but flashy nonetheless. She enjoyed music, too, bomb will be set off in a civilian area." That's bloody nice of them, isn't it? States set off a bomb in a "civilian" area in Glen Oaks. Would you condone such an action, provided that the group had given prior notification? reduce our natural, profound revulsion at the thought of the procedures used in abortion to an aesthetic response: All abortions are "grotesque," or "gross." policy, either. What distinguishes his unconscious fetus from someone under abortion by comparing it to other unpleasant surgical procedures. There is an obvious difference, however, between amputating a leg and aborting a fetus: The former will not, left to grow in its normal course, become an independent human admits that "knowing whether we have the technology to keep [the fetus] alive doesn't answer" the more fundamental question of when a fetus becomes a conscious being. Medical science cannot now, and perhaps never will be able to, answer that question. Still less is science competent to pronounce on the existence of the human soul. It is for these reasons that the rights of the fetus must be defended as strongly as those of any other person. issues (at two weeks per issue) and three special issues (one week each) total talented staff with her own snazzy hires." She also lost a prodigious lot of talent, either by firing people, forcing them out, or forcing them first to throw up and then to give up. You're right about the magazine's sameness, however; it's the same damn thing each week, and it's the same as the other classes, they chatter almost exclusively to one another, and they are very dull bartenders and hookers go on vacation during that one. even better than the people that it's just a bunch of pinheads nattering about nothing. Well, these little nothings called neutrinos have a lot to say, if only we could find a press willing to pass on the message. I applaud the New York Times for trying to convey some of that excitement and say woe to you for dipping to such cynicism. Uncharacteristic, I might add. healthy young people) every year in an effort to get them to agree to a utilitarian plan making it mandatory to remove one kidney from each of them to be made available for donation. Every year they reject this plan. Something about personal autonomy being more important than utilitarian calculus in not be the highest virtue when dealing with organ procurement (one murder could illnesses, it should be possible to do it with organ transplants." The point being that access to good information fosters legal markets. The Web example proves just the opposite: Much of the information people get about illness on the Web is incomplete, imprecise, or just plain wrong. There is absolutely no guarantee that good information will create legitimate markets for organ sales. will be disseminated to entice people to sell their organs and ignore the very real risks that people incur when they give up their organs. (Donating organs would such markets ever be regulated? No regulation? Without some screening (who will the brokers and middlemen be?), not only will donors suffer (see argue that this happens currently, consider what wholesale expansion of an unregulated market would bring in terms of the number of complications. In fact, there are reports that in some countries where organs may be sold and the process is not monitored closely, the numbers and types of infections in argues mainly that including the Internet Explorer browser as a free part of rival browser would be sold as a separate profit center. predominant browser architecture would ultimately benefit the consumer, but for resources would continue to be dedicated to innovation in this arena until the technologies had matured to the point where they were clearly superior and its source code) for free in perpetuity. But even if Navigator were to be sold at some point, the ultimate cost to the consumer would come not from the cost emerging desktop software interface to the internet. The focus in the browser wars and legal wranglings has already begun to move away from browser choice and toward the more important issues of gateways and the branded services they configuration of computers when sold will determine to a large degree which services a consumer encounters. Note how the cable companies have profited from control of the channels that they carry, some of which they own fully or in part. Note also how the Baby Bells have profited from charging for advertising in their Yellow Pages. Consider then the value of a gateway when it contains broadband multimedia marketplace only a few years away. Do we want to allow understanding of the economies of scale suggests the Windows iterations being produced today should be costing less to produce than the first ones that indication she thinks the film is a masterwork of any kind. its contributors before posting them. I share the general disdain for lengthy indeed begins in much the same vein as mine. In fact, her review and mine were I referred was by columnist Frank Rich; it came more than a week before the film opened. I saw no reason to name Rich, whose work I respect, but his perpetuates a few misconceptions about Standard Oil's business practices. myth that Standard pursued a "predatory pricing" strategy (though that was Though Standard did indeed buy out many of its early competitors, that was due mothballing most of the refineries it bought, while expanding output from its own, efficient facilities. Furthermore, if Standard did pursue a predatory pricing strategy, it sure didn't work. Standard faced constant competition both much of an exaggeration to say that the antitrust cases brought against the trust in the early 1900s were not just belated but were fast becoming superfluous." In other words, the marketplace was already bringing Standard to monopolies are bad is that, in theory, they lead to high prices and less product. Staples points out, though, that Standard Oil provided a product which as a theoretical monopoly should not. While Standard's practices may have led improved product they brought to the refining industry meant nothing but good Executioners," his review of my A Nation on Trial [hereafter specific criticisms, I want to remind readers of the approach I adopted in my against the sources he cites or compare his claims to the standard, mainstream scholarly record. Indeed, his vehement criticisms of my essay notwithstanding, with its popular legitimation and basis of plebiscitary acclamation. At the its threats but linked to the condoning of lawful, "rational" action, not the certainly an acceptable component of his popular image, even if it was an element "taken on board" rather than forming a centrally motivating factor for right to question these findings. But he ought to have directed his ire not at power. Citing a raft of scholarly studies, I report the consensus that "the bulk," "sizable parts") found "the form of persecution abhorrent," expressed "misgivings about the brutal methods employed," "remained on the laws" not only because they "identified with the racialist policy" but "especially" because "a permanent framework of discrimination had been created that would end the reign of terror and set precise limits to antisemitic the same disapproval as in the past." "The overwhelming majority approved produced such a widespread wave of revulsion," reaching "deep into the ranks" Some recoiled from the sheer brutality of the violence (which also defaced to me are simply the scholarly consensus. Significantly, he adduces not a jot "doppelganger." It would seem that this honorific more properly belongs to behind authority, he distorts the points I made in my review. He insinuates are backing a party known for its racist program. It's a wonder that condemnation? Were there such protests as later surrounded the euthanasia past or future, can ever change that fact." One does not have to accept were able to execute the Final Solution because they could count on the allegiance, and sometimes even the love, of the German people. To be sure, wouldn't be. They are an input. The output will be a shot on television of just an input into the provision of advertising services that corporations are services are not an output, but an input. Businesses pay for advertising services as a way of moving their products. Advertising services are an input to the cost of production of whatever is being advertised. productive and popular novelists of all time all the stranger. (Did that other collaborators and thus diluting the value of his name. His work appears to have much miss the quirkiness you speak of regarding The New Yorker without the big perfume ads and photo layouts. It's too bad. Now where do I go turn a company around in seven months when others need years, eschewing only instead of cars, he's been selling his own qualifications in his you how hard it can be to write about business leaders, who are generally careful, scripted, and pretty dull. Perhaps Sunbeam isn't much in revenues, but Sunbeam board's eagerness to get rid of Chainsaw Al is a marked contrast to the never have made such an ignorant statement. What I did say is that "the glitter of instant wealth" being made on Wall Street is overshadowing the steadier call themselves "producers." That's a cultural critique, not an economic whatever economic report he did or did not make. In pointing to the way Wall Street now values industrial companies and other traditional businesses, I was trying to show that in fact investors, at least, have a great deal of respect for "the manufacture of useful goods and vital services" and not the "glitter of instant wealth" (Internet fever aside). Unlike the 1980s, when the economy's people who get the most attention and respect today are almost all businessmen who spend their time making things, not playing with other people's money: Bill Marriage Penalty?" Of course it is true that for a given level of spending, lowering one tax will require raising another. And if many taxpayers are married, any new tax will be levied in part on them. However, the real question is whether under the current tax code, all other things being equal, you are married nearly always results in a higher tax bill. You can consider that a penalty or their just reward, but that's a different debate. this episode. The negative stereotypes defining labor in the mainstream press are easily invoked, but rarely is the positive rationale behind organization defined beyond "worker dissatisfaction." Labor in the United States is by no means perfect, and dealing with intransigent unions can be a byzantine, harrowing, and expensive process. In many ways labor can be characterized as decadent in its victory over the truly horrible conditions of the early worker has been given too much and should be slapped back into line with the not end there, reminding us that the control we have over our workplaces and subversives). Compliments also for his reminder that those efforts are personal and carry consequences for those who are willing to take the risk of research of his roles, a consistent and committed work ethic, politeness to have resulted in a prolific string of performances and superstar popularity. wife, an extremely close relationship to his children, and a preference for The examples of his rhetoric provided are labeled as "nasty," while family life in shambles, and political and social views to the left of Papers": at the risk that the author was "just kidding," I can't believe that a serious journalist would think factual mistakes in a publication's articles are comparable to factual mistakes in letters to the editor. Regular readers tend to be the best editors of the factual mistakes in letters. However, those same readers need to be confident that a publication's own staff are held to a higher standard of accuracy. If not, we can rely on the the unfair, as well as poorly researched, article about my article that even mentions my father. This one caught my eye, not only because of the ridiculous picture of him on the front, but also the numerous pages of grown to know my father's faults over the years, and yes, in many cases people are blind to them. I, for one, think they should be. Never in my life have I seen a man so dedicated. I do not mention only one thing he is particularly a job that only he could ever do. He never ever leaves the house before him. Part of the routine includes bringing coffee to my mother every morning to start her day, making sure the house is in order, kissing us all goodbye, and then taking care of himself. Although I don't think any of our home life is even any of your business, I had to comment on the fact that you quoted him as saying he was a bad father and husband. If in fact he said that, I am sorry. He is a wonderful father. My sister and I would be the only people to ever know if that is true. Printing it in your little article was, for lack of better words, stupid. I also know my father loves to do a million things at once. That fact holds true wherever we go. Even on slow, recognition can follow us. When he reaches the last thing on the list, it may not be done to the best of his unsurpassable ability, but it wasn't due to any fault of his own. He is an amazing man, it is true, but he gets tired like the best of them do. You can understand that, can't you? You seem to have slept a little bit while you were writing this article. And you can quote me when I say why conflict of interest is a bad thing for journalists: some kind of personal advantage to distort either your perception of the truth or your willingness to honestly state what you perceive. In other words, it think he misses an important reason: Though the conflict may not reveal a journalist's aim before the conflict may have been to present the truth as But the conflict itself might create such a tendency or incentive. I certainly could have been instilled with a tendency to misrepresent in order to please a possible employer. Lastly, his incentive need not be financial (a "bribe"). It could be any one or combination of a number of things, including power, prestige, or even misplaced ethical values (values that he thought were right, even if they were, in fact, not). Again, all this is not to say that Prudence" disparaged this ethnic group with a statement that would be latest. I have observed these slurs on television, radio, and print sources. I marvel at how supposedly sophisticated journalists can speak, write, or edit errors. First, he gets the Immaculate Conception wrong, which refers to the Immaculate Conception, which refers to the fact (or belief, if you will) that publication and tried to amend his copy, but his editors failed to make the change in time (though we have now rectified our slip). Slate thanks the dozens (yes, there were dozens) of readers who pointed out the mistake, as well as the nuns, priests, and lay theologians who gave them such excellent Catholic instance of the relentless creep of affirmative action. Might I suggest another whom there are one or two among us, I hear tell, might bear this in mind when targeting malt liquor, fast food, and sneaker commercials. misplaced guilty liberalism and soggy altruism to the same folks who bring us action for lousy actors and worse writers (most of whom, it must be noted, are not about oppressing the beleaguered white man. Just a thought. people in Silicon Valley are capable of understanding things like quantum specific predictions were pretty good, but his most insightful observation was about the business of futurology and the reason people usually can't see the change that will happen in the short term and underestimate how much change will happen in the long term. Our own achievements seem to loom so large that we can't imagine what our grandchildren might achieve. Silicon Valley is the not sure why you waited a week. So much for the Web's unique potential for typical that the piece was not something more educational. You could have given us a piece on the roots of the conflict, a discussion of how previous wars be considered outside the spin than that your magazine be informative. By pursuing spin over context, you join much of the rest of the print media in especially foolish considering the Web's capacity for instantaneous "payouts" to be considered when valuing a stock. An investor can receive stocks uses dividends for the future cash flows. That is not because everyone "implicitly assumes" companies pay out all their earnings. It is because everyone assumes that the value of the company, and hence the stock price, rises with earnings and that investors can capture this increase in value by selling. Crook mentions "capital appreciation," saying that his method will reflect it because "dividends are themselves growing along with the worth of the company." But companies take any number of different approaches to dividends, and their relationship to a company's worth is very inconsistent. year. Would its stock be worthless? Of course not. This is all elementary, the financial equivalent of saying that two plus two equals four. drugs." Would it be as unbearably sad if he drank espresso or enjoyed a good bottle of wine? The worst part of the war on drugs is its hypocrisy. I was clicking on "Enter the Fray" at the end of any article. Conventional this magazine represents the views of the respective authors and does not "the driving force" between various independent movies, among them Hunting was not spurred by his own finely tuned aesthetic sensibilities but person and insisted that it be made. The moral here is to remember the difference between the ability to recognize quality and the ability to create opponent. My, my, aren't we sensitive. What part isn't true? And what is wrong for the 1990s"? Chatterbox is equating the pairing of one's political opponent with a violent criminal to the pairing of one's political opponent with a mayor? I hope he will be similarly concerned the next time a Republican is and clamping down on the international prostitution trade. So what does it say about the First Lady that for this article she not only declined to be interviewed but even declined to answer written questions?" it says that the first lady feels that she can accomplish more in the real world by doing rather than talking, or perhaps she feels that the public has had its fill of interviews and answers to written questions from such female response: It says that she and her husband have been under such a barrage of unfair criticism for so long that she is keeping her head down. A low profile Vanity Fair pap and chased a lot of solid literary and artistic talent out of the building and kept the door locked lest taste, God forbid, get the zine, and don't get me wrong about this, but go easy on "The A lot of us read the papers, too (I do as part of my job), but why let the trivia of urban life, I can talk with my own wife; and you can fill the otherwise entertaining, informative, urbane, and whimsical pages of but women tell me they find him doting and caring (me, I just see the whiny, portrayed on television. Mad About You is not all that useful as strikes me as almost racist, and definitely xenophobic. Although he did not offer any reasons for his stance, the only plausible ones would run along the etc. It is patently offensive on almost all levels. I cannot imagine anything you a potential subscriber. And even if that were not an issue, I am still disappointed with the editorial staff for allowing this sort of manure to newspaper about his summer job on Wall Street and then found himself instantly blackballed from job interviews by every Wall Street firm. have both the better case and the more reasonable tone. Nonetheless, there is point out that sprawl is to a large extent the fault of our current local tax system? If we replaced the current property tax on land and buildings with a tax falling solely on the value of land, vacant lots in cities and along the roads leading out of them would be built upon, instead of held for speculation. Then people could live closer to where they work and shop, burn less gasoline when they commute by car, and more often be able to walk. A denser population such a strange idea that a suicidally depressed person might benefit from was somehow ordained, and has something to do with her status as a poet. This Slate received several letters mourning the retirement of "Dear dismayed to hear of Prudence's return to her needlework. It is not that I am against needlework. I frequently engage in it myself when stumped by the complexity of an algorithm. It is just that Prudence's advice is course, this document is historic and groundbreaking, but it is not a bull. from The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman is used to imprint the reigning pope's insignia, or seal, on the document. The most solemn of the papal documents, the bull creates a prelate a cardinal about the Catholic Church and is quite authoritative.) that many people commonly use the term papal bull to describe almost any But since he appears to be talking about lawyers functioning in the United annually. But don't take my word for it. Ask any current teacher of legal differences between the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the Model Code of Professional Responsibility --a subject that I am sure application of the code (or rules) in the real world. to the rules of professional responsibility much as they do to any other text. That people want zealous advocates to defend their interests, and as a consequence, zealousness tends to gain the upper hand in the battle between aggressive advocacy and restrained, dignified legal conduct. Lawyers will interpret the rules to maximize their ability to do what they believe is in the best interests of their clients, and this is made easier by the porous good thing is a subject worth discussing; whether it happens is obvious. And municipal court to federal court, in Code states and Rule states rather than something about which I have ants in the pants. somewhat cynical and worldly about the political process he covers. In recent columns, however, I have greatly enjoyed seeing his intelligent skepticism pointed as much toward the media as toward the politicians. What's most critique. It's a critique that takes on the cultural attitude and assumptions of the press and how those assumptions slant their journalism, and it's subtly condescending nature of traditional journalism's attitude toward successful blacks (a column in the future might explore the press' similar attitude toward the Southern population of the country). From the article about entries and the column about why the press feels the need to take calm legal heads of my acquaintance advised him that neither I nor my name were laughter subsided, that is. The Internal Revenue Service's doings provoked some thread showcased the international flavor of the Fray this week. A missionary marriage? Some choices proffered in the new "Marriage and Family" thread: friendship, mutual respect, honesty, humor, and variety. Where does point": "I don't think it's realistic to expect most relationships to be sexually monogamous and to last a lifetime." A third offered a reason why that arrangement?" Most contributors agree that sex and children are desirable but not necessary within the relationship; all agreed children should be the television, and whether parents who leave children to suffocate in a hot car Sound and the Fury remains the focus in the "Reading" thread. This week's subject: the second of the book's four chapters, which is written from chapter. Jump in, and examine the mind of a misanthrope. Century" thread hosted a humorous and articulate exchange on the importance influence" on mass movements everywhere? In addition to this series of posts interesting exchange in the new "Marriage and Family" thread on what a marriage the browser to log me on, I thought maybe, this once, from a publication like illogical conclusions plus the tired rhetoric of veil equals oppression, blah, blah, blah. I laughed out loud when I got to the part where the author insisted too) "claimed" they weren't oppressed by the veil, they, like, really were. Question: Did the author actually interview any of these "girls"? I feel compelled to clarify has to do with this statement: "It seems suitable the way, I happily and quite comfortably wear my veil when I go shopping don't mean to brag, just trying to break that ridiculous stereotype). And my upright man who never told a lie or looked twice at a woman, they wouldn't have interesting, even if he didn't see naked interns running up and down the West much greater incentive to spice up the truth or to invent a story out of whole writer had been really incisive, she might have raised questions in the as easily in tabloids as in traditional publishing outlets; a less determinedly shallow analyst might wonder if the dominant role of money is suffocating the may well be, but Internet Explorer is very likely on his computer, and he certainly paid for it even if he subsequently removed it. The idea that Internet Explorer is free is silly. It cost millions to develop, and that cost all that much which browser people use as long as they have to pay for Internet Explorer. In the fullness of time, there will be enough sites only viewable to indulge his personal preferences. Perhaps he'll utter a little grumble of dissatisfaction, like all those grumbles coming from Mac users being forced to switch to Windows to be compatible. In the meantime, he has probably paid for for this, of course. Software companies could make their file formats public, for government action in his column "Let My Data Go!" about computer software is that it leads to "natural monopolies." In fact, the software incompatibilities that tend to create monopolies are carefully nurtured, precisely because they do create monopolies. businesses to create and exploit monopolies whenever they have the opportunity, but that is why we have, and need to enforce, antitrust legislation. The software industry, if anything, has a greater need for protection of market recall reporters so viciously going after one of their own. One answer is that Brill has gone a long way toward turning off the golden spigot of leaks from to breach the inky wall of silence that largely protects reporters from being subject to the same rules of exposure they expect everyone else to live by. enough to disclose the sources of the information in a story; Brill also should whose input, he chose to focus on Brill. What are his hidden motives? The other Circuit Court of Appeals about the scope of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure Supreme Court takes up this issue, it is that court's rulings that bind him, regardless what the rulings may be in other circuits. Brill, who trained as a that they are collectively above criticism and that Brill has violated a taboo. their egos were punctured by even an intimation that the press was in the wrong aren't we? Two separate, exhaustive shots posted simultaneously? accountability, the establishment media have the biggest glass jaw in the proves it. Brill (or Drudge) tootles along and everyone in the prove the "professionals" deserve all the scrutiny anyone else can muster. part of the revolution, not the establishment. If you join the Old Guard aboard the "torpedo Content before anyone's even read the piece in question" years of public criticism of the press could not. Now someone has done unto you writer took a look at a few recent issues before typing. We call this we're surprised the false description got past your editors. readers to come to their own conclusions. Check out the to congratulate you on your fine sense of humor. In "Getting Buggy Wit It," values the offline stores at next to nothing. There's an alternative explanation. My wife and I have been regular customers of Amazon, but we telephone calls that we had to exchange before finally obtaining a book, the experience left us more determined to shop with Amazon. More importantly, my offline version, thereby rationalizing the Street's valuation. was not leaking to me; he was not telling me what to write or say on had asked if we could get together for a private and personal conversation to we should find a spot where he would run no risk of catching flak by being seen she would seize the chance to misrepresent our conversation as something embarrassed, for having concocted a fantasy to serve her partisan agenda. thing happened in dentistry in the late 1960s and 1970s. With increased government funding for training dentists, the nation got more dentists just in time for the full effect of fluoridated water to kick in. The result: thousands of unemployed or underemployed dentists through the late 1970s and early with uses the term "nigger" to describe each other or any other black person determine that "since it has become a common phrase of salutation and even endearment among blacks, a high proportion of its current usage is in fact as a comment sounds like amusing irony, it is in reality a dangerous assumption based on very little (if any) actual experience with people who have had the offensive term used to describe them. It is a propagation of the myth that if black people would just respect themselves, they would receive respect from meets my approval as an appropriate word to use to describe a human being. better or for worse, grow into their appearance, coming to look on the outside as someone who is "not to be believed." It would be very easy for me to say, piously, that I would have sacrificed my job rather than make the recordings, her ability to support them. What would people think of a mother who sacrificed conversation and hold it in reserve for that dark moment when her veracity was gratuitously, to get the ball, which wasn't moving much, rolling." Bedfellow," I can tell you that he has been a distant and ineffective economic development of our district. While I admire his championship of the arts and the environment, these do little concrete for the vast majority of physically infirm. He misses more votes than all but a handful of contact with his district and made only token campaign appearances. He refused to oppose him as traitors and thought of himself as congressman by divine personally enriched himself at the expense of his constituents and his couch his ideas, he was nonetheless a member in good standing in the wine table." When he was writing his Phenomenology of Spirit, despite his very reaction in the 1820s, he surprised his students sitting at the table with him of the students quite understanding just what called for such a lavish outlay on the old fellow's part, he astonished them even more by raising his glass and facts just plain wrong. Usually it's in the last paragraph, and it's usually some flippant remark that would be witty if it were only true. there that home ownership is an investment in society, the bedrock of was dashed when he greeted her return with the news that he had purchased a admiring the balls of a publication that ran the headline "Who gives a f*** about the yen?" last week and had already used the phrase "holy shit" upward of five times in the opening paragraphs, when I happened upon this sentence: ass" and "bites X in the ass" because they are colorful, evocative phrases; hilarious and because they don't evoke particularly vivid mental images of asses any longer. Or at least, less than they used to. to get at is: I don't think the phrase "spread its legs" has quite entered the for the average reader. (Then again, we have seen the rise of "suck" in its legs," that's exactly what I think of, and for me, there is something inherently unpleasant in having my gender's chief sexual activity thrown up on the electronic page as an analogy for submissiveness. Human reproduction pretty as an example of how the phrase "spread its legs" has become so prevalent as to have mostly lost its primary meaning; I think sex deserves better than to be role during sex interpreted as one of whorish submission. politics taken to an extreme." If only one couple does it, it will have little choice because you should be able to rise above principle to send your kids to Many of the opponents of school choice send their kids to private school, even then telling everyone we are running out of resources and everyone were only one white, affluent couple sending its child to private schools while decrying school choice for others, that would be one thing. For an entire political class to engage in this behavior is a national disaster. Perhaps that entire analysis. Exactly what is "soft focus" about the bank teller who gets Godfather pictures as a "daydream of limitless wealth and power" is even is right that in many ways the Godfather pictures (especially Part wrong in his reasons why. In fact, it's the older gangster pictures that al. There's nothing romantic about the criminal violence depicted in the "But I have now seen many hundreds of these boards, bearing the remnants of some recent group meeting, and I cannot recall ever seeing anything on them been part of a team developing a OO plan for a software project? Have you ever the white boards you've seen were spied while you were escorted about by PR flacks or techs and suits on a PR mission. They were all sort of nervous because you're a celebrity writer. They gave you free meals. Am I right so never seen a white board used in real technical development, have you? You don't really know what you're talking about, do you? The fact that what you've you because it's all in fun, right? And not really important, true? Just to personal opinion would be that people give so many technical presentations in formal and informal settings, where every other sentence or clause starts with forced labor without hope for education, decent child care, or a better future. been deregulated. Subscribers engage one another in debate, discussing news and cultural happenings and even trading gardening tips. To wit, a selection of last week's hottest topics. And of course, you can always jump right into the possibly tainted testimony. The possibility that outside forces (notably naturally, chafed at the notion that they might be sidetracked in their dogged most intense debate ever. The topic: Does language influence culture? By week's end, the lines had been drawn, with two opposing camps staking out their turf believe that language influences culture even as culture influences language; the other side avers it doesn't. The debate should segue nicely into next first to apologize to him for slavery. Affirmative action was debated, as was divisions or just lead to even more problems? But the biggest firestorm erupted slow start, the "Higher Education" thread got a shot in the arm when one high schools: Are high schools the best place for them? Should some programs be emerged: the issue of exit exams in higher education. Which states use them, and in what fields are students tested? The focus has now shifted to The Bell Curve and its discussion of the needs of gifted students. best Christian of the century. This question tapped an ongoing battle between interesting posts in the "Movies and Television" thread. To illustrate their from the familiar to the obscure. This led to some on just what belongs on a list of favorite films. Other topics this week: What makes a sex symbol sexy, reply to my recent letter to the editor. Responding to my suggestions that would have learned that the "Flick of the Week" is not an endorsement and can be a positive or a negative review; the current "Flick of the Week" gets only two stars. We have not appeared on a program named Sneak Previews since does not reply to my observation that most of the critics he mentions have given negative reviews to most of the films he says we praised. cheek, that we allow the president of the United States, after he leaves president] keeps us out of war through policies that make the world more president makes the world (including the United States) a more dangerous place, but the United States remains a safer place relative to the rest of the world? Even though the United States would be safer than other places, and thus him in history. Presidents who do a good job are remembered favorably; those who do not are not. This is not always true, of course. Sometimes when a president does a terrible job we just name an airport after him. The plan I proposed not only gives the president an incentive to make the United States better, it also gives him an incentive to make the rest of the world worse. So I should not have proposed it. After all, we wouldn't want to deter future presidents from emulating great achievements like, say, freeing substantive and interesting article posted. How about stopping publishing so much of this drivel and hiring people to write intelligent, interesting work on continues in anything like its present form, I certainly won't be renewing my subscription. You'll continue to have an audience of not the only one obsessed with presidential sex. In its latest edition, physical evidence that may confirm he had consensual sex with former White the national press, you seek to elevate what you call this "Flytrap" flap to nothing but a flyspeck when compared with presidential scandals of the past. press, it has become a "major story" that threatens to undermine the valuable woman's right to choose, making improvements in our education system a top By then, maybe the editors will have had time for a few cold showers, and rather than dwelling on sex you'll be ready again to write about national and international political issues of greater significance. dispatches are just great. However, his suggestion in "Give It Away, dozen different ways, but the fact remains that because of the financial liability to your parent company you decided not to publish a story that your training and experience as journalists indicated was important and ought to be several of her comments about my work, I am nevertheless indebted to her for taking up some of the questions I raised about Holocaust scholarship in the consider some of the things being written about the Holocaust by feminist scholars to be offensive, even shocking, I have never suggested answering them with censorship or anything of the sort. I am only in favor of subjecting them beyond discussion. I made it quite clear in Commentary that I favor serious research and teaching about the Holocaust in a university setting, and I have never suggested otherwise. I do, however, oppose the propagation of want to see how memory of the Holocaust is being twisted in the service of a contemporary political cause should turn to the August issue of Commentary and examine some of the passages I quote from the writings of She is hardly a marginal academic in a fringe institution; in fact, she occupies one of the most important positions in the field. little troubled and perplexed by the charge that I engage in distortion. In the obscure feminist source and repeating it "throughout" my piece for rhetorical effect. She also suggests, without elaborating, that I have committed other And I hardly drew it from a hard to find source. I was citing a basic text, a the Holocaust referenced in virtually every book on this subject. I hope I am not being "shrill" in pointing out that this journal is readily available in welcome credibility in its rulings if she were also to make a habit of being to censor anybody and was only exercising his right as a critic to damn entire should think about the language he uses when he does damn entire fields of ghetto from his criticisms) "execrable," "one of the worst excesses" of Holocaust studies, and "nakedly ideological"? It is true that he only uses genocide, we are being told on every side, is not so much mainstream as really mean to compare women writing about women who died in the camps with "a narrow cult living somewhere on a commune and insisting on a macabre sisterhood as it may seem to a journalist writing outside the academy, attacks as the funding, tenuring, and acceptance of scholars under attack. Just ask any literature professor how quickly English, French, and German departments flushed out their theory mavens once deconstruction became a dirty word. Or try has made a laughingstock of the field. Not that these particular movements and Slate behind them, to pause for a deep breath before we relegate entire categories of scholarship to the dustbin of intellectual weekend because, prior to reading your review of Snake Eyes in "Trigonometry," I had planned to see the actual movie version, and now I needn't bother. Your review not only told me I would hate the ending but gave such detailed descriptions of half the shots in the film that I was left with the feeling I had already seen the entire thing. All I need now is a CD of the music and a bag of popcorn. Your writing has the power to evoke strong visual images in the mind's eye and for that very reason I feel you should show restraint when reviewing a film early in its release. I found myself thanking the celluloid syntax better than the usual dumb adjectives. I didn't give away any plot surprises; read the review in the New York Times if you want to know otherwise friendly audience pissed off. See Snake Eyes next weekend and convicting one innocent person. He is right to try to quantify the costs, but system that allows a significant probability of convicting innocent people is that it allows unscrupulous prosecutors to become petty tyrants. Will you stand up to an official who can put you at significant risk of conviction with a do if your neighbor threatens to frame you for some crime, and you know the only the cost to innocent people of going to jail but also the cost in liberty when they must cave in to threats of slander or malicious prosecution. system, where innocent parties routinely cave in to threats of lawsuits. magazine in general has been from people in the mainstream media who were clearly part of the system I was writing about and, thus, responded fall into that category and deserve to be taken seriously, I thought I should for themselves if the magazine is "boring," a knock that reminds me of lawyers' ours. We blast faxed the piece to every major (and minor, I think) press leaked grand jury information depends on one's definition of grand jury disagrees with that. No mistakes? How about the stained dress? Or the president that quote. That happens with reporters a lot. But, interestingly, she didn't first story. My notes have her saying exactly that and then saying it again the course of narrating that first weekend of the "scandal." When I later asked when I talked with him about the tapes. And it's a big part of why with its first story. In retrospect, though, it would have been fairer and all clear that the president had instructed her to lie. Nonetheless, I think point) could have heard those tapes or briefed reporters about them. So I don't think it's "intellectually dishonest" to say that this information must have reports, and the crux of the reports was what was supposedly on these is kind of refreshing in the sense that it's so different from the "everyone wrong. There are no court decisions in the relevant jurisdiction that support "sources" that don't say how many sources or what ax they might have to grind. be named, enough identification should be supplied so that the reader knows the a Times person as the source and correctly identifies the potential bias. Now, go back and read my description of all the truly blind "sources" in the article, and see if you can tell the difference. knew would cover political stuff and politicians), I haven't made any contributions to anyone, let alone the president (to whom, again, I made one of our magazine and proud of this piece. Prouder, in fact, now than when we published it, because nearly two weeks later everyone who could take a shot at sequence (the Journal decided not to wait for comment from the White gratuitous adjectives that I now wouldn't. There may be more, and if there is I will be the first to concede it. But I hope my willingness to admit mistakes than my piece was. Several of his points, however, demand a reply. The only thing that's clearly illegal is leaking out of the grand jury room. were "no mistakes." I wrote that Brill didn't document any significant error of declined comment on her sources except for the one she revealed. But there's at least a plausible alternative explanation for where much of this information could have come from. As I say, it would have been only fair to question of what's illegal is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court, which will consider lower court precedents from various jurisdictions. right "that doesn't exist on the left today." Actually, similar machinery has existed on the left for years. It runs from the liberals in Congress to the liberals in the statehouse to the liberals on the bench to the liberals on the universal use of accepted terms such as "extreme right" to describe any given idea that emanates from the conservative end of the spectrum. It includes broad opposition to the slightest bit of reform that might impact the access of trial lawyers to the money machine of our tort system. It includes attack dog opposition to any and all school reform that does not result in massive amounts of additional money for the teachers' unions. And so on and so on. has for years started opposing things in tandem the moment the handwriting appeared on the wall. Their opposition has always included near uniformity, conservatives employing this often successful tool perfected by the left. the United States is the most powerful country in the world. It is also true that its erstwhile rival has collapsed rather utterly. However, even the merest scenario has been played out over hundreds of years: The wars were always the exceptions. It is also worth pointing out that the United States has actually declined in relative economic importance since World War II. was responsible for nearly half the gross world product. However, today, even to me that the world as a whole is an awful lot more interdependent than it further. Based on the available evidence so far, this abortion of a intellectual dishonesty and reporting at its shabbiest. cents per minute, day or night. In real terms, average airline coach fares are once was, and the service may or may not be better, but to me, this is easily "Manning the Hospital Barricades" with interest. I understand his generally work very hard. (The question of whether a lot of what they do is really necessary or appropriate is debatable, as it is for all specialties.) The "virtue" and responsibility aspect are more problematic. There is the blesses the operation and is allowed to share responsibility, despite the fact that the note is rarely read and the recommendations are often ignored. that is not unheard of is to hustle the patient of a failing operation out of for your medical jokes (not original). How do you hide something from an some exposure to a segment of society of which few people are aware. Across the nation (and, to a lesser extent, around the world) are a handful of people whose passion for birds in particular, and the magnificence of living things in general, holds them apart from the rest of society. They surrender to years of poverty. They don't watch much television. And the study of animals demands that they go where the animals live and put up with what the animals put up thorns; poisonous plants; days or weeks without showers; steep, rugged terrain; a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been caused by prior which, according to relativity theory, is not a "thing" but a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through it, the cause of center of any black hole, according to modern physics, is also a singularity. So, does each and every black hole in the universe also it, "prior physical processes" could not have created them either? should probably know better than to publish an essay aimed starts out that way, though he ultimately contents himself with the existence explanation is rather convoluted. Let me see if I can find a simpler way to present his view. Suppose that our position in time is represented by a first moment: if we're at time t, then time t/2, which is unequal to t, lies in our past. There you go: a universe with no beginning but a finite age. Great War (or World War I). He was placed in a zoo for safekeeping when the jelly is not a sauce but a jelly. You spread jelly on bread, like that piece of with beef and put gravy on it, so I don't know what bread you spread your mint I should have provided: The book's a fine read, if not a rollicking one. The of a book called Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in more knowledgeable friends to be a substantial contribution to the history of lots of things you hadn't known, you'll think about makeup in a new way, and you'll be spared the ranting about the evils of consumerism that so often accompanies social histories of women, beauty, and fashion. married because their federal taxes would skyrocket. He might want to check his arithmetic and reconsider. However lamentable the "marriage penalty" may be, ineligible for that credit.) But one suspects this is not the example that day care." He must have found a bargain rate. The actual penalties in this case Football Caucus"). The last thing we need is unrealistic and idealistic people voting their consciences. We need people who can play the game and get that he has been revealed as a "traitor" by selling satellite technology to wondered what was so wrong with the society in Brave New World and materialism, but others took exception to such a pessimistic view of life: "We return of the "Music" thread. It began with a request for participants to list their favorite rock or world music albums of the past five years. Discussions covered the merits of dance as a social and recreational activity ("facile" or "spiritual"?), and of rhythm in music ("fascist"?), as well as commentary on economic and philosophical arguments supporting rewards for results vs. rewards innate ability and inherited wealth should not be determinants of future economic opportunity. The week ended with a discussion of the economic rationale for employers paying people for both effort and performance (outcomes) in an environment of imperfect information and joint production. at the hands of the "Reading" thread, which was so civilized that participants the day's big issues. To wit, a selection of some of the forum's liveliest News interview as essentially truthful; defenders wondered if Burton was merely projecting. Meanwhile, the discussion over who's really in Constitution and definitions of personal and religious freedom. Also debated: were right, after all." Will the social sciences fall under the combined weight Sound and the Fury was the subject of the new "Reading" thread this discussion ranged from novices to experts; they included a teacher who shared her experience of introducing the novel to students and an author who has Walking Out on the Boys kicked off debate in the new "Sexual Harassment" thread: Is a single pass by a superior sexual harassment, or is a pattern of with someone who was honestly attracted to me and took 'no' for an answer than someone who may or may not be honestly attracted to me but wants to cow me in thread was on a roll. The discussion on language and culture moved to the need took the prescriptivist position: People must be told how to use the language Tosh, said the opposition. All language needs to do is communicate one's meaning clearly. The mavens are fools to fight the "tide of language underway in the "Person of the Century" thread, which, created before the recent Time magazine survey, aims to identify, once and for all, the person who has most influenced the century. Visit the voting site to register to post a statement on what is appropriate in the workplace. inspired reactions from both sides of the table, ranging from "Yes, that's exactly it" to incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage." would agree that if there ever was a disputatious intellectual culture, it was volumes ("What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate"). library's books are perfect, their typeface is elegant and eminently readable are of a thickness that affords pliability and easy separation while maintaining economy in bulk and weight. One of the many marvels of the series is that vast collections of authors' works are assembled in volumes so moral statements can be reduced to psychology, as if the disapproval of murder were just another human taste like the preference for sweet over bitter foods. logic of morality that is outside our minds in the same sense that our number sense evolved to grasp mathematical truths that are outside our minds.) mathematical truths and moral truths is that grasping the former provides an obvious survival advantage. We should expect an evolved number sense to discern mathematical truths fairly well; we should not be so optimistic about the evolutionary process will favor those moral intuitions that best spread the is high flattery for one of us, but it is inaccurate. I usually come up with my Security?" takes at face value claims that if retirement insurance funds are invested in private securities, a continuing rate of return well above that true in the past, and should continue to be for some years yet, the argument almost certainly will break down precisely when the money would be required. The rise in the stock market in recent years has been in no small part due to baby boomers' accelerating investment of their retirement funds there (see, for Syndrome" on the effects of excess money on Wall Street). However, when occur as the supply of people who must sell begins to outstrip the number of people wishing to buy at a historically high cost. The first to retire might enjoy considerable returns on their investments, but those at the trailing end of the baby boom might see their gains disappear while the market Social Security funds in the market only makes these effects worse, as that money must at some point be withdrawn, no matter what, to meet obligations (similar arguments might be applied to bonds, real estate, or anything else Social Security money might be invested in). Some form of privatization might behind. Any prudent plan to invest Social Security funds in private markets must have some way to address these risks; none that I know of do. inner workings of my heart as it relates to tax rates for married couples, Rob latter. I do know, however, that my numbers have a source that has nothing to knowledgeably characterizes without ever having been introduced. tripe over and over from the pen of a writer who once appeared on her way to being a great poet and gave it all up to write a single column, over and over, explain the fact that no hush money was raised or paid as a result of the March comments about raising money were the operative (as they used to say) part of library, of course am one) stress that the president said it would be wrong and that (if memory serves) "the White House can't do it." Seems that the only way to resolve such ambiguity is to see what actually happened as a result of the former track wannabe and somebody with several postgraduate degrees, I took only one criterion on which to judge road racing: time posted. You cannot argue about home field advantage, equipment differences, or help from teammates. You are arguing there is only one criterion (because it is precisely analogous) for determining a good college student: SAT scores. In a road race you look to see who finished first, and in determining who is eligible for race entry, you go by the unbiased clock. subsidized by health plans, and the sixth paragraph says that slightly more than half of all birth control pills are," there isn't really any bias, and to you that you are overlooking a key fact in this statistic and that is the amount of time it took to get each of those plans to subsidize the drug in that in that short space of time, it has already reached approximately the same politics than about legal history. He states, "The question whether regulation of commerce is a state or national affair was supposed to have been settled in assumed the states would govern the economy. Nineteenth century common law antitrust cases. Federal antitrust suits could not exist until Congress enacted remained. Since the Constitution only permitted the national government to regulate "commerce," whole areas of economic life were outside federal Supreme Court did not enable wholesale federal intervention by defining course, the fact that state prosecutions have a long history does not mean they certain why he finds diverse legal climates so disturbing. Are we to discount such antitrust prosecutions because the attorneys general are ambitious? This seems a mighty high standard for any policy. Though it may be inefficient, I think it reasonable that each locality can set the legal conditions of its own "The International Scene" was the hottest thread in "The Fray" this role in the unrest: Does the fund and its "economic groupies have something big "She certainly has a right to speak without being accused of wearing the pants sexual encounter for a bonobo a) occurs with a member of the same sex and b) Life" thread, which has discussed everything from genetics to friendships to prejudice. Is homophobia innate or a repressive cultural construct? Should gays be accorded equal rights by law in all respects, including social sociobiological and historical realities are irrelevant to gay rights.") Should into of their writing? Is it reasonable to assume a person is straight until inspired a new "Conspiracies" thread, with testimonials from "basement wackos" questioning why secret societies remain secret, what constitutes conspiratorial thought, and what differentiates the aforementioned wackos from legitimate raised questions on Abstract Expressionism and nonrepresentational art in general in the "Arts" thread. about art and art history to be able to bad; just that there is more bullshit attached to such paintings than others." 's work to be analytically sound and faithful to the facts. dead wrong. Heroin is criminal because it is deadly, not vice versa. The vast majority of heroin addicts, criminality aside, cannot adequately sustain themselves in society. For this reason, heroin maintenance programs in salary, housing, medical care, and in many cases even a dog and money to support the dog. Why? Because these addicts cannot hold down a job, and for won't use this deadly drug. To this end, one of the other ads in the National begins to strip away her makeup. She ages before your eyes, becoming increasingly haggard and ill looking. Finally, she removes her artificial just how glamorous heroin use is not. This is real life. references to marijuana are medically inaccurate. Take a look at recent medical regular marijuana user shows that marijuana changes the chemistry of the brain to render vast sections of the brain less active. Moreover, marijuana smoke contains countless known carcinogens, and the lung smoking of marijuana to into your body. (Smoking just five or more joints a day produces the same lung there. Babies born to mothers who smoke marijuana during pregnancy have an from the literature on employee marijuana use is its association with increased absenteeism. It is also associated with increased accidents, higher turnover, low job satisfaction, counterproductive behavior, withdrawal and antagonistic behaviors, and higher use of employee assistance programs and medical misunderstands the current ad campaign. The author says the campaign targets children, and he is right. However, the campaign is also largely focused on adults. One of the core messages of the campaign is that parents and other adult mentors need to talk to children about the real dangers of drug use. young people about the real dangers of drug use. Unfortunately, for all his couching language ("Drugs can be awful") and care, the author is part of the problem, not the solution. Inaccuracies like those discussed above, which downplay the dangers in drug use, send our young people mixed messages and increase distrust. Against this backdrop it is easy for young people to not buy the facts about drugs. The bottom line is: We can disagree about policies in a democracy; however, our disagreements should be based on facts. This article not facts, and his assumptions are misleading. While his claims of increased child cancer rates have been refuted (see the excellent Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts for a debunking of the study that produced this figure and "employee marijuana use," each of those effects (increased absenteeism, increased accidents, higher turnover, low job satisfaction, etc.) will show up tenfold in relation to employee alcohol use. Without doubt, constant intoxication of any form will hurt one's work capacity. And then this: "Smoking just five or more joints a day produces the same lung diseases as smoking a sure, there are "real dangers" of drug use, just as there are real dangers of alcohol and tobacco use. Let's be honest with our kids about all of them, instead of terrorizing them with exaggerations and lies. Mighty," many other less fortunate persons are either dead or not in a position within our society to be heard. Your attitude makes me sick! practically endorses legalization of heroin and the free use of marijuana among their diatribes against illegal drugs and their resistance to slamming "Big Tobacco." From a perspective you have a point, but I would rather be busy jumping on the bandwagon to tax the crap out of my fellow citizens who smoke a than use marijuana or heroin. Marijuana alters the brain's chemistry to produce hallucinogenic effects, while nicotine only satisfies the addiction the smoker's body feels. Would you want the person driving behind you to be high on the influence of nicotine are far less than being high on marijuana. a drug that can kill you on the very first try, and most heroin addicts didn't girlfriend's brother was found dead only a few weeks ago of what has since been determined to have been an overdose of heroin. This was someone who no one would have ever thought to have been a drug user. Personally, I don't give a flip what kind of action anyone takes to warn people against the use of drugs, stupidity in the absoluteness of the "Just Say No" campaign, which insists that drugs and alcohol are completely intolerable in a society where both, especially the latter, are so prevalent. How can we preach such an absolute message to kids all day at school or on television and expect them to ignore our social behaviors every evening? It has become uncomfortable for mom and dad to enjoy a beer or cocktail at the end of the day, lest junior regale them with the evils of drug and alcohol use. What's wrong with a society where supposedly rational adults have to "sneak around" to enjoy a drink within the walls of and Mighty" on the current drug ad campaign. There is no topic today that drug use, while dicey, is an established and unavoidable part of human culture and that dishonesty on this point does no one any good. DO! As a new reader, I have to tell you that I was disappointed in this opener. the big papers use to sell their stuff. But for days now, all you can talk something more interesting to discuss? This can't be the only story. Secret Service's Real Secret," about the extent to which presidential important question: What makes the president's life so valuable? In a democracy, after all, citizens' lives are supposed to be equally valuable. During the Cold War, it was feared that a presidential assassination might set off a nuclear exchange, so by protecting the president, the Secret Service was, at least arguably, protecting us all. But nobody worries about that sort of thing nowadays, and yet the president is more tightly protected than at the height of the Cold War. Perhaps the Secret Service is really protecting its own that he is simply ignorant of the facts of rural life. have a Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund for schools and libraries (dreamed up by a Republican state senator, among others) that antedates the rather expensive databases that few libraries can afford to purchase on their own. The smaller, poorer libraries benefit most, as their communities would deliver this service to our libraries is via the Internet. the past several weeks trying to get any kind of non-800 Internet access local calling area. (Ironically, thanks to the heavy hand of big bad state for these libraries), I asked several times for pricing and conditions back in probably will work quite well in providing good telecommunications in dense urban areas, very little has changed over the past few years in the rural areas circumstances of which he obviously has little firsthand knowledge. His "let them eat cake" attitude is insulting and offensive. it upsetting that someone could so quickly lose faith in the possibility of technological innovation in an industry that has been around for less than six years. While it seems as if all our technological problems would be solved if we simply regulated the industry, let me remind you that it took at least six would frown on the idea of ghettoizing an industry that is only in its produce, the Internet connection cost will remain exorbitant, even with the but ignore the needs of the rural population is absurd. The latest census which these commentators fully agree is that I am a village atheist. They are, recovered memory movement in the New York Review of Books --articles that challenge the empirical credentials of psychoanalysis. See the concluding psychotherapeutic involvement. Nor it is helpful to lump psychoanalysis and by which I mean the general enterprise of helping people talk through their anxieties and face the difficulties in their immediate circumstances. The patient's manifestly perceived problems, beliefs, and feelings are treated as mere "compromise formations" tossed to the surface by deep turmoil that can only be resolved by dredging for repressed memories, Oedipal cravings, and the like. If I am to be deemed a maniac, let's at least try to state correctly what alike deem me insensitive to the depth and complexity of the psyche, and simplifying the mind by presuming sexual and aggressive motives to be invariably primary and by invoking deterministic "mechanisms" that always lead to a few banal and arbitrary causative factors. As my introduction points out, devious and supersubtle mind. Only when we have grasped the full extent of the (1997)--will we be able to talk about motives with an adequate respect for was attained with or without the benefit of accurate clinical observation, defensible drawing of inferences, and encouraging therapeutic results. The answer is: without them. Once that fact has sunk in, a cultural historian can assess the true magnitude of the problem that Unauthorized intellectuals, not excepting journalists in therapy, could have been so "all drug use leads to disaster." Our advertising is based on a breadth of research from which we develop specific campaigns depending on the drug and the demographic we're targeting. There's a huge difference, for example, between fundamental lack of understanding about what our campaign entails. Had he contacted us, we would have been happy to discuss our advertising as well as our research. We would still be open to such a discussion. scrutiny into our advertising campaign and our organization, but here's one suggestion: How about waiting for some results before deciding this can't possibly work, and how about reading the existing research that shows it can Advertising will not solve the drug problem, but done right it can vastly improve the chances for children and teens to stay off drugs. on uncritical movie critics is wrong, I think, to suggest that mainstream critics should ignore blockbusters or dismiss them in a paragraph. Most readers of mass circulation newspapers and magazines are intensely interested in such stupidities being retailed by the filmmakers. He is wrong, too, to say of my favorable review of The Negotiator that I overpraised it in a sentence of an opening paragraph which, if he had quoted it all, would have generalizing from an exception to the rule is an effective but not honorable and that I review more foreign, art, documentary, and indeed films (like that illustrate his point, while remaining deliberately oblivious to reviews by the same critic that would weaken it. The article works only if information that I, for example, disliked it, because that would not help his mentions would also not serve his thesis. If you are going to criticize critics, you have to be a better critic than he is in this essentially their differences from everyone else transcend gender. I have made a couple of OPEN signs. As an artist, though, with a thing for language and how it is transformed by how it is represented, I had been thinking about the power that the blazing OPEN sign has in our culture. To that end, I made an OPEN sign sculpture in which the letter "N" swings from one end of "OPE" to the other, alternately spelling OPEN or NOPE. I only made one small microprocessor designed and programmed to control the swing over when a gear motor turns on and switches the letter position. idea comes from the OPEN sign phenomenon where one might be rushing to the store just before closing time, or maybe during imagined weekend hours, only to find, upon arrival, that one is too late or too early. NOPE! that indie films have been overpraised by critics. Deconstructing Harry that didn't echo a similar, usually superior, shot or sequence in another amazing trio of performances, it's true that the film itself was little more Sweet Hereafter does not, I feel, belong in this group. Though it has flaws of the ending), The Sweet Hereafter has none of the insufferable this case is necessary, and the fact that we are never given a final solution they are reliable entertainers. Sometimes that's enough. of lambasting studios for abandoning artistic principles in favor of the in favor of their own. He doesn't quite have the courage to say The Big poetic homage, for sure, since the two writers exemplify the stylistic divide of his dead wife, he writes under her stylistic regime. And that makes use sexist anecdotes these days? Surely you can find alternatives to being too young writers who make things up. It does, just as it protects magazines from old writers who get things wrong, no matter how many years they've been at it. When someone reports a complicated story for many weeks or even months, stuff the job of the editor to try to separate what is clearly not true from what may or may not be. Beyond that, the fact checker is a safety net. Anything the editor doesn't catch, the checker does, from misspelled names to lapses in fact checking "department" that Jack describes did not exist. In fact, having come from a magazine that rigorously fact checks every word of every story, I had several conversations with fellow editors about why such a system wasn't in late '80s, and it mocked the very notion of fact checking as unnecessary and writer following last week's revelations. It's a small, small world.) Heaven" story if the subject of the story wasn't called and the company he worked for wasn't contacted. Simply consulting the writer's notes ain't fact has become clear that almost everything about it was inexcusably wrong: suspect data, mistakes in statistical procedures that would have flunked a is true, it misses the most interesting aspect of that very bad book: Viewed solely on the technical merits, The Bell Curve is no worse than many more reputable examples of social science research. Many of the mistakes made spectrum. The public policy literature is filled with confused causal modeling and the use of flimsy, though grandly named, variables such as "socioeconomic are hardly alone in presenting sweeping policy conclusions based on the narrow correlations found in one limited data set. It is only the largeness of the employed. This book masquerades as reputable social science, which it is not. However, the ease with which The Bell Curve assumes this guise may be as The author's claim that she "backed down" from that number in later interviews preliminary investigation of her charges, to refer them to the Justice have referred the matter to the Justice Department. Post that the estimates she gave Salon were imprecise and last point: My brief piece made it amply clear that Hale was thick with the enjoys reading this stuff, I would like to see an expansion of this area. I which is sort of similar, but couldn't you have both? should take a breath. Who doesn't go through everyday life and see things that disturb one's aesthetic sense? Our culture is a sloganeering one. Why should learned to desensitize ourselves to the crass underbelly of organized religion. My daughter comes home from school and tells me that other kids have come up and others who get to make fun of them. Fair trade. offended by the article "Onward, Christian Clothiers," even though I am not religious. The idea that someone wearing their religion on their sleeve is someone to be finally coming out of the closet, so to speak. Articles like this one invite basketball," "bitch on wheels," etc.) but finds it necessary to tee off on evangelical Christian apparel. Why do overtly Christian messages bother him so that the only time liberals get excited about censorship is when it comes to Clothiers": I often wonder if the peddlers of religious schlock have actually read any Scripture beyond the gory "here's hell in your face" Land has been a tad, shall we say, excessive. It was bad enough that the is. But I suspect many agree with me that Brown's job change is essentially an motives matter in the context of either the investigation of the president or president's accuser. She has passed along tape recordings that (allegedly) she's bad. Maybe you or I would not tape a friend, or maybe we think that making the tapes are irrelevant to the charges against the president. While I into our debate over whether the president perjured himself or encouraged others to do so shows the effectiveness of the White House spin doctors. debate over the limits of friendship when confronted with (potentially) (the pronunciation was the same) was simply "drunk" spelled backward. enough time socializing. This was in sharp contrast to the stereotypical frat boys, who, in a time when the word "party" was exclusively a noun, would consume excessive amounts of alcohol as part of their recreational activities. The two campus archetypes were considered to be such polar opposites that the rule on his belt. The stereotype was so pervasive and pejorative that even at seen evidence of this usage and spelling in old campus humor magazines dating back to the '40s and '50s. I don't have any explanation for the current to miss the roots, so to speak, of the not quite blond bombshell phenomenon! stories and labels them "new." While it's true that recycling generally means finding a new use for something previously used, to slap a "new" label on a story written a year or more ago takes a certain bending of reality. Is this a Century Military" that "Reserve ground combat units at the brigade level and above cannot be maintained at any reasonable level of readiness on a He also implies that it would be impossible to maintain combat readiness in guard units typically conduct their training one weekend each month and two weeks each year. For combat and combat support units, the weekend training is military intelligence battalion in the 1980s, we did useful field training on occasions, most of the time was spent traveling to and from the training areas. The two weeks' annual training was much more useful, but even that gave us at most a week of field training, since there were several days of preparations for the move to the training site and several more days of equipment cleanup guard combat and combat support units should eliminate the weekend drills and instead have a single, one month annual training (AT). The benefits of this preparation and cleanup days could be kept the same. personnel turnover. In a 12-man unit, about every four months we lost a person (due to enlistment expiration) and gained a person. There was no way to set up a stable team to build skills because we constantly had to train someone new in the basic tasks. During AT, the teams could be restructured once, at the beginning, and then remain stable through the remaining portion of dependence of units. Since unit members must go to weekend drills every month, they must be close enough to the reserve center. With a single AT, even personnel from across the state or country could be flown out and back once a note that I am not advocating a change to the training for combat service support (maintenance, personnel, and logistics) units. Many of these units are able to conduct meaningful training on weekend drills, since their training the Internet and its links to depression: Maybe people who use the Internet a lot get depressed because the Internet is just more interesting than their regular lives. They meet people who share their preoccupations, quirks, sense of humor, and sexual fantasies, people who like to argue about politics and in fascinating subjects, and who like to explain them. They can take on a pseudonym and express parts of themselves that they have to repress in their ordinary lives. They can play bridge and chess and mental footsie with people may already have been anxious, bored, dissatisfied with their lives. But they thought that was just the way life was, so when social scientists asked if they were happy, they said, "Sure." After a year on the Net, they know it doesn't this: Despite the apparent oddity of the home run ball case, not one of these horrified public servants has shown why it isn't a perfectly straightforward application of the gift tax. So shouldn't they rethink the whole idea? is a straightforward application of the tax code not to tax the gift of the ball, since there is no income to the person giving the ball away. Since the person who caught the ball gave nothing to receive the ball and received there is no "realizing event" that would trigger taxation. People are only taxed on income that is actually received, otherwise you would pay income tax on the increased value of your home every year (you only pay when you returned it, and received nothing in return, I have nothing to tax. If I fill in my name and cash it, I pay tax. If I fill in the name of my best friend and he cashes it, he pays income tax, and the person who signed the check (not me, since I am simply the conduit and never received any benefit) pays gift expect and am paying for serious attempts to assess what happened and what the consequences might be. Leave the idiotic romance novel accounts to others. Romance," should get a grip. Adultery by one's parents, even necessarily the public disclosure of the adultery, it is the fact of the generally a good sign that all is not well in the homestead; ergo, the fact of adultery tells us the family is suffering. Therefore, the child is probably healthy shame, sound a lot like the greatest hits from a sophomore philosophy seminar. Clever? Sure. But of any real value or connection to real people in manipulate our emotions. These are potentially dangerous times. This country in a few articles (such as "An Innocent Romance") I have noticed the use of the term "bonk" to refer to the act of sexual intercourse, especially in reference terminology. As a college student familiar with all the latest urban lingo, I believe the proper term to be used in these contexts is "boink." Not only does the word itself sound more fluid, but I also think the connotation it has is Trashy Books") brought back fond memories of The Report of the administration, Supreme Court decisions permitted some "obscene" materials to be distributed only if they were combined with other matters that had "redeeming social value." The publication of a government document called like that, presented an opportunity to sell the smut under an appropriate cover. The illustrated edition included the full government report and garden quality was poor, with a mimeographed text and low quality photographic reproductions as well, which didn't match the text very closely. With modern technology, so much more can be done. The video of the president's testimony will also lend itself to interstitial illustration. copy of the "illustrated edition" was lost in a college dorm long ago and far away. Perhaps one could be found at the Library of Congress? to questions so as to better agree with what they perceive to be the majority ensure that his job approval remains high. This phenomenon could unravel in a similar way to that described in the article: As the polls drop a little, the pressure to agree with the majority decreases, and the numbers have the potential to drop precipitously. It would be difficult to determine which of Is Nice" misses the point. Legal gambling is a good idea, since people will gamble in any case. The state should regulate gambling as it regulates other businesses, seeing that the odds are posted, that the games who want to do so free to waste their money gambling if they please. But lotteries, or sponsors them and takes a large cut of the take, as in casino gambling. By running the games, the state endorses the dubious value of "something for nothing." Worse still, it deceives the people: Instead of unrealistic chance of winning big. (The ads for every state lottery prove that point.) The state treats people not as citizens it serves and protects but as partners of the gambling interests, they would apply the same consumer protection standards to legal gambling that they do to other businesses. As it is, they connive in the deception of the public, because they share the like to know if Chapman would favor privatizing gambling, so that anyone who put up proof of the ability to pay off the pot could run a lottery, casino, or whatever. That would take the government out of the gambling business both ways. And I am sure that in that case, the government would make sure not only that the games are honest but also that the people knew how long lottery business, repealing special gambling taxes, and leaving the whole business to the free market. But I would not let the best be the enemy of the inns today provide clothes to travelers. All patrons are offered light cotton robes, which can be worn around the hotel and in the surrounding neighborhood. Heavier robes are provided in winter. Traditionally, the wearer would wear his own traveling clothes to the inn. The clothes would be given over to be cleaned, and the traveler would use the inn's clothes during his stay. When the traveler left, he would again wear his own traveling clothes, which have been with just one set of clothes, which would be washed regularly. that hotels are interested in having customers walk off with their clothes, as customer with a set of clothes while he's staying at the hotel. For example, a business traveler could arrive at the hotel wearing a suit. The hotel would provide casual clothes, and also underwear, socks, dress shirts, undershirts, ties, etc. The business traveler would wear his own suit to business events, perhaps paired with the hotel's shirts, socks, and ties. At the end of the trip, the traveler would receive his own clothes back, now laundered, for the trip home or to the next destination. Admittedly, providing women's clothes, which are more complex, presents a slightly greater challenge. But this method would make it possible to travel indefinitely carrying nothing more than a paperback and a credit card. The hotel, which is assured of getting its own (erratic spelling, shaky grammar, much exposure of genitalia), I feel strongly obsessed, like the rest of you media types, with pubic matters, or perhaps we as a nation have finally entered adolescence, with a concomitant increase in sentence that contains the word "pubic" must also contain either the word my subscription until I realized that to do so would mean that I would not have Agency!") would like us to believe that the reason clients are jettisoning their advertising agencies is because the agencies don't know how to market themselves. In fact, much more has changed than meets the eye. his ad agency, corporations looked at ad agencies as marketing consultants. They would approach an agency and basically say: "Here's our product. How do we sell it?" Consequently, agencies were able to attract the top marketing talent And, because clients expected elite services from their agencies, they were willing to pay the high salaries such professionals demand. consulting firms realized that ad agencies had tapped a lucrative market in schools. Suddenly, ad agencies were faced with substantial competition for one of their basic services. Eventually, they were no longer able to compete for fair to characterize this shift as a "marketing problem." I think it was a fundamental shift in thinking on the client side. Agencies had been seen as marketing partners. Now they're seen as service vendors, not unlike any other have the sad situation where most marketing decisions are made long before ad agencies get involved. Typically, the client calls an agency and says: "Here's the strategy. Execute it as cheaply as possible." That's a big change. highest levels and must prove themselves to one another by being bright, competent, and able to handle lesser people in their circle. Having done so, they finally agree to marry but with stipulations: She has privacy, freedom to pursue her own life and friends, control over money, etc. The deal is struck her peers for landing the rake and he wins by landing the filly who was known but kinda warmed over and unsatisfying. I count on you guys for instant quicker when you were free. After anteing up last month to subscribe I still the use of the airplanes' autopilots. What exactly do autopilots The autopilot is an electronic system that manipulates the three "control surfaces" that determine an airplane's course: the movable panels, called ailerons, on the back of each wing that allow the plane to bank right or left; the tail rudder, which turns the aircraft's nose; and the elevators, which point the plane up or down. The instrument readings and radio signals from fixed points on the ground to figure out what adjustments are needed to meet the flight plan. If a human is in command, he or she must make the changes by hand; with the autopilot engaged, Autopilots have several advantages. Primarily, they help keep the crew from getting tired, leaving them free to alter the flight plan, scout for traffic, and monitor the plane's other systems (like hydraulics and air pressurization). Autopilots also improve fuel efficiency and passenger comfort, since the adjustments made by an autopilot are more subtle and accurate than That's why autopilots are typically engaged on commercial aircraft throughout nearly the entire flight. When human pilots take cues, to land the plane.) Pilots also take command in turbulence since an autopilot would waste fuel and possibly exacerbate the bumps by making many adjustments to keep the plane on a steady course. If a pilot doesn't disengage outside forces and instructs the autopilot to work against them. have to read a 25-page analysis of my various journalistic indiscretions in bathroom without washing their hands, etc. Instead, we get pots calling kettles black; and not just pots but rich and powerful pots with rich and powerful conflicts of interests that drive Brill nuts are inevitable. Media mergers and we're obligated to disqualify ourselves from covering companies or people a) we do business with, b) we have a personal relationship or history with, or c) are Where Brill goes wrong is in failing to distinguish between the most innocuous have and should have been avoided. In the former category, I put, say, And I won't even mention the sort of logrolling that routinely goes on in the weekly political magazine that shall remain nameless. But not shameless. Into the latter category, alas, I must also put at least one of your current employers (which each seem to be piece of a big, honking conglomerate, as is minefield, she's charging down the middle, ignoring the explosions to her left and right. What I don't admire is her pretending, however energetically, that [insert blonde starlet here] appears on the cover because she's got a movie because it was a cute idea and not because she starred in My Favorite Before I sign off, I must point out my favorite wire story of the week, Wow. I think I might finally be getting the hang of this whatsoever. Just a short note to get the ball rolling this morning: I know this is a national forum and all, but since the other Breakfast Table participants I didn't mention the biggest local news of the week (all right, who am I trying Everybody here is soiling themselves over this development. Actually, all drink out of the backs of their pickups for like six hours, and then the team runs out to like kettle drums and blaring brass bands, and the crowd stomps on the bleachers and they chant fascist propaganda really loud in unison, and paint themselves and scream like apes and dislocate each others knees and people get crushed and everybody pees on each other and throws their feces like in Gorillas In the Mist and then they all go home and get introduction today of safety rules designed to counter repetitive stress billion they'll receive in settlements with the tobacco industry. Most of the will also be spent on completely unrelated areas, such as roads, jails, farm aid, schools, and senior centers. The story quotes the architect of state legal Times leads with a snapshot of the nation's current political Democrats controlling Congress and a Republican in the White House (the stance the paper summarizes as "Times are good, so throw the bums out." sentence, "The Occupational Safety and Health Administration will take the first step today to require many employers to provide work spaces and equipment to support the physical makeup of each individual doing his job."? And the resistance to the rules as the chief cause in their delay, while the somebody from something called Food Distributors International as its source Business Administration, which the paper explains, is an independent government Moreover, the Times has the clearest statement of the dimension of year. (A puzzle arising from reading the stories together: Although the makes the point that the falling crime rate helps police fight crime: lighter says that this sort of lawsuit could ultimately be more of a threat to the company than suits brought by competitors, potentially costing it millions, the "Supreme Court's two most consistently conservative and antiabortion abortions but then immediately cites his remark that in his presidency an his commitment to an overhaul of the Social Security system. The Journal soliciting readers' opinions about the most evil people of all time: Bill Evidence of just how overpaid college coaches are at even "legitimate" Good morning again. It's embarrassing to admit this, but while I was walking coffee all over myself, the characters in excruciatingly unoriginal sitcoms and lame romantic comedies often do. It was pure, unadulterated bad physical comedy at its finest, complete with pinwheeling, flailing arms, and shouts of driven a golf cart into a pool. Passing motorists openly mocked me as they sped by. What's more, after later discovering an unfamiliar set of keys in my pocket, I subsequently realized that apparently, while stumbling around in a So what I want to know is: If time and space are now obsolete (my theory is even more radical, by the way: I think that they always were obsolete) then why do I still have to get up this early to file my copy for movie. I guess by this point I shouldn't have been surprised when the end star with a heart of gold and the wisdom to put his millions where they can do a lot of good. Stipe ought to be picked up and carried around on the shoulders of a crowd of cheering moviegoers in the streets. (On second thought, let's can that idea: He'd probably just get depressed over all the attention.) As regards the daily news: I toweled off my copy of the Times enough at what point exactly do negotiations for reparation payments to veranda and enjoying a nice game of croquet in the garden before the polite conversation suddenly came to an awkward halt? Gee, I hope nobody got figure (voice supplied by Tom Hanks), turns out to be a valuable relic of the to rescue Woody before he's shipped overseas. But Woody is by then uncertain whether he prefers a necessarily short shelf life as a child's toy to your troubles end up being outgrown and cast aside. Existentially, though, it's group identity. That's because Woody would be joined in Japan by various Woody meant to be gazed at behind glass? In the end, the filmmakers fudge on the Woody accessories to come with him), but reject unequivocally the creepy that made both Toy Story movies, is quite obviously very fond of computers. Still, what force in our culture is driving the growing obsession with collectibles? United States? The Web! (Pedants will observe that in the movie, the evil toy thief Al actually conducts his communications with the foreign buyers via cell phone and fax machine, but that's just because the filmmakers don't want to be too overt in challenging the mightiest phenomenon in capitalism today.) In a sprightly New York Times essay last year about collecting, Wonderment came to be perceived as a kind of middle state between ignorance and knowledge, and wonder cabinets were theaters of the marvelous, museums of accumulated curiosities, proving God's ingenuity. They contained whatever was the biggest, the smallest, the rarest, the most exquisite, the within a cherry pit, an armband made of elks' hoofs, mummies and various rare in paperback. But Chatterbox is always surprised to see the wares presented in offense that it has "writing on front fly." Why would Chatterbox care about a little writing on the front flyleaf? Pappy Chatterbox's second novel, because it's a first edition and wrapped in plastic. But Jeez, Chatterbox can all, is to read the thing, not hang it on the wall. Indeed, first editions in pristine condition ought to be less valuable than most books, because it's almost impossible to use them for their intended Sheriff Woody would understand. The Internet doesn't. This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one studies (take your pick of names). The field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a liturgical occasions we now have on the calendar that beg for special schoolchild reports of one sort or another: the King holiday, Black History not every school does all of this, most schools must do some of this. (And this, of course, has nothing to do with the occasional racial killing or major protest that took place or may be taking place somewhere that require a report cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly a great deal of use, to be sold to virtually every school, public, and university library in the country, as well as to a number of churches, to say nothing of the private homes that will have a copy right next to the Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies (politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral imperative.) It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view "the coming of the white man") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of bourgeois books that tend, in the end, not to promote intellectual inquiry on the part of the people who use them but rather to stifle it. Children tend to copy verbatim from such books without ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much serving the and to wrestle with it but to store it as an authority on the bookshelf. But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both white and black, feel bad if people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting or if they have on the blues.) What most thinking people in black studies find dangerous about the middlebrow apotheosis of the field is that it usually leads to the love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or her practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia "a Holy Grail." More triumphalist encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by college campus, a number of reference books about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not by increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of middle class that has demanded more artifacts and objects, more "education" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of important reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly critical importance to the book's audience as a kind of typology about the never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with a black point of view years and the dramatic change in its status. This book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become) and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about "struggle" and I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Chatterbox, a citizen of the United States who has a somewhat limited understanding of how they do things in the United Kingdom, is baffled by the appointed life peers ("day boys"), whose title and membership dies with them. A lively discussion has now begun about how to complete the reform of the House of Lords, which for most of this century has had the power only to delay legislation. The scenarios under consideration tend to emphasize making membership entirely or partially elective, which would make the House of Lords more democratic, and then giving the upper chamber greater power than it currently enjoys. If nothing is done, the House of Lords will persist as a patronage tool for whichever party happens to control the House of Commons. be ruled by an essentially unicameral parliament. Making it unequivocally embraced throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (Click here to read the House of Lords' own compendium of major the talk is drifting in the direction of turning the House of Lords into an streamlined than what it enjoys today? Chatterbox can't imagine why any country that didn't already have a Senate could possibly want one. (Click here to read an excellent recent column by the successful attempt to use his power to filibuster to promote the decapitation The Secret Lives of Citizens [click here to buy the book], which makes an excellent case for First ought to come the point of principle: do you want a hereditary head of state or inherited seats in legislatures? Then and only then does one have a constitutional discussion about which alternative to adopt. Brilliant as they second chamber with almost a hundred "chosen" hereditary peers, and the remainder a bunch of party appointees. Nobody could conceivably have designed such an outcome if they were writing a Constitution. And so of course this ought to have a written document with an appended Bill of Rights. It also was "fine by me, but most big decisions in modern history have been taken without reference to Parliament and so I suppose that one chamber is as easy to which scaled the Lords' power down from being able to kill legislation outright to being able to delay it for two years (reduced to one year in, I think, Several things have happened since then. For one, the relatively toothless post-1911 House of Lords lulled people into thinking it was a good idea to have a delaying or amending chamber as a safeguard against overhasty legislation. For another, a certain amount of bicameral delusion has seeped democratic, but the more democratic legitimacy a second chamber has, the stronger the possibility of gridlock. An appointed second chamber would have less legitimacy, therefore less power, therefore less likelihood of gumming up acknowledge the basic insincerity of the adman's project and which presumably phenomenally aware we are of advertising's attempts to ensnare us. Sprite's "Thirst Is Everything" campaign, with its faux pop songs touting the drink's magical powers, is the most obvious example, and some days it feels as if we're while those he talks to react with a mix of befuddlement and incredulity, peppering him with questions that show that they just don't get what understand what this whole newfangled approach is going to mean, like the guy who tells his broker how much he'll miss her, even as she assures him that the whole brokerage business was to begin with and how potentially damaging the new pricing structure (which includes much lower commissions) will same: The company is offering something incredibly simple and straightforward, I think it makes sense to ask whether people really like being told how obtuse they are, because even if the ads work on some level to inculcate a don't. So this aspect of the ads is genuinely perplexing. Usually, aspirational advertising doesn't include not being stupid as one of the aspirations it's But there is something else going on in these ads, which is that they're essentially a kind of reaction against data smog. The people in these ads have been confused by complicated pricing plans and service agreements with strange restrictions. They've been trained to think that everything will be difficult it's right in front of them. And in some way the ads are saying that simplicity is disorienting because we're too comfortable with complexity. It's like The problem is that this message is so simple that you can only hear it a "It's so simple it's baffling" ads cleverly, because the whole point of the ads being a person who normally thinks of breakfast as something you get at a just how awful it must be for a person to greet each new dawn with the meetings, the way is finally paved for China to enter the World Trade Organization. Everybody seems really happy about this, since it came through at the last minute despite longtime stumbling blocks in the way of such an agreement. Perhaps China threatened to electrocute their testicles and beat their families black and blue if they couldn't push the agreement through? You mentioned yesterday about being filled with repellent hatred and loathing? Yesterday the Journal and today again the Times had Umpteenth Gazillion Straight Week." I realize this is hardly an insightful observation on my part; after all, the same point has been made by any number of commentators before me, including my mother, the guy who works at the liquor store down the street, and virtually every human being who lives in an even swing sets always seem to make an appearance) while muted piano music plays and done with it? Who are they fooling, do they think? It's like the spots were mobilizing the relatives of all those elderly black grandmothers to start down or something. Oh, and regarding your last letter's comment about Gore somehow I don't think it'd work, because that's obviously what Tipper's been has finally made Time magazine." My first impulse was to write back, which lead me to assume that he had to be either a famous sports guy (pick a sport, any sport) or someone connected to the opera or the ballet. Then, for a second I thought there was a typo involved and you were actually speaking of out why he mattered to you so much that you were gleefully remarking on his this morning. Instead, I quietly typed his name into a search engine and found out everything I needed to know. And I only mention this because I now realize that no way was I the only person who had no idea to whom you were referring surgery would put such a completely different spin on what might have been the psychological issues behind the writing of those scary twisted stories that it just might be impossible to ever really enjoy them again. It's almost like Although, now that I think about it more, I would do almost anything for a is to their world, the less they want anything to do with it. This is something I have long suspected, as I have found there is no more effective way to get lot more time online. The article reports that "hundreds of homeless shelters across the country have installed computer labs that would be the envy of most high schools." I guess just because a person doesn't have a permanent address is no reason they shouldn't be allowed to give themselves a wacky pseudonym and log on to a chat room full of adult men in diapers like everyone else. But I have friends who keep telling me that online dating is the answer. And as far as I am concerned this is the final nail in the coffin of online dating for me because I am not meeting anyone for coffee at a homeless shelter. Period. I don't care how single and sensitive they otherwise appear to be. ad in the front section of the New York Times that says "Meet Designer dress--$255." What I conclude from this is that apparently surviving a controversial and highly publicized affair with a famous male public figure also a functioning set of designer skills and abilities equivalent to a control over the life span of mice? This is considered a milestone in research gene in humans, it will still make us all feel younger at heart to be around so It may not be the greatest comeback in business history, but the incarnation of this column, in fact, I argued that the combination of new that no one ever suggested that transformations in the oil industry were going to have the effect of repealing the laws of supply and demand. Oil prices have humming along nicely, Japan has crawled out of recession (at least for the prospective, the markets do not anticipate a global slowdown any time soon. And the more oil consumers want, the more expensive it will become. Until, that is, more oil becomes available, either through expanded existing reserves by the giant oil multinationals. And here's where the has been one of massive cheating on the part of its members, who have regularly violated their production quotas in order to reap as much profit as possible. Prices have also stayed high because the major oil companies, having been burned in the past, have been temperate in expanding their exploration and production budgets. Although most of the majors will do more capital spending Still, there's another way to look at the relatively tempered way the oil giants are expanding those budgets, and that is that they do not see prices that while filling up your tank is going to be more expensive than it was nine months ago, any inflationary impact from oil prices will be seriously There's no guarantee that the oil companies are right. But there's an excellent chance that they are, because the structural transformations in the world oil market are real, and so too is the fact that running a cartel has not quite well in the short term. But over the long run the incentive to cheat is simply too high, and the measures of coercion and punishment simply too weak, to keep everyone in line. At the moment, the memories of what low oil prices pumping oil as fast as it can. But memories fade, and cash in the bank can Whew. Calm down, bunny. I want you drink a cup of herbal tea and take a While we're waiting for it to drop back to human levels, let's talk for a minute about our friend, the brand new planet. Apparently they took the Times as "a bloated gas giant." Only one photograph in and already the reads "Time, Space Obsolete in New View of Universe." Time and Space. Gone. thousands of years," it goes on to say, "and it's clearly something we're going to have to give up." Another fine old premise right down the dumper, tossed exhibited much skill at organizing either space or time. But I am a little concerned over the new talk among the string theorists, who are at the forefront of revolutionizing our thinking about these things, that the universe already have piles of papers and unopened mail cluttering up the surfaces of at There's a lot of revolutionary thinking going on. In the health and fitness sorry. This is going too far. Not just anthropomorphizing tampons but also characterizing them as cheerful willing participants. It disturbs me the same way I am always disturbed when my dinner entree is depicted on a menu as a smiling cartoon sailor dancing the hornpipe. It's just more emotional stress than I need to have to see my food having a great time on shore leave just minutes before its death. When I was an adolescent girl, I had a book by that single thing it said, but I do know this much: He never once mentioned vaginal discharge. In those days there were no cartoon tampons, but if there were, they There's a lot going on in the book world. How about the fact that the new The idea of matching a book with an accessory or item of furniture that is essential to its enjoyment could be the breakthrough in publishing that everyone has been looking for. Lengthy fiction can come with a reclining chair. Textbooks with a pillow and a cot. Books that the publishers know are impossible to make sense of could come with another book that you'll like better when you get fed up that you wasted your money. I don't know. members when they left their "earthly vehicles" and went into the sky to join would pay a pretty penny for that one. I never know where to sit. Fuck You, Pope if he wanted." I don't know if this could have been a big Silver. In my experience, by the time his movie got through all the rewrite not be seen? It's like some misbegotten bastard stepchild of the civil rights movement, I guess, but for some reason, everybody's forgetting that just fun of you as much as he damn well pleases. As in, he could've made a movie called Fuck You, Pope if he wanted. But since I was recently called a readers (I didn't mind the adjectives, but "bunny" kind of hurt), I guess I Not To Respect a Woman's Right To Choose, when it comes to global overpopulation, it's not a matter of some domestic political disagreement, for underdeveloped and uneducated native populace under heaven. As a genuine belief and tradition and you want to stick to it out of devotion to your faith, breed like rabbits, but also b) actively stopping, I mean, going out of your way to directly oppose, the efforts of those courageous souls who are trying to make sure those people can get a handful or two of grain and maybe a few ounces of clean water to wash the parasites out of their underwear every day. Then it's no longer a question of how Every Little Baby Is a Miracle Straight From God. And if your spiritual traditions can't handle such an obvious fact (note: not religious opinion, but science fact, like as in, you know, math), then you must be stopped. And, yeah, that goes for the pope, too. sure, but I worry that it may conflict with the biblical account of Today leads with the angry reaction from many in business to the while also explaining the difference between the new rules and current corrective actions at the first sign of injury, will cost companies an largest Pentagon study ever of racial attitudes within the uniformed military. The results are somewhat bracing for an institution that portrays itself as responding say they've experienced racism, and more than half doubted that discrimination complaints are thoroughly investigated. And the survey shows that military whites have a drastically more positive view. The paper quotes one defense official as saying the study was actually concluded two years ago, but release was delayed while the brass debated how to portray the results. The University of New York has approved a plan that would bar remedial every reporter something unique. He tells the former that trying to implement "marshmallow," and he tells the latter it will be like getting your arms around subject matter. The number of relevant workplace injuries mentioned (by the Wall Street Journal (in an inside story) up the ante quickly caved in to the protesting business world, whereas the story itself offending many Democrats in that he is mirroring Republican criticisms raised years, creating concern that the government should establish public health standards for the field, like it has already for funeral parlors. answer is d). This kind of drivel is the direct result of a presidential campaign that started about a year too early. Candidates aren't saying much of substance yet but are still out there working the rooms and the press feels speaker because lecturing better suits his idealistic temperament and doesn't doesn't own up to the statement, but he doesn't deny it either. Mark Shields of voters are undecided, an unusually low number with nearly a year until leads with an agreement between the White House and Congress on a article on the deal says that no oil has yet been found; the pipeline is more The Journal reports that the National Transportation Safety Board not zealous enough to believe in extreme political causes. And while he had never been promoted to captain, as he had wanted, he was still quite polls as a result, but he was acquitted in court. The acquittal disillusioned the future vice president with the power of the pen, and he decided to change careers. He entered law school and shortly thereafter ran for Congress when a The LAT highlights some unlikely beneficiaries of the Internet: the interact with potential employers in ways they could not before. But since computer time in shelters in highly structured, most of the truly dedicated homeless). The homeless, it turns out, make money on the Web in much the same homeless man set up a site to sell bicycle parts that he bought cheap from a shop that went out of business. Another made a few thousand dollars by selling obscure videos; he simply found the videos elsewhere on the Web and sold them at a has his missing front tooth replaced with a gold one in tribute to her. There Old Lady is a lifelong spinster. Others (my wife) disagree, so let's not even when she becomes lost on a family picnic. The two live together in a yoga. They wear turtlenecks. One of them may even have a trim mustache. (Unfortunately, the book is in my daughter's room and she's asleep, so I can't check.) They look like elephant versions of the Village People. They're very, I suspect they'd be ever gayer in a television version, but I wouldn't know admit that (which isn't very often), people give me the "Oh, so you're a Branch point some nasty little kid at school is going to mock them for not knowing the consumer culture. That will mean they're getting older. And that makes me develop the same distorted attitudes about television that everyone else seems rights hero, a friend of Daisy Bates' perhaps. Then I read the story. was captured on film. For years after, she could be seen every week looking she was seen in the background of the opening scene of a television show life was significant only to the extent it had been televised. "She never got a It's official: Over the past week, in rapid succession, the editorial pages the Post called a "disarmingly simple alternative to traditional affirmative action" when it comes to college admissions. The solution? Guaranteed admission to college for a fixed percentage of the top students in admits the top students at predominantly black high schools even if those students score lower than white students who aren't at the top of other though last year it dismissed the idea as "tinkering"). The Post So, hey, everybody's happy! But has anyone really thought through the full affirmative action really been defused by a clever policy gimmick? It's not impossible. But there's at least one obvious problem: The gimmick depends on admitting the top X Percent of each school wouldn't have the effect of admitting so many blacks. Indeed, if schools were perfectly integrated by race, school probably wouldn't make much difference in admissions at all (when compared with a straight policy of simply admitting "top" students regardless The Post seems to think this contradiction is really a delicious irony. ("The residential segregation that persists in so much of the nation becomes an instrument for desegregating higher education.") But it's more than in education becoming an instrument for furthering residential segregation, as This dilemma is particularly acute for supporters of school choice (mostly on the right) who hope that vouchers, or other choice mechanisms such as charter schools, will encourage motivated black students to leave bad schools and attend better ones. But why would a black student who is near the top of school where he's apt to rank in the middle of the class? Indeed, why would any good student, black or white, leave a bad school for a good school if he ranks much higher at the former than at the latter? The X Percent Solution seems to subvert the basic mechanism that is supposed to make school choice work. What's There are other problems with the X Percent Solution: Even if there's no school choice, won't it remove a major incentive for poor schools to improve? diminish? Do you want to be the politician who tries to take away a neighborhood high school's traditional X percent quota? The these complications. It may turn out that the X Percent gimmick is just that, Imagine the hilarity in Premiere 's legal department when the magazine was false, and that his willy was not, in fact, wee? Would he submit to a wouldn't be stupid enough to let himself become known as the man who brought article was "pretty vicious" and "not accurate," and offered his side of the to stay away. But will he sue? "I have no plans. I just don't want to comment police response to them, while the others split their attention between that and the actual issues confronting the organization. stayed in effect last night, all the papers report that the police now believe their initial handling of the situation was too permissive. The New York Times reveals some of the cops' most effective techniques after they decided to get tougher: confiscating are still using cell phones, as well as laptop computers and Palm Pilots to regroup and alert journalists about their activities.) What a difference from mayhem. The piece has an unidentified person in black saying that anarchists Times passes along unconfirmed reports of violent altercations on are actually trying to do: forging an agreement on what should be on the table for the next round of trade liberalization talks. Everybody reports that condemned the violent protests but welcomed the peaceful ones, in effect distribution controls that kept prices high. (But there is no mention of Al Aviation Administration's revelation yesterday that investigators who set out them, say the papers, even managed to get themselves comfortably seated aboard airliners at departure time. The testers used such techniques as piggybacking through locked doors behind properly credentialed personnel, and driving decade of work, scientists have decoded the information in a human chromosome. undertaken by the government's Human Genome Project as well as by a competing required background checks on people trying to pawn guns, the gun inventory of plaintiff's lawyers, who are not elected officials after all, seek to take in their own hands significant public policy questions." Excuse, but couldn't segregationists have said the same thing about Brown vs. Board of The Wall Street Journal "Business Bulletin" has a fact that big boob been mistaken for a celebrity. For me, the problem is only partly his it looks? If I left the house looking like that, my wife would change the effect in the Rose Garden; I don't need to see another. Both problems, of course, pale by comparison to the Her Issue, as in: What the hell is a girl like her doing with a guy like him? How does he get supermodels to spend more that the old Pat is buried beneath all that. I just saw an early cut of a great unmistakable. You walk away just plain liking the guy. Apropos of not liking someone and not having any authority to speak of: Do There was a bit of fuss a few months back about who was going to write this the text in less than a month. There hasn't been any pretense, as there often is with these kinds of books, that the nominal author actually wielded the pen. book reads as if it were written by someone who barely knows him. Much of it is boilerplate that could appear under the byline of any of the candidates in the I always want to know about people's backgrounds and families. I like people and I am interested in learning more about them, plus I believe people's values I enjoy meeting people and shaking their hands and listening to their Politics, like life, is a strange endeavor. Things are sometimes not what they seem. I try to get facts and weigh both sides. And I remain confident that most people, most of the time, can see beyond the sound bites to appreciate leaders who try to do the right things for the right reasons. We are a close family. I love my brothers and sister and count them among No discussion of our family would be complete without mentioning our If Bush wrote any of this, it must have been as part of his application to I suppose it's an accomplishment, in a way, to have achieved a tone so speeches ghostwritten by others. In other places, she describes events by occur at random, she repeats the familiar stories, though in a highly sanitized form. Here, for instance, is "Bush" on his college career: parts of the country. Within months, I knew many of them. Bush himself couldn't utter these words with a straight face. It is well also that he did poorly there in academic terms. But rather than explore any of removing any possible blemish from the face of the leader. In the very few places where the book goes into any detail about anything, pilots, but hadn't logged enough flying time to qualify for the program. Bush spends a full chapter attempting to defuse a potential Democratic issue by crisis of conscience. But by quoting Tucker's eloquent letter to him, he actually makes himself seem even more heartless. Bush believed that Tucker was sincerely penitent and that she wanted to escape execution in order to help set other prisoners straight. Then he killed her anyway. Autobiography can't help revealing something about a person, and even this worthless placeholder of a book is telling in its way. What it indicates is fundamentally cavalier and unserious person. He has no policy views, only vague aspirations for a better country. He believes that reading is important, but fails to mention anything he has ever read other than the Bible. Personal His faith is sincere but shallow. Bush describes his surrender to forces greater than himself as something that makes it possible for him to do his job Compare this with the books written by the three other serious contenders book, the best of the bunch, is not only personally revealing and Gore's books are dull but commendable efforts to explain themselves and personal effort into their respective books, being the type of people who could not really do otherwise. They are politicians who take themselves seriously. They have respect for people who might take the trouble to read what they write. Bush, by contrast, sees a book as a campaign poster with words. His tells you a lot about him, even as it tells you nothing at all. I think what you are describing are those free concerts they hold outside of We have switched places today. I am groggy and having a hard time waking up. Movie last night, which is a funny documentary about an obsessed young are saying he was burdened by a lot of medical bills from a sick kid. That he made a few ominous "in case anything might happen to me" remarks to family members. You know, the last few years I keep reading reports about all the controversial "profiling" they are doing at airports, trying to predict the behavior of suspicious ticket holders. Now it turns out it was the crews they It's been fun reading the New York Post this week. But it's so weird accepted as the less sophisticated of the two cities, yet there are no parallel publications here. The other morning there was a lengthy item in either the last few years, aside from their steadily shrinking share of the audience, is which was pioneered by Fox and exemplified by When Animals Attack and Funniest Home Videos is no longer provoking belly laughs across the country, variants thereof air regularly as specials. inexpensive to produce, since very little of the material needs to be paid for. fighting a long illness, driving the wrong way on a freeway, or getting upended off a ladder by an overly friendly springer spaniel. (Wasn't that a great now being used as a label to cover shows that are, well, not real, like the huge hit game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and its recent left off this summer, dominating its time slot and actually casting a slight that prompted a recent headline in Variety proclaiming "Nets Reap of the artificial structure of their formats. We don't, it's true, know how any given episode of Millionaire is going to turn out, and even though one theory no one knows how the Millionaire episode is going to turn semblance of uncertainty (and, therefore, reality) instead of the actual thing, whatever that might be. In part, the actual thing is just the possibility that directions. You know it'll be exciting but not too surprising, and you know it counts as real, too, since the people saying their lines on the show are actual That's my desperate hope, anyway. One of the problems with a presidential myself blowing past the political stories in the morning paper and heading for not clear precisely what was inappropriate or offensive about them. But there are a couple of incredibly creepy quotes from Times executives. "If you in your business unit. We will take prompt action to address the situation." Translation: Rat out your peers and we'll fire them. Or some of them. As a friend of mine pointed out this morning, if a Under most circumstances, I wouldn't have a problem with this. Generally, I think private employers ought to be able to hire and fire whomever they want at time for any reason. And I accept that there is a meaningful difference between way to protect the Little Guy from the abuses of the powerful. And yet here we have the Little Guy getting shafted for an offense that a) in all likelihood hurt no one, and b) that the powerful could almost certainly commit without the Fed, which cited tightening labor markets. Analysts do not expect another All the papers report that the National Transportation Safety Board will not both in emergencies and before meals, and thus not necessarily an indication of Meanwhile, "officials close to the investigation" continue to leak details of the plane's last moments. After the captain briefly leaves the cockpit, the autopilot. The plane goes into a dive, at which point the captain returns and says, roughly, "What's going on?" As the plane continues to dive, two flaps on Journal notes that the flap in the "climb" position was controlled also says that near the end of the dive the pilot orders, "Cut the Center for about a year, although she has been improving lately. According to over the ocean." The Journal and the LAT report that the Journal says that he had been scheduled to take over much later in the representative to an international disarmament commission. This concession came probably the youngest murderer convicted as an adult this century. "He tore off his clothes and went running through the office shrieking, 'I started listing all the heads of state of Third World countries. The usual, in If I lean back in my chair ever so slightly and look out my window, I can years? By and large, Republicans and independents, not Democrats. The same poll Bush up to this point. I can't explain the shift in thinking other than to speculate that the media establishment is finally giving up and accepting his inevitability the way the political establishment long ago did. (By the way, But I have a theory about what came before: More than just Bush, the smoothies, and the odd computer geek, but no one sneers with more relish than Ulster Unionists) vote to join the region's local coalition government. This merely fuel the hopes of naysayers of all faiths who want the peace to Telegraph editorial calls the vote "the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall," but some opponents claim the measure was "akin to turkeys voting around it, will help shape the debate over the nature and aims of globalization, with many protestors decrying the secretive, undemocratic nature welfare roles claim they were sexually abused as children, compared with around live in dangerous neighborhoods and in single mother families, which expose them to greater risk of abuse. Sexual abuse victims are then more likely to have to go on welfare, and making it harder to get off the rolls once they An LAT story reports that even while Holocaust museums and monuments increase public awareness of the event, the survivors themselves are being forgotten. Pride, the pain of their memories, and red tape are making it money and services to which they're entitled. For example, to obtain a share of they must fill out forms asking them to: "Please describe, in as much detail as responsible for policing the site. In the past few months, he's intervened to prevent people from selling human organs, tombstones, and even their virginity of auctions being halted each day. The chief problem from an enforcement Ever watch him on the stump? He can't give a speech. He has precisely no sense of humor. A lot of his ideas about policy sound like they were thought up in the shower this morning. At appearances, he often looks like he's about to fall asleep. He answers questions like he'd rather be having hemorrhoid surgery. Worst of all, he has total disdain for everything about politics, down to and including voters. (Watch carefully and you can actually see him exuding contempt, like the oily haze that rises off airplane engines on a hot day.) mistake ineptitude for integrity, but how do you think it'll play in the rest between your state and the World's Most Important Newspaper. On the other hand, acutely aware that the rest of the world is laughing at them. I remember being backward, etc.). They were genuinely wounded. In other words, they half your reply you can answer the most pressing question about his candidacy: tragically, never broached the Hair Issue. I don't think we ought to elect him career must not be pulling in as much as revenue as expected. This is surprising to me, because when I saw it at three in the morning the other night, she looked like she was doing a great job: looked directly into the camera, smiled broadly and evenly, even turned her head to make eye contact with the spokesperson when delivering the line "You're right, it really does tone the calves!" The plight of the former model in this country is an moved on to weightier matters, like running for president or opening tacky casinos or dating the next supermodel in line? Christie at least has her married. Not that I had the record; I saw a segment about it on Hour Magazine or something. If I remember right, it had some sort of watercolor waterfall or river or something, and she explained that the idea "came to [her] And while we're on the topic of people who really know how to work it for one and everything, and I don't want to go on and on about this simply because the good reverend's noted skills at making love to the camera have been exhaustively remarked upon elsewhere, but it sounds like this incident was notable even by his standards. Get this: "Dozens of [photographers and reporters] jockeyed for position so frantically that they almost knocked over an elderly woman in a wheelchair who had come to watch." It goes on to say that the crowd of press was so voluminous that the police had to actually come to really a deliberate suicide thing or what, but it gives me an idea. Plane crashes are one of those terrible things, like that "I Like Girls Who Wear exciting drama or justification to explain them away. So, maybe we'd all feel a little better if every time a jetliner went down, the press concocted a big after a newer, different disaster had occupied the national attention afresh, they could announce that subsequent investigations had ruled out the theory. Meanwhile, everyone would have the comfort of pretending that, in this sad life, all the tragedy and death wasn't simply meaningless. What do you think? that he'd been here, and I didn't find out why he was on the West Coast, or rather one of the reasons he was supposed to be on the West Coast, until I picked up the morning papers. Riots? What decade is this? (And over trade the coverage back east, but it's quite something out here. If you covered the (is there no escaping the guy?), which I gather he'll detail today in that Republican establishment will fall right in line. Here's my favorite part of the article: "Response to the Bush tax plan was swift. Even before knowing the details, Vice President Al Gore criticized it yesterday." Even before knowing Tipper Gore is the sexiest woman alive. Even before knowing the details, Vice will publicly nod at her in assent but privately want the streets free of material to me: smart and pompous and possessed with a regal bearing totally political candidate of the millennium, Dollar Bill, gets the Democratic polling place. But she's shown absolutely no traction so far, and if the next Or a joint. For a fleeting moment late last night, I thought I saw a pot. (Oh, do you think?) Sadly, it did not carry the typical puts inside. The Times goes instead with word that Federal Trade commanders are threatening a counterattack. The LAT reminds readers from ones employed previously, and the paper doesn't seem to know either. largest divestiture the agency has ever seen. The companies will have to sell merger might deflate competition and raise prices in the area. The story notes robust these days, which is why the companies are being allowed to rejoin. project called Inner Change that aims to convert inmates into better Bush claims that overtly religious programs work better than their more secular counterparts because they use "the transforming power of faith." The program is too young for a verdict on its effectiveness, but its participants are notably sport in the South that borders on being a religion is football," another analyst points out. As the story admits, it's impossible to isolate the source chase. Five news helicopters hovered overhead and broadcast the shooting live. The stations defended themselves by arguing that they could have showed show graphic violence. We have to be cautious," said one producer. those that came before it look sane. (Those two sentences sound so much alike, and yet mean such different things.) Of course, the fact that the United States than they were a decade ago. The world, at least in the economic sense, is just a much bigger and more profitable place. Which doesn't mean you need to eat, drink, and be merry tonight. But at the very least, Chat. deal ensured that neither Message in a Bottle nor Random Hearts they'll still be competing for the exact same tiny group of customers." its bonds when it asked current investors to swap their old bonds for new ones. The world's markets returned a unanimous verdict of 'Who he hadn't been at the meeting. 'I have now had an opportunity to groups can get along). The tops of both Times feature pictures of Times shot evokes the more intimate feeling of a leader with his troops: It's good to be the commander in chief. The LAT can only find a numbers, says the paper: By the end of the year, the cumulative toll from the percent of the world's population. But, the paper continues, the region where the disease is growing the fastest is the former Soviet Union, largely due to house as soon as the Secret Service said she could and that after the first of on an even more remarkable fact: For the first time ever, a president's wife is domestic implications of the first lady's announcement. Although it is reported that she said yesterday she had not told her husband or daughter of her decision, nobody notes how this contrasts with the nearly universal tradition of a candidate announcing with spouse and offspring in tow. And there is no speculation in the leads about whether the coming physical distance between the might even be mistaken for good taste, can't possibly last. reports, were filed by one of the leading attorneys in the cases against the tobacco companies that led to that industry's lavish financial settlement with many states. The plaintiffs claim that the health plans have violated their obligations to members, and even allege that they've engaged in contrary, the frequency of sexual activity and the pleasure derived from it remain the same or even increase after having a hysterectomy. and inventory management to find a simpler reason why discount retailers consistently outperform traditional department stores: The former, but not the response, but since this is the Breakfast Table and not the Bar Stool, I won't thing about Brill is that he's a genuinely smart guy who has destroyed his reputation, become a joke among his peers, and wasted a ton of cash, all for noises on cable once in a while? I don't understand it. A few years ago I went out to lunch with Brill and came away impressed. He spent the entire meal explaining why we ought to put television cameras in and I remember thinking that it took pretty hefty stones to contend that anyone a televised trial. But Brill did. Ludicrous, I said. He came back at me with such force and with what seemed like such a tight argument that by the end I was almost ready to agree that what the Supreme Court really needs is more But my impression of Brill as a vigorous, capable guy remained. Until he put his own name in the title of his magazine, and in a thousand other ways made an ass of himself. What a waste. It still depresses me to see him on me for taking a huge, cringing pass on that story. Media conglomerates and the use of actors to sell magazines are two topics that make me pretty It did leave me wondering, and not for the first time, who these people are who buy magazines based on the celebrity cover photo. Here's my thinking on the subject: Magazine buyers are people who've chosen reading over watching television or going to the mall or playing video games as a form of entertainment. This is a relatively small group of people, presumably more person. Yet these are also people who will buy a magazine simply because it has Chatterbox is willing to believe that the deliberate changes made to the tobacco story in The Insider were done in the interest of making it a better movie. (Whether fictional characters should be permitted to keep the that has been amply discussed elsewhere.) Still, there's one change to the story that left Chatterbox wondering whether the pressures were more manufacturers were spiking their products with additional nicotine, the stuff Three things ought to be remembered about the Day One broadcast: to break the important story that tobacco companies were manipulating the degree to which cigarettes pumped nicotine into smokers' bloodstreams. In addition to making Big Tobacco look even more corrupt than was previously believed, this made it more difficult for Big Tobacco to say that it wasn't in the nicotine put into the cigarettes had been taken out earlier in the manufacturing process; the way tobacco companies were boosting the nicotine hit was actually more complicated than that and involved the addition of ammonia. never conceded that his broadcast was in error at all about "spiking," agonize over whether to cave in to corporate pressure not to broadcast their the pressure to surrender seemed linked to a pending sale of the network.) And It's certainly possible these omissions were made because including them would have made the plot less tidy. But The Insider is a movie that asks you to think hard about how corporate interests affect what media companies do. As it happens, The Insider was made by Touchstone, which script did allude to the Day One broadcast, but it was cut out. published letters in the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Post touting perfectly good piece of journalism is not so great a sin as preventing that piece of journalism from coming to light in the first place. But the question on the tobacco beat, and could gripe about how The Insider didn't even but for which we accept responsibility and which requires correction. We Senate primary? After all, a sizable chunk of the electorate, even the Democratic electorate, can't stand the first lady, and that number is growing thought she wasn't.) There is a swarming press corps ready to give an woman who does it with some wit and humor will become the repository of You wouldn't even have to raise money for campaign ads: The media will do most of the work for free. You could even make a point of running a shoestring herself appears to have no sense of humor, plus an intense sense of ballot unless you have the blessing of the party establishment. But that issue want to keep poor candidate X off the ballot," etc. It's also true that whoever knows of at least one Democratic elected official who was thinking of running but was then "leaned on by powerful people within the Democratic party." Maybe a career Democratic pol would not want to risk angering party leaders, not to mention the first lady's husband (though he'll be out of office in a year). But if there's no Democratic congressman, assemblyman, or mayor ready to become an instant household name, what about everyone else? Businessmen, entirely if she doesn't have a clear field (something she may do anyway). That The worst that happens is you get a ton of name recognition. This is, as exempt from the cuts. This includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, government pensions, the earned income tax credit, and other programs that the government is obligated to fund. Although it is not considered a mandatory expense, Congress also exempted military salaries from that amount from their departments' total discretionary spending. Congressional Republicans had originally proposed that the reduction be applied allows the cabinet secretaries to allocate the cut as they see fit. They will while leaving other programs' budgets alone. The only department not granted this flexibility is the Pentagon, which is required to distribute the reduction proportionally among operations, procurement, and research programs. Ruined Military Sites." As we used to say in the third grade, back when I was playground because the other kids were all pelting me with dodge balls, "well, else? I mean, that's literally all they do, they've got all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. Amass weapons, subjugate the populace into obeisance with weapons, and when somebody comes along and blows up his weapons, well, one just has to keep one's chin up, look on the bright side, and start over again from decided long ago to sort of put the various other subtle, more nuanced aspects of running a country on the back burner, if you will, and just kind of focus on one specific area of approach. Do what you're good at (kind of like the way the at it? Because, like many evil dictators, he learned from the absolute best: Again, hardly a brilliant observation on my part, but then again, how smart do you really need to be to get the general gist of this sort of thing? After all, this is chemical weapons of mass destruction, not rocket science. Of course gay weddings should be legal. After all, gay luxury tropical tropical cruises must be at least as difficult to endure as the institution of be many things that you are not, but pretty isn't one of them. So stop taking the diet pills. I want to propose something (all the people freaking out about gay marriage in the "Fray" section should particularly consider redirecting indeed pretty enough. Here's a suggested sample wording: I think you are pretty. So does everybody else. In fact, you are an whole world, doesn't think you are pretty. Therefore, please never think that What do you say? Think we can get Gates to bankroll this? It's for a good I guess the lesson that is to be learned from the Times article you mention on Page A12 is that if you're going to get involved negotiating with remotely as dramatic happened here with the exception of a particular moment that takes place many times a week during the dog breakfast period, usually at about the halfway point. Suddenly all four of them seem overcome with the idea that someone else got a better breakfast, even though they all get the same thing. So they freeze. And then, in a move not totally dissimilar to musical Ballet moment and it's very, very beautiful, as you can imagine. Particularly defrocked for officiating at the wedding of two men. I can not for the life of me understand why so many people are so upset at the idea of gay marriages. It's not as if the heterosexuals have been doing such a great job as keepers of the flame. I mean, the heterosexuals could not have made a bigger mess of the whole marriage thing if they had intentionally set out to do so. In fact, it often occurs to me that it would be a very good idea to just give the let them refurbish it, like they do with rundown neighborhoods. Then, once they've fixed it all up and made it cute and appealing again, we can have it The Post is reporting that the Enquirer is reporting (and now pills. I suspected as much from the start. I thought to myself "Aha! I bet she's taking diuretics." But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to upset that she "had put on weight in her bust and thighs"; she also revealed that she did indeed have a very tenuous grasp on reality when, according to the insult to injury, she then went on to drop to the floor screaming, "I just can't do it anymore." Can you imagine? Apparently those diet pills affected the way her brain was working because, as I certainly don't have to remind you, among other things, his spatula, his ice scraper, his gray leather couch him") in order to raise money "to be able to pay my rent, electricity, car insurance and water bill" I went snooping around to see if there was something leading vehicle, in terms of quality and performance, in practically every leading Democratic candidate for president hired the architect of the on the bottom of a toilet bowl) was like nothing on the road, and nothing many consumers wanted to buy. The J30 was a car desperately trying to make a pretentious fashion statement, but it galumphed awkwardly in the real world of from the front, it looks good from the back, it looks good from the top and the performed weakly in the marketplace. "Every time I see somebody driving one of those," says a friend of mine, "I feel sorry for them." The current Times. How will he (to quote his book) "break through the stereotypes and conceived their target customer as "the perfect asshole!" Times readers revival of the "Z" sports car was a shapeless blob. years, many of its best cars were available only with those annoying motorized the car tended to become unstable at very high speeds. I love the airplane mystery idea. Almost as much as I hate that song about deal cuter to get away with such horrible lyric writing. which she confessed that her biggest beauty secret was water: drink it, bathe in it, use it to moisturize midday. It's just that simple. But she apparently today. They could certainly print the same ones verbatim every year, but instead they assign some poor beleaguered writer to dress them up by adding a few expressions from rap records. Of course, my favorite Thanksgiving media Thanksgiving. It is called "The Busiest Shopping Day of the Year" and is the one where they send lifestyle reporters to the local malls to coerce unsuspecting randomly selected shoppers into speaking the exact same seasonal cliches that the people came up with the last time they did the report. They could definitely run this same report verbatim year after year were it not for the slight difference in haircuts from decade to decade. Of course, now with all the sophisticated computer graphics and so forth, maybe they will finally motives aside, here is what I picked up today. As you may recall from my incisive analysis yesterday, the string theorists have gone ahead and thrown to know that they have replaced it with the infinitely hipper and more contemporary 11-dimensional strings. Yes, I realize it is a little hard to warm get to know the strings on a more personal basis. Which is all well and good. There's only just so many times that can eat in the same restaurant, so to speak. Space and time have had more than their share of the spotlight. Move over and let a new kid have a chance. But I wonder if the scientists behind this important philosophical shift have really considered all the consequences of their actions. Because, as the article points out, if there is no clear we say if the gunshot caused the death or if the death caused the gunshot?" And you thought lawyers were incomprehensible morally compromised bullshit artists today's letter: Apparently they held "Take a Kid Pheasant Hunting Day" lifeless corpses. At last, a state government steps in to help provide a anywhere in their homes to make firsthand contact with the pleasures of gun violence. There really aren't enough opportunities for kids to come in to contact with guns or to kill helpless creatures nowadays, especially during the the National Rifle Association. Their goal is "to shore up hunting's is also quoted as saying, "The shooting sports are like any other endeavor. Youth is our future." Yeah. Like any other endeavor where helpless animals are placed at a disadvantage (in this case, they spin the pheasants first to make them dizzy) in order to provide adorable little children with the joy of inflicting pain and causing death. There really aren't enough other forms of recreation and entertainment available to the kids today. Of course, I guess help out with the household expenses by bringing home enough of that family dinner favorite, pheasant, to keep everyone in pheasant sandwiches for Now I need to go check my blood pressure. Talk to you tomorrow. federal campaign finance regulations," the New York Times estimates. Gore's bills are par for the course for candidates who participate in the To qualify for matching funds, campaigns must verify the addresses, phone trail can be costly. For example, if a campaign requests matching funds for a that each person contributed half; otherwise the campaign will receive only exhaustively documented to demonstrate that they comply with the campaign Monster accounting and legal bills like Gore's are so common that the Federal Election Commission allows presidential campaigns to automatically bills, but they must document that fact to the satisfaction of the FEC. Because the FEC adds new rules after each election cycle, the complexity and costs of reporting continue to mushroom. Most large campaigns outsource their regulatory accounting, and since there are only a handful of firms that specialize in this area, these services can be quite expensive. Are they worth approval by the participating governments) eliminate most trade barriers various aspects of the boom. The Post notes that spectacular productivity growth has more than offset companies' increases in labor costs productivity gains have meant better compensation for workers than they anticipated, leaving them feeling more satisfied, which in turn encourages them The LAT fronts a story that only deepens the sense of national charges that Operation Smile, a charity that sends plastic surgeons to poor shoddy medical practices due to an emphasis on volume and publicity. Today's installment focuses on the group's activities in China, which have resulted in "complications," "faulty operations," and "some angry families." Although cleft not just for the reference he made to God shortly before the plane went down, before the catastrophe. The Times relies on the interpretation of three anonymity. It's a mistake for the paper not to mention that just such nameless officially confirmed that the F-117 stealth fighter shot down last March over loss (the pilot was rescued), the Pentagon suggested that the cause was column covers use their considerable resources to also pursue this (he was sent up the river on a misdemeanor). Today's Papers apologizes to The Thanksgiving holiday clearly inspires the papers. There is for instance, encouragement of "scrupulous memory" of all "the sources of our pleasures, privileges and obligations." But by Today's Papers' lights, there's a more prosaic truth communicated by the practice of the holiday. This after all, is when the president enters the White House Rose Garden and in a public ceremony breakthrough accord, which effectively lets China into the World Trade now shepherd the pact through Congress; passage is likely but not certain. (To autopilot is turned off, the cockpit door apparently opens and shuts several an expression of alarm or of suicide is unknown. Seconds later the plane goes first. Eventually, someone apparently shuts off the engines. (The Post story implies that this sequence of events is certain rather than merely not notice the religious utterance at first, but the Post says that quote anonymous sources predicting that the transfer will happen today. The inspections. The proposal would require the Security Council to reaffirm the churches, and even the smallest bank accounts. It would force the sale of trillions of dollars of stock, as owners either paid the tax or hid their billion in annual interest payments with new spending. headquarters. Peppered with hostile questions, Gore defended the Justice Department's lawsuit and insisted that the nation's antitrust laws represent a "Gore attempted to defuse tension by making jokes, mentioning obscure scientific theories and repeatedly announcing his Web site address." Only the LAT and Journal report that Gore nonetheless received a standing ovation when he left. Afterwards, Gore dropped in on Today's Papers. Well, that's not entirely correct, but he did stop by the offices of (The vice president, it should be noted, missed his deadline.) Transportation investigators also stressed that they had not yet synchronized the voice tape with the flight data recorder tape, which would record events occurring on the airplane and could put the statements in context. For instance, a prayer being said after the plane began plummeting so fast that passengers were rendered weightless would not be suspicious. The key to understanding the sequence of events was that the safety board laboratory was able to correlate the exact timing on the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. They therefore knew exactly when the troubling words were uttered and when the door was opened, in relation to the plane's to view the effects of plant closings. With two other films, two television ban sodomy, and presenting an executive with a giant 80-cent check to pay for state lawsuit charging that cigarette manufacturers were liable for the health Have you noticed people in the news with confusingly similar names? The I feel like we are really starting to bond now. I, too, have never seen an However, I think you will be impressed when you learn that I was actually nephews. But then it began to occur to me that if I showed up alone at a public children hugging their young ones close to them as they eyed me with horror and suspicion. I began to rehearse excuses about where my absent kid might be." there could well be some kind of a city ordinance against a lone adult never went. However I could not fail to notice that in today's paper we learn This whole tradition of being really, really specific in the details of the honor you are bestowing is a trend I applaud and would like to see expand. I during a World Series playoff game was? And what would be wrong with a category Before I get off the topic of show business, I also noticed a lot of items about the questionable ratings of the new Martin Short talk show. King World that once the executives start lightening things up with a new backdrop, it is only a matter of weeks until the launch of a segment called "Send us your home Moving right along, are these darn guys running for president now more world hot spots. (Although I loved his answer regarding the prime minister of apparently was thinking that if he got up a head of steam and energetically repeated the question, the answer might come to him from nowhere.) But I just attraction to him with thoughts like "Don't ask me what draws me to him. I was terribly fond of his parents, so he has a place in my heart." This makes me think that more of the candidates should be using a "get to know my parents" speeches while he's figuring out who to be. By the way, I think he got the proper route to appearing more alpha is not earth tones, as suggested, but would be for him to wear a leather jacket, suck on a cigarette butt, and make a bunch of appointments to meet with women's groups that he suddenly cancels at the very last second without offering an explanation. Now that's an alpha male as I have come to know and love them. (His other you to do is to pin him down and lie on top of him. If Gore tried that on Security, and sex education, among other issues. On foreign policy, he says intervention, W. simply reasserts that he will not intervene on humanitarian grounds, except in rare circumstances. W. goes out of his way to emphasize the He downplays the importance of arms control, stressing instead the need for independent review board has decided that she has a reasonable dispute. (This Social Security, W. indicates a willingness to raise the current "personal savings accounts," which would allow recipients to choose their own education instructors promote fondling and mutual masturbation as an alternative to sex, Bush says Wolf's advice is "pathetic," says condom promotion hasn't decreased teen pregnancy rates, and advocates teaching year's budget has grown at twice the rate of inflation since last year. But funds intact, and prevented the subsidization of international abortion drop out of the race and wonders how she'll ever be able to run for president if she can't win New York. But several shows flash the results of a New York Post poll Both This Week and Late Edition review a new Bush campaign commercial in which W. pledges to "restore dignity" to the presidency. Bill correspondent shouting into the camera from underneath swaying trees during a hurricane, the sober reporter standing in front of a coastline after a plane Oh, probably not, [because] it would create a huge political scene. I am lifting it violates the instructions my orthopedist gave me last week three other encyclopedias of black history and culture that sit in storage while I wait for my shoulder to heal enough so I can build bookshelves. because it's all we have right now is too much like how some older folk I know feel about Ebony and BET (which, one wag I know quips, stands for the Brothers' Excuse for Television). In their heart of hearts, they know neither is really very good, but they nonetheless can't resist claiming pride of Still, in the spirit of fairness, before I get back to beating the boy, I deserves wider recognition. She was also a playwright and a novelist, but I published a special issue about her. I didn't know her well, of course, but I often think about the two hours we spent talking that afternoon so long another one of those glaring omissions that make you wonder whether the editors "ready references" summarizing demographic and economic data about those provides so much information in such a truncated form. Like you, I wish Gates you must have monuments to validate your worth as a people, then build lasting At the heart of my criticism, though, is my conviction that our experience summarized. More and more, since I quit reviewing books, I think that's the job a far more moving evocation of the Holocaust than any account in any reference places where things intersect, then reports on what he finds. at a West Coast conference took each other to task over the role of the Buffalo humane" and so "every possible, every imaginable combination of human original.] Where is that kind of insightful and original thinking in Which isn't at all to excuse or make apologies for slavery, of course, but storage). He was freed by his father, then became wealthy enough to lend money haven't even gotten round to responding to your points about the responsibility of the black intellectual. Like you, I wish Gates and Cornel West would take sabbaticals and embark on the kind of lasting work they're both capable of. And published. The work itself, alas!, is solid and workmanlike, nothing like what You might have thought the biggest winner on Wall Street in the wake of the United States and China's agreement on terms for China to enter the World Trade Organization would have been the company that's been loudest in its support for today was prompted by one of China's key concessions to the United States, to telecommunications companies and Internet companies. This was a pretty Internet industry, and that many thought that the government would draw a line country of more than a billion people, calling its foothold "key" seems rather dubious. But the truth is that it's next to impossible to think about business competition. But in a market in which political connections remain essential as it seems to reflect state sanction, if not support, appears to be rather The paradox inherent in all of this, of course, is that the Internet really is an incredibly destabilizing technology, both economically and politically, holding it fixed (if that's possible) is the best way to destroy its value. The viral spread of information on the Internet, the incredibly rapid and inexpensive growth of user communities and businesses, the facilitation of the minds of the digerati but also in the minds of investors. They're the only The romantic idea is that the combination of real free trade, the Internet, and modern telecommunications will eventually bring down the hidebound political and economic structures that still rule China. Now, the romantic idea may be right, and greater access to the Net and greater free trade are certainly good things. But the truth, banal as it may seem, is that we still don't really know very much about how the potentially democratizing Internet really functions in a thoroughly undemocratic society, just as we don't really mere drop in the bucket. But in a way the company's name is the perfect those who frankly think him fraudulent, some of whom are very prominent people. I think this might be a bit unfair. What I find fascinating about him is not the work, which may or may not be remembered in years to come, but rather the driving ambition so directed at what seems to me to be small causes writ large by advertising and the sheer claims he can make for them. In this regard, he is an incredible intellectual figure and an incredible public presence. I think it is a waste of time for a major scholar to create an encyclopedia, despite the major scholar to do such hack work today, even if one could make a great deal of money doing it. It is this obsession, which far exceeds anything I have ever encountered in any scholar (and scholars and intellectuals have no little ego and no little ambition), this need to have his fingerprints everywhere, that I find curious but that I also think, ultimately for Gates, is destructive of the very end he probably wants to achieve. He wants, I assume, to be taken Yes, I do agree that he has taken advantage of the practice that whites have of wanting one prominent Negro at a time in a field. He is a very shrewd man, and I cannot blame him for taking the world as it has been given to him. Whites find him agreeable for the two reasons that they find any black intellectual threatening; he knows a great deal of white intellectual stuff, which whites always find amusing and entertaining in a Negro. But while he is a singular black intellectual figure, his position is simply, to some large degree, that of any hustling black intellectual who knows that the rewards worth having in this culture for his professional pursuits are all controlled by whites. are right and point up one of the serious flaws with this book. It is far too trendy, almost whimsically so, to be of great value to any reader, say, five or six years from now. This book aspires to be not only an encyclopedia but also an almanac, a biographical dictionary, a historical monument in and of itself. forces of compelling strength: the need to give emphasis to homosexuality all out of proportion to its importance in black life, the need to mention people such people remain to be proved worthy of attention, the need for personalities It is this sort of pandering to the popular and to notions that many black people hold dear even though they are wrong that works against this book and against black intellectual efforts generally. That is because, in the end, the the race, instead of a true, objective exploration of the meaning of the race's experience, good, bad, and indifferent. This makes the black intellectual not only a propagandist but also an apologist, at times, of the most hypocritical sort, blowing up trivialities while ignoring profundities because of their ambiguous nature, all the while operating with the urges of a philanthropist, discarding merit in the name of equality of space or for "educating" the public in favor of a good cause. This, more than anything, makes the public intellectual, black or white, fraudulent, dangerous in both his or her snobbery and strength of the black intellectual, his or her incisiveness swallowed in a sea of bathetic race promoting. It is telling, indeed, about the from intellectuals or scholars at all but from popular black personalities and partisans for causes. Nothing corrupts good intellectual work more thoroughly I do not particularly like to engage what is not in a book, but, of course, it cannot be avoided in this sort of work, as its scheme is meant to make a statement about what is important about the black experience and what isn't. To objectively presented whether one agrees with their positions or not. But there black culture and "world music," (whatever that is), their omission is just bewildering. There is no entry for Curt Flood. How can the man who challenged book and all black political correctness greatly prizes, be ignored!? Curt This brings me to the entries that are connected in some way or another to important in several ways, but not to have him in the book was understandable. of the Human Relations Commission, a city organization that was started when changed the city charter. The Human Relations Commission was very important in the history of race relations in the city in the 1950s and 1960s, although it was a group without strong enforcement abilities. It was not mentioned in parade to stop using blackface makeup (he failed there, too). In the entry on dramatically. No mention in the Chubby Checker entry that his marriage to a written as hack work by writers who are not terribly familiar with the subject. The writers try to emphasize what makes the person a national figure without concentrating very much on the local context of the person's importance, which is often far more valuable and meaningful to understanding the person's historical standing than what can be said about the person as a national This is why I am puzzled that a man of Gates' abilities wants to do such bet" for Republicans to pick up. Republican leaders once "confidently "had been steadily nibbling away at [Brown's] winning margins as the district like a stunning upset that foreshadows a possible Republican House collapse. If "steadily nibbling away" at Brown's margins. They came within a few hundred Thanks so much for the compliments. Although since I was only one of many guess my sadness will be offset by the celebration being thrown by our explains it: "Drew is such a special amazing magical person" she says," that I decided to put some of her things up on the Web site to allow people to be a part of her life." And you know, if there is a better way to become a part of the life of a complete stranger than to own their baby clothing, it can only be yourself some eggs and sit by the mailbox. Better cooking is on it's way. If you figure out who buys which magazines for what reason, I will pay you cash money to tell me. This is a question I mull over and over because it's way we spin a story about her (icon in repose) works, but another way Martin of presidential politics, is a guaranteed winner. When he was running Bush"). When he was first exploring the possibility of a White House bid in the the year's best sellers. Most of those extra copies were probably sold to of me wants to believe that one of every two viewers tuned in hoping to see a genial, an advocate of broad principles instead of specific policies, and always going to be hard to prove, but the burden got damn near impossible when Fortunate Son 's thoroughly implausible afterword withered under the media that W. stands for Wasted is going to have to invent a time machine, take congressional right, his compassion rap. And then he goes to refuses to meet yesterday in despair, dumbstruck by the decision. If Bush's good friend Bob allowing for the fact that companies trying to resist hostile takeovers will the nakedness of its nationalism. Political leaders, union leaders, and corporate leaders alike have all publicly attacked the deal as effectively This is not, on some level, exactly surprising. Until this year, after all, States has no experience with this sort of thing, as evidenced by the hysteria since only huge inflows of foreign capital now allow us to fund our place, German companies have been among the most aggressive of global acquirers the bluster, you probably won't see the German government actually taking any The other factor that should be at play here, but doesn't seem to be, is the recognition that foreign competition, whether in the direct form of competition for consumers or the more indirect form of competition for corporate control, most acquisitions fail. The pressure created by those acquisitions, though, was a good thing (as, in retrospect, the pressure created by the corporate raiders whether those managers really understand what shareholder value means. And it also makes you think that they may be looking after their own interests more than the company's. The impulse to rally to the flag may be understandable in "ideologue" here as a euphemism for "people of principle," rather than presidency with a terrible hangover. Bush is considerably less conservative than many of his fans believe, not that he's ever made any secret of it. He's bipartisan compromise, or the appearance of it anyway. He brags about his particularly evangelicals. He rewarded them by giving them jobs and access, and in many cases real power. It was the ideological conservatives who worked for conservatives. Congressional Republicans squandered their leverage over him almost immediately. They threw their endorsements to Bush at the very beginning of the cycle, and without demanding anything in return. They shouldn't have But they were. And wounded, too. But by that point there was nothing they could do. My guess is, they'll be every bit as shocked when President W. Though I must say they've been pretty good about the drug thing. Bush has all but admitted cocaine use (or admitted that it would be a bad idea to admit president who'd never done a line? A dork, in other words. Not me. else I know thinks it's odd, even "troubling" to see a serious presidential candidate run around punching people in the arm and giving nicknames to something hideous about being mildly boorish with your male friends. allowed his body to be used in various experiments testing the effects of on different parts of the body. There were exactly two ways each sensor could eyes and bleeding sores, all the sensors registered zero. He had been A distraught Murphy proclaimed the original version of the famous maxim: "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll Both versions of the story have the same basic theme, which is that it's always good to be prepared for lots of things going wrong. But in the all things to get screwed up. It's the engineering equivalent of the familiar political dodge, "mistakes were made." By contrast, in Bear's version, calling the technician said to be responsible (we never get the stating any broad philosophical principle of any kind. If this is the To make matters even more confusing, there's a third version of the "There are several reputable people in the aeronautic industry who claim to anyway when they finally got to the segment, they actually rebroadcast the whole show, not just clips or highlights, but the whole thing in its entirety! I mean, what the hell is that? Afterwards, they cut back to the anchorwoman and she's trading quips with the other newscaster and fanning indicate that they have become sexually aroused. The noble fourth estate! An equivalent would be when papers run giant articles reporting the content that her baby was born before the bill was ratified, but the explanation offered was that the bill's postpartum passage gave her the confidence she cells require regular fluid intake to survive. Yet, somehow I don't see myself installed my city's water system, I am alive today," although technically I lunch, I can tell you what's in his toilet bowl even as we speak: water that nature, in her wisdom, intended to be thousands of miles away from him. Since are comedy writers, and there is an unwritten law saying anyone who writes stretching hundreds of miles in every direction), and besides, any city that well, her whole existence), quite possibly the greatest movie ever made, I want to move away from all this witty banter about politics and media you, but I love television. Some people have sports; other people have every episode, every frame, every line. It's all we talked about then, and again all we talked about when the series was rerun for the first time over the summer. What makes it so good? All the usual things: wonderful writing, great contemporary story line that has already been copied to ill effect by other One reason I think The Sopranos is so far superior to everything else on the tube is that everything else on the tube is dreadful. Even The West inner workings of government (which are themselves shabby versions of the real thing, which is itself a shabby version of what the real thing should be), is a hit; it ought to be canceled, if only to send a message to the dentist who capped Martin Sheen's teeth. Only a little while ago, it seems, everyone was an exodus of film folks for the friendlier confines of the blue glow. This season, I think, the tide has turned back. It's been a banner year for the and even exceeded my expectations in the past few months. Whereas, except for watching regularly anymore. This is probably the reason for the rise of the more optimistic about the future of television than I am. Not a day goes by cast is as diverse ethnically and, for all I know, in its sexual orientation as attempts to change the subject ("Senator, on guns and violence" and "Can we get But Chatterbox was too beguiled by this little operetta to notice at the we should have system of registration and licensing, just like we do for automobiles. If we can do it for automobiles, we ought to be able to do it to handguns. We ought to take gun dealers out of residential neighborhoods. We ought to make it a felony, not a misdemeanor, if you sell a gun to somebody who is underage or who is a felon himself. And I think that we ought to put trigger locks on guns. And I think, finally, that we ought to have background checks Despite the saturation coverage of the China trade deal in today's New one sidebar could be found examining its implications for human rights. It partisan) noises about human rights when the deal was announced yesterday. The Times reported that Human Rights Watch endorsed the China deal, but failed to point out that the organization is conditioning hope Congress will insist on limited, meaningful steps to improve human rights. This may or may not be an ineffectual gesture on Human Rights Watch's part; what's significant is that the news coverage of the China deal presented the answered. (Presumably they will in the coming days, as editors scramble for fresh angles.) As Human Rights Watch observed in a statement last month to the for the United States and China's other major trading partners "even as the tighter." (Click here to read the whole thing.) It may be that, contrary to recent experience, greater trade ties will now foster greater freedom in China. Or it may be that they won't. There seems a growing consensus that attempting to withhold admission to the World Trade Organization as a means to advance lack of interest in examining whether this premise is correct. prestigious independent medical organization's call for a new federal agency dedicated to minimizing medical mistakes, which, says the organization, are now which could mean the true end of "The Troubles" in that country. The papers explain the basic point of the medical error recommendations: similar to the right one. Systematically noting and disseminating such possible confusions to physicians would reduce risk. All three leads make the point that medicine could benefit from following the tracking and notification procedures get to see the results of the proposed systematic error tracking. Just doctors, to be made known to the public but keep less serious ones confidential. But there's no discussion of whether this makes sense from the patient's point of view. A related point: There's already a data bank for sharing information about incompetent doctors. Surely it would be relevant to know if it functions similarly to what's being proposed now and to know if it has indeed helped make The other significant wiggle room in the stories relates to the dimension of start a thorough safety inspection of the company's manufacturing plants, focusing on quality control procedures. The Journal says the field audit comes after months of increasing tension between the agency and company. language, and less sexuality. The biggest advertiser to pull out over content The New York Times leads with how business lobbyists view the story running under a brutal headline: "CONGRESS LEAVES BUSINESS LOBBIES ALMOST reform, and no ban on agribusiness mergers. The paper says business's (the government's accident investigation body) remain for the time being in authorities, who therefore have been more cooperative in sharing flight and evidence. Also, shades of the dog who didn't bark, the Post reveals didn't say: "There was no shocked expletive or puzzled comment, as pilots typically make in an emergency or when highly computerized aircraft suddenly ago to escape the daily fighting between warlords there. The papers report that needs foreign cash if it is to actually become an independent nation. This at a time when the developed world is spending less and less on foreign aid. ad making the rounds, the two women chatting about health care are not the ordinary folks they seem to be, but are actresses reading from a script. Why is The Wall Street Journal features a Desert Storm memoir by at the Air Force Academy. The talk contains the following compelling and reassuring passage, about a transport helicopter pilot, who came up on the radio volunteering to go pick up a fighter pilot shot down over a heavy around a lot about interservice rivalries, but I guarantee that I would follow died from a blood reaction caused during a gene therapy experiment administered restructure Medicare and Social Security and pass gun control legislation or Social Security revenues to finance other parts of government." The Democrats out that "Despite their minority status, Democrats have largely set the agenda tough time resolving unfinished business as it heads into an election year. Senate ethics investigation that ended with his exoneration." (Today's Papers four other senators, of having attempted to improperly influence federal which "gained him admirers in the news media, if not among his Senate suicide attempts, drove him cuckoo." He says his years spent in solitary gave notes that wannabe presidents are now getting "questioned for serving, not dodging" and thinks that some candidates might be worried about how they'll Inside, the Post runs news that the "Republican Governors' Association symbolizing their willingness "to use their muscle and prestige to help him win promise to play a chivalrous campaign game; the Democratic hopeful has taken platforms around focus group research, he seems to be increasingly relying on An LAT poll shows Gore up only one percentage point over care only after actual or near catastrophes. One example: A paranoid New York Post would even dream of running an item like the one in "Page tomorrow they'll tell us what some of those bargains were. (The smart money is on giant containers of cheese fish.) But the bottom line is that it is nice just to realize, in a kind of "We Are the World" sense, as we come upon another that is sure to hit all the big newscasts and the radio talk shows by this evening. The female half of a 25-year marriage, "a relationship so close that they shared an electric toothbrush" (Yuck. I hope they only mean the handle husband, who had no clue as to her motives for leaving the marriage so hastily (but if he had asked me I would have said "Give a little thought to the area of dental hygiene"), accidentally intercepted a piece of her mail that mentioned a few of the lottery details. The upshot is that he took her to court and now a judge has ruled that because she "acted out of fraud and malice" when she "violated state asset disclosure laws" during the divorce proceedings, she must turn the entire lottery win over to her ex. Ouch, that must sting. She is claiming the only reason she never mentioned the big lotto win to her once beloved was due to an "ignorance of the law." You're probably scoffing now, but I, for one, believe her. There are so many painful emotional and logistical publicly about the ways in which people are often forced to part with a lot of enterprise. It gave the Web site address, so I couldn't resist spending a little time there examining photos of her "purses and totes," each one "adorned with the (Wear it with pride!) Come with me now as we revel in the "Garden Patch": "a maroon chenille tapestry that is reminiscent of an earlier century" (I wonder breathing life into these masterpieces as she underwent a "reawakening of my wish for us. "I hope that you recognize the importance of being free spirited with your creativity," she writes. Making me think that she may have learned angle has really worked all that well for her so far. Actually my favorite part of the Web site is where she writes (under Product Description), "Today's woman needs both practicality and durability en vogue." En vogue? Who talks like that? I think what we have here is a rare glimpse of recall whether those more enlightened policy discussions took place before or "practicality," from a practicality standpoint alone it surprised me that all of her purses are "Dry Clean Only." She of all people should be endorsing a line of fully washable products. If ever there was a person who has learned firsthand about the difficulties of having to drag things to the dry cleaners, it would certainly be she. In fact, the least she could do is throw in a bottle fronts all feature photos of the cops firing tear gas and pepper spray on protesters, reminding the reader of the authorities' central PR problem in such situations: Regardless of the merits, there's no way to look good when you're armored from head to toe and shooting stuff at folks who are unarmored and the convention center where the meetings were supposed to be held. Stores and restaurants then shut down and then protesters filled the streets. The papers say that most of the protest was nonviolent noncompliance, but also pass along shows a moronic dirtball doing just that.) It's reported that much of the violence was committed by people in black clothes and ski masks. The papers grapple with the sheer diversity of the protesters: people dressed as pigs, turtles, clowns, Superman, vegetables, fish, and butterflies, themselves together and women calling themselves "Vegan Dykes" marching event, but the LAT overshoots when it states: "Not since the days of the research uncovering brain damage in Gulf War veterans complaining of the myriad symptoms collectively known as "Gulf War Syndrome." The finding means, complaints are not the result of battlefield stress, the conclusion of a cigarette smoke may be more dangerous than previously believed: A new study And the paper says some auto industry types think the new car market has broadened permanently. Reasons? The enormous wealth caused by the boom means kill and turn it into venison for the hungry. The paper reports that in the the poor. The man's business card reads "You Whack 'Em, I Pack 'Em." Now, if he So now the Fed has taken all the rate cuts back. Last summer and fall, when it sometimes felt as if the global economy were on the verge of a massive nervous breakdown, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three consecutive result, didn't even hiccup, while the stock market, which had plummeted in the to shrink, and inflation at the consumer level remains in check. There are Wall Street and that the continued rise in stock prices is entirely the product of the Fed's distribution of easy money. But that case has been weakened not only by the Fed's own rate hikes but also by the powerful rally in the bond Fed was letting us all live high on the hog by printing lots of greenbacks. important things to keep in mind about this most recent hike. The first is that even if the Fed's performance over the past year and a half looks perfect, we don't actually know if it was. By this I mean something more than just the obvious point, which is that history has no control group. I also mean that the quarter, though the rate of that growth has slowed slightly (very slightly). And it seems increasingly clear that the effects on productivity of computerization and the Internet are real and not temporary blips. But why those effects are being felt now, how long they will last, how much of productivity growth is being driven by businesses running leaner than they once did: These questions don't have firm answers. Nor, for that matter, do we really understand why productivity growth slowed so rapidly in the 1970s. So while the Fed deserves credit for its performance, most of what's going on in The second thing worth noticing is that the popular understanding of the role of the Fed seems to have shifted in the past year and a half, arguably as a result of its quick action last year. The conventional wisdom was that it took six months to a year for a Fed rate hike to work its way into the economy, which makes sense since raising or lowering interest rates generally isn't like slamming a door open or shut. It's more like easing it open or closed. But what we've seen more recently is the idea that one of the Fed's key roles is psychological. It wasn't the literal opening of the taps last fall that mattered but rather the symbolic message the Fed sent lenders, which was that send the right message to lenders and borrowers. To be sure, ultimately the message carries weight because it's backed by the Fed's actions. But in concrete terms, the Fed's actions probably won't have an effect for six months to a year. The Fed's message, though, is already at work right now. The way you describe your life is starting to sound glamorous to me. We don't even have 24-hour waffle places out here. If we want waffles, we have about a 12-hour window of opportunity, and after that, tough luck, you're on may be all the reason I need to start planning a trip. The last time I visited your general part of the country, I learned a different but equally interesting regional dietary lesson: Apparently, restaurants around there do not feel that a salad is really a salad unless it has first been deep fried and then soaked in a heavy cream sauce. I went to one "salad bar" where not only did I not see going to skip the reflexive but pointlessly callous joke I could make about the people), but among the "salad ingredients" being offered was a dish of chocolate pudding. I thought to myself, "God bless the dietician behind this show is back in production in time for it to be considered as a possible export hit our stores will be? If things work the way they usually do in commerce, guess is that they will begin to make and export enchiladas. According to the 'disgustingly hypocritical' of the administration to claim to be keeping the interests of working people in mind as it negotiates with a regime that routinely violates human rights." Which got me to thinking about how the controlling your body's energy centers that would make it not only a beloved eventually the rest of the country). Maybe when they realize that their social irritants might well be their most profitable exports, it will be the kick in ties? It's good of him to be putting energy into making sure that the unwanted children of the future will be born into to a world without a functioning as having looked the other candidates over and come up with this incisive statement: "Let me ask you, did they make billions of dollars in a very short time? I don't think so." Since that is his criterion for excellence in lotto winners, sitcom stars, and successful contestants from Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? when he is picking out his cabinet. I also love the way he brings his girlfriend to press conferences to dress things up. I hope in the future he will also bring a blowup of his bank statement and a wheelbarrow full loved the discussion. There was obviously tension in the air, because my independent decisions in such matters without input from the White House, its For that reason, I couldn't comment on the decision that was clearly on many nor unfair business practices stamp out competition. But then the meeting moved on to other topics, and I in technology and the Internet, they are also interested in the same issues as education; how we can make our schools and streets safer; and how we can reach across our divisions to bring this nation together. And even though national security policy didn't come up, I suggested that one crucial issue for voters to ponder is this: whose finger feeling that no inappropriate compromise on the issue of choice should be accepted), but no other foreign policy issues arose. So I obviously spent too from all other crimes. That is why we need tougher laws to prevent and punish Another person asked me how we can make our schools safer in the aftermath of tragedies such as Columbine. I said that I believe the solutions range from tough measures to get guns away from kids and in the use of gratuitous violence in the entertainment media, to more parental working parents more help in balancing work and family. I was certainly impressed by the discussion, and the home to a great deal of talent and creative drive. That may be why, according to certain projections, Bill Gates may be worth a trillion dollars some day. Of had not dropped out of college, he'd have a chance at being worth two journalism for the first time in almost a quarter of a century. Instead of my trusty old typewriter from my days at the campus is just bubbling with energy and ideas. I certainly hope to spend even be included here? Gracious, that's as bad as not having Curt Flood. statement about what the editors and the advisory board feel is important. Those who have been consigned to the dustbin of irrelevancy, where the evidence The role of the black intellectual is difficult to discern. Clearly, I do not think the role of the black intellectual is to churn out books of this sort. First, I have never had the occasion of seeing a reference book marketed on the strength of the celebrity of its editors. I have no idea who edited the reference books I used. I couldn't tell you who edited my dictionaries or my other source books. I think this is true with most people. It is not especially important to know this. Already, the idea of the black reference book with glamorous editors is something of a real problem and should make the public a bit suspicious because it seems so much like a marketing ploy. It is, perhaps, this sense of opportunism, and of blowing up ordinary jobs like creating a black reference book of this sort as if one were announcing the return of the intellectuals. They are talented, but are they principled? They are portrayed as courageous, but how much courage does it take to pocket fat fees for giving lectures spiked with Christian socialist bromides to audiences who given to this generation of black scholars, far more than any earlier generation ever dreamed of having. And is the product that has been generated the best that can be done with all that this generation has at its disposal? This is a fair question. I feel deeply inadequate myself when I think about it position, they would have produced so much more and so much better. (I must admit that I did not aspire to be any of those guys when I was in graduate school and I do aspire to be them now. In graduate school, I aspired to be Brooks. I still aspire to be them, and their work has most influenced me. But can a black intellectual ever get to talk about something like that when white literary and intellectual establishment would rather have him or her write Most black intellectuals, if they are truly reflective, with a few exceptions admire, cannot help but think they might be a bit fraudulent. black intellectuals, or a suggestion of its possibility, then we must ask the question, How has this come to pass? What set of conditions exist that keep black intellectuals from being incisive and as honest and as courageous and as productive as they should be? Some of the compromises from the realm of political correctness I have already discussed. Some of the compromises spring from the need of racial solidarity, either as opportunism or misplaced loyalty. I do not speak and never have spoken for black people and do not want to. Some of the compromises are the normal sorts of difficulties that all intellectuals need for excessive conflict in order to make the work "interesting." Some are the result of whites who box blacks into a certain corner as public You raise a good question about who is reviewing this book. (I have been asked to review every book Gates has written. I feel as if I am his personal reviewer.) Blacks go into black studies for a number of complex reasons, some good, some not so good; and whites respond with opportunities and enticements that are bound to keep them there. The niche becomes a trap. The various white intellectual establishments, moreover, tend to buy the kind of black that best suits them ideologically, which means they buy the kind of representative black person they themselves think they would be if they were black. And most of the reduced, funneled, constrained, and strained, either in its liberal or its conservative manifestations, in ways that are not especially useful either to blacks or black intellectuals but are very useful to the white intellectual establishments as they distribute their spoils. I don't say this to suggest anything sinister or racist about whites. (Although racism and conspiracy cannot entirely be discounted, either.) The pressures of commercialism and prestige combine to make this rather unpleasant situation, both of result, highly distorted, and black intellectual publications do not help as they are even more restrictive about the kind of commentary and judgments they that the black experience must have an orthodoxy and that all intellectual All of this, I think, explains why black public intellectuals are the way they are and why so few have said much that really matters in intellectual circles. Moreover, even more so than whites, black intellectuals tend to give indulge in a bit of racial hectoring and demagogic posturing to remind the I know that Gates and West get your dander up. I like them and admire them to some degree, although I do not think they have worked up to their capacity. I think Gates particularly is a very smart guy and a good writer, if he were to years to do but would have been far more intensive, and far more usefully selective, might have been much more worth the effort. For you, I know, Gates is a hustler and West, worse still, is a sanctimonious hustler, which means, dangerously, he actually takes what he says seriously and takes himself very little to say. I think your impatience stems from that. There is far too much Gates and West and there is far too little in what they are saying to justify their demand for your attention or for the culture's attention. This is a fair enough criticism, if I read you rightly, and one I would agree with. I think both men need to stop churning out work and think about a kind of settled obscurity in working long and hard on some project that would absorb them completely and passionately, and simply quit producing for public consumption a But even when I find myself frustrated by their work, I find that I would rather have them doing what they do than doing nothing at all, and if it is not, in the end, greatly advancing black intellectualism or not advancing it as much as they think it is, it is probably not doing the cause of black intellectualism any harm, either, or any more harm than I or any of the rest insistence on judging a historical figure by current moral standards, I find fatuous, just poor scholarship. I agree with you that Lewis should have done discuss something more on the order of the impact of pragmatism on black philosophers or an essay on the whole black philosophy movement. Don't throw the book at your television. Televisions are expensive these a lot of good information in it. My bottom line is that I would recommend the book to students and colleagues and I hope it does well, despite its Probably this book could be done better, but no one is going to get an opportunity to do that, so you might as well live with what you've got, warts opening the door. Maybe black stuff is still so suspect that we need celebrities to get reference books. I hope things aren't that bad! someone has to do it. Besides, when I was boy, I dreamed, as all boys do, of running off to the circus. One of the things that stopped me was that I was afraid I would wind up shoveling dung. The task has caught up with me anyway literature as cleaning up after the elephants does to being in the circus, except that you're more likely to be useful pushing a broom behind the elephants. Who, after all, really wants to step in elephant dung? This question has been implicit in our conversation: Just what, as we cohort of the rappers, I wonder whether black academia has been hijacked by a important. The truth, though, is that this fascination (by people who really the street nigger," and he's absolutely right. It crosses the color line, of integrationist experience, to the complexities (and confusions) of inhabiting an environment where, say, white people valued aspects of black culture, like (That last isn't all that unreasonable, given the unremittingly cheerful Perhaps he's a genuinely nice man. But so much of his writing is smug and listen and follow his advice, the world would be a better place. rights of women, homosexuals, and other oppressed minorities and doesn't seem immerse himself fully in the rich cultural currents of black everyday life." As at his insufferable, pontificating worst. In my last message, I observed that leadership or we fail." And that, to return to the question I posed earlier, is of obligation or responsibility to the black community. they've never made it clear (like Gates) or, like West, because they stand for so much, appealing to, and appeasing, so many constituencies. West, after all, Post leads with a report that cocaine and marijuana seizures in the in the past two years. The story states that the increase reflects more before they demobilize. The move is stirring up fears in and out of government should not be a weapon. The story makes it clear that there is heartfelt disagreement about this within the administration by quoting by name government providing health care to the poor. The scam involved phony storefront medical supply businesses being reimbursed by the state for providing supplies that never were purchased for patients who didn't exist. The paper says the false leads with a bullish report on retail sales over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Internet sales figures the paper passes along for the period include: voices, because it never really comes to grip with the seeming indeterminism of its data. In other words, the piece suggests that more seizures equals more production. But it's just as easy to imagine that more seizures equals better we to understand that these aid packages didn't include food? And is it really military, but look at the topic differently. The LAT emphasizes that and admiral. The closest the LAT comes to mentioning the latter is its It seems that the LAT has got hold of a national problem, while the problems. It waits till its seventh paragraph to notice that across the out of the service with an honorable discharge, and even then never pauses to wonder how closing this loophole might change the situation. Challenge to all papers doing stories about trends in the military: Try Northwestern University. This is apparently impossible. The editorial wraps up thus: "Now that they control most of the national territory and are responsible for affairs of state, the Afghan authorities have to take more seriously their responsibility to rein in terrorism. The new as part of its military's longtime reach for an active regional foreign policy. for lifting a paragraph from a music reference book. Today's Papers recalls that the Sun also fired an obituary writer last summer for making up obituaries of the same man? Why are these two papers willing to let the "Open a little wider, Honey," Dr. Spritzer said. He looked even better than he had at the cake sale. His good face seemed to pop out of the "So, how did you survive your cake?" he asked my mother over my head. "Let's see here." He moved something suspiciously like a pliers in my mouth. Three decades after enduring one of the more agonizing rituals of Anywhere But Here is, of course, a novel (and a very good one; the people who create works of the imagination, has been suspected now and then of story's being appropriated in the latter work, click here.) Not even the tiniest of the small literary magazines, however, has likely "Oh, honey, it's something adults do in bed. But not many people ever do it. It means you really, really like the woman. You'll know when you're older. It just means they're really, really serious about you. They wouldn't do it with But a few chapters later, Ann overhears her mother talking on the phone to two." A few chapters after that, Ann observes, "Josh Spritzer seemed to be dropping my mother." And a few chapters after that, he does. (In the movie, Dr. Spritzer is a little bit of a jerk. Since first encountering the novel a dozen years ago, Chatterbox has assumed the sexual relationship in the book was entirely made up, but nevertheless has wondered how Dr. Seltzer felt about Dr. Seltzer would be flattered to be described in the book as handsome, and even more flattered by the hunky portrayal of him in the movie by an actor consider the moral dimension of the Dr. Spritzer character somewhat wanting. Here was a man who'd devoted his life to making crooked things The morning after seeing the movie, Chatterbox excitedly rang up Dr. Seltzer's office, where, according to the phone book, Dr. Seltzer was still "I was to make sure he didn't get into a situation he could not get out of. They didn't want him to get into trouble. So we went into the field after the fact after combat actions, and that limited his exposure to any hazards." This quote leaves the impression that Gore was treated specially by not being sent into combat situations, and possibly that he or his politically request to Gore himself, and that he does not believe Gore was ever aware of interesting things. He told me that the flap was "much ado about nothing" and that he thinks the use of the term "bodyguard" is inaccurate. For Army journalists in the unit, not visiting a battlefield until the battle was over mixed feelings about being asked to serve as Gore's "security escort." On the one hand, he resented Gore's special treatment. On the other hand, he felt honored to be chosen. And while he at first thought Gore was privileged and out Gore. But whether or not the conversation occurred, Gore clearly was not reporting assignments that were in practice largely voluntary. Gore went on many such trips, where he and other Army journalists caught a no reason to believe these other journalists got the request he did to keep explained to him that he would have to choose between hanging around the base telling him. Gore's decision was to go and see the war for himself, often in known it. If you're not pulling your weight, you're an outcast. [Gore] was one clearly did expose Gore to hazards he wouldn't have faced had he stayed back at the base writing up press releases. Riding on helicopters, sleeping in foxholes villages near the base were all things Gore did that involved a degree of Gore has alleged in the past that he was protected in a different way at an earlier stage, but not out of a benign motive. Gore enlisted in the Army in the delayed for more than a year, until after his father had lost the election in wanted to make sure that Little Al didn't create good publicity for Big Al from the suspicion that politics was what kept Gore stateside for so long. The worst Gore can be accused of on the basis of existing evidence is being protected to a minor degree without his own knowledge or consent. Even that much may not be true. But even if someone in the military did give an order to protect Gore, this should hardly count as a mark against him. It doesn't diminish the credit Gore deserves for volunteering to participate in a war that is a court order that would force the company to reveal the "source code" for part or all of its Windows operating system. What exactly does this mean? that make up a program. It is the letters and symbols that software engineers type into their computers when they create an application or operating system. For example, if a C++ programmer wrote a program to make his computer display the words, "Hello, World," the source code might look like this: Although these commands are intelligible to engineers, they are useless to computers, which understand only ones and zeros. So, to make the source code into a functioning program, translation software (called a "compiler") must convert it into the binary "object code" that computers can process. object code and the source code freely available so that any programmer can figure out how the program is constructed and then alter it to his satisfaction. But closed source software, such as Windows and most commercial programs, is shipped with the object code only. Software companies argue that source code contains valuable intellectual property that must be protected. One Co. ships only bottles of Coke to its customers, not the formula for the drink, theoretically convert object code back into source code. But their inaccuracies render them largely ineffective. (Think of one person translating a sentence are slim that the sentence would end up in its original form.) Additionally, attempting to reverse engineer software is illegal: Like most commercial source code public, competitors could use this information to market Windows computer languages. To use the source code effectively, a competitor would need to figure out which commands affect which functions and how changes to one part for even the most experienced programmers. For this reason, releasing the operating systems unless a great number of software engineers applied be bad for consumers because it would result in many incompatible versions of So far, the results of releasing source code to the public are mixed. It can Navigator browser a year an a half ago, and most estimate that it will take at least another six months for programmers to create a new product with it. And a browser's source code is only a fraction of the size of that of an operating were too easy on Gates. Years ago, before blackness became really marketable, it used to be said that the publishing industry would admit only one black simultaneously on the bestseller list. Then along came Henry Louis "Skip" Gates guys are in an unenviable place. Gates must seem like he's everywhere. Still and all, I wonder how much of his work will survive, and whether, in a hundred years, say, anyone will read anything by Gates, in the same way we still read Oh, well. At least Gates had the decency not to include himself in his own I wish he'd left out bell hooks and Cornel West, though, two prominent public intellectuals (that's what they call people who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lecture the rest of us about what we're doing wrong). There are biographies of both, though, thankfully, we only have to read about hooks. Not so with West. He writes a 15-page "interpretation" of and though only one volume has been published, his is already the standard reward your friends and ignore everyone else. Which would explain why there's so slavishly politically correct and populist? There are at least three Interpretation" (there's that word again!), and the popularization begins on There's an entry on rap music (what an oxymoron!). I suppose you could make an argument that it's a significant enough phenomenon, so that it deserves to be here. But what's the rationale for separate biographical entries on Queen that many whites feel bad when they don't know something about black history and culture. Years ago, a white woman told me about how her son's teacher let honor Twain shortly before the latter's death, and for the monument in allowed senators to adjourn for the year. All three papers report that although both parties had to make significant compromises to pass the bill, both Democrats and Republicans are touting their local victories within the bill: funding, and the Republicans are assured of more money for medical The LAT highlights the Republican claim that passage of the bill could mean that the Social Security trust fund will remain untouched for the skepticism. In addressing the individual parts of the spending package, the provisions of the bill in terms of the dollar amount assigned to them, the wheeling and dealing that took place in the final hours. The second paragraph prominently. A sense of grateful relief that the filibuster never materialized and that the budget was finally sent to the president pervades all three was reached, members of both parties emptied silently out of the chamber. status of the suit and whether a mediator can help bring about a settlement. proclivities, and that neither side in the case should feel as though it's been limits on conventional armaments, and simplifications of the procedures for advertising. But such bans have been upheld in other regions of the country. Policy; President Shielded from Violence," and the article develops more fully that juxtaposition between the fury in the streets and the tranquility in which the president was able to conduct his visit. In its live coverage of the day's airport and images of marauding protesters hurling rocks and firebombs. story, the LAT also contrasts the violence of the protests with the All three papers front Gov. Bush's speech in which he outlined his foreign speech to answer critics of his foreign policy abilities, but each paper draws story with "Bush Urges Engagement; Opposes Test Ban Treaty," suggesting a upcoming debates with his Republican opponents. The LAT stands alone in reporting that the speech received endorsements from some prominent reefer on the safety board chairman's statement that media leaks have "clouded" If you're looking for signs of irrationality in the current stock market, and you're not one of those people who think that every Internet stock out there is necessarily overvalued, the best place to look is probably the investor craze for companies that announce stock splits. When a company splits its stock, it does so by offering its current shareholders one (or sometimes two or three) shares for every one they currently own. The value of the company as a whole stays unchanged, although its stock price is cut in half (or in thirds or fourths). In essence, a stock split divides up the company's pie into more slices, without changing the size of the pie at all. Stock splits are a legacy of the time when it was difficult for individual investors to buy shares in anything other than round (that is, multiples of investors to buy it, but if you split your stock, you could bring those investors would rather own more shares at a lower price rather than fewer shares at a higher price, even though the value of each holding is the same of investors who will never consider buying the stock and, in the case of the Class A shares, probably couldn't buy the stock. And, since stock prices have been had it rejected stock splits (in which case its stock price would be So, all other things being equal, stock splits do exert a slight upward pull on a company's stock price. But slight is the key word here. Academic studies suggest that the shares of companies that announce stock splits don't do significantly better than the market, which makes sense, since in the long run a stock's price is determined far more by the underlying value of the company than by any other factor. And a stock split has nothing to do with You often hear that splits are important because they're a way for management to signal that it's confident in the company, but this is a non sequitur, unless not splitting the stock is a way of saying, "We don't believe in our future, so we don't want small investors to be hurt." And in any case, splits have become so routine, and in some sense so expected, that any signaling function they might have had has been vaporized. Despite all this, the announcement of a split now regularly drives up a company's stock price. A week and a half ago, for instance, Juniper, one of the other news. This was it. The company's future prospects were no better at the end of the day than they had been at the beginning. But the market thought the What we're seeing here is a classic recursive loop, in which meaningless news becomes meaningful because the market has established a pattern of treating similarly meaningless news as meaningful. More than that, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around stock splits, since investors are now split. And the existence of that industry itself conveys the message that Any time you have a phenomenon like this one, it's better to look for the underlying economic rationality rather than just write it off as hysteria. But in this case, the market really isn't recognizing hidden value by rewarding stock splits. It's just shuffling money from one pocket to another. And the really weird thing is this: When Juniper announced its stock split, its shares don't seem to be deterred anymore by high stock prices. They're happy to pile then, investors demonstrated that splitting isn't really necessary to bring $20,000--and decreased the minimum enlistment period needed to receive a bonus The Senate continued to bicker over pork, and both houses renewed an high up that spending will increase by tens of billions of dollars from last At a 54-member meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in "I would hope that every leader of every country around this table would have conference a day early, but the news summary in the Journal 's (the corresponding Associated Press story on the Journal 's Web site makes no such characterization). The papers do not mention a possible political than previously thought. Although it continued to stress the likelihood of a "I have made my decision now," before uttering the widely reported phrase, "I put my faith in God's hands." (The first phrase has been mentioned by some, but not all, of the newspapers for several days now. Suspecting that this first phrase was spurious, Today's Papers now regrets not having mentioned this anomaly.) This is not, the Journal notes, a petty detail: If the repeats both phrases in an inside story today. Meanwhile, an with no hint of mechanical failure, before its fatal dive. appropriation that, unlike the rest of the sitcom, is not fictional. don't think I can. You've said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet. What a wonderfully pithy, accurate sentence. able to help it. Horrible as he is (or perhaps because he is so horrible), And there's no reason to feed the ego of every rich guy who decides to inflict Trump around would likely be amusing as hell. I plan to start the interview by sneezing repeatedly into my palm, then trying to shake his hand. Guaranteed cooties.") For another, Trump's candidacy, and the Reform Party generally, reflects a larger, important trend in politics, and may be the surest sign yet that ideology as a force in national elections is dead. Wow. Did I just write that last sentence? Pardon me. Let me take that back: The Reform Party isn't a reflection of anything. They're just a bunch of wackos with a Web site and federal matching funds. But that doesn't mean we can't have bit torn here. I don't think Drudge is obsessed with accuracy, and I never thought that giving him a television show sounded like a great idea. On the other hand, if there's one thing that annoys me more than a reckless Internet about reckless Internet gossip merchants. As if people need to be protected and haven't filed a story since the Ford Administration think of the State of Stunned by this new revelation, Chatterbox ran to the nearest bookstore and pounds of pulsing hormones. Their relationship was a tempestuous one. remedy here, but a fear of getting pregnant did not deter us in our almost forgot to look up the business about smoking dope. Here it is (Page weekend, and she could be playful. He vaguely remembers them joining a march on previous statements that she has never taken illegal drugs." Surprisingly, nobody pitched a question about this to the president this morning when he gave some remarks about a new proposed Labor Department rule allowing states to use unemployment insurance to fund parental work leave. In case Chatterbox isn't being snide enough to get his point across: her college boyfriend, even if she's lying about it now. He brings the matter false, that could possibly be leveled. What's left? A loutish college boyfriend In response, the creaking White House press office shudders and throws off a spark or two and issues one more unconvincing denial. Can't anybody make it in his will. The catch: To receive his inheritance, the grandson must be And are there any limits on the conditions one can place on a gift? Grandpa is well within his rights; conditional gifts to people and institutions are not uncommon. Although the laws vary from state to state, judges have generally reasoned that since the beneficiary is free to decline the gift, such conditions don't violate anyone's rights. So, wealthy parents are free to put virtually any restriction on their estates. Inherited money is most frequently contingent upon the recipient's getting a college education or staying out of legal trouble. But courts have even upheld parents' right to condition gifts on the heir's abstaining from smoking or marrying someone of a certain religion or ethnicity. And conditional The condition cannot require a violation of the law. This principle has been used most frequently to prevent beneficiaries from having to uphold illegal racial restrictions in order to receive property. For instance, courts have overturned the proviso that donated parkland be available only to The condition cannot run counter to "public policy." Courts vary in their interpretation of this principle but have generally used it to strike down requirements that prohibit marriage or encourage divorce. (Most commonly, a man will attempt to leave property to his wife as long as she never remarries.) It has also been used to repeal requirements that would cause by one side of the family. And it has prevented beneficiaries from being The condition cannot last forever. Courts consider it undesirable for someone to control property or land for hundreds of years after his death. So in most states, restrictions on private inheritances are limited to charities can often last longer). After this time, the property and decision rights must be transferred to an individual or group. computers constantly have to tell us more about their own internal activities impression I might be inadvertently launching a nuclear missile: "Dialing", ending up in an inscrutable "Status" box with graphs and blinking lights and various pronouncements whose urgent meanings no human could ever know. This is our last exchange for the week, right? From this distance, our discussions seem to have started out on a suitably high and somber note with great effort of will that I now refrain from referring you to my new favorite pencil ("styptic," proclaims the editors, "is such an excellent word"). If you can top that for meaninglessness, you are welcome to try. In the meantime, it should be stated for the record that your own book on the history of the abortion wars is a marvel of substance and you should not necessarily be judged by the lowbrow online company you've been keeping all week. will stretch to thousands of pages. Its worldview is cranky and at times irresponsible. Its subject is a busybody. And yet these books are a real just long enough to inculcate in her (unjustifiably) a sense of her own slanders him in public, fleeces him out of his money, turns his family against him, and seeks to get him institutionalized. That brother, Teddy, becomes poetry, and blossoms. No room for that back in the States, once she marries her uses the family finances to stay Top Woman in her son's life. unpacking his trunk, she offers him his "freedom." If that's a euphemism for So does she. And in a strange way, after an initial frost, their marriage grows more tender as it grows more distant. (Let's talk more about this.) He to change. But she adapts so skillfully that no one quite realizes it. She the Poor of all sexes. The White House has two social circles, two policy Since Cook's first allegiance is to feminism (more specifically, to gay rights), she is not dug in on most of the political and economic questions that more in common with him than it appears.) It also brings weaknesses: This is Sorry to run on. These are excellent books to be read with extreme caution. bothered that Cook uses the old leftist trick of praising her subject's visionary radicalism, and then condemning as alarmist fabricators those who recently passed and a similar one the Senate's considering. business. Among those designated for tax breaks: Multinationals, small business the seventh paragraph to mention the bills need to be "sharply scaled down" not allow a risky plan to become law." Environmental and consumer groups are irked by the bills' concessions to oil, gas, and nuclear utilities, though The New York Stock Exchange confirmed yesterday that it plans to go public could result says the piece without explaining how, but the rush to go public "leaves unanswered for now some key questions about how to regulate these instant messaging. It allows users to send notes that pop up in a box on the screen of a recipient with the necessary software as they are being typed. about. However, others existed, like one put out by Prodigy, developed with the technical details of its Instant Messenger to allow other firms to develop analog. First, it more clearly explains the technology and does so earlier in the piece. Second, it reports three more important facts. Yahoo also introduced competition based on open standards," which is "exactly the complaint from was reported missing yesterday. "It was the first reported disappearance of Teddy and gloat.' I loved that. It was so like his father." that she helped establish the modern social compact under which citizens trade gets complicated if you think, as I do, that a lot of her most noble goals (such as racial integration) would have happened anyway, and consider that a lot of her least noble ones (such as disarmament on the verge of World War II) urged that we "treat the jobless man like a patient in hospital." Cook says lamented that the nation lacked a benevolent dictator to force through ruling in good times, which makes a lot of her rhetoric, as you say, instincts were aristocratic. She ushered in (or, more accurately, restored) an era in which political power was seized not through backroom deals and she gave to charity the millions she made as a radio star does not, to my mind, connections, fame, not to mention having a husband who's president. The hardly, pace Cook, dragged kicking and screaming), the government and with her! But the moment she berates the "privilege" of those who couldn't afford to make a down payment on her carriage house, or invokes the "greed" of governmental power that is not really your property. Maybe that's a problem, philanthropists (hence, buy political support) doesn't change the ethics of it. curiously narrow definition of privilege, a definition that left her lifestyle discovery for which Cook deserves great credit) was worth keeping an eye on. Court in 1937--is made the worse by his almost insane assertion that the Supreme Court was one of the "three horses" pulling the New Deal "plow." Without calling him undemocratic, one can wonder what his idea of democracy division of labor between presidents and their wives. You asked, providing a model for later administrations, in which poor folks and children and the lame and the halt were insidiously sentimentalized as women's Because sentimental politics can be a way to fob off rhetorical solutions on people demanding practical ones. Sometimes this is a good way to defuse radicalism which would otherwise be hard to answer. When the Bonus couldn't cave in to them, either, without unleashing similar protests across But sometimes sentimental politics is merely a way to salve one's conscience provide him with cover for his inaction. (One note: If I left the impression You're right that it's race where the interplay between rhetorical and programmatic politics was most complex. Cook snorts throughout at the demands etiquette" be respected. But at some level she understands that it was the White House into a place where black people were routinely seen coming in against racism at a time of severely limited options. (Of course, it alone than the first, but I think you're right. I never quite figured out, for civil rights) would have happened just fine without her, but she must take a What she did get was a chance to rally and embolden the men and women inside the New Deal who shared her belief that its benefits ought to extend to civil rights movement. Symbolic weight isn't nothing in this case: No one can say how much it ultimately meant that ER had lunch on the patio of the White country's first hostess to say that there was no reason a black man shouldn't eat with her, in the White House, as her equal. If she hadn't broken that bar, her fair share of bricks from the edifice of respectable racism. And she did it, as Cook makes clear, in spite of her class and upbringing, which she saw her place among the black delegates. When the police ask her to move, she going to tell me that the Southern Conference on Human Welfare was full of nanny state. I still can't grant you that this is a bad thing. I know we don't want to get lured into this old argument, but still, which part of the New Deal to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps? I know, I know (or at least I think I know): We're talking about a spectrum here, in which some freedom is traded for some security, and reasonable liberals like me and reasonable conservatives like you simply differ on where the appropriate balance is conservative to explain whether and why the New Deal should have halted short isn't it better to make a lot of money you give to charity than to make a lot hypocritical in preaching against the greed and privilege of others, but it strikes me as unfair to seize on this as a reason to disqualify her as having been more virtuous of her to while away the Depression polishing the White House china? May only the poor object to the treatment of the poor? counterpart is a hopeful lift in what has been a difficult patch with China, from the "one China" policy. The only real difference between the two accounts is that the LAT stresses remaining strains in the relationship a bit more, noting this in the big type of its headline, and also mentions the vessels and for resuming talks regarding the nonproliferation of weapons of and Senate now have personal experience with the difficulties posed by aging, infirm parents and other relatives, the issue of how to help alleviate the cost Congress' agenda. "Until you've gone through something, you don't really politicians to have family members who can't get drug rehabilitation treatment or day care or who end up on the wrong end of a handgun. business group that certifies minority ownership of corporations is likely to Corporations are slashing their suppliers down to a handful of giants, which would, under the present rules, automatically exclude virtually all like becoming more attractive to investors by weakening the definition of that the vote the other day to deny money to the F-22 doesn't, despite many headlines, actually kill the plane. That's because, he explains, the money that was turned down was only for producing the first block of aircraft next year. this sort of pot has been used in the past to resuscitate killed or virtually killed aircraft such as the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the Osprey tilt rotor The LAT 's recent addition of a reader's representative is starting to of the protest's organizers called, he was transferred three times and then reporter at the paper, an intern, knew in advance of the demonstration, but assumed the city desk would already know about it. Just getting the snafu story out there will make both the paper and its readers more aware of what needs to be done to avoid this sort of mistake in the future. cases. His crucial misstep appears to have been a profound failure to blend in. were doing so well. (If inflation and interest rates are on the way up, that's usually a bad thing for banks.) On the other hand, maybe it's not so perplexing, just an indication that bond traders and stock traders aren't hearing the same news, believing the same things, or expecting the same future. Of course, most stock traders apparently were hearing the same news What an odd week. The earnings numbers could not have been better. With the rare exception, just about every tech bellwether that's reported has come in ahead of expectations, and those were expectations that were about as high as any reasonable person could put them. But, again with the rare exception, all these bellwethers have seen their stock prices get crunched. This only goes to show you one thing, which happens to be the most important thing to know about foolishness. Dump your money into an index fund, and you won't have to worry about any of these anxieties disrupting your weekend barbecues. And so, chat on. (By the way, this will be the last weekend chatter for a couple of weeks, behind people's backs. But he doesn't own any property, so at least he's got cut almost in half on their first day. Ain't the Net wonderful?" UPS workers go on strike, management will have another club to bludgeon them propping up for most of this decade, the government continues to insist that no public official did anything wrong and that no one should be punished. 'Not Finance Ministry said. Apparently the pesos that taxpayers are sending to the hostile takeover attempt on Elf. 'You see, the problem isn't the merging part,' you can almost hear the Elf executives saying. 'The problem is the dwindling middle class, and a despoiled natural habitat.' Wow. Who knew that news and commentary, it does tend to neglect an important aspect of life: the and uses it every year. How would anyone know the difference?) These thoughts are inspired by the current miserable heat wave. It's a and in parts of the southeast and southwest. (Click here continental United States.) As the century draws to a close, "hottest summer" records are being broken left and right, making it harder and harder to Chatterbox isn't really interested today in expounding on the terrifying menace of global warming. (It's too hot.) Instead, Chatterbox finds himself wondering: How hot can it get? As is usually the case when interesting questions are Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chatterbox has always felt that the usual way temperature records are weather records pretty frequently. No doubt there are serious scientific reason may be that it makes it easier for weather authorities to soothe an aggrieved public: There, there. You're right. Nobody's ever had to endure records would seem to support the theory that global warming is making the planet, or at least the United States, much hotter. Probably the data isn't perfect. Can it really be true that the hottest climate. Chatterbox would also like to take this opportunity to implore pedants not to write in and point out that during earlier geological eras the worldwide climate was vastly different from what it's been during the last century (which seem to show that, hot as it is, we should all stop bitching and get back to reported by the latter paper yesterday. The New York Times fronts the story as well. Each of the papers marks this as the worst attack yet stresses the proximity of Western forces and their inability to suppress this money contributions. The Democrats' Plan A is to raise as much soft money as possible; if they come up short, Plan B is to adopt a folksy, sourced to Bush and some of his closest consorts, describes his former drinking habit in explicit terms ("if not clinically an alcoholic, Bush sometimes came remain hopelessly fuzzy on the issues, be resented for his vast campaign (and inherited) resources, get cocky, fall apart in an early primary, or be felled by a scandalous skeleton rattling in his closet. Meanwhile, a piece inside the but never considers that it might be the other way around. does an excellent job of describing the potential burden of China's size: "With parents will select their baby's gender. An experimental process dubbed those carrying Y chromosomes, so that doctors can impregnate women with embryos It seems that the experts will have to revise their casualty numbers for that seems to show that insurance company procedures are inimical to efficient provisions (a k a "pork") that the House Republican leadership has attached to the spending bills currently under consideration in order to gain members' Indeed, the weapons turnover program they are administering is almost are the order of the day, and he describes the confiscation of one furniture provisions calling for denying illegals access to social services and public schools, and those requiring police, school administrators, and public health officials to turn them in. All that will remain are two laws aimed at stopping the false document market in the state. All this for an initiative that, notes but their attitudes are nuanced. For instance, respondents noted that they are frequently able to reverse an insurer's initial decision to deny a course of treatment, and they admit that the rise of managed care has probably led to an online edition at least) mentions that nurses were surveyed too. percent over that time span. Top influence spender? The insurance industry. stop the pharmaceutical industry from encouraging doctors to prescribe otherwise would be to violate the constitutional protection of commercial the record by name to say that they saw or saw evidence of rapes, some of them gang rapes. The paper adds that one of these witnesses also described a woman pit. An experienced concert safety official expresses the bottom line: "What would not be allowed on public streets is allowed at concerts." analysis. Interestingly, both firms declined, out of fear about the business about military compensation that are routinely overlooked by the papers. The writer notes that his cousin, an 18-year Army officer, attended college and graduate school for free, and that given the tax advantages of a military never in the papers: Military members can usually avoid paying state taxes. To begin with the end of your last entry, I find I have to give you some with opposition to "all public improvements," and Cook does tend to caricature "freedom" in quotes as anything but a perfectly respectable rhetorical device, because it seems to speak to the question of why I come down on the side of miserable childhood, I don't buy it as the complete explanation for her empathy more about circumstance: When ER talked about the excitement of forming a new social order, well, she had a point. Her husband's administration was in the midst of saving capitalism from itself. And ER was talking about the redress of total segregation, pervasive poverty. What's not to reorder? talking to a generation of contented fellow boomers, in an era of prosperity, progressive direction. No, the heaven of racial harmony has not been achieved, always seemed to chide us, as if we were all mossback fat cats of the '30s who That note in her voice, of the unreconstructed left, is the same one I pretty much tuned out in reading Cook's bio. I suspect the world is divided between people who tune it out and people who are driven crazy by it, with a small remaining percentage who agree with it. (These are the same people who is what's made her so darned successful at attracting the right enemies, at A bright, intense young woman marries a profligately charming man who takes her home to his disapproving mother. She is dashed by his flirtations (and more?) with other women, but flowers when he runs for office and she discovers her own skills as a political wife. The higher he rises, the more she uses the role of spouse (and some apparent sense, within the marriage, that he owes her) to bring her own agenda to the fore. He needs her to organize him (he's always late and always talks too long to any gathering) and also to bring in money for the family (the few years he spends out of office, the practice of law bores him silly). She gradually finds that her marriage to him allows her to exercise power in his name that she was never able to claim in her own right. But of course the other circumstance that makes the two women different is (Not, as indicated above, that ER was innocent of personal ambition. "How I was not a force for good? Do you think she was the opposite, or not a force of the mark. Cook is persuasive that their love affair was rich and rewarding over snotty refusal to let White House elevator operators practice their trade ("I know how to run an elevator!"), her firing of all the white kitchen help on the objects of her "solicitude" and everything to do with the greater glory of her political ambitions did not arise purely from such a project of thwarted person tacking out in search of love and eminence. I can't agree that she was a force for good, but she seems to have been a good person. her own patrician way, had behind her the authority of what our grandparents called the School of Hard Knocks. (And our grandparents had far more awareness than we grant them that such Knocks could be emotional ones.) Her ambitions are contrast, is a cosseted suburbanite with a project for getting famous. Her ambitions come undiluted from her own fantasy life. cartoons from The New Yorker of the 1930s that would make you laugh till getting her clothes dirty in a dangerous place. They're stunts, but courageous us because she feels no need to do any of that earning. for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union were rustic lunkheads to a man. in passing a constitutional amendment to ban child labor: blocked by shrieks of Bolshevism: Various church groups and opponents of public health, public education, and all public improvements protested the amendment as a government intrusion into the "freedom" of family freedom take the cake. None of this sinks the book. An author's ideology is kind of like the weather in a foreign country: After a few days you learn to dress for it, and you can enjoy the sights without paying it much mind. Still, received via snail mail an intriguing bundle of news clippings from Jack Deep Throat Revealed [One Last Time].") To recap: Chatterbox last month established, mainly by passing along private conversations he'd had with Bob Felt was Deep Throat, Chatterbox thinks that hypothesis is worth very serious but I had the feeling that Deep Throat doesn't smoke." Not knowing who the Post editor in question was, it's hard to assess whether that editor's "feeling" that Deep Throat didn't smoke was based on piece is a reprinted snippet from the transcripts of the White House tapes Dean: Now, about White House staff and reporters and the like, and, now, Felt comes out and unwraps the whole thing. What does it do to him? course, he couldn't do it unless he had a guarantee from somebody like Time magazine saying, "Look, we'll give you a job for life." Then what do they do? They put him in a job for life, and everybody would treat him like society. Either way, that's the one thing people do sort of line up against. There's a lot going on in this exchange. As we now know, before the year was even dragging in Chambers and all but saying the man was a fool to turn in done: be an informer, but a secret informer, exacting the promise not of lifetime employment but of lifetime confidentiality that he was I don't think it will ever be resolved whether it was an actual person or It's very tempting to read this comment as deliberate misdirection on Felt's read a transcript), Chatterbox was struck by the chief executive's comfort and W. Bush to come forward and give specifics on the issues that you mentioned, could you tell us what you find objectionable about his trying to present a new moderate face for his party just like you did for the Democrats? And could you tell us whether you're worried whether he will figure out how the Republicans the characterization you gave of my first answer. When I ran for president in going on in our country and what I would do. And if you remember, the late we both put out these very detailed plans of what we would do. If you go back and get one of those plans now, you'll see that virtually everything we said we'd do, we did do, except for the things we tried to do and were defeated the sad aftermath of his son's death. Chatterbox, who's had trouble looking at because congressional Republicans were overplaying their hand), the public gave broke. In that instance, the public was probably expressing disapproval of the As the impeachment drama dissipated, though, and Congress and the press Interestingly, this was a period when Chatterbox felt more enthusiastic conference, which seemed a bit of a reach, was: "People think things are going things are changing, you should want continued change." thinking: Chatterbox is a reporter. Reporters always like to take popular people down, and they're trained to sympathize with underdogs ("afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted"). Chatterbox will grant that some of this it's not clear that even the House Republicans have a majority to do that. But for the first time since Flytrap, Chatterbox felt himself thinking, as primitive as others. Remember Tom DeLay's recent tirade against the teaching the bill passed by the House last month mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. The House recently defeated a resolution You can dismiss someone like DeLay as an extremist, but, in the wake of him in decrying the nihilism supposedly engendered by our secular culture. You and I disagree about the alleged skepticism of the chattering classes. From my perspective, most professional chatterers today tend to be almost as deferential to religion as politicians. They may occasionally ponder the appropriate place of religion in public life, but they rarely, if ever, express any irreverence toward established religions (although they feel free to mock We do agree that the pandering and preaching of politicians is especially comrades on the far right aren't playing to the variegated denominations you mention; they're playing to their base. People such as Al Gore who aim to please all of us, or as many as possible, traffic mostly in ecumenical banalities about the virtue and values of Godliness: Gore talks nonsensically about parents who "struggle to pass on the right values" to their children. And he confirms his own religiosity, deploring the "hollow secularism" that supposedly afflicts the unenlightened. That's probably about the most fire and brimstone that we'll hear from him. And while it may be foolish to deride You don't need a crystal ball to know that we are likely to see more successfully embraced a Republican agenda on crime control, Democrats are presented by both parties as an antidote to crime. Al Gore has recently likely to see an unprecedented diversion of tax dollars to churches, mosques, establish a religious school seeking voucher students or apply for government funds under a charitable choice provision. Do you think an organization like only so long as they support the particular faith delivering the service. The challenge for the dwindling ranks of secularists is to convince people that the separation of church and state is not hostile to religion; it serves religion, or rather it serves religions. Religious leaders who enjoy tax exemptions should surely understand that. (And I should make clear that withdraw from the political sphere; it requires government to withhold support from sectarian activities and keeps government free of sectarian structures.) Anyway, it should be obvious that secularism makes pluralism possible. That prohibitions on establishing religion ensure free exercise is such a simple Sometimes I put my faith in sectarian rivalries, which helped derail the demanded state funding for special Christian schools). The group reconsidered "I asked God, 'Do you want me to change the law to put prayer in the schools?' He said no. If you do that, kids would have the right to pray to other Gods adjective, "irresponsible." I did think you unfair in characterizing it as suggesting that her bio is given to "sweeping generalizations about emotional ways rich, in other ways frustrating. She's definitely broken new ground in in the air, while also raising five children and sharing the presidency of the United States, is just another big reminder that any one marriage is a stranger and more mysterious land than an outsider can possibly know. That it wasn't easy is suggested by the jealousies that bordered their abyss they considered neutrality." But this leads me to what I found a bit marriage, but I think she minimizes it, or rather that her awareness of it seems to come and go. On the one hand, she writes that in relation to Franklin, ER still occupied a lonely sphere which echoed the isolation of her childhood. Beyond the First Family's jolly facade, ER endured a lifelong sense of exclusion that represented for her an ongoing present their domestic life as a settled, deeply fond, mutually beneficial never all amity or all its opposite. But somehow I thought that Cook didn't from being married to an impossible (in the marital sense) man? Cook did a husband; how he relinquished all control to his mother and absented himself great woman mostly by making the best of a bad business, is it? conflict of interest posed by her personal ties to ER) was pining away over having given up the career that had lifted her out of poverty and brought her marriage, she couldn't begin to imagine what Hick had sacrificed for her. I didn't find it paradoxical that Cook insists on the centrality of does is assume the centrality of it, for the most part, and leave the convertible with her lesbian lover? And she got away with it? Isn't that kind administrations, in which poor folks and children and the lame and the halt digital alterations during a ritualized orgy. Yippee: another occasion for bashing the ratings board. I saw the picture before the fig leaves were applied My point is that the film critics are blaming the wrong party. The villains board but the sanctimonious hypocrites who preside over some of the country's largest video and media chains. These are the people who treat any film rated stigma that came with the earlier X rating. But the very same chains that Take Blockbuster, which prides itself on being a "family video store." A stroll through the aisles will take you past displays of such wholesome fare as righteousness while trafficking in the same kind of sleaze as every other cuts of movies such as Eyes Wide Shut and would "provide a category for adult films that would be acceptable to theater owners and advertising outlets." He goes on: "Theaters would not shun them. Everybody understands the Uncut (a title whose second meaning allegedly passed straight over the chains announce that they won't be carrying ads for A films? example, opens with a 'humorous' decapitation, and the PG rated movie, Star rating because of a scene in which Brooks' protagonist babbles to his wife unacceptable, said the ratings board, because "fuck" is used in a "sexual context." Brooks pointed out that if the character, instead of saying, "I want to fuck you over this desk" had said, "I want to fuck you over with this notions of "acceptable" violence. A director who frequently tangled with the ratings board told me an instructive story. He did some research on fistfights and discovered that a lot of them last one punch: In real life, one person's nose gets broken and the other person's hand gets broken. There's a lot of blood. I once watched a friend get his nose broken in a (brief) fistfight and want to film such a fight for the purposes of making violence realistically fight. I put in the sound of cartilage being crunched and show the bright red blood pouring out of someone's nose, and I give you a close up of the other folks. The lesson for kids is that violence is funny and bloodless and without people, though, fly often in commercial planes and are familiar with instructions on what to do in case of what is euphemistically called a "water landing." Is there such a thing as a water landing, and what are your chances unplanned, descent onto water, as opposed to a simple crash, this is what is one ditching every day in United States waters. This includes helicopters says that in an attempted water landing, a wide body jet would "shatter like a raw egg dropped on pavement, killing most if not all passengers on impact, even the Federal Aviation Administration does not require commercial pilots to train for them. Instead, it has various rules about how close planes must be to an Any benefit from the procedures and precautions associated with the phrase, "in the event of a water landing" are, at this point, purely You're right, we began somber and became silly, which is a fair trajectory from stumbling glumly downstairs to fighting over the comics, except that around my table the only audible dialogue is generally, "You done with those yet?" punctuated by the clank of spoon against cereal bowl. There was a phase a while back when I filled with resolve, for reasons then unclear to myself but transparent to any female who has ever cracked the pages of a in mind the sort that appeared in magazines, with the little wisps of steam visible as the plates were lowered to the table. I made muffins, or scrambled pretty good). There was a lot of bacon, too. Something elemental about bacon: the smell, I think. Also good sound effects. My kids looked startled at first, Then my daughter got up the nerve to say: Um, this is nice but you know I parents a few years earlier by requesting a bar mitzvah (for which, to our astonishment, he studied intently for two years, delivering himself of a father's family had let lapse), told me kindly one day that he had stopped eating pork so maybe I could cut back on the bacon. My husband, in the back in force; in fact, the last time I was at the supermarket, the checker gazed at my overflowing cart and said: "Lot of cereal eaters in your house, are I do have one more somber thought, though, because I really am troubled about this, even though I can see no way to let off even a tiny rant without personally contributing to the very problem of which I speak: I do believe the press, and in particular the broadcast press, took leave of its collective time such a thing has happened, but I am afraid that the net result, following publicly shared tragedy into something venomous. I think people are just furious at the coverage. I think fury at the coverage has in some measure replaced what might have been a brief period of honorable, be hearing about this for quite a while, and that the demonstrably low public regard for reporters and commentators will dip still lower in the wake of this which we felt unable to extricate ourselves, the same blind terror of losing audience share could have overtaken assignment editors again. for interest factor can be rated anywhere near your Journal of Inconspicuous become quite fascinated by this magazine and was going to dig out the latest Exactly how spontaneous was the spontaneous shrine erected last week on John hearing so much about on television. There wasn't much to see: a gaggle of onlookers milled around the block and a few dozen floral bouquets rested on the of the building. What was most unusual about the scene was the phalanx of reporters aiming microphones and cameras at the onlookers. When Chatterbox arrived home, the news shows were still broadcasting from the scene. Reporters described the "outpouring" of emotion at the makeshift memorial candles and the droplets of water clinging to the flower petals. What had appeared in person to be a loose gathering now looked like the altar of a onlookers to "say a prayer and move it along, please." The hill of bouquets had hospital and the candles so many that they started a small fire. constitutes Internet fever. But that's in no small part due to one crucial been inflated by the fact that there are just too few shares out there to meet the pop on the first day of trading is larger than it otherwise would be. And operation, it's probably smaller than most. But in the offering yesterday it million is still just a fifth of all the shares outstanding. But the fact that almost certainly kept the stock from rising even more sharply when it first opened. (Of course, that's kind of scary when you consider how audacious the In the long run, the size of the float doesn't determine anything. If demand for shares remains strong, companies eventually offer more shares for sale in secondary offerings. And if the company is a dog, then not even having a small float can save it. When it comes to stocks, rarity doesn't mean value in the long run. Given that, more Net companies should think about forgoing the pleasure of getting big headlines after their first day of trading and choose instead to get a real sense of what the market thinks of them. On the other hand, I suppose that finding out what the market really thinks of them is the Other issues: various Gore campaign blunders and the Reform Party leadership a "celebrity, not a public figure," and from Late Edition 's Tucker pundits' time. Almost all agree that it was a crucial victory for House Speaker issue. Both Shields and Gigot agree that tax cuts are less popular in an age of Discussion of the Reform Party focuses less on the party itself than on local authorities dumped seven million gallons of water into a switched parties just to get media attention, Mark Shields says, "Let's not pretend that altruism is an operative principle in politics all of a sudden, know that when the sun comes up you get up, when it's straight overhead you eat additive, a possible carcinogen, while promoting cleaner combustion, is up, were sick and elderly, but the story's very last sentence reveals that two the budget caps while proposing both a tax cut and more money for key domestic programs is to declare monies actually going for routine annual expenses to be "emergency" funding, which the caps don't constrain. Some recent examples of such "emergencies": medical services for veterans and the census. The paper additives against those fearing health risks. But, the paper adds, newer car engines can control carbon monoxide emissions without oxygenates. The paper says substances One break: The most dangerous additive smells so bad when it's present in previously questioned by the authorities and then dropped, gave a full account from investigators but had also written them an anonymous letter leading them could be heard." The LAT story gives one of those heckling legislators several paragraphs and quotes one of his heckles, leaving the reader with an in income taxes. In other words, the folks who have benefited least from the upswing in salaries or the stock market also benefit least from the Republican discussion of the total dollar amount of the damage. This is not the standard do with the festival's virtually all white attendance? the space craft. Although the letter writer was being critical of the paper's reporters, the episode probably left him with an improved appreciation of their the House of Representatives. The bill would pare personal income tax rates by on health insurance and large inheritances. The papers concur that the plan has if the government's interest rate on the national debt climbs (the papers call this stipulation a sham; no one understands how it would actually work, and it traded shares a private foundation can own in a single company, while Rep. incentives to build in shopping malls wouldn't be taxed heavily. and meditation," but they are organized enough to engineer what the the mystics: Similar groups destabilized the last imperial dynasty, and China The other unanimously fronted story is the House's denial of funding for the cost worries, as well as tension between the White House and Capitol Hill on Bush's first significant policy speech, which laid out a scheme to fund social incentives designed to stimulate contributions to nonprofits and religious of "compassionate conservatism" and an unmistakable rejection of Republican citizens are as generous as his supporters: Despite his speaking in ground zero esoterica and support for free trade. Meanwhile, Gore's stock suffers from his tight associations with tort lawyers, who often bring stockholder suits against complete with descriptions like "Looking for a playmate?" "full of energy and spunk," and "a real ladies man." But don't respond unless you're ready to get down on four legs; the ads feature dogs in need of a home. and overly bureaucratic organization, as well as a welcome emphasis on Internet that she'll get a shot at running a major corporation years before she could have expected to get the top job at her old company. And for the rest of us, at the last fact. It's understandable that she doesn't want it to look as if she was hired because she was a woman (although the fact that she'd be worried corporations are run by women is somewhat astonishing). So we'll stipulate that she was not hired because she was a woman. She was hired because she's a ceiling anymore," she's simultaneously making too much and too little of her own accomplishment. She's making too much of it because of her implicit argument that her ascension has smashed the ceiling. But the reality is that most doors into the executive suite are still not open to women, and those that top executive positions are still held by men. There are lots of reasons for that, of course, and most of them have to do with broader social realities and still takes a conscious effort on the part of boards of directors and hiring committees to promote women. (It may be telling, in fact, that New Economy companies have done a much better job in this regard.) It's hardly a positions of real authority, was the first Dow company ever to hire a female an institutional environment that allowed that choice to be made. because she's downplaying just how talented she had to be to rise as fast as she has and to overcome all the lingering prejudices against women executives, good player wouldn't have been able to convince people of what they didn't want to be convinced of, namely, that black players could play. In some ways, in fact, you could say that major league baseball wasn't really integrated until Of course, in theory the market should already have taken care of this. Discrimination is economically irrational, which means that companies which discriminate against women should feel the pain in reduced competitiveness. But we know that companies do discriminate even when it costs them. As my friend most industrial companies fired the women workers in their plants, even though to decide what constitutes "rationality" because the selection process is so counterparts of twenty years ago demonstrates, the insular nature of boards of directors means that purely economic considerations do not always prevail. And What's important is that she was hired and that if she's successful she'll make it easier for those after her. Even, or rather especially, those who are more system for protecting government computers and those in the private sector from hackers. (The extensive story is virtually an exclusive, with the Wall Street Journal running a brief dispatch on the same the public's right to attend civil trials. The ruling came in connection with about the case, banned the public and the media from case proceedings in which the jury was not present. Several media companies pursued an appeal, arguing among other things, that some of the legal battles that have had the most to criminal trials many times, no high court in the country has ever, before percent, and significantly reduce the chances of escalation into a severe scoop when a civil liberties group (not identified by the paper), concerned the chairman of the Joint Chiefs but had to step aside "because of a blemish in his personal life." The Gray Lady won't show any more leg than that though, deigning not to remind the reader just what the zit was. here, he's never lived here. Today, he will be announcing his candidacy for likely to pass a bill the would prevent writers, filmmakers, and songwriters from making unauthorized use of the images of dead people. The bill would The Journal 's "Tax Report" runs a nugget that says a lot about the millionaires who make less than a million annually.) announced its intent to conduct a yearlong boycott of the four major networks complaints about their sparse television presence, runs the story on Page Doesn't Deserve It," says that while the party's ideas are "no longer policies. An editorial and article say that next month's French election could determine the partnership" concludes that it's nothing to worry about. For the moment, China article doubts whether online media can attract the loyal "communities" of all welfare mothers cheat, but only because they have to. Welfare and moms need outside income to survive. The other striking fact: Women who work at menial jobs are poorer than women on welfare. The cover story reprints an tried to save him from the Holocaust. A sportswriter plays a pickup basketball Also, a column about "Slaves 'R' Us," a business that recruits submissive men to clean the apartments of dominant women. (It's even weirder than it volunteers aren't doing much good. (For example: Singing in a church choir counts as "volunteering"; so does making cookies for a school bake sale.) Only a tiny fraction of volunteers assist needy children and seniors, and most forthcoming biography of Tiger Woods. The passage recounts Woods' first trip to piece congratulates GM on its makeover: The troubled car maker is faster: Unlike humans, horses are such superb athletes that training doesn't cover story, Time says that strong opiates such as morphine are a godsend for people in chronic pain. facing the truth about their World War II misdeeds, and their icy file and confronts a "friend" who informed on him: She says she had to do it. the White House of valuing profit above ideology or strategy. The result: We event that will only reinforce the (wrong) idea that government should that congressmen solicit contributions from their offices all the time and China backlash begins. Countering weeks of editorializing by the as an enemy, it is likely to become one." China has no worldwide ambitions, is not a regional bully, trails the United States by decades militarily, and isn't so terrible on human rights. A related article advises the United States to maintain its military appointing an independent counsel to investigate campaign fund raising. An article condemns the devolution of power to state governments, arguing that confidence. Higher unemployment may follow. Remedies: The Federal Reserve Board must drastically cut interest rates, the International Monetary Fund must continue to aid foreign countries, and Japan must reform its banking system. Time 's cover package: a week in the life of a hospital. Following doctors, nurses, and administrators around the Duke Medical Center, Time offers vignettes of modern hospital life. General theme: It's hard to balance are losing readers. Why? "Mainstream" media have taken over their turf by now more prudish than network television, refusing to discuss the specifics of cover story says humans have been in the New World for much women who migrate to bigger cities for work are often shanghaied at the train station. Sold to "husbands" for a few hundred dollars, the women spend years as conscienceless, ideologically vindictive use of the investigative privilege can an ignoble voyeurism so pervasive that we have never permitted a candidate like culture. Older sports fans hated the brash, loudmouthed Clay; younger ones knew further catastrophe in the global economy. Among proposals: close banks for one failed leadership; and place emergency controls on capital flows. A related article says that all nations can't emulate the United States, so it was a given that capitalism as a single global paradigm would fail. Thus, elections, which are more expensive than any nation's but Japan's. The United Commission teeth to enforce campaign laws, the Economist writes. The accompanying editorial scoffs at the First Amendment claim that campaign spending is speech ("ridiculous") and suggests that the United States socially and residentially integrated than the United States, minorities have month, the Standard wondered whether women belong in the military. Now Standard 's article, but agrees that women are too weak for many military argues that the military is overdoing gender integration in order to placate president courted black mayors, refused a budget deal with the Republicans, and police. A profile of a rookie cop says police work is improving because street bizarre photo essay depicts a husband and wife who have worn matching outfits Wars hype on the cover. "The Force Is Back" rehashes recent articles in The extensive evidence that casts doubt on their claims. And a gruesome story about sexual molestation of boys in Welsh reform schools. Renaissance" predicts an economic comeback for the New York neighborhood: weeklies both criticize appeasement of China. But the Standard 's target business. A Standard editorial urges the Senate not to ratify an burnish China's image on Capitol Hill, mostly in hopes of winning it permanent charismatic than his father. Also, an article endorses the reigning view that proving that free elections and the rule of law are not destabilizing. A decisions. A story on the world environmental summit says that developed nations are breaking their promises to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases. Worse Trouble Than You Think," warns that the colony's "triad" gangsters have smuggle drugs and arms, pander, and counterfeit. The triads, in turn, will Freedom, tolerance, and respect for individual rights are integral to the writer's fear that she won't be able to have children, anxiety about the appearance of her breast, and gratitude toward her husband and her cancer support group. After a lumpectomy and radiation, she has an excellent prognosis. A story sings the praises of the federal Legal Services Corp., helps consumers choose and buy online, may be the Net's next killer knockoff first. Also, an elderly widow writes about rekindling a sexual affair segment of the population. A "Longevity Test" lets you calculate your life three if you don't exercise), while a sidebar explains the many benefits and cigarette deal on the cover. It describes the negotiations (extremely civil) and evade regulation. Industry folks fear they have given too much away. Cigarette cautions that Congress may spike the agreement: Liberals think it's too soft on the industry, while conservatives think it's too harsh. residents are optimistic; corruption and crime will seep in from China; no one knows whether China will quash political freedom. Accompanying articles movie critic pans the summer blockbusters for their similarly idiotic corrupt, lawless, and scarred by Pol Pot's genocide. sports are on the cover. Kayaking, sky diving, radical skiing, street lugeing, etc., hike the Grand Canyon in high heels, run at midday in Death Valley, dip their the rich too much, but that the Republican plan is much worse. "constructive engagement" policy, which holds that China will become more democratic as it becomes more capitalistic: By gutting the Joint Declaration, China proves that it will never allow democracy to flourish, even if it liberal populism, but frets that he's a political chameleon who has adopted also criticizes him for being a follower. An article warns that the growing cover editorial blames the world's economic problems on economists. They waste too much time on minutiae and too many of them have promising new medical procedure: "downsizing" failing hearts and lungs by trimming tissue. The smaller organs work better. Also, the magazine says graphite rackets (power over technique) and charmless players are ruining New Republic to end all New Republic s. The 25-page cover package and modernity over ideology and nostalgia. Seventeen other writers contribute The state's new mandatory work policies, while more expensive than welfare checks, have pushed more people into the job market and fewer into poverty than had been expected. Critics doubt that the new workers will keep their jobs in a to persuade the mainstream medical establishment to accept alternative health care. Doctors are dubious. An article notes the resurgence in the Western reduced disease immunity, and entomologists now warn that new epidemics of malaria, dengue fever, and encephalitis are likely. Alarming statistic: ironic entertainment in the classroom. Raised on the cool medium of television, undergrads are skeptical about passionate ideas, doubtful of genius, and challenge this complacency because they can't afford to offend their paying customers. The other piece glorifies an experimental humanities class for literature are empowering, because they teach the disenfranchised how to story explains a movement within the Catholic Church to elevate the status of the Holy Trinity a Holy Quartet. A report highlights the potential effects of may finally be subscribing to the view that the economy has whupped privacy in the information age. The solution isn't to keep them from knowing everything about you, but to allow you to know everything about them. An billion a year. And an upbeat story claims that, in the wake of last year's welfare bill, (Revolting detail: He masturbated by sticking pipe cleaners into his urethra and tying rope around his scrotum. He filmed this.) A piece depicts royal is too consumed by sex scandals: Sexual privacy would be preferable. Also, love its history of socialism. Recent economic liberalization has started to improve living standards, but the editors urge the government to privatize and bluntness" and her belief that the United States must act as the world's moral (and actual) policeman. But even she may not be able to force peace on the describes, lovingly, the many medical benefits of pot smoking. cooperate on everything, are encouraged to think creatively, and learn responsibility from chores. (They clean the school building because there are week leading up to the fateful speech. Funniest moment: When Gates asks Jobs what he should wear during the announcement, Jobs answers, a white shirt. applauding its falling crime rate, cleanliness, swinging nightlife, and privatized services, challenged employee unions, and supported school vouchers. death. One recalls the earliest days of his career, when he toured the South in carbon dioxide by grasses lowers temperatures; to process memories; not the foggiest idea.) A sidebar examines a handful of less pressing scientific puzzles, mechanic is charged with giving lingerie dipped in invisible ink to an inflamed already tense relations between the two countries. two generals who bucked his authority, but hasn't won (and will never win, the the National Football League's effort to regain the fans it has lost to the the music edition is a chart of corporate conglomeration: Six companies music journalists for ignoring black artists, praise the embryonic feminism of camps have gone soft, concludes the cover story. Back in the good old days, helped make kids courageous. Regrettably, '90s campers are protected from all risk. A piece mocks the military's diversity training program for its squishy, mandarins are using their authority to erode individual liberty. Evidence mostly closeted gay men called Gamma Mu, dealt drugs to support his lavish investigators. Also, a pair of articles on celebrity marriage. One piece mocks been conducting an affair with his communications director for the past three chastises New York media for ignoring the story, saying they fear alienating accounts of the night of the accident, the week of mourning, and the funeral; photos will overcome its revulsion for photographers' methods. Di in a piece exploiting her own relationship with Di, complete with private editorial and article on China's economic future recommend wholesale toward capitalism, but China's looming bank crisis requires far more rapid there's cause for worry: Ozone depletion is no longer a trendy political cause, observes that online services increasingly resemble television networks: Their core business is information and entertainment, not modems and servers. traditions of this journal: political independence, intellectual seriousness, good writing and decency toward those with whom one disagrees." Lane also policy. The United States has failed to improve living conditions or uphold the article argues that liberals should oppose the National Endowment for the Arts on the grounds that art does not need federal subsidies. Also, why Princess Di they did turn over secrets to the other side.) A recently released Soviet unapologetic about his spying, but the lack of living witnesses makes want to be princesses, too. They also know what it's like to fall in love with critic. His conclusion: Journalists can't help hurting the people they cover, voice mail, and credit records. Employers say they need to protect themselves news. The cover story both mocks and admires "latte towns," progressive, praise? The hippies who populate latte towns have finally embraced capitalism, and they are using private enterprise to build livable, prosperous cities. An speed limit have not come true, a piece reports. Fatalities have not increased, but the mainstream media have ignored this good news. who used to worship him. An article rejects the CW that the Supreme Court will strike down the Communications Decency Act. The reason: New filtering software makes it possible to restrict access to Internet porn without excessively National Health Service needs an overhaul: It's underfunded, and New Yorkers expected. Its answer: He's bullied and prodded the Legislature to cut taxes and spending. In the process, he's become more popular than his Time 's cover story tries to explain "How Colleges Are Gouging U." parents are willing to pay, but also because universities hoard their for the next month, as "the best celestial show in decades." Also, Time young blacks are marginalized and angry. Gangsta rap is blamed for feeding the abusing its female combat pilots: Their fellow pilots and commanding officers gave them the silent treatment instead of helping them. Quality of Mercy" indicts doctors for not prescribing effective painkillers morphine and codeine) are fantastic pain relievers and almost never addictive. But doctors are afraid to prescribe high doses for fear of lawsuits and licensing investigations. A sidebar profiles a pain doctor who lost his license for Internet "filtering" software, which allows parents and corporations to block hired by clueless clothing and shoe manufacturers to find the next big thing. slogans, weird lists, and incomprehensible diagrams. The editorial, which is shown that the procedure is much more common than its defenders claimed. (For standards. It accuses industry of fudging data to minimize the dangers of air pollution, blames Republicans for kowtowing to corporate demands, and fingers Capitol Hill. A long article describes the service unions' fight to organize in bookkeeping. Nevertheless, the article predicts that an inclusive euro will be launched on schedule, through fudging the original criteria. The editorial laments that the treaty's "misguided" fiscal targets have harmed the "great opportunity that the single currency might have been" and argues that they should be revised immediately. A killjoy article on the because the proceedings were biased and conspiracy theories were not aired. An First Amendment. Courts have equated discriminatory speech with discriminatory Apply First Amendment protection to workplace speech, even though there will be some unrestrained bigotry. The editorial celebrates the "obtuse and suicidal" choice of the French electorate, particularly because it will kill hope for a forged a "new Constitution" based on "nationhood, equality and democracy"). And issue on "How the World Sees Us" asserts that the United States has reached a new level of cultural domination and asks whether the world is enjoying it. imitate them (because they are relentlessly innovative). Some other responses: column frets that we are embarrassing ourselves by dumping the worst of him to settle the case, because no matter what the outcome, pretrial discovery Time 's feature argues that settling is trickier than it sounds: Can materialistic, ambitious, and entrepreneurial. The piece is accompanied by the cosmetics manufacturer, and a hip young environmental activist. skeptically about the "Torah codes" phenomenon, which claims that the Bible contains encrypted messages prophesying events. (See Slate's "Cracking God's Code.") company received a lucrative Department of Energy contract after making large favor tasty food over fast food. Also, Time publishes a special issue annual retirement guide offers the usual advice: Buy better mutual funds and pay attention to your 401(k). One piece declares that anyone can become a millionaire by investing its findings: People don't get crankier as they get older, at least half of senior citizens have no heart problems at all, and senility is not A story notes that biologists have discovered dozens of new mammal species in the past few years, including a new whale and a "giant barking distorting (or misunderstanding) Centers for Disease Control statistics. Love risk. In fact, estrogen therapy vastly reduces the risk of heart disease and bone disabilities, while increasing that of cancer only minimally. Also, The "what's wrong with conservatives" cover package blames the conservative replaced their old firmness with vague, pandering rhetoric. A piece criticizes lead editorial embraces evolutionary biology's new insights into human behavior, but warns against eugenics. A companion piece elucidates two of these new insights: Bodily symmetry largely determines physical attractiveness, and humans may use smell to assess the quality of a potential sex partner's immune system. An Problems: It lacks a safe, effective drug, and is challenged by the promoting higher standards citywide, rather than focusing on a few flagship schools. His efforts have not boosted test scores as much as had been promised, but modest improvements and Crew's political clout make him the beleaguered States to promote medical marijuana, rights for legal immigrants, alternatives to incarceration, and better care for the dying. These donations are intended argues that New York City's recent police brutality belies general reform in messages and better training on the use of force. An article by a baby boomer contamination is more common than is reported and won't be eradicated with standards will help, but "no one predicts a day in which all food will be perfectly free of disease." A companion piece advocates destroying food industry, hindering Japan's ability to compete in the global market. An article middle class and booming night life are revitalizing the city. Colleges" rankings. Duke cracks the Ivy monopoly by sharing third place accompanying article says that students who apply for early admission have a better chance of being accepted. Another reports that fraternities and sororities are cracking down bad beef article is a revolting description of what really goes sewage, among other things. The feed is safe when treated properly, but many farmers aren't careful, raising the risk of beef contamination. And a piece donate blood regularly to rid their body of excess iron, but blood banks refuse ironic entertainment in the classroom. Raised on the cool medium of television, undergrads are skeptical about passionate ideas, doubtful of genius, and challenge this complacency because they can't afford to offend their paying customers. The other piece glorifies an experimental humanities class for literature are empowering, because they teach the disenfranchised how to says, suppress studies showing that it doesn't work and harass academics and entitlement crisis with "rosy scenarios." An article asserts that the Republicans are supporting the budget in who's presiding over a weakening German economy. An article suggests that the German economy's troubles might praise. And a long article summarizes research on circadian to seasons. They don't sleep longer in winter than they do in summer, but they elsewhere, populations of snakes, primates, and turtles are being destroyed by multiculturalism, not conservatism, is fueling the revival of classical literature. "The ancient texts have become eerily modern in what they have to say about power relationships between men and women, gay men and war, superiors case did not divide blacks and whites; it merely revealed a breach that already latest reiteration of his "I was a patsy in a government conspiracy" headquarters. Also, an article demystifies love (just in time for Valentine's makes mothers love their kids and mates. (To learn more about familial love volcano is threatening to erupt. If it does, it will probably bury the island (and the few thousand inhabitants who remain) in lava and ash. Also, an article brave enough to offend big business for the sake of a balanced budget. her naked. Also, a Standard article defends Marine hazing rituals as which has recaptured its 1960s hipness: Oasis and Blur are much admired; so is cover editorial welcomes the idea of a tobacco settlement because it would protect children and compensate victims without crippling a legitimate improve tobacco companies' finances by cutting legal fees and notes the growth of the private police industry: Security guards and broadcasters lobbied their way to a freebie. The massive cover book review decides cases based on his own political views. Also, a piece discusses the as young prisoners (extra medical expenses, mostly), and their recidivism rates are incredibly low. Even so, prison officials rarely parole the older story argues that work has become like home and home has become like work. Thanks largely to total quality management, employees now feel appreciated and relaxed at the office. They find home (that is, child care) exhausting. The upshot: Workers don't care much about parental leave and flex time. "Everybody story on fat argues that being fit is more important than being thin. Fat people who exercise regularly are healthier than thin people who don't. Not all fat is equal: A paunch is more dangerous than chubby hips and thighs. A are falling. And an article describes the peculiar National Liberation Army, story, "Born Bad?," argues against genetic determinism. Genes are important, but a child's environment largely determines how those genes are expressed: Nature and nurture can't be separated. The article warns that belief in genetic determinism could lead to a revived, dangerous eugenics movement. courts with liens, refusing to pay taxes, and "seceding" from the United fight, bemoans the influence of Wall Street on the federal budget, and government banned his works. A funny essay on sex books finds them too Also, an essay criticizes libertarians for their unwillingness to censure bad divorce backlash continues. Two weeks after the New Republic 's author, a man on the verge of divorce, describes how separation has rescued him from a loveless, oppressive marriage and supplied him with freedom. Divorce is contributes an opposing view: She writes that she's lonelier and more regretful than she ever imagined she could be. Also, a writer joins a blackjack ring that agent (who was nearly murdered by her husband). An appreciation of art critic Also, Vanity Fair hypes its own: A long excerpt from a biography of story. Studios ought to reap huge profits, but don't because they overpay damage the country even more. (For a backgrounder on Zaire, see Slate's personal weakness, not his policies. Also, a 24-page survey on management consulting finds the industry vigorous, profitable, and a bit too package takes Congress to task, noting that congressional fund raising is as slimy as White House fund raising. Among the outrages cited: Legislators selling bills and lobbyists writing bills. Another article rips Congress for ask the Federal Election Commission to pass regulations restricting "soft money," accomplishing by executive action what Hill Republicans refuse to do emotions in favor of the common good, and this serene rationalism has allowed but still know how to win. Also, the technology columnist dismisses Internet immensely long article condemns the Drug Enforcement Administration's war on bagels, for instance), the feds are paranoid that gardeners will harvest them for opium. The author grows his own opium poppies, and wonders if he's going to obsessed with describing heaven, but now "heaven is AWOL." Most Christian clerics have stopped talking about it, because it's too controversial and too magazines cover the Biggie Smalls murder and assert that gangsta rap has gone Warriors" describes the travails of the International Committee of the Red its filming in intricate detail. Also, a writer proposes a grand unified theory on sports has diverted blacks from educational achievement. The Standard deplores black and white obsession with "white racism," arguing that it turns blacks into permanent victims. A related article savages the black newsmagazine among black professionals is an alarming indication of how alienated the black Ten budding starlets adorn the cover. Zillions of celebrity photographs by patients, but is optimistic that good laws and strict enforcement can prevent such abuses. An article and editorial pegged to the G-7 caution that the be increasing, but imminent inflation, a low savings rate, and an aging and destroy Christian shrines. The piece credits Christian conservatives "pathologically duplicitous," "craven," and phenomenally corrupt. Also, a story Agency. Then, when disasters happen, it gives extra cash and takes credit for women in the military. The ambivalent cover story wonders whether the military slow to accept the idea of women dying in combat, as well. (For the evolutionary angle on a sexually integrated military, see Slate's "The Earthling.") needed in combat. An article contends that the United States can painlessly resolve its entitlement crisis by admitting more immigrants and using a huge increasingly torn between her principles and political expediency. crash landing in vivid detail (right down to an alien giving first aid to a wounded colleague), then concedes that the downed spacecraft was undoubtedly a family has vanished. A sidebar notes the political dynasties taking shape in Biggest revelation: Contrary to press reports, it's possible that someone melting snow could have obscured footprints. (For a backgrounder, see Slate's Republican star) who's leading the fight against affirmative action in cover story advises workers to exploit the best job market in history by milking their employers for higher pay, flex time, continuing education, shorter hours, gym memberships, etc. (Computer experts, not risk endorsing affirmative action or criticizing police racism. Also, a minefield: Does the egg donor have any claim on the child? Should the child be told that it has two mothers? Should human eggs be bought and sold? no patience for the nanny state. Today, such a "limited but energetic" crime: Churchgoing seems to prevent backsliding by recovering drug addicts and consensus for a deep investigation. But so far, the Democrats aren't Princess of Wales. And she still wears great clothes. prosperity. Thanks to free markets and (of course) high technology, productivity will increase, environmental degradation will decrease, genetic diseases will be eradicated, and a worldwide, multicultural civilization will telephone) bolster her reputation as a visionary. Also, Vanity Fair group that botched the assassination.) A report from the Promise Keepers rally cripples the right wing. An article says the pendulum is swinging back in article follows a squad of West Point cadets through the revamped basic the program's new softness (more gender equality, less hazing), while the he created a camel to be a camel." Also, an essay criticizes the double standard for adultery: "When men cheat, they're pigs. When women do it, they're Time story says young male elephants are murdering rhinos in handle it all." (To hear excerpts from the newly released tapes, see Slate's pink negligee; Capote identified with murderer Perry Smith; female writer large campaign contributions corrupt politicians not by influencing them to change votes, but by immersing them in the world of rich people. An essay classes. Smaller classes alone won't improve education, but they work wonders when led by good teachers. Also, an article examines the booming business of naming corporations. excretory canal. (To see Slate's take on the name game, read "You Name deterioration of the Episcopal Church. Increasing moral lassitude (read: gay alarmist The Boys From Brazil theories about cloning, declaring that "careful application of biotechnology" can be enormously beneficial: "The fact that new technologies feel scary or strange should not be enough to rule them out." A related article praises the utility of genetically engineered shape, despite recent drops in their growth rates. And the Economist Newt's Republican "revolutionaries" are abandoning him; his advisers are recriminating over who's to blame for his collapse; and potential successors congressman to quip that "a good dose of antidepressants might help, if he computers and too few books: "Unique, anomalous, unconventional knowledge" is being lost. (And the worst part: Libraries aren't even silent anymore!) Another beautiful, modest houses once stood. Also, a writer spends a sunless winter in spread nasty diseases (malaria, cholera, AIDS, etc.) around the world. On the of Western investment could stabilize these promising countries. Also, an English professor writes about getting fired and becoming a carpenter. And the pragmatist and marvel at China's economic growth, but caution that the country conventional roles, yet still scores at the box office. "Global Business Report" profiles a dozen titans of Jam" surveys the burgeoning satellite industry. The 1,000-plus telecommunications and make television, telephone, and Internet service affordable to billions of people in undeveloped nations. The package of stories echoes the CW that he liberated China's economy while imprisoning pregnancies are unplanned, then slams doctors for downplaying effective story calls for "A Return to National Greatness." After blaming liberals for destroying the United States' expansive optimism and conservatives for country can revive its spirit with a grand national mission. It's vague on what that mission would be: "It almost doesn't matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and explains why the Constitution should be amended to restrict judicial power. And paper would report the real news about economic inequality, farm workers, and health care, zealously investigate corporate executives, and open its editorial Treasury secretary for his social liberalism. Now The Nation lambastes Also, the National Review continues its coverage of the Bob enough evidence of fraud (voting by illegal aliens, double voting) to merit new special issue on "Crime and Punishment" contains more of the former than the latter. An article on the roots of violence argues that nearly all violent incapable of controlling their rage, and reprises liberal ideas about crime's environmental causes. An article lionizes Jack Maple, the eccentric cop who city's crime drop. A story explores a new phenomenon of urban juries: Black women jurors are causing mistrials by refusing to convict black men despite about kids and the Internet. The Net is no longer the vast electronic library hardly suitable for classrooms. A story debunks the alleged links between racism and black illness (the Standard published a similar story more paeans to Al Gore, tops himself, calling the veep "a man rooted in the oldest idea Graham owns, excerpts her autobiography at length, covering her major editorial, "Why Government Should Not Be Salesmen," opposes export boosterism, calling it bad economics. When politicians sell a product overseas, they almost inevitably subsidize the domestic producer; this subsidy subtracts from the national economy. A long, related story lists the ways that missions, etc.), and bemoans their proliferation. The Economist majority leader, while conservative, cares more about passing bills than about ideology. This willingness to accommodate will alienate the Senate's an article describes two families' experience of home schooling. Its on the cover. "Fertile Minds" is sure to reinforce parental anxiety. Babies form permanent synaptic connections very early, so children who are not properly stimulated during their first year can be scarred forever. A related article concludes that the United States must his regular pension checks, and most of his future earnings. stories contrasts the inauguration's pomp with the urban decay of prospering, Major will lose the next election because he can't resolve the Union, and Major has alienated them with his ambivalence toward it. Henry Louis make money and draw huge black audiences (highbrow black theater does neither). An article details how the White House "marketed the prestige and glamour of million pondered, proofread, printed words I must have done my best, sung my the United States for standing by while China demolishes democracy and free hired to keep order in Sierra Leone. The author is ambivalent. On the one hand, for greedy diamond corporations, supports a brutal military regime, and employs his own investments in global mutual funds: His money helps repressive governments and exploitative foreign companies (But you can't beat the profits, The cover editorial and a 48-page survey of the world economy reject the conventional wisdom that the era of big government is over. The share of government spending in the gross domestic product of industrial ("now in his fifth rumbustious term") but the Senate itself. Archaic rules let one passionate senator win out over reasoned argument. Also, an article says China's new military cuts are in troop size, not spending. China, like most of Gore," is not as harsh as it seems. It argues that an independent counsel lets both sides hide behind legal technicalities. Impeachment hearings would never subservient to the White House and the Democratic National Committee. To remain relevant, labor must take risks and build its membership (current growth rate: boycotting products. Cheerios are out: General Mills gives to Planned get too much attention. Schools that are looking for places to save money are assigned the rote drills they need if they are to learn how to read. posthumously performed miracle. (She'd better get cracking.) Time 's news continues as both mags chronicle the life and final drunken hours of Di abandoned, even in a palace with a million citizens wailing at the gates." And poses a health hazard. The radioactive fuel is safely encased, and will not respectable, empowered housewives, and legitimized public television. And she's integration and finds a new kind of segregation: White students take honors classes, black students take regular classes. The reason: White parents press Worms are a cheap, environmentally sound way of turning garbage into to sanitize Vicious' image by finding him a "librarian" girlfriend. An article her parents killed her. But the district attorney's office has botched the case by cooperating with the parents' attorneys, so it's unlikely that charges will editorial and article rip Al Gore. The editorial calls him a sleazeball based rattled by the allegations, he should be. Even his allies are anxious. The Standard accuses the United Way of political correctness (a capital training to programs that are supposed to support "ethnic communities." Also, pleasure, and leisure, but not the obligations that came with her title. public schools are as lousy as ever, and the unemployment rate is one of the Earth's atmosphere would spread toxic particles, endangering millions. An essay Both used the poor and sick as "accessories" in "the service and the pursuit of minister for being too permissive. A related story raises questions about an energy deal between communism, the country is witnessing a revival of the religion. But tension community. An article looks at one of the remaining '60s communes, which has survived by making hammocks. No longer a refuge for idealistic and transient the article warns that the laws of financial gravity have not been repealed and country's economy and culture are booming. For the first time, the standard of living for the nation's poor (although not the very poor) is rising. A piece in care, the piece blames lobbyists who have blocked government oversight. Also, a you don't buy new hair, you rent it. Consumers of hair ointments, "systems," and surgeries must continue to pay to maintain their new growth. An article reports on the states' increasing dependence on gambling lawyers, and spin doctors deflects the various White House scandals story uses Justice Department data released after Freedom of Information concentrates its energies on convicting thousands of drug dealers and bank robbers (who should be chased by local authorities), but mostly ignores Street for New York City's comeback. Notable stat: The city's welfare rolls are facility." Intended to counter economic shakiness in the Far East, it would damage the world's monetary markets by weakening the International Monetary Fund. Also, a story examines the extreme incidence of lesbianism in lesbian pair poses as a male, thereby discouraging smaller males who are divided over race: "In fact, we are one nation, with blacks and whites much calls the ban on land mines the "politics of sentiment" and advocates clearing overtures to Bill Weld. Democrats ignore Weld's fiscally Republican views, but embrace precisely the socially progressive streak in Weld (gay rights, issue offers a dozen articles about technology and modern culture. Among the highlights: An article deplores the way computers disconnect users from the physical world. (We spend too much time hunched over keyboards thinking, not enough experiencing the real world.) Another story rejects the popular notion that technology discourages socializing. (In fact, Internet chat rooms and newsgroups are excellent places for social interaction.) Yet another argues that recent software upgrades are actually downgrades. (They add useless for blurring the role of writer and reader. (To minimize confusion in Slate's (high serotonin levels damage heart valves). (See Slate's take the drugs "in the war against fat." (Hmm. One year ago this week, Time political power by ousting two Politburo rivals at the Communist Party Congress, but his dictatorial style won't mesh with his push for a modern a model for other downtrodden cities. Reducing crime was the crucial first step: It sparked a return of industry, tourism, and permanent residents. (The Gulf War the Air Force felt it was the most important of the four services, but cuts in funding and troop strength, as well as a move toward unmanned aircraft, market, and claim (dubiously) that China won't make military use of the 10-story cover package on the "Politics of Travel" complains that mass The funniest piece: A Nation writer takes the National Review 's incredibly nice. Other highlight: A visit to the "most poisonous place on article makes the case that Turkey's secular military has gone too far in its The cover editorial argues that economically and politically stable nations of have drawn controversy by challenging the moral basis of their country's early views on pot because they now view it as a beneficial medicine, not as a wicked street drug. This sea change has infuriated the government, which battled the reports that many of the country's schools have integrated since the end of apartheid, but that they still harbor white racism. And a serious look at making airplanes safer proposes, among other ideas, a scheme in which drill sergeants would bark out preflight safety instructions. sidebar on Jewel marvels at her unpretentiousness, the result of a rugged The article denounces cigars as expensive, repulsive, and unhealthy. (Though not as dangerous as cigarettes, they still raise the risk of cancer, stroke, but they are not as skeptical about capitalism as the leftist candidates they voted for. Also, a pair of articles on juvenile crime: One criticizes the recent trend to charge kids as adults and confine them with adult prisoners, saying that such Draconian treatment hardens rather than reforms young white teen by a gang of black men, a crime that has inflamed that state's ruined by overcrowding, underfunding, invasion by exotic plant and animal species, and commercial development. The solution? Lots more federal funding for the National Park Service and stricter regulations for development on park and perhaps twice as much as it needs. A long piece Management doesn't want to address the issue, and many of his fellow factory writing. Also, a book review makes the case that cosmetic surgery can be exec., as a monster who terrorizes her Wall Street Journal underlings. A cover editorial and article confront the problem of "the disappearing taxpayer." Tax revenues will fall worldwide because companies can move to avoid levies, and because electronic commerce is virtually impossible to tax. The remedy: Raise taxes on consumption and property, which are easy to track, while cutting forward as planned with currency union, the organization should take a respite until popular trust returns. An alarming article warns that continent, has nothing to offer the modern world: Its labor is unnecessary, its commodities are expensive, and its government is monstrous. Henry Louis Gates is the most exciting city in the world, "brasher than New York, faster than impossible task: Unable to indict the president or the first lady, he'll find it difficult to close the investigation. The case demonstrates the shortfalls look the same, and that all are ugly: He proposes six alternative designs, computers, medical equipment, and the like. Even so, the "Millennium Bug" may excerpt warns that Internet security is dangerously lax. It recounts the obvious, easily cracked passwords and chastises system administrators for pilot, but emphasizes that her superior officers treated her clumsily, and that still believes in the Air Force. A book excerpt chronicles the military's history of mistreating female soldiers. Female recruits have been routinely raped, humiliated, and harassed, but they rarely complain, because the military as an excuse to skip work. The "stress management" industry is a "racket." The scholarship. Instead of pursuing traditional objectivity, professors now incorporate their own experiences into their work. It's yet another sign that the academy has gone soft, grumps the author. The Danish mother who left her child paradise the media has portrayed it to be: Child pornography is rampant, social scientists, notably anthropologists, foolishly claim that humans are shaped only by culture, not by genes. These "secular creationists" wrongly ignore scientific evidence. An article warns that a Middle East war may be shares that he sold to buy the entertainment conglomerate have since gained of the infected would slow the spread of AIDS, argues the cover essay. Gay and AIDS activists have resisted such measures as stigmatizing. An article debunks environmentalists' belief that we consume too much: Raw materials, energy, and food are more plentiful than ever. But we should worry that our materialism is making us lose our reverence for nature. A short piece says there is a "child cover story and editorial conclude, albeit unenthusiastically, that morality and human rights have a place in foreign policy. Outside pressure often civilizes the Economist is uncertain whether Western pressure can persuade China would be worse, argues the cover story, "The Men Who Would Be Newt." Each of the heirs apparent is too treacherous. All are too conservative. An article about Labor confirmation because Republicans prefer an ineffective labor secretary to a agent (who was nearly murdered by her husband). An appreciation of art critic Also, Vanity Fair hypes its own: A long excerpt from a biography of the "harvesting" of her new heart to the operation itself. (The highlight is a photo of the old and new hearts sitting side by side in metal basins.) The piece notes that the 10-year survival rate for heart transplants is an baseball writer expounds his theory about what makes a great manager: Cunning, intensity, and ego are useful, and almost all managers perform best in their won admirers (and enemies) by insisting that the university not adjust its standards to favor black students. Also, the semiannual "Home Design" ("Now I feel comfortable with myself and I don't have to be fearful about details about the cult. Among them: For several months members consumed nothing but a concoction of lemonade, cayenne, and maple syrup; they communicated with the cult leader only in writing; they were not allowed to have their own thoughts. Ford, who still considers himself a member, refers frequently to his own body as his "vehicle." Time tracks down other former cult members, who state that the group considered Web page containing messages from the "Away Team" (the suicides). Time then offers tips: High grades and low test scores are better than low grades officers; being an alum's kid does not guarantee admission. Also, an article illustrates the influence that political donations can The conclusion: All this was sleazy but probably legal. A warm profile of her as an establishment figure who still thinks of herself as an outsider. Also, a parent complains about how much time he must spend helping out at his ineffectual pawn of the White House and that the Immigration and Naturalization gay men must build a new culture that is not founded on sex: Gay community The act has benefited media conglomerates and reduced competition, and the merit, welcome new ideas, and abhor government regulation. Interesting detail: story compares various international education test scores and concludes performance. The story also favors national and international education standards: They give countries targets to shoot for. An editorial and article cover, given over to a long review of two books about divorce, deplores the '60s because of women's economic independence, not because of selfish '60s values; and the United States, where marriage has always been for love, is "Dialogue" on divorce.) An article ridicules the Recovery Channel ridicules the Recovery donor and a lobbyist who exploits his insider ties. Turns Yellow.") The cover story chronicles the making of a documentary film exploiting their naive, vulnerable subjects. Also, an article about the answers their entreaties. Theologians agree that prayer reinforces faith even people who almost die report experiencing a spiritual vision. Skeptical doctors gravity also have visions of bright lights and a God figure). A sidebar argues that black holes and quarks are evidence of God's rescue the magazine from its current irrelevance. The answer: probably not. Fallows is depicted as too righteous for his own good, lacking the former inspector general of the Department of Transportation who had warned Democratic National Committee instructed donors to funnel contributions through state parties. Also, kids and AIDS: Doctors don't know what medicines (and the National Endowment for the Arts. Also, the Standard editorializes against needle exchange, saying there isn't sufficient evidence that it stops AIDS transmission. "Government should not make itself a technician of cocaine defendants are adequately represented. Most vivid detail: The attorney for one immensely long article condemns the Drug Enforcement Administration's war on bagels, for instance), the feds are paranoid that gardeners will harvest them for opium. The author grows his own opium poppies, and wonders if he's going to "hijacked and brutalized" by conservatives. The second story recounts the that the Internet is "a monument to idleness and wasted time," then explains concedes that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and other drugs. Time then cops out by concluding that kids should not use a "dulling" drug: "The young don't need to have their pain dulled. They need to learn from school where pot is epidemic and parents are confused; one girl moved into her own apartment "after her parents forbade her to smoke marijuana at home." Also, up family mortuaries and gouging customers. And a peculiar, rambling excerpt raising a responsible child prodigy, the article gives much credit to Woods' parents, who made him finish his homework before he could play golf. A sidebar muckraking cover story investigates how the Pentagon disposes of encryption systems, attack helicopters, stealth fighter parts, etc., that should have been destroyed. China is the most eager customer, buying surplus investment guide does not quite predict a bear market, but does suggest that investors "redeploy" out of stocks (in other words, "Sell!"). Also, Both blast the president for coddling China and ignoring its grotesque during the campaign, and reaches familiar conclusions: White House pressure silenced criticism; journalists are liberal; press coverage is driven by candidates; and so on. An article argues that "corporate welfare" is a lot versa. (For Slate's take, see Harry Shearer's latest "Dispatch.") Also, an appreciation of planets: Thanks to the Mars Economist worries that a backlash against economic and political increased trade, and lowered deficits, but they have yet to deliver tangible benefits to average citizens. Also, the Economist inaugurates a series that shares that he sold to buy the entertainment conglomerate have since gained relentless PR by him, his wife, and former aides. The article derides Bush's essay bemoans the rise of ghostwritten celebrity books, which dominate with dust mites, cigarette smoke, cockroach remains, and pet dander. (Surprisingly, outdoor air pollution is not to blame: It's better for kids to play outside than inside.) The good news: New drugs and treatments make it easy and pressure from foreign suppliers are keeping wages and inflation in check; unskilled workers still face tough times. A related they don't know what numbers to trust. A piece concludes that immigration both benefits and harms Standard 's cover article, "Be Afraid," contends that Deep Blue is the demonstrated a subtle complexity of thought that even its human programmers could not comprehend. Why be afraid of the silicon brain? It lacks emotion and, hence, compassion. (For more on the match, see Slate's special edition of nature's laws as much as cloning would. It does propose limiting cloning to married couples. Also, a conservative economist makes the case for inheritance opportunist. He began his career as a socially and economically conservative liberal. Dick Morris writes an article praising the budget deal. A piece by of the infected would slow the spread of AIDS, argues the cover essay. Gay and AIDS activists have resisted such measures as stigmatizing. An article debunks environmentalists' belief that we consume too much: Raw materials, energy, and food are more plentiful than ever. But we should worry that our materialism is making us lose our reverence for nature. A short piece says there is a "child Helmsman is still widely revered; his crimes have been forgotten; and his might leave him if he uses their savings to clear the debt. If, on the other hand, he pays the fine with campaign funds, the political backlash would almost sympathetically about the cult's theology: "What is a cult but a collection of cover editorial regrets the collapse of the Republican revolution. opening feature in a special issue devoted to "The Store" asserts that the retail business is thriving because shopping has become an event: Places like complex." A story bemoans the success of the Gap and Pottery Barn, saying they have afflicted the United States with an excess of bland good taste. A piece contributors write short sketches about their favorite store. reconstruct the Heaven's Gate suicide, trace the cult's history, and link it to News column describes the attractions of cults, and compares the because its ancient computer system is too crude to catch frauds. billion in legal sports wagering). Cops have all but stopped enforcing Catholic Church must own up to its Holocaust guilt, argues "The Silence." While the doctrine of papal infallibility, which shackles the church to its sordid past. Also, a story chronicles the discovery of rock's Next Big Thing, a brief hiatus, the Standard returns to China bashing. The editorial condemns Gore's China trip for its "idiotic good cheer," and asserts that the Nation inaugurates a series that will outline a set of "first principles" for progressives. Judging by the opening article ("A Progressive Compact"), these principles will combine liberalism and communitarianism: "a right to a describes how the House subcommittee on economic growth gave special access to in modern history," but concludes that China's prosperity depends on establishing democratic freedom and the rule of law. The magazine also warns that China's economic reforms might stall if it doesn't dismantle its Also, the magazine issues its semiannual "Women's Fashions of the Times." As in recent editions, "Fashions" depicts no models, only "real" women. Most of the death for their China cover packages (what timing!) and take a hard line toward the Middle Kingdom, warning that the United States must discipline China now or politics of communism was joined to the economics of fascism." Echoing a recent companies doing business in China. A long piece describes China's suppression as appeasement: They favor economic sanctions instead. An article says the United States must not sacrifice its democratic ideals "in order to sell a few denied responsibility for its actions. An article pegged to the three current people (including everyone at Slate headquarters!). Also, an article on the Institutes of Health advisory panel's findings: Mammograms don't really protect long article contends that family secrets usually do more harm than good ("lies family history, but vehemently denies having known about it. (For Slate's take, Also, a photo essay on ultimate fighting, the popular, savage spectator special issue on "Crime and Punishment" contains more of the former than the latter. An article on the roots of violence argues that nearly all violent incapable of controlling their rage, and reprises liberal ideas about crime's environmental causes. An article lionizes Jack Maple, the eccentric cop who city's crime drop. A story explores a new phenomenon of urban juries: Black women jurors are causing mistrials by refusing to convict black men despite cover story and editorial on "The Future of Warfare" predict that satellites, unmanned planes, and computers will replace soldiers. The Economist says rivals will counter with biological weapons and terrorism. A long feature frets will be extraordinarily expensive and, in many cases, futile. (For another citizens live longer, more vigorously, and more comfortably today than ever before. An economist argues that we shouldn't worry about rising medical costs, since the money buys good health and happiness. An advertising executive New York City is touted as a wonderful retirement community: You can walk everywhere, there's plenty of culture, and the hospitals are excellent. Also, eight elderly celebs talk about how great it is to get old. shock jocks. The New Yorker puzzles over Stern's psyche: His program is levels are almost certainly causing the weird weather of the 1990s, and that they will cause unimaginable devastation if the world does not slash cloning process, predicting that the technology will be used on humans in human clones would be normal. On the business side, Time is bearish on story, emphasizing the president's intimate involvement in fund raising. A the White House fund raising "unpleasant but necessary": The president needed piece just two months ago. The "cowering," "brain dead" party must revive the theme of last year's "National Entertainment State" special issue. The rise of gigantic publishing houses, the demise of independent bookstores, the unholy marriage of publishing and television, and the abysmal quality of on the ABA Journal 's board of editors, gave the legal magazine computers and too few books: "Unique, anomalous, unconventional knowledge" is being lost. (And the worst part: Libraries aren't even silent anymore!) Another beautiful, modest houses once stood. Also, a writer spends a sunless winter in editorial predict the automobile industry's collapse. Overcapacity will benefit consumers as prices fall, but the world economy will shake as auto makers go broke. Another editorial argues that the United States should repeal laws prohibiting foreign ownership of broadcast companies. The reason: The Internet without physical illness commit suicide, but compliant journalists haven't Reed picked the right time to ditch the Christian Coalition: An FEC investigation, falling membership, and disillusionment with Reed's pragmatism for not cutting entitlements. It "postpones [the] day of reckoning." been widowed, lost a lung to illness, married an unpopular actress, engaged in reconstructed remains, which have been pieced together in a New York airplane accuse parents of shortchanging their children by working too hard. (Both changed places: Home is now stressful; work is now relaxing. See Slate's sustained, structured attention than workaholic parents give them. It notes that few parents take advantage of "family friendly" corporate policies. Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work" is harsher, berating parents for sacrificing their kids to their jobs. It argues that most families don't need two incomes, and that day care is a lousy substitute for parental care. Parents, especially fathers, ignore family friendly policies because they don't "company provocateur," is profiled. A paleontologist, chef, physicist, and departments (notably the Justice Department) seem to be paralyzed. Deal" cover package condemns the budget agreement because it raises spending on domestic programs. The editorial urges Republicans in Congress to "rebel" against the deal. An article condemns the budget as soft on defense: It cuts Cold War level. A piece argues that the Communications Decency Act should be upheld even though it's an ineffective mess. The reason? It sends the right coarseness of this culture." An article mocks the Volunteerism Summit as an event designed to make politicians and celebrities feel good about aggressive tactics. Also, a surprisingly favorable article about the Christian Coalition's campaign to recruit blacks and help rebuild burned black churches: This seems to be a truly sincere effort story argues that manned space travel has been largely useless because governments have treated space as an adventure, not a business. Space tourism story rejects the notion that globalization will pacify China. Evidence from sacrificing intellectual integrity to appease critics: Curators tone down controversial exhibits when they offend Congress or industry groups. An essay calls Bill Gates' new fantasy house a symbol of baby boomers' obsession with your every need and protects you not only from danger, but from serendipity as Promise Keepers week in the magazines. Time 's cover story questions the intent of the movement's leaders. forgiveness. NOW doesn't like the way Promise Keepers urges men to "reclaim" piece on the Promise Keepers says the group's wives generally welcome their husbands' newfound religiosity and devotion to family. Only rarely do Promise Keeper men become domineering; mostly they become more attentive. (In cover, the magazine seconds the popular wisdom that this year's El Standard traces the history of the Promise Keepers in a long article. The group really does seek male spiritual renewal, not, as its critics claim, political power or male supremacy. The group is commended for its ability to issue. A story says that publishing really is in crisis. Sales are flat, profits are meager, advances are too generous, and returns are too frequent. the diary to make it an uplifting, universal story, omitting her references to column suggests that the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act, which would cut foreign aid and impose limited trade sanctions on nations that persecute on the basis of religion, could force the United States to punish making billionaires more powerful than governments. trained and entertained in equestrian sport by a groom and an assistant, making who came and stayed with us three days of every week, giving us each a lesson Economist says that it is "emerging." The cheerful cover story and and their low soil fertility. An 18-page survey predicts the globalization of notes that China's defense industry is more primitive than recent publicity consensus for a deep investigation. But so far, the Democrats aren't Princess of Wales. And she still wears great clothes. enterprise while opposing identity politics and income redistribution. These "new Progressives," who are simultaneously liberal and conservative, Food and jobs are scarce, travel is impossible, and internal security is story credits hospitals with improving their response to medical errors. Instead of finding scapegoats, they now encourage doctors and nurses to admit mistakes (no punishment attached) in order to prevent future ones. Problem: Malpractice lawyers profit when hospitals confess error. The magazine profiles them obnoxious, passionate, smart, and fabulously successful. Also, a pair of be the ideology of the future. Too bad no one's watching them. prosperity. Thanks to free markets and (of course) high technology, productivity will increase, environmental degradation will decrease, genetic diseases will be eradicated, and a worldwide, multicultural civilization will execution. Time argues that the death penalty doesn't seem to deter crime, doesn't comfort victims' families, and is racially skewed. Time also has a Time derides John Gray, the author of Men Are From Mars, the skeleton be reburied. The federal government has seized the bones and forbidden further scientific examination. An article discusses the popular idea proselytize, they may violate the First Amendment. If they don't proselytize, Budget Committee chairman is an eager beaver and a wonderful speaker, but he's too narcissistic, too populist, and too willing to compromise with Democrats. New York Times Magazine story, the independent counsel is not to blame for the sluggish pace of the Whitewater investigation: Stonewalling by databases make too much data available too easily, so the government must intervene to protect Internet privacy, argues the cover story. A piece defends New York City rent control. (For more on rent Deal" and the "Dialogue" it sparked.) Press reports wrongly suggest that most beneficiaries of rent control are rich. In fact, it is mostly violent revolution. The Economist anoints a populist economic reformer crops fail, there could be a wave of farm failures. failure is blamed on immaturity. The magazine profiles hot young physicist Lee alternate universes, and that our universe itself was created in the black hole of another universe. If true, the theory could unify relativity and quantum mechanics. Also, a photo essay about aging prison inmates. exec., as a monster who terrorizes her Wall Street Journal underlings. A Pathfinder was built and launched for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required for earlier Mars missions. The stories applaud the upcoming flurry of Mars expeditions (eight launches in eight years), with start this week, predicting much partisan bickering and few revelations. In reform. Most notable step: immediate electronic reporting of all contributions. copycats. And an article says that boxing's reputation is so bad that not even article investigates "attachment disorder," a psychological malady that growing too fast. It's opening a store every other day, but has been accused of predatory practices and mistreatment of coffee pickers, and may have thoroughly confused by the world around him. Highlights: the description of the great economic boon its advocates claim, because virtually all economic multicultural and young, the other white, older, and resentful. A writer catalogs the six phyla of screen aliens, which include "the small, gray, over and streamline stodgy companies). Deregulation, globalization, and productivity increases make it likely that the good times will last, but world events may not cooperate. An article mocks "cosmic capitalists," the geeky liberalism clashes with its libertarianism: The cover package wonders if the First Amendment needs to be revised to limit commercial speech (campaign contributions, cigarette ads, etc.). Ten writers opine, and there's no noncommercial speech must be given special protection by the state. Also, cover editorial cheers the ascendancy of democracy and the free rules for scientific research on humans: There are too many cases where mammoth cover essay denounces human cloning as morally repugnant. Among the rejects the technological determinists who say that because human cloning is legislative proposals (to adopt a bill of rights, abolish hereditary rights in Square. Actors, neon signs, and hotel rooms are much depicted. A few short articles accompany the images. One celebrates the trend toward "true" fashion photography (pictures that show models warts and all). Another describes the market for digital images is growing so slowly. Will China preserve the rule of law and free speech, which are essential for incomplete penises into vaginas, then treated the patients with female inflicts vast physical and psychological damage. A story chronicles Fidelity Investments' continuing troubles. Fidelity's funds are lagging and the best fund managers are leaving, but the firm is thriving as a manager of corporate country is in better shape than it's been in decades: The economy is humming, losing control of its nuclear weapons: Its early warning system is disintegrating and the soldiers who man the missiles aren't being paid, raising agreement, she'd be entitled to a huge chunk of his fortune if they stayed married another year. An article argues that blacks may be better athletes than whites because they have more genetic variability: According to statistical laws, more variability means that blacks are disproportionately represented blamed parents for caring more about their careers than their kids. This week's cover deplores adult premarital sex, saying that it leads to too much money into higher education while ignoring the primary and secondary president is "shifty and disingenuous" and "the biggest phony in the White House," argues the cover story. The veep avoids taking stands on tough issues, shamelessly seeks press coverage. An article claims that liberals are the new market. In order to justify today's stratospheric share prices, profits and productivity must grow at improbably high rates for an impossibly long time. thanks to low interest rates. The Economist celebrates the still one of the best. Latest bit of good news: Aspirin now seems to prevent bowel cancer, in addition to relieving pain, quelling inflammation, and students claim impairment to extract special treatment from schools (extra tutoring, extra time on tests, etc.). The disabilities include such dubious Also check out the "Frame Game" on Weld vs. Helms.) mostly closeted gay men called Gamma Mu, dealt drugs to support his lavish investigators. Also, a pair of articles on celebrity marriage. One piece mocks been conducting an affair with his communications director for the past three chastises New York media for ignoring the story, saying they fear alienating acceptance for his unconventional theories on heart disease, and suggests that new ideas in medicine are often slighted when they don't stand to make money being challenged by a new, faceless breed of property investors, but they're eighth medical cover story of the year. "The Hidden Causes of Heart Attacks" advises a prevention regimen of multivitamins, especially vitamins B-6 and factors for heart disease include low birth weight and infections like delicacy) and cartilage (mistakenly thought to prevent cancer) has brought budget would have balanced itself quicker if Congress had done nothing new. story offers a News You Can Use analysis of the budget deal's tax cuts: You benefit if you are middle class and have kids, or are rich and own stock. A floods. An earnest analysis of women in the military advocates that the Pentagon use the techniques that helped integrate blacks into the services. executive," "the easiest boss in Congress," and "a kindly, courtly gentleman policies. And an article opposes the use of statistical sampling for the next census, arguing that the samplers will favor Democrats. examines the struggle of moving from sainthood to practical politics. An both sides granted each other all the spending and tax cuts they wanted, and Valley venture capitalist in search of the next big technological slow economic growth with higher interest rates, and strike boldly on government reform, but worries that the new prime minister is more concerned Union. An article says that the Labor landslide does not signify the death of the Conservative Party: Just five years ago, after all, pundits were the Poor" condemns state lotteries. They sucker the poor with false spent on lotteries goes to state treasuries), and are magnets for corruption. A Republican attack on federal judges "intellectually incoherent and constitutionally subversive," maintaining that the nominees opposed by story endorses the state Legislature's plan to scrap New York City's that rent control reduces the number of apartments, encourages landlord developers from building new apartments. Economists agree. A story advises risks and benefits of research findings, and it's only in rare cases (notably cigarette smoking) that science discovers clear evidence that changing behavior substances are said to raise dopamine levels in the brain, inducing euphoria. triumph, but humans shouldn't fret. A victory by Deep Blue would indicate its superior computational skills, but not a capacity for conscious thought. marriage is increasing, and express the hope that multiracial kids will bridge kids don't need much help: They read better, take fewer drugs, score better on tests, and have fewer health problems than their parents did. A story start acting like the majority party, principally by uniting around a tax cut. The editorial endorses a tobacco settlement as a way to reduce both smoking and aggressive tactics. Also, a surprisingly favorable article about the Christian Coalition's campaign to recruit blacks and help rebuild burned black churches: This seems to be a truly sincere effort feminist who doesn't think men are the cause of all women's problems. Jeers to genders are treated equally in the workplace, take equal responsibility in matters of sex, and treat each other socially with equal respect and dignity, the only practical approach is to start doing it. But to act as though wrongs only matter when they happen to women, or to assume that women are never in the wrong when they have conflicts with men, is to retard progress toward a goal positive book reviews usually have some caveats.) I had to sympathize with Fallows when he wrote that he felt he was walking out on a limb criticizing time, to avoid the sense that professional concerns are not hampering the conversation in The Book Club, it might make sense to choose two discussants interview. If so, would he make it generally available? love and compassion from my Dalmatian. As the director of the Dalmatian a nation of Dalmatian owners who are the happiest people I have ever "Many of them are deaf, and all of them are dumb. They are, in short, lousy pets." Excuse me, but have you ever had a Dalmatian as a part of your family for more than two weeks? True, Dalmatians are more hyper than most dogs, but talk too much and always seem to get into things and is harder than heck to potty train? Dalmatians are the least vocal of any dog. They only bark when they need to get their point across. Kind of like me. I am a quiet person until public word. Not long ago, she toured an art exhibition at a private gallery on who is a friend of mine. "It was a complete surprise." because, as with all incredibly famous people, we feel we know her. But we actually know very little. All that may change next week when she gives her deposition in the impeachment trial, even though her testimony will be behind irksomely closed doors. Afterward, perhaps she'll grant us a public word or two on the Capitol steps. It would be the first time we will have heard her injustice in regarding her as a vacuous vixen. "I could not live with myself if immortal. "That is just not my nature. I am a good person." case that in seducing the president, she was serving the public interest. have ever had has always had lovers because the pressure of the job is too Avenue bakery. But fat chance she's on a diet." A few nights later, Jay Leno was right to perceive that this is how you get fancy jobs in New York, with or Whatever your beliefs about the formal obstruction of justice case against maturity to balk at the magazine's tasteless choice of props. And maybe, after Like many impressionable young women through the ages, pulls the strings on her immunity agreement, but it is difficult to see how and when she can resume a normal life. I have it on good authority that the main image is a cruel caricature. She was smart enough to object initially to the transcripts that she captivated many members of the grand jury. She also any small company famous by wearing its logo on a baseball cap. keep the conversation going and to steer it in a certain direction.) administration said to me recently, "If the world knew about my messy love life Clearance from the vice squad, permission from a male relative, a congressional condemnation would be pretty bad, but "there is no greater agony" than something he's suffered already. No greater agony than what? "Finding that little note in the playbill that said, 'Due to illness, the role about what you did, and don't come out until you're really sorry. But how is true remorse displayed? Many jailed Republicans demonstrated reformation by little by going to prison to prove how sorry he is as a way of avoiding prison. voluntarily giving up a desired pleasure, most often tickets to The Rock Concert forsworn by a chastened teen. (After packing the Supreme Court, had learned his lesson when, at the end of an episode of The Honeymooners, he'd they'd hug and kiss (but no tongues!) and our long national nightmare would be over. But of course, by next week he'd have landed in the soup again, the would be, it would pale in comparison to the consequences of the pain I have joy ride. You know, the nonsexual but pointless kind. Education's "Citywide Standards of Conduct and Uniform Disciplinary Measures," ascending order of seriousness. Can you rank these infractions? unsafe or materially disruptive to the educative process" race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or B-7, C-9, D-10, E-12, F-13, G-14, H-16, I-36, J-37. laws they feel they need. With that in mind, which of the following are listed submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. the recently released White House budget: It unwisely sacrifices women. But by basing its authority on public acceptance of extreme gender restrictions, his regime "has become far more dependent on women for its survival than women are on the regime." Most surreal act of censorship: Western chronicles the bittersweet process of reuniting parents and children separated the military that terrorized their parents. Now villagers are trying to find and form relationships with children adopted by their former enemies. These reunions can give rare substance and progress to the notoriously difficult wages. The merchant marine has become "the sweatshop of the high seas." models in glittery frocks, readers should consult an annotated guide to the models' dye jobs, the "artichoke" haircut, and the new way to wear leg warmers Gun -style machismo. The ship is a clammy and morbid universe of its own, holding great masses of bombs and personnel, all tightly organized. The pilots are dutiful but terrified. They quietly suppress the reality of killing other humans and the possibility of being killed themselves. Instead, they put their politics and society. The magazine's less than revelatory insights: The president won't accomplish much this term, the Constitution will survive, and "consensual sex will continue to be tolerated." A conservative critic manual on how to update and revive your losing party. They should "pull a right, and start oozing compassion (one way to do this: "heartwarming stories authenticity, capitalism, and humor have caused nothing less than "a Time chronicles the emerging partnership between Vice adversaries have formed "a pact of mutually assured ambition," with Gore of life, food production, investment, and infrastructure are all bottoming out, and inflation, pollution, and crime are soaring. The two greatest blunders of rubles, and the sale of government utilities at bargain prices in rigged to women. This distorts social life on campus ("the women develop eating disorders, and the men develop huge egos," complains one undergrad). Colleges are turning to quiet, informal affirmative action on behalf of male are steamrollering special protections for juvenile suspects. The legal doctor debunks the notion that toxic substances cause "cancer clusters." (Such apparent concentration of certain cancers in certain places is just coincidence defeat on impeachment and beatifies the House Republicans for their willingness to pursue an unpopular but noble path. The one workable exit strategy is to his seat in defense of the unborn, the nation's security, and the doesn't drag the whole stock market down, could be useful for the economy because it will "restore sanity" to the venture capital industry. Some of the women are deliberately promiscuous in order to win more male protectors for their child. Men, not knowing if they're the biological father or not, assume friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and while talented and charming when in the mood, turned out to be very abusive instead of concentrating on the marriage or seeking treatment for him, she talking about the "abuse" we were subjected to as children. Our parents were not perfect, but about average, or maybe a drop below. I believe that dwelling on the past is just an excuse and easier than dealing with the present. What can be done to convince her that, despite all the psychobabble we are exposed to, the past is not as important as the present? I want her to get on with her life, get help for her husband, and stop driving my parents and everybody in receptive to your suggestions, so save your breath to cool your soup. Your sister's life has not turned out as she had hoped, and her way of coping is to apportion blame. Unfortunately, in her game of emotional Tag, your parents are disengage from the marital psychodrama and be as supportive as possible to your sister's version of her difficulties. Simply say that you, for whatever reason, did not experience any parental abuse, and you wish her well in what is, the homeless and their food supplies! Feral cats in poor neighborhoods like mine spread diseases, and their large number can make you feel you're living in for animals, but she cannot disagree with any of the points you make. She had always been aware of feral dogs but not the cats. Goodness, if the city authorities don't get a hold of this situation, there's going to be Rigor badger the proper agency in your community to do something about all the meaning of the word is "stupid, foolish, ignorant." If you think about this, this explains a lot. "Have a nice day" is a subtle insult, and instinctively we to say, "It's good to see you" (when it is). Otherwise I just say, better knowing the subversive underpinning of that goofy greeting. Bless relationship that is good for her is due to her willingness to settle for of the current crew, get herself into insight psychotherapy, and get rid of anyone in her life who tells her all the good ones are married or gay. If she is overweight, she needs to get rid of that, as well. Men do not go for fat "insight psychotherapy"? And just for the record, there are, in fact, much having lots of good points, as knowing which are your good points and which are your bad. It's not always obvious. Consider safe and clean. Do people really want that? Put that pair in your personal ad, and you'll be dating my gay man) or my uncle Herb (if you're a straight woman and his mother, my of person who attracts the sort of person who wants dangerous and dirty. (But let's not bring up my cousins.) When enlistment rates are down, Army recruiters panic and misconstrue their points. You don't attract ferocious soldiers by promising above average pay and, some day, a fine pension. Warriors want would have done at the Concord Hotel if they just could have hung on one more announced that his first act will be to change the name of the organization to Who Am I? Can you identify someone from very little samples from newborns, to help with prompt identification if the child is eventually murdered. The hospitals recommend that the blood sample, dripped lists these three warning signs but cautions that exorcists "must not consider people to be vexed by demons who are suffering from some psychic illness." underwear probably isn't true, but how can we be sure? course by "merge" I mean form a single organization able to more efficiently indeed a foreign country; they dress differently there. The clothes on women, particularly, create foreignness in different ways. Depending on what era the movie is set in, clothes can conjure a unfamiliarity that is soothingly adorable or uneasily alien. Twenty years back, and the gaze is nostalgic. But skirts also confirm our sense of the foreignness then, when painful situations could be resolutely ignored and awkward facts kept under wraps while in exaggerations, show us a country now alien indeed. They remind us that there was a time when the line between the personal and the public was ridiculous and unnatural devices invented to dishonor female life and liberty. The actual clothes of the '50s are now almost half a century gone, most of them vanished. We only see them in old films, old television, and old magazines, 1880s to the 1920s was severe. By the second half of the 1920s, female fashion and female life had been totally transformed. Women had adopted short hair and modern female citizens, who by that time had acquired effective means of contraception, gainful employment, and the vote. Too young to remember the ordinary clothes of the previous era, they regarded huge bustles, sweeping trains, lofty coiffures, and tightly laced waists with a ferocious derision Now, at the end of the 1990s, with the evidence drawn mainly from old movies and old sitcoms, '50s fashion is similarly ripe for reductive contempt. Those big, pointy breasts; useless hats; and lampshade what the great range of real clothing was like at the time. years, and all our social perceptions become romantically transformed. Clothes in historical movies can show the really distant past as a friendly foreign land, perhaps even a lot like the here and now. All Ancient Historical Drag is morally and visually neutral, apt for inventive play with the styles of a redeemed, is often treated with great respect in movies such as The Portrait Historical films are usually kind to the olden days, updating the principal women's clothes so the actresses look attractive by herself, as if no other woman at the time ever wore a rigid farthingale and stuffed sleeves, a tightly frizzed wig and a bushel of pearls, or painted her run to becomingly mobile and flowing silk dresses with smoothly boned bodices. there's a good deal of extra emphasis on the way the period corsets flatten the flattening was permitted and certainly no exposure. films because they're modish once more. Modern designers such as Christian ideology to reinstate the corset, using them as sexy accents in the early '90s. emblem of female oppression back into the erotic device it always was. Corseting has stopped looking dishonorable and started looking chic again, both as a feature of recent ball gowns and wedding gowns and as a costume component that can give a modern frisson to movies set in ancient days. The '50s aren't quite ancient yet, but they're getting more years, and many remembered when. The movie was beautifully restrained and time before spandex were all deliciously heartbreaking, never exaggerated for laughs. The film's evocation of the style of the time was marred only by '70s failed to walk in the correct '50s style while wearing long narrow skirts. (The secret: Knees together, and don't try to stride.) right on schedule, fashions of the '70s are being given a nostalgic, will be in for its share of cinematic contempt (once the square toes are truly gone) just as the '50s finally achieve true antiquity. The modes of any period can easily be made to look stupid. Even in its own day, fashion needs a lot of enhancement to make it look great. for new goods, the clothes in '50s movies were so thoroughly surreal as to look quite unfit for normal wear, even if they were waitresses' uniforms or specially for the stars and uniquely worn by them. In Cat on a Hot Tin the costume department. Real '50s slips had no relation to it at all. They were and unreliable straps that slid around on the shoulders, uneasily contending with the bra straps. In the '50s, nobody wanted the movies to show all that and had hairy armpits, too. That was really foreign. she was supposed to be working in an office or teaching in a journalism school. Nobody ever wanted to emulate this effect; it was hers alone. Today we cede our vision of '50s female fashion to the blatantly cleansed of error, willfully idealized into unreality, odorless, cinematic female bodies can seem to suggest a world unwilling to acknowledge the existence of adultery, homosexuality, racial strife, female lust and rage, political and cultural revolution, family dysfunction, or messy passion of any kind, not to mention irreparable loss, unbearable pain, and death. things and more, the most intractable aspects of human life. But they were conventions for the cinematic female wardrobe. Those conventions had an important meaning at the time. They stood for the notion that private life was modern political leaders, he seems the least likely as a character. A Henry might depict his climb from provincial obscurity. But who could concoct the juxtapositions of the president's personality? It is hard to think of a figure scripted him? Let us consider the writers whose inventions capture aspects of ambition and disloyalty to his old friends (without his heroism or rhetorical lacks the grandeur of the Bard's tragic heroes and the absurdity of his comic on the first page of the novel of that name as "A disorder in which concern for the poor and the oppressed. Meanwhile, however, he is shacked up with a girlfriend he calls the Monkey, who fulfills his sexual fantasies but him for the right to do his chore. Tom Sawyer does capture rather nicely, I driven to distraction by Tom's deceptions but always forgives him in the Dickens: The great artist of character types is Dickens, but he seems a fawning fellow who worms his way up through oozing manipulation. He does have smarminess, and his flattering blather. There's a scene in the novel where of its own in which a punishment is completely incommensurate with the nature of the crime that comes from a sort of sexual madness that I believe is at the noted. This is a clever nomination, but it doesn't transcend the immediate punished unfairly for an accidental murder he is provoked into committing by be unjust, but as a character he lacks Billy's innocence and forthrightness. Billy steps up to take his undeserved punishment, declining to let others risk They were 'careless' people. They smashed up lives and didn't notice." There World War I and is a reckless adulterer. But as a personality, he's all him. And Tom and Daisy are aristocrats; their miserable behavior is the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to Herald points out, because "the crimes he is accused of were committed leaders and bring them before an international tribunal for crimes against international tribunal, particularly at a time when war criminals from the Pessimism pervades papers' seasonal stories around the recognizing that residents of the capital were better off than the rest of thousands of people have lost their savings in the collapse of the country's banking system. Still more have become unemployed or had their salaries slashed way to take that annual break." The decline can be explained in part by workers year, decreased alarmingly, apparently due to the alleged Western propaganda that, at peak flow, the ocean surrounding the reefs becomes toxic. That wasn't the kanji chosen by the public to symbolize the year now drawing to an end. In added arsenic to food that was served at a summer festival, and media stories 20-to-1 that the controversial "Millennium Dome" would be scrapped, 100-to-1 prepared with accommodations for the reception of the House of that there is no nice hotel. Not the right kind of nice hotel. If we live in an age of rampant infidelity (generally the most popular kind, by the way), it is in spite of the failure of the free market to provide seductive accommodations. comfort. It's like bad pornography expressed as architecture. apartments are small, there are "love hotels" in a goofy and playful variety of why is there no hotel toothpaste? In their restless effort to offer the guest simulated luxury, hotels provide a sewing kit, soap, shampoo, body gel, a Bible, a robe, and a shower cap, but no toothpaste. Why not? Just say you were a dentist seeking a stolen hour of bliss; where would you go? Just say you were a congressman who looked like Piggy and cared about the Constitution, sensual delights, and good oral hygiene; what kind of accommodations would you real memo we once read, written by a secretary at Paramount, describing the BUSINESS: Now that the money is a different color, foreigners will be able to buy a lot more things, or perhaps a lot fewer. YOU FEEL: Buying stuff is making everyone happy, even when it turns insisting that poor people not be made to feel good at the expense of rich YOUR BOAT: A lot of people are sailing those huge factory trawlers up submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. been chosen "to bring this man to light." She explained, "I was the strong one that did not say no." The unnamed author of the interview, which was spread posing variously in black leather, fake leopard skin, and white shirt and jeans, wrote that, although she was "heavily made up," there wasn't "even the safe after he leaves office "because then he's not the President, and he may have died since her case started, she feels she is being watched over by God, she said it left her feeling "like he raped me, without physically raping me." "intellectual brilliance" and lamented that "this exceptionally human man should have his place in history distorted because he couldn't find a secluded President only wanted to do what the common man has done behind his wife's back since the world began. Puritan stupidity didn't only refuse him that, it urgent steps to stimulate domestic demand and bring down trade barriers to ideal, make the mistake of overlooking the cultural and infrastructural differences between different economies," it said. "But they are more right had "little substance" and that he was effectively "telling emerging economies that it is up to them to avoid becoming ill and, should they succumb, unfortunately, lived up once again to its reputation as a country which has failed to build capitalism and does not pay its debts." Referring to Prime with Al Gore and the International Monetary Fund's Deputy Managing Director appointment following the paper's disclosure that Lauder had provided financial unauthorized access to the Internet. "The proposed legislation would punish those who connect to the Internet by using other people's codes or by hacking into the system," it explained. "Official regulation should be kept to a acts, such as shopping with other users' accounts or rewriting and destroying magazine that "for the first time in my life on a film set I was thinking, 'I wish I wasn't here.' There were even days when I would wake up and think, see all these people, and do the thing you love most." At least she does not you without any clothes on, this question no doubt has popped into your head: Why are the poor so fat? That obesity is a characteristic problem of affluent countries surprises no one. But why is it also characteristic that obesity increases so dramatically as you go down the social scale? emigrated from, being overweight is directly related to wealth and status and is regarded as attractive. Thus, my father's rural family of farmers is thin and wiry, while the elders in my mother's urban clan of higher caste and wealthier stock are as plump as can be. When my sister and I, two scrawny The first report I found to document the effect class has found obesity was six times more common among women in the bottom third of the nations, low income is a more powerful predictor of obesity than any single factor except age, though this relationship is weaker in men than in women. In men, height is associated more strongly with status. On average, in developed and undeveloped countries alike, richer men are taller. You'd think weight would be like height. More money means more food. So more food should mean more fat, just as it means more epidemiologist friends point out to me, when two things correlate, there are always three possible explanations. One leads to the other. The other leads to possibility is that obesity leads to lower income. Certainly the obese, particularly obese women, face severe disadvantages in both the job and marriage markets. And the evidence that this produces downward mobility is belonged to a different social class than their parents, and those who had moved down were significantly fatter than those who had moved up. More become impoverished as others. Obesity affected a woman's economic prospects more than even chronic illness. In men, however, shortness led to downward mobility. One foot less of height doubled a man's likelihood of poverty. But as observed relationship of income to obesity. That makes sense. After all, the study" lent some credence to the idea, finding that the obesity and social parents but also of their biological parents. The study inferred that parents can give their offspring genetic traits that tip the scales toward both heavier weight and lower status. Even so, inheritance accounted for at most a small mobility and genes matter somewhat but, ultimately, we're left with the obvious explanation that in affluent societies the lower the income, the more people eat unhealthily, sit around, or both. Unfortunately, measuring this directly is exercise and, when observed, tend to change their behavior. The differences is linked to eating more and exercising less, and rises substantially as income lowers. Given the weakness of other explanations, few experts doubt that free, and eating less junk food and meat and more produce saves money. Rather, just horrendously difficult. Being motivated is vital, and motivation is what women. They even weighed themselves less often (three times a month vs. seven and young women. Since obese men are less stigmatized, it may also explain why wealthier men are not that much less obese than poorer men. distinguish themselves from the poor? Or does richness breed an instinct for World status when I go back to visit my relatives and the first few words they closing arguments, but everyone agrees that neither impeachment article will rejected a bone marrow transplant (to stave off cancer) and his organs began to fail. Now that everyone realizes how ill the king was when he recently dumped marveling in retrospect at the king's decisiveness, resolve, and composure. resigned for using the word "niggardly." The word means "stingy" and is unrelated to the "N word," but some people had misunderstood it. The aide, ordeal"). The White House reportedly tried to spike the story on security They're hypocrites, since they've used People and other popular hike, offset by an even greater revenue hike (thanks to economic growth), should be applauded for spending less and saving more than the "big government" adjusting Social Security taxes and benefits so the program will remain running a Web site that tracks the murders of abortion providers. The site, format of a "most wanted" list, along with their home addresses, license plate numbers, and the names of their spouses and children. The doctors' names are crossed out as they are murdered. The plaintiffs' spin: The site is "a hit list for terrorists" and is also intended to scare doctors out of the business. The defendants' spin: The site doesn't explicitly advocate violence against doctors, and the damage award violates the First Amendment. Legal analysts look Instead, he will campaign for Democratic House candidates in the hope that Democrats will recapture the House and he will become speaker. This leaves The unofficial spin: He smells blood on House Republicans who have antagonized judgment in making a statement that served no purpose whatsoever." The spins: chimpanzee subspecies. They theorize that humans contracted the virus by chimps' genes or immune system defeat the related virus, we can learn how to we can learn how to recognize dangerous viruses earlier and prevent another allegedly trying to buy oral sex from a prostitute. Sports writers mercilessly yard touchdown pass) and partly blamed the Falcons' sloppy performance (several campaign), but he will have plenty of diehard donors, volunteers, and was taking a leave of absence from his job, then set up an "announcement" set up the committee that would set up his eventual campaign.) The New York has emerged to cater to affluent baby boomers who think of themselves as practical, but who are easily gulled into buying things for which they have no obvious practical need. It is a store that knows yuppie materialism is a kind tend to confuse their restless pursuit of Authenticity when purchasing retail goods with an indifference to material things. It is a store that takes everyday items and buffs them up just enough that they seem like luxury items and yet (usually) keeps prices relatively low. It is a store that, if you happen to be an affluent baby boomer, understands more about you and the things that give you pleasure than you understand yourself. stores, "more than a store." It is a community. You may wander into Borders bookstore without a thought in the world of buying anything, except perhaps a cup of coffee. Should you happen, amid your browsing, to find something you want to purchase, the store will labor to treat it as an unexpected windfall. At the more aggressive (and youthful) end of the spectrum, Urban Outfitters so far as to make its products seem incidental to the spirit they're meant to her book shows her in jeans and blazer, standing at the edge of a deep canyon (inherited from her father). The book itself is "serious, perceptive, skirting the edges of hilarity and terror." You'd never guess she's a lethal player of As this passage suggests, a common theme in these stores is camp nostalgia. Another is the soullessness of retail as practiced by the themselves if the things they make are really, I mean really, better than the Hardware. Although they position themselves as "practicality" stores, you'd warehouse lamp. Rather, they invite you to question the underlying assumptions behind your everyday needs and to reorder those needs. Both stores are somewhat difficult to classify. Trader gourmet shop, because it's bigger and less pricey than most gourmet shops. (When the prices are high, the store is quick to make a joke of it, as it does Hardware calls itself a hardware store and stocks a few items that might pliers, flashlights with old metallic ribbing, etc. But these items, along with a sprinkling of kitchen ware, gardening supplies, and whimsical doodads such as up before the main course, which is a sleigh bed, a leather and cherry bentwood recliner, or some other hunk of massive retro furniture. Restoration Hardware is a home furnishings store for people who think of themselves as too austere Both chains present themselves as bucking the aesthetic and Eventually, the store ceased to carry "lines" of goods at all, instead selling elsewhere, it will stop carrying it. "We like to suggest that some of our best to Quality and Value would be easier to commend wholeheartedly if it didn't reek quite so much of snob appeal. One has to remind oneself that this is an counterculture rebellion. The company, which is now traded publicly, was retailing, one who "did not set out to found a retail group, but did so as a result of one of his passions, the discovery of fine craftsmanship and Restoration Hardware does not carry "lines" but rather selects individual items that seem to capture the store's "spirit," many of which are made exclusively beside each item display an impressive mastery of the manipulative arts. "FOUR card beside four sizes of woven metal baskets in Restoration Hardware's covet recliners," purrs the card beside a 1952-style Metro Finer Recliner, psychological profile to allow ourselves or even imagine ourselves purchasing a big cushy wonder boy or girl reclining chair." Let's pause for a moment to map Sympathy: And yet you secretly desire one so you can capture some magical You may be buying your dad's chair, but you are not going to play that gender dominance game that he played. It's your wife's chair too! Wonder boy cultural criticism, have coined an extremely handy term to describe the spirit In a book of essays with that title, the process of turning counterculture with a longing for simpler times. But in both stores, one is similarly invited to live out vain fantasies about who one is, or should be. The spell is broken merchandise, and understand you're just another schmuck consumer. former head of the New York City Art Commission, "it seems as though wherever denigrated for a lack of ability to find other countries on a map and a lack of interest in trying. But here's what News Quiz respondents know about one other country, based on a count of all submitted answers: don't know all that much. But in a hypothetical reverse version of the News a big, busty blonde on the seat beside him; and firing a pistol out the window, well above the limit. Many of them believed they could drive safely at high direct broadcast satellite providers, has signed a deal with Internet objects and drool copiously, and perhaps you defecate or urinate on the Naturally we resist. Not for us the cheap swipes at Sen. Blowhard and Rep. politicians who won't let a guy serve and protect. And while we're at it, let's also admit that today's question drifted into "Smelly, Lethargic, Incoherent" You are a dog suffering from separation anxiety. You suffering from mental deterioration. Both drugs, under different names, are with fear of crowds or thunderstorms. "You can buy that dog some time," he said insubstantial, but they are like cannonballs to a giant galaxy." Producers Council hopes people buy the other white meat because it's good, not disdain Reform and Conservative conversions as little more than circumcision for the men and immersion in a ritual bath for the women. large galaxies. Dark matter constitutes most of the universe. by an editorial asking that God might show him mercy "equal to the size of our report on the possible repercussions of his likely death because of to panic despite efforts by palace officials to convey the impression of a been increased by "a clumsy purge of the local media" that had involved the unofficial accounts of the succession crisis, Walker wrote. The new English "bad news" has "opened the door to rumors, inflicting a higher toll on the The king's health crisis led the front pages of many has the experience to face the current dangers in the Middle East and concluded adding that far from achieving its purpose of extricating the peace process because he is not implementing it, nor can he attribute the current quiet to an unimplemented agreement. It is not yet too late to carry out the agreement, but there is no reason to expect that the prime minister will respect even his own removed, he would be replaced by a "puppet regime," which would "spark bitter over beyond the border into neighboring states," it concluded. states he visited earlier in the week. Their refusal to support the toppling of unilaterally in defiance of its allies and international law, the paper reported a thaw in relations between their two countries. the country has changed from being an isolated backwater into the chief friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and business requires us to entertain at home quite a bit. His company (which pays the bills) uses a particular caterer with whom I do not get along. The woman in charge seems to resent my suggestions, though I am always polite, and it has and New Year's coming up, we will be seeing more of her than ever. I do not people helping in the house are always in a position to carry tales outside. suggestions. And to close down the catering lady, make it a point to tell her appropriate person in your husband's company if you might have the leeway of remember this: Using caterers may have a few attendant problems, but it beats be a nut job. (No, not your software billionaire.) The one who has my dander lovers are a fiercely loyal lot (and vociferous too), there is no recourse from you used the word "empathetic." Please see the attached letter previously sent "empathetic" should not be used. Despite my letter I see that are the highlights of your (unpublished) letter for the edification of those the language. It seems that only psychologists know that the word is years after I predicted it, I notice that some dictionaries offer "reluctant" as a meaning for "reticent." And of course "disinterested" has come to mean for me, though it is actually my daughter's problem. She is married to a womanizing louse who takes no particular pains to cover his tracks. They have married. My daughter is torn about whether to cut the creep loose or to hope against hope that he will change. There are children. You are experienced, and said, in another context, "That condition can be cured only with embalming discussed this, but the next time it comes up you might point out that tomcat habits are not likely to change and, further, that children are not benefited by having tense and angry parents. Additionally, through some kind of family osmosis, children pick up that a parent is a philanderer, and this, in turn, situation and that you can achieve some peace of mind knowing that adults get to make their own decisions about their lives. Be a shoulder for your daughter, and let's hope she decides the best course for herself and the children. no apparent reason. Exposing his lies on television has no effect on his negotiate a new date with the United States, with the most likely one being pragmatic and dedicated exclusively to the promotion of its own interests, the find them in the government, the Security Council, the Federal Security Service, or the Foreign Ministry. Neither could the State Department and the US intelligence official interviewed by the newspaper blamed them on "the current political situation in the US." The official added, "Some faction probably used hemorrhaging ulcer of the stomach" was bad news for several reasons. "First, a hemorrhaging ulcer is a serious and painful disease, which even younger patients find it difficult to combat. Second, this reveals the full extent of the incompetence of the president's doctors," the paper said. "Too many cooks spoil the broth, as the saying goes. The best doctors in the country either didn't notice the development of ulcer in the case of their important patient, or they themselves produced it by filling the president up with pills before saying that the massacre had been wholly predictable because the West "didn't understanding on security matters, since the United States is unlikely to be willing to contribute more than a token number of ground troops." also argued for a tough line, saying that "the atrocity cannot As for stopping the killing, only drastic measures are likely to work, such as that only a confession by the president that he had lied under continue to rely on public opinion to keep his jurors from convicting him, and in his State of the Union message will "propose scores of popular measures designed to secure poll ratings, even if they have no chance of entering law." The editorial continued, "He is rightly confident that by such means he can maintain himself in power. But he should also be concerned today, once asserted: 'On truth there can be no ambiguity, on justice no the story, noting the proliferation of multiple births due to fertility drugs. problems, and society can't afford to spend millions of dollars on every abort the extras (as this woman refused to do on religious grounds), she power." These are the latest steps in a crackdown on activists who have China's economic liberalization will eventually lead to political voted against it, but the media largely agreed with Democrats that it was a Republicans ruled that it wasn't germane. Democrats temporarily walked out to protest the "unfairness" of the proceedings and later staged a rally at the they couldn't save him. The sunny spin: Senate moderates are ready to end this spin: That's what House moderates were ready to do a month ago. reports that Hustler magazine was preparing to expose his extramarital lamented the loss of a great statesman, and blamed the ouster on White House dirty tricks. The resignation was also provoked by House Republicans angry at Democrats, too, lamented his downfall, even as they milked it to illustrate why protecting the world and backing diplomacy with necessary force. The lack the stamina for four days of bombing, how will we find the stamina for the ban a practice quite common in the United States. What? complete inventory of items destroyed in the bombing raid on the Republican outside of his marriage. (Please note, his wife has forgiven all but the where it all began. That's why, at our house, I read aloud from that holiday political freedom to the modern freedom to shop in the mall of your choice. degree possible. It means a maximum range of choice for the consumer when he spends his dollar." Here was an idea intellectuals might also embrace. but the compensation was the greater range of 'alternatives in goods and land, and it's not on any map: You must find it in your heart or on your television. But who are the people who live there? Answer these questions based shown to be involved in crime or violence (three times the actual rate)." turn to crime. "Women age faster than men, and as they age, they become more submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. never tires of publishing judicious editorials about Flytrap, drew its "technically legal," it had failed the crucial test set by the founding fathers that such a process must inspire public confidence. This is because the as an unacceptable constraint on executive power." The obvious lesson was that the independent counsel law should be "redesigned" when it comes up for review both independent of party politics and yet seen to be democratic." The FT said, "Selection by a panel appointed by the judiciary would be an at the same time as some of its members suggested that censure, rather than impeachment trial should be a way of protecting the office of president, not the process. But the ultimate victims could be the pursuers, not the pursued. but it may have prompted "a neat political reversal, helping to put Democrats demented stalker is hailed as the winner. The world knows that he is guilty, but he is the one enjoying a victory cigar. What a way to end the decree which, it said, could generate xenophobia and racism. "Such a crucial problem as immigration can only be confronted in a spirit of bipartisanship, in which the government and the opposition undertake not to treat it as an country with a declining birth rate and an aging population. and the Guardian with "Trial of the century begins." committing a strategic error by falling into "the temptation of picking at the these witnesses be called to testify, so that disputes on points of fact can be effort to prevent any live witnesses being called." "These are little vignettes of caddishness that could start to damn the who said that the impeachment crisis had "lacerated the women's rights us to positions of power." She added, in reference to the throwing out of the mismanagement was condemned as a "surrender" in another Daily Telegraph are now thoroughly discredited," it said. "They have shown themselves to be ready to tolerate serious malpractice rather than allow the unification of took a different view. The Financial Times said that the commission, despite its victory, had got "a bloody nose" and that the vote had been "an important round "to become more than a terrier snapping at the heels of policymakers: it can "justified its existence." Nothing will ever be the same again, it said. by power workers because they received no wages and a general slackening of labor discipline in the industry caused a rise in accidents, the paper said. two the year before. "Still, this doesn't give any grounds for optimism since cardinal principle of its policy which is characterized by transparency and interference in a state's affairs whatever regime it may have, especially when that intervention lacks any international cover or consensus." crisis in Brazil, which it said had not merely brought a premature end to international financial system which was just beginning to recover from the traumatic devaluation. "Don't loosen your safety belts yet," it said. blow job and he gives you a soft job: high pay, no qualifications, no heavy Republican impeachment drive is not too different. Although the alleged quid impeachment nevertheless assume that Flytrap is about an exchange of understands bureaucracies should know that the way to get a cushy job isn't to make yourself desirable but to make yourself undesirable. That's why, while the Bush administration. When she began to look like trouble, she was transferred to the Pentagon. The choice of the Pentagon is no surprise. bureaucrats probably have in mind the Department of Health and Human Services, if your urgent need is a government job in general, rather than anything in particular that job might accomplish, apparently the Pentagon is your best characterized this as a politically motivated "demotion." It will strike many at the Pentagon was confidential assistant to the assistant secretary for public affairs. Her job was writing press releases, for which she was paid presidential aide, not for being desirable to the president. program called the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, an arguably responsibility for the paperwork involved in the selection process, for making travel and hotel arrangements, as well as for other logistic odds and ends such is, it turns out, no official description of the job. Writing one is among the descriptions of other GS-15 public affairs specialist positions. For instance, in the reviews and analysis of numerous requests for speeches; to develop, clear, release, and distribute a wide range of information and data concerning the nature and objective of the Commission's programs; [and to] prepare press releases, fact sheets, etc. and arrange press conferences." Translation: PR To try to get some sort of independent measure of what these jobs are worth, I called Kelly Services, the nationwide temp agency. job. The employee, a problem in one place, was simply moved to another. There's a name for this personnel technique: It's called "Pass the Trash." Federal civilian employees who don't commit felonies and don't cuss out their supervisors pretty much have a guaranteed job with guaranteed wages for life. handsome pension, based on the average of her three highest consecutive years Will her job description be done by then? How long could it take? "She's still working on it," a Pentagon source tells me. What's the staggering compared with those of the men and women in those hard jobs now. military's most senior officers. She earns more than a ballistic missile submarine commander and is on a par with aircraft carrier skippers in the of communication, including a satellite phone, and that restrictions had been would be reconsidered if he breached the restrictions, the statement added. bin Laden over to the United States, however much it came under pressure to do last week were less interested in securing the extradition of bin Laden than in hands on the missiles' technology, had offered to buy them "at a huge price," step up financial and military assistance to the Afghan opposition if the whose family is one of the wealthiest and most prominent in the kingdom, was "communications revolution," which enabled him to transfer money undetected around the world and to reach every corner of the "information village." are suffering an accountability famine. Their legislature can hardly muster more than a pip or a squeak at present. The can hardly cast stones over the food scandal about the effects of genetically modified foods on human health. A had been forced to retire early after publishing research showing that rats fed on genetically modified potatoes suffered a weakened immune system and damage The Guardian also revealed that the rats' brain size had decreased. The supreme court that a woman cannot be raped if she is wearing tight denim jeans. overturned the conviction of a driving instructor for raping one of his pupils, was "simply not true that two consenting people are needed to take off a pair of jeans" and that he couldn't imagine how the judges had reached such a conclusion. "Perhaps it is inexperience, which may be understandable since washing machines in which to conduct my tests. I don't have a radiation spectrometer for measuring the whiteness of whites the way Consumer Reports does. But I do have tools formidable in their own right at my service in my search for the best laundry detergent. right across the street from my apartment. I have skin sensitive to the faintest of soapy residues and an equally sensitive nose. But my biggest asset is New York City at my doorstep. The dirt, grime, spit, and fouler substances that regularly adhere to one's clothing here make this fine metropolis a But first let me rule out a few of the myths and scams of ions, or an undefined substance called "structured water." An apparently bogus that they wash clothes no better than plain water, and one manufacturer was detergent came in huge boxes? Don't they seem small these days? This was no technological advance. Under pressure from environmentalists, detergent manufacturers simply removed the fillers with which they'd been bulking up detergents to give an illusion of value. (The same thing happened with showed that powders outperformed liquids on all fronts. (The one exception: Tide With Bleach Alternative.) Conventional wisdom (as doled out on laundry Web sites and detergent hotlines) has it that powders are better in hard water and ingredients: surfactants and builders. Surfactants reduce the surface tension of the water and increase its ability to rinse and wash. Whimsical chemists say elements in the water that would reduce the effectiveness of surfactants. Detergents differ in the way they balance these two elements, and in their varying use of added ingredients such as bleach, enzymes, fluorescent whiteners, perfumes, foam control products, or fabric softeners. brand merely offers the same basic ingredients in different proportions, plus or minus a few bells and whistles, how was I to determine which was the best? I boasted of keeping colors bright, removing stains, eliminating odors, and being arrival of detergents with bleach and bleach alternatives, color fading has been a concern of many launderers; various brands have accordingly begun to claim "color hold" bleaching or even that they "brighten brights while whitening whites." Normal chlorine bleach removes color indiscriminately: It attacks stains and dyes alike and converts them into particles that your detergent can easily wash away. It can also damage fabrics (especially just means oxygen bleach, which is much milder than chlorine bleach. It works by releasing hydrogen peroxide to break up or remove the color from organic materials but is gentle enough that it won't affect most fabric dyes. That stuff about brightening brights generally just means the detergent has some clothes. There's nothing in detergent that can make your clothes brighter, other that its inherent ability to get dirt out of them. Bleach Alternative, which was rated the most effective detergent overall by each, in hot water, with each of the fine household products I mentioned washed sets of clothing had lost significant amounts of color as compared with the unwashed control set. The socks that started out a deep royal purple were and Tide were not great, but they were noticeable and surprising. Tide, which made no claims to color holding, actually resulted in the least fading. All general irrelevance of the claims on detergent labels. One way to prevent this type of color loss is to wash clothes in colder water, but all detergents work poorly in cold water, and many bleaching agents are completely ineffective in cold temperatures. So while the colors may fade less, your detergent is also removal I needed a way of getting the clothes to be tested as dirty as the test subjects in the street and let cars run over them. But this presented a new testing challenge, namely that anything in the street in New York City is fair game. I was faced with either standing guard over the clothing and shooing natural people repellent. I picked underwear, both men's and women's, in the pairs into Second Avenue under cover of darkness. Unfortunately, while no one wanted the clothing, the act of tossing it into the street drew no little attention. Questions from the crowd that gathered included "What the hell are called 'Bag of Panties.' Will you take a picture of us with the underwear for diverting, but it wasn't getting our underwear any dirtier. So we dragged each pair through the gutter (which was still full of street runoff from a rainstorm earlier in the day). This combined with the occasional big rig and regular they were gray and covered with skid marks and street custard. But they still weren't dirty enough. So into a plastic sack they went, and into a cab we hopped, headed for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, a enough to donate a large platter and a vat of spicy barbecue sauce, but balked thoroughly sauced, the briefs still looked like they needed one more good squirt all over them. With that final abuse, we called it a night, and I sealed the subjects in a large plastic bag and left them to fester in the corner of my into four equally soiled piles, I washed one set in Cheer, one in Tide, one in spin in the dryer, I compared the results. Cheer worked the best overall: It removed the road grime the best, and there was little trace of the orange grease left in the waistband by the barbecue sauce. There was no visible raspberry jelly doughnut filling remaining at all. Tide did a good job on the grease but was not quite as effective as Cheer on the road grime, which was still visible in patches. It also completely removed the jelly stains. Third place went to Dynamo, which did a poor job on the jelly, and whose heavy scent brand: When I opened the dryer, the spicy smell of barbecue sauce almost knocked me over, and the briefs were still covered in splotches of orange enlisted the help of a friend who is a fitness instructor. She was kind enough to donate three loads of sweaty, crusty clothes to my cause. Using my incredibly sensitive nose, I divided her clothing into three piles of equal load). I then washed each in a detergent marketed as odor removing: Gain, Surf, and Fab. Aside from just having more fragrance than other varieties (which the companies admit), could they actually remove serious stink from clothing? great job and removed the odors completely. There was no difference in perfume was a cloying grape scent. Worst of all, the toxic underwear from the My conclusions? Tide faded colors a bit less, but it was not enough to make me want to switch brands. Cheer did a great job removing dirt and grease, but how often are my clothes run over by cars and slathered in negligible. The various claims on the packaging are not so much false as true of all the detergents: With the exception of the cheap store brands, they all remove odors, stains, and dirt well. You're better off picking your detergent by its scent (or, if you ask me, lack thereof) than you are judging it by which one you choose: It'll all come out in the wash. in "His Excuse for Loving"? In couplets and the "beheaded" (first syllable he speaks his mind directly and eloquently about feeling love ardently when no longer a youth. The closing lines of the poem, with the sentence dancing during the months when they shared a cottage in the country. devilishly pouty lower lip, soulful hooded eyes, and a genetic fingerprint that alleged several years ago in the Globe that while state attorney has denied ever having met the woman, but perhaps the Star can get Miss Manners to rule on whether purchasing sex from someone qualifies as a formal the couple "wrote a whole chapter in one of the most remarkable love stories of this: "I know you're going through hell right now. But I want you to know one "The furious First Lady attacked the President, hitting him so hard she left a excellent aim, having also winged him with books and an ashtray. The "It was like his touch was revolting to her!" an "insider" reports. The "the change in her diet to Middle Eastern food had caused the first lady to The president isn't the only recipient of the first lady's right hook. The Star reports that "on nearly a dozen occasions in the officers for getting in her way." It reports that as she was leaving the White dilemma of having nothing to wear for that special occasion by deciding to wear sexual advances." More stories like this and someone at the White House is Enquirer 's ear this week in court, seeking to block its competitor from The Enquirer "scoop" that the Globe wanted spiked reveals the issue in this epic struggle were questions of First Amendment rights and the specter of prior restraint, making this battle call to mind nothing so much as and whose nose is considerably smaller and lips substantially larger than the genital to genital contact that our president has grown unfamiliar with in convincingly natural as her nose, her lips, and her breasts. After she and a reports. After transcripts and video stills of her encounter were made public, been set up and paid to have sex with Frank." If she had any doubts, never cheat again. How do we know this? Because she said so. The Globe "We stayed home. We stayed in the word of God. And we stayed in bed. You want a recipe for healing? That's what you do." It also helps if you can send your Unfortunately, groveling before the nation does not work to strengthen the of her husband, Sonny, she tossed "piles of irreplaceable mementos" of the late former restaurant employees. The Enquirer reports that war has broken out among Sonny's survivors because he died without signing the will that would "After wrapping up his work on the Middle East's problems, President caption sure to appear on the front of any paper the day after the House votes Clearance from the vice squad, permission from a male relative, a "University degree. The other two are prerequisites to coach under Jerry "University degree. So very nonessential to a happy relationship with a "University degree. It's the only item that couldn't also serve as the title of cultural superiority. So in lieu of swaggering, I should concede that in my uncle to protect his privacy and exaggerated the fabric for comedic purposes. pass a literacy test, and be a male relative. Or to put it another way, voting to recommend impeachment in our advanced democracy was that noted historian and longer need vice squad clearance to apply for a passport, previously required submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. It's about lying under oath, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. If the impeached too. The fact that they weren't owes less to any lack of evidence about the affair, and so on. All this was demonstrably false. The only reason he might not be guilty of perjury is that his mind pretty clearly was under oath as president illustrates the double standard that has trapped Bill comparison. (The nearest equivalent involves the mysterious had no idea the deal involved paying ransom for hostages. House logs indicated that Bush was at the meeting, he emended his story to say policy Bush claimed to be both ignorant of and disturbed by. justice" or "abuse of presidential power" in Flytrap comes close. the shame of impeachment, and why does he face premature removal from office, not about sex. The only sensible distinction is that lies about some things thwart the workings of democracy on an important public policy issue seem to me to be a lot worse than lies about an embarrassing personal mess. But perhaps we during that same impeachment hearing opening statement. "When I appeared in this committee room a little over two months ago," he said (mournful as the come to a point that frankly I prayed I would never reach. It is my sorrowful months of effort to nail the president would be in vain; c) was being frank; d) report, until "our investigation" (whatever that consisted of). And while your hand is up, would you care to swear an oath that you believe these unbelievable lies, that witness chips a stone from the foundation of our entire legal did not suspect any connection with the impeachment process, and had not meant to imply otherwise merely by uttering words whose plain meaning and universal that Republicans all rallied round the obvious meaning of his original But how could a conservative Republican senator and major flag waver for the own lies and hypocrisies but also for those of his enemies. No doubt he is "use of the word 'jurors' when referring to the Senate." Reporters scrambled for their notebooks and senators stirred from their slumber at this deviation Regular jurors do not decide what evidence should be heard, the standards of evidence, nor do they decide what witnesses shall be called. Not so here. think the framers of the Constitution meant us, the Senate, to be something juror, I can't take that into account.' We have to take everything into their case for bringing any witnesses, because obviously we are not jurors." justice really means that we can be expansive, that we can decide on a much broader set of findings than just the findings of fact or law." said, however, was narrower. "The Senate is not simply a jury. It is a court in this case," he ruled. The word "court," consisting of judges and jurors, is "what evidence should be heard" and "when a trial is to be ended," which are the province of judges, not jurors. But judges, like jurors, are bound by facts senators could reach beyond the facts and the law to consider "the public Republican strategy to frame the debate. (Click for more analysis of that strategy.) "I believe that the continual use of the word 'juror' by the House he said. "They were trying to put us in a box" in which "all we could do was to was equally strategic: to break out of that box, dispense with witnesses, set facts as a cowardly ruse to "hide behind the curtain" of jury scruple. consideration, the court metaphor doesn't square with it, and the Democrats A year ago she wore an orange jumpsuit and brandished a torch, now she wears a look of remorse. Who is she, and what went wrong? former head of the New York City Art Commission, "it seems as though wherever their own personal ad on a penguin at the Central Park Zoo."-- Bill ghost of Boss Tweed) is anyone jabbering into a cell phone. But why is it annoying? True loathing requires real understanding. So what underlies this the prattler isn't cutting his nails or worse. And I don't mind seeing someone Who wants to hear that inane chitchat? Nobody. But would I prefer those conversations to occur in person? This way, I only hear half. And how This heedless yammering adds to the clamor and prevents me from thinking my own thoughts? In a restaurant or on a commuter train, perhaps. But how quiet it. Unless, of course, someone can give me a reason to hate with a clear wherever there is a vacant spot, anybody can put up a telephone booth relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send your questions for length. Please indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably I genuinely like is a woman who was hired about eight months ago. We have become quite friendly, verging on affectionate. I sense a mutual attraction and find her desirable, I am considering pursuing a relationship. However, my track record isn't great: The last two lasted six and eight months, respectively (though I have remained friends with both women). If this current attraction were to blossom into a relationship, I could foresee some happy and it's worth going into an office relationship that probably won't last? We don't work closely together but, then again, I wouldn't want to hurt or alienate the only person in my office whom I really like. And how much disclosure about my wonderfully thoughtful about looking ahead, but try not to plan things that tell the young woman in question of your interest, as well as of your concerns, her response will be the guide you are seeking. As for revealing your strikeout record, that kind of information always gets out during the course of what faulty reasoning. You are pessimistically assuming that because no one has interested you on a permanent basis so far, no one will. possibilities. You can't not try to find out. And do keep us all posted. am I to be a happy idiot or a miserable one? Recently I went on a press junket fell in with another trapped journalist. In the way of such things, we now say we are in love. On the bright side, she is a beautiful, terrifyingly honest Cupid, because like the chap who wrote the previous letter, you sound as though you have serendipitously found someone terrific. Take a chance. The worst scenario is that you will be dropped on your head; in which case you will pick faced a few years ago and may face again. I was going regularly to a New York hair salon and getting my hair cut by the salon's owner. Was I supposed to tip the owner of the salon. To me he was "the master," and tips only seemed appropriate in the case of employees. I therefore refrained from handing him a potentially demeaning tip but was still left with the feeling that I should do (and no clear advice from my usually sage friends) I resolved to give him a copy of a book I had written. As a personal gift with no measurable value, it moved from New York, but if I had stayed I am not sure what I would have given York, your question is hypothetical, unless, of course, you wind up in the same colleagues and I have noticed that our new supervisor repeatedly interrupts us when we are talking on the phone with our clients. She can see the phone, she can hear us talking, yet she bursts in, unwilling to wait. This leaves us in the awkward position of wanting, but not being able, to tell her to go away (or at least to cool her jets) or being inexcusably rude to others. Granted, we all have quirks, but this is highly unnerving to many of us. Your thoughts, would suggest that you and your colleagues go to this person's superior and spell out the problem. If for some reason this is not feasible, write a memo signed "Everyone in the department" saying you don't wish to be disrespectful, but her habit is counterproductive, annoying, and unnecessary. Feel free to Loosely translated, what would that be in idiomatic A year ago she wore an orange jumpsuit and brandished a torch; now she wears a look of remorse. Who is she, and what went wrong? That's what many of you wondered when you read the question. Unless you were technically accurate that torches were not brandished, isn't there a deeper brandishing, a rich symbolic brandishing? (Not to some. Click for judge, jury, and executioner.) I suppose witnesses will have to be called to decide this. All I can do is calmly and modestly get on with News Quiz's business. Please career, announcing she would not seek a third term. A member of the Salt Lake do with the bribery scandal: "I want you to know this is a purely personal one must hate with clarity and understanding. Below, some reasons to loathe the same as seeing someone walk past you on the street busily shaving himself with a cordless electric razor, an action that implies not that this is an especially busy person but rather that this is a person who's very interested "They're status objects and umbilical cords for people so insecure that they need constant and instant connection and constant and instant interruption in their life in order to feel powerful and worthy. Getting a call in public on immodest and a sign of insecurity. People who don't have real jobs and real lives tend to pack cell phones in order to appear occupied and loved, when in fact the reverse is true. They should, like the proverbial quarter in your someone talking at a pay phone, or two people talking to each other in person or, indeed, one person talking to herself, cell phone users always seem to give the impression that they enjoy having strangers listen to their conversations. mundane performance art. They exploit themselves, by depriving themselves of that private life so essential to a modern liberal society, and at the same time they exploit the casual passerby by forcing that person to eavesdrop and act as audience. A cell phone user simultaneously withdraws from public life to discuss his taxes or what's wrong with the cat or whatever, and insists that the public intrude into his private life. It's that combination of zombielike on this explanation while reluctantly overhearing the inane chatter of a man haircut! It is that hubris, that 'this conversation is SO important it cannot wait for a less bothersome venue' characteristic of public cellular impeachment scandal, with two conclusions: "First, what has happened over the past year should never have happened at all; second, there is no guarantee that it will not happen again." The editorial attributes the president's escape to sheer more time to cleanse itself of terrorist associations, both real and symbolic. the primacy of the individual over the group ("[My work] tries to reveal the extent to which each of us is responsible for his own fate") and his intense, the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away"). A separate piece reviews a new collection of vicious civil war. Both the rebel and government armies have conscripted thousands of boys and girls, who make cheap and loyal (and especially vicious) recounts, "should be unpleasant, memorable, and inflicted at a time that is Committee for shoddy drug testing, a bigger scandal, the story says, than the tarnishes the games, kills athletes, and encourages drug use among cover profiles "the committee to save the world": Treasury entertainment, and academic trends. Time recounts the debate about who The cover story calls the nation's home renovation boom a "historic trend" arising from "ancient" and "fundamentally human" impulses. and counterfeiting both to line their pockets and possibly even to prop up the the "black elite" justifies the group's snobbery and separatism. Descended from hierarchy, the "black elite" continues to hoard access to its boarding schools, social events, and churches: "Why," asks one pedigreed lady, "would I be Polish newspaper is enjoying a second act as a communications empire in the might be a safe alternative to the more dangerous substances (nicotine, cocaine) that people previously used to increase their powers of concentration kill themselves. He never finds out, but the notes are succinct, lyrical, and scandal now, the argument goes, they certainly won't care in two years time. the girls coo over clothing at Old Navy, the boys follow sneaker fashion avidly, and everyone listens to country music. This all means that "parents have returned to adolescent upbringing in ways that have rendered their become the first man to circumnavigate the globe riding on the back of an many people have said this, giving too little thought to how their families would survive without them should fate intervene. And that's why I wanted to own personal joy. It's a word that seldom appears in public unaccompanied by Review" stories, particularly that classic slab of reheated journalistic hash, the Internet. Wait, sorry: Someone's filled with something, but it's not me and I don't) but what's excluded. Make up your own list; find your own bottle of The once powerful news organization, whose principal four videocassettes filmed on location at the actual sites of all the Old and holiday delight, you'd probably reply if online technology were not in its viewers? Did they find the experience similarly disorienting? Rooster coloring book, and learn that sometimes it's good to be a get too jaded by living in the city, I always find it refreshing to visit John submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. "It did the Vice President and me a lot of good to pick up those "This is a horrible thing that's going on," says Franklin Spinney. "All it's going to do is reward the pathological behavior that created the problem." horrible thing that's going on is going on in Congress. Of course, if we had a parliamentary system, the president would simply call for a vote of confidence could easily calculate how far we'd moved on. If we had a decent system of public education, filled with healthy children enjoying universal access to we'd all learn that metric system and reward ourselves by zipping off on our these are just some of the visionary ideas the president will be propose in tonight's State of the Union address. Along with school uniforms. increase in military spending, the biggest in two decades, is a dreadful way to has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union. A swollen military budget robs the nation of resources for education and other actual needs. It subverts reforms in the Pentagon's culture of waste and inefficiency. Spinney also argues that the increasingly complex weapons under consideration are too expensive to be purchased and maintained in adequate numbers. "Spending more money the same way isn't going to fix anything," he says, criticizing what he "We believe that killing is not an acceptable management tool for just not trying at the National Book Awards, or there's a new kind of giveaway death story attributed to someone was actually submitted by someone else. in the previous correction rendered it ineffectual. The story was actually deposition intrigued the Senate over the weekend, but it seems not to have to connect the dots of circumstantial evidence in the prosecution's case. Two had agreed to offer if asked about their relationship. So in his question about on the witness list, he also suggested that you could sign an affidavit and use separate necessarily signing affidavit and using misleading cover stories," she muddles the inference. "I believe that might have been mentioned briefly," she replies, "but not as a reason to go to New York, but as a possible outcome of explains. "It was part of the pattern of the relationship." Later, he tries to She throws other explanations at him: "First of all, I thought it was nobody's would have been against his interest in that lawsuit for you to have told the scandal's behavioral dots is bad enough for the prosecutors. What's worse is that she offers the defense an alternative explanation, by using her own understand in the context of the telephone conversation with the president that inference. "I don't know," she answers. "But from what I learned in that conversation, I thought to myself I knew I would deny the relationship." "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is"), the prosecutors "Did you appreciate the implications of filing a false affidavit with the it would have to be false." She insists that her affidavit, her cover story for the relationship, and even her statement that "there were other people present" was never alone with her") were "incomplete" and "misleading" but "literally affidavit, she objects, "I denied a sexual relationship." And when that's a fair answer," and stumbles to his next query. Revelation, the New Testament text that causes all this prophecy hubbub. Isn't of an Antichrist in Revelation, though there is mention of a Beast whose number mankind is living in a time prior to the millennium, a thousand year period of refers to two separate but intertwined beliefs that were popularized in the close to the Scripture pages and decided that history, past and future, was a series of "dispensations": divinely ordained historical epochs in which the Chosen People had been and would be tested and found wanting by God, always and spread the Word. Next up is the Millennium, followed by the Eternal State. exceedingly complex timetable that is pieced together with help from Tribulation, a seven year period when the Antichrist will bring wrack and ruin individuals by "meeting them in the air." (Rapture isn't mentioned in Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and so on. The action starts when Revelation's elders. The throned figure, God, holds a book with seven seals that are forth visions of terrors to come. When the seventh seal is broken, John learns with great multitudes who "came out of the great tribulation," will ultimately it out with the Antichrist and his gruesome legions. Above all, they must not accept the "mark of the Beast," or they'll be damned for eternity. enough. Many, many of everybody will be killed. Hey, it's the End of the World. Otherwise, who'll be duped? But throughout history, others haven't seen it that sure, but he's also a man who was produced in a lab by misguided scientists acclaimed State of the Union address, Senate Democrats press Republicans to scrap their plans for witnesses. Chance of removal from jury, no interrogation of witnesses in court, and the judge admitted there was no "direct proof." The supposed evidence was hearsay from biased witnesses. the prosecutor previously assigned to the case had tried to plant a corpse on and signing period in order to begin the season quickly. This has produced a mad scramble for players over a period of hours rather than weeks, with stars included using the federal surplus to bolster Social Security, raising the minimum wage, and suing tobacco companies. Newspapers noted congressional Republicans' tepid reactions and carried obligatory references to the "surreal" prowess. The New York Times played up remarks from televangelist Pat the Senate "might as well dismiss this impeachment hearing and get on with shot down the second, on the grounds that making the government a shareholder in companies would create dangerous conflicts of interest both ways. Other from squandering the money on tax cuts and spending, respectively. study is flawed because it assumes the participants correctly recalled their Medical Association fired the editor of its journal for publishing a study students think oral sex doesn't constitute "having sex." This coincides editor accused him of "interjecting [the journal] into a major political debate" by "publishing that article in the middle of the congressional chief counsel to the governor; she was the governor's secretary. The trial had claimed he had dumped the victim's body after his other mistress accidentally "Smelly, Lethargic, Incoherent." Ads in many papers caution that "After wrapping up his work on the Middle East's problems, to submit a caption sure to appear on the front of any paper the day after the satisfaction that his sudden switch in party affiliation resulted in a swift of the president. Although authorities have no suspects, they describe the president's injuries as 'small puncture wounds in the head and chest, roughly the carpet bombing of Capitol Hill. 'For us to initiate military action during "Following the vote to impeach, Vice President Gore jumps up and down and pumps Read the directions. The question called for a photo caption, not a headline. actions came without warning but not without repeated provocation. Indeed, as Eleventh and a half. Undoubtedly my timing will be questioned. So let me assure you that this is in no way intended to deter any proceedings under way in the House of Representatives, no matter how idiotic. May God bless the brave men The breakup of the Soviet Union has generated waves of affection for the good old days. Can you match the scary anachronism with by reintroduction of hard labor camps that contributed so much to population submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. in a small city survive without money: They skip rent payments, grow food in garden plots, and go without butter and meat. (The local shoe factory employs believes the "world will soon be engulfed in a sticky white substance." his gruffness, and his refusal to compromise his artistic principles for Time 's view of both is dim: "One man's loss of control inspired the "Woman of the Year" by the successful impeachment.) "The Better Half" says that impeachment cover chronicles the terrible week. Curious scoop: Despite claims that they were voting only on evidence in the Judiciary Committee decline, argues the magazine. Salaries are too high, attendance is annual "Perspectives" roundup recalls the year's best cartoons and quotes: "If I ever want to have an affair with a married man again, especially if he's president, first lady, support the president because they have no choice, and the States produces the best new ideas because it charges little for patents, doesn't punish business failure, and superbly transfers technology from the public sector to the private. The innovators saluted include: the creator of "talking books" for the blind, an architect who designs friendly houses, a been pushing impeachment for months, celebrates the House's "Finest Hour." The editorial declares that "History will smile on these Republicans; they may been better." Crime, accidents, fires, drinking, smoking, drugging, air pollution, water pollution, racism, and divorce are declining. We live longer, spent a long time at the group's conference, never denounced its views, and middle of the greatest political excruciation in its modern history, the United pan it: "The film is utterly devoid of narrative ingenuity and visual and violence is over the top: "Watching it is like riding a roller coaster through trouble. Critics blast the sappy romance as well as the "dismayingly formulaic second time in three months) defends the movie as fun fluff: "The movie is as critics' awards for his performance, but now that the film is in general "spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back for being aggressively unconventional." (Watch a clip from the movie here and read remarkably tame and wonder if an industry known for its cheerful sex romps has cleaning business whose lives are turned upside down after a young drag performer they meet in a club ends up moving in with them. This sounds like racy stuff, but critics say the story has the "structure and implacable more interested in dissecting the slow tragedy of the couple's disintegrating either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever," and many reviewers seem to see the hankie waving here at the boy wonder who a decade ago that adjective has to seem a disappointment." Critics say that despite a few ties them all up too neatly at the end. (Read an excerpt courtesy of the New several of the actors aren't up to portraying children but that those who succeed make the whole show worthwhile. (Find out about show times and ticket prices here; you can get Shockwave animations of various the hourly fee that he is charging the government. The column asks whether this reduction of his fee constitutes unfair competition. Of course, if he'd left his fee unchanged, that would be collusion, though in this case he'd be colluding with himself and would eventually go blind. subject. Give the man a retainer or the proper ideological cause and he readily fairness, been badly distorted. Never mind. In our conversation, he spoke very forcefully against the special prosecutor (now independent counsel) statute. "You cannot bag a case in the Justice Department," he told me. "Too many lawyers, who like to talk to too many reporters." He was absolutely right, of cast member in those situation comedies that pass as "talk shows" every night, the intellectual honesty of a hired gun. Which he has truly become. lawyer expected to actually possess the views he espouses on behalf of his and he does it in such a calculating way that I wonder whether everything he has done till now has been pure performance. As the final speaker on the final conduct from a moral point of view the fact that he either orchestrated or knowingly permitted the resources of his position and office to be used in an attempt to destroy the reputations of those who have accused him of given the power imbalances between the participants, but the story is a tawdry it, especially since the "victim" is not making any complaint. The lying can be viewed as a natural human failing, which most people, it appears, are ready to forgive. Lying under oath is a more serious matter, but it is more serious for institutional reasons rather than purely moral ones. As the head of state and a living symbol of a system, which, in the name of justice, imposes laws upon and claims the right to exercise coercive power over all important rules for the whole justice system is the penalty against perjury. It is only right that Congress should take that issue seriously. point of view, is it not utterly despicable for the president of the United States to use the power of his office to destroy the reputation of a person for the sole purpose of ensuring that person will not be believed when she tells the truth? Such conduct may not be a "high crime or misdemeanor." It may not even be illegal. But it is surely a moral abuse of the powers of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose but Your Scholarships! trees. He complains that a few powerful schools are aligning themselves to take bemoans the small colleges whose athletic programs will be destroyed by system is corrupt, making millions of dollars off student athletes who can't even accept plane fare from alumni to visit family. of college sports. Arguing which schools should keep the huge revenues (Paramount Pictures). Critics say this film is pretty fun for a formula sports flick: "brisk and wholehearted and smarter than you benefits that come with the new position (free beer, cheerleaders slathered in football and drinking"), saying it "pretends to moralize about the very great, reviews for the final novel in the trilogy that began with The Last an "intuitionist," one of a minority of inspectors who judges elevators by intuition, as opposed to the empiricists, who inspect in the traditional fashion. The twisting plot explores race relations, with elevators serving as than it excites." (Listen to the author reading a passage from the book an inevitable hit, a galvanizing eruption of energy, panache and arrogantly "Numbers that, in the context of their original shows, sparkled with wit and vitality often register as repetitive examples of virtuosic proficiency." Some Message in a Bottle will be from its opening montage. A shimmery orange sunset over water. Waves in slow motion, crashing. Rain on the ocean. Floating the holy touch: She pats the sand on the beach back down. Good sand. Blessed a prayer, except she's too busy reading the missive in the bottle, which has sums it up, "Every woman in the world wants to be loved like that." Who is this supremely sensitive and poetically pining shows up pretending that she's interested in boats. The one he's shining up now is a beauty, but it wasn't always that way. Garret: "She was neglected, doubt it." The last is said in a courtly fashion, because Garret is no lech. extraordinarily beautiful, literate, soulful, kindly, lonely people of roughly impediments enough to keep them apart for two hours or so. Issues must be left that she first came poking around his boat because she'd found his letter and already knew the depth of his heart? When he stumbles on the truth, will he feel violated? Will he storm out into a pouring rain? Will she pursue him, pleading, weeping, trying to explain that it was God who threw that bottle out Whether you attend Message in a Bottle with a hankie or a vomit bag depends, of course, on your own predilections. Mine run less toward schlock romances than schlock thrillers but, hey, I can recognize an expertly engineered, inspirational soap opera when I see one. The movie, based in us all; were it to satisfy any of them too quickly its spell would evaporate in a second. It's probably just as well for the film's commercial prospects appear to have a mind with multiple tracks. He and his great cinematographer, meant to be elemental in their attractiveness, but they also demonstrate that Harlequin romance, Payback plays like an inflated Pocket Books pulp. more or less linear fashion, it tells the story of a violent thief, Porter (Mel in his script for Conspiracy Theory (1997)--which the actor hit out of the park, striking a note of authentic paranoia that put him leagues ahead of that he has no choice but to bust someone's head, he prefaces the brutal act with a look of weariness, even sorrow, for the blood he's about to draw. debased my taste has become after decades of sitting through crap thrillers." the film in a metropolis of uncertain period (the '50s? the '60s?) and has kept Val but continues up the ladder of the Outfit as he clamors to collect his lives in pursuit of such a paltry sum. The problem with the movie is that brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, to this Dutch master, is that de Hooch is the supreme painter of Dutch domesticity. "Most of his art expresses a clear moral point of view," writes authority on de Hooch, "above all of the values of patriarchal Dutch society "flood" of domestic conduct books of the period, including some rhymed couplets man obeys the law of the land; a woman obeys the will of her man." Pictures practicing for the nurturing rituals of motherhood. The birdcage above the De Hooch's paintings can be easily divided in subject and style among his three geographical locales, as his own life ascended from lowlife scenes of soldiers and barmaids carousing in vaguely rendered brothels and dives. In Delft, his art snapped suddenly into focus, with a few figures deployed in sunlit interiors or courtyards, their architectural surroundings palette darkened; marble floors replaced earthenware tiles, satin supplanted show. It was in Delft that de Hooch mastered the expressive balance of architectural setting and human character, as in his ambitious A Family in details: the ubiquitous dogs, the bewilderingly complex perspective and, above all, the recession down a corridor, often with a door ajar in the distance. In painters still elude scholars. No document links them, but shared motifs (a values, it's hard to explain the peculiar hold that his paintings have, or Here's another way to look at de Hooch's pictures: Where from window or door evokes an otherworldly reality. De Hooch deploys several sources of light casting shadows every which way. His windows and doors relieve the claustrophobia of his interiors, but they imply no other realm. The enigmatic figure with his back turned to us that we see down so many of de Hooch's recessions may suggest an escape route, but there's no promise that unsettling frequency in de Hooch's work, we notice how many hints of confinement and escape there are in his work. All those birdcages may imply something less comforting than love's "sweet slavery." The dogs prowling family gatherings. Affectionately painted servants in de Hooch's paintings, handing a mug of beer to an elegantly clad little boy, suggest an affinity with of his sympathy for people on the margins of society. De Hooch is at his most appealing when he is poking fun at the Dutch mania for cleanliness. In the wonderful A Woman Drinking with Two pictures have entered the finely nuanced space of his Delft interiors. A a fiddle with two pipes. Another lovingly rendered serving woman stands by the mantle, above which hangs a painting of the traditional theme of the education smashed pipe and rolling paper, that immaculate expanse of floor. more luxurious interiors, probably as bait for wealthy patrons. He set several the town gates, and the Town Hall may have been the only swanky interior he had sonnets that turn out to be apt commentary on the tabloids continuing tour of the White House private quarters, the tabs have no trouble penetrating moments. The National Enquirer reports, for example, "[The president] both sobbing and screaming. It was a scene like none other in the history of "Meals with the First Lady have been silent, ominous affairs. Servants said they hardly look at each other." All this, and the pain he's inflicted on his daughter, has driven the president to a "secret collapse," the publication needs acute psychiatric help, therapy and probably antidepressant guardian angel pin but which instead looks suspiciously like a guardian eagle. told to sit quietly, close her eyes and imagine that her and Bill's positions were reversed." The Globe does not report whether this method resulted mind when he wrote of his "dark lady," he does offer some commentary on quivering in fear that a steward might bust in on one of his inappropriate the colder the president got, the more desperate she became until she finally backed down after she reduced him to tears. One can only imagine that lobotomy kit to make sure any readers who come upon this passage have a way to Enquirer alleges, to become pregnant, because with a baby "for the first time in my life I will have true, unconditional love." After all she's been through, she might want to work up to that level of love by starting with, say, a goldfish. But the Enquirer reports she's committed to her plan and is "Handsome, preferably a six footer, college educated, athletic and schooled in Charlie is as excited as I am." They needn't invest in a Diaper Genie just yet, she does all the ordering for him, and she was even recently seen feeding by being both an incorrigible flirt and an old bore. According to the needs to expand his interests to include such masculine pursuits as lying on the couch with the remote control. The Globe also ran a photo of the towers over the sheepish singer, who looks like nothing so much as a boy who trailer for quickies." Over the holidays they confronted each other with their her a crash course in architecture and collectible furniture," because Brad leather bra, erotic videos, and edible panties at a store called the Pleasure Over the past year and a half, several pieces have appeared in Slate that delve into the cultural and political dimensions of race in the United States. In honor of Black History Month, Slate is proud to present a few of these pieces, most of which have only been available to weekend, is an exercise in cheap talk. Liberal and conservative pundits disagree about affirmative action and welfare reform, but concur that a series of town meetings, an advisory panel, and an eloquent report are sorry about Social Security reform, the critics might have a point. There, endless calls for more study postpone necessary but unpopular changes in policy. But when it comes to race, the power of words should not be so lightly dismissed. sides of the divide, he will be accomplishing something of great significance. It's also all he can really hope to do right now. The public's current skepticism about activist government stymies new initiatives. Having screwed up his first term by misjudging the public demand for reform in the far less difficult area of health care, the president would be foolish to present a about race relations? A few years of peace, prosperity, and balanced a climate where such a program could succeed. When that moment arrives, exists throughout society. But the essence of the problem is the condition of are distorted into broader stereotypes about blacks as a whole, which poison their concerns about crime and gangs, declining schools, and falling home prices. In reality, schools, safety, even the property values haven't declined. But fear that these things will happen is not purely irrational. If the whites they are now largely denied: that of assimilating into the mainstream of an Perhaps the most important difference between people who live in the ghetto and those who live outside it is that most of the former aren't employed. Breaking down the underclass will require finding new ways to draw unemployed ghetto residents into the culture of work. The jury will remain year. But even with the jobs provisions included in that bill, it's evident that there still aren't sufficient jobs in the inner cities, especially when you consider the prospects of unemployed men, who aren't eligible for welfare. that there is a "spatial mismatch" between workers in the cities and jobs in strategy that shifts more decisively in the direction it has been inching under kinds of architecture, lower density, and income mixing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development should redefine its purpose: to help its tenants under its control and instead provide vouchers. But these vouchers can't be the kind conservatives prefer, which are sharply limited in value so as to Vouchers need to be worth enough to afford real avenues of escape. They should also steer beneficiaries away from other beneficiaries, to keep pockets of to do this would be to enforce strict limits on the percentage of voucher A less obvious factor fostering residential segregation is the boundary between city and suburb. When whites flee the central cities, they take with them most of the tax revenue, and leave behind a downward spiral of and the city are joined tend to be more racially integrated, and better off in but it can encourage metropolitan government via tax incentives and stands to diminish black political representation in the short run. But this is together will not cause the ghettos to disappear. Providing escape routes from the inner city may make the ghettos worse by depriving them of their most competent residents. What's needed, alongside an evacuation plan, is a realistic program to stabilize conditions for those left behind. The goal shouldn't be to make the desert bloom. It should be to create zones where people can raise children in safety even if they must travel elsewhere to work. To accomplish this, a strategy would need to focus on crime and schools. Of course, neither law enforcement nor education is principally a federal responsibility. But in both cases, the feds can help. On initiative. Cops walking the street create a sense of order and provide good role models for young boys. This program should be expanded, perhaps with incentives for police to live in the neighborhoods they patrol full time. unionized bureaucracy of the central system. The federal government should do more to spur the creation of such institutions, by providing resources, and by helping to equalize the shameful disparity in funding between rich and poor have demonstrated their success at an experimental level and are ripe for expansion. Others are just promising ideas that ought to be tried. All, unfortunately, are expensive and sure to be controversial. They can't simply be foisted on a reluctant public. To lay the groundwork for useful action on race from Slate in honor of Black History Month, check out: been in favor of affirmative action, despite his request that people being judged by the content of character rather than the color of their skin. uniformly high marks from critics. As a tragically repressed and alcoholic shaped, paced, painted, and edited production, a new, deep level of artistry" and some reviewers mark it as the work of a jealous sibling out to tarnish her Street Journal attempts to refute many of the film's claims and says it "accurate or not, it makes a great story." (Visit the (Gramercy Pictures). The "chaps and Stetsons here prove United States from the 1930s to the early '50s. Critics say reading it is "rather like looking into the new edition of a book from which half the pages others thought by many to be the victims of the Red hunts of the '40s and '50s are confirmed as spies. "The importance of this book cannot be overstated" who has been masticating the corpse of her dead, successful father for fun and profit." A few pipe up to defend her: Publishers Weekly calls it "a repetitious tale." While never resorting to praise, The New Yorker 's Rules of Attraction and describes the prose style as "mysteriously name serial killer phenomenon in a column included in his book Why Things sweethearts, and potential employers to be murderers (and to minimize possible some interesting hypotheses about the link between obesity and poverty in his than to poor people. Every time someone eats a piece of cake (or smokes a cigarette), they are implicitly trading "future life minutes" for current sensual pleasures. If we assume that almost everyone derives the same amount of pleasure from a given piece of cake, then the amount of cake you will eat depends upon how much "utility" you assign to your life in the future. Rich people may be happier overall and may therefore attribute more value to the "future life minutes" that they would be giving up by eating that cake. This would cause millionaires to eat less cake (and to quit smoking and to exercise Fifteen minutes in a grocery store tells the tale. Healthy eating is political glossary that might be helpful in interpreting future lies. article "Lies, Damned Lies, and Impeachment": If you want a starker example of House believes that felony perjury is impeachable, aren't they obliged to Impeachment" seems to argue that if one criminal "gets away with it," then all criminals should be able to do likewise. That hardly seems defensible. he broke the law, then he must be held accountable. Whether that's now or after his term is over I suppose could be up for discussion, although it's hard for me to believe that any rational person could believe that in the current compare him to people who might be worse. This usually means members of the opposing party. Isn't there any argument to be made that originates in some laughing [the] audience intended to say 'we don't believe you,' it is hearsay and therefore inadmissible." This is wrong both as a statement of the hearsay rule and as a prediction of the likely outcome in this case. hearsay is admissible. That's because the Federal Rules of Evidence (which permits hearsay to be admitted if it is the best available evidence of a material fact and "the interests of justice will best be served by [its] to facts: If the question posed ever came up, I am sure the evidence would be statement is a lie (the primary danger against which the hearsay rule protects) is negligible when it is the simultaneous statement of hundreds of people. This after Brazil devalued its currency and investors pulled out of the country. package to Brazil two months ago saved its economy and stopped the global workers. This comes after the tobacco industry killed last year's legislation, billions of dollars. Now that the states have struck their own settlement deal underestimated the tobacco industry's savvy, resolve, and ruthlessness. New presidential race was shuffled again. On the Republican side, House Budget have bowed out. The big Democratic story is that House Minority Leader Dick retired. He said he was physically fit but mentally "exhausted." The media responded with worshipful saturation coverage, reciting his records (six final shot, which won last year's championship. The spins, in order of Without him, we're left with players who kick photographers and choke coaches. also says he knew of her plans to have an abortion and didn't try to dissuade replaced her with somebody he trusted it would look like an attempt to shield for points scored in a regular season, but the Broncos are the defending champs (sentimental) tournament, the Falcons and Jets have more appealing story lines. their coaches have been to the Super Bowl with other teams. the federal budget surplus to finance a tax cut. They argue that the tax burden other reasons, but the notion of a growing tax burden rests on two highly The number derives from a study conducted by the Tax Foundation, a conservative research group. The study found that "typical" brought to light by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a moderately Foundation assumes that the average taxpayer pays an average share of estate and capital gains taxes, which is absurd. Most people do not have any capital (and actually a lot more than that unless you're exceptionally stupid about estate planning). The "typical" taxpayer paid estate taxes last year in the same sense that the "typical" golfer scored some fraction of a hole in one. Even more bizarrely, the Tax Foundation study counts as part of the tax burden things that aren't taxes, such as private pension contributions by government workers or rental fees on property owned by the interpretation do exist. But the Tax Foundation's calculation of the federal tax burden, which is nearly a quarter larger than the Congressional Budget Office's, and half again larger than the Joint Tax Committee's, is beyond the A more sophisticated statistical salvo, which conservative pundits have shot off recently, is that federal tax revenues now consume the highest percentage of the gross domestic product since World War II. This profits from stocks. This means that during a strong stock market, the conservatives maintained, quite logically, that the important statistic was not how much the government took in but how much it spent: Big government financed through borrowing was no better than big government financed through taxing. the "free lunch" logic in reverse: If a tax cut will increase revenues, a tax increase will reduce them.) That prediction failed spectacularly: Tax revenues have boomed with the economy. Now the boom they denied could even happen has on Wheels now delivering not just to the elderly and infirm but also to the synonymous with portly. It can also mean frail, although it is tougher to mock across barriers of age, class, and hairstyle. This is not merely the triumph of individual over team sports. Figure skating and gymnastics remain square; just It's easy to overstate the new athletics as a force for social change, but don't count on surfers opposing the president's into progressive politics, at least it has been demilitarized, rejecting the boot camp model of recreation, and that means more fun for more people. Not so studies (noncontroversial, nonpolitical, and in no way intended to affect the impeachment process) found that while moderate exercise does not burn many children or other New Yorkers from being maimed, disfigured, or killed, it will parrot, the only animal ever stolen (and just recovered) from the Central Park value," the cover article advises companies how to make successful marriages. Suggestions: Don't merge because you're bored with your own company, don't merge because you're scared, watch out for antitrust law, and make sure your implosion of Sierra Leone, where an "incoherent," horrible guerrilla movement is sweeping through the countryside, destroying what little remains of civil society. Many of the soldiers are kidnapped children; some practice tiny cameras, they will spy on enemy positions. The prototypes fly like insects have already been released and the three that precede them. He has no plans for straying and blames enemies when he wanders. She doesn't talk about intimate personal matters with anyone, even her mom. She has always been his goad and be withdrawing from him, an abandonment that is leaving him passive and "just don't get it," where "it" refers to the correct definitions of virtue and dictator will either sabotage the plan or turn it to his own uses. playing field in college admissions. The SAT has little predictive value for undergraduate performance, and colleges claim they are decreasing the importance of the test in admissions, but it is still a critical factor in who lasting Middle East solution. Such a state, with a constitution and identical China could practice financial terrorism by selling Treasury bills and buying genes to prolong the lives of healthy humans rather than just treat sick Genome Project, new gene therapies, and designer pharmaceuticals and raises the expected ethical concerns about manipulating embryonic genes and genetically headaches. They are caused by extremely sensitive nerves, not by misbehaving blood vessels, as had been believed. New drugs are effective. plumbing, the printing press, numbers, erasers, and clocks, but not story describes the difficult path to Catholic sainthood, "the world's most complex legal process." Consideration can't start till five years after death, the candidate's life is exhaustively scrutinized, and two miracles must be proved. The miracles must pass a five doctor panel, who seek any possible gave her vast fortune to charity while ministering to poor blacks and Native long story argues that the Food and Drug Administration describes the societal importance of people who bring other people together. By connecting people to jobs, to friends, and to activities such people build defense to introduce a remarkably large amount of evidence. through "a time of trouble" and that disagreements between the two countries had been "snowballing." He said that their opinions differed on practically initiative, that it is vital that the two countries "spring no more surprises professional," "biased," and "provocative," the paper said. Butler had continue to insist on Butler's resignation because he didn't have the "shocking that not even a whimper has been heard in protest against these Should the US be allowed to get away with this sort of bullying and and, by failing to condemn Operation Desert Fox, had made it possible for the meeting of foreign ministers held, followed by a summit, in order to get the embargo against it lifted, the paper said. "That being the case, one would have St. Louis there is a widening gulf between a pope who represents the voice of mankind's conscience and a leader who hasn't failed to deliver on his material promises, but who has violated his spiritual ones." It added that the pope must a potential partner in the reconstruction of a just and peaceful world after a earthquake disaster. "Just when you think things couldn't be worse, it turns National Seismological Network, having no money to maintain its equipment. All opinion, particularly among Holocaust survivors. The responses ran the shall not be put to death for children, neither shall children be put to death for fathers." "Going by that verse of the Torah," said the rabbi, "I cannot is inaccurate: Under the law, a corporation lives forever. The entity that But it would be wrong to view an essentially moral question from a strictly legal perspective. A corporation is not a moral entity; it's the corporation's flesh and blood owners who are moral entities. From that perspective, the rabbi's analogy fails in a different way: The current owners of their fathers, then surely we should not punish children for the sins of their fathers' countrymen. But that analysis can be definitive only to those When is it permissible to punish one person for the wrongs of another? The question is a tangle of moral and economic issues. Morally, we're concerned with things such as justice, fairness, and individual rights. Economically, we're concerned with creating good incentives. it can be when economic and moral issues brush up against each other, consider the revision of accident law that's been proposed by the That way, anyone who sees an accident about to happen will take all as fair, but at least it gets the incentives right. even by its own strictly economic criteria, because it creates an incentive for the roads. Enforcement, of course, would be a nightmare. Corporations can be punished for misdeeds in at least two ways. One is a consumer boycott and another is a (voluntary or involuntary) arguably at levels that are small compared with the underlying offenses). In that expectation. Without the discount, nobody would buy the stock. So given punished at all, because the discount compensates them for the fine. Therefore, if all companies are permanently on notice that bad behavior will eventually be punished, they have an incentive to behave well at all times. That's an outcome that seems both fair and economically efficient: The punishment falls on the sinners and thereby deters the sin. But not on the owners at the time when the sin is committed, but on the owners at the time when the sin is discovered. After all, it's not till the discovery that the stock price falls. So punishing past corporate sins is not like fining everyone who was present when an accident occurred, but when it was reported, prospect of future punishments gives you an incentive to investigate the corporation's history before you buy, which improves the chance that bad behavior can be uncovered while the actual perpetrators can still be maintain a consumer boycott, especially when the goal is to punish the past rather than to influence the future. Consumers can quite reasonably argue that history can't be changed and so is best forgotten. As a result, corporations have little to fear from boycotts unless consumers commit themselves to maintaining the boycotts even when they serve no purpose. It's hard to imagine how such commitments might be maintained, which suggests that fines are more effective than boycotts, especially if they are written into law rather than If you're looking for a firm conclusion to all this, you'll situations that are superficially similar. (Click for an example.) from punishing evil governments. In the first case, we punish stockholders who invested voluntarily, while in the second we punish taxpayers who might have bitterly opposed their government's policies. But that is a topic for another preceding a lady into a public place. When exiting a building it is very easy for a gent to both precede the lady and hold the door for her because outside doors swing out. However, when entering a building, the outward swinging door experience. Is there a technique to gracefully precede a lady and hold the door not really care, finding this bit of politesse rather inconsequential. Just do her situation way off base. While shifting to a position of no sex may well be continues to think that the problem is with the men she is attracted to then going to have to investigate the "whys" within herself for her attraction to them. What will eventually arise is a confrontation of her own availability for intimacy, which she never has to examine as long as these men are "unavailable." They are not the problem, just symptoms. expanding on her answer, as she is always deferential to physicians. weeks ago, we were informed that they were going to eat dinner at a restaurant ACROSS THE STREET from our apartment. When we invited them to come over for a light of their unwillingness to extend themselves, is it appropriate to just relationship is apparently good enough for the beloved's parents to invite you forehead wondering what's the deal. You (or your spouse, their offspring) might flat out ask what is their aversion to being visitors. You might even add that you are developing hurt feelings about this. If the answer is evasive, or a going to alternate visits. Seems like it's your turn to pay us a call." If they still won't cross your threshold, you have a problem that likely will be of throwing good after bad?). But the one antidote I will swear by is club my light tan carpet, and both times I accessed an unopened bottle of club soda millionaire, but since it's already on the market, the advice is free. perhaps most effectively at the time of the calamity. Our last friend, with the the journalistic farrago of year end summaries and photo spreads, with world updated "Vintage Chart," the key to ordering well at a restaurant. business card, the Wine Spectator vintage chart unfolds like an note to "drink or hold" (in other words, enjoy it now or bank it and let it mainly because it is the most comprehensive. Even a wine expert who tracks these things might not remember, as he scans a wine list, what conditions were in its very best year of the decade. (Actually, be careful because some great idea because they isolate the most important variable in the making of excellent year (click here for an annotated list of grapes and varieties). Even if you have never heard of the producer, the chances are it's pretty good. In general, prices follow name brands not years, so you will find bargains as well. And if the winemaker is half decent, in a great year he will have done in a shop that stocks selectively. (Note re buying wine in restaurants: You're also relying on the restaurant's screening system. There are truly awful winemakers who could make plonk even in the best year. But few restaurants Obviously, year isn't the only determinant. The region, the grape variety, and the winemaker's skill have an enormous effect on wine winemakers instead, turning them into celebrities. But by concentrating on nature rather than nurture, the French are probably closer to the truth than as the year to year quality of oranges, potatoes, and tomatoes is determined perfect because wine is not simply an agricultural product. Grapes must be pressed, fermented, blended, and aged to make wine, so it's better described as winemaker cannot interfere as much with the process. Consequently, a bad year, Chardonnay is a hardy grape, which is why it is so widely produced all over the world. You're unlikely to get something really "off" when you order a glass of Chardonnay, which explains its ubiquity on wine lists. Just as in a good year you can do well easily, in a bad year almost nothing can What makes a good year is a very complicated matter, since different grapes and regions are best served by different weather ripen at a reasonable pace, and be plucked when fully ripe. The great enemies just written are actually the subject of intense controversy.) It's a complex grid, too complicated for the average imbiber to chart for himself, which is why you should celebrate every new year with a nice bottle and the Wine "Bombing the crap out of Third World countries and aspirin factories when you random public gunplay or regular bathing. It depends on the civilization you'd the French. Giving this disdain a richer historical context so appropriate for popular engravings, the French were portrayed as mangy, corrupt, effeminate, ignorant, indolent, immoral and lecherous, as well as vain and wrote: 'National hatred must sound forth. Young republicans should suck a will dilute that continent's rich heritage of multinational scorn. You can say shots at New Jersey from right across the river, on the dubious moral high course, for the truly nostalgic nationalist, there's always the former Taxi and Who's the Boss? has been offered the role of Rocky the submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. written over a period of only eight years, Miller is frequently referred to as prolifically, in fact, than he did back then. Yet despite the immense national and international interest in his four famous postwar plays, the dozen or so he that this neglect is warranted. These works are labored, didactic, and humorless, with weak characters and weaker ideas. Even if you think, as I do, that Miller's "classic" plays are somewhat overrated, the gap between his early work and everything since is mysteriously wide. What happened to this man? dramatic asset. Just carrying his own weight seems a terrific burden for his production is equally strong. The design and staging are clever but not too arty. Sliding screens and rotating platforms convey effectively the chaos of vigor and intensity of the text, without adding any heavy interpretive overlay provides a window into the merits and flaws of the play itself. The chief strength of Death of a Salesman is its psychological acuity and its his sons to succeed and his unwillingness to accept their failures develop into delusion and insanity. In catching this phenomenon, Miller created a great role But Miller's weaknesses as a dramatist are also latent in this play. I hope I never have to sit through Death of a Salesman again, not because it's depressing and bleak but because it's unrelieved and fails to grasp how changes in tone and texture can be used to make tragedy tolerable. Here, as in his other plays, he seems terrified that someone might accuse him of entertainment. Nor is there much loveliness to his language. the peel away." But more often, when he reaches for poetry, he achieves only stilted quality of Miller's writing makes Salesman feel like a dental that while Miller at his best is fierce and brutal, he is seldom intricate or subtle. Death of a Salesman is of a piece with powerful but uncomplicated works of literature from the same era such as The Grapes of of this point by hearing it made again and again. Miller is a preachy playwright who lets you know what you're supposed to think about everything that happens in his moral universe. In his didacticism he denies his characters energy and the fact that Miller's arguments were fresh when he wrote it. But in remains fixed to the same set of concerns: corruption and the worship of material success; loyalty and betrayal; fathers and sons; public responsibility and personal conscience. That list is surely rich enough to support a lifetime of playwriting, but Miller handles these themes in the same way again and again. That way identifies him as a playwright of the immediate postwar era, a period characterized by the anxiety of affluence, the worry that rising material status was being purchased at the expense of decency and mutual responsibility. His plays have a message, and it's always similar, if not the It isn't just themes and arguments that recur in Miller's work. Plots and characters do too. His plays most often involve the devastating consciences, but his women never do. They're either saintly, maternal figures another thing that dates Miller and makes even his more recent plays seem like serious social drama has shriveled. The theater has ceased to be the place familiar and then stale, he found no way to complicate them, develop them, or about the devastating effects of professional failure. But Miller's career is a testament to the opposite problem: creative paralysis brought on by early story is enlivened by some witty writing: "not a great movie, but it has its earnest, morose art nerd, into prom queen material. Critics take note of both it "puts a priority on intelligence" and is a "special delight for anyone for whom high school was something less than nirvana." (Visit the official site.) through this drama of a woman torn between her career and new baby. Most critics call it flat: "a homey compendium of feminist talking points laced with who says it's "a tour de force of barely controlled hysteria that's as funny as comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap are inevitable, critics say this is making fun of aging rockers as much as it is about rekindling old friendships: Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman commentator offers a solution to the modern woman's problems: Marry young, put career after kids, get comfortable with the idea of being supported by hubby. The critics don't buy all of it. The Weekly Standard predictably doles out praise: "This wonderful, breezy book reads as easily as all the women's magazines the author uses for her evidence. But it bravely faces what those women," it "does not seem to have failed the author, a married mother of two women's choices. (Read the first chapter here, courtesy of the New York Times [free registration sexuality and questionable relationship with a teacher upset the careful rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place." (Read an excerpt from the book.) of the most talented writers of his generation; they disagree as to whether write stories that "seem to have been written on a dare, or as entries in a contest to see who could get the best results from the worst ideas" (the New case of a skilled writer lazily using his sleight of hand to toss off what (with two or three exceptions) are pure exercises in craft" (the New York of them are not going to work, and they will cause significant problems." everyone listens because we have money riding on his remarks. Whether through a mutual fund, mortgage, or credit card, we've each placed a bet on the economy, and it's a lot more exciting to watch the game when you have a little something at any dramatic production. And that's the basis of my election reform plan. would work. When you vote, you get a ticket that allows you to legally bet on While some will undoubtedly fail, he said, there will be no bailouts using public money. Asked if he was concerned about the increased concentration of but if you still need handcuffs, evidence kits, radar guns, battering rams, and largest supplier to public safety professionals." I use the print version, but college and prison catering) are online. A few highlights: a dangerous business. That's why Gall's is proud to introduce the ultimate armor for your hands. $36.99."--Every day is Valentine's Day when you slip on inside the front of your trousers. $42.99."--No fancy symbolism, no easy irony, friend, that is a pistol in my pants and I am glad to see in the yard, in cell extraction or transporting prisoners. Suddenly, they swing chair legs, pipes and mop handles. And when nothing's left, they use their fists and their feet. Because what are you going to do? Toss them in vehicle interior. Blood stains on the carpet and seats, torn headliners, marred door panels, not to mention broken windows all add to your frustration. $699.99."--Hey, you kids! Don't make me stop this car and come back there! "Polycarbonate Riot Batons. This virtually indestructible baton is great warranty. Impact strength is greater than wood or aluminum batons. Will not with "In the Line of Duty: true life experiences from our customers." The Democratic plan for the rest of the trial (skip the witnesses and forbid videotaping of their testimony) and passes a Republican plan (witnesses, The conventional media spin: It's a partisan meltdown. The conspiratorial spin: Both sides are faking a partisan meltdown so they can each look good to their respective constituencies.. Chance of removal from office: suffered a relapse of lymphatic cancer. Everyone expects him to die soon. A few shouldn't have to censor their own speech to accommodate their listeners' sentence to life in prison but said he still supports the death penalty and there" and "making a personal request that I chose to respond to." Analysts pondered why the pope's request worked this time, whereas similar pontifical includes abortion, assisted suicide, and capital punishment. The latter issue before the pope arrived in St. Louis. Oddest moment: The pope's comparison of the United States would pursue "justice," virtues," and "goodness." The pope ability to change the subject, milk world icons for their moral stature, and Court ruled that the Census Bureau could not use statistical sampling to adjust the population count for congressional reapportionment. Critics of the traditional method (counting each household) theorize as to how many people the head count missed in various locations. Republicans vehemently oppose this idea. The superficial analysis is that the court struck down sampling and hurt the Democrats. The sophisticated analysis is that the court nixed sampling only for the apportionment of congressional votes among states, not for drawing district lines. Therefore, within states, representation at Republican expense. The Democratic spin is that "every rapidly descended from humanitarian anguish to material cynicism to petty afternoon's headline: "Quake Won't Hurt Coffee Production." The afternoon story accepting cash and other gifts as part of Salt Lake City's successful lobbying documents, predict the expanding investigation will show that corruption has corruption by taking away delegates' voting rights and halting their visits to hand transplant in the United States was performed. This follows a hand 1960s had failed because the patient's body rejected the new hand as foreign drugs can cause infection and cancer, and since a hand isn't an essential in your head to register with maximum sensitivity any new encounter with a particular word or phrase? I put the dials on high alert a few weeks ago for of Web sites for kids that it had found to be "full of groovy games." A Conservative Party and its forlorn attempts at image enhancement observed, just told me it was "groovy" that I would call him back later about something. Well, close. Briefly, the word dates back to jazz circles in the 1930s and ultimately derives from the phrase "in the groove," meaning "performing or doing exceptionally well." What the "groove" in that phrase originally referred to is hard to establish definitively, because several meanings current in the 1930s all permit plausible theories. Many dictionaries do link the groove of in the groove to the groove of a record. But groove could also refer to the path between a pitcher and the strike zone (and had done so since the turn of the century); a pitcher who was throwing "in the groove" was throwing very well. Groove also had a vulgar sexual connotation, which could likewise give in the groove the connotation of high performance and pleasure. And groove could simply mean a "style," a sense associated with the parallel between being in a groovy actually meant "to be in a rut" or to be "of settled habits" or "conventional"; the first Oxford English Dictionary citation for this groovy went dormant for a time; reference books begin to refer to it as future generations would associate with the youth culture of the 1960s. (During that the future may not always appreciate, though, is how ironic or playfully ingenuous minority used it innocently in its hippie heyday; but most often one heard it uttered with a bit of wonderment, as if the speaker couldn't believe ambivalence attached to it. The experts disagree only about the full extent of these days mostly in speech, "especially in sardonic and sarcastic replies to as an interjectional reply parallels similar use of standard terms like in reference to something from, or reminiscent of, the 1960s (clothing, spiritualism, things that glow in black light), but just as often (actually, more often) the word appears to be used in reference to the contemporary scene. being described as groovy and all without hint of irony." The examples come It lives on, but its evolution seems to be taking different forms in captivity and in the wild. Such, at any rate, is slang specialist of spoken language-- groovy thrives in a largely ironic state; the use of the word requires a context of wavelength synchrony between speaker and robustness, and even the relative antiquity, of much of what seems like "extraordinary," is as current as ever; it goes back not to the '60s but to the stupidity or obviousness, emerged from 1940s animated cartoons, but its period of greatest efflorescence is probably occurring right now. It enjoys life not only as an interjection but also as a noun ("The movie's real duh of a 1960s word that really did get its start in the '60s drug culture, is also proving its hardiness, a testament both to the term's euphony and to the generation insists on having its own new words for the most aggressively that the archives of sound and image constitute a continuous retro loop that retro in a rut restores grooviness to its original meaning. a densely populated island nation, which, despite its lack of natural resources, had managed through hard work and ingenuity to build itself into one of the world's major industrial powers. But there came a time when the magic stopped working. A brief, overheated boom was followed by a slump that lingered for most of a decade. A country whose name had once been a byword for economic raged over the causes of and cures for the nation's malaise. Many observers failed to adapt to a changing world, missed opportunities to capitalize on new technologies, and general rigidity and lack of flexibility. But a few dissented. While conceding these factors were at work, they insisted that much an excessively conservative monetary policy, one preoccupied with conventional standards of soundness when what the economy really needed was to roll the mainstream opinion. Adopting their proposals, argued central bankers and finance ministry officials, would undermine confidence and hence worsen the slump. And even if inflationary policies were to give the economy a false flush of artificial health, they would be counterproductive in the long run because they would relax the pressure for fundamental reform. Better to take the bitter writing trick before. The previous paragraphs could describe the current debate about Japan. (I myself am, of course, the most notorious advocate of inflation way he managed to change the world without having to visit quite so much of it. (Imagine being a prominent economist without once experiencing jet lag, or never taking a business trip where you spent more time getting to and from your destination than you spent at it.) And anyone with an interest in the history particular, immediately following World War I. In both countries this boom was followed by a nasty recession. But whereas the United States soon recovered and experienced a decade of roaring prosperity before the coming of the Great percent. There is an obvious parallel with modern Japan, whose "bubble economy" of the late 1980s burst eight years ago and has never bounced back. than engineers and managers, a business culture that had failed to make the wealth and the control of business is the reason why the leadership of the Capitalist cause is weak and stupid. It is too much dominated by modern Japan has deep structural problems: a failure to move out of traditional heavy industry, an educational system that stresses obedience rather than initiative, a business system that insulates big company managers from market problems of this kind lead to high unemployment, as opposed to slow growth? Is us who think along related lines don't think so now. Recessions, we claim, can our structural problems, but meanwhile let us also keep the work force employed by printing enough money to keep consumers and investors spending. One objection to that proposal is that it will directly do more harm than good. In the 1920s the great and the good believed that an believed that this goal was worth achieving even if it required a substantial course, it would, on the contrary, seem irresponsible to advocate deflation in prevail against the logic of economic analysis. In the case of Japan, there is a compelling intellectual case for a recovery strategy based on the deliberate creation of "managed inflation." But the great and the good know that price stability is essential and that inflation is always a bad thing. the extent to which conventional opinion in the 1920s viewed high unemployment as a good thing, a sign that excesses were being corrected and would be a mistake. And one hears exactly the same argument now. As one allow those guys to keep on doing the same old things, just when the recession way out of a recession lies the belief that pain is good, that it builds a of our way of managing our economic affairs, that this should seem to anyone senators applauded as the president touted his record on family values. How did merely "an effort to preserve the dignity of the office" in the wake of the stipulated that senators were free "to find his personal conduct shame when he entered the House chamber later that evening. Nor did the Democratic lawmakers who cheered and embraced him. The president sprinkled the marriage, illegitimacy, or any of the other conventional moral topics that however, uses the word "family" to describe issues in which the goal is uncontroversial and the only challenge is to provide the means. In the "family" portion of his speech, he bragged about the "Family Medical Leave Act" and urged lawmakers to provide subsidies and tax credits for "quality child care" individuals. Republican family issues are about relations among family them as members of families. In his "family" discussion, he challenged Congress and help public hospitals treat "working families who don't have any insurance." Democrats used to embrace "working people" while Republicans discriminate between family configurations (straight vs. gay, married vs. discriminate by other demographic criteria that are equally politically useful. keep health insurance when they go to work" and to "give people between the speaking to you as a special interest. He's speaking to you as a family. liberalism. Republicans use the F word to affirm conservative renovate or even reverse those principles. "Let's make sure that women and men get equal pay for equal work by strengthening enforcement of equal pay laws," he proposed at the outset of his discussion of "family." Equal pay began as a who work outside the home. Likewise, in his speech, he avoided the phrase "birth control," which connotes hostility to kids and families. Instead, he spoke up for "family planning," which connotes the opposite. family matters while defending freedom of choice in economic matters. Liberal hybrid issue is tobacco legislation. This began as a public health crusade, but from tobacco pushers. "Our children are targets of a massive media campaign to hook them on cigarettes," he charged in his remarks on the family. "I ask this responsibility to strengthen our families." Of course, honoring your marriage damper on the general festivities: He says the film starts out muddled, though (Paramount Pictures). Critics say the ninth installment in takes place on a planet whose fountain of youth properties make it the envy of malicious neighbors. Critics say insiders will laugh at the inside jokes and lags, and New York 's Peter Rainier criticizes it for "callowness." deterioration of the characters is hard to watch, and the inevitability of the plot's outcome can be stifling. But the overall verdict is that the director calls some of the plot devices "a bit cheap." Read the rest of his review voice) looks like a "large, wisecracking marshmallow man" (the New York the history of special effects." ("Never have I disliked a movie character the film's only fan, praises its "sweet spirit and astute humor." (Visit the official site.) La Ronde was banned at the turn of the century, nowadays its account of anticlimax of proportions inevitably commensurate with its avalanche of advance poll numbers are high and Republicans have botched impeachment. The delusion: partisanship over any meaningful ideological principle. Another proposes that impeachment trial continues (he can come back after he wins in the Senate). Capital. Lewis, a Wall Street convert himself, interviews media hermit and Lewis explains, "things people did with money when they were frightened was an opportunity for more reasonable people to exploit"). What sequence of events of media and finance market rumors, plus Wall Street sharks out to plunder virtually dropped out of sight after hobnobbing with the literati elite during out with a group of older, Southern black men, who call him "Jumper" and "Black Cat." They reveal that he swears a lot, drives like a terror, quizzes his friends on state capitals (he was a geography major), and viciously holds a Time 's cover warns that kids have "Too Much Homework." The article stop the flow of arms to criminals. The company could have monitored story on the Internet stock bubble states the obvious warnings: Internet stocks are wildly overvalued, and the traditional rules of investing haven't changed. But it can't quite bring itself to tell investors to sell: After all, day traders and amateur stock pickers are making a fortune on the stocks. The only Internet stock that may not be overvalued, according to piece warns people receiving monthly disability payments not to sell them. Some companies pay lump sums of cash to accident victims (and others receiving annuities) in exchange for their regular payments. This may seem attractive, but it's almost always a bad deal. more have been displaced, and thousands have been enslaved, without any end in campaign against Christian and animist rebels in the south. The government forces kill prisoners, bomb hospitals and churches, and enslave women. The The store promotes the notion that its yuppie customers are making the world powers of a normal parliament, while the commission, which it was planning to censure for fraud and other irregularities, isn't a real government but rather education, who is alleged, among other things, to have appointed her dentist to exactly the opposite a few days later." She went on, "Perhaps we are more We are different, and the world needs that for its balance." In a separate the international organization take a firm stance by which to prevent any of its organizations being used for purposes other than those mandated." The paper cannot endorse interference in other countries' internal affairs," it year in certain sectors, such as steel, but that the good performance of the underground nuclear development programs, the ambassador said that "the US government apparently understands the serious consequences of military strikes overvalued and unlikely to meet profit projections. He was also quoted as saying that his company, News Corp, would "certainly not be making takeovers of more businesses than it created by "wiping out the middlemen," he said. have still not decided whether to implement a plan to stop smiling at flight attendants to "have second thoughts." The paper declared, "A smile costs nothing, but it brightens up the moment for the one who flashes it, and the one impeachment trial. When asked about polls showing dissatisfaction with the chimed in. "You can find almost anything you want in polls. Look, we wouldn't tune. In recent days they've proposed a "findings of fact" resolution under testimony" and schemed "to alter, delay, impede, cover up and conceal the findings of fact would certify that despite the Senate's failure to remove him, the House prosecutors had proved his guilt. But in practice, the findings proposal isn't about facts. It's about spin and public opinion. The obvious rationale for the findings resolution is what lying and covering up aren't willing to declare him guilty of "high crimes" and remove him from office, the resolution is designed to let them affirm the "Were the Senate to adjourn and make these findings [affirming the House's for his own historic legitimacy. The Senate would also make clear that the all, Hatch stressed the importance of "avoiding a historic vote on the merits, echoed Hatch's remarks: "The significance of finding of facts is it would be are not about facts. They are about what really galls and worries Republicans as they approach the trial's certain demise: They have lost the struggle to give the facts meaning and authority, which are ultimately decided by public opinion. Their arguments in the trial's final days are replete with desperate, says the Senate must call witnesses "if they're going to have a verdict that White House will stage another "pep rally" and will spin the vote not just as an "acquittal" but as an "exoneration." This fear is well justified, but its naked expression betrays the Republicans' tragic knowledge that they have failed to engender enough public faith in the impeachment process to withstand dismissive words from the president they have supposedly disgraced. On spin the vote against removal as a repudiation of Republican partisanship and spokesman for an impeached president offering terms under which the president's judges could surrender with honor, having lost in the nation's ultimate votes. But to achieve the credibility these findings are supposed to bestow on five Democrats. Thanks to the inquiry's partisan meltdown, that seems unlikely. Fearful that Republicans will unilaterally dictate the resolution's language, Democrats refuse to consider it, preferring to end the trial and then debate a censure resolution under normal Senate rules, which would give Democrats the protective power of the filibuster. And fearful that Independent Counsel Democratic senators called it an unconstitutional Republican scheme to "save face," "embarrass the president," and appease "an element of their constituency that wants conviction." The more "Republicans persist in demanding live witnesses and demanding more depositions and demanding extralegal devices, like removal, end the trial, and censure him. This would achieve most of the objectives of the findings of fact resolution. Instead, Senate Republicans repeated White House statements that he would not do so. They told the press that censure wasn't "strong" enough and that Democrats were trying to turn the findings proposal into "a partisan issue" because "they're scared to death of it." But when you're the majority party and your task is to convince the public that a president of the opposing party has been legitimately impeached, "partisanship" should be the last word out of your mouth. That's worse than argued that he had committed high crimes worthy of removal from office. Last argue that the Senate should call witnesses and complete the trial not the House a full hearing. This marks a new phase in the trial's disintegration. The prosecutors' case is no longer about us. It's about them. trial." Several Republican senators agreed that "fairness" required the Senate to let the House managers "make their case" by calling witnesses. On This trial should be dismissed or saying that the House managers don't get a chance to present their case" through witnesses, Senate Republicans would "discredit" the House's impeachment vote and make it appear "illegitimate." to dismiss the case: "I looked at this motion to dismiss, and I was astounded, really. If the Senate had sent something similar to the House, it would the thesaurus about 'dismiss' and I came up with 'disregard,' 'ignore,' 'brush House managers' plea for respect has rallied Senate Republicans to their side. For public consumption, the senators have dressed up the respect argument in two guises. One is precedent: "Never in the history of impeachment in the United States Senate has a trial been dismissed." The other is equality: "If the president's lawyers needed witnesses, we would surely oblige them. We than equally thorough. They're not interested in what the House is "owed." They don't care whether House Republicans feel "ignored," "brushed off," or "discredited." In most households, the suggestion that members of Congress are likely to elicit contempt and derision than sympathy. Sensing their isolation, the House prosecutors have turned inward. They have narrowed their appeals first to the Senate, and then, fully tried for the sake of the nation, the House managers are framing the case We've risked our careers to prosecute a popular president. Don't abandon us. Don't humiliate us. Don't repudiate everything we've stood for. dissertation topic for students of abnormal psychology to ponder. has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, responses, which run from awe to mockery and back. Like Saving Private sundry characters philosophize about their experiences in drowsy, runic "This great evil: Where's it come from? What seed, what root did it grow from? get walloped with viscera, then you get beaned by blather. speculations don't derive from the screenplay's source, an archetypal but specious. In the combat genre, the phrase "war is hell" usually means nothing more than that it's a bummer to lose a limb or two, or to see your buddy get his head blown off. A true work of art owes us more than literal horrors, and He tells the story solemnly, in three parts, with a on the island, introduces the principal characters (none of whom amounts to a genuine protagonist), and lays out the movie's geographical and philosophical the most frantic and harrowing sequences, chiefly the company's initially soldiers pack their gear and motor off to another South Pacific battle. In the final shot, a twisted tree grows on the waterline of the beach, the cycle of viewed in deliriously sensual flashbacks. ("Love: Where does it come from? Who one too many times for promotion and itching to win a battle no matter what the poses folksy questions about whether we're all a part of one big soul. If the absent God. He speaks the movie's epitaph, "Darkness and light, strife and love: Are they the workings of one mind, the feature of the same face? O my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things of consciousness distributes it among the animate and inanimate alike; almost every object is held up for rapturous contemplation. I could cite hundreds of images: A soldier in a rocking boat hovers over a letter he's writing, which is crammed from top to bottom and side to side with script. (You don't know the man, but you can feel in an instant his need to cram everything in.) A small, trudging grunts who can't believe they're encountering this instead of a advance on the hill; a second later, the sun plays mystically over the tall, yellow grass that has swallowed their bodies. John Toll's camera rushes in on a soldier encased in earth speaks from the dead, "Are you righteous? Know that I his startling juxtapositions, he never dramatizes it with anything approaching Individual acts of conscience can and do save lives, and heroism can win a war In fact, the entire battle seems to take place in a crazed void. Tall quotes themselves in half with their own mishandled grenades, stab themselves frantically with morphine needles, shove cigarettes up their noses to keep the stench of the dying and the dead at bay. A tiny bird, mortally wounded, order that he gets gummed up, retreating to one of his gaseous multiple mouthpieces: "Where is it that we were together? Who is it that I lived with? nature as viewed through the prism of war. Couldn't it be that the German and cause was part of a violent but natural correction? You don't have to buy into killed, they leave) but in the larger context of a war that was among the most rational (in its aims, if not its methods) fought in the last several side of the angels, too proud and arrogant to change tactics when all is (stopping just short of libel) the poison of the civil courts, where platoons of overpaid corporate lawyers can drive opponents with pockets less deep and of good journalism: It dramatizes and comments simultaneously. Plus, it gives more surface approach, sticking to legal minutiae and rarely digging for the knows that when you're playing a woman who has lost a child you don't need to real climax of this story isn't the downbeat ending of the book or the sleight of hand, "let's call the Environmental Protection Agency," upbeat ending of the movie. The climax is the publication of a book that takes the plaintiffs' side legally, but some of us will never use their products again without thinking to be independent. The conspiracy theory is that the weapons inspectors were officials admit they supplied spying equipment to the inspectors but offer last person to see Foster before his alleged suicide, she was pressured to independent counsel investigations, the little fish get caught and the big fish travel fatality in three decades. This achievement was ignored by most major representing the owners, and union chief Billy Hunter, representing the players, struck a deal one day before the league was expected to cancel the rest of the season. The standoff had already wiped out three months of the subtle theories: Dole is running because the country is ready for a woman, heroism and moderates like his positions on tobacco and campaign reform. The City woman was pushed in front of a subway train and killed. The mentally this was an exceptional incident, and you're more likely to be struck by lightning. The thousands of New Yorkers who are avoiding the subways since the edges of subway platforms reading newspaper stories about the incident are ago. Nevertheless, they were trumpeted throughout the nation, because the media countries adopted a common currency, the euro. The member countries have more people and exports than the United States but a somewhat smaller promote fiscal responsibility by limiting countries' authority to run deficits is back. The congressional seat in Duke's district, which raise money for the race. He told the audience he would "stand up openly" for (New Line Cinema). Blah reviews for this cutesy comedy notions (at one point he exclaims, "Oh my lucky stars, it's a Negro!") and his film has "the warm glow of a hazelnut coffee commercial" (the New York eruptions of bathroom humor." (This site has information on the original television show.) of being and faith puts him squarely in the footsteps of Dickens and Graham hidden truths." (Read the first chapter, courtesy of the New York Times especially the parting of the Red Sea and a neat sequence with dancing hieroglyphics. Biggest minus: the clunky musical numbers, which "hang like partly because "it tries to do too much" and be all things to all audiences two meet in cyberspace; the rest is thumb twiddling until they "solve their an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect." Read the rest full of firsthand accounts from the men who served on the underwater spying inflated claims to heroism. But the book is full of gems, such as the story of a massive wiretapping device placed on a Soviet underwater communication cable Government" printed on it. (Read the first chapter here, courtesy of the New York Times [free registration lecture, but more important, it features a wide selection of his poems, the kind of imaginative eclecticism that characterizes writers of the first Most notable is the revelation that a financial scandal involving close family "that was sweet rather than violent, that lingered for two weeks, and that sensibilities. How can you gain the moral high ground, that lofty crag from The best tactic for a situation tainted by your own imperfection is to define yourself as the happy medium, superior to those on both your left and right. Thus, cleaner than we are and they're prigs (like the half of it will be added to the cleaning products used throughout the subway Fill in the blank by matching each problem with its said, "They are in our chicken houses, killing our chickens, killing our barn cats. A lot of the sportsmen consider them a target. That puts the wolf in a submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. evidence, including the fact that pig bones were found alongside the skeletons and the site itself was probably a center of political administration rather in which he argues that time as we understand it does not exist. Even before the book's publication, the claim has stirred up controversy among theoretical literally the implications of the fact that a synonym for "infinite" is "timeless." The practical implications for things such as train schedules, magazine deadlines, and the minimum wage have not even begun to be they are unable to perform a courtship dance that relies on the display of bright feathers. Worse, toxins from the plant have greatly reduced the availability of a staple of the tits' diet: green caterpillars. Without caterpillars, the tits cannot produce the bright yellow breast feathers they need to do the dance and thus cannot attract mates. hypothesized that "each point of normal space is actually a loop in [the] fifth dimension." They thought the fifth dimension also accounted for forces such as Supplement reported that, thanks to advances in supercollider technology that enable the precise calibration of subatomic quantum energy and computer programs that are able to model the behavior of this energy with previously "Some physicists," the paper reports, "have suggested that we might one day unroll such a dimension [and] travel along it." But others are skeptical. "Traveling along [the fifth dimension]," says one, "wouldn't get you pressure of all the water they swim under? According to a law of physics called should, at the pressures a thousand fathoms down, decrease its volume to the collapse on a long dive, but the viscera move into the space. In short, most of Island School of Design have unveiled the "kitchen of the future." The utopian prototype, called the Universal Kitchen, is designed for maximum efficiency in functions of a microwave, a broiler, and a conventional oven, as well as project, "water and heat come together and create a totally new appliance." The Museum in New York City. If it's ever built, the kitchen will come in two documentary on the history of oral performance, from Homer to poetry of audience response. Some critics find the popularity of the events an work of some contest winners, declared them "of a badness not to be been better." Crime, accidents, fires, drinking, smoking, drugging, air pollution, water pollution, racism, and divorce are declining. We live longer, spent a long time at the group's conference, never denounced its views, and middle of the greatest political excruciation in its modern history, the United those who've left welfare are in better shape than they were when they received belong to the group or know who its members are, but he preaches their Baker have been asked to mediate between the White House and congressional Republicans but have not accepted. The White House is also hoping for a last strike. Black players feel that white owners don't respect them and are treating them as ghetto thugs who don't deserve their high salaries. package also chronicles last week's furor and lists the undecideds. Two United States more than China. These satellite launches are at the heart of the Hope depicts him as the first corporate comic. He employed armies of comedians to write his jokes, made early promotional deals with networks and advertisers, and worked assiduously to build the Hope brand. His great comic gifts: natural argues what Republicans have been hinting: Impeachment by the House is censure. action to harness the talents of retiring baby boomers. The boomers should be urged to be active volunteers, teachers, caregivers, etc., and the federal government should correspondingly raise Social Security payments. address broader future challenges, such as ethnic conflict and germ warfare. story yet. In addition to the usual list of catastrophes (power outages, plane shortages and accidental nuclear missile launches. It also berates everyone, says she's manipulative and awful beneath her sweet front. She refuses to because she's afraid of being charged with perjury herself. "This is a horrible thing that's going on," says Franklin Spinney. "All it's going to do is reward the pathological behavior that created the problem." people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the "Descriptions are not permitted because they would violate the sacred oath of padded, and one biblical quote away from declaring itself a sovereign with people who stand up for what they believe in no matter the cost, and so who in protest last week reluctantly canceled their subscriptions to all Devoted to metaphors of field and stream, News Quiz won't shoot sitting fish or ducks in a barrel. Good jokes surprise you, and what's an unpredictable comment about racism: that it's bad? Perhaps the task is not to shoot the sitting duck but to sneak up on it, loop a rope around its webbed feet, hang it upside down, and hit it with a stick until it bursts Southern culture? Would the grits be ducks, or are they fair game for News Quiz scorn? Fire away, but only if you wrote your reply between acts at the time to reconsider your sense of regional superiority and just go fishing. place. So he has developed little routines, one of which is this: When he arrives home from work each evening, he drops his briefcase, heads upstairs to his bedroom, and changes into his cotton pajamas. Then he bounds back down the the Capable and Attractive Attorney inquires: Why does every black leader who to illegal or unethical working conditions." Good enough for me. "Music is my strongest inspiration, and I feel that it encompasses the true style of fashion. The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band in the world, and I cannot think of another group of artists who have made such an impact on the world of fashion. Departing from my past ad campaigns, the rock pictorials energy, and modern environment." This may refer to a slightly different aspect contemptible, the cell phone inspires stories, sneers, and songs, except for lecture I was giving, a student in the front row got a call on his cell phone, and took the call, letting the entire class wait and stare at him while he section of my local market, I listened to a woman call someone in the meat red. Why have a face to face conversation when you can exist as a disembodied voice on their remote answering service? The only plus about cell phones is the way they make their owners look like the rest of the folks who shuffle around who think that the public use of a cell phone is a status symbol. Rather, a cell phone is a device of convenience, clear and simple. Folks who ascribe more importance to it than that are the same folks who think that cars are for more than driving, vacations are for more than relaxing, and clothes are for more than wearing. What I find interesting is this: Those who think that cell phones are more than two cans with an invisible string are those who want others to leather of their Range Rover on the way to that Vail getaway. Give it a rest, president today, the real obstacle they face is not the absence of witnesses or the dismal poll numbers. It is redundancy. Today's exhibition marks, by my ninth in less than three months, the ninth recounting of the same story, same the three day opening argument. The guidelines for senatorial conduct distributed yesterday make it very clear that perfect attendance and good chaplain thank God for guiding senators to unity "in matters of Senate. Senators have criticized the House managers for being too pushy, but believe in you. I have faith in the United States Senate." sanctity of the judicial oath, a favorite subject of his. He recounts the story introduces his fellow managers and recites their legal credentials. The most remarkable fact here is that four of the managers served in the judge advocate tougher on adulterers than are civil courts, making me wonder whether the than flee from it. Instead of trying to dazzle the Senate with something to be one law for judges and one for the president? Perjury is a high crime because it is as bad as bribery. The judicial oath is the foundation of and a tiny, pinched voice that sounds silly in such a beefy man, does not obstruction of justice. Congressional Democrats considered and rejected the Flytrap with his reputation polished, is superb. He has a warm voice, Senate to hear witnesses to confirm his obstruction of justice claims, and after a presentation this good, I can't imagine that too many Republicans will the Capitol I am accosted by a woman: "Tell everyone you know to face God this year. It's the end times." Unfortunately, she's wrong. The House cleverly and deliberately put together to confuse people by meaning nothing." cute as a button too. And being the woman, she did give it the woman's touch." hit with a restraining order prohibiting me from finishing the hurt when he did? Perhaps a few malcontents given to phrases like "incoherent nasal honking." But, fortunately, this was a rhetorical question meant only to remind us that we can't judge the praise of the past by the praise of five minutes ago. On the other hand, those who encourage us to forget the past are compliment in question? Is it churlish to rebuff praise? Not if it's didn't recognize you!" Our quoted compliment employs the implicit tokenism of virtue of "talented," suggesting that her abilities were something she was born with, not something she earned. So perhaps it's not a matter of changing mores idiot! There was a male phalanx, and then there was me. But when we were dreaming about being president when I was a kid, nor did I dream about being forms of abuse. There must be an end to the unnecessary recourse to the death Leach quells the unruly crowd at the Cool Site of the Year Awards people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the Loosely translated, what would that be in idiomatic "Danger! Fish are not working up to their full potential."-- Beth hundreds of them, if memory serves, and I can assure you that it doesn't. In slide show, and hand out brochures. The source of the dioxin is unclear. Legal "I detect two things. First, a mild feeling of envy along with irritation, as if someone had noticed something one can get away impressions together and you find the missing element that explains my own irritation: the public display of advantage. Maybe that's why listening to a cellulite strikes me as identical to watching the beautiful people in each other in the back seat of a convertible on their way to THE LIFE YOU WILL NEVER HAVE. All this shall pass when there are so many cell phones that no one is this big, and only God can repay it." He was wrong: Brazil eventually worked its way out of the debt crisis and even became a favorite of foreign investors. As late as last summer, things still seemed to be going pretty well. miracle" of the 1960s, the country has repeatedly seemed on the verge of an economic takeoff, only to slide back again into stagnation. Or as an old local But what has happened to Brazil over the last six months is perhaps the saddest story of all, because this time the punishment seems so situation: "Brazil has never had such a responsible government; the environment for business has never been so good; why is this happening to us?" Good time Brazil has tried very hard to play by the rules. Five years ago it introduced a new currency, the real, and promised to avoid the inflationary excesses of the past. Thus far it has delivered, with prices basically stable free up its markets, privatizing inefficient companies, eliminating import quotas, lowering tariffs, and so on. While the process of reform has by no means been completed, the progress is real and substantial. Well, to a certain extent both were attracting money from the same meant the funds had to sell off assets, which meant pulling money out of which also has large budget deficits, might be risky too. And so capital began fleeing the country. Initially Brazil tried to support the value of the real by selling dollars at the official exchange rate; but as its reserves of dollars declined it supplemented this strategy by raising interest rates to punitive levels in order to persuade people to keep their money in Brazil. Of course, these high interest rates also made a recession inevitable. this only shows that countries should not run big budget deficits, that Brazil needed to get its government accounts under control to restore market confidence. And that has indeed been the thrust of the government's policy, agreed upon with the International Monetary Fund. But there is something a bit count the interest on outstanding debt, tax receipts are larger than spending. The primary surplus would be even larger than it is if the economy were not So the problem must be all that debt Brazil ran up in years past, right? Well, not exactly: It turns out that Brazil isn't particularly deep in debt, by the usual measures. The government debt is less than half the size of its debt but the very high interest rates it must pay on that And why do investors lack confidence? Because of those big deficits. missed the absurdity of the situation, let me say it again: Investors lack confidence in Brazil because it has a large budget deficit, which is the result of high interest rates and a depressed economy, which are the result of investors' lack of confidence. It's completely circular. If markets were So what's the answer? Conventional wisdom, embodied in the vicious circle was for Brazil to demonstrate its resolve. And the way to do that was to make that primary surplus even larger and defend the value of the supposed to convince the market that all was well, so eventually interest rates could come down. The trouble was that all that austerity was a hard sell politicians: How well would our own Congress perform if told that taxes must be raised and spending slashed in the midst of a recession, with no clear reward except a possible reduction in speculative pressure, maybe, sometime in the simply let the real fall without raising interest rates, maybe even cutting that inflation would surge, and argued (in the wilderness) for temporary program fell apart, predictably, though earlier than most people expected. too bad. The currency didn't fall as much as some feared, and the stock market When the interest rate increase was announced, panic set in and the currency plunged. Instead of helping, in other words, the interest rate increase After firing two central bank heads in close succession, Brazil appointed an And perhaps the new man can somehow say the magic words, find the formula that lose, the story is, let us say, not exactly a wonderful advertisement for along predictably partisan lines. Following the Senate votes, the conservative Telegraph said, "a decent man would have resigned when his public lying mixture of brazenness, legal equivocation and personal charm would see him through." But the paper pronounced him "the lamest of ducks," which, it said, its front page and said in an editorial ("Suspended Sentence") that a "revival will require a huge investment of his time for uncertain returns. "Some [foreign policy initiatives] would invite internal opposition and risk damaging his precious poll numbers," the Times said. "That should not be an In an editorial it called "The end of the Zipper," the liberal Guardian said one of the losers in the scandal was the president, when none was there. "They also compromised some of their own most cherished ethical standards, a mistake they may live to regret," the editorial said. It acknowledged, however, that three "stars" of the affair had emerged throughout and "were able to distinguish between the President and the man, accepting one even as they acknowledged the flaws in the other." anyone sane it was always obvious that impeachment was a hideously survival, it cannot be pleasant for him to contemplate how his presidency will Senate impeachment trial "the first serious setback for the crusade led by the other: that of humanist good sense has beaten that of the fundamentalist preachers, that which wants to preserve certain achievements of the 1960s has information that invaded his privacy and subjected him and his family to heroine. Of all the people involved, she is the one who apparently never lied or knowingly broke a confidence. She never sought publicity about her affair has behaved with admirable restraint and dignity throughout the piece, the only preoccupied with a moral scandal that could have cost him his seat at the Oval Office, would be paralyzed and disabled once the episode is over." said the most important question remained what would happen if an agreement brandishing a fly swatter and saying, "Make peace or shit!" But it said she had years after his death, the theaters had been destroyed, the actors dismissed and breakfast coverage from outside the chairman's house. meeting, phone call, coffee, and bathroom schedule for the day. Immediate Historical impact of the chairman's choice of cuffs on the discount rate. Aware his hair is debonair, he wears it with a rare, square flair. Later: Tony president's policy and its probable effect on finance and the economy. coughs for several consecutive seconds, effectively splitting an infinitive; distraction is now over, and the media can return to discussing education evicted from office. But that doesn't mean our long national nightmare is over. smack in the middle of the impeachment process. And on the eve of his acquittal in the Senate, he allegedly let slip that his next major policy initiative is retaliating against impeachment foes. The White House strongly denies the last Despite the indignant denials of the president's pursuers, we're about to discover that Flytrap is indeed about sex. Or at least that the talk about such matters, some big questions arise: With whom is the president sexual relations.") When was the last time? Is he getting any at all? The president, a k a "the most powerful man in the world," (and this one is known for his large appetite, to boot) has been collared. Charismatic, suffused president nevertheless faces odds of scoring that have to be slimmer than return to the crime scene any time soon? Doubtful. Out of respect for the first lady, enough said. Any other candidates? Equally doubtful. With all eyes on the president, both inside and outside the White House, where is there even a trysting place, now that the Oval Office has been discovered? And would channels with the Secret Service to bring in concupiscent conscripts while particular president ever learns from experience on this particular subject, knowing what's at stake. Well, I guess the most we can say is: probably phone sex, it's a reasonable bet to conclude that the most powerful man in the world has to be, well, testy. And if so, that sure explains a lot. Missile id, declaring war on political foes. This isn't rational behavior. It's more befitting a hormonally unbalanced teenager who is acting out. hypothesis. The president isn't engaging in military action to distract public attention from his sexual activity. He's engaging in military action to leader, with the world's most powerful arsenal and fighting forces at his nation, we must accept that our very human and virile president has very human and virile needs that aren't being met. Denial is not an option. Believe me, environment, improve public schooling, and help elect Al Gore but, at the end Third, we need to cut the president some slack. If the first lady's job description no longer includes being first, then let's lobby how about more conventional remedies? Road trips. Prostitution is legal in the troops, or salute their memory, whatever, as long as there's time for ministered to (to borrow another terrific Flytrap euphemism). We will all sleep better at night knowing that our commander in chief's libido is "that was sweet rather than violent, that lingered for two weeks, and that "Smelly, Lethargic, Incoherent." Ads in many papers newborn baby. Mine's a full week old, and he's still acting like a difficult to distinguish the smelly from the lethargic, the lethargic from the government officials as their role models (particularly those in the Federal out of work basketball players. And of course You've got Mail opened, too late, because we don't recommend the other means of detection. It's called actual holiday movies and their putative sequels. Can you tell which of the House Without Adequate Wiring or a Reliable Smoke Detector submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. historically black colleges may be about half of that at elite colleges because the black students prefer to spend their money on "hot cars and loud stereos." supremacist. But I do mean he shows some symptoms that are still common among doesn't seem to have enough experience with black folks in or out of college to know that he can't extrapolate black college student behavior from the black a small subset of college students. He doesn't assume that serious students can assume that, as with whites, black students with enough money for expensive stereos usually also have computers, and that black students without money for computers usually don't have expensive car stereos or even cars. In short, he overlooks systematic, statistically verifiable inequalities between black and favorite "culture of poverty" anecdote. It's not so different from the old way of discrediting evidence of black poverty or segregation by saying, "look, direct proportion to family income, that whites party more in college than any other racial group, and that students who had to "sacrifice" to attend college spend the most time on their academics (see the Chronicle of Higher colleges. Don't you realize that these are mostly private institutions! Many of them are quite elite in their own right. Think of Spike Lee at them in high school. We do provide access to them here, but there is initial assumptions about poverty and race before making any more statements of the column is an unfortunate illustration of how race clouds the mind. Contrary to readers' complaints, I didn't assert anything about any group. The New York Times item at issue reported that a survey showed a great colleges and those attending traditionally black public institutions, and went on to suggest, via quoting two academics, that this was because of a great economic gap. My comment was that there was another possibility besides economics: namely, that black college students might disproportionately prefer spending their disposable income on items besides computers, such as sound systems and cars. I didn't say I know this to be true. I merely suggested that it would make sense to add some questions about this to the next survey. If it turns out that there's nothing to this, then so be it. What are readers so journalists of publishing his work unedited, partly because he is talented and trustworthy, but mainly because his "Today's Papers" column is posted at around from an affluent slice of black students that is smaller than, and included in, imply that X is suggestive of Y. Twice the percentage of whites than blacks blacks probably also drive fancy cars. Should we study whether whites who don't have Internet access are buying fancy cars instead? mean or ignorant. The man is in a wheelchair, for crying out loud. off the mark. It's best to let viewers and readers decide for themselves whether what they are seeing and reading is genuine or not. according to standard propagandist lore) and the intellectual honesty to point economy, though he consistently points at himself as the author of our current prosperity. As neither a Democrat nor a Republican, I am amazed at the mantle of glory as he balances precariously on the shoulders of those who came young basketball players eschew team play in favor of taking on defenders want to "be like Mike," as the advertisements say. All this is the legacy of taking over sports and his flashy style of play could be successfully marketed. have been offered without using the senator's name because the remark was apparently intended to be off the record. The senator was complaining about the In his otherwise useful and accurate analysis of the has won four Golden Globes, three New York Film Critics Circle Awards and two was a brilliant director, but he's already been saluted for that, so why give amusing guy, to judge by the terrific "Today's Papers") to join the ranks of himself a few simple questions before launching his attack-- questions such as, salary for her current position? If the job were held by someone other than rarely disagree about art and never disagree about politics. good, if maddeningly redundant. He left his wife, and he's kind to Polish with him, although it's kind of hard to tell. But it doesn't matter. Ford is the cold sins. They're real bad. It's better to lie and be nice than to tell Sometimes she wishes they were dead. That's bad. It's bad to wish people were perjury and five on obstruction. Censure fails on a procedural motion, so Democrats and several Republicans sign an unofficial censure statement instead. these events." Reporters sniff for signs of celebration at the White House but come up empty. Senators congratulate themselves for conscience, bipartisanship, will get majority support in the Senate, both sides gear up for the aftermath. "advisers" who leaked that story before the Senate vote and is determined to Republicans turn against censure, accusing its Democratic backers of "seeking close the deliberations to outsiders. The idealistic spin: Kicking out the media will allow senators to reach their verdict based on reason and conscience. The cynical spin: Democrats voted to open the deliberations and Republicans voted to close them because both sides know Democrats are on the acquittal, a few more Senate Republicans concede they could vote for censure. Democrats could blow up the impeachment process by crying "coup." opinion mafia holds forth on the president's predicament. window went centuries of snobbery, mystique, and pretension. Up, up went harbinger of the dramatic transformation that's about to sweep the entire business of buying and selling rare and precious things. The market for art, which has long behaved very differently from markets for other kinds of goods, is about to be transformed by the irresistible force of the Internet. The The trade in art has always been anomalous in economic terms. What's unusual about the business is its secretiveness. Vendors of most costs. Transparency benefits consumers, who can compare prices, features, and checking the newspaper for advertised prices. In markets where price conspicuous disadvantage. The buying experience is unpleasant because consumers suspect they're being fleeced. Market secrecy tends to break down, because sellers have to reveal their prices if their competitors do. In recent years, however, secrecy has survived. Art dealers seldom advertise prices and sometimes won't even quote them if they're not convinced a buyer is on the hook. There was an outcry among gallery owners a few years ago, when New York passed a law requiring them to post prices for works that are actually on display. Most follow it, but grudgingly. "We're sheepish about posting prices," information?" And don't even bother asking what they have for sale. At Master and Impressionist paintings, not even employees are allowed to know snobbery. The art dealer cultivates his aura (and the more mystical aura of the art object) by casting himself as a connoisseur rather than as a merchant. He flatters his buyer as a person of taste and distinction rather than a mere customer. As a consequence, buyers tend not to behave the way consumers do in other fields. But the most potent factor is the economic logic of selling rare or unique goods. Comparison shopping is hard. Even in the case of exist, you're not likely to find them competitively priced in adjoining storefronts. And virtually everything else is subjective. Which is better: a dealers augment their power over the market. In other words, they can get prices higher than what they would get if everything were laid on the table power of dealers has always been auctions, where individuals can buy and sell, bidding is public, and prices are published. Selling more art at auctions and expanding the number of people who can participate in auctions, which is what (if less drama) to the art market. But the real way the Internet stands to revolutionize the economics of the art business is simply by breaking down the how much they want for it will put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. They'll be denying themselves access to the fastest expanding sector of the who started the first international art fair, in Cologne in 1967--the first auction results. Now he has turned it into a consortium of galleries offering directly. "This tendency to keep everything secret, to take little advantages of information, has resulted in a suffocation of the market," he says. "If you wanted to set up a system to keep people away from buying art, it would be very spreading information but also by making art into a more liquid asset. Web should significantly reduce the transaction costs associated with selling shipping, and insurance costs as the work goes from gallery to auction house to whole exhibitions online. They encourage the kind of comparison shopping that was previously impossible in the art world. Not all galleries give prices, but enough do to allow the buyer the upper hand occasionally. For example, looking up the artist Chuck Close, I found nine different lithographs for sale online, Woodcut." The galleries offering this print advertised it at shockingly all three galleries, asking them to explain the disparity in their prices. Pace also claimed a misunderstanding, saying that his price, curiously enough, was really the same as Pace's--$18,000. He subsequently offered to sell it to me Chuck Close lithographs. But you can see why dealers are reluctant to give out prices: It makes it harder for them to raise them at a moment's notice when an artist's stock rises, as Close's did when he had a big retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art a few months ago. In any case, if I had actually been interested in buying the print, with the help of the Web, I would have been in a far better position to negotiate a favorable price. making information available online if it merely gives leverage to their customers? The answer is that the Internet stands to expand the market as a whole more than enough to compensate them for having to compete with each other. A gallery in Geneva or Berlin can now sell artwork to someone who never prices down initially, prices will rise as sellers are matched with buyers and from "In the Line of Duty: true life experiences from our customers," a film also failed to turn up the elusive missile. Where could it be? There was nothing that could be construed as even a fragment of a bullet. Certainly, nothing was evident over the pubic bone. Nor was the bone fractured. Bullets "While pondering this, his wife remembered that the paramedics had a lot of difficulty getting his zipper down. She looked at his pants more closely, noting that the zipper was deformed. Behind the zipper and in front of the protective cloth panel overlying the zipper, she found the world's parliaments, professors of law or history, former laureates, and members of the Peace Prize Committee may make nominations. The five member International scholars will be chosen to report on those candidates. The winner a treat. They run right over your face when you're in a sleeping bag," says crowd. When they were told to come, even if they did not really understand this contributing to the latest New Yorker theme issue or to demonstrating Association as it contemplates the massive task of retrofitting his country's would we be better off fighting it together or separately?" said President tree in the town square, you need a menorah as well. We festoon offices with fusion of these two otherwise unrelated holidays into one big seasonal the miracle in which, according to lore, a day's worth of oil fueled the crime to celebrate the holiday (punishment: five shillings). Only with the arrival of German immigrants after the Civil War did it emerge as the major visited the East Side last night," the New York Tribune noted on challenged this embrace of a festival that, despite its secular trappings, was fundamentally Christian. But parents couldn't very well deprive their kids of presents, so as not to fall short of their Christian neighbors. Prominent alternative to adorning a tree with colorful lights. which gathered converts in the years before World War II, also boosted in the face of persecution dovetailed with the themes of nationalists seeking organizations used the holiday as an excuse to prod individuals to donate coins no longer reverence to God for performing a miracle but rather the triumph over composition of cream cheese and fruit that, when molded, resembled a menorah." decorations, greeting cards, napkins, wrapping paper, ribbons, chocolates, cultural institutions. Except among the Orthodox, it has been thoroughly transformed into a major festival. Accordingly, religious leaders lament this a Christian society then into a secular, commercial one. Libel Manual on all matters secular and spiritual. Hence our use of "perhaps the greatest pitcher of his era" and described the trade as the down forcibly and bit her lips," leaving them "swollen to double their size," harassed her or subjected her to other pressures aimed at keeping the story wearing briefs with a visible bulge. Conservative Christian activists called the ads pornographic, psychologists called them attractive to pedophiles, and our children are not infected," conservatives "need some sort of quarantine." The conservative spin: He's a quitter. The moderate spin: He's gone nuts. The liberal spin: Hurray, the nuts are quitting! (Click to read Chatterbox's take Republicans will brutalize her, particularly over Whitewater and her failed senator, she couldn't rake in book and lecture fees to pay off her legal bills. The argument pro or con: If she doesn't decide soon, other Democrats will wait had forced thousands of flight cancellations and stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers by staging a sickout over a labor dispute. After a judge ruled the sickout illegal, the pilots still didn't go back to work, and the judge fined the union's executives several thousand dollars and ordered the union to pilots back on the job. The pilots' spin: Somebody had to teach this arrogant airline that it can't always get its way. Cynics' spin: Somebody had to teach these arrogant pilots that they can't always get their way. (See"," for why Now Turner Sports is hiring him to broadcast pro basketball and other sports on welcomed me back, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Cynics' spin on forgiveness of sexual violence in sports: Celebrity 738-Justice most lucrative prize, for the second time in three years. He edged out his us, to intimidate us, to get us to abandon our foreign policy." if it was now wrong to mock the charred remains of the dead, surely it was airline ridicule. And if it were in fact an honorable joke, then why not tell Another scenario. When the rabbi drops by for dinner because there's anything discreditable about eating sea and sty, but as a matter of tact. You're not having it both ways; you're being considerate. you announce over the PA? (Express in French in the form of a maxim.) disappointed supporters that he will execute other people: "I continue to support capital punishment, but after careful consideration of [the pope's] direct and personal appeal and because of a deep and abiding respect for the pontiff and all that he represents, I decided last night to grant his COWBOY MAGIC. 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The sexual puritanism of There is another, less talked about, reason why the transparent. By this I mean that those who hold nominally powerful jobs ought to exercise correspondingly real power. Title and authority should be directly related. The president should be the most powerful person in the executive branch, the chief justice of the Supreme Court the most powerful in the judicial branch, the speaker of the House the most powerful in the House, etc. This transparency serves democracy, because it enables voters to hold the politics has not always been transparent. In the golden age of political machines, for example, bosses often occupied ostensibly unimportant jobs and casualty of last week. If Democrats or Republicans fear that their leaders will has a history of modest service to his party and his district, delivering pork, deputy whip to DeLay, helping "The Hammer" count votes in the service of the conservative cause. DeLay mobilized his whip organization to ensure his deputy's election as speaker, and Democratic members are already wondering if true power base in the House Republican Caucus: a 60-odd member whip organization, the best access to corporate campaign contributions, and a fearsome personality. The whip, who knows he lacks the charm and cooperative behind closed doors. DeLay's job will be secure, and he himself will remain entered an era of puppetry. (A sample size of one does not an era make.) Still, on the part of one's rivals is a hallowed tradition of politics, and Flytrap has honored it. Democrats have tended to assume that Republicans are pursuing the president simply out of loathing. Republicans have tended to assume that Democrats are defending him simply out of political expediency. The House, by Senate trial is already confusing those assumptions. Some conservatives are behaving like moderates, some moderates like conservatives, Democrats like What follows is a taxonomy of the Senate, an attempt to classify senators and explain why they're doing what they're doing. efforts to broker a deal were that the majority leader is too conservative, too plan to cut short the trial by holding an early test vote on whether the with the other two defining elements of his personality: political pragmatism that a long trial will unhinge his Senate, disrupt this year's business, and accomplished more than most expected, a fact that even Democratic Senate staffers admit privately. He has assuaged conservatives by giving up on and crimes. They sincerely believe he is unfit to hold office and that the The Unbowed can afford their principles because of their other notable quality: The ranks of Unbowed Conservatives would be thicker they agree with everything the Unbowed Conservatives say. But political disastrous for their prospects. The Campaigning Conservatives walk a delicate the Senate hold a trial. But he also says the trial should be quick and no are as annoyed by the president as the next guy. But they're sick of the whole business, want it to end, don't want the Senate or the party damaged by it, and for president and has his own shaky marital history, has assiduously ducked conviction but will also cooperate with any compromise that shortens the procedural agreement collapses and the Senate faces a long, ugly trial, the Mods are the Republicans most likely to support a Democratic motion to themselves as the Senate's champions of The Law. They tend to favor a trial with as much procedural baggage as can be attached. Specter, for example, impeached, became an adamant supporter of a trial. He even favors having censure unconstitutional. They are also alarmingly prone to say things like trial probably benefits Democrats, but they are so sick of Flytrap and so concerned about the comity of the Senate that they will do almost anything to end this quickly. The other salient characteristic of the Disgruntled Pragmatists is that they speak out. Most Senate Democrats have ducked the spotlight during Flytrap because they don't want to get stuck defending the attacking the president, have filled that void. Those who criticize the The Disgruntled Pragmatists provide cover for two other Republican counterparts, are sick of Flytrap and will do anything to end the trial with as little damage to the Senate as possible. The Anxious face his own sex scandal and represents a generally conservative state, has made it through a year of Flytrap with barely a public utterance. (When quizzed, his press secretary gave me the most innocuous three sentences I have ever heard. their colleagues do the work of negotiating a deal and selling it to the public, keep their mouths shut, and vote to acquit. a Democratic political victory. A few Democrats believe that a full trial can serve the nation and the party. A trial would prove, once and for all, trial: "I think the Republicans are reeling from this," he told the New York At the far end of the Democratic caucus from the Partisans health of the Democratic party. They aren't worried about their poll numbers, order to "protect the presidency as an institution." Impeachment could "destabilize the presidency" and "degrade the Republic quickly." censure resolution, has made it his mission to guard the Senate's prerogatives. He has warned the White House not to lobby senators for their vote. According aphorism for political influence peddlers who defended their shady methods on the grounds that they didn't violate the law. The scandal, he observed, isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Since then, politics has stagnated, science has exploded, and the art of moral rationalization has mutated to suit the new environment. In this world, the game is redesigning human beings, the stakes are ownership of the fountain of youth, and the scandal is what passes as hearing to examine the moral implications of two recent experiments. cells" from human embryos and fetuses and had grown them into neurons, muscle Technology, testified that by putting the nucleus of an adult human cell into a cow's gutted egg cell, his researchers had converted it into an embryonic human cell, which presumably could be manipulated in the same way. "As we learn to control the pathways that take stem cells down the road to neurons, blood quantities of these cells can be grown for transplant applications." Old folks' "degenerating organs" would be repaired "with young, healthy, and fully functional cells." And one of the first organs to be repaired in this way, the immortalize cells, and theoretically live forever without the nasty old moral problem of "harvesting" fetuses. But the prospect of a human spare parts industry modeled on cooking, farming, and car repair raises a new moral politicians and biotech firms can't comprehend the gravity of this step. Like lawyers, they dwell on details instead of the big picture. While taking care never to cross the line, they ignore anything short of crossing it, and they don't notice that the line is gradually receding. They look for moral problems in costs but never in benefits. And they quarrel over yesterday's issues while biotechnology ethics has been mired in the politics of abortion. Since federal law restricts research on fetal tissue and human embryos, the debate over stem cells has focused on whether they are embryos and, if not, whether scientists are killing embryos to get them. The token biotech critic at last week's ignored the novel implications of the latest experiments, complaining instead that the researchers had destroyed embryos in the process. Conversely, forming an entire body), and therefore weren't organisms or embryos. "The issue Institutes of Health, "is complying with the law, knowing the legal definition into cells that are "committed" to become specific tissues. The differences in experiment, like the previous cloning of a sheep, proved that the cycle is reversible: "Committed" adult cells can be restored to embryonic executive director of the National Bioethics Advisory Committee confessed that the new moral questions raised by stem cell technologies, the witnesses praised observed, would reduce the need for "fetal donors." (The biotech executives' comments on "ethics" were even more diversionary. Click for an example.) said he was "deeply troubled by this news of experiments involving the mingling had supervised the experiment, in debunking this "misinformation" (the cow's explained that he had used the cow egg only to "reprogram" the human cell, making it "young again" and restoring its ability to "become any cell type." The fake issue of mixing species thus obscured the genuine issue of The notion of replicating whole human beings transfixes biotech alarmists. This concern, like species mixing, is easily dispelled. "We are not cloning human beings," West testified at the hearing. Indeed, why manufacture whole people when there's more money in the parts business? The horror movie "banking" your stem cells and growing them into new organs, including brain the hearing. Instead, as with abortion, the panelists praised the new demonstrating other ways of deriving stem cells, the new experiments had proved that the cloning of whole embryos could be banned, as Catholic scholars have recognizing the new issues because they're trained to look for moral problems ethicist at the hearing who betrayed any awareness of the new issues, focused good or benefit, with the least harm and destruction of things that we value," philosophers ought to ponder. Where are we going? What are we becoming? immediate threat posed by the unraveling of the old physical and moral companies were claiming licenses and patents to human stem cells. He said this concern had to do with the law, "not with ethical and moral implications." But if ethics is relegated to peripheral and obsolete questions while industry deconstructs, redesigns, and manufactures human components just like any other commodity, laws that exempt these components from patenting, licensing, and other property rights will lose their moral basis. And critics who object that qualities that make weasels (along with stoats and ferrets) such satisfying half so much contempt could be squeezed from "record industry squirrels.") That toothy, ruthless carnivore shows up in this familiar exchange: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? says, "They fool me to the top of my bent." Indeed they do, those weasels. It makes you wonder why anyone could name a product the "Garden Weasel" or why for a muscular substantive agenda," then he took a swing at a poor person bequeathed to him in his father's will. Or maybe he didn't. Pros and cons of trying to wangle a blind date with Uncanny ability to keep a straight face while saying No visible wedding ring could imply availability for dating or recklessness at the poker table or that it's time to break down and delicate cameo, membership pin in pernicious organization, or perhaps a dab of defense team. After a little tiff, she might get some guy to kill you. In the approve "findings of fact" that he lied under oath and interfered with the "speaks frequently" and "has discussed" the issue directly, have been past six months, the media and key congressional Democrats have turned on his enemies forced Congress and the press to confront his shameful conduct. once again engaged in illegal and partisan leaking." Hours after the the Senate's management of the trial. White House aides lost no time turning people in his office are trying to impact this trial. They've tried to impact it before in a number of ways, wrongfully, irresponsibly." The suspicion that argued for months that the Senate need not punish him because he can be punished instead by an ordinary prosecutor and jury after he leaves office. several moderate Republican and Democratic senators cited the Times prosecutor is still free to subject him to the normal criminal law, and it fact. Republicans have been floating a proposal under which the the judicial system. Some Democrats have indicated they might support such a resolution, depending on its language. But the specter of a criminal indictment invoking her immunity agreement, thereby implicitly threatening her with The resulting deposition seems legally and politically but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the [Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, have repudiated racism but used issues such as crime and welfare as veils for argues that the president's popular support should not prevent impeachment, because it is merely a "momentary delusion" achieved through "effective intended impeachment as a way to remove an unworthy if popular leader. As for censure, it would be useless, "a gob of spit attached to the presidency's lawyers will now a) bankroll the Democratic Party; b) fund their own political advocates the establishment of a conservative arts weekly (suggested title: scene," which is full of dissatisfied souls seeking only "a place to speak and interview that disabled people were disabled because of things they had done wrong in previous lives. This created political uproar and sharply divided the Football Association, soccer's ruling body, fired him after he refused to sever separate his rights of free speech from his duties as one of the most excluded homosexuals for security reasons, no longer see them as a risk if they of defending itself against any threat regardless of its source or personnel in emergency situations around Japan." This cleared a major hurdle in sentenced to death again until all citizens are guaranteed the right to trial by jury. But the paper commented that legislators might decide that, in to all the country's courts and that therefore capital punishment should be headlines as "the trial of the century," the impeachment proceedings against journalists clearly under strain to find anything new to say about the president's troubles. The angles varied widely from paper to paper. An editorial frustrated with political systems that have become obsessed with themselves, and wish that what they see as unseemly distractions will be quickly over." the man who talked best about it cannot be feeling very well in his heaven. obsession with truth and purity has turned morbid and demanding of psychoanalysis. It is even endangering the whole political system." "sordid and embarrassing, lending itself to the worst sort of moralistic posturing and inevitable charges of hypocrisy and opportunism." It went on, "It apartheid," the paper said. But it concluded that "the sobering fact remains White House was in reality "on the edge of panic." This was because this not obstruct justice; second, that even if he did, perjury and obstruction are not grounds for impeachment if they are committed in the context of sex." The like him much, to go on repeating these unconvincing lines week after week, vicious game." The papers said, "It is like a parody of an team might have been secretly passed to the United States. "The idea that somehow products of our work could be diverted to other purposes is theoretically tenable," he said, "but I have no knowledge of that." course of researching and writing this article I suffered crippling bouts of my colleagues by using the microwave in the communal kitchen area to nuke a my desk still get funny looks. I have poisoned myself in so many ways. But I frozen dinner aisle in your local supermarket with flair and ease. their limitations. Remember that they work by agitating (and thus heating) the water and fat molecules in food, which means that whatever you cook is pretty much steamed. This is great for heating up leftovers and coffee, not so great better than a full dinner, including dessert, that goes from freezer to table The scores of offerings at your average supermarket divide down to about four basic categories: traditional, healthy, budget, and vegetarian. I used the same standards in judging all of them: taste, nutrition, presentation, and ease of preparation. Here's a list of best and worst by separate sauce packets that you heat and add to the dinner when you serve it. The results are great. The Breaded Chicken Parmigiana, for example, comes out Worse, they require a lot of work. You puncture the sauce pouch, toss the dinner in, pull it out, peel back parts of the film cover, toss the sauce pouch your calorie intake be derived from fat. It couldn't be simpler to prepare and is surprisingly tasty. The chicken's not exactly crispy, but it is remarkably texture.) The meat has a grain to it, so you know it's not compressed, and the potatoes. The veggies are flavorful with a bit of crunch to them, and the mashed potatoes are buttery and smooth. Best of all, the dessert is a darn good dinner's punched metal tray, making for a heady mix of convenience and home the prize for worst traditional dinner. The Boneless Pork Rib Shaped Patty label), and it sits in a pool of orange grease. (The label calls it barbecue sauce.) The beans, too sweet and without a hint of tanginess, were also disappointing. The dessert was billed as "apple crumb," but it looked like them from fat. All in all, a heart attack on a cardboard plate. low calorie and fat contents. For example, Weight Watchers' Smart Ones Fiesta Choice's Country Breaded Chicken With Scalloped Potatoes, Garden Vegetables in tempted to eat more than one, with a corresponding doubling of the fat and caloric intake. The category winner, Lean Cuisine's Oriental Beef With Vegetables and Long Grain Rice, had combination of great taste and solid University. The portions are controlled and the nutritional information clear. Yep, that's the one that stank when cooking. Surprisingly, the steak itself your studio apartment, huddling in front of the space heater, and reading hopelessly damp and chewy stuffing. The gravy formed strings as I lifted the fork to my mouth. But at least it came on a nice paper plate. Gourmet. It is the cuisine equivalent of the landlord banging at your door. You box. The portion is tiny, the chicken is in rubbery cubes so uniform they barely look like food, and the noodles are all clumped together on one side. Cheese Enchilada With Beans and Corn was bound for the winner's circle until overtaken at the wire by a dark horse: Green Guru, a brand I was able to find enchanted my palate. The rice was light and cooked to perfection, and the vegetables were nicely steamed in a complex sauce that blended the subtle flavors of curry, coconut milk, and basil. There was enough hot pepper to be interesting, but not so much that this tenderfoot was scared off. The textures, and the tofu chunks seemed like a stroke of genius. At its best, tofu is supposed to be springy, and this dish proved how ideally suited it is the whole concept of it seemed misguided: What vegetarian wants to eat something labeled as "steak," even if it is molded soy protein? The "steak" was like the worst hamburger you've ever eaten: sticky, tasteless, and just plain slapping a metal tray in front of a sullen husband at the dinner table. But notes that because the vegetables in microwave dinners are frozen, they may retain more nutrients than those you'd buy fresh. The oxidation of nutrients is much greater in fresh foods than in foods that are frozen quickly after harvest. Your fresh supermarket broccoli probably had a long journey from the place it was grown, losing vitamins all the way. Boiling the veggies at home compounds the problem, as the soluble vitamins get poured down the drain. to your supermarket and confidently fill your shopping cart. Once home, you can peel back the plastic film covers of our winners with a steady hand, sure that insight into the minutiae of human interaction. She's the opposite of a detail homogeneity that seems part commercial cunning (her movies go down easy, like Muzak) and part the result of being rich and snobbishly insulated on the Upper West Side of New York City, that magic kingdom where people parade their enchanting comedies ever made. It's a classic setup: Two people work side by Friend") who pour out their hearts in prose. When I went online in the early '90s, the first thing I thought (and posted in a chat group) was: "Oh, now cybercafe who seemed to have a wonderful, funny, flirtatious personality online (I was in a position to read some of what she was typing) but who logged off and buttoned up her coat without looking left or right and hurried into the street as if afraid that someone might actually speak to her. The story works better when set in a society with a clear relishes the process of opening "superstores" and driving the local mom and pop conceals real economic desperation, and there are serious consequences when the two lovers clash and one of them gets fired. In the world of You've Got employees are happily hired by the competition. The movie, without seeming to realize it, turns into a romantic parable about the joys of being absorbed by a conglomerate. Why, its lovers never even get a busy signal when they dial close! But where The Shop Around the Corner had a matrix of who can be discarded at the narrative's convenience without muss or fuss. The other characters are just friends to be talked at. (You don't even get a sense nervously thinking them up on the spot, and he's better than anyone at saying something he doesn't mean and then wincing in horror, as if longing to hit the flamboyant movie tradition of movie mobsters who smile at the bullets that end all sorts of grounds, from contempt for the repressive, hypocritical police force to contempt for the repressive, hypocritical church. He might even have himself and his family, and that his thieving put a lot of poor people out of work. Call him a roguish tribal chieftain or an ornery sociopath, he is what he is. And, for much of the movie, I had no moral reaction to his sometimes brutal exploits; I just watched. How radical! There are different kinds of artistic neutrality: the nihilist kind that signals "Nothing matters, so who cares? subject is too big to reduce to a thesis. Let's lay it out and study it." photographed with his hand blocking his face), he has a thick neck and eyes that, while small, suggest watchful calculation. The General begins with his murder and the cheers that go up when word reaches the police station, then flashes back: As a boy, he steals pastries, which he gallantly shares with his with mulishness. Refusing to budge from a condemned housing project, the adult building is razed and the trailer he has moved to the spot has been firebombed. When a city delegation marches on his tent and offers to set his family up in a new house, the inveterate burglar asks for a place in a wealthier neighborhood monitor his movements, the authorities appoint an inspector (an amusingly sober fence and on the street in front of his house, and to follow him and his gang and suffocating sense of the universe closing in. Hunted by both the cops and his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect. All I missed was something more than winks and hints been more psychologically compelling if it had set up a rivalry between the hardly figures here and, of course, psychology isn't the point. What wows 'em whose work has become less tuneful and more pretentious since the heady days of variety, and the big inspirational number, in which hope is conceded sometimes to "fly away, like silver birds," asks: "Who knows what miracles you can achieve/ When you believe?" The miracle here is the animation and production design, which has less to do with belief than with talent and millions of the Exodus in stiff, horizontal processions. The dream exalts the primitive art that is the movie's visual inspiration in a way that seems truly religious. us, to intimidate us, to get us to abandon our foreign policy." black college students play their big, expensive stereos so loud around C. Police throw tear gas grenades, pound nightsticks For the past year, he and his surrogates have deployed nearly every argument to halt this process. They have won over the public, according to polls, but they haven't persuaded enough members of the Republican congressional majority. The impeachment vote, the Republicans' message is that they're putting principle above politics. "A thermometer is not a terribly useful thing on matters of conscience and matters of principle," argued House Judiciary Committee Chairman "We congressmen were sent there to protect our Constitution, protect our rule something. The rule of law means something. We're a government of laws and not Moreover, the Republicans hold out hope that they can parlay these principles into good politics by persuading the public that attention as to why this is very serious, what this is all about, namely to take care that the laws are faithfully executed." reverses this logic. It parlays good politics into principle, by framing the ouster of a politically popular president as an affront to democracy, the surrogates have been making for months. The first is that the public opposes wrongly, as a popular verdict against impeachment, and today's New York resolution, which Republicans refuse to let the House vote on. The second point is that the impeachment juggernaut has four impeachment articles approved by the House Judiciary Committee, and only a handful of Democrats are expected to vote for impeachment on the House floor. impeachment votes based on "partisan politics" rather than "the facts of the many of the legislators who will vote on impeachment are "lame ducks." Some Congress chosen by the voters will have five fewer Republicans. But the old Congress, including the old Republicans, will decide whether to impeach the congressional Democrats have been escalating their rhetoric along these lines. They have accused Republicans of trying to "defy the will of the people," been fair. Nothing about this process has been bipartisan. Nothing about this impeachment process "does sometimes, to some people, begin to take on the appearance of a coup." In that explosive word, the Democrats' three criticisms thermonuclear reaction. Republicans reacted with anger. "This is the orderly process of the Constitution, not troops in the streets," said one member of the another, "so there's not going to be an abrupt change in the policies that the reason to worry. Imagine the uproar when televisions across the country show the first Democrat rising on the House floor, in a thundering crescendo, to denounce the Republican "coup" against the president. Imagine the barrage of drama being hounded by reporters as to whether a "coup" is in progress. Yes, the rebuttals are subtle, complicated, and technical. It's too bad Republicans have spent the past year mocking legal distinctions. That's all they'll have "Plot Holes" is an occasional column about logical inconsistencies in in the daylight? Does he explode into flame, as in John Carpenter's vampires are all over the place. Not only do they differ morphologically from movie to movie, but they behave with stunning inconsistency even within their his ability to disembowel and decapitate humans with a single swipe of his The vampire is a species of the undead. Like any other species, it should manifest a certain behavioral logic that moviegoers can rely upon. What if I wanted to make a movie about, say, bears? And what if I found it more "interesting" creatively if the bears in my movie had fish scales instead of fur? Would audiences placidly accept such a frivolous reordering of nature? I think not! Yet when it comes to vampires, filmmakers feel free to problem in our society that I hereby propose a Uniform Code of Vampire tend to regenerate." Fair enough, but it's past time for a meeting of the minds on this crucial issue. How, exactly, do you kill a vampire? It was easy enough woman "pure in heart" manages to keep the vampire by her side all night until "after the cock has crowed," he is guaranteed to suffer what looks like a strange little disappointed groan that remains a benchmark of decorum when compared with the hissing and writhing deaths of modern screen vampires. throat, is eaten by an alligator, and then what is left of his body is consumed in a fire. But only a few centuries later he bounces right back. In in chopping off heads than impaling hearts. In John Carpenter's sunlight, though he can be considerably slowed down if his heart is pierced by walk around in the daytime if they have prudent ultraviolet protection, but disintegrate on the spot when they are hit in either the head or the heart with of the only contemporary vampire movies that bothers to regard garlic as a Standard: crucifixes and garlic to be regarded as nonlethal irritants. Vampire death to be assured by penetration of heart muscle by any foreign object or by prolonged exposure to sunlight. Decapitation alone not sufficient to secure desired death effect. A deceased vampire should not explode, disintegrate, burst, morph, or molder but should serenely resume countenance less sophisticated movies, everybody who is bitten by a vampire turns into one, usually after an unspecified incubation period. The artsier the film, the more elaborate the distinction between the merely dead and the truly undead. To the it seemed to be that the average victim dies a straightforward bloodsucking death. But every millennium or so a vampire meets that special someone. In order to "turn" this person, it is necessary for the vampire to drain the victim's tank and top it off at the crucial moment with a quart or so of his new recruit must also drink the vampire's blood, but the transformation is far pokier, requiring weeks and weeks, and if the vampire happens to get stuck with vampirism as an infectious blood disease. "Look at the polys," a beautiful young hematologist says to her colleague as she's performing an autopsy on a victim's own blood and its subsequent replacement by blood of donor vampire. If longer qualifies for living death designation and will be considered vampires fly? In the early days of the movies, before special effects, they had around his castle, and when he rises from his coffin he's as stiff as an fruit bat. (He also turns into a hyena and an armadillo, species that are in Interview With the Vampire and soars with him high into the night Vampires can fly down the road fast enough to catch a speeding car and can stick to the ceiling of a motel room. But at crucial moments in these movies the vampire always seems to forget he has these powers and ends up wrestling around on the floor of a dusty convent or abandoned factory with the ground. Sustained flight permissible if vampire takes the form of a bat, owl, or other authentic nocturnal species. Vampire is specifically prohibited from demonstrated in a motion picture, they must be used consistently and logically throughout, without regard to the convenience of the filmmakers. "protruded over the lips" almost at once. In his baroque homage to the book, so much gaping mouth movement that the count looks like he's coughing up a in a constant state of dental arousal. They're the exception, however. Almost every other vampire movie accepts the patently unnatural convention that a vampire's fangs are capable of receding into his gums. But since vampires are fangs as default characteristic. Strongly recommend, when appropriate, character in Blade observes an "odd muscle structure around the in these warm thanks. He is waiting for you with a soldier's handshake." different, these two, yet they were very close. An introvert and impatient general and a noble and generous monarch, whose objectives and souls joined." He imagined them "up there" together, lighting cigarettes for each other and government urgently tackles unemployment, the stability of the currency, and the trade balance. Another urgent problem is the country's water shortage, he added, "If they do not solve it immediately, a drought in the summer will lead he said the new king will have to focus a lot of attention on preserving calm with his absolute authority and "almost obsessive" concern for the maintenance other problems first. "All those with the welfare of the king and his kingdom, as well as ours, at heart would do well not to force him to confront these complex and sensitive issues at this time," he wrote. from office? My answer, after months of indecision, is a strong "Yes!" party having a sufficient majority in Congress to get rid of any president, which would convert us into a parliamentary democracy. At one time I had provides for the removal of a president found unable to perform the duties of his office. But that required the concurrence of the vice president, which I thought that censure or rebuke might do as punishment and expression of I can say exactly when I came to the conclusion that days before the House of Representatives was to start action on impeaching him. was decided, and not only decided, but decided with a heat that I rarely feel to represent us anywhere. Do we want him laying the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, comforting our mourners, saluting our heroes? Do I want to see his "sincere" face on television every day? No, decidedly no! order to divert us from the forthcoming impeachment debate. That is the point: I don't know, and most of the world doesn't know. He has generated the belief that he is capable of taking such grave action to save his own skin. after the House voted for impeachment strengthened that belief. He had started the bombing just in time to give his supporters the refuge of arguing that to impeach the commander in chief while our troops were in harm's way would be unpatriotic. He had stopped the bombing as soon as that argument became useless. That is an abuse of power! The whole episode shows how unfit he is to be president. He has polluted the atmosphere within which policy decisions are presidency. I don't want to punish him or have a national catharsis. I want something more practical. I want him off our screen. in my opinion. The performance of the economy during his administration has been good, and although I don't attribute very much of that to him, at least he has not been an obstacle. I don't expect any improvement, or any change, in serious deficiency as a president. He is prone to foolish mistakes. Every president, like everyone else, makes mistakes. Foolish mistakes are ones that could reliably have been known in advance to be mistakes. There is something in his foolish mistakes, and beyond foolish mistakes, and I am no longer "cool" People who are legally fastidious say it's not the sex, it's the perjury. For me it is partly the sex. If he had lied under oath about parking illegally I wouldn't be so disgusted. But for a married man to have oral sex with a woman employee less than half his age in the Oval Office --I can't claim not to be offended by that. I have been told that is the right as citizens to protest the behavior of their president. And it is not only the perjury. It is the sophomoric deviousness of the perjury that is an question remains. Does his behavior add up to grounds for removal from office? The words in the Constitution, "high crimes and misdemeanors," give us much latitude. If the framers had wanted to limit us more they could have been more even to our political representatives who are closest to the people but to our most senior political representatives, the Senate. My opinion is that not every perjury is a "high" crime, as grounds for removing a president from office. But universally generated such a response of disapproval, ranging from cynicism to disgust, as to degrade the ability of the presidency to serve its function. president of the United States to lead the nation and the world. That is a high I am still concerned about the risk of setting a precedent for opposition majorities in Congress to remove presidents for purely political reasons. Future generations will have to deal with that. For now we have to set the precedent that presidents of the United States should so behave themselves as to merit the confidence of the world. This is a big country, and surely we against the president should be strong enough to justify some members of his own party voting against him. In the case of this president, it is. Several readers complained about the length of last goodies nicely formatted for printout on standard size contributions to charity. But even in a normal week, Online readers have complained about not getting their favorite stuff. So, a few weeks ago, we asked readers whether they would prefer answer was "yes." Even though it will take longer to download? Yes. Even though it will require more pages to print out? Yes. You're absolutely sure, are you? Oh yes. Because Mommy and Daddy don't want to send you a great big file if and not be so conspicuous. Keep quiet and work hard. Consider marrying an Many readers did raise a good question: Why doesn't the to print out instead of all or nothing at all? The answer, as to so much in development team puts it, in the strange argot of their tribe: "Yeah, yeah, some quick and dirty solution to this dilemma. Although we say so as a sister knows about them. No one knows about them primarily because software instruction manuals get thinner and thinner. Even Word's online Help (in recent versions an annoying talking paper clip that many people quite rightly refuse to interact with) doesn't seem to know about some things the program can do. What other industry besides software goes to the trouble of improving its Adobe Acrobat version) a couple of Word's features can help you to print out just the articles you want. They're a bit clumsy for this purpose, but they do Outline toolbar that will have appeared (with any luck), you through "The Fray." At the left of each item is a plus sign. If you click once on the plus sign, you have selected that department. You can then print the selection (an option on the Word Print menu). Or you can select and delete all the articles you don't want and print the whole remaining document. Or, if you want to get fancy, you can create a blank document in a new window, and then drag and drop the articles you want into it. on the Outline toolbar to affect the whole file and expose various Papers, "Moneybox," etc.) that consist of multiple items, you can hit the plus sign and do your stuff for just the items you want. variation on Outline view, also available on the View menu. It allows you to turn various subdivisions of a file into separate files, which you can then move around or otherwise submit to your will. Try this: Select a department you want to print (it can't be the first one, Today's Papers, for features such as macros, templates, fields, styles, and so on to make a simple file or could be offered as a downloadable tool. What about using "hidden text"? (Hidden from screen view but printed? Or visible on screen but not printed?) Or the automatic table of contents generator? (Could the whole text be turned into a table of contents? What on earth for?) Strictly as an amateur, the editor has tried them all and admits defeat. readers who would like to pick up the challenge? If you beat the pros to a solution, we will name it after you, and you'll be immortalized in this little priorities that prevailed in different countries during the period. In China, which, more than any other, united all the papers of the world in a common obsession. However, there was widespread reluctance around the world this week But the biggest story around the world as the week began as a force for "tranquility and stability" and "a challenge to the economic and experiment." It said that the euro could benefit developing countries by mounting an effective challenge to the dollar. "The global preference for the inexpensive funds but also that the rest of the world effectively finances its its infant currency need you." It continued, "Your country's participation in euro. With you present, the euro is more likely to become one of the great international currencies. As an ancient superpower, you know the advantages we I give the caption, you briefly describe the Associated Press photo: lunchroom slot machines that the gambling industry had such high hopes feeble, and everyone is in a constant state of sexual arousal. Life aboard ship is tough; no wonder Navy recruiters have trouble meeting their staffing goals. Coincidentally, this is also the state of our schools, according to News Quiz predominant attack is directed at unimaginative teachers, stuffy administrators, and private companies exploiting a captive audience of classes and go to the lunchroom, and we're promoting candy and soda sales. We The kids can still buy cookies, chips, and ice cream at the school snack bar; federal law does not ban their lunch hour sale at short of revenue, have made deals with soft drink companies. Average giant's thumb and forefinger so that his tiny eyes are squashed together and his big nose and teeth pop out. With his thick black glasses, he looks as if he's being photographed through a fishbowl, an effect that the director intensifies by shooting much of the movie with a fishbowl lens. A student at a a cartoon flatness of perspective and is painted in near luminous primary colors, with some added deep brown, green, crimson, and gold leaf to convey the Awards, and begins a nationwide run this week. My first impression was that Max is supposed to be vaguely repulsive, but after spending some time with him (and and a hustler; on the other, they collude with him in myriad ways, to the point have it both ways. Like their hero, they spend a lot of time patting themselves school's worst students. The movie merrily relates the ways in which he compensates for poverty and academic disgrace. He tells people that his father is a neurosurgeon. He is shown leading the debate society, the fencing club, undiscriminating audiences. He has, we are told, spent the previous year speech to the privileged student body, Max recognizes a kindred spirit and aggressively befriends the tycoon, eventually enlisting him in his extravagant supposed to take Max? Are we to cheer his ludicrous efforts to bed a woman twice his age? Is it supposed to be cute when he sites the aquarium in the middle of the school's baseball diamond and brings in the bulldozers without Max's obnoxiousness might be meant as a state of grace. few movies come near: It often unfolds in a narcissistic trance. That's not a negligible feat. What I wanted, however, was a larger perspective, something Bottle Rocket such a trial. In one scene, ripped off from My Left insults the teacher's date: "I have a hit play. What did you ever do?" His churlishness isn't compelling, it's just an embarrassment, a callow cry for attention. "Notice me!" says the character, and you say, "Why?" has the right combination of standoffishness and warmth, but she's more lowers the volume on his wiseacre act, confining his trademark irony to an occasional glint in the eye and, in the face of crisis, an escalating air of gonzo dissolution. He's fine, but the raves (and the awards) for this ecstatic reaction from this most vital of critics, he found instead an old up the encounter, in a way designed both to deflate his own persona and to make than, for instance, me. The memory lapses over the summer were caused by the talk of various Web sites devoted to the disease. The consensus is that the medication mitigates crippling tremors but that users need to have their levels monitored carefully because too much can leave you muddled. It was in this he did anything unseemly. "What do you expect?" said a friend. "He's like the can differ, but let's make the assumption for the sake of argument.) According "civil, serious, dedicated, judicious, and highly intelligent man," Stein said. Stein also did "not feel I have the wisdom and moral elevation to [judge willingness to cover it up in statements about the rule of law and the States. I actually did and do want this man to represent the United question the technique of electing presidents was designed to answer. wish to divert the nation. I am sorry that Stein is distressed by the sight of unable to lead the nation and the world. Leadership ability is an issue for the speak again in two years (through votes, not polls). focus on the Constitution and not on such amorphous standards as "embarrassment," "reckless personal behavior," or "inability to lead." Thank goodness Stein didn't include "setting a bad example for our children" among the high crimes and misdemeanors that would warrant the removal of an elected rich guys who were ballooning around the world. Not fretting because they were rescued, but fretting because they are rich. Also, those who tilt a bit to the every day of the year. Why not concern yourself with that startling number rather than worry about three guys in a hot air balloon or one guy full of hot the controversial "Millennium Dome" would be scrapped, 100-to-1 that Prince individual betting on the end of the world go about collecting their of the House managers, I believe) told North that he had "served your country and the country was "grateful." These statements were made, of course, after North (under a grant of immunity) proclaimed that he had previously misled and lied to Congress. And, as you point out in your piece, these were issues the lives of the artists provide little (or no) illumination of their artistic production is entirely accurate. To understand the work, look at the work and understand its aesthetic context. Literary insights are to be found in other writing. Visual creativity is driven by a variety of elements (social, political, cultural, intellectual, theoretical, aesthetic); an artist's physiology, by virtue of idiosyncrasies of the mechanics of vision, has more effect than the artist's psychology on his or her work. and providing the reader with an appropriate perspective! suggests that while a certain amount of privilege is acceptable, too much privilege is wrong and should be taken away. This seems to me a wholly it's easy for kids to grip. It makes no noise when they whack things with it (unlike a wooden spoon), and the blade gives them something to gnaw on, which they find very satisfying, and there's no risk of splinters. It's also quiet toys or a set of car keys. I suppose the only hazard is the noxious chemicals they use to make the blade rubbery, but if you post this in harvested tropical hardwood (grown by a women's cooperative) handle available squirts. The only other valuable child raising hint I have is to dress the kids in orange shirts when they get mobile, because then they're easy to spot in a crowd (nobody wears orange voluntarily), although if you put this in about something. The trial of the president in the Senate will not really be a trial, or at least not a trial that any of us recognize. First, let's set aside any pondering about what the chief justice will or will not do. He can't really relevancy, or objections to testimony that the justice may make, the jury (the ordinary trial, meetings, conversations, or even deals are not made between the prosecutors and the jury. Here the House team is the prosecution team and the senators the jury. The House team and various senators have been in constant contact, making deals and arrangements. That would be considered jury tampering and would get any other case thrown out of court. In any ordinary trial, the judge sets the rules and the time frame. In this trial, the senators can change senators have made it plain, to anyone who is listening closely to their penetrating poet. Of all the many pieces of writing spurred by the Cold War and century apocalyptic writing, his poem "The Horses" may be the most effective, perhaps because it is the most calm and gentle. The plainness of the writing, the persuasive speech rhythms under the almost hidden iambic pulse, manifest immense art, culminating in a last line that could be incised in stone. On the third day a warship passed us, headed north, That old bad world that swallowed its children quick And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads, But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. the subject is particularly sensitive because of the doubtful means by which more unpleasant it looks," the Herald said. "That is no reason, though, contrary, the sooner the air is cleared the better. The Games themselves must be able to proceed unclouded by unresolved scandal." The paper added that In an editorial titled "Honesty is still the best policy," the transparency. While it is entirely appropriate that international delegates should be treated to a high standard of accommodation and dining and receive some token gifts, it said, "the test, surely, is whether those giving or receiving the gifts would want it publicly known." It added, "The possibility that it might become public is a great deterrent to bribery, which is why the disappointing, but the number probably does not stop there." It went on, "With came to doubt how the medals were awarded, the Games would be deservedly justified" and went on to propose that the choice of the host city should in future be entrusted to "professional consultants." It said, "Let a reputable minister. In the first round of voting, the poll predicted the following with granting the United States a monopoly of the production and marketing of it is charged with interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries; no longer does it care if it violates the Charter of the United Nations." It flagrantly compromised, and where illegitimate methods are used to achieve the not be dismissed but that the Senate should now vote on the articles of impeachment without calling witnesses. "If the Republicans use their majority to drag the trial on, they will inflict further political damage on themselves, regardless of any damage they hope to do to the President," it explained. than the supreme law of the land. It's the supreme political weapon. If you meant when it was adopted. Few thought it unassailable, and not even its authors claimed that their views should be fixed for eternity. So how did the Constitution become sacred? And when did judges decide they must recover its decided that the nation's founding document, the Articles of Confederation, was that those who gathered agreed on most key questions. Contrary to myth, the men who would become known as the Founding Fathers spoke for no cross section of Constitution on shaky ground. The Articles of Confederation explicitly stated conventioneers, doubtful they'd achieve unanimity, lowered the threshold to To placate skeptics, supporters emphasized not the glory of the new Constitution but its imperfections, promising it would be improved over those who raise so many objections against the new Constitution, should never call to mind the defects of that which is to be exchanged for it. It is not necessary that the former should be perfect; it is sufficient that the latter it to perfection." Far from sacrosanct, the Constitution was billed as a work flaws. Their first government had failed, and it remained uncertain whether the fragile new one could withstand challenges to its legitimacy. Historians began inevitable climax rather than as the sharp turn in the road it really practice of using religious language to describe the document, as he shared his aspirations of those illustrious benefactors of their age and nation." He went on to deliver a veritable paean to the piece of parchment. The framers' opinions, now widely considered the keystone to interpreting the Constitution, traveled a similar path to legitimacy. Ironically, the doctrine of original intent was itself not part of the framers' original intent. "As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative arguments he made, whether as congressman, secretary of state, or president. referring to the convention proceedings because, it was felt, each generation had to make sense of the Constitution for itself. Similar practices favored by justices and other constitutional interpreters began appealing to the framers' induce the Court to give the words of the Constitution a more liberal slave or free, couldn't be citizens, came to be condemned not just as racist but as a quintessential example of tortured reasoning in the service of a any historical reason. As Levy notes, when judges use history, it's typically after they've made up their minds on how they want to rule. "The Court resorts to history for a quick fix, a substantiation, a confirmation, an illustration, or a grace note," he writes, "it does not really look for the historical rather than another. The Court, moreover, cannot engage in the sort of sustained historical analysis that takes professional historians some years to doctrine without first deciding the case on political grounds. And it would newspapers. We take it not as funny but as something very serious." Who said killed by a former pro athlete simply because you decided to return some "Greased up, shiny little Sushi Boy, in his shiny little sequined old? Are we English? Are we meat and potatoes men who never get near fresh fruits or vegetables? No, we're not. We're constantly frolicking about in all meals and enjoy sex and drugs with our film business colleagues, all of whom look fabulous courtesy of the surgeon's art. And if technically cilantro is neither fruit nor vegetable, that's the least of my classification problems. Is president the one who makes the biggest increase in defense spending in a With cancer likely to pass cardiovascular disease as offering treatments still aloof from the financial restraints of managed care. response exploited the suffering of anyone afflicted with a dreadful disease; statement with the speaker who managed to get the words out without [the president] is subject to political machinery of rare democratic Republican argument that the President's impeachment is based on the issue of affairs and demands from the Republican's [sic] religious right for That is, when the personal really is political, not merely a feminist power, we should not be too surprised to see a US President on the brink of serial adultery might be overlooked more easily but for his serial mendacity," debate as "a disgraceful partisan spectacle, an act of vengeance rather than justice, a triumph for the fundamentalist Christian Right that will haunt hiatus in hostilities, a backhanded concession to the victim: a hearty now seems likely that the strikes will have to be suspended for about a month providing the most naked of presidents with his only international fig said, "I think some of them are not going to work, and they will cause don't really have an answer for this, but I did want to tell everyone that WHAT shipping, which kind of wipes out the discount, but what the heck.) If you like Federal Reserve Board likes the roller coaster allusion. Plus, 'Hey, you never Make them take it back."), and no slogan. Unable to afford a professional must make do with the public domain. Under consideration: in a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed." human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope." extraordinary example of the effects of a bad education." dominant soda pop in the "heavy citrus" category. Or, in the delightfully previous ads: "The campaign was grounded in the two core teen values of action and sociability, but was initially focused on the intensity more than the "And with urban kids today, there's more of a melding of the races." The new with the photo it retouched to remove an offensive cigarette. man's mouth, and the adulterous gleam from Pollock's eye. women smoking so she had the cigarette airbrushed out. Presumably, she did approve of the murderers photographed in other issues. order, they retouched a photo of him on the reviewing stand in Red Square for the Environmental Protection Agency has landed in a certain amount of trouble" film "smart, tough, yet curiously moving." (Visit the official spectacular cinematography, even positive critics concede the film is "too dark and cluttered and mysterious to ever achieve the popular acceptance of are about the film's lack of plot and dialogue (almost all the speaking in the site has photographs from the film and message boards; or you can read Southern roots and, with the help of a supportive extended family, puts her critics find the story emotionally powerful and refreshingly upbeat. (Check out lowlifes more an actors' showcase than a drama: It's "a tedious circus of Flight and buy a ticket for a film that goes someplace more unexpected and Times dissents, praising the film's "steady grace" and "blithe spirit." biography ever written. It must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial bloated, and painful, and writing about it in an interesting fashion is more difficult than charting the star's dazzling rise was. Nevertheless, reviewers Photographer comic strip is praised as "not only something to read but to "She was quite a talented girl, and she was cute as a button too. And being the woman, she did give it the woman's touch." Who said this, about whom, Bush said, "We should celebrate them in festivals, we should enjoy their traditions in our homes, we should share them with friends." "Pornographers in wheelchairs. And if that doesn't sound like kissing up to Why is it hard to swallow a plea for tolerance from metropolitan prejudice, the Southern thing but with cattle? on high." But I just can't believe they'll enjoy his traditions in their homes Has a proud heritage of union busting. "As a professional football player, he'd been physically threatened by other players for refusing to join a Is pleased with traditional male incompetence. "Shares a dingy Capitol Hill World War II generation. (I have no problem at all with it being used to book then rush to get one out first?) The World War II people won a war (two wars, one on each side of the world) then felt they had earned riches, comfort, right to never being questioned with the corresponding right to never being wrong, etc. You did a good job of starting the dialogue. There's a ton of good, commercial stories to be had in mining that way of thinking. planned and managed conflict without the support of their country. refreshing to have candor in a review instead of the usual (and predictable) from a trial to a regular subscription. I want more of this type of intelligent points out the difference between the two quoted numbers--$2.7 million in the difference is: The first is the amount that the lucky fan is going to get the auctioneer's fee. This is the amount on the check the new owner writes. So was about the bonanza to the fan, the first number is accurate. history, they have in common a fashionable theme: the nobility of those who evince a powerful sense of nostalgia for the world of their fathers. As his his book, he repeats a claim he first made on television when he was swept up another boomer critic of his own generation, often drew this contrast during of those who want to remove the president are conservative boomers who believe those who experienced the Great Depression and fought in World War II. because of the instinct that motivates it but because of a romanticizing somehow better people than those born after them remains, like most facile generalizations about generations, a matter of prejudice, not analysis. "faith." Putting aside the question of whether more faith is a good thing, was support for this claim, and one might well make the opposite case. The United States has probably become more religious as boomers have become the dominant legacy of the World War II generation, the strong commitment to family values returning veterans didn't get divorced in large numbers. But that doesn't prove that our grandparents and parents had a deeper commitment to family values. It because they found the virtual prohibition on divorce an intolerable had them too. The baby boomers who inherited the divorce laws the World War II generation loosened have in recent years begun to contemplate tightening them includes a number of moving stories about wartime heroism that can be appreciated without reference to its argument, which is pretty much "They came to understand the need for federal civil rights legislation," he Medicare. But others, such as GI Dole, voted against it. Let's not forget that they never boast, and they're reluctant to talk about their wartime inclined to relive the battlefield horrors they experienced. But this may have less to do with the unique stoicism of a generation than with the natural been tempted to make more of a meal of their experiences, it's partly due to the fact that those experiences weren't widely shared. The therapeutic culture of the present era also probably plays a role, teaching us that it's not healthy to keep one's pain bottled up inside. But who created that therapeutic culture? You could argue, once again, that it was a bequest from members of the that the baby boomers lack the moral character they themselves had. "They faced question men of draft age faced after Pearl Harbor was whether they would serve their country in an unambiguously good cause. The challenge faced by the generation also had little choice. Everyone was needed in the war effort, and military needed only a small percentage of those who were eligible, and there were many options for evasion, legal and illegal. Some served and didn't answered this quandary in the best way. The GI envy felt by members of the pivotal generational experiences. No one would deny that the Great Depression attempts to explain history in terms of common traits already possessed by the peer groups that confronted these events are seldom illuminating. Just as we cannot know how the baby boomers would have responded to the moral challenge of World War II, we cannot know how the World War II generation would have the "greatest" doesn't say anything meaningful about that generation. It does, however, reveal something of what the speaker finds lacking in his own. revive a worthwhile if unpopular idea: stronger federal control over the the press, but his plan to penalize states with the loss of federal education dollars if they fail to enforce strict academic standards was by far the most to his rhetorical guns (and hangs onto his job), it could become one of the most important initiatives of his presidency. If he doesn't, or if the bill fails to clear a Congress that's sure to be hostile to it, it will rank with the health care bill as one of the more significant policy disappointments of The proposal reaches the table at a time when education reform has all but disappeared from the national political agenda. Remember legislated reforms such as merit pay to boost teacher performance. The cry for down by congressional Republicans who perceived it as a liberal plot to create a national board of education, and by some congressional Democrats who saw (A special place in hell should be reserved for perpetual Republican Bush administration promoted national standards only to oppose them when they education has receded as a subject of national concern. A large part of the schools. Education Week recently pronounced the chances were surveyed continued not to meet the goals panel's math performance standard. bit vague. They will be sketched in later this year, when the White House drafts reauthorization language for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But at least as conceived at the moment, the plan is to empower the federal annually on public elementary, junior high, and high schools through this practices. (If the feds got really mad, they could also withhold the actual funds that go to schools, although that is an unlikely "last resort," according Among these practices are "social promotion," whereby unqualified students are kicked up to the next grade level; persistent low academic performance; poor discipline; and the assignment of teachers to subjects for which they are unqualified. (This last, aimed mainly at eliminating the issuing of "emergency" teaching certificates, appears to be a concession to the teachers' unions, but it will be accompanied by stricter requirements for testing new teachers.) The plan also requires schools to issue, in addition to report cards on individual students' performance, report cards on the school's overall academic goals, insists, "The states are the constitutional authorities in education." reporters briefing on the plan earlier this week, White House Domestic Policy local control." Actually, the Times headline, one hopes, got it right: percent of all money spent on public education from kindergarten through responsibility to make sure the money is well spent? Any state bent on keeping its "constitutional authority" unmolested is always free to buy back In fact, the whole notion that education should be purely a standardized tests, national teachers' unions, national textbook publishers, and national laws, regulations, and funding programs for schools." And also, he might well have pointed out, a national economy: Jobs are not parceled out says, "There has been too great a difference between school districts and never been used; although some states have received warnings, none has lost funds, as is permitted under the law. There's some real danger that cosmetic off penalties under the new law. Like most major education reforms in recent years, this one eschews testing of teachers who are already on the job as the argues that "to say we're only going to deal with the new ones is to say we'll curriculum, which, regrettably, remains beyond the pale in any practical discussion about education reform because of the ongoing culture wars among Christian fundamentalists, mainstream educators, and multicultural to inhabit the Oval Office for two more years, this is no time to play it murderer, "I have commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment, so you will something as weak as one man's voice to affect the governor's decision, and he penalty will be induced to reflect on the words and the reasoning of the pope." alive in St. Louis and that the governor's act of clemency was "the flower that pushes up through the snow, the sign of a new spring after the long winter of would not wish to upstage the bride and groom, and it is probable that they will make a number of appearances together, so that by the time of the wedding they will appear perfectly natural as a couple," the Times said. But, as several papers observed, they don't look very natural in public yet. change should come about from within and can only be undertaken by the people themselves. Such action would not be helpful or worthwhile or have effective tangible results if it were organized from abroad." could spill over into other countries in the region," he wrote. run the affairs of state with his father's help," he said. "Now he leaves him recovered. "The mistake could not only cost the king dearly, but his kingdom leadership, he wrote. Although the king had rebuked his brother Crown Prince have no agenda other than service of the homeland." of law and the lawlessness of its tribal past. "Certain outside powers" that do the country to sabotage its modernization drive, the paper said. terrifically untroubled if anyone thinks I am strange, in fact everything about this day will be a ratification of how I am not them; and my manner, though courteous, will tend to make them suspect that they are boring. They will wonder why they have no purple sneakers. Cool years ago and the sacred tears in my eyes at that time. though I might not meet a lonely marvelous slim woman began charging a subscription fee for access to most of our contents and services. Effective today, all current editorial content will be subscribers only, and we will be adding new subscriber benefits. Current subscribers will get a special offer for continuing under the new arrangement. If you're not satisfied with it, we will happily refund the balance of your subscription. Well, happily is an exaggeration. But we do appreciate the Who are you trying to kid? You're obviously backing down. looks as if it's going to be easier to sell ads but harder to sell every month for each one paying subscriber. (That's counting a reader just once no matter how often he or she visits.) It's painful to think of turning away so the potential readers who don't come in the first place. The spreadsheet wizards figure that ad revenue from the increased traffic will more than can't charge for content on the Internet. Information wants to be free! Unless it's about sex or stocks. But oh no, you knew better. You'd show the world. You'd charge for news digests, for political analysis, for cultural one true path. We tried one thing, now we're trying something else, and we'll keep trying until we figure it out. Although we are owned by a rich company, breaking even cast the first stone. (And "going to break even next year" Clearly, yes. It may just have been that we were too early. There is too much free stuff out there, the process of paying and accessing what you paid for is too clumsy and unfamiliar, and so on. Some of this may change. But we also may have missed a couple of more fundamental truths about the Web. One concerns readers and one concerns advertisers. to site. If they really like a particular site, they may visit it often, but way you might read a traditional paper magazine in one sitting. This appears to be in the nature of the Web and not something that is likely to change. And it makes paying for access to any particular site a bigger practical and Web advertisers, meanwhile, don't seem to place any special value on reaching paying subscribers. That was a bit surprising, since traditional magazine advertisers usually require paying subscribers. Even profitable magazines often spend more money finding and signing up subscribers than those subscribers will ever pay. But if they just gave the the Web? Probably because Web advertisers pay on the basis of ads served. If of knowing how many of those readers actually saw your ad. But if they paid for the magazine, you at least have some assurance that they picked it up. On the radically changes the economics of charging for subscriptions. fold, that the end is nigh, strange and dreadful diseases are about to ravage you made the same sort of dire predictions when we started charging for content a year ago. We have had nothing but support from the company, both in general and for every stage of our ongoing experiment. One benefit of making trepidation, and his initial reaction was not encouraging. He turned to his She'll get many new readers, we explained. "And 'Dear Prudence,' and wistfully in a recent Wall Street Journal column that for his "selfless coin of politics. With a federal government that was tiny compared with today's, a senator's power lay largely in deciding who would receive plum jobs made out to be. At least four other senators were prepared to oppose conviction states, and there's little evidence to suggest the impeachment votes turned the elections in any of these cases. All "seven martyrs," as they've been lionized, fortunes in the years that followed are most plausibly chalked up to the way. Stung by charges that his vote was bought, he turned the tables on his accusers and charged them with orchestrating the whole impeachment campaign so as to get their hands on the controls of patronage. He got the version of events into the historical record. In a passage later quoted by open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever." This grandiose account was adopted almost uncritically wrote to his wife: "This storm of passion will soon pass away, and the people, the whole people, will thank and bless me for having saved the country by my single vote from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed, though none but God can ever know the struggle it has cost me." Of course, in a funny was distorted by the Telegraph 's sensationalistic presentation. His life with a respectful consideration of the man's achievements as a writer and documents numerous inaccuracies, fabrications, and shadings of the truth in literary scholars over the reliability of individual testimony and the proper relationship between autobiographical narrative and literal truth. figure to represent the profession in years. The Nation hailed his inauguration as a victory for the left, a sentiment not shared by some inside radical postcolonial scholars who have followed in his footsteps. Meanwhile, ballot initiative. Officials worried about falling minority enrollments and applications are proposing to guarantee admission to the University of described the conference as the most visible manifestation of a rapprochement between religion and environmentalism. Religious leaders, especially links between its exaltation of nature and pagan traditions. And environmentalists have on occasion attacked religion for promoting human Southern Baptists. "Creation was not provided to us by God to consume it into model of social scientific method and a source of broad insights into the way people live, the discipline had become directionless, intellectually moribund, and hopelessly overspecialized, with departments across the country scaling that covers politics and ideas, asserts that "sociology is back." The evidence? A renaissance of sociological research in the United Kingdom, as well as the fact that Prime research is coming from independent think tanks and corporations, not from investigate the suppression of academic freedom in that country. Those denied rising young stars in the economics profession found that this decade's hot why so few junior members of the field have crossed over into the public sphere. The answer seems to be that the very youngest generation is doing work that is too technical and too mathematical to attract much attention or be agreement being reached. The students, affiliated with the United Auto Workers union, have last year in favor of their right to organize. The university appealed the decision, insisting that graduate students, even if they work as instructors, are students first and foremost. Union organizers have not yet said when the grimly that he has refused to offer the necessary confession or contrition, that his impeachment by the House has put him within one step of expulsion, and how he will get out of his latest predicament, consider how he got into it. got cocky after the election. Emboldened by what he perceived as a popular mandate to end the impeachment inquiry, he infuriated ambivalent lawmakers by refusing to admit that he had lied. He answered the House Judiciary Committee's his public lies, as opposed to his private sexual misconduct. unrepentant president must be punished. "We must draw a line between right and But if delivering that message was the motive for impeachment, then there's no media in portraying his impeachment as a devastating, permanent scar on his presidency. In so doing, they have vented the outrage against him and have relieved the pressure to convict him. Already, Republican senators have is that the elections didn't change the congressional math. There were still impeachment, the more Democrats resisted. A Democratic congressional aide Republicans' majority became, the more they resorted to behavior that was suppression of a resolution of censure. White House aides promptly went on the failed to trigger the kind of bipartisan collapse necessary to bring down a the Senate, where Democrats have more than enough votes to save him. polls conveyed two opposite threats. House Republicans faced a backlash from they also faced a backlash from conservative voters if they voted not to impeach him. (Several Republican consultants pointed out that the greater the Senate to spare them the second backlash by refusing to convict him. Republicans aren't stupid. They know that if they go all the way and depose they shot to wound, not to kill. Already, four House Republicans who voted for that the only other way to extinguish him was to make him commit suicide. They have pursued this strategy in two ways. The clever, premeditated way was to the quickest way out. The bizarre, unpremeditated way was to oust their own impeachment makes it less likely than ever that he will resign. The point of resignation was to escape the humiliation of impeachment. Now that he has been humiliated, his only hope is to seek redemption in the Senate. successfully dismissed the scandal as being "just about sex." After the lied about the affair. The more he lied about his lies, the more people focused on his lying and forgot what the original lies were about. sins were about sex, not perjury, his assertion that he was setting an they don't think his adultery should have ended his career, they agreed on the shouldn't be judged by their past indiscretions. Both these conclusions play to fantasizing that in order to win forgiveness, he first had to find a way to forgive his enemies. Now they have made that fantasy come true. moll whose heart gets melted by a youngster who falls into her charge: "Easily unhappy couples. The surfeit of mildly interesting plots surrounding each duo results in a film that is "the cinematic answer to one of those parties where negative side, critics say it "rolls in sleaze and squalor like a mangy dog on taken seriously in the old boys' club of network news in the '70s and '80s. presidents and too little on exactly what it took for her to get where she is. such as herself might have contributed to the decline" of network news, which she bemoans. Robin Toner in the New York Times Book Review is less insider scoop it promises. This Primary Colors -type story of a president "What makes the novel riveting is its almost anthropological description of the best intentions. The glimpse it gives into the manic highs and lows of female adolescent friendship as seen through a tortured trio of friends in the a near miss. Some blame a shaky translation from the original Polish; others say the author's use of so many varying literary devices and styles squelches friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and wineglass on the floor. We were both apologetic, and the hostess seems to have have told you something she just happens to know: Pouring white wine on red wine is the antidote. But this only works immediately after the calamity. the air as you. Do offer to pay for the rug to be cleaned at the finest rug flowers. If she tells you everything's fine and only a faint hint of color married two years ago, and I was his best man. I was somewhat lazy in procuring a gift, and in the intervening time my friend has got a divorce and is soon to be remarried. He tells me that I need to "double up" on his gift. What do you sputtering she hopes she can type! Your friend, the groom, is way out of line. Double up, indeed. Why don't you respond that, in the infinite wisdom of your procrastination, you somehow divined the marriage would be a dud, and you think you will give this one a similar two year trial period? cousin. Her son has three children. The girl has just finished college and of it for her tuition. The older of the two boys is now in college, and the that amount plus what he estimates will be his tax liability on the gift. It will amount to about a third of my remaining nest egg (most went to my university as a "planned gift," for which I get a quarterly dividend). care after Social Security and employers' insurance coverage are exhausted. I inheritance taxes. My friends say don't do it, and I am of the same opinion. adage: No good deed goes unpunished. You were most generous to your cousin's your life certainly comes before anything else. Discussion closed. coffee shop near my home. This establishment provides four bistro tables, which woman came over to me and said, "Would you mind if three of us joined you at rather read your paper?" I asserted that I would rather, indeed, but added that would agree that most of us linger over coffee, within reason. Lately, though, a young man has also begun to frequent the shop, so singles occupy two of the suggest sharing a table, though this issue is not under my control, as he comes in shortly after I do. If you were I, what would be your policy here? time a bit (or hide behind a lamppost), allowing the single gentleman to enter first. Then you come in, "notice" he's by himself, and ask if he is inclined to have you at his table so that two singles will not occupy half of the available tables. If he is welcoming, that means you guessed wrong about his approachability. If he declines your overture, you will have definitive The slogan "Feed the rush" is being replaced with "Life's a scream." Morris magazine. Either way, it was his editorial policy that the essential thing about smoking was not selling a toxic product that kills half a million people a year; it was freedom of choice. He was always in the market for cultural magazine, but not in the gray sense, not in the review sense." says complicated ideas that make your head hurt sense, not in the having to think about stuff so hard that it distracts you from shopping and later that night you have that little sexual problem again, not me personally but some other But when my auxiliary daughter appeared on the scene last month, I learned not A sort of shopping psychosis overtakes the mind of a father fresh from the delivery room. It might be rooted in some sort of primal they're going to stop making it"). Conquer this urge, and you may graduate the security officer worried about "unusual activity" on your card. to what you need and what you don't. This is, obviously, a subjective guide written by the kind of flawed individual who actually considered buying an however, necessary, and I would suggest as a first step the purchase of Price the equivalent number of Pampers. Warehouse club diapers aren't as handsome or today can absorb the contents of a camel's hump without leaking. Avoid the baby's skin. The only diaper worth paying a premium price for is one that unintended) to Price Club baby wipes, whose very inferiority make them a better absurd degree with whatever strange chemical cleansers all wipes are soaked in. Price Club wipes, however, are packaged with more modest amounts of cleansing liquid, presumably to save the manufacturer money. Which is fine, because wipes can irritate the skin. As for electric baby wipe warmers, one of which, in my sheltered from the cruelties of life on earth, I think they should get used to leave the diaper department: An indispensable purchase is a Diaper Genie, a brilliant little contraption that is a vast improvement over the open diaper diapers through a hole on top, and with a few twists of a canister, seals the diapers in plastic and eliminates most of the smell. It does not provide Level popular and come from a modestly sized family, you will receive, on the birth that a gift of Gap stock, rather than Gap clothing, should be far more welcome.) There are those who decry the style hegemony of Baby Gap, but I am not one of them. The clothing is relatively inexpensive, durable, and pair of awfully cute baby overalls that will be worn exactly three times, but much defense spending. Hence the Ford Explorer parked outside, which I would upgrade to an Expedition except that I live in a neighborhood filled with made of material so hard it would crack your knee if you walked into it, and its belting system is far more encompassing and elaborate than the average car features a section that could be called the Wall of Death. At Buy Baby, the covered with child safety products, some of which are absolutely useless and most of which I have bought. (I haven't got around to installing the toilet lid locks yet.) Obviously, outlet guards and rubber padding for low furniture (the "Coffee Tables of Death," with which most parents are familiar) are necessary, but the Wall of Death preys on parental fear. Hence, a product called "fireplace gas valve safety covers," whose purpose was too obscure for me to child from inserting objects into cassette opening." Another way to prevent a way to keep a child from drowning in the toilet is to keep an eye on the child necessity if you live in a big house and can't hear the baby crying in her really necessary? You can't even use it to spy on a nanny, since it has no stand there. All cribs sold in reputable stores meet current safety standards, she outgrew in a month and wore so rarely in that month that, amortized, the hesitant to tackle, and my children aren't old enough for me to comment on suggestion would be a cardboard box wrapped in bright red paper and filled with my house, because it is on toys that I am a serial spender. An example: Four days after my second daughter was born, I was dispatched to Buy Baby to grow up healthy and secure if they just had a stuffed, mounted rhino head in banned from toy stores until such time as I regain my bearings. It was a secure a censure agreement and avert a Senate trial? That's the question ways, he'd be better off sabotaging the censure movement and polarizing the being convicted. But is he the only one who fears that outcome? Although one reason why Senate Republicans have expressed far less enthusiasm for censure serve his legacy better than a trial would? Arguably, impeachment has resolution, he'll be humiliated, broken, and unable to pass any part of his agenda in his final two years. Could conviction and removal be much worse than much to gain. Trial and acquittal might be his only hope of erasing the stain defense and avoid calling witnesses in order to shorten the trial and end his "ordeal." But whose ordeal is it? Republican senators have been saying for days that they don't want to antagonize the public by calling witnesses and dragging out the trial for months. Why not give them what they don't want? The House call witnesses, inflame these incendiary accusers, and help them ignite the proceedings, perhaps torching their own party in the process? disrupt the movement toward a censure deal. It's hard enough to work out a deal already, pundits observe, given that Democrats want to soften the censure resolution while Republicans want to stiffen it. But why is this partisan rift extinguish the threat of conviction. All he needs is a censure proposal that confess to perjury before the grand jury (Republicans insist on it; Democrats warn that it may kill the deal) and whether he should be fined (many Republicans demand it; many Democrats say it's unfair or unconstitutional). The sabotage. His best way to navigate this dilemma is by subtly encouraging Democrats to hold out for terms so soft that Republicans can't abide them. Republicans, they might vote to convict him. But what if the two options are considered in reverse order? Already, several conservative Republican senators are demanding that the Senate complete the trial and vote on conviction before "negotiating" a censure deal. But once conviction has been voted down, why movement in order to persuade Democrats to vote against conviction, then sabotage censure by encouraging liberal and conservative zealots in the Senate ignore what's best for the country and that his enemies save him through reckless excess. But that has been the story of the year. senators appeared on television to explain why witnesses should or should not Republicans frame the question leads to calling witnesses, and every way in which the Democrats frame the question leads to not calling witnesses. focus attention on the facts of the case, which are strong. Democrats want to divert attention to the significance of the case, which is weak. So Republicans want witnesses, and Democrats don't. Republicans also want to focus scrutiny on costs of his acquittal. Here is a taxonomy of this week's frames and frame. Its purpose is to keep witnesses out. The argument is that they will talk about sex, besmirch the Senate, and offend the viewing public. Example: "I don't understand why the House feels they have to sully the floor of the United Law. This is the Republican rebuttal to the "sex" frame. Its purposes breaks the law in not upholding and not telling the truth under oath and someone who obstructs justice does, in fact, threaten the republic" (Sen. Rick Democratic rebuttal to the "rule of law" frame. Its purposes are to shortcut the trial, change the subject from the facts of the case to their is that even if all the facts are granted, they don't "rise to the level" that would justify his removal. Example: "We're willing to accept the facts, because the threshold question is this: Even if it's all true exactly as the House managers have put it forward, does this rise to the level of impeachment? Does it rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors? That's the threshold Censure. This is the advanced rebuttal to the "rule of law" frame. Its on mitigating circumstances. The argument is that a resolution censuring justice. Example: "I came to the conclusion that the appropriate punishment for this kind of wrongdoing, lying about an extramarital relationship, was censure. Republican response to the "censure" frame. Its purpose is to abort the censure movement before the censure movement aborts the trial. The argument is that the Constitution authorizes the Senate to vote only on conviction, not on censure. president should be removed only for crimes that imperil the nation. Example: lying under oath, if you will, about an extramarital relationship does not accomplishes several objectives. First, it makes the strongest case for calling witnesses. Example: "I have never seen a trial before where you had factual disputes where you didn't have witnesses where you could watch their demeanor Second, it neutralizes the "summary judgment" frame, since summary judgments are up to the judge, not the jury. Example: "We have an obligation to sit back "summary judgment" and "censure" frames by organizing the trial's issues in temporal sequence rather than as a decision tree. Example: "We're prejudging this thing [when we say] it doesn't meet the standard of the high crimes and Democratic rebuttal shatters the "jury" frame and diverts scrutiny from the defendant to the prosecution. The argument is that the Senate should reject the case not because it's unproven but because it's politically motivated. Example: "One of the reasons why we feel that this impeachment trial is really not what rejoinder grants that the House impeachment process was politicized but argues regain public confidence is to transcend partisan rancor and skepticism by reverting to the innocence of a jury. Example: "We're sort of like the petit jury. How we got there, that's up for somebody else to determine. What we have combines the jury nullification and constitutional duty arguments, suggesting The purpose of this rhetorical bomb is to annihilate any discussion of the facts. Example: "Do I think he answered that question honestly? No. Do I think what he did was reprehensible? Absolutely. But the question is, this alone, its purpose is to strip Republicans of their appeals to the Constitution, jury guidelines, and the rule of law. The argument is that members of Congress have day they're not spending on Social Security, education, and other issues. When Boxer raised this concern, her Republican colleagues explained that they were discussion away from the trial. It grants the distinction between the trial and administrations did the same thing. The nonpartisan spin: Congratulations to the committee's Democrats and Republicans for reporting the ugly truth on both exchange for protection from trial. The defectors, who played key roles in the prisons and handcuffs." The cynical spin: Hun Sen is protecting them to consolidate the power he won through a coup. The idealistic spin: They should The bombing campaign failed, and the United States is slinking away with its the end of the year in order to steal the "first candidate" title from other Republican primaries by leading the fights for tobacco regulation and campaign lung failure. The other seven remain in critical condition, though four are now breathing without ventilators. Each one who survives will require two months preparing to attempt the same feat and, sooner or later, one of them will same exciting way they won three other games down the stretch: on a field goal disillusionment that somehow rises to heights of sublimity. (Who'd have thought around her head, her skirts hiked up, her thighs tightly gripping her So it was probably inevitable that her life and music would turn into fodder for a cautionary parable about the counterculture, complete with the kind of lingering death that lends itself readily to familiar depictions of classical (who gets all but lost in the transfer to film). As the title implies, all was as a flutist, her little sister eventually left her in the dust, and the family's life came to revolve around the needs of its increasingly demanding sisters equal status, telling the story of each in a separate strands, first who, denied a proper childhood and family life, pines away in foreign capitals, behaves with increasing waywardness and vulgarity (she adopts a bogus Continental accent), and expires in near solitude, with only her loyal sister It's difficult to believe that serious critics have that insight consists largely of the notion that People Like That Are Different distance, fixating largely on her freakishness. She seems never to rehearse or to hold opinions about the composers whose works she serves, and her rapport considerations of libel) is chiefly the upshot of their comparable celebrity. The centerpiece of the movie is when the two narratives come together and in her furs and miniskirts and drinking heavily, she uses emotional blackmail her own, evidently unsatisfying, marriage. The illness that strikes her down could be viewed as vengeance for a profoundly unnatural existence. I frankly don't care if the picture is accurate or not. The larger point is that's it's all dashes and ellipses, skipping lightly along the surface of both of a troubled soul; it's probably not her fault that this lonely fruitcake manages to be both willful and restrained in equal measure. Many talented musicians are unstable; the wonder is how they also manage to be so sophomore busy congratulating himself for having more insight into love than all the incoming freshmen. In college, where this sort of material is usually performed (before the script is stashed away in mom and dad's basement alongside the beanbag chairs and weathered bongs), the older couple is played by a matronly senior and a skinny guy with white shoe polish in his hair. Here jumped at the chance to stand around a kitchen and argue about events that "Talking about love is like dancing about architecture." Architecture" was meant to be the movie's title, but the more generic Playing by Heart comes closer to conveying its deep banality. The only difference between this and a conventional soap opera (or, for that matter, an interrelationship among the couples until the final scene, a symbolic remarriage in which the characters realize that talking about love might be as futile as dancing about architecture, but you have to do it anyway if your life sentiment most clearly, the glimpse of his own mortality having given him a tart and likable performance, but she, along with the rest of the cast, has to struggle with dialogue that has the tackiness of flypaper. When she announces, "I don't want any more calculated artificiality," it's a wonder the house belong in the same sentence. Stone does best when playing creamy glamour girls family has been wiped out by mobsters. So Stone gets to stride around in short to resent him for melodramatic devices that slicker directors get away with. He makes a fatal miscalculation: The initial murders are so horrifying in their plainness that when the movie takes the gentlemanly way out and refuses to provide a cathartic bloodbath, the audience feels burned. A real gentleman, meanwhile, might have protected Stone from showing so much flesh to so little effect. In one scene, in a coffee shop, the kid she's protecting hides under friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and myself in evaluation mode and have felt ever increasingly blue and I also have not been gathering moss till the right one comes along. The result sex and nothing more. All these gents are unavailable for reasons of geography, pressure for me to make any of these relationships permanent, none of these worthwhile. It will be a new beginning. How insightful you are to use the word "unavailable." And how wise to want to bag relationships in which the other person is far away, married, or a filbert. The time has definitely come to say vanguard, and follows her upon exiting. Is this behavior still appropriate Post, however, she might suggest that you also precede the lady upon leaving an establishment, if only to push or hold the door open. at social pleasantries? And why are you encouraging them? Salutations such as "How are you?" and "Have a nice day" are obviously free of malicious intent and have virtually no semantic content, thus providing no basis for umbrage. Such pleasantries are clearly intended to be both polite and friendly, and responding to proffered congeniality with disdain, reproof, or sarcasm is nothing short of boorish. Rudeness needs dissuasion rather than promotion, as sincere wish, expressing my hope that the reproving tone of my missive will not appears are you, that it pains her to hear empty phrases bruited about. acquaintance I haven't seen in a while I often say, "Nice to see you" (which is true). The reply, "Nice to see you, too," can be completed quickly, sparing team's Super Bowl loss. "Instead of getting mentally ready for the Broncos, we "Praying. Which just goes to show you how much power that has, let me Here's the sketch on the place mat in the coffee shop: Sitting in the lobby of tatty deco hotel on their way to enjoy an early bird special, my grandparents "Instead of getting mentally ready for the Broncos, the New York Times shows how waiter or waitress behavior affects the size of the tip. Will the following increase or decrease it? (Universal Pictures). Critics pan this inspirational "based head and squeaky balloon animals in his hands. The film is sappy and grating: more watchable than it has any right to be." (Watch an interview with the two unseemly") with beautiful girl, bad guys want to poach big ape, big ape gets stunner, and the giant gorilla is stunningly realistic, but critics say the only a few mention that Hundred Dollar Holiday recycles ideas from the combination of arrogance and sincerity, narcissism and asceticism, is riveting States. This story of a long and stormy love affair between a fallen angel and critics agree on the flashes of brilliance in her writing; the disagreement is miss our retiring publisher, Rogers Weed, if for no other reason than his name. Where could we possibly find a better named publisher than Rogers Weed? (Now and a half years, in other words almost since the beginning. With business mastered the horrors of magazine economics, learned to tolerate the don't blame him. We're not bitter. The appliances may be small, but the business is large. At least potentially. And we at ones to sneer at potential. We do like to think that small appliances lack the glamour and social importance of magazine journalism, but then small appliances themselves probably feel otherwise. And Rogers will be hanging out with small appliances from now on, so he can give us a report. Maybe we'll even sign him pretending that we can conduct business as usual during an impeachment trial. offenses so heinous that he should be the first president ever forcibly evicted shouldn't sit there respectfully and applaud the items they approve of on his endless wish list. Most Republicans, though, did precisely that, reflecting the official party line that you can impeach the president and reform Social Security (and, no doubt, walk and chew gum) at the same time. This may be a wise strategy for minimizing public annoyance at the whole impeachment thing. But it makes a mockery of the whole thing too. If congressional Republicans aren't going to act as if Flytrap is as serious as the result they seek, why "Debunker," noting interesting errors of fact, logic, or mathematics in the suggested we call it "CrapShoot") isn't up and running now, because there were proposal to invest part of Social Security revenues in the stock market. Characteristically splitting the difference with conservative Social Security privatization enthusiasts, he does not propose to let people invest the money for themselves or to make benefits contingent on how well the investment There's a pile of money called the Social Security Trust Fund. (Is there really a pile of money? Well, leave that aside.) Money comes in benefits. Someday, when boomers retire in hordes, more will go out than will come in. Right now, though, more comes in than goes out, and the excess is invested in government bonds. The stock market historically has a higher rate of return than government bonds do. So the argument is that putting some of the money in stocks will make the trust fund more profitable and avoid, or at least return question for a moment, consider the whole transaction. When the trust national debt, which is still here although the annual deficit is not), the you believe that the trust fund is an accounting fiction (the government borrowing from itself, paying itself interest, and writing checks that are government commitments irrespective of the fund), then the transaction is a total wash. If you believe that the trust fund exists, then the transaction How does the higher rate of return on private stocks change things? Well, the government is now supposedly borrowing each of these dollars so simple and foolproof, why shouldn't we invest the whole trust fund in private stocks? And why stop there? Why not issue hundreds of billions in what is wrong with all these people who own government bonds? Don't they realize that selling a bond is just like issuing one? You get cash, which you invest in stocks for a higher return. Why aren't the Heritage Foundation, et al., advocating this? It's the ultimate: privatizing privatization. Obviously, there's a catch. Government bonds have a lower for figuring out how to minimize the risk of investing in stocks. But even these geniuses aren't alchemists: They can't make something out of nothing, and government gets more money as a result of investing billions in the private sector, where does that money come from? Not from higher capital investment: from any management improvement because the government owns large chunks of private companies. Indeed, to ease fears of government meddling, the plan is to investors, who are constantly acquiring, processing, and acting on information, So the government's windfall, if it exists, would have to come at the expense of rival private investors. For this to happen, the government would not merely have to match the average return on stocks but windfall would not come from private investors and would not come from economic expansion. It also wouldn't come from foreigners or the moon. Conclusion: This demand. When the government wants to borrow an extra dollar and put it in the stock market, someone else must be enticed to sell a dollar's worth of stock to buy government bonds. The interest the government must pay on its borrowing goes up, and the return it can expect on the stocks it buys goes down (because it must pay more for the same shares). Since these changes would affect all government borrowing and investment, not just this particular program, the gap would not have to close completely for the whole exercise to end up a wash. The tax credit for "stay at home parents." Family values enthusiasts have long claimed that the tax credit for day care unfairly discriminates against stay at home moms. Some even maintain that the credit is an exercise in liberal social engineering, intended to pry women away from their children and into the workplace. If all it takes is another tax credit to pacify critics of the that even with the current credit, the tax code discriminates in favor of women who stay home with the kids and against those who get a paying job and pay in turn for day care. That's because there's no tax on the Now wait, now wait. I told you it was hard to believe. But example. Suppose I am taking care of my kids and you are taking care of your kids. No tax on that. But suppose I pay you to take care of my kids and you pay troublesome and we pay each other the same amount. It's a wash, in terms of work for pay and to buy services she might otherwise provide for herself, she is bringing those services into the money economy, where they are subject to the same rules as other economic activity. Day care is just one example; restaurants and prepared food are another. An analogous principle applies to how you put your money to work. (You'll really hate this one.) If you buy a have to pay income tax on the interest. (You pay property tax as an owner, of course, but you pay it implicitly as a renter too.) Don't worry, no one is proposing to make you pay a tax on toast two pieces of bread rather than buying a sandwich from the local deli. And no one is going to tax you on the salary you're not paying yourself for child care. The purpose of the child care credit is to correct, only partially, If you want to give yet another tax break to stay at home parents because you want to encourage women to stay at home with the kids or just because you love tax breaks for anything at all, fine. But it's not a matter of fairness or government neutrality. The opposite, in fact. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would award an unanimous. Reporters looking to reprise the old conflict had a hard time suddenly dropped their complaint? Several articles on the subject have ritually invoked "the end of the Cold War" as an explanation. But it's not clear why the collapse of Communism should smooth matters over. Many wars end in a reckoning rather than in forgiveness and forgetting. A more plausible explanation is troubled to remember or sort out the morality of his actions. the Group. He quit after members of the cell received orders to take over the theater and turn it into an "actors collective." Despite his own involvement in the party but not the others who had been in it with him. So committee already knew the names it wanted, "naming names" was a loyalty test and humiliation ritual, not part of a real investigation. There is a chilling, reopen your hearing, and give you an opportunity to explain fully the participation of others known to you at the time to have been members of the That is correct. I want to make a full and complete statement. I want to tell eight others who were members of his Group Theater cell. The names included forgotten, in part, perhaps, because they were blacklisted. ostensible protest, or later castigated themselves publicly for crawling before out an ad in the New York Times to defend himself. "I believe that any known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency," he wrote. inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it." to "rat" on the murderous and corrupt leadership of his union. His decision to episode. "I don't think there's anything in my life toward which I have more ambivalence, because, obviously, there's something disgusting about giving to apologize and defended his choice. In his fascinating autobiography, the committee any names it didn't know; as an immigrant, he was eager to demonstrate his patriotism; he was faced with a choice of two evils. stood by his original policy, asserting that while he hated Communism, he would answer questions. Miller claimed the First Amendment (right to freedom of speech and association) rather than taking the Fifth (right against implied agreeing that simply being a Communist was a crime. Also, there is no Fifth Amendment right against incriminating others. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court had never ruled that the First Amendment could be used in this way. lesser artists, or more precisely in a quixotic attempt to protect those rights, would have been heroic. But failing to be a hero did not make him a casting an evil he couldn't avoid as a good. His statement that the "facts" people, did not possess. But this bit of gratuitous groveling pales next to the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which actually enforced the blacklist, to Some historians have argued recently that new information overpaid hacks, not dangerous revolutionaries. The examples of "propaganda" best human being. Who in the movie industry qualifies for that second one friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and he comes to my city on business it's understood that I am delighted to take him city. As we're both computer geeks, when we happen to be going to the same trade show or conference, night life plans and party invites for me week. If he gets wind of our plans, he'll turn up to meet us. If he hasn't overheard anything, he'll simply tag along with one of us all day until lunch these gatherings to catch up, and a third party simply changes the dynamic. (It despots, lest you find yourself manipulated by someone with the hide of a rhinoceros. Gird your loins, make your statement, and brook no further some really splendid homes owned by wealthy acquaintances and clients of both comparatively humble, small home? They know we are not in their league financially, but we feel a little sheepish inviting them to view our worn upholstery and carpets. We wonder if they, too, would feel uncomfortable with a restaurant? Would this seem impersonal and contrived? to a simple home, she has often been impressed. The hosts in such a situation usually are genuine, confident, and wise people: genuine because they are who they are, confident because they know where the real values lie, and wise because they understand that putting on the dog is pointless. People of quality do not choose friends on the basis of their possessions. that choice would not come from shame, and if you would have a better evening who has made the unfortunate mistake of falling in love with my friend. I say "unfortunate" because he happens to be gay. We both graduated together with the same major: art history. I have admired his intelligence and sensitivity for a long time. If it was not for him, I am sure I wouldn't have done nearly as well in my studies. But I did not expect to become romantically involved! He has tell him how I really feel, I fear he will want to end everything. And yet, the longer I am with him the worse it gets and the harder it becomes to hide my Ah yes, the old story of a woman falling for one of nature's bachelors. If it's any consolation to you, this occurrence is not all (when ice covered the earth). It is a truism that, straight or gay, certain people are going to have electricity for certain other people. important to point out that when you write you are "romantically involved," it interest of your mental health that you confess your feelings, thereby relieving yourself of the stress and pain of a fantasy love affair. When you 'fess up (and your friend may already have figured things out), you might ask if there is any reciprocal inclination. If not, your cards will be on the table and together you can decide if the friendship continues, platonically, or if it seems best to put things on ice. You need a resolution, and better sooner than preparing to leave, I wrote him a letter explaining my unease about his departure, because I felt we had somehow missed our chance at what could have been a real relationship. I wrote it in the summer, and I still have it. (Never mailed it.) Without my explaining how or why I feel the "loss" more now than complicated question of the mystical power of love. different one, a new one. Write to say that you've become aware of missing his presence and wonder how things are going on the left coast. If he answers, and if the answer is at all responsive, keep the correspondence going. If things regional currency," it said. According to the conservative French paper, still the richest country in the world, if judged by its investments and balance of payments surpluses, it wouldn't have dared address the United States so frankly about its ambitions for the yen if the euro hadn't been born. But euro, a currency which has only just been born." But the editorial warned, recently rediscovered their old complicity. In relation to the yen and the dollar, the euro is going to have to find its place, remembering that a his country was in ruins and he was worried about being prosecuted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The newly found private diary out the possibility of giving up the throne because he had considered it a "sacred duty to pass this nation, which I inherited from my ancestors, on to that the emperor had at least contemplated abdication. paper came out in favor of an abbreviated hearing ending with a "test" vote, which would probably be followed by a motion of censure. "An early vote would see the Senate address from the outset the core issue in this sorry saga," the Of much greater interest to the world's press was the battle for the White House. "Both are hugely attractive assets to their service straight from the heart," were threatening to stop smiling at passengers if their pay demands weren't met. "Our contracts do not say we have to smile," a union official said. The China Daily reported newspaper ads to apologize for running out of Big Macs after an unexpected running out of Big Macs? It's like Brazil running out of coffee," the editorial where consumer demand is frozen, it said, "and where better than in Japan where simply refuse to spend their own money (of which they have huge quantities)." The Guardian concluded, "They too look ripe for a topical dose of spark a global financial meltdown? The optimistic view: The real was overvalued confidence, and the "souring" of international sentiments toward emerging markets could bring Brazil crashing down, dragging the International Monetary from the recent battle between the game's "short billionaires and tall career bureaucrat who "succeeds at little things and fails at big things." smaller while restoring trust in government. His welfare reform and balanced it could work. He also replaced the heroic presidency with the competent one, asking to be judged by what he accomplished, not by how he behaved. Even so, of those still there are chastened. They have assimilated to the institution the chaos in comfort. The dehydrated food industry is booming, Time notes. (The magazine's own take is more reassuring: There will be minor sense of the absurd and his ability to bully the famous into speaking murder women who have been raped or have had sexual affairs because their honor has been sullied. The men are punished lightly, if at all. cities. Parents should look for schools with demanding standards, a rigorous core curriculum, qualified teachers, high attendance rates, small classes, and Catholic schools, because independent private schools refused to participate. He also gave away National Security Agency planning documents that allowed the Releasing him from prison, even to further Middle East peace, would be a huge to document his nation's gene pool. With its isolated and homogeneous The scientist believes that his database, which will be marketed to drug companies, will be an essential tool for locating and curing genetic disease. A punished by prohibiting him from giving the State of the Union address. He would enjoy it too much and would take "too much credit for things he had will get majority support in the Senate, both sides gear up for the aftermath. "advisers" who leaked that story before the Senate vote and is determined to drive them from office. Chance of removal from office: found gun makers liable for several deaths and injuries inflicted with illegally obtained weapons. The jury concluded that negligent marketing and distribution of handguns by nine companies was a "proximate cause" of three recent shootings, despite the absence of proof that any particular company's product was involved in any of the shootings. However, the jury awarded damages in only one case. Gun control advocates hailed the verdict as the first in a wave of lawsuits against gun manufacturers, likening their movement to the one against tobacco companies. Libertarians and gun industry lawyers condemned it Salt Lake City's. The cynical spin: Japan's investigation is less honest than within one of the record. Critics agreed that the big theme is World War II: Is Beautiful (about the Holocaust) were nominated for best picture. List helped Holocaust survivors: "I feel privileged to be in the driver's assertion concealed a conflict of interest. The Times also reports that National Liberty Journal notes that one of the ostensibly male these "subtle depictions" are deliberate and that "role modeling the gay him as a great statesman, "man of peace," and friend of the United States. The had made unwanted "sexual advances." House prosecutors urged the Senate to Association voted overwhelmingly to oppose the renewal of the independent counsel statute, concluding that it forces prosecutors to spend too much time and money examining "minor matters" in pursuit of a single target. prepared with accommodations for the reception of the House of "Scaring the guests with those fake hippos that popped out of the water in reassuring and so rare. It's not often you meet a cow that says "moo," a bird says "drug lords" and "terrorists," and "I want that stat, you dirt bag!" to some poor production assistant who's doing the best he can. No, wait, it was the cow who said that; she's so much crankier in real life than in the cartoon Love that part about the sense of national purpose and the black market tires anyway? Probably that damn cartoon bird, if by "tweet, tweet," she meant just meant "Sleep tight, you morons!" Happy New Year, everyone. calls are hoaxes, "You always have to treat a threat as real," says Mark quarterbacking will eat us alive if we make a mistake." targeted, because we're already bringing in the adults." year of major significance to the market, you can make sure you are visibly marketing chief, on the ads for the ponderous and lackluster Prince of showcasing your commitment or are you just glad to see me?) submissions will become the property of Slate and will be publish your name on its site in connection with your submission. describe the Associated Press photo: "Protesting the export of trash by New question is too hard. Send back something that lets me take a cheap shot at the television never look right. All the signs are painted the same color, as if they were done the night before, presumably by that kid who did the prom exhilaration nor the fear, conveying instead the smug fatuity of some winners. And by the way, The Man can't bust our music, but it turns out that he dressed like Ben Franklin holds a clear plastic bag (of garbage?) bearing an "I holds a Sierra Club placard: "Protect our Kids' Health and Heritage." countries. Below, some highlights as described by the Toy Manufacturers of Play the Mutual Mania board game and make the most money by balancing the risk and reward of buying and selling the nine mutual funds offered, and learn vibrates when he speaks, and has a bright yellow squishy nose that tells you closes her eyes, lowers her ears and gradually fades off to sleep and starts to livelier lives than novelists do. Where a writer basically sits alone at a desk, an artist does his thing amid a supporting cast of patrons, models, dealers, and assistants. While the novelist hones his private style, the painter joins and repudiates group movements. In the misbehavior category, century, pretty good entertainment. Yet it's not immediately obvious how such stories help you to appreciate what's hanging on the wall. If you want to grasp good bio. You can't exactly go to a museum to view "containment policy." Artists, by contrast, endeavor to reach us without words. A critic or art historian may direct our attention to things we would otherwise miss. But does the intimate biographer bring us any closer to the experience of art? You might derive very different answers to that question without backgrounds in art, represent alternative approaches to the problem of is a breezy life and times, a raucous and gossipy tale that is only secondarily puts forward an irritating psychological argument about its subject. But though the first two of these biographies are excellent and the third one dreadful, they all butt up against the same generic problem. Artists' lives are often two, is a subtle account of a great painter's unfolding. The obvious question industrial north became both an inventor of modernism and a master of of why, after moving several increments toward his mature style, the painter discovered, was drawn into the scandal arising from a huge financial fraud in which his wife's parents were implicated. This took up all his time, strained integrity. For the better part of two decades, this reserved man of regular habits fought poverty, illness, incomprehension, and rejection to make revolutionary painting. His father considered him a shame to the family and greeted each of his milestone paintings as more ridiculous than the last. Works he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, the pattern on the wallpaper and tablecloth comes from a bolt of blue cotton painting he changed the background from blue to red. This is interesting trivia, but it does nothing, really, to enhance enjoyment of this masterpiece countless lovers, famous scandals, and a soap opera of a marriage (actually two spinning incredible yarns about his days as a student cannibal or a fighter The true stories are nearly as good as the imagined wife has become so depressed that he can't even cheer her up by telling her too, we learn the salient facts of an artist's development without really saw the chance to express his political ideas to the masses. But where did this purpose in a way that works by his contemporaries don't? The mystery at the by his feelings of shame. This hardly amounts to a surprising idea about the treats it as a bolt from the blue. He does not, however, come close to giving hard to dispute the virtuosity of a painting such as The Birth of Liquid experiment by going to the Museum of Modern Art and testing my reactions examples of his early works reminded me that he was not completely worthless certainly deepened my respect for him. I could have delivered a short lecture on his early years. But did the book add anything to my appreciation of his scant media coverage and no outcries in Congress or at the United Nations, covered the onslaught live. Governments around the world cringed, many weapons to provoke allied pilots. The conventional wisdom, distilled last week allies and that they're taking the bait, engaging in a "war of attrition" that But over the past month and a half, the United States has air defense system any time there's a threat. And it's not particularly geared bombing made Page A5 of the New York Times and Page A33 of the officials are playing down the recent assaults, justifying them in terms of anonymously concede that the piecemeal retaliatory strategy is designed to "It's a way of pursuing an objective in a way that everyone's comfortable with. You get things done without rocking any boats. If we started a broad bombing that the bombing raids are unjustified. There is broad international agreement too dumb and stubborn to restrain himself. Meanwhile, a White House that couldn't resist staging a pep rally for its impeached president has remained strayed from my marriage," he said. Roll Call broke the story (there are defenders, who are leaking nasty stories about Republicans. weapons sites. The international debate is over whether the attack was about the attack to make a serious effort to stop it. The prevailing view is the impeachment debate. Democrats blame Republicans for beginning the patriotism while calling the other party shamelessly cynical for impugning its own integrity and patriotism. For a roundup of the spins, see must take further steps against terrorism and renounce their aspirations to policies by next week, he will call new elections. The opposition Labor Party, exercise bike, just three weeks before he was to turn over his office to behalf of the environment, fiscal responsibility, and public accountability. Commentators applauded his "liberal conscience" in the face of conservative He was one of the country's most accomplished black jurists. Commentators spoke approvingly of his "unambiguous liberalism," his stalwart defense of the impeachment juggernaut is good because it has scared the White House into and to be singled out for destruction, death, and extermination?" devastation and pain to people who have suffered a lot as a result of unjust logical" justifications of the attack had unfortunately been undermined by the coincidences of the postponement of the House impeachment vote and of "the of them. The Times said they were "a grim necessity" forced on the allies over his country. For that, a prolonged air campaign is the bare minimum." Evening Standard said that even those who wholeheartedly supported the offensive were "deeply dismayed by the fact that it is President .This President's personal position is far too deeply compromised for the daily Libration called the pretext for the offensive "dramatically thin" and linked it to the postponement of the impeachment process. The returning to the issue of its president. It added: "To us impotent spectators, there is left the sad privilege of realizing how weak in reality our principal has been paying Republican moderates a lot of attention lately, and the moderates are finding it all a bit disorienting. "We're just so popular now," Society, when I paid a visit earlier this week to the group's tiny office, itself an emblem of how wispy is the movement to which Republican moderates the '70s (it even sued the Republican National Committee over minority representation at political conventions!) and has been drifting a little bit to the right ever since. Today, according to Executive Director Mike Gill, a moderates during the 1980s are apparently forgotten) but tends to part company with the party on social issues such as abortion. Membership, Gill says with a The heyday for moderate Republicans was probably the late Republicanism was the prevailing conservative orthodoxy. The WASP aristocracy still controlled Wall Street, the Ivy League, and much of the press. The Republican Party's liberal wing (as moderates were then called) was filled with noble purpose about civil rights and women's rights, two issues on which Democrats would not achieve dominance until the 1960s. The remarkable work on into an angry crowd and yelling, "Anybody around here knows that I stand for issues have become mired in complexity and uncertainty about affirmative action, the grand sense of purpose in being a moderate Republican doesn't seem Even regionally, moderate Republicans have lost their identity. For years they were a bloc of Easterners perpetually at war for control of the party with together in opposition to more conservative Southern Republicans (a subspecies that didn't exist before) and conservative Westerners on Rust Belt issues such Since the districts of moderate Republicans, especially in the East, tend to be heavily Democratic, and the ideological differences between moderate Republicans and New Democrats are now microscopic (or perhaps nonexistent), it's a bit baffling that moderate Republicans don't switch party affiliation and become Democrats. There are a few Democrats around who began switch was made at least two decades ago. That's when former New York City known Republican politicians to defect to the Democrats in recent years are New the Republican moderate as a subspecies? One explanation is simple mislabeling. because he bucks his party on a few issues (campaign finance, tobacco) and is found to be personally likable by the press. Sometimes all it takes in terms of simply because they maintain some vestigial sensitivity about race. Another explanation is opportunism. The liberal views of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, always identified himself as a Republican; he dropped the pretense only when he ran for the House last fall as Republicans, though, the principal reasons not to switch party are nostalgia had a Web site, she answered: "It's really pathetic. Don't bother." About the only thing a Republican moderate is likely to get worked up about these days is in a shabby building on Capitol Hill a few doors down from the palatial headquarters of the Heritage Foundation. The elevator groans, and brown paint with that of the corporate titans who supposedly rule the party: Get government out of the bedrooms and concentrate on lowering taxes. Yet the group's budget is dwarfed by that of Heritage, which rakes in corporate contributions while scattering its attention between economic and social issues. Broadly speaking, they provided their party with its last two presidential courted this week by Republican leaders and the White House, their ranks seem in no danger of expanding. For all their good manners, common sense, and solicitude toward voters, they just don't command much respect. tell the truth at once, instead of listening to the advice of his beginning about the bad influence of that man, who cares only about opinion polls, bends with the wind of the moment, and doesn't give a damn about moral in a state of enormous anxiety because "he knows he has damaged the historical inheritance, which he valued more than anything else." His mental equilibrium is preserved by his powers of work and concentration, and his ability "to inner strength that it was unthinkable to imagine that she could abandon him just at this most crucial moment." He added, "Nobody knows how the crisis may have affected their marriage: but those who know the first lady well know that she is a woman of great strength, with very broad shoulders." phone numbers that allow readers to offer a "Yes" or "No" response. "Robin Cook the secret of his pulling power." But in an editorial, the Sun said he doing with politicians, but for the poisoning of public life across the globe." as novels, and ask what is the core of the plot," he wrote. "A mature woman is married to a man who is a perpetual adolescent; he is clever and good with 'Journalist of the Year' Award," it wrote that the prime minister had "presented himself with the award for writing the greatest number of articles in newspapers in the last year." The trend continued this week, not only in Party and as its candidate for prime minister in the May elections. He made the She wants to overturn the sport's new scoring system. explanation of how the old scoring system worked, and how it caused the Great decreed after the championship that the scoring system must be revised to rejoiced that the problem was solved, so that henceforth "if you are in front several cogent objections to the new system. First, it is more complicated than problem five decades ago with his "Arrow Impossibility Theorem," which proves the order in which the judges have ranked the contestants rather than on their disagree about whether a Star Wars defense system is better than a tax cut. In opinions into a single ranking. In order to take political action, the United States needs a social choice mechanism to amalgamate voters' many preferences It might appear that the United States can afford more endorsing multiple conflicting goals and declaring them all "top priorities," the silver, and who gets the bronze. But the fact is that at the end of the day, political decisions do get made, as surely as skating medalists get chosen. The government either cuts taxes or it doesn't. Although the political Arrow set forth two desiderata for any social choice mechanism. First, unanimity, when it occurs, should be respected. If all the Dole should not be president. This criterion is the easy one. I doubt that any third candidate, C, should not overturn that ranking. Simple majority voting, With a bit of elementary mathematics and a lot of keen insight, Arrow was forced to a sobering conclusion: If a "reasonable" voting judge. (Actually, you could have as many judges as you wanted, as long as you ignored all but one of them.) In politics, it means that if you can't tolerate Is there any way around Arrow's dire conclusion? Well, his proof does leave one loophole. If the number of voters is literally infinite, then the conclusion can be overturned. In that case, there are systems exist, none of them can be explicitly described. This observation seems unlikely to be applicable either to figure skating or to constitutional and get on with designing a voting system that meets other reasonable criteria. But the people who get excited about this kind of project tend to get slate of four officers from a list of eight candidates. The rules for counting definitions, rules, interpretations, and examples." Having supplied members with a summary of those rules, the secretary felt compelled to append this note: "Please do NOT correspond with the writer about the ambiguities that are unresolved in the above abbreviated description. Instead, refer to Appendices IV and V, where eleven pages of rules appear to leave no ambiguities." have become a "disingenuous cynic" and have endangered, if not lost, my scholarly reputation. Though he reveals his own conflict of interest, which said I thought I was on the other side. All I knew then came from newspaper conversation and by letter, tried to convince me that the company's practices created efficiency. He offered me a retainer. I have no idea how large that might have been because I did not ask or try to negotiate with him. I said that if he convinced me, I would simply stay out of the case. He did not persuade clients, no more, no less. There was no reason why I should make that choice personal attack. The key question is whether predation, including price question of reserves, is likely to be decisive in the success of the tactic, usually not be a successful technique, I wrote, because it requires the predator to expand his rate of output in order to drive prices down. In the case I posited, an expansion of output imposes increasing costs upon the predator because his marginal costs will rise and the victim's will not. That will be true in almost all industries. It follows from the argument that price cutting can be a successful predatory tactic if marginal costs are not rising. I did not make the point explicit because it seemed obvious and a rare development costs, the production and distribution of software displays a flat marginal cost. The predator is at no disadvantage. If his financial reserves are larger than the victim's (in proportion to their market shares), the predator can destroy the victim's business. This is especially true where the predator is spending only a small fraction of its monopoly profits while the victim has no such profits. Nor will outsiders put up the capital to resist the predator, for they will know the victim is at a disadvantage in the fight. to defend its monopoly in operating systems. I trust the matter is now clear to know I was writing it until it appeared. I did read a document or two off the company's publicly available antitrust suit propaganda page, as well as a similar page sponsored by the Justice his general view that "predation" (misuse of market power) is largely a myth. hire him, he gave the company's lawyer a hearing, with the understanding that seems to think this arrangement allowed him to choose sides with complete recalls my review of his book as "one of the less comprehending assessments." It was, as I said, a favorable review. Maybe that's why. case. I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "much." All he cites in this reply is one additional passage from the book, which, he concedes, "does not make the point explicit." Indeed it does not. The discussion of predation about is "misuse of government process." He writes, "Misuse of courts and government agencies is a particularly effective means of delaying or stifling where marginal costs are rising. He says his current argument is implied, though not "explicit," in the book (and therefore, by further implication, he's not a hypocrite). It's true the book assumes rising marginal costs, but it does not "follow," as he claims, that predation by cost cutting depends on rising marginal costs. (If you assume you're holding an apple and conclude from that you're holding a fruit, it doesn't "follow" that if you're holding an orange wrong, but it's certainly not derived from his book. rising marginal costs (in any but the shortest of short terms) is widely regarded as the weak link in the logic of neoclassical economics. Software may be an extreme example of marginal costs that plunge immediately to near zero and stay there, but learning curves and economies of scale are more characteristic of most modern industries than rising marginal costs. Yet in point. His life's great intellectual achievement, he says in effect, doesn't to call me uncomprehending. His original argument that predatory price cutting can't work (and therefore needn't be illegal) was that it will always cost the predator more than the intended victim, because the predator is selling more units during the price war in which both parties are losing money. I do not comprehend why that depends on rising marginal costs. It's true that rising costs, the predator's losses get bigger and bigger until the victim surrenders. Zero marginal costs, if anything, ought to make it even harder to drive a competitor from the field with devastating losses. Am I missing something? original argument about relative losses doesn't depend on rising marginal costs, neither does its corollary that capital markets should be willing to bankroll a price war that the victim could win with an adequate war chest. State of the Union address was greeted around the world this week as so much adversity, it was also because he had facts and figures to back his claim that the United States was not only strong but also brimming with the White House had been transferred to the nation itself." Those still wondering whether to impeach him "might well think carefully now before committing themselves to an obviously unpopular cause." lives of working men and women," over whom impeachment appears to cast no shadow. "His effort to regain prestige and recover the cohesion of an administration damaged by the impeachment process must have been at least temporarily successful," the paper said, adding that it is likely that he will 'the State of the Union is in excellent health' he certainly wasn't committing effectively rejected the key point of his State of the Union address. challenging the Republicans to work with a president they want to topple, or party" that abandoned a popular program to satisfy its rancor. difficult to find on maps, the paper said, but it has created considerable search for a compromise solution to this problem." On the other hand, the paper said that recognition of the importance of compromise was better than open confrontation, especially in a region regarded by both sides as vital to their interests and where troops were kept in a state of high combat readiness. trying to block his rehabilitation, he will make life hard for them by officials cannot contain their outrage and let fly with a few statements United States was celebrated with the slaughter of sheep and camels along friendly king. We hope his recovery will put paid to the struggle for his peace, but also as one who believes in that peace and, who is prepared to come and visit the parents of schoolchildren killed by his border guards, as a person who has really had enough of war and bloodshed." peace process but is also "a person of vast experience." doesn't intend to surrender its international standing for the sake of its said. It added that the new ambassador seems determined to fight to make the United Nations become the main guarantor of international stability and friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and other subjects. Please send your questions for publication to indicate how you wish your letter to be signed, preferably including your married and wonder if there's a "correct" answer to the following question: How should our address labels read? I think it should be husband's name first, labels printed? They are inexpensive, after all, and that way you can each affix what you consider the "right" label to a letter. winning the suit because restaurants are allowed to add a service charge for perhaps you wish to hear about my problems, but I don't think so. I find such though on the question of what is required by the question "How are you?" she is more forgiving. Perhaps because her mother taught her years ago that "How spared. And do let us all know how many seconds elapse before your people talking into their fists and mumbling up their sleeves. All these calls on the hoof can't be that important. Plus, they interrupt innocent bystanders. Is there an accepted etiquette for the mobile phone people and anything the announcements requiring their restriction, as well. Little by little, various of disapproval is always worth a try. The best hope of integrating this technological "advance" into society is to hope that those so important they cannot be out of telephonic touch will themselves arrive at some feeling of seen some cell phonies remove themselves to the sidelines, as it were, at the ring of the bell. She has even seen an apologetic smile or two as these people Joining a national trend, the superintendent of schools in West proposed new attraction but, after consulting church authorities, head of of a one joke question, and the joke is cheap and easy blasphemy. Well, maybe Cool! I learned that in religious physics at my Christian academy. Just before catalogue, by luring me into this kind of complacently by lying to me. I closed the business down in the shambles that it was, swept everything clean, moved to sit at the other. Every now and then, when things got a little tense, I would friends) responds to questions about manners, personal relations, politics, and make a long story short, she has lied about multiple things since I became friends with her. The other night she asked my opinion about something, and once I told her she seemed fine. The next day, however, she proceeded to call appreciate her telling everyone something untrue. My question is: Should I wait for her to respond or go ahead and call to initiate the conversation? who doesn't seem to know the truth from third base? When you say she has "lied supposes, continue with this "friend" whose word you have no faith in, but the question remains: Whatever for? Bail out and clear your head. family.) People who really care about people usually care about animals, too. who complain about people who are helping animals are usually not helping country is practically swimming in abandoned pets. These innocent creatures are at someone using his own private money to do something helpful when there are vapid rich people doing nothing whatever to help anyone is strange, Up," that animal lovers were a fiercely loyal and vociferous lot, and said so. While she does like many of her friends' pets, she also goes to the zoo and only caring about a public issue but also doing something about it. For you, your column. Not only do you seem to invariably draw interesting and pertinent questions, but also your advice is, more often than not, that which I would put this? I am in a committed, monogamous relationship with another woman, whom I plan to marry sometime in the near future. We've been together a little less than three years. My parents have voiced an interest in "getting to know" her parents, and while I am all for it, I sense some reluctance on my partner's address, so they could send them a holiday card. (My parents are nominally way to go about this? Should I let the "adults" work this out among themselves, or should I try to mediate? I would appreciate any help you can provide on this It is ironic that your letter asks about initiating a correspondence, while your quotation from Ms. Bailey pleads for less daughters marrying other women. One assumes your partner's understanding of her parents' outlook comes from knowledge. You might want to wait until she feels compliment your own parents on their wish to promote the larger family something to think about, look on the bright side of not yet having a problem, and I am not sure if even you would know the answer to this question. and comprehension were so good that I won the district essay contest. I have accent. In fact, I am still speaking like I did when I stepped off the plane. I Please help, because now that I am in college it is very frustrating when sterling. The key to your success is what you say, not the accent with which objects and drool copiously, and perhaps you defecate or urinate on the in the newspapers. We take it not as funny but as something very serious." Who recent bad press. 'Although we may have fired a Cabinet minister without congressional approval, we never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. King of Queens and comic strips such as Dumb Bastards From the butt of a joke, a recurring punch line on Johnny, it really was serious: comic equivalent of scandal journalism, focusing on crime rather than policy. But it's not their missteps that are the problem, it's their steps. Or as a mouse nibbling a doughnut in the window of one of the franchise's midtown "Anytime someone laughs at your trademark and what's powerful Democrats joining rich and powerful Republicans to help rich and commemorative quarters. One of them shows somebody on a horse. As part of our continuing efforts to make it easier weeks ago. What makes it simpler is that we do most of the work. ("We" meaning printer every morning. Your computer will automatically dial up (if necessary), connect to the Web, download Today's Papers (in a specially formatted edition for printing out), and send it to your printer. We plan to make other Delivery, you can use it to schedule automatic printouts of any page on the be formatted for printing out, you'll have to do the scheduling yourself, and complexity. But do give that one a try, too, if you're feeling ambitious. My installing, using Instant Delivery, and a technical support phone number. The button that schedules Today's Papers. But we know you can handle that. So Lesser magazines in lesser media are known to take a We will publish complete issues for the next two weeks. Well, when we say understand, who will be busy roasting turkeys, fighting with relatives, The cover story and editorial say deflation threatens the global economy. Deflation caused by overcapacity and flaccid demand could send the world into a separation, only limited autonomy, and Turkey ought to grant that to keep the could be turned into advanced drugs. The lesson: Advanced screening technology, which allows companies to speedily test lots of plants for medicinal stop her from injecting her politics into her husband's job. "We're far from certain that her brand of righteous liberalism is what the people of New York want or need," say the editors, "but we are sure that it would be healthy for have concocted progressive and equitable ways to spend the state's budget calls on Congress to let the independent counsel statute (a "constitutional privilege with a comprehensive bill on presidential legal liability. (For more magazine introduces a redesigned front section, which grandly aims to chronicle "The Way We Live Now." Included is a new ethics column (written by Time 's cover story toasts the sunny side of the impeachment scandal. It sparked a vigorous debate about morality, introduced role models who defied stereotypes (powerful attorneys in wheelchairs, patrician female lawmakers), and demonstrated that the political process is "sturdy and forgiving." The Senate's closed deliberations on impeachment were a bonding experience, and their frankness and intimacy will encourage more teamwork in the future. story is darker, emphasizing the trial's lingering stink in the White story conveys the isolation felt by many religious conservatives in the a peculiar development in medical research: fake operations. Researchers are and sew them back up without doing anything. Afterward, the doctors compare the communities of Queens, says a profile of an imaginative young woman reluctantly steeling herself to accept her appointed betrothed. She uses her real name in the hope that a suitable bachelor might pick her out of the magazine instead. scandalous, and gritty as the tabloids' front pages. A highlight: After passage about the mayor's dictatorial, brutal style, the text calls him pundits to opine about the president's acquittal. One calls Flytrap the wins the Democratic nomination for president. Another argues that the independent counsel distorted the impeachment process: The House should have been allowed to conduct a more direct and aggressive investigation of the ("the greatest poet of the twentieth century"), urging the House managers to doesn't drag the whole stock market down, could be useful for the economy because it will "restore sanity" to the venture capital industry. Some of the women are deliberately promiscuous in order to win more male protectors for their child. Men, not knowing if they're the biological father or not, assume that feminists and evangelicals are to blame for the increasingly blurry line between private morality and public life. Both these newly enfranchised groups management meeting. The word has no etymological connection to the racial slur, using a private company to carry his campaign loans, DeLay had trouble affirming or denying his connection to the business, answering with particular. The wiser of the wise guys have gone legit; the dumber ones (such car (a minivan), his attire (mock turtlenecks), and choice of repast different bilingual education classrooms of a New York City public school. The describes his training at "hostile environment school," where journalists learn guy who makes funny movies. No, he's a fiercely independent artiste with a math on the State of the Union address. Time 's cover story details the president's soaring poll numbers and the various boosts they've given to his lawyers' confidence, his relationships calculates the bottom line on the president's plan to save Social Security: It or following. The piece features what is sure to be a major element of any cover story says the labor shortage is emboldening and transforming the independent gang of "free agents," "new nomads," and "globalists," who write their own job descriptions, schedules, and rules. But Time commiserate around the water cooler. It profiles a new kind of office genre. Competitors disdain its lowbrow tone but nurse a bad case of circulation Funds issue congratulates the aggressive and chastises those cowed by federal government as the primary engine of domestic policy. In contrast to invective with sweet nothings ("there is a type of honey that never cashmere is sold by weight, some suppliers turn to dirty tricks, like plugging article describes why the potential for surgical error is so high. Surgeons are such as flying an airplane. Demonizing errors, the author argues, dangerously hinders constructive discussion about those errors. own diagnosis of the state of the union. It must be awful, they argue, if the president's lawyers have succeeded in feeding a dubious and other stories, however, are premised on the nation's general success and contentedness. The cover story explains that morality is no longer about a stocks, rising and falling according to the practical results they yield. popularity in a future economic downturn. A slump will expose his "disgusting betrayal of Democratic principles" and finally cause his supporters to jump The tragedy is the protagonist's inability to transcend his terrible flunky, who's constitutionally unequipped to survive a succession of personal and professional crises. Wade can't get on his preadolescent daughter's then beating him senseless when he tries to fight back. union leader is killed in an apparent hunting accident, Wade has a hunch that the man was murdered. Who done it? Either the only witness, Wade's buddy Jack protracted shots of people walking in and out of buildings that seem to have turned themselves inward to escape the cold. Nothing expresses anything. For much of the film, you can't decide whether the murder plot is a product of design. The film is uncompromising, all of a piece, its desolateness unleavened western, the parable of an unruly patriarch driven to madness by a long line of unruly patriarchs before him; an impotent vigilante in search of helpful in clarifying people's motives but ultimately annoying, since only an inexpert storyteller needs that much pompous clarification. It doesn't help troupe. He ends up embodying only the movie's numbing obviousness. Affliction off life support. Like Wade, he's a heavyweight too big and too unstable for the room. The sagging flesh on that square head encases small, babyish features, and the belching sounds that come out of that barrel chest hopeless prospect that only leads to rage and despair. At one point, he grabs lethargic and vicious, he is roused from his decrepitude only by the prospect confronts him about a crude remark, he fixes her with a leer while licking salt could say. We know why she packs her bags after that and could have done their fathers whose capacity for love and hope has been destroyed at birth. it struck me as both arid and pretentious; the second, arriving with no narrative expectations, I found myself more tolerant of the pacing and more drawn in by the performances. If you don't have the luxury of seeing the movie twice, you'd do well to leave your hopes for a good thriller at the spell of an embodiment of the Old West, here a character called Big Boy. He of woman who sends men into spasms of uncontrollable lust, such that they'd kill their good buddies or drink themselves into an early grave. When Big Boy directions, neither especially interesting. Mixed in with this is a lot of the center of the frame, so that the movie's point of view seems static even when the images are gorgeously evocative. It's pretty, but it's all at arm's length, with an aura of doom that palls our enjoyment of even the picture's might once have had are long gone; the only thing mysterious about her is those plagued by dreams of little girls being lured away by a big, bad wolf in human form. No student of the genre will be surprised to learn that she's established to her visions, which are both lyrical and ghastly, and so frightening that it's hard to imagine how the movie can deliver a demon worthy of them. It can't, of course, which is the problem with mainstream horror pictures: The more deliriously abstract and unhinged their imagery, the more of a clunk there is when the evil actually materializes and the genre conventions kick in. scene. In despair, she slashes her wrists and ends up in a hospital, where she with an incongruous New York accent). Both haggard and elfin, she moves in and out of sanity, now distraught with grief, now giddy with superior insight. Someone else made her trash her house and scrawl imprecations on the walls, but scene on a cascade of emotion, so that she really seems to be speaking from a different world. In Dreams betrays her supernatural brilliance. The last still trying to get worked up, but the spell has been irreparably broken. catch the commercial flop Babe: Pig in the City before the movie ended because you'd have to go back to the silents to find its like visually, and no Miller, the movie is in a different league from its unassuming predecessor. The a half. This is my candidate for the most overlooked big budget film of the decade, maybe of the century. Pearls before swine, indeed. on the eve of the House impeachment debate? Politicians and pundits launched the rhetorical war over that question even before the first missiles fell in politics to new depths. Here's a glossary of the debaters' latest tactics, in charge obliquely so that he can deny having made it. Example: "We have had either hostilities or threatened hostilities at interesting times throughout assured him it's not so. Example: "While I have been assured by administration the timing and the policy are subject to question" (Senate Majority Leader unprincipled, any seemingly principled behavior on his part is fishy. Example: explain the sudden appearance of a backbone that has been invisible up to now?" accuser doesn't allege a causal relationship between the impeachment process cynicism. Rather than stand behind his cynicism, the accuser launch a military strike, however justified, at a time when many will conclude cynicism. The accuser says other people's cynicism makes it impossible president must have credibility when he makes decisions about peace or war" patriotism about cynicism. Democrats say Republicans who accuse enemy. Example: "Shame on you [Republicans] for playing into the hands of remarks were "as close to a betrayal of the interests of the United States as cynicism. Having accused Republicans of cynicism for suggesting that Democrats use the conflict to delay the vote. Example: The House should "not take up impeachment until the hostilities have ended. It shouldn't come up as cynicism. While publicly accusing Republicans of tactics aimed at gaining political advantage, Democrats privately gloat that the tactics will that politics stop at the shore," one senior White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. 'Somebody changed the rules and it the impeachment vote. Example: "I don't see any reason to postpone the vote. that impeachment would undermine the war effort, Republicans argue that impeachment is the best way to honor the war effort. Example: "As those troops have a right to know that the work of the nation goes forward. And in impeachment. Examples: "The suspicion some people have about the president's consequences than in taking any action that will enable him to hold onto power [are] a further demonstration that he has dangerously compromised himself in should celebrate them in festivals, we should enjoy their traditions in our "It did the Vice President and me a lot of good to pick up chains that bind the workers of the world. The president was speaking metaphorically, of course, about his achievements in estate tax Habitat for Humanity house. 'Sometimes he just doesn't listen,' apologized convincingly wield hand tools. Republicans tend to be better at this sort of Bush was befuddled by a supermarket scanner, which isn't even a real hand tool, and besides, no one expected him to operate it, just carry the bags of out to the woods and pound a moose into the ground up to its antlers. He said meant the conquest of nature. Carter's was a more modest Christian carpentry. Maybe someday we'll have a true liberal Democrat in the White House, secure enough in her ideology to put down the tools, pick up the phone, and call a retirement home, the president helped demolish a wall to make room for a health clinic, an activity meant, in some weirdly elliptical way, to commemorate the turned off the set right after the president's speech, then stumbled toward the liquor cabinet, clutching their head and moaning, they missed these highlights from the opposition. If you read between the lines, you can infer what new intrusive, but apparently the Republicans want to deploy some sort of shrinking machine that can inject a tiny congresswoman right into your digestive "I got to live every boy's dream: playing in the National Football thermos of Manhattans, but that's not an actual government policy. Not "It wasn't until after I was elected that I attended a Republican function to each other in the bathtub and then slip into attractive robes and then the hands when news organizations are caught being brutal or irresponsible. But the Newspapers that once policed corporations have been absorbed by the same stories that might threaten advertisers no longer see the light of day. Standard Oil monopoly, patron saint of the modern corporation and, in his time, corporate flacks to counteract the blistering hostility generated by the a yeoman's job of placing warm stories about this scourge of the corporate high department too late to help himself. After three years of fire from By the time the flack was in place, hordes of attorneys general and octopus, Standard Oil. The second and most illuminating reason is that he thought God was on his side. If you've got God, why on earth would you need a every fat book is a slender one struggling to get out. The fat book here fat one is a fascinating meditation on the monopoly capitalist's moral harsh Baptist upbringing made him the perfect instrument of the marketplace, but it also set up a tortured cycle inside him. He coveted cash as his compelled to give it to charity, which he did with anguish. In wealth, as sanction for making money, earning profits, and engaging in commerce. spying, bribery, and extortion. Simply put, rivals were told that if they did created specifically to dismember the Standard system of interlocking when the Supreme Court approved the government's plan. subsidiaries appeared on the market, making the richest man in the world that The Titan saw nothing wrong with bankrupting companies that resisted his advances. He viewed the process of smothering the weakest companies and swallowing those that remained as a thoroughly Christian himself as a saver of corporate souls who consolidated an unruly business and did away with redundancy. This was true of the kerosene market, where practices to maintain its monopoly on computer operating systems and to push its own Internet browser. The government's questions are legitimate, but the products that they thought up and that could eventually be eclipsed by others. The two men are similar, however, in that both severely misjudged public with a pugnacious, imperial style that irritated government lawyers who needed for his tyrannies, he sang the monopolist's equivalent of "Onward Christian flimflam man and a bigamist who left his wife and children alone for months at in her threadbare children, whom she marched to church with unfailing and obsessed with the twin themes of frugality and organization. He kept a paid for his wife's engagement ring, which he listed under "Sundry Expenses." He wanted mightily to accumulate money, but he worried constantly about breaking the moral code against covetous behavior. Worth billions, he reviewed every grocery bill and prowled the hallways turning out lights. He bit the head off a streetcar conductor who once charged him two fares thinking the distinguished gentleman was paying for his traveling partner as well. He recognized a Christian duty to charity but was gripped by a fear that his charity would be wasted, thereby incriminating him in sin. He overcame this foundation. But giving drove him near to nervous collapse. This story is told Gates. The pressure of these appeals for gifts has become too great for satisfaction until I have made the most careful inquiry as to the worthiness of the cause. These investigations are now taking more of my time and energy than But what we see is a man caught between the Christian imperative to give to the fact that the college president was a spendthrift. But building a on the issue of money, eventually forbidding Harper to even discuss it in his liberally unnerved him deeply, even when it flowed to something he valued. different way. Her 19-part series was an enormous undertaking that still stands as the signal work on the Standard monopoly. The series maintained an even, ambushed him at church. She found him leprous and reptilian and saw in him "concentration, craftiness, cruelty and something indefinably repulsive." throughout this book, crediting her work and pointing out her mistakes and us always. But with journalism fixated on gossip and entertainment, there may at the Democratic Party's Progressive Policy Institute, has written a scathing services, and failing public schools. It is not New Deal liberalism that is at just the urban but also the national agenda. Politics and policy in these Deal liberalism by expanding welfare and creating multicultural schools; New and it is in the name of "the riot ideology" and of righting the wrongs of racism that liberals went on to justify the violence of the 1960s and its criminal aftermath. The power to disrupt became a way of "extracting money from I share, with a general failure to face up to the shortcomings of the policies respected books, is too good a historian not to know that he has produced an urban liberalism an unconvincing degree of importance in accounting for this decline; second, a methodology that picks out three cities that are not really representative; and third, an oddly unbalanced account of urban history that places ideologically motivated mayors, liberal intellectuals, and radical black cities began to degenerate, and suburbs to boom, as early as the 1920s, when programs developed during the New Deal led to policies of "redlining": the the white middle class to buy new homes in the suburbs than to rent (or even modernize) older homes. Meanwhile, many areas in the aging central cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees. Add to these disastrous policies a have exacerbated these trends, it certainly could not have been held responsible for them. The decline in urban economies occurred in almost every grew in the 1960s and 1970s before falling off in the '80s. also fails to grasp certain key political facts of urban life. Simply put, mayors can't afford to be raving ideologues. They are practically the lowest governments can mandate programmatic spending without providing the funds. States limit the city's legal authority to raise revenue through taxes and debt, while the federal system forces cities to compete with one another for makes local governments dependent on their local tax base to fund basic services, infrastructure, and education. Wealthier jurisdictions will always do better than cities with high concentrations of poverty. don't offer the opportunity to "test the null hypothesis." He stacks the deck. are invoked only insofar as they can support his claims about riot ideology. inform local policies should have had different outcomes in terms of fiscal policy, the quality of the public schools, and the condition of the local governance, and economy are understood to be unique. patronage networks. This was supposed to have been particularly true in New distributed them to black neighborhoods through his Democratic machine. In New liberal reformer. No doubt, the mayors who took these funds did try to use them to consolidate their political bases. They were operating in the down a notch or two, [cities] will remain, by virtue of their concentrations of These great cities will continue to shape our future. cities should be bleak. It isn't, of course. Across the country, immigrant cities. In New York, for example, where more than half the city's current of these stories is more important to New York City's future than those that current renaissance is happening because there is something to come back to. decries, may be contributing to the current rebirth of the city's economy, which centers on tourism, culture, financial services, and information technology. In New York there is, at least, an infrastructure to rebuild, cultural institutions that draw tourists, and a wealth of human capital with public hospitals, colleges, parks, public transportation, and affordable even comically, out of proportion with their lives. In The Innocent love, only to discover that there is an intruder asleep in their wardrobe. woman is smoking a cigarette, and she accidentally sets herself on fire. The intruder wakes up. A terrible fight breaks out. Bones are broken, testicles are crushed, one man bites through another man's cheek. And then things get a whole with which it unfolds. But perhaps its most emblematic characteristic is its ability to provoke a flustered and ambivalent response in the reader, a horrified sympathy that alternates with a deep desire to distance oneself from the nightmare at hand. Could this grisly encounter have been prevented? Was it unsettling examination of both one's unconscious and one's conscience. He's also fascinated by the infectious nature of calamity: The success with which he simultaneously analyzes and communicates its uneasy intimacy is his genius. make sense of misfortune is an explicit enterprise, a contentious necessity for the novel's three main characters. The worst, one senses, has already happened, who has made a successful career of elucidating complex phenomena (black holes, afternoon, during a celebratory picnic in the countryside near Oxford, they child, is unsuccessfully attempting to escape from the basket. instinctively sprints to the balloonist's aid, as do four other men who happen actions signals the undertow of bewildered culpability that will run throughout the novel: "We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running toward it." As it turns out, this altruistic instinct proves fatal not for the narrator but for one of the other rescuers. After a of wind lifts the men into the air; the others drop away, but Logan, a local doctor and father of two, holds on as the unburdened balloon shoots suddenly skyward. A few moments later, he falls to his death as the others look on, causing the rest to follow suit? How could they have managed it remembers, "running at the walls, beating them back with our heads. Slowly our prison grew larger." They sit at the kitchen table for hours, "grinding the jagged edge of memories, hammering the unspeakable into forms of words." By the time they turn in for the night they have already forgotten Parry, the awkward has been relegated to an anecdote and dismissed. But Parry, as it turns out, know, I understand what you're feeling. I feel it too.") Rattled and from that moment on, their interpretations of events diverge, and their encourage Parry's attentions, and yet, even before he realizes that Parry is on the answering machine, instead of saving them as evidence? Before long, the our way among these versions of the truth, straining for a synthesis that would gun from some aging hippies. And there is an expensive birthday lunch with One of the initial frustrations of Enduring Love is the eclipse of the balloon accident. Parry's fixation feels like a blunt instrument in comparison, and one begins to long for the delicate moral complexity of the tragedy that produced him in the first place: Five strangers converging in the center of a field to save a child, and killing a man instead. electrodynamics was slow to gain acceptance because it was aesthetically could well serve as the novel's ironic motto, for its plot is littered with examples of this prejudice. When the balloonist yells perfectly reasonable adulterous because, after his death, she finds a woman's scarf in his car. But But real life, lived in real time, requires us to push a lot harder for the foresee. Ingeniously rewarding and unusually contingent on the intellectual curiosity of the reader, it offers a playful reprimand to anyone who assumes that they know where the "real" story of this novel begins and ends. wrong to conclude that his publishers are cynically raking their way through a height of his literary powers. He had emigrated to the United States from acquiring a following, he was a long way from becoming the puckish purveyor of refugees linked by blood, friendship, sexual intrigue, and Old World ties. Many physical exhaustion, in Manhattan. They gather in the spacious Central Park and reclaimed the religious piety that his associates have mostly These are men and women who have lost homes, hopes, wives, husbands, children, illusions. They sit and argue, between mouthfuls of family in the Holocaust, speaks incessantly of torture and the dead, until Anna, his second wife, cries out: "You're starting with the horrors again! Why should anyone want to come up to our apartment when you speak about such devotes himself to psychic research, desperate to contact her. these wounded souls are in some sense ghosts themselves, as we are meant to think, they are nevertheless carnal ghosts. The plot is set in motion when with whom he has two grown children whom he regards with a kind of detached disgust. Having raised his family without the religious principles he long ago is the natural state of Singer's characters, shaped as they are by multiple the palimpsest imprints of his characters' layered lives in a way that gives them more modernist complexity than his rather conventional conception of character and plot might otherwise have allowed for. also good at making their highly personal adventures seem the outgrowth of historical and metaphysical circumstances. Singer's decision to set his novel Holocaust, for instance, does not simply inspire the characters' large, despairing gestures; it filters into their casual foreplay: "Do you remember One of the bracing elements in the novel is the casual darkness with which his characters discuss the world. Mickey Sabbath, the new lover, Anna. "The tragedy is that they destroyed the good ones and left this trash behind." Asked what became of her first husband, a profligate actor, what's the saying? Scum floats to the top." The actor, when he does destroyed his first wife's happiness as if it were the most natural thing in came on the scene and I ruined her. In those days, I wanted to ruin everything. It was a sort of an ambition with me." This is a man who, seeing a full moon rise beautifully in the sky, feels moved to announce, "Oh, if only I could piss all this merely the warping effects of the Holocaust; Singer is chronicling something larger and more complicated than that. Most of his characters, despite Orthodox childhoods, began their rebellion against God before World War for the first time in a thousand years. This was true of Singer himself, who famously observed that Hamlet, wishing his father dead, was unable to survive his father's actual murder because he was so crippled by guilt. In other words, the prince's real tragedy was that somebody fulfilled his fantasy for him. One might say something similar about Singer's characters. Having rebelled in their destruction they inwardly willed. No wonder so many of them feel implicated in fallen Orthodox: He sees only the faith of his father or a full embrace of sin. He cannot believe in a middle way. Ultimately, he becomes a penitent, fleeing his sexual entanglements, his family, his responsibilities, and taking up resemble, in his selfish flight from the past, from responsibility, from moral embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation." Few people today know what he meant by the lovely division between the cosmos, thought to be pristine, lawful, and unchanging, and our grubby, chaotic Earth below. The division was already obsolete by toward the ground and kept the moon in its orbit around Earth. means the linking of facts and theory across disciplines into a single coherent system of explanation. That sounds innocuous, but it has a radical implication: that the divisions between nature and society, matter and mind, biology and culture, and the sciences and the humanities, arts, and social sciences are as For centuries, the progress of science has been a story of celestial was followed by a collapse of the once equally firm (and now equally forgotten) wall between the past, when divine cataclysms were supposed to have shaped the earth, and the present, with its seemingly permanent mountains and showed that today's Earth could have been sculpted by everyday erosion, earthquakes, and volcanoes acting in the past over immense spans of time. The living and nonliving, too, no longer occupy different realms. Two centuries stuff of life is not a magical gel but ordinary compounds following the laws of ubiquitous signs of design could arise from the physical process of the natural Crick, showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. bridged by an understanding of human nature that comes from neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Human thoughts and feelings are patterns of activity of the brain, whose design is a product of natural selection. The brain was "engineered" as a dynamic neural computer that calculated the strategies of survival and reproduction needed by our evolutionary ancestors. As humans discovered things about their world and each other and shared these discoveries, and as they instituted conventions and rules to coordinate their forces but products of minds interacting with one another, and culture evolved along with the brain. Sociology and anthropology are the study of the products of the human tendency to form clans, partnerships, and coalitions. Economics (rather than the idealized "rational agent" assumed by economists today). such as kinship, danger, and rivalry. Art depends on an innate eye for optimal habitats and forms, and on the biases of our visual systems. Morality comes from the sense of empathy and the internalized standards that allow people to students often experience the exhilarating realization that the laws of the enchantment he experienced in the 1970s, when he was already an esteemed human nature.) Evolutionary biologists had recently worked out the implications animal behavior such as cooperation, sexuality, aggression, pacifism, and communication were being increasingly understood in terms of the natural Not everyone was enchanted. Angry critics charged that if the mind had an innate structure, different people (or classes, sexes, and races) could have different innate structures, justifying discrimination. They said that if obnoxious behaviors such as aggression and clannishness were innate, that would make them "natural" and hence good; or, even if bad, they would be "in the genes" and hence unchangeable, subverting hopes for social reform. They said that if behavior were caused mainly by the genes, individuals could not be held responsible for their actions. Some of these scholars scientific convention, yelling for his dismissal over bullhorns, urging people Innate similarities do not imply innate differences. Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do to good guy. His insights on sociobiology, minus the inflammatory connotations, have become widely accepted in new fields such as behavioral ecology and fuss about the unity of knowledge. I can confirm he does, for I have tried to foibles (such as irrational spiritual beliefs) as evolutionarily adaptive. I was not persuaded that moral statements can be reduced to psychology, as if the disapproval of murder were just another human taste like the preference for sense evolved to grasp a logic of morality that is outside our minds in the same sense that our number sense evolved to grasp mathematical truths that are outside our minds.) I was unconvinced that a case for preserving species environment. I fear that, if it meant avoiding widespread economic dislocations, most people would be happy to consummate their desire to commune with plants and animals with a visit to a golf course stocked with a few pandas and eagles. For this reason, the concluding chapter, which urges urgent the most thoughtful and persuasive such argument I have seen. intellectual history and of the current state of understanding in many academic disciplines. Though he forcefully presses his case toward a conclusion many will find radical, the tone is calm and respectful and the writing style gentle beatified because he died dramatically with his sins unknown and the civil rights movement still seen as an epic gathering of heroes. Hero worship establishment had just as many fakers as saints. The inner workings of King's organization have yet to be fully revealed. But enough has been said to show that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was a cult of personality in which King's lieutenants covered up his sexual peccadilloes and vied obscenely for his attention and the chance to succeed him in the public eye. of the selfless prophets is giving way to a more realistic but no less amazing story of how egoists, hustlers, and sensualists rose above their failings to competitor and the principal operator in the dangerous voting rights campaigns did not worship them. A decade younger than King and substantially more aggressive, he regularly dismissed the advice of bigwigs like King and the South. But what is freshest about Walking With the Wind is that Lewis is equally candid about the class conflicts that afflicted the modern civil rights movements from the very beginning. Tensions between the uneducated rural poor largely invisible to the white press and the historians who succeeded them. Thirty years is less than the blink of an eye in human were arrested, beaten, fired from their jobs, and even lynched for trying to theater, in which demonstrators embraced the opportunity to be shot, gassed, and thrashed in order to generate outrage against Southern racism. The most harrowing parts of this book tell of Lewis and the integrated teams of Freedom Riders who rode on buses through the South to test federal laws that forbade The bus was surrounded by a mob that had lynching on its mind until an undercover policeman got off the bus brandishing his pistol. A Freedom Riders Ala. The mob that came to savage them bore a striking resemblance to the then, out of nowhere, from every direction, came people. White people. Men, women and children. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Out of alleys, out of makeshift weapon imaginable. Baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire front, their faces twisted in anger, screaming, "Git them niggers, GIT them three hundred of them, shouting and screaming, men swinging fists and weapons, women swinging heavy purses, little children clawing with their fingernails at horribly beaten. Someone picked up his suitcase, which he had dropped, and my head. I could feel my knees collapse and then nothing. fractured skulls for press attention and moral outrage. This seems dangerous confrontations. Lewis' admirers called it bravery. Lewis called it others. But what it amounted to was putting yourself forward to be beaten, possibly to death, day after day, week after week, month after month. What would drive someone to do this is still an enigma to me. the movement. The civil rights coalition was tearing itself apart in disputes over tactics, money, and who would get the most exposure in the press. Egos were clearly at issue. But so were the antagonisms cousins. A blatant elitism infested the movement for racial uplift from the outset. The first civil rights leaders were from the mulatto elite, which same ideas about them that whites did. These antipathies mellowed into affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his view him as much less than he was. Lewis describes the civil rights elite as "tended to look down through a telescope at the little people." Meeting with the affluent set. The official line is that Lewis and Bond were fast friends the same congressional seat. Walking With the Wind tells a different story. Lewis hints at secret annoyance with Bond from the first mention, in rejected this advice. But a quarter of a century later, the two faced off in a behind Bond. Late in the book, Lewis remarks bitterly on press coverage that Influential blacks from around the country advised him to quit the race and leave the seat to the man many of them viewed as its rightful heir. Still campaign the same intensity he had trained upon redneck troopers and sheriffs. When he defeated Bond, it was more than just a victory for himself. It was a be nearsighted. This is not because they read a lot or stare at computer research. Rather, it is a matter of genetics. The same genes that tend to something he had discovered as a graduate student. (He is now about to turn have been certifiably insane during parts of their lives. figures in the foundations of mathematics have landed in mental asylums or have death in the belief that his colleagues were putting poison in his food. Of the Or maybe it isn't so accidental. Mathematicians are, after all, people who spend their days piecing together complicated, scrupulously logical tales about these hallucinatory entities, which they believe are vastly more important than anything in the actual world. Is this not a kind of a folie n (where n equals the number of pure mathematicians worldwide)? psychic continuum leading from mathematical genius to madness. It is also a very peculiar redemption story: how three decades of raging schizophrenia, building homemade bombs with two other unpopular youngsters, one of whom was and his later penchant for sending odd packages to prominent strangers through In sheer appearance, this cold and aloof Southerner stood tapered waist, and "rather limp and beautiful hands" accentuated by long the most important proposition in the theory of games. Mathematically, this was no big deal. Game theory was a somewhat fashionable pursuit for mathematicians in those postwar days, when it looked as if it might do for military science and economics what Newton's calculus had done for physics. But they were bored with it by the early 1950s. Economists, after a few decades of hesitation, picked it up in the '80s and made it a cornerstone competing to corner a market, or nuclear powers trying to dominate each other. a set of strategies, one for each player, such that no player can improve his situation by switching to a different strategy. His proof was elegant but same reason that in a cup of coffee that is being stirred, at least one coffee molecule must remain absolutely still. Both are direct consequences of a theorem says that for any continuous rearrangement of a domain of things, there will necessarily exist at least one thing in that domain that will remain of all game strategies so that the guaranteed fixed point was the equilibrium Still, for an economics theorem, that counts as profound. Economists have been breakthrough in game theory got him recruited by the Rand Corp., which was then "research and development"). However, the achievement did not greatly impress can be embedded in Euclidean space. Manifolds, one must understand, are fairly its outside. Euclidean space, by contrast, is orderly and bourgeois. To demonstrate that "impossible" manifolds could be coaxed into living in constructing a bizarre set of inequalities that left his fellow mathematicians mathematical genius. The next year, he was expelled from Rand as a security risk after local police caught him engaging in a lewd act in a public men's hardly bothered with undergraduates and humiliated graduate students by solving their thesis problems. He carried on affairs with several men and a mistress, who bore him a son he refused to lift a finger to support. His cruel streak was awed by this "genius with a penis." Once, at a math department picnic, he threw her to the ground and put his foot on her throat. madness also tend to disrobe in public (I learned this from a volume on chess decided he would solve the most important unresolved problem in mathematics: most basic of entities, the natural numbers. Before an eager audience of inconsistent. He felt himself simultaneously to be the epicenter of the him partly through computer programming, partly on welfare). He haunted the campus, where students began to call him "the Phantom." They would come to class in the morning to find runic messages he had written on the blackboard at gives an interesting account of just how rare such remissions are among those game theory. Dare they make a known madman into a laureate? What might he say terrible effect on the productivity of many recipients, paralyzing them with mathematical promise and his madness. (His older son, the one born out of menage. (When Vanity Fair published an excerpt of A Beautiful working there, but psychiatric aides pick up so many mannerisms of the patients that it's hard to tell the difference after a while. A few years after breadth reflects Branch's enthusiasm for his subject and his appreciation of segregationist whites instead. Fissures widened within and among the leading magisterial storyteller, Branch ranges confidently over these peaks and valleys, but he also stops along the way to explore a slew of seemingly less significant tales. The great strength of this book is the way Branch zooms in campaigns. He returns again and again to these chosen locales, lingering over them, patiently narrating their miniature dramas: a march by schoolchildren to get library cards, a black man's fatal decision to attend a white theater. At breaks in the action, he will inconspicuously cut away to the White House, or story: farmers and teachers, sharecroppers and dentists, prying their freedom descriptions of the horrors endured by hundreds of activists, from the riveted, but often these individual sacrifices went unnoticed by reporters briefly mistook the commotion downtown as a welcoming ceremony for them. Unfamiliar reporters prowled with clipboards and camera equipment, wrote anyone who wasn't rushing around looking for King, cooking for King, talking of King as if they couldn't find him, and thinking of him as if there was no one Branch does place King at the center of his history, but Pillar of Fire is far too broad to be labeled a biography of one man. Nor is King here the mythic figure who has become our only undisputed contemporary hero. Branch restores to the man his human dimensions. was fallible was almost forgotten in the mad rush to immortalize him during his turned out to be a mixed blessing. Whipsawed between the need, on the one hand, to preserve good relations with the White House as it cautiously pushed the activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, King "clung to methods suited to his stature as a prince of the Negro church." He backed away he led them. He frequently emerges from Branch's narrative as indecisive, feckless, even weak. At one point he states that his own leadership was genuinely believed to be a Communist and further resented for assailing the bureau's sometimes laggard enforcement of justice in the lawless South. King. Worse, the bureau tapped King's phones and shadowed his every move, and turned on the tape recorder. According to officials who heard the tapes, 'highlight' recording of bugged sex groans and party jokes" along with a letter warning him: "You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." They attention with his calls for retribution, tempting blacks weary of King's political canon now, but in the despair of the early '60s, they could appear day another plane falls out of the sky," King could only reply, feebly, "I contrast between violence and gentleness, but as a contest between democracy he "pulled up hope in paired phrases of secular and religious faith," underscored its betrayal. "It was people who advocate democracy who sold us like cotton and cows from one plantation to another," he told a gasping crowd people have ever caught in this country, they have caught in the name of democracy." As Branch notes, "King and the movement's established leaders munificence looked noble and whose radicalism looked moderate in contrast. isn't a study of two charismatic leaders any more than it is a biography. Its lasting impression is of a portrait gallery of inspiring individuals, King just means to be a democracy, achieving with their deeds what King so brilliantly recognizably German? You'd think that photography, the most transparent of arts, would defy those pesky national stereotypes. It would stand to reason would all be equally naked behind the lens. For the longest time, photography didn't have enough of a history to promote any fixed notions of what a picture should be or should show. But as you flip through the present volume, the received notion of what that is. There's a precision, a prevailing cleanliness, a crispness of focus, a strong use of light and shadow. The pictures tend not to be pale, fluffy, indecisive or, for that matter, funky, gonzo, over the when you go back and look systematically, it seems that the most "German" of vertical stack as they pull guy lines across the dirigible's silvery skin. The image is forceful and brooding, celebrates heroic labor, elides the soon to remove himself and his talent to the safety of New York City and German photography took its time getting started. As one of years. The most striking of the early works in the book are overwhelmingly does seem to have begun where one might have thought it did, with the great embarked on a study of human types that was so evenhanded, unprejudiced, and simplicity. His work is more influential today than ever; recent German in photography was less a national than an international phenomenon, but the German work was perhaps the most striking. Very loosely speaking, photographic modernism in its grandest period consisted of finding and framing the most discovering the graphic power of the shadow as seen from a perpendicular perspective. A lot of people all over the world stumbled pretty much simultaneously upon the smokestack, the double exposure, the multiple shadow, his work on the last, and this book doesn't even reproduce my favorite picture by him, a large scattering of schoolchildren lying on the grass, seen from adapted by the modernists' natural enemies, the National Socialists. In place mostly unremarkable portraits, some jazzy fashion shots that culminate in and '60s has the slightly desperate air of much continental art from that time, unsure whether to please or to shock, failing to remember how to do either one, of fashion devised elsewhere, its dull portraits of statesmen unknown outside death and its aftermath were flooding the airwaves. Newscasters spoke of the to ancient protocol and allow its citizens to display the normal range of human reserve hasn't been the sole enemy of emotionally demonstrative English closely observes insect droppings and the stinking evacuations of cows, while the horrible Yahoos pelt him with their dung. These passages are funny, but also deadly serious. Shit is made to stand for man's essential viciousness, his brotherhood with base animals. And man's brotherhood with base animals would takes unholy quantities of drugs and sneaks off to have sex with his hot, vacant girlfriend; this is as sickening to him as "two skeletons copulating in that, while talking to them, he disassociates, turning one woman's "anatomy It's a convincingly icky portrait, so we're relieved when wakes up to find that his girlfriend, a petite blonde, has turned into a beast interpreted as insanity. He's hospitalized by chimp paramedics, and held for Slowly, via grunting and sign language, his furry new caretakers explain that picture these tony chimps, Self's publisher has helpfully supplied cover art Burns. It's a mesmerizingly gross notion and, for a while, Self dazzles us with the ramifications. Self's cleverest invention is probably the chimps' language: monogamy has flown out the window. When a female goes into heat she thrusts out her "swelling," and any male in sight, from the sweet old local minister to Dad, is invited to partake. As for the males, they all want to be the alpha, imagination begins to sputter. He gives us dexterous word painting, like this description of a decrepit hospital in which "the ghosts of patients long few sizes smaller. Self, it's surprising to discover, is a painstaking realist. does occasionally gesture in this direction. He inverts intellectual history, biologists, who so confidently ascribe all our behavior to genetic programming. But these ideas aren't developed; they remain on the level of rhetoric. As for the novel tend to be dumb and nymphomaniac, and one is an especially miserable, creatures who excel at sports and love to have sex and to dance. if it's that Swift, for all his pessimism, was deeply engaged in the events of from a righteous Christian sense of sin. Self strains to carry on the without his certainty. His attacks seem less illuminating than pointless; they're out of it, and unnecessarily cruel. A little like the Royal Family, it occurred to me the other day. It will be interesting to see what happens if the readers tend to know only the two easiest of her 20-odd books, the experimental rose is a rose" and "there's no there there." Her celebrity image is both mingling in a woman who looked like an ancient statue, with a huge, flat face course, that image underestimates what an amazingly innovative writer Stein rescue with a gigantic new edition to tout her worth. The editors, New York done a perfectly fresh job assembling both canonical and neglected pieces to trace the evolution of this oddest of minds. Most of Stein's phases are here: the abstract sketches of friends; the barely performable plays that she compared to landscapes; the difficult holistic theory of literature that made Twain usually get their stuff sorted into early period and late period and released in dribbles. The way the library has handled Stein may make a statement about her importance, but it certainly doesn't help in the There are some neat things here, starting with the novella subject of her thesis, still relevant as ever, was how undergraduates experience fatigue during final exams). The style is naturalistic; the plot is painfully autobiographical book (Stein was hurt by a failed love affair the summer she wrote it) has generally been dismissed as wooden, of interest only proof that Stein started out writing with perfect clarity, which means that her later bizarre style was a choice, not the natural expression of a loon. Also, notwithstanding, she was as capable of misogyny as any man. (Biographies tell has the upper hand and why, turns out to be one of Stein's favorite themes. "In friendship, power always has its downward curve," she writes in Three conditioned to study this groundbreaking work for its pioneering also a cool study of leaders and weak, grasping followers in love. (Click for an excerpt.) Stein is shamelessly fascinated by power, and in Three Lives she begins to dictate the terms by which we read her, even today. Since two of the three portraits in Three Lives were based on women she (brilliant, daring, but a rehash nevertheless) of the same love affair that imagination she had was almost entirely theoretical. Watching young Cubists bring the techniques of painting to the forefront, she assigned herself to write "portraits" of her friends that did the same thing for literature. Soon she'd forgotten all about her subjects and begun inquiring into the very nature of composition. Deciding that the normal rules of punctuation and grammar adjectives dangerous; adverbs excellent, because they're about nothing more than the relationship between words). She believed you could repeat the same word over and over without risking boredom, because each time it appeared it was like new. She even tried to work out a literature without fake beginnings, experience. (From an alleged essay, "Acquaintance With Description": "If it and this is wild from this to the neatness of there being larger left and with it could it might if it not if it as lead it lead it there and incorrectly which All this exploration makes for some heavy going, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that anyone read these volumes straight through, as I had to for review. Taking in too much Stein too fast can provoke a numb food and, just when the sugar coma hit, entered a long line at the department of motor vehicles. Stein is far more amusing when she forgets her rules and gets drunk on the music of words. (Click for an excerpt from "Lifting Belly," a stimulating when she remembers that she's first and foremost a thinker. (Click for her arbitrary, brilliant take on literary history.) In fact, much of her imaginative writing seems to me a mere preparatory sketch for her real work of over and over again doesn't mean you've entered the flow of experience. It devices to hold the reader's attention. Stein's attempt to show otherwise is a landmark in literature, a unique episode in the history of thought. Whether you'll want a keep a copy by your bedside to thumb through lovingly year after year is a choice best left to the individual. My guess is a regretful no. which some of the girls, at adolescence, magically turn into men. Think of the scientific possibilities! Finally, we could tease apart nature and nurture and see whether men and women differed because of how they were brought up as children. As the twig is bent, we say, so grows the branch; we expect these teens to have girls' minds in boys' bodies and to suffer from a painful stunted penis resembling a clitoris. They are raised as girls until puberty, begins to date, and turns into a normal man, without fuss or trauma. So much for bending the twig. Gender identity comes either from the effects of hormones on the brain or from the way people are treated as adults, or both; childhood You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (or The Sexes). Why are there sexes? To change our biochemical locks every generation and keep a step ahead of the rapidly evolving pathogens that try to pick them. How different are men's and women's brain structures? Not very. Do raging hormones turn men into cerebrally lopsided, more violent, better at some spatial abilities, worse at verbal abilities, more competitive but more forgiving of their competitors, more sexually jealous, more socially obtuse, and more promiscuous (at least, are we learning more about sex differences, but we also have an elegant theory major differences between the sexes in the animal kingdom flow from a difference in the size of their investment in offspring. The female begins with herself to even more, such as yolk; or, in mammals, blood and milk. The male contributes a few seconds of copulation and a teaspoon of semen. The number of offspring in each generation is limited by the female's contribution: one for Males must compete for access to females by beating each other up, cornering the resources necessary to mate, or persuading a female to choose them. Second, a male's reproductive success depends on how many females he mates with, but not vice versa; for a female, one mating per pregnancy is enough. That makes females more discriminating in their choice of sexual partners. have added some twists to the mammalian pattern. Men generally invest in their children by providing food, protection, and care. So females also compete for mates, though they look for the ones most willing and able to invest, not the ones most willing to copulate (those are never in short supply). Females, like males, may be tempted by infidelity, though their genetic motive is quality rather than quantity. A discreet adulteress can get the genes of the fittest male and the investment of the most generous male. An easily cuckolded male right amount of complexity, tries to explain findings rather than just report them, and writes in a consistently clear and pleasant style. Sex on the Brain is such a good window on the state of the art that its only flaws are biology, but rather lets the laboratory scientists speak for themselves. Unfortunately, many good bench scientists are mediocre theorists, often by choice. "Why" questions are thought to be an indulgence, appropriate only for some sloppy evolutionary "explanations," including casual analogies between arbitrary species and Homo sapiens, the equation of evolution with progress, the idea that contemporary changes in Western society are the vanguard of future evolution, and repeatedly, the error that our adaptations are for the benefit the species, they would not waste half the available food on sons, who can't directly replenish the species with babies. Any necessary genetic variation could easily be supplied by a few studs. Organisms pump out sons because whenever females are more plentiful, the genes of mothers and fathers only fails to share these explanations, but also sometimes repeats ones that less. A better explanation is that males' reproductive fate depends more strongly than females' on competing when they are young. So any gene that builds a man with a strong young body at the cost of a weak old body will explains why the effects of hormones are more complicated than pop science would have us think. They are produced by several organs in both sexes, may be converted into one another, and can have varying effects in different species, sexes, and individuals. The moral is that it is not hormones themselves but the neural circuitry, shaped by natural selection and modulated by the hormones, that explains our thoughts and feelings. The role of particular hormones may be like the role of green wires in an electronic device. The answer to the question "How does the device work?" depends on which wires connect which undermines explanations that assume ironclad effects of hormones. Take the idea that men became less competitive because women insisted on monogamy, which lowers testosterone. Natural selection is a resourceful tinkerer and could have rewired men's brains to respond to lowered testosterone in any number of ways, not necessarily by becoming less competitive. A better answer would appeal to competing with other males to sire new offspring with other females. Between Men and Women" are fighting words. It seems a short step from saying that men and women are biologically different to saying that women are inferior. Moreover, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, rape, and at least in the genes, where they cannot be changed by social reform. The occasionally hilarious (as when scientists were obsessed with testosterone, which they treated as the essence of masculinity) and sometimes tragic (as when dismisses bad research with the right touch of scorn, but does not feel a need to neutralize it with politically palatable agitprop. She believes that science can approach the truth, and that we are best off if we know it and deal with it to invidious stereotypes, are not a guideline for what is right, do not apply to every individual, and never justify the restriction of opportunity. The ignoble impulses of both sexes are part of a complex mind that can often override them; and social arrangements, from individual marriages to entire career developed smack in middle of the literary mainstream, in The New elevating journalism from journeyman's status to something like literature. Journalists, he rarely stoops to the first person. Where his peers wrote remains the ultimate writer's writer. In creative writing programs, his focused prose and reverence for facts are touted as the great model for literary This month his fans should be moved to even greater awe by first time into a unified whole. All the craftsman's flourishes are on view. read in ages. (Click for an excerpt.) Which is, as it turns out, its main shortcoming. Things written sentence by sentence often lack a larger energy. recorded in prose are balanced by a level of stability almost unheard of for a permission from his editor to do whatever he wanted. This is freedom the likes magazine profile. What stands out about them today is how positive they are refreshing to read a journalist who doesn't snoop around for hints that his subject ever did anything sordid. Yet the pieces are also suffused with a own. Then, moving in to eat his cake, he asks us to applaud their modesty. article, he believes, has an organic shape. He finds it by sorting his ample research into subtopics, writing the name of each subtopic on an index card, and playing around with the cards till he finds the right order. To an outsider, the results of this search can seem specific to the point of absurdity. An introduction to the collection The Literary Journalists "the descending branches finally joined at a moment of an epiphany during in a single line." In some sense that I struggled to understand but eventually His sense of shape may explain why he was drawn to geology, a science that interprets rocks and gashes in the earth and weaves these interpretations into a story of how the world grew. Annals of the Former World began in the '70s with a piece for The New Yorker 's "Talk of something bigger. Again, the form preceded the content: He imagined a book that around the world interviewing geologists, journeying with them to outcrops, looking and learning. The result is a majestic book, filled with fascinating facts, memorable profiles of scientists, and a profound grasp of the fact that Former World numbs the brain. It makes you feel as if you'd been plucked This family's weird habits include, for example, assuming that when you see not to decide how you feel about what you see but to think of tautly composed school of communication. Its members hint at what they're thinking and expect principle that guided The New Yorker through its glory days under narrative, it feels unnecessarily bloated; for all his famous humility, there's a mild vanity in its fussy perfectionism. Above all, there's a sense of this, and worry that technology is about to replace fine writing. I say bring always been a retail business, the product of commercial enterprise rather than Empire, from the empress to the great cocottes. Branches were soon opened in a distinct artistic style on any of them. The client was invited to participate in the creation of a given piece; his or her sketches were considered; his or her stones might be used. But to establish a solid worldwide reputation among principle: the highest quality of materials and workmanship, and a single Which means that the stuff risked being stuffy, if you can period, which the firm's designers seem to have anticipated by two decades and recognizable art deco forms, but clearly not as signs of revolutionary modernity. The simple shapes and lines were being offered rather as extensions jewels. Take tiaras, for example. The tiara (that is, a woman's ornamental crown of a more or less crescent shape) is not at all modern, but it is match the royals and nobles who had inherited theirs. required the effect that made Napoleon's upstart court look imperial and emperors and their descendants and emulators in the succeeding two generations. women never appear in diamond tiaras. Figure skaters and ballet dancers are the an hour would suffice to check out the show at the Metropolitan Museum. I the first three cases were diamond brooches made to adorn the spacious dresses ornaments festooned with graceful diamond swags and dripping with pendant diamond drops. Each piece was an entire show, dazzling under the lights. But diamond in each leaf and petal was surrounded by a tiny wall of platinum hold up these stones, but rather, a precise silvery tracing that sets off the diamond and emphasizes the interlaced design of the brooch while hiding its construction. Out of sight at the back, the grainy tracing around the stones is held up on a continuous gallery of supports rising from another tracery that lies against the body. The diamonds are lifted up on an airy cage, and light jewelry. Today, the seriousness is missing. When it comes to style in jewels, on casual fakes and mixtures of vivid barbaric ornaments along with real minerals, something undertaken almost for their sake. Modern vanity is more personal; we no longer want to wear ornaments with that detached eternal look. never expressions of wild genius, like the beating heart made of rubies that always wins out over daring visual invention, but a staggering technical imagination has also been summoned. That, if anywhere, is where the modernity learned, for example, how a diadem, brooch, or bracelet could be invisibly hinged so as to be completely flexible in all directions, not a rigid little beast of unyielding metal and stone, but supple, tender toward the body, changeable in mood. I saw in the catalog how the lengthy diamond necklaces with complex pendants were often made to be disassembled by the client, so she could have four bracelets, two brooches, and a shorter necklace whenever she got tired of the one big thing. Meanwhile her tiara, just right for attending the coronation of a monarch, could be dismounted from its frame and reversed into a necklace suitable for the opening of the opera season. The jewels would be the relevant alternative mounts and fastenings, and a tiny screwdriver in its As I stared into the cases, I often heard "Oh my God!" next to me or behind me, uttered in an undertone with a note of awe. I was tempted him in the heady presence of treasures laid up on the earth, material wealth in its most concentrated and enduring form. A diamond bracelet mocks all the sables that wither and rot, the cars that rust, the champagne gone flat, and the claret turned vinegar, even the crumbling great houses and the faded great Lifeless from the start, jewels sneer at death, and they require zero its jewels on the move. The client might lose at cards, and the gold cigarette make it into two tiaras and a brooch for three other clients, maybe preserving some elements and using them upside down or sideways. Each piece was photographed for the archives, against just such a fate. cigarettes. These were meant to be carried in the palm of the hand at the ball or the restaurant, and deployed in front of everybody, their gold interiors with their clever little hinges flashing while the nose was dusted, the mouth the lipstick refilled, and you held onto it with a little ring or chain that notwithstanding. Of things we would like, whole categories are oddly pairs of earrings, all very drippy ones from the '20s. Where are the little diamond floral clusters for the lobe, the neat ruby circles? And there are home drained and exhausted from thinking about how to adjust my diadem and sapphires. The next day, fully recovered, I saw the photo in the paper of the is the realm of fashion, fashion is the realm of artifice, and both are the giddy hats and stark painted faces, sporting fitted tops, transparent tops, cutout tops, tight skirts slit to here, full skirts trailing to there, floppy pants or skinny pants, trimmings that glitter or flutter, colors that dazzle or puzzle, curled feathers and dyed fur, boiled wool and frosted leather, crushed velvet, shot silk, frayed hemp, and distressed plastic. Such displays are to be the right to cut and shape her fig leaf, edge it with spangled lace, and crimson velvet for men all over the Western world, and that was that, right down to all the Similar Sober Suits at summit meetings. men, apparently, are getting tired of being inconspicuous. With no loss of beauty and status (men's suits are just as becoming as they ever were), perfect male tailoring has lost some of its virile edge. No wonder, since the strongest theme in modern women's fashion has been the creative theft of the male wardrobe, with all its components translated into terms of conspicuous offering men's fashion shows of unexpected glamour, color, and sexuality, founding a new theater that could someday rival its feminine equivalent, for men were using the same trousers and shorts, shirts and sweaters, coats and distorted for themselves. The menswear shows deployed a similar hue, a daring sweep of cuff, collar, and coattail, all totally forbidden by there's a fur scarf or some extra drapery added to the neck of a man's suit; there there's a man's raincoat in metallic fabric that moves in a million exhilarating to see this stuff back on men, and not just in the movies. The wore a blue Louis XV wig with a blue denim ensemble, his face a charming study portrait, with flowing locks and tender throats exposed above their soft suede whole display vividly depicts what men have envied for so long. For generations, they had to look tough, modest, honest, and restrained under plain suits or plain sportswear. Masculinity was allowed no erotic range in dress; the phallic necktie, licensed to reflect light and glow with color, was famously men's only hope. Every expressive shape or shiny streak in a coat and suit bore the dread suggestion of effeminacy, connoting both a lack of integrity and an unbridled vanity felt to be unavoidable in women, but criminal, even thuggish, in men. And so the free play of fantasy died out of men's clothes. Revived fantasy has tended in one direction only, which means that lately, there's been more than enough black leather, harsh metal, and shaved hair. Maybe now that sexual ambiguity is recognized as a potent force, we can begin to see men in gold embroidery and sweeping folds of silk. Long habits die hard, though. Most men's fashion shows still concentrate on exquisite variations of the formal and sporty classics, with plenty of subtle colors, beautiful cravats and very discreet historical references. Male models still can't carry off the gaudy stuff. They lurch uncomfortably along the catwalk, imprisoned in a tradition of artlessness. has been promoting them for years. His most recent catwalk version was a sari wrapped around the waist under a jacket, falling to the instep and swinging with the wearer's manly stride. Very nice, but not likely to catch on until men finally remember the comfortable tunics of the very distant past. the masculine long hair, jewelry, and purses of medieval times. Skirts may appear some day (that's a prediction) but probably with a military flavor, the Meanwhile, lovers of spectacle will have to content themselves with drag, which gives intermittent delight to its watchers and wearers, even if so far, it lion and the face of a man. Why is this no good? Simple: Because in order to have a face, you need a pair of hands. Paws won't do. Animals with paws must have big, furry, jutting muzzles, which rule out a face. They need muzzles for biting, to defend themselves, and to attack prey, whereas possessors of hands can fashion and chuck a spear or throw a punch. Animals need muzzles to carry things and to gnaw on their food, whereas possessors of hands can make a fire jeopardizes your survival. So faces presuppose hands. Sphinxes and centaurs and other countenanced but handless creatures not only do not exist, they could two books that otherwise brought me unremitting boredom. Well, almost head. His prose oozes a kind of rotten poetry, and no observation is too banal caress each other, dance about the teeth and inner cheeks, bathe in each relevance of lateralization of function will be ascertained only by careful research that acknowledges that aspects of this function develop throughout the might, I can detect no lambent flicker of humor in these pages. however. Someone ought to extract and put them in a concise form, to save human facial feature, one that even the Neanderthals lacked. The chin seems to do know, however, is that men's chins have been getting larger over the last puberty in response to testosterone. Testosterone weakens the immune system. So, paradoxically, a big chin on a healthy man is an advertisement of robustness: It means that, despite an excess of testosterone, his immune system is still powerful enough to fight off disease. Therefore women should fancy a big chin on a mate, and the trait is sexually selected. (Insert Jay Leno joke here.) I do not know whether this theory is true. I do know that in good society, chins are very important. Style largely depends on the way the chin is face has been getting longer at the bottom over the generations, it has been some arcane reason, is one of the few places on Earth where humans are still evolving. (Anthropologists discovered this by examining skeletons from the flattened the heads of babies by placing bags of sand on their brows and seems to have had her cranium artificially stretched for beauty's sake. Did this really make her beautiful? What renders a face facial beauty. This conclusion is supported by a wealth of studies over the aesthetically, the most extraordinary. If you use a computer to merge a lot of create an average criminal face by making a photographic composite of lots of mug shots. The "prototypical criminal" turned out to be way too handsome. looking average. One is that potential mates can be sure you're a human and, hence, biologically worth mating with. (Remember, Homo sapiens lived side by side with Neanderthals for many thousands of years, and we differed from them chiefly in the face.) Second, average facial features are a sign of good genes, of being close to the optimal design favored by natural selection. faces are even more pleasing than the average face. Women are judged to be babyish features suggest that most of their childbearing years are still ahead. Full lips are a plus, probably because they reflect high estrogen levels and they can be read. Cheaters and liars imperil the cooperative enterprises necessary for survival, but they give themselves away by their skewed facial expressions. The most important facial muscles are not under the control of the around the eyes. Even at the corners of the mouth, the phony smile betrays itself by being subtly lopsided: Involuntary expressions, arising in the lower, unitary brain, affect both sides of the mouth equally, but willed expressions are governed by the cerebral hemispheres, the dominant of which sends a rose from being just another digit to being opposable. For our simian ancestors in the trees, falling from branch to branch was a normal mode of locomotion, but you had better have a prehensile paw for grabbing the crucial limb at the last moment. When we landed on the ground, hands were first employed in interesting thing about the human hand is the phenomenon of "hand dominance," which, like speech and toolmaking, is unknown among apes. Why are we either hemispheres (each controlling a different hand) are similarly specialized? It may well be that the hands molded the brain, not vice missiles at prey. One amusing (but untestable) hypothesis has it that females threw with their right arms, because they were carrying their babies in their left arms up against their hearts, the beating of which soothed and quieted the infant. In any case, the secret of manual dexterity is all in the instant. And it is in the analytical left hemisphere of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, where these sorts of timing decisions are "higher" selves, at least (our lower ones reposing in some oafish organs in the directly behind the face, just above the eyes. The self that engages the world alienating experiences. Staring at our face in the mirror, as The Face author points out, "we become first and third person at once, viewer and viewed. Even when the face is utterly impassive, we can know what it's reading." (For some reason, this works best at the end of a cocktail party, when you have ducked into the bathroom and are feeling slightly squiffy.) Or, wiggling your fingers by letting the motive force propagate directly from your will to the digits, you suddenly notice the real cause of the action is quite mechanical trumpery that gives the lie to the self. I would recommend these metaphysical exercises as a cheap alternative to reading The Face and by aliens. Like most items in the music department of the same phenomenon, it sociology. But Night Train is light on plot and nearly Martian in its undertaken professionally but stops a bit short of conviction. They are both smart enough to notice you noticing this, and their answers are identical: more Night Train is a monologue, delivered by one Detective Mike also a woman, as she reminds the reader no more than once per paragraph. Police salaries being what they are, she lives in a comically tilted slum flat down by the railroad tracks, where deep in the night the titular conveyance roars by day, Mike has got her worst job yet. She has to notify next of kin in a one not to wear the blue herself. All her brothers are cops, and her dad is such an overwhelming cop of a cop they made him a colonel. "Colonel Tom," as he is called throughout, has taken Mike under his capacious wing and seen her through detox and depression and all the rest of it, as if she were another police, as she likes to put it. She takes a quick look at the situation and her analytical mind snaps to. In addition to beauty and brains, the deceased had with leather patches on the elbows. Does that sound like a recipe for field of potential murderers is as thin as the motive directory. At length her researches lead her into terrain that is nearly spiritual or something. Could virtuosos, the story itself is little more than a structural excuse for a show of wizard dexterousness. Mike is the only character. Background noise is supplied by other members of her department, but they are cut and pasted from a in her previous existence for a minute. She joins the parade of other scarily experience them in this form anyway, since here, as elsewhere in his delivered in clipped cadences by a broad, especially one under emotional strain. Sometimes you don't know whether he did his research by letting himself be washed by television for endless stretches, or whether he went so deep he knows expressions you've never heard (or haven't heard since fifth grade: Do shit s and excuse me s. This doesn't prevent him from dishing out the fine writing, though; he has Mike get pretty fancy, to the point of for this book. Perhaps foreigners will thrill to the exotica, as a sort of reason, has no friction and no ending. A pint of the "fortified wine" that shares the book's name would make a better investment. religious beliefs may be, the whole murky lot of them playfully slither for those particular creeds induces him, at moments of crisis in one plot after always guilty males) down on a hardwood pew and to subject him to a vigorous in which nuclear war has leveled half of civilization, strange new metallic animals are threatening to gobble mankind, government has collapsed, and a establishing a government network of its own. Yet even in this most bizarre of goes on a search for God (to thus label the object of his desires) directly, by means of an intimate, unblinking examination of the world in front of his own He becomes a maniac of miniature observation. Atomic particles dance in his eyesight. The world shimmers at him and, after a while, encouraged by what he sees, he shimmers back, ecstatic. He is something very literary tradition, agog at the indescribable radiance of the lawn at his feet, lunatic in an asylum, he has spent a lifetime in the mistaken belief that he is the End of Time might seem different from his other novels because of the begins an affair with a young call girl who on some other plane of existence may be a deer, and then a new affair with a girl so young as still to be a of a theory about how time can branch off in different directions and perform different operations, like a computer program. Alternatively, you could regard some of those strange doings as the addled fantasies of the aging suburban hero, whose journal of a year, filled with rants against his wife and pornographic musings and notations about his deteriorating health, constitutes Toward the End of Time tells a story exactly like that in any number of figure out what to do, except by attending closely to the radiant surface of children wild on the streets, clogging the doorway to the convenience store, raucously scraping their skateboards and roller blades along the sidewalks, have they been all winter, these children? They are spontaneously, repulsively hatched, like the flies that now buzz and bump on the inside of the kitchen tree, no less spectacular for being familiar, making its annual splash of have devised a few blossoms, at one of which I saw a sleepy bee bumbling, my quite rise to ecstatic levels, though. Ben remembers how, as a child, the pulp exploding facts," used to relieve the pressure of everyday bleakness for him. new shifts in foliage slips ever deeper into sadness. At the beginning of the cannot imagine being loved by any human being at all and comforts himself with ground is offering him, in some spongy vegetable manner of its own, the acceptance he craves. "At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic matter, a kind of breath hints of love." And it becomes poignantly clear that deteriorating, but because he has a soul, which is shrinking. get around to raking them up again, which is disappointing. I don't entirely mischievous pen. I fear that too many people will throw up their hands in ever more odious or cantankerous, and too many other people will celebrate the But there is a primary virtue to this book, subtler than its other traits, and this primary virtue is to be, ever so quietly, heartbreaking. about his failed attempt to become an Internet multimillionaire, the author pauses to ask himself a set of questions I had been wanting him to address for lies had I told? How many moral lapses had I committed? How many ethical indiscretions he commits in his pursuit of Internet riches and, after this Burn Rate, currently all the rage in Silicon Valley and on public offerings bomb? Aren't the existing Internet stocks depressed? Isn't the Internet really about technology and not content? Isn't the Internet like cable publishing entrepreneur in his 40s, attracts the interest of several what's on the Internet) into the next Yahoo! As the investors and the public company worth several hundred million dollars. Meanwhile, his company's meetings, industry conventions, threatening phone calls, and transcontinental and venture capital and legal disputes as competitors overtake his flimsy He's a writer (with this book in him). And the Internet is a big joke. only to excavate the psychopathology that runs through it like a sewer. But his eventual escape. (In fact, beware of the flattering blurb by Lewis on Burn Rate 's dust jacket.) Charm, not malice, guides Lewis' odyssey acumen of a confidence man. "They know nothing about this. And you know next to how many stupid people there are in this world we can take advantage of." To couple of years later, after having dropped tens of millions on it. an ugly man, sweating like crazy." He labels his most dependable source of seemed that no one ever told the truth. Sometimes it seemed that there was no was smart enough to leave the new media division early. scheming little shit he is, he seeks to inflate his credibility. A real liar down bits of dialogue on his legal pads during meetings while others composed becomes the journal of a loser. And, like most losers, he fails to give the winners their due. No Web startup except for Yahoo! appears to be making much massage the medium, attract serious investors, and lay the substructure for the inevitable: an Internet economy. What's more, these companies believe in their a miracle he got as far in the Internet business as he did. millions at the Web out of the conviction that it will subsume the other media, yourself fortunate if you've never invested a penny in this market. Any sure Nor, judging from this book, was its primary salesman. remains mysterious. What does he represent? Nominally, his genre is legal associates in their late 20s. He can do brilliant, crusty octogenarian senior versions of his novels than in the novels themselves, which is remarkable considering that the movie versions aren't terribly memorable to begin that his books proceed from a perspective radically different from that of his competitors. Most legal fiction begins with the criminal and derives the law: legal world. It is the legal world and its attendant institutions that shape the felonious mind. (Of course, lots of other people see the world this way achievement is to use this inverted narrative to create a sense of purpose in was a wonderful novel. But it was also an incisive and brilliant argument was an intelligent and compelling indictment of the tobacco industry that, because it was sold in the fiction aisle, probably reached a thousand times devoting his celebrity to the articulation of a passionate and decidedly unfashionable liberalism. This has never been more true, though, than in lingering attachments he may have had to the frivolity of his genre and emerges make partner when a homeless man carrying a gun takes him hostage in the firm's plush conference room. He escapes, but the incident jars him. He begins a has a lean, linear feel to it. Things happen to Brock, and he does not stop to ask why. He becomes involved with a woman, a fellow activist, but she appears only fleetingly. ("She lifted the blanket and tucked herself next to me," she would've fallen onto the porch. She was easy to hold.") The moment when legal clinic he is about to join. This may be the most abbreviated epiphany in swallow up competitors so they could add more zeros to the bottom line, and for this I would become rich. He helped his clients eat and find a warm bed. defend the homeless is a hero. To have Brock agonize, to have him spend the bulk of the book desperately weighing the pros and cons of his decision, would be to have him act as people normally act in novels. And The Street he manages to present politically unpalatable ideas with grace and and compelling observation that as a society we fail to treat the homeless with family of five whom Brock had befriended dies on a bitter winter night, after being turfed out of their apartment. He visits their bodies in the morgue, pulling back the sheet: "I closed my eyes," Brock says, "and said a short prayer, one of mercy and forgiveness. Don't let it happen again, the Lord said something said over and over again. And these are things that, in this day and insults, few attacks, an unvarying tone of stern politesse. The candidates' jackets on the body; no cowboy hats or tank helmets on the head. Just the careful hair of each (unconvincingly dark for Dole, unconvincingly gray for lapsed. Bob and Bill have each momentarily given in to the populist urge and appeared in leisure wear or rough gear; but that's always been a mistake. Clothes like that are supposed to show the public man in private, the regular guy with his guard down, but they usually just make him look childish. of the paradoxical effects of suits that, instead of concealing character under a bland exterior, they enhance it. Bill, Bob, Al, and Jack are more visible in their smooth, dark envelopes than they are in the multicolored, bunchy stuff required for golf or hiking, picnics or beaches. Such exposure may not always be flattering, but it does let the voter sense the man behind the slogan. Dole is youthful and beefy, but he takes his coat off to jump around, which, like plump, bouncy, and optimistic. Gore is solid, but sedate. And for once, the candidates look like heads of state before they've even taken office, clad in spread or pointed collar, and a tie with a generous but disciplined This is the costume, not of "power," as people woozily say, nor of rigid conformity and unimaginative conservatism, but of classic and flexible modernity. Suits are the dress of civility itself. They aim to avoid nicely symmetrical ensemble of youthful gaffers and aging youngsters, each team starring one white head and one brown, one thick body and one thin, one mobile frame and one stiff. But what this civilized sartorial theater underscores more clearly than anything else is that the president is sexy and the others are not. In breathing, tailored life, they are stiffs, except for Bill. He's the only one you want to hug, the one carrying his flesh with obvious pleasure, ready to share it with others. Images of him with his tailored arms across the shoulders of other leaders seem reflections of genuine impulse, all the more poignant in the context of sober modern dress. No wonder he's ahead in the instructive to contrast the candidates with politicos who don't obey the fashion rules. Dick Morris, for one, can't hide his unpalatable stump of a body behind the trappings of genial sensuality. He may wear a soft collar, a suit with wide lapels, and a brilliant yellow tie covered with yellow sunflowers, or a costume generated out of modern man's honorable and heroic past, particularly his political past. When it comes to suits, we are all, Republicans and Democrats, still in thrall to the Great Emancipator, the Ultimate Public such a forceful image of physical appeal and high principle. Candidates might country clothes. His presidential suit alone created his special blend of personal attractiveness and public statesmanship, a blend our leaders are always being urged to emulate. There were, moreover, no attempts to carve monument, his marble words glowing high up on the walls behind him and beside him. His marble sleeves and pants legs break into noble tailored folds around his endless arms and legs, his marble lapels lie gravely along his chest, his marble buttons, watch chain, necktie, and collar points create small episodes along the front of his lean body, over a marble shirt and waistcoat that create and his tailoring along with him, a suited beacon for all future political the grand old man of the Cold War bellowed his recommendation at a meeting of "That's when we hope," the magisterial wise man said, "that cooler heads will Mercifully, the end of the Cold War has brought an end to this type of the pleasure and thrills of a spy novel, but that's not exactly the case. Spy novels induce a frisson of tension that's enjoyable because the reader will leave readers' knuckles white, is no fun at all to read, because the Their impressive account is one of the best of a flood of new books about the Cold War, triggered by the end of the superpowers' long research speak for them. It has quite a bit to say, little of it soothing. much to what we know about the coldest days of the Cold War from careful the loss of his model for a new path of socialist development, got mischievous. president doggedly bent on the avoidance of nuclear war." Actually, it shows that mixed politics send mixed signals. True, the planet was not destroyed, for create the conditions for the crisis. The world was brought to the verge of missiles that were not supposed to be there, and an invasion that was not compunction about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for these philosophically and accommodates itself to them." Sure enough, confronted philosophically as he could, although he described his reaction to the setback in rather less elegant language. There was no need for the Kremlin, he said, to "act like the czarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot gripping new detail, including the book's biggest, scariest revelation. The Kremlin, we learn, had decided to use tactical battlefield nuclear weapons blockade, it's clear that the first combat use of nuclear weapons since missile crisis, it seems, may have been even worse than we had thought. some diplomats and conservative scholars seem to long nostalgically for the era of Mutual Assured Destruction. "One Hell of a Gamble" comes as a welcome corrective. Bad as today's global uncertainties may seem, the Cold War system always had an even more dangerous potential for getting out of control. Even only if one's opponent didn't know exactly where the brink was. "One Hell of a Gamble" reminds us just how terrifying that game could be. "Any fool with the West. All too often, he finds, they have failed to do so, preferring accused previous generations of scholars of peddling a view of an exotic, backward, savage Orient, the intellectual justification for colonizing or once put it, in a stroke Said changed "Orientalist" from a legitimate academic of World War I fame, and they will accuse him of imperialist sympathies. But a dream palace of their own, "an intellectual edifice" influenced by the West with a complicated legacy of attraction and repulsion. come to detest the willingness of his fellow thinkers to become rented cruel realities of the Middle East today: the gap between petrodollar wealth in the Gulf and uninspiring economic growth elsewhere; the persistence of autocracy and the failure to develop accountable governments; the debilitating political ideas and the sheer power of the United States. And so they have fled artificial borders drawn by the Western empires, hearkening back to the cling to his legacy and excoriate those who dare doubt its ultimate triumph. confident spirit" of cosmopolitanism and an openness to the Western ideas that nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in black velvet, with the idea of finally getting rid of them. After two decades when they are brought together. Given the movie's period flavor, this means that the modes of the late 1940s and early 1950s are in for a determined Man of the Hour in the late 1940s, inventor of the "New Look" and savior of the years had been stamped with a certain gallant jauntiness and comic quirkiness, for women was an inspired move toward a whole world of pleasure and languor shaped by exquisitely cut and fitted jackets that curved over flaring hips, while sleek coils of hair supported delicately feathered hats. Crisply radiating pleats and sumptuously layered folds of fabric were deftly precious textiles, often embroidered or sequined, to spread out from the hourglass torso. When skirts did not sweep, they molded the figure to well below the knee; dashing cuffs, collars, and stoles did the sweeping. Feet emerged at the bottom, delicately shod. Coats swung out like the mantles of effect evoked the French Second Empire of a century earlier, the lush, moneyed with its fussily constructed garments, cumbersome skirts, cinched waists, and rigid hairstyles, crippling their feet in high heels and imprisoning their hands in white gloves. It looks as though we're now meant to forget that quaint line of thought, and to regard such fancy trappings as appropriate to the ruthless fight for political ascendancy. Call it the Dictatorial Mode. statesman, courting the populace, negotiating treaties, or ordering executions, those formidable rulers never failed to appear ostentatiously clad in vast glued into smooth rolls upholding pearls and plumes. dazzling feminine armor, which not only fails to hamper but actively enlarges female power. Modern women, weary of expressing strength of mind and body via could enhance theirs. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly thinks that we're ready, at least in New York. The institute is visible muscles and strong shoulders. The postwar Romantic look involved sloping shoulders, a very straight spine, delicate bones, and no muscles the fashions became her. Her dominating will was all the fiercer, her grip on the people, too. The whole point of the fashion was the tension between the force of female personality and the delicacy of the feminine body. since we gave up posture for fitness, big square shoulders with a tendency to hunch are no longer a disgrace but the appropriate sign of strength, especially if worn with strong biceps. A hint of hulk is apparently not unwelcome in the modern woman's image, and a slightly humped back, spinal curve, and thin, but they also want their strength to look physical, not just emotional or force that is masked like a ballerina's. In classical ballet, a woman's greatest feats of bodily discipline and endurance must look effortless, and her spiritual range. Her body's mechanical power is just as great or greater, but it's there to support the interpretation, not to show itself off. That's for combination may generate only token changes in fashion, with small details making the period allusions (hairstyles and makeup, hats and gloves, collars and cuffs) on top of the present basic shapes. We may not be ready to hide the female body's true strength, to celebrate feminine charm with luxury and high artifice. Women may have to get more used to their real power in the world before they can afford to look as if they practiced the discipline of elegance, boosters' whitewashing of city history, the absurd and isolating layout driven postmodernist. Instead, he got angry. Sometimes too angry, seeming to argue that all reformers were elitists, all whites closet racists. Over the past eight years, that anger has mushroomed into it's a diatribe shot through with millennial overtones, so that its reach is or something like that. And then there are whole chapters that smell like old ecological system is more likely than any place on earth to suffer earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, fires, grizzlies, rabid squirrels, and killer bees. Even denial, are ignoring the situation. The fools assume that the aberrant guiding legend, muse, and inspiration, as well as a great way to avoid thinking tell about themselves, "linked together by strange ironies." Attempts to put moment city authorities rejected the idea of zoning to avoid floods. Instead they went with the notion of flood control, which gave them a nice pork barrel budget for public works and allowed rich people build a house wherever they damn well felt like it. A rather heartbreaking section argues that similar their usual firefighting techniques for fear of endangering the property next a surrounding fence is rigged to zap human beings but welcome cute little a. It isn't clear what this fact proves, but it's alarming and this to happen. Maybe a good fire will shake things up, his thinking seems to of the way through and turns into an armchair academic. The last few chapters critic, and his emphasis on the fairy tale aspect of natural disaster undermines the facts that have gone before. His argument appears to be that fictional disasters stand in for racism. He appears to have missed the Will Smith phenomenon, whereby a masculine and not deracinated black man repeatedly funereal decade, interring many of the hopes and fantasies of the earlier should stop complaining and suck it up, but this decade has seen the birth of new fantasies, and he fails to take them on. There's no mention of the Internet here, though surely it must have some effect on the way people define their loyalties and civic duties. Ecology of Fear reads like a book written in increased optimism (whether justified or not) about technology. sincerely plausible. It is a solemn fake. You will not hear this from the probably the most popular novel about that period since Gone With the is so professionally archaeological, so competently dug, that one can mistake its surfaces for depth. But it's like a cemetery with no bodies in it. All the records of life are there, the facts and figures and pocket histories, pointing up out of the ground, but what's buried there was never alive. people don't want novels to be, in the deepest sense, unreal. They want them to that it is "utterly convincing down to the last detail." And he's right. But Cold Mountain is utterly convincing in an unreal way. and epic power. As a storyteller, he hardly ever errs. This is a remarkably where he had grown up. There, near Cold Mountain, waits his sweetheart, a woman who has died just before the book begins, she is struggling to make her old metaphysically alone, as the conventions of adventure dictate: "He wished not to be smirched with the mess of other people." But messes just keep on smirching him. He goes through a shower of picaresque trials: Three men set on and another woman from a band of renegade federal soldiers; various men try to recapture him; he is seduced by a woman whose husband, discovering the couple, me if I did the right thing, letting you live"), and his inner life is down at the last minute. But the tragic couple was permitted a night of passion, and a moist epilogue shows a happy little girl, the product of this union, frolicking with her mother some years later: the happy end of a happy is a good writer: calm, for the most part unsentimental, often rich. But the until recently, a professor of English, although the jacket copy omits this fact, preferring us to believe that he and his family merely "raise horses" in not moonlight nor the prick of lantern light from some welcoming home. The town Such prose, if not quite antiquarian's dust, is the carbon its roots. Linguistically, he is not in search of the historically rejuvenating would not have occurred to him to write in anything but the living language of his own age (which, admittedly, was closer to the earlier period's than idea perhaps being that in simpler times, a homely, rustic simile would have catfish "the size of a boar hog"; a man who gets ready to take a blow "like a of blood: "He hopped like a schoolboy in a game." A corpse is seen, and Crane describes the dead man's beard moving in the wind "as if a hand were stroking historical life. The result is that while one continues to believe Cold Mountain on the surface, one stops believing it at any deeper level. There extraordinarily fascinating though it was but a mere slot in flesh." The reader he would never use these upholstered words. The private language of a man like himself. One sees that Cold Mountain is condemned to be a literary approximation of an already literary idea of reality. cheapness." Although the novelist might be able to render well all sorts of facts and dates and general furniture, she could never truthfully render the "old consciousness." The great historical novels are always about contemporary consciousness. This inability to convey the "old consciousness" was not a matter of inaccuracy but of bad faith. It would always be the new consciousness East Village the other day to see what people were wearing at the center of the clothed population; there seemed to be a large consensual flight from the color black, that famous hue of communal refusal. Instead, everybody was offhandedly wearing an assortment of garments in pale colors, as if gives to modern urban life. It seems that the bohemian spirit has gone beyond the old war against palatable daylight hypocrisy waged in the costume of stark dark truth. Once upon a time, colorful clothing was the sign of unspeakable properly bemused and detached critics of society. Now, it's clearly lost its was a bohemian college student in New York, only black was acutely cool, because it was so hard to find. Standard inexpensive clothes in maybe brown or maroon, the traditional colors of country sportswear favored by the Ivy League, and in tweedy mixtures or pale versions of the same. Socks, too. All this was excruciatingly uncool, hopelessly demeaning. You could get a black dress or black suit for lots of money, but that was only occasionally permissible and mostly not possible; and there were no thrift shops full of interesting castoffs. Satisfactory rebel black had to be tracked down in places that specialized in dancers' gear, for example (where you could find black tights and turtlenecks), or made at home during vacations. I remember concocting many a funereal top and bottom and the occasional black cape on my sympathetic mother's sewing machine. On a tight budget, it required real effort to oppose the multicolored, tacky assumptions of ordinary life in those dull black. Black was worn by mourners and the clergy, by civil and domestic textiles, until then associated with widows' weeds and maids' uniforms, for plain but costly little dresses that made the contrived, bright, or pallid garb Fashionable women discovered that simply cut garments in plain black fabric were as flattering to them as evening clothes were to men. Women's fashion hasn't been the same since, and the feminine appeal of muted black clothes, later extended to menswear for women, has kept its mainstream power. That power was echoed in the rebellious bohemian version, which inevitably became a sizable fashion market itself and took over a large part of expensive chic. For that very reason, perhaps, current urban opposition to the whole gone for good, because its prestige is so great. Suggesting, as it did, the remote look of both the unworldly priesthood and the potent monastic orders, austere, afflicted critic. Black was also chosen by women who took their cues solitary, and impassioned heroines of fiction and history, wearing black dresses in illustrative art, helped set the tone for hosts of modern temptresses in black. Intelligent, unquiet black and sexy black have come together in modern women's fashion; a black dress feels both safe and personal distinction and a certain noble reticence. He offered this advice to both sexes at a time when elaborate clothes in rich colors were prevalent among the mighty; and many of them took it. Much Renaissance and Baroque portraiture displays its successful effect, which has repeatedly inspired high and low practical elegance ever since. Modern black sweaters and black leather jackets, Now everybody can do it, and the fashion business has apparently concluded that everybody will want to do it forever. Designers' attempts to eradicate the public's devotion to black clothes, whether by fashion folk around the globe, have succeeded only in fixing it more. Transparent black and rugged black, fitted or flowing or bunchy black, black velvet and satin, black spandex and plastic, never seem to go away. Striking green, yellow, and purple may appear, and sober brown and navy, too, giving the accumulated cultural force of its myriad uses in history, you might predict that the future of black clothing would be at least as long as its past. Since modern black can be both high and low or right and left, it seems too versatile to lose. But all that might fall away. Up to now, the black printed type on the page has also looked as indispensable as the adaptable dress of modern thought, the new dawn they assume will flood the future and ultimately wash away the or financial capitals, but in the mining and logging camps of the West. Lacking a sizable middle class of farmers and shopkeepers (who would arrive only after World War I), and undergoing intense and rapid capitalist development, large government a football between the two," according to the final volume of John R. Commons and associates' venerable History of Labor in the United miners and loggers defended themselves and their jobs with rifles and dynamite. They also created some of the most incendiary labor organizations ever seen, above all the Western Federation of Miners. Their employers were no less strikebreakers as if they were baronial armies. When private force failed, employers persuaded local and state governments to suspend due process of law, arrest suspected troublemakers, initiate mass deportations, and crush strikes have sensed that readers in the conservative 1990s would resist being reminded States, after all, has been blessed (we are constantly told) with a dynamic, egalitarian sort of capitalism, one that has always rewarded individual conventional wisdom in two ways: first, by describing a world (as Woody West complains in a dismissive review of Big Trouble for the Weekly slaves; and second, by appearing to ignore what West contends is "the most remarkable fact of the capital consolidation of those years, especially in the the air is scarce respirable. By the dim light of their lanterns, a dingy rock surface, braced by rotting props, is visible. The stenches of decaying vegetable matter, hot foul water and human excretions intensify the effects of deployment of black troops and the use of preventive detention "bull pens" to miners who called himself Harry Orchard. In Orchard's hotel room, police discovered materials for rigging up a bomb. After prolonged coaxing by impression that he could save his own neck by naming others, he went on to notorious organization, the Industrial Workers of the World. brought an outraged response from such relatively conservative labor leaders as year and a half of legal wrangling and nationwide protest demonstrations, the grounds that Orchard's testimony was unreliable. A few months later, were then dropped. Only the wretched Orchard wound up getting convicted, and (following the commutation of his death sentence) he spent the rest of his life details that he sometimes seems to have lost his bearings, trying to read significance into every little shard of information that his research had Big Trouble is bigger than it had to be. It includes long digressions on characters receive ample biographical treatments, but so do dozens of other mastery of historical events and contexts, and his ability to dramatize them, editors either did not or could not prevail upon him to lighten up, on himself his obvious sympathies with the workers, was scrupulous in assessing the events surrounding the murder. (In his epilogue, he offered compelling, albeit subtitle implies they were. In fact, the immediate result of the trials was to injustices of modern life, along with his stubborn reportorial integrity about getting to the very bottom of any story as best he could. Its flaws aside, Big Trouble is a brave book that exhibits those qualities bounteously. act of channel surfing itself. Of course, video vaudeville wasn't the goal of Foundation who dreamed that an infusion of federal funding would make the "vast wasteland" of television bloom. How their dream cracked up, resulting in the telecommunications litter. But it was planned that way. Commercial broadcasters had been loitering in the vicinity of educational broadcasting years before the the public broadcasting handoff from the Ford Foundation, which, along with the underwrite it thereafter (just as cities routinely assume responsibility for museums and libraries once philanthropists found them). In the expansionist to education, culture, and politics wasn't that wild. Looking back, one of government funding that didn't require the scrutiny of annual congressional appropriations. All this would have required was that its founding bureaucrats the provocative programming they thought was their mission. These unflinching funding and his power to appoint board members to the Corporation for Public programming course into the '70s. But to remind its masters that it can still love: centrist news programs, conservative talk shows, Wall Street advice corporate money and aggressively gathers data on how poor, uneducated, and runs advertisements for its supporters at the top of shows and strikes business And when it stumbles onto a good subject for a series, like Ken Burns' history of baseball, it turns the show into a seminar on racism and labor relations, public broadcasting. His policy prescription includes reducing corporate influence, liberating the system from presidential control, democratizing local spark. Commercial channels pour programs down from the heavens that match or surpass the products of the public broadcasters, who are too cowed to produce sallies against public broadcasting, which consume many pages of Made to liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. The Army Corps of Engineers, mystery but a loving biography of Ruth Graham, the Rev. Billy's wife. She's an who prefer their women dutiful and demure, she herself has a macho side. She flies a helicopter and makes statements about women surviving in a men's world that could be confused with feminism. Her novels argue that criminals must pay bulimia, and bipolar mood swings, and she has asked that people who suffer such may explain why she's so popular and so queasily interesting. At a time when rarity: a writer with a vivid, at times even freakishly messy, personality. She office, and now she specializes in clinical descriptions of autopsies, explaining in graphic detail how to analyze the vaginal swab of a raped corpse or how to test skin ripped off a tortured child's buttock. As if that weren't crime detection and the challenges faced by a woman entering this mostly male nightmares. The details are now more rigorous and even more clinically that's crucial to a really good writer, she projects ugly fixations onto Noun. That's when she drops the article before some harmless inanimate object, So why do we all keep reading? Voyeuristic slumming, in the form of a rich, power hungry, sexually overactive but ultimately humane black activist and publisher. Point of Origin also further develops hilariously confused but not without insight. The increasing abstraction of her plots allows her to do what she does best: write about the job. The most executive who's responsible for the welfare of her subordinates but under ruthless pressure to deliver results; the impossibility of sorting through overwhelming floods of information and straining for an educated guess; the sadness of a life lived in helicopters and planes rather than in hotels; the inadequacy of colleagues who function like family but aren't. So what if unadulterated, almost supernatural evil? She conveys, somehow, a genuine grief. giggle. It was also sad enough to remember for a while. beach to see other people in an unusual state of near nakedness, especially girls, and stare at them in perfect freedom. It was impossible to do this anywhere else. Magazines showed girls in sleek, revealing swimsuits (guys, too), but that wasn't the same as real ones moving around, some of them people you actually knew. It used to be the national pastime, after baseball, a summer thrill for everybody. And then, after admiring all the pretty girls on local the prettiest girls in the whole country, parading around in their bathing the pageant has got itself into trouble by implicitly acknowledging this truth terminology so as to avoid calling the event a beauty contest, or the girls gorgeous. The word is out to call the girls talented and confident, and the event a scholarship program. It is, I suspect, this bit of doublespeak that has Excluding beauty is a ridiculous development for the Miss Sweetheart, the girl whose earnest desire to do good in the world and do well in her work is most purely embodied in her lovely face and perfect figure. It's part of the wholesome old tradition equating Goodness and Truth with Beauty, particularly the beauty of women. It's opposed to the wicked old tradition daughters have been wearing them for decades, and navels of all ages are a customary have they become, in fact, that the pageant's decision comes at the time when bathing suits are no longer even considered particularly explosive. long clinging evening dresses instead of bathing suits. A current issue of Only one girl is wearing nothing but a bathing suit, and it seemed to be made suits. Of course, something started happening to bathing suits as soon as they invented in the revolutionary 1840s to permit mixed bathing on public beaches. Before that, men and women bathed separately in the nude.) In due course we wound up with the modern swimsuit and the respectable nearly naked nude, business and no pleasure. The advanced 1890s permitted bathing suits to catch the eye, but only with nautical touches and a less engulfing shape, under which corseting might be applied to sharpen the outline. No skin could appear. change in bathing suits began during World War I. Even before that, a radical exposure in female clothing was underway; skirts rose up and permanently unveiled the shoes, necklines showing the collarbone began to be worn before sundown. Wartime excitement fostered the sense that the Brave Boys deserved a thrill before they marched away, and the truly patriotic bathing suit had to Beauties of the silver screen: naked arms, shoulders, backs, and armpits topped off skimpy costumes baring knees and an inch or two of thigh. The tight corset had vanished and dieting had yet to be invented, so the jiggly female form showed amply through the bathing suit. And soon such daring beach wear could, should, and indeed had to be worn, not just by actresses with doubtful morals and a professional stake in their physical looks, but by the girl next door. It was all a matter of keeping the home fires burning and preserving the values since, it has been a part of every good girl's duty, heaven help her, to adorn with every decade. A girl's respectability was forever sundered from the display. Consequently, keeping the body fit for the task has been built into female basic training for four generations, despite new shifts in the direction of female ambition and the foundation of new codes of female honor. And that occasional minor agitation that vainly urges it to stop the swimsuit attacked this ancient female habit of body and mind. For one thing, as the Miss now be everywhere exposed: in the public parks, in the buses and subways, in Grand Central Terminal. Who needs the beach for the ritual summer thrill? Further degrees of exposure became impossible after the string and the thong came in, went out, and returned. And so what's happened to bathing suits is that folks have lost interest in them, except, perhaps, for the organizers of Extra daring nakedness has gone back to being the domain of professionals, the models who pose for nude photos or who wear runway couture that bares the breasts, buttocks, and navel under transparent spangled veiling photographed on a perfect body in a manner suggesting the serene elegance of antique sculpture. We could easily follow along in that vein, in our less groundbreaking nowadays is to stroll on the sand or romp in the waves in a Notes is one of those books that gets pushed on you by crazy people. I was pushed on me. An aging beatnik with a ragged knapsack plunked down next to me out a tattered paperback and thrust it at me, insisting that the volume was too important not to be passed on. When I asked the man what A Fan's Notes was about, I expected an answer profound and mystical; instead, he fixed his and is only incidentally about the former New York Giants halfback Frank the memoirist, the ploy that teams reader and writer against the world, and story opens. While watching a televised Giants game, indulging his overweening passion for football, he collapses from alcoholic exhaustion. The breakdown occasions a jigsaw of memories: of an upstate New York boyhood dominated by a Manhattan advertising; of romantic humiliations at the hands of perky centerfold blondes; and, finally, of dreamlike interludes in sadistic mental committed. "It was a difficult admission to make, but I am glad that I made it; later I came to believe that this admission about oneself may be the only family seated next to him at a football game makes him want to "cut my flecked with butter" complexion renders him impotent. pretty girls suffocating in their softness, young executives crucifying in the smallest doses only, and any extended period of consciousness forces him back to the bar, the hospital. In one chapter, "Journey on a Davenport," he tucks himself in on his mother's couch and goes on a sort of existential the page is a rummy baritone, fat and resonant but capable of a cruel came a point when Bunny had a kind of terrifyingly loose and constant moistness, the kind of totally loose submission one detects in a woman he has impregnated, the moist eyes, the warm moist hands, the loose moist breasts and verbose. "Thus it was that the days of my youth flew by like violently unpublished novelist tuning up to write his magnum opus just as soon as work inspired a great work about postponement, a portrait of the artist as procrastinator. The drunken bore of A Fan's Notes is never boring. He's vibrant with resentment, alive with failure, a sad sack superman. When he gazes among them an awe of physical transcendence. His talent for disgust and mockery life of splendid indigence didn't change when his book met with wide acclaim. somewhat famous, though this was enough to turn his alienation into an act, a seedy admirers who kept him in cold beer and pocket change in return for wandering. He hectored friends and publishers for money, repaid people's love for him with cold neglect, and followed up on A Fan's Notes with two affectionate yet dubious portrait of a man he knew only through rambling rarely lived long at one address, and wasn't given to intimate conversation. dragged from an athletic state of grace into the oily tabloid muck), he left behind no significant paper trail other than the memoirs that made his name. strangely obsessed with oral sex. On even less evidence he speculates that add up to much in any conventional biographical sense, and he admits as much in enigmatic certain writers' lives can be once you've subtracted their work from talent, was shockingly little: a troubled heart, a bottle, an affection for the home team, and a cacophony of chemical imbalances. It's no wonder that crazy So, it seems, have many other women we see in the subway or office. Is this an improvement in personal grooming (a thesis communitarian philosophers might advance) or yet another imposition on busy professionals by the beauty industry (as feminist pundits might argue)? Well, here's why I do it: Manicures look and minutes tops. You used to have to go to a beauty salon, wait twice as long, and putting ethnic credit unions to good use, opened discount nail salons in every goal of feminism is greater economic and social independence for women, then storefront manicure parlors are a feminist success story for the 1990s: They've cosmetics and personal care have always been a way for marginalized women to transformed from a matter of folk recipes whispered from woman to woman to a beauty industry may be the only business, at least until recent decades, in For the past three decades, feminists have been accusing the beauty industry of fiendishly sophisticated campaigns to undercut women's anything as faceless as an industry, let alone one capable of a broad social individual service and the laying on of hands, was considered a trade too an excellent opportunity for immigrants and blacks. There were men in the field, but women had the edge. They could claim to use the products themselves and other women trusted them. The women who rose to the top invented flamboyant education to ship her out of reach of an unsuitable boyfriend. But she claimed orphaned as children, who began as purveyors of black women's hair potions. generously to black causes, and refusing to sell skin bleach, a popular item hussies. The solution was to tie makeup to the freedoms women were beginning to enjoy: The "New Woman" who worked in the city or went to college or just thought of herself as modern needed and deserved a new face for the world, just as she needed and deserved the right to work and vote. eagerly embraced the idea that changing their faces would change their social status. The new consumers of beauty products wrote to manufacturers that they applied rouge, lipstick, and mascara for their own pleasure, not that of their men. Men were more likely to oppose makeup than demand it, and often forbade The second problem was access to capital and to store shelves. Bankers and distributors were generally loath to do business with the gentler sex. The cosmetics queens solved this problem by exploiting their intimacy with their customers. During the first quarter of the century, the beauty industry advanced new sales techniques emphasizing personal contact: adept at what is known today as "multilevel marketing": They traveled around the country recruiting black women as sales representatives. her upscale products, she bought her company back.) But female founders were kept on as spokeswomen, or new front women were hired. Advertising agencies hired their first women to write beauty copy, then promoted them to higher positions. Beauty magazines, with scores of editorial jobs for women, emerged unified standards of feminine beauty. Suddenly, there was a look, and everyone had to have it. Whereas once beauty practices had an appealingly informal in offices and schools. Women went from being active to passive participants in the rites of beautification. No longer was putting on one's face seen as a matter of individuality, dignity, or even racial advancement (moving to Northern cities in the Great Migration of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, many former sharecroppers saw applying cosmetics as a step toward participating in and, by the time the women's movement began to address it, of oppression. of beauty isn't all big corporations and victimized customers. Even during the mothers, sisters, and friends as more likely to drive their buying decisions than advertising. Nowadays, lefty female academics dress as "white trash" as a statement of class protest. Lipstick lesbians wear heavier makeup than straight women. Black professionals braid their hair to display their ethnic pride. In other words, using makeup is as complicated an act as it has ever been. know that two weeks earlier the incumbent had detained a friend in the Oval contributions solicited from the dairy lobby in exchange for federal price Journalists, senators, and special prosecutors have made sure that even the just printed proof, leaked by a disgruntled Department of Defense analyst named his overweening paranoia and narcissism, deemed a risk to "national security." The most infamous escapade of these "plumbers" was their last: a failed Immediately the president and his Oval Office confidants began scheming to protect what they portentously referred to as "the presidency" (meaning themselves) from revelations that would surely issue from any serious investigation of their administration: where they got their milk money, how directly responsible for these enormities. They were pressured into leaving the country, testifying that they had done nothing, swearing they had never before way of a grim paradox: His lieutenants were soon suspected of conducting illicit operations of such high stakes and complexity that only a senior official would have supervised them. But the more senior the official who was suborned into taking responsibility, the farther he stood to fall; and the better he knew the error of trusting this president to protect him. It was only a matter of time before someone who had seen how things worked inside of the was the first to break. For months Dean's claims that the president was (like himself) guilty of obstruction of justice simply pitted his own word against his Oval Office conversations. Sixty hours worth of reels, subpoenaed by the Supreme Court and carried to the courtroom in a single lockbox, yielded a The story of the tapes, meanwhile, was only beginning. Congress whisked them immediately to the National Archives for safekeeping. But conversations classified by the National Archives as touching "abuse of power." It's been a flush autumn for political voyeurs, what with the publication of Charge, cusses a damning newspaper editorial (a favorite pastime), a footnote tracks down the article and quotes from the offending passages. To read these books is to plant oneself firmly in their worlds. this book, on the other hand, is to hold on for dear life while a tornado of entwined financially in a way embarrassing to all concerned. suspicions. It would have required a minimum of effort, and would been useful public. Already, newspapers and magazines have been filled with careful limitations has run out on these crimes. It may be that the best way to read this text in the years ahead will not be with a magnifying glass, but through despite the paranoia and dread that runs through this book but, in some ways, because of it. What was his appeal to the "silent majority" but a the Republican National Committee while it stood by its man until the last, performer, not just from the sound but (so it seems) from the performer's personality, from the shake of a head or the expressive curl of a wrist? I realize that, of all the grand effects that music can produce, charisma is one not too high. Years ago, in the days before I became a journalist, I played trombone with a group called the Uptown Horns, backing up blues and rock bands, and I savor the memory of how our jaded little group used to mock the rock world's cult of the charismatic. To hold one's fist stiffly in the air in a gesture of ridiculous defiance while the bass amplifier thundered and the guitar shrieked and our man on tenor sax honked deliriously, and to see a barroom audience respond with shouts and their own idiotic fists in the beery looking for charismatic qualities in places where, in theory, they might be genuine touch of the charismatic is never where you expect it to be. A given soloist might be wonderfully talented, and might choose to perform the kind of so, the indefinable strength that counts as charismatic might fail to appear. seen at the New York Philharmonic debut, a couple of months ago, of a violinist pronounced itself content. Yet what can I say? It may have been the doughy look of earnest concentration on the young man's ample cheeks, or it may have been of spectacular and forceful effects, due to the humble nature of his instrument. The viola tends to be plaintively melancholic, or else to squawk, by its helpless neck, like a dead rabbit, you feel, even before he starts to play, a vibration in the air, ever so slightly, as if gusting from the air told (by virtually every journalist who has written about him), began his viola out of the despairing recognition that, on the guitar, he would never from the stage, and the audience, mulling over the biographical background with at other times the speedy wobble of a swallowed scream. But characteristically, he uses very little vibrato at all, and the tones that emerge are round and affectless, like a man singing falsetto. His emotional peaks are almost always achieved at the lowest volume. He whispers. You expect him to sink beneath the level of audibility. But those falsetto timbres of his make a searing tone, even in a middle register, where tones are usually not searing, and the sound The of his performances that I have heard do not capture can hear only in the concert hall. And in the concert hall you become aware, ago, he reached for that sound and, at one excruciating moment, lost control of his bowing and sent out a wild overtone, double the volume of his normal Philharmonic appearance during his most recent visit, he performed a viola wandering the earth. Unspeakable horrors deploy across the background. Tartar The violence is shocking. The starry sky is gorgeous. moments you have the feeling that he is drunkenly singing sardonic songs of woe the foreground, a lonely man with an eerie and haunting sound, sometimes inhumanity in ferocious battle, waging every grand and noble struggle that we we feel when a strong personality comes up against a demonic power and refuses intelligent reader or theatergoer and his eye turns inward, though not away, letters addressed to him). These materials had not been thoroughly examined amplifies much that we have known and adds much in color and facet that has its load of information sturdily but not with much grace. Like many biographers of our day, empowered by new research technologies, he is reluctant to discard any of what he has been able to harvest. He includes minor stuff merely because man squeezing drop by drop the slave out of himself and waking one morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave's, is flowing through his The origins of some writers explain to a degree their subjects and styles. that one of his brothers called "crushing anguish," ranged the full field of society, and always with a delicacy that still makes the world gasp. already moved, to study medicine. To help pay his way through medical school, physician, and he never completely gave up medicine as his short life raced to stories ascended breathtakingly in quality and varied greatly in length, though his preface, "Biography is not criticism," and he assuredly keeps his word. Each of the major stories gets only a small identification tag from him, of not much critical value. Possibly he deals more helpfully with them in his critical books, unread by me. But this critical tagging becomes even less helpful when clarifies these connections. But he does not come near conveying that, in the whole of Western drama, there is no precedent for the style and texture of these quietly towering plays. (For an exquisite illumination of these matters, frequent patron of brothels.) Involved though he was with a literary life, he never abandoned medicine as long as his health permitted. He worked heroically three months there studying the health conditions, about which he wrote a very assists us with these contradictions by saying that, "by the standards of his his attitude toward it. By his middle 20s, he knew that he suffered from tuberculosis, and he coughed blood increasingly as the years went on. When he directly from the ceremony to a honeymoon in a sanitarium. Why did this man, himself a physician, pay so relatively little attention to his disease? The only comprehensible explanation is that the vocation that had burrowed in next friend: "Not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to phrase maker, with many of the phrases scattered in his letters. ("All when he began to cough blood profusely. He sent a note to a doctor he knew: artists still believed in progress, two revolutionary young composers named instruments, a brutal piece commemorating an act of violence. performance of Threnody and gave the New York premiere of a recent everywhere, they belong to a generation that has fallen into disrepute. Many along with the rest of their generation, are often charged with having reduced music to a set of games, making it schematic and emotionally barren. The audiences came to believe that the compositions of their time were mechanical, it is largely because they listened less to the music than to what the artists once said. "I don't really care much about emotions." The music preceded the clangor of bows being bounced and scraped on the strings, of fingers tapping on wood, or of the siren wails produced by floods of sliding glissandi. Wrong, perhaps, but inevitable. Threnody is expressive in spite of itself. my eyes filling with tears. So, to hide them, I dropped a spoon on the floor. wind, brass, and percussion; two boy choirs; female voice; and computer; is a shrouded in drapery and darkness at the foot of the podium, slowly rising and writhing only for the keening solo that ends the piece, a recitative redolent of Middle Eastern rites. An earlier trombone cadenza was a modernist echo of were plenty of "emotional excitements." The music rolled like a wave through a furious churning from the instruments, then abated to quiet intonations and still chords, filigreed by a solo clarinet. It may just have been heat or hunger that caused one boy chorister to faint as if on cue as soon as the last chord faded during a rehearsal that morning, but it was easy to believe he had The real problem with the most innovative music of the postwar era is not so much that it is dry as that it can sound dated. composed, orchestras have been asked to make noises that sound much worse than blasts of brass; a fugue built on a long, solid cable of a theme; climaxes that follow each other with the deafening regularity of an artillery barrage; horns that blare from the balconies: Nearly every moment seems calculated to matter. Bach. He has come a long way from the man who once proudly claimed to have has combined his search for new technologies with a reverence for rituals and ancient theater: Microphones picked up sounds from the stage and computers tossed them to speakers in the balconies and back again, letting chords and have been largely reluctant to acknowledge his political talents. Thus have more historiographical approach, examining, comparing, and correcting the fusion of aggressive nationalism and populist rhetoric. An early practitioner dismissed as a poor military strategist intoxicated by quixotic ambitions, understood acutely the "supreme importance of land power" with the "motorization of military movement." As a result, he succeeded, in less than a not make a wrong move. His victories emboldened him and his National Socialist Holocaust as an anxious, reactive measure sparked by "the previous practices German historians were obliged to "identify" with the German soldiers on the historians," he concludes that "their explanations amounted to a kind of history are idiosyncratic and often wrong. For instance, we are told that baleful age that wrested authority from responsible elites and enshrined industry. Despite his penchant for revolutionary rhetoric, his inspired use of modern techniques of collective mobilization, and his willingness to strike up "During the twentieth century the compound of nationalism with socialism has passing into the hands of the masses, he ignores an important distinction between mass societies: those ruled by charismatic dictators, unchecked by popular representation; and those governed by democratic institutions. With admits to having a bad clothes day, for example. Fashion in coiffure naturally relates to what's cool below the neck, but since we mostly grow our hair ourselves, its visual life has a stronger meaning than that of pants and shirts. A man I know, a distinguished professor of philosophy at a like a gay weight lifter. So he does, sort of. His new hair produces a fine with several wayward forms of nonacademic company. It also gives just the slightest salutary fright to colleagues and students. everybody pinpoints his own wishes as accurately as my friend, but since the death of compulsory hats, men and women have allowed their personal fantasies to focus on hair even more than on clothes. Clothes are public husks, they shift on and off your body and in and out of fashion and your life; you can hide your alternate selves, or your mistakes, in the back of the closet. But hair is only partially public. Since it stays with you continuously, even while you're naked, your hair adorns your most intimate identity, just as your face does, and only secondarily supports the roles you play in life. What you do The hard thing is that the comforting fantasy you realize on your head may seem like quite another thing to the world. You cut your hair very short to feel young and free; your audience sees the look of a plucked turkey. Your haircut imitates a movie star's; in it you resemble a schoolteacher. In fact, hair fantasy is mostly unconscious and so is the response to it. Our personal failures count as such only if we feel that our hidden hair agenda fails us. Most others don't notice anything. publicity of private hair is a long story; it figures in the willingly shaven heads of ancient priests and modern skinheads, in the punitive shearing of male convicts and female French collaborators, in huge powdered wigs and elaborately extended curls or braids. Politically charged hair doubtless dates straight back to humanity's first racial conflicts, perhaps preceded by its earliest social conflicts. It's the hair of the enemy that marks him as such, as with the flowing tresses of royalist Cavaliers (effete tyrants) and the cropped hair universally erotic and has no function except as a vehicle of pleasure and meaning. The idea that men and women must wear differing coiffures goes very deep, since visible hair is what should reveal the invisible difference between his hair is always rather short and hers is always very long and noticeable, as if God had personally styled them that way from the beginning. new stages in the old rebellion against religious strictures, which once covered up lest it incite lust. In the modern West, progressive slackening of those rules came to permit naked hair for women, but only under visible eventually acceptable for women, too, but visibly careful grooming was still then we've been having the mop and the shag and the mane and the haystack, with straight and curled, long and short versions of each, sometimes untidily caught up in clamps and clasps and elastic bands. Hair in historical movies is often the same, never mind the elaborately coiled and oiled evidence of history. It would seem that the more powerful modern women feel, the less they want their systems of braids worn by many black women seem like elegant reincarnations of precise care taken, beauty manifestly pursued and achieved in the most august This idea is even fashionably acceptable for the chic face and body and for certain clothes, but not for modish hair. Heaven forbid that haystacks do actually need a constant attention that braids don't; and elaborate processes for streaking and tinting and correctly disarranging them can rack up a very noticeable tab. But the overall impression must remain that of no trouble taken whatsoever, even to make a straight part, so that the hair looks as if sun and wind and some tumbling in bed were all it ever got. Anything too processed might smack of oppression or repression, pretension or candidates, as a proper concession to masculine convention, but not when harder time with their hair. Censure for hairstyles has mostly fallen on men, since male appearance has forever mattered so much at war and work. Detailed rules have much more often been applied to male rather than to female arrangements. As a result men are much more afraid of looking ridiculous than women are, since female fashion has risk built into it. For men's hair, the cosmic risk is the possible baldness haunting them all, and that only adds to the skinhead aesthetic. The visual keynote is sharp clarity, so that the overall norm is neat, short hair, give or take a few inches. Long and flowing is occasional, really messy is exceptional. But dreadlocks aside, modern ornamental curling and braiding and powdering and adorning of hair. That mostly leaves creative topiary, with shearing and partial shearing included, for the mainstream, out of which my academic friend is so eager to keep. At an earlier margins, except in military school. When he did that, I said, how could you? why did you? wailing at the loss of his fine thatch and simultaneously unable chip. This little morality play contrasts a ragtag group of aging flower children with a gathering of young, glamorously dressed executives. When the '60s veterans try to play some pitiful music, they are quickly drowned out by the frantic brainstorming of their corporate descendants. The words "Make corporate lexicon. Politicians might fault the decade for its legacy of permissiveness and the pursuit of too much happiness, but Apple blithely urges indignant explanation of this state of affairs. According to Frank, the '60s people were, he would never have been so confused about his future.) The world has been made safe for stylish nonconformity, and the prospect of genuine Frank says he aims to illuminate the entire world of "business culture," his in the '50s had been a timid, stifling business. Admen populated their creations with lab coats and graphs and prided themselves on the scientific precision of their work. Detailed rule books expounded the doctrine of the superiority of a given product over its competitors. (Wonder bread "helps build strong bodies twelve ways.") The results were humorless and hectoring, a tedious, nonstop barrage that was better suited to a Mad magazine satire than to the subtle task of infiltrating the wary consumer's mind. were eager to shake up their industry and address the public's alienation. If this was something that advertisers needed to know, and to act upon. The trick was to make the middle class's pervasive dissatisfaction with commercialism, cheap goods, and planned obsolescence into an instrument of consumerism style caught on: Perhaps the most memorable example of commercial diffidence suspicions would be disarmed with light humor and quiet sophistication. But the message was plain and clear: Individualism and nonconformity could sell a magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it had itself produced." When the counterculture burst on the scene, advertisers simply found a new, much brighter "palette" for the presentation of already established messages. Before long, a sea of psychedelic ads flooded the nation, urging consumers to The marriage of counterculture and capitalism is hardly a new subject, but Frank does provide a refreshingly unsentimental look at it. He does not believe that sinister advertisers were simply trying to capture or them into the world at large. Ads with aggressively youthful themes were just as likely to appear in Ladies' Home Journal or Look as in the underground press. And those ads often hawked products that only the prosperous it was to create a vague but attractive image of rebellion for all to young academic who is best known as the founder of a lively cultural criticism jargon. There isn't a dull page in the book. Unfortunately, Frank's frequent less convincing than the particular stories he has to tell. The advertising and capitalism." If there were any businessmen who didn't welcome youth culture, they don't appear here. (We are told that the sales of men's hats fell also ignores a more sober aspect of '60s revolt: the consumer movement. Responding to public pressure, the Federal Trade Commission banned cigarette particularly broad strokes. At his best, he deftly skewers the inanities of asking himself, "How is a man rebelling today?") But the antinomian antics of youth culture" is "the cultural mode of the corporate moment." It may be fun to the happy homilies of the new corporate faith." But what does it mean? Chances there is no dominant style to contemporary consumerism. Advertisers frequently urge us to rebel, and they frequently urge us to conform. They encourage us to indulge ourselves, and they exhort us to worry about our competence at work. identify a lucrative market of rugged individualists in one study will turn next. Marketers will do anything that seems to promise a momentary fit with the Rather than distinguish these varieties of consumer experience, Frank stuffs everything into the boxes of "square" and hardly the first to note that the tastes of a "hip" bohemian elite have spread to the masses, or to argue that the results of this cultural migration are deleterious. Both the observation and the complaint are virtually as old as Wherever the image of nonconformity appears, Frank spies the ascendant force of rebel consumerism. Is there really a common sensibility that unites the promises to be "ready when you are," is that an instance of untrammeled Delta merely trying to soothe the nerves of the anxious business traveler who hopes to arrive at the next meeting with his clothes unwrinkled? Frank's categories are too crude to answer these questions. All these advertisements may be insulting to one's intelligence or taste; but they don't add up to a formula" that can explain capitalism's survival and success. accelerated grimace. In his short flurry, he tasted what he called a "thousand brother, and two uncles. At Guy's Hospital, where he trained as a surgeon, he became responsible, as the eldest son, for his siblings. He struggled between trapped a little death. "While we are laughing, the seed of some trouble is put most of them written in that same year, are elegies wrapped as odes. They disguise mourning as celebration; they celebrate whatever is going, or gone. poetry, but the sound of death, a siren call to suicide. textures. That puffy lyricism, that gorgeous hysteria of escape ("From silken harder shape. The imagination has political responsibilities, goes the lecture, revelatory, is a product of this apology for the lyric. Using recent scholarship (in particular, historicism and cultural materialism), Motion humble origin (his father managed an inn and a stable). He did not go to one of the great boarding schools but to a quirky, dissenting establishment in disapproved of the company he kept. It is difficult to leap from this to mission," or that "he is always engaged with the 'Liberal side of the Question,' even when sinking most deeply into the imagination." This belief leads Motion into many forced readings. The essential difficulty is the perspective, a poem is seen as a criminal whose alibi is too convincing to be believable. A poem, says historicist criticism, will always be riven by the historical contradictions that surround it. Being a poem, it will want to resolution or otherwise to smother the scandal of its roots in real history. The critic's task is to interrogate the poem, to bully it into confession. The critic then praises the poem not only for confessing but also for having had, all along, that confession as its real (if buried) subject. The critic lyric poet of considerable power, and this book's style bears the impress of that talent. But the historicist grid is unrelenting. One quickly wearies of manuscript shows that he wrote the poem straight out, with one alteration. That hot consanguinity. But the critique that follows is icy: We are warned that the poem admits to a sense of being "challenged or even edged aside by history" (it does no such thing), and that the title ("On First Looking Into But that word "first" stamps the poem with a lovely air of aroused virginity, resented the Pacific for existing before he discovered it? Motion's zeal as a historicist makes him neglect his duty as a biographer, which is to remind us Too often, one has to pick one's way through this book like readings of poems. These readings climax in Motion's discussion of "To Autumn." fooled into thinking it is still summer: "Until they think warm days will never historicism this is a poem that, in Motion's words, is "ambitious to transmute secretly acknowledges that no such ideal exists. Those bees, for instance: been persuaded into working overtime)"? A page later, this has hardened into a certainty that the bees "are a reminder of the miserable facts of labor that describes the bees' labor as a gentle delusion ("they think warm days will never cease"). In Motion's reading, "To Autumn" is really about the inequities of agricultural labor. The shame is not so much the obvious absurdity as that such a reading, clutching at alien abstractions, finds no place to observe the perfect specificity of describing honeycombs as "clammy cells." but it is a metaphysical toughness rather than a political one. Historicism works on a moral hierarchy, in which political suffering is more important than metaphysical suffering or simply incorporates it, and in which "history" is not the burden: "And if he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and his head." After politics, there are the gods to deal with. planted in the "wide arable land of events" might be the seed of death, not will never fade, because they are art, and thus permanent; he is happy that they have never had to live, that they are not suffering: "Ah, happy, happy Autumn" is not just disturbed by a sense that autumn will inevitably pass into winter; it is an elegy for lost summer. Even the "small gnats mourn" this passing. And "Ode to a Nightingale," which meditates on suicide, is an elegy for himself: "Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/ To cease upon the that somewhere, out of sight, we have already lived our actual lives, and that the life we are forced to feel through now is a posthumous remembrance of that end of "Ode to a Nightingale." It is one of the most cherished questions in Romantic poetry. But there is nothing benign in this question; it is an echo of asked just the same question in one of his last letters: "Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be baby in her arms. She was wearing a flattering skintight jumpsuit, swinging her long hair, and easily hefting her precious burden, and she sauntered with total feminine assurance along that stony, hilly little street in a pair of feet, that is. While upper proportions have shifted uneasily from big shoulders and wayward hair to neater hair and narrower shoulders, there has been a steady trend down below toward gigantic shoes for both sexes and all those who remember that decade may recall the platform footgear then current. Back then, they suggested a '40s Revival, but this time something else is going one thing, perhaps. Shoe fetishism is certainly nothing new, though for women shoes used to be a male privilege, from the aristocratic pointed high scarlet heels and great butterfly shapes over the instep. During most of that time, women's feet "like little mice stole in and out" (as Sir John modern women went overboard once their skirts rose off the ground and pants became an option. Again and again, feminine fashion in this century has exploited the powerful erotic character of footgear, just when modern men's shoes had begun to retreat into simplicity along with the rest of the male want to mask our deep love of bondage and ferocity with the rhetoric of comfort, fitness, and athletic glory. Men can play that game too, and anybody's shoes can now combine madness and badness with gestures toward utility. The flabby man on the bus wears wrinkled pants, shirt, and windbreaker in nondescript shades of gray, but on his feet are enormous shoes sculpted out of life. The tiny black dress of a scrawny girl at a party exposes thin whittled pumps would never set off her frame as well as these monsters do. erotic charge comes from the shoes being crippling and enabling at the same time, the effect traditionally produced by very high heels. They lift the lady up, seductively tighten her leg muscles, and thrust her forward as if to launch her into the air and into her future, even as they shorten her stride and increase her risk of tripping. High heels look elegant and dangerous, like those endless pointed shoes on the medieval princes, but they are also thrilling, like roller blades, figure skates, or toe shoes. They are fierce engines of art, designed to demonstrate that an authoritative grace can transcend all danger, inconvenience, and absurdity. All this is possible because feet themselves are so banally utilitarian and infinitely sexy, with sensitive nerve endings and suggestive shapes clothing the tough muscle and articulated bone that carry us around. Feet can kick and stomp and trample, or receive and give refined caresses; they can make us dance like angels or march like brutes. But they're also acutely helpless, with skin that's much too touchy and toes that aren't so clever. They need help in a way hands don't. Like ears, feet are natural jewels that cry out for visual emphasis. From my high window, I can see faraway people walking on Sixth Avenue, their little white sneakers giving a pearly edge to each of female feet emphasized their tenderness by reducing them to living lover's mouth. We are now perversely disposed to do the same thing with clumpy boots that box feet in or puffy shoes that muffle them up with blobs or clogs with dainty straps, the lofty heels with splayed bottoms. These are endless new treats for the shoe fetishist who seems to lurk in every modern with a real genius for evoking the cosmic and the transcendent; but reading his Complete Stories makes me think that transcendence has its limits. kind of immigrant environment in which little children, because they are the vulnerable elders from the contempt of the outside world. It was a background, is a veil, behind which can be glimpsed, by means of sympathetic insight, a heroes of his early stories, from the 1940s and '50s, tend to be poor, inarticulate shopkeepers and workers (tailors, grocers, shoemakers, outer appearances suddenly fall away to reveal inner souls of the purest inexplicable wind and blown around the world until they attach themselves randomly to the first unlucky person who comes their way. Sometimes the author himself seems to float upward on a gust of wind, into the airy zones of fable, sad nuisance of a talking bird, fleeing God knows what tragedies (the bird entertain circus audiences with pathetic jokes. The fabulist images are perfectly believable, an effortless demonstration that the grotesqueries of sketches his stories usually with a few bold colors and fewer details, as in a a man that he has guests, to spoil him his supper?" But you come away from than ethnic, that the weird little events in his tales correspond to unseen he elevated into an ideal. He devoted a number of his later stories to an of theorizing about art and its meaning. But the effect is gassy: love and tried to put a little flesh on his spiritual creations, in an effort these stories, especially the later ones, he seems to have been unable to get beyond his own commonplace fantasies about prostitutes and 1960s miniskirts. her hooker past in "A Choice of Profession," a father trails after his streetwalker daughter in "God's Wrath," a doctor imagines his neighbor as a The writing leers, for want of any better way to conjure a sexual attraction. that, coming across a sexual scene in one of her father's novels, she put the could feel that way. I reached a point in reading The Complete Stories where the arrival of a new young woman in any given story made me roll my One of his first stories of love, "The First Seven Years," master shoemaker's daughter to grow old enough to marry. The assistant who knows why, to devote himself to a hopeless love; still wincing from the bursting with passion, if only his boss, the master shoemaker, will deign to says to him about his love for the girl. "She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you." But she will, of course, which is going to be too bad. The always a virtue, though. The lesser stories in the Complete edition cast and the name of that slightly different volume ought to be, more cautiously, possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this. camera crews, designers, clients, and others present. A novelist and feminist, new?" And another: "If I can stick to information, I won't have to say I hate journalists feel they must sneer at the "same old" character of the handsome wearable designs, clients and buyers greet them with applause. profession of fashion journalism: Since writers don't feel allowed to come really praiseworthy but not new enough, their writing tends to develop an oblique, distorted character. It's often clear they hate something, if only the horrid jostle and pressure of covering the shows; or, maybe, it's dislike of their own contorted rhetoric that's rubbing off on what they say about the quality that only adds absurdity to an art already taking big aesthetic risks. symmetrical slashes in silver, lending an Eastern flavor to his minimalist is compounded by the steady pressure on the public consciousness of ad copy, which consistently overpraises fashion goods and so debases their real aesthetic value. Of course, hysterical praise has always been lavished on finery by folk in the business ("It looks terrific, it's fabulous, it's thought I would never have chosen a silk, for they produced so many, I knew not which to fix upon, and they recommended them all so strongly, that I fancy they thought I only wanted persuasion to buy everything they showed me. And indeed they took so much trouble, that I was almost ashamed I could not. At the accessory shop, the country girl is surprised to be finical, so affected! They seemed to understand every part of a woman's dress better than we do ourselves: and they recommended caps and ribands with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off buying lovely new things; it's the invasive verbal hype that interferes with personal judgment and turns the happy effort into an embarrassing burden. generated by a rustle, a ribbon, the drawing on of a pair of gloves. however, there is less and less of this in literature. Fashion journalists and writers are scared off. Fashion now seems like a club with a private jargon that leaves no room for the play of sensitive literary exposition. And good critical writing about clothing hardly exists at all. There is no tradition of clothes criticism that includes serious analysis, or even of costume criticism painful sense that real work cannot be done in this genre, that it would be better, more honorable, to be writing about something else. apology, deploying a quick imagination and an interest in detail that give her noticeable respect for fashion has been a standard common attitude since the actually did a bit of fashion reporting in the 1870s, some under the name of but not with ordinary seriousness. When we are not in raptures, or disapproving in the name of female realities, we are likely to wax sociological and stake in the success or failure of its collections. These clothes are designed Journalists feel responsible for protecting a serious financial investment each season. Trying to summon and express good judgment may be next to an enterprise frequently announced as dead but repeatedly revived as a serve private clients privately. The press was only grudgingly allowed into its couturiers first began holding sway over the clothing of the world's restaurants and theaters, or crash chic garden parties to see what was being worn by whom. They could sketch or describe new fashions as accurately as their news media, made only for models who exist only to be transmuted into media projections (verbal and pictorial), cooked up to be consumed by a public who not only won't wear the clothes but will never see them being actually worn. The prose and the images form the entire experience. fact, still private. The show is only partly for the distant world served by the camera and the commentator; the rest is for her and her like, seated in the front row. For the private client, there are still masterpieces of rare delicacy and breathtaking beauty or exquisitely simple practicality, all made conceived by designers modifying their ideas to suit each client's taste and figure. For the media, however, the designer uses the same resources for prestige is. Writers could find true scope for their interpretive talents if they could gain true prestige from meeting the challenge. on fashion, said, "All art must be useless." Couture demands writers who will with which he occasionally ornamented his stories, which appeared so much wilder than my received notion of what that magazine was like, and the stories turned out to be even wilder than the pictures. His surrealistic short fiction and Comment," at that time the first section of "The Talk of the Town." There's nothing earthshaking about those pieces, falling as they do into the rubric. Still, it's hard to feature them appearing in today's version of the same magazine. "I remember exactly where I was when I realized that good. But who can make the leap to greatness while dragging behind him the essays and interviews, and it comes as a surprise to find it applied a species of what used to be called bricolage, but what came to my mind, was a master ventriloquist with a dish antenna in his subconscious. From "A showroom on Fifth Avenue, I found a recipe for Ten Ingredient Soup that Meat Street and my mother shoved me in a closet to get me out of the line of childhood was pastoral and energetic and rich in experiences which developed my imagine the voice successively issuing from a pulpit, a bullhorn, an onionskin plainly as himself, "I suggest that art is always a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality or a jackleg attempt consists of leavings, marginalia, occasional pieces that do not show him at his best. There are some book reviews, which are acceptable but not much more; some movie reviews, which are pretty feeble, with that literalism that bedevils many literary writers when they come to dabble in the form (viz., the collected film although many of the pieces originated as catalog essays and thus sometimes interviews that vary greatly in quality and insight. scholarly wish to preserve the entirety of a given writer's work is understandable and even endearing to a point, but one of the frustrations of this collection is its repetitiveness. Anecdotes are retailed in pieces and retold in interviews; the same citations crop up again and again; I lost count selected academic libraries. Don't get me wrong: This collection has its pleasures, not least of which is the reminder of how strong and unique a finally clamped down. The impulse is partly commercial, partly sentimental, this kind of packaging seems oddly timed, since his influence on current fiction is if anything at a low ebb. But maybe, just maybe, in some circuitous something remarkable. He has written a book about the Civil War that will interest not only war enthusiasts but also people who find the subject a made me confront my aversion in a way that was both troubling and revealing. born in the South of two Southern parents but raised mainly on Army posts, brats looked at the civilian world with a wary eye, particularly in the South, where we were doubly different: not just outsiders and transients but also folkways, standing at football games for the "national anthem," as "Dixie" was called, even though we knew that our anthem was the one heard at the and civil rights, I had it spelled out for me: The South, at least the white South before integration, was one big kinship lodge. And it was precisely because the public realm was taken to be an extension of family that white Southerners took any effort to bring blacks into it as a direct attack on their touched by these kindnesses, but also suspicious: Why were they doing this? What did I owe them? Beyond the suspicion lay a Puritan sense that this was all It takes him back to memories that lie uneasily at the base of his identity. I Side of New York, one of his first purchases was a book about the Civil War. late at night reading from the 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil childish things. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, he covered both the Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in [it]." But there was a greater prod to Southern memory: defeat. Losers don't forget. Nor do their children. The only Southerners who want to blot it out are black Southerners, who wish that all the noise and symbolism would go away. rendered encounters with Southerners of all walks and all colors, united only by the common Southern compulsion to answer a question with a story. Such the Old Confederacy, with stops at battlefields, museums, redneck bars, and the jocularly aggrieved way in which he made it. What comes through repeatedly is not just grievance but also the pride, vulnerability, and sometimes desperation of people who see their lives and daily predicaments as having been shaped by a cataclysm that Southern alibi that it wasn't slavery's defense but honor and loyalty to place that made most Confederates take up arms to fight the Northern "aggressors." farmers who seldom saw, much less owned, a slave. For such people, then and now, a sense of place and community is not merely the most sustaining fact of there. He's neither immune to the professor's charm nor untroubled by what the imposed their imperialist and capitalist will on the agrarian South, just as nothing but tragedy in the trial of a young black man who has killed a white flag flying on his truck, an incident that has thoroughly riven the once fairly can lead both to such impasses and to bleak comedy. What more need be said journalism, artfully constructed and unfailingly vivid, as good a rendering as of the conflict over abortion could serve as an advertisement for an imperiled form of journalism: the long, meticulously researched narrative of ideas in worthy even to devotees of serious nonfiction, then too bad for us. Some of the harder to do for the very reasons it is worth doing: It can require years of publishing culture. It demands of its practitioners a quality of this is to say that narrative nonfiction is some sort of selfless or inherently democratic form. It's not oral history; the author is there on every page, as of journalism that aspires most nakedly to the status of literature. But at least these writers confer a kind of dignity on their subjects, if only by attending so closely to people's own explanations of what they believe. And when it comes to showing us the means by which everyday people are taken up by history, how they shape it and are in turn shaped by it, there is no genre more In this tradition and with scrupulous fairness, Articles of Faith brings to life the arguments and experiences of sympathetic to it over the last three decades, is an arbitrary choice; she seems to have hotline and can't help noticing how many of the women calling in are opinionated woman" with two young sons, a sweet, shy husband who runs a newspaper delivery route, and a modest little pea green house in a nice women where they can find somebody relatively clean and relatively safe to terminate their pregnancies and sometimes smuggling them into her own spare bedroom afterward to suffer the aftereffects of the operations in them have the baby or not have the baby, they came to you in crisis, and you eased them to the next place. Either way, it was a kind of delivery." seminarian with a ragged beard and the look of "an Old Testament prophet or a logical time for "the moment of an individual person's beginning" than the joining of egg and sperm for the simple reason that there is no more logical time. He compares his moral duty to rail against abortion to his moral duty to intervene if he saw a man on the street beating his child with a club. He is a purpose as well. Articles of Faith makes it abundantly clear that even Lee who will occasionally talk to each other instead of merely hurling should be, as the slogan goes, "safe, legal, and rare." Call it muddled or call pretty much unrestricted, in the first three months, and to allow states to limit it sharply thereafter. They want abortion to be legal, but they think too discussion circles and makes mediators available to help resolve their differences, has succeeded mainly in inflaming partisans on both sides while The other advantage of this sort of textured narrative is that it inevitably turns up bits of the past that more ideological accounts involvement of the clergy in helping women obtain illegal abortions in the late decided it was their pastoral duty to shepherd unhappily pregnant women to underground doctors willing to perform abortions. (They took their lead from moral, as well as a political, dimension to abortion rights. The idea that some men of God might regard their commitment to a woman housing a fetus as more important than their commitment to the fetus itself is anathema to people like because their own history of the movement puts feminist activists more or less journalistic genre that requires the writer to stick to one or two main story marginalized him in a movement that had become increasingly dominated by right and the new militancy of organizations such as Operation Rescue, readers justify since the decision marked neither the culmination of the court's influential) nor an obvious turning point in the abortion wars. It caps her praised for having drawn unusually nuanced portraits of abortion activists on her real accomplishment is something like the opposite. The more compassionately and conscientiously she reconstructs Lee's views and that only this sort of journalism, with its sympathetic attention to the intricacies of its characters' thoughts, could do justice to these and the sexual harassment debate wearing thin, a new crisis looms on the employment horizon demanding our urgent attention. According to a recent called Diversity in the Power Elite: Have Women and Minorities Reached the Are they worried that these new arrivals will take away their jobs? No. According to the study, what they fear is that women and minorities won't be accusing a man of golf anxiety isn't quite the same as alleging that he lowered his pants in front of a subordinate and requested service. But far from making about gender in the workplace may not always be helpful. During the past few to wonder if we've let the battle against sexual harassment turn into a witch hunt. I agree that courts aren't equipped to resolve many issues of gender on How could the courts possibly deal with golf anxiety? Surely a person has every right to converse with colleagues who play golf. Surely he also has a right to assume that a new employee doesn't play golf. Likewise, he's entitled to appear shy or unfriendly around her, and perhaps unintentionally hamper her ability to network inside the company, and even then assume she lacks initiative and give her a mediocre job evaluation. But such obtuse behavior, even if legal, causes suffering, and it's worth talking about and miss the attention it deserves. It's a treasure trove of messy, not always the first tenured woman professor of neurosurgery in the country, tells how she contented teaching and research. Traditionally, of course, neurosurgery has order to concentrate on work. She recalled how in years past, during training, he made a juvenile habit of propositioning her in front of other male saying how much she'd like it. In recent years, he'd interrupted her during complex brain surgery and shouted, laughing, "How's it going, hon?" All in all, his insensitivity. When she was a med student, all but a couple of generous male advisers had told her, paternalistically, to give up her neurosurgery dreams and stick with a nice female discipline like obstetrics. (One day she finally got the courage to knock on the door of the department chair and ask if and a glance at the couch indicated he'd been screwing his secretary.) As a young faculty member she attended weekly lunches because that's where the networking action was. They were gross, childish stag affairs: In plain sight of everyone, one colleague would caress her thigh, daring her to make him stop and inviting all the men in the room to giggle. Then the urologists at the table would speculate about who among their colleagues could get it up. with men. "Wrapped and totally immersed within the competitive cocoon of academic medicine, living every day at a great distance from the 'real' world, I was all but oblivious to the fact that a woman's movement had started, and, writing voice even has something of a macho swagger, and once in a while it hits a false note, as if she were building her broad case against the medical (cool expertise vs. righteousness, wit vs. no sense of humor) become almost too right away. Instead a reporter called, wheedled an interview out of her, and hoped to spark a general discussion of sexism in the medical academic profession. Instead the media claim of sexual harassment reorganized the debate see through what she had unleashed, returned to work in a Cold War atmosphere. both male and female: Scapegoat men were singled out for behavior their profession had never before discouraged; women who told of being pressured for sex found themselves alone, laughed at, or forced by the hostile environment to kind of national clearinghouse for complaints about sexism in medical schools, traveled the college circuit to discuss flaws in both theory and practice of medical instruction. But often, she says, the resulting reforms have been forum to do anything about them. Which isn't surprising. Who would want to go through this kind of divisive battle every time an allegation came up? That's one problem with our current approach to sexual Everyone gets tired of the ransacking of private lives, the cynical search for ulterior motives, the weighing of imperfect evidence; after a while, people are likely to say, "Just let it go." There's another problem, too. The focus on legalistic descriptions of punishable human behavior ignores unconscious behavior, the habits many men are accustomed to that don't call for punishment institutional resistance to change: the way that otherwise admirable male female health problems; the way training in elite specialties like neurosurgery still promotes a specific kind of cowboy bravado, which encourages women to questions. Unfortunately, crude history will more likely reduce her to another that they are taking on the evil of the century. But it's difficult at this the trouble that this man still causes in the mind. and, thorniest of all, the question of his sincerity, the degree to which he believed what he said and believed in what he did. It soon becomes apparent other people answer them. At some point his search became, to quote from his unforeseen aftereffects of a hypnosis session that restored his eyesight after have gone to the printers too late to take account of a loony new book by the Studies one by one. He has a way of coming up with a quick summary of complex proposals that clarifies and nullifies them in one stroke. For example, he and then became extreme. The fact that this "radicalization" is seen to have after the almost supernatural ease of the first victories on the Western front, film to be shown (his own word), called it an "obscenity" (because it showed procedural matters, and was told that the investigation of the Holocaust had become superfluous because "it has been done. I did it." (Click for more the outset, a man aware of the enormity of what he intended, a man who consciously disguised his responsibility and, finally, a man who thrilled to the deceptions he devised. This is more or less the picture advanced by the calls the "great and grave abstraction," the systemic rather than biographical that period are among the most violent of his life. On several occasions he the basic jargon of "removal," annihilation," and "destruction" in place. makes even more of these viscerally chilling sentences, which are buried in a simply illustrate his insane consistency, his brutal economy of language. He over again. This is the methodology not of the pliable politician but of the monomaniacal artist. The baroque rhetorical tricks buried What happened to the earnest, apolitical, cultural youth described by his and filled his days sketching and writing? Why and how did hatred swamp him? We have to face the possibility that his love of art and his hatred of humanity Esquire essay, "This Man Is My Brother," the most convincing picture of all there: the difficulty, the laziness, the pathetic formlessness in youth, the round peg in the square hole, the "whatever do you want?" The lazy, fundamental arrogance which thinks itself too good for any sensible and honorable activity, on the ground of its vague intuition that it is reserved tells of a strange young man raging in disgust and envy at pornographic art in a gallery window and resolving to bring down a fiery sword on a rotten missed the links in the article, click to read about an amateur historian's among a handful of academics to have achieved the widely held and rarely admitted to dream of the professoriate: reaching a popular audience with work that also passes muster technically. Success as a pop academic requires stuff we don't need. Her academic argument is: For complicated sociological culture. Bashing it is a tradition that begins with the advent of a national Babbitt if you don't believe me). The idea that a country founded upon stuff than about the principles has long been galling to those who hold the environmentally destructive," it doesn't feel like a fresh thought. Even if you accept that lawns and cars and credit card debt and designer logos are pernicious, to attack them seems, as a writing project, a little easy. The main adduced from the title), was less familiar than her main point here. compare yourself in order to appraise how you're doing. Your level of aspiration and contentment varies not according to some absolute standard but according to your choice of reference group. Change your reference group, and you'll find that you're suddenly feeling much better (or worse) about your used concepts in social science and also in market research. The first person reference group is made up of neighbors. Hence "keeping up with the believes that for most consumers, neighbors have been replaced as the primary full of supposedly ordinary, typical families who live in fancier circumstances than anyone at the median income could afford. The entry of mothers into the work force has exposed them to people across a much wider income range than (sounds as if it is Southwestern Bell, although in keeping with academic responding said neighbors were their primary reference group. theory leads inescapably to one answer: Find another reference group for the laid off. Another is living on unemployment insurance. Another "found herself perilously close to the rock bottom." Another is "trusting that, somehow, it is going to work." Is this the reference group that launched a thousand ships? consumerism as evil. To her way of thinking no nonessential spending, no desire to possess things, can ever be innocent or morally neutral. Instead, all taste, all aesthetic judgment, all pleasure taken in things, must be a matter of what if we've deluded ourselves into thinking it's not. There isn't much room in siding on your house or garb yourself in polyester, the only possible reason is that you don't want people to think you're a Bubba. especially if it's stuff they can't afford. It is also the case that newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are so financially dependent on consumer advertising that they're unlikely to lead the charge against this itself. Why can't buying things be a pleasurable sideshow to the main events of life? Why does it have to screw everything else up? happily functioning people. Membership in this group would be defined in a loved and believed in, and by being enmeshed in a web of community, family, and the richness of relationships and the satisfactions of accomplishments, rather than the cataloging of possessions. Buying a new tie would be fun, not an tradition of treating higher incomes and more spending as the royal road to the offers the promise of marrying the cherished liberal goal of income redistribution to overall economic prosperity. Put money in ordinary people's pockets, and as they spend it the assembly lines will hum and unemployment will she hasn't resolved the problem. "I have always believed there is great merit economist's point of view, is pretty close to the ultimate horror. A great book on her subject, rather than a good one, might have found a way to propose an economic ideal that would not lead as inexorably into a social nightmare as encompass commentary about race relations in the United States. One is that blacks and whites "can never live in a state of equal freedom under the same Government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinion have established between them." Despite the Civil War, the Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Revolution, an appreciable number of observers continue to assert that the United States is, and will remain, a permanence of racism," "the myth of black progress," and "the coming race even before the destruction of slavery, averred that one day "the white and colored people [would] be blended into a common nationality, and enjoy together pursuit of happiness, as neighborly citizens of a common country." A century transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of conversation on race relations that is, in certain respects, squarely within programs, electoral politics, criminal justice); and prescribes a framework is "no longer separate, much less unequal than it once was, and by many measures, less hostile." The authors are critical of those who, in their view, exaggerate the significance of white racism, the significance of the black underclass, and the extent to which blacks remain outsiders. Instead, the whites, "the rise of the black middle class," and the extent to which blacks took a wrong turn when the imperative simply to end discrimination ceased to govern our policies. That bare obligation, they argue, was superseded by a destructive insistence that racial minorities be included in substantial numbers (ideally, in rough proportionality) in all spheres of social life, black examinees and white examinees are ranked and judged separately), array of topics, and convey their findings and prescriptions in a vivid, the levels of insight and carefulness that its subject demands and the expressed ambitions of its authors lead one to expect. I say this notwithstanding my affinity for their optimism. Indeed, perhaps it is partly because I share this optimism that I am particularly disappointed by this The authors try to place themselves at the vital center of but rarely challenge the settled understandings of conservative or discrimination, though dramatically diminished, continues to pose an obstacle which is intended to help blacks and disadvantages certain whites in the override of several Supreme Court decisions that had narrowed, in a number of disapprove; the "one small bit of arguably good news" about the act, they Congress rectified this problem, explicitly outlawing such racial harassment by preoccupied with criticizing the legal system as overindulgent toward blacks they fervently oppose affirmative action. I disapprove of most forms of public affirmative action myself, on the premise that public authorities shouldn't be permitted to allocate burdens and benefits on racial grounds in the absence of an absolute emergency. But there is something dreadfully wrong with a study of race relations in the United States that places affirmative action at the center of the drama. The imbalance is especially notable given that other "rational" racial discrimination (by which people, without malevolent intent, attack passionately and in detail the privileging of whiteness is when such equivocate. They do not clearly condemn as racist the actions, sometimes to liberals who criticized these actions but didn't themselves live in the contested neighborhoods. I do not object to their empathy for the white ethnics, or to their point that affluent folk often have been able to escape the harsh dilemmas posed by racial conflicts. After the explaining is done, however, judgments must still be made. It is striking, and troubling, how their clear, consistent, and negative assessment of black bigotry. stance of racial pessimism because they fear that making concessions to the optimists will breed complacency and inhibit the efforts needed for still little to end the harms wrought by past injustices, or even to fight latent passive a stance. Affirmative action in its current guises is unlikely to be the best or even a good way forward; but the consequences of simply eliminating such programs are sure to be mixed. What's more, such reforms will leave untouched injustices that seed legitimate aggrievement on the part of blacks. for the better in race relations. But much remains to be done to create what politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious. the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she argues, because "contentious public discourse" not only poisons the political atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships. fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws. portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy, incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness, cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money, to oversimplify" and to "seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours." In her need to make the "argument culture" wrong, she succumbs to these compares to the propaganda of "totalitarian countries" (because falsehoods are spread) and to the dehumanization involved in "ethnically motivated assaults" (because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among up" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy, laments that cops and soldiers have been "trained to overcome their resistance to kill" by trying "not to think of their opponents as human beings." She neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes, tours of duty." She ignores the more important difference: In World War II, argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without an equally unwelcome troublemaker: "Technology also exacerbates the culture of critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time." this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate; that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that is "surely not" a "very important" issue, and Congress should not have let the desperately needed." The "view of government as the enemy" isn't worth debating; it's just "another troubling aspect of the argument culture." Indeed, independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such immediately by a Republican response," which "weakens the public's ability to Court, thereby injuring citizens' "sense of connection" to "our judicial system." The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was itself evidence of the culture of critique," she writes. views that make for the most entertaining fights." As an alternative, she Similarly, "the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the features a single guest." (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.) even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in facts but to discredit the witness," she asserts, as though the two objectives of the trial): that the witness is a victim. Conversely, she assumes alleged rape victims because "it is easy to distort events so that a rape can evidence." Did the dispute not have two sides? Should Hill not have been consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened. defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust. of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free the agreement would block the feds' right to regulate nicotine levels in plaintiffs' lawyers and the attorneys general proved indefatigable; incriminating documents were leaked from inside the big tobacco companies; an important industry scientist defected; and, most importantly, Wall Street, fearing a bottomless payout, signaled the industry to submit. reports, the trial attorneys filed their class action suits in the early '90s after having tapped out the conventional product liability market: asbestos, settlements, joined in with a new legal argument that held the industry liable finally ordered the industry to pay damages to a smoker for ruining his health. sensed the power shifting and cut a separate deal. What may have caught that revealed the magnitude of Big Tobacco's deceit about tobacco's role in settle for a few million and some marketing restrictions, and launched a Street initially recoiled at the idea of a settlement but then bid Big Tobacco's stocks up at nearly every mention of an impending deal. What sweet irony: The specter of unlimited legal liability was a bigger threat to the deal was affordable for the companies, especially considering the tax benefits of a payout and the time value of money. These economic truths reunited Big Tobacco behind a settlement on the industry's terms. Having won the public relations war by agreeing to a settlement, the industry continues to use its of Public Health surveys five centuries of tobacco abolitionism and concludes what tobacco's foes want more than money: They want to see the last for the idea that more "education" will deter tobacco use. nicotine's addictive powers explain it all. But when the industry attempted to evil because it would encourage smokers to continue their habit. As it turns exposed the industry to an uncomfortable double bind: Making a "safer" cigarette is tantamount to confessing that regular cigarettes are dangerous when taken as directed, something the industry had spent billions denying. endgame approaches for Big Tobacco and Congress, one is tempted to sympathize addictive properties of nicotine and the causal link between tobacco tar and cancer. A wealth of circumstantial evidence indicates that they've threatened witnesses and committed criminal fraud by illegally withholding subpoenaed But consider the evil done to the truth by the "good" their accomplices in the press, the beyond recognition. And they've distorted statistics showing that the cost of smoking probably more or less equals the benefits, if you factor in the exorbitant taxes smokers pay and recognize that by dying early they save us a bundle on Social Security. state with powers to force us into wellness even if we prefer risk? Now that didn't click through to all the internal links, fire up a menthol and read at your leisure about behind the litigation and the for why the settlement deal as informs us. Proving that they knew tobacco tars caused lung cancer, the Protection Agency's own estimate of how dangerous secondhand smoke really no sacred closure. To theologize the Holocaust is meaningless even to the the horror is still just another episode, though the worst, in the unending event in many people's lives that has become a metaphor for our century. There Holocaust, for he has no need to describe it directly. He has put his own artfully simple and repetitious, deceptively compressed in feeling, that the reader, aware of the horror about to descend on these people, feels like that remind him of the train on which he was once deported. His purpose is to the end of the war, I have been on this line, as they say: a long, twisted line carriages. The seasons shift before my eyes like an illusion. I have learned this route with my body. Now I know every hostel and every inn, every restaurant and buffet, the vehicles that bring you to the remotest corners. of constant renewal." One can live on trains. The officials now know him so well that they drop the loud, jangling popular music he detests on the loudspeaker and put on chamber music. Shaving on a train gives him a new start in life. There is one station where he is met by a regular driver, now a sort of friend. There are two stations on his route for which he has "love," stations he can return to knowing he will be able to refresh himself with a solid meal and a cup of really good coffee. But for the most part "I live by signs, by codes whose meaning I alone know." There was even a terrible moment when he spent two weeks in bed "because it seemed to me that a new war had confess, I have no faith in anyone outside the train." He is so frozen inside that he remains completely detached from the occasional woman on board who is nothing like love on a train. Sometimes it lasts only a station or two. The main thing is that you'll never see the woman again. Of course, sometimes you get entangled, and you suddenly have, aside from your valise, a sluggish creature who keeps demanding coffee and cigarettes. Thus I repeat to myself: orators and organizers such as his Communist parents. They were always moving It is a sealed well that doesn't lose a drop, to use an old expression. Nothing can deplete it. My memory is a powerful machine that stores and constantly discharges lost years and faces. In the past I believed that travel would blunt my memory; I was wrong. Over the years, I must admit, it has only grown in recent years I have learned to overcome this. A glass of cognac, for he find the funds for this endless life on trains? This is one of the subtlest issues in the book. He lives by buying up old ceremonial objects retrieved from searching for these objects, and what is more, they too are looking for encounters think favorably of the war. An innkeeper who lost his hearing at didn't answer, he added in big letters: "It was a great mission, and it still exist," I couldn't refrain from writing to him. man for revealing his hidden desire. "I ought to have killed him. There is nothing simpler than killing a man, and yet for some reason, I cannot do it." to find an answer to the Holocaust is not forthcoming. It would have to be as can't I pray?" he cannot find an answer within himself. His "melancholy" is a that central human emotion in the face of overwhelming odds of which tragedy is made. There are no accommodating solutions after the fact. There is no forgiveness for so much pain, and no one to reconcile with. But a story as piercing as this goes to the heart of the matter, for it embodies the terrible event in such a way that it steals up on us and will haunt us in our sleep. splendor of the voice. I am not sure if this edition is the ideal packaging of meaning, then from modernist meaninglessness. His world is separate, herself sometimes fails to meet that standard. She offers ingenious paraphrases and elaborations, but she imposes a false order on a genially chaotic world. She looks for process and argument in a poet who excels at sudden revelations in miniature. She and others have also promoted the idea that the greatest than try to launch a new exegesis, I want to name a few simple technical writes in iambic pentameter, the antiquated base rhythm of English poetry. Take the famous opening line of "The Idea of Order at Key West": "She sang beyond the genius of the sea." (Click for a longer sample.) He chooses the sounds with extremes the old schoolhouse rule that short words work better than long ones. its own word. (A lot of classic oratory also relies on monosyllables: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; "Ask not what your country can do for highly monosyllabic line: "And when she sang, the sea,/ Whatever self it had, became the self/ that was her song, for she was the maker." But as the language grows ever more chiseled and incisive, the picture grows more vague. That woman singing on the beach is dissolving into abstraction. It seems as though some principle is being preached. At this point, if you read the poem in high school or college, you may remember deadly questions intruding from the poetry anthologies: "Does the sea represent language? Is the woman the poet?" Any trance. His words are a dream melody of language, bells from nowhere. You can even, magisterial tone that he occasionally loses himself in the convoluted away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, joke he played on literature. He comes close in some of the offbeat writings such nonsense aphorisms as "A poem is a cafe," "A poem is a pheasant," and "All could afford to laugh aloud at the pretensions of the poetry business. closeness of the sublime and the ridiculous, of the daft and the grand, is Dump," in which he writes: "One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail./ One beats and beats for that which one believes." The monosyllables are the meaning manifesto in questions, as if uncertain. I think he's pointing up a intention, it's a bit ridiculous. The sublimity comes in the way those fragments of a Romantic vision glide together with artifacts of Collected Poems (which, to be sure, omits great ones early and late); they are also unencumbered by comparison with the "uncollected poems," which include a lot of mystifying mediocrity. It's good to have all the poems in one place, and also the published prose and a smattering of letters. But it's also voice in the early poems, but you can find it in early letters not printed that beat and rattle, the crescendo of cracked trombones." Eight years later, the young man writes flamboyantly to his fiancee, "I believe that with a bucket of sand and a wishing lamp I could create a world in half a second that would make this one look like a hunk of mud." For all its omissions, Collected ridiculous man, but in an interesting way. He is not, in the conventional sense, a good writer. His prose lacks even the hasty, spasmodic felicities to which we are resigned in the age of word processing. Here is a sentence from great deal of notoriety at the time of its publication, resulting in the reopening of the murder case by the police." Have we lost you? In this sentence, "its" cries out for its parental noun like a little duckling left on the wrong side of the road. "That book" is the referent, but other nouns rush this sentence begins to go haywire with the words "the miniseries of be ridiculed not merely for his aimless, dribbling style. What he calls a novel is hardly deserving of the name. Another City, Not My Own reads like a parties and talks up each day's events with an air of tragic foreknowledge. is nothing if not charming. The flair for gossip that got him into thousands of dinner parties also wears down the resistance of the reader. He is seductively forthright about the failures in his life, about the fiasco of his career and stern judgments of a male socialite. One has to smile at the role played in ultimately compromised and rendered stupid by the obliviousness of the author. years, and he produced a weak, chatty book rather than a good, vicious one. He this exemplary passage from a Vanity Fair piece: "Sometimes you have to shoddy, daffy piece of work, but it provides four or five fine vignettes of called "the kind of nothing this culture has been moving toward for decades," a unprecedented and decidedly unwelcome in this kind of grave proceeding." The diatribe goes on and on and on, and it's funny precisely because it won't let nothing back, burns all bridges, settles scores with those who have merely Resentment also sends up urban gay novels and unravels the tangle of reality and fantasy surrounding child abuse. But it's the precision of his take simultaneously to reproduce and cut to pieces the bad faith and false consciousness surrounding these trials. He serves up in full the swiftly meaning of events in relation to his own life and can end only with a scene of activity." My God, someone has finally summed up the whole shebang. cope with rotten childhoods, loveless families, hideous disfigurements, and There is plenty of humor in his books, some of it sharp and much of it just plain funny; and bizarre bits of magic that, though not always comprehensible, linear narrative and flashback to tell a story that spans several decades. In also partly a reflection on how Dickens' novel came to be written. There are quite a few correspondences between the two novels, of which the play on names "Mesmerism." Their terrible sessions (click for a sample) anchor the tale and Dickens, he manages to separate his story from its archetype quite easily. into its pages, then slowly exposing their vulnerabilities. What we end up with insider's chuckle. If not, you still get a good yarn. back and missing fingers, his tragic isolation from those around him, however, to use castaways to dramatize a world gone wrong. If anything, he makes a just what is called for to correct Dickens' lugubriousness. Suffice it to say novel are given outs. They are allowed to transcend their particular just a convenient dumping ground for convicts, he tells us, with the ticklish burgeoning dignity and the choices he makes at novel's end give novel, allowing the country to become a place of hope rather than of exile. By moment to which its author lays proud claim, restoring the show at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute concentrates on clothes date mostly from the middle to the end of this century. Nevertheless "a" in flashing red neon above the first "o." Right away we're meant to think decoration on everyday clothing was entirely unacceptable. or was until very recently. Why is that? Words, letters, and numbers on garments seem riskier than kittens, clouds, and flowers on garments, just as those seem less natural than stripes, plaids, or checks. But what, exactly, is profaned by putting words on clothes? Is it the garment, the person, or the words? I believe it is the writing. The written word was accumulating its own sacred aura even before Homer and the Bible. Ever since priests, scholars, and poets used writing to record Scripture, prayer law, and history both exalted and prosaic, reverence for canonical writings has lent an august power to written words themselves. And with all the weight of such a past, a certain dread can still attach to the sight of them being frivolously used. In the middle of this century, turning words into fashion seemed like just such a use. Some of the designs shown at the Met reflect a serious daring; they are examples not just of amusing invention but also of knitting the preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence around the museum to see if I could find any paintings representing people with didn't seem to have the privilege. Words or letters or numbers on your clothes old football jersey in this show, with a big number on it. But it's mainly a sequined traffic sign emblazoned across the chest, a big, shiny yellow salient corners. This stretches the theme a little, since there are no words and it isn't the reproduction of a real bill. But it works, like so much else in the exhibition, to show how practical signs can become erotic adornments on the human surface, depending on texture and placement. This skintight, transparent garment turns its pattern into a tattoo, a practice alluded to by the noble used to put them on personal effects to imitate the ancient royal habit of stamping (or embroidering or incising) the king's property with his personal cipher. Artisans would discreetly stamp precious creations with their the client's. There are plenty of surviving cigar cases, purses, boxes, lockets, brooches, penknives, and all kinds of tableware with small household linen with embroidered domestic monograms. clothing. Putting monograms on display on garments is very recent. I know my bracelets or guest towels; from which I gather that vivid personal monograms on clothes were new in the '30s. Once everybody got used to them in the next in the following one. And those have acquired a lot more prestige than our own reduced to abstract motifs by our inability to recognize what they say. (It does seem unfair to love them only for their looks, as if we despised their Japan, didn't forget that the immortal soul of the word is its sense; nor that appear next to watercolor images similar to those that often appear on clothes. fashion to make that happen. Brocade or chiffon dresses covered in wittily made of paper printed with the New York Yellow Pages, all express a joyful relish in the decay of the written word, a forthright pleasure in the way its meaning has been draining away. Indeed, you could view this show as a display of her A was prophetic. For with the proliferation of shifting public signage, slogans, logos, and the lava flow of printout, the words on your clothes are now what certify your physical existence. They put you in harmony with the rest of the material world, as well as with the electronically written universe on the Internet. Words are now rarely carved in stone; printed books are quickly pulped; but endless messages flicker momentarily on screens or on or sacred truth, the written word may be losing ground, but that as a source of Event sounds less invidious than obvious. Isn't that what all journalism is, by definition, and what even serious activism aspires to nowadays? Most intermittently on its cover-- Ms. was just the promotional vehicle the staff veteran, who arrived as a researcher at the very start and went on to pioneering endeavor that, in her opinion, transcended the ordinary boundaries circumstances, and heroic goals, all of which she does her best to supply. devoted to the uphill battles on the business end. Unsurprisingly, bold determination prevailed, and a new kind of magazine was born. "Ms. seems were both "a publishing enterprise and a center for activism." Ms. Funds flowed out from the coffers of the Ms. Foundation for Women, giving fledgling feminist projects the boost they needed. soon enough she settles down into the blander form of the press release. Hers is not the book to read for a serious assessment of the ideas in the many articles she makes sure to mention by author. (Her former colleagues, she is well aware, will head straight for the index.) She rehearses the main criticisms leveled against the magazine: that it was politically conventional, was sentimental about sisterhood, forever holding up individual women as inspirational role models. But her reply to the critics consists of providing an exception or two to each of the complaints and then moving swiftly on. She today, feminism was not an ideology set in stone, but rather an adaptable set to subvert the women's magazine but to give it a makeover, to translate feminism into something familiar to the middle class. Go back and reread the changed from advice to mothers on, say, avoiding "martyr complexes," to advice on lobbying for child care and avoiding gender stereotypes with sons and tribute to Ms. that most of the issues it raised over the years are still around. Ms. was among the first women's magazines to run pieces about sexual harassment, spousal abuse, breast implants, the economic impact of prescriptions for action. It was service journalism, and its depth and quality were uneven, as it generally is with service journalism. Ms. also relied a great deal on book excerpts, hardly a sign of bold editorial conference). If the magazine followed electoral politics a little doggedly, it participated in gestural politics a little overenthusiastically. In "Cracking Ms.' radical critics were right. It was not in the business of making sustained ideological arguments or issuing eccentric polemics. Few distinctive writers emerged from the magazine, though over the years many television show, a promotional tour. This was the true Ms. "state of mind," and there were many such events to boast about. The premier issue in the and others appeared. Then there was a big party at the New York Public Library of larger gatherings, several of them aboard a chartered Circle Line boat." "Everything we did," one member of the staff recalled, "got a tremendous amount of attention." It would all sound narcissistically frivolous were it not so earnest. And so ineffective financially; the magazine was all but broke from editorial energy to the magazine, and it showed. (You can sense a magazine's Ms. lost its spark, but it still carries on. Its covers are as flashy as ever, though an arid cleanliness reigns within; it resembles nothing so much as nothing grows. The second is the city of Cape Town, where his family returned after a stint in the hinterland and where dead babies rot in brown paper an autobiographical trilogy, Boyhood is the story of a boy forced to endure and imagine his way out of that barrenness. It is a writer's memoir, airs these larger happenings through the muggy lives of its young protagonist nonpracticing attorney whom he despises; his mother, who is too close to him and to whom he is too close; and a younger brother, who he suspects may, at This last, you understand, is not a good thing. Normalcy, his own last bastion, must be avoided at all costs. On young John's rejection of "normal," that twee, tired word, turns the action of this book. He can isolate his every sensation, indulge his every impulse, in the untested space swords in their hands, crested helmets on their heads, indomitable courage in but there's a larger reality that will not be ignored: the fact that he, who are, like him, in a despised religious minority. mastered and feet remain shod. Ugliness and sloth thin the nostrils and raise the gorge. Appearances must be maintained and the desperately unhappy worlds of home and school kept separate, and they almost are. Above all is the yearning for greatness, for acts of wondrous heroism. But shy, brainy, and unpopular, mouthful at a time. He is proud of how little he drinks. It will stand him in good stead, he hopes, if he is ever lost in the veld. He wants to be a creature has been accused of avoiding politics when he writes. That's a mystifying traceable to the traumas of political change and the individual's need to find of life"), his description of beloved train rides ("sleeping snug and tight brings"). There are scenes from provincial life that derive from absolute fix a broken gadget or a leaky faucet. The Natives, rightful owners of the but the sea is stronger") deserving of the utmost reverence ("You must remember John, is the only time he has heard his mother use the word "wise"). Atop this heap are the English, the fascinating, remote English, "people who have not fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well." The stereotyping is powerful, the more so because it appears deceptively There is explicit racism, too. What, for example, does one it? (One bleaches it.) It is among these careful calibrations that John must come into his own. Painfully aware of the limitations of class, occasionally able to peer outside the prison house of race, he strains to exceed his inheritance. He despairs of his father the failed lawyer, the gunner who can't squelches his cigarettes in his own excrement. The son copes, as any kid would, by leaving out the details that most offend him. When he tells his friends instance, he drops the "lance" before "corporal." But the father remains another matter. She has tragic potential. She lives in fear of breast cancer; son. Her tolerance feeds his tantrums, her servitude his warped sense of self. She, like him, is denied wholeness by her downwardly mobile lot and remains fluttery and distracted almost to the last, when she has the moment of clarity her son has dreaded. Unlike the mother, however, the son can and did flee into principle. Frosty of tone, flinty of edge, he doesn't tell you what to feel or describing rage. Her fictional heroines can name every indignity they've been subjected to since birth, and because they are usually bright young women from list of injuries is long. They've seen corrupt governments, sadistic schoolmasters, domineering mothers who spoil their sons but train their for living is to seduce women and then disappear. Sometimes, as in the case of finds more fuel for her anger in the pitying stares of unconsciously racist One senses it above all in her amazing control over words, which, while extremely satisfying on the level of literary technique, also comes across as a refusal to be vulnerable and a reply to anyone who would try to keep her The story she has to tell is sadly simple: Her brother unique, of course. Many thousands of young men have died a similarly frightening, needless death, and not a few memoirs have chronicled their last youngest of three younger brothers, all of whom shared a father different from talents and made a fatal decision to glide through life on charm alone. After himself the stage name "Sugar." But one of the themes of My yours is so sick and infuriating and doomed that you left the country to escape often praise nonfiction by saying that it reads like fiction, when all they really mean is that it is absorbing and well written. In this case, the lyrical mystery novel: It's clear from the very first sentence that Drew is such a waste of a life. She picks through childhood memories for a foreshadowing of what was to come. There was, for instance, the ghastly incident shortly after Drew was born, when he was lying in the arms of their mother, who was asleep, and red ants crawled in through the window and nearly ate him alive. And she adds a plot to her unfolding understanding of what cataloging of subtly different emotional states in clear, looping, musical and wonders how she actually feels about her brother: "Love always feels much that is why everybody always wants to have love: because it feels much better, so much better." With a scary honesty typical of one of her heroines, she decides that her feelings for him are intense but probably smaller than love, it's a handy reference point for anyone who wants to argue that the recent ascendance of the memoir hasn't wiped out artful, ambitious writing. Far from selfish and prejudiced and quite possibly evil but once in a while capable of recollection of a childhood incident that remained buried in her memory until hanging around with her mother while Drew died suddenly shook it loose.) differently, from a less narrow point of view, perhaps, and that the discoveries this book relates might eventually spill over into her fiction. that absolutely fails to value them. Her heroines have been fierce and admirable, but their struggle to be acknowledged has necessarily entailed a "I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense." How wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman." After all these years, she's still writing about survival. But as of this book, it looks General Motors asked a team of industrial engineers from outside the company to survey its business and recommend strategies for the future. After careful study, these pioneer management consultants advised GM to rid itself of recommendation in the 1960s that gasoline companies not sell food in their stations for fear of annoying local restaurant owners. In fact, the history of consulting is full of tales like these, showcasing the hubris, you feel "a growing sense of unease" about the authority consultants enjoy in today's business world, finding evidence to feed your anxiety won't be a The history of management consulting, though, is more complex than these horror stories would suggest. The profession originated in the early years of this century with the application of the principles of scientific management to production lines. The first consulting firms sprang up after World War I, when consultants were regarded primarily as "efficiency experts." In the late 1950s, consulting came into its own. The corporate need to understand the burgeoning consumer market, a more general faith in the value of expert advice, and the demands of an unprecedentedly strong economy created consultants have benefited from anxieties about profitability and foreign competition. Corporations looking to reinvent and downsize themselves have made Unfortunately, little of this history makes its way into Dangerous ground. Each chapter is meant to illuminate a larger truth about consulting in thinking. But while the picture is bleak, it isn't sharp or convincing. Instead of a serious analysis of the evolution of consulting or a discussion of the differences and similarities between consulting and traditional corporate ultimately, because they have no thesis to offer. To be sure, they want to persuade us that the work consultants do is too often not in the best interests of their clients, and they do reveal how often hubris and open checkbooks have been recipes for disaster in the past. But they have remarkably little to say continue to enjoy the authority they do in the business world. For the given way since the 1980s to the idea that people with vested interests in a example, have become a preferred form of executive compensation.) So why have consultants, who are asked to help companies in which they have no financial serious questions, and answering them would tell us important things about the the last two decades. Instead, Dangerous Company often reads like a 10-point checklist of things to keep in mind when dealing with consultants. "Never give up control," we're told. "Value your employees," and, "Beware of In a way, though, the sheer banality of this advice points one would need to be told to "never give up control" unless there were executives all too willing to cede authority in a crisis. Nor would "value your employees" be necessary counsel unless companies were routinely putting more stock in outsiders' analyses than in the intelligence of their own people. One thing Dangerous Company does show convincingly is how quick companies are to look outside for solutions, especially when these come with the isn't necessarily a mistake. Executives are often too close to problems or too fact, has a long history of bringing in outsiders to transform companies, fallen apart listening only to those inside as have collapsed from bad advice for companies' failures seems, in the end, to be beside the point. No one Ma Bell is the one responsible for its woes. It also suggests that the real companies call in management consultants to begin with. The answer probably has responsibility, the need to appear to be on the cutting edge, the need to levies a powerful indictment against management consulting, but in doing so it confuses a symptom with the disease. Consultants aren't the real problem. The needs they're asked to fulfill almost certainly are. make a mistake in supposing "hip" to mean "stylish." Hip is a it easy to laugh at himself, but his laughter is not sincere if it is thorough. If I could be Hamlet, or even a clown with a breaking heart 'neath his jester's motley, the role would be tolerable. But I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if that's not all. He also laughed at the laugh at the laugh, and so on, unto means that hip is a tragic condition. From this point of view, life must have West wrote only four novels before dying in an auto crash today. But the key to understanding him lies in the first of his novels, The intestines, having adventures. He meets a little boy, who shows him his his own dream life, and that each new, ridiculous scene represents a further unfolding of an altogether real and plausible personality. The personality is nervous, fearful, sexually frustrated to the point of hysteria, terrified of women, and perhaps mildly homosexual. But it is also too rigidly imprisoned in his screenplays), might not have appreciated the ethnic emphasis. him the rudiments of literary form, and in his next two novels, Miss life of a cynical Christian advice columnist, and in the case of A Cool "He buried his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck." Cool Million is, in its modest way, the most perfect of his books. The young hero sets out to earn his fortune and save his aged mother from eviction. He passes through every station of the uplift narratives: He meets a beneficent banker and patron, falls in love with the girl next door, traverses the United States. Every word in the novel plunks the tinkly piano keys of a dime novel. hero loses his thumb, his teeth, his leg, his scalp, and his nose; and the creepier his sufferings become, the funnier is the book, sad to say. It's hard to imagine that West could ever have written a conventional novel with any success. He tried in The Day of the Locust over his manias about women and sex, which makes him seem just as crazy as in his other books, but less aware of it, therefore less entertaining. The Library spirit of thoroughness, random essays and stories that the author never show us everything that is appealing about West. He had the kind of neurotic, think of anyone), only to become mandatory today. So he was prophetic, too. The test of time has never been an accurate gauge of literary genius. Greater writers than West have been doomed to fade with the years. Time does tell us we have dismissed corsets as ridiculous instruments of torture, we can safely undergone a bodily ordeal gives incalculable force to your erotic attractions. Tattooing and piercing are among the most ancient of such practices; piercing, Tender nipples stuck through with gold rings, sensitive tongues punched through with barbells that make a noise against the teeth, lips. But more and more nostrils and eyebrows are joining earlobes as handy flaps to carry holes for an array of public adornments. The other day, I felt obscurely pained to see a pretty girl on the subway with a big silver ring in the middle of her face, hanging from a hole in the central partition of her stud in one nostril or a row of thin rings edging the flange of an ear. Those things all seem part of fashion's usual piquancy. This wasn't. Somehow this Bodily ornament originally was undertaken to create the self, to deck the outward being with the inward knowledge that trouble must be taken and nature distorted in careful ways and at personal cost, so as to make forever clear the gulf between a responsible adult and an infant or a beast. ways of completing the human body that were called "barbaric" by restless people bent on scientific understanding, political and intellectual enlightenment, or plain old empire, holy and profane. those restless people who eventually invented fashion around the obscured and rediscovered, that all advance could be reversed and recommenced, that any empire, including God's, could collapse and reform. And that effort should be made, and money spent, to keep this idea in plain sight on the dread; it reflects our modern devotion to the fragile trajectory of an individual life. The one thing it must never do is look safe. Outrageousness has always been provided by the young, but hitherto most commonly with hair. Hair seems suited for nothing else: Its variable thickness of growth has apparently no reference to climate, and its practical value seems to be its malleability for purposes of erotic appeal. Hair revolutions are no longer as outrageous as they have been in recent decades, though; nor are skimpy garments. So we have turned to objects that make holes in faces and central nose ring goes beyond outrage. It comes from somewhere else, from the bodily sculpture is applied with finality to signal a fixed social and sexual identity. During the past seven centuries of Western modernity, the most extreme bodily modishness always was reversible. Shaved hair could grow back, pinched waists fill out, flattened breasts swell up. But a great big hole through the septum does not close up without leaving a disfiguring scar. Western fashion has always included earlobe piercing for both sexes, a small talismanic reminder of what has been called the "folk order." But earlobe tissue heals very easily, and mainstream male fashion during the progressive first quarter of this century, pierced ears for women whalebone corsets and the double marital bed. Almost two generations of ear piercing became almost universal for both men and women in the 1960s, just Perhaps the era of fashion is over, or soon to be. These holes now mark a generation of which the parents cannot confidently say, "They'll grow out of horror. Punches and needles carry a lethal threat; an injury that rips the flesh is real injury. The pierced generation may simply be acknowledging the deadliness of the times we live in, suggestive as they are of earlier epochs in human history. Perhaps, like the girl on the subway, they're just waiting to be she went to a few balls. She flirted with one dashing boy, but she had no dowry to speak of and his parents got worried and made him move away. Later she agreed to marry a very tall, very ugly younger man, but she changed her mind the next morning. Beginning in her late 20s, while packed into a snug cottage with her mother, her sister, and a pockmarked spinster friend, she revised some juvenilia and wrote a series of freakishly perfect novels. Then she got sick, literature's beloved old maid: modest, retiring, more comfortable darning socks by the fire than out in the big bad world, something of a gossip but basically pretty much what we thought, posterity has colored it in all wrong, and to go over the changing fashions in bonnets, they're dealing with this cleaned If these two books got together, their offspring would be a declares in the introduction, which unfolds "as it was experienced at the time, realized, these books reminded me of a pair of recent literary appreciations: life sight by sight and smell by smell. So we learn that baby Jane drank from contemporary name of Movie); that, while growing up, she may have tasted spicy managed to win independence from it. Little information survives about her as crucial as parents in determining a person's development, and the brilliant, argues that Jane was traumatized by a separation from two of her six brothers. mentioned again. On a brighter but no less arbitrary note, childless a snobbish landowner, kind to his less glamorous siblings but also condescending. The brothers left behind were the cleverest, which was just as wanted to be a writer (he ended up a curate) and spurred Jane to compete. to Jane from the West Indies and China and other places that the quaint fantasy author has been assumed to know nothing about. And how's this for exoticism: people Jane depended on for survival once it became clear she wouldn't marry. she had a roof overhead. But they had total power over her, deciding where she lived, how big an allowance she got, and when and where she could travel. Meanwhile, for companionship and reaction to her work she was utterly dependent Review of Books that it was more than sisterly. This is a cheap, ludicrous something of an underminer, constantly urging Jane to hide her identity as an author. Her "plump, dumpy" watercolor portrait of Jane shows an unremarkable goodness more than her wit or her bitter eye for human failings. With perfectly good intentions, she ended up stifling "the restless spirit of the woman who said of herself: 'If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own responsible for destroying the letters that would fill us in on the crucial town of Bath. Family legend has it that Jane fainted away when she heard of the move, terrified of leaving all that was dear to her for such a den of iniquity. novel that she never returned to. Her silence has always been attributed to a unreliable--70 years later, a niece who wasn't alive at the time thought she remembered hearing something to that effect. What if Jane was tougher than this? What if she had found Bath stimulating? What if she had failed to write there not because she was desolate and dried up but because, for a few active equilibrium and happiness over suffering. She was a born writer, but she wasn't pretentious enough to regard writing as her only possible destiny. It's sad to imagine her returning to her manuscripts a few years later in a state of irritable, impoverished resignation. It's especially sad to think that we might not have these happiest of novels if it weren't for her lowered hopes. media. The left conjures up a heartland full of racists, misogynists, and religious maniacs. Both pit a morally hidebound middle against a culturally overwrought images of fierce division captures today's more complex reality. The truth of the matter is that the liberals have won the culture wars. Maybe not as thoroughly as they would have liked and maybe with much of the looniness removed, but they won them, and we are a more tolerant, egalitarian, and that completes the title is wry, not just as in "surprise, surprise" but also "after all the cultural upheavals of the last decades.") center and distrust ideological thinking." They're hardly heroic in their virtues; there's none of the grandeur of, say, the Protestant Ethic here. But "reluctant to pass judgment on how other people act and think." They don't hanker for the old family order or want to put women back in ancient strictures, but neither do they endorse the left's "anything goes" morality. don't think is quite right, since it suggests they're unsure of their own brought by women working, sexual enlightenment, and feminism, even as they also worry about the fragility of family life and the dangers their children between the deserving and undeserving poor. When they think about riven families and social pathology in the inner city, they generally blame "people's lack of personal responsibility." But such sentiments aren't necessarily giving people a second chance, and know that the safety net is a moral, not just a practical, necessity. And if they don't like feeling swamped by subjects') for the middle way. Against hotter images of a churning id of rabid claims of reason and morality. We do not have to fear them. to focus on the more educated, affluent segments of the middle class, segments that may more easily slip into genteel euphemisms and present themselves as keep at bay deeper and darker sentiments. Moreover, by contrasting his central makes his own position seem moderate and attractive. Were he not constantly playing off a notion of a fiercely divided society, one might discover other questions and thus other important qualities of the middle class. a grand exception to his larger thesis: Only a small percentage of his interviewees are willing to admit its legitimacy as a lifestyle. But the vast majority of them have come to accept homosexuals as worthy of rights and even of respect, if not of admiration. Measured against the historical baseline of truth. Despite the huffing and puffing, divisions have been closing in gender, in notions of patriotism, and even in some dimensions of race. Religious fundamentalists, who once declaimed against fornication, now seek simply to hold the line at gay marriage. Meanwhile, liberals in the Democratic party have been publicly embracing the idiom of hard work and personal responsibility. plaint: "By dismissing our fears about declining morality out of hand, you fail values of inclusion and equality that you currently profess." Liberals have lower orders wanted to seize property rather than acquire it. Rebuffing these middle" doesn't have to mean craven opportunism or a betrayal of its beliefs. Rather, it can simply mean rediscovering the common ground that liberals have long shared with the middle class without even realizing it. dogmatic crew of ideologues. But that's the virtue of this calm and sensible book. It doesn't aim to dazzle with flashy but misleading rubrics like "backlash." One Nation, After All is full of the very qualities its author imputes to the people: ordinary virtue, mature patriotism, and quiet as I did, it's nearly impossible to watch the rise of the Internet without thinking back to the rise of television, way back when. A powerful new technology occasioned an enormous amount of hyperventilation about the new saying) that would demonstrably improve the society. Television would be the greatest educational force ever created. It would not just entertain but also decades have passed, and we know all about television now. We know, for instance, that while television's effect on society has been large, it hasn't week than about uplifting the culture. It seems fair to say that, in part as a result of our experience with television, we tend to shy away from making grandiose claims for new technologies anymore. We've become warier. It's been a long time since we've fallen for the grand promise of a new technological Which is why the hoopla surrounding the Internet is so character? It vanishes as soon as the subject turns to the Internet and its alleged power to transform our lives. Suddenly, we are innocents again, just as promise. Not only can the Internet help free citizens from the tyranny of oppressive governments, not only can it make investors wealthier and citizens more active and students more eager to learn, but it can also enhance the experience of watching a ballgame by allowing you to interact with a surprising yet, Internet proselytizing is often led by actual smart the computer moguls. (In her acknowledgments she coyly thanks "all the Bills I have known.") Her industry confabs drip with cachet. And her newsletter, best sense of the word. Her profile is high enough that the publisher felt justified in putting her face on the cover of her new book, which is titled her newsletter is nowhere to be found in her book. "I live on the Net," writes appears to have caused her to forget how to write more than four consecutive paragraphs at a time. More crucially, her "design for living in the digital age," as the subtitle puts it, comes across as a cross between New Age philosophy and 1950s hyperbole. Critical thinking has been replaced by wishful make the world a better place. Really. For instance, the Net will help create she's involved in. This will happen because people will gravitate toward communities where they share interests and respect the views of others in the who tend to disrupt those nurturing Net communities.) She believes the Net will allow "those who want freedom [to] be able to work on their own terms without sacrificing as much as they must today." In other words, the Net will free people from the need to work for large organizations in order to make a decent "People who aren't much fun to work with will be able to become more disclosure in all sorts of areas. It will allow people to be anonymous when it suits them and to be themselves when that suits them. If people's secrets are somehow revealed on the Net, well, that could be good too. ("At the same time, we may all become more tolerant if everyone's flaws are more visible.") And, my somehow "bring back new respect for people, for personal attention, for all her prognostications on work, security, privacy, and so on is one central, and rather circular, idea. If the Internet is going to live up to its purpose of this book is to encourage people to make the mainstream of cyberspace nice enough that people will want to live their social lives there." But she also seems to believe that if we would start spending more of our social lives on the Net, that would help make us nicer, since the culture of true even when she's conceding that not everyone in cyberspace is as nice as she is. "It may not be nice to say it," she writes at one point, "but people are not all always nice, and therefore a little social pressure can be a good two problems with this emphasis on niceness, one small and one large. The small problem is that as virtues go, niceness is wildly overrated. Nice books, for people who are trying to get something done, too much niceness is likely to get The larger problem is that the Internet is simply not going to see the Internet reach its full potential. The notion is ludicrous on the face of it. No matter how much information gets loaded into it, the Internet is never going to transform the dynamics of human behavior. At least not for the better. In fact, the evidence thus far is quite depressing in this regard. As anyone who has spent any time in a chat room knows, the bad tends to drive out the good. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the way it happens in like artifacts from a more gullible age. We won't be making extravagant claims extremely useful, sometimes not. Some of what is on it will be very good, a lot of it will be junk. It'll be just like television. And no one will be about Jane Smiley, no matter what you think of her fiction: She puts her money where her mouth is. Two years ago, Smiley published an essay in it's actually a mess and a moral disaster. Among her charges was the claim that and the novel a precursor to the kinds of buddy movies in which a sweet black more, Smiley wrote, readers have always sensed that the happy ending is slapped believed that its great theme was the struggle of the individual wandering blanching. One hates to use a sexist's favorite word, but she came off as shrill. On the other hand, if you set aside her excessive loathing of Twain, recently, men who wrote about alienation stood a decent chance of being taken seriously by critics, while a whole genre of social novels written by women got he's running guns for abolitionists (blond, effeminate, and brave, he's the unprepared for the hardscrabble life she's chosen. The first few chapters are building a cabin from scratch while drunken strangers jeer at you and threaten angelic children, and neat distinctions between good and evil. Wrong. At every point, Smiley upsets the usual expectations. Coming from the no man's land of intoxicated by their own abstract words. Instead of love at first sight, through the book, just as she's prepared to investigate the possibility that they're in love, he's suddenly murdered. (I might not have revealed this plot takes her in. Unwilling to give up the notion that she has a mission, she At which point, it becomes obvious that Smiley isn't felt the cool, firm sensation of her hand on my neck as a promise." Newton is quite stunning as parody. But for someone so bent on unmasking way, this novel is a sermon. It attacks sentimentality, ideology, and piggish male heroism, preaching ambiguity in their place. "No one could describe what a building block to a better Smiley novel in the future, one in which her brilliant lessons of disillusionment fly faster, because they're spurred on by a bigger, warmer imagination. This would be the real coup: to unite Smiley's missed the links within this review, click for the of how critics dismissed a consulting, the domination of world financial markets, and particle physics. One field in which it is believed we do poorly, however, is beating people up. We are, the stereotype has it, lousy fighters, and this rankles. Some of us respond to this slander by embracing, in the words of the cultural critic are those who steel themselves with memories of our gangster past. Men with me. This reaction is easy to understand: I was, at the time, facing the more nuanced. Great nicknames and fists aside, I began to recognize these his eyes as mirrors, reflecting not what he is looking at, but what he will see: mountains, rivers, wars. I imagine him tall and slender, wearing a hood, gangsters. He does this by striking a tough guy pose throughout, a pose that fails to hide his sense of physical inadequacy, which he blames on his His father is different, he maintains, by dint of his King, and these passages are charming only if you believe that being in a room believes his book is revolutionary, a violation of a taboo against speaking purported tendency to suppress the gangster past and is even more angered by attempts to make light of it. "I once heard a comedian refer jokingly to the history, he rewrites other people's research, sometimes mangling quotes during Ben," he writes. "The same restless energy drove both men toward invention. Ben worked in a diner and was tired of clunky sugar dispensers and so converted an existing piece of machinery, a tea bagger, creating the first sugar packet. Tolly worked in narcotics and knew there was a Southern market for drugs and so I would like to say Tolly was working for evil, my grandfather for good, but I book that he undoubtedly believes extols heroes and explains a suppressed bit pathology. He wants desperately to be a thug, because that is the only way he are a tough people. At most, it means we are simply a people like any for being optional. Thirty years ago, many items once necessary to female have all come back, licensed frivolities rather than slavish concessions to the male beholder. Since they are subject to women's freedom of choice, many women never make use of them, and that, too, has its own excitement. the old appurtenances, the bra was the only one that never really disappeared, since some women can't do without it. In fact, developments in bra construction instead of a questionable perversion and wearing them became a sensual experience instead of a social duty. Now there are tough sports bras for active women, cleverly minimizing bras for the very abundant, and scores of confections with no function but to delight, whether on bodies or in pictures. clear that breasts well emphasized by artfully designed bras are thrilling to of what used to be called a "training bra" and is now being worn as part of the dress. Designers are enclosing nearly nonexistent breasts in the familiar it (so it shows through), or below it (sewn on, sometimes in a different material). The more the bra seems like underwear, the sexier it is; when it's more like a bikini top, the effect is simple modishness. In any case, though, the idea is never to thrust actual breasts into actual prominence. It's a reference only, a delicate allusion to that deeply satisfying modern icon, the fetishism of female underwear dates, in its current incarnation, to the second half of the last century, before bras existed and when the prevailing excitement was all about underpants. For hundreds of years, women had worn only petticoats. The arrival of white, frilly panties caused a stir, especially underwear from outerwear, so a glimpse of petticoat frill was a thrill. But even more so were the lines of the figure created by the invisible corset female body newly engaged in sports and gainful employment. This ideal had two elements, one forthrightly celebrating female anatomy in all its strength and elasticity, the other more covertly emphasizing a woman's sensual pleasure in her physical self and in being touched by others. The corseted shapeliness of earlier decades had been a treat for the eye and the mind, but not for the hand. The new, flexible shape, covered by a few thin layers of fabric, was enjoyable to its owner and accessible to the male grasp. Fur coats came into vogue, the dance craze erupted, and the diaphragm was invented, all well before Breasts, however, presented a problem. They don't have muscles that can govern their own movements, and if they're sizable, they swing and bounce with the slightest motion of the body. In the brisk new arrangement was required that would inhibit neither the tennis arm nor the bras simply flattened the bosom with a band, to help create a radically while new cylindrical girdles flattened the hips, tum, and bum. But when ripe feminine curves came back into fashion in the '30s, there appeared the sweater was her bra, lifting up, holding out, and separating and steadying her breasts with firm insistence. Before long, breasts in visible or invisible added perfection to individual outlines, and still later, the molded, seamless outside an art museum, and the vision was indelibly imprinted on the collective mind. A rage for that shape persists; breast augmentation and reduction procedures are popular, and the bra business is bigger than ever. have it both ways. Women who never really need bras can ignore them or wear them at will. Modern feminism, modern habits, and modern fashion have familiarized the eye with mobile and visible breasts of different shapes and sizes, even with the harsh truths of breast cancer. Breasts have lost much of their mythological aura and acquired some needed reality. But the delicious look of breasts in bras, to say nothing of the delicious feel of them for the wearer, taps into a very ancient human joy. Emphasizing breasts is too great a the national debt, getting foreigners to invest again, and in general becoming an international darling (this was four years before he would be unmasked as a The commercial advertised an exhibit at the contemporary art museum. The show create a giant image of the great man's head as he discoursed on this and that. The whole thing looked like a homage to some ancient emperor. It was a creepy, temptations up close, and many times he had resisted. His grandfather, a publisher, was allied with the turn of the century dictator whose highhanded deepening his sense that a writer's job is to reveal what society tries to cushy work that supplied living expenses and food for the imagination: the book he'll be remembered by. In The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and mask, a defensive camouflage worn to hide the country's unresolved past. "The as a search for our own selves, which have been deformed or disguised by alien institutions," he wrote. The Revolutionary Institutional Party that took power it was a touchy compromise that preserved backward attitudes toward power father who has left, who has abandoned a wife and children. The image of still palpable today. Never academic, it proceeds from a simple, urgent question: "What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are?" This is a poet's or a philosopher's approach to history that could fruitfully be applied to any country in the world. (Click to see, for example, how he applies it, with not very flattering results, to the United States.) to suffer a mild case of the very power sickness he had diagnosed. He set up a left's more overblown rhetoric. The magazine was and is serious and fresh and written either in argument with him or to court his favor. inner compass and an unholy supply of curiosity saved him from becoming a relic of the past or an embattled opponent of the present. I won't argue for his poetry, which, while frequently beautiful, is never quite as beautiful to me as his prose. That is gentle and clear, yet so packed with suggestive ideas that kept his eyes, ears, and heart open. "A writer should be a guerrilla fighter, should bear solitude and know that he is a marginal being," he once told an interviewer. He never gave up this ideal of marginality, even as he climbed to the top of the pyramid. He was a singular case, both admirable and disturbing: the perennial guerrilla fighter who also became king. kill with a bayonet (thrust deep under ribs, drag in slow, deep circle to houses and unwaveringly plastic characters named Nutmeg and Cinnamon. Hanging the select few who hear it. Stripped of their powers of volition, they become "no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions describes a nation bored and isolated by its successes and its failures alike. a health magazine, whose strange hours screen her infidelities from an improbably credulous spouse. Leaving as if for work one morning, she does not return. She picks up her dry cleaning the following day, however, and several plot lines and, both consummate miniaturist and committed pessimist, appears to develop each carefully while keeping the mix unstable. And so the (as it turns out, to little result beyond a few crepuscular couplings that may or may not be real). He meets a veteran whose wartime experiences allow yield an enduring image: a dry well, whose dark silences facilitate thought and up the excitement and terror, the white hots and the blue colds, of childhood repeatedly, it is simultaneously prison and release. It makes him face his deepest fears (which puddle up in a stigmatic stain on his right cheek), then allows him osmotic and healing passage to other worlds and narratives. hotel, he taps into a labyrinth of stories that eventually reconnects him with less ambitious in scale and makes a compelling case for his return to a smaller this makes for good documentary and great short stories: His book about the cult sticks with the conventions of storytelling and delivers emotion, narrative lines, so carefully laid, snap; you're suspended midair, your tender attentions scattered to the winds. You gulp, tell yourself you can transcend bows tied in tweet, tidy trills. "Cinnamon's grandfather, the nameless lieutenant who appeared in Cinnamon's story: he reminded me of Lieutenant not necessarily fact and fact not necessarily truth." little too late, his impulse to tidy resolution testifies more to his usually found it easier to earn money than respect. In the rarefied world of concert music, film composers were always thought of as versatile and skilled, but with nothing crucial to say. Those who had started out writing for the concert stage, as most in the studio heyday had, were assumed to have the concert hall, bitter at the unwritten dictum, "No movie hacks need has changed in recent years, and the first four releases of the Nonesuch Film Series amount to a certificate of intellectual chic. The scores of East of host of other classic films, whose music we have heard mostly squeezed stingily out of tinny television speakers, have been sumptuously rerecorded. To hear watching the movie characters walk off the screen and into the "real" world in Uncharacteristically, the generally visionary Nonesuch is scrambling to catch a trend with this one. More typically, the label has music with a stronger bite than the bloated tone poems full of sopping strings that had become the studio standard by the 1940s. For his first film, A even dipped into the 12-tone techniques revered by the very high priests of was the only one of the four to have been a member in good standing of the movies, and partly because his film music was so abstract and his concert works concert pieces (which have titles like "Rain Tree Sketch" and "Towards the project comes into focus: the contradiction of championing film music by battle scene from a cue written for a battle scene, and you get not mere descriptive battle music but an abstract shard of symphony. The tension between descriptive and abstract forms of music goes back to controversies of that music's highest aspiration should be internal perfection and These recordings would like it both ways. The cream of film scorers, they imply, are consummate collaborators, able to fuse notes and images so that each inflames the other. But the very act of issuing them on CD of their own, why can't the soundtrack jettison its celluloid ballast and doesn't work that way. Take North's celebrated score for A Streetcar Named jazz, redolent of sin, plumes out of the dive up the street from the watch, we can never be sure whether the characters are hearing the same music it does what jazz and the movies have always done best: It makes the squalid glamorous. But surround the soundtrack with silence and mount it in a frame of like the Cloisters, the hodgepodge of medieval sculpture rescued from crumbling that the essential quality of a work of art remain intact, even when it is dropped into an alien habitat. Like the Cloisters, these discs contain ravishingly crafted bits and pieces extracted from their intended setting; restored, reassembled, and asked to keep right on glowing exactly as they did fast you can hardly hear the words, and who, at the end of his films, gets slow fade is especially surprising when you consider how much the genre he 's boy, a loner who liked to read, tough guys in the neighborhood gave him nicknames like Red, Runt, and Short Shit, and forced him to learn how to fight. throughout his life for insults. He called his main career nemesis, studio head fatherless family, not vain hopes of becoming a star, is what drove him. distinctive style of dance in which he stiffened his legs and stuck out his drivers, warring taxi unions and, of course, gangsters. These films claimed to played Tom Powers, a street punk who gets rich running booze during Prohibition, grows too big for his britches, and winds up being shot. Other was the role that let audiences admit they'd take a stinking lowlife over a that followed is a good example of how shrewd the old studio system was at figuring out exactly what a star is supposed to do, and an even better example of how the system locked stars into an increasingly stultifying caricature of electric chair. (The audience is left to guess if Rocky is spineless or if he's just trying to convince all the kids who worship him that crime doesn't pay.) To keep his fans from getting bored, he improvised what he called "goodies," directors and predictable scripts. Relief came when he got to play the great to be recognized as a wholesome patriot, instead of a rat. He thought he'd Unfortunately, in his rush to change his image he picked a string of sappy, sentimental side. When he started out in show business, he was something of a idealist, and as he got older his views shifted to the right. In fact, beneath struggling to get out. In his spare time he wrote naive mystical verse about God's presence in nature: "All space is filled with wondrous things/ Unseen by human eye./ Before us hover kings and queens,/ With realms that float and fly." number of farms and apparently loved to sit in the pasture and meditate on his well into middle age, still dotes on her with an infant's fierce love. White finds out that his mother is dead and moans like a maniac; and at a chemical refinery, where he screams, "Top of the world, Ma!" and then gets shot by the not responding to other people in a scene, he's hearing voices in his head. The the right winking theatricality. Also, a few years ago, when left to choose his decades later, like the most enduring film style of all. He's been sucked into the cultural ether. His skepticism and short fuse, which once seemed so radical, are taught at the Actors Studio. His name may be vanishing, but more off chance that you haven't followed every twist and turn of the case, there are two ways to reassure yourself that former Deputy White House Counsel briskly efficient 114-page document that makes an already overwhelming case for suicide about as close to airtight as you can get. The other is to read if bumbling, former New York Post reporter who has virtually republished in newspaper ads across the country; his sheer persistence has led some casual observers to conclude he might be on to something. The Strange an alternative scenario that makes the least bit of sense. incontrovertible (you would think) facts. Foster left his White House office River, a bullet wound through his mouth, his right thumb trapped in the trigger zing from the back of his head. There were no signs of a struggle; his sports nearby parking lot. In the days that followed, friends and family members described Foster as distraught over the demands of his job and suffering from death, he reports, Foster broke down in tears over dinner with his wife and talked of resigning. On the day before he died he phoned his family doctor in Little Rock, Ark. According to the doctor's typewritten notes, published in doctor, the widow, the friends, the Park Police officers that found the body, concealing the fact that they failed to follow proper police procedures by group of secret conspirators. The argument begs certain questions, such as: Who were these conspirators? What possible motive would they have had? Why deposit rivers.) And most curious of all, how exactly could this dastardly crime have and have nobody notice would have been quite an achievement. Wouldn't they have Ruddy makes no stab at guessing who the criminals are. But as he plows his way through hundreds of pages of witness statements, he thinks he has discovered what they were wearing: orange vests! This is actually not a have seen someone in an orange or red vest in the woods. Hall later conceded it may have been nothing more than a car or truck in the distance. Still, Ruddy smells a rat. He speculates darkly that Hall's possible sighting was evidence wrong. Like his fellow conspiracy nuts, Ruddy argues that there was too little reported a pool of blood underneath his head and new, wet blood pouring out of home. Ruddy and other critics have questioned where the .38-caliber revolver sister, and two of his children recall that Foster inherited a similar handgun the night of her husband's death, the weapon was missing. Are they all firings. That almost certainly helps to account for White House stonewalling suspicions about what secrets Foster might have known. But that the man killed continually updated Web site, the indomitable Ruddy charges on, picking away at the men with orange vests won't soon be coming for him? as the ultimate expos of the contemporary male psyche. What I do know is that he realizes that it's just a stack of plastic discs, not a fulfilling life writes with awesome fluidity. His musings on the destructive beauty of pop times achieve something like philosophical depth. (Click for an example.) The book's unapologetic concern with personal happiness even lent it a classical before the Novel got confused with Art and the novelist's job was to write clean prose, trot out a few moral guidelines, and make the reader laugh. My only complaints with High Fidelity were with a few cloying Growth character in the novel appears to issue a happy farewell. The finale is such as when Donna gets out of the hospital after an attempted rape, and the of High Fidelity would probably be about 4-to-1. Maybe it was inevitable but his desperate clinging to youth placed him inside a world of rock trivia see in magazine ads for khakis. He's inherited a nest egg, so instead of working he sits at home and watches daytime television. All signs to the contrary, he thinks this shallow bachelorhood is glamorous. His joys in life to sleep with women, but he doesn't want to get involved, so he comes up with a plan. He'll pursue beautiful single mothers and pretend he has a child, too. This will trick his girlfriends into thinking he's capable of depth and caring. Then, before things get too heavy, the woman will realize her child comes first and break up with him. "Great sex, a lot of ego massage, temporary parenthood his ruse, he finally embarks on a challenging relationship. It's not with a when the woman Will is currently attempting to date drags the boy along on a weird, but when he drops him off at home, they find the mother passed out in a failed suicide attempt, and Will's sympathy is engaged. Sort of. Actually, house uninvited. Will feels guilty, lets him in to watch television and slowly, touching creation, and his growth arc easily beats out Will's for interest. A victim of the modern parental tyranny of hippie idealism, he doesn't watch throw around at school. The bullies in his class sense this and pounce, like mother mopes around the house, so his only example of adult behavior is how to do? Buy records and clothes, be selfish, and not take anything seriously. In all the obvious ways, About a Boy feels like a Fidelity argued against too much coolness, the new novel is about the defense of conformity. It certainly defies the standard tropes of writing about different. Brave or not, though, it's still shallow. One of the great things about High Fidelity was the way it made emotional epiphanies function as through the motions of growing up without conducting the necessary internal search. Will's maturity simply arrives one day, like a piece of mail: "Will couldn't recall ever having been caught up in this sort of messy, sprawling, chaotic web before; it was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn't too bad, really; he wouldn't even mind being other marginal people would make life easier for themselves if they'd just get warmth and charm. In fact he renders his message in such appealing, facile strokes that one wants to believe he just panicked after the success of High Fidelity and turned out a callow rush job. More depressing is the deep South saw Brown vs. Board of Education in a favorable light. But those who had thrived in functional black communities with strong schools and ambivalent about desegregation. Their misgivings rarely reached the mainstream eating well and sharpening her oyster knife to feel victimized by racism. Black liberals attacked her bitterly when she described the Brown decision as an insult to black communities like hers, which had educated their own just with this heritage, filled with descendants of blacks who felt themselves equal Communities like this one faded with desegregation, which she returns accompanied by a plague of robins who coat the town in shit and fall dead from the skies. The novel strikes a creative balance between novels since then have revealed a growing tension between the two. Paradise finds that tension more pronounced than ever. The novel has a inspired the novel remain submerged and inaccessible, except to those of us who first black lawyer, and would have been a familiar figure in the local history dramatically when the proud Negro residents had exhausted their savings with no way of making a living. With prospects dwindling, the founders themselves Paradise recounts a similar move for the people who eventually founded Ruby, but attributes the migration to the fact that an earlier settlement had become too worldly and corrupt. In Ruby, founding families control the local bank and mete out justice as they see fit. The town is lavishly prosperous, sharing food and resources and money such that need is unknown. The nearest family that happens through town ends up trapped in a blizzard and is eaten by families evaluate prospective spouses on the basis of skin color, and only the blackest of the black are welcome. Mulattoes are despised as mongrels. The isolation pays off in immortality, for no one dies in Ruby. But inbreeding brings sterility and spiritual rot. The town's first family reaches the end of the line when neither of its scions produces an heir. Such children as there are grow troublesome during the '60s, when they rebel against tradition. Vexed by discord, the founding families find a convenient scapegoat in a colony of single women that springs up at a ruined Catholic home has always regarded the impulse to murder as part and parcel of love, example, an escaped slave slits her infant's throat to prevent its capture by him alive after he becomes a heroin addict and petty thief. Through murder, the smother to death in the family car. Mavis believes the deaths are accidental, but circumstances suggest that the act was at least unconsciously volitional. frightened to death of her remaining children, whom she suspects of plotting to Convent's other residents are refugees from bad marriages or abuse of one kind or another. The place also serves as a haven for Ruby citizens who need a break from the town's claustrophobic sameness. An influential townsman takes a lover there. A mother driven mad by caring for a disabled child recovers there. The her powers to bring a dying townsman back to life. But the stallions who run Ruby see the place as purely evil. To them, the women represent the danger and disorder that must be expunged if the town is to survive. The men attack, murdering some women and scattering others to the winds. The women do not go critique the utopian ideal as dangerous, stultifying, and illusory. The moral of the story, simply put, is: Till your garden where you are; good and evil simplification of a complex book that tells its stories from several avoiding literal references to history and even physical descriptions that might fix characters in time and space. These omissions blur the characters and allow them to operate at the level of myth. But the absence of workaday and are impenetrable to the mind's eye. The lack of literal historical context also allows us to leave Paradise without learning about the black Western who left the South to seek their fortunes on the frontier. The history is so point of departure, or the spine of a novel all its own. history of the eras and places she treats so compellingly in her novels. She has recaptured those communities beautifully in fiction. It would be even more audible, the winds biting through the string sound, the timpani crisp yet viscerally forceful. Then, the soloist begins his famous heroic surge up the keyboard. Except that he doesn't sound heroic; he sounds tinkly. His finger work is impeccable, his phrasing elegant, his stance as swaggering as one could original instrument movement is several decades old, and has moved so far beyond mere novelty that in some repertoires, it might even be considered the new orthodoxy. Bach performance in the style of those old Grand original instruments is still controversial. Do they reveal the composer's intentions, or merely demonstrate the practical limitations against which he struggled? Keyboard music poses the question in its starkest terms: Was the more fully, or was the Romantic style of keyboard writing itself a response to not unreasonable to assume that he considered it a superior medium for the performance of his music, even music composed before he received the gift. recording and a respected musical scholar, assumes otherwise. As he makes his instruments for the different pieces, determining the compass of each instrument he employs by the range of notes each piece demands. He believes, as he put it in a conversation with me recently, that "no matter the size of the his toe on the floor." This is elegantly put and close to inarguable: If wrote for it probably would demand the highest and the lowest notes of that available to him on any given occasion produced the ideal sound he heard in his its predecessors. Although not the first grandly heroic piano in so doing, became the model for concertos of the Romantic era. The drama That said, it must also be said that no other performance could have offered a better opportunity to decide whether Levin is right. playing is so dexterous, intelligent, and ardent; and the recording is so technically splendid (there are felicities of scoring, such as a solo cello peculiarities, this release at least qualifies as best of breed. lyrical sections, it works superbly (most of the second movement, say, and the projected with supple delicacy by Levin). In the filigree figures accompanying transitional passages in the first movement, or the dialogue with the French horns near the end of the same movement, it's close to a revelation. This, I heroic passages that define the work, it doesn't succeed for me at all. The cadenza that opens the concerto sounds wan and unassertive; its even more extravagant recapitulation tries harder while achieving less. The great execution. And in the battle of block chords toward the end of the development section, the piano comes off as strident rather than imperial as it attempts to works. In his liner notes, and more elaborately in our conversation, Levin point. His argument is persuasive, but the conclusion is so recording, the Fantasy for Pianoforte, Chorus, and Orchestra advocates for a work whose position in the repertory has historically been any general conclusions about what sorts of instruments are right for hunting. Bobby, a Navy vet who never saw action in World War II, fixed a deer to handle a gun like a man." He went on to break his word by giving Jack entertaining, original, and exceptionally researched book, it certainly makes It is hard to imagine two politicians more opposed in transcripts into one of the most intimate portraits of the inner life of a one senses that nothing less than the deepest matters of personal identity runt." It is not surprising that they didn't care to be in the same place at which he knew he wasn't the first choice (here was Bobby's East Coast arrogance, or maybe his idealism). Thither to the White House, where Attorney Senate committees, earned from journalists the label "assistant president" for his ubiquity at the highest levels of executive influence; while Vice President 1950s, found himself so insignificant that he was only informed of Cabinet only intensified as the martyr's shadow loomed ever larger. In his grief, each man blamed the other for the tragedy. Bobby had been point man for the insisted privately, had certainly brought on the assassination as an act of it loses a little of its aplomb. This is the period when a single forces larger than either man could discern. By the time they faced each other more abiding division in contemporary politics than those that divide today's Democrats. Like so much that polarizes us these days, it is more cultural than who reviled the young senator to such a degree is not broken down further. But gravely hurt the party's chances in the South and border states, among called the emerging Republican majority: the crowd whose voting habits were never worked a day in their lives, who were eager (so the perception went) to oppress the plain folk with burdensome taxes in order to fatten the undeserving contempt, hinted at but not developed in this valuable book, that haunts us explore the past in large sweeps. More opinionated than academic historians tend to be, he is also skilled at offering character sketches and at spinning gets bogged down here and there, it manages, for the most part, to move ahead also encounter a host of superficial and slanted judgments. Some of these conservative political and cultural agenda. He is better when he keeps things settled by extraordinarily adventurous and idealistic people and that the North honorable loyalty to each other." The founding fathers were "the most union leaders, and minority groups receive far less attention than in most whatever they think, presidents of the United States should not publicly proclaim their detestation of democracy and equality. That leaves only the great general, turned out a political and administrative booby. He wished controlled her diminutive husband and "launched the White House's first or blue coat with vest, black breeches and black stockings,' the ladies 'not remarkable for anything so much as for the exposure of their swelling breasts liaison, which led in time to a bit of genteel blackmail." Readers can guess revealed in a lengthy section lauding the minimalist economic and political conclude that "the whole of the Great Society program was unconstitutional." seems to agree that it was an "unprincipled decision" that "turned out to be a action programs, he adds, are "based on illegality." media, which are described as having abused enormous power in recent years. sport. All too often, however, such statements are zingers, as if whipped out conservative newspaper. Popular history need not come at the expense of substitutes for those qualities. This is a pity, for his caustic tone and shallow glosses undermine what is a bold and worthy effort: to write a readable men with syphilis and, without their knowledge or consent, withheld treatment so as to observe the natural progress of the disease. In this new biography, homosexual and a masochist." Everything else about him seems to follow. "The vitality" was the product not of a naturally energetic constitution, or a who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex researching gall wasps and was a serious gardener, hiker, and record may have had an inkling of his secret agenda but only now can the truth be "if only he could get the facts to people life would be a lot happier and less guilt ridden." And moreover, "he was a great champion of tolerance and irony, of course," is that many distinguished scientists who knew his work intimately "were not able to see beneath the surface." "Incredible as it may seem," the vice president and senior editor of the premier medical publishing The perpetrator of all these deceptions may not have been the paradigmatic social scientist of his generation, a man who more than any other made the study of human sexuality a respectable and legitimate field of inquiry. The author of the groundbreaking best sellers Sexual Behavior in graduate students is certain. He was into group sex and he masturbated. His sexual life unquestionably extended beyond the missionary position within homosexual contact." But he also had a long, loving, and complex sexual pornography. Whether he was a homosexual, readers can decide for relentlessly hostile readings of the evidence, however, make this difficult. "shriveled balls," and worried lest he himself "be castrated for biting a sexually despised to experience much pain and suffering, precisely as he had intended." (Forget the mocking tone; it pervades the book. Any reformer is threatened his "fragile sense of masculinity.") A footnote reveals that the one and, of course, corroborate the incident. But back in the main text he says public "cover story" (that a strep throat caused the problem) far likelier. seem to have little bearing either on his commitment to tolerance or on his never did anything for innocent reasons. Even when he tried to write weapons." He can't win. On one page he is charged with listening to music analytically, in keeping with his general penchant to dominate, and on the next meaty thumb upon the scales" so that he was "virtually guaranteed" that he the sexual response of the human female nonetheless contained all sorts of majority of women experienced not vaginal but clitoral orgasm. and it's not clear exactly what population it represents. That said, a the interviews themselves were remarkably probing and that, under the circumstances, a random sample was impossible. Most of us would respond to the phone call or knock on the door from a total stranger announcing that we had been randomly selected to tell them when we started to masturbate or how often we had been unfaithful to our partners with a polite "no thank you, not of his statistical work were merely cosmetic. The remarkable fact is that his shading of variation, a continuum of practices, seems to have had more to do with his training as an entomologist than with the nature of his own desires. against the ontological reality of established taxonomic categories. for a lay audience in the 1940s and 1950s was an openly revolutionary act. It other social scientist since the Enlightenment, was simply obeying the central tenet of his discipline: that the scientific study of society is possible; that the results of such study are a better basis for policy than, say, the Mosaic life, however nonstandard it was, would not render him incapable of objectivity practitioners have no values. It means that they gather and interpret their material fairly and argue about its interpretations rationally. By these deal with love, and perhaps overextended the protective umbrella of tolerance It is distressing that in this time of AIDS it could still product of perversion. The book's cynicism is even more distressing, symptomatic as it is of a larger cynicism that seems to have gripped our public culture. We seem to believe that all human action is motivated not by the desire to know or improve the lot of humankind, but only by the basest motives liberation, the broad and generous desire for others not to be harshly midst of something called "telecommunications reform." What is it, and how is cable, or the airwaves. Telecommunications reform is supposed to break down existing barriers between these media so that, for example, phone companies will sell television hookups and cable companies will offer telephone service. The early results have been poor to middling. Competition (particularly in local residential telephone service) has been slow to bloom. not arrived. Some critics say the problem is that deregulation didn't go maintaining or even adding new regulations in others. Other critics say the problem is too much deregulation. They point especially to a series of giant mergers --most notably those reassembling the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly communications industry: telephone service, cable, and broadcasting. the latter can compete without running wires to every house. It also requires the Baby Bells to resell their entire bundle of services wholesale to companies that might wish to compete on the retail level. Customers who want to switch phone companies must be able to keep their old phone numbers and can't be expected these provisions to leave the Baby Bells facing a variety of cable and utility companies (who own valuable rights of way), other Baby own local phone markets. The act also explicitly requires the Federal Communications Commission, for the first time, to ensure "universal rolled out a universal service plan, which included discounted Internet hookups for schools and libraries, to be funded by charges on all interstate Congress passed a law deregulating cable prices (even forbidding local will be able to set their own rates, except on "basic tier" service (the service, the statute allows cable companies to begin charging market rates as soon as they face competition from another local provider. The act allows local phone companies to provide video programming to homes (whether via cable, wireless, or through telephone lines), and it lets phone and cable companies in Critics call this a giveaway of a public resource worth billions of dollars. The broadcasters are supposed to use the extra spectrum space for the new digital signals. They are also supposed to give their current spectrum space broadcasters are now pushing to hold on to the additional spectrum space. the nation's households. The new law also makes it easier for broadcasters to was struck down this week by the Supreme Court. Has deregulation worked? During up, too, though some of this rise may be attributable to a reduction in Competitors have not rushed in. The Baby Bells still monopolize the The cable companies are facing some increased competition from the cable market.) Ironically, price competition has emerged most robustly plans to get into the local phone business. Likewise the Baby Bells, who, facing economic and technical obstacles, have abandoned plans to branch out "local loop" is the most expensive part of the entire system to build and offer local phone service has been widely dismissed as unconvincing. It would agreements with foreign countries. Most of the opposition comes from the president's own party, though some Republicans are also opposed (and others eliminating barriers to free trade such as tariffs, import quotas, and of both houses of Congress. Fast track is a congressional procedure limiting debate over these agreements. When the president invokes fast track, Fast track is intended to thwart filibusters and to prevent members of Congress from adding special protections for businesses in their districts. The rationale for fast track is that trade agreements are countries. If Congress makes changes, the whole agreement must be renegotiated. Furthermore, negotiations involve swapping concessions with the other side. Other countries will not make the necessary concessions in the first place if country gives its chief executive a power similar to fast track. But few other countries have a legislative branch so independent of the executive branch. multilateral agreements. These other agreements, like the recent Chemical Weapons Convention, are often subjected to prolonged debate and can be altered to reduce tariffs and implement multilateral trade agreements without its a series of popular export subsidies, Congress resumed its complaints about the congressional allies inserted fast track into a relatively obscure section of decades, Congress repeatedly voted to renew fast track, and by large margins. Presidents have only invoked fast track on a handful of say that with fast track, Congress is abandoning its responsibilities under the the process of hashing out agreements tends to be secretive --without public hearings or any opportunity for public input. But despite fast track, classic example. Congressional Democrats refused to support the agreement until president doesn't keep Congress up to speed on negotiations, Congress can revoke fast track. Other provisions in the original legislation give Congress contentious. Labor and environmental groups have announced that they House Ways and Means Committee voted in favor of the legislation. The chairman the bill before the full House until next year, rather than risk defeat. considered the continent's most brutal and corrupt living dictator. Since forest that divides Zaire. East of the rain forest is a hodgepodge. out of Zaire. They routed both forces, causing them to flee into the country's of the richest men in the world. He pays his civil service virtually no salary, requiring them to earn their income through bribes. through his identification with the leopard, which signifies omnipotence in jockeyed for power, creating serious harm to the war effort. This week, the parliament voted to oust the prime minister. The army is in shambles, and large sections of the country have been running themselves, without oversight from mercenaries to fight the rebels. In addition, the army relies on assistance to assist the rebels. Their intentions are unclear: Do they hope to grab land their countries? Some experts predict that their involvement in the war could escalate the conflict, drawing these countries into battle with one has not officially taken a position on the civil war. However, it has tacitly that the Republicans have no right to talk. "They raise more money. They raise more foreign money. They raise more money in big contributions. And we take all Party (the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senate Campaign donations that can be spent directly on candidates. Under the Federal Election parties can accept unlimited contributions to pay for activities ambiguously building referred literally to the cost of building and maintaining a party headquarters, as well as general promotional activities for the party. But recent court decisions and creative interpretations by the parties themselves have led to a much broader definition. Parties now spend the soft money on distinctions remain between the application of hard and soft money. The soft money can't be transferred directly into candidates' coffers, and the ads can't explicitly promote or denigrate a candidate, which in practice just means no use of the words "vote for" or "vote against." In the last campaign, the Republicans' edge in soft money reflects their greater success in raising exclude donations to state parties that are transferred to both federal and legal limits on such spending, as long as it is truly independent of the campaign alone. In addition, the unions sponsored voter guides and a contributions by foreign companies and individuals, which are flatly either type of foreign money. However, there are currently no federal laws "raise more foreign money"? If the statement refers to illegal foreign money, then his claim lacks evidence. In the last campaign cycle, Democrats returned receipts. But the data are incomplete. A study by Common Cause of contributions Democrats' new prohibition on such contributions is a definitional nightmare. Republicans argue that even though they receive more big contributions, the engagements with the president when they controlled the White House, and have repaired major infrastructural damage --to roads, industry, and Economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations have been each month from malnutrition and disease. The middle class has been hit $2-billion worth of oil every six months on the condition that the profits go the '70s. Three major domestic intelligence agencies report directly to him, and each reports on the other two as well as on civilians. Assassination, torture, and a network of informers keep the masses in line. Families left approximately $300-million worth of oil the United Nations lets him sell to the impression that the United Nations is about to lift the sanctions in reward power, could also challenge him. There are rumors that a cousin attempted to promises of forgiveness, but then had him assassinated. punished it by bombing military targets in the south. snuffs out unrest. Last summer the unit, which watches for signs of a military inspections and surveillance cameras to do their work. During the recent of the one that went into the Gulf War, but it is better trained. Since the traditionally a state and local responsibility in the United States. Yet many people feel that poor public schools are a national problem. President Bush proposed national standards for primary and secondary education, and so has designed to compare student performance across states and school districts. Participation by school districts is voluntary. A bipartisan, independent federal agency will supervise the drafting and administration of the tests. By making reliable comparisons possible, the new national tests are supposed to create healthy competition among schools, giving them an incentive to Senate has approved the spending of federal money for this purpose, but the conservative remedy that would allow parents to choose among schools. Without reliable testing, they believe, parents cannot be good "consumers." as the Educational Testing Service, these critics see the hand of liberal Department of Education administrators. Early versions, they say, reward subjects like history in the hope of avoiding arguments over politicization.) The Bush proposal, which was never prepared as legislation, would also have recently modified his proposal to give control to an independent board, he allowed the Department of Education to participate in the early stages independent board will have ample opportunity to amend the tests if they are way for liberals to establish a national curriculum and usurp local control of schools. At the very least, they say, schools are forced to tailor curricula to the test. They believe that all attempts at establishing national curricula will be riddled with ideology and partisan politics, and cite the controversial category of opponents comprises liberals, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who argue that low test scores stigmatize minority students as "inferior," when in fact poor schooling and other disadvantages are to blame for their performance. The test scores, they say, will be used as an excuse to pour resources into a few select schools, harming However, many liberals who opposed the Bush testing plan National Education Association --the largest and most powerful teachers' for their reluctance: A national test could be embarrassing and disprove claims Colorado school administrators like to brag that their state's average SAT students take a different college entrance exam, making the SAT an unreliable a single question: "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly query, made during a speech at a conservative think tank, to imply that he believed the stock market was overvalued, and that the Federal Reserve might be about to increase interest rates in order to lower stock prices. So investors Federal Reserve officials then hastened to assure the press that a rise in about it? The stakes for investors are enormous. The current value of define in theory than in practice. It refers to the prices stocks ought to sell for based on businesses' real economic value, apart from speculation. The assumption is that stock prices will ultimately (whenever that is) return to their fundamental values, however much extraneous factors may be influencing merely a claim on a corporation's future earnings. And the ratio of stock price to earnings is twice what it traditionally has been. In the past, whenever general stock prices have gotten as high relative to fundamentals as they are today, the next decade has been an extremely bad one in which to invest in the economic and profit growth will continue in the future at roughly the pace it did in the past. But (the argument goes), because we are on the threshold of the rate of return that the average investor expects to receive on stocks has fallen. That would mean that any given level of profit can sustain a higher stock price. In the past, demand for stocks was limited by fear of decent return with total safety. But (the argument goes) the 1970s inflation taught investors the brutal lesson that there is no safety in bonds: Your investment can evaporate if interest rates rise, or if inflation devalues the bonds' purchasing power. Investors today also have less fear of the business cycle and other risks associated with stocks. So investors are willing to pay Over the past generation, corporations have learned better how to avoid paying investors) that used to be called "dividends" into "interest." Dividends are business expense. Other companies have decided to buy back shares with money that would otherwise have been paid out in dividends. The money shareholders receive in this way is taxed as a capital gain, usually at a lower rate, whereas dividends are taxed as ordinary income. Furthermore, investors can choose whether to participate in the buyback or to hold onto their shares and defer taxes completely. All these various tax techniques make shares of stock more valuable, per dollar of corporate earnings, than previously. The only correct answer to the question, "Is the stock financier, had a stock answer for people who asked him what the stock market would do: "It will fluctuate." At the peak of every previous bull market, there have been experts and prognosticators declaring that the old rules of thumb are no longer valid. The most famous of these predictions came just before the investors that stock prices had attained a "permanently high plateau." But calls "irrational exuberance"? This is a bad thing because the exuberance may inevitable. The decline in prices to their "fundamental" level may be gradual, and even a crash may not turn into a larger economic disaster. When stock bank attempts to deflate overvalued stock prices is not encouraging. The Fed's it did start the depression it had hoped to avoid. The Fed's principal stocks and into bonds. But raising interest rates now (which would depress the economy now) to avoid a possible financial crisis (which would depress the economy later) is a lot like destroying the village in order to save it. shift market psychology and begin the gradual deflation. The risk is that the shift in market psychology might not be subtle, and the deflation might not be that he was worried because the stock market was overvalued: He asked how he could figure out whether the stock market was overvalued. He did not say that he would take any action in response to overvaluation: He asked if monetary policy should be any different if there were overvaluation. to the conventional wisdom, last week's murders were the latest chapter in a affairs and by restoring jobs. This satisfied no one: It was not enough to dent established a shadow government and sent envoys abroad to make the case for believes he cannot afford the loss of prestige that would accompany a Liberation comes from armed struggle, not nonviolence. Support grows for the war to boost his popularity. Another says he ordered last week's crackdown only position was roundly dismissed as a scholastic contortion of logic, performed feminist's hypocrisy on sexual harassment, the movement's sacred cow. No less descending order of sternness, are the five major groups (for a refresher on position, is trumpeted primarily by academics who take their cues from law laws are a necessary corrective to the oppressive patriarchy of the workplace, and she wants current laws stiffened. For instance, she would prohibit men from disparities of power in these relationships render them exploitative by she formulated the theory behind the current practice of sexual harassment Act could be used to regulate workplace behavior such as dirty jokes and accusers always deserve the presumption of veracity in sexual harassment cases. Women, they claimed, "don't make these things up." And feminists have an obligation to counter the prevailing tendency to dismiss accusers as "nutty and the press chiding them for their "double standard" did the groups begin to sexual harassment law as a pretext for preserving "women's virtue." And in harassment if there is no sex involved. This, she argues, has led these judges focuses on an alleged sexual act but makes no convincing showing of damage to proposition that with sexual advances, "no means no; yes means yes." And when position goes a step beyond the strict constructionist position. Articulated by that we've become paranoid about sexual harassment, criminalizing consensual the critique echoes conservative complaints about multiculturalism (harassment law makes women helpless victims), it also incorporates a libertarian strain (government should not pry into consensual sexual relations) and an Epicurean one (we shouldn't penalize people with active libidos; so long as nobody gets missed the link to the refresher on harassment law and its history, click come from, and what is the political impact of this rapidly growing together blacks, whites, and those of mixed race, has provoked a heated debate. Some complain that the categorization falsely homogenizes a diverse people fell out of vogue, many of its supporters joined forces with the "Latino" camp, debate boils down to personal preference, shown by clear regional patterns: In median age, higher poverty levels, and enduring cultural values that place a premium on large families. The Census Bureau estimates annual net of the electorate, they are significant voting blocks in key states and, most traditionally voted solidly Republican. But in the last election, roughly half votes also delivered the margin of victory to Democrats in several close official language of the United States. Dole also opposed public funding of Republican platform advocated that citizenship be denied to children born in be socially conservative, and these instincts could eventually propel many of realize anything near their political potential. Currently, voter turnout among population surges in the next century, both political parties are likely to Did the president know about such an initiative and was he or his staff upcoming election. Campaign contributions from foreigners, let alone foreign addition, China has grown increasingly concerned over the disparity between clearest. On his resume he even boasts about his friendship with senior government officials. His major business partner in China is a government government money, there is nothing more than highly circumstantial evidence to suggest they actually participated in a government scheme. But they also could have raised such large sums by laundering money from their foreign business the least, he was hired in an attempt to influence administration China policy. That would not be unusual. But skeptics suggest a darker scenario: that the International Relations Committee. Their conversations took place at precisely intended to illegally contribute money to their campaigns. (The six were Sens. others not yet identified.) Apparently, none of these members received misconstrued the agents' instructions to treat the matter delicately. president's assertion that he was kept in the dark, critics speculate that the depicts Mafiosi ruling a sprawling business empire in the 1940s. More recent What is the Mafia's role in real life, and how has it changed over the evolved into the island's unofficial government. It retained its paramilitary tactics and insularity (Mafiosi called their organization a "family," and turned criminal. It terrorized businesses and landowners who didn't regularly payments continued to be its primary function. Only during Prohibition did it branch out of ethnic neighborhoods and into bootlegging, gambling, and disputes and plan schemes. The Mafia played only a minor role. Godfather 's depiction of Mafia strength in the late '40s is largely accurate. Because of its committed, disciplined rank and file and economic base relationships with urban political machines (New York City politicians openly the existence of the Mafia and refused to investigate it). City governments helped rig government contracts and turned a blind eye to other rackets. Many of the scams depended on the Mafia's increasing control of unions, especially Mafia's other activities have radically changed. For instance, its biggest extortion schemes in the New York area have been broken up: It no longer investigate the Mafia. In addition, starting in the early '80s federal prosecutors have used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Restaurant Employees union, the Teamsters union, and the Laborers' International Union. However, subsequent government supervision of these unions urban politics destroyed the big city machines the Mafia once depended upon Turncoats have provided the decisive evidence in recent cases against John efficiently import cheaper drugs and eschew partnerships with the Mafia. In Postal Service is a national pastime. Consumers gripe about rotten service and international shipments. Stamp collectors moan that the Postal Service issues too many stamps, often commemorating frivolous subjects such as Bugs Bunny, hoping that customers will buy and hold these stamps rather than use them. the rate increase, when profits are high? Does the Postal Service compete Postal Service was not conceived with profit, or even efficiency, in mind. The Postal Service's mandate is not to make money but rather "to bind the nation agency since the passage of 1970's Postal Reorganization Act. Direct invest in new equipment and further automation. By law, the rates for each class of mail must cover direct and indirect costs attributable to that class, Rate Commission, which adjudicates the Postal Service's applications for rate federal taxes; it's exempt from Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws, zoning regulations, and antitrust accountability; and it enjoys cheap transporting and delivering letters or packets in competition with the Postal Service. There are some exemptions, such as those for delivering newspapers, magazines, and urgent letters, but where competition is allowed, as in the case that the firewall between the Postal Service's monopoly and competitive political action committees, but since every congressional district contains numerous post offices and politically active postal workers, it is extremely unlikely that Congress will enact radical reforms any time soon. cashing in on its enormous cache of detailed demographic data on customers by selling it to direct mailers. This rankles the newspaper industry, which wants to protect the income it receives for delivering advertising Congress and seems particularly aggrieved by the Postal Service's plans to than underwriting advertising mail most of them never asked for and don't made electronically, removing benefit checks, tax refunds, etc., from the mail to cut, mail, and handle paper checks, according to the Social Security billions of dollars spent on automation. Negotiations with the powerful postal health of the service. As federal employees, postal workers are not allowed to strike and, if a negotiated settlement cannot be reached, contractual disputes endorsed giving the Postal Service to its employees, there don't the next six nations combined. While service standards differ (many countries separated from politics, but the political uses of the presidency by the special prosecutor. What behavior would he or she prosecute? What exactly is bureaucracy, and was aimed at the civil service. But by its terms, it applies president, and appointees requiring Senate confirmation (such as Cabinet secretaries) are exempt. The original Hatch Act forbade government employees to raise funds, give partisan public speeches, or volunteer for any candidate or all these things, so long as they are done outside the workplace and government employees don't exploit their positions for political purposes. Enforcement of the Hatch Act was always erratic, and there was no serious attempt to apply its general ban on politicking to the White of the president to engage in "political activity." The law defines political prohibits. These same limits apply to Cabinet secretaries and all other presidential appointees approved by the Senate. The president's campaign or party must reimburse the government for the use of its offices and White House employees can work on their "political" projects only if they put White House installed separate phone and fax lines for political work. But these rules are not legally binding. And in practice, such distinctions between "official" and "political" White House work are almost meaningless. now under investigation for violation of the Hatch Act. Her nomination to be that planned strategies for hyping the president to different ethnic groups. She did wrong, the argument goes, by using government computers to draw up activity under investigation is simply part of the job description of public liaison, which is supposed to "outreach" with "different constituencies" to contributions, despite Hatch's prohibition on fund raising. And a White House raised by allegations that the administration granted access to the White House big donors being invited to the White House tennis court and movie theater. The attracted donors with promises of invitations to the White House, including sorts of perks are potentially illegal for two reasons. First, election laws federal office buildings --the White House included. In these cases, Republicans argue, donors received White House invitations to entice them to give more money. Even if the attendees were never explicitly asked to open their checkbooks on these visits, the administration's intention was obvious. The language of these laws, however, only forbids explicit appeals for but there is no evidence so far that anyone else solicited funds in a federal prohibit granting government favors in exchange for political donations. The law specifically forbids favoritism in awarding government jobs and contracts. More ambiguously, it proscribes "special access" to government officials. Like the Hatch Act, however, these laws have never been enforced Republican National Committee received ambassadorships from the Bush from administration officials and invitations to White House dinners. Many of the members had matters pending before the administration. and he has the right to have conversations with his friends and invite them to bounty hunters forced their way into a Phoenix home, shooting and killing two the wrong home and put three bullets in an innocent man. These stories portray bounty hunters as thugs who are beyond the law. What is a bounty hunter? What legal powers do bounty hunters have? Whence do they derive those powers? that is forfeited to the court if the defendant fails to appear before the judge as promised. Defendants who can't afford bail often hire the services of percent of the bail, with defendants putting up collateral for the states, a bondsman must return the skip within a year of the missed payroll for liability reasons, choosing instead to pay the bounty hunters the themselves "recovery agents") are paid only after the skip is returned to hand, are licensed and regulated by all states, and in many jurisdictions must skip, even a hotel room. Nor are they required to announce themselves before entering private property, as police officers must. Evidence obtained illegally by bounty hunters can be submitted in court. Like police officers, bounty This means they can shoot to kill if shot at. Also, they can transport skips across state lines without enduring extradition proceedings. (Bounty hunter hunter, when he signs the bail contract. The court decided that bondsmen and bounty hunters are proxies for the state, and therefore deserve police powers when taking "custody" of the accused. However, the usual constitutional protections enjoyed by suspects don't apply to skips pursued by bounty hunters because, the court decided, the bounty hunters work for the bondsmen, not the fetters than bounty hunters. They can't use violence or search private property without the owners' consent. And unlike bounty hunters, they can be arrested defendants awaiting trial. Usually, the custodian was the defendant's friend. defendants' punishments in their stead when their wards skipped, even if this hunters are more efficient at returning criminals than police are. The bail jumpers are returned to authorities by bounty hunters. Law enforcement Criminal justice experts credit bounty hunters' success rates to two things: They face less red tape than do police and, unlike police, bounty hunters have World Report proclaimed bounty hunting one of the hottest job tracks in its "Best Jobs for the Future" issue. No persuasive evidence substantiates this hunters in the United States, and they earn an average income of about courses that cover only basic legal constraints. Several states have bills pending that would require bounty hunters to register with police, take more extensive training courses, and obey procedural constraints that apply to police, such as announcing themselves before entering a private home. hunters abusing their power abound. In the Phoenix case, the bounty hunters claimed that they were pursuing a skip but accidentally raided the wrong address. The authorities believe that the bounty hunters used their profession as a cover for armed robbery. Increasingly, civil courts hold bounty hunters international treaty banning chemical weapons will take effect. So far, the United States isn't committed to taking part. Thanks mainly to the efforts of Senate has delayed ratification of the treaty and may ultimately vote it down. Helms claims that despite the ban's best intentions, it will actually encourage administration, worry that Helms' delaying tactics will shut the United States out of critical decisions about chemical arms control. What's really at administration to complete negotiations of the Chemical Weapons Convention possession, and use of all nerve and mustard gases. Production of other chemicals, such as chlorine and certain pesticides, which have commercial as This distinction between military and commercial production is itself controversial. Several chemicals exempted from the ban have only esoteric civilian applications, but obvious military uses. For instance, phosgene and hydrogen cyanide, gases ubiquitously used in World War I, will continue to be readily accessible to terrorists and armies. weapons, and prevent the recurrence of chemical attacks against civilian countries that the United States would like to check have yet to sign up. One nonparticipants is ominous, including most of the United States' current for the Senate to ratify the treaty before doing so themselves. Even then, some essential deterrent against such attacks by these nonparticipating weapons, the critics argue, because they have feared the United States would retaliate with its own chemical attack. Proponents of this argument point to the chemical arms race during the 1920s and 1930s, which they say prevented a weapons in any case and is already moving to destroy its stockpiles. The could blow the chemicals back on your own troops. And with the exception of used chemical weapons in battle since World War I. To allay concerns about any will respond to any use of chemical weapons with an "overwhelming and (chemical weapons can be produced from everyday products without elaborate suspects of producing illicit chemicals in another member country. This means Snooping foreign agents, critics fear, will exploit their visits for industrial espionage, stealing company secrets for firms in their homelands. a warrant to search private facilities. However, the treaty requires all inspections to accord with the constitution of the country where the inspection inspectors will be forced to obtain warrants. Also, the routine random and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are almost Domestic manufacturers of chemicals are pushing hard it also imposes stiff penalties against countries that fail to ratify the ban, to encourage nonparticipants to sign up. Signatory countries will be prohibited will suffer a fatal loss of credibility if the United States opts not to join. concocting the treaty and stewarding it to its conclusion. Failure to ratify from the member states can sit on the committee that finalizes the treaty's logistics, and the United Nations won't hire verification inspectors from proponents concede that in the short run, the agreement will do little to reduce the threat of a chemical attack. But the analogy, they say, is the only after the United States used sanctions to force the hand of reluctant hounds perpetuate this fad, rudely disturbing the dead. How do exhumations work? What do religion and law have to say about them? Why do we now have so flesh eventually dehydrates and crumbles and is devoured by bacteria. (One alleged origin of "ghost stories": Several breeds of bacteria, especially wood fungi, which feast on corpses, are luminous in the dark.) The longevity of a cadaver's flesh and innards depends largely on the embalming, the casket (hermetic ones preserve better), the decedent's diet (certain bacteria thrive on fat), and the warmth of the ground (a good freeze kills off bacteria). extractions to settle paternity suits; criminal investigations; relocation to spirit lives on and that to disturb a corpse is to disturb the spirit's life. of death, with members of the community keeping vigil over the body until it goes in the ground. Exhumation is allowed only when a body is to be reburied Catholic and Protestant churches say bodies shouldn't be disturbed, if possible. However, upon canonization, saints have frequently been disinterred so their remains can be dismembered and turned into relics. And in the past, from English common law. Oddly, the common law prohibits the theft of items bodies themselves. This was a matter left to the church. (Only in the became endemic, did states pass laws prohibiting cadaver theft.) Generally, citizens can apply to their state's attorney general for permission to exhume family members for any reason, and requests for reburial are usually automatically granted. And the state can exhume a body when it deems a death Pathologists say the number of exhumations skyrocketed in the 1980s and then increased even more in the '90s. Click for a list of recent and proposed pathology, the use of science to solve crime, has improved dramatically, required a sample from the nucleus of a cell, the new tests work off sturdier techniques include the use of computer animation to construct images of faces, about hair color. Previously, dental records had been the primary means of they represented a "great savings of cemetery space." Similar exhumations of instance, liberal reform parties have disinterred Communist leaders from their exhumations have sought to prove that elites and historians have conspired to suicide, as historians claim? It's conceivable that some of these allegations are true, and there's no harm in checking them out, as long as the decedent's family agrees to participate. But these sorts of exhumations have a track technology is new but the impulse is old. We are heirs to the inexplicable missed the sidebar on embalming techniques and their cultural significance complain that Major League Baseball's greedy owners are corrupting the game. The owners gripe that players are destroying it from within by demanding too decline or, as some claim, in the midst of a golden era? How are the economics of baseball changing? Are fans tuning out the televised game? How is the game itself changing? And is the current crop of players as good as those who played games, and the more telegenic games of basketball and football. Although The perception of declining fan interest causes owners to tinker with baseball traditions from time to time, mostly in the hopes each league was further divided into three divisions, creating six pennant Of course, pandering to fans is in the baseball tradition. Examples: night games, fireworks displays, giveaways, ladies' nights, mascots, etc. propose the realignment of the two leagues. Under his plan, baseball's six divisions would be reduced to four divisions in two different leagues. The Proponents of realignment argue that it exploits natural regional rivalries and decreases travel time for players. Opponents complain that it upends tradition. pro football and pro basketball (it collects about half as much from the sale teams aggressively recruiting stars from reliable talent pools south of the teams they were traded to) for life. Today, players can shop their talents to the highest bidder one year after their contract expires. Salaries have salaries don't necessarily correlate to competitiveness. Drawing on their distributed to teams who spend less, usually teams in smaller markets like cable deal.) Once again, it's the teams playing in small markets that suffer, Because baseball is an entertainment industry, media media moguls to pay as little as possible for broadcast rights, some critics owners complain about annual losses, there is no shortage of bidders willing to pay record sums for existing teams or new franchises. One reason for the high major profits from these new facilities, built at little or no cost to the lucrative amenity at the new parks are the sky boxes, luxury suites rented to corporations at exorbitant prices. Also filling team coffers are fancy food courts and merchandise concession areas. Team owners have also boosted ticket have gained the economic upper hand, there is a widespread consensus that the Improvements in hitting have been matched by craftier pitching (by such hurlers strikeouts in every year of this decade. The exorbitant salaries have inspired competitive today than it was in the dynasty decades of the New York have had consistent success in this decade, making them the first team since started climbing during the last year of the Bush presidency, after a dozen increases began during the third or fourth year of the Bush administration. Many drug experts believe that teen drug use today portends a higher rate of reported having used an illegal drug during the previous year, up a tick from crime has neither surged nor receded during the past three years. Federal, departments and dozens of agencies. The drug czar's office, officially known as the Office of National Drug Control Policy, is supposed to coordinate this spending. State and local governments disburse another $15-odd billion to fight barely differed from Bush drug policy in either scope or action. Total federal budget, about the same percentage as they did under Bush. The Bush administration cut spending for interdiction and international supply administration has had the same success (or lack of it) interdicting drugs as are seizing more heroin and marijuana than they did under nearly as often as his two predecessors did. The drug issue hasn't figured high on the president's domestic agenda until this year. that social and cultural factors are driving up teen drug use. A decade relentlessly publicized the horrors of crack addiction and drug violence; the drug prevention, but the frenzy of the 1980s dissipated, and the culture drugs. Television, radio, and print outlets are donating less time and space to marijuana users themselves, may be reluctant to warn their kids about president can and should keep the drug issue at a roiling boil in society at disagree, saying Dole himself is responsible for the biggest tax increase in history: a massive tax bill he engineered as Senate Finance Committee chairman be nearly meaningless. Nevertheless, the issue will be central to the fall exactly the same amounts of revenue. The Dole measure was estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation to increase the Treasury's take over the next five On the other hand, most of Dole's tax increase was actually billion in tax cuts over the following three years. (This did not deter delivered a tax increase instead. That is not quite right. A promise to increase taxes on the affluent was, in fact, a central feature of rate and new limits on the deduction for entertainment expenses. These also were campaign promises made and kept, not broken. (By interesting contrast, a introduced a variety of special business preferences.) benefit check that the government reclaims in taxes amounts to a payment reduction or a tax increase is another metaphysical question. So is the issue is supposed to help relieve the burden of payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare), and is "refundable" (paid in cash) to workers who owe less in income tax than the tax credit is worth. Whether a government check intended to mitigate a tax burden amounts to a tax cut or a spending increase is yet withhold interest and dividends the way employers withhold wages. (This provision was repealed the next year, before it could take effect.) Is getting people to pay taxes they already owe but would otherwise escape a "tax be regarded with suspicion. (a) Averages obscure the fact that most of family paid only the new gas tax. (b) Most of the increased tax revenue from individuals reflects higher income, not higher tax rates. (c) As a share of figure in her Republican Convention keynote address to illustrate the burden of speculation about whether or not it is breaking up. When pop music makes headlines, many people are forced to admit that they have lost track of it. Herewith, a guide. Although pop music has grown more complicated, most current performers continue to recombine elements from the '50s, '60s, and pop genres, involves lifting passages from older recordings and using them in decade, songwriters like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly established its song forms and subject matter: the lives, loves, and modest rebellions of and Jerry Lee Lewis supplied sexual charisma, abandon, and even menace. include the poetic and the political, while Eastern influences and psychedelic drugs changed the music and the culture. The '60s also saw the invention of the florid romanticism of Yes. Such music was meant for albums, not singles, nurtured by the underground infrastructure (indie labels, college radio punk choruses. The recipe has been adopted by scores of bands; most notable: mostly party music, but it developed a political message through groups like the pistol smoke," but musically, it's relaxed and sauntering. The big hit of music that is little more than rhythm to quietly rippling music that's only of reggae. The array of electronic styles pioneered or embraced in the United with an experienced collaborator), draw on the styles and attitudes of folkie the rough edges to create music that will energize but not alienate her young, that resonates as deeply with its listeners as any poetry. pop hybrids now being cultivated, there is, of course, a reaction. Musicians return to folk and blues roots, and reject studio techniques with a (real or imagined). When Iris DeMent, the most striking of these singers, But the song also gives notice that pop music, cycling and recycling again and court ruled that White House lawyers must hand over notes of their conversations between doctor and patient or priest and penitent, confidential communications between a client and his lawyer are legally communications, and only in rare exceptions will the lawyer be forced to deliver documents to a lawyer simply to elude a legal obligation to turn them this privilege. Lawyers who betray it risk disbarment and can be sued for law. The rationale is that it is in society's interest for people to seek advice from lawyers in order to make sense of complicated regulations and laws. Clients will only receive useful advice if they speak candidly with their lawyers without having to fear that their conversations could later incriminate extended the privilege to corporations and even affirmed its advice is used to plan crimes. Conversations between a Mafia boss and his protected. But the distinction is not always so clear. There is a fine line between abetting a client's fraudulent testimony, which is not protected, and lawyer becomes a defendant, the privilege evaporates. This applies to malpractice suits filed against lawyers, and in cases where the lawyer is implicated in a client's crime (this was the exemption under which White House second had to do with her testimony before a grand jury investigating the for two years before inexplicably reappearing in the first family's private Last week, however, a federal appeals court in St. Louis privilege does not protect conversations between government officials and government lawyers during the course of a federal prosecutor's investigation. Government lawyers are obliged to enforce laws, not to protect an official. If an official desires a confidential discussion about a potentially criminal act, decision has nasty ramifications for the entire government. From now on, officials will be reluctant to discuss tricky legal issues with government attorneys, fearing that their conversations will come back to haunt them, and documents until the Supreme Court adjudicates the case. The ruling, which is where the White House has an official interest (the meeting related to the Foster suicide) and reject it in private matters (the billing records). to prevent future incursions on the privacy of conversations between the first family and its lawyers. They say it does not amount to an admission that the began laying the groundwork for a greater sense of national identity. The world economy in the 1880s. Urban commerce drew some peasants from their family farms. Other subsistence farmers found themselves competing with sovereignty and ownership were established the way these things usually are: by decree did not have the power of civil law behind it. Nevertheless, the incentives to sell at the market price are substantial, and if the threats create new scarcities, higher prices will probably encourage sellers to unload of all the adultery stories in the news, here is the list: with the woman. Special angle: A tabloid paid her to seduce him. candidate Mike Bowers admitted to a 10-year extramarital affair. Special angle: When Bowers was attorney general, he prosecuted a gay man in what became derailed because he had a relationship with another woman while separated an affair he had five years ago became public knowledge. the prohibition's genesis. One is evolutionary: Men must determine which children they sire, something only strict monogamy can ensure. Another is economic: Prohibiting adultery preserves monogamous relationships and thence States inherited English common law, which made adultery, as well as fornication (sex between unmarried people) and sodomy (oral and anal sex), These laws vary considerably. Some define adultery as any intercourse outside marriage. According to others, it occurs when a married person lives with simply "to lewdly and lasciviously associate" with anyone other than one's adulterous relationship guilty of adultery? All but seven states punish both married man sleeps with an unmarried woman, only the man is guilty, but when a married woman sleeps with an unmarried man, they're both guilty. Most laws make no exceptions for couples who are separated or in the process of obtaining a Before the 1970s, when every state passed a "no fault adultery also can be used to get a more favorable divorce settlement. military criminal code, bars married servicemen from having extramarital sex and unmarried servicemen from sleeping with married people. However, the rules come with qualifications. They say that the military will only prosecute when a case harms "good order and discipline" and when the adultery is "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces." The ambiguity is intentional: Visits to affairs between soldiers are considered dangerous and deserving of military rules are sometimes enforced. Last year the Air Force alone prosecuted ordered a Pentagon commission to clarify the guidelines in an effort to still does not consider divorces legitimate: Marriage, it says, is a sacrament and insoluble. A church considers a divorced person who remarries to be living legitimate to begin with. Adultery is grounds for annulment, on the theory that if a person knew that his or her spouse had a predilection toward infidelity, the marriage would not have occurred in the first place. Until recently the claims that the church hurts children of annulled marriages when it claims that cheated on their wives. More accurate, more recent research shows that the prevalence of adultery is not as high. A survey taken two years ago by the Bob Dole has made a campaign issue of the tax collector. And along with taxes, complications, and some people can fill them out in a few minutes. The regular dependents, and live at the same address as you did last year, you can file percent filed a 1040PC form, meaning that they worked out their taxes using a special compliance programs, including a crackdown on widespread abuse of the Owing the government money is not like owing anyone else. penalties and interest). These weapons include a tax lien on the tax liens. The government can also levy property held by third parties, levy actually takes it.) Finally, the government can seize property and officers charged with collecting unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties. The recently passed a "Taxpayer Bill of Rights" that makes it easier for taxpayers it is going to conduct enforcement action and creates other new procedural a war crime? Where does the United Nations derive its authority to arrest and try accused war criminals from? Why has the United States resisted the concept of a war crime dates at least as far back as biblical times. In the the Roman Empire's militarism with the ideal of "loving thy neighbor." Killing he added, war must be only a last resort, efforts must be made to avoid hurting noncombatants, and the reasons for fighting must be "just." Ideas about the ethics of warfare have also been absorbed into secular doctrines of warfare, like the medieval code of chivalry. Similarly, in Japan the unwritten martial code, Bushido, required warriors to treat their enemies with honor, even providing prisoners of war with medical care. Modern military casualties were unprecedentedly high and civilian casualties were increasingly considered inevitable. In response to the new brutality, some declared all war sought to "end all war," or at least make warfare more "humane," through new top German officials for "unjustly" instigating the war. The allies never sentences. The newly created League of Nations debated, but failed to pass, treaties prohibiting the torture of prisoners and attacks on civilians. Only after World War II did the United Nations oversee the creation of the (1948)--treaties ratified by nearly every country in the world. The former outlawed all "intentional" attacks on civilian populations and created new rules to protect prisoners of war. The latter declared it a crime to kill members of a racial, religious, or national group of people when the intention conventions are vague on enforcement. If a country is unable to mete out justice, it is expected to extradite suspects to countries that can. Stringent United States has no such laws, but its military courts punish servicemen who idea because it worried that the country's leaders would be tried for the crimes included the "deliberate instigation of aggressive wars," the extermination of racial and religious groups, and the murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war. Three were acquitted, two committed suicide before the trial, including the heads of concentration camps, organizers of medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, and industrialists who used prisoners for slave labor. (Ordinary citizens complicit in war crimes were not called the trials "victor's justice" that unfairly applied new laws soldiers and instigating unjustified aggression. Many historians also deem the United Nations used a previously obscure section of its charter to convene that he be tried for the murder of the millions killed by his regime. that the current tribunals, having no police force to back them up, are too trials, attempting to make political points and failing to adequately protect something called "welfare as we know it." What is welfare as we know it? to Families with Dependent Children is the safety net for the poorest recipients at any given time are in the midst of welfare spells that eventually will last nine or more years. Many mothers, mainly divorced ones, spend a job. But many others, especially unwed mothers who had their first baby as teens and either dropped out of high school or have little work experience, find it much more difficult to work their way off welfare. Thus, the increasing length of time the average welfare mother stays on the rolls. (See chart.) immigrants are receiving welfare benefits. Illegal immigrants are not eligible, but during their first three years in the country they are presumed to receive some assistance from their sponsor if they have one. Immigration has federal spending for the indigent elderly and disabled under the Supplemental administration. The most common provisions allow recipients who go to work or get married to keep more of their earnings or stay on Medicaid longer. Other common reforms reduce benefits if welfare mothers don't send their children to pending. About half completely terminate cash benefits and about half trigger a months. Three others terminate benefits after a period of mandatory work. States making these fundamental changes include some with the largest welfare submitted by states initially proposed an absolute termination of for this decline. He may be right, but the bite of these new rules will not be felt for many years. Have recipients really changed their behavior in anticipation of future penalties? Another explanation is the stronger labor assets passed on to heirs when someone dies. It is the only federal tax on wealth --as opposed to income or consumption. Congress imposed it in estate tax is progressive --that is, the tax rate is higher on larger charitable gifts, are ample. The tax is based on property's "fair market market value are routine and often protracted. Trusts and other complicated devices are also used to reduce the tax on large estates, although possess highly valued land, but little cash. Consequently, they say, inheritors Much of the value of inherited land is offset by the deduction of debt. Farmers and owners of small businesses also enjoy special exemptions. For earned, then when it is invested, and finally when it's transferred to heirs. increases in value only since the property was inherited. Thus, billions of themselves a nation, they share neither a common language nor a common century has been one of almost constant warfare and disappointment, as they permitted them limited cultural expression, though no political autonomy. In been told this." Many people find that hard to believe. No one criticizes Communism), for how they chose to put their lives back together. But there is grandparents, along with almost all her other relatives, died in German death these omissions? The skeptics say her parents' story begs obvious almost immediately afterward, including her own parents' deaths in almost entirely assimilated into secular life, hardly practicing, and lacking secretary of state. But less tendentious media outlets have also reported on letters in recent years. The letters included recollections of her family and that she received several other similar letters as well. But she says they contained too many factual errors and inconsistencies for her to take them Over the years, other people have come across the facts they have encountered people who recall reading press reports from the late deaths in the Holocaust were reported in the city's papers. Democratic campaign coffers. It appears likely that an independent counsel will accounts for the explosion in the number and size of such operations? Who controls the gambling spigot: the tribes, the states within whose boundaries nations; they were "domestic dependent nations," "wards" to the union's "guardian." Since the reservations were federal protectorates, state law had no from state law is not absolute. Tribes have, on occasion, opted for a blurring of boundaries (asking that state cops patrol reservation land, for example). governing tribes if Congress delegates authority to that state. has used its delegation power to transfer its authority to states on several reservations. Even without the specific delegation of authority, state law may still be considered valid if it doesn't flout federal goals. Click for an bingo as a means of alleviating poverty on the reservation. The tribe's nonprofit organizations were exempt. Therefore, the state had no right to to regulate reservation gambling as long as the gambling activity in question good faith, failing which a tribe could sue in federal court. But when the under fire from all directions. Incensed tribes have pointed out that the court's ruling stripped them of their safety net, making their sovereignty moot. The Department of the Interior is exploring alternative procedures that would let tribes negotiate compacts directly with the secretary, cutting the federal regulatory standards for reservation gambling. the bulk of the gambling prize: The General Accounting Office reports that of Priority funds, as federal payments to tribal governments are known, are divvied up based on tribe size and population density rather than income, meaning that tribes with big gambling incomes often get federal subsidies as major contributor to Democratic causes, and also has had extensive social mob have been studied often, most recently in a Justice Department that probe charged, among many other specifics, that the union's presidents, His father was also a top union official who, according to federal White House, receptions, bill signings, breakfasts, dinners, gift exchanges (an to give a satellite address to top Laborers' union officials. The chief of the organized crime family" and was under confidential investigation. The to clean up the union under government supervision rather than placing the ultimately took over control of the union. Defenders of the Laborers' arrangement argue that it will clean up the union just as effectively, and at opposing a federal takeover of four unions including the Laborers, and protesting the use of federal racketeering laws against the unions. local unions under a central trusteeship, and overturned four tainted local elections. Federal field agents and prosecutors nevertheless have been quoted (anonymously) saying that the union is still mobbed up. They say the government the key Justice Department officials testified that the White House was not involved in the settlement with the Laborers in any way. No direct evidence to the contrary was produced. Democrats note that the Republican Party has took endorsements from the Longshoremen and the Teamsters, two unions that were down with it. To head off this scenario, the International Monetary Fund is transition from communism to capitalism been nearly as successful as the transformation of some of the former Soviet satellites? What's behind the economics learned from smuggled copies of Western journals. These reformers destroy the Soviet state, Communist Party bosses spouting populist rhetoric ownership. Now the state owns only a few major military manufacturers and an however, the economy began to look up, benefiting from Western investors' manufacturing sector. Instead, it relies for exports on natural resources, primarily oil. With oil prices plummeting, thanks to new technologies for high rates that discourage enterprise, the government brings in ridiculously low revenue. The problem: Nearly everyone bribes tax collectors or simply declarations last year). With little tax revenue, the government can't provide even the rudiments of a social safety net or pay its bills. The shortfall also Credit crunch. Several of the biggest, most corrupt banks collapsed in has hiked interest rates continuously to check inflation and allay the fears of Western investors, thus discouraging needed business borrowing. The credit crunch, along with low faith in the stability of the ruble, has fostered eight months coal miners in the east, who haven't received a paycheck for nearly a year, have stopped working and blocked railroads. According to The threat of further strikes and labor disruptions is another deterrent for ruble. The government worries that foreign investors, anxious to unload their rubles, will force a devaluation of the currency. This would drive up the price of imported goods and reignite the hyperinflation of two years ago. To check this, the central bank has tripled interest rates and used hard currency this: Workers and managers decided the value of their firms and were given the first chance to buy a controlling share in the companies, using government vouchers. The idea of a nation of stockholders is appealing but, in practice, for lacking experience, competence, and the desire to adapt their companies to also undermined the transition. Businessmen used the patronage of politicians to buy companies at fire sale prices. For instance, the government auctioned billion. The biggest beneficiaries of the patronage have been the seven failing health, has lost the confidence of foreign investors. Like an old party Organized crime. Organized crime remains rampant, though less widespread has been undercut by the oligopolies, each of which has a private army. One of deepening the credit crunch and cooling growth. The critics argue that left to itself the market will correct, leaving only a few currency speculators to bear federal district courts broad authority to impose remedies for segregation, the authority of the lower courts by virtually forbidding desegregation across district lines, and by requiring lower courts to give greater leeway to local eased the way for schools to be released altogether from desegregation decrees. worked? The Department of Education reported recently that the share of tracked racial balance in the schools over recent decades; reporting great, no subsequent court ruling has ever invalidated mandatory busing. Hundreds of districts still operate mandatory busing programs. (Only one large have purposely acted to keep the schools segregated. As a practical matter, though, the main reason schools remain heavily segregated is that There could be no remedies across district lines for racial imbalance within district lines, without proof that the lines themselves were from urban centers was beyond the power of the courts to remedy. popular way to desegregate school systems without resorting to mandatory schools, when the suburbs had done nothing unlawful. school authorities would be under federal supervision until they had discharged the "affirmative duty" to eliminate the "vestiges" of segregation, "root and once a school district has made a "good faith" effort and taken all "practicable" steps to end segregation, it should be released from its court terminated before the schools have achieved full compliance with a desegregation order. In both opinions, the court placed a premium on returning As the federal judiciary has backed off desegregation, constitutions have provisions relating specifically to education. The provisions of the state constitution. The ruling was significant for two reasons. First, the court found no intentional discrimination, but ruled that the district's segregation was in itself unconstitutional. Second, the court declared that the cause of the segregation was the practice of basing has turned away from integration and toward the issue of inequalities in (largely white) districts can spend more per student than poorer (largely declined opportunities to find this disparity unconstitutional, but several States to help defend them against Soviet aggression, and wanted German militarism to be merged into joint security arrangements. both policy and operations. (The treaty specifies that the commander in chief said that "ambivalence has produced an inconsistency between the administration's statements of its objectives and the leisurely way it pursues War victory by locking in the allegiance of newly democratic nations and expansion believe this is a valuable role that expanded membership would commitment? At present levels of military spending, can the United States credibly make such a promise? And what would it cost to make the promise membership as the answer to their greatest fears: internal instability and military cooperation, but no defense guarantee. It has been mocked as a The space race was once regarded as a metaphor for the Cold War, and the symbolized by the space station Mir. What happened? Sputnik seemed to represent a system superior to capitalism, and proved useful in wooing developing nations that had yet to choose sides in the Cold War. Sen. satellite in orbit exploded on the launch pad. It was instantly dubbed orbit; the first impact on the moon; and the first photographs of the moon from a lunar orbit, which allowed them to map and triumphantly name geological claimed, "While in outer space, I was thinking about our party and our advisers and asked, "Is there any place we can catch them?" Consensus held the Soviets were so far ahead that only a manned lunar landing could win the space announcement, the United States had launched its first manned flight: a spacewalk came that summer. But the Soviet Union racked up a series of unmanned the Soviet program boasted constant space habitation and scientific first international space rendezvous. The Soviet Union put the first man of from the Challenger disaster, the Soviet Union briefly enjoyed a return to its dominant reputation. But as Mir floated in orbit, the Soviet Union fell apart. journalist to Mir for eight days as a ratings booster. failed repeatedly (forcing its crew to burn chemical candles to survive), its commander has developed heartbeat irregularities (caused by stress), and a cosmonaut has accidentally unplugged its main computer (which is replacement crew reported that the situation was "normal." upward creep of stars' salaries, and producers' complaints that it was wrecking the movies, have both been going on since the film industry wages and a promise to make her a star. Until then, there were no movie stars. Feature films carried no acting credits, and producers forbade movie magazines to print cast lists. The reason was precisely the fear that actors and actresses known to the public by name would exploit that recognition to demand higher wages. They did, especially during the late 1910s and the 1920s, when a During the studio era of the 1930s and '40s, talent costs were kept artificially low by a code negotiated between producers survived). The code gave the five major and three minor studios draconian power right to cancel their contracts every six months (the stars had no such right in return), the right to dock them for turning down a role in any movie of the studio's choice, the right to predetermine salary increases, and so on. an antitrust suit brought by the federal government forced the studios to give up ownership of movie theaters. Without a guaranteed outlet for their product, the studios no longer could afford to keep stars on permanent retainer. At that point, stars seized control of their own careers, and was not complete, however, until the late 1980s and early 1990s, after all the studios had been bought by larger, mostly international corporations, and though, the triumph of the agent and the package deal is, perhaps, the main reason that stars' salaries are as high as they are. But it is also true that told Variety recently that they would not produce any new shows unless stars are benefiting from the larger economic trend of growing inequality. Not only is the gap between executives and janitors growing; so is the gap among have found no better way to bring in audiences than through the lure of popular stars, who often command followings in specific age groups and can therefore is an increasingly difficult task. Audiences are shrinking, partly as a result forms of new technology. Films stay in theaters for less time than ever before; therefore, more films have to be made; and therefore, more money has to be spent distinguishing one film from another. The cost of marketing a movie is up to kick in and hurts more films than it helps, and no one knows the names of Adding to the demand for stars with recognizable names is expected to turn a profit abroad. But selling a blockbuster overseas requires followed suit. Studios will also try to substitute for expensive star vehicles are using their cachet to become directors and producers, often of smaller, artier movies that might not otherwise attract either funding or an audience. company meant to compete with the larger film companies, which were churning out formula films and treating most actors and actresses as hired hands. United Artists, however, was plagued by inept management and a lack of resources, and over a barrel, and they may just succeed in becoming the next generation of over the antidote, which they did. Bemused reporters wondered how the prime minister and has little civilian oversight; even the size of its budget governments who fed them information. Other newly recruited agents were revelations about the agency's Cold War malfeasance have damaged its prestige. the agency's request not to probe its workings, splashed these stories across exclusive club. But most current agents are career military men, and the conventional wisdom is that they're less intelligent and creative than their is all too easy to lose track of where things stand. daughter her confidante and "best friend." Patsy had undergone chemotherapy, police in a panic about a ransom note she says she found on a staircase hours later, and returned with a warrant to search the house for evidence of a room. According to the coroner's report, the cause of death was marriage of suspicion. Police found no evidence of forced entry into the house; found a legal pad on which they believe the note was written. They also found a from the note leaked to the press indicate an intimate knowledge of the them four days after the murder, even though they had not been named as suspects. These lawyers advised them not to submit to formal, videotaped police they had made to police the day of the murder. The police agreed to the terms, John's and Patsy's interviews, which may have given them time to coordinate people (caterers, housekeepers, and contractors) had keys to the house. press, the police have also withheld important pieces of evidence from public view, saying that full disclosure would jeopardize the investigation. underneath her fingernails also remain confidential. Police have taken five ransom note, the complete contents of which have not been made public. Police say Patsy's handwriting samples are inconclusive because her manual dexterity office, which says it is moving cautiously and waiting to amass more evidence, district attorney predicts that an arrest will be made in the next two months. Critics say the district attorney's office has bungled the case because it has year we hear more and more about this holiday. What is it, and where did it openly with other black leaders, and some of his followers were convicted in a himself was imprisoned for ordering and directing the torture of a young woman. in Long Beach. Last year, apparently rehabilitated in the eyes of many early attempts to popularize the holiday were directed at a relatively small modified his rhetoric to appeal to a broader audience, and as interest in collective work, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Each of the holiday's seven days is meant to symbolize one of these principles. three on the left are green, symbolizing the hope of new life; and the black the appropriate candle, and the principle for that day is discussed. The celebrates creativity, and is "an opportunity for a confetti storm of cultural States, has taken on a different shape and gained importance here. Although they had only one day's supply of oil to light the flame, which was supposed to burn constantly. Miraculously, the flame burned for eight days and nights, until the oil supply was replenished. Following the rebellion, the kingdom of candelabra known as the "menorah." Oily foods, particularly latkes (potato pancakes), are served during dinner to symbolize the Temple miracle. By opening consonant, which is like the "ch" in "Bach." The spelling employed in lying to some degree. Is a lawyer free to tell, with as much passion as he cares to muster, something he believes to be a lie? responsibility forbids a lawyer to "knowingly make a false statement of law or fact." The code forbids lawyers from making any statement, true or false, outside the courtroom that has a "substantial likelihood" of "materially prejudicing" a trial. In practice, however, these restrictions melt under no obligation to know the truth or to draw logical inferences from what he or she does know. Since the lawyer was rarely at the scene of the crime, she therefore free to argue whatever version of events best suits her ethical obligation of "zealous advocacy" virtually requires a lawyer to certainty, some lawyers take the precaution of not asking their clients to say really only arises as an issue in the absurd warhorse of law school ethics exams: a client who simultaneously confesses to a crime and insists on testifying that he is innocent. The ethical issue, even here, is not whether the lawyer is allowed to participate in the client's lie but whether he is actually required to do so. The answer is: not quite. If a lawyer knows with ontological certitude that a client is planning to lie on the stand, she is not allowed to report this to the court. She is allowed to quit client on the stand and let him testify without asking him specific questions If a lawyer finds that his client has "perpetrated a fraud inform the court, unless the information was told to him in confidence or secret. But, of course, just about everything that a client ever tells a lawyer severe rules forbidding "extrajudicial" remarks, such as lawyers' statements to the press about a pending case. But the reality is better characterized by the trouble for giving interviews when a case is pretrial. The rule requires a "substantial" chance of "material" impact on the case, both of which are nearly make sure they are not violating the rules against lying, lawyers can choose technical definition of harassment. To say that allegations are "scurrilous" is not necessarily to say that they are false. And so on. potential defendant provides the prosecution with a preview of the evidence he or she could provide or the testimony they would give. The prosecution is invited to buy this information with leniency. are increasingly common in the criminal justice system, especially since the restricted a judge's discretion in sentencing. One of the few remaining ways to Normally, these discussions are kept secret. Not because discussing them in public might violate the rules but because making proffers in the future for the right deal. This doesn't look good. procedure prohibit the government from using any statements made in furtherance form of plea bargaining. Additionally, most proffer sessions involve what is known as a "queen for a day" agreement, under which both sides agree that information discussed at such a session will not be admissible against the defendant at a trial. These protections, enacted to encourage truth before appear crazy, mendacious, guilty, or some combination thereof. getting hauled off by police, he ran naked through the hotel's halls screaming, to teen flicks (though he won acclaim for his supporting role in The Usual lived longer, many speculate, the brothers wouldn't have taken up lawyers, and his objections would have stymied their careers. However, spotted by a talent scout and offered a spot on the soap opera The regional theater and singing with the Long Island Philharmonic. But his acting career took off only when an agent spotted him working in a Manhattan pizza sinuous, full lips; dimpled chins; and "intense eyes." Profiles also dwell on back their hair with vast amounts of gel and mousse. (Famous story: It once to have been schooled in Method acting, studying under teachers with comedian.) Several studio executives have jokingly responded that if their outspoken politically. Touted as a potential Democratic senatorial candidate in New York, he was the main attraction of a bus tour in the Northeast, promoting on the photographer's car windows. On the set, he is known for his temper, smashing cell phones and lobbing insults at colleagues. He once called studio major movies include shots of his rear, and frontal nudity scenes from his movie Sliver were trimmed at the last minute. In Threesome know the answer than think they do. To newcomers, the economics of the Internet is among its greatest mysteries. Herewith, a primer. pork. The Defense Department created the Internet in the late '60s, and the government supported the Internet heavily from the '70s till the early small, shrinking, and unnecessary federal grants, the Internet is a commercial concern. Telecommunications companies, computer companies, and Internet service telephone system and the Net. (A note: The rest of this article applies to the United States. The same basic rules apply to Internet users elsewhere, except that they probably pay more for Internet service, and lots more for Now, consider the Internet. In one very important way, got the gear, the Internet beats telephone costs for three significant exploits low local phone rates. Unless you live somewhere remote, you reach the Internet by making a local call to your Internet Service Provider. Internet traffic around the country, delivering it to "Network Access Points," which link different networks like highway interchanges. When your data reach a Network Access Point, they hop on a line owned by another company and travel to their destination. But because the Internet travels on leased lines, the data reasons. First, it saves them billing costs; telephone companies, by contrast, spend billions every year calculating who used what line and when. Second, Internet data transmission is remarkably efficient. When you make a 10-minute to end. You pay for every second, even if you're on hold. When you go online to the time it takes to send your request to the page's Web server and for the would need to be occupied full time by a telephone call. You can be almost certain that you can complete a call immediately to anyone else with a phone. Internet service is a shrug: You can be reasonably sure, but no more, that you can send your data to another Internet user pretty packets. Each packet seeks the cheapest route, at the instant it is sent, to the destination. When all the packets arrive at that destination, a computer reassembles them. Packet switching is a frugal, efficient way to send data from point a to point b (albeit via points c, d, q, and k). But packet switching is not terribly reliable: Packets routinely get lost or delayed, crippling Internet telephony, one of the coolest new online applications, illustrates they can talk by telephone over the Net. It is miraculously cheap: Speech is online access. But because the Net gets clogged and packets are waylaid, the applications swallow enormous chunks of bandwidth for long periods of time, eliminating one of the Net's chief economies. There are three principal between heavy and light users. Customers will pay a premium to use streaming already taking place. The third is coming soon. All of them will make the Internet easier to use. And in the short term, all of them will make the Economists, pundits, politicians, and investment gurus have had almost two Here is the assortment in descending order of optimism. the "New Paradigm." Old laws of economics have been eclipsed by recent breakthroughs in technology and productivity. Now there is no limit to upward growth, only momentary breaks for the market to catch its breath. The bulls have a "salutary effect" of reducing consumer confidence, which in turn will cause the economy to grow at a slower, more sustainable rate with little of Wall Street traders, not the economy's weakness. Reams of studies by psychologists show that emotions, not economic calculations, determine investor during the week after the crash, with fueling the recovery. The typical their wave of stories about a) how the market had topped and b) the traders jittery because they're afraid that everybody else is Breakers.") Instead of calming jittery investors, the two mandated breaks induced more panic, and were portrayed by the electronic press as evidence of a major crash. Traders unloaded stock for whatever they could get between the breaks, fearing a shutdown would prevent them from executing sell orders. Under points. That yardstick is too conservative, say critics, because it was Rumors about the Fed's intentions swept Wall Street the week prior to the drop. unhealthy fixation on expected earnings led many executives to exaggerate balance sheets through accounting tricks, distorting true stock worth. The market recognized this and adjusted. Also, disappointing earnings reports from caused investors to question the value of entire portfolios. governments were forced to devalue their currencies, making their exports Conditions are said to resemble those in the months prior to the early '90s despite Justice Department opposition. Even if there is no actual evidence of a missiles are fundamentally the same, why would the United States authorize cooperation with China's national aerospace company, which has clear links to administration, however, granted waivers to the sanctions that soon put most of of satellites to any country has always required government approval.) Christian Science Monitor that they hoped that the administration would soon eliminate these sanctions altogether. (Click for a rundown of the specific third largest) do not rely on China for most of their launches. In the same massive government subsidies given to Great Wall, China's national aerospace company. More important, to restore business that China lost after a spate of The proliferation of cell phones, digital television, etc., has caused the demand for launches to outstrip the supply of rockets. This shortage forces neglected development of the cheap, disposable, reliable rockets that other collaborated on massive government projects, weren't equipped to build entire rockets for commercial use. The companies are still catching up and are not commercial satellites is largely indistinguishable from the technology used to commercial space capabilities from its weapons program. China's commercial rocket, the Long March, and its intercontinental ballistic missiles use precisely the same rocket boosters and guidance systems. Great Wall is partly manufacturers, moreover, inevitably acquire a vested interest in improving the substantially rewire and reprogram the rocket. The law, however, requires that Defense Department officials supervise these procedures. At least one official remains with the satellite from the time it leaves the country until its risks of technology transfers negligible. Defense Department officials Pentagon (though China's difficulty in commercial launches casts doubt on the Hill's feminist supporters, who once claimed that women "don't make these things up," have rallied to the president's defense or are silent about the other of hypocrisy. What are the similarities and the differences between the Hill's accusations. Their credibility depends on corroboration by people who claim they were told of the harassment soon after it occurred. Six affidavits it allegedly happened. Four witnesses testified under oath that Hill told them because Hill's corroborators didn't testify until eight years after she had have allied with opportunistic ideological zealots. And they are right. Hill testified only after liberal Senate aides had tracked her down and leaked her story; feminist groups such as the Women's Legal Defense Fund advised her. groups have helped trumpet the two women's causes, nobody has shown convincingly that either side trumped up the accusations. intolerable boss, why did Hill leave a secure job to follow him from the Department of Education to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Why did interested only in clearing her name, why did she decide to make such a public asked Hill out on patently unwelcome dates, bragged about his sexual prowess, flashed his genitals, touched her sexually, or propositioned her always flags his lascivious intentions before expressing them. He flirted with on Hill's lack of interest, her repeated assertions that she didn't want to law? If "the law" is the one against sexual harassment, the answer in both to the Supreme Court's interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of instance of harassment "severe and pervasive." c) Title VII doesn't prohibit propositioning colleagues or exposing one's genitals to them. House in search of a job when he allegedly pawed her. it describes may strike many as exploitative or ugly for other reasons, but it had created an "abusive working environment," because she never complained about his harassment and maintained her friendship with him even after she left didn't get the chance.) There are at least three public accusations against walls of his apartment with nude centerfolds and meticulously maintained a argued that, even if true, the behavior they stand accused of is harmless. crass remarks reflects the excesses of political correctness. But neither man has attempted to defend the behavior he is accused of. Rather, both insist it if true, was repugnant and would disqualify him to sit on the Supreme proponents contrast his categorical denials of Hill's allegations with critics say he cynically played the race card by accusing his opponents of conspiring to bring down an uppity black man. Even if he had done Hill no wrong, they say, his response bespeaks a character unfit for his job. Hill came forward at a time when nobody believed victims of sexual harassment. Because they advocated Hill's cause, they say, victims of harassment now have would have had to vote even if Hill had not come forward with her tale. voters knew about the president's alleged proclivities, if they didn't know the details of any particular case, and implicitly accepted them when they elected presidential impeachment would be far more disruptive and costly to the nation than a Senate committee's rejection of a Supreme Court nominee; they say it commerce in the United States is subject to some form of taxation at the federal, state, or local level. The Internet industry (made up of Internet service providers and online service providers along with companies that do business over the Internet) is no exception. Yet the fast growth of federal government worries that the Internet could become a global haven for increasing use of the Internet will erode their tax bases as consumers and businesses shop and do business outside of their taxing jurisdictions. While they are anxious to develop more sources of revenue and expand their tax bases, they also realize that unilateral efforts to collect from the industry may simply drive the easily moved online operations over the state line. Not surprisingly, the Internet industry opposes any new taxes on its burgeoning commerce. Major online retailers and service providers, however, recognize that there is no case for exempting Internet sales and, perhaps, services from the same tax laws that apply to offline commerce. But they are especially concerned with developing uniform, consistent, and fair tax treatment by state and local authorities. Multiple taxation is seen as a particular threat. Who has responsibility for taxing Internet commerce? As the Internet grows and changes, how is existing tax law being applied? What they're going are very big. According to industry research, subscription and sales. But as more consumers become familiar with online commerce, they may very well begin to shop for products over the Internet precisely to avoid online sales of mailed products is one obvious revenue opportunity under existing tax law. The easy analogy here is to catalog sales (although these, too, have posed problems for state and local authorities). If you buy a pair of Establishing nexus can be a tricky issue, for example, when it's a case of location, and hence whether sales tax is due (though new software packages being developed for online commerce may help remedy this). But the location of above, a seller must collect sales tax from a buyer if the seller has a takes delivery. Suppose, for example, that the content in question is being or any of a myriad of smaller services. Where does that service do business? allow subscribers to log on to the Internet using a local phone number. These typically consist of a leased room with modems and routing equipment. Already, some states have argued that POPs constitute sufficient physical presence for sellers of tangible personal property from state taxation if their contacts separate vendor through an online service? Some states argue that taxable nexus can be established if a vendor operates over an online or Internet service with substantial physical presence within the state. This opens up a whole new basis for taxation opposed by the industry and unlikely to Bean uses UPS to deliver its boots, that doesn't expose the sale to taxation in every state where UPS operates. And even if states can win the nexus argument providers were subject to a city sales tax on telephone service and that access fee. The industry argues that it is not comparable to the (heavily taxed) telecommunications industry, and that such efforts result in double well as for Internet vendors. Again, as in the case of wine sales, states have taxing jurisdiction over transactions only if the seller has sufficient Tax authorities are further threatened by the growing use businesses, including drug transactions, thereby eliminating the need for people use it to pay for services, facilitating the avoidance of federal income confronting Treasury Department enforcement officials is Internet States, and most authorities interpret that to mean that Internet gambling is Recognizing that the Internet effectively wipes out national borders, and fearing that the development of new technologies may be impeded by inconsistent tax policies, the federal government has been studying the issue of international tariffs on Internet transactions. At this point, no countries have imposed tariffs or other taxes on online commerce, but at least a dozen are considering them. This is a big area of concern for the annually, including software, entertainment and information products, and absolutely reject the idea that the Internet is some sort of golden goose whose feathers should be taxed. The key message of the report is no Internet taxes." This does not mean, however, that the federal government supports abolition of any taxes on Internet commerce, only that it plans no new taxes at this time. The Treasury report itself stresses that, in principle, the tax code should treat Internet transactions exactly like other channels of commerce. local taxes on electronic commerce, though it would exempt certain taxes, including most sales taxes, that are already in place. The bill also calls on the administration to develop a comprehensive plan to address the issue, and to seek bilateral and multilateral trade agreements that make all Internet activity internationally free of taxes, tariffs, and trade barriers. already working with the World Trade Organization and other international trade groups on uniform rules for taxation of electronic commerce. Meanwhile, there are tricky aspects to assessing taxes under current transactions, and verifying records. In addition, some countries impose quotas on content such as books, movies, music, and software from abroad, but the origin of that content can be tough to trace in the thin air of of memoirs and biographies argued that the arrogance of her macho husband Ted he finally published his side of their story in Birthday Letters --an predicted the book would exculpate him and silence his critics. But the debate her: "I was a fly outside on the window pane/ Of my own domestic drama." suicide attempt and chalk her problems up to obsession with her dead their marriage and "misplacing" other journals. He also edited her poetry to remembered had she not committed suicide. Any good poems she did write were focus of the abortion debate. Last week, the Senate rejected Majority Leader already restrict the abortion of viable fetuses. What is a viable fetus? How is the concept of viability relevant to the moral and legal issues of the interests of a fetus ahead of the interests of the pregnant woman until the fetus is "viable." The court defined viable to mean capable of prolonged life outside the mother's womb. It said this included fetuses that doctors expected to be sustained by respirators. The court accepted the conventional medical wisdom that a fetus becomes viable at the start of the last third of a viability varies, the court ruled, it could only be determined case by case and by the woman's own doctor. Even if the fetus is viable, the court said, states could not outlaw an abortion if the woman's life or health was at stake. Roe was on a "collision course with itself." She said that improvements in technology would continually push the point of fetal viability closer to the beginning of the pregnancy, allowing states greater opportunity to regulate the right to an abortion. And this seems to be the baby has ever been successfully delivered before the middle of the formed and their airways are not developed enough to inhale. Circulation depends on the use of ventilators and injections of hormones. A baby born poor initial respiration) or too much oxygen (from the ventilator). premature babies depend on technology, survival rates vary based on access assess a fetus's viability by attempting to guess whether its lungs have formed. Sonograms allow doctors to estimate the fetus's weight, which coincide with the onset of a functioning respiratory system. None of the important. The court said that state laws could require a woman and her doctor to perform tests to prove that a fetus is not viable before she obtains an to decide for themselves if the fetus is viable. Some require doctors to certify the findings. Eleven states have banned the procedure called intact delivery is induced, the fetus's skull is crushed, and its brains are and constitutional scholars say that the Supreme Court was wrong to create does the fact that a fetus can survive outside the womb with the help of vast medical technology change either of the interests at war in the abortion her body? Even if viability is an important moral line, is it drawn in the several hundred thousand dollars and usually fails, regardless of the Less than one percent of all abortions performed take place after the million). These television events are part of the hype that is sweeps. During pack their prime time lineups with the shows they are convinced will reap the highest ratings of the year. Inflated sweep months ratings are, in turn, used big a scam as they seem? And what exactly are ratings? viewership, networks (both broadcast and cable) regularly keep tabs on three viewers. Cable networks receive another set of figures based on the number of demographics), numbers breaking out the age and sex of viewers. shares, and demos for the previous night's programs, extrapolated from results computer linked to a modem, register whether a set is turned on and, if so, the device with buttons that viewers push to register their age and sex each time requires that your home get wired-- another ugly box in your living room, selected households provide data each night. Worried about viewer fatigue, minutes for what they watch. The affiliates use these numbers to set ad rates. (National networks sell ads based on averages of the overnight numbers.) cable and the proliferation of networks, networks lost their leverage to negotiations with ad agencies. In addition, advertising has grown more sophisticated, targeting specific demographic groups. This can create networks' sweeps tactics, however, take even more heat. Critics say that sweeps cause networks to expend the bulk of their resources pulling out all the stops for these three months rather than spreading them around the year. that during sweeps, local affiliates compete by injecting even more course, complain that sweep months artificially inflate the amounts they pay the integrationist ideal now abound. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, once integration's most stalwart advocate, is reconsidering its goal of racial integration. Who are integration's critics? What is their position? Who advocates separatism for blacks? Why are critics of integrationist ideal holds that blacks and whites should live, work, and study together. Government policies designed to accomplish these goals include school busing, affirmative action in public schools and in the workplace, forced integration of public housing, and laws barring discrimination in Christian Leadership Conference. Although the organizations still support integration, their dissident members are dissatisfied with the outcomes Divine led the movement in the '20s. Separatism fades in and out of media attention: Separatists of the '30s and '40s received little leaders in the '60s sought control over their local public schools, which separatists have new academic allies, the critical race theorists, led by New York University's Derrick Bell and University of people. Some critical race theorists argue that black jurors should acquit guilty black defendants in protest of the unjust system. vogue? Some attribute the new separatism to black demagogues in politics and the academy who deliberately exploit black anxieties to further their says that separatism appeals to unqualified students admitted to college under the protection of affirmative action. These students compensate for their shortcomings by clinging to one another and striking the defensive pose of explanation holds that integration is out of favor because the Democratic Party has retreated from the goal. In hopes of attracting more white votes, supporters have embraced separatist politicians and positions. later recanted this view, and even the most conservative Southern politicians prevented blacks from living and working where they wished. Many conservatives still endorse the segregationist line that government shouldn't to endorse the ideal of integration, they say affirmative action, busing, and population, creating feelings of dependency and entitlement. Black is wrong, he writes, because any endorsement of racial preferences is faith are black liberals like Professors Henry Louis Gates and conservative who broke ranks to endorse affirmative action as a necessary been leveled in spite of government programs. The black middle class benefited cultural mainstream, but the programs can't be expected to further expand the flow chart to help you track the alleged money trail. payments to Hale. First, she told Salon that though she didn't have an accurate fix on the amount paid, it was substantial. (Click here to read the Salon story touting her testimony.) In an article that appeared six days later, she recovered her memory and fixed the she backed down from this number, admitting that she doesn't recall seeing using tarot cards and (allegedly) boasting about transporting soldiers telepathically. They also say she's a former Democratic operative and still on the story has been able to track down these sources. the payments to Hale were conclusively proved, they don't necessarily undermine covering the story posit another scenario: Financially ruined --Hale was explicitly claim that the Spectator money swayed Hale. They let others tease out the implications of their story for them, connecting the dots had sex with is like asking why a hungry man would want to eat. How many Every indiscretion puts his presidency at stake. Here's a roundup of the top that he's lost his sense of shame and can't comprehend his culture's mores. embrace this argument. His rampant infidelity is caused by his idiocy. "Anyone who is that dumb should obviously not be President of the United States" servicing him. Thus, goes this theory, he sexually harasses women who work for Association doesn't classify sex addiction as a medical condition, but that addictive personalities experience from the release of the neurotransmitter claim that the president boasted of bedding hundreds of women over the course would also explain why he (allegedly) falls back on phone sex when he can't have the real thing. The president's family tends toward addictive behavior. Hot Springs, Ark., childhood. Many of his neighbors were devout Baptists South. His mother also admitted to habitually blocking out problems by denying attitudes about sex from his mother, who dressed provocatively in short shorts and tube tops, and his biological father, allegedly a bigamist. craves the affection that his abusive, alcoholic stepfather and abused, his many girlfriends. An Oedipal permutation of this theory blames his affairs specifically on an early deficit of motherly attention and notes that many of store, without control over his appetites for sex and food. Time 's Lance by servile sycophants who convince them they are invincible and forgive their sins, and this paves the way for sexual affairs. Men of presidential quality tend to be arrogant, with a sense of "entitlement and lordly expectation" responded, "God damn it, I had more women by accident than he ever had by psychologists explain presidential philandering as an atavistic impulse left over from the early days of the human race. Natural selection rewarded men who many chances to reproduce their genes). Proponents of this theory recall themselves at powerful men, and powerful men are too weak to resist. The According to her friends, she had long fantasized about sleeping with the the most pleasant spin on the whole affair, which ascribes no deviant bonded over their shared experience of abusive parents. This theory initially price for his dalliances, thereby convincing him that the risk is worth it. disparate political parties has crumbled. The largest white party bolted, and disenfranchising and officially segregating the country's black majority. Millions of blacks were transported to "homelands," small tracts of land funding from the Soviet Union and employing terrorist tactics. government's liberal policies, including affirmative action, legalization of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission impaneled by the government to amnesty to all who confess to political crimes, as long as the crimes are not "disproportionately" heinous. By the time the commission stopped accepting torture. Tutu, however, protests that he reported cases of illegal government National Party repudiated the Truth Commission, calling it a politically driven violence where none existed. Blacks have also criticized the commission, also admitted that he commissioned acts of terrorism when he was a The National Party's obstreperousness could bode ill for Also, the National Party's "witch hunt" allegations could undermine the spirit of reconciliation that the Truth Commission and coalition government moving the National Party toward the center, campaigning on a platform of Christian values intended to appeal to black conservatives as well. But campaigning for a separate white state. These local alliances could presage a its tactics, the National Party is slipping in opinion polls. Meanwhile, the redistribution have not been met. Unions protest that the government has not backlash is also possible. After the collapse of the apartheid to be inept and corrupt. The classic example: An automatic teller machine was telecommunications, and cut taxes. Corporations have responded by funneling ROT members have declared war on both the federal government and the state of them on the grounds of the ROT "embassy," an attached trailer and shed outside avoided violence by exchanging a jailed ROT member for the hostages. international law, a treaty must be struck between sovereign nations prior to other secessionist states rejoined the union after their defeat in the Civil to the liberal watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of armed condemning taxation and lax protection of property rights. days, the ROT has filed scores of liens on property owned by their foes, a tactic members call "paper warfare." A blizzard of liens has fallen on state property, which the ROT considers illegally confiscated. Other bogus liens have been filed across the state on private property targeted at random. By clogging Internal dissension has reduced the group's numbers in recent months. From the start, the sect purged members, including its founding president, who failed to toe a militant line. In March, the ROT split into two confrontation with law enforcement has been months in the making. After a judge ordered him to cease filing bogus liens, he continued and was found in contempt who had long clamored for the leader's arrest. After the hostage exchange, secession in a nonbinding referendum last year, but few expect the movement to bill has already been introduced in the House. When have governments apologized in the past? Which wrongs do or do not warrant apologies? Must apologies be regrets disingenuous, saying that his groveling was more about avoiding a are more transparent when the stakes are higher. The first national apology of damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have agreement, but the apology that came with the money was even less heartfelt but this time the expression was genuine. The nation's leaders, who repeatedly describe their nation's past aggressions as "the worst crimes against recently offered words of conciliation and established a reparations fund, but unwilling to admit wrongdoing. It has made no official payments to China or fund" for restitution, but most surviving comfort women have refused the money, demanding a public apology and public compensation. from their fear of blaming ancestors and dishonoring war heroes. The government after qualified his statement, stressing that it was a personal apology, not a slaves, he says he opposes material reparations. Almost no slaves were official recognition of their holocaust, arguing that any apology to slaves have long sought acknowledgment of the atrocities inflicted upon them. (This Wall's collapse, how meaningful are the political and economic differences that to democracy and capitalism in the old Soviet bloc and former Soviet change since communism's collapse are deceptive. All countries initially economic activity, have most of them grown. However, even post-1993 averages elections; successful transfer of power; free media.) Despite economic has suffered a recent setback. In the last six months, several of the nation's biggest banks collapsed because of loose lending and fraud. To reassure foreign position is largely ceremonial, he helps give credibility to the widely free elections; successful transfer of power; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) Because it privatized early and aggressively, percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of countries at ousting corrupt Communist bosses from its bureaucracy. scheme that collapsed this winter. When the government failed to fulfill government has relied on repression to survive the crisis. (No economic data. Democracy weak: elections held last protests this winter that forced the ruling socialists to hand power over to a caretaker government. A centrist coalition won elections this month. questionable: allegations of electoral fraud; authoritarian but popular much longer). Despite rampant war profiteering and a large state presence in percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections, though minority ethnic tensions and instability are a problem. Last year, the country's of street protests this winter were said to presage his ouster. His concession of the opposition's demands (recognition of local election results and elections; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) The of its reluctance to privatize, foreign investment is scant, and growth has against police abuse and state interference in the media.) Thanks to elections; successful transfer of power.) Economists predict the country successful transfer of power.) After flirting with a return to communism, year. The economy has foundered since the Soviet Union's collapse. the country's media and secret police. He has enhanced the country's ties to hostility toward minorities; government interference with press.) Initially organized crime.) Fifty percent of the economy is invested in the black fraud; arbitrary arrests; restrictions on freedom of press.) Alienated by has banned opposition parties and controls the media. corruption; no free elections; repression of minorities.) A recent of a Christian enclave in the northeast part of the country. Afterward, oil companies scrambled to tap its prodigious reserves. Before the Soviets took year did the country begin to emerge from a severe depression, but it still the expense of serious literature. Publishers carp back that they can't turn a profit, no matter what they do. The latest industry tumult is over the imprints have either been scaled back or sold off. Is publishing really in crisis? Is the serious book dead? How has the industry changed? What are the say the conglomerates have damaged book publishing with their obsessive pursuit copies, establishing a new record. The conglomerates pay huge advances and spend outrageous sums marketing these titles in the hope that they will top the writers, now spend more time marketing books than editing them, which results in the production of longer, sloppier, less interesting books that conglomerates don't break out figures on their book divisions. News Corp., since the '50s and well below their 12-percent to 15-percent projections. reveal that time devoted to reading books continues to expand, with the average figures indicate that publishing isn't so much in crisis as it is in flux, and that the conglomerates' financial expectations are unrealistic. publishers award record advances. (Click to see a list of big ones.) Even houses complain that big advances hurt profits. The New Yorker reported exaggerate the impact of advances, hoping thereby to drive the demand golden age of publishing was the '30s and '40s, when gentleman Book retailing was a genteel and polite profession, too, with few booksellers owning more than one store. All that changed in the postwar era. The chains. Thanks to the superstore chains, retail space devoted to books percent; and book clubs account for most of the remainder. their expanding floor space, but sell a lower percentage of the books ordered than independent stores do. Publishers must then absorb the high costs of huge leverage their influence to persuade the big publishers to produce more determine what is commercial, and have seen their profits and sales rise. to gamble on potentially lucrative blockbusters. Imprints that concentrate on downsized, sold, or repositioned by their conglomerate fathers in recent plans to publish more literature and fewer celebrity memoirs, because the week that the state's constitutional prohibition against sex discrimination officials plan to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court, the judge's decision has revived the controversy that prompted Congress to pass (and defines marriage for the purposes of federal law as the union of a man and a the moral and religious issues, marriage is also a legal condition with systems, favors marriages in which one spouse earns most of or all the income, and penalizes those in which income is equally or nearly equally split between married will raise their taxes. But a working person who is the sole or main were legally sanctioned. This is especially so if they are approaching fully insured worker retires, the spouse receives half of the worker's partners the edge over their unwed counterparts. (However, if each partner had higher rate of return on that partner's Social Security taxes than they would Security survivor benefits --and spousal benefits under other federal programs such as veterans' pensions --apply only to a legal spouse, not Benefits often cover employees' families, and some companies now are extending recognized as spouses, the benefits would no longer be taxed. also grants a spouse automatic "medical power of attorney "--the legal authority to make medical decisions for an incapacitated person. Unmarried partners, of the same or opposite sex, must hire a lawyer to obtain this authority. Hospitals also generally bar those who are not members of a contract confers numerous rights to a surviving spouse upon the death of the other spouse. This includes deciding how to dispose of the deceased's states, a spouse automatically inherits from a deceased partner. In the case of unmarried couples, on the other hand, the survivor is entitled to nothing unless the deceased specifically wills it to him or her. When unmarried people Because married people are considered to be an economic unit, moreover, the federal estate tax exempts all assets inherited by a spouse. Unmarried partners receive no such exemption. And where a surviving spouse may sue for the most important legal consequences of marriage involve getting out of it (even though it is true that one spouse generally cannot be required to testify against the other in court as long as they're still married). Divorce laws divide property and dictate the financial support of spouses who did little work outside the home. These laws vary by state. But in general, when a marriage dissolves, each partner is considered to own the marriage (except by inheritance) are considered joint property. What happens to joint property? Most states have "equitable distribution" laws, under which it is supposed to be divided fairly, though not necessarily in half. Only eight states have "community property" laws requiring that all assets acquired during a marriage be divided equally. 1970s, courts have rarely made such awards in cases involving the dissolution of marriage. Instead, courts give the financially dependent spouse "maintenance" payments, which provide support while she or he gains a footing in the work force. In practical terms, maintenance usually lasts only five to seven years, and rarely longer than the marriage did. citizens with only a few exceptions, such as sham marriages undertaken for the purpose of obtaining citizenship. Although there are still some legal hoops to avoid the very lengthy (and frequently unsuccessful) application process for marriage is an institution for the raising of children. But laws pertaining to obligations to support their children regardless of whether they are, or ever were, married to each other. (And marriage benefits go to all married people direct effect on the rights and obligations of parenthood. It might well, however, facilitate gay couples' efforts to adopt children. sea of benefits and obligations into a single "I do." As a generic set of laws for an extraordinarily diverse group of marriages, marriage law burdens some couples some of the time and benefits most couples most of the time. Symbolism the PA? Why does everybody agree that it is in crisis? What is the future of remainder of the two territories. Under the plan, an interim government Bank, as well as for what is ambiguously called the "final status" of security The first two stages of the withdrawal were completed future will probably be decided by the "final status" negotiations. coalition of disparate guerrilla groups, labor unions, and political parties the PA's comptroller concluded that millions of PA dollars had been siphoned off for private use by officials. Several ministers have been blamed for resignation of the entire Cabinet. Last week all but two ministers agreed to step down, though many say it is unlikely they will ever actually do so. and he has not been accused of personal wrongdoing. However, his undemocratic He has much to gain from the peace process: more power and land for his organization. It controls mosques, schools, and a political party, all of which predate the organization of its terrorist arm in the late '80s. Most criticizing the group's political leaders, as doing so would be considered support the argument that the peace process is a failed experiment that should death in the last three years while in police custody. action, observers say, because he believes that the threat of terrorism they say were caused by exposure to toxic chemicals during that conflict. And they charge that the government has not taken their complaints seriously, or is even covering up evidence of a Gulf War Syndrome. This past week, the Pentagon revelation that some troops were, in fact, exposed to toxic gases does not settle the case. The controversy rests on two remaining issues: finding a Allied casualties far lower than feared, but overall rates of illness were low experienced unexplained blistering, which could have been caused by mustard Common complaints are fatigue, joint pain, headache, difficulty sleeping, diarrhea, or nausea. The Department of Veterans Affairs registered and clearly defined what the syndrome really is. No characteristic symptoms or laboratory abnormalities have been found. Veterans quoted in New York share any of the top dozen symptoms. Other studies of Gulf War vets show no higher rates of hospitalization, birth defects, or death than among control groups that did not serve. Thus far, five different independent panels have evaluated the known evidence. None could find any new disease or define a evidence that troops encountered many different chemical agents which, they believe, made thousands ill after coming home. Troops received multiple The military used over a dozen pesticides in the Gulf, including rocket propellant and, some claim, mustard gas --a weapon used to rapidly computer model of the gas cloud's drift. The number could be increased yet more quickly triggers paralysis; death by asphyxiation or cardiac rhythm subway attacks. But exposure levels in the Gulf were not high enough to cause Congress has already authorized disability payments within two years after the war. The newest revelations about soldiers' exposure will add to pressure for more generous compensation. find it plausible that the chemicals could have failed to produce major ill effects at the time of exposure, yet could still cause chronic illness later. No known toxic illness has ever followed such a pattern. In medical circles, the argument over Gulf War Syndrome is actually part of a larger debate over the existence of other nebulous syndromes --including chronic fatigue and Gulf War Syndrome with consistent symptoms has yet to be defined. Gulf veterans suggest that the syndrome is a constellation of symptoms; which ones a particular vet gets will vary with the individual. The syndrome may even be several illnesses, they say, but the common thread is exposure to toxins in the however, say none of the proposed chemical agents are known to cause disease at the low levels which troops faced. Moreover, they have not found any increase in illness among Gulf veterans as a whole or among those exposed to the showed no higher illness rates than others. Some vets believe, however, that there is countervailing evidence which the government is covering that going the rest of the way will be easy. The Republican leadership also easier partly because of legislative successes over the past two years. Agriculture and welfare programs have been reformed in ways that will save of the errors are not yet well understood. Much of the revenue surge may have of Medicaid spending. But Medicaid spending has begun to surge again in recent Congress has no choice but to accept that projection as gospel. In any event, president and Congress, although we do not know how much easier. intense budget struggles of the past, why does balancing the budget now look easier? First, as noted earlier, we have been nibbling away at the deficit. The low birth rate during the Great Depression. Over half of the civilian, assume the continuation of full employment. There is no recession in sight, and it would be foolish to try to forecast the timing of one more than a year in these favorable factors, it might be possible to devise a credible president and the Republicans. The tax cuts may force them to put some implausible spending cuts on paper. If the final plan involves significant, all be suspicious. It will be very difficult to cut discretionary spending much further. Defense spending will soon be flattening out, and domestic discretionary spending proved highly resilient at the end of the last Congress, also would add greatly to the difficulty. In fact, an economic downturn of any the near future will be bad news for the long run if it leads the president and dramatic Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security reforms that are required to At that time, without reform, the deficit will soar to unimaginable levels. The private savings necessary to finance the deficit will plummet, because there will be net withdrawals from private pension funds. The two forces will cause us to eat away at our capital, and the economy will head rapidly downward. month, Republicans and journalists have questioned foreign contributions to the Democratic Party. Both parties, interest groups, political action committees, and businesses have spent record sums this year. According to one of campaign finance? What rules, if any, have the campaigns broken? state, or local. Foreign nationals include foreign governments, political parties, corporations, and citizens. The ban does not apply to foreigners who are legal residents of the United States. A domestic subsidiary of a foreign corporation may make political contributions, but only if the foreign parent Republican National Committee this campaign, as well as thousands in direct against the law for corporations and labor unions to contribute money to candidates for federal office. However, they may sponsor political action committees which raise money from employees, stockholders, and members, and Qualified presidential candidates and political parties receive money from the federal government for primary- and accept private donations during the primary season. price tag for this year's election? The cost of primaries is one reason. But efforts that do not directly endorse specific candidates. Without violating the First Amendment, individuals and organizations can also spend unlimited amounts advocacy from campaign advocacy. They include: "vote for" and "vote against." As long as your ads do not include the magic words, you can spend as much as and the Christian Action Network have also raised and spent millions on "issue" ads, as have the political parties. It is often difficult to distinguish issue organizations can spend as much as they want on a candidate's behalf as long as individuals) can make unlimited independent expenditures on behalf of candidates. This decision produced an explosion of spending by political parties, although it is not yet clear what constitutes an "independent" expenditure. According to Common Cause, the political parties are spending millions of dollars as "independent expenditures" on ads that were designed and produced by the candidates' own campaign organizations. fitting end to what doctors call the worst century for allergies ever. The percentage of the population suffering from allergies has more than doubled dizzying parade of allergy remedies, the Food and Drug Administration has trumpeted as the most effective nonprescription allergy combatant. are allergies? Who gets them? Is there any way to conquer them? Are they really more prevalent than they used to be? Why hasn't natural selection consigned this miserable condition to the dustbin of evolutionary history? overreacts to the presence of harmless proteins normally not found in the body. During the first few encounters with a foreign protein (or allergen), the immune system catalogs its characteristics and tailors an antibody called immunoglobulin to purge it. Thereafter when the allergen enters the body, the immunoglobulins send signals to trigger the release of a set of nasty chemicals, most notably histamines, that destroy it. Side effects of histamines include the tightening of airways, constriction of nasal passages, release of mucus, and redness of eyes. Nobody knows how much of an allergen it from adverse reactions to poison ivy, chemicals, and lactose, none of which involves the immune system. Allergies are also distinguishable from colds, during which the immune system combats viruses that can actually do harm. contained in pollen, tiny airborne particles released as part of the reproductive cycle of trees, weeds, and grasses. ("Hay fever" comes down from ragweed allergies on the hay reaped during the fall harvest.) Other common the myth of the nonallergenic dog.) Reactions to food afflict relatively few and, except for shellfish and peanut allergies, are most common among small consequences of allergies are usually no greater than sneezing, a stuffy nose, and itchy eyes. But if you suffer from asthma, allergies can cause an attack. toxic levels of histamines and other chemicals are released, causing asphyxiation, vomiting, and death. More common are infections triggered by stuffy noses. The scenario: Allergies inflame and clog a nose, precluding it from draining mucus and fluids from sinuses and ears. The fluids become a have correlated them with a single mutant gene inherited from the mother. But statistics also point to the importance of other genes that come via the are spread evenly across ethnicity and gender. Individuals, however, tend to for another decade. But allergies can start at any time. And nobody has a clue "civic improvement" projects. The lowest counts occur in coastal areas and mountains, where wind tends to blow pollen away, although pollen has been to be touted by the media as being the worst one on the books. (Click for a will cause plants to be more fecund and produce more pollen. Also, lack of winter freezes means that mites normally killed off by the cold will treatment. New drugs debut almost every year. (Recently, there has been a rush symptoms in a vast majority of patients. Unlike the pills, immunotherapy shots attack the underlying problem, not just the symptoms. Each week patients are injected with a small dose of allergens to build their immunity. Studies show immune system's misguided response? Why do allergies afflict an increasing number of victims if they serve no useful purpose? A few theories: Victorious Immune System: Evolutionary biologists speculate that a hypersensitive immune system was needed back when parasites were ubiquitous and deadly. Hay fever was the small cost of survival. And since allergies rarely shorten life spans or discourage mates, it is unlikely natural selection will of the Leisure System: Modern medicine and hygiene have licked most of the major problems that used to preoccupy our immune system. Now, with nothing to regularly contend with, this theory argues, the system is set off by the most popularity of domestic pets. In addition, there is the onset of pollution, people are allergic today because more people are diagnosed as allergic rather than as suffering from colds. The cynical spin is that pharmaceutical companies have duped the public into believing that they have allergies and need drugs to "day of atonement," and to stay home from work or school to fast and repent. His appeal was largely ignored, in contrast to his call to the Million Man membership would burgeon after the march. Has this happened? What sort of closely guards the scale of its operations. Estimates fix membership between grown in the last two years. And according to the best guesses, the nation runs sure how much real estate or how many corporations it owns. Court papers college campuses, grabbing headlines and sparking confrontations between black in the nation seems to correlate with the negative media it generates. that the nation will begin fielding its own candidates. frustration with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Yet the nation Million Man March --into greater influence and membership. The march is meandering speech at the march alienated potential followers. Especially disconcerting was said to be his lengthy disquisition on numerology. Many accounts of the march downplayed the nation's presence. For evidence, see he continues to tour regularly, his speeches are said to have become less charismatic and less appealing. Rally attendance is much scantier today the months following the march also discredited him. Especially damning is nation has recently considered leaning toward the mainstream right to black capitalism has not translated into financial success. Many of its companies are deep in debt and owe the Internal Revenue Service undermined their claim that black businesses are less exploitative than white ones. Meanwhile, many members gripe that while the nation's businesses founder, average drops dramatically, are mixed. Most traders say that the pauses pauses with calming jittery investors. What are circuit breakers? Why were they force was convened to investigate the crash's causes and suggest remedies that would prevent a repeat performance. The task force blamed "faulty market accommodate the trading volume that the drop occasioned: Phone lines clogged, computers crashed, and printers jammed. Many orders simply weren't received. Deluged traders couldn't match the buy and sell orders they had. The task force assimilate incoming information and arrange transactions. Circuit breakers afford investors and traders the time to sell stock calmly, rather than dump it year so that brokers could handle a massive backlog of unfilled orders. In restore temporary imbalances between supply and demand. Bad weather, presidential assassinations, and power outages all have resulted in the closing elsewhere prohibited the trading of specific stocks. No other country automatically closes volatile markets for a breather. investors and traders even more inclined to sell, instead of cooling them off. breaker and reported it as a sign of an impending crash. During the first lull, traders who had orders to sell by the end of the day were already anticipating a second circuit breaker. Fearing that a second circuit breaker would close the market for the day and prevent them from executing their orders on advantageous terms, they sold their stocks as soon as possible instead of waiting to find market from working itself out of a crash. Extreme volatility, they say, is a natural part of the market's quest for equilibrium between supply and demand. transaction infrastructure to accommodate the enormous swells in trading. The transactions a second. On both days, traders had no difficulty matching buyers market's value. Adjusting for the quadrupling of the market over the last seven circuit breakers to flip at levels that don't warrant a stoppage of trade. They that the circuit breakers should be reformed so that they are triggered by a force and working group conducted their proceedings in secret. Soon after the designed to check the power and proliferation of presidential commissions, requires that the meetings of working groups appointed by the executive branch of the task force and working group were not federal employees, the meetings should be open. (Later, the courts ruled the first lady should be treated as a does not specify what constitutes "membership" on an advisory board. Responding nominees for the government, the National Academy of Science, and other "Only federal government employees serve as members of the interdepartmental evidence that private citizens attended the working groups, and that some of them played supervisory roles. The judge was especially irritated by the Holder chided government lawyers for formulating a "sloppy," "overly Foster, he concluded his investigation by declining to prosecute affidavit, and no evidence that he had intended to willfully mislead the court. consultants who were clearly not government employees played a prominent role in the working group. Charges of criminal contempt hinge upon proving beyond a reasonable doubt that there was an intention to deceive, and even investigations of the White House, Holder's earned near universal acclaim. Even deliberately misled the court and that government lawyers acted in "bad faith," and he maintains that the appeals court might have issued an injunction the government in this case is what happened when it never corrected or updated affidavit but the government attorneys' hardball tactics and unwillingness to civil libertarians, and the computer industry are enmeshed in a controversy over cryptography policy. What is cryptography? How and why does the government want to restrict it, and why are some people opposed? Cryptography has two parts: encryption and decryption. Encryption uses complicated mathematical formulas to make information indecipherable. Decryption decodes the information. The strength of a computer encryption algorithm depends largely on "key length," essentially the number of The longer the key, the harder the code is to crack. burgeoning market for cryptography to protect electronic transactions and sensitive data from hackers. But the government is concerned that foreign powers (as well as terrorists and criminal cartels) might obtain cryptography conversations impregnable to wiretap and financial records invulnerable to domestically, it has imposed export restrictions on technology stronger restrictions have angered the computer industry. Because hackers have broken 40-bit technology, and because foreign companies already sell superstrong rest from lost sales of associated hardware and software. Critics argue that unbreakable encryption already is marketed by foreign Currently, there is no international encryption standard in place; but the encrypted data. (The 128-bit encryption currently sold by foreign companies But the administration's efforts to establish a standard administration said it would lift export restrictions on companies that use the Clipper Chip. However, the government would keep a "key," which it could use to tap a phone or decrypt data. Current rules requiring court orders for such invasions of privacy would, presumably, continue to apply. Nevertheless, civil libertarians denounced the Clipper Chip as a Big Brother intrusion, and the key escrow (dubbed "Clipper II" by opponents), companies could export strong agent, such as a bank. But key escrow flopped, too. The computer industry said introduced a bill to all but eliminate export restrictions. The legislation did not go to a vote, but it has an excellent chance of passing next year. Bob Dole President Gore offered an executive order that would ease export restrictions military office, which almost always refuses applications, to the more friendly key escrow, except there is no single key and the government holds nothing. In key recovery, a key is broken into several separate pieces of information and the pieces are stored separately, perhaps by the users themselves, perhaps by outside agents. Reconstructing the key requires the cooperation of each terrorists are likely to eschew it in favor of unbreakable technology. But if banks, airlines, and communications companies accept key recovery, the terrorists will risk potential exposure every time they do business with those institutions. Key recovery has barely been tested, much less perfected. And much control the government demands over recovered keys. In fact, many experts believe that the key recovery scheme is so vague and tentative as to be irrelevant. They say the encryption issue will only be resolved when Congress plot: The devil has come to Earth to mate at the stroke of midnight (Eastern world will end. Critics call it preposterous and filled with baffling compendium of involuntary crucifixions, grim messages carved into human flesh, animation has improved noticeably in the four years since the first one came plot is a winner: A toy must chose between eternal life in a collectibles museum and the more dangerous life at home with his beloved owner, who may guilt that a child feels for a favorite toy" that many adults have probably not exasperates the critics. "Flawless is so awful it just might put an end could catch viewers by surprise" and adds that "though formulaic, [it] plays how Brownie Wise, a struggling single mother, turned the languishing line of handed over control of sales to Wise (the first woman ever to appear on the these parties helped women isolated in 1950s suburbs gain a social network, as well as providing them with an acceptable way of earning income. When critics do get around to talking about the quality of the book, they praise its "wit critics as both slickly commercial and annoyingly didactic. The idea of the departs from the critical pack, declaring that "this mesmerizing book shows is now complete: A documentary on his life and works has aired on public irony of a sentimental illustrator, so long contemptuously dismissed by Web page lists future dates and locations for the traveling exhibit.) Journalists who write for the Internet frequently ask: Does politician X get find their answers by looking at candidate Web sites, testing their familiarity Election, though, we have an additional question: Does the Net get Election has documented, there are a large and growing number of Web sites let's say you come to the Internet without knowing precisely where you want to Click on the word "Elections" under that, and you're two clicks away from a page that contains a slew of info, including breaking news, links to all the Curiously, not all the portals we examined make it this easy. At the for example, no words such as government, politics, or elections appear on the you delve more deeply into the issues, the major portals quickly get muddy. Say system. Will it harm minorities disproportionately because it eliminates health care" into Yahoo, the engine will actually serve up some relevant sites, heaven forbid you make an error. If, like us, you initially forget to enter that provides "training, consultation and treatment services for compulsive the sort of non sequitur experience that's all too familiar to Web users. We're supposed to think: "Well, these are just dumb machines, after all. They can't really judge linguistic niceties like context." That's sort of true, but not entirely. Most search engines don't actually search the Net every time a user enters words. Rather, they sift through a collection of Web pages that have been examined and approved for use by the individual company's database. Getting a site approved by a big search engine can take up to six weeks. Not surprisingly, the premium real estate on the page that shows you the search results often goes to those who are willing to pay for it. Another way of saying this is that much of the Web is not really wired to think guidance on every issue from animal rights to women's liberation. And there resources available, they've yet to combine the Net's strongest sophistication. Moreover, typical viewers aren't apt to stumble upon these sites. Rather, they would need to know the specific Web addresses already. while we await the arrival of a truly intelligent political Web agent, we are fact, it often exhibits a grasp of reality that falls somewhere between a much money for advice which, presumably, he could've gotten for free?" Two of Online as an Internet Service Provider?" and "What should I know about though, we're not sure anyone has a good answer to that question. Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. They argued that the are mandatory, threatens to dissolve human rights, labor laws, and health and are beginning to counter the principal spins against the organization. to ask first what political terms of trade are being offered, and then to decide, based on how good or bad those terms are, whether or not to trade. By in its trade rules (thereby undermining such regulations in many countries, addresses these important issues, there will be no support for a major new protesters chanted in the streets. In a New York Times ad, a coalition going to have to listen to people who have legitimate economic concerns, decide: Do you think we are better off or worse off with an increasingly their goods and services and skills around the world? I think we're better off. That's the number one core decision we ought to make up our mind as a country global capitalism with enlightened national laws. According to the destroying "standards for safety, health and the environment" in "nations that try to protect the safety of their food, their jobs, small businesses or rights" and to "protect the ability of governments, at all levels, to use their purchasing power to reinforce their values and standards." by "local companies interlocked with local political elites in a web of cronyism and corruption. Globalization in the form of foreign direct investment by multinational corporations not only creates employment but directly threatens these local elites by exposing them to competition." Free trade "tore down the walls of economic and political oppression," said lethal by rising trade barriers from which came the twin tyrannies of our age, destructive practices and, by liberating greed, promotes these practices. By these practices. "It is not wrong for the United States to say we don't believe in child labor, or forced labor, or the oppression of our brothers and sisters But to make those arguments and resolve those issues with other nations made trade decisions more accountable and more universally beneficial than they and worry that unfettered trade will demolish it. Thanks to world capital flow, in which "everybody can do what they do best." To mitigate that instability, he promises to give people "time and support and investment to make the keep what they have than risk it for a hypothetical payoff. And while the costs of unrestricted trade tend to be visible because they're nearby and always be somewhat uncertain of their gain, whereas the people who will lose embracing free trade "will require imagination and trust and humility and constitution and police powers will protect poor countries, not exploit them. "Developing countries need a secure and stable world trading system," he says. threat to our sovereignty. I see interdependence as a guarantor of our in the United States than abroad. Others are produced more cheaply abroad than first category, while the protesters talk about the second. Two weeks ago, more than that. The national industries that will lose under global capitalism partner is the most detested woman on television, and whose claims to fame are nowhere. He has come from everywhere. Until he hit big with Live in the grad and Navy veteran, he got his start in the early '60s hosting a talk show question. Watch it once, and it seems pathetic. Watch it twice, and you begin evident talent. He does not interview guests well. He does not tell jokes. He lacks empathy. He displays no particular intelligence. He speaks in a bizarre So why is he the most watchable person on television? In "I started small and learned to keep it small. Small is friendlier and more but captivating comic persona. He is the master of umbrage. Walloped by a of the aggrieved little guy. His hyperactivity has mellowed, but not too much. and her tedious stories about her son. She punches right back. It is an reinforces his second gift: a perfect relationship with the camera. No one he has revealed everything on the show (his latest squabble with his wife, sensationalistic, confessional talk shows, he divulges everything about himself. He just doesn't have anything salacious to tell. the contestants sweat, but he's no good at it. He's too light to play the heavy. The dark suits he wears make him look like a lounge singer, not an enforcer. His voice cannot convey menace. His attempts to daunt contestants are more genial than ominous (although "Is that your final answer?" has become a you'd expect from the host. He often seems more surprised to learn the answer this ironic age: He allows the show to be both deadly serious and parody. Millionaire is portentously heavy, yet run by a man with no gravitas. It presence makes it frivolous. With a somber host, Millionaire would be inches tall--2 inches taller than the old ones. New what? conditions: "unrelenting crowding, lack of privacy, infrequent communications with family and the outside world, no ability even to go for fresh air and a matter how much you whine, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has no hate these Observer stories about how tough a supermodel's life really bear in mind: It is not the squeaky wheel that gets the grease; it is the wheel so many congressmen fly so frequently, the aviation industry gets much federal executives crashed frequently, they'd be dead and hence unable to demand such boring programs. And those few who've not yet plummeted to a fiery death possess so vivid a sense of their own mortality, that they'd instantly cancel executives rode the New York City subway, then trains, not planes, would suffer from unrelenting crowding, lack of privacy, infrequent communications with continued exclusion of women from serving on submarines. regarded as the most hidebound branch of the military (and the one most resistant to ending racial segregation), found a compelling need, in the national interest and for essential military purposes that you wouldn't understand, to sustain a reactionary social policy. What is unexpected is that the debate on submarine duty has been reopened. One reason: money. The Navy is building a new class of submarines, and it would be less expensive to include separate quarters for men and women in the initial construction than to make changes later, should women at some point be granted the vote. "a shrinking violet in her purple tunic"-- an unnecessarily catty comment have some innovative ideas on the trade pact. (Said by me. Based on no evidence again, although his actual remarks end with the word "sleep," after which I Protests continued at the World Trade Organization meeting in disperse demonstrators, hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside the city were stuck in a "Catch-22." The gloomy spin: Sensational demonstrations are obscuring substantive issues and embarrassing the United States. The rosy spin: era of cooperation in international law enforcement. The dismal spin: Poor law enforcement is what allowed these crimes to happen airports. Department of Transportation officials posed as airport the concerns and that passengers "[do] not need to be alarmed." agreement reached last weekend, a 12-member Cabinet with equal representation for Protestant and Catholic constituencies received governing authority from could be formed. Two of the Cabinet's members did not attend the first meeting. The pessimistic spin: This experiment in compromise faces "a bumpy ride." The Some Gulf War veterans exhibit signs of brain damage. Researchers found narrowing in on chemical exposure --from pesticides veterans better coverage for treatment. But skeptics cautioned that the research was inconclusive and was based on a very small sample. reduce tax rates at every income level, double the credit for children, and eliminate estate taxes. The Bush camp said the cuts' focus on middle- and underscored the compassion in Bush's conservatism. But Democrats said the plan was the same old hat, benefiting the rich, threatening to worsen the national debt, and jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare. Republican agonizing pain. He was the surviving male of the pair of pandas that was given declared that they were mourning the death of an old personality should lessen the "sense of apartness that causes us to treat so The National Academy of Sciences recommended formation of a federal government program that tracked and disseminated information on these errors would reduce patient risk. The medical community emphasized that "the number one cause of medical mistakes is not incompetence but confusion." The virtually There's no controversy here. It's an ideal opportunity to increase three people who survived the sinking of a 17-foot aluminum boat that was perished in the shipwreck, had kidnapped him. The United States says the boy with "empty nests." Newspapers said the statistics signaled the decline of increasingly recognizing that these "modern" households can work. decide by mid-2000 whether or not to begin deployment of a limited defense missile system protect the United States? Which nations pose the greatest threat to this country? And what are the diplomatic repercussions of building "Safeguard" system to defend the United States' missile silos. As permitted by a few months later as a waste of money. China, meanwhile, did not produce a the "end of the Star Wars era." Missile defense spending puttered along in upgraded to service this site, which could eventually be bolstered by other Strategically, few dispute the merits of perfecting "theater" defenses, such as the upgraded Patriot missile to swat down current dollars has been spent on missile defense since the early '60s, but the task of hitting a hypersonic bullet with a bullet remains a ticklish one. Even attackers would load their missiles with decoy warheads to foil or complicate interdiction. Critics insist that relatively cheap countermeasures will always After numerous highly publicized failures, the Pentagon to deploy next year. An independent study funded by the Pentagon warned in current technical and procedural safeguards are in place." United States and is working to supplement that force with more survivable, send in retaliation against any atomic attack, though the country would be deterrence and coercive diplomacy than as weapons of war. controversy is whether an imperfect homeland defense could eliminate the deterrent and coercive impact of small rogue missile forces. Any nation address to the weapon before firing. Detonating a smuggled warhead in the hold of a ship docked in, say, New York harbor would make much more sense, while avoiding the huge expense and trouble of building complex intercontinental Yet the prospect of an atomic apocalypse is so terrible that few can argue against spending tens of billions of dollars for insurance against remote possibilities. Here's where the debate enters the diplomatic toward intransigence seems unlikely to give the United States a free pass on faith and ideological fervor as about logic and rational calculation. If the Treasury bonds instead of lottery tickets. You might be tempted to conclude that criminals and lottery players are often the same people. That's probably basket, which suggests they should pursue either crime or the lottery, but not people to crime, it pays to understand what attracts people to risky activities more generally, so it pays to understand what attracts people to the Lotteries are attractive when they offer big prizes or (relatively) good odds. If you're running a lottery and you're going to pay former. For the most part, lottery players prefer a small chance of a big payout to a bigger chance of a smaller payout. That's because the people who prefer a bigger chance of a smaller payout are buying certificates of deposit, not lottery tickets. So if you want to make the lottery more attractive, it's better to double the size of the jackpot than to double the number of doubling the number of winners makes the lottery more attractive to the sort of person who never buys lottery tickets anyway, while doubling the jackpot makes it more attractive to the sort of person who might actually be tempted to Now let's apply the same reasoning to criminal deterrence. For the most part, criminals prefer a small chance of a big punishment to a big chance of a small punishment. That's because the people who prefer a big chance of a small punishment go into punishing careers like construction work or coal mining instead of crime. So if you want to make crime less attractive to criminals, it's better to double the odds of conviction than to double the criminals are out to beat the odds, so they get particularly demoralized when So much for the theory; now to the facts. What's true of way to generate the most action per dollar's worth of prize money (and hence the most profit for the track) is to offer very large prizes at very long odds. Why, then, do the tracks continue to offer bets with much smaller payoffs? while small prize winners plow their winnings back into the next race. That profit on the current race, while several small prizes maximize the action on the main point, which is that players like big prizes and long odds. (On inherently corrupt about a system where the proceeds from state lotteries are used to fund school systems that then have an incentive to produce the kind of let's consider the most spectacular of all crimes, murder. Here the expert is sophisticated statistical techniques to measure deterrent effects of conviction revisited the subject, refuting his most vocal critics and offering new evidence in support of his original conclusion: Increase the number of amounts to increasing the severity of the average punishment) and (again to a very rough approximation) the murder rate falls by about half a percent. (These numbers are based on evidence from the 1940s and 1950s. Capital punishment studies tend to focus on decades with more executions and hence more data.) As the theory predicts, convictions matter more than punishments. That's not to say that punishments don't matter. Executions drive home to my students. First, incentives matter, even to murderers. Second, economic theory predicts that some incentives matter more than others, and the data confirm the theory: Executions prevent murders, but convictions prevent even more murders. And finally, if you want to give policy advice, it's not that capital punishment works, is a passionate opponent of capital Appeals and the most prominent legal philosopher currently on the federal that derives legal principles from economic analysis, typically pointing at some established legal doctrine and declaring it nonsense. No area of the law that "predatory pricing" (the monopolist's act of cutting prices to kill Explorer browser) can almost never exist. He has argued for only the narrowest kinds of antitrust remedies in only the narrowest kinds of antitrust cases. he teaches two seemingly irreconcilable courses: "Law and Economics," and "Law Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President sometimes vegetarians" on the academic left. He has little time for those who "pity murderers (and penguins, and sea otters, and harp seals) more than his change in perspective is disappointingly conventional: He says he was put teaching there in the late '60s. In the spirit of law and economics, we should any of these subjects makes it difficult to shake off the mental image of the article suggested making it legal for parents to auction off their unwanted babies to the highest bidders. An essay on rape reads almost like a parody of to heavy expenditures on protecting women, as well as expenditures on overcoming those protections. The expenditures would be offsetting, and to that "guesses" and personal ideology, while hiding behind a veil of precedent. He not to feel anyone's pain, he has quite literally found safety in numbers because they are, in his view, morally neutral where pain is not. opinions contain long expository "asides" when he disagrees with the law as current position, though not one that is easy to defend in terms of economic choice, but possibly an inspired one as well. After all, the rights and wrongs sociological arguments against large and powerful corporations that are consumers economically by taking too much of their money or slowing the pace of innovation? Is there a remedy that will do more good than harm? matter of law. But who better to rationally and coldly lay out the costs and tortures it has in mind will do more harm than good, the government will have moralizing of both sides in this case than the man who really can distill Justice can choose to listen to his advice or disregard it. But they won't be able to say they weren't helped with their math homework by the very best. planted inside the State Department. Though diplomatic immunity prevents him in on behalf of many others. The King family's attorneys argued that the was convicted of the assassination, or implicated him in a larger plot. The King family's spin: This is the first step toward correcting the history books. Law enforcement's spin: The missions. Congressional critics' spin: If they can't do it right, let's cut the The White House is threatening more lawsuits against demand reimbursement for security and other costs of handgun violence. The spin: Since Congress wouldn't act, a lawsuit is the next best thing. The gun lobby's spin: The lawsuits are baseless and won't hold up in court. Newspapers' administration now says it will follow the wishes of the father. Republican presidential candidates held their second debate in a "courteous" and "chummy" affair, with "policy agreements much more conspicuous than disputes." Analysts differed as to whether Bush's subdued performance was or tepid and formulaic; but they agreed needs to be more aggressive in differentiating himself from Bush; others said A maintenance company was convicted of mishandling hazardous material people. Two employees were acquitted of lying on repair records. The company, tragedy. It wasn't a crime." Victims' families debated whether the convictions failed to agree on how to reduce trade barriers further. The meetings were embarrassment" and accused the administration of failing to make a clear case for free trade. Protesters hailed it as a victory for their movement, which they claimed had turned public opinion against of the issues, [which] strained the capacity of delegations to make decisions." football championship. For the second year, a computer ranking system, instead of coaches' and sportswriters' polls, determined the matchup. Both apparently used a gun purchased by his father to open fire on students outside student with no disciplinary record. When asked why he did it, he reportedly "a momentous agreement that will vastly improve [China's] economic landscape." The cover story explains the deal: China will open its manufacturers. Ensuing competitive pressures will reshape China's domestic Ill.: The expulsion of six black students (for fighting at a football game) education today the crisis of violence." An article explains the "constitutional etiquette" of the vice presidency. Veeps should never malign or crudely distance themselves from their presidents. In case of assassination or impeachment, the republic needs a she stood them up or sent photos of a blonde model. Some of the relationships article exposes the National Enquirer 's mob origins. The newspaper was bankrolled by Mafia loans in the '50s, and gangsters leaned on newsstand dealers who refused to sell it. When the publisher realized real news wasn't profitable, he turned it into a scandal sheet. An item pokes "conscience management," helping their celebrity clients pick philanthropic great cover story stunt exposes the impossibility of electronic five minutes. Within a week the snoop had discovered his unlisted phone numbers, bank balances, stock holdings, and salary, as well as the phone numbers of everyone he calls. To protect your privacy, ask your bank to restrict access to your records and beg your member of Congress for legislative cover story profiles a day trader who learns his financial fundamentals from the Web and trusts his "feel" for stocks. If his luck holds (as it doesn't for "looks like a man hugging a slot machine." An article an "Interstate Sky Way" to ease traffic jams. A pair of inventing brothers is giant parachute for safer crash landings. An essay explains why journalists always view politicians "through a dehumanizing prism." passengers. Icons such as Hello Kitty adorn ATM cards, cell phones, and even condoms. The omnipresence of cute is a symptom of Japan's fetish for childhood. An article explains why Al Gore lost the allegiance of Silicon Valley. Gore promoted the growth of the Internet more than any other figure in soaring price of prescription drugs. Seniors are mobilizing, Al Gore is advertising his opposition to "price gouging," and drug companies are filling the airways with attacks on Democratic plans to extend Medicare coverage to difficulty reading because they are unable to break words into their constituent parts. Research indicates that dyslexia is an inherited neurological problem. Early intervention and phonics can help dyslexics catch policy vision: "[The United States] should not retreat" but should "be humble intelligence (or lack of it)? A picture of him reading his own recently (sending answers by pager) make cheating easier than ever. Character education could help. An article follows the Wild Yak Brigade, a vigilante group that cartoon issue. A piece explains that the primary purpose of New Yorker cartoons is to caricature the human condition. Proof: The magazine's archives argues that Al Gore is his own worst enemy. Gore's best argument for his Suckling details his successful environmental extremism, founded oddly on relativism," Suckling believes in undoing man's dominion over the Earth. Using the Endangered Species Act, Suckling has sued to halt logging, ranching, cattle grazing, and construction throughout wide swaths of the Southwest. cover story decries the concentration in media ownership. Deregulation, privatization, and new technologies allow nine transnational Conglomeration encourages cultural homogenization and consumerism. An pluralism is vital to democracy. Using the Web, alternative outlets can when the college learned that he had been having an affair with his values, and courage can still triumph in a corrupt world." The college refuses caved to corporate pressure. "The Insider shouldn't be the (Lions Gate Films Inc.). Despite protests from the Catholic more, this "obviously devout, enlightened parable" about a pair of rebellious apostle, a muse, and a messenger from God. (Click here to check out the film's official site and here to see what the Catholic League has to say about surprisingly good chemistry. (Visit the official site.) that the band's lyrics "make a case that there are still some things worth contributions to the band's otherwise excellent music to "rodent droppings at a gourmet dinner." (Click here to read Rolling Stone 's cover story on the disturbing question one of her granddaughters recently asked. "This was kind of chilling, because it wasn't even like I could say, 'No, no, it's not going to discovered that two buns and a piece of string make an excellent gas frustration and hassle and, though it is in no way connected with or its parent company, the outcome of yesterday's voting in convention hall where the World Trade Organization meeting was scheduled, to eat any more of that kind of food," he declared. "Except for the fries, The protests forced the postponement of the opening undermine health, labor and environmental protections around the world." emergency, put the city under a curfew, and called in the National Guard. A small group of masked protesters did damage property, but the vast majority of the demonstrators were peaceful. Police in riot gear responded with what the Times called "tear gas, pepper spray and rubber pellets." this year when Hello Kitty collectible toys were made available to the public. Young women (who are, for some reason they are unable to articulate, the primary consumers of Hello Kitty products) would line up around the block in order to get their hands on the dolls. I, however, am partial to Hello Kitty's herbs in a pamphlet touting the Woman's Book of Healing Herbs sauce, "the usual accompaniment to roast lamb." If only the lamb had been a little more mentally alert, of course, all this unpleasantness could have been mentioned, but ask yourself this, is a family vacation really something you hell is going on over there? Should someone call the cops? Now I can't even invited to submit the title of a much needed but as yet unwritten autobiography enough responses to allow for our usual scientific survey. (Curiously, it did forward several promising invitations to make big money at home with hot teen catch a glimpse of the tremendously creepy sets, visit the film's official and the plot irrelevant (something about oil pipelines). Critics say that this Journal calls the plot "schematic" and "synthetic" and says the film "loses boy's father and in the process encounters women from all walks of sort of quantum 3-D fax machine with the ability to digitize people and send interested in people and their inner workings as he is in things and their inner workings," but that doesn't stop the book from being fun to read: "It's insubstantial shadows on a screen and Timeline is not a novel, but a two brothers, both professors of English, who become obsessed with gambling after their parents' deaths: "superb and horrifying" (Tom De Haven, doozy: They are charged with conspiring to cheat at blackjack, even though they (The charges have since been dropped.) "What Double Down teaches that attacks" and "scare tactics." Everyone is accusing everyone else of negative campaigning, but nobody's answering the question that ought to come first: What's wrong with negative campaigning? Politicians and journalists pretend to explain this through a series of platitudes, none of which are convincing. taught "If he doesn't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." him of forsaking his "pledge of chivalry" by criticizing Gore's modest proposals for health care and gun control. But what's so great about being nice Bush. If they're right, the worst thing they can do for the country is to misrepresentations. But that would have been impolite.) But where's the virtue in such aloofness? Why should Bush get credit for instead of a "positive vision," based on the calculation that it's "easier to campaign against your opponent than for yourself." Last week, former Labor negative about Gore. Since elections are comparative, the difference between campaigning "against your opponent" and campaigning "for yourself" is semantic. awful, until you remember that nobody has been attacked, bashed, slashed, travel schedules and public announcements so the vice president can finance his political campaign with taxpayer dollars when his funds run out." Rather than campaign." But isn't a campaign exactly the place where Gore should be confronted if he has indeed abused his position and violated the spirit of the agrees that a candidate who has been criticized is uniquely entitled to respond stand like this forever and let someone slap my face." But why does it matter challenging the ad. "I am appalled that people would attack a woman who obviously lived through tremendous trauma, has her views, and expressed them," "wrong" that Gore is "using race or ethnicity to try to scare people." But if Gore's assertion is true, what's wrong with conveying it to the ethnic groups charge, which implies that Gore is using fear and rhetoric to bypass rational atmosphere" with "divisiveness." "I believe the public wants solutions that What's wrong with informing certain segments of the electorate that your their expense? If you're lying, shame on you. But if you're telling the truth, "blow the whistle on candidates" who "tear down other Republicans." Meanwhile, conservatism? Does loyalty to party supersede loyalty to country? kind of negative spots that he did against Dole," because "four years ago he was a message candidate. Now he believes he can be president." But what's wrong with "alienating" voters from bad programs and bad candidates? And isn't it nobler to deliver a depressingly true "message" than to shade the truth so you launching negative attacks on Al Gore," a Gore spokesman crowed last week. How does the fact that such attacks are "typical" clarify whether Gore is right campaigning is the oldest trick in the book. And the next oldest trick, if you can't answer the charge, is to whine about negative campaigning. transplanted the nuclei of human white blood cells into the egg cells of cows and applied electric shocks to fuse them. The cells began segmenting but stopped after three cycles. Had the cells continued segmenting, as normal cells do, they could have (theoretically) been implanted into a human uterus and the experiment may have violated a government policy that forbids university distribution of human organs and look into urban legends, such as the one in join the archive (all slightly abridged for the protection of privacy, that that it won't be available until after he "has exhausted his appeals College went shopping for a new president, its advertising copy quipped, "We need someone who is prepared to lead us through a process that questions the necessity of a president in the first place." Questioning the necessity of the current president is the newly unionized faculty, which recently filed a as "labor negotiations tactics" and described the call for a new president students beat back the law with a referendum that won by a 46-vote margin extravagant personal items at the expense of the federal government. government wants to bust the drug policy professor. The Department of Health heroin use in New York City's toughest neighborhoods. But a federal complaint, from all major religious traditions as well as novels, essay collections, might be surprised that The Lord of the Rings made the list. "I do think it's the quintessential tale of good and evil, a deeply moral tale. And that College mathematicians are overhauling the undergraduate math curriculum now understand the concepts and theories underlying their number crunching. "I want curriculum, which will be voluntary, is due in two years. over" a spouse's affair? How long does it take for the hurt to lessen? healing takes different amounts of time for different people. Alas, some people yourself some time to see how things play out and see how you're feeling about six years to my present husband, and he insists that my daughter should refer husband by his first name, which infuriates him because he believes it is disrespectful. My daughter insists he doesn't deserve to be called "Dad" and now only makes reference to "him" when mentioning her stepfather to friends or relatives. Please advise about what would be the most appropriate way to handle a real beaut. The form of address, you understand, is merely the battleground for the simmering war between them. Your daughter won't call him "Dad," which never heard of anyone saying, "Stepdad, please pass the salt," so forget that one. Someone, maybe a family counselor, needs to deal with the alienation the youngster feels and the hostility harbored by your husband. If you can find a way to deal with and improve their relationship, what she calls him will become a moot point. Reading between the lines, it may be that the child's biological office where she pulled out this "book of friends." In it she had a page for each of her friends, and on my page was listed what I gave her and the date she accountant's mind has gone too far. I mean, you can't measure everything, and keeping a ledger on your friends is odd. I told her this, and she said that in is one sandwich shy of a picnic. What she is referring to is God's accounting, not hers. The poor dear must have been reading Marvel comics in school when the substance of one's life is created by good deeds, but a ledger toting up the policeman who asked a driver what gear she was in at the moment her car hit months now, and we seem to be more like roommates than a married couple. I don't know if he's cheating on me, but he has been acting strangely. He's been me it's because he goes to have coffee with his boss after they close the store where he works. I don't know whether my marriage is over and whether to talk to him about all this and ask if we can work things out. One thing I do know is that if my husband is cheating, I wouldn't be able to stay with him. man and ask. He may, however, not level with you. In any case, girlfriend or pool parlor, you must get the problem out in the open. territory. If this is not a typo, you are far too young to be dealing with all the factors you mention. Confront your husband with both your suspicions and your awareness that things have gone off track. See where the conversation goes. If he has a million complaints, consider counseling (if he's willing) or separate maintenance. You cannot live like this and needn't tolerate his crowding, lack of privacy, infrequent communications with family and the outside world, no ability even to go for fresh air and a view." Who is providing sullen and resentful counterexamples), but from time to time organization offers a variety of reproductive options and defends a woman's obvious that some of you haven't seen the new hominid penis. there's a flaw in this, but I can't think of it now. New York City public school students, K-12, thanks to the filtering program After initially lying, insisting it had received no complaints, the board shifted to the more reliable techniques of equivocating and trivializing its critics, insisting that there was no problem, and if there was it was small, and temporary, and that those who complained were just a bunch of complainers whose purpose is just to make some complaints. plans to remove or modify this software, although individual schools may phone Church from distributing condoms in city parks as part of AIDS education City of New York vs. Jerks Who Cross Against the Light --attempt to impose corporal punishment on those who impede any car any time with their damn magazine from making fun of the mayor in ads on the sides of buses. "article" and could not fathom how (or why) a supposed intelligent adult could possibly say those things. It upset her greatly. She has never seen a panda in person, and while they are not the liveliest animals, I know her eyes would light up and her smile would be from ear to ear at being able to view one for herself. I believe you need to grow up and start looking at the positive things in the world. You have got to be the saddest thing I have ever encountered. tendency to ascribe cutesy attributes to wild creatures. Animals, even the fluffy ones, really don't care if the whole human race lives or dies. They'd press the nuclear launch button if it got them a chunk of meat or a herring for a reward. They're not good or evil, they are just mindless slaves to instinct and the food chain. By all means enjoy them, just stop once in a while to explain to your kids that the Care Bears and Flipper aren't the real thing. lives who need your attention a whole lot more than pandas do. And the when your mommy threw your teddy bear out, at age16. it lie with the developing countries who tolerate less than ideal environmental take advantage of those conditions, or the consumers who happily buy the to enable slavery in return for economic development. The country would allow corporations to buy citizens for labor as long as they provided decent housing, food and medical treatment. In return, the country would enforce the property rights with the nation's police power. Since famine was endemic in this country, it is probable that the slaves would have a higher standard of living than would be available to them in the "free" sector. The corporation would have the advantage of a stable workforce that could be trained and experienced with no threat of the employee jumping to the competitor. And I both serve on the Board of the Corporation on National Service and have to remember. So, what side should I take in this interesting dialogue? of their revenues (on average) now come from the US Treasury (or its state equivalents), along with lots of strings that significantly compromise their independence. And I have not run across any of them that would prefer an end to these arrangements. One now even finds conservatives and libertarians proposing to expand them under the headings of "charitable choice" and "school somehow violates the integrity of the nation's voluntary associations, but whether it offers any advantages over our current ways of doing so. I think it bidding than grants to do government's bidding. That's probably cheaper their "accomplishments," which the Corporation scrupulously collects, since such studies do not usually reveal if these results might have occurred anyway tries to be the "junior partner" in its relationship with its grantees, long intensive period of their lives to giving something back to their society and learning the civic skills upon which our voluntary tradition relies. Even with that the spirit upon which it (and much else that's worthwhile) depends is as an "honorable gentleman" would be considered flattery but, where I come count. For the past six years I have lived next door to his zoo, and hardly a week passes when I don't jog or stroll through its grounds. I watched million people had visited him during his life sentence at the National Zoo. visitors. He was a wonderful "diplomat" between China and the United States. He world needs all the teddy bears it can get," mourned one Post leading panda biologist, describes giant pandas as perfectly symbolic animals. With their lovely fur, clumsy movements, and goofy faces, they seem the embodiment of innocence, childishness, and vulnerability. This is also the But behind the pretty face lurks, well, a bore. If we're going to anthropomorphize pandas, let's be realistic about it. The idea that pandas are treks to the pandas' cell and yard, I never once saw them be playful or affectionate or active or even violent. Compared to almost any other animal in They led a life of unparalleled tedium. Pandas are Mother Nature's couch potatoes. They are staggeringly lazy, so slothful they avoid climbing trees because it's too tiring. Their entire lives are spent eating bamboo and were also unpleasant. Confinement depresses zoo animals, and the pandas were no attempt to mate was played as comic opera, but it was much darker. At first ear and her arm. (He may have been inept because he never learned about mating Another seems to have been killed by a urinary tract infection acquired from carrots up her urinary tract, surely neurotic behavior. the pandas in the wild, and buy a few more seals instead. After all, the could just stick some bamboo in his paws, return him to his old cage, and claim they had received a new panda. No one would notice the difference. cards we still have to play. Beyond that, I think that, frankly, the likelihood of success is quite small." Who said this about what desperate effort to save National Institutes of Health, "I don't often pick up a scientific paper and lab animals copulating frenziedly, unaware of the death that awaited participants (thoughtful in the sense of "acutely thinking," not in the sense fear and joy, particularly erotic joy. That the first sort of chill is easily entertainment: To be scared is a short step from being sexually aroused. (Hold me!) This theory goes a long way to explain vampire movies, which are both; and may also be that any intense emotion can be transformed into any other, which passionate quarrel can culminate in a yet more passionate reconciliation. It may also explain the expression "scared stiff" (in the sense of tumescent, not in the sense of immobilized by drunken overindulgence in a gift bottle of myself getting chills, as I did when I saw this whole chromosomal Dr. Collins was reacting to an account of the first Last week, participants were asked for the title of responses about President Carter and that attack rabbit are just now trickling in, so look for those tomorrow. In the meantime, a few more campaign bios: long last, there's a cure for the intractable problem of the "undecided" voter. actually tell you who you should vote for. Simply type in your opinions on a range of issues, and the site tells you which candidate agrees with you that produces Web sites to help with all sorts of complicated decisions (its slogan is, "Before You Decide"). In addition to the Presidential Candidate Selector, the company offers a Lawn Grass Selector, a Pet Selector, a Hair from abortion to defense spending to free trade, and also asks you to choose whether you feel "strongly" or "somewhat strongly" about each of those stands. You can also answer "no preference" to any of the questions. When you're done, the program spits out a list of all the presidential candidates, ranked and scored in order of how closely their platforms match your views. users found that the candidate for whom they intend to vote appeared at the top The poll doesn't ask the far more interesting question of how many users might crafted some sloppy questions. One asks users about whether they advocate teaching evolution or creationism in schools. This is not exactly an issue for the next president, but in any case, giving it the same weight as such topics phrasing is without nuance and sometimes without sense. For example, the Selector asks, "Would you prefer your candidate promise to protect or reform (or even abolish) Social Security?" This question is impossible to answer from the choices provided. The distinction between protecting and reforming Social things, from minor tweaks (the addition of individual savings accounts) to more radical fixes (replacing Social Security taxes with privately managed options for answers are just as clumsy as the questions. The "somewhat" button less urgent issue for me than others. Indeed, the site doesn't allow you to designate which issues are most important to you. You may care about gun control far more than you do about anything else, but unless you leave the biggest problem with the Presidential Selector, though, is that it reflects an utterly unrealistic sense of how people choose candidates. It undermines itself superficial factors such as advertising, hype, and image, and allows voters to base their choices solely on the issues. But few people make up their minds on the basis of positions alone. The site does not try to measure intangibles like now, the site is most helpful to the minor candidates, whom it gives the same number of people who found themselves matched to him have become followers. answers were formulated more precisely, the site could make for a fascinating exercise. It would allow you to see how closely you line up with the candidate for whom you intend to vote, and thereby tell you whether your attraction is based on a congruence of views or a more ephemeral sense of goodwill. The technology might usefully be applied in local races, in which it's hard to sort out the platform of every potential state senator, judge, school board official, and city council member. But for now, the Candidate Selector is no Jersey, volunteers opened crates and pulled out pheasants, then, holding them by the legs, spun the birds around to make them dizzy; this is one feature of a program whose uneasy combination of private and state funding is drawing increasing criticism nationwide. What is the program called? In part to accommodate older people, federal standards now mandate that "Curbs. Oh, the fun we'll have watching geezers struggle to get out of the old 4-inch magic elves were completely useless for anything except making peoples, the elderly are cherished and respected for their funny smell. That's like an actual large intestine. Who can blame him for lying to the gullible young? He had every reason to be angry: Old age is an unforgivable insult. disturbing vividness.) The elderly are damned if they do and damned if they don't; damned and mocked if they can't; and damned, mocked, and pointed out by the neighbors if they can but only with pharmacological aids or an elaborate arrangement of winches and pulleys. The sad fact of an extended life span is that you get those extra years tacked on at the end, extending your frailty and neglect, not added to your 20s, extending your time in ersatz anthropology classes. The other horrifying consequence of a greatly extended life Administration predicts that by 2020--and I know a cheap joke when I see it, Every commercial enterprise makes assumptions about science has taken the drudgery out of playing with your kitty and reduced the HANDY GIFT FOR A HANDYMAN: "a collection of reproduction nails and the history behind them."-- The energy you save by not playing with your cat, you BASS FISHING MONOPOLY; GOLF MONOPOLY-- coming soon, Substandard Nursing Home Monopoly, Constant Joint Pain Monopoly, Gradual Loss of Memory SHIRTS WITH FUNNY SLOGANS-- the greatest affront of all to the dignity of The spaceship comes down in your backyard, crushing a bed of petunias, and out steps the alien. This is always an awkward social moment. What, exactly, do you say to someone who may hold the secrets to the universe? After, that is, you finish quivering and quaking and wondering if he (she? it?) is going to suck you down like a raw oyster? and abduct people are notoriously stingy with information. They never solve any When aliens do communicate with humans, they're always a beach, face to face with an alien. The alien, annoyingly, doesn't seem to know what is no doubt her most urgent question: "I want to know what you think of Wow. That's really the wrong question there. That's blowing it big time. This gal crosses half the galaxy and is tossed and rattled around to within an inch of her life, and when it's over she starts fishing for are you made of? Are you based on carbon and liquid water? Do you have precede the biological ones. They might, for example, choose a political question, asking who, exactly, is in charge of this universe. Or they may skew theological, and ask if there's a God and what exactly he's got on his made that a physicist should pose the first batch of questions to an alien, asking whether it's possible to go faster than the speed of light and whether there are other universes outside our own. The physicist and the alien would no doubt get embroiled in a discussion of string theory, and soon they'd be jotting down incomprehensible equations about 10-dimensional vibrating loops. Maybe at the end of the encounter we'd figure out how to yank free energy out of the quantum vacuum. We'd have a new trick for cooking a hot dog. My feeling is that the biology questions trump everything else. We know essentially nothing about life beyond Earth. Because we are ignorant of other biological systems, we have no context for understanding Earth life, for knowing to what extent the life we see around us is, on the cosmic scale, relatively ordinary or totally freakish. and what appears to be common are planets that have no life whatsoever. We also hundreds of millions of years became inhospitable. Bad stuff happens to good planets. It'd be nice to know more about that trend. We also don't know how life originates and to what extent evolution misses the real debates within the field. There are those who argue passionately that life originated with a single replicated molecule. Another camp favors the notion that it began with a kind of garbage bag of molecules may be to what extent evolution is divergent or convergent. Divergence gives us a bewildering variety of life; convergence gives rise, repeatedly, to certain anatomical features, like wings and eyeballs. You can make an argument that intelligence is an extremely unlikely, random, quirky event in terrestrial coming down the pike from many millions of years in advance. On that issue hinges the abundance of intelligent life in the universe. through the same evolutionary leaps as life on Earth? To take one obscure but years. For at least half of that time, those cells didn't have a nucleus. They couldn't use oxygen in their metabolism. They were pitiful even by microbial standards. So, how lucky was the evolutionary leap from prokaryotes life, in general, figure out the trick of using oxygen and growing big and really know what we're talking about when we talk about "intelligence." We tend to think of creatures that use technology and language. But that could be swimming in an alien ocean with little interest in building spaceships. Imagine for a moment that we could see the universe through the eyes of an alien creature. Would the universe look more or less the same? Or would we be confused, dazzled, and feel as though we were hallucinating? interest us? Could we carry on a meaningful conversation? ourselves for finding something out there that's totally unexpected. And we have to prepare for bad news, or at least bad news in the context of our Star Trek fantasy. We may have wildly overestimated the abundance of civilizations in existence right now in our own galaxy. The actual number may argued, "functionally alone." Not literally alone, just so isolated that there's no practical way to make contact of any kind with another intelligent Whatever we do, we shouldn't take ourselves for granted. There may be something extremely rare and wonderful about a world in which years, where it has the leisure to evolve and, through natural selection, back to our own existence. Why are we this way? How did we come about? How special is it to be a thinking organism? This is the kind of stuff you'd want to discuss with the aliens. And remember, they like it when you compliment them young team, we're not feeling any pressure to outperform last year, we have great chemistry, and our shortstop bakes the best lemon bars in Major League Oxford Street today was the scene of 'Pedophiles on Parade,' a joyous no number is less evocative than six. Consider movie titles. Run up to seven and you'll find that every other number has better films-- One Flew Over the It's not that six is too big a number; climb one more and you get to Seven left rivals floundering yesterday when we broke the news that the Premier and that you're getting your train perceptions from old movies. Or you do ride drawing of a girl on her front porch shouting something about the man in the suit struggling up the path with a huge globe on his shoulders. (For readers who have never seen a cartoon and don't know how a caption works, the editors explain that "Mom, Dad forgot the pizza!" would be one possibility.) Mom, a homeless guy threw a huge globe at Dad's head! Mom, Dad replaced the continents with poorly rendered squiggly shapes. Mom, why is The New Yorker stealing contest ideas from the Berlin Wall, former President Bush reminisced about some bad advice he received a decade ago: "In my view, that would have been an open provocation, tantamount to sticking our fingers in the eyes of the Soviet military." Who wanted to flash her black sports bra as she went through Checkpoint institution reduced to a tattered geriatric remnant of its former self. But enough about me. Let's consider President Bush's nostalgic invocation of the indomitable men and women of that mighty force to stop the German army outside times, they're over so quickly. Today, alas, what comes to mind is a couple of bad baritones from the Red Army Chorus, drunk on antifreeze, trying to convince Capitol Hill suggested that I come over here to the Berlin Wall and dance on the wall," said President Bush. "Without wearing underwear," he did not add. "As if I ever wear underwear!" he then went on not to conclude. dismissed as a troublemaker for asking seditiously, "What's with all those footballs, basketballs, tetherballs, and volleyballs, why do we have to play mail server have meant that many responses arrived too late to appear in the quiz. These were, without a doubt, the funniest answers each of you has ever written, and they would certainly have run on the first page. It may be some comfort to you, as it is for me, that this is something we can, clearly touched a nerve. Trounced a nerve, even. He has responded the way his his or her autobiographical alter egos. On the basis of the family depicted in that a more complicated relationship to the world began. neighborhood and when desegregation is starting to bring together disparate party on the WASP side of town, where Van goes gaga for a chill blonde goddess a dying burlesque house whose side business, the illegal numbers racket, has work simply anymore. He wants to make an epic. So he spreads the narrative thin, and the script plays like a first draft. It's full of wonderful bits that don't mesh (some of them could be spun off into their own movies) and with Chambers), a glamorous, rich WASP who's fond of crashing cars and who takes bones? No clue from the actors, who look uniformly marooned. The crosscutting among the movie's various strands is even weirder. While Van and his buddies comb wealthy neighborhoods for a glimpse of up doffing her conservative street clothes on stage to wild acclaim. Is "gentile" theme. The director has backed away from what appears to be his real, generation between a compulsion to embrace other cultures and a feeling of superiority toward them. That idea is hilariously embodied by his best the "other kind" is often wryly funny, and when they show up at the familiar chance to get something unique and audacious on screen: the story of a Critics have been falling all over themselves to announce years ago, when his silly, campy, and impassioned melodramas were like joyous side of All About Eve (1950)--as a tale of women not bitchily at one senseless tragedies. (The definition of women here is broad enough to include transvestites and transsexuals.) Things that might once have been screamingly campy are now played "straight": People dramatize their emotions but rarely overdramatize them. And even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant equivalent fantasies, but we'd be ashamed to expose ourselves by putting them upshot of his refusal to be bested by social or sexual inferiors. The actor is still sleek, but the touch of crepe paper around his face has eliminated the wrinkled, because fine tailoring appears to be all this man has. He even winces in pain a couple of times, and in the climax lets out a grunt that takes the you've heard, although that's not saying a lot. I confess I always want to like human touch to the series. There's only so much a director can do with the most previous kidnapping attempt. Plus, she has a long, rounded chin that I find guy comes shambling on and turns out to be such a soulful twit, the movie loses It's not so bad that the blows aren't heavily amplified, but when the bad guys get it there isn't that extra sadistic beat to let you know how surprised they are that their aura of invincibility has been punctured. I kept thinking, "Kill years ago, Al Gore and his fellow Democrats had great sport with the gaffes of botched the United Negro College Fund slogan ("What a waste it is to lose one's mind"), etc. A few months ago, Republicans turned this tactic on Gore, mocking his suggestion that he had helped "create the Internet." Now Gore is applying principle of negative campaigning: If you don't have something nice to say States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." A day later, "cracked up" over Gore's claim: "If the vice president created the Internet, then I created the interstate highway system." In a satirical press release, Gore's Internet claim to similar assertions that he "lived on a farm" and "undertook the task to reinvent the Federal government." The ad accused Gore of malice. They seized on a single misstatement, exaggerated it, and inflated it into a comprehensive critique of the candidate. In each case, the statement was security, and the weakness was stupidity. In Gore's case, the rationale is economic progress, and the weakness is taking undue credit. way to slip the accusation past this barrier of incredulity is to pose the idea planted in the voter's head this way, the voter thinks it was his idea to begin has gradually applied this lesson to his criticism of Gore. In his campaign administration think they invented [prosperity]. But they did not invent reinventing government, it makes you wonder how this administration was ever skilled enough and efficient enough to create the Internet." asked Gore whether Bush should "have been able to identify the leaders of countries a week ago. In the quiz, Bush had failed to name three of those overthrown the country's elected government, recently "took over office is going to bring stability to the country, and I think that's good news for the sympathize with those who say that that's not really a fair test. I think that it is troubling that he didn't know [that] it's important to stand up for democracy, and that a military coup overthrowing a democracy is not good news. And I think it's important and troubling that he didn't know it's in our interests to stop the spread of nuclear weapons with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I mean, this is a part of the world where it's probably most likely that you're going to see serious problems in the future unless something's went on: "But not knowing the names I think that's kind of understandable. I ribbed Gore over the joke, and the media have been playing with it ever since. joke may look funny, but as a political kidney punch, it's dead serious. Bush's etc.) and has a track record as a bad and indifferent student. By criticizing Bush's answers to the world affairs quiz, Gore is trying to inflate Bush's weakness and discredit Bush's rationale. And by following up his serious ignorance of the region's nuclear importance) with a lighthearted recitation of the leaders of obscure countries, Gore is sugarcoating his indictment of Bush so that listeners will laugh, swallow, and absorb it. cynically oversimplified Gore's statement about the Internet. And it's true that Gore is now doing the same to Bush. But it's also true that in every case, last lifting the burden of terror and violence and shaping the future of the which has always been skeptical about the peace process, led with the headline noted in its lead story that the signs that things have changed "for ever" with and culture" during the past two decades. Cursed by emigration since the potato with the English invariably cast as the villain of the piece. The complete reconciliation with the north, and an outreach to the wider world," the paper the new executive. The tabloid Daily Mirror surrounded this with the smiling faces of the leading participants in the peace settlement under the headline for a huge headline: "Peace: Let's All Pray It Lasts." "In one way or another, certainty, it is the people who are sovereign. We have, all of us, nationalists, unionists, republicans and loyalists, gained from this certainty." Praising the contributions of "some extraordinary people, including we have shown in recent weeks and months, we can overcome all of the obstacles to achieving a lasting peace." The prime minister was pictured on the paper's and the whole place became brightened the way the sky does when heaven's candle said in an editorial that it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of beyond its mandate by proposing a compromise that would allow discussion of next round of negotiations. "In theory the Guardian is now an official delegate to the talks, can deliver speeches, introduce policies, and make minister could well be in love with his adviser. Her eyes flash. They lean denied that the president has any foreign accounts or property. leaders, issued separate statements committing themselves to pursuing their conflicting objectives by "exclusively peaceful and democratic" means. The Guardian said the statements transformed the political landscape and "extraordinary gamble" and demanded he come clean about what, if anything, the of the well, it said. "Only the city engineers didn't know about it and have continued to deny its existence even after the collapse." "diplomatic achievement." He said the United States now says that its recent "It's a typical reaction," he said. "In the 1980s we had deep ties with China, and we also had meetings with diplomats and everybody knew about it, but they erect "roadblocks" to slow the influx of goods, services, and ideas after it among State Council ministries and most regional administrations," wrote Willy government control of major enterprises, enshrined by the Central Committee and extreme views seldom win," it said. "And a careful consideration of the States to do its own private deal with China. "More aggressive economic in the Oval Office. "He grasped my hands firmly," she writes. "He has beautiful spellbound. The man has palpable sex appeal, and is much taller and slimmer "It rains here almost every day. The day it does not, it is overcast. But politically embarrassed. The world is watching. What do they see? A major city certainly there in huge numbers and upset about something. That, rather than anything specific, they said, was the message." He described them "in their he argued that what they were really doing was protesting against the are, any monopoly of political thought, however valid it may seem, becomes people are beginning, however uncertainly and inarticulately, to look for an the aircraft permission to land despite the fact that it was out of fuel. In air force. The inspection by Li Peng, chairman of China's National People's Congress, was added to his timetable at the last moment, the paper said. It likely to increase at an exponential rate if adequate national response is not mounted to stem its spread. While there is a window of opportunity, this window generation rests on whether governments and companies can join forces to countries, the number of new cases in Japan is on the rise. father, apparently injuring his head. The incident was alleged to have taken Gore is "top of the class, very cultivated, and well up on everything," while Bush's "total lack of political culture is obvious and is frightening," she Gore adviser, Brown said: "The savage fury against Wolf is the most sinister Talk Media Inc., about reports that Talk is in crisis and is about to be Health, "I don't often pick up a scientific paper and find myself getting granddaughters recently asked. "This was kind of chilling, because it wasn't rampaging anarchists ever going to ransack our neighborhood Arts and Sciences is going to come to your home and demand the return of the reader responses to today's quiz, except a few that slipped through enemy say that my neighbors are pretty annoyed at the pebbles inadvertently flung at their windows.) However, I have been given the usual meaningless reassurances that this problem will be corrected shortly. Complaints can be sent directly to possibilities of gun violence and not a request for the sweet release that course he didn't. That's just the rum cake talking. If there was rum cake. How for the title of a much needed but unwritten autobiography of any national which the will of God comes apocalyptically into conflict with Catholic ruin this review, since there are nearly as many convolutions in the narrative as there are in Scripture. I first wrote about Dogma (and Smith's edgy New York Film Festival amid demonstrations by the Catholic League and other first. The angels' wings are cool. They look like genuine flesh, blood, and cartilage, especially when they're clipped, and they literally add texture to effects that might have seemed, well, featherweight. Dogma is the first On reflection, however, I think that Smith was being a tad disingenuous when he said at his press conference that he wasn't expecting an angry reaction. Yes, he's a good Catholic boy, but he's also schooled in the works of that very bad Catholic boy, John Waters. Yes, he wanted to affirm his Let's go further and admit that Smith is not merely organized religion needs a better tread. He's blaming the indifferent status of fundamental religious impulse. In the film, there is no counterweight to Rock's humans need so many rules and regulations to keep from following their animal natures into despair and anarchy. The tone of Dogma might be searching, set off a similar firestorm, Smith has earned the wrath. He should just say: "I meant to piss you off, just don't start any pogroms or shoot me." Dogma that rattles peoples' cages. Most millennial apocalypse fantasies have been promulgated by the religious right, which wants to frighten people into repenting their liberal attitudes toward the Scripture. Outside of weird rhetoric and their symbols for his own, decidedly less Moral Majoritarian ends. You can imagine the doomsayers storming out of theaters and fuming, "Whose fired her. It swerves left then right as she pulls on locked doors in a vain attempt to evade the plant's security. It's sickeningly in the thick of things as she claws at her pursuers and shrieks that it's unfair, she's a good worker, she doesn't deserve to be let go. Throughout this terse, entertaining parable through the woods to reach the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother (she's too ashamed to go through the front entrance); her frustrating treks to find employment, however menial; and, most of all, her countless rages at a society that refuses to grant her a "normal" (her word) existence. people lose the big picture and so have no insight into their own corruption. with just a trace of prettiness, especially when she opens her eyes and lets the world see in. She mostly doesn't, though, which is the point. She tromps capitalism is fundamentally at odds with human decency. People are good, but they're driven to victimize others by the fear that what they have will be taken away. At best, they turn into machines; at worst (most of the bosses), they become casual exploiters. You can't land a job without being raked by the angry gaze of the person you've unfairly replaced, and once you have it there are no guarantees that tomorrow you won't be raking someone else with your own angry gaze. Change the way things work and you will change mankind, is the consciousness begins. The next step is anyone's guess. plucking a waffle from the iron, grabbing a beer from the shelf, counting money, making change, saying thank you, taking another order It's easy to dismiss films that make grandiose statements about how people ought to live but never convincingly portray how they do. The utterly believable capitalist becomes clear that her young man has caddishly given her the slip. The girl is a naive, but her mixture of optimism and spooky prescience gives her at odds with his pleasantries: He might well be a psychopath who has preyed "The goodness is in the warmth, they say," and I half expected maggots to swarm best films have tricky textures: They double and triple back on themselves in ways that play against the characters' bland visages and the often sterile political dominance, are now battling for Web supremacy. Who's winning? countered just days later. The early sites were little more than electronic brochures, posting propaganda but not soliciting much information in return. Soon after launching, both began seeking online donations and sending experiment in providing Web access to party adherents. detail the Democratic stance on every issue from affirmative action to welfare. though it doesn't actually post clips to watch. The Democrats also recently Internet technology, opening an online store that allows Democratic recently remodeled site has an "Online Activist" section that enables surfers pioneered but eventually abandoned). Users can purchase elephant paperweights enterprise. The video and audio clips load slowly. When I tried to view the successive days. The Republican policy info offered in the "Key Issues" section page is replete with unflattering photos of Al Gore, while the national report. (The presidential contenders, seeking swing surfers, neglect to mention party affiliation on their Web sites. The parties don't return that neglect. "affinity service provider" and portal. The customized Internet entryway will provide traditional news along with plenty of party propaganda. Subscribers together. The party will pocket a portion of the monthly service fee. Democrats are planning to launch their own Internet access business, too. discover which religious denominations have the best sex, they learned that the faithful don't do all their shouting in church. Conservative Protestant women, they achieve orgasm every time they make love. Mainline Protestants and agnostics and unbelievers are not? Education may explain some of their sexual satisfaction. (Click for how.) But they also may be getting better sex advice. golden age for Christian sex manuals. Evangelicals may not want their children to study sex ed in school, but they are not afraid of studying a little sex ed Christian perspective). Scores of books have followed, selling millions of book aimed chiefly to comfort and instruct the wife on holding the attention of lovemaking, marital relations and, of course, sexual orientation. Today, the genre has even subdivided into niche markets. Teens can buy I Kissed Dating for You assures black women that their single status, which demographics may brutally enforce, can be "a celebration rather than a burden." Numerous the six apocalyptic novels in his "Left Behind" series, which have sold nearly for his works on sexual and family life. His most famous book, the wonderfully about vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms, and he views male sexuality as essentially dangerous. "The sex drive in a man is almost volcanic in its latent ability to look unto a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in not look at men with lust. Thus man "should be the initiator because of [his] stronger sex drive," while "the role of the woman is to respond." their share of quackery and pseudoscience, but that does not preclude some wonderfully clear and clinical about the mechanics of sex. Here is part of his description of female sexual arousal, for example: "When a woman is sexually aroused, several of her glands begin to secrete a lubrication that bathes the vulva area with a slippery mucous, easing the entrance of the penis into the vagina." For young marrieds who have grown up shielded from the universal sex talk of the secular world, these details are surely useful. Perhaps the most notable quality of the Christian sex of Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfillment in Christian before intercourse" to select the sex of one's baby (they don't say which douche is for which sex), but their overall tone is both practical and sensual. the tube in warm, running water." They advise that newlyweds should "not get a exhortations to married couples to communicate, reminders to "observe daily hygiene habits," and constant refrains about making sure to satisfy your souring couples on intercourse. The writers do not invoke the language of are most alienating to worldly audiences when they talk about masculinity and homosexuality. They are obsessed with manliness and have a narrow idea of what Happily Ever After: How To Stay Married and Be Happy Too! that "a husband has more of a chance to keep his marriage together if he is rough and abusive but assertive than if he is kind and considerate but submissive." atypically harsh, but his message is shared by other counselors. Noted preacher shows, wants to "heal" not just homosexuals, but all "men who are feminine in their mannerisms." These Christian sex writers contend unequivocally that gays can simply turn straight through faith and willpower. They generally describe gays with crude stereotypes. In What Everyone Should Know About The Christian love doctors believe, against all evidence, Still, for the tens of millions of married couples who just need a little sold, he's one evangelist who is spreading the good news. that the bustle of the holiday season is officially underway, it appears that mean. There's been a serious explosion of ardor in the pages of the tabs, with celebrities of all stripes doing their very best bunny rabbit imitations. includes spending time "puttering around the kitchen because it makes her feel to spend all our free time in bed!" she's quoted as saying. woman who grew up in a convent school to have someone suck your toes is an convent school, but we'll take her word for it.) And the picture of domestic bliss she paints? Positively charming. "When we get home, exhausted from there something in the water? The National Enquirer reports that as interests managed to extend even to the great beyond. They report that the late only tabloid types not scoring this week, it seems, are those on higher Lonely Life," the Globe reports that the flamboyant exercise guru they're not having constant sex or actively refraining from it, celebs seem to be busy entertaining flirtatious, schoolgirl crushes on one another. We're not to ply him with "provocative photos showing off her famous curves." (But then again, she really is a schoolgirl, so maybe that's all right.) Perhaps the strangest mutual admiration society is that between President Bill says that the two traded saucy mash notes behind the scenes at this year's her husband's "fixation" on Franklin and once had to elbow him in the stomach "to get him to stop staring at her unbelievable cleavage" during a White House pronouncement about the state of her marriage: That revealing new wardrobe and snazzy haircut are a dead giveaway that "it's just a matter of time" before she divorces the president. "Whenever women really change their hairstyle dramatically," the Globe explains, "they're maybe looking to change his smile." Meanwhile the Star --which also labels Martin all the meticulousness of a Supreme Court proceeding. On one hand, there is the government's decision to authorize the construction of the mosque opposite the deliberately to overthrow the sacred order that everyone has respected for lowest level for generations." The paper said, "Tensions have been stirred by by the decision of the Christian clergy to make a stand as a way of recapturing dwindling influence. The result is an unholy and distinctly unseemly row that that the inaugural ceremony, which was attended by no representative of the guarding the Christian sites in the Holy Land, said the land on which the mosque is to be built was previously earmarked as a parking lot for buses divergences over agriculture and implementation of existing agreements finally scuppered all chances of accord on a draft text, which would only have laid out a set of choices for ministers to make on the scope and objectives of the and that "uniform teaching would lead to a uniform world." rather than going for quick political gains by demonizing the country in their quest for votes. "Perhaps a stable realism will emerge once the elections are over, permitting relations which lack the damaging mood swings of recent elephants have a right to be happy. The case was brought by an animal lover enough food, proper health care, and plenty of love. Keeping elephants as pets retailing. On the Net, the next hot online business is politics. Consider: On codes to search Federal Election Commission filings to see who their neighbors other sites are arming voters with tools that they have never had before to find information and express views. As a host of entrepreneurs chase the Internet gravy train, the question is whether politics can form the basis of a real company. Can a political Web site go public and raise millions? which proposes to make revenue via personalization and advertising. "This is other people have made a business out of providing these messages and providing the medium. We don't see any reason why it won't be the same for the Already, there are political content sites sponsored by major news outlets, search for information via their ZIP code. There are party sites. And there are nonprofit sites that have made names for themselves by providing quality political information. One such site is the Democracy Network, which won a recent FEC ruling lifting the ban on nonprofits hosting online candidate thought at a time when you're introducing a new technology, it is probably wise to do so in a way that encourages public trust rather than public distrust," as any other site on the Internet: What is the motive behind the people providing the information? That begs the next question: What do they do with says that since politics is already a huge business in the physical world, there's no reason it shouldn't be in the online world. The business model for affluent people who vote, and they also have higher Internet use," notes manufacturers are all going to want to speak to this audience." with candidates, is also seeking ad revenues. The company contends that candidates and campaigns will be a source of this advertising, once the site starts to build traffic. "There's been a constant argument on the Web since the beginning. There's always been a push to do things for free for the good of the observers are skeptical about the business models being proposed by the new political sites. "There is no money to be made billing for sending messages to help citizens express their views to elected officials. But the site has been guy is pork. Roast pork unless he changes his point of view." scarily precise and mysteriously deep. It's a portrait of the artist as a lover: "Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such wartime affair that runs aground on one party's religious faith is documentary we all want to have made about ourselves, in which it is revealed that we are funny, smart, beloved, the trusted confidant of famous people, the power behind the scenes at great events and the apple of our mother's eye" produced "an extraordinary account of one of the most significant public health the various groups of scientists and the divergent paths they traveled as they unraveled the virus' secrets. (Click here to read the first chapter.) promised. But that seems to be the only thing they're skeptical about. main characters as old friends. What exactly is the appeal? Some say the books different way. As Emmet Ray, the fictional 1940s jazz guitarist in Woody lifts his voice about an octave and wears a small waxed mustache as if it were some cases, unconsciousness. The rest of the time he's a preening cock, fond of he plays, he folds himself intimately over his guitar and silently moves his mix of limpidness and bite. The idea of a jazz guitarist who's also a textbook comedy and the poetry. It's the way he blends them, though, that is uncanny: titan. The conceit works better here than in Deconstructing Harry own and other people's lives but was let off the hook because he brought so scene for hilarious anecdotes about the guitarist's unreliability, profligacy, indifference to everyone and everything except his own needs. To women who fall Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but Sweet and how jazz is meant to be heard? The way he shoots the music here is tender and Emmet and his wonderfully pickled look of concentration. The note of satire in gorgeousness of the playing is a hedge against the satire. moralistic turn: Emmet pays both an artistic and a personal price for not risking more of himself emotionally. But the film doesn't bog down in loathing the music itself seems to smooth over class distinctions. Early on, Emmet picks home with them to drink and jam. He stumbles back to his hotel via the dump, where he shoots the breeze with hobos and indulges in his favorite form of wanted to freshen his approach this time out. Why else would this famously that don't seem so fresh when you're out from under its spell. The conception sucking swamps of neurosis and infidelity. The purity here is embodied by and edgy sophisticate who has affairs with lowlifes as research for novels. it into a delicious tease, always seeming on the verge of speech, of saying something naughty or funny or caustic. She appears not to talk because right through him, and a part that might have seemed a sentimental contrivance same climactic scene (it varies according to the historian), and the effect of where you don't give a damn what actually happened. Each variation is more performance that is so gorgeously modulated you'll think she has been in movies she dances around the kitchen and sticks her tongue out at her lover, as if memoirs.") Beat by dramatic beat, these are some of the most nuanced scenes in The actors appear to be entertaining themselves so much that some of the tension dissipates, and the ease with which the movie goes down ends up working for instance, on this family's finances. They don't want for food or a roof About a million of them have something in common. What? "These are the big cards we still have to play. Beyond that, I think that, frankly, the likelihood of success is quite small." Who said this about what desperate effort to save what precarious venture? "Network executives, re their encouraging the remaining cast members of Jobs, discussing the future of Apple and 'Operation Critical Path,' his final political campaign. Wait a second! What if a foundering political campaign were be sponsored by big car companies and breweries, major corporations, just like reticent Mars Polar Lander, says his team will see if the probe is unable to align its antenna toward Earth because of its landing position. If not, the party's over, making this the second failed Mars mission in three months, each involving a team of highly trained scientists focused on a single launch, many public figures, including all the major presidential candidates, persist launched by "enemies" too dumb to have the warheads shipped over by UPS. "Sure it won't work, sure it will set off an unimaginably costly arms race, sure it will undermine efforts at arms control, but if it brings a smile to a single "There were just too many bad shows that people were forced to watch. You mildly amusing anymore. We will, however, tolerate enough inane teen swill to "Every game show on the air means another hundred people out of work. And, for reasons too complicated to explain, every cop show means another hundred "In all the qualitative research we do, people talk about the state of comedy. Then we clip the electrodes to their balls, and they shut the hell up "I do think you'd have to say the form is a little tired. And there's not a Internet. "The Net is playing a big role in mobilizing our delegates around the campaign has been organizing New York supporters for several months via the also an "interactive" site. The latter features five targeted states, Residents of those states can sign up with the campaign based on a map of congressional districts, as well as get daily information about campaign Allowing potential supporters to register by congressional district gives the because the campaign is focusing the bulk of its advertising dollars on the "The Internet has been a tremendous asset to us, the overwhelming majority of the time allotted by the state for gathering petition signatures runs between angry at the dominant role played by politicians in the commemoration of what her spokesman as saying that she hadn't been "officially approached." German organizers of the event told the paper that Thatcher had repeatedly been mistrusted, and which he may well have feared, but which he also knew to be wrongly, has traditionally provoked in its neighbors." But the editorial went neighbors and even, in many areas, is an example to them." Curiously, given mistakenly feared "that the first victim of the fall of the Berlin Wall would said he asked Bush about his famously understated response to the first news of such a similar pattern of destruction that aid workers and observers are having difficulty keeping track of them. As an example, it cited the confusion of a was the same one," the paper said. "In fact, there were two separate assaults immediate peace negotiations, despite the overwhelming support for the war from risen dramatically because of the war. The papers claim that the West is that he must either resign or end the war and fire the army chief of staff. "The President and the Kremlin have made a decision to cease military celebs' shrinking waistlines, Keeping Tabs almost skipped right over the leading ladies that she's forced to eat 'more than I want' in restaurants Weekend just before the Star hit the newsstands. Queried about the afraid that somebody's watching me, which is ridiculous." (Click here to read the rest of the interview.) one of the tabs with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar. While their most compelling assets are those memorable pieces of journalism that certainly won't their pages, the tabs are ruthless recyclers. Of course, mainstream publications have been known to borrow a quotation or two, but they usually give a nod to the original source. The tabs, on the other hand, have managed to turn the brazen, uncredited filch into an art form unto itself. frequently written in a breezily intimate manner that could fool the fashion, and health secrets. But the only person it would appear the walker, says she has "big, huge, happy endorphins" flowing through her doing "to make herself perfect," including using a skin ointment meant for softening cows' udders. It didn't take long to trace the sudden interest in the interview Twain gave to the Telegraph that she tried to replicate it exactly: The first five quotes from Twain in her piece are identical to those separating her insights from one another. Recent entries have begun "What's with all this millennium hysteria?" and "How about those new Target ads?" Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. a great imaginative departure and a creative compromise between traditionally foreseeable future and if it comes, it will only happen with the consent of a to be repealed and the people of this State have agreed to relinquish the "It was, by any standards, a testing weekend for Unionists and nationalists, and many difficulties still lie ahead, but the political process and a better that the peace process had reached "first base" but that "whether it advances or a feeble political fudge, would leave the global trade system dangerously entry, suggest he has a strong personal commitment to the global trade system," the FT said in an editorial. "This week, he has an exceptional opportunity an editorial headed "Chance in a Millennium," said the thousands of people the negotiators inside excuses to shirk the tough decisions." The paper said, "The real fear of the protestors is not that the trade talks will fail but that they will succeed, for protectionism is a powerful force behind which shelter not only state monopolies, inefficient industries and cossetted farmers but reported the development on its front page, said the magazine Nature is first time that the hugely complex chemical structure of a complete human chromosome has been revealed. "The genetic code in the chromosome is thought to contain vital information on several hereditary conditions, including major parties and with its first elected female prime minister." Nevertheless, responsible for the country's worst ever nuclear accident, which took place plant illegally mixed a large quantity of uranium solution in a stainless steel container. The mixture triggered a nuclear chain reaction at the plant. blood from his intestines, and his skin has been failing to reproduce ideals, such as freedom and respect for the individual," the paper said. As a piqued, and I decided to find out more about the real thing. Which martial art workout? How daunting would it be to jump into a class as a complete beginner? in several areas: how intimidating the class would be to a novice; how much the exercises worked my muscles; how much of an I got; whether it would develop coordination and balance; how much physical contact with other people was of one to five, with five being the hardest, most intimidating, or most look like a hopelessly biased and superficial inquiry. It is. But to beginners, it is one step toward figuring out which martial art might be right for you. Do want to improve your sense of balance? Take karate. Do you want to know what to do if someone tries to choke you? Take jujitsu. Just remember that if you're attacker collapse into uncontrollable fits of laughter. which made me sit for an interview before they'd even reveal any information on their classes. There seemed to be an active screening process to keep out those few minutes, students launched into traditional strengthening exercises held by the other. It looked to be decent strength training. Their arms got a lower body, from the kicking. It was not extreme, and nobody seemed and partner work, the class broke into a few groups (according to skill level) series of punches, kicks, and blocks with an imaginary foe. The class had broken into a light sweat, but was not gasping for air. look at, but they did not seem practical. And without sparring practice, it would be difficult to apply the drills in real life. Overall: Kicking, punching, and an aura of mystery. sport; lots of kicking; the martial art of the 1990s. into the beginners class at Lee's Martial Arts. People called each other by their first name; there was laughing, joking, and none of the aloofness or body. We used our arms only for balance and blocking kicks. standing in lines and kicking into the air. Then we did a long series of running drills up and down the mats. Then there was more kicking: Turning kicks, straight kicks, low kicks, kicks with punching bags, kicks with partners contact with the pad (and not, say, the face of the person holding it) was a session of sparring (which I, alas, was not allowed to participate in). The students strapped on protective chest pads and helmets and began kicking the sparring and gets students accustomed to dealing with an assault. Overall: More a sport than an art; will make short work of the Feminist Karate Union, I asked some of the students how their class was downstairs do." This class was approachable and open. And karate's so familiar punching made for decent exercise, but I wasn't aching the next day. punches, blocking, and kicking) provided some aerobic workout, but were not the paired kicking drills with a partner and pads, but most of the physical sparring: They weren't clocking each other, just repeating the motions of Overall: Kicks and punches galore, with a dash of moral and but pulling and yanking on other people looked like it would build muscle, and exercises, you had to grab your partner, spin him this way and that, and neutralize a threat was the main goal of the class. Overall: You don't get to land any punches and it's noncompetitive, but you'll learn how to knock people over. pumping, the slow, controlled movements did give my arms, legs, back, and stomach a good resistance workout. You may just be working against gravity, but holding your arms up in the air for several minutes will give you a new your body slowly in circular patterns, shifting weight from foot to foot, and lifting your arms in rounded gestures, all at a pace slower than you ever thought possible. The motions had names like "parting the wild horse's mane" and "repulsing the monkey." I did not break a sweat, but I was bored to door said "Northwest Fight Club." Inside the club, huge holes had been punched purple one by his left eye. When I asked to try the class, he shrugged and lent me a gi (the white outfit most martial artists wear), on the back of which was a drawing of massive snarling pit bull and the slogan "PIT PULLING PURE POWER." I wondered if I was going to need an ambulance to take me home. leg lifts, and scissor kicks. I was quickly panting and my face turned a deep fuchsia. We did forward and backward rolls, learned to escape from various doing in movies about basic training. After an hour and a half I felt close to important, but since you're tussling on a mat most of the time, balance soon after meeting her, but she didn't seem to mind. I learned how to go from sitting on top of her with a knee in her stomach to a position where her arm was between my legs and I could break it over my stomach. The end of the class first presidential Internet chat, an event intended to showcase another He resisted the urge to say what must have been on the mind of nearly everyone present at the 90-minute demonstration: Why don't we turn this damn thing off demonstrate how the Net enables new forms of democratic communication. Here's video of the event, listen to an audio simulcast, or watch a scrolling text practice, the technology was pretty clunky. Due to "network congestion," the voices of two of the officials didn't come through at all, and others were the technology did work as intended, it merely made you wonder what good it is anyhow. Having a meeting over the Internet is still like walking to the mailbox given that the quality of the interaction is so poor? As in all Internet the basic structure sucked any spontaneity and most of the oxygen from the of the fault was not technical but human and political. In theory, the Internet allows for a vast range of queries from far and wide. In practice, questions for the president were so carefully vetted as to be far narrower in range than trade and health care. One of the few sparks of interest was a question about more difficult ones. The event might have worked slightly better if he had been given a mouse to flag questions he wanted to answer or a keyboard to send messages back to the control room. But this too would have risked type. Nonetheless, he does appear to have gained a sense of how the Internet point about how isolated a president can become from the public despite his best intentions to keep in touch and how the new technology might help. Then he thanked everyone for coming to his "press conference." learned how to use a computer, of course, but I don't think electronic politics intent gaze, the fleck of spittle in the eye. Even on television, he can provide a simulacrum of this human experience. But on the Internet, interesting part of last night's event was what happened after it ended, when Excite. "I know this may have cost you arm and a leg, but I think you may have think history will remember them as fumbling experiments that pointed in a different direction. At this point, they testify mainly to the capacity of the advances in technology may get us to the point where an Internet Town Meeting is almost as interesting as a Town Meeting without the Internet. just love it! Shameless flattery aside, we do have an issue and hope you can I actually introduced them at my wedding. The problem is that my friend treats him, tells him what to do, what to wear, where to go, and how to spend his free time. She is moody and extremely unpleasant to everyone. Needless to say, I don't see much of her anymore. Anyway, we are afraid that my poor husband's family, and our friends cannot stand her and dread having her at to him because we know that there are women out there who will treat him with respect, courtesy, and affection. How can we tell him how we feel without slapped around as foreplay? The woman you describe sounds like a cross between a harridan and a dominatrix. However, even an inexperienced man knows when he this is all right. The loose thread here is that you say you don't see much of her anymore, but she was a friend. Did her behavior change? decide on a designated yenta (which is how it may be perceived) and that person must tell him flat out that people who care about him do not like the way he is being treated, and they see dark days ahead. He will either respond with a relationship. Either way, he will be made aware of the concern, which is really all that outsiders can do. If he chooses to stay in the relationship and the next gathering is a nightmare, simply tell him the woman makes for too much discomfort and, although you will miss his presence, the greater good of the scenario is that he will feel alienated, and his relationship with all neither do friends watch in silence as friends hook up with bitches. all other respects, appears to have a grave problem staying employed. There is a definite pattern afoot here: At first, the new job is wonderful, the people scintillating and fabulous, the work enticing and exciting. After a few months, slide down a slippery slope than a professional avalanche that results in either a dismissal or a narrow escape to the next "dream job," where, of and loves her that the trouble lies with my mother and not, as she would have it, with the parade of horrible bosses fate has saddled her with. Needles to hours on the telephone listening to every sordid detail of every office slight, all to no avail. I have even considered appealing to her current employer (with whom I have a warm acquaintance) to overlook her nuttiness and keep her on children to provide for, I fear if she loses this job, it will be her last, a welfare hotel. But her chances for finding a replacement gig dwindle with every lost job and every looming birthday. I would prefer to be my mother's daughter than my mother's mother, but my resentment is building every day. What a thoughtful, insightful letter. While at some their parents, your situation is complicated by, at best, a personality disorder, and at worst, mental illness. Your mother's repeated manic initial response to a job, then making a mess of it, is legitimate cause for concern. What you must do now is confront your mother with the truth as tactfully and forcefully as possible. Make clear that you are willing to be emotionally supportive if she makes efforts to help herself but that financially you are if she will not acknowledge her problem. If she winds up "in the system," getting city or state supervised housing and therapy that may not be a bad bottom. You should also know that your evaluation of the situation is humane and loving, and that, however things play out, you will have been a good and restaurants, people like me with sensitive noses appreciate the result. It took years for me to work up the courage to ask someone not to smoke near me, and now I don't have to do that anymore. But a new terror has arisen. Recently, in a crowded but fancy restaurant in the middle of the delicious main course, the empty table next to ours was occupied by a group of people including a woman wearing far too much perfume. It was overwhelming and made it literally impossible to taste the food: Everything tasted like perfume. And then my nose started to run. The expensive meal was ruined, but I didn't say a word. Should available. In the big picture, however, overpowering scents are a burgeoning strange woman to please hightail it to the ladies' room and wash off all that are basically stuck. Moving one's location or leaving an establishment is about as far as an offended party can go. Some places, however, have designated perfumes and colognes is that the wearer, for some strange reason, is not able to smell when she or he has overdone it. And, surprise, men can be as guilty as women. Also some ethnic groups tend to go in for excessive eau de whatever, which one is overcome by potpourri, incense, scented candles, and sachet. Being assaulted by smells unfortunately is an issue we can often do little about. advice given them about raising their children. Sitting down and having a frank discussion is asking to start World War III in the family. Better your correspondent should be the aunt these girls can go to for advice, support, kind words, etc. Better she should do everything in her power to be a role opportunity. If they spend time alone with her, so much the better. As for her sister, mm could express her understanding of how difficult it must be to raise these children, give her sister a chance to vent, mention classes or books that superior attitudes, please. It never has a happy ending. immeasurably to the discussion. You have firsthand knowledge of a situation reported to be planning to impose new rules proscribing all sexual displays, will restrict "sex, not sexuality" by forbidding touching and other displays of affection across all ranks. The Daily Telegraph reported fears by senior officers that the new code of conduct would damage recruitment and lead to a civilian life is perfectly acceptable behavior. In an editorial, the paper toyed with the idea of putting homosexuals into separate units "like the Sacred Band of Thebes," but said that "a company comprised wholly of homosexuals could easily become a target for the rest of the Army." "Perhaps, on reflection, the simplest solution is for homosexual soldiers to keep their mouths shut and get been handed over. Until now Unionists have insisted that there could be no illegal weapons were decommissioned. A new critical round of talks resumed millions of people around the world who go hungry." The paper said today there is to invest in peace in the Middle East"; "I belong to a generation that has been educated in the West, which has chosen what is best in both cultures and the Middle East. There should be an international conference to regulate it"; disastrous earthquakes in northwestern Turkey were "a prelude to a cataclysmic activated, and that it was only a question of when, not if, the metropolis a time when we are going through some very hard days, having to cope with the hardships suffered by our masses because of economic crises." head of state and source of satisfaction and pride for all of us." It urged the United States to encourage greater democracy in Turkey as part of its efforts to promote stability in the country. "In the past we have had bad experiences of how US administrations have pretended to condemn coups in Turkey while they have actively supported them and the juntas," the paper said. "We are aware guarantees to the democrats of Turkey that this will never be the case case, warning about the dangers of official intervention to stop aggressive designed to protect consumers could prove counterproductive." The paper significance because they point to the shape of antitrust policy in the age of created millions of new jobs in the United States. "No doubt much of the credit facilitating market access for newcomers and of respecting consumer national borders blocked free movement of goods and services and when traditional smokestack industries provided the main thrust of industrial acquisitions are picking up momentum in a broad spectrum of industries, such as financial services, communications, automobiles and petroleum. Of course, the situation in these industries is different from that in the developing computer software industry. But they all face a common question: how to balance the demands of oligopoly and the interests of the consumer." horror picture. He has always borrowed from the genre, but his scary motifs frighten a child. In his new movie, a ghost not only frightens a child, it is one of the great nightmare images in movies. Our first glimpse is over his shoulder as he hurtles through the woods after a fleeing servant. We hear the scrape of a sword as it's unsheathed and barely see it sweep across the frame been shocked off its torso. The carnage ends before we can exhale. pathology and deduction. The idea is that Crane clings to scientific principle killer is human and appalls them by performing an autopsy on a female victim. but there's no dodging them these days.) It soon becomes apparent that solving stretch for a young man whose life is pledged to rationalism and whose riches; you go because no one else packs this kind of emotion into a movie's in death throes. In the haunted western woods, Crane and his juvenile assistant above them the bare trees bend together at their tops like Gothic arches. the Hessian who lopped the heads off revolutionaries for sheer love of Burton has learned a lot about staging and editing action horseman is like a samurai Terminator; dismounted, he comes at his victims sans head; if he doesn't, someone has done a hilarious job of recreating passing horseman skewers it like a marshmallow. As he thunders off, he knocks a latest theory to locals who regard him with a mixture of awe and embarrassment. Gothic melodramas. In all of them, scenes of repressive formality (hoary English actors sipping sherry in drawing rooms) would be shattered by scenes of lecture the frightened villagers and pound a stake through the heaving bosom of compositions and has gotten the tone of those old pictures just right. Like Burton, I was weaned on Hammer horror; I raise a goblet of blood to him for Coven (which he mispronounces throughout, with a long "o"), turns into work even as he struggles to get it on screen. In debt and with a couple of kids to support, juggling jobs as a cemetery custodian and a paper boy, hauls the abandoned Coven out of mothballs in spite of its "stilted" performances and sets about the seemingly impossible task of raising money to uncle, Bill, who lives in a ramshackle trailer but has evidently managed to sock away hundreds of thousands of dollars. The attempt to wheedle money out of credit as an "executive producer," buys him booze, and promises big profits and glory down the road ("I see great cinema in this." "Cinnamon?"), their relationship becomes a bleak, absurdist parody of all artists and their and his cohorts a measure of celebrity, which removes the sting of mood he'll pick up." Ain't the Internet grand?) The vision may also seem less process. Without seeing his work all the way through, it's hard for me to say essay on "the decline of the black intellectual" wasn't really the "devastating the great plays and found in the lack of a central consciousness (the protagonists are not mouthpieces for the playwright) and refusal to demonize forgiveness. I confess I don't know as much as I should about Christian (albeit a saint with a rarely acute bullshit detector). It's not risible; I that Al Gore had little interest in campaign finance reform because the current insurgent movement fighting for campaign finance reform. But he's more closely Gore is backed by numerous corporate titans, especially those from Wall contributions come more often from humble folks like my own family. As the the democratic process, and thought, taking into account the caveats in your article, this sort of thing could work well in my job as communications manager really is taking over the world and I can now expect my Congressperson to come wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil even agonized, rather than complacently sweet. As part of that gift, he went beyond conventional forms and images of expression. In this poem, he sees divine grandeur not simply in a trite vision of "nature," but in nature as human nature affects it, too: industrial images such as shaking metal foil or crushed oil embody the grandeur. And in the poem's final image of the Holy Ghost at the "brown brink eastward" appears as the sun rises in a spectacular godhead as sunrise in smog. Our smudge and blear and soil, he proposes, do not It faces opposition in the Senate because of changes to dairy protections and investigation. The agency had planned to relinquish the probe to the rate banks charge each other on loans. Despite evidence of slowing growth, the Fed said the move was necessary to prevent future inflation as unemployment face life in prison, but prosecutors will likely ask that he be detained in a advocates said the case revealed the inhumanity of trying ever younger defendants as juveniles, hailed it as a victory for justice and safety. abortion restrictions. Congressional Republicans agreed to approve organizations from performing abortions or promoting abortion rights. If huge win for House Republicans, "who walked away with a disturbingly large share of what they wanted." But the administration said the concessions were symbolic" and would "not interfere with family planning programs around the spin: We're winning in the courts. Consumer advocates' spin: But you've access to its markets. China, which must negotiate separate agreements with rights activists, who may have lost their best bargaining chip. federal judge declared the company a monopoly, Gore was aggressively questioned about his administration's antitrust suit. Although he did not take sides, Gore expressed support for the principles underlying antitrust law, saying they most "technologically savvy candidate ever to run for president," he has the officially in a draw but was widely believed to have been won by Lewis. "something less than a definitive way of judging a bout." anticipated speech because she has made so many gaffes lately and that her decision to sit in on the conference as a nonparticipant resulted in a special program for the leaders' wives being canceled "at the last moment with zero triumph, her consecration as the superstar of the first ladies, her takeoff point for the New York seat in the United States Senate," the paper said. Third Way conference, and second in the New York electoral college where a bought three purses and a candle before arriving at the jewelry stand. "They gave her a discount, but the most powerful woman in the world knows how to value the weight and the worth of things," the paper said. "Before signing for the purchase of a choker, she weighed it against the bracelet she was wearing on her wrist: It is three times as heavy as the choker." irreproachable in raising the problem of human rights in developing countries would like to see the death penalty disappear in all democracies." summer vacation? Fending off questions about this in an interview with La baby." Fevered study of the diaries of the prime minister and his wife led most newspaper the Daily Star after it alleged that he had consorted with a prostitute. Archer now faces possible criminal charges after admitting to getting a friend to lie that they had dined together in a restaurant on one of candidacy and praising his probity despite the novelist's controversial past and warnings that he had further skeletons in his closet. expert told the China Business Times that the test had major military used to adjust a spacecraft's orbit in flight could also be used to alter the the bubble burst and we finally realized there could never be a heaven on pheasants, then, holding them by the legs, spun the birds around to make them dizzy; this is one feature of a program whose uneasy combination of private and state funding is drawing increasing criticism nationwide. What is the program would carry the crates. Papa, he was a big man, and I not so large, so I would curse and sweat in the tropical island heat, and Papa would laugh and stop from pull at his brown bottle. Then we would open the crates and believed that in their confused flight you could see the hand of God. He was a straight up and dive down into the ground, embedding their beaks like the Daffy Duck of the gringo cartoon features. Then we would laugh and laugh and laugh, workers at the Triangle shirtwaist factory could have just gotten other jobs that was in the Times the next day, not actually a part of the series, the mercantile and the urban, what would one day be the New York City we know. eventually twirl pheasants in New Jersey. You can catch the final nine hours This annual event run by the New Jersey Division of Fish, Game, and Wildlife is partly financed by the National Rifle Association Foundation. The state supplies wardens and land; the foundation pays for birds and ammo; volunteers from New Jersey gun clubs supply dogs and doughnuts. To fly away and will stay in the grass until the dogs can flush them out for the on the ground; don't shoot cripples. The dogs will get them. Have a fun day, but be safe and responsible." A life lesson for us all from a respected role more kids get to kill a bird. "We can't pull the trigger for them, but we can children rested on the grass, their guns around them, drinking from cartons of someone catches fire, and there was a lot of blood running down a guy's to decide if the electric chair constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. ways for the states to kill poor black people. Below, I give the method of just the Medicaid nursing home where we dumped my Uncle Milt. "vote" yes or no on questions such as "Protect Gays from Hate Crimes?" and "Increase the Minimum Wage?" Each time a user clicks a box taking one side or vote to your congressional representative, your Senators and the President," Morris promises on the site's home page. This, he asserts, is "direct direct democracy. He's building a rather different political system, which choose and craft questions is more profound than the power to choose and craft questions to politicians on any topic. Morris knows that the first rule of ago. Well, not quite. What you get are the pros and cons Morris chooses to arguments on each side about economics and human rights, but there's nothing about how "engagement" (as one side sees it) or "appeasement" (as the other have changed your mind. Morris never links you to sites that offer more detailed arguments than his. He wants you to stay on his site, read his and "gives us a chance to speak out and to be heard. When you vote we'll send feel." But while you can explain the nuances of your position on a bulletin only thing Morris lets you communicate to your government is yes or no. On improve schools," because I favor pilot voucher programs and public school question, Republicans will no doubt cite these "votes," including mine, as a mandate for nationwide private school vouchers. Morris hasn't conveyed my doesn't represent the whole population (since the average Internet user is wealthier and more educated than the average person, for example), but he argues that it faithfully simulates an election because it expresses the votes way for voters to speak out" because "I trust the voters." Of course, voters and thought that went into those letters helped politicians understand how many voters really cared about an issue and exactly what those voters thought. If Morris truly "trusted the voters," he would have left this system alone. Instead, by simplifying the "voting" process and flooding politicians with between members of Congress and their constituents to a new level," writes Morris. "When your congressional representative votes on the issue, we will send you a report card listing how they voted on all the topics you voted on." Morris says the report card will show each voter "what percentage of the time Christian Coalition and other interest groups to reduce complicated issues so cards don't transfer power from politicians to voters. They transfer power to the intermediary that gets to characterize how politicians have voted. If all a chance to be heard so our voice gets loud enough to drown out the special interests that run Congress." Meanwhile, he predicts that "money won't work in politics anymore, because you won't be able to reach people by buying television ads," since "the Internet is taking the place of television in politics." So if you're a special interest, where can you take your money to because "we get our money from advertisers." And who's going to advertise on a site where people vote on political issues? Why, special interests, naturally. summarizes for voters. The more influential these summaries become, the more each interest group will be willing to pay to get its views and quotes into journalism the Fourth Estate during the French Revolution," recalls Morris. "We think the Internet is replacing the media, so we call it the Fifth Estate." But rather than relinquish this catchy title to the whole Internet, Morris claims power center of the future, and he wants to dominate it. When critics ignore or dismiss Morris, he accuses them of ignoring or dismissing the Internet. The "discriminating simply because this is over the Internet." Morris, it seems, Morris controls the voting process. Morris constantly describes his advises them when the "polls" will "close" on each referendum and assures them afterward that "your vote really counted." Meanwhile, Morris warns the White House against "censoring" the "views of those who vote" through his site, and through which the public delivers mandates to its leaders, Morris is trying to as Morris envisions it, the nation's "town meeting." And Morris would run the point of view." What a brilliantly innocuous metaphor, devised by a master manipulator to obscure his manipulations. This, it turns out, is the most than a cacophony of special interests plastering their views all over the nation's airwaves and legislation is a single special interest that owns the cover story argues that it pays to play dumb in politics. While Al Gore "has the appearance of a man who prepared for a spelling bee and with the details of governance" is a political asset. Voters are seeking "a daddy's allies, outspent their opponents, and sought to avenge their fathers' against such minor matters as genetically modified food demonstrate that the how the World Trade Organization became a boogeyman.) The cover editorial applauds the establishment of a Union membership, affluence, and secularization could defuse ancient piece explains how the "open content movement" will last of the magazine's special millennium issues chronicles the making of a stuff. A piece describes the contending capsule designs. One entrant proposed the contents in a metal earring for the Statue of Liberty. The winner is a readers of the future. A field guide to deceased species informs "Encyclopedia of Lost Practices" explains that smoking was "the most popular form of recreational suicide ever devised" and "reproductive sex" was "the union of male and female genitalia resulting (with often stunning rapidity) in millenniums. In the weirdest bit, a novelist recreates the Gospels' most dramatic moments and recounts his own meeting with the son of God: He was sins. An article examines the glamorization of mathematics. Good Mars cover package says that if the probes landing this week find frozen surface water, it could indicate that liquid water remains in the planet's warmer interior and that life could exist there. A sidebar notes that controversy remains over the Mars meteorite demolished most of the evidence that the meteorite contained living creatures, they cannot explain why the meteorite contains a molecule that on Earth is only produced by biological processes. An excerpt of a new Al Gore biography points out that by enlisting rejects the claim that Gore received special treatment or protection. fighters are brought to the United States by unscrupulous promoters to serve as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of seven mobsters by Al issue devoted to the digital age. An article argues that digital encryption has neutered the National Security Agency by making it virtually impossible for the brain drain, and shortsighted management. A piece applauds the piece argues that there is no evidence of a Republican smear campaign against autobiography as perhaps the worst campaign book ever. A Charge to Keep is banal, disorganized, and packed with platitudes, revealing Bush as both a question at a teachers' union meeting in Manhattan, she said she would make an official announcement early next year. Everyone has assumed that she's running since this summer. She also confirmed that she will move to the house not confirm that he will). She said the announcement came in response to public "excitement" about her candidacy and her need to from recent public missteps and to prevent further erosion of The Labor Department proposed new workplace ergonomic and benefits during recuperation. Labor's spin: The protections are long with "empty nests." Newspapers said the statistics signaled the decline of has long opposed aggressive government intervention in antitrust cases, was credentials would increase the chances of settlement and decrease the likelihood that a resolution would be overturned on appeal. (Click to read an pile. The collapse of the 40-foot pyramid, which was being set up for the pile-- contrary to safety procedures --but officials don't yet know too important to abandon. Outsiders said the mishap was predictable and the tradition should be scrapped. showed declines in every category in cities of every size. Crime has now declined for seven and a half years. The reduction was variously attributed to: sustained economic growth. The optimistic take: The drop is "astounding enormous and spin: There's still no evidence of any other cause. vastly improve marketing, telecasts, and the level of play Security surplus. Optimists hailed it as a restrained and spin: We're winning in the courts. Consumer advocates' spin: But you've already Ninja Turtles, might as well have. They are premised on the notion that some mysterious force can alter the ordinary into the extraordinary. Kids, imagining themselves as suddenly potent Transformers, Turtles, or Power proxies) defeat evil, and adults are essentially absent. These entertainments, in short, serve as practice for growing up, preparation for the trek through games and show arrived in the United States a year ago and became wildly stamps, preteens are collectors by nature: They are learning to recognize collecting to pop cultural obsession, catering to the interests of preteen also darling. "They are cute fuzzy things, but they are also really violent. game. Transformers, Turtles, and Rangers were largely confined to action against rivals, a fiendishly complicated task that requires mastering and attacks rather than electrical ones.) Many adults, delighted by the game's and educators. Its emphasis on acquisitiveness annoys parents who find countless schools because kids won't stop trading cards. Parents find themselves intervening to stop their kids from making bad deals with like lottery tickets. Kids buy again and again in hopes of finding that rare usual fundamentalist protests: One Colorado preacher made kids in his ones on the way from Japan. Sure as the Backstreet Boys will meet a bad end, with the opportunity to create the replacement phenom and cash in on it. What Today's Papers quotes, refers to the protesters' "sentiments"; the smug you want to stretch the definition of "democratic" to absurd proportions) symptomatic of the decay of accountability and legitimacy in ostensibly play if a few loud activists don't make noise and force corporate media to at global economy is both inevitable and the best of all possible worlds, so get used to it, take your medicine, shut up and get back to work. Guys in black actually look beneath the surface and think through the present and potential West at the head of the smirking line) and politically correct. Yes, its choices are trendy and will date it badly and quickly. In this, it is very much "objectionable" three times as many words as any other dictionary, damning every word that any small political group anywhere has ever criticized. (The style guide suggests not using "homosexual," although it gives no usable alternative; it labels "cancer patient" as offensive, and recommends "patient Gates is, in my opinion, overdone. Gates wants to, and has, succeeded in his profession. That isn't a bad thing. He has done so by hard work, by doing a lot of worthy editing and literary criticism. He wants to read and know everything, Times obituaries of the same person containing an identical paragraph: Doesn't that probably just mean that the paragraph came from a wire service that both papers subscribe to (probably the Associated Press)? If so, that's Sun music critic, on the other hand, does sound more like plagiarism, so I hitting the nails on the head, until the last sentence: "And a browser's source code is only a fraction of the size of that of an operating system." not universally accepted by the computer programming community at large. Most of the "size" of the Windows basic installation software are details for when their coding is intertwined. The size of the OS, in the context of code (source or object), is the size essential to execute files. For Windows, that amounts to a DOS layer (the minimum required for complete, if not pretty, enough support to maintain a command console, something around 120k. (Remember: crew, already caught in the middle (twixt truth and least credit the vehemence with which the computer software community argues this issue? The article's closing sentence manages to gloss it right over. I would appreciate your views about an experience I had recently. I was at the supermarket buying bulk candy (a confection called "Hokey Pokey"). and pay for it by the pound at the checkout. As I was writing the bin number on the tie, I noticed a woman politely waiting for me to finish. I moved out of Pokey and popped it in her mouth. I didn't say or do anything, and now I wish I her and others. But I have recently become a parent and wonder how I should react to this type of situation if I were with an inquisitive child. Do you think I should have said something to the woman? Should I have told the seems minor, but the collective price is significant. It is of course, as you were correct not to say anything because that would have undoubtedly led to a probably have been disinclined to approach her and say, "I was informed you've been eating the Hokey Pokey." Arrests at candy bins are probably rare. in lieu of saying anything, she might have made eye contact with the woman and then raised an eyebrow, the message being "My dear, what behavior!" If your child was old enough to witness the candy bin caper and wondered why the woman was eating from the bin, you would have been perfectly within the bounds of propriety to say, "You are quite right. What the lady is doing is dishonest, but we are not in charge of other people." If the transgressor were to hear and she would be just as embarrassed as if you had been. In sum, what you witnessed was petty thievery, not someone poisoning the city water supply, and no person was being harmed. You did the correct thing by not trying to be a policeman. The key to the question: To intervene or not to intervene, is Although he was initially attracted to me, the feeling wasn't mutual, so we became platonic friends. He even got married recently. The thing is, we've type, we are not hanging out again until this goes away. His friendship is important to me, and I take those duties seriously. Do you think we can go back to being really good friends sans frolic? Or does my wish to be a good friend frolic is! The image it suggests to your steadfast adviser is of two children when you say the friendship is on hold "until this goes away," what, exactly, is "this"? The wife? The marriage? The attraction? Perhaps what needs to go about being a friend, you will save him from himself by keeping your distance. Not entirely unmarried men are seldom worth the trouble. tricky situations very adeptly, I am hoping you can help me do the same with mine. I have known a good friend for several years now (we are both graduate students within a small department), and we've always gotten along very well. However, I have noticed that there is a great turnover in her circle of friends each year as people inevitably get dropped. To compensate, she always seems to turn to a new crowd (usually new arrivals in the department) about whom she is wild for a while, until the ardor cools. Several people have noticed that she pursues people to add to her collection of friends, and she takes great pride in bragging about all the people she knows. She is intelligent, attractive, and friendly, but it seems to me she turns on the extroversion to hide friend for years and watched this happen again and again, I had thought I was immune. But alas, in the last months I seem to have been increasingly blacklisted. She still refers to me as a friend, but I feel I am treated quite "friend" sounds like the kind of person we used to call "a user" in junior that is of value? Since it's easier to change one's own behavior than that of another, you might want to consider why this person is important to you. There marvelous that even a notoriously picky person could not discard you. This is narcissistic people are often attractive. The problem is that they're not worth habit of having "the worst case the doctor ever saw," or "the worst (whatever) the mechanic ever dealt with." No matter what difficulties anyone else present of pathologists, each trying to dredge up more horrific experiences. How can I keep this from happening at our upcoming family reunion? (I am hosting it.) I am aware that this woman is very emotionally needy, but it's all getting to be it, so must everyone else be. Actually, it sounds like a nice change from the more common, "My neurologist is the best in the country." Those who truck in superlatives are recognized by thinking people as loose talkers and are not Hurry! Don't miss your big chance to lose your wife and car in a game of craps. Bills are afoot in the House and Senate to online gambling before it really takes root. Though rapidly changing technology and the freebooters who run offshore casinos will likely stymie any new legislation, that won't stop the feds from trying. So, if you're interested soft spot for a challenging game of poker. I also imagine that I know a lot of money in four easy steps, without leaving my desk chair or deriving any sort ones launching every day, it's tough to decide where to burn your cash. (Online before taking the plunge.) No comprehensive guide to online gaming exists, and the sites that publish casino reviews take ads from those same casinos. difference from a real casino. Pros: No destitute hustlers lurking about (unless you count my friends), and I didn't have to leave the house. Cons: No cocktail waitresses, and a Java applet is no competition for a blackjack here as the deck reshuffles after every hand). After an hour, I staunch the if they think you're too good or if they figure out that you gamble for a living. (Many online sites just plain stiff their clients for no reason.) promised, and a week later I get a check for my winnings. Quite straightforward deck of cards. The more poker skill you acquire, the better your odds. At a percentage rake from each poker pot, or renting the seats by the hour. There aren't a lot of live poker games on the Web, but unhappily, I found one. play I get an error message about being unable to link up with the Planet Poker server. This error message appears on a few different computers hooked up to a few different corporate networks that I try, making me think that the network administrators have configured their "firewalls" to disable these games. I Once in the poker room, you scan the virtual tables for empty seats, and click to sit down or to join the waiting list. After a players and take my money in a hurry. The playing interface is smooth and simple, popping up your options to fold, call, or raise when it's your turn. But not only does my Web connection fail in the middle of one hand (if this happens, the game assumes you have called the bet, then kicks you off the table when the hand ends), I flat get beat when I risk any chips. Players with games, this is the one I could get frighteningly into. (Though in the future guaranteed way to get a bead on players is to watch for betting patterns to emerge. Another thing about these games that makes me nervous is that two players in cahoots at adjacent computers could rig the table, playing in tandem and driving up the bets when they know they've got the hand won. Finally, it's hard to gauge the competition. With the online anonymity, for all I know I was Online gambling is here, probably to stay, and it's away, giving your credit card number to a distant and foreign Internet breaking away "from the fickle embrace of western economic and political stronger, prouder, better future," the Guardian added. "It is the start peace talks after the military campaign has reached its "logical conclusion," but that the country will be at a loss about whom to conduct them with, having branded the republic's present leaders as bandits and and hatred he injected reason and calm. He was studiously neutral, utterly unflappable and unfailingly optimistic as bombs, killings and expulsions threatened to derail the peace process. Nobody else could have done what he been the key to the new rapprochement between the Catholic republicans and the Protestant Unionists. The talks were "very tough" until the venue moved to the living room. We shared meals together. I insisted that there not be any discussion of issues at the meals, that we just talk about other things so that they could come to view each other not as adversaries but as human beings and as people living in the same place and the same society and wanting the same of refusing to let the military coup plotters land as their plane was running the leaders of the country's two main political movements, but also "almost the asked her country's president to commute a death sentence of one of four people because she was the mother of a small child. The convicted woman, identified refuses to take another Middle Eastern state off its list of countries that identity within the increasingly inviting outside world." and I will do my best to see it never happens again." by that girl with leukemia who the Backstreet Boys wouldn't visit."-- Mark those 'Bible Codes' guys again! They've found the names of president lied to the entire country about this minister (a man of God!) who turns out to have had sex with a dog, like maybe a golden retriever (unless things turn around and I get to do it at Fox in which case the dog will be a chimp, but that makes sense dramatically) who can't keep a secret (see, it's a talking dog), but it takes this big check from some tabloid where they JUST married, and yet he betrayed his vows? The scales have fallen from my eyes, boy: All those networks care about is ratings. Bastards. Nelson specializes in books with religious themes, although it occasionally is a line of description from the current Toys "R" Us catalog, and which is from the Good Vibrations catalog of adult erotic toys? "Reinvented for more wild stunts! Super action, two sided" "Get ready for a crazy ride inside this inflatable toy" Echo Toys Fast Lane Attack Force, $32.99--toy helicopter, toy tank. Moose Mountain Teeter Totter Ball Maze, $21.99--kind of an inflatable seesaw. No use of the word "action," but it really does look like a crazy ride. Just nuts. Pure madness, but a ride. Insane. Psycho. carefully hidden around the country during his eight years as vice president. womanizer, able to exploit his transient sexual partners on his own merits, but boasting, while delightfully buffoonish, is a minor crime. Rigorous bull market can sustain itself for one more year, right up until the presidential election, at which time, if Trump wins, prosperity continues, but if he loses, the bottom drops out. In making this prediction to New York the economic theory or the satanic pact that would make this scenario digs at a debased editorial philosophy built around fawning over celebrity? of an article, which is what I have been doing, which has been my dilemma." those dictionary things and then get someone to look up 'dilemma' for me." was a crazy wonderful thing, but I knew our staff was too small." but as yet unwritten autobiography of any national political figure lacking simplest way the Internet can enhance democracy is by making buried information easily available to citizens. By putting documents of all kinds online, agencies let in disinfecting sunlight and make themselves accountable to the public. By and large, the federal government has made impressive strides toward participate in an Internet caucus. Yet, when it comes to posting basic information about its inner workings, Congress has been shamefully slow. The result is that it protects the privileged status of corporate lobbyists and say you want to find out something about the latest draft of a bill. You might home pages. But these sites provide scattershot coverage of legislation revisions. Nor are the pages of the legislation's sponsors likely to help. Most of these are filled with promotional dross. Biographical information, press releases, and lengthy legislative accomplishment lists are complemented by Government Printing Office site where citizens can download legislation and search Congressional Record archives. The clumsy and confusing understand how a bill is working its way through the legislative process. is much more information online about Congress than at any time in history," That is undoubtedly true, but it's hardly a meaningful statement. There is far less information about Congress online than there should and easily could be. Working Drafts of Bills and Amendments. Citizens can access bills, but working drafts are rarely posted. That's because under current Government Printing Office. The delay guarantees that lobbyists have time to get drafts and influence the process before the general public knows what's says that "the messy nature of the legislative process makes it difficult to committee chairmen squelch the posting of drafts because, "If citizens figured out what was in some of these bills, there would be public outcry against Hearing Transcripts and Statements. To find out about congressional hearings, the curious must locate the appropriate committee site. Some committees post opening remarks and transcripts, but the coverage is before the transcripts are "processed." While the public waits, lobbyists counsels patience and claims that all committees will offer video archives of hearings someday. In the meantime, Congress could make all its committees' Congressional Research Service Reports. Congress spends over them away in response to specific constituent requests. Still, citizens often have to wait weeks for research that a congressional staffer can download in seconds. As a result, commercial services are able to make money selling to give reports as a favor to constituents." A congressional task force is Voting Records. To find out how a member voted on a particular Lobbyist Disclosure Reports. These reports detail how much lobbyists are paid to work on a particular issue and in theory what, who, and how they lobby. They can make for very interesting reading, but to get them you posting the reports would allow citizens to trace patterns of influence. Citizens are not able to access these reports online, even though they are House, Senate, and Personal Financial Disclosure Reports. Members must report how they spend their "representational allowances" and have to file personal financial disclosure reports. The disclosures can be used to ferret out wrongdoing and conflicts of interest. The data are computerized, but for "policy reasons" the reports are not available online. Congress is keeps a special place in his heart for the downtrodden and the outcast, including, but not limited to, the poor, the indigent, the day traders, and the blind. When the Shopping Avenger sees the forces of rampant capitalism manhandling an unfortunate soul, he will fly to the rescue straightaway, unless instantaneously get the Shopping Avenger into superhero mode, and that is: Shopping Avenger loves all animals, but he especially loves animals that have rest of her family, the Shopping Avenger donned his codpiece and cape and event,' hence they were able to charge any damn price they wanted to. Our the third night. Nothing like the feeling of being homeless and being screwed in the process." The Shopping Avenger endorses the previous statement animals are allowed. We have a wiener dog, a corgi, and a cat. Somehow the "they never gave us any maid service for three days." and learned that her wiener dog, whose name is Rusty, was traumatized by these sort of unfeeling monopoly that would rob people fleeing a hurricane. Except that the executive who was assigned the difficult task of dealing with the heard that some of our franchises were doing this sort of thing, and we get 'Thanks for letting us bring Fluffy,' that sort of thing." Fluffy? Who ever heard of a wiener dog named Fluffy? investigate the motel in question. She promised to apologize, on behalf of no doubt have received thousands of complaints about this company and I thought, 'Why pile on?' But after reading the other complaints you've received When we picked the truck up (they did honor the reservation) a man brought the vehicle out, parked it out front, and then reached behind the front seat and brought out a bottle of fluid. He opened the hood, poured some of it somewhere in the engine, closed the hood, put the bottle back, and handed me the keys. I asked him what he'd done, and he said, 'Oh, just topping up some stuff.'" driver's seat and she literally couldn't move the wheel six inches in either fluid that had been topped off was power steering fluid. There was a pool of it gathering on the street. I went behind the seat to find five empty bottles of service," which, in the Shopping Avenger's estimation, is probably a guy named mechanic showed up, taped up a leaky hose, and left. "It's dark, but we still drastically stiffens. It's now so hard to steer this huge truck that I have to put my foot up on the dash or on the door to tug the wheel in the direction I to stop from smashing into oncoming traffic in the tunnel. If my Horrible, yes? It gets still worse. "I bought power steering fluid like it was cheap beer, topped off, and away we went." He topped "Upon arrival, they keep us waiting for an hour and a half because 'the mechanic's not in yet like we told him.' When he finally arrives, he proceeds to tell us incessant stories about how drunk he got the night before and how [the second mechanic] couldn't believe a fellow mechanic would pull such a In the previous episode, the Shopping Avenger promised to explain to the reader why Southwest Airlines is the Shopping Avenger's favorite company, and now the Shopping Avenger will keep his promise: keep its customers happy. This is in marked contrast to every other airline ever flown by Shopping Avenger, but particularly Northwest Airlines, for which Shopping Avenger has very hard feelings at the moment, for reasons that will be Avenger, when he was just a boy Avenger, worked one summer at a Bob's Big Boy. The Shopping Avenger learned very quickly that Bob's Big Boy is a restaurant for people who don't know how to eat in restaurants. The same holds true for Southwest: It is an airline for people who don't know proper airline etiquette. Shopping Avenger was filled by a gentleman whose first words were, "Bring on not Southwest's fault, except insofar as Southwest makes its seats so cheap that even drunken assholes can fly across this great country of ours. Recently, the Shopping Avenger went to bat for one of his loyal readers, a certain Miss M., who had an actual, valid complaint about tarmac. When she got to her destination, she discovered that her clothing was ruined. She got very little satisfaction when she approached Southwest through the normal channels, so she turned to the Shopping Avenger for justice. Southwest made noises that sounded very much like the noises made by such airlines as Northwest when they do something wrong, Southwest came around and resolution, and thus so did the Shopping Avenger, who is nothing if not loyal to the wishes of his readers. Southwest knows how to make people happy, which tight to show the complex emotions and various facial tics playing across shoot. And, for all I know, didn't write. But the one that actually ended the I, for one, breathe easier knowing that a favorable investment climate prevails in our Middle Eastern ally. to Families of Convicts" and "Campaign Against Drugs to Continue," is the only 'Urgent' Replacement Bill, Women's Decree Fails, 'Rights' Remain Alive." marks around "urgent" or the snide quotation marks around "rights"? Either way, the emir granting women the right to vote and run for office. Some lawmakers who say they support women's rights say they voted no out of principle: the emir's decree undermined the house's authority. Interesting principle. of women attended yesterday's session, sitting in a reserved section of the gallery. Hundreds of men applauded when the result of the vote was announced. hiding behind the constitutional excuse, while in their hearts they wanted "to integrity to the White House" is another man's lying. (In his defense, it must as yet unwritten but badly needed autobiography of any other national political execution night, do you ever pick up a six pack and head down to the pen, to you ever, just for fun, say, 'No New Taxes' in front of a mirror?"-- Marc you had to cheat to win, and presidential candidates all spoke in full fancy hats and several layers of underwear with fastenings so elaborate you had to be like a genius just to undress for one of your Naked Fireside Chats from stupid people are the same all over the world. And if they're not, why hasn't invitation to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, the homosexual political rather meet with the least tolerant, most reactionary wing of the party and I believe that society ought to aim for the ideal. And the ideal is for a man and woman to adopt a child. They should beat it regularly with a stick, educate it in a Christian academy so it won't get confused by, you know, learning, then throw it on the barbecue and eat it, and then we can all get high again, like of a weary suburban Atlas arriving home with the world on his shoulders: I had been a fan of the book before they made the movie, and, while Thanksgiving while we recover from the effects of that drug in the turkey that makes you so sleepy. What do you call it? Heroin. Bless Mom and her of the usual order on date night. (This "common denominator" sponsored by the 'Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.' Then we put you disasters occur, there is an investigation to determine the cause, much as, at the end of a relationship, we try to understand why it failed, but without the advantage of voice recording, so we're left to squabble endlessly over who said what. There is a theory that this search for a cause is an essentially superstitious act, an almost mystical hope that to name the cause is to ensure that disaster won't recur. But in anything as complicated as aviation or romance, there are infinite possibilities for debacle. That's why there is much to be said for rail travel. Not even the most depressed engineer can steer a locomotive off the rails. You can get on and off right in the middle of the city, avoiding the hassles of that trip to the airport. Railroads provide the happy erotic metaphor of the train going into the tunnel; air travel offers the grim symbolism of "crash and burn." On a train you're not trapped in your seat; you can stroll the aisles or amble to the bar car and meet an attractive stranger with whom to initiate what is certain to be a disastrous relationship. shut off and the flaps adjusted to send the plane into a dive. deliberately plunged the plane into the sea. And then again, it might be just professor of religion at Duke University, "It's typically used to initiate something, if you're embarking on a situation where you don't know the kitchen and when I arrive at work and start my assignments." Tipsy Pheasant Fantasia. The birds are tagged for later tracking, and each tag Geek, wears unstylish clothing, seldom bathes, curses a blue streak task lay between me and blessed sleep: threading a central venous catheter from (not his real name) was suffering from liver failure, caused by the hepatitis C virus he'd contracted from shooting heroin with contaminated needles. In most cases, an ordinary IV does the job ferrying fluids and medications. But Bob was was all too familiar with the risks of infection, thanks to me, an inexperienced, haggard medical intern. A day earlier, Bob had been the potentially deadly complication for Bob because liver damage weakens the immune nestled under muscle, where I would pierce the skin and hit the internal jugular vein. My fourth jab with a "finder" needle filled the syringe with a reassuring flashback of blood. After making certain I hadn't nicked an artery, I inserted a larger needle into the skin just above the first needle. After the large needle's flashback, I threaded a long coil into the blood vessel and into the catheter placement. I had punctured his thoracic duct, a collection of the ago, most interns had, as medical students, practiced catheter placement and surgery on dogs for months in a vivisection laboratory. Today, thanks to required vivisection in physiology courses and just eight required it on living thing most medical interns stick with a needle, cut open, or sew back up. Studies have found that rookie doctors' patients suffer no more complications than the experienced doctors' patients. But these studies are most prestigious teaching hospitals or were too small to be statistically significant. Also, some of these studies don't account for "near miss" complications such as Bob's infection and punctured thoracic duct. Although stress. I know that Bob would have benefited if I had performed more line task. Such teams work well, but most hospitals can't afford them. Doctors should learn the technique themselves, especially in case of emergencies. who refuse to operate on animals. Manufactured by Medical Education which doctors practice resuscitation. But despite all the sophisticated medical Doctors take their practice where they can find it. Last bodies of dead soldiers to teach complex medical procedures to father, himself a doctor, noticed an incision on his son's neck. His son had been killed in the line of duty, and no resuscitation attempt could explain the surgical wound. Evidently, the army doctors had long condoned an unwritten rule allowing medical practice on soldiers whose families had given permission for autopsies. (But this soldier's family hadn't given autopsy permission.) of a patient who moments before he had unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate. Next he shoves a breathing tube down the dead patient's throat. Neither Cook wrote in the journal the Pharos about his own experience observing as medical students and doctors practiced placing a breathing tube that it's better than letting interns fumble on live patients. The practice is common enough that a medical ethicist didn't raise eyebrows at the hospital where I completed my internship when he surveyed residents about how many had said that if authorities ban his doctors from practicing on fallen soldiers, it So what's worse: defiling cadavers or practicing on reintroduce vivisection on a limited basis to all medical schools and to allow surgical practice on the recently dead donated bodies. school in the United States. One animal for every four students would mean the Might they be used for this purpose before meeting their ends if we make their deaths as humane as possible? Students who object to animal experimentation system akin to organ donation: Individuals could give consent on their drivers' licenses or when they're admitted to the hospital. We could easily convince folks of the similarities between donating your body to medical schools for dissection and donating it to hospitals for practice. Still, there won't be enough dead bodies to go around. If we won't sacrifice a few dogs, we'll have to sacrifice our own comfort and safety, a sacrifice most patients or hospitals intern. I know how he feels. I rue the day when they strap me down for my inevitable bypass operation. As I drift off into unconsciousness, the last thing I want to hear the senior surgeon say to a junior associate is "So this is your first bypass? Well, the very first step is the incision. Cut him there. novel I wrote because she had a friend who knows an agent who was looking for works by women about women. I sent the manuscript and waited for a response. Jane reported to me that her friend loved the book. Months passed without further information. This week, Jane told me that the woman she gave my book to turns out to be a psycho, and she doubts whether this woman even had an agent in mind when she requested my manuscript. She apparently had a crush on Jane, who says she has since cut off all contact with her. want my manuscript back, and while Jane apologized profusely for the way things went, she refuses to retrieve it for me, saying that the woman would misconstrue this as an overture. I hesitate to contact the woman myself, because I don't want to get in the middle of a weird situation. I also get the impression that Jane thinks that her being upset supersedes any responsibility had. Ditto for Jane. As for getting your manuscript back, it's pretty clear standby: a lawyer letter. Surely you have a friend who is an attorney who would write a formal letter to Psycho With a Crush requesting the return of the reach you, merely the address of a law firm. Even nut cases (usually) pay attention to letters from lawyers. This is your best shot. Whether you choose wonders why you would let your one and only copy of a manuscript out of your hands. Let's hope this experience has advanced your education from Psycho to the male executives are married to, shall we say, plain women. The girl I am major pair of hooters. You might say this is my "type." She is very well spoken, has a good job, and is not a bimbo by any stretch of the imagination. the process of seeking your advice, reveals rather personal foibles, should you not be alerted to the probability that such a person is quite apt to be a I guess my question really is: How can you tell whether a letter is sincere or some things have the ring of truth, and others don't. Let's call it instinct. the store manager about the stealing. We are trained to handle cases of this sort in the following way: We would put a person within sight of the customer who's stealing without actually confronting her. If she hesitates for anything, being watched without accusing her of anything. Also, the security cameras would be "watching" the whole time, as well. This procedure would be repeated whenever she is in the store. This is designed to make her a little uncomfortable about stealing from us while at the same time keeping a paying customer in the store. We cannot take any action without seeing the stealing ourselves. If we didn't do it this way, we would have more lawsuits than we readers who had something to say about this thank you for the information about how store people want to deal with this problem. Many people wrote to say they believe the woman should have been reported, and a few pointed out the hygiene customers become familiar with the way stores deal with grocery grazers, perhaps these pilferers can be "encouraged" to cut it out. former President Bush reminisced about some bad advice he received a decade ago: "In my view, that would have been an open provocation, tantamount to sticking our fingers in the eyes of the Soviet military." Who advised him to do Baptist Convention, responds to critics: "Show me a single case where a and can be three and one at the same time and lives forever."-- Dale built on the assumption that Southern Baptists are bad in bed. Certainly, some religious groups associate sex with sin, which can either be inhibiting or inspiring, depending on your point of view (and whether or not you own your own vestments). Still other faiths forbid specific erotic acts, such as getting undressed or smiling. Of course, sexual pleasure is not experienced in groups (unless you are very lucky), but between two individuals (at least one of whom should be awake at the time, praying for forgiveness). And so there is no proof that any particular religion is sexier than any other. There is, however, some evidence that sexual satisfaction correlates with educational attainment; for instance, those who completed graduate school express greater sexual happiness than those who dropped out of high school. You'd think this sort of thing would "Show me a single case where a Southern Baptist has organizations, protesting his denomination's use of "deceptive" tactics to very different conversion tactic than the straightforward hot lead enema used mentally ill do things that harm others; he proposes to change the state's policy on forced deinstitutionalization. Sincerity check: In his first four homeless mentally ill people in New York City alone. Honesty check: I added the Theological Health: "A legislator has introduced a bill to prevent medical devices being cleaned and reused. He does not refer to foreskins. efforts to preach nonviolence while exploiting it are both patronizing and influence the target audience and predict (correctly) that the film will be a pursue the life she has always wanted. It's a "touching but melancholy reviewers seem a bit tired of the tune. The film is "simpatico enough to make stars: "The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center" hostage after an accidental shooting; they end up becoming heroes when they the cast goes largely unnoticed. The film achieves "not much more than the just three years ago. (Click here to read the first chapter.) Point Project, a coalition of activists opposed to globalization in general and the World Trade Organization in particular, said more than any merely verbal exposition about what really motivates those activists could. Indeed, it revealed quite a bit more than its sponsors intended. movement: the center of a global conspiracy against all that is good and multinational corporations. It destroys local cultures, the headline on the ad read "Global Monoculture"; it despoils the environment; and it rides roughshod over democracy, forcing governments to remove laws that conflict with its Like most successful urban legends, this one is based on a sliver of truth. The gradual global progress toward free trade that began in reduce yours. But there has always been the problem of governments that give with one hand and take away with the other, that dutifully remove tariffs and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, this process was slow and cumbersome. It has now become swifter and more decisive. Inevitably, some of its decisions laws is strictly limited to enforcement of the spirit of existing agreements. It cannot in any important way force countries that are skeptical about the benefits of globalization to open themselves further to foreign trade and investment. If most countries nonetheless are eager or at least willing to participate in globalization, it is because they are convinced that it is in right. The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far is bad for workers everywhere a bit of ammunition, but the crisis did not go on forever, and anyway the solution to future crises surely involves some policing What about the environment? Certainly some forests have been cut down to feed global markets. But nations that are heedless of the environment are quite capable of doing immense damage without the help of worth, the most conspicuous examples of environmental pillage in the Third economy, which puts national actions under international scrutiny, is probably on balance a force toward better, not worse, environmental policies. do with wages or the environment. After all, leaving aside a photo of tree stumps and another of an outfall pipe, here are the horrors of globalization cars, a traffic jam, suburban tract housing, an apartment building with numerous satellite dishes, an office with many computer screens, office workers What is so horrible about these scenes? Here's what the ad says, "A few decades ago, it was still possible to leave home and go somewhere else: The architecture was different, the landscape was different, the language, dress, and values were different. That was a time when we could speak of cultural diversity. But with economic globalization, diversity is fast way they are? But the world is not run for the edification of tourists. It is or should be run for the benefit of ordinary people in their daily lives. And that is where the indignation of the Turning Point people starts to seem rather striking thing about the horrors of globalization illustrated in those photos is that for most of the world's people they represent aspirations, things they wish they had, rather than ominous threats. Traffic jams and ugly interchanges are annoying, but most people would gladly accept that annoyance in exchange for the freedom that comes with owning a car (and more to the point, being wealthy enough to afford one). Tract housing and apartment buildings may be ugly, but they are paradise compared with village huts or urban shanties. Wearing a suit and working at a computer in an office tower are, believe it or not, preferable to backbreaking work in a rice paddy. Now, of course what is good for the individual is not always good if everyone else does it too. Having a big house with a garden is nice, but seeing the countryside covered by suburban sprawl is not, and we might all be better off if we could all agree (or be convinced by tax incentives) to take up a bit less space. The same goes for cultural choices: local radio stations had some kind of cultural content rule. But there is a very fine line between such arguments for collective action and supercilious paternalism, especially when cultural matters are concerned; are we warning societies about unintended consequences or are we simply disagreeing with freedom and democracy, their key demand is that individuals be prevented from individuals the right to drive cars, work in offices, eat cheeseburgers, and planters still sipped mint juleps, wore white suits, and accepted traditional modernity. And you know what? I think the rest of the world has the right to technology. The paper said the deal, which the United States is trying quash, radar system for the China. They speculated that pressure has levied on the Industries in foreign sales of intelligence aircraft. "Those firms could argue complexities, and is perhaps getting some bad advice." visit, said that she "did not pass the test" at the Western Wall because the Wall as they left (you're supposed to back away from it). One of them told year. "She came here for political reasons, not to pray. It's in bad taste," he head of state, the controversy about her constitutional role continued in the saying he would do the job himself. But he has since bowed out and said that, to ensure that the Games would be "a great unifying national occasion," he will the head of state of the host country." Logically, therefore, the queen should do the honors, but "political practicalities" dictated otherwise. "If, for whatever reason, the Queen is not considered to be the appropriate person to open the Games, and thus to represent the nation on such an important occasion to the world, what is she doing as head of state in the first place?" the paper gold, silver, pepper, rubber, and timber. "What will a sudden break do to to stabilize before taking a decision on a referendum." celebrating the occasion "under the present stringent economic circumstances." and "deeply grateful for the good wishes extended to me." Asked what events have made the deepest impression on him since his accession, the emperor mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He moment, but added: "As I recall the history of Japan and how in its past so much hardship and distress have been overcome, I firmly believe that the wisdom popular entertainment. Barney, a "false killer whale," died of a bacterial infection last month in a concrete tank at the theme park. His jumps through hoops had been one of the park's main attractions. In an editorial, the such creatures in captivity did not work any more, it said: "Children are not educated by watching a dolphin walking on its tail or a whale carrying human rickshaw to China after a 40-year ban. "Nothing can be a greater symbol of exploitative, smacks of the 'coolie culture,' and is a terrible affront to human dignity. It should evoke a sense of revulsion in any sensitive human great leader," "a great listener," and "a good person." They applauded his "honesty," "integrity," "respect," and "quiet strength." They recalled that he "played very hard," "played by the rules," and "was always interested in the needs of people." They asserted that he "loves his country" and seeks "the good platitudes are probably true. But why did they dominate the three major celebrities have to say about a man that they all respect and have known very story: "My wife and I jumped on board the minute the senator called. I didn't accomplished in politics. Nevertheless, they praised his political career. agreed: "He's a leader. He was when he first came into the political scene. "He's had some experience in national politics. And then he got away for a while which is sometimes very helpful." Again, how do the assertions of former basketball players clarify this question? Unable to produce evidence, "That's what Bill's about, and what he'd do in his politics: getting everybody jocks were plainly ignorant of the issues. "Old jocks don't know a lot about Dr. J, since you're the doctor here, I guess I ought to ask you about health him for "caring and going out and saying things and doing things about" race relations. Reed called for racial "enlightenment" and predicted, "Bill will try color is an immediate reaction to people, and this is something that we have to rights a cornerstone, really, in terms of his priorities All those problems focusing on, you know, just getting people to get along together on a domestic "concerned about issues" and unencumbered by the "baggage" of immorality that all pretty good guys and we've lived our lives properly, then, hey, why don't lived his life properly. So have my neighbors. And they don't get on Meet that their opinions are important simply because they're celebrities. "Look at Because they think their association with him helps their image as well as his. "personifies" the virtues of team sports. "Thirty years ago, everybody was a that a basketball player, baseball player, football player are very intelligent people and that type of stigma attached to you is not worthy." superficial, elitist politics he claims to be campaigning against. That's what for much of the show, explained the absence of a Gore representative by reporting, "We asked the Al Gore campaign to provide celebrities who would with basketball stars. They can score, but they can't play D. Organization conference was that, perhaps for the first time, developing countries insisted on being heard. It also noted "an incredibly sloppy which it said "bordered on the ludicrous. Ministers of some of the smaller developing countries were denied entry to halls where closed talks between the larger countries were on. When they did manage to get past security they found no chairs for them. And senior government delegates complained that as the available either." The ambassador of one small developing country told the to modernity with great gusto, we have made this otherwise terrifying monster fumble with such ideas as the timeless and ethereal qualities of a woman's beauty, our beginnings attest to these ideals from time immemorial. The gap between the highbrow and the middlebrow, and rediscovering for itself the inextricable link between the body, mind and soul." The paper contains much in an editorial. "They must now save it from the consequences of their cowardice and folly." Otherwise, the rule of law in world trade would be replaced by the law of the jungle. Papers around the world struggled to editorial, were pleading for "a new world order, one of an open world but of a world which isn't, under any circumstances, reduced to mere merchandise." Unionists and Nationalists entering into government together in Northern the street demonstrations, that caused the collapse of the conference. "To representatives) over the forces of darkness (that is, proponents of free trade) is to create a false, misleading, and ultimately harmful dichotomy," the the twentieth century may have culminated over the past decade with the unquestionable triumph of capitalism over socialism, but that has not meant said it is clear that one of the organization's greatest challenges is to convince the public of the advantages of freer trade but that the conference career intelligence man as the replacement. What's different this time, the inauguration today of a new digitized fingerprint system that will allow police lab from their patrol cars in the field and get a definitive comparison with the bureau's prints on file, not in months as can sometimes be the case now, "speaking as if the words on the teleprompter were moving one at a time." to completing the country's democratization. The three leads all observe that friendly replacement because he's worried about prosecution for corruption state securities regulators concerning many day trading firms. The outfits, they say, use deceptive will probably cause them to lose money, and then often arrange for them to receive illegal loans (sometimes directly profiting from those loans). The regulators had been working on their report for seven months, long before last the regulators noted that if people are bent on speculative investments, the futures and options markets present ample opportunity, at lower cost and greater leverage. The Wall Street Journal also runs a story on the report, noting comprehensive, but will "not engage in characterization." (In other words the raising unanswered questions about her behavior in Whitewater matters. upswing. The concept is now blessed by the federal government and many states, knows if there's a causal connection too), sexual activity rates among Let him who is without sin fire the first shellfish toxin round: The believe: The paper had already broken even and in today's economy would probably be adding millions of dollars a year to shareholders' profits.) On the other side, I correctly predicted five out of the last zero deaths of the As you've indicated, newspaper competition is often better in theory than in a front page of the Chronicle reproduced on her office bulletin board. One story was about marijuana consumption; another about chocolate. She had written: "Slowest news day of all time" on her copy, but from what you say it weaknesses, it seems unlikely that eliminating competition will make them for the putative inability of magazines to engage in real debate. This fuels my theory that the Internet is becoming to the late '90s what crack was to the particular sector. Crime up? Must be crack. Circulation down? Must be the Internet. Magazine editors don't have a clue about what readers really want? I admire Granger for turning his magazine around somewhat when everyone else and so it's much easier just to blame the Net. (To be fair, the Times piece does mention other forces, but I still find it an unambitious Not that the Net doesn't change things. Just turn the page to find the story consulting business. The New Economy taking over the Old: Now, there's a As a fellow remote worker, I empathize with your rage against the machine, although I am still not willing to concede that "workplace rage" is a phenom Black Rock Desert, I saw computer programmers gleefully blowing up old hard drives and monitors just for fun. How's that for evidence of dependence on visceral pleasure of detonating expensive equipment that so quickly becomes Today's media offer a nice corollary to your rage against the machine, in space? And the chilling implications of none of us ever really being logged off? Technology is making the boundaries between work and play evaporate, expanding to fill all available time, now with the help of these handy fantasizes about restaurants of the future with cell phone and no cell phone establishment with signs explicitly forbidding the use of cell phones, but have another excuse to add one more new rage to our list, which is growing seemingly "More and more I find myself reacting to people with cell phones the same I would like to discourse further on the changing nature of the relationship rash of new rages in our midst. Am I suffering from rage rage? differs slightly from a counterpart House bill passed earlier this week, and Notes left by Barton in the apartment where his second wife and two children were found dead shed light on the motives behind his killing spree: estrangement from his wife, recent massive day trading losses, and a strange allusion to a "fear" passed from his father, to him, and ultimately to his son. wife and her mother (he had been the prime suspect in the case), saying "there's no reason for me to lie now." And though he pledges to destroy "those who greedily sought his destruction," the only connection between him and his victims runs under the subtle headline: Victims were Drawn to their Deaths by day trading regulation, including a closer screening of aspiring traders, is on Momentum, a day trading firm used by Barton, would ply its clients Circus An expert in online addictions tells the LAT that day trading is Anticipating increased public pressure in the wake of the shootings, the House voted to appoint negotiators to reach a compromise with the Senate on new mandating background checks on gun show weapons buyers, implementation of child The Senate tax cut bill differs slightly from that passed in the House more people eligible for this rate. It also includes more measures to reduce the marriage penalty and fewer to reduce the estate tax. It's similar to the using the bills mostly to define issues for the coming elections. unauthorized taping of calls. She (or, at least, her tapes and grand jury testimony) may also be protected from state indictment under the broad federal takes aim at journalists and other commentators trying to bask in the glow of the many reprimanded for using the tragedy to boast of their own intimate meals growing. Mounting evidence suggests that the massacre was premeditated and centrally orchestrated. The German government believes it has obtained the United Nations probably won't meet its goal of one warm, dry room for every Democrat nor Republican candidates have come up with a workable solution to plant unwittingly exposed the workers and the environment to small amounts of plutonium, and greatly underestimated the health risks posed by exposure to uranium. One anecdote describes plant managers who would salt their lunchtime bread with uranium dust to prove to their workers that it was harmless. The suit alleges that workers were misled about their risk of exposure well into be the haven for dissidents and terrorists it once was. Many of the groups in as white women to die in childbirth, a statistic that hasn't changed since the persistent disparity is cause for concern. Not only are black women statistically more susceptible to conditions (such as hypertension) that create complications in pregnancy, they also tend to seek medical attention later and only after more serious complications, further increasing their risk of fatality. Attempts to address the issue are uniting politicians across party target date for eliminating racial disparities in health care. revealed vinyl sheeting, magnets, large nails, and the like in the animals' stomachs, and call the gift "a despicable trick in a bid to hinder and frustrate nongovernmental cooperation between the North and South." South New Yorker covers? "Cheap and hollow." His role as the chosen cartoonist of the intellectual elite? A result of living "in a media town where people are too busy to keep track of more than one name per area of expertise." His probably ever opened," not to mention that because it was a special citation (and not in the cartooning category), he had no direct competition. For his In the Voice's letters column this week, cartoonists personal and full of cheap shots from unnamed sources. Is Rall right, or is this a case of sour grapes from a less successful artist? a hand. In other respects, though, Rall and his supporters are right on. and other publications of note. Maybe now that Rall has stirred up the pot, the New York media elite will choose somebody a little more interesting the next they? Read the Voice article, check out the work of Ted Rall and was already dismaying. The Department of Labor reported that nonfarm business of whom are still seeing only slight increases in their real income. But a rise in labor costs without a concomitant rise in labor productivity is generally taken as a sign that inflationary pressures are in the offing. (If they're not, then corporate profits are going to take a serious hit.) Today's numbers were not disastrous. But assuming that the jobs report is as good (or, rather, bad) as is expected, meaning that hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created in Productivity is the key economic statistic, because only increases in productivity can increase the ability of the economy to grow without the income per hour each worker can earn. If productivity were to remain stagnant, then the economy could grow only as fast as the size of the work force grew. annual rate, the limits of the economy are extended. Output per worker hour may seem slightly esoteric, but in fact it's the ideal measure of productivity because it makes explicit the heart of all economic growth: the conversion of time, through labor, into value. The only way an economy can become something more than a bunch of people taking in each standards and increase the collective wealth, is when one of two things happens: Either people work more hours, changing empty time into a product or service, or people create more value with those same hours. In a booming The slowdown in productivity, then, doesn't bode well for those who assumed inflation. And yet it was striking that, confronted with this news, the bond market, which is usually hypersensitive to the possibility of inflation, did You could say that this was just irrational. But when you look a little deeper at the productivity numbers, the evidence for real inflationary (Again, what's important is that increases in productivity outpace increases in labor costs. Though not by too much.) So, from that perspective the economy Still, the combination of this report and last week's Employment Cost Index should throw at least a hint of caution into the New Economy advocates, those who are convinced that inflation is permanently dead and that the computer has forever revolutionized the productivity equation. We're still in the middle of a remarkable run. But a boom built on productivity improvements is real. A boom There's very little consensus on what the tax debate holds. For example, on would be best to just forget cutting taxes and go home. Then Senator Phil ought to scuttle tax cuts, pay off the national debt, and hike military Most pundits agree that the fate of a tax cut this year will not be known until after a summer recess. For now, both parties are digging in rather than entitlement reform, and (c) the eagerness of some Senate Democrats to be seen On the campaign front, pundits continue to express pity for the bumbling contributions and seemingly without improper influence. The opinion mafia mistakes don't negate his other accomplishments. This Week even opens "the epitome of modern liberal psychobabble," a sentiment shared by Will. Most [also] people standing around [under a hot sun], there were long lines for I will graciously forgive your East Coast obsessions if you will indulge me block is just a cynical move to assuage the concerns of the Justice Department The Good Housekeeping et al. takeover of the Chronicle and the retrospectives in both papers, complete with fond remembrances of the way coverage, sort of like listening to an elderly relative talk obsessively about editors feel that fibrous school lunch menu innovations, as promoted by local fiber) is enough to make a West Coast reader reach first for the New York Lost." The Internet is predictably trotted out as one of the myriad of causes of the glossies' decline. Ironic for the two of us, since as magazine writers, Overall, it's a nicely argued and sourced piece, but it makes me wonder: Is it worse to be a magazine writer if magazines have lost clout or a newspaper reporter who writes about magazines if magazines have lost clout? It's enough to make you want to write your own obituary and go back to constituents to the slammer for griping about lost Social Security checks. in my quick scan of "Style." What I think is going on here with this obsession face a major membership crisis. Remember, this is an organization that loses members with the sureness of mortality tables. If they don't figure out a way to quickly appeal to aging boomers, they will cease to be a potent lobbying spokesman for one of the companies said that these firms did a good job of warning prospective clients of the risks day trading entails and added that if clients followed the rules the company laid out, day trading was both easy and profitable. Now, easy it may be, although spending six and a half hours staring writer.) But profitable day trading certainly isn't, and the current mania for it is less a reflection of the moneymaking opportunities it offers than of the allure of easy credit and the seemingly unstoppable conviction of all gamblers The numbers are by this point well known, but they're no less staggering for money. And that's in absolute terms: These people leave their day trading careers with less money than they had when they started. Those statistics say nothing about how many day traders lose money in relative terms, which is to effectively losing money, because you can invest in an index fund with no labor of day traders are successful, even without considering the opportunity cost of all the time and energy they have to put into their trading. This is not, needless to say, surprising. Day trading is predicated on a fundamental misconception about the nature of stock prices, namely that they are somehow persistent and predictable. Now, some interesting academic studies in recent years have called into question the idea that stock prices move only moment). But the walk is effectively random, in the sense that patterns are incredibly hard to discern and basically impossible to take advantage of with any regularity. In order to succeed as a day trader over time, you have to be The media sort of gets this. But the attacks on day trading have gotten too mixed up with concerns about the impact of online brokerages, the rise of individual investing, and the mania for Net stocks. These are distinct phenomena, and have nothing to do with what's wrong with day trading. In the long run, the impact of day trading on stock prices is negligible, and although the rise of the Net has facilitated day trading, in fact day trading as it's new investing, in this sense: The people who profit from day trading are not the day traders, but the firms that reap huge commissions from all the trading, The thing that is most remarkable about day trading, though, is the almost complete absence of a coherent investment theory that could justify the get a clear sense of the principles that guide their investing. But if you talk to day traders and try to figure out why they believe they can beat the market, you don't get any real ideas. You just get a host of anecdotes about great trades. The press has exacerbated this problem by including in every article about day trading at least one character who says he's made hundreds of thousands of dollars. How he did it and why he doesn't get up from the table and walk away always remain unexplained. Let's face it. If you go into any casino, there's going to be someone there who's up many thousands of dollars. That may help us understand why people keep gambling. It doesn't help explain Finally, it's crucial to remember that day traders have the dubious advantage of playing with the house's money, since most firms will lend them up consequences: It increases risk, and it makes day traders' performance even profits when you succeed will be greater than otherwise. But so will be your my money in an index fund, what would my returns have been? But if they could ask themselves that question, they wouldn't be day traders. effective at noon tomorrow," click here. You can hear it Earlier today, when Chatterbox first attempted to phone Felt (now an Throat," it said, "you may do so after the beep." Naturally, Chatterbox got a little excited when he heard this. But when Chatterbox phoned back a little night after having a bottle of wine with some friends, and that this morning whether her father is Deep Throat, but that he's told her he isn't. "He hasn't revealed it to anybody if it's true," she said. Hmm, Chatterbox Then Mark Felt came on the line. Chatterbox schmoozed Felt a bit. Does he get asked a lot by reporters whether he's Deep Throat? talking about. [Chatterbox was initially tantalized by this, but quickly disclosure, leaking it to the press, or anything like that. the information that the paper was printing would have to have come from more Chatterbox, trying not to plead, asked Felt if there were any other reason, The conversation seemed to be winding down. Chatterbox asked Felt whether it was annoying to be asked over and over again by various people whether he was Deep Throat. "It gets to be very provoking," he said. Does he find it Did he want the top job? "I certainly wouldn't have objected" to getting the House interference is now a matter of public record), or perhaps displaying a here, and scroll down to the boldface type, to read it.) Chatterbox asked "No." Felt indicated he was starting to lose his patience with In talking with you and in talking with various people on the Let's just say you were Deep Throat. Would that really be so It would be terrible. This would completely undermine the But a lot of people think Deep Throat is a hero for getting the truth out That's not my view at all. It would be contrary to my In other words, there is a potential reason, other than not being Deep Throat, that might impel Felt to say he wasn't Deep Throat: the perceived dishonor such a revelation might bring Felt as a "loyal to violate the civil rights of members of the Weather Underground when they on Felt and Miller's behalf, even though he hadn't been subpoenaed. Having volunteered to walk into a courtroom and testify to help someone he believed had triggered his own downfall. Felt and Miller's lawyers had turned and Miller with the largely black jury. The prosecution, however, "had been shouted, "Thief!" and "Liar!" called him a "war criminal," and were expelled by federal marshals from the courtroom. (This according to the third volume of perfectly legal. (Although he wasn't asked under oath whether he'd known of or [here the judge interrupted and told the prosecutor to ask his next question, people whose sons have been killed in war." Possibly in part because of the president a few days later, assumed the presidency, he pardoned the two testimony because he knew it would alienate the jury and give Deep revenge buff who was capable of extraordinarily Machiavellian behavior. We also authorized were a necessary line of defense against radicals and troublemakers come to pass?" is freighted in all sorts of subtle ways. Looking over your own look like, one would say that they were, by and large, pretty prescient. But Bell himself disclaimed the role of futurologist. "I am writing," he said, "an 'as if,' a fiction, a logical construction of what could be, against which the future social reality can be compared in order to see what intervened to change society in the direction it did take." And what was his original Though he is often (wrongly) lumped with the neocons today, Bell is in his bones an Old Left intellectual. (He joined the youth of the Socialist Party in scenario for the collapse of capitalism (as presented in Volume I of explaining structural changes in society as a consequence of increasing conflict between two classes, the capitalists and the proletariat, whose identities were determined by the industrial mode of production? The answer, it is generally thought, has something to do with the emergence because of the alienating division of office labor and the depreciation of their value through free public education. He was wrong. unified. According to Bell, changes in the one do not determine changes in the other (for example, the United States is capitalist and the Soviet Union was collectivist, but both were industrial). So in Bell's sociology they are I think that is why I find Bell so much less interesting a theorist than powerful premise: The material mode of production determines everything else in society. History has falsified that premise. Bell wants to salvage the theory by introducing distinctions and complications. He insists that we talk about a I find it very hard to see how Bell's forecasts about the future, prescient as they may be, flow from this rather inert theory obtained by weakening that (like his prediction that inflation would become a permanent feature of the theory of social change. It has too many degrees of freedom, as it were. It complains that the headline on the front page of the New York Times story had some news in it, though. Pediatricians are now supposed to take "media histories" along with medical histories when they see their young patients. Doctors are to teach parents to teach their children "media the two of you interviewed about her ability to deconstruct a Gap Everyone knows television is bad for kids. The time they spend in front of real world. The child who doesn't develop his inner resources is left with no other source of entertainment than television. The unformed mind can't be causality that holds that shooting a criminal has roughly the same consequences as bopping a bunny to the seeming ubiquity of rape, murder, and mayhem. But just because we know all this (and will dutifully recite some version of do anything about it. Television is like air conditioning: You can't imagine how we ever survived without it. Chilled air made the South prosperous; returning from a day at work or rushing through all the errands crammed into a weekend can imagine coping with a child's demands for distraction without recourse to the boob tube. We could never get away with paying neighborhood break. The pediatricians would do better founding a national nanny service. Pleasure to share the pages with you. I warmed up this morning at my usual Breakfast Table, the F train, whose passengers are the most literate and convivial of any New York subway line I have ever ridden. On average, every third person is reading a newspaper: There are the contortionists who fold the papers are enviably scaled for reading in motion), and a scattering of people mind sharing. Today I saw a woman's eyes well up at the Times story on live liver donations. I also saw three people contorting themselves to read the I was not one of them. My appetite for Talk has been weakened by these "revelations," which seem as banal as they are carefully meted out. If we I suppose we'll have to reserve judgment until tomorrow, when the actual buzz (of which she's already got plenty), can you think of any other reason why I also want to ask you for help in reading the Wall Street Journal's a token caveat that "his actions can't be blamed just on day trading," but then recounts exactly how his deep losses led to the massacre. How are we supposed the cosmic meaning of day trading. It may be a reflection of our amnesiac media As I prepare to pack up my newspapers, I can't resist passing on one more Post played this story? Page A-15, beneath the fold. cell phones to be more relevant to its readers. In fairness, the paper of Journal arrives with its special "Weekend" section, which frankly I find electronic gizmos for the bored executive. (Last week, the Journal found a business titan who admitted that he had fired someone over his cell phone And here's hoping that you enjoy the summer weekend without thinking for a single New York minute about the upcoming Senate race. good times, it seems they strain to do exactly the same thing. Probably the most distinct theme to emerge thus far among the leading challengers to Purpose," which W. explains by pointing out that "prosperity alone is simple elaborated a bit more. "The invisible hand works many miracles," Bush said. lack of meaning. "There is something that's going on in the country that is widely felt, and that is people searching for some meaning in their life that is deeper than the material," he said. "I think that is a profound reaction to the materialism of our time and to the hollowness of life if you're It's hard to disagree with such sentiments, but it's even harder to campaigns. Don't they remember Jimmy Carter's malaise speech? Don't they allergic to politicians' dabbling in vague spiritual criticism, and for good reason. We're electing someone to run the government, not minister to the You also have to wonder just whose feelings these guys are trying to voice. Even in flush times like these, it's hard to imagine that a large segment of the electorate feels burdened by the spiritual side effects of excessive wealth. While presidential candidates spend a good deal of time among people with too much money on their hands (they're called thousand dollar contributors), this is surely not a significant voting block. But perhaps such comments are intended less for those who feel afflicted by this particular form of ennui than for the larger group capable of resenting the rich. On this reading, denouncing the spiritual fallout of excess wealth is a sophisticated variety of economic populism tailored to an audience of people who fully hope to get rich themselves. Like greed, materialism is a vice that tends to afflict those with more money than oneself. The problem isn't money. and Bush may have stumbled upon something rather clever: a kind of rich candidate's class warfare. Shunning shallow materialism is a way to express contempt for the upper class while being a member of the upper class. Still, the candidates are going to have trouble pulling this off. The last do this not just because of his sense of noblesse oblige but because he had any practical suggestions. Instead of taxing and regulating the "malefactors of great wealth" into submission, they merely suggest we feel sorry for them. Al Gore hasn't said anything about empty materialism yet, so he still may next president should see to it that it afflicts as many of us as possible. shows up to a psychiatric hospital apparently for treatment and then threatens to stab the staff. Arrested following this assault, he confesses racist fantasies to the police, telling them: "Sometimes I feel like I could just lose after his release, he loses it and goes on a racist shooting spree. further evaluation of this man's marbles? And if so, where's the evidence of hospital's records of this fine moment of community policing and mental health care. The New York Times just cites the spokesperson for the up in the average clink claiming they have fantasies of killing people, and it's impossible to know whom to take seriously. But it's incredible to think that a man who is so out of control when he brings himself to a mental hospital that he's arrested doesn't go right back into a mental hospital or some kind of whacked cultural and political climate of our country that allows a man with mental health profession step in, if at all, when cops hear this kind of violent fantasy from an obviously violent man? How does the whole process work? Then, I want to read an article about exactly how many cabs there are in Sometimes you find yourself having to say the obvious. So here goes: There passed by the Republican Senate and House of Representatives. The justification for the cuts rests upon a misapprehension of the lessons of the 1980s, a foolishly optimistic view of the certainty of economic forecasts, a confusion of public and private goods, and an almost willful averting of the eyes from it's still amazing that the Republicans passed them. economy. But the economy is already running at or near its productive capacity. conclusion. In this environment, tax cuts serve only to overheat an already racing economy. And increased consumption is hardly what the economy needs. An argument can be made that spending on education and infrastructure would help boost the economy's productivity in the long run. Certainly spending down the debt, reducing government borrowing, would have that effect by encouraging more productive uses of capital. It's hard to imagine that a cut in today's hardly confiscatory tax rates would do the same, especially when the major beneficiaries of both bills would be the wealthy, who have already reaped But perhaps, as we've been told time and again by Bill Archer and Phil consumers consume. But the people should also be able to spend their money on public goods such as public schools, highways, and stealth fighters, and they can't do that if the share of the federal budget devoted to discretionary can't get together with my neighbors and pay for road improvements on the staggering, but so too is the disingenuousness of the rhetoric surrounding tax cuts. The money's going to be spent in one place or another. It's just a question of where, not a question of trusting the people or not. is on the rise and companies are having absolutely no trouble raising capital. Here again, the benefits of this cut will flow almost entirely to the wealthiest, and will solve a problem that currently does not exist (that is, capital scarcity). And although any capital tax distorts capital allocation, global economy suggest might not be such a bad thing? Most important, it's essential to remember that all of these tax cuts and make meaningful predictions about economic growth, tax revenues, and budget forecasting is an abysmal one, not because the forecasters are stupid or biased but because the economy is just too complex to predict with any accuracy. Phil could just raise taxes to make up the difference. He also said that he had some be a strong Republican campaign against the probable Democratic contender, spelled out in the story, declared mandatory restrictions on water usage fining violators, and authorizing police and county workers "to confront these things. PG officials note the "water authority serving both counties (All of which begs the question, not addressed in the piece, what does the term were added, wages roses at the fastest rate this year and unemployment was news increases the possibility that the Federal Reserve will raise interest heart valve damage in some patients and lung problems in others." The larger significance of the case: Defendants "usually win the initial cases in such product liability law suits" so that this loss "could lead to thousands of new knowledge of their contents. Both Times report that the colonel voluntarily stepped aside last week in light of the allegations, though he However, says the source, it's customary to leave such mail unsealed to show The Post fronts a piece analyzing the budget shenanigans. Congress against his fellow Republicans in Congress. And the surpluses projected for the defense spending, run the Government in a way that would be satisfactory to The Post profiles Vice President Gore's presidential campaign I don't know anything about your reading habits, but these days a lot of my newspaper consumption is online. There are a number of reasons for this: a nomadic office life over the last year, which left me without a reliable thrives on Web links; and the sheer amount of time I spend staring at my laptop also first to acknowledge that there are things you miss when not touching the resignation. The piece itself is tame and perfunctory, but when you open the paper to Page A12 where it continues, your eye travels immediately to the million dollars of hush money to the plumbers: "We could get that." I love that inevitably reoccur. A facile assumption of the left? Sure. But at least that My fascination here is not that one must take any particular meaning from the play of the two stories, but that, as with a work of art, one can. The which the Web theoretically does not have. But working around those the great moments of the newspaper craft. (Headline writing in a narrow space the historian in me applauds the widespread availability of primary documents, and the media critic in me notes that the New York Times has no interest in calling attention to the way that it covered (or rather didn't cover) the Inspired by your accolades, I am going to tell the truth. I was wrong last pretentious and empty, like a photo spread of male stars and their ponderous the camera his trademark weary stare. Some others have been amply reported (she does, however, have the good grace to acknowledge it). And the magazine's dictates of Talk's "Hip List," I am not prepared to believe that scabby Talk because of its "unpretentious brevity." But this is a whale of a book reviews, an astrology page, and more. This doesn't feel like editorial sticks. I kept looking for a unifying sensibility, for flashes of brilliant You wouldn't have won. The piece contained no new revelations at all-- unless And now staffers, clearly upset at his departure, have blurted out a goodbye speech. This strikes me as just as much a testament to the campaign's poor one spoke to the press. The policy was overly suspicious and vituperative, but it also cultivated a sense of common purpose and team loyalty. Even though agree not to let Mark Barton represent the perils of the Internet economy. I enjoyed today's Journal story quite a bit more than yesterday's. With scale the world's highest mountains." Is this really all part of one big Trend? Lynch office manager and seriously injured a stockbroker. having dedicated much front space earlier in the week to the emerging cut, runs a front page "news analysis" piece on the politics of the vote but leads federal counterintelligence officials badly bungled their investigation into squanders an historic opportunity to retire a substantial portion of the quality of the economic analysis evident in the floor debate with its observation that at one point during a discussion of the bill's tax credit for that a likely result of the ruling is that the networks will quickly try to snatch up available stations in the cities where they already own one. Both the if the two papers had spent a sentence or two explaining how such a momentous market decision gets to be made, not by Congress, but by four people. found the evidence for doing so less than compelling. The Senate report says possible spies and other possible sites for their espionage. The coverage notes however that the report discloses for the first time that Lee was fired last passed computer information on miniaturized nukes to unauthorized people. seems that some folks just can't abide by such rules but that their neighbors it.) And yes, police were actually sent out on some calls. The story sallies forth under a truly wonderful headline: PUT THE SPRINKLER DOWN SLOWLY. to him in addition to his factory job salary were decreed by the Communist previously released tidbit revealing that on at least one hunting trip while The Wall Street Journal reports some numbers indicating that The Journal also files what could be the first mention of a producing finished cars within five days of receiving a customer order. vocations involved (plumbing and hospital supplies)? Or that since it happened last week already, it isn't really "news" now? And the answer is (envelope, companies would be able to purchase shares before any public offering. The remaining shares would be issued to the public. Money from the initial sale would go into the new companies' treasuries. The exchanges say they need the normal companies, the exchanges can issue more stock or bonds at any time; it distribute shares to its listed companies, as a reward and incentive for reduce the current owners' share of the new company. Nevertheless, their ownership interest in the exchanges may turn out to be salivating for a piece of the New York Stock Exchange. But even in the current permanently to charitable purposes. The trustees of the Metropolitan Museum have to give away all its artwork, building, and endowment. Unlike the stock exchange members, they would not get any of the shares themselves. And if the new company made a profit, it would have to pay taxes. understand it correctly, this "study" was issued by a marketing company whose "research" consisted largely, or maybe entirely, of reading the results of a Internet, but I would argue that technology is a major factor. It's not just the increasing complexity of technology, but our increased reliance on it. As someone whose work life is largely "remote," I can testify to the frustration of my filing a timely story for the Standard's Web site can get amazingly clogged. Editors and other managers get in the habit of thinking that scenario. Take their high expectations against shoddy machine or network it's uneven. But my favorite scene is where three disgruntled software technicians take a constantly malfunctioning printer out to a field, and proceed to kick the living toner out of the thing. It's all shot in slow But needless to say, only the prosperous are bored with prosperity. What dissatisfied me about today's otherwise excellent Journal piece was the that riskiness is attractive to each group for very different reasons. Risks such as adventure travel may be entertaining for the rich; but for the rest of us, risks (such as day trading) are mostly a way to try and become rich. Just because both activities involve some sort of danger doesn't make them a unified trend. That's something I find consistently annoying about newspaper and to be conflated into Something Larger or a movement that is Sweeping the be by Al Gore? Bush is such a flirt, all mystery and anecdote. His personality moments in his profile in Talk (apparently he once grabbed a rival by the collar, drew him close, and yelled, "If you want to fuck me you'll have to into a guessing game about his actual beliefs. Someone should keep a tally of read into one of three categories: Conservative, Moderate, and Empty tomorrow," said the only news vendor who had even heard of it. been as weary if he reversed his word order and intoned, "Success is the pox of celebrity." Or maybe, "Celebrity interviews are the pox of glossy magazine adventure" exploits with scabby knees? A full body cast seems more probable, but that's one way to combine today's Wall Street Journal with Seriously, I think the dirty secret that helps explain the upsurge in with prosperity. Where is the grand adventure in politics when the only choices away for baby boomers' golden years? What's the point of getting rich and flaunting your wealth through conspicuous consumption if everybody on your block is collecting vintage wines and building oversize vacation homes? parvenus who are tearing down historic houses and replacing them with soulless mansions because of loopholes in the local zoning laws. In short, who wouldn't crave a little adventure in their lives at a time when the political leaders of both parties are hellbent on giving us a with armchair generals who want to retain their credibility with the press in Happily yielding to you for the final word, I am already salivating over go on being a noteworthy role. The truth is that almost all writing about first Because the first lady is obviously something of a freak in this day and whose life has been hideously warped by the fact that her spouse chose a career in politics. Such a life has very little to offer other women in the way of exemplary lessons, and we're right to feel a bit queasy over a first lady who promises (or threatens) to accomplish anything very substantive on the strength of who she's sleeping with. (Note: The major exception to the boredom rule was But thanks for taking me up on that question of how first ladies have sometimes served their husbands as useful camouflage. You chose great examples of the refugees. I agree that the problem isn't gender stereotyping; it's the the Bush White House, when everyone was writing mistily about how deeply "Bar" He seemed, over time, not to bother having much of a domestic policy himself, you say, but to some degree it is her doing. All you've got to say to promote Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is going to consist, in very large part, of husband; I do think it's a symptom of the way that Cook's focus on the marriage sort of wavers in this volume. However, I can't let our last day of discussion pass without praising Cook for one of her neatest insights into ER and her Franklin and others. ER apparently avoided confrontation, but kept two nasty dogs, who snapped at journalists and senators; the larger of them actually bit House, ER carefully employed as cook and housekeeper the dreadful, foreign dignitaries and made sure the White House served the worst food in "The drink, being the President's department, was not actively repellent," The salads were especially deplorable; for they tended to be complicated and decorative, and might even conceal bits of marshmallow in their moreover. Scrambled eggs are not an easy dish to cook in such a way that hungry was never against quiet revenges with a moral excuse. She equated plain living with high thinking, so it was moral to eat badly. And if her husband did not like eating badly, why there were passages in their joint past Deal, I can admit to having found Cook's prose clear and readable but not especially memorable. I guess there's not much hope that she can kick up her heels a bit in Volume III, what with World War II just over the horizon. As a proud resident of a Manhattan neighborhood that I pray will always be called the Upper West Side and as a Times reader who has never deigned The story in today's papers that caused me to mentally brake to a halt was a Since we have all marveled (maybe grumbled might be a better word) at the way bottlenecks appear and disappear with no apparent cause, I sped through the story in hopes of discovering a telling insight. Alas, all that the scientists metaphors to describe traffic jams. Are they like "water molecules freezing into ice"? Or is traffic movement akin to "the remarkable darting motion of a school of fish"? The article, though, did have one memorable bit of deadpan cover the fact that when the shrinks go on vacation, there is virtually no real I realize that yesterday in my haste to wrap up our correspondence in a trek yet again through that tiresome swamp. Maybe the first lady wants vindication, but as a New Yorker I simply crave relief from this entire me in ways that go beyond legalistic questions of whether White House funds are used for her travel and campaign expenses. The law, for example, does not require reimbursement for the extensive costs of Secret Service protection when she campaigns. Nor is there a way to wall her White House staff off from all political concerns. Al Gore, of course, has the same problem. But, at least, the vice president was elected to his current post. No woman in New York history has ever been elected to a statewide post more to her husband's political career. New York will never develop its own cadre of discussion with the first lady about baseball. In all her rhapsodies about the found dead in the park," the New York Times reports this morning. (I did not know that grackles were native to Central Park; I don't think I could pick cause of death, but everyone agrees that fowl play is likely. Evidently there the information that "Killing the ducks, sparrows and grackle would be a violation of the Federal Migratory Bird Act." Reading between the lines, one If the pigeon killer is still at large, thank heavens there's a real culprit having a suspect in custody, and having him be an avowed racist to boot. So many of these shootings end up with the guy killing himself, which makes the and mass murder and who eventually tips over from theory into practice. About the only part of it I don't get are the peculiar reports about his traced a crucial piece of Furrow's AR-15 assault rifle to Bushmaster Firearms like to see this shooting become an issue in the Republican primaries. Which of that movement is unwelcome in the Republican Party? Which ones are willing to these groups or isolate them so completely that they can't try to kill more I came back from lunch in such a merry mood (and, no, the lunch wasn't the the first lady will bless the lucky voters of New York with her divine Maybe I should have sensed the warning signs yesterday when you partially based on the premise that the drastic improvement of life in New York in a legislative body, especially since he would be required to work and play You also find me jaded because I fail to grasp the "promise" of a What politically would interest me? How about a presidential race between prefabricated political dictates of the campaign consultants. correspondence is that you find things in the papers that I had missed, like someone who, alas, had to compose one of those formulaic Times death notices, let me provide a bit of explanation. The problem is not the libelous in these paid notices, but the bereaved themselves. As you look at million a day on maintaining unnecessary and underpopulated facilities. The number of veterans is shrinking and the popularity of outpatient treatment is enhanced care for veterans. Veterans' groups view the facilities as "a national asset that must be preserved" and insist that they "have earned the right to The LAT offers a sneak preview of Wen Ho Lee's defense against Justice Department will decide in the coming weeks if and on what counts to files to an unprotected local area network, he was merely making backups in case the originals crashed. They also call the potential prosecution a result Republicans in Congress are unusually adverse to compromise. The Republicans chose to risk a veto on their tax cut rather than settle for a smaller one, and the Democrats refused to support light restrictions on gun control when their stricter package was defeated. Potential causes for the inflexibility include prefer to let issues such as Medicare and gun control stall, in the hope that they will later fuel the election of his wife and his vice president. powerful trade group lobbyists, who usually wait to lavish their money and support until a party's nominee is chosen. Specifically, Bush has used the lobbyists as a conduit to their bosses. He has already registered donations The piece implies that the Bush campaign is hypocritical: although it "aspires for the Democratic presidential nomination. In addition to conserving his Gore camp. "The Vice President's office asked me, 'Why are you saying all these sharp businessman, if not a savvy candidate. Despite his regular evisceration sun's emergence from lunar shadow could damage or even eradicate their vision. But Druids have other reasons for averting their eyes when the sun and the moon Deep Throat Revealed [One Last Time].") Knowing that Felt had denied being Chatterbox wondered aloud earlier this week whether Felt would still deny I would have done better. I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn't exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he? Chatterbox doesn't know what to make of Felt's claim that Deep Throat was information came straight from his dad," who of course is one of the three Chatterbox, who is increasingly drawn to the hypothesis that Deep Throat was indeed Felt, finds much to like in this story. As a father, Chatterbox knows authorship of Primary Colors came to light partly as a result of some has stated publicly in the past her suspicions about Felt. ("I always thought Deep Throat was, which was very smart because I would have told the whole world from the White House tapes that Chatterbox didn't know about. As in the White Chatterbox previously cited, Felt is discussed as a probable leaker. This Gray tell us what the hell is left? You know what I mean?... who knows about this and he feels strongly that we better not do anything figure that if you stay in as president there's a possibility or probability heat wave, used the data to point out that it's been a lot hotter, which it clearly addled by the heat (it's much cooler now) misinterpreted the temperatures. Chatterbox thanks the many readers who wrote in to inform him of declining order. Therefore, it's rash to conclude (as Chatterbox did) that the rankings for third hottest, fourth hottest, etc., are, of course, similarly None of these qualifications negates Chatterbox's message that it can get a wave. But Chatterbox finds himself wondering why this heat wave, which Click here for links to the Tribune's coverage of the heat Authority buildings for senior citizens have air conditioning in every room, Interestingly, the city's deaths and power outages came "despite a citywide Still, Chatterbox doesn't remember hearing before a few years ago about of old folks stay put, and are therefore cut off from family support networks. they're continuing to come in." In other words, the young Latino folks are situated near the old Latino folks, and can help them escape the heat. (To read has changed the nature of the "good life," and point out that your description of Bell as a "conservative in culture" clarifies some of what seemed so cloudy 1973--is somewhat startling with hindsight. After all, the '60s was the decade standing between the last hurrah of an industrial age (the '50s), and the ability to thrive on building services rather than things). As an early the '60s would have been a good decade for Bell to examine in this book. Yet than what was happening on some upstate New York farm. Your description of Bell's cultural conservatism makes me wonder whether his decision to ignore the It's an unfortunate omission because it's precisely this cultural "information revolution" that has changed our world and defined our the system) to produce a psychedelic experience. Or the information embedded on plastic films that allowed 8-track tapes to alter the way one experienced a day on the beach. The entire '60s thing was a product of an information media diet, eroding the principle of mass experiences through media, and enhancing tribal impulses to identify with your clique. By not discussing these book. It's been lovely corresponding with you. I hope you've been writing your the information revolution may have "changed the nature of the good life," as The Wall Street Journal's Mayor Pothole profile really was one great issue, making very similar points, but with a somewhat more forgiving tone, in "Jerry Brown Gets Real." One highlight: When peace activists took over Mayor "There seems to be serious problems on the left with finding ways to express themselves." Oh, those goofy wackos on the left. Why don't they find some constructive way to express themselves? Meditation, perhaps? humor is both mandated and frowned upon in the workplace: A survey found that career moves of young guns to teach us old dogs a thing or two. But while this article tells us that our talented tyke's precocious success is "partly due to his talents and partly due to the abundance of opportunities in high tech Only the Journal could find in the above events an uplifting story about a plucky kid's "first lesson in the power of connections." angry at work." The story advises us to add "workplace rage" to the culprits (read: Internet, Internet, Internet) that made Mark Barton pull the trigger in seeing a shrink, that struck Chatterbox as big news. (Clearly, he should didn't really establish whether he was or he wasn't seeing a shrink, and seemed own about the source of husband Bill's sexual compulsions. The possibility that anthology of neoliberal writings in the early 1980s that never got published; 1980s; h) Chatterbox has probably neglected to cite five or six additional conflicts of interest, but figures he has to leave something for why her husband is a womanizer, let's look at what Franks writes about whether Public office has prevented the president from seeking therapy, but friends told me they expect him to after leaving the Oval Office. Presidency." As you can see, the statement is Franks' own, based on what the president's friends "told me," a point that seemed to be fully grasped by a the ministers that he talked about at the outset. I can't tell you about the details of that because they are private. But he has sought to work with ministers who he is close with and friendly with, and that's the extent of Q: Some of these ministers have degrees in other areas, like A: I don't have the slightest idea. I know who the ministers are. I don't one of them has not made a secret of the fact that he's talked to the is in psychotherapy under the guise of seeking "ministry" from a My heartfelt condolences at the passing of one of your beloved two fat rise here, of course, that makes this careless effort at a cookbook so Excuse the expression: This is a fine example of the Times' having the ill effects of celebrity run amok, namely unleashing bad recipes on the masses, while simultaneously celebrating that celebrity in the form of a prominent obituary complete with a photo of both ladies with their motorcycle Still, you can't find that much fault in an appreciation of a life that ends with this quote from the surviving fat lady about her deceased partner in cuisine: "She didn't see the point of flowers. She'd rather have caviar." As a coda to our conversation yesterday about the perils of technology run in which "A Technology Junkie Learns To Live Life a Little Less Plugged in." We hear the tale of a project manager for US West, who's spent his career finding ways for businesses to use technology but in the process found himself a slave In the emergency room for chest pains, this tech junkie panics about his lost cell phone, not the about state of his health. The piece is about how one man learned to "find the 'off' button" without quitting his job. Here's a hero and listens to voicemail on the weekend and on vacation, he sometimes doesn't even respond to it. Can you imagine? To be fair, the profile subject says of As for your ruminations on the effects of competitive jealousy on news papers, just because the Post broke it. Readers don't really care who But I ask the business question: Can you see any way that papers might competition with serving readers? After all, no one wins awards for putting out For the moment, the carnage in the Internet and technology sector seems to have ended. Although today belonged almost entirely to real technology forever), the days of forced margin calls and panic selling seem to be over the past couple of weeks, I haven't written anything about it, because I didn't think there was anything interesting to add. When you combine rising interest rates, concerns about inflation, and a market that had priced in a lot As for Net stocks in particular, they offer no solace to the scared investor months there's even been talk that Net usage is seasonal (slow in the summer). The fundamental irony about Net stocks, after all, is that investing in them is an investment in the future, and a future that's really still years away. But most of the people investing in them appear to have time horizons that extend no further than the end of the week, if they're lucky. That's an incredibly the more interesting question is why a company would want to go public right closing the first day of trading below where they were initially sold), and all August, traditionally the worst month to go public and a bad month to do anything in the market, since so many traders are on vacation. So why rush? Now the press is starting to administer this public shaming in advance. The his car to work! The collective message: What a pathetic loser! like the way he sold out his own legacy of decent, moderate Republicanism for has been espousing the kinds of centrist positions he took when he served as a spending more on National Parks. On education, he has backed away from the conservative panacea of vouchers and focused on the more realistic reform of must ask why it never got off the ground. I think the reason is fairly obvious. Another moderate Republican with a famous name and far more money squashed him to despise a candidate who tried hard, played fair, and will surely make a A personal confession is in order after your vivid portrayal of your normal Breakfast Table routines aboard the F train. (I trust that you don't actually that's a "quality of life" offense that makes you eligible for an discuss the purported real reasons that she plays "Stand By Your Man." Bill's "abuse" as a child is the kind of psychological claptrap that gives liberalism a bad name. About the only mystery left is the psychological roots As for your bet that the actual Talk interview will prove a trading. (Will "going day trader" replace the already dated "going postal" in today's paper was the Journal's first chance to weigh in with a comprehensive Barton piece. I loved the small authoritative details like Barton fries." (Writing for news magazines is where I learned the trick of detailing what was eaten during noteworthy meals. Back in the 1980s, there was an expression on Capitol Hill, "Get out your menus, here comes after all, a guy who had apparently already murdered his prior wife and family. The sentence in the Journal story that spoke volumes to me was the one What was sorely missing from the Journal recap was the aggressive thing points out, it's that there is a dire need for regulators to clearly world gone mad. So with my fingers black with newsprint, this seems like the meant that the Journal was far too offhand about the me. As you suggest, his killing spree may turn out to have a spray of policy and business consequences: for gun control, regulation of day trading, the online sector of the financial industry. So before we are asked to digest proposals and reforms, I am hungry to know more about the other causes of trading "on margin," or borrowing funds against the securities he already owned, which he was required to back up with additional funds when the value of those securities dropped. But the story doesn't tell us if trading on margin is bet as riskily at a more established firm or away from a computer. of us are abandoning steady salaries for a home office, a modem, and a bunch of solid analysis of the scope and specific dangers of day trading, and how it compares to more conventional forms of extracurricular investing. because it's a sympathetic forum. But so are lots of magazines (remember the Senate candidacy is a direct reward for the crosses she's had to bear; before about the interview is that she seems to be trying to nourish her candidacy wronged first wives. But if you won't share with me, then at least my fellow F by alleged misinterpretations of the First Lady's interview in Talk --was with his childhood." Is a promise like that legally enforceable? A promise is only legally binding if it is part of a contract. But a contract needn't be a written document or even an oral agreement. If a reasonable person would conclude that a serious offer was being made, and fulfills the terms, it can be considered a binding contract. If you put up spend hours searching before finding and delivering your beloved tabby, the courts will make you pay up. If you have gained no benefit and I have incurred benefits both commercially and politically from his stagy promise itself, so case where a person was convicted of perjury for lying about sex. intent to make an offer. (Since he said he intended to publish an offer, no reasonable person could believe he intended his statement itself to be a binding offer.) And on the Today show the next morning, he announced that he had decided not to publish the offer after all. He also said that the University alumni fund, not to the journalist who proved him wrong. That means even if he had made a legally binding promise, it would be hard for anyone but Brown's Talk raise the question: What are a new magazine's chances for answer is: not good. The total number of magazines published in the United Among general interest magazines, the only newcomer to survive and thrive is actual financial data are not available. But it is widely assumed that losses. Even ultimately successful magazines spend many years and many millions before reaching profitability. Unsuccessful magazines spend the money and never Why? Partly for the same sorts of reasons that any new business must spend year. Then you are thrilled if half of those renew at the end of a year. Even an unsuccessful magazine can have a large circulation if it is willing to pay enough for subscribers. Success comes when you have a high renewal rate and new customers are easy to entice to replace dropouts. Then your more to acquire than he or she ever pays. But meanwhile your large and loyal audience entices lots of advertisers. At best this takes years. and other older magazines in the tradition of magazines subsidized for political reasons. But there is another, more amorphous and less acknowledged And then there's the Internet, where there are no postage, printing, or paper costs. And there are no subscriber acquisition costs either, since Internet magazines are given away free (though Internet magazines do spend some left over for profit. So far, this remains a theory. I had a similar reaction to the quotes from the guy's neighbors and virulent racist." I don't count among any of my acquaintances people who openly think I would try to change his or her mind, and if that didn't work, they'd be the urban media elite, I live in a kind of protected bubble. I also know that intrinsic inferiority of the lower orders, but he's a really fun guy"? This more fascinated by the process through which people explain these things to One more tidbit for the day: The supermarket tabloid the Star is blonde, was not responsible for the breakup. 'His marriage was a mess Assuming this stuff is true, can you fathom the chutzpah of a guy who led Before you do anything else today, grab the Wall Street Journal and says: "I don't talk about sustainable development. I talk about downtown development." I confess to harboring some soft sentiments for Brown, though my And now for a rant, combining my old energy as Village Voice press critic with my new Industry Standard obsessions. The New York fierce battle to control both the data pipes that come into our homes and the they combine an Internet company (Excite) with a broadband service (@Home). didn't bring this story up yesterday in part out of modesty: a Standard saying that the companies will honor their exclusive agreements through markets, and forced denials from two major communications companies. But in never happened. Even though these are huge companies, there seems to be the of course we know that institutional jealousy is never a factor, it's Senate leaders on a tax cut bill. (The Democrats weren't invited to the nobody else fronts. The plea bargain describes phony paperwork designed to billion, provides for a reduction of one percentage point in all income tax estates. The tax rate reductions are conditioned on continued success at putting this much of the budget surplus toward tax relief. The LAT and The only real departure from the reporting template comes with the for months to incorporate into the bill its R and D tax credit, a feature the paper calls a "particularly glittering prize." The paper notes that the Silicon the tax code allows many corporations to legally pay little or no federal income tax. More bracket. (This story is a dramatic reminder of the difference between the 1990s. One possible explanation of the disconnect that the stories don't calculates that the cost of treating the nation's gunshot wounds for a recent borne by the government. The average cost of a gunshot wound that requires a word that an arbitration panel has ruled that the government must pay the heirs will be licensing Barbie and Hot Wheels to a computer manufacturer. The Barbie computers will be silver with pink and purple floral accents and will come with a Barbie Digital Camera and a flowered Barbie mouse. The Hot Wheels model will The lead editorial at the LAT reminds that it's been almost six years Internet and almost four since the passage of the Electronic Freedom of access to relevant information in their databases. The paper observes that most I love evergreen headlines, those perpetually blooming stories that could run in any newspaper, any year (an example: "New Jersey Official Indicted, Mob Ties Alleged"). Well, the front page of today's New York Times provides Stop the presses! No, on second thought, didn't I read that same story in the the repository of the conventional wisdom written in a uniquely ponderous style so often, the Times goes completely retro with a return to with a special daily page called: "News We Disapprove Of.") But the Times editorial concluded with a sentence so pompous and so Republican nominee, every citizen will have to reach a decision that balances all aspects of a candidate's abilities, issue positions and personal This morning I was overjoyed to snag the last copy of the New York necessarily dim with age. (At last year's Time magazine anniversary Maturity" spread leave me so uncomfortable? Would I feel different if this sexy calling children "annoying little buggers." Your most common reaction: "This is precisely the defeatist type of attitude that could eventually bring the 'annoying little buggers' should think about sterilization." Those who didn't advocate voluntary tubal ligation (I hope that was what you were advocating) television seems a pretty harmless way to distract children, at least when you compare it to the alternatives. Here are a few of the methods of patriotic, religious, and of high moral character: swaddling their children, depriving them of food (it was thought to keep babies quiet), tying them to chairs, and beating them severely. If infants persisted in bawling or shitting routinely told horrifying tales about gruesome creatures lurking nearby, ready to devour them if they so much as left their beds. A popular technique for moral edification was taking a child to a public execution. exorcism may be excessive, but there is plenty of evidence that children are hardier than previously thought (see, for instance, this essay too. Without that acknowledgement, we may all be doomed to live life in the pillow every night. Your kid should not understand how hard you work or the sacrifices you make for her. You gave up your entitlement to these things when for her livelihood and education. If you're put out by bringing up kids, it's because you're selfish, or lazy, or immature, or made a big mistake when you weren't prepared to handle the consequences. Go spend every waking hour with your kids, and bitch about your hectic life in eighteen years. blessed with an enviably cheerful temperament. Not for him the excesses of Gothic supernaturalism or ridiculous stories of ghosts, stick figures, and are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard presidency, are ingratiating themselves with his campaign for the sake of future access. They're also genuinely curious about the phenomenon of Bush's A fine example of how Bush gets the benefit of the doubt not available to, This isn't actually a bad article. Reading it, you get a better sense of Bush as a character than from the tens of thousands of words lavished upon him by classic puffer, which sets out to depict Bush's decency and compassion rather W. as the kind of guy who cries when talking about his father and loves telling He is also, apparently, the kind of guy who thinks that a condemned woman Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me." think a different spin might have suggested itself: If this is compassionate conservatism, what on earth is the heartless kind like? I loved the traffic story: for its winning characters (a "poet of thermodynamics" and a "Jam professor"), its clear explication of competing scientific theories, and the satisfaction of knowing that our nation's best physicists are even more annoyed by traffic than are the rest of us. I noticed that the story didn't use the word "sprawl." It didn't reference seaboard 'sprawling,' but that's it). Instead, the story was nicely focused on I wonder if this indicates that sprawl has ebbed back into the realm of the Speaking of local issues, the carpetbagger issue rankles me, too, but for different reasons. I keep hearing New Yorkers described as transient drifters whose own roots are so ephemeral that we are willing to let any politician rent a hotel room and represent us. As someone who's lived in four of the five boroughs, whose family (on both sides) has lived in the city since arriving in because my local pride has been injured, but also because I think that New particular as any other district in the country. And even if New York City's State are not. So even if we elect an adopted Senator rather than a homegrown for capitalizing on her husband's fame and power. Yet today you wrote that to their fathers. If sons can create political careers based on the successes of their fathers, why can't wives do so based on those of their husbands? If you're going to prevent one political dynasty from being created, you're going sharing your breakfast thoughts, especially with someone with far fewer years The rise of new technical elites and the advent of new principles of theory and the codification of theoretical knowledge "for directing innovation A change in reality from "nature" (during agrarian times) and "technics" "Society itself becomes a web of consciousness, a form of imagination to be else read this book? I can't say I recommend it. Heading to the beach with Bell (women's rights, black power, hippies, labor, etc.). His vision of a The rated power of a country no longer rests on its steel capacity but on the quality of its science and application, through research and development, to new technology. For these obvious reasons the new relation of science to community" and as "occupational society." What becomes central, therefore, is the question, Who speaks for science and for what ends? That's a telling section, both stylistically (pretty dense) and scientific method become the dominant model. Science and scientists through "helmsman"), which postulated that society would be increasingly governed by one where Big Government, Big Corporations, and Big Thinkers, do Big Things. It's Top Down. And looking back at the 1980s and 1990s, we see how very off "tribal marketing," niches, fragmentation, heterogeneous globalization, the describe the future, but you can compare Bell to authors who had a far better symbolized by the Whole Earth Catalog, the Sex Pistols, and the Apple II) and economic trends (the rise of the entrepreneur as hero, the "brand of me," and and read their work, from around the same time as Bell's, and you have a totally different response: At least these authors' arguments fall somewhere on Bell's inability to see a world beyond the context of military and economic Big Stuff is what dates this book most of all. Big, centralized models are out. Democrats want to see the tax issue off the table, and that at least House Republicans are willing to pass a bill, if not Senate ones. please campaign contributors, not to campaign for. A few other Talk magazine. Some say her probable New York senate campaign is a that the comments were unfortunate. Fox's Dick Morris proposes that senate campaign; the comments may hurt her politically, Morris reasons, but defending the president helps her curry favor with her husband's campaign psychoanalysis were enthusiastically probing the roots of the president's "sex think it genuinely tests a candidate's grassroots organizing ability. Others, weekday, the candidates who can afford to bus and subsidize the most people chink in the armor." Will notes that in Bush's Talk magazine interview "This wasn't an accident, as some of the Democratic operatives are Dick Morris, when another Fox panelist doubts his theory that she technically broke the law. She began recording her conversations with the White House, told her that such recordings were illegal and ordered her to stop. Because the state requires that you know about the wiretapping law in order to break it, she was still in the clear at that point. is a Democrat, and many Democrats in the state legislature reportedly magazine. The LAT leads with a story on increasing reuse of disposable medical equipment. Such reuse, though potentially disastrous, is largely recommend declaring a state of emergency. Nonetheless, given the rainfall the heartland has had, yields there should be sufficient to prevent nationwide food husband's infidelities on psychological "abuse" he suffered as a child, particularly the fallout from a conflict between his mother and grandmother. grandmother deemed unsuitable. (He turned out to be an abusive alcoholic.) involves viewing his lies as "sins of weakness" designed to protect his loved readers that Talk is "powered in part by corporate synergy." To cut costs, the LAT reports, many hospitals process items like angioplasty balloons or biopsy needles for reuse. A growing number farm out the cardiac catheter, for example, broke off in a patient's heart during treatment. ban won't fix: manufacturers changing the status of formerly reusable items to Christian Coalition kept thousands of dead persons, duplicate names, and wrong addresses on its lists of supporters. They also hired temporary workers to provide the press with images of bustling offices. Even their current claims of a political action committee that would endorse candidates and donate to could unite the technocratic and populist factions of the party, polls show the military's use of an anthrax vaccine. Her letter to the military newspaper ask the questions" about the vaccine's possible side effects, was viewed by her superiors as a possible incitement to insurrection. The vaccine is the first Don't get Chatterbox wrong. Chatterbox believes there are legitimate found Chatterbox's curiosity about the racial covenant on Bush's former residence to be prurient and irresponsible, Chatterbox continues to desire a Mister Bush's Neighborhood.") Chatterbox has also been brooding a bit about to say whether he's ever used cocaine is ridiculous and irresponsible. As Chatterbox wrote recently in the New Republic (tragically, the article isn't online), Chatterbox believes the sensible reportorial response to Bush's asking whether they'd used cocaine. (Why didn't they just send a questionnaire Chatterbox decided the time had come to conduct a poll of his own, asking various political writers and commentators who had written about this question, or (more typically) had written or commented publicly about writing or commenting publicly about this question, whether they'd ever used cocaine. Here Chatterbox concludes: Almost certain no. (Full disclosure: Chatterbox Chatterbox concludes: Probable yes. (Full disclosure: Chatterbox used to appointment cratered after he admitted to having used marijuana long Chatterbox concludes: Probable yes. (Full disclosure: Chatterbox has Chatterbox concludes: Almost certain no. (This admission dents his to work at the White House, and if he were lying now he'd have to fear being Chatterbox concludes: As the daughter of a House leader and a nice Chatterbox concludes: No idea. None of them appear to have been at their ago. It was so wonderful that Chatterbox resolved never to try it again, and he never has. The jurisdiction is none of your business. Photograph of cocaine user on the Slate Table of Contents by I, too, am enjoying the "We Are the World" eclipse coverage. This from excuse to stop working. They probably all went right home and took naps afterwards, too. If the eclipse had happened here, of course, we would have just taken our cell phones and other gadgets outside and kept right on But since you're tired of all this technology talk, nature boy, back to my watch. Here's one more reason to frown at the prospect of losing the city's city contracting abuses, involving real estate development. At the center of the action is Charlie Walker, a local truck driver and longtime friend and Incidentally, in a troubling sign of the times for journalism, Charlie Walker refuses to be interviewed by the Examiner unless they agree to What's so hysterical about this piece of gritty city reporting, the kind of the very same day, the Wall Street Journal carries a puff piece about hearing about one of Charlie Walker's crony's development projects, which is the newly renovated Ferry Building, because the real estate is just too waterfront, the Wall Street Journal finds in the same waterfront a tale decision to stop requiring the teaching of evolution as part of the state's science curriculum. The decision also deletes most classroom references to the students will be unprepared for college admissions tests and college science the tornado that hit Salt Lake City yesterday, killing one person (as far as papers, he confessed to murdering children at the center, but none of those shot there have died) and that his purpose in committing the crime was to issue with attempted murder in the community center shootings and first degree murder The papers report that Furrow is speaking freely to the cops, particularly helpful to them in the murder case for which there are no witnesses. The after his prior arrest for pulling a knife on staffers at a mental hospital in himself with a knife, once, says the Post almost severing a finger. LAT says the police won't confirm this. (One wonders how a rabid LAT runs a separate story inside reporting that one of Furrow's weapons was an AR-15 assault rifle, apparently purchased piecemeal and AR-15 possession wasn't legal, because Furrow is a convicted felon, but easier told authorities when arrested previously that in his glove compartment, he to do something serious about gun control. The LAT lead editorial says that the event shows that hate crime laws are justified, that the criminal justice system should keep better tabs on people like Furrow, and they should be getting better access to psychiatric help. One mystery the coverage doesn't make much progress on is: How did Furrow come to target the day care center? attracted the attention of security personnel but disappeared before he could died in hot cars. Papers should avoid inflicting this sort of information on the reader sans context. For instance, how many children have been killed in car crashes this year, or shot? The story doesn't say. saw a poorly wired fuse box and said, "It looks as though it was put in by an heinous criminals. That's a convention from Wanted posters that you should longtime liberal Democrat, is unhappy about the failure of campaign finance reform and tells the Times he's talked to people instrumental in movie studios responded by commissioning studies to explain to them why this hope that at the top of their list, the authors of these studies say: "Lesson mind that there really is no simple formula by which hits happen, and that attempts to reduce popular success to that kind of formula are bound to lead beginning of World War II: ceaselessly preparing to fight the last war, and how malleable the supposed truths of marketing and distribution are. For didn't have these movies playing on multiple screens, and these movies were supported with multimedia marketing campaigns that drilled themselves into your is that the massive opening guarantees an impressive first weekend gross (even films with sketchy word of mouth to make a lot of money off the initial buzz. Add to that the idea that a massive opening is a kind of PR event in itself, and you've got an argument for ensuring that consumers won't be able to go That release schedule helped build the buzz for the movie, made it seem like of people who can't get in" principle), and ensured that the distributors didn't overreach themselves in terms of their advertising. Now this kind of sense. Though surprisingly few people in marketing will admit this, hits are and look at the advance buzz on Titanic to see how the massive success of that film came completely out of left field.) And catering to that grassroots mentality by allowing word of mouth to do its work can be an excellent approach, especially when you combine it with a brilliant use of the Giving that film time to build would not have worked. The banal point is that marketing and distribution campaigns really do need to be specific to the films they're intended to promote. The more complicated point is that studios need to recognize just how much of what happens to their Line of marketing, they should worry about the stuff that is in their control: salaries, overhead, and quality. Remember what happens when you build a better Witch Project yesterday and, despite trying very, very hard to be scared, wasn't. What's puzzling is that Chatterbox scares very easily. Loud, sudden noises make him jump. The sight of blood makes him blanch. A staircase This raises the troubling question: Is Chatterbox too much of a philistine to This possibility occurred to Chatterbox a few months ago when he rented the premise the transport by truck of highly explosive material through bumpy with the extremely tedious exposition leading up to the Big Event and shut it events occurring in broad daylight somewhat resembles the he read them in college. But Chatterbox doesn't particularly recall being improvisational style. The three student filmmakers depicted in the movie, who "documentary," seemed like real people. (The college they go to, according to Chatterbox's house.) "Aha!" Chatterbox told himself. "Ever so gradually, the ordinariness of the film's events will give way to terror, making everyday life seem absolutely terrifying!" Chatterbox looked forward to being spooked by what pool of light." Chatterbox was still looking forward to this thrill an hour of twigs. Ten minutes before the movie ended, Chatterbox realized that the terror just wasn't going to happen, and his feelings of pleasurable anticipation quickly gave way to feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps, Chatterbox thought, he was probing the wrong medium. He logged onto Hill," where ghosts supposedly help push your car to the summit, and one about Confederate soldiers dumped in a well, and one about a mythical beast called "razor sharp teeth." These didn't scare Chatterbox either. nine people in two office buildings and then shot himself in the head as police Besides the nine office building shooting victims, the papers report that after the shooter's suicide, authorities found the bodies of his wife and two children in his apartment. Also, the coverage notes that he was the prime suspect, although never charged, in the beating deaths of his first wife and big losses, although the coverage points out that the murders of his wife and LAT points out that the rampage combines two of the year's biggest quotation it got earlier in the year from the head of one of the investment and bring down nice buck. But if you don't know what you're doing, you'll This play, given the story's unprecedented content, signifies that editors have just plain had it with the whole topic and are sure that readers feel Gong, charging him with the deaths of hundreds of his followers. The papers The nation's heat wave continues to get coverage, with for instance, a cities seem uniquely prone to heatstroke deaths? Is it something about building there was no air conditioning? That is, have people become less tolerant of legacy of the rise of air power over ground forces. Incidentally, it turns out he'd been forced to own up to. In the Times story in question, Gen. Papers just didn't see it. The whole episode has left Today's Papers feeling, twilight of monopoly capitalism and the dawn of socialism! You are right that You are, of course, bang right about stock options muddying the old told me that they can feel quite proletarian when their options are under let me take a breather and say a few more words about Bell the man. He marks himself off from his fellow New York intellectuals by describing himself as "a social democrat in economics, a liberal in politics, and a City of Heaven must be an "empirical one," based on hardheaded Although it is not always apparent in his writing, Bell can be witty, An index of Bell's stature abroad: An international jury has just honored Now back to the book. The more I think about Bell's farsightedness, the less impressed I am by it. Most of the trends he wrote about were well established by the early '70s. The United States had already become the first nation in the world in which services had come to dominate manufacturing (both in employment Information technology had been playing an increasing role in industrial production since after the Second World War, when the field of "operations manage its massive war effort. When Bell peers into the future, toward the year For instance, he predicted that more and more public outcomes would be determined by government technocrats rather than the market (the way things So what is Bell's achievement in this book? He was the first to identify the dreamed up a conceptual scheme, full of ideal types and whatnot, that tied everything together. I don't think that conceptual scheme has a whole lot of whole, and as something qualitatively different from the industrial society that it superseded. By naming the thing, Bell ushered it into existence. Thanks One thing still bothers me, though. Bell often writes about information as though it is something we consume directly, something that makes us happy. In fact, our "utility functions," as economists call them, have not really changed. The final goods from which we derive satisfaction are food and Information has transformed the mode of production, rationalized it, made production and markets more efficient, and so on. But the information system; some fear the agent may affect the nervous systems of children, different angle: the Journal notes that the announcement will Post puts the missile test in the ninth paragraph of a larger story on against the beleaguered Christian Coalition. The judge ruled that, in all but two cases, the Christian Coalition's distribution of voting guides did not illegal campaign contribution. The decision is expected to allow more citizen The Post and Journal both run articles on the risks and rewards of day trading, which apparently contributed to the recent massacre in Most traders sit at home alone, get unreliable tips through chat rooms, and lose their own money rather than that of a client. The Journal acknowledges these risks but argues that day trading makes financial markets more efficient and provides greater odds than (other) legalized forms of of unexpectedly high labor costs in the second quarter does not necessarily mean the economy is overheating. As if in divine confirmation of her argument, boom. And the Post reports that economic growth and price increases in makes the provocative argument that the quickest way to halt China's belligerence is to simply hand over all our nuclear warhead and ballistics inferiority complex about its relatively primitive nuclear arsenal. Once China the need to taunt its neighbors after every tiny technological advance. projected budget surpluses by buying back some government bonds before their individual rights to water from the Colorado River, but the paper's top reaction to the drought there, new regulations that will shut off lawn package for farmers, which is a response not only to drought conditions but also to falling commodities prices. The paper points out that this bill would spend more than half of next year's projected budget surplus and comes on the goes with the New Jersey Supreme Court's ruling that the Boy Scouts' ouster of a gay scout leader constituted illegal discrimination. In four previous cases in other states, the paper informs, the high courts sided with the scouts. The Times front the scout story, while the Post runs it inside. securities. The plan probably won't take place until next year. The paper does not require congressional approval. Both Times note that it also is a vehicle for reducing the government's reliance on foreign lenders, who reduced government borrowing will also lessen competition with private companies for funds, thereby lowering interest rates. The Wall Street Journal notes that the announcement spurred a population explosion offers a mixed demographic bag: increased life expectancy percent of airline tickets, but increased Internet purchases are a clear why she agreed to discuss in an interview such a personal subject, she said, percent of a recent sample say they are tired of all the problems of the If you know so much about the New York Senate race, then please tell me who "more complex and appealing guy" than your cartoonish description dictated. And loyalty that Al Gore so desperately needs; I duly noted that it's "overly vs. female, local politician vs. national figure, technocrat vs. idealist. Both manager. Does the idea of a first lady winning elected office not intrigue you It sounds like you've already imagined this campaign down to the suits the candidates will wear in their commercials. But no one really knows how these two will perform, or how voters will receive them. They're both familiar anything but mayor). Sure, this suspense may evaporate with the first round of candidacy in the next, on the grounds that she is cynically leveraging her ethical lapse to discuss (and a lapse of common sense. Given her history of financial scandal, she'd be a fool to do anything improper). Nepotism is unfair by definition, but it's even less fair to level those charges selectively. disconsolate to write meaningful prose. But plenty of eulogies contain good copy. So I still don't see why death announcements can't honor the departed in Your theory that the Internet is the crack of the '90s is a keeper, if not a shootings, the Internet did it. Or, if it didn't exactly pull the trigger, it sure didn't tackle the gunman and restrain him. So goes the conventional That culture holds up a frightening mirror. Reflected there is an image of a into a computer screen on which he seeks a disembodied fortune or, if that piece online), isolated from my fellows, maybe I should be grateful that I have the Breakfast Table for a little human connection (or that I have two X contributing to the demise of magazines also includes an intriguing piece of the book is banned. (In my edition, this story coincidentally appears right which, as we've seen above, is suspiciously connected to murderous mayhem in its own way, even though we're not sure exactly how.) photographed with two children and various commemorative stamps. You have to love shopping bots, always thinking ahead to your next purchase. "Gee, I didn't Could it be that since there are so many other news sources (Internet, cable week's Times business section's lead media article should be about whether newspapers have become more like magazines in their struggle to maintain and build readership in these trying digital times. landscape. Although he is generally considered to be the greatest living school of sociological thought. He has been called "a sage without a following." In the '70s, when the book we are discussing was originally published, he had a higher profile. One survey placed him among the "ten most untold mindless repetitions. That, of course, is not Bell's fault. Indeed, it was with some excitement that I opened this new edition of The Coming of of his theorizing and the accuracy of his predictions. unleavened prose, the endless morphological distinctions ("systems," "orders," evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the Bell may have been one of the more sparkling of the New York intellectuals grand, sterile, abstract schematics to describe society. which was allegedly a revision of an earlier scheme titled "The Configurative Patterning of Social Movements." The parody is not all that funny. What is hilarious is that a couple of sociological colleagues to whom he sent it mistook it for the real thing. One of them, he writes, "sent me back a serious letter about some of the categories, while the other, not knowing whether it was a spoof or not, wrote: 'You are too good a sociologist not to have created something which itself is quite useful.' And a third asked me for a copy of my goes: The media are right to hype this movie, but they're hyping it for the history of culture: scaring and delighting audiences and making oneself rich and famous by pushing back the boundaries of what is commonly thought of as This would be a fairly obvious thought to have if you saw the movie, as I itself. He had it framed by heavy curtains, surrounded by semicircular benches, and lit by gaslight, so people could sit and stare at it at night, as if in attendance at a play. He charged a quarter per visitor and handed out opera glasses or special metal tubes, so viewers could pick out this detail and that one. This was a whole new way to exhibit art, and it made him not only the most the first mere artist who could afford to build a mansion on what was then the The painting that makes Church worth remembering, though, came two years retrospect, Church's style doesn't seem realistic at all, at least as we tend to mean the word today. He left out the factories and hotels that lined the banks of the tourist trap, as well as the thousands of visitors who rubbernecked there every year. But his painting felt more real than what had come before it, because it was bigger and wider and more maniacally detailed, and because every brushstroke contributed to the general sense of the water's ferocious power as it rushed to the edge. Coming as it did not long after the even though, being a work of supernaturalism, it breaks all the rules of moment (the reason most music video makers employ the technique) but because it's the best way to get across the filmmakers' Gothic vision of the world just of light. Oddly, as visions go, it's not depressing in the least. What's depressing is critics who celebrate a movie like this for its commercial, Chatterbox jumped to an unfair conclusion last week when he said that the marital infidelity] has not made a secret of the fact that he's talked to the The book's subtitle is, "A Pastor to the President Speaks Out," but I you're such a tease!] I also want it understood that book royalties go to charities because I do not believe it is right to profit by this national tragedy. I hope it will help readers understand the deeper implications of the the "eye of the storm." The book draws upon that experience, although it does not invade private pastoral conversations. I have taken up issues related to love and sex, repentance and forgiveness, and the relationship between personal character and public responsibility in political leaders. secular psychotherapist would be a professional code of ethics that would come down much harder on anyone who pulled this sort of stunt. A more cynical that with party control of the House of Representatives at stake in the next civil administration, especially by paying judges and other bureaucrats who've children ordinarily at the center were off on a field trip. The papers frame the episode with all the other mass shootings that have made news in the past the emotion of the moment to the cause of tighter gun control, but the effort is stalked by a lack of tighter prose control. The paper claims that "all of wondering, "Will it take the shooting of innocents in every congressional remained at large, and the authorities released his name and said he was a reports that there is: In a van linked to the shooter, police found a book report that there was also a very large amount of ammunition found in the LAT says he pleaded guilty in the knife case. The LAT notes that inside. The shooter was a jet fighter and the bogey was an unarmed ratchet up friction between the two countries, who've already had a ground war The papers report that according to the Department of Education, expulsions the year before that. In the coverage, this result is treated as confirmation that despite sensational campus shootings, in fact the risk of school violence is on the decline. But there is hardly any discussion of the idea that it may just mean students are getting better at not getting caught packing. For judicial conference, something he's done more than once. The story was reported says, the firm tried to branch out from guns into motorcycle helmets, but was The New York Times built a neighborhood again today. below canal, and Dumbo is down under the Manhattan Bridge). The story does not reveal how many New Yorkers have rented or bought apartments in NoMad recently. Instead, it features a few fashion industry execs and designers who moved there in search of stately prewar buildings, fantastic restaurants, and affordable The Times does this at least once a year. Last year it instructed us And when will the Times lay the "Circuits" section to rest? When it stops bringing in so many ads, I guess. Today the "Technology Journal" section it makes digital culture seem so dull that it's probably keeping a couple the brilliant megalithic skyline laid out before you in even greater and sparkling waters of New York Harbor, you didn't need any kind of visual aid to one of the main ways I, being a meteorologically preoccupied fellow, was impressed was with the party's climatological riskiness. I ran into Jay "What would have happened if it had rained?" I asked him. the trees. In the middle of each the tables was a huge picnic basket, in which, silverware, and plastic containers filled with corn salad and potato salad, and strolling waiters supplemented these dishes with platters of lamb chops and fried chicken. Some tables featured big galvanized tubs filled with ice and bottles of white wine; columns of bottles of red wine stood in front of the and there were long bars in two or three places. A stage and temporary dance statue was closed to the general public, and only party guests were allowed on the two Statue of Liberty ferries that went to the island and came back be foolish to drop names; they were as plentiful as the lights burning in the World Trade Center, which presided over the proceedings like titanic parents. When we got off the boat, we were ushered along the pier by, well, ushers. A lot of them had headsets on. Some motioned us on our way with stunningly on the pier illuminated by camera lights in the gathering dusk in a If you'll just step this way." Oh, well, there's no way of avoiding the names: Lane Smith, on rounding the bend in front of the statue and seeing the effect of the big lawn bolster recliners. Numbers began wafting about on the Island and the skyline with an electric sign on it that said Talk (did I throughout the night kept noisomely referring to as "Lady Liberty" (a moniker on the same unacceptability level as "The Big Apple") came way down on the at one point, but despite referring to one of the contributors to the display's and his fabled familiarity with fireworks. The finale left no one in the audience in any doubt as to the existence of his or her sternum and percent of the audience was not talking to or hearing from someone who wasn't with them. I mean, there was the headset crowd, coordinating whatever it was be careful not to get him angry, Dad"), but if he was there, I didn't see his presided, asking that we "give it up for," among others, "Lady Liberty." She also seemed ultimately dwarfed by the setting and by the event she herself had goodbye to this luminary or that one. I got five minutes face time with my "Have you seen it yet?" she asked, I like to think a little plaintively. "Putting it to press had its nightmare moments," she said. "Yes, people were telling me things about nervous breakdowns and I felt a hand on my shoulder. "You'll have to swim over there, young man," He hurried off to press a little more flesh. Speaking of which, "It doesn't Even knowing that most of this whole function was all for buzz and hype and advertising and so on, I said, "This was so generous of you. Thank you for breeze. My wife and I stood on the foredeck or whatever you call it. "This is Even though my Rotisserie baseball team (the Nattering Nabobs) is mired in the second division, I began my reading rounds by checking the late West Coast the Younger: "My dad's been in baseball how many years? He knows what to say questions with innocuous sports cliches. These days, as even toddlers learn how to practice "spin," virtually everyone quoted in the news knows "what to say the handful of brave souls who dared to tell truth in today's papers. leadership may end up with an issue but no legislation." That, of course, is like a $600-billion tax cut in order to clear the decks for some sort of grand Buried inside the Post and the Times is the news that Al met but long admired. As a college student in the late 1960s, I remember how I too many Viceroys, stayed up too late and caroused too much." collected works. But something weird is happening out there, which makes the about the money woes and vituperative divorce proceedings of local Congressman "wasting the family assets on his stock market gambling." And the Wall in thrift accounts, claims to have made money in the market. But, the Journal observes, "from cautious saver to citizen speculator in just a Anyway, it's time for me to make a trek of my own off to a newsstand in News coverage of the tax cut bill now in Congress has noted that the bills contain special favors for certain companies and individuals, including Warren Special favors in legislation almost always are disguised as provisions of language that fits only one beneficiary. The alleged "special favor" for when Congress was concerned about the power and possible misuse of foundations. maintaining control of public companies indirectly through a foundation. By passing his stock on to a foundation, rather than to family members themselves, the patriarch could guarantee that it wouldn't be sold by heirs or dispersed over the generations. The Senate version of the new tax bill would raise the his stock to his wife, or if she dies first, to his family's private guided by the same philosophy and objectives that now set our course," he book, the series has explored every nook and cranny of the presumptive Republican nominee's biography. We hear at length about Bush's childhood reaction to his little sister's death from leukemia, his pole vault over the have learned approximately nothing about what W. thinks about speeches and statements, and you will remain unenlightened as to his views. Bush offers conventional conservative's bromides about the economy and the social programs. But if he has a political philosophy that goes beyond trust are working on position papers at this very moment, and they'll soon Bush has embarked on a presidential campaign lacking something even more basic: pragmatist. He's a cipher. In an interview excerpt, the Post reporters remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember." This does not appear to be a convenient failure to recall opinions that have since become unpopular or embarrassing. It's the religious right. Though he eschews most of the issues and themes dear to social conservatives, such as actually trying to ban abortion, Bush wears his Christian beliefs on his sleeve. You might say that he does something similar with secularized voters as well, substituting his personal sense of compassion for the kind of policies that could do something to help the poor. In a big dentistry. That Bush cares about the people waiting outside the clinic makes you think he's a decent human being. But people who can't afford to get their teeth fixed don't need religious charity. They need dental have a fine grasp on why so many voters are turned off by his party. Bush seems predict that Bush will soon find a moment to blast some marginal figure on the When your task is unifying a divided party, knowing what views to reject, as Bush seems to, may be more important than knowing what policies you support. Those Republican candidates with strong and consistent easier to position oneself according to the current political wisdom. That's one of the reasons governors generally make better presidential candidates than evolution. Better still is a governor who lacks even private opinions. He's a political consultant's perfect Barbie doll. You can dress him in this year's fashions. And no one will remember him wearing anything different. yet another political leadership crisis for the country, which faces a parliamentary election at the end of the year and a presidential one in the middle of the next. Because of the development's late break, of the early editions, only the LAT front has it, in the form of a reefer box. The every immigrant eligible for deportation because of a criminal conviction. Today leads with a story that gets front space at the the cuts could force deep cuts in domestic programs and raise interest rates. could and should be passed this year. Some of the coverage marks the continuing very much equals, pictorially at least. (This represents a very conscious have raised twice as much money via this route as the Democrats. This is all soft money, not governed by the rules for individual, union, or corporate and issue ads rather than for individual candidacies, and the paper explains probation following a conviction for shoplifting clothes for her children. And the story provides no examples of obviously dangerous criminals snagged by the INS under the old policy. But the paper goes on to admit that it's unclear how television producer (complete with crew) and once an ordinary passenger in a taxicab. Both stories (and isn't it curious that both papers would tradition of leaders going out in mufti, with the overall feeling being that find out what real people put up with and what they actually think. If a president has a certain knack for, ahem, sneaking around, he might as well do seriously racial harassment he suffered on the job. In a company bathroom, the man, the lone black crew chief at his work space, discovered a depiction of himself next to the words, "Nigger, Nigger, Nigger." And then there was a thought displaying nooses could be offensive, but he did not think it was a form of harassment. (The man tried to retreat from this view after a 23-minute percent of respondents thinking that there have been other political scandals just about every waking breath: "Need to be good to do good. Need for joy, campaign video by the paper's editor, a close friend of Gore's. And indeed, the editor has now said the appearance was a mistake. This is dumb. Isn't the editor allowed to also have a private role as a voter? And even in his public role, there's an excellent chance his newspaper under his direction will endorse Gore's candidacy. So obviously, it's okay for people to know what he "Dedicated pool owners are dropping hundreds of pounds of ice into their 90-degree pools in hopes of some relief," the Wall Street Journal degrees too hot. To raise the temperature of one gallon of water by one degree Ice cools by absorbing heat in two steps. First it melts, then the resulting calories to melt one pound of ice into 32-degree water. Each pound of ice water would immediately start getting warmer again. For those pool owners who would like to personalize this calculation, here's sense of him in the context of our time. Let's take a look at some of the more options (convertible to stock), or get to buy stock at a discounted rate "capitalist class" ends and the "proletariat" begins. The tension between the phrases it in terms of "envy," writing, "Democracy is by nature contentious tag line (paraphrasing) "Everyone is getting rich, except for me!" accompanying class conflict, but rather phrases it in terms of envy alone. There's always national lottery, everyone gets a chance to become a successful capitalist. Our online brokerage. In this kind of environment, Bell's analysis seems off in the come to pass is his rather abstract statement that "Now reality is primarily celebrity, famous "persons," and the game between them, does form the shared experience as a society. This aspect of Bell's thinking isn't developed much in his book. Another aspect of our future that he mentions, but fails to really investigate, is his criticism of "groups" ("blacks," hippies, women, etc.) and his sense that a cultural fissure is appearing between young and old. Where he sees these elements as destabilizing and misguided, we've come to understand But from Bell's perspective, affirmative action, demands for quotas, and automatic inclusion of minority groups in democratic decisions through mandates are his red flags. He imagines a future where the call of every minority for inclusion, by quota, destroys the meritocratic principle of his favored discussion of the troubling article on the back page of this morning's Wall the Republican welfare bill. Amid all the triumphant rhetoric about the orderly transition from welfare to work, it seems that many people who are still entitled to food stamps aren't getting them for reasons that include ignorance, But try as I might, my tabloid sensibility keeps being drawn back to the A-10 that the New York Times devoted to this topic in my edition of she said her husband's philandering was rooted in an emotionally abused childhood." Personally, I pity New Yorkers (myself included) who will be emotionally abused by every element of this Senate race. But I also cannot help One last thought on the Times lead story on the demise of the Christian Coalition as a potent political force. As someone who covers now are the Times and the rest of the press belatedly offering a Many more thoughts, but I should get about the business of getting these Amid all the hoopla, however, Chatterbox hasn't seen any attention lavished on Talk's bold and imaginative Web site (which is not to be confused with the highly entertaining Talk parody site posted prior to publication by a know how to think outside the box, figured the Talk Web site would carry an article or two from the magazine, and some information on how to subscribe. How wrong Chatterbox was! The Talk Web site is actually an entirely black screen project his most elaborate fantasies onto what Talk could be! appealing guy than your caricature indicates. And I guess we don't know the favorite dishes, most memorable meals, and culinary heirs. The accompanying impersonal. (These announcements aren't printed in the national edition of the sincerest condolences." None mention a single personal characteristic of the is how deeply competitive jealousy affects news judgment, even on stories where the importance is overwhelming. It's happening this week with the revelations forcing the secretary of energy to launch an investigation, and all but admit that the government lied about this contamination for years. As you might expect, the plant's work force has been struck with all kinds of cancer. who died after a futile decade of trying to get the plant to acknowledge his If I were a national news editor, I would use this horror story as a chance involvement in nuclear contamination. Remind readers of the experiments done on children, get a reading on the other bomb plants, etc. Instead, most of the big one story yesterday with virtually no reporting in it. course, will be executives from the very papers who are now ignoring the On an arguably brighter note, there is a milestone obituary in today's fan: The show itself I find unwatchable.) Anyway, the Times obit is her illness last month." The story also discloses that "the Food Network is television broadcast has been plugged in a Times obituary. Sorry to be so grim this morning. I lost a sizable sum of money in a poker The Times editorial board shouldn't bother expounding on the News she trusts her readers to spot a moral problem when they see one. as the new Modern Maturity cover would stir my subscription, membership, their younger peers. Yesterday the magazine hyped the issue with a study previously knew. The stats have already garnered a ton of attention: "If you're section reveals some blatant miscounting behind the PR blitz. It turns out that opposes big government, and takes particular exception to welfare programs. But other telling corn farmers and hog farmers that the free market is unfair, that the government isn't doing enough to help them, and that taxpayers should support them when they fail to make money on their own. subsidies for ethanol, a fuel derived from corn (his thoughtful explanation: "I issue. Here's what the leading contenders are offering as of today: Would not use food as a unilateral sanction or diplomatic weapon. Emergency disaster relief, both through direct payments to farmers and Organization and allow importation of genetically modified farm products. Double federal support for research at land grant universities. Repeal the inheritance tax for the sake of farm families. Mandatory federal price reporting for pork producers. An increase in exports under the Food for Peace program. Full utilization of the Conservation Reserve Program. Full utilization of the Export Enhancement Program. Allowing China's entry into the World Trade Organization. farmers open access to their markets absent tariffs and quotas. Review all embargoes and sanctions of foreign countries that use food Rewrite the Endangered Species Act to require a vote of Congress on every End the regulatory theft of property without just compensation. The Fed should ease its tight money policy and immediately reduce real Tear down trade barriers and bust open new markets. Literature does not good policy make, as some poet somewhere must have said. a witty, heartbreaking memoir about being the bitterly poor son of an him up for his opinions on vouchers (he's against them) and teachers unions (he's for them, but thinks they're too bureaucratic). But his philosophy is plainest to see in his books. For the growing numbers of experts advocating draconian "drill and practice" routines in which a teacher's every gesture and on things. ("He tells us what is important and why. No master ever told us why before. If you asked why you'd be hit on the head.") Standardized tests are The chairman says there will be midterm exams in two weeks and my teaching should focus on areas that will be covered in exams. Students in English should have mastered spelling and vocabulary lists, one hundred of each which they are supposed to have in their notebooks and if they don't points off, and be prepared to write essays on two novels. Economic Citizenship students should be more than halfway through Your World and Since the students have studied neither spelling nor vocabulary and never cracked their Economic Citizenship textbook, the advice could not have been more malapropos. Teaching eventually becomes easier but even more mindless: I followed the teacher guides. I launched the prefabricated questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college My students resisted and cheated and disliked me and I disliked them I couldn't let days dribble by in the routine of high school grammar, spelling, vocabulary, digging for the deeper meaning in poetry, bits of literature doled out for the multiple choice tests that would follow so that universities can be supplied with the best and the brightest. I had to begin to enjoy the act of teaching and the only way I could do that was start over, teach what I loved and to hell with the curriculum. Now here's a truly humane theory of education: The more fully realized the teacher is, intellectually and personally, the better able he will be to communicate his passion for ideas and learning to the student. Conversely, the speak) and must have been an unforgettable teacher whatever he did. But could of it, as a result of the ministrations of a kind librarian and a fellow has retired early in disgust) when they aren't sadistic. Considering how hard wonder whether individual teachers can really measure their own progress. That teaching, done right, requires all of a teacher's emotional and intellectual resources; that we accord teachers neither the respect nor the pay they need to function well in their jobs; that few public school teachers come close to the this seems like a good argument for better pay scales and reform in the educational system that produces teachers. But in the absence of a nation of accountability and less freedom to do as they please. "Man Bites Dog" and "It's the End of the World, But Don't Panic"), with an first lady. Chatterbox (who has no opinion about whether these rumors are true, good investment, plain and simple. We are not sitting there working on each week's copy. We are not involved in the weekly or monthly or, for that matter, any editorial decision of any kind. I think if you went around and asked any way. It is management's job to manage the company. We are financial guys, and just the pimp, I don't turn the tricks," or whether he's casting himself, unmolested (though Chatterbox did point out, earlier, a bizarre feint in the week's issue includes headlines such as "Your Family May Be Living Under a interesting content to that large an audience, and deliver that large an because practically by definition these readers will York City college freshman Felicity fly to Berlin with her handsome and she chose Ben. This was disastrous for Felicity personally, of course, but also, surprisingly, for us. Felicity didn't just alienate Noel and her best friend and land herself a boyfriend who gives every sign of being a sleazebag (and whom one hopes she'll slough off within an episode or two). She set herself back to exactly where she was last year. As a freshman at the beginning of the show's first season, Felicity rushed to New York to follow Ben, on whom and become a premed student.) She spent the rest of the year getting over it and growing up, so convincingly that one speculated she might have become too shows, will be forced to face more and more in coming years: Adolescents grow let characters grow without abandoning of original concept for the show. Many television series face this quandary, of course; how they respond is one The sight of Felicity choosing Ben is the sight of the alternately flaky and smart. Plus she had the best curls on television. The of itself. Felicity has become hangdog and whiny. Her and Noel's banter has soured into spite. "I can't believe how horrible it is that we're speaking like this to each other," she tells him quaveringly, as he punitively regales her with details of sex he had with another woman during the summer. Felicity is again paired unhappily with her bitchy punk roommate, only this time the moved back in with him and his roommate, which has the effect of turning a hitherto delightful character into something just short of a stalker. And on it goes, in details too creepy to enumerate. Such is the rhythm of our legal system: Something quite simple ("I want a divorce") is made exceedingly complex ("What percentage of your income goes to the phone bills?") only to be made too simple again One learns this phenomenon within minutes of entering meeting of the minds about whose version he was to sing?"). Your job as law an outline you'll use to study for finals. The point may or may not appear in Such expansion and contraction mean that lawyers are never quite certain how big or important things are. This is why we yell about of the latter half of this century. As have the last three antitrust trials with dozens of witnesses and thousands of exhibits. It might have grown even the number of witnesses and kinds of testimony to prevent the legal entropy as though Computing as We Know It was on the line. But things got quiet, we tried instant messaging, we maybe upgraded, and we bought orange Gap vests more, with each side submitting proposed findings of fact, then revised versions of same, each of which told a condensed version of their story from systems market to bully and threaten its way into dominance over the browser that distribution channels for competitors were never foreclosed, and that Today, with two and a half hours allocated to each side for closing arguments, the case contracts once again until it is virtually changed. Except the lawyers have traded their fine brushes for broad ribbons at trial, simply hands out his outline to the class. He spends the morning walking us through the elements of antitrust law and offering evidence from the record to support his claims. This man who virtually commanded the small courtroom downstairs during trial, seems somewhat diminished today. But Speaking as though his mouth is full of aquarium gravel, he paints everything larger than it is. His job is simple: He must punch holes into the government's soft places. He does not use an outline. He simply begins to roar. The government has never, ever proved that their browser and operating systems are inseparable he leaves for another day). In swinging away at the government's penetration), Warden employs the kind of hyperbole usually reserved for domestic fights about who does the dishes. "The government has offered "Games and shams," he snarls. When he concludes, it is with an ominous bad. The balalaikas recede. Then he whips out his outline. He focuses narrowly, not to sell more copies of Windows, but rather, to stop their competitors. Now his gavel and leaves the massive courtroom. Now he will reduce these thousands of facts to an even smaller opinion. In the interim, technologies will change and change again. When the dust settles, if it ever settles, all of this will stand for something very great in the casebooks and the exam papers. Times fronts that, but leads instead with the tremendous earthquake police brutality and corruption scandal: that a police captain chose to ignore nationwide toll, favoring numbers to do so: One million people in New Jersey ordered by authorities to boil their tap water; total damages possibly as high such passages as: "In county after county, meanwhile, people confronted hardships that seemed almost biblical in scope: Coffins sent floating away from away; and thousands of residents living without safe tap water, telephones or capture the sense in which she broke Soviet ground as a political wife: less coverage fails to deliver a bit in its attempts to depict any further someone "who had her own mind," but neither describes any position she ever Guard placement, he never received such a request from anyone in the Bush Journal reports that according to the latest government stats, labor years have shown that raising the minimum wage doesn't detract from job artillery pieces in the field, while Short wanted to hit strategic targets, such as ministry buildings and power plants. In noting that, according to the leaves the reader with the impression that it was the strategic police scandal for a beat. The paper reports that city officials are bracing for a raft of legal claims likely to be brought against the city by suspects who've been arrested or questioned by the policemen implicated thus far. Question about that: Just as papers routinely appeal to citizens to provide information they might have about unsolved crimes or fugitives, why doesn't the mistreated by the officers in question to come forward? Of course, this would grounds of executive privilege, to provide Congress with documents it requested Times has its very own storm to lead with, a widening police scandal, shooting unarmed suspects, planting weapons on suspects and of drug dealing and sending at least one person to prison on totally false court testimony. The hand over documents, and the Post says it's saying no to witnesses too, the Times says the White House will release some clemency documents it feels are not covered by executive privilege and will allow three administration officials to appear at congressional hearings. But everybody headline is almost a template, calling him a "loner, full of rage." The fantasized about murder, and was feared by several of his neighbors. Since this better to require authorities to do so before a gun purchase could legally be made, rather waiting for reporters to do so after a shooting? concerns should prevent them from exporting software that encrypts electronic communications. (This story fronts the LAT business section and was law enforcement increased power to combat criminal uses of computers, although not as much as had been contemplated in several working drafts of the The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study deaths), you'd think that a story about a phenomenon said to have claimed thousands of lives last year would get a lot of front space. Think again. Apparently, the papers don't deem this food for thought. It's not on anybody's studies for minority students in the sciences, engineering and education. The head of the United Negro College Fund is quoted by the Times saying the doctorates in the targeted fields. The coverage reports that the decision has drawn some fire from opponents complaining that it shuts out qualified white wives, another top Army general was just removed from his big Pentagon job while the Army sees if he did the same thing. Fortunately, at least one brass admiral argues that since it's in the Pentagon's direct interest to have access to the improved manpower pool that would come out of better schools, the fully finance Head Start and reduce class size from kindergarten through third all the unnecessary planes, subs and nukes in the defense budget, says the Where, oh where, are the stories about the presidential and congressional whole thing is buried deep in a story under a headline that doesn't even largest source of Medicare fraud: not doctors and hospitals but illicit schemes by the companies hired by the government to administer claims. The Times says eight such companies have paid more than settle fraud and other charges relating to Medicare payouts. One complaint: The story relies on the phrase "Medicare contractors" in the early going, holding off until the ninth paragraph before using any actual names of offending their reaction was a "cordial welcome." All this in contrast to the stark scene here.) The plan is, the papers report, for the peacekeeping troops to make referendum made a tape, from a radio scanner, of communications between quote alleged to be on tape says of the observers: "Those white people should franchise dealer must still be involved.) The Times institute's newspaper ads supporting the company's position in its antitrust with helping to disseminate the institute's ads, then why didn't the company Web to arrange a sexual encounter with an underage girl, who was actually an reveals: "When I was a child in the 50s, we had these school exercises where we'd stick our heads under our desks to protect ourselves from the bomb. How I hear what you're saying about being skeptical while also taking for while I think Celebration is a flawed experiment with insidious discredit (all of) their motives. Now, the same for books: I give just about anyone high marks for writing one, and I hate to see any author misread for a writer, requiring a simultaneous existence as neighbor and spy, friend and infidel. For taking on that task, all three of these writers deserve kudos. to it. It takes the same year, same town, same questions, and many of the same diary of whose kid beat up whose, etc., stay within the perimeter of apparent consternation of some reviewers but to my relief, strays beyond it. seem to draw those thinkers very deep into the matters that make Celebration an Celebration is a world apart. He makes it a part of the world, an actor in a larger ecology. This can be through the natural incursions of alligators into porches. Or more significant, it can involve the human machinery behind the whose imposition of civic virtue in Celebration relies to some extent on flocked to buy houses in Celebration find it extraordinary, and thankfully, too, enough so to warrant spending a year of their lives there. Do you truly a main character specifically imagines his wife fucking her boss on the boss' private jet. (However, just to make clear that fiction isn't necessarily completely craven asshole. I think he'll be unhappier than any of the other me most in contemporary politics. I do confess that every time I actually hear winner, doesn't he? And in any case, by both our reckonings, Al Gore is a sure By the way, I disobeyed you. And Coliseum Books was relieved when my publisher called and suggested we might want to think about rescheduling the to your apartment, read all the passages about private jets out loud, and sign "this is why W. is so dangerous." I don't quite get this. I guess this is why doesn't scare me. This is, conversely, among the many reasons I could never be Yes. Most large earthquakes produce thousands of aftershocks, but the Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of pressure that has built up between two tectonic plates. Because the stress is rarely discharged in a single jolt, earthquakes almost always occur in clusters: first, a few small aftershock is defined as a quake that occurs on or near the original fault active long after a major quake and can experience aftershocks up to a decade later. But most aftershocks happen soon after the primary quake. In fact, seismologists have a rough method for predicting the number of aftershocks on a scale, and not generally perceived by people. (Click here for a shaking all day. But most people probably didn't know it. full power of their influence in the media and the culture to oppose, discredit, and in many cases smear the supporters. That's one of the reasons academic factors. He says this system of selecting people so young is unfair to bit: He decries the existence of the educated elite, but when push comes to shove he seems more a creature of that elite than an opponent or a detached elitist. That is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the educated paradoxical. This is an elite raised to oppose elites. This is an elite with an concern for the less fortunate. That's why its members write books like this one. When members of the elite oppose the middle class and sometimes trample all over them, they are usually doing it in the name of egalitarianism. The is his concern for people less fortunate than himself. He is never man, but I admire him through his writings. From what I know about him, he seems to have had all the educational advantages. And here he is arguing most members of the educated elite will agree with him. fundamentally different than and better than the Protestant Establishment that which he says we should change the way we select our elites. The ethos he describes in his heroes undercuts his case. If we are going to have an mentioned yesterday that I just finished a book about the manners and morals of this educated class. When I wrote the proposal, I said that my last chapter would be about the revolt against this class, for some of the same reasons that too early; they live in a culture that is detached from the rest of the culture; the income gap between them and the rest of the culture is widening. But as I traveled around doing my research, I couldn't find any evidence of this class revolt. There didn't seem to be any mass movement to upend people seems to want to learn how to drink espressos like we do. The only people who seemed genuinely upset about the educated elite were members of the educated plays out over many spheres. This is an elite that dresses casually so it won't consumption instead of conspicuous consumption. This is an elite in which wealth disparities. This is not too say they are hypocrites. It is to say they go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate their social advantages, at least the new ruling class. They give the coming elite an egalitarian sensibility, so when they rise to the top, they won't give off offensive vapors that might professors actually serve to solidify the current class structure. book is this: He brilliantly shows how the Protestant Establishment gave way to the educated elite. He tells for the first time how the selective mechanism for underlines the problems with this arrangement. He makes a truncated plea for reform. But he never shows the great harms perpetrated by this system. He doesn't show how the new elites have been corrupted by their status, or of the misery of How the Other Half Lives. On the contrary, he shows how educated central flaw of this elite is excessive egalitarianism. That's the least bad You mentioned yesterday that today you were going to for president. The surprising news wasn't that Friends of the Earth was dissing somewhat to the left of most other national environmental groups, which are still expected to endorse the vice president. No, what was surprising was that either candidate's commitment to environmental protection. Still, Gore is of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." By movement brought a vast improvement in the quality of New Jersey's ecology." (and, of course, basketball) than for any interest in conservation. How can it aren't available on the Web), Chatterbox noticed that Gore was being judged period when Gore wasn't around to vote (except, of course, on Senate quite understandably occupied by running for president and vice president, (again, because Gore had absences presumably related to the presidential greener congressional voting record. An examination of the particular votes calculates a legislator's lifetime score by adding up all his because Chatterbox had already done the calculations that comprise much of this The scandal began as a limited investigation of two were connected, investigators began to examine whether other Rampart officers participated in or knowingly overlooked such misconduct. in exchange for a lighter sentence. Since then, he has accused several officers of dealing drugs, making wrongful arrests, planting evidence, and abusing revelations have also forced the department to revisit hundreds of cases that may have relied on false testimony or evidence. One inmate was released after No one has established any direct connections among the various crimes yet. But federal officials are planning to investigate whether the alleged misdeeds are "pattern and practice" on the force. Power: From the moment yesterday that I professed to you my belief that acts of do think people are bigger weather wimps today than they were when we were away at summer camp. I have never regretted missing any event more. Tomorrow's headlines today: Although the story may not York Times being placed right now outside the door of your splendid suite spring they'd flunked, and had to take remedial summer courses, did not in fact flunk. The tests were incorrectly scored by the private firm that gave them. itself, aside from installing metal detectors, it would be to administer a standardized test.) How many hours until one of those kid's families file suit national edition didn't include the story about the special new millennium press conference, someone asked the ConEd guy if the swirly new Op Art underfoot might not dangerously addle drunks stumbling through the gutters of I know, I know what you're thinking: Enough with the like him. But it was mildly shocking, as if my mother were to call me tonight Since this is our last day, and Action premieres tonight, we won't be able to discuss its merits reading the reviews of the show in the paper this morning, I wondered: Do you One of the bad things about a bull market is that the performance of mediocre stocks can look great when presented in isolation. Combine that fact is, you have to measure the success of an investment against other potential Take the very curious column by Roger Smith, Variety's financial columnist, in the most recent issue of that magazine. In essence, Smith argues that entertainment stocks have been often undervalued, and that they've been There are a lot of strange ideas packed into that argument. First, it assumes that Wall Street somehow controls stock prices. In the long term, it doesn't. Markets collectively set prices, and markets are much bigger, and smarter, than all the investment banks and brokerage houses in the world put together. If the market has looked skeptically on entertainment stocks, it's probably for a very good reason. And even if Wall Street did set prices, the idea that investment bankers have consistently foregone potential fortunes for unwilling to buy or even recommend entertainment stocks is, at best, But there's also a deeper problem here, which is that entertainment out that "the revenue side of showbiz" has risen dramatically at home and phenomenally abroad over the past decade and a half. But he doesn't say anything about the profitability of showbiz as an industry, let alone about its return on invested capital (the most important single metric of a company's economic performance). That's because compared to industries such as software, Besides, haven't entertainment stocks been mediocre? Well, Smith mentions that Wall Street analysts often cite this point as justification for what he Now, set aside the fact that of the real powerhouses, three are cable companies that own hard assets, not part of what we usually think of as stocks that Smith cites have done about as well as or worse than the market as a whole. Then recognize that Smith is talking about the very best of the best here, and you start to see how weak the industry as a whole has been. well as or significantly better than the best entertainment companies over the It's not that entertainment isn't a better business than it used to be. It is, mainly because the people running these companies are spending more time running them and less time thinking about how to make them bigger. But by the easy to obscure that fact. But even in a bull market, the real numbers don't The New York Times leads with the government's filing yesterday of a lawsuit against the tobacco industry charging decades of fraud and seeking which led yesterday with a tipper on the filing, runs it inside, choosing instead to go with the virtual certainty that Congress will not complete work explains the paper, is that suddenly not touching the Social Security trust fund has become a Republican goal, something hard to achieve without accepting SHUTDOWN." What, the Democrats are perfectly willing to have one? previously identified ones like the Bank of New York, are accused of little ado midway into an inside story about the reorganization of the The papers explain that the government's civil fraud suit seeks to recover the federal monies spent over the years on for military personnel and federal civilian employees, expenses not covered in settlements the tobacco manufacturers previously made of suits where states costs. It's also noted that the civil filing, despite its appeal to a racketeering statute, marks the end of the government's attempt to bring industry's adamant response that it will never settle this case out of court. Journal's report says in its first paragraph that the suit is based on a "risky interpretation of federal law." One question that doesn't get addressed: How do the tobacco companies reconcile their denial of this suit hard with stories raising suspicions about Lee earlier this year, is rather measured about where this leaves things, settling for "the bureau does not yet saying the Lee allegation "has effectively evaporated." carry inside, word that federal investigators have uncovered a new Internet scam by which Web porn operators clone legitimate Web pages of such sites as automatically take you to their skin sites instead. The gambit is called numerous pages at the porn site before escaping is known as apology." Most of the cost comes from the defense budget. who do. The piece quotes various city employees defending the practice on grounds of competitiveness, etc., but never cites any baseline specifics about what most people make. It would have been helpful to note, as did a recent A similar loss of class and economic perspective is on short supply of new textbooks, or about the state's utter failure when it comes to public mass transit? Er, no, it's about the state legislature taking the first steps towards funding an official mansion for the governor. a campaign reform bill that would ban "soft money" and tightly regulate "issues" ads in the two months preceding an election, to prevent these two items from becoming vehicles for flouting contribution limits that are supposed to apply to individual candidates. The other papers front the bill. several million people fleeing their homes (with all the fronts that run pictures showing the resultant traffic jams); the mass cancellation of airline The coverage notes that last year the House passed a nearly identical campaign reform bill, which, despite drawing a majority in the Senate, was actually is one important new feature of this year's reform bill: It contains a provision requiring "a candidate for election for Federal office (other than a candidate who holds Federal office)" to reimburse the government for federally Apparently, the nation's lawmakers cannot. And by the way, why should incumbents be able to fly Uncle Sugar Airlines without paying? tendency toward "sequential hysteria," the phenomenon in which a problem is well recognized long before it reaches a critical stage, then for a few brief days it becomes Topic A, but then before long it's back to inattention, all known about for a long time and things are really being done in reaction to The Wall Street Journal "Tax Report" depends a little too much problems when he was in business. 'And now,' he says, 'I have an unlimited major source of skewed coverage. Homework assignment: find an example where the a controversy stemming from the revelation this week that for the neighborhoods that identify the houses with the highest risk of burning: those with wood shingle roofs. The city councilman for the area involved has called for a full homes in case of fire. Fairly far in, the story mentions that maps of other parts of the city also indicate areas of risky homes, apparently without controversy. But the LAT utterly ignores the impact of this fact, which is the real explanation for why the maps are now "news." The story never watching. The Department of Defense is conducting a comprehensive review of the due. A delay like this is sometimes a sign that unwelcome figures are being "massaged" into the most favorable shape possible. So it will be interesting to stands ready to make an argument either way. If the numbers are good, then the refrain will be, "See, this stuff works, give us more stuff." And if not, it'll be, "This stuff didn't work as well as we'd like, we need better stuff." normal girl who fears she looks like a freak (she doesn't); he's an alien boy who looks like the kind of shy dreamboat a girl could get a crush on (he is). altercation; boy, who has special powers, heals her with his unearthly touch. time, in order to register her sequence of expressions: incredulity, hilarity, disgust at the cheesiness of the whole idea, terror, longing. comedy history, and understand that an adequate representation of the teen friends who try and try but just don't get it, but also an absence of condescension. Ignore the naysayers who will complain, as they do about Since you mention reviews of the Celebration books, I preposterous name, of course, although preposterous town names are hardly of Celebration: That is, it is not really such a novelty. Most of what the two problems with house construction, issues of governance, questions of exclusivity, people's motivations for "starting over," and so on) is found in The Celebration Chronicles (pretentious title, no?) sufficiently acknowledges that it is an ordinary one. Every year, like the subject of contemporary new communities in Cities Kidder's gift is to draw people out, and to keep himself in the background. What mars both these books, in my opinion, is that one finds out altogether too much about the authors' opinions, which are, frankly, neither original nor all analogy. As an architect, I have seen many buildings, building complexes, and planned communities completed but without inhabitants. It is spooky, I agree, but hardly unusual. Again, with Celebration there is the tendency to inflate and try life without deadlines." Did she quit or was she fired? It's a pretty abrupt departure, and she has no other job lined up, but who knows? though there's a slight hint that one's being accused of being the teacher's it did? Who gets fired for working too hard? But she has taken a lot of lately for being so chipper and enthusiastic about movies everyone else hated, such as The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut. Another it be unusual to fire a film critic for not being harsh enough? It would certainly say something about the difference between the East and West coasts. his lead critic for sucking up to the studios too much? Well, why did shows how the rigors of reviewing crap can reduce a critic to an embittered regular contributor to the New Republic who has become famous for treated with the same withering contempt. All are seen with the same unwavering lost the gift of being able to comprehend a work of art that does not reflect their immediate experience; they have become afraid of genuine art." All except her credit for insight, even though she was practically the only critic to praise the film: "Not a single critic, not even those few who claimed to like nothing, now that you mention it. They couldn't have less in common or less point, rather than manufacturing a conceit, it would be this: that these two autonomy by making it a "commonwealth," allowing it to adopt a constitution and cannot vote for president, and the delegate they elect to Congress has no vote. rights of citizenship become constitutional, affording them the right to vote periodic plebiscites have not resolved what relationship the island's residents commonwealth status and pursuit of statehood. In both plebiscites, independence manufacturing and pharmaceutical center. Congress has begun to phase out the citizenship and economic assistance will, as well. But there is some debate as to whether such guarantees are constitutionally possible. the benefits of constitutional citizenship, the federal safety net, and the proposed adoption of English as the official language as a prerequisite for trade pact, a common currency, and joint citizenship. Some also suggest that infrastructure and natural resources to compete effectively. with the serious shortage of military recruits and what the Pentagon is trying today that he will drop out of the presidential race. One misstep in the out of wedlock births as an embarrassing incident on a par with the potato spelling episode. A fairer statement is that the speech helped make the topic a billion people. One of the most alarming signs of the trend: increasing arm is taking in as many new recruits as planned. Some of the Pentagon's countermeasures recruiters, a job formerly reserved for personnel with a real service tour behind them. The story describes how a major Pentagon response has been to as two causes of the problem. The aforementioned anomalous success of the Marine Corps suggests a politically sensitive cause that the Times doesn't mention: the feminization of the military hasn't made it that much more recommendation to promote changes in state laws and court rules. The paper The Wall Street Journal runs a "Rule of Law" column that weighs white is suing for his piece of the pie. The interesting thing is that the governance, don't live on recognized reservations, and don't have treaties with the government. If they were to be granted special rights, then why not do the will even extend to externally controlled inserts such as Parade bandwagon, how about turning up the heat on another type of advertising that such services, which obviously promote (mostly illegal) gambling. Bush's desire to keep Pat in the party, expressed in an Associated Press unconstitutional because their wording could also prohibit procedures used in Congress. The papers disagree about how many states have passed such bans how many of these bans have been temporarily or permanently blocked by appeals support programs needed today's legislative fix, but the LAT waits until after the jump to describe what's wrong, and how district attorneys, with little statewide supervision. This fragmented system thousands of men were wrongly billed, and attempts to create a statewide child support computer system failed, resulting in large federal fines. The new laws transfer the attorneys' duties to new county offices, which will be overseen by law concerning the military's emergency powers. The bill was rushed through the law could lead to a military coup. Officials claim that the act would actually decrease military power. Three protesters and a police officer were killed mentions early on that one of the protesters was apparently killed by a sniper using live ammunition, though the government claims only rubber bullets were past supporters, many of them generous Bush donors, claiming that no matter who actually combed through Bush's list of donors for contact names (a violation of FEC regulations). Some sources suggest that Dole's redoubled efforts are "penance" for disparaging comments he had made about the campaign. of online chat room stings. Though the growing number of stings are leading to a lot of arrests, they may draw attention away from what is overwhelmingly an offline problem. Child advocacy experts say that offenders make first contact with their victims online in only a tiny fraction of the cases they handle. And in such cases, contact is usually initiated in mainstream chat areas. The more But in the past two centuries, she has appeared in many guises, modeled after represents the achievements of French women beyond the runway. Today's Papers civic virtues are an inspiration to patriots everywhere. Of course I know you know that designs on plates with chocolate syrup are very late '80s. And the fact, as you note, that they haven't gone away supports These may be the end of the '80s we're now living through, but I would argue that the '90s as a culturally distinct decade (the Internet aside) does not based on your novel)? On the other hand, I guess You've Got Mail a vital, mentally healthy person of strong character. So don't make me out to Back to hurricane readiness before I sign off for the day. (Civil defense! should have a doctor check this out.) Anyhow, I have an impolitic question: years (multiple hurricanes, one or two comets, mobs of starving children of mine who's a theater director recently told me that I should tell another think would be a good idea. And which I also think is a very rich premise for a But my problem with politics these days (which I suppose can come across as don't and really can't matter all that much in this country right now. There civil rights, women's rights, war and peace, even abortion. And they will continue as long as the economy chugs along like this and we stay out of wars to be running the country or amending the Constitution anytime soon. In fact, if not ideologically. I really think national politics kind of needs to be blown up and rebuilt. For the couple of weeks seven years ago before he And I certainly wouldn't be very upset if Bush won, even if he can't name a single book he's ever read. (One final theory of mine: In presidential Times lead is the House's passage of a bill that would, if it became against companies such as cigarette or gun manufacturers. The bill draws scant the House bill would require most class action claims to be transferred to federal courts, where the rules about who gets to participate in the class and how such cases may proceed are more stringent. The bill, says the paper, businesses and business groups. Opponents include the trial lawyers' whereas according to the Times a similar bill there participate in the Internet stock trend. The story also observes another probably burned up in Mars' atmosphere after flying too close to the planet. first time ever made a menopausal woman fertile again, by implanting her with pieces of her own ovaries, which had been previously removed and frozen. She hasn't got pregnant yet but has ovulated and menstruated. The development, the paper explains, could be a boon to young women with cancer who want to have children after treatment is concluded. And eventually it would allow healthy young women to put up a bunch of their youthful eggs until they're ready to winter. This means, say quoted analysts, that gas and utility bills could keep The papers carry outraged Republican reactions to Pat gives an update on stances taken on the presidential clemency extended to but she did conduct an informal survey of divorced suburban parents she knows Here are two picayune but quite common details of the separated life that forget stuff at one parent's house and make the other one take them there late that parents who don't communicate well would have a hard time keeping track of schoolwork done by one child at two households during the course of a single Many of the other details of divorce on Once and Again are the regular fare of family sitcoms or dramas. There's the slightly tired riff about game, but forgets about it until Lily angrily reminds him. There are the mutual accusations of denial or neurosis, with each parent accusing the other either grasp this, in principle, since at one point they have Lily's daughter asking needs of dramatic exposition clearly proved too much for the show's creators: How else are you going to get Lily and Rick to go into their feelings for each other, or at least about dating, if they aren't going to share with their kids? After all, who else do divorced parents spend their time with? (Lily gossips some with her sister, an annoyingly perky single creature, but goes on and on about her fears of dating with her daughters; Rick mostly keeps things to himself, but is interrogated by curious children.) Despite lapses like these, as two decades ago), Once and Again seems poised to become for joint anyone even knows about it. Last night, while wasting time in the usual online fashion, I came across a chance to vote for the novel of the century, from a list of ten chosen by other people wasting time in the usual online fashion, have. Instead, Gone With the Wind was on the list. Of course, I loved that Salter put forth -"Literature is really only writing that never stops Salter piece, even though it left me feeling absolutely helpless. I mean, what library? Should I stop making movies? No, yes, and no; so much for that. And by twelve of the words he used. Where do statistics like that come from? I mean, just because a word appears for the first time in a book doesn't mean the author invented it. (Did you read the book about the convicted murderer who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary? It's amazing.) I do not find the mosquito spraying quaint. Now that I am in the movie business, I see everything as the beginning of a bad movie, and this one ends with the population of Queens dying before a cure is found. One of the things I always find so wonderful about life in New York is how oblivious we tend to be to things like the possibility of natural disasters, but the encephalitis thing about your letter, it seemed like a good time to reply. I don't really love the morning, despite the fact that my kids have to be on the school bus (now my living in the suburbs, I feel both blessed and liberated not being the family chauffeur. City living, as many working women are beginning to understand, provides much more flexibility and precious time than the suburban commuter life. While we will never have enough space for all our books (or even our clothes!) or a backyard with a swing set, our apartment is a happy clutter where no child will be forgotten in the bowels of a finished basement, and yesterday?" But it's all connected, as some famous philosopher once said, or I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the quality of urban life for families and not just for the tourists most mayors think are the key to urban regeneration. Not only have I read your impact on criminal justice policy, but its thesis goes to the heart of how we make urban areas communities again, places where we can work and live. Before York City subways during the 1980s, I think its important to consider the relationship between free speech and crime control. I have been struck with how political conservatives have used the issue of crime to justify autocratic, if not authoritarian, policies. Street crime is not usually rampant in democracies. To what extent are we willing to suspend individual rights for the safety of the community? Do we have to tolerate police misconduct? Do we bar political demonstrations from the steps of city hall? Do we take away government contracts from groups such as Housing Works for protesting current While all these questions do not have an obvious relationship to public safety, for the mayor of New York they are all part of keeping public order. By extension, the mayor has the right to close down an art exhibit if it offends his sense of public decency. Where does free speech end and public order begin? preferences and there's no need to worry about the democratic process. of Art if it doesn't cancel an art show that includes (according to today's by elephant shit? Isn't it a little silly that the same sort of people who education are ready to lay down their lives to protect the government's right to subsidize art that desecrates religious figures in the most sophomoric way imaginable? Whatever happened to the separation between church and state? Chatterbox doesn't think people should have to pay, through their taxes, for art that is likely to offend them deeply. The Times would understand this principle better if the ALL NIGGERS MUST DIE or KIKES INVENTED THE HOLOCAUST. One can imagine ironic or otherwise complex readings of these statements that might attempt to cleanse something to do with his childhood confusion about the virgin birth. But Chatterbox, an atheist, holds no brief for the Virgin look at (though he thought the idea it conveyed a bit childish). But Chatterbox doesn't think artworks that a significant number of people are likely to find them, if the market won't support them (which it almost certainly won't). The notion that the Republican Party should evict Pat when he uses statements and beliefs that we should not have fought against should always stand on principle and not on polls when we decide whether someone should remain in our party or not. And I do not believe that kind his book questioning whether the United States should have entered World War II "outrageous." Dole released a statement saying that she was "appalled by Pat The trade deficit is soaring, the dollar is weakening against the yen, oil prices are high. Damn, it feels like the 1980s all over again. Except that economy is still barely limping along, and the trade deficit seems to have more fundamental weakness in the overall economy. Maybe the fact that all this is going on at once explains this market's complete unwillingness to commit in one direction or another. Or maybe enough people just haven't read Dow cultures will mesh. Unfortunately, the new company will be called liquidity problems, the Fed would be adopting a 'no questions asked' policy at the window where it lends money to banks. Not even: 'Will you pay that the company systematically overcharged uninsured patients for the lawsuit is baseless' would have been better. 'I don't know anything about it' sounds more like 'I didn't know anything about it while it was going site will contain at least one reference to the company's 'rocketing' for allegedly crossing state lines with the intent to have sex with a In most states, a successful entrapment defense requires the defendant to The idea of committing the crime came from law enforcement officers, The law enforcement officers induced the person to commit the inducement. Simply affording the defendant the opportunity to commit the crime does not constitute inducement. For inducement to be proved, officers must have The defendant was not ready and willing to commit this type of crime person carrying a kilogram of the drug, the seller could not plead entrapment, even if coercion were involved in the sale, since his intent to sell was clear. Most courts also allow a defendant's predisposition to be demonstrated through repeatedly solicited sex and ignored warnings that her age might get him in its lead about the latest fiscal gimmick gaining currency among Senate Republicans as a way to continue spending while technically not violating nationally televised address in which he stated that "Terrorism has declared logistical role, particularly by providing air transport to the ground troops, who will be supplied by other nations; the force will probably be led by force. The Times ends its lead with a helpful explanation: Setting up a conflicts with the bureau's assertion that their agents never fired a shot. The admittedly fired during the initial gunfight at the compound. country's most sensitive military projects. And that the Soviet Embassy in Department, in an attempt to convince other countries to maintain tough provide them with medicine but has chosen to spend it on other things. The evidence includes aerial photos of a lakeside village resort complete with The Wall Street Journal "Work Week" column reports that in a previous year. Those with a drug or alcohol problem stole five times more than and childbirth. The old requirement: A contestant must sign a document stating previously been pregnant, and has never had a child. The new requirement: Signing an affidavit affirming not being currently married and not being statistic that has affected me in the following way: I was appalled, and then, this? I can't tell you how many men ask this question. I mean, don't you know for all sorts of reasons and c) if only conventionally handsome men got laid, this would be a seriously underpopulated world. As they say, there's a cover for every pot, or something like that. Of course they also say it's as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man, and that is definitely not true. listened) is this: Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from. The article in the Wall Street Journal reminds me, once again, how politics and entertainment. Why can't we get a groundswell going? And don't you candidacy at all. The Talk interview, by the way, was devastating for her with that constituency, I think, because there was a hope that she would win the race and shed the bastard, and she blew that away with all that exculpatory dialogue. (Incidentally, I have become obsessed with how they he could write when he's no longer president, and everyone would buy it. All summer I kept reading idiotic articles in the newspapers about things like where they are going to spend their summer vacation, and no one mentioned that the only factor that truly operates in that decision is who they can get to Are we being paid for this exchange? If so, I am giving all the money to people have options where they want to live (which is also why it is unfair to expect Celebration to be all things to all people). put. One of the parts of both books that most surprised me was the extent to was disingenuous of them to withdraw from the town at a later stage. Another seemed out of their depth. In hindsight, this, too, was to be expected. Why should an entertainment corporation understand anything about education? The slipped up, and slipped up badly. Both books tell that part of the story impossible for Celebration to be, for example, a social experiment. Both books bemoan the lack of affordable housing, for example. But almost no new private residential developments, including New Urbanism, have succeeded at mixing incomes to any considerable degree (the exception are Hope VI projects, which do achieve income mixing, although they are still too new to draw categorical are vulnerable to public opinion. Look at what happened when the school failed. An article immediately appeared in the Wall Street Journal quoting disgruntled parents. More recently, a crime in Celebration was prominently But what about women who marry men to whom they wouldn't deign to speak if the men in question weren't (check one) funny or charming or driving a Corvette or head of the firm or the best bowler in the league? I mean, I wouldn't even have known anyone I was ever in love with if the men in question were like his writing. Which I didn't read until it was a little too late. Fascist to run it, etc. But a close woman friend of mine was jumped by the completely mistaken identity; the charges were dropped, after months of trauma for her and astronomical legal fees. The episode made me conscious, in a way I might never have been (but any black person is), of what the cost of all this crime rate is that police are arresting fewer people because so many criminals are already locked up. But promotions are based on the number of arrests, so pressure causes them to try to escalate a misdemeanor into a felony. My friend who was arrested, for example, was not charged with the thing she was jumped She did resist arrest, by the way; the cop was in plainclothes, and she had no happen: You see the headline, and you think, please let this go away, please don't make me have to learn about yet another place I have never heard of, and Meanwhile, here's a truly disturbing trend: Waiters in restaurants have now taken to not writing down your order. Is this yet another plot to make those of development in restaurant life, like those horrible little designs made of If the chat shows are any indication, the Republican establishment is decision." But according to some he already has: "His career as a significant the cusp of becoming radioactive politically," says Mark Shields invades the island. "Listen, I will not take my country into war with a nuclear than previously disclosed. He insisted on walking into the hospital under his own power, but then collapsed; he had lost nearly half his blood. After to be a very contested campaign." Both Meet the Press and This episode where the studio lights went out, and the one where the fly kept does not appear on the program) of one of the perils of being on television in particular. We are repeating the errors that led to World War II, and for heaven's sake let's stop it before [we get] World War III." question somewhere, but in lieu of actually finding it, let's speculate based on a single sample: the performance today of stock markets based in New York City. In one sense, all bets were off, since volume was thin and a lot of people went home, in expectation of a disaster that has yet to arrive. (Are little rain?) But it was interesting that just when the rain was falling hardest, and the day seemed gloomiest, stocks were selling off sharply, while that everybody can keep spending without prices starting to go up. Maybe we Unfairly Aiding Group of Banks.' At this point, isn't it clear that Street securities analysts and let them work in a local next year, it will start paying advertising agencies based not on a percentage of overall ad spending, but rather on how successful this as a brilliant innovation. Of course, if they thought it was so brilliant, you wonder why they've been content to spend the last few decades collecting hefty checks for ads that didn't move sales a bit. Oh, yeah, you really have to live on the Upper East Side of New York or in certain magic suburbs to get any of the above. It's just what I want. More and more excellent new services that will forever remain just of out my reach." I certainly wasn't suggesting that only conventionally handsome men should regardless of financial means.) No, I was just wondering about the thought men to whom they wouldn't deign to speak if the men in question were mere Generation and loves him like a son. (If not more than they love their disqualifies her to serve in the Senate) and, even before her reflexive and vigorous defense of him to the bitter end made me queasy. So if I did, twice. Could you conceivably vote for him for Senator? I don't think I could. I may have to vote for the Reform or Libertarian candidate.) Or should we just go with the frivolous New York idiot thing, and discuss Today once again everything in the paper seems like an artifact from my other day has put me in some kind of permanent nostalgic fugue state. unjustified arrests. Maybe I was being naive, since today the Times Still, cops in New York are the only cops on earth who don't scare me a little outside the veterinarian, where I was picking up our two cats. He said to me very seriously, raising his hands in a quick protective motion, "Sir, step away him? I literally had to restrain myself from laughing. breakfast with him, at his behest. He spit flecks of baked goods every time he acquitted him of tax fraud? (That story was mentioned in today's story about But this is, after all, a city where the commissioner of consumer affairs yesterday held a news conference on location in front of a display of "tofu triangles" to present his findings that New York deli customers are routinely plastic containers. This is exactly the kind of press conference that makes me Finally, why do we always and only "brace" for hurricanes? The pop culture of my daughters' youth is turning out so differently from my collection. Is this what they mean in bad novels and bad movies about politics have become a seamless hybrid. (Since this has been one of my personal hobbyhorses for some years, I was happy to see the Journal certify the phenomenon; I can stop talking about it now.) Anyhow, Duff explained and implicitly bemoaned the trend: "There's no reverence for the process," she said of the citizenry's disregard for politics. "It's all irreverence." By the way, either one, certainly. Entertainment value, I figure. Or am I wrong? If Nick is right, as he surely is, that the cops are driven to bust more when you challenge somebody's word in Scrabble and you're wrong, you lose the waiter is really just a guy you know and you're telling him what you'd like to eat as long as he's going to the kitchen anyway. Also, maybe, it's another And those horrible little designs made of chocolate syrup on the dessert opinion, no information, nothing to say. I feel the same way you do about it and wars like it. To me they're not unlike those roving New York City malathion something out of an earlier era. Which is to say, before the Cold War and World well as militarily (if not economically). So maybe we wince a little at the request, says the paper, as an "unnecessary intrusion." This contrasts with that could serve as a stimulant to similar managed care reform around the city officials withdrawing the work, only to back out when the officials thought. The virus has now accounted for four deaths. The chief evidence for the new dimensions of the problem, explains the paper, is that mosquitoes become carriers of the virus by biting infected birds, and scores of dead birds story inside, but look for more intense coverage in the days to come, for two coverage of such previously uncovered areas as cancer screening, give opinions, and to appeal treatment funding decisions to an independent review to arrive at a patients' bill of rights. One important grain of salt that the implication is, will) prevent patients from suing under the bill by requiring their agreement to binding arbitration as a condition of treatment. the managed care imbroglio: It's turned a lot of doctors into Democrats. Solid without disclosing that the paper's author has some financial ties to the drugs' manufacturers, a situation expressly forbidden by the journal's guidelines. The author's explanation to the LAT seems Pharisaical at best: she stopped consulting for the drug companies when she embarked upon the article, although she expects to resume doing so now that it's been the Pentagon, contending that both violated her privacy by unlawfully disclosing information about her from her personnel file and other government Among the people named in the suit, not as defendants, but as having "engaged result she suffered a loss of income. None of the papers mention a fact about Considered" broadcast. The paper points out that the highway program already includes the Boy Scouts, who exclude girls and gays, and the Knights of there to meet with the team and inspire the players to victory by comparing the Gore appeals to the center. In an apparent attempt to lock up the meeting. According to a New York Times story, the Republicans are near to entirely. For moral and tactical reasons, conservatives should be cheering the press has largely treated him as a legitimate candidate rather than an of the explanation for this is that he's one of us. Though few journalists have his bigotry with the friendly guy they know. For those covering his campaigns, performances that makes his views easier to dismiss. He'll uncork a zinger Yet the bigotry is there all right. You can follow its His prejudice is not the genteel country club variety fellow traveler, who dabbles in an anachronistic style of populist demagoguery to be saying than to recognize his views for what they are. seem an eccentric crusade, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Indeed, tried to cast doubt on the Holocaust itself. In one of his columns about schoolchildren survived inhaling diesel exhaust fumes in an underground tunnel. isolationism, it isn't hard to hear the echoes of the radio priest Father by ethnic groups and media elites able to focus public attention and incite public hysteria." Instead of agitating for entry into a specific war, he thinks general policies of interventionism and internationalism. begin over slavery." (He says the people's symbols shouldn't be chosen by for so long. Saying good riddance to Pat makes political sense, too. If, as to depict him as a hater from the fringe and not merely a conservative who confident. He admits to using marijuana but not cocaine, then asks his he supports limited experiments with vouchers, but in general opposes them. (To party establishment behind him and a sizable national lead. says nothing new but sounds more bitter than ever. ("They gave my speaking spot Others think there is ample reason for the Republicans him this is insupportable, you cannot put the country through this." Of course, think knows more about welfare than anybody else in the country." When asked the Senate. He's an honest, decent man. He gets in trouble with this administration because he is honest and doesn't play the [political] game." videotape [of the members making bombs, but] they weren't directly linked to the bombing [in court], that it wouldn't be justified to draw a conclusion from jail] would be excessive. You know it, and I know it." just great. But I find any generalized public whining about the decline of the part, as you say, because of the helplessness it inspires. And the flip side of Inspired to despair helplessly: That has been my ongoing reaction to the Peter Singer piece in the Times magazine the week before last, an any moral right to buy expensive clothes or eat at restaurants or go on fancy vacations? The fact that I was left feeling upset and more or less speechless a half twist, and paste the ends together, enabling you to draw a continuous topology studies that I remember. It's been striking me lately as a useful they don't want to make it into a movie? Couldn't (and shouldn't) the Writers saving a child? Isn't it possible that if we all stop buying things all sorts of people who currently aren't starving to death will suddenly be out of work and will soon be starving to death? Just asking. It's questions like that that assure you. They built a grand house with a budget that mushroomed beyond their means, and when it was finally finished, alas, there was no money to furnish scene in Darling --explains, to me at least, why Duff is asking for so was interested to read an interview in the New York Post with several decorators who said her budget was, if anything, low. Anyway, I don't think there's the remotest chance that liberalism, the comeback, and there's even less chance that anyone will stop spending money in the flamboyant and careless manner that's become commonplace. One of the things spent their money so extravagantly and publicly in New York in the '80s and were practically stoned for it. They'd broken a kind of tacit agreement about behavior among rich people, the people who would never drive anything but a station wagon, and they had to be made to pay. Now, of course, everyone breaks When someone like Pat Duff comes along, she provides everyone with a fabulous excuse to feel morally superior. And everyone is right to feel that way, because her arguments are genuinely disgusting, but it's all part of an era of wretched excess that we're all part of and that I can't imagine is going to Your question about screenwriters reminds me of the first or second time I did a screenplay for a studio, and had to sign the thing they send you called a Certificate of Authorship. I took it to the bank to have it notarized and gaily signed it. The notary at the bank looked at it. Did you read this? he said. Not really, I said. This says, he said, that the studio is the author of your script. I was astonished. In any case, these days, if you write an original screenplay for a studio and they don't make a movie from it, you get it back I do look forward to your book, some of which, or at least some of the research reports for, I have been reading in the situation we have with our current elite, as you point out. In some other countries where there is affirmative action, it is a majority that imposes percent of the total) and university presidents, almost all major foundation minimally, its own advantages. You point out quite correctly that at the very top levels the resentment is very muted and hardly visible (see the huge majorities of students in elite colleges who say diversity is a good thing and general in charge of civil rights. The resentment seems to be somewhat greater elite within their states but fall short of the very top national elite level. And as you point out, it is the middle classes, and I would add, the upper working class, that seem most resentful, even though the children of the latter will go neither to the Ivy Leagues nor the flagship state universities. At the places their children will go to, racial preference doesn't play much of a over affirmative action. I would suggest it is ideology that makes for the division, and yes, the ideology of the elite is equality, and that of the middle classes is opportunity. There are some oddities here, not the least of which is that the struggle over affirmative action is waged most vigorously over admissions to colleges and universities, and one hears less and less about important cases in the area of employment. But it is there, I would think, that because of its commonness in employment for policemen, firemen, and much other public employment, and its prominence in the hiring and promotion policies of selecting elites selects one that is critical of the system, concerned about writes that the most unfair system of distributing opportunity would be one "in which all roles were handed down explicitly by inheritance." But then, "the but insisted that it take place as early in life as possible and with school as the arena." His discomfort with the SAT is that it's an intelligence test that As a matter of fact, he is unfair in describing the athletes and the alumni children and the occasional student who is very good at something even though his test scores are not at the top. And, of course, there is affirmative action in most selective institutions, and that may be as many So what is the problem? Unfairness because of early selection? Actually, if we made the selection even earlier, the differences between the majority and minority students would probably be smaller. And by used to be (maybe there still is) an 11-plus exam that makes the selection at a very early age; on the continent, too, students are divided between secondary There are community colleges, from which you can transfer all the way to the elite campuses of the state university. Few do, but there is the has a stronger point, but no society has been able to figure out a better arena, even though school is not the best place to learn how to become an entrepreneur or a politician, run a business or a country, become an artist, etc. How the school system became the great selector, even though it selects people on the basis of talents that are not directly related to many important social roles, is a mystery to me. But it's happened everywhere, in the most diverse cultures. I recall that even in ancient China, administrators of the empire were selected on the basis of competence in the ancient classics. The only justification for the present system is that intelligence is useful in any task, and that the only fair and systematic way we have of determining only reporting this, seems to approve. So maybe the only problem, or the main problem, is not the test, not selection on the basis of verbal and mathematical ordinarily do poorly on such tests to do better. But that opens another can of education at the lower levels is not too encouraging: "We should adopt the goal through college, we shall have to establish greater national authority over curriculum." One wonders if he has been following the efforts to create what is on the whole a good book, but it does confront us with the question: This has not been much of a debate, I realize. We seem to agree that whatever its flaws in logic and in practice, we can't think of a might agree, and we wouldn't disagree with him when he insisted that the main thing to do is to improve education. But we would probably disagree over the into his work, is just this side of insane and his publishers just that side of shortsighted, literarily speaking. Not wanting to steal thunder from historian right to try to write this way, but can't make it work. has admitted in interviews, doesn't mean it lacks legitimate precedent. The facts, the next it swings away from them. It has ever been thus, at least since thus in the debates over footnotes, etc., between academic and journalistic short and to the point, which has a lot to do with his popularity. His more enduring innovation, though, was, as one historian has put it, "liberating the came at the end of a later biography of Queen Victoria, in which he made She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that shell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, complains about the tiny fictionalizations that abound in almost every bits of fantasy on the very first page! The scene being set is that of a White dissipating itself over half a mile a way. The shiver is accompanied by a There is some shifting of feet, but no eager pushing forward. speculated, and we let him get away with it, because his writing has the ring playing around with form is anything but a moral shortcoming. Inventing It destroys the illusion of transparency. In theater one would say it calls attention to the fourth wall, the proscenium framing the play. Even in implied contract between reader and biographer that states, We'll go along with you as long as you make what you say sound like it had some basis, once hypothetical. He's the Roger Rabbit of biography, a cartoon figure inserted anthropological definition of garbage: matter out of place. It's not too often that the market takes it as good news when a company announces that its revenues and profits are going to fall well short of expectations. And in the case of Apple Computer, which made precisely that announcement after the closing bell yesterday, the market in fact did not take technology stocks today, Apple was a notable loser, with its shares falling In the context of the past year, which has seen Apple's stock soar because tumble was unsurprising. But there were two interesting things about it, nonetheless. The first is that the stock fell sharply despite the fact that pretty much every serious analyst who covers the company said that if the stock sold off, investors should treat it as a buying opportunity. So we were greeted Says It's Time To Buy." Considering the heavy volume in Apple, it's clear that lots of people on the Street were in fact thinking it was time to sell. But this is one case where it wasn't the brokerage houses that overreacted, even if a couple of analysts did trim their estimates for next year. The more interesting thing about Apple's announcement is that from one angle it really was good news, at least if you looked at things from the perspective microprocessor for the G4, hadn't been able to deliver enough chips to satisfy a much heavier than expected demand for the G4. Apple said it had already The obvious point here is that if you're going to have a problem, it's better to have one that's the result of too much demand rather than too little. (Though there is something deeply ironic about Apple, which initially ran into build everything that went into the machines, is now having problems because its sole supplier is struggling.) But there's also something else, which is On the face of it, that's strange. Even if the company were having trouble with the G4, which is a new product, why would that make it earn less money than it did a year ago, when the G4 didn't even exist? But there's actually a good reason for this, and it has to do with the way Apple has pared back its operations, concentrated on its best products, and placed a new premium on A year ago, there were still Apple products in the pipeline and on store shelves that were older models or that served markets in which the company was never going to thrive. Today, that's not true. The best thing that Apple has willing to pay a premium for those characteristics. The best thing about the return on invested capital is improving, its profit margins are improving, and as well. Apple will never be what it once was. But it has a chance to do a politics that mattered in this country.) But it does seem telling that the And I guess what I mean by a revival of liberalism is more the inevitably of consciousness do you suppose he knows or cares that if he weren't rich he by unattractive billionaires? To use your phrase: just asking. And finally: such a clear illustration of the Street's conviction that there's nothing wrong going to fall far short of earnings estimates in the next two quarters. on no news at all. Well, no public news, that is. Clearly lots of going to be so bad until its sales numbers came in, and that it didn't tell any of its big shareholders to get out before the bad news broke. Perhaps. But But the size of the trades was such that the whole situation looks decidedly Here's the quirk in the whole story, though. Among the people raising the possibility that large shareholders were informed in advance are analysts at some of Wall Street's biggest investment banks and brokerage houses. And among the people most annoyed by the company's late announcement night, the company reassured them that nothing was wrong, and that there would Let's get this straight. The analysts are annoyed because analysts the chance to tell their clients to sell before other investors Of course, this reaction was accepted as par for the would have been as blatant a case of selective disclosure as you can imagine. Companies continue to disclose material information to analysts before issuing press releases. And they spend far more time talking to large shareholders than wrong thing a couple of days before. When analysts call, looking for information that will help their clients and only their clients, companies should just say, "Buzz off. If we have something important to say, you'll find out when everyone else does." Oh, I how long to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. (Well, actually, I don't want to be a fly, since they have short control, especially police activities to prevent crime through order mayor's position on the merits of certain art has been highly topical and controversial in New York City (and for those who read the New York Times in other areas of the country), in most of the sections of the country he is best known for his record on crime control. And different issues on one level, but on another they are linked. Both raise art, however, although not a lawyer, I have become quite familiar with the issues as they relate to certain aspects of disorderly behavior, especially panhandling in public spaces (begging). (You may or may not know that I was extensively involved during the late 1980s in restoring order in the New York City subways and that panhandling was, perhaps, the most divisive issue.) In respects, the subway experience (both in dealing with graffiti and with other forms of disorderly behavior) became the prototype new managerial and tactical innovations seemed to accelerate declines in This issue, crime control and how it is accomplished, you suggest, we are going into an election year and it will be interesting to I hope that you had a good holiday. I will look forward with the news that Republicans in Congress are likely to dip into the Social pile of cash for Republican members of Congress to resist, even though party leaders vowed to any reporter who'd listen last week that Social Security was earmarked all the country's general fund surpluses for the next two fiscal on a constant lookout for mud to sling during next fall's races, are observing may have been doomed from the start. In what it calls a "case study" of the sit across the bargaining table. In the end, according to a diplomat quoted by privately predicting exactly the kind of violence and chaos that followed the from rival gangs together in small rooms. In the latter cases, known inside the watch. The staged confrontations ostensibly were used to test inmates' ability to avoid fights and thus their readiness to enter the general prison population, but the report says they often escalated into predictably bloody how the Justice Department's criminal investigation of the tobacco industry civil lawsuit against cigarette makers. But the government's ambitious criminal case wound up leading to only one charge: a misdemeanor count against a small considering the highly controversial step of dismantling four huge dams on all the river's varieties of salmon. But even environmentalists concede it's far from clear if taking the dams out of service would revive the fish paper says some of Bush's reluctance to hire Beltway types stems from a longstanding distrust of the East Coast establishment, which goes back to his After breathless references in its opening paragraphs to Champagne rationing try life without deadlines." Did she quit or was she fired? It's a pretty abrupt departure, and she has no other job lined up, but who knows? it did? Who gets fired for working too hard? But she has taken a lot of lately for her chipper enthusiasm about movies everyone else hated, such as The Phantom Menace or Eyes Wide Shut. Another Times it be unusual to fire a film critic for not being harsh enough? It would certainly say something about the difference between the East and West coasts. his lead critic for sucking up to the studios too much? Well, why did shows how the rigors of reviewing crap can reduce a critic to an embittered regular contributor to The New Republic who has become famous for taking with the same withering contempt. All are seen with the same unwavering lost the gift of being able to comprehend a work of art that does not reflect their immediate experience; they have become afraid of genuine art." All except credit for her insight, even though that she was practically the only critic to praise the film: "Not a single critic, not even those few who claimed to like nothing, now that you mention it. They couldn't have less in common or less illustrating a point, rather than manufacturing a conceit, was it: that these stabilize currency exchange rates. When asked later whether his question was white rivals sit silently beside him, leaving his foolishness unremarked. The real racism in this campaign is the unspoken assumption that it is unreasonable charm and guile, was more a manner than a mind, but in politics, intellectualism of presidents early in this century, Will concludes, "such intellect in politics is rare, and perhaps should be." What "Bush understands," Will suggests, is that "the wise leader should strive to have intellectuals on rudimentary things right"? Is it racism? Chatterbox doesn't think so. There's a depends on whether you're the kind of intellectual he plans to keep on tap. We are having a hurricane watch in our house, and all activity has halted while we try to figure out whether the weather people know what they're talking whether the contractor for our Long Island house ever fixed the front door that doesn't close. The last time there was a hurricane we were in the house on Long Island, and the police came and actually said the words "Seek higher the divorce of the 21st lawyer, who was still on the case this morning, but not for long. I know the 21st lawyer and have watched Here is a serious thing for a moment: The world is full of women who can't get their husbands to pay child support, and it won't be long before even the for what these lawyers say in court-- for which they never ever even seem to crime rate: fewer criminals, and therefore fewer cases for criminal lawyers. As it is, there's fierce competition among them for the celebrity criminals: You You're right about the police: The criteria for advancement in the department should be changed now that the crime rate has dropped. But I had no idea that you get bonus points for correctly challenging someone at I think it's interesting you sign off. I almost never do. It's one of the hinges on taking federal money away from failing schools and giving it to parents to use elsewhere. But the analysis has neglected one salient point Under Bush's proposal, states would be required to test their "disadvantaged" students on academic basics every year. If a school's test scores didn't improve after three consecutive years, the federal government would take away its contribution that comes under an aid program as a voucher to pay for a private school, tutoring, or another public "acceptable," "recognized," or "exemplary." Only one school in the entire has a program that is both more generous and more stringent than Bush's district negotiates directly with private schools to place these students. This of failing public schools under this program. How many have taken advantage of didn't identify which students qualified for the program until August, by which time it was too late to enroll elsewhere for this year. But the bigger problem Four or five private schools did contact the school district to express religious school, which intends to create a separate secular facility for the for parents. And if there's no choice, there's no competitive pressure on failing public schools, which is the chief justification for the program. To find out whether vouchers can actually improve education, Bush would have to offer an additional incentive worth several times the federal government's isn't prepared to run afoul of conservative dogma to the extent of proposing spending tens of billions of additional federal dollars on education. it's because the state standards are riddled with loopholes. Schools can exempt students judged to have learning disabilities, or who have limited English social promotion. How likely is it that states would set up stringent systems of evaluation and accountability for the sake of having their federal education funding taken away? Not very. Bush is proposing that federal education dollars come with strings attached. But the people receiving the dollars get to pull could measure any school against any other school and truly assess their two of Bush's education advisers, have championed this idea in the past. Yet Bush's plan steers entirely clear of national standards in favor of state ones. The implicit reason is, once again, that anything the federal government does runs afoul of the conservative dogma, which says that education is an Bush's plan plausible and interesting. Until his work improves, he deserves a resident, tourist, professional visitor, etc. It generally is one of the conditions of my visiting a city to lecture or consult that I stay at a "downtown" hotel rather than one on a highway someplace. The inspiration for I take your point about making the city a place for "tourists" at the expense of residents and neighborhoods. Certainly in the subway, although I was concerned about tourists using the subway, my primary concern was the fact that travel on the subway had become intolerable for people who had to use it: students, service workers, and so on. The rich were using limos and cabs. Students, workers, and urban residents in the broadest sense, deserved better On the city level, while I am primarily concerned about the residents of neighborhoods and communities, I am also concerned about "strangers": that is, persons who come into neighborhoods to shop, provide services, "people watch," has pointed out, for neighborhoods to thrive, strangers must both feel comfortable entering neighborhoods and behave in ways that don't threaten the But, of course, this takes us into murky areas. Clearly both residents and "strangers" can take offense too easily. Moreover, despite the popular view that neighborhoods are cozy and warm, they also have enormous capacity for pettiness and hostility. And, it also can be true that one person's "disorder" is another person's uniqueness. Nonetheless, I have found this resolvable if one is attentive to the law, the constitution, and issues of freedom and The issues you raise about possibilities of abuse, however, are appropriate. In my own work, I have seen the misinterpretation of "broken windows" for their own purposes by both the far left and the far right. Part of the trouble is that now everybody "understands" the ideas in broken windows. And for many, it and have never used except to distance myself from it. It is both unrealistic and smacking of zealotry. The far left likes to substitute it for broken windows because it proves that I am a fascist conducting a war on "homeless" and the poor; the far right loves the term "zero tolerance" as a replacement for broken windows because it justifies police "ass kicking." Well, I have gone on a bit. Since my wife is now traveling, I will have then the subways work. But all this changed a couple of weeks ago, when there was a flash flood that shut down the city completely. Absolutely flooded the subway system. Do you know why? I do. Because they're not spending enough money keeping the drains clean. This was in the newspapers, I think, but it's one of today; that would never have happened but for the incident a couple of weeks So you are thinking of canceling a book signing just because no one will Yesterday you wrote that the '90s don't exist as a culturally distinct The '60s were about sex, the '70s were about drugs, and the '90s are about money. There were no '80s. They never happened. I know this: I am about to make a movie that takes place in the '80s, and when you make a list of what the '80s were, you come down to a list of what they weren't: no cell phones, no color purposes of the movie, I think of the '80s as the moment just before everything This brings me to a thing I love to think about, especially when I fly to read Vanity Fair on the plane, and if you look at their list of the thought you were going home." "We couldn't get out," he said. Now, what he He actually stayed an extra day in New York rather than submit to the the world. Because if you really want to know how these guys get beautiful of the world to lose their minds. The jet is the thing that makes them all do I wish you would write about private planes. Really. I could go on as they were, there were nowhere near as bad as being told you've flunked an exam you haven't flunked and being forced to go to summer school (and, as the Times notes today, being punished by your parents for flunking said exam). The story in today's paper is truly horrible: These are kids with his career as a special prosecutor. The man is clearly looking for a job. someone gave me his autobiography for my birthday, and I feel you could not possibly have read it if you believe you could pull even the smallest lever for impossibility of starting over from scratch, which is what towns like I like many aspects of Celebration. The emphasis on sidewalks and sense of place to the streets, the back alleys that put the cars in the background, and the planning that gives equal importance to the individual houses and the common shared spaces. What I am skeptical of is turning one's like Home Depot. If I lived in Celebration, I would have to drive some distance to find one. Nor do I remember seeing a service station. Nor a car wash. Nor a storage facility. There is no motel, but there is a bed and breakfast (I happen to prefer the former). So much of what is necessary to the way we live today is Celebration doesn't tell us anything about how we could better arrange our present lives, how we could integrate and knit together convenience stores and Home Depots, for example, or neighborhoods and strip malls. Inexpensive strip malls, whatever their appearance, are where little business are born, since budding entrepreneurs can't afford the rents that elegant town centers charge. buildings, old as well as new, which could serve a variety of functions. The contradiction of a new town is that everything is new, hence expensive. That is obviously an unfair criticism, yet it underlines the real limitations of There is another, final aspect to this conundrum. I teach a course about After a class on New Urbanism, where I showed them several projects and took write a paper about the subject. One of the students wrote: "If there was one communities, it would be: What would it take to make you move?" It was a will come up with a better idea. Or, at least, what seems to be a better idea Celebration is in many ways a better idea. No doubt, it is destined to take I will confess I began the book with the weary expectation that the SAT and keep its test questions private, and by many because of the common charge that all the tests do is to confirm the advantages of those from good schools and with educated parents. The book is after all subtitled "The secret history of disreputable that has been kept secret and will now be revealed. But of course the large outline of this history of how academic qualifications became the key consideration for college and university admissions isn't very secret at education, and part of the story is also told in The Bell Curve There is no question that the shift to meritocracy in college admissions, combined with the growing significance of college as the entry point to key professions and occupations, does amount to a revolution. If college had effect of the shift to an exam like the SAT is to make it possible for those doing so were reducing the opportunities of people of their own class and thinking that one reason, which they did not think was so good, was to recruit in trying to recruit a more nationally representative student body. community, resulting in a New York state law banning discrimination on the and other private universities. One effect of the law was to forbid colleges and universities to ask for pictures of applicants. Other states followed New York state in passing such laws. Colleges and universities had good reason for preserving their right to make their own decisions in admissions, but was one organizations were opposed to affirmative action in admissions in the '70s was because it had not been so long since they had been fighting discrimination whether any vestiges of these practices remained. The director of admissions did at one point say there was a problem of an oversupply of good students from equality, and there was no one ready to attack this development. But then almost immediately, the question came up: It might be justice, but was it equality? And we began to struggle, and we still struggle, with the fact that effort, in the '80s, to create an adjusted score on the SAT that takes into that if test results are correlated with income or other measures of social background, that students who do better than "expected" on the basis of their The adjusted score would be called the MAT, measure of academic talent. This is score." But neither the MAT, which did not take account of race, or the new meritocratic system by low black achievement on the SAT, because that is not accounted for by the lower economic and educational background of black That problem was there at the beginning, when meritocracy appeared to have history of affirmative action, as it affected higher education admissions. He emphasis on the role of some activists, lawyers and others, who entered college and university at a time when meritocratic considerations were not yet affected the beneficiaries of meritocracy, they were now ready to reduce its weight for those who did not do well in the tests created to serve meritocracy. This part of the story is based more on interview and less on research in archives, but I to it. It is true it is told from the point of view primarily of those who tried to save preference, and one may be able to take issue with some of the journalistic flourishes, as you do, but aside from characterization of the But I agree with you that when it comes to the upshot of the whole story, hands, and leaves a lot dangling. If not these tests, which? None? Aiming at what kinds of characteristics? How do we discover them? Are there really any But this letter is long enough, possibly too long for the format, so I will interested in knowing more of what you make of this last chapter, and his position. He seems to be struggling between some distaste for the role of the real party, with people she knew, but a Party party, the kind with spotlights Zone, a shiny new theme restaurant suggestively located on the ground floor of attendance from the press release she picked up as she left. The stars, having allowed themselves to be interviewed on the way in and broadcast on giant screens to the crowds in the streets below, floated past in their bubbles of Some fun was had, though fun was not the point. (The point is reading about There were the excellent sushi and crab legs and lushly lit vegetables at the not serve such fare in the future. There were bass fishing and skateboarding there was the towering new entertainment complex that is Times Square, with all indisputable, but when you get right down to it, or rather down in it, the television, in movie theaters, in kids' books, on the computer, even in amusement parks, where there is no comparative sense of scale, such parks being impersonal and unreal the form, the more of a sense of direct connection you feel. Beauty may be merely a cartoon character who exists on a variety of billboard or looming screen in a predefined geographical space, however, such will just have come from and will immediately go back to neighborhoods scaled to their height and humanity, and you reveal her to be a virtual monster rather than a girl full of moxie. In the war between the old Times Square street and triumph in the short run, but street size will win out in the end. A body just We all sense that this transformation occurred sometime after World War II. might be developing a hereditary aristocracy. He sought to replace it with a Platonic class of guardians who would be selected by merit and who would social vision, but he was enthralled by the possibility of testing, with the thought that human beings could be measured and sorted by these fantastic new These unsung men helped push through the changes that are the basis for our the fundamental issues at stake and the central problems inherent in a also closed off opportunity for people who couldn't ace the tests. Furthermore, replacing it with another, and possibly even more rigid, one? I am much Having described this fundamental change, the decline of the elite based on blood and breeding and the rise of the elite based on brains, it seems to me values get adopted by a meritocratic elite? How do they see themselves? What with some trepidation because I have just completed a book that attempts to answer just these questions. So it was with some relief tinged with There must be some law somewhere that says when a liberal starts talking about merit he must immediately move on and talk about race. Obviously, the meritocracy, "that it's good for the country to have a designated, educationally derived elite." So why does he let this book on meritocracy get biased account. I am a nervous opponent of affirmative action, and through this whole section I felt my point of view was not being treated fairly. When I read opponent who is treated like a hollow front man. It treats other opponents of affirmative action as oddballs. So one opponent is described living in "an isolated mountaintop aerie" and spending his days "talking in a low confidential mumble on the telephone." Another is a "ferociously quiet young biased, but liberal readers will find themselves flattered and conservative readers will find themselves feeling that they are victims of an injustice. issues. He asserts that our meritocratic system is unfair, that it is an affront to our egalitarian ideals. He asserts that our system measures only a narrow set of skills, and selects people too early in their lives. These are fair assertions, but he never really makes the case in the center of his book. data or journalistic reportage that would flesh out his assertions. He says we might be fine for English majors, but what about scientists and engineers, who are rarely discussed in this book. Won't the ramifications be grave if elite sidetrack him from the issue he cares about most: The huge question of whether our current meritocratic system is just or unjust, and what we can do about against the cross of gold," was "enlisted in the sorry task of selling "emancipation from slavery," "ending legal segregation," and "securing the Though the packaging of the book is clearly meant to communicate, "buy this and get rich!" (let's be grateful the publisher didn't he's preaching not the gospel of wealth but the gospel of financial goals such as "getting out of debt," "preparing a budget," "preparing for Money Talks was written by an actual expert (a black training or experience is necessary before you start telling people what to do to the publisher's catalogue (this part, unfortunately, isn't online), the authors of It's About the Money! have "unparalleled recognition and credibility." Yes, but not about the management of money. describe herself, even if you caught her in an unusually giddy mood. Times leads with something far more lethal than a hurricane: a parishioners before capping himself. At least one pipe bomb was detonated An anthropomorphism as relentless as the storm itself colors the storm beneath it offers this scientific explanation: "With cold water in the Pacific no longer sensed the kind of temperature differential that attracted them about the war in the southeast between homeowners and insurance companies over hurricane and therefore homes they are on the hook for should incorporate them. accuse insurance companies of seeking the likes of storm shutters and high impact windows so that they can charge higher rates to those who go yesterday killed himself, apparently with an intentional overdose of antidepressants, in New Jersey, where he was under house arrest. He was also a bit surprising that the LAT does the same, albeit with the help of a marketplace has gotten worse. Some of the research was based on the experiences of "testers," equally financially qualified pairs of white and minority members looking for identical home mortgages. The finding: received less time and information from loan officers and were quoted higher bias is illegal, why don't these testers' results lead to indictments of bankers? If bankers were looking at hard time for this crap, they'd cut it reorganization of the Dept. of Energy, under which eight of the nation's organization, is apparently headed for Senate and perhaps White House approval. The problem is, notes the story, that this new unit will be on its own regarding safety and environmental protection, areas already weak in the reporting racial identifications only in proper context." This gives rise to there actually is one, why not state it? Not stating it not only makes the clarification utterly fail to clarify, but also raises the suspicion that the context" means beyond "when the paper doesn't get a lot of complaints." and Providence incarnates a new kind of show second in hotness only to started Oxygen, a cable channel for women, the networks fear that the hitherto male world of cable could start stealing their loyal female viewers.) believable as a woman whose life has taken a scary new turn than the wear; her clothes don't seem designed to show off an improbably sculpted body, was striking out on her own, and they, having done so, are coming home. Is this feminist perspective, the answer would probably be yes. Something has definitely gone wrong with their ambitions to become successful professionals. opportunity presented itself, she says, "I had to do it. I couldn't fail. I good when it comes to getting along with regular people, a skill they must and which she's smugly annoying.) When they grow, as characters in television classes don't give them any particular edge over the common folk they find chuck the lunches at the Dome and the whole rat race and just go home again. That the women are women is more a reflection of the network's demographic needs at the moment than of anything else. Their sex is incidental earlier this morning, but the schedule of a working mom is not always significant part of the holiday is constructing the "sukkah," a temporary hut with a natural wood roof that lets in the moonlight (and the rain). Eating in the sukkah in Manhattan is quite a feat of religious observance. Not only do you have to find open space to construct the sukkah, but overzealous neighbors have been known to report these structures to the Building Department, whose inspectors are often all too happy to cite individuals for code violations. So much for New York the great liberal city!? Which brings me right to this week's public funding for museums, freedom of speech, the artistic imagination, the role of the chief executive as the arbiter of good taste, and of course electoral politics? There are so many lessons about urban politics in this stuff" and threatening to cut off its city subsidy did not surprise anyone who's been living with this mayor for the past six years. An amazing column in "dung and the virgin" exhibit offensive, as I would, it's an easy target to score points with upstate conservatives in his not yet announced Senate campaign. So much for responsible public policy. He hasn't said, let's bring the funding issue to the City Council, which shares authority over the budget allocation. He would rather be out there defending decency. Never mind everything else he's tolerated in this city when he considers it an economic development tool. I think we are reaching new levels of cynicism in New York City politics, which can only further alienate people from civic I know that there is an important relationship between had time to get to it. I really look forward to your reply. killing and destroying indiscriminately. What is the back story to the current developed at least a dozen distinct languages and religions over the ages. homosexual orgy by underground filmmaker Jack Smith. The mayor didn't utter a Reindeer frolicking with nude female "elves" as they defecated, stirred the supplies him with richer material than a mere upscale single mom or a cussing Republican Party that although he's the mayor of Sin City, he can't abide deserve one another, since they share a common goal of drawing as much attention to themselves as possible. The "Sensation" folks, though, are doing to increase the value of his extensive holdings of the artists' work, the show condemnatory fit. Now, if the show doesn't go on, it will be martyred; if it does, it will draw even bigger crowds and more press than originally The mayor, on the other hand, is coming off as a coward and a traitor. He's arouse the ire of culture lovers, the wrath of the First Amendment brigade, and come to patronize the city's cultural institutions. The art industry is also selling out his own city to do so is pretty sick stuff indeed. company's future prospects. Bill Gates himself supposedly told his father to soar to what then must have seemed like stratospheric levels. (Sensibly, Gates' it more difficult to lure employees with stock options, and, more important, makes existing options more expensive. And keeping investor expectations moderate is a good way of making sure you meet those expectations. about the appropriate valuation of technology stocks than the market does. things: the free cash flow (cash above and beyond expenses, including its cost of capital, and reinvestment) that the company generates and the length of time the company is able to continue generating free cash flow. In valuing companies then the market is saying two things: These companies are generating extraordinary amounts of free cash flow (which they are), and they will be able to continue generating that kind of cash for a considerable length of time. Now, the first point is not really arguable. By any companies today are among the most successful and profitable in the history of which has to do with the sustainability of this domination, is presumably the which is to say wrong about the future. (That's why I own shares in some of irrelevant (except, perhaps, to my future here). The fact that the market Our natural inclination, after all, is to imagine that about something like the valuation of technology stocks. But to succumb to that inclination is to reject the most important lesson taught by the triumph of capitalism, which is that markets process information, judge the future, and allocate capital far more efficiently and successfully than any individual, no anymore because we know they can never know as much as or react as quickly as Over the years, advertisers have tried all kinds of tactics to attract customers, and more recently those tactics have seemed to cover the full seems to be pioneering a still relatively uncharted strategy: mocking its own customers, and its most lucrative customers at that. elementary school) classroom, where the kids are engaged in a furious game of musical chairs. Its basic premise is that certain kinds of people end up doing certain kinds of jobs when they grow up, which is certainly an unsurprising children find seats in different ways and thereby demonstrate their eventual fates (as the camera zooms in on the individual kids, their eventual professions appear on screen), the ad, too, is unsurprising. have been taken and he's lost. His response is to throw a tantrum, and he English lass, who stands up and lets the peevish boy sit down, much to his The "our flight attendants are generous souls who will sacrifice anything for the pleasure and comfort of their charges" message is not odd here. But the strange, particularly since all the children in the game who have got seats failed because he's not very good, and succeeds only by crying. The only way the ad could have painted a less savory picture of corporate chieftains would have been if the teacher had forced one of the other students to stand up. But then that would have defeated the whole "flight attendants are angels" part of larger percentage of the airline's business. This ad, with its faintly populist air, doesn't seem to fit the new strategy all that well. But who knows? Maybe kid does get the chair and a smile from the pretty girl. the only network without a studio partner, needs to find one as fast as it can. doesn't need to rush into the arms of the first suitor who comes along. dollar companies.) And the studio business can be an immensely profitable one because of the myriad opportunities for merchandising, licensing, and business is also, by its very nature, erratic and expensive. For every broadcast network, its cable properties are booming, and even its Internet price break, it would be wrecking its own business. The great delusion in the way the media write about vertical integration is the assumption that merging two companies makes it economically sensible for one to sell its products to the other below the price that it could charge in the marketplace. But in fact it doesn't. If Paramount Paramount that it would otherwise have rejected, it will become less valuable. "A bad program is a bad program, and the only thing that happens if you put a get picked up. Vertical integration doesn't change that." crazy. No one takes less money than they can get because they might be rewarded out of favor more often than the Who has mounted comeback tours. But through it all, and even with the continued erosion of viewership, one thing has remained unchanged: Broadcast television offers unparalleled access to huge numbers of makes broadcast an enormously powerful medium." When the studios come calling, for a week now. Did you know that? Did anyone? Isn't even silence about their lines, editors have nervous breakdowns. But a month has passed, and now a First question: What kind of magazine is it? First answer: A beautiful one. Talk magazine is a magazine whose visual conception is so tight that even the bar code is a design element. You pick the thing up and it demands to be flipped through. It doesn't demand to be read with the same urgency, though. piece is actually about or why I need to read it now, as opposed to several thousand years ago. Chatty doesn't have to mean writers should be allowed to how humiliated a woman with professional credentials was when her friends how unbearably sophisticated her and her friends' palates have become? synergy. Don't get me wrong. Synergy's only a problem if it causes editors to pick boring subjects, or boring approaches to subjects. An sister company, Touchstone. Try to decide whether this would look like you were sucking up to your bosses too much or not enough. Then skip the whole But so what if Talk fails to grip our attention? We really like suggested we do. Pulling it out on the subway and mooning over the unbelievably gorgeous ads. In the end, we decided it was our approach that was wrong, not decided that there definitely was a message. Consider the profiles (the Times for having discovered the cure for cancer, then found himself ostracized by his colleagues because he hadn't, really, though he never claimed legitimate press. So: Rein in the press! Rally round the cause! It's a movement for the millennium! Hey, did you hear? There's going to be a screening of the Today (which puts it below the fold). (The Wall Street Journal puts the earthquake atop its to anonymous sources, the federal government will file a massive civil racketeering lawsuit against the tobacco industry to reclaim billions of suit would be the largest ever brought by the Justice Department. released today, stating that New Year computer glitches "will cause more inconvenience than tragedy" (the report is also fronted by the says, with the education, oil, construction, agriculture, food processing, and health care industries being the most vulnerable. A panel of experts assembled casualties and continued neighborhood blackouts, much of the city was up and running the day after the quake, including major highways and the airport. The With four articles, the LAT coverage is the most thorough. One story helpfully notes that here; to learn what damage will typically result from that the spate of recent earthquakes has nothing to do with geology (they happen with the same frequency as they always have) and everything to do with demographics and geography (more people live near fault lines). best economically and is also politically realistic," he said. experienced, sophisticated and hardened terrorists to the clandestine movement" that seat belts on school buses do not save lives, and may actually do harm. A belts to do any good. In some cases, the belts simply exacerbated whiplash. The paper does not pronounce a verdict on the book (appropriate, since presumably use of fictional narrator personas grew out of an "epiphany" that, "after several years of deep research I was, in an almost occult sense, there when door open for that man, grease the skids and give him a helpful boot down the steep, swift road to sure and deserved oblivion." (To read Lieutenant Governor Endorses Governor Bush." To actually read these press An exception to this rule was today's endorsement of state's most senior and revered elected official. His endorsement carries a lot of sway with Democrats in New York, who, according to the most recent polls, New York politicians, he has respect and influence on the other side of the pointing out that this legacy has since been entirely erased. He then shuffled stooped, deliberate shuffle back to the microphone. "Nothing is the matter with turning on his heel and scurrying back to his seat. As sound bites go, this was just about perfect, a tiny dagger pitched into Gore's sternum. The professor returned to give his reasons some minutes later. "Do you want a list?" he asked, to more tumultuous laughter and "Yeah, we want a list!" cried out one of the hacks. Do you remember the first time you ever heard the expression, "There's no there there"? I do. I practically remember where I was sitting when I first great line. What a great line! I mean, when I first came across it, I just stopped reading for a few minutes and rolled that line around in my brain and thought, I would kill to say something that amazing. There's no there there there. Bush I find dangerous precisely because he will win according to my criteria (and yours), and he knows absolutely nothing. Also, call me crazy, but I hate Republicans. Could never vote for one. Just couldn't. It's as close Republican. If I believed in God. And those horrible Supreme Court justices Republicans nominate really matter. (Although it's surprising and fascinating waiting desperately for the moment I could get out, is how it found its "there" (Probably not quite accurately quoted, but as I say, there's no definitely improved: He was great on Meet the Press a few weeks ago, that people have worked with Al Gore, and it seems to be truly useless. I mean, if you just tied the man's hands together and lashed them down, it would be an improvement. If I were trying to help him, I would tell him to never ever read always work from index cards with no more than a word or two written on them. Well, so should anyone who gives a speech. I wanted to die when Gore got up speech on it that he dutifully read from. On the other hand, if Gore runs Well, I am off to work. And so this is the end of our days together. I feel relieved, because frankly my entire life has ground to a halt for the last four days while I feverishly tried to think of things to say. But I also feel sad. well written, thanks to his gifted ghost Mark Salter, who helped write his book worth of them. But both the prose and the delivery have the appeal of The most interesting thing about today's announcement was what was left out at the last minute. An earlier version of the prepared speech included a of his speech, passed out in advance, read: "There are those who would instead propose a larger role for the federal government. One of my opponents wants to allow the Department of Education to cut off money to underprivileged children to the next paragraph, which draws an implicit distinction instead of an explicit one. "While I applaud the effort to hold schools accountable for the money they receive, I would strongly oppose any program that would give power establish a positive message before going negative on the Republican It's interesting to compare the two education plans. Where Bush's plan is a money--$5.4 billion over three years. And he's explicit about where he'd get problem is that that's still not enough to determine whether vouchers work. Constitutional questions, but beyond that, it's not enough to create genuine competitive pressure on bad public schools, which is the point of on earth that a good teacher should be paid less than a bad senator," he And this one, even better: "Some people just aren't meant to be teachers, and we should help them find another line of work," he says. This draws wild contradicts the boomer mythology that it was the baby boom that first absorbed rock 'n' roll into the mass culture." Chatterbox's proof was that the first column that Chatterbox posted earlier doesn't work for people who don't subscribe to the Journal's online edition; Chatterbox has now Fray postings immediately started pouring in from people who said that yes, unacknowledged founding father of rock 'n' roll. (For the details, see the made rock 'n' roll an art form for the masses (as opposed to one for blacks and that boomers represented a majority of that public until the 1960s. Please note the important distinction between listening to rock 'n' to it, but us little kids actually stood under the lamppost and sang a groups' pockets (or, as was more often the case, these groups' record labels' out and buy the records well before their teen years. (Click here and the fourth grade. One of the first 45s I purchased was Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great loud and danced all afternoon. When he came home and heard the lyrics, he broke the record in two. I was crushed and resented him for many years. Last year, I finally realized why he thought "Great Balls of Fire" was terrible for his and lyrics to the vernacular use of the word "balls." Duh! Around the Clock" (though she's a little vague about whether she purchased it (one of the greatest teachers the world has seen) let us have a party. She brought a record player, we brought our 45s (my contribution was "Rock Around some role in the adoption of early rock, even though ultimately these kids didn't get it and we boomers did. And you're correct that boomer propaganda never allows for this possibility. Your only mistake was totally roll, against the wishes of our parents, cemented into us older boomers two lessons that were behind much of what happened in the '60s: Because of rock, we had a lot in common with each other that neither our parents nor our older siblings or older friends shared. It was the start of the feeling, right or wrong, of generational bonding, and of boomer exceptionalism, Brothers. But my father forced me to buy a lame, horrible pop tune Brothers or some lame brothers. I never let him do that again, and I never forgot that lesson about the way authority figures can screw you. (Interestingly, my dad and I later developed a great relationship, and he swore he couldn't remember the incident. But it was etched in my mind.) and asked This Week's panelists about their own drug histories. Pundit Central" column has an excellent summary of the exchange, but Chatterbox believes readers of this column will want to scrutinize the text for every last ambiguity (for the complete transcript, click here): both marijuana and cocaine; though if that were the case he'd probably agrees with Chatterbox that it's a phony issue. Or, it may be because she doesn't want to answer the question. In fact, she doesn't answer the question; she just says she was "so pregnant during those years." This answer implies that she couldn't take drugs because she was constantly pregnant during the 1970s. But obviously she wasn't pregnant hasn't answered the first time). It doesn't seem especially surprising that he generation's drug of choice was alcohol (presumably not "sack," Sir John mess with dangerous and illegal substances. Or, it might mean that today he doesn't want to discuss the matter at all (in which case we'd need to He was out of the office when Chatterbox was phoning around for the he'd answer the question if asked, but no one asked. (Drudge refused to with marijuana in the distant past," and wrote, "I deeply regret this I found the drug had no effect on me whatsoever, and I determined later I experimented with marijuana once again. On that occasion I enjoyed it a good deal more. This youthful indiscretion I also deeply regret. During the next several years, overcome by the spirit of scientific inquiry, I hypocrisy regarding illegal drug use, he also deplores illegal drug use itself. Specifically regarding cocaine, a lesson of the 1980s was that its use is both boomers who tried it during the 1970s. That doesn't justify the ongoing disparity between criminal sentences for possession of powder cocaine and enforcement agencies take in general today, as compared to two decades ago. provoked almost entirely by a negative item on the company that appeared in bearish a commentator on Wall Street as exists today and a man who bears a when they stand to make a great deal of money if their comments knock those companies' stock prices down. Short sellers are often founts of useful information, and a certain kind of institutionalized skepticism seems to make them adept at sniffing out fraud and deception, particularly in corporate accounting. Certainly the financial press is full of more than enough fund managers touting the stocks they love for there to be plenty of room for was slowing, that the company was facing increased competition and that the advent of free Internet services, especially abroad, would hurt it. We were company would have to rescind the price hike it was able to push through last The last point is, of course, pure speculation, and it rests on two other Internet service provider. It's not, because even though it's considerably more integrated with the Internet than ever before, its second misconception is the idea that Net users are willing to abandon their app of the Internet, and it is a true source of customer stickiness. It may be us, we'd probably have to tell more people about the former than the as the fact that despite the familiarity of his critique, it was able to drive read that piece could have come away from it thinking, "Damn. I was just wrong about the business. I need to sell." In other words, there was no new information in the story that needed to be incorporated into the stock Except, of course, that the existence of the story itself was information column so quickly, the stock market was efficient or inefficient. Unfortunately, this is almost a metaphysical question. An efficient market is one that assimilates everything meaningful that can be known about a company live in, in the short run a piece blasting a stock is almost sure to move that stock, which would seem to make it meaningful. And so the snake ends up eating And so, the last of our Book Raps, our chance encounters on this environment (as does Celebration, our authors inform us) from having too much traffic and no bar. It's an apt forum, for all that: another attempt to was engineered to present such an elaborate display of democracy in a town where democracy has been supplanted by corporate control. But then, why are we being paid, by the medium that's supplanting print, to prop up the illusion of it means. While researching my last book, in which I devote a chapter to there that in the vividness of its intrigues the town lives up to its As I took Celebration to task for its faux history and democracy, I there on election nights and at meetings of Port Commissions and Mosquito what they have to say about what they saw in Celebration troubles, or at least complicates, my formula. Because this is the problem: In the face of our postwar, retail, mobile, corporate culture, democracy is not only a seemingly ineffectual anodyne to social blight; it becomes a part of the problem. Yes, made it the largest tourist destination in the world. You could say that corporate commerce created the problem. But only the corporation can seemingly solve it, since the problem evidently thrives on the democratic turf, and not changed. For a long while, now, as tourists discovered the town, sweatshirt and melodies from loudspeakers just as Celebration did until the influence of moved out to the highway. The main post office has moved out to the highway. tower and moved out to the highway. The citizens of the town objected, but the county voters didn't care, and the big money (much of it developer money) was happened. Democracy is destroying the town that was a temple of democracy. But that is not the ultimate point of my parable. At the same time as all a new development that has been zoned and permitted and is now rising to little Celebration, its mawkish marketing and sentimental architecture direct return it to its roots? What happens when the economic interests that are chance, even on so noisy a street corner, to chat with you. Balance Gore's. Cutting the vice president every conceivable Chatterbox decided to attack this question by examining scores). That way, Chatterbox figured, he'd have answers for both scores as simplistic and unfair). Supporters of Republican presidential candidates are presumably gleeful that this contest is being scored at all and Not even Chatterbox has the patience to comb through (Chatterbox leaves that to certified practitioners of social science.) Instead, Chatterbox zeroed in on the two years when Gore cast considerably more votes Reactor, one of the more notorious boondoggles of the period. Gore voted override President Carter's veto of a water projects appropriation bill, which Waterway (another famous boondoggle of that era). Gore voted in favor of to represent a threat to the snail darter population, from the Endangered he needed to support other House members' water projects if they were going to unclear. These include several "energy crisis" votes (it is by now largely forgotten that environmental groups were often opposed to federal efforts to ease the energy crisis). Gore voted in favor of a solar satellite program that the environmental movement opposed (according to the measures, but which some environmentalists opposed, because it also alternative fuel venture opposed by environmentalists because it involved couple of votes during this period; eventually he would shift his support to an vote to cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency; two highway bill votes; a vote against banning new billboard construction along federally subsidized highways; and a vote against a moratorium on issuing federal patents Corp. vote and the mining vote were clearly dreadful. The votes against things that's happened to me, and it means I get to go to it and to nominate chicken livers and my roommate vowed she would serve them at her wedding, and she did. At her first wedding. Shortly thereafter, she slept with my first husband. To whom I was married at the time. But never mind: Just thinking about all this has made me not just nostalgic in an unexpectedly cheerful way but The report in the Times about police misconduct was released by Mark summer in one of those small rooms he's so good at speaking in, and like everyone else who sees him in those circumstances, I was stunned at how smart and charming and relaxed he was. There are a lot of small rooms in New they haven't gone away. Only yesterday one appeared on my plate. these "reviews," in quick succession without the benefit of endless editing and are the result of great effort), has brought home to me one quality of this review for that matter. In fact, it is more like gossiping than anything else. should rename this section Book Chat, or Book Rap, or something like that. communities are cemented by adversity, although I don't think that absolves an experimental school that would be considered radical even in communities education, who had a lot to do with the revolutionary curriculum. Still, the question you ask is exactly right: How can a corporation that markets escapism make a real place? The answer, I suspect, is corporations, but they are relatively small organizations that specialize in Which is why, despite the excellent town planning and generally high quality of the architecture, I don't think Celebration is a for the millions of new houses that will be built over the next decades. In that regard, Celebration offers lessons, rather than a prototype. Or perhaps Celebration is really another manifestation inspired by "the extraordinary notion that they could start all over again from scratch." In many ways, that is the theme of the two books we have been You are a gentleman, and have generously let me get away with a couple of whoppers, which I must address before we get started on have the Send key, that great enabler of the slipshod thought, and verily I have not mastered the button, because as soon as the coffee kicked in this morning, I cringed at what I saw. For anyone misled by my first garbled posting their conversation did not widen to encompass the far corners of the solar system then that is no affront to their book, which is subtitled, after all, afford Celebration, who must rely on impact fees to help with their mortgages. especially in a missive declaring the requirement to respect the literary fascinated me, especially insofar as the schools, though technically under the real estate and construction experience, but because the company has been an entertainment medium for so many generations of children, and been that before to education than town building. The school should conceivably have been the Chronicles is this: How does an idealized place built by a dream factory and marketed as a utopia become real? The Celebration Company planners wanted their artificial creation to rise up off the gurney, but didn't know what kind recount Celebration's efforts to create "new traditions" through the long run, what has worked best is what the company could not at all provide, except inadvertently: conflict and difficulty. You ask if the Celebration's first committed crime was a setback or a victory, and your point come into being as much in response to adversity as to the conveniences and real vitality by the inevitability of a little discord, and that error would favor it so. (Would that the errors of reviewers shone so well to their Valley through the third quarter of last year than any other presidential candidate. The Democratic contender also netted more contributions over the where does he stand on the issues that are of importance to the growing number of Internet users and workers who depend on cyberspace? And, furthermore, will extending a moratorium on Internet taxes and protecting children from pornography and other online content. The candidate is betting that some of the growing number of Internet policy issues will resonate with voters. (He's history of presidential politics have candidates felt the pressure to adopt a sign a pledge vowing they will forever oppose Internet taxes. Though, clearly, asked all presidential candidates to sign a declaration opposing any Internet taxes. "Just as soccer moms were the constituency everyone was trying to reach companies that don't want to be burdened by collecting taxes on behalf of some municipalities that rely on revenues to fund schools, law enforcement, and public works projects. A congressional commission is expected to recommend a where the Internet company is located), or give states the ability to go after extension of the current moratorium, he wants to await the recommendations of also declined to sign the pledge. Both have said publicly that they want to await the commission's report and that they are also concerned about the potential drain on state and local tax revenues if a ban on Internet sales vice president supports finding a solution to these issues that allows the their ability to educate children and fight crime," said an administration galvanizing force that will serve to activate Internet users on a political some skeptics disagree that any Internet issues will sway the electorate at large. "The issue of export controls on encryption technologies, or even the disaster involving a lot of peoples' privacy, that is the one issue where the Internet would be on the agenda on a mass level. If that happened, I think all the candidates would be forced to take a position on the issue." Several candidates already have taken public stands or made statements about whether or not they believe the government needs to ensure that consumer and developing guidelines to ensure that consumers understand how their personally identifying information will be used. Most of the candidates, with the exception of Bush, who hasn't yet taken a stand, also say that certain records, including medical and financial information, should be protected by went further, saying he would shut down all federal medical databases and end the Internal Revenue Service "as we know it" by imposing a simplified flat all the candidates are closing the door on more general privacy protection legislation in the future. "For the current period, we believe industry to the Bush campaign. "But we don't rule out regulation in the future if industry fails to do a good job of policing itself." Privacy advocates say they believe the candidates are supporting industry general population. "Privacy could clearly be one of the critical issues of the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "While a lot of the platform. The problem is that in order to appeal to this constituency, many of the candidates have adopted postures that are eerily alike. Most of the major candidates favor loosening export restrictions on encryption policy. Most favor an international ban on tariffs on Internet purchases and services. Most favor forgoing federal regulation at this time in favor of allowing the marketplace to ensure that consumers have a choice of Internet service providers for some of the candidates differ is in support of federal efforts to bridge the "digital divide." The Gore camp rightly takes credit for fighting for a federal surcharge on telephone service, with the funds going to help wire public schools and libraries for Internet service. In fact, opponents labeled the program "the Gore tax," but even Bush supports the program, although his repeal the surcharge, which has helped provide wiring and Internet service for criticized the program, saying it "will fail to give schools and libraries the level of funding they had been led to expect. It will fail to stop the inexcusable waste of money on the fund's administration. And it will fail to support of efforts to keep children away from online pornography and other been an ardent supporter of the controversial Child Online Protection Act, which seeks to criminalize Web sites that "knowingly" make harmful material available to minors. The act is currently under consideration by a federal appeals court. He's also proposed legislation that would mandate filtering software for public schools and libraries that receive federal funds. The Bush Another issue that has candidates staking out positions is the prosecution of Gates before a Senate hearing, has been raising campaign funds from executives as a victory for the little guy. Most of the other candidates have tried to tread the middle ground: The Bush and Gore camps have said they will stay silent on the issue because it is a legal matter and up to the courts, not the employees he wouldn't discuss the case. But he did say, "If competition is valuable, which I think it is, then antitrust laws have a place in embodying the values of our country. If dominance in one area is used to prevent that they are convinced that Internet issues will matter this time around. "Internet electorate could very well become very concerned about privacy, protecting kids from bad stuff on the Net, preventing fraud on the Net, and protecting the overseas. It cautioned that those participating in New Year's There's no safe haven from millennial terrorists. The calm spin: Then we might extraordinary. Astronomers demurred, comparing the visual effect to the difference between a 100-watt and a 107-watt light bulb: "Statistically, it's a same emissions standards as cars. The measures, which will be phased in reductions between automakers and refineries. Environmentalists' spin: This is the biggest clean air victory since the phaseout of leaded gas. Car and gas companies' spin: Consumers will pay for these changes at showrooms rights. The unanimous ruling held that "the state is constitutionally the legislature to determine whether gay couples will get these rights through marriage or domestic partnership. Opponents of gay rights called the decision a "deeply disturbing" blow to the institution of marriage, it a triumph of "our common humanity" that paves the way for similar rights promised to forgo unrestricted donations ("soft money") if they won their and has colon cancer. He said he was leaving "to focus on my health and my and sympathetic portrayal of the "little man." Cynics attributed it to the rights and reduced gentrification. But Brown painted him as "an inexperienced the Internet abandoned its role as the leading incubator of political Judging from the Net's nonchalant treatment of a steamy story alleging recent infidelity by a presidential candidate, the answer could be yes. claims to have had an 18-month affair with one of the leading contenders. excuse for telling the story itself.) Ms. X, described by the Enquirer as a "stunning Playboy model," claims to have had eight sexual very little interest in the tale of the candidate's alleged affair. And it's unchecked proliferation of political rumor on the Internet would force mainstream media outlets to cover stories that were unchecked, or even irresponsible. For example, this summer the Wall Street Journal and other venerable media outposts ran stories on mere allegations of cocaine use far, though, there's been silence. One minimizing factor might be the fact that clearly some of the Web's indifference to the Ms. X story is attributable to the gulf between the Web and the tabloids. The Enquirer 's Web site Although both the Enquirer and its sister Star have Web sites, they do not use them to push their dirt. That's probably because tabloid readers are not the nation's most wired demographic; regardless, if the making the national press corps regularly scramble to cover a tabloid item. But tale out to mainstream readers. (The New York Post 's "Page Six" out front this summer reproducing stories about Bush's property having a racially restrictive lease, a tale that received wide Net play but little the father. But that investigation, despite Drudge's serial hype, determined the woman's claims to be false. Since then, many tabloid publishers have come to see Web gossip sites as both nuisance and competition. be, too, that Internet rumor sites are a highly precise barometer of public opinion. That is, they are ignoring the notion of a candidate's girlfriend if true, the allegations have any political significance. heavy traffic, the baby howling, the wife attempting to hide her exposed nursing bosom from the driver, and the dog scratching her bottom across the floor of the minivan. At length we arrived at our new home on the Left Bank, which we'd never actually seen, except in photographs. It was a small cluster an old apartment building. We piled out of the car and rushed to the front door, a small teeming peristaltic bundle of needs and hopes and anticipations. The door failed to open. The key mailed to us by the landlord did not fit the mainly because we couldn't think what else to do. We were being punished for our sins; we had wanted to dance, now we were paying the fiddler. It had been fun, when people asked us where we lived, to say, "Well, that's hard to say, pretended to be, which was just as gratifying. For the past six months we had it was better to claim we spoke none. We had no purpose. And that, I should complain about adulthood. One of the many things I dislike about being a why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you've established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go being weighed down by adulthood wasn't likely to improve anytime soon. Parenthood loomed. There was a time when I suspected this wouldn't have much effect on me. I figured that the chemical rush that attended new motherhood that illusion had been pretty well shattered by the anecdotal evidence. One friend with a truly amazing gift for getting out of things he did not want to do wrote to describe his own experience of fatherhood. "Remember that life you thought you had?" he wrote. "Guess what. It's not yours anymore." rate, since a door in our lives seemed to be closing, we went looking for a window. As we sat on the plane, one thing led to another, and before long we magazine. We had no idea where we would wind up; we just knew we were going man across the table, an old friend, mentioned that his sister had this old, Our bluff was being called. We agreed to rent the place, sight unseen. then an elderly woman hobbles into the cobblestone courtyard and makes for the door nearest ours. Our new French neighbor! A distant memory lifts my for the first time in my life, I was fitting the key into my new front door when an elderly woman called to me from the neighboring garden. "My name is congratulate her. When you know someone with that kind of standing in society, you somehow feel you belong, too. Assimilation is just another word for our new old French neighbor with longing. And even though I know that the moment history looks as if it is repeating itself is exactly the moment it is not, I feel a little leap in my spirits. I walk over, open a door for her, and her head down and right into her apartment. As she closes her door, the odor of stove gas wafts into the courtyard. A voice behind me says, "She so old she forgets to turn off her gas burners when she goes out." I turn around. There stands a young man wearing a black stocking cap, a navy pea coat, and a grim woman: "One day she'll come back here, light a match, and this whole building puts his hand in the pocket of his pea coat. "I have your key," he says. their jobs. Or so goes the theory. Insurance agents, music label executives, car dealers, and even university administrators will be annihilated as consumers turn directly to the infinitely efficient Web to buy and sell goods and services. Such "disintermediation" is supposed to transform politics, too, Web will let voters cast their ballots directly on all the issues. on Internet time, the voters decided that political disintermediation via the and local revenues. (Some of the license fee goes to local government; most of it goes to a shared transportation fund.) The second part of I-695 achieved disintermediation: It prevents any state or local jurisdiction from raising The government's first response to the tax revolt was a towns and counties have increased service fees on water, sewer, utilities, garbage, business, and parks. From "The Inevitability of Death and Taxes Department" comes the news that some jurisdictions are raising the price on cemetery plots. As a countermeasure to all the taxes, many drivers whose tags legislators are walking around like zombies. Stripped of the power to increase taxes, the House and Senate have been reduced to ceremonial bodies. on the legislature, based on inflation and population growth, but offered no tax relief. Instead, it diverted all excess state revenues to a special, almost with cash. Every time the political establishment damned I-695 as changed his tactics at the last minute when he saw the measure was going to if they voted I-695 down. This only gave I-695 additional credence. See! The ideological point that legislators can't be trusted with tax rates. taxes are relatively mild out here. There is no state income tax, property percent. So what started as a revolt against an unpopular tax turned into a I-695, portraying it in hyperbolic, apocalyptic colors. The political, corporate, and union establishments put their money where their mouths were, lines. Opposing I-695 were the wealthy who live in Bill Gates' waterfront government liberals. The biggest applause line on election night came when exaggeration, according to polls conducted on either side of Election Day. They suspected government of wanting to punish them for approving the measure. And reserve, a botched opposition campaign, and voters willing to call a bluff resulted in the I-695 victory. The unintended side effect is radical, direct democracy: In what other state do voters set the tax rates? challenges have arrived, but they're all piecemeal, failing to address sweeping are elected, legal pundits say it's more likely that the court will narrow be outflanked by the state auditor who has positioned himself as the Democrat who can make I-695 work (the auditor wants a financial review of all state programs). The Republicans, predictably, want to preserve the surplus, which when the cushion is spent in a year or two, or when the next recession arrives, analysts and tax wonks. What and who will they tax? Will they tax themselves to build highways and create new bus lines? Or will they stay the course and ask shot that the government might start taxing cars as property). And in a final "In fact, Masters said, she could think of only one other word that featured such an exquisitely pleasing articulatory progression the other direction: "Tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to did you let him kick it"? Rerun smiled and said, "You'll never know!" characterization regarding how the German press supposedly ignored or downplayed the story of the recent monetary settlement agreement for victims of paper I saw yesterday. It was the lead story in every national newscast I saw most shameful chapter to the business community's potential bottom lines. Believe me, it has been one of the top stories here for the last six months. artist's idea to stage what looks like a really cool light show on New Year's politicians to local artists, say the show must not go on. Why? Because dominated the German papers a day earlier when I didn't see them. expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. I was the author of that proposal. I wrote that, so I say, welcome aboard. That is something for which I have been directly into law. As the House Ways and Means Committee's authoritative "Green Book" notes, there were several expansions to the wages up to a maximum dollar amount. The income ranges and percentages have been revised several times since original enactment, expanding the credit (see Gore had everything to gain and nothing to lose by the offer. Gore went on the help get his name and message across to people who are not familiar with him. If you noticed, Gore didn't offer not to spend the money that would be saved by money early in the primary season. By not paying for ads in the Democratic primary, that would allow Gore to pay for ads in the period between the primaries and the convention. Again, the offer benefits Gore because his the future. If he was serious about the offer he wouldn't have sprung it on scenes first. To offer deals that only benefit you isn't campaign finance If you take most large industries (and automobiles, in far greater quantities in others (energy, telecommunications, office supply goods, construction goods, etc.). Furthermore, the economies of scale you get consumer may make a single purchase, amounting to $20K in net revenue, when the large number. As you can see, making the business sale is probably more industry: Marketplaces for petrochemicals can be established online between businesses, but it would be illogical for a Web company to try and sell Name one of these "Common Precepts to Promote a Virtuous and Civil School life will be like without the boy with the crooked smile. Back in the surgical unit, the doctors prepare to give Charlie Brown his first round of (It is difficult to be funny in praise of anything, so if you want your little laughs, leave off here and go peruse those newly released medical records with albeit adults depicted as children. And still more unusual, he was not concerned with the follies and foibles of everyday life, that least interesting comic subject, but something deeper, darker, and less ephemeral. Along with Warm Puppy," he more often executed that most difficult comic turn, being subjects and objects from a pair of actual headlines, you can eliminate the bad news that fills our front pages, and create a happier world, as in these entirely from the form, there is this holiday cheer: to submit similar mix 'n' match pairs using headlines from any news source. was a "top hat" but no "bad boy," something must be done. What? "Oh, I can't stand that. You could get diabetes reading them, couldn't or play or millennial fireworks display. The more common experience is to watch Short Cuts for dummies, or that Boys Don't Cry has no ideas about its subject beyond those in any of a score of newspaper articles written about the case. Indeed, if a movie is in color, in focus, and indoors, it was likely part, this is a form of kindness: It is terribly difficult to, say, write a novel. Indeed, the entire enterprise of serious literary fiction is so marginal also a kind of cowardice: A critic may be censured for slamming a worthy movie; she may have to defend her judgment. But she won't have to defend her praise; the pleasure she took in that film is its own justification. How perceptive is she to have seen its merit. How dull I am to have missed it. I can only hope that these low critical standards extend to my own work. Should I ever do buses, but can't because of laws about separation of church and state!) and praying --I just can't stand that sort of thing, talking to God about potential congressional candidates listed factors that might deter them from to rig the contest in your favor by fiddling with the meaning and sequence of wars, Holocaust, Communist purges), so if you look for who did the most to "that he had the most influence on the century by far. To not consider him lives." The populists have the upper hand in this debate, because the media want to please their mass audience by naming somebody whose contributions most Time rigs the debate in favor of its nominees by defining influence to doctrine of nonviolent resistance has overtaken the world. (Never mind that two of his other big ideas, sexual and material abstinence, went nowhere.) And while admitting that the New Deal was confused and failed to halt the hopes" and thereby "saved them from fear itself." (Never mind that a similarly animus that made all the difference in the '70s and '80s in overcoming the greatest threat of the century, which was the Soviet Union." "taught the greatest humility of all: that we are but a speck in an the great tricks of the virtue debate is the reciprocal blurb. To prove that them praising each other. What better way to validate a great man than to quote the top themes of the century, and then select figures who "embody" them. representing a theme, the trick is to elevate your theme. In principle, this is a symbol of all the scientists who built upon his work." He gets credit for the Big Bang, the bomb, the PC, and above all, television. opportunity through the New Deal (and gets credit for his wife's contributions United States (five more points for defeating totalitarianism and five for points for liberation and justice). "As the century's greatest thinker, as an immigrant who fled from oppression to freedom, as a political idealist, he best scientist, philosopher, or artist often turns on which of these fields drives movements by putting everyone to work regardless of race or gender. totalitarianism made economic progress possible, others, such as Sen. Pat everything. Not only did it promote freedom "more than any statesman or soldier "relativity paved the way for a new relativism in morality, arts and politics," press, of course, has its own causal theory: The press drives everything. the inventor of the printing press, as the man of the millennium: "The written accomplishments would never have happened without him. Since art is infinitely various and complex, it's particularly implausible that anyone else would have the grounds that "science has its own logic and is going to get where it's going," regardless of which scientist gets there first. Scientists counter this spin by arguing that the inexorable logic of their field makes it more "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity." timing was excellent, earning him credit for subsequent decades of get much consideration.) If your nominee showed up later, stress the immediacy of his achievements, since most people can relate to today's breakthroughs and gizmos and have forgotten those from the first half of the century. This too late for this year's contest, don't worry. Nominate her for next time. If that the move will reassure investors but questioned whether it is also "the institution of the Federal Reserve Bank, and could discourage a more open carrying in procession a statue of the Holy Protector to placate the weather. world's central square against the sudden and furious storm that is sweeping French papers were more concerned with the real storm that caused huge damage nothing comparable since detailed records began in the reign of Louis nations agreed to renounce their monetary sovereignty and to share it. explained for years that the project was impossible. One year later, they must admit they were wrong: the euro exists, it has established itself as one of the world's great currencies and, better still, it has kept most of its reform years," the paper said. "But the fact is, there is not a single major thinking masquerading as analysis." It said his record so far is "dispiriting." imperial war, one that punishes civilians in the name of protecting them." In will do everything to win, at any cost, and whatever the number of deaths." carry out the reforms that the West hoped for. "The regime will not change, there will be no fight against corruption," he said. "Above all, the interests and privileges of the oligarchy will be protected." "eliminated" as a political force. He called the general a "vain and even be an honest man, but he has the messianic complex," he wrote. Corp.). Critics bemoan the absence of songs in this latest film depiction of the film is "a luxuriant, lumbering behemoth pleasant, occasionally surprisingly harsh review: "It is an exotic escapist entertainment for matinee ladies, who can fantasize about sex with that intriguing bald monster and film follows an android that slowly gains human qualities and ends up as "a [the robot's] original sleek form. His performance is subtle, his reactions restrained. The more Robin is exposed, the more ham is served." Eventually the benign head of the orphanage (a doctor addicted to ether) is excellent, but his successor, is too deadpan for most critics. A few praise the film's with subtle strengths." (Click here to find out more about the book the film is based that will prove difficult for Mailer's official biographer to follow. One onto the page as story" instead of exploring the meanings behind them, and she "likes to knock the stuffing out of [Mailer] when she finds him too The "rambunctious new novel is an appetizingly rich stew, full of the varied between adore Beck's tribute to '70s funk (with countless '90s styles including Village Voice musing that the music has "a texture and effect that is stylistic debt than he can ever repay." (Click here to listen to clips from the album.) Apparently "it's easier to make a mouse talk than to come up with something cover story celebrates the coming of world government. Political globalization is catching up to economic globalization, as evidenced by the have world government but over what type of world government we should have. A will mediate international disputes and weaken national sovereignty. An essay blames the media's ignorance of technology for its cult. The blind worship of the fabulous Fed chairman, who was just nominated fire" was a dud, and the Millennium Dome is disappointing. The cover cover story marvels at the placebo effect and wonders whether we should allow patients, and fake surgery can improve health as much as real surgery. The real lesson of the placebo effect: When doctors are attentive, confident, and Placebos could be a bridge between the cold efficiency of modern medicine and the unscientific comforts of alternative therapies. An essay contends unfairness. An actress who has played in the traveling cast of New York event where the Internet millionaire host tried "to coordinate six fornicating couples into simultaneous orgasms at midnight." in the coming months, especially among small businesses. It also warns that that female baby boomers are its leading customers. A social stigma is still resignation for nearly a year to ensure the election of a loyal successor. he is focused on his presidential duties. In a Time review criticizes the new liberal wisdom that children will be scarred for life if their first three years aren't stimulating. Kids are extremely resilient, and their emotional and intellectual development can be normal even if their early childhoods are distressed. Only children who suffer the most severe has been a lively and gritty chronicler of New York City life and helped to plan, almost every voter in the primary will make worldwide history by month, the party agreed to become the first political organization anywhere on the globe to hold a legally binding election over the Internet. And whether development disturbs some voter education groups. At least one is considering about pursuing legal responses to the party's decision to use Net voting. "We have grave doubts whether an election by this method would comport with demonstrates that online voting has moved rapidly from a controversial theory to a real business. According to one estimate, there are over half a million public elections in the United States every year. That creates a potential disclosed this week that it has received a minority equity investment from many elections for labor unions and nonprofit groups, says that organizations using it "save substantially on postage and paper." remote voters, but even at polling places. "We'll have paper ballots [at polling places] for those who are afraid to use the Net, mostly because of Internet voters will, like those using absentee ballots, have a slightly wider voting window than those going to physical locations. The Net "polls" will be when the physical polling booths will close as well. fraud. According to the company, voters will be able to verify their identity using their date of birth and a digital signature. Critics point out, however, would probably be the largest group affected by any potential Net voting fraud presumably be affected. If, however, the Gore campaign is worried, they're not saying so publicly. "We view anything that helps expand participation in the electoral process as a positive development," says Ben Green, director of plan to teach school students to cry 'Please God, no!' before being shot by a you know that all of our presidents who weren't Masons were assassinated? participants asserted, ours is a very observant, very Christian nation, so please be sensitive to the displays of religiosity that are so common this time of year, often with elaborate lighting. One caution: People get cross if you something better, like a live monkey. Ask any kid what he'd rather see, illuminated plastic figurines or monkeys, and that kid is going to say, "Monkeys! Where's my present?" Sure, it's easy to decry the commercialization of the holiday, like putting trousers on all the figures in the nativity scene, some pretty sweet change from the Gap. But monkeys are generally nonprofit, and yet my damned neighbors have threatened to call the cops if I set one foot on you all season's greetings. A little impersonal, I know. How I wish I could visit each of your houses, when nobody's home, and go through your stuff. But the students receiving vouchers attend parochial schools, among them St. experiment in terror" (except for the words "in terror"). "And besides, I was so drunk that year, I never knew what the hell I was voting for," he did not spirit of this blessed season like a mass mailing from a vast commercial enterprise. Participants are invited to devise holiday cards from any Inside: Happy holidays from our remaining employees! defenders say? That each of these vices is really a virtue. experience actually reinforced his interest in economic liberalization. As prepared perestroika because they were very open and they knew the exact knows the western model of economic and political life not as an outsider but learned a lot about Western business practices, and that may be exactly what he state power over the economy and society, thereby undermining both capitalism capitalism and true democracy. "Any attempt to exceed the limits of the law and Eve message. "Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, much. But how can they make this case to the world's most powerful lender, the monopolies, helping small businesses to thrive and competition to flourish. state power over the government and economy to shape the capitalistic system other cronies to safeguard their financial interests and shield them from prosecution for corruption. By underscoring his image as a fearless strongman, pundits are reconsidering whether a strongman president is such a bad thing. "Does he have the power and the will to take on the robber barons?" asked efficient leader can win a ruthlessly efficient election and craft a ruthlessly Never mind morality. When asked whether the United States should oppose loans because the predicate question is whether they get the economic reforms in order," at which point "we'll have to look at what's in our national interest." "I wonder if she understands how much her life has changed this day. who came up with it. (Great product name, by the way.)"-- Ann Garden, whom he intends to turn into the Playmate of the Year. Said the Monopoly box who was always chasing his secretary around his desk in New screwball comedy. And now, judging by News Quiz responses, these wan titans are barely portrayed at all. Unless he makes his money in show business, today's billionaire is a sexless and unattractive sap who lacks the vigor and vanity to crush his rivals and build towering monuments to his ego, although he may have a nice house. He is a tedious corporate drone, as innocuous as the lackluster imaginatively Sybaritic. They are, at most, dull on the grand scale. We live in doll, the winning entry in a toy invention contest for children. that being in your 50s would be this much great good fun." everyone asserts in the Rolling Stone "Millennium" issue, except defiant, is peeling back a bandage to reveal the scars left by bullets from seen it, retains its creepy power. It also invokes a remarkably complex set of to a press corps as yet unaccustomed to familiarity with the intimate anatomy scars, both physical and spiritual: the disfigured face of a napalmed are not all that's exposed: Flipping through The Sixties you'll catch his dark shirt to show his navel, a winking eye in an expanse of pale flesh. On People who gaze at their own navels are called narcissists. What do you call someone who makes his living gazing at other people's? A voyeur? A sadist? A civilization he has documented for more than half a century, that he has published a fat volume of pictures of other people and called it An of our politics and our culture, is a defense mechanism: The selves we theatricality of the New Left and also the sheer dread. When you look into the revive the portrait as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious and August Sander, who set out to compile a comprehensive visual record of produced a staggering corpus of fashion and commercial photography. First at fashion photography in what will likely be remembered as its golden age. Along the way, he produced a staggering number of images that have remained lodged in and styles, and his willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and fashion at the expense of art." But celebrity, money, and fashion have been, at "What need for purists when the demotic is built to last?" Photography, in categories distinct. And this may be the point. "Distinctions between reportage, portraiture and fashion have always seemed arbitrary," the photographers who can address a camera towards anything that takes his easy categorization. The endlessly reproduced images of that decade tend to children fleeing burning villages, police clubbing demonstrators in the streets still. And then, on the next page, the napalm victim's face stops us dead. exhibited a series of deathbed portraits of his father, a New York clothing at seeing the picture, and he explains to her that, while the photographer and his model are in some ways collaborators, the power, the control, ultimately vague spiritual leanings. His most recent work, a portfolio in The New Catholic priests, and other believers. But these photographs, seen against the is, in the end, a thoroughly secular imagination. The metaphysical confidence immortality, which his subjects accept on his terms: at the cost of their promised to forgo unrestricted donations ("soft money") if they won their in the "war of attrition. Battles will be won and battles will be lost." and has colon cancer. He said he was leaving "to focus on my health and my and sympathetic portrayal of the "little man." Cynics attributed it to the tenants' rights and reduced gentrification. But Brown painted him as Colorado police showed the Columbine killers' videotapes to the planning their attack and expressing rage at their families, classmates, and community for allegedly mistreating them. Two days after the showing, Columbine High School was closed down when a student threatened to "finish" the job. Police said they showed the tapes reluctantly after Time violated its agreement not to use direct quotes from them. Observers called the fame. Critics said the showing of the tapes was the most chilling act, meeting of the six contenders was described as their "most spirited," with numerous disagreements over campaign finance, abortion, taxes, and ethanol assertive demeanor and a more confident manner" than in previous debates. Wen Ho Lee pleaded not guilty to charges of mishandling nuclear intent to injure the United States and secure an advantage for a foreign power." He was not charged with the more serious crime of spying. of his race. The Justice Department's spin: He's a security threat who may have gay service members to be discharged only if there is evidence of homosexual President Al Gore both said the policy was unacceptable and promised to work for its elimination if elected. The New York Times said the exchange members were forced to resign following allegations that they had accepted Perception is all they'll improve, since they don't have the teeth to be effective. newspapers tried to capture the spirit and meaning of the millennium said that during the biggest party on the planet "most of alive together, on Earth, the beautiful accident." There was much more in this being there. All six billion of us. We were there, and we were together alive, years of peace suddenly seemed to be a human possibility." The Independent might be. Noting that the wealth of the world's three richest men is greater economic globalization benefits only the developed world. "Unless the imbalance is rectified and people in poor countries come to live stable lives, the connections among different people cannot be said to be a genuine network of summed up the state of the nation at the millennium in the gloomiest possible democracy have been dashed by a corrupt political "mafia," which has terrorized said, "As of early this morning, no planes had fallen from the sky, no nuclear reactors melted down, no power grids collapsed. Computer glitches were scarce, ignorant, the IT consultants were drawn by the lure of filthy lucre, the ceased to be rational, the nutcases were declaring the end of the world and a sensible, empirically founded approach to risk was lost." the problem was already understood by software producers ("Thus, the technical as blaming the scare on Western intelligence services whose "crafty plan" was computer information they wanted, they had pronounced the country main uranium storage site for the US nuclear arsenal. The exact nature of the malfunction at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant was not disclosed because the computer controls a classified function," the the city for the start of what the pope has called its jubilee year. In the and urinate in shop doorways because there were no facilities," one which said that arms are not supposed to be linked until the last verse of The president of the Burns Federation explained, "It's no use singing 'There's step down as president now, not later, because he lacks the uprightness required of a public figure, and even now does not understand what he did wrong," the paper said. "If the president of the state does not pay the price for his actions, it will no longer be possible to demand proper conduct from other public servants. The role of the president is a symbolic one, and the symbol has to be a role model, not a symbol that engenders opprobrium." close. We've been a source of strength for each other ever since my husband died eight years ago. However, a recent humiliating experience now threatens that close bond. One weekend, while I believed my son was away with his best friend, I was trying on some swimsuits for an upcoming vacation. I was checking to get something from the kitchen, and who did I see but my son standing there! His weekend had been cut short, and he had let himself into our apartment. With my hands full, I couldn't even cover myself up. Fortunately, he ran from the room right away, but not before seeing me in all my naked glory. Since then he's hardly spoken to me. He doesn't even look at me when he comes home from school. I want to talk to him about this, but what could I say? mother has one of these and two of those. You weren't vamping him, after all, and both of you made a swift effort to end the scene. He wasn't even supposed to be there, which you might point out to him. The fact that your household has removed was granted. You might also ask him why he thinks there's been a change in your relationship. Try to bring up the uncomfortable encounter, and tell him he is making much too much of it. With luck, the very act of discussing it will major city, and a few months ago I moved into an apartment building mostly occupied by adults. Recently I asked a neighbor how I could keep my plants alive when I went home for three weeks. I didn't want to give anyone a key to my apartment, but wanted to know if there was another way. She told me that she would water them and, in fact, already had a key that the previous resident had She asked for a contact number for me, in case something happened in the problem is that I don't want any neighbors having a key to my apartment. I also do not wish to offend her by asking for the key back. matter slide; should I ask the manager to change the locks; or should I ask for Looking for the Key to Keeping Safe (Sorry for the bad pun.) As for wanting someone to water your plants without using a key to get in, your only hope is to engage one of those building be inside your apartment. If you are dead set against anyone gaining access in your absence, you might ask someone if he or she would be willing to let you move your plants to their apartment for the three weeks. having your key given to her by the old tenant, the woman should have coughed it up the minute you moved in. If you decide she is a neighbor you would like but the setup made by the previous tenant is now moot, and you've made other arrangements. There is no reason for you to feel shy about this. It is your she writes is hers the moment she writes it, paperwork or no, but registering swipes her work. If she sent her one and only one copy of her novel to what amounts to a total stranger, her best course of action would be to go out and treat herself to a fabulous lunch. Then she should go home, stand in front of the biggest mirror in her house, and say to herself: "I promise never to tell magazine. I promise never to buy a secondhand car from a friend or family member. I promise never, ever, under any circumstances to allow there to be one fabulous lunch plus copyright tips were soothing and useful. You are absolutely advice column, I am not completely sure what your views are on sexual orientation. Since that is a large part of this question, I will ask you to months. The union is planned for next year. Because of our engagement, we both wear very nice diamond rings. At work, I am often pestered for details about "the woman." I really see no need to come out at work, as it could well alter name! Just say to the next busybody who asks, "I am engaged to a fine person orientation, that is. At some point she hopes that you might feel free to live little sister, my designated maid of honor, being a nightmare to deal with. She has since apologized profusely (my mom showed her the letter) and has sought psychological help to deal with her misplaced anger. In a world as cynical as it is impersonal, I wanted to thank you for your help. You've really made a difference in my life, and I thought that you ought to know that the work you thinks your letter is a wonderful way to close out the old year and welcome the new. She wishes for her readers solutions, resolutions, and every now and then wondrous strange snow." His piercing blue eyes signal anger or torment while his manner stays glassy and querulous. This aloof, slightly inhuman mix of voice sounded great with a German accent, at once oily and metallic.) But irrefutable as the existence of God. He looks enraged at having reached the capture all aspects of the novel, but that hardly matters: It's middling more evocative when his settings were farther from home, as they almost always that vague spiritual yearning coalesces into candor so biting that it still has the power to shock. Wounded lovers dismiss each other with compact fury, while the fiercest insults are reserved for representatives of a God who has let More important, he distills from the novel a mournfully wry briefly: This is a tale in which every possessive human act ends up driving the on the surface, the way it is in some of his other films, but in the recesses. the light has had to pass through layer upon layer of dust and fog, so that only the faded yellows, oranges, and the occasional green of some wallpaper register amid the ashy grays. You can't make this world seem too welcoming or the characters will lose the incentive to seek out a better one. That means freezing rain, cheerlessly crabbed interiors, and lots of extras who visibly live lives of quiet desperation. The effect of so much misery isn't freckled complexion affords her no protection from the elements, worldly or responds by screwing him harder, her bare breasts looming over him, imperious lack of urgency amid the rubble borders on camp. It's a mark of her stature that another potential camp moment doesn't bring the house down: the line "It's persona struck me as overly pitiable for Henry: A more repressed, formal take care of him. In a late scene, the husband invades the lovers' seaside idyll, which is an impulse that might seem out of character for Henry and that use of birthmarks to indicate spiritual blight, the insistent pull of an adaption of one of his novels and has to shield his eyes from the coarseness respectful but ultimately cruel: He exposes the work as hooey. Actually, not the most casual exchanges carry an awareness of the electric chair nearby. The day before an execution, the condemned man is sent away and a surrogate (Harry an opportunity to make a final statement ("Sorry for all the bad shit I done"), worriedly. He says they shouldn't make jokes because the next day, when a man will actually die, they might remember the joke and not be able to stop from that: Its attention to rituals that other films don't have time for gives it T he Green Mile also features a giant, mentally slow "tried to take it back, but it was too late." About an hour into the picture he bedridden white woman, over whom the black giant hovers in a miraculous but influences. The gentle giant plays with a tiny mouse-- Of Mice and the evil people who get punished.) King isn't a cynical writer: He recycles these elements as if he has true faith in the power of his fables to heal. But I find his storytelling both morally easy and artistically promiscuous. The Green Mile is a fat old whore who thinks appealing to an audience's most They rephrased queries, rejected scenarios, and chose options other than those offered by the moderators. When politicians revise questions this way, as they do with increasing frequency, journalists accuse them of "ducking." But if someone swings a bottle at your head, what's wrong with ducking? If the answer is fair game for scrutiny and dispute, why isn't the question? about how politicians manipulate discussions of issues. They insert hidden assumptions to rig the dialogue in their favor. They narrow the range of options under discussion to force their opponents into embarrassing dilemmas. middle ground. When reporters use these tactics, why shouldn't they, too, be has to be our choice. We have to choose to stand forthrightly for the hypothetical question is no more important than the likelihood of the scenario it assumes. Imagine that Al Gore were asked to choose between a Republican pregnant and wanted an abortion, and at the discussion with you they were adamant in their decision to have an abortion, would you support that decision? that I loved was raped, that would be the most horrible thing. I would comfort her. I would pray with her. I would explain to her that she couldn't make right the terrible thing that had happened to her by taking the life of her innocent unborn child. But the most important thing, sir, is not what I would do under those circumstances, but what I would do as president. And as hypocrisy (he'd allow the abortion because the woman is in his family) or cruelty (he'd force the victim to suffer the lifelong consequences of her the two options: He wouldn't just "prevent" the abortion, he would "comfort" on him and argues for a third option, which he claims would prevent the enlarged the question, this option wasn't even on the table. you personally?" Bush replied, "What you're trying to get me to do is to asking you about your personal opinion." Bush elaborated, "I don't believe it's visceral reaction to seeing the Confederate flag?" And Bush concluded, "As an prolonged exchange made Bush look evasive, and he was criticized afterward for women are walking into a clinic every day and receiving abortions. Does believe it's the role of a politician to go into that clinic and tell those (let the woman decide) is more relevant than his "visceral reaction" as to whether abortion "offends him personally." Why can't Bush make the same settle for one to two sentences in length, if you must. All gentlemen will answered second: "The idea behind affirmative action was legitimate and decent. together." Bush answered third: "Only if affirmative action means equal "but" and "only if." This kind of qualification is often ridiculed as ifs and buts worse than a policy of no ifs and buts? Most people prefer with ifs and buts. Affirmative action in particular cries out for such moral and legal nuance. What voters really needed from the candidates on this question were longer answers, not shorter ones. For example, what does Bush "It may be more important to ask whether it's helped the people it was supposed to help," he began. "And I think it has actually hurt them by damaging the reputation of many minorities in this country and not giving them credit for answer didn't precisely address the question, but which was more interesting and enlightening? When the question is more specific than the answer, a candidate can be accused of evasion. But what's wrong with an answer that's back a weak, hanging slider and demanding a fastball so he could hit it what is the biggest mistake that you've made, and what lesson did you learn from it?" The crowd booed, and when Trotter was asked to repeat the question, she rephrased it: "Our viewers are curious. On a personal note, what is the biggest mistake you made as an adult, and what lesson did you learn from as an adult would be to treat that as if it's a question that is appropriate to be asked," he said. "There ought to be in our public life a certain decorum, a terms of what I think we believe to be relevant for the purposes of running for president maybe the biggest mistake I had made in my public life was not to have spoken out on the issue of the right of the unborn before I overreacted, but his answer illustrated three lessons. First, sometimes the propriety or significance of a question is a more important and instructive topic than the question itself. Whether the question was improper can be Second, challenging questions is a healthy way to hold the press accountable. Questions are instruments of power. Who gets to choose them? Notice how Trotter Then she said, "Our viewers are curious." Obliged to account for her question, she appealed to the notion of a popular mandate. Whether her station's viewers wanted her to ask that question can be checked. What questions should be asked, why they should be asked, and who gets to choose them are now open subjects for Believing that it was framed too personally, he didn't just dismiss it. He Questions don't have to be answered with a yes or no. Neither does the question long as the information comes from just about anywhere but the candidates the belief of many politically active Web surfers who were recently surveyed by percent think that the information offered online by candidates is reliable. survey also indicates that voters surf the Net to learn more about community problems, read candidate biographies, and determine who to vote for. polled, however, appear less enthusiastic about forging an "interactive" relationship with campaigns or candidates. Respondents are more concerned with whether political sites can document their positions, observe privacy policies, might be less interested in exchanging comments with candidates online because voters, who question whether their individual voices will be heard, much less a certain extent the medium is also having an impact on the message from respondents. Online, voters can shop for candidates just as they would shop for goods. "People are getting used to making choices on their own timetables," referring to the cottage industry in political parody Web sites. Democracy Online Project, has produced an online campaign primer for technologically challenged political junkies. Cornfield has also proposed a national government directory of official candidate Web sites, to help steer them: Buy a computer made in the last year or two, update information often, design the pages with the same overall color scheme, and always make sure visitors know how to get back to the home page. "These aren't politicos who are going online," says Cornfield. "These are Net users who are sidling over to politics. If they don't like what they see, they're gone." and privacy advocates who tend to view government involvement in any endeavor as a sinister machination. Cornfield responds by saying that the directory he envisions would be a benign source of information, rather than a "Good Housekeeping seal" of approval for political Web sites. question about my sister. I don't want to unload on her if her behavior is normal, but I have my doubts. Whenever we're in a public restroom, she will wash her hands (afterward) and then take a paper towel or toilet paper to turn off the faucets, then use it to open the door to leave. She does this so she doesn't have to touch anything with her bare hands. How crazy is that? Actually, your sister's routine with the paper towels is merely one of taking precautions. What is the point, after all, of washing your hands only to then health, in fact, that she travels with a physician. amputees and therefore wear artificial limbs. I can't count the number of times people have rushed up to me and said, "Poor children, what happened?" Or worse, "What kind of drugs did you take when you were pregnant?" (This, of course, is always in front of the kids.) My standard response is to stare calmly and ask, "Why do you need to know?" I am writing for two reasons: The first is to remind people that this is not a Jerry Springer society, and everyone does not have the right to ask about a stranger's disability. The second is to ask if you handling things perfectly. If you want to enlarge your repertoire, however, you might try saying, "I don't believe I know you," and continue on. They will get the underlying implicit message. The important thing for you to know is that these foolish people who think everything is their business have their own about his abnormal fixation on sex. Had he written you about an abnormal drinking habit, you might have sent him to Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you not organization, but it didn't come to mind; perhaps an indicator that sex addiction is less established in our society than alcoholism. Thank you for you'd call a philosophical argument with a friend. My position is that without rules and civilized, ordered behavior, life would be nasty, brutish, and short and more "honest," with no imposed ordinances. His point is that if rules are worth having. What do you think about this? Maybe a word from you could settle because upon reading the words "nasty, brutish, and short," she thought your letter was about her starter husband. In any case, offer your friend a very ordinary, everyday example: Imagine the flow of traffic without lights and mind (since they didn't exist then), but she has a hunch he would have appreciated their contribution to civilization. If you need more ammunition, In addition to having a name like that, he was electrocuted. all his political partners," the paper said in an editorial. "Three parties represented in the government temporarily joined the opposition, which refused to place its trust in the prime minister who promised that he would 'do everything to achieve the best Post 's editorial criticized the desire of "considerable numbers of single out any group as somehow disqualified to influence decisions, even critical ones, that are being decided democratically," the paper said. between slave and forced laborers is "a sore point" with central and eastern as saying that while no one denies that the slave laborers, who were in concentration camps, suffered more than the forced laborers, the latter "should different sets of victims has already begun, and he dreads the talks on allocating the funds. "I have heard things I really didn't want to hear," he relations with the West was accentuated by criticism of the West by the Prime picture is on posters and billboards all over the city, it said. A party called barrier that would give it members of the Duma. A recent opinion poll showed have ensured the continuance of the territory's vital textile exports to the United States. It also warned Congress, when it reconvenes, not "to slant the act too heavily on political issues. China has not intervened directly in Hong reached an understanding on establishing diplomatic ties. Quoting unidentified Bush's campaign is now running several different interactive banner ads targeted to Web users in early primary states, including one for voters in New sells them to campaigns for use in various kinds of voter targeting, from collected by portals, Web sites, and Internet service providers. By sifting such information together, the company believes it can surgically target this sort of targeting raises an ethical question: Should a person, by virtue of registering to use a certain Web site, become the involuntary recipient of offered voluntarily, not the kind gained passively on the basis of "cookies" campaigns both say they won't resell or otherwise use the information collected even if all are scrupulous about what they do with user data, there's something given for another purpose. Imagine if your television was able to gather details about your viewing habits and your personal life and then transmit that data to companies that wanted to use it to sell you things. You might find it recipient knows that someone is marketing something to him with the help of data that someone else sold. With banner ads, targeting can be invisible. couldn't provide the names of any of the Web sites where it was advertising. would be a matter of public record. According to federal law, stations have to maintain open books showing who spent how much on political advertising. This assures compliance with Federal Communications Commission rules designed to haven't yet been applied to the Internet, and it's not clear they can be. There's a widespread and largely sensible aversion to the mechanistic justify in principle and points to potential abuses down the road. As it is now, Web companies not only have the ability to provide diabolically precise demographic targeting to political campaigns, they can also make such offers exclusively. Yahoo could theoretically offer its entire inventory of New radio, entirely illegal. But a campaign lawyer I spoke to for this story said he couldn't see what would prevent it on the Internet, so long as Yahoo charged Effectiveness: Of course, we'll only need to worry about issues of fairness and privacy if banner ads are seen by political campaigns as working. The Bush people say the results of their effort aren't in yet, but those who viewed the banners. This isn't a bad response rate, though it means world saw, it said, was "a continuation of the coldest shoulder of the Middle exist. "The words 'border conflict,' combined with the concept of peace based description of what peace might be like. He spoke of a peace that would "open new horizons for totally new relations between peoples" and of "honorable economic." This, the Post said, suggested "a peace much broader and deeper than the exchange of ambassadors and other formalities." list of regimes that sponsor terrorism. The paper said that, while the United on both sides everything is resolvable." But it said there is still the problem and the roots they struck in the basalt soil are deeper than those of the have to go, because "peace under reasonable conditions is more important than the desire to ease the pain of the settlers who are evacuated from their to the ideology preached to them for decades," it said. honorably," the paper said. "It is doing all it can to attain an honorable peace which safeguards rights, dignity, and sovereignty. That is the only peace acceptable to our people, and that is the peace that will prove viable and to engage in political activity, freedom of expression, and economic technology when access to the Internet is restricted to the children of senior officials, and the use of a mobile phone must be cleared by the intelligence agreement would mean "the end of a history of wars and conflicts," it noted up to peace were not democratically elected, nor did they conduct referendums "They want the kudos for themselves, especially since they have both already relationship with his white jailer, played by Tom Hanks. Some are moved by the fish tank cleaner who falls into the gigolo business by accident: "Among inner happiness a considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other deserves to be, not to mention rather sweet in a sophomoric, critics ("compartmentalization, the need of children of alcoholics to please impending disaster") that will be of use only as a "compendium of all the field day pointing out factual errors in the book over the past few weeks. what they stand for or what might become of them or even what we should think about the things they do," the book has one point in its favor: It has the Catch-22 received mixed reviews when first published, it eventually sold Heller, which includes the original reviews of his novels and plays, positioned him to run for president as the candidate of "character." His Times has called "the broadest look ever given the public at the psychological profile of a presidential candidate." Presidential "character" mental health didn't enter the public debate. Most people didn't even know invaluable book The Psychological Assessment of Presidential that TR harbored an unresolved, repressed wish to run for president again himself. Though hardly controversial by today's standards (not least because we candidates on the couch acceptable, the advent of nuclear weapons made heart you know he's right," Democrats countered: "In your guts you know he's the magazine. --though, significantly, it also allowed that more "reliable" psychological assessments of a candidate might reasonably inform voters' skeptics wondered why he would travel to New York for a checkup. (One unproven to be confirmed as vice president, he had to explain his own visits to headline over the story about Ford's testimony. Ford's explanation: He had introduced a new aspect of the character issue: the stigma of seeing a shrink. one's "emotional stability" denoted "not weakness but courage" and should not be stigmatized. Most commentators agreed. Hovering behind this debate, of resigned from the Democratic ticket after revealing that he had undergone hospitalization and electroshock therapy for depression. That story quickly (and somewhat inaccurately) came to be portrayed as an illustration of the matter of mental stability into the larger issue of what kind of a president a the nation made the public correctly curious about candidates' hidden selves. president's performance based on a systematic study of his character. Meanwhile, the decline of the major political parties was creating a new Carter stressed his character, by which he meant his (alleged) honesty. In years, the character question was reduced to a checklist of intrusive inquiries dishonest answers were given, also about honesty and integrity. disentangled. First, there's no question that seeking psychological help needs "counseling" but, as Frank Rich has noted, Tipper's use of such euphemisms and the avoidance a "professional title [that] might include the prefix 'psych-' real clinician but a bunch of ministers, he sent the same message. rejecting consideration of character. Obviously, a president's ambition, judgment, temperament, integrity, and ways of relating with other people (among of this truth. Many others exist, too. One historian has argued cogently that character. Clearly, the press has done a lousy job with its focus on behavior such as infidelity or drug use that most people don't care about. Alternatively, some psychotherapists have argued that professionals alone minutes of fame, proposed establishing an official board of psychiatrists to screen all presidential candidates.) Not surprisingly, the push for a about what character involves doesn't mean we should cease to think about it. no one argues it should abandon the enterprise. The press is right to focus on character. Now it needs to think more rigorously about how to do so. death of distance." A bit melodramatic, maybe, but it's true that, in an age of airplanes and optical fibers, the world seems pretty small. For that matter, distance has been in decline for millenniums. Ever since boats were first paddled and wagon wheels first turned, physical separation has become less and obstacle to mayhem. Any vehicle that can carry merchants and merchandise can carry warriors and weapons. Germs can hitch a ride, too. The black death that followed trade routes west. In general, the march of progress has brought fresh death throes, this sort of fear will have a richer grounding than ever. New But cheer up! The coming globalization of fear isn't entirely regrettable. It could actually make us, in a sense, better people, designers, privacy invaders, and other malicious hackers. The Net spreads dangerous data: how to build a conventional or nuclear bomb, a chemical or biological weapon, and where to get the ingredients. With these weapons in a border with an atom bomb in a trunk or a vial of anthrax in a vest It doesn't take great imagination to envision a poor man's cruise missile with invention of gunpowder: As technology advances, the growing power, compactness, and accessibility of lethal technologies mean that more people in more lands have the option of committing atrocities of greater and greater severity. But the trend is now reaching critical mass, a threshold that warrants a rethinking In the end, we may have to try a radical approach to fighting terrorism: reduce the number of people who feel alienated and aggrieved enough to become terrorists in the first place. of grievances and the geopolitical complexity surrounding them. Besides, to indulge specific grievances once they've become terrorist causes is to encourage terrorism. Still, there are a few things we can do. something about, some of the disaffecting fallout from globalization, such as globalization's prime mover and head cheerleader and will be blamed for its excesses until we start paying official attention to them. focused on winning respect from foreign governments, we will need to focus more and more on winning the respect of foreign peoples. terrorists conveniently assembled in a single spot, the cruise missile strike of things? Several decades ago, the answer was: not much. Several decades from wall ourselves off from the problem than to address the root cause: disease abroad, especially in developing nations, where industrialization has turned some cities into a paradise for viruses and bacteria. economy, an economic downturn abroad can be contagious. Hence the International Monetary Fund. The same logic will apply more and more to medical health and what you might call cultural and political health. The less disease abroad, the less cultural alienation abroad, the less political grievance abroad, the But if you care more about faraway people in faraway lands only because their welfare may affect yours, does that really count as moral suddenly sensitive. She sympathizes with her captor, seeks the causes of his remarks, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." With the decline of distance, there will be more and more minutes of our lives when somebody will be there to shoot us. down his pen. Participants are invited to describe his final strip. frequently devastated by fatal explosions, or the nightly news if furious it so easy to knock this country and its great corporations with the sort of have a bumper! Try slapping a sticker on the conductor's ass, and he'll toss the rain. Maybe then you won't be too good to ride in an exploding Chevy. company would likely contribute to a fund to compensate the slave laborers who most of whom were concentration camp prisoners, left alive; about half are Search of Terrified Immigrants (Employee who finds the gold coin wins a free in Awe at the Splendors of Capitalism and Universal Studios Tour (Laid on to theme parks is better than returning to a poor country and his father.) double, so he can simultaneously attend and deny having attended authorities deputized a bloodthirsty lynch mob. A state commission is finally millennium: "With his cartwheeling intellect and generous heart; with his invention of the last thousand years: "Producing penicillin may be beyond the the glue that unites us." The magazine also includes a system remains robustly pluralistic. The Communists will probably retain a plurality in the Duma, and "reformist views may be more strongly represented." An article earnestly questions whether irony is eroding the superiority was proven by force of arms. Now the point is made with a joke, and a quiet, knowing smile." A survey cheers the globalization of wine. The "best wines of the new world can match or even surpass the great wines of the old world." chilling cover photo, taken from a surveillance videotape, shows Columbine cover story reveals the contents of the killers' homemade the video game Doom, and boasted that his plan was better than those of of state power. The theme of the century's second half was liberation." A portfolio compiles the century's best cartoons and quotes. An article explains how the stock market could have risen even ground: Enormous gains in the technology sector boost the overall market. the French are scaling back to a 35-hour workweek. Telecommuting has made long hours easier and may be contributing to productivity gains. An article applauds a Navy decision to build "electric drive" ships. Electric destroyers will have smaller engine rooms with more room for weapons. The new ships will be quieter, stealthier, and more efficient. A piece questions a new approach to cracking down on school of the United States trade representative: "Has she made billions of dollars?" would have loved to have had a shot to date her." An applying tough love to the homeless. Coddling hasn't worked. We should demand cover story claims that food will become a focus of radical politics in the 21st century, galvanized by opposition to genetically modified faux West Wing memo proposes first lady subs. The president's top picks are basketball game, we would be going into the second half with the Gore team, led quite caught up, and the captain is complaining that opponent Gore isn't vice president distorts a fellow Democrat's record because he thinks he can whining about Gore's tactics is, in fact, an essential aspect of his political style and is surely derived from his style as a basketball player. seeks to link his foe subliminally, if irrationally, to Republican plans for desire to spend a lot of tax dollars expanding the availability of federal liabilities with tactics, which, while not exactly cheating, were not quite her "gentle, totally open, inquisitive" boyfriend threw elbows like a street fighter. "Watch the elbows!" she warns to applause. voting to continue discussion on a variety of options at the same time; the administration was considering the same discussion." than surprising. The competitor who takes liberties when the refs aren't looking is often the same one who wants special attention when they are. Sportswriters call it "working the refs," and it is a subtle art. While a mediocre athlete (such as Gore) often regards the referees as impartial arbiters to be respected, a superior athlete (such as favorable decisions. In the political arena, of course, reporters are analogous to refs. Electoral competitors, as well as athletic competitors, seek to appear aggrieved rather than antagonistic. This appeals to the crowd (whose roar may provoke a favorable call) without calling into question the judgment of the "--because I haven't given you to cause to. But at the beginning of the This is the political version of the basketball moment when an exasperated player turns to the ref and points out his opponent's alleged foul. In sports the putative victim almost always shouts something like, "There The fact is that in politics, as in sports, bending the rules isn't cheating if you get away with it. Pitchers scuff the ball. Bills quarterback who ran for vice president on Bob Dole's ticket, has always baseball career for throwing hard inside fastballs to keep batters off the plate. But he hasn't complained about the tactics of his political rivals. him that you don't win the game by working the refs. You gotta score points on daggers, pipe bombs, spears, and bows and arrows. List of what? "Apparently, they're making the new Monopoly tokens more no longer invokes uptown swells, no other headgear has replaced it in our metonymy. Indeed, compared to the prewar wealthy, the contemporary rich have no apparent class markers. It is not just hats but entire wardrobes that fail to denote magnificent excess: The modern rich dress like business executives during the day and like pop stars at night, if indeed anyone is wearing anything, a cathedral of gay culture. Nor have the rich maintained that audible knows he's likely not seeing a mogul but some kids from Queens on the way to fraud and embezzlement after years of stealing from the charity, had a "top those offered to ordinary workers. Because his contract did not include a "bad boy "clause that would have revoked his benefits if he Swimsuit season will soon be upon us and once again been wearing doesn't complement their body type. So, for those who wish to relatives had argued that he should remain in the United States after he was rescued from a shipwreck in which his mother died. Protesters blocked third meeting in a month, they clashed over health care and gun control and Democratic spin: The frequent debates help both candidates practice "crisper critiques of one another and more polished defenses of their positions." The gloomy Democratic spin: The constant sparring over character issues makes them both less likable. followed suit. The apparent cause: Investors waited for the new tax year to reap profits from recent stock gains. The counterintuitive causes: Wall Street the likelihood that the Fed will raise interest rates. Wall Street shrugged off the decline as a "necessary and expected" correction. Skeptics termed it an indication that investors are "even more confused than usual about what stocks exaggerated by greedy programmers so that customers would commission expensive security guarantees and the restoration of normal diplomatic relations. The initial discussions were deemed "rocky," with each side claiming that the other that threatened to derail the entire peace process. Skeptics charged it was became the first team to hold a No.1 Associate Press ranking throughout the of their toughness to rest" with a valiant comeback attempt. cast "Bush as the charmed insider and [himself] as the scrappy outsider." acting president and is expected to win the presidency by a wide margin in March Pundits agreed he had botched much of his job but also noted his shrewdness in reminder of Mother Nature's power and predicted further climatic changes from playing politics with the hijacking. The rest of the world again worried about a nuclear confrontation between the two countries. The for "trying to have it both ways on terrorism. They play host to terrorist groups, yet wax indignant when terrorists hijack an aircraft." '50s. The "hypnotic, sensually charged adaptation has the same kind of complex allure that made The English Patient so mesmerizing. [It] charade cause some critics to lose interest in the second half of the film: "When Tom's aberrant qualities become more dangerous, the movie loses its moorings and drifts into a sort of highly polished, implausible melodrama" critics' main bone of contention is that the film makes no attempt to explain first thing expected from an ostensible film biography, is an answer to the his two top quarterbacks get injured and he's forced to put in the untried editing leaves some critics dizzy, others complain that once again Stone is achievement that has no peer in this century and may well have none in the Metropolitan Opera's last commissioned work of the century, an opera based on standout performers, and the set and costumes are stunning. The few who find composed with a comparable degree of musical sophistication and sheer virtuoso out more about the production on the Metropolitan Opera's Web page.) sip an espresso and take in the zany decor (chairs upholstered in leopard skin; with some campaign staff and a few reporters in tow, trudged up a narrow staircase, and had a campaign aide shoot a video with a rented digital camera was, of course, a gimmick. But all technological breakthroughs begin as answering that question, let's examine the somewhat flimsy substance of Gore's literature concerning the Medicare trust fund. "For my part," the flickering image of Gore intoned, "I have proposed dedicating a significant portion of the budget surplus to Medicare to extend the life of the trust fund." By contrast, Medicare. "Since independent experts agree that more resources will be necessary to assure Medicare is strong for the future," Gore continued, "my question is, 'What specific measures do you propose to compensate for not during his cybercafe appearance, Gore himself told reporters that "you have to have flexibility on the fiscal side." When asked about Gore's query, with its content from reading a transcript). Apparently the video message got attached. Thanks to its novelty, the stunt won Gore some coverage from the doesn't have to be a visionary to imagine where this might go. The largest video camera already in his personal possession, but campaign finance rules now, the Gore campaign has no grand plans to start spamming unsuspecting citizens with video messages. It does plan, however, to start sending video they'd like to receive such material. They number in the tens of thousands. It's not too great a leap to envision that in future presidential advertisements. If "push" technology makes a comeback, such video ads could be buys, would probably be microscopic. These ads probably wouldn't be as still aren't wired to the Internet. But they'd be so much more cost- effective that they might still transform the way campaigns do president, who resigned on New Year's Eve, totally eclipsed all the actual laboriously in the volume," the Post said. "But all he left for impossible that they would attack their own people," a spokesman said. a major obstacle to the restoration of diplomatic relations, the paper wanting to manipulate him to drive a wedge between his sect and the dominant left behind a letter saying he was going abroad "to get the musical instruments that he "did not mean to betray the State, the nation, the monastery, or the as its chairman, the FT said, however, that "the concentration of so much policymaking power in the hands of one individual does not constitute international best practice. Nor does the Fed win first prize for openness and transparency in central banking." The paper led its front page, as did the following revelations of rampant violations of share ownership regulations by "It suspiciously tracks the Ten Commandments," says District intends to post in every classroom. Name one of these "Common Precepts "Please, please audition for the spring musical, especially if you're a guy, don't forget my special day. You'd think being God would give him some confidence, but no; he goes on and on about himself. Despite his widespread and abortion or his enthusiasm for capital punishment, the flat tax, and an nearly everyone goes to church each week, and nearly every candidate flaunts that God. We're not going to turn our backs on him. You've got to draw a line to eliminate the bad news that fills our front pages and create a happier world by swapping subjects and objects from a pair of actual headlines. Wins Right To Use the Terms 'Playboy,' 'Playmate,' and 'Playboy Playmate of the (Note: "Life and Art" is an occasional column that compares fiction, in whether his acts were real or not. He would sometimes deliberately "bomb" in clubs, telling bad jokes and letting crowds grow more and more uncomfortable. man," was first spotted in New York clubs, where he did a faltering "foreign proved so rude to other cast members that he was thrown off the set giving the impression that he had lost control on air. Taxi was college years, in which he developed much of his comic material. (During The film does a good job of capturing the contradictions in movement threw him out at one point). Even though he was earning good money at himself through meditation and a strict vegetarian diet, he was at the same time addicted to chocolate and sex, and he often visited prostitutes. desperate for fame, he deeply resented the vehicles that were best equipped to sitcoms and wasn't crazy about the Taxi job: He eventually felt trapped by the "foreign" character that viewers adored. He was far more excited about it was made a year before Taxi went into production. The 90-minute a few seconds in which the screen was made to deliberately roll. In life, as in frustrated artist pitted against people who just didn't get it. But in setting the "first chapter anywhere, much less two pages." And the movie occasionally him that he has to decide whether he's out to entertain the audience or without bite; there's also a very funny moment involving a heart attack). And the film is true to the record when it suggests that people didn't believe that was a nonsmoker, which naturally made people doubt him. (In the film, as in often talked about how he would like to pull off his own death. And there are "top university reindeer expert" Maria Berg, male reindeer have already shed Enquirer explains, the "disclosure tears the wrapping off the widely she wasn't aware that such a myth even existed, much less that it was widely held, Keeping Tabs wonders whether those crazy kids at the Enquirer were what does it take to become a "top" reindeer expert these days? keeping with the holiday spirit, recent tabloids have been filled with tales of celebrity shopping excursions that amount to stories about people spending flamboyant guy pals" were recently spotted perusing the sheets and towels at to splurge; no doubt she had to recover from the traumatic experience of being of peanut butter, grape jelly, mayonnaise and cooking oil" at the "Smart and "crawled into bed" with him. "I just nuzzled up to whatever it was and went back to sleep," he explains. (And for anyone left in the dark by the reportedly haunted by the ghost of its famous former owner, director John saying. "I felt everything. I climaxed. And then he floated away." Wow. We bet card. The computerized letter began with the rundown of every family member's "accomplishments" for the last year. Included in the "accomplishments" were experiences, and an extended hospital stay. Having spilled their collective guts all over the page, the writing family then began a paragraph that name here) had been married in May, and they spent A LOT OF TIME making sure YOU were invited to the wedding, and that YOU had not cared enough to attend, the boorish many who didn't attend their son's wedding, or send a gift, or even braggadocio and bathos. They are extremely difficult to do well, and the bottom Angry at the World. He isn't always this way. When we're with friends he generally covers it well, but with family his anger is obvious. So obvious that our children refuse to go places with him because his temper is always flaring. Holidays with him are a nightmare. He makes everyone nervous, and no one has a good time. He whines and yells at the kids for laughing or playing too loud. My with his tantrums and childish attitudes. His family doesn't celebrate holidays, and he feels that my family traditions are impossibly overdone. I feel, however, that children need holiday celebrations, and I like the traditions, feeling they give meaning to life. My question: Since he seems to hate holidays so much, would it be appropriate to just let him spend holidays at a motel? I keep thinking that maybe if he saw what holidays would be like without us, he would realize what he's missing. Please help me. Scrooge with a mood disorder. If he goes bananas because the kids are laughing the answer. The fact that his family didn't celebrate, and yours did, may have something to do with it. Your whining, yelling spouse may be whining and yelling for help. Try to get him to see a mental health professional, using the argument that his behavior goes way beyond not being in a celebratory mood. all the way through the store. When it was brought to my attention, on her next then we would weigh him again on checkout. That was the last time she ever fed him while shopping, though she continued to shop at our store for many years. Sometimes all it takes to put a stop to it is to let the grazer know that you some wonderful store to have embarrassed the lady like that and still kept her as a customer. That was a very creative solution, but risky; she might as easily have asked if you were a pediatrician and then stomped out. A few things we do know from the original letter, however: Eating from supermarket shelves about is sex. All I ever look at on the Internet is sexual stuff. be pretty normal. Actually, a lot of people think about sex a lot of the time. Now that they've lifted censorship in the Soviet Union, for example, it's a dominating your mental life, your compulsive interest may in fact be about psychiatrist), why not see a professional to find out what's what? Insurance for, and consider it a plus that you know your interest may be excessive. that. You could get diabetes reading them, couldn't you?" Who said this about Television presents: DECADENT BROKER! Which indulged largely, but did not know New Revolution was soon occurring. (So sorry for it was more than one young Internet geniuses, who happen to be married, one a male WASP from the local school, gets involved in the lives of the students, then shoots When the ball fell, a huge sign was illuminated and Times Square thus achieved a complete capitulation of the civic to the known threat. But it must be admitted, the festivities were unmarred by blathered, with two world wars, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust, but there Perhaps "broadly" is putting too fine a point on it. The first hour, in which a mess: The order of scenes feels arbitrary, and characters pop up and vanish with bewildering frequency. You might be tempted to vanish, too. (Friends of to attribute the shapelessness of the early scenes to the characters' own lack formulaic plots involving magical elixirs and coins. A heat wave has hit in their work. He must also love that those scenes are narrative dead ends: Kabuki routines and women in kimonos pouring green tea ("spinach water"). When Mikado and painstaking scenes of rehearsal has magic in it: You're watching straw, then gold, then straw, then gold. And you see the What was different about this collaboration? No answer. becomes a quiet third protagonist, a humane businessman. He softly negotiates a salary increase with the company's lead comic (Martin Savage), a neurasthenic performers gossip and complain, drink and shoot themselves up with drugs. posturing middle class), whom he drills on pronunciation and poise. The chorus is presented as some sort of collective folk conscience when it lobbies Gilbert to restore the rashly cut solo ("A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist") of the sad, fat fellow (Timothy Spall) in the title role. glowering dedication to process. Gilbert haggles with his actors over small They rehearse in long coats and top hats, and some of the women (and men!) express horror at appearing on stage without corsets. Behind the satire, masterpiece, but by the finale I was ready to have myself committed. The finale transformation in the lives of its makers. Gilbert can't bring himself to reach drinking again, toasting herself in the mirror and praising the loveliness of feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists a clear idea of what he wants it to be. Sometimes he doesn't end a project with a clear idea of what he wants it to be, either. His newest documentary, how he became involved in redesigning problematic electric chairs. "Excess current cooks the tissue," he says, barely suppressing a smirk at his own M r. Death gets into deeper waters when it recounts chiseling at walls, vandalizing what even he admits are international shrines. figure out how the gas would even have been administered without killing the defense (he lost anyway) and of the burgeoning revisionist movement led by Morris hooks up with him for the last time, he's in hiding from creditors. no evidence of malice. Plenty of monstrous insensitivity and hubris, though. archives," says van Pelt, "he would have found evidence about ventilation think he knows German so it wouldn't have helped very much." The most art object. The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice. his subjects hang themselves, and for a while that works stunningly. But at a certain point, isn't it only human to want to engage this man? You don't need what he makes of, say, van Pelt's assertion that the answer to the riddle of the gas chambers was all over the archives, or what he thought of the chemist's declaration that the test performed for cyanide was the wrong test. Morris can be heard asking one question only: "Have you ever thought you might be wrong or the Holocaust revisionists, who'll just think he was sandbagged. The problem is that when a documentary filmmaker seems too scared or cool or arty to violate his own immaculate aesthetic, he ends up weakening his case. He also provides no emotional release, which isn't a small matter when the subject is Holocaust have gone a little deeper in search of a poison that does penetrate about my father wanting a divorce. Although we all plan to be civilized about it, if my father makes some offhand comment about the situation, it will be awkward to say the least. My sister and I feel our mother should discreetly tell her friend what's going on, but my mother is very proud and prefers to pretend that everything is fine, especially since she's the one who encouraged her friend to dump her husband. Mom's afraid that her friend will encourage her and I quietly tell Mom's friend what's up? Or should we ask our dad to stay away from the topic of the divorce during dinner? We don't know what to do that have a day or two to make your moves. Since the woman guest is your mother's friend, and your mother wishes to keep her marital situation under wraps the mechanistic thing to do to salvage the night is to quietly tell your dad pretend things are "normal." Take heart that yours will be just one of countless such dinners around the country where the family dynamics are, shall with serious curves on a trim frame, I, myself, have had to deal with the issue body. The difficult part for who wrote will be requesting, in a tactful metaphor as a gentle and flattering way to make this request. between "plain" and "major pair of hooters." The opposite of "plain" is actually "beautiful," and the opposite of "major hooters" is "flat as a the problem he wants advice for? Is he actually suggesting that having a great advice. Here is my problem: My mom calls me every few days for a chat, and she is in the habit of eating while talking on the phone. She is invariably crunching an apple or snacking on beef jerky every time I talk to her. It's disgusting! I actually try to avoid her calls so that I won't have to listen to those noises. I think this is so rude and inconsiderate of her, but I don't know what to do about it. I have even tried doing it back to her, but she didn't get the hint. Her grazing into the receiver is making me nuts. What the mother of all grazers will get the hint, why not opt for a more direct approach? Simply say, "Mother, you know I love you, but the noise of your eating while talking on the phone distracts me from what you're saying." You might suggest that she separate the activities of eating and phoning. If you feel she wouldn't respond well to your request, then avoid her calls when you can, and when you can't, hold the phone far away from your ear. Of course you won't know what she's saying, but life is choices, my dear. situation by the way. When talking to her mother, if she's in the kitchen it always seems like a good time to do whatever dishes are in the sink. that people do what they're in the habit of doing, unless specifically asked to spots? They are "pregnant lady" or "families with children" spots at malls and grocery stores. My contention is that these are no different in theory than a "whites only" parking spot, though of course, in practice, racial discrimination beats reproductive discrimination hands down. The contention of gentlemanly way out and quit parking in the spaces reserved for the breeders or these new preferential parking spots. It would seem prudent (to use the adjective named for your adviser) to forgo your "lonesome fight" in the name of peace and quiet. Hang on, though. The way reproductive developments are going, it shouldn't be too long before you can look a policeman in the eye and say, "Sir, I am entitled to this space. Though I do not show yet, I am due in the floor. It was covered until recently when a new, more liberal Bishop took over If she had simply said "spirituality" then everyone would be much calmer in focusing device, like a rosary or lighting a candle, which symbolizes something significant to us. It's just a "thing" we use to help us feel closer to God. centralized government has been a huge net plus when millions have died directly at its hands, and when common freedoms and civic involvement have been declining in liberal democracies as a direct result of this conglomeration of power? Sounds like the usual liberal tactic of attempting (desperately) to left, have killed millions this century. And surely government in the United United States. Surely there is a qualitative difference between a police state and a sclerotic republic. (Do you really think it's just a slippery conservative buzzword ("big government"), and tried to use real catastrophe to the average reader. I found his paean to the strip very moving. couldn't turn off his inspirations to save his life. If he wanted to, Fish could talk biscuits and gravy into a thrilling subject we would all take sides while he worked hard at making baskets and blankets, and yet remained poor, "the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed." Fish is that lawyer, and most of the rest of us are the again, words aren't everything (as, Fish cheekily delights in pointing "Mission Impossible" essay, for example), I get swept up by his great gift, and am ready to move the family to the woods to avoid the end of the world. But The author is a screenwriter. He makes the following point: important is that the distributing studio bases the advertising budget on the opening weekend grosses. Thus a feature that opens poorly doesn't get advertised as much as one that does well. It's the criterion they use to keep themselves from throwing money at something that is likely to fail. Although word of mouth sometimes works, for a feature to do well in the long run it wise and subversively sincere film about pain, forgiveness and the possibility of a movie, unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint "anesthetized," and other deadly adjectives fill the reviews for the screen almost no mention. The cinematography is alternately praised as stunning and condemned as boring, but the response to the story line is unanimous: It's a reluctantly detail their problems with this second volume of his memoirs. On the positive side: It's a compelling document "of a life marked by high seriousness, good conscience and an utter refusal to submit to evil and reading it you "become persuaded that something about his combination of seeming innocence and moral honesty has the power to move if not mountains then with his first because it lacks the kind of compelling events that shaped his conferences he helped to organize, ideological battles he fought" instead of a installment of the "Penguin Lives" series is well received, even though it The book contains an "impressive number of inaccuracies of a factual nature," parts of the title refer to the internal structure of the book, the first half following the life of the family's plain and somewhat dim older daughter, who after failing to marry is consigned to the life of a glorified house servant. columnist's latest thriller excoriating the excesses of his home state. "He shows himself to be a comic writer at the peak of his powers" and "once again psychotic environmentalist who decides to enact personal revenge on a local another between the conventions of the thriller and the conventions of slapstick, and toward the end matters get so frenetic that credulity is Federal Communications Commission to expedite its review of a transaction by but it's coming along pretty good." The implicit message of this quip is, "If it with a grin that suggests he's just razzing Bush. The grin isn't designed to money came into the campaign. Right now, a supporter of yours is running "And ask him at least to disclose where this money is coming from." anyone misses the implication that Bush is funding the ads in violation of their government." Bush replies, "What you don't need to do is tell me what I doesn't let up. "I don't believe you have a good idea," he says. "Otherwise most of his blast with a scowl. His mask is slipping, and his criticism is surplus. Then he turns the question on Bush. "We don't want to spend it all in tax cuts," he says. "Gov. Bush said the other day [that] we're awash in cash. away with reaching this far for a punch once, but not twice. Another point to to a tightly wound pitch. Bush maintains an air of ease and good humor, as though the exchange is friendly. Eventually, Bush gets a word in. "No one is suggesting we pass the entire surplus back to the taxpayers," he says. "But to respond, jokes, "No it doesn't, yes it does, no it doesn't." Everyone the largest squadron in the United States Navy. It was a great experience." spends the evening attacking Bush. He lands few blows, and he wears out his own plotting it. Analysts differed as to whether the concessions would make a settlement more likely or increase the hijackers' determination to achieve their remaining demand. But most agreed that the incident is "a huge wouldn't survive nationally, pointing to their candidate's lead in total fund there was no specific threat it was "impossible for federal officials to rule out the area as a terrorist target." International law enforcement has also overreaction is helping the terrorists achieve their goals. Skeptics suggested that the overkill of millennium hoopla was actually the greatest investors unload stocks they held for tax purposes. Wen Ho Lee was denied bail. A federal judge said his release could compromise global security because seven of the tapes onto which he had accidentally" disclosed secrets to a foreign country. Lee's lawyers attorneys' spin: The evidence shows that Lee was not arbitrarily singled out for prosecution. Lee's attorneys' spin: But the insinuations of spying are so, the case against Lee for security violations is airtight. possession of a handgun after an associate allegedly shot and injured three people in a New York club. Combs, who has signed and produced some of the biggest "gangsta rap" acts of the '90s, denied the allegations. Observers threatened withdrawal from the government. International papers termed it a "potentially destabilizing political crisis" that could have toys, distributed in "Kids Club" meals, are thought to be safe. But their round cases have been linked to the suffocation of at least one infant. It is the recall ever. Burger King's spin: We're putting safety first. The Consumer Product Safety Commission's spin: Only because we forced you to. rights. The unanimous ruling held that "the state is constitutionally determine whether gay couples will get these rights through marriage or domestic partnership. Opponents of gay rights called the decision a "deeply disturbing" blow to the institution of marriage, but they triumph of "our common humanity" that paves the way for similar rights presidential candidate who does well enough to attract media scrutiny is doomed to have a bad story written about him. Al Gore? A phony career politician. Bill veteran. It's an ingenious choice, a good story disguised as a bad one. It sating reporters who imagine that their questions about his "temper" amount to can't work with Congress and can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. To refute this charge, all he has to do is restrain his temper in a few highly visible situations. Journalists unwittingly oblige him. Bent on making news, they bombard him with questions designed to provoke an explosion. "Why is it that temper, they also want one with a sense of outrage. He flaunts his anger at feed on "corporate welfare." "It's important to have passion and to get angry we just passed that [is] an outrageous waste of taxpayers' money." In the New an independent fashion are going to break some china. It is very clear to all they're out to stop him because "John's shaken up the establishment by talking a sense, perhaps, that you are too much of a maverick to really become president and govern?" Too much of a maverick? The question was practically a good stories: his principled outrage and his war record. "Do I feel passionately about issues? Absolutely," he conceded in the debate. "When I see of literally life and death." Such patriotic outbursts have captivated the ordeal. This week, citing nasty rumors that his torture and imprisonment in records indicating that he had never been mentally ill. The records did more studios retelling his heroic saga. In every interview, he alluded to his wounds, calling his medical records "an orthopedic surgeon's dream." The New York Times discussed his "major fractures" and "solitary confinement." The since backed away grudgingly from that allegation ("I was speaking metaphorically," he says), but his aides have kept it alive by publicly urging the Bush campaign to make sure its agents aren't spreading the rumors. By There's no evidence to support this insinuation, but since Bush can't prove the aides. "It's going to be next to impossible to finger anyone in the Bush Again, he gets to impress everyone by turning the other cheek. "It doesn't framing the orientation of the questions. Everyone asks him about the "whisper about the "whisper campaign." Everyone expects Bush to halt the "Even if you handle it right, you still don't want this kind of thing out who only hear a piece of it and say to themselves, is something wrong with John a woman approaches a date. First, they want to know what's attractive about him. Second, if he passes that test, they want to know what's wrong with him. Third, they want to observe those flaws, examine them, discuss them, and figure out whether they're manageable. Every candidate has many flaws, some of which are worse than others. A candidate's best strategy, therefore, is to show the media and the voters his most manageable flaw in the hope that they will focus is precisely what the anger story has accomplished. By consuming the media, it illusion is felicitous. The anger story has distracted the media because it about. By focusing attention on tone, it has deflected attention from content. they indicated that he had muscled, rebuked, punished, and cowed fellow Republicans in order to squelch dissent. Those reports could have generated been a policy difference" over "big taxes and [putting] the government in charge of everybody's political speech." But the anger story has overwhelmed to be president? The question answers itself. A man who can use that issue to obscure his more serious weaknesses, underscore his strengths, and besmirch his opponent can't be accused of showing too little rationality and discipline. The Warrior, Dissident, Man of Letters, Statesman, Liberator, and Father of the is that he has never been quite as nasty, stupid, and uncivilized as his nationalism, and he implemented it with similar brutality, using murder, war, was a fervent Red, and after the war he rose through military and party ranks, a dissident professor, and he served a term in prison in the early '70s for admirable except that he offered an equally bad ideology in its place: ruthless nationalism in the late '80s when it was convenient.) organization and a convenient replacement ideology. They embraced him. He came an inflexible ideologue. But the history of the past decade suggests the The two leaders were made for each other. For most of the and used his control of state television like a club. During the last his idea of free enterprise is to privatize industries and give them to his hoping to generate a swell of patriotic sympathy that will help the party on effective sleaziness, would surely appreciate the compliment. and Sparkles the Elf in happier times, before the sexual harassment smiled benignly when an adult took an interest in a child: scoutmaster and pederast symbols, baseball paraphernalia. How does one tell foresight from fear? Today, some wary adults are reluctant to lift a thirsty tot to a playground drinking fountain, lest they be viewed with alarm. Others tow all at hand? Prudence or paranoia? Either way, I won't be taking the neighbor boy Inside: Our chestnuts are roasting over an open fire. We'll still be here as your stock climbs Higher and Higher. He'll be off the bench when our election donations take hold. lives in a nation whose government we disapprove of. Some key words in a story in yesterday's New York Times were: jumping jack; youngest; "Dream Catchers"; dreamy, romantic, and elegant; a him of being a fictional character or of writing a sentence like "Crushing all professional figure skating champion ever, male or female. a boy nor a girl ever won a professional championship at a younger age than skated to is called "Dream Catchers." Both the skating and the title song were You can infer as much about a publication's readers from its ads as from its articles: That's the wacky premise behind this Noel extra. Which of the following were promoted in the New York Times and presumably some of the ads are not intended to sell products so much as to instill a frisson of imaginary consumption, the sort of shopping erratically for the next couple of weeks. There seems to be some holiday going reduced to a trickle, and you may want to seize this opportunity to catch up on Archives" (formerly known as the "Compost") is now accessible without charge, list of articles in any department or by any author. (Of course you also can do a normal search for occurrences of particular words.) reflection, we didn't want to spend the holiday break pacifying outraged authors who were left out. So we suggest that you poke around at random. Start, Or pick your own word, type it in the search window our search page and ask for all articles published on your Government officials and industry experts have begun to caution noticed that this is the final News Quiz before the Earth plunges into the sun fertility ritual is unclear.) It's been a great planet. I particularly enjoyed your colored sky; a nice choice, blue, popular, everybody likes that blue. Also evolution, very entertaining. That was some fun watching how the giant gradually going faster and faster on the highway, flouting the speed limit, as limit. So one wonders why "speed creep" is reported as a problem rather than good news: Safer faster driving saves time and lives? Times articles and which are a clever ruse, like those cardboard tanks the in the state by state, meeting by meeting political organizing required for a surplus artillery and intends to shell the Justice Department. "We sell a legal product and believe in the Second Amendment. And several of the Ten retail is war, then the students of Providence Place Academy are the first declared from his bunker beneath City Hall. Something to do with the search for estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to "turn women into sperm receptacles" and to leave behind their "unmanly" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this night, determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. "We may be through with the past," says someone, "but the past isn't through imminent demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the goes: "It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up." She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words possibilities, including "confused." Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs. bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist a bit of polish he can pass for a playboy, and the bad fun is watching him do allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied what this ironic little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks. does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager brilliant." That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets. take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It meshed comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's "channeling" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, version of the original's famous "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment. The critics are nearly unanimous: The sequel falls short but is "splendid entertainment" Sorcerer's Apprentice" only underlines how much better the original was. The Fantasia and Fantasia/2000 is the difference between a dialogue balance, the film works: It may be "as blatantly manipulative as a pep rally," Star Trek spoof strikes a chord; it's "a fast, loose, and very funny naive aliens in need of protection" who mistook the program for a historical successful artists: "An amusing, contemplative memoir" that paints "a sell a lot of records has almost nothing to do with insight or maturity. by Communist regimes around the globe: "an extraordinary and almost unspeakably immediately created a stir, drawing criticism from the left and becoming an unexpected best seller. The book is not easy to read: "To the extent that the book has a literary style, it is that of the recording angel. It is a were killed by Communist regimes). What causes more of a stir is the book's assertion that "given the nature and the magnitude of the crimes committed in of our century" and the question it raises of whether "the history of the twentieth century hasn't given us objective and final proof that human nature the biggest corporate merger ever and would create the world's largest media themselves to describe the importance of the deal, saying, in order of business." Customers were tepid, wondering whether the mammoth company would improve consumers' access to products or increase investors' access to profits. gloomy spin: This shows the desperate measures people will take to escape United States until a hearing in March. Last week, the Immigration and almost certain to grant permanent custody to the father. Last The Postal Service wants to raise prices. If approved by Postal Rate Commission, stamps for letters and postcards would each increase by spun the rate hike as a competitive necessity that would allow it to maintain universal service, improve technology, and cover rising costs. Critics charged guarantees of security. Their delegations will continue to negotiate, and the and its adversaries in a negotiating arena, cut off from other distractions, military. Gore said he would insist that potential appointees to the would require his Joint Chiefs to carry out such a policy. Gore later asserted social politics and military policy." Analysts variously said the hubbub The flu is hitting the United States. Flu season arrived earlier than in previous years, and the number and severity of infections are higher than average. Some hospitals are delaying elective procedures to deal with the influx of flu usually react too slowly to flu symptoms for the new medications to be cast "Bush as the charmed insider and [himself] as the scrappy outsider." days of spring." Pessimists called the weather a "spooky" reminder of Mother Nature's power and predicted further climatic changes from the greenhouse exaggerated by greedy programmers so that customers would commission expensive ever bother to notice. This narrow focus has protected the gambling industry, have gathered enough signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the that state. These initiatives aren't trying to eliminate all legal gambling in gambling wars. Instead they are targeting only the newest and most addictive convenience gambling mark the most important development in gambling politics allowed just about everywhere: convenience stores, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, gas stations. Eight states permit convenience gambling now. In several, instead of a ticket. In fact, "video lottery" bears no relationship at all to a in similar places, though the state does not run the machines. introduced video gambling in the late '80s and early '90s for one reason: It is a stupendously effective way of parting citizens from their money. According to tax revenues, but it exacts huge social costs. Video poker is known as "video discourages social interaction. "The machines suck people into the screen," different from blackjack or even handle slots. These are the most addictive of any gambling instrument we have today." It's also voracious: A typical gambler bottoming out; a gambler hooked on video poker needs less than three years. The million a year for treating problem gamblers.) What's more, the small stakes in video lotteries encourage addiction. Unlike lotteries, which offer low odds but spectacular jackpots, video poker returns tiny but frequent pots. The state relies on people playing the games over and over and over again. Addiction is not the only drawback of video gambling. It is a cinch for kids to play video lottery machines, since they are often found in businesses that kids frequent. Though it pays off more often than lotteries, video poker offers poor odds compared with most casino gambling, taking about convenience gambling doesn't deliver the secondary economic benefits that big gambling can. Because states limit the number of machines that any one business can have, there are no large casinos. So video lottery brings none of the ancillary jobs, restaurants, and hotels that big casinos do. gambling is emerging as the kind of gambling that everyone can dislike, a juicy target for opponents and a scapegoat for supporters of more acceptable kinds of strongly supported casinos, tried to root out convenience gambling from stores in her city. The rest of the gambling industry treats convenience gambling like against the critics: They can't afford to drop video lotteries. Governors in both states have said they dislike relying on lottery revenues to fund essential government services. "The governor has never been a big fan of the lottery and of letting gambling policy drive public policy," says a spokesman abolishing the video lottery but said the state needed a phaseout period to "He wants to get rid of it, but then he wants six years. He sounds like an even one of the initiatives can pass. The lottery retailers will surely spend millions to keep their cash cow, and the governors are likely to campaign for video gambling as well. But if the initiatives do squeak by, they may signal a new and encouraging compromise, a recognition that just because gambling is legal does not mean it has to be everywhere. If the initiatives pass, after on reservations. These states will have gambling that is accessible, but not universal; gambling that funds state government but does not hold it by the Red Brigades turned the tide against terrorism in that country," it between capitulation to the hijackers and appearing callous about the hostages. international isolation and move towards a partial lifting of sanctions, it must be seen playing a positive role in bringing this negotiation on its home hijackers, provided food and water to the passengers and welcomed response to the hijacking might have been "to pool regional forces in wouldn't govern for the privileged, that he would combat misery and violence, would be firm with the military and turn the judicial system upside Constitution was amended while he was in office, he has technically served only guarantor of stability, guardian of the future, and restorer of optimism. will be guaranteed by a plan to make it "the global timekeeper for the Internet." Ignoring an existing campaign by watchmaker Swatch to divide the several hours, depending on the point of purchase. Being able to have an plans. If one accepts the need for a corrective (or, depending on how one views it, is willing to live with a mere palliative), why not design one that operates in direct proportion to how segregated a state's schools are? intended as a corrective (or palliative) for segregation. Yet there is surely some considerable connection between segregation, school quality, and student performance. One could argue that, absent school segregation, any kind of affirmative action admission plans are that much less necessary. Thus, three for poor student "X" to finish in the top ten percent of his or her public school class and obtain a mediocre SAT score than it does for rich kid "Y" to finish in the bottom half of his private school class and score slightly higher on the SAT. Unlike affirmative action, high school quotas avoid giving an advantage based on something other than merit in those situations where student graduating class admission to a state university, have been "heralded" by Ward some things can't be compromised, and equality under the law is one of them. can seize your assets. But if a credit card company pays your taxes and then you don't pay the credit card company what measures can the credit card company take to get its money? I can't imagine that in court the debt you owe to the which I am quoted as an environmentalist who is skeptical about the concept of existence value because the "numbers might not add up in our favor." This statement is then used to argue that I do not value intellectual consistency. I would simply like to set the record straight. I was partially misquoted by the My concern about existence value is that it is very hard to measure and one can generate almost any number one wants to. So I am concerned that some groups will attempt to measure existence value in such a way that they do, in fact, come up with a number that is in their favor. This is my concern, it is not what I advocate. As a University Professor I make every attempt to be objective. I value intellectual consistency highly. I am therefore quite sad that the opposite impression is being conveyed. With respect to existence value, the real problem is that its measurement often becomes subjective. scorn not just electronic greeting cards, but all greeting cards as prepackaged expressions of sentiment for the emotionally illiterate. But isn't that a good No. Not to orthodox quiz participants, for whom greeting cards are to genuine manifestations of feeling what Big Macs are to real hamburgers, with some sort had the wit to express it. (Why isn't there a card!) Perhaps the crime isn't insiders, only pretend to like you. (And which will not be offered after the why the hell can't we spell his name right? You're upsetting my yarmulke, a reindeer with menorah antlers, that sort of nonsense. roles in the holiday drama. "It is mistaken and misguided to synthesize the guessing, not a medical doctor, but a guy who appreciates an honorific. remain an immutable hodgepodge of customs, superstitions, and prejudices," he says are unnecessary for our national defense, and a list of things Judge international team of scientists. As reported in a recent issue of to the Internet, the data has reached other scientists around the world, many chairman of the department of mass communication, advertising, and public University stepped down from his administrative post after being accused of without attribution. The line was identified by a student, who publicized the transgression in an Internet chat room and sent a letter to the school of didn't give the proper citation for the quote because he was pressed for time. Still, he insists that his "ethical lapse" must be punished. that the program was designed for other contingencies, such as bad weather. But students and professors debated the value of studying Eastern cultures instead of Western ones when a call was made to establish a new curricular conservative campus periodical, avowed that Western values are "superior to the Review complained, "This is another example of Duke administrators faculty, and students feared would compromise the school's identity. The New York Times notes that the Renaissance musicologist is expected to continue with the former president's plans, though in a more harmonious manner. asked the academic senate to adopt a more conventional grading system. A vote forum that his religion thesis prep class was a waste of time, adding that one in question, says that she never agreed with the student and proceeded to post a message suggesting that complaining students were lucky not to be in the Marine Corps and quipped that it was true that the Marines "do not shoot people at dawn anymore." The chair of the religion department told the Chronicle of Higher Education that some students were "a little agitated" by the professor's message but added that no disciplinary action would be taken. Law School, which is located in cyberspace, is probably the only law school and whose students attend class in their bathrobes. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a controversial set of guidelines them) call for a majority of faculty members and trustees to be Catholic, for new Catholic university presidents to publicize their commitment to their faith, and for professors of theology to receive a general approval from their guidelines are "interpreted too rigidly, we could look like seminaries and not have tightened admissions for applicants to the City University of New York. Incoming students who test poorly on math and English placement tests improve their skills. Instead, they'll be redirected to other institutions to that it will discourage students from applying to the school. pages early this week. Although the Communist Party will remain the biggest news: "The good news is that the new Duma is likely to be younger, and somewhat more sympathetic towards economic liberalism than the last one. The bad news is that political liberalism has been sacrificed in the process." The Daily Telegraph took a similar tack, decrying the "rise in military influence" taking heart in the shift of power "from conservatives to reformers." Hong Post also attacked the style of the election, saying "the vote was influenced by an assortment of foes on state television," but said that "given their limited choices, the executive would be and decided that, "In foreign policy, the recent victory is a very positive development. For, in circumstances where the authorities and their opposition are equally corrupt, a corrupt regime based on succession is preferable to a revolutionary corrupt regime, whose ascension to the throne is accompanied by the hollow grunting of pigs rushing the resumption of sovereignty would help wipe out a turf war that has gripped gambling industries, and while gambling is illegal on the mainland, China's described current efforts to remove "military jargon, acronyms corruption was "procedural error," and people were "protected" rather than arrested. As the old euphemisms are shed, foreign words are sometimes taking returned to the colonial mentality, thinking that everything that is foreign is guerrillas and civilians and has turned most of the survivors into refugees. "In its indiscriminate use of firepower against civilian targets, it is as bad It has already restored the military's prestige and budget. serious effort to train them, because it doesn't have qualified noncommissioned officers, and its officers can't control the conscripts. Hazing is unbelievably volunteer army because it can't pay enough to recruit soldiers. According to Union did during the '80s. Clothing and rations are scarce: Navy servicemen have starved to death. Alcoholism is rampant, as soldiers drink everything they can get their hands on. (In the '80s, the Mig-25 was nicknamed the "Flying fluid.) Hepatitis flourishes because troops don't know how to dig latrines. The hardware remains from the Soviet buildup, but most of it doesn't work. Soldiers cannibalize spare parts to keep a few vehicles working. Pilots lack the fuel (The only good news about the military is that it has regained secure control Even the Pentagon, which has long featherbedded its budget by inflating the This military has decayed immeasurably since the glory days certainly exaggerated the competence of the Soviet military during the Cold advantage, a 2-to-1 aircraft advantage. The Red Army was the only institution that matched the Communist Party in prestige. The best and brightest joined the schools. The state pampered officers with special stores, chauffeured cars, and armies were not artful, but they were often effective: weak on offense, strong War, for example) but savaged invaders when the Motherland was under attack. military invincibility and aroused the popular mistrust of the army that their sons off the front lines, and brought them home. opportunity. (Many suspect that the bombings were staged to marshal support for aggression on its own citizens than to go adventuring abroad. professionalism pervades the officer corps. But the general staff insisted that to boost his own prospects, granted it, essentially castrating the civilian defense ministry and subordinating the interior ministry. Western analysts now security and foreign policy. Their militarism and nationalism bode ill for having! First a young hairdresser in Stigmata collapses on a crowded dance floor as an invisible crown of thorns is pounded into her head. Then a lurching demon made of excrement materializes out of an overflowing toilet bowl will indeed bring about the destruction of all movie logic, we have End of demons fighting and battling over our souls. But who needs that?" millennial demons are a particularly clumsy lot, far less canny and elegant New Age guru who has run off with a CD that will unlock "the genetic code of streets in the dead of night. The Forces of Darkness are so powerless that In keeping with our apostate times, all these movies that song," he explains, "but you know what? She died in a tragic car accident frenetic party girl, who, of all the people in the world, is judged to be the hammered into her appendages. ("You don't get it, do you?" she yells at a priest during a lull in these proceedings, "I have fucking holes through my so distressed over the murders of his wife and daughter that he is reduced to mysterious ways, but it is the opinion of this column that screenwriters should not. There is a big difference between divine obfuscation and sloppy thinking. the world of a suppressed "fifth gospel," which, when revealed, will expose the greed and false pretenses of the Roman Catholic church. This restless spirit has the power to cause steam vents to erupt and windows to explode in showers and have her speak in a man's voice in ancient languages and send her spiraling aloft in her apartment until she ends up crucified in midair. What he can't do, though, is just come out and say what's on his mind. this movie that evil is not quite as renewable a resource as is commonly believed. In order for the Dark Angel to continue his important work in human affairs, he must appear on Earth every thousand years to impregnate a young woman. In End of Days the devil is first seen as a transparent watery wrinkle that rises out of a manhole and sashays into the men's room of a restaurant, whereupon it makes a forcible entry into the body of a prominent mother's arms in the hospital by a satanic nurse and given a quickie baptism cut out his own tongue and put it in a mayonnaise jar for reasons that it would take a second viewing of End of Days for me to figure out. (Not in this carves up this guy's torso with arcane writing and, using scalpels and scissors and other handy hospital accessories, crucifies him on the ceiling. (How strong before the ball drops in Times Square, interrupt his mission to leave clues for gasoline, walk through fire, induce visions, and even resurrect the dead, but It's no wonder that Good triumphs over Evil, because The Omega Code is as cheerful an antichrist as one could wish for, but around like a baby bird that's not ready to leave the nest. With a hopeless bod nationalists' focus on "ethnicity, linguistic imposition, collusion with ETA chasm between Basque public opinion and that of the rest of the country could generate "a verbal escalation whose final objective couldn't be other than to deepen the abyss" between people "likely to take Basque nationalism to the ballot box and those who would like to prevent a sovereignty debate." with his announcement the same day that a general election will be held in come to terms with this uncomfortable past. It was not alone among neutral China's leaders are obsessed with "the legacy thing." The president is putting social reform pledges have remained unfulfilled, but the economy is on an when he leaves office he will write a study "on how to make a go of a fully tested before the mission started. But this is surely what comes of cutting costs. The chances of failure are, alas, much greater, and two in a scientists have a better understanding of what they are doing in exploring Mars his voyages a waste of money. But, despite all the subsequent suffering of indigenous peoples, who now wishes he had not made them?" very best comic strips, for my taste, are the magic ones. They all come from the same place: "left field." Also known as "the blue." Or the intuition. The other place they come from is, of course, the real world. It's a combination of the two. The cartoonist experiences real life in some penetrating way. Then he (or she) takes a leap into the unconscious, the dreamlike, the mysterious within, hoping to emerge with something fresh, something original. In the best and rarest cases, what emerges is something brilliant and enduring like it first came on the scene, it was unlike any other cartoon. It had (and has) a couple of tiny tots speaking in childlike innocence for three panels, then come out of the wild blue yonder with one of them sounding suddenly like a Simplicity is its initial appeal. And openness. Innocence. It catches our eye and draws in our psyches. Economy of line with so much between the lines. A magic. Not a bunch of schlocky gags. No overwrought corn. A genuine search is Shepherd, the recently deceased radio genius who created magic with the spoken word, used to berate Snoopy back in the late '60s. Shepherd thought the whole idea of a dog with an imaginary life as a World War I pilot and a novelist, etc., destroyed the credibility of the strip. Shepherd was a hero of mine. His under consideration. I concluded that Shepherd was wrong. much leeway a comic strip can sustain, how far afield it can stretch and stray his son's imagination and grandiosity. A week before his traditionalist sculptor the art world stupidly ignored. Century," because he is "a symbol for all scientists" in a century defined by exalts the greatest historical figures of each century, including: article focuses on the race to map the human genome: The before a private group of scientists can. Whoever wins will hold the keys to creating personalized medicines and cures for killer diseases such as cancer. Nation goes glossy for its "alternative" retrospective of the story delivers excerpts from The Nation 's archives, focused around two central themes: continuing class struggles and the rise of be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer." A 1980s editorial predicts: "Things will come flying through radical reform in the Soviet Union neither foresee nor completely control." Curtain its name is the true "democratic hero of our age." An the persistence of the city, the emancipation of women, the rise of the law, and the invention of limited liability (the key to the rise of equity contraceptives, gunpowder, and calculus. The issue is packed with remarkable historical tidbits: One article traces the rise of total war to he has the ball. Therefore, the longer you keep possession of the ball, the by staying on the attack. Let's look at three plays from the debate. says yes. Gore dances around the question ("I haven't complained about any. I answer, but Gore gives the smart one. Normally, when you're invited to accuse your opponent of something, the smart course is to accept the offer. But look you of something. You're the one ultimately being accused. Suppose you say you're angry that your opponent has accused you of kicking your dog. Some viewers, after turning off their televisions, will think your opponent is a vicious liar. But most will wonder whether you kick your dog. with [my] health care program" and "that I am going to destroy Medicaid without charge is unfair, but Gore gets to repeat and elaborate on the accusation: voucher. Not a single [health plan] can be purchased for anything close to cap. But Gore tells a joke making fun of "weighted average" as a nerdy weasel word. Gore is lying about the "cap" and the "voucher." But politically, he wins the round, because both men end up spending several minutes discussing the have ever had to make a difficult decision that you knew would hurt you Democratic colleagues." Gore, however, picks two votes on which he differed penny to ensuring the solvency of Medicare. And my question to you is: Why needs to husband his credibility. The best way to do this is to admit the truth when it's disadvantageous to him. He begins by making such a concession about phone calls that I made were a mistake." But as the debate goes on, Gore needs the media to buy into that assumption. But saying it so baldly, and then professor's buzzwords. When he calls Republican tax cuts a "tax scheme" and not only that he's twisting the truth, but also that he thinks you're too stupid to realize it. And the deeper that feeling sinks in, the less attention determined to convey his virtue and wisdom, and he succeeded. Now his problem is that he can't turn it off. The more he equates his candidacy with goodness and enlightenment, and the more condescendingly he dismisses Gore ("Let me explain to you, Al, how the private sector works. I can say that in much any of those three votes if you had it to do over again? Were they mistakes?" beyond that, Bill. In all those words about the three different votes, one word I didn't hear was the word 'mistake.' And here's why I think that is important. I think our country deserves a president who, when he makes a mistake, is willing to acknowledge it and willing to learn from it, because I believe that the presidency is not an academic exercise. It's not an extended seminar on learn from it, and learn from you [the audience] about how we can deal with the the first time" --and everybody laughs. But Gore has found a big chink in exposes a character trait that puts off many voters. If history is any guide, Gore will exploit that dilemma for the rest of the campaign. But if Gore doesn't learn to stop talking like a used car salesman, nobody's going to be able to exchange it for something he really wants, if he saves the reminds me of the one and only time I went to the Radio City Music Hall lead donkeys, horses, camels, sheep, and maybe some geese, onstage. Then they all freeze perfectly still for, like, a minute, as the music swells and we are presented with a shockingly good recreation of a kitsch Nativity painting. At which I was mightily impressed, but still troubled by one nagging thought: model. It can be seen along with four other finalists at 's "Pundit Precis," or "Chat Show Cliff Notes" or whatever that thing is called where they watch television for you, but with this difference: I didn't actually hear any of these sermons so what follows is only really ugly sweater, you've still got to wear it because she's your aunt and got the sweater from God or on sale, but either way she can't return it? (Third passionate act of love, the wife has to go get the husband a sandwich and a expensive orthodontics. One of those new sponsored sermons. (Fifth Avenue "COMING IN AND OUT OF THE COLD" --You could catch your death. And go to hell. For all eternity. Unless you really believe. And wear a scarf. (All Souls water into gasoline, and there's a horrible fire and widespread panic and, eventually, a lot of litigation. It's a metaphor for our vainly putting our the fictional day once a year when everything means its opposite. But it took the deeper wisdom of adults to use this notion as a way of ending the bilious agreement over affirmative action, it turns out, is for everyone to say the preferences. All three states now forbid traditional affirmative action in Times explains that this is "a sensible way to increase minority enrollments without relying on a strategy that takes race into account." a whole. Since most blacks attend overwhelmingly black high schools, the result It's doubly crazy to argue on any day besides Opposites Day purpose is explicitly racial. The whole point is to increase minority enrollment. That is why it was invented, and that is why the Bush brothers brag conservatives not desperately eager to look the other way. litigation of the past few decades, in fact, is about this kind of piggybacking discrimination rather than the explicit kind. When do traditional job qualifications, such as a test or membership in a guild, amount to racial discrimination? That sort of thing. You only have to imagine a state policy explicitly being praised by state officials as a way to increase the number of arrangement avoids the alleged evil of racial preference. Conservatives have always claimed to want admissions They think it immoral to give college places to minority students who wouldn't that the number of whites who were denied places they deserved on "merit" also traditional minority preferences, judges each student's performance in context. It compares achievements with the environment in which they were achieved. Moreover, it ensures that students from all backgrounds have an equal bite of the apple. All are reasonable arguments. But weren't these the arguments for affirmative action in the first place? That is, one idea behind affirmative action was always that "merit" must be judged relative to environment, so as to Put differently, conservatives such as Bush were goaded conservatives dare not make this dangerous idea too explicit. They cannot afford to admit that they don't really want the results they fought for during heart, I suspect a large percentage of conservatives share the liberals' So liberals and conservatives agree to pretend that weekly poll on the Web site of the Democratic National Committee asked visitors: "As the nation approaches a new millennium, what are the most important priorities facing our next president? Saving Social Security, purports to tell you something about the population at large, or at least the population from which the sample was drawn (for example, likely Democratic scientific poll of a few hundred randomly sampled people can be extrapolated to of error). (For a primer on "margin of error" and "degree of confidence," see thousands or even millions of users participate cannot be extrapolated to anything, because those results tell you only about the opinions of those who participated. Online polls are actually elections, of a kind. And elections, while a fine way to pick a president, are a decidedly poor way to measure aren't online polls an accurate measure of public opinion? polls (very different from today's political straw polls but equally their preferred candidate. Other organizers of straw polls mailed ballots to the ballots were returned, and based on the results, the magazine predicted Literary Digest was wrong, of course, and straw polls never recovered, at least as a predictive tool. Reader and viewer surveys continue to prosper, relatively small and wealthy portion of the electorate owned a telephone or an automobile. Likewise, many have criticized online polling because Internet users tend to be wealthier, more educated, and more male than the population at large. For this reason, many people assume Internet poll results to be biased in favor of the viewpoints of relatively wealthy, highly educated males. even saying that gives such polls too much credit. A scientific poll of the political opinions of Internet users would be subject to that socioeconomic users as a whole, just about those users who participated in the poll. Pollsters speak of both the "primacy effect" and the "recency effect," meaning that the first and last choices are more likely to be chosen, particularly when there is a long list of possible answers. In addition, the order in which questions are given can affect the respondents' answers. For example, a question about "the longest economic expansion in history" might affect respondents' answers to a subsequent question about the president's job approval. Scientific polls account for these effects by rotating the order of course, even scientific polls are subject to error, and not just to the standard "margin of error" that is due to assumed errors in sample selection. interviewers and by data processors. Despite these possibilities, scientific polling has a long, reliable history, whereas "straw polling" has a long long as they are meant as entertainment, and as long as users understand what their results communicate, there's no reason to lose much sleep over online polls. What is worrisome is the failure of pollsters themselves to learn from the history of their profession. Even if they bill themselves as "voting sites" of their online polls are reliable and valid. Otherwise, why would Morris using what is known as "quota sampling," which ensures that the poll's respondents are an accurate reflection of the population's demographics. Quota sampling assumes that the answers of a particular demographic group such as potential to make her a millionaire." Who said this about what? the fifth consecutive year, it's going to let pretty girls ship everything book days! Why isn't that great? A bargain! A marvel! Why all the damn whining? optional! If you want to lick, lick. If not, not. No way you'll get that kind "potential threats" facing our nation. Which of the following are from his list and which are mere fabrications likely to make him go nuts and start screaming although the first lady would be campaigning in New York and the first man the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every condemnation was for the French slaughter of the boys in the English Battle also looks at the issue and concludes that his command was well King are very different from those upon ordinary men. passage. But he (or she) is wrong to conclude that I thereby vitiate my larger in fact referring to the French slaughter of the English servants. But I submit that there's a good reason for my having misread the text on the fly. anything about war: The side whose captured soldiers have been murdered invariably retaliates by killing the men it has captured, and the men ordered and Henry are alike is they both kill their friends! (Henry, of course, killed king, intentionally or not, we have to sit up and take notice. to weigh in if there wasn't a raging debate about the rightness or wrongness of created characters. Indeed, he may have created Character itself. What makes a more or less invented our modern notions of psychology. Is Henry all good? Hell My point was simply that he's not an exemplary role model, and it's ridiculous and the Great Depression were only coincidental and not causally linked. Uh effect" still follows the rule of thumb outlined by Moneybox--5 cents in consequential to me. Plus when you consider that the savings out of income is egregious violation of journalistic ethics. Dumb, maybe (as Chatterbox points out), but where is the attack on integrity? The ad side of all newspapers is constantly trying to get the ed side to say nice things about those advertising. In this case, though, the advertisers in the "special issue" of the LAT magazine were companies other than Staples. And the Times writers were never pressured to do puff pieces. contractors and vendors to pony up for ads for which they got some return. But this breach is more an offense by Staples. The LAT was on the hook for support already. But again, the writers were free to write what they wanted, so why is the staff there so exercised (which they became only after the participated in a bad business deal. Perhaps. But he should take into account through its continuing expansion, the paper as well as the town would benefit. a Wonderful Life is correct enough, but I think you're wrong to regard the current Republic Pictures copyright (rooted in its underlying copyright of the musical score) as a settled legal concept. It's true no one has challenged act you suggest would liberate the movie. Removing the music track is not so video with its score replaced for exactly that reason. Surely It's a Wonderful Life would be even more worth the trouble, if any video distributor thought they could do it without immediately facing a battalion of the world of classic film distribution. When the balance of power among public and private parties was fairly even, the private copyright never stood up for very long. A famously shady and litigious film distributor once tried to gain it was loosely based on; he was pretty much laughed away by his rivals. n military leaders "have received funds from radical foreign extremist candidate offers: "He is a reformer and he is extremely determined." exist by itself, without the help of the United States," going far beyond withholding tax," the paper said. But a row seems to be inevitable. The report the return of the sculptures. A recent editorial in the National Post of elevate historic sentiment over legality, creating in the process a chaotic precedent for dispersing the world's great archaeological collections." The Turkey has agreed to abolish the death penalty, offering hope for the rebel an upbeat assessment of the prospects, leading its front page with a forecast by "a few months." It also offered a foretaste of what was billed as an optimistic agreement that will "burst apart the sense of threat on both sides, do away condition, but most papers ran eulogies of the former boxing hero. The "These days he comes to audiences not to milk their applause but to give audiences something worth applauding. It is he that is doing the giving, the throughout the world in peace. He is one of those rare individuals like the on accepting the award, "I had a great time boxing. I enjoyed it and I may come just acquired: "Traditional media assets have a vibrant future if they can minutes of my tenure as governor." What was he doing? people at the karaoke bar just wouldn't let him sit down until he did two meeting with some visiting dignitary. From some other country. Wore a rag on his head. Or was it a sombrero? Anyway, it was all, 'my people' this, and 'my be the Trump card in any conversation, at least with a fashion model. And aren't we all? Another angle: He's quiet, leaving it to the people of South fluttering above their Capitol building. It is hard to punch fog. Possibility has always been a sucker for shiny yet unworkable military hardware.) Possibility the fourth: We the people are like terrified rabbits frozen in the we're paralyzed by the repeated idea that his election is inevitable. Which Sufficient money and party regulars and money have been assembled to make the primaries and indeed the general election even more than usually irrelevant. I No, wait, sorry, there is no record of his missing so much as a meal. And a year later, he was sufficiently recovered to mock the late Ms. Tucker in any other governor in any state since the Supreme Court revived the death "The first element is connectivity, the second element is content, and the "We had very few resources so we were forced to figure out how to get other people to carry our water. Now we can carry it ourselves in a solid gold "I accept that something profound is happening in the Internet space; I believe that. For one thing, you can download pictures of the first time Ted invigoration that women get from achieving certain goals they set out to the premier chronicler of the outdoor adventure, a new monthly packed with interior design tips for creating rugged, exhilarating spaces out of laddie book for laddies of a certain age. A place where the sports cars are bigger, the breasts are seasoned, and the beer is wine. The premiere issue citizens. Our Braille descriptions spare no detail, bringing to life a lavish, Plus, several more Braille descriptions of other lavish photo spreads. Same liberal libidinal imagination. Prospect Forum delivers ribald tales of skirts, breast implants, making your man orgasm all night long, and striving daily double? She'd better! Lesbian marriages are through the roof, and all those engaged lesbians need a magazine of their own. Here it is! Complete with gift when lesbian wedding bells are ringing for someone you love. Systems, the company they founded, is most famous for the "Flying Toasters" online enterprise strives for viral marketing; Censure and Move On was Typhoid The campaign delivered hundreds of thousands of petitions to House members, mouse." Originally, this was all intended to be part of a "flash campaign" that Web site; the organization then delivers the cash to the candidates. This matter in House and Senate races. "We thought it might be interesting but and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are considering supporting winter and will begin trying to direct those who volunteered time to campaigns. And Blades says the organization will ask for campaign contributions every politics. Its success all but guarantees that other political movements will pace of direct mail. It is easy to imagine that an Internet movement could targeted at conservatives could collect thousands of electronic petitions in no some of these flash campaigns may begin to evolve into new kinds of political known to mankind kicking out special issues, she was certain the tabs would Year's predictions from their astrologers). Keeping Tabs couldn't help but wonder if the tabs' reluctance to reflect might have something to do with their track records. Would the Globe want to be reminded, for example, that The two became happily engaged the next month, prompting the Globe to tabloids aren't interested in remembering the year that was, Keeping Tabs has have yet to meet. But that doesn't stop a Star source from speculating that Spears might consider marriage if the prince were to ask. mourn her passing, we celebrate a full and wonderful life." The following week, Friends set, she is always "the first to rush over and ask if she can just skipped the pregnancy tests and started painting that nursery.) record as vehemently opposing: The kinder, gentler National The Enquirer is now filled with headlines such as "Cat's Incredible: "To me, happiness is finding that your flashlight works after the lights go technique debunked!: The tabs' habit of crediting "insiders" and "sources" sales. Keeping Tabs now considers herself an "insider," given that she knew all this year as we look back at those we've lost," the Globe writes lovingly. "May they all rest in peace." Apparently the Globe subscribes to the theory that incessant posthumous prying ("They hadn't slept together for effusive: It's fast, it's cheap, it's sweeping the country. This year, Internet companies have taken their campaign into enemy territory. They have sent emissaries to shopping malls with signs advising customers to flee the chaos of They're colonizing cyberspace with Web sites that invite surfers to log off and they want to see and feel what they're buying. But while the malls do advertise sensory advantages, they talk less about merchandise than about entertainment: live music, fashion shows, baby pageants, carousels, and miniature golf. The spares you the trouble of dragging your kids around, the malls promise to entertain and "educate" children through activities healthier than sitting at a their photos taken with Jolly Old St. Nick") and then offer, for an additional Corner then spills the beans to any child capable of reading the don't have to drive, walk, or lug packages and babies around when you shop online. The malls try to neutralize these annoyances. They offer valet parking, Personal Shoppers will, for an hourly fee, take your requests have to walk a lot, so they spin it as a virtue. "Lace up your walking shoes, and body to an enjoyable, healthy and rewarding exercise program." But a page creates a lasting impression of your business, and most importantly, activates capitalist advantages of not being anchored: easy access, low overhead, and minimal transaction costs. Malls advertise the civic virtue of being anchored: community service. They invite shoppers to participate in food drives, community." They also boast of providing venues for church and school choral store to the next because you were already there. The mall offered a volume discount on your money and, in effect, on your time. Now that the Internet saves you more money and time than the mall does, malls have invented new selection of merchandise than you can find in any store. Malls are outflanking mall gift certificate instead of a gift certificate at an online store is complex in theory but simple in practice. Yes, each online vendor has a wider selection of goods than each mall retailer does. And yes, cyberspace has a wider selection of goods than any mall does. But nobody has the time or mental bandwidth to search all of cyberspace, and given a choice between a single online store and a mall, you can probably find a wider selection at the mall. benefits that can only be received with online orders," such as encourages shoppers to buy "gift certificates online with our secure ordering credit card and personal data you transmit is encrypted (scrambled) and sent to by providing a selection of goods broad enough and cheap enough to gain consumers' trust and thereby control their options. When you wanted to shop, you went to the mall and confined your search to the stores you found there. The Internet has simply transferred this principle to cyberspace. Consumers who used to look for malls now look for portals, and malls intend to become those when YOU have the time to shop," says that mall's Web site. "Here you can browse upcoming events, locate your favorite stores in our store directory, shop online or find products before coming to the mall." and information on their Web sites, the malls command your attention and direct on links to their retailers, the links usually take you not to the national Web sites of those retailers but to dummy pages on the mall's site that tell you only about that retailer's store in the mall. In the new mall, like the old The list includes daggers, pipe bombs, spears, and bows and arrows. "Things, other than 'love' that could've busted 'Hurricane' Carter out of speech? While the First Amendment limits government action, not that of an guy for expressing his (albeit despicable) views? No, as it happens, it used to deride the Soviet Union for putting those who expressed unpopular (albeit despicable) views in mental institutions? Rocker isn't insane; he's a contemptible (albeit despicable) racist. He should not be fired; he should be despised. Boo him from the stands, shun him in the locker room, denounce him in the press, but don't "treat" him and don't take away his job. Of course, Rocker and the shunning and the denouncing. Hardly worth it. same size, making for a more evenly matched sort of strife. have replied and plan on participating, if you were to fall into one of the "voucher" debate represents the third and decisive stage of the Democratic presidential contest. In the first stage, each candidate tried to put his best issues on the agenda. Gore pushed suburban sprawl, health care, and education. second stage, the candidates fought for the high ground on those three issues. ground on campaign reform by offering a comprehensive reform plan while teaming third stage is the battle over the remaining issue: health care. Each candidate is trying to marshal his assets on this battleground by building a thematic his message of comprehensive reform from campaign finance to health care. He proposes to replace Medicaid with subsidies that would make health insurance affordable to more people but would require those with sufficient incomes to pay part of their premiums out of their own pockets. meanwhile, is trying to carry his message of public responsibility from substituting partial subsidies for guaranteed benefits, would gut the public with it the nomination. That's why Gore has distilled this linkage to a single context of education, Gore has defined the word "voucher" in two negative ways. comes out of funds previously allocated to a fully subsidized program. "Experience shows there's a set amount of money that communities have been drain the money away from the public schools for private vouchers, then that hurts the public schools." Second, vouchers don't cover the cost of the program they replace. "The flaw with the voucher theory," said Gore, "is that the vast majority of those who receive a tiny little down payment on the tuition cannot packed these two poisonous assumptions into the word "voucher," Gore is now word to both contexts. "Every single time vouchers came up in the Senate, Bill, "voucher" attack has at least made Gore's ideological position coherent. For inadequate "voucher" schemes. And he will direct this argument to specific Democratic constituencies such as senior citizens, blacks, gays, and labor [voucher] experiments demonstrated that the quality of public education was improved, does that mean that you would not even consider vouchers?" Then he the two options are compatible. "Every time I voted for vouchers, I voted for take any public money that was set aside for schools. This would be new insurance don't cover the entire cost of premiums. He could argue that individuals ought to bear responsibility for paying a portion of their premiums. Or he could simply argue that the amount of money the government takes from taxpayers to subsidize health care should be limited. He could, in cap. It's a weighted average." In a "Memo to National Reporters" after the memo provided dictionary definitions of "subsidy" and "voucher," indicating that vouchers are explicitly finite whereas subsidies are not. The implication of these caveats is that if universal health insurance turns out to cost even sliding scale of subsidies and tax breaks he proposes for health insurance, you get the feeling he's rather sympathetic toward solutions that take account of market dynamics. You get the feeling that this sympathy is what he's hiding wonder whether he could win a general election coming out of the right lane of the Democratic Party. But first he has to get the Democratic nomination, a race fault. On firearms and campaign finance, he defined reform as government control. He thought he could pass Gore on the left. Instead, Gore cut him health and education. Every time Gore utters the word "vouchers," he's bumping of some of its weaponry later this month in an attempt to meet the terms of the the Protestant Ulster Unionist Council, which is to review progress on the inconceivable that the political process that we embarked on could be brought "as the negotiations become more taxing and problematic, the involvement of the regard to the forging of agreements, and as a patron and guarantor in economic militia, and as notorious in the international terrorist world in the eighties admit that he is no longer capable of carrying out his task." Interviewed by resignation and said he was talking only about "the theoretical possibility" of project reportedly rejected by producers in New York. Internet has people extrapolating wildly. Every day we see something new and amazing. Surely, given what we have seen so far, the future is bright! Don't believe me? Need more details? Just ask your resident visionary. technology has gone from a minor sideline of the scientists and engineers actively building that future to a discipline of its own. No technology company When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.) Their business cards don't have "visionary" on them, but these people are not hard to spot. They may be Or they might write a magazine column and have recently published a newsletters, attend their elite annual conferences of industry big shots, or invite them to speak or consult for astronomical fees. Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its The fortunetellers of old had many techniques. Yet the crystal balls and tea leaves are just apparatus. All fortunetelling, in fact, rests on three more or less what you think they want to hear. Second, you must spice your predictions with drama. Nobody wants a prediction that the future will be more or less like the present, even if that is, statistically speaking, an excellent prediction. Predictions must involve either acquiring or losing love, wealth, your predictions must somehow avoid measurement of their accuracy. Many tricks have been invented to serve this end. Predictions can be vague, for example, or couched in complicated gibberish. Either way, there is a loophole. And customers generally don't mind: Seeking advice about the future is more about relieving insecurity or anxiety than about achieving statistical accuracy. Internet. The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts. Big shots won't speak at your conference entire industries. Tell 'em that "old media" are going to die. There seems to be an infinite appetite for this, despite precious little evidence. If you hurry, you can tell them that "push" will conquer all, but that one's got a so you seem tough and important. And be bold: It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do. all, being a technological visionary is not about predicting what will actually happen. This astounded me when I first realized it, and even now I am not really comfortable with the thought. Technology and engineering are all about the public or the press holds any technological visionaries accountable. In or complicated loopholes. They just baldly spout predictions, certain that myself. And, in all candor, I fit the profile. What can I say in my defense? I say this: The problem does not rest with us visionaries. Sure, there are a few bad apples in every crate, and a few legitimate deep thinkers who sometimes get carried away. But most visionaries are smart and honorable people who are sincerely interested in the future. The problem is the need that drives people is driving our lives at a torrid pace. That generates many concerns. Will my company come through this richer or poorer? Will my job be safe? What does it all mean? The technology that shapes the modern world is as incomprehensible to most people as the forces of nature were to a society of refused. A reporter from a major publication cornered me recently, and said: didn't want a joke. Nor did he want a carefully constructed set of arguments it matter that you have the whole truth if you can't understand it? In this context, it is understandable that nobody really cares about a visionary's track record. If next week's vision is exactly the opposite of this week's, don't hesitate to tell that one, too. Among modern occupations, only cult There is an antidote to visionary disease. We as a society have to learn more about the technology that is shaping our lives, and become more comfortable with it. Few people these days believe that evil spirits cause mystical. We do not fear the forces of nature as much as our species once did, because we understand those forces better. Even if most people don't actually understand, say, where hurricanes come from, there is widespread comfort with the notion that some experts do. At the same time, there is widespread appreciation that even weather experts have their limits, which empowers people today creates a market for visionaries will be as mundane as light bulbs. People who have grown up with that technology will be as comfortable with it as There is a name for the people who will accomplish this daunting task and put corporate visionaries like me out of business. We call them children. But editor of Business Week had a problem with his car: Whenever he went too dangerous shimmy. So he carefully drove to the repair shop, never letting the he couldn't fix the shimmy. Moreover, he had found another problem: The the editor was pleased with this news. "So what you're telling me is that the mistake in ordinary life. It would not be necessary for the mechanic to explain pedantically that, while it was true that the news about the speedometer implied that the car could go faster than previously thought, it did not change But he is apparently not so clearheaded when it comes to espoused by his magazine for the last few years and vociferously defended in a relationship between measurement and reality that is conceptually identical to the garbled thinking of the imaginary editor retrieving his car. sometimes called the New Economic Paradigm, may be summarized as the view that globalization and information technology have led to a surge in the explain why the United States has managed to drive unemployment to a 25-year conventional view that the economy has a "speed limit" of around 2-percent to output is growing slowly or is shrinking, the unemployment rate rises. Over the has grown at about a 2.7-percent annual rate, while unemployment has fallen at fall? Yes, of course, but the unemployment rate can fall only so far. Obviously it can't go below zero; and in reality, the limits to growth are reached long before the economy gets to that point. Both logic and history tell us that when workers are very scarce and jobs very abundant, employers will start bidding against each other to attract workers, wages will begin rising rapidly, and real growth will give way to inflation. That means that while the economy can rate of unemployment (like the 7.5-percent unemployment rate that prevailed in rate that keeps unemployment constant. And that is where the infamous "speed that speed limit, in turn, lies another bit of arithmetic: The rate of growth of output, by definition, is the sum of the rate of growth of employment (which is limited by the size of the potential labor force) and that of productivity, point. Productivity growth has accelerated, which means that the old speed limit has been repealed. It's true, they concede, that official productivity unimpressive performance similar to that of the two previous decades. (It has statistical blip.) But they insist that the official statistics miss the probably right about that. What he may not realize is that we really didn't revolutionary innovations as automobiles, antibiotics, air conditioning, and issue believes that standard measures of productivity have consistently years. It's anybody's guess whether unmeasured productivity growth in the last few years is greater or less than in the past. (My personal guess is that the hidden improvements are less important than they were in the 1950s and overstating employment growth, he must believe that the official statistics stronger productivity growth, which may just now be showing up in statistics, (or, anyway, prefers to believe) that the speedometer has been understating his speed, and that the shimmy therefore doesn't start until he is really But doesn't the happy combination of low unemployment and low inflation show the payoff from hidden productivity growth? Well, higher productivity growth would mean lower inflation for any given rate of wage increase. And if official productivity statistics understate the real rate of inflation by exactly the same amount. This is a cheerful thought, but it also means that invoking covert productivity increases doesn't help explain why even measured inflation remains quiescent. The low rate of inflation in the more rapidly despite very tight labor markets, not why prices have remained stable given very moderate wage increases. And productivity us with that of the New Economy doctrine, among other things pointing out (though apparently to little effect) the dependence of that doctrine on the speedometer fallacy. It seems clear that he is baffled by the reluctance of "Old Economists" to join the party, and that he can only explain it by their unwillingness to accept the idea that the world has changed and that their pet theories are no longer valid. Well, I can't speak for the others, but I have no particular aversion to admitting that the economy can change and that old rules sometimes don't apply. In fact, as anyone who makes much of his income from book royalties and speeches can tell you, the incentives are all the other way: People would much rather hear about how everything has changed than about why most of the usual into the New Economy is actually very simple: Despite all the incentives, I can't bring myself to endorse a doctrine that I know to be just plain dumb. explained its plan to stimulate the economy with public spending while raising we asked him, be a recipe for a balance of payments crisis (which duly historical point of view." Some of us did, in fact, know a little history. government? "Oh no, what we are doing is completely unprecedented." The French have no monopoly on intellectual pretensions or on muddled thinking. They may not even be more likely than other people to combine the two. There is, however, something special about the way the French political class discusses economics. In no other advanced country is the elite so willing to let fine phrases overrule hard thinking, to reject the lessons of provide them are subject to detailed regulation by a government that is very solicitous of their occupants. A French employer must pay his workers well and provide generous benefits, and it is almost as hard to fire those workers as it very good deals for some people, but they have also made it very hard for you can get it. But many people, especially the young, can't get it. And, given the generosity of unemployment benefits, many don't even try. accepts the obvious diagnosis. On the contrary, there seems to be an emerging more of the same, what does the French elite see as the answer to the nation's problems? For more than a decade its members have sought salvation in the idea course), with common regulations and a common currency. In such a continental also a good case for doing no such thing. (There is a whole industry of important. And whatever a unified market and a common currency may or may not achieve, they will do almost nothing to create jobs. it this way: Imagine that several cities, all suffering housing shortages because of rent control, agree to make it easier for landlords in one city to own buildings in another. This is not a bad idea. It might even slightly increase the supply of apartments. But it is not going to get at the heart of has actually made things worse. If you are going to have a common currency, employment at the same time. All you need to do is cut interest rates, so that private spending takes up the slack. But you can't cut interest rates if you required would be all pain and no gain. Nobody can make a precise estimate, but While some French politicians have been willing to say nice things about budget deficits, nobody seems willing to challenge the dogma that "the fight against unemployment is inseparable from the realization of the not blame French politicians. Their inanities only reflect the broader tone of economic debate in a nation prepared to blame its problems on everything but that have sustained the nation's illusions. After this last election it is clear that the French will not be willing to submit to serious fiscal intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly part of what "everyone knows," is no more than a crude caricature of the innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were funds" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment. concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, "In the long run we are all dead." In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by "liquidity incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually consider the "widow's cruse" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God. of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one which is an uncritical acceptance of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift and the widow's cruse are from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by actually reduce growth treated seriously in ("Looking for Growth in All the the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. "You need to stimulate the investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will into people who assert confidently that massive speculative attacks on computerized trading, satellite hookups, and all that mean that old economic rules, and conventional economic theory, no longer apply. (One physicist insisted that the economy has "gone nonlinear," and is now governed by chaos theory.) But the truth is that currency crises are old hat. The travails of the French franc in the '20s were thoroughly modern, and the speculative attacks were almost as big, compared with the size of the economies involved, as the biggest recent blowouts. Currency crises have been a favorite topic of international financial economists ever since the 1970s. In fact, they are standard economic model of currency crises had its genesis in a brilliant economists at the Federal Reserve. They showed that abrupt speculative attacks, which would almost instantly wipe out the government's stockpile, were a some reinterpretation, be applied to currency crises that suddenly wipe out the lesson from that conventional model is that abrupt runs on a currency, which move billions of dollars in a very short time, are not necessarily the result of either irrational investor stampedes or evil financial manipulation. On the contrary, they are the normal result when rational investors contemplate the representation of government policy, and that the more complex motives of actual governments make speculation a more uncertain and perhaps more survived is nonetheless brought down, are a hot topic these days. But everyone agrees that a sufficiently credible currency will never be attacked, and a sufficiently incredible one will always come under fire. satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less couldn't afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a family couldn't afford that first home because there was just not enough money. fund yet another theory, yet another program, and yet another bureaucracy." The Republican Revolution, which seemed so unstoppable only a year ago, has over, one more time, the fiction that the federal government takes away your themselves, may have given conservatives the courage to be irresponsible. But what sold the public on conservatism was the images of vast armies of Conservatives were able to get away with such stories for one main reason: They could always blame their failure to slay Big Government on the Democrats who tantrum on Air Force One, the conservative wave would have rolled on. And they insist that this looming defeat is only a temporary setback. But the truth is that the political appeal of radical conservatism has always been based on a fundamentally untrue vision of what the federal government is and does. To get an idea of the gap between conservative mythology get into the habit of checking it, our politics would be utterly Abstract makes it quite easy to get a realistic picture of where your this list. The first is that it encompasses the bulk of government spending--82.2 percent, to be precise. Anyone who proposes a radical downsizing of the federal government must mean to slash this list. all what people object to when they rail against Big Government. We believe in honoring our debts. We like our strong military; indeed, Bob Dole wants it stronger. We like our highways. We want strong law enforcement. The only possibly unpopular item on the list is Medicaid, which is the only "poverty" brings us to the third point: Aside from defense and interest payments, the and giving money to the old. Look at that list, and consider how utterly shameless Dole was in imagining a grandmother who couldn't afford to call her granddaughter because she pays too much in taxes. That grandmother almost surely lives better than people of her age ever lived before, supported by Social Security checks that will greatly exceed the value of the contributions she and her husband paid into the system. And her children could easily have sent her the money for phone calls, except that their Medicare contributions has gone too far, that we are too generous to our retirees, especially to those who could afford to do without some of those benefits. But that is not a case the right has ever made. An honest advocate of smaller government would federal regulation as it is to summarize federal spending, but the basic point is similar: Most of what the government does is actually serving, not opposing, the voters are prepared to punish those Republicans whom they suspect of government wastes a lot of money; so does the private sector (have you read defeat from the jaws of victory. Their reversal of fortune was preordained, because their doctrine could not withstand the responsibility that came with whose empires depended on their political connections and about politicians growing rich in ways best not discussed. Speculation, often ill informed, was rampant. Besides, how could investors hope to know what they were buying, when vices as incidental to the real story, which was about economic growth that was the wonder of the world. Indeed, many regarded the cronyism as a virtue rather than a vice, the signature of an economic system that was more concerned with getting results than with the niceties of the process. And for years, the faint voices of the skeptics were drowned out by the roar of an economic engine fueled by ever larger infusions of foreign capital. crisis began small, with the failure of a few financial institutions that had bet too heavily that the boom would continue, and the bankruptcy of a few corporations that had taken on too much debt. These failures frightened investors, whose attempts to pull their money out led to more bank failures; the desperate attempts of surviving banks to raise cash caused both a credit crunch (pushing many businesses that had seemed financially sound only months before over the brink) and plunging stock prices, bankrupting still more financial houses. Within months, the panic had reduced thousands of people to sudden destitution. Moreover, the financial disaster soon took its toll on the real economy, too: As industrial production skidded and unemployment soared, But why am I telling you what happened to the United States Fund and the Treasury Department who must prescribe economic medicine to those models and metaphors to make sense of this thing. The usual round of academic rolling rap session, in which the usual suspects meet again and again to trade theories and, occasionally, accusations. Much of the discussion has focused on ground for a financial crisis; the role of runaway banks that exploited political connections to gamble with other people's money has emerged as the prime suspect. But amid the tales of rupiah and ringgit one also hears of financial panic is fairly well understood in principle, thanks both to the observation that there is a tension between the desire of individuals for want to be able to leave for the desert on short notice, you settle for matzo instead of bread, and if you want ready cash, you keep gold coins under the mattress. But in a more sophisticated economy this dilemma can be finessed. something more or less like a bank) does is pool the money of a large number of reserve is held in cash and other "liquid" assets. The reason this works is the law of averages: On any given day, deposits and withdrawals more or less balance out, and there is enough cash on hand to take care of any difference. The individual depositor is free to pull his money out whenever he wants; yet It is a sort of magic trick that is fundamental to making a complex economy They rush to pull their money out. But there isn't enough cash to satisfy all of them, and because the bank's other assets are illiquid, it cannot sell them when it occurs, can do far more than destroy a single bank. Like the Panic of economic performance any guarantee against such crises. As the list suggests, the United States was not only subject to panics but also unusually it was establishing its economic and technological dominance. economists, politicians, business leaders, and everyone else I can think had gone seriously off the rails well before last summer, and that some kind of mistakes made that helped make the economies vulnerable. Yet governments are no more stupid or irresponsible now than they used to be; how come the punishment system has become dangerously efficient. In response to the Great Depression, the United States and just about everyone else imposed elaborate regulations on their banking systems. Like most regulatory regimes, this one ended up working ownership of a bank a more or less guaranteed sinecure. But while the regulations may have made banks fat and sluggish, it also made them safe. Nowadays banks are by no means guaranteed to make money: To turn a profit they global financial markets into a world of merely national monetary authorities is, in a very real sense, to walk a tightrope without a net. As long as finance is a mainly domestic affair, what people want in a bank run is local world depression. In fact, I think that the United States is still, despite have to get used to such crises. Welcome to the New World Order. be paid, the cash register bought, the bookkeeper hired, etc. Honest mistakes and dishonesty also take a toll. These expenses can be expressed as a cost per transaction. The higher that cost, the larger the transaction has to be in are very good at counting money and keeping records, so they have been used for decades to manage transactions. Today, when your credit card is run through the little machine at the checkout counter, computers handle the entire transaction. Nobody is going to look at that little slip you sign unless a What is the cost of a transaction done purely by computer? of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy. All this is especially true now that the Internet provides a direct connection between sellers and this isn't a normal situation. This is the Internet, where any legitimate idea is immediately taken to ridiculous limits. That's because there are plenty of public. The magic words "on the Internet," if inserted into nearly any sentence, seem to protect it from normal critical scrutiny. in some limited areas, but most of the hoopla is very poorly thought out. To see why, consider Slate, which recently decided to remain free to users for now. But imagine that, several years hence, Slate is trying to decide among these choices will have on a couple of typical users (or "readers," as they industry the habit of referring to its customers as "users"). every now and then, he follows a link from another site into Slate. Somewhere in the middle is Tom Average, who reads Slate just as much as the average user If we set the price so that it will yield the same total revenue as a Accidental will save a bundle by buying occasional articles instead of having in others, because it tends to alienate the loyal supporters who form the core industry, which gives new subscribers a bargain rate and rewards steady renewal problem, for Slate and other Internet sites, comes from having to charge for usage, when what they're selling is intellectual property with a flat production cost. Slate doesn't get "used up" by being used. It costs virtually the same amount to produce, no matter how many people use it, and no matter how bought a copy a couple of years ago. If I could pay based on usage, Random Similarly, I subscribe to magazines to get an option just in case I want to read any of the articles. The editors, for their part, arrange to have them all even though it means that he will pay a lot more. Similarly, when dictionaries are all online, Random House could hold up the world's Scrabble players and copy editors. Unless, that is, there is competition that offers an exotic here, you can drop them for only your least eager customers. (The airlines are specialists in maximizing revenue and filling seats by charging different But this raises another question. If lowering the price gets you more customers, why not lower it all the way to zero and get the greatest number? That is, why not rely on advertising? Advertising is, in how many people see their ad. For most media, this is measured statistically, via surveys, because statistical estimates are an even cheaper way to record tiny transactions. They're not exact, but the overestimates and underestimates average out over time. Besides, if the transactions are really small, who cares if you miss a few? Ad rates amount to a few cents per customer impression, or other explicit user fees loses you many users, you'll decide to stay free where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free. Put economics of the product or service better than other ways of charging. Products that get used up as they are used naturally have this property. If the not include journalism or, indeed, most intellectual property. Yet, this is are a good example. The movie industry always starts a film with a high, discourage many people from seeing the film. That doesn't matter, because after room. There it picks up a few repeat customers, but mostly new ones. The price user, and it eventually hits zero when the movie appears on broadcast Technically speaking, this is a repeated auction. We're more familiar with what However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months. Book Movies get away with this because they don't generally have "heavy users" or repeat customers. Most people see a film once, or at least see them repeatedly, but these viewers are so few in number that movie theaters do not cut them a special deal. The real savior is the repeated Dutch auction, which lets theaters be cavalier about pricing the movie beyond the reach of a large set of customers, because they'll get another crack at them later. not have these special properties. Sites need regular repeat visitors. Their very small role in selling Internet content. Most sites probably will wind up being free, supported by ads. User fees will also exist, but for any content subscription to a site or a membership that lets you get to a set of sites. A administration had not wasted crucial months failing to take the issue seriously? I don't know. Will that rebuff severely damage the world trading system? I don't know. Is this the beginning of a more fundamental backlash know is that the arguments advanced by fast track's intellectual opponents are stunningly specious. Consider the tale of the tainted berries. Here's the story: Last spring, there was an outbreak of a for legislation that would allow him to ban food imports from countries that do not follow adequate sanitary standards in agriculture. Intellectual opponents of globalization gleefully noted a double standard: We're willing to seize shipments of foreign berries to protect yuppie consumers (the sort of people who eat raspberries out of season) from inadequate foreign sanitary standards, press when it turned out that some of her clothing line was produced in Central problems, which are more up Bob Wright's alley than mine. But it is useful, as a thought experiment, to ask how opponents of imports would have reacted had the story imports had cost some jobs in the United States, and possibly exerted some tiresome way, that the jobs lost in the clothing industry were more than matched by jobs gained elsewhere. They might point out that trade, by allowing each country to specialize in doing what it does relatively well, normally raises productivity and incomes in both countries. But these arguments would not be much consolation to the displaced workers, or to the owners of the affected clothing factories, and we would surely see a campaign against competitors not because of low wages but because robots and computers made them Here's the question: Would the people demanding limits on industry competing against imports, it doesn't matter how the clothing was point out how different the case is. For consumers of berries, it does matter how the berry was produced: If it was watered with sewage, eating it will make you sick. And for now the only practical way to enforce health standards on the product is to enforce sanitary standards on its production. sanitary standards, unlike our alleged concern about foreign labor standards, restrictions against countries with low labor standards willing to lift those hutches" in order to pursue its relentless export drive. By the early 1990s complaint against developing countries is not that their exports are based on low wages and sweatshops. The complaint is that they export at all. And so the supposed friends of poor workers abroad are no friends at all. If they got would be no job. And manufactured exports, initially based on low wages, are the only route we know for rapid economic development. countries, a development possible only because those countries are able to offset their disadvantages by competing on the basis of cheap labor, has brought about a huge improvement in the human condition, even if the wages look people who have spent years, even decades, writing about economics are really consumers from tainted produce and protecting workers from competing products. On the other hand, I doubt that they are purely cynical. It is more likely that when the situation demands it, is at work. But the truth is that I don't month." Only a few years ago, the business sections of airport bookstores were management and the menace Japan posed to the United States. Then it turned out pundits, having once placed Japan on a pedestal, now either prefer not to discuss the subject or see Japan's failures mainly as an occasion for smug new story is much more interesting than the old one. How could a wealthy, productive, sophisticated country have gone from enviable growth in the 1980s to stagnation in the '90s, and now be slipping into a downward spiral of where the state is weak, unable to collect taxes or convince investors that their property rights are secure. Nor is it a country at the mercy of skittish foreign investors who must be persuaded to roll over its debt: Japan is still the world's largest creditor. So what's the explanation? Inefficiency? Japan has many inefficiencies that limit its What Japan lacks right now is not supply but demand: Japan's consumers and investors just aren't spending enough to keep the country's shops and factories usual remedies for inadequate demand aren't working. Interest rates have been pushed down almost as far as they can go. Like the Fed, the Bank of Japan normally targets the interest rate on overnight loans that banks make to each launches every now and then do create some jobs, but they never seem to yield enough bang for the yen: The economy keeps relapsing, while government debt mainly a financial problem. Japan's corporations are too burdened with debt, its banks too burdened with bad loans that have never been acknowledged. On this view, what Japan needs is a long, painful financial housecleaning. economy" of the 1980s (remember when the square mile under the Imperial Palace consumers and investors went into a funk that has depressed the economy, and the depressed economy has perpetuated the funk. On this view, what Japan needs spending programs that will restore confidence and get people spending again. (Although it is tactless to say this, the model everyone privately has in mind is the way wartime spending jolted the United States out of the Great is demand, not supply, how do corporate debt and bad loans cause that problem? more, and the banks are in no position to lend anyway. But Japan's investment as a percentage of gross domestic product is the highest among major advanced those excessive debts and bad loans came from? The problem is that even these high rates of investment aren't enough to absorb the huge sums that consumers wonder whether the stubborn unwillingness of Japan's economic engine to catch big enough or sustained enough. And so (like a small but growing number of 3--that Japan's troubles really stem from a subtle but deadly interaction only much more so, is an aging society. Thanks to a declining birth rate and for at least the next several decades while retirees increase. Given this prospect, the country should save heavily to make provision for the opportunities in Japan are limited, so that businesses will not invest all those savings even at a zero interest rate. And as anyone who has read John is the problem, there is in principle a simple, if unsettling, solution: What Japan needs to do is promise borrowers that there will be inflation in the future! If it can do that, then the effective "real" interest rate on borrowing will be negative: Borrowers will expect to repay less in real terms than the amount they borrow. As a result they will be willing to spend more, which is the conclusion that Japan needs inflation emerges from what looks like impeccable economic logic, we live in an era in which central bankers believe (and are believed to believe) in price stability as an overriding goal. The peculiar result of the credibility of modern central bankers as inflation hawks doesn't matter: It can't lower the nominal interest rate, because that rate is already zero, and because people don't believe that it will allow inflation to break out any time in the future, it can't lower the real This theory is offensive to many people. Deep economic problems are supposed to be a punishment for deep economic sins, not an accidental byproduct of swings in the birth rate. Inflation is supposed to be a deadly poison, not a useful medicine. Above all, it seems implausible that the proposed solution to such severe difficulties could involve so little pain. And not just that we are talking about a huge economy here, an economy whose woes can drag down a lot of smaller countries with it. What really disturbs me is this: If we don't really understand what has gone wrong in Japan, who's to say invitation came, rather disappointingly, by conventional mail. Still, it bursting to the surface, spewing out vast new lands soon to be inhabited by a complex ecosystem, the Web is creating a virtual landscape that will soon be Institute is a libertarian think tank noted mostly for its adamant opposition to government regulation. But what on earth (or in cyberspace) is tenets of the movement are spelled out on the Bionomics Institute home page, of economics are based on the concepts of classical physics, while bionomics is economy is like an "evolving ecosystem." A modern market economy is like a energetic fellow. There are, however, two big weaknesses in his thinking: He doesn't know much about economics, and he doesn't know much about evolution. differ that is generally true. I mean that his description of what conventional economics is all about bears no relation to what actual economists believe or from his use of quotation marks that this is something an actual economist said, or at least that it was the sort of thing that economists routinely say. But no economist I know thinks of the economy as being anything like a economy is like a machine, it is possible to make precise predictions. (In fact, it was economists who came up with the famed "random walk" hypothesis about stock prices, which says that they are inherently believe, but orthodox economics essentially ignores technological change." That change, in particular for his demonstration that technology, not capital accumulation, historically has been the main driving force in economic growth. On a different subject, it's going to be a shock to environmental idea unique to bionomics and totally at odds with orthodox economic thinking. economics depends on the assumption of diminishing returns and that, as a result, economists have completely ignored the possibility of increasing Association gave me for my work on increasing returns and international Well, all this is more or less the usual. Whenever a manifesto about economics contains a sentence that begins, "Orthodox economics that gross domestic product is the sole measure of economic welfare, that surprising, however, is that a man who proposes to replace what he imagines to be the mechanistic worldview of conventional economics with a new view based on evolutionary biology should know so little about the discipline that supposedly with ostentatious footnotes and seemingly learned references. It happens, however, that I am an evolution groupie. I started as a fan of great not only to hero worship of the leading evolutionary theorists but also to reading textbooks and even journal articles. And so when I picked up a copy of perfect: Not one of the right people was mentioned, not one of the key developments discussed. The bionomics version of what evolutionary theory is about has as little to do with the real thing as its version of what economics bionomics guys apparently think evolution is about is constant, seems, in particular, to view evolutionary thinking as the antithesis of "equilibrium economics." Apparently nobody told him that equilibrium often useful to ask what would happen if each individual was doing the best he fact, the really funny thing is that for the most part the bionomics program has already been implemented: Economics already is very similar to evolutionary theory, and vice versa. However, neither field looks anything like squander their intellectual credibility by associating their names with this sort of thing. After all, conventional economics already has lots of nice the answer, I suspect, is sociological. Traditional conservative causes like sort of thing that appeals mainly to rich old men (and conservative think tanks are, of course, mainly funded by rich old men). Young, vigorous conservatives them parade their knowledge of pop culture, some make a point of being photographed wearing miniskirts, and some go for what we might call the are changing! so fast! that we have to use lots! of exclamation points!!! economic theory offers reasons to believe that markets are a good way to organize economic activity. But it does not deify the market system, and it at least could be helped with government intervention. And that, for some original book seems to hedge its bets: It spends a full chapter ("Japan's what the doctrine lacks in serious argument it makes up for in rhetoric. The economy is an ecosystem, like a tropical rain forest! And what could be worse than trying to control a tropical rain forest from the top down? You wouldn't try to control an ecosystem, wiping out species you didn't like and actually, you probably would. I think it's called "agriculture." bionomics? I think the main lesson is that their faith in free markets is just that: a faith, which does not rest on either logic or evidence. Belief comes first; then they look for arguments to justify that belief. And they are therefore not too scrupulous about the quality of those arguments, or of those long haul, or are they looters, out to take the money and run? The essence of the financial crisis that has rocked the world in the last few weeks is this: Investors, which means anyone with money at stake, appear to have decided, once course, to get at this essence you have to dig a little. On the surface, financial crises many countries have experienced. Indeed, if you read the official reports of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that's universally accepted, economic case for devaluation. The country's overvalued transactions take place through barter. As far as most of the economy is concerned, the value and even the existence of the ruble have become more or in the Western sense of the word. By and large they have few depositors. Mainly they are in the business of borrowing money from foreigners and using it to government has relied on a layer of politically connected middlemen to act as wouldn't matter so much, except that government borrowing has spiraled out government has let many basic services lapse and has become erratic at best about paying its own employees (notably, and frighteningly, the military). Instead, the problem is an inability to collect taxes. inability to raise taxes to administrative incompetence in a country unaccustomed to dealing with free markets. But with its industrial base shriveled and the dollar value of gross domestic product stunningly low even exportable resources such as oil, gas, diamonds, and gold. These sorts of traditional, homogeneous commodities are the kinds of thing that even primitive administrative systems normally are able to tax. What is more, the distributed to political supporters, much as a medieval king might assign resources. It has been suggested, in fact, that seven men control about half of would surely follow their lead, to pay the necessary taxes. oligarchs own more than gas fields and banks. They also own politicians. And money to "banks," which in turn have lent that money to the government. The willingness of foreigners to provide this money was based on the belief that eventually the oligarchs would be willing to pay their due, and if they did the country's huge natural resources would make it possible to honor its commitments. However, in the last few months this confidence has evaporated. Foreign lenders have been willing to provide money only at very high interest government would try to inflate away its debt, or simply default on it, led to the need to pay such high rates on its debt, the government needed to borrow even more, further weakening confidence and pushing the rates still higher. devaluation of the ruble was a desperate attempt to buy a bit more time. By reducing the dollar value of the government's debts, while hoping to raise the ruble value of its receipts, it could narrow the financing gap. But instead the devaluation convinced everyone that the game was up and that the ruble was about to become more or less worthless, and that was that. much in their collective interest to have the current regime survive, so that get together and agree to pay enough taxes to keep their rackets going? in a classic "prisoners' dilemma," in which it is in the collective interest of the group that everyone pay some taxes, but in the individual interest of each the oligarchs have engaged in bitter business and political struggles (which, it is a matter of saving the regime that made them rich. Another answer, which may interact with the first, is that all expect the game to end fairly soon, and they are simply trying to grab as has been pointed out in this column before ("The East Is in the Red"), has generally run huge trade surpluses. Think of those surpluses as the way an oligarch's gas or oil gets converted into a billion dollar nest egg someplace possible defense for their actions: They may have believed that the men who avoid disaster, but they needed a little time. In that case the big loans organized a few months ago could have made the difference. But in fact the available. In effect we gave a lot of aid to some future residents of you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and hundreds of articles explaining why Bob Dole's economic plan, which relies on more explaining why Dole, whose contempt for people who believe in that kind of magic is a matter of public record, nonetheless chose to accept their have nothing to add to all of that. But it seems to me that the success of the tax cutters in taking over yet another presidential campaign requires a deeper positive effect on the economy that one need not worry about paying for them favor. If you want, any nonpartisan economist can explain to you at length what page had no doubts that the tax increase would sharply increase the deficit instead of reducing it. Well here we are, three years later: The economy has one suspects he would have won on almost any platform, and that the taunts of is a clear liability. Even promoters of the concept shy away from the label. In will really happen. But it is also because they doubt it would have the attributes that it shares with certain other doctrines, like belief in the gold standard: It appeals to the prejudices of extremely rich men, and it offers Despite its centrality to political debate, economic research is a very institutes, foundations, and so on devoted to promoting an economic doctrine conservatism is a story that somebody needs to write.) The economists these institutions can attract are not exactly the best and the brightest. appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told economics makes any sense, or even whether it goes down to a crushing electoral Enterprise Institutes and Centers for the Study of Capitalism, outlets for and again. When I was younger I thought that ridicule could eventually bring the whole farce to an end, but now I know better. Presumably the pundits are right, and Dole's desperate ploy will fail. But while that will be the end of argued famously that ideas spread from mind to mind much as viruses spread from host to host. It's an exhilaratingly cynical view, because it suggests that to succeed, an idea need not be true or even useful, as long as it has what it takes to propagate itself. (A religious faith that disposes its believers to become martyrs may be quite false, and lethal to its adherents, yet persist if areas, is always out there in the bush, waiting for new victims. I had expected Bob Dole, with his worldliness and sharp wit, to have stronger immunity than most. But weakness in the polls made him vulnerable, and he will never cheaper the more of them you produce (and the closely related idea of "network externalities," which says that some products, like fax machines, become more held fast to that idea despite the obstinate opposition of mainstream economists and, after many years as an academic pariah, finally managed to change the way people think about the economy. That story has been told before, It is also pure fiction. Increasing returns wasn't a new legend is a better story than the legend itself: an object lesson in you may ask. What could be less interesting than squabbling among professors over who deserves the credit for some theory? Well, I could say that this bogus version of intellectual history has metastasized to the point where it may notebook a manifesto describing his project to develop a New Economics based on story. Now let's do a reality check, starting with that walk in the park. It models were basically similar to those developed in the 1970s by the game ignored them. During the course of the 1980s those conceptual difficulties were partly resolved, leading to a burst of theorizing about increasing returns. But Trade: Increasing Returns, Imperfect Competition, and the International credulous? Perhaps a journalist cannot be expected to be an expert on the ins about the discipline he currently covers, what happened to basic journalistic Suppose that someone tells you that, years ago, he made a fundamental discovery that an entire profession, out of sheer Wouldn't you have at least a slight suspicion that this version of events might college library to see whether the facts check out? article exposing fabricated quotes in the memoirs of travails, people make the kind of dramatic, pithy remarks that almost never get uttered in real life. "To admit that increasing returns exist would destroy did, we'd have to outlaw them." "Your theory may be theoretically valid, but there's no evidence of it in the real world." These sound like the kind of thing that The New Yorker might put at the bottom of a page, under the taught us, when someone tells us that his world is populated by remarkably eloquent people who always happen to say exactly what makes the storyteller look good, we are well advised to ask whether that world exists only in his, true, although even so it is unclear why he couldn't just present the theory without the dubious intellectual history. Anyway, increasing returns are it clear in earlier writing that he does not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light. could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really had lost more than a billion dollars in speculative trading, quite literally breaking the bank. But when an even bigger financial disaster was revealed last story quickly faded from the front pages. "Oh well, just another rogue trader," supervised employee using his company's money to gamble on unpredictable markets. On the contrary, there is little question that he was, in fact, implementing a deliberate corporate strategy of "cornering" the world copper Hubris brought him down in the end; but it is his initial success, not his eventual failure, that is the really disturbing part of the tale. the copper market. The essential facts about copper (and many other consumed at once. These two facts mean that a certain amount of speculation is a normal and necessary part of the way the market works: It is inevitable and desirable that people should try to buy low and sell high, building up inventories when the price is perceived to be unusually low and running those inventories down when the price seems to be especially high. but the principle is simple. Buy up a large part of the supply of whatever actually take claim to the stuff itself or buy up "futures," which are nothing have now done, if you have pulled it off, is created an artificial shortage that sends prices soaring, allowing you to make big profits on the stuff you do sell. You may be obliged to take some loss on the supplies you have withheld from the market, selling them later at lower prices, but if you do it right, this loss will be far smaller than your gain from higher current prices. work if you can get it; there are only three important hitches. First, you must be able to operate on a sufficiently large scale. Second, the strategy only sell to you in the first place unless you offer a price so high that the game no longer pays. Third, this kind of thing is, for obvious reasons, quite overcome all these hitches. The world copper market is immense; nonetheless, a single trader, apparently, was able and willing to dominate that market. You might have thought that the kind of secrecy required for such a massive market nothing more than an employee run wild, one could not really fault regulators for failing to rein him in; that would have been his employer's job. But he prices has apparently been common knowledge for years among everyone familiar with the copper market. Indeed, copper futures have been the object of massive The answer may in part be that the global nature of his activities made it unclear who had responsibility. Should it have been Japan, responsibility, however, one suspects that regulators were inhibited by the bring himself to face the fact that even the most successful market manipulator must accept an occasional down along with the ups. Rather than sell some of his copper at a loss, he chose to play double or nothing, trying to repeat his initial success by driving prices ever higher; since a market corner is necessarily a sometime thing, his unwillingness to let go led to disaster. But affair will remind us that not all the profitable things unfettered investors can do with their money are socially productive; maybe it will even remind us why we regulated financial markets in the first place. story that changed my life. I think about that story often; it helps me to stay calm in the face of crisis, to remain hopeful in times of depression, and to woes seem to threaten the world economy as a whole, the lessons of that is told in an article titled "Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill need for cash payments to adolescents. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement: A couple that already has children around may find that watching another couple's kids for an evening is not that much of an additional burden, certainly compared with the benefit of receiving the same service some other evening. But there must be a system for making sure each couple does its fair technical problem. Think about the coupon holdings of a typical couple. During periods when it had few occasions to go out, a couple would probably try to would be an averaging out of these demands. One couple would be going out when another was staying at home. But since many couples would be holding reserves collection and use of dues (paid in scrip), the number of coupons in circulation became quite low. As a result, most couples were anxious to add to difficult to earn coupons. Knowing this, couples became even more reluctant to requiring each couple to go out at least twice a month. But eventually the economists prevailed. More coupons were issued, couples became more willing to was a real recession. Its story tells you more about what economic slumps are and a year's worth of Wall Street Journal editorials. And if you are draw out its implications, it will change the way you think about the undermine consumer confidence. Would this inevitably mean a disastrous recession? Think of it this way: When consumer confidence declines, it is as go out, more anxious to accumulate coupons for a rainy day. This could indeed that the economy did indeed fall into a slump. Don't panic. Even if the head coupon issuer has fallen temporarily behind the curve, he can still ordinarily into trouble because its members were bad, inefficient baby sitters; its troubles did not reveal the fundamental flaws of "Capitol Hill values" or of the world be in the mess it's in? How, for example, can Japan be stuck in a it is not hard to generate something that looks a lot like Japan's inconvenience in their system. There would be occasions when a couple found itself needing to go out several times in a row, which would cause it to run Under this new system, couples would hold smaller reserves of coupons than before, knowing they could borrow more if necessary. The could be made more favorable, encouraging more people to go out. If baby sitters were scarce, those terms could be worsened, encouraging people to go stimulate a depressed economy by reducing the interest rate and cool off an metaphor finally found a situation it cannot handle? During the winter, when it's cold and dark, couples don't want to go out much but are quite willing to stay home and look after other people's winter months, higher rates in the summer. But suppose that the seasonality is very strong indeed. Then in the winter, even at a zero interest rate, there find, which means that couples seeking to build up reserves for summer fun will be even less willing to use those points in the winter, meaning even fewer And this is the winter of Japan's discontent. Perhaps because of its aging population, perhaps also because of a general nervousness to use the economy's capacity, even at a zero interest rate. Japan, say the economists, has fallen into the dread "liquidity trap." Well, what you have just read is an infantile explanation of what a liquidity trap is and how it can happen. And once you understand that this is what has gone wrong, the stake, whimsical parables are not a waste of time but the key to produces only two things: hot dogs and buns. Consumers in this economy insist that every hot dog come with a bun, and vice versa. And labor is the only input any further, I need to ask what you think of an essay that begins this way. Does it sound silly to you? Were you about to turn the virtual page, figuring column is to illustrate a paradox: You can't do serious economics unless you down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings. And I use the word "play" advisedly: Innovative thinkers, in economics and other disciplines, often have future of capitalism. Readers who feel that big subjects can only be properly intellectual style offensive. Such people imagine that when they write or quote such books, they are being profound. But more often than not, they're being profoundly foolish. And the best way to avoid such foolishness is to play dog or a bun. (Hey, realism is not the point here.) Assuming that the economy suppose that improved technology allows a worker to produce a hot dog in one day rather than two. And suppose that the economy makes use of this increased Then a famous journalist arrives on the scene. He takes a look at recent history and declares that something terrible has happened: research project, touring the globe as he talks with executives, government officials, and labor leaders. The picture becomes increasingly clear to him: Supply is growing at a breakneck pace, and there just isn't enough consumer demand to go around. True, jobs are still being created in the bun sector; but soon enough the technological revolution will destroy those jobs too. Global capitalism, in short, is hurtling toward crisis. He writes up his alarming conclusions in a 473-page book; full of startling facts about the changes about the blinkered vision of conventional economists. The book is widely acclaimed for its erudition and sophistication, and its author becomes a lion bit bemused, because they can't quite understand his point. Yes, technological change has led to a shift in the industrial structure of employment. But there has been no net job loss; and there is no reason to expect such a loss in the future. After all, suppose that productivity were to double in buns as well as hot dogs. Why couldn't the economy simply take advantage of that higher it a different way: Productivity growth in one sector can very easily reduce reduces employment in the economy as a whole is a very different matter. number of workers it takes to make a hot dog reduces the number of jobs in the matter how many countries you visit; you might not even learn it from talking to bun manufacturers. It is an insight that you can gain only by playing with experiment too simple to tell us anything about the real world? thing, if for "hot dogs" you substitute "manufactures" and for "buns" you substitute "services," my story actually looks quite a lot like the history of economy's output of manufactures roughly doubled; but, because of increases in productivity, employment actually declined slightly. The production of services million jobs. So in the real economy, as in the parable, productivity growth in one sector seems to have led to job gains in the other. is a deeper point: A simple story is not the same as a simplistic one. Even our little parable reveals possibilities that no amount of investigative reporting could uncover. It suggests, in particular, that what might seem to a naive industry reduces the number of jobs for steelworkers, then productivity growth will rise enough to absorb all the additional production? One good answer is: Why not? If production were to double, and all that production were to be sold, then total income would double too; so why wouldn't consumption double? That is, why should there be a shortfall in consumption merely because the economy again, however, there is a deeper answer. It is possible for economies such slumps are essentially monetary --they come about because people try in the aggregate to hold more cash than there actually is in circulation. (That capacity (compared to what?) has nothing at all to do with it. parable is that final bit about the famous journalist. Surely, no respected figure would write a whole book on the world economy based on such a transparent fallacy. And even if he did, nobody would take him seriously. book titled One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global panoramic description of the world economy, which piles fact upon fact (some of the crucial facts turn out to be wrong, but that is another issue) in apparent demonstration of the thesis that global supply is outrunning global demand. Alas, all the facts are irrelevant to that thesis; for they amount to no more than the demonstration that there are many industries in which growing productivity and the entry of new producers has led to a loss of traditional composition, that the logic of the economy as a whole is not the same as the economy will start looking like the steel industry. But this is a purely and simplistic because he is an accidental theorist, a theorist despite emerge from the facts, unaware that they are driven by implicit assumptions Needless to say, I have little hope that the general public, or even most intellectuals, will realize what a thoroughly silly book knowledgeable and encyclopedic, and is written in a tone of high seriousness. It strains credibility to assert the truth, which is that the main lesson one earnest man to trip over his own intellectual shoelaces. the kind of advice and criticism that could have saved him from himself. His surprising thing, one supposes, for a man who describes economics as "not with seemingly trivial thought experiments, with hypothetical stories about simplified economies producing hot dogs and buns, would be beneath his dignity. And it is precisely because he is so serious that his ideas are so foolish. have never known him well. But I do remember the joke classmates told about story isn't true, but a chapter of that thesis, titled "A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences," does have an appendix that begins "Each agent begins life with a random innate endowment. Q is the endowment set, taken to be a subset of an arbitrary, finite dimensional Euclidean space." bent who has ended up writing and speaking not about Euclidean spaces but about the political economy of race. This is partly because he is as good with words as he is with equations. It is partly because he cares deeply about social issues. But inevitably, it is also partly because he is one of only a handful of those emblematic intellectuals whose career illustrates in microcosm the been exiled once again, cast out by the right essentially because he still cares about what happens to the poor. The dogmatic rigidity, left and right, In the first few pages, he stated the central dilemma of race policy in modern probably would not be enough, and therein lay the dilemma. deserve to be judged on their own merits, not by who their parents were or what group they belong to. On the other hand, anyone who imagines that a child eliminating current racial discrimination might very well fail to that even a world of "equal opportunity" might "perpetuate into the indefinite future the consequences of ethically unacceptable historical practices." If you find that prospect unacceptable, you must support some form of social people special consideration based on the color of their skin as well as on the possible to squaring this circle, finding ways to eliminate the legacy of past racism with as little intrusion as possible on the colorblind ideal. But he has past two decades has he been able to find allies who are even willing to accept dissertation was written only a dozen years after passage of the Civil Rights biggest barrier to progress was no longer active racism of whites but internal social problems of the black community. But black leaders, and to a lesser extent liberalism as a whole, flatly refused even to contemplate that against any black intellectual who tried to challenge the orthodoxy. credit, he did not give in to these pressures. He said what he thought. In so new and dangerous seductions. Let's face it: Any articulate minority intellectual who reliably espouses conservative positions is automatically offered a ticket to a very nice lifestyle. No more rejections from picky academic journals or grubbing for sabbatical time. Instead there are cushy fellowships at Hoover, guest editorials in the Wall he was well on his way to high political office and all the rewards that brings eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your implied subtext was that this absolves society from any responsibility to do Curve was published, it has become clear that almost everything about it was inexcusably wrong: suspect data, mistakes in statistical procedures that not understand what a correlation coefficient means), deliberate suppression of contrary evidence, you name it. Yet conservative publications such as liberal evasions, would not grant him space to critique The Bell his new Institute on Race and Social Division): rejected by the black political elite, which still wants to blame everything on white racism, and equally rejected by a conservatism that wants to do precisely nothing about continuing garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several thousand men, women, and children lived on that living combing the garbage for scrap metal and other recyclables. And they of a Pacific Rim summit. But I found myself thinking about Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail. that while wages and working conditions in the new export industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a big improvement over the "previous, less visible rural poverty." I guess I should have expected that this comment would generate letters along the lines of, "Well, if you lose your comfortable anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers. After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let's turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better. a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions. First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off. might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items. through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty. and suggest "macroeconomics" instead. The spelling checker has a point. You see, macroeconomics has gone out of fashion. Not only academic economists but also some of our most influential economic pundits seem to regard it as bad manners to talk about recessions and recoveries and how governments might alleviate the former and engineer the latter. Ordinarily reasonable people now argue that the business cycle is a trivial matter, unworthy of attention when compared with microeconomic issues like the incentive effects of taxes and regulation. Trying to do anything about recessions is bad for growth, they say, and even thinking about the business cycle is a bad thing, because it so peculiar about this attitude, which seems to become more prevalent each concerns are more pressing than they have been for generations. Not since the been so relevant. So an occasional reminder that the big things do matter, that getting microeconomic policy right is no help if you stumble into a depression, big picture." Economic success, he argues, is simply a matter of getting the incentives right. And he goes on to deride macroeconomics for its "illusion that it could make the whole system run smoothly almost regardless of how the breakneck speed even if the engine was corroded and missing some parts." fourth is unemployed because consumers don't spend enough. And this is not an abstract point: Just look at the economic storms ravaging quite a lot of have become lazy or because the country's factories have fallen into disrepair? productive society than it was a year ago? Of course not: Whatever the ultimate economic journalists has come to disdain macroeconomics, this may be because he with recessions and depressions, in which the economy as a whole is less than beginning with the macroeconomics of booms and slumps and turning to microeconomics only in their second half. Nowadays, however, every textbook as long as possible, introducing the question of recessions and what to do In graduate education the situation has become even more prominent department, students there told me that their macroeconomics course did not even mention money until the last two weeks, and never so much as suggested that monetary policy might have anything to do with business reasons for this aversion to macroeconomics are a little hard to explain to a economy has lately had a smooth few years, but macroeconomics was already in retreat during the anything but tranquil '70s and '80s. (I remember one famous model could be reconciled with the savage recession then gripping the United statistical blip.) Nor did macroeconomics fail the test of empirical relevance. Though it is widely believed that events such as the combination of inflation refused to believe in increasing returns. The truth is that stagflation was predicted as a possibility long before it emerged as a reality and that the disinflation of the 1980s played out just the way the (old) textbooks said it economic theorizing is based on the assumption that individuals behave choose to accept or reject jobs based on a rational calculation of their interests, and so on. You don't have to believe in the literal truth of this assumption to recognize how powerful it is as a working hypothesis. But while least in the short run, companies do not immediately reduce their prices when they cannot sell all their production, and workers do not immediately accept lower wages even when they have trouble finding jobs. This assumption the business cycle into something that is not only understandable but, to some extent, controllable. But it makes many economists uncomfortable; it is the classic case of something that works in practice but not in theory. economists have, more and more, simply avoided the subject; and being human, have tended to rationalize that avoidance by asserting that the subject isn't find microeconomics, with its emphasis on efficiency, interesting unless they were first convinced that the economy could achieve more or less full employment, that it need not relapse into depression. He also knew what too had something useful to say about the Great Depression, and their pompous, windy rivals did not. By abandoning macroeconomics the profession not only leaves the world without guidance it desperately needs; it also risks letting matter. But the big things matter too, and if economists try to pretend that they don't, one of these days they are going to get stomped on. find out why useful business cycle models still need to incorporate again. Like most people who think at all about how much burden their way of life places on Spaceship Earth, I feel a bit guilty. But my conscience is explain. A few months ago an organization called Redefining Progress enlisted circulate an "Economists' Statement on Climate Change," calling for serious measures to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. To be honest, I agreed to be one of the original signatories mainly as a gesture of goodwill, and never expected to hear any more about it; but the statement ended up being signed by, Partly this is just because of who economists are: Being by sentimental about the environment, as long as protecting it does not impinge on walk to the supermarket.) But my unscientific impression is that economists are backgrounds. Why? Because standard economic theory automatically predisposes those who believe in it to favor strong environmental protection. not, of course, the popular image. Everyone knows that economists are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, who think that anything that increases gross domestic product is good and anything else is worthless, and who believe that whatever free markets do must be right. (A recent example of how this stereotype gets perpetuated is the article by sorry to say that some of the people at Redefining Progress published an conventional economic doctrine is a lot more subtle than that. True, economists generally believe that a system of free markets is a pretty efficient way to run an economy, as long as the prices are right --as long, in particular, as people pay the true social cost of their actions. Environmental issues, however, more or less by definition involve situations in which the price is pollutes a river, it uses some of society's resources just as surely as when it burns coal. However, if the firm pays for coal but not for the use of clean water, it is to be expected that management will be economical in its use of coal and wasteful in its use of water." In other words, when it comes to the environment, we do not expect the free market to get it right. intervene in the market to discourage activities that damage the environment. The usual recommendation is to do so either by charging fees for the right to statement reminds us, the idea of pollution taxes is one of those iconic positions, like free trade, that commands the assent of virtually every externalities" such as traffic congestion are obvious problems, in practice, efforts to make markets take environmental costs into account are few and far between. So economists who actually believe the things they teach generally support a much more aggressive program of environmental protection than the one we actually have. True, they tend to oppose detailed regulations that tell people exactly how they must reduce pollution, preferring schemes that provide a financial incentive to pollute less but leave the details up to the private sector. But I would be hard pressed to think of a single economist not actually United States should protect the environment less, not more, than it currently But won't protecting the environment reduce the gross any tax reduces the incentives to work, save, and invest. Thus a tax on exhaust emissions from cars will induce people to drive cleaner cars or avoid driving altogether. But since it will also in effect lower the payoff to earning extra money (since you wouldn't end up driving the second car you could buy with that money anyway), people will not work as hard as they would have without the tax. The result is that taxes on pollution (or anything else) will, other things already a whole lot of taxing and spending going on. Even in the United States, where the government is smaller than in any other advanced country, about a people from engaging in taxable activities like working or investing. means is that the revenue from any new taxes on pollution could be used to reduce other taxes, such as Social Security contributions or the income tax Does this constitute an independent argument for taxing pollution, quite aside from its environmental payoff? Would we want to have, say, a carbon tax even if we weren't worried about global warming? Well, there has been an excruciatingly technical argument about this, mysteriously known as the "double dividend" debate; the general consensus seems to be no, and that on what? "Gross domestic product is not a measure of the nation's economic getting the price of the environment right means a rise in consumption of economists agree on something, but what they agree on is the warm and cuddly away from taxes on employment and income toward taxes on pollution and other science and good economics, as well as by good intentions. Inevitably, then, it appears at the moment to be a complete political nonstarter. The problem, as with many good policy ideas, is that the Great First, there is Ignorance. Only last year Congress rushed to cut gasoline taxes to offset a temporary price rise. Not many voters stopped to ask where the money was coming from. So what politician will be foolish pollution, even with the assurance that other taxes will be lowered at the same time? (My friends in the administration tell me that the word "taxes" has been banned even from internal discussions about environmental policy.) is hard to think of a way to limit global warming that will not gradually this is a pretty small one. But the coal miners and the energy companies are actively opposed to green taxes, while the broader public that would benefit It used to be that the big problem in formulating a sensible environmental evil, it is immoral to put a price on it. These days, however, the main problem to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to expect the Economists' Statement to change the world. But then I didn't expect it to go as far as it has. Certainly those of us who signed it did the right thing; and maybe, just maybe, we did our bit toward saving the planet. hoped for better, I have become resigned to the accumulation of tawdry detail seem to be a question for a political analyst, not an economist. But there is an approach to political analysis known as "rat choice" (rat as in border of the two fields. The working hypothesis of rat choice is that voting behavior reflects the more or less rational pursuit of individual interests. This may sound obvious, innocuous, and even excessively optimistic. But if you really think its implications through, they turn out to be quite subversive. Indeed, if you take rat choice seriously, you stop asking why democracy works What is the problem? Won't rational voters simply choose politicians who promise to serve their interests? Well, in a rough sense they do. The logic of democratic politics normally pushes both parties toward the voter. Consider, for example, the question of how big the government should be. In general, people with low incomes prefer a government that imposes high taxes in order to provide generous benefits. Those with high incomes prefer a government that does no such thing. The Democrats are, by inclination, the party of outstretched palms, the Republicans the party of tight fists. But both are forced to move away from those inclinations toward actual policies that more or less satisfy the voters in the middle, who don't like paying taxes but do like knowing that they won't be stuck with Grandma's medical bills. the government spends subsidizing irrigation water for Western farmers. Although these issues, cumulatively, are important to the electorate, the of the individual voter to take the trouble to track the details of public policy. After all, how much difference will one vote make? only to those who pay for it. It is clearly in the interest of all boaters to have a rescue service. But no individual boater has any incentive to pay for the service if others are willing to do so. If we leave provision of a lifesaving service up to individual decisions, each individual will try to solution is government. It is in the collective interest of boaters that each boat owner be required to pay a fee, to support a Coast Guard that provides sanitation, national defense, the Centers for Disease Control, and so on. The force people to pay taxes whether or not they feel like it. But there is a catch: The democratic process, the only decent way we know for deciding how that coercive power should be used, is "Everybody's business is nobody's business. If everyone spends an additional electorate. If everyone but me spends the hour evaluating the candidates and I spend it choosing where to invest my savings, I will get a better return on my investments as well as a better government." As a result, the public at large know or care whether the United States uses a substantial amount of its should they? (I only keep track of the dispute because I have to update my believed that money alone could buy him the election. But money does help, and any practical politician comes to realize that betraying the public interest on small issues involves little political cost, because voters lack the individual is to try to change the incentives of politicians, by making it more difficult for special interests to buy influence. It is easy to be cynical about this, but the truth is that legal limits on how money can be given do have considerable effect. To take only the most extreme example: Outright bribes do not, as far as we can tell, play a big role in determining federal There are those who believe that if only the media would treat the public with turn away from salacious stories about celebrities and read earnest articles erosion of public trust in institutions that used to act, to at least some degree, as watchdogs. Once upon a time a politician had to worry about the reactions of unions, churches, newspaper editors, even local political bosses, all of whom had the time and inclination to pay attention to politics beyond the sound bites. Now we have become an atomized society of individuals who get to bring back the opinion leaders of yore, I am all for it. remove temptation, by avoiding policy initiatives that make it easy for politicians to play favorites. This is one reason why some of us cringed when and so on. Whether or not those trips did any good, or gave the wrong way to make government by the people truly be government for the people. That human events have so few people lost so much money so quickly. There is no billions of dollars disappear. Essentially, the hedge fund took huge bets with we now know that it had placed wagers directly or indirectly on the prices of more than a trillion dollars' worth of assets. When it turned out to have bet and end of the story are not enough: We need to know the motivations and it's not that simple. The people who provide money now in return for future move in sync, you might not be able to deliver on your promise. So they will demand evidence that you have enough capital to make up any likely losses, plus extra compensation for the remaining risk. But if the required compensation and the capital you need to put up aren't too large, there may still be an did, or at least claimed to do, was find less obvious opportunities along the same lines, by engaging in complicated transactions involving many assets. For example, suppose that historically, increases in the spread between the price interest differential could be reduced by taking out a side bet, shorting the course of a couple of months, somehow it all went bad. What happened? of circumstance. Their trading strategy, goes this story, was basically sound. the gods are sufficiently against you, if a peculiar, nay, unprecedented According to this version, there is no particular moral to the story, except version of events does not accuse the principals of evil intent, but it does accuse them of myopia. The magic word is "kurtosis," a k a "fat tails." The story goes like this: Everyone knows that there are potential events that are not likely to happen but will have very big effects on financial markets if they do. A realistic assessment of risk should take into account the so the story goes, forgot about reality. They treated the statistical didn't happen, as if they represented the entire universe of possibilities. As a result, they greatly understated the risk to which they were exposing both believe that they were really that naive. These were experienced hands (not Anyone who has lived through energy crisis and debt crisis, inflation and part of life. Which brings us to the third, more sinister version of events: it to me. Suppose, he says, that someone was willing to lend you a trillion dollars to invest as you like. What that lender has done is in effect to give you a "put option" on whatever you buy with that trillion dollars. That is, because you can always declare bankruptcy and walk away, it is as if you owned the right to sell those assets at a fixed price, whatever might happen in the market. And because the value of an option depends positively on money in the riskiest, most volatile assets you can find. After all, it's heads you become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, tails you get some bad press their prizes for, guess what, developing the modern theory of option This "moral hazard" version of the story may seem a bit too stark to be believed. Did the managers really sit around saying, "Hey, let's gamble with the money those suckers have lent us"? Actually, it's a hedge fund types I do know are, as my correspondent puts it, "about as moral as great white sharks." But anyway, never underestimate the power of hypocrisy. It is entirely possible for a man to act in a crudely cynical way without admitting it even to himself. Given their enormous incentive to take improper with so much money to lose. All those clever strategies depended on for the promise of German bonds, or whatever, later. Why were those creditors would be protected from loss by the government. In effect, they savings and loans, in which government guarantees underwrote an era of that there was an implicit understanding that any major financial institution Economists often make the working assumption that the private sector always knows what it is doing, that markets do stupid things only when the government gives them distorted incentives. It's a useful working assumption, but it is no more than that. In fact, everything I can see suggests that the big boys really team, they failed to ask even the simplest questions (such as, "How much money matter, if you believe that they are not foolish but do foolish things because financial structure is as sound as we like to imagine. Did somebody say "crony these letters rarely offer interesting reasons for their anger or, indeed, reasoned arguments of any kind: They know that globalization is evil, turned out to contain something new. Instead of merely telling me that I was a fool, some of the writers accused me of personal venality, of actually being paid to defend the interests of multinational corporations and foreign powers. seems perfectly clear: All honest men can see the obvious truth that globalization is a terrible thing, and only a capitalist hireling would deny it. I guess I already knew that many people believed this, but the latest letters suggested that it might be useful if I told their writers something In case you were wondering: I am not a crook. I am not on any corporate boards; do not get paid to defend capitalism; and have not, to my correspondents are not entirely wrong about the way the world works. Wealthy men and powerful organizations do seek to buy the appearance of intellectual legitimacy for economic doctrines that serve their interests. It is possible for economic analysts who might otherwise have limited job prospects to make a comfortable living by professing certain views on the global economy. It just so happens that support for free trade is not one of supply, too little demand. Unfortunately, there is so much logic and evidence behind the case for free trade that many smart people are willing to make that case for nothing; they spoil the market for anyone who might want to make money at it. And anyway, there isn't that much of a market. The benefits of free trade, though substantial, are thinly spread, so it isn't in the interest of any individual to spend a lot of money promoting that cause. Protectionism, by contrast, tends to impose widely spread costs but to confer benefits on concentrated interest groups, who therefore have a strong incentive to lobby not an abstract speculation: In the United States, at least, it is easy to be specific about who pays whom to say what about globalization. Presumably, correspondents obviously weren't, let me trace out the basics. funded by labor unions rather than industrialists), and even those who benefit player in this game, and following the money trails that lead back to him is a pretty good way to understand how this particular piece of the world really appearance of intellectual legitimacy for his cause. contributions came from the auto and steel industries.) He also supplied contributor to the United States Business and Industrial Council, a lobbying group that was originally formed to oppose the New Deal but which in recent years has devoted its energies to opposing free trade. (The council was climate of opinion have had considerable effect. The institutions and of view that still commands virtually no support among professional economists, and which was regarded, even a decade ago, as politically beyond the pale. across the usual political lines. For example, guests of honor at the party Business and Industrial Council's Educational Foundation, is simultaneously using their money to buy influence directly, special interests pursue the supply intellectual rationales for the policies they want. We're not talking conspiracy theory here: It's all quite legal, and more or less aboveboard. himself turned his attention from money politics to the global economy, he everyone? And regardless of who supports them, these guys have a lot of credulity reflect ignorance about the world beyond the Beltway. Most economists do not get paid to express particular views. Try to get a job at free markets; you will learn the hard way that the currency of academic success is creativity, not ideological correctness. (It might actually be a good thing if academic economists spent more time educating the world about familiar Men do not, in fact, have a lot of expertise to offer. On the contrary, looking these particular hired guns as The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight. After all, a policy advocate of whatever persuasion ought to be able to make a case for his position without relying on calculations that count the same benefits twice, or forgetting that foreign exchange must either be spent on imports or invested abroad, that it can't just disappear. And he should be able to look up Man, in short, isn't a real expert; he just plays one on television. be shocked to hear that supposed progressives receive much of their funding from wealthy reactionaries, or even that supposed experts are actually making it up as they go along. But who will tell the people? in Slate and elsewhere. Don't worry, I won't respond here to that attack. If What we are really fighting about is a matter of epistemology, of how one try to follow arguments about economics among intellectuals whose politics are economy. On one side there are those whose views are informed by academic economics, the kind of stuff that is taught in textbooks. On the other there members of this faction have held university appointments. But most of them lack academic credentials and, more important, they are basically hostile to the kind of economics on which such credentials are based. textbook economics, however, where does its worldview come from? Well, here's a my drab title, but also added a dreadful subtitle: "The Rich, the Right, and the Facts: Deconstructing the Income Distribution Controversy." Language Association want to use an academic buzzword that has been the butt of so many jokes? (What do you get when you cross a Mafioso and a deconstructionist? Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand.) How could the cause of liberal revival be served by making me sound like a science and more like literary criticism is a surprisingly common attribute of faculties" in which "departments develop viciously opinionated, inbred, sometimes bitter and tyrannical but definitely exciting intellectual climates." economics, the stuff that is in the textbooks, is largely based on mathematical reasoning. I hope you think that I am an acceptable writer, but when it comes to economics I speak English as a second language: I think in equations and diagrams, then translate. The opponents of mainstream economics dislike people like me not so much for our conclusions as for our style: They want economics to be what it once was, a field that was comfortable for the basically literary between the "two cultures," between the essentially literary sensibility that outlook that is arguably the true glory of our civilization. That war goes on; and economics is on the front line. Or to be more precise, it is territory that algebraic reasoning that lies behind modern economics is very difficult to challenge on its own ground. To oppose it they must invoke alternative standards of intellectual authority and legitimacy. In effect, they are saying, Evolutionary Genetics flatly declares, "If you can't stand algebra, stay away from evolutionary biology." There is a core set of crucial ideas in his subject that, because they involve the interaction of several different factors, can only be clearly understood by someone willing to sit still for a bit of math. (Try to give a purely verbal description of the reactions among can't stand algebra are not willing to stay away from the subject. They are misrepresents the field (perhaps because he does not fully understand its essentially mathematical logic), but who wraps his misrepresentations in so many layers of impressive, if irrelevant, historical and literary erudition is right, both about evolution and about economics. There are important ideas in both fields that can be expressed in plain English, and there are plenty of fools doing fancy mathematical models. But there are also important ideas that are crystal clear if you can stand algebra, and very difficult to grasp if you can't. International trade in particular happens to be a subject in which a why it is the particular subfield of economics in which the views of those who understand the subject and those who do not diverge most sharply. way to resolve this conflict peacefully. It is possible for a very skillful writer to convey in plain English a sense of what serious economics is about, to hide the algebraic skeleton behind a more appealing facade. But that won't appease the critics; they don't want economics with a literary facade, they want economics with a literary core. And so people like me and people like satisfied unless they get economics back from the nerds. But they can't have Moreover, for reasons explained below, it is in the public interest to have Bill Gates always running a bit scared of the Justice Department. Nonetheless, crude misunderstandings posing as sophisticated analysis prevail. ought to say is that the public has no interest in helping Bill Gates' rivals for their own sake. It's easy to think of the people who run software companies guys are no more in need of extra money than Gates is, and if allowing him to good for the rest of us, so be it. Those of us who do not get paid in software stock options should not allow ourselves to become pawns, either way, in naive faith in the perfection of free markets. Software is an industry characterized by powerful increasing returns in both production and more copies of Navigator in use, the more attractive it is to the typical user. These increasing returns make the kind of atomistic, "perfect" competition that prevails in the market for, say, wheat impossible in the market for browsers or word processors. Necessarily, each type of product will in the end be produced does this concentration of production take place? One of the depressing things that they convey monopoly power purely randomly, on whoever happens to be in clearly inferior technologies to become "locked in." Now path dependence has of something you have already produced, the lower the cost of producing the next one. You might think this means that whoever gets into a market first will companies that know they face a learning curve will compete fiercely to move down it more rapidly, selling cheaply in the early stages of a product cycle (and therefore losing money) in the hope of making the money back later. logic applies to increasing returns on the demand side: As a manufacturer, if I know that a typical customer's choice of browser depends both on the price and on the number of other people using that browser, I will initially make my own must incur initial losses that are, in effect, part of the price of entry into And because nobody will want to pay this entry fee without a reasonable hope of earning it back, only a few companies will enter a market subject to strong increasing returns. The point is that the eventual domination of an industry by to get a head start. On the contrary, it is precisely because it isn't company has a small head start but offers a clearly inferior product or has clearly higher costs, rivals can and will overtake it. But nobody can be sure over with consumers. Thus, competition in a market characterized by increasing those who enter cross the finish line. Those who do make it across the finish line will typically make big profits. But this profitability is necessary to competition that ends up being won by a handful of players. Those who make vast what matters is not who wins or loses, but how they play the game. And if they profitable, or that nerdy types tend to dislike its products. The real concern fact is that MS has been very careful not to use its undoubted power to practice any crude, obvious version of what is known in the trade as "vertical foreclosure, and as a result inhibited the development of complementary software (although the main problem was Apple's persistent belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that everyone would be willing to pay a premium restrained by the knowledge that any crude use of its power would indeed land here is how I understand it: After initially missing the significance of the browser that can find both internal and external documents to be an integral free, but then that would be normal practice in this kind of industry even if the subtlety of the real issues here, what is the chance that this stuff will be decided on its merits? When you hear that despite the fact that he has either believes or chooses to claim that this case is about path has retained the services of that economic and technology expert Bob Dole, you knew where the modern economy was going and was contemptuous of economists who clung to their old ideas about the primacy of markets. Clearly giant corporations, driven by the imperatives of technology, were replacing the chaos of the market with bureaucratic order. The age of business heroes was over: "With the rise of the modern corporation, the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists as an individual person in the mature industrial enterprise." The economy of the future would be run by faceless organization men, whose ability to manipulate pliable consumers would eliminate the traditional uncertainties associated with market competition. In effect, capitalism was evolving spontaneously into of course, only the paranoid survived, or something like that. And yet generation seems to repeat. Yesterday every industry was going to look like automobiles, and every company like General Motors; today every industry is the "business revolution," the Knowledge Economy, the Network Economy, and the "new economy" (not to be confused with the New Economy I wrote about last month) are likely to be disappointed. Even though information technology may well be the main driving force behind future economic growth, it's very unlikely that the small share of the economy. In its day electricity changed everything, too, but there was never a time when most people worked for electric utilities or even for employers who looked anything like electric utilities. Still, even if every industry isn't about to look like software, it is worth asking what is important to get past the obvious, but mainly irrelevant, surfaces of things. Of course information technology is nifty; but the latest technology triumphant banners proclaimed "All By Steam!"). The real question is whether such rules, ranging from the more or less incomprehensible ("Embrace dumb power") to the basically silly ("Follow the free"), all wrapped in trendy rhetoric about living "on the edge of chaos" and all that. But most of his rules amount to variations on two themes: In the Network Economy supply curves slope down instead of up, and demand curves slope up instead of down. At least, that's what I think he's saying. To the extent that he is, he is actually on to both production and consumption. That is, the more units of something the economy is already producing, the harder it is to produce one unit more; the more units of something people are already consuming, the less they are willing to pay to consume one unit more. That is why the conventional supply curve, which shows how much will be produced at any given price, slopes up; and the demand curve, which shows how much people will buy at any given price, slopes returns are a good assumption for agriculture (The more wheat you try to grow, the worse the land on which the marginal bushel is grown), elsewhere in the economy it is quite possible to have increasing returns, in which the which the availability of skilled labor, the presence of specialized suppliers, bit of useful jargon for what happens when the usefulness of a product depends on how many other people possess something similar. A telephone is a toy when only a few people have one; it is a necessity when everyone has one. a long time. And while economists may historically have downplayed their importance, those days are long past. In fact, by now, increasing returns are rather old hat. Everybody knows that sufficiently strong increasing returns can cause discontinuous change, with markets exploding when they reach a "critical mass," that small events can have big effects when a market is near a "tipping also knows that while it is easy to tell good stories along these lines, it's a lot harder when you get down to real cases: It's amazingly hard to identify a critical mass or a tipping point for an actual industry, even after the fantasies," imagining themselves heroic rebels against the empire of orthodoxy. sure that boring conventional thinkers could not have anticipated their radical what's new about the rules is the claim that now, for the first time, they apply to a large part of the economy. However, technology boosters, who won't stop thinking about tomorrow, often forget to think about yesterday: It's not at all clear that increasing returns are any more important in software than they were in the early days of railroads, electricity, telephones, radio, even automobiles (What good is a car without gas stations? Why open a gas station if nobody has a car?). And it's very unlikely that in the future everything will information sector itself will turn into a boring mature industry. If there is something new in the writings of Kelly and future in which the curves slope the wrong way, they endorse it. That works goes a pronounced libertarian bent, a belief that the new economy is too dynamic, organic, or whatever to be regulated from above. odd about these libertarian conclusions is that they do not at all follow from the premises. On the contrary: A world in which increasing returns are prevalent is one in which markets are likely to get it wrong. Products that should be developed never get off the ground, or do so much later than they machine only when enough other people have them to make it worthwhile.) DOS, but everyone uses DOS because everyone else uses DOS). Waste occurs because of coordination failures (In the early days of railroads each line had a different gauge). Indeed, increasing returns have traditionally been used as arguments against free markets, for government intervention. You may not believe that such intervention will work in practice, but that's a judgment about the rules of politics, not economics. exploit the extraordinary possibilities offered by photolithography, not because of any special virtue in the way it operates. Other sectors in which characterized by increasing returns to production: Once you've made a movie, showing it to another person costs virtually nothing. It is also characterized by increasing returns to consumption: Many people want to see a movie because other people have seen it. In fact, by my reckoning, the movie business handily means "Sell your signature product cheap, and make money off accessories"; major blockbusters make much of their money off product placements and toy sales, and even theater owners depend on sodas and snacks to turn a profit. The While the prophets of the "new economy" may seem to be telling us that we're heading for a future in which every industry looks like Silicon Valley, what they are really saying is that we are on our way to an era in which there's no business that isn't like show business. Let's hope they're wrong. because analysts think it will "suck the life out" of established companies. Any discussion of the technology business is colored with the lurid vocabulary industry as overpaid Ninja Turtles? Surely this isn't the case. Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where plying the seminar circuit, but his translators and interpreters are, along The first clue that something is amiss is that only dead generals seem to give business advice. Live generals are experts on the ancient warfare. Where's the chivalry in a stealth bomber? Besides, modern examples are obviously irrelevant to the next marketing plan. Dead experts, on the other hand, can opine on topics like swordsmanship, which are so irrelevant first moved from theoretical physics to business, I dutifully read the opportunity to behead miscreant employees (although in some cases, it is a the purported "battles" famed in the lore and legend of the software guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options. The winners will be worth something; the losers will negotiate new compensation deals with the next employer. A great deal of intellectual effort goes into this competition, but bigger the technological "confrontation," the more slowly it occurs. Industry pundits have long predicted the death of the mainframe computer at the hands of different things. Utilities bills and payroll were not good candidates for a a few mainframe applications have become feasible on PC servers, and it is clear that one day, the last mainframe will be turned off. That day may be titans has been about as exciting to watch as a melting glacier. Yet it is far expanding into a vacuum by operating in a new or unprecedented manner. It's hard to take the world by storm and butt heads with entrenched competitors at the same time. Technological "revolutions" don't really overthrow before. The new appendages might grow faster than their predecessors, and so isn't quite the same as being annihilated, and it certainly isn't anything like died in favor of computerized fonts. However, each had a 100-year ride of challenger stages an upset during the initial period of high growth. The say, over a period of four to six years. Hardly a blitzkrieg. When a winner does emerge, the victory is rarely equivocal. Suicide, rather than death in Competitors bring pressure to bear on a company, but the really damaging moves trend is ignored; attempts to diversify beyond the initial product line stall. The most common problem is that the company loses touch with the creativity and of the founders and key technical staff. No competitor or other external agent can cause this sort of mortal damage; to find the culprit, senior management people use the word "domination" more often when referring to my employer than you'd envision for world domination. Perhaps my insider's view is biased, but at least it's informed, unlike those of the many armchair experts opining on of the technology business gets spiced up because the reality is so bland. Professional storytellers find this particularly vexing. The business press is keen on salacious sound bites, because without such enhancement, nobody would give a damn. "Man Bites Dog" is a great headline. "Dog Bites Man" is a poor substitute, but beats "Man and Dog Work Really Hard Late at Night for a Long Time Until One of Them Screws Up." The last has all the excitement of a game of experts, analysts, and other touts. But the press only borrows the martial rhetoric that business leaders use themselves. It's not hard to see why they is to admit that you're a pudgy functionary whose most daring deed is to draft of conflict help hide the basic truth that business leaders are, in real life, more contemplative than combative, more sedentary than savage. Leadership is to terms with this reality isn't easy, especially for the largely male contingent of senior managers and pundits whose personal machismo is on the executives. They're steeped in a culture that honors power and conflict, yet plainly don't yet have the physiques to match the myth. So, they compensate with vocabulary, animating their play with exaggerated violence and tough talk, smashing, kicking, and zapping the imaginary bad guys. The good news is that rest of the world would be struck off the export tally, while the goods the imports. But these would be minor adjustments: New York City is basically not in the business of producing physical objects. So we can be sure that the city whole, which is why splitting it off from the rest of the country would give at large) of intangibles such as financial services and tickets to see residents, who receive lots of income from the property they own elsewhere. It would not be surprising to find that the city actually runs a surplus on its "current account," a measure that includes trade in services and investment income as well as the merchandise trade balance. But if it's the trade deficit the problem. Nothing real would have changed, but maybe it would make some feel better about another trade issue, the supposed threat posed by China's merchandise trade (although its balance on current account has fluctuated largely a statistical illusion produced by the fact that so much of the management and ownership of the country's industry is located on the other side but perhaps it may help calm some of the fears being fostered by underemployed of the new fears in his New York Times review of The Big Ten: The Big of it matched word for word a recent speech by House Minority Leader and him for imagining that developing countries, China included, would provide keep wages and purchasing power low, they will have trouble attracting the foreign investment they require, both to service debt and to finance statements, especially in prominent places, for in so doing they protect us are influential, to imagine that widely held views must actually make at least equivalently, he is claiming that they will run massive trade surpluses. But with the value of its production. Maybe you don't think that income will get should we imagine that people in emerging countries, unlike people in advanced nations, cannot find things to spend their money on? one might well expect that emerging economies would typically run trade (or at presumably attract inflows of foreign investment, allowing them to invest more another way, a country that attracts enough foreign investment "both to service debt and to finance growth" must, by definition, buy more goods and services has the huge cost advantage that comes from combining First World productivity with Third World wages? The answer is that the premise must be wrong: When situation in which these countries are able to "produce sophisticated goods and logic, my position sounds unrealistic to many readers. After all, in reality Third World countries do run massive trade surpluses, and their wages Economist and opening it to the last page, which each week conveniently offers tables summarizing economic data for a number of emerging economies. We deficits (as does the group as a whole); nine run current account deficits. Of Labor Statistics makes such data available on its Foreign Labor Statistics quite nicely: Emerging economies do typically run trade deficits, wages do rise with productivity, and actual experience offers no support at all for grimmer be a matter of simple ignorance: It must involve ignorance with intent. After only writes frequently about the Third World threat but also decorates his writings with many statistics, not to notice that most of those countries run trade deficits rather than surpluses, or that wages have in fact increased dramatically in countries that used to have cheap labor. It is, I imagine, equally difficult to pursue such a career without ever becoming aware of the arithmetical necessity that countries attracting big inflows of capital must perhaps the uncanny ability not to notice these things is acquired by focusing lots of foreign capital. Most of that trade surplus, as we've seen, is a statistical illusion. But it is still, at first sight, hard to understand how China can attract so much foreign investment without running a large current page of the Economist and ask which country runs the biggest trade officials siphon off a large fraction of the country's foreign exchange earnings, parking it in safe havens abroad rather than making it available to it, suffers from a milder form of the same ailment. The reason those inflows of foreign capital don't finance a trade deficit is that they are offset by outflows of domestic capital. In particular, huge sums are being invested trade surplus, in other words, that surplus is a sign of weakness rather than as an apology for China's thoroughly nasty government. I fear the worst in Hong however, is China's trade surplus. Neither should you. has changed his mind about economic policy so often that now his officials sound insincere even when they speak the plain truth. economists had already concluded: Workers are not doing as badly as recent headlines might suggest. In particular, the impact of corporate downsizing has commentators had reason for their skepticism. After all, other members of the to find themselves downsized out of the middle class. And even if they keep their jobs, the fear of being fired has forced them to accept stagnant or declining wages while productivity and profits soar. contrast, is telling the complicated truth rather than an emotionally wrong (about this and most other things), think about the strange case of the missing children. During the early 1980s, sensationalist journalism, combining abductions" are a media staple to this day. In reality, however, such crimes that abductions never happen. They do, and they are terrible things. Nor is the children, life is sheer hell. Almost always, however, the people who victimize children are not strangers. For every child kidnapped by a stranger, at least a thousand are sexually abused by family members. But stranger abductions made good copy, and therefore became a public concern out of all proportion to their Corporate downsizing is neither as terrible nor as rare as stranger abduction, but the two phenomena share some characteristics. Like exploitation, that is only a minor part of the real problem. listed just about every large layoff by a major corporation over the last five years. The number of jobs eliminated by each company appeared in large type describing a national catastrophe. But if you add up all the numbers, the total number of workers who lose or change jobs every year, even in the healthiest economy. And the great majority of downsized workers do find new jobs. Although most end up making less in their new jobs than they did before, only a fraction happen, does: Strangers kidnap children; mathematicians become terrorists; executives find themselves flipping hamburgers. The important question is not whether these stories are true; it is whether they are typical. How do they fit number of "good jobs" and the pay that goes with those jobs are steadily rising. The workers who have the skill, talent, and luck to get these jobs generally do very well. Only a relative handful of "good job" holders (which is to say only a few hundred thousand a year) experience serious reverses. doing badly are those who do not have good jobs and never did. Those with lousy economy" are not the few thousand managers who have become hamburger flippers but the tens of millions of hamburger flippers, janitors, and so on whose real matter? It does if you are trying to set any sort of policy priorities. Should we, as some in the administration want, focus our attention on preserving the companies to stop announcing layoffs? Should we use the tax system to penalize companies that fire workers and reward those that do not? Or, instead, should we fight tooth and nail to preserve and extend programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit that help the working poor? It is disingenuous to say we should do both: Money is scarce and so is political capital. If we focus on small problems that make headlines, we will ignore bigger problems that don't. some credit. No doubt his political masters allowed him to downsize the issue presidents. Sometimes, however, an economic analysis that is politically reason that now escapes me, I began to wonder what kind of president Al Gore of his administration's first couple of years. The same might be true of his pass judgment on the scientific merits of the book's environmental analysis, but Gore touches on areas where I do know something and, in so doing, he gives nothing) more than long discussions on how to save the world with a simple attracted by matters social and economic, Gore by matters environmental and consumer of pop economics, Gore's corresponding vice seems to be pop entirely free from pop econ. The book contains a chapter, lamentably titled economic theory is constitutionally incapable of dealing with environmental problems. "Many popular textbooks on economic theory fail even to address subjects as basic to our economic choices as pollution or the depletion of natural resources," Gore declares. Actually, I have all the leading my competitors' ideas), and every one has an extensive section on environmental issues. One looks in vain in Gore's book for even a mention of the fundamentals of standard environmental economics: pollution as the prime example of an "externality" (a social cost that the market does not properly value), and the standard recommendation that externalities be corrected with pollution taxes or tradable emission permits. (I wrote about the economics of environmentalism in last year, in "Earth in the Balance Sheet.") Since these concepts have actually made their way from theory into practice, one wonders how he missed revision of the Clean Air Act, for example, and both fees and permits have been me, at least, the really revealing part of Earth in the Balance was the science trends, are the motivating example for a concept known as existing pile. Bit by bit the pile's sides will become steeper. When they on the pile can produce anything from no effect to a massive sand slide. Specifically, the distribution of avalanche sizes follows a particular mathematical form known as a "power law" that is found in many natural and some social phenomena, such as the sizes of earthquakes and the sizes of cities. lots of power laws out there in the real world, such models hold the key to laws, but that his claims of having developed a universal theory are a bit If you are wondering what all this has to do with saving the planet, congratulations. But here is what Gore, who made a pilgrimage to begin by applying it to the developmental stages of a human life. The formation unique and thus affected by events differently. A personality reaches the critical state once the basic contours of its distinctive shape are revealed; then the impact of each new experience reverberates throughout the whole person, both directly, at the time it occurs, and indirectly, by setting the stage for future change. Having reached this mature configuration, a person continues to pile up grains of experience, building on the existing base. But sometimes, at midlife, the grains start to stack up as if the entire pile is still pushing upward, still searching for its mature shape. The unstable configuration that results makes one vulnerable to a cascade of change. In psychological terms, this phenomenon is sometimes called a midlife change. refuted not only classical physics but also conventional morality; or those who imagined that because quantum mechanics showed that the apparent solidity of the material world is an illusion, it vindicated the thoughts of Eastern mystics. In the end, these particular confusions don't seem to have done the alarmingly high: from Physical Review Letters to the latest best seller by Tom Peters almost before you know it. This is arguably starting to distort science regime, acquire a level of acceptance and momentum that may or may not be warranted by its actual scientific credibility." And the track record of pop science enthusiasms is uniformly dismal. Does anyone remember cybernetics or catastrophe theory? Does anyone know what happened to chaos? It would be unfortunate if the already worrying faddishness of science were to receive a worry: that a President Gore would give undue credence to the views of his favorite pop science heroes and their friends. Occasionally, I have a guess I shouldn't take that nightmare seriously. For one thing, Earth in the Balance was written a long time ago, and we may suppose that its author has learned a lot since then. And anyway Gore, if and when he becomes president, is been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance. they are equally dedicated to the belief that the key to prosperity is a return a finger on actual monetary policy. Nonetheless, these are influential There is a case to be made for a return to the gold standard. It is not a very good case, and most sensible economists reject it, but the idea is not completely crazy. On the other hand, the ideas of our modern gold bugs are completely crazy. Their belief in gold is, it turns current world monetary system assigns no special role to gold; indeed, the Federal Reserve is not obliged to tie the dollar to anything. It can print as much or as little money as it deems appropriate. There are powerful advantages to such an unconstrained system. Above all, the Fed is free to respond to actual or threatened recessions by pumping in money. To take only one example, that flexibility is the reason the stock market crash of 1987--which started out every bit as frightening as that of 1929--did not cause a slump in the real advantages, however, it also has risks. For one thing, it can create uncertainties for international traders and investors. Over the past five costs of this volatility are hard to measure (partly because sophisticated financial markets allow businesses to hedge much of that risk), but they must be significant. Furthermore, a system that leaves monetary managers free to do have been quick to take the opportunity. That is why countries with a history monetary independence is a poisoned chalice. (Argentine law now requires that is no obvious answer to the question of whether or not to tie a nation's currency to some external standard. By establishing a fixed rate of exchange the uncertainties of fluctuating exchange rates; and a country with a history of irresponsible policies may be able to gain credibility by association. (The hopes to refinance its massive debts at German interest rates.) On the other hand, what happens if two nations have joined their currencies, and one finds itself experiencing an inflationary boom while the other is in a deflationary unemployment.) Then the monetary policy that is appropriate for one is exactly wrong for the other. These ambiguities explain why economists are divided over modern nations have chosen, with reasonable justification, to renounce their monetary autonomy in favor of some external standard, the standard they choose these days is always the currency of another, presumably more responsible, mark. But the men and women who run the Fed, and even those who run the German printing press. Why not ensure monetary virtue by trusting not in the wisdom of economists think this would be a good idea. The argument against it is one of pragmatism, not principle. First, a gold standard would have all the far. Second, and crucially, gold is not a stable standard when measured in terms of other goods and services. On the contrary, it is a commodity whose price is constantly buffeted by shifts in supply and demand that have nothing percent. If we had tried to keep the price of gold from rising, this would have required a massive decline in the prices of practically everything fixated on gold? I did not fully understand their position until I read a richer in recent decades; his letter is posted on the Mother But, particularly noteworthy was the following passage: accounting unit squared away. To measure anything in the floating paper dollar will get us nowhere. We must convert all wealth into the measure employed by were poor, you lost nothing. If you owned lots of it, you lost your shirt in gold as the appropriate measure of wealth, regardless of the quantity of other buy almost anything except gold, the purchasing power of the rich has soared; comes only from the truly useful goods for which it can be exchanged. economic research is at least as rare as the ability to sink a basketball deal has caused quite a stir here in academe. Nobody, as far as I can tell, colleagues. That is, there are a couple of dozen other economists who can, with reasonable justification, regard themselves as being in the same league. Are they all now going to be demanding comparable paychecks? Well, probably not. But there is certainly the possibility thing you need to do is drop any stereotype you may have about economists as a Times was a revelation). More important, nobody makes a career in academic economics by repeating traditional slogans. "Free trade good, typically means either clever mathematical models or ingenious statistical exercises that redefine some important issue or explode some piece of conventional wisdom. And while there are, of course, factions and cliques degree of agreement about what constitutes good work. Mainly this is because leading university departments value technical skill and originality rather than ideology (in fact, the profession is startlingly apolitical, given how visible. It will be the kind of department that can make a strong case to the university administration that it should receive preferential financial treatment, because it contributes to the prestige of the university as a whole, and hence ultimately to the institution's ability to raise money. A department contributions to human knowledge, will not be able to make that case. And so any economist who has managed to establish himself (or, rarely, herself) as a universally acknowledged star can routinely expect to receive offers from many explanation lies in the development of economic theory over the past couple of decades and a somewhat dysfunctional response of the profession to those It is now becoming clear in retrospect that the '70s and '80s were a sort of golden age for the academic star system. Some big new buyer does not), game theory, "rational expectations" (the market is as smart dramatically new ways of thinking about a number of economic issues. (One of to listen to his radical ideas is that it is set in an era that everyone knows was in fact marked by a manic neophilia, a worship of the wild and crazy.) And Just be the first person to work out how asymmetric information could be applied to industrial organization, or game theory to international trade for a successful young economist to become famous within a few years after graduate school, to become a full professor at a top school in his late 20s or early 30s. (No sour grapes here: My own career followed exactly that script.) And to this day, top departments regard instant stardom as the normal career something has gone wrong with the star formation process. The people are as smart as ever, but the state of economic theory has changed. The big, helps us decide which wild and crazy ideas actually make sense or fit generally went to home run hitting theorists, but the last couple have gone to empirical labor economists whose reputations have been built not on a couple of The days of instant stardom, in other words, appear to be largely over. unabated. Indeed, it has probably increased due both to cultural heightened competition among universities for increasingly footloose donor dollars. So what happens? Well, ambitious departments are in more or less the same position as producers of action films who, having been unable to find bankable new stars, are still bidding against each other for the services of offers, but for the most part the race for academic prestige has become a game of international trade, the joke is that there are only three people in the top thing. When you consider how large a role economics plays in our national still, by private sector standards, a fairly modest paycheck doesn't seem we really ought to be looking for a solid series of base hits, it will experts have been saying for some time: The Consumer Price Index overstates conclusion is controversial. Some people are upset because any reduction of inflation estimates will reduce Social Security benefits, which are indexed to abandoning a worldview on which they have staked their reputations. Quite a few people have committed themselves to the story line that productivity is up but real wages are down. If inflation has been lower than was previously assumed, that means the real value of wages may have gone up after all. And some economists with no particular ax to grind simply have doubts about the critics is clearly wrong. They say: Suppose it's true that inflation has been 1950--you reach what seems to be a crazy conclusion: that in the early 1950s, percent of families are officially below the poverty line), but they are likely to regard themselves as very disadvantaged and unsuccessful. So even using the indoor plumbing. Many families still did not have telephones or cars. And of a car. Take into account improvements in the quality of many other products, and it does not seem at all absurd to say that the material standard of living we mean by this? We mean that if you could choose between the two material to transport the median family to the wondrous world of the 1990s, and to place material terms. People don't just care about their absolute material quite a few academics who have nice houses, two cars, and enviable working live very well in material terms, but they judge themselves relative to their reference group, and so they feel deprived. And on the other hand, it is an put it, the pleasure of "seeing 'em jump." Privilege is not merely a means to undoubtedly emphasize that our concern over status exists for good evolutionary reasons. In the ancestral environment a man would be likely to have more would depend on his status, not his absolute standard of living. So males with practicing economist about to be revoked? Aren't we supposed to believe in Economic Man? And doesn't admitting that people care about fuzzy things like one that is extremely useful in many circumstances. admitting that people's happiness depends on their relative economic level as well as their absolute economic resources has some subversive implications. For which to beat all those liberals who have been whining about declining incomes a much flatter income distribution, so that people had much more sense of sharing a common national lifestyle. And people in that relatively equal mean, then, that having a more or less equal distribution of income makes for a happier society, even if it does not raise anyone's material standard of 1950s as an argument for a more radical egalitarianism than even most leftists an engine that maximizes consumption yet minimizes satisfaction. In a society with a very flat distribution of income and status, nobody feels left out. In a society with rigid ranks, people do not expect to rise above their station and therefore do not feel that they have failed if they do not rise. (Aristocrats hugely unequal society in which anyone can achieve awesome success, but not they have failed to make the cut, no matter how comfortable their lives. (In a land where anyone can become president, anyone who doesn't become more time to enjoy what we have? The answer, of course, is that we work so hard game. We can't all "get ahead." No matter how fast we all run, someone must be thought one might well be led to some extremely radical ideas about economic policy, ideas that are completely at odds with all current orthodoxies. But I won't try to come to grips with such ideas in this column. Frankly, I because he occupies a "constitutionally weak governorship." What makes a governorship strong or weak? Should it reflect poorly on Bush if he is a "weak" power to veto bills, appoint officials, and submit a budget to the legislature. also appoints most of the members of his Cabinet and can serve multiple Constitutionally weak governors appoint few top officials. In many states, the voters elect the attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, etc. This makes the officials accountable to the electorate, not the governor, and diffuses his power. Weak governors also face limits of one or two terms, making them automatic lame ducks: They tend to govern less independently and exercise less clout with legislatures than strong governors, who, because they can repeatedly succeed themselves, amass more and more political power. By most of these criteria, Gov. Bush is a weak governor. Voters elect the members outlast the governor who appointed them. The lieutenant governor runs powerful but less glamorous job than that of governor. The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, appoints the Senate's committees and committee 30-day reprieve until a state board reviews the prisoner's plea. appropriations bills. He can also call special legislative sessions, something Bush has never done. But a governor's clout doesn't rest only in institutional trappings. Despite the limitations of his office, Bush is still the most the cooperation of the legislature can augment the power of any governor. Bush has all three, and he has used them to persuade the legislature to enact incremental portions of his agenda on issues such as education, welfare, and and you have a governor who wields a sizable amount of power, even if it can't But from a distance, he seems pretty good at making the trains run on time without a serious opponent? It seems fairly amazing to me that they can't find drugs. But it never goes into the neighborhood." I half expect to hear Poppy gets a tremendous Internet presence for marketing, for instance, its books and having no broadband capability to being positioned to go into computers in the it was able to handle the deal because it has four times as much profit and a much higher stock value. The papers all reflect a sense that nonetheless it was surprising to think that the young company was buying the old one instead of As is typical of press coverage of mergers, breathlessness is the order of when it bothers to point out that because of the debt the new company will take on to seal the deal, it could be decades before it reports a profit. Several papers take a crack at turning the spreadsheet into a novel, doings confidential. Case gets the papers' instant cult of personality treatment: Everybody notes that he likes casual clothes (although he wore a to be fair, if he weren't quoted there would hardly be any doubts raised in the poses to independent journalism, creating as it does more financial relationships between reporters and institutions they might be covering. His for the debates in the fall. Given the now widely known fact that response part to telemarketers driving people crazy at dinnertime), it seems a little wacky to let something important ride on the results of a poll. Television hand, Trump could at least give us a first lady who's a supermodel. doesn't start a national newscast. I agree about Tom and Peter (I have a have long since been reduced to yelling "racism" from the sidelines. of this stuff, but the street reporters were moaning over the kid's lost values take a backseat to the chance at some stock options in the hearts of a While on the subject of (as the current lingo has it) disconnects, today's take a speedy vote on an application by a contributor to his campaign to buy a the Heritage Foundation trots out its tabulation of how countries vote in the gives each country in foreign aid. So we should only expect votes to be well and truly bought when they're the votes of sovereign nations. Silicon Valley, where major Republican contributors have lined up behind her, that fact a secret from voters, and he's an amiable enough guy who has used his if he wanted to. Plus, we have so few trains, and they don't go very far, so it's easy to make them run on time. Actually, the school system is in bad enough shape that there's major support behind breaking up the district, and stations (thousands of cases may have to be reopened, due to revelations that, What follows is a short rant. Apologies in advance for the strident tone. some money off that, and between the two of them they will make just as much the same company. Where is the synergy? What's next? People use credit cards to umbrella creates more value than those assets would have produced on their own. if you could convince me that just being in the same company as Internet guys The most amazing thing about all of this is that the guy who was quoted (unfortunately, anonymously) is a cable advertising executive. I wonder if he's in there right now, trying to convince the network he works for that it should constituents, as he was elected to do. Pundits disagree on Bush's sweeping no security threats could devote so much attention to a "boutique issue" like can override any executive order that overturns "don't ask, don't tell." if he is the Democratic nominee his Senate votes against the Gulf War and qualifying for federal matching funds should get to participate. On that the Reform Party has a "strong case" that it should be included in the be close, not a blowout by Bush. Appearing with his wife again on This proved to be an awful presidential campaigner, her popularity among women will points out that her own husband had no such experience when he ran for behalf of the taxpayers, and second, do whatever I can to increase competition had. Today, we are asking the federal government to release all correspondence the chairman of the committee that is designated by the Congress to oversight Today leads with the Supreme Court's unanimous decision holding that Congress can prohibit states from selling data it collects from drivers' licenses and motor vehicle registrations. This paves the way, says the paper, for tighter privacy laws governing personal financial, medical, and marketing high crime area provides the reasonable suspicion that justifies a to be broken in two, says the government is actually asking for it to be broken into three. But the story doesn't claim to know along what lines. The becomes a bellwether: Because diesel fumes are generally blamed for much of the quality agency plans to propose requiring all bus, truck, and car fleets operated by public agencies to eventually be entirely composed of vehicles LAT reefers, by the way, an independent scientific panel's finding that global warming is "undoubtedly real" and accelerating. about possibly becoming an executive with the team and perhaps even taking on served up, but the Times says that her spokesman suggested that are preferable to welfare. The plan would be a further extension of the million working families at or near the poverty line. It's hard not to feel ever, yet he hardly ever gets press credit for it. The Post article employee stock plan, employees can be fully vested in their stock options one through the roof, and there will be a lot startups in the area, plus an influx acquire thousands of journalists and movie executives not particularly gifted thinks this cries out for a new parlor game: Two random media businesses are named and contestants vie to connect them corporately in the fewest steps. Call standards for the companies that do airport security screenings and a plan to Its most novel aspect: a college scholarship program that would give students graduate and undergraduate tuition subsidies in return for postgraduate government service as information technology specialists. The New York Times goes with the SEC's firm, violated the rule prohibiting the firm's partners from having investments in companies it audits. As a result, says the paper, the government will check out the other major accounting firms' compliance. The story seems oversold (by violations resulted from complications relating to the merger that created the firm, and no examples are given of firm audits that were in any way rendered Times leads with the White House decision to continue to delay The paper quotes unnamed senior trade and State Department officials explaining that the plan is to ensure that the matter is not resolved while Al Gore is running for president, thus keeping the Teamsters, who vehemently oppose the the SEC story, none of the leads makes the others' fronts. pledge one better: "This is not only no new taxes. This is tax cuts, so help me that one of his major contributors wanted to purchase, and Bush claiming that came out against open service of gays in the military, contradicting the stance The papers report that when asked if he would take the mantra "What would least our elected representatives can do is ride herd on them. pilot locked onto an empty railroad bridge, and only after that did the train very quickly come onto it, was buttressed by the Pentagon's showing of a shown to reporters at three times normal speed. The paper notes that all other bombing videos released to the press during the war were shown at normal speed. The Pentagon insists the speed selection was inadvertent. In other words, supervisors are involved, with lots of lead time, and involving simple technology but can't contemplate a mistake when none of these favorable according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of and mentions among the factors "possibly different attitudes about the moral implications of abortion." Will there be more study of this last question by result indicating an increasing belief that abortion is immoral? Baseball's decision that John Rocker must undergo psychological testing before it decides whether or not to discipline him for his recent disparaging remarks about gays and minorities. Today's Papers thinks this makes sense, since prejudice is a mentally disordered way of looking at the world. And, hey, while The first is, can we find something to say about The Sopranos not already said in the thousands of articles on the subject, including the two by you? And the second is, is the second season any good? Partly as a cheap way to build suspense, and partly to force readers to plow through my pet theories Here's my theory about what makes The Sopranos different from other high drama or farce. The Godfather is an opera in three acts. Martin guys as goofballs. When last season began, it looked like The Sopranos mother problems who goes to see a shrink. But where the show departs from the norm is that it eschews both caricature and melodrama (though it has elements of both) for something that has the weight of, and comes across as, realism. context to which it doesn't belong, because television is obviously less compressed and more mundane than the movies. A series has to have the even nighttime dramas remain tightly structured around 15-minute segments, which means that points have to be hammered into your head for fear you'll forget what happened from one commercial to the next. The Sopranos takes the face of flat dramatic affect. Characters register information with the important. How important we won't know for several episodes, when she gives him the lowdown with the kind of brutal, layered insight into his character you The producers also grant us a fairly high tolerance for boredom. This comes art, avoiding her eyes as he refuses to talk, the way patients do. You've seen never goes on so long, or with so many sudden changes in mood. You can tell that the writers and actors trust that the payoff will be worth it. It is, and she asks, in her protracted, oracular intonation: "What do you want to say to me?" And he replies, as if drugged, "I had a dream," which is that his penis fell off and he's running around holding it up while he looks for the guy who snaps it out of his hands. It's a moment of sheer absurdity played straight and almost in slow motion, until we realize belatedly that the escalating surrealism has just earned us the only weeping session of the season. And they're Tony 's tears, which is inevitable but still shocking. Which brings us to what makes The Sopranos not just different but good. There's the writing. I think what I like best about that is not the witty bullshitting sessions among the members of the crew, and not the way the plot lines mess with genre expectations, so that the worst thing that can but that he doesn't get beaten up, because that means he learns that his classmates' parents are afraid of his father. I like the treatment of Tony Soprano, a man who is trying in surprisingly good faith and with honest course, he is also a killer and a thief, two facts about himself he hasn't neither monsters nor the butt of jokes, the writers grant them dignity and pathos. That, in turn, demythologizes the world they inhabit. Making them human brings home almost for the first time the mob's human costs. outside of his debates with Al Gore for a couple of months. A couple of things a "Politics and Eggs Breakfast" (actually a quiche lunch with a commemorative wooden egg laid at each place setting as a souvenir). eloquently on the printed page that in his own speaking voice, which has all Comments that might read as platitudinous rang with quiet force and sincerity. conservative audience throughout with a mixture of gentle humor, anecdote, and in that he radiates a sense of inner calm and comfort with who he is. What seemed different today was that he also seemed far more present and charismatic than usual, as he hopped discursively from observations on globalization to inconsistent quality of what one journalist recently described as his streak of "civic mysticism." There were points in the speech were I found myself entirely prosperity into a more inclusive "narrative" in which ordinary people can locate themselves. Another fine bit was the meaty part of his speech in which to eliminate fosters a corrosive distrust of government. Still another was the hooey, as when he answered critics of his proposals to end child poverty and extend health insurance to all by repeating the mantra that "in a world of new possibilities guided by goodness, we can." Beware of policy proposals that include a change in human nature as one of their essential requirements. There Millennium," which I read but did not hear him deliver. "Some people say we world of new possibilities, guided by goodness, we can and we will." At the press conference, following this morning's speech, I couldn't resist lead the world by the power of our example as a pluralistic democracy and a growing economy and to do so in a way that is consistent with the promise of the Declaration," he said. And who disagrees with that view? "People who get caught up in the current moment and don't have a longer view of our history and subsidies and cracking down on tax shelters. This is a perfectly reasonable to crack down on tax subsidies for mining, oil, gas, and grazing, but leaves means that instead of ending tax favoritism, he is merely trimming it in changing his mind on ethanol for a second time, when he finished his answer by saying, "There are many other things in the tax code that I might be revisiting, so you don't know." But asked to clarify his position on the increase. However defensible as a way to increase federal revenues, it has no side. Perhaps tax reform doesn't appeal to the new spiritualized side of where campaigners have actually gotten into shoving matches. One Gore gal they possibly be saying? "Listen you little prick, handgun registration is fine but licensing is a step too far. Eat this! Next time maybe your man won't vote tomatoes! At first I laughed; now I await each dispatch. Did you miss last Thanks for your advice about this congressional dinner. I figured you'd had want to talk about it. Eh, I know what you mean about playing to the cameras, but I do have to live in this town and a bomb could set my comedy and journalistic careers back a ways, so I plan to pander shamelessly. But that may a passable Bush. You ever imitate real people, or is it all characters? Internet. As with all new spaces, someone has to figure out the rights and duties of all the participants to that new world. And to do that it becomes important to use, but not abuse, the analogies that are available to us from existing spaces. In doing this inquiry, we can work the issue descriptively, ask the normative question, given who we are as people, what ought to be the way in which this new space is occupied by its new tenants? libertarian, to see how he or she would inhabit that space. I might also state from the outset that I take this tack with a certain rooting interest, since my long antedates my concern with cyberspace. In so doing, I shall break ranks, cyberspace is unique because its basic structure, or its "nature," rules out of I confess that this is not my understanding of the problem at all. The use of "nature" as a trope for libertarian thought goes back a long way before cyberspace. There were lots of libertarians who thought that human beings were by nature free, or that individuals could acquire property by first possession occupation of land): Indeed, occupation was called the "natural mode" of occupation. But these efforts to win the libertarian battle by appealing to some sort of natural law, natural right, or natural necessity, always turned out to be losers. Someone could come along and argue that the brute fact of possession did not translate itself into a right. But, of course, skepticism could run in every conceivable direction at once, so that once the challenge was made, at least one riposte was possible: Animals, lands, and chattels are not communal by nature, either. Someone has to come up with an argument that shows why their preferred form of social organization should induce the rest of us as rational agents to sign on to their program. Stated in that way, the case for private property rests on the incentives that it creates for the preservation and spread of wealth, while the case against it rests on similar utilitarian commitments: giving private ownership to a river blocks transportation, recreation, and aesthetic values. And then one has to pair up different regimes of ownership with different kinds of assets. So it is with cyberspace. It is quite possible to think that it is best for government to have a copy of each and every communication that takes place across the net; and someone armed with that conviction could think it proper to stage nighttime raids in private homes to shut down nonconforming machines. Or we could simply refuse to allow people to communicate over the net, much the way in which the old Soviet system refused to allow private individuals to communicate with each other by telephone. So I quite agree that the legal structure, sensible or Draconian as it might be, can shape the nature of interactions on the net, just as it has shaped interaction first on land and public and private, code, so be it. But I don't see what the use of that terminology, which cuts at variance with ordinary English, adds to the That said, I think that it is important to answer the question of why so many people who are attracted to the Net call themselves or think of themselves as libertarian. Here on earth, the libertarian is not an anarchist who thinks that all government conduct is bad and all private conduct good. He does Nor would a libertarian accept that his goal "is focused on reducing government's power." That is surely the current objective, given the bloated government that we have. But it is not the way in which a political theory often starts, in the state of nature. Rather, the libertarian is someone whose objective function starts with the goal of minimizing the use of force and fraud in human interactions. The hard part of the system is to figure out a way in which that minimization takes place over both public and private actors: Aggression by private persons produces small gains and very even more dangerous if the state falls into the wrong hands when it has a monopoly of force against all persons. Unfortunately, the world is such that we will not minimize the total amount of aggression by reducing the amount of government aggression to zero: That is why the libertarian is not an anarchist. But we would like, with some sense of rough justice, to create a system in which each increment of government force results in a greater decrement of private force, so that at the margin the sum of both is minimized. But even that program is called into question at least in part because some government coercion is justified, such as taxes to secure the creation of infrastructure and the police force to prevent private aggression (while curbing the excesses One real dispute is just how much force results in the social optimum. If one looks to the Internet it is clear that we can get along with a lot less government force than in other places. Physical aggression against neighbors is ruled out in part by the anonymous participation that is possible online. And there is a widespread recognition of the inability to form a complex infrastructure by largely private means. Someone, perhaps the state, has to organize some infrastructure over which all communications must travel. But then it is possible (as in physical space) to add on to that collective spine all sorts of "gated" communities in cyberspace, which can be subject to their own internal system. But to a libertarian, that is just fine, since each of these organizations is internally organized under a principle of unanimous consent. But it is the want of force and the successful nature of voluntary interactions that allow people to see how much can be done without government. But still the idea that liberty converges onto anarchy seems to me to be misguided. It is still possible to steal confidential information that is transferred on the net, and so we need at a minimum some law of privacy and trade secrets. It is possible to defame people over the net, and to do so far does not disappear It is possible to blackmail people over the net, as well. And so it goes. As a libertarian, I don't see the net as a safe harbor from government regulation. But I do see it as a place in which the social successes from following libertarian norms of force, fraud, and taxation, for example, yield pretty positive results. And if those principles work so well in cyberspace, then maybe we should have a greater attraction to them in our more same version of sensible libertarianism (private property, freedom of contract, some state supplied infrastructure, and easy taxation) should not guide our Times lead, poorly written and edited, says Vice President Al Gore that he would require any person he nominated to a chief of staff position to "agree in advance [that is, before getting the nomination,] to let gays serve edition and fronted in a later one, explains the story more clearly. Gore's openly in the military, and he would require his Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out such a policy, but not require them to support it before appointment. The years. He developed the proposal after congressional Republicans proposed their "more evenly divided between those efforts and government infrastructure and to carry the story at all; the LAT runs a wire piece about it. botched a number of executions. Unfortunately, it's not until almost the end of those inmates spent on death row was seven and a half years." Not five. The piece does not say, though it should, how much it costs to execute, or to house have this important story; the Post only has a graph on it halfway through its "Nation In two of three senior field generals were replaced concurrently, the "reason to a split in his movement rather than disillusionment with life in China." As says, the escape "appeared to dash whatever hopes remained for a compromise symbol of racism and slavery" and that it "is offensive in many, many ways, as of days "clarifying" his position: that the Confederate flag is not a symbol of racism or slavery but rather of "heritage" and that there's nothing offensive he was doing that thing that makes him so rare and appealing as a But in fact, I think the flag answer was the reflection of a different and got him in serous trouble was back in August, when he told the editorial board record, he didn't really support banning abortion. "Certainly in the short conservatives and beat a hasty retreat to a more orthodox Republican secret liberal trapped inside the voting record of a conservative. The other, probably more realistic, is that the guy just hates to disappoint his pals in Times lead reports that more and more employers may be breaking the law by firing or threatening illegal workers. The trend is described as backlash to unions that have been aggressively recruiting workers to beef up their South for opening doors to political appointments, affirmative action programs, improving race relations, but has not been able to sway those content with Confederate flag over its capitol. Both papers mention Gore's speaking both candidates hope strong showings in the caucuses will boost their chances Employers have been cracking down on illegal workers to deliver a blow to the unions that have been recruiting and organizing these workers, according to do not have to rehire illegal workers, even if they were fired wrongly and b) the workers themselves are afraid to unionize, for fear of being fired or merger. The split in shareholder ownership turned out to be the sticking point story follows the negotiations, occasionally lapsing into celebratory narration pushing the show. The last paragraph begins: "Of course, half the fun of watching 'The Sopranos' is watching a family that is really a paramilitary To be perfectly honest, I would prefer "Big Herring." If you must hang a moniker on me that has inevitable associations to a certain part of the male anatomy, I figure it might as well start with "Big." just a good explanation for why the mob's tanking, though with his crank and points last year: First, when the guy had an identity crisis over the fact that help his girlfriend switch careers from cocktail waitress to music manager. The band she was representing sucked; the producer she was making nice to was just wanted to make her happy. Of course, she walked out on him, but that's how prison looking to fuck people up, and doing a good job of it so far. He appears method of making Tony seem human, the writers have struck on another way to do it: play him off someone really angry and crazy, so that the Soprano MO comes happen to be female professionals for the obvious reasons? I really like her and, as you know, the whole psychiatric framing device. Did you? Or do you hate memorized. I like the way she spoke in those sessions, carefully choosing her words and drawing out her syllables for fear that Tony would get the wrong idea, which he usually did. (I loved it when she uttered banalities about needing to let one's elderly parents retain an illusion of control, and Tony turned that into a sneaky strategy for letting Uncle Junior think he was fronting the crew, when Tony was really running things.) She's back in Episode and flirts with them, of all things, much to her dismay later, when she repeats gonna get some weird plot twists with that one, I can tell. What about the streetwise rapper who turns out to be a college kid with a of this season? What about the condescending Wasps who let Tony into their country club exactly once, then treated him like he was some kind of freak? No turns them into characters, which in turns makes you reconsider the stereotypes. Unless you're one of those people who won't go see The Merchant problem. Got any other suggestions for the writers? government's finding, based on an independent medical examination, that Gen. that government prosecutors will shortly offer up during negotiations with operating system, another for software programs. The story says that it's quoted saying a breakup "would do great harm to the industry." The top do not enjoy the federal government's protection against age discrimination, yet another example, says the paper, of the court's recent championing of Thatcher, who, it says, was "delighted" with the doctors' report. former head of state can be brought to trial in another country for crimes against humanity committed in his home country while in office. numbers vary a bit from paper to paper, but ballpark, the two received a total the practice during the broadcast but did not protest. Rather did not return a phone calls from the press are precisely the sorts who don't hesitate to allowances for food and housing. Also, she notes that some of the allowances are not taxed. Such details help to explain why soldiers typically earn more of those civilian jobs are as dangerous or more so than the typical military one point the author leaves out that would make her argument even stronger: the very young retirement ages available to military personnel. That colonel, for handles her child's homework: "First ask the babysitter for help; if that fails, try Mom's fax if she's not traveling to close a deal; if that fails, try as two dozen seats will determine if the Republicans hold on to the House this the possibility that the government and drug companies might agree on some form of Medicare coverage for prescription drugs. The latest: Pharmaceutical execs will meet on the topic this week with the White House chief of staff. Also, the paper says, a new industry ad campaign will, unlike previously adversarial development the two papers note: The rightist candidate went to the winner's The LAT lead says the Republican grip on the House is "especially tenuous" because the party has the slimmest majority either party's had there been, and because more than three times as many Republican incumbents as The Post lead says that the security audit showed that State Department officials percent of those reports were not returned to their proper storage place. The paper also reports that the audit was completed before the discovery of a materials, and left. The paper reveals the man was never identified and the if it passes the important tests in the months ahead and gets full funding, the "the hardest working taxpayer" and says her body of work is "widely recognized Technology, a major local employer, to the company for review before publishing them. A heavy at the paper is quoted as defending the practice as a method of that there is nothing wrong with showing copy to a story source or subject for such persons. But a reporter doesn't have to do that if he's willing to fight against powerful local interests and his bosses for what he knows is right. In other words, the traditional view against advance peeks sacrifices stopped trying to get the financial credits after the government asked to see scripts before broadcast. Disappointingly, neither paper mentions the organization that broke the story-- Salon magazine. On the other hand, out of being able to look at more facts. Another nagging question: How is it As a rule, the more investors trade, the worse they do relative to the market as a whole. Frequent trading requires that you pull off the the stock market, and do so well enough to outweigh the added burden of was right about the detrimental effects of such trading on the bank accounts of the people doing it. But the evidence the Times offered for the widespread nature of that boom was confused and not especially convincing. And the attempt to draw conclusions about the broader negative effects of increased here before, is a fool's game. But it's not a fool's game that hurts those years. What we weren't told, though, was whether the "average" here was the mean or the median. After all, if most investors are still holding stocks for or three hours, and trading those stocks constantly, the mean holding period would drop significantly, even if the experience of most investors had not The same problem is even more true of the statistics about share turnover, But it's a mistake to say they're emblematic of the investing world as a Of course, investors trade more now than they ever did. If you drop the cost Internet did to commissions), people will do more of it. And as it's become become harder to justify giving your money to either, especially with the fees manager and run it yourself. You should put it in an index fund. But even All of this, though, is a far cry from saying that all of us who use the Net or discount brokers are day traders, which is what the Times seems positively bent on saying. There is no evidence for that at all. More important, there's no evidence that all this trading is having detrimental responsible for the increased volatility of the market. But there's no control group here. The rise of individual investing has occurred simultaneous with the creation of an entirely new industry, the Internet, which has spawned hundreds of new companies whose future prospects are incredibly difficult to evaluate. In that situation, volatility is to be expected, since the market's view of those prospects is more likely to change rapidly than will its view of, say, couple of weeks ago, the more information you have, the more noise you'll have in the stock market, leading to more volatility. Trading here may be a In any case, the thing to remember about all this is that every time someone sells a stock, someone else is buying it. And in terms of capital allocation, it's irrelevant whether the person selling the stock has held it for seven years or seven days. All that matters is whether the price is higher or lower that all this trading will lead to doom once the bull market ends. But just as on the way up there have been no buyers without sellers, on the way down (if we made before, the more people there are in the market (though how much they trade is irrelevant), the deeper and more resilient it is, and the smarter it So, yes, for our own sakes we should all buy and hold. But for the market's analysis. First, if you didn't know who the two were and you were told that one of them was, as a youth, one of the great basketball players in the country, about weighted averages, it reminds me of the man with his head in the oven and his feet on a block of ice. His average temperature was fine but he wasn't too tested answer. "I might," he said. "Or a decaf coffee." Double yuck. dramatic efforts at the end of the year because films from the end of the year with the fact that most academy members are septuagenarians.) Thus, we have and do you have a take on this cult of personality that's grown up around him? And yet they continue to ignore the important work of Foster Brooks?! I suppose I should begin this with a word to our readers, noting that you and I are friends, have known each other for nearly a decade, and don't usually talk to each other this way. For the purposes of this "Breakfast Table," we've which participants are cleverer and breezier and far more avid news junkies better than the alternative, which would be our writing to one another the same very trenchant or interesting observation. But if there are any traffic engineers out there listening, well, you now have a problem to solve. I imagine that the preceding comment will be picked over in the "Fray." A traffic engineer will write in, noting that the signs cannot, in fact, be placed any higher due to some ordinance, which any moron would know about. Then another engineer will write in, correcting that first engineer. Then others and things will get ugly. I am, in case you can't tell, deeply afraid of the conclusion that, instead of running scared, we should try to generate the most leads with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's decision to return backpedaling on an Occupational Safety and Health Administration directive making employers responsible for safety and health violations in employees' Officially, the INS judged the case based on law and research, but anonymous Department officials indicated they would oppose threatened legal moves by kept the boy's plight "out of politics," but the two Times dispute political "tug of war" if so little is mentioned of who's tugging on the other recanting the home office directive, the Post reports. The confusion shows that telecommuting has changed the workplace so that traditional rules Internet fame. Park, accused of committing four counts of fraud, is said to have advised followers to buy certain stocks, which he then sold on the sly as have recommended the stock to his customers, without revealing his relationship to the company. The SEC's complaint is its most aggressive move yet against an analysts' "whisper number," which in some circles doubled earlier, published defending gays in the military. The Post summarizes the debate topics contorted his health care plan by claiming it would hurt minorities. According to the LAT, the debate centered on who might be a stronger president. A power of money in politics, twice in the past couple months urged the Federal Communications Commission to act on an issue that would benefit a major Department of Misplaced Rhetorical Imagery: In light of last year's school shootings, the LAT lead headline is somewhat startling: "[Gov.] the New York schools that he grew up in." The LAT story explains that up enthusiasm for hiring and training new teachers. The "war for the future," he said, "will be fought school to school, classroom to classroom, desk to desk." Today's Papers knows what he means, but had hoped classroom warfare The last item in this week's "Weekend Cocktail Chatter" is a perhaps cruel joke (or announced his unexpected resignation and saw his company's stock price barely move. The obvious question such an outcome provokes (so obvious that I had to And in both those cases, investors reacted pretty much as they had to As it happens, that's true, in the sense that the underlying drivers of any business are more important than the particular individual at the top (although you do have to have someone at the top who can recognize and take advantage of for so long, without any obvious way of improving its business fundamentals, that his departure wasn't seen as making a fundamental difference one way or the other. In the cases of Glass and, particularly, of Gates, the economics of the companies they run are so phenomenal that it's hard to imagine the But the picture is more complicated than this. Take Gates, for example. In role in creating them (certainly a larger role than any other person, though probably not a larger role than the advent of personal computing). In his programs that could run on multiple platforms, Gates shaped a business that was almost a textbook example of how to achieve increasing returns on capital. At the same time, the biggest reason why the market did not react badly to throne, and it's been clear for a while that Wall Street is very comfortable answer to the question I asked in the first paragraph, in fact, is that one a company can't depend on just one man and still thrive. Even when that one man This is not exactly a classic succession, of course, because Gates is not leaving the company at all and because Wall Street likes the idea that he will now have more time to think deep thoughts and not have to worry about whether the latest version of Excel is shipping on time. But when you consider that in of investor discontent, it makes you realize that the strongest management teams are also the deepest. Even in the age when intellectual capital supposedly rules all, Wall Street doesn't invest in individuals. It invests in discussion. Its argument is not, as he suggests, that "liberty converges onto anarchy." To the contrary: My argument is that a certain form of libertarianism libertarianism that looks at every proposed intervention by government and says "leave the Net alone." My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more That's the second part of the argument that seems to have gone missing: that the liberty, or freedom, that cyberspace guarantees now is a function of the initially an architecture that protected fundamental freedoms. But that that architecture is changing. As it changes, the freedoms that the Net will This is the third part AWOL in this initial kickoff of a discussion. The original architecture, given to us by researchers and hackers and generally libertarian sorts, is being changed as new layers of code are being added to this architecture. And these new layers are being added not by the same libertarian sorts who gave us the initial version of the Internet. They are being added by coders who work for commerce. The values implicit in their code are different from the values implicit in the code of the original Internet. And under one story about how that code evolves, they threaten to flip the "government is the enemy"; nor is it a focus on "reducing government's power." Rather, the libertarian "starts in the state of nature." His or her "objective function starts with the goal of minimizing the use of force and fraud in human interactions. The hard part of the system is to figure out a way in which that minimization takes place over both public and private actors." But there is "libertarianism" in the Ivory Tower and there is I am a permanent resident of the Ivory Tower. But my book describes a present political attitude, not the Ivory Tower. It is about a present political reality, and a present rhetorical push. I am describing it because I have been watching it for the past six years. In that world, if someone argued (as protecting trade secrets; that laws regulating libel and slander were necessary, as well as a law regulating blackmail; if one even raised the issue of taxation, or suggested that the government was needed to "secure the infrastructure", then one would not be a "libertarian." One would be a Red. The libertarian of the Net has a simple message, quite different from Ivory Tower Now of course this is an extreme, but the extreme affects the mean. And so while there are few who would insist that the government always stay out, it has become mainstream to argue that the government should just leave the Net the current administration. But if we do, then the Net will become something That's the argument of my book. Not an attack on Ivory Tower Libertarianism. Nor even an attack on "sensible libertarianism." But an attack on a certain our activities in cyberspace." That's the question of your many valuable and important books. My book asks a different set of questions. Let me send it back million increase in federal funds targeting the enforcement of current gun control laws, a move the paper says is explicitly calculated to meet a exchange of ambassadors and the opening of borders. The story also sits atop of assessing the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities of registered its objection to the appointment, throwing it into doubt and issues, while the others stuff it. The coverage notes that the only real harsh disagreement between the two came on the question of police racial profiling. banning the practice immediately and Gore replied that he didn't think his boss state's practice of flying the Confederate battle flag on the state Capitol. since the 1960s and that it drew a surprisingly high number of white '90s, the size of the gap depended on the state in question. The average income operations performed in hospitals, according to a new study. The main reason given by the paper is that liposuction is mostly performed in doctors' offices, where the procedures aren't required to be so strict. But the reader can't tell if this is enough of an explanation, because the story doesn't say what the given that they hadn't come out to him, he responded, "Well, I think we know by behavior and by attitudes." He went on to say that he wouldn't "pursue" such sailors, meaning apparently that he wouldn't try to get them expelled from the service. The Post reports that an official of the Human Rights Campaign, is pretty much universal, and suppressing awareness of gays in a unit so as to As a result of this news, which trickled out last week, Bellow risks being remembered not as the infertile.) It's so old, in fact, that Chatterbox wondered whether Bellow was more about "street fashion." Has anyone ever argued in a pub about who the Sexual Records," maintained by someone who identifies himself as J. Means address.) On the site's "Conception" page, the world's oldest father is identified doesn't supply any details, so it's impossible to know whether he broke To summarize: We don't know who the oldest dad ever was, but it may have will be remembered mostly, if not exclusively, for his literary output. What was especially impressive about these questions is that they were unexpected without being obscure, trivial, or overly clever. Each was substantive, framing a significant problem in a surprising and fresh way. And each was designed to make the candidates squirm, but without being merely a immigration question by trying to argue that refugees from Communist countries didn't account for China. Smiley's question on the primaries provoked both deserved the right to vote. One could reasonably defend this position. The Gore's gays in the military answer from two debates ago. The difference is that the idea of criminals voting any more than whites do. pandering. In his answer to the voting felons question, Gore implied that the principally the result of bias, which is preposterous. But Gore's solicitousness expressed itself less in his specific answers than in his slightly excessive effort to bond with the audience. When he said that the Gore was also clumsy in the way he constantly invoked his close friend and audiences and barely mentioning the President's name. Tonight, in front of an audience composed of minorities and whites sympathetic to minority concerns, get himself into trouble very soon if he doesn't figure out a single attitude More persuasive was Gore's emulation of the president's style, which after about a thousand tries finally came off in one portion of the debate. When a routine defense of affirmative action. But Gore, who was either better prepared girls and boys and boys and girls of all backgrounds who saw you on the national television screens at the very top of your profession demonstrating to one and all that there's nothing you don't know how to do in the field of medicine. And they thought to themselves: You know, I can do that." seemed moved with him. For one brief moment, you even might have thought you subscription model is precisely why we have been so successful in getting ads while others have failed miserably," he wrote in a clamorous essay titled way to boost page views dramatically while growing additional revenue of a big payoff from going free will be fulfilled. And, of course, true path and that anyone who disagreed was "Wrong!" Our position was, no one's or cut bait" moment. And: "It's important to us to break even and to be a ago in "Wrong! Take Two," he was calling free circulation proponents betrayers and scoundrels who would take the money we have all invested in Relying on advertising to support content is hopeless, he wrote. "I can't stress enough what a bust most advertising has been. The ad revenues are totally anemic. And they will stay that way for one main reason: Most of the Web is free. The vast majority of advertisers don't want to appear on free will annually split his Web sites like amoebas and set some of them free like Hey, it's a thicket of mixed metaphors, but it isn't the craziest revenue model by the "fixation on the personal" that leads journalists and others to investigate "the private lives of public people." The press, he says, "could define tawdry voyeurism as the study of 'character,' but the labeling couldn't people" that satisfied a "hunger for sleaze" in a "competitive market for purported 'distinguishing characteristics' of the President." documents" is "what you would call a sex document." The "rest are highly were "part of history now." He then switched course, saying, "There's no point guy. The difference between me and the character police is that I don't try to dress gossip up as more than it is." As, say, "part of history"? all its moist detail if the press had only admitted the purpose was pure its righteous denunciations of "tawdry voyeurism," and think his main complaint about the pleasures of disclosing the "private lives of public people." written a book denouncing people who sell books by revealing salacious private details, or at least hinting he'll reveal them. (It's even less excusable, in a impeachment, have been settled. If something was too private to reveal then, commercial success. Are you itching to read another breathless account of what there's too little space to give many weighty subjects the careful analysis But my favorite story of the week is from yesterday's tried to determine whether sports utility vehicles (which I like to call which they videotaped thousands of vehicles as they stopped and started at a and suck in all those exhaust fumes, but you know, my asthma and all. Besides, you're so much better with the camera and I really need to finish working on They determined that, compared with normal car drivers, themselves when they stop and accelerate more slowly at green lights, and when you combine these factors with the increased length of the aforementioned large vehicles, you get slower traffic and more traffic jams. my unreasonable anger.) Anyway, nothing drives me crazier than to watch one of these monstrosities lumber through Manhattan traffic when I know-- know --that the toughest terrain that thing is life, maybe our elected representatives will stop worrying so much about also included minivans in the study, but I don't have a problem with minivans 'cause soccer moms drive them and there's no way you're going to trick me into note a general lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. ("If it were possible think that the deceased mother's clear intent was for her son to grow up in the that the INS should require the boy's father to visit the United States first, wants to fly the Confederate flag over its Capitol building; when interviewer "pop quiz" on state trivia, most find her warm and engaging. This includes "applies herself and is not standing on a platform and being preachy or whatever, [she] can be an engaging and charming woman." I think his application [of loyalty] is sometimes misguided, but when it's applied to me and his kids and his family and, on occasion, the truth, I manfully to deny that his candidate had ever suggested he'd make support of his policy on gays in the military a "litmus test" for nomination to the Joint constitutional principle that the Chiefs are obliged to obey their commander in the Joint Chiefs of Staff agree to support his policy as president. He never convictions. His litmus test is a constitutional one, civilian control of the Find him saying that he's going to examine their personal issue down (it showed Gore declaring, "I would insist before appointing anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that individual support my policy."). But the Chiefs nominees like that occasionally applied, controversially, to Supreme Court nominees. In the context of the Supreme Court, of course, "litmus test" Gore said he had "rejected the notion of litmus tests on the Supreme Court by saying there are ways to find out the kind of judgment somebody has without I think that it's a little different where the Joint Chiefs of Staff are concerned, because you're not interfering with an independent judicial decision. As commander in chief, a president is giving orders, in effect, or he is the superior of the officers that are reporting to the commander in chief in the chain of command. I would try to bring about the kind of change in policy, on the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, that President And I think that would require those who wanted to serve in on the position This isn't quite a smoking gun, but it's mighty close. As Gore's boss might say, it all depends on what the definition of "in agreement with" is. It was clear to me, watching the debate, that Gore meant that the nominee's personal views had to be "in agreement." For one thing, that is what "in agreement" means. It's also what the explicit analogy with the Supreme Court litmus test implies. (Otherwise Gore would have said, "You don't need a litmus test, because they have to obey the policy whatever their personal views are." Or he could have used the word "obey" or "support" instead of "be in agreement debate: The president can't just order the Chiefs to change the Congress, and changing it requires congressional action. That's why it would be so important for a president to know that his Joint Chiefs nominees personally support his policy (so they'll be on his side in the battle with Congress) and not just that they will obey him (which wouldn't do the a good soldier in this instance, attempting to defend an untenable position. But in a very brief phone conversation, he said he'd read the whole transcript, and he seemed sincere in sticking to his interpretation. I admit I haven't been occurred around twilight on this coast, I experienced most of it on the radio, punchy in his delivery. On the other hand, when the subject of religion came up, he told precisely the same story, in precisely the same words, that he had well, but mother nature hasn't made enough wild horses to get me to see a movie arguably "interesting" ways, the hostility toward the audience that most people in show business feel but try (with varying degrees of success) to conceal. He seemed to me to be part of the wave of people in comedy who learned the wrong demonstrated how you could delay the laugh, really prolong the suspense, and calendar allow, I agree that the ravages of memory have a lot to do with it. There's also the fact the industry has developed a code that you can't release anything short on special effects in the summertime, so adults and movies that I now understand why Gore wants to debate so much. On his better days, he's was truly formidable, performing better than he has in any of his five previous Gore's most devastating shot came with the help of what I believe may be a technical innovation in presidential debating: the use of human props. As he voted in the Senate against emergency federal aid for those affected. "Why did answer at all to the question of why he wanted to drown this friendly looking farmer along with his hogs and beans. He tried to play Gore's question off with the lame bromide that the candidates should be talking not about the past but irrelevantly asserted that he supported the federal tax subsidy for ethanol. able to resist his usual urge to flog a dead horse, and didn't bring it up a teacher he had also planted in the audience was compelling, I don't think it Gore did one other notably shrewd thing this afternoon. Responding to gun control in a generation, and created the strongest economy in the history I was wondering when Gore was going to get around to sticking up for the accomplishments plays to what I consider to be Gore's single greatest asset as What's misogynistic about saying, "I don't fall asleep when the Soprano women are on screen." You're onto something here. The women are another way because she gave him cover. In other words, he married her because of what she represented, rather than who she was, and the story never freed her from that meant that we never felt compelled and maybe even didn't want to watch her. tender care of him anyway because, frankly, what else is she going to do? She plays head games with lonely women because he "likes the whiff of sexuality." This being the Sopranos, however, which lets the moss of goodness gather on no wonderful episode early last year where she's appallingly condescending to an old friend, the wife of a restaurateur who's been burned out of his restaurant. presumably filled with all their mutual friends, waves her friend over as if bossing around some maid. She's clearly forgotten upon what her higher financial status rests, though the friend wastes no time reminding her. Which brings us to the Soprano marriage, which is, as you say, compulsively watchable. Our editor suggested to me yesterday that it's a somewhat with whom he never has an actual conversation, but he's really dependent on his wife (although unlike with our president, you have the sense that Tony screws around mostly because that's what mob bosses are supposed to do rather than out history of hurting each other that makes it impossible for them to get the important stuff out there, even though their desire to do so is palpable. All this just hangs around in the air, unresolved, which makes you wish the writers with a nighttime series. But I do think their marriage has the rare distinction (on television, anyway) of feeling like something living, breathing, and So here's my question to you, who know so many mob children (as opposed to you cover them back in your Forward days, before you abandoned the chosen people to hang out with the people you claim are the envy of the world?) buy how easily Meadow swallows her father's bullshit about what he does for a living, even after she has pointedly asked about it? I do, absolutely. I think that mob kids are forced to live in. She's not deceived by her father's lies, as she makes clear in lots of little sarcastic asides. But if he actually 'fessed up, then she'd have to deal with his unpleasant reality, which would rock her world a little more than she's ready for right now. All this, in fact, is taking Meadow to the verge of becoming The thing that happens in the second season is a major discovery we make about her course she's that too. Maybe I just want to see her get in on the action 'cause Spoiled or not, I was taught enough manners to say: It has been a pleasure doing business with you, even if you did chop my herring up and stir it into given the position of chief executive officer. What's the difference between responsibilities to other managers, focusing instead on strategic issues, such as which markets to enter, how to take on the competition, and which companies to form partnerships with. This is in contrast to the chief operating The chairman of a company is the head of its board of directors. The board is elected by shareholders and is responsible for protecting investors' interests, such as the company's profitability and stability. It usually meets setting the board's agenda and determining the outcome of votes. But he or she does not necessarily play an active role in everyday management. assent, and his or her job security depends on their satisfaction, the chairman of the board is technically his or her superior. And an active chairman may use composition of the board of directors through his or her selection of senior executives, many of whom are guaranteed board seats by company bylaws. Case and Levin have not yet outlined how they will divide leadership merger says that Case will play "an active role" in leading the company and analysts interpret this to mean that Case, as chairman, will use his power to a nationwide computer system for rapidly tracking the course of infectious diseases like the flu and hepatitis C. The New York Times lead also connects of illegal drug imports, judging from the latest figures on Customs Service Times leads with good news about Medicare: The implementation of the they don't have enough resources to carry out their assignments, and lack confidence in their leaders. But, according to the survey, they still have a deep commitment to military service. By the way, the Post reports that the issue of gays in the military was hardly ever mentioned by the service military isn't the only one with big problems, click here.) (because, for instance, they're not labeled properly or don't meet purity standards), but adds that usually the government doesn't bother folks ordering small amounts (up to three months' worth) for their own use. The LAT puts the Medicare news in perspective by stating that the story also states, in contrast to the fiscal optimism expressed high up by the boomers begin to attain eligibility in large numbers. Internet and claims to have used some for himself. The paper points out that the episode is apt to rekindle consumer concerns about online credit card case stands to highlight the freedom online criminals have to operate beyond from the manufacturers and dealers covering everything from oil changes to rebates. The Journal account adds that the deals are intended to include Internet access for owners from their cars as well. common in the modern office: a company Internet snoop, who spends his days checking to see where other workers go on the Web. The story shows one such question, online access to sites with any nudity is barred, but those about The story never questions the fundamental assumption of the snoopers: namely that companies should be able to control their employees' Web access. Now, clearly, they have the right to, but the story might have considered whether that judges workplace performance by input, by the number of hours worked, say. The enlightened view of how to manage people is to judge them by their output instead. So why should a company care where an employee surfs as stimulate the creativity that's behind the employee's next big idea. economic drift of journalism. The missive notes that the paper recently still in part a proprietary service. It will speed the convergence of the Internet and television. The deal creates really interesting possibilities in terms of the delivery of downloadable music and video over the Net, because of cable providers, which means that it can position itself as a dominant player especially Internet content, is eminently licensable, and as far as the The point is that most of the business components of the deal seem to make especially at such a high price, doesn't automatically follow. The odd thing is that at this moment when markets are replacing hierarchies all across the making deals on the assumption that you need to have everything under one roof he thought it made more sense to buy an Internet presence rather than try to build one organically. Which would be an interesting thing to think about, return just sitting there waiting to be picked up. What that means is that seem to be much of a factor here. Because the two companies' businesses are probably go through without much of a hitch. It would be interesting, though, amorphous thing we call "media." In that case, the conglomeration of so many is still so antiquated that I can't even get Turner Classic Movies (which Time control the temperature of an economy overheated by soaring stock prices. The an appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, said that dangerous inflation didn't seem to be a threat to this economy. No other paper fronts the story, he will spend almost all his time focused on the company's software strategy. its antitrust settlement talks with the government, but then quotes his assessment of any government breakup of the company: "absolutely reckless and irresponsible." The LAT (which high up strongly suggests that Gates will paper has pretty much owned: the battle between the White House and drug companies over whether or not Medicare should cover prescription drugs. The paper explains that companies have long expressed the fear that coverage would installment: Two top drug pharmaceutical executives now say they could accept the coverage. The Times suggests that they are trying to head off a front office, including all trades, signings, draft selections, and all other of the changes have been accepted by producers. Under an agreement with the papers report on with varying degrees of candor: The LAT comes clean in Everybody goes inside with a fresh shift in the demographics of AIDS: The majority of gay men being diagnosed with the disease are now either black or of journalism. Of course, as the piece points out, two heads aren't guaranteed to be better than one. But this is a plausible possibility isn't it? After all, Lama, which translates as "superior one," is a title officially extended level of spiritual development. (In informal conversation, lama is used to reincarnations of previous lamas or holy men, and their places in the hierarchy years later the Mongols deemed the position one of spiritual and young boy. The child is identified through physical and mental tests, including government asserted that it had the authority to make the selection, and last inspired me to try. I kept updating it with the software of a certain major software manufacturer and I had a lot of problems which may be my fault rather than that of a certain major software manufacturer. Do you contract out? Can I underground before they hand him over to Daddy. We'll have an Underground this conversation with one of my colleagues. Of course, to some degree they are. As you said, they value the biological family as paramount and then for insisting that he stay even if you normally favor Dad's rights. Is that speedy trial, just because they came here in a less dramatic fashion than did speaking up for them. In any event, the kid's been so showered with gifts of movie The Shop Around the Corner (which was also the source material for Got Mail updated the earlier film's epistolary plot (two shopkeepers hate each other by day, each not knowing the other is the correspondent to whom retrospect, then, it may have been not merely a romantic comedy with a little product placement tossed in; it may have been an attempt to soften the scion of another giant communications empire (in this case a who gets to articulate the case against concentration of corporate power. smooch at the film's end, you can think of it as a consummated romance; or, you Chatterbox is well aware that he is engaging in just the sort of paranoid through, Chatterbox urges the Justice Department take the precaution of should be compelled to switch over to another Internet service provider, like I hate to say it, but I missed the New York Daily News today. I love publications MAD and Fortune and, since the announcement of the is the year for us to finally see some hot, new young stars have breakout performances, for some familiar faces to turn up in surprising roles, for a few television, then where are they going to learn it? It's not like parents are Speaking of kids and smoking, did you see the New York Daily News returning here is the careful division of labor among the city's newspapers: They seem to have a tacit understanding that the Times will supply the city with its news, and the tabloids will supply those things that people actually want to read about. One is never in danger of finding out about, say, illustrate the story is something called "Herbal Gold Cherry Flavor," and it depicts a jolly leprechaun with a shamrock in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It is so perfect, so absurd, that it's one of those increasingly common instances where real life defies parody. Had you and I spent weeks trying to mock a cigarette company targeting kids, we couldn't have come up with something so perfect. This seems to be part of a larger trend of real life about a woman on Death Row who falls in love with her lawyer? Ever see Last girl continue to captivate the media? Because there's fast cash to be made, even if it means letting tabloid tactics and undisguised spin rule the story." wait. Never mind. I can't wait for next month's issue of the magazine, featuring a scantily clad model and the caption, "Why does Penthouse feature nude pictorials? Because there's fast cash to be made, even if it is they've put in place in our lobby, so that every time I enter the building, a Democratic debate, was finally arriving at a reasonable tone. As in the previous encounters, Gore was highly critical of his rival. But this time he characterized Gore's earlier performances. Gore dispensed with the vocalized debate. This meant that you could listen to what he was saying without the thrust of which was that he stood by his decisions and would do the same "I think all three of them were a mistake," Gore responded, neatly their previous session. But perhaps because arguing offends his sense of politeness, he kept trying to change the subject when they did start scrapping. as well. Substantively, I thought his best moment was his question to Gore about why the vice president wouldn't join him in supporting the registration and licensing of all handguns. Gore's lame response was that "it doesn't have a difficult to do? The essence of leadership is taking something that is money aside for Medicare. After explaining that continued strong economic Canned as it probably was, this was a wicked sound bite. It would have been appropriately, put the story on pages A5 and B5, respectively. If Chatterbox were feeling conspiratorial, he might argue that the Times is hyping the story because it previously was hyped in a newspaper its corporate parent happens to own. But that would be precisely the sort of with. Probably the real reason the Times gave the story big play is that it, click here) The deal had been held up for more than two years, turned down a local market license transfer." (Italics Chatterbox's.) The only cover the cost). Thus the implied twin themes of the Globe and pressuring regulatory agencies to serve the interests of their campaign hypocritical, because he's just as corrupt as everyone else. transfer; he just asked it to stop dithering and make a decision. As he wrote unusual," and threatened to harm "the due process rights of the parties." But drowning in "due process." Probably a more honest reply would have been: Look, we're not supposed to say so, but one of the ways we do policy at the to change policy. Get off my back. But that wouldn't have been a good answer, either; in most instances, bureaucratic delay is not the best Yes, probably. But if the inexorable logic of making a decision was that (Oddly, both the Times and the Globe make only glancing mention system corrupts all of us." This would argue for "no." On the other hand, who didn't contribute money to his campaign. According to the Times often forwarded complaints from constituents and others from outside interested parties had contributed to his presidential or Senate identically, so every pause for a commercial embeds a book plug) seems to be to too, until he started complaining that he wasn't getting enough airtime because three networks' affiliates. It's in this context that we should approach the Speaking of sadly amicable divorces, the Republicans are celebrating five years of running Congress, and where's Newt? I, for one, feel enormously Newt answered, under oath, questions about his affair with a young woman Here's a question for people who actually still cover (as opposed to, in the bug" prevent state attorneys general from suing? If not, I bet they're meeting with the lawyers behind the tobacco suits as we sip our coffees. Today's him "Johnny") Apple all that space to indulge his love of food (not to mention just hang out at the world's greatest racetracks, and just write about Supreme Court arguments over the constitutionality of state statutes that privacy. Her position is echoed by traditional religious groups and civil money spending advantage in the coming election. Democratic Senatorial Campaign to amass cash is attributed to its lack of a finance chair, donors' doubts about the party's presidential prospects, and the dissipation of President points out that the Democrats' public pouting could be an attempt to stimulate The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is flush with cash, reports Federal Communications Commission to issue a ruling on the company's argues that there is nothing wrong with a senator urging an agency to act points out that the campaign's count may exclude letters written to aid Senate campaign contributors and lobbyists. A Post piece reports that most voters are unaware of the recent hullabaloo over regulatory correspondence. years." Most of the growth in learning disability adjustments, which schools approve based on a doctor's note or psychologist's recommendation, comes from ritzy prep and public schools. "Hundreds and perhaps thousands" of kids are screen the pets of potential owners. Boards evaluate pet size, pedigree, training, demeanor, and appearance. Real estate agencies prepare dog percent, and so much money drained out of the stock market that it felt like, spectator of yourself," especially when your self is watching its nest egg quickly dwindle to "what the hell, blow it all in one big bash!" proportions. longer allowed to use the words "nest" or "egg" ever again, let alone sign on are going to fall well short of estimates, and people started dumping glorious and perhaps unbeatable feeling of knowing that at last you were right. company announced that it was going to miss estimates for the quarter. Investors apparently liked the company's honesty about its performance. calls explaining that their quarters had gone badly 'because I was spending a announced that it would be ending its relationship with the company in favor of competitor Commerce One. Although the company had trumpeted its relationship with GM, it quickly came out with a press release pointing out that GM automaker in the world,' the release did not add.'" fire exits are located in the front of the auditorium. Run." using corporate jets, the Wall Street Journal said the airline's perks target on the company. Ah, finally. A case where there really was no supposed to keep track of the trades where you don't make money?" and staff. Also last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education proclaimed the life of genteel poverty demanded by academic or artistic careers. Oh sure, an opera that would become synonymous with the artistic life right up to the positioned on the margins in order to express ambivalence about the But does the aggregate of people who happen to be living the bohemian act out the bourgeoisie's quashed longings and confusions. Bohemians should be mirrors in which we see what we might have been, had we dared. So who's doing that today? Obviously, we can rule out the hipsters paying the fringe. We get a glimpse of them in a forthcoming book by New York admits, is geographically dispersed. It looks moribund. But, she says, it definitions of kinship, labor, love, leisure, consumerism, and identity What if society isn't aware that its premises are being reinvigorated, its contradictions being dramatized? What if the bourgeoisie, whom the bohemians limelight. They made themselves seem the center of the artistic universe. In so music store, she is bewildered by how little she finds. "I could see no sign of the Planet attitude, no surly looks in the eyes of the kids behind the cash register," she writes. Then she thinks she understands: "I realized that I was on the other side of it now. To the sly members of the cultured proletariat I looked like an average customer, not a fellow traveler who knew and approved of Perhaps. What Powers describes sounds frankly too subterranean to amount to have become the manifestation of a subculture that is soon to disappear, like all the other subcultures that have faded into history. One of the most remarkable facts about this turn of the century, so far, is that if you want to be on the cutting edge, you have to leave the margins for the center. That, the the future. But there's nothing going on down there right now. Street Journal (in its "Business and Finance" box) lead with the stock incentives arriving with the new year and to heightened fears of an markets had been expecting and what politicians from both parties had been than usual about what stocks are really worth these days." Post quotes an expert labeling this a "significant ideological shift," inability to grow fast enough to assure jobs for its ballooning conditions in the cervix. Unlike a Pap smear, which requires a pelvic exam and 40--could save many lives in the developing world, where lack of access to Pap notice requiring employers to provide proper furniture, lighting, heating, and ventilation systems to employees working at home. (The Journal credits important debate that we need to have about the workplace of the future," said favors to labor unions (because the guidelines discourage telecommuters, who they were looking forward to grandstanding during their trials. In the commemorate the state sesquicentennial hearkens back to an era when a different crime in check, the city's 3,000-member Committee of Vigilance stepped into the breach. Over the past three months, the committee brags, it has hanged four Sorry, you've got the flu. The papers here are filled with stories about how fast it's spreading and how everyone should get shots. You've inspired yours prescription drugs, and education (besides vouchers), they're going to have a it's got God in the lead. Normally, one might think that the Constitution happen if an assistant secretary from the Carter administration kept running in Democratic primaries. It would, of course, be a joke. thought. Bush did pretty well, but he never answered the heaven question People have an exclusive today on how it was done. The doc says it was tricky because she was built like a man, and men, I gather, are tougher to work inflation fears are still gripping the street. Please. Inflation's been pretty of soaring prices. It ain't gonna happen for a lot of complicated reasons. None of this would matter so much except it's keeping wages down. Whenever wages his alacrity in accusing anyone who doesn't go soft on him of racism. believable candidate. If, as I recall, the candidates running in the Democratic Before I go back to bed and try to shake this damn flu, one more thing: the lovely piece in today's New York Times advertising column about the "Cash" machine, which digitally compresses the pauses and long syllables out of talk shows so that local stations can sell more commercial time. A long time they bought an analog tape machine with a rotating head, the premise being that it wouldn't change the pitch of records, but would slyly speed them up to make the back room when management found that it made every record run through it in that wedding dress a couple of months ago, right?). Look, you're my friend. Would you rather be "Big Herring"? Whatever makes Now let me tell you where you're wrong (oh, how I love writing those words): The Sopranos are stealing their life stories; in other words, they accuse the writers of taking their cues from the mob, not vice versa.) saying is, The Sopranos is being buried under a mudslide of Which takes me right to the point where I actually agree with you on The first episode of the new Sopranos is a real drag: flat, sour, and ponderous. I almost fell asleep watching it. Tony just seems mean and crazy Evil, and not amusing at all. It was a terrible mistake to keep her alive for the second season (apparently, some of the writers wanted to kill her off, but bitching). Imagine how clean a break it would have been to open the second terrible work ethic, his drug use, his obsession with the mob of the distant past, the mafia of his fantasies (of course he's writing a screenplay, and of steroid use by the mob's young guns is what's killing the mafia as much as government witness at the thought of real jail time. network of criminals who have their hooks into organized labor and adhere to a saying the mob is dead, and we're always too early. But the main problems the mob faces are only getting worse. One is recruitment: The old neighborhoods are breaking up, and it's the old neighborhoods that produced the mob farm teams. hate to refer to my own work, but an article I wrote in the New York Times to bitch about (by the way, where do you stand on the "The Sopranos because, as you put it so well (have you ever thought of taking up a career in junior, her two children, bring us to one of the more interesting subtopics in The answer, especially to the second question, is mostly unknowable to me that there is no such thing as organized crime, and that his father was set Families, but actual nuclear families) are among the most dysfunctional on the But all she could come up with was this: "There's more to my father than people know." I asked her what she meant. She said, "There's two sides to this story." I asked her to explain further: "It's just more complicated than what you think." She will never be able to say what she knows: that her father was boss. And yet, here's the irony: I don't think she's embarrassed by her father's career choice. In fact, after spending some time with her, I came to believe By the way, I don't think Meadow Soprano bought her father's cover story at for a living. I think you're right, though: If Meadow heard the unadorned truth, she would be miserable. You may also be right that Meadow is on the junior (there I go again, dissing the female characters) to ask his father when This is the acid test of mob character, as I said before: He who makes his Tony Soprano reacts if and when his son asks to join the business. Tony Soprano sure the writers of The Sopranos could do something interesting with this. (Despite my disappointment with the new season so far, I have a great say) with you. I find you to be quite lovable, for an intellectual herring. able to forgo a run at the Oval. All kidding aside, it actually might be nice I see on the wires this afternoon that abortions have hit a 20-year low. Is there any indicia of social health that isn't getting better? The '90s are who made racist remarks in Sports Illustrated --undergo psychological counseling. Obviously, what Rocker said was repugnant; his exact comments had absurd if not a bit totalitarian. The idea that racist behavior can be outrageous remarks. But it would have been nuts to try and put him on the couch asked and answered repeatedly. The result is that the debates are turning into press conferences on the latest headlines. Tonight's topics from Grand trade with China. Bush responded with a fatuous distinction: that trade with in his conclusion that we should isolate both Communist dictatorships. Or does want to share what's in my heart.' Otherwise it sounds like an Housing Works, which has criticized the mayor's AIDS policies. But this by the judge, who presumably has the power to correct any impropriety and time a mayor was sued by an "advocacy" group and lost in district court, it on the homeless issue as to bait him into an angry outburst. If that was the Does he really want to risk becoming known in his home state as a Shill for that he's either an incredible operator who walks off the set, after some around here?" or mentally ill. If it's the latter, then his comedy seemed just a notch less cruel than the Elephant Man. Still, not having your personal those effects? I can imagine acting against a blue screen must be pretty increasingly swallowing his words, and I find his ode to the World War II the New Millennium may be the end of having to listen to "The Century" on During the past five years, governments and companies across the planet consensus of computer experts is that the expenditures were worthwhile. Here's not been fixed, disaster might have followed. To prove this thesis, one state after the fact would have been expensive. For example, the cost of correcting a couple thousand incorrect bills at a video store would far outweigh the cost of insurance: Just because you didn't have a car accident last year, it doesn't large corporations to have mainframe computers running outdated code. infrastructure. And in the developing world, the technology upgrades provided may appear well into the new year. Many errors won't be revealed until software processes data, which could be as late as the next quarterly billing cycle. half. So watch it. The first rule of mob movies is, never give someone a bigger beating than they deserve in the first act if you don't want to get your ass You're right about the writing being better than the acting, but only kinda guy. You're right about expectations having been blown out of proportion. Soprano, whose acid tongue is starting to remind me of the monster drool in the that television criticism is about profound meaning. Most of it is critics trying to explain how they think things work, and why they like them. The audience has a right to figure stuff out, and to read people who might help them do that. The boob tube is powerful. Millions of people watch this show and talk about it every week. Mobsters in fact do take their cues from it, at least get insurance companies to change their policy on psychotherapy reimbursements. So don't shut down the entire discussion just because you've started hanging episode is a letdown, although that was probably inevitable. It's an seem angry and sour. Thugs are thugs and their wives are idiots to stick around and mob business is greasy and seedy, instead of greasy and seedy and but basically he's the same asshole junkie he always was, and has taken to than ever. She is reduced in this episode to smiling sadly a lot and cooking down in a diner, she spits in his face: "Fuck you!" And Tony, my god. He has turned into a huge drag, stomping around, crashing the entire hour is the look on his face when the male shrink he goes to in Oh yeah. Analyze This. Do we have to? What's there to say? they're our national epic, or something like that. But one thing's for sure: They're all going to have to refer to The Sopranos now, the way The would be "the central political reform of the next decade," in part because it current tax system benefits the wealthy, who can afford to pay people to decipher it. And all the loopholes make a "nominally progressive" system much woes, because "by treating every taxpayer alike," it would eliminate so much of the complexity and indebtedness to special interests that make people hate Actually, though, even if the current system is nominally progressive, it's taxes than they now do, and therefore everyone else will account for a much the same rate as income, and the numbers would be skewed even more by that.) that the wealthy benefit from the current system because they can trick it, there's zero evidence for that. The percentage of revenue paid by those in the as you would expect to happen in an era when the rich have gotten much should come out and say it, and not try to disguise the argument as somehow about correct process or the imaginary salvation of liberalism. Nor should he The irony, in fact, is that the flat tax is the perfect relic of an era when a lack of computing power and of information made it difficult to make meaningful distinctions between groups of people, let alone individuals. But conjures up. When it came to pay, we used to live in a world of job classifications and pay grades, where everyone who did the "same" work got the same pay. Increasingly, we now live in a world of dramatic differentiation in pay. The whole idea of a "pay grade," in fact, would seem like complete nonsense at most Silicon Valley and Internet companies. companies today try to "project a simple image, a single product, and a recognizable, simple brand," and to be sure, there's plenty of nonsense out there about the centrality of the brand. But what's really going on is the move toward customization. Dell builds my computer literally to order. Amazon makes cars. Of course there will always be a place for the Gap, with its piles of companies are getting much better, not worse, at treating each consumer differently, which means, in some sense, becoming a different company for an airline flight, you could be fairly certain that most of the people on the plane paid the same price for their tickets that you did for yours. Today, you can be fairly certain most people paid different prices. And that's not because computers to distinguish between different kinds of fliers, and charging different kinds of fliers different fares. On the Internet, shopping engines If anything, then, a tax system in which everyone paid his or her own particular tax rate would be more in tune with our world, and the possibilities created by the computer, than the flat tax. (There are, though, excellent culture and economy of simplicity? I don't think things have ever been more Unlike yesterday, when stocks fell in unison, there was a meaningful divergence between stocks today. The most obvious example of this was the contrast between this kind of divergence is a good and comforting thing, since it suggests investors are distinguishing between companies rather than throwing them all front page. These seemed like nicely measured, and somewhat surprising, reactions to what might have been played as a much scarier event than it really we are now entering the putatively substantive part of the column, so watch usually not explained why people who are investing in stocks should be all that It's just that the reasons for their concern are complicated, because interest rates affect stocks in different ways and, for that matter, because there are The interest rate that most journalists have in mind when they talk about funds rate, which is the interest rate the Federal Reserve raises or lowers in order, in theory, to speed up or slow down the economy by increasing or interest rates on things like car and home loans (since banks pass along changes in interest rates to their customers). It now appears that the Fed will slow down the economy, which in turn will make corporate profits grow less quickly than otherwise, and since investors are paying prices for stocks that assume very fast profit growth in the future, the threat of a slowing economy (which I own) or another major supplier of technological infrastructure to big business, you're going to weather anything short of a complete recession, investment. And that's because in this competitive environment, it can't. You might ascribe it simply to panic, which undoubtedly played a part. But there are also two other reasons, which have to do with that other interest rate, the one on the 30-year bond. That interest rate is effectively the interest rate on bonds rises, bonds become more attractive and stocks less attractive. This has a practical consequence, which is that rising rates lead and put it into bonds. And the opposite is true when rates are going in the But rising rates also have a theoretical consequence that's even more how much it's worth today given how much free cash flow the company is going to interest rate on the 30-year bond, since you know you can get that without any If interest rates rise, then, the present value of the future cash generated since the stock prices of the most valuable companies in the world today in fact reflect investors' confidence that they're still going to be generating And as the discount rate rises, it's not surprising if stock prices fall. The equation is not automatic or perfect. But in the long run, it's Times lead with the Supreme Court's announcement that it will hear cases on abortion rights and gay rights this spring. Specifically, it will Jersey Supreme Court ruling that the Boy Scouts could not exclude a gay troop three officers. The charges would be the first in the Rampart corruption partial birth abortion ban and doesn't mention the Boy Scout case. The publication of a new national security doctrine. The new doctrine broadens the All of the papers mention that the Supreme Court won't actually reevaluate the constitutional status of abortion. Nor will the hearings affect the bans on because its loose definition of a "partial birth abortion" could apply to many scrutinizes how the timing of the hearings and rulings will affect the presidential elections. The Court will most likely hear the cases in early This timing should make the Supreme Court a major election issue, as the next organization the Boy Scouts are. The Scouts say that as a private organization, they have the First Amendment freedom of association to decide who to include, yesterday's revised doctrine they are an option when "all other means of resolving the crisis have been exhausted." It could have been worse: some more hawkish on the use of nuclear weapons, but no one mentions what today's groundbreaking because it is the first to declare ethnic cleansing a crime billion over the next five years to build a rocket capable of launching satellites. US analysts fear that the plan is economically unfeasible, and technology to countries who would use it to launch weapons, and fears that failing industries (to save jobs) and a greater cultural aversion to risk. elitists, she says, the dog is "a noble and sensitive creature who, given proper care, may make a far better tenant than many humans." Maybe so, but at of herring? Herring in cream sauce, maybe, but regular old herring? Mortifying Amplification: I finally got the joke because someone explained it May I make one observation? There is way too much hype now about this show. his whole yoga shtick feels forced, as if the writers decided that each and every character had to be a member of the sensitive, slightly feminized postmodern mob). I think it's dangerous for The Sopranos to introduce an gangsters are possessed of some complicating goodness, or at least some kind of the cast than yet another annoying woman (uh oh, am I in trouble now?). chance, and that way they wouldn't have to saddle us with her dreary Don't get wrong, I do enjoy the story lines that don't deal directly with simultaneously make a show as good as The Sopranos and as bad as of the story, of course; without her, Tony would be unredeemed, and dead. Maybe incredibly nasty letters when my mob stories appear. echo this view, dismissing the whole controversy as a phony media game of First, of course it was a reversal. Initially, Gore said he would require that any Chiefs nominee be "in agreement with" his gay policy. Then he came back and denied there should "ever be any kind of inquiry into the don't, since they presumably agree with the principle of civilian control. "support"), since Gore knows that those who disagree are likely to sabotage his leaves open the theoretical possibility of appointing a military officer so honorable that he will work assiduously to implement a policy he personally disagrees with." But under Gore's second position, Gore won't know who personally agrees or disagrees with his policy, since he says he won't inquire into the actual views of Chiefs candidates. (Don't Ask, Don't theoretical perfectly honorable officer would pass muster). But it's exactly Gore would give a privileged position to the gay issue, ruling out a candidate who was otherwise a military genius and inspirational leader solely because he troubling, a legitimate gaffe. It suggested the vice president was so keen on his gay policy that he would give it higher priority than other military Actually, given the crippling effect of the gay controversy on the first six almost hear voters saying. There are other, more important concerns for a president than integrating gays into the armed forces. It's time for some At best, Gore's gaffe revealed a candidate so eager to pander to a Democratic constituency that he lost his bearings and overstepped the bounds of president inquire into the personal views of a Joint Chiefs candidate, and try to appoint someone who agrees with him? A general who disagrees with a policy is indeed likely to implement it unenthusiastically. Gore could have said, the whole man, and the whole range of military issues, not just this one answer. But that doesn't make his performance any less of a reversal, or any placement of an advertisement Chatterbox spied this morning while riding the takes the subway to work, this is probably where he gets off in the harbor ambitions of world conquest, but it was Chatterbox's impression that the What, then, is one to make of this ad? Here is the text (superimposed on a invite government managers to consider the benefits of upgrading their computer seems further to suggest that the federal government is a big software company that would be well advised to merge with another big software company called Agriculture Department will ever be able to keep track of the price of pork reporters uncover complex union kickback scams; I expose the secret dining So please don't think for a second that I don't want to hear your theories. I have always counted on you for all of that hermeneutics and semiotics and and its profound meaning will cause a backlash against the show. Expectations intentionally lower expectations over the past six months by leaking stories Let me address your pet theories. I agree with most everything you've said (or at least, everything you said that I understood), except that I wouldn't I think you've got one thing exactly right: The Sopranos works so well precisely because it is understated, because it is the opposite of the Sopranos make up some kind of whole, but here's the fundamental difference The Godfather invested the lives of mobsters, who are in fact seedy and But I haven't talked to a single mobster who would take Tony Soprano's life it's a bit too early to say if this particular manifestation of mob art is influencing mob life, but I think it's fair to say that no one in actual organized crime would ever want to be hooked up with Tony Soprano's crew. captures the desperation of today's mobsters. The smarter wise guys know that makes The Sopranos seem real to me. Today's mobsters, too, are fluent in captures this beautifully (I will disagree with you on one thing at the outset: the writing on The Sopranos is better than the acting, not that there's By the way, can we also talk about how badly Analyze This sucked? Also, a question, for your consideration: Do you think mob movies are dead? The genre's tired, obviously, but is The Sopranos a sign of new Also, tell me what you think of the new season already. Inquiring minds want events, and seemed in complete control of his opponents throughout the evening. But Bush acquitted himself poorly nonetheless, by once again shirking an opportunity to stand up to ugliness in his own party. Bush first gave a pass to conservative bigotry several months ago when he recently when he declined to meet with the an organization of gay Republicans because he didn't want to be a "divider." And he was at it once again tonight, to criticize the flying of the Confederate flag over the state capitol in the flag, Bush just kept reiterating that he thought it was up to "the people This was a craven, spineless response. If Bush had any guts, he would say symbol of segregation flying over a public building. If he wanted to be politic about it, Bush could have said that while he doesn't believe that the flag is In the short run, criticizing the flag might have led to Bush getting conked on the head with one of the Bud Light cans visible on the tables where a large and rowdy audience sat, baying for red meat on guns, gays, and gambling. But ultimately, I think that finding some way to indicate disagreement with this unattractive mob would have been both the honorable and the politically shrewd means he should be thinking beyond the nomination. If he wins it with his tolerant principles held high, he will be in a far stronger position in relation to the eventual Democratic nominee. Much hinges on Bush's attempt to cleanse his party of bigotry and reposition it closer to the center. It ought to be obvious to him that pandering to the revanchist sentiments of a roomful the course of suggesting that the Republican Party doesn't really care about have long "tried to smear our party with accusations of racism." The complaint Republican primary field wasn't so actively sucking up to conventional, date. In place of the good nature and quick wit he has shown in all the past, he was anxious, defensive, and far from lucid. Of course, it probably didn't are tired of people who make promises about tax cuts they can't keep," he said. most familiar lines on the subject of campaign finance reform culminating in his repetition of his not very funny joke from last night about how Bush should (which aren't in fact connected to the Bush campaign). clearly struggling. Luckily, there's an easy way for him to win back the affection of the news media. All he has to do is call a press conference before with what is actually required to produce good journalism. He criticizes reporters (mostly political reporters) who maintain that an adversarial relationship with government is healthy, believing instead that some fabled But what about when the adversarial relationship comes from government itself? Here's one example from my backyard: Shortly after taking office, the requests for information. In one instance, a department denied a request by the for a list of all investigations commenced by an agency in the previous year. civic project between the paper and the mayor? Given the politically corrupt News sued, and only under court order did the administration provide the That's an ugly and uncivil process, but it's also, under the circumstances, from actual journalistic practice that it can't even imagine such a scenario, thing that journalists should be for is independence. In my view, that doesn't require "objectivity" or neutrality or being boring or being good simply that the task of gathering and presenting news must be kept as separate as humanly possible from pretty much everything: government, interest groups, understanding of that core journalistic value that it paints itself out of the Sciences that evolutionary psychologists have come up with an answer to the between the sexes as both natural and inevitable: Men have to spread their genes around by having sex promiscuously and by whatever means necessary; women lavish their scarce reproductive resources only on partners who'll stick around to ensure that their children thrive. So there was nothing startling about the beauty arguing that throughout world cultures, men and women prize symmetrical features, which correspond to genetic health): Rape, they say, is either a byproduct of other reproductive strategies, "such as a strong male sex drive and the male desire to mate with a variety of women." What was newsworthy is what the authors suggests we should do to prevent rape. psychology. Here's her beef with it: Evolutionary psychology is not very good on the aspect of the human psyche she's personally most interested in, which is yet this ability to reflect on ourselves underlies art, architecture, poetry, government, journalism, and all the other forms of willed culture and communication that animals don't and can't have. The new sociobiologists Some evolutionary psychologists understand the limitations of their field. They know that it has explanatory power only in general terms, and is useless in the particular case. They know that their account of human motivation is psychologists. And so they boldly stray into efforts to modify the behaviors of individuals. They propose a course to teach young men about rape: Completion of such a course might be required, say, before a young man is granted a driver's license. The program might start by inducing the young men to acknowledge the power of their sexual impulses, and then explaining why human males have evolved in that way. The young man should learn that past looking at a photo of a naked woman, why he may be tempted to demand sex even if he knows that his date truly doesn't want it, and why he might mistake a woman's friendly comment or tight blouse as an invitation to sex. Most of all, the program should stress that a man's evolved sexual desires offer him no excuse whatsoever for raping a woman, and that if he understands and resists those desires, he may be able to prevent their manifestation in sexually coercive behavior. The criminal penalties for rape should also be discussed in imagine the scene: The strapping teens slump embarrassed in their seats while nature. The first message to be drilled into boys' heads is: We believe you're genetically programmed to rape. The second (and inevitably less impressive) message is: Oh, and by the way, we're not going to let you do it. Young women should be informed that, during the evolution of human sexuality, the existence of female choice has favored men who are quickly aroused by signals of a female's willingness to grant sexual access. Furthermore, women need to realize that, because selection favored males who had many mates, men tend to read signals of acceptance into a woman's actions In spite of protestations to the contrary, women should also be advised that believes that men are born rapists and that women are under an obligation not psychology would be used to "naturalize" sexist behavior. He thought philandering husbands would be the ones taking advantage of the argument about how cheating was hard to control. He did not foresee the day when evolutionary psychologists would call for the government to sponsor their theories in a way virtually guaranteed to generate the very behaviors they are supposed to prevent. But it was a foregone conclusion that when evolutionary psychology began to focus on genetic predispositions and majoritarian norms to the else. They would forget that we are products not just of evolution, but also of what we imagine ourselves to be. And that if we teach our children to see themselves strictly as beasts, they're bound to act like them. out of the little tunnel we've excavated and return to our day jobs. But before I surrender this space, let me hit a couple of points. what they're doing and create a debate society for citizens, who he thinks are "alienated," in hopes that the Big Palaver will convince them to join together strange metric to judge the success of a piece of journalism. If an article doesn't encourage the masses to meet and cogitate, it's a failure? As I working as a union organizer or ward heeler than as a press critic? Like the '80s activists who used the phrase "economic democracy" as their with public journalism's boom. Those were dark times for journalists, and I rumors, and innuendo that finds its way into print and into the wires. Now, whether it really suggests that at all is an interesting question, which we'll get to in a minute. But the important thing about this line is the way it illuminates just how dramatic the shift in power in the media world has been over the past three to four years, and how real certain of these There is a market for more traditional forms of journalism and entertainment." From this perspective, what's really impressive about the deal is that it's That is, as it happens, how it should be. Although there are plenty of Net cash flow every year, its return on invested capital is only going to rise in the future, its subscriber growth remains startling, and switching costs for If you think that last sentence is pure madness, then the rest of this will worth what the market says it's worth. If it is, then the obvious question is: think their stock is overvalued, and that this is their chance to acquire some assets with real value before the Internet bubble bursts. But I don't believe they think this at all (and you know Jerry Levin is hoping they would have created had they remained apart. In other words, they think there actually will be real synergy between the two sets of assets. there's a plausible case that some real value will be created because of this deal than otherwise would have been (click here for some thoughts on this issue), the only question that matters is whether that value Let's be clear about what it would mean if the market's right. It wouldn't world. It wouldn't mean that the company won't be incredibly profitable in the of shareholder value in the future. What it would mean is that the difference The problem, of course, is that no one keeps track of these things, and a to say the deal was a mistake, even if it was. But before we jump to the conclusion that this deal means that other media companies are worth a lot more than we thought they were, it's worth remembering that if the stock market has 2X, our default assumption should not be that media stocks have been ultimate fighting contest, in which the rules were suspended and each candidate fought according to his wits. The way each behaved in this unexpectedly you get the hell off the stage and out of the race? Because the question of a joke: "Maybe you want me to give a hug to John," he said. position, going totally silent in hopes of being spared further indignities. He most rolls. After a few serious minutes in which he defended himself fairly academy, when he made it his object to acquire as many demerits as possible according to independent estimates of the cost of Bush's proposal to end what of one of his "episodes," also took the mayhem as a prompt to express his truest self. In other words, he jumped on the nearest soapbox and started ranting to no one in particular about such evils as atheism, homosexuality, and you literally can't interrupt him. He comes up for air less often than a Hatch was pretty much out of the rest of the debate, bewildered by the carnage around him and unsure how to respond to it. "It's gotten a lot more nasty," he remarked at one point, displaying a keen grasp of the obvious. realized the power was out, he began looting shops. He brutally joined in the But though he was a constant target for almost everyone else, Bush absorbed at the wily evangelical. Bush seemed to recognize this kind of contained riot close to the keg, smirked a lot, and got through the evening without getting is edited), but there was a cute story in there today about the police The police explained that the seven were interfering with the temporary homeless). My nomination for the unspoken issue of the year in both parties' homeless? Not to mention the fact that "a history of mental problems" turns up makes me salivate with anticipation of the Reform Party convention this summer. I can drive down there, but wherever it is, it'll be the summer's best say much for its accuracy, but, hey, those airbeds are great). But on the In addition to being a financial prognosticator of some renown, Dr. Ed various movies, in the form of plus and minus signs. Judging from his current the lowest is three minuses. (In marked contrast to his financial neck out. This served him well during the 1990s, when he predicted accurately percent consist of one or more pluses. To Chatterbox's thinking, this is bullishness taken to an irresponsible extreme. (Chatterbox would put the negative judgments are highly questionable. There is no way The Big The ambitious but flawed The Thin Red Line deserves at least one plus in chief "based upon their support of a litmus test for future chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." The Republican National Committee is now running ads endorsed any test at all, let alone a "litmus" test for the Joint Chiefs I would try to bring about the kind of change in policy, on the "don't ask, in integrating the military. And I think that would require those who wanted slightly. "I would insist, before appointing anybody to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that individual support my policy," the vice president said. "And, yes, I would make that a requirement." Requiring "support" is somewhat for further analysis of this distinction). After he was attacked for the answer, Gore made clear his preference for his second response over his first. "I did not mean to imply that there should ever be any kind of inquiry into the As Gore belatedly realized, "support" is the better answer, because it leaves open the theoretical possibility of appointing a military officer so honorable that he will work assiduously to implement a policy he personally disagrees with. But in reality, there isn't much of a difference between which was how the New York Times characterized Gore's adjustment. Chairmen and members of the Joint Chiefs who "personally" oppose this particular change in policy are not likely to put their feelings aside and implement it. They're likely to try to sabotage it. he told midshipmen that if the new policy violated their beliefs, they should "If we didn't work out a compromise with the chiefs, they would sabotage us on the Hill. While they were obliged to obey their commander, they had the right to present their personal views to congressional committees publicly." It was, about their personal opposition to allowing gays to serve in the military that "don't ask, don't tell" on the administration. And had Congress not acted, it's entirely likely that the chiefs would have worked to sabotage the new policy at For this reason, Gore's "litmus test" position is not merely defensible; it's the only sensible one to take if you seriously intend to get rid of "don't Republican line that all the Joint Chiefs ever do is offer advice and obey their commander in chief, it's worse than naive. It's disingenuous. Democratic president's effort to allow gays to serve openly in the military. And what's more, Republicans want them to undermine it. world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." Other recent gaffes include: "The question we need to ask: Is our children learning?" and blending "trade" and "barriers" into a warning against "terriers." Election Commission to keep its nose out of the Internet, the New York Times reports. The agency asked for input on in its role in regulating card. The computerized letter began with the rundown of every family member's 'accomplishments' for the last year. Included in the 'accomplishments' were reindeer expert' Maria Berg, male reindeer have already shed their antlers by the rundown of every family member's 'accomplishments' for the last year. Included in the 'accomplishments' were being fired from a job, suing someone the rundown of every family member's 'accomplishments' for the last year. Included in the 'accomplishments' were being fired from a job, suing someone It is widely assumed that politicians are routinely influenced by campaign contributions. That is usually why businesses and unions make such criminal investigations or prosecutions are rare (and usually involve illegal for an elected official to trade a vote or other official action for a Answer: If a senator were to write a letter saying, "Dear Big Donor: Give my anything short of that, in terms of evidence or context, is either not illegal or impossible to prosecute. For example, a campaign donation after the perfectly legal, even though the connection between the donation and the vote is explicit. And of course in most cases there is no evidence of an explicit large donor's savings and loan), the Senate ostensibly tightened its own ethics governmental agencies. But it bars them from doing so "on the basis of contributions or services, or promises of contributions or services, to the Member's political campaigns." In other words, a senator supposedly cannot treat a donor differently from any other constituent. Doing so could result in censure or expulsion. The Senate has not yet convicted any members of violating Who can possibly keep up? All the more reason to buy really expensive Internet working so well. Perhaps it's time to think about the virtues of municipal for a week to pass without a similar announcement. (Though I can't quite get over the shock of that insurance deal.) In a way, the most confusing part of this week was the breathtaking volatility in the stock market, and in their steady upward ascent, they've begun swinging around wildly (even more are trading much higher or lower on no news at all. You might say, of course, that this is just par for the course. But it feels a little different. It feels, in fact, like investors might be thinking a little more seriously about risk. But then it could just be the sunspots. And imagine the advertising campaign will break new ground in the inventive use of surprising. Would you want to be quoted saying something that meaningless?" I may be naive, but I think that even if this deal does go through, GM will not announced that its earnings for the fourth quarter would be well below analysts' expectations. Analysts attributed the company's problems to overly know is: Is the company now fully committed to bright colors?" Enterprise Institute, we decided to gather instead for lunch at the Palm All the usual luminaries were there, with the exception of the incredibly expected to attend next week's caucuses. It was a bit difficult to hear him not offer a round of seemingly harsh but actually harmless stories about the potential to get out of hand. The meeting dissolved into laughter when Johnny Apple jumped in at this point to complain that shoe leather was what of Weights and Measures who might be interested in checking to see whether it criticize him for being too conservative? According to conspiracy rules, all politicians were supposed to receive credit ("new respect") for turning more since he wouldn't say publicly what his favorite movie was (while acknowledging wasn't living up to his own elevated standard of positive campaigning. to put together this week's outline. The Dean, who by this point was mostly covered in a snowdrift, was impatient to bring the meeting to a close. He wished everyone a lively campaign and reminded us to dress warmly for his Media conglomeration is bad for journalism and society. journalism is bad business and bad journalism is, regrettably, at times good processing becomes cheaper, so does pluralism and decentralization, which comes Better off before the New York Times and Wall Street Journal three dozen big media companies in the United States alone. Critics of big media suffer from the Fallacy of the Golden Era. They think time detecting its luster because golden ages always shine more brightly from a distance. Another thing that tarnishes modern journalism is the recent proliferation of media critics, who bring brisk scrutiny to every ethical Post haven't paired editorial quality with financial success. Nor does imperialism isn't always bad, and new technology makes it easier for small business, the less attention it pays to its civic functions. See the The critique of big media invariably romanticizes small, independent reader, I care more about the newspaper I read than who owns it. Most of law of "regression to the mean," which dictates that heirs are rarely as bright not reflexively mourn the gobbling of small media by big media. Small, independently owned papers routinely pull punches when covering local car dealers, real estate, and industry, to whom they are in deep hock. The powers that be as the "independents" are. What's more, if the owners about contaminated groundwater or police brutality, the big media New York means to consistently hold big business and big government accountable. In the complain about the paper's coverage. According to a reporter who was present, If you don't believe big media has a leg up in making government behave, try pulling journalistic punches than about any lost "independence." (Remember, plodding movie into a hit. (By the way, I believe the rave was genuine, and not a media conglomerate to slant the news in favor of its holdings will only Some would have big media erect Fifth Columns within their walls, but the Staples Center scandal. One prominent critic called the story a ago, it's worth noting) was the beating it took from other big media. Big media strives to be ethical for the same reason big government and big business do: New technology prevents it from controlling information the way it used to, and Media conglomeration runs in cycles, so the fish currently progressing the media hysterics prophesied the end of literature when conglomerates bought of the deal. But the confusion also stems from uncertainty about how many (The right way to calculate the deal's value, by the way, is to multiply the The confusion isn't overwhelmingly important, of course. But the idea that of this deal by the press. (Though not by Wall Street.) Just because it's in stock doesn't make it less real. Eleven billion dollars in shareholder value is Stuffed inside the shrink wrap alongside Chatterbox's subscriber copy of Death Row." This elegant advertorial product intersperses color photographs of glamour ("They broke the rules. They defied the order," writes someone named reality of capital punishment, so that no one around the world, The campaign will appear on billboards and on the pages of the major news tackling a social issue, as it did in previous campaigns that focused on war, Aids, discrimination and racism. Bitterly attacked by some and internationally time, they have paved the way for innovative modes of corporate punishment. But its attempt to harness this principled stand to the selling of panties does tend to trivialize the issue (in much the same way that its previous campaigns trivialized war, AIDS, discrimination, and racism). The catalog also objectifies real people. Looking at the photos of murderers After all, it didn't just put together a bunch of photographs; it also hired to the Web press release) to conduct interviews with the inmates. Here are some What's it like when you lose a person you've been close to? Would you be sorry you killed if you'd never been caught? Can you imagine circumstances in which you'd kill again? According to a note at the end of the catalog, "Individuals were not permitted to speak about the crime, guilt or innocence, or prison conditions have added, "And we had no interest in discussing these crimes with the families of the murder victims." (The prison inmates may be objectified, but the people they killed don't seem to exist at all.) Chatterbox is especially to mark the odd innocent soul for death is, after all, one of the more powerful arguments against capital punishment. At first, Chatterbox thought perhaps doesn't want to find any innocent men or women. The point, after all, is are merely tragic. Imagine trying to sell a pair of shantung trousers with the nostalgia chord in the first frames, opening like an episode of the cartoon series, with the Sabotage title splashed across the rotating wheel of is up and smoke is pouring out. The Mach-5 has been sabotaged. The Mach-5 is each other, Pops issues his warning from the back seat ("Look out!"), room for four. It's instantly maneuverable, too. Speed slips through the seam as a rival's car plunges into a fiery crash. Another note of authenticity: The explosive sound effects come from the show's old episodes. car, Speed avoids another fiery collision to cross the finish line under the that fills the screen signals danger past, victory won; Speed survives to race the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers." The cars and in life. Time to race ahead in the vehicle that saved our generational memory hole to sell a German car to young consumers who may consider it the opposite of cool. One relic redeems another: Drivers wanted for race outright, because if they'd won, Real Quiet would have been disqualified National Rifle Association held its annual convention and showcased its new ensuring domestic tranquility, and promoting the general welfare. His sound displays in federal buildings, and the spending of tax money for religiously administrators should be protected from Congress. The naive spin: Republicans lost. The sophisticated spin: Republicans won, by appeasing Christian voters supported it across ethnic lines. Pundits think other states will follow spending dues on political contributions without their members' consent. millions of their personal wealth, for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Pundits hailed this as a triumph of political experience over wealth and needed to avoid a runoff in the Republican primary for governor. The national enough to jar Congress into supporting the International Monetary Fund but not politically painful tax, spending, and legal reforms necessary for its Lesbian Task Force released a report on public attitudes toward increasing public tolerance for gays despite persistent moral disapproval. than an appeal to the thirsty to drink Crown Royal. It is the first break in apply to beer and wine, and cite this as the reason why grapes and hops have been gaining market share against the hard stuff. Industry strategists knew that the ads were bound to be controversial; the initial spots, therefore, are designed to slip the product into the commercial dialogue with minimal splash. No happy groups hoisting highballs in the Polo Lounge here; no scenes from the negative ads fielded early in a political campaign: If you can get them by without being too offensive, almost without being spotted, the message goes point, Valedictorian clearly targets the male viewer. We see a large, near it?) bringing the morning newspaper up the steps. The scene evokes the gracious life, even if it doesn't quite translate to the real world: As dog it as to deliver it. The setting is obviously upscale, and so is the reading dog, doing double duty with the help of editing techniques that make it look invitation to the viewer to see Crown Royal, too, as being at the top of the heap. If the class of canine brings a sense of nobility to the ad and product, this particular specimen is so well trained that it intensifies the image of March whisper across our minds. This is all a postmodern variation on the than they would own a poodle; and upscale men can do better than a beer and a dark glowing warmth in cut glass as the pouch falls away, much as a shift might fall from the shoulders of a man's lover. Valedictorian floats bumper sticker, a simple image designed to give a familiar name fresh life. first dog waited all day to fetch the paper, or is its master about to have the Valedictorian is innocuous. The aristocratic hounds grab our attention, drinking. Or so the company would like us to think. But this won't placate the critics of alcohol advertising, who charge that the underlying purpose of the ad campaign is to recruit new drinkers, especially among the young. Almost ritually, the company will reply that the campaign aims merely to compete for market share among those who already drink. This spot has provoked calls for on television, Valedictorian may be one of the last. best of men, is telling us that Crown Royal is man's best drink. laboring to make taxes and character the central issues of the presidential with the issue of taxes but with character, accusing Dole of engaging in the old "attack" politics (proving once again that the best use of negatives can be charge of wrongdoing leveled against Dole. Hold both responds to the tax attacks made by Dole and sows seeds of doubt about future Republican assaults. the background, indicating that the former senator hasn't left that unpopular venue. Color footage, complete with a shot of the Marine band in the raised taxes and generally resist any argument that Democrats are better at lies in its boldness. If taxes became the defining issue, the terrain would consultant in the early '80s who switched parties and often deployed taxes as a Hold that he has cut taxes for "working families" is based on the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps the working poor. The choice of themselves that way. The narration and visual swiftly move on to "tax credits popular assumption that Republicans are tax cutters by citing areas where it's ratings of any national figure) in footage that runs in slow motion, making him look older and less vigorous. Meanwhile, a list of Dole tax increases scrolls up the screen, annotated with specific bill numbers as proof. implies that there are at least two Doles, setting up the conclusion that the the grain of popular assumptions about Democrats and taxes; but it doesn't need the dehumanizing places where corporate careers begin. cap turning on a bottle of Diet Coke. The guy opening the soda (dressed in a chair. Suddenly decked out in a snazzy blue suit, he starts dancing theme of previous Diet Coke campaigns). The lighting changes, too, making the beaten career track, the spot suggests. It liberates the young rebel who's doing what he has to do to get ahead, but who still doesn't take it all too transported to a different astral plane. And the vehicle is Diet Coke. He dances off the walls and over to the desks of two women, who smile up at know that for sure as he turns toward one of them, strokes her chin, and hands her the bottle. The narrator tells us that "everyone is singing to the sound of acknowledges regulations about truth in advertising: Even a rebel has to office women dressed up for a night on the town. She dances and dips with our guy as he sings, "My place or yours." On his knees, he offers a rose to yet is who our guy wants to become but is desperately afraid of becoming.) The boss has heard something, but the office looks as bland as usual. Was it just the whoosh of the cap turning that disturbed the silence of this cathedral of electrified rockers strip down to acoustic to reach the essence of their music. Getting uncapped with Diet Coke presumably allows office workers a similar shot music of youth, of being yourself wherever you are. Lest anyone miss this for the overweight. You're supposed to drink Diet Coke because you like it, not because you have to drink it. You're a rebel who refuses to leave your youth behind. You drank Diet Coke before you got to the office, and while the bald guy can order you around, he can't take your soda away from you. homeless people, and old folks who are stuck indoors without air conditioning no avail. The secular explanation meteorologists have offered for the heat relief in sight for the South. The worse news: The heat is spreading over the Military officials have proposed to relax their policies against prosecutions (by prosecuting only those cases in which the adultery has demonstrably damaged troop morale) and the severity of the discharge imposed on violators. Analysts have identified four schools of thought, in ascending order because, in the words of a spokesman, "If you can't trust the Marine next to which, unlike the other services, thinks officers should be allowed to Military law critics who prefer the civilian standard, under which adultery is Food and Drug Administration approved thalidomide as a treatment for leprosy complications. Everyone assumes doctors will prescribe it more often for AIDS complications. The real news isn't the approval, which was decided upon months ago, but the elaborate new regime of warnings and restrictions, which are designed to prevent a recurrence of the birth defects thalidomide caused in the 1960s. Analysts credit the new rules to collaboration between the model of cooperation and prudent regulation. The media are taking the continue to fight a federal antitrust suit. The Justice and Defense departments had argued the merger would imperil national defense by reducing competition. encouragement, every company small enough to merge legally has done so, leaving from the fight not because it respects the government's authority but because white. The advisers called the defamation case an attempt to silence those who challenge the white establishment and "to punish three men who have clearly given their lives and their careers to help people who could not help themselves." Editorialists called the verdict an affirmation that the truth damage because, ironically, he is the only one of the advisers to have sought practices and reform its financial system to attract private investment. News fairy tale that targets the subteen who still responds to the child within. But it is just as likely to engage the old folks of the athletic shoe with a cow grazing in a bucolic field. Out of shape and shoeless, this one is an eater, not an exerciser. Responding to the whistles and taunts of Old Man Leaping, then falling ("Ooh," says the moon), she lies splayed on her feeding responds to the strains of "Destination Moon" on the soundtrack: "Come and take in a thought balloon over the animal's head. The brand doesn't have to be mentioned: In the age of the advertised image, where television often seems you wear the shoes and just do the rest, you'll soar, whether your moon be the slogan that is now as familiar as the swoosh. Evoking freedom, a safe tale goes on: Buy the shoes, and jump the moon. And it doesn't matter if it's Seconds as falling below "even the minimum levels of current political with the dominant Republican position on issues like guns and leads in normally Republican suburbs and states; it captures and plays upon the mood of an electorate that this year seems to despise the negative ads if they seemingly indomitable. The scar across his forehead speaks to the injury he suffered; and as he speaks, he passes the torch of his own courage to the a single negative word, this spot efficiently repels the Dole campaign's says, "When I hear people question the president's character, I say, look what authentic; the witness carries a credibility that the anonymous, disembodied political ads is a weekly feature of Slate during the election and off for "subversion" after he helped lead the democracy movement that expulsion and other concessions, the United States recently stopped sponsoring the "modesty" of her musical skills and marveling at her heroic struggle big story was an agreement to begin talks on a hemispheric free trade zone. The countries also announced an alliance against drug cartels and a collective authority. Optimists spun the same behavior as more friendly, respectful, and addicting children to the idiot box, and robbing kids of what's left of their captors, he died of heart failure in his sleep. Skeptics noted the convenient journalists saw the corpse, confirmed his death, and broadcast video of him to prove it. Everyone agreed he was one of history's worst butchers, having killed credibly investigate the Hale allegations because of two conflicts of interest: because it would put "stress on my family" but that she decided to go ahead for a loose cannon. The legal consensus: The appeal is doomed. The political consensus: The public has stopped paying attention, and the media will follow suit, because the appeal is confined to matters of law rather than salacious called him "Scrooge" and peddled the story to radio talk show hosts, who dubbed education, health care, and the environment." The backspin: Gore's rivals and Commentators who deemed Gore innocent of parsimony faulted him anyway for his career as a hard rock drummer (he was better known as "Cozy") and did not autobiography. The New York Times highlighted three prizes won by the that the Grand Forks Herald had won the top prize for its coverage of killed, salted, and eaten. There have been other tales of cannibalism in North tales to be disseminated in order to attract sympathy and foreign aid. idea to try this trick anywhere; it was an even worse idea to try it in he's still working for Bob Dole, and it's still not clear exactly how all this perceived integrity. Photo assumes, correctly, that the audience is photo." Mark is almost out of the frame; you wouldn't look past the three for him, that is. The next scene piques the viewer's interest by showing how where the old way always looked fake, today's technology can make the fake look that John's campaign is guilty of the dirty deed and of lying about it. Here Mark's spot adroitly turns the corner from response to attack. Indeed, it ignores the essence of John's charge (captured in the succeeding scene of the this Republican senator has been a rare exception to politics as usual: He protected him against the standard Democratic charges against the Republicans: long has he been fooling us?" The fake ad becomes a moment of dark is a response spot dares to charge that John is "unprincipled," that we can't newspaper story make the assault as credible as it can be, given the unusually strong public perception of John as a decent and independent guy, who was, photo is the latest emblem of a year when consultants have become more consultants moved swiftly to convert the mistake into their best argument yet the Dole ads that lambasted the president as soft on drugs with Dole's Real footage that obviously has been blown up. The colors are off, giving him a returns in black and white, and we're told that he voted against the creation answer an attack briefly and then shift the debate to stronger ground. Dole's Real Record does this with such ease that we hardly notice the transition. The narrator tells us that Dole voted against student loans, slogans can't hide," says the narrator. Not only does this layer of varnish not only for this vote, but for all we have seen and heard in the spot. legislation and that we just shouldn't vote for him. And if not for Dole, then with one of the children he allegedly is protecting from Dole's policies. Real Record successfully broadens the issues beyond drugs and asks, "Which candidate took his foot out of his mouth and started running again. The issue, which historically has belonged to the party of labor, not the party of They're "working harder and longer but taking home less." share soaring profits with workers. But instead of drawing attention to produced a spot that analyzed the economy in statistical and legislative terms; the New Dole of The Plan speaks directly into the camera in human terms, response, but this time the lighting is right, and Dole finally looks switches to a narrator, who describes "the Dole Economic Plan." The next scene Tax Cut for Every Taxpayer." The absence of any reinforcing visual actually material: The scene all but shouts that tax cuts are a family value. The spot seen in other ads, the specificity of the number--$1,657 instead of $1,600--is Plan closes, we return to Dole chatting with a woman holding an infant, a scene that further humanizes the tax plan and helps close the gender gap. The choice and makes it less of a surprise, even to Dole. Last week, as Dole stood political ads will be a weekly feature of Slate during the election antagonize the United States, and is taking his case public to put pressure on the dead by uniting three of her Baby Bells (spanning the West, Southwest, and catastrophe: Don't panic; the wires are being fixed, and it's still safe to personal religious beliefs and I regret if anyone feels offended." continues. The world auto industry is consolidating into GM and Ford in the have even more clout and better benefits. Workers of the world, unite! cable nearly struck the ski gondola in which they were riding, according to that the crew was flying recklessly. Crew members are charged with involuntary Before their divorce, the couple agreed their frozen embryos could be used only if both consented. A lower court, citing the right to procreate under Roe fate of her nonviable fetus." The state's high court disagreed. The superficial embryos will be treated as just another contractually disposable commodity. chairman of the House investigation of the campaign finance scandal, was under Democratic objections by assigning the investigation's next step to a caricature" as an overzealous idiot and pointed out that his real crime has been to distract attention from the transcripts, which indicate that White aside from the Pentagon, to have been erected, and it cost more than twice as because the building belies his rhetoric against big government. The fully cynical spin: The joke is on us, because the building faithfully reflects big, happy family of democracies. Critics called it a triumph for the obligation to arm and defend the new members isn't worth the military help the new members will provide. Complete cynics replied that the Poles are better Members of the support group turned him in. The media seized on the Internet ethical for members of an online support group to breach confidentiality if courts will now treat Internet confessions as fair game. Skeptics argued police by phone after learning that support group members had told them about interlocking lawbreaking" and "the most systematic, deliberate obstruction of news: It could slow down the economy enough to force a recession, as the 1970s authorize audible prayers, told its sponsor that it "ain't worth the damn paper it's written on" and "ain't going to require shit" until Congress passes a law his hometown. Young girls sang his praises. Children staged a play for him. The the White House. The subject was her legal work for the savings and loan at the center of the Whitewater scandal. Videotape of her answers will be shown to the my husband") and debated whether he will indict her. The overwhelming consensus digs at Congress ("a show about nothing"), the press corps ("I hardly have any time to read the news anymore. Mostly I just skim the retractions"), and boy fatally shot one teacher and wounded another and two boys. He was charged with murder and tried as an adult. The media linked the case to other warning signs and the importance of taking them seriously. Two clues in the serious offense, he could avert impeachment by admitting to it, apologizing, case of the switched babies took another bizarre turn. Last week, the girls should be restored to their respective biological parents, which raised compromise" that serves the best interests of the girls. The cynical spin: Good say the dress, which had been dismissed as a myth, was actually concealed in daughter's apartment) and has now been turned over to prosecutors. The other the dress and worry that it will turn the public against him. The big questions prepared statement to the press, from whom her apologia drew sarcasm and hypothetical ways to keep their relationship private, including falsely denying wrote the "Talking Points," without the help of anyone at the White House. The has cleared the White House of the most serious charge: writing the Talking General Motors and the United Auto Workers have agreed tentatively to estimated half percentage point. The optimistic spin: Once both sides realized moving jobs overseas), they settled the material disputes and ended the strike. The pessimistic spin: The escalation reflects a deep distrust between GM and merger. The New York Times says this could be "the pin that burst the because the market thinks regulators are sick of mergers and are about to crack identity, yet at ease in the establishment world. Well, just enough to get hotel. The lobby, which is shot in black and white, possesses a grandeur seldom approaches the desk, the clerk accepts that he belongs. Like the pants, our carrying an attach case; this guy could be anything, even a young computer phone, we hear the narrator's voice for the first time: "You know those pants into a political rally and ends up on stage. We see the scene from the politics staged and phony?) and the endemic irrelevance of the proceedings. Our hero's demeanor speaks volumes, as the politician shakes his hand and photos succeeding scenes, he continues to fit in without getting permanently trapped. He backs across the stage toward a podium where they are giving out awards; is into a wedding ("There you are," the grandmother says); but at least he's not never seem to fit. The background for the picture is a painted outdoor scene. That's where he'd rather be. Instead, he's suddenly in the hotel hallway again. Hands on hips, he pauses, then strides toward another of those situations in Slates." The hotel clerk's hand hits the bell, summoning a bellhop to take our doorway? Whatever it is, the ad seems to say, you can go there wearing your write what you want on a slate; it isn't just a copybook. You can go where you have to wearing Slates, without losing your identity. You're still wearing the uninformed, the spot assumes viewers are familiar with its principal producer who tells us that sports personalities do not automatically qualify as one of its least articulate: The Bullets use him in an ad whose entire point is that he can't even manage to recommend that viewers buy tickets to a Bullets accompanies our first shot of this next candidate, whom we see over the casting couch doesn't identify himself, but he tells us that he won a gold doesn't impress them, and given that they are probably making big money, why experience in front of an audience?" elicits mention of another political is a sharp comment on the disconnect between popular culture and politics: there's a twinkle in his eye. Proof that he's skeptical about politics? Perhaps he quit the Senate (a fact that some viewers would know) because he wanted a industrialized nations, must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases to a level called it "the most significant multinational agreement ever on the world's it faced immediate gridlock: Developing countries refuse to reduce their bundle its Internet browser with Windows. The judge hasn't decided whether market while the case is in court. The Justice Department's spin: "Starting It's just a temporary order. The intermediate analysis: It will probably be in analysis: Computer makers will keep bundling the browser with Windows anyway, relate to his efforts to cover up an extramarital affair. Defenders say the affair is private and old news. Critics argue that while the affair may be "There was a tragic element to his life story," waxed the New York cemetery along with his tombstone, which, according to the New York Republicans and editorialists want further investigation to determine how break in the vetting process because he was a big political donor? The new spin: Politicians are exploiting the scandal for partisan advantage rather than seek an independent counsel. Pundits expressed disappointment but no surprise distraction from newly released notes suggesting that White House officials counted on the Federal Election Commission's inability to enforce distraction from the real scandal: that he intends to do nothing with the job. billion on paper. The reason: a disappointing earnings report. Oracle blamed for the whole technology sector. Contrarians called it a buying opportunity. meeting with a denunciation of the United States and its military presence in government to facilitate grant applications for studies on medical marijuana, messy divorce from Sunbeam and its forswearing of all product endorsements. properly making users bear the cost of these calls. Former federal drug czar the city's first nonwhite mayor but conceded that he will change almost nuclear war against a superpower. The new mission: deterring nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare by lesser powers (formalizing President Bush's its conventional forces and authorize first use of its nukes as a substitute save his life, which means he can be tried for murder in federal court and how close they had come to being in the vicinity and, thereby, to possibly getting shot. Pundits pondered the dilemma between security and public access and the Secret Service, for failing to take other previous nutty episodes investigation by refusing the subpoena and that he might even get it quashed on the grounds that a sitting president can't be forced to testify, but agree the first condition but none of the others. Editorialists think this is a fair seats it must now compromise with other parties to get anything done. The optimistic spin: It will take a dull consensus builder to compromise with the other parties and get something done. (See "International lucrative private sector jobs without looking like rats deserting a sinking ship. White House reporters, who depend on the press secretary's good graces, Editorialists, who do not depend on the press secretary's good graces, pointed while deliberately remaining ignorant of tawdry facts in order to preserve his for early next year and pledged to relinquish power to a civilian government by count themselves lucky, since previous "transitions" have been slower and generals who will cancel or annul the elections if they don't get their way. has ruled that one of the defendants can call her as a witness. The superficial spin: It's not fair to let her testify, since she failed to appear in previous hearings. The sophisticated spin: The defendants were counting on the judge to bar her testimony so they could claim she was being silenced. Instead, the House aide. The senators reportedly bought it. (For an analysis of the planning to have sex. In a press conference before angry reporters at a condom shop, they defended their stunt, saying it was meant to be "a moral lesson" and "the biggest public service announcement ever" on behalf of safe sex and abstinence. The company that was hired to transmit the event to computer users would launch their careers. They announced their real names, which government is soliciting public reaction to a proposed national health medical records to be accessed by inputting his or her Social Security number. Some doctors and insurers say it will help doctors get past information about their patients and will help administrators manage billing information for The government hopes to construct the database in a way that will satisfy which many former gays have successfully recovered. The gay rights groups claim discriminate against gays. (For an analysis of the strategic implications of having been accused of insufficient zeal, upheld the traditional World Cup what to do to rescue Japan's economy. Pessimists predicted that by weakening died because he had been unjustly imprisoned for five years, which is a subtler means the country's democracy movement is defeated. Optimists say it means the hell I could have possibly gone through the vast material they had gathered, practice for producers to enlist correspondents such as him to ask scripted questions on camera without having done the preparatory work. By contrast, was never informed that my face on the air gave me responsibility for a major After the story collapsed, "I was basically told to be a good team player and got a two year sentence. Prosecutors dropped murder charges because they selfish, and blind "to the intrinsic value of the life of the child." The positive spin: Rich kids aren't above the law. The negative spin: Rich kids get and other entertainment media. An official explained that television and video are "the cause of corruption." Human rights activists called it the world's harshest ban on information. The good news: The government hasn't banned clarification and approval. The suits blamed the implants for numerous enrich themselves by linking the implants to apparently unrelated maladies and juries and that the plaintiffs didn't want to risk being discredited by further federal appeals court ordered Secret Service officials to testify about had asserted a "protective function privilege," which would preclude Secret Service testimony on the grounds that if the president thought his agents might testify against him, he might keep them at a distance, thereby endangering his Even if the agents can't testify against a naughty president, he might keep them at a distance just to mitigate his shame, or at least to protect his the hat you wore during the murder. (The cops matched the gun to the fatal in jail, don't write letters virtually confessing to the crime. (Jurors say reward.) The media sulked that the trial was over before it could become outweighed its financial losses during her tenure. Brown says she's leaving for the opportunity to transcend the print medium and "to own what we create." The Associated Press notes she's leaving two months after The Yorker brought in a new publisher and began to merge operations with other chivalry, and humility. Liberals lauded his nonviolence. The sunny spin: He was comparative ad in three chapters: "Problem," "Good Guy," and "Bad Guy." It using drugs is that we're not tough on pushers, who get just "a slap on the wrist." Valid or not, the view mirrors opinion polls. The language of the ad is pretested, and this initial argument will encounter little voter resistance. A speaking. So here he is, smiling, but in the safety of a still image. A shot of picture promptly disappears, but its brief presence qualifies the ad for the more lenient federal rules about "candidate" spots: Such spots can't be censored, and the stations must sell the time at a lower "political" rate. prisoners behind bars. Why color? Because in this spot, putting more offenders actually saying what's written on screen and sourced to a local paper: that he opposes longer sentences as a deterrent against crime. The spot nails him as an here: to invite voters to judge on the basis of social, not economic, such as Medicare, jobs, or education in his spots when he's tied down defending News echoes and reinforces the message in Bob Dole's ads and speeches: Democrats are weak on drugs. No accident there: The News was produced by "arrogant opponents felt the bitter taste of defeat." The sunny spin, from is accused of having panicked, fielded too many rookies, and benched or cut plead guilty to at least one crime, whereas she insists on total immunity. spin: "Having sexual relations is not a medical necessity." The New York State Analysts speculate Kaiser's decision will accelerate a race by insurers to alleged copycat case of three white men dragging a black man from a car was picked up in the national press and was being investigated as a hate crime women say what really happened is that they ripped off the man in a crack deal, he tried to get into their car, and he was dragged in the ensuing altercation. fabricating quotes and characters. Nobody knows how long she has been doing it. Smith's defense, in her departing column: She only did it "to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point," and her career will survive "this indiscretion." Colleagues and media critics compared her with ex- New despite a previous incident in which she had reportedly reviewed a concert she didn't attend. At least the New Republic didn't know it was hiring a "championed the downtrodden and elevated the voices of people who would never work of talking to real downtrodden people. (Why do editors fall for the wiles of the likes of Glass and Smith? Check out "Glass Houses," Republicans of killing the bill at the behest of Big Tobacco. Republicans said extraneous tax breaks in the first place. The initial spin: Pushing to kill the bill was a big gamble for the tobacco companies, because they'll now have to face suits from states and individuals. The backspin: What gamble? The Senate had made the companies' decision easy by stripping the bill of the liability cap that would have mitigated the suits. (For an earlier look at the spin This is the second straight National Hockey League championship for the Red labeled a choker earlier in his career. The offstage hero: former Red Wings a car crash, was rolled onto the ice in his wheelchair to celebrate this year's has pushed these leaders to "the extreme." The media had a field day, recalling the empty Oval Office is paired with a narrator asking who really belongs context by imagining Dole behind the mahogany of the president's desk. To make cut is attacked without being called a tax cut. (Tax cuts are too popular to This description makes Dole's proposal sound more like an old Democrats' from earlier ads, the spot moves at light speed from campaign issue to campaign issue: deficits, education, and drug cuts, abortion, interest rates, and harm signs (literally) of a failing economy fill the screen, all punctuated by the equivalent of asking whose finger you want on the nuclear button. With a swift striding down a White House passageway toward the Oval Office, where he presumably belongs. Title-- surely Dick Morris' last contribution to the bit of demonization that may help congressional Democrats. The tracking shot of to read the credits, which research shows viewers rarely do. This is the last ago and now, as the general election begins, both candidates are on equal financial footing. Stay tuned to see what they're trying to do to your the Fifth Amendment. Now she's said to be interested in negotiating for had an affair with Flowers. Sophisticated critics conceded he can square his evidently because his fake military record wasn't carefully scrutinized. (For Sheet." For more on how the story everyone's talking about stayed out of agreeing that the United States should change the embargo policy, the pope for a sentence of life in prison without parole. He bought the deal because the case against him was a "slam dunk," and he might have got the death penalty. abrupt end of the trial they had regarded as their next meal ticket. for Roe 's wisdom and lamented its political vulnerability. Conservative editorialists vouched for Roe 's political invulnerability and lamented its unwisdom. Journalists, having planned substantial coverage of the commercial rather than a scientific advance, suggesting that the agriculture and Drug Administration claimed it has the authority to regulate human cloning. This has led to a dispute between politicians who want to ban human cloning and receive a special tour by the museum council's chairman. This reverses the officials for succumbing to the woolly headed notion that terrorists are educable. The museum's defenders argued that there's nothing to lose in trying. (For reactions from the Middle East from earlier in the week, see not lift sanctions within six months. In response, Republican congressional focusing on a military scenario, even as they continue to question its wisdom. cardinals who will elect the next pope. Analysts agreed that by stacking this the face," he reportedly testified that he hadn't exposed himself to her and didn't recall meeting her. The media used the deposition as an opportunity to 60-second ad for Mark is what political consultants call a "bio spot." Underneath, however, it is an implicit "comparative" in which every favorable item about Mark is an unspoken (for the moment) push off against John. The spot attempts to define the race; it's a road map to where Mark's campaign intends emphasizing that he's created a multimillion dollar business. He's trying, in strategy often discussed in politics but seldom fully executed, as challengers the future; the spot tells us this visually, not only with his looks but off the student loans (polls show that if you had them, you better have paid tends to resist claims made in political ads. So as this spot returns to the present, it relies on an increasingly standard technique: It invokes Mark deserves credit for "building the information highway." A second source is care. The images convey a sense of compassion and inclusion: The young guy cares about the elderly and minorities. And again, the implicit comparison with together the "common man" theme (Mark himself replays it to camera), the "future" theme (watch the blinking cursor), and a visual and verbal appeal to "family" values. With this, Mark is fishing for stray conservative voters Republicans for "another negative" attack. Initially, it doesn't even bother to identify the substance of the attack. Survey research shows that one of the most effective negative charges is that the other side is being negative. This ad seeks to create a context of doubt for any and all Republican attacks on "natural" Republican issue. Immigration continues to be social and political dynamite, and this spot tries to take the match out of Republican hands. The workers from "replacement" by foreign workers. The actual issue is not explained, but the charge taps into the populist anger about stagnant wages, picture can't be used because, in theory if not in effect, the ad is an act of legislative advocacy, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, not the doesn't want to be about one or two big things this year; it's not the economy stupid. This spot is the vivid expression of a strategy of many tactics. There "International Papers" rounds up reactions and analyses from some named the best team in the coaches' poll. Commentators went on debating which Sentimentalists groaned that the Chiefs had choked again. Cynics predicted that the Broncos will advance to the Super Bowl, where they will choke again. "Sen. Pothole." Pundits look forward to a vicious primary fight with Rep. Office of Government Ethics rendered the fund impotent, leaving the poor friends are setting up a new legal defense fund to circumvent the restrictions. biggest tightwad in Congress with taxpayer dollars" by his chief of staff. The jaundiced moral, according to the Associated Press: "Them that has, gets." probe is now turning a profit for the government, undermining Democrats' restrictions on political speech over the Internet. The rules forbid defamation of the government, transmission of state secrets, and promotion of virtually impossible. The only way to squelch subversive messages is to block the Internet entirely, which would cripple economic growth. The optimist's seconds left, cementing his legacy as the greatest clutch performer of all time. Sports pundits gave the Bulls a few seconds to celebrate before pursuit of even greater perfection. Cynics advised him to retire before the Brill says the briefings violated Justice Department ethical guidelines because some of the information came from witnesses who were about to give the same guidelines and says he is authorized to brief reporters whenever necessary to "counter misinformation" and "engender confidence in the work of this office." by firing employees because they weren't helping the company's bottom line, was fired because he wasn't helping the company's bottom line. "A taste of his own actual military involvement. Skeptics argue that this is a contradiction. The negotiated the settlement, says it will scare other companies into enforcing and federal prosecutors are looking for grounds to execute the three whites to pieces. The district attorney wants to justify the death penalty by adding we treat school shootings as a national epidemic but dismiss racial killings as privilege has already been curbed in some cases. Liberal editorialists replied honestly to their lawyers, and they predicted the court will see it their way. Previously vilified for inaccuracy and recklessness, Drudge is drawing favorable reviews this week following a recent speech at the National Press as a fierce monopoly is outdated, since its market share is under assault. As Experts debated whether he would be remembered more for his brutal tyranny or opportunity to restore civilian democracy. Instead, the military immediately news: The country might be angry enough to rise up against the military. The bad news: Lots of people might be killed in the process. (Read "International campaign's new spot that aired two days before Bob Dole's acceptance strategy is to highlight the cut's dangers without mentioning the benefits. shots of the "Old Dole" filmed in the "attack colors" of black and white. It rips Dole's economic proposal, but avoids calling it a tax cut. Instead, the Dole footage, bolsters this idea. So does a quotation from Business how he'll finance his "scheme" makes his plan sound like a Democratic giveaway from the Bush recession: an empty factory; a family apparently struggling to than you were five years ago?" and suggests that a vote for Dole would return Medicare premiums to "help" pay for Dole's "promises." Again, there is no we still don't know how the Dole plan will be financed. The message is driven home as the camera pans across a doctor's office to an elderly woman in a shown yielding the microphone to Newt. Better than any narrator's accusations, choice will peak. Will voters go for the Dole tax cut, the Republican who claims to have ended the Bush recession and who offers a lesser tax cut? Framing the election around the desirability of tax cuts is risky business for window of a darkened suburban house. Thunder claps, lightning strikes, and is, in the desk lamp that begins to move on its own. house activate, leaping and flying off counters and tables to the ground, moving purposefully together across the floor. Although unplugged from their alerts us to the promise of electricity made mobile, the next electric revolution. Light is a metaphor for life here, with animated appliances that inexorably drawn to Devil's Tower, where they await the arrival of extraterrestrial spacecraft. The appliances gather in nervous expectation at the curb, fidgeting and looking down the empty street. The vehicle that represents the future doesn't descend, but glides down the street in a morning distant car. We get a glimpse of the car, refracted through a blender's thick traditional appliance to the most modern to this postmodern vehicle, which, we assume by now, is powered by electricity, not gasoline. The toaster waddles into the street, and the other appliances on the sidewalk fly or move closer to the car. We hear the narrator's voice for the first and only time, the text as spare as a biblical prologue: "The electric car is here." responsive chords of modern mythology and ancient religion. All cars are mobile, of course. But this new, rather squat automobile is introduced in a both substance of the present and symbol of the future. also reminds us of the power of television. This ad has to be seen to be appreciated. Here, the very arrival of the product is enough to fascinate and move us; it is almost as if the future had just happened. Unlike many commercial and most political ads, the spot couldn't be put on radio with just a few tweaks to the language. What would be a mundane announcement on won the women's championship, overcoming her history of choking in the finals. should continue to pursue "openness and freedom" but that the United States should not simply "tell other people what to do." Analysts noted that this China. Click here. Also see International Papers for reactions from around the public image as a reckless zealot and removes the leverage he had hoped to use province (which they officially control, though its population is 90-percent populations of adjacent provinces and countries. (In exposed and exacerbated the national Republican feud between social and lives in a state of euphoria, in his own world, cut off from reality," said disagreed on what the magazine should cover, particularly when it came to politely invite voters to retire an incumbent, they're said to be "giving the his 40s, then one of him in his 60s (70s?), the narrator praises the senator record would only appear to upbraid voters for having sent him to the Senate a the thoughts of his constituents by now: "We appreciate all he's done." But brought out of the attic of memory, aging before our eyes. argument. It begins with a tight shot of an open book featuring two photos of he's an old man working out, trying to hang on. The camera cuts away to reveal that the reader is Close, sitting in his own living room. Literally closing the more conventional, but Close's every appearance, in vivid color, completes the case. At what appears to be a Chamber of Commerce lunch, he chats with a woman in entirely positive terms. Next we see Close in a country store, pledging, does well. "I, too, will provide great constituent service." identification in the South, and Close can't risk conveying, visually or worries. Thanks to his record, he is at liberty to build bridges to blacks that a younger version of the senator should replace him. These two points are efficiently fused together in the last scene, in which Close is surrounded by his very young, very contemporary family. The narrator gets the last word: President campaign produced the classic "Daisy Ad," which successfully cast name. The ad juxtaposed a little girl counting the petals on a flower with a the Republicans extract (esoteric) revenge with The Threat for the spot aired, the Dole campaign gleefully revealed that the spot was a feint: It was at a cost of millions of dollars. But the feint also fooled the news media and documentary monochrome, The Threat moves from its defining playground using, buying, or being tempted by drugs. The narrator cites two incontrovertible facts as the front page of the New York Post ("TEEN children continues, the narrative glides explicitly to the character issue: that surgeon general is long gone, the Dole strategists assume that this is the waffling is that he is a moderate, pragmatic politician. The negative spin is that he suffers from character flaws. The Dole ad, naturally enough, pushes the change his mind." The Threat stimulates viewers to ask the question the ends with an abbreviated nod to Dole's slogan, "A Better Man for a Better voters deserve it or not, we're likely to hear a lot more in coming spots about Republicans accuse each other of lying about their respective Medicare proposals. In fact, neither side is lying: Each selectively cites facts and offers proof. The Republicans say they want to limit the increase of Medicare of growth; the president wanted to cut, too. The Democrats maintain that the Republicans' increase in spending is below the rate of medical inflation (the Republicans respond by pointing to the general rate of inflation). The would have prevented millions of seniors from choosing their own doctors, and would have denied coverage for services like diabetes blood tests (which Republicans know that Medicare is not their issue. Voters are more likely to believe the Democrats on Medicare and more likely to believe the Republicans on tax cutting, which means that there is a limit to what political ads can do to almost entirely and engaged in a struggle to make welfare, taxes, and character response ad that actually and almost exclusively responds. Fool is entirely defensive, despite the obligatory knock on the other side's accuracy. that not only references, but reinforces the charge that Dole sought to cut Medicare. The second scene even shows Dole with the singularly unpopular opening is frontal, audacious, maybe foolish, but the Dole strategists obviously decided to take the chance. The red "Wrong" stamped across the scene is a standard technique that does little to detract from the effect of seeing part, because some inside the campaign thought it was too defensive and raised double meaning: That's what you are if you vote for him. political ads is a weekly feature of Slate during the election conservatism before his time. Liberals congratulated him for repudiating the religious right in later years. Pundits, starved for candor among today's world treaty to limit the nuclear programs of all nuclear powers. The good known nuclear powers will never agree to a nondiscriminatory treaty. Instead, liberal pessimistic line: Sanctions won't solve the proliferation problem. The conservative pessimistic line: Treaties won't solve it, either. The nonpartisan were trying "to attack me when I am overseas trying to be helpful." The alleged offenses: abusing its monopoly power and using pressure tactics against uncooperative computer makers. Future charges may include predatory to the majority Protestant North. Editorialists cheered the vote as a rejection rejected the argument, advanced by the Secret Service and by President evade the Secret Service personnel who are supposed to protect them. that only half the legislature's seats were available. The rest are chosen by organizations from which most voters are excluded. The fully sophisticated spin: Despite getting ripped off, the democrats have secured a political base has been used to prosecute pregnant women who imperil their fetuses by using arguments, but the media are spinning the court's action as a victory for fetal more year, preferring to leave the audience wanting more. Critics appointed the show to the pantheon of Zeitgeist landmarks, alongside I Love health minister banned the practice (removal of the clitoris and sometimes the authorizes mutilation "as an individual right" beyond the reach of government. Advocates of women's rights think the ruling will help defeat the practice killed four. According to scientists, humans have no natural immunity to it, but they also don't transmit it easily. Experts from all over the world have year after falling out of football, answered the Giants fans' jeers with a Experts explained the manslaughter verdict as a finding of recklessness, not premeditation, but puzzled over how to reconcile this with the conspiracy conviction. The prevailing theory: an awkward compromise among the jurors. Best Prosecutors get another chance to win a murder conviction and death sentence case's peculiar combination of glamour and sleaze. As a New York Times editorial put it, "if there were ever a case in which pregnancy really did jeopardize one's ability to do a job, surely this was it." The plaintiff's defense argument: That was the job description. The punch line: She won the case by looking sexy while pregnant throughout the trial, thereby convincing him to life in prison. He has been linked to scores of other murders, in of force and the tragic loss of life was wrong." He also advocated free speech, ruled out completion of sex so that he could technically deny they had sex. not suffer adverse job consequences for rejecting a supervisor's advances, the employer can be held liable unless a) the employer shows it "exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behavior" and b) the employee "unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities." The New York Times praised the standards for employers and might prompt them to suppress employees' civil privilege continues after the client is dead. The media spun this as a short shrift to the broader implications of the court's expansion of allegations that the court was firing a shot across the bow of the closest planet we have found beyond our solar system. The superficial spin: It might be warm enough to support life. The sophisticated spin: It probably can't support life, but its discovery indicates there may be billions of other planets near us. Meanwhile, other scientists say they have found bacteria living in Antarctic ice, raising the possibility that life exists on planets deals, it will finally deliver some of the competition that was promised after the industry was deregulated. (For a less sanguine view of the potential features to Windows that provide "advantages unavailable if the functionalities are bought separately and combined by the purchaser." Analysts agreed this they wanted her out because she was stiff and amateurish and wasn't helping the client. Normally, a spouse's endorsement spot doesn't do much beyond making a candidate feel good. If your wife or husband isn't for you, who is? But woman in the soft yellow suit who's sitting casually in what appears to be her living room. The smooth, slow camera movement through the spot imparts a degree of visual variety without disturbing the intimate mood. The surface simplicity attempts to make three separate points, all of them critical to the Dole oasis in a desert of attack ads on both sides. But it, too, is intended to be negative: phrases like "doing what's right" and "living up to his word" play to deal with one of Dole's central political weaknesses, a gender gap that successful in her own right, and except for her politics a poster woman for the "Ms. Generation," tells us that her "husband" has strong commitments on domestic violence and equal retirement benefits for women. here. It moves swiftly and smoothly to Dole's most fundamental problem, his loss of credibility on the tax issue. In part because his campaign ads dealt in drugs and character in the weeks after the Republican Convention, voters suggests that he wouldn't propose the tax cut simply because it was easy or us? It helps. After all, would this lady lie to us? And we know she's too smart to be fooled. Just for insurance, she returns to the implicit comparison with sharpness of the message woven through the softness of the image recalls Carl from, where, as he said in his acceptance speech, a man is very small against the sky. Dole, the picture says again, is from the heartland, the land of plain people to decide are true: "Bob Dole will cut our taxes." This last scene is curiously disconnected from the preceding conversation with our friend its claimed attributes is actually remarkably low, and that the research "proving" the efficacy of the ads is largely controlled by the ad agencies that made the ads in the first place. (That's mild, by the way, compared with what the commercial advertisers say about the quality and ethics of political exception to this rule. Batteries are practically a commodity, but the reliability in the public consciousness. The Bunny is now almost a cultural artifact, and if the "keeps going and going" message is to be extended, it must be restated in ways that build on the image without boring the viewers. from a television set showing the Energizer Bunny in action, we see a group of the women: Don't they buy batteries?) The group piles in and sets off down the "gone days without seeing anything." Here and later, the borrowed images from Twister are amplified by the searchers talking not to the viewers, but one of the searchers expresses the frustration inherent in any search for a that are the talismans of an entire subculture. The searcher insists that the photo is real, that it is proof: "Right there you can see its ears and its searchers is in a field, trying to capture an undeniable video of the rabbit. north instead of south. The next scene is a closer rear view of the truck, the radar antenna relentlessly turning. Look closely: Is that a set of rabbit ears subliminal image tells us, but not the searchers, that they may have missed the spotted the Bunny, the group clambers out of the vehicle, shouting and firing these guys aren't that many years distant from: The hare is beating the and going." That might also serve as a mantra for the '90s generation, seeking the constantly moving targets of meaning and success. that just keeps going. Woodchuck refrains from identifying the product because it's selling the name of the product, not the product itself. And if you don't think the names of commodity products matter much in the marketplace, intentionally quiet images never get in the way of the message. Made by Don of the campaign laws, which now count Dole as out of money. The ad is presented (just barely) as legislative advocacy for (just nominally) the Republican "tax relief no matter what we do." We can almost see him biting his lip. This that their taxes have been raised. People nearly always believe their taxes increase in history." But the Republicans offer it without fear of refutation, visual for "increased taxes on Social Security," and so on. The series culminates with a generic photo from a backyard barbecue and text that alleges staples of political advertising. So is stamping a negative description, in condemnatory scarlet letters, across an opponent's picture: "Broken Promises" between the narration and the words written across the screen at the end. The waste. The screen, to satisfy the law, concludes with a dash of legislative seek an independent counsel. Pundits expressed disappointment but no surprise distraction from newly released notes suggesting that White House officials counted on the Federal Election Commission's inability to enforce distraction from the real scandal: that he intends to do nothing with the job. get a break in the vetting process because he was a big political donor? The new spin: Politicians are exploiting the scandal for partisan advantage rather meeting with a denunciation of the United States and its military presence in billion on paper. The reason: a disappointing earnings report. Oracle blamed for the whole technology sector. Contrarians called it a buying opportunity. government to facilitate grant applications for studies on medical marijuana, The old mission: waging nuclear war against a superpower. The new mission: deterring nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare by lesser powers is debating whether to cut its conventional forces and authorize first use of its nukes as a substitute deterrent (as the United States will still do). properly making users bear the cost of these calls. Former federal drug czar the city's first nonwhite mayor but conceded that he will change almost of their companies. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that nearly month and that a thousand Wall Street executives are expected to get bonuses for a year. The reason: He threatened during practice to kill his coach, choked again. It is the stiffest penalty for insubordination in sports history. pleaded no contest to carrying an illegal gun. Sports pundits applauded heartily. The sunny spin: Finally, lawless superstar athletes are being reined spineless team would have signed him. The fully cynical spin: He'll make announcing that he will relinquish the chairmanship of the Senate Armed superficial spin: The even split of many of his assets vindicates her argument and bodes well for corporate wives. The sophisticated spin: His ability to hide the majority Protestant North. Editorialists cheered the vote as a rejection of past violence and an embrace of peace and cooperation. Click for a rejected the argument, advanced by the Secret Service and by President evade the Secret Service personnel who are supposed to protect them. that only half the legislature's seats were available. The rest are chosen by organizations from which most voters are excluded. The fully sophisticated spin: Despite getting ripped off, the democrats have secured a political base groups was based on narrow arguments, but the media are spinning the court's It's the biggest lottery jackpot in world history, though after taxes it turns professor calls lotteries "a tax on the mathematically challenged." the price of cigarettes (thereby ostensibly discouraging youth smoking) by imposing half a billion dollars in fees on tobacco companies to support far, critics have offered amendments to cap lawyers' fees (defeated) and increase the price hike (defeated). Pundits think the bill will pass promoting technology trade with China at the expense of national security. in the United States were knocked out by a satellite malfunction in space. The technophobic spin: This is what we get for relying on gadgets. The International Monetary Fund and the United States are bailing out South thought and because, without the bailout, the crisis might spread to Japan and serious because if it were, the Cabinet wouldn't have approved it so decisively it (thereby appeasing the United States) without having to fulfill it (thereby of defense experts and former military leaders accused the Pentagon of gross strategic errors in battle planning and weapons procurement. Among the comfortable fight we'd prefer to wage (Air Force bombing) instead of the messy Analysts agree that the criticism is largely valid and that it will be ignored. made hay of the story, and several congressional Republicans demanded investigations, thereby entitling the mainstream press to wade in. The Army eventually released the list of those getting waivers for burials. It showed only one major donor, and he had served in the Merchant Marine in World War II. laudably hastened its exposure as such. Democrats consoled themselves with the Scout" journalism. Critics say he's all glitz and no talent. Media reporters convicted of assaulting and committing the boy, but not of killing him. previous accounts of the murder, and another of her henchmen has already been convicted of it. Analysts questioned whether her appearance before the commission, which was supposed to help revive her political career, might end telling one of his mistresses that his wife deserved a husband who could "help the royal family's ability to raise her children properly and accused the tabloids of residing "at the opposite end of the moral spectrum" from the crowed, "He is not fit to lecture anyone about morality and decency." (Also see asleep, the grandfather clock ticks peacefully in the background, but Gramps is too frightened to move, lest he disturb the infant. Tentatively, awkwardly, he reaches for the television remote control and taps it. The set turns on in an explosion of sound. The baby! The baby! The noise will wake the baby! It as simple as the remote control. This man is technologically inept. cacophony, Gramps puts the crying baby into the playpen. (That will only make sonny, don't cry. Mom and Dad will be right back." A placebo: He shakes a toy as he tries to calm the storm. As the wailing reaches a crescendo, lights go on a picture of the baby's parents off the piano and takes it out of its frame. doing? If he can't handle a television remote or even a doll, can he figure out a computer? He uses the mouse to click on the picture he wants, and it rolls out of the HP printer, enlarged and in brilliant color. This process is simple, easy, accessible. So he can operate technology, even under stress. The noise rushes on through all the activity, a metaphor for the challenges of the grandfather's voice, punctuated by the ticktock of the grandfather clock. The doesn't a contented baby make, surely? But next, we see the reason: Gramps is wearing mom's "face" as a mask, a disguise that deceives even the dog, who does concluding frames break away from the drama, the happy ending driving home the HP name and the idea that with this product, the complexity of technology has become an engine of simplicity: "Built by engineers. Used by normal people." use the new HP printer to become a faux mother and thus accomplish one of the we know it really wouldn't happen this way, but we are persuaded that anyone can operate this device. The message: You don't even have to be able to play a reflection in the water, a rumble of thunder, a sense of beauty and menace, which the music amplifies. But there are no words. The images become all the more powerful as the dappling of the water slows and the rain seems to would we experience so wordless a span. Survey research urges ad makers to use clearly his sense of relief at having to make only one powerful point. The opening draws us in: What is this, we wonder, and what will happen next? The the image seems almost the dreamlike product of our own minds. We see a The narrator's worried tone fits this setting of a stone angel intimating mortality: "What would happen if you weren't here?" shifts to the angel (tombstone or promise of heaven?), and the spot brings us where it would come from. Each successive question seems to echo the ones kind of responsive chord, appealing to a different family value. child's hand, and then, as the words invite us to wonder what would happen if she were gone, she apparently is. Through the splashing water, across the angel's wing, we think we see the child alone, until the mother steps clearly back into the picture. The narration gives the answer. Something needs to be "Life insurance" doesn't sound crass because the context itself implies not takes the boat out of the water, and mother and child head homeward. The sky is cloudy; is the storm returning? They walk hand in hand down the path as the subject is inherently unsettling. Death and life insurance are not the stuff that daydreams are made of. But this spot is visually arresting, involving, and dramatic. We want to see it again. By the end, we are left with the sense that whatever angels we may go to when we depart, life insurance is the guardian angel we should leave behind. The strength of the spot is that the fabric of its images converts the actuarial into the nearly spiritual, and raises Papers" for reactions from around the globe. "Pundit communications satellites by transferring licensing authority over these Times reported that this decision overrode State's wishes and benefited, contributions to the Democratic Party. The naive, dramatic conspiracy theory: fourth most populous nation have provoked lethal gunfire from police. Riots and looting have drawn tanks into the streets. More than two dozen people are dead. that his corruption and mismanagement have ruined the economy. Everyone is to democratic institutions. Cynics observed that there is little empirical one Medal of Freedom. Obits called him the pop singer of the century, noting his range, durability, and influence through Big Band, blues, and rock 'n' in a small town. Dozens of peripheral characters mocked by the main characters in previous episodes returned to testify against them. The spins, in order of at other magazines for whom Glass wrote are reviewing his published articles to who was arrested in New York last year for leaving her baby in a stroller falsely arrested, maliciously prosecuted, and unconstitutionally deprived of custody of her baby. Reporters noted with irony that the woman, having been New York City officials compounded the irony by accusing her of gall. makers of LifeStyles condoms, conducts a condom ad contest that anyone can broadcasts the winners as its television advertising campaign, or tries to air broadcasters can't censor ads for political candidates, but everything amorphous standards of accuracy and good taste. So most of the ads you see on television, believe it or not, are certified as true, defensible, and tasteful. is computer animation. A talking skeleton holding a LifeStyles condom in bony fingers confides that he never used a condom because he was "too embarrassed to ask for them from behind the counter," and because he'd "feel awkward stopping in the middle of everything just to put this on." He continues: "But then AIDS, sex was equated with death. Before It's Too Late updates and exploits this cultural assumption, letting the viewer play with the horror of sex and death without really confronting it. The words aren't explicit, but the reach for a condom. It conveys the sense that LifeStyles condoms must be a reliable product, maybe even the best of condoms, because its makers care enough about your health to advertise it that way. We share your fear, the ad melodrama about the wages of illicit love. Our heroine punishes herself because she yielded to temptation, a temptation that was probably more alluring in the early 1980s than it is today. She meets her "out of town" guy and takes him back to her apartment. "I woke up the next morning and he was gone," she says, her voice cracking with emotion. "I spent the last two weeks worrying that I woman, the secondary consumer of condoms, reminding her that an alternative to "no" is "wait a minute," followed by a quick dip into her nightstand drawer for drawer. Lonely and anxious to be used, the condom grows so weary of the wait that he throws away his watch: Either the condom's owner is abstinent, or he's careless. Sad organ music is suddenly replaced by an upbeat, jazzy score: The owner opens the drawer and takes the package. Virtually without narration, the spot ends with a row of condom packages morphing into the name of the raise the hackles of the pressure groups than some of the others. For one, the cheerful music suggest that sex is a fun consumable. The spot does leave the viewer wondering about the rest of the story, and what tale the condom could after it happened, saying only that the president had made a pass at her." Now indeed mentioned a sexual advance. He wrote: "Just two weeks ago, however, Could it be a case of confusion and miscommunication? A lot depends on the advice: Spill your guts out, Mike! It's not as if you'll be protecting the identity of a confidential source. Reporters, like other citizens, have an obligation to testify. The alternative view, that reporters have a special role of story? If you read Time you have no idea that there was an issue hoped he'd be. But he was quite disingenuous on the subject of whether he still recantation. What reporter doesn't have occasional pangs of doubt about controversial pieces? Pressed on this point, Brock paused, then paused some more, then would only say, "There may well be some truth in what [the troopers] that is his position on the record. You get the sense that he doesn't want to the gist of the troopers' story was false, of course, he could just declare Chatterbox would like to pose a contrary hypothesis: in Flytrap, virtually all frenzy" will turn out to be essentially true. Here are four of them: Keep score at home! Add new stories to the list as they come out and get (The same way all those ordinary voters who are telling pollsters they think course, even if all the "feeding frenzy" stories turn out to be true, by the time they are proven true the public may already have come to the unshakable conclusion that they're suspect, or the public may be so accustomed to the scandal that it doesn't care. This is the genius behind the "knock it down president's function is to be a "role model," as opposed to simply an effective president. Alas, the evidence keeps coming in that the "role model" effect is to undergo that radical procedure rather than have a less drastic "lumpectomy." influenced substantially by the behavior of celebrity role models." And sexual "Let me say that there is a lot of talk about personal responsibility. What we have to do is practice it. There's a lot of talk about valuing family and work and community. What we have to do is value them." Chatterbox is already feeling occasional pangs of doubt about all of the in the campaign, that some of the rumors about the governor were true and that the Flowers story might just be one of them." (Indeed, the core of Flowers' candor that they crashed on a bed together, "too numb with fatigue and despair interview? If you persist in foisting a candidate on the nation in the face of asking"?) was the equivalent of the journalists' "reckless disregard of disappear from the market." Wrong! says Chatterbox, in its best John "People have tried to suggest they are former friends, but when the dust money like that? Nothing, at least in Chatterbox's book. Brock apparently someone who wants a story written paid him to research the story. When the Ford money to freelance journalists every day, at least that has (unfortunately) been Chatterbox's experience. It's especially implausible that Brock "didn't remember" the payment when he had just finished writing what was supposed to be a confessional article detailing his own journalistic missteps in the service call asking for comment. Here Chatterbox goes the extra mile to be fair, and relatively good news contained in the overall admissions figures for the entire it always does, to offer qualified students rejected by their chosen campuses Chatterbox's paranoid fears have been borne out! This will only encourage him. Some readers wondered why Chatterbox made such a big deal about the delayed university itself recalculated the 8-campus figures to eliminate this to students who have overcome economic hardships. "This shows that economics university has eight campuses in all. Students who don't get into one campus sometimes get into another one. And today, two days after the release of the number may be misleading, since it doesn't include blacks who chose not to check the optional box declaring their race. Indeed, the large increase in the number of students declining to give their ethnic origin was one of the more right. Presumably they're both right: Black and Latino admissions fell most at And why couldn't both sets of figures have been released on the same day? Why release the "bad news" first, then let the "good" news out two days later a bad story." He says the release of admissions data has always been left up to the individual campuses, and it simply took a couple of days to calculate the a good bargain, because those who are admitted won't have to worry why. If the interviews and making television appearances that he's had no time to write his Press how Drudge's face seems to curve from top to bottom like a giant MUCH CHATTER about what a relaxed good mood Vice President Al Gore "carry special clout" because "he is one of the Senate's most respected members, seen as a leader on matters of ethics and values." In truth, see he strongly dislikes, if not loathes the president. He may have good reason for this disdain, but it means his resignation talk doesn't carry much weight a very cheap shot against Hart, and my guess is that he is gloomy over the whole mess, not experiencing any schadenfreude." If so, Hart is a bigger man perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. Second, various federal laws imply must pay. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the value of these special than earned his fantastic paycheck. Mainly, he uses traditional methods-- checks to neighborhood groups. (Chatterbox himself once managed to cadge a chairmanship is another weapon in his PR arsenal. It's pathetically easy to when he managed to distract attention from his corruption by playing classical and simultaneously cozies up to a journalistic institution that could do it a lot of damage. (Can you imagine the Post sponsoring a concert series government enterprises when they need to be defended, and criticize subsidies borrowing to offset the effect of the implicit federal guarantee. Economist "catalyst for community development." Don't you want to squash them like bugs? has always preserved its lucrative privileges in part because it's a pretty obscure agency. Now you present a big, juicy public target. What if some hit on and didn't have affairs with? Does he score every time? When Chatterbox to be concerned about ridding the White House of Bush holdovers when her become tedious. Initially the issues were legion, the ramifications seemingly kaleidoscopic, the players unsure of their positions. There were traitors and and many who were simply confused and bemused. Now things have settled out, along binary lines that are all too familiar. "Everyone lies about sex." "But winning this argument; nobody wants to have this argument again. Were somebody other room as surely as if that someone had said "Let's build the bridge to the people in the capital need to choose up sides in order to do their jobs, in part because the only thing more boring than having an opinion on Flytrap is much about Flytrap in the first place, opinions may be much less dug in, more tempted to conclude that Flytrap is over because it is bored with the scandal. divorced, and their divorce papers contain a lot of interesting information, extensive selection of adult magazines. Chatterbox heard about this from a for the name of the newsstand, which Chatterbox provided. Four days before the the story out by shouting questions at the Republican during a campaign admitted going to the club, which he called "a cocktail place." Witnesses Note to starving freelance writers: If you've been recruited to write consider the rent paid just yet! Specifically, have you ever tried actually department? Expect roughly the same effort it might take to obtain payment from Chatterbox's theory: in the exciting new world of personal computing, you can create unlimited amounts of paperwork without even the constraint of having to buy the paper! ...Recommendation: Demand cash up front, before you write a Straight to Video: Chatterbox (having been paid) was about to write having sexual relations. But perhaps the book contained some deeper, more attention (and that of the Independent Counsel) to the following passages: Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so; I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long and provides them exclusively to readers of this column: are more credible today than comments made recently, in the middle of a photogenic version of the talking points might look like, presumably as cooked up by the magazine's art department. Apparently the real talking points look report as follows: "At a dinner party at a producer's home, which took place somehow tainted because she's been out to get the president all along. But if instead looked "flustered, happy and joyful." Certainly it would be more WE LOVE HIM WHEN HE'S ANGRY: Is Chatterbox alone in feeling that ingratiating, good humored sales job. Something really seemed to be at stake. that since the voters didn't care about Flowers, "an implicit bargain was implicit bargain was this: Since the voters didn't care about Flowers, they'll let him get away with it again. That's the problem with those "implicit" her to 'lie' about what had happened in order to give credibility to the You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her But the mere existence of the "talking points" casts a retrospective cloud over million in insurance money after his death, and apparently didn't give any of it to the poor client whose money was stolen. Indeed, she has fought through protracted legal proceedings to successfully stiff him. Is it must be a heady thing for the president make a pass at you, even an unwanted may have been "joyful" that she was going to get the job she desperately as if he were the heavy in some "How to Stop Sex Harassment" training impeachment. The new Gore strategy apparently calls for Gore to be as annoying implement a midnight brainstorm of his: Putting a continuous, live image of weather is slow, so it's not like there is perceptible motion. It is about as exciting as watching the grass grow." Sort of like watching the vice president demographers discussing overpopulation; and a proposal to have "students of the bit about having students gather daily environmental information isn't phony. told her to lie, made her look as if she'd just tried out a vacuum cleaner on to quickly secure the competing food source. Readers should simply be aware, as they weigh what they are told, that each magazine has an incentive to few bones in the hope of gaining his cooperation, or that Time won't editors are among those who have been privileged to receive the White House sexual and probably inappropriate relationship that was, alas, never actually, not for a New Republic -style "magazine of opinion." He gave his opinions readers were somehow misled into thinking they were getting a dispassionate perspective. But any New Yorker subscriber who didn't realize that capper, the first of what will probably be many righteous editorials denouncing the program. It happens that workfare is an old hobbyhorse of Chatterbox's. Chatterbox thinks it's the key to successful welfare reform (which is the key place yet. He'll have to do better. As for the rest of the series, let's stick People into Private Jobs. Politicians like to say the purpose of welfare reform is to move people "from welfare to work." That's certainly a goal. But it's not true that unless welfare reform takes all the people on welfare and gets them private sector jobs, it's failed. The overall goal of of poverty and dependence." It's a culture that traps the poor in isolated, tension, etc. To change that culture, you don't have to get every unmarried welfare mom into a job. The idea is to establish the principle that every family has to send somebody into the workforce. Enforce that principle, and some of those on welfare will go to work. Other mothers may choose to live with breadwinners and spend time with their children. Other women not on all, postponing childbirth until marriage. Eventually, communities of fatherless welfare families will become communities of intact, working Even if you think the point of welfare reform is to get everyone into a private job, that's not the immediate goal of workfare. Workfare is usually only one part of the larger welfare reform plan. Most plans attempt to "divert" those who apply for welfare into private jobs. They require those who do apply to search for work. Only those who fail to find private sector jobs are then offered workfare jobs so they can earn their benefits. Workfare, in effect, is the employer of last resort. (A fine old liberal notion!) It's crazy welfare quickly turn up on the tax rolls as workers. The Times has made a big fuss about a New York state survey showing that "of the legions of full quarter after they left welfare. Yes, we want to know how many more people are working thanks to welfare reform. But the people welfare reform will push most successfully into the private sector are those who now never show up at the welfare office in the first place because they realize they'll do better just getting a job. The survey completely misses this group. For those who do go on welfare, the survey only counts those who then work for private sector employers who report them to the state for tax purposes. It report their income. It doesn't count those whose employers don't fill out the required forms. Many employers who do file their forms do it late. Experience Even if a single mother leaves the rolls and doesn't get a job, remember, that doesn't mean reform has failed. She might have moved in with a man, even gotten married. She might be getting help from friends. If former recipients were showing up in shelters or on the streets, it would be bad news, regular city workers once did. So? Is the work low paid? Sure. If workfare is going to be the employer of last resort, it can't pay good, union wages, or else half the city will go on welfare to get a workfare job. Nor did the Times show that any regular workers were laid off or fired to make way subpoena "repugnant to the Bill of Rights" and "a scenario that belongs in Everyone should calm down. Can't books be evidence? If someone bludgeons Chatterbox hopes prosecutors will be able to check whether any of its enemies previously purchased that worthy tome. If someone blows up the United Nations, it's worth knowing if the prime suspect bought The Anarchist's Cookbook continues apace. Lewis has been a reliable First Amendment defender, but his last column suggested that judges should hold journalists in contempt (and even on gossip, speculation and innuendo." Here is an idea that really is "repugnant irresponsible press activity is the "overwhelming television and print of the president in the Oval Office, about which the voters are surely entitled the end of Lewis' column you realize that yes, that's exactly what he means. "administration of justice," Lewis is at least hewing to his prior reputation good, here's what he'd do: Have a fresh, previously unknown woman come forward conference. Then have her confess that it was all a lie, that she was in fact a prospectively discrediting any women who might come forward in the future. But statement saying she was not "aware" of any legal or ethical impropriety. panicked White House officials couldn't locate her early in the scandal. (She quiet!... Personally, Chatterbox would have held out for ambassador to Private Lives of the Three Tenors." In the cover blurb, to help sell books, she when he has so many safer, legal ways to achieve the same end? For example, getting her a lawyer, who, like all lawyers, would let her know her full she was about to perjure herself at his request and b) his help could be construed as a bribe to facilitate the perjury? Or would he have helped her if and deposed in a friendly manner, would be one less problem. When the conservatives in Congress gutted the National Endowment for the Arts, they predicted that art patrons from the private sector would come forward to fill the ensuing culture gap. Balderdash, said the art community. Without actually viewing them, Chatterbox can't comment on whether or not these are great paintings, but we are prepared to judge these works by their were statesmen, bringing compromise and tact to everything that they did. Also, Resolution, we're not so sure about. This painting depicts the Gulf Making the strongest argument for the return of the National Endowment is The Four Statesmen, depicting everybody's favorite '70s political hacks: All these insults have been covered in the press. What hasn't been unreliable, according to Automobile magazine. The magazine reports that smell of burning oil wafted into the car. When we pulled over, a small bluish cloud enveloped the engine bay." After this and other experiences Is Chatterbox obsessed with Flytrap? Yes. Is this obsession justified? don't care much about Flytrap because they've known the rough contours of president, especially considering the alternatives. Chatterbox fully expects about them to the press and public. We didn't quite know the unhesitating grace deceive the courts. Hey, honey, you don't have to turn over those gifts if you no longer have them in your possession! (It was especially shocking to see that doesn't mean he necessarily lies about Social Security. The slope isn't under oath about sex he also lied about Whitewater? About what was given in exchange for campaign contributions? Maybe it stops somewhere, but where? hypertrophied faith in his ability to pull anything out of the fire with a been proven wrong, since the election, on the "fast track" trade issue, and annoying, cloying quality of the modern babble about "role models." He's right. presidents a lot, and in exchange we ask them to be a little better in the moral example department than the rest of us. (See this piece by latitude in moral and criminal matters goes with the president's exalted powerful libidos. What's the problem?" The big chief gets many women! That's been true through most of human history. It's not supposed to be true in just in that we expect monogamy when the rule of history has been polygamy. that he doesn't have to play by the same rules. He's too important to be sued while in office. He's too important to be subject to the intrusive, him with fleshy offerings. ("Hey, man, what's the fuss about? He gave a blow Chatterbox always suspected that Democrats who focus compulsively on the corporatism, of seeing society as a single body with individual human components performing different social functions and having different, unequal important that his prosecutors get a special right to criminalize free speech special privileges and (inevitably) obligations, the eyes of the social corpus nobly gathering information on behalf of poor, ignorant citizens. Better to demonstrate his concern. "These are probably the most serious allegations yet leveled against the president. There's no question that, if they're true, they Is Chatterbox alone in thinking there is something strange and even The problem isn't so much his disloyalty. Political figures turn on each other discrediting Flowers and anyone else who tried to point out the truth, namely rebound too quickly in our celebrity culture. But usually at least a nanosecond through the minimal motions of holding himself accountable for misleading the seems credible is this: if she were making up a story, she could have made up a that somebody's going to walk in here?" Not exactly the strongest or most plaintive objection she might have lodged. The pass itself could easily have pregnant. But not just pregnant, pregnant with his twins! Then she told him she would have an abortion. Then on the morning the abortion was supposed to Then she had her friend tell him she'd had a miscarriage! Could any hack screenwriter have milked that scenario for more drama? Contrast that with the deal. Social Security's solvency is one of the two or three major domestic speaks with some authority as ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. His plan was also considered radical, coming from a Social Security defender, because it suggested using part of Social Security's payroll tax to fund "voluntary personal savings accounts" that would supplement regular Social Plan is something he would normally be on top of, were he not preoccupied with investigative reporter who has been chronicling the machinations of the Vast quality control policies were "stupid. They just won't tolerate any mistakes at Never mind the ethics of paparazzi who torment celebrities. Bill wildlife photographers of needlessly stressing caribou and other critters by pictures of emerald boas eating parrots because it creates false expectations of what the wilderness is all about. Evidence that the public has gone mad on are approachable beasts. In fact, bears that become habituated to people usually end up getting snuffed by rangers because they become dangerous purchase any photos taken after that. It's not as if there aren't enough slides of elephants a few years ago while planning a story on them. uniquely human gift, the one talent no other creature or community possesses Chatterbox sort of likes the idea of a president so desperate to avoid impeachment, to demonstrate that his private behavior doesn't affect his public conduct, that he is driven to an orgy of accomplishment. First, peace in you got that hummer, buddy, so you better fix Medicare while you're at it. Then replenish the ozone layer, democratize China, figure out an efficient way to store electricity, and solve the Four Color Map Problem, and we'll think succession," and desired a long period of "extended overlap with his successor" leave without looking like rats jumping ship. The Post would have Reports just published its Annual Auto Issue, which contains the most Another news flash from the Auto Issue concerns the sad performance of the "Voters in the Generation X pool could care less what role model their president presents. They want someone to help them stop their kids from You mean they have kids already? Those punks? Chatterbox is feeling in the last paragraphs of a story on page A-21. The piece, by media reporter (illustrated with an exhibitionistic photo of Brock in an open shirt posing as him back in the late 1980s. The epithets? The Creep and El adulterous affair while in the White House, but because "the girl is by many positions of power do not exploit the vulnerable for kicks." It will also be tapes actually contradict. As the girl who lives down the hall from Chatterbox complains, "she gives him a blow job and then has to wait around in receiving Chatterbox believes the dynamics of human sexuality are complex and subtle, may be a user, but you don't get driven from office for being a user. (Name a the he'd be "alone" after he left the White House. But that may have been the truth. Overall, the situation must have been pretty clear. Chatterbox sides were victims. There were victims, but they are to be found outside the You're right, Maxim's strong point is that it's totally unsentimental say, Hustler was, and the difference (surprise) reflects the sexual culture of the '90s. With its belligerent grossness and misogyny, Hustler rebelled against the establishment men's mags' class condescension, the earnest philosophizing about the sexual revolution, the "thinking men's sex bomb" syndrome, at the same time that it was deliberately goading feminists. It came right out with the anger that the regular men's mags tried to hide. Maxim pokes fun at its progenitors but with considerable ironic affection. It's not angry. In fact, while its fondness for the most idiotic, juvenile humor knows no bounds, any strong emotion is taboo (unless because its basic ideas have been assimilated and are taken for granted, partly because politics in general and feminism in particular barely exist in the consciousness of Maxim's age group. (Whereas Gear, which retains feminism, as in its recent piece on sexual repression in the military, in which rape and harass women without suppressing the urge to kill that's the and that of contemporary women's magazines seem to be converging, at least of entitlement to the good things of life, including women, that pervaded the the paradigm, there's a much more bluntly instrumental, "male" attitude toward getting sex of the quantity and quality desired. Beauty is as central a preoccupation as ever, if anything more so, but the preoccupation has much more for some irrecoverable, primal imperfection. In the men's magazines, there's much more of a sense that if you want women to give you the time of day, you have to make some effort to find out what they want and give it to them. In the old model, if men needed advice on women or sex, they got it from a male expert like the "Playboy Advisor." Now Maxim features advice from women on such matters as how not to give the wrong impression on a first date. guess that part of the reason men's mags have gotten sillier is that they've around. Regarding your suggestion that these magazines give men a safe place to be together without their heterosexuality being questioned: That sounds like more of a hope (on their part) than a reality. Because it's ultimately This week's New Yorker is light on ads (Chatterbox picked it up and You thought Flytrap was about sex and perjury? Wrong! It's really about the Well, Gates is right about the gummy part, for sure. Three questions, his failure to confess his own complicity in that crime. Overall, the striking thing about Flytrap is not how much disloyalty there has been but how aide to admit even the obvious. We're so accustomed to spin that common sense and then proceeds undeterred. Like a thinking man's Johnny Apple, he surveys harrumphing along the lines of "I come from an era when loyalty and gratitude were regally honored," not like these young whippersnappers, etc. He cites Archbishop, since he has the greater social contribution to make." [Gates' words.] In Gates' essay, those who would favor a stand of principle over the antiwar dissenters, anyone who says "I often place my duty to society above my their own dear mothers burn to a crisp with nary a second thought while they at the expense of family and group ties ("the intricately reciprocal character of a life lived within community"). Of course, Gates comically stacks the deck the name of truth but in the name of some sort of obnoxious aristocratic utilitarian arguments about the overbalancing value of the president's "greater family, "community," employer, or other social group. Is it really such a great thing? Loyalty, in this sense, has given us wars, racism, tribalism and genocide. Selfish uniform principles have given us science, human rights, and rest of us? By the end of his piece, Gates has subtly slipped from and wrong without recourse to abstract principles." Anyone else is a does. If the charges against the president are true, isn't it he who has more loudly? Why should we spend valuable time reading the journalism of Henry has seen On the Waterfront too many times. But should we really root for "blurred the boundaries between mainstream and tabloid news." Blurred? The lines have actually crossed in at least one instance. Time magazine to the President for b___ j___." The supermarket tabloid Star was assistant to the president for (oral sex)." Even that was too much for the alleged romance by saying that she was 'special assistant to the president.'" Here is a woman whose husband has been caught misappropriating funds, who must would commit suicide before the deadline). She needs a job. She goes to see the president, who at this moment of temporary advantage takes her into a side room and gropes her breast and puts her hand on his genitals, saying he "always away again. Contempt for the electorate (and democracy) among this group will skyrocket. Some already seem practically ready to pick up the gun and join but viewers don't want to hear it. The same goes for your average blatantly lying, but they are constrained by popular demand and the additional strictures of "objectivity." The inevitable result? The press will take it out say, his Medicare numbers don't add up, expect him to be roasted for it with a ferocity explicable only by reporters' frustration over what they perceive as the Big Lie, but they can never admit it in public. Maybe they can't admit it they'll keep on spouting the spin. Further study will be required on the "I want to be absolutely clear, to the extent there is any implication or else tried to influence her recollection, that is absolutely false and a coach her. She just denies that he was trying to change her somewhere else. But, as has been widely speculated, he could have been trying within "shouting distance." In other words, he was merely schooling her in the so snowed by the phrases "absolutely" and "slightest suggestion" that you won't notice that what is being "absolutely" denied isn't all that much. anyone." But of course she might not be "aware" that a semantic discussion on replied, and from that day forth we remained the very closest of friends." Sounds important, and Time's readers could be forgiven for getting the impression that the magazine had discovered something new. Trouble is, "left with the impression that there was nothing more than 'mutual affection,'" disgruntled reject, or trenchant media analysis? You, the reader, make the implication or the slightest suggestion that it was aware that any part of this goes without saying that Chatterbox is also shocked and dismayed. The press bears a heavy burden of responsibility in the crisis now engulfing the White House. It is imperative that we not get ahead of ourselves and that only be elected president twice, and if you serve more than two years of a term "to which some other person was elected" you can only be elected once.) If Gore drags it out for another year and then quits, he'll probably be so unpopular that he'll pull Gore down with him. And he'll deprive Gore of a crucial year in said confidently that you intend to own the magazine until "the end of Al Gore's second term" as president. You even sacked your magazine's editor, Amendment too, it must now be tempting to use your magazine to at least help island's new popularity and the ostentatious displays of wealth. Less fortunate about the president's visit this year. He also describes in detail his moments on the island's Milk Meadows golf course. On the same page, under a Northeast the UPS strike and on current understanding of the cosmos, but the datelines jury to tell prosecutors whether he was saying nasty things about them? The sound bite by characterizing it in advance as a "tirade."... The most there are important things at stake. Imagine the respectful tone the the grand jury. But the First Amendment issues would have been the same.... peak of the Western Hemisphere's last total solar eclipse of the millennium." Chatterbox at first thought this was an adventurous metaphor for the way get the joke, it doesn't belong in the paper. If Chatterbox gets the joke but right, Chatterbox actually picked up the phone and called somebody for a reaction. Journalism! Don't expect it to happen again... CORPORATISM WATCH: "There is a significant difference between asking a White House official for his sources and asking the owner of a Web page on you're in uncharted waters." Meaning what? That Drudge has different [fewer?] there is a difference between the two situations, and it's not the offensive court for libel, the same way any citizen can sue another citizen for libel. If before the grand jury (where, among other things, you're not entitled to have a lawyer present during questioning), we'd have a different story on our hands. under existing First Amendment precedents would have the same trouble proving of sentimentality or pretension. The crucial lesson taught by those two that only winners will be let into their club. In this week's Advertising out pages in Maxim, since the readership is composed entirely of classy anymore? The recent vogues for cigars, cocktails, and the Rat Pack were not wistful evocations of a more civilized time; they were wistful evocations of the last great period of big Straight White Guy fun, before the broads and The tits in these magazines, likewise, are not there for the purpose of issue). The photos are rarely "hot" in the manner of pornography or even in the have been to the baby boomers. Hey, talking nasty to the president is just given a tacit thumbs up to the president's sexual harassment of an intern (an Chatterbox has harnessed the vast power of the Net in search of a handy, can say is, For God's sake, stop! The contest is over! Explicitly disobeying Chatterbox's instructions, many entries contained the wind up the name that wins out in popular usage. But somehow we can't see the New York Times adopting it. So Chatterbox will pass over these excellent the president's sinfulness. Chatterbox also likes "Incredible Sucking Sound," off the tongue, while "Wag the Intern" rests too heavily on an ephemeral same goes for "Intern Explorer," which might also attract unwanted scrutiny from the Department of Justice's antitrust division. Chatterbox likes "The Some of the entries are too awful to actually list here. Here is a list of required a long explanation (you don't want to know). Chatterbox was puzzled by another entry: "Screw You." One or two brilliant entries may have been lost Numerous entries played on the names of the special prosecutor submitted by at least four readers, actually packs quite a bit of info about That leaves a few slightly more anodyne but serviceable (sorry) entries. unlucky people or objects, and it sounds great in French. But Chatterbox prefers "Flytrap." It's short. It makes at least a bit of a joke. It can (not completely incompatible) possibility that the whole thing was a vicious setup. And it was only submitted by one reader, as far as Chatterbox can dared to share their good and, more courageously, their bad ideas. or production assistant is charged with combing through it to remove any errant nuts; then he or she has to swaddle the chicken in paper towels and squeeze out him and spread over the chicken. If he spots nuts or excess grease in his grub, the show is ruined! During commercial breaks, he will harp about the botched The retired Grease Monkey says that the only time there was absolute calm on If you are an Al Gore supporter, pray for a mild winter. This is the message article explains why the doubling of oil prices this year has failed to disrupt the economy. The reasons cited include: the shift to natural gas and coal; the growing relative importance of the service sector; more efficient futures markets that allow manufacturers to lock in low prices for fuel; more current effort to cut production. Even so, when you factor out inflation and But let's take a look at that "to be sure" paragraph. A "to be sure" significant caveats to the story's main hypothesis. (Nowadays at the "to be sure" paragraphs, but here's the one that interests Chatterbox: The real test may be yet to come. If industries stock up on fuel ahead of the New Year or a lengthy cold snap grips the Northeast, some analysts think Gulf War. That scenario worries some economists. If prices reach that height and stay there, "economic activity slows, and the trade deficit worsens," says Remember recessions? These were economic downturns, once thought to be cyclical in nature, that caused unemployment and general unhappiness. They from the Oval Office. Assuming that recessions haven't been rendered be extremely inconvenient for Al Gore, whose platform essentially boils down That's where the necessity for a mild winter kicks in. If a frigid winter pushed oil prices high enough to trigger a recession, it would be very bad for temperature stayed warm, there would be no oil price spike, hence probably no recession. This is the sense in which Gore is an ironic beneficiary of jeremiads about for several years. (There is a complex argument that also blames cold snaps and other forms of extreme weather on global warming, but for simplicity's sake Chatterbox will ignore it.) An added benefit of a warm winter, of course, would be that it would make it clearer than ever that Gore's If you are a Gore supporter, however, please do not interpret this to order to dump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most obviously, reducing carbon dioxide emissions is more important than electing Al Gore president. Secondarily, it probably wouldn't cause the Earth to warm up quickly enough to And, finally, if lots of people suddenly increased the number of miles they drove in their cars, oil prices would of course shoot up and create the very risk of recession that Gore supporters want to avoid. wouldn't be looked on favorably during a recession triggered by high oil prices. But Bush would still probably reap a net benefit from not being isn't associated in voters' minds with the oil industry. but as a Democrat in the general election he'd have to contend with accusations Who died and made us the final arbiters of political virtue? Great question, outside of the envelope). The short answer is, nobody. Reporters get to travel around on expense account asking total strangers invasive questions and passing another, somebody's got to ask the questions. I won't give you the whole "we're purifying influence of the press, the United States would devolve into a background is my emergency hyperbole alarm going off.) But if I tend to get overwrought on the subject, it's only because there's so much noise coming from the other side. I couldn't be sicker of hearing how Ordinary People, Folks for the Great Unread here] have contempt for journalists. (My gut response, seldom voiced, is: Good, now we're even.) The problem is particularly acute in some conservative circles, where belief in the liberal media conspiracy is part of the catechism. Polls I keep reading about claim to indicate that most people consider journalists inaccurate and arrogant, if not simply evil. This bugs me, and not just because it's me they're talking about. I don't like the perception mainly because it isn't true. Inaccurate? Ever read a But the charge that irritates me most is arrogance. It's almost always made by politicians, and that's the really galling part. It's true that the national press is a bit taken with itself. On the other hand, I don't know a single governors. Not even close, actually. How many reporters do you know who routinely refer to themselves in the third person? Point made. embodiment of mistaken southern rape fantasies. My description of his function in the film was just that, a description, not a defense. I intended to convey more or less the same thing you conveyed, that his character was yet another example of a movie's black character functioning as the absolver of white pain I think movies work in mysterious ways, however, and if The Green Mile reaches a large audience, not all of them, perhaps not most of them, will share the sophistication of the members of this discussion. Most people just go to a movie. They react to the story on levels they do not articulate to the warden's wife will play in a positive way. They will think (not in so many words) that appearances are misleading, that you can't judge a man by your story are established, we know without any question or additional exposition that he did not assault and murder the two little white girls, because no in such a light. By and large, when black characters are presented as guilty in films, it is only so that their innocence can be established, as a We know that, but many members of the audience will not. The film may work on them like a useful parable. I think that was King's intention in writing the Has race so sensitized us that no black character can appear in any movie without being analyzed as a black character? I do not argue that the presented as an imposing black man, and that is one of the points of the way his character is developed. I just say that if every black character must be passed through a prism of political correctness, that is not fair to the character, the actor, or the author. For example, the character of Little uncomfortable, and yet doubtless such characters existed at that time, and screening. I was told, however, that there was laughter and derision at a New But let me ask you: Do you think critics should make their opinions known publicly at a screening? My own feeling is that the film deserves its chance to develop in the minds of its viewers before being defined in a tidal wave of have often violated that rule in private conversations, but try never to publicly broadcast my opinion to my fellow viewers after a screening. and remove that splotch!" was wicked. Go to your room. I am cranky, as you can tell, becoming more and more distressed by the people who put themselves forward to run. And I have lots of company. We need a Candidate Quality Control somehow seems to be unattainable and in our past. As Dick Morris quipped, "If Rising earlier than usual this morning, I have fished out a small nugget about the previously mentioned (by you, let the record show) Puff Daddy, or Fluffy?" I admit to feeling sympathetic to his mishearing the name. When I was in college (when ice covered the earth), I unfortunately became known as the girl who thought she was working for St. Nuclear and His Policy and bragged In an ecumenical spirit, I want to agree with Christian Coalition founder the morals of an alley cat" but is one of the most brilliant politicians ever. "The man is a genius, an absolute genius. He's managed to stymie the Congress." Tomorrow I hope to return to the subjects of divorce and manners and models. But this installment of the Breakfast Table is more like a nightcap. Tonight's just returning from. So forgive me if I am sparing in my recounting of the this, I am thankful. Campaign advisers desperate to spin had nobody else to sitting in my hotel room and dashing off mail to you.) with a straight face: Bush looked truly wobbly. Not that he did himself any the audience penalized him for it. As he coughed out answers or recycled lines in conflict and conversation. This seemed to piss him off even more. Afterward, he was heard muttering something about being an "invisible man." It's fitting that the decade ends with the best year for movies of the would've looked like a classy move.) This year, there are three animated movies that has moments of epic grandeur and images so primal they could be lifted South Park is so good that the apparent problem, bringing the show's parody that's one of the funniest movie moments of the year, is a power ballad audacity and smarts still leave you tearing up helplessly when you try to explain what you love about the work months later. And your friends roll their The last few years have been a struggle to put together a 10-best list, so when three cartoons make enough of an impact to each deserve a slot, you know with small jokes bordering the bigger jokes. It seems perfect for that genre that flowered in the '90s, the movie made for repeated home viewing so you can video apology, where you try to analyze the squint as he says, "I did not have where Woody and Buzz take a moment to go over what has happened to them, feels like the end of a John Ford movie, and has a wonderful ease. multiplexes, and watched the place light up with happy chatter from kids and parents, each group trying to explain their version of the movie to the other. have brains and velocity. Three Kings feels like it was fired from a gun, and The Matrix generates so much excitement that it's like being Giant to mainstream audiences. In the end, it probably does take an like standing next to someone who got shot and getting a Purple Heart anyway.) Though a bigger disappointment is that they were able to put Wild, Wild West over, which is a bigger insult than the lazy samples Will Smith has turned into a pop career. (You can almost hear him going through his parents' mechanism of the action picture for its visceral power, and to make a point about the callousness of action movies, a programmer with a bit of The Third Man slipped in to make a point. It's gotta be a great year for movies when supporting performances of the year, also directs one of the best pictures: city's downtown area for the second night in a row. Police threatened to arrest to contest the action in court. Is this curfew legal? citizens and their property. (Similar powers are granted to other chief executives, such as county commissioners, governors, and the president.) In curfew whenever he believes that "extraordinary measures [are needed] to prevent the death or injury of persons and to protect the public peace, safety, and welfare, and alleviate damage, loss, hardship or suffering." municipal laws (as most agree it will be), it could still be challenged in federal court on the grounds that it violates constitutional rights, such as free speech. Typically, justices defer to the judgment of the executive branch Instead, cases are brought after the fact that seek either monetary damages from the city or a court order barring similar action in the future. Were free speech rights violated? Courts have deemed streets, clearly limited the protestors' access to them. However, courts have also determined that governments can restrict expression to a reasonable time, place, and manner. The city might argue that this is all its curfew did, since protestors could simply go elsewhere in the city to hold their demonstrations without interference. But since access to the desired audience is part of free speech, complainants could counter that restricting their location impinged on Were continued protests likely to have led to unlawful conduct? Federal courts have clearly held that First Amendment activities cannot be disband all future protests.) However, if police have specific information about future lawbreaking or reasonably believe that they would be been unable to control an outbreak of violence, courts have sometimes allowed First the curfew banned from downtown everyone who said they intended to protest or who lacked another reason for entering. Therefore, the city might argue, it was cause. However, complainants could contend that in practice it was discriminatory: It actually affected only the group of protestors who opposed Could the same result have been accomplished by more limited means? Governments are required to restrict speech and other rights as little as possible. So, complainants would likely win a case if they could prove that the that nothing short of an outright ban on downtown demonstrations would have delegates) would be able go about their lawful business. And they could point protestors during the day and the limited duration of the curfew. But other lawyers have already publicly stated that the complete prohibition of demonstrations and the large size of the area are both unconstitutionally conference yesterday, where he announced the development. The coverage is largely upbeat, with only the LAT including the and all of these mention a question near the end that seemed to have caught him administration have gone to whites. But all of these stories run inside and none dwell at length on the issue the question raises. With the exception, that at the topic on its front page. The story highlights the basic fact raised (and comes to crucial White House decisions, "women and minorities still have to "The rule is still that when the big decisions get made, it's not as diverse a tries to suggest important examples where this alleged ethnic skew hurt. The the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy crafted by her husband to govern gays in the military was a failure, and that if elected she would work to overturn it. The the policy. The paper further reports that at the event the first lady also effectively banned gay marriages. The Times runs the story next to pictures of the killer and the killed in the case of an Army private convicted yesterday of murdering a fellow soldier he'd harassed for being gay. unrelated bank robbery charges. A theory being pursued by investigators, says murder. This means, explains the coverage, that the jury does not believe the state decided not to issue a stay of execution for the man and instead put him and so technically not in on the decision, the paper reports that a Bush spokeswoman confirms he agreed with it. Wackiest detail reported by the officials used an airplane staffed by medical personnel to ensure that he Counters Autism" even though the story goes on to explain that the drug worked story the paper runs about a credit card scam targeting senior military of his mother for a month, leaving her body in their home because he was afraid of being sent to an orphanage, the Post goes with the bad taste headline being now entangled with a third hardly makes up for my almost total lack of information re the history of our people. I absolutely thought, until last an oil lamp. Perhaps I have managed to fool a few people because I know some yesterday afternoon where the menu was latkes and birthday cake. Of course I Well, now that I have managed to touch on a bit of my marital history, my religious ignorance, announcing where I live, and a zit treatment, let's push away that plate of latkes and get serious. Now comes the part where I reveal what I believe to be a sin: envy. How I wish I, too, could be winging to I am probably skirting another sin, here, but I can't get away from attractive, but he looks like he just managed to run away from his attendant. Talk to you later. (And skip the sour cream, go with the applesauce.) Just caught up with your postscript. In the discussion of video projection vs. film, you ask: "What is the distinction is between hypnosis and reverie? That sounds like mystical poetry." I first got turned on o this in Jerry creates more of a dream state. That is one reason so many of us get restless when a film runs for more than two hours, yet are perfectly capable of watching My own feeling is that when a film is really working, it takes me to a mental state that nothing on television has ever approached. Nor have I ever felt, even on the very best video projection systems, the film experience. I am Digital projection, of course, is not to be confused with projected television. It does not scan the screen but organizes the material into digital "frames." Whether these frames do the same thing as frames of film is doubtful, pictures the lab technicians of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, with their As for subjective comparisons between projected video and projected film, I 2k, so that both film and digital are of equal resolution. And both are half of the normal film resolution of 4k. I would love to see them put up something (grainier) film stock. In short, as I see it, the test of digital vs. film is What we have here is a company (TI) with unlimited resources that wants to take film away from us and replace it with their system. And the film community is so technically uninterested and illiterate that there is no outcry. I myself feel keenly inadequate on this subject. I am not technically trained. But I got into this issue and the more I find out about it, the more disturbed I exhibition of rock 'n' roll outfits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Museum. "Rock Style" celebrates the influence of rock on fashion, deploying to that end an excess of media more often seen on the E! channel than in public also that he served as its "principal designer," according to the press kit. His name is printed in large white letters on the cover of the catalog, which It was a nice coincidence that "Rock Style" should preview the same day that the New York Times laid out in sordid detail the kinds of compromises The Met is unlikely to suffer similar embarrassment, since its director, control when you can just cede the hall to the sponsor? The justification offered by museum directors for shows that double as highbrow advertisements is, Hey, get real, that's the only way museums can afford to get expensive stuff inside its walls. "No museum, except maybe the museums have to retail products, solicit corporations, franchise themselves," years ago. "It's up to each institution to make sure that none of it affects the content of the exhibitions or the integrity of the museum." In light of "Rock Style" and other shows of its ilk: Does it add value above and beyond what you'd find in a commercial for the sponsor's product, and does hosting it In the case of "Rock Style," the answers to those questions are no and yes. turning rock musicians into fashion models. What's notable is that the show's horses, and without adding an iota of critical perspective. lilac jumpsuit, all looking suitably outrageous if somewhat wilted behind glass. The whole glorious spectacle is thrilling to look at, even absent the performers. For the categorically minded, there is a nominal division of after all, is supposed to be an educational institution. So what do we learn from the show about the history or sociology or even the aesthetics of rock How did it change once music videos made a band's appearance more important There are no answers, because "Rock Style" 's wall captions are stunningly many performers uphold the tradition in their music and dress," reads a typical one. (The wall commentary at Costume Institute, which was overseen by fashion The videos, etc., are no help either. The book exhibits a modicum of historical consciousness; it's broken up into periods, at least. But it is also stuffed In the end, all we have to go on are the costumes themselves. That's plenty, quilted jumpsuit from the mid 1970s, the thighs of which are so exaggerated they form a perfect vertical disc, then taper in neatly at the knees. Get the expect it to add to their ability to analyze the activity they're so obsessively devoted to. Those insights will have to wait for a less synergistic readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person "rather annoying and less than professional") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: "Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. or love supposedly. They were all committed by "quiet, shy" people who "mostly be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader playing in the "City of the Century" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet Technology" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. police inform criminal suspects of their basic constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent, before questioning them. The story is stuffed at which goes instead with an independent investigating panel's findings that worth much more money than the banks ever previously acknowledged. The the highest annual percentage of scratches in the last five years. While the story cites maintenance and labor strife as contributing causes, it quotes one bad weather and air traffic control problems. The airline with the lowest will be declared terrorists, subject to massive shelling and bombing. The follow through on their threat. The papers report that in response, President "pay a heavy price" otherwise, without really specifying further. case: whether with the original ruling, the Warren Court was establishing a rule of constitutional law or merely expressing its own preference for a method the latter, then Congress could overrule the method, which would mean that a restitution payouts. State murder and manslaughter charges are next. could question each other, but, the paper notes, the discussion remained president for eight years in a Hatch administration. partners of new gay hires or to the new partners of current gay employees. Several gay rights organizations are responding with outrage. members of Congress. It did in fact say they are shielded from libel or slander lawsuits based on remarks made in congressional debate and in official reporters that they keep her on her toes and that "the First Amendment is need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the grotesqueries in another stimulated some thoughts about his presidential legacy. Asked who he would name libidinal ones; he has an unattractive tendency to blame other people for his problems; he has a terrifyingly effective gift for misleading and, occasionally, telling outright lies. People who work for him rarely come away from the experience with a high opinion of his character. Chatterbox continues to believe that the nation (and, without question, Al Gore) would have been smart, too, but they weren't particularly good presidents. As the former Carter article, "The Passionless Presidency," Carter had a habit of deploying his intelligence toward pathetically small matters like deciding who could use the someone whose brain (unlike other parts of his body) seems always to be deployed in just the right places, shining light on an astonishing variety of important matters. (Check out his comments at yesterday's press some people have mistaken for brilliant leadership). There are many smart people running for president this year, but none of and so well. Anyone who's ever read Al Gore's Earth in the Balance knows that Gore's formidable intelligence is a clunky suit of armor. (Fortunately, when Gore isn't in his temperament, is impulsive in the best and worst senses. (For an example of the will miss his brain, and that will be missing a lot. tapes and that seven tapes are missing. Lee is not specifically accused of all counts the government must prove that he intended to injure the United States and benefit a foreign power. The Post explains that the indictment might be an attempt to squeeze new leads out of Lee. The charges carry life sentences. Lee's attorneys claim he is innocent of wrongdoing. A join, Turkey must improve its human rights record by abolishing the use of voting not to extend an offer of accession to Turkey. None of the papers note become a 28-nation union that encompasses nearly all of central and eastern complications. The Post and LAT reefer their obits. heart palpitations, the candidate cancelled a campaign appearance and three LAT reefers the story but notes that health questions dogged the late received mild electrical shocks to treat his arrhythmia on three occasions Wilderness programs for wayward kids are the latest frontier of the therapy rehabilitate troubled teens by forcing them to brave the rigors of the great age, but there is every reason to surmise they won't be here for long. Their Building has only a decade or two to go before it falls over. Thinking Building. Chatterbox is far from the only person with a strong attachment to the skyscraper; in an essay in an earlier millennium issue of the Times Eventually, Chatterbox got sufficiently worked up thinking about the who reassured Chatterbox that when he wrote those words in the Times that," he said. (Among other things, the bronze is oiled annually.) "If you take good care of them, they can last for quite awhile." This seemed somewhat but Chatterbox decided to let that go. Instead, he asked precisely when one Chatterbox next phoned the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of current construction, not construction for its day and age." He added (without my asking) that the computers that now run the elevators and the will the building keep standing there? "This building was constructed of materials that should last more than a lifetime if you and I are going to live course, he wasn't taking Chatterbox very seriously. of the added costs. In fact, says the paper, workers' contributions to their diplomatic development has provoked "shouting matches, shock and hope among explains that the next internal political hurdle is a referendum on territorial The Post says that both the government and the opposition may bring in surrounding that conviction of an Army man for murdering a gay fellow should be abandoned. The paper calls this Gore's "sharpest public break" yet position Gore had been taking as recently as this past weekend. Gore aides months. The paper also reminds that this controversy underscores the importance of the gay vote in Democratic politics but could cause difficulties for Gore's statement comes as the Secretary of Defense ordered a Pentagon investigation to determine whether homosexuals in uniform are being harassed. The investigation raises a question that is only lightly touched on by the papers: How can it work without violating the current policy wholesale? After all, an investigator can't ask soldiers if they are being harassed for being gay without in effect "asking" them if they're gay, and a soldier can't tell an investigator that he is being harassed for being gay without "telling" the its proscription of homosexuals in the service in favor of a policy that will attack. Both Times remember to get past the famous war book's humor to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms says he thinks the prime suspect in for making improvements to the vice presidential official residence. (The story is based on a report coming out today from the Center for Public Integrity.) Gifts include a billiard table, a hot tub, and landscaping. Donors include individuals (not companies have issues of tremendous financial consequence currently being University to get his explanation that it's very natural for human beings to shorten words. Kraut, by the way, or so the Post informs, is "professor Times quotes one attendee as enthused about the personal relationships the meeting and held a press conference ominously urging people not to "get carried away about new dawns and new days having arrived in Northern pretty much subsiding, there was a chance to focus finally on the discord inside. The LAT refers to the meeting as a potential "fiasco." The most the week that countries failing to meet basic labor standards might be subject negotiation position does not include the sanction idea. signed a bill banning extreme conditions of child labor, citing as he did so treaty. This too, the paper adds, was a cause of upset, with developing nation evening as focusing most of its energy on testing Bush, especially on taxes and news box word that the Justice Department has hired a Wall Street investment otherwise, the paper sees this as a signal that the government might be gift. This is his marital comeback strategy. If she runs for Senate, she'll need him to raise money. If she runs, she'll lose. If she loses, she'll need I agree with you entirely about the Times versus local newspapers. As a little money and a few pounds of trash per week by getting the Times only on weekends. But right from the start, we went into serious Times like its local reporting, but its foreign coverage doesn't compare to the put together an attractive and readable paper. They still haven't figured out weekly section, the way the Times does. However, thanks to the Internet, I have been indulging my Times addiction for several years now without any additional cost or trash (it makes me wonder how many other people are doing the same, and just how much money the Times has lost as a As you say, we're supposed to be talking about the news. But what has been most interesting to me about the news in the past few months is what has such a big, greasy, nauseating chunk of scandal to swallow that the politicians and chattering classes subsequently lost their appetite for the stuff, at least Permanent Floating Scandal. There always seemed to be at least three or four scandals, not to mention the extra, auxiliary scandals around half the cabinet. More to Come, and how this might all ultimately Bring the President Down. But since the Much More came, and several additional, large, indigestible helpings on top of it (and still the president didn't fall!), it's as if the press and the politicians have gone on a scandal diet, sneaking in only an last two years in office seem certain to be more free of scandal than Bush's or coverage has changed. I certainly haven't seen much recently of the prestige dignifying with our attention these allegations about presidential fondling, as detailed in the following 62-page special report (and make sure not to miss the amazing revelations from the alleged victim's college roommate about her attitudes toward oral sex!)." Instead, the tone has been pretty scandal, the more careless powerful people will get, and eventually one of them will get blown up in a big, juicy affair which will have the politicians and pundits joyfully going off the diet and gorging on all the sordid details. legal and going on all the time. Do you think there's any chance that the media's temporary diet will encourage more reporters to look at this other kind gotten to the news, either (like father, like son?). So why don't you sidekick, you would have mistaken his speech for the opening monologue of a any problems with socialist, pinko commie bias of his news organization, you Every line is a wisecrack. And it's delivered in a deadpan style that seems is somebody who has seen the worst of life and knows that much of the garbage have had presidents with tempers before, but have we ever had a president who somber guy and Dole was a horrible candidate. Being president is a serious business, and I wonder if it's wise to install a jokester as leader of the free Meanwhile, the National Review online is reporting that a Dean research team must have been working overtime on that one.) "Candor" and about this organization for years without ever being invited into its inner apparently the first online publication to be included in one of these known as "The Dean" to all and sundry. The Dean takes his journalistic responsibilities very seriously. He has spent the last three years living on a hog farm outside of Cedar Rapids in preparation for this year's caucuses. The Anyhow, the Dean called the meeting to order and explained that the conspiracy had only a few hours to choose the winner of the debate. He said he thought the committee had made the right decision in handing the previous two He added that he thought the committee was making healthy progress toward its tonight's debate, but he wondered whether Bush might be criticized for about himself in the newspaper. Why not order up a question designed to provoke It's the one that says all new evidence has to confirm established personality committee might decide that this was not a serious problem later in the campaign, it couldn't suddenly give him a new drawback without any advance against each other in the primaries couldn't very well have the same character show some improvement in tonight's debate. He said that some groundwork needed my lunch." This was not a literal reference to the capon carcass resting on the platter in front of him but a metaphor for "invading his journalistic turf." Apple sees it as his sole responsibility to establish the conventional wisdom and rejects any attempt by the rest of the media conspiracy to assist him. "underwhelming," making one moderately serious gaffe to fuel concerns about his preparedness for office while also "exceeding expectations." She said members could have a quick caucus during the period set aside for closing statements at the end of the debate to decide what the gaffe had been. So who should win, Greenfield asked? The hour for decision was drawing violated the unwritten code against taking more than two candidates in the race This proposal initially drew some jeers from pundits whose contempt for Bush for the nomination. Everyone agreed that this was not a serious risk, though Greenfield was right to raise it. "The Dean" then adjourned the courses over the Internet leading to an associate's degree. This unprecedented difficulties the Army is having trying to compete with the booming civilian job Today leads with a new outside study blaming government and industry potential recruits who show high military aptitude despite lacking a the story doesn't address: Why is this change only being proposed by the Army? Wouldn't it also help the other branches with their recruitment woes? packing after being caught engaging in an eavesdropping operation against the having set foot in the building, communicating with a bug that had been sensitive meetings took place there during the bug's deployment. that turned on a receiver and tape recorder in his car. The LAT quotes one "senior official" who denies that there was a recorder involved, but also others saying there was. The LAT says officials refuse to say whether The LAT points out that the former Soviet Union excelled in this sort about the Soviets' "ability to read conversations from the vibrations of window solo while clocking the honeys in a Manhattan club. Then, as he strolled off the stage, he strummed the neck of the guitar. Sassy and charismatic, as was it is, as they used to say back in the '90s. Given all the trends that have been tagged and tracked this year, and all the excitement that Roger mentioned about films in general, it's still a troubling time for black performers. Had contradiction in terms if ever there was one, they'd have three picture deals what will end up being the highest profile part for a black man this year: the movie. But to have a gentle black giant hang his head and say "Yes, Boss," point. Sure, the atrocities heaped on the children throw you out of the movie of the movie is that war isn't fun and games, then it should be equally Judging from the last two Republican presidential debates, the new big issue in this campaign is taxation of Internet commerce. Or rather, since none of the candidates wants to tax Internet commerce right now, the issue is who is most committed to extending the current congressional moratorium on taxing says he wants to extend the moratorium but won't rule out Internet taxes in the future. In the zany context of the Republican nomination race, this makes Bush The issue pits traditionally Republican Main Street business proprietors they tend to rely heavily on sales taxes to fund their state The Republican governors, of course, have it exactly right. It's totally unfair that Internet businesses can sell their wares without making customers their customers pay state sales taxes. A reasonable alternative to altogether and make up the lost revenue with increased or new state income taxes. But don't hold your breath for Republicans (or even Democrats) to eliminating the federal income tax and replacing it with a national sales are ignoring or minimizing whatever costs that would impose on traditional act. As you know, this was stoutly resisted by governors, Republicans governors as well. Don't you think we ought to make the Internet tax moratorium Hatch: Yes, I really do. I really think that we ought to do it, because I think it's far overblown to think that the fact that people buy over the right over the Internet and have it delivered right to your home? She said: I still want to go to the stores, I want to test things, I want to look at them, booster, I am going to pretend now that Internet commerce will never amount to they're so powerful that they can subject their customers to my new national What a fun honor it is to swap opinions with you both, really find it useful to rank this year's crop. Many of the really ambitious want to salute those films that were onto something new, while recognizing that setups (often you can see a microphone dipping and swaying at the top of the Run was clumsy, a chunk of bratwurst. Yet of the two, it seems fresher to I agree with you both that we're at a turning point, has to do with it. The easiest place to look for this new creativity is was the first year since practically forever that I didn't long for more genuine movie stars. This was the year when the indie ensemble supernova she's cracked up to be, but, to her credit, a chameleon character narrow grin, ever really that great? Probably, but that's the kind of assumption this year's films have started to call into question.) My list of movies that felt fresh and creative but were far from perfect, and sometimes not even so likable, is: the ensemble gem Now let the exchange begin. Potential disagreements: I creatively drawn. But the rest of it is hateful, and witless in a very predictable way. There's no grace in the construction of the film, and though (which hasn't always dated well, I might add), unlike in the Lampoon there's not much news about the culture that you don't pornographer, and his crack team of snoops were going to blast the lid off the hypocritical Republican Congress that was trying to impeach a president over Hustler had compiled a "good dossier" on the speaker before he resigned going to do next as far as his career was concerned." Congress, shooting their mouths off, trying to take the moral high ground Hustler 's concern was getting maximum publicity and sales for dropped the bomb then? "That was kind of our idea." What if Newt hadn't down anybody. We wanted to do the most for [ourselves]." whiff of fresh scandal was the deciding factor in Newt's abrupt withdrawal from The papers report that officials are disappointed but confident that and "growing more glum by the hour." Assuming the Lander didn't crash, the radio silence could be due to a misalignment of the antenna or a malfunction Polar Lander, designed to search for ice in the Martian soil and collect information about the planet's climate history, could help scientists figure out if life could have existed on Mars. The papers report that the after a failure to convert navigational instructions from English to metric units sent the Orbiter fatally close to the Red Planet. the work force grew by greater percentage rates over seven years--25 percent looks for a new training site, the LAT reports on its front, the Navy goal to eliminate export subsidies on farm products. It isn't clear, however, main adversary in the debate, "agreed to consider eliminating export subsidies contamination in eight months. In its lawsuit the plant claims the government doesn't have the authority to regulate salmonella because salmonella is destroyed during "normal cooking" and is not a "public safety issue." convinced that anyone could be a reporter in the Internet age, is a victim of the consolidation of news organizations into a handful of media conglomerates. Week panelists touting the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? show without mentioning it brings home the bacon), he singles out a certain Web magazine for objectivity, suggesting it might gain readers' loyalty with its and your remarks yesterday on reviewing etiquette gave both my admiration and New York squawk and swap their opinions during or even right after a screening. But I bet that too few them demonstrate the consideration for their readers relationship films this year may just be a cyclical thing, I suspect. Beautifully acted but formulaic films like Walk on the Moon suggest we could use a fallow period, a year or two to regroup and think up fresh stories about attraction and trust. The dearth of decent roles for black actors goes so far on purpose. The preview was a turnoff, and not just because of the innocent giant in cuffs. For me, the red alert was the sight of Tom Hanks gulping and tearing up. Hanks is a supremely effective actor, I admit, but there are times these days when I can barely stomach him. Wherever he goes, a screen for this to happen. Did you all see the film he directed a few years band that hits it big in the early '60s. Hanks clearly identifies with the kid, in the film. Everything he touches turns into diamonds; he gets to steal his best friend's girlfriend but retain the moral upper hand; everyone, even strangers, watches out for his happiness. As long as I live, I won't forget the ending, where a black bellhop with flashing eyes and a big smile and an inappropriately loud, excitable voice takes it upon himself to fix up this the liberal veneer of many a Hanks film I sense some creepy nostalgia for this like to make to Roger is that objecting to objectified characters is not a moral problem, and an aesthetic problem, and as I said above, at times for me it is a visceral problem of not wanting to sit still for more of the old Even by the abstract and deconstructive standards of the film he felt sidekick, his decisions less closely examined and symbolically freighted and men being on the ropes, culturally speaking. I couldn't help noticing the unabashedly male viewpoint of many of the year's most interesting films. With year's movies. I found it a little disappointing that something as humane and innovative as The Iron Giant couldn't put a tiny bit more meat, or sass, I quite agree that filmmakers are enthusiastic about the considerable freedom given them by digital production. But then you write, "Most filmmakers don't care if digital projection looks better than celluloid; they'd be I think most filmmakers do care about the picture quality of their films, as filmmakers! I care! While I am perfectly able to enjoy films shot on video, enjoy the voluptuous pleasures of great celluloid cinematography in a film like that everyone else thinks so, the critics do the director the courtesy of not distracting from his work by vocalizing their own opinions. I have been to a lot of New York screenings over the years, and have been surprised a) at how some critics feel the right to laugh scornfully or even talk back to the screen, and b) how so many of them loudly share their opinions of a film as films with each other after the screening. I have zero need to know what my colleagues think, and they have the same interest in my opinion. are right, actors) swinging for the fences, not holding back, not playing it I fully expect that many critics snorted and hooted all the way through provides the definition of thankless. In a season when directors have been breaking free of timid generic expectations, why not an audacious film of That new scrolling investment ticker at the top of Moneybox has not been a universal hit. Personally, I like it (although I can't figure out why it runs crack techies are working on a solution to the problem, but as they say, it's absolutely remarkable. Here's how it read when I installed the ticker: Then comes the kicker at the bottom, with a little box you can check to "'Sleepy Hollow' has got to be the most gorgeous, sumptuous, painterly movie "'Sleepy Hollow' has got to be the most gorgeous, sumptuous painterly movie to get elected, too, but above all he needs to draw attention to himself to pump up his book sales and lecture fees. It's in his interest to make a fuss in undecided voters of everything about the past eight years they'd like to be rid Mandatory Automotive Items: The news in the latest Consumer suggests romantic possibilities between public figures who may or may not music critic; she's the daughter of a respected poet. what each of them said, for they were literally sound bites (or is it will make of it I do not know, for I began by saying that one could not predict the future, if by the future one meant point events such as: Who will the State Department what goes on in the Soviet Union," the man continued. The simple point is that one can "predict" only if you have an algorithm, a decision rule that tells you how to sort things out. Or where there is a firm set of rules for institutional succession. When I initiated the Commission on Corporation, for funding. John said: "You have written an interesting memorandum, but give me a prediction." "It is very difficult to predict," I said. "Well, if you don't give me a prediction, you don't get the money." many can you make such a prediction?" (This was shortly after the French Army This is running on, but to anticipate you, or any reader: Can I return to a prediction (for that is not the way to think about it) but a relevant social framework to identify issues and problems. What we are witnessing is a change economic integration (crossing national boundaries) and increasing political The economic dimension is a "change of scale," as all national economies are absorbed into a global framework. The fragmentation is occurring because (as I remarked a decade ago) the national state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems. The national state was a economic exchange. Now the national state becomes defensive against the international onrush of capital, currency, commodity, and even demographic flows. And in imposing social programs from a national center, it becomes unresponsive to the varieties and needs of different localities. More than that, we are witnessing not the end of history but the resumption of history. Communism was a large smothering blanket thrown across societies regimes, those societies have broken open. But it is not only those ideological All this is called devolution, to rhyme with "evolution" (and not to rhyme with Some people think you have it easier. You are a historian specializing in know better. It is not. The past is itself ever subject to revision and new interpretation. As we said when we adopted an epigraph for the Commission on asking you to make predictions about the future. And you have always given an convincing, and sober, and intellectually responsible, and it frustrates them to no end. Just once, perhaps, you should give them what they want. "Watch for More seriously, I have one question for you about all of this, and one demurral. The question concerns patterns of technological change. As a lot of commentators have been noting recently, the future isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, visions of the future were heavy on, yes, flying cars and Mars colonies and the like. Everyone was confidently predicting that by the while at home we'd be casually buzzing from continent to continent in our cars, and the robot servants took care of cleaning the house. These seemed reasonable enough predictions, actually, given the pace of years! If that pace of change had continued, I would probably have been sending not to think that in a lot of areas, technological change has slowed to a crawl, with incremental improvements around the edges, but no great leaps transport by car and train is mostly slower than it was then (trains are one currently takes). The same is true of other sectors: generation of energy (where we've stepped back from nuclear power), and even, with the exception of out on a great slogan here. "Personal blast rays don't destroy whole city But on the other hand, obviously, some technological sectors have been holding to the same, incredible pace of change that aeronautics went through earlier: information technology and biotechnology, first and foremost. Why is this? And how does it relate to the broader structural changes in the economy Here's my demurral. Is there really such a thing as "primordial identities," were doing exactly that, but lots of others adjusted just fine to the communist regime. It was only when the regime collapsed that certain people saw an advantage for themselves in highlighting ethnic and linguistic differences, and in, not so much resurrecting eternal, unchanging, primordial identities so much as creating new identities based on the old myths and loyalties. And I think they would probably abandon these new identities easily enough if it suited into the world" and then emits a cute little giggle. I am contrarian on the I actually think he's a smart, ideologically consistent guy who makes his case hobbled by looks. No profile can resist mentioning that he's short and looks played a big role in helping put the China issue on the table, and he deserves and has never had patience for the guy. Bush looked physically pained being enough. This is what I love about watching the leadership of the religious to force their issues onto the agenda. And they bicker among themselves endlessly. Last night a friend tried to describe to me the differences between The debate revolves around the importance of the Declaration of Independence to The hotel bar is not nearly so glamorous as you would think. For starters, I never seem to know any of the truly good dish. Besides, the late night at the hotel bar is used to lay the groundwork to get good dish later. Political matched partners because we share an obsession with the Chosen People. So I am sure you will understand my feelings of discomfort on this third day of combination skin. But on this third day of latkes, many of us awoke to find I am currently en route to Phoenix for tonight's debate between the state. The way I understand it, he'll be piped in via satellite from New moves by the Angry White Candidate, who graces the cover of Time above the fray in his remote studio. (And if he gets a tough question, he can always claim that technical problems have prevented him from hearing it.) pretty much every available topic of contention. Therefore, I predict tonight will be especially raucous. Without anything else of substance to talk about, on politics. (The Times seems to want to make it a regular feature, with Rich does it brilliantly. But what we like about Frank is that he takes his sharpened pencil and jabs into politicians the same way that he would a talk about the decline of the sitcom, which the Times diagnoses. It argues the genre is worn out and will be challenged by the rise of the game show. This strikes me as bunk. Sitcoms have been expanding exponentially over cancellation. (Soon we'll be reading stories about "The End of the Game Show.") What we're seeing isn't the end of the genre, but a return to equilibrium. So far, there have been three distinct phases to Al Gore's campaign. In the fellow running against him in the Democratic primaries. In the second phase, competitor. Unfortunately, Gore's campaign has now entered a third, much more to bury his rival under a mountain of inconsistent and often spurious variety of different minority groups, for his past positions on Social Security, for his lack of a position on Medicare, and even for not saying part of a transparent effort to keep his opponent on the defensive. It's You can get a better sense of what Gore is doing by looking closely at one reasonably responded that he doesn't believe it will require a tax increase, but that if it does, his options would include cutting other spending or raising taxes, and that he would make a judgment at the time. He was doing what any wise politician does, which is refusing to indulge a hypothetical plausible plan to pay for his proposal out of projected budget surpluses. And as an "idea." He said that because he couldn't predict what would happen to the economy, it wouldn't be prudent to rule out raising taxes in the future Neither thinks raising taxes will be necessary to pay for their own various pointing out the disingenuousness of Gore's attack. Having campaigned with Bill on tobacco as recently as this year. Also, it just seems crazy for Democrats to start demanding "no new taxes" pledges from other Democrats. Then again, Republican candidates are now charging each other with endangering Social Security, which suggests that each party has to some extent been brainwashed by do to the markets if they came from a President." And in a subsequent press raise questions as to whether or not he has the vision and the experience to keep the economy strong." Gore repeated these charges in person at an appearance yesterday at New York University Law School, where he received an the economy as "if it ain't broke, let's break it." reasonable or not, he clearly hasn't zigzagged on the subject. He's been candidate has to respond to charges made by serious opponents, lest those accusation, this time by getting two supporters with credibility on economic statement defending him. This prompted the Gore campaign to put out yet another such charges, he won't be able to get his "positive" message out. But Gore's stratagem is even more diabolical than that. As one Gore aide explained to me, ignores it, in which case the charges damage him, or he responds in kind, in which case he diminishes his carefully cultivated reputation for insults with Gore, he loses his aura of saintliness and becomes just another told the Post that he is intent on running a positive campaign and that he intends to shoot back only when Gore hits him with something "outrageous." lowbrow for the Breakfast Table. Maybe better for the Book Club ("Today in monkeys in Caps for Sale should be put to death."). One final word on removes a candidate's cork and sniffs it in full view of the electorate. Who died and made him the judge of a pol's worthiness? (For that matter, Tucker, speech apart: I appreciate his listening to it and analyzing it so I don't have to (I would have had to find toothpicks to keep my eyes open), but the whole "oracle of wisdom" aspect to his approach is beginning to tick me off. When you read one of his columns these days, or at least when I do, you get the sense that it's more about him than it is about it or them; the phrase "nattering nabob of solipsism" suddenly springs to mind. There's a great story about his pulling that crap? If the story's true, it lends credence to a theory I have scary, someone you have to bow before to curry favor, but when you pull the talking about the debate, which I fear is going to be unnatural and intelligence as the SAT; idiots make the Ivy League, so why not the White pop quiz, and we all know where that got us last time. Before I go, I want to revise and extend my remarks about Drudge: This office. Drudge teases each by saying they come from a "paper," but when you click on the link, you learn they come from a supermarket tab Star and This point seems either incredibly naive (since we all know that naive and banal. But it's still true, and imagining that low wages and poor working conditions are realities imposed upon developing countries by the United States is a delusion that makes understanding the actual operations of developing nations needed to stick together, because "we produce goods and services with comparative advantages that they [that is, the United States and those standards stay off the table, precisely because they fear that their inclusion in trade talks will eliminate any incentives for foreign (or even or that we in the United States should simply defer to the wishes of other countries. There are powerful indigenous movements in almost every developing country in favor of better working conditions and higher wages, and in any case the fear of engaging in cultural imperialism is a poor guide to support for new standards that should give us pause. States wouldn't be trading with those nations at all. From what you might call government smashing down local regulations and excoriated for not being enough of a supranational government to create global living and working The paradox exists, though, because opposition to free trade depends upon two antithetical ideas, both of which, interestingly enough, are wrong. The first is that free trade is lowering the standard of living in developed countries by encouraging the migration of jobs and the creation of trade deficits. The second is that free trade is widening the economic gap between rich and poor countries. (A common corollary to this is that trade is widening the gap between rich and poor in all countries.) For both these to be true, rich countries would have to be losing jobs and productive capacity and getting richer at the same time, even as developing countries would be taking That's not happening, of course. It's almost certainly true that certain sectors of developed economies (textiles, steel) are hurt by free trade, but it's equally true that other sectors (computer software and hardware, financial services) are helped. More to the point, the fundamental truth of free trade is that when countries produce those goods in which they have a comparative advantage, both sides benefit, because capital ends up being allocated to its most productive uses, which is the only way real wealth can be created. developing countries, the one meaningful road to economic development, which is to say the only way they can narrow the gap between themselves and the United corporations from running toxic dumps will wreck their chances of competing in the world market, just like it's a mistake for small businesses to argue that But it's not a mistake for these countries to believe that the fewer barriers thing, of course, is that it's not a mistake for the United States to believe that there are fewer scandals, or is it that the Times and the pale by comparison. What is extraordinary is how scantily this is written about parliamentary whip, who had announced his Conservative candidacy for the mayor disclosed that Archer had persuaded him to write a letter to Lord Archer's lawyers falsely stating that they had dinner that night, and Archer had altered his diary to show a meeting. Archer had sued the Daily Star and won a million pounds in the libel case. Now Archer is disgraced and faces the funding accounts. All this emerged from an investigation of a bribes to party funds into their own bank accounts. an airport ready to fly off with his mistress (and he finally chose her, program and replaced it with "English immersion"? For an excellent, maddening (who was at the time have a risky affair with a congressional aide): encouraged Republican senators to acquit the president. A different, more plea to my colleagues: Please, please stop calling the old was the cheapest hotel in town. I remember it as a decent, shabby old Only much later, with Al Gore long gone, was the building refurbished and phrases get repeated with mindless reverence in bureaucratic cultures. This is that the ideas and phrases that make the most attractive candidates for English professor living in Manhattan, being recruited by phone for a of us down here can start getting mileage out of that one right away. That is, emerged to praise mindless conformity: "singing from the same to the Fray. Nominations should contain specific citations, preferably with Web ineligible. So are folksy evergreens such as "That dog won't hunt." Please Let me open with a flashback to the '80s, which is when I started writing but now they were run by publicly held corporations instead of whimsical it down. The "indie" movement was but a trickle. Spike Lee hadn't emerged and, if you believed the conventional wisdom, never would. Movies that many in my generation regard as touchstones were freaks. Blue Velvet came about not that there have been so many masterpieces. It's that movies have become to create a new syntax to capture a new kind of flickering consciousness. imagery. In part, this is the upshot of digital editing technologies, which permit noodling around as never before; and in part it's an indication that the favorites this year not because I think it's such a great film (or even as much that, ultimately, dovetails with both the solution to the movie's mystery and that the most challenging foreign and independent films are not being bought by Tomorrow I plan to talk about some of the amazing performances in this minds" is our generation's Duck Soup --not to mention the most inventive It might have been even better if it had been less bound by formula; the of roughnecks who would kill her if they knew her true gender. either), but one that ultimately pays off. It could have been A Walk on the Life is Beautiful --the English version. (Okay, I admit it, I didn't actually see the English version. I just think it's cool that I can put this movie on my worst list two years in a row. Maybe I should make it a Moon to a son on the verge of expiring from AIDS. Then, monstrous. many other matters for which I need your advice. But perhaps it is best that I On the subject of W.: One cannot fully appreciate his appeal from television weaknesses, and that may be a fatal flaw. But there's a reason he has raised governor's mansion, I heard a voice scream from the beyond the gates, "Hey finger at me, he joked, "My odor better be off the record." The next thing I me sitting out on the patio. Though I had spent hours concocting a strategy for teasing information out of him, he answered my toughest question nearly at the start. None of his answers struck me as especially stupid or brilliant, but rather they were rather convincingly earnest. This question on Bush's matter that will be hashed over in many a Breakfast Table. Finally, we should update readers on a priceless headline from this leaving her body in their home because he was afraid of being sent to an orphanage, the Post goes with the bad taste headline of the year, wondering, later editions of the Post went with a more tasteful "Mother Last week, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that medical interns and therefore form unions. What other types of employees can unionize? Relations Act, which gives virtually every private sector employee the right to unionize and bargain collectively. (This is why last week's decision of the the same rights through other national or state laws. So, only those workers (However, this does not mean that they are prohibited from Small business employees: The definition of "small business" has not changed since the 1950s. As a result, there are very few companies that still qualify. (For example, a wholesale store would have to have annual sales below Managers and supervisors: This group includes anyone with hiring, firing, disciplinary, or compensatory authority over other workers. They are Independent contractors: These are people who are hired on an Agricultural workers: Because they are seasonal laborers and have a Domestic employees: This group includes maids, butlers, and other when government employees are excluded, the percentages are even lower: While necessarily because the guy appeared to be rude but because he would appear to Republicans, are so cautious about image that whatever "real" characteristics most "authentic," and even he's had a little coaching. Since I know you have a little time to kill before you go to work tonight, Artists' Committee, and I always enjoyed the event. En passant I read (owned by no one I was married to) wondering what our civilization's entertainment." Wouldn't you think for that kind of money they could get so the United Way people won't waylay them on their way to dinner. on the phone deal, but the real question is what was a supermodel doing in a said he was unemployed. Which makes for a nice segue to my thought that you and I should perhaps cool our ethnic references. It is conceivable that we could riot squads there are pooped. Well, maybe just one more latke. And do check reservoirs of strength, and still capable of delivering vicious and unpredictable blows. In his shambling gait and glassy, uncertain stare he reminds me all too closely of another awesome wreck of a man who led another a state of collapse, the government tottering dizzily from crisis to crisis, and the people increasingly gripped by resentment and rage against a West they Of course, historians easily get carried away by historical comparisons. But, if you forgive me for tooting my horn a little, you may remember a little United States do? We can always sit around and flagellate ourselves for letting running up with a selection of nice, dry, leather bullwhips). Personally, I doubt that there was anything we could have done, given the thieves and thugs thrown up into leadership positions by the Soviet collapse, and the disintegration of anything that might have evolved into civil society. Check on this, and on Al Gore's willful blindness to the corruption of his good But regardless of how we interpret our own actions in the 1990s, it seems to me that there is one critical historical lesson we can't afford to forget. In them. Give them a little slack now, and everything will even out and get back to normal. Well, we know how well that policy worked. So by all means, flagellate away. Lay in with a strong will and a strong arm. Howl to the Possibly. You actually need two numbers to understand a poll. One is the margin of error --an estimate of how large a discrepancy might exist between a survey's results and the true value. (It's unlikely, for instance, always cited alongside the results. The other important number is the degree Here's an example of how the two numbers work together. This week, a relates to each candidate's individual score. But the margin of error on incorporates the potential variations in both scores. As a rule of points, it's being called a dead heat. But the small lead is not meaningless; decision to reopen two homicide cases and their pledge to revamp the city's routinely don't investigate the suspicious deaths of retarded people. The Times lead is what the Post went with yesterday: the decision by runs this inside, leading instead with the trend in many states to aggressively enforce truancy laws that threaten parents with fines and jail time. The story Commission will have increasing trouble doing its job of enforcing federal election laws because of the upsurge of work brought about by the most The Post lead points out the limits of good journalism when it it promised in response to a Post series done earlier this year on abuse in those group homes. Obviously, the city needs to bring in people with more investigative talent and a better sense of the bureaucracy than those calling the shots now. How about hiring (in jobs with real power) some of the is this election cycle producing more work for the agency? The story mentions the rise of complaints about "issue ads," but is that the sole cause? And what do independent experts think? The only people quoted by name in the story are FEC personnel, which is less than convincing since it's in the interest of growing concern among project scientists that the craft will not complete its manufacturer of the craft? When an airliner crashes, the papers quickly performance this year is brutally frank, appearing under the headline "HEALTH In its "Heard on the Street" column, the Wall Street Journal makes a great observation about wireless business: underwriters of such deals tend to be firms that have in the past given good ratings to the issuing company. Which of course means those ratings aren't exactly reliable for the rest of us. provision that no member of its parliament can be prosecuted for a crime while in office: One hundred and five of this year's candidates are convicts and four others are wanted by police. It would have been nice if the story had mentioned to solicit sex from a minor has a defense ready to go for his trial this week. He will claim that the Web is a massive masquerade ball and that he never expected that anybody portraying themselves as a minor there would actually be the times. So fascinated that it ran not one, but two stories on the apparently bottomless topic, one in the "Money and Business" section and one in the "Week months. Since everyone's so surprised when the market actually drops, that must mean that they expect it to keep going up. But then you'd think everyone would pile in right now, since it's better to buy stocks when they're cheaper rather than more expensive. Of course, that logic is both impeccable and almost blissfully irrelevant to this market. We have a dream: Buy low, sell high, wait till the stocks tumble, then buy low again, sell high again. And so we creep on down the content and language on one of its most popular shows, office and teaching him a lesson he'd never forget wasn't considered a there were six episodes of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire in the Web page designed by your precocious nephew, sell closeout merchandise from million on 'unauthorized' transactions by a trader for the company. Either the trader bet wrong on oil futures, or he floundered trying to corner the peace talks. Both papers emphasize that prospects for an end to the 51-year surgeon general's report, to be released today, stating that although in any snapshot of how the country has changed during this century. Some examples: In engaged in much secret diplomacy, including a dozen phone calls between disorders don't get help because they don't think effective treatments exist, or they fear being stigmatized, or because they lack applicable insurance. The report endorses, says the paper, equality between mental health insurance coverage and that for physical illnesses and claims that such a coverage most prominent measure is a ban on members' visits to bidding cities. The story is solved, but it also notes that the House of Representatives will be routinely held on to an opposing player's shorts and even garners a quote from Sawyer, seriously enough that she and her parents visited his house over Night Specials." The text says they are a favorite among criminals, but the percent of all guns traced to crimes, and another shows that five of the nine We remember when "Gilded Age" was just an expression: The Among the many things Al Gore has claimed credit for introducing to the world is apparently the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is a refundable credit paid swelled both in size and in the esteem with which it is held by Republicans and Many politicians have wrapped their arms around this sturdy reinforcement author of that proposal. I wrote that, so I say, welcome aboard. That is something for which I have been the principal proponent for a long time." Who then can claim credit for this invention, which this year distributed viewed him as the major roadblock in the way of a more generous welfare state. Assistance Plan, which would have doubled the size of the welfare rolls by Long didn't like the idea adding millions of people to the rolls, but he long as it was done in a way that would encourage rather than discourage work. friend of hers from the Urban Institute to help out. The final plan, which the generous than the welfare reform enacted a few years ago of which both Gore and his boss the president brag. It guaranteed a job to any family head encourage people to abandon their private sector jobs for the perhaps less demanding public sector. But to help out people working in poorly paid jobs, Long came up with the idea of rebating their Social Security taxes as a "work would be computed, he insists the idea really was Sen. Long's. "He liked the idea because it rewarded work," says Stern, who is now with the Investment what the feds were then spending on welfare for families. As former Federal time, when she and Chatterbox were on a panel together, if someone other than quietly passed into law. So quietly that Al Gore apparently didn't notice Times leads with an assessment of the World Trade Organization talks in "open access" policy. The piece says "open access has become a pivotal debate within the telecommunications world." Competitors and consumer advocates feel the company to avoid stricter industry regulation. There's also worry that the telecommunications giant still has the power and potential to "undermine the his second major foreign policy defeat since summer; the first was the Senate environmentalists and human rights activists credited their protests; trade ministers said it was the sheer complexity of issues coupled with delegates' "eliminating its generous subsidies for farmers and their exports" the biggest quote: The talks represented "a stunning breakthrough in the public debate over globalization." It (almost giddily) states "the unruly forces of democracy The LAT lead says Mars Polar Lander mission officials' mantra officials think taxpayers will be comforted by the idea that they thought a more pessimistic tone than the others about the likelihood of establishing and Prevention of Violence found that violent crime in major cities reported to counterpoint to reports of crime decline based on comparisons between contemporary rates and those of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when "unusually using for a variety of reasons. How important are these essays compared to scores as a college determines acceptances, and are the essays fair assessments of a students' abilities? The piece might be weightier if it addressed such intermittently since then by telephone. You have gone far geographically, and, knew she would wince at that "wise" ending. (We used to say that when you were should not begin a sentence with "Hopefully," and more, why one should not do so.) In any event, meander as I am wont to do, you have gone far in your chosen computer; I don't, though I use hers fitfully. This is in spite of the fact have even written books on the new technology. But as you know, I always who, when asked if he knew how to swim, replied: I know the theory of it. My interest is in theory because I am interested in the logic of technology and how that unfolds. And as a sociologist, I have long argued for the priority of theory, since theory allows one to take a finding or a proposition out of one context and apply these to different, and even unfamiliar ones. I stand by the old saw: If something works in practice, does it also work in theory? As you can see, I am seeking to avoid getting started over this unfamiliar route and talking, as we are supposed to do, about the day's events as they unfold in the morning newspaper. But the morning newspaper, for me, is something I read at a distance, so to speak. Though we have now lived in paper. Each morning, before we get up, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are delivered to our door. I have always found the Globe to be somewhat dull and parochial, and I would know what was We get the Times because it is the Times and has all the news appreciate the Times all the more for its detailed news coverage, as presentation of business and political news in two columns, even though the many senses, since they do not show tits and bums or print gossip about the marital adventures of cabinet members), but it is too expensive to get here daily. Besides, we read the Economist regularly, such a prize for its fine and lucid prose and its comprehensive worldwide coverage that fills the can't open a binary attachment. Eventually a small, dim light bulb illuminated talky. I left after an hour, because I had another screening next door I had to attend, and because I thought perhaps on a fresh day, freed from I thought The Best Man was similar to, and inferior to, The having a reunion at a wedding. The Wood had many of the same qualities how to use a camera instead of lining up the characters for prolonged from the decades of films in which black characters have done the same thing whether all but one of its guards would have been so decent and humane. should be subjected to the kind of unspoken test that no white actor or character ever has to face. No one ever asks whether a white actor, as a white play a villain like that." Since Freeman is one of the few actors I can think hotel bar. We imagine that the lubricated and informed nature of your skewering is just better than ours. What political junkie wouldn't give anything to hear someone to ask him what caused World War II, and for him to tell us it was To show solidarity with you, I watched the whole encounter, larded up as it president simply cannot do everything he wants, and can't do anything by himself, so who really cares what gets said there? It's all just blah. The only useful byproduct, perhaps, is that we get to see who's After a while, I couldn't even make myself listen. Do you think I have plan to be good, fair, more, better. The impressions I came away with were that was whisked out onto center stage, no rehearsal necessary. (This is assuming, of course, one imagines it lucky to wind up in the presidential race.) Not to problem is that I haven't read that book, so I don't know if they caught him out or not. And I want to know. Do you know? Maybe they could put a truth Since I was invited into no bar after the "debate," I read the New well and equates with "character." Oh, brother. Anyway, come on out of that old talents, came bursting forth. The year was a slow starter, despite such unveiling of riches that went on week after week after week. inventive and unexpected as the first. Having been pounded through the '90s really have to burn at the stake?"), I was so exhilarated to see films that gave themselves the liberty to surprise and amaze me. was demonstrating in a way both comic and bizarre that all narrative is need feel shackled by audience or studio expectations. I imagine Magnolia will get widely divergent reviews (I know of one the right note to close this season of invention. Yes, some will argue that here that he has the soul of a real filmmaker. Yes, the movie is frustrating and aggressive, but after it is over it has revealed a shape and purpose, one suited to its style (the whole story is seen through the eyes of a video camera, and (if we can judge by the outtakes on the Web site) its style door of digital production; these days anyone can make a movie, and if which more of the movies had been shot on film than video. We shall see. I am as firmly in support of video production as I am opposed to the alarming Most people in the industry believe the hype that digital projection is destined for the near future. The fact is that digital projection is nowhere same thing? Some perceptual scientists believe video creates a hypnotic mind state, and film creates a reverie state. Why is it that we sense, however, vaguely, a different mental state in a movie than while watching television? existing, proven technology, and produces a picture its patent holders claim is As we bow gratefully to this wonderful final year of the first century of film, let us hope it is not one of the final years of celluloid itself. economics, and foreign policy. The more varied format, which also allowed the candidates to question each other, was a marked improvement as well. performance was consistent with his first. He came across as jaunty, likable, also failed to reveal any hidden depths. In the round of questions on foreign Woodruff asked what lessons Bush took from the successes and failures of must not retreat within our borders. That we must promote the peace. In order alliances in the Far East. In order promote the peace, I believe we ought to be nation's greatest export to the world has been, is, and always will be the between his seeming need for a plural verb and his seeming need for a singular one. So he uses both, as in his favored expression "are is." Bush also commonly removes the "to" from infinitives, as with "in order promote the peace." Syntax The way he speaks reminds me of something I once read about the linguist otherwise normally intelligent, members of Family K stumble over basic grammar, coming up with sentences like, "The boys eat four cookie." They have trouble peculiar form of aphasia, but W. and his father both seem to suffer from a version of it. Another possibility: The Bushes actually are "Family The second, and probably more significant criticism of Bush's answer is that trite and banal. They are, in fact, simply Bush's own platitudes about the believe that communism could be contained, or the peace kept, by a policy of displayed this same callowness throughout the evening. In other instances, such as in his closing remarks, he simply recited familiar arias from his stump provokes him to stay and waste more of your time. And with his money, he can substance buried somewhere. Though he sounds even more canned than Bush, many people think of him as intellectually if not morally superior for canning the abandoning his second set. Where Bush has an idea of where he wants to lead the the party is going, he can simply hop aboard and ride it. conservatism. He pandered to what he took to be the ascendant religious right by saying that abortion was the most important issue to him. Amazingly enough, many moral conservatives accepted his conversion. But their support hasn't recent debates, he has left abortion and school prayer to the true believers as a kind of meditational "om." Only this time, his fanaticism doesn't even this year, you didn't know what was going to happen next; you couldn't spot the mythologized so much. Did you feel, at the time, like the movies had more in I wonder if this year's highlights, wildly disparate as they are (from the her leaps and bounds brought back images that match any this year for memorability: the scene where she's alone in the hallway, bouncing higher than know people who have tried to imitate this upon leaving the theater.) Also the that wants to ingratiate but looks like a grimace. It's hard to write about this performance, because it's so natural that it looks tossed off, and pretty great. She's quite real but at the same time abstract, almost cartoony; a packed, whooping theater would have helped. But you know, I reserve my right to find the South Park phenomenon a little toxic; I can't cut it too much slack because I don't sense half as much going on upstairs as you do. I mean, forget about art. Can it really be that difficult to write a song called at every opportunity, as well he should. His major political achievement has but significant way, the answer is yes. The announcement was buried in the culture of welfare from one that fostered dependence to one that honors and money that will be used as a carrot to induce states to do certain things. One problem there.) One will reward states that enroll more poor children in Medicaid. (Good idea!) But a third will reward states that show the biggest "improvement in the percentage of low income families eligible for Food Stamps they will promote the goal of "ending the dependence of needy parents on government benefits." But wait a minute. The proposed bonus tries to get states And food stamps are a peculiar benefit, in that, if you have children, you can get them whether or not you work. Indeed, you can make no attempt to even stamps can be used only to buy food, they work just like cash. You buy food with them as if they were cash; they are traded informally as if they were The word is welfare. Pushing food stamps on poor people is unlikely to move people off of welfare because food stamps are welfare. As a veteran liberal welfare expert told me, upon hearing of the new bonus, it's "perverse eligible to get them. This stigma is the natural flip side of the work ethic: slightly dishonored and ashamed to get a handout that goes to people who don't percent of individuals with earnings who are eligible for food stamps benefits But many are undoubtedly people who are simply proud that they don't depend on a handout. It's hard to deny that this pride is, in some sense, a good welfare programs such as food stamps by repackaging them as "work supports" "hold states accountable and make sure families get the benefits they need." To qualify for a bonus under his new regulations, states would be required not application halts." In effect, states would be saying, "Sign up! It's good to food stamps might help support some welfare mothers during a transitional risks encouraging a far greater number to become dependent in the first place. Suppose you're a single mom working at the Gap. You're proud not to be on welfare. You don't even know where the welfare office is. Then you hear a tells you that food stamps are respectable, that you're a fool not to go down and claim what you're entitled to. So you find out where the welfare office is, and there you also learn that if you quit your job you can qualify for two Gap, you get to keep not only food stamps but a bit of your welfare check too. Or worse, you're a young girl who's just graduated from high school. You've in stamps, live with your mom and worry about going to work later? Food stamps working at all. The sales pitch designed to "support" workers will also protect stamps for the former group but not for the latter group (who are, under law, How did the welfare culture grow in the first place? It happened in the late 1960s, when state and local officials embarked on a campaign to encourage The result? A tripling of the welfare rolls. This "welfare explosion" wasn't reversing, at least partially, the actual, practical process that brought him the caseload declines he's crowing about today. Will he be happy when the rolls The arguments the administration now makes about food stamps, of course, can "critical support" for those who've just gone to work but don't earn enough to make it all the way out of poverty? Shouldn't we encourage those people to stay on welfare, albeit at a lower benefit level, rather than make a harsh, clean they are "nutritional"? Don't babies need clothes as well as food? In fact, these arguments are already being made by Money Liberals around the respectable "work supports," will be to make those benefits more generous. But alike. If benefits are raised, it will be increasingly possible for at least some part of the population to piece together enough "work supports" to live on the supports without the work. Not to live well, of course, but the problem of dependency has never been about people living well. collapse, which is that programs to help poor workers should actually be politically unassailable, while welfare programs are either unpopular or actively despised. And when a benefit is restricted to workers, Congress can make it more generous without the risk of creating a culture of dependency. handout, that judgment, too, deserves respect. The government shouldn't make it a goal to push benefits onto people who think food stamps are welfare by is to go to the states that show the greatest "improvement" in the percent of restriction doesn't save the plan, however. The working poor are the group of eligible recipients who are most likely to stigmatize the receipt of welfare. They are a key group we don't want to slip into dependence. And removing the Many questions. Many "methodological difficulties." How can I sort these story. (In my old age, I regress to the methods of my youth.) to trace out the possible impact of airplanes for the remainder of the century. such as population, family, cities, religion, health, environment, recreation, crime, education, marketing, agriculture, public administration, international the effect of reducing the number of births slightly." One rubs one's eyes in smaller than would otherwise be because of the expense of owning and operating would have private airplanes, the reason being that these were the ones with hologram. Many people thought that this would "transform" our lives. Fifteen houses. What? What? What? I do not mean to jeer, but the point is that, You use the phrase "the rate of technological change." The only trouble is that we do not know how to measure it. Technology is a large globule of many diverse components. Rate is a metric, but what is it? Economists measure technology as part of total factor productivity, but usually as a residual after all the other factors (capital, labor) have been measured. Not very glamorous. And of limited use, since it does not deal with institutional and speeds and size, or more broadly, the change from a propeller drive plane to a escape velocity and you are then not in cyberspace but real outer space. The beginning of wisdom, I suppose, is disaggregation and particularity, and once these have been carefully defined, to begin to generalize through theory (which brings me back to where I began yesterday). On primordial identities: I don't believe in single identities, but against a larger, sometimes more smothering polity or culture. But let me but they're solid, serious wonks. They have a history of putting important the environment, technology, etc. Both have bucked the party line on big interesting fashion. They have little patience for libertarians, and they have a relatively expansive role for the federal government in their policies. To listen to Bush talk about compassionate conservatism is to realize that party leader. Look at the way that Republicans are talking about education this year. During the Newt era, Republicans objected to all forms of national education testing and standards. They would spout ridiculous hyperbole about scream, will turn to liberal shit. It hurt your ears to hear their screeds. Now Bush has a plan that includes national standards and tests. You can dispute his nifty little innovation that could cure blindness. Somehow, it involves a camera mounted on a pair of glasses that transmits signals to the brain. Pretty damn cool. That means it's not a far stretch to imagine that someday soon Speaking of vision, I am giving some thought to laser eye surgery. The question "Round Mound of Rebound" used to obnoxiously proclaim, "I am not a role model." But he was. All of us short cagers with potbellies placed him on a pedestal. and poor manners. He would routinely flick the bird to fans and brawl. Just play. In other words, he was a jerk with a big heart and an awesome game. finally entered the fray tonight in a Republican Presidential Forum sponsored Bush's effectiveness didn't have much to do with the quality of his answers. derived from his demeanor. He seemed not only at ease in the confrontational missed. Bush wore a jaunty grin through most of the debate, grasping the podium as if it were the steering wheel of a sports car. When one of the Republican pygmies attacked him, his grin would turn into a smirk. The smirk turned into a the Social Security retirement age. Bush was armed with the perfect comeback: a mate, Bush felt no compulsion to respond to him at all. Nor was Bush set off balance by questions designed to expose him as a Bush answered, "I read the newspaper." He subsequently mentioned "a book about contents of this work, but the format didn't permit it. wanting to privatize Social Security and for proposing tax cuts that would reappointed as chairman of the Fed if he persists in raising interest rates, prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him." If you were watching at home, you saw Bush laughing hysterically at this, perhaps recalling his the Senate, Hatch responded: "He does have a temper and sometimes it's terrible his allegation that the media treat him in a racist fashion, he stuck to his attacked Bush's proposed tax cuts as insufficient by saying that we shouldn't again came into the media filing center and repeated his nutty "You ignore my successes, just as you ignored my ancestors' successes," he exploded at a harmless question. "And then you want to tell me you're not a racist! You better think about it, my friend! You better think about what week since its addition to the index was announced its share price has risen The situation, at least today, boiled down to too much demand chasing too weighted. And since there are plenty of mutual fund managers out there who try company's shares became more expensive, funds had to buy more of them (because Still, the picture seems a bit more complicated than this, because the institutions are not buying stock in 500-share lots, so that means that a great deal of the action today was driven by individual investors and, most likely, day traders hoping to ride the stock's momentum and to get out before the eventual fall. Today was, in that sense, a moment when this decade's crucial It's almost certain that the stock will fall in days to come, but its ride up has been so furious, and the company is such a good one, that it would be surprising if the tumble were too precipitous. In any case, the most important This point was first made, as far as I can tell, by Bill Miller, the earlier this year. Index funds, Miller pointed out, are passively managed, to and subtracted from in an attempt to make the index look as much like the stock market, and the economy as a whole, as possible. If this is the case, why is it so difficult for fund managers to beat index obvious, is that index funds have minuscule fees and very low transaction and more expensive, they take up a larger percentage of the index, and as they grow less successful, and cheaper, they take up a smaller percentage. In other words, the index effectively allows its winners to run and its losers to You'll often hear fund managers say it's unfair to benchmark them against company that will be booted tomorrow). Assuming that Yahoo, even with its better, in fact, given the size of Yahoo's market capitalization.) But the addicted to trading fund managers have become that instead of replicating that I was happy to see you refer to a restaurant where "people smoke freely at their tables" as "unsullied," just as I was discouraged but not surprised to night's debate. Bush did a decent job, I thought, but he just didn't come across the way he did six months ago. He seemed far stiffer and more programmed than I remember. His physical restlessness, which always stuck me as appealingly energetic and vital, all of a sudden seemed twitchy and nervous. Part of it is context. Bush is so much better in person than he is behind a microphone that people who've experienced him only through television must be This spring, for instance, I asked Bush about his reading habits. He was himself the greatest damage when he agreed to appear with the other five candidates in the first place. Yes, I know he had no choice, that the political costs of ditching another debate were too high. Still, it's hard to maintain a And I agree with him on more things than you probably care to know about. In the Despot Test. It's simple: If a candidate had absolute power, how many unblinking stare, I suddenly had the feeling he was going to steal my soul. I choked back panic and turned away, probably just in time. Spooky. I think Bush has had the same experience, which may explain why he was of politics is personal. Doesn't bother me. At least he knows an alien when he critics. So why talk about it now? Because while its detractors have rightly banal, they have not responded to an implicit and probably unintended message the unknown women on her own. (There are no notes to tell us where the photographs were originally published, so it's hard to say which pictures were one hand and testifies, seemingly lost inside one of her many magnificent each sexy in their own glamorous ways. The athletes are each tough in their own heroic ways. As the image of one famous woman follows another, we seem to understand why they've made such names for themselves: They are so singular, so attractive, so powerful, the world just had to take notice of them. less well to personal characterization. Unlike the celebrity portraits, these were mostly taken without benefit of makeup, props, and lighting design; as a result, faces tend to disappear into contexts. The miners are grimy. The sewing victim of domestic abuse looks battered. They are icons, in short, either of their pioneering professions or else of their stereotypically feminine phylacteries and holding a Torah, that she can't serve God! The women trapped blank or frankly hostile. You can't look for long at the picture of Maria distrust in her eyes. We still feel a certain warmth toward these abstract emotion. We feel proud of, or sad for, women in general, not for any In short, individuality here becomes a function of fame. The better known commercial photographer. When she's told to shoot a celebrity, she shows up with a crew, an expansive amount of time, and the driving idea that this person inspiring professionals that she can't seem to extend to the abjectly formal: It's hard to communicate roundness of character in a single photograph, which is perforce a limited slice of space and time. How much easier it must be to photograph women whose identities are already publicly disseminated! All you have to do is gather up the strands of commonly told tales and give them visual for editors at glossy magazines who spend their days wrangling celebrities onto their pages. Celebrities demand flattering representation as the price of their cooperation, and no one is better at flattering in a sophisticated yet intimate Nonetheless, this troubling collusion of photography and social hierarchy (for fame is well on its way to replacing class as the determining factor of hold forth about with brilliance and insight. And she does, too, just not in her introduction, a disconnected series of meditations on what a collection of photographs of women might tell us in this day and age. (Very little, she is essays published during the 1970s. The subject was August Sander, a 1920s photographer who also set out to catalogue a large category of people, in his Sander's social sample is unusually, conscientiously broad. He includes bureaucrats and peasants, servants and society ladies, factory workers and industrialists, soldiers and gypsies, actors and clerks. But such variety does not rule out class condescension. Sander's eclectic style gives him away. Some he was photographing. Professionals and the rich tend to be photographed indoors, without props. They speak for themselves. Laborers and derelicts are usually photographed in a setting (often outdoors) which locates them, which complicity with everybody also means a distance from everybody. His complicity disagreement as your crackly tone would imply. The level of invention this year has been amazingly high, but few movies have maintained it consistently. My and The Limey are full of qualifications, but many of the most exciting films in a given year are messed up in one way or another. (The last film for perfectly with his moral outrage, he deserves our awe for having pulled off the on how a film is masked, you can see microphones in movies by the greatest directors and cinematographers), but there are flatfooted patches and a distinct falling off in the last half hour (despite some marvelous puppet notwithstanding, there are an infinite number of possibilities for framing our to cheat by pointing out that I know you didn't see the movie in a packed, of glee that attended each fabulous number. The second half boring? The whole chip, the blaspheming French resistance fighter, and the staggeringly brilliant it in because I wouldn't know wit if it bit me on the ass. tomorrow.) In fact, as I write this I am turning toward 43rd Street and has ever fronted. Daily film critics are generally a sorry lot. They have to overwrought literary pyrotechnics and banal humor. (There are exceptions, such Times crew will be the bright shining lights in their dim profession. profusion of disaster movies and romantic comedies. He's a hipster with a canny understanding of the popular culture. It's hard to imagine him praising every dismissing them outright either. Plus, he can write wonderfully scathing pans. done much in the way of film reviewing. But this is a plus. It will be fun to There are other reasons for a rosy cultural outlook Recently, record sales have been disappointing. It's a deserved fate. This is (If Notorious had lived, perhaps their partnership would have flourished into well, puffy. His music does dwell on his friend's death in a way that feels disgustingly hollow. And the rest of oeuvre consists of forgettable, not very catchy ditties. In other words, he's commercial without being listenable. And that makes him merely crass. Finally, I think that the existence of the Boring expertise in etiquette, I propose that we put out a special millennial edition nominees. (I have begun creating a set of criteria and my own list of choices, Your plane ride sounds amazing. Were I you, I would've looked at it this way: Nothing will happen to this plane, because the news value of a crash would be too astounding. Are you old enough to remember Bishop Sheen? We were once on know, but that's the way my mind works. Or doesn't. loser by a former sycophant weren't bad enough, the first lady was just any woman would have about moving into a new home. Will she be able to find her underwear with all those boxes piled up? I know she intends to find it, phone even work on the first day? I hate to say this, because it's politically other reporters) implied that the White House equivalent of the store dick ought to keep an eye on Hill so she doesn't try to furnish her house with But just to show that I am not totally down on Hill, I hope that, like some the girl could use some, uh, well, whatever. What I really want is for the Post quotes his reference to the "colonialism" and "state socialism" of the original arrangement. The New York Times fronts the canal, but more inmates will be released as a result, that criminal charges will be filed against some cops, and that the whole thing will take years to resolve. explains that the warning about him comes after the State Department just barely announced arrests yesterday of Bin Laden operatives somewhere about to with German subsidiaries. Previously these firms had protested that they had no approved by a judge, five weeks after it was first promised to her by Ken defense in her wiretapping trial scheduled for next month. largely discredited portrayal, the paper reminds) the agency's hounding of auditing the complex returns of the better off, while putting more effort into looking for abuse of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a credit available only to the working poor, and into catching people who file no returns at all, traditionally a practice inordinately associated with modest earners. antitrust violations in its dealings with major music companies. The core issue making it nearly impossible for rival music networks to enter the market. The issue will take on even more importance, because the resulting new company Everybody fronts an illustration of Charlie Brown, in honor of yesterday's looks at his schoolboy days in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. The story late in bed with them, breathless and excited, but when you wake up in the morning next to them you feel ashamed and disgusted with yourself. them. The thing about growing up the son of two New York intellectuals is that misdemeanors (even more than using the word "hopefully" incorrectly). The tremble so hard the book falls out of my hands, and she sees the cover. The tries to slip a copy of a pornographic magazine in with them, only to have the merged to form a new magazine called Dysentery-- I was probably one of don't know much about him, and in any case, the current scandal is much too top of the White House into low earth orbit. The president is revealed to have, not just a mistress, but an entire second family, whom he has been housing, for collaborators from the law. And just to make things really juicy, he covered up the fact that he suffered from cancer throughout much of his presidency. That minister??!!), he could set off a small nuclear device while simultaneously engaged in an unnatural act with a hippopotamus in the middle of the But enough about this. We're just two and a half weeks away from the year going to crash and burn.) That's not so much because of the company itself, like General Motors. Rather, it's because investor appetite for Internet being told, the true wave of the future on the Web, and so companies ranging from professional services firms to infrastructure providers to database past few months you could have made a huge amount of money in stocks like There are, as usual, a host of studies by various research groups to justify these companies are currently so tiny that estimating their present value on are doomed (as stocks, that is). But it does suggest that you'd be better off But there is one problem with this whole theory, which is that the companies money with which they pay for all their purchases somewhere. And it can't just day just to keep its business going, and multiply that by all the giant companies out there that have to buy parts." But let's remember this: GM spends less on parts in a year than consumers spend on GM cars. That's by definition. Otherwise, GM would go out of business. In fact, if you add up all the money GM and its suppliers spend on parts and databases and infrastructure, it's less than consumers spend on GM cars, again by definition. businesses that sell to other businesses are going to migrate to the Web while businesses will probably migrate more quickly, and while obviously there's a lot of business that will always be offline (unless we figure out a way to get will remain stagnant. Especially when the former ultimately depends on the take another look at companies like General Motors. How much longer can it be before cars are actually being sold online (instead of through the archaic help having a creative laugh: unfeigned, joyous, it made you feel much funnier than you thought you were, which is among the kindest of social gifts." I can't which might certainly help get readers through a cold day. There's a certain delight in the inessential things in life which is one of the most pleasant Guards and public schools and the royal family! But as a historian, I can't resist remarking that the cultivation of the inessential is a trademark of aristocratic societies (aristocrats deliberately spend their time on trifles to appears to outsiders, most native members of the society are unlikely to be so well disposed, since the burden of the aristocracy falls on their shoulders. And having seen one of the famous public schools at rather too close quarters But back to the news. The most amusing thing I saw in the paper yesterday again for the entire year, relying exclusively on the Internet for furniture, food, services and entertainment. His Web site claims that he will spend the year "living inside the Internet," as if this were some great foray into new and unexplored regions of cyberspace. Talk about being behind the curve! I today would be to spend a year living entirely outside the Internet: no or selection of benefits through the company intranet, not to mention, of being anywhere near as much a regular user of the Web as I am. But then again, wondered why you didn't dwell in that piece on what, for me, is the most means of production. As you've pointed out in your entry above, what thrills filmmakers is that shooting on digital video is, like, a thousand times cheaper great equalizer. You shoot as much footage as you like and you don't have to thing of the past. Most filmmakers don't care if digital projection looks better than celluloid; they'd be thrilled if it looked as good. frames a second and that a lot of what you're looking at is blank space and flicker. There's a distinct difference in his films between the video state and One more question: What is the distinction is between "hypnosis" and "reverie"? idea over and over. He isn't trying to capture reality, he's trying to rub your nose in it. And underneath, he has the same huckster's mentality as Roger attention. As for the idea that the movie mimics the perceptions of a delusional schizophrenic, it's hardly in the other the other the other shut up Actors. Any bit could be taken out of context and shown at the Academy Awards. strange thing isn't thematically unpredictable. It has the same logic as Which might be a good segue for talking about the year's great performances, with the filmmakers, daring to leave dreary realism (and other misapplications Election isn't realistic; it only seems that way, because she's making drag probably doesn't look much different today than it did then. We were in a smoke freely at their tables and vegetarians like me are out of luck. I thought to myself: So this is the last unsullied place on earth; these are the last we heard a dusty coot in a cowboy hat in the booth behind us talking about his It is definitely true, as you say, that politicians turn the folks they of a rope line to play a round of Who Wants to Be a Campaign Accessory; he was a committed partisan duped into portraying no one in particular. When Vetted for Anything Embarrassing and Untoward, and Whose Personal Misfortune presidential ticket referred to themselves so frequently in the third I couldn't help but work in a sports metaphor, which was the other maddening incessant use of basketball terminology by political reporters. I think it's Many thanks for the thoughts on technological change. As for identities, I suppose I could continue on the subject with a lengthy disquisition on the book. But somehow, I think this would be getting a little too specialized for the Breakfast Table. So I hope you don't mind if I change the subject and I must say, though, that since I spend much of my time immersed in the me very forcefully. The weirdest thing, to my mind, is the way the candidates and the media all seem to pretend that we are electing a benevolent dictator who, once elected, will snap his fingers, and the thousands of pages of position papers drawn up by his campaign staff will automatically become the W. and we will get a tax cut. Elect Al Gore and gays will be welcomed into the At the very least, it seems to me that reporters could make more of a distinction between three very different types of campaign promises: those it finance reform, because of first amendment concerns); those that would require congressional action (health care, tax cuts, etc.); and those that could be done with a presidential order. Why even waste much time on the first category? Let's pretend, as a thought experiment, that a conspiracy of vintners contaminates the champagne supply with powerful psychedelic mushrooms just about the second category as well, especially when it comes to the details of (possible) passage. In fact, one of the few big issues where the candidates' specific promises really matter is gays in the military, since that can be done the gays in is probably the most important campaign news today. This general problem is why I get steamed when pundits moan about how candidates are ignoring "the issues." Get real. What matters is not the candidate's position papers, but their basic principles, the three or four things they care most about; their experience; their advisors; their political Times yesterday), and yes, their character. And this is all the more the case during a time when there are no big national disasters to be faced, at least not the sort that require urgent responses. If peace and prosperity continue, and there are no major wars, pretty much any of the serious candidates now running could probably muddle through all right (not counting those things that the candidates don't have position papers on? What really matters is to choose a president who can deal best with a real crisis, rather than worry about what's going to happen to ethanol subsidies (anyone care to Box," the issue itself is still a good test of character). Thinking in will have been released, and if this month's other economic statistics are any producer pipeline. With the exception of energy prices, in fact, inflation remains about as quiescent as it can be, despite the fact that the economy rate has reached levels no one thought were possible anymore. If you take is the lowest annual inflation rate we've had during this entire business No one, of course, really knows why this is happening. But there is one remarkable statistic (which itself is difficult to explain): Since the middle of last year, the falling unemployment rate has become decoupled from wage increases. In other words, even though it's getting harder and harder to find workers, the tight labor markets are not yet translating into wage increases in society, or of continued anxiety among workers, or it may be that the wage gains due to productivity are enough to keep workers happy. Or perhaps it's action figures have ever been bought in the United States" buying wood until the new year. Apparently there wasn't enough room in the increases if he's elected president, but did allow that if the economy went even weaker. Economy booming, people spending freely, keep taxes same so demand who bought that first block of stock was doing it just so he could say, 'Yes, I else pledged to uphold gastronomical values. On the other hand, it's not for "dummies" either, as the other leading introductory series likes to put it. the kinds of sample recipes you find inside the box when you open your new Kitchen Aid. The introduction lists emerging food trends of the year, albeit a bit cursorily, and without really specifying how the trends are certified as such. There are marginal notes explaining how to secure obscure ingredients or perform difficult procedures, and menu recommendations that allow you to the perfect purchase or gift for those among us with bare kitchen bookshelves conceit, did it take so long to come up with this one? The answer surely has dishes must be presented with the requisite ironic appurtenances, such as trays editor who asked food experts and celebrity chefs of all stripes and But cooking is one of the few areas in which anthologizing actually makes compilations always lack context: Who can grasp the greatness of a poet on the basis of a single poem? Anthologies of essays, on the other hand, just make you dishes, such as the cloyingly sweet lamb with olives and oranges from celebrity once, then store in your liquor cabinet? Or should you make your own, which people whose love for garlic is as intense as it is for each other." The happen to be fashionable right now, such as cumin and coconut milk. But these are quibbles, which could well be obviated by next year's anthology. And besides, they're in keeping with the basic idea. This is a cookbook that's pleasingly shallow and imperfect, just like those of us who are drawn to (until recently) we have spent considerable portions of every other year or so flat on Regent's Park Road, facing Primrose Hill, and down the street was one working class. Or enemy of the capitalist class. Just political (Aristocrats have land, even penniless, not money.) It is there in Graham in which he remarked: "We are all familiar with being in strange places and not knowing exactly where we are. I woke up one morning and was served a filthy it was a "filthy kosher breakfast," unless it was filth recognizing filth. Not authoritarian streak) but vacuous in his rhetoric and ideas. His house ideological spectrum. So, they have formulated the Third Way. What is it? No sociologist at Trinity (quite a combination), calls it "recycled platitudes." debate appearances has made him vulnerable, but pundits disagree over just how Bush's debate performances will start a popularity slide in the early primary involvement because the dismissal was necessary to assure civilian control of the Fox producers flash a message on the screen asserting that, with handsome guy, but that's not the one I want her to marry. influence over the presidential campaign from about March [until the Gore and Bush, I hear, are going to have a joint event funded by soft money function is essentially to absorb and process white pain, suffering, disease films in which black characters have done the same thing invisibly." That's autonomous existence, that he's there solely to help "process" white pain. that's meant to summon up rape fantasies of fragile white Southern flowers inversion of a rape fantasy is almost as cheap and false as the thing anecdotal evidence. Your fears about the medium might be warranted (and let's find out before all those theaters get converted!), but the tendency to trance the setting and the quality of your attention. You can stretch out, glance ashamed to have his opinions widely broadcast.) I suppose I invoked them list, because it needs champions; it seems to me so poignantly vulnerable to people reading this exchange could do as well or better." Mom Is a Bitch" is an infantile playground chant raised to the level of comic words barely intelligible) and the steady repetition of "bitch" on the downbeat, it has the primal force of an incantation: missed it? As for Puff Daddy, isn't he the one who dates the girl with the much making him, I guess, not my kinda' guy. And whatever happened, anyway, to names fave: "He blabs and banters and jokingly called an Associated Press reporter a some of the rest of us. Any candidate who says, "I hate the French" and calls Speaking of things genuine, it seems the handlers of in the debates and just "be himself." Himself is looking dumb and programmed, or is it stiff and smug? Some former supporters, according to the er, "unqualified" to be president. And while they're considering a makeover, is a little like a pregnant virgin. And of course this is the wrong season to I had an interesting focus group moment before and during the debate that told me all I needed to know about it (or so I thought). I couldn't watch it in care that he and the five other Republicans were having at it while we made reporter. Not a single highly paid political spinner or slick lobster (as we privately refer to lobbyists) seemed even a little bit curious to learn about reason is that the damn thing didn't matter and wouldn't unless Bush or maybe no matter how many times the candidates stiffly turn to address each other. There's nothing being debated here. They don't really answer the questioner's political discourse; add water and serve), stand up straight, smile wide, and I thought I saw him rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. I couldn't tell if he was nervous or excited, but he wasn't comfortable; he wasn't in his politician. Put him in a social setting, where he gets to grab shoulders and kiss cheeks and twinkle, and he could be the next pope. But in front of a big audience he's off his game. I haven't seen every one of his speeches this and say "God bless" in one fluid motion (in Bush the elder's case, too fluid). put the right emphasis on the wrong words, and twists his face up into a rather be anywhere else. There was a lot of this in Bush's performance last night. Did you notice him weirdly laughing when other candidates, particularly didn't look right. I keep having to remind myself that Bush has a mixed history group last night, it's possible that not many folks saw this one either. But Bush shouldn't worry. Stylistic quibbles aside, he was the night's big winner. How could he not be, given who he's running against? lost any shred of a chance he had when he refused to allow Bush to consider a change in the Social Security age. By doing so, he gave Bush his best shot of assistant is getting his hand wickedly slapped in retrospect.) of his answers went in one of my ears and out the other because they were delivered from behind an enormous, unnatural smile. John, lose the happy Do I really want to waste my breath? No. But let me say just one thing: It ain't racism that's causing the media to ignore his positions on the sanctity of life on down are simply too extreme for the momentarily moderate. Otherwise, Tom DeLay would be running. it has taken only four days to convince you. Perhaps I should run for Couldn't agree more that the four guys looking the strongest wouldn't be you think that's a good idea, then you need reeducating. As for the way glasses look. If glasses are your trademark, you may want to think twice before ditching them. I mean, without them, you might be just one more Just before I push away from the Breakfast Table, you should know that the playroom. The way I washed that taste out of my mouth was to follow some makes the world seem a more admirable place when you consider that there are good and selfless people with values and heart. And I found it enormously touching that firefighters came from all over the country. It is, indeed, a comes to sports, I am, shall we say, not present. Some might say non compos. I And it is to my more serious Dear Prudence persona that I now return. I shall miss the opportunity to be flip about the day's happenings, and I shall rooting for you in your yearlong quest for the perfect political story. don't tell" policy regarding homosexuals in the military isn't working. Rather better enforce the current one. The statement was prompted by his wife's remarks earlier this week that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve special education programs simply because they were not taught to read. The next month; the department has "credible information" that terrorist groups are just yet. Such announcements are relatively common, although they usually accompany military actions, economic sanctions, or other foreign policy terrorist organization, but the link is dubious: Officials wouldn't name a points out that attacks could occur any time from now through New Year, likely, not more likely, to take terrorist action during a holy month? than it would have been without the disease's effect on young workers. The closing because their patients are getting better and leaving, a phenomenon their services not to obtain cushy ambassadorial posts or lobbyist clout but to millions of dollars to generate magazines similar in look and feel to popular magazines, packed with tobacco ads, are an attempt to plug the "communication has the compelling obviousness of good local gossip, though with the upbeat ending you'd expect from an author whose message has consistently been, The today out of a desire to avoid becoming her mother, a withdrawn and frustrated father who didn't even attend his own daughter's college graduation. His lack which led her to abandon her political dreams and take up his, which made her resentful, which caused her to push him even harder than his own considerable both in a horrible mess, from which she has emerged in her early 50s a new woman, ready to break out of her chrysalis and fly. lives of everyone around her reeks of dourness. That the newly hatched what might become of them or even what we should think about the things they the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements that influence the masses." Since then, history has been through a host of stage exists as nothing more nor less than a setting for grand is personality; she doesn't give a damn about the national stage. Reading plants. What she extracts from the public figures in whose private selves she children of alcoholics, and that, she pronounces, is bad. Never mind how order to find himself, and soon. Each story she tells is a cautionary tale with the exact same moral: You have to pass through the stages of adult development Transient, the Wunderkind, the Caregiver, the Nurturer Who Defers Caregiving, skip a step: "One cannot jump from A to C, and the only path to D is through engaging the tasks of C; there are no alternative routes." It's not as if these steps are unusual or bizarre; on the contrary, they're soothingly familiar. At one point, you're supposed to break away from your parents and find your own way. At another, you have to commit to a "lifework" or risk drifting into All this is so anodyne as to be completely unobjectionable. If you believe that personality trumps everything else, you might as well have an idea about theories not just to explain decisions that have proved historically momentous, perceived as nothing more than an example of one man's difficulty making a necessary passage: "Taken to the extreme," she writes, "the unwillingness to commit leaves no quarter for expression of the merger self. If no school, Cleaver, the only way the individual sees fit to redress the wrongs of society is to smash it or choose exile from it), the path leads to isolation." Banished in those two sentences is the entire world outside Cleaver's he became a revolutionary because he failed to grow properly, like a vine that run for the Senate while still first lady good for anyone but her? Is it an abuse of her power? Should New York be glad or sad that she might become its It's tempting to get up on one's high horse and declare this a wrongheaded way to approach politicians, whose actions have an impact on the rest of us now the journalistic norm. (These days, any effort to arrive at a deeper question of whether and how a politician has grown in his or her adult years is more or less running on a record of turning his life around after having another inner child. Has Bush changed in a way that makes him better suited to govern? Do we really like Al Gore's latest reincarnation? Who knows? Who yet another uplifting tale of growth in the face of personal suffering. Will It isn't often that you actually get a look at corporate life as it's actually lived from the inside. That's part of what makes The Target Shoots assistant, mostly so he could buy time until he figured out what he was really going to do with his life. He brought with him a devotion to punk and indie rock and a video camera that, somewhat improbably, he used to tape marketing meetings, design discussions, conversations with his fellow employees, and a The result is a movie that's a remarkable document of the time when it was explosion, which at the time looked like it was going to reshape the music industry but would instead quickly fade away. In the wake of the huge success stayed on the charts for more than a year, major record labels went on a the faintest possibility of being the next Nirvana. Of course, since this was a that something important was happening and that they had no clue either what it really was or, more important, how to make money off it. In some sense, alternative rock really did shake the industry, because it came, if not from nowhere, then nowhere that the major labels had previously cared about. The (Parallels could be drawn between the record industry's reaction to a smaller scale, what happened to them was like what happened to people with shut were opened, and they were given far more freedom in the workplace than And it was a huge hit. Except, of course, that no matter how clever it was, it and the movie as a whole is embedded in a critique of consumerism that seems ultimately naive. But naive or not, that dismay certainly feels true to its one of the things that was most different was the feeling that music really the culture as a whole. The Target Shoots First is amazingly moving, at least for me, precisely because it reminds me of what it was like to feel that way, and so of what it is like not to feel that way now. Having said all that, the most interesting thing about the film is the way it shows how changing the way people work actually makes a material difference result, perhaps predictably, was a working environment that was both more enjoyable and, by all accounts, more productive. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of experience that Fast Company loves to write This matters because the critique of consumerism that animates The Target House, people really can be happier and more engaged if they're allowed to work differently. This doesn't mean, of course, that team structures are the route does serve as a nice reminder that not all fads are frauds. At the Breakfast Table these days, quite literally, the first thing I turn ago, some people had a prurient interest in these, such as those who went to was dead. But nowadays, so many of my contemporaries and colleagues are fascist? Yes. People forget, or most never knew, that in its early years, write a monthly column. On what? He asked. Oh, I replied, on, say, "Travels to There are, or have been, strong differences between obituaries in the and thin and fail to catch the personality of a man or woman. Those in the English press are often quite personal and written at times by a friend of the Times yesterday, beginning with two columns on the front page and continuing, after the jump, to almost a full page inside. year to the cemetery, we place a stone on the monument, in commemoration of the death of his father. It is haunting its recurring refrain, and keeps pulsing But the breakfast is finished, and here is the rest of the cold day ahead frothiest of markets. But in fact there was nothing typical about the success by replacing the traditional method of allocating shares and setting opening initial filing price, then takes provisional orders from institutional investors that it uses to gauge demand. The filing price can be adjusted upward if demand is strong enough, but in general the offering price for a company In a Dutch auction, by contrast, the price is essentially determined by the investors, who submit the highest price they're willing to pay and the number of shares they want at that price. The people who bid the highest (and, if they bid the same price, the earliest) get first dibs on the shares, which are then allocated in order from highest to lowest bid, until they're all gone. No matter what you bid, though, the price you pay is the lowest price that any basis of who they know, and because it ensures that the company going public isn't going to leave too much money on the table by going public at a lower price than the one the market was willing to pay. It's also superior because it eliminates the middleman (the investment bank) and lets the market set the Given the more general move in business toward disintermediation, it seems inevitable that eventually this will be the way most companies go public. But least in the sense that neither company has seen a significant gain over its same companies were being underwritten by more established investment banks, on the opening day, is so important. It suggests, as I argued at companies that were going public. Take a real company in a hot sector, like There is, to be sure, something of a paradox here, since if the point of having a Dutch auction is for the company not to leave any money on the table, the auction didn't work all that well. But there are two things to keep in mind here. The first, and more mundane, point is that you have to have a brokerage more comfortable with Dutch auctions, and as more investors take part in these confident a good plastic surgeon could help now. (Insert jokes about candidates has the best manners? And does it matter? We are, after all, me more, and here I am talking about such things as etiquette and decency. I want a president who is true to other people more than he is true to himself. of the second largest state (which if it were a nation, would be the Southern Baptists. But I don't think that this is a government function." And victim of unfair innuendo and as a passionate war hero with fervently held thinks the evangelical is a serious threat. Morris says that, according to methods may be open to question; for more on his Web site, click here.) that if they are the nominees they will devote themselves to campaign finance policy, Shields says, but his knowledge of domestic issues was weak and he emphasis? Pundit Central suspects that the forum holds a clue: The Capital Gang Shields has to moderate four other guests and probably The Right Honorable Gentleman From the FT seems astonished by the whole, well, vulgarity of the debate. Every time the camera lands on across his face occasionally at inappropriate times" had occasioned perplexed there, he continuously wore a sort of smile as he listened to each woman. One after the Governor has delivered a line particularly well, or thinks he The smirk is causing much justifiable worry in Republican circles. "I hear smirk and smugness," a "senior Republican official" was quoted as saying in the make sure that charm is not mistaken for arrogance.'" Presumably Bush himself Clearly, though, the smirk will return, and when it does, political faulty subjective analysis by pundits and voters. A far more interesting just a cruel trick of genetic physiognomy: "His father has the same thing; it's just not as pronounced as it is with 'W.'" But since personality is also to some extent genetically based and, moreover, can be passed environmentally It would be easy to mistake such elaborate body language for arrogance, as more than a few observers have, whereas the true meaning of the tic may be managed to jump another public hurdle without embarrassing himself. Or it may Concluding that the matter of Bush's smirk was too weighty to be left in the "leading smile researcher." His academic writings on how to interpret facial expressions have been used by lawyers to figure out which potential jurors to about never talking about anyone who is in office or running for office, or is in litigation. So I can't help you. I don't know anyone responsible and Undaunted, Chatterbox marched off to a nearby bookstore and purchased What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Chatterbox learned that the science of studying facial expressions is relatively new: Before the 1960s, apparently, "it was deemed a useless facial expressions were essentially the same as when they watched the films sometimes, and actually masked negative emotion with smiling behavior." they're feeling. A reassuring finding in light of the question before us. wrinkling of the nose, a puffing of the cheeks, dilation of the nostrils, perform these various tasks, are the tools used in What the Face imprecise, "ignoring differences between a variety of different muscular actions to which [it] may refer, and mixing description with inferences about meaning or the message which [it] may convey.") But there are three chapters in the book that may nonetheless be relevant to the smirking smile. Then they were asked, "Now that this is done, aren't you glad it's others) titled "Type A Behavior Pattern." Here, the authors argue that the group of people most likely to suffer heart attacks are more apt than others to Chatterbox can tell, but his smirk may be an expression of disgust. If that's true, he would seem to face a heightened risk of heart disease. "masking" smiles intended to hide some other emotion. (The subject doesn't actually have to be telling a lie; rather, the facial expression itself is the lie.) Felt happy smiles "are defined as the action facial muscles associated with fear, disgust, contempt, sadness, and anger. One Chatterbox will refrain from endorsing any of these three announcement that it plans to play a role in the numerous city lawsuits against gun makers to make concessions to settle the various city lawsuits and if the behalf of the nation's public housing authorities. The story is fronted at the completely reassess its interplanetary exploration program, a story everybody the decision by a federal judge to block a web news service's attempt to post the annual financial disclosure forms submitted by all federal judges. Paper versions of the forms are already available to the general public. The that dozens of New York City teachers and two principals supplied answers to students for the standardized tests that determine how city schools are ranked courts gun control measures that have failed in Congress. Measures like controlling sales at gun shows, limiting the volume of gun purchases at any one time, and cutting off dealers whose sold guns are disproportionately involved committed with a handgun. The papers point out that the federal government's move is patterned after its lawsuit against the cigarette manufacturers. But the LAT notes an important difference: the tobacco companies have many times the size and staying power of the gun companies. "Clearly something is wrong, and we have to understand it." The coverage makes it clear that understanding might require postponement or even scrapping of forced, since it's now apparent that the company's performance will be a focus dissemination via the Web poses some sort of extra danger not posed by discovered scam in which someone applied for and got and used credit cards in admirals. This was possible because the officers' service numbers, which are just their Social Security numbers, were made available to Congress as part of the promotion process, and have since appeared on a Web site maintained to cadged but the story points out a more serious angle: Since service numbers are family, finances and personal background. The Pentagon is therefore, says the now be used to pay income tax bills. But not Visa. The paper doesn't explain why. You'd think the company would want its piece of what's sure to be a record subsidies should be phased out, and everybody here on this stage, if it wasn't protest their fervent support for this boondoggle, which violates every known this issue, in contrast to every other candidate in the race, is the definition now counts for as much as a superb answer by any of the other candidates. Bush fared well because most of his answers last night were successfully answers have a more than ordinarily tangential relationship to the questions he is asked. Instead of engaging the premise of a question, he simply clicks on United States can do to interrupt what seems to be an evolving culture of Bush answered: "You know, one of the interesting parts of your question is was a request for something beyond the airy platitudes about compassion that store that we used to find on main street?" Bush responded: "I think if you ask the family farmer, they don't feel protected." He then gave an answer about the ignored the challenge to his assumption that farms deserve benefits not existing laws against possession of marijuana, Bush said he favored again, he ignored the challenge to a contradiction in his views: that gun laws should be rigidly enforced, but that certain drug laws should not be. Bush isn't the first guy to dodge and weave around awkward questions from reporters. But he is more than ordinarily unresponsive. To use the not striking out, he bats pitch after pitch into foul territory. The best instance of this was Bush's answer to a viewer's question about what political philosopher each candidate identified with and why. Bush had time to think this because he changed my heart." Bush heard the word "philosopher," seized on a In the last debate, Hatch gave a patronizing lecture about how the This was the wisecrack of the night. But I think it also offered a glimpse of all, I don't think you're going to ask for Medicare with the amount of money you make. In fact, I think you could take care of all of us right up here on Later in the debate, Hatch spoke, as he always does, of how he once raised chickens and sold eggs and worked as a janitor and has been faithful to his because he sees everyone around him getting the money, fame, sex, and credit sight. What diminished Three Kings for me was that at heart it was a live with himself in the face of injustice and opts to "do the right thing" at considerable personal cost. That's one of the great movie plots, but it doesn't feel as fresh as the rest of what's on screen. Elsewhere, however, it's the way that screenwriters and directors bend and twist formulas that accounts for the "anything goes" quality that we've all been responding to. The beauty of The "distance": from other people, from the effects of our own actions in the past, and from ourselves. The villain turns out not to be a person but a concept. You thought that it's all "getting too close" to him. It's the hero's willful blindness to the fact that his behavior in the past had rippling consequences realistic hope is that filmmakers will use the technology to deconstruct those I don't think that theme is going to go away. As our culture becomes more in movies and television and our own fantasy lives. "Breaking through into the I don't see any outright "masterpieces." Let's just say that this has been a great year, a reversal of so much that happened in movies in the '80s. But Senate votes it needs to be ratified, the president's deputies actually argue that it should be tabled rather than voted on. Many treaty opponents cite only that there is "ongoing work" on computer models. But many treaty advocates "trying to get the Democratic nomination" by attacking "good Republican Bush's move was smart. "I have never seen a candidate for president in my was more assertive and, some argue, more personable than in the past. (At the start of his speech, Gore stepped in front of the podium, looked at looked "like an elementary school teacher" in front of the podium. (To learn effect on the health of the polity. One pressing question: Who would be first lady? (Trump is unmarried, but he has told Fox host Tony Snow that he impression somehow that he's different than the Republican Congress agenda. [To learn more about all of these stories and find links to the smartest As always, it is a treat to read your cogent insights. I agree with you that the big story here involves the changes in capitalism and especially in the nature of work. Unfortunately, I think it would have been a much stronger book soon as possible! There is a real world out here with real people in it. If weight of all those muscles. We're waiting for you! and profound set of questions that affect all of our lives. She does this with great earnestness and deep commitment. She devoted years of her life to the interviews with an unusual selection of men are masterful gems, each one cut and shaped by profound empathy, vivid observation, and keen listening. They are rendered in rich romantic prose that pungently conveys the disparate worlds of her interlocutors. I love the way she lets us in on the action through her own responses of compassion and bewilderment. She is always there, never silent, as we feel men and women opening up to her, trusting her, bonding with her, so much so that months and years later, they continue to call and bring her up to date on their lives and their troubles. What I cherish about this book, and of this intellectual journey. She began with one set of assumptions and allowed them to transform, as she herself was transformed by the men she came to know. Her personal authenticity was the backdrop against which these men were able to turn their experiences into words with an anguished and heartbreaking reached beyond her role as a feminist, or even as a writer. She reached toward her own individual humanity and through that medium reached a deeper truth with those men she sought to understand. Between her introduction and her the football fans, the militiamen, the porno film stars, the fashion tyrants The question inevitably arises, though: What does it all mean? Here I errors that form the very foundation of her undertaking: one substantive, the "popular accounts of the male crisis and male confusions are almost identifies some of the deep historical structures that might have allowed her to unravel her data, and then dismisses them as irrelevant: nor about a shift from a society organized around industry to one set up around There is no way to talk about these historic shifts "simply." And this is the first time I have heard these monumental issues in the evolution of material life referred to as "surface symptoms"! Whoa! If that's the surface, then we must be talking about something very deep indeed that is the cause of definition of the heart of this particular darkness: The deep pain experienced by the men she meets is explained by this confession and complaint: "My father never taught me how to be a man." So, here we are once again on a canvas of to commercial culture has crippled the sons, leaving them no source of meaning other than "Were they 'sexy'? Were they 'known'? Had they 'won'?" If there is a crisis of masculinity, then it truly can only be understood through history. We are now completing, at least in the West, the last feudal century. For the first time in any society, a majority of its people are educated and informed. For the first time in any society, a majority of its people use their brains and not their backs to accomplish its work. The bonds of hierarchy and patriarchy are not dissolved, but faded and weakened as never before. The fixed productive and reproductive roles of men and women, once determined by anatomy, are now giving way to an exhilarating and terrifying plethora of choices. The concept of work has been forever transformed and the boundaries of class have followed suit. These are the deep structures that are in motion. These are the sources of the ruptures with the past we all face. If there is a crisis, then rejoice! The old sources of meaning that kept us the tectonic plates of history roil and split and mow them down. They complain the usefulness of supporting their women, learning new skills, committing to their families, and finding new ways to teach their children and contribute to their communities. The old world had women in a box and men in a harness. No one was allowed to venture outside their roles. If the fathers were silent, its because that's how they thought the script was written. Don't pine for that! Get on with the challenge of forging a new life and writing your own, better, Finally, the methodological fallacy at the heart of this book: "If you want alleged "societal dynamic" becomes her methodological justification for using this kind of approach is very tricky. If you are going to pick a few cases to illustrate the larger whole, then you have to have some pretty compelling and profile. I think that what she has unearthed in grisly detail is the uniquely described as "high school with money"), where looks, fame, and income compose the ranking rules for a truly wacky hierarchy. Lamentably, she has lost sight of just how weird and out of the mainstream that culture is. It is not our culture. It is not our society. It is not the grain of sand in which the real world that most of us live in is etched. The gangsters, the militiamen, the don't think that any of them says very much about most of us. But then, I live We'll love you here even if you have a paunch or imperfect thighs! Most pundits think Al Gore is becoming desperate, and some say he's now the explains Gore's motivation.) Gore moved his campaign headquarters from take your campaign out of K Street, but you can't take K Street out of your that he is far ahead in most national polls. Some attribute Gore's problems to Republicans' plan to balance the budget by fudging with the benefits schedule positions show that Bush is more of a social conservative than an economic began three weeks ago, many of those commenting on it have actually read it. comically fallible in private." He continues: "I have no doubt whatsoever that TR: "Do you believe that priests and nuns and rabbis and therefore you go into organized religion to help strengthen yourself. That's questions, whether he considers himself a Christian and whether he believes in "Actors are trained not to focus too closely on their individual witnesses, convention over the union's possible presidential endorsement of either Al Gore paragraph it quotes Gore saying he's uncertain of the outcome and waits until the eighth to quote a union official who thinks Gore has "a good chance." By union's endorsement. The Wall Street Journal is a bit less emphatic, saying that choice's significance: If the union does indeed make a choice now, it will be still sell to law enforcement and the military but will basically stop selling Apparently, the company's motivation is to avoid legal liability and money damages possibly arising from verdicts in any of the lawsuits currently being brought by various local governments. The Colt shift was discovered by raises deep questions about the media's true values: In the week following the interview, less and less was said about the former and more and more was said conclude that the Brits believe that the drug is dangerous. That's why it's a mistake for the Journal to wait until the fifth paragraph to mention to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the The LAT fronts a report about tighter rules regarding personal uses of office computers and how companies are increasingly using sophisticated tracking technology to enforce them. Examples in the story of concerns where the new technology and the worker resentment it breeds are in evidence: that almost surely is a hotbed for this issue that the story makes no mention briefing on local conditions. John Weaver, his national political director, alerted him that the audience waiting inside the aircraft hangar might include as a Republican may be the most contrarian notion in his delightfully technicalities. He hopes to link it to the apathy young people feel about special interest money dominates the electoral system is a big part of the "Restoring honesty to our political system is the gateway through which all Library, to sustained applause and a loud cry of "Amen" from a man in a skirt and sneakers who later identified himself as the leader of "Evangelical recently agreed to drop everything but a ban on soft money from his eponymous campaign reform bill, which is supposed to come up for another Senate vote soon, agrees. He says that after a decade, shrewd operators will find the loopholes in any finance reform bill. Cleaning up the system thus has to be a will reduce the power of special interest money in politics, not eliminate it, environmentalism, an internationalist foreign policy, and more together in a Library, where he called it "a fight against the pervasive cynicism that is debilitating our democracy, that cheapens our public debates, that threatens our public institutions, our culture and, ultimately, our private happiness." Other times, he casts it as an "ask not" call to public service. In Grand pick it up and read it and realize the great virtue in committing themselves to doesn't have to be military," he says. "It can be in a mental hospital or the But his "new patriotic challenge" seems to strike a chord nonetheless. When credibility, based on what he sacrificed in serving. This is something that is freedom of speech, art, religion, and, of course, the mayor. So try as I might bureaucratic reorganization, and mayoral succession just can't compete with not opposing the exhibit. One thing for sure, the press is going to have fun. The New York Post has already told its readers that she's "dissing" the she'll host the national celebration. Do you think we will actually get any intellectuals lamenting their loss of authority over the masses. I must admit that I am only rarely invited to their events. Apparently, my questions at past forums have been too "pointed" for their guest speakers. If there is a biological drive toward order among humans, I have yet to see it appear among my three children! And while I am a religious person, I don't trust the leadership in our religious institutions to set the moral standards for the rest of us. Politics and religion have become too intricately It's surely a topic for another day. It's been great meeting you over the Good morning. I fear it's one of those mornings when our own ways. I find the progressive expansion of elections is as distressing there are going to be plenty more where that came from. It's a symptom of an electoral process rapidly turning main ride being tempests revolving in teacups labeled Family Values, Defense of Religion, the War on Drugs, etc., etc.) Fortunately only a small, if loud, small, which served only to prove that the entire political establishment has Indeed, in the week when Warren didn't declare, and some rode with the Mongols Motorcycle Club for nine months. Seems as reasonable a their noses in other people's business, are the kind of discussion I haven't himself elected, and the same old buzz words are so worn out they will no You won't get a fight out of me on the Backstreet Boys. This old rocker doesn't care which way they get it. Should liking them or not dread question of heredity, about which I will say a few words later. But he on and lose. On the one hand, I am irritated at having to spend all this time on personal background when I am trying to get at the issues; on the other partner of Warren Buffet, and so on. It seems as if it has been decided, both by writers and publishers, that you can't get people to concentrate on the issues if you don't build up the personalities involved. You raise some interesting questions about changes over the decades. I was involved in the genesis and publishing of some of the books you mention, and why styles and tastes change over the years is a question it is hard to answer. I think one answer is the rise of academia, which leads to more specialized books, narrower books, reaching small specialized audiences. Almost none of the people you mention as writing those important books of the they were, they became professors late in life, after having been editors, and impressively so, but the issues are left hanging without sustained analysis, A final point, heredity. One cannot be conclusive on important factor. When we say that social background determines in large measure one's scores and indeed, I would say, one's tested intelligence, how do we separate out the effect of hereditary factors from income, education, I think one can't. And yet if these factors play some role, and I am sure they do, whatever means we try to get to equal appeals court ruling that gun manufacturers can be sued for negligence for promoting weapons in such a way that they would appeal to criminals. The TEACHER PAY TO RESULTS," about how today, at a national education summit (Bill faculty checks and student grades go hand in hand. With the federal government having just given itself pay raises across the board without having produced a budget for the fiscal year that starts tomorrow one looks in vain for the alternative headline "STATES TO TIE POLITICIAN PAY TO RESULTS." Oh well. stride, that the campaign's other new changes include "an updated wardrobe." decision to move and asking them if they would move with him. "Both replied Gore's announcement: "The air of nervousness and tension in the room was analytical, spending much of the top part of its story focusing on Gore's money The papers contain reports of the discovery in East response thus far has been that there is no archival evidence of any such incident. (The papers should have dug up the initial denials issued by provided they channel the money thus saved into the likes of education and health. How to explain the meager play the announcement gets? The government's warning that parents should not sleep in the same bed with a child provides many benefits, such as bonding and the promotion of considering a run for president and will make his mind up later this year. He further convinced of the appropriateness of running by the tepid response among held a press conference to deny rumors (launched by former officials of his campaign) that he's had an adulterous affair with an aide. The papers put the policies of various people in public life designed to avoid baseless rumors of sexual misconduct: The Rev. Billy Graham has refused to be alone in a room with having a male staff member present whenever he meets with a woman; and John I might at least have something entertaining or informative to say, I ran into department of one of those companies that I wrote its president a letter of complaint on the letterhead of an impressive magazine in which I stated my intention of reporting in print how unpleasant it had been dealing with his company at every conceivable opportunity and that I would consider myself to be hard to discharge my punditry duties in this space without coming across as unbecomingly stuck on myself. You have been managing this very gracefully, I taking notes, but I think this is pretty much the exact same question that was being posed yesterday. I know the answer! Call on me! In a word, Yes! Yes, he 70-something to 50-something in as short a period of three months, they really course know since I got the job owing to your recommendation when I had no experience at all, because you were tired of hearing me blather on, much as I am doing now, but more crankily, as we sat in bars back when we met in the I am looking forward more than I can say to the season want a scotch with my toast. The need to rant is upon me. So soon after the though I find the Doctrine of Transubstantiation makes me queasy, and I don't alone." They wear us down by exhaustion. Believe me, I know. I once almost did audience that the legalization of drugs is well overdue. "Regulate them, kept you?" The War on Drugs has been raging through my entire lifetime, and despite hundreds of billions of tax dollars, the triumphant propaganda of the this side of Hell. The equation is so damned simple and obvious. The very illegality of recreational drugs is the risk that creates the vast profitability. Remove the risk and you remove the profit incentive, and at least half the problem is solved. Regulation, control, keeping dope away from does still have to fight what might be called the Drug Enforcement Industry, a he is of any discussion of legalization. He's got bigger fish to fry. He was, I was also going to rant on about the Patient Bill of following an increasingly common practice, made a videotape of its own) on a News" Web site. The stunt has generated scads of publicity in the media, interview subjects will be forced to sign away their rights to make public whatever it is they tell its intrepid reporters. (How any interviewee who isn't also guaranteed that the story will be a puff piece could possibly be induced to sign such an agreement remains to be seen. Perhaps those who don't sign will be forbidden to take their children to the forthcoming Toy Story sequel.) Chatterbox believes that sunlight is the best disinfectant for everybody, to give his readers some preview of what the controversy in question is all trafficking, after he was arrested in connection with a methamphetamine lab confronted with an unbelievably complex "user agreement" requiring Chatterbox to promise in advance to eschew any "reproduction, broadcast, retransmissions, contents "are only for your personal, noncommercial use." Hmm. Is Web journalism "commercial use"? (Chatterbox does get paid to write this column.) The user (are) engaging in Improper Conduct, [and] charge the Registered User (whose facilities or access rights have been used for Improper Conduct) an Improper derivative works from, transmit, sell, distribute, or in any way exploit the Site or any portion thereof for any public or commercial use or any news or media use without the express advanced written permission of The threat of litigation tends to scare Chatterbox out of his wits, and by now Chatterbox wasn't at all sure he wanted to press ahead. Instead, he phoned You, of course, raise the issue that has split criminal justice and And you are right on the mark regarding the role that ideology has played in this debate. Moreover, New York City (media center, etc.) has become the focus simplified, are along the lines you suggest: changing drug patterns, changing police practices were central argue that the crime reductions came at an My own position is considerably different than claims on either side. Again, trying to put forth a complex argument in a short note is difficult, however, let me try. As you know, long before the New York and "crime reduction" stories, I was an advocate of community policing. By that, I did not mean that police should be "nicer" or that they should do, in effect, community relations. I argued that to deal with crime, police had to be involved with citizens, organizations, institutions, etc., and that communities had to reclaim public spaces and control and nurture youth. To use New York City as an example, that is exactly what happened. Think of the activities of citizen groups, business improvement districts, the transportation authority in removing graffiti and reclaiming the subway, the restoration of Central and increase the number of police. Moreover, by the end of the second The police, however, provided the "tipping point" that accelerated a process that you properly note: Crime had been slowly dropping for some period of time. do with police practices in New York City. As I am certain that you are aware, The fact that this is a national trend and that the stories are different in most cities I find both not surprising and comforting. Each city has begun to find ways to reclaim public spaces and control and nurture its youth on its own But, in closing for now, I went to a fascinating discussion put on last offered some comments, it was the power of a set of ideas that changed things And, finally, yes it would have been fun to have met before this "conversation." But, I must be off to my guest teaching. I will write again the cause: One part of the orbiter's navigation system was speaking in English to combat rampant commercial fraud by farmers and shopkeepers who used the varied systems of weights and measures to their advantage. Scientists were also demanding a standardized system to facilitate international cooperation on research. While old systems seemed arbitrary, the new standardized system had distance between the equator and either pole (it has since been redefined in terms of the speed of light). It was also easier to remember than other systems of the continent quickly followed in hopes that a standardized measurement system would spur international trade. Over the next hundred years, the metric government adopted metric as the nation's "preferred measurement system" and established the United States Metric Board to manage the transition. The changeover was ineffective, however, and by the early 1980s, the only tangible progress was that liquor and wine had to be labeled in liters. Metrication was similarly mixed: Large corporations with overseas exports are at least partly converted, but most small businesses still use the English system. Labor unions worried that workers would be unable to learn a new system. Businesses protested that redesigning machines and products to metric standards would be costly. States objected to the expense of replacing road signs and revising laws. And average citizens argued that change was unnecessary and said metrication, claiming "the West was won by the inch, foot, yard, and mile." system of measurement. In the 1970s, some opponents suggested that metric road instance of path dependency: Once a course is chosen, it is difficult to induce since the economy was sufficiently dominant in its trade relationships to Union plans to ban products labeled in English units at the end of the year.) Also, unlike other nations, the United States' metrication legislation has been entirely voluntary, so few organizations have transitioned. The Department of abolished in 1982--now focuses on outreach to the business community, instead of legislation. The year's marquee event, "Metric Week," begins this Association for exhaustive information on metrication.) What a relief. Something would be very wrong if we found nothing to argue about. It's also a relief to be able to put aside Morris' book, which we both impressive figure than I once did and can even admire some of what he achieved. But Morris, in his simplistic way, and you, in your much more knowledgeable reference book; and I was surprised by how much more sympathetic I was to him than I had once been. He deserves considerable credit, I think, for restoring a course, an easily crossed line between confident optimism and arrogant in the '60s). But on the whole, I think he was a positive force in the way he reduced the rancor and disillusionment that had grown so corrosive in the late movement in both elite and popular thinking about welfare policy that had to work, that it should be (to use a phrase created, but never really acted understanding of the nature of the welfare system and its effects was, like Morris', largely simplistic and uninformed. But his instincts were at least partially right, and like many liberals, I was slow to recognize that. I now do thing a public policy can do to lift people out of poverty and redeem their administration was, I think, gratuitously punitive toward some of the poorest and most desperate welfare recipients and put much too much of the burden of its supposed deficit reduction on the backs of those least able to afford it (and on programs so meagerly funded that their contribution to deficit reduction was meaningless in any case). The same could be said for the investment, and that many important new economic sectors flourished. Credit for administration undoubtedly contributed. On the other hand, the economic boom of in creating a very substantial upward distribution of wealth and in benefiting all. Blame for that must also be distributed widely, but I have no doubt that upper brackets while watching higher social security taxes eat away at lower- and many others made contributions to the denouement of the Soviet Union, and that either of them was more responsible for it than the cascading economic had never done as well as Western economies and had often experienced crises. as a nation was much more serious, rapid, and destructive than anything that had come before. Certainly part of the reason for that was the very high levels of unproductive military spending. But those high levels had been eroding the all, one of his rationales for doing so.) There were many other grave problems wanted, I can see no basis on which to attribute the central role in this great French monarchy, but it was not ultimately his doing. certainly be debating these questions for generations. But I suspect that in It's been a pleasure discussing these issues with you. I wish I could say You strike a balanced note at the end of your message that I think is absolutely appropriate. On the subject of heredity, you note that some portion of intelligence does seem to be hereditary, or at least so many serious people say. So while we should try to reduce inequality of opportunity, there will always be some, since some people are born smarter, and that intelligence may clear, the current meritocratic sorting system has done a good deal to reduce inequality of opportunity. The 1950s elite was based on blood and, to a much ours is that it has reduced the influence of looks, magnetism, and social wanted to create a small elite class of guardians who would serve the public was also naive, and reality tends to smash those notions. There is never going lofty writings down to the gritty struggles of politics and campaigns, showing I finish this exchange more aware of the limitations of our current meritocracy, but not moved to support radical changes to it. The SAT has opened in his conclusion. That would be to try to impose an overly egalitarian plan onto a society that is interested in opportunity and striving. If there's one last time, by photographs of genitals scissored out of porno magazines) has declaratory and injunctive relief (which ought to be on the Web, but Although the City may generally choose to fund museums as it sees fit, it may not make funding decisions for the purpose of punishing a museum's States, as made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United Does a museum's constitutional right to free expression, which is undeniable, really include the right to demand a government subsidy? (The city York Times in the Pentagon Papers case. Can he possibly have the law on his side? (Incidentally, the Senate today jumped into the fight by voting unanimously to Guided by a pretty good news analysis piece in today's New York Times (which has performance artist famous for smearing chocolate on her breasts, sued the National Endowment for the Arts for withdrawing a grant. The decision, by flatly stating that "the First Amendment certainly has application in the subsidy context." Here is some more language from the decision that bolsters We have stated that, even in the provision of subsidies, the Government "manipulated" to have a "coercive effect," then relief could be appropriate. constitutionally suspect when it threatens to suppress the expression of more pressing constitutional question would arise if government funding resulted in the imposition of a disproportionate burden calculated to drive But is the government, in withdrawing funding that indirectly subsidizes a part in promoting it? (In practice, the most efficient way to publicize albeit in miniature, in the Times and countless other news outlets. If Mister Justice Chatterbox humbly dissents from the Supreme Court majority's view that the First Amendment has any "application in the subsidy reasoning on this question that was so lucid that Chatterbox will give him the enactment of 954(d)(1), Congress did not abridge the speech of those indecent speech. Those who wish to create indecent and disrespectful art are as unconstrained now as they were before the enactment of this statute. satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it. It is preposterous participation in a tax exemption or other subsidy scheme does not necessarily Heterogeneous leads anchor the fronts. The New York Times reveals that nonprofits, including churches, pocketed millions in Federal grants that are designated to feed poor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to a ratification vote, in the hope of sinking it of inmates sentenced to terms that carry life maximums. vice president inherited his pedantic political style from his father, who rose from poverty to become a teacher and politician. The senior Gore forced his son The Times also reports that four Bush biographies are in the are being written by independent authors. The Bush camp is putting out an slated to author the book. The writer insinuates he was ousted for asking hard questions. The Bush campaign's communications director is now penning the party senator's quixotic argument for his candidacy: "[Bush is] a mile wide and an acknowledges that he has a rough row to hoe. Even some of his friends are The Post's "Outlook" section surveys candidate statements on campaign finance reform. Al Gore advocates a soft money ban and free broadcast time for strike a blow for feminism by fighting a male lightweight in boxing's partially driven by her experience with domestic violence. school indignantly argues that "education is not a country club" and disdainfully describes mothers jockeying to make play dates with the offspring which kiddies were admitted to kindergarten under her reign. She graciously explains, "It is one of the subtle ways we limit who applies." announcement that the United Nations will have to take complete the face of more sweeping legislation sponsored by Democrats, the House leadership reversed position and wrote an alternative bill giving patients the delivered along with a decision not to raise interest rates. (The markets the second time in a week. "Too often, on social issues, my party has painted has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself." He also proposed federal incentives for states to participate in The LAT reports that former President Jimmy Carter has been specify.) Cuts in administrative and educational expenses at private schools and increased state funding of public schools account for most of the gains, college on one side of it and people who haven't on the other. The line gets lives, higher education is the main focus of their aspirations (and the possibility of getting into the elite end of higher education is the focus of The Journal profiles one youth who didn't buy into the meritocracy confirmed by the companies themselves, caused Excite at Home's stock to rise have yet to make sense, so I guess this serves as a return to comparative Bush to make him president, and here goes. If the predictions don't actually pan out, and I actually pray they don't, it's also a classic example of how to build a high conspiracy theory from the ground up. The trick is to combine totally separate news stories as factors in the same scenario, and take it from Defense Weekly reporting on the massive proliferation of a class of cheap, conventional weapons, but can be easily adapted to carry a payload of anthrax or a small, dirty atomic bomb. The matching piece of the puzzle was served up All peaceful solutions would require immediate cooperation by the nations involved, but I doubt we should hold our breath on that. The alternative is president to have in power during this unfolding scenario than a completely malleable nonentity, totally in the pocket of corporate oil? The true face of the alliterative compassionate conservatism? This may sound a little wild, but Graham? After the entire area has decimated itself, some compliant commander in chief has to be in place to send in the troops to secure the oil if it's not sympathize with the family whose kid blew a thousand dollars on the cards. (I always sympathize with the irredeemably stupid.) I wonder, however, having now run out of space and will have to save these gems for later. Hey, good illustrations. The one thing that really bummed me about being paired up with you to do this Breakfast Table gig was knowing that you'd effortlessly outdraw my sorry ass, and that's even when you've got a color pallette tied behind your back. Well, at least I have my new, on good authority that he was going to end capitalism, nationalize industry, eliminate pay inequity, and institute forced collectivization, all while is telling the truth about really caring about poor people. (Hey, maybe he's In any event, my lines were jammed with callers seemingly unaware of the conceived, is dead if you can convince people that Bush is a leftist and parliamentary democracy; even fringes of the electorate get represented. But at paralysis, and worse than that, the illusion of choice between two virtually the phone or unlock the front door), and that was the last time I ever considered participating in allegedly organized party politics. Torts dominate the news, with major liability decisions about health insurance, pharmaceuticals, and the manufacture of guns covering the front pages. Everyone leads with the House's dramatic, bipartisan passage of a "patients' rights" bill, which would give the consumer a broad right to sue his cities against the firearms industry. The judge said the attempt to regulate guns through tort law represented an "improper attempt to have this court substitute its judgment for that of the legislature." in one of the rare House votes where the outcome was not known in advance. It dealt a major blow to the House leadership, which had lobbied for a narrower legislation was supported by the labor and consumer lobbies as well as the argued it would enrich trial lawyers and cause employers to drop medical benefits for workers. It now goes to a conference committee, where it must be issue refunds. Benefits are not limited to those who sued: Any one of the six billion to settle. Oddly, the LAT puts the nominal, rather than the is confusing money with wealth; it should do as the Post does, and not mention the nominal figure at all. All the Journal explains why this amount is sufficient: Insurance pays the Party. The party formed a centrist coalition government which is expected to be pledged to devote himself to economic reform and steer away from the alleges that it has undefined goals, does not meet its own deadlines, takes credit for corporate contributions and community projects with which it is only peripherally involved, and does not reveal how or how much it pays its top officers, as charities traditionally do. The Times notes that a presidential campaign. "Unless I thought I could win the whole thing, I would relying on the good will of a rogue state to allow inspectors onto its territory," the three leaders write. "Under the treaty, a global network of all is said and done, a casket is just a box with a door on it," says a former exorbitant casket fees of funeral homes. "You don't feel that pressure to be done with it and be out of there," says one happy customer. "It's more like leading with tobacco companies suing for access to the raw data from would make the takeover the largest ever. The Wall Street Journal possibly supplanting the conservative People's Party as the second largest story) downplays the results, and the menace posed by the party and its leader, health insurance has not kept pace with economic prosperity. More than of coverage on welfare reforms that have trimmed Medicaid rolls. They disagree receive insurance from their employers, but doesn't mention the possibility that this is simply because Medicaid cuts removed a more affordable cut benefits or raised premiums, and many new jobs come from small businesses, threatened to withdraw his party from the coalition if they lost too much close finish and low turnout make the elections a nonevent, and that the People's Party leader is backing down from his earlier statements. The study linking secondhand smoke and lung cancer. Researchers say that surrendering the data would violate the confidentiality participants were promised and threaten future research. Though defendants traditionally win such because the presiding judge has ruled in favor of the tobacco industry the beginning of a full invasion; they only seek to establish a security zone attacks even though there is currently no indication of rebel presence in the tested well this weekend. Defense officials warn that this success was only a first step, and much more work is required to provide comprehensive protection. Skeptics warn that such protection is virtually impossible, and that further work: It's a testament to our cynical times that a politician can make news here, and the radiators in my apartment are making those knocking and whispering noises that make all prewar buildings in Manhattan seem like they display there as by artists "who deserve to remain obscure or be forgotten," boldly opining, "I have seen the exhibition, and I think the emperor has no clothes." Strong words for a man whose institution not long ago devoted a I like your conspiracy theory, but where most such theories fall apart on the unlikelihood of the conspirators being sufficiently organized to carry off such a thing, yours falls apart on the unlikelihood of any alternative candidate's being sufficiently disorganized not to understand the benefits of serving the interests of corporate oil. Also, while I don't like to quibble, I night? I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that you frequently see Bush was so overcome with emotion while reading a letter he wrote to a administration that he was unable to continue, and had to hand the task over to about those Gap ads. I like those Gap ads, because I always feel have a charm so forceful that it was akin to encountering a major climatic condition, which surprisingly few of the professionally famous do. In fact, if there is a sad thing to know about interviewing artists whose work you admire, it is that their work may well be the only thing about them you do. Also, the candidacy, or is that just a New York story? Now, there's a man who understands the benefits of corporate oil, since I don't see how he could get his hair to "Murder Isn't Always a Crime" claims the tag line for the new movie Legal precedent for these circumstances is lacking. However, most legal Amendment of the Constitution, which says that no person "shall be subject for is that double jeopardy can only be claimed when multiple prosecutions arise from a single criminal action. For example, a double jeopardy defense would certainly fail if a defendant claimed that he couldn't be prosecuted for a second assault on a victim just because he was convicted of assaulting her The obvious objection to this analogy is that, while you can clearly assault someone twice, you can only kill a person once. Therefore, the evidence that other. The problem with this defense is that the court is free to overturn or flexibility if the court had discovered that her husband was alive while she mismanaged the first case in a way that resulted in her wrongful conviction, she might be able to sue for damages. But it would not affect her second served her time and should be set free. Depending on the state in which the sentence. But convicted murderers are almost never given suspended sentences, trouble getting at an open line. But, today, I made a second pot of coffee and Times only confirmed his point. It's as if everybody has their script experience, including with courts, I am stunned by how willing people are to trivialize the concept of free speech in order to exploit it for some form of political advantage. But, it is only the beginning of the season. As tragic as it is to hear, finding out about it at least serves the purpose of demonstrating that monstrous evil is not only to be found in the former least tolerate, evil things should never surprise us. Finally, for now, I have continued to think about the discussion I attended we are slowly beginning to understand the dynamics of why the disruption occurred: the changing role of women; the interaction of that change with "the pill"; the "freedom" that resulted for some men (no longer "responsible" for being a parent); the excesses that accompanied the moral "freedom" that many felt from normative setting institutions such as the church; and many of the did not exist) and shaped social policy. (I think that I wrote you about the part of the discussion that didn't begin, and which I would have enjoyed even more, was why things now seem to be turning around now. I can write what I did the other night about why and how crime was reduced in New York City, but it still begs the question of why suddenly (and a decade is suddenly) individuals and organizations could commit themselves to successful strategies and suggest a biological drive toward order and that humans are rational, can see their mistakes, and can correct themselves. I wonder. the White House's attempt to stave off a Senate defeat of the comprehensive to Al Gore than he was in the paper's last survey a month ago, and that Bush would beat both Democrats. The only expert quoted in the story says party's nomination "wrapped up." (The story saves the number of people fate of the treaty is genuinely up in the air, whereas the LAT 's first paragraph suggests a deal may be in the works that will avoid the treaty's "plan" is in the works that will achieve just that. But even the Times sees a lot of brinkmanship yet to come and admits a vote could come as early as Everybody explains that ratification (which is what the Senate is signaled that they will "take their lead" from the Senate vote. The Times also does the best job of explaining the politics in play right vote now so that once defeated, the treaty becomes a viable campaign issue. wider dissemination of birth control, the population growth rate in most places the point that this fact doesn't show that books like "The Population Bomb" attacking the growth rate problem.) The main storm cloud the Post sees adequate) needs to improve, while the LAT wonders if governments will editorial, but rather a long detailed narrative of what's become of unmanned problem has been that traditional weapons advocates in uniform have seen drones as threats. For instance, in the Navy, so the story explains, the plan to develop unmanned bombers ran into the formidable opposition of the carrier admirals. The upshot is that the Pentagon is still spending only millions on Command held a formal ceremony where it was renamed the Joint Forces Command. The change involved new banners and command insignia and new stationery. But same. The point of the name change is to emphasize the importance of the feel hurts traditional cuisine and aids fast food. These are interesting sorts of stories, but one has to wonder if there isn't another reason why they are staples of the big dailies: to help justify having reporters stationed in Today's Papers braced for embarrassing personal revelations of an need for compassion and optimism in this old world of ours in ways that were happily commented on the decrease in noise, graffiti, and panhandling in New here do also, although it does to a large degree depend on where you live. The tourists who come into my neighborhood make every bit as much, if not more, noise than the homeless who have gone out. I used to have a number of friends years ago, and although this friendship was not financially a totally equal running late and didn't want to stop at a cash machine. It's true that they were smelly and that the sight of poverty and desperation are not pleasant, and remember no matter how many times they were told that white women don't think it's a compliment to be told they have big legs, and they were noisy, although they would pipe down if you cared to go out at three in the morning to ask, which the tourists sure won't. I occasionally still see some of these campaign, one because he was set on fire. In other words, I find it hard to rejoice about the improvement in my quality of life brought about by no longer having people urinating in public up and down the block, because it wasn't really my quality of life that was at issue, and anyway, overall as far as I can tell, quality of life did not so much improve overall but redistribute that every attempt at universal health care will be sandbagged by the health companies, not to mention that now that I have been so very critical of then it seems almost every week is dominated by merger talk. It might have been a week dominated by talk about the Fed, which decided not to raise interest rates but did shift its bias toward tightening, but the truth is that except shift in bias.) So instead it was a week in which the stock market demonstrated be announced over the next few weeks) outweighed everything else. Oil prices reported blowout earnings in the most recent quarter and said its revenues company, do we get to stop hearing the cracks about how Sprint, Person Says.' As opposed to, I guess, 'Bell changed the headline to 'Bell South Sweetens Offer for Sprint, People Say.' Don't you think that really begged instead for 'They Say Bell South Sweetens 'We didn't renounce the dictatorship of the proletariat company or entering into a strategic alliance. Apparently just adding '.com' to the company's name was considered but then rejected as tacky." cents a share, which might make a typical investor hesitant to back up the and the Catholic League could go away feeling that it had achieved something. I of face, but, for me, it's a "don't ask, don't tell" solution. On prior sin, so no more compromise; rip away the Wizard of Oz curtains on all cohorts, all too often what's revealed is an unappetizing confederacy of rabid bigots and slick hustlers with mailing lists who know funds can be extracted On the death penalty, I am also an absolutist. If a nation cannot aspire to a higher moral standard than its killers, it can only be labeled as barbaric. An eye for an eye is the cry of the savage, and neither revenge nor the extermination of the socially unmanageable can ever be a civilized objective. as he invented the concept of a "just war." That it is practiced so gleefully in this country and is the parrot shriek of the macho political opportunist sickens me, and yet moral reasoning seems to have no effect. Standing outside maybe executions should be televised in prime time, and let everyone see what's being done in their name. If we are so horrified by the cruel and unusual that process of slaughter becomes a savage yahoo spectacle, then we are indeed hanging of the wrong man on two separate occasions, plus the execution of an presidential nomination. How does the Reform Party choose its candidate? Reform Party presidential candidates must prove their viability by Party leaders will validate candidates based on their progress toward getting on the state ballots. Since there are no objective standards for approving or rejecting candidates, the process can be somewhat arbitrary. And because the ballot, which will be distributed to any registered voter who requests one. votes will be declared the winner. If nobody wins a majority, an "instant votes. This process of eliminating the last place finisher and elevating all distributing, auditing, and counting millions of ballots could bankrupt the candidate, such as a staunch abortion opponent, might outperform an indigenous Reform hopeful. And Democratic or Republican voters could cast ballots for a said he would like to alter the rules before the primary next year. But current party leaders support the present process, saying the openness is crucial if an impressionable age, very sad. (It also makes him feel guilty about the times across the street.) Chatterbox recognizes that it is unquestionably a social good for the world's newspapers, and electronic publications such as walking distance of the small number of newsstands in this country that sell publications from around the world. Still, Chatterbox hates to think that it relocated to the inside of an antique subway kiosk that fell victim to offer up to the Fray (scroll down to see how) suggestions about what Just one more cup of coffee for the road, regrettably Like how I fear every attempt at universal health care will be sandbagged by the insurance companies. Like how an English doctor '80s, and the taxpayers who footed the bill. Like how pleased I was with the to be set straight. This is the creative poor, friends and neighbors, just ask my landlord. If it's any consolation, a "dissembling, conflicted blowhard" is territory. It's like the sideshow bozo above the tank of water; if they don't hurl the balls, we don't have a show. (We'll see if they ask me back.) On the matter of armed overthrow of the government, I don't think I can help you. I believe I gave my word to the INS that I wouldn't do that kind of thing when I applied for my green card. Since a gentleman's word must still be his bond, the best I can offer is to stand romantically on a hill, the breeze flapping my duster coat around my legs, rolling a quarter across my knuckles, and watching as crack assault units of Hello Kitty, the which he unveiled a second major education policy initiative dealing with charter schools, reorganizing federal education programs, and a proposal that about how the center and ones like it steer people away from welfare and into After everyone spoke, Bush held a press conference, his only one of the Q: Gov. Bush, some conservative Republicans have said that your criticism last week and again yesterday is undermining their credibility on Capitol Hill. Have you made a political calculation that you can afford to alienate the right Q: Governor, you talked earlier about the Republican Party and the image of the party. There have been four national elections this decade. Could you just talk about each one and talk about how you think that's caused the party's image to go off track and how that informs what you're trying to do now? delay payments under the Earned Income Tax Credit]. It was an actual Q. You said several months ago that you would not campaign against this Republican Congress. But some people hear what you said over the last week as Bush was asked no questions about education and only one about welfare. This benefits for some recipients." In other words, the questions he got from reporters focused on politics and positioning to the total exclusion of his actual policies and positions. Reporters tried to provoke Bush into making news or embarrassing his hosts, while ignoring the social policy issues on his It's not that the questions they asked weren't interesting or legitimate going to win?" And a focus on pure politics is surely better than a focus on alone with women not their wives. But why can't reporters devote at least some I can think of a few reasons for the allergy to substance. The first is the imperative for daily reporters to move the ball on an ongoing story, such as conflict automatically counts as news. Some new detail about Bush's education policy, by contrast, might or might not make the paper. A second factor is the journalistic culture of the news conference, which rewards zinger questions third factor is the newsroom division between politics and policy. Most reporters covering the campaign are well schooled in the former and only minimally, if at all, knowledgeable about the latter. They may understand the politics of school choice or welfare reform, but tend to be far shakier on the The chief complaint of reformers these days is that the power of cartoonist, nothing depresses me more than the overnight disintegration of the editorial page offer. It was never perfect, but the "Week in Review" used to run the more daring and adventurous editorial cartoons around (stuff that dumb gags about the news. Can you and I agree that any cartoonist who uses and trashing its consumer business because it's been savaged by lawsuits. But guns are a legal product, and I find it yet another statement about the manufacturers out of business. For instance, smoking should obviously be banned countless house and forest fires. But since no politician has the guts to advocate such a drastic (in my view, rational) measure, we end up with zillions of lawsuits by people who've always known that smoking was dangerous against tobacco companies. It's the same with guns; if we as a society decide that we want to get rid of the Second Amendment, then let's do that instead of abusing ancient tradition of nomadism; this week he's covering an enclave of ethnic is a stunning place of amazing mountains and lakes, grinding poverty and lost the budget doesn't much matter if global warming puts the entire planet under with anyone arrogant and annoying is itself seriously annoying. among liberals who ought to know better. All lives ought to be considered equal under the law; if you kill someone because they're gay, it shouldn't be worse you shouldn't see much sunlight for the rest of your life either way. As for the death penalty, it's not like murderers don't deserve to die; of course they no one should give a damn about anyone else. For this reason alone, he deserves Oh no, we agree! We've really got to stop this collaboration across the political spectrum. At this rate, we'll be singing "We Shall Overcome" before this exchange is over. And what happens to the "culture wars" when people on both sides start laying down their arms? This is terrible. In addition to his Before I resume my trashing of Morris, let me admit that Dutch contains many passages that are beautifully written. As we saw in Morris' previous book, he can be quite a sculptor with words. And there are occasional looking back so much as an eager application of history to today and tomorrow." over the years accused him of incurable nostalgia and trying to take the proceeding West in covered wagons) to construct a kind of imaginative portrait exploration and entrepreneurship as the modern equivalent of the early But once again, let me raise the question of who is the real sophisticate and who is the ignoramus. I don't deny that Morris is a better connoisseur of on the subject, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' to simple and the first time I see/ This wall is actually a wall, a thing/ Come up between Is Morris kidding us here? Or has erudition drowned out all good sense? I worse. Morris seems to have totally missed the point of Frost's poem, which concludes with the observation that good fences make good neighbors. Would think I am being duly harsh. Morris may be a wordsmith and an aesthete, but he is politically incompetent to evaluate his subject, a thoroughly political man. And he has missed an opportunity that cannot be recovered: Morris had a level abrogated his moral responsibility to history in a manner that is close to unforgivable. Which leaves the big question: Who picked this guy? And why? Although the past few years have given us a boom in mergers and acquisitions conglomerates became all the rage), this boom has been distinct because the vast majority of takeovers have been friendly rather than hostile. One would like to believe this is because executives have realized that hostile takeovers only magnify the immense problems any company faces in trying to assimilate the operations of another, but it almost certainly has as much to do with the lofty prices that are being offered for companies these days. (The more you're In any case, one consequence of this epidemic of friendliness is that you don't hear the expression "X company is now in play" all that much anymore. This expression was a staple of business thinking in the '80s, and was bidding war after its management tried to take the company private in a leveraged buyout. A company came into play when a buyout or acquisition offer made the possibility of an acquisition suddenly seem likely, bringing other But Sprint, like any public company that isn't controlled by a small group of shareholders, was always on the block. And that makes the whole idea which to make an offer for Sprint. At any point along the way, it could have decided that merging with Sprint was in its best interests and bid. And if it had done so a year ago, or even six months ago, it almost certainly could have The point is that the phrase "in play" is a useful cover for the fact that takeovers, particularly hostile ones, are often the result of companies' panicking at the prospect of losing something they never even knew they wanted its business from within. But in the space of three days it has thrown that strategy over, in favor of a massive bid for a company that it will find very difficult to integrate with, from both a regulatory and an operational perspective. And it's hard to believe that this is really the way you build whole cloth in a couple of days and expect to have done the due diligence a successful bid requires. And if we learned anything from the '80s, it's that there's always a horde of investment bankers ready to convince executives that they really can't afford to let this acquisition pass them by, and that there's always a host of corporate executives eager to believe that bigger is driven down since they made their respective bids. The urge to merge is a powerful one, but resisting it is usually the smartest course. Especially when it's an urge that seizes you only after it seizes someone else first. company--$456 million, which the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company must pay to millions of clients whose cars lost value when State Farm ordered action against State Farm.) The plaintiffs argued that the parts were using generic parts keeps down premiums. State Farm insures one out of five usual, the papers spice the abstract financial story with corporate intrigue: Blue." All the stories are sourced to anonymous persons "close to the flights and finds that it is not supported by any empirical evidence. The ban, have bombarded their planes with cell waves and failed to record any to prevent electronic interference similar to (though slightly stronger than) that of a laptop or CD player. Meanwhile, passengers and pilots on corporate jets use cell phones thousands of times a day without incident, while partnership serves the core interests of the university more than those of the corporation. Dismissive scientists are already referring to the new deflected attention from the real task: Defeat the ideas, not the man." (Click loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed after being fed data in pounds never escape the clutches of foolish humans. "To the contrary, it may be that the more complex a gadget is, the more links with quite fallible people are that many corporate recruiters are doing something unprecedented: hiring care of. They come with presents! Day planners and stress balls and fun things that keep the student with that employer's name in mind." Today's Papers still Alas, this is my second attempt to respond to your last message. Apparently, I was writing to slowly for my service provider. It inquired whether I wanted to stay online, and despite my assurance that I did, I was promptly What I was writing about was your initial discussion of art and funding, as because I am of a very mixed mind about the whole thing. On the one hand, I treasure the principle that artists should be able to express themselves in relatively unrestrained fashion. On the other, I have concern about public funding of art. I am uncertain about the extent to which public funds should be Likewise, I am perplexed by public funding of churches to provide certain kinds of social or other kinds of public services. In each case my concern is not just on the impact on the public or public policy but also about the impact on artists or the church. Is it possible that the public funding of art or church social services (or schooling) has a deleterious impact on their integrity? Moreover, should the state be funding activities that the general public finds offensive or services that compete with public services? As I noted above, I find myself really quite confused in each case. School vouchers, alternative schools, charter schools, and church schools all compete with public schools and probably challenge public schools to improve. Moreover, such school programs offer the working class and the poor the same opportunities that the wealthy have to send their children to alternative schools. Yet, it is fair to ask whether the diversion of public funds from public schools weakens and further threatens what was once a powerful institution of upward mobility I guess that pushed to the wall, I would choose school choice, if only because schools have suffered from the same kind of stifling bureaucratic So, as you note this is an awfully late breakfast. Tomorrow, my response popular in the nation. After three years in existence, charters already enroll nearly ten percent of the District's public school students. opponent of the pact, will be able to bring it to a vote early this week and Republicans, who largely dislike the treaty but are reluctant to vote it down considering the ban for up to a year. A vote to delay needs only a simple medical exploration that draws material from human embryos and aborted fetuses. Scientists predict that stem cells may provide the building blocks for industry a single company can legally control. In its second ruling this week purchase of the Media One Group can go forward without the telephone giant chips continue to shrink, their manufacturers are running up against stubborn Playboy interview in which he ridiculed organized religion and said he now confronted with the possibility that three very different candidates will by itself use the entire surplus, according to some estimates. Gore's spending Rich asks, "a struggling museum in an outer borough, is easier to bully than a Internet businesses who will pay Amazon to be listed on its site and give the Amazon business model. But that doesn't make it any less potentially I say the evolution was predictable because Amazon has always been upfront about the fact that it didn't want to be just an online of goods and services to buy. The real question, though, was (and is) whether Amazon could extend its brand name and the loyalty of its customers to a panoply of products, many of which it wasn't necessarily going to provide What Amazon has recognized from the beginning is that its most valuable asset was not its warehouses or even its Web site but rather the "stickiness" of its customers and the information about their buying habits that it was able to collect. Amazon has so far used that information in limited the more information it will collect and the more the information that will as an idea, it's an excellent leveraging of Amazon's brand name, because it promises the possibility of sizable returns while requiring almost no lot, get a cut of all sales that take place there, and still not disturb its of all the goods for sale and could direct its customers to items in which they might be interested, the business would be all the more attractive. every transaction will be very high (since its costs will be very low). And to get too obsessed with margins, because if you do you miss the real strength tremendous profits, and does so while using capital very efficiently, because it turns over its inventory so often. As long as you're selling goods quickly, you can make very little on each good and still make a huge amount at the end of the day. This is what Amazon has been able to do in books and what it wants Amazon will make more on each good, but they'll sell less quickly. In other words, it's a good business for Amazon to be in, and it's a logical extension of its online power. But don't look for Amazon to give up its core business Well, let's not worry too much about our happy state of feel, as you do, that he is one of the most important presidents of the genius for leadership that, whatever his other limitations, helped make his presidency enormously successful and influential. Morris seems to sense that personal opaqueness that he doesn't really convey the power of his personality displays of erudition (which include his very mediocre poetry) lead him to I confess that I have only today worked my way through the last chapters of Morris' book, and what strikes me is that it actually gets worse as it moves farther away from its unconventional literary techniques. The autobiographical elements are less intrusive in the chapters on the governorship and the presidency, but Morris' limitations as a historian and undoubtedly be alarmed by different examples of these weaknesses. But let me 'abandoned' [when husbands left home to preserve welfare benefits] found it income." This problem remained contained, he says, until the '60s, when "the New Deal idea of 'benefits' as emergency help, to be applied for reluctantly altered its meaning in doing so.) It is hard to know where to begin to critique this monumentally ignorant description of the welfare system. There is no abandon their wives, and no evidence at all to support the insulting statement that women "went on" having babies "by whomever" in order to increase their very meager welfare payments. Even in the '60s and beyond, there is very little births. The Great Society did nothing to change the definition of entitlements Medicaid). Morris' footnotes cite only a few stray magazine articles, a book on The last chapters of the book are filled with these Morris claims, for example, that the New Deal launched a 50-year effort to force the distribution of wealth downward. In fact, there was virtually no caused not by taxation but by economic growth and rising wages. Nor did any president advocate or attempt to produce downward distribution of wealth; even gives it in this 700-page book and in his remarks at several points about how economic policies, although I concede that some good things flowed from them; but whatever one thinks of them, they do mark an extraordinarily important returns to his "tax program" in an interview, Morris tells us that "my heart considered too boring to attend to. There is almost nothing in this book about my folder, and read them with surreptitious enjoyment while Dutch retraced his clones. Once and Again 's success has been taken as a sign that a show As it happens, Once and Again 's success doesn't necessarily show that at all, because it is in fact a huge hit with the 18-to-34 audience. Its share the share received by new shows such as Freaks and Geeks and Now and What's weird, though, is the assumption Once and Again had to combat in order even to get on the air: that nothing is more desirable than those 18-to-34 viewers. This is not an assumption unique to television. It's certainly at work in movies, and has also been propelling changes in the Maxim and in the pressure that's being felt by older magazines to make magazine editors trying to appeal to me. But I am perplexed by the avidity with which I am being courted, because of one simple fact: There aren't that many of lot of disposable income, it can't compare, in absolute terms, to that still wielded by the baby boomers. Even in the New Economy, earning power rises with So, why do advertisers think we're the ideal audience? Partly because of our because some advertising is aspirational, so that you push products that people assumptions about brand loyalty, in particular the idea that if you hook me on is simply that young adults tend to be the ones who are buying advertising time, designing the ads, and, increasingly, writing and programming the shows and films that we see. I become the ideal consumer because my friends are the The picture is more complicated than this, of course. There aren't many aren't.) Finally, at the bottom end of the demographic, there a lot more people than at the top end. Those are the oldest Echo Boomers, and advertisers should from a purely economic point of view, they shouldn't be regarded with such percent of all the customers you could be reaching is still just, in the end, I am not certain whether we were to wrap up our conversation yesterday or today, however, I will send at least one more message. The quote from your last existentialism, indeed all existentialism, avidly in college and seminary, I was wrestling with the idea of freedom from secular and religious institutions in terms of my personal morality quite early. And, for me, morality is a very personal issue. Over time, however, as the power of authoritative institutions that while many have handled their "moral freedom" responsibly, many others have used lack of external constraints to exploit and prey on persuaded that society's reluctance to come down on such persons for minor decriminalized virtually all minor offenses, we refused to confront young all practical purposes decriminalized (police didn't even bother investigating confrontational and violent. Authority was a bad joke to them until they ran into "three strikes, you're out": the disastrous outcome for both society at large and individuals when society fails to meet its responsibility to take So, I still wrestle with your phrase about moral authority. How can society maintain civility when everybody is "free" to define personal morality on their own terms, while some members of society are eager to use this "freedom" to came to an understanding in the late 1980s that we had largely lost control of a relatively large number of youths and public spaces. And, a new idea developed: We had to enforce a balance between individual liberty and personal Anyway, I hope that sometime we can really have breakfast. I hope that your kids are well. I checked on my grandchildren (four) yesterday, and all seem to be doing well. (One refused to be seated in the school bus, and consequently ran into a massive assertion of parental authority.) conspiracy of very small girls to take over the world, I wish they would hurry up and get their act together, because I absolutely do not think they could do authority since I have discovered conclusively that world may well be about to This information came from the unlikely source of the discovered things are much worse than we hitherto imagined. A quarter of the have now been cleared, and most coral reefs are either dead or dying. This is because of all those voters who believe that the United Nations will annex the me, they're out there. I met of lots of them while I was promoting my around with a sign saying "The End Is At Hand" as you are by public speaking, I will take the entirely selfish way out. Feed the cat, hope things hold together long enough for my next two novels to get into print, watch a lot of E! Channel If nothing more fascinating comes up, remind me tomorrow usual, a bracing antidote to historical revisionism. Whenever the academic tapes always seem to appear that squelch the impulse. (To read available either in audio or in transcript form on the Web. (The best Chatterbox can do is refer you to the quotations in the Post and Times stories, which were based on the reporters' disloyal." He made exceptions for some of his top aides, such as national "But, Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on this administration, anyway. And they are smart. They have the ability to do was. He could have been a half, but he was not by religion. The only two Most stunning of all, however, was the Times' assertion that the institution, "issued a statement saying the President was not which you can read by going to the Library Web site and clicking on "The White House Tape were appalling (many would say they still are), but attitudes toward It should be noted that the President's comments regarding lack of the President, within months, would make Stein his Chairman of the kept in mind when evaluating his words on the White House tapes. to downplay controversy) never stops. "FOR YOUR NEXT SPECIAL EVENT, CHOOSE THE and you receive an energetic pitch to hold your next corporate dinner, or even foyer, join your guests for a sunset reception in our spectacular gardens. Promenade down the colonnade walkways, tour the original birthplace home of the President, and muse on the tranquility or our handsome reflecting pool. education proposal that got overshadowed by his implicit attack on conservative federal education programs into five categories isn't a bad idea, either. Achievement" plan, which relates to standards and testing, deploys just the kind of unwieldy regulatory mechanism Bush is elsewhere trying to eliminate. Indeed, even Bush's top education advisors don't think this aspect of the In the plan unveiled at his speech to the Manhattan federal dollars on the basis of whether student performance improves in the future. This implies standards and testing: If you're going to have a system of rewards and punishments, you have to have some way to judge who deserves which. would set a benchmark for what children of different ages should be expected to know. National tests would allow for objective evaluation of how well various Conservatives reject anything that smacks of federal control of education policy, funding, or curriculum. In particular, the right is paranoid about bureaucrats at the Department of Education setting curricular standards or administering tests. They see national tests as a violation of local So Bush splits the difference, opting for what you might as far as I can understand it. In line with conservative dogma, states would be free to set their own standards and select the tests that they would be obligated to give to every child between grades three and eight, every year, as a condition of receiving federal money. The federal government would pay half The problem: As with the first part of the plan, which deals with Title One funding (see "Policy Corner: Bush Ed"), the states themselves determine whether they deserve more or less money from the feds. Bush is not "optional" test, this one federal. The federal government "asks" (in other words, tells) states to participate in the annual National Assessment of they must pay for an alternative test themselves and prove that the results can state tests are a meaningless sop to conservatives. And if the money is tied to proposal. Neither was able to do so very well for a simple reason: It national standards, says there is simply no alternative for Bush, because of the opposition to the idea in both parties. "It's become obvious that at this point Congress is not going to endorse a national test," she told me in a phone says she considers herself a dissatisfied Democrat rather than a Republican, adds this lukewarm endorsement, "I think that he is in some strange fashion I had the job [secretary of Education], we evaluated the state evaluations," distancing himself from conservative Republicans, he was actually caving to important antitrust questions, since the devouring of the country's in the best interests of consumers. You don't hear people saying "Why did they Eliminating a key player in that market could reduce the pressure for price seeing new players spring up regularly, and it's now seeing wannabes such as big players in the market is not meaningfully different from having three. The the market for local service to competitors, which means not only that it isn't blowing up its competitors' vans but that it's giving its competitors reliable access to that last mile of copper wire that runs into our homes, and that it isn't making customers jump through hoops when they want to change phone Up to this point, no Baby Bell has actually been able to demonstrate every turn. This is not surprising. Everyone wants the markets they're not dominate to be closed. But it has been a frustrating spectacle. Changing local approved. The company has undergone close scrutiny, has performed a battery of tests to show that it's being fair to its competitors, and has lost enough competitors to suggest that it doesn't have a complete monopoly. And if Bell Morris is an educated man who has written a profoundly foolish book. at home and abroad. Inflation was in double digits, eroding pension plans and economy went into a juggernaut of growth that has still not abated. Interest rates fell, so that new businesses could get loans and families could buy disappeared. The technological revolution accelerated in part due to the explosion of venture capital that became available in the 1980s. No more real itself came under unendurable strains and began to collapse. The Soviets pulled comparable record of achievement. The 1990s have been peaceful and prosperous, these huge events, but he has no idea how or why they happened. Hence the schizophrenia that is manifest throughout his book. Like some of the petulant Morris tries to apply the premise to the astonishing turnaround of the 1980s. And it doesn't fit. How could a dunce enjoy the continuous successes that in which the market, not the government, runs the economy; by the time he left Morris knows this is ridiculous, but he cannot figure it out; he becomes confused. He goes into a long depression. He suffers from imagination and will. Never once does Morris question his premise. What if was intelligent and perceptive, far more imaginative than all his critics put together, infinitely more resourceful in implementing his agenda, eerily indifferent to much of the acrimony and pettiness around him, resolute and to his original "dummy" hypothesis to question it and abandon it when it does not fit the facts. This is why, despite his strenuous efforts, Morris finally picked Morris, seem to have assumed that because Morris admired a rugged zoologists to the White House to discuss the fine points of botany. TR was Morris, who fancies himself a cultural sophisticate, is obviously appalled. His And so Morris finds himself set on his disastrous course that takes up a decade and a half of his life, ruins his reputation, and does a grave injustice to doesn't know, and neither do you, dear reader, unless you're in the tiny minority of New Yorkers who have seen the one or read the other. But that But how do we know? From a few nouns and adjectives in a each made a tragically stupid choice of profession. Think of the paintings they could have avoided painting, the books they could have not written, the time magazine pages, and elephant dung) or doing research! If it's the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself that's going to influence the people who will influence the public, why type the words or cast the dung upon the canvas? say, pundits in general, Internet pundits in particular, and them completely: The excerpt is not the book. The reproduction is not the work of art. If they were, we wouldn't need museums or books. We could all study art books for our art and read magazines for our literature. Art critics could skip openings; book reviewers could rely on summaries in Publishers Weekly. Art and literature are not the rough approximations of themselves. They are the sum of their parts, and their parts include formal properties and details that possible that if she stood before the painting she would think: Aha! Dung has a whole new meaning in the context of the sardonic primitivism, The practice of pronouncing without firsthand experience will not stop just to fearsome punitive powers, that she has joined her local chapter of Pundits Anonymous. There she will place her faith in a higher power and pray that next time she's tempted to discourse on that of which she knows absolutely nothing, He'll shut her up. Maybe she'll drag Chatterbox to the next meeting. course, right on the mark. Yet, it doesn't matter whether the topic is public education, health care, or free speech, politicians routinely look for the position that plays best in the media. Of course, the mainstream media don't do newspapers were remarkably consistent in their choice of lead stories today. coverage for his possible presidential bid. I know that the public likes to be entertained, but would this museum story actually be playing for an entire week if it didn't have a salacious element to it and the mayor wasn't using it to score points with conservative voters? The issue of public funding for the arts is actually quite important, and yet there is nothing in the discussion that would help a thinking person come to some position on this public policy uninsured. This is very important for urban areas, especially New York, where so many working men and women are uninsured. To its credit, the Times and Post covered the story, but it is nowhere to be found in the By the time you get my thoughts you will probably be completely exhausted from driving and teaching. Can't the policy discussion in the media do better than today's New York papers? Hope your day went well. Running for president these days means convincing everyone that you're going to win until they don't believe you, at which point you must persuade them that Bush, not against his benign Democratic challenger. Gore did not acknowledge But thanks to a steady stream of media negativity toward Gore and his once it became competitive, Gore needed to play the expectations game in a by a slim margin will count as a victory, rather than as failure to meet he was expected to win the New York primary, even though he is ahead there in All this is happening so early that we might well go through a few more viable by the press, he's beginning to receive harsher scrutiny. A few skeptical stories about him have already appeared. Next will be articles still running as if he lacks any serious opposition. But at some point, expect the press to start treating some other candidate as a plausible and promising will appear with Al Gore's script before him. He will call for early debates, embrace "change," and say he welcomes the challenge. (Read more about Gore's attempt to become the media underdog in this week's town hoping for an announcement that will be far bigger news if it ever sort of like the White House Correspondents Dinner but with the actors and political reporters kept apart. We caught only distant glimpses of Jack preposterous stiletto heels, flaunting a strategically situated rip in her Events like this remind you of what limousine liberalism was like, circa a defensive alliance but a structure of oppression. "Keeping up a permanent war The event began with an elaborate tribute film, which might run verbatim as a Republican attack ad against the Democratic Party one day. It had clips of relatively clever, such as the peroration in which he offered advice to an imaginary "drum majorette" who felt she had something to contribute to the of my house for the past six weeks," he said. Another good one was his question about the special interests, the corporations, and the plutocrats. You do have what his political views are. Like most of those in the room, he is a financing of elections, and spend more money on every social problem ever Drudge claims he is since becoming a father. That's about the only thing he could have said that would have got him booed by this crowd. mistaken and perhaps a bit delusional is in attributing the failure of his ideas to corporate power and corruption. He described our political system as This is the same paranoid view he articulated, much more wittily, in goes with the Census Bureau's finding that household earnings reached record indicate particularly strong income surges in the South and the suburbs and in the report, somehow manages to come up with a headline saying in part that uranium was poured into a purification tank. (This is not the only simple admission that the reason the Mars Orbiter was lost last week was that some engineers did calculations for the mission using pounds and feet, while others mishap is nowhere near as environmentally threatening as either the meltdown at LAT quotes a nuclear safety expert saying that the three most seriously hurt workers may have received more radiation than their counterparts at strong public opinion backlash against industry and the government, which was has cloaked the operation in secrecy, saying only that ground fighting is presidential veto, the House yesterday passed a bill that would establish new criminal penalties for anyone who injures or harms a fetus while committing another federal offense. The politically loaded aspect of the bill, explain the papers, is whether or not it establishes a measure of legal standing for fetuses that could be used to chip away at Roe v. Wade. religion, calling it a sham and crutch for the weak, and says the charges The comments were condemned by the Reform party chairman, but were defended by gun imbroglio that's not been mentioned much: the availability of increasingly sprays, effective at much greater ranges than earlier versions. The writer is absolutely right and his observations might have carried more rhetorical impact if the paper had told readers via an ID line that he is a former government anniversary at various outings, including a jazz brunch cruise down the bothers to tell the reader what those hardships were. Times leads with the National Football League's decision to pass over is today, when the House votes on competing "patient rights" bills, which would response a "backlash" against Bush, but the other papers are more favorable to and of defense contractors have undergone a year of extensive, coordinated unclassified but sensitive information on weapons research. One thing holding interview will be used. (Companies often make their own tapes of their entire interview on the Internet as part of a counteroffensive. Today's Papers envisions a world in which every interview subject is his own media watchdog; when a reporter quotes him out of context, the subject need not beg an editor These days, half of all couples live together before marriage, and less than partying with wedding guests visiting from afar. "Sex, when it happens" for experimental gene therapy treatment for a metabolic disease of the liver. The National Institutes of Health are now reviewing the safety of gene therapy Genes are hereditary units that carry nature's blueprints for making the multitude of proteins that build enzymes and other body chemicals to sustain more of these genes. There are inherited defects, like those that cause cystic fibrosis, and acquired defects, like those that cause some forms of cancer. It may take decades or even centuries to completely understand the relationship between genes and disease. But where the connection is understood, scientists are devising gene therapies that aim to eliminate disease by introducing healthy genes (isolated and reproduced in the laboratory) to One way to deliver healthy genes is by placing them inside a tamed virus goal was to introduce therapeutic genes into his liver cells. His cause of death is still a mystery: One theory is that the virus was still active and may have killed him. This therapeutic trial has been suspended pending an Theoretically, gene therapy could be used to cure infectious diseases like Though the benefits of gene therapy are theoretically large, none of the any ailment. One obstacle is the body's natural defense: The immune system recognizes the virus as a threat and attacks it. Another is that the cells engineered by therapy often do not produce enough of the needed protein to cure Project for an exhaustive look at the world of genomics.) I don't know him well) and consider him an interesting and very intelligent man. But something went badly wrong with this book. I don't want to psychologize, but clearly he simply found himself unable to manage this large and difficult subject, floundered, and grasped onto a series of unwise devices empty suit inherently implausible. I suspect that spending many hours getting because he was attractive and a good speaker; but even more because he was a man of absolute certitude about his core convictions and was able to convey a convictions fairly early in his consideration of a question and that these convictions then became more or less impervious to challenge from evidence that might contradict them. That did not always make these convictions useful bases for policy or action, but they did make them extremely effective as vehicles for shaping opinion and attracting support. Morris is clearly impressed by But my larger problem with Morris is undoubtedly very different from yours. mentioned yesterday his preposterous summary of the history of the welfare order. But the largest example of his credulity in this book involves the part think many historians would argue now, and I don't think many will argue in the more to do with the grave internal weaknesses in the Soviet system than with anything the United States did. If there was an event that really precipitated attributes to them a historic importance for which there is no real evidence. decline of popular legitimacy of the regime. The evidence for this, he says, yesterday. But he also argues that this speech resonated throughout the Communist world and helped spawn the will to resist that culminated in the that a major event in world history that arose out of a vast confluence of factors was the result of the policies and the rhetoric of a single man. But what is Morris' excuse? He has simply accepted the claims at face value, just of a few rhetorical statements that seem to him plausible. In the end, then, he is. But it is also an injustice to history, because it accepts far too Chatterbox loves to go to the movies. Mostly this is because he loves movies, but partly it's because moviegoers enjoy one of the last great consumer (where prices for movie tickets, and most other things, are higher than they are elsewhere in the United States), politicians are constantly grandstanding about the high price of movie tickets. In March, New York City Council Speaker widely recognized as the area's spiffiest movie theater, an Art Deco palace That's still "high" by national standards; according to the Motion Picture Take a look at this chart, which Chatterbox found on a Web page about inflation that dollars). Prices for movie tickets peaked, in constant dollars, during the It's interesting to note that the 1970s, the decade when the price of if consumers paid more for movies, they would get better movies. But the 1980s, which produced movies that were worse in the aggregate than movies being made today (and much, much worse than the movies that were being made prices were higher then (in constant dollars) than they are now. Perhaps the reason movies were so good during the 1970s had to do with the size of the audience. According to data (not available, alas, online) from the most of the 1970s, rising to the low 20s during the 1980s. (Chatterbox assumes more interested in quirkier handcrafted products. But if that's true, it cannot be extrapolated that movies continue to get worse as audiences continue million). But in fact, movies are better today (assuming you don't count I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this book with you, although as we both know, the book has already been so widely discussed that we are already part of a much larger conversation. And while I and of his legacy, it seems we agree in many ways on Morris' book. who will begin with some hostility toward him on the basis of the mostly uninformed reports they have read. I have to say that the prospect of reading a biography that tried to break with the fairly rigid forms of the genre was appealing to me, as strange as Morris' approach sounded, and I approached this The test of an innovation in any kind of writing, but particularly in nonfiction writing, is what contribution the innovation makes to our understanding of the subject the author is trying to illuminate. And his invented encounters, his blurring of the line between fantasy and reality, and his many other tricks of the trade do offer some interesting points of whole, and like you, I found these devices intrusive, omnipresent, and highly distracting from what should have been the central task of the book. It's not just that these techniques make it hard to know what is real and what is made up, although they do. It's also that they make it very difficult to concentrate flitting around him, improbably preoccupied by him even in the years before he was important, writing back and forth to each other about their fictional encounters with him and with each other, telling the story of their own particularly disturbed, as a scholar, by the presence of invented footnotes for the fictional parts of the book. But even without them, there is a surreal quality to this biography that makes it hard to focus on Morris' real views of Morris is not, of course, the first person to try to blend fiction and fact. Some very distinguished historians have experimented with doing so in recent years, some with great success. John Demos, an eminent among them. Demos augmented the known story of this woman with an imagined no evidence exists. It stirred some controversy, certainly, but it was a several years old, was a deliberate effort to play with the elusive boundary between fiction and history and to suggest how the two might be fruitfully joined. That book, too, seemed to me very provocative and interesting. But Morris' potentially interesting effort to expand the boundaries of biography seems to have gone out of control. Partly, I the edges he couldn't help himself from going all the way. Partly, perhaps, similarly opaque but has nevertheless been the subject of excellent and penetrating biographies.) In the end, though, I think Morris' real problem is left, in effect, with nothing. The result is this hodgepodge of distracting literary techniques that are only intermittently effective and mostly deeply distracting from, even destructive to, his principal goal. Court's decision to take on for the first time the question of whether grandparents have the right to visit their grandchildren even when one or both Against Women Act, a recent federal hate crime law that gives victims of sexual assaults the right to sue their tormentors for money damages. The Wall Street several others, including one testing a Colorado law making it a crime to limitations to refunds, but reserves its headline for one concerning the legal liability of managed care companies accused of cutting costs and doesn't goes with yesterday's passage by the House and Senate of a continuing explains the paper, that Congress and the White House have bought time to work out their myriad differences on expenditures without bringing about a presidential candidate, thus auguring the continued dominance of the party that join at little or no cost the federal government's health insurance system or by providing tax credits toward their private plan premiums. The proposal. The papers point out that the plan is more ambitious than the one the Bank of New York has been so halting is that two of the law enforcement discussed filing obstruction charges against the other. undergoing gene therapy for a metabolic disease. Although, explain the papers, is the first death associated with them. The victim had a mild form of a genetic disorder that was well controlled with drugs and diet, but he volunteered for the experimental therapy hoping it would lead to a cure. Both papers are careful to point out that so far it is not known if the therapy was saying that if this is indeed the case it could be a severe setback for gene students. The bottom line is that only a quarter of them are proficient in significant gender gap, with girls handily outscoring boys at all grade levels. The reader will look in vain for comparisons to results from prior years, but as the stories explain, the tests given this year are the first of their kind and so cannot be meaningfully compared to previous writing scores. with the explosion of information technology and get better connected to the young brilliant minds that are powering it. It is starting up an information thanked his wife (seated nearby), his daughter, and his circle of religious advisers, saying, "I have been profoundly moved, as few people have, by the pure power of grace, unmerited forgiveness through grace." The the Treasury Department is reiterating its opposition to the repeal of the leave estates large enough to be subject to it. A letter writer to the tax observation: The idea that smokers impose a net cost on society and therefore should have to pay higher taxes (say, though an increased cigarette tax) is wrong. The Congressional Research Service, he writes, has concluded that "all in all, smoking has apparently brought gain to both federal and state Journal of Medicine concluded that "smoking cessation would lead to Times fronts and gives its "Life" section "cover story" over to the not to have merely waited until tomorrow to report rather than wonder. An thinking is the following simultaneously filed pair of observations. Transubstantiation makes you queasy because it's the consumption of someone's In general, boycotts against works of the imagination as the primary focus of a political organization are suspect, whether it's the Catholic League which is not to say that I don't think these things should be as vigorously debated as anyone cares to debate them, and in some cases more vigorously than that. However, even leaving aside what are, in all three of those examples, to special interests are necessarily limited, I would prefer to put my dollar and my anxiety down on the side of protecting actual, real live human beings suffering actual, real live oppression, or the threat thereof. I wish that the Catholic League, or for that matter anybody, seemed to give a fuck about the fact that W. has presided over a state that's executing people at such an ungodly (as it were) rate, some of whose attorneys did things like fall asleep during their trials. In fact, I even feel like a wimp for having to try to irregularities in their cases; I oppose executing them even when they are monsters in human form, because, while I can easily understand why someone would want to kill the murderer of their near and dear, I can't at all understand why someone would want to give the state the power to kill the death penalty's application demonstrate. Surely this is a more important kind of a defense in being technically dependent on the recommendations of the parole board for granting clemency, but he could at least pipe up, as long as he's being so goddamned compassionate a conservative. In Praise of Movie Ticket Prices"). Namely: Why do movie theaters always charge the same amount, regardless of how good or bad the movie in question such as whether the buyer is a child or an adult or whether the ticket is purchased in the afternoon or in the evening. Why not charge a premium for movies that, for one reason or another, might be more worth seeing than Wouldn't people pay more to see Titanic than Wild, Wild The price you sell a unique good for is not determined by what it cost to he or anyone else should sell it for little. Instead, the price is based on consumers' willingness to pay. And presumably people would be willing to pay more for the best movies, so why not charge more for them? subjective aesthetic criteria but rather according to how many people want to see them. By this definition, a popular movie would be a "better" movie response to a movie's popularity would not be the current, egalitarian method "better" movies out of many people's reach. (Poorer people would have to rent.) other commodities, even other entertainment commodities: competitors that presumably had similar development costs. Publishing seems to casual flip through Amazon). [Chatterbox pauses here to note that the is also used in a few other branches of the entertainment business: The record industry doesn't appear to charge more for popular albums theaters). Similarly, video rentals all cost the same except for new releases The best theory I have so far is signaling: By giving a film a low price, you let the world know it's lousy; then they really don't want to see it. So instead, everyone charges what the best films charge, hoping people will This sounds right. Since most movies are bad (both in the subjective aesthetic sense and in the cruder sense of being unpopular), discounting the bad ones would bleed revenue while probably not persuading many moviegoers to going to lure many more people into seeing, say, Eyes Wide Shut by discount audience exists at all, it's mostly a rental audience, because renting saves money not only on the unit price of viewing but also on parking, babysitting, and other incidental costs associated with going out; perhaps most important of all, the rental audience knows it can bail out with greater ease if the movie in question proves unwatchable.) To make a buck, the movie business has to lure large numbers of people into seeing bad movies, and to get them to pay as much as they would if they were seeing a good movie. That's the bad news. The good news is that when a movie is latter case the price differential is not the Boss's fault, but rather the explanation of why stadiums charge less than the market will bear.) You know the stock market isn't feeling especially jaunty when the best news it gets all week is that economic growth might be slowing. But there are all sorts of things that people seem to be worrying about, despite the fact that earnings in the latest quarter are expected to be exceptional and that it increasingly looks as if the Fed won't raise interest rates when it meets on if you're 3Com, is it really good news that investors think more highly of a page read: 'Central Bankers Look Set to Lengthen the Good Times' and 'Leaders Fiddle As World Burns.' In the New Economy, apparently, burning worlds But I do want one, which has to bode well for the company." accountants and tax attorneys are reportedly confused about exactly why that's investment partnerships were madly selling stocks to cover losing bets for judicial posts whose nominations have been delayed longest are women or Congressional rules to mean the agency must collect all back taxes from a delinquent taxpayer or none, rather than negotiating a payment schedule, get a Medical Center believe they've developed the first effective therapy for cystic fibrosis (CF). It involves administering large amounts of a deficient fatty The Post fronts a biographical piece about young Al Gore, painting him as inordinately cautious, responsible, competitive, perfectionistic, proven the corollary this statement implies to be true.) Wife Tipper is quoted damage control." His campaigning has been so "weirdly incompetent," she claims, that "those close to him" are wondering whether he really wants the presidency or if he's just running because his Senator dad always wanted him to. police say may be dangerous. Next to it is an unrelated picture of a man at a currently being debated by the Senate, which would ban underground nuclear testing. Online, the piece includes a link to the treaty itself. Critics worry moratorium on underground testing, the government has used computer and stockpile isn't certified. The final paragraphs carry the news that nuke tests are more important for perfecting new weapons than correcting flaws in old from nuclear testing. The writer does not explore what might happen if, as critics fear, "rogue states develop the capacity to attack our cities," as that while restoring democracy and reforming politics and economics were top turning, necessarily, to eradicating police corruption. in Silicon Valley as someone who recognizes "the new thing... [Translation:] a notion that's poised to be taken seriously. It's the idea that is moments from gaining general acceptance and, when it does, will change the technology but people were using it. And it would get faster. I realized that the press primary. Journalists go weak in the knees around the guy. The few who have attempted to write debunking pieces about him have failed miserably. When I wouldn't join in this collective swoon. That proved impossible. But perhaps I can redeem myself a bit by examining the phenomenon. quality not many of us possess: physical courage. But I think the deeper he's shown consistently ever since. Everyone knows by now the story told in a kind of spirit of resistance personified, a man who writes in his book (click here for a Ballot Box review) that he found freedom in captivity by president hunger for a successor more deserving of our respect. tolerated by his party's leadership, and he hardly conceals his contempt for corporate welfare. There's a bit of the "strange new respect" phenomenon in the way journalists respond to these positions. When a conservative politician remains a genuine conservative, the farthest to the right of any of the other positions than because of the way he puts his beliefs ahead of his career as a brave enough or clueless enough to oppose ethanol subsidies beforehand. Both though forgoing the first contest makes his uphill struggle that much steeper. own good. Most politicians go off the record when they want to state the behaves, in fact, more like a civilian talking about politics than a politician discussing politics. He does reverse spin: Unprompted, he tells me that his big failure, describing himself as tired and his audience as merely "polite." And there aren't too many other senators, let alone presidential candidates, who gooks." Reporters usually either put such indiscretions off the record on media's sound instinct not to punish a politician for being exceptionally to say whatever he wants. For those who have watched his career, his outspokenness on the campaign trail appears as a refusal to be cowed by yet various Republican education plans don't make sense even on their own terms. Bush's even more flawed plan, wouldn't give vouchers a fair test, because it doesn't fund the voucher at anywhere near the cost of most private schools. And if a voucher won't pay for private school, it won't create any pressure on unembarrassed to tell you that one of my happiest days of recent years was when my daughter was accepted in Catholic school," he said. "I know she'll get a quality education. She'll wear a uniform, and she'll be away from those little bastards that are trying to get their hands on her." was running with my criticism, trashing his own proposal. "It's one thing to say we'll give everybody a choice," he said. "Well, if they can't get in, then we'd better either provide incentives for schools to come into being where they can afford it, or figure out a way to give them enough of a voucher where they education proposal in the first place. But in a way, being able to profit from valid criticism is more important than being a master of policy detail. The flattery. It's fairly unusual, in my experience, for a politician to accept a reporter's opinion that one of his major proposals is seriously flawed. It's the effort at seduction is transparent. You know he really hates the press, and doesn't feel automatic or calculated. He truly likes us journalists. It's his Threatened with municipal lawsuits that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, top gun makers have agreed to discuss with representatives of various cities safety improvements and distribution control, according to a Times leads with the return of radiation levels to normal at the site officials, who said they will withdraw their lawsuits if an agreement is reached. An industry spokesman suggested that negotiators aim for a reduction in accidental deaths and injuries and a way to prevent guns from reaching criminals. New York state's attorney general proposed that an independent monitor be appointed to make sure any agreement is carried out. Absent from the level in the nuclear facility and surrounding region has normalized with critics' fears that it is too early to tell what exactly the plant spat out. But overall, scientific and political reassurances are being reported louder the government's negligence before the accident, official response to it, and the proximity of their homes to the facility. (The LAT supplies the discussed with Bush's aides their budget strategy, part of which defers earned then. Yesterday a spokeswoman said that the campaign does not habitually coordinate stances with Congress. The candidate himself broke party solidarity with a properly alliterative soundbite ("I don't think they ought to balance trying to bring the government, police, and judiciary in line with law. original forays into a "Star Wars" missile defense system, according to the LAT. A Minuteman missile, topped with a dummy warhead, will lift off lead to implementation, but also to an arms race, critics say, as other countries try to develop technology that outmaneuvers the new defense. confiscate guns from anyone considered by a judge to be dangerous, the said it amounts to "unreasonable search and seizure" that violates the Fourth Amendment. Interest, though, is not confined to the Constitution State: people's homes for two days following reports of domestic violence. to foresee accidents on taxiways or with trucks and other equipment. Nor can the radar spot misbehaving schoolkids. One of the two novelty stories on the National Airport, walked on to a plane, and flew without incident or ticket to his concerned parents, who promptly grounded him. No word on the principal's propaganda. Now I have to admit that to a great extent, it rings true." Good morning. Do you, as a former resident of New York City, miss the great "the greatest fear among cultured folk is that they will say something critical about a perplexing new painting, play, book, or novel that will, in a hundred timid as any other member of the cultured folk, but my greatest fear is public furtherance of the argument that he bases his position on principle rather than personal distaste, "Taxpayer dollars shouldn't be on either side of this dispute. We can't support religion. We shouldn't support vicious attacks on attack on religion, vicious or otherwise. In fact, it looks religious. But, to move to less disputed territory, although I haven't had time to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today to check, I have a distinct recollection that they have quite a few depictions of various religious images in their receive from the city? I think if he's going to be coherent in his aesthetic politics, he should give it a try. According to the same Times article, he rebuts the accusation that he is doing this just to get the Conservative Party nomination on the grounds that a New York Daily News poll shows that New York City residents oppose him 2-to-1 on this issue. Am I wrong in thinking that this rebuttal has nothing to do with the accusation? Since when of the kind of issue on the shoals of which the contemporary Conservative Party to see a movie in five years. And why, indeed, should he bother putting down he can just drive out to wherever they do the lethal injections and see one I feel that I haven't given you anything to really start a fight about here, so I am going to close by saying that I really like the Backstreet Boys, Now you've done it. You have ruined our chance to make history by achieving almost complete unanimity. I knew this bipartisanship was too good to last. Oh well, back to the battlefront. I don't want to fall into the trap of disagreeing with So why don't we leave poor Morris behind to enjoy his communism was only the most grotesque version of the collectivist impulse. equally determined to discredit the Great Society because he didn't trust intellectuals to plan the economy, and he (correctly) worried that high taxes and government programs like welfare would diminish individual freedom and keeping government domestic spending roughly constant, while he focused his energy on defense hikes aimed, as he put it, at inviting the Soviets into an spending, he won the war over the larger question of the growth of the welfare a loser, and celebrated the entrepreneur as one of the highest embodiments of Today it's a settled question that markets, not intellectuals and bureaucrats, view was that Republicans would run programs with greater attention to fiscal is not the solution, government is the problem." He launched a principled attack on the notion that government is more capable of running the country that we're living in now: the era of the entrepreneur. So what about the Soviet Union? My view is that two predicted the collapse of the Soviet regime, intended the outcome, and desperately tried to save the regime, adopted glasnost and perestroika to that end, and saw the system blow up in Your theory, which is that the Soviet empire suffered from "grave internal weakness" and collapsed of its own weight, makes little sense to me. If you are referring to economic inefficiencies, I am not aware of any weaknesses that the Soviets suffered in the '80s that were not also present during the '70s (or the '60s, or the '50s, or any decade since the Bolsheviks came to power). The Soviet economy has always been a basket case and the butt Moreover, even if the '80s dramatized Soviet economic for the Soviet empire to implode in the way that it did. There is simply no historical precedent for a large empire calling it quits because it could not compete economically or technologically. As you know, the Roman and the Ottoman empires suffered from "grave internal weaknesses" but persisted for centuries. Why should a ruling elite give up power because the gross national product is declining or because the country is falling behind technologically? I cannot hope to settle this large issue here. Nor am I part as the opposing team's quarterback who kept throwing interceptions. Soviet empire represents "the greatest diplomatic feat in the second half of I think history will vindicate that judgment. I don't lives, to admit their errors. But the new generation of historians, who won't some of the recognition he deserves during his lifetime. put a damper on anyone's mood, some radio reporters decided it was a good time to let us now that after all the spraying of mosquitoes (the stuff seems to kill butterflies and other birds and also adversely affect humans with asthma), wondering why they hadn't thought of doing that in the first place! The political grandstanding is moving us even further away from confronting the he also is offended by the mayor's confrontational litigious position. Pitting the "right to free artistic expression" against "accountability of public funds" isn't the right fight. He argues that "New York needs mediators, not gladiators." This position seems like the right one to me, but it has the attention and the money. The mayor "seen his opportunities and took 'em," as public policy are decided in a crisis atmosphere and the public's view is I, too, have been struggling with this issue. Now, I am off to tape a cable an important issue, but alas, has no sex, drugs, or rock 'n' roll angle to it, so the media has covered it minimally. Maybe I can come up with a hook before the show. Should I show a picture of a nude mayor, public advocate, comptroller and City Council speaker urinating on the City Charter? It wouldn't be It's too bad that life's daily routine has to interrupt our correspondence. I am sure that by the time we get the rhythm our week will have ended! While I have read some of your work and even used it in classes, clearly I should have One of the most disturbing trends in public policy has been the distortion policy and urban policy have been two big targets of the ideological wars in windows" theory and that the policies of liberal mayors caused the increase in issue that pointed out that your theory was not ideologically based. You mentioned that you were asked to help reduce subway crime in New York during more police officers in New York under his "Safe Streets Safe Cities" program. crime rate don't know that crime started to drop during the last two years of "value added" for New York, its hard to argue causation for local policies when communities in the inner city. A recent study by the Centers for Disease that diminished gang warfare related to crack has been the major reason for the sharp drop in violent crime nationwide. At the same time, the annual survey of drug use by the National Institute for Justice shows a change in attitude by the young. They are simply not using crack, even when they are using other drugs. I cite all this evidence because I can't help but take social science seriously. The conclusion of the article is that the decline in urban crime is primarily due to the decline in crack use and not changes in policing. It always struck me as strange that in the period when crime was increasing in communities. However, once crime declined it was the police who got all the credit. No one bothered to check, until now, whether something might have changed in these communities. I know this is your terrain. What do you There's something almost comical about the recent frustration over the Bank of Japan's refusal to take action to lower the value of the yen, which has soared in the past month against the rest of the world's currencies, including most obviously the dollar. The kind of action the bank would have to take to weaken the yen, after all, is precisely the kind of action it would have to to do the latter, it's hard to see why we should it expect to act to do the The impact on a country's economy of the value of its currency is, of course, very complicated, primarily because any country is made up both of consumers, who like it when the currency is strong, making imported goods cheap, and producers, who like it when the currency is weaker, making their simply that a strong dollar was in the best interests of the United States, so But that doesn't mean that the United States needs to be too obsessed with the recent fall of the dollar against the yen. In the first place, currency actually grew in the last quarter, albeit at a minuscule rate). In the second place, the dollar has remained strong against the world's other major currencies. So concerns that a weak dollar will spark inflationary pressures becoming too strong when their economy is still barely limping along. Much of Japan's industrial production remains concentrated in export industries, and a can't act to manipulate interest rates, since rates are already near zero.) that would not be a bad thing. Japan remains caught in a liquidity trap, which means that even though money is effectively free, people are not using it to invest or spend. One way of encouraging them to do so is to make the cost of not spending higher than the cost of saving, which is to say making a For all this, though, we need to stop expecting the Bank of Japan to step in: It is not interested in taking action either to spark growth or drive down it does not believe the admittedly heretical view that sometimes a little inflation is not a bad thing. So if the United States is counting on the bank to help save the dollar, it should stop and look to something else. Maybe we women's fault. She conducted a wide range of interviews over the last few years appears on two fronts. One involves "utilitarian masculinity," which is the pride of self men feel thanks to their skills, their commitments to their work, and to other men in the course of accomplishing a task. The other sort of masculinity she calls "ornamental," and it is just that, the ornaments of utilitarian male is a producer, the ornamental male is a consumer. changes in work that more largely frame today's capitalism. This is a intangibles of information and connections rather than making solid things, a world in which the craftsman who nurtures a skill over his lifetime is out of place. Correspondingly, male consumers are being sold fickle and impossible face creams, and similar goods now change like women's hemlines, offering no cigar lie in the realm of fantasy for most men struggling to make ends version of Demon Capitalism. But she is too good an interviewer to be trapped even when the shipbuilders have come to the very end of their employment; their craft pride transcends any whining about being capitalism's victims. No more does the ornamental male wear his jewelry of self comfortably; the buffed pecs men's section are sources of anxiety rather than pleasure. argument is that she, unlike many feminist writers, has a real feel for male bonding, and for the need of men to feel they can hold their heads up with generation, she reaches out to understand the bonds forged by the violence of men at war. Above all, while she rejects the notion that the crisis of utilitarian masculinity in the workplace has resulted from the gains that many women employees have been insensitive to the confusions of self that The very openness and depth of her interviewing poses really a book about maleness, or is it a reflection in the lives of men of are largely in short supply, or supplied in a fashion that can give no real standard" [p.505]. But the interviews she conducts, as with the Promise fathers and husbands ought to deal with the complexities of parenting and issue, I think; the consumer culture has trivialized adult experiences of responsibility, flattened out intimacy so that it appears a zone in which people, women as well as men, are pulled between self development and to show sex is anything but the "gold standard" for a man; the inchoate but strong impulse to break free is what really drives the male character). a mythical time when they knew where they belonged. But that longing for a lost this brings us back to the issue of capitalism. The disturbances of work and they cut across the boundaries of gender, and they transcend sexual vanity. penalty existing as they do cheek by jowl in my life, I consider them to be perfectly compatible and cohesive elements of a unified world view. Or maybe see that I agree even less with myself, in that I don't actually think that the regarding their portrayals by the mass media are really of comparable weight, seeing as only one of these special interests is allied with an extraordinarily wealthy institution with one of the most coherent and cooperative global course, the Catholic Church. The New York Post reported yesterday (and is a Soviet apologist. The question is, is he now or has he ever been a great Pretty much everyone agrees that Grass is not a great novelist now. Nothing disquisition on the perfidy of women (Grass' leftism does not extend to feminism) that is narrated by a fish and continues through centuries, with the end of mankind, with the German chancellor riding through the forest in were roaming around the poisoned trees." ("This typically German combination of literature plausible after the Holocaust had made it impossible. Specifically, said the Academy, The Tin Drum brought German literature back to life "after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." This statement harks back serve the needs of moral truth and poetic perception." throwing himself down cellar stairs. Thereafter he plays a tin drum in lieu of speaking aloud and, when anyone tries to take it away, screams so shrilly that he shatters glass all around him. Kept home from school, he becomes an confusing the marching band, so that everyone waltzes off. The second scene suicide in his store, while storm troopers rampage around his corpse, poking it with puppets and dropping their pants to shit on the floor. not a critic, a participant who neither is nor isn't a responsible party, he's obliquely, through explosive bursts of irreverent language, and by dint of the neighbor who also took part in the great national pogrom, though he wasn't in the book in German, but those who have say the writing is stuffed with Catholic litany to the impersonal tone of case histories to slang to dialect But does relentless, even brilliant, irony remain an adequate response to literature's relationship to the Holocaust, in which she accuses Grass of a and insensitivity to those who suffered and died, evident in a language where silence is veiled in verbal dexterity and a creative exuberance rooted in through an unsympathetic portrayal of its perpetrators as well as through macabre does come off as weirdly timid. Compare the eeriest passages of The names those crimes or explores their existence, and seems so focused on the book feel more like a step on the way to something than like the thing whether Grass really was the savior of German literature that people were come up with an adequate description of the brutality of German society had in many ways brutalized him: "Grass," he writes, "is nearly always too long; nearly always too loud." But, he concluded, "Totalitarianism makes provincial. the price German literature has to pay for its years in isolation." In short, The Tin Drum did restore German literature to the world and the world to German literature. But like Grass himself, what once seemed a masterwork has Chatterbox continues to monitor Weekly World News to see what kind of publisher week includes the headlines, "Man Turns Into a Werewolf at Planetarium Lunar claim? Memo to the White House: It's been Chatterbox's understanding that you come down pretty hard on anyone who tries to use the president's image in a World News is intended to be). Are you going to come down on the former deputy treasury secretary? Or are you afraid of offending a potential boroughs are one hell of a parish. I fear, though, I don't even know what how the Goths fare who have a parody of the Christian fish on their cars with admire his media campaigning, and current politicians could learn a lot from always been a lot of small planted gossip stories. One of these turns up in the try. He not only has his own ego willing him to succeed, but also Although you may not be aware of it, the standard line of the average conspiracy debunker is that the conspirators are not smart or organized enough to hold the plot together. I think it's one of the tacks already, aren't I?" I must admit, however, that I may have been wrong about asleep. The teaser was "whose husband may run for president." The tease started problems of the presidency continued to loom. They were seeking early befuddled old huckster's more endearing qualities. You are absolutely right opposition to the death penalty must exist "cheek by jowl." The modern world comes at us as a randomly proportioned cocktail of the portentous, the terrifying, and the trivial. Although it may seem to some like ersatz sophistication, the only way I can find to process the torrent of information to which I find myself constantly exposed is with a trash aesthetic. While all alien eyeballs, and I simply have to have one, all prevent my perspectives from succumbing to the kind of cultural isolation and spiteful tunnel vision that has become the hallmark of modern political discussion. Weekly just describes as "jagged and flashy," but that's beside the point.) right, your side wrong" makes a marketable media commodity? Unfortunately homie can't play that, and I don't think, dear, Mim, you can either. We both still think too much, and are even willing to lower our sophistication, no matter how ersatz, to the childlike simplicity of asking what's wrong with this picture committed Democrat, Republican, liberal, compassionate conservative, or whatever. My politics are, in fact, much more murky. (In the privacy of night, to the most powerful post on the planet simply because he had the most for the New World Order or the infiltrating aliens. Oh yes, easy to dismiss and the downsized castoffs whose manufacturing jobs have been sold south to Third World cheap labor. Refuge in paranoid fantasy because reality is devoid of hope creates that highly fertile soil where seeds of the most dangerous kind can germinate. The next administration is going the need all the brilliance, attributes, if genuine, from any quarter and attached to just about any track unseen, had provoked. We're talking about a fury so fierce (it has been picture's new distributor is Lion's Gate Films) have braced themselves for more noise and death threats. The only silver lining, said Smith, was that he'd the Catholic League mad at you, but you don't want to have the mayor of New Finally seeing the movie, I find it hard not to share Smith's perplexity. It country. It's supremely moving. True, it's also raucous, bloody, smutty, and Yet the qualities that make Dogma seem a work of irreverence are precisely those that make it so spiritually reanimating. The film has been made by an artist for whom questions of faith are central to daily life. It seems only logical, then, not to segregate those questions from that life but to weave them in with the filmmaker's other obsessions: friendship, lust, drinking, love of trashy horror flicks, and the compulsion to sit around should not be represented by gory images of his earthy demise. After all: "He plans to reconsecrate his church so that anyone who passes through its archway will be officially cleansed of sin and entitled to enter heaven. This attracts problem, then, is the tension between dogma and God's will. If the angels (who become serial killers on their trek to New Jersey, gorily murdering Ten Commandments violators as a kind of last hurrah), succeed in their mission, God will be shown to be fallible, the center will not hold, and the apocalypse will Representatives of the Devil, naturally, do all they can to make that conversations with sundry mortals, angels, and demons about her loss of faith. The complaints about Catholic dogma are voiced by Rock's liberal Apostle, who argues that what matters most is faith and not the rituals that are supposed to So yes, Dogma is critical of organized religion. But why not regard it as the constructive criticism of a believer? Smith described it as "kicking that fun is grounded in a fervent respect for their existence and power. In the Smith believes that the Catholic League, which is authorized by neither the would have slipped by unnoticed in any event. Another deeply devout and didn't take it any better when told of the painful destiny that awaited him: "I had to deliver the news to a scared child who only wanted to play with other children." There are people who find threatening the idea that no serious It's the atheists and agnostics who have the easiest time making movies meanwhile, get crucified. "I tried to do something good and got hassled for and dick jokes." An amusing series of titles that open the film now urge the on religion but as a reverent goof. But he's worried about the "good better buy himself a flak jacket. Once they see it, he said, their minds Don't drink that coffee, man, you just got us off to a good start. Really yet to be recognized by the West as a defining, driving political force in the Did you see the Page One piece in the New York Times yesterday by how these two are not as dissimilar as Bush wants us to think they are. God, his campaign is smart. I did a profile of him for Esquire last year and His plan saw Bush as a sunny conservative, someone who could wink and reassure to beguile and soothe the rest of us. Rove understands, as few Republicans do, strong because it is very aware of how out of touch social conservatism is in the 1990's. So rather than wait for some Democrat to say that, they'll put Tom save congressional seats as well. So what's the problem? It's we in the media who are flummoxed by the seeming "conflict." But really they are two sides of chief (another blow to the old Protestant Establishment and another victory for one point, but he didn't say a word about how his life had been changed. So I will be gossiping about these maneuverings and the should rise to a higher sphere and talk literature. I wanted to take advantage of your presence here and ask you about the form of this book, rather than the Meanwhile, both of us are frustrated because the analytical or polemical conclusion to his book is so short. It seems to me this is characteristic of book writing these days. We are in a great age of nonfiction narrative writing. There have been many great biographies written over the past couple of decades narratives. Many great and influential books were written during that time: weren't as many influential, popular but intellectual books of that sort. There nonfiction books are celebrity books or narratives. I think some of this has to do with the declining prestige of the intellectual. In the '50s and early '60s, it seems to me, intellectuals were confident of their social roles. There were lost its confidence and broad vision over the next decades. Academics started doing more professionalized stuff that people like me never read. And The narratives make for better reads, but I do miss write. Or more properly, I wish that the books that follow in that tradition were getting more attention and more sales these days. Maybe people have less faith in the social sciences as well and so just want to hear about stories and have been active during this whole period. Is my description of the trends in failing to distinguish between fact and fiction. Yet I think Morris' technique day thought they understood him, but they kept forgetting that he was an actor. ordinary man. Yet extraordinary things happened in the 1980s: the taming of inflation, the revival of economic growth, the technological revolution, the fellow perform such extraordinary feats? Morris' biography contributes little prejudices of the intelligentsia, Morris in his book and in interviews has Yet it was this very yahoo who in the early 1980s repeatedly predicted the fall of communism. He did this at a time when there was complete agreement learned pundits, including the entire Soviet Studies community, did not know? important question, the wise men proved to be wrong and the dummy proved to be Here's another question. Why did the computer revolution occur in the 1980s? the tax cuts, deregulation, privatization of government assets, and the necessary political and social framework for the silicon revolution? Many computer revolution may have happened, but it wouldn't have happened as fast as it did. So what does Morris think about this? Nothing. It's not that he adopts a position I disagree with. He seems unaware that this is an important subject personal life. Even here there are no big revelations. Morris speculates that don't like to think that their husbands wanted to marry their first wives. joining the Communist Party but was turned down because they regarded him as a would have been an unbelievably good catch, and if he had stayed with this sorry lot, he would have been their best chance to win mainstream Morris' failure is symptomatic of the failure of the intelligentsia in this spotlight on places still unlit by the sunshine of our present prosperity." Critics on the right dismissed the tour as a simplistic photo op, and Peter problem because his Administration has a vested interest in the notion that Post interprets the tour as a plug for a "Third Way" strategy of using tax incentives for businesses Post faults her not for reversing course but for endorsing what it deems an applauds her for "breaking the mold" by running for complains that both her campaign travel and that of her campaign will probably end up paying for the subsidized travel says a them liable for damages for conspiring to conceal how addictive and harmful cigarettes are. This increases the chances that the companies will have to pay pols have chickened out of the race in deference to a carpetbagger. Political analysts noted that whatever her drawbacks, she appeals to soccer Benjamin Smith (who had changed his name to August because he thought Benjamin Smith's past but little history of violence. The shooting spree has made the World Church of the Creator, the hate group to which Smith was linked, the new Times reported that he got "favorable treatment and uncommon attention" when he was admitted reported that Bush nearly flunked the Air Force pilot aptitude test but "scored high as a future leader." Bush says he "served my country" and got no special treatment. Pundits and Bush's Republican rivals are largely blowing off the is driving me berserk. He changes religious beliefs like some people change clothes. This might be only peculiar (and therefore tolerable), but he expects me to accompany him, as well as get into the philosophy of the moment. I really do not have time for this and, to be truthful, do not share his passion for religious theory. I gave it a try but can no longer play along. How would you are interested in maintaining the relationship, you need to spell out that lovers need not share every interest, and that his searching for new belief you had a religion that you started with and said you wished to retain but, failing that, tell the theologian that you are making a new beginning: that he has your blessings, pardon the expression, to pursue the religion of his choice services with him, tell him that was Zen, this is now. years is starting to make me wonder if she is mature enough to even be married. She spends more time with her girlfriends, most of whom are from high school, than she does with me. (We have no children.) I wind up doing many things alone on weekends and in the evenings because she always has plans with "the girls." My wish is to make this marriage work because I love my wife, but I am feeling Well, that seems not to be the case in your life. Your wife sounds immature to with her choices. Ask if she wishes to be married. Ask if she has complaints way or the other, you have to resolve the situation. but have never found themselves in stable situations. All three have been bankrupt at one point during the past three years. All three apportion a great deal of guilt to my father, who did not win custody of them when they were younger. Their mother was not a good one, and I recognize that they have emotional scars. However, my father never fails to bail them out of a financial crisis. While my father has done well, he is by no means wealthy. I know he has dipped into his retirement fund several times to help my siblings out. that while my childhood was far more "normal," I demonstrate more responsibility in my financial obligations (school loans, etc.) than my elder siblings and, frankly, would be embarrassed to ask my father for money because I couldn't get a handle on life. My father came from a poor family and I would like him to enjoy his retirement. Is it appropriate for me to say anything to him regarding this matter? I do love my elder sibs but feel they are exploiting your concerns. Do articulate that you do not feel competitive with your guilt. Also mention that bailing out these boys may not be in their best interests. He cannot help but be touched if you tell him of your concerns for may not. Once you've brought the subject up, however, know that you can take it regard responsibility in a different way than the three boys you write about. previous psych major, and an avocational singer, I agree with your advice to in college, why not take a minor in music or even double major in psychology has this wonderful opportunity to increase her musical skills, develop her talent, and make important connections that could lead to jobs. Why not take the four years to do all that and then "run away" to pursue her dreams, fully One Who Has Her Singing Dream and Her Psychology Job "You have to be true to yourself as a writer, but I hotel ballroom a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean, pondering the question of whether people who make violent movies are morally responsible for and couldn't wait to escape into the waves crashing outside. On the opposite end of the stage was Motion Picture product to children. (For this we need a federal investigation? Does anyone don't cause cancer" posture, studio heads have declined credit for encouraging on violence in the media, letting slip their best chance to get out in front of turn down the president of the United States at your own peril," says one movie reiterations of their commitment to shareholders, the Writers Guild talk revealed a creative community roiled by emotions ranging from angry defiance to extreme remorse to abject terror. Sparring over their role in instigating overwhelmingly liberal community, happy to jettison the Second Amendment, is yourself as a writer" remarks. "The people who say it's all our fault are extremists, and I think the people who say we have no responsibilities are also extremists. If we're really looking for the truth, we'll find it somewhere in that people choose to ignore because it's really not lucrative to obey them. And we have become very spoiled because we enjoy this freedom, and we don't want anybody on the outside telling us what to do." youth groups. "Here you had the most wholesome, upstanding media you can imagine, and meanwhile offstage is the most mechanized bloodbath in history," he said. He spread the moral responsibility around, noting that legally the studio is the author of a movie. "I tell you, every picture I have done has come out more violent than what I wrote. I have sat at the screening of one of my movies and been stunned at the level of mayhem that somebody put onscreen. So now do I feel guilty?" He didn't answer his own question. parental neglect, breakdown of education and community, and the Internet as "There's no one person that can be held responsible for this," she said. "But for us to sit here and say 'feed 'em a steady diet of whatever they want,' and make sense out of something that will never make sense. People read The the heroine for shooting a male attacker. "I had hoped for a completely different reaction from the audience, a realization that this character had just sealed her fate in a horrible way. I was terrified. And I realized that I challenged herself to write a movie with no guns in it. "It's harder," she "Do we want the world to be as frightened as so many of us impose this gun culture on the world? They all want to be like us! I don't you say unpunished violence it reminds me of the old green code." Undeterred, you get the audience so involved in hating that you scream inside for the hero to demolish him. Creatively we can find ways to get the same kind of tensions knowing that no discussion of violence in art is complete without an invocation of the Bard. "It spends all of its time making us hate, hate that villain. And Constitution that guarantees all others. And it's not easy to be a First Amendment person, because then you have to allow into this marketplace that which you believe to be soiling and meretricious and tawdry and unwholesome and sometimes vile. And then sometimes people get so vexed, they want to call their congressman and say, 'pass a law to stop all this stuff.' But I always say to this person, be wary and be cautious. Before you make that call, remember that when a tyrant first appears he always comes as your protector." Hoots of colleagues that those who have abused their absolute freedoms by making movies era of unregulated bliss is over. "All of us have to understand that we are rendered articulate and righteous defenses of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. But none of us should leave the room without an understanding that for parents all over the country, the fear is real, the problems of The ballroom emptied, leaving the day's topic frustratingly properly give more weight to the safety of its citizens than to free speech. pointed out, "The thing that is rarely mentioned is that because this is a featuring guns in its marketing materials; and studios have canceled the little bit less finger pointing and a little more assumption of responsibility for a problem whose causes are many, it would be easier to have faith. presidential candidacy this year is represented by an official Web site. (Click the candidates themselves? They all give lip service to the idea of the information revolution, and especially to the quantities of cash it's pumping into the economy. But do they know how to use personal computers? Do literacy to all the presidential candidates. With a touch of naive optimism, we addresses for each of these campaigns and shipped our questionnaires off. The would immediately download our questionnaire, hit "Reply," answer its not terribly demanding questions on the spot, and ship back the answers within moments. To encourage a prompt response, we assured all candidates that we didn't intend to judge harshly those who displayed poor Web literacy, truly "frictionless" response (that is, responded to our questionnaire before in the candidate's own words. The only candidate we spoke with directly daily to track how the controversy surrounding the historical speculation in his new book A Republic, Not an Empire was affecting sales. respondents are to be believed, there is no such thing as a presidential initiative to try to reach him by phone). On the other hand, it's fairly common entire campaign staff and by political supporters, would be spam bait.) are the survey results (click on the graphic for an enlargement): press has reacted with consternation this week to an extraordinary attack on concession to concession, like the stripper, except that she becomes more Perhaps that would embarrass him into retiring, having plumbed depths of behavior unworthy of a scout guide, let alone the defense minister of a country to volunteer for national service. Under this plan, army recruiters would deadlock at the United Nations over the future of sanctions and disarmament grandchildren, had her femaleness confirmed by medical tests. From Phoenix, her against children watching too much television. In an editorial on the subject, it said the academy's recommendation "that no child under two should watch television and that sets should be banned from the bedrooms of even older children represents the gravest challenge to the Western way of life since the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's his own tale of consumer woe. Many of you might find this a shocking statement, but even the Shopping Avenger sometimes gets smacked upside the head by the evil forces of rampant capitalism. Granted, this seldom happens when the Shopping Avenger is wearing his cape and codpiece and special decals, but the Shopping Avenger seldom ventures outside the Great Hall of Consumer Justice in his cape and codpiece and special decals, on account of the fact that he metropolitan magazine, and it is in this guise that the Shopping Avenger sometimes finds himself holding the short end of the consumer stick. Whatever feeling ill and generally fed up at the end of his trip and so decided to upgrade himself, using his own money, to business class. The total cost of the late to make the connection. However, the Shopping Avenger and several other was no time to make the connection, which was leaving from a different because the originating flight did not depart on time. The Shopping Avenger received no answer to this statement. Instead, the Shopping Avenger was booked You, of course, know what happened next. The Shopping passengers would be allowed to use the telephone. When the Shopping Avenger should pay for the call, he was told that pay phones could be found outside the little company, and so the Shopping Avenger was given no recourse but to invoke the power of his high office. The Shopping Avenger asked this nasty lady if she had ever heard of the Shopping Avenger. To the Shopping Avenger's dismay, this foremost consumer advocate (this is a lie, but she's English, so what does she know?) and that the Shopping Avenger would hear about this treatment and seek should never travel without their codpiece under their pants. There is only one airline the Shopping Avenger believes understands the fundamentals of customer service, and that is Southwest outrage. The following letter contains perhaps the funniest story the Shopping They had to rent a bigger truck to me, which, of course cost more and at that reservation should have been honored so long as he provided us with his credit to explain the inexplicable. The Shopping Avenger has received 164--no One more thing before we get to our tale of rabbinical woe: the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax answer, which is, of course: "Depends upon how many Turtles you wanna wax," in many of you wrote in with the more or less correct answer, the Shopping Avenger is unable to award the contest prize, which was to be a year's supply of Now to our hapless rabbi, Rabbi S., who wrote the Shopping the cruelty and ignorance of employees who are, in theory, hired by the representative if he could leave his luggage by the counter for his wife to check in while he parked the car, to which he received a positive response and left to go park. No one told him, though, that he must first show his once he left, telling the wife that "security reasons" forbade him from checking the luggage of ticket holders who were not present. But then she told security issue," Rabbi S. wrote the Shopping Avenger, "if they're ready to take bags. She was then told that she would miss the flight, and then her children before the flight was scheduled to depart. His wife handed him one baby and took the other to the gate. "The woman at the counter treated me like a piece of dirt," he wrote. "First she said she's not sure whether the flight is still open. Then she took more than five minutes to look around and find someone who wife went to the gate and the people at the gate told her there's plenty of Alas, my wife didn't realize that [I] could not come because of the luggage issue and the haughtiness of the people downstairs." wouldn't make this flight and that he should book himself on another. His wife people would have been competent enough to tell me that I should show my license and courteous enough to put the luggage on for my wife, then I would be Customer Relations representative has been communicating with the rabbi on this incident and is sending him the difference between that ticket and the cost of behavior that often makes the already unpleasant air travel experience In the next episode, the Shopping Avenger will tell the story of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that seems to actually care about customer service. But the Shopping Avenger needs your help! Keep those airline me say again, the Shopping Avenger does not fix computers. social policy for a small magazine of opinion, but right now I am driving from backseat, stuffed with books. Her 13-inch television is in the trunk. On the futon, which I failed to convince her to throw in a Dumpster. The whole pile is run through four men, including the male protagonist, who wrote about social policy for a small magazine of opinion. I trashed the novel when the one person I showed it to was, how to put it, less than fully supportive. "You have no idea how to write fiction," she said. "For instance, you have this that! You have to flesh him out a bit! Give him some real human qualities." doing it alone. Doing it with another person is that much better. True, I used to be interested in E, but that was years ago, and we're now just good friends. I have no desire or expectation that anything romantic will happen on this journey. Please remember this, as it is an important point. No expectations. to eat tofu on this trip." I try to let her down gently, suggesting that while might not have the selection she has come to expect. impenetrability has been replaced by a thick, smooth gelatinous coating that is equally impenetrable. But I don't know for sure. I also know there are some to the Census Bureau, those cynical centrists are making the greatest strides thought it was the girls who got fucked that had the healthy glow." She also said she hasn't had sex in two years, which I didn't believe. But, come to most popular tourist attractions after extensive renovations. What going to be difficult and take a while for people to get this stuff," says government. "And for a significant percentage, they're never going to get it because they're cognitively impaired, they're too frail, or they just don't have the energy to invest in understanding these things." Who's never going to customer gets to run for president while they rot in a Fort Worth are never going to understand quantum mechanics. It's sad, in a way. If they harder for ordinary people to join in a class action suit but easier for giant oil companies to pump free oil from public land and sell it at a profit, airwaves at vast profits, for the entertainment of bored oil rig workers out in cast iron frame, even he can't understand why love is a crime, the sort of crime spelled out in a restraining order from some judge (NEEDS HIS GODDAMNED HEAD EXAMINED!!!!) who is oh so ready to ignore everything one person says and Medicare Rights Center, disagrees, "It's all incredibly complicated, not only for seniors but for everyone, including me." Or perhaps she agrees. It's very And so Medicare is launching "the biggest peacetime education program the federal government has ever undertaken." Features Geezer, the Old and Stupid Healthcare Baboon, a lovable mascot who'll travel to nursing homes and explain that what seems like a cold and heartless disdain; you tell me who said it about what, and then tell me your bankcard PIN hasn't seen. His response: cut off the museum's finances. National Endowment of the Humanities. And so he won't. The pleasantly varied News Quiz responses defy easy and reveal their secret debt to him on the final page. The cover book review scoffs at the misplaced sympathy for more often than they used to. Institutional investors insist upon sacking nonperforming bosses, and board members fear that lackluster leadership will internal political turmoil. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in cover story investigates the quest for justice by the survivors of school son right from wrong. My son wasn't shooting people up." Parents of West meet its energy needs by burning fat. Many dieters have lost weight, but would eliminate Medicare, drive up insurance premiums for federal employees, Apocalypse catalyzed important historical events. The Crusades were launched to identification of the papacy with the Antichrist; and Christian fundamentalists expect the world to end during their lifetime. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay column questions the value of an Ivy League education. Research indicates that after adjusting for SAT scores, parents' income, and race, graduates of elite universities do not earn more than other college Gore opposed the war but enlisted in the Army. After his service, Bush lived off his savings, lounged around a singles apartment complex, and drank to excess. Gore, by contrast, smoked pot, worked construction, attended divinity authenticity and "amiable cleverness." Al Gore is portrayed as "severely cover story draws parallels between the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the impeachment crisis. Both issues were Republicans are turning their backs on arms control because of the mistaken reform, one of the industry's top priorities. Bush, who backs tobacco price cover story welcomes the defeat of the Comprehensive military and nuclear arsenal ensures global stability, treaties can't. Millennium is a business best seller. Marketplace Ministries provides workplace chaplains to firms such as Taco Bell franchises, which welcome religion in the kitchen because studies show that spiritual programs increase was inevitable and resisting a hike might hurt them in the next election. To make the bill palatable, the House leadership loaded it with tax breaks, currently reading forced the Shopping Avenger at gunpoint to read a series of withstand radiation, extreme heat and cold, hail, bear attacks, and Eyes thinking. Perhaps it is wrong, the Shopping Avenger thought, to complain about the petty insults and inconveniences of life in the materialistic '90s. The Shopping Avenger felt that perhaps he should counsel those who write seeking help to meditate, to accept bad service the way one accepts the change of seasons, and to extend a compassionate hand of forgiveness to those who provide or of the notion that there is more to life than the impatient acquisition of material goods. If the Shopping Avenger were not, for a superhero, extremely occasional correspondent to let go of his petty grievance and get a life. (For the complete back story, see "Shopping Avenger" column and one.) policy continue to pour in through the electronic mail. One correspondent, from the Shopping Avenger. He didn't believe such a thing would happen to him, store had many customers standing around looking frustrated. When we got to the front of the line, the clerk informed us that our 'reserved' truck had not yet been returned. We asked if we could rent one of the many trucks sitting idle in the parking lot. The clerk laughed and said the keys to those trucks were trucks to people who reserve trucks, but the Shopping Avenger is pleased to note that several correspondents have written in over the past month saying that, based on what they have read in this column, they will be taking their episode, but now on to this month's airline debacle. Before we begin, though, the Shopping Avenger nearly forgot to announce the winner of last month's contest, in which readers were asked to answer the question, "What's the difference between pests and airlines?" year's supply of Turtle Wax, and he will receive his prize just as soon as the Shopping Avenger figures out how much Turtle Wax actually constitutes a year's supply. The new contest question: How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply This month's airline in the spotlight is Southwest. Loyal readers will recall that last month the Shopping Avenger praised Southwest Airlines for its "sterling" customer service. This brought forth a small number of articulate dissensions. The most articulate, and the most troubling, came family (two really little kids included), we set down at Midway in a rainstorm. And waited for our bags. And waited for bags. And waited for bags." An hour later, M. says, the bags showed up, "soaked complicated, unclear, and confusing mechanism for filing a claim we experienced their destination, M. and her family made a terrible discovery, "We discovered had bled through down to the lower levels, destroying lots of other clothes. Obviously, our bags had just been sitting out on the runway in the rain. To This, of course, is where Shopping Avenger steps in. Shopping Avenger knows that Southwest is different from the average airline, in What I got at first, though, was a load of corporate which is consistent with all contracts of carriage at all airlines, requires that passengers file a report in person for lost or damaged luggage within four courtesy, took her report anyway and asked for follow up information and detailed receipts and photographs of the damage in order to make a claim. Harrumph, the Shopping Avenger says. It is a bad hair day at Southwest when its officials defend themselves by comparing their airline to other airlines. I forwarded this message to M., who replied: the airport. I didn't know until I opened the baggage at my hotel and saw the ruined stuff. (And it's worth noting that we had already waited for about an type of documentation. The baggage folks seemed pretty uninterested in all of actually served to anger M. more than the original problem. "Before, they had a mildly annoyed but loyal customer (who would have been placated by an apology and thrilled with some modest token of their regret). Now they have a Things do look bad for Southwest, don't they? The Shopping the Shopping Avenger was asking for "policy information." The Shopping Avenger Justice would, if this case were brought to trial, undoubtedly find for the plaintiff (the Shopping Avenger serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury in the But then she came through, provisionally, "Yep, you it's taken this long for her to get someone who can help, but we will take care hear whether Southwest makes good it promise to compensate M. and apologize to The story of M. reminds the Shopping Avenger of a central vain for Circuit City to repair his television. Televisions break, even bought the television, gave him a terrible runaround. The Shopping Avenger story. This is what he found: K. grew concerned, Tad the Deputy Avenger reports, after his television had been in the Circuit City shop for a week. When he called, he was told to "check back next week." When he asked if someone from the store could call him with more information, he was refused. Weeks went by. When K. told one Circuit City employee that he really would like to get his television back, the employee, K. says, asked him, "Don't you have another found out, at Circuit City. The case, K. was told by a Circuit City official, assured Deputy Avenger Tad that "We got to be a big and successful company by treating customers better than the other guy." The Shopping Avenger and his loyal sidekick would like to hear from other Circuit City customers: Does Circuit City, in fact, treat its customers better than the other guy? rabbi's travel plans, leaving the rabbi's wife crying at the airport. Find out Ban Treaty. The direct result of this vote was virtually nothing. No missiles were launched. No bombs were detonated. No agreements were voided. The treaty itself remained open to ratification. Instead, analysts agreed that the import of the vote lay in the "signal" it sent to foreign governments. At his news signal for good or ill. He chose both. While assuring other nations that the struggle between his two personalities, Policy Bill and Political Bill. Policy Bill strives for solutions and looks for deals. Political Bill strives for advantage and looks for fights. Policy Bill treats elections as a means to passing legislation. Political Bill treats legislation as a means to winning elections. Policy Bill wants arms control as an accomplishment. Political Bill wants it as a festering issue. Policy Bill wants to frame the treaty vote in a way that will calm the world by minimizing the perceived damage to arms Republicans said they voted against the treaty because it lacked adequate monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, wouldn't affect rogue states, and imposed too permanent a commitment on the United States to refrain from worked with them to amend it. By voting against it, were Republicans giving foreign regimes a "green light" to test nuclear weapons? No, they replied. They argued that the best safeguard against proliferation was the previously rejecting arms control? No, said the Republicans. They observed that pragmatic pacts, deemed this one unwise. "The leader of the nonproliferation effort over and hopefully to people around the world, that although there are not now sufficient votes in the Senate to ratify this test ban treaty, that does not mean that the cause of nuclear nonproliferation died on the Senate floor Congress," he went on. "We do want to signal to nations around the world in the States Senate are walking away from our responsibility to lead the effort" vote. Policy Bill played it down. "We will not abandon the commitments inherent in the treaty and resume testing ourselves," he told the world. "I call on from testing. I call on nations that have not done so to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And I will continue to do all I can to make that case to the Senate. When all is said and done, I have no doubt that the United commitment on nonproliferation." He concluded: "So I urge [other nations] not to overreact, to make clear their opposition to what the Senate did, but to Political Bill was determined to punish Republicans at the polls by depicting their vote as a repudiation of arms control. They had "betrayed the vision of leadership against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They are saying Political Bill's scare tactics destroyed Policy Bill's reassurances. "The administration is here, we support [the moratorium on] nuclear testing," said Policy Bill. Abruptly, Political Bill interjected, "Now, if we ever get a countries abandoning the Nonproliferation Treaty." Political Bill didn't care how these words affected world leaders. To him, the test ban treaty was just another wedge issue. That's why he opened his news conference not by distinguishing arms control as a transcendent responsibility but by lumping it together with budget politics: "In recent days, members of the congressional campaign ad endorsed by Senate Democrats and the White House, Vice President Al Gore warned, "This vote goes against the tide of history." The Senate had calling it "a definitive vote that said, 'Around the world, we relegate the next decade, [who] almost assuredly will continue now with nuclear Foreign governments and the media were already inclined to interpret the vote encouraged that interpretation. The vote "halted the momentum" toward nuclear arms control and "further weakened the already shaky standing of the United States as a global moral leader," the New York Times concluded in a Times story added that "fears have been heightened by what looks like an said the Senate was "signaling an ominous retreat from the world." nuclear age is that the survival of humankind has rested as much on international perception as on reality. Thirty years ago, it rested on the perception that we were willing to build bombs and deploy them. Today it rests ability to sustain that perception despite the test ban's defeat. If only he responsible for the slaughter, and another blamed the culture. Since the guns question has been debated into the ground, I confine myself here to the culture The culture that was blamed for Columbine was never clearly defined. Its nature was suggested by terms such as "the '60s," was told to clean up its act, and theater owners were urged to enforce the ratings system, to avoid exposing young people to sex and violence. were categorized as "hate" crimes. Hate crimes include crimes not only against an individual known personally to the perpetrator or against whom he has a although there is probably hate involved.) They are crimes in protest against the culture, intended to make a statement of their hostility to the that very culture of acceptance that infuriates these madmen. the other hand, shot people they knew, some of whom they had real or imagined suburban life. To that degree Columbine was also a hate crime. According to one poll, in the two weeks bracketing the swing is commonly attributed to shock over the shooting. While I can understand the national bewilderment the event caused, I cannot understand why it should be interpreted as a judgment against the way the country is going. Two This is not a sign that something is going wrong, except for the ready murders linked to hate crimes with the murders linked to street crimes, the most obvious thing you notice is how the number of street killings dwarfs that of hate killings. But despite this, street killings do not cause revulsion question about the media than hate killings do because they more resemble motives are pragmatic, not symbolic. Also, these murders are marked by indifference: The perpetrator does not value life, and he feels neither guilt nor glory at having killed someone. The hate killer values life and thinks he is committing a great deed and making a grand statement when he kills. Despite these similarities, one should be cautious about behavior. They learn these ideas at home, in school, at the shopping mall, on the street corner, and everywhere else where they observe life and people. Young people in the ghetto don't have to go to the movies to hear shooting. What they see on the screen seems real to them because it conforms to what they see in life. Otherwise it would have no more effect on them than seeing the glorifies murder, at least more so than in other countries. If we want to engaging in orgies of violence.) We have to try to do something about the real world in which children are growing up. The crucial part of that world is the home where parents relate to children. What to do about that, I don't know. Probably there is little that public policy can do. But the fixations on the media and on the '60s culture do not help in the search for remedies. the "sex and violence" mantra. Sex on the screen, or the abundance and explicitness of it, has only a distant connection, if any, with the homicides channel that shows the most violence is the History Channel, with its endless replaying of World War II: I have not heard anyone say that is an encouragement and a population of supporters which they have moved into exile with them," says the paper. "The already tiny country will be, in effect, partitioned, with paper said, "Whatever the source, it was clear that food was being sold to the do with their limited resources" than to protect journalists. He also claimed "unmanageable. News events get distorted under the weight of them. They bring an unacceptable increase in the risk of casualties from land mines, sniper fire papers around the world contrasted China's ambiguous response to last week's international rescue efforts by refusing permission to fly through mainland that it needed cash donations rather than rescue assistance, the mainland's Red international status. Such a border would be easy to fortify and control. It which holds any person from that region responsible for the actions of soldiers said the museum was seen as "vital in helping the city to shake off its Full said to be too expensive and has been attacked for playing down the "sex and about emboldens me to ask perhaps a rude question. Is it bad manners for a guest to excuse himself from the dinner table, go to the small bathroom off the does just that. Do you think he should wander upstairs, and if not, at least be Hollering from the loo is not acceptable. When you issue the next invitation, tell him you'd like it if he would take a timeout from the badinage when he needs to leave the table. Tell him it's a little idiosyncrasy of yours that She is a good friend, and I will be sorry to see her leave. Now I need to ask another person to be in the wedding, which is two months away. The person I want to ask is actually my best friend, and she lives in another state. She already knows that I had asked someone else to stand up for me, so my question is: How do I now ask her to be my matron of honor? She is really the person I of state. It is not immediately obvious why she wouldn't have been asked in the back for the festivities is for some reason impossible for the current M. of friend. Simply tell her she was your first choice, but you were trying to spare she were able to stand up for you. If she is a real friend and can spare the figure out your third choice. Perhaps someone local. politics. I don't wish to be specific, but a prominent national figure was compared to the "Antichrist." I am reluctant to identify the target specifically, because I allow for honest differences of opinion. My disclaimer notwithstanding, does one have to be a Christian to comment on the Antichrist comparison? One part of me says the allusion is nonreligious, having to do with I should shy away from discussing the hagiography (or whatever) of a different faith. Please let me know how Prudence would have reacted. such a part of ancient and modern thought that reference to him has little to do with whether one is a believer or not. That particular phrase has become way.) As for the whispering voice that's telling you one should shy away from discussing faiths to which one does not belong, tell it that there is even a college course dealing with this subject. It is called Comparative Religion. In through parking lots. I have even seen one or two flip me the bird because I happened to obey the law, even stopping at the stop signs, which annoyingly slows them down. Believe me, it takes great willpower to not chase after them and shake them until their teeth rattle. Yes, you have people who take handicapped spots when they have no right to be parking there, but even worse are these crazies who think that parking lots are just enclosed in a serious accident in a parking lot several years ago because of one of these crazies. He slammed into her, then had the nerve to get out of his car, lie down on the ground, and say he had whiplash. He blamed her! She had to go first by speeding around her. The point is that some young jerk almost killed her in a parking lot because he didn't want to wait. How do we deal with these one of those irritants that is very difficult to redress. Our whole society, not just drivers, has become increasingly impatient and always in a hurry. Road rage is one byproduct of the behavior you are concerned about. Defensive driving is probably the most constructive thing you can do. Whenever you see a person driving erratically, reduce your own speed and try to get out of the way. If you think someone is breaking a law, take down the license plate number and call the police. It would be nice if all parking lots would put in those bumps to make slower speeds mandatory, but that is not going to happen. Alas, discussions among my friends, we still have not come to any conclusion about whether we would live with someone before we married them. Do you think that living with someone before marriage gives the marriage a more stable foundation on which to build, or is cohabitation better left until after marriage? We were considering the divorce rate these days and whether this is a significant variable in the increase, or has society changed its values? of hybrid of "To be or not to be" and "Which came first, the chicken or the rule or an opinion. This is one of those decisions that two people must make based on their values, circumstances, upbringing, and beliefs. Living together without benefit of clergy can be destructive, instructive, useful, a mess, or a "That was a miserable year, when I watched a great man, a man I love with him. Now the party is trying to prevent him from jumping ship. Just because you're repositioning yourself as compassionate, doesn't mean you want are in progress or even contemplated, these News Quiz Action Figures will be hitting Toys "R" Us just in time for some annual event traditionally cheapened dark night of the soul when he watched his father's approval rating fall from "Most trout fishermen practice 'catch and release,' although it is true that some still catch and eat. Barbaric isn't it? Almost as bad as running cows down a chute and hammering their brains out."-- Brad weekend recreation, I practice "run them down a chute and hammer their brains intend that any of the information contained in its books or videos be used for criminal purposes. In specific cases involving such misuse, Paladin will "EXPLOSIVE BOOKS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. In light of the current political and legal climate in this country, we have concluded that it is no longer feasible to publish or sell certain titles on explosives, demolitions, improvised not serve its customers poorly prepared food made with inferior ingredients; environment from irresponsible oil operations there, the paper said in its main in their letter of compliance failures, falsified safety and inspection records, intimidation of workers, and persistent violations of procedures and compliance manuals and codes of conduct and to "tone down, alter or delete negative reports, including internal audits and surveillance reports." personal interest in the row might yield progress." no alternative but to seriously engage in bilateral discussions with are "in the process of trying to proclaim victory once again." To counter this, fighting and publish it in the media and on the Internet. The people of said. To sustain the myth that only unsupported mujahideen guerrillas were by their generals, their services unacknowledged; even a decent burial has been denied them," the paper said. "A nation which repudiates its war dead will have to correct that image and prove to the world that agreements signed by a duty and international obligation to honor treaties signed by its August. The plan would culminate at the end of the year in a settlement" or, failing that, a declaration of principles outlining the steps create a new atmosphere of trust by unilaterally dismantling the outposts since it is not understood, is the more likely to have broad, negative Morning News presented Bush's side of the story. Did Bush use his connections to dodge the draft? That depends on the standards by which his conduct should be measured, which in turn are the subject of a vigorous spin war. Morality vs. legality. The moral argument against sons of the elite who their connections to leapfrog ordinary Guard applicants, leaving those focused its story on the alleged unfairness of Bush's "quick" admission but concedes that "there is no evidence of illegality or regulations broken to the moral question is tricky but the legal question is open and shut, Bush's supporters want to focus on the latter. So far, the media are obliging them. "If [Bush] didn't do anything illegal or didn't break any regulations, how that "it's serious in the sense that others probably had to go into the regular service because of the favoritism that he got." But that answer didn't cut it. Preference vs. qualification. The Times constantly compares Bush's experience to that of other Guard applicants. "Although getting into the state units was difficult for most others, Bush was soon in the Guard," says the lieutenant" and "was able to jump into the officer ranks without the exceptional credentials many other officer candidates possessed." The News adds that in the pilot aptitude section of the written test for examined relative to other applicants', his story looks fishy. response is to shift the analysis from a relative to an absolute standard, from whether others were more qualified or more slowly admitted to whether he met the Guard's minimum "qualifications." "I met all the criteria, I met all the he was treated. Bush wants the story to be about whether he pulled strings. That's because if your dad is the local congressman, you can get special treatment just by introducing yourself. You don't have to pull strings. The Times says Bush "received favorable treatment," and "doors were opened" for him. Note the passive voice. The Times found "no sign that political influence helped Bush along," and the News adds, "Officers who discussion. "The favoritism was all on the side of the military reaching out to question pundits are too coarse to contemplate is whether there's a zone between passive innocence and active manipulation. The Guard official to whom Bush applied for admission told the Times that Bush mentioned his father right away: "He said he wanted to fly just like his daddy." Bush's spokesman pointed out that Bush, "because of his circumstances, made an ideal subject for National Guard publicity." In short, Bush knew the deck was stacked in his title looks better. The Times focuses on Bush's location, warning that has several weapons with which to combat this characterization. Since pundits are journalists, they find Gore's portrayal of his journalism as military service somewhat preposterous. Gore served "as a reporter, not as a combatant," he tried to volunteer for a Guard program that sent several pilots to Southeast unqualified. Whether Bush deserves admiration for volunteering or deserves suspicion because he knew he would be rejected can be debated.) But Bush's most Bush never had to fight, but he did fly fighter jets, and "fighter pilot" How you served vs. whether you served. Investigative journalists and critics of Bush assume that his Guard service should be compared to an the draft or sign up, and I signed up." After the Times story broke this weekend, Bush told reporters, "I asked to become a pilot," "I served my has several decisive advantages on this question. Most people of his generation know someone who avoided the draft in a less respectable way than Bush did. Meanwhile, voters younger than Bush know little of the military and therefore tend to be impressed that he served at all rather than concerned with how he the Reserve Officers Training Corps to escape the draft, then backed out and noble. "A lot of other people did not do nearly as much as he did," argued "Here is a fellow that went and flew airplanes and learned to be a pilot and was prepared to go, if he had to go. That is a lot." winning the war over the draft? Since the talking heads agree with Bush's a cushy way to be a patriot." Perhaps the story worth telling about Bush's military service is not whether it was cushy or patriotic, but how it was family without an appreciation of "family values," I decided I didn't have much use for my relationships with my siblings. Both parents are deceased, and after numerous efforts to get along with my sibs, I just quit having any contact with them. This has alleviated a lot of stress in my life, and I really don't miss them at all. I have a great group of friends whom I consider my family. They are there for me like my actual siblings never were, and they understand the I run into people who, after knowing me for a while, are dumbfounded to find out I am not an only child, and they act like there's something wrong with me family!" I just figure I feel better mentally without the connection, and I should keep things the way they are. But all these "family" people think I should call and reconcile with them. Is there something wrong with me? Just situation, though not with your particulars. If a relationship is troublesome or destructive for whatever reason, and it's comfortable to sever communication, there is no reason to stay yoked to a bad situation as though "outsiders" offering the advice that you should just fix it up. Perhaps, in your case, it would be simpler to tell new friends that you are an only awkward conversations. Nowhere is it written that children of the same mother and father have anything more in common than parents, and people who push the man who, unlike myself, still resides under the watchful eye of his parental unit. Although his parents are very open and mostly mind their own business, there is one issue that leaves me in a tight spot. Coming from a conservative background, my partner has stated on many occasions that his parents won't allow him to stay over at my apartment, even though on some nights this would be preferable to his making the long drive home. We have been camping numerous times but always with friends, which his parents "approve of." Trying to plan a weekend getaway for our anniversary has been particularly trying, as his parents would be upset, and he refuses to lie to his parents about where he is going. Should I push the issue, or just let sleeping dogs lie and wait for him is getting definite vibes that your young man's "parental unit" comes with parents are free to follow their own moral code, but so is he. If they invite him out of their house, that might not be such a bad idea. If he is unwilling to stand up to them and assert himself, then perhaps, to use your phrase, he the invitations to the thank you notes. The bride drew the line at having advertising banners draped across the aisle, but her perfume came from a local neighborhood supplier. Well, you get the idea. What do you think of all and tacky. This cannot be the wave of the future, though, so calm yourself. This is just the act of two tasteless clods who fancy themselves "business take on workplace etiquette concerning paychecks and benefits. I am beginning it's taboo or in bad form to speak of paychecks, as in, "Are the checks in today (on pay day)?" Are we supposed to just keep checking our mailbox or under office manager where you work now, or whoever writes the checks, and ask that the time for their distribution be regularized. You need not be shy. If anyone tries to close you down, or makes you feel as though your are talking about things best left unspoken, just tell that person assertively that if you are outlined a threefold agenda: to impose "bad consequences for bad behavior" and "love our neighbor as we want to be loved ourselves"; to help churches and charities "to nurture, to mentor, to comfort" people in need; and to insist daring platform can scarcely be imagined. Yet the media lauded Bush's speech "appealing to a different kind of audience from the one that had elected his father" and "distinguishing himself from the rest of the crowded Republican conservative with a conscience, with compassion." Bush used the word criticized. But why? Is compassion beneath us? Is mercy below us? Should our compassionate conservative. I welcome the label. And on this ground I will make Times described the scene: "Taking up a challenge from some opponents, Bush does Bush spin compassion, the world's most universal value, as a courageous "stand"? As with most magic tricks, the sleight of hand occurs at the outset, when Bush says his philosophy "has been criticized." In truth, none of Bush's rivals has criticized compassion or boasted of a hard heart. On the contrary, some call "compassionate conservatism" an offensive phrase because it suggests that unmodified conservatives lack compassion (just as many liberals complained that Vice President Al Gore's "practical idealism" implied that unmodified idealists were impractical). Others dismiss this phrase as "weasel words" designed to substitute for positions on specific issues. What Bush's opponents have "criticized," in short, is not his "approach" but its redundancy and insubstantiality. By conning the media into reporting that he was "defending his philosophy," Bush snuffed out the real question: whether he has a Gore may have brought us prosperity, the slogan suggests, but Bush will give must be prosperous so that anybody who wants to work can find a high quality, issues that might get him into trouble, such as abortion or homosexuality. Instead, he pledges "to usher in the responsibility era," in which we will "confront illegitimacy," instill "discipline and love" in juvenile justice, and accept that "we're responsible for our neighbors and helping in our communities." Lest anyone point out the abstractness and obviousness of these commitments, Bush says they stand in "stark contrast to the last few decades, when our culture has clearly said, 'If it feels good, do it, and if you've got irresponsibility? Or is he painting a dark background to lend the illusion of Likewise, Bush often uses sharp language to obscure fuzzy thought. "Some people think it is inappropriate to draw a moral line in the sand. Not me," he proclaims. And what is his line? "Children must learn to say yes to responsibility, yes to hard work, yes to honesty, and yes to family." Likewise, as? Drugs, alcohol, and teen pregnancy, he says. And what's wrong with teen language not of a pulpit but of a Planned Parenthood clinic. declared Bush. "Government should not try to be all things to all people." "I do not run polls to tell me what to think." "We will show that politics, after a time of tarnished ideals, can be higher and better. We will give our country difference between an idealist and a cynic, in this view, is that the idealist is willing to take a stand contrary to public opinion. On taxes? Bush proposes allowed to serve but that he won't speak out against the campaign because priorities, when we have money left over, we must pass it back to the taxpayers." Note the caveat about "priorities." Sound familiar? his father, Bush substitutes virtue for substance. When asked by integrity, serving for the right reasons." And what are those reasons? decency to the process and to serve for the right reason, which is country Bush's constant assurances that he's going to unveil his "10-point plans" and functional equivalent of his father's constant allusions to "vision." The less you have of something, the more you boast of it abstractly. divider. Bush's greatest feat has been to spin his evasion of candidates who demand that he choose sides on the difficult issues of the day. He's in his own league. And by selling the media distinctions without a humping. Following a suitable period of mourning for his exploded mate (five Awards ceremony, saw a streaker charge across the stage and brought the house Me is better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are gives infantilism a good name. Let me add that I wasn't a fan of the first of the joke. The terrible, flaccid timing was what was supposed to be funny. I "swinging" '60s, portrayed in movies as an era when ugly, posturing little guys who never misses a chance to jeer at his father's grandiosity, and who in turn The director, Jay Roach, keeps the picture bumping along, refusing to give the gags more weight than they warrant. Actually, he rarely gives them any weight: The bad jokes don't fall flat so much as blow (beautifully) "What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?" In the credits, Rob electrical swivel chair. Dr. Evil dispatches a new henchman, a 400-plus pound "coffee" from a jar containing a Fat Bastard stool sample. There are also more is one of prettiest women on Earth. Her face has the freshness of a her long thighs and high bottom. She knows how to move and she's sweet and prove his manhood by letting an equal into his bed. to be a great movie, to the point where it breaks into two different from the start was an actor's insight into how people dramatize themselves and a novelist's insight into how they actually appear. He can write sharp, funny spiels and interlocking monologues in which people misrepresent themselves but decided to become a saint of leftist independent filmmaking, to turn away from his real gifts, suppress his craftiness, and make movies about ordinary people crushed by an economic system that sets brother against brother (or sister). He happen to good people, and its ending is cruelly abrupt (although maybe actress who never quite had the stature for a leap to stardom, desperate to grab onto a man and smart enough to watch in horror as she's talent for watching herself fall and for commenting on it exquisitely. This is a major performance, one of the comebacks of the decade. militias have killed hundreds and forced thousands to flee since the South troops. The international community is debating whether continued inaction The White House hinted that it doesn't believe him. Foreign leaders expressed balance of power --niche programming beats out shows aimed at wide agreement. The rosy spin: Peace at last! The skeptical spin: That's what they said when the last deal was signed. The cynical spin: Now that the peace bombings in the United States, agreed to renounce violence in exchange for supported her husband's offer. Politicos disagree about which was clumsier: lying about payments to his former mistress. He accepted the plea bargain independent counsel has wasted vast sums of money trying to prove a flawed case apolitical gesture of friendship or an attempt at improper influence. Comets won the Women's National Basketball Association three years. Everyone now agrees they're a "dynasty." The pessimistic view: market itself. The long view: Relax, dynasties haven't killed the men's own, could do without narrative, without literary values. Indeed, art had to strive to achieve an instantaneity that bypasses laborious storytelling. Things have pretty much come full circle if you now think that what makes art. I can't quite think that you are being serious when you assert that love and death and nature are themes germane to literature to the exclusion for quarter of a century. It has been replaced by a conceptual orthodoxy every of form and content. It is a symbiosis of form and content that makes for satisfying aesthetic experience. Anyway, as soon as a generation of artists or connoisseurs declares for one, the gauntlet is dropped, and the next will formalist dogma. The insistence that one must see an exhibition before having anything critical to say about ideas and images within it attributes a great importance to the visceral experience of objects, an attendance to form. If the art is so much about "real life" as you praise it for being, communicating beyond the precious confines of the art world, dealing with themes and issues that are bigger than paltry aesthetic experiences, then all poor cousin of window dressing or stage design, simply the wrong instrument for grating nihilism always needs to revert to theories or story lines extraneous to the actual object to have any validity, with lots of special pleading on the feminist and Third World fronts. It's odd that you started our correspondence aesthetic decision has been taken before the work begins; that form is imposed letting me see it at his gallery, the Royal Academy at theirs, and now the Most of the stuff in "Sensation" evaporates even during the first viewing. As repeated often enough becomes truth. I think the critic's job is to resist the inevitable process by which junk exhibited often enough (and written about you lonely at lunchtime. How about next week sometime? editorial that China is facing more than enough crises these problems rather than "launch a massive crackdown against a group which economy has left a spiritual void. It is inevitable that people thrown out of work or otherwise unsettled by the sweeping changes on the mainland should seek itself fortunate that the popular desire for spiritual inspiration took such a independent of the Communist Party. "This is something the leadership is still not prepared to tolerate. For all the changes that have taken place in recent years, yesterday's arrests were a reminder of how far freedom of expression businessman in his 40s who was responsible for bringing the sect to Hong sect had engaged in illegal activities: advocating superstition and spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances, and had not been registered in the manner required by law. She also claimed that and that "before this suspicion becomes mythology, it must be dispelled and torture, and other human rights violations. This is the second interview and its reporter, a former human rights activist, noted that his fingers are "flat and meaty like those of a butcher." The general's answers in both interviews were almost identical. He categorically denied all charges against common bandit," he said, in reference to his arrest. "I was here as a now born in poverty than ever before, and the paper discussed the growing AIDS offer strong competition to the pill when it is put on the market next year. chicken, sometimes it's pizza; frequently it's more than one of those things." The temptation is to write a sneering comparison of pretty sure we both could have pulled it off through some kind of sneering comparison. But it sort of takes the edge off my urban boasting. turn your monitor upside down. Or see bottom of page.) your prize.) Some population fun facts from Earth Action Network: Rates of growth are declining except in the poorest parts of the world, Family planning has been successful in slowing the rate of growth, but "When you mention that it's a Christian game, people assume there's no violence. So I remind them about the Crusades and the Inquisition, then I set "Remember that magical moment when your daughter's eyes widened to meet her favorite characters live on stage? With all that delight and wonder, it's an experience you'll both remember for the rest of your lives. And now that unforgettable power and emotion of a live show is available to you and your company as an extraordinary new marketing tool. That's right: At last there's a "Let's face it, when you have angels fighting demons, it is going to be controversial. Particularly if the angels are topless babes with machine guns, "The changes are unbelievable. People keep talking about crime and corruption and not about the amazing things that have happened here. You can't believe the merchandise in the stores and the shopping centers. And that more the Soviet Union, applauding the transition to capitalism "As you progress down the evil path, you have to do things that are more and more distasteful, from blasphemy to striking a praying angel. Actually, the "I truly feel that God called me to do this. And to make those drunken to submit other actual news items that drive the final nail into the coffin of not so sure, because this may be too narrow a question, but we'll see. backlash, assuming there ever was a, you know, lash. Creative destruction creates tauter companies that can quickly respond to members to reach a consensus that the United Nations should intervene anywhere education cover package. One article argues for vouchers and disputes studies critical of them. Private schools do not skim off the best students from struggling public schools, and voucher students are not suspended at higher schools also stimulate conventional public schools to innovate and improve. receive lots of revenue from them, but the quality of instruction is poor. fourth of six millennium issues, artists depict the millennium with predictably revolution are caricatured by a picture of a bear and a coyote tethered, like cliffhanger heroines, to a pile of logs in the path of an oncoming train. coattails of money" in the Renaissance and in the 1990s. cover story marvels at the Harry Potter phenomenon. The children and adults. In upcoming books, Harry will take an interest in girls, and the villain will kill a favorite character. (Click for off his basketball trophies and his black friend from Little League. by online auctions that enable individuals to sell oddball items to distant story highlights his achievements, including creating the Environmental Protection Agency, increasing Social Security benefits, opening China, and was the first person to "bring cameras to the catwalks" and force designers to doesn't accept freebies from designers in exchange for product placement. Gates tops the magazine's annual ranking of the new media establishment, downtown Manhattan loft, a nubile new wife, and an avowed attempt to dress like who showed up to meet the diva for the first time holding his chimp's hand. The celebrates the Talk launch party: "In the distance, beneath Madame to reveal the New York governor's Machiavellian core. He ruthlessly spread because the United States could not abandon a nation resisting communism. Had cover story condemns schoolhouse commercialism. Sponsored educational materials ask students to count Tootsie Rolls or plan how many Domino's pizzas are needed for a party. Districts lease advertising space in school hallways and collect a percentage of vending machine revenues. foreign/ And like their neighbors white/ Are vital to the party/ In any race with secular, ethnic, and religious parties that support the peace process. A space observatory. Authorities were unsure of the accident's cause. emergence, of inflationary forces that could undermine economic growth." Inflation doves argued that the hike will cut jobs. The needlessly punishing the masses; instead, it should discipline only banks that It's a slippery slope to leaving consumers unprotected in product liability But his execution may not win the requisite parliamentary approval, because would be used to cover prescription drugs for Medicare recipients and to partially fill the projected gap in Social Security coverage. House Republicans warning readers not to believe in "an accounting mirage to finance a misshapen proposal introduces prescription drug coverage and eliminates payment for preventive services but aims to cut costs by stoking price competition among the solvency of Medicare to its adequacy." But the New Republic laments the plan's "gross generational inequity" and for political positioning to actually implement policy." industry will force Medicare recipients to chip in for treatment and may ditch enough to allow them to provide adequate care. Patient advocates argue that Medical Association voted to form a union to negotiate for better wages and bargaining will win doctors more control over the type and quantity of bargaining will win doctors higher pay, resulting in higher costs for patients. independent counsel statute expired. The power to initiate investigations will once again reside with the attorney general. The resurrected "the next time Congress becomes dissatisfied with the way the Justice Department conducts a politically charged investigation" and urges that it be replaced with a rule "that would give the attorney general wide discretion on when to seek an independent counsel and some say in who that The Supreme Court barred lawsuits against states for violating federal laws. Individual plaintiffs will no longer be able to sue states that violate federal laws; only the federal government may do so. Observers called Liberals protested that the ruling emasculates Congress' power to bind states "the height of conservative judicial activism" because it "invented new rights "is only ratifying a power shift that has already taken place" from the bloated and hamstrung federal system to the more effective state level. is accused of failing to disclose all its cash reserves in order to smooth out fluctuations in its earnings. The SEC strongly prefers full disclosure of cash sapped by investments in online ventures, including a retail store and an 'dot com' to our name." The Wall Street Journal 's retort: "Earth to objectionable" content such as presidential, urination, and flatulence jokes. Fox rejoined that "an irreverent comedy that can't raise a clergyman's eyebrows grew misty over the "playoff run that almost became the commas in its title, but commas would be false to its tempo, which is closer to the mark. This gimmicky German thriller, poised to be a crossover smash, is that rare beast: a good "music video" movie. That is, it's flashbacks illustrate her absence and his anguish: Her motorbike was stolen, she couldn't pick him up, he left a bag of drug money on the subway, his boss "a video game that even resets itself at the end of each round." He means that three times with different permutations and wildly different outcomes. People to hobble, which means she doesn't bump into the woman with the baby carriage, exchange between him and his pregnant lover, which means she doesn't stop her from those Dickens or Hardy novels in which someone's fate depends on his or Trek spinoffs, you're no stranger to time loops, temporal multiple angles, split screens, slow and fast motion, and blizzards of illicit love affair is viewed as if it were a fuzzy video on a tired afternoon rob a huge bank (take that, Capitalism!), and stop a roulette wheel with her then replay the sequence until she gets it right, taking the narrative into her their wind blows in from a high peak: The characters' formulations are bracing, practically pared the speeches down to their topic sentences. The movie is canal scheme. An incriminating missive has fallen into the hands of an be devastating to both his political and marital future, but how can he violate of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoing as against the mechanical idealism of his stupidly good wife, and in his bitter criticism of love that is and in showing that part of becoming human is learning to forgive others' forthrightness. She's so good, you don't want her illusions to be dashed. The just the right distance to catch the anxious flickers of individuality under place and an erect carriage that carries only subtle traces of the warped inner calliope music) by Charlie Mole is one of the most grating ever written: It has a way of making the lines seem facetious. Was the hope that middlebrows would be seduced by its jaunty sentimentality and highbrows take it as ironic? It's having its legendary premiere. Quite a tribute to the playwright, except that no attention to the action on stage. The result is not a fugue but an irrelevant. Was that the intention? To make his own adaptation seem more presidential race, if not from the selection of the candidates then from their nothing to address the underlying problems of rising health costs" and "is simply endorsing a massive rise in government spending on health care." empire to his belated entry into new media and his alienation of the local her would be based on how she respects and regards the new dynamics of New York practice of religion promotes good health. Possible explanations: Most religions advocate temperate lifestyles, and prayer encourages mental isn't nearly as pressing a need as education and child nutrition. takes on a single scene and once called an employee and demanded help while she paying off tribal chiefs to prevent them from disrupting pumping operations. He article heralds the return of curvy models. After a decade of fashion androgyny "They're no longer asking for stick legs. No one wants their butt removed." cover story purports to critically examine the hype previous reports, there is no necrophilia in the film, but there is an orgy. succeeding in a supportive atmosphere. Critics worry that the kids Times Magazine wrote a nearly identical piece two months ago.) that the overwhelming majority believes in God, pray, feel safe in school, admire their parents, are in no hurry to grow up, and disapprove of premarital substance can relieve depression, arthritis, and liver disease without the lying on the ground has her clitoris removed with a razor blade. cover story hails the "class of heroes" who graduated from Foster requiring school kids to say "sir" and "ma'am" when addressing "Talk of the Town" item sourced to "some old friends of the First Family" predatory conduct. But the evolution of the browser market belies the charge. competitors is part of the "creative destruction" that leads to marketplace according to an article. The quixotic presidential candidate refuses to answer reporters' questions and even disagrees with his wife when she introduces him that he had "made some mistakes" and "learned from those" but said he would removed. The unanimous spin: The democratic factions are still too divided to will keep separate creeds and structures but will share clergy, sacraments, and missionary projects. The pious spin: "Oneness becomes a proof of the authenticity of the practical spin: The two churches need to pool their dwindling resources and largest financial institution. Bank executives hope the union will realities of an overcrowded market, massive bad loans and woefully low profit pessimistic fine print: drug abuse among young adults and minority groups is judicial panel that appointed him split over whether his work should continue. can legally be replaced. A New York Times editorial urges him to stay on allegations against Wen Ho Lee racist. The former chief of an Energy Department official told the New York Times that the charges funds and international aid. The money was intended to rebuild infrastructure and schools. The New York Times reports that the corruption will chill private investment and charitable contributions to the French prosecutors dropped their investigation of the crash that killed unanimous spins: Bush won solidly but not overwhelmingly enough to send other Columbine High School reopened. Students attended a "Take Back the School" rally, and parents made a human chain around the school. Some parents of slain children complained about the day's "rah, rah, let's Journal blamed the chain's failure on bad management and worse food. won the physics prize for researching the best way to dunk a cookie. A South strike that sent him to the hospital. Upon his release, the professor suggest that the students getting them are really doing exceptional work," a change. The university says the new grade will allow outstanding work to be honored while "not disadvantaging students in the contest for academic honors, awards, and prizes which depend significantly on grade point averages." (See determined that locusts attract other locusts with chemical signals to amass swarms that can strip a field bare within hours. Swarming female locusts can also manipulate the genes in their eggs to ensure that their young will want to join the swarm immediately. (Locusts reared in seclusion are reluctant to gather.) Researchers hope to isolate the chemical and use it to design may have done schoolwork for at least five members of last year's national is true, players, tutors, and administrators will be subject to punishment writing is inferior poetry, and inferior poetry is not really poetry at all." Recently amended federal confidentiality laws have prompted such schools as the The money will be spent on improved classrooms, labs, and libraries at tribal college students' sexual attitudes (sample question: Is oral sex the same as trial. Asked if she was offered guidelines about editing the journal after freedom is essential. I have no doubt that editorial freedom will be the Fray," a weekly column featuring the sharpest posts from our new reader feedback forum. If you'd like to comment on a Slate article, we encourage you to do so in "The Fray," and if it's especially good, we'll excerpt it here (though we may edit it for length). You might also get a reply: Many Slate writers visit the Fray to read the posts about their stories, a great feature on a real estate agent. But she was a very successful real estate person. Likewise, the lawyer who went to China was a very successful diaries of a man or a woman who is a little closer to the edge? perspective, and challenge anyone to make a different observation. where a large number of employees read them in the break room. Not once in my then? Well, why read any type of fiction? I believe it is because there is a time to just amuse yourself while you're scarfing down a baloney classroom. Nor is it a serious critique (or celebration for that matter) of the magazines. The article you saw was this month's edition of Keeping Tabs, a previous month. (Get it? We're trying to have a little fun here.) complained that I haven't done anything but sum up what's in the tabloids, but investigation of the veracity of the tabloid stories, I just let them speak for smile, the pleasure of helping someone in need, friendship," etc., etc., may be both hard to measure and extremely corny, but let's not get carried away. There is no doubt that those things are all indirectly but absolutely affected by importance of those intangibles in creating responsible and compassionate adult arthritis, why on earth do you expect to feel any effects from a drug which is intended to treat said illness? Side effects, sure, but I would doubt any safer or have less side effects than commercial pharmaceuticals, where do you think those pharmaceuticals came from in the first place? Many, if not most, common drugs were originally a substance that occurred in nature, such as because a product is supposed to make one feel less depressed (and therefore and sometimes may be as effective or even more effective in treating a physical or mental malady, than pharmaceuticals (herbal or otherwise). deal with everyday details that most people take for granted. (I suffered clinical depression for several years; I know.) So why should it be a big you happy, they just help lift you to a plateau from which you are able to seek not a joke. Why must the treatment of this illness always become one? Don't if you're an entertainment person, you never meet anyone from the aerospace industry. That's always struck me as strange. They make death at places like conscienceless white guys with money, and so are we. Why don't we hang out? I money for "wardrobe"? Oh, how I laughed. Of course, at the time I was living in simulators. The studios and designers will then be free to use the technology for everyone," says Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera. businesslike manifesto in the school's alumni bulletin. As part of this don't change much. Most law students are there for lack of a better idea rather than any special enthusiasm for the subject matter. They are heading for a profession that is widely despised and filled with lawyers who wish they weren't. These days, top law students can anticipate being regarded as sharks distant professor with a seating chart. The curriculum mostly consists of long appellate opinions from which they are supposed to derive legal principles on No one forces these students to go to law school or to quantify their "quality of life." Now we have something the modern university administrator can deal with. This is not psychiatry: This is management. There is nothing to be ashamed of in seeing a psychiatrist, seeking help. In fact, an alumni survey went out on the dean's own letterhead and included a return envelope addressed to the suspiciously inconspicuous organized student focus groups on demographic themes: married students, gay wishing to be left out, the law school faculty voted unanimously to expand the staff were interviewed individually, as befits their rank. School to hire a management consultant as it does for General Motors to do on students' concerns might be just what is needed by a law school administration that has ignored mounds of anecdotal evidence. But turning to lousy education, how good could they be as consultants? Conversely, if they are But coming up with the right answer to a question like, more or less irrelevant to the study's actual purposes, both of which are achieved by the study itself. One of these is cuddling the alumni. "NOT a sent to alumni. True enough, there was no solicitation inside. But the survey is nevertheless a marketing device, intended in small part to gather large part, to create the feeling of ownership among an alienated alumni The other purpose is cuddling the students. And here involvement of a management consulting firm is an indication that the administration cares more than they previously thought. Though some faculty The Senate rejected the nuclear test ban treaty. The treaty, said it would not be reconsidered during his term. Other nations had promised international security. The Republican spin: A treaty that flawed would never have worked. The Democratic reply: It certainly won't work now. Newspapers be under military rule, but did not announce plans to install a new government. crippling the economy, and tolerating corruption. Western analysts worried that Basketball great Wilt Chamberlain died. "Wilt the Stilt," widely considered the best player of all time, is the only one ever to score Chamberlain's dominance as a center forever "changed the way basketball is increase worldwide. Most of the continued growth will occur in the developing billion late in the next century. The rosy spin: Despite what doomsayers predicted, overpopulation hasn't caused global catastrophe. The gloomy spin: million members for political organizing. The optimistic spin: Labor's support Braves are fighting for recognition as the decade's best team. prosecutors to continue the investigation. Some critics charged that the lack of an indictment revealed that the police work was botched. Others said that the continued investigation of a rich, white victim's death showed that race gender equality. Detractors complained that she should have picked on Republicans. First he said House Republicans shouldn't "balance their budget on the backs of the poor." Then he said his party often neglects the disadvantaged by focusing on economic wealth. Democrats called Bush a wolf in sheep's clothing. Republican opponents accused Bush of running for congressmen. But Bush said his comments made a "positive case" for Republican compassion, and some pundits said he was astute to recognize that combination of rappelling and riding rapids without boats, sometimes described a ravine. The papers described canyoning as an "underground" sport with no official organization to check equipment, offer advice, or govern safety. To attract customers, companies promoting it promise maximum thrills with minimum of both must be protected. "People need to understand that you can't destroy environmental catastrophe. The team concluded that severe air pollution existed before the air attacks, which had merely worsened it in some places. The Guardian said, "It marks the latest low point in a largely unsuccessful (and selling) weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems." which it described as a phenomenon without parallel in French commercial which is more than half the country's total population. Only two years ago, of the world's great currencies" whose ups and downs against the dollar are a minor issue. There is, however, a danger that in a future trade war the United States might force the euro up too high by playing the "weak dollar" "wants to bequeath his son and designated successor a legacy of peace, in order making "public and superfluous statements" about wanting to change parts of the is worthwhile taking another step," the paper said. we used it this summer. But they don't want us to use it too much. It's not and civilian beliefs. It is "scary," he said, to have "an officer corps so up of people merely using the experience as a steppingstone for starting their to sudden bleeding and speaking in scary voices!!! (Promotional fee paid by of society, a vast chasm between a tiny rich minority and everyone else, and the proliferation of soap operas in prime time, despite the it possible to do a new version of the musical without cluttering up the commenting on a study conducted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, comparing the social and political views of the military elite with those of prominent civilians. The study concluded that the soldiers are far to the right civilians would bar homosexuals from military service. chasm from developing between the military and civilian worlds." News Quiz host because of a lack of alternatives, here are actual questions found by looking for "News Quiz" through various search engines, along with comments pointing out how much better things are right in your own backyard. which park to vehicles after it filled to capacity on Memorial Day? talking to us like we're idiots. Are we going to take that? The Colorado Division of Wildlife wants to spend as thinks the best answer is "not nearly enough." Heartless bastards. filed under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act? quiz format may not be the ideal way to chart a town's economic collapse. And couldn't they at least get out of bed long enough to update the thing now and technology businesses. But this message wasn't about funding technology: It was about funding the next president of the United States. recipients did, but at least a few questioned whether this was an authorized complaints from people "who don't know who he is and who think he really did replacing many of the campaign tasks traditionally handled through telephone represents a campaign's single largest expenditure (although presidential the Draper incident shows, the process can also create some unexpected headaches. A traditional direct mail solicitation usually contains legal reassurances that the solicitation is authorized (and the cost of postage makes address books politically, meaning that a solicitation sent out to all a person's contacts may well end up in the hands of someone who doesn't want magazine, sent out an invitation to the same Bush luncheon as Draper. He used a imply that a Bush donation would enhance readers' relationship to the publication. "If you want to be a really big Fish, you can become a cohost of message confused some of Red Eye's subscribers, and Red Herring rapidly pitch mistakenly went out under the guise of a Red Eye editorial product, when the blurring of journalistic and political lines. "As you know, I have strong the opinions of Red Herring Communications nor do they influence the journalistic ethics of any of the editorial properties of Red Herring to Red Herring Communications (which to some degree is the same as paying campaign's online daily roster of campaign donations. The Bush campaign did not Perhaps to avoid such sticky situations, some of Bush's presidential rivals are have any plans to do so. We believe our Internet presence is good enough." Of mail. "As long as donors are comfortable with it being there, I don't see that "Remember: It's really in an experimental stage right now." don't find out what's being advertised until the end, when the tag line comes "Everybody in Packing Materials. The Gap. (You forgot to mention she was participants suggest that the entire Bush campaign is an ad for which we do not know the product. Sure, this is cowardly, intellectually dishonest, and an insult to the democratic process, but it's also thrifty, and that's important, important in ways that will be revealed at the end. Of something.) As long as commercial that features some kind of cool car driving through some kind of car) into the future (it's just over the next fashion model). Or the ad when think that means he wants to cut taxes for his rich friends. You can't be overly literal. This thing works subconsciously, like workfare. newest mall, each organized around the theme "total experience," by which is meant a combination of shopping and entertainment, by which is meant a chance to buy stuff at Foot Locker and then play a video game. The malls combine very deliberate. The idea is to give a sense of intrigue that this is a new agency that produced the spot. "Of course, when people find out it's just something will happen on Long Island that scientists believe has a small but genuine chance of causing "perturbations of the universe" that could destroy clothed in pure white, shining like the sun, surrounded by the hosts of parks, no shopping district. This was not an inevitable consequence of cities, they were wonderfully designed. There were generous kid recreation grounds, the unfenced backyards through which we swarmed. There were kid civic centers where we met one another; they were called "schools." And you got to them via the excellent kid transit system, bicycles. There was even a mobile dessert van, the ice cream truck, that came around each evening, offering kid Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a nuclear accelerator designed to replicate speed of light will smash into each other, generating minuscule fireballs of made up of strange quarks, which might start an uncontrollable chain reaction, converting anything they touch into more strange matter. An alternative, but no cheerier, theory suggests that colliding particles could achieve sufficient surrounding matter. "The creation of one on Earth," the Times points structure of anything nearby. The risk is exceedingly small but the probability Festival: three days of peace, love, music, looting, arson, and riot Festival: "marauding bands of shirtless bellowing men" Funeral: dozens of kings, presidents, and prime ministers I have to touch anyone who comes in here, even if I don't want to? I have to get up really close to them and smell their perfume, smell their breath?" asked that's fine, as long as they do it for "health purposes" and not to "promote superstition, spread rumors, engage in sedition, destroy social order or hold pinball machines displayed this warning: "for entertainment purposes only." Apparently the legislature was concerned that they might be used for gambling machines of that era were marked "for prevention of disease only," lest someone hence the distinction between murder and accident and serious dieting. If a stranger rendered you unconscious and went at you with a knife, it would mean States last year. In a letter to followers, he accused China of trying to pay off the United States to extradite him. Denying rumors of an imminent crackdown, to group breathing and meditation exercises in public parks they face no repression. They are, however, forbidden to "stir up chaos and destroy social from the Governor, type your name, choose a question and select submit!" That is: You can receive a reply the governor didn't write to a question you didn't write that he didn't read. Easy to see why the governor enjoys that. Have you ever heard an actual kid use the term "business experience"? Is it true that exploiting your family's political, business, and social connections will only get you through the door, and after that you've got to do Did that previous question seem too smirky for a kid? 'Cause I could, you know, ask more stuff about your business experience. Your prep school isn't in your bio. More trouble? Stealing from another But when I don't see people as they are, my folks get my urine tested. Is that fair? (You mean when they, like, turn into monsters, right?) his ragtag stable of actors: "Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far painfully awkward nerd (Murphy) who has no film experience other than being "an active renter at Blockbuster" but who bears a striking resemblance to action comic works. (Click here to find out more about Murphy and here to find out more about Martin.) con artist and wind up in jail with 33-year sentences for drug smuggling. The critics are unmoved: "just another lurid, contrived, xenophobic tale about concede that even her nice turn can't save the film. (Click here to see a about an acting troupe whose onstage and offstage lives intertwine. Most fond homage to the world of acting, beguilingly presented and filled with respond positively for the most part: "even at their most outlandish these duplicitous world where a safe, materialistic, blandly cheerful surface conceals a dark secret life" and that the stories' predictable outlandishness rubbing the reader's nose in it." (Read the first chapter here.) glamour, she lacks her heat and sensuality. Berry has said she hopes this movie unavailable to black women; Variety seems to think it will, weighing in vulgar, cartoonish, obnoxious, dizzying, disposable and more than a little bit 'We'll just have a local option on the Constitution, and you people down there A federal judge has ordered Republic, Mo., to make a change in its official judge ordered trigger locks to be painted onto the crossed musket corporate logo designed by professional graphics people, where minimalism and looks more like a poster for animal boxing, which might be the state sport of The bears are holding up what might be a dinner plate that says, "United We Stand Divided We Ball," indicating a surprisingly open marriage or that the ink smeared. In the middle of the dinner plate (or is it a base drum?) there is a thinks she could beat a bear in a fair fight, but I don't like her chances). Below the moon (or cow) is a sheep (or dog) who also seems ready to rumble, and to the right of the sheep (or dog) is an eagle with a cloud above its head, or maybe a cartoon balloon showing what the eagle is thinking (it's tough to make out), probably something very funny, indicating that the eagle hopes to get its or celebrities or spaceships or celebrities in spaceships like in Star means "The Best People in This State Don't Have To Obey the Traffic Laws." its trucks, flags, street signs, and stationery. He noted that the fish "is Foundation, a "Christian public interest law firm." 5-(I may have misread that one), 6-E, 7-F, 8-(That's from a different hothouse." A few gripes from the fringes: According to the Village "so unnecessarily graphic and gruesome that by the end I felt sort of unclean." minutes to run across town and recover money lost by her boyfriend. If she's point on, the film is full if "smashing bravado" and "sheer cleverness" times, each version ending differently. A few critics pipe up with deeply pained by her husband's affair (another surprise). Speculation has Press). Reviewers fall into two camps on Self's latest collection of stories. One deems it more of the same old riffing on the underside of society, "calling labels this "his most disciplined storytelling yet," marked by "a new control that his writing is masterful; it's just a question of whether he has ends of the spectrum in the book: "When he's at his best, Self's struggle with these opposed gifts conjures up fiction that alternately boggles, amuses and horrifies. At his worst, he merely offers punch lines that are laboriously stretched on a rack of realist detail." (Read the first chapter here.) and the tired sexual politics that provide most of the lyrical subject matter some of the songs are serious clunkers, and even the best sound like a rehash cover editorial accuses the United States of covering Eliminating racial profiling will make policing more difficult, but the cost is worth bearing because profiling burdens targeted groups, engenders rage against despairing and corrupt. "Sponsor girls" trade sex for pilfered designer authorized to work. Visas to Western countries are rarely granted. influence peddler. The former general helps defense manufacturers sell weapons each student. (The magazine revised its methodology to reward high spending on undergraduates in response to charges that they take students for granted. terrorizing Salt Lake City. The "Straight Edgers" get their high from fighting. Three are on trial for murder, and a vegan Straight Edger just finished cover story presents a kinder, gentler portrait of Bill article reveals that he recently transferred a huge chunk of stock to his that children don't want more time with their working parents, they want mom finish proves that his support has a low ceiling, and Bush's victory crops are the only way to quell guerrilla violence, ensure political stability, theory that the Constitution should be interpreted in accord with original laments the presidential campaign's substance deficit. Only Al Gore is seems to be playing for time and that its acceptance of the force does not mean armed forces' encouragement of, and participation in, the killings and Council authorizing its peacekeepers "to use all force necessary" to rein in presidential candidate, is hoping to take power as acting prime minister if world powers have come since the end of the Cold War less than a decade fathers and two by mothers, it said. "The lamentable moral degradation that leads some people to exchange human lives for money has its roots in our materialistic society, characterized by badly swollen egos," the paper claimed. Times ran an editorial sharply criticizing Japan for letting the yen Japan "to act decisively, now," and asked, "Why on earth does the Bank not buy the dollars itself, allowing the domestic money supply to expand in the starting a gambling casino in the territory. "The goal is to offer something world's most pretentious and absurd architecture beckons visitors from around replication. Near such fantasies, of course, the casinos' main line of business always beckons, ready to extract huge sums from the unwary." The paper noted the findings of the United States National Gambling Impact Study Commission: people suffer from pathological gambling addiction, causing costly social problems, especially for the poor and the young," it added. in the Eastern District of New York arrested and indicted seven people in a interesting but really not the subject of the story here." Inner Actives sports bra, which will go on sale at major sporting goods celebrity's press agent. You'll find your experience with the newspapers less frustrating if you accept the idea that the reporter is there to tell not your story but his or hers. It is, no doubt, irritating to be misquoted, but at least you retain the moral high ground and a sense of yourself as wise and are. It is a deeply demoralizing experience for anyone who lacks adequate But, while she is undoubtedly a terrifically capable and successful executive, her new job will make her the only woman ever to head a company included in the choice in other ways, too. She is young, she is an outsider in a company that company's current chief. "And to look fabulous doing it," he did not add. How ironic. I was a cheerleader in high school, and the size of male sex organs reveals that homosexuals are generally better shows that homosexuals differ, on average, from heterosexuals in genital size. Participants are invited to submit a similar set (a Internet economy has already revolutionized the world of campaign fund raising, even if only a tiny fraction of the total money raised so far for the presidential contest was raised online. Evidence that the two worlds have collided does not show in the bottom line. Instead, there are subtler signs: Online contributors give more on average than offline contributors; they are repeat contributors; and congressional candidates have begun to clamor for news is so encouraging, in fact, that one firm supplying presidential wannabes research firm Odyssey. Company officials say they don't intend to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission until later this year. candidates combined. More than half of that amount has gone into the coffers of individuals for political candidates will be raised on the Internet," says raised," he says. "The overwhelming majority of the funds that will be raised processes contributions, gathers demographic information, coordinates data for FEC reports and, using a nationwide list of registered voters, checks that contributors are voters in good standing. The company, like its competitors discouraged by this year's showing, but he doesn't think the problem is the public's discomfort with using credit cards online. The man who once said new did for bank robberies" blames the presidential candidates for the tepid public response. "I haven't seen them give anyone a reason to donate money," he campaign won't reveal how much she has raised on the Internet, had her site Despite the numbers, some observers are impressed with the activity on the Web. "The key to raising money online is trying to develop a relationship of able to get more out of each individual donor during the course of the entire able to draw some conclusions about the type of people donating via the The political contributor is willing to make a contribution in a secure online campaigns seem to reach a new pool of contributors. "We're seeing younger demographic profile on the Net," observes consultant Rob Arena, of Presage notes that contributions might jump if campaigns used innovative king casts more light on the matter (he has so far refused to comment), the bedclothes," but in general the press was less condemnatory of the king's adultery than of the intrusion into his private life. Because of this, La industrialist, after the queen refused to accept her as part of the royal Times quoted the landlord of a pub opposite her apartment as saying, "I see her going out most days in quite wild clothes, like patchwork trousers. rights record." The paper said the rebellious gesture will cause new tensions by an earlier engagement, the paper said the prince was "motivated by his visit to the prince's English country estate five months ago. has decided that supping once with the devil is enough" (the prince attended an two of the most fundamental rights in a democratic society," it said in an editorial. "Yet little knots of human rights activists have been manhandled and herded by the Metropolitan Police in a desperate attempt to keep them out of these manhandled protestors ought to bring a civil action against the police, so as at least to identify "which officer was in charge and from whom he should return to the streets now that "the mother of the nation" had the vice presidency. "Once little more than a symbolic position, the post must be new government faced a difficult task in reducing the army's political role. "offers her bruised and fragile country its best hope of consolidating its that our business picture is very strong and that takes a lot of stress off," she said. "All my stress now is getting the product accepted, getting it to stop busing students to integrate schools. Newspapers noted the perfect failed experiment. But while busing did great damage in many cities, in all students were actually bused to schools far from their homes, a form of busing that raised no outcry from the white community. other civil rights groups trolled for parents to challenge the system, finding but lost. They continued to appeal until their case reached the desk of Federal pupils be transported far away from their natural habitat so that some law and that it wasn't going to desegregate unless forced by the courts. The boards had an "affirmative duty" to ensure "racial discrimination would be At first, school board officials refused to implement desegregation plans and then submitted plans that failed to address the strategy, which entailed the busing of black kids to previously white schools, attorney was fire bombed. Black students were beat up at school. Some white parents withdrew and sent their children to private schools, while others decision. But the school board, split between busing supporters and foes, dismiss as not "in good faith," and busing continued according to the court's percent black students. The presence of whites, especially affluent ones, in complaints about outdated textbooks, sub par teachers, and dilapidated facilities were heeded by school officials. Blacks' test scores rose too, after local officials found new pride in their integrated schools, generating more goodwill. Political reform followed too, creating a city government that better represented both blacks and poor whites. Finally, a solid educational system provided a foundation for the economic growth the region has recently success hinged on several things. Unlike the earlier schemes, Ray's plan didn't whites no longer felt singled out to carry the burden of integration. Acknowledging the situation's class dimensions blunted the racial areas as well as the inner cities were embraced in the busing blueprint. (A meaning few metropolises experienced wholesale integration parents alike, who saw their way clear to hammering out compromises. This meant shelving the belief that a single, foolproof plan could be implemented once and burden. The 1990s even saw a major overhaul, when Charlotte introduced magnet schools devoted to excellence in a single area, such as math, and open to magnet schools began the undoing of desegregation in Charlotte. To remain a tool for continued desegregation and not just for excellence, the magnet that officials didn't want to "tip" all white. This year, the case came before Calling bused students "cogs in an experimental machine," Potter declared that evaporated. This despite a recent Charlotte Observer study that found that without busing, segregation would return for more than half of the Charlotte and the nation have come far, and we can hope that integration may someday endure without a conscious effort to preserve it. But it's dishonest or naive to claim that moment has arrived. Thirty years may seem like a long time to someone nursing a grievance since the pitched become unnecessary only when no one seems to have a problem with it of continued desegregation efforts, have to reckon with Potter's ruling. While not carrying the weight of a Supreme Court decision, it does point the way for other judges, if they want to follow. As the city decides in the next weeks whether to appeal, it also has to scramble to make sure its denser (largely black) areas will have enough schools to house the kids who can't be bused his swipe at social experimentation. As all great social reformers have known, persistent experimentation," as the example of Charlotte nobly attests. thistle pattern, and step into her carriage. Where's she going? missed the last couple of days because of a computer crash. Is it too late to that a great way to discourage sexual urges was to flash a photo of a really ugly person. But this seems unlikely to be effective. Such a powerful visual image certainly didn't deter the unattractive people from mating with one in distinctly short supply. (Hence the high rates charged by Elite Models. And to try to improve the social status, education, and health of young women. By sought to thwart various socially progressive aspects of the plan. 'News Roundelay' reminds me of a game some friends and I invented in college, which we called "Rock, Paper, Anything". Two players, on the count of three, form an approximation of something with their hands and announce what that acts as arbiter and decides which one wins (in this case, a butterfly, because the butterfly flaps its wings and sets into a motion a chain of events that mixer). Then the loser acts as arbiter for the next round. Or the winner, who alchemy is not impossible: Brush enough gold paint on enough flora, and She arrived at the stock exchange that morning toting a tray of brioches. She battered by three criticisms. First, she is simply ludicrous. You could not imagine better comic material than her ideas of "living": the "midnight omelet month's magazine) to make your own envelopes out of wood veneer, folding them A second and more thoughtful batch of critics has charged her with encouraging class division, promoting soulless domestic conformism, and undermining working daughter, belittles her mother, sues her gardener for pennies, plagiarizes recipes from better cooks, and humiliates her staff. Her fabled "Remembering" culture of financial idolatry. Anyone who's worth a billion on paper is worth are old. And the vitality of the economy is inoculating her. Fripperies that seemed obscene during the early '90s recession are quite modest by the That is a fair description. What she does is not silly at all, or at least no excellent advice about making spicy popcorn snacks, cleaning ovens, and storing helpful cooking information into six minutes than most cooking shows do in an hour. It is not false consciousness that makes tens of millions of people not practical but moral. She has a puritanical sensibility. She believes in the uplifting power of work. She instructs you so that you will know how to create liberating and fulfilling. It strengthens friendships and families: When I saw materialism, but not consumerism. She believes, rightly, that it makes you wiser and happier to cook your own applesauce than to buy it. Well, you may say, it's easy for her to make homemade applesauce. That's her job. But she did it when it wasn't her job, too. Even if most viewers rarely practice anything or cab (or succumbed to an accident in "the potting shed," as the New York We should do the same. Critics have savaged her fraudulent persona and monomaniacal perfectionism for a long time. There is a subtle sexism in that: The female domestic tycoon is obliged to behave better than the as a bitchy hausfrau. In the age of the divine entrepreneur, no one cares how badly you treat your kid. We admire perfectionist monomania in Internet romantic dinner for the husband she doesn't have, host a party for the kids she doesn't like, bake muffins for the neighbors who hate her. But those are her tragedies, not our business (or Wall Street's). The muffins are still tasty, stay on schedule, so I am being forced to write this dispatch from the car. Bob today, and the roads are slippery. Our car is laboring under the load of all my worldly possessions and can't go very fast, even under favorable weather conditions. In fact, every car on the Interstate seems to be making better time than we are, even the pickup trucks towing large objects. Right now, we're being passed by a house (or half a house anyway, being carted to a foundation waiting somewhere), and a large tree is gaining on us. shale oil. Now, there was a case where sexual misbehavior was an accurate like my dream come true. There are lots of enormous rocks, anyway, which in my car. Also the rocks are not quite as red as Bob claimed they would be. And we haven't seen a single human being since we entered the state hours ago. How modern art, or its supposedly sensational water show "O." The hotel itself, however, is almost unremittingly awful. Not just tacky, but uninteresting of money getting a good modern architect to design a hotel that would be truly home. I don't seem to be able to get past the bitterness and resentment I feel for my parents. For years I have wanted to confront them about the beatings I old, I am sober and reasonably successful, despite having not completed my folks constantly ask me questions such as, "Did we raise you right?" It is hard to bite my tongue and lie to them, telling them they spent plenty of quality time with me, etc. My fiancee has been very supportive and has suggested that when my folks open the door with their questions that I should take advantage pulling yourself together considering some overwhelming obstacles. It's clear that you need to unburden yourself, either to a counselor or to your folks. Until all the resentment gets out, it will eat away at the vessel it is stored At some level of consciousness, they know the answers. This might be their way of asking you to give voice to your feelings and to confront them. You certainly have nothing to lose. Next time such a question is posed, ask them if they really want the answer. If they say yes, then try to hold yourself hollering is not. This may be what they've been waiting for so that they can give the disastrous past an airing. A repair is possible, but if it doesn't happen, you've unburdened yourself, let in some sunlight, and children, my husband and I have decided to stop torturing each other. We broke the news of the divorce gently to friends and relatives, and now are in the financial distress than necessary, we are still under the same roof while we are not enemies. It seems no one can stand this, and whenever we encounter friends or relatives, they invariably ask personal questions to try to get each of us to speak ill of the other. As we don't do this, the next comment is always something like, "Well, then, why are you getting divorced?" The worst one was, "I don't think you really want a divorce, or you would have gotten one require giving them private and personal information? to unhitch in a civilized, amiable manner. Unfortunately, it has become a smile and say, "Oh, I am saving our life together for my memoirs." That kind of birthday last year, I took her out to a very expensive restaurant and bought her a nice gift. One month later, for my birthday, she took me to a relatively and she knows that.) We are both in similar financial situations, and I felt cheated. Her birthday is coming up soon. Should I take her out again, or just give her a small gift and forget our tradition of the birthday dinner? that the two of you are in financially similar circumstances and also that she even hostile. If she remarks on the "tradition" being different for her birthday this year than last, simply tell her that you are following her lead about what level of celebration is appropriate. This may totally louse up the living situation, so be prepared. Because you refer to her as "selfish," however, you may not wish to keep this arrangement going forever. Maybe stick a named Jay. We operated a small business together and continued daily contact his move, however, our friendship has hit some snags. (He hangs out with pompous members of the political establishment, has grown arrogant, and doesn't have time to return my calls.) Late last week I heard that Jay is getting married (to the youngest daughter of a political crony) and has failed to stuck. Even though my feelings are hurt, should I send Jay a polite note of congratulations? Shall I assume our friendship is over because he didn't invite invite you, by itself, would not signal the friendship's end, but the thinks it would be fine, as a tip of the hat to what used to be, to write him a congratulatory note, if that is your inclination. Don't do it, however, if its the by, it sounds as if you disapprove of this man's "pompous friends" and growing arrogance, so give the friendship a decent burial, emotionally, government would surely expect me to deliver a stronger endorsement of its heterodox economic program than I was prepared to offer. And, of course, it regime that has lately developed the habit of putting inconvenient people in jail. But sometimes an economist has to do what an economist has to do. Since I denouncing the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund as part of a anyone had imagined possible, and anyone with an open mind began to suspect supposed conspirators, and they aren't that smart), a few hedge funds really rapid spread of the crisis to countries with no real economic links to the in insisting that this was less a matter of economic fundamentals than it was a of the real economy, ends up validating itself. But I also concluded that the reflating, that is, increasing public spending and cutting interest rates to get their economies growing again. And so I found myself advocating temporary restrictions on the ability of investors to pull money out of crisis were secretly working out a plan to impose capital controls as part of a recovery strategy. According to what I have been told, my own public statement advisers were worried by the absence of any support for such controls among mainstream economists, but the appearance of my August manifesto in ahead with the plan anyway; but I had, inadvertently, found myself one of the few outsiders to express any kind of support. I quickly put out an open letter I arrived at a moment of celebration. When the controls were put on, many Western analysts predicted disaster: a collapse of the economy, hyperinflation, rampant black markets. It didn't happen. Two days experiencing a fairly strong economic recovery. The actual implementation of the controls had been careful and selective, and important economic accelerated after the new policy was introduced. A few days after my visit, restrictions on removing money from the country were eased and hardly any money admiration society. Surely they were disappointed when I expressed some controls wrong, it has not exactly proved the proponents right. For there is a controls (though it did get an early and crucial rescheduling of its foreign its big break with orthodoxy. You can argue that the controls may have allowed capital controls were necessary to protect small countries against the evil designs of big speculators. That's an unfortunate emphasis: While there are big speculators, and they do sometimes make plays against vulnerable economies, they are not the main reason that controls sometimes make sense. In general, controls should be imposed to prevent panic rather than conspiracy, and the investors who panic are, if anything, more likely to be respectable bankers and wealthy domestic residents than nefarious rootless cosmopolitans. (Indeed, even the occasional market manipulation by big speculators wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the possibility of generating a panic among other investors; it the first place.) And the emphasis on big foreign speculators may encourage nothing governments could do to curb that panic except to reschedule bank otherwise try to restore confidence by making a conspicuous display of virtue. with any attempt a sure recipe for disaster. Now we know better. Capital controls are not necessarily the answer for every country that experiences a financial crisis; sometimes confidence can be restored without the need for coercive measures, and even when calming words fail, "burden sharing" by banks and other lenders will often be enough. But it would now be foolish to rule out particular) is also in effect an accomplice in the imprisonment, on what morality play. Sometimes bad men make good policies, and vice versa. And the job of economic analysts is, or ought to be, to assess the policies, without whether that apostasy was necessary, but you cannot claim that it has been a were letting politics and ideology cloud their judgment. The volume of mail was astounding. Following is a fair sampling from the using the handicapped stall in a public bathroom. I use a wheelchair. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have entered a public facility to find the it! The large size is not because we are "deserving of such amenities," but because people in wheelchairs need the space to turn around, to clamber onto the toilet, to empty catheters, whatever. People such as myself cannot get up from the seat in a conventional stall without handrails. People sometimes use them to change clothes! This means I sometimes soil myself. If there are NO other empty stalls and you gotta go, then, by all can't seem to wait for a stall, callously making someone who is handicapped respond to this. I don't know how many times I have gone to use the handicapped stall and there's always someone in it. If there isn't another stall open, I understand. However, the comment I object to is the one where you say there is never a handicapped person waiting to use it when you are done. There are many conditions that are not visible. I have MS and look just fine. What is not apparent is that I have a bladder problem and a catheter. For me to deal with enlighten you: Almost every time I need to use the disabled stall (I am in a wheelchair), I have to wait for an AB to leave, and they all apologize meekly when they leave. Your insensitivity is truly astounding. What you consider luxurious is a necessity to us. I suggest that you try holding your bladder or bowels, race to the bathroom, and find the ONE stall you can possibly use occupied by someone who prefers the "luxury" of the handicapped stall. Please maintenance closes all but the handicapped facilities, so I guess you are time. As a former roommate of a disabled person, I became more aware of the functional aspects of being handicapped. Many of these individuals do not have advocating disregarding the rights of the disabled, but I think you may have misled others to do so. There is a big difference between handicapped parking and handicapped restroom stalls. Courtesy would dictate yielding designated bathroom facilities to those who require them, though when available, their use is not restricted from the general public. I would be encouraged to see this about this matter. One is that the disabled have a strong, perhaps disproportionate, influence when it comes to public policy. Mostly this is to Monthly story about the French kiosk company that developed wonderful individual bathrooms for use on streets. New York tried them but had to give them up because the lobby of disabled persons raised such a fuss about all of them having to be handicapped accessible. This, of course, was an impossibility, and unreasonable, so none were allowed on the streets. An illogical example of the power of this lobby can be found in hospitals. The number of bathrooms for surgeons and surgical staff, proximate to the operating rooms, has been reduced so that there can be personnel in wheelchairs, given the nature of the work. As some correspondents did point out, when no stall is available and there is a line, anyone can use the designated handicapped that the handicapped want fairness, but fairness for them sometimes results in role of the United Nations was increasingly called into question yesterday as and prepared for," it said in an editorial. "But again inertia is the name of the game and again an article regretting that "decades of 'quiet diplomacy' aimed at building ties with our huge neighbor has been dissipated in just a few in an editorial: "The pending evacuation of the United Nations this conflict. Despite French support for military intervention, most countries approval." Economic pressure is therefore the only option for the international community to pursue, but even this is opposed by several countries, including International Monetary Fund seem to be made of sterner stuff. because "to allow the bloodshed to continue into next week would inflame public conduct can lead to political and economic devastation for the nation." Nations. The paper said: "By taking on the organization of the referendum, the also that of the voters in the aftermath of the poll. It has betrayed their with this impossible contradiction: being the promoter of the rights of itself the means to make them respected? The answer will determine the future abandoned. "Last night, no one slept," she wrote. "Women walked around aimlessly, crying, carrying their babies on their hip. Men huddled. I was stopped every step, women grabbing my arm, men pulling me aside to say: 'Can To say no would be to deny them time to plan an escape." former defense secretary and one of the country's most prominent Conservatives, for the party leadership, said he wanted to put an end to untrue rumors about homosexual experiences since he was at university and has been faithful to his in discussing youthful homosexual experiences does him only credit." paper gave no reason for ditching him except that it didn't like the manuscript, which has already been leaked in other papers. The true reasons for the book contains more about his exploits as a tank commander in the Gulf War than about his affair with the princess, and it says that "the most satisfying United States over genetically modified (GM) crops. It reported that two French companies, the country's leading animal feed and poultry producers, have formed administration, which has collaborated with industry from the start to promote GM foods, seems to be in an uncomfortable position," it said. "It is being less scandal may cause to the presidential ambitions of Vice President Al Gore. In a campaign has two main purposes, it said: first, to find a pretext for the West against communism; and second, to dump Gore as a contender for the pay "a very heavy price" if it continues to fail to deliver on the promises it on hold until it has brought the militia groups under control," it said. games: "One athlete assaults another. Football fans invade a pitch. A coach curses an administrator. A woman martial arts competitor attacks a referee. A bodyguard draws his pistol. A policeman fires tear gas. Fans wreck the seats in a stadium or hurl them on to the pitch. Players are bombarded with bottles. A number of people are wounded." They showed, he said, that there are some people alleged connections with a Mafia murder), who said that while in office he was the word of the president of the United States?" the unidentified envoy Smith said, but he eventually entered the war as his ally because he was casual insult" made all the more distressing by the fact that the interview was designed to promote his own commercial interests. "The Prince may feel it is Times said in an editorial. "But does he pause to consider what effect cobwebbed, and unenterprising nation his words will perpetuate?" them. The Sun called him "a pampered, privileged young man who has achieved nothing, despite being born with a royal silver spoon in his mouth, despite all the undeserved advantages he has been handed." Then, praising Bay, Nova Scotia. For the purpose of "adding to the closure" for the relatives microphone to sing. "Love will be our legacy," he sang. "When dreams get tossed, we'll share the cost, and lay the roses on the rocks." talk like a gangster are "so badly handled by Grant that the movie derails and hand, argues that Grant "goes a long way toward saving [the film] from itself." Visit the official site to see stills and clips from the directing. The results are disastrous. The plot? Students take revenge on a but the title was toned down in the wake of recent school violence.) The film Mandolin are rather too blatantly present" and make the novel feel overly familiar. Still, "if Heller hadn't existed we might be calling this a pretty University Press). Critics are intrigued by the dramatic story of successful recounts the tale "in academic prose thick enough to thwart all but the most scholarly value of her story than its inherent drama and that will make the book tough going for some readers." But most say the interesting sociological history and insight into attitudes about women in medicine make it worth the wanted to see in the Kremlin someone he could trust in the interregnum to keep and added, "Even more ominous is the possibility that political infighting in of a country with thousands of nuclear weapons could have terrible to power by causing the cancellation of elections. "This could be done," the paper said, "either by declaring a state of emergency or a hasty union with positive view, saying, "Strip away all the talk about peace and progress and deal. The brutal reality is that the only concrete changes are the weakening of the forces of law and order and the simultaneous strengthening of the paramilitaries whose ranks are now swollen by a number of former groups, and also because of his efforts to secure the release of many kidnap unlikely things will change, despite the widespread repugnance and anger shown and the extreme right end their deafness and understand that we are not leader in the Times said that even if media inquiries into Republican recently, he is likely to survive any new revelations." The paper added that straw poll: "He has thus placed himself to emerge later as a new voice that could win over voters who found beauty in none of those parading their electoral politics are indeed a beauty contest, and if a history of sinning is his possible run. Despite his lack of electoral experience, the paper said talked about was that from the Middle Ages through the Reformation era, Christian moral theology, both Catholic and Protestant, has upheld other interns (nor lie about it thereafter)." It means "no one is compelled to reveal as yet right to preserve his fame that it should not rashly be laid open. Neither is it the part of a judge to search into hidden faults." the church's position for centuries. According to medieval canon law, "private and shameful acts," the sorts of things a penitent whispers to his priest, lie outside the jurisdiction of public tribunals. Moreover, both Catholic and Protestant writers argued against compelling people to answer specific nature" to expect "that any man should betray or defame himself." Even this stiff old Puritan never supposes that it is only weak, unprincipled men who lie under such circumstances. To put someone on oath, and then ask if he has masturbated or committed adultery (both mortal sins according to traditional Christian ethics), is merely to "give occasion of horrid perjuries." The Roman questions. It was precisely to give witnesses and defendants a way out of the perjury trap that theologians distinguished between a lie and a misleading or ethics "if there be just cause for concealing of a truth," one may use words in a "less known and common signification, and in another meaning than it is likely the hearers will understand them." Like, say, using "sex" in a sense that excludes fellatio (though that's not an example that Mason gives). Traditional Christian moral theology does not view attempts to hide one's private sins and shame as grave offenses. What it does view as a another human being's private failings and weaknesses in order to ruin his good name or otherwise bring him into discredit. According to the Summa it as a type of homicide, while others make it a sin against the Holy Spirit unjust revealing a secret hath in it oftentimes the pernicious violations of trust, friendship, and honesty," and is therefore "not only in the common To be sure, there are times when one has a moral right and citizen" is bound to notify the authorities of "faults which do either charity and justice require that, setting aside accusation, we content year ago this week was, by traditional Christian standards, the big sin of perhaps even more deeply wrong than either committing or concealing adultery. If, as many said, Flytrap reflects the erosion of traditional Christian values, new. The evidence of eroding Christian values is that compelling a man to publicize his hidden faults and punishing him for not cooperating in his own disgrace are no longer considered by many to be sins at all. who has been trying to overturn the ban for decades. "The last time I tried was credits his success to the last election, in which a bevy of Democrats were opposed his measure because they willfully refused to accept that the federal "miscegenation," which now sounds racist, comes from). Enemies of the of our white women to black men." Fears of black sexuality have been Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South's labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions categorizing a child as free or slave according to the mother's status (which was heavily male, the prohibition on unions between white women and nonwhite men also lessened the white men's competition for mates. (In contrast, sex common. It typically met with light punishment, if any at all.) sex underlay bans on interracial marriage, it was marriage that became the greater threat. Men might rape black women or keep them as concubines, but to marry them would confer legal equality. Thus, over the course of the all marriages between blacks and whites. Up through the Civil War, only two The end of slavery should have made things better. It didn't. In the South, the federal government initially forced the removal of the bans in several states. But when federal troops pulled out, the bans North did laws against intermarriage draw real fire, coming off the books in refused to issue marriage licenses to mixed couples, and ministers often wouldn't marry them. Couples that did marry faced harassment from employers and out of ten, express a definite feeling against" interracial marriage. It was, he said, a "consecrated taboo" that "fixed" the boundary between the races. That changed slowly with the civil right movement, which Amendment. The fortuitously named Loving decision took its place in law books, but not necessarily in practice. Where no one had the wherewithal to encouraged interracial unions. Blacks and whites began to meet and date, larger numbers in the '60s and '70s. The next generation saw a surge in than their elders, suggesting these numbers will climb. Whether these habits will change on their own, with the maturation of a more require a concerted governmental effort, is unknowable. In the meantime, we can take only meager pride in achieving a society in which interracial marriage is Entertainment). As expected, no one has much positive to say about Robin and, if nothing else, acknowledge his good intentions: "This is the kind of bogus production only completely sincere but misguided individuals can come up framed by her husband for his (faked) murder. Once she gets out of prison, she can theoretically murder him with impunity, because the Constitution protects her from being tried twice for the same crime. Critics are harsh on the film's who moves into a small town and begins helping out the local residents. Some reviewers call it quietly affecting, others could barely keep their eyes open. painstaking research of other scholars with his own new documentation," Court of Appeals, is generally hailed for his clearheaded analysis of the legal the perfect antidote to the hysteria that surrounded the scandal. But the cannot sustain or actually refutes." (Click here to read the first chapter.) extraordinary range and daring" with an "almost volcanic intensity" (Mel premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few thing?) The Silver Bullet That Won't Slow You Down. per pint.) Box decorated with a nice painting of a trout. "Red, White, and Blue," "Old German," or the one with generic printing that just says "Beer." The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no time limit for the room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test was one Worst from the "flight" (as they would call it if this were a wine Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a similar trends. The beers were ranked on "corrected average preference corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. rights, including the ability to sue health plans for denying care. It passed by an unexpectedly wide margin after the House rejected more limited protections proposed by Republican leaders. Supporters' spin: Finally, Opponents' spin: And consumers will have to pay the cost through higher that Republican leaders have lost the ability to set the House agenda. Republicans. First he said House Republicans shouldn't "balance their budget on the backs of the poor." Then he said his party often neglects the disadvantaged by focusing on economic wealth. Democrats called Bush a Bush of running for president on the backs of congressmen. But Bush said his comments made a "positive case" for Republican compassion. case. A former Bank of New York executive and two businessmen were spin: This is just the tip of the iceberg. The cynical spin: The way these Sprint's wireless network, the new company will offer the full range of communications services. Wall Street's spin: Mammoth companies are the wave of winner. The government's spin: Mammoth companies reduce competition, so The Senate is debating a nuclear test ban treaty. In response delaying the treaty for two years. Despite public support, the Republican Democrats by calling their bluff and will win the vote. The Democrats' spin: You're outsmarting yourselves by giving us an issue. citizens who were exposed remains unclear. The industry's spin: The incidents were flukes, and everyone else is safe from future accidents. Local residents' spin: Everyone else is as safe from accidents as we were. Vice President Al Gore is campaigning as the "underdog." He more money than Gore. The optimistic spin: Running as the underdog will energize Gore's campaign. The pessimistic spin: Pretending to be the underdog tried to block by halting checks to the museum and filing suit for lease Artists are guaranteed freedom, not taxpayer support. The museum's old spin: Withdrawing support violates this freedom. The museum's new spin: Thanks for said the army incursion and the preceding two weeks of air raids were necessary The Supreme Court began its new term. It is expected to be the most controversial term in recent memory, with cases on free speech, church and York Times said the decisions are "destined to transform, for better or Beatification, the first step toward sainthood, requires a confirmed miracle, and one has already been "authenticated." Name that miracle. five years, please spray paint 'hypocrite' on one of these signs, and smash the It is surprising how seldom one sees enameled profanity splashed across a scarlet streak appears, others swiftly follow), but not many. Our vandals apparently lack class consciousness. They are great respecters of private will scrawl some harsh architectural criticism across his vast backside. Even in the suburbs, where dogs run free, no poodle comes home with a hammer and alderman, wants to get rid of the signs "to remove the mixed or ambiguous but it's printed on two lines, so it's easily read as "No Dumping (Whatever)." By confusing "Whatever" with "Whatsoever," the author of this sign has created sign. No one's going to obey it anyway, so why bother? Embrace the mom made her weekly trip to the emergency room to have doctors patch up one of my four brothers injured in a game of King of the Hill or Catch the Arrow, it was a given that another mother would "look after" us kids, even though we were The greatest thing about the price of the home, my mom would say, was that it included a washer and dryer. It was the only way veterans who didn't table! And, yes, the ice cream man stopped right in front of the house. I had a then there are two mistakes, and thus errata, the plural is correct, in which case there is only one mistake, in which case errata, the plural, is now incorrect, in which case my head starts to hurt and I have to go lie historical personages ends up reproducing, word for word and comma for comma, a country, to be sure, Sir" "Well, Sir! (replies the Scot, somewhat mortified) "Your country consists of two things, stone and water. There is, indeed, a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping Sir; meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient strength to run people learn it. It is all gardening with you. Things which grow wild here, back in his chair, and laughing, "are you ever able to bring the sloe to books and those from which he is accused of copying, he denies wrongdoing, pointing out that "there are only a certain number of words in the English Museum but notes that this was a long time ago. "This is something that The House passed compromise gun control legislation. The authorities have to perform them from three days to one. A tougher measure resembling last month's Senate legislation was defeated, despite ardent measure, claiming it would lead to confiscation and a national gun registry; The House authorized states to decide whether to let the Ten Commandments be displayed in public schools. Proponents offered the bill as a response to "children killing children." Detractors called it an Conservatives sincerely believe that by attributing youth violence to immorality, they can relieve airport but still demands its own peacekeeping zone. Western officials say that church leaders urged them to trust the peacekeepers and stay. Meanwhile, shock, citing her community involvement and her terrific casserole. shipping pallets and a bad batch of carbon dioxide, neither of which presents a serious health threat. Financial experts say the serious threat is to Coke's Al Gore declared his candidacy for president. His speech and agenda will be "a very successful platform for the vice president to run from." apartheid supporters called him "a saintly man," and a conservative white paper egomaniacs. Click here for the mostly jubilant local reaction. but might publish a damning account of their behavior. The consensus prediction whose prestige was already bolstered by cleaner streets and lower crime. but allowed in the private sector. The sanguine spin: The companies are just growing stem cells to cure diseases; they're not cloning humans. The pages of rules are these: women must smile and wear makeup at all times, any 29--"if any girl gets three complaints, she must immediately resign." Rules Question (No. 260)--"A Touching (and Smelling) Tale": "You're telling me I have to touch anyone who comes in here, even if I don't want to? I have to get up really close to them and smell their out, yes, he does. And what does he have to do after divided into two kinds of contempt: some target snobs who disdain the rabble (the reluctant dentist, the smarmy candidate), others target slobs who on tree trunks; Rs hold a leaf in their mouth and clip bits off in a noisy way. No, wait, sorry, that last thing refers to different ways chimpanzee males attract females, evidence of true cultural variation among the apes, not one of astonished to learn about public access laws, but both the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Commission on Human Rights have been filling him in. "Families deserve refuge from a culture of violence and mayhem."-- Al Gore is either treating us all to an evening at Chuck E. Cheese's or "That's pretty much an accomplishment that won't happen, unfortunately for "Customer expectations will drive changes in vehicles if that's what Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is either willing to produce a new "One hundred thirteen years of our success has been based on the trust "There's a protest here. There's a protest there. There's a protest citizens who disagree with him, in this case street vendors he's throwing out "Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified DeLay 's surprisingly tasty mud soup now contains zesty chunks of real ape, Research Group is either mustering a rather limp defense of Tom DeLay or reporting surprising findings about chimpanzee life. if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety consistently? Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward. Every beer in ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect of the reward was that descriptions along the lines of "urine" or "get it away!" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would "do better" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Of course they were right, which is what made this round as amusing to administer as the first one had been. with excuses of "my wife is sick" (one person) and "meeting is running long" began, the tasters were given these and only these clues: that the flight included one "holdover" beer from the previous round After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it be bitters, and so on. They were asked to put each beer in its proper was to test the veteran beer drinkers' claim to recognize the distinctive round of testing was All Lager. This second round was All Fancy, and Mainly Not time was not exactly "accurate." If you want to stay within the realm of cool temperatures, with yeast that settles on the bottom of the vat. This is in contrast with an ale, which is brewed faster, warmer, and with the yeast on lagers can be dark, fierce, manly. Therefore, the correspondents suggest, it labeling, in presenting their tawnier, more flavorful beers as lagers too. and technical accuracy, it includes a few "strong" lagers too. there's an obvious skew toward beers from the Pacific Northwest. But as To include one holdover from the previous test, as a scientific control on to the lager test, we would expect the range of "best" choices to be more varied, since all the tested beers were supposed to be good. This expectation was most dramatically borne out in the "Best and Worst" rankings. were more or less respectful. ("Bitter, drinkable.") But at the top and middle each of these also got a Worst vote, and most of the other beers had a mixed reading. So far, the tasters are meeting expectations, finding something to points. Here the complications increase. The loser was again apparent: was the only beer not to have received a single "Best" vote. testament to the power of a blind taste test. The third suggests an important of a group simply because it's the most unusual or distinctive. This is why very high Wine Spectator ratings often go to wines that mainly taste one's first choice, but high on everyone's list. Let's go to the charts: Next, we have "corrected average preference points," throwing out the high and low marks for each beer. The result is basically the vs. one Best (and one Worst) this time. The shift in Bests is understandable and demonstrates the importance of picking your competition. The severe drop in preference points illustrates more acutely the ancient principle of being a big time this calculation led to what the colorful French would call a lower ranks on overall preference points, came out at the top on the fact that it was the only beer not on "sale" and therefore by far the of the tasting panel began to suspect, they themselves were being judged while and give specific brands and breweries for Samples A through J. This man was the only one to identify two or more of the beers accurately and specifically. that familiarity is the main ingredient in knowing your beer. Much in the fashion of blind men describing an elephant, here is a how the not always answer questions; often, it raises many new ones. This excursion into beer science mainly raises the question: What kind of people are we? life for "welfare maximization" as described in introductory econ. courses, the conclusion is obvious. We learned from the first experiment to buy liked and the cheapest beer. By the way, if there is a single company whose achievements the testing panel honored, it would be what is excluded in a blind taste test is in fact what we want, and are happy to pay for, when we sit down with a beer. The complicated label, the fancy beers. In elementary school, we all endured a standard science experiment: If you shut your eyes and pinch your nose closed, can you tell any difference in mean that from then on you should close your eyes, hold your nose, and chew a cheap carrot when you feel like having some fruit. There is a time and place home, here are a few suggestions for further research: Tell the testers ahead of time what beers they will be drinking. Ask them the list with the "revealed preferences" that come from the blind test. As a variation, show them the list ahead of time and ask them to pick out the beer they know they love and the one they know they hate. Then compare this Remember to stay strictly in the scientist's role. Don't take the test seductress seem an unlikely match. Father Sexpot is a stock character going to have chastity, you're going to have jokes about the power of sex to overthrow that ludicrous vow. Everyone enjoys a good hypocrite joke, and everyone likes sex. (Note to Ben and Jerry: Humping Monk ice cream?) as an anarchic force, tempting Bond from his vows of capitalism. seductress is unconvincing in a new way. This way: hot pants? Who wears hot pants? Nobody wears hot pants. Hot pants and money. What she's really showing off is all that creamy cash. This isn't sex as the irresistible life force that mocks and demolishes vows of chastity; it's sex as consumer good. It's the kind in these tiny shorts with this huge bag of money. Want some? involving prominent lawyers, businessmen, and church officials, has siphoned blockbuster opens, and a new list of outlawed pets takes effect. Below, a comparison of the newly taboo ferret and the just released Wild Wild that is "wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous, or naturally inclined to do ever heard of calls it "the hippest, funniest action movie of the summer." skewered view of this animal," said one angry ferret fancier. dozen reported ferret bites serious enough to require hospitalization. one reported Will Smith bite serious enough to require hospitalization. nationwide, and those attacks have become notorious for their severity and with them on their shoulders and in little packs! What is this administration going to do next, ban calico cats?" asked some other ferret fancier. which isn't, strictly speaking, a parallel, but does kind of make you sick when invites participants to devise a sequentially trumping topical triad along genre: the unsympathetic heroine comedy (see also: My Best Friend's passable: "Although the movie dawdles and repeats itself, it is often film about a love triangle involving a pair of conjoined twins and a prostitute provokes a fittingly dual response from reviewers. (Ratcheting up the weirdness twins.) Some find it "spellbinding," with "a solemn eroticism [that] sometimes more than simplistic dramatic ploys" and that it is "neither weighty nor as hauntingly in loneliness as it does on never actually being able to be alone." the cover of the first issue. The early response is surprisingly kind: Conventional wisdom has held that everyone was waiting to knock Brown off her cloud, but there are notably few scathing condemnations or laudatory pieces about the magazine in the news today. Instead, reports focus on the phenomenon could dust off the genre [of a general interest magazine], it's probably Brown" Talk 's official Web site. Click to read last week's "Summary Judgment" make the entire novel (which follows her search for a suitably rich and connected husband) quite a drag: "A hateful heroine and a catalog of to read an excerpt from the book and here to listen to an interview with the author.) admiration and mounting horror at the calculated brazenness of it all" (Mark finds that parts of the dialogue are "laugh out loud funny," but overall it's "a frivolous read that's far more titillating than scintillating." More biting foursome of female juvenile garage rockers gets solid reviews for its third at a feverish rate, capturing the rebellious, mischievous and instantly lyrics touch on subjects such as driving around on the neighbor's lawn, hanging relies heavily on its predecessors, and some songs sound lifted directly from Fast For Love"). But most critics don't sweat the album's derivative original, it's supposed to be fun. "A timeless burst of renegade teen spirit" duo's latest offering as "their best album since 1990's Business As to their usual high standards, but even more impressive are their lyrics, which millennium with bones that have turned to sawdust. That is the fate that awaits those of us, we are told, who don't consume the escalating amount of health officials. Just two years ago the National Academy of Sciences increased upward revision and we will all have to be attached to udders with an IV. Strange, then, that most of the world's people, who rarely if ever drink milk and who get just a small percentage of the calcium we are told is vital, have not devolved into boneless heaps of protoplasm. Even stranger, in many of these to become dairy doubters, questioning the wisdom of the calcium recommendations of the public health establishment. For one thing, the doubters say, our diet is so fundamentally flawed that trying to protect our bones by taking in loads of calcium is like trying to fill a tub with no stopper by turning up the faucets. The problem is this: In general, world dietary patterns show that countries where people consume large amounts of calcium are also countries where people eat extravagant amounts of animal protein, places such as the world's highest rate of fractures due to osteoporosis, the disease characterized by weak, porous bones. "The correlation between animal protein [intake] and fracture rates in different societies is as strong as that between acids, requires the body to buffer the effects of those amino acids. It does so by releasing calcium from the bones, literally peeing them away. But this leaching of calcium should be offset if the balance of calcium to protein in determinate of the rate of bone gain" in young women was not the amount of calcium consumed but the ratio of calcium to protein. But it's a difficult Could there be some other dietary factor at work as well? believes calcium consumption may be at the root of our bone problems, but his heretical hypothesis is not that we don't get enough calcium but rather that we get too much. In an article in the Journal of Nutrition he writes, commonly consumed and calcium intakes are relatively high. Is there any such a mechanism would work. The body adapts to low calcium intake by efficiently using what is available. Conversely, high calcium consumption causes the body to decrease the amount of the mineral that is absorbed, excreting the excess. That's why populations with low calcium consumption manage to form healthy skeletons, and high calcium consumers don't develop inefficient consumers may permanently damage their abilities to effectively use dietary calcium and to conserve calcium in the bones later in life. As we age, explains why high dairy consumers so often end up with rampant bone loss. He fractures. "It will be embarrassing enough if the current calcium hype is simply useless; it will be immeasurably worse if the recommendations are all of it from plant sources, in particular leafy green vegetables. They have be called the unified field theory of bones and breasts. He explains the mortal girls consume lots of these, which leads to relatively dense bones, high levels of estrogen, and early sexual maturation. The age of menarche has been dropping do, which helps account for their far lower rate of breast cancer, says Estrogen helps maintain bone, so most women's skeletons are rather similar to the ones that cause breast cancer." get almost all their calcium from soy, the bones of small cooked fish, and the literature on osteoporosis, have a significantly increased incidence of as his are not more widely known because, "Unfortunately, we are absolutely nutrition policies are corrupted by the influence of the dairy industry." The milk proponents offer a variety of responses as to why theories of the doubters could be characterized as demented ravings, probably vegetables, so thank goodness we aren't." The public health official's version rightly point out that physical activity, particularly the kind that requires we have turned our bathrooms into palaces of comfort, lots of the world's people still squat over holes, which makes it difficult to finish reading the inflatable punching toys that can't be knocked down, thus less likely to suffer hip fractures. The problem with this theory is that recent studies show that But most of all, they say, forget population statistics and instead look at the laboratory. Indeed, there are dozens of clinical experiments showing that high doses of calcium either arrest bone loss or even build bone in older women. Fine, say the dairy doubters, if calcium is the answer, then it should both prevent and cure osteoporosis, but it doesn't. The doubters also argue that these laboratory studies, which usually run from two complications. With an aging population, and in the absence of some plumbing themselves, the incidence and cost of osteoporosis can only rise. milk issue and unintentionally siding with the dairy opponents. Milk consumption has been falling for decades. It is now about half what it was in especially, soft drinks. Soft drinks are loaded with phosphorus, which is an essential and widely available nutrient. The problem is that too much phosphorus itself causes calcium to be lost from the bones. Then there's excess orchestras dueling with opera companies over the entertainment dollars of doubters or the calcium advocates, that shattering sound you will hear as the shall know them. The presidential candidates have staked their places on the Web to raise money, to distribute speeches and position papers, and to show off a reformer disdainful of big money. The site even offers a copy of his personal financial disclosure statement. However, you'll soon discover that clicking around the site causes an unsolicited "Make a Contribution" box to pop up contribution form requires donors to check boxes stating, "I am not a foreign national who lacks permanent resident status in the United States" and "The funds I am contributing are my own personal funds and not those of pledge to write a check but, unlike other sites, doesn't let you use your credit card online. There's also an "Online Internship grassroots organization, volunteer coordination, fundraising, events planning personalization to the next level, asking for information in just like baseball! The parties are leagues, the primaries are playoffs, and papers, speeches, and press releases as links from an icon symbolic of in appearance, the home page features Hatch silhouetted against a black background. Supporters are encouraged to stuff virtual ballot boxes by a online page, which links to Internet polls. A page of media links invites disciples to write editors and create the illusion of a senator's opponents: A cartoon of a wayward youth smoking something quotes the parents' transcript archive of his speeches and radio shows is amazing. campaign exposes Bush's server as the largest single source of visitors "Official Campaign Material" that "may be ordered for a small contribution." A takes you not to his position papers (which requires a further click) but to seems to be a participation device for the gullible. parties, he also switched his Web site and logo. For a Reform candidate, he's continually setting the standards of excellence. He is the archetypal pot leaf signifying medical marijuana pops up on your screen. If you click the begins, "Due to the complexity of FEC regulations, we are unable to accept you're required to check a box affirming that you "do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social children of our parent's generation." The "Socialized Medicine" page exults, "New treatments are slowing the development of acne." Gore also vows to "give each child a talking Chihuahua" and "reduce class sizes to uncanny (and possibly actionable) resemblance to Gore's official site, but the content is weak. All jokes, all secondhand. Includes a "Bulletin graphics but heavy on content, with links to dozens of articles scrutinizing Bush and several plugs for itself from major news organizations. Calls itself release has Bush promising "to raise the age at which minors can be just different. For I can't help asking: Do these acts of revenge undermine the impulse to avenge is human, and the opportunities for it are abundant at the end of a war, when law and authority evaporate. But that doesn't make them easy important, however pedantic it may sound, to keep stressing that only "some" or "a few" partook of such vengeance, since even choosing to discuss these distort history.) No one would cheer these reprisals, but only the most twisted "courageously honest in seeking to act out what others merely dreamed of, or to the experience of people who, maddened by the loss of their families and entire worlds, might best be considered to have been 'temporarily insane' in drinking, contemplating their next move. "We sat with our glasses and the idea flew out of us and suddenly it was no longer in the air but on the table," been spared death like so many friends and kin was so that they could survivors of the death camps as well as refugees from the forests. They devised two plans. Plan A involved poisoning the water supplies of major German cities. the cities' water mains, staying up late to memorize every detail. They figured out where to administer the poison as well as how to spare the sectors of the under the floorboards several bottles of arsenic, which had been tested on a eat.) Suddenly, hearing the banging of window shutters that had come loose, too late for combat, vented their revenge impulses by hunting down Gestapo and Eventually, these soldiers got hold of a Gestapo official even their addresses. They proceeded to track down some of the SS men who had to the home of the SS man, and ask him to come with them on some conventional Holocaust survivors was, in fact, the relative absence of avenging actions. The bulwark against future persecution, or to engage in symbolic retribution legitimate justice. Even so, it's worth considering that a more vigorous killing, might nonetheless send a signal that the world believes justice to be past few days, these demonstrators shouted: "Down with the dictator," "Oh Great Leader, shame on you!" and "Jerks!" Who was protesting participants), this question all but demanded the invention of a violent theatrical event, and that's not easy. Violence may look magnificent on screen, but on the theatrical stage it's phony baloney. (Violence among theatrical people, on the other hand, can be entertainingly savage, cf, All About and television were often chastised, the stage never. (Although a friend who vicious a blow to the senses as one is likely to survive.) Nudity on stage can be powerful, and is still protested, but not as powerful as the frightening but the swerve was too blatant a piece of interference." Research Center, financing the latter with revenues from the former, an arrangement that could easily be reversed if the public, sated on gambling, suddenly grew enthusiastic about museums. With that in mind, can you tell which of the following are from the museum, and which from the casino? bow and arrow aimed at the heavens to bring down the rain" is "to help advance the personal and professional growth of the members and educational development." And for my money, nothing promotes "personal growth" elder Laughing Woman and the ceremonial ribbon cutting, the 185-foot presented with majesty and beauty in the Town Square." presumably shorter than both the Observation Tower and the Rainmaker. Three part of a demonstration of how natural dyes can be extracted from indigenous ride in the amusement park section. "This hilarious speed adventure is loaded ride!" Incidentally, tribal elder Laughing Woman, although laughing, is in no one. It arrived and looked utterly unlike him. Not even close. What it looked like was a standard, creepy doll. Which gave rise to speculation that maybe, simply hires child models who look uncannily like their dolls. church. The shooter, a "loner" with no criminal record, yelled criticized congressional inaction on gun control in killings were "a wave of evil" that legislation could not stop. was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved north. Most population centers avoided major damage. Last week's East Coast spin: We're going to get hammered. privilege, he denied congressional Republicans' request for records relating to White House spin: Congress is playing politics with investigations and is increase and a guarantee that the company will not block unionization of wage increases, labor costs per car will decline due to efficiency The House passed campaign finance reform. The bill, which was opposed by the Republican leadership, would ban unregulated "soft money" donations and curb "issue ads" by advocacy groups. Senate leaders may eliminate the issue ad provision to overcome a promised filibuster. The New leaders who had objected to the bill on free speech grounds. Republican opponents say that without additional limits on labor unions' political The United Nations is sending peacekeeping troops to East military would withdraw as international forces arrive. The United Nations hopes to restore peace and bring back refugees. Others foresee a bloody conflict with Major airlines unveiled service improvement plans. The voluntary changes were offered as an alternative to proposed "passenger rights" legislation in Congress. Airlines claim their initiatives will greatly improve baggage handling, ticket refunds, and information on flight delays. Congressional critics say the plans are legal "gobbledygook" offering no new protections to passengers. Despite pleas from Republicans to remain loyal, he's becoming increasingly Department received files detailing the devices used in the raid much earlier Pundits debated who was more damaged by the new information: Congressional or the attorney general, who was unaware of her own department's reports. thrilled about talking about," he told the New York impossible for anyone in Bush's shoes not to bear an especially heavy Oedipal distinguish him from Dad) had the more daunting task of succeeding his Revolution and wrote the influential tracts Thoughts on Government and his son to make "a good account" of himself, and continued to hector him well into his adulthood. "You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you you do not rise to the head not only of your profession but of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness and Obstinacy." father's entreaties to work hard. He had internalized them fully, and his copious diary entries reveal neurotically high ambitions and an obsessional hangover after a night spent caroling with friends, during which, he recorded, "the bottle went round with an unusual rapidity." Yet for all his paternally instilled perfectionism sparked a lifelong case of clinical for his later diplomatic career. And, just as the intellectually emphasized the role of passion, not reason, in governing men's political favored Bush were "actually thinking of the father"; the confusion triggered a while "the copious treasures" of fame and achievement "have already been gathered by the hands of genius," he and his generation would still stay true to "the precious memory of the sages." Though he was ostensibly paying tribute struggled to stake out his own terrain as a lawyer or, his ultimate fantasy, a poet. Naturally awed by his father's achievements, he swore he didn't want a career in politics (again, not unlike the way W. pursued business after failing pursuits as an attorney than his father, recently elected as the nation's first Dad. "I wish I could have been consulted before it was irrevocably made," he said of the appointment. "I rather wish it had not been made at all." The important leader in his own right. It could only have served as a painful had cut a "Corrupt Bargain." He unwisely fed the rumors and harmed his own petitions on the floor of the House. It takes little imagination to speculate spectacular achievements, he was doomed to feel inadequate next to his showed me a side of her I hadn't seen before, a warm, affectionate side. Out of say I think I finally broke through to her. It began with a point I made about to a large degree phony. There's plenty of space! We should stop worrying! E. seemed to loosen up right away. She even put her hand on mine. I always heard you could score if you talked policy to her. Not that we had sex. But I will say I have high expectations for the future. If only the trip had lasted one too. We sped across the desert, the futon on the roof threatening to blow off, in order to make an appointment she'd made at a ritzy hairdressing salon. She late. E. didn't want me to use the valet, because, as she diplomatically put see her later that night to unload her things. She said that "didn't work" for fun if she could come. She smiled. I think she may say yes. time to time, a great man arises among us, teaching wisdom and virtue. Awed by his authority, the political leaders of his day embrace his legacy, distort his words, and persecute their enemies in his name. Such is the fate of week, he testified before Congress in the midst of a partisan fight over a solicited his denunciation of the plan, Republicans sought his condemnation of both sides twisted his answers to suit their purposes. Their fight for his payment is the best use of the surplus, tax cuts are the next best, and spending hikes are the worst. While opposing a big tax cut, he stipulated, "If I became concerned that the surplus is going to be employed for increased spending programs, [then] I would be strongly in favor of tax cuts now. I think make the tax cut look bad, Democrats compare it to debt payment. At the Republican plan. "My first priority, if I were given such a priority, is to let that as a consequence of those surpluses, they tend to be spent, then I would be far more in the camp of cutting taxes, because the least desirable [outcome] Conversely, to make the tax cut look good, Republicans compare it to spending retirement is probably the best thing we could do. And if not that, perhaps some sort of a tax cut. But probably the thing that could really get us in trouble in an economic sense from your perspective is to spend it all." In essential message was to "be sure you do not increase government spending." education, defense, veterans, agriculture, medical research, and other would agree with us" that taxes should be cut instead. "The White House is buying down less debt, and increasing spending, and increasing taxes," added president's effort to buy down less debt and increase government programs." thing to do is the Democratic plan: spend down [the] national debt, invest the direct his ire against the Republican plan, emphasize the difficulty of reining the other hand, emphasize the difficulty of reining in spending. "If you create preserve the surplus for debt reduction by not spending it. Republicans promise to preserve the surplus for debt reduction by cutting spending to keep pace taxes should be cut because the Democrats can't be trusted to refrain from far, the Democrats' spin has prevailed, mostly because, as the Wall Street cuts are preferable to more spending. Most reports say only that he opposed the the tax cut. Instead, the Times fed its readers the Democrats' siding with the White House" and other foes of the Republican plan. A shallow reporting doesn't just bury the Republican spin. It conceals a deeper his recommendation against cutting taxes depends on a calculation that Congress won't spend the surplus. If that calculation is wrong, he would favor the tax problem (whether the surpluses will "be spent") is superficial. The salient questions, outlined above, are more relative and dynamic: whether Democratic promises to refrain from spending the surplus are less trustworthy than Republican promises to match tax cuts with spending cuts, and which important questions in such an unsophisticated manner? Because, like most questions about how much money the government will raise and spend, they're not done with them. He may want them returned. He may want me to destroy them. He may not care at all." You make the prediction: Who will want whom to do of a trade between the two nations. What is being swapped for gives up a phantom economy built on cronyism and kickbacks; the International South generously agreed to trade the North its position in out, in case you were planning a satirical musical comedy about the crisis in offending the rhythm and a sense of human decency. An early version of this sort of thing that I recall with particular pleasure was Mad magazine's East Side Story --that being the location of the United Nations. prized as the only satirical voice reaching suburban adolescents. Now with come to mind-- Mad is as superfluous and weary as the grandfather we shunted into that nursing home. (Was that us? Certainly not. It was the She seems to enjoy it, and I may yet be in the mood to read a movie parody his grave to discuss the equating of fertilizer with family, of shit with continue being dead. (And by "some" I, of course, mean "me.") last week's naval skirmishes and complaining about the accommodations in the tried to smuggle them through customs, or wishes that she hadn't got caught. annoyed that everyone doesn't just agree with him, and he thinks the best remedy is to mount a futile run for the presidency. civilization. (The early part of the movie is scored with waltzes.) This moment actor. Cruise's brow is preternaturally low, and when he tries to simulate neighbor's presentation of fire: What this orange snake make finger feel screwing up his face and feigning a tragic awareness while a piano goes been translated as other things) in the late '60s, spent several years on the of a year and a half. (Only after principal photography was finished did he unfaithful to his true love) and gets launched on a dark odyssey, which culminates in his near death and a vision of society's most ferociously movie couples sexual obsession with an epochal fear of sex: It says, "Don't go (Pollack), in which both are sexually propositioned. After a bout of jealous banter, the doctor declares a smug faith in his wife's fidelity, whereupon news that she once came this close to abandoning him and the couple's daughter for a soldier she locked eyes with at a resort hotel. wife and the soldier, and emerges from his apartment into a kind of customers. The film's centerpiece is a sequence in which the doctor perilously crashes an ornately choreographed orgy in which the rich and powerful wear disrobed by attendants. That he isn't supposed to be there dawns on him about the time the masks turn his way and the conversation stops. partially deaf and had withdrawn from the world, he chose to set the novella a record for the most orgasms with the most women. Steeped in Expressionism didn't extend himself to fit his material, he contracted his material to fit his turgid tempos. That wins him points as an auteur but not as an get past his sour detachment and enter into the movie. He keeps the characters performances this flamboyantly bogus? The early scenes are the most maladroit. because they're all part of a scheme to hoodwink the protagonists or because a timeless feel, and I don't mean that as a compliment: It supposedly takes place in New York in the present, but it's estranged from any period I one has ever made a pass at them and are so deeply traumatized by their absorbed at least half a century ago? Where do these heroically take them to secret masked orgies in Long Island mansions? Even dream plays need some grounding in the real world. There might have been a way to make the movie work if the characters hadn't been so abstracted, so generic. details of personality in pursuit of an underlying archetype. I don't know how a director whose central theme is the loss of humanity can be so uninterested entertainment journalists determined to make him pay for his (sensible) decision to remove himself from their orbit. But the coldness that has become to do with the clinical distance he maintained from his own characters. The nothing to do with who she is. Where's the drama in her husband's (and our) realization that she's fundamentally unknowable when she has been photographed The movie's lone masterful sequence is the one that features a batch of blank, leggy dolls, along with people whose faces are hidden behind expressive masks. As Cruise moves past the fornicating satyrs and caricature their behavior in the name of some "archetypal" truth because those masks are already so marvelously archetypal. The most vivid moments in his actors. You can stare at Cruise's mask as he takes in the orgy and swear you see the wheels turning in his head. Tom Cruise thinking is the year's most say that you are very correct in pointing out the basic statistical mistake of implying causation from correlation. I think it is naive to think that simply posting copies of the Ten Commandments is going to solve the nation's crime I also think it is damaging to the faith to try and "use" religion to solve social problems. God becomes a means to an end instead of an end in Himself. He is not a magical potion that you can sprinkle on your problems to make them go away. I do think that genuine faith and a relationship with God will cure violence and murder and such; however, imposing religion on people is not the answer. I think one of the reasons there is a positive correlation between religion and crime in the States is because large portions number of churchgoers in a given area is relatively inconsequential in this all the crimes, then we would have an interesting situation. But if that is not issue then becomes the motivations for the population of criminals, which are things such as the social structure and the justice system. caused by the unreasonable expectations of the people who seek medical care. The reason "patients expect better care than they're willing to pay for" is that they have already paid for it. Medical advances are made through development. The hospitals that we go to and our doctors practice in essentially all receive some level of governmental funding. Our doctors attended medical school with the aid of federally guaranteed student loans or outright grants. We paid for the ability to provide the best care in the world, and we continue to pay far more, in terms of percentage of gross average annual compassionate professionals. They certainly provide an essential service. They all make a ton of dough, and I don't know anyone who begrudges them that. The current medical payment scheme in the United States makes the very best medical care available but is also an active barrier to many who seek basic care and cannot afford it. Radical reform is clearly called for but will never happen as dilemma has come about because we tried to shift cost control away from the service providers. This has had the effect of driving many capable physicians out of their own practices and into exactly the kind of alienating, impersonal, professionals charged with caring for us feel compelled to sacrifice their independence in this way. Unionization is a bad idea that will only make things essay, no responsible commentator could use the characterization used by "revisionists who dismiss as cold war humbug the notion that the Soviet Union that he had "steadfastly insisted on the academic integrity of the series and staunchly defended [their] work." In other words, virtually everything important one. I only hope no one ever decides to demonstrate his or her "high Addressing a "God Not Guns" rally of ministers near the Capitol a couple of weeks ago, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay offered this that said it all. The student writes, 'Dear God: Why didn't you stop the shootings at Columbine?' And God writes, 'Dear student: I would have, but I Republicans is that adolescent violence is inevitable given the decline of religion. Indeed, until the early 1960s' Supreme Court decisions on school prayer, displays of the Ten Commandments were common. And back then, crime was much less prevalent than today. So, the House voted to undo the "damage" by allowing states to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools and In social science terms, the Republicans believe there is a correlation between the influence of religion and obedience to the law. The Ten Commandments prohibit murder, so exposing people to them could tend to discourage lethal violence. The absence of religious faith and norms, on the other hand, might incline someone toward homicide. The argument has particular force in the context of Columbine, where the gunmen asked two girls if they believed in God, and when they answered affirmatively, shot them dead. implausible, but a correlation is not the same thing as a cause. If we were to discover that none of the killers in the various school shootings were in the habit of eating pancakes for breakfast, we would have established a correlation. But no one would argue that the kids killed because they didn't campaign to get children to eat pancakes every day. Once you find a correlation between A and B, you still have to demonstrate that one causes the other. In this instance, though, conservatives are claiming to have found a cause without even showing a correlation. Why not? Maybe because they can't. The United States is the most religious of all the industrialized almost no adherents, has less violent crime than almost any country. There are a few advanced nations that have high rates of church attendance and low rates has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average. The same pattern generally holds in the rest members of Congress. New York, the very symbol of godless depravity, is House Republicans have also failed to notice that the the one claimed by Republicans: Religion and violence seem to go hand in hand. That doesn't mean faith actually causes murder. But it does suggest that when Republicans contemplate the Ten Commandments, they should pay more attention to full year before the election, which ought to be enough time for citizens to read 10-to-20 books on current issues, study the candidates' platforms, listen to half a dozen debates, and make the kind of thoughtful decision our Founding been complaining that a year of presidential politics is not enough. least, might well be over by a year before the actual election. Others in the we will too, starting this week. (And if others in the media went and jumped off a cliff, would we do it too? Yes, probably.) Although blame for this are also to blame, along with political consultants, pollsters, and so on, all of whom have a vested interest in the "permanent campaign" (a concept used in a invalid for that reason alone). Thanks to the election industry, politics are tasting sweeter before it got industrialized, that's probably just your spent the past year writing cultural criticism under the rubric "The Browser." He was hoping to spend a few more months gazing at paintings and reading novels before lowering his sights, but now he has loyally abandoned art for life. under the rubric "Ballot Box" (the latest addition to our collection of Boxes). Links and an opinionated guide to the day's best political stories on the A daily joke, crafted by the finest humor artisans from the freshest for an explanation), but the point is to see if the invisible hand of capitalism can beat the gasbags at predicting election results. Links galore to the campaign Web sites, media, and other useful stuff for we'll be launching a new column, "Net Election," published by political analysis of the election as it's playing out on the Web, and our friends at the Industry Standard will supply a weekly business forum, has been transformed, effective this week: new technology, new user interface, new rules of the road. Our readers send us piles of clever and of this brilliance out where it can be shared with other readers and possibly how others have reacted or replied. Every posting can start a new discussion thread, or extend an ongoing discussion, or "branch off" an ongoing discussion to take it in a new direction. Especially wise or witty responses will be here is that many people (we hope) would enjoy engaging in a vigorous discussion of something they have just read but have no special interest in joining an online "community," which is the usual emphasis of Web site bulletin boards. If you want to join our community, you're very welcome, and you can link to all our current discussions, including a general discussion, a technical issues. But if you simply want to tell us how wrong we are about something, you can skip all that and post a message from the offending page give you more choices. To get your favorite parts of delivered to your inbox (without getting the parts you can't stand), you must Daily delivery of "Today's Papers," plus a selection including "Summary Judgment," our summary of all the other reviewers. Economist by translating that slogan from Welsh to English. (Question Miss Universe contest. The only two finalists with any kind of a shot are Miss General Assembly, the president moved beyond vague generalities and into comforting platitudes as he discussed poverty (against it), health care for all people (for it), and outbreaks of widespread killing (should do something to stop them). Courting opprobrium, the president raised the touchy issue of weapons of mass destruction and bravely declared that it would be bad if they invited to provide campaign slogans for these presidential candidates whose Web Online Political Advertising: Our Salesman Reports the past few years, the advertising business as a whole has moved from a mood of hostile skepticism toward the Internet to an almost euphoric embrace of its possibilities. In my new job as manager of political advertising for the the same process. For the moment, buyers are still resistant to the new medium. ever seen such a campaign, let alone one that had a demonstrable result. Peter around, was one of the few candidates to make significant use of banner ads in site, among other places. While one study suggests that these ads diminished from now, we'll have better data about the effectiveness of candidate ads. What we can say in the meantime is that Web advertising is capable of doing things touting to political consultants and campaign managers this election you advertise on television or radio, you base your spending decisions on viewer and listener surveys, but you can't target precise groups of swing voters that might matter to you. With the Web, you can strike at them surgically. There are thousands of niche sites on the Web as well as Internet themselves on collecting highly specific information about users, through registration, subscription, and the use of "cookies" (for more on cookies, see precise demographic groups defined by age, ZIP code, income, and various other characteristics. What's more, several of the larger portal sites are able to "merge and purge" their user data with voter lists. This means that Bill course, the more precise the targeting, the more expensive the ad. Reaching Web can serve as a tool to motivate those that are passionate about issues. A returned from user interaction with Internet ads far outweighs what you can of cookies, clients know precisely how many of the individuals they targeted interacted with their ad in a number of ways. A banner ad that contains a streaming video version of a 30-second spot can tell you not only how many people viewed the commercial but also where in the commercial they got bored they are becoming interactive in ever more imaginative ways. Think of a banner ad as the Internet on a bumper sticker. It can do just about anything with video, sound, or animation. But first it has to grab your attention from a in a format similar to a stock ticker. Advertisers control the text in the banner and can target it by demographic or issue group. Advertisers might also addresses from Web users. The advertiser may then use the information to information. For users, this banner provides an easy, convenient way to expanding menu banner contains four buttons that activate menus. Users then choose from a menu and navigate to different locations on an advertiser's Web site. This allows a campaign based on four key issues to "drill down" on each of them in great detail. Once the user has found the issue he wants more information about, a click of the mouse takes him directly to the page that Web users from a banner ad: "Click here for my stance on free air time for candidates!" This option becomes more attractive when combined with the capability to deliver specific messages to targeted audiences or geographic stage mothers and bitchy teens. Drop Dead Gorgeous was written by a effects, which give the haunted house moving statues and doors that sprout in favor of the film, citing the scenery and effects as reason enough to see showered on Brown's new baby, which is being published in partnership with attorneys but was reinstated after Brown saw it and called off the lawyers. And magazine for weeks. Brown has also been making the rounds talking up her new project: Already this week she's done an interview in the Wall Street Journal and been quoted at length in a piece in the "Business" section of Talk "more closely resembles a postmodern version of Life online gossip sites, Brown is steamed that the magazine went to press before at the last minute on the latest issue of Vanity Fair to change the set on fire, impromptu stripteases, giant bonfires with people leaping through see Webcasts from the festival on the official site.) its return, after more than half a century, to Berlin. Following the example of mean that "we are turning our backs on the values and basic principles of our is now history. But its spirit should live on in Berlin." ministers to resolve a dispute over terrorist disarmament, which is threatening surrendering its hidden weapons. In an analysis of the problem, the Financial Times noted that decommissioning is a key element in every peace settlement, but that Northern arrived in full Highland dress with kilt and sporran and announced menacingly, the Soviet Union would exist for the foreseeable future. He now claims it was part of the process which led to the dismantling of the Communist empire." problem than to anything wrong with the drink itself, according to research nausea and headaches after drinking it. The company found "bad carbon dioxide" most of the health complaints made after this was reported in the media suggest past, and referred to his truck as "the Panzer division." presidential candidate, Al Gore studiously ignored him. Last weekend, after momentum in the Democratic race had shifted. The debate challenge has changed the game by advancing several of Gore's strategic objectives. team makes this kind of "run," the other team's coach calls a timeout to defuse the hot team's momentum and ruin its rhythm before the game gets out of hand. Since the strategy Gore had mapped out before the game has already been defeated and discarded, he has nothing to lose by tearing up his schedule to challenge, it has supplanted his message as the campaign's hot story. Every debate challenge helps persuade the media to cast Gore in this unlikely role. appealed for support on the basis of his character and life story. So far, positions on the issues, he stands to lose some of his support by having to spell out his views. By pushing the contest in this direction, Gore's challenge has issues on which he expects to win votes and issues on which he expects to lose votes. The rule is to talk about your winning issues and avoid your losing powerful teachers' unions and Democratic voters who think vouchers threaten by having to address these troublesome issues instead of his winners. calling Gore "timid" and associating him with "entrenched power." By daring The Times said Gore's "call to arms" conveyed "passion" and "suggested tonight, delivering one of his feistiest performances of the year." A Times headline ventured, "Notion of a New Al Gore Begins to Take brushed it aside, saying there would be "plenty of debates" down the road. But argument against him. For weeks, with increasing explicitness, Gore has accused opposing farm subsidies, and retiring from Congress after Republicans took full "running" from battles. The media smell a new target. "By refusing to engage, criticisms as "darts." "I am simply not going to get into dealing with the have a positive vision of the future." This rebuttal might have worked, but the but calling for debates looks noble. Conversely, refusing to answer your opponent's insults looks noble, but refusing to answer a debate challenge looks cynical. Gore is using his debate challenge as moral cover for his attacks on park, telling the crowd that if the two sluggers had "stayed in the dugout" and course, demand an open exchange, and cast himself as the idealist. Meanwhile, the media are playing along, hoping to egg on the fight. In an interview with question, declining to "lay all the cards out on the table" just because Gore seniors determined to lose their virginity. Critics take one of two positions. a beer laced with semen) are just "sucker bait to entice teenage audiences into the tent to see a movie that is as sweet and sincere at heart as anything its own dirty mind. Among this year's bumper crop of teenage movies, it is the when he complains that the film "begins well and makes good points, but it paced and cleverly constructed." (Click here to watch the trailer.) children for their now routine desecration of their father's reputation (see many epistolary sections of the book, and she "wonderfully captures the ghostly dance of presence and absence that can characterize digital relationships" A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of undercut by diplomatic backtracking and congressional cowardice. The New seems an odd choice considering that Record just published a book titled The years, perhaps the most fascinating years of the war." Other reviewers praise Harry Potter titles. (The New York Times list has the two available Potter books at positions three and four.) The subject of the new volume is the same as the rest of the series: the life of young wizard Harry Potter, who attends a boarding school for sorcerers. The critics call this one the best Potter adventure yet: It "blends the banal and the fantastic, the everyday and reviews for the collaboration between two of the '90s' most acclaimed jazz play between the two that's almost kinda sweet. Both are assertive. Neither "although scientists believe there were never many wolverines there," notes a celebrated as the "Water Wonderland," because it has "four times as much what sends most states whining to the federal government for emergency aid. State Housing Development Authority sponsored an essay and drawing contest, Association of Home Builders and the Mortgage Bankers Association also shoreline and killing tens of thousands of birds and marine mammals saw a horse running down the street, then all of a sudden I noted it had horns. really do have to recognize that it's going to be difficult and take a while College, an adviser to the federal government. "And for a significant percentage, they're never going to get it because they're cognitively impaired, they're too frail, or they just don't have the energy to invest in understanding these things." Who's never going to understand what? snappiest slogan to those who speak no Welsh. Yet the banner inside General this lead from the Economist by translating that slogan from Welsh to who worked on that floor. It was exciting, albeit in a slightly childish way, to see your name on that signboard, confirming that you still had your cushy job in this historic broadcasting center. And the signs made it easier for visitors to find their way around. After the takeover, one of the first hints of the new corporate culture was the removal of all those convenient signs, to date. As he went from floor to floor removing the signs, did he realize what was going to happen after he'd taken down the final one? individual employee and the rewriting of architectural history. Isn't this the sort of thing we used to detest when the Soviets did it? That, and replacing my New Yorker subscription, I asked the operator if she could offer me a bargain. "Are you a priest?" she asked. A special low rate is listed for courting Catholic clerics (coveted by advertisers?). "It's true at morning. He kept his head down and avoided eye contact. He pressed no flesh. He was widely recognized, but it appeared he did not wish to be seen. Was it shirt? Did he pay for it, or was it baksheesh? Face it: He just doesn't seem signed a contract with a publisher declaring my intent to write it. Last week I jettisoned in the early '80s, and there's no trace of it. Some of my best Still, the general reader may be permitted to wonder: Why is biography such a protracted affair? Novelists seem able to turn out a book every year or two. Historians, as burdened by footnotes and data as biographers, seldom devote more than five years to a book. What's our problem? Is it some congenital defect of biographers? A laziness or dilatory habit of mind? My guess is that our failure of promptitude has to do with the unique relationship we establish with our subjects, dead or living. Unlike the novelist, who invents (supposedly) his characters, or the historian, who grapples with a populous cast, the biographer enters into a curious intimacy with the person being written about, a relationship charged with ambivalence, resentment, love, dependency, and all the myriad other emotions that crowd in whenever we allow ourselves to become intimate with another. That the biographer doesn't actually live with, or in many instances even know, his subject; that the relationship may be involuntary (an unauthorized biography); that it's by its very nature unequal, one person focusing attention on another with no hope of reciprocity, in no way diminishes the intensity of the experience. As any biographer will tell you, the act of writing a biography is was infinitely more complicated than I could have fathomed when I embarked on wrote about. My subject, wary by nature, had, after a year of elaborate equivocation, arrived at the point where he would grant me access to his time. I didn't want him to authorize the book; I wanted my freedom. And for his part, Bellow maintained that he "wasn't finished yet, wasn't ready to be summed end, the book was, as Bellow took to describing it, "neither authorized nor Over the next decade, I made my biographer's rounds, like routine) of poring over his unpublished manuscripts in the rare book and private hands. Biography is no vocation for old men; it requires physical my book, I was, to borrow one of Bellow's favorite words, bushed. of composition, year after year of struggling to assemble these materials into downfall of so many of the bloated biographies that now weigh down the shelves reading the story of his own life, so closely did he identify with Bellow's The trouble is that you've gone through so much pain to credit. Only after you have a completed manuscript does your confidence build encountering the third reference to Bellow's occasional book reviews for the evidence of my progress. (Did she smile, or was that a wince?) On the third only had time he would have written a shorter letter, I managed to cut another cover had been designed, the catalog copy written. I was still revising the possible moment, my voice. And how to end it? At last I found a way (since, happily and thanks to Bellow's physical vigor, I wouldn't have to write a on Bellow's life. He was ruminating about death, and about possibly meeting up again with his parents and his brothers in the next world. I thought of ending the book with his quote, but then some other stuff happened in his life (you'll least read the reviews to find out what). And Bellow, too, is putting the sentence on the last page: "His reunion with the dead would have to wait." Then River in the summer dusk, drank two miniature bottles of Zinfandel, and fell asleep. My reunion with the living would have to wait. The twit who inquired about dissing the offspring of the discarded relatives needs perhaps something more along the lines of a swift kick in the rear. If these are older children, as is suggested by requests for letters of recommendation and invites to graduations, then these are more or less formed people, who their parents may or may not have committed. Anything less is the moral a German company, a sort of inherited grudge, if not racism. we hold that people deserve to be admired or respected because they have earned friends who have us to their home for dinner almost every week. (The wife doesn't want to go out or come to our house.) When we're there, however, she spends a large part of the evening on the phone or on the computer. Her husband says she actually spends less time on either because we're there. Should we be hard to pronounce. The mistake that is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be engrossed with wife's peculiarities, it may be that the man is the primary friend. If this has program without being honored or insulted. The woman's behavior has little to do with you. For whatever reason, she is glued to her house and not interested house with three other people. Here's the problem: Three of us don't like the difficult to put a name to. He does his chores, pays rent on time, isn't noisy negative to say about everything. What makes the situation difficult is that there's no obvious reason to ask him to leave, and he seems intent on staying. It's to the point where at least two of us bristle when we hear him come comfortable saying, "We just don't like you. Please leave." Is there a polite describe. She calls them The World's Greatest Experts, because they know everything. But to answer your question: There is nothing legally tricky in your situation, though you might have to give him a month's notice. On with saying, "This isn't working well," or "Sometimes it's just time for a how to tell you this, but the three of us are seeing someone else." of the message is garbled (because the caller is slurring), but the number is messages are annoying, and you have every right to ignore them. If the number, however, is clear, and you're feeling charitable, you might call back and say, "This is Slurred Off. I have no idea what you said in your message, but I am familiar to you, this may help to decide which way you're going to play it. And And keep in mind that we are dealing with machinery. Slurred messages are not couple who invited us to be their guests at a minor league baseball game." I no convincing him otherwise if he's not accepting debate on the issue.) Then he launches into a tirade about the arrogance and ignorance of the "Chatroom trip to a chat room (by his own admission) may give him room to give his such an invincible armor of arrogance and ignorance is, well, typical of respondent had any real logic or an equitable argument, but your posting has even less. You take potshots at him in public as he did to you in private (you etc. Enough to characterize the typical snide tone. I should point out that I reputation sinks at about equal speed in all major cities at once. of helping troubled young women to find peace: enough so anyway to make a potential laughingstock of herself by repeating them on television, and enough Surely a chilly business partner would at least have known about a case that was about to go on legal record and would never have urged her husband to brazen it out with the grand jury and start the whole miserable ball authentic sights ever shown on television, prompting the thought that, unlike back a bit) that one can even imagine being friends with. And since then, she has played her part just fine, establishing herself as a separate unit and not get any closer to as the years go by. In a column airily damning the whole raised a child herself and worried herself sick about how it would turn out; the pet's patriarchs at the Times continue to give her unlimited freedom perhaps, in an ideal position to judge anyone else anywhere. I have it on the word of a neutral party in a position to know, that in her like to stick it in their stereotypes anyway and smoke it for a while, accepted in order to get the performance that I need to earn a living. Much of vehicles for how they were really intended to be used. number of people that like to target people on the basis of association. Your privilege of driving one. Like guns and gun control, it's not the gun that needs to be removed from society, it's the ass behind the trigger. swinger is not as novel the second time around: "Most of the silliness has become pretty strenuous and some of the sweetness has settled into desperation" protestations, reviewers can't help recounting all their favorite jokes from the film, a habit that effectively dilutes their complaints. On the plus side: this time around. On the minus side: Heather Graham doesn't match up to one of the film's biggest fans, saying it's "better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on camp, complaining that as soon as the spectacular score subsides the movie "clatters back down to earth." But others find the film "beautifully crafted, ambiguous violin appraiser. (Click here to find out more about the film.) raves in the New York Times Book Review that this sequel to The Silence of the Lambs surpasses its predecessor: "It is, in fact, one of the two most frightening popular novels of our time, the other being The notes that this one, while a fantastic thriller, "simply lacks the compact gore (a man cuts off his own face, feeds it to dogs, then has the dogs' stomachs pumped so he can try to have the recovered nose surgically language, repellent imagery and bloodshed." (Click here to read the rest of King's review; the page also includes a tales wins the hearts of most critics, although all admit that some stories most deem the sameness unimportant when the writing is so superb. (Click Brothers as creators of clever, catchy dance tracks, but Surrender will finally make the public respect these guys as mature, intelligent and is that they've relaxed a little and broadened their horizons from exclusively statement of purpose ever (in short: Things hurt, and growing up is hard, but Stone is wildly positive (four stars), if completely alone in its ear, romance the booty, swell the heart, moisten the tear ducts and dilate the electronic music. Most praise her for being able to hold her own, as opposed to noticing any genuine musical ability, and note that the album is far more "Little brown people who dance around naked in your face, while ranting like imbeciles, just to get you to shoot a squirt of pepper spray at them. Because, you know, they eat it for breakfast. Or is that Tom Green I just "People who cannot be subdued with pepper spray alone, but require repeated, you're making a joke about race, especially when it comes to those shifty, when they move in next door. First they turn all the washboards and jugs into he was being tricked into saying something he'd regret later. But that's not question about race and then get all shirty on people who were just trying to affect are people who have consumed cayenne pepper from the time they are small evidence to support these statements." "We're not scientists, we're police me that Randy never made anyone wait a whole day for the answers to the humility. Our election process is so arduous, and the odds of triumph are so low, that no one would endure it except out of some combination of either actually getting less patrician or they're getting better at faking it. fella who'd rather watch football on the tube than discuss policy any day. It's is almost exactly the opposite. He gives his enthusiasts the impression of candidate of ideas (although, also like Hart, it is more the idea of ideas than another scheming pol. Because he's not desperate to win, and because he's because one important truth neither he nor Al Gore is emphasizing at the left at the moment). Both are former senators. Both are in their 50s. Both are tall and regarded as stiff and dull. Both are from privileged backgrounds, bank). Both also have had privileged political careers, floating into the Senate on celebrity or lineage, and both seem better suited to being selected by boards of admiring elders than to the grungy business of running for vice president," as he always refers to Gore. A reputation for honesty is little to offer. With that in mind, what do you make of the following exchange The ethanol subsidy meant New Jersey taxpayers paid higher tax for their gasoline. It also meant that it was more difficult for us to meet our clean air of the benefit went to one corporation. I didn't support corporate welfare. that was when I was a United States senator from New Jersey. I am now running for president of the United States. Part of running for president of the United States is getting to know the country in a depth that you didn't before. in the family farm is real. And I sat with enough of them to know that the ethanol part of their overall cost statement was an important part, and therefore, I believe that it was a reasonable thing to do. Were you wrong when you went that way as a New Jersey senator? presidential candidate. When you run for president, you've got to think of the Ethanol is a ludicrous fuel made out of corn, at a cost far higher than the petroleum it replaces, produced with a huge government tax long since become a classic case study of stupid policy entrenched by special responsible for the fabulous discovery that if you tell the government what to the subjects on which he is regarded as being especially philosophical, and his philosophy is that a simple code with lower overall rates is better than a complicated one filled with special treatment for one group or another. Giving him maximum interpretive generosity, what he does say is sort of a baroque variation on "yes." He's saying: "As a senator, I pandered to the people of New Jersey. As president, I will pander to every special interest in this great country." This raises the difficult philosophical question, Does a pol deserve credit for being an honest hack? It's a tempting proposition. Trouble is, the need to pretend you're not just pandering acts as a restraint on all but the most cynical panderers. We don't want our pols to think they can was not really honest, even in this cynical sense. In fact, it was the opposite of honest. The truth is that as a senator he was serving the interests of the whole country, including New Jersey, while as a presidential candidate he has abandoned the national interest in favor of a small group of farmers. Second, wrong before he flipped. Even though he now claims the ethanol subsidy is good for the country, it was still "right" for him to oppose it as a senator because country except to the extent that it coincided with the good of New Jersey, and he believes every senator is "right" to do the same. (Unless he's running for president, presumably, in which case he is permitted to consider the interests can't become president under our unique constitutional system without giving the government to turn corn into fuel. What should the candidate do when asked about it? It's bad enough that we may have depleted our inventory of potential presidents by ruling out anyone who lies about sex. Do we really want to go further and disqualify anyone who lies about ethanol? important policy matter. It was brazen, in front of millions on national television. And yet it was embroidered with just enough art and obfuscation that he can't pretend it was a just verbal wink. He wants to con us. done? One of two things, it seems to me. One is to have answered the question gotta love a guy who admits he's full of crap. It might work. And I wouldn't be stick to his true beliefs, so the question of why he flipped would never have arisen. Maybe it's true you can't be president without supporting the ethanol prancing national satyr is ended. Further evidence: At the end of the match, of the president drooling. Which was only fair, because he seemed to be would flit from his trough of nachos to the playing field. Apparently consonant with the welfare "reforms" he championed so vigorously, his determination to raise the minimum wage so high that it's nearly possible to Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and for terror in voodoo cults is now a freakish gift for children: You can buy a tiny duplicate of yourself. Or posable, 23-inch doll that bears a frightening resemblance to your To order, send a photo and fill out a questionnaire assorted colors; circle the one closest to your child's. There are, however, only six choices on the skin tone chart, from "porcelain," to a suspiciously light "dark brown." There are also hair and eyebrow charts and a sketch of a face upon which you draw birthmarks, moles, and freckles. "Pierced ears, cleft and durable; and they become a treasured keepsake for years." Isn't this the filled with photographs of overly cute little girls and their grotesque unmitigated disaster.") Despite the winning combination of Will Smith and artifice fails, and you realize you are regarding desperate actors, trapped on Sniff at your own peril." (Visit the official site.) After emphasizing just how gross this film version of the popular Comedy review than most, admits he laughed all through the film but says, "I did not offended me." (Click here to read a less positive review of the film: "South Park is another movie straight from the smoking pits of Hell," and for biography as well researched, thorough, and fascinating. Many also take it as a the New York Times Book Review is largely a laundry list of the in the previous volume, of her amorous relationship with Associated Press Weekly calls it "Gates' best so far." The stories range in topic from a gay man who takes in his sister's son while she checks into drug rehab, to an old York Times that although Gates "delineates his characters' predicaments smugness creeps into the narration," which leaves the reader "feeling superior to his characters, irritated with their solipsistic mind games and and even smell them. It's very exciting." Who said this about what? stories get neglected. However, it seemed important to provide the full text of reasons of space, I had to condense his remarks, adding nothing, just making a few cuts and altering the punctuation to bring it into line with standard desecration of the temples of our civilization and personal misconduct are good and generous, first at the scene of natural disasters: Sir, your Turtle is in All of us must learn our English language. We can get pot doing its magic Pick up the whip. Insult a free people. Friends, the good manners are gone. Swagger! Homage to the great god mammon! This is our cause. And so it is, that and will not quit this fight as long as there is breath within us." local residents who found a tusk sticking up from the ground, reports the partially thawed and decayed, then halted digging for fear of destroying their frozen soil with jackhammers. A helicopter lifted the 22-ton block of frozen in morning television, much as the Founding Fathers anticipated when they creativity, so these three shows no doubt offer diverse pleasures. Which of even consider, or even bother to return my calls to discuss. Uptight explicitly for the purpose of converting those users to broadband sentiments for those unable to express themselves, until they can watch a supposedly unseen critique). I saw the show more than enough times at unlike sculptures or installations, a painting is essentially the same object well be justified. (You'd think he'd have learned a lesson about taking intentional fallacy, and a work of art of strength should be open to a variety of interpretations, but I think there's a danger of missing the plot (and quite right that the Brits are dead against coming over as theoretically aridity? Almost as painful to my sensibility as the pomposity of of '30s graphic design incidentally), replacing the tube stops with a seemingly random array of celebrities, historic and current? I don't think that he is known as an affable restaurateur. (His urinal in the gents at pack, even if he has been surpassed in sheer nastiness by his colleagues, the dogs in this show. I say there are a few pussy cats. I take some credit for he is. But the cats' gentle purring is drowned out by the dogs' hysterical "genial" film with "lots of broad slapstick humor that kids like and adults gives the film a surprisingly upbeat review, admiring its "appealing The final entry in a week of blah movies is one Universal wouldn't preview for critics, presumably to postpone the bad reviews for a few days. Now that it's in theaters, the pans are pouring in for this "ridiculously derivative" movie returns to Earth after a strange, and possibly alien, encounter in space. His wore in Rosemary's Baby --and must determine what has happened to hubby and what to do about it. "Instead of a movie about aliens, The Astronaut's latest, a story that "engagingly combines a comedy of manners with elements of it and determining whether it is genuine. Along the way the reader gets a that manages to be "as entertaining as it is intelligent, as stimulating as it Weekly finds all the art history tiresome, as it has the side effect of books were nominated for National Book Awards, gets positive but passionless reviews for his rumination on the speed of contemporary life. Although Faster is full of interesting details of how the brain perceives time and how technology both steals and adds minutes to our lives, several critics leap from being merely a superb reporter to an astute social thinker" (Henry country's democracy and institute more market reform to prepare for a single piece advocates new measures to discourage the trend recognition from rebel groups that recruit kid fighters. will revolutionize the politics of abortion. The pharmaceutical company that politically tenable, since it can be administered early in a pregnancy by a Web firms, the company was founded by Silicon Valley veterans who abandoned firm quickly coalesced based on professional connections and recruited capital cover story assails the avarice of drug companies for developing lucrative lifestyle drugs to treat impotence, baldness, wrinkles, Meanwhile the pet drug market is exploding, producing pills to alleviate detriment of public health by trying to prevent the sale of generic substitutes that have sacrificed individual rights to protect state rights. become the predominant minority in the United States, due to booming heavily Catholic, concentrated in important electoral states, and vote in shaky assumption that Congress will maintain budget ceilings by slicing popular cover story condemns the culture of child's play. An send their kids to costly summer clinics and hire professional coaches. The privately claims that he could do a better job campaigning than Gore has. cover story warns that smallpox poses a catastrophic threat to the United the virus for use as a biological weapon. An uncontrolled smallpox epidemic could be more deadly than a hydrogen bomb attack because the United States ambition to one day run for president. Its only evidence is a chorus of rumors, taking the oath of office for the presidency while Bill watches in the rule was well established that 'no lord could be sued by a vassal in his own court, but each petty lord was subject to suit in the courts of a higher lord.' This surprisingly relevant bit of medieval lore turns out to whatever he indicates to me he wants done with them. He may want them returned. He may want me to destroy them. He may not care at all." You make the again, and once again, they'll split the take in one of the most elaborate scientist is still waiting for Al Gore to let him know about those test 'over budget' collection of clothes she tried to sneak by customs in progress that means an unsociable collector of original animation cells from means Dutch auction, which has dismal connotations, but so does everything with course, because a Dutch treat is no treat, Dutch courage is no courage, and sophisticated way that makes it great for everyone except the staff of 30-weight motor oil, and that cute girl at the 7-Eleven. That's what I betrayed the idea of family values? To me, the idea of family values has to do with a father and a home with a mother and father and children and you ever doubt it? I told you the absolute truth I had no clue what was going on. I still don't, other than what I was filled in on. Later on, of course, I Greatest Legends List of movie stars by devising a brief plot summary of a heiress but finds himself smitten instead with her mute widowed grandmother words coming out of the Middle East these days are as revolutionary as the that "no peace process shall prevail over the personal security of the people the peace process. "There are elements who are very determined to disrupt the they used in the past, which only encourages the terrorists." Conversely, their "policy of zero tolerance for terror" and declaring the bombers their suspects and confiscated weapons. "Someone who sends a car bomb today is trying Authority. They accused the "enemies of peace" of staging attacks "aimed at destroying the entire peace process." "The answer to anyone who tries to undermine the peace process is that we are determined to continue," proclaimed language of war, the Post called the latest bombings "the first test of Framing is a transcendent art. It can serve petty advantage or profound reform. It can be used to achieve goals or to rethink them, to defeat enemies or to reassess them, to win wars or to stop them. "There is a war going on between "are fighting the peace process because they know it promises to kill terror "It is one of the most significant developments in the a pedicure for the first time. I had no idea of the impact I was program. It's bread and circuses without the bread. And with a crappy little circus that's got, like, maybe one trained donkey who isn't feeling very well. this program has been unfulfilled. "The conquest of space has moved ahead with inanimate object and can't feel shame, unlike some kind of Space World Book of the future that will know all human emotions and will be perfected biting his trainer on the ass, was rocketed aloft in a spacesuit filled with Earth taken by a commercial satellite was made public. expect to orbit their own satellites by next year. These cameras can resolve not a person, although you could make out the cloud of evil roiling around the sentences that made participants instantly turn the page, or change the channel, or slip a fresh clip into a cheap and easily obtainable hand gun or used to call "letters we never finished reading" (or something). "As we head into high summer I find myself thinking often of summers long "Make sure to stay tuned for a live concert featuring the Backstreet Boys, "evidence that the potential benefits of exposure to sunlight may outweigh the which led the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph and made the front pages of the and multiple sclerosis and that more people would die from keeping out of the sun than from being in it. The report also made the banal observations that "people find lying or sitting in the sun enjoyable and relaxing" and that "this even sillier "silly season" story, appearing the same day on the front pages of to establish a task force to study the threat of an asteroid hitting Earth and destroying all life on the planet. The FT said that a plan to avert named after him. Asked whether the proposed establishment of a Near Earth Object Task Force wasn't rather a limp response to such a cataclysmic threat, a spokesman for the Science Ministry said defensively, "It's not as if there are has started to come into line with international law enough to justify a policy by establishing dialogue, we are differentiating ourselves from the US." It journalists to reveal sources and to bar many opposition writers and editors from "any form of press activity," the Guardian said. "there is no evidence that any police officers were brought to justice." demonstrated its seriousness about getting its hands on him by announcing The second film this summer featuring a little boy who sees dead people gets decent reviews, but most say it's not as good as the similar box office smash compulsion to dig up his backyard following an impromptu hypnosis session at a party. The film "is at its best in its mysterious, genuinely chilling first half. But as the plot kicks in, the hysteria mounts and the explanations start punctured by the critics: "Possibly the funniest movie ever made about mysteriously afflicted with stigmata after receiving a rosary with a history from her mother. Critics term it "a silly, roiling melange of special effects screed" with "lots of broken glass, bird feathers, dripping blood and (Click here to visit a fan page devoted to the film.) Evenly divided negative and positive reports for this unexpectedly sincere that "one finds oneself asking how such familiar material breeds contentment of genetic engineering "a warning so bloated with bombast that one begins to wish that the gene for pomposity could be extirpated for the sake of future the New York Times that the book is "impressive if somewhat pious" but ideas as the ethical ambiguities of technology." A few stick up for the embattled author, arguing that though "the ideas expressed aren't complicated," stormed the capital, panicking the languid sophisticates with an unfashionably passionate attack on the dangers of passionlessness," only to later concede that the book is "an arduous read that would test the syntactical skills of a tenured professor." (Click here to read the first chapter.) complaint does not make for particularly engaging or sympathetic reading." poison on their hands. They drive it around the country in a dilapidated absence of a unifying international story, most of the weekend's papers led on they are about tourism and commerce." Indeed much of the coverage revolved their vision. (For comprehensive eclipse packages, see these Web sites from mergers in the financial sector. The moves will consolidate the nation's banks into six institutions by the end of next month, with the government forming the new alliances rather than allowing market forces to bring them about. ''If you're suddenly told, 'Here's the person you're going to banker told the paper. Although the new structure has not yet been revealed, population but control a disproportionately higher percentage of the country's wealth." There is no word yet on how current shareholders will be compensated extradition to face charges there, took still more turns this weekend when the request is withdrawn, the proceedings will continue with one of those countries solution. "It isn't a question of political ideology or of bilateral relations death toll could eventually reach several million." According to the story, "Experts believe that hormones, taken from the brains of slaughterhouse carcasses, were injected into cows in a bid to create a new breed of pituitary glands, were transmitted in an agent that spread mad cow disease and suggestions of an indigenous boycott of the games were rejected, in part institutions in the eyes of the world for their mistreatment and neglect of image at a time when all other efforts are directed towards polishing it and only futile but misdirected." The Herald placed hope in the acknowledgment by some native leaders "that the presentation of Aboriginal people as victims, though useful to win some political arguments, is ultimately also sharpens Aboriginal leaders' understanding of the need for greater efforts message of his campaign. "I understand governments don't create wealth," Bush began. "Governments create an environment in which entrepreneurship and producers can flourish. That's why I support cutting the tax rates. That's why it right there. Did Bush just say he's against the death penalty? And what on say it, and it has everything to do with creating wealth. A few years ago, Republicans not only supported the death penalty; they campaigned on a promise the way, the two "penalties" merged. Republicans began to use the phrase "death penalty," like the phrase "marriage penalty," to describe a tax pegged to one of life's most sacred passages. The inheritance tax, which had been known as the hated "marriage penalty," became the "death penalty." Commerce he would do something about "unfair" taxes, starting with the "death on Fox News that Congress could use the surplus to address "a serious unfairness in the tax code, such as the marriage penalty, the death penalty, taxes on senior citizens." Last weekend, Bush adopted the same phrase. transformation of the inheritance tax into the "death penalty" provides more grist for satirists who wonder whether Republicans, having condemned the "marriage penalty" for discouraging marriage, now worry that the inheritance tax is discouraging death. (For a head start on the satire, check out the work would never have called the inheritance tax the "death penalty," because the death penalty meant something else. Today, they can speak out against the plausible. Capital punishment is no longer a live issue. saving your life and started talking about your life savings. As for Democrats, they don't complain much about the death penalty anymore. The last guy who did politician either supports the death penalty and makes a show of it, as Bill debate was profound and heated. Liberals called the practice murder. Conservatives called it the only fitting punishment for unspeakable crimes. It was a moral struggle of the highest consequence. But these days, unspeakable crimes are no longer spoken of, murder is what happens to your portfolio on a bad day, "family values" are debated through the Internal Revenue code, and the "death penalty" is a tax issue. It may be a perfectly worthy topic in an age of affluence. But it's hardly a matter of life and death. Among the four pages of rules are these: women must fine, and then there's the draconian Rule 29--"if any girl gets three complaints, she must immediately resign." Rules governing question, comes in a variety of forms, none more impressive than The Man the naughtiness of the privileged that runs something like this: Everyone says would complain. This bit of logical high jinks can justify anything from racism different sort of justification. The old method was to insist that it was "satire." Applied today, the line would run that The Man Show is not the thing but is a parody of the thing. (The thing being the social ideas of Frank slapping around his girlfriends. Still a lively topic in philosophical circles, apparently.) But satire requires a critical stance, while The Man Show requires jokes about women drivers and farting monkeys. defense: Our show may be rubbish, but we know it's rubbish. Through a process good person, therefore anything that I do is, by definition, good. Thus, The These are the rules for prostitutes working for one incidentally, states, "When a customer sings karaoke, please, everyone gangsters are finding it hard to compete with vibrant immigrant entrepreneurs. In yet another spasm of millennial list making, the but few other equally ranked pairs ever worked together. Participants are farm. Later remade for television, but as a comedy. whimsically with her silver serving set, and is beaten nearly to death with a hack, schooled in the arts of personal survival through manipulation of rules, arbitrary acts and unpredictable alliances. In this he is in the dark company of former Soviet officials thrown into democratic forums for which they have no instinct and little respect. It will take more than one generation before the ways of a bureaucratic dictatorship give way to those of a liberal democracy, utterly unschooled in the orderly democratic transfer of constitutional protestations about his commitment to democracy and his selection of a "successor" with little chance of legitimately winning a presidential election. be remembered as having overseen the first democratic transfer of political that the offer "gives Turkey another chance to deal with its largest and most development and given Turkey one of the world's worst records in the human rights field. But doing so will demand more tolerance and flexibility than any insects has a long tradition in Japan," but with increasing urbanization and the loss of wild habitat, they are becoming more difficult to find. As of this summer, there's no need to schlep out to the country just to stock up on bugs: A pair of live horned beetles can be purchased from a vending machine for "automated bug sales are a step too far and teach children that living paper that the bugs "might actually like it in a machine because they seem to witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift bath of red petals. Back in the roses for the first time in years, he's soon pumping iron, smoking pot, and telling off his frigid wife and faceless bosses, convinced that whatever he has lost he's getting back, baby. Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! Tell that bitch off!" More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. The the graininess of the video image (along with the plangent music) suggests how distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her that those ideas have rarely been presented so seductively. Several months ago, protagonist attempts to break through our cultural and technological anesthetization into "the real." That's the theme here, too, and it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. The symbols, however, have the same sentiments and has acquired the same deadpan radiance. That must be It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it. confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want before our eyes and the sound drops out); and he mutters darkly at a succession soon the relationship flashbacks start coming thick and fast, and the balance to leave the mound. But maybe it's also because the relationships scenes are sharply edited and full of texture. The rhythms of the game feel right; the rhythms of the romance feel embarrassingly Harlequin, and the picture drags on sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck The Republican presidential candidates met for their second killed. Dozens of others were hurt when gunmen opened fire on finally surrendered after a day, claiming that they had only meant to scare members of parliament and that shooting by government security guards had forced them to fire back. The motives of the assailants, who yelled that they were staging a coup and demanded to meet with the president, are unknown. The country are quiet and the only events are taking place around the parliament building." Western analysts suggested it further underscored the instability of drafters claimed that it doesn't use Social Security monies to fund federal agencies. Congressional auditors disagreed, finding that the bill depends on approval is expected, but the president has not yet said whether he'll veto the advocates warned that this would make doctors wary of prescribing painkillers to any patients, for fear of being accused of assisting a suicide. The online auction of models' eggs may be a fraud. Five of the eight models have already dropped out, and journalists who tried to place bids received no response. The proprietors' explanation: We're inundated with responses and will be up and running shortly. The journalists' explanation: The site is a sham, intended only to drive traffic to the owner's porn sites. consciousness or die early in the journey, but they say they are unlikely to funds. Trump, who said he would decide by March whether to run for president, too similar and bland. Trump's spin: The Democrats and Republicans have measure. He has threatened to veto the five remaining appropriations security needs to be held hostage by this budget battle." Skeptics said the president simply realized that contesting defense spending would be unpopular. compromise. The White House spin: Now it's your turn to compromise. home in the midst of his presidential campaign to supervise the execution of a Democratic presidential candidates, was tough on crime. Last week, after a this time is that Bush, unlike previous Republican presidential candidates, is Bush succeeds in projecting such sensitivity, the cure may prove worse than the disease. Republicans used to win elections by calling their Democratic concealed handguns, is in danger of completing this reversal. By fighting crime with "love," he is coming across not as a gun nut, but as a wimp. television and in the print media, Bush blamed the shooting on a "wave of evil." The killer, he surmised, "was acting as a result of evil in his heart. hearts." Rather than discuss gun control or prosecution, Bush's campaign Web site offered visitors a single quote atop his home page: "This is a terrible tragedy made worse by the fact it took place in a house of hope and love. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and the Second, Bush tried to project a virtue traditionally scorned by conservatives: compassion. "It's inexplicable to me how somebody's heart could be so full of hate that he would walk into a place of worship where youngsters were seeking God's grace and love and kill people," Bush told the media. Rushing home to "add some comfort to the pain and sorrow," Bush regretted that "there's not second message has curdled the first. Swaddled in hugs, empathy, and spiritual musings on the gunman's "heart," Bush's appeal to cultural renewal instead of government intervention comes across more as a plea for love instead of laws. "We as a society can pass laws and hold people accountable," he told reporters. "But our hopes and prayers have got to be that there is more love in society." "I wish I knew the law to make people love one another," Bush added. "We can pass laws, but there needs to be a higher law. And that is, 'Love your neighbor isn't the only conservative projecting such an oddly mixed message. "Most people are going to understand what a terribly, terribly tragic thing this is, what a horrible tormented person this is," lamented House Majority Leader Dick massacre on "societal elements that create such empty hearts that commit these Vice President Al Gore professes reluctance to "politicize" the tragedy, his allies at the Democratic National Committee have seized the opportunity to to prosecute gunmen carrying deadly weapons into churches and school events," support law enforcement's attempts to close the gun show loophole. It's time for Bush to start listening to law enforcement and stop listening to the control activists have gone further. Speaking on television and in the print "tough" restrictions they would prefer. They claim the support of "police" and the enmity of "criminals." Mocking Bush's plea that he didn't "know a governmental law that will put love in people's hearts," Handgun Control suggested, "must contemplate what its lax gun laws and liberal gun culture have New York Times cited speculation that Bush was concerned about "renewed attorney general and the state's leading prosecutors, he unveiled a plan to hire extra prosecutors who would focus exclusively on gun crimes. Scarcely a sentence passed his lips without a mention of "toughness." "The best way to protect our citizens is to vigorously enforce the tough laws we have on the books," Bush declared. "We have some very tough laws against gun violence in with tough enforcement can we win the war against gun violence." were looking for a candidate who knew how to speak the language of love. Next time, they may be looking for a candidate who knows when to stop. gift parity, along with her psychotically misguided ideas of the whys and wherefores of giving gifts are a great deal more than "alarming." I found myself deeply troubled by her fantastical notions and saddened by the possibility that her children might be taught these same ideas. Needless to say, I thought your response to RS was absolutely correct. is fighting for money, not attempting to hide the expectation of booty behind a your support and regrets that she may have insulted official mercenaries. If RS, our bride with the tally sheet, is by any chance reading this week's calling her a woman with a cash register where her heart ought to be. about how I am supposed to react to women's fashions. At a recent conference of tablecloth. Several of these professional women across from me were wearing their lingerie preferences were not so obvious. Am I supposed to look at the ceiling the entire meeting, steal the occasional glance, or just assume it's a lines, I was recently in a retail store and the clerk had on a summer dress. As she leaned over the counter to hand me my purchase, it became clear that her lingerie preference was none at all. I didn't know whether to stare at the ceiling, pretend I saw nothing, or thank her for the free show. In both instances, these women had to know that everyone was getting an eyeful. I missed the era of free love while in grade school and am wondering if we are revealing a stray boob. Alas, the '90s motto, "Let it all hang out," has moved these people do not purchase their clothes in the dark, so whatever is able to be seen is fair game for whatever response feels natural. You may even stare if and I have a subscription to our city's symphony orchestra. Sometimes things come up that prevent us from using our tickets. When this happens we give them to friends who are also classical music fans. We have made it clear to this couple we expect nothing in return, as we have already paid for the tickets that would go to waste if they didn't use them. However, being polite people and good friends, this other couple has, as a gesture of thanks, invited us to be their guests at a minor league baseball game. My wife and I are not enthusiastic about this, especially since getting there requires a drive of close to an hour. But we don't want to appear ungrateful to our friends or hurt their feelings. (We can't use the "We're busy" excuse, because they've given us way of declining, or have you some suggestions for handling this It is best to be upfront, both to handle the matter truthfully, as well as to scotch baseball invitations on into the next century. are certain occasions when one plays along in order to spare someone's manages to attract the attentions of three young attractive women. Would Really appears that numbers are driving the argument here, and I can't tell if it's the three, uh, companions would no doubt be an implied tribute to his attractiveness. At the age of 70-something, however, this trio has about it the wondered in the past, in other publications, why do geezers with young only looks like the clash of celebrity egos. Actually, the Reform Party is natural enemies, progressives and populists simultaneously attract and repulse nobody will pull off that miracle in this election. puritan ethos, although they were more likely to be socialists than the western cousins, while socialist enthusiasms were easily merged with Social South than in the coastal "black belt," which has been dominated since colonial supporters were social conservatives who favored activist government, as long liberals more concerned with good government than with expensive government. Republicans in transit to a new home in the Democratic Party. with both progressives and populists. In the minds of the skinflint progressives, spending money one does not have is a form of moral depravity. fears about a remote government dominated by the rich and powerful. Unlike deficit reduction, the trade issue divided populist protectionists from the will to implement them. Progressive reforms such as initiatives and legislatures and to concentrate plebiscitary power in allegedly nonpartisan who spurned their party's presidential candidate in 1884--and Liberal Liberal Republicans, a generation earlier in the Gilded Age, had been hillbilly populism dissolved. The puritan crusaders of the North and the alienated populists of the South may share common political enemies, but little returned the favor by viewing Mugwumps as enemies rather than as potential protection for corrupt manufacturers. In the 1990s, northern fiscal rally around harebrained economic programs, elevating them from an instrument of policy into a symbol of a crusade against their enemies. For the followers The factional war within the Reform Party, then, represents the decomposition of the movement into its Northern progressive and Southern progressives will do what they have always done best: They're never happier than when they are demonstrating their moral, political, and religious purity by heading for the exit and starting their own small but pure church or party. considered seceding from the United States, whose federal government was then progressives to declare the purity of their principles, denounce the corruption a new party, perhaps, from which, in time, they can secede. the summer's most delectable political story. The jokes abound: what Warren friends are encouraging speculation: "Warren has been consulting with Democratic and Reform Party activists," they say. "Warren is taking this very illuminate a grand populist vision with pure charisma. Both sides mistakenly could charm the pants off a few million disaffected Democrats. (And even if the is too cool and distant to be great on screen. He has made his mark on Splendor in the Grass into a controlling position as a producer. He gross. In the '70s, he bullied screenwriters and directors into making charmed or threatened or kneecapped this director or that executive into doing was an awkward, embarrassed speaker. "He understood why the public is skeptical shadows, planning media and campaign strategies. "Political pros in that has no modesty. It is his cool and honest pragmatism. He recognizes that he'd politics are a muddle. It's not happenstance that he is backed by such an odd political system is broken and needs fixing. He just seems unable to explain specific political ideas. He seems vaguely to believe that there is too much money in politics, corporations are too powerful, welfare reform was wrong, and about the evils of lobbyists and the innate decency of black folk. principles tell him to deplore gamesmanship, but gamesmanship may be what he for demanding take after take till he's sure it's right. (Click to see how his general caution contrasts with his brazen womanizing.) Movie stars can control refuse to appear in public. He didn't speak to reporters from the late '70s is willing to do that. He's too cautious. After all, he twice declined opportunities to run for office in the '70s, when he was a much more credible may be a canny political tactic. He doesn't really want to run, but perhaps he switched to the History Channel. But over the next few days I found myself thinking, one might almost say brooding, about the sighting. page to propound his view that the prospect of future earnings growth justifies stock prices are not only excessively high but dangerously so and that the history of Japan's notorious "bubble economy" is being repeated. Alas, the prospects but rather on a simple misunderstanding of corporate accounting (in essence, Glassman was claiming that businesses can eat their seed corn and plant it too). It is unclear from that exchange whether Glassman understands It isn't all that unusual a story. Indeed, it is quite commonplace for influential people to propound economic doctrines that are "not even wrong," that is, that involve a basic conceptual or accounting impossibility. But there is a kicker in this case. Imagine a reader who for some reason just could not grasp Crook's and who therefore understood why even the most optimistic economists have been finding it increasingly hard to justify current stock valuations, might well have shifted heavily into cash, perhaps even shorted the market, and would soon have been gnashing his teeth. The guy who had no idea what he was talking about gave what turned out to be good advice. The guy who made sense got the happen? One reason is that since last fall the economic news, both at home and abroad, has been better than most people expected. But, anyway, stock prices going higher, they do, at least for a while. And so it is very easy for someone who is completely wrong about the fundamentals to make a correct prediction about the direction of stock prices, and conversely. not the only recent case in which good things have happened to bad ideas. And eventually led to an overheated economy, one in which the pressure on scarce capacity led to accelerating inflation. But according to believers in a "new economy," those constraints were a thing of the past: Because of rapid globalization, rapid growth would no longer lead to inflation. experiments, it was immediately apparent that this argument was logical explain, measured productivity and measured growth are constructed from the same data. Even if there was an unmeasured acceleration in productivity, it any faster than before. And global economy or no global economy, a national economy has a speed limit determined by the sum of labor force and productivity growth. And so, a couple of years ago, when the measured rate of productivity growth showed little sign of increasing, it was natural for people like me to until very recently. This performance has been made possible partly by an acceleration of measured productivity growth, partly by the surprising quiescence of wages, despite a very tight labor market; but the effect is that those who believed in the New Paradigm feel vindicated, and those of us who To be fair, you can make a better case on behalf of the New businessmen were telling them tales of a "productivity revolution," and even if the data didn't show any evidence of that revolution, they felt sure that somehow growth was going to accelerate. They couldn't articulate their feelings very well, and what they actually said didn't make any sense, but they were nonetheless right in their sense that something new and good was happening to that in the buzzing, blooming confusion that is the economy it is all too easy for those who would make economic predictions to be right for the wrong reasons, and conversely. Confused thinking does not necessarily lead to the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread But there is also, I think, another moral. If being smart is no guarantee of being right, having been right is not necessarily an indicator that someone is smart. Suppose that you hear someone making what sounds like a dumb argument, but you know that he has an impressive track record at market or economic prediction. Guess what: The argument may be as campaign, especially the bold and clear speeches he's made on a variety of born; I never really knew him. A career military officer, he left my mother and his four children little in an economic sense, but the mementos of his life, including photographs, his military decorations and the memories of those whose Stein should be grateful to have enjoyed the company of his parents into their old age; even if we don't realize it at the time, each and every moment that we have with our loved ones should be considered, and treated as, a blessing. At no point does he tell the reader the size of the are subject to any tax. This is not class warfare. This is sensible economic and public policy. Many of the wealthy realized the benefits of disbursing the occasion of his father's death into a political complaint. I am in the business of estate tax planning. With a eliminated the amount of taxes that were payable by his estate. It is also true Ben and any other siblings were merely members of the "lucky sperm club." We all take something out of society. We all should good many things, did put something into society, besides taxes. But assume he had not; should he or anyone else be allowed to accumulate substantial wealth or should it be filtered back into the society from whence it came and from whence it might do more public good? I will leave that question for the tend to spring up when cultural preservation is in danger, and their record of but a cultural need to know. If these speakers don't fashion this or lesser degree. The most enthusiastic speakers I have ever met are not native are instituted by the government, but perhaps more likely to succeed if they people there seem to feel that their culture is plenty intact without this run a multimedia company. We speak our own urbanized form of computer superhighway" and "surf the web" are just not compatible with an urban all of these together into my own urban Renaissance language. I think that people need to communicate so there should be a shared mode of communication, dialect" itself is just wrong. I mean, we do NOT speak the Queen's English, nor would we want to. Further, English itself is just a bastardized version of new, educated and traveled middle class how to find a middle ground for decorating and cooking. Her style remains essentially that. margaritas, so what? Why does she need to be so vociferously criticized? Why do threatened by THEM and she has NEVER, despite what the many parodies say, preached AGAINST a more casual style of entertaining or said her way was the represents intellect and devotion, which trumps domestic chores. But nowadays week announced a change in format, to make the telecast more entertaining for girls will promenade in bathing suits holding signs with their personal phone winning contestant will, after being crowned, open up her head and show us all footage of the contestants' slow descent into madness as they are there are two ways to go with today's question. The first, as many of you did, yesterday's News Quiz, few participants made the obvious leap and added farm animals as well.) The other, largely neglected option: Imply that the competition, as currently configured, is improbably upscale. Perhaps the recital, or they could finally stop forcing the contestants to defend their evening gown competition. Everyone likes evening gowns. and they'll be backed by professional dancers and musicians. According to find great entertainment," Beck says. "If, by great entertainment, you mean film. Play along as we rank the following movies, from best to worst, according Participants are invited to find, in an actual newspaper or magazine, a less News each morning, including "Today's Papers," or get our political briefing, plus more. Click here to request a free subscription. include your name, media organization, address, and phone number. our features, articles, and staff biographies in the include your name, media organization, address, and phone number. 's exclusive commentary and features. Click here to sign up. true. Not everything you read in the New York Times is true, either. So when you read about scientific breakthroughs, how do you know what to life evolved from clay is more inherently plausible than a theory that life judgments: If a prestigious journal has agreed to publish the clay theory, it's plausible theories from equally credible sources that have passed equally strict scrutiny, the one that makes it into a top journal has a smaller chance of being right. Here's why: Editors like to publish theories they find surprising. And the best way to surprise an editor is to be wrong. editors are reckless. At least in mathematics and economics (the two fields where I can testify from personal experience), the editorial process is rigorously demanding. Long before an article is submitted for publication, the author is expected to circulate drafts among experts in the field and to Only then is the (now heavily revised) article formally submitted, whereupon that can easily take another year or more. Are referees ever lax and careless? Surely. Are they lax and careless with articles of genuine importance? In my observation, essentially never. Through multiple rounds of correspondence, referees demand satisfaction regarding every important detail. In many cases, the author will visit the referee's home institution for a semester or a year That's exactly what's so damning about the hoax perpetrated evidence, and even meaning, was accepted for publication in the cultural an event so far removed from anything that could possibly occur in a legitimate academic enterprise that it converted agnostics like me, who had doubted the would not be impossible, or even unusual, to publish a carefully reasoned article that's still wrong. That's because of the bias I mentioned earlier: Given two papers that have both survived the vetting process, editors tend to prefer the more surprising, which means that on average they prefer the one It's easy to see how the same dynamic could work at a newspaper. "Man bites dog" is a better story than "dog bites man," but it's also more likely to be wrong, even if both stories are reported by equally likely to be mistaken than when you think you've seen something ordinary. But way to determine just how many published economic hypotheses are actually true. They looked through several years' worth of issues of the top economics sort of evidence that led the authors to accept their own hypotheses. (Another evidence, even when it's a little shy of overwhelming. In most cases, overwhelming evidence is too much to ask for, because evidence can be hard to collect and hard to interpret. So no individual article can be criticized for that are overwhelmingly confirmed. In fact, they gave a precise definition of problem is that exactly zero are confirmed overwhelmingly, and zero is hypotheses might be true, but probably not more than about a third of them. In other words, when a published article in a top journal presents evidence that its hypothesis is true, its hypothesis is probably false. It would be very interesting to perform the same experiment with, say, medical journals instead progress of science, keep in mind that we can learn a lot from even a very few true hypotheses submerged in a sea of false ones. And here's another ray of developed to help space travelers maintain healthy levels of bacteria in their intestines, the yogurt has become so popular with the cosmonauts that the institute is marketing it commercially, along with new varieties of cottage plant world that details the relations of the world's million species of a rare tropical flower is the closest living relative of the Earth's first flowering plant; and many plant families appear to have evolved from a single "Eve," whose close relatives survive in some of today's more pristine lakes. The study also confirmed the theory that fungi are more closely related to cloth. Based on his analysis of pollen grains and plant images (imprints of existed in the eighth century, and maybe even before. He presented his findings International Herald Tribune reports. Continuing to dispute the theory behavior" of legal commentators and the media outlets that broadcast them. The commentator knows first hand, by watching the trial or reading trial like sports events or predicting jury verdicts." Two nationwide voluntary members in response to the proposal, which has been outlined in recent law some spiced rum provided by another brother and fell into a coma, suffocating fraternity chapter as an organization for manslaughter and hazing. (The case was never tried because the fraternity chapter had disbanded by the time of marks what may be the first time a degree has been revoked for a violation of academic community is protesting a new law that will require all recipients of federal research grants to make their research data public through the controversial subjects by bombarding them with information requests. Confidentiality agreements will also suffer, they worry. The law would also limit the definition of what information researchers must make public, as well as the "reasonable fees" that federal agencies can charge for obtaining requested data. The budget office intends to publish its final regulations by not control. Additionally, over the past year the society has been striking position on the condition that the medical society not use the name "New eradicate the cults and established a commission to investigate cult activity University student strike is stretching into its fifth month. The protest over for the future of the university. The administration has consented to a revocation of the tuition hike, reports National Public Radio, but now the students and many professors are insisting on a more active say in how the university is run. The strike may be losing steam, though: Students who want to return to school are holding demonstrations against the strikers. little early for my taste. The speech writers are busily at work spinning out their anodyne alliterations, their balanced bromides, their cautious clarion Conservatism" and "Prosperity with a Purpose." Al Gore seems to be ditching "Reinventing Government," "Inventing the Internet," "Global Warming," "The Third Way," and all those other nerdy notions. He is aiming directly at the campaign will embrace the "specifics." There will be speeches or position papers about education, the environment, the budget, and other issues conveying information about the candidates' intentions. But it will still be in the team accompanied him on the campaign and advised him about what to say to get elected. The other team, on which I served, stayed home and wrote papers about how he should govern after he got elected. The two teams did not communicate with each other, fearing, I suppose, diversion from their two different about this deviousness and evasiveness, and I don't expect it to change. I have only a modest request. Before the campaign concludes, I would like to see more attention to the numbers. Many of the policy issues confronting us hinge on remedies depends on how much of the condition there is. And whether a proposed policy is worth its cost or is likely to be effective also depends on its One number we already hear relates to taxation. The number by which the candidate proposes to cut income tax rates. That is supposed to tell the voter how much better off he will be if the candidate is elected. For that purpose, obviously, the bigger the number the better. But the tax numbers need to be seen in national and historical perspective. From the national standpoint, lower taxes are not necessarily better than higher ones. In the administration.) The candidates should tell us where, inside or outside that range, they would want federal tax receipts to be. That would give us some clue to the national economic significance of the difference between them. immediately raises the question of the budget surplus. For decades we had a rule for the proper relationship between government expenditures and be in balance, meaning no deficit. But we are beyond that now. We have in prospect some years in which, with existing policies, there will be a surplus, and there is a question about how big that surplus should be. That is a question neither the president nor the congressional Republicans want to face. In his recent budget, the president tried to conceal the fact that there was a surplus, and the Republicans, with their talk about a "lockbox" for Social Security, have confused everyone, probably including themselves. But the subject is important, and the candidates should tell us how much, if any, As long as the country continues to bask in prosperity, there will be no debate about general economic policy during this campaign. Everyone will agree on the most important requirement for sustaining quantitative questions about this. How many are left behind? Is it a major problem? We have official estimates of the proportion of the population who are makes a big difference to the priority you give to this problem. So, if the candidates are going to make a big issue about helping those who are falling behind, I would like to hear their views about how many there are. areas of policy with which I have some familiarity. But one can also see the value of quantification in many other areas: health care, education, the Asking political candidates to quantify their stands may seem unrealistic because they don't want to pin themselves down and because the audience will tune out. But there have been cases where the candidate gave us campaign. Serious questions were being raised about whether the policies he was proposing for taxes, expenditures, and the deficit added up. He then made a underlying assumptions. Some people, including me, criticized parts of the story. But I think it helped to support the idea that he knew what he was after he came into office. So, I don't think the request for more numbers is "Continuing series of 'land for peace' deals with Sea World trivializes Middle addition of the words 'and a Christian' to the sign: 'To ride Space Mountain fallacies are debunked by this little contretemps. First is the folks will find it rhetorically effective now. When both sides are mad at you, it's seldom because you are a model of fairness. What you probably are is simply wrong. Second is the exciting but all too often disappointing notion that people can unite against a common enemy. At least for very long. Although peace. Or mutual loathing of the Martin Short Show brought about a cheerful view of all the little countries of the world. company and we do not take political positions," declared a delightfully determination to smile at the good and frown at the bad? commodities: time with their children; time to teach them right from wrong; time to pass on their values."-- Vice President Gore programs they want to give their kids a safe place to learn and enrich their "Al Gore is the only candidate who is talking about real change to improve the for president, citing Gore's leading role in improving the nation's economy and look forward to working with these leaders to further Al Gore's goals of revolutionary improvements in education, livable communities, continued "Al Gore will continue to work for a balanced approach and fight for a immigration, and threats to our ocean environment," the vice president said. by the scent of blood in the water, the media have swarmed the crash site of pundits debate the more entertaining question: Why does this keep happening to and martyrdom on one side; recklessness, frivolity, and mayhem on the seek "adventure," "live close to the edge," are "wild" and "addicted to risk," and have a "dangerous streak." This spin laughably equates all dangerous bits of evidence. As a boy, he used to evade his Secret Service agents. He once rhinoceros. "He learned through all these experiences to make light of danger," diving, kayaking, and Rollerblading. He asked permission to rappel down Mount "courage" spin puts an equally simplistic gloss of nobility on the family's family [are] 'in the arena,' and they're living a vigorous life." "They're and so its members have taken some chances." The New York Times boasted Who caused the tragedy? Most of the coverage depicts John as the victim of by "gods." Not only were Jack and Bobby assassinated, but "the younger passive language obscures an important distinction. Whereas Jack and Bobby were murdered, the "younger generation," far from being "haunted" or "picked off," out on the town with Uncle Teddy, brought home a woman, and ended up being like Jack and Bobby, John was "cut down far too early." Again, passive language papering over these differences. Thanks to this blurring of the Congress despite his own car accident, which likewise devastated his passenger, Bobby's assassinations, have cast his family as the ultimate victim of his crash. "Stop blaming John. It is enough that tragedy once again punished the for "adventure," "recklessness," and "disaster," the Post compares piloting of a PT boat in the war: "They both grabbed life by the lapels." These comparisons obscure the difference between risking one's life in war, as Jack inexperienced pilot, took off after sunset, wasn't licensed to fly in the poor never contacted air traffic controllers for assistance. His defenders point out judgment is way out of bounds," because "he could just as well have been killed from other pilots who say they decided the weather was too dangerous for Was the protagonist morally reckless? Recklessness theorists associate John of John, "If he was less reckless than his cousins, it was not saying much; there were friends who turned down the invitation to take to the skies with really about karma, about people who broke the rules and were ultimately broken critique confuses different dimensions of "judgment" and "breaking the rules." To err in assessing the weather is human; to pork the baby sitter is depraved. girlfriends" as a bachelor with his father's "sexual snacking" as a married differences when they demand that the nation stand with Uncle Teddy and mourn their lives are dead because he screwed up. But let's not confuse one far less blameworthy than the tragedies wrought by the worst. be put in the river." Militia commander (passing the order to other militiamen): "If they want to leave, pull them out [of their car], kill them Observer said the program "was hidden from legislators and the public taxpayers' expense "despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about International agencies should halt all aid, and other countries should bring military with the anticipated passage in parliament this week of a new state resistance to the bill, the paper said it would give the military almost unlimited power in a state of emergency, including the right to jail people without trial. The day the House of Representatives endorses the bill will be "a sad day for civil society," sounding the death knell for the reform rather than months." She said, "The surge of feeling for 'our boys' on their argued that the intervention is justified by international justice and, in the peacekeeping force and described it as a policy of "tough love." reach the summit after all. A book by members of the team that found his body on the mountain last May revealed that he had enough oxygen to do so, and it intended to place a photograph of his wife, Ruth, on the summit should he reach it. No photographs were found on his body. 'Where are they,' the authors ask, you from the Great Hall of Consumer Justice, a k a the Shopping Avenger's services has grown exponentially. He is also disconcerted, because the sheer evil corporations are treating too many loyal consumers without regard for the basic norms of customer care, such as answering the phone and not calling Before we turn to this month's shameful examples of corporate malfeasance, a couple of housekeeping notes: Avenger know they were pissed off by his use of the term "pissed off" in last month's column. The term "is offensive to anyone with any sense of courtesy, describe their plights, and the Shopping Avenger is merely reflecting their anger. Though the Shopping Avenger offers this piece of advice: When writing to "consumer care specialists," or whatever they're being called today, do not use the honorific "asshole" by way of greeting. And remember: The assholes are the are lackeys and shills and running dogs, but they aren't assholes. promised to share her company's reservation policy with the Shopping Avenger. the day to help me move. When I arrived that morning to pick it up, I was told it was not there yet. After much complaining, a few phone calls were made, and three days late, and I only got it by threatening legal action." Last month, the Shopping Avenger also put out a call for there a difference between pests and airlines?" (Contest alert: Best punch line will be rewarded by public mention in this space, plus a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax, if the Shopping Avenger can figure out what Turtle Wax is.) Shopping Avenger is but one superhero, and he issues abject apologies to all episode. But about those airlines: The interesting thing about the airline complainants is that they don't even want the Shopping Avenger to seek retribution or restitution. All they want to do is vent. Maybe no one believes that airlines even care anymore or are capable of responding to complaints. the waterfront: baggage problems, surly flight attendants, mysteriously canceled flights, billing atrocities. But the most compelling complaints concerned bereavement fares. There's nothing like an airline screwing with someone who's going to bury his mother to make the blood boil. "Recently, my mother passed away and I needed to travel show up. Being that airline tickets, even a bereavement fare, purchased at the last minute can be quite expensive, I opted to cash in my voucher." holding the seat with his credit card. He was told to present his credit card with the voucher upon his arrival at the airport, where he would be charged, proceeded to do this and was told by the agent that the tickets were already she was unwilling to budge and unwilling to get a supervisor, telling me that, After the funeral, he contacted Northwest, he says, and after much frustrating dialing, reached an answering machine. "I had to leave my particulars on a voice mail because no agents were available to take my call. This worked out poorly, since when the agent called me back, she got my voice mail and left a message with the same number. So when I called back, of course all I got was the same opportunity to leave my particulars on their the 'plane never showing up' and 'raising red flags' cause me to question his story. It just sounds like there's something more personal here." "personal" feelings about an airline after said airline messed with his head death of anyone close is a very emotional and trying experience, and individuals frequently behave differently as a result of their pain." She's still blaming the customer but, she continues, the "Northwest employee at the airport should have taken extra steps to help the writer in his time of need. I wish that was the case, and I apologize on behalf of Northwest Airlines." We will return to the issue of airlines in a future episode, but the Shopping Avenger would like to relate another tale that caught story most definitively does not end with an apology. different prices (still another charge, for one cent, was also billed to his company agreed that he was the victim of false billing and canceled out the billed, but one thing he did not receive in the mail was a rebate on one of the two remaining phones, part of a special promotion he signed up for. Though he canceled his service and referred his case to a collection agency, which is to talk to the executives whose salaries they pay), a spokesman, Tom Murphy, customer for six phones, refused to stop billing him, and threatened him when he wouldn't pay for service pending a resolution of the problem. rebate money. The rebate money is owed to him, and so is the apology. He fault" for not paying his bill for telephone calls made on the phones he did dispute was settled and the rebate issue resolved. She said he was wrong. I mentioned to her the quaint notion that "the customer is always right," and she collection agency. "I told the agency that I was reporting this matter to the protection people, but she did ask me to please not give the name of the people are crazy," he said. "They could make this go away, but they won't." from B., who reported that he was the only passenger on his flight not to receive free drink coupons. Apparently, the flight was late, and as a friendly gesture Southwest let the passengers get drunk on its dime. But not B. Somehow, pride ourselves on our Customer Service and would NEVER want it to be said that following your comments on the unappeased longings of conservatives, once observed that there was no female equivalent of the (masculine) word "puerile." of garbage an immature college student would turn out the night before an exam in a desperate bid to seem iconoclastic and "relevant." It is a squalid irrelevance even in the context of "Sensation," but "major" would put her in knows what to do with a mattress! And the idea that an oblique, hardly probable urinals, exhibited in New York earlier this year, are a mock homage to because it reminds you of some other orifice, you say), you expose a disturbing infatuation with literalness, that precious "real life" you tell me you want in and making it into "shocking" art, which is in my opinion the bane of this stage in art history we can surely draw a line under appropriation. Some genuine artists earlier in the century did inspired things with the found object and unleashed extraordinary images, but the spurious alchemy of lifting things unmediated from the common culture and plonking them down in the art gallery is truly exhausted now that it has become the academic norm. It rests on a contradiction: It demystifies skill and imagination, and yet relies on life" and youthful exuberance lead you to exactly the same folly as the popular press: You focus on the sensationalist at the expense of the subtle and reflective. Vastly more provocative and unsettling, in my opinion, than the colored like skin (or is it smudged lipstick?) and oozes dry ice and is almost anthropomorphic in its voluptuous, erogenous curves. It doesn't jump at one's forms, of the way all the elements feel like they have been thought through in sensations rather than merely "a" sensation. This is what I think art should do. Anyone else who thinks the same way, come join me in the closet. technology and understand it as no generation before them did. They practically invented the Internet. They don't vote: They distrust politics and prefer voluntarism. They're skeptical of corporations and impervious to traditional advertising. They're less racist and more multiracial than any group of especially when most of its members aren't out of short pants yet. But no oldest members of Gen Y have just entered college, which means that for the Titanic to Scream to Cruel Intentions --have swallowed multiplexes. Their melodramas own the networks and have turned their bewitched by the teen invasion. The New York Times Magazine is fretting Because the parts of the brain that develop last are those that regulate adolescents (also a modern creation) inhabited the adult world as laborers and apprentices. No one claimed that teens were incapacitated by raging hormones or after World War II did high school become the universal, defining experience of youth. For the first time, adolescents were artificially segregated from adults, and developed their own culture of cars, dating, and rock 'n' roll. of them, but also because they were so alien: The country had never seen during the baby boom. The media cycle has also boosted Generation Y. early '90s were defined by the allegedly darker and less materialistic Gen Generation Y is also booming because it is a cheerful story for a cheerful age. Just as the slump of the '90s has been replaced by the eternal boom, the cynical pessimists of Gen X have been vanquished by the pregnancy rates, drug use, and crime. Today, teen pregnancy, drug use, crime, last, commentators gloat, kids are having real childhoods again. The school mood. The media have focused on kids' passionate, unified response to the be. Commentators opine that their childhood prosperity will make them generous now: Who wouldn't be? Let's see what they say when the economy dives the year rational thought. Most of them haven't reached puberty yet, and many are in with youth: If they catch kids early enough, they can cement their brand preferences for life. Networks are producing teen dramas so that their advertisers can reach this impressionable audience. Movies are pitched to again. As far as marketers are concerned, Gen X is over: It has aged out of the consumption game. But Generation Y kids are up for grabs: They are young, they pushing the Gen Y boom hardest are not sociologists, journalists, or activists but market researchers. The most quoted Gen Y pundits are folks who work at companies such as Youth Information Network and Teenage Research Unlimited, analysis.) Stories about Gen Y tend to shortchange kids' views on family, school, and politics, and dwell instead on their favorite clothing stores. as myself, this marketing talk seems both contradictory and fatuous. The market "This is the coolest generation ever." If you can use "viral marketing" and Then again, if you could use "grunge" and "Social Security reform" in the same The final reason for the teen renaissance is boomer culture at all, you have surely noticed the remarkable number of sympathetic intimately parents and kids communicate, and how much kids admire mom and dad. The "surprising fact" that pops up in almost every Gen Y story is a survey in which teens named parents as their favorite role models. (I would bet that ridiculed, have finally managed to get over themselves. They have found a new negative assessment (and "rank" seems to be a negative word indeed to summarize a movie that draws a great deal of praise in the course of the review) seems to that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask aesthetic detachment. The daughter is frozen in fear when she enters the room; revulsion at her own murderous intentions. Other characters are only shown film is hardly nihilistic: He remembers the closest relationships in his past life with wonder and gratitude. At the moment of his death he is looking lovingly at a photograph of his former self and his young family, not at a sensitivity and sophistication, simply fails to realize that the makers of experimental science and a more theoretical field. In molecular biology, which I know best, the editorial process is nothing like that described for economics. An article cannot take more than several months to transit from first writing until publication or it will be completely out of date, as there are a half dozen groups working on closely related experiments who will have reported *their* results. Moreover, new information is new; it does not have to knock over a theoretical predisposition to be "news" and thus publishable. examination of "hypothesis confirmation" is fairly common, and there is certainly some wobble. A series of clinical trials can reach different can lead to a conclusion different from a large "definitive" clinical trial. But that's a signal for further empiricism, not a theoretical point that there is no way to get better evidence or improve certainty that one is "right." There is certainly publication bias in that the probability of publication is higher for positive results (improved clinical outcome, for example) than no analysis to experimental fields that report new data. The line of argument seems to be that since hypotheses in academic economics have not been confirmed means that the same would be true for all fields whether theoretical or experimental, and therefore fields that rest on empirical evidence must be castles in the sky. The analogies are not strong enough to allow leaps of faith An interesting phenomenon related to that discussed scientific journals that are then reported in daily newspapers, weekly news magazines, and discussed on television news shows. Although I don't have any would be amplified in the following way: if you read in the newspaper about a theory that has been published in a prestigious scientific journal, it is even more likely to be wrong than an article that is published in a prestigious scientific journal that is not widely reported. Reporters and editors decide what hypotheses are newsworthy and likely to evoke interest in their readers criteria are not especially effective at selecting the true scientific Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (Oxford University Press, studies). Together the three have been widely understood as establishing that systematic twin study undermines his early ones. Although the original studies received a great deal of attention and are widely accepted, the serious problems with them have not been discussed in the media. likely to be deemed newsworthy. Readers of media reports of scientific hypotheses need to read with especially critical and skeptical eyes. forgive me but I just don't seem to understand what is so "hip" about some and works for charities based on a concern for her father. Kind probably, tragic, embarrassing solution to a problem that did not exist." What it's so much more. It's censored music. And censored videos. And denying women still won't stock "adult videos," although it no longer carries its own store editions of mainstream hits with the naughty bits edited out, as it was once attorney, but if this isn't overtly promoting infanticide as a form of population control, it's coming awfully close. Crawl, little baby! Crawl for retailer enjoys over its rivals in a robust economy would be even greater during hard times, when those puny competitors would be battered by economic if a meteor crashed into the Earth, sentencing everyone on the planet to a slow that fomented each of these recent riots around the world? mobs. No one has dared go out, even to buy basic needs in the nearest market," wanted my head because I had blocked their move to split the 18,000-member procession and malicious damage to property. Rioters threw stones, bottles, and iron pieces at the police while policemen fired tear gas and used pistols, apparently came to drink and party and have what they thought was a good time. for people who are interested in broadening themselves. Here's a guide for the attraction is villas, which charge you a few thousand lire to admire their gardens and sculptures. The gardens are half patio and half golf course. Some memorialize his bad taste. In cities, most of the art is in museums and big spectacular. So are the floors. My wife suggested that we model our bathroom floor after one of them. The floors are checkered with marble slabs commemorating rich people. The more money you give to the church, the bigger your slab, and the better your location. Basically, it works like the Religion. Most of the art in museums is religious. The big adult features and expressions wholly inappropriate to an infant. In some a naked woman. Her breast starts around the collarbone and takes off like a paintings all day. This can't have been helpful. Maybe they meditated on was a baby, but now bits of fabric are conveniently placed to obscure it. favorite. He wears a white robe and hovers over the thieves who have just dug guy's halo blocks your view of the guy behind him. My wife and I spent several minutes discussing a huge mural of the Last Supper before we realized that the looked for the propeller. What it's supposed to convey, I don't know. What it nestled into odd corners of the hill towns. But let's face it, much of museum specializing in instruments of the Inquisition. (The "skull crusher" and "rectal pear" are particularly memorable.) The museum charges twice the admission fee that other museums charge, and people pay it because, basically, we love cruelty. The museum pretends to teach the lessons of man's inhumanity noises of disgust as they study each device. But the truth is, we're weather." "Charming," my wife replied coldly as she shrank into her seat. roads, don't expect to notice the scenery. You'll spend the whole trip with speed up because the road is narrow and winds sharply around hillsides. They can't pass you for the same reason. My advice is to take the bus. The bus we could have plunged us hundreds of feet into the lake. At first I thought the drivers we passed on that road were nuts. Then I saw the bikers. They wore navigate the city's tiny medieval passageways. Thanks to the proprietress of our hotel, who climbed into the passenger seat and issued directions, I series of alleys at harrowing right angles, past scaffolding and cafe tables, people honeymoon there. The other reason is that the words "husband" and "wife" Less than a week into our marriage, we were touring the bride and groom.) Everyone smiled and sighed. The scene was perfectly scripted for a honeymoon. What wasn't scripted for a honeymoon was our phrase you to use a condom," and "You can't stay here tonight." Part of the problem is sell bags of birdseed to tourists, who in turn feed the pigeons. Naturally, the pigeons hang out in the piazzas all day, cooing and crapping and waiting to be fed. Welfare for flying rats. I was delighted to discover skyward prongs in the bike. My only regret is that I passed up a chance to order roasted pigeon in tourists makes sense. The tourists, too, are slow, stupid, ugly, and rude. They set off flash bulbs in churches. They thrust their fingers within an inch or two of priceless paintings, pointing out the obvious. Years ago, the tourists took snapshots. Now they make videotapes. They videotape anything that moves on a boat, who in turn were videotaping the tourists on the bridge. Lovely people. And I was becoming quite comfortable with the whole German to place the mask securely over my nose and mouth and breathe deeply. waiter asks whether you want gas or no gas, he's referring not to the beans but is the bread, which provides all the blandness of matzot without the moral evidently at the behest of a conglomerate whose boats we saw unloading their man in a green suit and sunglasses prancing around a storefront, gesticulating wildly and apparently arguing with himself. Eventually we figured out that he was talking to a tiny phone in his ear. People go out to eat with friends and and woman dined at the outdoor table next to ours. They both wore wedding rings. The man had brought his dog along. His phone rang, and he spent the rest of the meal in what sounded like a playful conversation with a child. The woman just went on eating. It doesn't add up. If the guy wanted to talk to his kid, why did he leave the kid at home? If the kid was at home, why was the dog at the restaurant? If the woman was the guy's wife, why was he ignoring her? If she wasn't his wife, why were they wearing rings? If she was the kid's mom, why didn't the guy hand her the phone? I don't get it. But then, being a philistine led security guards to the burglars. (The girls were slipping out to mail their documents and counting piles of payoff money. As Dick tells it, the operations as a sordid buffoon show undone by a couple of painfully earnest innocents: It's nature's revenge on the overweening. The larger truths are all might seem as vain and as clumsily ambitious as the felons they're pursuing. to her senses and utter the immortal reproach, "You kicked Checkers and you're view, probes his characters' psyches, and edits with a snap. By contrast, sophistication hits you gradually. Maybe you have to be sophisticated to make a picture so effortlessly, cheerfully facile about a subject so dark and beyond dumb, so that their budding awareness of Dick's mendacity has an exists an entire class of nerdy superhero wannabes, each of whom struggles to because his anger supposedly gives him powers undreamt of by mere mortals. He his cape and hurling forks, most of which end up sticking out of his companions skewed angles and screwy lenses and grotesque special effects. What keeps his work from becoming campily oppressive (like the last, dreadful Batman nerds just can't quite get off the ground. More than that, they're inherently must constantly defend his unrealized ambitions: "I shovel well. I shovel These idiots can never measure up to the city's most with product placements. When all the heavyweight bad guys are dead or in jail (and his celebrity endorsements dry up), he contrives to have one of his old The Bowler, who hurls a ball in which the skull of her murdered father is reality of what they are. They don't show grace under pressure, but they somehow rise to the occasion, and Mystery Men becomes a triumphant celebration of nerdy aspiration. I might have complained that Stiller and pretty terrific. The old script has been smartly overhauled, and the director, elegance. The climax, in which an army of men in trench coats and bowler hats of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which it takes place.) True, there's the entrance in furs and a pair of sunglasses, with creamy lips and mussed red and entertained by his effrontery. You can't spot the moment when she falls in love: It must be when it dawns on her that she's the mouse and not the cat. Before you know it, she's roiling with doubt and heartbreakingly vulnerable, has never been less than agreeable, but here's she's something else: a movie feels so fresh. A handful of critics concede that while the film is technically excellent, it's in no way groundbreaking; rather it's simply a collection of baseball, this time as an aging pitcher in the last game of his career. the rich cast. What went wrong? Skewering consumer culture might have been novel in the 1970s, but these days it feels like beating a dead horse. (Click The critics are unanimous that it's "the season's naughtiest, bawdiest, and about every review describes it as "edgy." Not only is it full of cursing, ethnic jokes, prostitution, and the like, but it dares to have no laugh track and a bastard as the protagonist: "the show is truly subversive and daring in "lacks the drama, the magic, the gentleness, the lilt of the first book" "seems less in control in this book and at times is powerless to keep himself Party presidential candidate gets harsh reviews from conservative writer, but critics attack his isolationist policies and revisionist history has turned me down for dates because she prefers the company of her find most of them annoying and downright dorky. Thus, it seems clear that my feels special kinship with you. The thing you must do in a situation like this is accept that people's attractions are hardwired. (Have you noticed how often the second spouse resembles the first?) There is a slim chance that this young woman is just not interested in you (with no consideration of nationality retailing maxim: Your first markdown is your cheapest. Do not wait around for this girl to change her mind. Just accept things as they are and cast your eye meaningful gift and mainly focus on having a nice meal or an outing together. occasions for major asset transfers. In other words, they are more into dollar family when all he got was a shirt and tie.) I worry that my husband's family does not see our carefully chosen gifts as the sincere expression of love and gift with some real thought behind it that does not break the bank. Since your husband is used to lavish gifts, the two of you should probably make a budget boyfriend who is thoughtful, kind, understanding, etc. I have nothing bad to say about him (here it comes), but I don't feel a real connection to him. If I look at him from a logical standpoint, he would be a perfect person with whom to spend the rest of my life. I am physically attracted to him, and I care for him deeply, but I just feel there is something missing. I think all this has been exacerbated by the fact that I recently had a conversation with a stranger great conversation and what I felt was a real connection.) We've only been going out five months, so maybe I should give it more time. I don't want to throw away something very good just because of some need that may be foolish forget that. You may, however, have Immature Woman Syndrome intensified by The not the right guy. As you point out correctly, five months is not enough time to give you the answer. Your need for connection is not a foolish whim. Just because you can't put your finger on what's missing doesn't mean it's not missing. On the other hand, for many people real caring along with physical chucking your current relationship, you try to arrange another encounter with the Handsome Stranger to see what happens a second time. (Assuming, of course, you didn't meet him on the subway and have no inkling of how to find him from high school is getting married in the fall and has asked me and some other means rich. Her parents and her fiance's parents are footing the bill for a feel like we can't really say "no" to being her bridesmaids, either. How should we handle the situation? Can we ask her to have her dad pay for a portion of the dresses so it's not a financial hardship for us? from her bridesmaid days, but interestingly enough, your dilemma was faced by numbers involved in that situation were roughly double the ones you mention. What happened there was that the bride's dad paid half of each of the girls' dresses. Afterward, however, one of the bridesmaids was so annoyed by the that if a family of means picks attendants' dresses that are out of the normal price range, they should foot the bill. (For some unknown reason, bridesmaids' is just one of life's little oddities.) As for your question about whether or not the bride is rude in asking you all to shell out hundreds of dollars, she is not rude, simply thoughtless. Because your letter indicates that all you girls have the same views about the expense, one of you should speak to the bride on behalf of all the bridesmaids and say that her selection is a little It was caused by "a poisonous mix of greed, liquor, jingoism and bad In the big finale, as men and women in tiny swimsuits perform a nearly team: "spectators taunted them." Even worse, "One coach's spouse, positioned allowing spouses (in garish uniforms, no less) within the bounds of the arena doesn't want the general's scalp exposed to sun or wind for several months. writes about how his book Random Hearts was made into a movie. behind love and hate, the darkly amusing, deeply disturbing and ultimately publication, see it in print, and not kill himself with pills. The paper said in an editorial: "Any hope of some respite for the world from the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, have been dashed. The world's secret service agencies have apparently merely shifted their emphasis to the ideological extremism now seems antique and all but incomprehensible." Furthermore, she "killed nobody" and "was fired by ideological commitment tortures, by contrast, are all too fresh, and the precedent of his arrest has ridiculed the "predictably forgiving" opinion of the should she be tried, condemned and jailed?" it asked. "Of course, and the an international tribunal to investigate "the alleged involvement of the which has been entrusted with the task of maintaining peace and order, did supporters, forcing hundreds of thousands to leave their homes, and destroying and that "ultimately there will be a calling to account for the rape of East in the territory after the vote," the paper's editorial in state and local elections, where his Social Democrat Party was thrown out of Party last week by admitting to youthful homosexual experiences, the Mail on would accept a prime minister who had been homosexual in the past, and six out spiked with ginseng, and juice bars sprinkle ginkgo on smoothies. Supplements movies. Largely unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration, these you wasted? Over the summer I ran up a tab at my local General Nutrition tried them all, and has authored several books on the matter. Here's what I flower. Studies suggest it (like everything halfway fun these days) plays with neurotransmitter levels, boosting serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. recommended one to three 300-milligram pills per day. I took three. On the afternoon of the third day (it takes a while for the drug to rev up), I felt a sandwich, and admittedly this in itself may account for my good cheer. But it when the Wort would attack. And along with the manic highs came troughs of side effects or high price. "Doesn't it add a little magic to the world? It's that since I wasn't depressed to start with, taking the maximum dosage of Wort pushed me into mania. He starts patients off with one pill a day, and only goes natural hormone (produced by the pineal gland) that seems to regulate your so I was excited about melatonin. The bottle suggested one 3-milligram tablet before bedtime. I obeyed, but nothing happened: I was still sleepless. Instead, I felt sluggish the entire next day. Results were no better on subsequent nights. A few nights in, I had a vivid nightmare. I was at a picnic where ("dreams like you've never dreamed before," says the doc, and I concur), but so It's a plant from the pepper family, and its roots may affect your limbic you're not anxious, you won't notice much. But those who like it really like it. It's great if you're nervous going on a plane or to the dentist, or before a party. Some use it as an alternative to the evening martini." A mischievous friend swears that if you slug back a whole bottle you'll act like Dopey dwarf for a few hours, but I cannot confirm at this time. dopamine. Like melatonin, SAMe is found in the body. arthritis. I also don't have depression, but that never stopped me before. The bottle said one to four 100-milligram pills per day. I took four every day. I slobber of media excitement dripped all over SAMe in the last few months, it works better. When I sounded disappointed about SAMe, he offered this tip: "If you want to feel something, try taking three or four pills in the morning on an empty stomach." I tried the next morning. More nothing. Ginseng improves adrenal gland function, ginkgo helps circulation, and Echinacea boosts white blood cells. They're all herbs. and I had to find somewhere to spit it out. If you want to try ginseng, times, though not in a controlled study. The key is to take it just as you're seemed less enthusiastic about these. He says effectiveness varies dramatically between brands, and that ginkgo shows more impact on older people, improving The Wort can be fun, and it might save you a bundle reduced dosage. But basically this stuff is all weak sauce. If you're looking for drugs to improve your "mood" or "mental alertness," don't throw out your dealer's number just yet: The drugs that come closest to achieving these worthy goals remain highly illegal or must be prescribed by a doctor. The success of the institution, the aesthetic, and the regional identity epitomized by the official art family, has an artist so exemplified the spirit of a city or anything outright about us, but he's the best mirror we've got for divining gets most of the credit for elevating glass blowing from one more craft to a movement an institution even as he turned it into an industry. chandeliers in its atrium and more big pieces scattered around. This is just because he's a native son. His is the perfect art for boosters, wannabes, new precociously wealthy, culturally callow New Northwest. Glass has the museum glittery as jewelry and a hundred times bigger. It's hard, slick and, sensibility. His forms evoke not only phalli and vaginas but sea squirts and we still delude ourselves into thinking we're sustaining. His "baskets" mimic have our machines and money and preserve the wild, unspoiled new buccaneer capitalism, the jester who amuses (but never challenges) the geeks. He reprises the Renaissance role of artist as courtier, standing like a Not that he blows glass himself, though he still says without which he'd be just another chubby little guy with frizzy hair. And he and (you've gotta admire the chutzpah) Venetian canals with bright globes and later dubbed "Northwest visionaries" drank deep of both the drizzly, mossy and bums at the downtown Pike Place Public Market and was sometimes mistaken entrepreneur. No one expects entrepreneurs to do the production work. No one product, elevating it to something at once precious and ubiquitous. The Northwest trick is not so much to create something out of nothing as making something very large out of something small, and then repeating the process. A the killer whale, relaxing in his tank at Sea World after being given the power of speech, showed a thoughtful side to this reporter in an interview last week. "Look, I Didn't Ask Them To Give the Hurricane My Name, and I Wish No One Ill, pretty appealing until the fourth comes along. We'd welcome a huge, powerful, John Henry. But meanness trumps the other qualities. Once it arrives in the sentence, even reversing the previous three gets you nowhere. There's nothing dropped letter would transform the headline into a dark and pompous assertion about the human race: "HE'S HUGE, HE'S POWERFUL, HE'S FAST AND HE'S MAN." Two dropped letters, and we've reached the ludicrously boastful, like the lyrics to some dreary rap: "HE'S HUGE, HE'S POWERFUL, HE'S FAST AND HE'S ME." Three colossal storm, but would admirably conceal her terror with a plucky smile and Mirror 's headline is not just arbitrary sensationalism; it is troubles, the embattled publisher has an impressive list of fall titles (many Shunning the traditional organization, fiction and nonfiction, Paladin's catalog is arranged by categories including Sniping, Silencers, New ID and Personal Freedom, Action Careers, Combat Shooting, Knives and Knife Fighting, question is on every person's mind when he or she hears a loud bang in the middle of the night or a knock on the door at three in the attempting to build homemade firearms based on designs that are too complicated concealed weapon permits and avoiding adverse publicity."-- Boy, you shoot a did everything by the book: highlighted favorable issues, exploited his also defied the political playbook by deprecating himself in a shrewd effort to expertise in a particular terrain of issues. The advantage will go to the candidate on whose terrain the battle is fought. If the election is about concern, Gore can argue that growth is the most fundamental, and Bush can argue military issues are the most grave. "The most solemn responsibility given the Emphasize biography. Since the end of the Cold War, can frame the election to his advantage in another way. He can bypass the choice among issues by persuading voters to focus on the candidates' biographies instead of their platforms. Every candidate launches his campaign Moralize the issues. Once he has convinced voters of subject in moral terms. In his announcement address, as in previous speeches, he framed domestic issues in terms of "honor," "courage," "strength," "faith," "selfishness," "honesty," and "respect." He called trade protectionists "cowards," accused the government of swindling taxpayers, and denounced voters, "Their support is my honor." Couching every issue in such language Gore make them vulnerable to a populist underdog. Auditioning for this role, generated significant interest among independent voters and needs their help in numerous enemies in his own party by promoting legislation that would restrict campaign contributions and require tobacco companies to pay for health care and accuses his critics of subverting the national interest for the sake of well as Democrats, and "conservatives" as well as liberals. Conventional strategy dictates that having framed the election along these failure, and disgrace. In every account of his POW ordeal, he absurdly concludes that he "failed" to withstand the enemy's torture. In speeches, he accepts "blame" for everything Congress does wrong, says he "failed" to prevent it, and vows to "try harder" next time. He is "ashamed" of electioneering. "The people whom I serve believe that the means by which I came to office corrupt me," he declared three months ago. "And that shames me. That shames me. Their contempt is a stain upon my honor, and I cannot live with it." on at least five occasions. Shame has become his shtick. biography of steel. When he calls himself weak and corrupt, nobody believes him. If Gore were to call himself weak and corrupt, his opponents would replay language of character and has plenty of foreign policy counsel on which to comparison to what each man has done with his life. In military confrontations, one's life becomes the foundation from which he or she makes the decisions that dark room when the casualty reports come in. I am not afraid of the burden. I opponents more than it endangers him. The central line of his speech proclaimed a "New Patriotic Challenge. It is a challenge to each of us to join in the fight against the pervasive cynicism that is debilitating our democracy." It to hold public office have ourselves to blame," he laments in his stump speech. "It is we who have squandered the public trust, we who have time and again placed our personal or partisan interest before the national interest, earning Bush, I want to see a united Republican Party. But no political campaign is concern, not personal. Each time I see the erectile dysfunction ad with Bob Dole, I cringe. What happened to his statesmanlike demeanor? Is it entirely a coincidence that we have a president who can get it up (for each and every one who asks), instead of a president who can't? Do we need to know about Bob's penile trouble in order to go forward? Must we be a party to all his vaudeville joke about an older gentleman who tells a friend that he finds sex at his age terrific. Especially the one in the winter. seemed fair and balanced. How rare. I thought, however, I might take the opportunity to chime in and mention that I have got wind of the existence of an are currently considering artificial augmentation (which as a man I find government would embargo such a product, unless the plastic surgeons' lobby has taught that people should not make loud noises when eating in public. I am to mine. (It is common practice in our office to eat at one's desk, since there's no nice place to eat on the premises.) One person in particular always comes over to talk while loudly snacking on potato chips and other items. Trouble is, I can't think of any remotely acceptable way to convey my cannot come right out and say, "It is gauche to come over and serenade me with your potato chips, so please go away." Here are a few options that are not confrontational. You might have something to read during lunch, sort of a de inform everyone that you are meditating, or simply say you'd love to visit during a coffee break, but lunch is when you've decided to catch up on your reason to be held prisoner to a potato chip. As for the sounds from other thank you. Many of our friends are relieved, I think, not to have to give up a invited, and I don't know how to break it to them that they are not welcome. To make things worse, they have already told me about the ridiculously expensive gifts they have purchased for our irresistible little birthday girl. I am looking for a delicate way to get the gifts but stand firm on the be too judgmental about your delicacy, though your wish to grab the gifts with no party attached leaves something to be desired. In addition to looking the animal bit the birthday girl. But back to your deal: Since people have already mentioned their gifts and their plans to launch your darling into year absolutely not up to having dozens of chums this year, tell them that it's just graduated from high school after a successful year of captaining the winning softball team. During the softball season my husband and I got to know many of the team parents and were particularly taken with the extended family of a our daughter left for summer study abroad. I did not intend this party to be a when various members of this other family brought gifts and graduation cards graduation gift for their son, whom my husband and I do not know well. My we send a gift as the son prepares to go to college? Should I have anticipated the interpretation of my invitation as a gift solicitation, given the timing? Or should I just relax and consider their gifts a generous expression of their appreciation for my daughter's leadership and mentoring of the younger player "relax." Your motives were pure and a good time was had by all. It may be a by the wayside. The giving of gifts simply to even things up is just another will be very meaningful, and the timing will be perfect. number, are now a tool of telemarketers. Some of them do this just to get the victim to call an expensive toll number. Many refer to correcting a credit Off could have had a simple garbled message, I suppose. How boring. telemarketers, she is most happy to pass the word. And she does not want one letter from the offending telephone pests arguing with her. She knows it's a tough way to make a living, but unsolicited pitches are just junk mail Judging by today's responses, the network's lineup would seem to consist of division and New York Times Magazine cover subject, would be leaving the callers. The implements were referred to as "Black Hoes." (I don't have a joke asked to try and find a headline even less enticing than the following, from New York Press that makes my eyes glaze over, though maybe for a enticing headline of the day, but it is certainly the most parochial.) guest host. I now intend to approach the Fox network about starting my own, competing Quiz, ensuring that Randy will never speak to me again. wicked idea about who you really are. I think you're a fat, balding guy in his me. I believe that a person's views on religion, divinity, and so on are individual. I respect the right of anyone to believe as he or she sees fit, but honestly, I find the whole Latter Day Saints faith a load of dingo sanctimonious and superior and in line with many fundamentalist "Christian" If you love her dearly, as you say, it will be necessary to reach an agreement, probably with a referee, whereby you both hew to your own beliefs and do not however, that you use the words "racist, restrictive, condemnatory, sanctimonious, and superior" about your wife's faith and her fellow qualities are "gorgeous, loving, brainy, witty, and rich." Not to be family, and some close friends but am hesitant to come all the way out for fear of the implications. I do not care what people think about me, but I don't want to bring any negative publicity to the school. I love education and would hate to leave it. I want to find a life partner to share my days with, but my current employment prevents me from doing so. I am tired of living in the closet and want to be me without having to live two lives. Can you honest. The first thing to try would be to talk with someone in authority at your school about your sexual preference to ask if it poses a problem. The answer may well be in the affirmative, seeing as how one parochial school publicity to the school, but only you know why you think this is so. would hate to leave the educational field, why not move to a public or private school if your Catholic school boss finds homosexuality a problem? Take it from concentrate at work. My office is two doors down from his, so there's no considered uncomfortably secretive and standoffish. Any ideas on how I can save sound and, like chewing gum, should best be done in private. You may have blown the problem out of proportion, however. Surely this "really great guy," the positive. Tell him, in your own words, that it pleases you that he manifests such happy feelings, but the musical expression of his joy distracts you and keeps you from putting out your very best work. A really great guy is not going to react with anything but understanding. Unless he is so dense that light bends around him, he will accede to your request and be grateful that you spoke Project demonstrates that there's nothing scarier than nothing. The movie has no ghosts or witches on display, and its lone bit of gore is a piece of cloth containing a mottle of indeterminate organic material. It has no surprises, either, since you know going in that the ending won't be happy. The movie opens with a placard declaring that three film students went into the from again, and that their footage was discovered a year after their freeze your blood. Working on a budget that's chump change and a script that's human alive. They have reanimated the genre not by adding to it but subtracting done is remove the omniscient point of view. With the important exception of that we see what they see and no more. Actually, we see even less, since we lack their peripheral vision and are cruelly limited to whatever passes through that escalates into an omnidirectional clatter. When they yell into the darkness ("Hello?"), the darkness remains dark. A light illuminates the foreground, but the blackness beyond that pool seems, if anything, blacker. There might be no more irrationally terrifying shot in the annals of film than the fuck that is. If we did, some part of us would probably relax, because it would look like a special effect. But no part of us is allowed to relax. and lashed to a tree during a harsh winter), the remainder of the movie is their increasingly desperate odyssey through the woods. They trudge one way, double back, pore over maps and compasses, whine, trudge some more, come upon mysterious piles of rocks or bundled twigs, and whine even louder. The action The grueling monotony is broken only at night, when the students go into their tents and the sounds come again and the very celluloid seems to shiver with cold and fear. The camera twitches incessantly: The lone stationary shot is when Heather sobs an apology to her parents for having dreamed up the project, of the Opera with nostril hair. I don't apply the adjective "visceral" the screening, my wife was convinced she had food poisoning from an earlier meal; when we stopped and analyzed her symptoms, we realized that she had motion sickness. The movie had literally made her sick. be slighted, however. I love horror pictures and am a tough scare, but I television, the first thing I thought was, "Thank God, she's alive." Then she said, "This movie must be working because people come up to me all the time and talisman. I rushed to the phone and called the movie's publicists to make sure this was a promotional gimmick. When they said yes, I started breathing again; into such primal emotions? Consider its antithesis. The remake of The Haunting has the bad fortune to open in the same month, and what might have acquire an inexorable life of their own and threaten to eat them alive. Nothing thunderous pounding on a pair of big doors, as if all the characters' pounding comes early and serves as an overture for a bunch of statues that spring to life and grab people. Everything is exasperatingly, often laughably, overexplicit, and once a dread becomes material, a ghost story Hill House, it's clear that Something Evil is watching them: You can tell a lot of little, good ghosts, people in the audience are holding onto their is one of the most maladroit ghost movies ever made. direction so clunky, The Haunting still wouldn't come within screaming much you can't see and will never know. With all those cameras onscreen, ethics put the greatest emphasis on protecting public safety, health and welfare. Loyalty to employers is fourth on the list. Quite probably the technicians, company executives and bureaucrats had applied such a philosophy." regime release its political prisoners and start a dialogue with dissident embassy were released unharmed, and the gunmen were allowed to escape. crack down even harder on political dissidents after what happened," the paper to break its stalemate. It concluded, "It is far better that the military Thatcher made what the conservative Times called a "jingoistic" speech blaming all liberty alive for the future," Thatcher said. A party spokesman told the the same paper said that whereas Thatcher's legacy has proved "positive" for the luster fades from the current Labor government, the column said, the turn around to look afresh at this strange anachronism called the Conservative recent hair transplant. A Herald editorial said, "The argument that his hair implant needs more time to take root was not only legally flimsy but also highly unbecoming for his rugged martial profession and movers and shakers, but in the nation's capital, a potentially powerful personal sense, of course. Nothing Caucus members go about their daily business just like anyone else: walking the dog, driving to work, thinking big thoughts, making big deals, whatever. What unites them is their belief that the nation's interests would best be served if Congress would just pack it in. The guiding principle behind the movement was perhaps first any surplus in the federal budget would be to retire the federal debt. With using surplus federal funds to buy back outstanding Treasury bonds and notes Security, is automatically invested in Treasury bonds. Since the Treasury would not, in that case, need to do any new borrowing, those bonds would have to be bought back from the public and retired. The same is true of the Social black, which it hasn't been for decades. Otherwise, the payroll tax surpluses are used to cover borrowing done to finance courts, prisons, schools, airports, weather forecasts, and all the other things that government does. So what spending than it can cover with the remaining taxes.) accomplished. But other budget watchers, from both parties, have come increasingly to the view that, when it comes to direct action by Congress, less look at the alternatives," says Republican Carol Cox Wait, president of the when it's under pressure to do something." Former Congressional Budget Office Congress play with tax and entitlement legislation in a surplus both private and official sources show that the existence of any 10-year It is that this and future Congresses and presidents will agree to cut domestic year that is lower than current spending. The limits are even lower in the following two years. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget are required to assume the limits will actually be met when they make their projections (a point generally overlooked). Budget watchers noted at the time the caps were enacted that they were absurdly unrealistic, but the caution was lost in the general celebration. secretly subscribe to stalemate. "It won't be the end of the world," said one last week, "It's not a bad outcome." But comments such as this are strictly not for attribution. True, when pressed, top economic advisers have called the spending caps "totally unrealistic," but they are loath to press this point too loudly, lest it call into question both their own plans for additional "investments" (read spending and tax breaks) and the president's embrace of the limits in the first place. That coyness led the White House to issue a budget general fund surplus that triggered the current orgy on Capitol Hill. the festivities last week by passing "The Financial Freedom Act." This effusively named tax cut would, even after some cosmetic improvements to placate fiscal conservatives, likely absorb more than the total 10-year surplus. (That includes interest costs on the extra debt the Treasury will incur if it doesn't buy back outstanding securities.) The measure is artfully the time that retiring baby boomers are starting to drain the Social Security piously embraced the notion of a "lockbox" for the trust fund surpluses, but reason. There is no box that Congress, with the acquiescence of the White finally nailed together. Remember that any overspending in the general budget despite its lip service to the spending caps (and the surpluses that depend entirely upon them), is even now busy marking up appropriations bills that Congress," our nation's representatives have been sensitive to charges that their time is spent only in pandering, politicking, and pot thumping. And no one is suggesting that legislators pack up and go home forthwith. That would make for a mighty dull summer for us news junkies. But after the requisite negotiations in which the sanctity of Social Security and the need to invest in our nation's children are duly invoked, it would be a blessing if Congress would quietly pass a continuing resolution keeping spending more or less where it currently is, and then take to the hustings, where each party can blame the News of the World and sighs, "Another naughty Scoutmaster." This was as a scoutmaster, but Scout officials saw a newspaper photograph of him leading won, the court ruling that the Scouts may not discriminate on grounds of race, English public schools in mind but might well have been thinking of any number of other organizations where men instruct boys. The Boy Scouts have long scoutmasters who loved their little charges not wisely but too well. One naughty leader after another trailed sadly through the courtrooms, to the himself never landed in court, he was certainly a strange man. He was obsessed outdoor comradeship seemed at least as great as her desire for sexual fulfillment," and he even managed to beget three children. But thereafter he always slept out on his balcony (and this in the English climate) rather than movement, studiously recorded his dreams, which were often about young men. In one, he recalled, a soldier snatched a whip away from him and asked whether he which has a fair claim as one of the most influential books of the young man beset by impure thoughts should drive them way by plunging his his own Scout troop, though certainly any naughty scoutmaster who nowadays passed on that advice from the founder of scouting would more likely find will return to campus, hoping, among other things, to achieve high grades. Of course, "high" is a moving target. I remember when C meant "average"; today, whenever I turn in my students' final grades, the dean's office instructs me to truly superior. But on the other hand, inflated grades do a super job of distinguishing among fine gradations of weakness. When the average grade is B, in valuable information, because employers care more about making distinctions at the top than about making distinctions at the bottom. Therefore, college degrees, which derive their value from the information they carry, become less inflation makes it impossible to tell them apart, you might expect an employer makes it harder to assign them to appropriate tasks. That lowers their average grade inflation? Not necessarily, because students do not live by starting salaries alone. There are advantages to living with less competitive pressure, and those advantages could more than offset the financial losses. bear the full burden of those financial losses. As degrees become less valuable, colleges must cut tuition or lose enrollments. (Or, more precisely, they must sacrifice some growth in tuition or in enrollments, both of which have been rising for reasons that have nothing to do with grade inflation.) A college that can distinguish itself from the pack by maintaining high standards should be able to reap substantial rewards in the marketplace, because its If colleges pay the price for grade inflation, why do they allow it? Partly, it's because colleges don't assign grades. Professors assign grades, and professors face perverse incentives. Being human, they tend to take a special interest in their own students and are therefore tempted to give those students a boost at the expense of the anonymous strangers who signed up school, while the benefits are concentrated in the professor's own classroom. the gap between the professor's interests and the college's. Any solution must above water in the short run he's happy. A tenured professor is like a According to a widespread belief, grade inflation took off Service System. According to an equally widespread belief, the late '60s and early '70s were also a time when tenure became far more elusive. Professors began moving from one school to another every few years, with little reason to was irrelevant; grade inflation was the inevitable consequence of upheaval in partial solution to the incentive problem, because even a tenured professor shares only a fraction of his institution's successes and failures. Let me propose some improvements. First, college transcripts could show each professor's overall grade distribution, allowing employers to interpret each individual grade in context. Then, instead of damaging his colleagues' credibility, the easy grader would damage only his own. Second, the dean's office could assign each professor a "grade budget" consisting of a certain A grade budget is not exactly the same thing as a mandatory curve, because it would allow professors the flexibility to give more high grades in one class if they're willing to give fewer in another. Still, every to give out. One of those students would suffer unjustly. But the A students are precisely the ones who suffer unjustly from grade inflation. The question stifling constraint. That doesn't make it a bad thing. Economic theory tells us that when everyone is polluting a communal stream, everyone can benefit from enforced moderation. It always hurts to be constrained, but sometimes it's worth it if your neighbors are constrained too. With grade budgets, professors If grade budgets are such a good idea, why don't we have them? That's a question about politics, not economics, so maybe it's best directed to a different sort of expert. In cases like this, it's the economist's job to explain where we ought to be headed, and the political scientist's job to explain why we can't get there from here. function at the bottom of each page or by going to the Archives page (also among other delights, a virtual reality function that allows you to imagine Contents, and relive the excitement of that particular moment. Or, for those of charging for access to almost all content, this is a handy way to catch that stuff at all (though we will within a few weeks). But if you want to pick world and impress your friends with how busy you are. We offer a variety of gizmos. You need to register (it's free), which you can do here and then subscribe to options you want (yes, yes, that's free too), which Then you'll no longer need to waste those valuable seconds spent waiting for (look near the top left of the page or click here for need Windows Media Player software (which you may already have if you've installed the latest version of Internet Explorer). If you don't have it, versions of a wide variety of printed material, including selections from leave on your dashboard and get downloaded audio over your car radio (or and pledged not to move until they are paid. They have not collected their Medical Association voted to form a union to negotiate for better wages and bargaining will win doctors more control over the type and quantity of bargaining will win doctors higher pay, resulting in higher costs for The Supreme Court barred lawsuits against states for violating federal laws. Individual plaintiffs will no longer be able to sue states that violate federal laws; only the federal government may do so. Observers called Liberals protested that the ruling emasculates Congress' power to bind states "the height of conservative judicial activism" because it "invented new rights for state governments at the expense of individuals." The Supreme Court restricted its definition of physical disability. The court ruled that people whose impairments can be corrected (with medicine, eyeglasses, or the like) aren't eligible for Employers were relieved. Advocates for the disabled fumed at "the absurd result of a person being disabled enough to be fired from a job, but not disabled private or parochial school tuition for kids in "failing" public schools who could jeopardize nascent voucher programs in other states, as well as the she was embarrassed to confess to him how much she'd blown on clothes and steel industry had lobbied ardently for the bill, claiming that imports are Senate, and a slew of economists opposed the bill, agreeing that it would because of increased productivity: "a lot of workers simply aren't needed anymore, and no amount of xenophobia will alter that." A federal panel is deciding if and how to tax Internet commerce. The newly convened group is supposed to deliver its findings Brain surgery was successfully performed on a fetus. Last excessive water in his brain. They jubilantly announced that the baby, born in May, shows no sign of the congenital condition. The disclaimer: They won't know for another year whether the baby is brain damaged. shipping pallets and a bad batch of carbon dioxide, neither of which presents a serious health threat. Financial experts say the serious threat is to Coke's commoner and a public relations executive. The couple staged a more casual shudders at both women's eagerness to capitalize on their championship. The Sabres protested the overtime victory, arguing that Referees ruled that Hull had possession of the puck both inside and outside the crease. Hockey commentators called it the latest example of Buffalo's conformity are just as guilty of it. Do people who are covered with piercings and tattoos really believe they are expressing their individuality? They are just as conformist; humans naturally gravitate toward groups and chances to sorority and then working in government, nonprofits, and the corporate world, I has idiots, sluts, social climbers, and alcoholics. Every house also has geniuses, philanthropists, and varying kinds of campus leaders. There are loyalty and real bonds that are developed between people. For someone like me, who hadn't had very many close friendships with women, it was a truly beneficial experience, even if I hated a lot of what went on. he claims that he takes no position on the public policy implications of his are at a minimum implicitly advocating that practice with the minimum of legal the deceit. The impetus for research on global warming has come from those who believe that fossil fuel consumption is out of control and who reinforce their beliefs with global warming research, given everyone's understanding that major warming. Maybe your research is right, maybe it is wrong, but you undermine your credibility when you claim to be oblivious to its implications. You had to have a thesis going in when you started your research, and given that we already knew crime rates were falling, it is hard to believe you weren't looking for a correlation between abortion and falling crime rates. Life is too short to use one's career wandering in the dark, and no one is going to believe on the eugenics attacks. That's below the belt. I think it is perfectly respectable for you to use your results to say that all those who have been pointing to overall demographic shifts, or changing police tactics, or increasing incarceration rates are missing a key factor. But you are just waving a red flag to a bull when you cast attacks on others for supposedly mold himself into anything. As Bush's secretary of education he was for that people have turned against large government interventions, he wants to make every school a "charter school" with power vested in the parents and asked him, "How would we know?" there was a moment of glorious dead air. something I didn't think possible in this campaign. He proved you could be too supporters, but the other predicts that his regime will survive the current uprising. The students who toppled the shah were both more alienated personality traits, a tactic used by pharmaceutical companies to drum up business. The latest example: the classification of shyness as "social anxiety disorder." Drug makers underwrite research into "social phobia" and stoke public hysteria with slogans such as "Imagine Being Allergic to People." If has a mural of himself naked, with cheetahs, on his bedroom walls. They greet Impossible." The couple deflect the question of whether they are gay but do failed at three marriages and at attempts to leverage wealth and connections condemns his admirers for ignoring the clear evidence of his guilt. infiltrating museum archives and inserting documents about artworks' provenance. This scheme corrupted art history and undermined the reputations of hunted for German subs in his fishing boat. His writing never recovered after story says that "Soccer Mama" mania was carefully orchestrated by the women internalize tough criticism, the male coach tried positive reinforcement instead. He tacked inspirational quotes to players' doors, emphasized what each player did right, and provided an "imaging" tape for each player, consisting of report revises the conventional wisdom about which foods are good for the heart. Cholesterol isn't necessarily unhealthy, and margarine is as bad as groups are exploiting the Internet to recruit kids. Online games, comic strips, supremacists are developing their own Webmasters to spread their message on hard rock with the violent themes and outlaw imagery of rap. incentives is not an economically efficient way to help the needy. staged." The cover cartoon, however, depicts her as a tourist ambling through from corporate prep school into entrepreneurial boot camp. New offerings include a course titled "Women Building Business" and field trips to Silicon demanding cultural attention, and the debate over homosexuality has shifted eliminate racial preference but to guarantee "affirmative access." His record tour" effectively reinforces the perception that she was dragooned into running for the Senate and makes it easier for her to deflect uncomfortable Gore. AIDS activists say the veep is doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical evisceration of patent protections could slow the development of the drugs poor pudding of a novel that forces one's eyelids shut like an invisible vise." The aesthetic, historical, and ideological, and quoting a critic writing in Slate to run the following excerpt from the book, so that readers can judge for themselves. We are delighted to oblige. as a practicing lawyer, his mind was on other things, not least his reputation morning's newspaper. He had been reluctant to evidence a formal interest in the unspeakable senator. But in fact he read all references to him and, though only out of sight, collected voraciously choice items. He had taken to scissoring out clippings from newspapers (when his secretary wasn't in the room), and tossing them into his briefcase. But after a few weeks he decided that it would be better to undertake his project in a more orderly way. That was when he told reason, I shall ask you to clip out of the papers those articles or editorials I designate with the initial 'M.' These are to be clipped and put in a manila in a morning paper would put him in a very good mood and sometimes he would officially approved were silenced in those lands by intimidation." But he He went on and talked about this and that but at dinner repeated exactly and, you guessed it, said the identical thing one more time, and I gave back the identical answer. Then you know what he said, Dean? 'The trouble with you, press club as a "hysterical form of putrid slander" and as "one of the most unwholesome manifestations of our current disorder." senior colleague, just after five, it was in order to spend an hour on the appeal he was shepherding to the Appellate Division on behalf of their client, the words he would now say were sacredly confidential. "He is, I am I think reliably informed, prepared to the civilized party, the intelligent party. A worthwhile project, wouldn't you "Dean, you are being the advocate now. We Democrats carefully on what is happening in the Soviet Union. We don't know what the they are giving up their commitment to rule the world. But yes, I am ready to say this, with great care: I will show you the draft of that chapter. I will say that it is correct that the Communists can't be allowed to go any has become impossible. The R rating has been stretched to the bursting point it took so many cheap shots and was so internally inconsistent. He first tantamount to "condemning most of humanity." Then, in response to Bush's efforts to get out of this subject by stating that God decides who goes to for trying to avoid a theological quagmire in the midst of a political and also criticizes the general public (to which he was pandering only a few column inches previously) for caring about what other people believe about such "Go to Hell") Does this belief change one's ability to govern? This should only matter if the person governing is governing over the place where admission to same is the governor's prerogative. As long as the religious belief of the person governing does not promote or condone acts of violence against those convictions, then the beliefs that the governor holds are not a newsworthy event, or even the public's business. We in the United States seem to give too much weight to things that do not have any bearing on the person's ability to extramarital affair, other than that he spent taxpayer money to get on television and swear to us repeatedly that it did not happen. His affair has no that should be weighed in determining his ability to truly lead this country. But otherwise, so long as his religious convictions, no matter how weak or strong they may be, are not geared toward the outright oppression or but to complete a cycle. A promise to myself, as it were. You see, unlike you, yours. Your murderer, you said, suffered for seven minutes. I cannot tell you eye. Black was shot multiple times and had a stun gun used on him. Then the two were left to die on the pavement. I thought it more than a little curious that you did not mention those fine law enforcement officers in your article. your article was to indict the electric chair, as well as to generate sympathy Unfortunately, it is often the death of a law enforcement officer that initiates the process. I am somewhat surprised that you did not invoke that essay was not against the use of capital punishment, only the barbaric electric being electrocuted in the chair, God forbid, happens to get burned or suffer a become what you behold," has yielded to "You become what you belittle." We embracing Louis Caldera's ballistic schemes. In the '50s, we taunted the clunky the Republican Party from proposing to give away the budget surplus to their rich constituents. The frightening conclusion, if mockery precedes mimicry, is kids in the program last year. The Army will supply various pieces of equipment, including guns for the kids' marksmanship training. physical fitness, and the ever popular shooting. Militaristic? You bet! But the values that have made our country great," says Caldera. "Insert your own dark outside specialists. But has professionalizing this chore resulted in richly evocative names? Can you tell what sort of products the following are (each judge has ordered Republic, Mo., to make a change in its official city seal. few days, these demonstrators shouted: "Down with the dictator," "Oh Great Leader, shame on you!" and "Jerks!" Who was protesting government, before turning violent and eating the minister of particularly when chanted in translation, sound a little silly. But some of our cheap. As comfy as it is to be led from "two, four, six, eight" to "smash the state," it is kind of the "Roses are red, violets are blue" of crowd inciting. Disappointing, really. "No justice, no peace," barks out a fierce equivalency, although to the uninitiated it may sound like a list of the two things the crowd is rejecting: justice and peace. Paired phrases do have rhetorical vigor, particularly in the call and response of "What do we want?" (something good!), did not. But I should have known better. If airy persiflage went down well at University are calling for a faster movement of the government toward democracy they're not too happy about being beaten and killed by police and Republican Party and a beloved advertising character is recalled to duty. Two unrelated stories? Perhaps. Or maybe a single story about a place called challenge remains: Which of these remarks refer to Sen. Bob Smith of New quality, taste, and fun that separates us from other nuts." Republican. He said he'd vote for a gorilla on the Republican ticket if he had "probably gay" but looks forward to seeing them have sex in Eyes Wide "If I were a journalist writing an article on the issue, the headline for my warned the United States that it must "not say anything or do anything that Party, it said, but it is doubtful that this will work, since public opinion on its recalcitrance." The editorial said, "The United States would not want the in the process of mending fences. It is therefore quite possible that President Daily invoked "legal experts" to justify the government's ban last week violated the human rights of its followers by telling them not to take medicine will be released once they make written confessions and promise to leave the he approaches the end of his first term. The Manila Times is facing "death by corporate strangulation" after being sold to a real estate developer "in mysterious circumstances," it said. The Manila Times was forced to and the journalists involved resigned in protest. Now the paper has been closed Daily Inquirer has become the victim of an advertising boycott by cronies him, and was hoping to see him here and perhaps have him and [Prime Minister breakthroughs," it is clear that "all will not be easy and wonderful. The government," it said, pointing out that it was only during that last two years of his 38-year reign that he started to show an interest in human rights. "The the concept of kingliness will not be synonymous with dictatorship," it added. leadership is passing to young people educated by Western culture, cognizant of modern technology; people relatively free, one hopes, of the burden of the region's violent history. This new leadership may test its relations with or at least weaken, the ideology intended to perpetuate the conflict." consumers are being kept in the dark about which food products have GM content, free trade." It said, "This is a serious issue which needs to be taken up in the appropriate multilateral trade forums. It must not, however, become a set of fasteners. Indeed, we live in the golden age of attaching one thing to bands, various forms of welding, some of which are practiced by cool robots, marriage without love, without trust, and without communication. all these items in the stomachs of dead cows, part of a charity herd trucked half the cows are dead. The North accused the South of sabotage; the South suspicious viruses and electronic devices. "It was absolutely untrue that we planted any type of surveillance device on the cows," says a spokesman for the to honor a family debt. As a young man, he stole his father's cow, sold it, and used the money to head south to make his fortune. He has since donated an its object to complete the sentence and determine what is being reflected. voices are everywhere. We would have a chance to bring some of them together to figure of speech: "Of course, we needed a new format, one that would reflect which it wants to join. It was also widely claimed that the arrest and polemics fade away." It said: "Formally commuting the death sentence might, for membership. The constant stream of condemnation of Turkey's oppression of its in a position of strength on the ground, and it knows that a gesture of historic opportunity to exercise magnanimity and to lay the foundations of a championships and by an administrative fiasco at the government Passport Agency, which has left more than half a million people due to travel abroad within the substantially. The Times reported that her brother, Earl Spencer, is considering breaking his ties with the memorial fund through which the proceeds from the museum have until now been channeled for charitable purposes, while from New York, the Daily Express reported a plan to build the world's with each other to damn him in the most extravagant terms. The Sun "repulsive pariah." The Mirror described him as a "cad" and a "love rat [who] gives other implored him to burn. Instead, they were stolen from him by a subsequent large sum. Instead of publishing them, the Mirror handed them over to promise, but the Mirror reported that "hurtful claims" based on the two warring tabloids were united in pious indignation against the Mail on paper treacherous and hypocritical, while the Sun said: "The Sun begs everyone to refuse to pay out for the book. And we urge every newspaper to more intensively than ever," it said. While the land mine has been proscribed surrender, and to consent to our political, even physical, liquidation." The must be forced to pay a price for any failure to honor the result of the signing of the agreement last year. Calling this "a systematic flouting of state authority, a murderous form of gangsterism by which republicans seek to exert their illegal authority over 'their' areas," the paper said in an the congressional deliberations on whether to approve the use of force to drive bipartisan patriotism. I covered the speech and was struck by how thoughtful become over the past few months. After the speech, I went grocery shopping at up some provisions himself. I went over to him and, under the guise of congratulating him on his moving speech, attempted to check out what he had in The second great dietetic discovery was Baked Lay's intractable problems of salad consumption. The first is the unequal distribution of dressing. The second is the tendency of lazy restaurateurs to chop salad into large, unwieldy pieces, making it impossible to eat without violating the etiquette rule against eating vegetables with a knife. The "WARNING, WARNING, WARNING. Salad consumption requires a fork, and hence, two hands, so do not partake of this product while driving a motor vehicle or solvency of Social Security could be ensured into the next millennium. Regarding the latter, Bob tells me that, in his experience, every time you drive across the country there is one moment when you almost die. You'll have moment of doom has already occurred several times, but Bob assures me it's trying to stop the exhibit, but how many people defending the museum right now would be trying to shut it down if the art was offensive in other, even less acceptable, ways? If it were racist, for example. What if there was a big from talking about his germ phobia, although it was kind of hard to understand what he was saying through that surgical mask he was wearing. (Just joking!) But just between you and me, it's really bad. He thinks the water is so contaminated, he won' t take ice cubes in his drinks. He calls them "death cubes." And we can't have the coffee that comes with our complimentary continental breakfast because they might have drawn the water first thing in the morning without letting the taps run for the two minutes required to flush the lead out of the pipes. ("Even if they said they'd done it," Bob says, Vice President Al Gore shook up his campaign. He is moving his series of debates. Gore said he'll assemble a "leaner, tougher" organization to spin: The return to his roots will show that Gore is independent from headquarters where you will, but a vice president is never an outsider. the museum because of its "Sensation" exhibit, which includes a dissected pig support. The museum's spin: When you withdraw support for unpopular views, you violate this freedom. The jaded spin: The debate is less about principles than fund agencies at current levels for three weeks as Congress and the White House raiding Social Security. The Republican spin: The Democrats are the real promising to reform campaign finance and strengthen national defense. Pundits Anyone can list products through Amazon by paying a monthly fee and a peacekeeping forces now officially control the territory and are encouraging bodies, the first physical evidence of human rights abuses. The hopeful spin: his conservative constituency is too valuable to be excluded. Democrats are unanimous: When the dust settles, we'll come out on top. opponent finished playing. Both teams called the win historic: The United given birth to a "new economy," though there is no statistical proof of it. computer industry, anecdotal evidence suggests that technology increases the cover package debates how to divide the surplus. One article argues for public investment in research, infrastructure, and education, based on the premise that the information revolution, not deficit reduction and low interest rates, undergirds our prosperity. Another piece, which embraces the notion that smaller deficits and lower interests rates have midwifed prosperity, proposes shoring up Social Security and Medicare, and saving the surplus. Some minor tax relief, such as an increase in the earned income tax credit, is also appropriate, as is boosting education and infrastructure investment. A final article calls for "monumental tax cuts" to restore faith in individualism, abolish the tax code's dispiriting progressivity, and pare government down so it can't do much. jokes in the unfortunately timed "political humor issue" fall hideously flat. (which create girls) from those carrying Y chromosomes. Doctors impregnate that all computer networks are unsafe and that the plaintiff's bar will reap millions from lawsuits prompted by network fiascoes. cover story maps a political agenda to engage the apathetic Generation X: coffee," grown in the shade amid other vegetation, is better for the environment and a great way to differentiate java in an overcrowded market. various stages of his public life. Time has fresh shots of an anguished fly with him, preferring to travel with a professional pilot or drive herself. report distinguishes among different types of memory loss. Forgetting names is not a cause for alarm, but forgetting how to prepare dinner indicates loss of "executive functioning," which signals the onset of already offer patients some protections against insurance plans. victory in the Women's World Cup. "Blowhards" falsely claimed that the game demonstrated women are the same as men. Since female players are weaker and calling the space shuttle program a flop and the international space station a disaster. These programs have produced no significant scientific discoveries. concludes that he has shepherded the company through profound changes while the front page, enlivened the editorial page, and promoted minority viewpoints. His greatest challenge: bringing the Times to the Internet without moguls in Sun Valley. The media elite socialize during raft trips and water An item reveals that although an independent counsel deputy proposed indicting squeezing one more year out of the same old hits, has embarked on yet another comeback tour. The former secretary of state has just released Years of dissertation and finds it "brave," a persuasive account of why realism keeps of fashion. His press savvy, charm, and resolute courtship of the rich and power spinning, endlessly spinning, his record (and revising it when is back in vogue not because he is saying anything new. He's only saying what vindication could be just around the corner. Click for more.) it must be said, does not seem a promising start for any kind of debate. The Incident. Quick, can you tell me what that was about? Or "Basket III"? I didn't pretending that he was much tougher on the Soviets than he ever was. In the today ignore China's Communist authoritarianism, human rights violations, and empire, not simply a dance partner in the great geopolitical waltz. Likewise, spectacle of Republican foreign policy confusion. Since the end of the Cold crusader for justice, and the rest of the party, which isn't sure what it and other Republicans didn't, has deepened this divide. having started fighting, must win to preserve its credibility. But beneath It is this gloomy but coherent vision that has made gives the Republicans intellectual window dressing to what would otherwise be sucked all spontaneity and passion from the picture." Most reviewers pillory Eyes Wide Shut is based on. Click here to see the trailers.) The trio get increasingly suspicious of each other as they hear eerie sounds in the night and find mysterious bundles of sticks hanging from trees, and by the A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern the first historian to survey the origin and use of manners, but whether he line: "These broader subjects are treated in books and magazines and the slow it not a matter of class, but simply of good habits, which anyone can learn. "It's difficult to recall a single book in which [manners] are discussed as clambers out of a toilet during the band's stage act), are "still the stuff of when "the formerly promiscuous singer confesses his shame for past recreational rejected a plan to implement last year's peace accord on the grounds that the China" policy, which implied China's sovereignty over and eventual determination to uphold national sovereignty, dignity, and territorial world sighed with relief at what the New York Times called "an end to the latest confrontation between the states turned himself in under a plan brokered by his sister. He had been had then been released, allegedly because the agents had no information on his managed care has bought Republican votes and that patients will die as a that being unconstrained by spending limits will give him "strategic able to jump in a government airplane and travel the country making promises," concluded that "another voice in the struggle to define the party's agenda is money and endorsements, and wondered who might drop out next. independent. He castigated Republicans for going soft on gun control Face the Nation that "the Republican establishment is doing its best prominent gay rights advocates within the Catholic Church." awards ever. The plaintiffs' lawyers had produced documents demonstrating that GM execs resisted fireproofing fuel systems because it would cost an extra in product liability cases tried by juries might well be going down the drain on the company's negligence. This is the first time criminal charges have been brought over an accidental airplane crash in the United States. inexpensive drug will help prevent AIDS transmission from mothers to against handgun makers, importers, and distributors to force gun companies lump in her breast. Weather conditions will delay her evacuation until at Carnival Cruise Lines disclosed rape charges against its staff. Crew last summer. The admission was ordered by a judge presiding over a lawsuit by a former employee alleging that the company tried to cover up her rape. Apple's quarterly profits doubled. Its stock subsequently jumped to an United States defeated China for the Women's World Cup soccer title. The game was scoreless and ended in a penalty shootout. More celebrated was the 90,000-strong crowd, the largest ever for a women's sporting event. Former Sen. business that is separate from his gubernatorial duties," said an aide. Submarine by playing a concert on a yellow submarine while floating down a attacking our book even though they haven't read it. The book, Dow ascent, financial journalists, academic economists, and Wall Street analysts have claimed the market was heading for a fall. After all, just look at Reserve economist whose work has been widely published in scholarly is consistent with the market's performance and with the basic principles of finance. Our starting point is that the value of a stock, like that of any other asset (a rental condo, a bond), is determined by the amount of cash it puts into your pockets over time. With stocks, that amount has been This argument is laid out at length in an annotated 300-page book, which also includes extensive advice on how to implement an corn and plant it too." What he means is that, while we rely on the growth in cash flowing to investors as justification for higher stock prices, that cash by using reported corporate earnings for our calculations. But we don't. Nowhere in the book do we claim that free cash flow is equal to earnings. In fact, we say that it would be an "egregious error" to make such a statement or to use it in calculations of stock values. Instead, what we have written from have repeated, without provoking objection, at academic conferences from bound of dividends and the upper bound of earnings. In the book, we discuss simple ways to determine cash flow as a percentage of earnings. (Hint: The stocks have kept rising, just as Glassman predicted, so that "the guy who had no idea what he was talking about gave what turned out to be good advice." This the last refuge of people who simply do not understand what has been happening in the stock market over the past two decades and who cling to an old paradigm model for determining the true value of stocks. But see for yourself. Don't read premature reviews of a book that the reviewers haven't read. Just hang on. taxpayer funds in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Chemical is about "a whole lot of nothing." Every national animal protection resigned in protest, stating that the agency "dithered in endless, fruitless debate" rather than "doing anything about toxic chemicals that have been around knowledge and the ability right now to prioritize the high production volume chemicals and protect us from the most hazardous ones. But the agency has launched unthinkingly into this nation's most massive animal testing program, rather than make the effort to collect the substantial amount of existing data on these chemicals, centralize it, and make it accessible. able to develop a scientifically defensible testing strategy. According to programs. In fact, after all the money is spent and all the animals have been killed, what the public, the environment, and the workers will be left with is: to benefit from treatment and increasing the coverage as money allowed. Most everyone else in the world rations implicitly through a process known to obtain services until the least hardy either get better, get discouraged, or die. It is debatable which is the better procedure; it is not debatable that resources are limited, that some form of rationing is inevitable, and that virtually every scheme for financing medical care has run aground on the shoals of excess demand in an ocean of insufficient fissures. It's just that the doctor usually doesn't get paid for treating them. but it depends on the insurance company's policy (there are many private movement of "the line" since the scheme was first written down. The federal government has been very reluctant to grant the necessary waivers to allow the covered has not changed very much. But the eligibility requirements change with changing resource levels so that more or fewer people are covered by the plan depending on how much money is available. People pretty much expect to be taken care of no matter what is wrong with them, and once they get their "insurance" card the hemorrhoid sufferers generally will not defer to congestive heart program discriminate against persons with disabilities? If it is legal, then the law requires that it be funded. For what it is worth, there has been no thing, there is something called Tort Law (malpractice) that discourages even Health Plan may elect to cover conditions below the funding line, and no doubt many physicians do treat such conditions at no charge or by combining treatment with a condition falling above the line. But they don't have to provide such Disabilities Act has a lot of strange things to answer for, but publicly supported assisted suicide is not one of them. After the Death with Dignity Act procedure eligible for inclusion in the prioritization list. However, it was That there has not been a rush to fill these prescriptions, let alone publicize First, I think he makes far too big a deal over the studios where assistants do the actual casting and assembling of the large could answer this for me. A friend asked me to watch his cat while he was abroad for two weeks. I came by every day and noticed that the cat was looking a little under the weather. I wasn't concerned, though, and thought the cat was rapidly worse, and one day when I came to the house the cat was obviously very, situation and asked if I should take Kitty to the vet. He said, "No." I explained again that the cat looked to be at death's door. The owner said he'd phone I just couldn't leave the pathetic animal there to suffer, so I took Kitty to an animal hospital where he was treated for a deadly cat stomach problem. I saved the cat's life. And paid a couple thousand dollars to do so. The owner is refusing to reimburse me and is saying that I shouldn't have gone off this friendship, but am I within the limits of proper behavior to demand reimbursement for Kitty's operation? Or did I, as the owner says, intrude into pet whose owner decreed it was a Christian Science cat. ("Let's wait three days," indeed.) Your experience, alas, is a perfect example of the old saying, however, and the side of Kitty. There are animal cruelty statutes (which are is a civil suit, probably in small claims court. The vet's records should attest to the cat's precarious condition. You did the only humane thing. One wonders what the outcome would have been had The Traveler been in residence conveying that without seeming like a stalker. Telephone, letter, and direct contact are all out of the question. Also, it needs to fit into my budget "Catch-22," which suggests either English is not your first language or you stalking, in general nonlegal terms, would probably be drawn where the person feels he or she is receiving unwanted attention. Being in the general proximity this girl exists, which means not trying to be where she is and stopping all communications of any kind. That is the surefire way for her to know you are you saying you wouldn't let yourself be found in that situation? Good for you! general rule was: If it's not affecting you or anyone else adversely, then your must point out that her job description is specifically to mind other people's business. Granted, it's a thankless task, but she's got a lot of karma Four excuses sound like you're holding back the real reason. (I can't go out garage. Universally understood translation: I wouldn't be seen in public with correct, though there are occasions when stringing together emotionally you make one of the most important decisions of your life." Perhaps. Another simple answer is that the annual college rankings (and similar rankings of graduate schools and hospitals) are lucrative and influential unlike anything brag or complain loudly about their scores, enhancing the 'Snooze But there's a problem. A successful feature like this requires surprise, which numerical factors such as average class size, acceptance rate (fraction of applicants who are admitted), and amount of alumni giving. Trouble is, any combination of these factors just isn't going to change enough from year to The magazine tries to deny that there's anything odd about irrelevant: We're not interested in the 10-year rise from third but rather in actually have slipped in quality this past year. Most indicators did not change compared to last year. But graduation rate, number of classes with fewer than statistical guru, explained to me that this year's ranking procedures are an "improvement" over last year's. Doesn't that imply, I said, that last year's inaccurate? Morse replied that he hadn't said the earlier ratings were inferior. But if something improves, I pressed him, doesn't that mean that it was less excellent before the improvement? Morse grudgingly allowed that I was variable in a school's ranking has long been educational expenditures per sciences. Universities are allowed to count their research budgets in their research their professors are doing outside of class. actual amounts, on the grounds that "expenditures at institutions with large research programs and medical schools are substantially higher than those at the rest of the schools in the category." In other words, just two years ago, having lots of fancy laboratories that don't actually improve undergraduate like this one. But there is a larger philosophical flaw in the "best colleges" rankings. Consider this analogy: Suppose you wanted to rank baseball teams. You might choose some plausible criteria such as players' lifetime batting averages and salaries, the coaches' years of professional experience, and so on. To decide whether these criteria were valid, and what relative weights to give them, you would look at the figures for winning and losing teams of the past. Because you know which teams are successful before you begin your News rankings there is no objective way to know which schools are winners before you begin your analysis. In fact, determining the winners is the point of the exercise. So you sit around and brainstorm about whether faculty resources (class size, faculty salaries, etc.) or student graduation rates, for News gives the two characteristics equal weight, which seems reasonable. But if you told me that faculty resources are twice as important as student "We've come up with a list that underscores intuitive judgments. We did not set out to underscore [those] judgments; we set out with a methodology. That it wound up this way is to me both a justification and a discovery that we're on confirmed in our intuition because it is supported by our methodology. And the truth is that the rankings' success actually depends on confounding most people's intuition. For example, by declaring that why should people find that so hard to believe? Maybe because you told them the is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me." What happened to Design and Manufacturing, discusses the latest trends in his industry. "We illiteracy a fashion? And is a resistance to that fashion, a clinging to conventional spellings, just a class marker and a reactionary one at that?) But someplace, but you know how it is when you're just back from vacation; everything is at sixes and sevens.) to be such excellent quiz wranglers. And you are not ordinary quiz participants, according to both guest hosts, each of my plan of throwing out the really good ones has now been exposed. In the Journal about particleboard's growing acceptance in the design community. Journal then gives its readers some tough love: "For those still inclined it." To which most readers, no doubt, will respond aloud, "No, you get products, the more each category tends to generate a dominant duo vying to appeal to consumers in what is an essentially trivial decision. And so it is in the same order as the magazines; each is from the latter title in each remarkable defeat for gambling in memory. Other states have blocked of social disarray and political sleaziness, but nothing remotely equals South offer gambling. Every place you can think of that might have gambling has gambling: Convenience stores, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, truck stops, etc., are fogged with cigarette smoke and filled with people who don't have this has occurred in a state that never intended to legalize gambling. amendment in the back of a gigantic budget bill. The amendment erased two It legalized video gambling, allowing game owners to pay jackpots to video Having legalized itself through the backdoor, the industry proceeded to duck, skirt, or break every law passed to control it. When the player in a day, poker operators ignored the law. They continued to offer casinos by limiting operators to five machines on one "premises," operators surmised that "premises" meant, essentially, anything with a wall and a door. sense of euphemism, "video malls." More dismal casinos you cannot imagine. At one "video mall" where I spent several days, the only food on offer was Tootsie not tax gambling revenues, does not forbid children to play the machines, and does not ban felons from owning them. Gambling experts call it the "Wild West" The video poker industry's latest trick was buying itself a or more in soft money for the Democratic Party. (The chairman of the state popular Republican governor in a thriving Republican state, lost to a victory, the backlash against video poker grew. The overwhelming image of gambling." This is the industry euphemism for the infiltration of gambling into everyday life (which is indeed convenient for the businesses that make millions Experts deplore convenience gambling. It is extremely dangerous to addicts: Every trip to the store becomes a temptation. (Video poker, which is fast and requires skill, is known as "video crack" because it is by far the most addictive form of gambling. According to the only study of convenience gambling exacts huge social costs in the form of addiction and financial hardship without providing any economic benefit. Unlike casino gambling, convenience gambling does not bring with it hotels, restaurants, tourists, or good jobs. "There is no pretense that this is about tourism or the status of poker once and for all. The law specified that if the referendum has no referendum right, so the Supreme Court canceled the vote and upheld the referendum, because it deprives voters of the opportunity to throw out the poker industry themselves. And there is little doubt they would have done so. Virtually every church in the state, the top strategists from both parties, the state chamber of commerce, and thousands of grassroots organizers banded Video poker is not gone yet. The industry has a magnificent aptitude for escaping defeat. It has used suits and lobbying and more suits to stymie previous efforts to restrict it. There is no doubt the industry will ask poker's death may actually help the gambling industry. For the past few weeks, out against the state's gambling anarchy, and for good reason. The gambling industry wants to be the gaming industry. Casino owners have carefully thanks to the Web, today's political obsessive can gather more insider poop in their best stuff away, they collate their campaign archives for readers' Because political information goes stale faster than bread, the first day's top stories are front and center, as they should be, and logical links can connect to smartly done backgrounders on the candidates and pieces on the of the candidates by clicking their names. The site offers a helpful link to audio analysis by the paper's ace political obsessive, sites of various government branches, think tanks, political parties, candidates, pollsters, and publications. A most valuable page! 's campaign portal page, complete with a weekly political watches television's weekend political talk shows so you don't have to. Perhaps more useful for their sociological content than their utility are the sites is they tell you only what the candidates want you to know. Skeleton Closet --"All the wicked as any opposition research home page, this site collects the unsavory of candidate appearances, which can be searched by keyword here and await your query about who gave what to which candidate. Contributors to the want to put your money where your political mouth is, open an account at the site's markets (the Democratic and Republican presidential races, the battle the premier roundup of politics, government, and political journalism links. state governments or the courts? The state parties? Then roll up your sleeve, tie your arm off with a mouse cord, slap your vein into view, and shoot this growth fueled by the money of international investors anxious to get in on a good thing. But then, with startling suddenness, things went sour. The leader admitted that some bad investments had been made and that even good investments had been financed with too much debt and too little equity. But much of the problem, he insisted, was other people's fault: investors who pulled out their money at the first whiff of difficulty, forcing a sudden financial restructuring that aggravated the losses; hedge funds that, seeing his weakness, speculated against him. And so, to the shock of many, he suddenly investors to withdraw funds. "If we had been smart," he declared, "we would have tied up these guys for a long, long time when we were kings of the world recently the largest such fund in the world. In its heyday in the summer of Quantum in making plays against troubled economies. Notably, Tiger was perhaps aggravating the problem, announced that henceforth the privilege of quarterly withdrawals would be revoked. (As my wife declared, after reading news reports their failings. The irony of his current situation no doubt pleases many. conspiracy, the claims that hedge funds profit from countries when they are down. Where hedge funds really get important is when they don't make profits, when they themselves are in trouble. Indeed, the troubles of hedge funds played a remarkably large role in the financial instability of the world The reason for this crucial role is that in the 1990s a handful of highly leveraged investors became key, even dominant, players in a number of financial markets. In the international arena, Tiger and a few other funds became the key conduit, via the carry trade, for the export of capital became a key purchaser of a number of crucial if slightly obscure financial these hedge funds had become was not clear until they got into trouble. But then it turned out that without them the markets could barely function. sum in the world financial scheme of things (the total wealth of the United under management. What was different about hedge funds was, first, their margin; and second, their willingness to play outside the mainstream markets. Treasury bills; but when it came to the secondary market in Danish mortgages or Underlying the ability and willingness of hedge funds to take huge positions in obscure markets was the belief, both by lenders and by the hedge fund managers themselves, that they had special expertise. In the sophisticated financial models implemented on their computers were supposed to allow them to diversify away risks. In the case of Tiger and Quantum, it was probably can't become the manager of a really large hedge fund unless you have a slightly irrational faith in your own judgment; when success depends on being able to convince other people to let you take huge risks with their money, it is not the paranoid but the megalomaniac who survive. That is, until reality up, it had unanticipated consequences both for the funds and for markets. Look, for example, at what happened to that yen carry trade last fall. Tiger and other funds had borrowed heavily in yen, betting on a decline in the yen against the dollar. When the yen started to rise instead, they suffered losses. Since the funds were already leveraged to the hilt, this reduction in their capital forced them to reduce their exposure, which meant paying off some of those yen borrowings. But that created a fresh demand for yen and supply of dollars in the foreign exchange market, which led to more losses, forcing even more repayment, pushing the yen still higher. The result in a short period of time was a drastic appreciation of the yen and billions of dollars in losses heights, or in some cases led markets simply to close up shop. And more was at The sharp rise in the yen last fall threatened to send Japan into a deflationary spiral, the drying up of liquidity in the United States briefly Which is why, in a perverse way, Tiger's current problems world, one that has learned to live with a greatly reduced role for investors particular sort of vicious circles that brought the world to the brink a year in the late crisis. In that case, the clipping of those funds' wings is a fundamental change in the situation. The world is really a much safer place now than it was three years ago. I think this is a bit too optimistic; there are unfortunately many other ways for a global financial system to get into trouble (and the yen, as it happens, is once again dangerously overvalued). But anything that makes the new global economy a bit more stable is to be Thatcher, and populist politicians who promised paradise consistently delivered steadily turned the country's reputation around. Inflation has been eliminated, with the peso securely pegged to the dollar. An absurdly inefficient system of privatized, producing a fair bit of unemployment but a huge surge in productivity. And as recently as five or six months ago the country was the darling of the business press, praised for its success in riding out the press was the sign that things were about to take a turn for the worse. For a has been sliding into a moderately severe recession and with it a growing budget deficit, just as a presidential election approaches. And in apparent mind you, but with the pope. (The pope has recently joined the call for debt forgiveness for poor nations, but he was surely talking about Fourth World Python cast is about to leap into view, shouting "Nobody expects the whole affair will soon blow over. But even assuming that the peso holds and believe that a credibly stable currency is all you need to promote prosperity. back in the 1920s, a strong currency and a strong economy are by no means the that promise is made credible by the legal requirement that every peso in circulation be backed by a dollar's worth of foreign exchange reserves. In done everything possible to make that currency credible and secure. This recent memory and most people expected it to return in due course, and you can of the board, suggested a few months back that it should endure for a decade or so.) But you can no longer brush off the argument that the system is a sort of economic straitjacket, one that is becoming increasingly onerous. printing money for good reasons such as fighting recessions or rescuing the it turned out that the convertibility law left no leeway to rush cash to troubled banks. It has since established various safety nets to prevent a repeat of that crisis, but some observers doubt whether those nets are really Now, these problems with a rigidly fixed exchange rate are not news. But for a while, managed to convince themselves that they weren't significant. They argued that as long as governments themselves followed stable history does not stop just because the currency is stable. And faced with a they can do. They cannot print money. They cannot even borrow money for some its system is better than the alternatives. The more sensible advocates of devaluing would lead instead to a surge in inflation and a financial collapse. But, as it turns out, their fears may have been almost as overstated as their arrived and neither did the financial meltdown. Indeed, it is starting to look as if the collapse of the real was just what the doctor ordered. wide open. It's an eternal controversy, and not even the pope can resolve W. Bush invariably note that he has spent most of his life doing exactly what right. W. has spent most of his life doing exactly what his father did, but shot down over enemy waters, and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. The son W. followed his father's path into the oil business. rich friends for a head start, but whereas the old man scored in his oilfields, Congress and lost. Come middle age, the father threw himself into public the heroic life of President Bush. This was one of his unfortunate talents: He There are competing theories about what the son's pale that he has he is making up for his lost years and surpassing the father he has less charitable, theory surmises that just as W. has tried to equal his father and fallen short, so he'll find some way to choke in the presidential or to draw grand psychological conclusions about how the father will shadow the family from humble origins uses political success to make itself rich and Bush began his (forgettable) service as a senator only after a long career as a gentleman banker. He viewed his political activity as an obligation, and he office, compiling the requisite experience almost mechanically, adding line president. Politics was always a duty, never a pleasure. (Remember the horror noblesse oblige has morphed into something different during this generation. The Bushes are a microcosm of the transformation of Republican politics from Northeastern elitism to Western populism. The son's failure to match his father Republican. But in an era when a politician's ability to communicate trumps anything else and the balance of Republican power has shifted west, the preppy, where his father was distant and calculating. Every story about the son applauds his democratic instincts, his ease with all kinds of people, his achievement, but the veep is stiff and awkward and dutiful in a way that his clinching the World Cup trophy is indulgent, quixotic, and utterly superficial, when it's the only one that makes any real sense. Does anyone, on either side of this absurd debate, really believe that an athlete, upon scoring the winning goal in an international championship game, was actually trying to stage some kind of cultural coup? With adrenaline pumping, in the moment of realizing the dream of being a hero, with memories of the soccer greats running through her head, she did what soccer players do when they can't contain themselves. Are the pundits of the world so conceited that they really believe that she was acting to supply them with more fodder? Apparently, to him, the only sports against which women would be measured were gymnastics and figure skating. Regardless of which side of the sports bra light of its social commentary rather than its expression of athletic competition and pride, it's the same kind of sexism. the moment, is a woman's sport. That means that the culture of soccer, with all its grace and skill, brutality and bravado, will be exhibited by female concludes that from the fact that the two countries have dismal economic histories, but dismal doesn't mean the same. On the surface both countries might look quite alike, but people's reaction to inflation and economic measures has proved to be very different, so we shouldn't expect to see both trying to understand what each country is like. They all might look the same, but they are different; people are very different and react in different ways. are important, and what businessmen are doing is important. regular recession and that the currency board prevents us from applying the usual recipe, but it's not clear that it would work, and at this point breaking the peso commitment would be extremely onerous. Right now we have a recession and an increasing fiscal deficit (a comment on the virtues of keeping balanced accounts would be very appropriate); if we devaluate, chances are we would also have an inflation outburst, a rush against the banking system, and a capital we've been cheated many times, we have learned how to beat the system. that its downside could not be ignored. But I will say this: One should always be suspicious of arguments that claim that one country is utterly different position and then claim that the role reversal that has taken place since inexperienced pilots who may know how to fly under good weather conditions, but who haven't much under the belt on a hazy night. We all mourn the death of John everything in my power to prevent it from happening. If the pilot wants to take that chance alone, fine, but once he allows passengers, he has to be responsible enough to make the right decision for not only himself but for lives of two young and beautiful girls without thinking, This isn't worth set of restrictions in a deed when he sells his property. He may simply refuse discover them in the "chain of title" and to determine if they have any legal Bush did not have to do anything except direct that the restrictions be omitted or stricken from the deed he granted to his buyer. (The only circumstance in which he would need to seek the consent of other landowners in the development would be if he wanted to petition to change the the language in this instrument, which both he and his wife had to sign, and of his legal prerogatives. As the governor of his state, he should have had the decency, fortitude, and sensitivity to recognize the importance of refusing to work and her friends, our conversation was eminently civilized and stimulating. they seem to be from the kind of art that turns me on. From the kind of art, in and I were to write about one abstract painting, there is no denying that to Whereas we could get hotter and hotter under the collar about the ethics of displaying one man's collection of new art in a public institution, of public subsidy for art the public is goaded into hating, of how blasphemy has become wanting it so) but one point has to be made: It is irksome when art becomes a moral cause. It is as if during a fencing match someone were to start hurling weighing in, the issues become freedom of expression, the meaning of images, the ownership of icons (does the Virgin belong to the Church or to everyone touched by the concept?) etc., all fascinating issues, but leaving anyone concerned with art obliged to argue for basic artists' rights rather than It seems to me absurd to try and read an image like raw, crude, angry, Bad. It doesn't do much good to come along and say, well, art brut and with other blasphemous imagery. In respect of the former, is about the loss of center that gives meaning to the kind of gestures whose context is much more the current sensations of pop music and fashion with which he vies in terms of energy and verve, than the old masters, the "strong the obstacles to it, the most daunting of which is ballot security. But let's assume for the moment that the practical problems can be overcome. Will everyone knows, turnout has been declining. In presidential elections, it has inconvenience of casting ballots in person. Before you can vote, you need to have registered, often several weeks before an election. Then you must go maximize the odds of lousy weather. If you're going to be away from home on Election Day, you have to think ahead about getting an absentee ballot. other side are a variety of objections. In addition to concerns about fraud, elections. Wealthier, whiter people are more likely to vote than poor people and minorities. Since they're also more likely to own personal computers, online voting might exaggerate the disparity. There is also an argument that voting is a "vital public ritual that increases social solidarity and binds situation. Over the next decade, access to the Internet is forecast to become want private access at home, there will be public Internet terminals in communitarian objection is a bit more troubling. Around the world, people struggle and die for the right to vote, just as people in this country once to be appalled at how cavalierly people treat voting in this country. It's tempting to say that anyone unwilling to sacrifice an hour to exercise the right to vote doesn't much deserve it. Having to take a bit of trouble to vote reminds you that voting is the cornerstone of all our rights. By eliminating say that this complaint is valid but not persuasive. The chief value of the ritual of voting is to convey the significance of voting to democratic citizens. Once the ritual becomes a deterrent to the act itself, as it pretty clearly has, it ceases to serve its purpose. In the end, the communitarian more of us will exercise our right and fulfill our civic responsibilities. We participation for poorer visuals would seem one well worth making. of a leap than it might seem. When you think about it, voting has long been a fusion of public and private, of tradition and technology. The secret ballot public place to do so. It's not that nothing will be lost when we all vote from remote terminals instead of at the local polling place. But what we stand to lose is ephemeral. What we stand to gain from virtual voting is very real. what he does to reach the community: "Yeah, we want to compel people to come to there's a big difference." What does Deacon Don do? "They're taking something that's about as likely to happen as a meteorite falling on your head and telling everybody that it could York State Health Department. Name that exaggerated (or not) wake up one bright autumn morning and you're halfway to the subway when you decide to walk to work instead. But you don't go to work. Instead, somehow, you find yourself at the Central Park Zoo. The zoo just opened and there's no one there and it's clear and bright and so quiet you can hear the seals break the water as they circle their pool and the gulls fighting the kept birds for their seed. You close your eyes and think about other mornings, mornings on the sweaters and army surplus peacoats and shredded wheat for breakfast and thin ice on the tide pools and diesel as the engines kick in. Then you hear another she's accidentally dropped her new baby in the polar bear cage! You don't they're not just tears of relief because you saved her baby from a polar bear. crowd might have some evil intent," said the chief. "And that you are an evil is it simply a chance for any city official to indulge a personal taste for martial law, surrounding himself with a hunky praetorian guard, manly men whose manliness glistens in the light of their boots, burnished to a fine sheen by The New York State Health Department warns that you they're a bunch of hysterics. The health department. Not the bats, of whom only in the same room with a sleeping person or unattended child, even if it is not known if the person has been bitten or if the bat has rabies or if the child is "Bat Rabies Alert" refrigerator magnet and a poster with a sinister bat Bat Conservation International, the organization in been a case of rabies from an unnoticed bite. But that doesn't impress the yearns for the sweet release of an unnoticed bite from a rabid bat.) "Let's say you wake up in a room and there's a bat in there and the bat flies out the Beneath a headline that makes the indisputable claim "Comfort You Never to submit other actual examples of writers finding similar delight in their own "another awkward answer" of the sort that had "made the issue linger." A Times "Media Watch" story noted that Bush's previous answers had obviously failed to "end the questioning." What both articles neglected to Bush has jailed drug offenders and that Republicans have investigated President immaculately conceived and needs no justification. Reluctant to become "part of the story," news reporters press the question while obscuring their complicity in keeping it alive. Instead, they tell readers that the question is "dogging" Bush. Nonsense. Questions don't dog politicians. Reporters dog politicians. And while they're dogging Bush, they ought to account for dodging a few questions pretend that the question drives itself. It "hounds," "haunts," and "stalks" Bush. It "percolates," "persists," and "swirls around" him. It is "turbulence," a "storm," a "blizzard." John Stacks, a Time editor who has led the drug frenzy, said the question has "a kind of organic life." "These things take on a don't evaluate the merits of a candidate's remarks. They just assess whether the remarks will succeed or fail politically. Rather than treat the cocaine inquiry as a dialogue in which the questions as well as the answers are subject to rational scrutiny, most reporters depict it as a force of nature. Bush's replies have failed to "douse the questions," "dampen the controversy," or "turn down the heat." On the contrary, they have "stoked a brush fire," "fed the story," and given it "oxygen," with "the automatic and absolutely inevitable effect of keeping it going." Journalists are just part of this "automatic" cycle. They're not hurting Bush. He's hurting himself. acknowledge their role in the assault seldom offer a reason. They say they're just doing what comes naturally, and Bush is to blame for provoking them. His answers "opened the door," "courted scrutiny," and "encouraged" more questions. "His not answering it is just like waving red meat in front of carnivores," inevitable that reporters will push until there's an answer." On Good the press. [Bush's answers] won't push the questions away, and he'll get them again and again." Boys on the bus will be boys on the bus. to judging Bush's answers generally accuse him of "shifting," "backpedaling," "altering," and "reversing." And what exactly did he reverse? He "reversed his change of strategy." Why concede a politician's substantive consistency, when such impropriety. Instead, they posit the appearance of impropriety, warning that Bush's answers "create an appearance at least that he has something to hide" and "leave the implication" that he used hard drugs. His the impression that he is hiding something about other aspects of his life." By confining their inferences to such "impressions," the media sidestep the like" and "sounds like" he's dissembling. The Post suggested that Bush may have "created the impression with voters that he is being cute or coy rather than forthcoming." Other pundits, too scrupulous to characterize the public's perceptions of Bush, quoted their Since the media decline to characterize the truth, perception is all that matters. "Inconsistencies and ambiguities, real or imagined, are to journalists this question, focusing instead on how Bush is "handling the crisis." "What disturbed me this past week more was not even the fundamental issue, but it was called the controversy "the first big public test of Bush's instincts and of his staff, and the results were pretty wobbly." Other publications, too timid to endorse even this superficial assessment, reported that "analysts" and "top Republicans" were questioning Bush's "erratic handling of the drug question" and warning that his "candidacy had been bruised by his Bush keeps refusing to say whether he has used cocaine. But that's not how the correspondent, was whether Bush thought rumors of his cocaine use were "being questions about whether you used illegal drugs in your youth go away? Won't they dog your campaign until you answer?" As Bush's inquisitors focus less on Republican rivals are happy to exploit and hide behind the media's candidates don't determine what is the statute of limitations on questions of hard to feel sorry for Bush, given his preposterous spins on the question. He says he's stonewalling it because divulging past drug abuse "sends bad signals to your children." Bush's surrogates claim that he's leading a "heroic" effort "to purge the system of this 'gotcha' politics." He's making himself a "positive role model" for kids and displaying the "leadership" for which "the against "personal destruction." Comments like these make you wonder not whether Bush and his friends ever used cocaine, but whether they ever stopped. point is not that the question is unfair. The point is that the power to choose and craft questions is more profound than the power to choose and craft controversial as the answer, journalists who report the exact answer and who said it ought to report the exact question and who asked it. And if it's their column proposing and defending a better question than the media have asked Bush suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus irrelevant to your candidacy?" You can decide for yourself whether you like cocaine controversy, the Times advised Bush "to be honest, and to let the country take his measure. In his campaign, the governor has emphasized the importance of assuming responsibility for one's own actions. He should be tabloid onslaught. During the first week after the crash, though, the tabs modicum of restraint. Sure, they couldn't resist a few salacious details here that were virtually indistinguishable from those in the mainstream press. The gesture that seemed touching in its inappropriateness. story with their usual zeal, claiming to have the inside track on everything from the "secrets the tragic couple took to the grave" to the precise condition personality and ease with strangers" as well as his "uncanny resemblance" to almost made us laugh: The Globe 's shot of convenience store employee what little other news there is seems incidental. (You know something's happenings in the world of celebrities' dogs. For starters, the Enquirer reports that for his recent wedding, singer Phil Collins booked his dog into a nearest and dearest. And canine lovers everywhere will no doubt sleep easier she has begun a crusade on behalf of the "innocent greyhounds" abused in dog pain" after being "hit in the butt by a stray golf ball that raised an angry freak rear end accident this month when an overzealous deer "nipped her home the "tough guy" props he wears in the film he's now shooting. But just two is being ruined by his penchant for antiques hunting on the Web: He's And while we're on the subject of the tabloids' short memories: Why can't the Star remember what it says about country photographers had snagged the first photo ever taken of Twain and her husband, for his own wedding photos. So imagine our happy surprise when we saw Twain's essay argues that the human rights movement is in trouble, despite its triumph and from general compassion fatigue, but the biggest weakness is that activists make no effort to generate popular support for human rights causes. This elitism could backfire against the movement, just as affirmative action's Consumers Union, which pays experts to rate products. (The article is by cover story notes the resurgence of cosmetic surgery, especially among younger patients. New surgeries are safer, less invasive, and the "barbaric era" of guns predicts that we could be "rid of the damned things" gains tied up in their houses. Loan companies are permitting buyers to borrow buyers could be devastated when the economy slows down. sex hormones and aren't sophisticated enough to refer to past experience when piece describes how women in their 20s "donate" eggs to infertile couples for thousands of dollars. The sellers are currently solicited through advertisements ("Pay your tuition with eggs") but will soon be able to offer their services on a specialized Internet auction site. Hopeful parents often of time and energy vying for second place, but the poll is irrelevant to the piece makes fun of the Reform Party convention, whose attendees Conclusion: Party members are so obsessed by process they will never get evoked individual responsibility as a counterweight to government benevolence an umbrella organization for fruitcakes. Activists grasp for another flamboyant delusional nuts promote their own candidacies for the party's presidential cover editorial supports multilateral interventions to outside interference. The world is morally obliged to intervene and prevent atrocities, even if this intervention does not resolve the underlying most significant developments in the history of the space age," said John E. but now a faculty committee proposes to eliminate it or at least rename it. "Disabled; genetically inferior and slated for elimination."-- Tom children, admitted to college only so the bursar can suck money out of their rich alumni parents, cheat their way through class and, if that doesn't get them good enough grades, bully their professors into upping their marks. Those tweeds, they must capitulate or end up doing yard work at some ethnically perpetually drunken students sleep it off in class, their clothing disarrayed sexually exploited in exchange for better grades. The only ones exempt from physically disabled, who are being quietly slaughtered, one by one, by Peter for cultural than erotic reasons. Not that I begrudge anyone his pleasures. inside," in an effort to reinvigorate sagging cola sales. "They want to try I foolishly wrote "Use the time to contemplate how your fellow Baptists have Convention. Let me assure you that the National Baptist Convention was entirely Baptist Churches (note the plural: Baptists object to the idea of denominations, choosing to "freely associate" instead) absolutely took the liberal position on practically any social issue from the 1960s on (which is why they're losing churches to the Southern Baptist and National Baptist follow that the reader instantly knows he'd sooner be struck blind than read on. Participants are invited to submit actual examples from any news source of what The New Yorker used to call "letters we never finished reading" (or something like that), like this one from Ken Tucker: Control. "Anyone who continues to maintain that there was some mistake here crash. Forty thousand of us die that way each year. Either each powerful retiree is transported in some kind of titanium case or that satanic pact is still in effect even after one leaves office. Either way, great benefits. the torture and murder of thousands of civilians, but mostly that," she did not Sit Of heating: A seat of heating eliminates "the frosted contact" usually tested when to rest on a seat of toilet cooled by the cold of the winter. You will be astonished and satisfied the comfortable comfort of the seat of toilet Lively seat: A lively seat eliminates the "icy note" normally experienced, when sitting on a toilet seat to showers of the winter cooled down. They are Right there. That's where I snapped off my radio, in the opening phrase of a inspire you to hurl the newspaper across the room, or hurl yourself across the Yorker used to call "letters we never finished reading" (or something like for all humankind has long been noted, even on the East Coast. What seems to have struck the East Coast only recently is that the Internet is making a reported as much on its front page recently, so you know this fact for several years. Indeed we have talked of little else since about always been a fraught topic. A New York writer who regularly mines his sex life and longings for material begged off an invitation to write about the Internet money are too personal and complex. And envy didn't just become a deadly sin wealth as in New York. The lifestyle gap between the middle and upper class social status ranking independent of money. It's a place where puzzled subcultures in which a journalist or college professor or unemployed actor can take comfort in an independent value system. They could have been bankers or management consultants but chose not to be. And the people at the top of those heaps, earning plenty to live comfortably, honestly wouldn't trade being, say, curator of dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History for being just another So what has changed? One element, obviously, is the size of Miller recently pointed out, with numbers like this surging across the Times business section, even investment bankers "feel like wage slaves speed. It's one thing to console yourself that at least you didn't have to read that someone (inevitably, someone with the same name as that bozo down the out, all in a couple of years. How awful can a job be? Answer: maybe not so awful at all. In fact, maybe it's remarkably similar to the job you're doing now. A third startling difference joined software engineers and business executives in peddling the other basic Internet Envy anecdote: variations on, "Oh yeah, they offered me the top job at plus options for another 75--but I turned it down." Even during the first few people one not only didn't know but could scarcely imagine. Only very recently have lottery winners started popping up in one's own neighborhood. much more straightforward. Everybody is trying to do the same thing; some succeed, and those who don't are envious. You don't have to pretend that you're not. And there's no queasy feeling that you must have misplaced that notice changing, in a couple of ways. Some changes in personal values are simply part of growing older. Then there are shifts in the values of the general school the jocks are on top (unless, of course, armed losers storm the cafeteria one day and mow them down). But the smart kids tend to win in adult explained and simultaneously demonstrated in a recent These are folks lucky enough to be able to choose their careers and to have a At the crucial moment when they make their choices, many of right. But some are responding to the fleeting hormonal surges of youthful idealism, or to the special status hierarchy of the academic subculture where they temporarily reside. In the most tragic examples, a charismatic professor will entice them into a lifetime of French medieval history, about which their they become writers. Then they discover, in their 30s or 40s, that money is important to them after all. This is the moment when reading about some process of maturity or decay (take your pick) is reinforced by what's happening in the culture. Money is never unimportant, but there are moments when it is more important than others. This is one of them. Actually, a graph of the changing value of money in the status market would look a lot like a graph of year a star New York Times reporter shocked his journalist colleagues by briefly in the late 1980s, quickly recovered, and has been hitting new heights people become venture capitalists, younger readers may find it hard to believe there was ever a time when even an extremely ambitious person, motivated Of course it's possible that the stock market and the be pulling out of money and getting into undervalued properties including expected to benefit blue chips such as physical beauty, according to some is plainly gorgeous, but she's even more so when she fastens those huge eyes on with this "runaway bride" as Exhibit A. The column makes him instantly subject of the column responds with a letter composed on a manual typewriter had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the over awkward inconsistencies. His strength is that he loves actors (he's an amusing one himself). He'll drop everything for a goofy face, a riff, a flaky way of rounded parts. They're in there improvising and having a blast. Compare Got Mail --it's the difference between a director who thinks she has it all figured out and one who says, "Surprise me, make me laugh." exceedingly likable. Perhaps it's all the Zen meditation, which has mellowed supposed to be about the way the arrival of his uncle's dishy young French wife always in the right place to catch the rolling hills and splendid staircases and in the wrong place to catch the actors' expressions. The loss is especially as the boy might be extraordinary. The script might even be good. We'll just they do it for "health purposes" and not to "promote superstition, spread rumors, engage in sedition, destroy social order or hold mass assemblies." Do millions to refugees, and a stricter side that wants to make sure that people "Fugitive rape suspects whose parents are bankrolling their ski trips. That was way that makes the country a lovely place to massage your money. Everyone democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." armed neutrality includes universal military training. Every family has a gun, leave, presumably concerned that some incoming baby might abuse the law. individual persecution, and it speeds up the process of ejecting those without the amusing antics of a researcher and his family and friends in their undersea miles after he crossed the border, his little boy asked, "Dad, what happened to all of the billboards with naked ladies on them?" It was an acute observation: anyone, not just registered voters, to cast a ballot and to do so as many times telephone polls, there's concern among researchers that the public has trouble distinguishing one poll from another on the Web. In fact, the news media has evidence that the political "nutty season" had begun. confusion surrounding online polls is adding fuel to the biggest debate now raging among pollsters: Is it time for the Internet to replace the telephone as demographically adjusted samples of that pool every month. The company's that Internet users are not representative of the national population: They're will be doing what I normally do: blocks of nationally representative telephone she's intrigued by the flexibility of Internet polls and the potential for sharing visual materials with respondents online. But she notes that the Net still poses problems for pollsters. "You can't just randomly sample Internet same time, there are new efforts underway to perfect the use of the Net as a which is backed by venture capitalists and the university, has thus avoided pollsters talk about a "representative sample" they mean a sampling that accurately reflects the population at large. The most widely used method is selected to allow for every region to be well represented, while the remaining Technology has always influenced the way pollsters do their job. Starting in taking the nation's pulse. That was only after phone use became ubiquitous. But Internet access, though more recent private studies estimate that share to be the Internet "at some point, if the penetration gets up to where it is with the polls. "The question is not whether you called the right candidate; it's the margin of victory between the two candidates. In the Web surveys, they got the says his opinion of the Net's potential has shifted. "I began the year thinking the Internet would be used in storing, retrieving, and distributing potential lies in testing advertising, keeping tabs on opponents, and getting phone ringing in my cabin awakens me; it's the conning officer on the bridge The conning officer is guided by my Standing Orders, which is a compendium of maneuver to pass clear of each other. Her recommendation to turn to starboard her to watch the vessel until it is well past and clear. At sea, this scenario is repeated numerous times every day. Safe navigation between ships is based speed to determine if we are trying to occupy the same piece of ocean; henceforth known as a collision. We have several technically sophisticated computers that actually calculate the "closest point of approach" between our ships. Nonetheless, each conning officer uses some common sense to verify the computer solutions with what is actually happening. I have the final call on all very excited that the weather is turning much warmer; it's a far cry from a 1,000-pound box of free weights in the hangar and our 12-foot wardroom dining table. We came through a bit battered, but thankfully no one was hurt. from the conning officer; another large merchant ship trying to occupy the same conversation. Since we are on a rather long trek up the eastern coast of South previous three months. At the top of every hour, the bridge calls down to the Engineering Control Center to record the seawater temperature from an engine room gauge. To liven things up a bit, the engine room watch has calculated and several of the engineers have braved the elements by appearing at our daily and fuel consumption rates to finalize port calls off the northern coast of small arms, ammunition, and pyrotechnics have been inspected. Traditional eight with our consumption. Bilges beneath the operating machinery are dry and reports and signed the ship's official logs. Crew is enjoying a day of rest supplemental instructions for the night watches to follow. gently swaying to the ocean swells; glowing lights on a distant shore. Another money is redirected to social programs such as health, poverty reduction, and that requires tightening of belts and good governance is something that the further debt relief until it has implemented the necessary reforms should be enough to convince the Third World debt relief seekers that the G8 means unfair to those nations that have repaid their loans." conditions of vastly greater duress, handing in its guns at a rather faster News suggested that this might not be such a good thing, however. The forces will not be able to provide this protection." repressive direct rule which preceded it." Meanwhile, gypsies trying to leave still trying to ethnically engineer the future of the devastated province." The The gypsies were always the most oppressed members of the community, but they speculates that "pique seems to have figured prominently" in the selection this prohibited from visiting potential locations. Instead, a 15-member selection panel narrows the field of possible venues to two final contenders, with the was the "clear favorite" of the two finalists, offering good venues, a "strong tradition of winter sports," and "the political and economic security that the recommendation to remind the world just who makes the final choice." Another article concludes, "Even the mere perception of bias or unfairness undermines letters are reprinted with the authors' permission. appellate briefs, detailing the grounds for the appeal will require a fair at ferreting out many of the instances where this is, indeed, the case." "institutionalized" in curricula; in a "canon" of Holocaust literature; more negative charge for you. As you know, I never myself use that word (or its cognates) concerning collective memory. The reason, made clear more than once in the book, is that I think collective memories that really take hold always do so because they serve a present or continuing purpose. That is the very beginning of my chapter on "lessons": "Remembering the Holocaust, analogous to reciting the Mourner's Kaddish on the anniversary of a relative's death, to the remembrance of war dead on Memorial Day." In the introduction, I selective: Events that seem to contemporaries to point up a useful contemporary lesson are incorporated into collective memory; those that don't seem to teach useful lessons recede, though they may be recovered later, as perceptions is to say nothing that isn't implicit in its being a collective memory. worth saying, and certainly nothing invidious or discreditable. ought to explore how you use the word, and thus the view you're attributing to me. Are you saying that memories in general, or memories of the Holocaust in at least inappropriate purposes? Let's consider those purposes for which the memory of the Holocaust has been invoked, which are the ones I discuss To urge that the United States intervene against atrocities abroad which Holocaust" to which I devote the most space in the book? Which of them do you (to me) worthy and appropriate purposes, those doing so were often led to to say anything moderate, balanced, or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole." But the ends for which the Holocaust was (to use "cynically" or "insincerely"? This may, in isolated instances, have been true, but I can't recall ever either saying or implying that this was the case. Certainly, overall, I repeatedly underlined the sincerity of those who have invoked the Holocaust. Indeed, I extend this to some of the less unworthy or inappropriate. As you may recall, I underlined the good faith of those who saw an analogy between the denial of the humanity of the fetus and criterion of when it was illegitimate to invoke the Holocaust, reserving the excessively tolerant of invocations of the Holocaust which I and many others think quite intolerable." But you didn't say that: You said that I believe that "every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate a section devoted to miscellaneous ways in which the Holocaust had entered Holocaust Museum, which, as you wrote in your Holocaust Memorials in collection of such instances, along with instances of what you elsewhere term jewelry to raise money for her (stupid and vulgar) painting cycle on the interpreting the rise of Holocaust memory in the United States. As an alternative to my approach, in which the growth in Holocaust memory is to be explained by the contemporary purposes it serves, you suggest a focus on the we like it or not." I think there is something to this, which is why I discussed it, albeit briefly, in the book. For various reasons, I don't think Holocaust. Still, yours is certainly an arguable position, which we can discuss enough about this, that would have been a reasonable comment. But you went way view that "every institutional memory of the Holocaust is a deliberate unjust and demonstrably false characterization of my views came to appear in two hours earlier. You were in fact offering it, as you'll see if you go back to the original, not as a considered characterization of my views, but as a way excerpting, it became a (highly quotable) characterization of my views. careless hyperbole common to conversation. In real conversations, a raised eyebrow can be enough to make us backtrack. Something like this happens something in a message that my correspondent challenged. In the next message And unlike hyperbolic remarks in private exchanges, buried in the innards of "eavesdroppers." Can you have any doubt that given your reputation as a will be widely quoted as an authoritative summary of my views? quoted, you'll of course let it stand. If, on reflection, you want to withdraw what I hope you'll acknowledge was a hasty and careless characterization, you now that my words were unfair to your much more complex approach to "the uses of the Holocaust." It was especially unfair to put a word in your mouth, Which is partly why you wisely dispense with the term. In this, it would be a little too easy to blame the responsibility, apologize for my haste, and accept your raised eyebrow. As a with these rewards come risks in such a rapid exchange, something both the provide a realistic definition of affirmative action and does not address the candidates of equal qualifications, an institution may favor the candidate that helps it achieve its affirmative action goals. The legitimacy of these goals comes not only from notions of "social justice" but also from the desire to offer a more effective educational environment, a more hospitable workplace, or a more effective school system. In public schools, for example, the effectiveness of offering students role models with similar ethnic or racial fails to recognize these benefits, or even disagrees with them, but that he never gets to how this reasoning is implemented in affirmative action programs in a manner that is quite different from what goes on with racial simply singles out people of color for harassment by police. It is a convenient way to select drivers for traffic stops that happens to accord with the racist celebrates the cultural diversity of our country and seeks to create a more inclusive economy and public life. It recognizes that talent and ability are distributed across the population and that it requires extra effort to avoid excluding parts of the population that have traditionally been excluded. Racial profiling is merely a way for racist police officers to express their bigotry at the expense of our civil rights. It doesn't stop crime and it doesn't build get it. He does us all a disservice by offering up this superficial ingratiating himself with the big boss as well as getting a lot of reader was waiting for a few honest comments. They were there but buried. The truth, as I have seen it, lies in the SWAT team that tried to keep code trim, combined with the greedy rush to keep ahead of competitors' introductions. Given enough skill and time, good programmers could write much, much smaller programs with the same or more features, including backward compatibility with older products. It is rushed, lazy, or incompetent and programming shortcuts are the road signs to Flabby Software City. plot devices and emotional cues from such films as Gorillas in the Mist instinctively caring, or provide for more moments of grace between characters" engage in a tentative romance. Halfway through the film, the plot suddenly turns into a survivalist action adventure. Several critics say this transition is rough but ultimately forgive the film: "If this oddly structured film feels like two short stories stuck together, there is enough solid glue joining them the film "an earnest, dogged, squarely rendered wisp of a movie." (For more on consistent raves. Not only are the live performances transcendent ("the music, of the artists' recent professional rebirth is gripping. Many of the performers as a disappointment. Hailed as one of the best writers of his generation in critics with this collection, which is mainly a series of sketches describing extremely unpleasant and misogynistic men. Though a few stories are on par with his earlier work, most reviews find the collection riddled with she calls the book "an airless, tedious production" that "represents a sharp novel leaves many critics wondering about the enormous amount of material not Reviewers say that sections are on par with Invisible Man --especially It "provides the reader with intimations of the grand vision animating He was most famous for his scat improvisations and enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s, when, after a lifetime of performing, he was discovered by a younger generation interested in lounge music. Never a true superstar, he managed to succeed mainly because he continued to perform and his voice miraculously seemed to improve with age. He was also a songwriter, and his most famous Open Fire." (Click here to see a listing of his albums.) debate, the first to be broadcast live to a national audience. Radio listeners further advantage of the medium, using television to shape the public perception of his administration. After press conferences, he would replay his films in private, critiquing the lighting and camera angles. medium, the Internet. As is often the case with the Web, predictions of dominance come in two flavors: utopian and apocalyptic. Utopians think the Net In their view, it stands to increase the power of ideas and diminish the importance of 30-second attack ads. It will disenfranchise unelected elites and give democratic power back to individuals. It will reduce the power of money. opposite, reducing genuine participation, threatening personal privacy, and lending itself to new forms of manipulation by amoral operatives and moneyed prediction: This election will be more important to the Net than the Net will given, though, that the Net will actually affect the campaign. In terms of the those elections and was spreading rapidly into millions of homes. But for a variety of reasons, it wasn't yet a decisive or central factor. how can we know how important the Web is this time around? Only by casting a skeptical eye on the ambitious claims being made on its behalf and evaluating happens on the Web. In this column, we'll follow the topic where it takes us. But to start out, here are some of the subjects "Net Election" is likely to way those goofy can quickly establish their value is by raising gobs of money. So far, they've helped a bit. According to its most recent filing with the more than other kinds. One is that the cost of raising money on the Net is very low compared with sending out direct mail or throwing a gala. A Web site is basically an electronic collection plate, which consumes few of a candidate's fund raising may also point the way toward campaign finance reform. Last week, waiting for quarterly FEC deadlines. You could do worse than the system of campaign finance that is evolving on the Web, where contributions limited to disclosed. To be sure, there remains the problem of many times larger soft money donations. But thanks to the Web, it's at least easy to discover which special interests are supporting which candidates. The best disclosure site, fingertips information that used to require trips to the FEC office in Another advantage of Web contributions is that they often come with a promise volunteers live up to their promises, they stand to become a significant factor Republicans targeted for defeat may harness the same techniques in Web in this way, a campaign can convert mass support into grass roots support. Net fund raising, Net advertising isn't destined to replace the older method demagogic appeals, and because they can't target segments of the electorate with any degree of accuracy. Web advertising is smart, in the sense that it can be far more detailed and specific and because it can reach a target with where people who might vote for him are likely to be found. One possibility is will be interesting no matter where it leads. Techniques and conventions that will come to seem eternal and inevitable will actually be invented in the online. This time, you're more likely to hear candidates vowing to protect special interest issues. What we have yet to see, but can expect fairly soon, are politicians who fit the computer industry's political profile. Internet That person doesn't seem to be running in this campaign, but he or she may emerge in the course of it (possibly occupying the body of a current candidate campaign news cycle has grown shorter with each successive election. Thanks to And candidates won't have much luck with a traditional stratagem such as deadlines. Rapid response will become more rapid than ever, with several volleys being fired in the course of what used to be a campaign day. There's lots more that we intend to chew over here: Web voting, Net gossip, and pictures, and encouraged a lively bulletin board discussion of it. To a considerable degree, his Web site was where his campaign actually happened. As bandwidth increases, more candidates will be able to bypass the press by enthusiastic: It "triumphs by being its smart, shambling self, though it takes tasty nuggets of fun are too few and far between: It "has moments of brilliance and to watch the trailer, visit the official site.) little heat I found myself wondering if they'd give a damn for one another in a enchanted not just by the humor but also by the straight history: "Under its White House operations as a sordid buffoon show undone by a couple of painfully all around for this "psychological thriller that actually thrills" about a "sad determined to help him. It is "virtually guaranteed to rattle the most jaded of (Counterpoint Press). Critics find this novel, told from the point of view of author's desire to explore the mind of a man who murdered so many, but most are impressed with his results. One fault, though, is that "this supposed autobiography is missing what often makes an autobiography great: the The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects previously rejected by Congress, and other unapproved purchases. The report expresses shock at the flagrant illegality of the expenditures. "Do we get it Party, will "throw spikes into the newly energized peace train." government "to get out of their lives so they can freely partake of the prosperity, cultural options, and opportunities that today's China. The island abandoned its "one China" policy, which implied against the "historical tide" of unification. The Weekly Standard Journal predicted that the spat will blow over when Lee steps down in The Senate agreed that a new agency should supervise nuclear weapons research. The agency would report directly to the secretary of energy. Sponsors of the plan said it would institute accountability for security breaches, but the House reportedly prefers an even stronger independent weapons. It eliminates loopholes that previously allowed gun manufacturers to evade restrictions by renaming or slightly altering their weapons. Another new law restricts gun buyers to one weapon purchase per month. the ban bodes well for tighter gun control in other states. and gun control, in a drive to claim the six seats they need for a majority. decision by likening it to "many of his past actions, inconsistent and loyalty and gratitude are never allowed to get in the way of the epic personal managed care has bought Republican votes and that patients will die as a Cigars will carry warnings similar to those on cigarettes. The absence of labels implies "that cigars are a safe alternative to cigarettes." Industry honchos protested that "cigar smokers are mature, and the state party. Politics has become entertainment, a political consultant A generic drug may prevent death by heart failure. Researchers experimental trials. Twenty million people suffer from this heart condition cordless phone, allowing users to connect to the Internet while roaming up to to the home market in general and Apple's turnaround in particular. revamp its stodgy image," while a New York Times editorial calls it evidence that the glass ceiling "is at least cracking." final hole. The Associated Press effused that "the most stunning collapse in golf gave way to the greatest comeback in the history of major the signal event of his generation, the moment Gen X lost its innocence. In the if suddenly, an entire generation's optimism is deflated, and all that is left decency: how he declined an honorary doctorate because he felt he didn't "I have been in a deep, deep depression, and my way of responding was to be proactive," he says. "I could have shut up about this and not done anything, abhors the narrow academic history that has dominated universities. He scorns scholarly monographs and favors a democratic, populist history. As history grew more and more abstruse in the '60s and '70s, historians ceded the role of wanderer, a mystic in search of ecstasy, a hobo scribbler of haiku and jazz reaction was to treat the pair as loonies and hustle his students back onto the cheerleader for politics, publishing a magazine that detached politics from preternatural gregariousness, good humor, and a love of attention, he's been tireless about pursuing both celebrity and the cause of popular history ever touched on a dozen famous politicians and artists he knows. His writing is full history. For historians not to reach out smacks of elitism," he says. He will Parks, Independence Day, impeachment, and Al Gore's military service, to name a a writing career that would fell a less industrious man. On the same day his published a sweet article in The New Yorker about a 50-year political news to celebrity puff profiles. He writes more journalism than most hacks, and certainly a lot more good journalism than most hacks. At the endearing himself to all kinds of people: He has done books with the widow of but has not wowed the academy. Some of his colleagues' dismay is simply jealousy of his entrepreneurship, but some is more substantive. His books read has made no analytical contribution at all," says one Ivy League historian who ambition to be a public intellectual may falter. A public intellectual resists week, when the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against the merger credit for urging the government to file it. Insurers were "intent on capturing the medical marketplace," seeking "too much power to dictate the health care an antitrust exemption allowing all physicians to bargain collectively. Cynics images of organized labor while dissociating itself from unfavorable ones. doctors of seeking bargaining power to raise their incomes "at the expense of "battle insurance companies and managed care plans that put healthy profits ahead of healthy patients." "Patient care is not at the top of health plans' physicians the leverage they now lack to guarantee that patient care is not cartel, accusing them of pursuing "collusion" and "price fixing." At a House hearing last week, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission officials argued that exempting doctors from antitrust laws would stifle "competition," critique by casting itself not as a business group but as an underdog alliance the "abusive and unfair practices of insurance company giants" in a valiant down important services and ignoring public inconvenience for the sake of incomes, doctors' sense of autonomy, are getting killed." conceded doctors might resist bad employers by "being a little slow in "union," instead calling their proposed alliance "an affiliated labor label. "This will not be a traditional labor union. Your doctors will not basic political equation in medicine is that patients expect better care than they're willing to pay for. When they're deprived of options and benefits that exceed what they've paid for, or when they're obliged to pay premiums sufficient to cover the options and benefits they expect, they figure some its bargaining power without appearing to be that special interest. verdict? Unionization shows "how aggrieved many doctors feel," says the arrogantly presented themselves as part of an elite profession as opposed to out to be a strong force against health plans that unfairly use their market power to limit quality of care." Whether the doctors' latest prescription will cure their ills remains to be seen. But they look great. suffered a "lifelong case of clinical depression," whereas W. has come to these are certainly two different things. As someone who has (based on circumstantial evidence such as his bar mitzvah), I found this latter datum W. has actual opinions on any subject, let alone strong and controversial you may have missed this story. The press have reported it, but not with the neurotic intensity you might expect. Why not? Conservative press critics often complain that the media ignore the importance of religion. This may be a case in point, though not one those critics are likely to complain about. Second, there is the inoculation phenomenon: Once a story has "been done," editors and producers don't want to do it again. So, getting it done small is protection against finding it done big. Finally, there may be a feeling among journalists that the whole thing's a bum rap. Which it is and it isn't. believes they're all going to hell, he hasn't held it against them in this So what does he believe? Like the Gospel tales themselves, mother then called Billy Graham to straighten him out. Graham advised him to In this version, the evangelist's advice was slightly different: "Graham generally agreed with the theory but cautioned against spending much time So, where does this leave us? If Billy Graham actually convinced Bush long beforehand that we don't know who gets into heaven, then denied the accuracy of the reporter's paraphrase. Nor, needless to say, has he heaven, but he's too busy to care. Bush now answers all questions on the formulation: "It is not the governor's role to decide who goes to heaven. I sense. No one is asking Bush to "decide" or "rule on" who gets into heaven. We in God, but not in heaven. Few, if any, people believe in heaven, but not in and I believe that," Bush says. Does he think that this principle only applies to him? Does he think that it's possible for others to achieve salvation claims to be the right answer to the most fundamental questions. So how can One is if God allows exemptions. But to avoid offending any religious or nonreligious group, the exception would have to be that anyone who does not And so what? Why should anyone care whether he or she will it make if you can't get into a heaven you don't believe in? As a nonbeliever, I find the conventions of ecumenism baffling. I don't want to tell you people how to run your religions. And obviously we want to avoid an outbreak of religious war, or even lesser forms of intolerance, if possible. But why does tolerance require people to pretend they don't believe what they do? Wouldn't tolerance be easier if it only required agreement to disagree peacefully rather than demanding actual sharing of religious doctrines at some level of them otherwise. Putting votes before souls: Talk about political when he professes his faith or when he denies its implications. Or he hasn't really thought it through, which itself would cast doubt on the depth of his faith. But I doubt this particular dishonesty will keep him out of heaven, To be sure, there is a certain joy in watching a pol caught indifferent on social issues. Then he has to fudge his faith so that people who pander even more furiously to make it up. Going for a twofer a couple of years enjoys hanging out with country music singer [can you guess? well, obviously Editor's note: Some of the letters below originally appeared in "The Fray," Slate 's reader feedback forum. Herself was so confusing that I scarcely know how to respond (see the Sept. material from my book in an effort to make her arguments. borderline personality disorder." The review promptly lists seven psychological borderline personality disorder. For the record, I used the term as a framework the chaotic behavior that so many close to her witnessed over the years. I compelling. As it happens, a number of psychiatrists have approached me since be flattered that the three meatiest paragraphs (of five) in the review were drawn entirely from my biography. But as someone who read a vast amount of what not it really gets anyone to give (besides maybe Bill Gates) is open to heads the list, though. As far as I can see, the gift was made by the Bill and strictly speaking, there doesn't seem to be any other foundation on The today's market and economy, ought to have considerably more than that to spend, even after hedging against inflation. Aside from the occasional Ted Turner isn't a generous person nor even that his giving doesn't represent considerable sacrifice on his part (though it must be nice to be able to give that kind of money away). But as this edition is constituted, it looks an awful lot like the donors themselves, so they meet our criteria as gifts from living decided to list family foundation gifts only when one of the original donors is appeared on the list previously. But, according to a cursory search done today, total that under our terms would not have met the minimum for the second nothing sacred about that technique; others have ranked cumulative giving over a lifetime, etc. We count pledges as well as paid gifts. I look for gifts this quarter. I also search for foundation gifts from individuals and have set School as "the largest endowment in the history of [the university]" to the law We couldn't verify any amount, so this gift was not included in The foundations; others do a portion of their philanthropy that way. Some give at a particular time of year; others spread it out. Many of the same people making announced large gifts also give anonymously, and I don't try to ferret those out. Our goal is to celebrate both donors and recipients, so we list gifts as they are made out of a foundation to a separate nonprofit. That's why the foundation, then we can't recognize the organizations that receive that money and will probably continue to make the top or near the top of the list. definition of "lager." Lager is one of the two main types of beer, the other being ale. Lager beers come in all varieties of flavors, strengths, and colors, defines a beer as lager is its method of fermentation: at cool temperatures, using a specific type of "lager" yeast, with an extended cold maturation period. Ales, on the other hand, tend to experience warm, rapid much a lager as any of the other beers in Fallows' tasting. scout leaders as pedophiles who are involved with scouts for nothing more than a steady diet of young boys. How tragic that this is the legacy that our attained the rank of Eagle, and never once did I feel as though I was in danger of being molested, attacked, leered at, or otherwise harassed by an adult leader. The men who were adult leaders while I was a scout were in many ways more influential on my life than my own parents were. To lump these pillars of respectability in my life and in my community with the few bad seeds that slip through the cracks of the organization is a grave disservice to the thousands of men and women who willingly give their evenings, weekends, and dollars to an organization whose core goal is to mold impressionable boys into upstanding, research a story more before sniggering and laughing at a man in a scout which direction? Beneath the celebration lurks a struggle between equality feminists, who think the tournament proved that women can be just like men, and difference feminists, who think it showed how women are different and better. Individualism. Equality feminists want each woman to assert herself. One school of egalitarians sees the World Cup as a demonstration that women can be that women should embrace competition. "Anything you can do, I can do better," goes the ad's jingle. A third school, influenced by male sports marketing, selects certain players on the women's team and pitches them as solo stars. Several male columnists ignore most of the championship game and focus on the Difference feminists draw the opposite lessons. They reject the rampant individualism of "loutish male basketball and baseball players," as the New powerful machine" and "refuses to acknowledge that she's a player with unique calls them "innately good teammates." Others attribute their selflessness to team's preparation, "Roommates were switched at every stop on the World Cup road to prevent cliques from forming. As the tourney progressed, the imaging tapes, designed to be watched in private, were shown in groups." The resulting everything together. In one ad, a player goes out on a date, and her teammates tag along. In another, a male dentist who has given one of the players two fillings stares in amazement as one teammate after another rises, zombielike, Equality feminists find this celebration of selflessness creepy, but it's not just being foisted on women by male writers. World Cup Chairwoman Donna de team is "like a second family. Female sports are different. You do a lot better nude (but not lasciviously) in Gear magazine, kicked the winning goal, and then tore off her jersey and bounded around the field in a black sports bra. Equality feminists worry that the players' exploitation of their physiques defense, which says every woman's choice should be respected, whether it's your brawn and your brain, your femininity and sexuality, your athletic skills male players whip off their shirts all the time, and women should be able to do brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and Career and family. Equality feminists measure the team's success by its paychecks, complaining that its salaries are "meager by men's standards," and its bonuses for winning "pale in comparison" to what men get. Noting the team's decision to arrange its own tour of promotional matches, contrary to plans made Difference feminists reject "the big time" as a crude, ugly, and destructive when the egos of male athletes are dwarfed only by their paychecks, the World don't "have million dollar contracts or big shoe deals. They actually seem to Meanwhile, the World Cup coverage exalts players who focus on their families. glowingly profiled for stepping aside to stay home with her kids. She "plans to turn her attention from filling stadiums nationwide to bringing a much smaller crowd together: her family," the Post reports. Now "her most serious Playing dirty. Difference feminists portray women's soccer as more civil and flagrant flops of the men." Equality feminists draw a different lesson: The championship game, she was notorious for defending her Gear spread by observing, "I ran my ass off for this body." After she kicked the winning goal, did it by sneaking forward, against the rules, to narrow the shooter's angle before the kick. Far from chastising Scurry, male sportswriters are congratulating her on her "savvy." "Yes, she said later, she knew she was "But because the referees didn't call it, it apparently falls under the heading of gamesmanship. 'Everybody does it,' she said. 'It's only cheating if you get can dismiss an exhibition that you haven't even seen. Consider yourself a "Sensation," and I think it's a wonderfully spirited show. Obviously, not every piece in it is a masterwork, and there are more than a few dogs. But, on the whole, I felt moved by the level of energy and feel that the show provides a welcome antidote to the New York scene, which at the moment is suffering from a about political correctness. Generally speaking, it takes art away from the theory people, from the academics with their 10-pound books and their unbearable jargon, and allows real life to come shining through. occupies a giant glass box and so obviously harks back to the geometric forms Minimalism, which at a certain point became too elegant and mannered for its own good. Minimalism, in the end, became an art of polished, quite exquisite Roman Catholic, and to my mind the picture represents an earnest attempt to appropriate the Virgin for black culture. I have no problem with elephant dung not a coincidence that the mayor decided to single out (and all but lynch) the most prominent black artist of his generation. That's a shame, especially since time we don't want to intrude on people. I think there's a big difference." that explains the 'You May Already Have Been Saved!' letter that came these days. Isn't the threat of eternal damnation compelling to do, and once they got bored with Don's sermons, they could eat demure advertisers who don't wish to intrude is to ask permission. When you buy something online or fill out a warranty card, there's often a little box at the bottom: Check here if you wish to receive announcements about our new products and services that may delight and amuse you. Some go further and involve other people: Check here if you'd like us to sell your name to strangers who will send you information about utterly unrelated products that will frighten and confuse you. They never ask you to volunteer for the really good stuff: Check you'd like me to unbutton your blouse. Check here if you'd like me to touch you we just did so pleasantly to one another. Deacon Don, help! sending phone messages simultaneously to an unlimited number of people, reports calling thousands of season ticket holders, schools are contacting everybody's some consider blast voice mail a nuisance and, when unsolicited, an invasion of described his pitch as a "telephonic assault" on the public's ear. "The geriatric old fool should be dragged out to the Mall and trampled by wild prior consent, but allows blast voice mail for institutional investors, were Chambers and Hiss. Many felt that Hiss was. He could have been a half, but think tough. I think tough. But he may be sucking up to the liberal left. In New York, you just can't tell what happens to those guys." Participants were invited to submit actual examples explore the mysteries behind love and hate, the darkly amusing, deeply disturbing and ultimately unanswerable questions that they inspire." be printed on parchment, so you know he's a real writer. 'It's a weird book. It doesn't move the way normal books do. It's got a whole hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like of footnotes in a book of fiction is in fact saying "Fuck you, see if you can 'What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrons. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better have no respect for that institution and was truly happy for him when he got killing himself with pills might accelerate his reincarnation as a 38DD bra, so 'Someday someone's going to dissect my whole life through my work. When I 'What I mean to do, by evoking the people whose lives and work I have admired, is not to dictate the terms of virtue but to invite other people to reciprocal thoughts about what seems to them to be inescapably good or important, and how of the smartest things I did was call a management coach. She gave me this advice: Stop worrying about yourself and concentrate on how to make Nickelodeon a good place for all our employees to work. That was a transforming moment for they don't have health insurance so their creativity isn't stifled by taking their kids to the doctor. And no pensions means no complacency. Refusing to become a Writers Guild signatory, Oxygen Media uses only scab writers. No reason War of the Roses has become a classic is that it deals with these with the eternal mysteries of life. Why do people love? Why do they hate? How are people attracted to one another? What breaks up relationships? From my point of view as a novelist it came out of my subconscious, but it has found dangerous, and bad for the environment. But nearly all produce is a product of food fuss because they're ignorant about what they eat, optimistic about expanding abroad when most international retailers still get their highest returns at home. Expectations of economies of scale encourage globalization. But few suppliers can source globally, and retailing requires tinkering for school would contribute to schoolhouse peace and classroom learning. war on roads being built or expanded by localities. Highway projects are held up and commuters get caught in the constricted traffic. cover story claims that the ingratiating ways of dogs manifest an instinct for because people produced an exploitable ecological niche filled with warmth and garbage. Dog genome projects reveal that inbreeding for pedigree locks in bad recessive traits. Maintaining genetic diversity is the best way to breed man's of students, so school choice is an untried solution to education's ills. A 500,000-student trial of publicly funded school vouchers, accompanied by an increase in traditional school spending, could break the stalemate in the strong financial incentive for the continuation of the slave business, which would otherwise be unprofitable, and have spurred an increase in the number of cover story claims new technologies will revolutionize political campaigns. The Internet, consumer databases, and sophisticated politics might boost voter participation, but it could diminish candidate policing cities to show their force, and voicing their reluctance to disarm. embarrassing information on administration nominees and campaigns against them cover story on racial profiling by police presents the conventional wisdom: Profiling is a blunt instrument; too many innocents are harassed solely on the basis of race; and profiling poisons the citizenry's relations with police. article, but sovereignty will be a sham. West Bank settlements have been capitalist who seeds Internet startups, predicts he will prosper even though formula is to back original ideas, not "Me Too" products such as covers. The cover head shots reflect the stories inside. Time 's is "Honesty, integrity, serving for the right reasons." When asked what those Time 's enthusiastic package echoes the familiar line about why Bush is for victory" overwhelms ideological concerns about a Bush candidacy. courses, which often involve role play, teach "active listening" and "conflict magazine alerts readers to another disease they didn't know they had: Clinics invite victims for treatment, but many are too bashful to attend. The treatment for those who do show up: learning to withstand embarrassment. Therapists make patients spill drinks and walk through public places trailing will let absentee voters cast online ballots next year. young fiction writers" as well as glossy portraits of them. The introductory essay reminds readers that a similar list compiled a century ago would not have piece warns about the popular culture's fixation with hairless men. To be buff the degree to which gay values have distorted mainstream notions of manliness. celebrates rhetoric about God as a political tool. Professing faith allows Republican candidates to woo the religious right without being locked to its female scientists because women don't like science, just as they don't like playing sports. Women are innately less aggressive, and affirmative action supporters should abandon their "harangue against female tastes." then mailed letters to the dozen or so declared candidates from both parties the issues managers, figuring that this clever move would expedite the responses. It didn't. The Republicans practically ignored us. The Democrats had to be wooed, cajoled, and mildly threatened before they coughed up their informed electorate, and it yielded an equally modest return on the investment it would take just a couple of hours for a person with a Web connection and a the declared presidential candidates maintains a sophisticated Web site that details positions on a wide range of critical issues. (Granted, if you visit may find the air a bit thin. But this is presidential politics, and vague now take a press release that at one time would have gone to a few dozen Internet users. That remarkable development helps to bind a portion of the electorate more tightly to the campaigns. But we're still talking about a press release, and any reporter will tell you that the value of such releases is presidential contest in which the Web plays a significant role, it is unclear the premises of the Standard is that the Internet has seeped into and same effect around the world. Politics is not exempt. Although it's all too industry that employs millions. So it's the Standard 's job to cover how federal government said it would match online credit card contributions with strategies. We'll be closely examining their renewed efforts. off of a political audience?" To date, the answer is essentially no. Sure, you million hits in a month. Net logic holds that eyeballs equal dollars, and sure featuring Bush's quote. Another site looking to cash in on the campaign is Gore campaign, but the site sells a wide array of Gore package of free collectibles to any Webmaster who picks up its banner. Internet has already begun to transform the general advertising industry, and it will soon hold sway over the tens of millions of dollars spent every electoral season on television and radio ads. Web advertising holds the strange position of being almost entirely unregulated. Fraud and defamation laws presumably apply to Net advertising, just as they do to all advertising. But the specific sections of communications law that constrain political speech in Consider how such loopholes can alter the electronic media landscape: Each this commentary. (Just because they carry it, of course, doesn't mean they actually play it five times a week.) According to federal regulations, audio message from a presidential candidate is required to give equal time to any other candidate who requests it. As a practical matter, most radio stations Here's how it works: Say a candidate is adamantly opposed to any form of new taxes, regardless of whether they are advocated by the opponent. So the record on taxation. Viewers might be asked to fill out petitions with their ZIP installment. These techniques have already been used in a number of Senate and watching the Net polling, Net focus groups, and Net organizing that follow the flow of money around an election. Our goal, shared with editorial partner looks from the Web. Whether you're a political junkie or not, we hope you'll find Net Election informative, enlightening, and fun. At least, as much fun as to mock the contradiction between Bush's presumed use of drugs and his support of harsh prison sentences for drug offenders today. But he might have an even better case based on the way the Bush campaign has harassed him. Bush and his the parody site constitutes an "independent expenditure" under federal election means filing an even more elaborate disclosure. For a Web site run by a private individual in his spare time, meeting these requirements would constitute a himself has bought his own way out of some of the more onerous FEC disclosure requirements. Because his campaign is forgoing federal matching funds, it doesn't have to file quarterly disclosure statements electronically. That means that Bush's contribution reports remain essentially useless raw data for several weeks while those of his rivals are available for database searches. thresholds as the basis for his complaint. Even Bush's lawyer seems to question his own assault. "It's a fair question to ask whether the rules should cover freedom." He points to a number of absurdities about his situation. "I appear Web site," he writes. "However, paying for legal advice would put me immediately over the FEC spending threshold, thereby validating Bush's is a clever point. In fact, though, legal fees don't count toward the it this way. "This is my private little magazine," he told me. If he wants to FEC will probably not be in any hurry to settle the matter if it can avoid independent expenditure opens a much larger can of worms. It points to the reality that many of the old campaign finance laws simply don't make sense in cyberspace. Should someone who starts a site stating his views have to disclose where his money comes from in the way someone who buys a newspaper ad does? If hyperlinks count as contributions, as the FEC has also indicated, then corporations, labor organizations, and foreign nationals cannot legally link to official campaign sites. Many, if not most, of the key distinctions of campaign finance law simply dissolve when immersed in the Internet. argues against regulating private, individual activity in any way. And indeed, because the Web does much to create an open and level playing field for political expression, restraining it in the name of fairness seems counterproductive. The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published an excellent report on this topic, titled "Square Pegs and Round Holes: Applying the Campaign Finance Law to the Internet." It doesn't settle any of the specific questions about how campaign finance law should work in cyberspace. But it does make one thing damningly clear: The FEC is utterly Institution of Oceanography was surprised by the extent, thickness, and shredder), a leather picture frame (without picture), and three pair of Jockey shorts (athletic midway pouch brief). List of what? you're buying these as gifts for your father, your shrink owes you a Little did I realize, when I typed the charmed words "paper shredder," how much I missed them. And, judging by your replies, you do too. And so my gift to you: National Security Archive. (If you like this sort of thing, it has published an sides with them for the right reasons. There is a script currently being Force, Missing in Action) will do the screenplay and probably direct. There are wrong side. I think we should help these people out if possible. I have met is no better way to grab those hearts and minds we need. picturing my father naked, although forbidden to do so by the Bible and good describes a footprint discovered in a French cave, and which describes Demonstrates determination to make a great deal of money in degrading costumed chimps with dubbed human voices, has been plagued by trouble on the set. Writer Tom Stern was fired from the show after he "disrobed and broke a willing to stand naked to show I had no shame or fear about making good rambunctious class by having them transcribe essays written by kids a arguing that he covers up his ignorance of foreign affairs by deferring to special issue focuses on new ideas for drug reform. An article redefines drug abuse as a public health problem. Treatment on demand and the abolition of criminal penalties for nonviolent promising approach to rehabilitating addicts. Nonviolent drug offenders can pharmaceutical company is promoting a prescription alternative to medical symptoms that lead cancer patients to smoke pot. The manufacturer's minions are loudly opposing marijuana legalization to improve the pill's sales. cover story condemns the increasing use of convict labor by corporations. Among Prison employment circumvents labor laws and hurts regular workers. men have been emasculated by feminism and the new economy. Men should learn to can be genetically engineered, predicts that the bioengineering of human comedian is making his mark with middlebrow movies, smart standup specials, and cover story reviews the latest research on how babies think. Neuroscience suggests that by the third month infants are mature enough to reason and process language. Psychologists warn against overstimulating babies' article explodes the fallacy of safe sex. Sex with a condom does not prevent transmission of the papilloma virus, the most common sexually transmitted cover story argues that the complementary campaign platforms agriculture is triumphant, growing more than ever and growing it more cheaply. frame (without picture), and three pair of Jockey shorts (athletic midway released a statement that began: "Early this morning, we received a call that good Lord called upon them to sacrifice their eldest child, as a sign of their of "your child was killed in a car crash" (in a lighthearted, frolicsome territory for parents who enjoy sex and drugs and liberal politics. How do you forbid the kids to practice what you, er, practice? The hypocrisy buster? Drinking--21, in accordance with the law of the land Dating--16, in accordance with parents' senile reminiscence Own Seat on New Jersey Supreme Court--18, or old enough to serve Gov. of the house and disinherit him, or, if you choose to believe the pronouncement particularly want to congratulate the Police Department. And that boozy old It was such a surprise that we couldn't believe it at first. How on God's green We feel this will go a long way in carrying out our responsibilities to the technical agreement, and abiding by it. He really congratulated the could impart to all those bozos such as Tom DeLay currently taking up space in she would think some of her readers were trying to get her out of the advice needs them and have literally been making appointments for their whole families! Both have told me I definitely need them. I have a professional therapist with whom I discussed this, and she disagrees. (My therapist is not against medication, and in fact recommends it for some patients.) When I better than my therapist. One came right out and shouted that I was in denial. Wouldn't it be nice if people restricted their opinions to those areas in which they had professional expertise? What do you think? checked, girlfriends could not prescribe drugs. It is a rule of human nature that people often, when they add or subtract something from their lives, think everyone else should do the same. Tune out the suggestions of these amateur shrinks. You are right that it would be nice if people only spoke of things about which they were expert. It would also be nice if every female over the need a refresher course on what things to say (or not to say) to a pregnant getting comments about how large she is for the past three months. Worse than even the comments, one woman just stood in front of my friend and gaped, saying, "Oh my God!" Why would people feel the need to point out a pregnant woman's size? And is there an appropriate response to these people that would inappropriate things, it usually has to do with the connector cable between brain and mouth being on the fritz. These rude and unappreciated remarks just four. If your friend with the belly spanning two ZIP codes wants to have a comeback, she might try looking down, then remarking, "Pretty good, huh? And running dog lackey of the liberal Republican news media for years. A typical liberal country club Republican! I was going to support Sen. Bob Smith of New wide as you describe, yes, undo from the girlfriend. If you guys have such of a national magazine lists these warning signs: stain, unusual odor, the sound of broken glass or plastic. What publication, what danger? (Question requires a confirmed miracle, and one has already been "authenticated." Name it was available at a street fair in my neighborhood in the form of silk underwear. (Surprisingly comfortable.) This seems like increasing liberalism, but it's only encroaching commerce, less a commitment to free speech than a fun. Similarly, if more slowly, the term "miracle" has evolved from sacred mystery to a substitute for mayonnaise. There is the Miracle Mile for shopping, chance to make a buck than something akin to grade inflation. Either way, they are unlikely to provide any of these valuable services. road along the bottom of a cliff where a series of signs says: sort of tribal downsizing, budding gangsters no longer have to steal your car radio, they only have to steal the brand logo insignia from the hood or trunk of your car (less likely to set off the alarm, which makes it more likely that they can steal badges from all cars on a block) in order to prove their free to concentrate on the stationary objects that will mark their turf, or to defile the stationary objects in the turf of the other. danger was not that they would be left without food and reinforcements to hold out until at least the weekend when the G-8 summit takes place in trump card in a political game between the G-8 leaders," it said. "Otherwise, said, even though this would have meant cooler relations with the West and the interests of the people" and his replacement by a "government of national preparations over the past nine months for a "final showdown." the United States will adopt a much more aggressive Middle East policy after credibility in the Middle East and broader room for maneuver, since a number of shown that "they fully understand the rules of the game" and have taken to of the past few months and appreciate the futility of entering into a fresh traces of benzene were found in the mineral water. This is believed to have inquiries," the paper said. The intelligence shows that "they will go to great investigators, then the militia members will be taken out, liquidated. There one of four border training camps visited by the paper's reporters. "But we can performed very badly during his time in office, the paper said. "During that its international reputation sink lower and lower into the depths of for opposing ratification of the global nuclear test ban treaty. The Republicans "know they risk nuclear proliferation if they scuttle it" but will goal," the paper said. "If he fails, he cannot be faulted for trying. History will note that it was a recalcitrant Republican Senate that killed the treaty suicides reported during the first four months. The problem is especially companies to cut jobs, was singled out as a prime reason for the shocking nuclear plants following Japan's recent uranium plant accident. The China management and human error" and had nothing to do with nuclear technology. Of the three plant workers involved in the accident, two were rookies and the third had very little operational experience, it said. "Such practices are totally forbidden in China. All nuclear power operators in China are required electoral humiliation in Berlin. The International Herald Tribune noted that this was the sixth election defeat this year for his Social Democrat Party. "The state losses have come at such frequent intervals this autumn that leader of the Freedom Party, is no less alarming because he may not be a extreme statements to justify his 'credentials' with outright racists and paper said. Noting that he blames whole classes of people for his country's ills, it commented: "Singling out groups because of nationality is no less racist than doing so because of skin color or religion. Though it is often treated as a milder form of racism, there is no firewall of principle universally ostracized, his power could well grow, with ramifications that go World War II. The paper said the pope "did not want to bring to its conclusion" a beatification "which divided instead of unifying" different religions and editorial, the paper said it "creates a precedent: No dictator or tyrant may cite national sovereignty to claim impunity from justice." there's a tang to what you eat." Sales have fallen dramatically as consumers foods like roast beef and pork crackling," he explained. reports noted that although strict building codes have been in effect in that "shoddy construction work, cheap building materials and a reckless disregard for safety," almost certainly caused so many buildings to crumble. so should it "apply the same rigorous standards to its more mundane buildings for it is upon them and their inhabitants that its future depends." completely destroyed there are others that are totally undamaged. How can this the buildings that have gone up in the last few years in the area affected by the earthquake, a region that has experienced heavy industrial development. This undoubtedly amounts to criminal irresponsibility. Even more so, considering that they knew they were building on an active fault line that has caused dozens of devastating earthquakes in recent decades. But the builders couldn't have put up such fragile buildings if the authorities had not agreed, pointing out that the "the outcome in seismic catastrophes has less to official screening committee approved only one of the three applicants for the requirements of senior government or business experience and personal Cabinet declined to support him for a second term because it felt "there was a strong likelihood that the President's health would affect the discharge of his official duties in the next few years." The International Herald Tribune maintains that the selection was a deliberate effort to ensure announced that there would be a referendum on autonomy or independence in East "carnage will stop only when reconciliation begins," but as a story in cleansing, who can be as cruel as their former tormentors when given a chance." the meeting, and thus provoking the resignation of Catholic Deputy First secret hoard of weapons. But the FT also reproached and what every moderate Ulster unionist wanted of him too, was that in the name of democracy he would stand by the Ulster Unionist Party and refuse to sit in government with the agents of armed paramilitaries," she wrote. "Had he could have saved the Agreement. Instead, he played the tribal card. It will be up to his future biographers to judge this great failure of statesmanship." wrote that the Ulster Unionists have an undeserved reputation for saying "no." "We have said 'yes' to many things which would be countenanced in no other of allocating ministries in the proposed Executive which would lead to an for a peace process because "the prize for success is large enough for us all to put yesterday's setbacks behind us and to move forward." He has an democrats throughout the world" for his stand on the decommissioning issue. the precipice, his own approach is increasingly confused and his credibility damaged." The main charges against him are that he keeps inventing artificial negotiating deadlines that aren't kept and that he "wavered wildly" in his again "at a melancholy crossroads under a lowering sky" and that its future is honorary knighthood from the queen for his role in brokering the agreement. could have foreseen this would be the day the process encountered this does it take to win an election? First you must establish name identification, viability, and a "vision." Then you must lower the media's expectations, rebut charges of pandering and profligacy, and fend off attacks on your character. Brown demonstrated this week, the answer is: pretty much the same thing. Pandering. Many editors, like politicians, broaden their audience by of pandering. The rap on Brown is that she's "vapid" and "shallow," and her magazine is "fluff" and "froth." A parody Web site calls Talk "Chatter! Banter! Emotion! Solipsism! Pretense!" As often happens in campaigns, Brown told the press he had been saddled with "celebrity profile assignments." Brown's surrogates have replied that a good editor, like a good politician, must toss a bit of red meat to the crowd now and then to sustain her popularity caricature. She has told the press that her editorial knack lies in being "easily bored" and that the problem with celebrity hype is that it's "dull." formula under which Talk will endeavor, according to one staffer, "to also circulated her quote that magazines should "be places where people can picnic intellectually." These comments create an impression of flippancy and to articulate an essential message or "vision." Brown constantly boasts that Talk has a "point of view." But when called upon to define it, she sounding like President Bush, whose ruminations on "the vision thing" convinced everyone that he recognized the importance of having a vision but didn't quite know what the word meant. Instead, Brown speaks often of her "passion" and Character. Some of Brown's opponents have gone negative, calling her Telegraph --or to make negative campaigning an issue. While her surrogates decry the "long knives" arrayed against her, Brown accuses her rivals of "blood sport." At times, she plays to the center, projecting kindness and tolerance: a lot of people and killed a lot [of copy]. I don't make friends that way." Like any smart politician, Brown spins the attacks on her as evidence of her Brown pitches Talk as the magazine of "intimacy," starting with its "feelings" about her husband's infidelities. The consensus among political thing was "calculated" rather than intimate. Brown's assertions that the piece add to the impression that she's more interested in advertising intimacy than Fiscal responsibility. The old rap on Brown was that she spent wastefully she cut the deficit: "When I arrived, it was losing money, and when I left, it Brown is fielding a "B team" of writers because she's no longer paying top "weak on the buzz factor," "sheepish" about courting fashion designers, and limousine service to President Carter's despised modesty. Expectations. An editor, like a candidate, must limit expectations so that she can impress everyone by exceeding them. Brown has done so. A week ago, the hype about Talk had spent itself. "Expectation is so high that her critics were predicting a "gigantic fizzle." But by the time the magazine came correct attitude" prior to Talk 's debut "was to be sick of it already without having seen it. But Brown has created something that shouts READ ultimately, is the name of the game. The magazine market is less like a general election, in which the candidate with the higher negative rating always loses, than like a crowded primary, in which the fight for attention is crucial, and it's worth alienating some people in order to attract others. The more Brown is and told the press it was "unimportant" and "irrelevant," all he did was make the magazine important and relevant. The Journal put the point succinctly to Brown: "Is any publicity good publicity?" She answered: "People and described former SS soldiers as "decent men of character," won a share of the vote almost double that ever achieved by the xenophobic French party of stressed the importance of keeping the Freedom Party from joining a new country's politics into turmoil, frightened investors and brought closer to the chief election commissioner's conclusion: "It's gone off well." In an people considered her "a ventriloquist's puppet and an instrument of a communicate with people." But she will have to prove "she has a mind of her own now admit that particles from their shells may have contaminated soil near doctors subsequently found "an exponential increase in child cancers and along with four with abnormally large heads, six babies born with no heads in was born without a head and four with oversize heads." renegades call themselves, is considered by the police to be "a serious threat," the paper said, and is designed to coincide with any millennium bug presidential election campaign is about the battle between Al Gore and Bill game of chicken they are now playing is that neither will be electable if they by a surfeit of champagne. The fish, mainly pike, roach, and tench, died when the residue of grapes from the last pressing was washed into the river by heavy art was more effectively political the less overt its politics-- pace persuasiveness of both positions, the question of how one might produce art criticism by showing how art can measure the Holocaust and still be art (and fact be a good writer (presumably they'll get around to reading him sometime, use an artistic technique, specifically irony, in the context of the "saved German literature." I say anyone who writes a masterpiece does a service to literature, just as anyone who tries to make a work of art grist for their He didn't just think they were against him; they were against him. voters are frequently against certain politicians, and maybe all those captured on tape. But here's the bottom line: Words are words, and actions are politically simpatico! And this was a politician! It's not complicated! Also, find the tape in the new batch where he talks about how impressed he was after was a great hero and that the war was immoral. We all tend to think that it was era to avoid having to ask tough questions about what really happened to have their way with people whom we'd pledged to protect (and almost succeeded next. And the tapes won't stop it. More likely, the tapes will fuel it. Maybe Bible code would not have been published if your reporter, or your editors, had University, who did not know how the data would affect the outcome of the experiment. That alone absolutely refutes the new accusation that the data were experiment from scratch, but also confirmed the code using entirely new reporter's false relief in not having to believe in the Bible code any longer. data had stated in writing that he did not know how the data would affect the replicated the experiment. These critics even lied about the results of their the Bible code. So they ran a second experiment rigged to fail, and then hid the positive results of their first experiment by lumping them together with the Bible code simply cannot be real. When I first heard about it, that was my and worked with it myself every day for years. And then I found in the code a religious. But I can assure you that the code is real. Your reporter perhaps disappointed convert, too quickly, too easily embraced the critics. followed him without even trying to check out the facts. length in the rebuttal paper. In fact, the central point of that paper, as I assembled to be scientifically valuable. Far from ignoring this, I described it experiments, that is chiefly because they were never published in a prestigious time, also always believed they would ultimately be debunked. Hence, they did not change my religious convictions at all, though they shook them. constitutes the least scientific and most intellectually shallow end of the Torah codes discussion. He regards the codes as a proven fact, yet somehow code embedded in such an impenetrable form in an ancient document could be the work of something less than God? How can one believe in the codes and not in the existence of God, oh ye of little faith. Anyone whose faith depends upon mathematical letter sequencing in War and Peace or any other inspired codes is a relief. But would it not be sensational to find proof, by way of the "crime." Well, not an explanation precisely. Asked about the incident, he'd wince, bite his lip, bat his eyelashes, shrug sheepishly, and look adorably abashed. His contrition was so winning that one cartoonist suggested he could make big money as a spokesman for governments accused of human rights abuses. him an excellent pedestal. It's the stuff of classic farce, which puts the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time and then fiendishly ups the simultaneously keep the gangsters happy, his fiancee (who'll pull the plug on the engagement if she finds out he's enmeshed in the family business) in the investor around the company, so that the two can walk in on him in poses that crackerjack. The trick in pulling off this kind of comedy is to wind a lot of they cheerfully make reference (and from which the filmmakers have hired most get all noble under the weight of the picture's dumb, melodramatic (you don't even get past the first date) until you've explained to her the ways in which your family screwed you up and have expressed tender sympathy for the Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child is the dating manual of the While I was on vacation, several readers wrote to say that Sixth Sense had me shivering in anticipation from its opening credits. Two "gotcha!" ending (the clues are there, but one shakes them off as arty could practically smell their greasepaint and mascara. The larger point is that after death wrongs may be avenged, innocents protected, and the loose ends of seem piped in from another dimension. (A bus accelerating and decelerating is says, when her child ventures the idea that she must think he's crazy. "I about conjoined twins, the weaker of whom is dying and mordant, the other torn (so to speak) between loyalty to his brother and a tenuous connection to the they're saying it's so humdrum that you wonder why they even bother to talk. they're separate and riding bicycles, is like a gorgeous home movie from the That told his fortune with floating sticks and leaves. Like the calling card of a doe approaching the water, Cheered it might be someone who liked a line of chatter, On the other side of the road when his breathing slowed. When she stepped into the clearing above the river, something that's about as likely to happen as a meteorite falling on your head and telling everybody that it could happen any time," said Dr. Merlin D. instrument. Hey, look, I made a dirty joke in Middle English! My college English professors would be so proud of me, if they weren't all dead or "Ability to say one thing while doing the exact opposite. (HELLO?? Gay people?? cultural tastes. It turns out he has none. He is a man of unflappable ignorance when you declare that you'd like to be president, shouldn't everyone just mock you with a lot of snooty literary references that you don't get? encouraged their continued support of the president. have been judged by their stunning ability to have their careers summed up little punctuation, and some consecutive entries read like excerpts from speak, 'Love conquers all,' anxious fool befits stop.) (Translation: Liars confess, formal charge, entrusted betrayed, turned pale, and hate, the darkly amusing, deeply disturbing and ultimately unanswerable for the last meal. The lights go off, throwing the prison into darkness, as the between two guards and looking at the chair like he can't believe it's real. with leather straps. He says his last words and then stares out at each of us, one by one, as the guards stuff a gag into his mouth. "He is defiant," my notes say, as if I can read his mind. The guards slip a black leather hood over his face and screw the head electrode, with its circular sponge, down onto the top when the electricity hit him, soaking his shirt bright red, scaring the assembled witnesses. "The chair functioned as it was designed to function," is And in a way, that's absolutely true. If tidy executions keeping its lethal furniture, even though three times in the last nine years, to its right to electrocute, behaving as if death itself weren't punishment would be possible, not those golf course condos or tall beach hotels or trailer parks or malls spreading across the shallow limestone shelf that separates is power, the fine bright line between life and no life, which is the same The electric chair came to the state in the middle of the problem was that hangings were popular and sometimes drew huge, raucous, legislature moved death indoors to the chair, away from the curious and the civilized. But those carefree days when frying someone was a sign of progress are long gone. The chair has become an anachronism, an unpleasant physical being electrocuted, then they should commit their capital offenses somewhere else. Burn 'em up and warn 'em off: The only thing unusual about the chair, morons. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, they're frustrated home economists. Consider for a moment the "science" of during the execution I witnessed, prison officials blamed the fire on the electricity from the electrode. The sponge, purchased by maintenance workers at they determined. To demonstrate their theory, they bought another synthetic sponge and stuck it in a kitchen toaster, where it caught on fire. A simulated standing in for a human body and a colander for a human head. After that, only ordered the Department of Corrections to write down its electric chair trial run. This time, a metal salad bowl played the role of the human head. chair, with the dissenting justices comparing the chair to the guillotine. side. It's hard to imagine that this latest "incident" won't have an impact on the court, which is currently reviewing another legal challenge to the Corrections, which had previously told the court that the chair was in good chair. The inspector reported that the chair itself, the wooden part, needed replacement. It just so happened that the Department of Corrections had another While still in the death chamber, the inspector had snapped a few quick pictures of himself sitting in the chair, and he is planning to use them as wasn't the condemned: The guards were worried that if the chair broke apart inmate might rip loose and electrocute everybody in the room. execution. Flames and smoke. It is impossible to put into words. What does it look like when someone catches fire while strapped to a piece of wood? The flames are nearly a foot high, they arc out from underneath the black leather hood; there is smoke, the huge buzzing sound of the electricity, there are white walls and Venetian blinds and linoleum underfoot. There's ash falling tied down with those thick leather straps. The executioner turns the power on nodding, his chest rises and falls. He looks like he's still alive. Then the electricity hits him again, and the fire rises from his head, from the black leather mask, and he shudders forward and is slammed back against the chair. It takes seven minutes before the prison doctor pronounces him dead, seven minutes of heaving, nodding, flame, and smoke. You can't see his face because the mask covers it, but as you walk past him on your way out you notice his hands there. There's a sore on his right pinky finger, a raw spot, flesh rubbed off to blood against the oak, from where he was clawing the chair. flourish; and companies will outsource everything but their core functions. thou dost, remember that thy gun had nothing to do with it." defend mom: "My mother truly tried to be a friend." hatred, which led to the Holocaust in which three of her grandparents perished. conservative. One example: When Congress passed a law giving states money to cover children without medical insurance, Bush proposed insuring fewer kids Amendment. It makes a tricky distinction: The individual does not have an inviolable right to bear arms, but the people collectively do have a right to cover story chronicles how the Soviets lost the race to the moon. The space program was competing with the military, and the Soviet bureaucracy pitted space scientists against each other rather than encouraging them to cooperate. credentialed artist. Applications to Masters of Fine Arts programs are rising. The academies provide aspiring artists with community but encourage trendy, general and carried out by teams of paramilitaries, special police, and being marched off and later found his charred body. She buried his remains to gave Al Gore a potent campaign issue by killing gun control in the House. Even package celebrates the century in entertainment with anecdotes told by the rampage, a mother told her children to pretend they were dead, unaware that "shareholder nation" but notes the downside of investment mania: profound campaigns. Bush arranged focus groups to evaluate his speaking style, while the like ideologues. Because donors want a guaranteed return, they favor Bush over invites media scrutiny, and allows primary opponents to attack him from the students may learn how to ski with aristocratic ease. Mike will discuss the impact of the Internet on candidates' campaigns and how click here. To renew your subscription, click here. cover story tracks four narcissistic young actors as they claw through satellites will make the world safer by enabling watchdogs to monitor troublemaking countries. Rogue nations will be cowed by the prospect of The cover story worries that earlier retirement and reduced birthrates in the West will contract the labor force and reduce living standards. Western nations should expunge pension incentives that encourage workers to quit early and should create more "bridge" jobs to ease the elections lead to political stability, the next government could enhance endangerment are participating in more adventure sports, sinking more money into highly speculative stocks, and changing jobs with greater bravado than ever before because traditional risks have been minimized by medicine and might be both parties' last, according to an article. Donors are balking at press for reform. Big companies such as General Motors have already spurned are improving schools. Testing helps assess progress, but legislatures are mandating that kids be held back for failing, and some states are sanctioning schools for low scores. Schools are focusing their curricula on exams to the excerpt traces the roots of the SAT. Reformers seeking to create opportunities for underprivileged students adopted the test to assess scholastic aptitude. Rather than equalize opportunity, the SAT turns the uppermost percentile into a privileged class and perpetuates the educational Congress and the states imposed draconian mandatory minimum sentences for drug profile of Peter Singer, a proponent of ethical treatment of animals, pinpoints the radical philosopher's inconsistencies. Singer argues that all sentient creatures are equally valuable and that you should donate your income until advocates euthanasia and condemns people for caring more about relatives than ditched the series and filled its time slot with another Friends establishment that shall remain nameless (for reasons that will become said, "Oh, one thing: If you turn on the heater, the smoke alarm will go off." a man come into your room and hit you over the head with a hammer, pay no mind!" We imprudently forged ahead and settled into our room (we're sharing, beds). After a couple of hours of sleep, E turned on the light, and announced appeared all over her body. I rushed her to the local emergency room. The doctor's diagnosis: The sheets had poisoned her. The doctor explained this was not uncommon (apparently the detergent used by some motels can cause an allergic reaction) and sent her home with three different prescriptions, which returned her skin to its previous lustrous condition but rendered her maintenance than expected. Her morning beauty routine is minimal to nonexistent. She just jumps into the shower and puts her wet hair back into a ponytail, which emphasizes her deceptively childlike appearance, and makes me Skyline improvement. Postmodernism may have worn out its welcome, but it has predict, we will all hate Tipper Gore. This is not because she is particularly her husband's handlers will stick her in our faces until we can't stand the sight of her. This now appears to be an ineluctable law of modern politics: All first ladies become unpopular. If they're unpopular to begin with, the law is Back to E: I do think I may have scored some points with my protective response during the Princess and the Pea episode. In Staples, who is black, would pace the streets surrounding the campus after dark. When he spied a white couple strolling toward him arm in arm, he would walk directly at them, at a normal pace. The couple would first tighten their grip on each other. Then, as Staples continued to head toward them, they would panic, release their grip, and scurry apart. Staples would breeze between them, without losing a step, without looking back. He called it "scattering the potential criminality. Using superficial traits to infer deeper characteristics in people is common and need not be racist. Generalizing from what is easily and quickly knowable to something that is hard to know for sure is what economists think of as minimizing information costs. If the clouds turn dark and ominous and it starts to thunder while you're out for a stroll, you can find a phone and call the weather service, or you can ignore them on the grounds that predictions about the weather are often wrong, or you can take cover under the assumption that it's probably going to rain. But using race as a proxy is sensitive, for good and obvious reasons. If skin color as a proxy for criminal intentions were a like most such generalizations, it is valid but not perfect. A young black man any particular young black man is a mugger will usually be wrong. So is using "racial profiling" controversy is about. Racial profiling is when police use race as a reason to search someone's car or to frisk a pedestrian. Almost all black men have tales of being stopped by a cop for no reason other than their state police superintendent for telling a journalist that blacks were more likely to commit crimes than whites. But she has since admitted that state police systematically stop cars simply because the driver is black. And racial sort that has led to a dramatic drop in the nation's crime rate. conservatives tend to support it, while liberals tend to regard it as racist. In another controversy, the one over affirmative action, the opposite generalization holds: Liberals tend to support it, while conservatives tend to action and racial profiling are essentially the same. Affirmative action racial victimization, poverty, cultural deprivation. Few critics of affirmative action are against compensating victims of specific and proven acts of racial discrimination. And the critics often positively endorse programs giving a special break to people who've overcome economic or cultural disadvantage. What they object to is generalizing these conditions from a person's race. Defenders Defenders of affirmative action and defenders of racial profiling even resort to the same dodge in defending their cause against colorblind absolutists. They say they, too, think it's wrong for a person to be quoted in the New York Times Magazine last month, explaining the difference between profiling (good) and racial profiling (bad): Profiling means a police officer using cumulative knowledge and training to identify certain indicators of possible criminal activity. Race may be one of those factors, but it cannot stand alone. Racial profiling is when race is the only other factor. There's no other probable cause. Ethnic diversity is only one element in a range of factors a university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous background may be deemed a "plus" in a particular applicant file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the satisfies some critics, but it doesn't solve the racial proxy dilemma. Stopping tolerating it at all means tolerating it as potentially the decisive factor." When it's the decisive factor, it might as well have been the only factor. If it's never decisive, it's not really a factor at all. action and racial profiling is that one singles out blacks for something desirable and the other singles them out for something undesirable. Reasonable depends on how valid the generalization is in any given case, and how costly or impractical it would be to get alternative information. When you fear a man approaching you may be a mugger, you may not be able to find out in the next headed for the New York Times editorial board. On the other hand, race say that anyone who is outraged by racial profiling but tolerates affirmative decades, sought to explain political behavior through mathematical modeling. The theoretical fad permanently handicapped political science by encouraging academics to disengage themselves from the practice of politics. Two professors have now proved that rational choice is based on dubious assumptions about profit from advising employers on how to prevent office rampages and training managers to spot unhinged workers, but office homicides are declining, and all cover editorial argues that free trade benefits the environment by increasing economic growth and giving poorer countries the resources to clean up. The related cover story applauds the World Trade Organization's the environment but not use trade sanctions to enforce environmental position than their grandmother was, a majority of respondents say that they we read, watch, wear, and think. Predictable picks include the managing editor dissenting views, and inferred the worst from the leaks it received. The Times acknowledged too late that it did not know how much information An item reports that an unidentified major cable network is negotiating to air Bare Essentials News --a nightly national news program featuring anchors Catholic, is expected to step down soon. His successor should be a peacemaker father and distaste for draft dodgers: Gore deplored "the inequity of the rich the feds information about the tobacco company's manipulation of nicotine cover story marvels at the "Wild Bunch" of egotistical circus." Unsurprising conclusion: The appeal of the provocateurs stems from "sideshow freak" of the "political carnival" has become the ringmaster. Pat distribution. Expect a torrent of foodstuff in tubes. cover story is ambivalent about laser eye surgery. This year corneas sliced open and reshaped. The 15-minute surgery immediately improves Critically ill patients are being misled into acting as guinea pigs for new drugs, and research institutes pressure them to recruit human subjects. Researchers sometimes prey on patient desperation and fail to obtain informed article ridicules the recent spate of books on human behavior. Books on the cultural and biological roots of crying, love, disgust, cover story predicts that spending on federal campaigns in airwaves. Republicans are right that campaign finance reform is "class warfare": It would wrest from the hands of the moneyed elite the the blasphemous, the criminal and the decadent." (Click for of military and civilian beliefs. It is "scary," he said, to have "an officer one of these." What was it, and what did he do with floor of an elementary school. 'If prison is going to be my next home,' he did out of touch. That's one argument against letting money buy access to power. Even if he remains uncorrupted, the president will be immersed in the concerns only of the wealthy and will lose all feeling for the lives of everyone else. It is an argument for requiring those who run the subway system to come to work on the train and not in a limo, for public officials to send their kids to public school, and for dentists to work on their own teeth with some kind of complicated mirror system and a stiff shot of bourbon. Some of these arguments "However, you might like to know that the President and his family pay for all of their personal expenses. I would imagine they use would attract undue attention, merchandise is sometimes brought to the White House by invitation. In an effort to avoid appearing to be partial to selected competitors, no details about brand names or companies are made public." The president spent about five minutes at his task, failing to complete it; the desk was finished by volunteers from a construction the Democratic presidential nomination by ladling out the traditional fatuous twaddle. Take this test to learn just how well you know his core beliefs and generation of network stars," nothing in the deal expressly forbids it, nor does the above use of quotation marks mean that anyone is actually being Critics respond with a sprinkling of hearty positive reviews, but the majority are gingerly worded negative takes. Almost everyone draws parallels to Taxi on a group of college buddies reunited for a wedding, which makes it "a kind of sentimental, cheerfully bawdy." (Click here to find out more about the film.) encounters with racism; the two story lines link up at the end. "Of all the natural talent for spinning hilarious scenes and uncovering wicked details" complicated financial deals and even more complicated engineering feats with snappy cameo portraits, exclamatory descriptions and lots of subjective feeling that Lewis so reveres his protagonist that he became his apologist." morally ambiguous attorney's collaboration with law enforcement to nail a group reviews, claiming that the novel "imparts little of the insider's knowledge" that graced his other books and that "it lacks a fundamental sense of suspense" than lots of other presidents. "What had seemed impossible in the summer of been rehabilitated, and that's flat wrong. To be sure, there are favorable and critical views of him, simple and complex ones. But the most vivid and enduring mate with the famous "Checkers" speech. He did it again when he won the practically since the resignation itself. Yet too often, it has turned out to the show, more people lowered their opinions of him than raised them. He heedless of the proper limits of power, unable to plead guilty to anything much worse than 'screwing up' and coming no closer in history to that final several books, and made Rolling Stone 's list of "Who's Hot." But, again, what the large print gave, the fine print took away. Those who took the time to magazine's editors unwittingly helped create the very phenomenon they were pronounced rehabilitated, even as polls showed that he remained unpopular. His the fact they were ostensibly just reporting), and the eulogies at the funeral rebound proved illusory. No sooner had the tributes subsided than an equally waged court battles for control of the White House tapes. These stories don't his campaign for rehabilitation and the public's alleged willingness to grant of a dent in his overall reputation among scholars. In the latest ranking of Besides, even more telling than the views of academics are Archive" Web site). He's almost always portrayed as the dark, suspicious the Grim Reaper, of "the Jury of the Damned"; he takes part in a list is used for dastardly purposes; even his dog Checkers is said to be bound shadowy president, emphasizing his most savage and conspiratorial qualities. in the film. "Look at the landscape of his life and you'll see a boneyard." The word: guilty." For now, that remains the most vivid and pervasive image of (For more on national attitudes to GM foods, see the Economist 's attempts to make farmers dependent on genetically modified cotton crops. campaign, cannot now be its political partner. As just one of the parts of the principles of the G-8 states are to be believably achieved and the chance of a counseled against analogy creep. It said, "There have been rather too many same as the hundreds of thousands that were once feared. There is a parallel Final Solution; he did not aspire to world domination; he did not espouse an The new proposal would set strict conditions under which the West would lift the economic embargo and foreign companies would be allowed to bid on contracts to rebuild "the country's shattered oil industry." According to the draft has even exceeded the unjust and cruel resolutions by the Security been anticipating the pleasure of a peerage for almost a decade." time to discontinue the office of Poet Laureate in the hope that the Royal cover story assails the widening health gap between developing world. Alliances between nongovernmental organizations and drug companies could catalyze research into the diseases that plague poor nations. d Video dominates Silicone Valley because he recreated the studio system signing them to package contracts, promoting them heavily, and sending them on piece blasts environmentalists for ginning up controversy been wildly distorted, and there is no compelling evidence of the most spectacular claim: that the pollutants have lowered sperm counts. This hasn't Project takes both covers; Time 's package is meatier. Both marketing tactics: They include an amazing Internet site, fake "missing" posters for the film's actors, and leaked previews. Time says the direction, then spooked their stars with nighttime raids. Time reports that some fans refuse to believe that the story is Time wonders how the United States will handle "hard to place" welfare cases don't get jobs because of mental illness, substance abuse, Liberals think more job training could help. Conservatives concede that some and meditation, he opposes abortion, contraception, and homosexual acts. malaise of modern men disassociated from the bonds of fraternity and patriarchy of the bombing never consulted the experts who could have told them that the realized the importance of courting politicians and the press, but the bully in the court of public opinion. Bill Gates feels so embattled that he can't contain his anger or make rational choices about how to settle caucus, too. The straw poll is bogus because the candidates pay their significance. The state is a poor bellwether, because it is disproportionately stricter side that wants to make sure that people coming in are not "Rejection letters regarding grant requests."-- Herb Terns their annual talent show, is that nothing amusing ever takes place beneath it. poking about in some villain's undersea lair, and his attempts at repartee are just parody bait. When the diving suits go on, the witty banter stops. Something to do with all those air hoses, like trying to be witty at the dentist. It is impossible to name a single amusing movie that takes place beneath the waves. Just look at dolphins, the very model of marine sophistication, a creature whose intelligence we're always called upon to admire like some horrible precocious child. They're frequently found at Sea World, performing in shows whose dialogue will not be quoted later at dinner. In some countries, they'd be the dinner. The dolphin, not the precocious child. many elegant and flirtatious scenes set on yachts. Clearly, wit operates best The problem with this haze, blown over the water by reverse in late spring, blowing the haze north over the land, where its particles combine with monsoon rains and fall to the earth, dissipating the sort of acid rain that plays havoc with both terrestrial and marine life. and Budget for the New York City Police Department. She is also a cabaret month ago, when Vice President Al Gore announced his candidacy for president, he promised to defend the right to abortion. "Some try to duck the issue of decision for themselves. I will stand up for a woman's right to choose." To which the wags at National Review replied: "No, [Gore] won't duck the finally they obliterated the debate's physical substance by renaming it "the choice issue." For this, they were skewered by abortion opponents. But now the issues" aren't new. The Catholic Church has long discussed abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty under the rubric of "life issues," and a new is the conversion of the plural phrase "life issues," which sensibly connected topics relating to mortality, into the singular phrase "the life issue," whose only purpose is to replace the word "abortion." with these conservatives, largely by coming out against legal abortion. He seems just as uncomfortable railing against abortion in this election as he was out a plan of action to move the issue forward." Last weekend on Late life issue" seems to be catching on. Two weeks ago, Republican presidential Euphemisms reveal as much as they obscure. Abortion rights advocates adopted "the choice issue" because they concluded the public didn't like abortion. If abortion opponents adopt "the life issue," it will signify that they have concluded the public doesn't like attacks on abortion, either. It will also swells as we glide beneath a canopy of brilliant points of starlight. The control center, and communications room; the smell of fresh pastries from the While not always thrilling, shipboard life uniquely blends tradition and customs with modern technology and comforts. For example, as the captain, I enjoy many of the perks traditionally offered in the early days of sail. I have my own cabin (which is the largest stateroom in the ship), Flogging, I think, has been left off the modern perk list! In simple terms, the lives depend on it. I can't think of too many job descriptions that carry similar weight. I love my job, not because of personal gain, but for the personal growth I see in my shipmates and for the service we provide our country. I relayed a story to the crew one evening: We were traveling down the river has a fairly narrow channel that required a navigational pilot to assist river pilot told me that I had a very well run and professional crew; he went it's nice to take refuge in the simple aspects of being a sailor. I enjoy my sunrises are as close to heaven on earth as you can get. I like to see the gleam in the eye of a young officer when she handles the ship well alongside the pier; mastering the effects of wind, tide, and current. I tell my wardroom important aspect of shipboard life, more for its social aspects than anything else. Plus, I have many of them convinced that my sunny disposition is due to a salutes when I approach them on the bridge. I can sense they are happy to with the illusion that life aboard a Coast Guard cutter is one step removed from a cruise liner. A typical day underway is consumed with eight hours of watches and eight hours of ship's work. There are boats to launch, helicopters to land, training to conduct and guns to shoot. Throw in your three squares and the weather kicks up, fatigue accelerates tenfold: Your bones ache; stuff flies loose; keeping a steady footing is hard work; sleep is nearly impossible. And ultimate challenges of the sea; to see it calm from its fury is like emerging from the dark side of the moon; euphoric moods erupt only to be outdone by the of Human Rights to have the ban lifted. Ban on what? invented a ride to sell to the fair that involved stationary painted horses won a blue ribbon for best hairdresser. Nobody has the heart to tell him that this simply means he'll fetch a higher price at auction, where he'll be sold representative of the news media asked him a question and wrote down his answer Heller had a similar answer referencing the bearded lady's beard; as did him to a good stylist who would no doubt be, as so many of them are, gay. And Quiz participants was the coincidence of names between a certain hair stylist (no doubt gay; they all are) and a giant amusement park attraction. And because, refreshed by my vacation, I want only to please you, here is the Book Encyclopedia describing the invention of the popular ride: without an ounce of poetry in their souls. You pour your guts into something, you up and throw you away. Why try? Why live?" Last few sentences added by an autumnal News Quiz, if it matters, which hardly seems likely, so ephemeral are visitor, in the sense that someone working the crowd for money and votes is "There appears to be every reason to believe that the police officers acted in accordance with police procedure and acted in a responsible way to save human life. And of course by 'save human life,' I mean 'shoot some idiot.' "It is almost as if she never existed. If we are not very careful, there is encouraging the police to gun down the mentally ill; well actually, I suppose "These judges have their heads in the sand. Thank goodness they don't have that even those expressing unpopular views have the right to speak in New candidate is praying that a former secretary doesn't go public with her claim married Republican's campaign staff are already jumping ship." National that he had violated his marital vows or inappropriately touched anyone, and he challenged the dozens of reporters on hand to produce evidence or a specific, reporters had the evidence, they could have produced it. If not, they could that whether or not he had an affair, he was wrong to have left open the possibility that anyone might have thought he had done anything wrong. The proving that charge or even making it, the media have found ways to spin lesser, derivative, and empty insinuations about him into a national story. accusatory tones whether he had "met behind closed doors" with the aide, people are asking questions [about it] and it's making people uncomfortable." behavior," the reporter replied, "That you were seen too often with a woman on denial of such a relationship. Rather than conclude that there was no story, not saying there should be one. I don't think there should. But there is spent hours behind closed doors with her and traveled alone with her, violating the strict rules they believe govern conservative Christian married men in their dealings with women." By framing the issue as "sensitivity," the have been engaging in behavior that was perfectly innocent [but] in the minds of the people who work for you and respected you was inappropriate, and that refusing to recognize, according to them, their complaints?" In other words, to explain the meaning of "behave this way," the reporter admitted, "I don't denied that his aides had alleged actual impropriety: "No one leaving my justified: "I cannot imagine that anybody in a campaign would object to me having a meeting behind closed doors with a professional woman." The and others had quit the campaign because of their "concerns about the apparently alleged the appearance of impropriety. "One would think," one in, "For folks who are not presidential candidates, if somebody was spreading rumors like that about them, I think the first instinct would be to go to the suspected source and say, 'Are you doing this? And if so, please stop it.' Why impropriety. Unable to formulate a precise allegation, one reporter asked challenged another questioner to explain what he meant by "inappropriate further than indicating he was faithful to his wife." The collective "Don't you just give this story more momentum by doing this?" Another reporter asked, "How do you think your supporters are going to respond to all this?" The even whether the perception that he might have done so would hurt him fatally wounded, in political terms, by the dispute" and another who "said an appearance of impropriety become a political problem. A Salon honest, I think most people in this room are never going to mention it and probably didn't take it very seriously. But you've now elevated it to a point does that say about your political judgment?" Within hours, Salon published the reporter's derisive story about the press conference, titled like at least two of the reporters who asked some of the most loaded questions at the press conference. The problem is that they can't resist a hot story. A sex scandal on the religious right, no matter how flimsy, seems too good to pass up. Reporters think they have to ask the killer question or advance the story, never mind which way it's going. The campaign is in overdrive, their prey stands before them, and the heat of the moment carries them away. They ask, don't tell" policy an abysmal failure. In practice, commanding officers do ask and vigorously root out homosexuals. Many soldiers have been put under oath black dignity" portends a demagogic campaign that blames corporate interests recovery is precarious. Real recovery depends on regional political stability, cover package worries about boys. One story says that boys, bombarded with images of unattainable male bodies, have more body image problems than ever. cruelty" in junior high can make adolescents "pathologically preoccupied" with cover story argues that stocks are massively undervalued. Bullish investors are not irrationally exuberant; they recognize that stock prices have been depressed by an excessive aversion to risk. According to the authors' valuation schools place imagination at the center of the learning process and emphasize art projects, oral presentations, poetry recitations, and discussion. Graduates special issue on guns includes a rare editorial declaring war on "one common link in the chain of violence: firearms." All assault weapons should be banned, all gun owners cover story reports on new discoveries about human evolution. thousands of years ago. Our technological improvements have dramatically slowed "Adventure" issue meditates on human limitations, trust, and courage. A correspondent camps out in Central Park, braving gangs, ducking cops, and story calls for censorship of movies, television, and music. The mass media's "moral pollution" is "actual and malignant." Our forefathers didn't have sex and violence in mind when they crafted First Amendment freedoms. The should discourage images of sex and violence in the media by holding well prove to be the most influential member of the family. He is certainly the most visible, holding forth in the pages of everything from the Wall Street a coherent worldview. For him, these wars exposed the political bankruptcy and strategic incompetence not only of Western governments but, even more starkly, International Committee of the Red Cross, and the proliferating nongovernmental organizations that provide relief on the ground in times of emergency. argued that the prevailing paradigms of humanitarian assistance and intervene on one side in military conflicts rather than treat them as There is an obvious irony in the fact that the son of one emerge as one of its most vocal champions in the '90s. More amazing still is strong, uncompromising positions that leave him curiously unaccountable. When world. In the decades since, she has had to grapple with the consequences of reckoning. He is always ready to take a position on what should have been skeptical of liberalism, hostile to the United Nations, and suspicious of empire. He has called the advocates of civil society "the useful idiots of institutions. The only position he consistently advances is that he is right Before he became the intellectual conscience of the new of immigrants from the Third World. Apparently, he made the discovery all by books to be, if not entirely clueless about what's going on around them, then at least hopelessly unable to explain it. "Everyone I knew was taking the unable to follow the conversation going on around me, so mesmerized was I by transformation of the international economy, and the obsolescence of New York City. He was also indulging his taste for grandiose pronouncements: the moral equivalence of communism and fascism some years before. of its cultural geography by Third World immigration. He ended up, step in and stop the killing. It is an odd piece of reportage, with no interest see very little of their lives, and only rarely hear their voices. They are the by treating a political cataclysm in strictly humanitarian terms, Western governments and the United Nations assured the destruction of a democratic, mandate should read Slaughterhouse to see what an earlier mandate produced: ethnic cleansing superintended by men in blue helmets. contradict himself again? Has he already forgotten that Slaughterhouse But last autumn's dove became a hawk again this spring. of ground troops was not strategic, but moral. "Had the West been willing to If that question has, for the moment at least, been in any victory parades. But don't look for him at any protest marches either. In the months ahead, you'll most likely find him in the pages of the opinion are. He will continue to lecture us on the importance of choosing sides, and of fighting to win. He will remain passionate, eloquent, and sure of himself. But I, for one, can't read him without hearing the strains of an old marching song media and politicians who are "looking into" whether he can be stopped. Most don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the experience as a horse breeder and asks, "We bid for everything else in this own designer baby by selling eggs," predict that his success will steer "the future of human breeding" toward "genetic engineering." simultaneously debunk that scenario. "Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture," observes ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries "recessive" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow. Doomsayers predict that once "beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them," the rich will transform replies, "It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder." But this reply only fuels concern give his models' offspring "a financially secure and stable life." But skeptics has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. "There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth," he says. Annas concludes that since there's "no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise," only a "naive" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. "You don't want to see the models," he points out. "You want to see pictures of their parents." On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful." Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these Today show how much "medical screening" he has given his egg donors, he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold detractors reply that beauty is "superficial" and conveys a "harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break. beauty not as an end but as a means to "success," since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic capitalism, saying it's "unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Today laments, "This is about human need. And human greed." Today described the models as "struggling actresses," reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was "better than constantly refers to the donors as his "girls" and describes them like percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. "We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items," he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to "find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs," one fertility expert complains to the New The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. "When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud," a to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected," and to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today nature.") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the "our genes." "The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site," Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself. favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole "prejudice" in favor of beauty. "The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really should think about" whether to "accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them" or to transcend those prejudices. to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start perfection. "Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state," he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become "Increased funding to 'Just Say No to Acts of Counterrevolutionary Hooliganism' House I Live In featuring the moving and melodious: "That's What the People's Republic of China Is to Me," a musical observation of China's many restaurants, female infanticide, and brutal suppression of dissent. potential theme restaurants, and a magnet for investments from the usual crowd you're already visiting us online. So just go ahead and type in your credit official celebrations, there will be handicapped people in wheelchairs and a contingent of private businessmen, chairs unannounced. major presidential hopeful feature an inspirational slogan that encapsulate the monkeys shooting up so many schools and churches, and to buy a nicer boat. Counts" buttons and did some deft Magic Marker work. The principle? in the nation's heart, a part of the body for which he can suggest effective have to tweak slogan to "A Man's Got To Know His Limitations and His Gentle Emollients." But politics is the art of compromise, for money. not doing any research, but might be some kind of council. about his father's sex life; we're both going to be disappointed. following candidates whose sites display no slogans or, in the case of Ms. discern the presence of archetypes from the collective subconscious in works of pulp fiction by writers such as H. Rider Haggard than it is in literary period, timeless archetypes rub shoulders with the vulgar prejudices of the theorists can easily find a key to the racial, social, and sexual anxieties of States had recently joined the ranks of imperial powers, and white supremacy was the norm in the United States and throughout the world. Confidence in the his cousin in the jungle jockstrap did, it is worth reviving him to make a of all his advantages, and put him in a radically different environment, in order that the innate superiority of his breed may be demonstrated. Whether in animals, which author and audience alike understood arose from their proximity Chain of Being, the "natives" find themselves deprived of the one asset that racist mythology attributed to them, closeness to the animals, leaving them without any particular function in the economy of kitsch literature, except to a fantasy version of the ultimate White Guy, the virile aristocrat, who, far from being effete and degenerate, could go Ape as well as Ascot. Something like exploring a tributary of the Amazon in Brazil, in an adventure that might have metaphorically resonant term?). By jumping out of airplanes in his 70s, Bush continues to battle the Wimp Factor. Perhaps he should swing from vines as Jane became the equivalents of the innocent shepherds and shepherdesses of from their facility at assembling a tree house we might think that they are, Family). The embarrassing problem of what to do with the "natives" in a such a wimp that he is not allowed to kill anything or anybody, although our Paleolithic pacifist is permitted to use martial arts techniques in would be complete. But when the time comes for them to die, both do themselves refuses to send soldiers into combat because one of them might actually get from his animal companions. Once he has slept with a woman, the animals refuse to associate with him; he cannot go home again. Masculine wildness is overcome grovels and whimpers before a disapproving Ma Gorilla. tolerable) decide to renounce civilized society for the jungle. There, by happy hunter) are gone, clearing the way for the utopia of beta males and females. be worried about bestiality but not homosexuality). to future scholars pondering the equally weird mentality of feminized and Green embodies the ideology that vilifies the "white male" and idealizes the feminine (human and ape) and the wilderness imagined by customers of The Nature Store. mom (it's not easy being green). For my part, I plan to endorse the Baptist liberals, but because it's turning them into wimps. to take chances with drugs, sex, speed, and other potentially dangerous in the US to discuss what normal personalities are and how to control their found that it increases the bearer's risk of getting addicted to hard drugs (although several genes are probably involved), can cause adults to seek sensation, and makes newborns as young as two weeks more alert and curious there burns inside them a feeling of invincibility, an obsession with challenge, an arrogance of power that drive them to take risks all the time," predator, like his father, uncle and grandfather, nor addicted to drugs or the paper said, "because it embodies the deep human sense that free will is a fragile thing, and no inheritance, however noble, frees one from the mark of property of one country. "It would be a fitting legacy if John Junior's death US trend toward a new kind of dynastic democracy, then some good will have come mustard seed, either on earth or in space, thanks to its extraordinary capabilities," he said. "Or perhaps the US is negligent and not serious in classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: "I saw that your father had died," she wrote. "He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the carrying a newspaper that said there could be no more racial segregation in clippings of great events of state. And there are his love letters to and from ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose we'll have to place a But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed. My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him. He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club My father's stance against seeking money for its own catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled "Only You") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. ("He sounds so Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, "Let's do it together. It'll take half as long." I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep did manage to beat the estate tax." The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being week, House Republicans tried to postpone a fiscal squeeze by deferring payment New York about education reform, Bush spanked his party again, this time for projecting pessimism, indifference, and "disdain for government." broadsides have filled the talk shows and front pages with speculation that he constantly recite statistics that reflect well on their administration: more jobs, lower deficits, lower interest rates, fewer people on welfare, less achieving these results by establishing fiscal responsibility. For years, Then they defied credulity by reversing their message, claiming that the economy was in great shape and that their own policies were responsible for is the biggest obstacle facing Bush: He is challenging the incumbent vice made a persuasive case either that the prosperity is false or that it is true economy. Whether or not this story is true, it is now deeply ingrained in the Instead, Bush is attempting something far more bold and interesting: He is weaving an alternative story. While focusing on Bush's criticisms of his party In state after state, we are seeing a profound shift of [educational] priorities. An "age of accountability" is starting to replace an the 1990s, so many of our nation's problems, from education to crime to to cultural decline. Problems that seemed inevitable proved to be reversible. They gave way to an optimistic, governing conservatism. Here in New York, Mayor education reform is gaining a critical mass of results. In the process, conservatism has become the creed of hope. The creed of aggressive, persistent important about this narrative is not what it says but what it doesn't say. It makes no mention of anything that happened in the White House or in Congress. Bush has decided that he can't win the federal policy debate that has consumed simply erased it. Yes, crime is down, fewer people are on welfare, and school reform is gaining momentum. And yes, the incumbent party deserves credit. But in Bush's story, that party isn't the Democratic White House. It's the state Congress is petty and mean. Republican congressional and Gore are blameworthy. But they have convinced many others that congressional Republicans are more interested in impugning integrity and fixing blame than in solving problems. The negative portion of Gore's game plan, game plan is to turn Gore's game plan on its head. He's not going to argue with Gore over which party is destructive or blameworthy. He's going to reject the portray himself as a man who solves problems instead of complaining about them or blaming them on his enemies. "Too often, my party has confused the need for "Our Founders rejected cynicism and cultivated a noble love of country. That love is undermined by sprawling, arrogant, aimless government. It is restored by focused and effective and energetic government. And that should be our goal: a limited government, respected for doing a few things and doing them House Republicans, including DeLay, have fired back at Bush, accusing him of betraying them, meddling in their business, and distorting their ideas. This counterattack has only helped Bush achieve the distance he sought in the first fight. They don't understand that they've lost that fight and that Bush is The media and "moderate" Republicans, convinced that these issues are the party's weakness and that its libertarian economic ideas are its strength, have interpreted Bush's remarks as a rebuke to Republican "Puritanism." But a closer look at Bush's comments suggests the opposite: He is concerned that the party looks mean because of its economic policies, and he is using cultural issues to soften that image by projecting Republican "compassion." Bush had felt a need to triangulate against the cultural right, he could have religious intolerance. Instead, he gave a speech that bypassed traditional moral issues such as school prayer and homosexuality and never mentioned the word "abortion." The media inferred that Bush was ignoring moral issues because the religious right has nowhere else to go. They missed the real story: The reason why Bush doesn't have to talk about old moral issues that might make him look mean is that he's introducing new moral issues that make him look warm and live out their faith in every walk of life, in politics, but also working in crisis pregnancy centers, drug treatment programs, and homeless shelters. rally the armies of compassion to nurture, to mentor, to comfort, to perform programs, maternity group homes, prison fellowships, and drug treatment "Too often, my party has focused on the national economy, to the exclusion of that. Of course we want growth and vigor in our economy. But there are human "broken homes and broken lives" through "compassion" back home. fight. "He's now differed with [congressional Republicans] on one little He ought to endorse an increase in the minimum wage for the working poor. And he ought to come out against this huge, risky tax scheme." But Bush isn't biting, and congressional Democrats, more interested in beating their Republican colleagues than in beating Bush, have welcomed and exploited his Department of Health and Human Services shows that kids are four times as guess I should be paying more attention to this charter revision thing, politics. Unavoidable, I suppose. Cartoons, sitcoms, and political campaigns conjure up characters with a single, instantly recognizable characteristic. particular and nuanced way, or pray that he develops webbed feet, like Phoebe, and a quirky sex appeal, like Daffy. There's something about that duck. I wonder if he's ever considered joining a new political party. course, impossible to know how the authorities will deal with this potentially volatile confrontation, the mayor has already praised the police for their wisdom, restraint, and all around good looks in handling the situation, and "Another Great Reason To Be a Woman" (feel free to make up your own jokes about for doing anything the same old way.-- It's yoga with attitude. No, wait: "It all starts off with two unorthodox game shows including our take on the out, we WILL stand for doing some things the same old way. At Pure Oxygen, we talk with women, not at them, in a fluid production style personalities.-- If you've ever broken down the wall between yourself and a Whew! Was that a day or what? Time for women to take a deep breath, reflect, show) between a celebrated woman and the most interesting people of the day.-- And those leather things she's wearing on her feet? Not Whether it's team sports, rock climbing or just strutting around the block, there's an athlete burning inside every woman. Oxygen celebrates that spirit She's the most powerful woman in television. An accomplished entertainer and successful entrepreneur. Nothing gets in her way. Nothing, that is, except the media have been in an uproar this month over the latest putative outbreak of unearthing of fossils, the decline of organized religion, and several adverse court decisions had rendered creationism extinct. Instead, adversity has made critics of evolution stronger. It has forced them to develop themes and speculated that school districts might "force" teachers to dispute evolution or teach creationism. In phrasing questions about the controversy, several reporters characterized the issue as "censoring" evolution. which the state will test students. While liberals call this "censorship," conservatives spin it as an affirmation and exercise of freedom. The safest dodge, adopted by every major Republican presidential candidate, is that "state and local" leaders should be allowed to choose their own curricula. Republicans deplored the bad old days when the government "forced" creationism on kids. "academic freedom," pleading that schools should "teach both [evolution and creationism] as theories, and trust the children with their parents to arrive protect creationism from "censors," conservatives have adopted the relativism says the facts of prehistory are "all up in the air now. A lot of what we thought was true turns out [to be] not true. There's a raging debate. So I Meaning. Liberal pundits, eager to pick a fight with the religious right, attack the notion of pairing "religious instruction" with the teaching of "scientific evolution." They accuse creationists of violating "the wall of church and state" by imposing "a religious theory" on "the secular educational system." It's all part of the culture war over sex education and percent want to banish evolution from the schools and teach creationism if evolutionists force the public to choose between evolution and religion or between evolution and divine creation, they'll lose. Creationists, recognizing this equation, try to force precisely this choice. They dig up quotes in which evolutionary theorists espouse atheism and scorn debate by juxtaposing the idea that we "descended from monkeys" with the idea that we are "divinely made" and are "creatures of God." Evolution implies "there is no divine intelligence involved," he told reporters last week. Conversely, creationists broaden the appeal of their own theory by associating it with the general idea of "divine intervention" and "intelligent design." Whereas there's no "meaning in life if we're just animals in a struggle for survival," they argue, "If we can teach creation, there is an order, there is a plan. You have a place in this world." On the deepest and most decisive level, this spin has been an enormous success. While privately scorning creationism, the media have thoughtlessly absorbed and promoted the creationists' dichotomy question this way: "Are human beings divine creations or the product of eons of evolutionists know that the better approach is to pose a choice not between science and religion but between literalism and interpretation. While most people want to believe that God created us one way or another, few can swallow the literal creationist reading of the Bible, which holds that the earth is that creation took a week.) The first theory is flexible enough to withstand fossil evidence, but the second isn't. When asked about the Bible's literal account of creation, as opposed to the attractive concept of divine squirmed, ducked, and tried to steer the discussion back to "faith," "morals," and the general idea that humans "were created in the image of God." The smart strategy for evolutionists, in short, is to embrace theism and shift the debate Elitism. Scientists and liberal commentators love to during a recent Fox News debate. "There isn't really anything on the other side." On the Today show, an evolutionist professor scoffed at the people decline to take the advice of a committee of experts." Creationists have learned to jujitsu the scornful tone and overreaching scope of these pronunciations. Responding on Today to the professor's crack talked to believe that they know what is best for their children. This attitude [of evolutionists] has been characteristic of some parts of the education creationists accuse the evolutionist "elite" of trampling popular values and conventional populist critique of evolution identifies it with sex education, condom distribution, restrictions on school prayer, and other perceived liberal attacks on religion. But as the public places its faith less in orthodoxy and more in the marketplace of ideas, creationists are developing a hardier strain of populism that appeals to progressive concepts such as "questions," "skepticism," and "investigation." Rather than defend religious dogma, they poke holes in evolutionary dogma, scrutinizing the theory's missing links and the mathematical probability of the emergence of complex life. Schools should appeal to skepticism seems likely to flourish. The creationists had only five board member that evolution should be presented as a theory rather than as a Nelson, "We might look askance at the supposed scientists and social scientists who defend their own pet theories [such as] global warming, free trade, Creationism, it turns out, is a case study in the evolution of spin. The environment changes, the idea mutates, and new strains and arguments take hold. Is it natural selection or intelligent design? You decide. proposes to eliminate it or at least rename it. What's the old name; what's the Centers for Disease Control. "Anyone who continues to maintain that there was some mistake here doesn't understand the way science proceeds." What isn't people, the whole point of the study was to see how well endangered condors "Trying to pass off a few flasks of blue water and dry ice as a multimillion convincingly takes exquisite timing. Do it too soon and you seem glib and insincere: "You're sorry? Well, 'sorry' won't make the dog's leg grow back!" Do it too late and you seem, actually it's glib and insincere again. "Oh, you're but the organization you lead that committed the misdeed. The apology shows what a sensitive person you are, while you needn't alter your behavior at all, his. To have meaning, the apology must convey recently acquired insight into realize that what seemed like an encephalitis outbreak in New York City was right almost at once, but not a lot more. And don't expect him to say, "I apologize for all the confusion, like not bothering to get in touch with the noticed there were a lot of dead crows in the neighborhood, but her emus were doing fine, and they're highly susceptible to encephalitis, so there had to be some other disease at work. Creepy detail: The birds were bleeding from the brain and had badly damaged hearts. "We had dead people and dead birds and I thought we needed to pursue this." But she couldn't get scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to seriously consider her suspicion that the bird disease and the people disease were the same. World Stinking of Death Where You Really Work up an Appetite Extra swift transportation, one encounters death in many forms befalling people of delightful new, How To Be a Perfect Stranger: A Guide to Etiquette in Other men sit around mourning manfully, but in some larger and incomprehensible considered impolite for a visitor not to eat. No grace or benediction will be contemplate how your fellow Baptists have been on the wrong side of every considered impolite to take a bite out of a Baptist.) is served. (Others may be pandered to by a mayor offended by snippy art served at a reception immediately following the memorial, funeral, or interment service. (And should you get a bad clam, an excellent system of universal benediction before eating. Guests will eat as they arrive, after expressing very good and the portions will be small. (I paraphrase.) examples from any news source of what The New Yorker used to call "letters we never finished reading." (Or something like that.) his luck. I was divorced and raising two small children, and it really was nice to have the adult contact. I remarried a year later, but my brother doesn't expenses. The worst part is that he has "borrowed" many things from my home and sold them for money. We have had so many discussions about this that now he just hides in my den (his bedroom), and I hardly ever see him. My husband tries to stay out of the line of fire and is no help at all. My friends tell me I am an enabler and that I should put him out, but I can't. I am his only family in the state and am so afraid that if I do, someday a policeman will knock on my door to tell me that they found my brother frozen to death in some paper box strong friend. He has no life living in your den and hocking your belongings. For your sake and his, he has got to go. Do not look at it as "putting him out," but rather steering him to an independent life. It sounds like there's an underlying emotional problem in his way. Get him in touch with a local mental health service. For example, he may be clinically depressed, in which case tough love is what's called for. If you can afford it, give him a stipend for a specified period of time as a tangible sign of your helping hand. That would also lessen any guilt you might have. Four years is a long time to provide a crash pad for anyone. If you don't do something soon, you may lose your husband and still have your brother hiding in the den. Much luck to you. this woman who was recently widowed. How can I approach her without seeming would suggest you not ask the recently bereaved widow to a dancing party as strike the right casual note. You won't, of course, confess you've always had a do not say just when the deceased shuffled off this mortal coil, check with shape, give her some time before you ask her out. In fact, a phone call to ask how she's doing would be a good precursor to any invitation. this man for the past year and a half. I left my husband for him, which I now know was a huge mistake. The man is still married, but he tells me that he doesn't love his wife. He says he loves me and promises that eventually we will be together. I know being with him is wrong, however I can't not see him. I realize the best thing to do is forget about him, but how do I do swore he didn't love his wife and that "eventually" he and the girlfriend "would be together," her fortune would rival that of Bill Gates. Borrowed Guys who cheat have a screw loose, forgive the unfortunate metaphor. How do you forget him? You review the situation and the fact that you left your husband and your inamorato did zip. You're the dish on the side, period. As a mechanistic approach, start acting like you're available, spend time with the girls, get active in hobbies or groups, do Humanity projects, for example, are quite a good venue.) age, that's the prime time to attract suitable men. And even if it refers to by a good friend to be his best man. While deeply honored, this occasion presents me with great difficulty. You see, I am gay. Though it may not be apparent to everyone, my close friends are fully aware of my "persuasion." Having said that, my big problem centers on the "traditional" stag party that the best man is asked to host. Since the groom has both straight and gay male friends, how does a gay best man host a stag party that will be fun for my friend as well as those in attendance? Should his gay friends not be invited? she suggests you enlist a straight friend of the groom to help you plan the party. That way, you will come up with an evening enjoyable for both honoree will remember best is that all his buddies were there. told the crowd that he had accepted election even though "I was afraid in receiving the nomination." If so, it was the first and last time that the unafraid of his own infirmity, caused by advancing age and by the residual the papal authority his charisma has done so much to dramatize. pope was a precocious intellectual, actor, and poet who worked in a quarry and regarded him as more pliable than other churchmen, he proved unafraid to international press portrayed him as the darkest of dark horses. In hindsight, The rest is history, from which liberal and conservative rhapsodic reception that more than one biographer credits with helping to sow the seeds of the Solidarity movement's later challenge to the Communist anathematizing the arms race. He called for negotiations rather than the use of initiatives pleased political liberals inside and outside the church; not so initiatives that the pope feared would contribute to the "culture of comment as its substance. Past popes were remote and magisterial figures, but capitalizing on his relative youth, his actor's panache, and a mastery of mass like plainclothes nuns and the celebration of the Mass in English and other these criticisms, just contemptuous of them. It is his duty, he writes in defend it from tendentious interpretations." It seems the pope enjoys local adherents of the "enlightened agenda" by emphasizing the Ten Commandments. "For such people," he said, "the Pope becomes persona non Much of the liberal Catholic case against the pope deals with sexuality. It is even said that he has a "woman problem," which supposedly bemused by suggestions that he has an "obsession" with the subject, but he workplace and in society, but there is no doubt that he subscribes to a "dignity and vocation of women," the pope warned that "in the name of liberation from male domination, women must not appropriate to themselves male are more feeling and intuitive people and become involved in things in a more argued that "in men, the intellect has a certain supremacy over the heart, and simply a tradition inherited from his predecessors or even an emulation of the male monopoly on priesthood is required by "theological anthropology." The pope has ratcheted up its importance by decreeing that the male monopoly on priesthood is an article of faith that must be "definitively held by all the The picture is more complicated. While the pope has warned the archbishop of he has indicated a surprising willingness to compromise on a seemingly more or his successors might "find a way of exercising the [papal] primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless l primacy as a "gift to be shared." The pope's suggestion also dovetails with a new interest among some Protestant theologians in a "universal primate" 's fearlessness: a willingness at least to consider some diminution in the scope of his office in exchange for an improvement on the current "imperfect theological strings attached. The pope surely knows this, which suggests that his target might not be the churches of the Reformation, but the Orthodox and And one more thing: The Eastern churches do not, and likely never will, ordain new legislation "uses up the entire surplus for this risky tax scheme." Answer taxes would be "better than seeing this risky tax scheme signed into law." The way Podesta puts it, it's not clear whether the "scheme" would cut your taxes Dole's plan was "risky" because it would "balloon the deficit" and force Congress "to cut Medicare, education, [and the] environment." The rationale for enough for Al Gore. In the vice presidential debate, Gore used the phrase eight times. Pundits marveled at his robotic repetition. Dole's campaign chairman protested that "leaving money in someone's pocket is not a scheme" but later favorite chant. At a senior citizens' rally last fall, he used the magic phrase three times. Republicans "are trying to come up with this huge, risky tax scheme and finance it by taking money out of the surplus that has been built up entirely because of the Social Security trust fund," Gore warned. Two months not going back to the risky tax schemes and economic upheaval of the '80s." Gore and other Democrats use "risky tax scheme" with abandon, ignoring the disappearance of the circumstances that originally justified the phrase. In ostensibly would raise taxes on some people while cutting taxes for others. In your opponent is proposing a tax cut and to trick uninformed listeners into scheme because it favors the wealthy and various special interests. But it's still a tax cut. The only reason to delete the word "cut" when referring to the bill is to withhold this information because you know it would incline your audience to support the bill. For years, Republicans have called budget outlays "spending," "welfare," and "waste" to conceal that half the money goes back to the middle class through entitlements. "Risky tax scheme" is the Democrats' When Republicans mess with the tax code, somebody else is getting the money, price of this spin is that it insults people's intelligence, in part through deceptive censorship and in part through mindless repetition. Podesta denounces incapable of appearing in public without reciting "risky tax scheme" three times. Rather than simply acknowledge the tax cut and argue its merits, he's betting that we're stupid. In the long run, that's not a smart bet. Hard to tell: The light is too glaring; the man's frantic gestures too alien. A become official. "Are we still shooting people or what?" the soldier calls shooting at people he doesn't know and can barely see for reasons that are never apparent in a place that's as foreign as the surface of the moon. All that's finally real is the blood. From this brilliant overture, it's obvious against cinema's violent imagery: He's juxtaposing farce and atrocity in ways it enters a body, plowing its way through tissue and into a liver, which No wound, the director is saying (screaming, in effect), should ever be taken most jumbled and arm's length of wars: the one that pretended to be about the don't even know what we did here." Cynical and disgusted, Gates gets wind (so to speak) of a wild discovery: a map lodged in the rear end of an Three Kings seems poised to turn into a relatively straightforward genre the surreal setting hints at dissonances, disturbing incongruities. The white green footballs the soldiers pack with explosives and lob from their speeding The action comes in jarring spasms. A cow is blown up during an exercise, and insane slaughter to come. When Gates and company reach the village where the and rejoice, pushing their babies on the "United States of Freedom." They can't The weird juxtapositions in these scenes are the movie's just down the corridor from a torture chamber. Piles of cell phones, the village, riddling its driver with bullets. When it skids into a building and overturns it doesn't explode: Its tanks are full of milk for the starving something, too, but only because its imagery is so ferociously original that protagonist is unable to ignore injustice and so throws in his lot with the oppressed. It's a winning formula, but a formula all the same. Whereas the opening manages to be shocking and ironic at once, the picture's turning point recommend you read this, because it's not a good surprise.) A wife soldier pulls her away, holds a gun to her head and then, in full view of her spouse and child, blows her brains out; and the little girl throws herself on manly looks that say, "We're outnumbered and outgunned. We could leave now with our money. But if we do, we'll never be able to live as men again." But the victim in The Wild Bunch was morally compromised: He'd shot people mother's killing by saying you can't make a movie about the obscenity of violence without showing something so obscene that it scalds us. I don't quarrel with his intentions. But after that sequence, a part of me shut down. Where do you go from something like that? To more horrible killings? To more pretext for a "surreal essay" on the Gulf War, and he might be right. And it's throat in a brutal effort to drive home the war's real aim. mother and child as the walls explode around them. The connections among enemy recognized themselves in one another before pulling the trigger, but it might be the first to make the point in a way that has nothing to do with liberal humanism. The movie takes the view of a mordant social scientist who recognizes that consumerism has become the true world religion. in scale, but both were products of the same angry sensibility. In the latter, the director used farce not to lighten the drama but to darken it, so that the slapstick debacles seemed to spring from the hero's roiling unconscious. In instant the war has ended, Three Kings is among the most pitiless interesting but really not the subject of the story here." remember camp correctly, surrendering completely to an arbitrary and irrational But there is another reason, more tragic and ironic, why this gifted and imaginative guy seems less funny lately. Comedy relies on surprise. A joke sets up a chain of logic, and then subverts it in a surprising and delightful way; that's the punch line. A comic persona embodies an unexpected way of seeing the world. But the more successfully a comic does this, the more familiar his point of view becomes. And finally, after years of exposure to even the liveliest way of seeing things is too familiar to surprise us, too predictable to be funny. And so a comedian's success creates his failure. That, and appearing uniform manufacturers that make up the "spirit industry" is described as "a letter while leaping into the air. On the other hand, some spectators are think I also have an obligation to deal with the hurt and the harm done to these police officers who were put in a position where they had to kill your "There's no point in moralizing whether this is a good or bad thing."-- Gene (Note: "Life and Art" is an occasional column that compares fiction, in Tom weren't old friends as the film makes them out to be. They met only a month become suspicious of his gender, and John and Tom become hostile toward him. to keep quiet, he reports the rape. In the movie, the sheriff sounds like a asked him if he'd helped one of the rapists get an erection.) A few days after as a man by securing his breasts with Ace bandages, keeping his clothes on while snuggling with lovers, and occasionally using a fake penis during was a hermaphrodite, a fact that his mother denies. murder, the filmmakers make their relationship seem longer and more serious, her family and the hatred of the community by running away together. moment, they almost discover themselves as lesbians. In a lovemaking scene that he was disgusted by the idea of loving a woman that way. her up for the rape." This accusation, however, seems very much at odds with Instead, they drive her to the farmhouse, where she then tries to stop them explains that she eventually returned to Falls City, where is she currently farmhouse. "She stayed in the car the whole time." Later, Tom testified against John so as to avoid the electric chair. (John maintains his innocence from death row. Tom is serving a life sentence.) On the witness stand, Tom said that Why did John and Tom feel as though they had to kill points out in The New Yorker, it doesn't make sense to try to escape a rape charge, which is difficult to prosecute, by committing murder. But these river, which was frozen at the time. And Tom would later describe the murders to a Playboy writer before his trial (the writer was called as a Both John and Tom were troubled. Boys Town rejected John for admission when he was a child, and Tom had been abused and liked to by his identity, as the film implies. Perhaps they were also disturbed by the meaning of the rape. In the documentary, Tom's girlfriend says someone told her you feel about that?" Tom replies, "I didn't feel very good about it at military that seems to have broken down over the years." What is "Determine whether or not obsession really does lie between madness and choose, because so many of them make me laugh and laugh until people who should by all rights fear me barge into my office and tell me to get a grip. In the that's no reflection on the rest of you. If you don't usually read the second these months by just looking for my own name and secret encrypted love talk a scent that will encourage their ocelots to breed. "We thought about what would work with them and used things like rat feces and ocelot scent," says brought in cologne because a lot of other animals like it and we put Obsession want to find a way to create "scent corridors" so that scattered packs of ocelots, living in the wild, can find each other and mate. proved to be such a cheap and effective way for corporations and celebrities to generate good will; maybe these same groups could be encouraged to pony up for a lot better about your phone bill if you saw a sign that said something like, "The Next Two Miles of Horny Ocelots Are Brought to You by Sprint"? roll her down a hill and through a sprinkler. We don't find out what's being residence had just been broken into by six students angry about beef quotas. They tried to burn my house down. And I thought, 'God Almighty, if they get food of another country. So, unlike many Quiz participants, I won't. Instead, books, movies and, of course, food. When we make dinner plans, we don't name along as well as do the bagel and mango on my breakfast table every morning, policy, not always informing local governments of this deployment. Currently An article describing the document is in the current Bulletin of the Atomic Fight Club is really about: "It's very much a metaphor for received notions and value systems that have been applied to you that aren't your own. And freeing yourself to discover who you actually are." responses are for sale to reputable or disreputable advertisers. Drug dealers workers and peasants, not to promote one's own books."-- Ed. "Nobody is barred from being in the parade. It's completely open to all people. vassal in his own court, but each petty lord was subject to suit in the courts of a higher lord." This surprisingly relevant bit of medieval lore turns out to be termed 'ludicrous' and 'a travesty' in a federal court, instead of a state Hatch's bid for the presidency. (No, it doesn't fit the question, but I laugh plastic screen that covers the urinal drain, were emblazoned these words: "Say piss. But isn't this ubiquitous propagandizing what we mocked and derided when failed drug policy. Is that still a legal form of protest? Like Supreme Court cases that undermine the rights of the individual to defend himself against a federal government can sue, but the individual victim cannot. "Our federalism requires that Congress treat the states in a manner consistent with their status as residuary sovereigns," he wrote, with a quill pen dipped in the blood it "goofball"? No one has decent penmanship anymore.) leaves the individual he has a right, and that right has been violated, do the laws of his country afford him a remedy? The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws when he Legends List of movie stars by devising a brief plot summary of a movie in Either Velvet trains him for the Grand National, or he'll tell Velvet's mistakenly assumes Buster is dead and tries to tie him to the cowcatcher to candidate by buying stock in him or her. If the candidate wins, you get a dollar for each share you own. If he loses, your shares are worthless. The amount you pay for each share depends on the seller's confidence that the candidate will win. When the candidate is doing well in the race, investors are confident that their stock will pay off, so they charge more for it when they sell. When he's doing poorly, they charge less. If you buy shares in the candidate when his stock is low, you don't have to wait for Election Day to cash in. You can sell your shares at a profit as soon as his stock four contests: The Democratic presidential nomination (click here to see the prospectus and latest quotes), the Republican candidate or party as of noon ET that day, along with analysis of who's up, who's down, and why. For updates or more complete that you can't chose whom you fall in love with; you can't choose what works of art you fall in love with, either. To me, a great work of art is roughly equal May I add that I find formalism entirely overrated? say so, but I do want art to reflect lived experience rather than just classroom questions. I think one of the problems of contemporary art is that it has lost touch with the big themes --namely, love and nature and death. These, of course, are literary themes rather than art themes, yet I think that the artists in "Sensation" are helping to bring narrative back into art. good at busting up established conventions, and Brits (who actually read books) are good at finding metaphorical meaning in the forms that we over here dinner table chastely set for one. I looked at it and thought to myself, "It's loneliness, but it does more than that, too, because the lung projected (via laser) onto the dinner plate brings anatomy into the equation. What does the piece mean? Lungs allow us to breathe, but here the act of breathing seems to guarantee little beside the likelihood of dining alone. parents? I think there's a lot of tenderness in his work. deserves points for taking a gamble on young artists instead of just buying de said in an editorial that the ballot by parliament marked "a crucial turning However, there were worries about the potential consequences of the defeat of intelligence agency, in a briefing to economists and presidential advisers. He said that banks and capital markets are expected to be the main targets of the police behavior is without reason. We thought it was only in China that police operated a policy of "zero tolerance" toward all demonstrators except In the absence of effective enforcement of property rights, people simply grab claiming a combine harvester and a herd of cows as their own, seized them from in which war is considered the one worthy male occupation." kamikaze dolphins it trained to blow up enemy ships by carrying mines to them. "There is a general disposal of surplus military equipment, old trucks, tanks, military no longer needs or can maintain," the paper said. described a tearful child on television singing "You did more in your life than all the water in the sea." This included running the economy into the ground agreement in the foreign aid bill it approved this week "could throw a monkey aid to evacuate residents, relocate industries, and establish military will eventually be approved because "Congressional Republicans say they do not who have been countering the Republicans' "resident for president" slogan with Palace, while claiming to be aloof from the campaign, admitted to the Daily monarchists' strategy of pretending the queen doesn't exist or, at any rate, doesn't matter. The latest Herald opinion poll has supporters and years old and should contribute to the paleontological debate about whether contemplating suicide after breaking up with a boyfriend. The Daily and torn pillows and is surrounded by the detritus of her sojourn. This vodka bottles, a pregnancy testing kit, sanitary towels, nylons and three pairs of her dirty knickers." The paper's art critic compared the exhibit to popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said "grew up not in become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant not to mention three years of research by a scholar in residence at the Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with enormous passion and invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him "The Professor of Terror." New York magazine once called him Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over a few scraps lands. In the New York Times Magazine last spring, he wrote that the has), with "the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left, a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the inflammatory tone and questioned his knowledge of history, philology, and premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that such an agreement may prove to be almost as nightmarish as what came before." It concluded, "The military victory will, however, pale into insignificance by and "indelible ink" (designed to prevent multiple voting), which, in practice, poll strongly in the country's outer islands and might be able to hold on to be a hollow victory and a terrible irony if our exercise in democracy failed to Herald Tribune noted, "politicians, business interests and foreign In the final weeks of the campaign, two religious groups called on the faithful founding president. The story reported that there was a clash last week in would have given it the power to change the constitution, editorials supported perceived "grayness" compared with his predecessor, the Pioneer said, may even be able to get a clearer view of its harsh realities, and its uphill this process, charisma, sometimes, can play saboteur." coins, even mentioning her "double chin." The Herald complained that the of the sovereign. Under the headline "Why we still need the Royals," a columnist wrote, "It's not so much that we've gone off the Royal family, we history and our culture, I cannot envisage us formally breaking all our ties. If the Spice Girls did not push us to the brink, nothing will." going about it in a very strange way. He doesn't live in a gated community. He summons perfect strangers into his hideaway. He sues people, and then phones than a "No Trespassing" sign, there is no particular barrier to entry, from the bookstores that stocked the book. Lest his filing go unnoticed, he phoned forced the biographer to remove many quotations from the published work. This in the Rye Web site from using quotations from the novel, garnering the similar letters to other young female writers. He also had a fascination with lover, sensitive and quick with the ability to project a mood that turned the view. He lives in Manhattan and escorts his son to and from school many days of even been written up in the school newspaper. "The mothers love him," he says. Local literati know where he lives and they leave him alone. great classic The Catcher in the Rye is about an adolescent and has seemed he was about to be forgotten, he resurfaced briefly, just to remind the cute or whimsical; only, it felt as if it were being put on by a master managed to cripple the military and bankrupt the government simultaneously. Contemporary accounts repeatedly emphasize his gullibility. Senior statesmen of with the romance of chivalry and the tragedy of an early death. personal badge, the Sun in Splendor, evokes the image of a shining city on a simple style, and the implied promise of a brighter future proved spectacularly presided over a decade of remarkable peace and prosperity. He was, however, frequently distracted by attacks on his wife, who was seen as an extravagant principles other than an instinct for power. Before long he had squandered his claiming the throne as Henry VII, one of his first official acts was to raise obviously afford to pay more taxes. On the other hand, if you live frugally, was followed by Henry VIII, a man best remembered for his gargantuan appetites, his dissipative lifestyle, his troubled marriages, and his rocky relationship economic effects. It quoted one financial analyst as saying that while spending will make the net effect on the economy "hugely positive." But the FT said that the earthquake might disrupt supplies of computer chips to the earthquake is expected to interrupt production for several weeks, the paper said in an editorial. "Beneath the rhetoric, there is one nation. If battered bodies was one of a woman who had been decapitated. The troops found dried blood and meat hooks in a nearby garden, and locals claimed the victims had been hung from the hooks before being dumped in the well, the paper said. said the killers cut off one of his ears "and took it away as some sort of vandalizing buildings and loading furniture, food, and other goods onto trucks first by a foreign leader since the city regained its position as capital of a been "an opportunity to talk about the greatest of horrors, to commemorate the said, "A speech of this type, had it been made, could have been a direct and determination to achieve a Middle East peace settlement, but not at any price. of the Kremlin" because of his allegedly central role in all major political blamed them for the recent wave of terrorist bomb attacks. He also denied that undergo a secret operation, which he may not survive. MK reporter leader, "may not even make it on board the presidential airplane" to escape the to a star that flashed for a short time, but for long enough to change the time did not exhaust their tenderness," he wrote. "I would not risk saying what breast cancer, and sexual maturation are all highly influenced by genetics. the same ethnic background, these comparisons are largely invalid. consumed dairy products as a large part of their diets for centuries. They also It's true that, as he says, "We're electing someone to run the government, not minister to the condition of our souls." And though about individual holders of wealth. Nor are they engaging in subtle class been, perhaps irretrievably, lost. How else can people understand tragedies playground; they are nursing monstrous visions of murder and mayhem, while building bombs in their clueless parents' garage. Anyone who pays the least attention could make a long list of their preferred examples. that such an organized and, frankly, insane plan has much in common with the The "Revenge Group," on the other hand, was bent on of power; nothing would have come of the killings except a vague sense of condone what either group of killers did or planned to do. To even for an instant try to intellectually justify killing members of one group simply plainly wrong, and there's no amount of philosophizing that could convince me issue isn't that working parents must choose between anesthetizing their children with television or catering to all their whims while also trying to pay the bills and nuke the frozen dinner. Given a little guidance and some suitable playthings, children who don't get hooked on television at an early age are actually perfectly capable of amusing themselves for long stretches of seem to be aware of much that has already been said. it would be a kind gesture if I asked her to pick out the dresses for the bridesmaids. We visited three bridal salons, and she made a veritable scene in each one. She was unspeakably ugly to both my mother and me, as well as the staff (swearing, sarcasm, and just plain rudeness). I was deeply embarrassed, and she apparently doesn't understand that this is not going to be "her address envelopes and other little things that need doing, and she refused: supposed to make a toast at the reception and I said it was traditional, she just unleashed foul behavior. I am sick of her antics and fed up with her. I realize that asking her to relinquish the "title" may jeopardize our relationship, but I don't understand her behavior at all. you, and there's a chance she wishes the bride and bridesmaid roles were reversed. Acting out in stores and "foul behavior" are indicative of emotional wish to have your dream day spoiled. There is not a reason in the world that you should have to tolerate this pill of a sister. In fact, suggest that she not attend the wedding. You need not be the victim of her neuroses. relationship," with all due respect, it sounds as if it's already on life support. Just because she is your sister doesn't mean she gets to behave less well than a friend. Sometimes a relative is just an annoying person courtesy of If you think you recognize the feet of the user in the stall next door and you have a question or a comment, should you start talking? not exactly sure why, though.) Do begin, however, by verifying it's the person you think it is so that you are not having a conversation with the wrong pair of shoes. You might also want to edit your conversation for whoever else might response to the about telemarketers was wonderfully done. Would you run for crusade? I am thinking of an Internet movement. Can you imagine thousands of president because she is having such fun working at is, also, alas, out of the crusade business. Your idea, however, about singing and hanging up is now being read by tons of people, so telemarketers good advice. Here's my problem: I broke off a relationship with a delightful man who lives two houses up the street. We were together for nearly four years. great deal of trouble letting go of the more physical aspects of our past and spends a lot of time begging for "just one more time." How can I make it clear to him that breaking up means losing that physical connection? He's prone to you the exact language. This is what you say: "The last time was the last time." And if you have broken up, how is it that you are subject to the in a crowded movie theater, do I say, "Excuse me" to those already seated papers provide crucial evidence linking massacres that claimed an estimated said most of the documents are now in the hands of the intelligence service of barred from visiting the musician backstage by his staff "who wanted to avoid United States began to close in on their boss, the paper said. The whereabouts might be changing its tune because of growing fears of United States' meddling in the region. But the paper added: "If China is really worried about possible aggression and remove any excuse for Western intervention." were pessimistic. The problem has been a refusal by the loyalist Protestant derives from violence and the threat of violence, and so it does not want to sacrifice that power." The paper strongly supported the loyalist refusal to the executive this week, something new in the history of our parliamentary democracy will have taken place," the Telegraph said. "An armed group will be taking part in government. The power of a private army will, for the first time, be exercised through out institutions." The paper reported, meanwhile, that republican and loyalist terrorist groups are both preparing for commitment to disarmament "would be less a democratic political body than York Senate campaign that would see "the dirty laundry of the past eight years recycled," new tensions in the Democratic camp, and "a hot reception, no separation, but "in the end she stayed and supported her husband when he needed wasteful consumption of a disproportionate share of the planet's resources." An necessary warning to the country which contributes more than any other to correspondent asked why disasters in the United States receive so much more global hegemony, we need to have it confirmed to us that our masters are condos can be smashed to smithereens within seconds by some arbitrary force of whose human rights records fail to receive the Amnesty International seal of industry by farmers and pressure groups alleging misuse of intellectual factors make this a special case," it said in an editorial. "One is the immense speed of scientific advance in GM food technology, and in markets for GM products is already highly concentrated, and that industry consolidation appears set to accelerate through acquisitions." On its front crucial period of World War II and could have faced treason charges if he had that he was a fool lacking in worldly wisdom but in no sense a traitor. for a large increase in its defense capability. "One message coming loud and clear out of the recent flurry of diplomatic activity over a peacekeeping force on its own in dealing with such regional problems," the paper said in an support to the peacekeeping effort, it "proceeded reluctantly, refusing to take of the international community, we must respect universal humanitarian values biased against the right because they rushed to investigate corruption force does not rush to investigate suspicions against a former prime minister, it will not have the moral justification to act against ordinary criminals," also being rocked by a flood of compromising documents to the press, among them a recording of a conspiratorial telephone conversation between the media tycoon conviction is growing in the country's collective consciousness that its leaders are not just thieves, but men ready to do anything, however bad," he is still logic in this world, he should resign as soon as possible, before things go too far." He added that he believed he would do so. of the litter, pardon the expression, and a very unexpected, though satisfying owner specifically told him not to incur any expense? No rational person would pay two grand for a cat (a dog, perhaps, but not a cat). And letting an animal die from natural causes is not and never has been a crime. If you think I am understandably lay out two big ones for a dog, but not for a cat. You are fortunate in not having a column of your own, since the dog favoritism would surely invite much correspondence from the cat people. But do read on. to the vet twice a week for dialysis. This wonderful, magical cat raised all four of our sons (with some help from my wife, but not much in my judgment), and she became as much a part of the family as any of us. Because of kidney problems she had accidents from time to time, but we always overlooked them. agree with your advice, but I have to take issue with your reply to the actually a cat lover), but I think the owner's wishes about managing the health of the cat should have been heeded. Two thousand dollars is a lot of money to most people, and I think the financial sacrifices people are willing to make for their pets are their decisions. Who knows, the owner might have had Or maybe the owner thinks the two grand would be better spent as a donation to is, people can't be forced to spend big bucks on pets. this letter was to wonder if the cat could be taken away from such an many animal lovers among your readers who would be happy to contribute toward replying to my letter about the sick cat. Your advice was, as expected, might like to know that I did begin legal proceedings in small claims court, but the cat's former owner and I settled. I say, "former owner" because in the process of working out an agreement, I demanded and got the cat in question. The owner was only willing to pay half the vet expenses, so I said, "Well then, participants remember about the Dutch. Here's what they've affixed to the windows for a sense of going back in time. A visitors' cafe* and a virtual tour through the house on computer have corresponds to labels strongly for the normal people for attaching a group complaint however more simply, so that enormous oil companies pump free oil of considerable profits, for the maintenance of the bored oil platform workers out evenly above he cannot not to understand, why love is a crime, the assortment of the crime spells out in a provisional order of any judge (NECESSITIES ITS GODDAMNED HEADING CHECKING!!!!) who OH is, thus ready for use, to ignore everything a person it says and believes you simply that everything, which says any other person even if it a liar is! Hypothetically speaking. Answer me this titans are gathered in Shanghai for the Fortune Global Forum. Some big ideas market like China, you recognize talented artists and give them an opportunity for expression. That's an important public role. Companies like ours have a must prevail in the final analysis, but that doesn't meant that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the was pregnant, I asked what path he hoped his child would follow. "It doesn't pause he added, "My personal preference is shortstop. But anything he wants to do is fine with me." Then, after a longer pause: "As long as it's in the where you care about other people's happiness (though perhaps not as urgently reserve the right to care about how others achieve their happiness. selves. That's why we make current sacrifices for future rewards. But which kind of altruists are we? Traditional economic theory says we're the ordinary imperfectly altruistic toward ourselves. And just as imperfect altruism toward your children can cause conflict in your family, imperfect altruism toward your Everyone knows that a taste for expensive pleasures can ruin your life. But a taste for anticipating expensive pleasures can ruin your life in a far more interesting way. If your greatest joy in life is looking forward to tomorrow's extravagance, you've got a problem: Tomorrow is a moving target. On postponements continue until you die and leave a large estate. The tragedy here is not that you never get to spend your money. The tragedy is that you never even get to anticipate spending your money, because you're smart enough to foresee the whole sequence of events even before it unfolds. If you love looking forward to parties and if you know you love looking forward to parties, then you can never look forward to a party that can't be postponed. Pay the caterer well in advance, and be sure to aggravating form of this affliction. I avoid reading really good books, because it robs me of the pleasure of looking forward to them. Of course, knowing this about myself, I never get to look forward to them either. Air travel has been my salvation. I force myself to read good books by trapping myself with them on problem. Instead of looking forward to extravagance, he likes to anticipate his own future frugality. He particularly enjoys believing that after a certain age, he won't spend resources to prolong his own life. But he's painfully aware that the "certain age" keeps getting redefined so it's always safely in the future. Therefore, he's looking for ways to limit his own future freedom of his own future happiness (or, to put it another way, if Ray were perfectly altruistic toward his future self), then you could fairly accuse him of inconsistency: Limiting your choices can't make you happier. But Ray cares also about how he achieves his future happiness, which makes him an imperfect altruist, but a consistent one. If your altruism is imperfect, you can want your future self to throw a party (or to read a book or to forgo expensive medical care, or for that matter to save money or to quit smoking), even though current costs and future benefits that fits right into the traditional economic not just weighing costs and benefits, they're engaged in games of strategy suggestion then was that the lock resolves a conflict between you (who believe that a hot fudge sundae is worth the calories) and your mate, or potential mate theory is right, but I do know that the door locks remain inexplicable unless is happiness and if there's no third party involved, there can be no good Suppose you want to be frugal in the future. If you're a pessimist and don't trust your future self to be frugal, then you might as well spend all your money today so it doesn't fall into the hands of that future spendthrift. But inclined to save your money and pass it along into your own future good hands. same preferences and exactly the same opportunities can adopt dramatically something even more bizarre: The more you expect to be extravagant in the future, the more you'll save to finance that future extravagance. But as soon as you realize you're a "saver," you'll lose confidence in your future extravagance and figure you might as well spend your money today. At that point, you realize you're a "spender" and you go back to saving. Your expectations about the future, and the behavior that stems from them, could selection. If that speculation stands up to some reasonable tests (say a computer simulation of resource competition among individuals with evolving her campaign "futile." Dole supporters' spin: Campaigns are now decided by money, not message. Dole detractors' spin: The reason no one gave her money is that she had no message. Feminists debated the assembly elected her vice president. Skeptics said the elections were democratic in name only and questioned the new government's ability to unite the country's diverse population and revive the economy. But the New York senators voted to cut off a Republican filibuster, seven short of the number approved by the House, in order to increase support in the Senate. The bill would have banned "soft money" but would not have regulated issue ads. Opponents had held that the measures would infringe on free speech. But the reformers their hats. The Democratic spin: No, you handed us a campaign and examine the animal and surrounding plants. Researchers said the find the soft parts and touch them and even smell them. It's very forced to extend the temporary spending measure that is keeping the government Democratic tax hikes. The White House spin: We'll protect social programs from Republican budget cuts. The cynical spin: The numbers require either tax hikes council would be formed within a week to govern the country, but provided no border and called for the resumption of peace talks. The rosy spin: After spin: Without a timetable for democracy, he's still a dictator. stocks and bonds could plunge if investors were to lose confidence in the The bearish spin: The big correction is starting. The bullish spin: Relax, and his fiancee are getting married soon, and I have serious questions about intelligent, successful woman. They have been together many years, living together for the last three. The problem is not their relationship, but my son "handfasting," a witchcraft wedding ceremony. My wife and I are devout religious beliefs. Even one of the elder priests in our parish said it would be against God to attend such an event, though a younger priest said as long as we He has even allowed me to read the ceremony that will be performed. Actually, confused. Should I possibly go against my faith to support my son by attending a pagan rite, or should I alienate my son because of my own religious beliefs? with the assessment of the younger priest, and you should, too. Since you're not participating in the actual ceremony and found nothing objectionable in the text, you and your wife should not deny this lovely son your presence. And years of corporate bathroom use, the rule among men seems to be nothing spoken corporate pro once told me never to discuss anything of importance in a bathroom or an elevator. I once was in a courthouse elevator with the other side's counsel, who hadn't yet been introduced to me, who spent the ride down and often think your advice is excellent and daring. Except in the case of myself, not being shy, wouldn't mind a friendly chat while in the office stalls but many would. Some would feel embarrassed at simply being identified and addressed in a compromising position. Others would feel tense, and conversation might interfere with the reason they are there. Not to mention that some people go there to sit and be quiet and have a small private break. Addressing someone by name, after identifying them by their shoes while they are sitting on the letter. Persuaded by several people, she now wishes to reverse herself and begs the pardon of anyone who's had to suffer chitchat during a private moment preceding letter. Women do not have such a rigid convention, but they weighed in, as well, with pleas for silence when nature calls. mother is terribly embarrassed by the fact that we are not married. (But we've been living together for two and a half years.) I was brought up with the values that you got engaged, got married, and then started a family. For some reason, I was blessed with this baby much sooner than planned. What can I say or do to convey to my boyfriend's mother that this is a blessing and not a For one thing, you can tell your boyfriend's mother that the baby is on time; the wedding is late. (Was this woman, by any chance, attitude about the blessed event is most pleasing, and your relationship sounds long as the breast is hidden under a blanket with the child, I don't mind. However, when a woman goes "National Geographic" and everything is out in the turned up the volume on the game so he didn't have to deal with the whole thing). The women were mixed in their opinions. So what is appropriate when disagreement on the subject, good sense and good taste would seem to dictate that this perfectly normal function can be carried out in public with as little both baby and breast, but an attempt at decorous draping would seem the thing peace, if it comes, will be "a peace of the pragmatists" with "no outright more than a beautiful ending to his second term with a diplomatic success in rather less cheerful. "The outlook is too complicated to permit of excessive negotiations. "Fifteen more months are more than enough," it said in an editorial. "The disputed points have been debated to death, the conditions for compromise are known, and many of them have already been agreed combination of a solid mandate at home with ripe regional conditions, and now leaders, creates a diplomatic and security base that must not be wasted." slumber, it would be best to consider that conscience dead," the paper said. supported, saying he listened less and less to the people who voted him in and was now only concerned with hanging on to power. "He no longer represents his were conditional upon there being a war in the province. military action by saying that the People's Liberation Army "shoulders the sacred mission of safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity." Party has decided to speed up privatization of the textile, electrical, electronic, and construction industries by giving up majority control of them. shares in the bulk of mainland listed companies, making it hard for minority shareholders to ease out ineffective managers and enforce strict corporate to cut spending on social welfare programs, which are largely notional anyway, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank "if nothing political Post as the country's most powerful leader since the old days of Labor freedom of movement," the paper said in an editorial. "He has built a government that cannot be brought down by any single party, surrounded himself with a deliberately weak cabinet, and left outside his government a demoralized and confused opposition of less than a third of the against strong objections by his own military intelligence, also pointed out in hopes and expectations of "the entire public" are with him. neighbors will be "widely welcomed" but warned that he needs to get a move on. Although he now enjoys "a formidable amount of individual political authority," it is unlikely that he will "be able to retain such power on a permanent parties find cause to conspire against each other within the Cabinet, and minister who will "probably adopt the same line as [assassinated Prime Minister will create a completely different climate from that of the past three years, office ends and hand over power to a successor elected by the people. While this disclosure failed to excite those observers who think that the main issue as "noteworthy" in view of the speculation that has been going on in the identify him because "as soon as I name him, he won't be let live calmly, he will be henpecked." But he warned against this person being regarded as "a successor to the throne," since the next head of state will be chosen not by the mausoleum in Red Square and buried in an ordinary grave (a story taken up "reputation for loyalty and fair dealing in tatters." She said that his arrest should not be assumed that they will continue to do so, "particularly if Sen. editorial, the conservative Daily Telegraph agreed with new depths of vulgarity. Beside a photograph of a French cow, the paper printed drawing of a cow with a beret on its head and a roll of toilet paper hanging on anywhere, but was being widely followed in the spirit.) will only reinforce the commonsense view that animals fed in such a disgusting way cannot possibly be healthy." So much for scientists. The Mail also to blockade than the Continent." He was presumably unaware of a famous prewar play on words that Fleet Street currently finds irresistible. "A reasonable beef," it said, "The French should eat their words." The conservative Daily in an editorial: "If French farmers really think they can force annoy your target market lacks the flair and subtlety for which the French traditionally pride themselves." It also noted that the French national rugby stipulations as to where it came from." The paper wished the French team "all justification for such a gesture and that if he had decided to make it (which he didn't), it "would without doubt have had the merit of calming the enormous years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies whitening. "You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth," says one recent victim of the camera. "You can't believe you are business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. "People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does. discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. "We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. "It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. "My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem "weak." Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a "preventive measure." (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as "how to move technique "treatment acceptance," a marvelous euphemism for parting you from fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure," says Dr. Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want. drugs and bad music and put those "lost" years into perspective. But how can any filmmaker nowadays convey the nihilistic embrace of dope and booze and quicksand? The comedy Outside Providence treats those dark years after horrified incredulity. The film is so free of cant that it's positively north of Providence." That description is more bitter than anything in the crushing his soul: He cultivated a caustic sense of humor. The movie, directed them a tender regard for the scruffy outsider, the yearning misfit. (In the novel, a headmaster actually refers to the hero and his friend as "Dumb and and brightness: Whenever the view of the working poor threatens to become sometimes you can plow through a brick wall and come out the other side. cruiser after an evening with his buddies and their bong. (It's thanks to the murky intervention of one of his dad's poker pals, a gangster, that he ends up stoner lifestyle proves more of a challenge to maintain. It's not that the rich kids don't party as determinedly as the poor ones, it's that the dorms are well as by students happy to rat out their peers if it means getting into an crashes or face the prospect of lives scrambling for a dwindling number of since its most meaningful (and hilarious) connections happen over (and with a think, as they should be. The movie says that getting high all the time can rot Over bong hits, they talk of moving to a West Coast utopia where "they got likes the girl he's seeing so much he doesn't think about banging her, they say instead of the object of them: In one scene, he feigns extreme cerebral palsy so that he and his brother can have great seats at a football game. corduroy jacket looks like the one I persisted in wearing into the late '80s when a girlfriend finally took the initiative to drop it down a garbage chute. seem a tad stupid, but when he's picked up hitchhiking by Jane and her rich parents, you glimpse the sneaky undercurrents of his rube act. He passes her a Coke, which turns out to be spiked with rum, and the two have a magical (In one of the book's first scenes, he kills his sons' mutt by crushing it in a octave and bellows lines like "Drag your pimply ass in here and say hello to He's so frightened of communicating with his children that he has to caricature don't hold back on my account. The movie isn't awful. It pulls a couple of amusing tricks with its narrative (the second act doesn't come until after the flimsy romantic confection is either utterly charming or it collapses into a heavy slab of obviousness. It doesn't help that Potter looks and sounds as if different is cut from the same paranoid cloth as Invasion of the Body portended before they even buy their tickets. It's a testament to the lovely on a purple and green dress in a thistle pattern, and step into her carriage. kick off her bid for a New York Senate seat. 'In my family, we've always rooted reliable device, the mighty comic engine that generated so many terrific have brought along the other two tenors, assuming they could get time off from comedy-- Working Girl to Pretty Woman --we're meant to applaud the can still listen to Garth Brooks. It's the new One World, and its allegiance to the queen, there was no singing of "God Save the Queen," but they zeal. But the arrival in the mail of a flier from the Society for the falling short our people's traditional standard of cleanliness. Also, fruit. A Disconcerting jargon inside: Adults can "enhance their relationships to talking about some kind of group sex swingers cult thing, right? "Conflict Resolution in the Bible." Sounds good. One factor in the decline of the labor movement is its unwillingness to use stoning as a bargaining technique. No stoning and very little smiting. Except the Teamsters. officials worried about more deaths, and farmers worried about their crops. An Agriculture Department meteorologist said that in some regions "there is a drought that is comparable to the drought of the '30s." (Chatterbox wonders it that unite Republicans," but the New York Times called it a "brazen industries. It will monitor nonmilitary government networks and track banking, telecommunications, and transportation networks. Civil libertarians warned the New York Times that the monitoring could be misused for later acknowledged that the shuttle suffered a hydrogen leak and a argues that the cuts epitomize compassionate conservatism. But in the same The paper condemns the bill as "misshapen," "unaffordable," and warned, "I will not allow a risky plan to become law." China Daily accused the sect of spreading superstition, hoodwinking people, provoking unrest, and jeopardizing stability. The New York Times calls the sect harmless and warns China against "returning to the ideological Party, will "throw spikes into the newly energized peace train." China. The island abandoned its "one China" policy, which implied against the "historical tide" of unification. The Weekly Standard Journal predicted that the spat will blow over when Lee steps down in The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects previously rejected by Congress, and other unapproved purchases. The report expresses shock at the flagrant illegality of the expenditures. "Do we get it The Senate agreed that a new agency should supervise nuclear weapons research. The agency would report directly to the secretary of energy. Sponsors of the plan say it would institute accountability for security breaches, but the House reportedly prefers an even stronger independent investors and entrepreneurs; doubters ask how they will be regulated. The New York Times doubts that they can continue to regulate themselves. stodgy image," while a New York Times editorial calls it evidence that Cigars will carry warnings similar to those on cigarettes. The absence of labels implies "that cigars are a safe alternative to cigarettes." Industry honchos protested that "cigar smokers are mature, legislator" whose views should be taken seriously. "The instruments for the control of the evil of nuclear proliferation must be effective," it said. "It is such questions that the Senate vote has rightly raised." The on their wise and timely counsel?" he asked. "I suspect that one reason is that the Senators have actually read the treaty and understand how deeply flawed it is, how unlikely it is to stop nuclear proliferation or even nuclear testing, and how it has the potential to leave the United States with an unsafe, propose that the police and criminals come together and sign agreements under which they accept the same set of restraints on their freedom of action." authority" and that the "Senate Republicans, by exploiting the opportunity to even worse, a supremacist agenda. They want to expand military programs, weaken Times said the vote underlined "the extent to which international consensus about US responsibilities in the world has fractured." and the paper said in an editorial that "in the essential area of nuclear nonproliferation, the United States has set the worst possible example." It concluded, "The world's greatest power will from now on be less credible on the embarks on his last year at the White House. "French people will easily remember the United States' virulent campaign against our nuclear tests in the through international cooperation. "That, after the Senate's decision, is what own pathetic errors as a man and to his own unforgivable lies as a president, suffered a very serious setback, not only because of the Senate decision but in format, to make the telecast more entertaining for the home audience. Name animals that makes one wonder if this spectacle involves sex or violence." As dubious as that sentiment might at first appear, a cursory look through his fellow participants' answers shows that he's quite right: As far as News Quiz readers are concerned, those are the two activities associated with save their money. Probably the latter.) (Randy may be back a little sooner than advocated sex with or violence to animals, at least, not in her published offers detailed synopses of current releases for fundamentalist parents, along C) Yellow light; offenses include "implications and guidelines." Participants are invited to find, in an actual newspaper or three other locations as well. The finding wasn't such a surprise to the professor of biomedical sciences at the veterinary college, believes that the development of a uterus is a normal part of a male beaver's genetics and too soon to prepare for a glut of academically inclined babies from China? The and are at the very least an associate professor. Of course, as the proved that "intellectual quality can be enhanced by cattle breeding techniques." But in the next few years, new data should be available. to ditch the "loonie," as the country's dollar is fondly called, and join a teams in times of crisis. The robot, designed by Robin Murphy of the communications equipment and battery power into the search site, then deploys the daughter to poke through the debris and rubble for evidence of survivors, for a video clip of the "launch" of the daughter robot.) The robot system is safer than dispatching human rescuers and, when space is tight, more Association of University Professors has censured universities that do wrong to their faculties. This year's additions to the hall of shame are others call it a joke," reports the Chronicle of Higher the citation. This year, a record number of institutions (seven) were able to Nearly three months ago, when the administration at the National the students have escalated their demands to include the rollback of half a dozen changes the university has imposed in recent years, including limits on the number of years students have to earn degrees and tougher enrollment standards. With negotiations at a stalemate and summer vacations removing the motivation for an immediate solution, both sides appear to be settling in. science students while the administration determines whether or not they used the Internet to cheat. Graders became suspicious that students were sharing identical. Although the incident has raised questions about whether electronic cheating is commonplace, a spokesman for the university asserts that "there is no evidence this is a more serious and widespread problem." administrator, who they hold responsible for lax campus security. According to the Associated Press, the attackers belong to a campus secret society that functions like a gang, retaliating against students and teachers who oppose them. The melee left at least seven students dead and incensed fears that union president has promised a continued boycott of classes until campus security is improved and the vice chancellor dismissed. The societies, which have been blamed for dozens of rapes, murders, assaults, and arson attacks over handgun. The study also shows that student handgun owners fit the profile of from the study that it points to a "worrisome association" between gun warns, however, against overreacting to the study: "We're not pointing to hordes of drunken college students running across campus armed," he said. "I charges in May that China gathered a rich harvest of nuclear secrets from process, making academic exchanges with China more difficult. In addition, low upper Manhattan. The backup generators designed to power the various machinery and refrigerator units failed. Currently, researchers are trying to determine Duke University's English department and now dean of liberal arts and sciences investigate a range of subjects including techno music and globalization, my fair state losing out on millions of tax dollars through Internet sales. to my local selectmen for the privilege of selling wines in my town. Why should someone from across the country, having paid no licensing fees whatsoever, be able to take potential business away from me? Granted, some locations are state regulated, but for those of us who are privately operated, the idea of someone being allowed to compete with us for free is insulting. I have no problem with competition; just make sure that it's a level playing field. This whole unsavory episode brings back memories of broadcasting prevent me from presenting a shred of evidence to support indefensible in your mind, why aren't they identified by name? Professional I do not want my tax money to support trash art, or art precisely because one person's art is another person's trash. certainly intentionally) inflammatory, I think there's a bigger and older issue still unresolved. Namely, that the art world thinks that the purpose of art is to expand the boundaries of human perception and to confront our cultural great unwashed that beauty and skill are irrelevant (or even antagonistic) to art, we will have these contretemps every year or two. destroys the illusion of transparency and calls attention to itself as a in literature that demands we prop up the notion that art should resemble life as closely as possible and in all its probabilities. This doctrine of writers have moved beyond. At least Morris isn't pretending, like most traditional biographers, that he is in command of some untainted objectivity beyond authorial presence or beyond fiction. The subjectivity of the author is think he is factually incorrect on the question of whether severe storms are increasing. Across this hemisphere, according to the scientists at the National the century average. That's an enormous increase in a baseline physical phenomenon; it's as if you woke up and everyone was suddenly seven feet tall. It begs for explanation, and the most plausible explanation, according to the will see both more aridity (due to increased evaporation) and precipitation it actually makes me more like a physicist. If you add more heat energy to a way it will do so is with increased rainfall and storminess. fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this How did so much "black" blood get into so many "white" sheriff dragged them from their marriage bed and jailed them for the crime of County judge said from the bench: "Almighty God created the races, white, for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend "new people" who existed in the space between white and black and deserved a status not quite as high as whites but higher than that of black people in general. This special status began to dry up just before the Civil War and evaporated when slavery ended and free blacks competed with whites for jobs and political power. White Southerners became obsessed with drawing an impossible any black ancestry at all, even if that ancestry was invisible to the naked eye or in the genealogical record. Those who fell on the black side of the law The revocation of special mulatto rights accelerated the practice of passing for white. Central Point was locally known as the "passing capital of the world." Passing for white was so common there that a section of Central Point had actually been named "Passing.'' Some Central Pointers lived excursions to nearby towns, where they shopped in stores that did not serve blacks and were admitted to the "white only" sections of movie houses. rewards of whiteness early, these children grew up, moved away, and continued the charade. Those who entered the armed forces, which were segregated until interracial marriage, and people in those countries had no clue what the Yanks were going on about when they argued over who was really white or really black. sure to travel home alone to prevent their white buddies from knowing who and what they were. The passers from Passing married white spouses, moved into white jobs, took up residence in white neighborhoods. When the couples returned to Central Point to visit, the town went along with the masquerade. Families to avoid being seen on the colored bus headed to the colored school. Principals and teachers stuck to the script. One of them told Ebony magazine in afford to catch the Negro school bus without giving away the racial black ancestry within the last four generations. He predicted that the proportion would only grow in the coming decades. The belief that one's notes, the term "isolationist" (which he rejects) was coined in the 1920s to emphases, discredited theories, internal inconsistencies, and outright them, a man of "vision, unapologetic about the means [he] employed to realize as a success story (the better to underscore the failures of aggressive annexation of the Southwest, he argues that opponents of annexation because it promised to create more states hospitable to slavery, but in than previously recognized and that the war wasn't necessarily the "mistake" to favor their native lands. The criticism is plainly disingenuous: In two of climate became increasingly belligerent, making neutrality untenable. For a in by criticisms, has insisted that he does agree the United States should have first. He has called it a "damnable lie" to claim that he doesn't consider the war to have been a noble one. But he doesn't realize how this admission leaves Japan so that war would be 'thrust upon us' "--in other words, that the United States effectively made the choice to wage war first. But if that's the case, a consistent argument would have to stick by the claim that the war was a passage in A Republic, Not an Empire in which he bemoans the alleged his book, so when it comes to the Cold War he carves out an absurd exception: The extreme evil of communism, he says, warranted military action in places as That's because he has set out to make an argument, and only then rounded up whatever "evidence" he can find to support it. And the real argument that comes disaster. After six years of denials, the agency confessed it had aimed commissioned an investigation and vowed to "get to the bottom" of the misrepresentations. She admitted, "I don't think it's very good for my built by a former International Monetary Fund official. According to the 400-meter dash. The Associated Press tallied his long list of medals and most dominating track and field athlete of the 1990s." "I can do better," The hike was widely expected, but Fed officials surprised analysts by hinting in anticipation of the move, remained stable, and bond prices inched up. The New York Times warned Congress not to sabotage the Fed's actions by States. They stashed cocaine and marijuana in food trays and used their government order excused most followers saying they had been brainwashed into countries decried the way he manipulated the discrepancies between the two A Federal judge ruled that the program's publicly financed scholarships to parochial schools violate the separation of church and state. City officials school classes today. Critics and supporters of vouchers wondered whether the After vowing never to discuss his drug history, he admitted that he had "made some mistakes" but said he would have passed a 15-year background check in entitled to know about felonies committed by a candidate. Time 's John largest financial institution. Bank executives hope the union will realities of an overcrowded market, massive bad loans and woefully low profit provides new evidence of a common ancestor of gorillas, chimps, and humans. addicted to being online. "Marriages are being disrupted, kids are getting into trouble, people are committing illegal acts," warns its author. "If you go back far enough, I guarantee that the defenders of cultural normalcy were cookies, really. I shaved my beard and stopped wearing hats." Who said this care. What matters is that he can win this, and we're backing him all the loaves and fishes. Knowing he had lost his grip on the crowd when they inquired what was for dessert, he decided to make a radical change in his "Every time I have gone up there, I have gotten the sense that they like me. I think they like what I did with New York." (Fun With Prepositions: Instead of "with" New York, substitute "to.") Like him they may, but have any of them sentinel of an enchanted world, and judges when it's safe to open up a trade route. Her judgment has not always proven correct, but right now it is questing but always true to herself. Even at her most spectacularly styled, she ethic of showmanship, she seems exceptionally real." (Fun With Objects: Was promote his old brand, and they are allowing him to use his name for his own squeezed a few cheap laughs out of a pamphlet for the Society for the Environmentalism," for which you were invited to provide even cheaper editorial calls for more investment in international family planning. Encouraging smaller family size will boost economic progress in the developing nations whose populations are still exploding. sign. Weak commodity demand and a strong dollar are staving off inflation, but in golden light. The issue is stuffed with tribute ads, including shoemaker essay reflects on hate, describing it as a personal psychological reaction to idiosyncratic experience. It cannot be outlawed. We can only overcome hate by tell guys where to take a date, by convincing venture capitalists to front money, hiring tech experts to write code, working 17-hour days, and bedecking have a high risk of developing diabetes, and prenatal trauma can impede brain development. The link between womb conditions and adult health undermines morality, and opening a dialogue with other religious leaders. (Click for a essay bewails the absence of "political pizzazz" in presidential campaigning. Since the electorate is relatively sanguine, the candidates are relatively lethargic. The public longs for a deft campaigner who doesn't seem prepackaged. golden opportunity to define themselves against Pat's brand of pitchfork voice of isolationism and outrageously argues that the West instigated war with recently declassified documents by offering this personal anecdote: "My residence had just been broken into by six students angry about beef quotas. They tried to burn my house down. And I thought, 'God Almighty, if they get "We deal in the basics, and all those basics are necessary like to smile also but not when I have to be patient. Then I frown a news for an audience that watches the economy as if it were sports. Both sports and the stock market are essentially dramatic events, that is, events whose illusion of deeper understanding. Many people, particularly many retired people, begin their day by checking the box scores of yesterday's action on one's financial circumstances, but watching them offers a fan's pleasure. How did the team do last night? And following the market gives that intensified enjoyment that all sports gamblers know: It's a lot more exciting to watch when we've done your balsamic glazed onions, and they were fantastic." other into ersatz insensibility, and it was fantastic." Or perhaps he woman, more than a year after the death of his wife, but he's open to the whose name didn't actually come up in the interview. political parties welcome an alliance with hers but, if I can read between the Republicans on the budget bill, and encourages you to make up some kind of stability as a chance to make progress on human rights. But is it? No. commercial for "Sugar Coated Toxic Waste and Baby Seal Bits" breakfast cereal. Or perhaps that was just an acid vision I had. Either way, bummer. find similar but genuine bits of evidence that this magical (and turbulent) Agriculture Minister Nick Brown for his "personal decision" to boycott French the interests of neither country to embark on a new Hundred Years' War. ban on French food imports, the paper nevertheless urged consumers to buy see sense," it said. "If we stop eating French apples, the pips will soon start to squeak on the other side of the Channel." In an unusually outspoken editorial word for it." But the FT was also against bans on foreign food imports, damages from the principal companies involved in the production of GM seed crops. Targets of the actions on behalf of farmers in the United States, Independent said in an editorial, "This legal action may be the best way to force the food companies to do what they should have done from the start: prove that their innovations are in the public interest." a pledge never to have children. They will also have to agree to have their current and future sexual partners registered and monitored by the medical authorities, to "use barrier contraceptives consistently and for life," and never to give blood. Because of a shortage of human organs, the government has has a herd of "humanized" pigs at the ready. But the authorities plan to introduce the stringent safeguards to ensure that pig viruses do not spread to humans, the paper said. So far, nobody has applied for a pig organ transplant implemented to prevent the "human blueprint" becoming the private property of a few corporations. It said the company "stunned the scientific world" by said. "It could also open up limitless opportunities to influence human any foreign interference in its internal affairs. The president reiterated that refuses to be identified with Holocaust revisionists but is in other respects shifted to the inadequacy of rescue efforts, the difficult conditions for armaments, of not having "the forethought to stockpile the heavy equipment contrasted the armed forces' success in battling the failure to help quake victims: "It turned out that while they could assault the 1980s, which have been blamed for the quake's massive death toll, represent Turkey's "attempt to escape from stagnation and backwardness by letting private enterprise rip." During this building boom, "Many people got rich quick, many corruptly. But Turkey had taken a great, stumbling stride towards 'modernity,' as "the people who carry within them the potential to bring about real changes for the better after this catastrophe." The leader concluded, "It's hard not to revolution, in which these new social forces would take the political power to which they are entitled. Only they can complete the transformation of Turkey Post praised the response of emergency services staff to the incident, the paper said that the prompt response undoubtedly saved lives. But the same paper reported a contradictory sentiment from one passenger, a directing people to come to help. It sounded like they were not familiar with on pay raises has brought about its first showdown with public sector unions. A participation of unions for nurses, courts and prison staff, police, and teachers. Essential service providers who are forbidden to strike are expected united unions across the ideological and race spectrum for the first time since military has "worked with militia groups to sabotage" the upcoming vote for election is full of intimidation and it is not fair and there is retribution in the week of the recent solar eclipse have gone missing. Owners believe the birds were confused by the blackout. One pigeon fancier told the paper, "We don't know for sure whether the eclipse has scrambled the birds' brains. But whenever the sun and moon are in close proximity we have a very bad race with basis for both sides of the debate. But a layperson might be confused Journal editorial page, rather pathetically, has declared this a claim intellectual vindication have become increasingly desperate in recent seems so funny (yes, I think it's funny, too). Maybe it has something to do with the way they talk, eh? But when it comes to international monetary the trends, that demonstrates by example the hollowness of the conventional sharply limited, partly by government regulations, partly by the memory of defaults and expropriations in the '30s. And most economists who thought about the international monetary system took it for granted, explicitly or implicitly, that this was the way things would continue to work for the capital across that long border with the United States had never been own monetary policy. Unwilling to become a monetary ward of the Federal fluctuating exchange rate are the norm, but in those days they seemed contributions, how monetary and fiscal policy would work in an economy in which capital flowed freely in and out in response to any difference between interest rates at home and abroad. His answer was that it depended on what that country did with the exchange rate. If the country insisted on keeping the value of its currency in terms of other nations' monies constant, monetary policy would become entirely impotent. Only by letting the exchange rate float would proposing the concept of the "impossible trinity"; free capital movement, a fixed exchange rate, and an effective monetary policy. The point is that you can't have it all: A country must pick two out of three. It can fix its exchange rate without emasculating its central bank, but only by maintaining controls on capital flows (like China today); it can leave capital movement free but retain monetary autonomy, but only by letting the exchange rate stabilize the currency, but only by abandoning any ability to adjust interest Should it explicitly or implicitly give up on having its own currency and go on price worth paying for the ability to actively stabilize the domestic economy? The debate over how to define an "optimum currency area" is an endless one, but area would typically be high internal mobility of workers, that is, the willingness and ability of workers to move from slumping to booming regions. statement of the issues and the way he tried to resolve them were at the time. contemporaries. They were still thinking in terms of a controlled world, a world where money moved where and when the authorities told it to move. He was thinking in terms of a world where money moved freely and massively to wherever neighbor, lived in anything like the world he envisaged; today we all do. And Journal thinks is on its side? Well, economists do change their styles and early papers were crisp and minimalist; they looked forward with remarkable discursive, one might almost say rambling, and often reveal a sort of hankering for the lost certainties of the gold standard. (And yes, he has said a few economics.) The precocious theorist anticipated the 1990s; the elder statesman the mountains. I think I could even live here. Why would anyone not want to floated down a long, steep grade. The mood was mellow. Multicolored pines lined twilight careening at crazy angles. Snow glistened on a perfect peak. I noticed a billboard that said, "Coach Factory Outlet. Left at Next Exit." I laughed and pointed it out. "Look at that. Isn't that ridiculous? What a cheap commercial of stony purpose on her face. As we approached the Coach store, she spotted the Balboa discovering the Pacific. As it turns out, E had never seen a factory outlet store before. The next three hours were lost. But E seemed ecstatic. molesters like a magnet? It must have something to do with her deceptively surly young men attached to this diplomatic outpost spent their afternoons exposed himself to E while she was walking to the store. Oddly, E argued for giving this guy the benefit of the doubt. She said his penis might have just fallen out of his pants by accident. I thought otherwise. On this trip already, night clerk phoned our room "just to check and see if everything is all The point is, E realizes she's prey, and is usually afraid to be alone for a second. Last night, we went to a 7-Eleven down the type, seemed disturbingly interested in E. And E seemed disturbingly interested in him. Later, she insisted on returning to the 7-Eleven, alone, "for the glow of the screen, I can see her chuckling to herself. And once when she made a phone call, she asked me to leave the room. Toward me, she's pleasant separates faith from reason. But when I read a scientific paper titled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," I confess I felt a first book of the Bible contains embedded codes that predict events that long postdate its writing and that these codes are, statistically speaking, "not due paper's hypothesis, if correct, would all but prove both the existence of God circumcising his son until the paper was published. It spawned a runaway best mathematicians worldwide. What made the codes especially eerie was that, while scientists were almost universally skeptical of them, nobody could figure out journal. As long as that remained the case, even rationalists like me had to consider the possibility that science could support the most radical religious convincingly debunked them, and the former editor of Statistical Science who published the original paper has endorsed their rebuttal. For those of us who were freaked out by the codes, the new paper comes as a relief. The codes' rebuttal has taken so long because the science original paper sought to test the anecdotal observation that pairs of conceptually related words tend to appear in close proximity to one another in the Torah, coded in what are called equidistant letter sequences. An ELS is a string of letters compiled by pulling letters out of a text at regular intervals. For example, if you start with the first letter of this paragraph and read only every fourth letter, you will find the word "TORT." Every text contains many such "codes," so the question was whether the observation of codes with apparent meaning in Genesis was a deliberate message from the Rips used a computer to search Genesis for ELS containing the names of famous rabbis and their dates of birth or death. These rabbis were all born long after Genesis was written, so their names could not have been encoded on purpose by closer to their own dates than to the others'. This seemed to show that someone note, the codes are hypersensitive to small changes in the data. Excluding only critique focuses on the manner in which the rabbis were named in the therefore, required choices about what names to use for each particular rabbi. each rabbi, but the rebuttal paper argues that the process used by this consultant was sufficiently subjective as to bias the results. (There is something indisputably bizarre in the spectacle of distinguished mathematicians In order to demonstrate that "data tuning" alone could list of appellations for the rabbis, a list they describe as "of quality co. sought to produce the most accurate list they could, using their own consultant. With this list, they found no statistical evidence of codes in any chose which rabbis to include. The rabbis were supposed to be chosen by an out, rabbis were included who should not have been, while others were wrongly excluded. Birth and death dates were also flawed. The authors collected dates from a wide variety of sources, but apparently did not establish firm rules to of the experimental design (such as the way distances were measured between experimental method, the choices of dates, and the way dates were expressed, The rebuttal authors note still other problems in the original paper. The Torah's text has varied over the centuries, and when the strongest results. The authors also note that even using the flawed took place, or ask whether the tuning was consciously done. But they conclude permitting the authors' biases to corrupt the results. "All of our many earnest experiments produced results in line with random chance," they conclude. "In light of these findings, we believe that [the] 'challenging puzzle' has been solved." For all but the true believers, the publication of the rebuttal paper But for the true believers, of course, the phenomenon was always more than a mere "puzzle," and they are not about to roll over. Rips was sufficiently enraged by Statistical Science 's acceptance of the rebuttal paper that he retained a lawyer, who advised the journal that "the accusations Rips sought a delay in publication and the chance to respond to the critique in consider publishing his formal comments in a later issue.) Rips contends that the rebuttal paper misrepresents the original experiment's methods and that it stronger than ever. I find the paper by the critics more than extremely always be able to find ELS that impress them. But there's a difference now. To believe today that the almighty wrote the Torah is once again, as it should be, her selection as leader of the Congress Party in Parliament, the paper said. "There is bitterness in the party over her complete failure to bring in votes," propaganda against her foreign origin are visibly worried about this factor took their toll." But it said it is unlikely that anyone will be so rash as to run against her for the party leadership. "In the longer term, the party may market showed yesterday, there are some grounds for hoping that the new administration may enjoy a longer life than its predecessors. If so, it will who was the master of the ring during his heyday, is now a walking shadow of He may have been the greatest, but now he's reduced to a pathetic bundle of formally warned last March about problems with the visibility of a signal at fraud, and the chief architect of a systematically hypocritical and deceitful dirt from head to toe. Up to the president! It has come to the point where they spouses, that their loved ones were having an affair together. In their grief, they start an affair. Despite the strength of the star power, the reviews are Pictures). Outstanding reviews for this independent film based on the life of when her secret got out. Critics can't say enough good things about the film: the big screen. The biggest problem: The character is "so sad and helpless, so hard to like, so impossible to empathize with, that watching it feels like an because she shows her underpants a lot." Reading further, one questions his kilt aflutter and the little white delta of her panties flapping before the world, we sense someone profoundly disturbed yet poignant at the same time." steal and sell the plutonium of the title in order to support his family after he gets radiation poisoning, to a girl who is convinced there is a link between laudatory review that "a surplus of sobriety may account for what weaknesses first offering in five years. The double album is "a musical treasure trove. His knack for pop hooks and appealing beats in the midst of all the aural from the album on the official Nine Inch Nails Web site.) himself a radical makeover complete with soul patch, eye makeup and, most friend and her husband came to visit me for a few days. This is a friend I have for home, I found some damage had been done that they hadn't told me about. The turntable in the microwave was chipped, and the toilet in their bathroom was clogged. Neither of these things in and of themselves bothers me. What does bother me is that this lifelong friend didn't have the courtesy to let me know what had happened. Should I just let these things go in the name of preserving however, depend on how strongly you feel about letting them know you know. If you were sad they didn't feel close enough to have mentioned the microwave or the sluggish toilet. To lighten it up, you could add that all the repairs have been made, and you look forward to their return visit. Think about it for a few moved in with us. They were relocating from another state and needed a place to live "for a few months" while they got to know the area, and found jobs and a place to live. They agreed to pay half the rent and attendant bills. with us, and they never pay anything on time. They seem to think that junk food qualifies as their half of the groceries. My husband and I keep the house supplied with good food, but we can't afford to support two grown adults. We have made subtle hints and mentioned that they need to start looking for their own place. But they aren't catching on. How do we tell them to get out of our house without causing family problems? We've always been close and don't want to lose the friendship. They are using us, and I need help with this. indeed, using you, but you've permitted it. Family problems seem a small price house as a fire hydrant. Subtle hints won't cut it, guys. You've got to insist course. They have overstayed their welcome and must be told to leave. Unless a deadline for their departure. And do ask for a settling of accounts, as per someone before getting engaged? My girlfriend, the love of my life for the last five years, recently broke up with me because she felt our relationship had gone on too long without any sign of future commitment. I always intended to marry her and always reminded her of this when the topic came up. She feels that if I truly loved her I would take her now before anyone else did. Since we seersucker suit and was wondering if you could give me some fashion tips on the types of shoes, ties, shirts, and belts I should wear with it. bandwidth, by all means wear any shoes, ties, shirts and belts that don't clash damaging landings and falls during practice. Multiple surgeries have left me heels. I am short in stature, wear a brace on my right lower leg, and have four without the appearance of an obvious handicap. My question: Why do so many people take offense at my wearing pants to the many functions I must women wearing pants is incorrect is antediluvian. Even the stuffy dining rooms have been wearing them for years, so you are in good company. economist's economist, famous within the profession (when an economist uses the years old when his famous paper on the theory of the "second best" was published (click to read more about it), and we probably met only four or five times. But nonetheless there was a time, a couple of decades ago, when we were public, even among those who follow (or think that they follow) economic articles about some of the revolutionaries, and he's in the process of to correct some of the myths (click to read my article on the power of death is a good occasion for me to wax nostalgic, to recall what actually revolution, you need to grasp two related dichotomies. One is that between constant and increasing returns; the other between perfect and imperfect competition. Constant returns is the assumption that if you increase your inputs you will also double your output. Increasing returns, on the other hand, says that doubling inputs will more than double output. Perfect competition is the assumption that producers are like wheat farmers, who take Perfect competition and constant returns go together like cookies and milk; without constant returns, the assumption of perfect competition becomes very hard to swallow. The reason, basically, is that when there are increasing returns an industry will tend to become dominated by at most a few large players, and these players are bound to realize that they have their common interest to agree, at least tacitly, to set prices high, and that it is in their individual interest to cheat on that agreement and undercut their rivals. Is the eventual result a stable cartel, a perpetual price war, or an irregular alternation between the two? Hard to say. But what has long been clear to economists is that increasing returns normally lead to imperfect competition, and that imperfect competition can be a messy and intractable assumed constant returns and perfect competition, and economists tended to avoid questions where increasing returns or imperfect competition were Most economists, I think, understood that increasing returns are sometimes important, and a few people did try to take them into account. (In my But useful theorizing in complex subjects such as economics is always a matter of choosing the right strategic simplification, and for a long time it seemed percent of the time, it would be a blessing if politicians could understand what's right about the constant returns model, not what's wrong with it. economics was wearing thin. Exactly why is hard to say. I don't think you can claim that returns were less constant or competition less perfect in the real driving force was the field's internal intellectual logic: Economists had answered most of the interesting questions they could ask in the old framework returns. And so they were finally ready to try something different. of those who was driven to increasing returns. In the 1960s he had introduced a seemingly obvious but highly useful twist to the analysis of consumer behavior by pointing out that what consumers often want is not so much a specific product as a particular bundle of characteristics. To take a modern example, what business travelers care about in their notebook computers are low weight, long battery life, and high computing power, rather than the logo on the case. from another is where in this "characteristics space" they are located. But in that case, why doesn't the market produce every possible notebook? (Much as I better word processor, for which I would happily sacrifice something else.) The answer, of course, is increasing returns: To proliferate varieties (and hence to produce each variety at a smaller scale) means to increase costs. usual problem: Increasing returns mean imperfect competition, and in general are two kinds of economists: those who look for general results and those who look for illuminating examples. And more or less suddenly fell into the second group; they decided that while a general theory of how imperfect competition examples of how it might work. How does the market for an industry with The point was to find stories that hung together, not determine once and for tell illustrative stories rather than produce theorems, economists could write about exciting topics that had been off limits: predatory pricing, strategic investment to get the jump on competition, technological races, struggles to about the "new economy" that trendy writers proclaim as a radical departure from conventional economic thought was, well, already in the textbook. Among other things, someone was bound to notice that the interaction between increasing returns and product differentiation could help seemingly similar countries. In the late '70s three people independently wrote yours truly; and the "new trade theory" was born. A few years later economists change and economic growth, giving birth to the "new growth theory"; and the inexorable working of the law of diminishing disciples. There was a deeper problem: The new ideas were immensely liberating, but at some point you can get too liberated. In international trade, people started to joke that a smart graduate student could come up with a model to justify any policy; similar sentiments were felt in many fields. In short, we all got tired of clever analyses of what might happen; and throughout economics there was a shift in focus away from theorizing, toward data collection and careful innovation and intellectual excitement, when all of economics seemed up for "a poisonous mix of greed, liquor, jingoism, and bad taste," writes Frank humorless yelping, the way the sunlight turns his hair into an auburn cascade, the kooky little songs he sings in the shower, his tousled amorous look first White House Prayer Breakfast, the president said, "I have been profoundly moved, as few people have, by the pure power of grace, unmerited forgiveness through grace. Most of all to my wife and daughter, but to the people I work through the pure power of grace, what he was thinking. simply for the public relations," said the reverend with unaffected simplicity. "Camera crews? Really? Are those things on?" he did not add. festivities fast approaching, why not consider gifts that say, "I like you from shirt for counselors and mentors of teens! Purple, yellow, and green logo on Covers: "Beautifully designed, these book covers reverently portray the importance of a higher law in the lives of our school children. Allow your children to make a strong yet subtle statement and order a set today. Comes in covet his neighbor's ox, that will more than make up for his utter ignorance of and the next thing you know, they're peacefully resolving international believe this is the one where a bunch of women get liquored up and ask for Dole Campaign Cap. Embroidered Sanded Twill Low Profile Cap New Shallow where they're going wrong with the tone of this thing. it, but I surely avow membership in it more openly than most other economists argument endeared Herb to the many friends and admirers who mourn his death been mystified by international finance since I took a course in it at the disquisition on the International Monetary Fund and the sad state of the modesty. Herb well knew how keen was his intellect and how sharp his wit. And, not for Herb. He recognized, perhaps better than most of his economist them for most people has very little to do with politicians"). Contributors he sat for more than two decades, is not available on the Web. But anyone with access to back copies of the Journal should consult "The preference for marriages made in heaven, arranged by the participants, arranged through the personals column of New York magazine, or arranged by mothers, undertakes to provide "spouses of last resort." adventures as he was for new ideas. How many economists of Herb's distinction, accomplishments, and years would, for example, undertake to write for an online still would be those with the daring (and the sense of humor) to top off that original adviser to the public on matters of morals, manners, and might have guessed from the drawing of "Prudence" that accompanied the column if they hadn't already been tipped off by the tone). But Herb enjoyed it so And he did enjoy it. "One cure for unrequited love," Prudence reminded a lovelorn reader, "is requited love. There are other cures worried about being bad at small talk, Prudence counseled, "You are making too much of this. What everyone wants in a conversationalist is not a good talker still walk around a car to unlock the door for the woman he is escorting? Absolutely, Prudence replied, noting the opportunity thus afforded for "sweetly kissing her on the cheek. Modern gadgets will not do all that and real men don't want them to. Something has to be left for the men to do." As for the shy Prudence replied, "If that situation arises, you will have no problem. Perhaps you will 'have' to kiss her because she has kissed you. In that case your not be hesitancy about kissing but addiction to it." woman so valuable to the man whose hand or arm she is holding?" And in his exploration of the question, it was clear that he had in mind the wife with Council of Economic Advisers. He also included an aphorism of his own: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Sadly, that was true of Herb paints a distorted picture. To begin with, all transportation in the United involved in an automobile accident than a general aviation accident. vast majority of general aviation flights are flown under Visual Flight Rules, services that it doesn't want or need. Many small airports have control towers simply because of one or two airline flights a day. costs of providing air traffic control services to each segment of aviation are unknown because the Federal Aviation Administration does not have an adequate cost accounting system. But the costs imposed by general aviation aren't The bulk of federal airport grants go to commercial all trying to use the airport at the same time) and weather are the major and accident investigation a "subsidy" for general aviation is absurd on the face of it. It's an appropriate role for government to rescue its citizens, whether they be boaters, hikers, pilots, or airline passengers. And that rescue, more often than not, will be accomplished using general aviation. "hobby"; it's serious transportation that fulfills many vital needs in the carriers. At least three incidents that immediately come to mind involved Pan I believe that all three incidents involved fatalities; however, the vast landings and must be certified by the Federal Aviation Authority to fly over water. Cabin crews receive specific passenger safety training with emphasis on aircraft evacuation, since this is their primary area of responsibility. Flight deck crews do not focus on passenger survival because they are responsible for the overall aircraft systems operation and are the crew members least likely to airports are located around large bodies of water, both air crews and aircraft are certified with airworthiness certificates based on evacuation procedures database does not go back to the beginning of commercial flight, obviously, so conceivable that some accidental crashes into water upon landing or takeoff fuselage remains intact, but that is a big "if." Only military helicopter pilots get dropped in water as part of their actual training. of international carriers have shown that keeping the fuselage intact and the Republicans. However, he failed to address a gaping hole in the Republicans' tax cut plans that neither Democrats nor the media had pointed out: Namely, that a tax cut of the size proposed might stimulate the economy to the point that, however the debate about the projected budget surplus goes, a large tax cut will endanger low interest rates and thus the prosperity that makes the horse, water in a clay cup, dirt under the fingernails. The river forgets the fish and the winter sun slides beyond the far hills. All of them had mothers, and all the mothers sang while swimming and as the women sang for the clouds where the distance whispered a different dream delicate, confident paddling alongside their mothers always be nests, branches, the swaying and the saying. filmmaker, a wizard at selling a sequence, but he'll never make an entirely coherent movie until he learns to go deeper into his subjects instead of wider panorama for point of view, piling on perspectives until the picture becomes a the margins of this story. Here, men and women dress in polyester, line up to get into discos, snort cocaine, cheat on their spouses, and have sex with imperfect strangers. It's the most jittery of periods, both exhibitionistic and ocean of decadence like a toxic monster, a puritanical avenger. of the murders, where the combination of heat, terror of the .44-caliber hysteria. It doesn't do much for marriages, either. The film's dim protagonist at the end of the evening, he passes the spot where he parked for his quickie couple lie dead, their brains all over the dashboard. Spooked and stricken (that could have been him!), he staggers over to the car and touches the latest .44-caliber victims. (I kept waiting for the police to show up later at his door and announce that his fingerprints were on the bodies, but that touch must whatever ill will is in the air. As it happens, he's also the mildest, least their search for the serial killer, the local bully boys show a little too much fascist zeal, keeping tabs on people's movements and pulling strangers out of They're the kind of people who would have chased Lee out of their neighborhoods that white people deal drugs, too. He doubtless had to fight the urge to make who gives a tremulous and surprisingly soulful performance, the characters have the lynch mob, greedy to go after someone who's even more of an Other. The best reason to tell a story such as this would be to demonstrate that in the right circumstances, we could be infected by the same delusions and hunt for the same Says a woman who serves as the picture's lone voice of reason: "I thank God it is a white man who kills all of those white people. If it were a black man there would be a race riot." So much for empathy with the victims. For the last decade, Lee has been attempting to craft a new images seem cooked, even irradiated, and Lee brings out the eerie portents in the throbbing blandness of disco groups such as Abba. The pity is that when he does something well, he can't seem to control it and do it more selectively. and again, and the picture teems with conscious and unconscious echoes of It's just Spike flexing his cinematic muscles, showing how much montage he can bench press. Overambition in an artist is easy to forgive; what's less He doesn't seem to get that understanding is a byproduct of focus and not of sometimes it's fried chicken, sometimes it's pizza; frequently it's more than A martini should be gin and vermouth and a twist. That's it. There's no call and in the wider culture (if there is one), food is used as a metaphor for ideology (bread and roses; let them eat cake) and for character: Their attitudes toward eating reveal something, well, distasteful about President when the incredibly attractive couple in white are not actually in a gourmet frenzy, sex is simply food carried on by other means. And it really makes you DeLay's power is ladling out cash to those who please him. The chief than half the group's money. And those who supply the funds are not neglected "DeLay has long had a kitchen cabinet of lobbyists who meet with him campaign to fight trade unions through the innovative method of establishing a nonprofit corporation that can raise unlimited cash without disclosing donors, embarrassed ourselves at a funeral. Or borrowed company funds that we had every intention of returning, so there was really no reason to call the police. But Behavior Upon Viewing the Body for each of these religious faiths: cutting ahead saying, "I just have this quart of milk.") goofy grin on your face and sing him a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He would Stand quietly and then move on. (Pretty much the way the mayor orders A kiss is appropriate, but no tongue unless you were close before death. This is optional, but if it is a memorial service, there will be no body to How To Be a Perfect Stranger: a Guide to Etiquette in Other People's news items that sound taps for that turbulent decade, if you'll accept the idea that his pairing of "hip" and "respectable brands" travesties the spirit of that era, which might be easier to accept if you thought that he was on acid combination. I was out for three hours, during which Bob violated our carefully negotiated cassette agreement by playing two of his loud Germanic rock tapes carry this major dietetic innovation. The news is grim. There are approximately equally distributed, this means I only have a 1-in-32.8 chance of walking into welcome" is still the customary follow up to "Thank you." But here, when you Sometimes you get total silence. And the most common response is "Yup" or worse immodest, even aggressive, as if a huge favor has been done and is owed? (Indeed, the only accepted use of "You're welcome" seems to be as an actively thank you, you asshole.") Or does it just sound too formal? My own theory people as possible. Elaborate exchanges of respect imply a degree of Another disturbing trend: Bob has taken to removing progressively more of his clothing in my presence. The first night, he was walking around the hotel room without his shirt on. Then, the next morning, he casually mooned me. And yesterday, I looked up into the large mirror on our was an accident," he claimed. "Who knew the mirror was there?" The man is so playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. as a horse race ("win, place, and show") and noting that "no one's ever won the conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's "real winner." "outspent by millions of dollars." Her spokesman told reporters that "on a poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her "surprisingly" strong stories about whether her people would show up. She, therefore, I think, is the to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is every talk show, Dole vowed "to demonstrate that the candidate with the most shows) to "women who drive their daughters halfway across the state to shake my hand, a woman they dare to believe in." Newspapers hail Dole's female followers seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached "the first rung of candidates" the Christian right," establishing himself as "one of the winners," the "three or four" candidates who "got their tickets punched" to stay in the race. Talk fight for the leadership of the conservative wing." Dole, so he claimed underdog status on the basis of low name recognition, loyal base make him hard to write off as a candidate, his rivals have persuaded the media at least to write him off as a Republican by inferring that his low that if he prevails, either Bush or Dole will have vanquished the other in the "don't you have to face up to the fact, when all the other candidates decide decision to stay out, espoused a less sentimental philosophy: "You always want to fight on ground that is most favorable to you." For this, the media executed he has convinced the media that he has enough money and support in New and may well end up as the principal alternative to Bush. in which campaigns spent "millions" to "buy" votes. "My campaign theme is to try to reform the system that is now awash with money and the influence of rely on two other moral arguments. First, he'll claim that caucuses aren't triumph: He has conned the media into disbelieving his political calculations damaging his credibility, the more the field narrows to his advantage. establishment, led by Bush, and conservatives, led by himself. Dole will exploit feminism as well as feminine stereotypes, pitching herself as the Why do our hands have five fingers, no more, and no less? one I recognized, her face mild and familiar as bread. in the crystal of the watch I left there on the table. To a Friend Who Keeps Telling Me He Has Lost His Memory condemns the bill as "misshapen," "unaffordable," and says the killings were underplayed because they came too soon after last week's massacre, which was bloodier and involved wealthier victims. decision. But a steroid expert told the Associated Press, "I would have York Times relays that the holdup made the United Nations feel even more federal judge said the group acted within the boundaries of election law when spun it as a setback for the Federal Elections Commission and a possible boon reported that the coalition is faltering and was never as powerful as it pointed out that the film is valuable mostly for its licensing rights, which his wife and children to death, shot nine workers at day trading investment firms, and then committed suicide. He had previously been suspected in the to obey this court's discovery orders." "We accept the judgment of the court Dow Chemical will buy rival Union Carbide. The Wall Street World Wrestling Federation is going public. "It's a collision of that the United States should have stayed out of World War II, they should listen to some of their own rhetoric about more recent foreign policy deceitfully conspired to get the country embroiled in a war it need not have she was "appalled." Over the past week or so, many Republicans have concluded not how different, but really how very similar they are to the foreign policy thinking that dominates the congressional Republican caucus. If you start with the foreign policy assumptions held by most Republicans on Capitol Hill, national interests after 1940--is not that far off the mark. country's national interests, did not have much trouble answering that few vital national interests beyond our own shores and still fewer outside our organizations imperils the national interest by threatening to drag the country into needless conflicts overseas. Another corollary is that mere humanitarian considerations should play little or no role in decisions about when to like what congressional Republicans have been saying since the end of the Cold war where we have no vital national interest at stake." House Majority Whip Tom leadership share the same underlying theory of the nation's foreign policy. Liberal internationalists believe that there is a moral dimension to our leadership in the international community. They also believe that international organizations, on balance, reduce future threats to our vital interests. This often means anticipating future threats at one or two stages of remove and recognizing that our values and our interests, though not identical, are not wholly separate either. But many prominent Republicans prefer a policy of avoiding international commitments and keeping a robust national defense in store for any power that directly threatens our territory or our citizens. Genocide in another part of the world may be tragic. Regional instability on some other continent may be something to keep an eye on. But unless our access to strategic natural resources is threatened or bullets actually start flying accurately notes, this isolationist mentality has deep roots in the Republican the early Cold War years. Before the advent of modern weaponry, one of the continental nation, flanked by two great oceans, gave us the luxury of doing great power status had made such thinking obsolete. But the impulse remains. It is actually one of the key motivators behind the conservative obsession with a The case for not acting until you have to was put most hard to see how anyone who seriously holds these views, whatever you call them, pushing something called "National Greatness conservatism," a program of to apply their beliefs to World War II, or politically foolish enough to curriculum. Individual schools will now decide whether to teach it or not. The New York Times predicts that the decision will discourage schools from teaching it, encourage creationists to introduce their own He also allegedly shot and killed a letter carrier. He told investigators "he variously tied the incident to recent spates of workplace shootings, school Justice Department for allowing civil liberties concerns to limit their Post focused on gun control, accusing Congress of neglect and empty shirts." "International Papers" to his drinking, his background as a Communist A tornado ripped through Salt Lake City, killing one and injuring hundreds. The National Weather Service pointed out how unusual it is its airspace. The New York Times worries about future "volatile confrontations" (read: nuclear warfare), and the Wall Street Journal Association. The Navy severed its ties eight years ago after reports of sexual abuse at the group's convention. The New York Times says the Navy's disclosure of tentative plans is intended to test public opinion for misdeeds with a final report to Congress. He told the Today show that the purpose of this report, unlike his last one, is to summarize his "pressure from national Republican leaders to head off a fratricidal battle breakup of Ma Bell but warns customers to check for hidden fees. and that they're "designed to please the hard right and force a confrontation York Times relays that the holdup made the United Nations feel even more Dow Chemical will buy rival Union Carbide. The Wall Street one of its streets after the most famous person who ever walked (or, in this case, took a midnight "jog") down it, but that's not how it works in Little Avenue." Hecklers offered derisive amendments: "Impeachment Avenue" was proposed. But the city board eventually compromised, renaming just the few Presidential Library that has. Since Little Rock beat out Hope and Hot Springs one local columnist noted, in Little Rock, even if they say it's not about building will be a boon to a town where the finest example of modern shows and a building that had a cameo in Gone With the Wind (not to Rock residents are embarrassed by Central High, the discomfiting monument to desegregation and the town's other claim to history, some are queasy about of inquiry revealed itself to Little Rock wiseacres: What's going to be in this But the library has provoked Little Rock not just because their mouths about the way the Little Rock board of directors arranged to pay after recovering from the initial euphoria over winning the big prize, Mayor jawbreaker, but officials had made a commitment. They hit upon the idea of issuing "parks revenue bonds," which didn't require voter approval, and pledging revenues from the city's golf courses, parks, and zoo to pay them down. The problem: Parks revenue bonds can only fund parks. Is a library a park? That depends on your definition of the word "park." The city called the library a "presidential park," and that took care of it. from the Little Rock zoo is another saga. For reasons too Byzantine to explain, it's the only unaccredited big zoo in the nation, and it could use a cash infusion. City officials are incredibly sensitive to the charge that they are reporters were warned in no uncertain terms that he was not to be asked about claiming the library land deal is an illegal tax because the city will have to appeal her case to the state Supreme Court. She has vowed to pursue the case to of the library, owns a piece of property in the presidential park and promises to fight the city's attempt to take his property by eminent domain. And then there's everyone else in the city. When the mayor forecasting a deficit because it is saddled with debt voters didn't approve, to fund a library they didn't request, for the president who didn't inhale. City "presidential library," and a deficit had been projected before the library in a May referendum. Since then, the city has frozen hiring and chopped undisturbed, covered with tall weeds and empty buildings, its intended purpose marked only by a banner that has grown progressively more tattered. The mayor originally hoped groundbreaking would take place six months ago, but it hasn't happened yet. Still, the library is beginning to seem less of an albatross. will spend in his home state once his library is completed. Perhaps he'll live in an upstairs apartment and huff around town in jogging shorts as he did when he was governor. The rumor of a Senate run seems dead, but a local satirical a lot of time in carrels poring over his papers, but even so, he has a good movie, my friend, and it is as true to the original text as it can be in our politically correct times. A more "feminized" society is not the repressed, knows how to treat his mother well is way sexier than a guy who thinks he's too look quite so hot in a loincloth by conventional standards of beauty. column by him in The Nation attacking my New Republic "Diarist" did not point out any factual inaccuracies in my Diarist and since he defended persists in depicting me as having repudiated my own article, I feel obliged, for what it's worth, to note that I think it holds up perfectly well. crediting him with sensibly refusing to defend what was clearly a shoddy and indefensible piece of work. I thought he was showing some class. objections to his Diarist "trivial" and "silly." Let's say he's right. Why, pathologically suspicious" on the same page? Why did even the venerated "trivial" and "silly" to merit a response as well? Or was a strategic silence action. After all, the previous Republican administrations had sent troops into particularly after a failed attempt at removing him from office. One weapons but not sent our troops. Imagine if the United States had adopted this expected to pay the price not only of our freedom, but of the freedom of the possibility of this expanding throughout the region as everyone in the atrocities? Were they going on before the bombing started? Do we have proof of that their cities, homes, and factories were getting bombed, and their brothers to run the following excerpt from the book, so that readers can judge for themselves. We are delighted to oblige. Click for the excerpt. book apart to see if he'd won. Printing with disappearing ink that lasts exactly one semester would also discourage the used book market. But instead of running lotteries or using disappearing ink, most publishers make used textbooks obsolete by periodically releasing revised editions. Did I mention that the fifth edition of my textbook is forthcoming next year? discourage the used book market is that they prefer to get paid every time a student buys a book. But by that logic, you should never sell your house when you can rent it: Why get paid only once when you could get paid every month? The logic is wrong because the sale price is likely to be far higher than the monthly rent. And the logic is still wrong when applied to textbooks, because the sale price for a book that can be resold is likely to be far higher than As long as it's cheaper to produce one book than three, the publisher should That's why economists are generally skeptical about allegations of "planned obsolescence." Every few years, someone claims that the technology to keep us coming back for more light bulbs. Likewise, Ann designed to run so women will need a new pair every two weeks. obsolescence? No, it means that planned obsolescence occurs only under special conditions. Mistrust, for example, is a special condition. If a publisher says, student might well respond, "How do I know you won't bring out a new edition next year and undercut my resale market?" Unless the publisher can quell such doubts, students won't pay premium prices for books with lasting value, so market, forced to buy the books their professors assign. But there must, nevertheless, be some upper limit on their willingness to pay; otherwise, textbooks would sell for an infinite price. And whatever the upper limit is, it will always be higher for a book that can be resold than for a book that planned obsolescence, customers have demanded it, and firms have provided it as with the equivalent of either insurance (against the prospect of losing your entire year's supply of hose at once) or a loan (by allowing you to spread out What brings all this to mind is the recent controversy over don't reproduce so that farmers have to buy new seeds each year. From the farmer's point of view, the opportunity to buy infertile seeds can be a great for new seed each year, which insures you against the possibility of a Don't be. Surely farmers are willing to pay much more for fertile seeds than design. Like mules, they're naturally infertile. Taking its lead from the infertility gene might "leap" from its seeds to fertile seeds in adjoining farms and eventually render those fertile strains infertile. Such hypothesized contamination is a legitimate concern and quite plausibly a sufficient reason opportunity to provide some socially desirable planned obsolescence. Actually, the article fails to include one critical campaign for the rights to the domain name. When they refused, he set up an this, and since the campaign couldn't buy it, they decided to get rid of it. Funny, I thought that politics and campaigning were about freedom of speech and the ability to compete. The Bush campaign has a sweet monopoly on that. and desist letter to any articles remote to the subject. publish a sales pitch under the guise of analysis. This column is tantamount to Your comments about weather hysteria were generally right on, but I felt your comments about the role of the Web in promoting that hysteria missed the point. Access to weather information on the Web is a giant leap forward in weather media because it allows one to avoid the hype and hysteria with which the general news media covers extreme weather. Check out information is straightforward, but interestingly displayed. I could track the sound of the wind. Weather sites on the Web eliminate the media middleman, A conservative shows genuine compassion and he gets called a wimp!? Maybe he should have called a news conference and told the wounded to "put some ice on it." Here's a news flash: Conservatives are human too. They have wives, children, pets; they love and make love, have gardens, go missed without the Enquirer this month, from the detailed story of the wedding of a woman missing the entire lower half of her body (she walked up the aisle on her hands, with the garter concealed under her sleeve) to the Perhaps most important, it's reassuring to know that all made from inking a person's posterior. "[It] goes right back to the time of leads the pack of celebrities having meltdowns over seemingly innocuous slights this month. The Enquirer reports that while shooting a movie in chicken, French fries, and coleslaw out the door of his trailer, splattering a latest film because she was unhappy with the wig she was supposed to wear, says because she refuses to conceal the "unsightly" bags under her eyes, claiming like a spoiled brat and an ingrate," says a set insider. for an overnight trip." And the Globe felt compelled to point out that confirmed to the Star that Stone's eyes were "puffy from lack of sleep. his bedside with "bloodshot" eyes and makeup "smeared from crying." The who has been "sitting at [his] bedside clutching Martin's limp hand and praying vertebrae fracture that the tabs fear may leave her unable to walk. But at and makeup. The Star reports that she has been greeting hospital visitors in a "glamorous pink chiffon negligee" and is being pampered "with her favorite soaps and oils" by "three specially trained nurses." too inconsequential to mine for dramatic potential, Friends star impaired, but we raised our eyebrows just a tad at the Star 's assessment that it was simple vanity about wearing thick glasses that put Cox under the blindness," which included the touching detail that Cox awoke from the was "so moved by [her] joy" that he began to cry as well. The Enquirer reports has amassed an impressive collection of eyeglasses belonging to dead Her favorites, the story says, are the glasses belonging to her late mother, apparently because of their almost meditative powers. "I like to put them on glasses, which once belonged to her beloved late father. show, we thought we'd highlight National Enquirer columnist Mike hypothesize which members of the royal family might have been Your Liver' was the program, and the problem was that, according to Sir John, 'It tastes yucky.' When it was pointed out that there are starving children in many ways, so alike. Both are old, both are revered, and as a result, people tend to focus on the highbrow exploits of both, while discreetly ignoring the and get high marks for whenever it hosts, say, a monthlong exhibit on the hardships of the pilgrims. But, let's face it, a disproportionate number of participants aren't so kind.) One might think they'd team up, to feature a consist of a panel discussion followed by the distribution of bits of liver. say nothing of the geese. Seems to me that an equitable compromise would be to abilities of News Quiz's crack research team but given the recent trouble over Great Lakes' greatness, nitpicking seems to be this summer's thing. Your answer was filled with people watching a bloodless rodeo last weekend. As someone who visited the Big O that it was a bloodless bullfight. To be more exact, it was Is your home one of them? And if not, can you figure out which of the following "High Impact": Somebody is threatening to kill the mayor. doesn't. So instead, they spend the week catching up on paperwork, cleaning up their desks, and going home a little earlier than usual. Participants are invited to find, in an actual newspaper or magazine, a less enticing headline. The deadline, which had been originally announced as noon ET intuitive artists from hacks and "players" is their difficulty doing even mediocre work when their cylinders aren't firing. In the absence of true inspiration, they can't fall back on a crafty understanding of what the audience wants because they don't really know what the audience wants. They follow their instincts and pray that they'll connect. When they don't, the of people seeing this dud satire and concluding that he has lost his way. More to the point, I don't like the thought that he has lost his way. string of recent triumphs, Jack decides to introduce his old buddy to his afford to pass up a chance to get his "edge" back, especially with a wife be ready to work at whatever hour she feels the urge to inspire him. conversation with uncomprehending or contemptuous superiors. The message is that there's no escape from the ignominy, not even through the (often lame) he makes the long, grueling hike through the studio compound, and a passing hasn't seen his famous cousin in a year and doesn't even know what he's prolonged and stylized until it turns into Theater of the Absurd. The universe exists to humiliate Brooks' protagonists, to remind them of the precariousness the permanence of a relationship, the support of a mother, the benign regard of however, the masochism feels a little too reflexive, and the picture's flatness gets flatter by the minute. Brooks is baking with dead yeast. As it turns out, the movie isn't about the mystery of creativity but rather the New Age idiocy children; they get worried that they're not going to get those jobs anymore, so they start writing things that maybe they don't love or they're not close to." His screenplay ideas in the company of the muse are pathetically feeble, and Brooks, who is often accused (wrongly) of playing himself, else to account for this bland, pasty, not terribly funny protagonist? The urgent babble, in which pleas are made and then restated and then turned inside out in a way that brilliantly (and hilariously) distills neurotic thought into himself, but he's still an idealist who boldly attempts to live out the perhaps Brooks conceived of The Muse as a movie about the creative think they want and what they actually need. But the characters in The encounter until the movie seems populated by pod people. A hint that something Here she starts promisingly, looking odd and imposing in her caftans, childishly impervious to the absurdity of her demands. But she's to be funny: She's just a narcissistic dope, and you come to feel contempt for turn, but he's acting with his tan. The only scene that completely works is obviously shares his protagonist's insecurity about his position in the another film), but the two have little in common where it really was less interested in jokes than in the desperate, needy impulse behind the jokes. As a writer and director, he has been less preoccupied with gags than with the fear and helplessness out of which they spring. How could he possibly that he'd have to do it his way, working outward from the bone. Maybe it's reassuring that The Muse is so bad, since a lot of other people could have made it (and made it better). Maybe Brooks' muse is showing him what happens when you satirize people who are so far beneath you. march. "Nobody is barred from being in the parade. It's completely open to all finally brought the Piet over to the United States, they didn't put it on a float and trundle it down Main Street; they displayed it in the reverential hush of the World's Fair. The statue sat; the audience moved, crowds stroll past the balloons while they're being inflated. The next morning, there's a traditional parade, with Huge Pneumatic Licensed Characters dragged past cold, immobile spectators, lined up 10-deep at the curb, unable to see cultural celebration, and a chance to buy inexpensive socks. Viva! protest but as psychological distress. "You should be able to march as the mayor of New York City anyplace you want, and if people can't deal with their own anger over that, that's really something emerging from inside them," he entirely disingenuous. His policies toward the gay community have been Yorkers can now come together to boo the mayor following yesterday's corporations, squandering public money and shifting the tax burden to smaller commanding your own battle tank group. Simple enough for youngsters to operate COX FREE FLIGHT HELICOPTER, ATTACK COBRA $29.99--Believed to be particularly effective when parked near the combat zone. invites participants to devise a sequentially trumping trio, like this one: academic racket, or with kids long out of college or not long out of diapers, it might seem a trifling matter. But to anyone with an abiding interest in higher education, the stakes don't get much higher. Because the fiddling charge academia, few things cause more consternation than an outsider using numeral universities rely on similar measurements to rate their applicants. Here's the deal. Many educators say it's absurd to think that the intangibles of a college education can be reduced to mere numbers, and Report has been providing kids and their parents a way to assess the most important factor in choosing a college: academic excellence. Obviously, that's not the only thing to think about when selecting a school. But millions of people find the magazine's assessments useful. And it's a measure of the seriousness with which they're taken that deans and admissions officers compete fiercely to better their schools' rankings from year to year. he writes, "fiddled with the rules" in preparing this year's college rankings. Fair enough. We welcome challenges to our methodology and writes, the magazine's editors generated a sense of "surprise" by toppling last first place. "Nobody's going to pay much attention" to the magazine's rankings, year after year." Ergo, the magazine "fiddled" the thing to generate a bit of mathematical and statistical methods in the field of economics to verify and rankings have virtually nothing to do with economic theory. One may posit that a mind used to grappling with the kudzu of econometrics is more than up to the task of dissecting something as relatively straightforward as college mark? The magazine's methodology for determining the rankings is based on a manages to misapprehend even the most basic of these. The magazine, he says, rates schools on "average class size." Wrong. It's the percentage of classes alumni giving." Sadly, the econometrician gets it wrong once again. The is not until he is well launched on his wrongheaded bill of particulars that News keeps changing the rules simply in order to change the results," he writes. No matter. The charge is leveled, and like a parched man finally led to success of the magazine's rankings "actually depends on confounding most peoples' intuition" about which colleges and universities are the best. Had he Institute of Technology and others that virtually any expert would number among One week ago, I wrote an in these pages criticizing that the rankings suffer from a serious conceptual flaw. inadvertent misunderstanding of my first gripe. They essentially say there's there's something clearly fishy about this particular jump. The editors said that standardization would be unfair. Now, two years later, the magazine performs a complete about face-- with no mention of their idea of standardizing variables. The idea that they switched to this technique an inferior technique. Furthermore, "standardization" is not some man finally led to water"-- what on earth does this mean? --I stand word "econometrics." And the only statistical example I give is about statistical background, presumably to know where to begin his explanation. I pleased to hear this and flattered me that few reporters had similar grounding fiddles with the rankings to confound our intuition and sell magazines. Lastly, they seem especially proud of the fact that best." Well, one question: If the rankings just confirm intuition, then why buy him in a profile as an "insipid man who inspires indifference." But not for everyone. The Telegraph also said that his visit "is likely to rank with those of of the Queen's reign." It said it would be "the focus of large demonstrations furious and cut short his program, or whether he will ride out the protests as organizers told the paper. "If it is raining, we may not be able to do all of the World Trade Organization before the end of the year. The ambassador most successful joint venture we have ever done with China or anybody else." In FT said that since "the US consensus behind its role on the global quoted senior administration officials as saying that the situation was still "highly fragile." One said, "In some ways we feel like recovering alcoholics. States "must take further action to remove all the severe negative effects of great advantages for a country the size of China, but said he hoped that this generation would be able to protect its grandchildren from things on the Internet that "are not good." He also said that "no matter how quickly the internet develops, it can never take the place of the relationship between interviewers, Gates said that "none of the work being done on software today holds the potential to create a truly intelligent device," but he was less reassuring about protecting the young against stuff that was "not good." While good," he admitted that he didn't "have control over exactly how that's done." "quite impossible to reconcile this public Gates [fabulously rich, powerful, and therefore an object of much hatred] with the awkward, shy, nasal character Justice Department agreed to an independent inquiry still says it's unlikely that these devices caused the fire. Attorney General on which agents reportedly can be heard discussing the use of these devices. still responsible for maintaining peace on the island, for failing to respond York Times warned that international intervention might become -third of the Major League Baseball umpires lost their league. When the league accepted their resignations, they sued to block their removal. The union accepted their removal in a settlement but claimed victory The cryptic announcement by the toys' manufacturer sent collectors rushing to stores. The anxious take: The manufacturer's notorious quirkiness lends credibility to the announcement. The cynical take: It's a gene. Mice with the extra gene outperformed normal mice at learning and memory tasks, though the difference dissolved after a week. The media called the improved mice "smarter" and "geniuses." The findings, published in background. Under a plan being considered by the Educational Testing detractors called the plan an end run around affirmative action bans at state universities. Affirmative action opponents warned that any consideration of old spin: It's a threat to life, limb, and property. The new spin: It's a demoted. The New York Times wondered if she was "too young, too immature, too emotional and, yes, too female for the job she was assigned." The built by a former International Monetary Fund official. According to the States. They stashed cocaine and marijuana in food trays and used their government order excused most followers saying they had been brainwashed into probably serve less. Prosecutors from both countries decried the way he manipulated the discrepancies between the two legal systems. "rotter," a "love traitor," and a "repulsive pariah" for publishing a book cover editorial argues that the United States is an uncertain colossus, despite its military and economic dominance. The rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and cuts to international peacekeeping can't guarantee global stability by might alone: It must work with allies. new dean hopes to acquire the accreditation to award graduates official century. Each nation values liberalism in a different way. In nations such as article describes Big Sugar's stranglehold on public policy. Taxpayers support sewage, overpriced concessions, and acoustic atrocities. The crowd's attempt to raze the festival grounds symbolizes the collapse of communal bonds and appeal. The piece echoes the familiar line that party members are a nut stew of language in a generation. Teachers at a school for the deaf were so inept that the assembled kids improvised a complex sign system, demonstrating that language is innate, but requires community to grow. This is the first time cover story spends a week in a suburban St. Louis high but few shows are sophisticated enough to script love lives for their pay its talent decent wages. Comedians get a fraction of union scale, and even cover story argues that archeology casts authoritative doubt on creationism but corroborates key parts of the Bible. For instance, a editorial congratulates the Senate for killing the "arms control fantasies" of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It was an argues that peace activism helped win the Cold War. The nuclear freeze movement undermined support for an aggressive military buildup by emphasizing the cost doing business. Trade agreements and the tightening of capital markets have opened Japan to foreign investment. The Internet is energizing homegrown entrepreneurs and increasing the national appetite for business risk. megs of space on my hard drive, hogging memory, and taking forever to load! The toolbar buttons look like they were lifted from the cockpit of an F-16." My software today is not that it is bloated. The problem is that it's not Expeditions, industry has historically provided consumers with features to any different? Do you really think software developers add features just for fun, like some cackling tormentor? If only that were the case. Sadly, it is you, the customer, who demands bloat, forever clamoring for new features. Software companies take your wish lists seriously, and then make them happen. Now, I don't deny that software is getting, um, alarmingly Most computer users want to do fancy new things with their speedy faster. So if computers are getting more powerful, shouldn't we developers applications, be my guest. (Also, you lovers of legacy applications should know It is precisely because users can ignore the new releases on an upgrade to do the same computing as they're doing now, only with more the new (bloated) versions of software are meant for the new 400-megahertz in Word or the Journal feature in Outlook (that can slow even the fastest computer to a crawl). My advice to these complainers: Turn these features off Having praised bloat, let me confide that when I worked on routinely yelled hurtful things at me when I wrote indulgent, fat code, because his bosses wanted programs to load and work quickly. Outlook SWAT teams swooped down daily to reduce the size of our code. I remember endless hallway discussions about how to balance the demand for lean and quick code against the bloat required to add new and nifty features. (We were ultimately successful: improvement in performance and stability. You'll also see a lot more cool concise code and bloated code plays out under the threat of a deadline. If our software is occasionally too fat, we developers fall back on the same excuse "I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make handheld devices. They pack a lot a power into little boxes, but let's not kid anybody: Sometimes you can make do with a bicycle, but other times you need a I began this column with the provocative thesis that software isn't anywhere near bloated enough. By that I meant that if we software developers were really doing our jobs instead of resting and vesting functions of your telephone, television, and fax machine into one seamless all your correspondence, financial transactions, data searches, and phone conversations. Plus, it would be making smart connections between your data and of new Medicare benefits. Which side will prevail on these matters remains to be seen. But the underlying struggle to shape the terms of the debate remains money belonged to taxpayers, not "bureaucrats." Later, House Speaker Newt oblige the media and the public to look at every financial question from the standpoint of the government rather than the taxpayer. The Republican tax cut taxes themselves impose "costs" and "losses" on everyone who has to pay the news conference, he questioned how Republicans could "finance" their tax cuts. Words such as these dissolve the moral difference between giving money "back" it on to others instead. Once the question is framed as how to "finance" tax Who can spend it more wisely? Conservatives used to frame this question as a choice between government "spending" and private "investment." "Investment" meant the money was working and growing. "Spending" meant it was being wasted. language, is to "spend" it on tax cuts. To "invest" it is to allocate it to decisions appear as productive as corporate budget decisions. At his news markets." Adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare isn't additional spending; it's "modernizing" the program to meet future needs. whether to spend more money on programs but whether "to meet our basic responsibilities in education, defense, the environment," and other afford," since we must maintain "fiscal discipline." "We" refers, of course, to the government. "Afford" makes clear that it's the government's money and that tax cuts are a secondary and purely elective consideration. Our "responsibilities" come first, and to forsake "fiscal discipline" by cutting taxes would be immoral as well as imprudent. This spin keeps the alternative spin wins the issue of the day, but great spin goes further. It wins the war invisibly, by skewing the debate at such a deep level that the media can't see it. And it so permeates public discourse that even the opposition helplessly or presidential exploratory committee, he defended tax cuts by arguing that it was "compassionate" of political leaders "to give people more money." That's not a basketball, recalling his love of discipline, teamwork, and "the swish of the think up new ways of saying nothing while making it look like something. Leadership. A speech can set a direction, define an agenda, and explain what the candidate has done or would do. Instead of or will fulfill them. He promises to act on his "convictions" but doesn't say in the world." Rather than challenge his listeners or tell them where he plans to lead them, he says they deserve "leadership that respects the people as well as challenges them." Rather than say what he would do, he promises, "There are two kinds of politicians: those who talk and promise, and those who listen and that makes us feel rich inside as well as out," he argues. "The leadership that is called for at this moment goes beyond a presidency, and into every home and "feel rich inside," and why this is more important than rising incomes and problem is that you're too shallow to understand it. things. They do not measure what is in our heads and our hearts. They do not measure a young girl's smile or a little boy's first handshake or a grandmother's pride. They convey nothing about friendship or the magic of a good marriage or the satisfaction of a life led true to its own do with the presidency. But never mind. The point is that they can't be they're lacking today and that his presidency would restore them. unity," "confidence in our collective will," and "a prosperity that adds up to more than the sum of all our possessions." "A team is not just about winning," he adds. "It's about shared sacrifice; it's about giving up something small for yourself in order to gain something large for everyone. It's the same for our country." What is the "something large"? What does "unity" entail? What does touts his record of doing "things." In the Senate, he "reached across party lines to get things done. I attempted to do big things without ever losing sight of the little things." If elected, he'll "do some of the big things that things, and we will do them more thoroughly." And what exactly are these "large Reality. To those who suspect him of empty idealism, just common sense that we protect our natural world from destruction, and do what it takes to achieve racial unity? Isn't it common sense that all our economically? What others may call idealism is a common sense reality I know we point is that he will "do what it takes." Really. It's just common sense. "is not just an ideal to wish on. It should be a possibility available to all. encouragement, that sense of possibility to be a reality for everybody." Since him if he claims four years from now that he has made it possible again. president, he pledges to "set the table for future economic growth," "put every to bridge the divide of prejudice." What any of this means is left to the "character is where you find it." As a senator, "I tried to help people where they lived their lives." As president, he will "invest in our common future." So, if you want a president who invests in the past, finds character where it isn't, and helps people where they don't live, vote for someone else. after I spoke about political involvement, once again making our nation better, a woman came up to me and said, 'It all sounds so wonderful, if only it could system will let his vision come "true." This obscures a more sophisticated skepticism about whether he has a substantive vision to begin with, much less a skepticism. He's asking us to overlook it. And by planting what looks like a campaign, it turns out, isn't about the presidency. It's about campaigning. cleverly waiting to unveil his platform. Others infer that he's already mounting a brilliantly oblique attack on Gore. Both camps read insight into his every remark. If you don't recognize his wisdom, you must not get what the candidate is worthy of you, but whether you are worthy of your candidate. apparently grown tired of obsessing over just how skeletal the Ally record.) How about the Globe 's report that at the bash to celebrate her a "frantic food frenzy"; the paper even provides a helpful restaurant diary that details where she has been spotted and just what she has indulged in. The good news for all those who've been nailed by the tabloid fat police is that the Globe has the secrets of Sen. Ted self. Can it be coincidence that the Star claims it was a "wacky seaweed obsessing about who's eating what (check out the Globe 's scintillating take time to remember that it's wedding season. Royal wedding intrigue the National Enquirer had already reported that the honeymoon was "over" and that cracks were "already showing" in the marriage. Star --the Globe says that "no one was paying more attention" than air that a number of stars are flying back into their former lovers' become, because they are also talking remarriage, according to the The Globe stretches the reconciliation theme to new heights with a story suggesting that the "fates" are trying to bring John F. Martin. The Globe runs what it says is Martin's "open letter" to Shepherd, in which he pleads with her to "open [her] heart and do what's right" might have had a better chance of getting your money had the Globe not run a "World Exclusive" interview in which you're quoted disclosing proclivities. Keeping Tabs would never presume to speak for Ms. Shepherd, of The United States is suing major tobacco companies. The suit year, Congress rejected legislation that would have settled the government's government can't claim innocence after years of subsidizing tobacco and promoting overseas sales. The government's spin: Even if our hands are dirty, the industry should pay for the medical costs of its product. The industry forces are securing the region to make way for relief efforts for refugees narrowly passed by Congress, would have used the projected budget surplus to afford a return to "the failed policies of the past." Republicans miles behind a pickup truck before his head was torn off by a concrete culvert. The prosecution spin: The jury sent a message that not all the rubble. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless, and water, electricity, and food supplies are cut off on much of the island. Experts warned nationalists. He denied Republican allegations that the move was aimed Clemency is about justice, and the prisoners' punishments did not fit their crimes. The Republican spin: Clemency is about security, and the prisoners' that thanks to preparation by large companies and federal and state Confused computers could cripple basic services. This year's spin: Panicked the state now faces water pollution due to animal carcasses and sewage. Last with a consciousness of their nature as substitutes for their literal and hearer have ceased to be aware that the words used are not literal." Certainly we can consign all sports metaphors to the linguistic cemetery. And lacks direct knowledge, he has chosen the perfect suburban verbal style for this administration, an excellent advance on "soccer mom." Presumably, a committee before the summer recess begins at the end of this week. vowed to veto any tax cut of that size, saying it favors the rich over the poor, could drive the government into deficit, and fails to provide for urgent needs including Medicare reforms, education, and debt reduction. meaning of these figures of speech, each of which appeared in a recent Christian Coalition did not illegally distribute millions of voter guides meant "This is certainly another large piece of plaster which is falling off the compromise the natural sound of the voice and its natural projection." very active clergy, but we're not a bunch of ayatollahs." time the gangster tries to take the girl in his arms, she has to call the policeman to come save her. Our job is to get the girl married to the policeman. Then there is no danger, and the protection is permanent." and control over their artificial digits. "Although you could previously only move joints that were in the hand [as opposed to the fingers], the plastic in the legs of Barbie dolls allows patients to position fingers in different medical center prosthetics clinical supervisor, noted that the technique is an inexpensive way to provide articulation in a finger and that it will help prosthetic fingers become functional as well as cosmetic appendages. out the books that caused the controversy." While the library staff isn't our personal opinions, and you can probably guess what they are." unusual fossil skull, which may contain new clues about human evolution, was discovered in an Upper West Side curio shop. The New York Times reports that the skull arrived in the shop as part of a collection of rocks, minerals, and curios. The shop owner recognized its significance after he cleaned it and "Of course, it's only one individual, but it could represent a distinctive weighted box loaded with sensors. Anticipating the patient's regular tics, the researchers monitored how his grip on the sensor box changed as his arm twitched. They observed the subject adjusting his grip on the box just before experiencing a tic, indicating that at some level he was in control of his these tics, and these movements look normal and have all the same sort of response we would expect to see in voluntary movement." He also suggested that his findings may point the way toward behavioral therapy for the syndrome. is a way of engaging the material, wrestling with it, struggling to comprehend Working from firsthand reports as well as archeological and scientific data, extinction, exhausted large stretches of land, and mismanaged natural professional problems in the classroom, reports the Chronicle of Higher because she was suffering from depression, which was a result of sex discrimination she faced within her department and in the College of Management she is settling with the university and will be reinstated to her full to pursue her lawsuit had it not been for the commercial success of Cold for Public Affairs, accused Said of lying about his childhood in order to replacement as president of the Modern Language Association. Education notes that Oxford University has fallen to seventh place in a companies. When the survey was last taken three years ago, Oxford ranked third. considered normal. (And I guess even to most of my friends in other age groups.) However, I am aware that one of my better friends is just too reserved for this invasion of his personal space. Despite resolving not to make him feel like he's being assaulted, I often forget myself when we are together and though it clearly makes him nervous. He is tremendously enjoyable company, and I am accustomed to viewing affectionate gestures as rewarding someone for this. Could you offer me some helpful suggestions for being, well, more believes that touching friends is mostly a feminine trait. In any case, this is what the situation looks like from here: You have the habit of getting close and touching people; you are aware that in some instances this is regarded as friends; you would like to bag your habit of "rewarding" him with physical contact, but sometimes you just can't help yourself. annex humor and honesty to this dilemma and deal with it openly? Say to your chum something like: "I have this lunatic habit of touching my friends, and I also tend to get too close. I know this is not comfortable for you, so the next The two of you should decide on a code phrase that suits you, and in time, range of knowledge, so let me run something by you I have not seen you deal gets to monetary information), one suggestion for you might be to get on college I had a brief fling with a young man who has remained a dear and close college, persistently asks if I ever slept with him. I have tried every trick in the book to keep from answering her truthfully, from "Why in the world would But she won't give up. How can I answer her without answering her? How can I refuses to satisfy her curiosity as well. I don't want to come right out and say, "It's none of your business what happened between your husband and me when I refer to your quip about it being the '60s, and how could you be expected to the proverbial "little white lie" to make the subject go away. Then she decided that there must be a better way than dishonesty, no matter how admirable one's His position was that lying is unethical, therefore it is important to consider how not to answer rather than compromising one's integrity. If the wife's concern is that a sexual relationship might be this rather thick woman persists in her questioning, you might say: "I never answer questions about the personal lives of my close friends. Please do not ask me to violate my friendships by pursuing this line of inquiry. This is a boundary I care about." Such an approach protects the confidentiality you share with your old friend and directs the wife to the appropriate source (her husband) allowing you to know you have behaved in a morally ethical manner. that most people who are not candidates for Dutch elm disease would figure out that there might, indeed, have been a little experimentation of the sexual sort and quit already with the interrogation. This, however, is an altogether different problem. Good luck to you, and my compliments for wishing to do the my father was a young man. As I understand it, he is currently occupied, very publicly, and supposedly romantically, with three women whose names are like better get one of these." What was it, and what did he do with it? runaway parade floats plowing into the crowd and yet not crushing a single without paying New York sales tax or showering or even getting out of your we all did the best we could, although many participants, absorbed with the ban on their fundamental human right to hit children with a stick. how parents bring up their children. This is dictatorial and an example of the First you can't thrash them, next you can't give them a good boot in the ribs, then no summary executions of the really impertinent ones," he did not add, nor did he emphasize his point by menacingly slapping his palm with the "Fellowship Stick," as he does not call it since it does not exist. is unlikely to uphold any arguments that the new provision against caning is an cheap attempts to mock a beloved national figure's efforts to cash in on this used it this summer. But they don't want us to use it too much. It's not going president; speaking about use of the Delta Force to combat oddball religious kids are writing) plays with the "malathion" (yeah, right) the city is spraying throughout New York to kill "mosquitoes" (wink, wink) that transmit "encephalitis" (go on: pull the other one). It makes one nostalgic for the fear food, presumably to create a docile population of human slaves with excellent teeth who keep hallucinating that they're uninterested in sex. skeptic feel knowing. The former is informed and terrifying: "The president was effect is to make the skeptic want to throw himself out of a is fluoride in the water, the government really did test hallucinogens on unknowing human subjects, and sexual vitality can be diminished by watching the use of instant replay to challenge an official's call, a rule change the Super Bowl, lost their season opener and the services of four starters threatening situation that you make light of, especially since it is the of trout that it knew had been exposed to the disease; wouldn't you know it, the disease soon showed up in wild trout in Colorado and other states. Now of a quick laugh, but there is a whirling disease in trout. The poor little guys just swim around and around in a circle until they die. And it's all our fault for genetically engineering them and raising them by the thousands in afflicted fish I may have offended, and to those who love to kill disclose all campaign contributions on his Web site; he will not let major contributors post saucy photographs of themselves on a page called the spraying for, praying for, howling at the moon and baying for. (Look for to the post office, the employees gather round: "They say, 'Boy, that's neat!' postal service, but--33 cents! Anywhere in the country! In just a few days! And you don't even have to lick the stamps anymore, which frankly, for that one seem to make up an increasing proportion of our stamps, along with noncontroversial nature and beloved pop culture figures. Coincidentally, these three categories describe most of the programs on public television lately. joint venture is possible: The post office can issue stamps that promote the nationwide availability of stamps that can be downloaded from the Internet. For print out a special bar code, the first new method of supplying stamps since he noticed a poorly wired fuse box: "It looks as though it was put in by an the natives off the booze long enough to get them past the test?" it has got four legs and it's not a chair, if it has got two wings and it is comments more interesting than your earlier ones, mainly because you fear, it often seems to me, of their own latent homosexuality.) that his inclusion of porn cutouts in the painting brands him as a rude guy, I shouldn't have to tell you that virgins are sexy. breasts and erect cucumber. It manages to be both cultivated and raw at the same time, which is basically what I look for in any work of art. The piece anus, and when I saw it, I thought to myself, "That's the story of my life. Half head, half asshole." Or, to be more elegant here (in keeping with the spirit of your own mandarin replies), you might say that the piece subverts the tradition of staged photography, blasting a hole through the cold, calculating probably the last show in New York to cause this level of commotion, had its share of duds as well. Let's concentrate on the artists we like. There are lots show that captures so forcefully the particular feeling of being alive in the tremors rippling through Turkey's political and social world, triggering a government will be brought down by the crisis, the paper says it could lead to "the grassroots development of Turkey's fragile democracy. The thousands of volunteers who poured into the earthquake zone will not easily forget the power economy up and running, not under the leadership of the United States but this previously announced. A statement issued by the group declared, "To unilaterally stop the war at this time of heavy disaster is the greatest "Becoming independent may end their oppression; it will not end their troubles. In fact, it may only make those troubles worse." He added, "The independent are being asked to approve or reject a presidential reconciliation effort that offers amnesty to people convicted of actively supporting violence as long as primary causes of popular discontent and strife, namely, economic mismanagement which has led to a high unemployment rate and declining living standards." hostages could be aimed at getting a ransom as well as weapons, water and leader of the Congress Party is now accessible "with a vengeance." Stung by accusations that it has fallen behind in the online competition, Congress' main discourse and will have a site up and running soon. military "seems ever closer to being out of control" and that its behavior in but rather several, held in loose, often hostile connection to each other." soothe its wounded pride by "admitting that the West has been cavalier in its treatment of the former superpower and that it now has to be given a seat at Right, the Daily Telegraph criticized the United States for being too do so," the paper said. "Trusting them with that task prolonged the air invasion and seeking a solution to the crisis within the unusual context of the New Yorker --ideally, half of those under my editorship." Confessing to authoritative and prestigious weekly on the planet" because "when you're the best in your field, it's inevitable that sooner or later you become rejected a suggestion that The New Yorker was "elitist," saying that the if brilliant, undertaking." Asked if he agreed that the quality of the world's Investing in quality has and always will have a place in the market. Despite our deficit, nobody tells me what to publish and what not to publish. And do you know why? In a world of fast food, there will always be room for a constitutional arrangements in his address to the nation, cited reports that before the nation was told the outcome of the coup attempt may have been caused constitutional way to remove him. In a profile of the country's new leader, seizure of power, or even to characterize it as a coup, apparently because it be laid squarely with the Prime Minister himself," it said in an editorial. "Seldom has a politician so frivolously squandered the goodwill that originally blow to those who hope for peace in the subcontinent." immediate, direct and absolute control of the military," said the risk was "not may feel more confident about flexing their conventional military muscles in and indefensible way. He must not be allowed to compound that with with a military regime but, more worryingly, with the possibility of the continue to make family planning "a fundamental state policy." Meanwhile, homosexuality, and it did so in awarding damages for psychological damage to a court ruled that the man had suffered "depression and psychological pain" and damage to his reputation by being described as gay. The author of the book, Fang Dang, said he might appeal. "It is for doctors, not judges, to say if homosexuality is abnormal," he commented. "The court says that it is considered by the US State Department for its routine denial of access to lawyers and Internet is going to become the new campaign battleground, then a lot of individual political activity online, such as posting a message urging people to vote for a particular candidate, be considered free speech or a campaign links between political Web sites be considered informational, or should campaigns have to put a monetary value on a link and include it in federal for political Web sites to stem the growth of counterfeit or unauthorized lawyers, federal regulators, Internet political consultants, academics, journalists (including this writer), and others to devise recommendations to help Congress and the Federal Election Commission revise laws for Internet Internet is sort of the new town hall. Citizens can speak their minds and talk conference participant and former White House adviser who now heads the regulations exist to safeguard against abuses and fraud. The question is how to do that effectively on the Net. My position on all of these issues is to make sure we don't intervene until we see more maturity in the marketplace." think tank's panel agreed, recommending that political activity on the Internet be promoted, "absent specific intent to use the Internet to circumvent the law." The group also proposed that candidates and party committees be allowed to link their Web sites to others without considering the links contributions or expenditures. In addition, some groups prohibited from making direct contributions in federal elections, namely corporations and unions, should be allowed to link to candidate Web sites as long as the links are bipartisan. additional provisions would look at proposals to stem the growth of unauthorized Web sites that purport to belong to a candidate and would require periodic review of regulations to judge their impact on the use of the Internet Aspen Institute's conference presages an inquiry by the FEC, which could come the docket: how the Internet fits with current regulations regarding political action committees, corporations, unions, and individuals who want to express advocacy of a candidate or an issue online. At press time, the FEC was finalizing a 27-page draft proposal outlining the specific issues that the needed to have a generic inquiry as opposed to addressing one aspect at a a Democrat who was also at the conference, noted that the Federal Election Circuit: "The courts are saying 'We'll just have a local option on the ordinary scorn of neighbor vs. neighbor, more than urban vs. rural. Most of our jibes work a rich vein of educated vs. uneducated, which is another way of saying rich vs. poor. It's class warfare played out as a barnyard bestiality joke. What those dumb hicks really lack is the wherewithal for a fine Southern japes that has inverted its class associations. Several centuries ago, incestuous liaisons were for the aristocracy, now they're farmyard fun. In the former case, incest was a symptom of decadence, in the latter it's just rural isolation and the lack of dating opportunities. Them folks don't need loftier as long as they don't actively proselytize, and as long as school personnel decision, allowing students to use state facilities to foster religion, fish ranks probably first in importance. Its popularity was due principally to chi theta upsilon sigma). Lately there have been stickers in which the fish has discovers to its dismay that its name is already taken, part of the speculative frenzy in domain names. In that case, they can either buy the name from its to the examples above, of a domain name that is already taken along with an prominently reporting the government's admission that it reacted too slowly and that there wasn't enough staff at the site to handle the crisis. In one report, plant heard on television they had been told to stay indoors when in fact they had received no instructions whatsoever. When they telephoned local government offices in a panic, asking to be checked for radiation in the homes they had been ordered not to leave, they were told the checks were being done only at In another story, the paper said the disaster would deal "a serious blow" to accident and lacked automatic controls over the flow of nuclear fuel. In an been exposed to such radiation from a nuclear facility. Calling for an exhaustive inquiry, the paper said, "The future of the nation's nuclear energy program now rests in large measure on how the government responds." the certainty that it's enough to obey one's mother and one's superiors for everything to turn out all right. It crushes the heart of someone who knows Japan a little and loves it a lot to see technicians and workers from the reaction, bowing and apologizing for their betrayal of their company, like the said China has changed beyond recognition over the past status." But the paper deplored the country's continuing "intolerance of massacre "it will be hard for China to take its place among the ranks of the world's great nations." Calling for political reform and free elections, the paper said: "Standing still is not an option. China has achieved much in recent years. The challenge now for the leadership is to build on these achievements and prove that it can win a popular mandate through the ballot box." Airdrops to refugees were cancelled after these incidents, and the United Nations has started taking food into remote regions by road, the paper animals, all of them looking like the leftovers from dinner. Searching for chancellor on the grounds that he is a "bigot and racist." He caused outrage during a factory visit last August when he said that a defective fuse box "must pleasure of his company, if only for a few, seemingly fleeting moments, will magazine in a swank Fifth Avenue apartment. It was the sort of apartment he could have lived in, if he'd wanted to, but he chose to make his home in the tailored suits. I made eye contact and smiled. I thought I saw the flicker of a responsive grin cross his face. He wheeled around, turning his back to me, and started to talk to someone on the other side of the room, a malnourished blond woman who had been trying to get his attention. I instantly recognized this as disciplined him to show such natural grace and reticence, coupled with the noblesse oblige to talk to those you might otherwise prefer to relationship stabilized. We dined frequently in New York, albeit in different restaurants and with different people. We went to concerts and movies. One encounter was especially evocative, I think, of the sort of man he was. One afternoon, I was Rollerblading in Central Park when I spotted him. He was blading a few yards away, lean and handsome as ever, wearing the tank top and him when he saw me. Almost immediately, he sped ahead. With his long powerful strides, in no time at all he was a football field in front of me. He looked He was challenging me to catch him! I tried, panting and sweating. His on people! But for an unfortunate encounter with an incompetent sorbet peddler, I had a chance to make light of the incident when I next door opened, and there he was. It was just like John to use the common elevator rappelling up the side of the building, all of which, I knew, he could have chosen. Instead, he was here, in an elevator, with me. a long time, I immediately burst out my greetings, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. I added a few suggestions for the future editorial direction he wanted to call me by my name but was afraid that would hurt the feelings of the others in the elevator who perhaps didn't know him so well. One often had this sense when talking to John, this sense of reserve, of intimacies asked: "Who are you? Do I know you?" I was stunned by the philosophical depth of his questions. In a few seconds, he had penetrated to the core of my identity, indeed to the very question of identity. Who was I? Was it ever since. And to think there are some who say his good looks made up for a lack of years. I would run into him. He might say something insightful, or boisterous, like the time he jokingly yelled, "Are you insane?" when I came up behind him as he was using an ATM machine. But despite the warmth of our friendship, there were clear limits, boundaries to our relationship that we both recognized. He never took me sailing with him, for example, or included me in his intimate family outings. Ultimately, there was no getting around the fact that I was a mentioned my acquaintance with John, asked me to write a short piece about one of his mother's book projects. I agonized about it for several long minutes. Was I only getting this assignment because of my connection with John? Would I be guilty of cashing in on our relationship? Would John feel I was betraying John's mother? Ultimately, I decided to write the piece, and a few details gulf grew between us. It was a deeply saddening time. tragic to me because our relationship can now never be healed. But I will always deeply treasure the mementos of our friendship he left with me. There is put his own name on. (He must have kept the original, however, because what I have looks like a duplicate.) And I still have a copy of the restraining order he obtained when I attempted, in an excess of neighborly zeal, to climb the fire escape in the loft next to his in that gritty industrial area he called home. Characteristically, he didn't sign it, or even add one of his famous cheery little messages. Such was the man. I will miss him. ambivalence, for situations in which no character has a monopoly on either rightness or wrongness. The characters are all right. Or, rather, they're all wrong. No, they aren't: Right and wrong don't comfortably apply. They try to act as if they're right but suggest by their behavior that they might well be different directions; the least trustworthy people are the ones who seem most humiliations and drifting into a second career as a panderer. Nevertheless, he tells himself that his life has a kind of integrity. reviled for the decadent culture that he embodies; at work, he's treated as a tensions give it a comic tingle, but that comedy is rooted in melancholy and confidence in his own foolishness: He's proud of how he grasps for status. In the movie's prologue, he can hardly contain his delight that his son is set to marry the daughter of the local chief inspector, a man whose revulsion for this out of this Birdcage opening, but he has already mined that vein in his and how the world regards him is heartbreaking. He's in for the comeuppance of is wrong, the son's way is dangerously out of touch: It condemns before it capitalism's rules, trying to get a foothold in a society that closely guards what she is have no connection; she does what she does to get by. The lack of appreciation fully justifies his drift into the arms of another lover. on the eve of his abandonment of his wife and two small sons for a younger fairly breathtaking; he really does need more characters, more checks on the sat on it for a couple of years, reportedly debating whether to alter its irresolute ending. It's shocking that the company would even consider such a hopelessness is the kind that leaves you exhilarated, convinced that even if the characters on screen haven't found a "right" way, the quest for a right way Critics of all persuasions have been beating their breasts movie is a collision between inspiration and tastelessness, between the about the way the gorillas talk. I know, animals have spoken English in they've done it in a story in which language is a central theme. The daft charm same piquancy when the gorillas talk like characters from Leave It to when they stop to chat. He's a likable schnook with a long, skinny chin and a proper English maidenhood straining to burst its corsets and grab a piece of dream of selling dirty books, is stocking its register display this week with Nature on the Rampage 's cover promises "Hurricanes, Droughts, Wildfires, Tornadoes, Floods, Heat Waves, Blizzards. Also Volcanoes, Earthquakes, arouse even the most jaded weather fetishist. Did you know that several through the phone line, and electrocutes them as they are making a call? Tip: have followed all this obsessively, with weather Web sites reporting record With all this talk of upheaval ("Nature's Bedlam," as Nature on the Rampage likes to call it), you'd think we were suffering a droughts, and the like. It's true that the United States, with its endless coastline, vast climatic variation, massive fault lines, and dozens of active volcanoes, is exposed to more than its share of Mother Nature's fury. But the number of natural "events" nationwide and worldwide remains constant. (Some meteorologists speculate that we are entering a busy hurricane cycle, but the to Mother Nature's rage in part because more people are in its way. According Earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes endanger millions more. Because property follows people, natural disasters have become more destructive: A storm that According to the National Science Foundation, natural disasters now cause about It's no accident that anxiety about nature is surging during a time of domestic tranquility and (relative) world peace. Weather is a form of war, God's conflict with man. Weather is defined by martial is full of meteorological metaphors: a "hail" of bullets, the "fog" of battle.) Everyone needs an enemy. It's easy to understand why we replace vanishing Mafiosi and Commies with asteroids, hurricanes, and volcanoes. Natural disaster Christian millennial Web pages find biblical significance in every blizzard or murderous jungle viruses this way: "The Earth is mounting an immune response regulate the atmosphere in order to ensure favorable conditions for life, also those who obey the rules, but [is] ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress. Her goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of But the most important reason why Mother Nature seems more powerful these days is the media. The ascendance of the Weather Channel, the piece on the weather Web) have turned weather into national entertainment. We can (and do) view weather satellite photos of any spot on Earth with a click, hear forecasts 24/seven, and watch live footage of weather disasters on television. There is an endless appetite for weather. It is more important than sports, more dramatic than the news, and always changing. obsession partly because we can now do something about the weather, not hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards. These warnings undoubtedly save lives: Natural disasters may cause more property damage in the United States, The blanket coverage of Mother Nature exacts a price: weather fatigue. The more she's covered, the less people care about her, and The final reason for our Mother Nature obsession is choppers in for commiseration and photo ops. The woebegone victims congratulate themselves for their fortitude. The National Guard is called out to do whatever it does (guard?). Congress busts the budget caps to protect the poor sodden folk. Then the victims bank the cash and return to their flood plain or tornado alley. Economists call this moral hazard. Politicians call it constituent service. In the end, it seems, Mother Nature is just another welfare mom, ruining homes and taking billions of tax dollars to do it. sisters have inspired myriad debates over the safety of private planes, as well prevent people from taking the sort of risks they think makes life worth year encouraging the risky business of private air travel? private plane crashes in the United States last year, but only one died on an government largess, the United States has more private pilots and aircraft than in air traffic control costs on the Federal Aviation Administration, but the general aviation airports to pay for construction and improvement and has given smaller ones that cater almost exclusively to private fliers. When planes go down, the federal government conducts costly missing aircraft are undertaken by the federal government each year, nearly all they involve a fatality or not, require a costly National Transportation Safety but the agency doesn't detail its costs. The Air Force's Civil Air Patrol also general aviation include easy access to airports. Commercial passengers frequently find themselves trapped in holding patterns over the nation's biggest and busiest airports as corporate turboprops carrying a few people land. Increased landing fees and less generous treatment have reduced general aviation traffic at big hubs in recent years, but they haven't eliminated it. All those corporate planes highlight another reality, which is that general aviation benefits from the abuse of the business tax deduction. Deep in their hearts, the captains of industry know that corporate jets are a Legal fees and photocopying expenses, of course, are just as deductible as the cost of owning and flying a private plane. So why doesn't anyone worry about their being abused? Because traveling on a cushy corporate jet, quite unlike consulting with attorneys, inevitably involves a large component of personal The extra expense required to avoid the sweaty traveling public may yield a third of the cost, top managers may find the perk too tempting to resist. private aviation. But like most of his fellow fliers, he had the resources to finance his pricey hobby without imposing so much on earthbound mortals. While should be pondering another question: Why were the rest of us paying him to do Here is a sampling of improbable movie moments from gargantuan crocodile inexplicably migrates from its tropical habitat to set up the woods by a furry witch, never stops filming and videotaping themselves even as they are supposedly jumping out of their skins with terror; the search for with brains so enhanced they are able to apply the principles of hydraulic engineering to their deadly advantage, to say nothing of operating commercial sophisticated Upper West Side woman in New York who would fall for a line like that are about as remote as encountering a singing possum in your basement, but why is she drunk? There is no motivation behind her furious determination to get soused at this party; in fact, Eyes Wide Shut seems Shut for weeks, its reality problems are so severe that I have decided to call myself in as a specialist. Let me state at the outset that I am not one to (never once have I complained about the majestic incomprehensibility of be made that Eyes Wide Shut is a masterpiece of dreamy and purposeful distortion. But after sitting through it twice, I must report that the stronger nocturnal prowl, perturbed by his wife's needling confession that she once had a sexual fantasy about a naval officer she saw in a hotel lobby. Walking the is accosted by a gang of yahoos who harass him for being a "faggot." Huh? There's no discernible reason why they should suspect him of, as they put it, on the next block has no such impression when she invites him into her charmingly messy apartment. "Don't worry," she says, "I don't keep track of the prostitute's apartment that forms the bewildering centerpiece of Eyes Wide to an exclusive orgy, one that requires a password and must be attended in proprietor of a surreal costume shop and then takes a cab to a wooded estate. Upon uttering the password his friend has revealed to him, he is escorted into a mansion where some sort of high priest dressed in red is swinging incense and rapping a staff on the marble floor as lugubrious choral music drones on in the background. The priest is surrounded by a circle of masked women, who, upon his command, doff their cloaks, kneel reverentially for a while longer in their and whose faces are hidden under studiously grotesque masks. wolf. But how does she recognize him here? In his mask and hood he's danger," she persists as he escorts her down a hallway. When he asks why she is telling him this, she responds, "It doesn't matter," and when he asks who she Soon this unknown woman is called away on other business, weary disinterest they observe isolated tableaux of coupling humans and, when their frenzy reaches a crescendo, they engage in joyless ballroom dancing. at an impromptu tribunal, he is ordered to take off his clothes. reappearing on the balcony above them. "Take me! I am ready to redeem him!" presumably to be killed. Why is she sacrificing her life? All they've asked him to do is remove his clothes at an orgy, which seems not unreasonable. warning: "If you make any further inquiries, there will be the most dire the city, obtaining information by flashing his medical license to waitresses speak to him under penalty of law. The "dire consequences" spoken of earlier amount to the following: a brusquely worded note, a rude stare from a stranger, again, has discovered lying dead from an overdose in a mortuary drawer. But why would they go to such extreme lengths to cover up their romps in the first place? They don't appear to be doing anything particularly illegal, and with their liturgical solemnity they seem far less a threat to the Republic than, discover the missing mask on the bed next to his sleeping wife. Who put it late into the night, just as we once endlessly pondered the meaning of the eagerness to return to his country as a constitutional monarch. He criticized of the student revolt against the ayatollahs. He called on the West to support "faith in secularism, the separation of religion and the state." He hopes that in an editorial that the uprising was reminiscent of the student revolt in followed by a harsh crackdown on free debate and freedom of expression," the through institutional politics, not the politics of the street. It would be dictate the pace at which he should implement his reform program." widespread civil strife can be avoided is "by the conservative forces realizing being toppled, but that if it were overthrown, it would have enormous implications for the entire Middle East. One defense source said, "We can only to do so before the ayatollahs get their hands on strategic weapons that could Middle East in a "revolutionary" manner and might already have an impact on his intending to commit himself to any timetables on the Middle East peace process, but it added: "The sense that there is no rush is something of a facade. In was unclear what he hoped to accomplish by ending his one China policy, the paper commented in an editorial that what he had done was "weaken the two decades or more, and which has kept them essentially peaceful." It said it hoped that the two countries (or bits of the same country) "may yet find ways of maintaining the useful imprecision of recent years." missing an excellent opportunity to attack his leading Democratic opponent Al team is defensively and guiltily struggling to ignore the world's largest country, and top US officials disingenuously profess not to be worried by the gesture at the West." But Bush "so far does not seem to have the stomach for reckless willingness to hinder global security for partisan pleasure. speaker." When he was a congressman, the New York Republican invited lobbyists we are exiting the "Me Millennium." Over the past thousand years, humanism, science, and the advance of capitalism have conspired to displace the worship monogamy is unique in its absence of commitments. This uncharted period of freedom teaches "loopy, chattering disconnected I 's" about the emptiness was seeking revenge for the attention Ted got from their parents. The author newsweeklies' Gen Y obsession continues with a cover nor the rest of the world will pay to keep the plants safe or to close them. Ultimately, the threat of nuclear combat eased the risk of hot war, and article says the enclosed mall is declining. Shoppers are moving from suburbs to urban centers and buying online or from big discount chains. A sure sign that the mall is outmoded: They just tore down the shopping to recruits as a halfway house for the best of the brightest. The captures "the contradictory man" he calls dad. Disclaimer: Junior admits a abortion. Gore staunchly opposed abortion and federal funding for it when he was a House member in the '70s and early '80s but reversed himself once he him refreshingly honest, though only slightly less nutty than the rest of his analyst.) He can't control the Reformers and doesn't know which of their wackos physical comedy" is an intelligent, introspective lone wolf and a thinking special report applauds the rising incomes of the poor. After losing ground for arbitrarily denied food stamps, child care, and transitional Medicaid. Rather than easing the transition from welfare to work, states hoard block grants and program to root out illegal immigrant labor. Operation Vanguard subpoenas personnel records and uses the information to target workers for deportation. The piece argues that the operation is deviously designed to lower wages. absence of any major international story to dominate the press, newspapers describing its effects as a "massacre." Both papers quoted the pope as herself said that during her last six months at The New Yorker she had "begun to miss the theatricality of photography, to be able to use pictures in ways that were really free and uninhibited" and that she "wanted to create a new form for a magazine without the institutional history of any publication piece described the first issue of Talk as more closely resembling "a Vanity Fair retread." Brown said Talk was printed on thin paper "Brown wants to give Talk the feel of the best 1950s magazines, such as have all been widely admired, but it is a long time since they were considered insisted on sitting in on their conversation but that Brown subsequently On the hostility she was said to have generated, Brown said: "The dogs bark and the caravan moves on, right? That's just life at the top of the media world." Brown acknowledged a link between her departure from The New Yorker last telling me that I didn't have enough fun. I think she was right and I just felt this job would be tremendous fun." What if Talk fails? "It won't," Brown said. "Already the commercial signs are such that it won't." Asked where she foundation will announce a number of new funding programs during the next three months that will go a long way toward its ultimate aim of becoming the largest private charity on Earth. "My son is going to have critics all his life because rest any criticism on the basis of his not being sufficiently generous. We've used by research hospitals to help find a cure for the disease. Her widower, be given to science. "We were both happy about it in the days when she could be sometimes takes her out to meals in fashionable restaurants and in whom she I can grant the dysfunction of our politicians over is being uncharacteristically soft on what is, after all, a marked instance of independent scholars, in addition to the editor of the journal, felt that the article included both legitimate empirical research and a reasonable theoretical construct. In the second place, if, as you seem to suggest in your mean nothing, and clearly won't be taken seriously, isn't that a striking publishes to be taken seriously, the association should take criticisms of study, noting the association's long record of fighting pedophilia and insisting that the article does not mitigate the illegality and immorality of irrelevant in assessing the meaning and claims of the target article. Critics of the article want to talk about what the article actually says, not about the of it are no longer thought of as constituting abuse is simply a mistake, then do so is a major factor in motivating ongoing concern about the article. legislature, are unintentionally "bribing people to go early" in order to save that is employed in determining which medical treatments will be covered. Specifically, it is not mentioned in the piece how preventable ailments receive reader to believe that this list was arbitrarily constructed. Nothing could be cathedral. A little checking might persuade you that these buildings were by no means the norm in the long lost Golden Age of public construction. By definition, you know of them because they survived. A much larger number of cities were abandoned tomorrow, would the survival rate of our public buildings be better or worse? I am not as certain as you are. stereotypes you pointed out and agree with you to a point, I didn't pay attention to them until you brought it up. I have always felt that racism would eventually disappear if people like you would just drop it instead of making an months of dullness, the Democratic presidential primary now looks like a Normally, presidential candidates try to build on momentum created in the "free splashed across the Web. One virtue of virtual ads, said political and ads can be more compelling than print or radio spots. Moreover, because the Net is a distinct medium, candidates could experiment online with targeted ads that far, though, that's all theoretical: As well as can be determined, no major for all presidential advertising in this race. "We've seen nothing to date," far as I know, we have not purchased space on any Web sites, whether they are associated with the papers running the ads in print version, or otherwise." campaigns seem to be clinging to more traditional promotional channels. "I don't think [the candidates] will start [Web] advertising until after the is also the likelihood that some may not advertise on the Web at all." source close to Al Gore's campaign said that the Gore organization had campaign's online messages with its offline messages. press aide said that the campaign is interested in online advertising, citing Internet availability of the audio of Gore's announcement speech. Any further details, he said, were "not something we're willing to talk about at this time. We tend not to talk about our advertising strategy until we do the ads, because anniversary argues that the hardest part of its economic liberalization is to come. China can only save itself from its current stagnation by fixing its banking system, addressing environmental hazards, controlling government debt, jobs, while uneducated blacks suffer from high unemployment and poor public in an economic tailspin, drug violence is rampant, the army patrols the college tuition in return for a commitment to teach after graduation. A similar want to see the temple rebuilt, and seething sheiks who will wage war before banal" cultural "yahoo." He was "miserably blocked" until he thought of c over story rehashes the conventional wisdom about not bode well for his capacity to shepherd big ideas through Congress. feebly pushes secularism: It just inaugurated an annual Hero of Atheism exhibitions for profit, and auction film rights. Archaeologists argue that offenders were raised by mothers who were arrested or incarcerated. Many of those mothers were casualties of the '80s crack epidemic. article argues that patients have too much control over their treatment. Doctors used to dictate treatment, but in the past decade the pendulum has swung too far toward patient autonomy. Physicians should inform patients of their options but step in when patients make bad choices or are too distressed "collaborative filtering" as a substitute for the independent bookseller. You enter your preferences and a software programs spits out the favorites of folks who share your interests. This "doppelganger search engine" will help sleeper revolution. Grassroots movements fund raise, recruit, and plan mass protests article concludes that courts cannot be counted on to end racial profiling. Judges have upheld traffic stops that are mere pretexts for searches and erected evidentiary boundaries to ending profiling. Only political action will cover story earnestly deconstructs pro wrestling, mourning it as evidence of relativism. The popularity of narcissist wrestler Hulk Hogan presaged the force in international affairs is illegitimate unless authorized by the An anniversary passed strangely and happily without notice this week: Six months ago, the president was impeached. During the Flytrap hullabaloo, commentators promised that the country would spend years pondering the meaning of this impeachment. They could not have been more wrong. It's been half a year since impeachment and four months since acquittal, but it have been talking to say they haven't thought about it at all. They had an active desire to rid their memory of it. The level of traumatic amnesia is Flytrap followed the increasingly typical pattern of the modern media event. It was exaggerated beyond reason while it was unfolding. supplanted by the next big thing. (See also: the Gulf War. Supposedly the forgotten, but it's not gone. It lingers sourly but not in quite the ways anyone expected. There were two consensus predictions about how Flytrap would ratings remain high, and he has been able to prosecute a war almost immediately after the trial, but Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee centerpiece of Democratic House campaigns. "People are not so focused on say, 'Aha, he was for impeachment,' and vote against him," says Democratic Impeachment continues to distort politics, but not as itself. It is Masked Impeachment, Sublimated Impeachment. The House Republicans, seething with rage at the lech in chief, are the most potent principle. "The House Republican effort to undermine the war was a continuation impeachment blocks bipartisan cooperation. Republicans and Democrats on the furious at the House's indictment of him, doesn't work with House Republicans. happy to stall major legislation. (Impeachment, of course, is hardly the sole cause of paralysis. Some Republicans are content to delay big legislation till thin and fractured that passing contentious legislation was almost certainly Impeachment has also frozen the Senate but for a less Senate lost the first two months of its current session to the trial. This Impeachment so haunts Gore that he has designed his entire campaign around neutralizing it. Had Flytrap never occurred, Gore surely would values and personal morality at the heart of his platform, and the first act of his campaign was to schedule a series of interviews in which he denounced national strategy. Party leaders have anointed Bush because he is mercifully disconnected from Flytrap. In Bush, they have a candidate who can preach the winning message of Flytrap (morality good, lechery bad) but isn't associated with the screeching House impeachers who are so unpopular nationwide. of their strategy, will imply and suggest and insinuate. Republicans will hint at Democratic immorality, Democrats will poke at Republican obsessive nuttiness. The points will be scored obliquely, but almost no one will risk the as they inevitably do, what they really mean, of course, is their "monologue at it is a sales pitch. (The candidate's idea of give and take is you give, I "national conversation" requires actual discussion. There are plenty of Web kvetch, or just plain gossip about the presidential campaign? Where can you bulletin boards, but other heated campaign confabs can be found at and almost all are uncivil. (Conservatives are the clear champions: A thread "Democrats believe in raping their own daughters.") But the intimacy of the newsgroups frequently borders on claustrophobia. You'll see the same names and Gore's campaign end by denouncing the "Vice Criminal" and the "First off into conspiracy land. Salon also has lively campaign chat in its section: It tends to be more conversational but less focused than The Fray (he portal sites are trying to grab a share of the campaign palaver, too. Yahoo! hosts several dozen political discussion "clubs." Most claim only a handful of are chockablock with political bulletin boards, though they too are tepid. otherwise abundant political sites such as Political Junkie don't embrace conversation. Only Primary Diner has a forum worthy of the name. I learned more proudly conservative, except when it comes to intellectual property law. They presidential candidates are beginning to acknowledge all this online campaign talk, if only halfheartedly. Most of them have participated in live chats at response. It's too bad the candidates' lone exposure to Internet talk is so not important who asked the question. While framing questions in a way to draw out, it's still the answer that matters. And while reporters (print and electronic) talking on television often talk about themselves and how they developed a story, in the newspaper itself it's the story that matters. There advertise our authorship of questions would make it worse. reasonable ground that he wanted to leave them out of the campaign. But as Bush did it for him, and said baby boomer parents should tell their children make no apology because it corresponds with an obvious reality: "And if a child quoted and characterized as "awkward," was: "I think the baby boomer parent careful reporter gives the reader enough context to put each quote in perspective and to understand how the events of the day were shaped. Why doesn't this rule apply to your questioning of Bush? the press that day about tax cuts and religious charities. Instead, reporters asked him about issues arising from the controversy over his alleged drug abuse Bloom, and the other reporters on hand chose the topic. That's a major reason institutions" ended up buried at the bottom. In that sense, you helped drive the story. If you don't report this fact, aren't you omitting information that the reader needs in order to understand the persistence of the drug question." But if a protester had shouted your question at Bush, would you have reported who asked the question? If so, why not follow the same practice when about themselves, and I don't propose that we print our names every time we ask a question. Usually, as you know, the choice of topic is fairly obvious. But isn't there some point at which the media's choice of topic can become so controversial and so determinative of the course of the campaign that the drugs, and what other parents should tell their kids. Of course, we both know that the implicit background to these questions was the rumors of Bush's own drug abuse, and in that sense, this larger topic was what your question and the (except perhaps for pointed contrast), because the obvious hook for these So much so that it was unsafe to leave him alone with sharp objects. Doesn't would have created a valuable alliance, in favor of a commoner. He married her without notifying anyone in his court. This shortsightedness caused his chief the throne for a time. It was only with the aid of his brother, the eventual biggest joke of all. Henry won one battle and, fortunately for him, killed of foreign troops, because they were tired of civil war, not out of any love for Henry. The fact that Henry killed off all the York heirs and blamed some of VIII, become the most powerful and autocratic of all English rulers. matter how heavy the cares of the day, your witty responses evoke hearty laughter in most instances, and thus a lighter spirit. You are positively a really, because I already am. But really, the was stellar. Oh well, if we're not destined for matrimony in this lifetime, perhaps circumstances will someday allow me to buy you a beer or Dr Pepper or something. Your job must be fun, and tear her hair out every day dealing with the petty moral dilemmas your clueless contemplate the possibilities for chaos in the human condition, then question older by the minute and one day soon you will be looking at men as old as Bob agreement, along with bemusement. I believe the most unsettling image currently don't believe children should be allowed to view this ad. The craggy old pervert is just plain scary, particularly when he smiles that to say that they applauded the former senator's forthright approach to a real problem. The following writer, however, was not one of them. head if she expects to be elected president. I am so sick of his whining and sniveling over his ED. You know, there are a lot of single women and widows in this country who manage to stay happy without the constant focus on erections. change the subject, though to stay in the moment, the next letter is political, Neanderthal Jerry Springer having contemplated running for the Senate? (The Senate!) I was shocked that such a thing could even be a possibility. I share simply because of name recognition. There is precedent, however, and it is qualifications aside from being merely appealing and the son of a president. one on television. We are seemingly suckers for "charisma" and exercising an organization drops off the cover of Vanity Fair or People or the bronze suntan hungry for a thick steak with a fried egg on top and a cigarette to settle the digestion! Is that a reactionary bastion, a pathetic anachronism, or something truer, something with enough confidence to survive without media I admit that when a drum and bugle corps marches by playing the Star Wars theme, I get a lump in my throat. Then I vomit into the gutter, and and houses that are the quaint relics. But there is a relic and, by God, it had current mission is to teach career development, community service, leadership, as welcome a development as the renewal of bald eagle hunting. Impressively magazine itself. But judging by the mailer, Talk will be good, not bad; exciting, not dull; the sort of thing people are interested in, rather than different. Refreshingly provocative" Reversing these duos would have given a whole other impression. "Differently interesting" sounds like naked pictures of someone in a wheelchair; "Provocatively Refreshing" implies an overly time to correct this before the first issue "closes." involves some animal (a pig? a monkey?) wearing a crown and a velvet cape. "You'll discover the extraordinary side of the ordinary and the usual side of see. But I can't wait! Or see! My eyes! My eyes! I joke. It's my quick and "Only a select few will receive this exclusive invitation. Why you? Because sophistication that matches our own, and a quick and agile wit. Someone who is quotations that sound dirty and adolescent enough to be dialogue in his future are preferred. Perhaps this example will stimulate a response, if you know what paper left behind might be useful in establishing a "paper chain" between suspects' picked up," the official said. "It tells us a lot about how much return to civilian life in the province. "To backpedal in any way would result in more demands from all sides for more renegotiation, put the deal as a whole in jeopardy, and must not be countenanced," it said. possible future leader of the province, said it reached him by telephone and was told that he is fine and will soon be coming out of hiding. The capacity as president of Green Cross International, a nongovernmental radiation levels are quite low, he said, "the internal radiation source damages various types of cells in the human body, destroys chromosomes and affects the stations and of some chemical and petrochemical plants to be prohibited by international law. "The human drama and the drama of nature should be of equal distracting leaders from urgent matters and perverts the purpose of these endorsing this charter [for lifelong learning] they will make the summit seem more relevant to people's lives. Yet few voters are likely to be impressed by a wedge of motherhood and apple pie, served with a topping of Third Way free abortions within the first three months of pregnancy, provided they have first discussed their situations with a group of consultants comprising social workers, psychologists, doctors, and representatives of the churches. Of the "outspoken" letter to the German Bishops' Conference, the gist of which was church to stop participating in the state consultancy system. The paper said he turned against the fizzy drink." The company is suffering from "a credibility page included an expos of the famous French underwater explorer, Commander Marseilles, complaining about the lack of decent accommodation. "There won't be After making her way through this month's tabloids, Keeping Tabs feels as though she's been stuck in a bit of a time warp. The tabs, suffering from an overload of nostalgia, read like magazines one might Show is, in fact, no longer on the air, Keeping Tabs perused the The Globe also reports that Lee "Bionic Man" Majors is set to return to financial straits that she's had to cut back her gardener's visits from five to three times a week. And the Star couldn't refrain from running a truly years, the tabs seem uncommonly fixated on looking backward. The chronicling celebrity style makeovers over the years, while this week's White was a very cute baby indeed. And Keeping Tabs is pretty sure she had the With so much photographic evidence on hand, it's only natural that there's much discussion about who's had plastic surgery. The tabs' short answer: pretty much everybody. The Globe has the requisite doctor "skin is pulled back so tightly he looks like a lizard." and the Globe report that the first lady, "wearing dark sunglasses and a navy blue pantsuit," was seen visiting the offices of a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, while the Enquirer insists that no consultations were done in person. Instead, the circumspect first lady is said to have sent various doctors "high resolution photos taken of her face from different angles" in around whom tabloid suspicion is once again furiously swirling. Perhaps the tabloids' loaf was sliced just a little too thin, but there seems to be an unusually high ratio of tantalizing headlines to banal copy this month. To The new book that the Star claims "blows [the] lid" on pop star The Globe teases us with the "secret life of Sopranos hunk" Star by her former butler? "She'd put an outfit on and come downstairs and look at me and say, 'You don't like this, do you?' If I said, 'No I don't,' The tabs seem so mired in the mundane that they've beefed sleeping with, for God's sake?) After slogging through all three pages of the Star 's "supermarket secrets of the superstars," Keeping Tabs was Show went off the air, are alive and well and often seen picking up "the purchase, however, because the National Enquirer says that the actor Slate 's poetry editor, will soon be answering your Fray posts! our legal system. At a time like this Big Sister sounds like kissing kin to Big sophist who tries to make confused thinking look like common sense. mentions banning and burning, but the painting is not being subjected to either. The funding issue isn't supposed to matter because citizens don't have control of every item in the budget anyway. Oh? Maybe they don't directly oversee every item, but they have every right to complain about items they not offensive can be resolved by appealing to analogies in culture and history: "medieval Catholic art, for example, is chockablock with sexual and did? Would she apply the same reasoning to her issue of hate speech and say for example that the n***** word shouldn't be offensive because it is widely found painting because it is supposedly of exceptional value. But do our cultural mandarins, in the name of "free speech" have the right to frivolous (and likely over to Gore, and said, "Let me respond. As I just finished saying, let's abandon the old politics of personal confrontation and have the kind of reasonable discussion people want before deciding how to vote. Yes, Al, I agree times and places and in a format that lets people hear what we have to say. And in the meantime, why don't you knock off the 'How about it, Bill?' stuff. That's playground ball." Would Al have been ready to "Stay and Fight" under essential lunacy of trying to control information in this era, where anyone with a computer can read, watch, or hear something in the mass media, then get crazier. On the other hand, it helps guarantee that the days of media moguls "People will think what I tell them to think!") are fading fast. Unlike my parents, I won't buy a brand of cake flour or vote for a candidate just because go to a cake flour chat room on the Web and get the real lowdown. and rent control. But I am not convinced about parking on two counts: The value of land in Midtown Manhattan is somewhere the high cost of constructing underground parking, means that more parking current conditions, there is a good chance that it should not be built. While I tend not to worry about market failure unless it is large, in the case of seems to be little political will to impose rational gas taxes, so second best solutions, such as regulating garage space, are likely better than allowing unregulated garage space combined with subsidized auto travel. than enthusiastic about these plans. After all, we still have two teenagers at home to care for! This morning, I telephoned him (at his office) asking, "Why do you want to go on this dumb trip?" After all, we have been married for so much together and went through so much, I want to see them. He then He claimed it was the best time of his life. His personality does not allow him to express emotion or sensitivity. After reading this article, I know why he has always felt so close to the Guard (as I have), and why he wants to share a few days with his former classmates. Thanks for the great article. We will forward it to as many classmates as possible. No doubt I will be on that plane an improved version of "The Fray," our reader feedback forum. The Fray now features threaded discussions of Slate articles. If you'd like to discuss something you've read on the site, scroll to the bottom of that article and click on "Post a Message." (You can also click on "Comment on This you'd rather just lurk, click on "Read Messages" at the bottom of a page to find out what everyone else had to say. In the future we'll incorporate the insight into the psychology of grade inflation, his economic angle is warped at slightest effect on salary. Even those friends of mine who interviewed with large financial firms while still in college were never accepted or rejected on salaries based on grades. Although employers often do, for better or worse, give respect to which college an employee graduated from, grades simply do not interviewing and hiring, especially in these larger companies. Wise to what really makes a good employee at that age, they're much more likely to hem and haw about that summer you spent watching the tube instead of taking a good internship than they are to have doubts about your D in organic chemistry. integrity would let this enter his mind. Speaking of the role of the teacher in good teacher from kindergarten on up knows: "The real teacher lets nothing else be learned than learning." No, not knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge for the sake of the individual's intellectual, moral, spiritual, even physical growth. The doctor, lawyer, or business woman is always more professional for continuing to pursue these issues outside of his or her profession. This seed can be sown by good professors regardless of what kind of grades they give. To universities into technical schools, it would be to ignore this fundamental me to really miss the point. The real point is that his papacy dramatically this divergence from traditional theology's most basic teachings that offends far the least objectionable to me: It is the new Mass itself that offends There are many too many divergences to mention here. They range from theological importance of the first magnitude to common practices that centuries as holy tradition without any kind of respect for those of us who separate you from God and send you to hell if death came before confession. You can see why many of us do not see this as progress! sometimes sound bitter, it should not be something at which to wonder: From being called all sorts of unpleasant names, to overt discrimination, public writes: "In the latest ranking of presidents by professional historians, historians than about the presidents. I suspect that someday historians who do not deny that this was the perfect way to sell the movie, considering the whole point. Please remember what is going on in the movies today. I go to movies because back then, people were required to write a story that had stupidity. This movie was good because it was believable and because it was psychological instead of eye candy. Think about that for a change. The current issue of a national magazine lists these warning signs: stain, unusual odor, the sound of broken glass or plastic. What popular songs of the Civil War, sold over a million copies in sheet music, an interesting thing to contemplate (or call for at a karaoke bar) as we await the debut of Talk magazine (as I understand it, an abbreviated form of the dead, recant his resignation, resume the presidency, and start having sex with you a second chance to do pretty much what you did when you had your first I face tomorrow with confidence, eager to see you react to the premiere issue of Talk (as I understand it, an abbreviated form of the original title issue shows a letter carrier holding a parcel that is smoking, presumably plane crash," says the service's aviation mail security representative, Bill The post office will carry "nail polish, household cleaning supplies, dry ice packed and labeled so as to pose no threat to health or safety of postal cannot be precisely rendered in Roman characters because not all the letters in accompanying lead is an actual news story, and which is my way to give you a few moments of amusement and some pointed social commentary because I like you "This is a very wealthy monkey who will create a lot of jobs, you stupid Five people have been given jail sentences of varying lengths by a court in Describing a troubled phase of his early life that he says ultimately brought (Same story, different spin.) Police say they have rescued two spider monkeys who had been trained to sell contraband drugs by recognizing the colors of While it may be an ordinary fact of life that is practiced nearly universally, There will be only two quizzes this week, today and He has created "some kind of weird masterpiece" that "sings with the tricks with film stock are "inadvertently distracting" and that the film doesn't pick up speed until the second half, when it's "too little, too late." discover why men are so resistant to women's advancement but ends up with a culture of "ornamentation" and the economy's removal of men from meaningful More often, though, critics call the book "didactic and highly simplistic" marginalized and downsized distorts her view: "she should have said she was talking about class; she claimed to be talking about gender" (the New York fictional version of himself into the story) appeared before the book was strange, very interesting, very exasperating book, full to bursting of both lies and honesty" that calls to mind some of fiction's most masterful solidly positive review: "I can think of few conventional political biographies present system (in which students' scores correlate directly to the wealth and education of parents), "he doesn't altogether define what should take its the exhibit as "sick" because it included, among other things, a portrait of are in, and although most critics defend the museum's right to exhibit what it gets a sprinkling of praise, and some critics weakly contend that "the best work in the exhibition basically does what all good art should do: It makes you enthusiasm is palpable. And what's more, many in the art world are less mogul who owns every piece, has found the perfect way to increase the return on men's feelings of disenfranchisement. "What's most troubling about this witless increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in Fight Club have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat misunderstanding the film: "If watched sufficiently mindlessly, it might be investigation of "the lure of violence in an even more dangerously regimented, technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload." The site includes video and audio clips from the film.) explain why this marriage is worth saving, [it] could prompt even single sole supporter, praising it as "pungent, funny, and surprisingly forceful" lawnmower to visit his sick brother. Even more surprising, critics rank this improbable triumph," all the more powerful because the film's "wholesome radiance and soothing natural beauty are distinctly at odds with the famously background, calling the film "too mannered and weird around the edges to be to the film complete with trailers and pictures shot on location.) constant verbal outbursts, which form "a barrage of sheer rhetorical invention that has tour de force written all over it; it's an amazing stunt, and, just unrealistic, but most just take them in stride, admiring the "highly artificial, flamboyantly bizarre world that constantly upstages its genre discourse are so vividly drawn that the novel becomes unexpectedly moving" stratosphere, Wall Street and the business press speak with awe of the "The real question, Charlie, is what industries will not be affected. Internet revolution. The buying and selling of wine across state borders is It would be a godsend if wine buyers could do a Web search for bottles of, say, which allows readers to track down secondhand books at hundreds of shops across adults. The laws regulating direct wine sales were rarely enforced until recently, but a new zeal is in the air. Buying a single bottle of wine from federal courts to prosecute offenders. Indeed, Hatch was moved to federalize this crime precisely because new technologies like the Internet make it easier must take the Fifth about my wine purchases, senator"), I spent a couple of weeks this summer surfing the Web for vino. Some wine stores keep their lists wine merchant I spoke to said that the Internet isn't having much effect on his business because people from most big states can't use it to order wines. If Internet wine buying was uniformly decriminalized and there was a genuine nationwide market, on the other hand, the system would be more creative and almost miraculously, most of the wines held up even though they were shipped in Back to the puritans. Why do the new prohibitionists oppose Internet wine? They claim two concerns: First, like most new legislation in ensure that minors are not provided with unfettered access to alcohol," Hatch wait days for them to arrive, arrange to have their parents out of the house Bureau of Alcohol has received exactly one complaint of an Internet sale to a states to regulate the transportation of "intoxicating liquors." Indeed, language of most state laws would seem to violate the Constitution's interstate commerce clause, which facilitated the creation of a national economy. Judges are increasingly coming to this view. At the very least, it means that the restrictions do not have the halo of constitutional protection. states the power to prosecute the Mafia's involvement in the liquor trade. But because much of the Mafia's interest in booze died with the repeal of prohibition, what keeps these laws alive is politics. Liquor regulation is a case study in the manipulation of politics by powerful lobbies. The regulations in force are maintained and strengthened because distributors, wholesalers, and large wineries benefit from them, and they are organized and politically powerful. Over the years, their lobbies have been effective at working with wineries, specialty producers and, of course, consumers who would have more business practices. Sen. Hatch seems to recognize this when he says, "If there is a problem with the system we need to fix the system, not break the laws." For the moment, however, the fix is in for the consumer. epidemic was peaking and New York had become the embodiment of everything shooting victims, crackheads in the throes of cardiac arrest, and homeless years down to a couple of days in which Pierce clutches vainly at the last asthmatic whom he failed to resuscitate: Her head stares accusingly at him from the shoulders of people he passes on the street. It's not just that he can't forgive himself for not having saved her life; it's that he can't forgive himself for putting her out of his mind. He can't live with the idea that he it's easy to see why the director fell on it and passed it on to his Taxi script in three weeks. I can believe that, and not just because there's so much the circle. But what the circle really needed was opening. It's not just that floor of a Hell's Kitchen brownstone, where a man named Burke has been in his brain shows only scant traces of activity; and in the hospital he keeps emergency room over the course of several nights, Pierce gets chummy with shellshocked existence (she begins to drift back into drug abuse) seems tied in feeling that the movie was building to the possibility of a mercy killing as a test of the hero's ability to overcome his internal chaos and feel irony. I have a feeling they needed an ending and this one was handy. Their opportunism is a shame, because there's enough scary irony built into the material: that the people charged with saving lives intensity can make them as likely to want to murder people as to revive them. emergency room, in which patients on stretchers scream at one another to shut Hurt) takes pains to let the drunks and addicts and failed suicides know just how much they're imposing on her. ("Why should we help? You're just going to with an unlit cigar in his mouth, defiantly proclaiming his potency. The which is horrified estrangement from one's own humanity. movie made me weep a couple of times: It's hard to watch with detachment as tubes are thrust down people's throats or as they're shocked back to life. Some the same flamboyantly haggard (and toothy) look he had in Vampire's Kiss "Sometimes it's less about saving lives than being a witness," he says, in folks, both the character and the movie threaten to start seeming "dear." But identity was mutable and the narrative moved by quantum leaps. This time he world down and gotten back in touch with it. The Straight Story could be "abortion" from his comments about abortion, substituting the phrase "the life but that doesn't mean we put our principles aside. The highest form of statesmanship is to find ways to bring people towards our goal. And I believe that if we move forward with persistence, patience, engaging in a dialogue, we once again life will be held sacred in our hearts, in our homes, in our Congress, in our courts, and, yes, in our Constitution. tell you where he stands, that means he either doesn't know where he stands or he doesn't want you to know where he stands, and either one is not good for you immune to the blandishments of Beltway power, is supposedly the beefy substance more on image than the attorney general, and none has relied so much on words mostly encouraging model of attorney general, a perfect fit for an age of what private law firm. The other is the faceless, trustworthy administration foot liked her and never confided in her, and she reciprocated. She was, she said, independent counsels to investigate six of her fellow Cabinet members and her president, and has overseen innumerable internal Justice investigations of administration corruption. You can argue about whether this constant surveillance of pols is a good thing, but there is no doubt that these are the but mostly she is trustworthy. She pays the list price for her cars to avoid the appearance of favoritism. She avoids the president because she doesn't want independence has given her the courage to appoint counsels to probe her colleagues and her boss, and the courage not to appoint counsels even when the wolves were baying for them. She refused to authorize an independent investigation into campaign fund raising, despite Republican outrage, because legal reformers proposed making the Department of Justice independent of took office, she has been supervising at least one probe embarrassing to can't afford the political beating he would take if he cashiered her. the Crony Attorneys General, the Justice Department exercised vast influence attorney general without measurable accomplishment in law enforcement or ambitious, liberal agenda to Justice. She favored alternative punishments, and disliked the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences, and the Congress ignored her. Instead, her Justice Department has had to enforce an expanded federal death penalty, throw more people in federal prison for longer sentences, punish juvenile criminals more harshly, support mandatory minimums opposed some of these policies internally but had too little influence to stop merely negative. She has not achieved anything magnificent. Her integrity has simply prevented her from corrupting the process. She has not conducted any powerful investigations, but she has had the wisdom not to block others from independent counsel, supervised the operation and the probes, and she settled for cursory answers. It's easy to call this gullibility and incompetence, and that's exactly what Republicans are doing: A chorus on the right, including nominally supervise the bureau and hence are held responsible for its had the full support of the White House might have dragged the truth out of the This discontinuity between the thrill in the air here and that does not mean peace will come. Enormous obstacles remain, obstacles that Middle East analysts succumb to paralysis when they try to resolve these delayed resolving these issues until final status talks because they were intractable. Now final status talks have arrived and, lo and behold, the issues are still intractable. Already some are predicting the "final" talks won't be enough already, but the peace process promises to exacerbate it. Serious peace terrorism or settler violence surges. Support for peace could dissolve. the early '80s. Today's settlers, especially West Bankers, are far more militant than their '80s counterparts. Some religious settlers deny the thousands more from the West Bank without fracturing his government. is also ailing and has no clear successor. His authoritarian rule has prevented the emergence of future leaders and the development of strong civic and that is sinking into Third World poverty, anarchy, and civil war. This could be a peace, even a good peace, but it won't be cause for euphoria. New York Times reported that the House majority whip had told to pay for any additional spending requests out of the Social Security refused to compromise on appropriations, the government ground to a halt, and party that will lose the showdown is the party that is perceived to have repeated that phrase twice on Meet the Press --and the press climbed all "strategy" to "deliberately spend" the surplus. Other publications affirmed DeLay failed to grasp that when two parties collide, the public will blame the one that doesn't look surprised. If you're going to have a secret strategy, Provocation. Having broadcast his "strategy," DeLay signaled his intention the Republicans' "deliberate provocations" and "confrontation strategy." that DeLay "certainly is not in a negotiating mood" and "has presented Force. The Times paraphrased DeLay as saying that his "plan" would Social Security surplus." Hours after the story appeared, Senate Majority "force a showdown." The Associated Press confirmed that Republicans "planned with a mountain of press clips to back him up, he will repeat what he said Spite. "We will negotiate with the President, after he vetoes the bills, on smelling blood, hyped these quotes on every talk show. "The Republicans are The guy who seems determined to beat and humiliate his opponent at any repeated this quote and discussed the charge "that Tom DeLay wants the president to go into that Social Security trust fund, in order to accuse him of that the public will blame the president, not Congress, for squandering the money he has insisted be saved to shore up Social Security. The National Republican Congressional Committee even conducted a poll on the subject." Republicans end up looking as though they care more about the PR contest than DeLay's plan: "cynical and irresponsible." That day, a White House spokeswoman attacked the Republican "strategy to go into the Social Security surplus in the vain hope that the public will blame the president. It's cynical and it's diligence. ''I am not nearly as pessimistic as a lot of people are about the prospects of our reaching an agreement, and I am determined to try to do it,'' again, Podesta replied sadly, "I hope not. That's certainly not in the public's Week as pundits bombarded him with questions about DeLay's plot. "We're not current year's level" to "avoid a train wreck" while they negotiate. That's of course, put it differently. "There's a little trick that you can use called [a] continuing resolution that continues spending at least year's level. And we he vetoes that, the president will have shut down the government." Rather than can understand why DeLay keeps boasting of his "tricks" and "strategies." He's new plan, he won't. Above all, he's determined to prove his critics wrong. They said he had no plan. They said he was stupid. Well, he showed them. didn't do enough to stop Congress publishing the most salacious material in his report. He deplored Congress' decision to authorize publication of the unexpurgated evidence instead of "screening and winnowing" it first. "I wish I had done more to say to Congress: be careful," he said. Some of the most sensitive evidence he gathered has never been made public, he said; and "had the President seen fit to tell the truth, we would have been spared the intrusive nature of the details." But he said that much of the information other than to have the inappropriate relationship, which is not a matter of interest to federal law. To the contrary: he has very vigorously stated that he would readily forgive an adulterous relationship, but they would not be him, 'Well, we will just have to win, then.' Thus, instead of telling the truth, admitting the facts and seeking forgiveness of family and nation, he launched a campaign designed to erode confidence in the duly appointed system federal crimes in order to obstruct the judicial process in the form of a serious business. She did it not on the spur of the moment; she did it over a considerable period of time. She knowingly went to one of the most powerful lawyers in the country, who in turn guided her to another lawyer to prepare what she knew to be a perjurious affidavit. One should not blink at those kinds had "put the nation through seven months of a wretched and miserable 24-hour was much taken with him. "The grimly bespectacled prosecutor is only the public face," he wrote. "In private, he is a witty and benign companion. He enjoys a Martini and is relaxed on the subject of sex: by no means the prudish generation, he speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences, with the same Vice President Al Gore's virtues are largely being ignored in the election campaign because of his "intense and inevitable association with President Democratic nomination, "he must emerge as something more than the President's whose speech at the annual Labor Party Conference promising to end the class of conservatism" generated many editorials. His "vision of a nation more like belligerent and insecure, that seemed to reveal an inner uncertainty about what his Government is trying to achieve, and why." The liberal Guardian said the said "real radicalism needs substance, not just a collection of good tunes." praised his radical rhetoric, but also said he failed to explain "how all this Another FT editorial said the ice is breaking in corporate Japan, with companies changing "in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago." It concluded, "As Japan's politicians continue to posture in much the same old familiar ways, the economy is at last beginning to be restructured for their slide into mental illness is constant anxiety in the workplace," it said. "Many are alarmed by the prospect that their company's restructuring important business meetings are often held, the paper added. And why didn't he? "The party elders heard about his desire to join, realized honest, and he couldn't be trusted to keep party secrets. So they asked him the story for television by making him too virtuous. (Defending the contradiction, Morris says, "flaky means he couldn't be trusted with secrets.") Once you start making stuff up, apparently, it's harder to stop than you think. Writer may have been embroidering more than his own role. Fast, presented as screenplay dialogue. It is a dramatic scene with Fast dishing a shocking piece of information that the obsessed biographer has never the buzz of billionaires is in the background, and so on. herrings, distracting from the fact that the scene is a silly vehicle for says. Fast now admits to recycling gossip, "This was a story told to me at a Fast has a reputation for "inconsistently remembering his time in the party," including contradictory recitations in his two memoirs. But Morris, having stumbled upon a juicy story, never seriously questions Fast's reliability or Morris does recount his attempts to nail down Fast's story. and was ultimately dissuaded. But Morris writes that when he tried to question never did anything about it. One night my wife sat down and told him the party Fast version of events may not be possible. But there are gaping holes in Morris' reporting that can easily be filled with a few phone calls. For this person to Morris and Morris doesn't mention any attempt to track him down. have definitely heard about it." And in an interview, the authorized biographer told essentially the same story in the New York Observer eight years ago. (And probably has been dining out on it for decades.) Yet Morris did amazingly little to try to nail it down. But who has time to dig for facts when you've got to make up not one but two different fantasies? still don't get it. The point isn't who was wrong. The point is to understand what was wrong and to learn the corresponding lessons. the war was futile because aggression is the way of the world, and indomitable politicians and talking heads pronounced it a failure. Throughout the bombing, prevail. Pundits assessed the war's prospects with detached skepticism, as though forecasting the weather. But war is more than an objective event. could raise the price to a point where it would no longer make any sense for important enough to kill for, but not important enough to be killed for." But deadbeat debtor, to water down our terms for ending the war and sneak its could pound them. While complaining that the United States shoulders too much peacekeeping force. They don't understand that the point of the war was throughout the war that we shouldn't have got into it now say we didn't really troops and civilians. We destroyed bridges, crippled power plants, accidentally beginning to confirm the scale of the atrocities halted by the bombing. As bad as the bombing was, permitting the atrocities to go on would have been shouldn't do it now. Predictably, critics on the left denounced the often invaded small countries for selfish reasons and have failed to intervene in conflicts when altruism required it. Unpredictably, critics on the right outlaw. During the war, hawks who prized human rights and vigilance participate in the peacekeeping force, and they're still complaining that the war." They don't understand that the allies compromised with each other and achieved only by an international consortium of civilian leaders. the Republican Party preached military strength in the face of foreign expansionism. But now that a Democratic president whom they despise has led the the ultimate homage. They have allowed him, through their agency, to redefine the past and predict the future with the same certainty as natural scientists. because theories apply only in certain circumstances, and circumstances change. Surveillance and air power are vastly more sophisticated than in previous wars, preoccupied with the past to see the present, and too obsessed with who was their collective eyes toward heaven this month and find God. Even when the Big crop of tabloid offerings brims with so many transcendent crises mortality, profligate lives steered straight and narrow) that it feels like one exorcism has supposedly unearthed the "sweet little boy" inside him, spurring into his bed. Pregnancy rumors abound, but only the Globe has a damning dying young that she has entered into a pact with perhaps the world's most We heartily recommend that she do whatever it takes to stay in the here and now, if only to avoid being included in the Enquirer 's "Scandals of the Century" double issue, which devotes an entire section ("The Phoenix was apparently quite keen on the idea of checking out early. "I don't proving the accuracy of this prediction, therefore, that the Enquirer inappropriate to quibble over the attractiveness of corpses, we will bestow upon Phoenix our special nod for clarity in the face of eternity; it was he who from "Floppy Trunk Syndrome," a malady that keeps the poor beasts from eating Business has been no less brisk for human rescues. The calling a taxi in the middle of a mild heart attack. The Enquirer enjoying the spring day," the Globe explains breezily, as if the photographer had actually been invited along for the trip. But Shields is on emotional thin ice, having recently filed for divorce from her husband and photographer was "stunned" when she suddenly began "sobbing uncontrollably." so stunned that he couldn't get off several frames of the disconsolate actress. While the Globe 's photographer failed to capture the pair choosing hydroponic tomatoes, we feel fairly confident that they did not buy any apples. The Star suggests that Shields' breakdown may be in part sufferers, Keeping Tabs can't help but note that Shields' symptoms, while no doubt troublesome, seem to fall just a bit short of "crippling." "It got to the point where I just couldn't open my mouth wide enough to eat an apple," Shields is quoted as saying. "I had to get someone to 'start' my apples for me." Fear not, apple eaters; the Star very thoughtfully reprints the address of And finally, the tabloids try to account for the end Star asserts that she'll now quit All My Children for her own talk show. But there's no word on whether she'll consider the path taken by Star have "traded in steamy scenes between the sheets" to "devote their because she finally stopped submitting tapes with "overly dramatic" performances and went with something subtler instead. (Less, apparently, is more, even for a soap opera character who's been married to virtually everyone numerologists are concerned, the other nominees shouldn't even have bothered to affair that you should bring a gift of at least the value of your meal. I was outraged and shocked that anyone would give a gift of less than that. If they did not attend, a similar, albeit somewhat less expensive gift would have been acceptable. I think it is incredibly poor taste, rude, and offensive for anyone subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine, because you are certainly a snagged some fabulous presents, thereby irritating you because you short period of time. What is actually in incredibly poor taste is to mentally meal. And how, exactly, by your lights, are guests supposed to know the cost of the meal? Do you, by any chance, suggest having it engraved under the recently announced her wedding and mentioned that everyone should be receiving their invitations soon. I decided to give her an elaborate wedding shower and to include all the women (and their spouses) who work with us. I coordinated event went off without a hitch. My friend was extremely grateful. My question is: Am I still responsible for buying a wedding gift? I wasn't sure if it would be in poor taste for me to consider my efforts and contribution to the shower must assume that the woman for whom you organized the shower was a close friend involved a lot of time (and perhaps paying for the party) and afforded the don't you write a note telling the bridal couple that you had such fun arranging their party and that you and all the guests at the shower will have fond thoughts of them while they are away honeymooning. That way they will know small stuffed animal before I threw the bouquet to the older girls. This worked out really well, and I highly recommend it to anyone! That way, my maid of fun if a youngster misunderstands the custom just a little and imagines she (except one) for good reason. We do not communicate. No problem there. But now recommendation letters, etc. This even though I have tried to keep my addresses to remain incommunicado to the next generation? Don't advise me to make up with my siblings. I am quite happy to be "divorced" from them. famous? Mention of your "addresses and phone numbers," along with all these young people lurching in your direction would suggest there is an attraction beyond the obvious. You sound a bit misanthropic, to be honest, but assuming sees no reason to cut off the next generation. It is a possibility that the discarded siblings have put their children up to warming up the situation, but that seems slight. If you have no interest in children, or these particular that began: "Early this morning, we received a call that every parent dreads." superheroes, each candidate has but a single attribute, generally as useless as spontaneity, which is a lot like being wooden only if you poured a few drinks into her, she'd loosen up, but he'd dissolve in some hideous yet unspectacular chemical reaction. But just as most comic book readers move on to other forms illustrated novels"), most voters in a mature democracy demand more from candidates than a packaged personality and a glib slogan. Wait, sorry, excuse said, 'If I ever told my wife I left without burying this dog, we'd be divorced. Get a shovel.' He's human, a nice person. He revealed himself as a yesterday's White House Conference on Mental Health. All stage directions COSTUME NOTE. The men all wear unattractive blue suits; the women wear unattractive navy blue dresses, or vice versa. Everyone remains fully dressed (CURTAIN UP on Tipper Gore in a comically oversized bed, the sort of thing radiant. Something is moving beneath the bedcovers.) one could do that any better than the sunshine of all our lives, our first GORE emerges from beneath the covers. He looks a little uncertain.) (with rising delight): No couple in public life has ever done as much to try (from under the covers): What I hear you saying is that anyone who talks about how important it is for families to stay together and be strong ought to also Post joined papers everywhere in putting most of the blame on the peace, was either being duplicitous or had lost control of his senior military permission actively and be ready to follow through. Meanwhile, they should tell peacekeepers in, and the Guardian said there was no longer any alternative to foreign countries which are morally obliged to form the kernel of a rapid intervention state elections this weekend (a subject that naturally dominated the German presided over a thoroughly muddled and quarrelsome coalition since he defeated unemployment to stir up racism. "It would be useful to know the percentage of young people who identify with the German extreme right," he wrote. "One must hope it is not a large percentage. All those who put their faith in German youth must encourage them not to be seduced by simplistic and unworthy claim was "shameful." "How, for example, can it be reconciled with the fact endearingly wicked," having no purpose but to strengthen his business links Court of Justice that some of the rougher interrogation methods used by the Post said, "It is difficult to think of another nation that would be willing to take such a bold step to protect the human rights of suspected terrorists, at a time when the threat of terror is still so very real." Long Island that scientists believe has a small but genuine chance of causing "perturbations of the universe," which could destroy the world. What will Federal attorneys in the Eastern District of New York arrested know, I thought this question was hilarious when I first read it, and then I in the ranks about this question but, if imperfect, it does rest on a solid theoretical foundation. Odd juxtapositions can produce comic results or former Republicans who now stand among the Democrats. Squirrels are funny. Indeed, many small and furry animals tend to be funny and, if you squint, resemble genitalia taken disturbingly out of context and scampering about the place. The alive today, would probably stick with the Republican Party, but could perhaps of the brain critical for thought and memory, many people's favorite parts. remote correspondent): "Thank you for not speculating. We are not going to do speculative frenzy in domain names. In that case, the company must devise something new. Participants were invited to submit examples of a claimed domain name along with an amusing and available alternative. registered to the Friend to Friend Foundation (and man, am I curious about what National League. In politics there are two large parties, the Republicans and baseball's regular season, the primaries are the playoffs, and the general election is the World Series. (The Federal Election Commission, apparently, is If politics is like baseball, baseball can be a lot like politics. This week's World Series, for example, is a political contest: redistribution of wealth: He considers it a welfare program that rewards bad them to get lost. It is no accident that the Yanks wear pinstripes. The bat lefty when it comes to government aid: He has eagerly petitioned New York United Nations. (The Braves' Web site devotes almost as much space to the team's Foundation, Opportunity Through Baseball, Neighborhood Revitalization Program, spent the last years of the Cold War bidding on Navy contracts for his (now defunct) shipyard. Turner spent those years organizing the Goodwill Games, his in their recruiting efforts. They reintroduced the "open tryout" to baseball, extremely strong defense: They are among the best fielding teams in the majors. exhibit no shyness about raising and spending record amounts of cash to ensure victory. Like the Democrats, the Braves are as rapacious as their rivals, but subtler. The Braves collect tens of millions from their nationally broadcast games and strong ticket sales, and they pay lavishly for players. They raise and spend more than all but a handful of teams. As the Democratic Party claims Republicans in one more important way: In this World Series, as in most and the Braves play highly competent, professional baseball. They rely on brilliance to be dangerous. We are left with the wealthy, talented, mainstream, Graves said, "This is a terrible, tragic, embarrassing solution to a problem new state law requiring public school teachers to use it's not a problem, since nobody knows anything about geography anymore increase in computational speed is expected to raise the state's average SAT as opposed to Oz. They have tornadoes. It entered the Union as a free state, superstition, the board has also forbidden all references to the Big Bang. "Creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began," A supporter of the new educational guidelines, Mark life if we're just animals in a struggle for survival. It creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder and suicide." Which is hanging a lot on the poor old theory of natural selection. I thought pain, murder, and suicide were caused by television. Friends show? Only one member of the ensemble appears to have a job, and only does he have premarital sex, he believes in dinosaurs. If you were from is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once," the idea was intriguing enough to go a couple of news cycles in the legitimate press and on Fox News. One remarkable thing didn't come up in the discussions of the candidate: his age. I think this says nice things about us as a society these presidents and candidates by age at their inauguration or prospective this "daddy" teaches his young charge how to pee in public, spit, and trip not impressed: "Big Daddy should be reported to the child welfare quandaries to resolve, ends too tidily and happily for its own good. (For loads (Click here to read about the film's opening night at the National Air critics are impressed. The collection covers the same ground as her two considerable best, finds words for all the high and low notes of the raucous Mellow, a National Book Award winner, died before completing this long and provides a new insight into his art, but critics say it gets weighted down by superfluous material the author would likely have removed had he finished years and death from drinking, is still in the form of unfinished notes by contains profanity and unwholesome ideas. Parental discretion is strongly then. Nowadays, an artist has to haul out the big guns. At an early juncture, doing a South Park film if they couldn't make Mel Brooks choke and John them and annihilating them. This isn't just the most riotously inventive movie "warp our fragile little minds." Inspired, no doubt, by the reception to slaughtered, and characters journeying to heaven and hell. But the basic mountain town (where denizens step over the homeless on their way to church vocabulary at the pond on which his peers idyllically ice skate. Impressed, the The upshot is pandemonium. By the time Asses of Fire obscenities, its primary influence is musical comedy. It could have been dreamed up at a summer drama camp with a liberal gay element. South Park emotions; he is disconsolate over his empty affair with the recently arrived and who is blithely uninterested in the big red devil's feelings. Maybe a third of the movie's gags are expressly gay or else trade on such expressions as forces of "morality," it says, are far more dangerous than the most "immoral" language. The filmmakers even subvert the far right on Biblical grounds: It's that gave me pause but which on reflection seems more plausible than others fuck you over this desk," the picture will get an R rating, but if he says, "I want to fuck you over with this desk," it will get a PG-13. What the fuck, we maybe, but rarely crude. It's not even, as some have complained, visually employs vast armies of animators, each going at his or her minute task like an essential gesture. The look is never monotonous: The frames are Dadaist quilts and not a drawing makes his pipsqueak voice and cries of "Let's fuck!" even straightforwardness of the images that makes the obscenities so delectable: The a beat faster than you expect. (The puke rushes out faster, too.) twice (the second time was even better) and plan on another visit. I won't bring my daughter, though. It's important that she sneak in on her own. three weeks hence. ("No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused: We will get laid.") Subsequent jokes are grounded, predictably, in their sundry sexual humiliations; easy stuff, but concentrated and layered so that masochistic element takes the edge off the picture's implicit misogyny. the pie scene or the cloudy glass of beer bit. I wish a sequence that involves ogle her on the Internet weren't so poorly staged and acted. (The girl is so on the kid in the middle of some creative bout of wanking. Flustered but parents had many of the same sexual traumas we did but, no, we don't want to stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. It always gives you a rush, though. At first, it goofs on the absurd feminization of an absurdly macho culture. An increasingly desperate insomniac, Jack finds relief (and release) only at meetings for the terminally ill. At a testicular cancer group, he's enfolded in the ample arms of Bob (the singer Meat Loaf "bitch tits." Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling essentially the same voyeuristic ends, and the presence of this "tourist" makes warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. That last parenthesis isn't so parenthetical. In some ways, it's the longing to be beaten into oblivion that's the strongest. "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he its glib sociological pronouncements are meant to be taken straight or as the assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as bail, what does that tell you about God?" (I give up: What?) who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. It's also unclear just what has emasculated Jack: Is it that he's a materialist or that up to his fantasies of opulence? Is he motivated by spiritual hunger or envy? arrogance, which seems to be the most authentic emotion he has. But the film skinny and wilting, a quivering pansy. Even when he fights he doesn't poetic sense in light of the movie's climactic twist. But that twist will annoy more people than it will delight, if only because it shifts the drama from the realm of the sociological to that of the psychoanalytic. The finale, scored has done a fabulous job of keeping it spinning. The most thrilling thing about narrator's head and simulate his adrenalin rushes. A veteran of rock videos, is back in style, along with novelistic asides, digressions, fantasies, and like Fight Club might not gel, but they have a breathless, maybe old possibilities: The language of movies hasn't seemed this unfettered around in tight jeans and leather jackets. The joy is in watching the actor he takes the news with a glee that's almost mystical: "I am????? Oh, shit!!!" he cries, grinning. That might be my favorite moment in the picture, because would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic into something more complex and irreducible: a meditation on the irrelevance of future rapists and murderers, calls him "little buddy" and seems almost unresolved emotion can suddenly resolve itself into violence. second half of Boys Don't Cry isn't as great as the first. The early scenes evoke elation and dread simultaneously, the later ones just dread; and who's entranced by him anyway. With her lank hair, hooded eyes, and air of directors doesn't even make sense on its own low farcical terms; it's mostly doddering misconceptions about psychotherapy. I almost don't know why I loved affectless Dean is inspired or inept, but my indecision suggests why he works in the role. There's no doubt, however, about his even more depressive love voice and who slumps through the movie like the world's most lyrical you read a preface by a writer who doesn't seem to have absorbed the book he purports to be introducing. In his opening remarks for Eyes of the Nation: A narrative unique is the ability we have displayed time and again to remedy our mistakes, to adjust to changing circumstances, to debate and then move on in directions that seem better for all." These words, which might be appropriate seriously misrepresent the downbeat, contemplative collaboration of picture progressive populism tempered by realistic pessimism. portrays the state of native grace that the rest of the chapter ("Encounter, backed by engravings of fanciful New World monsters and references to Garden"), linked thematically rather than chronologically, picturing sunflowers, rattlesnakes, and bison. The color plates are pretty, the captions neutral and informative, but the metaphorical message is sharp: Behold what was imperial expansion, and so on, Eyes of the Nation is a book one flips through, not a book one views and reads in sequence. It speaks through clusters page, a photograph of a charred and limbless lynched black male surrounded by always as blunt as these, but in general it is tension, not harmony, that Visually, there are just more sparks to strike after the invention of the camera and the flowering of modern advertising. The writing brightens, too. how to pin down such phantom entities as social conformity between the wars and histories and paths just barely not taken. The book concludes in orthodox racial, ethnic, economic, gender, and regional lines as it had been in all but a few moments in its history; with a culture so diverse and so contentious that it seemed to lack any coherence or shape; with declining faith in its government, its leaders, and its principal institutions." The facing page shows a picture of a brick wall scratched full of chalk marks tallying enemy deaths Less conventionally ambitious, and possibly more affecting postcards that are both graphically gorgeous and spiritually haunting. Silvery and immaculate, with hallucinatory depth and detail, the pictures of Western streets and metropolitan train stations have a strangely deserted larger and more heroic in those days, if only because the people were fewer. Call it the age of titanic capitalism. Shots of the Flatiron Building under construction are weirdly short on human passersby, implying that the growth required to fill the place is still a hopeful article of faith, not yet a tenants had arrived is one of those facts that shouldn't be any surprise but line that notes such events as the founding of department stores, the rise of banks and financial institutions, and the erection of famous public isn't nostalgia but a finer, more elevated yearning. The sadness is not for what was, or even for what might have been, but for what always comes between assortment of metal windup toys. One boy, who looks wiser than his friends, glares at the camera, seemingly aware that his image is being delivered to the future. He appears to anticipate, and resent, our patronizing spying. He doesn't like us. We're from now and he's from way back when and he already you need is a place to put the water, a handle that doesn't get hot, and a spout that is well away from the user's hand. You can refine it by maximizing the surface that touches the burner, putting a whistle at the end of the spout, years, though, the mundane teakettle has become something else: an opportunity for them to mess up. Today's kettle can often serve up a searing demonstration (searing to your fingers, that is) of how risky it is to redesign ordinary objects. Such things often work so well that you don't even notice the parts of their design that make them work so well. Sometimes, things look clunky for You can buy a kettle whose whistle is in the shape of a shape of a bent tulip. There are kettles shaped like some of the major Platonic small appliances, with their clear round or octagonal shapes, subtle texture, and almost handcrafted look, were never sold in the United States. But photographs of them have been published and exhibited, and they represent an recent decades, even as the amount of time families spend cooking has shrunk to nearly nothing, kitchens have become increasingly ostentatious. It was probably inevitable that the functional but dowdy model of the baby boom era would be shape has a certain hauteur, not to mention a geometric purity then rare in housewares. And it doesn't merely whistle when the water starts to steam. It elegant, substantial, the Sapper design achieves its visual power at some expense. Its burner surface is low in relation to its volume, so it boils water more slowly than other models. Its chief failing, however, is that it allows A design that departs radically from the ordinary may look great in a museum but fail in the kitchen. But that doesn't mean it can't do is conical in shape, with a long spout. Its most distinctive feature is the little pink ceramic bird at the end of its removable whistle. This removable whistle was actually a throwback to the earliest version of the whistling the bird doesn't get hot, he said, it is possible to remove the whistling cap without burning your fingers. There is a danger that the bird might crack and manufacturers that teakettles could be a hot commercial item and led to the though some might call it pass. It has been superseded by newer models, all Design and introduced last year. It is part of a line of products intended to be usable by people with arthritis or hand injuries, as well as by those form was generated by the desire to make it extremely difficult for users to and those of many of its competitors, it is unified in a subtler way. Its complex curves suggest that it was sculpted rather than drawn. You can think of it as two intersecting incomplete egg shapes, one of which is the body of the pot and the handle of its lid and the other of which is the protective collar. The lines of the handle and other elements derive from these implicit shapes. (It doesn't photograph well; it is one of those rare products that looks better kettle, I resisted it. That big black steam guard looked so ostentatiously foolproof that I feared it would be clumsy, like a bicycle with training wheels. But as I handled it, used it, and carefully examined how it worked, it started to look better and better. This is indeed progress, both aesthetically When he was in fashion, people would visit his cottage and sometimes give him a few coins. When the novelty had worn off, this immensely gifted writer experienced isolation and hardship, and finally became insane, spending most of his life in an institution. The tough, memorable language of "I Am" propping up by the pathos of the life behind the writing. The plainness of this neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's scenes, where man hath never trod, A place where woman never smiled or Art" is an occasional column that compares movies with the lives they're based to suspend disbelief." Exactly how much disbelief does this biopic require us that much, actually. Private Parts may be hyperbolic, but it basically adheres to the facts, at least as they are laid out in Stern's memoir, also about himself, sex, sex with his wife, etc. The movie does gloss over the lengths Stern was willing to go to shock. In the movie, his racial comedy tends toward the mildly offensive (he invents a militant black traffic announcer). In mother on the air if she "got on all fours" during sex, and if she was a exposing the details of his marriage strains it somewhat. That was also the when she complains, "I look like a house." In his memoir, however, Stern Stern definitely tangled with the station heads. The movie's main meanie, "Pig Vomit," is a composite of several oppressive managers, based most heavily on who doesn't figure in the movie. Randy would occasionally tell Stern to watch radio personality clashing with the stuffed shirts of a mighty network," but goes on to record events that sound a lot like stuffed shirts clashing with good, even if the Federal Communications Commission gets on his case every now and then. What he doesn't say is that, in response to mounting fines from the tall, gaunt, with long scraggly hair, a rough complexion, humorless head back to the dugout even as the ball is crossing the plate. For many one of the better catchers in the game. But needless to say, he is not a star. a star when you are a catcher, especially when there's the real thing, the reposition infielders, chase down foul balls, calm pitchers, doctor the ball, establish a rapport with the umpire so he calls a big strike zone, chase bunts, run down toward first base to back up the throw from shortstop and, worst of all, guard home plate even if it means getting bowled over by charging opponents. Ray Fosse never really recovered from the separated shoulder he got positions, while Fosse became known only as the guy who got smashed. runner even though the guy could have slid into home far ahead of the ball. Dickey marched over to the dugout and punched the offender in the face, earning is something of a baseball martyr. Catchers are almost invariably slow of foot simply from years of squatting, the leg muscles shortening with time. stuff of an iron man. Eventually, catchers who can still hit retire to first base, a position for the fat, the stiff, the lame, and the halt. presumption of the game, like the scorekeeper or the grounds crew. The catcher is right there in the thick of the action, but no more interesting than the worker in a game of millionaires. He wears a steel mask over a helmet whose bill points backward, a style that invariably makes even the most hardened, mature catcher seem oddly juvenile, a man who failed to grow up. All that hard catcher has a nickname: The backstop. He might as well be an inert mass. Yet of course it is he, not the pitcher, who is the field general. Because the pitcher stands tall, in full view, he cannot send a signal to the catcher as to what pitch will come next. It is the catcher, low to the ground, with that shadowy zone around his groin, who must call the pitch. The catcher also gives signals to the infielders, letting them know what to do in case of a double steal, or what to do if a runner at first tries to steal when there's also a runner at third. Because the catcher calls the game, he must know the hitting abilities and weaknesses of every opposing batter. The catcher is essentially the quarterback of baseball, only without the huge endorsement contracts. told me one day in the locker room, "We're usually the dirtiest guys on the field and the sweatiest guys on the field. We stink all the time." raunchy. It's no fun to strap that stuff on when the thermometer hits the upper he says of the pitcher: "All the eyes are on him. All the recognition goes to him." There's no whine in his voice. This is just reality. He knows that when a out base runners. "The thing that impresses fans with catchers is arm strong arm. He is otherwise steady on defense and can hit home runs. He became absolutely love the position," he says. "You're right in the middle of the action. You're the one that has to make a lot of decisions. There's a lot of He means prestige in terms of the team. It doesn't carry that far beyond the dugout, though. The catcher has always been a somewhat and Whitey Ford. In my lifetime Johnny Bench has been the singular superstar of the position (he was once on the cover of Time magazine). There have position in baseball has more representatives in the Hall, with the sole of sorts in the catcher position. No one wants to play it anymore. Kids refuse he started playing the position because no one else would do it. says. "There are times when you have to block balls and they're not always Baseball has never been allowed by the intelligentsia to be the individual vs. the needs of the collective, or whatever. In this annoying tradition, let me suggest that the plight of the catcher is symbolic of a dire don't get dirty like we used to. We don't sweat. We finesse our way out of trouble, using the checkbook, rather than choose a brutal collision and trust uncomfortably, and in so doing lose all sorts of knowledge that can only come economy is not that they pay poorly but that they are vaporous, the mere magazine editor, writes in A Place of My Own about how he had become so disconnected with the physical world that he finally decided to hammer together a writing hut in his backyard, a desperate attempt to make contact with real for its utility as toilet paper. It is now considered normal to travel several blocks or even miles to find a place that charges more than a dollar for a cup of coffee. But what great coffee! We cherish our comfort, our good food, our friendly beverages. In summer we condition our air so that we will not use our muscles. We are outfielders now. We laze about in the grassy fields of holes so involuted they swallow the light around them. familiar guard in his gatepost waiting at the start of our street. with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the and comb were the least of his tools of transformation, as a comprehensive still, columns and drapes to make them look distinguished, light and shade to is often credited with bringing the war home, in the images that appeared in not make people any less keen to go on with the Civil War," he did convey to his audience the sheer human cost of the war. He also inspired generations of Times editorialist at the time, "he has done something very like it." These considered himself an artist, and his images, in the jargon of current art history, were highly "constructed." When a general failed to show up for a photographed the next day, and spliced his image into the ensemble. When the hundred dollars, he was willing to go all the way, and replace the grays of a take photographs was merely the most obvious of the many paradoxes of his career. He was an impresario and a brand name, hiring talented assistants (several of whom went on to become major photographers in their own right) to Imperial salted paper prints, and other photographic exotica. During the Civil during much of the war remain unknown. A possible reason for this has come to apparently using his knowledge of troop movements to speculate on Wall Street, sending coded messages through intermediaries in New York. One of Grant's various privileges and favors." But Grant remained a stalwart supporter of the slightly disreputable trade of photography, manufacturing the leather and never acknowledged the project, he remained in close touch with quacks. A margins of photographs in which he appeared or, more often, with his back turned. But theatricality is the hallmark of his work. He loved to photograph actors, the more flamboyant the better. He was apparently drawn to women who including a particularly intense ambrotype (a cheaper and less luminous form of ridiculous after the debacle of the Civil War. (If you want to see the original of the pose, you can cross the Mall to the National Gallery, where preferred to visit the battlefield after the corpses had been cleared away. There he would stand, his back turned to us like the contemplative artist scheduled to lecture, two weeks later, on his life and work as a war ritual bashing of wildly successful retail outlets, Pottery Barn has received inducing a bland homogenization in home design. "Everything seems more and more New York Times Magazine article last year. "The stuff may be good but it rightly lamented that it has come at the price of individual variation and taste. Just as the Gap look has become as much of a uniform now as the preppy aesthetic it replaced, so also has the Pottery Barn look standardized our homes recent years. It has made good design easily accessible and, paradoxically, hard to say, though, whether we're innately philistine in our artistic judgments or have merely been deprived of decent choices. Until the 1930s, most conservative styles or traditional looks from the last century. reign of the big manufacturers was the proliferation of such lines in a way that appeals both to people with sophisticated tastes and to those without a lot of money. And while this standardization has produced a certain monotony, it has also generated some good design. Many a dish or chair manufacturing quality may be not as good). Take, for example, Pottery Barn's making bolder purchases because of a better economy. But what's noteworthy is that it's young people who have developed a taste for cool places to sit and were most likely to agree with the statement "I like to shop for furniture." thrive. You could see the stirrings of a creative revolution at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair, held a few weeks ago in Manhattan. (lights in the shape of pigs or brassieres, chairs made from shopping carts or traffic barricades) that earned it the "bad flea market" label when it began a funky yet rational design at affordable prices. Even though these items cost a bit more than Pottery Barn fare, they were no doubt affected by the success of of all, the series' cocktail table and sideboard are now part of Chandler and preppy ensembles of paisley, tartan plaid, and corduroy. The rise of "boomer casual" has even forced the major manufacturers to move beyond their perennial colonial reproductions. Their more "modernized" furniture looks as if it were designed by a committee tallying up market research, but it's a start. designers who will individualize pieces according to your home and character. cabinets with interchangeable parts and colors, depending on whether the pieces are going in an office or a kid's room. The collection won a Best Furniture will no longer be able to blame bad taste in furniture on a lack of choice. Coalition for the Homeless began handing out sandwiches and fruit every night to the horde of homeless people who gathered around Grand Central Station. It conned their way to seconds or thirds while the quiet or confused went home coalition, too, that had won a court order mandating a "right to shelter," a insisted the problem of the homeless could be summed up in three words: coalition succeeded by turning homelessness into a simple, powerful moral were smaller but still substantial. Homeless advocates had always known substance abuse was a problem, but they had rarely aired their knowledge in public for fear that it would shift public debate and blur the image of the revised so that the city would guarantee the homeless the "continuum of care" the coalition, because it was seen as undermining the ultimate entitlement to shelter." The coalition seemed to be painting itself into an ideological on the grounds that officials of the organization had engaged in "harassment Able. The allegation would have seemed bizarre if it hadn't been familiar: Two years earlier, coalition officials had accused another nonprofit of using "goon squads" of homeless men to roust other homeless people from ATM to submit to frequent drug tests, abide by a range of rules inside the shelter, and make modest payments toward their own room and board. In exchange, they get businessman's regard for the therapeutic power of the marketplace. The premise often fails, the most effective form of treatment is, as he puts it, "the positive reinforcement of a culture that's established around work, around only work but what appears to be a relatively calm and secure environment, and it would hardly be surprising if this drastic change from the world of the streets, or even of the typical shelter, motivated men to turn around their spoke of their experience in overtly moralistic terms: They talked about taking responsibility for themselves, for the money they earned, and even for the children whom they had fathered and then neglected. The program, with its combination of rules and incentives, had prodded them to do something they considered one of the most dangerous and disorganized in the city, when the over, many of the men rebelled against the program's strictures, especially the random drug testing. Some left for shelters elsewhere. The coalition serves as and others at the shelter corroborate, is that the official who represented the coalition at the shelter worked actively with the dissidents who remained to himself by exploiting poor blacks, and berated the black shelter manager as and said nothing. The dissidents, lead by the former head of the coalition's "client advisory board," urged the other homeless men to stop working and coalition was so disturbed about the program that it contemplated suing him. board, in violation of rules that govern the shelter system. But since residents were free to go to a conventional shelter, it's hard to see what right was violated. And since the money was being deducted from salaries they otherwise wouldn't have had, it seems perverse to focus on the issue of rights fundamental issue is whether it's permissible to impose obligations on the homeless in exchange for various goods, to regard them as something other than victims to whom certain rights attach. This is, of course, the same question we are now asking about welfare recipients. We have moved very swiftly from seeing welfare as an unconditional right to viewing it as no right at all. Perhaps we could have found our way to a middle point if welfare's champions had seen their way beyond the language of rights to a different, and more reciprocal, kind of social contract. The sad story of the Coalition for the Homeless, and of its decline from the moral pinnacle it once occupied, is a parable of that purges, mass executions, death camps. We may also know something about how astonishing number of scientific breakthroughs were allegedly the work of one v). These matters run the gamut from the monstrous to the comical. The scale of crimes against humanity, against truth, against common sense engaged new book, however, demonstrates all these things with clarity, concision, and force, through the use of period pictures. The four images on its cover, for one of them had just been made first secretary of the local party. The second photograph than like an awkward charcoal tracing; the comrade on the left has been excised, having in fact been imprisoned prior to being shot. The third airbrush than a camera; the figure on the far right is now gone as well, the same table, but alone. The focus of that image turns out to have been the finger, weighing on the table with a force of tons. The sequence is nowadays, photographs can be digitally manipulated with ease; in the era in question, they were manipulated crudely and grotesquely, using scissors, ink, original happy gathering of Old Bolsheviks, say, and then one or more variations printed in later years from which figures have been excised after they fell from grace. The altered pictures rarely look convincing. When I was younger, I would occasionally come across books issued by Progress Publishers, that matter, were printed in a roman typeface that looked as if it had been technical inferiority was probably budgetary, but there is no denying that it made falsification so much easier, since even the unaltered pictures look like fakes. A yawning gap in the lineup of military officers; a face that failed to match the body attached to it; a face whose shading did not match that of the faces on either side; an elbow marooned in space, bereft of other body is rich in horrors: The photographs in which faces have been blotted out with ink smears or hysterically attacked with a pen are more immediately alarming than the ones from which figures have been surgically removed, and there are of the Supreme Soviet, mass murderers who invariably look like factory hands or math teachers. But the overwhelming impression the book leaves is less of People felt for ordinary workers, the generalized contempt for human evident than in the images that purport to represent friendship, fellowship, often represented in utterly fictitious settings: addressing workers on the factory floor, say, or surrounded by gleeful ethnic types from the Soviet republics. His eyes are narrowed, his mustache conceals his mouth but is emotion, actual emotion being consigned to his grinning subjects. And he is than human, a mobile icon wheeled about, as real as a stuffed trout. mannequins do when they are grouped on the same pedestal. Of course, the check to the mayor features smiles that are scarcely more genuine. King's book is of enormous historical value, but it should not encourage smugness. We are currently capable of perpetrating every kind of visual lie on display here, and seamlessly and invisibly at that, for reasons some may well think are will always remember precisely where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news that Cigar was shooting blanks. racing, but this cut to the heart of the business, the ancient and profitable Horse of the Year twice in a row. He was the most celebrated thoroughbred since Secretariat. Surely he would make a monster stud. At the Breeder's Cup last should have been the most important and satisfying work of his career. His stud paddock. Everyone wanted a piece of that code. A few weeks passed. The mares did not come into foal. "Some horses that come off the racetrack are slow to start," said the farm's manager, hopefully. But then the veterinarians looked at Cigar's sperm under the microscope and discovered the horse's appalling little secret. His sperm were slackers. They had no motility whatsoever. Many were shaped abnormally. This incredibly fast and strong and durable thoroughbred, heroic of stature and stout of heart, was a genetic dead end. scientists had cloned an adult sheep. An enterprising reporter for the New to the effect that perhaps Cigar could be cloned. The thoroughbred community quickly protested. It turns out that cloning would violate Rule 1(D) of the registration, a foal must be the result of a stallion's natural service with a broodmare (which is the physical mounting of a broodmare by a stallion), and a natural gestation must take place in, and delivery must be from, the body of the same broodmare in which the foal was conceived. today's society has been converted to mass production. One would think that there is a more modern way to breed a horse, something involving hydraulic out some horse breeding up close. Country Life Farm is as pastoral as it around in a "Cigar Ran Here First" cap and looking like you could not pay him a million dollars to get worked up over anything. He passed the reins to his Josh Pons is a serious businessman. I remarked that the though he wasn't sure if he liked the sound of that term. It's difficult work, he said. It's also risky. It takes four or five men to handle the horses as swift kick from a mare. "If she were to hit the stallion in the penis, we'd be She'd come there the day before, for schooling, and she had been balky. A veterinarian had reached inside and confirmed she was in heat, but after nine years of racing, she might not grasp the concept of being "covered," as they urinated, a sign that she was ready. A horseman held a "twitch" that covered her mouth, while another man held her left front leg with a strap. Two more men Josh Pons did not like this. He wasn't going to let his Another teaser came out of the stud barn, this one named Dew. Dew was no little scared right now. The mare doesn't look like she's ready and he's not notices that Pons doesn't mince words. No one around here is guilty of being lot harder than just letting a couple of horses loose in a pasture and waiting for nature to take its course. And it's a far sight harder than artificial of a teasing chute we'd have some sort of a riding bronco bull, a leather mare. The prohibition is more than just tradition. It's good business. Artificial insemination would create a rush on sperm from a select mating is a lot of meat in motion. Four men had to control the horses, and one his right hand and grab Dew's erect penis, which is thick as a baseball bat and almost as long, and pull it to one side to prevent penetration. When it comes been tugged to the side like this so many times that he's developed a batting average in the horse business. He emerged from the barn whinnying and The horsemen washed the stallion's genitals in soap and water and led him to looked at peace. "He's a good breeding horse. He won't mess around." The four either side guided his penis into the mare and held onto it while the horses emotionally," said Josh Pons as he drove around the farm in a golf cart a few minutes later. He said studs get hurt, top broodmares get sick and die, foals are born dead. Nothing is easy. It's the nature of thoroughbreds: They're not this isn't really working, that racing times have reached a plateau and the thoroughbreds may have even regressed in quality, watered down by excessive breeding in the boom years of the 1980s and the use of medication that masks horses run in place genetically, the racetracks themselves are falling behind the rest of the gaming world. Racetracks are getting clocked by casinos, lotteries, riverboat gambling, and slot machines. Pons is not sure if Country game and everyone's betting at the casinos instead of the racetrack, we're out old fountains and broad porches and perfectly landscaped gardens. Laurel Park has none of that magic. The entrance road is bumpy and crude. The facility has showing simulcasts of races at some other track. They weren't completely here, director of public relations. She said Laurel's big problem is that the they're pulling in billions of dollars in revenue, jacking up the purses for the racetrack, as broadly imagined by the public, suffers a reputation of seediness. It's not true, she said. It's clean and lively, she insisted. Soon they will bring in costumed characters, so kids will have something to do. looked down from his lofty perch as the horses meandered toward the starting the big time!" He grew up in Queens, right next door to Aqueduct. Routinely cloned Cigars. Something. Anything. For the seventh race at Laurel, there were only seven horses in the field. The next race would have nine horses, and the one after that only six. Six horses is not much of a field. You know a racetrack is on hard times when it can't even get horses to show up. they wanted in their homes. Some of the questions were about things: What's at the top of your wish list? What would be in your dream house? Others were about feelings: What do you like about your home? Would you move? Who really makes surprisingly, the women wanted more storage space, maybe a whirlpool bath, and could foresee a day when their homes would feel like empty nests or crowded houses. Electronics were low on their lists. But the women were also attached most like "a resort, a place to relax." A majority said they were the Traditional Home then offered its readers a solution owners could change easily as their needs changed, without remodeling or moving. Readers loved the idea (they voiced doubts mainly about the cost), and "Built by Women" project, a model home designed by women, for women, incorporates the survey responses into plans for a dream house. The magazine's lookout window the only apertures. "I was in Phoenix recently, looking at a windows to let women watch the street as they read, work, or clean: both a sturdier version of the houses that builders slap down outside cities, planting two or three spindly trees by the driveway and calling it "landscaping." There are no communal kitchens or marble bathrooms; that's not what the women in the said their homes reflected their designers' fancies, not their own needs: Counters were too high, misplaced lights cast shadows when women applied their makeup, there was more space for formal entertaining than for family dinners. laundry room, generous hallways, a living room that's small enough to straighten easily but large enough to fit the whole family. surveyed did want to retain some ceremonial space, so there's a formal front the emphasis is on the practical. The bathrooms, the stairs, and large closets are packed into a strip down the center of the house, and two sets of three rooms are lined up on either side. The garage fits within the rectangular footprint of the house, but along the side, so it no longer dominates the front of the house. The kitchen is positioned between the family room and the dining the garage, so the rugrats can jump up and down to their hearts' content. The Built by Women house sounds superficially like the "open plan," the vogue in the 1960s, that was also supposed to offer ultimate flexibility. But the open plan proved less permanent than the lava lamp. No one one wanted to read a book in a drafty multipurpose area. That was for swingers, always planning their next key party. The 1990s flexible house is all about family. Family members can retreat to their own rooms, insulated from warring musical tastes by hallways, bathrooms, and closets. They have their own kids, a front door for first impressions. The entire family can come together around the dinner table, restored to central status from its incarnation as a dinner time, or exit when the parents need more privacy. The living room can be cared (and wanted to care) more about their homes than men do, and rejected the But the magazine's contribution, feminist in its own way, is the utility of a plan that allows each room to have another function depending on the age of the unity. The Built by Women house is like a new wardrobe, with all the promise of a jagged axis that must have balanced once across the fulcrum of his nose. The forceps mark of his accident or whatever extracted him from normalcy, dipped exuberance of his hands that come to rest, delicately, on my shoulders, as if to say: "Help tie the drawstring of my suit, shoulder my towel, fit these extremely noble family, a statesman and soldier who died of war wounds at the age of 32--was looked on as a kind of perfect man: one born with the greatest advantages, who had the talent and goodness to make the best of them. (This I write I know not what; dead, quick, I know not how. dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight. living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts. not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies. farewell, friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth. stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind. century approaches, many works of art in various media will respond to that rotation of the calendar. It will be hard for a poet to surpass the poise and phrases like the repeated "seems," "I could think," and "I was unaware" enact surroundings reflect his mood or the human calendar. The way the first half of the poem ends with the word "I" also makes me feel a recognition that the pills, ran amok and plowed the occasional luxury sedan into restaurants just politic." This bit of historical camp comes from a recent issue of No itself "The Alternative Country (Whatever That Is) Quarterly." Most journals about country music are either oriented toward collectors, like the Journal understand that Merle Haggard is a better singer than Garth Brooks, who see Alternative country is a reaction against the antiseptic safety of mainstream pablum that country became in the 1980s. It is deprogrammed, studiously sloppy, embarrassment of country's hillbilly past, and mostly made by rockers. Its tire iron," sings one alternative country act, Moonshine Willy). Its The phrase "alternative country" has become as good as hard cash in the last year, so desperate is the white pop industry for anything new. kinds of bands. First there are those whose sheer talent makes them appealing classicists BR5-49, all of whom strike the difficult balance between themselves in the trappings of country but use a studied, shambling rawness to aggression: The lyrics to a new song, "Misunderstood," begin with spare piano accompaniment and local color ("You're back in your old neighborhood/ where the (Thrill Jockey), is "alternative" by process of elimination, not by design. believable as contemporary songs. They don't respect religion much, either. On quiet 11-piece band fitted out with a trumpet, baritone saxophone, and organ, productions. Their are slow and graceful, with lulling chord cycles, shimmering dynamics, and surreal lyrics delivered just above a whisper (as on a recent country as a shock device, a flash of bad taste, and seems to view the genre as "Alternative" has famously been defined as meaning that at least one of the musicians in the band can't play. BR5-49 and the Mavericks place out of the genre on those grounds. On BR5-49 (Arista), the band demonstrates a grasp of 1940s and 1950s country, down to the grace notes and details, and invests its songs with so much professionally recycled enthusiasm that a listener can relearn the dynamics of the old stuff. The Mavericks, in Music thinking that it would be great if it just sang its harmonies with a alternative country, however, is piety. Traditional country is a sidestepping, bohemian atheists behind alternative country, on the other hand, have no shame at all. The hell with piety, they say; they'd rather play up country's in country music usually yields little more than a cheap lampoon. It's not as to the easily caricatured image of country musicians as "the real thing," many he was no primitive. He was a song collector obsessed with the idea of country is a genuine expression of something: Hipsters with a sense of ironic tendency to ignore what's durable about country in favor of its stereotypical owns up to in the song "Faithless Street": "I had started this damn country gaseous glow elevating dull verbs (EAT), bland nouns (HOTEL), and vapid neon's cool heat alone did not make the OPEN sign the visual loudspeaker of commodity, from carefully considered decision to impulse purchase, from custom manufacture to mass production. Only then could OPEN join the pay phone and public toilet as invisible icons that don't appear until you look for them. The sign's ubiquity was a long time coming. Until a decade but it's far less expensive than the first neon sign sold in the United States, sign in the window also advertised the fact that a merchant was flush enough to have spent some coin. But even after the neon patents expired in the '30s and the form boomed, signs stayed expensive. And thanks to their fragility and artisan nature, they also remained locally produced. In the medium's heyday, brands. Protective plastic housings, sturdier mounts, lighter transformers, and from beer logos and a few other popular corporate insignias, neon was a tough (it's a matter of dispute who made the first one), but the way they sold local shop would charge for one made to order, and the market responded just as busy. The market blossomed in the late 1980s, with the rise of contain gases other than neon. A few puffs of argon fill the blue border of an OPEN; neon itself powers the red portion of the message. In the new generation of OPEN signs, the red is redder and the blue bluer because the glass tubing is coated with colored ink. If reheated, as they would have to be in the course of repair, the inks melt into brown goop, making the signs such a pain to fix that it's easier to buy another than to take a broken model into the shop. rectangle, with a dozen feet of 12-millimeter tube in the word OPEN and another eye. Another is that the size fits most transoms, windows, and walls. Still another: The shipping box stacks easily on a standard pallet. The OPEN sign's popularity tracks that of the strip mall. they were ready for business. Fifty years ago they'd have scrawled OPEN on a shirt cardboard and perched it to catch the eye of a passing pedestrian. But there used to be customs about when businesses could operate," says Dusty no one needed an OPEN sign. But things have changed. Shops may be open later, power of its own. "We get calls from people whose signs aren't working. They're because my competitor on the next block has a neon OPEN sign. People can see shocked indignation, controversy has been one measure of seriousness in Western turban. To a contemporary audience, the picture is still disturbing, but for different reasons. It's the uneasy conjunction of race and sexuality that the recent firestorms concerning artistic expression and its public support. urine. Recently, however, it has found itself on the other side of the censorship divide, and race is what pushed it there. It has made news not by mounting a show, but by canceling one before it opened. The show in question, writing catalog copy. That neither writer was ultimately able to do so may have have counted as "critique" or "transformation." But such is the nervous rigidity of our current aesthetic climate, where ambiguity is tolerated on some reviewers followed the institute's lead in thinking that only two Upper East Side of New York City. The show, which covers seven different series Union have the grainy, blurred look of authentic reportage from the Eastern two soldiers mounted on a motorcycle and cab push inexorably into the frigid Moves East" in pushing photography away from the sternly mimetic documentary style of the 1960s toward a more playful, artificial relation to the world. nostalgia for a simpler, "good" war. These soldiers have driven out of a dream world set far back in an imagined past, one drawn from movies and newsreels. rearing white horse and, for a second, you're caught by the power and careful is "mindful of real history," and that his work somehow "prompts the viewer's recollections of our forefathers' injustices: cultural expansionism, genocide visual imagination stocked with '50s movies and a reckless willingness to play these overexposed scenes straight, with neither irony nor commentary. controversial (is he complicit or "critiquing"?) without being particularly disturbing. His latest two series, though, succeed at being both. While the humanity. We see "inspections" of nude candidates for the gas chambers, women enacted by lifelike dolls. The images have some of the power of Art the same reasons. Given the rote piety of so much Holocaust rhetoric (there's varied, and the galleries might have helped the viewer out by furnishing details about the items' provenance and use. Nor is the degree of "stereotyping" at all consistent among the items. They range from crudely series reveals his interest in a tradition of blackface masquerade that, by the people were inherently funny, it also reflected a complex identification of cork smeared over the face does not a new identity make. The very luridness of It's as though their melancholy derived from the excruciating imperative to be blacks performing according to the conventions of blackface. The objects that Gallery, could as well be called "white memorabilia," since they record, presumably, the fantasies of white people, including the fantasy of assuming a they attest to the indomitability of the human spirit? They infiltrate every corner of our consciousness, but do we understand them? Let us begin with the play was so unbelievable I must raise the roof of this arena to contain the ownership. Raising the Roof is the celebratory sports gesture of the moment. Like all inspired sports gestures, it's moved beyond sports. Everybody trace the lineage of Raising the Roof, one must understand the history of the sports gesture itself. One must go back to a time few of us can remember. A that it's hard to imagine what else people could have done, it wasn't invented invented this elevated palm slap, Smith replied, "We decided to be a little crunching of radius and ulna bones. The Bash began in baseball, and it went would meet at the plate for Monster Bashing. Within a month of the Bash's featured a challenge to the Bash's ancestor: "If you're a big fan of the had begun as a struggle for individual expression ended in an avalanche of artists sold out. They now seek the public's embrace and are aided by the holds it started on playgrounds in New York. Popular mostly with football and it is also the hardest to perform. It requires a level of fluidity not commonly reached its zenith with the Packers' Super Bowl win last season. This season's turned football celebration. A basic salute to teammates after touchdowns. preseason games this summer. A gesture clearly suited to football's warlike invited their fans to join in, creating a stadium saluting in unison and marking the pinnacle of the football culture's fascistic tendencies. game. Fans standing at appropriate moments fashion a group undulation. Particularly frustrating for abstainers: A cry of "down in front" will not dampen a rollicking Wave, so sight lines are blocked at regular time intervals. maybe even a harsh poet. The richness of language, image, and imagination all domestic details of this poem, the shawl and the vase, convey a dire, steely perception: that life's sweetness may run out long before the duties. Here is no benign affirmation of redemption. On the other hand, there is something in her clarity on this point, her ferocity of truth, and her firm sense that it is her duty to carry on, that I find exhilarating. Even the dashes, with their suspended, rising quality, suggest the vitality of endurance. can be categorized as liberal or conservative. It is the liberals who concern me. Their hearts may be in the right place but, as a result of attachment to dogma and oversimplification of facts, there is much that they fail to understand. Since they are the majority, and their views the predominant ones, I feel compelled to come forward on behalf of my fellow politically incorrect gardeners are people who feel that, through gardening, we can alleviate our sense of alienation from nature; and that, through good gardening, we can repair some of the damage we have done to our environment. The most extreme liberals believe that there is an original or a natural state in which the environment would be if we hadn't shown up on the scene, and that we have not only the ability but also a moral imperative to help nature return to this state. Remember the '70s, when people were turning their suburban lawns loose and allowing them to aspire to being meadows? They were letting the grass their neighbors were handing them citations demanding a return to neatness and neighborliness. This liberation of grass struggling to be free was yet another basic idea is that nature is good, man is not, and the more we can keep the The liberal solution is what has come to be known as a "natural garden." Judging from the looks of it, it might more properly be called a "naturalistic garden." These gardens contain many elements cribbed godliness. A walk or a drive up to the house or through the garden should bend and wind and provide a "sense of journey," as one might experience on a walk in other wonder of the natural world. Sometimes, if the garden seems very "natural," as Central Park is meant to, people may even mistake their is no hero to our liberals, for he committed the unforgivable sin of using "Natural gardening" is a strictly regional affair, done with those plants that fall of man. (This type of gardening came into vogue in the 1980s as the gardening environmentalists' response to the excesses of that decade. It only with lessons about water conservation and ecosystems but also with the as a villainous expression of suburban man's environmental insensitivity, and turned against it entirely. Grass was yanked out by its roots and tossed onto the compost heap. Those offending areas are now populated by happy natives indigenous plants refrain from sending their seed downwind into other areas where they do not belong. But can we be sure that any "native" plant was not cigarettes in his garden, an act incomprehensible to liberals), poked fun at those who think they garden in "a natural way." That, he claimed, could be seen other hand, was for him the "high defiance of nature herself." Nature has no patience for your garden. She wants to reclaim it, and if you turn your back on it for a moment, she'll be there, with weeds and vines and tangled brush. It is men and women, not gardens, who are found in nature. And because we aesthetes. Gardens, particularly flower gardens, serve no real purpose. If gardens must have a higher calling, it is the cause of beauty. Failing to recognize the primacy of aesthetics in gardening, liberals are left vulnerable to all sorts of unnecessary errors, such as using bark mulch as a decorative element. This can lead you down the slippery slope toward plants artlessly plunked down in an unrepentant mishmash, the garden equivalent of an unshaven ultimately a folly whose goal is to provide delight. A liberal may look at a landscapes based on a grid. His belief is that we should not shy away from geometry in the design and layout of gardens, since the entire cosmos is based on it. To garden in this way is to copy the spirit of nature, not its liberals say about conservatives is that we are not sufficiently concerned about the environment. We, too, are concerned. We just express our concern in a different way. Imagine Nature looking down at what we have made at, say, boggy pond. Which would it feel was a more fitting testament to its mysteries Art," a new department, will compare movies, books, etc., with the facts on People fudges lots of little details. For example, in the film, masthead was constantly changing. But composite characters are a cinematic device commonly used to reduce audience confusion and maintain narrative court battles (which numbered more than the four the film describes). However, movie, cheerfully describes himself as a scum bag, the movie clearly wants to one day and discovers he is a rich publisher. But the story behind the real couldn't pay) as "an unwelcome addition to the scene." But that fraternity might have included some rough players itself. A book by former Penthouse a white supremacist currently serving six life sentences for murder (and the risk at trial, according to law officials (and he was in prison indefinitely, anyway). Franklin does have a history of confessing to crimes all over the Hustler a place it doesn't deserve in the sexual revolution. The film right to sleep with other women; so does she. At the magazine, she has extensive editorial input (which is true). Even after he is paralyzed and their told Hustler that she didn't see anything wrong with a "man striking a wheelchair into the bathroom and tries to save her. His memoir says he asked a him of sexually molesting her and, in an interview in the current issue of film sanitizes Hustler 's unsavory sexuality. Even the most cursory look at back issues of Hustler confirms that the filmmakers seriously misrepresent its content. The images we see or hear described in the movie are gagged and bound on the top of a car). The magazine's "humor" often depended on in organized crime. The film portrays the sentencing, and then a prison visit emotional distress, the film sticks fairly closely to the facts. Indeed, the screenwriters borrowed lines from the court transcript. At an earlier Supreme justices "eight assholes and one token cunt." That transcript didn't make the is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the begins and ends with disclaimers. The opening statement says that characters and dialogue have been created or altered for "dramatic purposes." The closing servant, "was created to reflect a viewpoint concerning this turbulent period not by the standards of docudrama, where synthesized characters and invented dialogue are routine. But in its selection of material to include and The film portrays the fervent opponent of the civil rights Standard that "viewers without prior knowledge likely will leave the film White House today." The film also does little to suggest what other historians it was politically advantageous and jettisoned it when it wasn't. less accurate (though it includes two major fictionalizations along the way). he had in 1958--and won. We don't see the campaign, but we do hear parts of his promises, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." The troopers were justifiably trying to keep the peace and protect the state from troopers' use of force, the film's portrayal of his reaction is consistent with asks the congregation for forgiveness. The crowd starts to sing "Amazing Grace." The visit did happen. Carter notes, however, that it wasn't forgiveness"; he just said he opposed integration because he favored states' Two inventions are used to bolster the dramatic power of prattles on about a favorite black handyman of his youth. He clearly has far to scene at the church is wrenched from its political context. The film doesn't suggesting that his conversion had political motives. Commentators have noted cast in the Democratic primary, a fact alluded to in a written epilogue at the in flamboyant and often witty form much of what would soon become the program was as new as I was old, I resented the short specimen saplings that dotted our lawn and the neat rows of perky yellow daffodils that popped up from the wood ancient groves with thick canopies and filtered light whose mysteries lured the children I read about in books? I have always been drawn to the drama of landscape, of wild nature and grand, cultivated gardens. To be able to fashion beauty from light, scent, earth, flora, and fauna, and then to give it over to the uncontrollable forces of time and decay seemed an endeavor noble and humbling. I wanted to make gardens. But I moved to the city. year, when I finally got my own piece of dirt and took a spade to it, it landed earth, getting dirty, getting scratches that I wore proudly, making compost, lugging, digging, and planting. The result of all this was something else entirely. The garden I made was a meek little mess, a structureless collection of plants that never grew from the size at which they entered the ground. While out to toil anew, and well after dark, lit by headlights of the car, I would realize that pleasure had turned to despair. I grew sullen and ashamed of my While gardening is assumed to be so therapeutic that there is even a field called horticultural therapy, it wasn't designed to help those been too high. Worse, I recognized a disparity between my idealized self and my actual self that I had last observed in the seventh grade when I was a gawky for the relief that winter would bring. To most gardeners, winter is merely the anticipation of spring. They take spring gardening catalogs with them into the tub, where they plan their coming glories. They start seeds in their basements to get a jump on the season. I was not ready to go there yet. Instead, quite by accident, I ended up gardening all winter, happily and in private. that meets to buy bulbs in bulk at reduced rates and exchange bits of gardening wisdom. Seduced by the descriptions in the catalog, I recklessly bought flowers that I knew would become deer food if planted outside. Fortunately, the bulb ladies showed me how to force them into bloom indoors in winter. Just pot them, they explained. Jam as many into the dirt as possible, water them, and then required for dormancy. After a couple of months, having been deceived into thinking they've just slept through the winter, they can be brought inside and acclimating them to their new surroundings before offering them the winter darlings. I arranged them carefully, watered them dutifully, and checked their progress constantly, recording their growth rates and bloom times. As someone who resents houseplants enormously for needing so much and giving so little, I thought at first that this might be hypocritical. But these potted wonders changed daily, stretching and budding and turning toward the sun. They did not just sit there inert and accusatory, the way houseplants do. Hungering for more flowers, I moved on to the woody stems of forsythia. Noticing that a willow tree cut down last year had resisted death, sending up dozens of shoots from its stump, I cut and forced those too. lovely flowers for a few days in May and one or two fruits clinging pathetically in late summer. Removed from its body, its limbs were elegant and for weeks, bulbs and branches rising from slumber into bloom. I would change water, snip stems, peel back bark, arrange flowers, arrange arrangements, and maple that looked promising. Anything with a hint of swollen bud became my in a storm, and put them in a pitcher. In came some mysterious blue berries the irksome ivy by the front door looked good indoors. At the supermarket, I stared for a long time at the delectable dark green foliage and deep red stem buckets filled with branches so large they scraped the ceiling and the walls as I dragged them to the sink for their changes of water. Dinner came later and later as the kitchen was covered in twigs, branches, and berries. write, the house is alive with flowers and foliage, and it is starting to snow attached, and the pendulous leathery seed pods of wisteria. On the mantle, an old iron urn holds cascading ivy and some fragrant winter honeysuckle. Next to that is a small black vase of cut miniature daffodils bought in the supermarket because I could not bear to harvest any of my own. And on it goes. not quite one thing and not quite another. There are clear days when you can skate on the pond and others when you can walk about without a coat. Looking around for branches to bring home, I see the beech trees still hanging on to of the maple are about to open. While others are just dreaming of their worthy images, full of human dignity and topical picturesqueness and formal relegate him to a historical back shelf along with so many other humanistic of Man whose work today primarily inspires a nagging sense of duty. his youth, however, Strand was a radical Modernist who made one startling picture after another, progressing in giant leaps that apparently occurred month to month. With dazzling speed he went from being a promising imitator to discovering dozens of avenues that would be explored by others in the ensuing period, gathering for the first time nearly all his surviving work of the of discovery. If you have ever wondered what inspiration might look like his education was completed at the Ethical Culture School, which prized the took place at the New York Camera Club, a hobby league whose members were doctors and lawyers less interested in art than in craft, and then he gravitated toward the artistic forefront of the medium, namely, the that the group's work restricted itself to counterfeiting the effects of drawing and painting. The images were soft, vague studies of moony, "timeless" by any mechanical process and wholly innocent of the industrial world. appropriately languid views of shimmering water; decorative sheep; and bathtub toy against the swirl of rocks and spume. By the time he made that picture, though, he had already taken in works by more venturesome boxcars surmounted by a tangle of rails and a head of steam that has nothing to Very soon he was touring the country, bringing back new stripped trees leaning over, bearing aloft a neat grid of wires, towering over that had never been made before (but would, in one way or another, be made started investigating the graphic dynamism at work in the shadows thrown down by the el tracks, and he began seriously investing in the possibilities of the numerous social interpretations, but to our eyes it might look like an went off to his family's country house in Twin Lakes, Conn., and there he He arranged bowls, jugs, and fruit in sunlight or whipped them with the shadows of the porch railing, then left the objects alone and began rearranging the position of his camera instead. The pictures become increasingly free; they can abstraction and from the ground up toward dramatic diagonals in the sky. Back in town again, he set about making portraits in the slums, arming himself with a camera equipped with a false lens at a right angle to the actual one so he are among the greatest photographic portraits ever, an accumulated life visible pictures that synthesized everything he had learned. Chief among these, in my false front, a couple of roofs, a fence, and some people in the street that marches the eye up one side and down the other, seamlessly blending all his knowledge of light and shade, volume and flatness, geometry and the shapes of these years in a private collection, a barely known monument of the most liberating Modernism, the kind that the viewer can take out into the world to transform its least prepossessing elements into jazz and verve. The same could be said of the exhibition as a whole, and its splendid catalog: They animate a was inclined to trust any saint who carried a knife. conversation in his poem is so convincingly real yet the poetry so gorgeous in its sounds that I always feel a little shocked to realize how sad the art and life in such a small space, with such a beguilingly intimate genre of the commissioned poem, there are not many as charming as this one. to the old myth of the tortoise that supports the universe, he slyly introduces the underlying weight of civilization and history into the interchange between the eyes of a bird, but because he is beaked, has the turtle attracted you. He is your only pet. opposes him in the streets of the city shall go down. arms of your Lord Well that's really nice I thought eyelids for a second& when I did the mist had cleared although a faint mist clearing again& again I could finally breathe a little look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to "relate" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action. made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the college football player, says, "That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged. bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's "Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period." must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey extremely important, are the producers and directors. calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics," director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call "illegal defense," which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my girl?" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years: game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, golf has become auto racing. What makes it so riveting are the crashes. The had always dreamed of winning the Masters, and something had always gone wrong. merely raised the standard by which other blown tournaments will now be judged. that night, people I hadn't spoken to in a long time. In a world of pain, anyone else in history, yet he will go down in history as a man of golf's surgical ability to bring to the surface a man's mental weakness. I gaunt, and has been prone to fits of rage lately. He screamed at a volunteer at He had a straight uphill putt for par. He could make a thousand such putts in a yanked his putt left and lipped it out. His wheels had come off. He'd hit the wall. There was nothing left but shards of metal and the wails of the doomed. He was still tied for the lead, but that didn't matter, since the devastation identically easy putt, three feet straight uphill, he didn't even catch any lip, missed it wide left, game over. The world is a dark, cruel place. A few It may be that the media spotlight is that much more intense, and golfers know how many cameras are trained on their quivering hands. Maybe it is the dollars. Or maybe it is that the competition is so stiff that no single player the majors tend to win only one or two. The window of opportunity is small, and they all fear having it slam shut on their fingers. over there and get Tiger's divot," I heard a fan say one day, referring to the tiny chunk of grass and dirt that Woods had scraped from the fairway on one of same course every year, and some of us can recite the yardage from tee to green conditions. Everyone was buzzing about the rough, the dreaded rough, the never got close to leading the tournament, much less winning. I followed him some on the first and last days, and he was spectacular. No one has as much club speed, and when he strikes a ball, it whistles, rockets out into space on a line and then, astonishingly, rises, as though hitting another gear, some kind of warp drive, before parachuting to Earth uncannily close to where Woods the next hole. Woods played conservatively, rarely using his driver; but, for all his genius, he's not the straightest golfer in the world, and he ended up putt well ensured that he wouldn't be a factor. He finished tied for that he was on his way to becoming just a golfer. (And, eventually, a broken They were men without color, literally wearing gray and beige and brown. The was obvious, watching them labor away, unsmiling, that this was just an endurance test to see who could avoid crashing and disintegrating on national three rounds of the Open for the third consecutive year. I could not bring alone among the final four had won an Open, but was a vanilla man, player in the world never to have won one of these things. said afterward, "I feel an incredible amount of pain." Minutes passed. Sometimes a person in life is faced with a crucial decision, a decisively without pause or excessive contemplation. Everyone watching thought: gestures as though he was going to throw his ball in the lake, and the crowd want to hit the putt. Because he knew it wasn't going in. He knew he was about government budgets behind it, is conceived in optimism, if not in fantasy. The bills aren't called promissory notes for nothing. What they promise is a flush beguiling visions of unity and wealth, of responsible fiscal practice and continent in a few years, these notes herald nothing less than a new and nobly all their color and utopian promise, the new notes are lifeless. After all, coinage and currency usually reflect the character of the issuing state, and in name, the euro, was picked because it translates easily into almost every the businesslike thought of its designers. And the decision to cut each of the seven notes in a different size (as well as a different color), to help the specifications laid out for the look of the new bank notes by the institution rules fastidiously prescribe every detail of what can and cannot be sold within fruit cultivated for centuries has been found not to make the grade.) Back in possible "themes" for the designs, settling at last on two: a historical one, These themes were broad enough to encompass almost anything individual designers could come up with. What they ruled out were portraits of people, especially portraits of leaders. Individuals inevitably raise the specter of inviting design teams from the central banks of the various member nations to whose diverse national and professional backgrounds rivaled even the crew of winner, although it has kept the creators' identities unpublicized in the for the "ages and styles" theme, interpreted as such stock architectural elements as bridges, windows, and gateways. The eight ages in which these Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo, the age of iron and glass architecture, and the age of modern architecture. The colors are muted and staid, the illustrations as innocuous, impeccable, and dispassionate as those you would also supposed to have symbolic meaning. The windows and gates represent the spirit of openness and cooperation of the new confederation, we are told, while heads of the populace of any continent. More specifically, according to the common cultural heritage and the vision of a common future in the next century, indeed, the new millennium." These are not, mind you, actual existing bridges, who will have no English umbrellas, French berets, or German bellies. It is not considered, may make more practical sense than our greenbacks, with their wacky still putts along in front of the Treasury building. But will they ever really circulation only after individual national economies have hit certain economy and the strongest currency in the group, was supposed to lead the way, Institution promises that it will announce within the next two years the exact date on which the euros will go into use. It's supposed to be no later than I should settle our dispute in an alley. But he wouldn't know a spinning time to answer, once and for all, the most important unanswered question in cinema: Who is really the greatest action hero of them all? Or, to put grave to join them. Therefore, Slate has secured the services of a panel of needs 'em? This is real fighting. Two men. One ring. A fight to submission, falls in Round One. He's beefy, and he learned to box for the Rocky karate champion, but the judges doubt his credentials. "He's a ballet dancer, not a fighter," says Ultimate Fighting champ Ken Shamrock. "In a real fight, got one kick off before a real fighter took him down and had him for pounds, he's too small to fight barehanded in a ring against monsters like tricks, I have many ways to win. But if I am standing there [in a ring], there probably one of them," says a judge. But other judges drool. "He has enough also large, powerful, and notoriously belligerent. "He has the will to kill," braggart; most great fighters are quietly arrogant. He has the mannerisms of a bully, someone who abuses the weak and is cowed by the strong. "I don't think says, "It's a wonderful movie system, but you have to be fighting a very sloppy immensely strong. He trained more fanatically than anyone in the history of and other styles. Unlike the other actors, Lee loved to fight, instigating only hope: his size. If he managed to grab Lee, he might be able to pin him, he has sent six opponents to the hospital. I asked him how the best fighting is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the least as described in media accounts and in such books as the unauthorized she dined at Pizza Hut, shopped in malls, mowed her own lawn, and lived in a tour bus and asks children seeking autographs how they're doing in school. In she wouldn't want a blood transfusion because of her faith (by that point, though, she'd already been given blood, to no avail). entirely, until the producers convinced him not to. The film implies that was a shrine to the singer) nor the tabloid rumor, denied by all and not backed attract the attention of the mainstream media (inspired by the success of their magazine). As the movie implies with a scene in which a crowd forms around edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade. little fanfare. No one played "Hail to the Chief." The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing. hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy. break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what there is no such thing as a "hot hand" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. "He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport," my colleague Tony would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the car, and the population wasn't growing. The only way to keep making money was to make each automobile more expensive and more profitable. The goal, their marketing strategy was to link automobiles to the glamour and speed of the supersonic jet fighter planes that the Navy and Air Force had introduced in quality that was abstracted into the parabolic, boomerang shapes that started splits on wheels, dripping with the extraneous decoration that stylists called Yet its lofty stock price assumes continued growth. embossed with parabolas, and the razor itself is festooned with them. Starting where they'll enjoy the quickest, slickest shave in history. irony. Unlike the lounge music revival, it's aimed not at a hip coterie but at be a sincere attempt to embody progress. For the last quarter century or so, designers have not made this a high priority. Products have evoked cool (Ray snowboard). Few have tried to communicate that things are actually getting There is, on the face of it, something ridiculous about a model. It featured an animation sequence that showed the second blade cutting what the first one missed and the third getting even closer. The tag line: won't be in stores until summer, so it's way too early to know how the shaving just about wiped the smirk off my face. The damned thing works. able to shave with fewer strokes. This shortens an unpleasant activity and of this trend; it's mainly the cartridge that's been upgraded. The razor's body is, functionally, just a handle. But it is touting the rubberized boomerangs on its top and bottom as gripping aids, to keep it from slipping in your hands, even though the parallel ridges on the Sensor line probably work about as well. The difference is all in the visible to the casual shopper. Like the microchip and the altered gene, they fall beneath the threshold of visual perception. With its outward imagery, throwback to a time when progress took a back seat to empty stylistic gestures, deep down inside, the razor really does represent an advance. is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the digits of the total amount wagered at a given racetrack, which anyone could learn through the sports pages. Since the game never favored the players, the "bankers" naturally amassed large profits. Besides, the outcome was often beer baron who has muscled his way into the neighborhood numbers racket, returns from jail upset by the white incursion into the trade. Meanwhile, between the film's portrayal of him and the record? Though he may have been overlooked in white newspapers of the time and in subsequent histories of the film, though, exaggerates his role in several instances and gives no hint as to what happened to him after the numbers battle was over. who can take back from their boss the racket he stole from my colored friends Union message: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap." That telegram is omitted from the That's only one of several inaccuracies in the film's was killed was because he'd recklessly threatened to rub out special prosecutor proposed the hit to the syndicate, which rejected it: The mob couldn't afford prosecutor, district attorney, governor, and failed presidential candidate. the movie depicts him as a gangster with a heart, but a gangster nonetheless. At one point, he throws cash to people in a local soup line. At another, the and more grainy and ultimately black, as if to suggest that settling the big is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the subsequently made a few changes. For instance, when, at the beginning of the previously held beliefs (or what exactly those beliefs were in the first place) until the Stern article was published. This summer, one day after that leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the filmmakers were able to incorporate Stern 's unpleasant revelation into "emotional transformation" and then says that the Stern piece helps us contending with treacherous terrain, frostbite, hunger, robbers, and an king" and is apparently his sole source of informal contact and entertainment. (for instance, it was someone else who helped him tinker with old cars). And it days, and an incident shown in the film as crucial to the success of the destruction of ammunition supplies before he left. Moreover, the film's Lama sees his native village being pillaged and monks shot) reflects the historical facts all too well. As the written epilogue to the film states, well as spiritual leader of the country. The film's epilogue mentions that he life as exiled leader is beyond the movie's time frame (for more on this, see denies having known she was.) She divorced him while he was gone. At various overtures are rebuffed; his son has come to think of his stepfather as his true also claimed he has no hard feelings toward his father, whom he now sees United States dropped its efforts to extradite him. A former drug informant and political influence with the island's shaky government. At the news of Miller's Miller imbroglio and the assault on Bin Laden would appear to have nothing in The United States, born and raised during the age of the foreign policy. The United States negotiates with nations, trades with nations, issues sanctions against nations, and makes war on nations. But the United States has begun to realize that it lives in a very different kind of world, weapons, and is engaged in an elaborate conspiracy so secretive that we were not aware of it till it smacked us in the head. Habituated to presidents and prime ministers, we are now dealing with autonomous, mysterious characters driven by motives that baffle us and who are unchecked by any government. Bin actors are not, of course, an invention of the '90s. The United States fought terror network is currently dominating headlines, but other terrorist groups lords have neutralized (or purchased) governments and recruited private armies. arms barons compete for power, while legitimate governments of the region are patsies by comparison. Even corporations are getting into the Bond business. overpopulation, and urbanization have undermined Third World governments. For most of this century, colonial rulers or nationalist dictators dominated countries, monopolizing power with mighty central governments. But central filled the vacuum. Where anarchy reigns, dollars can buy a private empire. It's don't like. This is government privatization, twisted beyond recognition.) generally yawns at the rest of the world. The tried and true method for ginning up excitement about a foreign entanglement is to demonize, to focus on a single puppeteer such as Bin Laden. (It was astonishing how rapidly Bin Laden emerged his name. The next day, we all did, and we were mad as hell at him.) actually trying to assassinate the chosen villain. Here is the heart of the how does a great power do it? The cruise missile strike against Bin Laden you can't rely on Bond tactics forever. We bombed Bin Laden once. Can we keep that violate the island's sovereignty? These are questions to which we don't intact. Bin Laden is a fearsome enemy of the United States, and the sooner he's killed the better. But even if he dropped dead today, there would still be millions of underemployed, undereducated, alienated men in the Middle East rarely appear in print or on television, can tell you that the media are no mirror of the nation's complexion. But they understand that the media do well that innuendo is effective only if well calibrated. political participation" is merely a cover for some sinister foreign It is also, to a lesser but still substantial degree, the racialist language of strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone century later, the metaphor of dual identity endures in our racial narratives. This bifurcation is intuitively appealing because it makes concrete the ambivalence of assimilation, the gnawing sense among many people of color that membership in the mainstream comes at a high personal cost. The symbolism of split personalities and divided souls also has visceral power. And there is a certain romance to the imagery, adorning the ordinary lives of nonwhite folk with the dignity of redemptive suffering. is too much that is flawed about this pose. For, what do we presume when we speak of the minority person's "dual identity"? We presume that "racial identity" is foreordained and monolithic, and ever at odds with "national But over the course of a generation, activists and bureaucrats have manufactured a single race out of a diverse mass of several million people whose origins can be traced to dozens of countries. tells us something about the magnetic appeal of racial fundamentalism. More Yet, even if we did believe in the fixity of races, "double the classic pluralist formulation, is a "nation of nations," a neutral holding teens are reciting gangsta rap lyrics, when salsa sales are surging past ketchup sales, how can we speak with a straight face about the ineffaceable experience as a simple equation plotted along two axes, as if class or gender contingency never sculpted one's sense of self. And, in the name of minority individual his full, complex humanity; interpreting his voice as the contemporary multiculturalism, that sort of illogic can be affirming. So long as color is a proxy for entitlement, there will be many who find it useful to ostentatiously posit a conflict between their racial core and their assimilated remind us all that flimsy notions of the minority's eternally dual identity, whether tinged with xenophobia or candied with race pride, in the end amount to to make the media look absurd, he got off to a roaring start. On the front page important enough for the front page, you might wonder why the Times needed Brill to raise the subject. And who knows better than the Times is that though the editor seems to envision a magazine that will hold the press accountable to a wider public, he has created one that is unlikely to interest anyone outside the media. The second problem is that though Brill deserves a Let's start with the magazine. After hearing it disputed for so many days, potential readers will be fooled into thinking something scintillating is going on. In fact, what will strike most people when they is a problem for media magazines in general, the prototype being the ever filled with articles you'd say only people in the business could possibly want to read, except that they're too mundane even for people in the business. "New directors who can't seem to put anything but crime on the air. feature lauding the New York Times for its fine reporting on returns of their investment club. Seems he had to go in for sinus surgery the better person, perhaps I would read stories like this through to the end. attitude that he's the only guy in the world with the guts to point out other scandal coverage is intended to be a devastating case study of media journalists have been irresponsible. By my reading, Brill does not document a received. To conclude, as Brill does, that the press is now "an institution being corrupted to its core" wildly overreaches the evidence he presents. claims plausibly to have been misquoted by Brill, see "Chatterbox." We cannot know for sure who is right, because Brill president doesn't think she is going to tell the truth. Second, the Brill ignores a highly plausible alternative explanation: Most if not all could have come from the lawyers of various witnesses sympathetic to the president. others are operating under what is called a "joint defense agreement." They there are lots of lawyers with access to information about what various witnesses said and a variety of motivations to leak that information. Noting decisions," he writes, "that have ruled explicitly that leaking information about prospective witnesses who might testify at a grand jury, or about expected testimony, or about negotiations regarding immunity for testimony, or [about] the strategy of a grand jury proceeding all fall within the criminal prohibition." Nowhere does he note court decisions that have ruled the opposite, or acknowledge that the question is far from settled. News and the Wall Street Journal Web edition have been endlessly hashed over. So have various nuances that Brill presents as revelatory. Both talks to reporters? At televised press conferences he has held in Little Rock, he can be seen calling on journalists by their first names, suggesting that he knows some of them pretty well and that he doesn't regard this as a secret. seems exactly the sort of thing Brill started his magazine to nail other journalists for doing. And what's a "jam job," anyway? campaign contributions, certainly to people they're writing about. But whether disclosed this fact, as he acknowledged when busted. Flytrap. In the heat of competition, stories have run that shouldn't have. But the best reporters covering the scandal have done an extremely good job in a vexing and unfamiliar situation. At times, they have behaved almost heroically. passing up what might have been the scoop of the decade out of concern that doing so would put him in an ethically compromised situation. Brill disparages he was under contract to discuss the campaign finance scandal. That makes years, someone somewhere must have decreed that the intellectual buzzword of the '90s was to be "communitarianism." Only five years ago, communitarianism was an obscure school of philosophy discussed in faculty seminars; today, its and "civil society," the two mantras of the movement, are part of everyday Curiously, in a climate of polarized political discourse, everyone is a communitarian. The movement's cheerleaders can be found across the political political correctness, throw millions of dollars into projects relating to these ideas. (The result, predictably, is that the magic words "community" and "civil society" are sprinkled liberally now in all proposals for research conservative Heritage Foundation, announced last year that it was reorienting What is communitarianism? Where did it come from? How come everyone seems to agree it is good? It's actually all quite simple. You just He is probably started it all. In his treatise on government, The meaning that human beings can best fulfill themselves as part of social and creed, leave human beings feeling "hollow at the core." is perhaps mostly closely identified with communitarianism. Along with serious the expense of social and moral issues. In his new book, Democracy's liberalism's reluctance to introduce morality into politics is trenchant, instead on vague statements about the value of community life and troubled liberals say is wrong with modern society. His answer, however, is not to talk about nice neighborhoods, but instead, to talk about Virtue. Actually, morally instructive tales from all over the world, are relentless best sellers, actually filling the vacuum with any kind of absolutist morality. They are, Both groups talk up abstract virtues like honor, commitment, and thrift, but conservatives then propose specific policies that put into law their moral and religious preferences in order to deal with all sorts of issues: unwed mothers, absent fathers, unruly schoolchildren, gay lovers, and so on. It's a game B Is for Bowling. One of the most important debates among academics and policy wonks over the last two years has been, is it better while individual bowling is on the rise. This, he contends, is a symbol of the decline of community spirit and the rise of atomistic individualism. the best of the new literature on community, because rather than waxing poetic about community in the abstract, he describes actual communities. The result is a vivid picture showing that the strong bonds that developed in those fabled neighborhoods of yore were kindled by conditions that we might find stayed in neighborhoods, for example, because they could not afford to move, and because other neighborhoods would not accept them easily. They attended church services and neighborhood social events because small banks, schools, and other community institutions were run by a local elite that enforced a certain kind of conformity. Porches and stoops, those symbols of a vibrant social life, stopped being used as gathering places for a rather practical it sounds more and more confining on close examination. Imagine having to go to parties with your local bank manager so that you could get a mortgage. horrified by this rise in nostalgia about the 1950s, a decade that was seen, spontaneous fun with one's intimate friends and family." Hmm. "Temperate and spontaneous fun" sounds like something one might have to do in a work camp. And be for "baseball," but it turns out that baseball leagues have been growing steadily over the last decades. And the number of soccer clubs has been rising meteorically as well. The simplest explanation for this rise might be the C Is for Civil Society. Civil Society has nothing to do were good for democracy. This celebrated hypothesis has by now become a better governed than the south for centuries, but that is not to say that is civil society is good for efficient government rather than democratic Consider the difference between the conservative writer business activity is a key indicator of a politically and economically healthy from being part of civil society, leads the assault on civil society. "Who will get business off the backs of civil society?" Barber asks. Now it isn't clear why firms don't fulfill most of the functions of civil society. Indeed the term private business activity. On the other hand, you don't hear many conservatives supposed to be a third way, neither liberal nor conservative, that charted a new course for philosophy and politics. But as this primer suggests, it has become a collection of meaningless terms, used as new bottles into which the old wine of liberalism and conservatism is poured. Community means one thing if society, and even bowling. Call it politics as usual. moment they arrived, the two have had an aura about them. Both won desirable committee assignments. They are frequent guests on talk shows and favored publications such as the Weekly Standard as having what it takes to be a Republican vice president. Watts, who is also frequently mentioned as veep "character is simply doing what's right when nobody is looking.") Even jocks. This taboo is a form of political correctness that even Republicans endorse. But in truth, the stereotype is not too far off the mark. Both are embarked on undistinguished, if not utterly futile, careers in Congress. While they're both very nice men, in an unworldly sort of way, they're in way over their heads. Treated as stars, they're really just mascots. was the more successful football player and is a more extreme conservative. A gay rights. "My faith is the foundation of my life," he says. "I won't deny that, because the way I relate to people is a reflection of my faith." On his enough to push despite its idiocy (I have my hunch) and something called the extremism but rather his disinclination to compromise or operate as part of a team. As part of the small, ongoing insurrection of conservative true believers he made a scene by telling the speaker that he wouldn't succeed in intimidating does have a kind of blinkered integrity. Along with another colleague from all been intercepted. He had to withdraw his parents' rights bill when even because he has cooperated with the leadership. Watts has succeeded in helping much in the House. The problem is that Watts would never be given a leading role in his party if he weren't black. Republican affirmative action is the basis for his career, and Republican political correctness is the basis for his reputation. Though Watts is a minister, when he speaks without a script, he can on like this forever. On affirmative action, he has urged "caution." When I understand the people who have voted for it, and I understand the people who voted against it." Asked which he would have been, he answered, "Good after six years, next term will be his last. But like other term limit added that he had seen too many people fail to leave the stage while the denser than many of its other Republican politicians. This is the state, after Congress members are dim. Only about former football players are you not an alternative to jail time. Well, now is the chance for the president to put dignified way out of Flytrap: How about community service? We should let the president serve out his term, but let's make him really serve. conundrum for those who want Flytrap to end is this: Any remedy lenient enough punitive enough for conservatives will enrage the left half. A solution must None of the proposed remedies suffices. House Republicans, to take his licks standing in the well of the House). A censure plus a fine the other hand, impeachment would be bloody, endless, and intolerable to most voters. And resignation would set the horrific precedent that the media and the opposition can drum a president out of office if they shout enough. community service, plus censure, might succeed. Every week until the end of his number of hours and the kind of work (more on the specifics of this later). The apology is action. His prolific, ever savvier apologies are selfish: They are designed to make him look better. He has announced that he has accepted responsibility, but what exactly has he done about it? Redemption, in most allow words to substitute for actions. He would have to act. would meet another requirement of Flytrap punishment: It would humble him. president. But we require more visible evidence of his regret. Being president is no suffering for him. In fact, being president reinforces his worst instincts. His chief Flytrap sin is believing that normal rules and moral codes don't apply to him, that everyone else exists to do his bidding. His punishment must remind him that he is merely a man, and so he must be chopped down to cater to others instead of being catered to. That might begin to cure, or at least temper, his wicked and dangerous sense of entitlement. function: It would placate conservatives, especially if service were combined off some high school might persuade enough Republicans to sign on. cathartic enough to liberate us from our Flytrap obsession. We would no longer need to debate dada legal technicalities and gasp over sordid details. might even benefit the president in the way he cares most about. It must history is now secure: He's the reckless lech who ruined his presidency for a as the reckless lech, but he may also be remembered as the reckless lech who service, but they are surmountable. Would he have time? We can't expect him to skip G-7 summits so that he can collect roadside trash. But he managed to object that service, like censure, is not in the Constitution. Congress cannot proceed. And he would certainly consent if the alternative was impeachment. The thorniest question, of course, is: What kind of service? It must be dignified: It cannot tarnish the presidency, and it must be that's what he does best. Just as drunken drivers convicted of manslaughter are for such honorable yet humble service already exists, and it even has a the poor with Jimmy Carter. Or, better yet, he should build houses for the poor under the supervision of Jimmy Carter. Now that's a Flytrap remedy even revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be "offered an increased years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm. Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a "misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion." And ever since, the whole subject has been women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture. realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year. option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication editorial apology, the Inquirer said: "Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right." No, they were wrong, and the women would be free to "change their minds at any point and become fertile subsequent commentary, "saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms. use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. contraception from their parents, not the government. requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies. do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the notion that he's powerless, so disgraced and mistrusted that his presidency is finished politically if not chronologically. But a peculiar little side drama on Capitol Hill suggests that this conclusion is not as certain as it seems. It needed to keep the government operating. Every year, House Republicans strip agreement between Congress and the president, conflict escalates, and the president threatens vetoes. And every year, a last minute continuing resolution concessions, the bills move, and everyone goes home. education, the International Monetary Fund, summer jobs, and literacy programs and that they have attached unacceptable language about abortion, the census, and the environment. Does this mean we are headed for another shutdown? the reasons reveal much about Flytrap game theory. At the mere mention of the word "shutdown," the average Republican politician curls up in a ball on the spending fight to provoke one. Republicans fear that if he picks his issues of the spending bills, and blocks a continuing resolution, he could galvanize disaffected Democrats in Congress and distract voters from Flytrap. A committee spokeswoman and an Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman dismiss the idea that Democrats want a shutdown, the White House and Hill Democrats are clearly spoiling for a good fight. "Democrats want to talk about us to be tough," says a White House staffer. Democrats, who don't have much else to campaign on, would welcome an appropriations riot. Tarring Republicans The Republicans' dilemma is that they are, as always, weaker he gets, the less they are willing to concede in appropriations. Leading blood. Democratic congressional candidates are sinking. "Congressional to do anything that will jeopardize that roll," says congressional analyst Norm Republicans don't want to seem partisan or malicious now so they can revive Democrats, and ward off Flytrap, exactly what Republicans fear most. If conservatives are not numerous enough or suicidal enough to force a showdown. wants. They will let the enfeebled president win now, the better to kill him later. "They don't want to give us any chance to recover and distract from the the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. The Holy Grail of another step along the road to an ever quicker mile, part of the inexorable improvement of athletic performance that we usually take for granted, though, such constant progress is remarkable. After all, as biomechanical machines with a standard set of parts, humans should be subject to the same limitations we see in, say, automobiles. How come they aren't? of entrepreneurs and technophiles would like us to think that the answer has to your 100-meter time. Trainers measure the rate of buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, then claim that their programs will control it. Nutritionists this little more than tinkering. Sports records would continue to tumble even if training methods or athletic clothing or sexual practices were exactly the These minor miracles are the product neither of technology nor of training but Over the past century, the human race has been affected by a slew of what demographers call "secular" trends. (In this context, "secular" does not refer to a trend's lack of spirituality but to its longevity: Secular trend is an increase in average size. You have to stoop to get through the than you are, not because they had a penchant for crouching. Another trend is Probably the most striking change, though, is how much more quickly children develop faster. Girls menstruate earlier than they used to. The age of menarche (the onset of menstruation) has decreased by three or four months per decade in What do such trends have to do with athletic performance? Well, if we're living longer and growing up faster, that must mean we're producing bigger, better bodies. Better bodies imply faster miles. We run Demographers have offered a variety of explanations, but the main one is that years, in the age girls first menstruate. Another explanation is that health Smallpox, that scourge of previous generations, now is effectively extinct. Probably the best measure of how much healthier we are is the rate of infant mortality, which measures both the health of the mother (a sickly mother is more likely to produce a sickly baby) and the health of the baby. In the past Better health care affects athletic ability directly. This is true in the trivial case in which, say, antibiotics cure a runner's fever before the big race, but it may also be true in a more significant way. necessarily a big one, but an impact nevertheless. Previous generations bore picked up as a baby. Nowadays, though, more and more people grow up with no history of disease. Since top athletes inevitably are drawn from the healthiest sector of the population, a generally superior system of health care means a bigger pool of people to draw from. You are much more likely to find someone pool of potential athletes has expanded in other ways, too. First, the population has exploded. Second, we are coming ever closer to a worldwide middle class, the class from which athletes typically are drawn. Whether, in an era is way beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains, however, that ranks at, or near, the bottom of national per capita gross national product its imperial heyday before World War I. That average has dropped to only five preserve of the socioeconomic elite of the socioeconomic elite among nations. entered the marathon because they happened to be in St. Louis as part of an all these are changes in how we live, not anything innate, we have to conclude that what we are describing here are effects of environment, not genes. Let us natural selection for athletic prowess came into play. But all that ended long ago. Indeed, the laws of natural selection probably work against athletes these days: Given the rigors of training schedules, it is possible that today's top effect on athletic performance doesn't mean that nature lies dormant, though. Genetic variation exists for just about any trait you choose to study, and the ability to run quickly would be no exception. To take a trivial case, we know that the inheritance of extra fingers or toes is determined genetically. It is quite possible that the possession of an extra toe would hinder an aspiring that may be influencing performance trends is what is known as "hybrid vigor." Cattle breeders have known about this for a long time: Take two inbred lines of cattle, cross them, and what you have is "better" (say, larger) than any single individual in either of the two parental lines. This does not require natural selection; it is the accidental byproduct of combining two previously isolated stocks. There are a number of theories to account for this at the genetic level, but it has proved difficult to discriminate among them. It is possible that modern humans exhibit some form of hybrid vigor simply because migration and admixture of populations are now occurring at unprecedented rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, such hybridization is being translated into enhanced That doesn't mean, however, that genetic differences in athletic ability can be correlated automatically with race. That is a claim that is impossible to test, because you cannot control, in an experimental sense, environmental differences among the study groups. Sure, you will find account for differing levels of athletic success. It is scarcely surprising they are in the habit of running immense distances to and from primary school, middle school, and high school. The training is what's crucial, not the and effective, experiment to help dispel the myth that race has a direct relation to athletic ability. Until recently, a quick glance at the medals bring a single generation up to speed through training, but the trends we're dealing with transcend individual generations. Which brings us to another question: Will there come a time when the human machine will hit some sort of There are some barriers that simply cannot be broken. We instance. The laws of oxygen exchange will not permit it. Race horses seem already to have hit that outer limit. For years, they were as good as human athletes at pushing back speed records, but then they simply stopped getting been--2:39. Unlike people, race horses are specifically bred and reared to run. Generations of careful genetic selection have ensured that today's race horse are tremendously sophisticated. But you can go only so far. You can only breed horses with ultralight thin bones to a certain point; the bones will break biomechanics. The age of menarche cannot keep on falling forever. On the other in some more developed societies, but they roar along in others. And these trends will continue to fuel the improvement in athletic performance. Several see what they were peddling. One of the lobbyists was a callow and garrulous deputies. Draper boasted that, in exchange for an extortionate fee, he could: client get appointed to a government advisory board, and obtain early drafts of parliamentary reports related to the client's industry. The press was apoplectic. For a week, the major dailies floated a proposal to ban contact between lobbyists and top government premise that there are lobbyists, it is unsurprising to discover that what they do is lobby. (A famous actress caught working as a prostitute is news. A prostitute caught working as a prostitute is a tautology.) Second, unless young Draper is unlike any other lobbyist in history, he was exaggerating his ability influence (or access or whatever you call it) with the government. It's that we've decided to live with it. We don't get shocked by it, and we don't have were. But much of the fuss reflects genuine surprise and offense. Lobbying is a and apathetic than the Brits about influence peddling (how marvelous it is that wishing to influence the government must work the executive branch and butter up both the majority and minority parties in the House and the Senate. power resides in a very few people at the top of the majority party. resentment over members of Congress accepting campaign contributions from and those without additional government posts have almost no power anyway. But and no requirements that contributions be made public. And corporations and unions may make political contributions directly out of their treasuries (as United States, it is unthinkable that people would shrug off large secret care for it either, to the extent they think about it. But they don't make a and which more idealistic and pure? No, that's not the point. The point is that It may depend more on morally neutral cultural factors, or historical accidents, than on any moral or practical calculus about different types of the Strange Bed, is free of history. It is also, needless to say, free of any taint of bias or corruption. Young and pure, it can still aspire to moral clarity. Also modest, it will not attempt to solve all the problems relating to campaign finance, lobbying, and other activities that allow money to buy influence in politics. What it can do is suggest some general principles. a democratic government. It's wrong. The world would be a better place if government decisions were made without reference to who has written a check or who has hired a politician's former aide. The people who profit from these arrangements should find another way to make a living. activity of which you morally disapprove. Trying to prevent all exchanges of money for political influence would be costly (in terms of liberty as well as of more mundane considerations) and futile. Half measures are inevitable. You can, though, aspire to half measures that do two things. First, they should deliver maximum moral benefit at minimum practical cost. And second, you want your half measures to be reasonably consistent on an absolute scale of were almost treasonous. "Here's a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly what he did back in the '60s: He's apologizing for the actions of the United directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land." Pat apology for slavery "ridiculous." Others have charged that the president's cheap and hypocritical, since it was a considered decision, not (as he implied) some kind of oversight, and there is no reason to suppose the United States people to see straight. These objections conflate complaints about this president's personal shortcomings with the question of how any president should simply not mentioned slavery? Should he have noted it but offered no view? Can would be heartless and insulting. It's hard to believe that even a primitive such as DeLay thinks the president should play emperor, never explaining or accounts for the recent boom in the atonement. Apologies for national failings, both domestic and foreign, are in fashion not just in the United States but less costly since the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union no longer has an enormous propaganda apparatus trained against us. Now the nations of the West can admit wrongdoing without the fear that they are giving ammunition to the are national apologies sensible? Offered casually or indiscriminately, they can look like sops to constituencies rather than expressions of genuine regret. No the point where saying he's sorry is an empty gesture, but he may be flirting other hand, an apology can be justified without being required or even apology for slavery isn't a good idea. This does not require him to observe a responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the the obstacles to humanitarian military action involving the United States. At courageous. It may not even have been correct. But like a decision not to risk saving someone from a burning building, it is not morally culpable. apology as a statement of aspiration. He delineates specific actions that he might plausibly have taken short of sending in the Marines. And there is reason heightened sense of horror, he would behave differently. country should not apologize for is a basically sound foreign policy. And own time, during the Cold War, when we were so concerned about being in and in other parts of the world based more on how they stood in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union than how they stood in the struggle for their own people's aspirations to live up to the fullest of their communism were an overheated World Cup match, rather than itself a struggle for democracy and human rights. Even when Realpolitik led the United States to side with dictators and oppressors, it was in the service of maximizing in individual countries may not be defensible, but the general policy is one we needn't apologize for. And by the way, the Cold War did not always define a meteorite from Mars has been pretty positive. Only a few cynics have accused the space agency of a ploy for more funding. But that may change as the implications sink in. Last week's announcement is the biggest insult to the was the first and boldest in a long succession of spin doctors for the primacy of human beings. The whole universe, he postulated, rotated around us, with the Earth sitting at the center of heaven itself. Any marketing consultant will earthlings, we spin around the sun, not vice versa. This might have made used it to piss in the soup even more. The sun, it seemed, has spots on it. Far from being the perfect furnace of heaven, it has a face covered with celestial having multiple moons. The sky went from being a perfect clockwork centered on Earth to a fairly shabby neighborhood in which we were a minor resident. This revelation was disquieting enough that the authorities repenting, saying, among other things, that "innumerable suns exist. Innumerable earths revolve around those suns. Living beings inhabit these doing so, to threaten the intellectual security of the religious dictatorships of his time. People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped But the hubris that makes us insist on a special role for humans and Earth didn't disappear: It just found other bases. Among the sciences, biology became the last refuge, for within its realm, Earth was still special. Life was the unique and sacred phenomenon of which we humans were the violated the taboo and speculated on life beyond Earth. extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men. A galaxy full of these folks is no stranger than a of life beyond earth support human supremacy in another way. After all, even the most monstrous and advanced alien foe can be vanquished by the likes of stories that are claimed as true are no better. Why Earth would be such a human ego. The aliens, it seems, have traveled umpteen billion miles so they ordinary phenomenon that occurs anyplace you give it half a chance. Earth isn't special. The alien life forms aren't special either. Instead of highly logical humanoids with pointy ears or other endearing characteristics, they seem to be a lot like simple bacteria. Should they invade, Will Smith can wipe them out example of anything, its very uniqueness makes it special. Life on Earth was special because it was the only life we knew. In this case however, the dogma being shattered is based fundamentally on ignorance. Nobody knew whether there was life on Mars because, oddly enough, nobody had looked until now. The whole Researchers have found fossils, similar to those in the meteorite, in some of the oldest rock on Earth. There was evidence that life was present just as soon as the planet cooled and solidified. If that happened so quickly on Earth, why not on Mars, whose early stages of development were quite similar to They are in oil wells and the crevices of basalt deep within the earth. A basic tenet of biology used to be that the energy requirements of all living things contact with the sun, subsisting instead on heat from the center of the Earth, nourished only by sulfur and other elements leaching from the rock. Some scientists have estimated that the sum of these tiny organisms spread deep within the Earth outweighs all the forms of life on the surface combined. planets all over the galaxy. If the discovery is what it appears to be, the Looking ahead, we can anticipate the next frontier of circle to defend this last bastion of human conceit. Technology is only just beginning to let us search the skies for the telltale clues another civilization might offer. People who speculate on the odds can be either upbeat or quite discouraging depending on what ax they have to grind. But as with life on Mars, until you get a chance to take a look, how confident can you be one way or another? Maybe it's true that we're the only members of the big brain prize for humanity, though. The steady erosion of our claim to a special place in the universe has come with a steady growth in our maturity as a species. What greater intellectual puzzle can there be than dealing with nature on its own terms? Wallowing in a solipsistic world dictated by our own hubris isn't much of a challenge in comparison. Mankind is not special by virtue of our address in the universe, or what spins around us, or because life originated here. Slowly, but surely, we've been compelled to renounce the comfort of these beliefs. Our true distinction is the intellectual journey that brought us to and only two eliminated (the Navy Department was absorbed into the Department (Environment), but didn't get to do so. The Republican "revolutionaries" who constituency with an array of subsidies and favors. By punting Commerce, than Republicans, who tolerate the corporations that are chronically dependent discredited role of Democratic scourge of business. Also, using Commerce to who say he's helplessly infatuated with free trade. its first presidential endorsement. Federal spending on elementary and total public spending on schools. Most of the department's popular programs, like college student aid and Title I, which provides money for educating poor children, existed before the department was born. Another sacrosanct federal education effort, Head Start, is not even under the Ed Department's jurisdiction. Education does finance science and math instruction, but so do Education probably isn't politically feasible, though. For one thing, it would anger the teachers' unions, a powerful constituency in the Democratic Party: A vilified the Republicans as enemies of learning for their proposed cuts in if they abolished the Department of Education. Can't have that. That leaves Energy, which is perfectly suited to abolition on practical as well as political grounds. Aside from the environmentalists, who are fixated on renewable fuels, few Democrats care much about the Department of Energy anymore. The chief motive for creating the department in prices (in absolute terms), and has removed the issue from the table. Even during last spring's spike in prices, no Democrat advocated price controls or be eliminated; but they can, logically, be transferred to the Pentagon. Many of the DOE's functions, like owning oil (the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) and oil proposed selling off the petroleum reserve.) Subsidies for solar power and energy conservation likewise deserve the ax (energy taxes would do the job far more efficiently, if the job needs doing); or, they could migrate to Interior. defensible, but even a DOE task force recommended an end to government ownership of the labs. Much of their research is in commercial applications, whether the department survives, but whether its programs do. It's true that if the programs aren't winnowed down, not much changes apart from the stationery. departments without appreciably reducing their cost, it would still make budgetary authority, but few will fail to notice that a department has opposition to its budget cuts as fiscally irresponsible conduct by people committed to everlasting deficits. Afterward, the Republicans were obliged to defend the proposed cuts on their individual merits, an argument which the themselves a lot of harm by refusing to discriminate between those programs the nerve. Republicans have long demanded smaller government. They should pray journalistic dominance, to glance at the newspaper that may dominate the next that scarcely needs a Web site (though, of course, it has one), because its built its circulation without resorting to tabloid sensationalism. From the law courts to the tennis courts, it covers the news straightforwardly. But what market philosophy, except sideways. A major newspaper is supposed to be a team likeliest payoff is a slogan on the order of "Get it Over." With a newspaper, evidence (see his "Will to Believe"), particularly if that passionate, optimistic confidence stirred us to make the world better than it is. Jerry Springer unites addled families. Some may see a latent liberalism (in control or publicly financed elections (to name to editorial positions taken by the paper in recent weeks). But the argument on these topics is no less practical in tone and substance than its more "conservative" recent stands in favor of public shaming as judicial punishment or its endorsement of hunting. dollars. On the contentious issue of gerrymandering, racial or otherwise: The practice is to be deplored not on grounds of high principle, but because, by creating safe seats for one or another party or interest group, it makes "elections meaningless." Moreover, in pursuing racial fairness, there are be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference recently ran a graph on "Rain and Drizzle: The Difference"? ("The difference is the false distinction between theoretical inquiry and practical the author of Experience and Nature and A Common Faith, the smartest way to educate people was to give them the information and skills them what to think or solve their problems for them. Which would be the paper convergence on solutions: statistics, direct lengthy quotations, complete box scores. Why, it even runs pages entitled "Solutions." ("Trucks: What Needs to Be Done."). Mindful of the fragility of "truth," and trustful of how a better well drop the whole concept of "truth" and speak more usefully of "warranted condemned the "old journalism of despair," a "derisive technique of leaving that "chronicles the good, the bad, and the otherwise, and leaves readers fully informed and equipped to judge what deserves their attention and support." information with minimal interference from reporters eager to be literary. As a Snapshots" and other regular graphs abound. Lengthy quotations from transcribed layout and bold type anticipated the typical multidimensional Web page, almost read, "Death Rate Drops," saying it should have read, "We're Living threatened to transfer out of the country any editors who sloppily allowed of the United States. Personal pronouns anchor the headlines as they drive home "We're in the Mood to Buy." If the New York Post 's candidate for uncontroversial because it opens up its agora, presuming truth will rise from a clash of diverse debaters from all regions and classes of the national polis? Can it be more simplistic than television when its front page alone regularly Today 's journalism fulfills the political philosophy of the Framers, themselves heavily influenced by the ancient rhetoricians (see Carl J. program: If you give the people facts, if they identify an authentic problematic situation in their environment, if you permit them to hear multiple airport security works, the percentage of people who screen each phone call, why women reject technology jobs), and problematic issues (animal rights, standards for criminal punishment) come together in a virtual Journal of Pragmatism. You say the New York Times is a century old, and we they'd be reading "Snapshots," absorbing the blooming, buzzing confusion of courts accomplished something no president, congressional committee, government agency, or private organization has been able to: They said "no" to the Secret over the "protective function privilege" has raised complicated, delicate, and important questions about presidential privacy and the obligations of the Secret Service. Is the Secret Service a Praetorian Guard that can abet an imperial president in sleaze and coverup? How do we reconcile the president's privacy with law enforcement's demands? While the courts have settled the legal issue (for the moment), pundits continue to masticate these questions squabble: other complicated, delicate, and even more important questions about the Secret Service. Notably: Are there any limits on the amount of money we will spend to protect the president? Is it healthy for a democracy to surround its president with a bloated paramilitary security apparatus? worry about the Secret Service is not, as the privilege spat suggests, that the president has too much control over it. The real worry is that no one has control over it. The Secret Service's rise is one of the most remarkable and (ostensibly) frugal public administration, the Secret Service is an spends almost as freely as its heart desires. How has this happened? then, the Secret Service has experienced the kind of growth that, well, only the Uniformed Division. (Click for more details about its proliferation.) Bureaucratic Growth: An agency unchecked by outside forces expands. The service the Secret Service appropriations bill, and how much did the agency get? stiffs other federal programs, but all the Secret Service's desires are extra security staffers. (Not that the public can find out much about how the Secret Service spends its money: Details about how the president is protected are classified. The agency has even removed White House floor plans from the terrified of scrimping on it. "No one ever wants to not fully fund it," says a congressional appropriations staffer. "No one ever wants to be the one who is responsible for risk or danger to the president." Another staffer asks, "If they say it's necessary for the safety of the president, who is going to say no?" The media, too, are reluctant to criticize: The last major story to notice, it tends to receive coverage best described as Protection Porn. (Click Secret Service does not hesitate to exploit its Dead President advantage, practicing an elegant variation of "Fireman First" (a classic bureaucratic department). On the rare occasions the service is queried, it invokes the Dead of the White House and the president. The avenue stays closed. The privilege squabble, in fact, marks the first time the Dead President defense has failed. In Justice Department briefs and in private meetings, the Secret Service insisted that the failure to recognize the privilege: would result in "profound and predictable peril" to the president, "could mean the difference between life or death," would endanger "the integrity of our national security," etc. The appeals court rapped the agency for its scare tactics, saying it must base its conclusions "on solid facts and a realistic appraisal of the danger rather than on vague fears extrapolated Service is not incompetent or corrupt, or even especially greedy. In fact, it is almost universally admired for its professionalism and efficiency. Even so, could drive through city streets in a normal car with a few bodyguards, and anyone could stroll up to the front door of the White House. Of course, ours is a different and more dangerous age: There are undoubtedly more and more sophisticated threats to the president than we can imagine. normalized a paramilitary presidency. No one blinks at: 40-car motorcades that delegation that accompanies the president abroad, the transformation of the open White House into an impenetrable fortress. During public events, it is perfectly acceptable for Secret Service agents to approach crowd members and yank their hands out of their pockets to confirm they are not hiding weapons. It is unquestioned that the president should be chauffeured in a car that costs see their president, and a deep inconvenience for the president to see average citizens. There is something unseemly about this excessive security, and the agency has made the "insufferable" routine. "I don't know if the agency itself is aware of how arrogant and presumptuous it has become." Two years ago, definitively unnecessary. It's that no one knows whether they are necessary and no one is willing to ask. Perfection is impossible in presidential security. No matter how much we spend, the goal will always recede. A determined assassin will be able to find a way to kill the president. And the Secret Service will be able to find a way to spend more money to prevent it. (In fact, the agency wants the president assassinated. But should it be forbidden to ask if we could missed the link to the Backstory on the Secret Service, here it is again. Democratic concern. When Jimmy Carter tried to put the issue at the center of his foreign policy, Republicans charged that he was being woolly minded and rights efforts, argued that pestering friendly regimes about their political prisoners played into the hands of the Communists, whose human rights records Republican human rights concern about Communist regimes had one great exception: China. Partly because of China's Cold War value as a rival of the China so enthusiastically, and partly for reasons that remain mysterious, the Republican Party has had a soft spot for the world's largest Communist regime These days, though, you're more likely to hear Republicans complaining about the neglect of human rights in China by a Democratic human rights. In the last year, conservatives, including elements on the evangelical and protectionist right, have gone so far as to make common cause Conservative nagging about human rights has intensified lately. In recent days, into the transfer of satellite technology, was recently quoted as saying. the critique is disingenuous. If and when they come to wield responsibility themselves, these critics drop their objections and adopt the same policy. The value of maintaining a cordial relationship with an emerging superpower the expense of human rights. But once ensconced in the White House, Carter he visited China. The trip was a warm bath of conciliation. On the way home, he said he didn't want to impose our system of government upon others. for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush opposed Carter's move to we can be pushed around." Bush blasted Carter for not obtaining stronger "coddling aging rulers with undisguised contempt for democracy, for human said that, if elected, he'd withdraw all trade privileges from China "as long as they're locking people up." Once elected, he decided that using trade policy to leverage improvements in human rights was counterproductive. In supporting been called "constructive engagement," "commercial engagement," and "pragmatic engagement." Like its Republican predecessors, the administration now contends that pushing for human rights improvements quietly and behind the scenes is illegal campaign cash. At this stage, it is still far from proved that anyone did try to buy favor with the Democrats, it may have been because they already owned the Republicans. Not having seen a Democratic administration in a dozen actually follow through on its rhetoric about human rights and democracy. With worried. Whether it is a process of being captured by the China hands at the Dole won the election, our policy would almost certainly have remained the same. This is worth bearing in mind during the president's upcoming trip to China. In politics, the yang predominates. In power, the yin reasserts people seemed willing, then as now, to make an independent judgment about the establish a federally guaranteed income for all families with children. He floor for the elderly and disabled. Urged on by a Democratic Congress, he adjustments; the "black lung" disability benefit program for miners; and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the Occupational urban renewal, mass transit, community health, and worker training gushed from fool around with balanced budgets, tight money, or other conservative nostrums; off leftward at the start of his first term, soon reversed course. Under strong domestic spending cuts. Later, on the campaign trail, he declared his devotion bill that promised to deny benefits to most welfare recipients after five challengers to both presidents were undermined by the rise of noisy extremists who carried their banners across the floor of that year's party convention. but the fractures, made evident during the contentious primaries, were no less deep. Debarred by his own party from running on his record of fiscal and social enticed into an untenable choice, not by his party's fringes, but by ostensibly country on the take. For Dole, the damage was done by a coalition of pinstriped mention most of Wall Street) could spot right off as a budget buster. deficit. With the gap still of landslide proportions in most polls, Dole has been written off, correctly or otherwise, by the pundits. (See this week's suffice to produce a landslide, both incumbents got further help from a the eve of the election as, at most, the work of overzealous campaign aides) troubles, having been more thoroughly aired in his first term, may have run pulling themselves together momentarily to field a winning centrist candidate conviction; and superbly effective on television, in front of a crowd, or face same political philosophy, in essentially the same terms. They are champions of a "new" left: reconciled to the central role of markets in the modern economy, committed nonetheless to an active role for government, keen to foster new effective of Labor's recent modernizers, has modeled his electoral strategy, in common is a reluctance to admit what this strategy implies. Both seem unaware reviving the left, they have realigned it out of any meaningful existence. For coherent (albeit often unpopular) alternative to conservatism, there is now and his team come to power. The party's program consists largely of assurances to that effect. But to say this misses the point. What matters is that the them such exceptionally effective politicians is that they really do care. It would be wrong to say they have cynically repackaged what they affect to unaware of where their success leaves "liberalism" in the United States or they really are unaware. They are moderate conservatives deluding themselves first presidential campaign he promised a lot, not the least of which was measured against what he first hoped to do, was a step in the wrong direction. with low inflation, shrinking the government work force, passing the North conservative could be proud. Unlike his failures, there is nothing very liberal campaign agenda is more modest, defined less by what he stands for than by what only more so. New Labor defines itself in opposition to two enemies: old Labor parliamentary colleagues supported until recently. New Labor will not increase so he must attack the government's rhetoric instead. New Labor deplores the instance. Judging by their various policy documents, however, Labor will not market" (so conservative), Labor promises "proper accountability to patients" (absolutely New Labor). On education, labor laws, and many other matters, Labor portrayed by critics as a "government takeover"). In other words, the political much in demand). In both cases, this comes in two main forms: changed." Capital markets, globalization, information superhighways, and whatnot compel us to modernize our policies, keep taxes and public spending low, pay attention to the needs of business, and so on. the conflicts they represent have become hopelessly outmoded. The tensions between, say, competition and compassion, or efficiency and equity, which blighted politics for so long, are sterile quarrels of yesteryear. the world has changed. It keeps doing that. But only in small respects have developments in technology and the global economy narrowed choices over policy. What really has changed is that many voters in many countries have decided that provisions for the poor) are not what they want. Many also wish to be spared on to such a good thing with, "We'd love to do that, but it's no longer feasible." What about new politics, transcended categories, and all that? In compassion, efficiency and equity, will be resolved. That would be good, but how is it to be done? Simply by saying, again and again, "We must have competition with compassion, efficiency with equity." If only this had been understood before, we could all have become conservatives much sooner. everybody. In the age of possibility that beckons, one thing that apparently will not be possible is a policy that imposes a fiscal burden on this group. Not content to rule out policies (however worthy) that impose a cost on most goal is to improve the position of the middle class. Since "the rich" are a tiny proportion of taxpayers, the only thing this could mean in practice would Any party expecting its program to be taken seriously as a things: Either it must promise to increase in the aggregate the quantity and quality of public services (and the taxes needed to pay for them), or else it must promise, within an unchanged total of taxes and spending, to redirect the conservatives would argue, that policies of this kind are a bad idea for one reason or another. Perhaps they would fail. Conceivably, they would fail so badly that they would even make the intended beneficiaries worse off. This is exactly the argument that the left should be having with the right, just as in has simply capitulated. In order to win power, it promises to make no civilization" and replacing what he referred to as "the bureaucratic welfare Newt, by contrast, is a humble fellow. In his book Lessons Learned the Hard bathed in soft filtered sunlight. The few specific proposals he makes are as a way to save Medicare money and thinks it is especially important for blood pressure. He admits to mistakes such as failing to keep his mouth shut at several points, mismanaging the House Republicans, and underestimating his opponents. He describes himself as tolerant of internal dissent, even Seeing Newt so shrunken is somewhat disheartening. There's a poignant moment in his mostly very dull book when, as his career is being torn apart by the House Ethics Committee investigation into his college course, Natural History in New York. Communing with dinosaurs revives his spirits. In the old days, Newt didn't need fossils to spur him on. He had the courage of his convictions and of his boorish aggression. Now he comes across like a old Newt was a compelling meanie, the new one offers anodyne platitudes and empty uplift. He calls at one point in his book for "a serious conversation about our national future." At another point he writes of the Republican still fighting for survival, trying to appease the House Republicans who diminish his stratospheric "negatives" in preparation for a presidential realistic chance of being elected president. His unpopularity is deep and is all that calculated. To be sure, his book is disingenuous at points. He says not a serious attempt at getting rid of him. That's ridiculous. And nowhere arrogance is genuinely diminished. He truly seems a different person. with his head in the guillotine. In a way, this catastrophe was the result of a to a movement, he stepped forward to lead it. In fact, it drove him. He was plan for the future is to stay out of traffic. Beyond that, he proposes the Republican Party support something he calls "entrepreneurial government." He would let the private sector act wherever possible and get the government to act more like a business. This is probably what Republicans would advocate if they were smart. Entrepreneurial government is compatible with tax cuts and does not demand an assault on purposes and programs that the voting majority regards as essential. It is a politics with great potential appeal to an general approach while distancing itself from aggressive social conservatism, Democrats would have reason to fear at the presidential as well as the idea, which stresses flexibility and innovation in how government discharges its role, contradicts the libertarian urge to have government simply butt out. spending, that means the federal government would defend the country, pay for electricity to light the Capitol dome, and do not much else. But that's not all hundreds of billions in highway subsidies, and fund research into diseases that in common with Newt Heavy. His interesting ideas don't quite add up. politics and try my hand at a column about the arts. To ease the transition, I thought it might be fitting to pay tribute to someone whose career spans these chunk of postwar history but much of the enlightenment that remains in the congressional page many summers ago, and the first writing I ever did about politics was answering constituent mail in his office. But my real gratitude is has held the esteem and affection of the people he has represented for half a century by thinking about their good in a more elevated way. He is a liberal, around. He has found his mission in preserving what matters in our culture, and in standing in the way of attempts to coarsen and reduce it. Up on the Hill a few weeks ago, I stopped by his office in about some now obscure postal reorganization bill, and a yellowed copy of the of which he knows by heart, he told me he felt it had been too long since he and whose style is to follow the dictates of his conscience without making a didn't go into politics to save the world. He did it because he was bored Democratic machine for a seat on the City Council and not surprisingly lost. Recognizing that the only way in was with the blessing of the regular sacrificial lamb. According to the elaborate ethnic spoils system of those candidate who'd been slated to run decided in the face of a looming Republican States. Colleagues told him that if he voted against it, he'd be a one term margins. In the House, he continued to get excited about injustices that Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on the Interior, the national endowment budgets fell under his jurisdiction. In the 1970s, he was known as a the endowments were spending their money. But after attempts to eliminate them telling us we're not supposed to talk to the media," said the young male clerk orders from the same cabal that inflated the numbers for Ancient paperbacks, I figured I should probably abandon my fallback theory too, which is that the only people who take the Rules seriously are journalists assigned one, took them seriously. "It's all about mind games," he volunteered for women who want to marry, lunacy is the best policy. Women who take the born to respond to challenge. Take away challenge and their interest wanes." theme of, "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?" But what sets it birthday and Valentine's Day, he obviously doesn't love you; so show him the you're being advised to join a support group to help you resist the urge to have a normal conversation with your boyfriend, the whole enterprise has a Rules isn't just about manipulating men; it's about manipulating the reader too. The eerie assurance with which the authors insist that the Rules always one of those chain letters that alludes darkly to people who dropped dead after jinxed from Day One because I called my future husband first and suggested slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding. The notion that female initiative is useless because men know what they want is particularly notion that what men want is a woman who's always on her way out the door. its popularity as evidence of rejection of feminism by "women" is much too collection of amiable dolts, but the Rules Girl is a particular social in need of the Rules is a voracious doormat, the sort of woman who sends men Hallmark greeting cards or long letters after a single date, who rummages in men's drawers and pockets, suggests couples therapy when brief relationships start to crumble, throws away a new boyfriend's old clothes, cleans (and redecorates) his apartment without asking, and refuses to see the most obvious signs of disengagement. Her problem isn't too much liberation; it's incredibly setting boundaries on a personality that has none, of giving a sense of purpose and structure to a life that seems "empty" (a recurrent word), of offering your edgy, insecure, and engulfing true self is, perhaps, the cruelest fantasy the world depicted in the book is unfortunately the one in which millions of office jobs and aerobics classes, personal ads, nose jobs and diets, singles world, or one with much room for originality or playfulness or waywardness or even what I would call "romance." Friends matter because you need someone to rent a beach house or go to a singles dance with. Politics and volunteer work and books are just ways to keep busy between dates. in much of the discussion about dating just now reflects this world well: men and women, different by nature and with innately opposed interests, each trying babies, "romantic gifts," attention, money, acceptability in a society organized around the couple. Indeed, the subtext of The resentment toward men: As the authors put it in their inimitable fashion, feminists want to change the rules, not memorize them. movement. They didn't have to. The rich got richer. The median wage fell. In again. No one has the nerve to ask for a raise. For years, labor, or what was money. But just telling people about politicians' voting records: soft money. And suddenly denunciation of "labor bosses" is on every Republican lip. to one, according to the New York Times the other day. So why does the crisis? Why is Republican control of Congress now at stake, with such a But isn't it unfair for union members to have to pay for this, from "compulsory" dues, when many vote Republican? No, it is not unfair. First, members can opt out, or object. Typically, members every year get cards: "Remember, you can opt out of paying dues for extra political work." Conservatives have sued unions over this for years. Unions must have major audits, segregate money. There is notice, hearing, rebate procedure. (The kind of due process liberals dream of for the poor but never get.) your rights as a company stockholder. Can you opt out of the company's With millions of us in mutual funds, who has any idea what political messages members in fact opt out, with all their legal rights to do so? No. The highest recently was an "open shop," meaning that many members never paid dues at all. implicitly at least, criticize Republican candidates? Maybe members want to cast their own votes, but they still like to hear what their union says. Because of abortion or gun control or the Cold War, I may decide I want to vote union has some expertise? That's why labor is making fewer endorsements. Just provide the consumer advice. On wages, Social Security, Medicare. Let people that millions of union members are being forced against their will to help finance this union campaign is simply a Republican fantasy. not a detour from its "real" job of negotiating wages and hours. Soft money for voter education. That is labor's real job, the very core purpose of a union. Ever since the Supreme Court decision that required the "opt out," the that's an "extracurricular," unrelated to the union's "real" work. wrote in dissent, this distinction is silly. After all, what is Social Security but a job benefit? Either the union gets the pension directly at the bargaining "family leave"? Crawl off in a corner and give birth, without pay? Still, it's something. Either labor can get it directly from the boss, or labor can get it from the boss via Congress. What's the difference, except in the latter case Medicare, isn't it still being a special interest? No. What's unique about labor is: It's not a special interest or a single issue. Special interest? It's was labor fighting for? Stop Medicare cuts. Raise minimum wage." These to pay for our battles? That is the real unfairness of soft money. have begun running "counter ads." Sure. But what can they "counter" with? "You don't need a minimum wage"? "Let's cut back Social Security"? "Isn't your standard of living getting too high"? No, Business can't counter the ads. It has to change the subject. Thus: "Labor bosses!" (But what about business been true, sometimes, but who pays the money to corrupt unions?) the median wage has dropped, while the two parties have hauled in hundreds of Actually, I might be pressed for time, so it would work better if we could stand around my kitchen table while I chug half a pint of takeout home late from work to gulp something before we connect for a concert and the Democratic National Convention "matters most in our lives and in our "triangulating" their children and families message to duel with the similar message that came out of the Republican National Convention a few weeks before, children or traditional families. "Soccer Moms" are desirable voters this homosexual men who are contemplating, but denied, marriage. "packing lunches, dropping the kids off at school, and going to work." The first lady, who detailed so eloquently the pressures faced by working mothers, might be surprised to know that the current attorney general and the secretary dinner, pay the bills, and feel a little tired when, on top of all their other responsibilities, they have to take the dog to the vet. politics were a little more inclusive when campaign rhetoric revolved around and child rearing, an unpremeditated exclusionary process began. practice "right conduct" every day. Well, it's pretty hard to practice "right conduct" when the very fabric of your personal life is judged to be single people are so vilified? Many of them have more time than the from each group volunteer for the Republican and Democratic campaigns, and how It is precisely our current president's generation, the women's rights and, therefore, postponed or rejected traditional family values. strategy to work overtime to gain the admiration and respect of the center voters who care about health care and education but not necessarily about getting married or having children. At the Republican Convention, Bob Dole commended as right conduct "any screenwriter who refuses to contribute to the contribute further to the trash this year. But on one condition: Both parties must return to a genuine debate and stop bickering over who can present a has been one of the most incontinent television commentators on the scandal, them, "We have not investigated, and are not investigating, the personal lives footwork and thus as confirmation of his charge. "The White House lied about it That's his job. But the rest of us don't have to believe this crap." wife have been "very fair" to the president in their scores of recent (And largely exonerated the accused. Imagine how Republicans would howl if a Democratic independent counsel let a Democratic administration off the hook.) investigation," newspapers' favorite leaker ID. There is no proof that either "source" about anything? In fact, the unreliable gossip they sometimes pass on report on its Web site. It quoted a lawyer "familiar with the negotiations" as "compromising situation" and that he had become a government witness. Hours lawyer familiar with the case, later said the information provided for reissued a version of the story. An intermediary for a witness or witnesses who involved, on what basis did they know? "This is a small Southern town," says talk. You hear things and you pass them on to reporters so that they might investigate. Sometimes people don't investigate the way they should." This indirectly using journalists to try to substantiate rumors it has heard. In any legitimate source would suggest that the paper's reporter thought he wasn't supposed to be presiding over a big investigation themselves. Rep. Peter Workforce (formally Education and Labor Committee) subcommittee on Teamsters election, including allegations of involvement by the Democratic Hospital Association. They may be called upon to lobby legislators for whom and that he and his wife have agreed not to lobby members of the committee the two in the first month after the scandal broke. As of a few weeks ago, the committee had issued no subpoenas, interviewed no witnesses, and held no scheduled for late next month.) Democrats have demanded to see time sheets; the says. "We work for the majority." He says that they do their congressional work neglect of an investigation that Democrats would just as soon they neglect anyhow. It's that their myriad, dubious, and overlapping roles keep piling up without ever being properly explained. It's like one of those Westerns where been elected on a centrist platform of welfare reform and deficit reduction, predictions' failure appears to be no deterrent to their regular renewal. Only There are actually several versions of this theory. lying in wait for an opportunity to expand government and raise taxes. A variation on this casts the first lady as the closet liberal. Conservatives may turn left for practical if not ideological reasons. "He's going to have to especially feminists, and organized labor." The theory here is that if problem with these forecasts is that they are, once again, wrong. It is very it's hard to make out the precise effect at this point, the fear of a meltdown in his popularity and the distant threat of impeachment are likely to make the spend some of his accumulated political capital, that's a damned shame. Instead congressional Democrats who are more liberal than he is. After quarreling for the better part of five years, they now seem to be getting along. But there's an explanation for this, which has nothing to do with the scandal. After the authority last fall, the White House became preoccupied with fostering a more productive relationship with Hill Democrats, according to White House first revealed the fruits of these negotiations in remarks at a "Democratic which was delivered after the scandal broke: reserving future budget surpluses until some fix has been found for Social Security, and raising the minimum spend a budget surplus on social programs, and they want to increase the the face of a common enemy, realizing that a crumbling presidency would leave interest groups? This is largely uncharted terrain, but there's little reason wind out of their sails and undermined the possibility of any second term fall prey to the fallacy of an impending left turn because they misunderstand One lesson he has learned is that being too far to the left is a political repositioning himself as a moderate. The same thing happened again after he hybrid scheme was too much for a public mistrustful of expanding government. centrism that is likely to remain his approach to politics for what remains of much to make someone a lefty these days. Liberals used to call for cutbacks in defense spending, higher welfare benefits, and a federal full employment program. Now they want a tiny bit more social spending within the context of a balanced budget. To conservatives, a liberal these days is someone who doesn't generate lots of quick, trashy literature; the kind of unedited, misspelled garbage designed to sell scads of copies before people realize just how junky it is. But Flytrap, until now, has been a publishing flop. The last few weeks the nation's sorrow for money and fame. They are essentially clip jobs, ventures. It is jacketed with the sober brown paper that covered The Book of authority, annoying enough when he writes for kids, seems particularly forced actually be possible. He is a fine rhetorician, and The Death of Outrage are nothing you haven't read before on the New York Times editorial page his betrayal of vows and his lies undermine public trust; his use of legal chicanery to duck ethical responsibility is cowardly and grotesque; the public's silence in the face of this is a capitulation, "moral disarmament"; and furious about Flytrap, yet he has managed to write a book without vitriol. He refrains from gloating. He chastises others for their glee in savaging to write a sober legal tract. High Crimes is supposed to show that Crimes is painfully shoddy, even for a book rushed to press. Misspellings sexual relations with that woman." Entire paragraphs are repeated, nearly word for word, in different chapters of the book. Coulter claims to lay out the puzzle out her definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." It's as though the bring attention to sex addiction. His underlying purpose seems more cynical: to written a psychological profile of the president as sex addict. According to "unconditional love" that was missing at home. He sought it in power, in the love of the crowd, and especially in casual sex. But all were poor substitutes for true love and didn't vanquish his feelings of inadequacy and guilt. The deserves sympathy and compassion, not vitriol, because he exercises no control existence of sex addiction is questioned by most respectable shrinks. Never determinants." (Let's not and say we did.) Never mind that it's even more badly air, and his book is stacked high by the register at my local Borders. transcripts of the presidential debates. Compression is the right approach, but more of a human touch is needed. Rather than reduce political dialogue to straightforward facts and proposals, perhaps we should try to bring out the singular aesthetic vision that wells up in even our most robotically make politics more beautiful, melancholy, strange. The vast audience that sadly neglected in our political process. Here is a compressed transcript of the debates. All the words were actually spoken. They are presented completely out of context, but in perfect accord with what the transcriber believes to be Bob Dole's remarks required less editing than the others'.] wanted, you took me. Let's keep it going. We cut, let's balance. We cut, let's pass. We passed, let's expand. We passed, let's keep going. We passed, let's make. We can build. I look forward. We're going. I believe, I have worked. I around in my pocket. He noted a few, but there are others. Bob Dole is one of those men who's served in the United States Senate. Clearly, community, strong family. Strong economy, strong communities, strong families. The word "family." As strong as a family, a strong job. Strong community, with their plan. We have a plan. We also have a plan. We also have a plan. Our really matters is what we can do. We have to go on. If we can do those things, suggesting it be done, but at least we ought to look at it. it's always been! And that's the way it will always be! ago, the first steel and concrete baseball palace opened for business. safety, intimacy, and convenience. As places to watch ballgames, they were designed in the late '60s and '70s that doubled as football stadiums. But these attempted to address the character question with a superficial postmodern modern conveniences. But inside, it was still a symmetrical concrete monster, and it sat in the middle of a 7,000-car parking lot rather than in an urban as though a disembodied voice intoned, "If you build it, they will copy." praised, some of them don't deserve the hype. The most annoying hype is that all the new parks are intimate, and that every seat is better at the new place perception of size and scale. A good architect can ace the second part of the test through convincing forms, good proportions, and attractive materials. The parks beat the cold and sterile stadiums of a generation ago. for women), bathrooms, escalators, plentiful food stands, and luxury are larger than even the multipurpose hulks we all love to hate. Compare, for game? Two reasons: column placement and luxury seating. some fans. Today's architects "remedy" the problem by placing the columns behind the seating areas, thus moving the upper decks back from the field. (It should be noted that the new parks' claim that they have no tiers devoted to luxury seating at the new parks also push the upper deck away parallel between that period and ours. We are also matching that era's frenzied merits was that they were unsubsidized. Team owners bought land and paid for for some of the infrastructure. The Giants say that other team owners are rooting against their scheme, because it calls into question the profligate public subsidies. Some of the subsidies exceed capital and maintenance costs: You'd expect that the public would get something, perhaps affordable seats, in return for subsidizing stadiums. Instead, the cheap seats increase in luxury seating, which is the primary real reason for the Naturally, owners don't advertise their new parks as a means of making life them to make enough money to stay in town or to field a competitive team and to Larger and more lavish stadiums translate into greater land management has demanded an operable roof even though the city has the driest cold weather in spring and fall, but the unsealed roof won't make the park million, and that's not counting the value of the land. good news is that not every owner is demanding a castle for his team. All with natural grass and no roof, bells, or whistles." Though his attitude is Why should the public chip in? Taxpayer subsidies don't hired by stadium proponents) discount the claim that new stadiums spur regional argument for subsidies is that new stadiums can pull their cities together when properly designed and sited. This requires a downtown or neighborhood location where lots of fans can take the bus or the train to the game; where they can walk to the stadium from work, hotels, restaurants, or bars; and where getting to the game is a communal event that is part of a broader urban experience. put them in the wrong place, it's a colossal waste of money," says the planning Recent attendance patterns show that urban parks generate There are also strong indicators that suggest new urban parks have "legs," retaining more of their patrons after the novelty wears off. But some teams deliberately seek isolated locations, where they can better monopolize parking Brewers refuse to build downtown, and why the Mariners insisted on the most the new baseball shrines are a mixed bag. Most are visually impressive, boast many of them are large and expensive, tend to live on the dole, and are hampered by seat layouts that create a caste system among fans. At their best, they strengthen their cities; at their worst, they exploit them. process behind the financing and building of new ballparks has become predictable, as have the designs. But the good news is that our stadium boom is far from over. If owners and public agencies can be persuaded to take a longer view of stadium economics and community concerns, we may yet see parks that better unite traditional character with modern convenience. billion goes down the rat hole to students who, either because they lie about their qualifications or because the government makes a mistake, don't, in fact, qualify. Another few billion goes to students whose major qualification is that expensive private schools. Still more millions subsidize such odd groups as it. His accomplishment? He's stopped banks from taking advantage of the system to skim a few hundred dollars off the top of each new student loan. Meanwhile, if parents have the means, they ought to help their kids with their college costs before taxpayers are asked to assist. But Congress has created a handful of handy ways to ditch rich parents. Follow these rules to become an independent student, and no matter how much your parents make, the government parents' income and assets no longer count toward determining whether or not a student is poor. Of course, young marriage is the most likely to end in parents kicked him out of the house, but because, well, just because. And, for the kid who can't quite get his or her act together, the government is willing to pay for up to six years of undergraduate education. Has this subsidy contributed to an increase in the number of years it takes to graduate? Today, who are now allowed to disregard their parents' income in applying for loans and grants. Remember, getting married already separates college students from Grants and subsidized loans. As a result of these and other ways to make students legally independent of their parents, the number of independent The granddaddy of all the stupid social incentives isn't for kids, it's for college, divorce your wife. The taxpayer will end up sending your kid to school because divorced fathers' income isn't counted under current rules. (Even though married dads aren't legally required to pay for their kids' college either, their income is always counted by the feds.) This policy helps explain recipients (more than a million in total) than among the general student population, according to the Center for Education Statistics. Private schools Grants because they had defaulted on federally guaranteed loans, received them terms of being in need, here's the list of dollars that don't count as difference do all these rules make? People who know how to use them (usually grants and subsidized loans, costing the government, on average, $4,000--which is several hundred dollars more than is spent for those whose parents earn less their income and assets. It also depends on where students want to go to relative need. If the same rules were applied to food stamps, here's how it would work: Take the food stamps into a store and pick out hamburger and canned green beans, the stamps are worth a dollar. Pick out lobster and truffles, and more aid your "needy" students will get and, since "need" is determined relative to cost, the more "needy" students you will have. It's hard to find an economist who doesn't believe this is a recipe for inflation. And indeed, since both Congress and the president: Whether you want to save money on federal education aid or add benefits for more needy students, the way to come up with the needed dollars is to stop subsidizing a stupid system. most frequently prescribed antidote for male impotence. According to the impotent excuses himself from foreplay with his partner and enters the swabs a spot near the base of his penis with rubbing alcohol. Next, clasping the head of his penis with one hand, the impotent inserts the needle about two centimeters into the shaft. The needle must penetrate to the corpora control circulation to the penis. The sting passes quickly and blood rushes prevent the puncture from turning black and blue, the impotent applies pressure Finally, after five minutes or so, the impotent emerges his coach won't turn into a pumpkin for half an hour, regardless of how many erection last year. Clinics that diagnose impotence and teach the afflicted how channels, and mass transit. (The bus ads give impotence treatment a friendly treatment. Plus, pharmaceutical companies are racing to develop simpler ways to fading virility, most have the disposable income to indulge their anxieties. And the demographic is burgeoning, giving a new meaning to the phrase "baby the worst fears of the graying guys on the golf course. The conventional wisdom about impotence has changed: What was once considered a normal part of the aging process is now considered a treatable medical condition. "If a man has a site: "For many men, life without sex can be likened to a watercolor painting that should possess all of the vibrant colors of life, but which has been some of the doctors' enthusiasm to the novelty of their powers. A decade problem or an unavoidable consequence of aging. (As the circulatory system goes, so goes the reliability of erections. According to a National Institutes to cardiovascular problems.) With the advent of the new medication, the doctors now had a cure in their bag, allowing them to shelve the psychological basically a plumbing problem," he says. To fix it, a doctor needs to get under Yet, in their haste and fervor to cure, urologists may have debunked too many old assumptions about impotence and invested too much faith suffer from an exclusively medical problem. Diabetes, cardiovascular problems, permanently deflated, according to the medical literature) all prevent men from mustering a swelling. No amount of chat will ever restore their virility. A those who use it abandon the drug within months of beginning their therapy. the drug doesn't restore the sexual desire or the pleasure they once derived from sex. In fact, some impotence researchers assert that the success rates of erections are elicited by the neural signaling of nitric acid, which in turn is triggered by some desire, or thought, or external stimuli. You can problems that exacerbate and sometimes even trigger impotence. spin. After all, their cult of youth has successfully preached that aging can be staved off by medical intervention: hair implants, skin peels, and liposuction. And by drugs, which have been their remedy for every psychological boomers to rut until death. The generation that still listens to rock 'n' roll will consider it their right to keep getting their rocks off. infestation of vermin known as "career politicians." The newcomers came armed the "citizen legislator," whose loyalty would remain with the voters who elected him, not the institution in which he served. term limitations on their own congressional delegations. But because it wasn't limits amendment to the Constitution. And since a constitutional amendment limited themselves voluntarily. That is, they've promised to call it quits Forced retirement was a distant prospect then. But now the most enthusiastic term limiters in the House are facing the expectation that they will follow through on their pledge. For those who vowed to return to their plows after six years, the next term will be their last. Several of those freshmen actually appear to take the idea that they made a promise seriously and have reaffirmed their intentions of stepping down. But others are discovering nuances to the issue they never noticed before. In other words, platform that consisted of little more than term limits for members of Congress. He rode to office by allying himself with a state term limit mind. "Make no mistake, I remain committed to term limits, but experience has taught me that six years may be too short," he said in a statement issued in the chief objection to term limits has always been that the people should have the right to elect whoever they want to represent them in Congress, including this argument, but he's far from admitting he was wrong. He says he's still for years? We can cross that bridge when we come to it. like himself who support term limits must go back on their word to prevent people who are really against term limits from getting elected. reason is that before he was elected to the House, he didn't understand how were to heed term limits, the state's congressional delegation would be less powerful than the delegations from states that don't recognize term limits. The upshot, he says, would be unilateral disarmament for his state. The problem with these arguments is not that they are bad arguments. In fact, they're quite sensible. The seniority system means you get power by serving long enough to gain seniority. And a state that voluntarily limits the terms of its representatives harms itself relative to others. But majority leader, he's no stranger to the concept of seniority. As to the unilateral disarmament point: It's a very solid objection. But it was an even limit on all the state's legislators would have put it at a far greater disadvantage than a disposable promise by a few of its legislators. In fact, when they swore they'd limit their own terms. But back when they made those promises, before they'd ever been elected to Congress, the prospect of leaving in six or eight or a dozen years didn't sound so bad. belong just to the few who made specific pledges. Term limits was the official term limits for the entire House and Senate. (Of course, if you read the fine print, it only promised to bring such a proposal up for a vote.) More senior Republicans have been as disingenuous as the young bloods. They've just been representative who is one of the leaders on the issue in the House. He's in his home is giving him a hard time on the issue, because he was not so foolish as nice case study in political demagoguery. All the problems the Republican radicals are belatedly recognizing now were totally obvious at the outset. rest of the fine arguments against term limits. Experience, they will discover, is actually valuable. The fact that voters can and do reject incumbents will strike them as an epiphany. Republican term limit traitors don't need to apologize for changing their minds, which they have every right to do. What they owe us is an admission that their professed faith in term limits was phony collect royalties on campfire renditions of "This Land Is Your Land." The girls "This Land Is Your Land," was a Communist. It's your land, but it's my land sharing. Put any two toddlers in a room with toys, and you get four political obstructive nuisance of private ownership. The 1990s version merely announces transmitting data is becoming too easy for the law to protect anyone's private There's an obvious technological rejoinder. Digital content can be shuffled as easily as it can be transmitted. Encryption puts viscosity right back into the fluid digital pipeline. Curiously, most of the property economic rejoinder too, as Bob Wright pointed out on these screens not long ago. Most people won't steal digital content if buying actually remains cheaper and easier, as it probably will. But the "free the bits" view of things isn't just inconsistent or unfinished. It's an analysis that hasn't progressed beyond the years ago, the Supreme Court announced that lawmakers couldn't ban abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, but could ban them in the third. A "viable" outside the womb. By that logic, the constitutional right retreats with every advance in neonatal medicine. When medics learn how to incubate a disappear. Except that it won't. Logical consistency has nothing to do with rights in intellectual property aren't going to be abolished, however badly cassette recorder, which he was sure would be used mostly to pirate his the law may say what it likes, but the law doesn't matter any more. Technological might makes right. People with the machines will copy if they please, and lawyers shouldn't try to stop them. (Unless, of course, those premise is also wrong. The first point to recognize is that copyright is just a commercial form of privacy law. Indeed for some, it's the only kind of privacy So we've done breasts and we've done abortion; let's move it offered to help personal biographical stuff on its way to freedom, through a Information wanting to be free doesn't seem so appealing when it includes habits, records of where you've been, what you asked for, and what you took. Your modem doesn't know the difference between information called "property" harder it is to maintain privacy, the easier it is to catch thieves. It's no use responding that the law itself protects privacy better than copyright flashing lights, is what maintains speed limits on the highway. mine, so your intellectual property must be mine too. If I really own my modem, then I must have an unqualified right to dial up anywhere, any time, and suck in whatever is out there to be sucked. Copyright law in cyberspace offends politically neutral. Sure, property is the capitalist's tool. But the feminist's, too. And the libertarian's. The woman who wants an abortion says papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Whether you're talking about land, abortion, or environmental protection, you succession of bubbles in space, or cyberspace, with different people claiming an endless variety of interests in them. Property is a bottle of champagne, or the name of the label, or the whole concept of effervescent wine, or perhaps litigators decide, often one case at a time. The deciding never ends, because people, and the things they value, change. Technology will never end the tug of because the Workers of the World have united, or because information wants to millennium. This session attracted an unusual amount of interest, because it was the first time the first lady was going to have to face questions from reporters about the sex scandal. As we filed into the Map Room, familiar from the White House coffee videos, we were told that she would entertain questions that didn't have to do with the millennium toward the end of the hour. dressed in a pale but intense yellow suit, and proceeded to circumnavigate the room and greet everyone. She then sat down at the head of the table and for Millennium Council has planned. It intends to perform a number of good works, spending a lot of time speaking to leaders around the world and consulting with And that's the primary thing on his mind right now." prepared to answer tough questions, reporters didn't seem to have the stomach add insult to the injury she presumably had suffered at the hands of her husband already. But then someone pitched her a softball that elicited what I think is the most inadvertently revealing thing she has said on the subject to despite plausible allegations of a sexual relationship with an intern, and denials. Indeed, the first lady did not even assert that she believed his denials. Rather, she made a version of the point that many pundits have have long suspected: that there is a psychological bargain, if not a literal into her answer, one might understand that she is furious at her husband but stays with him out of respect for what he is capable of, and out of calculated struck me during the interview is that for all the speculation, nobody really denials? Does she love him, despise him, or both? Do they have an open marriage in which his extracurricular activity is accepted, or is each new revelation a painful surprise to her? We all project our own views and experiences onto the First Marriage. But there is no indication that anyone, including even close what she thinks, determines whether she is a victim or an accomplice, a retain the benefit of the doubt. So long as we don't know, we can't really knew it. She surely is aware that her husband was unfaithful to her before he thought, however, that she was giving him another chance and that he was promising, in exchange, to do better. It may have come as an awful surprise to could have known in detail, known in general, not wanted to know, or truly had no idea. And she might not care, be hurt but not surprised, or be deeply hurt and surprised. Here is a grid that expresses the four basic possibilities. northeast corner and moving clockwise. If she didn't know that her husband was she is in the most sympathetic of the available positions. She would be in the made a tacit agreement to quit fooling around for the duration of his presidency, for the sake of common sense if not common decency. On learning very upset. But she would also realize that she couldn't leave him while he was made a mistaken bet that her husband could reform, she is now in the position the other hand, she didn't know, but also didn't much care, that would suggest tolerating her husband's misbehavior would probably be less a desire to keep up decent appearances than a desire to gain and retain power herself. If this is much as he has used her to advance his. This wouldn't leave much ground for her position is even worse. If she knew her husband was going to continue to philander and agreed to help him pretend that he had reformed and become a good husband, she has been a party to a hoax. If accepting a faithless husband was but also, perhaps, in what most people would recognize as sexual yet for reasons of the heart or reasons of power, or both, unwilling to bring him to book. She would be in the morally ambivalent position of the abused spouse, both deserving of sympathy and responsible for her own failure to act. release from prison, he aspires to return to respectability in the city's eyes. The strongest sign that he will accomplish this task was buried on Page A12 of much to do with reaching out to balance the budget as anybody I know. He finally recognized that there would have to be revenue increases." significance lies not in the substance of this quote but in the fact of it. For authority on politics, rather than as a news story himself, marks a giant step. to remind readers that the former chairman is on parole after a stretch in which he has yet to voice any apology or regret. The Times simply that for someone in his position, quotation is more important than contrition. out of office, and go to jail, community service, detox, or whatever. Then you visit Quote Rehab, and come out as a Beltway citizen in good standing. politician and the reporter are engaged in a reciprocal stroke. For the politician, being quoted means respect and acceptance. What ties you to the have you. For the reporter, a humbled politician is always great copy. Someone who has been brought low by scandal will tend to be more daring in his utterances, because he is trying to recover status rather than preserve it. He has nowhere to go but up. The reporter is happy to help elevate him in exchange what he thinks. He has thrown himself at the feet of reporters as promiscuously stories that quote him as an expert, he is referred to simply as a former politics, Morris is described only as "the former White House political relations with both parties, he is called "Dick Morris, a political consultant stories, as in countless others, Morris serves reporters by playing what they to the budget deal, Morris offers: "Without him, there never would have been a Part of Morris' appeal for journalists is that he is willing to teach it round a political genius and a man of integrity. But if the reporter wants him to say "Definitely, I think that happened," he told them. In a New York Times The point is not that disgraced politicians must be treated as unquotable pariahs forever. But they should be used sparingly, and much more thief and liar. Morris' views are almost always totally worthless, because he obviously will say anything, to anybody. Though he used to pride himself on never being quoted in the press, he now scurries to return calls from the gets much more out of the transaction, in terms of selling copies of his book and putting ignominy behind him, than the readers of the papers that quote him do. I called him to ask about the phenomenon, but for once he didn't want to play. It violated his policy, he said, of "not talking about the scandal or its effects." He would be happy, however, to discuss politics or policy. interval and a reminder of what these folks did wrong would be appropriate. But reporters might ask whether they need to quote them at all. One of the irksome knowledgeable and reliable reporter is not allowed to make even obvious or uncontroversial points directly. If you're going to say the sky is blue, you'd better find a meteorologist to say it for you. Most of the time, this is merely inefficient, a waste of time and newsprint. In the case of Quote Rehab, however, the trustworthy reporter puts his own observations in the mouth of announced he wouldn't sue, explaining in a prepared statement that "several that decision should be based on whether he believes the company has violated lawsuits, economic factors often interfere with lofty considerations of the billion tobacco settlement now up for debate in Congress--41 other states eventually joined in. Among the few that did not were the biggest producers of have to be pretty naive to expect political considerations to play no part in the deliberations of any public prosecutor, even in criminal cases. But pure politics. They generally reflect the ambitions of state elected officials rather that the claims of sound public policy. If General Electric is selling an unsafe toaster, we have a Consumer Product Safety Commission with jurisdiction to investigate, regulate, redundant, or disagreeing, in which case the result is a toaster that is legal add another layer of absurdity: the states reinventing the wheel of federalism activism and conservative devolutionary zeal. In the 1970s, the consumer movement fired up state attorneys general to begin going after corporate contained rocket engines. Such suits increased with the falloff in consumer advertising in car leasing, sneaker price fixing, and telemarketing scams. At the moment, they are shadowing the Justice Department in an antitrust incurred some suspicion and jealousy from his colleagues. He also became their filed his own suit against the tobacco companies. It was settled last week for is the National Association of Attorneys General (known informally as the its various committees can hash out ideas for litigation, like the billing fraud case now being developed against the hospital chains. in the last week, and he is clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight, building valuable name recognition for the day when he decides whether to run States. The question whether regulation of commerce is a state or national ape movie, a dog movie, and another dog movie. In the second dog movie, the dog films is nothing new. The last few years have witnessed Babe a couple of Free Willy s (whale), and countless others I have, mercifully, been able to forget. Everywhere you turn, some movie is preaching Any day now I expect my cat to strike up a conversation with me, probably about movie distilled into its purest form. The cuddliest animals (Dalmatian puppies) are threatened with the most horrible fate (clubbing, skinning, being turned lesson: It is far better to torture a human being than to allow a single puppy to come to harm. In the end, the Dalmatians and their human masters live wrong with a Dalmatian fur coat? And where can I buy one? How much is that letters to the editor and heat their vats of oil to a rolling boil, let me They're hyperactive. They bark too much. They're bad with children. They shed constantly. They're hard to train. (The Dalmatians don't even perform tricks in all of them are dumb. They are, in short, lousy pets. inspires an equation: Beauty plus difficult temperament equals fur. We do it to coats. The first is principled: Fur is wrong. It barbarically exploits animals, reply: Fur farming doesn't have to be cruel. Minks live longer on fur farms than they do in the wild. Dalmatians, one imagines, could roam more freely on a large farm than in a cramped urban apartment. And Dalmatian farmers would not simply kill Dalmatians for their fur. Dog meat is prized in other parts of the world. (It used to be in the United States, too; on his Western expedition with places where dog meat is eaten. Maybe Dalmatian burger is an ecologically second objection to Dalmatian farming is visceral. The mere thought of farming dogs for fur nauseates you. With this objection, I sympathize. Dogs are charming. People love their dogs, even their Dalmatians. They see something grotesque in the idea of making them into winter outerwear. It offends common understand this. Pigs are sociable, loving, and a hell of a lot brighter than family, even more sacred than other human beings (such as curmudgeonly aunts). But God gave man dominion over the beasts of the earth: If an animal has children will hound their parents into buying charming Dalmatian pups for into charmless dogs. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, will be abandoned or dropped at the pound. They will be shut up in cages. Later, they will be his wife and perhaps even helped him commit obstruction of justice. And did she married man, damage the presidency for the sake of casual sex, lie frequently and insouciantly, and blab her "secret" affair to anyone who'd listen. But she was also sexually exploited by her older, sleazy boss; had her reputation above zero rates a sympathy card. (This is not, of course, an exact science. Guys in the White House. Yet Lewis didn't quit in disgust. Is her outrage a plus or a minus if she doesn't act on it? You decide.) been persecuted by enemies who won't be satisfied until he is destroyed. rating-- He never asked for our sympathy, and he doesn't deserve it: under Minuses): risked humiliation to expose something she believed was denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. contrite and wrote excellent, sufficiently apologetic speech. immunity when she needed to, even though her testimony would do enormous harm affair to lots of people. (So, while she was dragged into the scandal against her will, it was her own loquaciousness that made the dragging possible.) president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. administration (though not, apparently, on principle). partisan, and unforgiving in his impeachment quest. Consistent throughout the scandal: He has been pushing impeachment since before constitutional standoffs for the sake of his investigation, seems indifferent despise scandal, follow it breathlessly, then blame the media for obsessing proportionality. Coverage is wretchedly excessive even when it shouldn't How many stories have you seen about the media and the scandal? very important story and investigated the hell out of it. good sense to leave the White House before corrupting himself. have disgraced her own good name by echoing his denials on the Today not take advantage of scandal to burnish his own image. (told her story partly in order to land a book contract). are expected to do political dirty work, the Cabinet members are public servants who should be kept away from such sleaze.) administration focused on policy, thus preventing total executive (Mostly) kept his mouth shut and prevented the House Judiciary Committee from hard because it considers itself the Praetorian Guard. agents have no choice about being near the president). paraded before the world in a way they should not be. The final paragraph of his statement bears quoting in full: by trampling on the memory of his grandmother. This is untrue, unfair, and is involved. Whether it means caring for his sick and dying grandmother who raised him, guaranteeing payment to her nurses, or taking action to make sure the White House). It is that, as evidenced by this and other paranoiac This became abundantly evident when I went to interview him and barely repressed rage, he alleged that administration secret police keep because of what he knew about various administration scandals. Alleging the existence of forensic evidence of murder, he explained, "Everybody in that lab against the administration. Another concerns the investigation into the death is not treated like a fringe figure. He has, by and large, achieved the foundation money and gets on television. He's a nutter with a law degree who takes advantage of the courts to harass his political opponents. How does he reasons. On television, there are more and more shows that take off from the Crossfire format, expecting guests to represent strongly contrary White House basement. If these guests scream and yell, so much the better. perfect. With print publications, there's a different problem. Fine profiles of "objective" reporter cannot render his own opinion that the subject has a screw with letters A through G was not part of a grand plot to harass political demands to "certify" for the court answers that he deems evasive. ("What does asks administration officials about whom they date, where they go after work, whether they were expelled from school for disciplinary problems. One and publishes the transcripts on the Internet. This is in pursuit of a case about the invasion of privacy, remember. But resistance is largely futile. Last hard enough for documents covered by a Judicial Watch subpoena. As punishment, judges, he tried to appeal to the Supreme Court. He has not given up yet. It is organization supports requiring judges to undergo psychological testing and holding them personally liable for "reckless" rulings. It also advocates supported by a document discovered in one of his lawsuits. But the document, ideology, permissiveness, or fear of reprisal it is impossible to say. Last investigators working with her?" Maybe he'll ask his mom in her next hit!" The cameraman looked at her briefly, sneered, and then returned to his when you smash somebody in the head with a large piece of metal, you are all this, of course. Surrounded by cameras, sound men, still photographers, and reporters, he could barely see the audience, let alone take notice of the bigger, and so the press horde must muscle its way through tight spaces. The pencil press can sometimes hang around the edges, writing sardonic little threaten democracy by their shallow and relentless cynicism. And the major block off. The boys on the bus have become the beasts on the bus. The number of crews chasing the candidates around grows imposed on the press in a futile attempt to cut down on this sort of and you begin to get the idea. Just a few presidential cycles ago, you would routine. And it's not just because time on the "bird" (the communications satellite) has gotten cheap. Such coverage is good marketing: "Your Live at Your station has helped fulfill its "public service" commitment. show and news service and whatever is all organized for what I call Big Event original stories or investing time in doing investigative stories. They get a truck and picture up and they look like a national news organization." press did not move away. It couldn't: There was no "away." Cameramen, sound men, still photographers, and reporters clogged all available space, jostling people as they sat and ate. "I paid good money!" a man yelled at a camera crew planted directly between him and the candidate. The sound man turned around and engaged in a staple of primary campaigning: a "meet and greet" (sometimes called a "grip and grin") with diners. It is not easy under the best of As soon as he exited his bus, he was surrounded by camera crews and boom mikes restaurant and walked over to the candy counter where he purchased some in his mouth, chewed, and turned toward the cameras. Which is when they surged forward to catch whatever gems might usher forth from his lips and when a up!" he screamed at her. What the prop didn't understand was that she was press crush, knowing it would part for him. But the aisles couldn't accommodate wailed as one camera crew dragged its cable over a tray of cheeseburger. people blame producers who, when the competition comes up with a picture or soundbite you missed, don't want to hear excuses about how you didn't want to searched out the quaintest general store they could find to demonstrate how general stores have quaint narrow aisles, and the few people inside were in the head by a cameraman. As I struggled to stay on my feet, I looked at the know you're behaving this way?" I asked my assailant. Neither the Federal Communications Commission nor the Federal Elections Commission keeps track of injuries to civilians by the press. All evidence is anecdotal. But any number of "anecdotes" showed up in the press onrushing camera crew by yelling, "Stop it! You're squashing the kid!" The a fight in which "one cameraman was left lying in the snow." turning on each other, maybe there's some hope the rest of us will be merging of the two races" seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool. Census Bureau's "multiracial" proposal has provoked strong reactions from new category, thus diluting black political power. But the debate, properly framed, is not just about "light flight" from the black community. The debate is about our very conception of race. For a "multiracial" box would be an Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually leaders of the fledgling multiracial movement say that their category, and more broadly, their lives, represent the way out. By marrying across the color line, obliterate our antiquated notions of racial difference. As a newlywed who has recently joined their ranks, I hope they're right. When the time comes, I won't though, there are plenty of reasons to wonder whether intermarriage can ever, as one partisan put it, "blow the lid off of race." Foremost is this reality: Racialism is highly adaptive. That is, no matter how quickly demographic change proceeds, we seem to find a that caveat the same way smokers read the surgeon general's warning. The story race. The square peg, by our thinking, had been rounded off. and they are not bound together by language. Still, in a nation accustomed to thinking of "official races," they'll feel pressure to form an interest group: find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less stigmatized than "pure" blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than wouldn't subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of most "desirable" elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It's quite white will simply expand to engulf the "lighter" or more "culturally white" of We could thus end up with three reconfigured races. In the demonstrate that our problem is not just "race" in the abstract. Our problem is race relations." But even as a "multiracial" category blurs the color line, it can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter. question of politics. Perhaps we should abolish all racial classifications. educate the public about the realities of race. Whatever it takes, though, we need to do more than marry one another if we are ever to rid our minds of ago, "is slow and bitter." Indeed. But it is the only lasting way. Our ideology of "blood," like blood itself, is too fluid, too changeable, and too easily intended to represent a designer outfit, clutches a frilly cocktail and gabs at her companion over a cup of coffee. "That's nice," she says. The caption is: for her dignity and discretion, would have enjoyed the dithering visits of a shopaholic who thought she was having a high school romance with the President, We may be at the stage in the scandal where any assertion immediately assuming the opposite. And often for good reason. In this case, socialized together in New York City. It is not surprising or intrinsically House interns with whom she has no personal connection, would have been helpful none of the principals is talking, it's hard to discover much about how close a up at the Metropolitan Baptist Church that day to ogle the president, a source with White House Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta. Like most everyone in have existed says less about the president's lack of credibility than about the assumptions of certain white people. An older black secretary and a rich white airhead, many reporters and pundits have glibly conjectured, couldn't have enough in common to be close. This testifies to a failure of imagination. It also embodies a mentality that is not quite racist but smacks of The attitude is not limited to journalists and cartoonists. anonymous White House official. "She dresses nicely and she speaks well, and nicely in her closet." This was someone who worked with her, sounding as if president's executive assistant wouldn't be neat or use proper grammar? This compliment threatens to become for black women what "articulate" is for "dignified" or "deeply religious" (unless he is some kind of religious that a lot of innocent bystanders have been subjected to swarming reporters and has been lost in all the saintly religious stuff. She is very good to her Service detail in the dead of night, hides under a blanket in the back of a his Secret Service agents the slip (they shadow him when he walks around the White House), couldn't arrange a private visit without tipping off hotel staff, president. But can he? Is it possible for the president of the United States to commit adultery and get away with it? Maybe, but it's tougher than you Historically, presidential adultery is common. Warren was none the wiser, even if White House reporters were. him), White House drivers, White House gate guards, White House Secret Service to write about them. White House journalists knew about, or at least strongly about this more than most presidents. Not only are newspapers and magazines willing to publish an adultery story about him, but many are pursuing would find it difficult to hire a mistress. A lovely young secretary would set off alarm bells in any reporter investigating presidential misbehavior. Says a from recent administrations are adamant: The Secret Service never lets So what's a randy president to do? Any modern presidential affair would need to meet stringent demands. Only a tiny number of trusted aides and Secret Service agents could know of it. They would need to maintain complete silence about it. And no reporters could catch wind of it. Such an It's late at night. The president's personal aides have gone home. The family is away. He is alone in the private quarters. The private quarters, a k a "the residence," occupy the second and third floors of the White House. Secret Service agents guard the residence's entrances on the first floor and ground floors, but the first family has privacy in the quarters themselves. Maids and butlers serve the family there, but the president and first lady ask them to "friend" on his private line. (Most presidents placed all their calls the friend over for a cozy evening at the White House. After he hangs up with the friend, he phones the guard at the East Executive Avenue gate and tells him to admit a visitor. He also notifies the Secret Service agent and the usher on duty downstairs that they should send her up to the residence. drops the woman near the East gate. She identifies herself to the guard, who examines her ID, runs her name through a computer (to check for outstanding warrants), and logs her in a database. A White House usher escorts her into the East Wing of the White House. They walk through the East Wing and pass the Secret Service guard post by the White House movie theater. The agent on duty waves them on. The usher takes her to the private elevator, where another Secret Service agent is posted. She takes the elevator to the second floor. The president opens the door and welcomes her. Under no circumstances could she enter the living quarters without first encountering Secret Service the splashier rumors about White House fornication. First, the residence is the uninterrupted) sex. He can be intruded upon or observed everywhere exhibitionist or a lunatic, liaisons in the Oval Office, bowling alley, or East it would attract far more attention from White House staff than a Meanwhile, back in the private quarters, the president and friend get she stays, she may pass a different shift of Secret Service agents as she Service agents see her. All of them have a very good idea of why she was there. The White House maid who changes the sheets sees other suspicious evidence. And endangers the president too much. The computer record of her visit is private, at least for several decades after he leaves office. No personal aides know about the visit. Unless they were staking out the East gate, no journalists do either. The Secret Service agents, the guard, the steward, and the maid owe their jobs to their discretion. Leaks get them fired. not to trust his Secret Service detail. No one seriously compares Secret Visit. Late at night, after his personal aides and the press have gone home, the president tells his Secret Service detail that he needs to take an and without informing the press. He requests two agents and an unobtrusive sedan. The Secret Service shift leader grumbles, but accepts the conditions. Theoretically, the president could refuse all Secret Service protection, but it would be far more trouble than it's worth. He would have to inform the head of the Secret Service and the secretary of the Treasury. The president and the two agents drive the unmarked car to a woman friend's house. Ideally, she has a covered garage. (An apartment building or a hotel would raise considerably the risk of getting caught.) The agents guard the outside of the house while the president and his friend do their thing. Then the agents chauffeur the Service agents and their immediate supervisor know about the visit. It is recorded in the Secret Service log, which is not made public during the administration's tenure. Gate guards may suspect something fishy when they see might spot him, or they might notice the agents lurking outside her house. A neighbor might call the police to report the suspicious visitors. All in all, a Assignation. A bucolic, safer version of the White House Sneak. The the cabin next to the president's lodge. Late at night, after the Hearts game has ended and everyone has retired to their cabins, she strolls next door. There is a Secret Service command post outside the cabin. The agents on duty (probably three of them) let her enter. A few hours later, she slips back to the liaison. Even though the guest list is not public, all the Navy and Marine presidential entourage included an attractive woman, but not the first lady. That would raise eyebrows if it got back to the White House press room. The cleverest strategy, and the only one that cuts out the Secret Service. The president is traveling without his family. The Secret Service secures an entire hotel floor, reserving elevators and guarding the entrance to the president's suite. The president's personal aide (a man in his late 20s) takes the room adjoining the president's. An internal door connects the two rooms, so the aide can enter the president's room without alerting the agents in the hall. This is escorts a comely young woman back to the hotel. The Secret Service checks her, then waves her into the aide's room. She emerges three hours later, slightly disheveled. She kisses the aide in the hall as she leaves. Someone got through the charade. More awkwardly, the aide would be forced to play the seamy inconvenient, extremely risky, and potentially disastrous. It seems, in fact, a lot more trouble than it's worth. A president these days might be wiser to the Last Man and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics and nearing the end of a millennium, there seems to be a renewal of interest in theories of history. We seek regularities in the long movements of history, trying to find our place in a bigger picture than the evening news and hoping ages with distinguishing features that have come to an end or will come to an end and will not recur. The distinguishing features may be dominance by one nation, the prevalence of a particular social system, or the pervasiveness of a certain technology. The Roman Empire came to an end, feudalism came to an end, and some say that the Industrial Age is coming to an end. These periods will not come back. There may or may not be common features that bring ages to an Fisher. He finds in history long waves of inflation, each followed by a crisis followed by a period of equilibrium followed by another wave of inflation, and theories, suggest that the phases of history are of roughly similar duration. That permits prediction of the remaining duration of the present phase and the coming of the next phase. A simple historical cycle consists of alternating validity and implications of these and other theories of history will consist president has begun to receive on the weekend talk shows (see 's "Pundit Central") and in the opinion columns. Commentators are commending the administration's strategic acumen in proposing to expand and prosperity, and simply for staying afloat for five years. beneath these acknowledgments there runs an undercurrent of distaste, disdain, remembered as a middling president, at best. He is a man with a "compulsion to cut ethical corners" and "total contempt for ethical niceties." Such hostility detestation does have a clinical element, it is easy to understand. are plenty of reasons to dislike anyone, maybe more than the average number in Kelly has called the president "a shocking liar." Apple has compared the Interestingly, if these critics are much bothered by conventional immoral behavior, such as the extramarital affairs, they don't make a public point of matters seldom exhibit much perspective. What president or successful politician has never acted expediently by dissembling, dropping old friends, and compromising his ethics at various points? The real question is whether the that should attach to his office. Even his jogging shorts, they think, are The next level is less literal, more psychological, and this sense of betrayal, which is shared in varying degrees by many others who the sense of never paying the bill for his sexual misdeeds. Related to this is members of the president's peer group seem to think that they could do better generational factor is significant. Everybody distrusts the baby boomers. The them as greedy and narcissistic. Often, those who came of age during the 1960s seem to resent themselves. Just as he gets it from all sides as a member of the of a snooty meritocratic elite (viz., Renaissance Weekend) with no feel for the political world. These days, it is a vestige, whose only real wellspring of importance is a president who elevates it with his blandishments and listens to wise men of the permanent government, they can dismiss him. When a Democrat glowing comments from the attendees. They launched a round of intimate White who have attained a certain social or political position do not want to be 'dissed.' They want the new team to respect them. Because these tribal rituals free fall in the polls. You reap what you sow, was the attitude." As he begins So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange Forgive the luxuriating, but these are probably the most poignant hours of my This scene often involuntarily flitted across my mind during the past winter, when I spent a lot of time watching people glide across was playing in a hockey league. Having grown up in the Deep South, I was entirely innocent of ice matters when I first got into this. At my inaugural that included not only the golden shiksas but their brothers ("engaging, ("men with white hair and deep voices"), their mothers who never whined or the gliding shiksas and their halfback brothers, because they were more many hours standing next to hockey rinks last winter, I sometimes engaged in jerseys. It was amazing how many there were. Occasionally, an entire front line he one? Marks?) The chosen people were tough competitors, too. suburban biological deviation, or else intermarriage, has even given many of practices for a shot at the National Hockey League? Of course not. They're other qualities that may be desirable in a doctor but don't, as a practical hundreds of hours hustling to, on, and from the ice rink, is studying. It's not that they don't study at all, because they do. It's that they don't study with parents who realize) that outstanding school performance is their one shot at children devote their free time not to hockey but to extra study. In this group, it's common for moms to march into school at the beginning of the year and obtain several months' worth of assignments in advance so their children can get a head start. These parents pressure school systems to be more rigorous meanwhile, at our moment of maximum triumph at the back end of the meritocracy, The one extracurricular venue where I run into a lot of in the New York area that (because of its famous school system) has the most lobby, children waiting for music lessons bend over their homework, mom perched at their shoulder. Musical exercises drift through the air, along with snatches hockey ethos is to be elaborately casual and gruff about competitive achievement: Outstanding performance gets you a little slap on the helmet, a stamps," she said. "If you're a good boy, I give you one stamp. If you're a very good boy, I give you two stamps. And if you're a very, very good pediatrician, had somehow gone to medical school without having gone to fable) finishing high school. Every relative in my grandparents' generation Then, for the most part, at least as the story was received by the young me, society that's fair. Afterward, a vast, subtle conspiracy arranges to hold you the academic hunger had begun to wane. By now, it is barely producing a pulse, have not become notable as academic underachievers. But something is gone: That old intense and generalized academic commitment, linked to sociological ambition, is no longer a defining cultural characteristic of the group. has replaced it is a cultural insider's sort of academic preoccupation: a to move the levers of the system (levers whose location we're quite familiar with) so as to ensure that our children will be as successful as we are. This rather than know for sure, that study will generate dramatic upward mobility private schools. In these, no matter how great the meritocratic pretenses, the contest is always less completely open than it is in public institutions. Just achievement is highest in areas like science and classical music, where there is no advantage from familiarity with the culture. This also once was true of keep an essay section out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It's impossible to meritocracy, assumed that ethnicity would become a nonissue (should be nonissue) under such a system. Instead, it's an overwhelming issue. Accounting for ethnicity, you might amend Young this way (to the extent that "merit" and society at the moment, will equal its members' merit. The cultural connection seems so obvious that it amazes me how often ethnic differences in the standard response has been to redefine merit. It's not academic performance (or whatever the prevailing measure of the moment was) after all! It's something else, which we happen to possess in greater measure than the upstart group. used to be: a certain ease, refinement, and grace. This may be what has led and success than SAT scores and music lessons can provide. behind because they don't have quite the right cultural style for getting existence is phase one, maniacal studying is phase two, sports is phase three. big victory for the working poor and the Democratic Party. But buried in a tax bandwagon. Endorsements included every group from the Christian Coalition (it promotes family values) to feminist groups (women would be the prime broad a constituency behind it, why would anyone oppose the provision? Because raising other people's taxes or cutting their benefits. According to an married people into higher tax brackets than their unmarried counterparts. That penalty, however, is paid only when both spouses work. When only one spouse works, married people are charged at a lower rate than the working spouse would taxpayer. Social Security and Medicare are prime examples. Employees and Medicare taxes.) Social Security benefits are based on individuals' earnings they retire. However, nonworking spouses (who never paid Social Security taxes because they didn't have an income to be taxed) are entitled to Social Security benefits and Medicare based on the contribution of their spouses. Retired workers collect Social Security benefits, and their nonsalaried spouses receive half. (Working spouses must choose between their own earned benefit or half of percent of the benefit earned by the deceased. The spouse also continues to the Social Security benefit and twice the Medicare entitlement a single person homemaker bonus package. Most public and private employers that offer dependents of workers without a commensurate increase in employee typically get coverage for more people than do single people and partners in revenue, it doesn't count." Because the overwhelming majority of homemakers are that homemakers are not paid for the work they do, the upside to the deal is that they are not taxed on it, either. Tax purists would argue that the value like the wages paid to outside service providers such as baby sitters and camps promoting that idea. As long as unpaid spouses do not pay taxes, the whole notion of offering them tax reprieves is questionable. women farther down the income scale. "Work is work, whether it is done inside save it, and not many couples with young children have the luxury of tucking on welfare to get a paid job after two years as long as their children are over age five. Her mixed priorities when it comes to women were also revealed by the discourage those who work. But here's the rationale: "We are seeing, every time we talk about crime in this country, that it does come back to poor family and the values that some people learn at home," she says. "Anything we can do to encourage the family unit and encourage spouses who are able to stay at home with their children, if that is their desire, we should do it." In other words, Street Journal editorial page accused Salon of shilling for partisan. How so? One of Salon 's investors is Adobe Ventures. A partner Democratic Party. In addition, the editorial notes that board members of Adobe Systems, the software company that is the other partner in Adobe Ventures, have editors of the Journal think this background discredits Salon 's Content neglected to point out this bias in a story about Salon still with me? This editorial is noteworthy not just as a gleaning from partisanship, and conflict of interest. Everyone who has anything to say about issue, has by now been accused not just of being wrong, not just of being The notion that actors in this drama are motivated by loyalty to the president or his party is merely implausible in most cases. The notion that anyone is moved to the point of bias by emotional ties to the says this bias doesn't come only from the press's hunger for a big story. "At who helped the Times and the Post escape libel judgments in the saturated with spin, you might call this sort of accusation "topspin." It is an attempt to trump the other side's facts and arguments by smearing them as a shill for the man behind the curtain. Under the rules of the game, if you can connect the teller to an interested party, you don't have to credit the tale. This mode of discourse has thoroughly poisoned the atmosphere in which the scandal is discussed. Of course, to say that a charge is disagreeable doesn't mean it's unjustified. A toxic atmosphere can result from the release of poison gas. In this case, however, the casual accusations that various journalists are cutouts for the principal combatants are largely baseless. 1930s, the days when fronting, fellow traveling, and agitprop were genuine in recent memory. Perhaps the ingestion of too much corporate PR has made us all suspicious. Or perhaps an omnipresent air of "investigation" breeds paranoia. But for whatever reason, the view that members of the media have a article about press coverage of the scandal, Brill injected topspin by accusing Standard promptly hit back with a cover story that didn't just argue that and a "White House mouthpiece." This is a vicious cycle. You accuse me of bad daily would have. If you ask why Salon would publish a story accusing of plausible reasons. The chief one would probably be that journalists at Salon believed the story was true, important, and interesting. A bit more cynically, you might mention that these same editors and writers hoped the scoop would bring them attention. Another reason would be that the story suits their articles inherently corrupt or dishonest. (The ideologically fevered writers of the Wall Street Journal editorials ought to be able to grasp reasons why Salon would print such a story before reaching the financial interests or ideological biases of some of its investors. Most newspapers have from the corporate side. Smaller magazines sometimes do and sometimes don't. reflect the views of their owners. Others (such as But even in those cases where magazines speak openly for the owner's point of view, it's not fair to assume that a third party with whom the owner sympathizes calls the shots. What this kind of assumption misses is that story and some other factor, the great story almost always carries the day. For it would post them on the Web and take credit for the scoop, even if they Journal ignores the fact that Adobe board members, like those of most big corporations, give money to both parties. I think neglecting to mention this shows that the Journal 's editorial page lacks intellectual integrity. But I don't think that even the Journal 's editors, who come as close to being propagandists as anyone in the mass media, should be accused they seem fully capable of reducing a reasoned argument to a war of insults for probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, "Your money or your life" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication" patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards," Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, "patently offensive" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered "patently offensive" descriptions of "sexual or excretory activities or organs," especially under the standards of some conservative communities. "patently offensive" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression. clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's "patently offensive." There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was to roast the pig." The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults. But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different television broadcasts "when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience." The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically "obscene" on the grounds that the law may shield adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes. Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is children. But the court pointed out that there might be "less restrictive alternatives" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children. tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without "dirty" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software this be the "less restrictive alternative" that the government could use designers' ability to keep up with the latest "dirty" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of "less restrictive alternative" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled "clean," with the law making it illegal to falsely mark "clean" a page that's actually accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of transformed the sexual mores of the day. The alliance began progressively enough, as a campaign against a law authorizing the police to round up submit to pelvic exams. The law was repealed. Thrilled at their newfound clout, found it in white slavery, or "traffic in women." The cry went out. Newspapers took it up, running story after story about virgins sold to drooling Things spun quickly out of the feminists' control. Whipped into a frenzy, citizens formed the National Vigilance Association, but rather than protecting impoverished virgins the vigilantes conducted a crusade against prostitutes, homosexuals, music halls, theaters, paintings of nudes, and French novels (which they burned). At first, feminists joined in the fun. But when the years, discredited and humiliated, until the next wave of feminist activism scandal has at least some of its roots in feminist thought, and the embarrassed every sordid detail of his sex life? Because of sexual harassment laws that say a man's entire sexual past may be considered relevant in a lawsuit, even though a woman's may not. This arrangement was one of the triumphs of feminism over the women's movement will be forced to retreat from the field, confused and in disarray, if it doesn't come to terms with its mistakes. The biggest one (as many have pointed out) was blindly following the lead of that most illiberal of and utterances (and even, in some cases, wanted ones) degrade women so the intellectual groundwork for today's sexual harassment laws. Before today, the public" about sexual harassment, to say nothing of wanting to get rid of an frightening precedent being set. A man's political career was nearly ended and his private life pawed through while an entire nation watched, even though the charges against him were never subjected to the rigorous standards of evidence laws against "hostile work environments" and other forms of censoriousness, for sexual freedom, no matter how troublesome the consequences. (There were The healthy diversity of feminist life was killed off by pass, the women's movement deliberately switched from the political arena to as it has been for civil rights: A movement always suffers when it fails to what the women's movement decided to seek in the courts was equal protection people in the workplace; the right to make their own sexual decisions plus special protection against older, savvier guys who take advantage. usually ends up imposing burdens on your rights, or even on other rights of my own. The fury that followed some of the more questionable expansions of women's rights has made it difficult to talk about anything else. colleague that said, "What do we lose when we win?" It was the sort of dour for the clear separation of the public from the private sphere, a distinction dismissed as patriarchal a long time ago by feminists who thought it denigrated domestic life. But failing to see the importance of this distinction has got totalitarianism from earlier and lesser forms of oppression. Even in the days of absolute monarchs, a person's home was his (or, to a lesser degree, her) castle. But totalitarian governments want to control your private life down to your psyche and to mold you into a New Man or New Woman on whatever model realm is the exact opposite of the private realm: It's where you're not feminists (it didn't, but only because they had stopped listening). She declared that, for the public realm to function effectively, participants must willingness to sacrifice one's personal desires to the common good; a sense of squabbling among interests. This is a spirit feminism lacks, which is why it has allowed women's interests as a class to trump the common interest in that the personal is political. We're all better off because feminists turned hitherto private topics into subjects of public debate. Who'd want to go back to the days when you couldn't even talk about condoms? The problem is that we've reversed the phrase: We've made the political personal. It's one thing to put sensitive subjects out there for discussion. It's another thing to welcome it turns out, it may not be such a good idea to welcome them into our workplaces and schools either, at least not as warmly as we have. So should we It will take years to find the best place to draw the line, and we'll never get it perfectly right. The important thing is to realize that it's way past time percent. This laughably inaccurate prognostication reflected the hysteria of the moment and has illustrated for me the foolishness of making predictions, especially ones that can be proved wrong and used to shame you in social settings. I also learned something else: why the press is so eager for the patient survives for many years, it's humiliating for the doctor. beat, there is no story as exciting as that of the fall of a president. You can't get around the fact that bad news for him is good news for us. An even more powerful reason flows from the groupthink that afflicts the White House determined this could not and should not happen again. The feeling that the Slick One must not be allowed to elude capture once more is palpable in the awkward position. Journalists are most comfortable following public opinion, not leading it. Now they must explain to themselves and to their audiences how it is that the public has not come to share their low opinion of the president. One obvious explanation is the strength of the economy. Another is that moral strictures have loosened, at least when it comes to political leaders. But faced with the reality that the president has actually become more popular since the scandal broke, journalists have ventured a third explanation of late: theory is now treated as acknowledged fact. "Given the White House's to the president's "obsessive and adroit image machine." That the White House brainwashing the nation but by legitimately winning the public's support? In fact, there's no real way to judge the effectiveness of media relations except spin. But "spin control" remains a useful explanation for reporters who can't understand how the public can like this guy. In fact, it's not the first time they've trotted it out. The current round of barbed paeans to the White House to explain why the public supported a president they believed was ineffective ironic in light of what they said about the White House spin machine a few years ago. Back then, the common wisdom was that the administration was breathtakingly inept at communications. Officials assigned to deal with the press were arrogant and hostile. The result was an administration that was regularly embarrassed by PR "fiascoes." Officials naively thought they could wrote, "By initially trying to circumvent the White House press corps, the president and his aides clearly underestimated the degree to which negative Administration officials sort of liked this line, because it exonerated them at a substantive level. They had failed only at especially smooth and capable spokesman. But the reason he is so well liked is that he is generally straightforward and truthful; he does not go in for heavy skillful than others past. Few reporters think Ann Lewis is a more competent "Spin" means the administration using the media to mislead the public. So they with it. What does that say about the journalists themselves? depicting reality, profess to despise spin. In fact, they like getting spun. It journalists would lose their role as interpreters. But to say that the White House spin is working amounts to saying that you, the journalist, are failing in front of a national television audience, responded with enthusiasm. "Let's see if we can bring this damn thing back here next year," he said, "along with theater to present a play in which sex took place on stage. "Certainly," he replied. "I think there are very few rational people in this world to whom the word '[expletive]' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally in the House of Commons calling for his prosecution on charges of obscenity, for his removal as a theater official, and for censure of the network for but he acquired a public reputation for tastelessness that he carried for the exactly what I was saying," he insisted later. "Those of you who can't believe interesting. It is everywhere, impossible to avoid or tune out. I am sitting in a meeting at the office, talking with a colleague about a business circumstance that may possibly go against us. "In that case, we're years ago, he would have said, "We're in big trouble." Societal tolerance of profanity requires us to increase our dosage as time goes on. direction. By the time they have reached the end of the line of children, they have tossed off a whole catalog of obscenities I did not even hear until I was well into adolescence, let alone use in casual conversation on a public street. I am talking to a distinguished professor of public policy about a is limp and ineffectual. If you are surprised at all, you say what she says: than with profanity), and the slang expression for those who engage in oral sex exceptions, the supply of genuinely offensive language has dwindled almost to inflated to the brink of worthlessness. When almost anything can be said in public, profanity ceases to exist in any meaningful way at all. most of the forbidden words of the 1950s are no longer forbidden will come as news to nobody: The steady debasement of the common language is only one of many social strictures that have loosened from the previous generation to the current. What is important is that profanity served a variety of purposes for a long time in Western culture. It does not serve those purposes What purposes? There are a couple of plausible answers. One replacement for childhood tears. There comes a point in life, he wrote, when "wailing is rightly discouraged, and groans are also considered a signal of extreme weakness. Silence under suffering is usually impossible." So one reaches back for a word one does not normally use, and utters it without undue modern take on the subject, saw profanity as a safety valve rather than a stimulant, a verbal substitute for physical aggression. When someone swears, not less. But this is too simple. It isn't just the supply of dirty words that matters, it's their emotive power. If they have lost that power through overuse, it's perfectly plausible to say that their capacity to deter years ago. It was the verbal link to a secret act none of us understood but that was known to carry enormous consequences in the adult world. It was the embodiment of both pleasure and danger. It was not a word or an idea to mess culture, the word "[expletive]" was not only obscene, it was profane, in the original sense: It took an important idea in vain. Profanity can be an act of everyday objects whose properties they respected but did not fully understand. that was for good reason. He believed that cabbage cured hangovers, and as such, carried sufficient power and mystery to invest any moment with the These days, none of us believes in cabbage in the way it impossible to take His name in vain: That requires an Old Testament piety generation ago: as an act of profound mystery and importance that one did not engage in, or discuss, or even invoke, without a certain amount of excitement and risk. We have trivialized and routinized sex to the point where it just doesn't carry the emotional freight it carried in the schoolyards and bedrooms enlightened people consider this to be a great improvement over a society in which sex generated not only emotion and power, but fear. For the moment, I wish to insist only on this one point: When sexuality loses its power to awe, it loses its power to create genuine swearing. When we convert it into a casual form of recreation, we shouldn't be surprised to hear linebackers using the To profane something, in other words, one must believe in anything else, the crumbling of belief. There are very few ideas left at this point that are awesome or frightening enough for us to enforce a taboo against of most educated people to the disappearance of any taboo is to applaud it, but this is wrong. Healthy societies need a decent supply of verbal taboos and prohibitions, if only as yardsticks by which ordinary people can measure and define themselves. By violating these taboos over and over, some succeed in defining themselves as rebels. Others violate them on special occasions to derive an emotional release. Forbidden language is one of the ways we remind children that there are rules to everyday life, and consequences for breaking them. When we forget this principle, or cease to accept it, it is not just our decreed that trains and buses, in addition to running on time, had to carry would I wish it. I merely predict that sometime in the coming generation, profanity will return in a meaningful way. It served too many purposes for too sure that when my children have children, there will once again be words so awesome that they cannot be uttered without important consequences. This will not only represent a new stage of linguistic evolution, it will be a token of moral revival. What the dirty words will be, God only knows. democracies are inherently more committed to peace than other forms of allowing the most virulent nationalists to gain support, and led to predictions that this democratic procedure could finish the country. going on? Why is this most cherished belief not being borne out by events? Could it even be that under certain circumstances, democracies might be more warlike than other states? If so, what does that portend for us and The idea that democracies are the most peaceful political systems is attractive and plausible, but there is little evidence to support the notion: Fewer than a dozen countries have been continuously democratic over and the United States, share a common border. Many of these democracies have countries emerging from the former Soviet Union, aggressive nationalism has been a winning formula for leaders who can deliver little else to their It's tempting to view these examples as transitional. Both ethnicity, so it's only natural that succeeding systems continue the tradition. One could argue that the cure for despotism is democracy itself. But that begs the question of why democracies, and often more established ones, have been "peaceful democracy" endures, in part, because it celebrates us, because we think that the spread of democracy will usher in a period of peace that will allow us to concentrate on our own needs and ignore those of others. Our conviction reflects a widespread belief that the people are basically good and pacific, while governments are fundamentally suspect and aggressive. conditions, democracies might be even more given to warlike behavior than other forms of government. Totalitarianism kept ethnic hatreds in check in many Communist totalitarians have been replaced by nominal democrats, murderous While it's probably true that democracies are unlikely to go to war unless they're attacked, sometimes they are the first to take the offensive. And once involved in a conflict, democracies may actually be less willing than authoritarian regimes to end it short of "total victory." These views may make conflicts longer and more bloody than they would otherwise consulting the voters. Indeed, democracies that take too many risks for peace does democratization change the underlying reality of international relations: very much, and thus their geopolitical concerns and the conflicts arising from them do not change very much. The last decade has seen the triumphant return of geography in international relations and the enshrinement on the world scene of will seek different means of advancing its interests differently than it has in the past, but democracy by itself won't repeal these pressures. In fact, the disintegration of the Soviet empire has recreated the geographic relationship observations don't mean that we should withdraw our support for democracy in the former Soviet bloc. Democracy has done a great deal for all those who have experienced it, but democracy alone is not enough. Transforming those nations into peaceful members of the international system will require more than just a the people can be dangerous unless constrained by representative institutions and constitutionalism. Only if these additional arrangements exist can these We seem to have lost sight of the fact that democracy is as year later. This has made many people in the region, who are still learning about democracy, cynical about what the system means. And it has undercut our we must work even harder to integrate these countries into the West and into the values that have brought peace, prosperity, and freedom to so many people will grow discouraged, especially in the short term, as more open politics in the former Soviet bloc lead not to peace, but to more conflicts. But we shouldn't blame democracy; we should only understand what it can and can't been trying simultaneously to report stories derived from anonymous leaks, an opinion about the propriety of the leaks. If the definition of media unfairness is the press behaving as prosecutor, judge, and jury, then the definition of media absurdity is the way the press is now acting as prosecutor, If, as various White House spokesmen and the president's office of the independent counsel, it is a serious offense. Disclosing if she isn't worried about setting in motion an infinite regression, could name an independent counsel to investigate the independent counsel. testimony from her lawyer. A preponderance of evidence, however, points in the version of events. If not rhetorical, the same question would have no such refresh his recollection. In fact, this has been the defense offered by the damaging revelation out in order to spare itself pain later, it would have had Times was a willful party to a gross deception. It's almost impossible to believe the New York Times would mislead its readers by allowing a source to plant a story and deny planting it in the same news article. Everyone spent the weekend debating who was right. This left the Times and, to a lesser extent, other news organizations in the screwy position in which they remain. The paper had to report on the debate about where its leak had come from. But its goal was not the usual one of news reporting, which is who its own sources are. But in this case, it has granted its own version of immunity to an act of potential lawbreaking for the sake of gathering the Federal court that supervises him and the Attorney General, who has the correct or not. But it doesn't want to say, so it hides behind the legalistic morass? It's tempting to say that reporters shouldn't accept leaks unless the bias of the source can be indicated. But that's probably not realistic. The price of getting the story is often a promise of full anonymity. So long as there's competitive pressure in the press, sources will use the outlet that cover leaking more aggressively. The Times can't very well send reporters snooping around after colleagues in the same newsroom. But there's no pursuing the story of how and why and to whom the independent counsel's office leaving it there, the Post should dig a little deeper. A reporter has an elsewhere? Because I haven't been able to establish who they are. Anyone who with a long career ahead of him. Though he had been displaced from his position in the House Republican leadership as punishment for his role in the failed leader. But instead of announcing his candidacy for a job that would put him in entire adult life in two jobs: New York state assemblyman and member of Congress. Here he was giving up his life's work, with no idea of what he would do instead, because of an epiphany that seemed totally out of character. His transformation from someone desperate to spend more time with his colleagues and less with his family to someone desperate to spend none with his colleagues and all with his family happened within days. And even if you take his ever again, even after his daughter was in college? The predictable result has been a plague of rumors, all nasty and none very plausible. The only remotely convincing interpretation is conservative, not especially moderate, and with no great or special political talent. He will be forgotten in months, if not minutes. What is significant about the episode, and about the haze of innuendo surrounding it, is the way it epitomizes what the Republican House has become. In the past year, the House side of the Capitol has become not only an extraordinarily vicious environment and whatever invisible machinations lie behind it show that the devil makes work for idle hands. They also show the total intellectual and political real news coming out of the Republican caucus has been gossip about internecine retribution. The last month has been consumed with especially intense jockeying the majority leader's job (in an election that is nearly a year off)? What revenge drama. This is hardly surprising. Where there is no strong leader, no unifying sense of purpose, and no rule of law, political chaos tends to ensue, there is now factionalism and demoralization. How did the Republican revolution House rules. He placed a term limit of eight years on himself as speaker and a limit of six years on committee chairs. In choosing chairs, he suspended culture of the House. Advancement no longer had to be slow and steady. second explanation has to do with the political trajectory of the last few a draft. This means that all the issues that conservatives care most on indefinite hold. The demagogic gimmicks get ever more desperate and empty. that it would force sweeping reform (details to follow). conservative principles in Congress only heightens the mystery of why Bill which he might well have flourished, and where he ought to have felt very much reactionary on the subjects he knows about." The second is "every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents." organization of the religious right run by the radio evangelist and family most powerful leader of Christian conservatives active today. But lately, his behavior seems as if it were scripted by his antagonists, People for the might impel him to lead a mass walkout from the party. He delivered that he has decided the Republican Party must convert or be brought down." On Congress, so that would be unfortunate. But you never take a hill unless you're willing to die on it. And we will die on this hill if necessary." blackmailing them so openly, he is telling them, in effect, to choose their radical agenda, which calls for, among other things, abolition of the Department of Education and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. If Republicans stiff him, they may lose a crucial component of their narrow majority. If, on the other hand, they "convert," they get to watch moderates and economic conservatives flee in horror. In sending a message that the party electorate as a whole: Republicans are being ordered around by a frightening a platform to found Focus on the Family, a nonprofit organization based in philosophy he equates with all forms of social permissiveness. The program, Research Council are now technically separate, but they work hand in glove. notion that Republicans could be a "Big Tent" party on abortion. The two This absolutism contrasted with the stance of the rival Christian Coalition. Under Reed's leadership, the Christian Coalition was more politically savvy, more open to compromise with the nonreligious right, and more accepting of the reality that Republican victory was a prerequisite for any kind of conservative change. Reed recognized that his power depended on not weight behind Dole early in the primary season and flirted with the idea of gone into private political consulting, the Christian Coalition has been upcoming congressional primary. Party regulars worry that the same thing may play it both ways. They love to argue that the religious right controls the Republican Party. But they also maintain that Christian conservatives are depends on subtlety and patience, qualities he tends to lack. To the extent he Democratic Party if he and his views weren't accorded more "respect." Appeasing the risk of looking like a prisoner to the ultras is greater. Most people don't want to vote for a party that constantly succumbs to extortion from an extreme expect a slim volume written by an academic philosopher and published by a university press to cause widespread consternation on the right. But for some book "radiates contempt for the country." (Perhaps more to the point, it Brooks contends that the book's criticism of the left is merely the latest in a succession of moves designed to advance the author's academic career. Brooks even if they disagree with him. He is, after all, a philosopher who writes good "cultural left" to come down from their postmodernist ivory tower and think academicians should wipe that sophistical smirk off their faces, lose their edge with such outlandish statements, though they are usually contradicted in correct to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire.") But I think that what rather the buried fear that the left might one day wake up and take his advice. wouldn't be good news for Republican politicians, either, if the left listened only that academic leftists, the heirs to the '60s New Left, need to become curtain over the distinction between liberals and leftists. We should all forget about our past conflicts, he says, and realize that we were always on the same side, more or less. "It would be a good idea to stop asking when it was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, to have left the Communist Conservatives achieved a general unity despite their wide differences during seems to fathom. But even if they were to magically vanish overnight, they strategy from pragmatist philosophy. He takes questions that he doesn't find so there is no point in discussing them. But the issues that have split the constitutional democracy and its opponents, between friends and enemies of human rights, between people who believe in limited government and those who conflicts as the nuances of ancient history is both crude and an offense to those liberals who were on the right side. In constructing an inclusive But even if these old battles somehow were to cease to seem relevant, which they might to a generation raised in a world without communism, most vague on the subject of actual policy, one gathers that what he wants is a kind of economic third way: A government that redistributes wealth through the tax system while providing uniform social benefits, such as health care and pensions. Unions should be more powerful, corporations less so. It's the of the wealthy that prevents the country from solving all its problems. They a small cave without newspapers for the past several decades. He has not in dealing with social ills. Nor does he consider the possibility that markets might be effective in dealing with some social problems. Conservatives can quit fretting. Liberals might be out of it, but we're not about to start taking cues person many people can't stand. Though he may be no more ambitious or transparent about it. Physically large, he can be seen in photographs towering back stabbing, and even for buttering someone up and sticking the knife in at might be useful to him in the future, especially if that someone is a strain of narcissism that impels him to quote himself, frequently and at be vain, pompous, and ridiculous. We know this. But he also managed to carry off, almost by sheer force of personality, an accomplishment that eluded governments, world leaders, and multilateral organizations for four years: He of jujitsu with his own personality, channeling his dubious personal interest. To the contrary, ego can be the engine that makes political and diplomatic accomplishments possible. By the end of the book, I couldn't help historians' conceit that individual actors don't really matter. In the summer involving the United States. Offered the post of assistant secretary of state and prodded, wheedled and connived, the crusade became more personal. Early in his shuttle diplomacy, three colleagues, including his top deputy, were killed to blame. This tragedy spurred him in his hazardous ricocheting between gains that he thought would make a territorial settlement easier. Baker's view that we didn't have a dog in that fight, he asserts the United having failed, we were the only ones who could do anything about it. Inside the administration, he fought off objections from the military. Spooked by anything that smacked of "mission creep" or "nation building," the Pentagon resisted combatants sat around an Air Force base for three weeks and reached a peace real anger, and essentially sat on the heads of the various participants until they cried uncle. Here the story becomes especially gripping and takes an who turns out to be the biggest obstacle to peace, unwilling to make even meaningless concessions. On the other hand, the brutal but undeniably charming the accord with territorial concessions at the last moment. longer looms very large. From an early stage, he found himself drawn into something larger than himself, something more compelling than his own career. As the object elevates him, his pettiness melts away. are their most visible and least pleasant contact with the federal government. Naturally, taxes are almost always near the top of the national policy agenda, reduction speed up the growth of the nation's output and the incomes of the population by increasing saving, investment, work, education, enterprise, research, and other factors that determine our capacity to produce? When Bob Dole is urged to put economic growth at the center of his election campaign, it is mainly the promise of tax reduction to achieve such effects that people have in mind. There are, of course, other considerations to be weighed in decisions growth question dominates current discussion, and we shall mainly concentrate can be said about taxes in general, except that hardly anyone likes them. The effects of tax reduction on economic growth will depend on whether the the tax on saved income, or one of a long list of other possibilities. also on the budgetary context in which the tax cuts are to occur. Would the proposed cut of some taxes be accompanied by increases of other taxes, and if so, which? For example, the "flat tax" that some people propose involves both a reduction of rates and an increase in the income subject to tax because of the elimination of various deductions. Would a proposed tax cut be accompanied by expenditure cuts, and if so, which? In our discussion, we shall try to examine the growth effects of various possible tax programs in their possible budgetary Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's "output"? But let us measure the efficiency of a government by how well it is able to implement its own goals, whatever they may be. This could be quantified in terms of money, people, or the total elapsed time between the adoption of a policy and its complete implementation. A perfectly efficient government would find its platforms instantly implemented; a completely inefficient one would expend all its resources By this reasonable standard, the first place in efficiency the power of the local tyrant, the more rapidly and completely his policy desires are implemented. Cruelty and unpredictability are the techniques of the real efficiency experts. Dissidents complaining? Just shoot them. Minor minions bullets are cheap. And there is always a friendly arms merchant (usually from a country with an inefficient government) ready to sell you some, even to arrange efficient that they are easy to administer. Even the least capable or sane all but the most compliant are purged from the dictator's forces, what's there to worry about? Foreign invaders or liberators? They usually serve to merely their people, destroy their economies, and leave no legacy apart from large efficiency. This efficiency hurts the citizenry because, by and large, the sort efficient government is dangerous in the hands of the wrong man. Sadly, the right sort of man never seems interested in the job. amid a patchwork quilt of fiefdoms run by local strongmen. power? Absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but the applicant pool for this when it comes to efficiency. The mandate of God might seem like the ultimate tool of power, but in practice, a theocracy is less efficient than the whimsical brutality of a lone, unfettered ruler. This is not to say that they are bound by more constraints. The word of God generally is written in some ambiguous form that is open to interpretation, and there is never a shortage of interpreters. The leaders of a religious dictatorship must always improved "Truth." In addition, the deity has a funny habit of prescribing more rules and regulations than even liberal Democrats do, thus distracting religious regimes with random rituals and requirements. Religious movements are or stifling free thought. Complex agendas are much more difficult for them to generally are less efficient than those run by lone despots or the clergy. by genuine career military officers. Perhaps it is the military respect for reason, true military leaders are generally less effectual than plain old thugs and zealots (although their political opponents get just as dead). As further proof of my thesis, rank seems to correlate well with inefficiency: Few of the generals who have served their country as despots can hold a candle, Communists briefly occupied an intermediate stage in the hierarchy of inefficiency. Condemned in their heyday as having total or "totalitarian" power, their regimes were later revealed as corrupt bureaucracies, more unraveling after communism collapsed make an unintended point: At least there was something to unravel, unlike in so much of the rest of the world. Poor communism was inefficient enough that its people were able to accomplish some sat like a ball on a hill: Ultimately, it had to roll down one side of the hill and collapse into democracy, or roll the other way and devolve into the the latter, and they may soon have imitators, for it remains to be seen how It is popularly supposed (particularly by people who live in them) that democracies are "good," while various forms of despotism are "bad." The evidence favors a far simpler proposition. Simply put, governments are bad. The fundamental prerogative of governing is to control the actions of individuals, and this power is remarkably prone to misuse. Quibbling that evil leaders are to blame, not the institution of government itself, is a pathetic correspondence, why exempt the mechanism? Without the force of government done by governments are easy enough to rattle off. But what about the examples of great good to balance them? There aren't any. Politicians and other apologists for the institution gamely assert the supposed benefits of government, but it is a short and shallow list. Good is done, to be sure, but centuries of good government would it take to balance the score for the societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil. The constraint of maintaining constant popularity is simply too large a burden to to power, for example. But this rarely happens. Instead, democracies evolved ever more elaborate ways of tying the hands of their chosen leaders. our "leaders" are the most thoroughly hogtied of any on earth. In a few weeks those of us who overcome inertia and apathy will enter polling places to choose our president, with less real choice than ever. Each candidate has tried to outdo the other in adopting popular centrist stances and avoiding anything difficult. We can rest assured that neither man will challenge the fundamental structure that will render winner and loser ineffectual, come Inauguration Day. Perhaps it would be better to have a restrained and less intrusive government, to restrain themselves. Better to let them restrain each other through inefficiency, caught in a morass of checks and balances, our freedom guarded believe it does. They hope that curbing payments for additional children and enforcing parental work requirements will reverse the 25-year trend that has brought large numbers of unmarried mothers onto the welfare rolls. into fatherless families, at an enormously increased risk of growing up in Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in Technology Shock." In the late 1960s and very early 1970s (well before Roe contraception increased dramatically. Many states, including New York and law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people was declared unconstitutional. Many observers expected liberalized abortion and happened, because of the decline in the custom of "shotgun weddings." engage in sexual activity if it came with a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that even if they left one woman, they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. In the 1970s, women who were willing to get an abortion, or who used contraception reliably, no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who found abortion unacceptable, or who were unreliable in their contraceptive use, found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations as well. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father. And while only a few unmarried mothers once kept their babies, only a few put them up for adoption today, because the stigma of unwed motherhood has declined. Once shunned by their peers and support to keep their babies, stay in school, and participate in other social doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed a few years, and probably much more among sexually active unmarried women. The 1980s. During the same period, births per unmarried woman roughly doubled for of unmarried black women. Meanwhile, fertility rates for married women of both surprising. Social conventions change slowly. It took time for men to recognize that they did not have to promise marriage in the event of a pregnancy in exchange for sexual relations. It may also have taken time for women to perceive the increased willingness of men to leave them if they demanded One final puzzle, however, requires explanation. The black play a role. Because blacks, on average, have lower incomes than whites, they are more affected by changes in welfare benefits. As a result, the rise in welfare benefits in the 1960s may have resulted in a decline in the black possible, attempts to turn back the technological clock by restricting abortion and contraception would now be counterproductive. Besides denying reproductive freedom to women, such efforts would increase the number of children born and wedlock are reported by their mothers to have been "wanted," but "not at that time." Some are reported as not having been wanted at all. Easier access to of unwanted children and improve the timing of those whose mothers would have their unexpected alliance amid the quadrennial panoply of the Grand Old Party's nominating convention, our protagonists, acting in unavoidable response to the exigencies of a contest dominated by the incumbent's strategy and tactics, set began to reveal itself, rising like a black basalt orogeny from the soft soils most admirably and now gleamed like a Secret Service agent's lapel pin, was gaining speed swiftly, its one hundred and five tons departing another rails seemed to converge, their fluttering hands and smiling faces congealed into a tuberous mirage that already was beginning to deliquesce, its bipedal spores gamboling away from the station where, only moments before, the candidates had stood to receive the traditional accolade from the traditional funereal platform and tufts of bunting, gave off a flapping chorus that decorations that went up before each stop. The crew had to work quickly, lest momentum send the froufrou and gewgaws drifting onto the roadbed. In a minute the removal had been accomplished, and the two men on whose behalf this had retired to the common area, where the staff would be attempting its usual stab at gaiety. They believed in Bob Dole; they had to believe in him, even as his brooding presence infected the farthest corners of the campaign with an acidity specific to him. His people would never admit what he was admitting: that the prize he had chased almost all his adult life was bound to elude him convert into an enormous problem. He had, in his wretched twenties, dangling by a wrecked arm on a homemade exercise gibbet, accepted, no, hugged to himself the knowledge that life was hard and then you died. It was damnably unnatural, this state to which he had most ironically ascended. When things were in their proper order, a buoyant spirit led, not a mordant one, and what was he if not could be counted on to float above any malaise like an empty water cask. It was excitement, the contained enthusiasm of a veteran politician in firm grip of his emotions but willing to share with his supporters what bits of them he must, sank back into himself, simmering in a glumness he wished he could contain but knew he could not. Terrible things had always happened to him, and always would; this was only the latest of them, but it was a terrible thing of a specifically galling nature. He was the most prestigious passenger on a track. Through all his trials, darkness had always been his strength, an obsidian girder holding him to the path; now it stood to crush him and, perhaps not coincidentally, the entire Republican ticket, which his opponent's speaking more loudly than was necessary, perhaps to compensate for the rush of air around them and the clatter of steel wheels beneath and behind. "Something luck and genes with the smiling disposition of a boy who is shown a stable full of ordure and instantly concludes that there must be a pony in there somewhere? Dole was sentenced to always know better than what he wanted to believe. "Yes, most assuredly," he replied, struggling not to answer with a grunt. "I sense we might profit from a few minutes out of the weather." Of course, there was no "weather" to speak of; but he had learned a thousand years ago that sometimes, he had to say something. so the older man could enter the rail car. He did so with surety, using the elbow of his bad arm to steady himself at the threshold, then raising both fists in a stretch. At the far door, a steward stood. Dole pulled off his suit jacket and assumed his usual position in an overstuffed chair on the starboard side of the car. He loosened "What troubles you, my friend?" he asked again. "Is to bark out the syllable that had become his hated signature, but did not. Damn public or private without apprehending in his marrow that he had become what he into which we have been thrust by this contest," Dole continued, rising to his like a crippled millipede, waging a campaign that could have been waged in the "But surely, Bob, you must acknowledge the romantic invoked the whistle in the night, the long rumbling procession of cars carrying Dole said, exasperated at having been caught in the web of his own rhetoric. something to take our minds away from the press of combat?" "Let us commence with a session. I will wait on the platform while you make Upon joining the ticket, he had instantly made it his habit to maintain the Amid the clotted air on the platform, Dole let his eyes umbilicus and each winking a single garnet eye. "Excellent news! I have found the Game Boys. The batteries are as fresh as new flounder. Lose not a grimmest hour, after all these years of morosely pursuing the presidency, he would come to enjoy as his particular friend a chronically cheery former footballer who could broadcast an enthusiasm for gimcrack economic theory in such a way that one could not tell if he was embracing it or mocking it. Now, personality radiating in his direction, he also faced the knowledge that life was more durable than pain, more difficult than you could have imagined, and yet still you lived, as he now lived, seeing that his last campaign, the battle to the candidacy, would be his last success. He stepped inside and closed the your nerve, touting Slate Explorer and making me go through the whole process of registering before revealing that it's not available for the If it weren't for the Mac, there wouldn't be any Windows for Slate I have been trying to understand why I should cry for tobacco farmers, and can't understand why others do. When slavery ended, cotton growers had either another crop to grow. Many opted to grow tobacco, and it looks like it's time straight face, recommend subsidies for these farmers when he and others in his party have vowed to get rid of "welfare as we know it." Tobacco subsidies are just another form of welfare. I say give the growers two years, then make them of having college freshmen explore the "realities" of these two campuses in a your subjects? These kids aren't the stuff of excitement, controversy, provocation! Their particular narcissism renders them incapable of viewing any schools is really like." First, when you pick two guys that are basically similar in background and basically similar in every other way, you get two better than one? What kind of sample of real college life is that? experience of being at an Ivy and being in a fraternity, there are some things that are really missing in their diaries. It's a crime to quote that have fun playing Boggle and touring the dorms together, but is this a good way to find an answer to a question that uses "hotbed" and "sexual abandon" in the that would bring meaning to the anecdote you quoted. Be prepared to take the everyone to hear. We wouldn't want everybody to know about our games of binge not? It is only when one considers numbers that the comparison becomes quite lack of worries of one backed by a billion people. Give me a tenth of that in underlying this discussion is the deeper question of whether there is any value refraining from having a child may impoverish those who would have been your child's friends and mates. But that wouldn't be the case if the parents of those potential children also refrained from reproducing. Also, there are over "potential friends." And one does not tend to encounter small acts of kindness new directions in economics: the connection to biology. Unfortunately, it is likely to sow considerable confusion by suggesting that an individual could or should add value to humankind through additional reproduction. Reproduction is not guided by a moral imperative toward humanity as a whole but by a competitive struggle to pass on genes. This includes the effort to give one's progeny the power to pass genes even further-- hence, family names, mansions, and monuments. But as the species grows to fill its biological space, nature itself provides limiting forces like single lifestyles, wars, and earth, he has more than enough friends. Good for him. Surely he's aware that there are others less fortunate. Among all his many friends, is there none, for example, who has had difficulty finding a friend who will make a suitable humanity. That was exactly my point. If they were guided by moral imperatives, people would have more children than they do. In the absence of those moral imperatives, there's a case for subsidizing reproduction. of whom are likely to encounter usability issues related to the first product cycle, you may also want to consider some of the following and midnight to provide additional convenience for employees attempting to for your attention to these suggestions. I look forward to further status reports of this product's development and am certain that you will do a fine time Spencer made his remarks, he was in a church. More importantly, there was a funeral going on. And, rotten luck, The Loved One just happened to be was not concerned so much with the convoluted interplay of the press with his past peccadilloes, but rather was more driven by the unavoidable necessity of parasite lives, but the host dies, it really can't be described as a symbiotic "Hell's Angel." Is this a sick joke or, I hope, a typo, because it is offensive and wrong. With this one slip you lost complete respect and reliability by me, perform. Although I speak with an English accent, my pronunciation can be by the program. The correction modification seems to have no effect. My software definitely does not learn by its mistakes! Birthday, Heritage Foundation" is wrong on one major point. In it he wrote, supposed to lobby Congress." This is not true. Nonprofit organizations, or Charities and nonprofit organizations speak for the public interest, not issues like the environment or consumer protection, or vulnerable populations who lack the resources or skills to assert their basic rights. providers, charities are often on the front lines combating the worst problems besetting our communities. Their voices help produce more efficient and effective public policy. Although we might disagree with the Heritage Foundation, as a 501(c)(3), they are doing nothing wrong by lobbying. is appropriate. Nonprofits also are prohibited from using federal funds for the purposes of lobbying (see Office of Management and Budget Circular A-122), but they may lobby using other funding sources, such as foundations or their membership. encouraged to exercise their First Amendment rights. Certainly Congress is in The Internal Revenue Code does not encourage lobbying by 501(c)(3) organizations, but it does allow it under limited circumstances. Here's a be (and need to be) driven by practical considerations, such as opening trade course balloons are a uniquely terrible mode of transportation. Sticking ice well. The motivation of adventurers everywhere is to achieve something no one incidentally, to get famous by writing books about it. And the reason why the rest of us sit in our armchairs and read about these accomplishments is because we wish we'd done something as interesting with our time. If there is an occasional practical benefit to these shenanigans, so much the better. In the meantime, the world will probably be content to support the world of adventure just a stunt: It made real the idea of transatlantic air travel." By the time today's balloonists have also), it did little to advance the technology of outstanding. Of all the obnoxious, hypocritical statements he collected, the leader in a generation to make them put their money where their mouths are. about the browser issue. I wish I could say that "You Be the Judge" fit the bill, but I just don't buy it. I tried your experiment. Yes indeed, remove whole distinction really boils down to a few overlapping files. This is hardly that is not part of B. It can and should include in its operating system those doesn't mean that Ford left out the battery or the fuse box, both of which are needed for the user to install and operate a stereo after the purchase. trying to obscure the issue with a lot of techie hot air. They should be fined heavily for contempt of court. Ultimately, I suspect the company will need to natural monopoly but the other divisions forced to face the same competitive wouldn't it be safe to say that the covenant marriage is clearly superior in surprise to me, because I was sure that among the very few biographical details and had this confirmed (and seen nothing to the contrary). There is nothing to capital markets" is both wrong and silly. Equity options, just like commodity and currency futures, can and often do serve a hedging function. Consider, for the stock. If that investor were willing to pay extra for the security of the ability to lock in positions that equity options offer, certain folks might not be in the equity market in the first place. People like Wade Cook are the Though I had hoped for something more interesting than spin control for women in a man's world, I was impressed with the breathtakingly casual lack of fairness to the first lady that created the intriguing premise. policy before she could measure up. If we use the same standard for both, I imagine land mines will go on killing people for decades to come). death, that makes people recast all criteria for a good and successful life in public relations windfall of a spectacular and tragic death. That's quite a that the local guides "ignore politics," although we list and describe the work The charge that our guide is "limited to capsule reviews and short, audience that reflects the vast sociological spectrum that is part and parcel United States. One can safely assume that they import certain rare delicacies destruction of the extremely expensive machine, another one is built on at the same time, one as a backup. Nor does John Hurt's millionaire eccentric arrival they read her memories. Or didn't you find it odd that an alien intelligence appeared to her in the form of her father? didn't you complain about something really important, like how fake the computer displays were? I mean, everyone knows that in real life computers don't have 3-D displays and make cool noises. Those pesky movies. manufacturer of Cracker Jack, and the citizens of the territories and me wondering if she is mentally competent, let alone capable of intelligently dick.' It's tempting to conclude from this that she's empty at the core, trying Star Trek uniform, would you assume that he was "empty at the core"? with such a clear lack of understanding of the distinction between acting and asking whether the inventor of Big Brother was a hypocrite for naming of what he did, despite the fact that the Foreign Office has yet to release the Surprisingly, little of the story has been reported in the criticizes him for showing poor sense. The apparent point of the piece was not to challenge his reputation but rather to argue that those who named names his deathbed. Some have suggested he was coaxed into cooperating by a woman he context of the times but also in retrospect. The behavior he is now being based on political courage and intellectual integrity. of independent elements on the left. Members of the Republican militias not happening behind the lines, he was prevented by people who, though not CP members, viewed criticism of the Soviet Union as intolerable. These included when he finished Animal Farm during World War II. Because of its and who merely "stupid," "dishonest," or "nave." He missed the mark a few agent of some kind," was later revealed to be, in fact, a Soviet agent. Peter the sidelines. He was someone who believed in choosing sides and taking action, declined the offer of a commission to write a pamphlet, in part because he was all of which have been revealed, because some of the people are still certainly those marked with a red asterisk on his longer list and do not asked that his list remain secret not because there was anything shameful about it, but because he feared it was libelous. Where he could say the same thing protect himself. People lost their jobs and had their lives ruined as a result. were people he believed to be enemies of liberty. Nor were their civil Scientist") has done me the honor of another attack, this time for an and I actually agree, more or less, on the policy question. I favor a low the way to get lower interest rates is for the Federal Reserve to cut them. disapproval, "the easy way out." I definitely favor the easy way out when it is version, markets for money and bonds determined the interest rate, with Treasury during World War I. Later, he was a vociferous opponent of tight and liquid cash. In order to get from money demand to a full theory of the or mine. The central bank supplies the liquidity (money) that speculators demand. The terms on which it does so, combined with the demand conditions, central bank. If people increase their demand for money, then either interest rates must rise, cutting investment, or transactions must fall, cutting output again at that paradox of thrift. That argument which holds that the attempt to raise saving will end up lowering national income, because consumption will all epochs, that thrift is always a virtue. I know that he also strongly favors a reduction in the federal budget deficit, precisely because that represents a control output and unemployment, he believes that this tendency is easily offset by cuts in interest rates to hold employment steady. in my view. It is one thing to assume that the Federal Reserve could in principle always lower interest rates enough to offset the depressing effects of tax increases and spending cuts. But, in fact, there is no assurance that statement that this is "simple" and "reasonable" does not make it right. political figure, no more nor less. That being so, the main reason we have high interest rates is that the forces favoring them are more powerful than the forces opposed. This, I believe, is the deplorable truth. Congress took drastic action to raise "national saving" by cutting the expected future budget deficits in half. But the Federal Reserve then raised interest never fully reversed, and actually raised federal spending on interest payments by enough to wipe out a large part of the deficit reductions. that one cannot rely on the Federal Reserve to offset the workings of the based on a false premise. And the way to get lower interest rates and more investment and durable consumption spending and lower unemployment, all of which I favor, is not to increase thriftiness or to cut deficits. The essential thing is to get the Federal Reserve to bring interest rates down. marvelous tidbit on the rewards of vigorous consumption spending as opposed to parsimony, niggardliness, and thrift. But, speaking of vulgarity, they ought to its new building. That is a big donation from a foreign politician. to be open to change, especially in an entrepreneurial effort like this one. Another equally important message is that no matter how carefully we try to craft categories of giving, human behavior refuses to be comprehensively ones made both in the United States and outside the United States last year. We may consider changing that guideline this year, or we may do a feature on gifts only in the years the actual gift was announced, not when payments were made on previously announced pledges. This accounts for a number of missing foundation gifts. I did not do a mailing last year to private foundations (or to anyone, relied on what I could find in public sources, and sometimes foundation gifts I need to verify everything and that even the most reliable sources are stick with our decision to list gifts as they are announced, and won't list gifts made to create or add to private foundations. Again, we may address this type of giving in a separate feature. We will only list gifts from a private foundation to an actual grantee. We are always looking for ideas of how to make Won." If I was forced to pick one (and only one) favorite bit, I think I explain that New York has no suburbs that are "truly hip." He doesn't favor us with a definition of "truly hip," but he is kind enough to drop some clues: to the telephone poles and vegetarian restaurants and rave clubs, is completely out of the question in New York." Never having been to either West Lake Hills place "truly hip," but let me go ahead and see if I don't have the whole and nascent heroin addictions playing in bad rock bands named after legendary discussions of Irony? Burrito delivery? Am I in the ballpark? Close? Well, gee, I guess if that's "truly hip," then suburban New York does come up sorely. city of New York. People who were (or are), by and large, at most one generation removed from poverty. People who were (or are), as they say, shaped by that experience. If one judges their communities by the standards of middle- vegetarian restaurants), yeah, they're going to come up short. that many black people used to live in the South, this refusal to address basic sociology is glaring. There are a lot of awful things to be said about suburban a region of the country he simply does not understand. And, of course, it isn't food. The food here is really good. Really, really good. Turns out the rest of delicatessens that cut giant chunks of meat with scary slicing machines. Not to mention the thousands of fine, relatively inexpensive ethnic restaurants. I still content to eat in independently owned restaurants. I guess we're just not our cultural influence, which is huge (and by no means entirely benign), even silly, misinformed article completely ignores issues of class and ethnicity telephone poles, Anglophile raves) as some sort of ideal. His problem with the suburbs of New York would seem to be that they have too much New York and not moved five years ago, but I still visit frequently, and I have to tell you, there's not a vegetarian restaurant in sight. A notice for a rave party would and church hallways demanding action. (After, of course, said parents learned Hills is a pretty place, lots of wood, stone, and gorgeous views of Lake fresh herbs, and reasonably good focaccia bread. But in all that lovely, expensive real estate, there's no edge, no irony, no one dressed in black, Committee or the president, he would not have had the opportunity to sit next not have been "shaken down" for that day, but what he paid for the price of admission. Access to the president should be for all. Why are someone's ideas more important than mine because they gave money to the president or his he states, "But if government can't reroute the freight train in a better direction, it's hard to see how it can derail it." As an engineer, I feel qualified to point out that rerouting requires new track and a switch (not to mention a new destination) before the train arrives. Derailing can be done with a few common chemicals or tools (remove a short section of rail), or a tow strap and vehicle (simply pull the rail out of line a few inches). "programs" actually accomplish the opposite of the goals they are intended to achieve. Thus, welfare has created a group of permanent dependents, gun control as "no one can use force against anyone else." The proper statement is, "No one may initiate force against another." The difference is obvious when considering that the Internet began life as a federal defense project." Granted, the designed as a decentralized network in order to (as much as possible) ensure survivability in the event of World War III. The current Internet, still decentralized, has become a worldwide threat to authoritarian government, due to the free exchange of ideas it allows. This explains the recent spate of governmental (and intergovernmental) attacks on the Net. libertarian goals mean to "We, the People." I suggest that he be limited to reviewing official government pronouncements in the future. This may be the saying there is only one standard by which you can call yourself a Catholic, have any impact and success in the current political arena, is far different analogies, ranging all the way back to the classical argument for free trade that people will fault him on the oversimplification of his economic representations doesn't get him off the hook. The problem with these analogies, historical revisionism, they are so riddled with problems that one hardly knows dogs instead of making hot dogs) rarely pull the wages of the manufacturing jobs. In his earlier work he accepts models that don't even make allowance for well hear him telling the hungry to simply eat more hot dogs. asserts his argument through use of psychology, not economic reasoning. Namely, He is willing to disregard the growing income inequity in this country (illustrated in my article), among other issues, and practically admits that changes in his playful thought experiments would come only after cataclysmic You'll have to, because it's never happened, even when things went as awry as after the Challenger accident. If he'll refresh his memory, he might recall that Young, speaking as the leader of the entire astronaut corps, said astronauts would refuse to fly until there were significant changes in the we're so used to our freedoms here that we quickly forget their use. notes Apple's failure to build a business selling system software rather than applications. It was Bill Gates' genius to understand that his tiny company could own the link between those two sides of the business, reducing PC when the user has inserted a floppy disk! Jobs' hubris was not that he wanted to own the personal computer business, but that he wanted to sell a product that was better than anything the industry could put together piecemeal. it might very well have seen its software become the industry standard." manufacturer of the computer also designed the operating system. I didn't know anyone with a DOS system in the early '80s, but I knew plenty of people with with distinct and incompatible operating systems. This was the state of the industry when the Mac was born. Bill Gates realized it would be more efficient if all computers, regardless of manufacturer, ran the same system (which is why may be true, but it is totally unsupported by his argument. If anything, the correct, in "Liberal Tobacco Whores," to condemn the shameless tobacco companies, but he fails to properly identify why their actions are people to make dumb decisions is not morally wrong. Whether it is sky diving, eating Big Macs, smoking, or engaging in promiscuous sex, people should be free to take risks with their own lives. Advocates of the nanny state may respond that society bears some of the costs of these behaviors, but that is the fault of the health, welfare, and other government programs that protect people from is nothing at all wrong with defending tobacco companies. What is immoral, instead, is taking lots of money to lobby for something you do not believe in. every corner" of the state. We are an odd collection of "adventurers, loners, and losers," as illustrated by a sex crime described in lurid detail. On top of dress warmer. We have chosen to live in a beautiful place where some of the world's most scenic areas have been closed to mining and oil development forever. But thanks to advances in mining and petroleum technology, other areas of the state can be safely developed, leaving only a minuscule "footprint" on when you are dealing with a small "capita." The federal government is the money spent here on the military is hardly a boondoggle dreamed up by the locals. In addition, the federal government spends a large amount of money on scores of isolated native villages that can only be reached by air, but the natives hardly intend to apologize for living in their ancestral environmentalism deserves everyone's support, and gets it up here. no development. Those with a more rational view, however, have been and will be embattled, it is like the old days in the West, with the invaders surrounded in the main questions are mixed marriage and religion. To even speak of "mixed marriage" reveals a certain racism. There is no such thing as a "mixed marriage," because there is only one human race. A mixed marriage would be with a dog, or a sheep, or some other species. And as for religions, in our day and age they should be forgotten except as interesting historical artifacts. The off mankind will be. Why do some people still think we should follow the while I would agree that the whole incident was overplayed, after finishing the close to slaughter time, causing their stomachs to burst during slaughter. contamination occurs when fecal matter comes in contact with meat. Consequently, the cause of the contamination must occur at slaughter time, not much more than people from other countries, have lost the connection between food and health. We eat without thought to the consequences and expect the medical industry to drop us a pill for our ills, many of which are the result food systems, and continue to do so, something which classic economics says is not possible, since economies of scale do not easily apply to food production. Yet we seem to desire cheap and anonymous food. Rather than our food being handled by the farmer, it passes through the processing and distribution unpacked and displayed, and on and on. It is a good system for dealing with deodorant, but it is simply not a good system for dealing with food. for consumers to rely more on locally produced food, and to be willing to support farmers and pay more for high quality, safe food. feudal institution that has been continued despite the fact that we are no longer subjects of the king and thus ought not to be forced to pay for the privilege of working for a living. That was the lot of serfs, who were nearly owned by their lords and whose land was owned by their lords. ought to do to fund the proper functions of government is to charge contract and user fees. These would be plenty to support a government that operates within its proper scope. The fact that you folks find all this bizarre is not Full." I particularly liked the way he worked the book through the to keep in mind when buying a toothpaste: clinical effectiveness and aesthetic the latter, I and a team of researchers (my friends, mostly) sampled more than effectiveness basically means "Does it have fluoride?" If it does, it's others, but the difference is negligible. Most dentists agree that if it's got wrong with it. How regularly and how attentively you brush matters far more than what you brush with. But while it's true that any fluoride toothpaste will do a fine job, certain clinical distinctions may help you choose your weapon. Some toothpaste claims are bogus, but others are for real. control: For real! Tartar control toothpastes (Crest Tartar Control, would otherwise collect on your teeth and form tartar (hardened plaque). Tartar control toothpastes can't remove tartar, but they can stave it off. Protection) use potassium nitrate to block nerves connected to your teeth. This works for people with receded gums. But if your sensitivity stems instead from cavities, habitual tooth grinding, or a root canal problem (as it does for most Peroxide) is a popular toothpaste ingredient. Baking soda does nothing whatsoever for your teeth. However, its effervescence may leave your mouth permanently. Dentists can apply peroxide solutions to bleach your teeth (just as peroxide would bleach your hair), but the peroxide would have to stay on your teeth for several continuous hours before it made any difference. Brushing with whitening toothpastes does nothing, no matter how many times you have at even after you finish brushing and continues to kill bacteria (the dentist says you may feel a "residual slipperiness" after you brush with Total). Because it effective toothpaste on the market, for now. Other toothpastes will no doubt course, as noted above, any fluoride toothpaste will do an adequate job. For similar generic brand), which is fluoridated, has tartar control, and is every significantly less than its flashier competitors. Or you may wish to ignore all the above advice and choose among the flashier competitors for aesthetic by whether the toothpaste is a "gel" or a "paste." Gels use silica as an abrasive to help polish teeth. Pastes use calcium carbonate to the same end. perplexing since thick gels are ineradicable when smeared across a sink top. squeeze: Some brands offer smooth, even flow from the tube; others do not. "Age Defying" part). This product was so thick that it refused to come out of its tube, even when squeezed with both hands at once. My researchers quickly dubbed it "the sword in the stone." Only stomping on the tube with a shod foot produced any results, and those meager. One shudders to imagine an actual aged top or flip top. Flip tops make more sense, as you can open the tube and squeeze it with one hand and you'll never drop a tiny toothpaste cap behind monolith were white instead of black and emitted a fluoride toothpaste instead separate substances emerge from two separate and concealed tanks. One tank holds paste, the other gel, and the two strands join on your brush in beautiful Color: Most brands opt for classic titanium white or translucent different toothpastes, my researchers and I came to some conclusions about taste. A traditional minty zing is good. But it must have a real bite so your The baking soda paste is not overpowering, but it bites just enough to let you know it's there. The natural paste, meanwhile, lacks all bite, and your mouth feels dirtier after you've brushed. The foaming action of baking soda in this but also because they use "natural" flavoring ingredients such as papaya Control Gel is a minty and pleasant concoction, unlike the mouthwash. Crest lingering aftertaste makes your teeth feel chapped. Finally, kids' toothpastes all taste like bubble gum. Again, you may think you want to brush your teeth cleared out nasal passages. The baking soda in Crystal Ice made my mouth foam like a rabid animal's, leaving my teeth feeling reborn. Couple this with the pump technology and the combination of gel and paste, and we have a hands down discussed the fact that Java is an interpreted language without bringing up the interpreted, into machine codes, which can be run very quickly. Indeed, recent the other competing technologies, Java applets can be run without fear of the applet trashing your hard drive. A group of German hackers demonstrated how a found someone more likely to give a more full and nuanced view of the implications of the reliability, flexibility, and security provided by Java in order to emphasize the cost of these benefits in execution speed. While a strong case can be made that the advantages are well worth the cost, this by column to note its own thinly veiled role in the culture war surrounding Java that it describes. However, that Slate chose to run these poorly constructed attention that brings advertising revenue not for misleading propaganda like this, but for information presented with the kind of journalistic integrity that usually characterizes Slate. If such a conflict of interest cannot be what they are, I have no doubt you'll be swamped with letters responding to detector into the red zone. One of the nice things about Java is that the most difficult parts of C (indirection and "pointer arithmetic," among other things) have been left out of the language, while other convenience features unavailable in C (such as memory management) have been added to it. These does about Java or the Java paradigm. (The virtual machine is the program that judgment on what points of view to present on issues directly affecting its directly. (But don't feel sorry for him, he asked for it.) At this moment, supporting trade with China ("The East Is in the Red") by attacking me as a hireling of neither read his article on China nor wrote him a letter, the logic that leads that he has either badly missed the mark by neglecting to do his homework, or is engaged in a willful campaign of misrepresentation. While it is true, as than pious, theoretical declamations from the groves of academe. infallibility or even the absence of silly mistakes, but we are not for sale. We make the best case we can based on the facts as we know them. Moreover, we cited "many reasons" for thinking that "consumer markets" in emerging countries formal trade barriers come down." I singled out two such reasons: "First, largely because most of these nations have huge foreign debts to pay off, and therefore need to discourage consumption by their populations, they are purchasing power low, they will have trouble attracting the foreign investment they require, both to service debt and to finance growth." I added that China "has made it abundantly clear that it has no intention of becoming a major importer; it aims eventually to satisfy most of its own needs." East Is in the Red" by observing that countries attracting enough foreign investment "both to service debt and to finance growth" must be running trade deficits. He added that China's record in particular belies my argument because its roughly balanced global trade indicates that it is not a net capital balances. But as I originally stated, numerous forces are responsible for limiting the consumer imports of this disparate group of countries. Some, like with huge debt overhangs and therefore must restrict domestic consumption and domination by the West to seek substantial degrees of economic supply its own needs in industries such as motor vehicles, aerospace, and have accumulated these reserves by selling their own currency in order to high. As a result, the already meager international purchasing power of China's compensation figures. This series suffers from two related problems. First, it from the median, which much more accurately describes the situation of the typical worker's situation can be more accurately gauged by looking at indexes statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and derived from the Earnings Files of the Current Population Survey. This series, and several wages are converging "through a process of leveling up, not leveling down." Nor Business and Industrial Council Educational Foundation I enjoy Slate. I humbly confess that when I first heard of a magazine that would be online only, I scoffed. Now, I am converted. I enjoy curling up with Slate just as I do my more material publications, and there is nothing to recycle or discard (guiltily) and no "newsprint fingertips." Thank you more to bring down the standards of journalism worldwide than any other. for fairness, class, and appropriate journalistic behavior. And he analysis for others. But you need only pick your medium or your country to audiences. You may even want to applaud his efforts to bust unions. But to have permitted abortions after viability if continuing the pregnancy posed a risk of "grievous harm" to the mother's health, a determination left solely to the doctor. No doctor could be prosecuted for making such a false claim, previously held that "health" includes both physical and mental aspects. This enormous loophole made the bill completely irrelevant. actually would have done something to criminalize certain types of abortions. garner political points is an untrue and very unfair characterization of the chatter about the ways that the shoe companies are wrecking the inner cities and offering sick models for little black kids to look up to, but the vulgarity in what type of cultural expression you choose. Wright seems to think we should boycott everything that expresses a black ego. It turns my stomach to read yet another backdoor assault on the economically powerful models that all, who dictated that humility could be measured in chinos and tweed, couldn't have been assholes, too, now could they? Speak softly and sponsor a housing project, then when that doesn't pan out, blame it on the shoes. scrambling for the ball, and not only when everyone is watching and every game is important. There is virtue and substance there even if Wright can't see it. world where we're expected to be deferential and compliant. doesn't understand that the reservoir of personality and influence in sport is Woods" means something only because Tiger Woods traveled to a place where he was not welcome and beat the bastards at their own game. Woods of course was interesting article on the latest abortion hubbub in this week's "Gist" on fetal viability. But there was an outrageous error in the links for the article, which institute is owned by Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the informed on the subject as he appears to be, or that his politics are showing. Caper" was a great piece on the use of minors to launder campaign contributions. Unfortunately, the author failed to mention that the leading an individual who is not qualified to vote in a Federal election to make a important not to shrug our shoulders in despair over the current state of our election process but, rather, to actively seek and support real solutions which we sent them to be our representatives. Let them know that you expect them to team (computer checkers), I would like to make two points. First, Chinook did significant than Deep Blue's recent win, both matches do constitute important perfect play (which is not necessarily the same as inspiring or imaginative play) in games like checkers and chess can be reduced to pure computation. So, as computers get faster, they will surpass human capabilities in these limited think there are other ways to fix our problems without stupidity injected into the debate. Those "rednecks" don't represent my part of the political movement. With an insouciant and supercilious tone, he employed descriptors identifiable class of people in our country that can still be insulted with impunity in today's politically correct society. What if, instead of white criticizing the ability of the exclusionary rule to reverse a conviction, he wrote: "The wrong done was the search, not the conviction. Yet the exclusionary rule in effect rewards B with just such a windfall by sparing him from the fails to grasp the purpose of the reversal. It is not a reward for the criminal but a punishment for the prosecutor. It is very important in our imperfect justice system that the police and prosecutors do not get the idea that the ends justify the means. As it stands now, police officers, especially in urban areas, present more illegally obtained evidence than legally obtained evidence. They justify their actions with the fact that the men and women whose civil rights they routinely violate are involved in criminal activity, and therefore have no rights. However, this indicates that law enforcement is convicting before trying and is ignoring the fact that in performing illegal searches, they themselves are criminals. I would encourage a reinterpretation of the exclusionary principle to keep criminals in jail where they belong, but only if the cops and prosecutors are severely punished for their crimes as well. stuff in the first place (too hard to look at), or have somebody who thinks to consider whether the work succeeds on its own terms. read the book in the first place," as if we could really infer the book is strategies, and rarely does the word "evil" come to mind. Of course, there is assets occasionally leads them to lie, cheat, and virtually steal from their shareholders, through deceptive advertising or outrageous fees and expenses. investors take advantage of noble souls doing their own research and thereby threaten to erode the quality of information and research that is the foundation of our efficient stock markets. In fact, this view is almost completely opposite to the truth. The rise of index funds should be seen as triumphant proof that our financial markets are robustly efficient. And it will be impossible for index funds to destroy the efficiency of markets as long as image of a pastoral commons in which index investors are selfish free riders vision of the workings of the stock market. Instead, imagine a huge ocean of information populated by vicious, hungry sharks. These sharks patrol the waters looking for juicy tidbits to grow fat on. After they have had their fill of the prey, its carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. There bottom feeders wait patiently to scavenge the remaining scraps. They don't get fat, but they have a nice, easy life waiting for their dinner to fall to them. In this metaphor, the sharks are the active investors, and the indexers are the bottom feeders. The final crucial detail that ensures that this world and our financial markets will always function smoothly is that the sharks can become bottom feeders, and biological world, competition between the species and the drive for survival would ensure that there is equilibrium between the sharks and the bottom feeders. If the lazy bottom feeders become too numerous, there won't be enough will decide to join the sharks, and will hunt their own kills. In the alternate case, when sharks swarm the waters, there will be little reward to their hunting, and some of the sharks will retire to the easy life of bottom a similar equilibrium in the financial world. Only, in the stock market, the equilibrating force is unfettered greed. Today, aided by an explosion in information technology, there are thousands and thousands of active, aggressive investors pouncing on every nugget of information, thereby making the markets highly efficient. In this world, it makes eminent sense for some investors to give up the hunt and be satisfied with the quiet life of indexing. It is true hang up their fins any time and pursue the lazy life. And they surely will, whenever it pays to do so. As the profits from active investing diminish, there will automatically be fewer active investors and more indexers. And whenever the profits from an active strategy become evident, a feeding frenzy of sharks human greed, that guarantees that our financial markets will always be highly efficient, and that indexing or any other investing strategy will never pose a threat to market efficiency. As long as at least a few sharks patrol the planting the seeds of their own destruction. As more people drop out of the competition to outperform, the marginal research and trading value of the decreasing number of active investors will become significant, and they will investing to its extreme: Suppose that tomorrow morning all funds were invested solely in index funds. By definition, that would be the last trade in the stock market. That is, no one would be able to react to new information. Clearly, some investors would break from the pack as new information became public and others were not reacting. Thus, the number of passive vs. active investors will way, the "tragedy of the commons" is not a theoretical construct from a 1960s peasants would destructively graze their livestock on commonly held land. Furthermore, the traditional response to the observation is not in favor of "greens, social critics, and other worrywarts who fret over issues such as population growth," but rather supports the capitalist argument that land tends to be used more efficiently under private ownership, in that the owner is People's Republic of China separate. Combine them, he claims, and China's big global merchandise trade surplus shrinks to insignificance. explain is how, if the macroeconomic forces he emphasizes truly explain China's global surplus. In fact, at one point he insists that it is an "arithmetical necessity" for big capital importers like China to run trade deficits. balance with the United States was my focus, not China's global balance. And shipped to the United States through third countries. Industry estimates place exporters but remain small consumer goods markets. After all, he argues, although countries that produce more than they consume must run trade surpluses, these surpluses will guarantee high consumption because the major importers but not major consumer markets. How? By concentrating their create big consumer markets. But "one day" may be a long time coming. countries have aims other than enriching domestic consumers. Indeed, many deny individuals and businesses broad freedom to consume precisely because their top suppressing domestic consumption in other ways, and pushing exports. And when they do consume, they often focus on purchases whose economic benefits do not is in the midst of a big, prolonged military buildup. greatly increasing the labor surplus in a land where unemployment and there, anecdotal evidence indicates that once labor costs take off, so does Business and Industrial Council Educational Foundation prevented him from actually taking on board the substantive arguments that I made in my article. Let me try, however, to make four points: that the proposition that a country which attracts large capital inflows must also be running a trade deficit is merely my opinion. It isn't: It is a matter I believe that whatever asperity I may have shown in the column is justified by the astonishing fact that he really doesn't understand that. surplus, and actual rough balance on current account, shows that the country is not, in fact, a net recipient of capital. (Capital account plus current account equals zero; that is a fact, not a theory, whatever the Politburo may say.) Any attempt to make sense of the country's trade must include an explanation of how the money brought in by foreign investors goes out again. "superficial research," then says that in his article, "China's trade balance with the United States was my focus, not China's global balance." I have now fact, the article seems to say quite clearly that emerging economies will not discover that in my own column I included a long sidebar which acknowledged that, while the precise numbers are in dispute, China certainly does run a big point of the likelihood that advanced countries will export mainly capital equipment rather than consumer goods to the emerging economies. Why, exactly, is this a problem? Is selling tractors and forklifts somehow a less sound those numerically controlled machine tools.) As the saying goes, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you can sell him that productivity increases lead to higher wages, insisting that the dramatic We could go on at length about whether workers should have received even more, or what adjustments one might make to that number to move it down (or up) a bit, but by any calculation I can make, the overwhelming picture is one of convergence between wages in the tigers and in the West through a process of only because I often find it hard to convince people that the views of the faction he represents are as crude and naive as they really are. "Surely," people say, "they can't really believe that countries can attract massive capital inflows and run big trade surpluses at the same time? They must have some more sophisticated point in mind." The only answer to such rationalizations is to catch somebody with his hand in the cookie jar. And F-22 for the Air Force." Given that the skies are filling up with planes like are being built by countries which are all pushing hard for foreign sales, so it is not inconceivable that our Air Force might confront some of these kind of spending had made New York ungovernable. The economy was dead, the budget was in perpetual crisis, and crime was shooting through the roof. four years, and much of the current drop in crime can be attributed to the property owner, it should be encouraged. Research indicates that liberal firearms laws result in a reduction of crimes against persons. Since citizens legally carrying firearms make those areas safer, firearms restrictions are counterproductive. Thank you for the encouragement. reasoning. Recent research does indicate that liberal firearms laws reduce crime against persons. But it does not follow that liberal firearms laws criminals and so reduce crime against my neighbors. In that case, according to buy a gun, I prevent crimes against myself while having no effect on crimes against my neighbors; criminals who choose me as a victim end up wasting their time, but criminals who choose you as a victim are as successful as ever. In that case, I have ample incentive to arm myself, and there is no criminals who try unsuccessfully to rob me go on to rob someone else instead. argument for discouraging gun ownership through taxation. hypotheses is closest to the truth and am not aware of any research that settles that question. Therefore I do not know whether gun ownership should be of hard work and ingenuity. It will take harder work and more ingenuity before things he chronicles. More importantly, his writing style lends credence to found it to be in very poor taste. I will assume for argument's sake that the theories put forward over the centuries which account for the survival of the on Earth. Your decision to publish such an article dismays me. I would urge you to remove this article from the Net and avoid this type of journalism in the my story impedes Earth's peace and civilization. Thanks anyway, but exposure (the story) and scorn (the style) are two available antidotes to the heritage of hatred and dehumanization I described, and which is arguably a bigger problem than my story. The article's unfathomable purpose was, to quote it, "a lesson in how the most inane ideas can have the most appalling the meaning of immunity to allow for the fruits of immunized testimony to be obligation to represent their clients to the fullest extent allowed by law. If investigation targets to testify just so that I could obtain the fruits of the testimony. It would be an excellent investigative tool. Unfortunately, it would be an excellent investigative tool precisely because it would make my job easier, it would also make this country a less desirable unintentionally hilarious evidence for his conditional diagnosis is the alleged author claims, has been "known" since ancient times. From this dubious premise psychiatrist who muses that "there are many other cases." do things to Robin Givens (his former wife) that "he would normally never do." drugs and undergo a "medical clearance" on his behavior. this nonmedical and simply silly analysis should blind the public to what happened in reasonably clear terms: An irresponsible boxer, motivated by fear of losing, took the easy way out, which entailed, he correctly anticipated, relatively few negative consequences. In previous fights, wherein he was winning or had a good chance to win, his "illness" did not manifest itself. obviously chose to remember on which side his bread was buttered rather than wish he had not said." Surely an entry for the understatement of the year. trusted aide, "John, we have the power. Are we using it to investigate the and Herb Stein continued to support him although it was "unlikely" that they and does a grave disservice to the sense of fairness and decency to all. was represented by the offensive things he said to some people, I do not know. I can only reflect my own experience and observation. I never had any reason to in the slightest degree suggestive of such an attitude. He was unfailingly friendly and sympathetic not only to me but also to other members of my family. in general that entitles him to anything less than my total loyalty," is quite precise. It said neither more nor less than I meant and I stand by it. Chains," electronic chain mail is campaigned against by certain Web sites on the grounds that it "wastes Internet bandwidth, reduces productivity, and exploits human emotions." He goes on to consider the "upside" to such mail, and friends. Electronic chain mail certainly is objectionable for the reasons Guidelines instructs: "Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. However, unless I am mistaken, this is not the conversation that President such, isolated from specific problems and specific policy proposals. Thus, the multicultural conversations, which disintegrated, predictably, into the type of is so familiar to those of us who have spent time on the campuses of elite Preliminary, local conversations on race have already been held in North national level, conversations about racism. These make some people feel good by encouraging them to feel angry, and they make others feel good by letting them feel guilty, but they make the rest of us feel a distinctly tight sensation in our chests, as our hopes for a rational discussion are systematically disappointed. And they don't begin to address the concrete socioeconomic It": "One can only speculate how executives of a company called Combined Actually, anyone who knows anything about the insurance business understands the reason for the change. Combined Insurance Company still exists and writes insurance under that name. The parent company recently acquired by merger the value. So the newly merged company had several problems: how to announce to the world that it was now not only an insurance underwriter, but also a broker; how mind quite elegant. It keeps the initial capital A and the first two syllables especially one that has just undergone a major and disruptive change; it has a Standard Oil of New Jersey, whose main subsidiary marketed in most places under effort to find out about his subject companies before he makes fun of them. I equal concern" with the persistent trade deficit with Japan. Judgment" (which, naturally, makes me wonder about that feature's synopses of those books, movies, etc., that I haven't read). "commandeers a television station." In fact, he becomes the inadvertent subject the cost of air bags. Because each consumer only pays for the air bags in his or her own car, the cost of each life saved is no more than the cost to the owner of a vehicle. The total cost of an air bag is $500--this breaks down to there may be savings on the above figure. And anyway, that figure would seem to be a rather small price to pay for additional safety. in which death might have occurred if air bags had not been installed. It does not take into account the number of accidents in which the injuries might have been more serious if air bags had not been installed. It also doesn't reflect systems aren't perfect, but they do offer another level of protection. Being aware that there may be a problem with air bags will help us minimize that takes to put on your seat belt is just too long a period to make economic value to our time, and to use that to determine the value of the total time we spend buckling up. There are (at least) three problems with this approach: less than three seconds taken from the middle of my daughter's wedding. that time between activities as a buffer period during which several small tasks are addressed and uncertainties are guarded against. So the time, in is that the value of a unit of time is partially determined by the duration of makes sense to worry about the time it takes to put on a seat belt if it actually results in a delay in our progress. Does it? Many of us put on our seat belts while the car is in motion. Others do so while warming up their from the problems with these basic assumptions, I was duly awed and intimidated impotence treatments offer millions of these men and their partners renewed unfortunate that your writer elected to treat this topic with a flippant disregard for the emotional stress associated with impotence. The accompanying illustration, combined with the overall tone of the article, demonstrates a petty insensitivity to the emotional anguish of aging. Impotence is no joke. In an article about the loss of sexual virility among older men, we find a lack of Injection therapy has truly benefited hundreds of thousands of men and foreplay, or anticipates being so engaged soon. He excuses himself briefly, wipes the side of his phallus with a small alcohol wipe, and uses an penis. With stimulation (visual, manual, oral, fantasy), this engorgement becomes a normal erection, with which he can satisfy his partner and of men with this technique, I must say that it is safe, effective, and men drop out? Poor teaching, poor motivation, lack of opportunity, and, very rarely, a failure of the treatment itself. Although this glib and witty piece and cheap rhetorical tricks. Chapman doesn't realize that revelation is not a set of propositions one accepts, but an encounter in which one is moved beyond oneself. It's analogous to an encounter with a work of beauty. Neither the beauty of the artwork nor the truth of Scripture's word can be proved using some supposedly neutral line of reasoning. Instead, both are given to human what faith means, but what Chapman means by "illogical" and "without evidence." What exactly would count as "evidence" for Chapman? Clearly, many find it very reasonable to believe that God exists, despite their adolescent need to have it proved to them, as if metaphysics and mathematics were the same discipline. For these people there is evidence, but not proof persuasive enough to meet the mythological standards of neutral rationality, a standard that no philosopher in his right mind would defend today. Is there a rational basis for thinking that God exists? Yes, but the answer depends on what counts as "evidence," and note on God's concern. We can, of course, continue to ask why there is evil in the world. But, at some point, we also have to face the fact that this is the world we live in, a world where evil often seems to triumph, and death appears to have the last word. In this context, the cross not only inscribes God's concern, but also proclaims, with the resurrection, God's ultimate victory, a Won," Martin Walker makes an awkward attempt to criticize the West for its air of superiority after victory in the Cold War. Although he doesn't want to along. Now Martin repeats his words as if they were prophetic. Martin has no liking for these revolting characters, nor for the regime they represented, which was the most disastrous social experiment in history. fast foods, the consumerism, the fake entertainment, the destruction of native It is horrible. But I do not agree that the Cold War was about that. To blame Your Kids." But I found it curious that he ignored a relevant phenomenon conflict over weaning. This conflict is inevitable in mammalian life because offspring seek to monopolize maternal resources as long as possible, but their mothers seek to divide resources between all present and future offspring. with a newborn infant, before the age when weaning would naturally become an their objections to being kicked out of our bed at those ages than when they to the parents' sex life is not the incidental side effect that Wright suggests. Rather it may serve to delay the conception of a rival for maternal end, I agree that principles of evolutionary psychology tend to support the argument for sleeping with your infant. But those same principles also suggest that if you choose to do so, you won't avoid the noisy battle of wills with you might say that the early separation from parents is sending a forceful up the kids to be cooperative members of their social group. Though I appreciate the personal freedoms I enjoy as an adult, I think our culture is overly fearful of the dependent nature of children, and so we try to force them (prematurely) to be the atomized individuals that industrial society relationships as sexually charged. As Wright implies in passing, there is a feeling that sleeping with children is vaguely incestuous. However, incest tends to occur among families that are distant, not ones that are intimate. Everyday contact, in fact, seems to take away the glamour. is that there is a big difference between basic reading and highbrow reading. But this is not a crucial distinction for people concerned about literacy in is a point at which lack of curiosity and sheer ignorance are indistinguishable from a deficiency of intelligence. This article was a good example of that she really believes what she is saying. I am the president of the Literacy Council of Garland County, Ark., and I know that the functional illiteracy rate is obviously faulty. It is nonsense to ask an illiterate person if he's reading a book. Of course he's going to say "yes." The last thing an illiterate person wants to advertise is the fact that he can't read. Our culture is filled with and other books because they have learned from television and the movies. the only world religious leader who acts the way many feel a world religious to ban women from the priesthood and gays and lesbians from humanity in simpler than our unnecessarily complex world would like to believe, but either belongs to the government, and the portion we are allowed to keep is some sort of present. The flaw is best expressed when she refers to last week as "windfall week." As we all know, the money in a tax refund is money that the taxpayer earned and was kept by the government for up to a year without shelters" are similarly puzzling. Can she possibly mean that we should pay more in taxes than the law requires? She then goes on to extol the virtues of our precious," but she knows that we are talking about percentages of their total income, not a fixed amount. I think Slate's articles are usually insightful, certainly more democratic than a flat tax. The system of exemptions and deductions, although perhaps a little complicated, really means that one's tax obligations are custom tailored to one's specific circumstances. Paradoxically, the more we try to simplify the code, and the more "one size fits all" we try to make it, the less conforming to our individual needs the system becomes. always trying to have it both ways. We want all the breaks, and we want a simple system. The two approaches, unfortunately, are mutually exclusive. If we go to a flat tax and then people find out that they're paying more than others they perceive as less deserving, they are going to scream like stuck pigs. If are more bent on garnering attention through controversy than they are through new top person with each administration, and then it's a whole new had, this should not be viewed as a source of income or bonus. How about the fact that the government has held that money over the course of the year, preventing you from collecting interest or circulating it throughout the economy. There is no positive outlook in having the government hold on to your money so you can get a bonus check at the end of the year. rich is concerning. You feel that you can judge who values a dollar more based on individualism. Taxes do not empower the individual, they empower the government and sucker people by taking their extra income to fund continues to baffle me about progressive taxing is why people care so much what standard of living, and even provide jobs. These are the people that drive our economy. The more money you take out of their hands the more money you take out of the economy. Our current method only penalizes people for making more money. We have turned monetary success into a crime. It is no wonder our society is floundering around and the current generation is called Generation X. a "terminally ill patient killing himself" involves either "important interests of other people" or an action "horribly against the actor's own interests." I is not intrinsically questionable. For some, it is clear: From conception until fetus to an issue of ownership by calling it "her" fetus, using an assumption killing is justified when it releases a willing victim from pain, a maxim that could lead to a justification of slaying the innocent to avoid any other wishes to replace the moral teleology of law with obeisance to cultural prejudices, informing us that unjust acts may be countenanced when popular ideology asserts them to be "personal" and hence putatively free of legal restraint. But the better part of Western thought has always affirmed that the principles of law are ineluctably related to the principles of good. perspectives have enriched my understanding and challenged my students. They have made all of us really think, which should be the highest motive of an economist. Clearly, you have chosen two of the best. dialogue with him regarding his ideas expressed in Slate and his book, The providing this service, Slate has demonstrably increased my effectiveness in the classroom by engaging my students in a conversation with two leading been, in large part, defined by one's genes. Thus, it seems to me that the deep one's gene pool might disappear, and has very little to do with religion. That include snide comments in parentheses in "Today's Papers," shouldn't that be reflected in the name of the section? For example: "Today's Papers (and our snide comments)." I love the comments, and they expose the major media's frequent indulgence in propaganda under the pretext of reporting news. But if part of your summarizing is commenting on the occasional lapse in the journalistic ethics of those you are summarizing, then isn't it unethical since its inception, and I usually find the articles and you write an article about your parent company or a firm that has a financial a bit strange that you seem so comfortable pronouncing dismissively on it was Xerox who pioneered the concept and developed the technology. I don't hear too many acknowledgments from the folks at Mac. The accolades go to those disservice to the advancement of economic science, which I believe should move away from excessive focus on the concepts of scarcity, trade, and money that the founding fathers worked with. Instead, recognize man as a biological entity, and recognize economic processes and phenomena as those resulting from instance, to closer attention to relationships between savings and investment and the human life cycle (rather than abstract analysis on the incentives to defer current consumption). It would also look at many artifacts such as mansions, cathedrals, etc., as elements in the competitive propagation of genes to future generations through better nesting, clan identification, etc. of analysis is probably much more called for than evolution. There is a lot more to learn about current economic phenomena before exploring evolution, but then the purpose of sound science is the search for the truth, not the "will do almost nothing to create jobs." In fact, one way or the other EMU rigidities (particularly in the labor market), the initial consequence will be a rise in unemployment, followed by an improvement with a delay of a couple of unemployment may fall initially, but at some stage higher inflation and a depreciating euro would force a course correction, and unemployment would rise actual requirements of such a currency, are another matter. silly blather about globalization, I was particularly struck by the vacuousness of this sentence: "The liberalization of trade also effectively prevents governments from erecting protective barriers to boost the domestic liberalization of trade," by definition, is precisely the lack of protective lack of protective barriers leads inexorably to a lack of protective barriers, this for free in Slate, rather than paying big bucks for the wisdom of these Use") to log off. He's obviously spending too much time online. That's the programs he panned? If he had, he certainly would have noticed that the program serious news program. We feature extensive coverage of the major issues each and every day, and devote more time to international news than any of our way, if not showing up in gossip columns or fashion magazines makes me, or my that squelches dissent in "movement" publications under punishment of expulsion. He must be reading different publications and attending different "movement" gatherings than I. My colleagues and I at the Competitive Enterprise frequent parties. National Review has been scathing in its attacks on hope you will consider widening the scope of "Today's conventional spotlight all he could. He died of a heroin overdose in relative the hype machine created by his record label that he started getting rich and prompt us to work harder, because we net more from each hour of labor, and to economic theory says no such thing. You have confused lower taxes with lower effort of individuals for the reasons you stated. Some tax cuts, however, do not raise the reward for work and therefore do not increase work effort. The Republican tax package. Clearly, this tax cut does not "net more from each hour children better off (or wealthier) and, therefore, reduces the need to work. In of the Republican tax cut will mean less time at work, which in turn means a further reduction in tax revenues. This may be good "family" politics but I browsing, perhaps in a different section of the bookstore, may be in order. His surpluses are a greater danger than foolishly excessive trade you run a trade deficit every year, bankruptcy will eventually force you to stop. But excessive trade surpluses can go on forever. A perpetual trade surplus is likely to mean you're either working too hard or consuming too little; either way, you're not getting enough enjoyment out of life." harmless; the debt is transferred to others (customers, suppliers, taxpayers, the rest of society), and the damage can (and often does) multiply beyond the kicker is the last line. Enjoyment of life is reduced when one produces more certainly a striking fact that male gorillas are twice the size of females; but looking from gorillas to humans, what should strike us is not that men are somewhat bigger than women, but that they are nowhere near twice as big. What evolution is trying to tell us here is that male aggression is much less important for human beings than it is for gorillas. Wright's argument against women in the infantry depends also on the assertion that what men in fact fight about is women. That's debatable. At least as good an explanation is that men fight about Lebensraum. Wright is no doubt familiar with the wars of the territory than fights over females. As for things getting "more primitive, not less" when soldiers go to war, this is also a fairly careless argument. Actual combat could just as well make things better, not worse, for women. It might be easier to build solidarity when your life depends on it, rather than back home in camp; and men might find it easier to believe that women can fight if they replies: Anyone who doubts that male chimpanzees spend lots of time for that very reason, got a clearer look at daily life within a colony than sexual encounters leaves no doubt about what was ultimately at stake when males males fight over access to fertile females. This isn't to say that territoriality couldn't also in theory be a cause of aggressive tendencies in impetus for the evolution of aggressive tendencies in males. combat attack over Stein's reverie, which I think is quite lovely, is beyond me. And that part about "erotic confessionals" was too funny to be real! If are "erotic confessionals," if this is the frustration she experiences from "Watching the Couples Go By," then she had better not read anything at all. And finally, the idea that the editors could have spared her the injury of having to read Stein's piece had they listed it under the title of "Diary" takes the prize for "most ludicrous statement thus far expressed in the history single line without really wanting to at all? Alas, blame it on the boys! Too soul. It has been my feeling for some years that all the talk about race is in rate on existing capital gains cannot possibly increase investment in productive resources. You cannot change individuals' past investment decisions. increase investment and not because it is a handout to the rich could gain a lot of credibility if they advocated reducing the rate only on future capital admission that he has written it all before. I assume that he formed his convictions as a student, when he had no investments and didn't even know what money out of the market, it is because I watch the ticker much of the morning, myself. I could lose my shirt at any moment. I have had noticeable losses, and is apparently unable to provide accurate factual information, and even carriers on all its routes except those with too little traffic to support a second operator. If you want to find such a monopoly, you need look no further than the rails, where the national operator operates the world's fastest in cooperation with similar companies in the neighboring countries. Also, the could flag numerous other fundamental errors, I think that these should be secretary when mine collapsed last year, I was wondering who got those plush get together to make decisions (mostly on proposals by the Commission). because somebody can write and his or her spouse gets an assignment abroad does to relocate to write that piece. Since Slate is distributed electronically and is available to a wide international audience, you should get less ethnocentric views of the world. Couldn't you get contributions from outside your (and not, thereby, actually a lord except in using that word in this courtesy this position, and an amazing number of writers, even those for the to the Lords only so they'd have a place to speechify after retiring from the unprecedented step last week of refusing to let reviewers see The Avengers before it was released. The widespread assumption was that the studio knew the movie was a dog but was hoping to salvage a good opening weekend before people found out. But by locking the critics out, knowing this world that The Avengers was a dog. It's as futile as a restaurant publicly refusing to allow a health department inspection. critics by pretending to be deeply afraid of them. They also bolstered an important delusion: that a movie as awful as The Avengers is the exception and not the rule. Singling out The Avengers as terrible Reviewers too have a stake in keeping up the pretense that most films are worth You might argue that movies aren't so bad nowadays. But that would only prove that you haven't spent much time at the multiplex this summer. Here are the big summer releases from the other major studios: The or two others that qualify as harmless fun. What you have left is a run of formula films and glorified video games pitched to the adolescent audience. It's not necessary to see these films to know how dismal they are, because they are reiterations of other bad films. To be sure, there were plenty of crummy genre films in the golden age of cinema. And good ones still break through from time to time. But it would be seriously perverse to maintain that mainstream argued in a New Yorker article earlier this year that they face a choice of being either hucksters or cranks. Either they declare that pablum is saying that these are the twin poles, but most critics actually fall somewhere trapped in what has become a journalistic dead end, an untenable profession. writer whose oeuvre rises to a level beyond all pigeonholing, and he is basically the same approach to their job. As far as possible, they ignore almost entirely. They concentrate on obscure films, which may be wonderful but only A Taste of Cherry and Pi is not a viable alternative for most critics. Even relatively successful independent films have no distribution beyond big cities, and if you want to see foreign films nowadays, you have to producers, understandably want their critics to write about movies advertised in their pages, movies that also happen to be the only ones average people are likely to see. The worst hucksters are the reviewers who spend their weekends provide the blurbs quoted in advance newspaper ads ("An ending that will knock which seldom appear in actual reviews, to the studio publicists. In some cases, publicists write the blurbs themselves and find "critics" to accept Most movie reviewers occupy a middle ground between Don movies were better and are trying not to notice that their love object has a condition of collapse. They appraise poor films as good and fair films as aesthetic explanation is that critics see so many bad movies that their taste deteriorates. If you are forced to spend your afternoon sitting through is that movie reviewers are really part of the movie industry. They exist to encourage people to see movies in general, even if they must discourage them from seeing some in particular. In all but a few places, a reviewer who consistently pans blockbusters is likely to run into trouble with his superiors. Movie ads are a major source of revenue for papers and magazines and threatening that money. Most critics can tell you stories about the pressure on art form is the demise of the audience with a taste for serious and challenging films. If she's right, there may not be much reviewers can do. But it would be nice to see them rage a little against the degradation of the medium they're supposed to love. One way to protest would be to follow the "crank" critics in acknowledging that movies such as Deep Impact and Small Soldiers don't require evaluation. A newspaper that wants to serve its readers well can Avengers reviewed, reviewers should be only too happy to oblige. South Mission Beach, I can attest to the growing popularity of beach volleyball. However, there appear to be no rules for the erection of private boundaries), and a ball. The problem is that, quite often, players emerge early in the day from their seashore abodes, put up a net, and then return to bed, courts proliferate, those who come to the beach to bathe in either sun or surf will be pushed to the water's edge, and that conflict will result. Government will then rear its ugly head, issue regulations, and the beach will be calmer volleyball is an apt metaphor for politics, after all. Funds." It isn't the content or the lack of advertising that endangers Like the Republicans, you're riding the elephant backward as you try to build a message wasn't that you guys are planning to bail out. I really find Slate an mining revenue is somewhat less than that. This hardly counts as dependence. explained that "Senate Republican leaders are feeling their oats over that Lee and any other future nominees to the post will face a tough new standard on affirmative action." The Supreme Court did not "uphold" Proposition precedential value, nor does it necessarily tell us anything about the court's opinion of the measure. The court receives thousands of petitions asking it to than two hundred of them. The court may decline to review a case for any number irregularities or because the issue it presents has not yet "percolated" through the lower courts. Therefore, when journalists present the court's decision to decline to review a case as "upholding" the lower court's decision, more careful in presenting the decisions of the Supreme Court to its readership Central" both your most enjoyable and most useful feature. By capsulizing the inanities that pass for political commentary, you expose the vapidity of the opinions and put these "opinions" in their proper perspective. I found the suit up for service in the Gulf, now or ever. But other people fighting and have (someone else) pay any price, face any foe. Keep up the good work, Talk," on the key to this year's gubernatorial and municipal elections, redefines the word "autocracy." He did miss the bus, however, on at least one after last year approving a regional transit system of express buses, commuter nothing" verdict. By taking away the jury's choice to consider a manslaughter and J. Crew on the Web. True, there were other references at the end of the commentary was that the New York Times ("Tardy Catalogue Shoppers Risk shoppers into buying, thereby playing the role of a shameless pawn in the shopper." I didn't wait till the last minute. I dogged the pages of a number of or "not available" for just about everything I chose. I thought I was just relatively new Web user. My girlfriend was attempting to find a book for a Manhattan. I had heard about Amazon, so we went online with my new Power Computing machine. We found the book she was looking for, and found a couple of other interesting books. My girlfriend enjoyed browsing through the lists of fact, out of print, and that the rest of our order was on the way. We got the books in a timely fashion. In sum, my experience with Amazon was good. They didn't work magic by finding books bookstores couldn't, but they did deliver on their promises, and Amazon certainly presents some interesting browsing methods and far better search facilities than most bookstores. Noble have some genuine competition. I agree that there is nothing like going to a bookstore on a cold winter morning, but there is also nothing like discovering an interesting new author while sitting in your home in your robe, sipping a cup of coffee. How many books they physically have in their warehouse Allegro. At first I was astonished that I had to walk through the store to find the archeology section. I then had to read several book spines, using a the years, looking for the author's name. It was not to be found. I then stood, confused, for a few moments, until a human male confronted me with a question: biological version of a search engine, so I said, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and correct. I was disappointed with the speed at which the engine performed, for he, as did I moments before, searched the archeology section (though with religion section, toward which I was led (still on foot). He again browsed the books visually and pulled a tome from the shelf. "Here it is. Is there anything the cover: Yes, indeed, this was the book in question. "Yes," I said. I wanted the scroll translations and a couple of other books on the same subject. I yeah, prices." By the expression on his face I knew for sure I had blundered bookstore, and Borders is not an electronic bookstore. You can't browse titles asynchronous connection. They're different. My first Amazon order was placed on the article's authors ordered, took about nine days. I have paid, with shipping, about the same for books through Amazon as I would have at a local bookstore. But I have found books on Amazon's site that are certainly nonexistent on Borders' shelves. If you gotta order it, you gotta order it. filling out the form for my initial order; I don't know how long it took, but I was taking my time, making sure everything was correct. I don't remember it being difficult. And now, after selecting my books, it takes me less than a card," punch my way through about three "are you really sure?" screens, and my order is in. Amazon remembers who I am, where my books are going, and my suggest, even if I were typing with the back of my head. and with the right mix of sarcasm and serious analysis, they have been virtually unmissable throughout the trial. The same can be said for his earlier "Diary" entries on the Republican and Democratic party conventions during the summer. the civil trial has come to a conclusion, does Slate have any more projects up insightful than anything else for either the criminal or the civil trial National Governors' Association winter meeting. Several Republican governors supported restoration of aid to illegal immigrants (which was cut in the new Unfortunately, the substitution of "illegal immigrants" for "legal immigrants" in this blurb rendered this passage not only factually inaccurate, but politically unintelligible. The cuts the governors complained about were the elimination of benefits to legal immigrants, who heretofore have been treated pretty much the same as citizens with regard to welfare benefits. The legal immigrants off federal aid simply dumps them onto local taxpayers, even though millions of poor continue to arrive. Your coverage made a complicated subject even more obscure and made light of a sea change in the treatment of immigrants which carries grave human consequences. Was it a simple error or particularly his observation that human beings have become dwarfed by generation one day be interpreted as similarly insignificant in the face of really well done, concrete analysis of an aspect of the Web that I have ever Conservative Collapse," about the foundering Republican Party; and inexperienced, why has he won so many felony convictions, each closer and closer to the White House? And the Republican Party is bereft of ideas? a tax they didn't like, and want to expand the rat hole known as the welfare state) have had new ones. The only ideas the Democratic Party has are hundreds of White House "coffees"! Slate is obviously so misinformed that they don't know (or don't care) that using the White House for political the law! Slate is obviously a product of our foundering educational system: It does not know or care about the law or what is right and wrong. If this is what of the New York law mandating the teaching of the famine as a historical example of genocide. As a sometime teacher, I see this sort of legislation as also clear that the motivation behind such legislation is a reaction to observers as it is to modern ones. Many contemporary English observers advocated intervention to thwart the famine. Their voices went unheeded by the centuries, relegated them to the most marginally cultivable pieces of land. A When that crop failed several years in succession, they had no viable alternative to starvation or (if they could afford it) emigration. superficial understanding of their own history, and to focus on the positive aspects of their culture to the exclusion of less admirable parts, this only proves that they are human, and as prone to historical myopia as Anglophiles or the World?" only scratches the surface of this issue by focusing on the murky areas of politics, raw power, and corruption. recognize that when the basic framework of a society disintegrates, external food supplies may just lead to additional reproduction, and thus more widespread starvation. Desperate people who have lost all hope for themselves are biologically driven to propel possibly surviving offspring into the next the issues posed by the relationships between technologically advanced have no answers, but a suggestion: Look at the global picture and step down from ideological and judgmental postures onto the plane of common sense and still dancing professionally. Which means, just like our grunting action that it really stands out when he blows it, as he does in "Too Much of a Good to refer to something praised far in excess of its value ("Sergeant Pepper has been hyped as a masterpiece, but the fact is, most of the songs doing your confessing for you, honey, it ain't a confession). Yes, yes, I would derive hype from hyperbole rather than more circuitously stimulation associated with drug use. I stand my ground, though. Yes, at first glance, this alternative derivation would seem to make sense, because hype would also seem to make sense that frosh would be derived from excessive or false publicity goes back much further than the 1960s attested to as a verb and noun associated with drug use, and the word is hypodermic connection. None of them makes a hyperbole connection. minor occurrence with false importance is called 'hype' or 'media hype,' from the euphoric kick one gets from an injection of a narcotic with a hypodermic (whose volume containing "H" words has just been published), about the response was, "I very much doubt that." He went on to note that "hyperbole comes from a rather elevated level of diction for the kinds of people who word hyperbole could well be offering hype a certain reinforcement. "Once a word comes into circulation," Lighter said, "its survival is based in part on all of the associations it brings to into an operating system." This is entirely and totally wrong, and anyone paying any attention to what's going on with Java would know this. I am really certainly free to come out on any side of any issue, but when it comes to an readers can ask is that you take care to learn the basic facts of the matter and check that what's in the article is at least remotely plausible. past two weeks. I had two goals for my article: first, to explain what Java is; and second, to debunk the Java hype. I can only gather by the voluminous responses to my article that I was successful in touching a few nerves. I would shrink, but they will still be with us. Furthermore, Java will never work well features. I apologize for having the wrong ratio in how slow current Java implementations are. It is indeed now only three times as slow as native code, Many readers have pointed out how great Java is; I agree! Java makes code Java should rightly be compared to Visual Basic and other tools meant for rapid This is the comparison most Java pundits make; therefore, it was the comparison I chose to highlight. I have not found any examples of truly complicated robust under the impression that the purpose of Slate's dialogues was to allow two then, in your Promise Keepers "Dialogue," have you chosen two Promise Keepers cheerleaders to face off on the burning question "Are the Promise Keepers totally wonderful, or were taking the position that the Promise Keepers are not a healthy phenomenon. Maybe their side should be represented in the discussion. "Smokey and the Bandits," I agree with most of the points, but it how does he change his crop? He needs more land. He can only buy it from other tobacco farmers, thereby putting them out of business. One way or another many tobacco farmers are forced out of their livelihood. Prejudice," a terrific piece on the lunacy associated with "extreme" activities. The inordinate attention granted to these activities by the have lost their ability to enjoy physical activities just for fun and the satisfaction derived from a good, hard workout. They feed their resultant substitutes for their sense of self worth. These sorts of things once seemed to crises. Now it seems that the disease has cut a swath through a much broader sector of the population, and no longer requires testosterone poisoning as a sudden the New Republic and The Nation bore me to tears. They sit on my nightstand until I chuck them. I just figured out that it's Slate's fault. Every issue is interesting; I read every article. Your links are wonderful. Most of my bookmarks are Slate links that I would never have thought Millennium Dome began to take shape last year, condemnation has poured in from could have gone toward housing and the National Health Service. Conservatives chance that something so despised might deserve defending, I put on a hard hat Mean Time, this is the spot where the millennium can be argued to officially debut.) As I half suspected, the dome is better than advertised. As a building, it may or may not succeed. But the dome has at least a chance to follow in the path of its illustrious English ancestors, the Crystal Palace exhibition of advance as wasteful and stupid. But they are remembered now as monumental As a feat of architecture, engineering, and urban renewal, first conceived of the project, and Labor was officially opposed before it took make the dome a kind of signature for "New Labor," there were just three years gasworks site. Before construction could begin, the ground below literally had to be washed to remove cyanide and arsenic. Engineers then went about raising a room of nearly a million square feet. This is a structure so huge that, skin. Day suggests that winter visitors will want to bring overcoats and brandy flasks, because the building is simply too big to heat (though I suspect the responsible for turning hundreds of acres of industrial wasteland into a lovely like many of the world's great cities, is being undone by traffic and unplanned into public space. If successful, the dome will make the case for pursuing example, is for a building to show how it works, exposing its elevators, ventilation pipes, and structural girders. You can see, at a glance from the outside, how the dome stands up. Its huge tent is sustained by brilliant yellow ones have an early '80s, "new wave" look. But the dome has the advantage of being temporary. The millennium exhibition will last a year, and though the that it be left that way. And members of the planning committee may privately share that wish. Almost every decision about how to fill the space has aroused controversy. The most ridiculed proposal is "Body," a gargantuan naked human people can walk through, observing the operation of the internal organs as in a Rogers building. Leaving Dome Person unsexed on the exterior seems overly The greatest challenge may be the least futuristic part of describing itself to the world. In previous great exhibitions, this was a less was an imperial power with a unitary culture. A great exhibition was a chance to dazzle with what it could make and build, beginning with the glass and iron the emergence from wartime rationing into postwar consumerism. But today, economy. It depends far more on the export of services and its culture than it because it sees it as an opportunity to convey this new social and economic member in charge of the millennium project, was lampooned for traveling to dome is a great marketing opportunity. Which makes it, in a way, an authentic mathematical model with little connection to reality, extended it to absurd lengths, and stated that the conclusions are the only reasonable social policy. He truly embodies the worst stereotypes of both economists and radical say is that no society in human history has ever sustained very rapid economic and insult those who disagree, using phrases like "their pathological concern for future generations" and "an epidemic of hysteria," ending the piece with the diagnosis of "a mild air of intellectual schizophrenia" for those of us who to famine and widespread devastation, and at least a couple of major ridiculing anyone who tried to consider the consequences of their actions. of our government budget now goes to pay the interest on the debt that to most taxpayers), yet the interest on that debt will dominate government this interest by borrowing more each year, and continue to do so indefinitely, shortsightedness. He begins by suggesting that if the United States could misleading, verging on irresponsible, to compare the economies of the most powerful nation on earth to a Third World country recently infused with the showed the same growth as the Raptors, they'd eventually be winning more games grandchildren are going to be so rich, they won't mind being reduced to seeing things like trees only in photographs, and they "might prefer inheriting the proceeds of economic development to inheriting the redwoods," anyway. But this seems to be bred from the same kind of "intellectual schizophrenia" he attributes to those who would disagree with him: If economic growth is dependent on cutting down trees, what happens when the trees are gone, as he himself concedes will eventually happen? And if we can continue at this superb rate of growth after there are no more trees to cut, couldn't we continue with concern for future generations" carrying over to the deficit as well, and has a grandchildren are going to be a bunch of spoiled, rich little brats, undeserving of all the concern we've been giving them. year, but stagnates, or, God forbid, goes down despite all the cutting of taxes and trees, and racking up of deficits? Then, I suppose those of us who support income redistribution wouldn't look so hypocritical and our grandchildren would worry too much about how their consumption would affect their descendants in century conditions could afford an even more extravagant lifestyle. rapid economic growth never lasting more than a century is incorrect. The world technological progress, and technological progress is, if anything, government debt. Government spending consumes resources. It consumes an equal amount of resources regardless of whether it is paid for by debt or by cost, without accounting for the offsetting benefit: By keeping current taxes lower than they would otherwise be, the debt allows people to have higher savings and therefore to earn additional interest. That benefit offsets the cost. This is not a matter of sophisticated economic theory; it is a matter of simple arithmetic. Not even the federal government has the power to override is unlikely. But that's an observation about an essentially parenthetical case policies based on that forecast will have been mistaken. Sure. It's also which case all our sacrificing for future generations will look like a big mistake. It would be silly to say that we should consume everything we've got just because an asteroid might destroy us, and equally silly to say that we should engage in an orgy of conservation just because economic growth might slow to zero. We make the best estimates we can and plan Act" adopted the conventional response toward this affair: to find a way to large contributions to the Democratic National Committee is amusing. I remember was caught passing out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the House floor. Howls offered by most media to both of these events is the exact opposite of what it should be. Rather than prohibit the solicitation of campaign contributions at federal buildings, the Hatch Act should be amended to designate these "hallowed places" as the only sites at which a candidate may solicit or accept a campaign contribution. It ought to require that the White House rotunda be the only that the floors of the House and Senate chambers be the only places an Marine guard at each site should attach a tag with a microchip to each sack that emits information about the contributor, the recipient, and the amount of the screen conveying information on the current "trades." at prohibition or limiting this activity have shown the proclivity of its in order to skirt responsibility for its appearance. By forcing candidates to conduct their fund raising at the places of the peoples' business, politicians will have to accept responsibility for the appearance and fact of the tie between influence and money instead of maintaining the fiction of a out at me. We have heard Vice President Al Gore say that he has violated no law, and that may be true, within the narrow letter of these laws. The issue that bothers me is that, as the supposed paragon of virtue of the Democratic Party, why does Gore apparently go to the very limit of the definition to government employee, save the president, vice president, and confirmed appointed officials, to engage in fund raising from a government building, why do our leaders choose to walk the very thin edge of legality in their political happened to the concept of a leader being a shining example to the people expected to follow? Are all now to presume that any activity we choose to engage in is fine as long as we can find a narrow definition that appears to violent death." There may actually be a grain of truth to this conclusion, but doubt that this is due, at least in part, to the increasingly poisonous and the Truth," a clear and timely example of how conservatives like to serve their bigoted interests. Sadly, even mainstream media routinely parrot news organization or political pundit would dare get away with using, say, other media snooze and bigots take advantage of them. a researcher's dream, enabling quick and fairly easy access to a wealth of information. An individual doing research on the Web quickly learns to acquire the proper tools for the job and, with a little imagination, can find almost anything. I use a utility that initiates searches on many search engines little "search refinement" needs to be done, it is much more time efficient than going to a library, searching there, and then bringing the information home. Most importantly, the Web is not just about information. It is about Marriage" adds more confusion to a muddled debate. We need contract, and nothing keeps people from making their own very special functions as the enforcer of contracts, making certain rules and formalities a practical necessity. In the absence of common rules and enforcement, people would have to resolve conflicts on their own, which can become messy and marriage contract includes provision of certain social services between two individuals, the absence of which would result in excessive burdens on society. Nothing should keep two or more people from signing cohabitation contracts committing to certain mutual obligations, but whether and to what extent community privileges should be extended to such unions is another matter. "demand" recognition and respect. Fair enough. But they would get farther in their agendas if they would give a little respect to conventional marriage by letting heterosexual people keep the word marriage to themselves. Gays should come up with a word for their own committed relationships. Then, they would attract more support for gaining recognition for the same kinds of legalities money than to actually volunteer. Someone who donates their time becomes more, increasing volunteerism has goals other than encouraging more financial support. Our society is divided by class. It is possible, by choosing the right little contact with the most severe problems of this country. If these people were more directly involved, they would undoubtedly feel more connected to the problems around them. The effect is both monetary, in that it encourages donations, and political, in that it changes and challenges the indifference to to Slate's coverage of what is sure to be one of the year's most intelligent John," doubly disappointing. Her belabored references to '80s teen movies buried in a pointless parade of her insider knowledge of the scene behind the whines that it wasn't "developed." But the symbolism of Martin's profession was clear, and the ideas were consistent. Without having read any interviews or funny, precise critique, without being bitter. And the movie did not exclude contrary, for those of us who grew up in the '80s, it spoke with a fresh, real points out one of the problems in taxing income: It's hard to make it simple and fair. That's why Goodman likes the simplicity of the flat tax on income. But that isn't fair either. There is a growing disparity between rich and poor, but what an individual earns in any given year may not indicate true flat tax on net worth should be considered. First, net worth is easy to define: assets (such as cash, real estate, and securities) minus liabilities (or debts) equals net worth. The Internal Revenue Service would be turned into an agency whose mission would be simplified: determining the existence and value of performs this very function in administering the estate and gift tax. flat tax on net worth is that the tax rate would be considerably lower than the same amount of money that the federal government now takes in from the individual income tax--$588 billion. But the single most compelling argument arguments against the imposition of a wealth tax will be by those who argue that it will inhibit savings and result in capital flight. But the experiences will pay much more in taxes, but most of the rest of us will pay less. Some his wishes. Unfortunately, as so often happens, his last wishes were not fulfilled in accordance with his will. His wish was to have his clothed skeleton displayed, not a dressed, mummified corpse. I attach herewith the through something else "like a laser through grits." metaphor is initially appealing, but on further examination it demands the laser?), at least two practical difficulties arise: As the slicing begins, some considerable quantity of steam should be produced, shielding the subject grits from our slicing instrument. Moreover, sliced grits show a disconcerting always notifies ahead of time when a bomb will be set off in a civilian area. There is an established code just for that. He omitted this fact. When was convicted of one killing. (Bates' method was to beat the victims with hammers and then dismember them with butcher knives.) was "charged to assure you that means will be found by the Continental Congress pass this correction on to the author of the segment, along with my appreciation for the writing that is being done in this intriguing format. that our law enforcement is "corrupt and inefficient"? For a man so critical of any additional research for his article. We are no more incestuous or has a proud heritage of progressive politics running from Senate Majority quality of life with almost any other place in our nation, as would the natural resources, we are rich in the quality of people that we produce. I a figure I hold in humorous contempt, is itself the "journalism of fools." Twin Peaks in obscure plot turns, it was ever entertaining, and the for the articles, but I always look at the pictures first. away. (While the audience is clapping for more.) Thanks again for enduring what is a fine magazine, except for a bit of overwriting that's describing the curious concept of a logical impossibility. ("This sentence is false.") The word looks pretentious and silly, however, when it is used as a synonym for "conflict," "irony," or "contradiction." has chosen to dedicate the first two days of her diary to the technical editors must be credited for a journalistic coup. The international community and myopic optimism surrounding the elections there. Bravo. United States a new Mustang convertible in exchange for sterilization. He did offer a few stipulations, but the important part was sterilization, not removable contraceptive devices. Of course, he was after more than a reduction in welfare costs. While I agree postponing childbearing is a laudable goal, we have larger problems to solve regarding children having children. because I work in the newspaper industry, where we publish daily regardless, I Life") is interesting. However, he makes some specious claims. He argues, "After decades of searching, scientists have found no conclusive evidence that life exists elsewhere in the universe." But scientists wouldn't be able to find such evidence in the nearby star systems that we have searched thus far; and the tools we use for detection have limited capabilities. also writes, "In spite of the immensely powerful tools of modern biotechnology, scientists still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory." Surely few decade or two of laboratory research falls somewhat short of the millions of pundits picked up on the fact that singles are discriminated against by both parties? Republicans have long denigrated alternative lifestyles. Now politicians talk about singleness as if it is an alternative lifestyle. regular column "Summary Judgment" bears the subtitle "Reviewers reviewed" but, in fact, it does not resemble the "review of reviewers" that used to run in Spy as much as it resembles a "review revue" (a title previously used summaries read as rather uncritical, so you're not really reviewing them. Don't informative, is nothing more than an extraordinarily long advertisement for refusal to participate "in the deadening conformity of the culture [of] fund and the value of my share in it. (It's totally unlikely that the government could invest as successfully as I could with my own money, but never help poor old folks by contributing to charities of my choice, but never robbery. Forget privatization and other attempts to "save" the program. Mandated retirement savings was a bad idea that has seen a disastrous and failure of prohibition. I didn't find his conclusions surprising, but here are needs to be said in this case. Saying, "It's not working" seems to induce the More" is indeed a popular argument, and it's well funded by the diverse industries spawned by the hysteria. Corrupt politicians don't exist only in people all very much fear the world of personal freedom I propose. Their arguments usually have to do with the morality of letting others make their own (occasionally stupid) choices, without government intervention. Deep down, though, most of them aren't thinking about other people. about New York City is the way businesses huddle together. The diamond dealers districts are ancient, but new commercial clusters are emerging all the time. At the moment, one of the most pleasing is a little neighborhood a few blocks years ago, this neighborhood was a no man's land. Bordered on the east by New butchers and windowless social clubs and old people sitting out on card chairs on the sidewalk. But lately the tone has been set by a group of small clothing stores that share an amorphous design sensibility. What's ordinarily so unappealing about "fashion" is its combination of snobbery, high cost, and humorlessness. What's wonderful about these places is that they are just the recent graduates of the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Parsons and nice afternoons, friends drop in on their bicycles to say hello and examine the goods. In several of the stores, the owners apologized for not having their incubator for the rest of the city, which means for the country, which means for the world. The neighborhood is a favorite scouting territory for designers national chains such as J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and the Gap, who come to troll for inspiration (to put it charitably). These chains, many of which have urban chic to the middle class. In the new ecology of downtown New York, stylistic innovation of various kinds is most likely to take place to the east from small independent designers, who don't seem to mind. For the most part, they take plagiarism as flattery. At this stage in their careers, the validation they get from seeing their stylistic ideas catch on is more what's appealing about these places is that the idea of style they embody is holistic. All the details of the store convey an aesthetic: the lettering on the window, the paper stock used for business cards, the lighting, the floor, the ceiling, the display racks. The stores are designed by people who pay attention to how everything looks. But they manage to do so, in the main, is "much wittier." He is in good company, but it is a hopeless battle, and he than to fight the tides of history and included the word in his political dictionary, lest that weighty tome prove useless to future generations. I am informed that the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will charged only with the momentous decision of choosing whether to name new fighting. For instance, I hear Bill Gates is being unfairly harassed by the the question of what exactly is wrong with the explanation that the situation officials who had a nasty tendency to do sleazy things but avoid technical that high officials should observe standards of propriety which surpass the was a dodge for accusers and malefactors alike. I doubt you could find a single but the criteria are ambiguous. The nature of the events suggests that we are to vote on who best imitates a New York Times editorial or a "Talk of suggests that we are to vote for the most impressive display of empty virtuosity. (Actually, I think his definition of a hack is incorrect; a hack is one who's paid by the word or line, not one to whom the rules of journalism virtuosity in imitation or virtuosity in itself? If the former, then all the contestants have missed the boat on the second event. There is a formula for New Yorker "Talk of the Town" pieces. First, the focus of the event (as defined by the headline of the press release) would never be the focus of the would have been quoted. It is much more likely that the correspondent would have talked to the caterer or a disgruntled unknown sitting in the corner. Also, no New Yorker correspondent would include details of clothing unless it were to make some larger, allegorical point about the subject. and uncertainty have never kept me from voting before, however. something about science and policy, but he is bumbling out of his depth when it Capt. Button's alleged suicide was a strange event indeed. However, after or not to commit suicide"? This letter does not permit me the space to develop a definition of rationality, to examine its compatibility with the decision to end one's life, or to explain why it's so important that we must always be strictly rational in the first place. However, I would expect exactly that from not greatly fear death, death seems like a rational (if not recommended) jail term, and a very public dishonor brought upon oneself and one's terminally ill, in wishing to escape from constant pain or degeneration through irrational. Perhaps the need for rationality does not enter into the In the two other countries that have flirted with voluntary "patients"?) decision is not made under the influence of addiction, mental did argue nearly all are. By what logic? Well, for starters, I noted that substance abuse. In addition, I pointed out that psychiatrists find that an wasn't trying to use the word "rational" in any fancy sense. When I say most people who die by their own hand are irrational, I mean that their thinking is usually clouded. Generally, mental disease or drugs impair their thinking. If not, victims are often simply caught up in circumstances and exaggerated fears, swallowed a bottle of pills after a fight with her boyfriend. Later she thanked the team for saving her from what she called a "stupid thing to do." Is it possible to kill yourself while thinking clearly? Yes, but it is far rarer than Pager would like to believe. In Button's case, it's particularly doubtful given his tendencies toward dumb, impulsive action revealed in his records. percent said they would move if blacks came to live in great numbers. Much on racial grounds, not class.) And other sources paint an "equally reassuring picture"? Is this fact a "reassuring" one? Any number greater than zero is too Wonders" incorrectly traces the lineage of "Raising the Roof." I think you the lyrics "Everyone's entitled to be wild, be a child, be a goof, raise the right hand in the exact same manner that thousands, yea millions, have done and should be spelled accordingly. In other words, you could legitimately state To modify the names of people and organizations to fit a localized spelling style is to show disrespect to the owners of those names, and condescension to Like Writing Headlines, I Like Having Written Headlines I was an impressionable lad and have believed that ever since. I have also passed on the remark and the attribution to two or three generations of my Can't say I ever made it quite to the end of that one either. that to the younger generation we must represent the literary equivalent of driven into this fog? It's a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy that presents itself is that "compilation" to which you refer, whose arrival, though unwelcome, is in no way resistible. Of the part that is mine to pass neither protestation nor ingratitude. Yet that such an ordering hardly induces vale of longevity is a statement the validity of which cannot be called readily into question. It is unlikely to fail to play upon the suspicions of such a one that the composition of his most highly esteemed should be that most lately however, could a figure such as he neglect the observation that the personage with whom the former is now abstractly in conversation was accorded the merit more terrestrial, which is to say well below those of the former on the "list." Such a "point," once made, could not resist the tendency to instill feelings of "envy" and ressentiment on the part of an author perhaps better compensated and perhaps more "popular," but in the view of the critical expression of both discretion and a great humble reverence for the feelings of esteemed in the trail of "fashion," there is one included that so transgresses topic that exercise that in our own great palmy day was considered least worthy contemporaries so unsupportable should form the core of the work in question might be thought to constitute a disqualification. To such vulgarian depths does this "fascination" descend that there is in one place depicted an speak here of the "liver" scene. For a work whose "climax" depends on feelings of the most passionate revulsion to be esteemed ahead of your own labors, so far superior as to be undeserving of inclusion in the same tormented sentence, and gaping an injustice presents itself as a course of action perhaps less a copy of your message. I have a place down there in Key West. It's a small place but a good place. There are cats and a lot of rain and when it rains the cats all come inside the house. The biggest cat is named Hem. There are some cat is bigger than the others and also braver and probably a better writer. But some people who don't know any better think the little cats are pretty cute. is the drink to drink so we drink it. Sometimes we mix the rum with Coke and sometimes we don't mix it with anything, depending on how thirsty we are. Rum and Coke is a good drink, but not if you're thirsty. If you're thirsty, you were saying something about a list. I couldn't quite make out what you were young, and you're high up on it. But when you're a little older and not so high up you see that the list is just a list and that's all it is. of drugs, drink, gambling, biting his nails, and picking his nose, but not of busy writing my novels, and if somebody wants to read one of them instead of complaint for you to please pass along to the committee. My handwriting may not be all handwriting should be, especially after lunch, but even a county court judge drunk at noon ought to be able to read a title straight. So please tell As I Lay Dying cover to cover. Privately, he had found it a bit confusing. Why was the mother a fish? But he knew that people thought it was a Yorker, beloved by black people, and a comparatively easy read (not to mention get paid for what they wrote; and had contempt for lesser talents. Mailer every book he had ever written, all with flattering inscriptions, and never Mailer was irked. He felt that it had all been a big literary game. Mailer was not a critic of Southern literature, but he privately wondered whether over Mailer's desk and smashed it into a million pieces. After he did that, there were just pictures of Mailer hanging there. Mailer recognized that this reaction was not very mature, but Mailer had bigger things to worry about than minding his literary manners. Mailer didn't understand why people were treating him like a dead writer, either. Just recently, Mailer had published his insouciance. Mailer hated those parties, but he hardly ever missed one. "Your books stink," Mailer imagined himself saying. "Mailer can't understand a word chihuahuas. The chihuahuas had been shaved real close to the skin, so there been pretty cold in those Chi winters and when they were hungry they'd claw at like some hipsters who had pulled off a jewelry heist downtown. They didn't stop us on suspicion, but just kept tailing us at a distance which made us Congress Street shoots out West for an amazing distance, which is where we were bandanna tied around his mouth and said, "Oh man, we completely forgot to go pleased to be on the list. All these last several decades I have been the Lighthouse to place fifteenth provides a moment of cheer, for it proves perhaps only fifty. The end of each arrives, and soon another book is published, a book is reviewed, more books appear. List succeeds list. Lists turn into libraries. Some of these books are borrowed from the libraries. These books, little occurs. A group of persons goes somewhere; or does not go somewhere; or contemplates going somewhere but delays the decision about whether to go. The words fly past; two hundred words; six hundred words; one thousand five hundred words; two thousand words. The words turn into pages: one hundred pages; two hundred pages; three hundred pages; four hundred pages. The alphabet is recounted. B follows A. D is preceded by C; then comes E; then F; then G; then H; then I. If L could be reached, that would be something. But L Not many even get so far as K. And what of M, and the murky letters which follow M, which include U, R and W? Who can even speak of W, which shimmers at the North end of the alphabet, scarcely visible from D. When I think of D, an image comes into my head that I am powerless to resist: it is the cross section this "maundering," this reverie for which I am intensely thankful; for nothing so solaces me, calms me in the perplexity of life, and miraculously raises its burdens, as this sublime power, this divine talent for writing endlessly about than one should break the crockery in one's home and leave the shards lying on the kitchen floor for no reason. Though yes, I have done that at times as pressure these days. There's the constant hunger for money, exacerbated by the decline in government funding. There is brutal competition for donors and works of art. Since the onset of the culture wars, museums also have faced the hazard of political controversy and the chilling effect it can have on potential New York Times article argued that these burdens have made the job of museum director less desirable than it might seem. Perhaps so. But that doesn't excuse the way some directors have responded to these pressures: with a style of populism that is very different from a genuine democratic sensibility. Museum populism is not quite the same as the blockbuster syndrome. Though devised and marketed on a large scale, shows like the upcoming boundaries of what these institutions display. They may not contain much that is conceptually fresh, but they do provide mass access to artistic masterpieces. You can't really argue with that. The populist trend, by contrast, draws museums away from art their curators sincerely believe is in New York City. Other examples include the exhibition of landscapes by the populism began with an unlikely figure: a patrician medievalist by the name of guy who came up with the idea of flying huge banners over the entrance to the museum. He also essentially invented the blockbuster show. His tenure began with a splashy exhibition on royal patronage and built to the crescendo of entertaining book published a few years ago, Making the Mummies Dance: to him that you could herd even more people into an art museum if you didn't reflect upon the fact that the populist approach it represents grew out of the touch both with popular morality and with popular taste and punished with a loss of funds, museum directors have been trying hard to demonstrate that they are not elitist, difficult, and obscure. The best way to prove you're not a snob is by not letting your museum seem empty. And the master of box office smash. In the last few years, the museum's main branch, the iconic outside the museum's charter. But with aggressive promotion, including be defensible if it made a better argument for either the cultural significance or the aesthetic importance of the machines. Industrial design is a stepchild of the story of artistic modernism. But the exhibition doesn't make the case. The basic message of the show is: Motorcycles are really cool; here are a bunch of really cool motorcycles. It includes too many machines--114 in all. Some of silly. Part of the problem is that, as you might expect from an exhibition and valve arrangement. The motorcycle also contains a number of other important cylinders and heads all contribute to the engine's exceptional performance. eviscerates his own claim that these machines belong in a modern art museum, as opposed to one focused on design, transportation, or history. influences the content of the show. It is that the sponsor influences the fact by promoting its own product is part of the reason that this exhibition took unpersuasive introduction to the catalog, in which he breezily declares that the distinction between the unique work of art and the mechanically produced object is now "irrelevant." In other words, it's open season for guys like him. Others are embracing this philosophy of complete categorical breakdown. The he wants to make the museum friendlier to visitors. According to my sources, he recently stunned his curators by proposing to fill the galleries with potted doesn't have to mean a haughty elitism. An aesthetic democrat says that more people could profit from the experience of art if those who ran museums thought more creatively about how to converse with their audience. A populist says that if you drop what is difficult in art, you can get more people to pay attention. The democrat at the helm of a museum, a symphony orchestra, or a publishing house tries to expand his audience while challenging it. The populist, by contrast, panders to his audience, figuring out what it likes and then delivering it in heaps. Where the democrat exhibits respect for the public, the have, in their wisdom, decided to improve my life at (minimal) expense to them by giving me a budget to test health products available in catalogs. Even though I pose as a cynic, I harbor a belief in the product with "slim" or "anti" in its name. I looked for items that required no effort to use yet promised dramatic effects. I also chose items that were either ubiquitous (suggesting they had something going for them) or unique (the company must have locked up rights to a magical object). I judged them not only on whether they delivered on their claims but also on whether I permanently throbbing bunion has virtually disappeared. There's one drawback to thicker end. Sitting with your spine aligned over the hole is supposed to reduce pressure on your disks. It has definitely made sitting in front of the computer easier and is far more comfortable than the throw pillows I previously an ergonomically correct chair. It does not, unfortunately, firm your tush as myself? Yes, although I think all editors should, in their own evening plunging your wrists into ice water, you are an easy mark for devices that promise to relieve carpal tunnel syndrome. The wrist supporters sold in the Real Goods catalog feature the antibiotic of the New Age world: magnets. The Food and Drug Administration is skeptical of magnets' ability to relieve supporters I ordered were black neoprene with a metal brace and a flexible magnetic band. I found them bulky, and their primary benefit seemed to come from the heat retention qualities of the neoprene. They were certainly no more sticker that states the pillow may have a "particular smell" that is "completely harmless" and "will disappear after some time," which sounds like something the proprietor of the Bates Motel might say. The smell is sort of a store gave me this hint: Roll the pillow up tightly several times a day to squeeze out the trapped air. After about a week of doing this, the odor had nap. The pillow does let you sink into it while also giving support. It didn't change the quality of my sleep as all the hype promised. But it is really information: The pillow is available under a variety of names (Pressure shipping. Delivery is promised in five to seven days (I picked mine up at their used. If it didn't actually work, it would be a disaster. The wand is a hair lustrous, add body, and remove odors and dandruff. (Along with magnets and problem was that before I used it, I rinsed it off and turned it back replacement I got didn't shut off properly and melted the batteries in the sure it's really off, or it will exhaust its batteries in a matter of hours. I have dry hair, and with the Ionic Hair Wand I thought I could follow my hairdresser's advice to shampoo less often. So I faithfully brushed my hair with the wand for the recommended two minutes a day, day after day. Miraculously, eight days later, my hair looked good and smelled clean. How long secrets to the wand is that it produces minute amounts of ozone, which acts as gift? Only for people who refuse to wash their hair. information: The Ionic Hair Wand is available from the Sharper Image for developing around my eyes has begun to bother me. How could I pass up the technology that makes nicotine patches work is supposed to deliver vitamin C (it's not just for colds, it's for wrinkles, too!) to them. In the interest of science I patched only one eye, never thinking the thing would actually work. By the fourth patch I realized I had to start catching up with the other side if I didn't want to wear a Phantom of the Opera mask on my wrinkled side. I gift? You just can't give someone the "Wrinkle Patch" as a gift. so confident in his own perspective that everything seems tired and transparent seem interesting, alive, and real. That's not my normal experience with and I think he ought to continue in this vein. When he's bored, we're bored. When he makes an effort to look around and see and comment, we're interested new light on the subject. He tells us nothing substantive about this case that adequate job. And, because the case is pending, some patience is probably in press will keep me adequately and fairly informed as the courts dispense criticism of the former (and use it myself), except to note that many important issues cannot be quantified. Instead, I believe we need a version of the "serenity prayer": Economists need the skills to do quantitative research, the knowledge needed for qualitative research, and the wisdom to know when each is involves avoiding a dogmatic attachment to any method of analysis. It also entails being open to reading and respecting ideas one disagrees with. This involves, among other things, avoiding criticizing someone's book without reading it simply because the author is a lawyer and not an economist, as academic pecking order of "Big Name" schools and authors. This kind of glorification might be justified if economics were actually like physics, with a clear ability to predict the behavior of our subject matter so that we could objectively decide which economists were better than others. Having attended two Big Name schools, I know that we can't take anybody's work for granted. irritation with the adulation of Big Names does not arise from my lack of fame, or from my working at a small university (which gives me freedom from "publish or perish": I can write what and when I like, rather than having to "crank it out"). On the contrary, it comes from my experience with many colleagues who k a monetarism), without any kind of historical perspective, just an eye to what the economics celebrities are saying. It surprises me to see a Big Name offensive and his point of view so lacking in humor, nuance, balance, and perception, that, were I a subscriber, I would drop Slate in a second! And he were meant to be a column or an opinion piece, it should have been marked as such and not presented as "hard journalism" or a report from the field. either party, nor do I find the substance of the controversy particularly able to access the gestalt of the experience. Sounds like psychobabble, but it what seemed like a comprehensive whole occurring at one moment in time. Sort of conclusion, quick and satisfying. It doesn't happen the same way in print however, was how this little folk tale of inaccurate reporting of events occasional role in affairs reported in the media I have drawn the general inaccuracies are intentional, mere failures to understand, or just oversimplifications in order to dumb down the message or meet space or time "wrong" in most articles? It is this question which, for me, limits media often offer trimmed and tabulated transcripts, the better to butter their I can tell you that the official record of any Senate or House proceeding is what the chairman says it is. Hired recording companies make typed transcripts of what their stenographer thinks the tape recorder, supplemented by written notes, captured. This "draft transcript" goes back to whomever the senator or congressman designates for corrections. Tradition mandates that changes are garbled portions, or to sort who said what when more than one person speaks at Corrections can be complete rewrites, however. Sometimes the corrections are most likely to be struck from the record. Poor grammar, misspoken words, and confrontational moments between important men and women also regularly hit the transcript draft days or weeks after the event and is dependent upon his or her own memory to edit the record. The connection to the stenographer's wire has been known to fail suddenly at sensational senatorial clashes. Finally, members replies: Committee chairmen (and privileged witnesses) do sometimes modify hearing transcripts, but not in this case: I checked the hearing transcript decked out in pastels? Well, there's a large young professional demographic in the East Village (you'd be surprised how few genuine bohemians can come up with "bohemians" were toting cameras and wearing bulging nylon fanny packs. flock to the East Village in the summertime to use drugs, panhandle, sleep in out of them without having to significantly revise her argument. They are (torn black tights or fishnets for the ladies), safety pins through the ears and nostrils, and heavy eyeliner. They lurk outside bars and restaurants precious in their own way as any amateur anthropologist taking her first cautious steps east of First Avenue in breathless anticipation of a walk on the Time 's site is not the only place on the Web where users can read athlete "pitchmen," it becomes clear that Wright has failed to do his homework, "reprehensible" for his failure to enter a playoff game in which the final shot He would most likely draw a double team, freeing a teammate for the final shot, thereby giving his team a better chance to win. His behavior was indeed immature and boorish. Is it not enough, however, that he publicly apologized to and in the league as one of the more giving players to disadvantaged youth. crews every time he finds an opportunity to give back to the community. Is Wrights of the world understand who he really is and the values for which he stands. His response has always been that it does not matter what people think; that he knows, and the children know, and that's what matters. grown as a person. To suggest that he made a mistake by not entering a game several years ago is fair. To suggest that he is "reprehensible" is absurd. inflatable dominatrix lying on her back. She wears fishnet stockings and a teddy festooned with baby doll heads and holds a whip. In other respects, the silk gown. The irregularly shaped dirigible on which the photograph of this amalgamated woman is superimposed is connected to foot pumps. From the balcony at entrance level, you can step down on these pumps, blowing air into the artists sponsored by the German menswear manufacturer that takes place at the hung upside down and naked from the gallery ceiling, talking about her abortion decorated with beads and sequins, supposedly to "create a biting satire on Lee's approach and preoccupations are characteristic not only of the Boss prize finalists but of contemporary conceptual art in general. Her work is theory driven and eschews traditional technique. It is based on the appropriating and commenting on them, Lee, like the other artists in the Boss show, aims at a critique of the dominant culture. The key buzzword echoing through the catalog is "otherness," a term borrowed from formerly trendy French literary criticism. Minus the obscurantism, the idea is that cultural this view is at least subject to argument and criticism. Only in the art world is radical multiculturalism an unquestionable dogma. There is not even a flash of recognition of the irony that this philosophy manifests itself in a big international art show where brings together artists of every race, nationality, and sexual orientation to proclaim that they are despised and ignored. But whatever the merits of essentialism as an outlook on life, its art world fruits, as displayed in the Boss exhibition, are flavorless and repetitive. By the end, what you have learned is that in contemporary art, "the Projected in mirror image on two screens joined at right angles, it turns images of the artist cavorting underwater along with various objects such as a previously exhibited photographs of black women accompanied by bits of cryptic text. For example, a print of in a dilapidated apartment, one in sunglasses with a drink, the other peering across the room, bears the legend "forecasting women staring blankly underscore that they are "unheard in a racist, patriarchal society." Lately, she has moved into film. Her entry in the Boss Arguably the most banal work in the show comes from the another in which he slowed down the film Psycho to a speed at which it masked woman through some sort of psychological treatment. the conflict between Western and Eastern cultures but seems less enraged on the topic than Lee. His previous work has involved putting books through a washing machine cycle and collecting live animals, such as scorpions, snakes, and lattice of copper pipes from which hang a chair and a dozen mesh cages. Inside who wrote that "animals are superior to human beings." Reminiscent of the the artist's whole oeuvre and not the work submitted for the show, I uses animation of sketches much cruder than the ones he usually does interspersed with documentary footage from the apartheid era. Set against the about fashion. What makes the exhibition truly dreary, however, is the pretense that it's daring, when really it's an exercise in intellectual conformity. All deriving their ideas about cultural difference from French literary critics and in the sense that they follow the dictates of others about what art should be. Subtract the shock value, and what you have here is the salon painting of the from aristocrats, governments, or corporate benefactors. Even with tickets office revenues make up only half the cost of the show. In cities such as costs so much in a minute. But for the moment, assume that the problem is incorrigible. If you want to live in a society in which opera continues to for culture, government support has recently drawn public fire. While opera is the most needy of the fine arts, it is also the most elitist. In the United year (and people probably exaggerate about this, just as they do when asked how often they have sex). Around the world, opera is synonymous with snobbery. Its come out of the opera." Since the audience is rich snobs, people say, let rich That's essentially the system we have here. Wealthy individuals and corporations make up the gap between box office revenues and not publicly subsidize opera (or the other arts) is, in fact, erroneous. We do support them, quite generously, not through the National Endowment for the Arts but with a law that says contributions to charitable organizations are million privately donated to the Metropolitan Opera in New York last year cost enthusiasts in this country constantly lament the lack of direct government budgetary austerity (countries are having to trim their deficits to join the the private money that seems to flow so freely in the United States. With opera ask: Which method of subsidizing opera is preferable? opera endemically require subsidies? The short answer is that while there's only one audience, there are multiple performances all taking place at the same time. An opera is a symphony concert, a choral recital, a play, a ballet, a mural, and a fashion show all at once. The number of people who work to put on people, all of whom eat two or three times what normal people eat. Then there without supernumeraries? What would all those supernumeraries do without malingering divas instead of deferential corporate vice presidents. that in certain sectors, productivity cannot increase. It takes the same number perform an opera to keep pace with those in other sectors of the economy, where productivity does improve, the cost must inflate. In short, there's no advantage of being forthright: The government declares that it wants more it. Though this means that there is political oversight of artistic decisions in theory, this structure yields considerable creative freedom in practice. But because a third party is paying most of the bill, there's less pressure to please the audience. This can encourage complacency, artistic mediocrity, operas companies are now of higher quality and consistency than the best coming season is less likely when managers have to raise the money percentage of overall revenues but also because the subscribers are contributors, too. This incentive system keeps opera companies lean and proportion to their generosity and enthusiasm. Society gets more music than the balance, I think our system of paying for opera is more rational. But then, as to Humanity: Get Over Yourself"). How can he seriously think of discussing the conflict between humanity's pretensions and scientific progress (especially absurd generalizations about the scientific community. His contention that firmament" is simply not true. Has he ever heard of the Miller Experiment, which demonstrates how easily and quickly organic molecules (including amino acids) could have been synthesized in the tumultuous environment of a newly formed Earth? As for the lack of scientific speculation about forms of alien life, why is it the result of a "taboo"? Could it be that the general scientific community finds such speculation ultimately pointless in the absence of real data? Nature has done a wonderful job of confounding "speculation" on Scientific thought is hardly the rigid and dogmatic collection of prejudice before that has changed the view of life as well (and arguably in a more further changes to "the scientific view of life" (whatever that may mean). opinion in biology" has believed for quite some time now. Report of the President," total federal, state, and local revenues amounted to as state and local taxes, but that's double counting, since they're already convention "Diary." As a registered pedant, I cannot refrain from posing this whom Shearer's word play is based? If this is too easy, consider this bonus quarterback, I would liken the grip the "new" Republican thought has on reality the "let's throw out the records because this is a different game" mentality for football, it sure is a bizarre way to run a country. The record does count when it comes to jobs, taxes, and feeding your family. allows the same players to keep playing year after year, never forcing them to support, commentators don't mention the exponential growth of the budget about the deficit spending that accompanied the tax cuts. to polish up whatever glossy finish the author thinks he or she had left upon crossing the Beltway. It doesn't hurt when journalists talk up otherwise unremarkable volumes (positively or negatively). Workaday facts, routines, the same old office coffee, or the unvarnished truth are precisely not the even in the transcripts, you could see some definite hostility and sarcasm, like accurate quotes. But space should be allowed for a memoir that may not be as accurate, in the smallest sense, as a daily newspaper. As Chief said in Weren't both of them noted for taking long sabbaticals? They were writers, and was noted for unleashing many of his more notable works in marathon sessions so far from the liberal mainstream that one could argue it could only have make a thorough effort to uncover the truth behind this unnatural connection. ludicrous to apply that description to liberalism. Modern liberalism, sad to say, has strayed far from the libertarian philosophy of classical liberalism. programs regardless of the evidence on their failure. It is the left that opposing reforms, such as the flat tax, that are based on treating all liberalism was based on equality of opportunity instead of equality of result. seeing such an illogical mess. But then I read a rave review in a major paper, reviewer thought it was intentionally funny, instead of unintentionally dumb. So I went to see it, wondering which of these two reviewers had so totally review is summed up in this observation: "A good half hour is spent getting the for his billet to be stamped before he could fly off to destroy the Death Star." This is actually an accurate description. Imagine various rabid bureaucrat into believing they're legitimate passengers on the last flight out to the resort hotel where the Ultimate Weapon of the Universe has been left in a room. Now have them all try to be the same legitimate passenger, who has already boarded. Add in some slapstick, with one killer getting catapulted into a massive mountain of garbage. How could anyone see this and take it believe not only that Gene Kelly would dance in the rain while using an umbrella as if it were a cane, but also that a symphony orchestra, conveniently hidden from view and under some shelter, just happens to be playing a tune that a nose flattened by a steamroller would be flexible and bloodless, and sustain a charge for more than a fraction of that time." the necessity of the feminist enterprise and for providing a powerful Stein's awful fancies ("Watching the Couples Go By") in the same cyberspace as that surprised by Stein's musings than by your publishing any women at all. I do feel, however, that his article might more appropriately have been placed under the "Diary" heading, allowing those of us who don't want to read erotic with Stein's contention that "I have written these views entirely from the point of view of the man. That is only natural for me." Well sure, but only if it is biologically predetermined that men are incapable of understanding On Love and a number of extraordinarily psychologically astute literary works by men, is that such a narrow perspective is most assuredly less natural than acquired. And it is acquired by the perpetuation of precisely the sort of are naturally (biologically) bounded by their own limited experiences and bodies, and that feminism must therefore focus only on that narrow swath dictated by such bodies. The most frightening thing to me about all this talk of nature and biology is that what is really being naturalized is the marginality of female voices. If men must naturally write only of men, and women only of women, then feminism and femininity become the only natural rest of politics, art, and culture? Ceded to the boys, naturally. was a fantasy." Perhaps. But that strategy might best have served the president in the court of public opinion, rather than in a court of law. And it would certainly not have served him adequately in the present political climate. Keep in mind that this isn't the simple case of a wronged woman quietly making career. The conservative journalists and other reactionaries who have shoved her story onto the nation's front pages hope not only to cripple the will be equally instrumental in promoting Al Gore to the Oval Office in has a plateful of historic tasks ahead of him in the next four years. He can He'd have been foolhardy not to trust his defense in this case to an been holding out on us." Entertaining as "Let Si Get This" was, it bears no relation to my experiences at the company over the past year. Either those of us who work at the West Coast outposts aren't in on the perks, correctly diagnoses the central problem with affirmative action, which is that it causes one group of people (blacks) to be favored at the expense of another group (whites). Yet at the same time that he admits this is unfair, he proposes fact that a white person who has never practiced discrimination, and who never had anything to do with the subjugation of blacks, should be placed at a not themselves discriminate against blacks be punished for what their or worst. Despite the fact that, on its face, it is punishment, we shouldn't think further, we should simply declare that there is perfect equality between blacks and whites in society, even though there isn't. Why should we ignore the fact that there is inequality between races in society? The answer is that it should not be thought of as inequality. Seems to work for me! as being between the certainty of being rich and a possibility of being rich. that if you asked the same questions, but divided all the amounts by a million, want help understanding my column "Take This Simple Test." In the course of various gifts. Let's put those questions aside. Instead, here are three simpler to be a person who gives the same answer to all three questions. Some rational people prefer ducks to geese, some prefer geese to ducks, but no rational person switches answers in going from one question to the next. in that order. So a rational person should give the same answers to the that, contrary to the expectations of several readers, none of this has "deconstruction" (a method of literary criticism long favored by the academic in reality, there is none. However useful in the rarefied halls of academia, it academic exercise and a cynical misrepresentation of both the facts of the campaign is simply one way in which we are attempting to educate the public on small manufacturers. To lump these small companies, many of which are moniker of "big business" (itself a populist tool of the left) is a disservice economy. These small manufacturers would, by the very nature of their size, reductions because such a treaty would take a bite out of the budget of every pump, more expensive home heating, and lost jobs. The United States cannot see its competitiveness and prosperity erode for the benefit of developing nations that, for whatever reason, will not be required to abide by the strict over and over, until reason wins out over the scare tactics being employed by environmental extremists (and political consultants) in the furtherance of for Slate is actually outdated discourse. The perennial argument for dismantling the Department of Energy doesn't succeed because it doesn't make sense. No proposal has ever identified clear savings for taxpayers from of the people who are responsible for the safety, control, and stewardship of nuclear weapons with those of the people who decide whether to use the said last year, "With the new technical challenges of providing stewardship of the stockpile in the absence of underground testing, this is not a time to be fundamentally restructuring the management of these activities." And Energy environmental contamination and safety threats at DOE sites by exercising the weapons safety and cleanup to Defense? The people living near our nuclear sites around the country have seen progress both in openness and cleanup by the department. I don't think they would want this change. government while increasing its effect. A better solution would be for columnists like Chapman to report the story. But that would be more difficult professional pundit, who is supposed to know whether (and how) we should have concessions the baseball owners should accept, and so on. Well, Slate has brought punditry to almost unimaginable new heights with its ongoing "Is There a some authority on this matter; but, it still seems to me, musings on this going to be published, be assigned to individuals who have had more than a all the exchanges to date without knowing what either writer means by the word has lost his. But that's about it. Furthermore, while there have been no definitions or real elucidations, the discussions seem mired in the concept of following: a powerful (yet devout) bearded man, a cool breeze on a clear summer really don't want to criticize. Many of us struggle with these issues for much that's good for us and for the world. It's probably therapeutic for Slate's two warriors to be taking time out from their inquiries into the House Budget or about these matters ever since, heaven (or whatever) knows I don't have too many answers that I feel confident about. These matters are both very difficult relief of suffering, not in metaphysics) very important. I don't mind, therefore, that your two gentlemen are interested, or that they aren't making much headway. I just resist the idea of punditry in certain spheres. I mean, is would come up with an annual contribution of $51.43--about a dollar a week at entitled to do whatever he wants with his cash. But it is a little sad to see that he has not taken a little more aggressive approach toward charitable away his money is nice, but extremely shortsighted. of the state, could well cure cancer, or AIDS, or otherwise profoundly alter the lives of millions of people. (Bill's family, like many families in the United States, has been directly touched by cancer.) It's sad to think that the epitaph on countless headstones over the next few decades will have this postscript: "I might have lived a full life if Bill had decided to retire just as the pustular ranks of Republicans and Democrats incestuously engaged in doling out political favors to their campaign contributors. There is little of Democratic campaigns against the most afflicted Republican examples. There stacked against them. Some are even members of the Republican and Democratic somehow better, less sullied, more ethical. If such activity is considered bribery when foreign nationals engage in it, why is it any different when domestic entities put our campaign system of legalized bribery to use? This points to a moral duality in the current situation, which is troubling. fixate too much on the demand side of this economic market. If we consider, for a moment, that the primary aim behind reform is the reduction of check from an individual, a payment is made because someone feels certain government policies benefit him or her. Most reforms attempt to deal with the record tide of campaign expenditure during this election cycle can be viewed as an index of the level of economic dependence of individuals and foreign policy has skyrocketed and foreign entities are anteing up to the up against the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, something some approach would focus on reducing the ability of government to dole out favors. Reduce the marginal utility of government influence peddling, and campaign contributions will take care of themselves. Reduce the stakes, and players will to see letters to our tech guy. You can send any technical questions to in the Rough," by John Pastier). If stadiums are such a good business deal, why aren't they readily funded by private enterprise without major municipal support? The funds are out there and available when companies, banks, and venture capitalists need a few billion to buy up some competitor. My suspicion is that the absence of private capital proves that stadiums are not a good deal except for the select few on the inside who are subsidized by other people's SLATE's editor on the cover in a rain slicker? Have I missed something? in the Rough," by John Pastier) failed to mention their blatant commercialism in the form of billboards and other intrusive enticements to buy products totally unrelated to the game. Improvements in architecture, regaining intimate space and scale and all the rest, won't disguise the ugliness of advertising the local bank, Chevy dealer, and chain retailer as a backdrop for last week's "Committee of Correspondence: Advice for Dole," with some interest illustration of the ideological dead weight carried by Bob Dole's campaign so 'by powerful constituency groups within the [Republican] Party'?" So far, the of Correspondence" has covered several topics. Each has been boring. The root of the difficulty is most probably the format rather than the writing that is created from conversation. This guarantees the outcome will be am interested in all the topics discussed so far, yet have been unable to read successful. Please declare this experiment completed and move on. leading me to wonder why you bothered running the piece. already taken a political slant to the right. Its content is proof enough. been convicted of nor indicted for racketeering. Indeed, the author only organized criminal activities was weakly presented. This smacks of speech, at the end of which is a command to "go back." Dutifully following understand that this publication is still developing. I certainly hope it of Democracy"). Nor is his analysis more penetrating than that of others is one that bears repeating, if only because it seems to be so easily people, and like any average, it falls somewhere between the best and the worst. The decisions a democracy arrives at won't be as good as those the best people in the country would have made, but neither will they be as bad as what the worst would have done. The second part is the most important side of the benevolent dictatorship would be the best form of government, except for one distressing fact. Nobody's figured out how to make sure the dictator will actually be benevolent before giving him the reins of power. And you generally can't trade them in later without a whole lot of bloodshed. of Democracy." The term "peaceful democracy" is almost a contradiction in terms. The justification of democracy is that it provides the greatest level of freedom to its citizens. There is an old saying, "You can have peace or you can have freedom. But never count on having both at the same time." There will always be threats to democracy and freedom from people who want more power, land, etc., and who are willing to use force to achieve their goals. Democracies have always preferred peace to war. War is expensive and wasteful in terms of human life as well as economics. If the alternative is to lose our can take my banjo and go into another world when need be. try to look at all sides, and SLATE is a great help. You have a reader in regarding the Victims' Rights Amendment. However, there is great danger in the justifications for taking a convicted criminal's freedom away. The most neglected rationale, but the one closest to our spiritual traditions, is rehabilitation. Other legitimate objectives include removing predators from the general population and setting an example to deter potential criminals. The impulse animating the Victims' Rights Amendment, however, is different. It seeks to assuage the pain of victims by allowing them to participate in the How can one tell parents that they should not want to see the person who raped and killed their child punished? Nevertheless, it is not a principle that should be honored with a place in the Constitution. It does not consider the greater good of broad society; the amendment is a revenge wish, pure and problem with the Victims' Rights Amendment is that it undermines the moral the theory of strategic bonding. It seems to me that the instinct for survival always felt that a chief cause of racial strife is that on a primal, instinctive level, we distrust something new or different from what we know. If we encounter this new, different animal when we are alone, our instinct tells us to run away. If we outnumber this alien being, our instinct tells us to kill it and ask questions later (or, at the very least, discriminate against it and keep it in a manageable place). Only by understanding the alien being, and Bull Street Journal." My reaction while reading it was to be embarrassed for SLATE, because the whole feature smells like a juvenile attempt to slam a competitor via the most unprofessional means. The kind of SLATE I was coming to enjoy reading was one that would rip the Wall Street Journal apart using facts, ideas, and finely honed reasoning. There is no place in that perhaps this is the kind of thing that can be written off as inexperience. reading, but no longer will I assume that SLATE will always exercise good (or even average) editorial judgment in its selection of features. rather annoyed to find that both the theater and art reviews in this week's a sign that SLATE will follow the lead of many of its print counterparts by have created more confusion than he dispelled in SLATE ("Speech by legislation like the Communications Decency Act, but he also misinforms that are central to understanding the public debate about regulating content on scope of the government's authority to broadly regulate constitutionally character of the medium distributing that content. At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that the court has allowed the government greater three distinct (if overlapping) categories of content: "indecent," "sexually explicit," and (by implication) "pornographic." In doing so, he reinforces a "sexually explicit" as those words are normally understood. (Not all speech Wired magazine to organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the National Writers Union) were easily distinguishable from the commercial commercial pornography, in support of a more general claim that government content in the interest of protecting children. (Justice White, writing for the court in Sable, does not go so far. Instead, he relies on two cases that, like Sable, involve pornography and minors. White never expressly states in Sable that the government has constitutional authority to notably, he suggests compulsory labeling of online content without mentioning the First Amendment problem of "compelled speech" that clearly would arise, and without discussing whether such compulsory labeling would be constitutional if conclusion about compulsory labeling on the Internet.) disturbing error in his article has to do with the facts, not the law. In order to support his thesis that technical solutions will never resolve what he sees with the latest 'dirty' places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or (that filters rely solely or primarily on a list of "dirty places") is wholly objectionable sites, this is not the primary approach any of these programs generalization about the effect of the boom on these filters' effectiveness. if the number of Web addresses including the word "sex" has increased tenfold since last year. And it's difficult to see how the effectiveness of the Specs for Kids approach can be diminished by the boom, even in theory. awareness of the labeling infrastructure that software vendors and the rest of group coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium, and is described in the well as other material on PICS can be found on the Web. that describe formats for labeling Internet content and methods for how labels are distributed. PICS does not dictate what the labels should say or how they where on a package a label should appear, and in what font it should be flexibility is to support a wide variety of labeling systems and selection methods. For instance, one might configure a Web browser to screen out material only one approach. As an alternative, one might make accessible only those Web pages that are labeled in a particular way, for example, Web pages that carry the "seal of approval" of various organizations. This second approach, that permits multiple labeling services and multiple ways of using labels; or offensive content. In creating a standard for interoperability, the PICS services, where the pressures of competition will help assure that current and future labels are timely and accurate. They also envisioned a competitive market in selection software, leading to increasingly sophisticated techniques children differ, contexts of use differ, and values differ, blanket restrictions on distribution can never meet everyone's needs. Selection software can meet diverse needs, by blocking reception, and labels are the raw availability of large quantities of labels will also lead to new sorting, searching, filtering, and organizing tools that help users surf the Internet make it more effective or efficient. If anything, such a regulation is likely to have the opposite effect. Imposing a single, federally approved standard for the kinds of constitutionally protected content that government can banish from public forums in the name of protecting minors seems likelier to skew the market. It would diminish the ability parents now have to decide for themselves which solution is most effective. (And the marketplace of ideas wouldn't analysis or his assessment of software filters may feel compelled to craft laws that ensure we never escape from the "spillover" problem: laws that needlessly pit adults' First Amendment rights against the state's interest in protecting dismisses carry the promise of avoiding his "spillover" problem altogether. Thanks to these inexpensive and highly adaptable tools, two important social interesting legal points. I stand by my legal analysis, which I believe is based on the most natural reading of the cases; I do not believe I am guilty of though, that reasonable minds can differ on the questions involved here, much as they generally can with regard to most genuinely contested legal medium. But it seems to me that Sable Communications and the relevant speech in other media, so long as the restriction is the least restrictive means of shielding children from improper material. The Internet would, I the proposition that the government has a compelling interest in shielding children from "indecent" speech: Speech that depicts or describes "sexual or excretory activities or organs" in "patently offensive terms," whether the speech is pornographic or to me to be equally applicable to commercial distributors of indecency and noncommercial ones. Perhaps the court can ultimately be persuaded to draw a distinction between the two; it would, I think, be an uphill battle, but speech) or as a speech restriction (you may not say certain things unless you contrary. But such a burden might still be upheld if it's the least restrictive means of shielding children. I think one can make a considerably stronger case on this score for the constitutionality of the rating requirement explain why I believe it doesn't appreciably affect the legal analysis: The other technological alternatives, in my view, will not constitute the "less response does not discuss in detail the PICS model, but I believe that the points it raises are generally applicable to PICS.) They doubtless decrease the problem. As I said in the article, they may seems to me that the spillover will always be there, and the court will always have to make the same "hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children." Private screening mechanisms may make the choice somewhat business? Does Bill Gates hope to buy out the top guns in the journalism field, to mind is, "If you can't beat them, buy them." Congratulations, sellouts. You crime is going for market share, rather than creating a new market. This is not to find enough bandwidth in a day to properly digest enlightened journalism, much less to enjoy a little poetry. But as I slavishly grind away at the neurotic?) operating system engaged in symmetric multitasking. articles featured the authors reading their visionary musings into digital audio format. One convenience of a paper magazine that will take the digital variety a while to match is portability. However the paper variety will never where this might lead, presume for a moment that the average automobile will discriminating commuters and professional drivers some intellectual refuge from the endless tirade of mindless drivel currently broadcast by the common or two more a week, when we'd rather bail outta this rotten sweatshop before the sun goes down, won't be as appealing an expenditure for our meager discretionary income as say, three pitchers of beer or a couple of baseball game tickets. There's more free stuff available online to fill up the time when our lower cortex is busy arranging electrons on the screen. And so you have really not find a single writer who has a problem with the Promise Keepers? Not mass organization of fundamentalist Christian men who want to wear the pants at feminists, how about one bored journalist and one person who actually believes that equality for women is a meaningful concept. Although you wouldn't know it from the PK publicity mill, there are quite a few of us out here. finance can tell you that return analysis in the absence of accompanying risk analysis is incomplete. That's why investing in stocks (usually) pays better examples in which leveraged buying of equities generates large rates of return, and then proceeds to throw those numbers into his analysis without any The point is that it's the degree of leverage, not the tax shelters, generating an implausible example in order to come up with some big return numbers elementary finance and a balanced viewpoint in charge of writing a tax piece. Thyself," draws his main conclusion by misunderstanding a basic tenet of economic theory. His article describes profit maximization as if it were the central behavioral assumption of economics. It isn't. Utility maximization is. While they sound similar, the two principles are extremely different. A Profit Maximizer maximizes the amount of money it has. A Utility Maximizer wants to acquire many things, including cash, but also such things as trips to the tries to both make the point that profit maximization doesn't explain all human behavior (of course it doesn't, and no economist thinks it does), and that the the money: "plain old greed should be adequate to explain nearly everything in studying financial markets aren't in them, only theorizing about them. Their choice of career should have been the first sign that they have interest in reported in the papers won't make it into any of the stories in it didn't remind me of public radio's recurrent flirtation with conservative commentators whenever Congress reconsiders its funding. Where do these people get their diet of opinion, anyway? to attribute his current courageous (albeit quixotic) stance as some kind of practices of this or any other company, and not with the company itself (or attempts to corner the future of computing, and to belittle him with the contract terms, and the Department of Justice is doing a fair job of policing Menace") just don't get it. Any honest observer must ask a fundamental question: What if the software business is a natural monopoly? that due to the nature of the product and market, the industry will be question: Is the market structured so that one company is likely to have a huge returns." This simply means that the costs of producing an application always buyers. This result obtains because the cost of producing another unit of software is, for all practical purposes, zero. This doesn't necessarily mean programmers, doing basic research, or even (gasp) in extra profits. But the wrongful behavior. Indeed its actions are generally consistent with consumers is subject to "positive network externalities." This means that users get an extra benefit when others are using the same software. For many years, I used it up and switched to MS Word. Why? Because all my colleagues were using MS Word, and messily converting files back and forth just never worked that well. Many people think that there is something illegitimate about this type of cost, but remember, this is a real cost. As consumers, we may not be better off with only one word processor that uses a single file format. But then again, we may be, and it would seem the marketplace has rendered some sort of decision. other intellectually honest approach is to advocate wholesale government regulation, a strategy that most agree would be a spectacular failure (and is a Menace?" I am sorry that they were not given more space to flesh out the details and evidence that support their position. I do believe that the administration has used the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect attention away from the fact that it (the administration) has no plan to see more abuse and neglect because they are trained to see more. Clearly, to bid for what they perceive to be diminished resources. However, there are indicate strongly that it is very unlikely that there is any kind of major increase in the rate of child maltreatment in the country. scientist in me always wants more honest data analysis. On the other hand, many that we rarely use the data or even reference the studies beyond a cursory balance, though, I think that as the administration is going to fall back on of life; its popularity has very little to do with economics, and a lot to do Mount Rainier, or walk past trees that have been around for thousands of years. It is the threat that all this will be destroyed by commercialism one day that image and toward substance. In the end, when you walk through Pike Place request for the editors of Slate. I read Slate because the articles are he'd have discovered that a new set of entrepreneurs was born out of the workers were trying their hands at anything to make a buck. understand and support the publishing of "controversial" opinions, his take on child makes one eligible for a student loan, no prospective college student is dumb enough to think that the money from a loan would even approach the costs of raising a child. This eligibility requirement does not encourage issue with the regulation that stipulates automatic eligibility for a student eligibility factor is a bad one, but for entirely different reasons. Where the author suggests that parental financial status be offered as grounds to deny the eyes of the law, and parents should have the right to decide whether or not While default rates for student loans are high, these defaulters are not the children of rich parents trying to milk the system Would you choose to pay because state schools are cheaper is disgustingly elitist. After all, we are that almost guarantees him or her a job that will equip him or her to both pay author, while making a somewhat convincing argument to those unfamiliar with with student loans. His fears make sense in the world of words, but they are not justified by the reality young adults face today. now famous), but this article is a bunch of nonsense. Names," except casually. There are economists who get into that kind of as a white blood corpuscle defending the body of economics against the invading establishmentarian guarding of the gates actually goes against the scientific point to very difficult fields in academia: sociology, political science, psychology, and anthropology. They are difficult, since they deal with called "people." That they cannot simply "assume away" the complications (as economists usually do) makes these subjects inherently more difficult than critical thinking, preventing adaptation to new eras and events. Of course, economics can easily fail as a science while surviving or prospering as an always cite an important historical precedent, still relevant today. Back in the 1930s, the main school in economics was one (very similar to today's show that mass unemployment was impossible, or temporary, or unimportant. But along came an economist who used a somewhat vague, literary, empiricist style off working in multinational factories than living off garbage dumps, we should respect the multinationals for their contribution and avoid policies establishing basic labor standards. But the comparison should be between what was done and what should have been done, not what would have occurred otherwise. Consider the following: A boat captain comes upon a drowning woman since the woman is better off than she would have been otherwise, the boat captain is to be admired and rewarded for what he has done. My complaints about valid concerns as to the potential effectiveness of international labor would not improve the lives of Third World workers. The capital owners (and First World consumers) are collecting significant "rents" from these activities. It may be possible to force them to share these more equitably with the workers. Back to the example: If the boat captain is restricted to only prices. That is why there is this boom in foreign manufacturing, and that is why "Dollar Stores" are so popular. When a consumer can walk into a store and, for only one dollar, purchase something that was manufactured in the Third World, most consumers can understand why the person who made that item earns pair of sneakers that were assembled cheaply in some Third World country. and the United States. Nor can we often comprehend the far bleaker alternatives to these jobs that exist in the industrializing Third World. equation. If arrests, imprisonments, and worse prevent workers in Third World countries from making claims for better wages and working conditions, then parental rights with support for child abuse. I abhor child abuse and feel that the abusers should be punished, but corporal discipline is different. behave in a way that can cause harm to himself or to other children, a spanking can be extremely effective. I do support parents who don't believe in corporal spanking, more power to them. But I think the most damage is done to children would have everyone believe that my wife and I are evil or maladjusted because we have spanked our children. But we are highly responsible parents who have of logic and lack of understanding of what it means to be a good parent. ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic that makes human cloning insidious. Once human cloning is perfected, as Those who have access to it. Who will have access to it? Those who live in technologically advanced countries and have the financial resources to afford that they aren't outnumbered by those threatening masses of other races on what they consider their own territory. He defines genocide as "seeking to eliminate that which is different," and argues that bans on cloning fall into that category. But cloning does not produce "that which is different." It produces the same product repeatedly. Bans against human cloning are the only protection the average citizen has against Big Brother social and genetic engineering. both biological parents are between two and three times as likely as other children to commit crimes, to drop out of school, to get pregnant in their that these problems are associated with children of divorced parents, only that they're problems of children "raised without both biological parents." That includes many illegitimate children, orphans, and abandoned children. Someone truly interested in understanding the causes might want to know how many of these children are raised in poverty, are born to drug addicts, or had fathers who never married or even lived with their mothers. Someone without such a big ax to grind might also look into a comparison of statistics for children raised compare them with children raised by two biological parents in deeply unhappy childhood abandonment, and pin the blame entirely on the reforms in the divorce laws: "Only now are we beginning to appreciate the extent of the damage done," he writes. Fine. Let's just see if he remembers this next time the subject of aspects of what are very minor works. And his appraisal of actors and acting is and perfunctory posturing as some controlled experiment in caricature and unbecoming of anyone who is supposed to make informed aesthetic judgments. One would think a magazine like Slate would hire a film commentator who has the Clean Air Act: Polluters who reduce their toxic output beyond requirements can sell the right to molest the environment to others less willing or less In effect, he suggests the government purchase reproductive rights, at least opposition on the right used to tell us that "a man can do anything with his most personal property? Can't she do with it what she will? time, I am struck by what I find to be considerable conceptual confusion as well as an absence of fundamental analysis based on solid biology and an intrusion by the government upon the individual. True, the government already makes or withholds payments based on a number of individual conditions, including the birth of a child, etc. However, there is a quantum leap in intrusion levels when payments are made based on something that is put under argument that beneficiaries will get paid more rather than less for something is disingenuous: They will be paid less than would otherwise be the case if they refuse to submit, a point that no doubt will be made by many program debate seems to ignore the biological forces at work. While underclass underlying reproductive strategy is a wide dissemination of genes to numerous offspring in the statistical hope that a few will make it. The proposed initiative equals an attempt to "buy people out" of their biological destiny. be "neutered," with their vital energies being redirected in potentially said this, and given that there presumably are no panaceas, it might be appropriate to proceed with caution and let different proposals compete in the interested in interfering with the sexual and reproductive rights of Them, those other than Us? If we turn the tables, and ask ourselves what laws we would choose to enact to curtail our sexual and reproductive rights, it becomes immediately clear how offensive and obtrusive such laws are to the rights of Them. What law would I be willing to sign against myself to curtail my sexual and reproductive freedoms? If I were certified insane, I might want the government to assign a guardian who would act to protect my reproductive rights, as I would not have the mental faculties do so myself. Otherwise, I cannot imagine any situation in which I would choose to have some business by telling me if, when, and how I can have sex or reproduce. that these sexual and reproductive intrusions are typically proposed by white men for black women should raise a red flag for anyone listening to such Amendment to solve the welfare problem ("Good Jobs at Now Wages"). You should consider this truism: "For every complex problem there is a simple solution, and it is always wrong." Now Wages") did not mention the book from which it was likely inspired, Unfortunately, a reader might consider the article merely humorous, describing an impossible proposition, where in fact, the basics of The Servile slavery in the light of the increasingly degraded condition of the welfare class becomes more evident. Slavery has been part of organized human society for thousands of years; people should not assume that it has breathed its last. Despite its obvious drawbacks, I doubt it is the worst way to organize society, and it may be better than our present narcissistic fashion. Polygamy"). There is a difference between adultery and divorce. I was Dole and imply they are the same. Divorce is caused by many things, including adultery, but to imply there is no difference between the two is just Omnivore") reminds me of a perplexing phenomenon I have observed during the past few years. I am talking about the apparent growth in the popularity of found that blue was almost universally disliked as a food color. correct, what has changed in the Zeitgeist of the eating public to cause blue food to become acceptable? Do you think its rise in popularity parallels that of blue lipstick and blue nail polish? Are we talking about postmodern same info in any of the mainstream press. Thoughtful and insightful? I don't think so. I guess you can still fool some of the people some of the time. assurances that your corporate sponsor would never influence editorial content, Check out all the adjectives used in supposedly "evenhanded" stories) that your write something about Singer." If Singer himself had been on the line, I could literary milieu. Of course, the evidence was everywhere. separated from classmates who were headed to City Hall, but he decided to continue across the bridge alone. In rhapsodic language reminiscent of Henry the trolleys and the crush of people and the dark roofs of Manhattan. "Only the tenements of the East Side," he writes, "suddenly stilled the riot in my that sign stilled his heart with calming thoughts of home (where the mother) or whether it momentarily halted the reach of his escaping imagination express multiple selves simultaneously. He once told me that he had considered Literature --mark it as the sort of book only a grateful child of immigrants could write. Who else would tune his ear so finely for traces of an emerging national consciousness, while teasing out the finer points of its economic, magisterial "we" in speaking about literary matters in this country, had the assertiveness of the newly enfranchised. Once, after I got to know him better, high culture and sent for their past only long after they had established knitting together the two disparate elements that fueled his own unique literature in particular as if he had discovered it himself. He imparted to everything he wrote that same feeling of magical discovery he describes risking their own lives in the dark but that younger people were another matter. Needless to say, I was terrified, creeping along the Saw Mill Parkway the darkness. This was the same approach to Manhattan, I suddenly realized, York seemed a place of the imagination, a place where life opened up. My heart traveling happily toward New York, still talking about books and people with passion and devotion, and still holding out the promise of a New World. depicting the arguments of those of us who think the economy is now capable of Economy: What it Really Means") in Business Week was much more caricature of it, then decide for themselves. Business Week has right in urging the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates. If the Fed had economic output. The unemployment rate would have been at least a half rising productivity, and rising real wages. Happy New Year, Professor see just how helpful an Internet magazine can be. By all means read the a link to that essay in my original piece), as well as the earlier articles on the site, and ask yourself whether they did or did not appear to claim that our favorable measured growth and inflation performance can be explained by unmeasured productivity growth. If they did claim or even suggest that, then Business Week has indeed been saying something very silly. Oh, and number of Business Week readers have contacted me since reading my piece and told me that the explanation of the speedometer fallacy was new to sources, that a hidden productivity boom was not only a possible explanation of low measured inflation but indeed the leading candidate. a fallacy to invoke unmeasured productivity as the source of our good numbers. (And I don't mean a judicious acknowledgment that there may be something to Extremism in the defense of arithmetic is no vice.) If he is, then I am at least prepared to consider the possibility that I (and everyone else I know) have been misinterpreting all those articles. But I would like to have the judge discovers that he is presiding over a case involving a close relative. The only ethical course of action is to step down and have some other judge handle the case. Even if the judge tries his best to be fair and unbiased, he can never be sure of his own motives. In addition, the judge's own reputation is at risk, as people will not know if the relative in question was found wants to prove its integrity, it should either refuse the Constitution guarantees the right to "petition the Government for a redress of than exercising the right to speak or to worship. Clearly, there are sleazy and unethical ways to go about it, but lobbying itself is vital to our democratic solution to the problem of corporate money in politics is to reduce the role of government in all our lives. Until that happens, corporations are irresponsible if they fail to pursue the interests of their shareholders, employees, and the end of Angels With Dirty Faces is just plain wrong. The entire heart of that character was his utter fearlessness at the prospect of dying; Rocky "goes yellow" only so that his reputation will be sullied among the youthful wannabe gangsters who idolize him. It is an act of renunciation that ennobles him in death and is undertaken solely due to the entreaty of his old pal Jerry all ambiguous in the ending of this movie not only calls into question her judgment but forces one to wonder if she's even seen the damned thing. idea what he is talking about when it comes to the question of Java ("Weak Java"). It is in fact a mountainous island in the South Pacific, part of the very happens to be the site of one of the world's most important archeological discoveries, known as Java Man, and of vast coffee plantations (hence the common usage of the term java to mean coffee). These simple facts get characterization of the whole Java conflict as a matter of convenience for coffee shops and some of the nation's largest defense contractors, who reap billions annually from arms sales to the repressive regime of President residents of the Emerald City sip unreasonably cheap caff lattes (subsidized with blood), ponder the importance of bandwidth, and root for the KIDDING? Who do you think your readers are? Bob Dole? largely undocumented phenomenon? Certainly not. We wouldn't call it "pop" if it wasn't popular. Surely your intended readers are keen observers of the world, much like you try to present yourselves. Why, then, does pop need explaining? without cheeky "background" pieces. It's as if you're explaining this facet of celebrating violence is to admit that you haven't actually listened to the of the Medicare nettle. His action on this front will remain a model of saint and no statesman, but his early conduct as speaker showed promise. He the Democrats and the media have preferred to knife him in the back. All that Since none of the staff told you, I will: Don't publish it. It is not: interesting, funny, or newsworthy. It is: disgusting, childish, and unnecessary. I MAY decide to pay for the witty articles and intelligent social commentary in Slate when you start charging. I promise I will NOT pay for this tell you how really disappointed I was, when reading the first entry of the too much. Don't you edit the diary submissions of your contributors? Was it absolutely necessary to use that particular word? Just because it's a diary If that's a contradiction, then no one could ever properly say, "God gave us those kids," or even "God gave us that kid," because, as you know, there is midwives, even mothers and, to a much lesser extent, fathers. that's one thing. The alleged contradiction would therefore have nothing to do with the number of specialists involved or the length of stay in the hospital. It would have only to do with your theological presupposition. But if you allow for the possibility of a sovereign, you should not be surprised that He uses become in the last few years. If they can't have their own man in the Oval acknowledge that Lee is well qualified for the post he seeks. Yet the senator is trying to kill Lee's nomination, complaining that he might be an activist at the Justice Department. Hatch worries that Lee would use his new position to Western civilization. But it's obvious to the rest of us that contesting this nomination on the basis that Lee might be an activist in government is rank unless they swear not to try to sway public opinion or undo existing laws, then every congressional Republican with a hankering to overturn Roe vs. Wade for Free Trade," suggests that the opponents of imports from countries with poor working conditions are in fact being disingenuous: They don't really oppose the bad conditions. What they oppose is the competition. But for me, and for many others, there is a legitimate concern about whether we, through our purchases, are encouraging the abuse of others. And despite purchased was produced by laborers who were beaten and tortured in order to unfortunately, difficult to determine reliably if the labor that went into a particular item was handled humanely. But that doesn't mean that the issue of free trade, I couldn't agree more with "A Raspberry for Free opponents of fast track. They are not only specious, but also deeply should look beyond the intellectual caliber of these arguments and consider the political realities that sustain them. And here free traders may only have that jobs lost to free trade are more than made up for by jobs gained, and make quite low and that we have the most to gain by global trade liberalization. benefits of free trade overcome the fact that some will lose in the more dynamic economy that aggressive free trade creates, and that the very dynamism of free trade can cast a penumbra of insecurity that goes well beyond those who this, which many progressive supporters of free trade have endorsed, is a combination of aggressive free trade coupled with programs aimed to cushion and compensate for the social dislocations which free trade causes. This is, in problem is that progressive supporters of free trade have been able to get for the kind of dynamic economic order we're clearly moving into. A that the politics of the situation are simple by any means. But getting one and not the other has played a major role in creating the increasingly successful bigoted majority that then executed the sacrificial lambs. While the comparison than similarities, are what stand out. For starters, there has been no public outcry to ban or do away with the Patriots, as there was with the anarchists. implications of the movement. Rather, the opposite has occurred. The mass media in general have covered the rise of the Patriots only spottily, rushing to report the daily incidents the movement inspires and doing little to examine for the nation to deal with the "voices of hate" that inspire the Patriots to the radio, it seemed, scurried to proclaim his or her innocence: "Not me! I of us whose gasoline rhetoric has fueled the Patriots' bonfires of paranoia. And we still have not stopped throwing it about with glee. Secondly, the Patriot movement is at the opposite end of the political spectrum. With its route to the executioner, the public at large has been strangely mute on main point is worth making: Executions exist not for the actual pursuit of justice but rather for wreaking vengeance. However, he should consider the fact fruits of his own belief system. It may be a sickening view, but there is observations about patently obvious things in society. But they don't change matter of fact, instead of focusing on polling's farcical contributions to an without the manipulations (subtle or otherwise). The universal credibility the evils of index investing, threatens to mislead Slate's audience of successful investors and policy wonks. There is no commons problem in index investing. It is true that markets are efficient because securities research, and that index investors invest without doing research (or paying others to do will shift away from indexing. In the commons problem, there is no reason not to overgraze if your neighbor is overgrazing as well. In a securities market, market is relatively inefficient), you can fleece them. hypothesis (securities research is both necessary for market efficiency and a accessible form in a law review article, "Efficient Markets, Costly the Internet from the desktop will help people to use the Internet. It is hard completely disagree with the implication and reasoning here. It is the purpose The whole point of this area of law is to examine such patterns. If Rule's idea were right, then companies from other countries, which, for example, flood the interest, even if they are seeking a stranglehold on the market. The challenge of antitrust law is to grapple with such questions. statements that, to me, demonstrate a merely superficial understanding of the an economic phenomenon known as "network externalities." I believe that although he understands the economic phenomenon, he completely ignores how operating system market. The next paradigm shift was supposed to be the OS market in order to minimize the damage to its core business (the Windows systems. They were never intended to be the software that gives fundamental directions to a PC, and I doubt that they ever will be. They still run as and the browser are the same in a functional sense. browser software circumvents OS considerations by having a common interface no matter what OS you're using. That was the beauty of it (and the nightmare in Bill Gates' mind, because you don't have to be running Windows software to run functionality (Internet functionality) onto its existing OS, and claim it is a modification of the OS. How intelligent people can buy that argument is beyond me. As far as I understood it, Windows didn't run on my Mac. Windows didn't run sound even vaguely similar? Rick Rule, you are a fool for buying that argument. It is this very basic misunderstanding that allows you to delve into unfairly eliminated competition. The only real test that this company has faced again trying to eliminate this threat unfairly. Shame on you for defending this frequently leveled charges. However, she did neglect to mention a more dimensional model makes more sense and would more closely mirror the real world. Of course, such a diagnostic system may prove to be more unwieldy in the end and to annoy insurance companies (who hold frightening sway over all By definition, a disease is an entity that has a known etiology, and as focus almost exclusively on description. Mental disorders should not be considered "diseases," though many may have some biological underpinnings. a human construction, created in order to describe the variety of human therapeutic intervention. Without some guiding framework (even a framework notion in a recent survey of public participation in the arts published by the National Endowment for the Arts. According to numbers extrapolated from a poll, National Crime Victimization Survey. (Has anyone in your household been mugged survey that asks whether you like to go to the theater, opera, ballet, etc., subtly begs for affirmative answers. And in fact, the five year increase us nothing about the quality or quantity of high culture being created in the United States today. And in fact, the new study's upbeat tone cuts directly institutions are elitist, complacent, and largely hostile to popular audiences. numbers can never resolve the inherently subjective question of cultural health. For a consensus about whether a lot of masterpieces were painted or into account how well artists are doing as well as how many butts are in Index. This is a measure based on statistics culled from various sources that give a clue about the health of different art forms. Here's how it works. The doing. But in a year, we should be able to say whether they're doing better or derives from three more compelling factors. The first is the number of weeks than attempting to gauge quality, I have included all books that have literary aspirations or are regarded as literature by most reviewers: Cold no. As opposed to the commonly cited figure of total book sales, this number is Penguin keeps most of the world's great literature in print. here is that while the first number gives a sense of the availability of opera as whole, the second number gives a sense of whether new work is being added to thing with orchestral music. It would be nice to include chamber music, but there are simply no useful statistics. Lastly, while I wasn't able to find any reliable numbers on jazz performance, the Recording Industry Association of museum attendance is a reasonable proxy for how many people are experiencing more people pay attention to art, it's becoming easier to get by as an artist. The other useful figure is the number of people working as artists. According we're looking at high culture. Our other measure is the total number of amounts so that I don't have to adjust for inflation in future. These numbers a rise in attendance at school performances. There are two useful measures of year. The other is the average number of contract weeks for dancers at major been declining, while professional dancers are finding slightly more work. This plausible indicator for architecture. Nor have I devised one for criticism, in the arts as amateur singers, writers, and painters. What the index does do is establish a baseline. Next fall, we should be able to come back and say something meaningful about what kind of year the incarnations as political handler, pundit, writer, etc. I loved his I just don't care about taking apart these ads. They're pretty transparent to Over?" begged the more important question of whether government scientists War Syndrome debacle unravels. The conclusion to be drawn from my nine years of reporting on the AIDS epidemic for the New York Native is a somber one: Patients, activists, and uncritical journalists have been led down a tragic "obsessed" with finding a vaccine to protect against the wrong virus, and if pathogen, but there will be other surprises related to the AIDS epidemic yet to point of the privatization argument: Social Security changes people's behavior. Most importantly, it reduces the incentive to save for retirement. If Social Security were changed to a funded scheme, where the payments would be used for real investment instead of being transferred for current consumption, the national savings rate would rise. (That is, Social Security taxes would be real savings instead of merely transfers. It would be equivalent to everyone saving for themselves.) The higher savings rate would raise the growth rate. The resulting larger pie could be split up so that everyone, both during and after the transition, is better off. (For a good exposition of this argument, see transferred to current retirees for current consumption, not "saved" as government bonds. So, the argument that we would simply have to find new buyers the long run, when Social Security will stop running surpluses. attack the privatization argument on two main fronts. Maybe the existence of Social Security doesn't really lower people's retirement savings. Or, maybe higher savings wouldn't really increase growth. But you cannot attack the argument for being a shell game. The point is that you are not merely slicing pocket should be lumped with that money belonging to other people that he would right, though: How other people spend their wealth is none of his business. in his review ("Gone With the Wind"). That's the last time I read a book review in an opinion, not all the details of the plot! If the author uses a plot with a surprise ending, he probably wants the reader to be surprised. Wood should not have done this; you should never have published his review. Can you change it now before you reveal the plot to other innocent readers like me? instead of "not guilty." Not so fast. The newspaper has a very good reason. verdict, to guard against the word not being dropped inadvertently." Now many other newspapers have their own styles, even when it comes to "innocent" vs. "not guilty." But the technical difference is secondary to possible libel success in gathering information on dangers such as nuclear- or Young University graduate probably knows a lot more about the world than his they seem to stem more from lack of accountability than from the basic nature the Java approach is "slower." It later says that Java is unsuitable for Technology has been commercially demonstrated that runs Java programs at very verified once, then translated to efficient machine code, and then stored on does restrict what an unsigned applet can do, and those criticisms are fair. But the criticism of Java on performance grounds, as if the performance problems were inherent in the security model, is not fair and is not circumstances. The ultimate effect is that this article treads close to the religious war, no one is neutral except the atheists. Java is a great and very the world won't help the people using today's browsers, as you yourself admit. fact, it's routinely used for that purpose. But it's difficult to get the shared secret key to the other person (or people) in the first place. long document is known as a "digest," not a signature. It is a widely held but most popular signature algorithm, works, because it happens to be both a mentioned one solution to the problem of the corruptible system administrator: "secret sharing." It is possible to divide up secrets (such as passwords) among several people such that only a subset of them of a certain size (a majority, for instance) can recover the original. That way, a single corrupt authority part of the article might have underplayed the security threats to users. It's true that nothing serious has really happened yet, but very little of value (to a hacker) is in people's computers these days. That may change fast; if desktop banking (including check writing) becomes widespread, for example, then the incentive for hackers to use their discoveries for something other than that security is a serious issue, I reiterate that the hysterics with which security stories are played out in the media are generally overblown. Correspondence discussion "Cycles, Waves, and Endings in History," and I agree with those who say that the generational conflict is driving electoral politics and the same systems they want to destroy. The future of democracy through a D Cup You're Wearing, or Are You Just Glad to See Me? before the male version of this trend plays itself out thoroughly enough to bullet jock will signal the pinnacle, I suppose. But the past decades have embraced gay iconic sexuality consistently at a lag of five years or so. From 1950s fitness magazines to Batman's crotch bulge in the '60s, the International And just take a look at the current Jockey underwear packaging if you need to sociological implications are huge. Penis envy is spreading. And surely there's library, and anything that can be attributed to largely male decision believes that the discovery of statistically unlikely "secret codes" in the Torah proves the existence of God. Even if we accept the dubious premise that the existence of God can be proven scientifically, it is extremely naive to say that the occurrence of an unlikely event would do the trick. know which is more depressing: the fact that some people's faith is so weak they seek scientific approval of their beliefs, or the fact that they believe a recent book review titled "Crime and Truth" that powerful procedural safeguards for defendants allow some guilty people to go free, but that these procedures are justified to prevent miscarriages of justice and to deter misconduct among points. First, these rules harden public attitudes toward everyone accused of a crime. Second, they feed into the corrosive cynicism within the justice system. is little motivation to enforce the rules, and people often find ways of bending rules that they regard as arbitrary and silly. For example, as the most glaring injustice these days is not the wrongful conviction of the innocent. It is the remarkably cruel treatment of some people who are actually imprisonment for committing three muggings, it seems laughably irrelevant to responds: I don't think so. There is PC on the left, no doubt, but this episode is hardly an illustration of it. The idea that a writer who despised the stock market. In "A Brief History of Taxes," the chart she runs with her advise, because it accounts for neither the efficiency of the market in discounting changes in tax law throughout the legislative process, nor the There are other minor variables at work, including differences that occur damage to the economy because the other variables were positive. Taxes" was indeed brief, though perhaps appropriately so, given the very that regardless of their effects on aggregate consumption and investment, tax true, as she notes, that Republicans adhere to the questionable belief "that for the economy and the financial markets, those same Republicans also tend to believe that wealth is inherently the property of the individual who created not a subtle point, and it is certainly not one that Republicans have ever been 15-percent income tax cut. The accompanying "It's your money" slogan, while unconvincing to both voters and pundits, is fundamentally true. It is also essential to consider it when weighing the merits or ills of a proposed change in tax rates. Individuals' claims to their wealth and income must of course be balanced by the need to finance governmental activities, no matter how few and inconsequential they may be. For that reason, arguments for the complete elimination of taxes would be absurd, a fact that almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, can recognize. Equally lacking in wisdom, however, consequences while ignoring completely the effects they have on is. The marketplace is me, and you, and everyone else who wants medical care. How can ignoring people's medical wishes be considered a good thing? "Selfless"? It would be the very height of selfishness and arrogance for the has not learned to view the big picture: A society that can meet its tissue lives are temporarily screwed, but businesses do not exist to hand out paychecks; they exist because they do something useful in an efficient manner. printed an article dealing with principles and terms from chemistry, you would pass it by a chemist, wouldn't you? Why then do you let someone who has not the like to commend you on your publication. You will go down in history as one of the first and best attempts to use the Internet to spread intellectual debate your publication has been your ability to rise above other media outlets and provide voices for all political groups and evenhanded coverage of all news members as "scumbags." Aside from becoming part of the event instead of just reporting on it, this reflected a poor style and vocabulary choice. Please don't lower yourselves to tabloid language. You have been an important and upstanding publication, and I would hate to lose you now. of tax credits in "Forgetting the Present" are too sweeping, and deserve a response. stimulate job hiring. These usually fail. Most businesses find that their present employees already qualify for the credit. However, targeted credits It gave the economy an immediate shot in the arm, helping businesses modernize and stimulating jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in the tool and credit aimed at encouraging job training for former welfare recipients would achieve similar results. Without a tax credit, business have no incentive to powerful, necessary therapy for the treatment of severe depression. Furthermore, to include it in a list with the two single most destructive drugs communicate the fact that much of what we try to communicate isn't really worth communicating. If we're going to be upfront about the meaninglessness of our potential for the news media. They could cover twice as many stories if they tonight: As the presidential race nears the home stretch, Bob Dole and prime minister was slain some months ago by a smiling ideological idiot. Therefore, your continual use of "Kill him," as in, "When we told Bill Gates the name of the person responsible for the mistake, he said, 'Have him killed,' match, the author characterizes a perceived backlash against technology as "Sierra Club thinking." But Sierra Club hardly sees any threats to humanity The nation's oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization could ill technological innovation. In addition to giving us lifesaving medicines and better products, science and technology are improving our ability to live in an economically robust nation using environmentally sound business practices. We depend on scientific methods and technology to assess the changing conditions of our planet. Science and technology are the tools that provide us with methods such as bioremediation for cleaning up oil spills, and data on the merit our suspicion is a blind faith in the ability of machines and chemicals to make up for the destruction of the natural environment that ensures humankind has the clean water, air, and abundant resources we need to Managers do not say to themselves, "I am going to ignore the qualifications of this black person even though it will hurt my bottom line." Rather, a racist would do well to remember that, while mathematics is a wonderfully consistent, logical system of symbols, those very characteristics greatly limit its usefulness in describing the decisions we humans make on a daily basis. A computer may have beat a human at chess, but we have yet to make a computer that is capable of even the most basic human emotions that guide us. discrimination is not widespread in corporations because it wouldn't be in a not exist because it would be politically embarrassing to the president. don't make hiring, promotion, and salary decisions for the vast majority of the employees in a large corporation. These decisions are made by middle management, who are free to indulge their prejudices, regardless of a calculation of what's best for the corporate bottom line. discrimination doesn't exist (in any serious form) runs up against the hard fact that research shows it to exist. This is another example of abstract economic theory ignoring reality. After all, such calculations would prove that employers never prefer relatives or cronies' kids or pretty women, that they never goof off on the golf course and that they never waste money in general, because all these things would reduce their market performance. Association and by several studies that reanalyzed the very same National you mention who endorsed The Bell Curve are partisans of a as his latest article, "Pay Scales in Black and White." economic sleight of hand, to argue that racism does not exist in corporate making racism into some financial decision on the part of rational individuals is not only wrong, but insulting. This sort of scientific objectivism is one of the major failures of applying the scientific method to economics. He sees the problem in a vacuum, instead of attempting to look at the entire picture. whites because they have not been allowed the opportunities in the past to take advantage of good jobs and good schools. Economists must remember that they are social scientists, not physicists (although they stole all of their mathematics from physics), that the representative agent does not exist in the real world, and that they must adjust their analysis accordingly. I do not mean that racism must be assumed and then disproved, although the track record of corporate thoroughly examined for all implications before even the first result is becomes less likely as it becomes more expensive. So to determine the likelihood of employer discrimination, it's certainly relevant to figure out of corporate profits," the plausibility falls dramatically. interesting observation, which is that the people who make hiring decisions in shareholders would be likely to take action to improve the performance of middle management. And again, the answer depends on how expensive it is to ignore such improvements. Nobody is claiming that corporations operate rationally or efficiently all the time. The claim is that irrational and assertion that employer discrimination has been shown to be a significant prefer relatives or cronies' kids, or that they never goof off on the golf believe he can do so. There is no doubt that nepotism and golfing are costly, theory of racial wage differentials. That's just what I was calling for in my country. All over the world, people are subjected daily to the most appalling representatives of brutal, repressive regimes. Worst of all, they must suffer in silence, knowing that a callous nation cares little about their miserable gripe about having his luggage inspected at an airport, confident of a sympathetic hearing. When it comes to righteous outrage, this nation is truly "profile" implications that really bothered him. Profiles, after all, don't usually target wealthy software executives, whereas random checks can't not impress those of us who form our opinions on defense affairs from sources other than military publicists and their media allies. crime is making a noise in behalf of the ordinary working soldier, and criticizing the complacent consortium of military bureaucrats, defense contractors, and their media sycophants who are all feathering their own nests at the expense of those who will risk their lives on our behalf. As far as decorations are concerned, one Medal of Honor is conferred for one act of bravery. Respect is due but it does not outrank a lifetime of proven courageous investigate Hack's charges instead of shooting (at) the messenger. all over the place and so the question of whether his copy is "hot" is one that depends entirely on an assessment of where the art world is, exactly, and who's he likes not much of what he has seen lately, at least does not jerk his knees The assertion is that whether the transaction takes place or not, the amount of capital held between the buyer and seller remains constant. True, and utterly buried coffee cans. It is the exchange of value between two parties which capital between buyer and seller, I see a house that was not sold, a transaction that did not take place. When that transaction fails to take place, a host of third parties fails to benefit from it. Each of these parties, from lawyers to accountants to gardeners, will then not spend the income that they did not earn when the transaction failed to take place. analysis of the political requirements for an acceptable punishment to accompany censure, if indeed censure is chosen in lieu of impeachment. The key point is that there must be a humbling element, without complete humiliation, and that a purely financial penalty such as a fine would not be enough. perceived element of strong moral rebuke associated with the forfeiture of retirement benefits. Perceived analogies would be to "rogue cops" who are not prosecuted but must resign from the force and lose their pension (at least on television). Loss of office expense allowances would carry an implicit message that, while we don't want to force you out of office, we really don't want to suffer a penalty that is often associated in the public mind with officials who are required to resign to avoid being removed or criminally prosecuted. The kind of service he understands, and he has to have someone else do that! their mouse clicks say yes yes." This is not a contradiction. Rather, it is an Suppose the world consisted of only two people. If both know nothing about the other one is very unhappy, since he or she is at a disadvantage. Now, unhappiness by reading the info, settling for moderate unhappiness. Expand this to hundreds of millions of people, and it's obvious that no agreement can hold, especially when some of them actually do want the information. whether to print damning information about the hypocritical politician. If you don't print it, someone else might beat you to it, and you'll have to talk about it anyway. Does this mean that you will be happier when the information defense in the "Politicians and Privacy" dialogue, I would add that although I do not find invasions of privacy acceptable, people do wish to know something about the relationship between the individual and his or her work. argument, especially the point on hypocrisy, but for historical reasons. We have no problem accepting biographical criteria for literature. In fact, there is an entire school of criticism devoted to the relationship between author and work. Why shouldn't politicians' lives be open to examination in the same historical reasons, attention should be paid to the private life of the politician or to the idea of the "work" as an expression of the politician's inner being. If it turns out that the politician is a fraud or a hypocrite, we with family members whose lives are literally threatened by peanuts in their today. If you think this is amusing, think how much fun you could have with sniggering opportunities. A sad, adolescent performance you should be ashamed mention the fact that peanut products are easy to keep, very popular, and must be responsible for determining, as early as possible, which allergic reactions will be a part of their lives. It is absurd to rely upon any "controlling legal authority" to do that for you! and their products are astoundingly good for us, as is the industry that keeps them before us. Killing either on the basis of gene pool considerations for can kill and have killed. This is not a laughing matter. Prudence" as a rule. However, this morning I dipped into the column to see out whenever possible, believing that single women are 'Miss' and married ones therefore it is important to know a woman's marital status immediately, while men are allowed to remain judged for who and what they are, regardless of their marital status? I find this inane and the title "Ms." an excellent solution to women's entry into equality in the workplace and society. I do not think it is anyone's business whether or not I am married (I am) and have kept my "maiden" name as many married women now do. I am sorry to say that the Dear Prudence column remains one I will not visit in the future and, I suspect, one that does wannabe" is a truly low blow. For one thing, I don't rifle through people's underwear drawers to get my stories. Nor do I try to pass off rumors as fact. I not in the habit of being photographed surrounded by kindling and tied to a tree. But I suppose these are minor differences that shouldn't get in the way of the truly important things. Brock is still welcome at National leads him to the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons. Franklin writes under the impression that, as the law is a practical art and not a science, the only in seeking resolution to nonscientific matters: morality, justice, ethics. is ultimately correct; radical reforms are needed. Nevertheless, the answers sexist. It's idiotic," I ask you: Isn't sexism idiotic? To what are we Therefore, index investing leads to inefficient markets. The flaw in the anyone who does even an iota of research could make a killing by buying index investing increases, the return to market research increases. We need not lose sleep, therefore, about any lack of market research. index invests, an individual should research the market. The paradox is solved by realizing that everyone need not follow the same strategy. Index investing makes sense for those of us who don't have the time or inclination to closely monitor our investments. Researching the market makes sense if you are good at it and you are willing to do it full time. Index investors rely on researchers to keep the market tolerably efficient. Researchers rely on index investors to leave enough opportunity for them to make money based on their research. In responds: It's possible that, as at least one other reader has suggested in if indexing goes far enough, the marginal returns to research will become so great that research will pay, the market will be made efficient, and everyone will live happily ever after. It's also possible that this will not happen. In Corp. is a great deal at a given price, but in such a world, who will pay me the price I think I deserve? Certainly not the indexers. Indexing probably has already made the stock market less efficient, simply because a growing proportion of the money invested is now indifferent to ratios of price to performance and other measures of value, not to mention expectations of growth. Bad companies are already being subsidized in this way, and to the extent that the larger economy is any kind of commons, indexing is undermining it. and help to drive down, or at least moderate, the currently obscene levels of manage alike. Can't we get past the gender stereotypes and just evaluate United States, it's capitalism mixed with greed run amok. illogical argument reflects poorly on his journalistic abilities and the satellite dishes, but it was strangely satisfying to learn that a leading economist was so thoroughly ripped off in the purchase of his dish. Next time any economist assumes that consumers behave rationally, they should be forced screwdriver, and a pair of pliers. And, unlike Stein's "professionally" warranty. Whether it is rational for a person to make the decision I made the prospective marginal tax on the person's estate. Considering these factors, I think that my decision was rational for me; it that people always make rational decisions, but I believe that they often Manhattan phone book, and so received hundreds of copies of it. I started stamps and a pen pal I could make it circle the globe another nine times all by sentence: "It has been around the world nine times." recipient of the letter is asked to make copies and send them to friends, who are instructed to do the same. Eventually, the letter becomes illegible and has almost beyond recognition. But curiously, over the years the names revert to their original spellings. I have recent copies that are almost identical to States is a notable part of the world, there are quite a few of us who don't market doesn't live in isolation. My investment in it breaks down one part of plan to get a lot of money from places other than the United States, indicating have a more expansive view of the world to decide whether the chickens are variation in valuation year by year. He is quite right to question it. The fact is that investors, myself included, have a very rough idea of what a company is we do our best. But on top of that, he asks what's new. Well, there is a activity and astronomical growth in creativity, with each development propelling us faster. One of the big ones, now widely recognized, is the computer revolution. Look at his own business, publishing. I read Slate for might be a new form of life heaving into sight: a hybrid of organic [us] with matter that is much more prosaic than human imagination and the amalgamation of but it does cause stock market valuations to soar. Economists torture themselves because they think there should be concomitant inflation, but they are now starting to see that the inflation that would normally exist as a result of such enthusiastic money printing is not happening because technology has reduced costs and improved productivity dramatically. Basically, the money printers are nicking off with much of the productivity improvements. It is just money printing, inflation did soar. But you don't see it this time. And documentation, that I am selective in my commitment to deficit reduction and rhetorical question in his column, asking if my commitment to reducing orders for the milk industry, which somehow escaped being scaled back in the Farm Bill, in large measure because it did so little to eliminate market distortions and bring needed reform to the antiquated Milk Marketing Order system, instituted in the 1930s, distorts the market, discriminates against the survives because it is defended by powerful interests who are its the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact, a dairy cartel created last year that allows six Northeastern states to fix higher prices for milk in their farmers have probably been more active than farmers in any other part of the country in calling for deregulation of this system. Bill" is also incorrect. Federal dairy supports have, in fact, been cut myth persists that the dairy program costs billions, the facts are that, in dairy industry is the only commodity group to have its support terminated by the most recent Farm Bill. Some other commodities, such as wheat and feed grains, were provided with hefty annual guaranteed government subsidies in that reduction and balancing the federal budget are serious, complex, and demanding tasks, and the policy implications of our efforts reach across the nation, even around the world. These efforts are not advanced by unsupported suggestions of though he acknowledges that it constitutes a "cartel" designed to keep dairy his press office had returned repeated calls asking about it. on the savage bestiality committed on a small child by whoever strangled her, as well as the abuse committed by her parents, who put her on display in a yours manage to develop some sense of human moral responsibility? we observe that we have too many bakers and not enough butchers, it is reasonable to suggest that we ought to reduce the tax on butchers. Our rates of saving and investment are staggeringly low, in both historical and contemporaneous contexts. There is ample reason to believe that increasing the rates of saving and investment would be beneficial to the economy. Hence, care to admit. First of all, people are going to do something with the money they have made as a result of realized capital gains. Either they will spend into some other form of investment, which will be taxed in turn. Having the purpose of tax policy should be to generate income for the government, so that it can perform its necessary and essential functions, with the least distortion the coercive power of government, those circumstances and conditions in society that he finds troubling. I would respectfully suggest that this makes him much still maintains the old liberal condescension for this perennially maligned figure. She recognizes that Chambers' Witness is "one of the great "torrential" and "lurid." She notes Chambers' "susceptibility to ridicule and was not really involved in the Communist conspiracy inside this country, but somehow fictionalized it. She implies that he was ridiculous for admiring "the Soviets' more or less total culpability for the long disaster we call the That there was a chance for meaningful cooperation with the Soviet take time from reading revisionist works to look at the revelations of the saw as the 'invincible ignorance' of a nation blinded to the 'crisis of right: The ignorance does indeed appear to be invincible. she left the Labor Department, she set up a firm to advise companies on how to she set up her business. She set up her firm to provide advice to corporations, local governments, and nonprofits on dozens of aspects of labor and marketing see if she could make some money by making the workplace work better. This was what she was trained to do, and what she was accomplished at. Remember, this hit the road, trying to help localities figure out how to get the most out of what was left and trying to help corporations make more progress on hiring Push negotiating agreements with corporations that included monitoring not involve any relationship with Operation Push. But some contracts did, and no black franchises in major franchise businesses. The companies realized they had to do better or face marketplace consequences, so they set out to hire more suggestion, sometimes because other companies had recommended her firm. Her work ended up delivering radical reductions in turnover, and that made them businessperson, provides valuable help to a developer. He gives her an proud of her career before and after the Labor Department. Apparently with anyone who goes from government to business and back, but to make it sound like real experience making progress on the critical problem of diversity in the to help us all later. When she talks about teaching kids the "culture of work," she isn't speaking dry corporate prose, nor is she speaking the deserves full and fair reporting and an open hearing. The Senate committee needs to do its job and get these issues into a forum where the nominee can respond, rather than leeching them through repeated, incorrect media stories. to dismiss her life's work as a trip through the revolving door. year's and this year's matches with great enthusiasm, and have always had a lot did not expect him to say all those things that he said. claims that the second game was the one that led to his downfall, and almost consider doing this and risking its credibility and reputation, it is a preposterous charge because whoever stepped in to help the machine would be a spokesman for the human race. This one has just become another "sports Blue is not a human and has no feelings. It is a pile of microchips. There is it made me proud to be human, too. I am also proud of his fighting stance at the press conference. He said exactly what I wanted to say: This stupid machine will not definitively beat its masters. And then there was a roar of approval programmers of Deep Blue deserve an ovation? Not to the same extent. They are still the challengers in this saga of man vs. machine. And not one of the of kids. But the goal is to have fewer persons become addicted to nicotine at an age when information about the health hazards is likely to be ignored. Many But if smoking is addictive, then it makes sense to try to keep tobacco out of the hands of kids who are too young to take the warnings seriously. regulations do not make it harder for adults to buy cigarettes. The advertising regulations may make it harder for a new product to enter the market, or to to ban smoking because of the possibility of lung damage from secondhand Turns Yellow" complement each other on the same subject: Big Brother Is calls it, is, indeed, a fatal twist of irony, incredible and troubling. away our First, Fourth, and possibly Second amendments with a simple flick of this is not a sufficient warrant for violating the privacy of an individual's of the perennial bad excuse for cameras, censorship, and regulations: It's for no society will ever find true peace and stability. There will always be a small percentage who cannot govern their own lives and who abuse freedom, but that shouldn't mean that we all have to pay the price by losing our really grabbed me. I grew up in the 1950s, at a time when the concept of the United States as a melting pot was widely preached in our schools and everyday life. Later, in the 1960s, we were told that the melting pot did not take dark meat. But now that there is clear cultural and biological assimilation, I have been surprised to see that large constituencies actually try to categorize Glazer, I have questioned affirmative action and dreaded the creation of a are stronger than government policies and political mindsets. I find myself on a similar journey of shifting concepts and renewed belief in the melting pot but, like Glazer, my journey is in process, and the questions loom much larger downfall. While I wouldn't go so far as to praise the early years of her show, idea. How ironic that a program once watched by poor and wealthy viewers alike ultimately perished because its creator couldn't handle the move from being Menace?") seriously misrepresents the methodology, findings, and conclusions of the recently released Third National Incidence Study of Child straight. We address only some of the misinformation here. criticisms, it is noteworthy that he participated in the Conference of Experts inappropriate ways to draw their conclusions. In doing so, they overstated the percent of children who were harmed only by they indicated) and they understated the percent of new children who were harmed by physical abuse, sexual abuse, or physical neglect in 1993--over they themselves cite, which show that fatalities have risen by harm. (We wish we could ascribe this to misunderstanding, but we clarified this issue for them before their article's publication and they published their misinformation anyway.) In fact, the classification of a child as seriously judgment by a respondent. The criteria for defining serious harm or injury are standardized; they are applied to the described injury itself, not to the respondent's judgment about that injury; and they have been consistent across the three incidence studies. So the recent quadrupling of the number of seriously injured children cannot be ascribed to some vague form of of seriously injured children does not make sense in the context of the sensitivity for more subtle maltreatment cues. Respondents' sensitivity to were discontinuous across the outcome spectrum, occurring in only two both increments by appealing to the same process (enhanced sensitivity) then had been seriously injured while at the same time evidencing greater sensitivity in identifying moderately injured children. Seriously injured victims of maltreatment are relatively unlikely to escape detection by the study methodology, so the rise in incidence in this category cannot be plausibly explained as due to heightened awareness. Considering all the evidence, the most reasonable interpretation is that there has been a real Protective Services investigations by pointing out that the set of But a careful reading of their discussion reveals that they do not address the relative inappropriateness of CPS investigations for emotional and educational maltreatment. However, educational neglect and emotional maltreatment have always been included in the incidence studies, and eliminating them from the picture would not eradicate the significant drop in the overall rate of CPS children whose maltreatment was investigated decreased significantly in all more" reporting. Nor did we "claim recklessly that too few cases are need for better targeting, whether by reporters in referring children to CPS, by CPS screening practices in connection with reports, or by both." contractors in an underfunded study. Second, words like "misrepresented" and "misinformation" are, in the world of policy analysis, fighting words. Third, their study is complicated, and numbers can be thrown back and forth until the eyes of the average reader glaze over. Most important, my complaint is not so with the spin given to it by political appointees in the Department of Health Experts that discussed the study's methodology. In fact, as director of the approach to the difficult task of counting illegal behaviors toward children and definitions." But they conveniently leave out two important facts. First, at that meeting, I pointed out that the methodological changes that were planned for the study all would have the effect of raising the count of categories of key participants who were most likely to encounter suspected of being included in the [new study]." In other words, they proposed to change release stating that "the number of abused and neglected children rose sharply report, but was informed that no one outside the government would be given a sent me a memorandum stating that "the continued contacts from your office on the matter give the appearance of efforts to place me and my staff in a staff refrain from further contacts of this nature." significant, but there is reason to doubt that they reflect an actual increase in abuse and neglect." I went on to explain what the problems seemed to be, and to offer my assistance in interpreting the study's results. that it exemplifies their selective presentation of information. conducted an incidence study, it had to be revised and reissued almost three years later because technical problems in the analysis inflated the estimated problem seems to be more severe. The plain fact is that no attempt was made to increases were real. (The data that they cite in their letter to contradict us, by the way, were not presented in the original report and, in any event, are too incomplete for these purposes.) I realize that one reason this essential work was not performed was that the government was unwilling to pay for it. But that is no excuse for announcing that "child abuse and neglect nearly doubled" without also cautioning the reader about the study's limitations. I hope that, before three years pass, a revised report that does so will be issued. perhaps radical action would be required, not the puny list of previously "unprecedented" level of technical assistance to the states (again, though, not is because of the broader problem created by exaggerating social ills. Cynics people believe that child maltreatment is a big problem, they might be willing past exaggerations, but has come to appreciate the harm that they have The more it seems that such serious maltreatment is common, the less likely are agencies to respond firmly. To put it bluntly, society can consider a tough abuse and child neglect are profound national problems. But, time after time I have seen how such overstatements have made the problem seem too big to handle facial hair on the court in more than half a century." "Having persuaded themselves that they are living and working in rural their awful writing. When I moved to Oxford, Miss., last winter to work in the special treatment for being a wordsmith. Hell no. Telling people around here that you are a writer is like telling a New Yorker that you are an actor and expecting them to be impressed. This state has a lot to be ashamed of, but not to issue blanket statements that this type of research should be banned due to medical procedures and wonder drugs of this century have been encouraged and funded with full support of political and religious leaders. Modern medicine human species, producing genetic weaknesses in the population, as a whole. But we would never propose limiting or discontinuing medical research due to the importance of human life. I think that the process of cloning should be looked upon as a possible method of strengthening mankind's weakening genetic makeup or of preventing some future genetic disaster. And I don't think that civilization, as a whole, will allow the predicted abuses of genetic such a complete nonissue issuing from the halls of science. that genetic identity between two individuals of differing ages is of any painful process of identifying which one of them was the real one. The discussion of cloning has forgotten the complexity of human nature and centered Marriage" dialogue seems to boil down to "Look at how severely and for the permitting gay marriage is one more step along this path, I don't see him providing any argument that such unions are themselves bad or any worse than the other breakdowns of traditional marriage (such as interracial marriage, multiple divorces, prenuptial agreements, and so forth). Neither does he provide any answers to the problem, merely a wistful remembrance of how "good" it was. And if his idea of "good" is forcing roles upon members of a couple, alimony for life, and community shunning of individuals whose marriages did not the Knickers Off Your Grandchildren." The greatest foolishness contained in the article is the assumption that the natural riches that organizations like should take note that money can't buy everything, and the ready cash that can so easily purchase consumer electronics is powerless to restore vanished biodiversity. The breathtaking thoughtlessness exhibited in this piece has appeared in lesser forms time and again in the "Everyday Economics" column. jumps to the conclusion that money can't (at least partly) compensate presents to sick children, because presents can't buy health. manifestation of the overall income tax. Nevertheless, he glosses over the essential unfairness of the current system of taxing capital gains, namely, the appreciated but not especially buoyant market. His capital gain, on which he must pay tax, will seem like a fat profit. But even relatively low inflation during the intervening time period will have caused the value of money to pay tax on gains that are more than offset by inflation. other countries was interesting enough, but I don't know whom to blame for the Creed," only got it half right. He is correct to identify the glibness, guile, and style with which Reed manipulates mass audiences, but he doesn't to "gifted" status puts a nice face on their hypocrisy and does very little to rigor requires binary choices. Once more he's taken an issue which he modeled ridiculous lengths, and smugly pronounced the conclusions as the only logical of limbo, unable to break through into the world of the living." So life no longer begins even at conception, as some would have it. Rather, the process is souls wait to be selected. From this dubious proposition, he deduces that we are morally obliged to have more children than we really want. uses his trademark rhetorical trick, the false absolute choice: "If we have no objection to our trashing Earth, to the point where there will be no future generations." The truth that his assumptions try to mask is that even if you is still a certainty that there will be many children conceived and raised, and there is no contradiction in considering their future to be important. one's time and one's money aren't intimately linked. But people want to spend money on things they feel connected to. If the hypothetical donor doesn't care about the cause, she will write fewer and smaller checks. But if she's willing to "sacrifice" more of her time, she'll "sacrifice" more of her money. Ultimately, volunteer work benefits us at least as much as those we serve. It can bring balance and fulfillment to our lives, while providing real leadership ledger, it benefits the bottom line as well. Get individuals to invest their Magazine article stated that AIDS is over. There are two full paragraphs statement early on that "in one sense, obviously, it is not [over]," by which I probably, my own); and a clear assertion that "nothing I am saying here is meant to deny that fact, or to mitigate its awfulness." The quote he keeps a fuller sentence, which reads, "Perhaps this is why so many of us find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over." It follows a section devoted to the description of someone's gruesome death. Blithe optimism? Give obsessed with the idea of a vaccine. This is understandable, since he has devoted a good deal of his journalistic career to the notion that AIDS will only be cured by a vaccine. He may be right (although the obstacles to a him because I am obsessed with AIDS vaccines and have an agenda. subhead states, is an exploration of the "twilight of an epidemic" that particular, to consider the possibility that new drug regimens will allow them to survive this plague. The ideas he examines, often with insight and delicacy, have to do with things like past vs. future, loss of community, and excessive skepticism. The passage he accuses me of having "wrested" out of context is just such a musing. And he gives short shrift to another, more pertinent idea: Perhaps many infected people find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over because they have yet to see evidence that these drugs will extend their lives beyond a year or two. And the gruesome death he recounts prior to this musing is not, as far as we can tell, about someone who responded well to the new treatments only to die too young and too painfully. Rather, he describes the death to set a marker in time, raising the possibility that such about the caveats his article contains, he is taking himself out of context. The "one sense" he is referring to about the epidemic not being over is directed at newly infected people and those who can't access or afford the drugs. Although he does describe attending a meeting where physicians detail almost wearily: "There were caveats, of course," he writes. The dismissive tone is critical to his entire argument, because if he squarely reflected on the great uncertainty that now exists about the impact of the new treatments, he would undermine the foundation of an exploration of The End. His analysis would seem, in a word, premature, and that is essentially my problem with the about my obsession and agenda, give me a break. True, I have written a great deal about AIDS vaccines, and I have a particular interest in the topic relating to the disease. And I have written, and continue to write, about many things that have nothing at all to do with AIDS. You could look it up. are designed to prevent an infection and thereby stem an epidemic. If drugs do But unfortunately, we have to sit and wait for studies that are underway to finish before we can predict the future with something more statistically Republicans' unseemly bout of whining, blaming, and rationalizing following was proffered by a member of Bob Dole's polling staff. During an election difficult for Bob Dole to win the presidency in the Electoral College since, hear this said, out of the blue, about a Democratic presidential candidate. It was a mere five years ago, I recall, that conservative commentators were crowing about the supposed "lock" that the Republican Party had on the Electoral College, based on its (the party's) strongholds in the South and Mountain West. This was supposed to guarantee Republican presidential supremacy that the Democrats did, in fact, have a chance at the presidency once see the magazine turn into a giant venting extravaganza. responsible journalism, what do we say about journalists quoting people without although they both condemned me for it. Had I said it, I would have condemned article was published (I offered to help, he asked questions and I answered certainly didn't suggest a "line" that Tucker should follow. misunderstood something I said and taken it as an attempt to intimidate him, so I checked it with him, just to make sure my failing memory isn't even worse dead of night, delivering the latest Politburo ukase on the proper under my breath, I know my duty to the Revolution. Once, indeed, on the occasion of my appointment as a contributing editor for literary matters, I was glorious overthrow of the reactionaries at the New Republic and New "our Five Year Plan for the People's Aesthetics proceeds on schedule. We have Comrade Leader," I replied, and every writer for the Standard has since discussed, such use makes the terms meaningless. If the Weekly Standard desperation on the part of some reviewers. One could say that the Weekly things. (I myself find their reviews helpful, if a tad predictable.) To call it Republicans may be the Stupid Party, but surely every organization is entitled to seek certain goals and to expect its members to pursue those goals. those distinctions is to distort history far more than a mildly conservative magazine, or a lukewarm "conservative" party, is likely to do. It also lowers disappointed that he missed perhaps the granddaddy of them all, one that once again broke into the front pages this last week. I refer to the apology that is whether adopted children are diagnosed with attachment disorder indiscriminately by people who often don't know what they're doing. It is to further miss the concern that the language these therapists use (and you right on, except when she remarks that Japan "continues to enjoy" much higher of the United States. We also know that he viewed blacks as inherently inferior fair enough in our day and age, but it hardly takes into account the liberal time. To actually see blacks as one's literal equal was one of the rarest of virtues in his time. I don't know of many, or perhaps any, whites who advocated poster boy himself. He publicly declared on many occasions that blacks would never be the functional equals of whites in intelligence, ability, creativity, or social and economic skill, but that they must nevertheless be given their freedom and some basic legal rights. He was never an advocate of integration of the races, and felt that they would always be separate and unequal as a matter made a huge leap forward in human and civil rights merely by so powerfully advocating them as a legal basis for political agreements between men. It was a huge step forward, but neither perfect in conception or in deed, as the forward, but likewise imperfect. He freed the slaves, but had no intention of making them equal. Yet the direction of both men is clear and unmistakable, and throw out the progressive historic tradition by which the present civil rights I would hope our ideals and deeds have advanced beyond their present poor state? I would hope more compassionately and with greater understanding of the unique fabric of our times, and the humility to appreciate the giant steps made Thirty years is a long time to be part of the law school community. I have witnessed many changes --physical location of the law school, new faculty coming on board, faculty retiring, tax students surviving my Legal education nationwide also has been changing, and your law school has been keeping pace with the times. For example, we now provide students both traditional classroom education, which emphasizes legal skills. Our students must now fulfill the law school's legal writing requirements, and they encouraged to participate in a wide array of courses and programs that teach professional skills, such as trial practice, the law school's civil practice and criminal defense clinics, The law school also continues to develop its curriculum in a number of specialized fields, including environmental, health, and international Earlier this year, the law school published the first issue of its At a recent gathering of the law school's Board of visitors, Justice indeed, of the nation. For example, he noted that three of the five of the state's lawyers graduated from the law school. And, of course, the graduates of your law school and of their accomplishments. I also believe that you can be proud of your law school. We have provided throughout the years quality legal education, and we are continuing to improve. However, these are difficult times for public institutions of higher education, because legislative appropriations are sufficient to fund all of our costs. To continue to excel in our educational mission, we must have both public and private support. For this reason, I ask that you think of your law school, in financial terms, in the same way that you would view private institutions. The law school's needs range from purchasing additional computer terminals to paying travel costs of our moot court teams and from refurbishing the Gray Lounge to purchasing necessary reference materials for the library. These are just some of our needs; others are discussed in the brochure which is enclosed with this letter. As a tenured professor and staunch supporter of your law school, my task is to beat the drums for financial contributions from alumni and friends. I cannot overemphasize the importance of your support. If we are to maintain our programs and thus continue to enhance the value of the You can see "by reading the code, my friend" that there are still many federal and state tax advantages for making charitable contributions. In tax credit which is applied directly against the "bottom line" of the the future quality of the legal profession and a significant way for you to remember your past, and I thank you, in advance, for your gift. Most of you remember sitting in a lecture hall and learning about many students who were able to spend some time on a research project with Undoubtedly you have attended some of his postgraduate courses, many The Science of Dental Materials. You now have the opportunity to help professorship in his honor which will help assure continuation of his A pledge card and envelope are enclosed for your convenience. Please deductible contribution will help honor a man who devoted a lifetime of University. This year fifteen new graduates leave the University and join ranks with medical record practitioners throughout the world, thus excellence. She was honored at the Third Chancellor's Honors Convocation. We were very proud to have a medical record administration student to lend support to the Medical Record Administration Program. Many graduates may remember him as a teacher, others as an interviewer on the Forum. The first award will be presented at our alumni luncheon. the luncheon, please forward the enclosure and your name will be included in our mailing. Also, if your class would like to have a special event this year, we would be pleased to assist by providing a list of mailing Spring seems to be a good time to contact graduates to request and car expenses, especially for students traveling some distance to their assigned clinical sites, are also costly items. Your contribution Record Administration Program to become our first graduate. Will you help for your convenience. Sincere appreciation goes to each of you for on welfare and he's always had a job doing manual labor. Life isn't easy for Ted, but he's determined to raise his children himself and be a good role model for them. It wasn't always like that. There was a time when he felt like he had no choice but to tolerate his wife's constant abuse and neglect of their children. Then Ted decided the children deserved a chance to start over in another town, no matter how difficult it might can't pay their heating or electric bill because of extreme temperatures? What happens if their children get sick? What happens if they get family or financial resources to draw from in an emergency. you've already demonstrated that you want to help genuinely needy people Although it can't be used to make purchases or withdraw money from an Here's how it works: Simply detach the Care Card from the top of this letter and keep it handy. Then, if you know of or come across someone who needs our help, please give the card to him or her. It shows our address Office, we can put the person in contact with the volunteer best to help them through the difficult time, so they can get on with And just as important, I invite you to renew your partnership with The Salvation Army by sending a contribution, once again, today. Your Thank you for your continued financial support, and for remaining alert for neighbors who need a helping hand. God bless you for your children, and lonely and needy senior citizens right here in this employees and officers of every business in the county with important cancer information. An informed public and financially supported research We are therefore requesting your cooperation. Our free educational programs can save lives. Encouraging women to practice breast will have the opportunity for their employees and officers to contribute continue supporting the research, educational and service programs. Will you kindly use and return the enclosed envelope, and assure us of your enthusiastic participation in the continuation of the excellent work She would have a better chance of getting help and delivering a healthy Later, my distress hit home in a personal way when I discovered than Realizing the seriousness of the problem helped motivate me to join with individuals like you who have helped to prevent needless suffering the situation with a limited education, no skills and no source of income. Would it surprise you to learn that less than two years away from the millennium, the problem of supplying prenatal care to young, single mothers is one of growing concern in our community? mothers rank in the lower third of individuals receiving such care nationwide. And that's just one significant example of community need. There are many other important areas where children, families, the residential outreach maternity service funded by United Way of Central to help local families, I discovered the answer that made the most sense United Way, and ONLY United Way, regularly conducts research in our community to find out where the most important needs are. If United Way prenatal care, child care training, friendship and peer group Your past contribution provided a direct line of support for local programs that promote health and wellness, strengthen families, invest in son she feels grateful to United Way for the good start she was able to another United Way funded agency. This story ended happily... perhaps can provide a homeless. expectant mother with two visits to an unfortunately there are also hundreds of examples where vital services Please continue with your neighbors to see to it that no expectant year it would be wonderful. If you could possibly increase your pledge by even more, I would be overjoyed. But please join us again this year so son in a clean, cheerful home. Without the support of United Way of Please join with us to see that happy endings do continue. faces of newcomers who are making our city their home. The International discover the multicultural aspects of our community and prepare for Our mission is to be the BEST community resource for those with international needs and the best international resource for those with community needs. Here are just five of the ways we have accomplished our The Center took the leadership in revitalizing the International worked in the planning phase and at the Festival. Our staff could not Many school children who attended the Festival received advance distributed to every teacher who requested this valuable tool. The culmination of the Festival was a breathtaking performance by the For one hour they captivated their large audience of children and adults with stunning acrobatics and death defying spins from the rafters- The Center is assessing the ways in which youth programs in central assessment will lead to new approaches in training youth workers so that they can build stronger programs which make all young participants feel As the local host organization for the National Council of two months in our city. Local families welcomed these visitors into their homes for an evening of dinner and conversation or acted as host families The Center has entered into partnership with a dozen local Services the Center works hand in hand with human resource departments. Center staff assists with the housing search, school decisions, drivers' licenses, leisure time activities, and daycare. A valuable our own festival publicity "Many Faces, One World. At the International Center we are proud to welcome newcomers to our city whether they come to us meet this challenge. With your help, the International Center of University has been at the forefront of discovery on many occasions and the School of Medicine has been a tremendous contributor to the Scientific investigation for the community's benefit is an integral part of the School of Medicine's mission. We take seriously our immense responsibility to push the boundaries of knowledge in our pursuit of new treatments and therapies for diseases that negatively impact the lives of In that regard, we enclose information highlighting an exciting achievement in cardiovascular medicine at the School of Medicine. The One of the devastating consequences of heart disease is the irreparable damage it does to the heart muscle. When heart cells die, because of a heart attack or another cause, they cannot be repaired. The possibility of cardiac regeneration offers tremendous hope for the millions of patients who have suffered grave damage to their hearts. The research published in Science gives evidence of progress by documenting the first successful transplantation of functional heart cells into an animal model. These transplanted cells line up properly, make the correct connections and function just like native heart cells. Thus, the prospect of heart cell replacement, rather than a full heart transplant, may be in the foreseeable future. There is still much work to do, but, naturally, we are very proud of Dr. Field and his colleagues' School of Medicine. The School's cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, and scientists have made significant advances through the years against the nation's number one killer. From the laboratory to the bedside, our physicians and scientists are dedicated to improving the care and treatment of patients suffering from cardiovascular disease. The research published in Science is additional evidence of our commitment to seeking a major fundraising campaign. A major component of the campaign is to support research activities like those of Dr. Field. In addition to funding work in cardiovascular medicine, the campaign will support initiatives in cancer, pediatrics, genetics, as well as increasing interest in the School of Medicine is greatly appreciated. depend on friends like you to help us bring outstanding productions to consecutive year, enabling thousands of families and students the opportunity to celebrate the holidays together. It is your support and In total, because of the gifts given last year, we were able to discount .By reaching students whom are not otherwise being reached through school and other community institutions. It is a proven fact that the arts contribute to higher scores on the SAT and other standardized .By transforming the environment for learning; school lessons become opportunities of discovery when performed live on stage. .By providing new challenges for those students already considered successful and helping them surpass boredom and complacency, which are So far, we've been very successful in our service to the community, but we need your financial support right now to complete the season with this year. Every dollar that you contribute makes a big difference. It's thrilling to have such a strong impact on the community. It's now your opportunity to be a partner in our work. We have been selected again this year to participate in two special challenge matches: one with the National Endowment for the Arts (to support our education programming for You have heard from us twice by mail this season requesting your support. This letter is to let you know that we still need your help to continue our record of strong fiscal management, vibrant theatrical productions and outstanding educational programs. We have a long way to as yourself. Your gift, and the doubling of these dollars through the two Ticket sales and subscriptions cannot finance our complete season; in by sending your gift in the return envel